The Long Good Read #guardiancoffee003

Transcription

#003
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Introduction
Welcome to the Long Good Read. This is an experimental, almost entirely automated newspaper that
uses an algorithm to pick the week's best longform journalism from the Guardian. The idea was
started by developer Dan Catt, print-your own
newspaper service Newspaper Club, the design
team at Mohawk and the technology editorial team
at the Guardian. We've put this together for you to
read with your coffee. Enjoy! And please do tell us
what you think - what else should we include in our
experimental, automatic newspaper?
@thelonggoodread or
hello@thelonggoodread.com
Spend time listening to anyone in the media industry, you might think newspapers are dead. In
fact it's just pulse of the big media businesses
around the newspapers that is growing weaker, with
readership and advertising revenues falling and increased competition from new technology just a
part of that.
But newspapers themselves are a delightful, tactile, luxurious technology in their own right. The
success of Newspaper Club, which lets anyone
cheaply print their own newspaper, shows that
newspapers have been reclaimed in a way.
Its success is partly down to our curiosity about
being able to professionally print in a format that
used to be hard for an individual to access, but it is
also part of a wider craving for tangible, physical
products to compensate for our digital dependency.
Our screen lives make much of our life feel overwhelming, yet at the same time we have nothing
physical to show for it. And there's a real human
pleasure in being able to make and hold something
in your hands.
Editorially, we get enormous satisfaction in exploring and playing with new projects. It's not about
finding a future for paper, but a future for the stories that deserve telling. Where shall we go next?
Jemima Kiss
Head of technology - editorial
The Guardian
theguardian.com/tech
This newspaper is in beta. It's an experiment in
combining the Guardian's readers, writers and
robots with Newspaper Club's short-run printing
tools, to produce a newspaper that's completely
unlike the daily Guardian.
We're only printing 500 copies, and it's just for
#guardiancoffee, so it needed to be quick and easy
to produce. 'One person, one hour' was the goal,
and achieving that required automating as much as
possible, while still retaining an editorial eye.
First, the team at the Guardian wrote a small tool
to sift through the most popular and interesting
long form content, as driven by website analytics,
comments and social media.
A selection of these are then imported into Newspaper Club's browser based tool, ARTHR, and
they're quickly laid out into templates designed just
for this project.
Then, it's onto one of Newspaper Club's printing
presses, where it's printed, packed, and delivered
straight to #guardiancoffee and into your hands.
Of course, this isn't designed to replace the daily
Guardian paper. It's an experiment to see what's
possible at the other end of the spectrum, using
new technology and techniques to produce a newspaper as quickly as a webpage.
And if you like it, wait a little while and maybe
we'll be able to generate one tailored just for you.
Tom Taylor
Co-founder and head of engineering
Newspaper Club
newspaperclub.com/longgoodread
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Issue #003 already and I'm going to see if I can write
this editorial thing in less time than it took me to
put the whole paper together (grab a copy from last
week to read a little more about that whole time
thing).
Four slightly different things this week, and tiny
incremental changes they are too, mainly because
I'm particularly pressed for time this week and have
handed over more responsibility for the whole issue
to the automated algorithmic paper creating robots.
ple can often post comments and have their chance
to reply, but in print not so much of that goes on.
This being a sort of hybrid digital/analog experiment I wanted to pull some of that in, a few lines of
code later I had a quick way of grabbing the top rated comments from the Guardian's comments API.
I've tested the waters a bit on Jack Monroe's frozen
yoghurt recipe (p23), hopefully we can extend this
in a "What we said, what our readers said, what the
internet said" direction during this project.
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4
Out with the "The week in Tags" graph from the
first two issues, although I'll probably bring it back
at a slightly higher quality and resolution soon. I
pushed it out this week and turned over the centre
spread to the lovely photos of issue #001 being
printed taken by @newspaperclub. There's just
something about seeing those printing plates that
makes the whole thing seem much more real and
newspapery.
Finally, the cover. I tweaked the code from last
week that shows when the Guardian publishes articles to show the colour representing the section of
those article. There are 7 columns, one for each day
of the week, starting with Monday on the left, the
weekend on the right, which is pretty noticeable.
Midnight starts at the top of the page, and runs for
24 hours downwards. Reds are "Newsy" sections,
bright reds are breaking news & global news, the
darker reds are for politics, technology, science and
so on. Pinks & magenta represent arts & culture, yellow is life & style, light blue is travel and dark blue is
business.
What's interesting about this colour version compared to last week is the green which represents
sport, you can see how there's much more sports
news published in the evenings (unsurprisingly)
even more so at the weekend.
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I've pulled in a little bit of content from notguardian, or to be more specific BoingBoing (boingboing.net). Both inside and outside of the Guardian
there's been some discussion about how articles
from different places could be smooshed together.
Boing Boing generally publish their articles under a
Creative Commons License that allows re-use and
Cory Doctorow & Terry Pratchett are pretty
Guardian, seemed like a natural fit. You can find
them on page 18.
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Another thing we've been wanting to do is take advantage of the extra time we have because of the delay between articles being published on the website
and our weekly printing schedule. On the web peo-
There, that wasn't so bad, and typed out in record
time. Best thing is, being the Guardian typos probably don't matter so much!
Onwards.
Dan Catt
Developer
revdancatt.com
4
The gambling machines helping drug
dealers 'turn dirty money clean'
Dealers talk to the Guardian about laundering drug
money through fixed odds betting terminals in
bookies across Britain
By Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor
Dressed in a grey hoodie and jeans, James, 24,
looks like just another lost soul in the high street,
shuttling between the six betting shops in an east
coast seaside town. It's a weekday morning and if
you catch up with him inside a bookmaker, you'll
find him peering intently into the green glowing
screen of an electronic gambling machine – feeding
in £200, "a score at a time".
But this is not a young gambler blowing his meagre wages. James is a drug dealer and his interest in
the bookmakers – and the fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) in each shop – is all about laundering
money. "That's what turns dirty money clean," he
says. Dealers feed their drug money through the
machines, losing a little and then cashing out with
the vast majority of their stake, James says. They
can then collect a printed ticket showing they have
gambled that day – meaning that if stopped by police, they can answer questions about why an apparently unemployed young man carries hundreds of
pounds in rolled-up cash.
The FOBTs are probably the single most profitable
pieces of property in the town centre's shabby
pedestrian precinct. Each machine, according to industry figures, grosses about £900 a week. The 24
FOBTs within a few minutes' walk are worth an estimated £1m a year in profits to the betting industry.
The terminals arrived in Britain in 2001 and were
lightly regulated from the outset. Punters in bookmakers found that they could bet £100 every 20 seconds on roulette. The temptation of high-speed,
high-stake casino games in the high street proved irresistible: there are now 33,345 FOBTs in the UK.
However, several high-profile cases have exposed
a seamier side to the rise of the machines. Earlier
this month the Gambling Commission, the industry
regulator, fined Coral bookmakers £90,000 in profits
it made from one drug dealer who had laundered almost £1m in its shops. Last month the industry regulator also publicly admitted what has long been
privately acknowledged: FOBTs present a "high inherent money-laundering risk". In a letter to the industry trade association, the commission warned
about "a retail betting model that includes high volumes of cash transactions, particularly where this
includes low individual spend and a high level of
anonymity... especially where that model also offers
(FOBTs)."
What the machines provide is the chance for criminals to convert quickly large sums of money from
the real world into virtual cash that can later be converted back into the real thing. There is little official
research into the scale and extent of such operations. The 2005 Gambling Act, which regulates the
terminals, says one of its primary objectives is "preventing gambling from being a source of crime or
disorder, being associated with crime or disorder or
being used to support crime".
However, it has long been obvious to the public
that criminals can convert their loot into a clean win
on an electronic roulette table. Surveys for the commission show that 40% of the public regularly identify gambling with criminal activity. The industry
regulator found one in 14 respondents associated
money laundering with gambling.
The Guardian persuaded a number of drug dealers
to talk about their criminal pursuits. What was remarkable was that they saw FOBTs as both a nuisance and necessary, trapping "weaker" people into
addiction while allowing the "strong" to prosper. All
exchanged tips with fellow dealers on the best ways
to launder money; all were surprisingly frank about
their methods.
James's strategy is simple: £20 on black, £20 on
red and £2 on zero. A press of a button and the
wheel spins before the ball lands on red. That's a
loss of £2. The money placed on the zero is the only
risk James is taking with his cash. If the ball does
land on zero, he wins £72.
With no horses to run or dealer to shuffle and just
the 20-second spin of an electronic roulette wheel
to wait for, it takes a little over a minute for this
drug dealer to cash out. James says he knows that
unless he gambles at least 40% of the float money
he has put in the machine, an alert will pop up on
the staff computer warning them of suspicious activity. So he methodically places the same bet to
make sure that he has wagered enough.
To ensure that his winnings are not an unlikely
round number, he loses some more money on the
one-armed bandit. Leaving the tea brought over by
the shop manager to go cold, James wanders over to
the counter to collect his winnings in the form of a
receipt – transforming the money he made from cocaine into apparent gambling winnings. He has lost
a little more than £10. "You have to make it
realistic," he says. "Bookies get nervous if you come
in and just lose the same amount every day. So I
vary it a little."
Drug dealers say the reason fixed-odds betting
terminals are used is precisely because they are so
lightly policed. James is careful not to visit the same
shops in a pattern. Handily there are 15 betting
shops in the town within walking distance of the
main bus routes that snake through the suburbs and
along the Thames estuary. "Smart dealers don't
drive around here. You are more likely to be stopped
by police driving around late at night doing deliveries than if you are taking a bus somewhere into
town."
Then there are favoured bookies. Ladbrokes, says
James, is useful because you can transfer winnings
in the shop to an online gaming account. In William
Hill's you can ask for your winnings to be credited
directly to your debit card, with the cash landing up
in your bank the same day. "Look at my account and
I am a very successful punter," he says.
The economics of drug dealing make it cost-effective to pay 5% to 10% to betting shops to launder
the illicit profits. James claims to have "about 100K"
in his bank account. He sells about 56g (2oz) of ordinary cocaine a week and another 28g of a purer,
more expensive version. "Normal customers like
teachers, doctors they get the ordinary stuff. The
cleaner gear is for the City boys."
James left school at 16 and worked in shops and
restaurants before ending up in the City of London.
"That's where I saw people using coke and I was
asked if I could get some. I knew some people and I
did. Never looked back. How long would it have taken to save £100,000 if I just continued doing admin
in a bank?"
Selling cocaine in 0.8g wraps, in a week James
turns over about £5,500 of drugs, of which half is
profit. "I buy it on tick so you end up carrying a lot
of money around. The trade is run by Albanians
around here, so it's best to have cash ready if you
need to pay it back in a hurry."
Almost all his money is laundered via FOBTs.
James calculates he is worth £15,000 a year to the
betting industry. "Valued customer," he grins. "I'd
say there were about half a dozen of us [dealers]
around here using machines. We swap tips – where
to go, least crowded, staff not bothered, that sort of
thing. You don't want to be recognised too many
times."
In opening up to the Guardian, James says there is
a risk that bookmakers in the coastal town will
tighten up on who enters and who leaves. "Sure,
they could stop us, but in the end they want the
money.We can hang back for a bit and go somewhere else. Pretty soon they will relax and welcome
us all back."
Bookmakers essentially regulate themselves: deciding whether to bar problem gamblers, call the police over violent behaviour or report crime. As the
machines contributed £1.4bn to its bottom line last
year, there have been suspicions that the industry
has played down the shadier side of the terminals.
Adrian Parkinson, a former regional machines
manager at the Tote, now with the Campaign for
Fairer Gambling, said: "Money laundering on FOBTs
has been a problem since their introduction.
Whether it's cleaning notes from the proceeds of
crime or drug dealers legitimising profits, it is well
known in the industry that it goes on.
"I raised the issue some years ago at the Tote after
being swamped with incidents of money laundering
following a series of armed robberies but it's still going on."
Even worse, Parkinson says, the technology is
outpacing the law. He says by the end of the year,
customers in Coral will be able to transfer any FOBT
winnings to their online account. "The staff won't
be able to intervene, whatever their suspicions. The
industry is riding rough shod over the licensing objectives. Keeping crime out of gambling has to take
precedent over profit."
The Association of British Bookmakers said the industry complied fully with the law. William Hill said
it had "robust systems" to meet its regulatory obli-
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warned that such games were being used by organised crime to launder cash.
Also helping to rehabilitate gambling is a new
range of interactive TV programming. Late-night
shows such as ITV's Jackpot247 – in which television viewers place bets online or over the phone,
playing along to a live presenter-hosted roulette
show – repolish gambling's image by treating electronic betting as a form of mainstream entertainment.
This shift in the marketing of electronic gambling
Photograph: Alamy
gations. In a statement, Ladbrokes said: "Any criminals attempting to launder large sums are placing
themselves at high risk of detection as they will be
on CCTV and staff are trained to spot suspicious behaviour. Given most stakes in shops are small, any
large transactions are easily recognisable. Any attempt to transfer money to online accounts will require identity verification at account opening or
first transactions which in conjunction with CCTV
would be an excellent source of evidence for the police."
