When individuals go above and beyond expected job requirements by doing such things as offering to assist a co-worker on a project, or voluntarily working additional hours to complete an assignment, organizations can be more efficient and productive. According to this article, however, some employers have removed or reduced the voluntary nature of these types of activities—making such behaviors a normal expectation. These expectations become unspoken demands which add a level of pressure that could lead to burnout and job-related stress and consequently have a negative effect on both employees and the organization. The author offers supervisors some practical suggestions for reducing this type of stress and its consequences.
by oracleeditor@gmail.com (Breanne Williams, COLUMNIST)
Despite many attempts last year to alter the statewide ban, Florida is still one of 19 states to prohibit carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus. However, many believe the policy will once again be under scrutiny in the next legislative session.
Texas is about to experience the effect of lifting such a ban, as the University of Texas (UT) at Austin will officially become a “concealed carry zone” in August. A New York Times column on Monday described the disturbing transition.
In Texas, students will soon check off all the things on their back-to-school shopping lists. Backpack? Check. Pens? Check. Notebook? Check. Smith and Wesson M&P9 Shield? Check.
While some believe concealed carry on campus only allows students to protect themselves in an emergency, it would realistically cause more harm than good.
Senseless violence is sadly considered the norm in today’s society. People have to be on guard when going to the movie theater, shopping or even walking into a health clinic.
Would arming students decrease the harm a shooter with a premeditated plan could unleash on a campus? Probably. But the reality is it could also create an environment with an increase in rash, spontaneous shootings.
If a student becomes angry with another student or faculty member, he could easily discharge a round in a matter of seconds in a fit of rage. This will without a doubt alter the atmosphere of learning on every campus where concealed carry is a norm.
Under campus carry, the University of Houston’s Faculty Senate warned professors to “be careful discussing sensitive topics; drop certain topics from your curriculum; not ‘go there’ if you sense anger…”
If your university knowingly adopts a policy that forces the suppression of education, it needs to seriously re-evaluate its priorities. College is a place where students come together to express different ideas and views and learn from their peers.
The knowledge gained from the classroom and the conversations shared across campus shape students into intelligent and well-rounded adults. Creating an atmosphere where students are terrified to express their opinions and professors walk on eggshells deprives them of that growing experience.
If universities are truly concerned about the safety of their students, the answer is not to allow thousands of guns on campus. Instead, they should seek methods to better arm and train the university police so it can successfully handle threats such as active shooters on campuses.
As long as we continue to live in a world full of hatred and intolerance, people will continue to unleash harm in public places such as universities.
The campus carry bill being adopted in Texas is “a 50th anniversary gift of sorts from Texas state legislators. For when the law comes into effect on August 1, it will be 50 years to the day since a heavily armed young man ascended the clock tower on campus and shot 45 people, killing 14 of them, in the first mass shooting at an American college,” the column stated.
Fear often causes people to resort to desperate measures. And yes, unfortunately, attending a university in 2016 comes with a dosage of fear. But lawmakers need to recognize the repercussions of their actions.
Hopefully, Florida will continue to forbid students from carrying guns into classrooms. However, with the number of states across the country yielding to this fear dogma, it will not be surprising if Florida students soon have to worry about offending a classmate and risking their life in a lecture hall.
Breanne Williams is a junior majoring in mass communications.
by George Dvorsky on Gizmodo, shared by Mario Aguilar to io9
Mosquitoes love to breed inside discarded car tires. So why not use this against them? Such is the thinking of Canadian researchers who have developed a DIY mosquito trap that’s already proving its worth in field tests.
Former French sex worker Rosen Hicher, centre, who marched 800km to raise awareness of the Nordic Model. Patrice Pierrot/AAP
This week France became the latest in a growing list of countries to decriminalise sex workers while banning the purchase of sex.
The French legislation is based on what has become known as the Nordic Model, a form of decriminalisation that treats prostitution as a cause and effect of gender inequality and a site of violence against women.
The Nordic Model shrinks the market for prostitution by targeting demand: making the activities of sex buyers illegal while removing any punitive measures against prostituted persons. It has been effective in Sweden, and has since been adopted in Norway, Iceland, Canada and Northern Ireland.
French sex workers protesting against their country’s new laws.
Ian Langsdon/EPA
In places like Victoria, a state with one of the world’s oldest legalised systems of brothel prostitution, the sex industry has a lot to lose from the success of the Nordic model.
The conference, organised by Sister Survivor, a collective of sex trade survivors, includes a planned address from a well-known author and activist, Rachel Moran, who co-founded SPACE International: a survivor-led, non-governmental organisation that advocates for the Nordic Model.
It will include the launch of a new book Prostitution Narratives, a collection of survivor testimonies edited by Dr Caroline Norma and Melinda Tankard Reist. Sex trade survivors will speak at the conference and survivors who wish to attend can apply for free admittance.
The blog of one sex worker activist, a Media Liaison for the Vixen Collective (which dubs itself Victoria’s “peer only sex worker organization”), calls the conference an “attempt to silence our voices”.
“Thinking of joining the online campaign? (against the RMIT conference)” asks this blog. “Do you have an anonymous Twitter/Facebook/Email account? Please consider your safety/anonymity in your protest activities.”
It goes onto suggest that protestors “write to RMIT to express concerns about the Conference to the University Chancellor”; tweet directly to RMIT using the hashtag #RMIT2016 and take action on RMIT’s Facebook Page. (The conference, incidentally, is not run by, or officially endorsed by, the University.)
The use of such strategies will be familiar to any academic or commentator who has publicly criticised the sex industry. The same old myths about prostitution, trafficking and the Nordic Model are recycled, as are the online tactics used to bully, intimidate, and deny people a platform to speak.
Also familiar is the hyperbole of claims on social media. For instance, the existence of a conference critical of the sex industry is said to be discriminatory because “the disabled use sex workers”. Others claim that simply holding an event like this will increase “stigma and harm” against “sex workers”.
In these arguments, it is important to keep in mind that prostitution is not simply a contract between individuals but a lucrative, and exploitative, industry that is able to mobilise to protect its interests.
As the French Socialist Party MP Catherine Coutelle noted in support of the new legislation in France: “the prostitution market, which enriches only the exploiters, is the extreme form of capitalism”.
According to reports from IBISWorld, the legal “brothel keeping and sex worker services” sector in Australia is profitable and growing.
The Scarlet Alliance receives government funding. And the sex industry lobby is so normalised that it even has a political party to represent its interests in parliament.
It seems this “extreme form of capitalism” is firmly entrenched in Australia too.
This article was written with input from Dr Helen Pringle, co-convener of the Nordic Model Information Network.
Meagan Tyler is a co-convenor of the Nordic Model Information Network (NMIN), a volunteer with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia (CATWA) and will be participating in the World's Oldest Oppression conference.
by Kate Knibbs on Gizmodo, shared by Kate Knibbs to io9
If you’re one of the 17 million people with a grandfathered-in Netflix subscription, take note: Netflix is raising its prices for those plans next month.
The most common form of cardiac arrhythmia in the western world is atrial fibrillation, where the heart beats improperly (usually more rapidly) and irregularly. But, so far, no large studies had examined the link between stressful life events and atrial fibrillation.
Our study, conducted at Aarhus University and published in the journal Open Heart this week, was based on data from nearly one million patients. It has shown a significant link between loss of a partner and development of atrial fibrillation.
We found the risk of developing an irregular heartbeat for the first time was 41% higher among those grieving a partner’s loss compared to those who hadn’t experienced such loss.
We also found the condition could persist for up to a year after the tragic event.
In our population-based case-control study, we took information about 88,612 patients in Denmark who were newly diagnosed with atrial fibrillation between 1995 and 2014 and compared it with 886,120 healthy people.
Both groups were matched on age and sex. Among those with atrial fibrillation, 17,478 had lost a partner. In the control group, this number was 168,940.
Death of a partner is considered one of the most stressful life events.
from shutterstock.com
We looked at several factors that might influence the risk of atrial fibrillation, including age, sex, patients' underlying health conditions and the health of their partner a month before the death.
We found the risk of developing atrial fibrillation was highest eight to 14 days after a partner’s loss and remained elevated for a year. The risk was higher in those under 60 years olds and the effect was most dramatic in those who had unexpectedly lost a healthy partner.
The heightened risk was apparent irrespective of gender and other underlying health conditions.
Those with partners who were relatively healthy in the month before death were 57% more likely to develop an irregular heartbeat, but no increased risk was seen among those whose partners were ill and expected to die soon.
The link between body and mind
Our study is the first to show that severe stress could play a significant role in the development of atrial fibrillation.
The exact mechanisms linking the mind and heart, however, aren’t certain.
Studies have suggested acute stress may directly disrupt normal heart rhythms and prompt the production of chemicals involved in inflammation, which is a physical response to injury or infection.
The central nervous system modules heart rhythm.
from shutterstock.com
Bereavement, such as after the loss of a partner, often brings about symptoms of mental illness such as depression, anxiety, guilt, anger and hopelessness. Losing a partner to death ranks highly on a psychological scale of severely stressful life events.
Such stress could affect basic hormonal processes. The release of adrenalin, for instance, is useful in acute danger – as it increases your heart rate and diverts blood to your muscles so you can run or fight – but it can disrupt heart rhythm if the release is excessive and prolonged.
