Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon.

Google Gemini offers “a new way to bring your imagination to life.” Adobe Firefly promises “The ultimate creative AI solution.” And Craiyon invites you to “Create AI Art.”

Don’t believe the tech hype. Close the generative AI window. And turn to the book that has sparked creativity for decades: Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published 70 years ago this fall, it is a manifesto for human creativity disguised as a children’s picture book—a message that’s even more relevant today than it was in 1955.

The opening pages of Harold and the Purple Crayon illustrate why throwing prompts into AI does not create art. Art begins by facing an empty canvas. Maybe you scribble a bit—as Harold does. Only after four pages of zig-zagging experiments does Harold pause and decide to take his line for a walk in the moonlight. Traveling along the line of your imagination requires your full attention. Resist the algorithm’s allure and become an active dreamer.

For Harold, as for most artists, drawing is a form of thinking. After drawing the moon for his walk in the moonlight, Harold makes “a long straight path so he wouldn’t get lost,” but he doesn’t “seem to be getting anywhere on the long straight path.” So, he leaves the path. But he had to create the straight path in order to realize that straight paths lead nowhere interesting. Making art is a process of discovery. Getting lost and making mistakes are part of the process.

A mistake might inspire a new direction or generate the art itself. Harold’s mistakes do both. Frightened by the dragon he has drawn to guard the apple tree, “His hand holding the purple crayon shook.” At this moment, the shaky crayon’s line oscillates between these different possibilities: a wavy scribble, or a series of conjoined cursive w’s, or the surface of an ocean in the visual language of the cartoon. So, as artists do, Harold grapples with uncertainty, and then has a realization: this line must be an ocean. When he recognizes that, the story can continue; Harold draws a boat and launches a several-page nautical voyage.

But AI’s risk-free, frictionless “creativity” launches nothing because friction generates the surprises that create art—the unpredictable results of an imagination in conversation with itself. For young people who may be dazzled by or even encouraged to use AI, let them also be encouraged to take the long road of doing things the “old fashioned” way because in doing these things ourselves, we learn, we grow, and we find our own voice.

It’s true that AI images can surprise us: that sixth finger or phantom arm in a photorealistic portrait of smiling people does make us look again. But art’s surprises emerge from a larger vision. Harold’s triangle-fingered, goggle-eyed policeman is Crockett Johnson gesturing towards the untutored abstractions of children’s art. It’s an intentional shift in the visual style. In contrast, AI’s extra fingers or limbs steer us into the uncanny valley—apt if the image illustrates horror fiction, but not if it’s supposed to represent, say, cheerful coworkers.

Drawing on decades of experience in the visual arts, Johnson’s aesthetic choices suit the story he is telling. Drawing from millions of works that feed its algorithm, AI can only imitate aesthetic choices. It cannot make them. And a statistically probable sentence or image can only gesture broadly towards the subtleties of human perception.

Because AI doesn’t understand why humans make art. Nor do the high-tech hucksters who are promising art without effort.

If you want to resist AI’s lure of frictionless creativity (and trust me, you do), open Harold and the Purple Crayon to experience the excitement of the creative mind at work. Johnson’s tale positions us as witnesses to the moment of artistic creation, watching Harold invent the story that we are reading while we are reading it. Although that’s not literally true, it feels true because the crayon—the embodiment of Harold’s apparent improvisation—is the engine of narrative. The story emerges from the path of a crayon which simultaneously generates and is inspired by the unfolding story.

The book’s ability to dramatize what creativity feels like is one reason it has inspired so many artists. Prince’s favorite childhood book, Harold is why Prince played purple guitars, favored purple fashion, and strongly identified with the color purple. Harold inspired Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Powers to become a writer, and the name of Yale’s improvisational theatre group the Purple Crayon. Upon receiving the Caldecott Medal for Jumanji (1981), the classic picture book that would launch a film franchise, Chris Van Allsburg thanked “Jan Vermeer, for the way he used light; …Federico Fellini, for making films that look the way they do; …and Harold, for his purple crayon.”

Harold and the Purple Crayon has inspired so many because Harold’s journey is a story about what it means to be human—facing our challenges by thinking creatively, transforming problems into solutions, drawing new paths forward. When the scribble becomes an ocean, draw a boat. When it gets dark, draw a moon. To live is to improvise, and artists are our most gifted improvisers.

But developing our creative muscles requires the friction of crayon against paper, of imagination against impediment. If we delegate our dreaming to subcommittees of robots, humans’ unique strength—our capacity to imagine—will wither. If we outsource our creativity, we outsource our humanity.

And that is dangerous. Harold is in greatest peril when he slips from his unfinished mountaintop, stops drawing, and begins falling through space. These three pages mark the longest time that his crayon leaves the page. Put another way: he comes closest to his demise when, mid-adventure, he relinquishes the symbol of his creative mind. He stops thinking.

Then: “But luckily, he kept his wits and his purple crayon.” Harold presses crayon to page, draws a circle, which becomes a hot-air balloon that carries him to safety.

Johnson wrote the book while his own safety was at risk—under FBI surveillance and at risk of losing his livelihood due to McCarthyism. In daring to dream, he temporarily escaped surveillance and created a template for resilient, liberatory imaginations.

In these dangerous times, we might look to Harold’s crayon—or whatever that represents for each of us—and recognize the power of our imaginations. Rather than outsourcing our dreaming to machines, we can instead cultivate our capacity to imagine better futures.

And, come what may, remember what Harold would do: Always keep your wits and your purple crayon.

^{Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash.}

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Journey into Darkness: The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Basel, Switzerland

When you let me go
I barely stayed afloat
I’m floating all alone
Still holding on to hope

—JJ, Austria, “Wasted Love”
Winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025

Many waters
Cannot quench love
Neither can the floods
Drown it

—Yuval Raphael, Israel, “New Day Will Rise” (from the original Hebrew)
Second place, Eurovision Song Contest 2025

How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope. Darkness haunts both songs, filling the stage with the stark play of light against the ominous backdrop of black. If the two songs and their metaphors are consonant at many levels, they were also portentous of the larger dissonance of the largest song contest in the world and its turn toward the darkness that envelops Europe in 2025.

The signs of Eurovision’s turn in 2025 took many and varied forms, but it is the abundance and commonness that pose questions about Europe itself. In significantly larger numbers than previously, the lyrics of the competing Eurosongs were in languages other than English. Each of the Baltic states, for example, sang in languages other than English—Latvian and Lithuanian, and Estonia’s Tommy Cash sang “Espresso Macchiato” primarily in Italian and Spanish. Larger and smaller nations alike chose to sing in national languages. Germany and Iceland, for example, both with long histories of Eurosongs in English, sang in their native languages.

The lyrics of the 2025 Eurosongs tended in greater numbers toward serious subjects, further reflecting the darkening moment. Songs with the comical lyrics that often distinguish Eurosongs did not entirely disappear, but they did not place as well as they frequently do. Sweden’s “Bara bada bastu” (Just Take a Sauna), sung by the Finnish group KAJ and wackily staged in a sauna, was favored to win prior to the Grand Finale, but it placed a fairly distant fourth.

The field of competitors in 2025 was noticeably smaller: thirty-seven as opposed to as many as forty-three in previous years. Above all, the nations choosing not to compete were in Eastern Europe—Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia—while Russia and Belarus are banned from competing due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Despite the financial reasons for not competing, the result has been a realignment of European nations with political stakes that resemble an earlier division of Europe into East and West. Just as the first Eurovision Song Contest was a response to the Cold War in 1956, so too do recent Eurovisions reflect the East-West divide in the Europe of a New Cold War.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is responsible for organizing the participation of nations in its European media empire has long established rules meant to distance the Eurovision from politics. Over the contest’s historical longue durée these rules have been effective to varying degrees, often by requiring that Eurosongs with politically specific lyrics make changes that depoliticize them. Those changes are usually accommodated (e.g., in 2024 when Israel was required to change some lyrics and the title of its entry, from “October Rain” to “Hurricane”), but occasional rejections are not unknown (e.g., Georgia with its 2009 entry, “We Don’t Wanna Put In”).

In 2025, the dividing line between the political and apolitical collapsed, thereby releasing the flood waters of the political. The rules designed to prevent the political could no longer withstand the Realpolitik of a Europe in conflict with itself. At the center of the storm was Israel and the contradictions unleashed by its continued participation while at war in Gaza. Calls for banning Israel because of its conflicts with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been growing for years. Palestine has itself launched tentative efforts to participate in the Eurovision, but without luck because of the absence of a national broadcasting network. Protests of Israeli Eurovision participation coalesced in 2019, when the Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv. Palestinian musicians even went so far as to organize an alternative Gazavision in 2019.

In 2025, all forms of pro-Palestinian protest were banned in Basel. Palestinian flags were not allowed, and the negative response of audiences to Yuval Raphael’s performances (booing) were scrubbed from EBU broadcasts. When Raphael placed in the middle of the field after the professional-juries voted, she catapulted to first place after the Israeli government organized a massive popular-vote surge on social media. She led the field until the final announcement of popular voting nudged JJ ahead into first place. In the week following the Grand Finale in Basel, the critical response to the flood of politicking in the Eurovision had swollen to the point that many recognize it as an existential crisis for the Eurovision Song Contest. It either will or will not be a response to the political forces dividing Europe.

It is my custom each year to end this blog post by giving final voice to a song that has special meaning for me, often because it offers an alternative vision for what the Eurovision Song Contest has been and what it might become. I discover the meaning I seek in these final sonic epilogues through acts of return and remembrance, return to powerful and intimate Eurovision moments of the past, return also to the exquisite beauty afforded by song itself. Accordingly, I remind myself that it is song that lies at the heart of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is song, so the first great theorist of song, Johann Gottfried Herder, reminds us, that “loves the masses” and their humanity. In search of song, I return to Latvia, where the young Herder, living in Riga, may have experienced his first folk songs, and I look to this year’s Latvian Eurovision entry, Tautumeitas’s “Bur man laimi” (Chant of Happiness). To complete the rhetorical framing of this blogpost, I close with the bridge of a song from Latvian folk song tradition. I return to “Bur man laimi” to remember—and to remind us—that the journey into darkness can pave the way to new light.

I didn’t know my own happiness
I didn’t know my own happiness
Until I met my misery

_{Featured image: the stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 by MrSilesian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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10 books to read this Pride Month [reading list]

Dive into ten remarkable books that illuminate the diverse and vibrant experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. From historical explorations that uncover the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ history to biographies of influential musical figures who have shaped the cultural landscape, these books offer invaluable perspectives. Whether you’re looking to educate yourself, find inspiration, or simply enjoy compelling stories, these books are essential reads that honor and uplift LGBTQ+ voices.

Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice

What does the battle between conservative Christians and LGBTQ+ people look like from the vantage point of those who are both? Choosing Love brings together LGBTQ+ conservative Christian experiences with insights from civil rights thinkers, Black feminism, and queer thinkers of color.

Learn more about Choosing Love by Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin

On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide

A lively and imaginative exploration of the career and music of the Rocket Man. Elton John is not only “still standing,” he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry.

Learn more about On EltonJohn by Matthew Restall

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace—the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly emerged as style-conscious men about town during the modern age. Discover the hidden history of the transgender dandy in interwar Paris and Berlin, the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, the New Romantic, and the many colourful dandies from the past that continue to influence us today.

Learn more about The Dandy by Peter K. Andersson

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Negro. What better way to celebrate than by learning more about the life of Alain Locke, the man who popularized the term.

Learn more about The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America

The Things She Carried explores how purses have served as more than fashion accessories—they’ve been symbols of privacy, pride, and activism. Kathleen B. Casey examines their role in breaking social barriers, from Black women in the civil rights movement to LGBTQ+ individuals using bags to defend their bodies and as declarations of identity. This powerful history highlights how everyday objects can become tools for resistance and self-expression, making it a compelling read for Pride Month and beyond.

Learn more about The Things She Carried by Kathleen B. Casey

Colette: My Literary Mother

Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. Michèle Roberts examines how Colette expresses her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love.

Learn more about Colette by Michèle Roberts

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin’s work remains profoundly relevant, offering a lens into the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity. His fiction explores personal dilemmas amid complex social pressures, as seen in Giovanni’s Room, which centers gay and bisexual experiences, and Sonny’s Blues, where music becomes a metaphor for resilience. Tom Jenks’s analysis of Sonny’s Blues highlights Baldwin’s meticulous storytelling, showing how the narrative stays with readers. Baldwin’s exploration of masculinity, race, and class challenged norms and shaped conversations around LGBTQ+ rights, making his work essential reading.

Learn more about James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere in Europe, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys.

Learn more about Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Sir Noel Malcolm

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness is among the most famous banned books in history. A pioneering work of literature, Radclyffe Hall’s novel charts the development of a ‘female sexual invert’, Stephen Gordon, who from childhood feels an innate sense of masculinity and desire for women.

Learn more about The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love.

Learn more about Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Check out these books and more on Bookshop US and Bookshop UK.

_{Feature image by Steve Johnson via Unsplash.}

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A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

Oxford editors from across our press submit books for catalog consideration; our sales team evaluates forecasts and sales patterns to determine the market for each title; and the trade marketing and publicity teams coordinate, plan, and pitch to get these titles in front of readers. Each year, when December rolls around, we excitedly wait to see which titles will be featured in the year end “Best Books” lists put out by the major media outlets including The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New Yorker, TLS, and more. Inclusion on these lists serves as yet another seal of approval, highlighting the quality of the content, wide appeal, accessibility, and novelty of the books we publish. Being featured in such reputable lists and selected by the top critics and thinkers reinforces the press’s reputation for publishing high-quality, impactful work.

This year’s list includes the first ever history of the transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts by a Professor at the University of Oxford; the final book by the prolific writer John L. Heilbron—the definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate; a collection of nine tales of romance and wonder from early Irish literature; and a deep dive into the mysterious origins of words by arguably the greatest living English word-hunter.

As the world’s oldest and largest university press, OUP holds an important place in the publishing landscape. The press’s mission is an extension of the university’s—we strive for excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our global publishing program. A crucial aspect of the trade team’s role is making sure that the work of Oxford’s academics and scholars isn’t kept solely within the confines of academia, but instead is shared with the wider population. Through the use of accessible and engaging writing, OUP’s trade books share the expertise of highly qualified researchers with the general public, allowing new ideas to spread and reshape our knowledge of the world.

The ‘Best Books’ lists which numerous major media outlets share annually represent the capstone of yearly book coverage. All year, publicists submit books to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and other outlets for review, excerpt, author interviews and news coverage. In the last 12 months, the New York Times (with its 153 million reported unique visitors per month) covered 18 of OUP’s titles—including a review of Making the Presidency which drew comparisons between John Adams and Kamala Harris’s legacy, and an Op-Ed by the authors of Wreckonomicswhich asked when liberals became so comfortable with war.

Beyond the Times, in the last year 11 books were featured or reviewed on the BBC, 19 in the Wall Street Journal, 15 in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 in the Financial Times, 8 in the London Review of Books, another 11 in Time Magazine, and to the delight of the author, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was recommended on Oprah Daily. These reviews are truly just the tip of the iceberg in publicity campaigns that also include hundreds of podcasts, local media coverage, and events that bring authors directly into communities. The additional visibility a book receives when it is reviewed in major outlets often translates to significant boosts in sales and allows authors to extend the size of their audience and the reach of their message. This visibility is also many authors’ first exposure to OUP’s range of publishing and can be instrumental in attracting future authors that help the program grow and diversify.