The media have helped to cement the place of
gambling in the national psyche. Advertising during
televised football matches exhorts audiences to
have a flutter. Electronic gambling has found a
younger audience through online role-playing
games such as World of Warcraft, in which players
have been able to set up virtual casinos. This year
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
has taken place as suspicions emerge that the industry has been targeting poor people. Last December,
in a paper for the Journal of Gambling Studies,
Heather Wardle, a former project director of the
British Gambling Prevalence Survey, warned that
gambling machines were more likely to be found in
areas of high socioeconomic deprivation. Earlier
this year, the Guardian revealed that in the 50 parliamentary constituencies with the highest numbers of unemployed people, punters visited 1,251
betting shops and wagered an astonishing £5.6bn
through 4,454 fixed-odds betting terminals.
The presence of these machines appears to have a
distorting effect on these moribund local
economies. In a pub near Salford's Duchy estate,
close to where rioting took place in 2011, two young
men nursed pints of soft drink and explained how a
vortex of soft drug sales, payday lenders and betting
shops kept the local economy afloat. Salford has 72
people chasing each vacancy. It was the only part of
Greater Manchester which last year recorded a rise
in numbers on jobseeker's allowance (JSA).
Unemployed Jake, 28, sells marijuana on the local
streets and smokes some of the profit. He recoups
any losses by gambling and taking out loans at payday lenders. He points out the brown shopping arcade in Salford lined with bookmakers and loan
companies. "It's the only thriving industry around
here," he says.
"There are six bookmakers, one more is on its
way, and five loan shops. Even if you are on JSA you
can borrow money from Speedy Cash. It's the main
business around here.Take dole, turn it into weed,
sell them, take your profits and put them into the
machines. If you win, you are quids in. If you lose,
you get cash from the money shops to cover your
losses. Back to dole and buying drugs. There's nothing else around here to do."
The drug dealer admits that he is "a bit" addicted
to gambling, comparing the thrill of betting on the
electronic spin of a roulette wheel to the rapid highs
and lows of drugs. "You get a buzz. Which is why
you might lose £16 or £1,600 and not notice until it's
too late. I've done both."
The spread of betting shops in this part of the
north-west is astonishing. Manchester city centre
has 26. A few miles away in deprived Cheetham Hill,
dubbed the "Bronx of Britain" for gang violence,
there are four bookies in the high street, with another scheduled.Such bunching could be linked to
the fact that bookmakers are limited to four machines a shop. As the machines are hugely lucrative
the betting industry has bypassed the restriction by
opening branches in high streets – "clustering" in
poorer areas.
A betting shop manager in Greater Manchester,
who agreed to be interviewed anonymously, said
the FOBTs in Cheetham Hill easily earned £10,000 a
week, four times the over-the-counter trade, and
that local mobsters gambled heavily. "We get punters who lose big time on the FOBTs, punch them,
chuck them to the ground. Smash them. We tell
staff to play it cool. Don't call police. We don't want
to arouse suspicions. It's madness. We employ
young mothers in those shops.
"You have people laundering money every day
with cash from robberies and drugs. Do you know
that dyed notes from bank robberies can be submitted to the Bank of England and the company gets reimbursed? Staff know what pays their wages. They
stay quiet."
Some names have been changed.
6
Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook
and hello to messenger apps
Gradual exodus of young people towards WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk is just as their mums
and dads get the hang of social networking
By Parmy Olson
Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In
other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're
just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic
who often point the rest of us towards the next big
thing.
Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as
WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to
Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The
road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active
users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of
the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too,
spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and
images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids' photos. No surprise, then,
that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited
status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory
communication tool that younger people maintain
because everyone else does.
All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere. On their
mobiles.
When mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp
first emerged in 2009, they looked like a threat to
mobile carriers. Everyone from Vodafone to Dutch
operator KPN was mentioning them in sales calls.
Mobile operators are estimated to have lost $23bn in
SMS revenue in 2012 due to messaging apps, which
host free instant messages through a phone's data
connection, which these days is often unlimited.
Now these apps are becoming a threat to established social networks too.
WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in
the UK and on half the country's iPhones, according
to Mobile Marketing Magazine, has more than 350
million monthly active users globally. That makes it
the biggest messaging app in the world by users,
with even more active users than social media darling Twitter, which counts 218 million. About 90%
of the population of Brazil uses messaging apps,
three-quarters of Russians, and half of Britons, according to mobile consultancy Tyntec. WhatsApp
alone is on more than 95% of all smartphones in
Spain. The power users and early adopters of these
apps, the ones you're most likely to see tapping
their thumbs over a tiny screen, are under 25.
Part of the reason is that gradual encroachment of
the grey-haired ones on Facebook. Another is what
messaging apps have to offer: private chatting with
people you are friends with in real life. Instead of
passively stalking people you barely know on Facebook, messaging apps promote dynamic real-time
chatting with different groups of real-life friends,
real life because to connect with them on these apps
you will typically already have their mobile number.
The trend flies in the face of recurring criticism of
young people – that their social lives are largely virtual – when many more are in fact embracing the
virtues of privacy and services like WhatsApp,
which shun advertising.
"I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send
pics these days," said Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London. In the last
few years she has used Facebook less and less because she doesn't want "the whole world to know"
what she's doing. When people set up events and
get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend
tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because "it's
more personal". For similar reasons, some 78% of
teenagers and young people use mobile messengers
to plan a meet-up with friends, according to research advisory firm mobileYouth.
Another factor is the rise of the selfie, often silly
self-portraits taken at arm's length with a mobile.
Almost half of the photos on Instagram feeds
among people aged 14 to 21 in the UK are selfies, according to mobileYouth. Sending those photos via a
mobile messaging service is safer than broadcasting
them on Facebook, since they're less likely to be
seen by a boss or dozens of Facebook friends you
forgot you had. Selfies are even bigger on Snapchat,
the evanescent photo sharing app that deletes a
photo several seconds after it has been viewed.
With about 5 million active monthly users, the service has inevitably become a favoured way for teens
to send sexy or even naked photos of themselves,
an ill-advised practice known as "sexting". But
teens also love Snapchat because it allows them to
send inane photos of themselves without fear of
leaving a permanent digital footprint.The Californiabased app is seen as so hot, with so much potential
for growth, that it has already been pegged with a
$2-$4bn valuation in the Silicon Valley tech community. Estimates are even higher for WhatsApp,
which makes money through an annual subscription; some observers suggest it could be worth $5bn
or more.
The final, big reason why young people are gravitating towards messaging apps is that many of these
apps no longer do just messaging. They are social
networks. The best examples come out of Asia, with
messaging platforms KakaoTalk (South Korea),
WeChat (China) and LINE (Japan). All have tens of
millions of users, with WeChat boasting more than
200 million, and take their services beyond offering
straight messaging to games, stickers and music
sharing. Before you write off digital stickers as
inane, they are a decent moneyspinner for LINE: of
the $58m the company made in sales in the first
quarter of 2013, half came from selling games and
30%, or roughly $17m, from sales of its 8,000 differ-
ent stickers. Some are free or, in Spain where LINE
has 15 million registered users, cost around €1.99.
Often users choose stickers instead of words when
they need to express themselves, one LINE executive said; it's known to have helped couples get over
fights more easily by offering multiple stickers to
say sorry.
Gaming is another money-maker. With
KakaoTalk, which is thought to be on 90% of all
smartphones in South Korea, registered users can
choose from more than 100 games they can play
with one another, and games alone helped the company generate $311m in sales in the first half of 2013.
A couple of non-Asian messaging apps such as Kik
(Canada) and Tango (US) are turning themselves
into full-fledged platforms too, inviting software engineers to create games that run on their apps. They
will typically let developers take home half the revenue while taking a 20% cut. App stores such as
Google Play and Apple's App Store take the remaining 30%. Tango took all this a step further this
month when it partnered with music-streaming
Spotify to allow its 60 million monthly users to
share music clips with one another. Two years ago
Spotify launched a similar partnership with Facebook. "What we're seeing in the messaging space is
an explosion in growth," said Spotify's vice-president of strategic partnerships, Tom Hsieh, who
hinted there would be partnerships with other messaging apps in the future too. "I don't think there's
been a clear winner [among them] yet."
It is worth noting that, with so many of these apps
getting into games, stickers and now music sharing,
it is becoming harder to define them as messaging
services. "I think there is some misunderstanding
here in how we categorise these apps," says Pavel
Durov, who founded Russia's version of Facebook,
VK.com, and recently launched a mobile messaging
service called Telegram. "They are social networks.
You have a social graph there; a newsfeed; you have
profile pages. Many things that are related to social
networks by definition." Social chat apps is another
way to define them, says Gartner mobile analyst Brian Blau. "People are sometimes using three or four
of these apps."
Many of the Asian chat apps such as Kakao and
LINE are struggling to appeal to US users, though,
because of the stylised nature of their interfaces –
vivid colors, manga-style characters and lettering.
"We're used to being a little more subdued," says
Blau, who is based in the US.
In the race to become platforms with extra frills,
the big exception is WhatsApp. Founder Jan Koum
has said publicly that he has no plans for his service
to start providing games. Koum and his co-founder
Brian Acton, both former Yahoo managers who were
one of the first to create a mobile messaging app for
smartphones with WhatsApp, see it almost as a pure
communication utility that should not be saddled
with extra features that might slow things down.
"That's what's happened with most social networks
on the web now," says Neeraj Arora, business manager for WhatsApp, which is based in Mountain
View, California. "It tries to do everything for everyone. Our core is communication."
That is a somewhat conservative approach compared to most other messaging platforms, yet WhatsApp is still quietly broadening out. In the same way
Facebook first rolled our Facebook Connect in 2008
to allow people to use their profiles to like or comment on other websites, WhatsApp recently unveiled an instruction set known as an API that lets
other mobile apps share content through WhatsApp
too. The roll-out is still in its infancy, but after one
music streaming service in the Middle East added
the WhatsApp sharing button, its was surprised to
find its users sharing 50% more songs via WhatsApp
than Facebook.
The future for these messaging apps is still uncertain. Some in the industry expect buyouts from big
internet companies like Google, which was rumoured to have flirted with WhatsApp earlier this
year. Facebook already has its own popular Messenger service, while Apple has iMessage – both are
popular, but lack the gaming ambitions of Asian
chat apps. Still, it is hard to imagine these players
consolidating to create a global social network as big
as Facebook.
"If you look at the landscape, it's geographic,"
says Greg Woock, CEO of the US calling and messaging service Pinger. "We dominate the US, WhatsApp
dominates Europe, LINE owns Japan." China's
WeChat is trying to break out of that mould. Its executives have talked about expanding internationally, and custom building its app to suit local tastes
for how it should look. "We have put a lot of
thought into how to take it outside of China," Martin Lau, the president of WeChat owner Tencent,
said at a recent conference.
Who dies, survives or thrives may ultimately depend on how well any of these players can make
money. Snapchat, arguably a photo-sharing service
more than a messaging app, has yet to explain how
it will do so.
WhatsApp says it is already profitable thanks to its
annual subscription fees; Pinger relies on advertisements; WeChat, LINE, Kakao and Kik sell stickers
and games. Some of these services are bound to go
out of fashion, and a few business models will fail,
and they're still a world away from the $2.1bn in
sales that Facebook brought in this last quarter.
But there is little doubt that millions of teens will
use these apps more and more, and older demographics will eventually join them. There's a good
chance that will continue to be at the expense of
Facebook.
7
Facebook is seeing a decrease in daily users - especially teenagers. Photograph: Image Source/Corbis
Parmy Olson is a technology writer for Forbes magazine in San Francisco. She is the author of We Are
Anonymous (Little, Brown, 2012).
WhatsApp
Started in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo staff, this smartphone messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages a day and is reckoned to have more
than 250m users worldwide. One of the most popular paid-for apps on any platform, and a threat to
telecoms companies which charge for texts.
Snapchat
Allows users to send "view once'"photos, specifying how long the photo will remain on the
recipient's device. "Snap an ugly selfie or a video,
add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a
few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap
disappears," says Snapchat. The company is valued
at $800m and users send 350m messages per day,
up from 200m in June.
WeChat
The Chinese social media app, which handles voice
messages, snapshots and emoticons, has more than
200m subscribers. The vast majority of users are in
China, though it also has subscribers in the US and
UK. It is being tipped as the first Chinese social media application with the potential to go global.
KakaoTalk
A Korean messaging app with more than 90m users
that generated $42m of revenues in 2012, ending the
year with users sending 4.8bn messages a day. The
company recently launched KakaoHome in its home
country: a similar app that provides "a customised
home screen experience on your smartphone" with
widgets, notifications and deeper integration of the
main messaging service.
8
The man
behind Silk
Road – the
internet's
biggest
market for
illegal
drugs
Silk Road was the internet's wild west. What are
the ideology and passions behind its radical
founder, Ross Ulbricht?
By Parmy Olson
On a bright Tuesday afternoon at around 3.15pm,
a handful of plain-clothed FBI agents climbed the
stone stairs of Glen Park Library, an unobtrusive
building on Diamond Street in San Francisco. They
entered the library in staggered succession, gradually making their way towards its far corner: the science fiction section. There, sitting at one of the
faux-wooden tables, was a pale young man with
dark hair, jeans and T-shirt. He was on his laptop,
chatting with someone online. Staff had not recognised the slim man with wide-set eyes, but then
people often came here to use the free public Wi-Fi.
