Banksy's NHS tribute sells for record $30 million as UK marks coronavirus lockdown anniversary
3/23/2021

Banksy's 'Game Changer' painting sells for record $30 million at auction

VIDEO 

Duration: 1 minute 24 seconds

  Banksy's NHS tribute sells for record $30 million as UK marks coronavirus lockdown anniversary - ABC News

A Banksy painting showing a young boy playing with a toy nurse as a superhero has sold for more than $30 million, setting an auction record for the elusive British street artist.

Key points:

'Game Changer' pays tribute to frontline health workers during the pandemic

It fetched a record price on the one-year anniversary of the UK going into coronavirus lockdown

Banksy has released a series of COVID-themed artwork over the past year

'Game Changer', which was unveiled last May at University Hospital Southampton, paid tribute to the frontline workers of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The black-and-white artwork shows a young boy lifting a nurse, her arm stretched and wearing a cape, while traditional superheroes Batman and Spiderman lie in a bin behind him.

In a Christie's auction streamed live, the painting sold for a hammer price of 14.4 million pounds ($26 million).

Added fees gave it a final price of 16.758 million pounds ($30 million), a world auction record for Banksy, according to Christie's.

The painting had carried an estimated value of around $4-6 million going into the auction.

Christie's said proceeds would go towards "supporting the wellbeing of University Hospital Southampton staff and patients".

The sale took place on Tuesday as Britons marked one year since Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the nation into its first lockdown.

A minute's silence was observed to remember the more than 126,000 people in the UK who have lost their lives to the virus.

Banksy has been busy during the pandemic, releasing several pieces that have caused amusement and sparked topical debate.

Last April, he created a new artwork in his bathroom that showed his trademark stencilled rats running amok around the sink and toilet.

The craze over toilet paper inspired Banksy in the early stages of the pandemic.

(Instagram: Banksy)

He posted photos of the work on his Instagram account as he abided by stay-at-home orders, along with the comment: "My wife hates it when I work from home."

In October, his Show Me the Money work, a twist on the impressionist's painting, sold for $13.9 million at auction.

And then in December, a mural of a sneezing woman by Banksy appeared on a house at the end of one of the steepest streets in Bristol, his birthplace.

'Aachoo!!' was unveiled in Banksy's hometown of Bristol last December.(Reuters: Rebecca Naden)

Banksy posted pictures of the work on his official Instagram account, along with the comment "Aachoo!!"

The mural showed the woman's false teeth propelled through the air and her handbag and walking stick sent flying by the violent sneeze.

London Transport ordered cleaners to remove Banksy's trademark rats last July.

(Instagram: Banksy)

But his work isn't universally beloved — his undercover graffiti on the London Underground last July — was scrubbed clean by Transport for London.

Banksy, whose true identity is a closely guarded secret, has been an active artist since 1990.

ABC/Reuters

Documentary films

That Cloud Never Left review – experimental ruminations on cinema and labour

Mundane life meets magical daydreams in a West Bengal village where discarded film footage is turned into toys

Otherworldly ... That Cloud Never Left

Phuong Le
Mon 22 Mar 2021

VIDEO 

That Cloud Never Left review – experimental ruminations on cinema and labour | Documentary films | The Guardian

An artful hybrid of documentary and fiction, That Cloud Never Left zooms in on quotidian life in Daspara, a small West Bengal village where toys are made from reels of discarded film footage. The iconography is clear: these pieces of film are filled with nostalgia and longing, and now bear witness to the beauty and toil of manual labour.

On the surface, That Cloud Never Left appears structurally fragmented, even opaque. There is an opening title that states that this is a work of fiction rather than a documentary; it is actually quite cheeky, considering that narrative is not a priority here, nor are any professional actors used. Instead, the film ditches linearity, and sees the villagers in fragments: a marital dispute over finances, a mother who waits for the monsoon, a boy searching for rubies in the forest. This mix of mundane life and magical daydreams lends an otherworldliness to this little village, as if the content of the cut-up film strips has seeped into everyday life.

In visual terms, That Cloud Never Left is just as eclectic and experimental, alternating between straightforward scenes of toy-assembly with scans of the discarded strips where the images are scratched and intelligible. The sound mix contributes, too: the landscape murmurs, a static-heavy score disrupts, and the news on TV speaks of war and unrest, as well as an imminent eclipse. Out of the blue, dialogue and songs from old Hindi films sneak in.

The symphony of these elements is exhilarating enough, but there’s more to be mined. The scrap film footage travels from wealthier Indian cities to be dumped on poor villages such as Daspara for recycling, meaning That Cloud Never Left becomes something more than a stylistic exercise in experimentation and nostalgia; there’s a hard economic reality here.

That Cloud Never Left is released on 26 March on True Story.

'No more shame': the French women breaking the law to highlight femicide

 An activist who is part of Les Colleuses movement stands in front of a poster which reads: ‘I believe you’, in Paris, France, in October last year. 

Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Alarming rates of violence have inspired a poster campaign that has spread beyond France to more than 15 countries

by Kim Willsher
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 23 Mar 2021

On a weekday evening, in between coronavirus lockdowns and curfews, Camille, Natacha and Cindy are out with a bright yellow plastic bucket of glue, two large brushes and a wad of A4 paper, each sheet covered with a single letter.

