A year ago, a visit to the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition left me completely astonished.

Obviously, it’s the paintings that are the star here. That unexpected, indescribable presence, the astounding attention to detail, the lifelike quality. They really are utterly unbelievable, completely astonishing.

I was so unexpectedly bowled over by the exhibition that I did something I’ve never done before with any exhibition: I went back the next day. I was so surprised by the strength of my own reaction that I couldn’t quite believe it, and wondered if I’d just been tired or overawed at being back at the beautiful Rijksmuseum. But no: the paintings really are spectacular, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

This weekend, Art Fund members—myself included—are being treated to the opportunity to stream the film version of the show, created by Exhibition on Screen. And so, last night, I found myself settling on the sofa to watch.

I was impressed. Obviously, seeing paintings on TV is not nearly the same as standing immediately in front of them. Many of the things I liked about the exhibition, such as its spare use of commentary and explanation which really allowed the work to sell itself, wouldn’t lend itself to film.

Yet, the film really did a fantastic job of bringing across that ineffable quality in Vermeer’s work, the arresting way they pull in the viewer. The experts featured in the film explain that this is partly attributable to Vermeer’s use of light, as I thought when I saw them. They also point out that Vermeer’s brushstrokes are invisible: an attribute I hadn’t noticed independently, though I suppose it should have been obvious.

It was an hour and a half well spent. That the opportunity to watch the film appealed even after seeing the exhibition twice made me reflect on quite how big an impact that once-in-a-lifetime show had made on me. As I said last year, Vermeer got inside my head; he clearly hasn’t left yet.

This book sold by the tonne last year, and the resulting coverage of ‘ultra-processed food’ was unavoidable. I studiously avoided reading the book, though. I’ve dabbled in nutritional research in the past, and have a reasonable handle on how complicated the subject can be. I assumed that this was another book by a celebrity doctor who would be giving an oversimplified, somewhat self-promotional message.

But then I gave in and was pleasantly surprised.

This book is quite narrowly focused on the under-recognised harms of ultra-processed food. As one of van Tulleken’s interviewees memorably puts it: ’It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.’

This is explicitly not a diet or self-help book, and van Tulleken repeatedly emphasises that there’s more to diet than this narrow topic: cutting out all ultra-processed food from one’s diet does not guarantee a long, healthy and happy life. The central argument is merely that the introduction of ultra-processed food is probably an under-recognised driver of ill health at a population level. I was fairly convinced by that argument.

I found the book easy and enjoyable to read, partly because of van Tulleken’s humorous style of writing and his personal anecdotes, but also because some of the background literature he cites is familiar to me. I sometimes found some arguments in the book a little reaching, particularly when it came to trying to connect the development of ultra-processed foods with wider ethical concerns in some multinational corporations. I came to accept this as a rhetorical device in keeping with the tone of the book.

I enjoyed this and felt that I learned from it, and regret misjudging it from its cover!

Eleven years ago, I wrote a post about coffee shop loyalty schemes, and the way that they deviate from the psychological evidence base.

The thing that links all of the common schemes is they are effectively fixed ratio reinforcement schedules. That is, they entice customers to buy more coffee by promising a freebie every X visits. But a wealth of literature from psychology reveals that this isn’t really very effective in getting people to form habits, not least because their motivation to consume drops off immediately after claiming free coffee Y.

A far more effective method of getting people to establish habits is to build a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. As with gambling, this means that the punter / customer never knows when the win / free product is going to materialise. This keeps motivation consistently high.

In practice, what I’m suggesting is that the ratio of visits to free coffees is kept the same (X+1:1), but that the free coffees are dispensed at random.

I still think about this a lot. Eleven years ago, most coffee shops used paper stamp cards, which didn’t really lend themselves to this sort of thing. I proposed using scratch cards as an alternative.

These days, these schemes use apps, so the switch should be much simpler. Indeed, some coffee shops use variable ratio reinforcement within the apps for special promotions: Caffè Nero’s app sometimes has a fairground spinner, and it has crackers at Christmas—both operate on the variable ratio reinforcement principle. I see no good technical reason why the randomised approach couldn’t be used for the core loyalty scheme.

And yet, the fixed ratio ‘stamp card’ approach is ubiquitous. Costa, which had a different system when I wrote that post, has come into line. Even M&S has a version now.