Each year’s list of best book serves as a distillation of our collective questions and priorities as a society. Trade publishing must be more agile than traditional academic publishing because every title has to tap in to at least a certain portion of the zeitgeist. As a reflection of preoccupying questions, last year’s list was topped by Kirkus’s selection of Trans Children in Today’s Schools, as well as both Defectors and The Ruble from our Russian and Soviet history lists. This year, different trends have clearly risen to the top of readers’ consciousness. The New Statesman (in their seasonal lists released throughout the year) have selected not one but two Oxford books on AI. The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor—a former AI ethicist at Google—offers advice on reclaiming our humanity in the approaching age of machine thinking. AI Morality edited by David Edmonds is a collection of essays from leading philosophers exploring some of the nearly endless questions about our changing relationship with AI.

Similarly, this year’s list includes two titles about China. The former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd’s book On Xi Jinping and Oriana Sklyar Mastro’s Upstart both provide informed perspectives on China’s role in the global world. When asked why she chose to write her second book for a general audience, Dr. Mastro points out that China’s power has impact far outside of academia and she wanted to make sure her work could reach readers in all walks of life.

The support that the trade marketing and publicity teams provides authors is crucial to strengthening their careers. Debut authors utilize our platform to both benefit their scholarly careers through the academic prestige the Oxford brand provides while simultaneously developing their presence as a noted subject matter expert in the media. This recognition grows in tandem with the author’s career, allowing the Oxford trade program to retain successful authors as well as attract well-established authors who haven’t previously published with us.

This year, COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black was selected as one of The New Yorker’s recommended titles and among The Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. Dr. Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves after the Battle of Port Royal and joined the 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman. Only her second book, and her first written for a wide audience, it was essential to Dr. Fields-Black that she had an opportunity to share both her research and also her family’s story.

On the other end of the spectrum, the trade team works with many authors and scholars who are well-established in their careers and come to OUP with ample experience and high expectations of the publishing process. Our team was honored to have the opportunity to work with Noel Malcolm on his 12^th book Forbidden Desire which was named by both The Times Literary Supplement and History Today as one of the best books of 2024. Malcolm has published across academic and trade publishing houses during his long career, and it was important that we be able to provide him with the highest level of marketing and publicity possible.

All of the books published by Oxford are the culmination of years of work on the part of the authors, research assistants, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists. Each one is an accomplishment that has the potential to move knowledge forward. The books in our trade program—with their potential to speak to all readers—represent a unique opportunity to inform, illuminate, and entertain. Join us in celebrating the best books of 2024.

_{Featured image by clu, Getty Images via Canva. Image modified in Canva.}

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Orality, the book, and the computer: What happens to ‘literature’?

Coming into academia from the margins of Postcolonial Studies, when it was heroically striving to give an academic voice to indigenous cultures in the 1980-90s, I am aware that any celebration of the book is likely to be considered by some to be a subtle denigration of past traditions of oral composition and recording. What is worse, these days celebrating the book might also be resented by those who owe allegiance to futuristic forms of digital reading or what one can call visual orality—the use of mixed media, rooted in TV and film technologies, to tell stories and convey information. The book is in a terrible squeeze between those two positions. And yet, the book needs to be championed as the prime site of literature.

Before doing so, one also needs to face the fact that literature is not an idealist construct; it is not a form of immaculate conception in the human mind. It is shaped by the media of its recording. Literature in cultures of primary orality—if the word ‘literature’ can be used in that context, for its etymology denotes writing—was fashioned by the medium of breath which recorded it. For one, oral literature’s construction was often repetitive and contained many redundancies: you can find echoes of this even in written epics rooted in earlier oral cultures, such as Homer’s Odyssey, where the same god is heralded with the same description or phrase every time he or she appears in the narrative. Such repetition served various mnemonic purposes in a culture where the story had to be memorized, and there was no written text to consult. Moreover, the enunciation and preservation of oral narratives were mostly linked to their practical usage, either to record lineages, sacred stories, foundational myths, or to provide information about, say, foraging and shelter-building.

It is with the book—also in its earlier forms—that ‘literature’ slowly gets riven into ‘creative/artistic’ and vocational/professional/trade literatures. Whatever the drawbacks of such alienation, for ‘(creative) literature’ the book offers serious advantages. One can argue—despite the well-intended objections of many of my postcolonialist colleagues—that literature comes into being only with the rise of the book (including its early manuscript form). Here is a medium that, after breath and stone and other media, shapes what we now know as literature, because once words can be written down extensively, they can also be written down exclusively. The separation between literature and trade or vocational literature is easier to introduce, propagate, and sustain. This has drawbacks, but it also has serious advantages.

The book, contrary to what has often been claimed, is not just an elitist project; it is also a hugely democratic one. Historically, this can be illustrated with the example of India, where the earliest book manuscripts are associated with Buddhism and the non-Brahminical language of Pali, not with the Sanskrit treatises and epics of Brahminical Hinduism. Evidently, Buddhism—as a ‘religion’ with a middle caste following and without the institutional hegemonic privileges of Brahminism—used the written word extensively to connect across large spaces and periods.

The ancient Vedas, passed on orally from one consecrated Brahmin to another consecrated Brahmin, remained unchanged, and unrecorded in writing, until after the ‘bookish’ challenge of Buddhism and other such ‘sects.’ As Wendy Doniger notes, the Vedas, which were recorded orally (and, one can add, institutionally: through the Brahmin caste), were preserved in one iteration: “every syllable preserved for centuries, through a process of rigorous memorization.” Hence, there are no variants of the Vedas, in comparison to the later epics, such as the Mahabharata, which were recorded both orally and in writing, and so they exist in multiple versions. This brings forth the other democratic aspect of the book: its ability to escape capture and to survive as a minority position. For dissent to survive and be passed on in oral societies, it would require large areas of support. Individual dissent would exist, but it would never get recorded or passed on. The book, despite all kinds of inflicted burning, enables this.  After all, the book can be moved across space and time, which means that it can more easily survive spaces and times hostile to its contents. This physicality increases the possibilities of literature, delinking it from social utility.

Another aspect to how the book enabled literature to be literature is embedded not in the words written down in a book, but, so to say, in the spaces between the words. “When you speak, you automatically stop thinking; it’s like being released from a contract,” says the authorial narrator of César Aira’s Ghosts. Unlike oral recitations and speaking, the book actually enables thinking, including dissenting or deviant thinking. The kind of contemplation it demands and permits is unique.

Aristotle held contemplation as the highest human capacity, ranking it above activity, because it involves thinking about the cosmos, which far exceeds in beauty and complexity any work of human hands. From his perspective, actually reading a book—the work of human hands—would not be true contemplation. I do not follow this Aristotelian definition of contemplation. Instead, I think of it more in terms of “deep attention”, a phrase that the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han uses interchangeably with it.

But, interestingly, when one reads literature, one reads not only the words, accessed within the purported transparency of all other disciplines, but also between the lines and between the words. Literature depends not just on words, but also on silences, contradictions, and noise to convey its meanings. One can use the image of the blank spaces that lie between words and paragraphs and chapters in a book to illustrate this: in literature these ‘blank spaces’ also count, and the book, as a medium, enables us to pay deep attention to these ‘blank spaces’ too. At its best, one can argue that the book enables us, despite the limitations of language, to contemplate what Aristotle considered the “eternal”—that which actually escapes language. Eternal is not the word I would use for it, given its many misusages since then, but I think it will suffice to convey my point here.

Will this “eternal” nature still be available when we move to futuristic media (digitized reading and visual orality)? In a series of fascinating books, Byung-Chul Han doubts this, pointing out that the “medium of thinking is quiet” and noting that deep attention is not compatible with multi-tasking and incessant pop-ups, among other things. The book obviously also offers a greater capacity to slow down and focus than current futuristic replacements, and both of these are essential for deep attention. Visual orality, with its tendency to define our imagination—something capitalized, literally, by all those super-hero and fantasia films and computer games today—also curtails the borders of contemplation. There will obviously be some advantages to this shift to digitized reading and visual orality, but they are unlikely to accrue to our writing and reading of literature. This will affect our capacity to contemplate and pay deep attention to everything outside and inside us.

The ‘literature’ that will come out of it, if the book is largely abandoned as the primary medium for literature, will be very different from what we have had for a few centuries now, just as the ‘literature’ of primary orality was markedly different. It will affect the way we ‘contemplate’ the cosmos and how we understand ourselves.

_{Featured image by Freepik}

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Is Boris Johnson like James Bond—or more like Homer Simpson? [long read]

The question may seem like an odd one, so let me approach it by sketching some context. 2024 has been a year of elections worldwide, with voters around the globe hitting the ballot boxes, from India (the most populous country in the world, with the largest electorate) to Venezuela to the UK. And needless to say, one of the most consequential of the 2024 elections looms on the horizon­—indeed, advance balloting via postal vote began as far back as September—with so much at stake in the US Presidential election, now just days away on November 5th.

At this point the political tactics and rhetorical strategies of the major candidates and parties are more than familiar to us: Kamala is a commie, Donald is weird; Harris can’t be trusted with the border or the budget, Trump will be a disaster for abortion rights, the environment, and democracy itself. And so on.

One particular rhetorical weapon available to political actors, to diminish their opponents or to aggrandize themselves or their allies, is to liken them to other agents—even, or perhaps especially, those fictional agents known as characters. The commentariat likes to play this game too. This takes us back to Boris Johnson. In the 2019 election campaign—which Johnson and the Tory party won with a landslide victory—Johnson was likened by one group of polled voters to James Bond, the suave Secret Service/MI6 agent born in the fictions of Ian Fleming and developed through the movie franchise beginning with the adaptation of Dr No (1962).

Embraced in some quarters, this rather unlikely analogy was met with derision and push-back in others, in particular via a counter-comparison made by another group of voters in the same poll. Johnson isn’t much like James Bond, so this response went; he’s rather more like Homer Simpson. Strip away the trappings of his upper-class background, and what you’re left with is a bumbling, unkempt, uncouth oaf, prone to gaffes, a ‘bit like a buffoon…in the power plant, thinking what do I press here? What do I do?’

History weighs rather heavily in favour of the Homer Simpson comparison. What, I shouldn’t have broken my own social distancing laws during covid? I’m not allowed to mislead parliament? I can’t manipulate parliamentary procedure to suit the interests of my party? D’oh! But all such analogies will be partial, highlighting some attributes of the object, downplaying others, and suggesting a kind of ‘gestalt’—an overall shape—to the character of the figure under scrutiny.

The Johnson episode is not an isolated one. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—mocked by Johnson himself with a lewd limerick—also became the target of a satirical comparison with a fictional character. Erdoğan has been likened to Gollum, the stunted, grasping, unreliable Hobbit from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Erdoğan didn’t take kindly to the unflattering analogy; at least three individuals were pursued in the courts for making the comparison (with varied outcomes). Erdoğan’s fellow autocrats, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are similarly reported to be unamused at comparisons made between them and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dobby the House Elf (from Harry Potter), respectively. In all three cases, the comparisons have a serendipitous, physical basis—all three political figures look sufficiently like the fictional characters to whom they are likened for the comparison to stick; the popular ‘separated at birth’ trope trades on the same phenomenon of physical resemblance between figures who in other respects contrast strongly with one another.

Note, however, that there is variation here in the way the negative comparisons work. Winnie and Dobby are benign, child-like figures, pointedly contrasting with and ironically undercutting the authoritarian, strong-man demeanours Xi and Putin seek to project. By contrast, Gollum is menacing, pointing directly to a negative trait in Erdoğan (though in an interesting twist, in one of the Erdoğan cases, the defence successfully maintained—with support from the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson—that the specific images from the film depicted the naïve but good-natured Sméagol rather than his demonic alter-ego Gollum, and so the comparison could not be held to be insulting). But in all three cases, the strategy is to drain the target figures of their symbolic standing by likening them to fictional characters—usually absurd, pathetic, or comic—drawn from children’s fictions (Gollum first appeared in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, written for children). And in all three cases, the fictions from which the characters hail are in wide international circulation, making the satirical force of the comparisons readily understood across communities, cultures, and nations.

We think of characters as creatures of the imagination, but as these examples show, they enter our actual lives in a multitude of ways. Satirical character comparisons in the political domain are but the tip of the iceberg; we routinely consort with fictional characters first by imagining them, and then by comparing them with those in our individual social worlds—not just public figures, but friends, family members, colleagues, and not least, ourselves. Characters arise from our fascination with the varieties of human personality and agency, and they act as vehicles for contemplating and comparing our own agency with that of other agents, possible and actual.

Possible and actual? Aren’t characters, in the sense discussed here, by definition fictional? They are indeed. But even non-fictional representations which purport to represent the actual world rather than project an imagined world—documentaries, news reports, political campaign materials—offer characterizations of the agents that they represent. Joe Biden really exists, but when Trump dubs him ‘Crooked Joe’, he reduces the multifaceted real agent into what the novelist E. M. Forster described as a ‘flat’ (one-dimensional) character, casting him as the villain in a political melodrama. The ‘baby Trump’ blimp seen floating above London on the occasion of his visit in 2019 did the same for the former president, characterizing him as a bloated infant. The latter trope is restaged, alongside Trump’s more recent ‘Sleepy Joe’ characterization of Biden, playing on Biden’s perceived infirmity, in a political cartoon by Steve Breen. Johnson’s limerick characterizes Erdoğan as a voracious zoophile (and is rather mild compared with the poem by German comedian Jan Böhmermann that preceded it).

Cartoons have long been a vehicle for such polemical characterizations. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Nast’s political cartoons established the iconography of Republicans as Elephants and Democrats as Donkeys; in our own era, Spitting Image carried the tradition of the political cartoon caricature into the world of television. Through these examples we see that the characterizations can be spare and abstract, drawing on types rather than individuals: Democrats are likened with the donkey as an animal type, not with any specific donkey (say, Winnie’s gloomy friend Eeyore); Republicans with the elephant as a type, not any specific elephant (say, Dumbo or Nellie).

All of this points to some important metaphysical features of characters. The first is that characters are real. That might seem like an oxymoron, if we hold that characters are imaginary, and imagined objects are just those things that aren’t real. But we need to recognise a more expansive conception of reality. Characters are real in the same way that novels, or scientific theories, are real; that is why we can refer to and make use of them in the workaday world, including the sphere of politics. As abstract artifacts—recipes for possible persons—the reality of characters is distinct from the reality of flesh-and-blood individuals, but they have a reality and a utility as palpable as physical artifacts, from hammers to Humvees. Characters are part of the furniture of the world.

So characters are imaginary but real entities. And in the cases at hand, we see how they can function as a vehicle of imaginative cognition: the forging of metaphors and analogies, in which one entity is thought of in terms of some other entity. Consider the classic case of Charles Philipon’s satirical depiction of Louis-Philippe, which allows us not only to see the King in the drawing, but to see him as a pear, and thus by inference as a fool (‘poire’ meaning ‘dupe’ or ‘fathead’ in the Parisian vernacular of the period). And once again, we see that the idea of a ‘poire’ as a type is all that is necessary: no specific pear, or fool, need be invoked for the charged characterization to pack its punch.

Our examples also point to the portability of characters. A character will be invented in a given fiction, but they can take on an existence beyond that literal ‘origin story’, reappearing in subsequent fictions created not only by the original author, but others too. The case of James Bond is a rich and instructive example, appearing first in Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953). By now Bond has featured in dozens of later films and novels authorized by Fleming’s estate, not to mention his countless appearances in fanfics. There is a sense in which each one of these versions of Bond is different—as different as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig, and all the other actors who’ve incarnated Bond in the films, are from one another. But a thread of continuity runs through these different renderings of the character; and it is this continuity which allows us to refer coherently to ‘James Bond’, and to transport that character from one fictional world to another, and, as we have seen, from the zone of fiction to the real world.