Acute mental stress may also create imbalance in the central nervous system – the autonomic nervous system – that controls many basic functions. It also modulates our heart frequency and the electrical nerve pathways that run through the heart to the muscle, facilitating a synchronised contraction of the heart chambers.
Those grieving need special attention
Our study indicates that people experiencing severe mental stress from bereavement are a vulnerable group that might need more medical attention.
With a biologically plausible association, early identification of this group is currently a major challenge in the health-care system.
The study’s findings don’t just have significant clinical relevance though. We are currently experiencing substantial levels of stress in modern society. And while stress is a potentially modifiable risk factor, many people develop stress-related illnesses, that are a key driver to growing health-care costs.
Simon Graff have recieved funding from The Lundbeck Foundation.
by Kim Beazley, Senior Fellow, Perth USAsia Centre, University of Western Australia
Donald Trump has been highly critical of trade liberalisation, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Reuters/Jim Young
Kim Beazley was Australian ambassador to the United States from 2010 until January 2016, and a former leader of the federal Labor Party. He is now a senior fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre. This is the first of an occasional series he will write for The Conversation on the US and Australian elections.
All of us believe we own the US presidential elections. Globally, there is great sensitivity to the possibility of America’s political intervention in a country’s domestic politics. Often that is more a product of a politically motivated paranoia than it being any real prospect. The fear is mostly pure projection; we want to be involved in US politics.
I used to dine out in Washington, D.C., on a piece of Pew Research done for the 2008 presidential election. The question was asked around the globe whether the respondent was “interested in the US presidential election”. In the US 83% surveyed revealed themselves so focused. The Australian response was 84%.
We were more interested in their politics than they were. Many other countries were pretty close to us on the measure.
Generally, the presidential race teases out reactions among foreign observers as candidates reveal their approaches to global leadership. Discussion revolves around the degree of unilateralism or collegiality expressed by the candidates in how they propose to manage American leadership.
If the candidate is a sitting president this can throw up surprises. However, the view abroad usually is that both the incumbent and the challenger, or the two candidates at the end of a term limit, are exercising a metaphorical global wink of the eye at us. Change will be nuanced, peace will be sustained, allies massaged, competition with adversaries kept within bounds and rules of global order sustained.
This is felt no matter what harsh things are said on the hustings. The impact of the debate on American global positioning is negligible.
This election is different. The Republican race is coming into global focus. This is not simply because candidates’ claims are more than usually vivid, but the character of them is impacting American diplomacy, materially and immediately.
Secretary of State John Kerry recently described comments by Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as an “embarrassment” in his dealings with foreign governments. He told Face the Nation on CBS that they:
… upset people’s sense of equilibrium, of our steadiness about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions the way they’re proposed to me is clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.
Kerry’s is a near-unprecedented call. One of the inhibitions on American politicians drawing attention to the unpopularity in foreign countries of an opponent’s views is the tendency for the American electorate to dismiss the foreign criticism and instead mark the complainant down. That an old campaigner like Kerry would thus engage is a mark of his high anxiety levels.
Kerry’s complaints were directed squarely at speculation by Trump and Cruz about keeping Muslims out of the US, and various forms of constraint and surveillance of Muslim communities in the US.
In the struggle with Islamic extremist terror, words are bullets. Across the globe Muslim communities are in a finely balanced debate over whether or not the extremists are jihadists or heretics.
Members of those communities are either acquiescent in providing safe space for extremists, actively supporting those extremists, or alerting authorities of problems with them out of a sense of shared citizenship. Only the latter position is acceptable for the broader community.
Spreading that sentiment is entirely dependent on Muslim members of our communities feeling part of the whole and not the “other”. In this battle folk working either way are not suspending judgement until the poll produces a result.
The debate is part of the current fight. Kerry knows it is destructive of American leadership; it fosters an atmosphere conducive to extremist propaganda.
Kerry knows this is not an either/or fight – it can only be conducted one way. But it must be a two-pronged approach: on one side, maximum effort must be invested in stifling sentiment conducive to extremism. And alongside that must be a clever military/political engagement with complex countries and movements in the Middle East to optimise the effectiveness of the military assault on the extremists.
There are no negotiations that can be had with the extremism heretics. The only negotiations are with those who have to bear the brunt of the struggle. They are all Muslims with a substantial trust deficit when it comes to us. The US administration effort is damaged at so many levels in so many ways by the candidates’ unedifying manipulation of fearful sentiment in the American electorate.
The problem doesn’t end there. Australia has for years relied on the ballast the Republican Party has provided the liberal internationalist argument in American politics – not only on the military front, but the economic as well. Having unilaterally disarmed on protection in the 1980s, Australia has needed friends. By a country mile the US has been the best, both in its own actions and in international forums.
Likewise, Australia has sought military commitment and openness with the US on sharing intelligence and capabilities. Republicans have been the most forthcoming.
Importantly, when protectionist attacks have been mounted on America’s Asian trading partners, the Republicans have been most resistant. This has been critical for Australia’s prosperity as much of it is based on trade. Asian nations turn Australia’s raw materials into products for the US market.
This is no longer the case. Cruz at least is within reach of this longstanding Republican role. Trump is trashing it.
The trade debate also has an immediate effect. The critical trade agreement for American prosperity and leadership in Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sits becalmed in Congress. A House majority supports it – at least about 190 Republicans and 40 Democrats. Trump has summarily dismissed it to wildly cheering crowds.
There has also been loud applause at Trump rallies for massive tariffs on Asian products, and belting Asian military allies like South Korea and Japan. If implemented, these moves would have a devastating effect on the global economy. There is no room for nuance in Trump’s stance. To avoid this cost, Trump would have to take a 180-degree post-election turn. Hard to see it happening.
These are hard times. This mayhem is built on the solid grievance of the contemporary American middle class. Their grandparents carried the battle for freedom in the second world war. Their parents were prepared to be held hostage to the good behaviours of formerly very bad powers in the Cold War nuclear standoff.
The post-1970s model of multinational production, a surge in illegal migration, trade liberalisation, the collapse of trade unions and above all technological change has blighted their expectations and their hopes.
No political parties in the US embraced what Australia started to call the social wage when Australia opened up to the global economy in the 1980s. Going for growth in Australia enabled universal health care, substantial training and educational improvements, and a broadening of its industrial base. Middle-class incomes doubled.
The blighted middle-class Americans who have had no real increase in wages in the last 30 years don’t demand a performance from the government. They demand its dismantling. Trump will probably lose, but working back from the end of this shaky branch will be a difficult task for Obama’s successor.
Kim Beazley is a former Australian ambassador to the United States, and a former leader of the federal Labor Party.
A very unusual exchange is about to take place over the Atlantic. The UK is sending some 700kg of highly enriched uranium to be disposed of in the US, the largest amount that has ever been moved out of the country. In return, the US is sending other kinds of enriched uranium to Europe to help diagnose people with cancer.
The vast majority of the UK’s waste comes from its fleet of nuclear power stations. Most of it is stored at the Sellafield site in north-west England. But the material being sent to the US is a particularly high (weapons usable) grade of enriched uranium that you wouldn’t want to move to Sellafield from its current location at Dounreay in the north of Scotland without building a new storage facility – presumably more expensive than the cost of transportation.
The decision to move this radioactive waste out of the UK has been presented as making it harder for nuclear materials to get into the hands of terrorists, but this is implausible. The UK is capable of managing homegrown highly enriched uranium itself. The plan also contradicts the principle that countries are responsible for managing their own nuclear legacy.
The announcement draws new attention to an old issue: how to find a long-term solution to nuclear waste. Countries with atomic weapons or civilian nuclear power have been wrestling with this for several decades. This is partly because the problem was neglected for years, but more fundamentally because governments have failed to develop a strategy acceptable to the communities affected.
This reflects the uniqueness of the problem, of course – we are talking about substances which could harm human health for tens of thousands of years into the future. It raises profound ethical issues of equity between generations.
Deep burial
The scientific community does in fact agree on how to dispose of these materials safely: deep underground in appropriate geology such as clay or granite, with well engineered radiation barriers as an extra defence. Yet only Sweden and Finland, with political systems built on more trust and consensus than most countries, have a clear repository plan – and it will be several years before they become operational.
Most of the storage facilities at Sellafield are designed to last mere decades. The UK has been sporadically focused on deep disposal since the early 1980s, but for a long time approached it top-down and secretively. This became known as the “DAD” method – decide, announce, defend. But it has always led to “abandon” when local communities, having had no part in the siting decision, have rebelled successfully.
It was not until 2008 that the government introduced a system of rules under which local communities would conditionally volunteer a site and then negotiate a deal with the authorities. So far it has produced no result: attempts by district councils around Sellafield to volunteer it were overruled in 2013 by Cumbria county council, the local-authority tier above them, and no other communities have come forward. The government has reserved the right to override the voluntary process but shows no sign of doing so yet.
In such circumstances it becomes tempting to look for short cuts. One occasionally raised is to put all the world’s problematic waste somewhere very remote like the west Australian desert. This is a non-starter. The Czech and Slovak experience illustrated this. As a single country they planned a single repository, but after their “velvet divorce” each insisted it would not permanently manage the other’s waste. Such an international solution also contradicts the aforementioned issue of being responsible for your own legacy.
