Friday, September 03, 2021

The political consequences of Kenney's 4th-wave vacation

Alberta premier hasn't been seen by the public in weeks, leaving a vacuum filled with critics and concern

Premier Jason Kenney addresses Albertans about COVID-19 on May 5, 2021, not long before his government declared the province 'open for business' for summer. The premier hasn't been seen by the public in weeks as a fourth wave grips the province. (Andrew Peloso/VEK/Alberta Newsroom)

In Alberta, COVID-19 hospitalizations are up, case counts are up, and anxiety, too. Schools are reopening, some workplaces are returning, vaccinations are lagging. "Best Summer Ever" hats, meanwhile, are still for sale on the United Conservative Party website. 

And there sits an empty podium. 

Taking a casual stroll through social media in Alberta these days, it's hard to ignore a common question: Where is Jason Kenney? Why has the premier been silent in public since Aug. 9, as the delta-driven fourth wave of the pandemic surged? 

The absence appears, for all intents and purposes, to be a direct refutation of everything that's known about communications in a crisis: Get out front, be clear, calm people down, empathize, never leave a vacuum. 

But does it matter? 

Without a guiding voice, citizens, businesses and organizations are left to fill a void, with their own policies and procedures, their own personal decisions or their own misinformation. There are many questions that have been left unanswered in the absence, including the rationale for lifting almost all COVID-19 restrictions this summer. 

Critics of the government have also filled the space left by the premier, ministers and the chief medical officer of health and the message has spiralled well out of the government's control. 

So why then has the premier been missing in action?

Where is Kenney?

Kenney's office says he was simply on a well-deserved vacation and that he was in constant contact with officials. On Wednesday, the office said he had returned to work. It's not known where the premier was.

It was a similar argument laid out by Finance Minister Travis Toews on Tuesday as he spoke to reporters after presenting the province's fiscal update. 

Kenney's last public appearance was 23 days ago, on Aug. 9, when he announced an expansion to the Labatt's brewing plant in Edmonton expected to create 25 jobs. (Alberta Newsroom)

"There has been communication, daily communication around the pandemic and I have full confidence in our chief medical officer of health and our health minister to, at the appropriate time, make themselves available for the press," he said.

"Look, we're in the fourth wave at this point in time. The delta variant is very contagious. Cases are going up. That wasn't unexpected at this point in time."

Kenney's office has not yet responded to questions for this article.

It's hard to argue with the need for a vacation. The premier is not known to be lazy and the pace of the pandemic would be gruelling for any leader. Give the guy a break. 

But it's also hard to understand the timing of it all, or why there hasn't been a minister who stepped up to answer questions for the premier. 

In an article on crisis communication and COVID for doctors published last year by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the authors argued that emotional responses to pandemic public health measures require a steady communicative hand.

As the public tires of uncertainty tied to a novel virus, that becomes even more important. 

"This uncertainty can again increase anxiety, stress and fear, causing the public to dismiss risk altogether, or become angry about mitigation strategies," they wrote. 

"Communicating actionable steps for the public to take can help to reduce this anxiety and fear by increasing a sense of agency and personal control."

Without a guiding hand, the vacuum gets filled.

Crisis communication and the vacuum

In the absence of briefings or public appearances by either Kenney or the chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, a group called ProtectOurProvince, which includes physicians critical of the government's pandemic response, has sprung up to offer regular updates. 

Hinshaw has not made a public appearance since Aug. 13, when she delayed the province's plans to lift testing, tracing and isolation measures until at least Sept. 27. 

"We really don't have very far to go before the [health-care] system is completely overloaded, not just because of the number of cases but because of burnout," Dr. Ilan Schwartz of ProtectOurProvince said Monday. 

"I've never seen my colleagues in the ICU more despondent in the last week … in part because this wave is entirely preventable."

Dr. Joe Vipond, who has been critical of the Alberta government's COVID-19 plan, gives a speech to supporters gathered in front of the Foothills hospital. He is part of a group of doctors that have started regular COVID briefings. (Rachel Maclean/CBC)

It's not the kind of message a government would usually allow to dominate the headlines without a response. 

It's also just one side of the coin. 

"The thing is, their absence is not just leaving a void with the pro-vaccination people, it is also leaving a void with the anti-vaccination people," said Janet Brown, a Calgary-based pollster who runs Janet Brown Opinion Research.

She points to the City of Edmonton bringing back a mask mandate and the Calgary Flames requiring proof of vaccination for spectators as two examples of changes being implemented without the province. 

"I mean, if I'm an anti-vaxxer, am I happy that Jason Kenney is not responding to that?" she said.

The opening for critics is especially hard to understand in the context of who Kenney is. 

