How diverse is the United States now?
August 13th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
America’s white population has declined for the first time, while US metro areas were responsible for almost all of the country’s population growth, according to groundbreaking data released on Thursday by the US Census Bureau.
The rapid diversifying of the US was among the most notable findings of the census. Nationwide, the number of people who identified as white fell by 8.6%, which means 58% of Americans now identify as solely white, a drop from 2010 when they made up 63.7% of the population.
Meanwhile, there was significant growth among minority groups over the last decade. The Hispanic or Latino population grew by 23%, while the Asian population surged by more than 35%. The Black population also increased by more than 5.6%.
“The US population is much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than we have measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, a Census Bureau official.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the 2017 film “Downsizing”
August 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I had thought that this was one kind of movie but it turned out to be a rather different one altogether. I had imagined – based largely on the trailer – that it was some kind of romantic comedy starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, both of which I enjoy as actors.
At first, my expectations were essentially fulfilled: here was a fun tale of a married couple of limited financial means who seek to save the planet and expand their lifestyle by undergoing a radical scientific technique that makes them truly tiny. But, about a third of the way in, the movie dramatically changes take and becomes a more serious consideration of personal relationships and human survival.
Responsibility for this switch in direction and tone – and for the flop at the box office – is down to co-writer and director Alexander Payne who has previously had both commercial and critical success with the likes of “Sideways” and “The Descendants”.
In my view, Matt Damon and Christoph Waltz are miscast, while (spoiler alert) Kristen Wiig is sadly under-utilised and Hong Chau is not given the billing she deserves. So, in short (see what I did there?), this is an interesting effort to do something a little different that falls rather flat.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of “The Secret Body” by Daniel M Davis (2021)
August 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
There is a certain irony that, a year and a half into the global pandemic when I finally fell foul of the coronavirus and had to self-isolate, top of my reading list was this book with the sub-title “How the new science of the human body is changing the way we live”. Although the author is professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, I had thought this was a popular science book, but it’s hard going for someone (like me) who has never had any lesson in biology and the 538 endnotes are very much for medical readers.
What any reader cannot fail to take away, however, is the conclusion that “we are at the cusp of a revolutionary time in virtually every aspect of human biology”. It is striking how so many of the discoveries described came from collaboration between scientists from different disciplines and how frequently the spark was a chance conversation at a conference (you don’t get this from virtual events).
The six chapters look respectively at the individual cell, the embryo, the body’s organs and systems, the brain, the microbiome, and the genome. Above all, what we learn is that everything is immeasurably more complicated than was once thought.
Take the brain. A human brain is made up of 86 billion neurons. Those neurons are connected by around 100 trillion synapses, each allowing messages to move from one cell to another. Neurons are not even the most common type of brain cell which are in fact glial cells which do all sorts of things including forming and adapting neural connections. There are around 100 billion glial cells.
I find these figures mind-boggling. Yet there are scientists trying to create a wiring map for the brain that shows which neurons are connected to which other neurons. A new word has been made up for such a concept – one of many new words to me in this fascinating book: the connectome. Remember where you heard it first.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Some people say that we live in a new age of identity politics. But what is identity and why has it become more complicated?
August 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The question of identity has troubled humans throughout the 200,000 history of humankind. Just who are we and what makes us different from other humans and how important are those differences?
In evolutionary terms, for most of human history, identity has been a relatively simple matter. But, since the age of civilisations emerged some 5,000 years ago, it has become more and more complicated.
In this short essay, I have endeavoured to explain why identity has become more complicated, why it is influencing politics, and how we should respond to the identity debate.
Posted in Cultural issues, World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the 2017 film “Beast”
August 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
If you were thinking of having a holiday on the English Channel island of Jersey, you might want to avoid this psychological thriller which is set on the island. In his first feature film, writer and director Michael Pearce – who grew up on the island – offers the viewer some glorious local scenery but parades a set of characters who, in their different ways, are comprehensively unpleasant.
The lead character is Moll, a deeply damaged 27-year-old who lives with her family in the genteel part of the island. Jessica Buckley is quite mesmerising in this complex role. She befriends Pascal, a working-class local with good looks and a history that are both roguish. Johnny Flynn fits the role well.
The trouble is that there is a serial killer on the loose and, perhaps not unreasonably, Pascal is a suspect. So Moll is playing with fire, but she is not exactly an innocent herself. We fear that this is not going to end well and we are right – but the ending is unlikely to be the one you expect in this dark and gripping tale.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Does anyone still seriously doubt that the climate is changing?
July 22nd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is the latest Weatherwatch from the “Guardian” newspaper:
A deluge of rain has inundated parts of western Germany and Belgium over the past week, caused by a slow-moving low pressure system that led to catastrophic flooding. Several rainfall records were smashed, including Mannheim in south-west Germany, which usually receives 70mm (2.7in) in an average July, but recorded more than 150mm of rain in 24 hours, most of which fell in about 12 hours.
In the southern hemisphere, New Zealand’s South Island has also been reeling in the aftermath of heavy rains. More than 800mm fell in the southern Alps in just a few days, owing to a tropical low in the Indian Ocean, which caused alpine rivers to swell and burst their banks.
