| Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong review – a call to arms for the Snapchat generation |
[26 Jan 2020|07:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/26/unfree-speech-threat-to-global-democracy-why-we-must-act-now-joshua-wong The Hong Kong protests leader, a veteran activist at just 23, on his extraordinary decade – and what comes next I don’t know if it counts as a demographic anomaly or a new world order, but our social media decade has seen the emergence of teenage political changemakers – the guerrilla wing of influencer culture. While Greta Thunberg may have become the most recognisable of these adolescent activists, the model was established by Joshua Wong, who at the age of 14 engineered a rare political climbdown by the Hong Kong government, and by 17 was on the cover of Time magazine as “the Face of Protest”. Wong, now 23, and having spent many months in prisons and detention centres, is the gnarled veteran leader of the “umbrella movement” against creeping Chinese authoritarianism. In a blurb to this book Thunberg describes him as “the future that has already come”. Wong’s story is not unlike Thunberg’s to the extent that a stubborn school-based protest that might have once been confined to the human-interest pages of the local newspaper quickly became first a national and then a global concern. Continue reading...
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| Introducing our 10 best debut novelists of 2020 |
[26 Jan 2020|08:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/26/10-best-debut-novelists-2020-paul-mendez-abi-dare-anappara-elaine-feeney-beth-morrey-douglas-stuart All first-time authors dream of becoming bestsellers. The Observer’s past picks have included Sally Rooney and Jessie Burton – who among this year’s crop will make it big? Spring is a time for new beginnings in the books world, especially when it comes to fiction – not so much for established authors, who tend to unveil their new work in the autumn, as for fiction debutants hoping to become the next Sally Rooney or Jessie Burton. For the seventh year running the Observer New Review has chosen a select group of first-time British and Irish novelists we believe will make their mark. Our selection procedure was rigorous, with all eligible novels being scrutinised for readability and literary merit by a handful of editors on the New Review. And the class of 2020 looks particularly promising. Among those who made the grade were a poet, a journalist, a former teacher and an actor. The subjects they take on range from modern love in Hong Kong, child kidnapping in India and the Japanese marriage breakup industry to the brutality of Thatcher’s Britain and murder in a women’s refuge. Continue reading...
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| Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener review – bullies, greed and sexism in Silicon Valley |
[26 Jan 2020|09:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/26/uncanny-valley-anna-wiener-review-silicon-valley-bullies-greed-sexism This closely observed account of everyday life in the tech capital reminds us to be wary of all those boy geniusesI sometimes wonder, having studied engineering at university, whether I should have headed for California to pan for digital gold, working as a coder for one of Silicon Valley’s tech giants or trying my luck at an overvalued startup with employee share options. Anna Wiener’s book is a reassuring reminder that, had I gone, I probably would have hated it. Uncanny Valley is a memoir with few revelations for those who have had contact with the technology industry. Even people familiar with it only through media coverage will already recognise Silicon Valley as a world of young men (and it has to be said, a few women) who have had their egos massaged perhaps a little too hard and a little too long. Their stories of failure and greed, sexual harassment and bullying, toxic cultures fomented by bloated valuations of firms that turn out to be built on thin air, have become our generation’s cautionary tales. And that’s to say nothing of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Continue reading...
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| Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K Chong review – rickety scaffolding |
[26 Jan 2020|11:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/26/inside-critics-circle-book-reviewing-uncertain-times-phillipa-k-chong-review A study of book reviewing shows little understanding of the activityAlthough I’ve been reviewing books for half a century, this little treatise caused me to do some anxious head-scratching. Phillipa Chong, a tenure-hungry assistant professor at a Canadian university, here presents an earnest sociological analysis of an activity that for me has been sometimes a chore, always a test of punctuality and proficiency, on occasion a wickedly thrilling chance for retaliation, but mostly a source of pleasure. Reading the product of Chong’s jargon-clogged research, I found that I lacked all symptoms of the professional malaise that afflicts her informants, who suffer, she believes, from “epistemic uncertainty”. I may be a shallow fellow, but I’ve never worried about what Chong clumsily describes as the “lack of groupness” among reviewers. Who cares that no certificates of “accreditation” enrol us in “the institution of literary criticism” or that we “inhabit nonprofessional spaces”? I also hadn’t realised that I was supposed to function as a “market intermediary” or – with luck – as a “cultural consecrator”. Continue reading...
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