The other major hope is that science will find a convincing way either to use waste as fuel for reactors, and/or that “partitioning and transmutation” would drastically reduce the half-lives of the relevant isotopes. Yet these approaches are complex and expensive, involving molten salt reactors or accelerator-driven systems. And critically, there would still be some volume of long-lived waste that needed to be managed – no method can yet promise to drastically reduce the half-lives of all the different waste types. The only credible way forward is deep burial.
Sellafield
In the absence of a deep-disposal plan, the UK has a more immediately pressing issue – what to do with Sellafield’s contaminated materials and waste from the UK’s near-70 years in the nuclear power and weapons business, much of which is housed in dilapidated facilities that are not fit for purpose. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA)
expects it will cost some £68 billion to clean up Sellafield by stabilising and safely packaging the waste and building new stores. This will only be completed by around 2120.
This problem is at least now getting serious attention and resource – despite the climate of public austerity. Currently the country is spending over £1.5 billion a year on the site, which is one of the most hazardous in Europe.
Sellafield stores a further 140 tonnes of waste plutonium that also stems from British and some overseas nuclear power. If used in bombs this amount could obliterate humanity several times over. The NDA is now focusing on what to do about this too, after years of political inattention. Yet the decision-making is laboured and the currently favoured solution of using the plutonium as fuel for conventional reactors lacks credibility – no operator wants to use plutonium-based fuel because it is more difficult and expensive to manage than conventional fuel; and moving it around the country is a security risk.
So nuclear waste remains the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry, in the UK and elsewhere. While the financial problems behind the proposed new nuclear station Hinkley Point C attract most of the headlines, the waste problem hangs over the industry behind the scenes. Until we find a way forward that is scientifically and politically acceptable, it will continue to do so.
Gordon MacKerron is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group based at Princeton University, comprised primarily of academics and other experts, with the objective of promoting the technical basis to achieve reductions in stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. He chaired the UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management from 2003 to 2007.
by Ghada Bassioni, Assoc. Prof. and Head of the Chemistry Department, Ain Shams University
Proceed with caution when using foil for cooking. Shutterstock
If you’re baking fish, roasting vegetables or preparing a piece of meat for dinner tonight, chances are that you’ll wrap your food in aluminium foil. What you may not realise is that some of the foil will leach into your meal – and this could be bad for your health.
Research that I conducted with a group of colleagues has explored the use of aluminium for cooking and preparing food. Aluminium doesn’t just appear in foil: it is the most popular cookware material used by people in developing countries. Pots and pans are lined with it and it is found in some kitchen utensils like large serving spoons. Copper used to fulfil this role, but over time it’s been replaced by aluminium because it is cheaper to mass produce and easier to clean.
But while cooking your food in aluminium pots or pans isn’t a bad thing, placing it in foil and putting it in the oven is problematic. This is especially true with acidic or spicy food that’s prepared at high temperatures.
Aluminium and health
Human bodies can excrete small amounts of aluminium very efficiently. This means that minimal exposure to aluminium is not a problem: the World Health Organisation has established a safe daily intake of 40mg per kilogram of body weight per day. So for a person who weighs 60kg the allowable intake would be 2400 mg.
But most people are exposed to and ingest far more than this suggested safe daily intake. Aluminium is present in corn, yellow cheese, salt, herbs, spices and tea. It’s used in cooking utensils, as described above, as well as in pharmacological agents like antacids and antiperspirants. Aluminium sulfate, which is derived from aluminium, is used as a coagulant during the purification process of drinking water.
Scientists are exploring whether over-exposure to aluminium may be posing threats to human health. For instance, high concentrations of aluminium have been detected in the brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists have examined the community of old people with Alzheimer’s and concluded that it is a modern disease that’s developed from altered living conditions associated with society’s industrialisation. These conditions may include high levels of aluminium in daily life.
Aluminium poses other health risks, too. Studies have suggested that high aluminium intake may be harmful to some patients with bone diseases or renal impairment. It also reduces the growth rate of human brain cells.
Avoid foil when cooking
Given all of these proven risks, it’s important to determine the aluminium concentration when cooking. Pots and other cookware tend to be oxidised, providing an inert layer that prevents the aluminium from leaching into food. The problem is that when you scrub your pots after cooking, that layer is worn away and the aluminium can seep into your food. This is easily avoided: when you get new aluminium pots, boil water in them several times until the base becomes matt. This creates a natural oxidation that prevents leaching. They may look nicer when they’re scrubbed and shiny, but a matt base is better for your food and your health.
But cooking your food in foil is a different story. Aluminium foil is disposable and you will not be able to create that inert layer prior to using it. My research found that the migration of aluminium into food during the cooking process of food wrapped in aluminium foil is above the permissible limit set by the World Health Organisation.
Ghada Bassioni explains the research she and her colleagues conducted.
Aluminium is significantly more likely to leach into food, and at higher levels, in acidic and liquid food solutions like lemon and tomato juice than in those containing alcohol or salt. Leaching levels climb even more when spice is added to food that’s cooked in aluminium foil. Anything acidic sparks a particularly aggressive process that dissolves layers of aluminium into food.
This research suggests that aluminium foil should not be used for cooking. Instead, we’d recommend using glassware or porcelain when preparing baked dishes. It’s safe to wrap cold food in foil, though not for long stretches of time because food has a shelf life and because aluminium in the foil will begin to leach into the food depending on ingredients like spices.
Ghada Bassioni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
In a familiar yet different world, a young student finds out they have a penchant for magic and go to school to learn more about it. No, this isn’t Harry Potter. While it may seem similar on the surface The Paper Magician series is actually quite different—and Disney just bought the movie rights to it.
by David Arbesú, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of South Florida
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'The Tower of Babel' (1563). Wikimedia Commons
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language?
In a recent Wall Street Journalarticle, technology policy expert Alec Ross argued that, within a decade or so, we’ll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones.
No more trying to remember your high school French when checking into a hotel in Paris. Your earpiece will automatically translate “Good evening, I have a reservation” to Bon soir, j’ai une réservation – while immediately translating the receptionist’s unintelligible babble to “I am sorry, Sir, but your credit card has been declined.”
Ross argues that because technological progress is exponential, it’s only a matter of time.
Indeed, some parents are so convinced that this technology is imminent that they’re wondering if their kids should even learn a second language.
…if the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now – well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
Needless to say, communication is only one of the many advantages of learning another language (and I would argue that it’s not even the most important one).
Furthermore, while it’s undeniable that translation tools like Bing Translator, Babelfish or Google Translate have improved dramatically in recent years, prognosticators like Ross could be getting ahead of themselves.
As a language professor and translator, I understand the complicated nature of language’s relationship with technology and computers. In fact, language contains nuances that are impossible for computers to ever learn how to interpret.
Language rules are special
I still remember grading assignments in Spanish where someone had accidentally written that he’d sawed his parents in half, or where a student and his brother had acquired a well that was both long and pretty. Obviously, what was meant was “I saw my parents” and “my brother and I get along pretty well.” But leave it to a computer to navigate the intricacies of human languages, and there are bound to be blunders.
Even earlier this month, when asked about Twitter’s translation feature for foreign language tweets, the company’s CEO Jack Dorseyconceded that it does not happen in “real time, and the translation is not great.”
Still, anything a computer can “learn,” it will learn. And it’s safe to assume that any finite set of data (like every single work of literature ever written) will eventually make its way into the cloud.
So why not log all the rules by which languages govern themselves?
Simply put: because this is not how languages work. Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different.
Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese – to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world – are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.
Words don’t indicate meaning
As long as one is dealing with a simple written text, online translation tools will get better at replacing one “signifier” – the name Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure gave to the idea that a sign’s physical form is distinct from its meaning – with another.
Or, in other words, an increase in the quantity and accuracy of the data logged into computers will make them more capable of translating “No es bueno dormir mucho” as “It’s not good to sleep too much,” instead of the faulty “Not good sleep much,” as Google Translate still does.
Replacing a word with its equivalent in the target language is actually the “easy part” of a translator’s job. But even this seems to be a daunting task for computers.
So why do programs continue to stumble on what seem like easy translations?
It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t – or shouldn’t – involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning.
And in order to infer meaning from a specific utterance, humans have to interpret a multitude of elements at the same time.
Think about all the contextual clues that go into understanding an utterance: volume, pitch, situation, even your culture – all are as likely to convey as much meaning as the words you use. Certainly, a mother’s soft-spoken advice to “be careful” elicits a much different response than someone yelling “Be careful!” from the passenger’s seat of your car.
So can computers really interpret?
As the now-classic book Metaphors We Live By has shown, languages are more metaphorical than factual in nature. Language acquisition often relies on learning abstract and figurative concepts that are very hard – if not impossible – to “explain” to a computer.
Since the way we speak often has nothing to do with the reality that surrounds us, machines are – and will continue to be – puzzled by the metaphorical nature of human communications.
This is why even a promising newcomer to the translation game like the website Unbabel, which defines itself as an “AI-powered human-quality translation,” has to rely on an army of 42,000 translators around the world to fine-tune acceptable translations.
You need a human to tell the computer that “I’m seeing red” has little to do with colors, or that “I’m going to change” probably refers to your clothes and not your personality or your self.
If interpreting the intended meaning of a written word is already overwhelming for computers, imagine a world where a machine is in charge of translating what you say out loud in specific situations.
The translation paradox
Nonetheless, technology seems to be trending in that direction. Just as “intelligent personal assistants” like Siri or Alexa are getting better at understanding what you say, there is no reason to think that the future will not bring “personal assistant translators.”