"Everything I know about politics and Jason Kenney is that Jason Kenney loves the battle, right?" said David Taras, professor of communications studies at Calgary's Mount Royal University.  

"He loves this smoke of war, right? He loves to be engaged and he loves the headlines. And not to be there? Not to be on the field of battle? Very strange."

That's not to say there isn't plenty of speculation as to why.

Why?

Sifting through the theories as to why the premier has been so quiet, some percolate to the top. Chief among them is that Kenney is so unpopular and controversial at this time that either he is maintaining, or has been asked to maintain, a low profile during the tight federal election campaign. 

Kenney has held the lowest approval rating of any premier throughout much of the pandemic and the UCP has trailed the NDP of late in both polls and fundraising.

Brown argues the downside of that keep-away strategy for Kenney far outweighs any positive impact it could have.

There has been speculation that Jason Kenney, right, is keeping a low profile to boost the chances of Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O'Toole, left, during a tight federal election campaign. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press, Chris Schwarz/Government of Alberta)

Taras says he can't account for what goes on within the federal Conservative Party, but there would likely be people who would want Kenney to stay out of the picture. Or perhaps Kenney is worried about internal ideological battles within his own UCP.

"The only logic that I can think of is that they don't know what to do, that they're paralyzed," said Taras.

"That they've just sort of trapped themselves in a series of decisions. That he can't get out of that. That he's played his cards poorly, that he's lost the public trust and doesn't know how to regain it."

In June, shortly before his government removed most public health restrictions, Kenney said they did not expect to see a scenario where case counts rose dramatically. His government opened quickly, removed restrictions ahead of any other province and pushed hard to turn the page on the pandemic. 

"If we see any unforeseen circumstances, we will respond to those in due course," he said in June. 

The lack of response and the perception his government is paralyzed could have political consequences for the leader and his party.

The consequences

Brown hasn't conducted any recent polls she can point to that might indicate the impact of Kenney's vacation, but she says she conducted focus groups on Monday night and nobody had anything positive to say about the premier. 

"I was hearing really, really harsh language," she said. 

"But what was so surprising was I was hearing harsh language from people who I would have, in another period in time, expected a more sympathetic tone toward the premier and a conservative party."

It's a snapshot that fits into a larger picture of a party and a leader that are struggling to maintain the support that launched them into government in 2019. 

These are the Best Summer Ever Hats being sold on the United Conservative Party's website for a 'limited time only.' (unitedconservative.ca)

Politics is, after all, a profession of self-promotion and image control. When things get tough, the leader appears with sleeves rolled up, ideally with a hint of crust in the eyes to suggest a sleepless night of policy debates.

When critics attack, you refute, you fight, you defend or demur, but you try to control the message. 

In the middle of a pandemic, you speak to the citizens impacted by every uptick in cases.

Without those responses, the message gets away from you and building trust becomes increasingly difficult.  

"For a government to have gone silent for three weeks, in the middle of a health crisis is ... I can't even come up with a parallel that's even close," said Brown. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Drew Anderson is a web journalist at CBC Calgary. Like almost every journalist working today, he's won a few awards. He's also a third-generation Calgarian. You can follow him on Twitter @drewpanderson. Contact him in confidence at drew.anderson@cbc.ca. Signal contact upon request. CBC Secure Drop: www.cbc.ca/securedrop/


Welcome back to your political problems, Jason Kenney

Twenty-three days.

That’s how long Albertans went without seeing their premier, Jason Kenney, in the flesh as a 4th wave of COVID hit Alberta.

Then suddenly, without any advance warning, Kenney appeared live on Facebook Wednesday night where he took selected questions sent in online from the public.

He made no apology for being away so long, saying he had been on vacation recharging his batteries. He scoffed at critics who complained he has been in hiding since August 9 when he made his last public appearance – and mockingly pointed out he was “hiding in plain view” Wednesday by being on Facebook Live.

Mind you, he could pick and choose the questions on Facebook where he didn’t have to deal with irritating journalists who have a habit of asking followup questions.

Kenney said the 4th wave is a “wave of the unvaccinated” and the COVID Delta variant tends to attack the unvaccinated elderly and although some children might be getting sick, none have died.

You have to think his performance isn’t going to placate his critics.

Kenney’s whereabouts have been the topic of rumour and speculation for weeks.

His office had announced he was on a two-week-long vacation. Considering that Kenney disappeared August 9 – more than three weeks ago –  it would seem time runs at a different pace for Kenney than for the rest of us.

With apologies to Einstein, call it the Special Theory of Political Relativity, where even reality moves differently.

