The Monthly Digest - Edition 2

Updates, links and recommendations

I’ll start this month’s update by welcoming the many new sign-ups, from all over the world, we’ve had in the last week. Dad’s two posts on the invasion of Ukraine have now been viewed well over quarter of a million times which is quite something for a small blog. It’s the first time we’ve had meaningful traffic coming from Facebook, Reddit, and even Instagram, which just shows how far interest in this war has spread beyond the usual news obsessives.

Dad will continue to write about the war over the coming month. As promised we will continue to make all these pieces free to read. We are grateful to those of you who have signed up, or upgraded, to a paid subscription as that allows us to spend more time on the blog, but we also appreciate not everyone can afford this.

I will write some pieces for paid subscribers with a UK focus, including one later this week on the potential consequences of the war for British politics and policy. We’re also expecting the Met to make a decision this month as to whether Boris Johnson will become the first Prime Minister to be found to have broken the law in office. The whole “partygate” affair is, of course, now overshadowed by more historically significant events, but is still an unpredictable moment depending on how Downing Street and Tory MPs react.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy this months links to the most interesting things I’ve read (on things other than Ukraine) as well as my book of the month, which is very relevant to the current crisis.

Links

The "misinformation problem" seems like misinformation:

A superb piece by Matt Yglesias - who has one of the most successful US substacks - where he looks at the “rise” of misinformation and decides there hasn’t been one. We’ve always been pretty misinformed and if anything things are better these days. What *has* increased is polarisation (especially in America) but that is more about the selective use of information that wrong information. In my post on numeracy and politics, I looked at how polarisation can lead smart people to cherry-pick more. Here Matt makes the point that conspiricists are often extremely well informed about the subject of choice, to the point of obsession and spotting patterns that aren’t there.

What was the TED talk?

Oscar Schwartz analyses the strange phenomenon of the TED talk, which has now become something of a punchline (though they’re still popular events) but were briefly very zeitgeist-y. I buy the conclusion that “the rhetorical style TED helped popularize…[has] directly influenced the type of intellectual work that [can] be undertaken” by conflating the ability to tell a good story with an actually good idea. Perhaps this is because I’ve seen one of the most popular TED talks on education by the late Sir Ken Robinson do so much damage. It’s a brilliant structured talk, from a well meaning (and personally extremely kind) man, that is just completely wrong. But it has become so popular on teacher training courses we had to include a rebuttal of it in the Teach First training programme I worked on.

The rise of unpopulism:

I cited this piece by Duncan Robinson in my article on the politics of the culture wars and am highlighting again as it raises an issue that’s intrigued me for some time. Why are the so called populist right obsessed with issues like masks, working from home, Net Zero etc… where polls show people overwhelmingly disagree with their position? This piece sets out some of the reasons they’re struggling to find a new “Brexit”.

To own Whiteness:

Continuing on the culture wars theme, my favourite pieces on the topic tend to be those that critique their own “side”. Musab Younis is an academic who has written on the development of anti-colonial thought and is steeped in critical arguments about race. From that perspective he launches a subtle but barbed attack on the raft of popular “anti-racism” books in the self-help format from people like Robin DiAngelo. There’s a particularly interesting section on the risks of strengthening racial divides through linguistic focus on them e.g. the black British writer Paul Gilroy’s belief that “the language of race should be abandoned altogether because using its vocabulary, even critically, reinforces its power”.

Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap:

Girls now outperform boys academically at every level and in almost every country in the world. As a trend it doesn’t fit neatly into contemporary concerns so doesn’t get nearly the attention it should given the substantial and growing gap in performance. This paper is the first I’ve seen to look at the exceptionally high attainment of gay boys and relative undertainment of lesbian girls. This makes a compelling case for gender norms playing a major role in the broader gender performance gap. Unfortunately it’s paywalled but I’m hoping interested readers can find access via an academic login.

Book(s) of the Month

Putin’s People by Catherine Belton - I started reading this once it became apparent an invasion of Ukraine of some kind was likely, in the hope it would help me understand the mind of a man who’d make such a breathtakingly malevolent decision. It didn’t disappoint. The most eye-opening sections for me were around Putin’s early career and rise to power, starting with his days in the KGB in East Germany where Belton focuses on the (unproven) possibility that he worked with the Baader-Meinhof Gang to terrorise West Germany. Belton goes on to describe how, as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 90s, Putin worked closely with organised criminal gangs to manage the city. When people now say he’s acting like a gangster, it’s hardly surprising, he is a gangster.

In 1996 Putin was hired by the Kremlin and rose vertignously through the ranks until he was put in charge of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. By appearing loyal to Yeltsin and his allies while they found themselves dragged ever deeper into various corruption scandals he managed to position himself as a surprise successor, while retaining support of a network of former KGB colleagues in key positions of power. The pages on how he hoodwinked Yeltsin’s team are heartbreaking, a reminder of how unlikely it was that this unknown apparatchik would be given the opportunity to become a dictator.

Once in control he used the Chechen war to bolster his popularity and quickly took control of all levers of government, went after opposition media outlets, and cracked down on the oligarchs who’d take advantage of the chaos of the 90s to take ownership of Russia’s vast reserves of natural resources. Belton describes one, televised, meeting where Putin took the oligarchs to task, citing a Russian folk saying “it’s no use blaming the mirror if you have an ugly face”. If only there was someone around now to say that to him.

Belton’s book is invaluable in understanding how Russia ended up in the place it’s in today (you can tell how important it is by the number of wealthy Russians who have attempted to abuse the UK’s ridiculous libel laws to force retractions).

Some other recommendations to understand the recent history of Russia:

Svetlana Alexievich’s “Second Hand Time” - one of the best books I’ve ever read by, in my opinion, the greatest living non-fiction writer. Alexievich uses her unique approach of merging the voices of interviewees into a fragmented narrative to show how the fall of the USSR affected ordinary Russians - the strange mix of hope, shame, defiance and frustration that allowed Putin’s nationalism to take hold.

Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing is true and everything is possible” - the author spent a decade working in Russian television and chronicles the growth of a new Russian elite and a new media world that reinforces the kleptocracy.

Arkady Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia” - which explores how Putin took over Russia media and made it an arm of the state, using innovative techniques to distort reality that influnced various Western demagogues, particularly on the far right.