So the traffic between the real world and the worlds of fiction runs in both directions. Moving in one direction, the very concept of character designates the fictional analogue of an actual human agent, and many specific characters are modelled on and inspired by actual persons. Moving in the other direction, fictional characters are a tool for thinking about real people and the world itself. A web search reveals the strategy in full swing, as one might expect with the Presidential election just around the corner. Chris Wallace likens Nixon and Trump to the Joker; Trump’s critical remarks about wind power earn him comparisons with Don Quixote, swinging at the enemies populating his political fantasy, as illusory as the windmills Quixote mistakes for giants. George R. R. Martin compares Trump with Joffrey Baratheon, while Stephen King points to two of his characters as Trump-types, and dozens of other commentators play the comparison game. And Trump himself can’t stop referring to Hannibal Lecter—a fictional serial killer modelled on a real one—though it isn’t always clear what the former President wants to say through these allusions, or even whether he thinks Lecter is a figure to love or to loathe. None of this means that the distinction between the actual world and the worlds of fiction has been swallowed by a post-truth vortex; indeed the force of these comparisons depends on our ability to keep the different status of the fictional figures and their real targets of comparison straight—a task that most of us manage effortlessly, all the time.

_{Featured image by Matt Davis via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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Global mobility, bordered realities, and ethnocultural contact zones

Over the course of the last few weeks, public opinion in the U.S. and the U.K. has ignited in relation to issues of gender, race, religion, and place of origin. However, a closer look at this recent turmoil suggests that there is a clear concern regarding global migrations, inter-genetic contact zones, and the presence of Muslim communities across Western nations. During the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, I felt the academic urgency to focus on global migrations as places of conflict and political contact, and today in 2024 this urgency has acquired a more defined intellectual and cognitive pervasion than back then.

On the surface, anti-immigration in the U.K. and the presidential candidacy in the U.S. of a woman with multiple cultural heritages that self-identifies as an African-American are unrelated and respond to different cultural anxieties. Nevertheless, global social reality provides quite a different perspective, particularly because migrations across the globe are triggering mainstream rhetorical responses that appeal to both nativism and genomic anxieties. Furthermore, the recent social media attacks focused on athletes from Algeria and China competing at the Olympics have put into question the western cultural protocols of trans-inclusion at such a competitive and global level as it is the case of the Olympic Games.

While these sociocultural phenomena seem to underscore different biopolitical trajectories (cultural difference, intersectional power dynamics, and postmodern gender re-configurations), they share a common rhetorical point of encounter. The proliferation of global bordering processes at all biopolitical levels emphasizes that our realities of interaction impose more borders than ever upon human experience. Borders no longer are mere fixed invisible divisions set under geopolitical rationales whose main objective is defining national territorialities. Moreover, the circulation of global migrants across national borders and global urban spaces has shifted the interplay between humans and borders internally. Thus, borders are not only serving as external points of biopolitical entry, particularly as cities in Europe and North America (thinking solely about the Western hemisphere) are experiencing an administrative reconfiguration of public spaces, as street policing has incorporated violent exclusionary practices to further distinguish between those who seem to belong from those who fall under the migrant/other category. In addition, public services targeting migrants are strengthening the protocols of national belonging while also defining the routes that migrants endeavor with administrative purposes, such as obtaining transit, residency, and employment permits.

Back in 2016, while teaching at a very conservative liberal arts institution in the southern United States, I made the risky decision to bring into the classroom The Origins of Nazi Violence by Enzo Traverso. Traverso’s monograph rightfully maps the conflicting genealogy of the Nazi regime, framing the extermination camps as an early epitome of European modernity’s industrialization of dehumanization and killing. The reading provoked a blitzkrieg of disapproval among my students. Despite my efforts to situate the reading within contemporary ethical debates, most of them argued that Traverso’s book was dated because Nazis had been already defeated and therefore that kind of “evil” had been successfully eradicated. I clearly remember my anxiety when one of my students angrily expressed that if Traverso’s book was at all useful it was only to place the role of Barack Obama as the main culprit for constantly fueling waves of anti-white racism across the United States. From this particular vantage point, the current attacks of Donald Trump on Kamala Harris’ heritage and racial origins are not at all unfamiliar among the American electorate. These attacks have a precise epistemological origin and are also sanctioned by entire communities. Moreover, these attacks aim at very specific social and cultural places of exclusion, similarly to what Traverso exposes in relation to the Nazi regime.

Nevertheless, while there is undoubtedly an epistemic entanglement between the emergence of anti-immigration and the rejection to acknowledge the biopolitical rights of migrants, the future keeps promising more global migrations and acute social mobility. In this specific sense, a paradigmatic example of this global phenomenon is the Central America-Mexico-U.S. human migration corridor. Over the course of this new century, a shift has occurred in relation to what at some point was identified as the ground-zero level of undocumented migrations to the United States. The once regarded as dangerous Arizona desert and Río Bravo/Colorado River irregular crossing points have been replaced by the treacherous Darién jungle, which stretches across southern Panama and northern Colombia. One of the consequences of this rebordering process is the sudden amplification of global migrations to North America—as borders play a crucial role in the allocation of human rights and the redistribution of cosmopolitan ethical concerns. While people from all over the world are crossing the Darién jungle on their way to Mexico and the United States, this sudden relocation of the entry point to North America has transformed Central America into a human corridor where entire families invest their futures. In consequence, this phenomenon has transformed in a short period of time the paradigm that once characterized migrants going to the U.S. as lonely men that were often considered outliers in their home countries.

This recent “expansion” of the U.S. national border across Mexico and Central America not only fulfills the American neocolonialist agenda but also demands an ongoing administration aimed at establishing protocols for the control of human mobility. In this specific sense, although departing from a philosophical standpoint, Thomas Nail suggests the term kinopolitics as an approach to understand global mobility. In The Figure of the Migrant, Nail advances the idea that the conceptual understanding of the kinopolitical figure of the migrant underscores the multiplicity and multidirectionality of a global character, “the migrant,” that has become central in the reconfiguration of geopolitical and biopolitical borders. Moreover, Nail’s Theory of the Border proposes that everyday life is bordered in every single direction, including the human body, our mindsets, and material life itself.

Nail’s theoretical approach to both the figure of the migrant and global borders has encouraged me to wonder about the incipient emergence of global identities that in the coming years will challenge the nation-based experiences of belonging. Not only transnational experiences will become more prevalent across global spaces but also the conservative approaches to racial nationhood will be challenged by new genomic configurations inherent to global mobility. The recent Venezuelan and Haitian diasporas are already transforming the urban landscapes of global spaces like Mexico City, which is regarded as the most populous city in North America. Similarly to the ongoing disinformation campaign on social media regarding non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in the upcoming November election, during the recent presidential election celebrated in Mexico on June 2 there were also public opinion concerns regarding the false claim that South American and Haitian immigrants had been given voting cards by the ruling party MORENA, which consequently won the presidential election.

Even though anti-immigration seems to be on the rise across deeply polarized nation-states, the furthering of neoliberal postmodernity across the Global South is paving manifold routes to endeavor global migration with the clear intention to relocate as close as possible to the Global North. After all, the invisible guiding force of neoliberal postmodernity is transforming subjective, objective, and symbolic space into a spatial puzzle that could be understood as a global borderspace. And this process of spatial configuration within the global realm has positioned mobility across borders as a fundamental starting point to both access and understand the future of (inter)national borders.

_{Featured image by NASA via Unsplash}

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Figleaves: 5 examples of concealed speech

In art, a figleaf is used to barely cover something one isn’t supposed to show in public. I use the term ‘figleaf’ for utterances (and sometimes pictures, or other things) which barely cover for speech of a sort one isn’t supposed to openly engage in.

When someone says “I’m not a racist but…” and then goes on to say something very racist, they are trying to use this first phrase as a figleaf—to convince the audience that even though they might seem racist they really aren’t. For many people, this figleaf won’t succeed. But for others, it will—convincing them that maybe it isn’t so racist after all. And this is why figleaves are so important and dangerous: they have the potential to shift our standards, helping to normalise what was once beyond the pale.

Donald Trump is a big user of figleaves, and it’s through reflecting on Trump’s speech that I began to understand their workings. However, this is not just a Trump phenomenon.

1. “I’m not a racist”

Two classic figleaves are “I’m not a racist” and “I have a Black friend”. These can be used at the same time as the racist utterance, or later to cover up for it. The reason these work is that many white people subscribe to a very restrictive view of what racism is: they think that a racist must be someone who is proudly and intentionally discriminatory toward all members of the group they take to be biologically inferior—the paradigm case here is something like a hood-wearing Klan member. A person like that surely wouldn’t have a Black friend or deny their racism.

2. “This doesn’t apply to everyone”

Trump launched his campaign with a speech in which he called Mexicans rapists, but added on “and some, I assume, are good people”. For many people, this won’t work at all—it seems like a bad faith addition to obvious racism. For others, it’s not needed: they are happy to see an obviously racist remark. But crucially, there is also a persuadable group: these people don’t want to support a racist, but are willing to be convinced that the utterance isn’t racist. If they are like many white people, they will think that racists must believe in the biological inferiority of racial groups. Someone like that wouldn’t add on the assumption that Mexicans are good people so for this persuadable group, the figleaf works: it makes them think Trump might not be racist after all. And it can even make them think that it’s not racist to call Mexicans rapists.

3. “Only temporarily”

When Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, he also used a figleaf: he said the ban was meant to be in force only “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. This is also a figleaf, and it works on those who think that a racist would discriminate against all members of a group forever, rather than calling for a temporary ban. In fact, temporariness is rather an interesting broad-spectrum figleaf. We see Trump using it again, more recently, as he insists that if elected he will only be a dictator for one day. The idea here is that a real dictator would not be satisfied with this.

4. “Others say”

Another broad-spectrum figleaf is to report what “others” have said. This can be a way of introducing racist content without having to be held responsible for it: it’s not necessarily racist to report a racist utterance from somebody else. This can also be used to spread wildly conspiracist claims.  A person who would feel hesitant sharing a post asserting that Bill Gates uses vaccines to monitor people’s locations might feel more comfortable sharing posts that merely assert other people are saying he’s doing this.

This technique is nothing new. British fascist Enoch Powell used this technique in his infamous Rivers of Blood Speech, when he described a constituent (a “quite ordinary working man”) saying “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. In so doing, Powell placed some of the vilest racist rhetoric from his speech in the mouth of someone else.

5. “I’m only asking”

Another favorite figleaf for conspiracy theorists is to insist that they’re just asking questions. After all, one does not need to know that something is true in order to ask a question about it. And the person who pushes back on this can be accused of not really seeking the truth. Joe Rogan, a prolific user of figleaves, combines several in this utterance (figleaves highlighted):

This doctor was saying Ivermectin is 99 percent effective in treating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,” he says on his podcast. “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong. I’m just asking questions.”

An insidious all-purpose fig leaf, the standard of evidence required to ask a question is very low, and one doesn’t have to take on responsibility for asserting something. One can “ask questions” about immigrants stealing jobs, or scrounging from the state, or committing crimes. One can “ask questions” about the dangers of trans people. And one can do all of these without having to show that there’s any reason to believe these questions deserve to be entertained.

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Dogwhistles: 10 examples of disguised messages

Dogwhistles are one of the most discussed methods for politicians to play on voters’ racial attitudes in a stealthy manner, although they come in handy for manipulation on other topics as well. They take their name from whistles that can be heard by dogs but not by humans. The key to a dogwhistle is this hiding of what’s really going on. Broadly speaking, a dogwhistle is a bit of communication with an interpretation that seems perfectly innocent—but which also does something else. It can send a clear coded message to those in the know—what I call an overt code dogwhistle. Or it can work on its targets without their awareness—what I call a covert effect dogwhistle. Let’s turn to some famous and less famous examples:

1. 88

The number code ‘88’ is a very clear case of an overt code dogwhistle. White supremacists and neo-Nazis often use number codes to communicate with each other, especially (but not only) online. ‘88’ stands for ‘Heil Hitler’ because ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet. To those not in the know it just looks like a number. And, crucially, it sometimes is. This is why you’d want to know why the person on a dating app is wearing a sweatshirt with ‘88’ on it. It could be the year they graduated. Or it could be something much, much worse.

2. Egg Dumplings

Images can also serve as overt code dogwhistles. In Austria, Nazis will post images of Hitler’s favourite food (Austrian egg dumplings) on his birthday. To one not in the know, they just look like pictures of egg dumplings. But this method of Nazi communication is so well-established that an Austrian policeman received a prison sentence for engaging in it.

3. The Willie Horton Commercial

One of the most infamous examples of a dogwhistle is the Willie Horton commercial, used by George HW Bush in his campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. Created by Republican political mastermind Lee Atwater, this advertisement did not mention race but merely showed the face of William Horton (called ‘Willie’ in the ad), a Black man convicted of murder who had been given a furlough from prison under Massachusetts law. During this furlough, he committed further violent crimes which were described in the ad. Political psychologist Tali Mendelberg studied the ad and found that exposure to it made racially resentful voters more likely to vote for Bush. This effect, however, began to disappear as soon as racial justice campaigner Jesse Jackson called attention to the role of race in the ad. This is what led Mendelberg to argue that this kind of political messaging functioned outside voters’ awareness—once they became aware of it, it didn’t work any more. And that’s what makes it such a clear example of what I call a covert effect dogwhistle—it only has its intended effect if it remains outside awareness. (Mendelberg argues, by the way, that Jackson’s criticism was so effective that Dukakis might well have defeated Bush if the election had been held two weeks later, a sobering thought for those interested in alternative histories.)

4. The Breaking Point Billboard

The Breaking Point billboard from the Brexit campaign very likely works a lot like the Willie Horton ad. It makes no reference to race, thereby conveniently providing deniability. But the one white face in the crowd depicted has been carefully covered, inexplicitly activating the audience’s racial attitudes.

5. Save The Children

Not all dogwhistles are about race, however. They are also very popular with conspiracy theorists, and in particular with devotees of the Q Anon conspiracy theory. This theory holds that a highly placed Washington insider, Q, has been releasing hints online about a vast conspiracy of paedophiles and child abductors and about the efforts to bring them down—including the role of Donald Trump as chief savior. Followers of Q Anon have adopted the slogan “Save the Children”, employing it on T-shirts, signs, and hashtags—much to the dismay of the venerable anti-poverty charity. The fact that this is the name of a mainstream charity but also a coded way for followers of Q to communicate with each other makes this a highly effective overt code dogwhistle.

6. Emojis

Emojis are also used as dogwhistles, and some of them have become especially popular amongst anti-vaccination groups as a means of avoiding content moderation. These include carrots, cake, and pizza emojis to represent vaccinations.

7. Groomers/Grooming

Dogwhistles can vary greatly from country to country. Consider, for example, the idea of grooming. In its mainstream usage, grooming refers to a technique used by pedophiles to gain the trust of their victims. The terms ‘grooming’ and ‘groom’ have become popular dogwhistles in both the US and the UK, though they largely target different groups. In the US (and sometimes the UK), the term ‘groomer’ is used primarily to refer in a derogatory way to LGBTQ people, based on the false and defamatory stereotype that they’re attempting to make children trans or gay. In the UK, the term ‘grooming gang’ is used primarily to perpetuate stereotypes of Pakistani men, referencing some particular cases of child abuse—and ignoring the evidence that such gangs are in fact more likely to be white. In both cases, users of these terms are able to fall back on the claim that they’re concerned about child abuse, rather than about trans people or Pakistani men.