But translating is an altogether different task than finding the nearest Starbucks, because machines aim for perfection and rationality, while languages – and humans – are always imperfect and irrational.
This is the paradox of computers and languages.
If machines become too sophisticated and logical, they’ll never be able to correctly interpret human speech. If they don’t, they’ll never be able to fully interpret all the elements that come into play when two humans communicate.
Therefore, we should be very wary of a device that is incapable of interpreting the world around us. If people from different cultures can offend each other without realizing it, how can we expect a machine to do better?
Will this device be able to detect sarcasm? In Spanish-speaking countries, will it know when to use “tú” or “usted” (the informal and formal personal pronouns for “you”)? Will it be able to sort through the many different forms of address used in Japanese? How will it interpret jokes, puns and other figures of speech?
Unless engineers actually find a way to breathe a soul into a computer – pardon my figurative speech – rest assured that, when it comes to conveying and interpreting meaning using a natural language, a machine will never fully take our place.
David Arbesú does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
People born in autumn or winter are more likely to suffer from allergies than people born in spring or summer. Nobody is certain why this is, but there are several theories. These include seasonal variations in sunlight (which could affect vitamin D levels), levels of allergens such as pollen and house dust mite (which vary by season), the timing of the baby’s first chest infection (colds tend to be more common in winter), and maternal diet (price and availability of fruit and vegetables vary by season).
But no matter which of these exposures causes changes to the risk of developing an allergy, until now nobody knew how these early environmental influences were so long lasting.
Our study tested whether epigenetic marks on a person’s DNA could be a mechanism behind these birth season effects. Of course, your genome doesn’t change depending on which season you’re born in, but there are epigenetic marks attached to your DNA that can influence gene expression – the process where specific genes are activated to produce a certain protein. This may result in different responses to immune triggers and hence different susceptibility to diseases.
Unlike DNA, which is inherited from your parents, epigenetic marks can change in response to the environment and allow gene expression to respond to environmental exposures. And they can also be very long-lasting.
Epigenetic imprint
We scanned DNA methylation (one type of epigenetic mark) profiles of 367 people from the Isle of Wight and found, for the first time, that the season in which a person is born leaves an epigenetic print on the genome that is still visible at the age of 18. This discovery means that these marks on the genome could be how season of birth is able to influence the risk of having allergies later in life.
We went on to test whether these DNA methylation differences that varied by season of birth were also associated with allergic disease. We found that two of them appeared to be influencing the risk of allergy in the participants. As well as allergies, other studies have shown that season of birth is associated with a number of things such as height, lifespan, reproductive performance, and the risks of diseases including heart conditions and schizophrenia. It is possible that the birth season-associated DNA methylation that we discovered might also influence these other outcomes but this will need further investigation.
The marks that we found in the DNA samples collected from the 18-year-olds were mostly similar to the epigenetic marks found in a group of Dutch eight-year-olds that we used to validate our findings. But when we looked at another cohort – a group of newborn babies – the marks were not there. This suggests that these DNA methylation changes occur after birth, not during pregnancy.
We are not advising women to change the timing of their pregnancy, but if we understood exactly what it was about birth season that causes these effects, this could potentially be changed to reduce the risk of allergy in children. For example, if the birth season effect on allergies was found to be driven by sunlight levels experienced by the mother during pregnancy or breastfeeding, then the increased risk of allergies among babies born in autumn and winter might be lessened by giving the expectant or breastfeeding mother vitamin D supplements. You wouldn’t need to time births with the seasons to get the benefits.
Our study reports the first discovery of a mechanism through which birth season could influence disease risk, though we still don’t know exactly which seasonal stimuli cause these effects. Future studies are needed to pinpoint these, as well as to investigate the relationship between DNA methylation and allergic disease, and what other environmental exposures have an effect.
With the considerable burden allergic disease places not only on individual sufferers but also on society, any step towards reducing allergy is a step in the right direction.
Gabrielle A Lockett receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.
John W Holloway receives funding from the Medical Research Council (UK), National Institutes of Health and the European Union Horizon 2020 program.
We all love a life hack that makes our day a little cheaper and easier. And the neat tricks that iron out the niggles of life can come from some interesting places. There’s some cool chemistry loitering in your cupboards that can also be put to good daily use. Here’s how – in words and video.
1) Clean your silver
There are plenty of products out there for polishing up the silverware. But there’s actually no need to buy any of them – all you need is some aluminium foil and a little bicarbonate of soda (sodium hydrogen carbonate).
Simply add a tablespoon of bicarb and a few strips of foil to a cup of hot water. Then drop in your tarnished silver and leave it for a few minutes. Remove, rinse and hey presto … sparkling silver.
So how does it work? Well, the black tarnish is silver sulfide. It slowly accumulates as the silver reacts with sulfur in the atmosphere and food (don’t use silver spoons to eat eggs! The sulfur in them brings up the tarnish quick sharp).
Polishing your silver removes the tarnish to reveal the silver underneath, but that slowly wears away at the surface detail. It’s much better, then, to use the foil trick. The aluminium reacts with the silver sulfide to create aluminium sulfide, turning the tarnish back to silver. So unlike polishing, you don’t lose any of the precious metal.
So what’s the bicarb for? The foil is covered with a thin layer of aluminium hydroxide, which stops the aluminium metal reacting with the silver. The bicarb removes this layer and allows the foil to do its stuff.
You might also notice a faint rotten egg smell. That’s due to the aluminium sulfide going on to react with the water to produce stinky hydrogen sulfide gas.
Want to know if all those old batteries in your kitchen drawer are fresh or flat? Simple, just drop them – the old batteries will bounce. Alkaline batteries contain two chambers, one houses manganese dioxide, the other a mixture of zinc and potassium hydroxide in the form of a gel. As the battery discharges, the gel slowly turns to a ceramic. And as every chef knows, ceramics bounce and jelly doesn’t.
3) The great vinegar descaler
No need to fork out for anything fancy to descale kettles. Plain old vinegar does the trick just as nicely. Simply fill your kettle with one part vinegar to two parts water. Boil it, let it cool, then rinse.
Limescale is largely calcium carbonate. Acetic acid (vinegar) reacts with the scale to produce water, carbon dioxide, calcium acetate (which is soluble so it can be rinsed away) and a clean kettle. Now, who’s for tea?
4) Chilli bird feed
Don’t worry, it’s not cruel. In fact, if you want to attract birds to your garden with some tempting feed but aren’t so keen on rodents getting a free lunch, it’s just the thing. You could, of course, buy an elaborately engineered, squirrel-proof bird feeder – but it’s far cheaper and easier to go down the chemistry route and spike the bird food with chilli powder.
Chilli feels hot because it contains a chemical called capsaicin which triggers your heat receptors, fooling you into feeling like your mouth is burning. Your body is so convinced you’re on fire it starts the normal inflammatory response it uses to mitigate burns. This is what causes all the swelling, sweating and general discomfort associated with spicy food, symptoms that can also be used to your garden’s advantage.
In nature, the chilli pepper produces capsaicin to repel pesky mammals and insects. Birds, however, are entirely immune to the spice’s effects. In fact, the chilli plant needs birds to eat the fruit and spread its seeds far and wide.
The upshot is that you can load up bird feed with as much chilli powder as you like and your avian visitors won’t feel a thing. Meanwhile, any roaming rodents won’t come back for a second bite.
Mark Lorch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
In one of the better ways of marking Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, MAC Cosmetics is coming out with a whole line of makeup inspired by the show. Yes please, give me all of it. I’m going to wear it all on my face at once and scare small children and large dogs.
by Ria Misra on Gizmodo, shared by Cheryl Eddy to io9
Earlier this week something happened to make Japan’s brand new black hole satellite suddenly, mysteriously lose all contact with Earth. Now, we have video of it spinning wildly in space—and JAXA has also received a few odd, new messages.
The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in the mountain town of Corbin, Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of paint was gradually obscuring the sign that had been painted there previously. Stewart paused when he heard an automobile approaching at high speed–or what counted for high speed in 1931.
It was coming from the north–from the swath of backcountry known among locals as “Hell’s Half-Acre.” The area was so named for its primary exports: bootleg booze, bullets, and bodies. The neighborhood was also commonly referred to as “the asshole of creation.”
Stewart probably squinted through the dust at the approaching car, and he probably wiped sweat from his brow with the back of a paint-flecked wrist. He probably knew that the driver would be armed, angry, and about to skid to a stop nearby. Stewart set down his paint brush and picked up his pistol. The car skidded to a stop nearby. But it was not an armed man that emerged–it was three armed men. “Well, you son of a bitch!” the driver shouted at the painter, “I see you done it again.” The driver of the car had been using this particular railroad wall to advertise his service station in town, and this was not the first time that the painter–the manager of a competing station–had installed an ad blocker.
Stewart leapt from his ladder, firing his pistol wildly as he dove for cover behind the railroad wall. One of the driver’s two companions collapsed to the ground. The driver picked up his fallen comrade’s pistol and returned fire. Amid a hail of bullets from his pair of adversaries, the painter finally shouted, “Don’t shoot, Sanders! You’ve killed me!” The dusty roadside shootout fell silent, and indeed the former painter was bleeding from his shoulder and hip. But he would live, unlike the Shell Oil executive lying nearby with a bullet wound to the chest.
