Search Results for: The Guardian

Chasing Spies From the Couch

Pexels

Eliot Higgins followed global events from the comfort of his sofa in the East Midlands of England. However, as Luke Harding reports for The Guardian, this did not stop him from analyzing what was going on. The digital world is largely open-source — anyone can access social media, Google Earth, Google Street View, or YouTube. Higgins found by cross-checking video footage with photos and Google maps, he could investigate what was happening in war zones across the world.

At home, and surrounded by his daughter’s discarded toys, Higgins unearthed a number of scoops. He found weapons from Croatia in a video posted by a Syrian jihadist group. The weapons, it emerged, were from the Saudis. The New York Times picked up the story and put it on the front page – an indication of how armchair analysis could be as telling as dispatches from the ground.

Higgins documented the Syrian regime’s use of cluster bombs. He discovered that government soldiers were tossing DIY barrel bombs out of helicopters, and that rebels were fighting back around Aleppo with Chinese-made shoulder-launched missiles. His reputation spread. He launched a new investigative website: Bellingcat.

When in the summer of 2018 two Russian suspects tried to poison Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, members of Higgins’ website, Bellingcat, took on the challenge of unmasking the true identities of the attempted murderers. The armchair detectives were successful, identifying the first assassin in a message on its website, and the second at a press conference. The identification led the would-be poisoners to defend themselves in an interview that was comedic in its lack of credibility.

They appeared nervous, shifty, under pressure, timorous, idiotic and craven. Unlike Putin – a grand master when it came to deceit – they were lousy liars. The pair insisted that they were not GRU officers, and that their real names were indeed Petrov and Boshirov. As for the curious events of Salisbury – well, these might be explained:

Simonyan: What were you doing there?

Petrov: Our friends have been suggesting for quite a long time that we visited this wonderful city.

Simonyan: Salisbury? A wonderful city?

Petrov: Yes.

Simonyan: What makes it so wonderful?

Boshirov: It’s a tourist city. They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral. It’s famous throughout Europe and, in fact, throughout the world, I think. It’s famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock. It’s one of the oldest working clocks in the world.

Chepiga/Boshirov’s knowledge of Salisbury seems to have been gleaned from a cursory reading of Russian Wikipedia. The cathedral spire is impressive – built in the 13th and 14th centuries, the tallest in Britain, octagonal, with flying buttresses and scissor arches, and praised by Sir Christopher Wren and Malcolm Muggeridge as a marvel. Still, it seemed unlikely this spire had drawn the two spies all the way from Moscow. How also to explain the fact that the Russians visited Salisbury twice?

Read the story

How Four Americans Robbed the Bank of England

The Great City Forgeries: Trial Of The Accused At The Central Criminal Court. Austin Biron Bidwell; George Macdonnell; George Bidwell; Edwin Noyes; Henry Avory, Esq., Clerk Of The Court; Mr. Justice Archibald Alderman; Sir W.r. Carden, 1873 Engraving. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Paul Brown | Longreads | June 2020 | 22 minutes (5,961 words)

On April 18, 1872, Austin Bidwell walked into Green & Son tailors on London’s renowned Savile Row and ordered eight bespoke suits, two topcoats, and a luxurious dressing gown. Bidwell was 26 years old, 6ft tall, and handsomely groomed with a waxed mustache and bushy side-whiskers. If the accent didn’t give it away, his eye-catching western hat marked him out as an American — a rich American. London tradesmen called Americans with bulges of money in their pockets “Silver Kings,” and they were most welcome in upmarket establishments like Green & Son, which charged as much for the strength of their reputations as for the quality of their goods.

Read more…

How Covid Is Decimating British Music Journalism

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Few countries have a more robust culture of music journalism than England. “Music is such an inescapable part of the British cultural landscape,” journalist Pat Long writes in the book about the famous music weekly NME, “that it’s strange to think of a time when it wasn’t ghettoised in a weekly newspaper, when families didn’t spend their summer attending well-provisioned inter-generational rock festivals, when parents didn’t swap music with their teenage children.” Imagination is no longer necessary. British listeners have no concerts to attend. Advertisers have no events to sell. And with few stores open to sell physical issues of magazines, Covid-19 is threatening UK music publications, from Uncut to Metal Hammer, the way it has so many communities and business. For The Guardian, Laura Snapes writes about how British music publications are struggling during the pandemic, how they are working together, and what it might take to survive.

Music magazines have “been on the edge of sustainability” for a long time, says Douglas McCabe, of the media research group Enders Analysis. Print advertising has dwindled. There are plentiful free online publications. Key titles have closed: in 2018, NME axed its 66-year print incarnation (the brand survives online). Every year brings headlines about shrinking sales figures.

