Humans

In an era of social media cancelling, our nasty side has never been more prominent. But the latest research suggests that, when wielded right, petty ill will can be a force for good

Humans

1 September 2021

By Simon McCarthy-Jones

Ruby Fresson
A MAN buys a house next door to his ex-wife and installs a 4-metre bronze statue of a hand, middle finger raised, facing her window. A prominent investor buys a company so he can fire the management he dislikes, even though he stands to lose money. People take their time at the checkout to annoy the next customer, buy gnomes for their garden to antagonise a neighbour and slow down to annoy tailgaters, even though it puts everyone in danger.
Examples of spiteful behaviour, harming another at some cost to yourself, aren’t hard to find. As a psychological game where no one wins, spite is puzzling: we may wonder why it wasn’t weeded out by evolution long ago. Instead, in a competitive era of identity politics, all too often played out on social media, it seems more prevalent than ever.
Yet, compared with other social behaviours like selfishness, cooperation and altruism, there has been relatively little psychological research into why we do it. With potentially far-reaching consequences for both political stability and individual mental health, it has never been more important to understand this dark side of human behaviour.
For many years, most of the research into spite came from the field of behavioural economics: the study of how human decision-making differs from what you would expect from a purely rational point of view. Classical economists dreamed up the concept of Homo economicus, a person who only ever acts to maximise their own rewards. If offered a choice between something and nothing, Homo economicus would always take what is on offer.
In experiments, however, this isn’t how everyone behaves. In … More

By Michael Marshall

The Actual Star culminates in Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belizemauritius images GmbH/Alamy
The Actual Star: A novel
Monica Byrne
Harper VoyagerAdvertisement

WITH her second novel, author Monica Byrne has pulled out all the stops. The Actual Star was eight years in the making. It has three storylines, separated by millennia: one is set 1000 years ago in a declining Mayan kingdom, one in 2012 and one in a distant future shaped by catastrophic climate change. The seemingly disparate stories are rapidly revealed to be linked.
When a book is this ambitious, either it is a thumping success or it falls on its face. Happily, The Actual Star is a stone-cold masterpiece. It is one of the most moving novels I have read and surely a contender for major awards.
The first thing that struck me was how immediately immersive the three stories are. The ancient Mayan storyline follows three young members of a royal family: Ajul, Ixul (the “x” is pronounced “sh”) and Ket. Byrne keeps the story tightly focused on their perspectives. She has a tricky tightrope to walk because the characters use human sacrifice to solidify their political power, and Ajul and Ixul have incestuous sex. Yet Byrne shows their motivations and makes them sympathetic, without unduly softening them.
“The Actual Star is a stone-cold masterpiece. It’s one of the most moving novels I have read”
The middle timeline follows a young woman named Leah from Minnesota, who travels to Belize on a journey of self-discovery: her late father was from there, but she never met him and is in search of her identity and heritage. Byrne finds great depth and nuance in this story, never falling into the trap of exoticising the Belizean culture. It helps that some chapters are told from the perspectives of two Belizean tour guides, Xander and Javier, so we get to see Leah through their eyes.
The futuristic sections follow Niloux deCayo, who finds herself labelled a heretic when she dares to challenge her society’s beliefs. Byrne’s version of the future is richly imagined. In response to devastating sea level rise and extreme weather, humanity has adopted a nomadic existence. Nobody is allowed to stay in the same place for more than a few days.
Acquiring possessions beyond what is absolutely necessary is condemned as “hoarding”: these future people look back on our consumer era with horror. Byrne imagines a swathe of new social rules, an entire political system based on decentralised technologies like blockchain and, crucially, a new religion.
It is in the religion that the three timelines link. Byrne’s futuristic theology is based on Mayan beliefs, specifically the idea of Xibalba: an underworld ruled by gods of death.
But this version of Xibalba is a place where people can finally perceive the world as it truly is, without the filters and concepts imposed by our sense organs and brains – to comprehend “the thing-in-itself”, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it. Or as Ixul thinks at one point: “The star we see is not the actual star.” In all three timelines, characters converge on the cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize where this transcendent perception may be possible.
If this all sounds like a lot, it is, but the book is perfectly paced: it is leisurely enough to let you get to know the people and grasp the heady concepts, but there is constant forward momentum and a steady crescendo. The climax is as dramatic as anyone could wish for, but for me the real joys of The Actual Star are the vivid characters and societies. It is a book that will resonate with me for a long time.