Kenney seemed to be living in an alternative world where Alberta’s economy opened “for good” on July 1, where Albertans have enjoyed their “best summer ever,” where there is no worrying fourth wave of COVID, and where nobody is wondering where in heck their premier disappeared to.

Either that, or Kenney was so painfully aware that, in his rush to drop restrictions and open the economy two months ago, he managed to launch a fourth wave in Alberta that is, per capita, the worst in the country. In that scenario he was in hiding figuring out how to explain himself to Albertans.

At the same time, he’s become so politically toxic for Conservatives across the country that Erin O’Toole and the Conservative Party of Canada would happily launch the premier into orbit for the duration of the federal election campaign.

A few of Kenney’s cabinet colleagues have made appearances, including Finance Minister Travis Toews who on Tuesday announced government revenues are projected to be up by $11 billion this year – and the deficit is projected to drop by almost $8 billion.

The good news is oil prices are up. The bad news is the Alberta government continues to rely on volatile oil prices to save the day.

Being the only cabinet minister available, Toews couldn’t avoid questions from reporters about why neither Kenney, nor Health Minister Tyler Shandro, nor the province’s medical officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, has held a news conference in weeks to explain the government’s COVID plan. In the face of an information vacuum, municipalities and school boards have been forced to come up with their own plans.

The City of Edmonton, for example, is re-invoking a mandatory mask mandate for indoor public spaces on Friday.

“We have not kept anybody in the dark,” said Toews, who pointed out Hinshaw has been issuing regular tweets updating Covid numbers. But Twitter hardly seems like a suitable means of communicating with the public when 1,000 people a day are contracting COVID. More than 400 are in hospital and more than 100 of those are in ICU.

Yes, everyone is entitled to a vacation — including Kenney, Shandro, and Hinshaw, who’ve been front and centre for the past 18 months. But it beggars belief to think they couldn’t have nominated a deputy to hold news conferences to take questions and provide answers.

Kenney’s absence from the federal campaign is no doubt frustrating for him, especially when he loves to bash Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, but it is an understandable tactic when Trudeau is eager to use the unpopular Kenney as a whipping boy and a stand-in for O’Toole.

The good news for the federal Conservatives who, when the campaign began, faced losing four seats in Alberta (two in Edmonton and two in Calgary) to a relatively popular Liberal party. Now, with Trudeau’s prospects faltering nationally and O’Toole’s chances blossoming, Liberals could be completely shut out of Alberta as they were in 2019.

However, Kenney’s lengthy absence during the fourth wave of the pandemic will be more difficult for him to justify, and could further erode the public’s confidence in a premier whose popularity has fallen from a high of 60 per cent in 2019 to about 30 per cent now.

Kenney is back in the office and speaking to the public – but in a carefully crafted appearance online.

He has yet to face the news media who tend to be more difficult to handle than written questions on Facebook.

And he has yet to face the ballooning problems plaguing Alberta as the province is hit yet again by the worst COVID wave in Canada.

CORPORATIONS IN SPACE
Rocket 'terminated' in fiery explosion over Pacific Ocean


VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — A privately designed, unmanned rocket built to carry satellites was destroyed in an explosive fireball after suffering an “anomaly" off the California coast during its first attempt at reaching Earth's orbit.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket was “terminated" over the Pacific Ocean shortly after its 6:59 p.m. Thursday liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, according to a base statement. Video from the San Luis Obispo Tribune showed the explosion.

Firefly said an “anomaly” occurred during the first-stage ascent that “resulted in the loss of the vehicle” about two minutes, 30 seconds into the flight. Vandenberg said a team of investigators will try to determine what caused the failure.

The rocket was carrying a payload called DREAM, or the Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission. It consisted of items from schools and other institutions, including small satellites and several demonstration spacecraft.

“While we did not meet all of our mission objectives, we did achieve a number of them: successful first stage ignition, liftoff of the pad, progression to supersonic speed, and we obtained a substantial amount of flight data," Firefly said in a statement. The information will be applied to future missions.





A rocket launched by Firefly Aerospace, the latest entrant in the New Space sector, is seen exploding minutes after lifting off from the central California coast on Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The Alpha rocket was "terminated" over the Pacific Ocean shortly after its 6:59 p.m. liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, according to a base statement. (Len Wood/For The Santa Maria Times via AP)

Austin, Texas-based Firefly is developing various launch and space vehicles, including a lunar lander. Its Alpha rocket was designed to target the growing market for launching small satellites into Earth orbit.

Standing 95 feet (26 meters) high, the two-stage Alpha is designed to carry up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload into low orbit. The company wants to be capable of launching Alphas twice a month. Launches would have a starting price of $15 million, according to Firefly.