But many British music magazine editors and publishers say they were thriving in straitened times, at least before the pandemic. “The huge drop-off that most magazines experienced in the early 2010s has, relatively speaking, flattened out for many brands,” says the editor of Metal Hammer, Merlin Alderslade. “Most of our issues in 2019 were actually up year on year.”

Paul Geoghegan, the editor of global music magazine Songlines and managing director of Mark Allen Group music publications including Gramophone and Jazzwise, said the brand’s titles were sustainable before March. Stuart Williams, the publisher at Future Publishing – home to publications including Classic Rock and Metal Hammer – said its 13 music titles were profitable in April 2020, “when half the shops in the UK were closed and the population was barely allowed out.”

Read the story

Among the Last in An Iron Lung

An iron lung sponsored by the March of Dimes helps a young boy with polio breath during the 1950s. (Photo by Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis via Getty Images)

Lawyer Paul Alexander contracted polio at age 6 in the summer of 1952. The disease left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe without assistance, but it didn’t stop him from living his life. As Linda Rodriguez McRobbie reports at The Guardian, Paul, with help from a therapist who promised him a puppy, learned to breathe on his own for periods of time, giving him respite from his iron lung. Today, at age 74, after surviving a polio infection in an epidemic from a different time, coronavirus is a looming threat.

What Paul remembers most vividly about the ward is hearing the doctors talk about him when they walked through on their rounds. “He’s going to die today,” they said. “He shouldn’t be alive.” It made him furious. It made him want to live.

Paul told the therapist about the times he had been forced by doctors to try to breathe without the lung, how he had turned blue and passed out. He also told her about the time he had gulped and “swallowed” some air, almost like breathing. The technique had a technical name, “glossopharyngeal breathing”. You trap air in your mouth and throat cavity by flattening the tongue and opening the throat, as if you’re saying “ahh” for the doctor. With your mouth closed, the throat muscle pushes the air down past the vocal cords and into the lungs. Paul called it “frog-breathing”.

Sullivan made a deal with her patient. If he could frog-breathe without the iron lung for three minutes, she’d give him a puppy. It took Paul a year to learn to do it, but he got his puppy; he called her Ginger. And though he had to think about every breath, he got better at it. Once he could breathe reliably for long enough, he could get out of the lung for short periods of time, first out on the porch, and then into the yard.

Although he still needed to sleep in the iron lung every night – he couldn’t breathe when he was unconscious – Paul didn’t stop at the yard. At 21, he became the first person to graduate from a Dallas high school without physically attending a class. He got into Southern Methodist University in Dallas, after repeated rejections by the university administration, then into law school at the University of Texas at Austin. For decades, Paul was a lawyer in Dallas and Fort Worth, representing clients in court in a three-piece suit and a modified wheelchair that held his paralysed body upright.

Before the arrival of a vaccine in 1955, what made polio so terrifying was that there was no way of predicting who would walk away from an infection with a headache, and who would never walk again. In most cases, the disease had no discernible effect. Of the 30% or so who showed symptoms, most experienced only minor illness. But a small proportion, 4-5%, exhibited serious symptoms, including extreme muscular pain, high fever and delirium. As the virus hacked its way through the neural tissue of the spinal cord, a few of those infected were paralysed; this progression of the virus was known as paralytic polio. Roughly 5-10% of patients who caught paralytic polio died, although this number was far higher in the days before widespread use of the iron lung.

Read the story

Caring Without Touching

Pexels

Gavin Francis, a doctor in Edinburgh, Scotland, writes candidly for The Guardian about his life as a general practitioner (GP) being turned upside down by COVID-19. While his GP training emphasized the importance of building empathy and rapport, now he stays as far from a patient as possible until the moment of having to examine them — if they meet in person at all — with the number of actual face-to-face encounters with patients dropping by 90%.

“Could you stand up for me?” I asked. We shuffled awkwardly on the small landing in a doleful dance. He turned his back and I lifted his pyjamas to place my stethoscope on his back. The sound of air through his lungs was accompanied by a quiet hissing sound, like sizzling fat. The sound of pneumonia. In his case, pneumonia probably caused by Covid-19.

“I’m going outside, then I’ll phone you about what happens next,” I told him. I picked up the clear bag with my stethoscope, oxygen sensor and thermometer, and stepped out, trying to hold central to my awareness and every action that there was virus on the walls, the door handle, my gloves and all my equipment.

