99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment

Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]

The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.

Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]

Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”

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New Statesman: Capitalism after coronavirus

We should remind ourselves that only a year ago we faced the daily nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn versus Theresa May: the two worst party leaders since 1940. The transformation for the better in British politics is extraordinary. In the Labour Party, the hard left could not avoid responsibility for Labour’s crushing electoral defeat, and its ringmasters have been swept away. Not only is the party expecting change, but with his decisive leadership victory, Keir Starmer has the power to deliver it. Similarly, the Conservatives first ejected Theresa May, followed by Boris Johnson’s high-risk strategy of ousting the established order of Philip Hammond and Jeremy Hunt, which was rewarded with a decisive election victory. Both parties had been bitterly divided, and in both, the internal opposition has won an election. [...]

To guard against the strong tendency to interpret the crisis through a lens of understanding that inevitably reinforces existing beliefs, a good discipline is to start by asking: “In what ways have events not been consistent with what I would have predicted given my prior beliefs?” Applying this discipline, I think one awkward fact really does bear political attention and, as it happens, it is deeply rooted in both left and right. While it can doubtless be spun away into the deep grass, it is sufficiently surprising to mainstream thought that it should shift ideas: Britain is heavily over-invested in its belief in the efficacy of centralised state direction. Underpinning this belief are two fallacies. One is that the top knows what to do. It knows best, because it is staffed by those of the highest calibre and they draw on the finest expertise. The other is that central control is necessary for coordination. These sound – at least to the people to whom they are congenial – obvious. Indeed, anyone hearing them would judge them to be common sense. How could either possibly be wrong? [...]

When Britain’s health outcomes are properly measured beyond the privileged zone of London and its region, its health system is not even ranked within the Western European pack – according to medical journal the Lancet, British outcomes look more like those of eastern Europe. The rest of western Europe has “the best health systems in the world”. Why don’t we learn from them? And no, it isn’t just a matter of money. Coronavirus fitted this pattern: we could have learnt from the responses in east Asia, but instead, public policy – though set by scientists – was based on a British model with assumptions about critical unknowns. [...]

We need compromise, mutuality, long-term perspectives and mediators: exactly the properties that bonus-hungry bankers and aggression-fuelled lawyers are trained not to possess. Returning to the unrepresentative nature of our political parties: depressingly the Tories are overloaded with bankers, and Labour with lawyers. We need to devolve the power of decision from Whitehall, but to where and what? To communities. The right political community, at which many decisions should be exercised, is the region. Whitehall, staffed by people whose daily life is the weirdly atypical experience of professional London, is both too remote and too exceptional to be the locus of many decisions. London is less “the capital” than “the outlier”. But the term “region” begs the question of appropriate boundaries, especially after what coronavirus will do to our economy.

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UnHerd: Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

Unfortunately, on this occasion, the would-be gatekeepers have not developed the requisite muscles either. The ISD briefing says that a far-Right online community has “mobilised” to “advance a range of… conspiracy theories relating to COVID-19”. As well as anti-Semitic tropes, the ISD lists as other ‘conspiracy theories’: the idea that this is a deep-state plot; the idea that it is a cover for celebrity arrests; and that the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory. It should not be hard to spot which of these conspiracies listed is the odd-one out. Of the last, ‘bioweapon’ conspiracy the ISD say [...]

People who have been told that something is a ‘conspiracy theory’ only to learn that major western governments are looking into the exact same thing, might be forgiven for being more sceptical in future about the way in which ‘conspiracy theory’ is used as a gatekeeping term. In future, they may be far more sceptical of the term whenever it is used. At the far end of this some people may even decide that other ‘conspiracy theories’ are in fact true or at least plausible.

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Wisecrack Edition: HER - Why You Suck at Dating

Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her" is ostensibly a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer. But if you look a little closer, it's actually more like an advice manual about how we can get better at human to human relationships. Allow us to explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Her: Why You Suck at Dating.

statista: The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans (Oct 30, 2018)

A Pew Research Center survey set out to answer that question by surveying 56,000 adults across Europe. Respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement "our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others". The following map shows the share of people in different countries considering their own culture to be superior to others and there are certainly some interesting results. Take Portugal where 47 percent of people agree with the above statement compared to just 20 percent in neighbouring Spain.

The most chauvinistic attitudes towards culture were recorded across Eastern Europe with Romania (66 percent), Bulgaria (69 percent) and Russia (also 69 percent) on top. The highest score of any country across Europe was actually recorded in Greece where 89 percent of people agreed with the statement.

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