Firefly will have to catch up with two Long Beach, California-based companies that are ahead in the small satellite launch sector.

Rocket Lab has put 105 satellites into orbit with multiple launches from a site in New Zealand and is developing another launch complex in the U.S.

Virgin Orbit has put 17 satellites into space with two successful flights of its air-launched LauncherOne rocket, which is released from beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747.

The Associated Press

Firefly Aerospace rocket explodes minutes after first launch


Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket completes a test firing in Cedar Park, Texas, in October. Photo courtesy of Firefly Aerospace

Sept. 3 (UPI) -- Texas-based Firefly Aerospace's first rocket launch attempt ended in an explosion minutes after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night.

Videos and photos posted online showed an orange fireball about two minutes after liftoff of the Firefly Alpha rocket at 9:59 p.m. EDT. White smoke trailed as a piece of debris as it fell into the Pacific Ocean.


A Firefly Alpha rocket, built by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night. Photo courtesy of Firefly Aerospace

The U.S. Space Force terminated the flight after a problem that wasn't immediately known or disclosed, according to a Space Force news release. Such flight terminations are done to prevent rockets from flying outside the designated launch path.

The announcement also said debris could be floating in the ocean and may wash ashore.

"A team of investigators has determined that any debris from the rocket should be considered unsafe," according to the release.

The company acknowledged the incident, which it called an anomaly, quickly on Twitter, and posted a statement.

"While it's too early to draw conclusions as to the root cause, we will be diligent in our investigation," Firefly Aerospace said.

The rocket had been carrying experiments for Firefly and for several universities.

Despite losing the rocket, the company said it gained data about the rocket as it reached supersonic speed. Alpha, at 95 feet tall, is designed to place payloads into orbit.


Firefly, founded in 2014, is led by CEO Tom Markusic, a rocket propulsion scientist who worked for NASA, Elon Musk's SpaceXJeff BezosBlue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.
World's largest carbon capture plant will soon operate in Iceland

Climeworks, a company that owns 14 direct air capture facilities across the globe, is set to launch its largest plant to date on September 8th.


Isabella O'Malley 9 hrs ago

"This will be the largest direct air capture and storage plant on Earth"

The plant, named Orca, is being built in Hellisheidi, Iceland and the company says that it will be the largest direct air capture and storage plant in existence.

Orca is estimated to capture 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year and the company says it will be the world’s biggest climate-positive facility. Carbfix, an Icelandic company that converts carbon dioxide into stone underground, will permanently store the captured carbon in the ground.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkClimeworks says that Orca will become the world's biggest climate-positive facility to date. (Climeworks)

Orca’s eight collector containers are sustainably powered by the geothermal Hellisheidi Power Station and use a two-step process to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

A fan draws air into the collector and then a highly selective filter material captures carbon dioxide until it is full. The collector is then closed and its contents are heated to a temperature between 80–100°C, which concentrates and purifies the carbon dioxide before it is permanently stored.

Carbfix mixes this concentrated carbon dioxide with hot water and then pumps it deep below the Earth’s surface where it reacts with basalt rock and slowly turns into stone over a period of several years.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkCarbon dioxide is turned into stone that will be stored permanently underground. (Carbfix)

“Orca demonstrates that Climeworks is able to scale carbon dioxide removal capacity by a factor of around 80 in 3–4 years. These developments will lead to several million tons of direct air capture and storage capacity by the end of this decade,” the company states on their website.

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that carbon capture technology will be needed to mitigate severe impacts from climate change. The IPCC says removing carbon from the atmosphere through technology can reduce global warming, reverse surface-level ocean acidification, and influence water availability and quantity, food production, and biodiversity levels.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkThe geothermal Hellisheidi Power Station in Iceland. (ON Power)

Even if all greenhouse gas emissions ceased today, atmospheric temperatures will still continue to rise because the emissions that have already been released will linger for hundreds of years. This is why experts say that carbon capture technology will be essential for removing historic emissions.

While the world waits in anticipation for further development and deployment of carbon capture technology, scientists say that expanding natural carbon sinks, such as forests, are essential for protecting the environment and the planet’s ability to manage greenhouse gases.

Thumbnail credit: Climeworks
'Surreal': Armed Taliban watch over Afghan news host as he delivers live broadcast
Devika Desai 
© Provided by National Post 
The video shows two armed militants standing behind the host as he delivers his on-air broadcast.

Armed Taliban militants stormed an Afghan television news station and watched over the host during an on-air broadcast.

A video, shared by BBC host Yalda Hakim on Twitter Aug. 29, shows two armed militants standing behind the host as he reads the news and conducts a debate during his programme ‘Pardaz’ on Peace Studio, an Afghan TV network.


