keep a record of interesting things I have read

by Nick Davies is an expose of the crisis in British journalism at the moment. Davies is an experienced journalist who has worked for several of the major papers, and is very even-handed in his criticism of them.

His argument is that in the old days, journalists used to go out in the field, interview people, dig up evidence, and above all check their stories. Nowadays commercial pressures mean that there are fewer journalists per page of output required, and rolling news means that deadlines are tighter than ever. The result is “churnalism” where a huge amount of what is produced is the result of recycled PR and even government propaganda. Very few papers have the resources to do proper, old-fashioned investigative journalism any more. They rely more and more on press agencies, but even these have fewer people and are not there to set an agenda, only to report who said what.

He kicks off with an account of the millennium bug fiasco – how we were told the millennium bug was going to mean the end of civilisation, nuclear bombs going off etc.etc. and it simply didn’t happen, and explains how the dangers were wildly exaggerated by people with vested interests, and journalists simply didn’t know whether these claims were true and didn’t bother to find out.

The book contains many other anecdotes, for example on how the Observer (the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper) fell for the Washington / Downing Street line on weapons of mass destruction and ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq, despite having evidence to the contrary. There is also a scary chapter on the Daily Mail, which any right-thinking person loathes. Apparently it once sent a reporter to investigate the murder of a woman and her children in the north of England, only to recall him as he was halfway there because the paper had just found out that the victims were black.

This is a scary book, and it has opened my eyes and confirmed some of my prejudices. Experts get wheeled out to make comments and no indication is given of the fact that they are paid by industry interests. I was extremely pleased to discover that Susan Jebb, who is a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council and is always making anti low-carb diet comments, is funded by the flour industry. Hmmm. Reminds me of the time my doctor gave me a leaflet on how to lose weight which said sugar was fine. I immediately wondered if it could really be ok for me to live on wine gums, as it didn’t seem likely. Then I saw in small print on the back page of the leaflet that the British Sugar Council had helped pay for it. That was at least ten years ago and I haven’t trusted NHS nutritional advice since.

As for PR, only the other day I was listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme, which is its early morning news flagship programme, and heard a piece about a book on derelict London. It was essentially a five-minute plug for a book someone had written. This is not what I pay my licence fee for. But before reading Flat Earth News, I probably wouldn’t have realised that this was PR masquerading as news.

The question the book raises is who can you trust? And it sadly doesn’t have any prescriptions on that front. I think from now on I’ll take my news with a large pinch of salt, and rely on the London Review of Books which carries lengthy articles by well-informed people. I’m also considering subscribing to the New York Review of Books and resubscribing to Private Eye.

is Catherine O’Flynn’s first novel, and what a first novel!

The first section is about a young girl, Kate, who wants to set up her own detective agency. It’s beautifully observed and had me gripped with pleasure from the first page. I enjoyed the way the author played with my preconceptions – twice in the first few pages things are not quite as they seem.

When I discovered Kate has a stationery fetish it got even better. “Kate had not been prepared for the level of riches in the stationery cupboard. First, it was not a cupboard, it was a room. Secondly, it was evident that the full range of stationery she and her classmates had ever used were but tiny and very dull drops in the vast ocean of the cupboard. The room contained luxury items like multi-coloured Biros, metal pencil sharpeners, entire packets of felt-tips alongside serious, high-end items like concertina files and jumbo staplers. Kate didn’t hear a word Mrs Finnegan said because she was in a state of actual, physical shock.”

Later on, Kate gets given a swivel chair for her room and has to ration the amount of time she spends spinning on it. Shades of “When We Came to the End” there.

After this section, the book becomes sadder and darker and generally less jolly as themes of loss and death emerge. The later parts are set in the enormous, fictional Green Oaks shopping centre on the edge of Birmingham and involve a security guard and the deputy manager of a record store. They’re both sympathetic characters and gradually more about them is revealed and connections made. This is all set against a backdrop of the decline of manual industries in the 1980s and the subsequent rise of retail and Sunday shopping.

