Humans

By Davide Abbatescianni

kartemquin films
The Ants and the Grasshopper
Raj Patel and Zak Piper
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ANITA CHITAYA is an extremely determined person. A leader in the Malawian village of Bwabwa, she converts men to gender equality, fights to end child hunger and was ready to take on an impossible mission: travelling to the US to persuade then president Donald Trump that climate change is real and a threat to both rich and poor.
Chitaya is at the heart of The Ants and the Grasshopper by directors Raj Patel and Zak Piper, shown at the 2021 Sheffield Docfest this month. The film emerged from work by Patel, a professor in food systems at the University of Texas at Austin. It starts with Chitaya’s life in Bwabwa, moves to her journey across the US in hope of accessing the White House, and ends with a short epilogue after her return.
The opening section makes the origins of Chitaya’s gender work clear. After a tough childhood, she was forced into an “abduction marriage” by her husband-to-be Christopher, his friend Winston and a group of other men. She didn’t feel she could fight because of a strong local belief that refusal to marry might have killed her mother.
Some time later, she met Esther Lupafya, an activist and nurse who co-founded a non-profit organisation called Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC), and her life changed. SFHC now works with more than 6000 farmers in northern and central Malawi, who exchange knowledge to improve soil fertility, food security and nutrition, and in the process encourage gender equity and resilience against climate change.
Christopher seems to genuinely regret his past deeds and does his best to support Chitaya, but Winston stubbornly refuses to help his wife Jenifa cook, farm, water plants or do other chores seen as women’s work. At SFHC, Chitaya learns more about climate change, convincing her neighbours to build clay stoves and reduce their firewood use. Unsurprisingly, she accepts the directors’ invitation to fly to the US with Lupafya.
“Many in the US don’t fully understand what it means that we in Malawi live on the same planet as them”
During one early visit, to the village of Wonewoc, Wisconsin, Chitaya and Lupafya explain how climate change helped make their soil arid. One young farmworker argues that the world is undergoing a “weather cycle”, refusing to accept the phenomenon’s scale.
As it unfolds, the film shows encounters with farmers and activists both urban and rural, who in turn reflect awareness, advocacy, indifference or mild scepticism, as Patel and Piper struggle to make the links between gender inequality, poverty, racism and environmental issues explicit.
Anita Chitaya wants people to understand the impact of climate changekartemquin films
It is ambitious for a 74-minute film, and the directors take unwarranted shortcuts. We see only individuals on whom their encounter with Chitaya had a positive effect in the long term. In the epilogue, the farmworker from Wisconsin regrets laughing at Chitaya’s concerns. He now runs an organic chicken farm, proving he has changed. We also learn that 18 months after her visit, Democrat senator Jeff Merkley co-sponsored the Green New Deal, although the impact of Chitaya’s efforts is unclear. Merkley’s office is as close as she gets to the White House.
The Ants and the Grasshopper attempts a fresh take on complex issues, but remains on the surface because it draws on too much material. It is the powerful portrait of Chitaya’s courage, however, that makes the film worth watching. In one of the last scenes, Winston pounds maize and joins a cooking demonstration, proving he has finally learned the value of caring.
But shortly after an image of a dead grasshopper borne away by ants, Chitaya says that many in the US don’t fully understand what it means that “we live on the same planet as them”; there are many ants, but only a few lifting the grasshopper. A deeper focus on her fight against climate change and local inequality could have delivered a stronger message, but may not have been as messily truthful.

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Fantastic Beasts, both real and magical, stalk London’s Natural History Museum until 3 January, revealing how mythical and imaginary creatures are inspired by real-life animals. With nods to all the connected films.

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The Ascent of Information, by astronomer Caleb Scharf, argues that data of all sorts is really an aggregated organism, controlling our behaviour and evolving alongside us. Terrifyingly, it has goals and needs.
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Apples, directed by Christos Nikou, is a much-praised comedy-drama about a man developing a new identity after an amnesia pandemic. Available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema. See a full review on our website. More