“This is what a political debate now looks like on Afghan TV, Taliban foot soldiers watching over the host,” Hakim explained in her caption. “The presenter talks about the collapse of the Ghani govt & says the Islamic Emirate says the Afghan people should not to be afraid.”

“Surreal,” she wrote.

A separate photo posted by Zaki Daryabi, the editor-in-chief of Etilaatroz, an Afghan investigative newspaper, shows the host sitting next to a group of armed Taliban militants, apparently engaging them in conversation on-air.




“This is what @Etilaatroz can’t accept. If so, we will stop our work,” tweeted Daryabi, who last year won Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption 2020 Award.

Hakim’s video has since gone viral on Twitter, with more than 800,000 views since being posted and over 3,000 retweets.

Despite the Taliban’s assurances of a moderate rule that ensures freedom for its women and journalists, more accounts of their brutality and control on the ground have emerged everyday.

The video follows after Afghan female journalist Beheshta Arghand said she fled the country with her family, after being the first female journalist to interview the Taliban on live television.

She told Reuters that two days after Kabul had fallen into the control of the Taliban, militants had showed up at her television studio, unannounced, asking to be interviewed.

“I was shocked, I lost my control … I said to myself that maybe they came to ask why did I come to the studio,” she said.

Days after the interview, she found out that the Taliban had told local media to stop talking about their takeover and their rule. They ordered her employer to enforce the use of a hijab — a scarf closely covering women’s heads while leaving their face uncovered — and banned female anchor at television stations.

With the help of her activist contact, Malala Yousafzai, she fled the country with her family to Qatar.
Engine No. 1 takes climate fight to other big oil companies after underdog win at Exxon
Hannah Miao 8 hrs ago


Activist firm Engine No. 1 after winning three board seats at Exxon is meeting with other oil companies in its climate change fight, a source familiar told CNBC's David Faber.

The hedge fund ha
s spoken with executives of several different oil corporations including Chevron, the source familiar told CNBC.

Engine No. 1 may not necessarily target Chevron in its next challenge, or target any company at all, according to the source.

© Provided by CNBC A view of the ExxonMobil Baton Rouge Refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, May 15, 2021.

Activist firm Engine No. 1 after winning three board seats at Exxon is meeting with other oil companies in its climate change fight, a source familiar told CNBC's David Faber.

The hedge fund has spoken with executives at several oil and gas corporations including Chevron, the source familiar told CNBC.

Engine No. 1 may not necessarily target Chevron in its next challenge, or any company at all, according to the source.

Chevron confirmed the meeting with Engine No. 1 to CNBC.

"We have contingency plans to respond to many different types of events, including an activist investor," Chevron said in a statement to CNBC's Leslie Picker. "We engage regularly with shareholders in constructive two-way dialogue and look forward to discussing the next chapter of our lower carbon story with them later this month."

The Wall Street Journal first reported the activist firm's meeting with Chevron.

Engine No. 1 gained two board seats at Exxon's annual shareholder meeting in May, and a third seat in June.

The upstart activist firm has been targeting Exxon since December 2020, pushing the company to reduce carbon emissions in the face of a changing climate.

Engine No. 1 also launched an exchange-traded fund in June to further its shareholder activism focused on environmental, social and governance issues.

— CNBC's David Faber, Leslie Picker and Pippa Stevens contributed reporting.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains why today's bull market isn't sustainable - and why he welcomes the US labor shortage

snagarajan@businessinsider.com (Shalini Nagarajan)

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz said the current US stock market environment isn't sustainable.

A tight labor market forces employers to include marginalized groups into the workforce, the economist said.

A tighter labor market and restoration of interest rates to more normal levels would be a good move, he said.

US economist Joseph Stiglitz told CNBC on Thursday the current bull run in the market isn't sustainable, and he welcomes the tightness in the US labor market.

"A tight labor market is really good for our society, for our economy," he said on CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe."


There is an acute shortage of available labor in the US economoy at the moment, with many still jobless people unwilling to fill vacancies, for example. Wages are rising as demand for workers is outpacing demand.

"The only time the United States has succeeded in including marginalized groups into the labor force, reducing inequality, is when we have a very tight labor market," Stiglitz said. "So I welcome this situation, and I'm 100% in agreement with the diagnosis of the Fed that most of what we are seeing are the hiccups of restarting an economy that had to shut down because of COVID-19."


The reason he welcomes the ongoing recovery towards maximum employment is that it would move the economy "out of this world of zero-interest rates."

"It distorts risk-taking. It creates bubbles," he said about major US indices hitting record highs on a daily basis. "It would actually be a good move - have a tighter labor market and a restoration of interest rates to more normal levels."