I don’t doubt that there’s a good reason for the lack of adoption of a variable ratio approach, but I’m not sure what it is: I struggle to imagine that large corporations are squeamish about using gambling-like mechanics to increase sales, so I expect that it’s to do with effectiveness. I’d love to see a trial, not least as it might help illuminate the limits of effectiveness of variable ratio approaches.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

The cover of this book caught my eye when it was first announced, but its subtitle—’an A-Z for the weary’—didn’t appeal. I imagined it to be a slightly patronising self-help book, and I didn’t buy it when it was published in January. This brief review in the TLS changed my mind, and I thought I’d give it a go.

The book is a literal A to Z, from ‘A is for Acceptance’ through to ‘Z is for Zeitgeist’. Each chapter is only a few pages long, but provides some genuine insight into burnout, and the relationship between modern work and exhaustion. Schaffner is a ‘burnout coach’, which is not the sort of title that fills me with confidence, but she is a great writer and clearly brings a wealth of experience and insight.

This isn’t a self-help book in as much as it isn’t directive: there are no instructions here for overcoming burnout. It’s a book designed to provide insight. Many of the chapters were about things that were already familiar—Bartleby the Scrivener, for example, or the Stoic philosophers—but I did find value in having Schaffner’s reflections on how these examples related to modern-day burnout.

So, I enjoyed this more than I expected.

Here are some passages that I highlighted:

The writer Jonathan Malesic defines burnout as the experience of being pulled between expectations and reality at work. We burn out, he argues, not because we are exhausted but because our hearts are broken. Our love for work went unrequited – it did not love us back. And nor did it bring us the dignity, purpose and recognition for which we hoped. Burnout, he writes, is ‘an ailment of the soul.

When we are in the grip of anhedonia, we often cannot even remember what used to bring us joy, and what it feels like to be properly alive, engaged, connected and full of zest. If that is you, then I urge you to find a hobby. This is not facetious advice for the following reasons: hobbies serve no purpose other than making the person who performs them happy. Like child’s play, they are unapologetically non-instrumental activities. They cannot be monetised nor utilised.

Sometimes, being caught in a bad situation can drain us of all vitality, even destroy our will to live. When we are that unlucky, we turn into ghosts, neither fully alive nor dead. We may continue to function at a physical level, but our spirits appear to have departed. Empty shells, we are incapable of experiencing joy. In fact, more often than not, we don’t feel anything at all. We have numbed our feelings to such an extent that we don’t even register the true scale of our suffering. And this is the point, of course: because it would be too devastating to hear what our feelings have to tell us, it is safer not to feel anything at all.

‘Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.’ In other words, what tends to be within our control is our inner life, our judgements, our reactions and how we treat others, while most other things, including what people think of us, are not.

The news we are fed is almost unremittingly negative. Studies have shown that it triggers our limbic system and stimulates the release of cortisol, thus deregulating our immune system, inhibiting the release of growth hormones and making us more prone to infections. As well as making us more fearful, aggressive and desensitised to the suffering of others, it can become a source of chronic stress. It can also kill our creativity.

During those dark nights of the soul, when all hope is gone and we feel lost and alone, we still have one option: to do the next right thing.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Last week, a colleague sidled up to me at my desk: ‘Simon, do you think Kate Middleton is dead?’

Until that point, I’d been only vaguely aware that theories were circulating about the status of the Princess of Wales. I’d seen passing mention of the existence of such discussion, but rolled my eyes, and wondered who had time for such things. After all, she’s been unwell, indications from the start were that she wouldn’t be returning to public life until after Easter, and it’s not Easter yet.

It turns out that I was just out of the loop: it appears that it’s been the hot topic of conversation for weeks, now.

For a little while now, I’ve been harbouring a contrarian theory about images generated by artificial intelligence. It’s widely assumed that these will cause chaos as people struggle to work out what’s real.

I’ve been unconvinced by those arguments. In my mind, there are two groups of people:

1. Those who get their news from social media. These people often seem to be surprisingly gullible and develop quite peculiar beliefs. They are vulnerable to being conned by fake imagery, but they’re already conned by any number of weird theories spread by other means. The addition of fake images doesn’t change much.
2. Those who get their news from professional outfits. It is the job of professional outfits to know the provenance of images they share, and so—by and large—they’re unlikely to be fooled for long by fake images.
   

I’ve long felt that AI imagery is unlikely to cause much movement between the groups, and therefore to have much impact on the news or how it is consumed.

On Sunday, Kensington Palace shared a picture of the Princess and her children to mark Mother’s Day. When professional outfits assessed the image, it was found to have been doctored, and was withdrawn from circulation.