I’d never even thought about the existence of the “secret” passages for staff in a large shopping centre, but here they are central to the plot. O’Flynn worked in a record shop, so I assume some of this is based on her personal experience. This book reminded me of Ali Smith’s “Hotel World” which is also about the other side of a familiar institution, the hotel. That’s one of my favourite books _{albeit very weird} so this similarity is no bad thing.

I read this book over two days and was sorry when I finished it. O’Flynn is a very talented writer and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

by Suzanne Segerstrom is about optimism and presents the results of psychological research into the differences between optimists and pessimists. Segerstrom is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

She has an engaging writing style and there are a lot of self-deprecating jokes, which I enjoyed to start with but found increasingly irritating as the book went on, mainly because most of them are in footnotes which I find distracting.

I thought the first couple of chapters were the best. There is a whole chapter about the pursuit of goals which is likely to be of interest to many on 43T. Segerstrom argues that optimists and pessimists don’t differ much in the type of goal they set, but in how they approach those goals. Optimists are more likely to expect to achieve their goals, and are more committed to them. “Expecting success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who hold optimistic beliefs also believe in their goals, work harder towards their goals, and thereby set themsevles up for success.”

She uses a thermostat as an analogy. A thermostat has a goal (an ideal room temperature) and a state of being (an actual room temperature). “Stretching the analogy somewhat by endowing thermostats with motivation, the thermostat is motivated to take action to reduce any difference or discrepancy between the ideal and actual room temperatures: to heat the room if it is too cold or cool the room if it is too warm.” Similarly, people have states of being. “When current states of being and goal states differ, as they frequently do, discrepancies arise. When people notice discrepancies, they become motivated to reduce them and take action to get closer to their goals.” Optimists are more likely to persist at their goals and this is a large reason for why they are more likely than pessimists to achieve them. Pessimists give up more easily.

Much of the book is based on Segerstrom’s own studies of law school students, and she is generous in sharing the credit for these studies with her graduate students, which is something you don’t see much of!

In the chapter on relationships, she talks about how we compare how we are doing on our goals with other people. If other people are doing better than us, optimists are more likely to find them inspiring, whereas pessimists are more likely to find them threatening. “Social relationships can have both positive and negative consequences. We can have negative, conflict-ridden interactions with others, we can feel inferior to them, and their help can even make us feel inadequate to life’s tasks. The positive expectancies that come from optimism, however, seem to lead to positive relationships in which believing the best of others brings out the best in them, people who are excelling become sources of inspiration rather than envy, and the perception of support buffers us against social events.” Good point.

There is also some information about how to act like an optimist even if you’re actually a pessimist. The top tip is to keep a “three good things that happened today” diary – like the gratitude diary some 43Ters have – because this encourages you to think about positive things.

Perhaps diminishing returns kicked in because I didn’t find the second half of the book so interesting, and occasionally had trouble concentrating – I’m not sure if this was because the book is a little repetitive or whether I was just too tired to take it all in.

Right at the end, Segerstrom talks about her reluctance to have her work lumped in with the positive thinking genre, and refers to a book by Norman Vincent Peale. She says “The Peale book was full of examples of people whose positive thoughts helped them achieve miraculous things…. Notable by their absence were the examples of people whose positive visualizations were not realized.” If someone dies from cancer it’s a bit revolting to imply that they didn’t hope enough or have enough positive thoughts. I’m glad she makes that point. She is also at pains to emphasise that positive thinking isn’t enough – you have to act, and it’s the action that makes the difference.

by Gary Taubes is the UK version of his book which goes under the title “Good Calories, Bad Calories” in the US. It’s a huge book, 600 pages, of which 40 pages are notes and 65 pages are references. It took him 5 years to do the research and he says it would have been essentially impossible to write if we hadn’t been living in the age of the internet.

Taubes is a journalist with a specialism in science – he has also written about Nobel Prize winners. I get the impression that before writing the Diet Delusion, he had no particular axe to grind, but this book is nothing if not controversial.