The women, all in their 20s, stop on the main road of this Paris suburb by the wall of what looks like a former bank.

“This is good,” says Camille. It is the signal for a well-practised piece of choreography: Natacha glues; Camille slaps up each lettered sheet; Cindy pastes over it.

They stand back. The message, in black letters on white paper, is clear: “Stop au harcelement de rue” (stop street harassment).

Another wall, another message. Outside the municipal swimming pool it’s paste, slap, paste: “Le consentement n’est pas une option” (consent isn’t optional). On a kiosk under the awnings of the local market, paste, slap, paste: “Stop féminicide”.

Then it is up and out of there to avoid a €68 fine if caught by the police. Another successful, albeit illegal, hit-and-run poster pasting.

For the past two years, similar messages have been appearing on walls all over Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Poitiers, Lyons and other French cities. They are the work of Les Colleuses – the gluers – feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard.

Camille Lextray became a colleuse afterthe particularly brutal murder of a young woman in September 2019 . Her partner denies her murder.

“Her name was Salomé and she was only 21 when she was beaten to death. The police had been called but they treated it as a domestic and did nothing. Later, they found her body under a pile of rubbish. We put up a collage on the anniversary of her death at the request of her mother,” Lextray said.

The idea for street posters to highlight cases of femicide was dreamed up by Marguerite Stern, a former member of the feminist activist group FEMEN. Stern, then living in Marseille, was deeply shocked by the 2019 killing of Julie Douib, 34, a mother of two children, shot dead at her home by an abusive ex-partner who goes on trial in June and denies her murder.

Douib had reported the man to the police five times before her death, but no action was taken. Stern began putting up posters denouncing violence against women in Marseille, later moving to Paris where she set up a collage collective. 

Activists known as Les Colleuses paste anti-femicide posters on a wall in Paris in October last year. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

In the early days they were called “Collages Contre les Féminicides” (collages against femicide), with groups pasting up the names of women killed by their current or former partner. The street action caught the imagination of women everywhere and spread even beyond France.

“Suddenly we had people all over the place contacting us.” says Camille. “At the last count more than 200 cities, towns and villages in France had collage groups others in London and in more than 15 countries around the world.”

“Anyone can get involved. It takes 10 minutes to write a slogan on a piece of paper, it doesn’t take a lot of money or resources. It’s extremely important for women. It’s about daring to occupy the public space, about women leaving their mark in public.

“One mother had suffered conjugal violence and painted the messages with her young son, went out and stuck them up. It’s taking back control in our lives and it is liberating. No more secrets, no more shame, no more silence. We have constructed our own media platform. This is our loudspeaker.”

France has one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe. In 2019, 146 women were killed in France by a partner or ex-partner. More than 40% of the victims had already suffered violence at the hands of their partner and nearly half of those had reported it to the police.

It’s about daring to occupy the public space, about women leaving their mark in public.

Camille

The term femicide is sometimes defined as the murder of women by men but in France it generally refers to the murder of a woman by a partner, ex-partner or family member.

In 2020, the number of femicides in France fell to 90 for the year – the lowest since such statistics began to be collated 15 years ago. But Caroline De Haas, who started the feminist collective NousToutes in 2018, said that even if the numbers dropped, “nearly 100 deaths is no reason to celebrate”.

About 200,000 women in France are estimated to suffer domestic violence every year, but fewer than one in five go to the police and the problem has worsened during Covid-19 lockdowns, Natacha said.

A hotline for female victims of violence set up by the government received 45,000 calls during the first three-month lockdown last year.

End femicide: 278 dead – the hidden scandal of older women killed by men

“Nobody was prepared for the lockdowns,” Natacha said. “We are sticking up [posters] for ourselves and for the victims and to raise the issue to a wider audience. In doing so we hope we are educating people on the subject of violence done to women and minorities and creating an atmosphere for change.”

The group is fiercely critical of what it sees as the lip service paid by the Macron government on the issue. “We were full of hope: they said they would fight against sexism, and make it a big cause. But it was words and inaction and nothing has changed,” Natacha said. “We have lost confidence in the politicians. We are disillusioned. We have to change the psychology of the patriarchy.”

Camille, Natacha and Cindy glueing up posters 

in Paris demanding an end to femicides. 

Photograph: Kim Willsher/The Guardian

The government responded to the outcry at the alarming levels of femicide in 2019 with new legislation including 40 emergency measures such as electronic bracelets to keep violent abusers from approaching their victims.

Critics say the rules, which took effect last July, are being implemented too slowly.

Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister at the interior ministry, was formerly the country’s equalities minister. She told the Guardian combatting violence against women was a government priority.

“Of course there is progress to be made in France in terms of the rights of women. The subject remains a priority for the government. We must always do more as long as violence exists,” Schiappa said.

Data collected by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, for 2017 suggested that Romania and Northern Irelandhad the highest number of women killed by partners as a percentage of the population. But in terms of overall femicides, Eurostat found that Germany and France had the worst records. According to the UK femicide census, a woman is killed by a man who is or was her intimate partner every four days and the rate of fatal violence against women in Britain has shown no signs of decline since the organisation started monitoring in 2009.