Once they opened their laptops they would see a
window pop up, offering unfiltered content on the
condition they avoided browsing illegal content
"out of respect" for fellow library users. It seems the
young man wasn't complying.
His name was Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old former
physics and engineering student from Austin,
Texas. Many men of his background were in this
same city to launch a technology startup or two, but
the FBI believed Ulbricht was into something far
darker: manning a vast, black market for online
drugs and other illegal goods known as Silk Road.
He was, they believed, a millionaire drugs kingpin
who had twice ordered someone killed to protect
his empire.
There was a crash that sounded like someone had
fallen onto the hard, tiled floor, library staff later remembered. Poking their heads around the shelves,
they found the young Ulbricht pressed up against
the window by what seemed to be several other library patrons. It looked like a fight, at first.
"We're the FBI," his assailants said, adding that
everything was under control. Soon Ulbricht was in
handcuffs, and chatting to several agents who
blockaded him into a corner of the library, according
to another witness who posted her account online.
The agents walked him out of the library, two of
Photograph: Google
them returning not long after in blue FBI jackets to
do a sweep of the area where Ulbricht had been sitting. They found nothing. The person Ulbricht had
been chatting to online, according to an FBI complaint, had been a cooperating witness in their investigation.
This was the result of more than a year of dogged
cyber sleuthing and old-fashioned detective work,
and news of the arrest broke the following day, 2 October 2013. Police claimed that Ulbricht had been
running Silk Road since 2011, and for the last year
had done so from his home in San Francisco as well
as a nearby cafe. He had operated under the name
Dread Pirate Roberts, a character in the film The
Princess Bride that referred to a mythical persona
shared between several people. They charged him
with drugs trafficking, money laundering and attempted murder.
The FBI agent who led the team investigating Ulbricht, Christopher Tarbell, had also been responsible for the 2011 sting in New York on Hector "Sabu"
Monsegur, leader of the notorious LulzSec hacker
group.
"He's a very big deal," says one lawyer who has
dealt indirectly with Tarbell.
"He does most, if not all of these cases," said another source with knowledge of the investigation.
By Thursday the FBI had shut down Silk Road.
Anyone who attempted to access the site saw a large
digital poster saying it had been seized by authorities. Police also took possession of a digital wallet
allegedly belonging to Ulbricht containing thousands of Bitcoins, the anonymous, crypto-currency
used throughout the Silk Road market. To date it is
reportedly worth $34.5m, and it's thought that more
of the Dread Pirate's takings are still at large online.
They claimed Ulbricht was making $20,000 a day on
sales commissions, amassing a total of $80m, much
of which was reportedly going back into maintaining Silk Road operations.
The whole Silk Road enterprise had reportedly
seen $1.2bn in sales in its existence, and nearly one
million anonymous customers, making it perhaps
the world's biggest online marketplace for drugs.
Chillingly, the FBI indictments also claimed Ulbricht had ordered two hits against people whom he
thought might expose his clients, one against an
"employee" of Silk Road in January 2013 and then
against someone, who was in fact an undercover
agent, threatening to leak names of his clientele. In
the first hit, police say Ulbricht offered $40,000 for
the job, and asked for "proof of death" in the form
of a video. Police staged photos of the death, and
when Ulbricht saw them stated that he was "a little
disturbed, but I'm OK". "I'm new to this kind of
thing, is all," he added. "I don't think I've done the
wrong thing."
After the arrest, photos of Ulbricht's smiling face
were soon scraped from his profiles on Facebook
and LinkedIn, and posted on hundreds of websites,
blogs and Twitter. On Thursday morning, another
young San Francisco resident picked up a copy of
the Examiner newspaper and was startled to see Ulbricht on the front page. He took a photo with his
phone and texted it to his housemate. "Funny," he
said. "Looks kinda like our sub-letter."
"Not looks like," his friend replied. "Is." He sent
back a link to a news article, and the descriptions of
a Texas University physics grad who had worked as
a "foreign currency trader."
"Holy shit."
The two men, who named themselves only as
Drew and Brandon in an interview with Forbes, had
been living in the house where Ulbricht was renting
a room for $1,200 a month on 15th Avenue, in San
Francisco's West Portal suburb. They explained that
Ulbricht had applied for a room on Craigslist, identifying himself as "Josh", a Texas man who was
"good-natured and clean/tidy." He had no mobile
phone and chose to pay in cash. The housemates
weren't suspicious because "Josh" had just moved
from Sydney, Australia.
Brandon ended up living with Ulbricht for two
months and said the man "seemed like a normal
guy". He was friendly and polite, had few possessions – primarily his laptop and a few changes of
clothes – and spent most of his time in the master
bedroom, on his computer, engaging in what he
claimed was currency trading. The one oddity they
noticed: "Josh" liked to walk around without a shirt.
He reportedly almost never went out, spending
America's 4th of July holiday at home, and cooking
steak dinners for one. For all the money he allegedly
made, Ulbricht seemed to have spent very little of it
at all.
Ulbricht had family back in Austin, but housemates said he had cut off ties with friends. His
grandmother, when she first heard about his arrest,
seemed nonplussed by the whole affair. She told
Forbes that Ulbricht was "good with computers".
His half-brother, Travis, called him "an exceptionally bright and smart kid". A close friend and former
housemate, Rene Pinnell, told the Verge that police
had messed up. "I'm sure it's not him."
No one close to Ulbricht seemed to believe the
low-key, young scientist was the notorious "pirate"
behind Silk Road.
Ulbricht's alleged, dreamlike world as the
internet's Dread Pirate Roberts would have been the
antithesis of the real world around him. Drug dealing was nothing new in San Francisco.
A few miles north of West Portal, in front of the
larger San Francisco Public Library, more than a
dozen of the city's homeless are wandering a grassy
square or lying like planks under thin blankets. In
broad daylight and directly in front of the library, a
homeless man in a wheelchair hands a pair of $20
bills to another, receiving a small package in exchange. "See you later, asshole," the drug dealer
says smirking, as his customer secrets the package
into a thick, yellow coat.
Such transactions are commonplace in San Francisco and the Silk Road was meant to be their alternative: a place where anyone who wanted drugs
could buy them without associating with underhanded dealers or entering dangerous alleyways.
In the US where laws over the use of cannabis or
possession of class-A drugs can be wildly different
between states, it also made it easier to hide from
the law. And buying drugs from a real-world dealer
meant you could never be sure if the product was
good quality.
On the Silk Road, you could get anything from
"red joker ecstasy pills" to LSD and check the reviews and star-ratings of each dealer left by previous customers, as you might on eBay or Amazon.
There were 10,000 products for sale in the spring of
2013, 70% of which were drugs. But there were also
159 listings for "services," most of which were for
hacking into social network accounts like Twitter or
Facebook, and more than 800 listings for digital
goods such as pirated content, or hacked Amazon
and Netflix accounts, according to the FBI indictment. Fake drivers' licences, fake passports, fake
utility bills and fake credit card statements.
Everything was here, facilitated by the Silk Road.
Customers felt safe because they accessed the site
via Tor, an anonymising network that up until recently was a reliable way to mask their tracks, even
from the police. You never paid with credit cards or
PayPal on Silk Road. The only acceptable currency
was Bitcoin, an encrypted digital currency that
couldn't be traced, with no government or bank behind it. The currency was regulated by a network of
computers, and represented by a long string of
numbers.
While there are other sites that sell drugs, the Silk
Road's user friendly interface and third-party payment system made it more popular than others.
Many customers also chimed with the Dread Pirate's
libertarian principles, which he wrote about on Silk
Road's forums.
In the last two years the Silk Road's Dread Pirate
had given a handful of press interviews, unusual
given his insistence on staying anonymous. In a
9
2011 interview with Gawker gaming site Kokatu, he
said his views stemmed from the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of agorism. "Stop funding the state
with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market," he said.
Then in 2013 the Dread Pirate told Forbesin an interview that Silk Road's "core" role was "a way to
get around regulation from the state". He even hinted that Silk Road might head in the direction of selling weapons. "Firearms and ammunition are becoming more regulated and controlled in many
parts of the world," he said.
Ulbricht was a strong libertarian, a member of the
Libertarians Group while studying at Penn State
University and identified in his school paper as a
supporter of US presidential candidate Ron Paul.
The one blog post he published on his Facebook
profile was titled "Thoughts on Freedom," a philosophical exposition of his libertarian ideas. He posted it on 5 July 2010, just after America's Independence Day; exactly three years before he would be
holed up indoors in San Francisco.
In one way, Ulbricht's alleged work chimed with a
prevailing belief among technologists in Silicon Valley that the right algorithm, the right software, can
spark social change. It is hard to walk down a street
in California's Bay Area without passing a startup
founder who claims he or she can fix the American
health system, or education, or use a GPS location
tracking to predict crime, with some sort of app.
Companies such as Airbnb have completely upended industries and their founders, like Ulbricht, are
hackers at heart. They subvert not just lines of software code but entire systems of thought and economic structure. Ulbricht was taking this and the internet's anti-hierarchical tendencies further, embracing the libertarian notion that private morality
was not the state's affairs, particularly in the case of
activities such as drug use or prostitution.
Many observers were shocked at the news that Ulbricht had chosen to live and operate in San Francisco when he could have been hiding out in Iceland or
Latin America, and that he had given lengthy interviews to journalists. "When you start giving interviews like the CEO of an established company, it's
just wrong," says Pavel Durov, another 29-year-old
technologist who recently visited San Francisco and
had been following the story of the Dread Pirate.
Speaking over a cup of camomile tea at a five-star
hotel on Market Street, Durov is the successful head
of another, rather more legal online network, called
VK.com. Called the Facebook of Russia, VK gets
more than 50 million monthly users, and as any successful businessman in St Petersburg might, Durov
has had his own brushes with the Russian law. Such
experiences have helped reinforce his own strong
libertarian views. "I believe the role of the government is too big," he says. "Society must be more decentralised."
But Durov also doesn't care for the Dread Pirate's
apparent thirst for notoriety. "If you're involved in
something like that and everybody ignores you, the
officials ignore you and you ignore the officials, it's
OK. It's like you don't exist."
Ulbricht seems to have cared more about making
an impact than in maintaining complete anonymity.
He reportedly took pains to keep himself anonymous, going online through Tor and only communicating through the Silk Road chat system.
"The highest levels of government are hunting
me," he told Forbes. "I can't take any chances."
Yet in fact he took plenty of chances. In one of the
first postings about Silk Road on other online drugs
forums, in January 2011, a commenter said: "Has
anyone seen Silk Road yet? It's kind of like an
anonymous amazon.com."
The posting linked to the site's Tor address and a
blogpost with instructions. The poster, nicknamed,
"altoid" deleted their comment, but someone else
copied and pasted it onto another forum. Then "altoid" made a careless mistake: he posted on another
online forum of Bitcoin users, asking people to contact rossulbricht@gmail.com.
In July, Ulbricht was visited at his home by customs and immigrations officials who had intercepted a package of counterfeit IDs from Canada, all
with different names but with photos of Ulbricht's
face. The agents didn't arrest him even though, in
another bizarre display of recklessness, Ulbricht
mentioned that anyone could "hypothetically" go
into a website called Silk Road and buy fake ID documents there.
Police carried out further online investigations
and discovered six online servers, through which
they could observe the buyers and sellers of Silk
Road making their Bitcoin transactions. The FBI has
said in court papers that it has accessed months'
worth of sales history from Silk Road, giving them
new information on the site's dealers.
The UK's National Crime Agency says more arrests
are on the way. Before they arrested Ulbricht, the
FBI had taken one of the Silk Road's top dealers into
custody in July – then flipped him. Steve Sadler of
Seattle, who was known as "Nod" on Silk Road, reportedly sold heroin, cocaine and crystal meth on
the site, but ended up working with agents for several months to help track down their biggest target,
the Dread Pirate himself.
Ulbricht has denied his involvement in Silk Road,
or that he was ever its administrator, but the
prospect of a dragnet operation to bring in other
dealers following his arrest will still make any of the
nearly 960,000 registered users with the site – 30%
of whom were in the US and Brits being the second
biggest contingent – very nervous.
Another online drugs bazaar, called Atlantis, shut
down in September, while there were reports that
Black Market Reloaded, another, would shut down
too, although that hasn't happened. Police will
probably continue to tighten the noose on more
black markets.
"The best way to change a government is to
change the minds of the governed," Ulbricht had
said on his LinkedIn page, where he described himself as an entrepreneur.
"I am creating an economic simulation to give
people a first-hand experience of what it would be
like to live in a world without the systemic use of
force." The "economic stimulation" came to fruition
with Silk Road, but in the end the very hierarchy he
seemed to fight against caught up with him, handcuffs in tow.