The highest temperature ever reliably recorded anywhere on Earth was broken on 9 July, with a staggering reading of 54.4C (130F) in Death Valley. This was followed by the hottest night in North American history, with a minimum temperature of 42C. While Death Valley is no stranger to intense heat, it is not alone in experiencing these unprecedented conditions. After the hottest June on record in the US, Canada also broke its all-time temperature record as the month came to a close, with 49.6C, shattering the highest temperature ever recorded north of 50N latitude.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
Have you ever heard of a place called Arthurdale?
July 21st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I hadn’t – but I’ve been watching the excellent 2014 PBS America television series “The Roosevelts” and I was fascinated by the reference to the experiment in community living called Arthurdale.
The Wikipedia page on the subject states:
Arthurdale is an unincorporated community in Preston County, West Virginia, United States. It was built in 1933, at the height of the Depression as a social experiment to provide opportunities for unemployed local miners and farmers. Arthurdale was undertaken by the short-lived Subsistence Homesteads Divisionand with the personal involvement of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who used her influence to win government approval for the scheme.
The aim was to encourage self-sufficiency, and reduce dependence on both market forces and welfare provision. The experiment failed through a clash of ideologies. There was a strong emphasis on accommodating those most in need. Yet there also had to be qualifications to ensure that the community would be self-governed in a professional manner. The entrepreneurial community spirit never took hold, and the project is remembered by some as a classic failure, though some of its original residents have contradicted this narrative.
Arthurdale is now classed as a historic district, with over 100 of the original buildings still standing, and a New Deal Museum.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
A review of “V2”, the latest novel by Robert Harris
July 20th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is my seventh novel by Harris (he has written 14). He is never going to win the Booker or the Pulitzer, but he is a consummate storyteller whose forte is to set a fictional personal tale against a backdrop of actual historical events.
In this case, the story takes place over five days at the end of November 1944 and alternate chapters provide the contrasting viewpoints of Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer with Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who joins a task force in Belgium attempting to track the launch points of the V2 rockets, and of Rudi Graf, an engineer who has worked on the development of the V2 from the very beginning and is now playing a key role in the launching of these rockets from The Netherlands on to London and Antwerp.
There is a lot of fascinating detail about the development and launching of this vengeance weapon and the techniques for trying to track its trajectory. The absurdity is that this technological marvel – a development of which would one day take man to the moon – was a military nonsense.
It cost the Nazi regime more than the US spent on the Manhattan Project and, while it was unstoppable, it had no effect on the war’s development and four times as many people (some 20,000) died in the manufacture of the weapon than were killed by it.
Like all Harris’s work, this is an immensely readable novel and it is entirely credible, excluding an absurd final paragraph. But there are two problems – one the responsibility of Harris and the other unavoidable.
The first issue is that, with the exception of those nasty boys in the SS, the Germans are presented as decent souls who just happen to be caught up in the greatest assault on civilisation in the history of humankind. The second is that inevitably the conclusion is anti-climatic: we know that no V2 was stopped and no launch site was hit.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
A review of the new super-hero movie “Black Widow”
July 19th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and I’ve seen virtually all the previous 24 movies in the franchise, but these films have been released over a period of 13 years and I’ve only seen each offering once at the cinema on its release, so I struggle to remember all the cross-linkages – not helped by the fact that the stories told in the (now) 25 movies are not presented in chronological order. And this time I was viewing the production with someone who was totally new to the MCU (I know …).
In fact, this is the ninth outing for Natasha Romanoff – aka the eponymous Black Widow – played by the wonderful Scarlett Johansson, but all was well because effectively this is a stand-alone origin story and so welcome after its release was postponed for a year by the global pandemic. And we saw it in IMAX which was a blast.
The movie has a female director, Australian Cate Shortland, and three leading roles for women, so it could be seen as the most feminist of the franchise, except that the robot-like army of women fighters is not exactly an advertisement for female empowerment.
After an exciting opening segment showing Natasha as a child, we jump to a time after “Captain America: Civil War” and before “Avengers: Infinity War”. Natasha is now a fully-fledged Avenger, while her ‘sister’ Yelena (an excellent performance by the British Florence Pugh) is now herself a Black Widow who wants to team up with her sibling to bring down the notorious General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and his evil plan to control the world via a network of ‘widows’ who are lobotomised and given forced hysterectomies (the ultimate misogynist?).
The plot is all rather silly (why are there these red vials that are the antidote to the lobotomisation?) and there is more than a hint of James Bond villainy around (references to “Moonraker” especially), but there are lots of thrilling fight and chase sequences, some huge explosions, and touches of humour, making for a very satisfying addition to the franchise and a final farewell to Natasha.
But, of course, the franchise rolls on and an end-of-credits sequence sets us up for “Hawkeye”. I’ll be there …
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A review of the classic film “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925)
July 17th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This black white silent film directed by the legendary Sergei Eisenstein narrates the mutiny on the titular vessel in 1905 which can be seen as a forerunner of the two revolutions of 1917.
Except for the leader of the mutiny, all the roles were filled by ‘people off the streets’ and, in the Odessa steps sequence, many of the extras were people who had been present at the actual event. The close-ups of many of their faces are memorable features of this strikingly radical work. The other dramatic elements of this innovative film were the use of montage and symbolism, while the cutting is superb.
The most memorable sequence is a segment of the slaughter on the Odessa steps: a pram with a baby inside tumbles downwards in a frightening juxtaposition of vulnerability and violence. The idea was replicated some six decades later in the concluding shoot-out of the gangster movie “The Untouchables”, a homage to the Russian Eisenstein from the American Brian De Palma.
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