8. Immigration/Immigrant

Another term that can be used as a dogwhistle is ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’. We can expect to hear this one a lot. It’s particularly potent because it can dogwhistle so many different things—racism, Islamophobia, anti-Eastern European views, or simply xenophobia. And these shifting possibilities make it especially hard to discuss or object to.

9. George Soros

It can be easy to suppose that the right approach to dogwhistle terms is to simply avoid them. But not all such words are avoidable. Take for example George Soros. He’s a real person who has done a lot of important things that one might wish to discuss. But his name has also become a very widely used anti-Jewish dogwhistle. Much as we might like to avoid using dogwhistles, we can’t simply avoid all discussion of George Soros. (And for Soros himself this would be even more difficult!).

10. Anti-Jewish Art Mural

Importantly, it can sometimes be difficult to discern the intent behind a dogwhistle. Back in 2012, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted his support for an artist whose mural was being removed. When Corbyn was Labour leader in 2018, this became a subject of considerable controversy. The reason was that the mural was filled with classic anti-Jewish dogwhistles: in particular, hook-nosed bankers. As a half-Jewish person who is very interested in dogwhistles, I initially agreed with those who felt there was no way Corbyn could have been unaware of this. I found to my surprise that very large numbers of my friends in the UK did not recognize the anti-Jewish dogwhistles in the mural and were sceptical when I pointed them out. This left me uncertain about whether Corbyn in fact recognized them.

And this is where we sometimes end up with dogwhistles. What is well-known and obvious to some is not at all obvious to others—so it can be difficult to know what the intention was behind the usage of a dogwhistle term or image.

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“But you got to have friends…”: A Bette Midler playlist

Bette Midler began her recording career back when Richard Nixon (“Tricky Dick,” as she liked to call him) was still President, and her range and versatility were obvious from the very beginning. Since she first entered a recording studio, she’s tackled just about every genre of music. This tour through her recorded output reveals not just the familiar best-selling hits but five decades of deep cuts and delightful discoveries. Take a listen for yourself:

1. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1972)

Midler’s affinity for 1940s music resulted in her first top ten hit: a period-perfect recasting of this Andrews Sisters’ World War II boogie woogie smash. Multi-track layering gave us Midler as Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne, all in perfect harmony.

If you like that, try this: “It’s the Girl” (2014): Decades on, Midler’s harmony chops were undiminished as she revisited this swinging 1930s hit by the Boswell Sisters, one of her childhood favorites.

2. “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972)

This sultry, slowed-down version of the Bobby Freeman hit opened Midler’s debut album, The Divine Miss M—no album ever got off to a better start. Midler has never sounded more sensuous as she pleads for one more dance in an arrangement that remained a staple of her live concerts into the twenty-first century.

If you like that, try this: “Under the Boardwalk” (1988): Midler brought a similar sexy vibe to this remake of the 1960s Drifters’ hit for the soundtrack of Beaches.

3. “Friends” (1972)

This jaunty sing-along ode to the importance of friendship became Midler’s unofficial theme song when she worked at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s and it’s been part of her act ever since. Its lyric, “I had some friends but they’re gone/Something came and took them away,” has meant different things at different stages of her career. In the 1970s it was a promise of solidarity with the gay men who made up her first audiences. During the AIDS epidemic, it acknowledged the unfathomable losses of the gay community. In later years, it marked the passage of time and the inevitable loss of aging friends.

If you like that, try this: “Samedi et Vendredi” (1976): Midler wrote lyrics to many of the songs she’s recorded over the years, and this captivating burst of witty wordplay and infectious rhythms is one of her best. Singing all the voices––and doing it entirely in French––Midler sounds like she’s gathered all her friends into one room and let them run wild.

4. “Hello in There” (1977)

Midler the actress made a meal out of John Prine’s poignant ballad about an old couple facing the end of an uneventful life. On her 1977 Live at Last album, she prefaced the song with an outlandish monologue about a giant, bald-headed woman on the streets of New York wearing a fried egg on her head, turning the fried egg into a metaphor for the existential anxieties of our era. After that introduction, “Hello in There” was more heart-wrenching than ever.

If you like that, try this: “Waterfalls” (2014): Midler turned TLC’s rambling scenario about mothers’ inability to keep their sons safe from the horrors of street crime and AIDS into a stripped down, mournful ballad.

5. “I Shall Be Released” (1973)

Midler claimed ownership of every song she ever sang. In the case of Bob Dylan’s classic lament for an incarcerated man, she turned it into a furious feminist cry. Barry Manilow’s piano arrangement slowly builds in intensity as it takes Midler from quiet resignation to righteous anger.

If you like that, try this: “Beast of Burden” (1983): Midler did a similar renovation of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s teasing riff aimed at a reluctant lover, redefining it as a woman’s demand for respect.

6. “Cradle Days” (1979)

Possibly the greatest vocal Midler ever laid down. In this slow-burning soul shouter, she’s a modern-day Medea pleading with a departing husband to restore both their relationship and their shared children. Her singing is equal parts untamed and tightly disciplined, all of it cushioned in creamy backing vocals led by Luther Vandross. Sublime.

If you like that, try this: “Birds” (1977): Midler’s take on Neil Young’s gentle breakup song gives it a driving R&B edge and features fierce vocal back-up from the Harlettes.

7. “Stay With Me” (1979)

Midler’s film debut as a tortured Janis Joplin-like star in The Rose gave her plenty of opportunities to rock. But her best moments demonstrated her (and Joplin’s) feel for combining rock and soul, as in this staggering plea to a lover as he heads out the door.

If you like that, try this: “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1979): The other great performance number from The Rose. Midler sings the old Percy Sledge ballad as a recognition of the difficulty a woman rock star can have finding love. For maximum impact, watch the performance clips of “Stay With Me” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” rather than only listening to the audio.

8. “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1988)

Midler’s first and (so far) only #1 hit demonstrates her skill at stirring in a bit of vinegar to cut the sticky sweetness. She rides the song’s anthem-like waves, but never falls off into bathos. Even if you’re immune to its message, it’s hard not to be moved by Midler’s sincerity.

If you like that, try this: “Laughing Matters” (1998): This rueful call to keep a sense of humor in a world gone increasingly mad gets a ravishing orchestral backing for one of Midler’s most reassuring vocals.

9. “The Rose” (1979)

Just about perfect. The hushed power of Midler’s voice captures the “endless aching need” so vividly evoked in Amanda McBroom’s evergreen hymn—a classic pairing of singer and song.

If you like that, try this: “Lullaby in Blue” (1998): Midler holds back on the emotion and her restraint makes this tender remembrance of a teenage pregnancy deeply affecting.

10. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” (1973)

Another great Barry Manilow arrangement, this one starts soft but gathers force as Midler and a stentorian choir take it to church. Just when you think she can’t go any higher––or wilder––she reaches even more frenzied heights.

If you like that, try this: “Bang, You’re Dead.” (1977): Midler was known to dabble in disco, and this propulsive Ashford and Simpson production is one of her best in that genre. It’s impossible to stand still when Midler’s scorching vocal rides that four-on-the-floor beat.

11. “Mele Kalikimaka” (2006)

Midler frequently evoked her background growing up on the island of Hawaii, and this holiday song, based on the Hawaiian derivation of the phrase, “Merry Christmas,” is an affectionate tribute to her home state.

If you like that, try this: “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (2003): Midler at her good-humored best, swinging lightly through Johnny Mercer’s dense, savory lyrics.

_{Featured image by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo. via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.}

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The year of singing politically: The 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Malmö, Sweden

Welcome to the show. Let everybody know I’m done playin’ the game. I’ll break out of the chains.

—Nemo, “The Code,” winning song of Eurovision 2024

Breaking out of the chains had emerged as a central leitmotif and call for activism at the Eurovision Song Contest long before Swiss non-binary singer, Nemo, performed it as the winning song, “The Code,” at the Grand Finale on May 11 2024 in Malmö, Sweden. Though the lyrics could and did allow for different interpretations when the 2024 national entries first began to circulate on the internet—whose show, whose game, who’s everybody, who’s playing—ambiguity had been stripped away by the height of the Eurovision season in April. Nemo’s own breaking of the code became an allegory for direct engagement with the most unbreakable of all Eurovision codes: performance of politics, understated or overt, is strictly forbidden.

Violating the code would lead to rejection of a national entry by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the largest broadcasting network in the world and the organizational infrastructure for the Eurovision itself. In extreme cases, when the politics of a song mirrored the geopolitics of Europe, violation of the code could lead to banning a nation from competing entirely, as it did in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Eurovision Song Contest, in a word, should be apolitical. It should channel a cultural democracy for Europe heralded by an annual motto, this year “Unity by Music.” Such lofty goals for song may well be cause for celebration, but the reality of the largest music competition in the world, in which nation vies against nation on the global television stage, undermines the myth of a world without politics.

At Eurovision 2024, that myth would be fully dispelled. It was the announcement of the Israeli entry, Eden Golan and a song called “October Rain,” that in February forced the EBU into its attempt at apolitical activism. The title and lyrics of the song, according to the EBU, were direct references to the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel. Whether direct or not, always an abstruse category for EBU censors, Israel was given the option of withdrawing, substituting a new song, or altering “October Rain” to contain no political references. Israel chose the third of the options, entering with a song called “Hurricane”. With that entry, political controversy was unleashed, with calls for banning Israel because of its war in Gaza, which led in turn to massive demonstrations on the streets of Malmö and loud booing of Eden Golan at the semi-finals and finals—and a fifth-place finish in the May 11th Grand Finale, highly respectable under any circumstances.

Just how does the EBU and the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest, including the host country that produces the shows for Eurovision Week, exercise its apolitical activism? To answer that question, one needs to consider the long history of the counterpoint between top-down organization by Europe’s media empire and the bottom-up participation of a musical citizenry seeking to win its place in a Europe constituted of diverse fragments. There are many ways to pose the question, but a critical way to answer it is to reflect on the different ways song itself expresses organization and participation.

In principle, any citizen of a nation whose broadcasting network is a member of the EBU has the potential to participate in the Eurovision. Competitions begin locally in the nation, move across regional boundaries, and eventually reach the stage provided nationally by the country’s broadcasting network, for example, the well-known Sanremo Song Contest in Italy. Winning entries are determined by a voting system that, though in variants among different countries, affords the feeling of democracy. The entry of San Marino (population 33,660) reaches Eurovision Week through a process that is comparable to that of Italy, albeit on a vastly different scale. The concept of Eurovision democracy in the bottom-up process is inherently political, which in turn is evident in the changing styles, languages, and symbolism of entries from year to year. Some nations choose to be more international, others recognizably national, for example, in the folk music-inflected entries of Croatia and Armenia on May 11th. The musical politics of some nations serve style and genre: for example, the consistent use of chanson and cabaret style by singers for France, the political meaning of the lyrics notwithstanding. In 2024, the LGBTQ+ signifying of the North African Muslim French entry, Slimane, fitted beautifully to the chanson style of his song, “Mon Amour.” National differences, when performed effectively, do not deter the voting public across Europe, who this year placed Croatia and France in the second and fourth positions.

The top-down musical democracy of the EBU and of the Eurovision Song Contest (as pageant and spectacle) depends on another set of criteria to enforce its apolitical activism. Not only the content of a song, but its structure must observe strict rules (for example, exactly three minutes, maximum six performers on stage). Infringing on these rules is an act of not belonging to Eurovision democracy. In 2024, as conflict and controversy enveloped the rest of the world, the EBU and the Swedish production team turned away from the roiling of external politics, instead looking inward, gazing at the Eurovision itself, its history, and a sort of fantasy world imagined as its alternative for Europe. In both the semi-final performances (May 7th and 9th) and the Grand Finale, the intermission acts on the stage in Malmö were consistently retrospectives of earlier Eurovision entries performed by former Eurovision stars. Host Sweden had made the decision that Eurovision 2024 should be a grand fiftieth-anniversary celebration for Eurovision 1974, won by ABBA singing “Waterloo,” the most popular song in Eurovision’s sixty-eight-year history. Many of the songs performed in the 2024 Eurovision imaginary came off as sad commentaries of a world no longer relevant, if apolitical. I found it rather pathetic to watch Johnny Logan (“Mr. Eurovision” from the 1980s and 1990s) during the first semi-final singing Loreen’s 2012 winning song, “Euphoria.” When Loreen, the Swedish winner from 2012 and 2023, introduced her “new song” at the appropriate ritual moment in the entr’acte of the finals, it was barely distinguishable from those earlier songs, as if she was trapped in a cycle of covering herself.

As the political world did battle with the apolitical world, it was the former that broke through, opening the stage for a politics that could capture a new attention. Criticism of the politics of ongoing war, in Gaza and Ukraine, can be openly expressed. Engagement with a different Europe, one unsettled, not united, by music, might someday occupy a presence on the Eurovision stage. In 2024, we witnessed that presence in the powerful cry to humanity in the Ukrainian entry of Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil, “Teresa and Maria,” which concluded the Grand Finale in third place. As I did in my blogpost last year, I give the final words in 2024 to Ukraine, which show us why the Eurovision really can and should matter.

Spring makes its path, no matter what.
The world is on her shoulders,
Misled, winding, rocky. . . .
All the divas were born
As human beings with us.

_{Featured image by Arkland via Wikimedia Commons. CC4.0.}

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Here’s Johnny––and Bette!

New York-based talk shows in the 1970s offered plentiful opportunities for quirky young talents like Bette Midler to sing a song or two and maybe kibitz with the host, regardless of whether they had a Broadway show or film or new record to promote. Midler had none of these when her manager Budd Friedman got her booked on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson not long after she began her legendary run at the Continental Baths. Her bawdy alter ego, the Divine Miss M, was birthed during late night performances for an audience of gay men sitting at her feet, naked but for skimpy bath towels. The Divine Miss M brought together gay, Jewish, feminist, and show business sensibilities in a package that combined raucous comedy, a jukebox’s worth of old songs re-energized, and devastating ballads that brought tears as well as cheers. Midler immediately became the most celebrated new star New York’s gay cognoscenti. 

Carson’s flirtatious/fatherly chemistry with Midler continued during her frequent visits over the next twenty years. In 1973, now a best-selling recording artist and concert star, Midler made a triumphant return in all her curly, red-haired glory. Midler, musical director Barry Manilow, and her backing trio, the Staggering Harlettes, tore the place up, with the Harlettes’ “Optimistic Voices” leading into Midler’s grand entrance for “Lullaby of Broadway” and a sizzling “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They were a sight: Midler spilling out of a garish evening gown, accessorized with stone martens and platform shoes, and the Harlettes in vintage tie-and-tails harmonizing and dancing their stylized 1940s moves like contemporary women giddily discovering a new/old musical world. Manilow and the band in their 1970s long hair and street clothes jammed in the background. If any single performance exemplified the musical and sartorial fun of the early 1970s nostalgia trend, it was surely this one.

In 1980, publicizing her new book, A View from a Broad, Midler looked remarkably subdued, wearing what she might sardonically call a “tasteful” ensemble of slacks, jacket, and high-necked blouse, with her now-blonde tresses pulled back behind her ears. But she’s as vivid a conversationalist as ever. When Carson asks if she ever envisioned she would be as big a star as she has become, her answer is a straightforward, sincere, “Yes.” But she’s quick to point out that her early view of stardom was superficial. “I didn’t realize that the one thing that’s worse than not being looked at is being looked at,” she says, before launching into a comic riff on being followed in the grocery store by fans who judge her food choices. “I can only go to the fancy food section now.” It was a perfect Midlerian anecdote: outlandishly funny, told with mock horror, but with an underlying seriousness that made it entirely plausible.