By Simon Ings

Georgia King plays failing artist Leena in ParallelShane Harvey
Parallel
Isaac Ezban
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WHAT if you could step through a mirror and visit other versions of the world? Would you explore these alternate Earths? Would you try to find a better home for yourself – in a world, perhaps, where a loved one hasn’t died?
Or, as happens in Parallel, Mexican director Isaac Ezban’s first English-language thriller, would you simply go around stealing?
Of the four young friends who discover a dimensional portal in the attic of their rental, only Devin (Aml Ameen) thinks it might be a means of personal salvation. As a boy, he flew into a rage at his fraudster father, who killed himself the next day. Now Devin is in search of a version of the world where his father lives, and the rift can be healed.
His friends, however, simply want to get rich. The four have been working together on a parking app called Meter Maid: an idea so uninteresting, I wonder if it is meant as an early comment on their lack of real talent.
Behind their mirror, through which they pass, Alice-fashion, into other versions of the world, time runs faster. For a moment, it seems that to get stupidly rich, all they have to do is bring back the winning lottery numbers from alternate realities. But the worlds they visit, though very similar, are different enough that the winning numbers don’t match up.
Is there a way to exploit these little differences? Screenwriter Scott Blaszak’s first feature fizzes with incidental invention as the friends explore the commercial and financial angles of their multiverse. Their solutions are tailored to character. In the end, Josh (Mark O’Brien), the group lightweight, goes chasing women across the multiverse. Meanwhile, failing artist Leena (Georgia King) fills portfolios with plagiarised pictures and Noel (Martin Wallström, effectively reprising his role in Mr Robot) steals the intellectual property of unwitting inventors. No spoilers about the end result of all this, but it is a catastrophe worth waiting for.
“Handed a world of infinite possibility, all the film’s characters can do is play out their failings”
Parallel is no masterpiece. Made on a shoestring, and boasting a silly and intrusive soundtrack, its fairly familiar premise depends on the sharpness of its ideas. Luckily, Blaszak knows what he is doing, and has given us characters who, while engaging enough, aren’t good people. Handed a world of infinite possibility, all they can do is play out their failings.
They aren’t even very curious. Bankrolled with money stolen from their “alt” selves, they consume, but they cannot create. Their cruelty is as devastating as it is casual. By bringing an alt Josh into our world, Noel destroys at least one innocent life. Then the alt Josh begins to mentally disintegrate, tormented by the tiny but ubiquitous differences between his world and ours.
Ezban’s direction is efficient, more than inspired. Those wondering what he could achieve on a bigger budget might not have too long to wait. He has been hired by Sony Pictures to direct the adaptation of Dan Simmons’s horror novel Summer of Night.
Meanwhile, Parallel is a well-constructed calling card. It is a film with heroes that are meant to be likeable, flawed as they are. Pulling its punches in this way gives the enterprise a curiously dated feel. I was reminded in particular of Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners and The Lost Boys. Not every movie has to plummet the depths of despair, of course. But I do wish Parallel‘s cast (Wallström in particular) had been handed more of an opportunity to chew up the set.

Simon also recommends…
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
This alternate history traces the lives upended by intrigues between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the post-war rulers of the southern and western United States.
The Butterfly Effect
Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber
Writer-directors Bress and Mackye Gruber (later of TV’s Kyle XY fame) created a low-budget mind-bender, as Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) travels through his memories to fix his past.

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By Clare Wilson

Duncan Mcewan/naturepl.com
AS MOST of the UK recovers from a frigid April and a soggy May, its gardens are starting to perk up. That means so are caterpillars, aphids such as greenflies, and other plant-feeding invertebrates generally seen as the gardener’s foes.
A common reaction to seeing prized plants covered with bugs is to reach for the pesticide spray. But we should temper that instinct, says Andrew Salisbury, principal entomologist at the UK Royal Horticultural Society. Many invertebrate species in the UK and elsewhere are in decline, and gardens can be a haven – the UK’s home gardens collectively add up … More

Behavioural scientists Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony explain why “noise” in professional judgements harms everything from criminal justice to medical treatments

Humans

16 June 2021

By Graham Lawton

Siegfried Layda/Getty Images
If you have ever jumped to the wrong conclusion, made a terrible mistake thanks to your inbuilt biases or been subtly nudged back to your senses, then you are (a) human and (b) already on personal terms with the work of Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Thanks to their academic and popular writing, the world is now very familiar with what are collectively called “cognitive biases” – systematic errors in human thinking – and ways to correct them.
Sunstein co-wrote the highly influential book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness with Richard Thaler, while Kahneman popularised the work that won him the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 with his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sibony is the author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How biases distort decision-making and what you can do to fight them.
You may think that, in no small part thanks to their efforts, the swamp of human fallibility has been well and truly drained by now. But that would be yet another mistake. Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein say there is an even more important source of warped decision-making. The three have banded together in a behavioural science supergroup to draw attention to what they call “noise” – persistent inconsistencies in professional judgements that lead to bad outcomes in all walks of life.
Kahneman and Sibony spoke to New Scientist about the group’s new book Noise: A flaw in human judgment (Little, Brown Spark in the UK; William Collins in the US). Sunstein was due to join the conversation, but was called away at the last minute by his … More

By Gregory Wakeman

(L-R) Lucius Hoyos as Noah, Gina Rodriguez as Jill, Ariana Greenblatt as MatildaPeter H. Stranks/NETFLIX
In the dystopian sci-fi movie Awake, everyone on Earth suddenly loses the ability to sleep, plunging the world into hysteria.
As scientists race to find a cure, ex-soldier Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez) discovers that her young daughter Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) might just possess the means to save mankind.
 Awake’s compelling premise is enough to make the opening of the film enjoyable. Director Mark Raso slowly cranks up the tension – there are some unsettling set pieces, and the film doesn’t waste time trying to explain the phenomenon. Instead, the slow reveal of information does enough to keep you hooked.Advertisement
Unfortunately, though, Awake soon goes off the rails. Raso is constantly trying to create the same mindset of those who are unable to sleep in the viewers, but it just makes things increasingly confusing.
It also doesn’t help that, by only following Jill’s relationship with Matilda and her son Noah (Lucius Hoyos), Awake is too contained. We learn very little about what’s going on across the world, so when symptoms suddenly escalate and humanity descends into anarchy, it has very little impact.
But what would actually happen if you suddenly couldn’t sleep?

