“You can’t be neutral on a moving train” — 2020
The “best of” version of everything I read, saw and heard in 2020 — lists are either in the order that they were viewed, read or listened to, randomly ordered or in some kind of ranking. Good luck
— Podcasts
— Films
— TV shows
— Documentaries
— (Watchable) Internet
— Music
— Art
— Fiction
— Non-fiction
— Articles
Boris Johnson in Downing Street
“Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?”
— @UKCivilService. May 24th 2020
The most interesting podcasts episodes #
My podcast listening fell of a cliff when my commute did, so…
— “Kantor and Twohey: The Reporters Who Broke the Harvey Weinstein Story” on Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin and “The Woman Defending Harvey Weinstein” both with startling moments as Baldwin is challenged and the lawyer defending Weinstein says “Because I would never put myself in that position.”
— “Everyone’s a Critic” — This American Life. Where an author contends with people who rate his book with 1 star and where a church is rated by tourists.
— “Ep. 406 - A Side of Franchise. 99% Invisible. McDonalds, franchising and it’s role in the US civil rights
— “Your Call Is Important to Us” - COVID and the Universal Credit helpline
— “Frosted Flakes.” What Tiger King says about America’s unique relationship to freedom and “Delicious Vinyl” about High Fidelity both Still Processing podcast
And the best podcast series #
— “The Great Post Office Trial. The scandalous story of the Post Office and faulty technology vs. its Sub Postmasters.
— ”Winds of Change.“ Entertaining in trying to investigate if the Scorpions were spearheading the fight for the US in the cold war.
— ”The View from Somewhere.“ Asking valid questions about the idea of objectivity in journalism. Introduced me to the idea of Hallin’s spheres of consensus.
— ”The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast.“ Every testimony continues to be shocking in what it reveals.
The best films I watched #
— Small Axe: Lovers Rock
— Parasite
— Portrait Of A Lady On Fire
— Uncut Gems
— Pain & Glory
— Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse
— Soul
— Ad Astra
— The Last Black Man In San Francisco
— Snowpiercer
— Queen & Slim
— Thunder Road
— 1917
— The Gentlemen
— The Personal History Of David Copperfield
— The Farewell
— The Beach Bum
— Honey Boy
Some quotes #
“It’s a living thing, Brian. It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling, not because of the physics of flammable liquids, but because it wants to.” — Donald ‘Shadow’ Rimgale, Backdraft
Music #
TV Shows #
— I May Destroy You
— Better Call Saul - Season 5
— I Hate Suzie
— Watchmen
— Normal People
— Ted Lasso
— The Morning Show
— The Boys
Documentaries #
— Song Exploder
— the Edge Of Democracy
— The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty
— Black & British: A Forgotten History
— the Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files
— The Ripper
— Lance
(Watchable) Internet #
— Chris Voss Teaches The Art Of Negotiation Masterclass
— Inglourious Basterds’ Witty Slate Clapper
— The Time You Have (In Jellybeans)
— An Invocation For Beginnings
— Goldman V Silverman
— John Mulaney And Stephen Colbert Explore Each Other’s Deepest Anxieties
— The 25 Best Films Of 2019: A Video Countdown
— Not Our Problem
The best fiction read #
— The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
— Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
— Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
— Spring by Ali Smith
— Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
— A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa
— The Devil all the time by Donald Ray Pollock
— Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Non-fiction #
— She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
— The Night of the Gun by David Carr
— Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert Caro
— On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
— Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
— King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
— Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored by Jeffrey Boakye
Articles #
— *An Architecture Critic Looks at Four Seasons Total Landscaping
"Perhaps it was sabotage on the part of a minion who had had enough. There’s speculation on Twitter that Trump announced an event at the Four Seasons (hotel) before it had been booked, and aides had to scramble to find any venue that made his words true. None of these explanations makes sense, because the site was simultaneously too perfect to be accidental and too elaborate to be intentional. The end of an administration marked by episodes of sordid sex, wishful thinking, and mass death took place next door to a dildo-and-porn store named Fantasy Island and across the street from a crematorium. If you were hunting for such a symbolically rich stage, how would you even Google it?”
— Red Pill, Blue Pill — James Meek on the conspiracist mind
— Dancing With the Octopus by Debora Harding review – kidnapped at 14
“Her mother had a peculiar response to the attack. Decades later she told her daughter’s husband, quite matter-of-factly, that the kidnap had never happened. Harding was so unsettled by her mother’s belief that the abduction was just a fantasy, she began to question her own memory. Could she have concocted such an event in her mind? She and her husband begin an investigation into the assault, scouring FBI records and newspaper reports to uncover the details of what took place. Records confirmed her memories were entirely correct.”
— Gene Weingarten: A neighbour asked for a tomato. This is where the story gets weird.
“Algorithms of one sort or another have been used in university admissions for years. In 1979, St George’s Hospital Medical School began using a computer algorithm to screen applications to its undergraduate programme. Unlike Ofqual’s algorithm it was remarkably accurate, agreeing with the judgments of a human selection panel 90 to 95 per cent of the time. It achieved this accuracy partly by mimicking the panel’s prejudices. Candidates with ‘non-European-sounding’ names were marked down and as many as sixty applicants a year were excluded on that basis. The Commission for Racial Equality was alerted in 1986 and the algorithm was scrapped. An article in the BMJ called it ‘a blot on the profession’. The algorithm was nakedly racist, though it’s worth noting that while it was in use the proportion of non-European candidates accepted at St George’s was higher than at other medical schools.”
“The most widely reported bias followed from the judgment that any form of statistical adjustment would be methodologically unsound in classes with fewer than five students and only a slight adjustment should be allowed in classes with between five and fifteen students. Since smaller classes are much more common at private schools than at state schools and further education colleges, private schools’ results were much less likely to be downgraded.”
— Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster
On January 24 Matt Hancock told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”. Johnson missed four Cobra meetings on the virus and he didn’t attend one until March 2nd.
UK in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and was out of date after becoming a low priority due to austerity. Training had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.
The government shipped 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China.
The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted the health service would collapse and that there would be a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.
The British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most of the UK’s testing sector did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1
By February 21, the virus had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless, Nervtag, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.
— The Arrestables by Jeremy Harding
“XR had three demands and addressed them to government: it should ‘tell the truth’ by admitting to a ‘climate and ecological emergency’; it should ‘act now’ to bring carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025 and halt the decline in biodiversity; it should create a citizens’ assembly to advise government on how to reach the 2025 target. Managing a ‘just transition’ away from carbon – rebuilding livelihoods for workers in declining sectors of the economy, for instance – would be the objective; spreading the pain of the transition fairly, at home and in the Global South, would be the utopian principle.”
“Crucially, they believe that it only takes 3.5 per cent of a population – sometimes less – to mount a non-violent protest and achieve success.”
Art #
— Zanele Muholi
— Among The Trees At The Hayward Gallery
— William Blake At Tate Britain
— Steve Mcqueen Year 3 At Tate Britain
— Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits At The Royal Academy
— Picasso And Paper At The Royal Academy
— Nam June Paik
The VERY best on the internet #
Sometimes when people sell mirrors online, they can’t figure out how to get out of the way for the photo.