In 1983, she was pushing her new single, “Beast of Burden” and her new book, The Saga of Baby Divine, a lavishly illustrated children’s book with adult appeal. Her savage re-envisioning of the Rolling Stones’ hit began with her on the floor, crouching like a caged animal. A tight, spaghetti-strapped cocktail dress and spike heels didn’t inhibit her from dropping to her knees and “humping the floor,” as she liked to call it. The performance ended with a full round of microphone swinging that threatened to destroy the set. The topper was her ad lib as she took her seat next to Carson: “And she writes books too!”

Midler had just turned forty when she returned at the end of 1985, and unlike so many other women in show business, she wasn’t afraid to joke about getting older and trying to stay in shape. A bit more zaftig than usual, and ruing her love of food, she launched into “Fat As I Am” while seated between Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon and proceeded to take over the set, lounging on Carson’s desk, kicking off her shoes, and pulling every laugh out of the comic torch song.

Then she turned around and offered a heart stopping “Skylark” that surpassed her recording from the 1970s.

By her next appearance at the end of 1988, she was one of the most successful and highest paid women in films following a string of hit Disney comedies. She was there to promote her latest film, the dramatic musical Beaches, and was very much the regal film star, complete with an opulent mane of auburn hair cascading around her shoulders while performing “Under the Boardwalk,” from the film’s soundtrack album.  

Midler was on another upswing when she returned just as For the Boys was opening in November 1991. The expensive and ambitious movie musical had good buzz and Midler, coming off big record and film hits, was in high spirits and looking splendid. It seemed more like The Bette Midler Show than The Tonight Show, with the star showcased in several songs from the film, including another impromptu (but not really) comedy number from her guest chair, making “Otto Titsling” a hellzapoppin’ history lesson about brassieres that even for her was wildly, comically flamboyant.

For the Boys was a high-profile failure for Midler and she laid low for months, finally reappearing, at Carson’s request, on his penultimate episode as host of The Tonight Show. After nearly thirty years, Carson was retiring from the show that had come to define late night television. His last guests were Midler and Robin Williams on 21 May 21 1992. It was rare for Robin Williams to be relegated to the role of second banana, but that night Midler left him in the dust. She pulled off one more sitting-on-the-chair song––this one for the television history books––with a specially-tailored version of “You Made Me Love You” and its introductory “Dear Mr. Gable,” first performed by Judy Garland to the movie heart throb, Clark. “Dear Mr. Carson” and “You Made Me Watch You,” with new lyrics co-written by Midler, Marc Shaiman, and Bruce Vilanch, hit all the comic bases, from Carson’s personal life (“I watched your hair turn slowly from dark to white/And when I can’t sleep I count your wives at night) to jokes about Ed McMahan and even Carson’s longtime producer Ted DeCordova (“Before you bid adieu/Don’t be cheap/Put DeCordova to sleep”). Midler was known for her razorlike timing, but her every slow take, grimace, and pause was delivered with comic perfection that was deepened by her genuine affection for and gratitude to Carson.

It was hard to imagine Midler topping that moment. But returning from a commercial, Midler sang Carson one last song. On a stool in the center of the soundstage, she delivered Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road),” turning this boozy barroom standard into a final, loving tribute, as if standing in for the millions who had watched him over the years. Midler could sometimes overdo the pathos, but here her smiling warmth was even more affecting because it kept the tears at bay. It was Carson who grew increasingly misty-eyed as the camera captured him over Midler’s shoulder while she bid him farewell on “that long, long road.” The moment was instantly iconic, a prime example of live television at its best.

The night was as much a milestone for Midler as it was for Carson. The eager, anxious-to-outrage young chanteuse had matured into an evergreen entertainer who could effortlessly toggle between uproarious comedy and deep emotion. All her Carson appearances had been notable, but this night it was impossible to imagine anyone in show business other than Midler creating this final moment for him.

_{Featured image credit: Publicity photo of Bette Midler from 1973 by Aaron Russo-manager. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The Alexander Mosaic: Greek history and Roman memories

Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended.

Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition.

All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs.

Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance.

When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject?

_{Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Exploring language and masculinities in the media landscape

We all engage with different media formats on a daily basis. From watching television shows and movies, to catching up with the news, playing videogames, reading a blogpost from a favourite author, downloading the latest app, or discussing current events with people on social media, the media is an integral (and inescapable) part of our lives. While there is some evidence to suggest rates of use across commercial media platforms is declining, a recent Ofcom report found that over 90% of the British adult population are regular users of the internet and British viewers are still watching over five hours of television per day, even as overall media consumption is now fragmented across smart phones, online platforms, radio stations, television, streaming services, and print. 

Men in the media

What is also clear across a variety of news reports, television shows, social media sites, computer games, and other media formats is that men appear to dominate, both in terms of focus and the number of contributions they make. In the case of televised and printed media, this dominance raises questions of representation, equity, and the shape of contemporary gender relations. In other spaces, such as the manosphere (a loose collection of blogs, websites, Twitter accounts, and Reddit communities dedicated to a variety of men’s issues), this dominance is inflected by a virulent strand of networked misogyny, anti-feminism, and male supremacism. 

This intersection of men and media has been a research focus in academia, public policy work, and the charity sector for some time now. This research highlights how the media sets out cultural scripts of what’s “normal” and “accepted.” Media outputs give audiences exemplars and models they can compare themselves against, offering aspirational goals to strive for or images of self-hood to avoid. The media can also subvert these scripts, pushing gender discourses into new territory, challenging established wisdoms, and destabilising conventional stereotypes. By virtue of their interactivity and sense of community, manosphere spaces bring an added layer of complexity to proceedings, with research suggesting that their technological affordances play a key role in driving online radicalisation. 

And it is clear that the diversity of media influences can have substantial real-world effects. For instance, a recent survey commissioned by BBD Perfect Storm found that 51% of men believe that the media negatively impacts how successful they feel, while a joint UN Women/UNICEF report from 2022 notes “the particular role of news media reporting in perpetuating discriminatory gender norms and stereotypes, and bolstering the social permission structures that normalize this violence.” The arrest of Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed “king of toxic masculinity,” in December 2022 brought some of these issues into ever clearer focus, with a number of teachers, educators, charity leaders, parents, and counsellors expressing concerns about how Tate’s controversial talking points around consent, respect, dating, gender relations, and women were being parroted by male pupils in school hallways and classrooms up and down the country.  

Exploring the language of men in the media

Given the ubiquity of men in the media, it would seem to be an obvious place to look at how language relates to issues of contemporary masculinities. But while masculinities studies is a well-established field, the empirical analysis of the language used by (and about) men is a relatively new part of language and gender research. In my own work in this area, I explore how language is used by men across a range of media contexts, including fatherhood forums, television comedy shows, newspaper articles, manosphere communities, and alt-right spaces. More specifically, I’m interested in the history of “tough” masculinity in the British press, evaluations of “ideal” masculinity in the manosphere, the role of the media in promoting “positive” masculinities (with specific focus on the comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and the representation of caring models of fatherhood in online forums.

Why might we want to apply a linguistic lens to men in different media spaces? First and foremost, language is the primary means through which we relate to one another and (dis)align ourselves from other groups and categories. By paying close attention to linguistic practice, we can learn more about contemporary gender dynamics and how language is used to structure these relations. Second, by analysing the kinds of linguistic strategies used in manosphere and alt-right spaces, we can better understand how these strategies become part of a system of persuasion and manipulation to recruit young men to male supremacist ideologies. In the context of the growing threat posed by networked misogyny (captured in the toxic narratives promoted by Tate and other “manfluencers”), challenging these strategies becomes an important pedagogical intervention. Finally, it is clear that some media outputs offer a more positive and healthier configuration of masculinity and we can do a lot to learn about how these outputs use language to disrupt some of the more damaging aspects of masculine behaviour.  

For many people, language is an unremarkable part of everyday life, yet it is through this mundanity that language retains its power to shape society in subtle and indirect ways. The job of a linguist is to bring to light these hidden systems of differentiation and alignment, in order to show how language contributes to ongoing processes of discrimination, bias, and prejudice. The media reflects (and influences) both the good and the bad of who we are and what we stand for and, because of how it sits within a broader system of gender discourses, different media forms are ideal spaces for exploring the contemporary construction of modern-day masculinities (and of gender relations more generally). With the media so deeply integrated into our everyday lives, and substantial concerns being expressed about the problems of networked misogyny, gender representation, online radicalisation, male supremacism, and a whole host of other social ills, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to try to address these problems.

_{Featured image from the book cover of Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints (OUP 2023)}

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Has Russian journalism returned to Soviet era restrictions?

“As Vladimir Putin’s leadership enters its third decade, time will tell whether the despair of the current generation will be replaced by a renewed sense of journalism’s power to effect change.” That was how I ended the epilogue of News From Moscow, my monograph on post-war journalism in the Soviet Union. When I wrote those words, the situation for Russian journalists was already dire: journalists who contradicted the Kremlin line were regularly harassed, and independent publications were forced to register as “foreign agents.” But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February has made a bad situation immeasurably worse. Sooner than expected, the dismal future of Russian journalism is becoming clearer. 

Before I discuss the war’s effects on Russian journalists, it is important to begin this post by acknowledging the even-worse fate of Ukrainian journalists, at least 30 of whom have been killed in the conflict, either as frontline reporters or victims of Russian bombing. Occupying forces have deliberately targeted the press: countless Ukrainian journalists have been kidnapped, tortured or “disappeared,” while their families have also been threatened. But it is thanks to these journalists that audiences around the world have learned about Russian war crimes. Despite threats to silence them, Ukrainian journalists continue to search for the truth about a war Russian journalists cannot even name. 

The intensification of the so-called “special military operation” became a pretext for a crackdown on independent media across Russia. Officials threatened to prosecute those who described events in Ukraine as a war, while the state’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked access to the websites of many independent outlets. As a result, the Russian news landscape has become a state-controlled landscape, with news outlets including Meduza and Mediazona only accessible through a VPN. Staples of the liberal 1990s, such as the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaia gazeta closed their doors in March, having been threatened by Roskomnadzor. The latter’s editor, Dmitri Muratov, was attacked with red paint on a train to Samara, an assault which underlines the dangerous conditions for anti-war journalists, who now face 10-15 years in jail for disseminating “fake news.” 

When, in June 2021, Muratov was awarded the Nobel Prize, the committee’s statement mentioned the newspaper’s “fundamentally critical attitude towards power” as well as its “fact-based journalism and professional integrity.” But how can journalists working within the Russian mediascape maintain their integrity in a climate that seems to mitigate against truth, and which calls for moral compromises rather than ethical principles? 

For some Russian journalists, the invasion presents an opportunity. Russian television now offers a ready platform for various regime loyalists, nationalists, and conspiracists to launder their pet theories, including Vladimir Solovyov, a media pundit famous for his increasingly-deranged rants on Channel One. For others, the invasion became the straw that broke the camel’s back. State media was hit with a stream of resignations, while most of the non-Russian staff who had run the various versions of RT, the Russian state’s foreign broadcasting arm, rapidly jumped ship. The most high-profile act of dissent was the protest of Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor on the Channel One news, who famously crashed the channel’s evening news broadcast carrying an anti-war banner. Ovsyannikova was feted by western media and subsequently accepted a post with the German newspaper Die Welt. That decision was met with consternation from journalists and activists, who wondered why Ovsyannikova, who had for many years worked to disseminate the Kremlin’s narrative, had suddenly become a poster child for dissent. 

These discussions of complicity recall debates taking place after 1991, at which point journalists were understandably keen to deflect accusations of having been Soviet propagandists. They raise a wider question about journalism in authoritarian conditions: are journalists automatically tainted by association with a discredited regime, or can they point to positive actions they had taken to mitigate its impact? 

I am sometimes asked about parallels between the present-day Russian journalism and the press of the Soviet era: are we back in the USSR? The journalists at Dozhd’ suggested as much when they broadcast footage of Swan Lake in March, an allusion to Soviet TV broadcasts of the ballet during emergencies. One must, however, acknowledge the differences: independent media in the Soviet Union ended with the Decree on the Press of 9 November 1917, which effectively mandated the closure of all non-Bolshevik newspapers; after the Soviet collapse, it has never been illegal for journalists to start a new newspaper, nor to express opinions that differ from those of the regime. The Kremlin authorities have preferred to dismantle these freedoms piece by piece rather than with a single legislative act. The key point is that for much of the Soviet Union’s existence, journalists had no memory of the pre-1917 past, nor any expectation of being able to act independently. Today’s journalists, by contrast, are the children of Perestroika and the 1990s, and had, until recently, been able to speak truth to power. For that reason, there is a sense of loss.

Good journalism meant different things in each period. Soviet journalists were never free to contradict the Party line, nor to break important news stories, which were always approved at high levels. Journalists’ work was always tied to the overarching goal of building communism. Nevertheless, this still left them with space for creativity—especially after Stalin’s death. For journalists in the 1950s and 1960s, a period I examine in detail in my book, journalists helped popularise new pedagogical initiatives and even inaugurated the country’s first polling institute. Doing so, they hoped, would unleash untapped energies from below that would enable the building of communism. At the same time, they helped smooth the regime’s rough edges. Newspapers received thousands of letters every week, complaining of various ills of Soviet life, from a leaking roof to wrongful imprisonment. These letters became the source material for articles which could reverse a sentence, secure long-awaited housing, or expose official wrongdoing. It is this spirit of public service that allows Soviet journalists to claim that they were public servants, even if much of the material in their newspapers was geared towards the Party’s goals.

In the present day, the Kremlin’s constant attacks on independent journalists mean the hard-won freedoms of 1991 have shrunk to almost nothing. Top-level journalists at leading state broadcasters operate under constraints that recall Soviet conditions, including daily memorandums giving details of subjects to be covered and those to be avoided. The majority of journalists, who form the staff of regional television stations and newspapers, are increasingly squeezed between the requirements of their employers, their advertisers, and the demands of local politicians. In this climate, as Elisabeth Schimpfössl and Ilya Yablokov have noted, good journalism boils down to adekvatnost’: an ability to understand the “rules of the game” in the face of political and commercial restrictions and to operate effectively within those parameters.  

Adekvatnost’ could similarly describe the work of Soviet journalists who operated in a hostile political climate that severely restricted their freedom. Indeed, one of the most iconic accounts of the Soviet press came from the émigre novelist Sergei Dovlatov, whose comic novella The Compromise (1981) details the daily accommodations with authority that marred a young journalist’s career. Yet some Soviet journalists remained hopeful about the communist future and even when that future horizon receded, retained a belief that journalism could serve the public. Present-day Russian journalists, by contrast, have imbibed the Putin’s era’s trademark cynicism. The disappearance of independent media will only intensify the feeling that Russian journalists are providers of propaganda and distraction rather than contributors to the public good. Nevertheless, there remain journalists—many outside Russia, some, bravely, within it—who have continued to question the official line via Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, or blog posts. As Farida Rustamova, an exiled journalist whose Substack offers a perceptive view of Russian politics, told Meduza: “I started writing, among other things, to keep my hands and my head busy and to be of at least some use, describing what I can discover. I don’t want Russian speakers, especially in Russia, to be left alone with Putin’s propaganda”.