Parmy Olson is a technology writer for Forbes magazine in San Francisco. She is the author of We Are
Anonymous (Little Brown, 2012)
10
Kathy Burke interview:
'Work non-stop? That's
not me'
It's been 10 years since Kathy Burke stuck two fingers up at stardom. Here she talks about loving
theatre, hating writing – and why Richard Dawkins
gives her the hump
By Ryan Gilbey
'Don't write about how much I'm chain-smoking,"
grumbles Kathy Burke. "Everyone opens with, 'After the fourth cigarette … ' and it's boring. So don't
be doing that, Ryan, else I'll say you're just the same
as everyone else." She releases a tight laugh and
takes another puff. I mean: takes another sip of
rosehip tea.
an ancestor.") Burke also has a Cannes best actress
award for playing Ray Winstone's devoted punchbag in Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth in 1997. That
performance felt doubly devastating for revealing
an aspect of her partly concealed from the mainstream. The collective feeling was: "We didn't know
she had it in her."
Now 49, Burke is these days almost as famous for
what she doesn't do as for what she did. A decade
ago, she quit acting to devote more time to one of
her first loves: directing theatre. "I told my agent, 'I
wanna knock the acting on the head for a bit.' I
Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
We're up on the roof of London's Tricycle theatre,
sitting on two rickety chairs beneath a blank
November sky. Downstairs, Burke has spent the
morning directing a new production of Once a
Catholic, Mary J O'Malley's comedy set in 1957 at
Our Lady of Fatima convent school. Burke is a versatile actor, adored for her populist, prickly comedy:
she was Linda, the voracious ginger foghorn with
porthole specs in Gimme Gimme Gimme; carbuncular Waynetta Slob and teenage lug Perry, both with
faces like drip-drying seaweed, in Harry Enfield and
Chums; and the stiletto-sharp magazine editor Magda in Absolutely Fabulous. ("Here's my list. Cross
her off, she screwed me. Oh, and put him in, he
screwed me. Don't do anything on anyone called
Freud. I don't like them. Bunch of no-talents with
thought if I gave it a few years, I might not feel so
jaded. And it's rolled on to 10 years." She offers a
shrug and a smile. Her zingy green eyes are set in a
pale, mutable face: she can look kind, but also
unimpressed, as chirpy as the Artful Dodger one
moment, as disconsolate as Droopy the next.
Occasionally, she will agree to small, strategic bits
of acting. Last year, she played an abrasive nun with
mossy eyebrows in Walking and Talking, the autobiographical comedy-drama series she wrote for Sky.
After being out of action entirely for 18 months following an operation and a bout of the bug Clostridium difficile (which she contracted while in
hospital), she turned up as an ageing spook put out
to pasture in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. She appeared
alongside her old chum Oldman, to whom she acted
as "skinhead consultant" for £30 on Mike Leigh's
Meantime when she was 18. "Gary's such a nervous
wreck," she says of Tinker. "He asked me, 'When's
the last time you were on a film set?' I said, 'Ten
years ago.' He said, 'Oh, blimey.' I went, 'How are
you?' And he said, 'Ooh, I'm ever so nervous
darlin'.' And it became all about him so I thought,
'Right, I've just gotta fucking get on with it.'"
Those exceptions aside, she has stayed away from
acting. "Until Nil By Mouth, I'd always felt in control
of my own career. Then, when you're in a successful
film, you're wanted for other films, which is nice –
but before I knew it, I didn't have any control and I
wasn't seeing family and friends. What should have
been a really happy time was affecting my personal
life. It was non-stop work and that's not what I'm
about. It also took me away from theatre, which is
what I love most."
She has just overseen the first "stagger-through"
of Once a Catholic and is feeling buoyant. "It's about
an innocent time, so there is a quaintness and an
old-fashioned quality to it. The comedy softens the
horror. But it's also completely bonkers. Through it
all, there's the journey of Mary Mooney, this little
creature we follow. The nuns and priests are spouting off about saints and miracles and, in a way, she's
a representative on earth of all that, but they can't
see it. This girl has the most faith of anyone in the
play, and yet she gets blamed and doubted, a bit like
Jesus."
Burke did a speech from the play as an audition
piece in the late 1970s. "It's been lovely returning to
it," she sighs. "It's brought back so much. I can see
how it's influenced and inspired me. Good, natural
dialogue. Very funny." She knows the religious terrain, too. Her mother died from cancer when she
was two; she was then raised in Islington, north
London, first by neighbours who fostered her, then
by her Irish immigrant father. She later attended
Catholic school in Camden.
"Mine wasn't as hardcore as the one in the play.
The one I went to had just turned comprehensive,
so we had a lot of the teachers who'd taught in the
grammar school system and then suddenly had to
adapt to having girls like myself, who weren't that
bright but were there because of being Catholic. I
don't think there was a lot of patience; I didn't come
across much. But there wasn't the gruesomeness
you get in the play. And at least sex education had
started to come in." What she didn't learn in biology
lessons, Burke picked up in the playground or at
home. "I had two older brothers who kept dirty
mags under their mattresses. They didn't know I
knew. So I'd have a look at them. They're a bit grim,
aren't they?"
There was no drama at Burke's school, at least not
on the curriculum, but an English teacher did im-
provisation exercises and spotted her talent. He encouraged her to sign up for drama lessons at the
Anna Scher theatre, near her home. She put her
name down at 13; just before her 16th birthday, she
got in. At 17, she was cast in Scrubbers, which was
marketed as a female Scum (tagline: "It's a crime
what borstal can do to a girl").
She had always been funny among her friends,
but her comic presence wasn't felt strongly on
screen until she started working with French and
Saunders in the late 1980s. Then her partnership
with Harry Enfield gave her a first taste of the proprietorial relationship the public can feel toward a
favourite performer. "Friends were getting a bit fed
up 'cause I'd chat to anyone while we were out.
They'd say, 'Look, whenever we go to the pub, you
end up talking to people who come up to you and
then the night's gone.' So I just thought, 'Oh, bollocks, I'll stop going out.'"
It was the extraneous attention that partly killed
off Burke's enthusiasm for acting, more than the job
itself. "The thing I hear most about Kathy is, 'Oh,
she's so down to earth!'" says James Dreyfus, who
played Tom, her prissy gay flatmate in Gimme
Gimme Gimme. "In fact, she's incredibly complex
and complicated, and I mean that in a positive way.
She's fiercely intelligent and hates all the PR crap
that goes along with being an actress."
If she is the salt of the earth, then she's peppery
with it. Her insistence that she really is a grumpy
old boot would be harder to believe if it wasn't corroborated by some intense don't-mess-with-me eye
contact, or her transparent displeasure at being photographed after the interview. Lately, she found that
side of herself coming out more while she was writing a new script for TV (which, if it gets made, she
hopes to direct).
"I hate writing," she says. "I'm quite a solitary
person. I like being on my own. I live alone. I'm not
saying I don't understand loneliness, but I've never
felt lonely – until I write. When I sit down and write,
I can't bear it. I feel very much on my own." Though
she collaborated on the material she performed
with Enfield ("Perry is my creation and I'd bodge in
with ideas on the rest"), she couldn't consider actually writing with someone else. "I'm quite a cantankerous soul. People have this impression that I have
a happy disposition. But I'm dark and cynical underneath. I can see a lot of bullshit in the world and it
gives me the 'ump, Ryan, it really does!" Her wicked
cackle does nothing to neutralise the sentiment.
Even in the hour we spend together, it's clear she
probably needs to use both sides of the paper when
compiling her shit-list. Richard Dawkins is on there.
"I feel like, 'Shut up, Dawkins. Take your tights off
and have a beer.' I envy faith. If he believed in
something, he might not be so arrogant." But most
of the offenders turn out to be in showbusiness or
11
journalism. There were those who had it in for the
BBC3 sketch show Horne and Corden, which she directed. "The sketches weren't up to it, basically. But
there are certain journalists I will never talk to again
because of the disgusting things they wrote about
Mathew and James."
Then there was the reaction to her Day-Glo sitcom
Gimme Gimme Gimme. "It was round the time of
The Royle Family and The Office. No one would admit they watched Gimme. And no one would dare
admit they actually fucking liked it!" She sees Mrs
Brown's Boys as following in the same tradition and
upsetting the same sorts of people. "I really love
what [creator and writer] Brendan O'Carroll has
done. Sometimes in our business, we think we're
here to entertain each other, and we forget there's
an audience at home. They're the most important
ones – not pleasing the Bafta panel that year. I
couldn't give a shit about that."
Easy to say when you've been named best actress
at Cannes. "Well, there is that." Some award-winners will spin a self-deprecating yarn about keeping
their Oscars in the loft or their Emmys in the shed,
but Burke goes one better. Her Cannes prize ("It's
like a swimming certificate, really") is hanging in
someone else's bathroom. "My mates Anthony and
Peter said they loved looking at it. So I said, 'If you
like it that much, you can have it. So it's in a toilet in
Manchester."
Despite Burke's protestations that prizes mean
nothing to her, she gave a rabble-rousing speech at
the 2002 British Comedy awards – one of her most
stirring performances, in fact – after being named
best comedy actress for Gimme Gimme Gimme.
Rapturous applause greeted her opening broadside:
"It's about fucking time, innit?" There's an intriguing contradiction here: the bruiser who deplores
trinkets and trophies complaining that she wasn't
given her due. Clearly, the show means a lot to her –
she and Dreyfus still text one another in character
as Linda and Tom – but did she mean it was about
time for her, or for the widely maligned series?
"I meant it about everything really, but yes, there
was a semblance of arrogance there. It seemed people had been enjoying what I'd been doing for years
and it'd never been properly acknowledged. So I did
think, 'About fucking time!' I was just saying what
everyone else was thinking." It seems unlikely that
anyone could deliver such a line with magnanimity,
let alone grace. But somehow, Burke does.
• Once a Catholic is at the Tricycle theatre, London
NW6, from 27 November to 18 January, then at the
Royal Court Liverpool 28 January to 8 February.
12
13
14
My partner is one of the
Arctic 30
Nina Gold's partner, Frank Hewetson, is one of 28
Greenpeace protesters being held in a Russian
prison. What is that like for her and their children?
By Amelia Gentleman
Nina Gold cannot remember how many times her
partner has been arrested. There was a memorable
occasion in Washington, just after the birth of their
first child, when it looked like he might have to
serve a six-month sentence, another time in Brazil
and another in Norway, in Greenland, in Japan …
She stops counting and concludes: "He's been arrested a lot of times in a lot of countries … It's terrible for your car insurance."
A dry, understated sense of humour helps when
the father of your children is imprisoned in a Russian jail, awaiting his fate. Nina's partner is Frank
Hewetson, a logistics coordinator for Greenpeace
and one of the 28 Greenpeace activists (and two
journalists) who staged a protest against Russia's
first off-shore oil rig in Arctic waters in September.
The Russian authorities responded with unexpected severity and they were all rounded up at
gunpoint by masked security agents and taken to a
Murmansk prison. For the last five weeks he has
been locked up in a cell with two chain-smoking
Russian prisoners, waiting to find out if he is going
to be tried on piracy and criminal hooliganism
charges.
Arrest is "an occupational hazard" when you're an
environmental activist, Nina says. Usually, their
teenage children, Nell, 16, and Joe, 13, are untroubled when they hear details of their father's latest
detention. "They're used to it. It seems standard to
them," she says.
But it is increasingly clear that this arrest is far
more serious than anything that has gone
before."The children are mainly OK and trust that
things will be resolved and he will be back soon –
apart from moments when they are suddenly desperately upset and get a flash of the possibility that
they might not see him again for seven years. Those
moments are tough."
Family life has always been punctuated by periods
when Frank has been absent, staging protests
around the world, so when he left home on 2
September – having explained that he would be
away for a few weeks, sailing on the Arctic Sunrise
to international waters north of Russia, to attempt
to attach a protest pod of protesters to the side of a
Gazprom oil rig – Nina wasn't unduly concerned. He
had been involved in a similar action on a Cairn Energy rig in the same geographical area last year. That
action also ended in arrest and a two-week imprisonment in Greenland before a swift trial that saw
them released and allowed home.
Just before her partner left, he explained exactly
what they were planning. "You find yourself thinking, crikey – that sounds terrifying," she recalls. But
Frank pointed out that Greenpeace had previously
performed an identical action on the same Gazprom
rig and no one had even been arrested. They knew it
was going to be challenging, but the action was in
international waters, so they assumed it would not
be seen as excessively provocative by Russia. Frank
was in a very upbeat mood before the trip – he
thrives on the adrenaline. "He loves it. And it must
be incredibly exciting if you like that kind of thing,"
Nina says.
She became uneasy when she learned (on Twitter)
that the entire Greenpeace team had been detained
as they tried to fasten the pod to the rig. She began
to worry a little more when she saw images of her
partner on a news website, hands in the air signalling surrender, as a masked Russian in camouflage brandished a knife at him. Frank is dressed in
so much weather-protective equipment that you
can't see his face, but Nina spotted his initials, FH,
on the corner of the yellow helmet.
Nina, a very successful casting director who has
cast Oscar-winning films such as The King's Speech,
and is now casting Star Wars, sits at her kitchen table in the family home in Queen's Park, north-west
London (a Free Frank placard in the corridor, electric car in the drive) and finds the images on her laptop. "It doesn't look great, does it? It looks frightening," she says, as she flicks through images of armed
Russian security storming on to the Greenpeace vessel. Living with an environmental campaigner inevitably makes family life somewhat unpredictable.