The benchmark S&P 500 has gained almost 20% so far this year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 19%.

Stiglitz used the expression "something that's not sustainable won't be sustained" to explain why the record run won't last.

The monthly jobs data for August due later Friday is expected to show a slowdown in hiring. Non-farm payrolls are expected to rise by 725,000 for the month, according to economists polled by Bloomberg, down from the 925,000 increase in July.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has indicated the central bank expects continued economic progress as it seeks to lay out plans for a tapering program. That would represent a reversal of the Fed's economic support.

But Powell has said the labor market still needs support. Analysts say any weakness in the August jobs report would likely highlight how such a move would likely be some way off.
Fruits of the loom: why Greek myths are relevant for all time

From Medea to Helen of Troy, Greek myths still speak to the modern world. Classicist Charlotte Higgins explores stories that weave together the fabric of our existence


Kate Fleetwood as Medea at the Almeida theatre, London, 2015.
 Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian


Charlotte Higgins
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

Among my most treasured books as a child was a volume of Greek myths. My eldest brother, a sleep-deprived junior doctor at the time, bought it for me from a warren-like bookshop near his flat in London. The shop, sadly, is long gone, but I still have Children of the Gods by Kenneth McLeish, illustrated by Elisabeth Frink. It infiltrated my childhood imagination – it was one of the things that set me on the path to studying classics, and becoming a writer. The stories were strange and wild, full of powerful witches, unpredictable gods and sword-wielding slayers. They were also extreme: about families who turn murderously on each other; impossible tasks set by cruel kings; love that goes wrong; wars and journeys and terrible loss. There was magic, there was shapeshifting, there were monsters, there were descents to the land of the dead. Humans and immortals inhabited the same world, which was sometimes perilous, sometimes exciting. The stories were obviously fantastical. All the same, brothers really do war with each other. People tell the truth but aren’t believed. Wars destroy the innocent. Lovers are parted. Parents endure the grief of losing children. Women suffer violence at the hands of men. The cleverest of people can be blind to what is really going on. The law of the land can contradict what you know to be just. Mysterious diseases devastate cities. Floods and fire tear lives apart.



For the Greeks, the word muthos simply meant a traditional tale. In the 21st century, we have long left behind the political and religious framework in which these stories first circulated – but their power endures. Greek myths remain true for us because they excavate the very extremes of human experience: sudden, inexplicable catastrophe; radical reversals of fortune; seemingly arbitrary events that transform lives. They deal, in short, in the hard basic facts of the human condition. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, myths were everywhere. The stories were painted on the pottery that people ate and drank from; they were carved into the pediments of the temples outside which they sacrificed to the gods; they were the raw material of the songs they sang and the rituals they performed. Myths provided a shared cultural language, and a tentacular, ever-branching network of routes towards understanding the nature of the world, of human and divine life. They explained the stars. They told of the creation of plants and animals, rocks and streams. They hovered around individual locales, explaining the origin of towns, regional cults and families. They reinforced customs and norms – sometimes offering a narrative justification for habits of oppression, not least of women and outsiders. For a people scattered liberally across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – Greek culture flowed out well beyond the boundaries of the modern Greek state – they also provided a shared sense of cultural identity.




Epic win! Why women are lining up to reboot the classics


What we think of as “the Greek myths” are the stories we find in the poetry, plays and prose of the ancient Greeks and Romans – a world also animated by an extraordinary surviving visual culture including ceramics, sculpture and frescoes. These myths deal with a long-lost past in which the worlds of immortals and humans overlap, and in which some exceptional humans can become almost divine. It is from this vast, contradictory, extraordinarily variegated body of literature that the tales in my new book are taken.


There was no canonical, fully authoritative account of the Greek myths in antiquity. There were certainly versions of stories that dominated. Euripides’s rendering of the Medea story, for example, became extremely popular, and you can see its famous final scene – the titular character magnificent in her dragon-drawn chariot – painted on Greek pots. But stories of the Greeks were endlessly variable, endlessly proliferating. The dizzying variety of stories reflects the geography, politics and culture of the Greek world – scattered over a mountainous mainland, a jagged coastline, hundreds of islands, and the western seaboard of what is now Anatolia. From the 8th century BC onwards, expanding trade networks also led Greeks to settle around the Black Sea, and on the coasts of north Africa, southern France and Spain. The same goddess might come with different associations, and differently weighted stories, in different city-states.
Penelope welcomes her husband Odysseus after he has rid the palace of the suitors. 
Photograph: Ivy Close Images/Alamy