_{Featured image by Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash, public domain}

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Digital dance cultures: from online obscurity to mainstream recognition

I didn’t enter the world of digital dance cultures as a scholar. When I was introduced to TikTok and Dubsmash in October 2018 by my high school students, I first engaged with the platforms as a dancer. Despite having no formal training in dance and believing that any opportunity for me to become a dancer had passed me by, I was suddenly dancing alongside my students on a number of digital platforms that facilitated a growing screendance community. These platforms—namely TikTok, Dubsmash, and Triller—became part of my every day vernacular as the Gen Z dance moves that fill those spaces such as the Woah, the Mop, and the Wave became my choreography. Suddenly, I was a dancer. 

In just over three years since TikTok’s entry into the United States and Dubsmash’s re-launch as a dance challenge app, so much has changed. When I joined these apps, posting videos dancing alongside my students, I was one of few adults among millions of teenagers. In fact, even today, Dubsmash is still an almost exclusively Gen Z space. TikTok, bolstered by the pandemic, has become a home for social media users of all ages even if young people continue to dictate the app’s dominant culture. TikTok and Dubsmash’s emergence as critical spaces for digital dance fall into a lineage of screendance platforms that have proliferated since the dawn of the internet. Although screendance has been steadily gaining popularity, the pandemic accelerated this trend.

As with most things during the pandemic, the digital dance world saw a dramatic shift that both changed the culture and solidified many of the trends that had been shifting on the sidelines well before March 2020. Seeing this, dance scholars Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig guest-edited a special issue of The Journal of Screendance that responded to the nuanced ways that the pandemic has shifted the ways we engage with dance on digital media. Bench and Harlig note, “Activities once on the sidelines of the dance field are the new normal: teaching technique on Zoom, holding online dance film festivals, DJing house parties on Instagram, streaming archival performance documentation, making TikToks.” Indeed, screens are where we dance now.

As digital dance cultures became more normalized, scholars and the general public began to take notice. This was no more apparent than on 12 March 2021 during the This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Symposium, produced by Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig to coincided with the special journal issue. The online symposium began with a keynote roundtable featuring dance and digital media scholars Crystal Abidin, Kelly Bowker, Colette Eloi, Pamela Krayenbuhl, Chuyun Oh, and myself. Each scholar presented new research about how platforms such as Dubsmash and TikTok have exploded during the pandemic, making what was once something largely associated with teenagers in the US to something more universal. Now, dancing on TikTok, Triller, Dubsmash, and the like is not just an activity filling the hallways of high schools across the US. Rather, digital dance platforms have become an integral part of the mainstream.

As TikTok and Dubsmash have solidified themselves in mainstream US culture, so too have many of the conversations I engage with. Discussions about artist credit, monetization, choreography, activism, and community-building on social media apps, for example, are commonplace now. Casual onlookers now see these apps as serious spaces for artistic production which is the antithesis to how adults diminished young people’s content in the early days of these apps. 

Take for instance the story of the Renegade Dance Challenge set to K-Camp’s song “Lottery.” The Renegade Dance entered the mainstream in Fall 2019 after Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s most-followed creator, posted a video of her performing the dance. The dance took off, becoming what is arguably the most famous dance in TikTok’s short history. But TikTok isn’t where I first encountered Renegade and Charli D’Amelio wasn’t who I associated the dance with. I first learned about the dance from my high school students who had seen it on Dubsmash. The dance wasn’t created by D’Amelio, but was created by Jalaiah Harmon, a Black teen who wasn’t credited for her choreography and was seemingly left behind. After a media firestorm in January and February 2020, Harmon was rightfully credited as the mastermind behind the Renegade Challenge. Her popularity and career both took off, demonstrating the monetization that corresponds with social media virality.

The case of the Renegade signalled a shift in TikTok culture. Soon after, TikTok’s major talents such as D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling began giving dance credits in their videos, which modelled a culture of crediting artists. Their followers soon began giving credit, as well. By the time Keara Wilson choreographed one of 2020’s biggest dances, the Savage Challenge set to Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name, the entire landscape had changed. Wilson immediately was given credit, received the blue checks on Instagram and TikTok, had articles written about her, and even had the stamp of approval from Megan Thee Stallion. As TikTok grew in import throughout 2020, this became common practice, demonstrating how digital dance spaces became more recognized and respected by mainstream US culture as well as the media who had frequently disregarded TikTok and Dubsmash as silly spaces for teenagers. 

Indeed, now looking forward into what the future might hold for screendance, we can see that the pandemic has ushered in many changes that were likely inevitable. Social media dance spaces have been normalized. 

_{Feature image by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.}

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François Truffaut: why we crave great fiction

François Truffaut is among the few French directors whose work can be labeled as “pure fiction.” He always professed that films should not become vehicles for social, political, religious, or philosophical messages. As Bunuel used to say: “My cinema is not meant to be understood. When you understand, you reach a meaning. If you reach a meaning, there is no use for images.” Martin Scorsese flatly declared: “If I could put it in words, I would not have to put it in films.” The specificity of images is to transpose something that goes beyond the linguistic and the cognitive. Truffaut called it emotion as opposed to ideas and he was supremely gifted at delivering this precious good in his work. What exactly is emotion? This innocent word covers a fearfully complex process.

Truffaut grew up in an atmosphere of secrets and lies. He was unwanted child and found out when he was 10 that his father was not Monsieur Truffaut, but another, unknown, man. Early on, he confronted a world where words could not be trusted and learned to rely on the accuracy of non-verbal signs. His fictions expertly reactivate the silent grasp of the external world associated with pre-linguistic perceptions and create a pregnant reality alive with telling gestures, lights, colors, motions, sounds, music. A brilliant film critic and script writer, Truffaut also worshipped the formidable power of language. His films abound with letters and literary texts and cultivate elegant dialogues. He devoted one of his most beautiful films to the duality of language, verbal and non-verbal. In The Wild Child, he confronts a scientist—played by himself—writing his diary and a little savage who will never master the use of words, but still displays a natural gift for deep connections. 

Truffaut translated a rich perceptual world into hallucinatory landscapes. Under a deceptively realistic guise, images of his heroes chasing magical women in the streets of Paris become beautiful and universal metaphors for human destiny. His fictions give a geographic reality to emotions, memories, perceptions we cannot grasp or control. These metaphors suggest a hidden order organizing this buried material and bring it to light with exhilarating clarity. We are suddenly face to face with subterranean passions and we love what we see, instead of experiencing them amidst fear and confusion. 

Truffaut often declared that human destiny is imprinted by what happens to a man between the ages of 8 and 12. To illustrate how his metaphoric constructions are charged with deep autobiographical overtones, I want briefly to compare two films dealing directly with these years in his life: The 400 Blows (1959) and The Last Metro (1980). More than 20 years separate these works. The 400 Blows is Truffaut’s first film and The Last Metro his antepenultimate one. He would only make two more films before his death in 1984. Besides covering the same time-period, they share another characteristic: both were his two biggest financial successes. They obviously delivered a powerful emotion to audiences. In every other respect, however, they completely differ. 

First, style: realistic in The 400 Blows filmed in black and white and natural decors; elliptical and allusive in The Last Metro, which uses a studio-like set and a rich palette of colors where a deep red dominates. Second, narrative: The 400 Blows follows the social exclusion of a lonely 12-year-old boy who is successively expelled from school, home and Paris, and is ultimately locked up in a center for delinquents in Normandy. The Last Metro depicts the life of a theater during the German occupation, with a large cast of characters who closely interact in a series of subplots dealing with secrets, transgressive love, and creativity. A third difference sends us back to dates. Truffaut, born in 1932, was between 8 and 12 years old during WWII. He chose to film The 400 Blows in a 1959 setting, while The Last Metro is set in the Paris of the French Occupation. In The 400 Blows, we have the child, but not the décor; in The Last Metro, the décor but not the child. 

Or so it seems. One feature common to both films is the presence of a formidable woman: in one, the child’s mother; in the other, Marion Steiner, played by Catherine Deneuve. Enigmatic, lonely, distant, somewhat scary but totally fascinating, both women harbor a secret: the former is hiding a lover; the latter a husband. The main dramatic twist in both narratives will be the unveiling of this secret by the hero: Antoine Doinel, will run into his mother and her lover in the streets; Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) will discover Marion’s hidden Jewish husband in the cellar of the theater. From the beginning, Granger is associated with a young boy, the concierge’s son— who will be Deneuve’s illegitimate son in the play the theater is rehearsing. In The Last Metro, we also have a second major male figure: Deneuve’s husband, the creator in the cellar. In other words, in The Last Metro, Truffaut is present under three different personas: as a child, as a lover, as a celebrated creator.

Like Antoine Doinel, the creator is in jail, hiding and threatened because he is Jewish. Truffaut suspected that his unknown biological father was Jewish, and Catherine Deneuve was one of his great loves after their meeting on the set of The Mississippi Mermaid in 1969. Their break-up broke his spirit in 1971. “Love hurts” a line from The Last Metro, is a quote from The Mississippi Mermaid. The 400 Blows and The Last Metro form a diptych; they’re two complementary facets of Truffaut’s childhood. The 400 Blows evokes the loneliness of a rejected child, The Last Metro the healing art can dispense. The theater it depicts, with its red velvet seats, is a wonderful space, protected from the threats of the outside world (the Gestapo) and dominated by a radiant star figure in a splendid red dress (Marion Steiner). This is Truffaut’s everlasting image of the cinemas of his childhood.

Autobiographical material in The Last Metro is ubiquitous, albeit most cryptic—

so cryptic that it eluded even Truffaut’s directorial eye. I wrote my first essay on The Last Metro while Truffaut was still alive. He read my analysis and told me he was “staggered” by it. Knowing nothing about his illegitimate birth and his Jewish father, I was explaining that Bernard was in the position of a child who explores the maternal space and discovers the hidden father. Under the guise of a historical film, Truffaut had unknowingly projected, within a beautiful metaphor, the secret of his birth. This anecdote is meant to make an essential point: metaphors belong to the pre-linguistic perceptions; they escape the control of the cognitive mind. This is true for both the creator and the spectator. 

Metaphor seems to be a key word to define Truffaut’s art. In each of his films, he seems to craft a new one almost more elegant, arresting, and poignant than the one before. The metaphoric constructions are embedded in formal elements that are peripheral to the main narrative. While analyzing The Last Metro, I decrypted the metaphor by focusing only on spaces, colors, and movements and ignoring the plot. Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, is already profoundly metaphoric. Jean-Pierre Léaud was instructed not to express any explicit emotion while acting. The film’s form, in appearance naturalistic, furnishes secretly, through images, the key to the child’s inner rift. One example: the camera work sets up a contrast between the streets of Paris filmed in long mobile tracking shots and the inside scenes where fixed close ups dominate. The use of space captures a fantastic vitality frozen by the constraints of school and family life. Antoine’s long run at the end of the film brilliantly picks up both this spatial energy and its counterpoint in the last frozen shot by the sea.

Truffaut’s metaphoric constructions have a double function. While displaying a subterranean reality through formal arrangements, they generate a light hypnosis in the spectator. This perceptual mode differs radically from our normal ways of perceiving. It is not only different, it is accessible only through fiction and its metaphoric language. Emotion is hypnosis. Fiction opens a perceptual experience otherwise unreachable except, possibly, with alcohol and drugs, which however both lack the harmony inherent in art and, clearly, its safety. Mystical rapture would be another avenue, albeit much less within everyman’s reach than a film ticket. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson writes: “What unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of the mind.” Art, in all its forms through the centuries, is not a luxury, but an adjuvant, an ancillary to our equilibrium and even survival, as Bateson suggests: “Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate.” The systemic mind fosters empathy.

Great films also have moments when the hypnotic process breaks down because the images suddenly concentrate, in a fantastic coda, all the formal elements of the metaphor. This overload of effects wakes up the viewers and imprints the scene forever in their memory. It becomes what we call “an iconic scene”: Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate; Anita Ekberg in the fountain of Trevi, De Niro in the “You’re talking to me” scene of Taxi Driver and, of course, Antoine Doinel facing the viewer, his back to the sea, at the end of The 400 Blows. This last image is, by general consensus, one of the most memorable shots in the history of cinema. 

At this point we may well ask two questions: Did Truffaut know he was putting this architecture in place? Do viewers realize it exists? As I suggested earlier, the answer to both questions is almost certainly no. Knowledge implies a conscious, deliberate cognitive operation, one that is lacking on the parts of both creator and spectator. Truffaut conceived his films as a trajectory in space, as rhythms and forces in movement. The logic of this vision instinctively guided his creation of the mise en scène; the viewer responds unknowingly to the call of these forms. They trigger the pleasure of the film, which becomes the locus of a passionate dialogue between two unconscious minds, one forcefully leading the other. Such is, in fact, the film’s raison d’être. When we go to the movies, this is what we crave. Basking in the dim light of great films, we rejoice in this pause in our daily routine—a pause as indispensable as it is blissful.

_{Feature image: from Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A Charlie Brown Christmas: the unlikely triumph of a holiday classic

A Charlie Brown Christmas was never supposed to be a success. It hit on all the wrong beats. The pacing was slow, the voice actors were amateurs, and the music was mostly laid back piano jazz (the opening theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” carried a strange, wintery melody built on unconventional modal chord progressions). It was almost like the program was constructed as a sort of anti-pop statement. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was. And that’s exactly why it so worried the media executives who had commissioned it.

Incredibly, however, A Charlie Brown Christmas emerged from the holiday season of 1965 an unlikely and instantaneous classic, beloved by both the hip and the square in the United States. It did the incredible work of bridging the vast cleavage between the conservative and increasingly radical elements of the nation. The story of how this off-beat children’s program became a staple of modern American pop culture reveals much about the moment in which it was created and the people who fell in love with it.

The Christmas special had its origins in a television documentary that no one wanted. A young California filmmaker named Lee Mendelson had first met Charles Schulz in the early 1960s while shooting footage for a television program about Willie Mays, the famed centerfielder for the recently transplanted (1957) San Francisco Giants baseball team. Schulz, himself a recent migrant to northern California, had been at the ballpark to celebrate a Peanuts-themed event at the Giants’ Candlestick Park. After an enjoyable introduction, Mendelson had reached back out to Schulz with the idea for a documentary on Peanuts that he eventually titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown. The television documentary depicted the unassuming daily life of America’s hottest new cartoonist, from the school carpool to the drawing board to the evening at home with all his kids. Try as Mendelson might, however, he could not find a network interested in buying the program. After a year and a half of searching, it seemed that A Boy Named Charlie Brown was a loser like its namesake.

Despite this bump in the road, filming the documentary had sparked a strong working relationship between Schulz and Mendelson. During the first half of the 1960s, Peanuts grew into a national sensation thanks to big advertising deals with Ford Motor Company, a best-selling children’s book called Happiness is a Warm Blanket, and a rapidly expanding national syndication. All of this success led to a phone call in 1965. John Allen, an advertising man from McCann-Erickson, reached out to Mendelson. Allen had known Mendelson from his many attempts at selling A Boy Named Charlie Brown. This time Allen wanted to talk about a new idea for Schulz. Coca-Cola was in search of a television special for the holiday season. Did Schulz have anything, Allen inquired. “Of course,” Mendelson lied.

Mendelson immediately telephoned Schulz. “I think I may have just sold a Charlie Brown Christmas show,” he breathlessly announced. “What show might that be?” Schulz replied a bit stunned and entirely confused. “The one you need to make an outline for tomorrow,” Mendelson replied without missing a beat.

That weekend Schulz, Mendelson, and animator Bill Melendez typed and retyped and cut and pasted a draft of the script for A Charlie Brown Christmas. By Monday morning it had reached Atlanta where it received immediate approval from Coca-Cola and was soon picked up by CBS. Now the truly difficult work began. These three men had to make a promising idea into a reality.