Conventional wisdom has it that we can lose weight by reducing calories in, or increasing calories out by exercising, or a combination of the two. Taubes argues that until the middle of the century many researchers and clinicians believed this was inaccurate, but for various reasons this strand of research hit the buffers. One reason being it that was largely German research and after WWII nobody took German research seriously. The dietary establishment was taken over by some strong-minded individuals with pre-conceived ideas and by the 1970s the low-fat diet was on a pedestal.

Taubes suggests that we need to take a completely different view of the mechanisms of weight loss. The conventional equation, weight change = calories in – calories out, assumes that calories in and calories out are independent variables, but there is a lot of evidence that they are not. Put people on very low calorie diets and their calories out adjust accordingly – they become lethargic and cold, and vice versa. Thus on a low calorie diet you’re engaged in a battle against your own body which you’re not going to win.

The alternative approach is to look at the cellular level. He argues that fat people have a disequilibrium in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue. The fat cells are taking in too much fat and not releasing it when they should. This is caused by too much insulin, which is caused by too much carbohydrate. As one researcher puts it, “carbs drives insulin drives fat”.

There is an amazing photo on p.361 of a woman who is suffering from lipodystrophy, which is a disorder of fat regulation. Her top half is emaciated, but her bottom half is incredibly fat. It is really quite a disturbing photo. Taubes says “if emaciation above the waist is followed by obesity below it, can the quantity of calories consumed have anything to do with it?” Hormones drive us to put on weight in particular areas. We have to rethink the causation – we don’t get fat because we eat too much (this is a tautology), but we eat too much because we are getting fat – for another reason. As someone who needs to lose weight, I like this approach because for once it doesn’t blame fat people for being fat. It sees a tendency to become obese as a genetic disorder which is switched on by too many carbs. Essentially we weren’t designed to eat cereals, sugars and high fructose corn-syrup.

This is a dense read and quite hard-going. G read a few pages the other night and gave up! It certainly isn’t your average diet book, it is a science book. I stuck with it because it’s a subject I’ve been interested in since 2001 when I did a low-carb diet and lost 30lb. Since then I moved to London and lost focus, and now I’m a low-carb dilettante, largely because I worry about not eating fruit and vegetables. But Taubes says once you start adding even small amounts of carbs to the diet, it stops working.

Obviously this has a lot of negative implications from the point of view of vegetarianism and the world population, and I’m sheepish about advocating a low-carb diet because it feels awfully selfish and uncaring about animals and the planet. I’m lucky that I can afford to eat free-range meat and ethically-sound fish and salve my conscience that way. So I’ll probably be low-carb as possible from now on except when in company!

A couple of shorter articles which he has written are on exercise and why it doesn’t make you lose weight, published in the Observer here, and on his central hypothesis, an article from the New York Times here. I do recommend them.

by Stuart Sutherland was first published in 1992. Sutherland was Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex and the book discusses a lot of experimental psychology experiments. It’s about how we make decisions and the things that distort our decision-making ability.

One major factor is the “availability error” – for example, when we have just heard about a plane crash we’re more likely to drive instead of fly, yet generally you’re more likely to have an accident on the roads. The drama of the plane crash is more readily “available” in our minds as opposed to the road accident statistics which we’re probably not be aware of.

Something that struck a chord with me is the “halo effect” – the tendency to assume that if someone has a particular good characteristic, then they are good at other things too. Sutherland describes an experiment where the same examination scripts were written out twice, once in bad handwriting and once in good handwriting. On average the scripts in good handwriting received considerably higher marks than those in bad handwriting. I was reading this book on a wine-tasting expedition to France and became aware that I had a tendency to find the wines better if I liked the wine-maker than if he was a surly type, even though personality should have nothing to do with it.

There is a lot in this book about people’s tendency to get confused by probabilities. The section on doctors and their inability to interpret screening probabilities was something I’ve read about before in Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk.

