Across the Tyne and Wear Metro, new signs have appeared.

Previously, the position at which the drivers’ cab of the Metrocars should stop in stations was marked with a diamond-shaped “S” sign. Of course, Metrocars used to differ in length, shorter services operating on Sundays, but the front always stopped in the same position. This practice ended about a decade ago, and the facility to vary the train lengths ended when carriages were permanently coupled together during refurbishment, leaving a redundant drivers’ cab at one end of each.

Recently, the diamonds have been joined by new signs indicating the point in each station where the front of the shiny new trains should stop. These are required as, later this year, the 43-year-old trains will start to be replaced by new Class 555 trains with a fixed length of five carriages. And, I can only assume, slightly longer trains mean slightly different stopping positions.

Weighting Time is an exhibition of Fiona Crisp’s work spread over two different locations on two different sets of dates. I’ve been to see the portion exhibited at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art: the portion at Sunderland Museum has already closed.

This was a small exhibition of photography and film drawn from across Crisp’s thirty-year career. Included were representations of large, deep underground industrial spaces, which contrasted with images of similarly structured above-ground buildings, such as theatres and cathedrals. Both seem like otherworldly spaces.

A film installation took us driving through the Boulby Mine which stretches out under the North Sea, to space imagery travelling through time itself. The industrial aesthetic of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art complemented the work which also includes structures and seating designed by the artist to help viewers to contemplate the work.

I found this intriguing and enjoyable, though perhaps too small to be fully immersed or to completely appreciate all the ideas Crisp had in mind. Though, that feels like unfair criticism when I have effectively only seen half of the exhibition.

Fiona Crisp: Weighting Time continues at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until 3 September. A virtual version is also available online, if you’re into that sort of thing.

So here’s a thing.

For the last little while, I’ve been running our dishwasher on a short cycle, intending to save energy. This seemed like a no-brainer: why wouldn’t I run the dishwasher on a short cycle if the results were still just as good?

Reader, I was a fool. The instruction manual is explicit:

To obtain optimum cleaning and drying results at a reduced running time, water and energy consumption are increased.

Don’t make my mistake.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Richard Smith recently shared this editorial he wrote more than thirty years ago, on the subject of preventing whistleblowing. It seems entirely relevant to the present day.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

Most organisations eventually have to take tough decisions. Difficult choices, particularly over allocating resources, have long been part of working in the NHS. The choices will become tougher, and there may be more losers than winners. The fear that the losers will tell all to the media is what leads managers to reach for their gags. They make a mistake. Instead, they need to create organisations-be they hospitals or health authorities -where employees feel enough part of the decision making process not to need to blow their whistles.

You begin by letting everybody know what is going on. If the rhetoric is glossy brochures full of the word “quality” and the reality is elderly patients with pressure sores in back wards with peeling paint, then staff will become cynical and demotivated. They need to be convinced that the available resources are used fairly, efficiently, and effectively. The surest way to convince them is to involve them in decision making. The decisions that are made must be clearly and honestly communicated. Staff must have a chance to come back on poor decisions, and managers should not be afraid to reverse decisions that are wrong.

If staff understand the true circumstances of the organisation and feel that their views have been given serious attention then they will accept tough decisions. But if seemingly arbitrary decisions appear from nowhere then staff will be unhappy and one or two will contact the press. Managers who try to create a climate of fear will neither stop whistle blowing nor run an effective health service.

That second paragraph is remarkable: it is common sense, it has been clearly articulated for more than thirty years, yet it is seldom followed.

The difficulty so often seems to come at the point of involving people in decision-making. Frequently, efforts to do this appear as cynical attempts to justify decisions that have already been taken. This isn’t solely a problem in the health service: we can see similar cynicism, for example, towards the ongoing consultation about closing railway ticket offices.

If we choose to be as uncynical as possible, then it strikes me that this often boils down to poor communication. Smith talks about ‘glossy brochures full of the word “quality”’—and I think he’s right. Starting a conversation about funding cuts with rhetoric around ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’ drives cynicism more than collaborative decision-making. Too frequently, managers fear being honest, and too often, managers choose not to be plain-spoken. You cannot have shared decisions if the people sharing in the decision have no idea what you’re talking about.

For the relatively short time between it coming available in the UK and, erm, closing down, I was a subscriber to Neeva, a paid-for search engine. I paid for it mostly because I liked its philosophy. Neeva was unconflicted in giving users the best possible search results, without considerations such as advertising getting in the way.

In terms of user experience, I found it only marginally better than the competition, but for a tool as commonly used as a search engine, marginally better is worth it.

The ever-excellent David Pierce had a great piece profiling the downfall of Neeva in The Verge recently, which is well-worth reading.

One thing Pierce neglects to mention is Kagi, a search engine with a similar philosophy, which I’ve been using after Neeva closed. Kagi is not marginally better than the competition: it’s miles better. It has lots of thoughtful customisation options, like allowing users to “pin” results from given sites to the top of their results, or to exclude domains entirely, or to generate a fast AI “quick answer” with references. But that’s not the main thing.

Do you remember the feeling when you first tried Google instead of Alta Vista, Excite, or Yahoo? The pages were clean, clear, and amazingly fast to load. The results were uncannily accurate. It was just obviously better, by leaps and bounds. The alternatives felt like they belonged to a different era.

That’s the feeling I get with Kagi.

It might not last. Feature bloat and the perverse incentives to act in interests other than those of the users might win out. And Kagi isn’t for everyone: ad-funded search has its place, like ad-funded newspapers, radio stations, television programmes, email servers, and so on. But right now, Kagi is perfect for me.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Wendy and I were recently reflecting on tattoos after seeing a large number of them. I don’t think of myself as being under-confident, but I don’t think I could ever imagine being sure enough of anything to want to tattoo it on my body.