A Charlie Brown Christmas would later become famous for its embrace of authentic child actors, smooth jazz soundtrack, and deliberate pacing. Unmoved by the flashy, multi-colored aluminum Christmas trees in fashion at the time, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree was a spindly, crooked sprout that could not stand up to the weight of the single ornament placed atop it. Love and teamwork (and the comfort of Linus’s security blanket wrapped at its base) transformed the pitiful sprig into just the right tree for the Peanuts kids. Fans of the program found the whole thing instantly heartwarming and refreshingly genuine. That’s not how the CBS and Coca-Cola executives initially saw it, though.

In a pre-release screening, moods could hardly have been more dour. “The network thought it was awful,” Mendelson remembered afterwards. None of it had the polish, flash, pizzazz they had hoped for. Most troubling of all was a section Schulz himself had insisted on adding to the final act of the program. In it Linus finally answered the question that had plagued Charlie Brown throughout the special: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus then stepped into a spotlight on the Christmas pageant stage and recited a passage from Luke 2 about the birth of Jesus. The CBS executives minced no words about the scene after their screening. “The Bible thing scares us,” one admitted.

While this might seem like a bit of surprising response to us today as we imagine the quainter times of the long 1950s, it is important to understand just how different the television landscape was in 1965. With only three national networks, television programs competed for the broadest audience possible with their programs. This meant that television executives wanted their content to be inoffensive both to viewers and advertisers (unlike our fragmented media landscape today which thrives on polarization and controversy to sustain loyal subsets of American viewers). Religion, then, was suggested in the vaguest and most ecumenical ways so as not to stir sectarian differences. This is why Linus’s monologue put knots in the executives’ stomachs. It is also why Schulz insisted on keeping it in the program despite repeated concerns from Mendelson and Melendez. “If we don’t do it, who will?” Schulz asked.

So in December 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas ran for the first—and, CBS executives assumed, last—time. The audience response could hardly have been more surprising or overwhelming. In the days following the program, thousands of letters and postcards flooded the offices of Coca-Cola, CBS, and Charles Schulz. Viewers praised the authenticity of the special, the message of finding deeper meanings in the season’s traditions than crude consumerism, and—for the Christian subset of the audience—explicit reference to Jesus. By juggling a broadly popular message of anti-consumerism with a more niche message of religious exclusivity, Charles Schulz and his collaborators created one of the most unlikely Christmas television classics of all time.

Feature image by Lucas Hoang on Unsplash

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Fake news, misinformation, and disinformation: journalism today?

Fake, false, inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive. This rhetoric is all too familiar to the news consuming public today. But what is fake news and how does it differ from misinformation and disinformation?

Referring to falsified or inaccurate information, “fake news” can be defined as “false information that is broadcast or published as news for fraudulent or politically motivated purposes,” whereas “misinformation” refers to any false information with intent to deceive its audience. “Disinformation,” by contrast, refers to false information that has the intent to mislead and usually refers to “propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.”

Given this language and skepticism surrounding the news industry, can the media and journalists regain public trust?

The five books in this reading list explore communication challenges facing the media. Sample open chapters and discover how the industry can bridge the gaps between the public, journalism, and academia.

News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture by Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson, and Seth C. Lewis

In News After Trump, the authors provide an in-depth look at former President Donald Trump’s relationship with the press and examine the place of journalism within a shifting media environment. Taking a forward-focused approach they propose a future in which journalists can reclaim public trust by developing a moral voice and building relationships.

Learn more in the introductory chapter, “Decentering Journalism in the Contemporary Media Culture.”

Journalism Research That Matters edited by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and Nikki Usher

Is journalism still relevant? Journalism Research That Matters explores contemporary media industry challenges. Including perspectives from academics and journalists, this book provides a blueprint for bridging the current gap between scholarship and practice. Can they cumulatively overcome industry disruption?

In this chapter, discover “Why News Literacy Matters.”

Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public by Jacob L. Nelson

In Imagined Audiences, Jacob L. Nelson addresses the current crisis facing the news industry by considering the relationship between journalists and their audiences. Do the audiences that journalists imagine match their actual readership?

Read chapter three, “The Promise of Audience Engagement,” and explore differing perspectives on whether journalists should increase their focus on audience engagement to increase media success.

Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society by Victor Pickard

Contrasting current belief that the media industry has only recently fallen into crisis, in Democracy without Journalism Victor Pickard expresses that today’s misinformation society is a symptom of a flawed media structure stemming from its commercialization in the 1800s.

Read the introductory chapter and explore what happens “When Commercialism Trumps Democracy.”   

The Epistemology of Fake News edited by Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree, and Thomas Grundmann

In The Epistemology of Fake News explore an in-depth account of the concept of fake news, the structural mechanics that help promote it, and what can be done to rectify the current situation.

In the chapter “Speaking of Fake News,” uncover an expansive review of literary definitions and discover the importance of defining of fake news if the industry is ever to overcome such threats.

_{Featured image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay}

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash

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The rise and fall of the European Super League: when the American challenge backfires

In the long history of America’s influence on the politics of innovation in Europe, the case of the planned football Super League stands out. This is not because of the project as such, but simply because, of all the variety of responses Europe has produced when faced with the latest American novelty, none has provoked enthusiasm and rejection—above all rejection—with such extraordinary intensity, unity, and speed.

The Super League scheme is well known to have precedents going back decades in a long line of efforts to “modernise” the organisation of football up and down the Old World. What is not recognised is how closely the vision—once taken over by American entrepreneurs—found its place in a grand historical catalogue of initiatives, corporations, movements, personalities which could emanate from any corner of America, and would set out to make their mark on the world outside the US, and Europe in particular, whether the rest of the world liked it or not. Embrace, adapt, or reject it, the great new challenge might be called Hollywood or the Marshall Plan, rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop, Über, Google, Netflix,  or even the Black Lives Matter movement; in every case America’s disruptive innovations would end up providing a mainspring of change in Europe all through the 20th century and down to the present. The European Super League (ESL) proposals, and the reactions they aroused, demonstrate that this dynamic of asymmetric cultural confrontation is as active as ever.

On every such occasion cultural protectionisms are invented, diplomatic deals drawn up, international laws proposed, opinion makers and intellectuals mobilised and inevitably—sooner or later—the politicians become involved: the patterns repeat themselves over and over again. In the case of the ESL it was only when the American owners of Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and AC Milan backed by the billions of J.P.Morgan, took up the original idea of the owner of Real Madrid, Florentino Perez, that the challenge emerged on the scale and of the profile of a typical American entrepreneurial threat to an established European order. And as ever, the Europeans immediately split: six English, three key Italian, and three Spanish teams instantly signed up. The French and the Germans steered clear.

The ESL was launched in public late on Sunday 18 April. It was an announcement, said the New York Times’ soccer writer, James Montague, next day, “Made in America.” He explained:

“In American sports leagues, the norm is cartel-like structures, where owners control franchises and share revenue along the way. … But it is utterly alien to how soccer operates… promotion and relegation are in European soccer’s DNA but don’t exist in U.S. sports…Why plow money into a team when one bad season could cause you to lose your seat at the top table?”

The sale of football clubs as such in Britain goes back to the creation of the Premier League as a single commercial operation in 1992. It was a classic outcome of the free-market, top-down Americanizing views of the world which rode high in the post-Thatcher-Reagan era, and were translated into pay TV by Rupert Murdoch.   By 2020, 13 Premier League Clubs, and others, were foreign-owned—the Chinese alone controlling four. Yet suddenly, with the ESL project, a tipping point was reached. The proposed League would have a permanent membership with clubs turned into free-floating brands, enjoying total control over the crucial broadcasting revenues and the market in players. A vast nationalist reaction set in with quite extraordinary ferocity and speed.

Celebrated veteran footballers, such as Gary Neville and Alan Shearer, immediately gave voice to the opposition in unmistakable terms: clubs such as theirs, they said, represented a heritage rooted in decades of local working class life and loyalty; power, pride, and dignity were at stake and could not be sold off at any price to a cabal of vulture capitalists, oligarchs, Royal sheiks, and bankers, just so that these tycoons could make even more money. Seeing a populist wave of indignation arise before their eyes, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron made clear their opposition in the Sunday night hours before the official announcement of the new League.

By Tuesday morning the political backlash had broadened to include even the governments of nations not touched by the ESL project. But it was Johnson’s Tuesday morning meeting with the chairmen and fan clubs of the 14 Premier League teams not involved in the ESL which, according to many in Europe, made the key difference. Here, Johnson spoke of a “legislative bomb” which his government was ready to drop on the project. By Tuesday night the project was dead in the water.

Later, Aleksander Čeferin, the head of football’s European governing body, UEFA, acknowledged that the proposal had arisen against a background of deep financial, pandemic-related, crisis for the whole sport. He called for “solidarity” not “self-interest,” and on 21 May announced a Convention on the Future of European Football, aimed at radically reforming the governance of the game in the whole of Europe.

Indeed, even when the American challenge fails to overwhelm its intended beneficiaries, such is its force that they cannot avoid dealing with its implications and its after-effects: sooner or later everyone adapts, willingly or otherwise. The next big cultural upheaval will have “Made in America” stamped all over it once more: it will arrive when the great streaming services—Netflix, Disney Channel and now Amazon-MGM and Warner Discovery, already threatening established cinema and television everywhere—decide to get into sport. Netflix alone, with its $17bn content budget and its typically American scale, dynamism, ubiquity, and “relentlessness” (a favourite Jeff Bezos word) could certainly “find ways to make streaming live sport a viable business,” wrote Alex Barker in the Financial Times in January;  “Netflix could buy a league or just create one from scratch.”  Even if that came about, after the ESL fiasco it would most certainly not feature a European league of football teams. In one very special case the soft power of tradition, loyalty, identity, and solidarity had won out spectacularly over the hard power of the billionaires and all their cash.

Featured image by Jack Monach via Unsplash

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The Turing test is not about AI: it is about our tendency to project humanity onto things

As Artificial Intelligence technologies enter into more and more facets of our everyday life, we are growing accustomed to the idea of machines talking directly to us. Voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri inhabit domestic and professional environments, chatbots are standard in customer care, apps such as Replika offer virtual avatars to provide companionship, and even the Twitter account of NASA’s Perseverance mission sends updates in first person, as though they were posted directly by the rover from the surface of Mars.

These new situations and opportunities make Alan Turing’s imitation game—the Turing test, as commonly called—more relevant than ever before. Only, not in the sense through which the test is usually interpreted.

The Turing test, in fact, is generally regarded as a way to assess the proficiency of AI. Its real “message,” however, does not have much to do with the intelligence of machines, but rather with our relationship with them. The question, Turing told us, is not if machines are able or not to think. It is if we believe them to do so—in other words, if we are prepared to accept the machines’ behaviour as intelligent. Once we take this point of view, we realize that that our interactions with AI are shaped by our tendency to project humanity onto things: this is one of the least understood, but most interesting implications of the Turing test.

AI, seen by humans

The paper that introduced the idea of the test, Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” starts with the question “Can machines think?” Yet, Turing immediately proceeds to declare this question of little use: it would be impossible, he reasons, to find an agreement on what we mean with the word “thinking.” He proposes therefore to replace this question with a practical experiment, the Turing test, in which a human interrogator exchanges written messages with an unknown partner to find out if this is a human or a machine. Although the test is usually discussed as a threshold to assess if artificial intelligence has been reached, such an approach misses its most important implication. Assigning to a human interrogator the responsibility to evaluate the behaviour of the machine, Alan Turing refuses to define AI in absolute terms and considers instead how humans perceive and understand AI.

In this sense, Turing’s proposal located the prospects of AI not just in improvements of hardware and software, but in a more complex scenario emerging from the interaction between humans and computers. By placing humans at the centre of its design, the Turing test provided a context wherein AI technologies could be conceived in terms of their credibility to human users.

I believe in you, Alexa: the example of voice assistants

The example of voice assistants, such as Alexa or Siri, helps us appreciate the implications of the Turing Test as seen from this point of view. In order to ensure that voice assistants reply with apparent sagacity to users, Amazon and Apple assign to dedicated creative teams the task of scripting appropriate responses. Their work is facilitated by data collected by recording users’ conversations with these systems, which help writers anticipate frequent questions and queries.

The seemingly clever replies that result from this work are actually one of the least “smart” things Siri can do. The activation of scripted responses is, in fact, exceedingly simple at a technical level: it is more similar to dramaturgical scripting and does not foreground complex social behaviour from the part of the machine. Yet, the ironic tone of many such replies is striking to many users, and is often indicated as evidence of voice assistants’ intelligent skills.

In other words, the least complex feats of AI systems may appear to users as if they were evidence of significant technical achievements in AI. This example shows that our perception of AI technologies does not correspond to their internal functioning: it always depends on the subjectivity our own gaze and on the all-too-human tendency to attribute sociality and agency to things.

Therefore, what the Turing test, and AI more broadly, call into question is the essence of who we are. But not because, as suggested by posthumanist theory, AI erodes the boundaries between humans and machines. Rather, the key message of the Turing test is that our vulnerability to being deceived is part of what defines us. Humans have a distinct capacity to project intention, intelligence, and emotions onto others. This is a burden but also a resource: after all, it is what makes us capable of entertaining meaningful social interactions with others. But it also makes us prone to project intelligence onto non-human interlocutors that simulate intention, sociality, and emotions.

Featured image by Possessed Photography 

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Victorian 3D: virtual adventures in the stereoscope

Armchair travel is more popular than ever today, making this an excellent time to explore a key moment in the history of home-bound travel. In the Victorian era, people used a stereoscope to launch themselves on virtual journeys to far-off lands from their own parlors. Users inserted a stereograph, twinned photos of a slightly discrepant image, into the device and then peeped into the eyepiece, where the image leaped into startling three dimensionality. The stereoscope created an immersive you-are-there illusion, a feeling that was pleasurable and even dizzying.

The stereoscope was actually invented as a scientific experiment. In 1832, Charles Wheatstone wanted to prove that human depth perception was a result of the distance between our two eyes. If this were the case, he hypothesized, then the eyes could be tricked into perceiving depth by each being presented with a slightly different two-dimensional image. The first stereoscope used two drawings, but scientists quickly realized that photographs—invented in 1839—could create an extraordinary illusionary effect within the stereoscope.

The lenticular stereoscope debuted at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, where it was seen and admired by Queen Victoria. When she received a gift model, the ensuing craze provoked the sale of 250,000 viewers in three months. During the era of the “parlor stereoscope,” the device became a familiar fixture in Victorian homes, and stereographic photographs eventually numbered in the millions. (This massive output explains why you can still find stereographs at flea markets today, usually selling for a few dollars or pounds apiece). The stereoscope was called a “philosophical toy,” along with devices like the kaleidoscope and zoetrope: these were all entertaining, family-friendly commodities that were invented to demonstrate scientific principles of optics.

Stereographs depicted all genres of photography, from still-lifes to pornography. But the majority of stereographs depicted places, especially places where British people desired to travel. During the first wave of the stereoscope’s popularity, in the 1850s and 1860s, stereographs captured the romantic and picturesque destinations on Britain’s tourist track. These locations had actually been chosen well before the invention of photography. In the late eighteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars closed off the Continent to British travelers, tourists went in search of “the picturesque” in the ruined abbeys and cathedrals across the UK and Ireland. The same spots that artists had previously canonized in picturesque paintings now became mass-produced views in the stereoscope.