This bubbling, argumentative diversity is reflected in classical literature. Disagreement on the details, I’d go so far as to say, is one of the most noticeable aspects of Greek storytelling about gods and mortals; ancient mythography is full of warnings along the lines of “some people say this happened but other people, somewhere else, say that something different happened”. For writers from antiquity onwards, this sense of branching choices has provided exhilarating freedom. A change of emphasis in a mythical tale could happen through compressing certain details in favour of expanding others. (A stratagem often used by the tragedians was to use an apparently minor episode in Homer as the seed from which to grow an entire plot.) It could happen through selecting a particular point of view for the telling, as Ovid does in his Heroides, a series of poems in the form of letters from female characters to mythical heroes. Stories could be radically altered: a playwright could perfectly well write a play in which Helen of Troy never actually goes to Troy. (I’m referring to Euripides’s Helen, in which the Greeks and Trojans fight over a replica Helen made of clouds, while the real woman sits out the war in Egypt; the playwright was borrowing the idea from the sixth-century BC poet Stesichorus.)



For the tragic playwrights of the fifth century BC, myth also offered a means of confronting contemporary politics and society. Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy is set in the distant aftermath of the Trojan war, but it also offers an origin myth – and thus a kind of legitimisation – for a new democratic order in Athens. Euripides’s Trojan Women and Hecuba are also set at the time of Troy’s defeat, but you can read them as reflections on the moral failures of the playwright’s own day, as Athens poured resources and human lives into a grinding 30-year conflict with Sparta. That’s partly why the plays are still being staged now, their urgency and vitality undimmed.

For all these reasons, the modern reteller can never be some kind of faithful handmaiden of the stories. She must choose where, and at whom, to point the camera. In the compendia of mythical stories produced in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those for children, the camera was usually pointed firmly at the figure of the hero. These characters – Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Theseus – were often subtly, or unsubtly, co-opted to offer models of male virtue for their young readers. Female characters were frequently relegated to the background as defenceless virgins, vicious monsters or grotesque old women. Homosexual desire was usually banished altogether.

Helen of Troy, by Evelyn de Morgan. Photograph: Alamy

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s volumes A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls and Tanglewood Tales provide excellent examples of this kind of tendency: his Theseus is a stout-hearted chap, unafraid of monsters; his Ariadne too virtuous a maid to abandon her family; his Medea reduced to a vindictive, jealous stepmother and ill-natured enchantress.

A complication for the reader (and reteller) is that the heros of ancient Greek literature was not at all the kind of person meant when the word “hero” is used in modern English – the self-sacrificing military man whom Hawthorne might have had in mind, or the frontline healthcare worker we might think of today. The heros of Greek literature was an extreme and disturbing figure, closely connected to the gods. Achilles is by modern standards a war criminal who violates his enemy’s corpse; Heracles murders his own wife and children; Theseus is a rapist.

Some of the flattening-down of the strangeness and violence of the characters of classical literature has doubtless been an understandable consequence of retelling the tales with children in mind. But the Greek myths shouldn’t be thought of as children’s stories – or just as children’s stories. In some ways, they are the most grownup stories I know. In recent years there has been a blossoming of novels – among them Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships and Madeline Miller’s Circe – that have placed female mythological characters at the centre of stories to which they have often been regarded as peripheral. And authors such as Kamila Shamsie (in her novel Home Fire) have used Greek myths as frameworks on which to hang modern stories. My new book, however, is more like an ancient mythological compendium than a novel. My work has not been to bring psychological insight to bear on a cast of characters as they develop through time, as a novelist might do, but to beckon the reader onwards through a many storied landscape, finding a particular path through a forest of tales.



To emphasise the contrast between different approaches is not to devalue the old retellings, such as Roger Lancelyn Green’s wonderful volume for children, Tales of the Greek Heroes, or Robert Graves’s beautifully written The Greek Myths, which provides an intriguing monument to his own preoccupations, prejudices and theories. Rather, it is to underline the power of the Greek myths to produce resonance for every new reader and writer, and for every generation. Once activated by a fresh imagination, the stories burst into fresh life. The Greek myths are the opposite of timeless: they are timely.

My first concern was to decide how to frame or organise my chosen stories. I considered the greatest of all compendia of myths: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic poem about legendary transformations. Its content is inseparable from its structure: the poem organically transforms as it progresses, seamlessly unfurling each new story from the last. The form itself is expressive. Nothing is stable, it says. Everything is contingent, matter is always on the move.