If we really want to tackle femicide, we need to track violent men

There’s no way to monitor the stalkers and domestic abusers whose behaviour can escalate to murder. It’s time for a register

A woman passenger holding a Reclaim these Streets placard 

in London on 14 March. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Sirin Kale
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

In the immediate wake of the tragic killing of Sarah Everard, parties across the political spectrum called for tougher action on male violence against women. The government had the political capital to do something. Instead, it promised us more street lights, some undercover police officers and proposals to record misogyny as a hate crime – symbolic policies that do little to reduce violence against women. After half a decade reporting on the issue, it should not be surprising to me that the government views female lives with such contempt. And yet somehow it is.

There is a policy that would save lives: a stalkers register. Proposed by the anti-stalking charity Paladin, a stalkers register would be a national database of men convicted of stalking and domestic violence. The government would not need to build a new database from scratch – we already have the system in place to track these often serial offenders. It would simply be a matter of adding such men to the violent and sex offender register (ViSOR), which is already used to keep track of sex offenders.

Crucially, these men would be monitored by police and be legally required to notify them if they were entering a new relationship. Police would then be responsible for notifying prospective partners about their offending history. (Under Clare’s law, women can ask police if their partners are convicted domestic abusers; however, the request has to be made by the woman – there is no onus on police to notify women proactively.) This is critical, because – as the criminologist Prof Jane Monckton-Smith has identified – such abusers tend to “love-bomb” their partners in the early stages of relationships, showering them with affection and romance. Early intervention is key if we are to empower women to make informed choices about whether they truly want to date violent and abusive men.

Studies have found that 83% of domestic abuse perpetrators are repeat offenders. They start off with the smaller offences, testing the waters, seeing how the police respond, and when nothing happens – in the majority of cases nothing ever happens – they are emboldened. Their offending escalates to sometimes fatal ends. The anti-stalking campaigner Zoe Dronfield was beaten and left for dead by her ex-partner after she ended their relationship. Afterwards, she found out that he’d stalked 13 other women before her. The only thing worse than being the first partner of a serial abuser is being their last. The final partner seldom survives.

It is inconceivable to me that there is no existing framework to monitor serial stalkers and domestic abusers. We track paedophiles, rightly, because such people cannot be allowed to work in our nurseries and schools. Why not also protect women and girls from abusive men? Our elected representatives agree: in 2018, the home affairs select committee backed the introduction of a stalkers register, as did the London assembly and the mayor of London in 2019. A petition to introduce a stalkers register has more than 235,000 signatures. An amendment to the domestic abuse bill, proposing the introduction of a stalkers register, is currently before the House of Lords. The amendment has just been passed, meaning that MPs could soon have the ability to vote on the proposals.

In 2018 I ran a year-long campaign at the media publication Vice, calling on the government to introduce a stalkers register to protect women and girls from serial abusers. I launched the Unfollow Me campaign because I was horrified by the case of Molly McLaren, 23, who was murdered by her stalker ex-boyfriend Joshua Stimpson in 2017. McLaren reported Stimpson, who had a history of aggressive behaviour towards women, to police before he killed her. Had police been able to check a stalkers register, they’d have seen they had a repeat offender on their hands. Instead they did almost nothing, and McLaren died in a Chatham car park.

It is obvious to me that these dangerous men need to be monitored and tracked. But, all too often, police seem apathetic about investigating reports of stalking and domestic abuse, dismissing serious crimes as the romantic overtures of a rejected suitor. Take the case of 19-year-old Shana Grice. She reported her ex-boyfriend Michael Lane to the police five times for stalking before he murdered her in 2016. Instead of investigating Lane, who had a history of abusing women, Sussex Police fined Grice £90 for wasting police time.

I have looked the families of murdered women in the eyes and seen their pain. People such as Sue and Clive Ruggles. Their daughter, Alice Ruggles, was murdered in 2016 by her stalker ex-boyfriend, Trimaan Dhillon. She was 24 years old. After Alice ended the relationship, Dhillon stalked her relentlessly. Alice called the police repeatedly about his harassment but they did almost nothing. Dhillon broke into her flat in October 2016 and slit her throat. After she died, Sue and Clive found out that a former girlfriend had taken out a restraining order against Dhillon. Had Alice known whom she was really dating, she might never have had a relationship with him. Since her death, Sue and Clive have made it their life’s work to introduce a stalkers register, to protect other women from men like Dhillon.

There are so many women like Alice, Molly, and Shana. Two women a week are killed by current or former partners in the UK. Covid has intensified many women’s experience of abuse: during lockdown, there was a 61% surge in calls and contacts to domestic abuse helplines. Last week, the Guardian reported on the case of Amy-Leanne Stringfellow, who was killed by her partner, Terence Papworth, in June 2020. Previous girlfriends had accused Papworth of extreme domestic violence. Papworth had abused a string of women, and Stringfellow was unfortunate enough to be his last. Men such as Papworth are all the same. They do not change. The only thing that changes is the women whose lives they ruin, and, ultimately, end.