Michael also recommends…
Film
Nomadland
A more contemporary take on nomadic life, Chloé Zhao’s beautiful film follows Frances McDormand’s Fern around the US in search of work following the 2008 economic crisis.
TV
Loki
Disney+
The latest Marvel series is a riot of invention that fuses time travel, multiple universes and a cosmic bureaucracy – even if the finale is a bit of a let-down.

More on these topics: More

By Michael Marshall

The Nefud desert in northern Saudi Arabia, which humans have inhabited during periods of increased rainfallCeri Shipton
Ancient humans repeatedly entered the Arabian peninsula from Africa during the past 400,000 years. A single archaeological site in Saudi Arabia holds evidence of five separate occupations, according to a new study.
A second study suggests that each out-of-Africa migration was made possible by a shift to a wetter climate, creating green corridors. It simulated changes in the region’s climate over the past 300,000 years, and found that there were several periods when conditions … More

John Kraus/Courtesy of Netflix
Watch
Countdown: Inspiration4 mission to space follows the first all-civilian crew of a SpaceX Dragon. Their three days in orbit later this year will raise funds for a children’s research hospital. On Netflix from 6 September.

Read
Five Minds, a speculative thriller by Guy Morpuss, is set in a future where, to solve the planet’s population problem, human bodies play host to multiple minds. But what if you might be sharing a body with a murderer?

Read
What’s Eating the Universe? wonders physicist Paul Davies, as he … More

By Jacob Aron

Don’t break the Golden Rule otherwise statues will come after youDear Villagers
Game
The Forgotten City
Modern Storyteller Multiple consolesAdvertisement

IF YOU could live today again, would you do anything differently? This theme has been explored in everything from films like Edge of Tomorrow to pretty much every sci-fi TV show of the 1990s looking to produce an episode on the cheap, but time loops are rarer in video games.
At first, that might seem strange – unlike a film, a time loop running on a computer can be instantly reset, making them easy to produce – until you realise that the best examples of the genre (Groundhog Day, obviously) make heavy use of cuts and rely on the viewer to fill in the repetitive details. That is harder to do in a game, where players are responsible for all of the protagonist’s actions.
The Forgotten City has a neat solution to this problem, which I will get to in a moment. The game sees you thrown back 2000 years to an underground Roman settlement, where you must attempt to solve a mystery in order to free yourself from living the same day over and over. Only then can you return to your own time.
The titular city has one very simple law, the Golden Rule: if anyone commits a sin, everyone is punished. Exactly what counts as a sin is one of the themes explored in the game, as no one in the city is exactly sure. All they know is that if someone breaks this rule, the golden statues that are littered all over the place will come to life, attacking everyone they see and turning them into gold.
“By exploring the consequences of an all-seeing authority, the game critiques modern surveillance systems”
Thanks to the time loop, you are able to escape this fate – and more importantly, keep any items you have picked up, along with any knowledge of what has happened before.
This makes for some fun puzzles to solve. Some are simple – can’t get inside a locked door? Steal the key, reset the loop and let yourself in. Some are more complex, such as a woman who seems to have been poisoned, and is about to die, without anyone breaking the Golden Rule.
Thankfully, once you have solved a puzzle, you don’t have to do it again the next loop around. The first person you meet at the start of every loop, Galerius, will happily, if slightly bewilderedly, follow your instructions to complete tasks on your behalf.
This frees you up to delve further into the plot, which had me hooked. Although set in ancient Rome, the game serves as a criticism of the panopticon concept invented by 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison in which everyone could be watched from one location, with the intention being they would be on their best behaviour. By exploring the consequences of an all-seeing authority, it also critiques modern surveillance systems.
One slight disappointment is that the time loop in the game is a bit of a cheat – certain events trigger not at particular times each day, but when you approach a specific location – but I can forgive that.
These days, most video games are created by vast armies of developers operating in teams around the globe, so I was impressed to learn that The Forgotten City was mainly the work of just three people. They have cleverly worked within those limitations – the city you explore is more of a large town, and only hosts a couple of dozen people, while the time loop allows for scenes to be reused without feeling cheap – to create something that really shines.
Jacob also recommends…
Games
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Nintendo
The definitive time-loop video game, in which hero Link has just three days to prevent the moon (which has an evil-looking face!) crashing into the planet.
The Sexy Brutale
Cavalier Game Studios
Another time-loop mystery, set in an Agatha Christie-like mansion whose inhabitants are all murdered over a 12-hour period.

