Hello, and welcome to your weekly digest of the stories we’ve especially liked reading. Things with the climate feel even more dire than usual (read Adam Morton on that, by the way). But people are still out there living their lives – going to the movies, going on bus trips, grappling with the future of chatbots, creating elaborate television meat hoaxes.
Life finds a way, or, to quote our recent (and nice) Anne Patchett interview, “In a world that is going to hell, there is still so much joy.”
Tasting notes: Forget breakfast – save these reads for apéro hour and try a citron pressé. Seasons are meaningless now; summer is wherever you want it to be (everywhere).
1. What do you mean, ‘human meat’?
The cheery British TV presenter Gregg Wallace recently took viewers on a tour of a “secret factory” and its innovative ways of farming human meat – a magic bullet for the cost-of-living crisis. “By the time he got to the children’s wing, where the tenderest human flesh was being farmed, most viewers would (or should) have smelled a rat,” writes Steve Rose. Because, spoiler, Wallace’s doco was a satire. But a lot of people didn’t clock it.
So? Well, as Rose points out, we’ve all gotten used to saying satire is dead – or at least superseded. An abundance of fake news, guardrails and unfunny millionaires has made it harder for proper pastiche to cut through. “But perhaps The British Miracle Meat tells us it is not good enough to blame ‘reality’ and give up,” he writes. “Satire can still be an amazingly powerful tool when it is done cleverly – and television remains a particularly effective medium for it.”
How long will it take to read: about four minutes.
2. Is your tendency to expect the worst hurting you?
Speaking of being fooled, let’s turn now to three psychologists in 2007, who came up with the term “sugrophobia”: the fear of being a sucker – and now, “a veritable epidemic”.
“The fear of being duped can be so aversive that it transcends rational prudence and becomes something more automatic and more intense – a true phobia,” Tess Wilkinson-Ryan writes. “But there are costs to excessive scepticism, too, for both the self and the social order.” As she explains, clearly and thoughtfully, an “aversion to being suckered” becomes a “legitimising myth” for social hierarchy – one that leaves us politically and personally alienated.
Why should I care about this? The research Wilkinson-Ryan gets into looks especially at financial scams – but her findings apply to so many things. Take this: “When people perceive the threat of exploitation, it seems to shift their attention from the risk of material loss to what the situation means for the self – if I let you take advantage, what does that make me?” Indeed.
How long will it take to read: seven minutes.
3. Travelling across America
The writer Joanna Pocock travelled 4,500km across America – from Detroit to LA – in a Greyhound bus. “I wanted to take this time to think deeply about our overreliance on cars and our love affair with the open road,” she writes. “I knew I would encounter ecological catastrophe. I expected the poisoning of rivers, the desecration of desert ecosystems and feedlots heaving with antibiotic-infused cattle.”
***
“We could relate to the screaming man – somewhat.” – Joanna Pocock, somewhere near St Louis
But as she explains in this great and very communal road-trip read, what she found was “more complex, nuanced and intimate”.
How long will it take to read: five and a half minutes
Further reading: Surrender, Pocock’s great, if meandering, book about America and the various ways people there are trying to commune with nature as it all (nature, the US, both, everything) falls apart. Actually, basically everything Pocock’s publisher, Fitzcarraldo, puts out is worth reading – you can read more here about the influence that Jacques Testard’s house of blue and white books has had on readers worldwide.
4. Chatbot Confidential
Ben Tarnoff’s piece on the computer guru Joseph Weizenbaum is fascinating. Weizenbaum created the first chatbot – but was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans. Tarnoff looks at his influence on our thinking about AI, and considers a future “in which we form a relationship with AI as we would with another species: awkwardly, across great distances, but with the potential for some rewarding moments”.
Notable quote: Weizenbaum wrote that we should never “substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love”. As Tarnoff puts it: “Living well with computers would mean putting them in their proper place: as aides to calculation, never judgment.”
How long will it take to read: 15 minutes
5. How to capture a sound
Max Pilley’s interview with Dan Carey goes deep on the post-punk superproducer’s methods. His knack for playing tricks on bands to get the best out of them has birthed pop and indie hits (Slow by Kylie Minogue!!), and more recently the “boom of agitated, prodigious post-punk bands” (Wet Leg, Fontaines DC, etc) defining the “south London guitar sound”. Pilley follows Carey – who “rightly strides through this patch of south London as if he has been granted special civic freedoms, such has been his role in establishing it as a hub of alternative music culture over the last decade” – and finds out how he does it.
… but how does he do it? Carey has a set of golden rules, which is fun to read about – and does things such as force bands to “commit to recording three tracks back-to-back, and if any mistakes are made then all three will be wiped from the master tape”. “It really sharpens everyone’s nerves,” he tells Pilley.
How long will it take to read: less than three minutes
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