The government has the ability and infrastructure to stop these men in their tracks, and yet it does not. Why won’t anyone join up the dots, and protect women and girls from these violent men?


Sirin Kale is a London-based journalist specialising in women’s rights, politics, music, lifestyle and culture

A.E. VAN VOGHT  ON THE VIOLENT MAN

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Stephen Harper "The Right Man" (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

Rio Tinto pledges to protect cultural heritage after Juukan Gorge disaster 

(DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION)


Chief executive Jakob Stausholm says he will make heritage protection be ‘felt in the hearts and minds’ of his employees

 

The Juukan Gorge site before the 2020 blast. Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm says the company’s new executive team ‘feel very accountable’ for ensuring an event like its destruction never happens again. Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation


Calla Wahlquist
@callapilla
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Rio Tinto chief executive Jakob Stausholm has pledged to make protecting cultural heritage an issue which is “felt in the hearts and minds” of his employees in an effort to avoid another Juukan Gorge-style disaster.

The mining company on Tuesday announced it would publicly report to investors on its progress on improving cultural heritage systems and renewing trust with traditional owners, as it attempts to rebuild its shattered social capital.

It will also publicly report on its progress in implementing the recommendations from a parliamentary review into the destruction of the 46,000-year-old rock shelter at Juukan Gorge, and recommendations from its own internal review.

Stausholm said the new executive team “feel very accountable” for ensuring an event like the destruction of Juukan Gorge never happens again. The incident led to the resignation of the three senior executives, including the former CEO, and prompted the chairman to step down.


'Rio is still on notice': native title groups say mining company's reshuffle is mainly PR

But Stausholm said achieving that goal required changes in the company which went “way beyond procedural”.

“It’s has to be felt in the hearts and the minds, the same way as we have built safety culture over decades,” he said in an investor briefing on Tuesday morning.

“The one big thing is to make sure that we consistently get this as a value.”
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Despite the negative publicity and heads rolling in senior management, the company reported a 20% rise in profits in 2020 and a record shareholder dividend of $9bn.

Investors have welcomed the commitment to greater transparency, which was brokered in negotiations with stakeholders including the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI), AustralianSuper, and HESTA.

HESTA CEO Debby Blakey said investors put forward “very clear requests” around disclosure and governance arrangements and said it was “pleasing that we’ve had constructive discussions with Rio Tinto that can support progress towards managing this clear financial risk for investors”.

“The steps the company has agreed to will support broader improvements in practices, disclosure and oversight urgently needed across the mining sector,” she said. “Rio is at the start of a very long process of rebuilding trust. It will require long-term commitment to deep-seated cultural change and strong frameworks and processes in place to support genuine, open and ongoing partnership with Indigenous communities, no matter who is in management or board roles.”

ACSI CEO Louise Davidson said it was “positive” to see Rio Tinto commit to work more closely with traditional owners.

“Investors will continue to engage with Rio Tinto, and other companies with cultural heritage exposures, to understand how they are managing these risks and measuring against commitments,” Davidson said.

Rio committed to establishing an Indigenous advisory group, which will work with managers and may report to board level; modernising its approach to negotiating agreements with traditionally owners to remove confidentiality clauses; and spending $50m on attracting and retaining Indigenous people to work within the business.

The company’s chief adviser of Indigenous affairs, Brad Welsh, said the number of Indigenous leaders in the organisation had doubled last year, though only from seven to 15.

Rio also committed to measuring and reporting on social impact metrics, and to disclosing and explaining to traditional owners the likely heritage impact of projects, “as part of earning back trust” .

Megan Clark, a non-executive director and chair of Rio’s sustainability committee, said changes to cultural management practices to make it an iterative process would “fundamentally change the way we do mining”.

Clark said 1,000 cultural heritage sites in the Pilbara had been reviewed in the past 10 months, with a number of sites reclassified from being cleared for mining to protected.

She said relationships between traditional owners and Rio managers and executives needed to develop beyond a business relationship into friendships, “where the communication channels are just open, and those relationships are deep and trusting so that something like this could never happen again”.

“The one thing that still sticks in my mind as I look at what happened [at Juukan Gorge] and why it happened was: where was a quick phone call, where were all of those linkages that could have stopped it at any time?” she said. “And it’s a question that still sits there … those relationships with the traditional owners, they are as important as relationships with the prime minister of the countries in which we operate or the president in those countries. And I ask myself the question do we invest the same time in those relationships?”

The National Native Title Council chief executive, Jamie Lowe, said investing in those relationships with traditional owners – “I don’t think friendships is the right word” – was essential to rebuilding trust.


'Every day it's happening': Juukan Gorge inquiry told Aboriginal heritage is commonly destroyed

“You can have an advisory body that may sit at a high level but the relationships with the traditional owners are vital because that’s literally where the work happens,” he said. “And you have seen from the Juukan Gorge inquiry that those relationships either weren’t there or weren’t respected.

“So they will be talking some flash language and having deadly plans about what it will look like, but what it will look like will depend on the personnel. The personnel that you have is crucial, that’s how you build the relationships.”

