About a month ago, Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. The truth is, it’s getting hard to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

It’s a sentiment that reads differently after the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and yet, at the same time, that result makes it a much more pressing issue. Warzel uses Hurricane Milton to frame his argument, pointing out that people chose to lie in ways that put people in harm’s way, and led to the government officials who were trying to help being harrassed and attacked.

Misinformation is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to the USA. We all know people who credulously believe ever local bullshit rumour posted on Facebook, in the same way that we all know people who believe ever bit of tittle tattle they overhear. We also all know people who peddle that stuff, even if they probably don’t believe it themselves. The rumour mill spins quickly.

We’ve always told people not to believe this stuff. We tell our children to look for reliable sources—what are officials saying? What are journalists saying?

And yet, Warzel observes that television news was peddling lies, and the people who yesterday became the US President- and Vice President-elect also spread falsehoods. The sources we are supposed to be able to trust have proven their unreliability time and again. This is also not a US-only problem: it has been proven that being sacked for lying is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister, and broadcasting lies that put people at risk of death is not a definitive barrier to retaining a UK broadcast licence.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives have just elected a leader who says that she wants to reduce carbon emissions ‘but not in a way that would damage the economy’—as though she believes that an economy can function without a habitable planet for it to sit on.

It feels increasingly like the world is losing its shared sense of reality.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly.

I don’t know how democracy can function in this context—and I don’t know how I’d begin to fix it.

I recently came across this 2013 article by Adee Braun in The Atlantic, which takes a historical perspective on the perceived medical benefits of time spent at the seaside. From a British perspective, there wasn’t much here that was particularly new: I’m sure we all learned in school history lessons about the Victorian obsession with the seaside.

The seaside resort was where the serious healing took place. The sea air along with the ocean views and warm weather were considered critical to a patient’s recovery, especially when treating tuberculosis.

Something about the presentation of the article, though, made me reflect on how restoring a walk at the seaside is for me—and how, in its own way, that’s a modern perspective on the health-giving benefits of the seaside.

Wendy and I love a walk along the coast or the beach, and we are therefore particularly lucky to live in the North East, where many miles of spectacular coastline are close by. If we’re feeling down or not quite ourselves, a bracing walk by the sea always helps. This is undoubtedly partly due to the physical exertion, but I think it’s also to do with the perspective that the coastline brings: the vast scope and the view out to an impossibly distant horizon serve as a reminder about how small we and our problems are in reality.

We have many friends and colleagues who dip into the North Sea year-round, as Braun describes people doing for hundreds of years. Braun says that a dunk in the freezing sea can resemble ‘waterboarding far more than a spa treatment,’ with ‘the twin effects of cold and suffocation causing terror and panic.’

That’s not for me, but I continue to enjoy a long stroll along the coast.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3. I not sure what’s going on with the doctor’s teeth, and can confirm that I’ve never worn a stethoscope at the beach.

In the final seconds of BBC One’s Weekend News bulletin yesterday, Reeta Chakrabarti squeezed in an extra story in just 25 words:

Just before we go, President Biden has just tweeted that he intends to address the nation later this week, saying that it has been a great privilege to serve. We’ll bring you more at ten.

We know now, of course, that in the judgement of mere seconds, the team had perhaps overlooked the more significant message of Biden’s message: his decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign.

It’s not hard to see why: Biden’s statement refers only to standing down, without complete clarity on what from. It’s a letter that’s hard to parse on a scan-read, with the eyes of a nation watching.

Wendy and I switched over to the news channels, and after minutes of slightly desperate filling, the airwaves were thick with discussion of the political consequences of the decision, with hot takes and commentary on who might replace him and what it may mean for an election that’s still months away.

Nobody seemed keen to take a step back. It’s not hard to imagine the sense of profound grief Biden must feel at this moment. This is surely a moment that marks a painful shift in the way Biden sees himself: judged irreversibly incapable by dint of age of doing something he’s done before.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic last night:

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency.

It must cut deep; I hope he’s okay.

It’s funny, really, how little attention the news pays to the universal aspects of stories like this. How the immediate reaction focuses on predicting what might happen next, rather than on sitting with what’s just happened. How it refuses to dwell on the humanity, those moments of insufficiency most of us have faced and will continue to face in life.

The news runs away from the lessons of others’ experience, the things we might take and apply in our own lives. And that seems like a shame.

There’s a form I have to fill in at work every quarter, in which I’m invited to answer the question ‘How are you?’ with an integer. The instructions say that I ought to ‘rate how things are feeling 1-10’.

Anyone who knows me well enough will be unsurprised that I have a cut-and-paste paragraph that I shove in the box intended for an integer. It explains that I am declining to answer in the requested format because I cannot summarise how I feel in that form, and that I find the question inappropriate and mildly offensive.

Nobody has ever questioned my response.

I was reminded of that when I read this article by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The Atlantic. As a doctor, Rosenthal admits that she has asked many patients to rate their pain on a scale of zero to ten, but reflects on how useless this question is when asked to rate her own pain:

Pain is a squirrelly thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it, and can recede, nearly entirely, if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?

The article dives into the history and future of this kind of pain scale and was a great read: it’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

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

Yesterday, I read Emilio Casalicchio’s excellent Politico article which gave a glimpse into the Conservative’s election campaign. I was struck by the line ‘launching the first attack by shooting yourself in the head doesn’t look so clever’.

But I was even more struck by the notion that the campaign had been led by a headstrong small team, which neither sought nor responded to external feedback. This is redolent of the flaws of Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign.

Perhaps responding well to feedback counterintuitively conflicts with the egotism necessary to seek public office. Perhaps this is only exacerbated for those seeking the top office in an era of ‘strongman leadership’.