More on these topics: More

By Gege Li

Getty Images/Cavan Images

Podcast
Inventive Podcast
Overtone ProductionsAdvertisement

PICTURE an engineer and you may well imagine a white, university-educated man in a hard hat with a roll of blueprints under his arm.
The Inventive Podcast aims to flip these conceptions by highlighting inspirational and influential engineers who don’t fit this constricted, outdated mould.
Host Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, UK, chats with a different guest in each episode before asking a writer to come up with an original story inspired by those conversations. That makes the podcast itself an innovation of sorts, in that it marries fact and fiction to demonstrate there is far more to engineering than people might think.
It is a welcome addition considering the lack of diversity and uptake that still plagues engineering. In the UK, only 12 per cent of engineers are women, and 186,000 new engineers are needed each year until 2024 to make up for the country’s skills shortfall in the profession.
Reassuringly, the podcast’s first three episodes feature women, the first of whom is electronics engineer and activist Shrouk El-Attar. Part of her day job involves designing and developing technologies for women’s health, including silent breast pumps and a pelvic floor trainer. El-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions and raise money for the LGBTQ+ community.
As a woman and asylum seeker from Egypt, El-Attar knows first-hand how being denied opportunities, such as going to university, can cause engineering to suffer – not only by being less diverse, but also at the expense of innovation. “How many amazing, creative technologies are we missing out on today as a society because we’re telling these people with the amazing ideas that they don’t belong here?” she asks.
In response to El-Attar’s work and her account of being inspired into engineering by the “magic” people living inside her TV as a child, writer Tania Hershman incorporates poetry to create a thought-provoking story that reflects El-Attar’s life. It uses the idea of a human being as a circuit board and emphasises the importance of language.
In the second episode, Cox meets Roma Agrawal, a structural engineer who was part of the team that designed The Shard, one of London’s most iconic landmarks. Agrawal also wrote the book Built: The hidden stories behind our structures. She did so to encourage people to become engineers by showing that it is “so utterly an intrinsic part of humans and the way we’ve lived right from the beginning”, she tells Cox.
“ShroukEl-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions”
The accompanying story by C. M. Taylor draws on Agrawal’s self-confessed love for concrete (“I have been known to stroke concrete – I love feeling it!”), as a mysterious figure known as the Night Builder begins to secretly create colossal concrete structures in cities.
Cox’s third guest is aerospace engineer Sophie Robinson, who works on a type of drone-inspired aircraft called eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing), with the idea of developing widely accessible air taxis that cut road congestion and carbon emissions.
Robinson is also an avid swimmer, having once swam across the English Channel, a fact that is at the centre of novelist Tony White’s story about an engineer who grapples with the ethical dilemmas of her job while on a cold water swimming trip.
As you would expect from the experience of the personnel, the podcast is built on strong foundations. Cox asks perceptive questions that get to the heart of what it means to be an engineer, as well as helping to flesh out the details of the work itself, while each writer’s take on the interviews adds an interesting and different element to the show.
The guests’ enthusiasm is also infectious. “Being an engineer is my superpower,” replies El-Attar, when Cox asks her which superpower she would like. “I hope people see that and that it can be your superpower too.”