One study in the US found that if a woman has breast cancer, there is a 92% chance that her test results will be positive. Women without breast cancer had an 88% chance of a negative result. Sutherland says that in a study in the US, it was found that most doctors thought that because the probability of testing positive if a woman has breast cancer is 92%, then the probability of having breast cancer if the test is positive is also 92%.

In fact, if you took 1000 women and 80 of them had breast cancer, then 74 would have a positive test and 6 would have a negative test. Of the 920 women who didn’t have breast cancer, 110 would have a positive test and 810 would have a negative test. Overall, 74 out of the 184 women with a positive result would have cancer – which is 40% not 92%. Quite a big difference. (This is about as hard as the maths gets, by the way!)

At the end of the book Sutherland discusses whether it really matters if we are irrational, and concludes that most of the time it probably doesn’t, as most of the decisions we have to make are not huge life-or-death matters. This was a refreshing thing to read after Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness where most of the experiments seemed to be about what flavour of ice cream people prefer the most and other trivial things, and yet the author seemed to think the results were very important.

Sutherland’s book is generally very readable and he has a dry sense of humour. At the end of each chapter is a list of ways to avoid the pitfalls described, e.g. at the end of the chapter on obedience, largely about Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments, the morals are 1) think before obeying, 2) ask whether the command is justified, 3) never volunteer to become a subject in the Psychological Laboratory at Yale.

Having said which, if one wanted an even lighter introduction to the same material I’d recommend A Mind of Its Own by Cordelia Fine, which is very entertaining.

While I’m on the subject of rationality, I should also mention Damasio’s Descartes’ Error which is about the link between the brain and the nervous system. This is much more in the neuroscience tradition i.e. it got pretty difficult after chapter 1, but that chapter was excellent, discussing the case of Phineas Gage, who was an upstanding citizen involved in a nasty accident which removed part of his brain (I won’t go into details!) back in 1848. Incredibly, Gage lived to tell the tale but his personality was completely changed and he became a wastrel. Damasio thinks this is because the part of the brain removed was the part responsible for feeling emotions, and that one needs emotions to make decisions. If you don’t feel anything, then it’s impossible to evaluate your options, or make plans for the future.

There’s a lot more complicated brain chemistry discussion after that, but Damasio concludes that our brains are constantly receiving information from our nervous system and our bodies – so the idea that we can somehow be separated from our bodies is nonsense. He argues this so convincingly I came away thinking how could anyone think otherwise, and yet I suppose lots of religious people believe in the afterlife. Hmmmm.

This is an American novel with a slow plod through a sleepy town in the South and a cantering ride through New York and the sleaze-pit media, and very skilfully the writer drives these mismatched horses to pull along one narrative about someone who really doesn’t know who she is, but, through illness mainly, she stops running away and finds out very painfully who she is before it’s too late. So there’s a mystery at the heart of this story and it works very well – you feel for the characters and you want to find out what happened.

there are also themes – one comes as a surprise so I won’t say – and the continuing loss of integrity in the news media is another. I recommend this author, perhaps not for heavy-duty reading but certainly for a good story, well-told.

I got 2 collections of Betjeman’s writing for Christmas and I enjoyed them very much. In fact, I think the Betjeman started me reading for pleasure again. He is keen on Architecture and buildings – the built environment – it is very strange to read him on the prospect of Waterloo bridge being rebuilt when it now seems to have been there forever – but the old one was apparently better – and it is quite marvellous to read him telling what it’s like to go to the Festival of Britain and his impressions of the brand new Festival theatre, for example – just like a time machine. He also raves about his favourite churches and tells you what to look for in a church so that you can share his enthusiasm – and I immediately wanted to draw up a list of must-visit churches – including one in Swindon, for Goodness sake, just to see if that quality he raves about is still there.