I wonder what that says about me?

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

A couple of weeks ago, I made passing mention of the 1984 BBC drama Threads, the chilling one-off film that dramatised the aftermath of a thermonuclear explosion in the UK.

I know I’ve already recommended one article from the latest LRB, but Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s essay on Britain’s preparations for nuclear war during this period is well-worth a read.

The advice given to medical staff ran from the ridiculous to the sublime. Staff at ‘casualty collecting centres’ were told to siphon off patients whose deaths seemed inevitable to a holding area, though they mustn’t describe these patients as ‘moribund – expecting to die – but expectant, meaning expecting to get away to hospital as soon as possible’. A lecture on nursing after an attack warned: ‘There will be no place for grumblers.’ The government contemplated requisitioning ice cream vans, using their chiller cabinets to store blood and medicine.

I particularly liked the description of local Government push-back against national Government:

When the radicals on the South Yorkshire Fire and Civil Defence Authority were forced by the Thatcher government to make plans for nuclear war, they responded by publicising plans so detailed and lurid that they functioned as anti-nuclear propaganda. Protect and Survive advised readers, grimly enough, that ‘if anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room’, you should ‘move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.’ The South Yorkshire plan warned that ‘the bag should not be too tightly sealed, as pressure of the gases produced by a body decomposing is likely to rupture the bag and the resulting smell is likely to create unnecessary offence.’

Wither any national Government that forgets that local Government has democratic legitimacy, too.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

There’s an article in the latest edition of The Economist which laments the death of the hatchet job in book reviewing. At first, I enjoyed it mostly for the bitchy quotations from bad reviews:

It is delicious to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.

And:

In the Victorian era, “reviews were seen as a kind of cultural hygiene, so there were high standards,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford University. Reviewers were not merely taking a swipe at an enemy but cleansing the sacred halls of literature. Not that this stopped them from mild grubbiness themselves. For example, one reviewer called a fellow writer’s work “feculent garbage”; the reliably robust Alfred Tennyson called yet another “a louse upon the locks of literature”; while John Milton (apparently having momentarily lost paradise again) described another as an “unswill’d hogshead”.

And:

One of the most famous poems of the Roman writer Catullus is a riposte to critics who accused him of being effeminate. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” he wrote, which means (broadly speaking): “I will sodomise and face-fuck you.” Not the sort of thing you see in the Times Literary Supplement these days.

But the comments later in the article about the effect of the internet on book reviews came to linger longer in my mind. The article argues that the risk of a social media pile-on has led to fewer scathing reviews.

I then came to read an article by Megan Nolan in the New Stateman and one by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, both criticising the negativity of the online book-themed social media site Goodreads. They both cite the same examples in some cases, and make the point that many people on the site review books even without reading them.

At first, I was slightly taken aback at how this implies people use Goodreads: I mostly use it to see what people I know in real life thought of books, not to look at the aggregate scores and (seemingly aggressive) reviews of random strangers. I’m not certain why people would attach much weight to this.

And secondly, I thought about how this is a good example of the complexity of the influence of the internet on systems. According to these three articles taken together, the internet has vastly decreased the likelihood of a book being panned by a critic, making professional reviews less valuable as a result of them essentially becoming less discriminating. At the same time, it has drastically increased the likelihood of an amateur reviewer having a disproportionate effect through sharing opinions uninformed by the most basic facts.

It feels like that that might read across to other areas of life, too.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

I’m not typically drawn to reading fiction set in the First or Second World War. This may seem odd and limiting, but I often feel uncomfortable about using such horrific events as a backdrop for fiction. This discomfort distracts me from the story, leading me to dark reflections on human nature—something I usually prefer to avoid.

This book was an exception. I avoided reading it for all of the above reasons, but eventually the weight of the number of recommendations wore me down. It was Tom Rowley and Amy Strong’s recommendation that finally tipped the balance. And, my goodness, I’m glad it did. I was interested that Amy said exactly the same as me about generally avoiding books set during the war.

This was an outstanding novel—and it’s a debut.

It begins at Preshute, a posh English public school. The novel focuses on two of the boys at this school—Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt—who we find on opposing sides of a school debate in 1916 about whether war is a necessary evil. We follow their relationship as they both end up on the Allied frontline, a particularly challenging experience for half-German Gaunt.

Winn examines how war transforms individuals, both subtly and profoundly. She captures the sheer brutality of war at a personal, intimate level, but skilfully mixes in humour and doesn’t shy away from highlighting the absurdity of war.

I would normally also object to the book featuring almost entirely upper-class experiences, but Winn won me over. I appreciated how she showed us the unhinged and unhealthy intertwining of the public school and class systems and the war. In that respect, this book makes an interesting companion to Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men and Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland.

The ‘historical note’ at the end of the book knocked me for six.

I’d recommend this very highly.

Ru Paul’s Drag Race has become such a cultural phenomenon that I think it’s impossible not to have watched at least some of it at some point. Wendy and I certainly watched a season or two years ago, though didn’t stick with it, as it wasn’t really our kind of thing: a bit too forced, a bit too formulaic (every episode is essentially the same), and perhaps a bit too exploitative (in the way that most reality television feels a bit exploitative). I’ve never understood the strength of feeling about the show, or what about it drives such a devoted following.

If you feel similarly, then I’d encourage you to read Mendez’s excellent essay in the latest London Review of Books. As so often with the LRB, it gave me a wholly new perspective.