Lowe said the Indigenous advisory group would only be effective if it was given the necessary power and responsibilities.

“If it’s just a peripheral body that meets four times a year, it’s not going to cut it,” he said.

Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters 

KILLERS flock to shoot rare ibex

Conservationists fear for endangered Nubian ibex in Sudan as westerners sold permits to hunt

Two male Nubian ibexes fight in a national park in the Negev desert, Israel. The sub-species is extremely rare in Sudan and numbers are declining. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

Global development is supported by

Kaamil Ahmed

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Sudanese conservationists have accused trophy hunters of exploiting the country’s political transition to hunt the country’s unprotected rare animals.

Photographs posted online of westerners posing with the body of a rare Nubian ibex angered Sudanese wildlife campaigners this week. They called for Facebook to remove the pages of tour groups promoting such hunts.

While wildlife hunters have long come from the Gulf, Abubakr Mohammad, a biodiversity researcher, has seen a recent trend for western trophy hunters to come too, which he said could be a result of the country being more open to outsiders since the removal of Omar al-Bashir, the former president. Permits for hunting are being given out without sufficient scrutiny, says campaigners.

The Nubian ibex is considered extremely rare in Sudan and its population is classified as vulnerable and in decline, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


Donald Trump Jr killed rare endangered sheep in Mongolia with special permit

“Before this, they were not able to do it because of the government’s approach to European visitors, especially to these areas – they were considered spies.

“With this new government, the whole world comes to Sudan,” said Mohammad, who runs a popular Facebook page on biodiversity in Sudan. “They’re all taking advantage..”

Hunt Geo, which is based in Austria and promotes hunting trips around the world, released a YouTube video in December of what it said was the first hunt in Sudan in 10 years, since the secession of South Sudan. Hunt Geo posted photographs online of its customers posing with the Nubian ibex.

The photos were also shared by Kush Armaments, a Sudanese company that attracted Mohammad’s attention because he noticed it shared his posts about wildlife spots in Sudan. He feared it was then hunting in those areas.
This will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militiasMohamed al-Tayeb, singer and campaigner

Responding to anger in Sudan, Kush Armaments has deleted posts of the hunts, but they remain on Hunt Geo’s Facebook page. Neither Hunt Geo nor Kush Armaments responded to requests for comment.

Mohamed al-Tayeb, a Sudanese singer and wildlife campaigner, said Sudanese law needed to be changed to outlaw such hunts, but that there was still a problem of the companies being backed by powerful figures in the country.
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“I think it’s really difficult to change this – they are the power in Sudan, they are the people who have money and weapons. Maybe they will close one company if there is media pressure about it, but this will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militias,” said Tayeb.

Mohammad said that permits were given without enough attention to which animals were being hunted and whether rules were followed. He called for all hunting to be halted, especially as there is no clear idea about how many Nubian ibex remain in Sudan.

The IUCN said last year that the number of Nubian ibex in Sudan and neighbouring Eritrea was unknown. Mohammad said Sudan needed to update its laws to protect wildlife and write into the constitution a requirement for a body that would tasked with conservation.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli review – the mysteries of quantum mechanics

Having altered how we think about time, the physicist sets his sights on perhaps the most maddeningly difficult theory of all

A view of Helgoland, where Werner Heisenberg began 

to develop quantum mechanics in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

Ian Thomson
Tue 23 Mar 2021

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, sold more than 1m copies in English translation in 2015 and remains the world’s fastest-selling science book. In The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli illuminated the disquieting uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other tentative physics. Nobody said that post-Newtonian physics was easy, but Rovelli’s gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. Only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive again.

Rovelli’s new book, Helgoland, attempts to explain the maddeningly difficult theory of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland. It was there that the 23-year-old, stricken by hay fever, conceived of the “strangely beautiful interior” of an atom’s mathematical structure and, at a stroke, overturned the certainties of classical physics. Gone was the old idea that atoms consisted of tiny electrons that moved mechanically round heavier protons – as planets orbit the sun. Heisenberg’s intuition was that electrons moved in diffuse, cloudlike waves.

Excited, he devised mathematical tables (“matrices”) to predict the electrons’ wave mechanics. His work was soon refined by other forward-looking physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac. Quantum theory was sired out of Heisenberg’s observations and Einstein’s earlier relativity theory. Until Einstein, scientists believed in a predictable, deterministic universe – one driven by clockwork. Newton’s idea of absolute “true time” ticking relentlessly across the universe was countered by the Einstein theory that there is no single “now” but rather a multitude of “nows”. Heisenberg and his followers, more radical even than Einstein, held that we cannot know the present state of the world in full detail, but only by models of uncertainty and probability. The riddle of quantum theory may ultimately be beyond our tentative, Earth-bound comprehension, says Rovelli; but Newtonian mechanics, though far from obsolete, can no longer account for every aspect of the world we live in.

‘A deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit’: Carlo Rovelli. 

Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images

Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors and MRI scanners.