This encounter might have been as commonplace as any other gunfight around Hell’s Half-Acre were it not for the identity of the driver. The “Sanders” who put two bullets in Matt Stewart was none other than Harland Sanders, the man who would go on to become the world-famous Colonel Sanders. He was dark-haired and clean-shaven at the time, but his future likeness would one day appear on Kentucky Fried Chicken billboards, buildings, and buckets worldwide. In contrast to most other famous food icons, Colonel Sanders was once a living, breathing person, and his life story is considerably more tumultuous than the white-washed corporate biography suggests.
For all that individual stills of the titular children have been creepy, this first trailer for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has a sense of wonder that is charming as all get out. The pairing of this story and Tim Burton’s visuals is fabulous.
by Jennifer Ouellette on Gizmodo, shared by Cheryl Eddy to io9
Most NYC subway riders are pretty blasé when panhandlers hit them up for cash between stations. When a panhandler announced he was collecting funds to build a time machine, riders chuckled at the odd request—until another man boarded the train and announced he was the inventor’s future self. He implored them not to give any money because time travel will ruin everything.
Actually, they’re not just making one sequel, but two. The late-night incarnation of Cartoon Network announced that it was helping create two more seasons—totaling 12 episode—of Gainax’s cult classic FLCL to air in late 2017 or early 2018.
by Peter Squires, Professor of Criminology & Public Policy, University of Brighton
Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling, Scotland on March 13 1996, armed with four legally-owned handguns and over 700 rounds of ammunition. In three to four terrible minutes, he fired 105 shots killing 16 children and their teacher, and wounding 15 more children. His last shot killed himself.
In the 20 years since Dunblane, a great deal has been learned about preventing gun violence. Only the United States, where mass shootings now number in the hundreds, seems reluctant to embrace those lessons, prompting president Barack Obama to wonder why the US could not do more on gun control.
The politics of handguns
After the Dunblane massacre, handgun control became highly political. Handgun ownership was increasing in the 1990s and sports shooting, the only legitimate reason for owning a handgun, was a fast growing sport. Yet even members of the elite country-sports lobby were troubled by newcomers, keen on “combat style” shooting, entering the sport.
These tensions opened up after Dunblane. The government commissioned Lord Cullen run an inquiry into the incident. He recommended cautious compromises (storing firearms in secure armouries or police stations). These were initially rejected as “unworkable” by shooters, but they were ultimately overwhelmed by the strength of public feeling.
Arguing that Britain’s developing gun culture was responsible for the tragedy of Dunblane, the Snowdrop campaign presented a 750,000 signature petition to the UK parliament.
The government of the time, under the premiership of John Major, was split, reluctant to confront pro-gun Tory backbenchers, although Tony Blair’s New Labour was waiting in the wings, ready to seize the issue. The then home secretary Michael Howard initially wanted to accept Cullen’s compromise. But the Scottish secretary, Michael Forsythe, MP for Dunblane’s neighbouring constituency of Stirling, with one of the smallest parliamentary majorities, had made commitments to bereaved family members. Eventually the prime minister supported Forsythe and backed the handgun control proposals.
A steep learning curve
The Conservative government legislated to ban higher calibre handguns in 1997. After the New Labour government swept to power that May, it added .22 calibre handguns to the prohibited list.
By March 1999, the National Audit Office reported to parliament that 165,353 licensed handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition, had been surrendered, involving an estimated compensation cost of £95m.
A Home Office analysis cited by Cullen had found that, between 1992-94, 14% of firearm homicides had been committed with legally held weapons. Even allowing for some slippage of weapons from legal to illegal ownership and stolen firearms, nobody expected that the surrender of legal handguns would hugely impact the rates of gun enabled crime. But few expected the 105% increase in recorded handgun crime which occurred between 1998 and 2003.
In Scotland, handgun offences fell by almost 80% in the five years after Dunblane.
As any criminologists would stress, passing a law does not in itself prevent crime. Rather more was happening, for the 1990s saw the development of a wholly new gun market in the UK comprising non-firing “realistic imitation” firearms (hitherto largely unknown in the UK), BB guns, and high-powered air weapons.
There was a ready demand for many of these “junk guns” in Britain’s emerging gang cultures, where firearm carrying was culturally endorsed. Researchers found that a large proportion of “armed robberies” were carried out by offenders with imitation or non-functioning firearms. The rise in handgun crime had nothing to do with the handgun ban and everything to do with the changing patterns of supply and demand in the illegal firearms market.
In some respects, displacement of firearm demand into the multi-layered “junk firearm” market could also be seen as a sign of success – offenders were finding factory quality weapons harder to come by.
In turn, both the police and Home Office began to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the composition of Britain’s illegal firearm supply. As the graph above shows, from around 2003 the gun crime graph picks out the contribution of different firearm types. The pie chart below shows the full variety of firearms making up the criminal armoury – guns recovered by the police in England and Wales in 2014. A large number of firearms remain unknown or unidentified.
Supply routes continue
In the face of some of the world’s toughest gun control laws, criminal ingenuity has worked to create new supply routes into Britain to meet criminal demand, even as local intelligence-led policing has sought to suppress the demand for firearms in “gang affected” communities. The National Ballistic Intelligence Service has contributed enormously to our understanding of the supply, circulation and misuse of criminal firearms.
New types of gun supply have arisen offering converted or “reactivated” firearms, recycled antique weapons or ammunition. Meanwhile, smugglers, the internet and the UK fast-parcel service have all played a part in arming Britain’s criminals.
The authorities in the UK are now considering how to prepare for new threats, such as the Paris style “mass casualty” attacks. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has recently published a hard-hitting report recommending further important changes to British firearms licensing, for instance by requiring better information sharing between police and community mental health teams and a more rigorous vetting of firearm license applicants.
Dunblane represented an almost unprecedented challenge to British understandings of the public safety issues presented by firearms. Effective research, diligent lobbying by the UK Gun Control Network, new legislation and new policing practices have made substantial progress on the problems. But the answers did not come all at once and, as the uptick in gun crime figures for 2015 suggests, there are no grounds for complacency.
Peter Squires has receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council for research on preventing gun crime. Since around 2000 he has been a member of the UK Gun Control Network.
Penelope is a young girl in a small town, but everybody calls her “Lizzie Dripping,” because she’s always making up stories. (I guess “Lizzie Dripping” was British slang for a girl who tells lies.) And then one day, Penelope encounters a witch that only she can see.
by George Dvorsky on Gizmodo, shared by George Dvorsky to io9
It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google’s AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer—yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event.
‘for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions…’
trumpery ˈtrʌmp(ə)ri
noun (pl. trumperies)
practices or beliefs that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth. he exposed their ideals as trumpery. theatrical trumpery. [ as modifier ] : that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves.
adjective
showy but worthless: trumpery jewellery.
delusive or shallow: that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves.
On no! Another blog about that Trump man. Surely saturation point was reached long ago?
Bear with me, caller. I am reproducing here, shortened but otherwise unaltered, a diary entry that became a chapter in the book I wrote about my travels around the United States.
From the autumn of 2008 to the late spring of 2009, accompanied by a TV crew I made my way around America in a black London taxicab, visiting every single one of the 50 states.
We started at the top right with Maine, and the eighth on our list, in December 2008, was New Jersey.
Now read on …
My taxi and I are on our way to a place that has hammered its own nails into the coffin of Jersey’s reputation for refinement. Atlantic City.
Best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its boardwalk, all seven miles of it, Atlantic City on the south Jersey shore was one of the most prosperous and successful resort towns in America. After the Second World War it freefell into what seemed irreversible decline, until, as a last ditch effort in 1976, the citizens voted to allow gambling. Two years later the first casino in the eastern United States opened and ever since Atlantic City has been second only to Las Vegas as a plughole into which high and low rollers from all over the world are irresistibly drained.
And so I find myself driving into hell.
The weather does not help, heavy bruised skies brood over grey Atlantic rollers and on the beach the tide leaves a line of scummy frothing mousse and soggy litter. The signs advertising ‘Fun’ and ‘Family Rides’ on the vile seaside piers tinkle and clang in the sharp wind, a feeble ferris wheel squeaks and groans. Along the deserted boardwalk the wind tosses and rolls Styrofoam coffee cups and flappy burger containers – New Jersey’s urban, eastern reinterpretation of the mythic tumbleweed and sage brush of the West. Above tower the hotels, the ‘resort casinos’, blank facades in whose appearance and architectural qualities the developers have taken precisely double-zero interest.
Would it not have been better to let the home of Monopoly, this seedy resort town and remnant of another way of holidaying, simply fall into the sea? Instead we are given an obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming. But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … The Trump Taj Mahal.
For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions all along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built. I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are, have a kind of joy and wit to them … oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go.
The automatic doors of the black smoked glass entrance hiss open and I am inside. I see at once that the exterior, boardwalk side of Atlantic City is deliberately kept as unappealing as possible, just to make sure people stay inside. All you need is here: mini-streets complete with Starbucks for people who hate coffee and KFC for people who can’t abide food; there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul.
Everything sold here is in the ‘executive’ style, like bad 80s Pierre Cardin: slimy thin belts of glossy leather, notepads, cufflinks, unspeakable objects made of brass and mahogany. There is nothing here that I would not be ashamed to be seen owning. Not a thing. Oh, must we stay here one minute longer?