Statues of Aphrodite and Artemis in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. 
Photograph: Vova Pomortzeff/Alamy

Clearly, I am not out to rival Ovid, but I realised that, like Ovid, I wanted the form of my chosen stories to be expressive in itself. I thought about other ancient authors who had framed mythological poems or compendia around various themes. One early text had used female characters as its organising principle: the fragmentary Catalogue of Women, once attributed to Hesiod. What remains is important and often beautiful; but it is a work that is largely concerned to establish genealogies of heroes, and the women’s chief role is to give birth. There was also the lost Ornithigonia by Boios, about the mythical origins of birds; the little handbook of erotic stories, Sufferings in Love by Parthenius of Nicaea (said to have been Virgil’s Greek teacher); and the fragmentary collection of star myths, Catasterismi, attributed to the Libya-born polymath, Eratosthenes. I decided to frame my Greek myths as stories told by female characters. Or to be strictly accurate, my women are not telling the stories. They have, rather, woven their tales on to elaborate textiles. The book, in large part, consists of my descriptions of these imagined tapestries.



This idea is rooted in a recurring motif in classical literature: the idea of telling stories through descriptions of spectacular artworks, a literary convention known as ekphrasis. The first and most famous ekphrasis is the description of the scenes decorating the shield of Achilles, in the Iliad. Much later, in the first century BC, the entire story of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur was told by the Roman poet Catullus through a long description of the designs woven into a bedspread. A feature of ekphrasis was that the item under description could, at times, take on its own life as a narrative, escaping the status of an imagined object. Specifically, though, the idea is inspired by the occasions in classical literature when female characters take control of a story.

On a number of striking occasions, this happens through the act of weaving. Take Helen of Troy: when we first encounter this most famous of literary characters, in book three of the Iliad, she is at her loom, weaving the stories of the struggles between the Greeks and the Trojans. She is the only person in the poem who has the insight to stand at a distance from the events unfolding in front of her, to interpret them, and to make art about them. Intriguingly, an early commentator on the poem, writing in antiquity, observed of this passage: “The poet has formed a worthy model for his own poetic enterprise.” Both writer and character are, the early critic noticed, making art from the same material – the poet in verse, Helen in tapestry.
Laurretta Summerscales in Yabin Wang’s reading of the Medea myth, M-Dao, 
by English National Ballet, 2016. 
Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In the Odyssey, Penelope waits at home on the island of Ithaca for her husband, Odysseus. He has been away for 20 years, 10 years besieging Troy, and another 10 who knows where. He’s probably dead. It is time for her to remarry. She tells the suitors who are harassing her that she will decide on a husband when she has finished making her father-in-law’s winding sheet. Every day she weaves. Every night she unravels her work, delaying the decision. Describing this device, which is also a plot device, she uses the verb tolupeuein, which means to roll wool into rovings for spinning – or, metaphorically, to contrive a stratagem.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela, an Athenian princess, has been imprisoned and raped. The perpetrator, her brother-in-law Tereus, has cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. But she weaves her story, and thus bears witness to the crime, moving the plot along to a gruesome conclusion. In another part of Metamorphoses, a young woman called Arachne challenges the goddess Minerva (the Roman version of Athena) to a tapestry-making contest. Arachne weaves a design showing the terrible crimes committed by the gods; Minerva – who is, significantly, the goddess of winning – depicts the stories of the awful punishments that lie in wait for humans when they challenge the gods. Arachne will soon discover the consequences of her choice of design. These are some of the characters who control the many narratives contained in my book.
Chris Ofili’s illustration of Odysseus’s return, for Greek Myths: A New Retelling


Running through Greek and Roman thought is a persistent connection between the written word and the woven thread, between text and textile. The Latin verb texere, from which the English words text and textile derive, means to weave, or compose, or to fit a complex structure together. Textum means fabric, or framework, or even, in certain branches of materialist philosophy, atomic structure. The universe itself is sometimes described as a kind of fabric: Lucretius, in his first-century BC scientific poem On the Nature of the Universe, describes the earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to. In turn the Latin and Greek words are related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave. Greek and Roman literature is full of metaphors that compare its own creation to spinning and weaving. Ovid describes Metamorphoses, for example, as deductam carmen, a fine-spun song. When relating how he outwitted the Cyclops, Homer’s Odysseus says: “I wove all kinds of wiles and cunning schemes” – which you could read as a description of the shrewd design of the Odyssey itself.

My book reasserts the connectedness of all this: text and textile, the universe, the production of ideas, the telling of stories, and the delicate filaments of human life. These are the lives that are so cunningly and ruthlessly manipulated by the Fates, the all powerful ancient goddesses who spin, wind and finally cut the thread of each person’s existence.




Greek Myths: A New Retelling is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). 


Charlotte Higgins will be in conversation with Mary Beard about the Greek myths at a Guardian Live online event on 3 November. Book tickets here