He describes his young days in Oxford and other experiences in a very charming and friendly way. He would have been such a pleasure to know, one thinks, but perhaps it’s all in the writing: he puts himself out to be charming in a way that people don’t bother about any more, it’s one of the ways that the between-war generation seems to have had, a sort of ability to fit in anywhere and a willingness to be entertaining, that we miss so much these days.

Alan Bennett is not so good at being charming, he values being dry far more: not wasting words. But he has some things in common with Betjeman; they both write about poets they admire, and about Oxford, and they are both interested in visiting churches.
But some of Bennett’s Untold Stories are dull diary entries, and this put me off for a while. When he writes for an audience he writes to entertain and he’s very very good.

by Irene Nemirovsky is the book I’ve been reading for my book group this month. It falls into the “depressing but good” category.

The novel is in two sections. The first part, called Storm in June, tells the stories of various families when France was invaded by Germany, and the exodus from Paris as many people fled into the countryside. This is a part of French history that I’ve never really thought much about, but the book conveys the horror and panic of the situation very well. The chapters hop about between the different groups of people, few of whom are portrayed in a sympathetic light, and at least two of them come to a grisly end.

The second part is called Dolce and is about the experience of occupation in 1941 for a French village, and the relationship that develops between one of the French women and a German officer. This is written in an even-handed style – the German soldiers are presented as very human and the French villagers don’t quite know how to react to them, because they are the enemy but in some ways they are fun to have around.

The writing is excellent and the scenery is very well-described. In places it reminded me a little of Jane Austen, with a kindly, detached narrator. For example, at the beginning of Dolce, the villagers have heard that the Germans are coming and hide their precious possessions: “In the large linen cupboard, beneath a pile of sheets, they buried the family picture album, to prevent the sacrilegious enemy from seeing Great-Aunt Adelaide at her First Communion and Uncle Jules, aged six months, naked on a cushion.” But there aren’t very many comic moments like this.

The tragedy is that the book was never finished. It was supposed to have five parts, but sadly the author, who was Jewish, died in Auschwitz in 1942. There are some miscellanea at the end of the book which explain all this. Her husband also died in the camps later and their two daughters, who were children at the time, spent the rest of the war hiding from the Germans. They took the manuscript with them as a memento of their mother and it was only many years later that one of them typed it up and it was published. What a sad story.

I had this on my Amazon wish list for some time and eventually got round to buying it a couple of weeks ago. I think the reason I’d hesitated was because I thought from the title that it was going to be a book of puzzles or Sudoku or something like that! But it isn’t at all. Instead it’s about self-improvement and covers a lot of the things we talk about on here.

There are chapters on how to be lucky, arguing with yourself, deciding whether to undertake a new venture, making a good impression on other people, influencing skills, giving people feedback, dealing with stress and creative thinking, amongst others. The gist of it is that they have gone through all the psychology literature trying to find lessons which are useful in real-life situations. The authors run seminars for business and include many examples from their clients, so a lot of the situations they describe are work-related.

The emphasis is on positive thinking and working out what you can control and hence what you can do about a situation, rather than getting angry about it or wallowing in self-pity _{would I ever do that? ;)}

I read the book cover-to-cover but they encourage you to dip into it, which is fair enough as not all of it will be relevant all the time. For example I’m not contemplating any major life changes so the chapter on making a Big Decision wasn’t very relevant for me. But I found the chapters on influencing other people, having presence, defusing conflicts, giving praise and giving bad news very useful indeed.

The book is written in an engaging and chatty style – here are some problems you might face, here are some techniques you could use to solve them. It also gives you a key to access the website, where allegedly there is more stuff, although my brief foray found it rather confusing and difficult to find the content. I also found it annoying that some of the answers to the creative thinking questions are on the website – I think a book should be complete in itself! But that’s a fairly minor quibble.

There is a second book called The Mind Gym: Give Me Time which I will now add to my list, and I see there is a third book coming out soon so it will be interesting to see what that covers.

another reading goal on my list, I’m going to call this one done – that way, I can still be on the team and add entries, but it will be off my 43 list.