Out on the doorstep I gulped down the fresh air, then it was back to the rigmarole: topmost layer of gloves off and into a waste bag. Still wearing my underlayer of gloves, I took a chloride wipe and began to clean all the equipment – stethoscope, oxygen sensor, thermometer – and placed them into yet another clear plastic bag, ready for the next patient. The wipe went into the waste, then my apron. Next it was the visor’s turn to get cleaned, and afterwards I placed it on the ground to dry. Then undergloves off, mask off, the clinical waste bag tied off and sealed, and back into the car.

The lockdown in Scotland has caused the number of COVID-19 cases to fall. However, Francis points out that doctors are noticing a different type of problem.

It’s clear that though the lockdown has slashed transmission, it is provoking a silent epidemic of despair. Panic attacks, sleeplessness and plunging moods are all difficulties GPs are encountering daily – tough conversations to have at the best of times, but even tougher on the phone. Within our area of the city, we already know of suicides triggered by bankruptcies and business closures; and of marriages breaking down. Alcohol-induced injuries are up, as are injuries from assaults. Between 23 March and 12 April, there were 16 deaths from domestic violence in the UK – more than triple the still-shocking figure from last year. A police officer friend told me that domestic abuse support lines were experiencing a 30-40% increase in traffic. Samaritans and Childline, too, were receiving high volumes of calls. A domestic abuse hotline for NHS workers had been inaugurated – intended to support both health workers at risk, and to offer advice should they suspect patients of being abused. When I check routine blood tests on my patients, I have been seeing new flares of liver irritation, which suggest rising levels of alcoholism.

Read the story

What I Want to Know of Kindness

County Kerry, Ireland / Getty Images

Devin Kelly | Longreads | May 2020 | 14 minutes (3,897 words)

This is the second time we’ve been lucky enough to publish Devin Kelly. Read his first Longreads essay “Running Dysmorphic.”

I remember that I was in a 6th floor classroom of the high school where I used to teach when I got the text. I read some words: Nancy…about to happen…they moved her.

I remember leaving the classroom and all those kids, finding my department head, and huffing out a rush of phrases.

My friend’s mom is about to die, I said. She’s like my aunt, I said. No, no, I said. She’s like my second mom.

I remember how bright it was outside as I walk-jogged to Grand Central to catch a northbound train out of the city. I remember the polish on the shoes of blue-suited men, and the tinny clack they made as they slapped along the sidewalk. I remember thinking how odd it was, and how much I felt alone, and how the world felt stilled and tilted on its axis, but that I was the only one who felt it, like I was leaning sideways while each other person I passed stood upright.

Read more…

And Then We Grew Up

Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2020 | 11 minutes (3,116 words)

“I envy you,” my cousin told me once, as we were sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in the Ohio woods, eating peach pie. “You have a word.” That word was WRITER. My cousin, who’d bounced around jobs in her twenties and thirties, envied the way my word so neatly answered the questions of career and identity, the way it brought me into focus. I may not have had any money. I may not have had any idea if the project I was working on would ever actually be seen by someone other than myself, but I had a word.

Every once in a while, I go through a spell of applying for jobs. Teaching jobs. Tech jobs. Utterly random jobs. I google “how to write a cover letter.” I fantasize with both fascination and horror about showing up at an office and chatting about The Handmaid’s Tale over tepid coffee in a communal space. Then inevitably I imagine that moment when a stranger asks me what I do and I can no longer supply my word as an answer. It is incredibly disarming, even just in my interior dreamscape, not to have that word. It has been an anchor for my personal sense of validation, my identity, my way of relating to the world for so long. What would it mean to give it up? To hand over all my art monster ambitions and renounce the often cruel bargain of personal stability for creative nobility?

Read more…

The Shopper’s Dream of an Optimized Life

Press Association via AP Images

Shopping online can seem like the ultimate way to save time and trouble. This is especially true now that we have to stay indoors to reduce exposure to the Coronavirus. From Netflix to candle subscriptions to Rent the Runway, subscription-based businesses and direct to consumer services like Warby Parker take that promise further, allowing you to both avoid a brick and mortar store and even the thought of shopping at all. Subscriptions buy you time. Think of all the things you can do with your time once you have to shop less! At Esquire, editor Kelly Stout reveals the tragic flaw in that thinking. Although, theoretically, subscriptions free up customers’ time to do other things, no one can get us to spend that newly available time more efficiently. There is no optimizing for that.

The dream of the subscription is that without having to use our brains for something as mundane as remembering to buy razor cartridges, we might do something better with our time. We might even become more optimized human beings—an economic fever dream that dates back to, I don’t know, the invention of the cotton gin. Probably earlier. In a memorable essay for The Guardian, Jia Tolentino summarized the economist William Stanley Jevons’s definition of optimization: “We all want to get the most out of what we have.” Saving not just time but effort is key to forward momentum in the industrial phantasmagoria that is, at this moment, blasting circus music into my ears. It’s a flattering proposition that implies I’m capable of something grand. Once we’ve saved all that money, all that time, all that hassle, out pops a gameshow host—his smile wider than a Smile-DirectClub member’s—to ask us, What will you do with all this time?