It was certainly true that Sunak’s public response to even a hint of public criticism during the campaign was primarily defensive: he did not give the impression of being curious to better understand the alternative viewpoint, let alone to change course in response to it. It’s not like he’s alone; this behaviour is common.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot about the skill of constructively receiving feedback. I don’t think it is something that comes naturally to anyone, but it is a skill that’s particularly well-developed among people that I admire. Getting better at it has certainly been useful for me and has helped my professional development.

I recently read one of Arthur C Brooks’s articles in The Atlantic covering this topic, too. I enjoyed his observation that ‘once you depersonalize criticism, you can start to see it for what it is: a rare glimpse into what outsiders think.’

This is both blindingly obvious and yet also often missed: it’s easy to get too caught up in judging the person who wrote the comment or perhaps being defensive. But taking feedback exactly as it is offered—as in, this person thought X—can be radically helpful. One doesn’t need to agree with the other person’s viewpoint, but having knowledge of it can nevertheless be extremely useful.

After reading Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s book Thanks for the Feedback a few years ago, I added a link in my work email signature which gives people the opportunity to offer anonymous feedback. This has served me very well, giving me lots of opportunities to reflect and develop my understanding of others’ viewpoints. Philippa Perry’s book also offered some useful insights into contextualising and using feedback in a personal (as opposed to professional) context.

I can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if people were better equipped to receive criticism—politics would certainly be better for it. Failing to make use of feedback feels a bit like ‘shooting yourself in the head.’

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

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.

I read Jacob Stern’s article in The Atlantic about the political controversy in the USA related to specific car manufacturers selling certain models without AM radios.

It made me wonder whether my car has an AM radio. I know it did when I bought it, a little over 14 years ago. I remember occasionally listening to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the car. But I’ve replaced the radio twice since then.

For the last three years, I’ve been using a ‘radio’ which uses Apple’s CarPlay system to stream content from my phone. Since then, I’ve never listened to broadcasts via FM or AM. I knew the system had a ‘tuner’ function, but I wasn’t sure whether it included AM frequencies.

Surprisingly, the ‘radio’ unit I bought is still ‘current’. I found it on sale on a national retailer’s website. Despite the technology now being several years old, the retail price has inflated by more than 11% since I bought it.

The retailer’s website didn’t list whether the ‘radio’ had an AM tuner. I can only assume this must be irrelevant to many people’s purchasing decisions these days.

I consulted the manufacturer’s website, but it wasn’t listed on the main product page there, either. I dug into a separate ‘full specifications and features’ page—lo and behold, there it was!

My car radio does, indeed, have a hitherto unused AM tuner.

Some US commentators appear to believe this to be essential to my freedom. I still don’t think I’m going to use it. Given that my car model isn’t sold in the US, perhaps no one will mind.

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

I’ve been the proud owner of a nose for over thirty-eight years and went through more than thirteen continuous years of medical training. Yet, somehow, news of the nasal cycle had utterly passed me by until I read this article by Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic.

Since I learned about it, I’ve been borderline obsessed with it. I already knew that humans effectively have two noses, like we have two eyes and two ears. Each nostril connects to an independent nasal cavity, a complex construction with multiple functions. These include filtering, warming and humidifying air, as well as containing the olfactory epithelium which allows us to smell (and, to a large extent, taste) things. The nose also plays a vital role in speech.

It was news to me that each of the cavities contains erectile tissue similar to that found in the sex organs. Each side alternatives throughout the day in swelling, leading to slight congestion. This ensures that one cavity always has high airflow and the other low. This is important for the olfactory epithelium because different chemicals take different amounts of time to bind, meaning that we need high and low-flow surfaces simultaneously to have the full spectrum of scent. The cilia, tiny hairs which clear mucus, also suspend their usual pattern of beating on the congested side, allowing it to be more moist and hence help humidify the air we breathe.

Even more astoundingly, when one lies on one’s side, it appears that signals from the compressed armpit can induce the nasal passages on the opposite side to open.

Now that I’ve learned this, it’s obvious: I’ve become obsessed with noting which nostril is congested throughout the day. Wendy and I even sometimes ask each other out of mild amazement that we’ve never noticed.

I trust that you, too, will be amazed by this and will spend the next few days noticing with fascination what your nose is up to.

Highlighted by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic Daily yesterday, this first-person account of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 is brilliant and hilarious. It was published in 1956, and written by Thomas P. Curtis. It is stuffed full of moments like this:

For the aquatic events we had on our team a very fast short-distance swimmer, who had won many races in warm American swimming pools. He journeyed to the Piraeus on the day of the first swimming competition blissfully ignorant that even the Mediterranean is bitterly cold in the month of April.

He had traveled 5000 miles for this event, and as he posed with the others on the edge of the float, waiting for the gun, his spirit thrilled with patriotism and determination. At the crack of the pistol, the contestants dived headfirst into the icy water. In a split second his head reappeared. “Jesu Christo! I’m freezing!”; with that shriek of astonished frenzy he lashed back to the float. For him the Olympics were over.

It’s well-worth five minutes of your time.

‘Dechurching’ is an awful word, but Jake Meador has an interesting article in The Atlantic about the decline of church attendance in the USA. I thought this section was particularly interesting:

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go.

The dread of having to explain previous non-attendance—not at church, but anywhere—is a specific feeling. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach as I write this. I think it’s something we’ve all experienced, but which I don’t recall seeing articulated, and certainly not in this context.

I probably need to be better at thinking about how to avoid conjuring that feeling in others. Are there, perhaps, meetings that I invite people to, where they feel guilty if they miss one—guilt which, in turn, makes them less likely to come to the next one?

Keep with the churchy theme: how can I be better at welcoming back the prodigal son rather than making them feel guilty for their prior absence?

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