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
Solar system agronomy
Could we grow endangered plants on other planets? We pause and consider this question. No.
Still, since this query is the subject line of a PR email from an online flower-delivery service, handed to us by a colleague with a pair of tongs and a disparaging look, we find it worthy of further consideration. Even more so since we are promised conclusions reached “using research and working with a designer”.
“Today, nearly 40% of the world’s plants are endangered, according to a report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,” we read. Sad, sad science fact. But never fear, once we have destroyed Earth’s ecosystems, a bright, green future exists elsewhere in the solar system, at least in the world of whirly-eyed PR.Advertisement
“As the soil on Mars has double the amount of iron than soil on planet earth, leafy green vegetables and microgreens would easily thrive there,” we learn. Dandelions, too, apparently – a species far from endangered on Feedback’s small patch of terra firma. “Hops vine [sic], trees, shrubs and poison ivy might be able to survive the challenging temperatures on this moon”, it opines of Jupiter’s satellite Europa, where days struggle to rise above -135°C and surface radiation levels are around 2000 times those on Earth. “One of the only things that can kill poison ivy is boiling water – so the cold and wet conditions on Europa seem to be the ideal environment for this plant.”
The outlook is even rosier on Titan, the Saturnian moon where water ice at around -180°C fulfils the function of bedrock, and great surface lakes are filled with liquid natural gas. “Titan’s surface is sculpted by methane and ethane, which only one other planet in the solar system has: Earth. Therefore, tobacco plants should grow on this moon too”, our correspondent concludes, non-sequentially.
“Please let me know if you have any questions”, the email ends. So, so many, including where we get some of the wacky Europa baccy too. Optimism is a fine, fine thing, but as far as the future of life on Earth is concerned, we fear the rationalist’s counterstatement applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Bog standards
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, as one of the usual suspects once wrote. Or we are all in the gutter, sending in responses to our recent item on peculiar toilet signage (31 July).
“Toilets and viewing area” was an unfortunate juxtaposition that confronted Richard Ellam at an Aberdeen Science Festival some years back, while Chris Evans relays that “A lay-by eatery near where I live (on the A59 between Skipton and Clitheroe) for some years displayed a sign reading ‘Sit-in or take-away toilet’” – neither of which seems particularly practicable or desirable.
Hazardous fore play
Our item on the newly introduced crocodile hazard at the Royal Port Moresby Golf Club in Papua New Guinea (14 August) reminds Stuart Reeves in Wake Forest, North Carolina, of playing at the Skukuza Golf Club in Kruger National Park in South Africa – a sentence that exhausts us even typing it.
Its “local rules” include such gems as “Burrowing animals – Rough/Fairway drop without penalty from holes made by burrowing animals and termites, NOT HOOF MARKS. Burrowing animals include warthogs, moles and termites”.
Other rules (“formal and informal”) that Stuart has encountered on his travels include “Give way to a herdsman and his cows crossing the fairway; free drop from a hippopotamus footprint; free drop about 3 club lengths if the ball lands in the coils of a snake (no need to be precise); if a monkey steals your ball it is a lost ball”. Strong stuff – and further congratulations on your self-confessed status as a “recovering golfer”.
Transcendental number
Mentions in Almost the last word (14 August) of “interesting numbers, numbers with their own Wiki page and the fine-structure constant (approximately 1/137) prompted me to recheck the Wiki page for 137″, writes Mike Sargent, displaying the talent for the tangent that we so admire among Feedback readers. “It has for several years now informed us that ‘Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, died in a hospital room numbered 137, a coincidence that disturbed him’.”
“It is difficult to know which is more surprising, that Pauli’s consciousness transcended death, or that he then contrived to communicate his feelings on his demise to a Wiki page editor,” he continues. We don’t wish to sound too woo, but it is a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed, and “Physics might create a backdoor to an afterlife – but don’t bank on it” is the headline of an article we see in our webspace starting from that basis. We would say that’s living proof, but that’s possibly not quite right.
Last laugh
Casting our all-seeing eye over our shoulder, we see that our neighbours and friends in Almost the last word (backwards readers: you’ll find it towards the front) are discussing how a photon “knows” to travel at the speed of light.
With the privilege of having the actual last word, we must give the obvious missing answer: because it is very bright.
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By Swapna Krishna

In Star Trek: Lower Decks, we see what life is like for low-ranking members of Starfleet2021 CBS Interactive, Inc.
TV
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Amazon Prime Video

WHEN Star Trek: Lower Decks first premiered in the US last August, it presented a perspective we had rarely seen within the Star Trek universe. While we had traditionally focused on the “upstairs” bridge crew boldly going where no one had gone before, Lower Decks turned its sharp eye towards the “downstairs”: the workers responsible for the least glamorous tasks on the ship. That it was … More