Fortified with reflections on Vedanta Hinduism (the author has a hippyish past), Buddhism, Dante, Empedocles and Democritus, Rovelli applies quantum theory to various philosophies. Humans exist by virtue of their continuous interactions with one another; so, too, do atoms and electrons. As a happy integration of science, literature and philosophy, Helgoland owes something to the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi, whose literary-scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, reached the UK bestseller list in 1985 alongside Dick Francis. Rovelli’s book displays a very Levi-like enthusiasm for abstruse facts of all kinds. (The German director FW Murnau, we learn, had filmed parts of Nosferatu on Helgoland in 1922 a couple of years before Heisenberg arrived.)


Carlo Rovelli: ‘Time travel is just what we do every day…’

Undeniably, the book is hard going at times. (“I hope I have not lost my reader,” Rovelli says at one point.) The American physicist Richard Feynman presumably meant it when he said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics”. In his trademark lucid prose, Rovelli does his best to explain why this might be so. Known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander, Rovelli is a deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit who sees no incompatibility between physics and philosophy – only mutual attraction.

Science, in Rovelli’s estimation, is not about certainty; it is informed by a radical distrust of certainty. What is real? What exists? Helgoland, beautifully translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is the beginning of wisdom in these things.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is published by Allen Lane (£20).

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli review 

– a curious paean to science

The theoretical physicist untangles seven topics in a short book that works best when it doesn’t delve too deep

Carlo Rovelli: 'his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks'.

 Photograph: Tony Reed/Splash News/Corbis

Nicola Davis
@NicolaKSDavis
Sun 11 Oct 2015

When I was a kid, my mother would sneak brussels sprouts on to my plate. I hated those revolting little orbs of bitterness – but Mother was wily. “It’s only a small one,” she’d say, as though diminutive size suddenly rendered the unpalatable acceptable.

I suspect Carlo Rovelli would get on well with my mother. He too is attempting to woo a tough crowd with a portion of something they find hard to swallow: physics. And he’s opting for a similar approach, issuing what JD Salinger would no doubt term a “pretty skimpy-looking book”, just 78 pages long, no doubt hoping his delicate touch will stir up a taste for the subject.

Born of a series of articles in an Italian newspaper and covering just seven topics, Rovelli’s book conveys a simple truth: physics is beautiful and awe-inspiring, its mysteries there for us all to muse upon. And his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks. Elementary particles, he writes, “combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties and of the night sky studded with stars”.

Despite its austere title, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is no primer for the budding student, rather a curious paean to science. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the cosmos are covered, but other bastions of the lecture hall, from optics to condensed matter, get the boot in favour of loop quantum gravity and consciousness. For each, Rovelli unpicks the basics before revealing the loose ends scientists have yet to tidy up.

And there is plenty of food for thought. “The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat,” explains Rovelli, deftly leading to the sort of existential ponderings more commonly fuelled by late nights and a bottle of red. “What is the ‘present’?” he asks, pointing out “in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now’”. The flow of time, he implies, is simply a matter of statistics.


Seven brief lessons on physics - podcast

Rovelli has a rare knack for conveying the top line of scientific theories in clear and compelling terms without succumbing to the lure of elaborate footnotes. “Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves,” he writes, neatly summarising the ramifications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.His attempts at closing the distance between himself (a leading theoretical physicist) and his readers (who, he admits, are likely to “know little or nothing about modern science”) are perhaps less successful, describing his student digs as a “refuge from the tedium of university classes in Bologna” in the manner of a politician angling to be judged “of the people” by hanging out at a local pub. And Rovelli occasionally comes a cropper in his explanations, complacently slipping in references and terminology unlikely to ring bells with his readers. Einstein’s “box of light” thought experiment is bandied about to underline the great man’s scepticism of the later developments of quantum theory, 

but with no explanation of its thrust, the passage merely frustrates.

On the whole his spartan offering is a breath of fresh air. However, it remains to be seen if his pared-back approach could be married with a more in-depth take on physics. Capturing the imagination of a reader is one challenge, but delving deeper while retaining an accessible air is quite another: Richard Feynman, Rovelli is not. Still, perhaps his shorter form is for the best – in exploring the link between physics and the “self”, Rovelli’s occasionally florid tone is given full flight. “Amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes,” he writes, throwing measured enthusiasm out the window.

Rovelli’s approach might be refreshing, but it is still an acquired taste.

Covid-19 has shown humanity how close we are to the edge

Toby Ord

To prevent catastrophe, governments must transform our resilience to climate breakdown, AI and engineered pandemics

Eagle Creek wildfire, close to Beacon Rock golf course, Washington, US, in 2017: ‘We need to transform resilience to the full range of extreme risks we face. We don’t know what the next crisis will be.’ Photograph: Reuters

Tue 23 Mar 2021

It is profoundly difficult to grapple with risks whose stakes may include the global collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity. The pandemic has shattered our illusions of safety and reminded us that despite all the progress made in science and technology, we remain vulnerable to catastrophes that can overturn our entire way of life. These are live possibilities, not mere hypotheses, and our governments will have to confront them.

As Britain emerges from Covid-19, it could find itself at the forefront of the response to future disasters. The government’s recent integrated review, Britain’s taking of the G7 presidency and the Cop26 climate conference, which will be hosted in Glasgow later this year, are all occasions to address global crises. But in order to ensure that the UK really is prepared, we need to first identify the biggest risks that we face in the coming decades.