Nina and Frank have known each other since they
were teenagers, so she has had a long time to acclimatise. She talks about these uncertainties with a
wry smile, as if they are no worse than the trifling
everyday irritations of coexistence faced by two
busy people. "I've become very used to him coming
home and saying 'I'm off to Brazil tomorrow. Oh sor-
ry, didn't I mention that might be on the cards?'
"As Frank has done this job for the whole of our
family life, we are pretty used to his eccentric
lifestyle. We have learned to tolerate and, I have to
admit, appreciate being bossed into travelling everywhere in Europe by train as opposed to by plane;
being terrorised into not using the tumble dryer;
fighting a continual battle over the central heating
thermostat; learning to love his strange wardrobe,
which comes almost exclusively from a tree
surgeon's catalogue; the motley collection of homemade or recycled items he considers to be presents.
I even grudgingly know he is right when he tries to
convince me that I don't need to buy quite as many
of the things in life I deem essential and he thinks
are consumerist waste," she says.
She and their children support the cause Frank is
working for and believe in the positive impact of
protest, which must help when he packs his bag and
disappears for an uncertain period. "It's so easy to
be really cynical and to think it doesn't help – that
nothing is going to change. People are going to continue drilling for oil.
"But you have to hope peaceful protest has an effect. If people know about what's happening, then
at least we can have a discussion," she says. "We
can't beat the might of all the oil companies, but
some of Greenpeace's efforts – on deforesting the
rainforest for cattle feed, for example – really did
help make that situation a lot better through
protest," she says.
"The purpose is to bring global attention to
drilling in the Arctic to show what a fragile setup it
is, and how easy it is for it to go wrong. Just like the
spillage in the Gulf of Mexico was a complete disaster – this is the same sort of drilling technology. It's
a big problem. They want to make sure that people
know about that."
The children, she says, are proud of their father.
"They have done some campaigning. They're not
ready to fling themselves into it heart and soul, as
he is, but my daughter is doing geography A-level
mainly because of her interest in this kind of thing."
Since his imprisonment, Frank has had one phone
conversation (it took five weeks to secure permission), in which Nina found him "in good spirits and
making terrible jokes". She has received several letters from him – not the kind delivered by the post-
15
Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
man but a hybrid modern form, written on paper,
photographed by his lawyer or the British consul
and emailed to her. These contain details of daily
life, and sparks of humour and misery. He describes
his delight when his cell-mates show him how to
stick photographs to the wall using toothpaste.
Elsewhere, he is tersely bleak: "23 hour day lock up.
One hour a day 'exercise'. No hot running water.
Light on 24-hours … It's a mixture of hope and despair."
In public at least, Nina is inclined towards hope.
She thinks Frank will cope better than some of the
other protesters because he is a professional campaigner.
The morning we meet, pictures of the cells in
Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle
(before transfer this week to a less remote prison in
St Petersburg), are published for the first time.
There are images of cells, painted in a very particular Soviet green, with underwear hanging on string
between the sink and the grey bars of the bunk
beds, a small table big enough for two people cov-
ered with newspaper and some plastic food containers, towels hanging to dry on the bunk bed, grey penal blankets.
"Mmmm. Oh, my God," she says, smiling and
looking worried at the same time. "Well, to be honest it doesn't look that much worse than the ship,"
she says, when she has found something positive to
say.
"Frank has been in tricky, frightening situations
before, and is probably better suited to a Russian
prison than most people I know. He's certainly better than I would be. He doesn't care about being
cold," she says.
But Nina thinks the ordeal must be particularly
hard for some of the others, such as Alexandra Harris, a 27-year-old British Greenpeace campaigner,
who is being held in solitary confinement. "She's
just a young girl – I feel really sorry for those people.
She's totally on her own in a cell."
Nina isn't certain whether this prison experience
is much worse than the time Frank spent in prison
in Washington DC, soon after their daughter was
born, when he was arrested after driving a dumper
truck full of coal up to the doorstep of the Capitol
building, in protest at America's refusal to commit
to reducing emissions. He found his cell-mates very
alarming. "He could have stayed and fought the
case, but he would have been fighting the case for
six months, so he pleaded guilty, got a fine and was
deported. He thought, 'I'd rather not miss the next
six months of my daughter's life.'
"He's now not allowed into America. That was
pre-9/11 – obviously now you wouldn't even begin
to be able to do that kind of protest now."
Despite her determination to be upbeat, Nina admits that this experience is different. This is the
longest time that Frank has been imprisoned, and
the fact that lawyers and the British officials are uncertain about the likely outcome is very stressful.
Although she is used to being a single mother once
or twice a year for stretches of about a month, when
Frank disappears to stage an action, the extra responsibility of liaising with lawyers and Foreign Office staff and trying to get permission to visit, is a
strain. "We are all experiencing a whole new level of
worry and uncertainty," she says.
She hopes this ordeal may persuade Frank to rethink his career path during his time in prison. "I
think he could consider that he might be getting a
bit old for this kind of game. He could do a slightly
less crazy version. Hopefully, he won't have too
much appetite for doing it again in a terrible hurry."
16
Caitlin Moran on her
first crush: 'I loved you,
Pavid Dreen!'
When the writer started work on Raised by Wolves,
a sitcom about teenagers, she thought back to the
edgy boy who played Han Solo to her Princess
Leia ...
By Caitlin Moran
You don't really start having teenage crushes
when you're a teenager – those feelings start much
earlier, although you're too much of a wide-eyed
faun to properly identify what they are. When I had
my first crush, at the age of 10, I didn't know it was
love or affection or obsession or pre-sexual fixation
– I just knew I was really, really interested in this
boy at school, and wanted to stand near him all the
time. Like in Gregory's Girl, where there's just a series of shots of John Gordon Sinclair, only half in the
frame, just hanging around Dorothy while she
cheerfully ignores him.
So his name was David Preen, but I should give
him the veil of anonymity, so let's refer to him for
the rest of this confessional as "Pavid Dreen". Pavid
was the most charismatic and handsome boy in our
class – obviously. I wasn't going to fall in love with a
donkey – with incredibly pale skin and a very "edgy"
sense of humour. Now, at 38, I'd like to say that the
edgy sense of humour revolved around making brilliantly cutting observations about the social and
racial hypocrisy of our council estate school in
Wolverhampton, but I have to admit that it mainly
consisted of him painting his hands with Copydex
glue during art lessons and shouting: "Look! It's
spunk!"
When art lessons were over, we would all go out
and play Star Wars. Pavid, because he was the handsomest, and edgy (Have I told you how edgy he
was? Even though the school uniform was a royal
blue jumper, he would wear a navy one. As a very
obedient and fearful child, this blew my mind) always took the role of Han Solo. As I had very long
hair in plaits, I would roll them up into two buns
and play Leia. As you may imagine, us playing Leia
and Han in the playground fuelled my obsession
with Pavid to the point of mania. I would chide him
with "God, I pity your future wife!" while thinking,
"Who will be me! I shall be your future wife! I've
subtly put that idea in your mind, and one day we
shall wed," and would pathetically go and hang his
parka up for him in the cloak-room whenever he left
it on the floor. Like a wife.
Caitlin Moran with her sister Caroline (centre, right) and the actors who play them in Raised by Wolves. Photograph: Colin
Hutton/Big Talk/Channel 4
When we broke up for the summer holidays, I was
looking forward to the autumn term – our last in junior school – being red hot. Clearly, as fourth years,
we were going to get down and dirty in our last year
at Springdale. Maybe even hold hands. All my
neuro-linguistic programming, re: "wife", was going
to pay off handsomely.
Alas, when I came back to school in September,
Sasha fucking Williams had grown her hair long during the holidays, and – as she was prettier than me,
and, also, not fat – was instantly declared the "new
Princess Leia" in our games.
"What about me?" I wailed, with as much dignity
as I could muster.
Pavid looked me up and down, with his edgy,
handsome eyes. He still had bits of Copydex on his
thumb.
"You're hairy. You can be Chewie," he said, in the
incomparably flat and dry manner of the Wolverhampton man.
I let out a sad Wookiee cry – "RARRRRRGHLE" –
and then spent the next six months in agony, watching Pavid and Sasha basically getting it on in space
while I was sent off to "mend the
hyperdrive" (stand by the big bins).
However, as I constantly reminded myself, "Han
loves Chewie. They're close friends." And indeed,
Pavid and I were still pretty close friends – we sat
next to each other in class, and he would show me
his gluey hands, and I would repeat jokes from 'Allo
'Allo, pretending that I'd made them up myself. It almost made sense the afternoon that Pavid sent over
his emissary – Andy Webster – who said: "Pavid
wants to go out with you. Do you want to go out
with him – yes or no?"
My heart exploded like a hive of bees – he loved
me! The Wookiee had won out over the Princess! In
your fucking face, Sasha Williams, aka Organa of
Alderaan! I may even have said that to her. Quietly.
In a corridor. As she was walking away.
Having given my consent to Pavid's love declaration, I went home and properly lost my mind. What
did "going out" mean? We couldn't actually go anywhere – there was nowhere to go, apart from the
swings and slides on Warstones Drive, which
seemed inappropriate. There was a rumour that,
last year, one fourth-year had gone to McDonald's
with a boy – but, to be honest, it all seemed very un-
likely. It was 12p just to get up town on the bus, and
what kid on our estate would have the money to
then buy a McDonald's? It was utterly unthinkable.
And that wasn't my worst problem. My worst
problem was: what if he wants to kiss me? I had no
idea how you did this. Obviously. Imagine a 10-yearold kicking back in their bunkbed going: "Can't wait
to go in there with tongues. It's gonna be mega."
I did all the usual things: practised on my hand,
practised on my pillow. Then I did unusual things –
practised on my elbow; practised on the baby. I hasten to add I didn't do tongues on the baby – just did
a straightforward kiss, but with my eyes open, to
see how the baby reacted to my "kissing persona".
Crushingly, it did one of those full-body shivers babies are apt to do – jerking away with its eyes boggling open – and so I stopped practising getting off
with Pavid Dreen with the baby, and went and ate a
whole can of tinned peaches with evaporated milk –
a dish we called "Dead goldfish" – which was my
stress-relieving method of choice back them. Obviously, when I discovered masturbation two years
later that all changed quite rapidly.
On Monday morning, I turned up at school for my
first whole day of "being someone's girlfriend". I
had prepared for this shift in my status by wearing
perfume, which wasn't actually perfume – we didn't
have any – but a dab of SuperCook Vanilla Essence
behind each ear. So sensual. I walked across the
playground, my heart full of flowers: I was loved by
someone! I was a girlfriend! At playtime, we'd sit together by the hedge and eat salt'n'vinegar Chipsticks – that was what all the other loved-up kids
did! I had, in some way, become real!
Andy Webster suddenly appeared before me, capering like an evil jester with a battered Adidas bag
full of towelling sweatbands he'd shoplifted from
Penn Sports. "Pavid says it was all a joke, and yowm
dumped," he said, gleefully.
The minute he said it, everything suddenly made
sense. Of course. Of course it was just a joke. How
could I have not known that? What is the point of
scoring 98% on your last maths test, and being "a
pleasure to teach" (Mr Thompson, headmaster,
school report 1985) if you're still dim enough to believe a boy who, while handsome and edgy, would
also go and ask unwary second years "Have you got
skill?" and, if they replied "Yes", would snap his fingers and shout: "Oh man, do you actually know
what 'Skill' is? It's African Bum Disease! YOU'VE
GOT AFRICAN BUM DISEASE!" and then run around
the playground, arms wide, as if he'd scored a goal.
So yes. That was my first-ever crush. Pavid Dreen.
When me and my sister started writing a sitcom
about teenagers, we wanted to write about all the
most agonising and awful things about being a
teenage girl, and my hopeless non-affair with Pavid
Dreen became the basis of the first episode: there's
nothing quite like a fat, bookish teenage girl who
wants to be "noble", and accidentally says
"forsooth!" when panicked, falling in love with a
swaggering knucklehead who would probably sell
her down Ca$h Convertors for a tenner if the trafficking laws in this country were more lenient.
That's not all that's in the first episode, obviously:
someone puts their foot up someone else's vagina,
there's a very inappropriate singalong in a car, a frog
dies and some of the most lacklustre mothering in
Britain is done with aplomb. But it all started with
Pavid Dreen.
You were so edgy, Pavid. You shattered my heart.
And, ironically, I couldn't mend it, as you'd smeared
the last of your Copydex all over your hands while
shouting: "I spunked up while watching Cagney &
Lacey!"
I wonder where you are now.
• Raised by Wolves will be shown on Channel 4
later this year.
17
A word from our
developer team
“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the
freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long
run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—
and autonomy can be the antidote.”
Those words from author Dan Pink begin to introduce his principles on what motivates people, his
three intrinsic themes of autonomy, mastery and
purpose. Motivating any team is challenging, and in
large organisations it can be hard. But whenever I've
had control of structure I've focused my energy and
determination on setting in place certain principles
that minimise disruption and reduce delays and
bottlenecks:
Focused & Flexible. By focused, I mean 100% dedicated to a single, common purpose - one team, one
goal. By flexible, I mean not too hung up on job titles and job descriptions and roles are not over-specialised. I might specialise in a particular area, so I’d
rather be doing that most of the time, but I am happy to do anything that helps my team to achieve its
goal.