Into the casino I go …
Above my head glitter the chandeliers that for some reason Trump is so proud of.
‘$14 million worth of German crystal chandeliers, including 245,000 piece chandeliers in the casino alone, each valued at a cost of $250,000, and taking over 20 hours to hang,’ trumpets the publicity.
‘An entire two-year output of Northern Italy’s Carrera marble quarries – the marble of choice for all of Michelangelo’s art – adorn the hotel’s lobby, guest rooms, casino, hallways and public areas.’
Yes, it may well have been the marble of choice for Michelangelo’s art. English was the language of choice for Shakespeare’s, but that doesn’t lift this sentence, for example, out of the ordinary. And believe me the only similarity between Michelangelo and the Trump Taj Mahal that I can spot is that they’ve both got an M in their names.
‘$4 million in uniforms and costumes outfit over 6,000 employees.’
‘4½ times more steel than the Eiffel Tower.’
‘If laid end to end, the building support pilings would stretch the 62 miles from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.’
‘The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort can generate enough air conditioning to cool 4,000 homes.’
You see, all that this mad boasting says to me is ‘Our Casino Makes A Shed Load Of Money’. They can afford to lavish a quarter of a million bucks on each chandelier, can they? And where does this money come from, we wonder? Profits from their ‘city within a city’ Starbucks concession? Sales of patent leather belts and onyx desk sets? No, from the remorseless mathematical fact that gambling is profitable. The house wins. The punter loses. It is a certainty.
This abattoir may be made of marble, but it is still a place for stunning, plucking, skinning and gutting sad chickens.
It is with real pleasure that I leave Atlantic City behind me, certain that I shall never return. Donald Trump. I hope never to hear the name again.
Now, I am not claiming that there is any remarkable degree of prophecy or insight to be found in that furiously intemperate outpouring. Anyone could have seen eight years ago (ten years ago, twenty years ago) that Trump was poison. Not because of his disgusting Mexican walls, but because of his disgusting marbled walls. Not because of his unacceptably vulgar and contemptuous speeches, but because of his unacceptably vulgar and contemptuous buildings. In case you think that is glib and silly, let me expand a little.
Oscar Wilde visited America in 1882, giving talks on the renaissance goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and on what he called ‘The House Beautiful’ – so far as I can tell, the first ever lectures given anywhere on the subject of interior decoration.
The story goes that he was asked in Chicago whether he had an opinion as to why America was such a violent country. It is worth recalling just how strange, puzzling and upsetting to Americans their homeland’s almost apocalyptic explosion into violence seemed. Here was a country founded little more than a hundred years earlier in the spirit of the most optimistic and harmonious enlightenment values of justice, equality and freedom. Yet now it was recovering from the psychic shock of having recently erupted in the most bloody civil war in human history. The West was opening up in a trail of blood too: the blood of pioneers and the blood of plains Indians. Even species were being slaughtered wholesale, the buffalo, the bear and the passenger pigeon. In Chicago and New York the first gangs were beginning to exert their deadly grip. Everything, in short, was going wrong with America, that great and noble experiment. So …
‘You’re an intellectual kind of a fellow, Mr Wilde, do you have an opinion?’
‘As to why you are so violent? Oh yes, that is readily susceptible of an explanation,’ said Wilde. ‘You are violent because your wallpaper is so ugly.’
The first reaction to such a remark might be to laugh. Or to roll the eyes. So facetious, so precious, so appallingly trivial in the face of such a question. So Oscar. That first reaction would be wholly wrong.
Wilde was brought up under the powerful influence of two great aestheticians (I say that rather than aesthetes, there is a difference) – Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Under them Wilde learned a very important truth. An aesthetic wrong is a moral wrong. Aesthetics and morals are inextricably interwoven. If a thing is ugly it is wicked. If it is beautiful it is good. The qualities flowed both ways of course. If a thing was good it was, or became, beautiful. If it was wicked, it was ugly. Have we not all found that a lovely, captivating face belonging to an unkind, proud or unpleasant person very soon becomes an ugly face? Next time, we will be on the alert when we see that kind of apparent loveliness again. In other words, our sense of beauty (like our sense of smell) has evolved to warn us. Evil smells are bad for us. Ugliness is bad for us. Or, if you prefer, what is bad for us we have learned to find ugly.
Consider this too. We look out at the natural, wherever we are in the world, and it is always beautiful. Whether it be the deserts or the arctic wastes, the fells, the plains, the tundra, the bush, the cataracts, the mountains, the veld, the savannah, the jungle or the coastlines … nature is unconditionally and extraordinarily beautiful.
But if we look out of a window in a city (especially one at the height of the industrial nineteenth century) so much of what we see, made by humankind, is quite dreadfully and unremittingly ugly. Ugly to the point of contemptuous, terrible and wicked. Ornaments and utensils stamped out in cheap base metals, dangerous to the touch and horrid to the eye: crockery, cutlery, buildings, clothes and – yes, the wallpaper we wake up to and fall asleep dreaming to – all dreary, ill-considered and insulting to the spirit.
A child would soon see that they had been born into a species that can only uglify and despoil. What visible or viable perfection could there be to aim for? Can disconnection, contempt for life and ready violence really be such a surprising outcome?
You may think I am overstating the aims and claims of aestheticism. I am not. Ruskin lived all his life trying to prove the power of architecture, art and design to uplift spirits, heal broken societies and reconnect humankind to nature and our own selves; and conversely to warn how bad design and flawed, careless and callous architecture can corrode the soul of communities and peoples. I am old enough to remember how as a nation Britain underwent a rediscovery of these thoughts when we finally awoke and rubbed our eyes in disbelief at what had been done with the thoughtless development of ugly, ugly, socially sterile and contemptuous tower-block council flats and brutalist concrete city centres in the 1960s.
Pater’s, Ruskin’s and Wilde’s ideas are absolutely as alive as ever they were. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate Wilde because he was funny. His being funny was an index of his high seriousness, especially in matters of design, beauty, happiness, moral tone and their eternal interconnectedness.
Which brings us back to Trump. It is not his policies that stand as the clearest guide to his wickedness, contempt, stupidity, meanness and lack of moral character, it is his atrocious and life-throttling taste. Surely this should have been seen this before he even began to think of running for president?
But in fact he has already won. Trump’s idea of what success is, what style is, what America means has largely been ‘voted for’ and has become an aspirational norm for hotels, malls, resorts and homes up and down the land, uglifying America with an especially repugnant kind of short-lasting gloss and shallow gleam.
Trump is the faux-mahogany and fake-brass lamp and ceiling fan available in Target and Walmart that swirls and beats the air above us all, not shining light, just stirring the air noisily and to no purpose, while claiming to be somehow an heirloom and a collectible.
Do please believe that to decry such offences against taste is emphatically not a kind of snobbery. Doubtless Trump and his supporters would see any attack on him on aesthetic grounds as sneering metropolitan elitism because they would choose not to understand the moral dimension at play here. It must be understood that bad taste on the monstrous scale that Trump disseminates and embodies is the most brutal crime against the human spirit – a snobbery that looks down with contempt.
If you don’t know Peter York’s book Dictators’ Homes you really should try to get hold of it. It demonstrates quite wonderfully and hilariously how a gross, shatteringly greedy appetite for power and gross, shatteringly vulgar taste go hand in hand. The ‘ruthless, ill-educated, ignorant and trashily vainglorious’ who want to rule us at any price can be read through their bedrooms, dining-rooms and studies.
And, leafing through the book, whose execrable, vomitous taste do you think is shown most exactly to match that of Trump and his towers and foul resort hotels? Why Saddam Hussein’s of course. Indistinguishable.
Missouri is poised to become the latest state to allow guns into college classrooms.
The Republican-led state senate is currently finalizing deliberations on a bill that, if passed, would remove restrictions on carrying concealed weapons on college campuses statewide.
The specter of loaded firearms in college classrooms raises particular concerns in no small part because the dynamics of learning often depend on professors challenging students to step beyond their comfort zones.
But beneath these concerns lies a broader question: do guns change the ways that people engage with each other?
Scholars who research guns and gun violence, myself included, often track the impact of guns through homicide and injury rates. But the impact of guns on everyday interactions, and instances when guns are neither drawn nor discharged, remains a largely unstudied topic.
So I decided to talk to people about it. I’m a native Missourian, and I went back home for research as part of a book project about guns in everyday life. Last month I interviewed 50 people, including everyday citizens, religious and political leaders and gun-violence prevention advocates in Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis about the impact new guns laws are having on social interactions in the state.
Again and again, people with whom I spoke raised concerns, not just about the lethal potential of firearms, but about the ways that allowing guns into previously gun-free communal spaces might impact a host of commonplace civic encounters as well.
Missouri used to have some of the strictest gun laws in the country
Missouri used to have among the strictest gun laws in the nation, including a requirement that handgun buyers undergo background checks in person at sheriffs’ offices before obtaining gun permits.
But over the past 10 years, an increasingly conservative legislature and citizenry relaxed limitations governing practically every aspect of buying, owning and carrying guns. The legislature relaxed prohibitions on the concealed and open carry of firearms in public spaces, lowered the legal age to carry a concealed gun from 21 to 19 and repealed many of the requirements for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits.
And in 2014 voters approved Amendment 5 – which effectively negated the rights of cities or towns to pass or enforce practically any form of gun control.