Technological progress since the Industrial Revolution has ultimately increased the risk of the most extreme events, putting humanity’s future at stake through nuclear war or climate breakdown. One technology that may pose the greatest threat this century is artificial intelligence (AI) – not the current crop of narrowly intelligent networks, but more mature systems with a general intelligence that surpasses our own. AI pioneers from Alan Turing to Stuart Russell have argued that unless we develop the means to control such systems or to align them with our values, we will find ourselves at their mercy.

By my estimation, the chances of such a risk causing an existential catastrophe in the next century are about one in six: like Russian roulette. If I’m even roughly right about the scale of these threats, then this is an unsustainable level of risk. We cannot survive many centuries without transforming our resilience.

The government’s recent integrated review highlighted the importance of these “catastrophic-impact threats”, paying attention to four of the most extreme risks; the threats from AI, global pandemics, the climate crisis and nuclear annihilation. It rightly noted the crucial role that AI systems will play in modern warfare, but was silent about the need to ensure that the AI systems we deploy are developed safely and aligned with human values. It underscored the likelihood of a successful biological attack in the coming years, but could have said more about the role science and technology can play in protecting us. And although it mentioned the threat of other countries increasing and diversifying their nuclear capabilities, the decision to expand the UK’s own nuclear arsenal is both disappointing and counterproductive.

To really transform our resilience to extreme risks, we need to go further. First, we must urgently address biosecurity. As well as the possibility of a new pandemic spilling over from animals, there is the even worse prospect of an engineered pandemic, designed by foreign states or non-state actors, with a combination of lethality, transmissibility, and vaccine resistance beyond any natural pathogen. With the rapid improvements in biotechnology, the number of parties who could create such a weapon is only growing.

To meet this risk, the UK should launch a new national centre for biosecurity, as has been recommended by the joint committee on the National Security Strategy and my own institute at Oxford University. This centre would counter the threat of biological weapons and laboratory escapes, develop effective defences against biological threats and foster talent and collaboration across the UK biosecurity community. There is a real danger that the legacy of Covid-19 does not go beyond preparing for the next naturally occurring pandemic, neglecting the possibilities of a human-made pandemic that keep experts up at night.

Second, the UK needs to transform its resilience to the full range of extreme risks we face. We don’t know what the next crisis on the scale of Covid-19 will be, so we need to be prepared for all such threats. The UK’s existing risk management system, within the Cabinet Office’s civil contingencies secretariat, is strong in many ways, but it only addresses risks that pose a clear danger in the next two years – making it impossible to adequately evaluate dangers that would take more than two years to prepare for, such as those posed by advanced AI. We also suffer from the lack of a chief risk officer, or equivalent position, who could take sole responsibility for the full range of extreme threats across government.

Time is running short – but we can get a grip on the climate crisis
Alok Sharma

Third, we need to put extreme risks on the international agenda. These are global problems that require global solutions. The legal scholar Guglielmo Verdirame argues that while the climate emergency and nuclear weapons are covered by at least some international law, there is no global legal regime in force that grasps the gravity of other extreme risks, or that has the necessary breadth to deal with the changing landscape of such risks. The G7 presidency is the perfect opportunity to remedy this. Rather than settle for a treaty on pandemic preparedness, as is being proposed by the prime minister, the UK could set its ambitions higher, and lead the call for a new treaty on risks to the future of humanity, with a series of UN security council resolutions to place this new framework on the strongest possible legal footing.

There is an understandable tendency for even the most senior people in government to see extreme risks as too daunting to take on. But there are concrete steps that the UK can take to transform its resilience to these threats, and there is no better time to do so than now. Covid-19 has given us the chance to make decades’ worth of progress in a matter of months. We must seize this opportunity.

Toby Ord is a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University, and author of

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

Amazon is a disaster for workers. Nomadland glosses over that
Jessa Crispin

The film doesn’t glamorize life at an Amazon warehouse. But it’s undeniably useful to the corporation to have a prestigious film to give political cover

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Amazon is putting cameras in the trucks of its delivery drivers, monitors on the bodies of its warehouse workers, and security cameras both inside and outside its facilities.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

The new movie Nomadland may have received six nominations for the Academy Awards this year, but it’s also been met with its fair share of controversy. Telling the story of Fern (played by Frances McDormand), a woman who lives an itinerant life, moving from state to state to follow work, sleeping in her van modified into cramped living quarters, the depiction is, some critics say, too cheery. She lives this life because she chooses to, hitting the road after a tragedy, not because she has to. And the work she does supports her lifestyle and she wants for nothing more.

Comfort food: the Oscars nominations are not nearly as radical as they think they are
Peter Bradshaw

Nomadland shows Fern working in an Amazon warehouse; the makers of the film received permission from Amazon to film on location. The work that Fern does looks tedious and difficult, but let’s just say there are no labor violations shown on screen. Fern does this menial labor to remain true to herself and the life she wants to lead, and Amazon essentially funds her authenticity.
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Meanwhile, in the real world, Amazon is putting cameras in the trucks of its delivery drivers, monitors on the bodies of its warehouse workers, and security cameras inside and outside its facilities. It creates heat maps to detect if too many employees are gathering in the same place at the same time to discourage both fraternization and discussions of forming a union. And the company touts all of this, as effective methods for boosting productivity and profit margins.