Autonomous. The team ideally has control of
their own destiny, from idea to value, with minimum or no reliance on other teams. This is hard to
achieve in larger organisations, but it is worth striving for as it may be the single biggest factor in creating high performance teams.
Small. Research suggests that the optimum team
size for interdependent work is 5-12 people. I would
agree with this, but I would go for the smaller end
of this range whenever possible. Minimising specialists helps to keep teams, and the overhead of each
team, small.
Talented. Over the years, I have seen many managers talk about recruitment, retention and performance management as though it's a chore. But one
of the most fundamental aspects of creating a high
performance team is the people. Give recruitment
the energy it deserves and be very selective. Actively focus on how to retain your best talent. And actively manage the weaknesses in your teams – either
through more support and training, finding a more
suitable role, or ultimately by managing them out.
Give your teams the opportunity to develop their
skills and help them to master their chosen discipline.
Established. There is no team like an established
team, and there is immense value in creating persistent teams that are long-lasting. In a project environment, this means feeding work or projects to established teams rather than forming new teams
around projects as they start up. Established teams
have already been through their forming and storming phase and learnt how to work effectively together, they’ve optimised their processes and they understand their capacity.
Stable. It’s related to the point above, but once a
team is established, try to keep it stable, instead of
chopping and changing people. Frequently changing team members is disruptive to team dynamics
and sometimes causes major problems. Recognise
that ramping teams up and down is expensive. Try
to keep teams steady for as long as possible.
Together. This is the simplest principle of all, but
often it’s not simple in an organisation where functional teams have sprung up in different locations.
Re-organising teams isn’t just about the structure of
reporting lines and seating arrangements, it can also
be about relocating people and none of this is easy.
There may be economic or other reasons for not colocating people, but if at all possible, sit teams together.
Kelly Waters
Interim CTO
The Guardian
18
A conversation with Terry Pratchett,
author of The Carpet People
Cory Doctorow and the famed author discuss
building worlds, the legitimacy of authority, and
the future.
Cory: You took a bunch of runs at building a world
where a million stories could unfold—The Carpet People,Truckers, and, finally, Discworld. Is Discworld’s
near-total untethering from our world the secret of its
staying power?
Terry: It isn’t our world, but on the other hand it
is very much like our world. Discworld takes something from this world all the time, shows you bits of
the familiar world in new light by putting them into
Discworld. Is that staying power? You tell me.
Cory: What’s the secret to Discworld’s unplumbable depths, and is there something a big world
lacks when compared to one that’s smaller (in more
than one way), like the Carpet?
Terry: We know about Earth; we know an awful
lot about the solar system. When you do Discworld,
you, the writer, can more or less change anything if
you want to, if you can make it fit. It means you’re
god, and that’s a great responsibility.
As a writer, you can take bits of the universe and
put it in your own new universe. Working in Discworld, you use the word sandwich, and you think:
Can I do this? Now I’ve got to have a reason why a
sandwich is a sandwich—in our world, it was named
after the man associated with its invention, the Earl
of Sandwich. Can you have your own universe and
still have sandwiches? You have to do it all yourself
and decide if you need to open the door into our reality at the same time.
Once Discworld started moving, as it were, it
started moving almost of its own volition, because I
would write a Discworld novel, and that novel required that such and such should be available, or
whatever, and that means that the next time, that’s
real in Discworld and the thing grows. And I must
say it grows to be rather bigger than a carpet—but
with care, it can have just about anything in it.
I’m finishing up Raising Steam, in which the railroad comes to Ankh-Morpork, and an awful lot of
things have to be made and discovered until you get
to the top of that pyramid. You can’t have Vaseline
until someone’s invented something else. You have
to create and understand a lot of things before you
can move on. And so, since I work on Discworld almost all the time, it grows because I need it to.
Cory: Do you think that there’s any way you could
have kept us in the Carpet for anything like the num-
ber of books that we’ve gotten from Discworld?
Terry: I was about to say “No,” but right now I
wonder. . . . If the idea had taken, I don’t know. I really don’t. But how would it be? It would be almost
a kind of . . . People in the Carpet are more or less
tribal. What would happen if I . . . You’ve got me
thinking!
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Cory: Contrariwise, I feel like Dodger could have
been the start of its own saga, about any number of
characters from Dickensian England—do you think
the world of Seven Dials has enough material to fuel a
Pratchett engine through quite so many books?
Terry: The answer is yes. Because it’s all there.
The people Dodger meets are real, the places he
goes are real, and all I have to do is put in that little
touch of fantasy, i.e., Dodger himself. Queen Victoria was real, though it’s hard to believe—and she’s
free; you don’t have to pay to use her. There’s a
whole lot of people that Dodger could have met. I’m
pretty certain he’s going to meet Darwin or his
grandfather (more likely) at some point.
If I run with it, no limitations, I could keep it going, I think. I know a lot of the stuff. I know how
they talk, I know the history. It doesn’t really matter
if I put a bit of fantasy in to make the pie rise. You
can go into the world of “What if?”
Cory: So much of your work is about the legitimacy
of authority. You write a lot of feudal scenarios, but
you also seem like a fellow with a lot of sympathy for
(and suspicion of!) majority rule. The witches gain
authority through cunning and compassion (Nanny
Ogg), through knowledge and force of will (Granny
Weatherwax). Kings rule by divine right and compassion for the land; Vetenari, out of the practical fact of
his ability to control the city’s factions. The Carpet
People is shot through with themes of who should rule
and why. Where does legitimate authority spring
from?
Terry: The people! The only trouble is the people
can be a bit stupid—I know that; I’m one of the people, and I’m quite stupid.
Lord Vetinari is that wonderful thing: a sensible
ruler—that’s why he’s so popular. Everyone grumbles about him, but no one wants to chance what it
would be like if he wasn’t there. I like Vetinari. I
don’t mind authority, but not authoritarian authority. After all, the bus driver is allowed to be the boss
of the bus. But if he’s bad at driving, he’s not going
to be a bus driver anymore.
Now, an interesting sideline on this is the question of the writer’s position is vis-à-vis authority.
A journalist looks at authority as a target as a matter of course. You don’t actually have to fire, but you
see it as a target. Since I am tainted as a journalist, I
can’t separate that out from being a novelist, and
my personal view is that you look askance (at the
least) at authority. Authority must be challenged at
every step. You challenge authority all the time to
keep it on its toes. Vetinari works because there
aren’t enough people who think he’s doing a bad
job; they’re all factions, in any case. So he balances
the world. It’s not everyone being happy, but rather
not too many of them being unhappy.
Now you, Cory, seem like a fellow with a lot to say
about authority yourself. Where would you say legitimate authority springs from?
Cory: This is a question I’ve put a lot of thought
into as well. I think that just authority arises from
systems that fail gracefully. That is to say, the important thing isn’t what happens when the ruler does
something that you agree with—the important bit is
what happens when she does something stupid and
terrible.I am far more interested in graceful failure
than blazing success. If you select a leader by a means
that contains robust oversight, a meaningful recall
mechanism, and recourse to alternatives (an independent judiciary, say) in the event of substantial
wrongdoing, the authority is legitimate, because if
things were going badly off the rails, you could replace
her. This is something that worries me about Lord
Vetenari. He is, like all of us, imperfect. Lacking any
checks on his authority (apart from civic uprising), he
is likely to fail badly, even though he succeeds brilliantly. All that said (and to your question below): the
*reason* to have authority is to simplify the task of
getting on together. But technology lowers coordination costs and so undermines the case for governance
in some instances. I generally refuse to predict the future (on the grounds that SF writers who dabble in futurism are like drug dealers who sample the product—
unlikely to come to a good end). But when pressed, I
say, “To imagine the future, imagine the cost of coordination trending towards zero in more and more domains. Now we make encyclopedias and operating
systems the way we used to organise bake sales. What
if we could build skyscrapers that way? Airplanes? Air
traffic control systems?
The Carpet People concerns itself with many questions of infrastructure and public works—another
theme that has featured in many of the most enjoyable Discworld novels, especially Going Postal/Making Money. Ultimately, it comes down to the builders,
the wreckers, and the free spirits. Now that we’ve arrived at a time of deep austerity, what do you think
the future of infrastructure is?
Terry: To crack and fall away, I sometimes think.
From what I see around me, it’s people doing it for
themselves. We know the government is there, but
we know they have no real power to do anything
but mess things up, so you do workarounds.
On the matter of builders, wreckers, and free spirits, I’d say that Tiffany Aching [beginning with The
Wee Free Men] is a builder. Moist von Lipwig [beginning with Going Postal] is a free spirit, but also a
builder—I think people can go in and out of sequence. My dad was a mechanic; maybe my interest
in builders starts there. You made your own catapult. You made your own crystal receiver. He encouraged in me that kind of thing. Even if it was
dangerous, he took the view that I ought to be
clever enough to know what I was doing.
My parents were practical people. That’s the word
that is missing here: practical about just about everything. The ground state of being of practicality.
Sometimes things need tearing down—and that
might be, as it were, the gates of the city. But if we
talk without metaphors, I would say that building is
best. Because it is inherently useful.
And you, Cory? Do you want to make the case for
wreckers?
Cory: Never wrecking for its own sake. But disruption, yes, I’ll make that case. There is no virtue in the
fact that all of us use toilets, but only some of us clean
them. If we invented a machine tomorrow that obviated toilet scrubbing, that would be an unalloyed
good, even though it also obviated the work of toilet
scrubbers. That isn’t to say that a just or caring society should cast aside the toilet scrubbers. The Luddite
fight is miscast as a fight against technology, but it’s
not—the Luddites smashed looms over a difference of
how to apportion the dividends from automation, not
because they objected to automation itself.Kevin Kelly
has a marvellous “robotics curve” that goes: 1) A
robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.
2) OK, it can do a lot, but it can’t do everything I do.
3) OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me
when it breaks down, which is often.
4) OK, it operates without failure, but I need to train
it for new tasks.
19
5) Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to
do, but what about me?
6) My new job is more fun and pays more now that
robots/computers are doing my old job.
7) I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I
do.I’m not so sure about #6: we seem to be perfecting
a system that only provides a living to financiers who
invest in robots. This won’t work (if the bankers have
all the money, no one can buy the things the robots
make). We need a system that distributes
automation’s dividends or we’ll end up with nothing
at all.One thing I’ve always enjoyed about your books
with feudal settings is that it seems you get something
like the correct ratio of vassals to lords. I always get a
sense that for every ermine-trimmed guild boss in
Ankh-Morpork, there are a thousand potato farmers
in a shack in a field somewhere. So much of fantasy
seems very top-heavy—too many knights, not enough
serfs. Do you consciously think about political and
economic considerations when you’re devising a
world?
Terry: I’ve never been at home with lords and
ladies, kings, and rubbish like that, because it’s not
so much fun. Take a protagonist from the bottom of
the heap, and in the same way it’s good to have a female protagonist, as she’s got it all to play for.
Whereas people in high places, all they can do is,
well . . . I don’t know, actually: I’ve never been that
high. If you have the underdog in front of you, that
means you’re going to have fun, because what the
underdog is going to want to do is be the upper dog
or be no dog at all. And I’ve never felt the need to
have lords and ladies as my champions, as it were.
In Ankh-Morpork there are notables, some of
whom are stupid, and some of whom are useful and
likeable, but it’s a mercantile place. It’s money that
matters. And where do I get that from . . . ?
Cory: Damon Knight once told me that he thought
that no matter how good a writer you are, you probably won’t have anything much to say until you’re
about twenty-six (I was twenty at the time and he was
my writing teacher, at Clarion—ouch!). You’ve written
about collaborating with your younger self for the
reissue of The Carpet People. Do you feel like seventeen-year-old Terry had much to say?
Terry: That’s the best question you’ve asked all
day!
I think the he had a go, and it wasn’t bad. And
then he was clever enough to read a hell of a lot of
books and every bound volume of Punch. But when
I was younger, I didn’t have the anger. I think you
have to have the anger. It gives an outlook. And a
place from which to stand. When you get out of the
teens, well out of the teens,you begin to have some
kind of understanding, you’ve met so many people,
heard so many things, all the bits that growing up
means. And out of that lot comes wisdom—it might
not be very good wisdom to start with, but it will be
a certain kind of wisdom. It leads to better books.
The Tiffany Aching series is what I would most
like to be remembered for, and I couldn’t have written Tiffany Aching when I was seventeen. I just
wouldn’t have had the tools.
But the question remains: As a writer of fantasy,
can I be a proper writer? I don’t do literature, I do
writing—you get paid for writing, for literature you
just get plaques to put on the wall. I never really
bother about it. I don’t think anyone in the genre
does. It doesn’t really matter; it’s what you’re doing:
you’re working. Writing happens; it’s what I do. I’m
here; I do it. I like doing it. I like getting paid for it. I
like the fun.
Being an author is not as much a job: it’s a life.
Thank you, Cory. It’s been fun.