A natural experiment
What followed was a state of affairs that The New York Times has described as a “natural experiment” testing whether more guns led to more safety and less crime.
Instead, according to research, the opposite occurred, in as much as gun deaths soared when it became easier for people to buy and carry firearms.
A team of researchers led by Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, analyzed extensive crime data from Missouri and found that the state’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase handgun law “was associated with a 25 percent increase in firearm homicides rates.” Between 2008 and 2014 the Missouri gun homicide rate rose to 47 percent higher than the national average.
Missouri’s startling rates of gun death made national news. At the same time, many people with whom I spoke – and particularly people who did not support recent legislative developments – suggested that loosening gun laws also forced nonarmed citizens to adapt in ways that ranged from acceptance to anxiety to avoidance.
For instance, a number of African Americans I interviewed worried that guns heightened racial tensions.
I met a man named John Steen who now thinks twice about shopping at Sam’s Club. Steen, a Vietnam veteran who works in Kansas City, used to stop by the wholesale megastore on his way home from his job as a home health-care provider. But that was before he saw armed white men strolling through the aisles exerting what gun proponents describe as their “unalienable” rights to carry firearms into public spaces including retail stores.
For Steen and other African Americans in Kansas City, the result was often intimidation. “I see white guys and their sons walking around Sam’s Club, Walmart, and other places where we shop, strolling with guns on their hips like it’s the wild west,” he told me. “They’re trying to be all macho, like they have power because of their guns, walking down the aisles. It just makes me…stay away.”
Subverting the traditional narrative of racial anxiety, African Americans often cited the charged implications of white citizens brandishing guns in mixed race settings – a narrative that played out writ large in downtown St. Louis after the passage of Amendment 5 and just months before protests began in nearby Ferguson when white Missouri open-carry advocates paraded through the streets waving handguns, long guns and assault rifles.
For Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould, events such as these illustrate a double standard through which society codes white gun owners as “protectors” and black gun owners as “threats.”
As Pastor of Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church in Jefferson City, Gould led an intense debate among her congregants after the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015 that yielded a decision to ban guns in their house of worship. For Gould, “even though I want us to be protected, I can’t escape the fact that these are the same guns that are oppressing communities of color in our state.”
Accidental shootings are up
The complexities of parenting in a milieu surrounded by firearms emerged as another theme.
In Missouri there are now virtually no remaining laws governing gun safety or storage. And the state now leads the nation in accidental shootings by toddlers – instances where young children find unlocked guns and accidentally discharge them.
In response, the Missouri chapter of Moms Demand Action signed onto a BeSmartcampaign promoting safety steps including training parents to secure guns in their homes and ask about proper firearm storage before dropping children off at a friend’s house.
As Becky Morgan, Missouri Chapter Lead for Moms puts it when we spoke, “this is a new step to parents are taking to look out for our children’s safety. We already ask about food allergies, pet allergies and pools. Now we ask if firearms are in the home, are they stored properly out of children’s reach?”
“I’ve seen people with guns in their belts at the supermarket,” a Columbia parent named Megan White added. “It makes me reconsider bringing my kid on shopping trips.”
Caution surrounds a host of everyday interactions as well. Consultant Jeff Fromm thinks about armed motorists when he drives to and from work in downtown Kansas City. “I try not to drive too close to other cars on the highway, or pass in front of anyone at a stoplight. Road rage takes on a whole new meaning when you don’t know who’s going to be armed.”
Changing the fabric of social interactions?
Thoughts about gun proliferation even impact exchanges in the halls of power that passed gun legislation on the first place.
Democratic Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman worries that many legislators and their staff carry concealed weapons during heated debates on the House floor.
“With new laws, capital security can no longer ask lawmakers to check their firearms at the door,” she explained. “And I often find it quite unnerving that the people I’m working with or arguing against might well be carrying secret guns during our legislative sessions.”
To be sure, notions of an armed society are precisely what many pro-gun-rights Missourians and legislators envision and support.
John L., an advertising consultant who asked that his last name not be used, told me that he appreciates being able to carry a concealed firearm when he visits printing factories and other work sites. “I’ve been robbed before,” he explained. “The thought that I can carry a gun just makes me feel safer.”
Linda Hopkins, owner of Smokin’ Guns BBQ in North Kansas City, told me that she welcomes customers who carry concealed weapons and feels far more angered by “food prices and intrusive government regulations.”
For these and other reasons, Guns and Ammo magazine recently cited Missouri as “ahead of the curve when it comes to gun rights” and a “top state for gun owners” thanks in large part to legislation allowing concealed carry.
But a number of Missourians with whom I spoke felt otherwise. Their concerns seemed to provide broader context for questions of civic engagement, power relations, and conflict resolution that lie at the core of debates about allowing guns into college classrooms. And more broadly, the experiences of Missourians suggest a need for more research into ways that allowing guns into the public sphere might impact otherwise quotidian social interactions.
Newman, the state representative, particularly worries about the effect that guns will have on the “psyches of our children” who go to college to learn and grow in a safe environment, and instead may soon encounter classrooms where guns and armed confrontations remain “constant possibilities.” For Newman, the issue hit home when her daughter enrolled in grad school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. “As a parent this is my worst nightmare.”
Meanwhile Steen, the home health provider, has seen enough of guns in his lifetime. “I was in Vietnam with the U.S. military, I saw what it means to draw a gun and shoot another person, it’s devastating. Trust me…most of these people have no idea.”
This article was updated to correct the institution that Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman’s daughter attends.
To the horror of the mainstream Republican Party, Donald Trump is the frontrunner for its nomination in the 2016 presidential contest. To listen to the panicked, baffled tone of the coverage, you might think that nothing like this had ever happened before. But that’s not quite the case.
Some more historically minded observers have noticed that Trump’s supposedly unprecedented march to the nomination bears more than a passing resemblance to the career of Andrew Jackson, the US’s seventh president (from 1829-37) and the controversial face of the $20 bill.
They’re on to something. Here are five reasons why:
#1: Look at the competition
Before he won the White House in 1829, Jackson had already run for president in 1824, at a time when US parties were changing. Until then, the system had consisted of two parties: the Federalists, mainly northeastern merchants and creditors who solidly supported the federal administration, and Democratic-Republicans, land-owning and farming southerners who claimed commitment to the common man.
In 1824, five Democratic-Republicans competed for the presidency against no Federalist candidate. Jackson received the most popular and electoral votes, but a majority of neither. Following Amendment XII, the House of Representatives decided the outcome, and John Quincy Adams became president.
Adams resembles Trump’s leading competitor, Hillary Clinton. The son of a former president, while she is a former first lady, Adams and Clinton are also both Ivy League-educated, both have served as US senator and secretary of state, and both represent the established political system of their time.
#2: Instinct over ideology
Jackson was born in the Carolinas. He was a self-taught lawyer who had become a national hero in the War of 1812, and was the first person from Tennessee elected to the House of Representatives. These are not qualities Donald Trump shares. But he does share one important attribute with Jackson: he represents an idea, rather than an ideology.
The House of Representatives' choice of Adams in 1824, which Jackson’s supporters dubbed the “corrupt bargain”, came to represent the elite’s subversion of the will of the people. Jackson rose to the presidency in 1828 by deriding those same elites, just as Trump rails against Washington today.
Historian Walter R Mead tells us that Jackson represented a “set of beliefs and emotions”. At the heart of his worldview was the notion that the federal government held ultimate power and authority, and should do everything possible to protect and promote community well-being. Trump, although running for the Republican nomination, also advocates a strong central government, emphasising its role in physical and economic security – and casting himself as the protector of the ordinary man.
Additionally, Jacksonians believed the US should not seek out wars, but if called into a war, must achieve “unconditional surrender and total victory”. When Trump states that he would “bomb the shit out of ISIS”, he plays upon the same insecurity, nationalism and patriotism Andrew Jackson tapped into.
#3: Appeal to the common man
Trump and Jackson both appeal to the instincts of voters outside the political establishment. Despite being rich and powerful himself, Andrew Jackson railed against the rich and powerful, just as Trump criticises Wall Street bankers despite being a member of the Forbes 400. As with Jackson, the contradiction does not affect his appeal.
They are reminiscent of Jackson’s voting base: inland voters who appreciated his “tell it like it is” personality and disdain for social niceties. Jackson was quoted as saying that he wished he had shot his chief political rival and hanged his vice president, and still retained overwhelming popular support.
#4: Offence to the establishment
Comments such as these offend the political establishment. Jackson alarmed Thomas Jefferson, who called him unfit, disrespectful, filled with rage, and dangerous. Subsequently, Jackson condemned political leaders as “demagogues”, and filled his cabinet with business-people who had no public service experience.
Donald Trump has a similar relationship with current Republican leadership – they find him dangerous, and “unelectable”. Polls report the general opinion that Trump would be an embarrassment as president – yet he still has a steadfast and growing pool of supporters.
Trump’s defence is understandable, because his is a special kind of racism. He doesn’t exactly hate African-Americans, latinos, or other non-whites; like Jackson, he simply doesn’t respect their rights. Minorities can live their lives as long as they don’t threaten the security of the white majority.
There may be no president in history that represents this notion better than Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act and announced with “pleasure” the “benevolent policy of the government” to resettle “Indians” far from white settlements.