The horrors of working at Amazon warehouse facilities have been circulating for some time. Employees, not granted long enough bathroom breaks that allow them to travel all the way from their position to the facilities and back, have reported peeing in bottles. They have said they are sometimes forced to stand in line after work for security screenings to make sure no one is smuggling out product, time they are not compensated for. Warehouses are often not temperature controlled, meaning employees have to work in sweltering conditions in the summer and in cold temperatures in the winter.

POST MODERN TAYLORISM
But the increased surveillance is a new level of indignity. The pandemic has increased the volume of packages being handled by Amazon delivery drivers, in some regions doubling their workload. Workers have complained about having to work at backbreaking speeds to meet their quotas, about injuries and exhaustion. These workers are often contractors, meaning they are working without the protections or benefits that come with full-time employment.

Instead of giving their overloaded workers a pay raise to match the increased labor, or hiring them full-time so they can receive health insurance to cover their repetitive strain injuries, Amazon has responded by putting cameras in the delivery vans to carefully monitor performance. The cameras attach to the ceiling of the van, with one lens pointed directly at the driver’s face. Now if a driver cuts corners in order to meet their impossible quotas for the day – running a stop sign here, peeing in a bottle to avoid having to stop to find a public restroom there – it will be reported immediately to Amazon headquarters. Even things like U-turns, braking too quickly, and other minor traffic issues are automatically reported without notifying the driver. Human beings are being expected to reach the performance levels of machines, and to go without basic human needs like food, bathroom breaks, sleep and leisure time.

Human beings are being expected to reach the performance levels of machines, and to go without basic human needs

Amazon trots out the usual answers when questioned about the increased monitoring: they are concerned with safety and fulfillment. They have delivery promises to keep, as their Prime customers expect their orders to magically appear on their doorsteps the day after, or even hours later, their orders are made. It’s about customer satisfaction and keeping the streets safe. (It’s not clear how Amazon’s failed plan to spy on its employees’ social media presence, including communications and posts made off hours, was about customer satisfaction, but I’m sure they will figure out a way to explain it eventually.)

We can debate whether Nomadland deserves the criticism it is receiving – it is, after all, a fictional film and not a documentary about the labor conditions of the working class. But it’s undeniably useful to Amazon right now to have a prestigious film providing cover for its abuses. Then again, the working conditions of its employees and contract workers have been well-known and reported for years, but the company keeps increasing its market share. Amazon doubled its profit during the pandemic, and the gap in pay between its executives and its warehouse workers continues to grow. Also the company doesn’t pay taxes. Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, saw his personal net worth grow a staggering $75bn in 2020.

Amazon can get away with it because there is an underclass of insecure workers who rely on even this underpaid, dangerous work to make ends meet. It’s not the narrative failures of one film, or even the moral failings of one CEO, that got us here; it’s the inevitable result of a society which wants to squeeze every dollar and every hour of productivity out of human beings to benefit the few. Each worker who gets fired because they ran one too many stop signs can easily be replaced by another desperate soul.


Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist

Italians urged to boycott Amazon to support day of strikes

About 40,000 logistical workers hold national walkout over working conditions

Amazon employees demonstrate in front of the company’s premises in Brandizzo, near Turin. Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Mon 22 Mar 2021 14.28 GMT

Italian consumers were urged by unions to refrain from buying from Amazon for the day on Monday as about 40,000 of the online shopping giant’s logistical workers held a national strike over working conditions.

It is the first walkout in Italy to affect Amazon’s entire supply chain and involves warehouse and logistical hub workers as well as drivers provided by third-party services.

The 24-hour strike was called by the Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uiltrasporti unions after negotiations over job contract revisions between the workers’ representatives and the US company broke down.

According to the unions, Amazon’s delivery network in Italy depends on 40,000 workers, including those working for the company’s own logistical unit, which employs the majority of its 9,500 staff who are on full-time contracts.

The main demands relate to workloads, long working hours for drivers, results-linked bonuses, lunch vouchers and stabilising temporary contracts. Unions also argue that workers ought to have been paid an allowance for having continued to work during the coronavirus pandemic, especially as the period marked a boom for Amazon orders.

“The strike is necessary because the workers are exhausted,” said Michele De Rose, the national secretary of Filt Cgil. De Rose added that delivery drivers “work 44 hours a week, and very often for the entire month, following the indications of an algorithm that does not understand work-life balance nor the traffic times of our cities”.

The workers’ and unions appealed to consumers to stop buying from Amazon for the day. “The people who receive the service are those we ask for solidarity, so that the service continues to be carried out in the best possible way,” the workers wrote in a statement.

In a letter to customers, Mariangela Marseglia, Amazon’s manager in Italy, wrote that the company “respects the right of everyone to express their position”, adding that the company “puts our employees and those of third-party suppliers first” by offering them “a safe, modern and inclusive work environment, with competitive wages that are among the highest in the sector”