Cory: “Being an author is not as much a job: it’s a
life.”Preach, brother!It’s been fun for me, too. You
certainly have your share of plaques on the wall and
a richly deserved sword made of genuine sky-metal,
but as a reader of your works, the thing that matters
most to me is the books, for which I am heartily grateful.
This article first appeared on Boing Boing and is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. boingboing.net/2013/11/05/a-conversation-withterry-prat.html
20
Think digital distractions have killed
our attention spans? Think again
The rise of complex TV series and vast novels
shows we still prefer commitment to a quick fix
By Stuart Jeffries
The young woman opposite on the tube last week
was lost in Donna Tartt's new novel, The Goldfinch.
She personified the truth that attention deficit disorder is a lie. I'm not saying she was weirdly small,
but she could have used the 771-page book as a coffee table. She was about halfway through and the
covers kept springing back in defiance of her struggling fingers. When she finally got off at Earl's Court
she looked like she needed assistance, or a trolley.
Why didn't she read Tartt as an ebook? Why did
she choose this inefficient delivery system that
proves what Philip Larkin wrote at the end of A
Study of Reading Habits, namely that "books are a
load of crap"? There seem to be two reasons.
One, the notion of conspicuous consumption developed by Thorstein Veblen. It's not enough to
have a yacht; you have to park it at Saint Tropez harbour for the rest of the leisure class to see. It's not
enough to read the latest Donna Tartt; you have to
read it in public as a marker of your good taste. Even
if it gives you a hernia.
Two, books are getting longer in a crazy bid to
confer on the literati's waifs an evolutionary advantage over their peers. Books are getting longer, even
as articles moaning about our declining attention
spans are getting more frequent. Eleanor Catton's
recent Booker-winner The Luminaries is 832 pages;
the new translation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables,
called The Wretched, which comes out on
Thursday, is 1,416 pages. Remember The Little Book
of Calm, which was so small you could put it in your
breast pocket and bring out when you needed a little soothing or tear it to shreds when its advice became insufferably twee? They don't make them like
that any more. Yes, you may think that three of
those big books, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy,
needed something (an editor?), but that's not really
the point.
In a culture of speed-dating, quick fixes, fast food,
bullet trains, pop-up everything, and unreadably
long jeremiads about the increasing incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the singleminded commitment required to read a long, absorbing book serves as a rebuke to a culture that
favours those who can simultaneously email/tweet/
instant message/hold up their end of a phone call/
Skype while live blogging the whole shebang. In
1977, the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon
warned about the dangers of the looming information-rich world, arguing that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".
No doubt Simon was right, but perhaps we're now
witnessing an inversion of that equation: a wealth
of attention focused more readily on the things that
warrant it. According to Daniel Goleman, author of
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, some Silicon Valley workplaces have banned laptops, mobile
phones and other devices during meetings in order
to battle the lack of focus that you'd think (ironic
face) Silicon Valley's gadgets facilitated in the first
place.
And it's not only books that are changing. The idiot box is braining up too. University College London recently held a seminar, called Complex TV:
Television Drama in the 21st Century, premised on
the idea that in recent years, the television drama
series has undergone radical development, both in
terms of series-creators' ambitions for the medium
and audiences' expectations. Hence The Sopranos,
Breaking Bad, The Wire, Scandi-Noir, Downton
Abbey, Peaky Blinders and Broadchurch. There was
a time when TV only earned scorn from academia.
Now, according to the seminar's blurb: "Episodic
storylines have increasingly expanded into seasonlong arcs, allowing for a far greater subtlety to narratives, which are no longer dependent upon satisfying the casual viewer." They've become, in a sense,
like the TV equivalents of long novels and professors at UCL, the fourth best tertiary educational institution in the world, find that they're worth academic attention.
Why? One reason, according George Potts, a graduate student behind the UCL seminar, is that the
best TV series no longer have to pander to viewers'
lack of intelligence or want of concentration.
"It seems to me that TV drama has risen to its
supreme position because of its unique ability to
overcome or buck the trend in the short-attentionspan society," says Potts. "It's strange how some series can demand so much of viewers and yet this
doesn't put people off in the way that a 'difficult'
novel would."
He cites the lack of flashbacks in Breaking Bad as
indicative of the tribute its makers paid to viewers'
intelligence. An example is drug dealer Jesse
Pinkman's realisation, in episode 11 of the show's final season, about what had happened to the ricin
cigarette (a key item in the unfolding drama of betrayal). Saul had earlier pickpocketed the ricin
cigarette. "There's no flashback, no initial explanation – all the viewer is offered is Jesse gazing at a
cigarette packet as a reminder that in the previous
season Saul's assistant Huell had pickpocketed him
in exactly the same way."
Why is that significant? "The lack of flashback for
such a key scene and the confusion it can and did
cause is my favourite example of how television no
longer feels the need to pander to viewers," says
Potts. "Given that Breaking Bad's audience kept increasing until over 10 million tuned in for the US
season finale, this clearly paid off."
But why would TV be in a unique position to buck
viewers' short attention spans? Potts cites the rise
of online viewing, Netflix and Sky+. Viewers have
been given tools to instantly rewatch and make
sense of these unprecedentedly complex narrative
arcs. "In this, I'd say complex television is taking
the place of the novel we used to read in bed at
night." Maybe. Or maybe long novels and complex
TV are two faces of the same zeitgeist-confounding
phenomenon.
Perhaps, in any case, longer novels and complex
TV series are not the only countervailing forces
against short-attention-span culture. Maybe, just
maybe, music is rebelling against its cowellised rihannificaton. Does James Blake winning the Mercury prize with a difficult record amount to a Gagareflex against homogenised music? Let's hope so.
Yes, but how many copies of these long novels
that frustrate instant gratification in favour of richer
experience actually get their spines broken? Don't
they sit on your shelves like good intentions along
with Proust, Tolstoy and Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit? According to my estimates, of those of you
who bought David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest,
only 37.25% have read it. And don't some series sit
on your hard drive, unwatched and reproving, while
you watch reruns of Horrible Histories or You've
Been Framed? Maybe that's just me.
David Sexton, the London Evening Standard's literary editor, reckons "long novels are having a moment", but it's more than a moment. This time two
years ago the Guardian's John Dugdale noted that
the "craze for long books goes on and on". That season the must-have bricks of paper were George RR
Martin's latest fantasy whopper, A Dance with Dragons (1,040 pages) and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (just
under 1,000 pages). And Stephen King's 11.22.63 had
just landed – at 740 pages shorter than its predecessor Under the Dome (1,074 pages), but long enough
to make reading King's oeuvre a full-time occupation.
So why is there a trend for longer novels? After all,
Philip Roth, in an interview in 2004, augured as
much: "I don't think in 20 or 25 years anyone will
read these things at all. I think it's inevitable. There
are other things for people to do, other ways for
them to be occupied, other ways for them to be
imaginatively engaged, that I think are probably far
more compelling than the novel, so I think the novel's day has come and gone."
Nearly a decade on from that prediction, the inevitability of the novel's obsolescence seems fanciful. They're not so much disappearing as taking up
ever more space – even if a growing proportion of
that is in cyberspace.
Why? "It is one of the paradoxes of our age,"
wrote Esquire's Tom Jonud recently. "We complain
that we don't have any time. Our storytellers proceed as if we have nothing but. Our directors seem
incapable of making a movie less than two and a
half hours long, our novelists of writing a book less
than 400 pages … In journalism, what used to be
characterised as 'narrative' or 'literary' or 'new'
journalism is now described simply as 'long form',
as if length were the trait that supersedes all
others."
So what's going on? One theory (mine) is that the
lure of the long is a revulsion at the zeitgeist, a desire to live in a different way from the one that dictates that everything can be expressed in 140 characters or fewer: long books, TV series and unbelievably protracted journalistic pieces meet a demand.
And that demand is kindled precisely because our
attention spans have become shorter as a result of
the increased claims upon them. We want an out
from an unsatisfying way of being. Especially if it involves, say, an immersion in the interiority of a
character (the descent of Walter White, Don Draper,
maybe even Thomas Shelby). We want to spend
time on one thing, rather than fracturing time incessantly, making it thereby unendurably meaningless.
What's striking is that some figures show that
those most likely to read are not old people but
those aged 18 to 24: in the US, at least 88% of 18-24s
have read a book in the past year, compared with
68% of over-65s. It's young people, traditionally
viewed as the irresolute, attention-lite problem,
who – more than the rest of us – don't like the way
our culture is working.
Kevin Pickard, a 21-year-old English student at the
University of Oklahoma, recently wrote: "It's
painful to hear people talk about my generation.
The 'millennials', according to the critics, are a gen-
eration of addicts, our thumbs permanently
scrolling through the flashes of text provided by
Twitter, the ostentatiously antiquated photos of Instagram, and the pretend sociality of Facebook."
Still, cool name. The Millennials. There are lots of
less nice names for those immersed in unedifying
multitasking reality. The vampire novelist Cassandra Clare dubbed them the Mundanes; you could
also call them the Wretcheds. Here's another: the
Desultories, those who yield to the attention-fragmenting technological strictures of our modern
world. The Desultories, those whose brains, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield worried, are possibly being rewired with shortened attention spans and loss
of empathy, because they spend too much time online. The Desultories, those whom Maryanne Wolf,
cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, argued
are losing the brain circuits honed by reading books
and thinking about their contents as they spend
more time on computers. "It takes time to think
deeply about information and we are becoming accustomed to moving on to the next distraction,"
says Wolff. "I worry that the circuits that give us
deep reading abilities will atrophy in adults and not
be properly formed in the young." Atrophied, superficial, unempathetic, pointlessly hyperactive –
who'd want to be a Desultory?
In that sense, the desire to read longer novels is
understandable. It's akin to the desire to write
them. "I love having an alternate life to retreat into
and to lose myself in," Donna Tartt told an interviewer recently. "I love being away from the world
so long – so far out from shore. Eleven years." It
doesn't take 11 years to read The Goldfinch, but it
takes some commitment.
David Sexton noted that when he was reading the
ebook version of The Luminaries recently ("I
couldn't face carting such a heavy object to and fro
every day." Wimp) his Kindle measures his progress
by percentages. "In the case of The Luminaries," he
noted, "that means you can read for ages without
seeming to make any progress at all." It's that big.
21
But how nice, in a way, to be so lost in a forest of
text that you don't seem to make any progress in
your journey out of it back into the real, and really
boring, world. That said, Sexton was happy when he
hit 100% and finished the bloody thing: The Luminaries was, for him, written by a "juvenile Kiwi AS
Byatt". Ouch. AS don't buy it, more like.
No wonder, either, that Netflix has done so well
since it established itself in the UK last year: it dangles before us an escape from an irksome world. After you've watched one episode of Parks and Recreation, up pops a little box on screen saying the next
episode starts in 12 seconds. One more episode
wouldn't hurt, would it? Five hours later Lesley
Knope is your role model; you want to lose your fingers in Ron Swanson's luxuriant retro-moustache.
Then you dimly realise that you've forgotten to pick
up your kids from school and/or that the beeping
noise is that your boss has texted you 12 times wondering if you're planning to show up today.
Perhaps subscribers have yielded to this importuning pop-box so readily as an antidote to the
short-termism of the Desultories. And perhaps technology, which helped us become desultory and unfocused, also now facilitates greater concentration
and focus.
In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud saw humanity oscillating between freedom and security.
Today, nauseated by desultory freedom, we are flipping back to security – the long book, the immersive
TV series, experiences deeper and richer than posting your "likes" on Facebook. Hey, maybe in future
even marriages will last longer than they do now, as
we get tired of the gimcrack claims of sexual novelty? Yeah, right. Let's not go nuts.
Breaking Bad, just one of the many subtle dramas to be found on TV. Photograph: Allstar/HBO
22
How to make the perfect onion bhajis
Can another member of the fritter family beat the
onion bhaji, do you eat them as a starter or a snack,
and what do you serve with them?
By Felicity Cloake
The onion bhaji was probably my first introduction to the joys of Indian food back in the late 80s,
so I feel I owe this simple snack a considerable debt
of thanks. The word "bhajia" means fritter – in fact,
they're just one small part of the wider pakora family, which encompasses all manner of good things
(goat brain pakora stands out in my memory) fried
in chickpea batter, but in Britain, a land never
known for its subtle taste, the pungent onion variety rules supreme.
Usually served as a snack in its homeland, generally with a nice cup of chai, bhajis are the stalwart of
the starter selection here: a deep-fried appetite
whetter for the myriad joys to come. At their best,
they're almost ethereally light and addictively crisp.
At their worst, they're stodgy and bland – as chef
Cyrus Todiwala observes in his new book, Mr Todiwala's Bombay: "What you see in stores and supermarkets does not always represent the bhajia we Indians know." So just how do you guarantee great results?
Felicity Cloake's perfect onion bhajis. Photographs: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian
Onion
Often lost in mass-produced versions, the bulk of
the bhaji should be onion, rather than dough. Most
recipes use yellow onion, sliced very thinly so it
cooks through quickly, but food writer Simon Majumdar specifies white and Alfred Prasad, executive
chef at the Michelin-starred Tamarind, goes for red.
I find white too mild, and although I like the sweetness of the red versions, I miss the yellow onion's
pungent flavour, so I'm going to stick with that.
to cling to the onion, but not firm enough to form
clumps of its own.