These tribes were not threats in themselves, but were seen as a threat to white prosperity and security. Jackson thus ordered a forced removal of tribes to regions west of the Mississippi River, during which an estimated 4000 Cherokee and 3500 Creeks died. These events are collectively known as the Trail of Tears.
Some regard Jackson to be the father of the Democratic Party, which emerged during the political turmoil of his presidency. His treatment in 1824 galvanised his supporters, and propelled him to election in 1828 and re-election in 1832. When his vice-president, Martin Van Buren, was elected to succeed him, it was clear the Democrats and their common man appeal had staying power.
Whether Donald Trump will usher in a new era of American political development remains to be seen. There has been talk of changing nominating rules or negotiating the convention if Trump wins the most primary votes, something he remains on track to achieve. Trump could be denied a nomination he would have won according to the rules under which he entered the race. If it comes to that, Republicans should recall the events of 1824-1828 and ask themselves what they have to look forward to in 2020.
Gina Yannitell Reinhardt receives funding from the British Academy, and has received funding from the US National Science Foundation.
by Nathan Hollier, Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University
Argentinian artist Raul Lemesoff drives his vehicle called "Arma de Instruccion Masiva" (weapon of mass instruction) through Buenos Aries. What is Australia doing to protect its publishing industry? Marcos Brindicci
How healthy is the bookselling and publishing industry in Australia? And what are the key reasons for this state of wellbeing (or illness)?
These questions have been pondered by many people over the past decade. But they’re worth asking again, given that Amazon, the “everything store” that began as a bookstore, will soon be warehousing stock here and fulfilling orders from Australia, via a partnership between its subsidiary Book Depository and Australian logistics company DAI Post.
We’re also in the midst of a new round in the highly emotional argument over whether Australia should keep its parallel import restrictions on books.
As debate continues over the impact of digital technology and e-books on the industry, genuinely disinterested voices are hard to find and conclusive data harder still to locate.
The decision is expected to disadvantage humanities scholars and their publishers.
It also illuminates our government’s general attitude to its role in the setting of cultural and intellectual policy frameworks - which should be of more than passing interest to publishers, booksellers and readers.
The Amazon factor
Amazon.com (as it was then known) entered the bookselling retail marketplace in the mid-1990s. Since then, Australian booksellers and publishers have been shielded to an extent from the competitive (and some would say anticompetitive) pressures it has imposed on the industry by one key factor: delivery of a book from the US took time and cost money.
Geographic isolation provided some comparative advantage to our book industry, even allowing for Amazon’s premium delivery rates and its sales being free from the GST. In 2011, however, Amazon bought the UK-based company Book Depository.
At the time, Book Depository was its biggest online bookstore competitor. Buying it meant Amazon could take advantage of what now seem arcane international postal union agreements between Australia and the UK, offering zero postage costs for Australian consumers.
Any comparative advantage for Australian booksellers will now go. Amazon setting up here is likely to mean a further drop in retail book prices, (which have been falling for the past five years), as it goes in search of a greater Australian market share.
In one sense, of course, that is good for consumers. And by providing new sales platforms and channels, the firm may also help some Australian retailers and publishers stay in business.
But others may find the new degree of competition pushes them to the wall. Over the last decade, many bookshops have gone under.
Parallel import restrictions prohibit retailers here from bringing in overseas versions of a title if an Australian publisher has released a version of it within 30 days of its initial publication and are able to supply the retailer with copies within 90 days of an order being placed.
In April 2015, the Harper Competition Policy Review recommended that the import restrictions be removed. If the federal government does so, what impact will this have?
Some retailers would prefer to have the option of importing a cheaper overseas edition of a book rather than risk losing sales to overseas firms selling books online.
Most publishers here, however – and not only home-grown ones but the Australian offices of multinational corporations – have stridently declared that the removal of the restrictions will seriously damage their business.
It positions the debate squarely as one between supporting Australian authors (and the import restrictions) or abandoning them (with the restrictions).
Perhaps the stridency of the general response by the publishers, authors, and to a lesser extent the retailers, is more a reflection of the difficult overall industry conditions than of the likely catastrophic effects of the restrictions' removal.
The Australian Productivity Commission, which has also examined the restrictions, has almost always tended to the view that the interests of the consumer should take precedence over those of the producer. It reasons that there are more consumers than producers.
Still, it’s interesting to note that while lower prices seem to trump all other concerns in the case of the book industry, when it comes to the Australian banking sector it is apparently essential for us to have a “strong”, or wildly profitable, handful of banks.
Are ebooks replacing print? Is the book itself (in whatever form) in the last throes of life? What do consumers really want? And should we let them have it?!
With the possible exception of this last question, which may be heretical within our parameters of public debate, all of these questions have been asked in depth in recent years.
Indeed in 2010, a Book Industry Strategy Group, was set up by the then Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr. Later, Greg Combet, in a slightly rejigged ministerial portfolio (Industry Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education), set up the Book Industry Collaborative Council from 2012–13.
But as there is no body with the capacity or authority to collate e-book sales (in the way that Nielsen BookScan does for print books in Australia) and most information we do have comes from industry participants, authoritative pronouncements on whether e-books are displacing print are not possible.
For most publishers, their profit margin is less on an e-book than it is on a print book – thanks chiefly to Jeff Bezos. In 2007, he wanted to sell e-books for his new Kindle at $9.99. He had the market power to enforce this price as a standard across the global market.
(E-book pricing in the higher education market, it should be noted, is completely different from the retail sector being referred to here.)
In general, e-books are only slightly cheaper to produce than print books. So, with Amazon tightening its percentage screws on publishers for the use of its Kindle channel, most publishers report that print sales remain much more important for them financially then e-book sales.
But what does this mean? That no-one wants to read books anymore? That no-one has time to read books? That book readers are dying off and young people don’t like books? That books can’t compete with other forms of entertainment and instruction? Or only that print books have had a temporary period of … negative growth?
The Australian retail sector as a whole experienced very flat growth across 2010–14, before picking up, as bookstores did, in 2015. Owners of physical bookstores have had to contend with burgeoning online sales.
Meanwhile, Australians are working harder and longer. And government policy decisions seem to be made with increasingly little reference to intellectual, let alone cultural, considerations.
Joel Becker, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, told me in February that there has been a “small but noticeable growth in the presence of bookshops, coming either from existing stores expanding or from new stores opening up”, in the five years since Borders and Angus & Robertson closed.
He notes that sales in the US independent book retail sector were “buoyant … up over eight percent in December 2015 on the previous December, which was also not bad.”
Devaluing the humanities has ripple effects
The federal government making it harder for humanities scholars to demonstrate their value financially within their universities can hardly be viewed as a major index of the health of Australian publishing and bookselling.
The clear message it sends, however, is that the government does not regard cultural matters – questions of historic, literary, philosophic, artistic or social value – as of public significance.
The ancient Greeks saw attending theatrical performances as an important part of their responsibilities as citizens: a way of trying to ensure that political decisions were the result of shared understandings and values.
For our leaders, however, it seems such fundamental questions must be removed from life and made wholly subject to economic considerations.
For the Productivity Commission, tellingly, consumers’ interests are defined almost solely in terms of price. That which cannot be easily measured is simply ignored.
There is no evident government interest in encouraging a public conversation about shared or differing values. This is bad for book publishers and sellers because books are a – if not the – major vehicle for such a conversation.
This lack of interest raises a bigger, rarely asked question: just what we want our bookselling and publishing industry to do or achieve for our society?
From the discussions I had with participants in the previous book strategy group and collaborative council, it was relatively clear what people in the industry generally wanted - an efficient, self-reliant (rather than government-reliant) sector, not disadvantaged by regulations that effectively provided assistance to overseas competitors.
In other words, they wanted a fair go and an industry policy framework reflecting that. (In this context, it is worth remembering that Amazon’s sources of profit include the Internet, developed primarily by the US government, tax avoidance, low wages and determined opposition to the unionisation of its workforce.)
But for Australians in general, is our bookselling and publishing industry any more worth preserving than, say, the car industry?
If what “we” want, most fundamentally, from publishers and booksellers, is the opportunity for Australians to write important books for a local readership that can help us build, ultimately, a better overall quality of life and a more robust democracy, perhaps the most important policy decisions pertaining to the industry are not those most immediately affecting it.
Reduced book prices from the arrival of Amazon, for instance, are unlikely to lead to a boom in reading, because there are other more important factors influencing whether people read or not and what and how they read, if they do.
It’s not a coincidence that some of the most enlightened nations in the world, with the highest literacy rates; the best outcomes on a range of social measures - from equality to social cohesion to education and health - and populations who work relatively shorter hours for relatively more money, also have the strongest book publishing and selling businesses.
It’s not a coincidence either, I would suggest, that these northern European nations have produced some of the most successful writers on the world stage in recent decades (Stieg Larrson, Henning Mankell, Karl Knausgaard, Jo Nesbø …)
The best societies create the preconditions for the best minds to shine; instead of the preconditions for the best minds to give up or take up banking.
Thanks to John Byron, Malcolm Neil and Sean Scalmer for reading and commenting on drafts of this article.
Dr Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing and Chair of the OL Society Ltd, publishers of Overland. He was a member of the former federal government’s Book Industry Collaborative Council and its Scholarly Publishing Expert Reference Group and founding President of the Small Press Network.
It could be that combining Tim Burton’s sensibility with weird children is just yielding the creepiest possible results, but the images we’re getting from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children are honestly terrifying.
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