One answer is work. With fewer hours, minutes, or even seconds spent chopping onions and herbs for tonight’s dinner, I could be turning that extra time into money. But I had a different idea: What if, instead, I enjoyed myself? In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for leisure time—not leisure time as “side hustle” or “monetizable” or even something that will improve the self, but as recreation for no reason. This is a novel idea in 2020, even though it’s been around for more than a century. “As far back as 1886 . . . workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will,’ ” Odell writes. The movement inspired a poster of people in canoes and a song about feeling the sunshine and smelling the flowers. When I read that, I thought: Dang, I never canoe! Maybe shaving off a sliver of my time at CVS could add to those eight what-I-will hours. And yet I spent those extra seconds sitting on my couch. I wasn’t doing anything except scrolling through my feeds, thinking about my subscriptions, contemplating how I could optimize my life further. I wasn’t even going to the store.

Read the story

The Streaming Service of the Moment

Courtesy of Getty Images

Disney launched its new service, Disney+, on March 24th, the same day as the lockdown began in the United Kingdom. As Sophie Elmhirst wryly notes in her piece for The Guardian, the launch falling upon the day that 66 million were told to stay at home for 23 hours a day, must have resulted in “a quiet elbow bump in a meeting room, perhaps.” Elmhirst herself was quick to sign up in the service as a source of her entertainment for her children. 

Maybe it didn’t feel like that for everyone. Maybe the parents who secretly love the home schooling vibe, the timetables and worksheets, the children sitting happily at kitchen tables, tongues sticking out of the side of their mouths as they complete little astronomy quizzes while the parent stirs a healthy stew, maybe they didn’t sign up for Disney+ a full week before it launched. For the rest of us, hurling fish fingers into the oven with one hand while trying to tap out a piece of work with the other and break up a fight with a toe, the relatively low cost of a Disney+ subscription (£5.99 a month) when contemplating the long, long, just so very long, period of time ahead of us, felt like a sensible investment.

Rewatching the old classics, Elmhirst soon realizes that she signed up for the service for herself just as much as for her children. In times of uncertainty, there is comfort in the familiar.

During that seventh Bolt viewing, I realized why the kids wanted to keep watching the same movie over and over again. There’s the expert appreciation for a fine piece of computer animation, no doubt, but there’s also the deep comfort to be found in repeat viewing. Even multiple screenings in, they both covered their eyes in terror during a chase scene. The fear was real, but it was that pleasurable kind of fear you know will pass. There’s no uncertainty, no risk. You know, for a fact, that everything will be OK. It’s fear with a happy ending.

Despite the current crisis Disney probably will indeed be OK. However, it’s current reality is very different from its normal fairytale image. 

Rightly, the company isn’t high on anyone’s worry list. But it’s striking how far the current reality of Disney is from its well-tended corporate image. In late March, various news outlets published pictures of Disney’s closed theme parks – empty car parks, rollercoasters, cafes, golf courses, and a lonely-looking Millennium Falcon at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. The photographs are somehow more sinister than those of empty cities that have been doing the rounds. Cities, at the best of times, are conflicted and messy, beautiful, and cruel. They rarely pretend to be anything they’re not, unless there’s an Olympics going on.

Disney, on the other hand, is always pretending to be something it’s not: it is a highly efficient profit machine that presents itself as a place where a merry band of misfits conjure happiness.

Read the story

How Margaret Atwood is Passing Time During the Pandemic

(Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Without book signings, festivals, talks, and fundraisers to attend, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s got some time on her hands, as she notes at The Guardian. How is she passing time during lockdown? Why, thwarting squirrels, sewing face masks for health care workers, and conducting rubber chicken choirs. As one does.

Mary Beard, the two-fisted Cambridge classicist who understands crises, debacles and pandemics, being an authority on ancient Rome, asked me to do a remote item for the BBC Front Row Late show, which usually reviews theatre but now can’t because there isn’t any. “Just a little something,” she said, “as long as it’s on plagues.” This awakened the Kraken of my deep past – a childhood of reading horror literature, not only the Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook for proto-homemakers but also the collected work of Edgar Allan Poe. Who let that into the kiddie section of the library? Well, there isn’t any sex in it: that was probably the excuse; and children are so fond of decaying corpses, especially those with all their teeth pulled out, as in “Berenice”. So me and “The Masque of the Red Death” go way back.

Read the story