The Sunday Papers

Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for firing up Twine again and thinking you know what, if this swanky IF plotter had been around when I was an undergraduate, I might have preserved all my exam revision notes in text adventure form. I still have two, reassuringly heavy boxes of tabbed and colour-coded index cards that you could plausibly lay out to form a maze, navigable by compass commands. Head down the western corridor from Middle English to the Renaissance, and – ah, bollocks, you have been eaten by a Grue. Surely somebody's thought of this, in the decade and change since Twine was released? I mean, we already have 3D museum exhibits extracted from Wikipedia.

Sundays are also for heading to the allotment and getting annoyed with the tomato plants, who have decided to go bonkers right at the end of the growing season. I thought you were done, pesky nightshades. I thought I could leave you alone for the rest of the year. Finally, Sundays are for sharing good criticism, like the below.

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Here's a hard and hopeful essay from Palestinian writer and academic Dana El Kurd about different kinds of silence, following the revelation that she has a Jewish Israeli great-grandmother.

Rachel’s story provoked many questions. I wondered if I had lost relatives in the Holocaust. I must have—Rachel’s family was still in Poland in 1935. I wondered, if there were survivors, whether they ended up in Israel. They surely served in the army, if so. Did they kill any Palestinians? Did they end up in Gaza?

Right now, I would rather not know the answers to these questions, not as I continue to watch a genocide unfold. I doubt Rachel’s descendants want anything to do with me either. She concealed the identities of her Israeli children in the interview, saying there were “sensitivities” around the issue. Clearly their background is a secret they keep to themselves as well.

How might Rachel’s life have looked had it not been overtaken by the Israeli state-building project? Her story speaks to thornier issues that Palestinians grapple with constantly in their struggle for self-determination. What do you do when your colonizer has no home country to return to? How did my grandfather, a devout Palestinian man, make peace with his Israeli mother, and what might this say about coexistence? Is there some way to reform Israeli society, twisted by ethnonationalism though it is?

For the London Review of Books blog, Iza Ding compares Wen Muye's film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East to Hollywood's recreations of US wars in Iraq, identifying a different strain of interventionist mythmaking.

Chinese state media praised Once Upon a Time in the Middle East as a new kind of anti-war film, comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front and Schindler’s List. The criticism of the US invasion is unsparing (there are plenty of lines like ‘You Americans think everyone is a terrorist’) but most of the individual American characters are humanised. Tony Wang (Aarif Lee), a Chinese American soldier from California, acts tough until, after a few shots of whiskey, all he can say is that he wants to go home. The Iraqis begin as innocent victims, but the film shows the ways in which ordinary, decent people can be gradually bent towards extremism by unbearable circumstances. The moral ambiguity is characteristic of Wen Muye. There are good guys – the Chinese – but no bad guys: the Americans are homesick and frightened; the Iraqis are grieving and enraged.

While we're at the cinema, here's John WM Thompson on Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Carrie and the bowdlerization of horror, with a few notes on the "cosy horror" that has crept into videogames of late.

Here in America, it is the market actors, not the people, who truly cannot abide tragic storytelling, resisting as it does linear franchising, four-quadrant reboots, children’s toy merchandising, so on and so forth. I believe that regular people, if you pushed them, would appreciate and embrace tragic storytelling — no one actually wants to eat candy all day every day, and few people are actually satisfied with endless pandering. But if they only see comedy, they will come only to expect comedy. If they are told that art must make them feel good and reflect an optimistic world, they will become dismayed and confused when offered the sour or bitter, enriching as they might be. They may seek to escape tragedy. And thus we would see depictions of complexity, complication, reality at its least friendly, all feared and reviled. It is already happening. By Flanagan’s own words, Carrie is part of that action.

NHS England has banned trans women from female-only hospital wards, the latest stroke in a campaign of institutional cruelty that will make it harder for trans people to access healthcare, while also increasing the burden on facilities who are strapped for space and resources. While reading around about this, I came across this essay on "why trans people deserve to be boring" from Ash Lazarus Orr - the named plaintiff in a federal lawsuit over the Trump administration’s passport policy for trans people in the US.

Marginalized people are often easiest to defend when we are sympathetic, and there is something deeply unfair about requiring someone to be likeable before deciding they are worthy of dignity. The trans person whose story is supposed to change someone’s mind is asked to be vulnerable enough to create empathy but composed enough to remain credible, angry enough that the harm feels real but not so angry that someone stops listening. After years of preparing for interviews and thinking about how something would land with an audience, I became very familiar with those calculations.

Sometimes those calculations are necessary. They are also exhausting when you realize how much freedom there is in being allowed to disappoint people only as yourself. A cisgender person can be an asshole without anyone treating their behavior as meaningful evidence about cisgender people as a population. Trans people deserve the same freedom to be mediocre, annoying, wrong or unlikeable without someone deciding our individual failures reveal something larger about whether people like us deserve to exist comfortably in the world.

For Equator, Arundhati Roy goes long about the North American tech billionaire class and generative AI, with a focus on self-serving industry calls for regulation and the ramifications for Indian workers in particular. We publish or share a lot of apocalyptic pieces about generative AI on these pages, and there's always a risk of wallowing in misery while generating nega-publicity for the chatbot tycoons, but Roy is a great rhetorician and this essay covers a lot of ground.

In her incisive, dagger-sharp book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao describes the ongoing, all-out plunder of land and resources, and the dragooning of workers in poor countries labouring on starvation wages to become “data capturers” to keep Cyclopes’ dreams afloat. Since there is unlikely to be enough water or electricity to feed the massive energy appetite of its companies and its $100 billion supercomputers, Cyclopes is aggressively lobbying for private nuclear plants and the rollback of safety protocols. As backup, billions of dollars are being poured into developing nonperishable sources of fusion energy, so that data centres can be moved into outer space or onto the moon.

Meanwhile, on dear, shabby old Earth, the government of India has stepped up to welcome the setting up of more energy-guzzling data centres. Six in Visakhapatnam alone, including a $15 billion hub for Google. They are being given clearance with virtually zero environmental oversight, as though they’re just buildings, warehouses. It’s an old tradition between India and the US – give us your garbage, your toxic industries, your poisoned chalice. We’ll treasure it. And as in the US, activists in India are putting their bodies on the line to stop the poisoning of the water and the air for the tens of thousands of people who live in the vicinity of the proposed “warehouses”.

Music this week is Gordon Lightfoot's Sundown, which appears in the OST for kind-of-alright Jawsalike miniseries Below. Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are. Please share any really interesting Twine games and bulk-cook tomato recipes you've discovered.