To say this caused a furore is a substantial understatement. In his insightful article, Charlie Warzel shared this reflection:

Adobe Photoshop, the likely culprit of any supposed “manipulation” in the royal portrait, has been around for more than three decades. And although the tools are getting considerably better, the bigger change is cultural. The royal-photo debacle is merely a microcosm of our current moment, where trust in both governing institutions and gatekeeping organizations such as the mainstream press is low. This sensation has been building for some time and was exacerbated by the corrosive political lies of the Trump era.

The affair has made me reconsider my views on the threat of AI imagery. Unlike Warzel, I don’t worry excessively about trust in the mainstream press’s ability to separate fact from fiction, but more in their ability to focus on the issues that matter.

A photoshopped image has dominated the news agenda: it isn’t difficult to imagine arguments about AI images dominating in the run-up to an election, drowning out discussion of competing policies.

I still think I’m right that professional news organisations can sort fact from fiction, but I’d underestimated the likelihood of the process of dispelling the myth becoming the story—and the debate becoming framed by hand-wringing on how to deal with this stuff.

Fakery has proven to be more disruptive than I imagined it could be.

Fintan O’Toole is always worth reading, and his latest for The TLS is no exception. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, which does a great job of summarising the failure of the current Government while setting out the challenge for the next:

Comparatives make Starmer look good, but they also make his task, if he wins, look overwhelming. Income inequality is higher in the UK than in any other large European country, with the exception of Italy. Typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts and the poorest households are a staggering 60 per cent poorer than their equivalents in Ireland. Almost a third of young people in the UK are not engaged in any formal education by the age of 18 – compared to just one in five in France and Germany. UK hospitals now have fewer beds than all but one OECD advanced economy. Since 2005 UK companies have invested 20 per cent less than those in the US, France and Germany, placing the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of OECD countries in this category. Since 2008 the UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the US respectively has doubled to almost 20 per cent. It is quite possible for an incoming Labour government to do much better than all of this without doing nearly well enough to get the UK back on a par with the countries it used to be able to regard as its peers.

I’ve written many times before about how I could never be a politician, so this is never likely to be a problem for me: but where on earth do you start on sorting out this mess?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Sunderland has a long heritage of making cranes, most notably at the Crown Works site belonging to Coles Cranes. Cranes were built here from 1939 to 1998. In 2015, the site was cleared to make way for the construction of the Northern Spire bridge.

Much as with the Doxford Arch, this stonework was retained when the headquarters of the Crown Works was demolished and has been re-sited nearby in this memorial.

You might reasonably ponder the relevance of the retained 1879. This is the year Coles Cranes was founded, initially based in Derby.

The site is due to have an exciting future, with one of the UK’s most extensive sets of film and television studios planned for construction—the Crown Works Studios. Separate, though seemingly less-developed, plans exist for constructing Shipyard Studios nearby, including re-purposing the old shipyard to create the world’s largest underwater studio.

It seems like Sunderland is making a concerted push to pivot from heavy industry to visual arts.

This book was a gift from some friends, and like all good gifts, it’s something I’d never have chosen for myself: with occasional exceptions, I tend not to read books about wars. This novel is set in Newcastle in County Down, during the First World War. It is a fictionalised portrayal of an army unit set up to manufacture lifelike masks for soldiers who had suffered facial injuries during the war. It became known as ‘the tin nose shop’.

A novel about a British army unit stationed in Northern Ireland is not an obvious choice of subject for an American author, and it felt a little tonally off, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It’s really a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and the horror of war, and Snyder leans in heavily to the obvious allegory of a mask of normality hiding life-changing wounds.

Before reading this book, I had no idea about the historical existence of the ‘tin nose shop’. The venue on which the one in the book is based was actually located in London; Snyder’s introduction talks about relocating it to Northern Ireland after he holidayed there. I’m not sure if this was the right decision: the inevitable inclusion of the Easter Rising felt like an unnecessary additional complication to the plot. It worked for me, though: the imagery was lent a poignant vivacity by my previous visits to the town.

Without wanting to spoil anything, I was also surprised and pleased by the ending. I wasn’t surprised by the revelations at the end of the book, but I was surprised and moved by how they played out.

This isn’t the sort of thing that I’d normally read, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

From 1870, William Doxford & Sons Ltd has a large shipyard in Pallion, Sunderland. After a storied history, the final ship floated out of the yard in 1989.

The yard’s gatehouse, built in 1903, was a local landmark. Many thousands of workers plodded through its archway in the twentieth century. Yet by the twenty-first century, the gatehouse was badly dilapidated and in need of demolition.

In 2019, the gatehouse was knocked down—but the archway was preserved, and reconstructed close to its original location in 2021.