One of the most popular British stereoscopic destinations was Tintern Abbey, the ruined stony arches of rural Wales. William Wordsworth’s poem about the area had made the abbey into the foremost destination for adventurous travelers with Romantic sensibilities. Now stereoscope owners could use the device to travel virtually to the Gothic abbey, letting their eyes wander along ruined walls traced with ivy, or looking up at massive arches open to the sky. Although the stereoscope epitomized modern technology, with its lenses, optics, and photographic cards, the kinds of images that viewers consumed inside the stereoscope tended to look back into a romanticized history. (The images gave no indication, meanwhile, of the roaring iron factory near Tintern Abbey that disturbed visiting tourists). These details remind us that technology itself is not inherently oriented toward the future; in fact, new media often intermingle with old media, as new technologies enable nostalgic, fantastical journeys into the past.

It was rare for stereographs to portray factories, crowded cities, or other mundane aspects of everyday nineteenth-century life. Instead, photographers captured scenes of picturesque beauty, old towns, peasants in “authentic” costume, churches, ruined castles, scenic landscapes. One popular set of images from beyond Britain was titled “America in the Stereoscope” (1857-59). While some of the scenes captured American cities like Boston and Washington, DC, most of the stereographs portrayed scenes of natural beauty—echoing the stereotypical British assumption that the former colonies were less cultured and more “primitive” than the UK. In fact, most of the American stereoscopic images portrayed waterfalls, from both the US and Canada, uniting both under the rubric of a nature-themed “New World.” Waterfalls were especially popular stereoscopic subjects because of their astonishing depth effects, as their rushing, blurred waters leaped out at the viewer. “America in the Stereoscope” featured at least ten different views of Niagara Falls and its environs. An 1861 London reviewer of the series wrote ecstatically: “The Horseshoe Fall [of Niagara] affords a good idea of the awful power of the mass of descending water; we can almost hear the deafening roar. The effect of viewing this little photograph in the stereoscope is to make one giddy.”

Another extremely popular mid-century destination in the stereoscope was Egypt. Travel to Egypt was tremendously expensive, arduous, and beyond the reach of most nineteenth-century people. Hence Francis Frith’s 1857-59 series of views from Egypt met with resounding interest and acclaim, accompanying other forms of British “Egyptomania.” Frith’s images today seem starkly beautiful, with the Sphinx, pyramids, and ancient temples rendered in austere desert landscapes. Yet the realism of Frith’s photographic medium shouldn’t obscure some of the fantasies generated by the images, as they carefully omitted any signs of Egyptian modernity. In fact, Egypt was the site of numerous nineteenth-century imperial intrigues, and host to mingled cultures under European colonial influence. The stereoscope instead created an illusory Egypt, implicitly defining British modernity against the backdrop of an Egypt that seemed buried in the past.

Many of the pleasures proffered by the Victorian stereoscope will seem familiar today. A popular twentieth-century inheritor of the stereoscope was the red plastic “Viewmaster,” whose cards animated 3D scenes of fairy tales or exotic destinations—a toy still being made, even though it’s been updated by virtual reality goggles. On YouTube, travel videos today boast of high-definition 4K streams, even while they avoid grimy, modern urban realities in favor of picturesque landscapes and ancient ruins. Cutting-edge technology continues to enable ever-more illusionistic spectacles of the past. The technology itself might have changed, but the fantasies that the technology helps to enable seem very long-lived, as we escape from our mundane, home-bound lives to stunning, faraway lands.

Featured image: Stereograph of Niagara Falls. “American Fall, Niagara—Winter Scene.” America in the Stereoscope Series, London Stereoscopic Company, 1859. (Via The New York Public Library, public domain)

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SHAPE today and tomorrow: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part two)

SHAPE (Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities for People and the Economy) research helps us to make sense of the past, to inform the present, and develop a vision for the future. Considering the last year alone in which the vital work of STEM researchers in developing vaccines and treating COVID-19 has been closely followed across the globe, it is also important to acknowledge that SHAPE research has played an important role in our response to the pandemic. From considering ethics to inform how vaccines should be allocated amongst the population, to looking back at the societal and economic impact of pandemics through history, SHAPE research has provided us with valuable insights across a vast spectrum of different areas.

This second part of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, reflects on how SHAPE disciplines can help us to understand the impact of the events of the pandemic and look towards the future of SHAPE.

In part one of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black, they introduce SHAPE and what it means to them—if you missed it, you can read it here.

In the current context of the coronavirus pandemic, how can SHAPE subjects help us make sense of how the last year has impacted us and the world in which we live?

Sophie Goldsworthy: The last year has been testing in many ways. But we might turn to SHAPE subjects as we start to evaluate what life looks like after the pandemic, assessing the human impact, finding new ways to connect, and working out how to salvage the best of what we have been left with.

SHAPE subjects can help us start to understand where we are now and drive innovative solutions. We can draw on what these subjects tell us as we endeavour to improve on the inclusivity of our virtual networks; and to figure out how we retain balance in our ways of working and flexibility around our caring and other social responsibilities; and as we think again about how we might inhabit global city spaces and reimagine transport networks with sustainability and environmental impacts in mind. Scientists tell us that birdsong changed during the shutdowns, that wild animals moved quickly to inhabit the spaces we vacated, that air quality improved as transport ground to a halt. SHAPE subjects can help us to think about the ways in which we learn from and build on this enforced hiatus.

Julia Black: It’s difficult to think of a single area where SHAPE subjects don’t help us make sense of how COVID has impacted us and where they won’t be relevant in thinking about the future. The enforced lockdown of the world’s population has been a natural experiment of a scale no policy maker would never have volunteered to undertake, but our clearer skies, quieter roads, and noisier wildlife have made us all acutely aware of the impact our ways of living were having on our planet, and to the vulnerabilities to which we are thereby exposing ourselves as well.

We have turned to literature and, virtually at least, to the arts to provide us with solace, enrichment, entertainment, and sheer relief. We have turned to history for insights into how societies in the past have been fundamentally changed due to pandemics and to philosophy for reflections on how we want our societies to be. As we re-think how we will live, how we will travel, how we will work, insights from anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, politics, literature, design, architecture, and art, to name but a few, will all be essential.

We also face other challenges which COVID has revealed or exacerbated: to equality and inclusivity, to democracy and to human rights, to the shifting imbalances in power within societies and across nations. And meanwhile the need to address climate change and enhance biodiversity are becoming ever more pressing. Ultimately SHAPE subjects help us imagine and evaluate what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of life we want to have.

The pandemic has undoubtedly had a profound impact on universities and the student experience. Why should prospective students choose to study a SHAPE subject, and what unique skills do you think SHAPE graduates bring to the workforce?

SG: SHAPE graduates are highly employable, bringing a wealth of skills to the workforce, and prospective students might be attracted to these subjects for the same reasons. They help us make sense of the human experience and develop our capacity for critical thinking and communication. They encourage problem solving, creativity, and curiosity, and help graduates approach a question from many angles, working collaboratively and with empathy. In a world beset by challenges, among them not only the pandemic, but climate change, structural inequalities, the rise of populism in some quarters and nationalism in others, SHAPE graduates are central to the development of the versatile, resilient workforce that will help us respond to these challenges, identify future opportunities, and nurture innovation.

JB: Studying SHAPE subjects provides both knowledge and skills which are valuable to all aspects of society, whether a person is working in a business or the public sector, or for a charity, or in the voluntary sector, or as a freelancer, or an entrepreneur. Some of the subjects have more direct application than others, such as law, finance, journalism, languages, education, design, or the arts, but in different ways all provide knowledge of how to analyse complex problems, interpret and integrate information and ideas, test the strength of competing arguments, see things from another’s point of view, create new inspirations and forms of expression, and understand how and why context matters.  Many of the skills of analysis, rigour, interpretation and creativity can be learned studying either SHAPE or STEM subjects, but it is their focus on the human world which helps those who study SHAPE understand people and the societies they live in, and the values they live by.

Where do you see SHAPE in the future? How do you think these fields of study might change?

SG: Just as we think about SHAPE and STEM as complementing each other, so we’re seeing an increasing move towards interdisciplinarity within SHAPE subjects, both in the academy—with university trends including the amalgamation of departments and interdisciplinary research programmes—and in our publishing programme, with multi-disciplinary content one of our fastest growing areas. Our disciplinary analysis shows a fascinating web of connections between subjects, showing how our existing content clusters and is used online, and we’re excited to explore this more at OUP, developing our acquisitions approach to reflect changing practices within the academy and encourage emerging spheres of research, as these subjects aggregate to redefine fields of study.

JB: I think the SHAPE subjects are changing in three ways. The first is a growing inter- or multi-disciplinary engagement across SHAPE disciplines and with those of STEM, often focused around particular challenges or themes, such as health, climate change, or conservation. The second is the awareness that the languages of mathematics and computer codes can be used to interrogate questions which preoccupy social scientists and humanities scholars, just as they can those of physicists or biologists. Digital humanities and computational social sciences combine knowledge from languages, history, media and communications, economics, information studies, graphic design, computer sciences, data analytics, machine learning, AI, and more to analyse texts, music, or data on a scale which was previously unimaginable, providing powerful new insights. Thirdly, both SHAPE and STEM disciplines are adopting critical stances towards the other in ways which are, or have the potential, to change the way in which each are conducted: the challenge to social sciences to produce results which are replicable, verifiable, and falsifiable, for example; and the challenge to science and technology to be conducted in ways which are ethical, non-discriminatory, and which take into account their impact on societies. The core disciplinary pillars within SHAPE and STEM subjects remain strong, but increasingly we are seeing them combined in new and exciting ways.

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Introducing SHAPE: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part one)

OUP is excited to support the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. SHAPE has been coined to enable us to clearly communicate the value that these disciplines bring to not only enriching the world in which we live, but also enhancing our understanding of it. The contributions that SHAPE subjects make are more important now than ever as they can help us to navigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global economy, dramatically altered our quotidian routines, and changed the way we communicate with one another, against the backdrop of climate change and urgent calls to address structural injustice.

In the first instalment this two-part Q&A, we spoke to Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions here at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, to find out more about SHAPE and what it means to them.

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your background and current position, and what SHAPE means to you?

Sophie Goldsworthy: I’ve worked in publishing for approaching 30 years, 25 of them at OUP. My first role at the Press was on the Literature list and I currently run our humanities, social sciences, and trade programmes in the UK, as well as directing Oxford’s content strategy more broadly across the research publishing business.

At a time when the content needs of the university sector are evolving, leading to shifts in research publishing, my role is about developing our focus and building data and evidence into our approach to content acquisition, more closely aligning commissioning with what librarians, researchers, and readers want, and working to maximise the reach, impact, and amplification of the scholarship we publish.

Oxford is the world’s largest university press, and SHAPE subjects sit at the very heart of our offering, giving us breadth which in turn underlines a complementary view of the subjects. SHAPE gives us a better way to articulate that mutual, porous relationship, helps us move past an arts/sciences dichotomy to a place where each enhances and supports the other.

Julia Black: My academic interests span social sciences and humanities. I focus on how governments and other organisations regulate behaviours, systems, and processes to address complex problems, such as environmental management, or financial stability, or AI, and what values guide, or should guide, those processes. Given that problems are multi-dimensional, trying to address them requires engaging with technical, scientific aspects of the issues as well as the social and ethical elements. As my principal research questions are always centred around people and organisations, social sciences and humanities dominate, but for me, it seems quite natural to engage with several disciplines, across SHAPE and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), in order to understand and address the multiple dimensions of a problem.

I’ve also always worked quite fluidly across the worlds of academia and public policy, and I’m constantly struck by the huge reliance which government places on social science and humanities in seeking guidance and evidence for its policies, and yet the contribution those disciplines can make, and are making, is often under-recognised and under-valued. And when I look beyond policy to the vibrancy of the arts, the richness of literature, the diversity of our society, and even to the structure and dynamics of our economy, SHAPE subjects are everywhere. So for me SHAPE is a way to celebrate the value of social sciences, humanities, and the arts, and to demonstrate their relevance and value to ourselves and to society. It’s also to encourage people to study them, and to build meaningful lives and contribute to society using the knowledge and skills they gain in doing so. For we need them now, more than ever.

What are the benefits in bringing together the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines under the SHAPE umbrella?

SG: How we describe a thing has the potential to accord or diminish its power. At its heart, SHAPE offers us the opportunity to begin to tell the story of a set of subjects which might seem at first glance to be disparate. It allows us to draw together the ways in which they contribute value to society, helping us make sense of the human experience, develop our understanding of global issues, and work to find solutions.

JB: SHAPE is offering social sciences, humanities, and the arts their own descriptor, providing a coherence to a heterogenous set of subjects in a way which celebrates their diversity but emphasises what connects them: a focus on the human world—on people and societies across time and space.

It’s important to emphasise that we are not “setting up” social sciences, humanities, and the arts in opposition to STEM. SHAPE subjects have their own value which is on a par with STEM, they are just differently focused: on the human world, rather than the natural or physical worlds. There are areas within each where they operate largely separately, but if we want to understand how humans interact with the natural and physical world, then we need the insights gained from connecting both sets of disciplines. There are also opportunities to use the knowledge and insights from each to inform the other.

How can SHAPE and STEM disciplines complement each other in our pursuit of knowledge?

SG: The pandemic has reinforced how essential STEM subjects are, as we look to medical and technical solutions: witness only the breath-taking speed at which vaccines have been developed. But SHAPE disciplines complement STEM in myriad ways—and conversely leaving them out of the mix can have troubling implications.

We might need to draw on behavioural economics and “nudge” theory to help influence how people act, changing the message around mask wearing from “protect yourself” to “protect others,” for example. Or to take a holistic approach to data interpretation to circumnavigate structural inequalities, where the price we otherwise pay is a high one. The past year has been full of stories about “one size fits all” PPE that leaves female health workers poorly protected, or remote education initiatives that overlook those children for whom a school lunch provides the only meal of the day.

At its most straightforward, learning the stories of past pandemics can enlighten us in the present. How and why do conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferate in an outbreak, for example, and what should we learn as we navigate precisely that set of circumstances all over again in the rollout of a new vaccination programme.

JB: SHAPE subjects can complement STEM, and STEM subjects can complement SHAPE. In some cases, one discipline may be more in the lead than the other, but the synergies still exist. Some SHAPE subjects are through their approaches closer to STEM, for example in their use of quantitative and statistical methodologies and data analytics, and some directly cross the boundaries, such as mental health and wellbeing. However, we could do more to illustrate how STEM and SHAPE subjects can together enhance our knowledge, and what we create from that knowledge.

Some have asked why we aren’t satisfied with the term STEAM to describe this interaction. The answer is that STEAM focuses only on the interaction of art and design with STEM subjects, in other words it only looks at the “A” in SHAPE, not the “S” and the ”H.” Whilst art and design are hugely valuable to the design of products developed by technology, or as ways to visualise the natural and physical worlds, for example, there are many more benefits to be gained from the interaction of STEM disciplines across the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Changes in an ecosystem are frequently rooted in human behaviour; managing pandemics requires knowledge of history, cultures and behaviours, as well as economics and logistics; the search engines we have become so reliant on use natural language programming based on linguistics; and for science and technology to be legitimate it is imperative that it is developed and used in ways which are aligned with our ethics and values.

But these examples are the tip of the iceberg; there are multiple instances where the insights of each enhances the other, and it is often when they are combined that truly transformative developments in our knowledge, understanding, innovation, and creativity can occur.

Read part two of our Q&A, in which Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black discuss the importance of SHAPE today in light of the pandemic, and how consider how it may evolve in the future.

Featured image by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

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