Majumdar suggests letting the batter rest for an
hour before use, much like a yorkshire pudding,
presumably to allow the flours to absorb the moisture in the batter. I don't think this is desirable here,
though: his coating is tough, but not particularly
crisp, and one taster likens it (approvingly, I must
add) to a Woolworths onion ring.
Spices
Batter
Onions are onions, but where bhaji recipes diverge
is in the batter that binds the slices together. Gram,
or chickpea flour, is fairly standard, but Prasad and a
brilliant little book called Flavours of Gujarat (which
has been sitting on my parents' bookshelf for more
than 20 years, waiting for this moment) recommend
adding rice flour, presumably to make the batter
crisper. For me, the difference between a great bhaji
and a merely adequate one is in the crunch – as with
all deep-fried foods, it should fight back – and
Prasad's are particularly fiesty, so I'm going to adopt
his 2:1 ratio of gram to rice flour.
Perhaps more important is the liquid used, both
in type and quantity. Water is obviously the first
choice, but Nikita Gulhane, whose bhaji recipe features in Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Nation, also adds
plain yoghurt, and Prasad stirs in a little melted butter. I like the rich tanginess of Gulhane's yoghurt,
but I find it makes the batter a bit thick and gloopy,
so I'm going to use Prasad's butter, plus Todiwala's
lemon juice for flavour.
The batters vary enormously in consistency: Gulhane's is a thick paste, while Majumdar counsels
aiming for the texture of double cream. This makes
all the difference to the finished result: the two
thickest batters, from Gulhane and Flavours of Gujarat, produce rather doughy bhajis that seem to be
more about the batter than the onion. They're tasty
enough, but I prefer the more delicate coating of
Todiwala, Prasad and Majumdar's versions. The
guiding principle is that it should be thick enough
The gram flour gives the batter a subtle nutty
flavour, but subtle isn't what we're looking for here.
Chillies are a popular addition, with Prasad and
Todiwala plumping for fresh green chillies, and
Prasad, Todiwala, Majumdar and Flavours of Gujarat sticking in dried chilli powder too. I prefer the
cleaner, greener flavour of the fresh variety.
Turmeric is also fairly standard, as much for colour
as flavour.
Gulhane and Prasad both add garlic and ginger to
the batter, which lend it a pleasing and more interesting sweetness than Majumdar's sugar – as do
Prasad's unusual, but very welcome, fennel seeds,
which I prefer to Todiwala's sharper ajwain, or lovage seeds. I love the earthiness of his cumin seeds
with the onion, though. Sesame seeds, as used in
Flavours of Gujarat, seem an unnecessary addition.
Fresh coriander, used by everyone but Majumdar,
adds an attractive colour and a fresh, clean flavour
to the batter, while curry leaves, as used by Prasad
and Gulhane, contribute a herbal note. They're only
worth buying fresh though, so if you can't find
them, leave them out.
Cooking
It is very important to get the temperature of the oil
right, as Todiwala explains: "Too hot [and] they will
fry too fast and remain raw inside and gooey. Too
cold and the results will be oily and soft." The fairly
standard 180C seems about right – most recipes sug-
gest dropping a piece of batter in there to test the
heat, but if you do have a food thermometer, use it –
it is far more reliable than the sizzle test if you're after perfect results.
The perfect onion bhajis
Felicity Cloake's perfect onion bhajis. (Makes 8)
60g gram flour
30g rice flour
1 tbsp ghee or butter, melted
Juice of ¼ lemon
½ tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin seeds, coarsely chopped
¼ tsp fennel seeds
1-2 hot green chillies (to taste), finely minced
2 tsp root ginger, finely grated
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Small bunch of coriander, chopped
2 fresh curry leaves, chopped (optional)
2 onions, halved, core removed and thinly sliced
Vegetable oil, to cook
Sift the flours into a mixing bowl, then stir in the
ghee and lemon juice and just enough cold water to
bring it to the consistency of double cream. Stir in
the spices, aromatics and herbs and add salt to
taste. Stir in the onions so they are well coated.
Heat the oil in a deep-fat fryer to 180C, or fill a
large pan a third full with oil and heat – a drop of
batter should sizzle as it hits the oil, then float.
Meanwhile, put a bowl of cold water next to the
hob, and a plate lined with kitchen paper. Put the
oven on a low heat.
Once the oil is up to temperature, wet your hands
and shape tablespoon-sized amounts of the mixture
into balls. Drop into the oil, being careful not to
overcrowd the pan, then stir carefully to stop them
sticking. Cook for about four minutes, turning occasionally, until crisp and golden, then drain on the
paper and put in the oven to keep warm while you
cook the next batch. Serve with chutney or pickle.
23
Jack
Monroe's
frozen
yoghurt
recipe
Jack Monroe's frozen yoghurt Jack Monroe's frozen yoghurt.
Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
This simple dessert is a great way to stretch fresh
berries, but it works brilliantly with cheaper frozen
fruit, too.
By Jack Monroe
I first made these berry desserts with foraged
blackberries and a few things from the fridge, but
any berries will do. You can often get bags of mixed
frozen berries far cheaper than their fresh counterparts, which are perfect for this simple dessert.
(Makes 4 ramekins or lolly moulds)34p a portion
100g white chocolate, 30p
100g mixed frozen berries, 33p
150g soft cream cheese, 40p
300g low fat natural yoghurt, 33p
Break up the chocolate and melt it gently in a mixing bowl over a pan containing a couple of inches of
boiling water. Make sure the water doesn't touch
the bowl, as too much heat will make the chocolate
bitter.
Remove the bowl from the heat, using a tea towel
or oven glove.
Add the berries, cream cheese and yoghurt and
stir well to combine until smooth – the cheese will
soften into the chocolate and yoghurt.
Spoon into ramekin dishes or lolly moulds, and
freeze for at least two hours.
The lollies can be served as they are; ramekin
dishes should be removed from the freezer 20 minutes before eating to thaw, or pinged in the microwave for a minute to soften.
Replace the white chocolate with lemon curd for a
sweet, zesty dessert. Dark chocolate and fresh
chopped mint works well too.
• For more recipe ideas, including using up remaining ingredients, see agirlcalledjack.com or follow
@MsJackMonroe on Twitter.
SonOfTheDesert
I wonder which of the prices people will get worked
up about today?
pcdave98
Me too.
*sits back and opens popcorn. 23p*
FarsleyBantam
I wish I could afford ramekins!
londonhongkong
In my day we didn't have ramekins. We had to hold
the mixture in our hands and hope for snow to cool
it.
londonscot
I think it might be the ramekins rather than the ingredients.
Daily Mail fury - "Jack Monroe spent money on
trendy french pots: british bowls not good enough
for left wing, guardian reading, pro europe, big tv,
single mum columnist"
apologies for repeating all the rubbish that the
mail spouts
madwilfred
You had snow...and hands?!
You were lucky.
gavshaky
I use only home-grown, free-range ramekins.
londonhongkong
hahaha, I thought of topping you but I couldn't :).
TheJoyOfEssex
I make my froghurt in a wood fired Aga.
notmuch
I wish I could afford ramekins!
There's a desert in sinsburys called GU that comes
in ramekins. I suggest you go there check the best
before date (they never sell them all) and buy them
for around 10p
onalongsabbatical
They sell ramekins in Asda nowadays. Spotted 'em
the other day when I was in there looking for a butter dish.
No butter dish, though.
SonOfTheDesert
I have some ramekins that came attached to a fancy
pudding when I bought them.
And before anyone complains, these fancy puddings were almost out of date and marked down to
about 50p.
Emma Williams
What on earth is a ramekin?
To Google!
onyourbike
my mum has been collecting every ramekin that
ever came with a fancy pre-made pudding for years,
on last count we had 48!
dianab
actually over on another article the fuss is someone
saying Jack unfairly pushes sainsburys
dianab
and if you don't want to buy said desserts in the
nice ramekins, get a freind to give you the empties
jonbryce
http://direct.asda.com/ASDA-Elegant-Living-WhiteRamekin/001427700,default,pd.html
They cost £1.50 each. Other suppliers exist.
24
Photograph: Albert Gea/Reuters
Michael O'Leary's 33 daftest quotes
The Ryanair boss regularly causes an outcry with
his unreconstructed, often foul-mouthed, statements. Here are some classic he-didn't-just-saythat moments from the past
By Michael Hogan
Despite them both wearing suits and helming
huge commercial operations, Ryanair CEO Michael
O'Leary isn't quite as well-loved as his namesake, X
Factor host Dermot O'Leary. The 52-year-old multimillionaire aviation magnate is outspoken, unreconstructed and makes headlines every time he
opens his mouth. Fasten your seatbelts for 33 of
O'Leary's most turbulent utterances …
1 "Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken
glass to get low fares."
2 "The French have never produced a great
philosopher. Great wine maybe, but no great
philosophers."
3 "If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to
engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes
sales."
4 On passengers who forget to print their boarding passes: "We think they should pay €60 for being
so stupid."
5 "Anyone who thinks Ryanair flights are some
sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you
with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys
as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake
them up to sell them things."
6 "Ryanair brings lots of different cultures to the
beaches of Spain, Greece and Italy, where they couple and copulate in the interests of pan-European
peace."
7 "One thing we have looked at is maybe putting a
coin slot on the toilet door, so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in
the future. Pay-per-pee. If someone wanted to pay
£5 to go to the toilet, I'd carry them myself. I would
wipe their bums for a fiver."
8 "Do we carry rich people on our flights? Yes, I
flew on one this morning and I'm very rich."
9 To a Ryanair employee who dared to join the
Twitter Q&A: "Get back to work you slacker or
you're fired."
10 Opening a press conference to announce
Ryanair's annual results: "I'm here with Howard
Millar and Michael Cawley, our two deputy chief executives. But they're presently making love in the
gentleman's toilets, such is their excitement at to-
day's results."
11 On why his bride arrived 35 minutes late for
their wedding: "She's coming here with Aer
Lingus."
12 "You're not getting a refund so fuck off. We
don't want to hear your sob stories. What part of 'no
refund' don't you understand?"
13 "Screw the travel agents. Take the fuckers out
and shoot them. What have they done for passengers over the years?"
14 "Why are we carrying 81 million passengers if
we're this terrible? We have the lowest fares, we
have brand-new aircraft, we have the most on-time
flights. It sounds like kind of a fucking Mormon
Moonie session but we do."
15 "The most influential person in Europe in the
last 20 to 30 years has been Margaret Thatcher.
Without her we'd all be living in some French
bloody unemployed republic."
16 "We want to annoy the fuckers whenever we
can. The best thing you can do with environmentalists is shoot them. These headbangers want to make
air travel the preserve of the rich. They are luddites
marching us back to the 18th century. If preserving
the environment means stopping poor people flying
so the rich can fly, then screw it."
17 On the British Airways/Iberia merger: "It reminds me of two drunks leaning on each other."
18 "MBA students come out with: 'My staff is my
most important asset.' Bullshit. Staff is usually your
biggest cost. We all employ some lazy bastards who
needs a kick up the backside, but no one can bring
themselves to admit it."
19 His response to the first questioner, a woman,
during a live Twitter Q&A: "Nice pic. Phwoaaarr!
MOL"
20 "All flights are fuelled with Leprechaun wee
and my bullshit!"
21 "If global warming meant temperatures rose by
one or two degrees, France would become a desert,
which would be no bad thing. The Scots would grow
wine and make buffalo mozzarella."
22 "I'm Europe's most underpaid and underappreciated boss. I'm paid about 20 times more than the
average Ryanair employee and I think the gap
should be wider."
23 On transatlantic Ryanair flights: "In economy,
no frills. In business class, it'll all be free – including
the blow jobs."
24 On Bertie Ahern: "I'm disrespectful towards
authority. I think the prime minister of Ireland is a
gobshite"
25 "The airline industry is full of bullshitters, liars
and drunks. We excel at all three in Ireland."
26 "The airline business is it is mostly run by a
bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don't
want to stand up to the environmentalists and call
them the lying wankers that they are."
27 "People either see me as Jesus, Superman or an
odious little shit. I think I'm Jesus. A prophet in his
own time.
28 "Ryanair's biggest achievement? Bringing low
fares to Europe and still lowering 'em. Biggest failure? Hiring me."
29 On a bomb scare in Scotland: "The police force
were outstanding in their field. But all they did was
stand in their field. They kept passengers on board
while they played with a suspect package for two
and three quarter hours. Extraordinary."
30 "I should get the Nobel peace prize – screw
Bono."
31 "Nobody wants to sit beside a really fat bastard
on board. We have been frankly astonished at the
number of customers who not only want to tax fat
people but torture them."
32 "I don't give a shit if no one likes me. I'm not a
cloud bunny or an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other
platoons of goons who populate the airline
industry."
33 And finally, O'Leary on readers of this very organ: "The chattering bloody classes, or what I call
the liberal Guardian readers, they're all buying SUVs
to drive around London. I smile at these loons who
drive their SUVs down to Sainsbury's and buy kiwi
fruit, flown in from New Zealand for Christ sakes.
They're the equivalent of environmental nuclear
bombs!"

The Long Good Read #guardiancoffee003

Transcription

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