Alastair McLean at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who specialises in sleep deprivation, says its biggest impact is on interpersonal interactions, as people quickly become quite irritable.
“In terms of performance, one of the most obvious things that happens are microsleeps,” says McLean, in which people fall asleep for up to 30 seconds and can’t remember what happened. “They can occur after 24 hours.”
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There is also cognitive slowing, which sees people taking longer to make decisions, and cognitive rigidity, in which individuals can only think about things in one fixed way. Loss of motivation, paranoia, memory and balance issues, mood changes and visual problems can also occur, while some people experience hallucinations and even speech difficulties.
In 1963, 17-year-old Randy Gardner set the record for the longest time a human had gone without sleep, staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. Finland’s Toimi Soini and the UK’s Maureen Weston and Tony Wright have allegedly beaten this time, but none of them were studied as closely as Gardner.
Studies of sleep deprivation on animals have also proven to be revealing. “In 1989, Allan Rechtschaffen and his Chicago group studied rats that were sleep deprived. After two to three weeks, they started to die,” says McLean. “You saw the same pattern in all of them. They began to eat more and more as the sleep loss went on. Despite that, they had a fall in body weight.”

A 2020 study by researchers at Harvard Medical School on sleep deprivation in fruit flies also provided the same outcome. The more they didn’t sleep, the greater the increase in a molecule in the gut known as reactive oxidative species.
“If they gave the fruit flies materials to offset the effects of this, they didn’t die,” says McLean. “We’ve been looking for the effects of sleep deprivation in the brain. It looks, though, that it’s the gut that may be critical when it comes to survival.”
Based on the trailer for Awake, McLean agrees that it looks accurate in its use of disorientation and even hallucinations, but says it appears to exaggerate the problems and even speed up the timeframe in which they occur.
By doing just, that Awake strains to repeat the success of thrillers like A Quiet Place and Bird Box. But not only does it lack the ingenuity, tension and star power of these films, it is too aimless, meandering and lacking in heart to come close.
Awake is now available on Netflix .

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By Simon Ings

FOR most of us, buildings are functional. We live, work and store things in them. They are as much a part of us as the nest is a part of a community of termites.
Were this all there was to say about buildings, architectural historian Barnabas Calder might have found his book easier to write. He is asking “how humanity’s access to energy has shaped the world’s buildings through history”.
Had his account remained so straightforward, we might have ended up with an eye-opening mathematical description of the increased energy available (derived from wood, charcoal and straw, then from coal and then from oil) and how it transformed and now, through global warming, threatens our civilisation.
But, of course, buildings are also aspirational acts of creative expression. However debased it seems, the most ordinary structure is the product of an artist of sorts, and to get built at all, it must be bankrolled by people who are (relatively) wealthy and powerful.
This was as true of Uruk – perhaps the first city, founded in the area now called Iraq around 3200 BC – as it is in Shenzhen, the Chinese former fishing hamlet that is now a city of nearly 13 million people.
While the economics of the built environment are crucial, they don’t make sense without sociology and even psychology. This is particularly the case when it comes to what Calder calls “the mutual stirring, the hysteria between architect and client” that gave us St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, the world’s biggest building by floor area.
Calder knows this: “What different societies chose to do with [their] energy surplus has produced endless variation and brilliance.” So if his account seems to wander, this is why: architecture isn’t a wholly economic activity, and certainly not a narrowly rational one.
At the end of an insightful, often impassioned journey through the history of buildings, Calder does his best to explain how architecture can address the climate emergency. But his advice and encouragement vanishes under the enormity of the crisis. The construction and running of buildings account for 39 per cent of human greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete is the most used material on Earth after water. And while there is plenty of sustainability talk in construction sectors, Calder finds precious little sign of real change. We demolish too often, build too often and use unsustainable materials.
There may be solutions, but we won’t find many clues in the archaeological record. As Calder points out, “entire traditions of impressive tent-like architecture are known mainly from pictures rather than physical remnants”. The remains of civilisation before the days of fossil fuel only offer a partial guide to future architecture. Perhaps we should look to existing temporary structures – even to some novel ones used in refugee camps.
Rather paradoxically, Calder’s love poem to buildings left me thinking about the Mongols, for whom a walled city was a symbol of bondage and barbarism. They would have no more settled in a fixed house than become enslaved. And their empire, which covered 23 million square kilometres, demolished more architecture than it raised.

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By Robyn Chowdhury

A brain implant promises to boost multitasking in We Are Satellitesmetamorworks/Getty Images
We Are Satellites
Sarah Pinsker
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CAN we really trust a company seeking to put wires in our brains? And is it worth suspending any mistrust for the sake of our children’s futures? These are the deep, real-life questions posed by award-winning author Sarah Pinsker in her second sci-fi novel, We Are Satellites.
The story follows a family of four as they become increasingly entangled in the debate on a brain-boosting implant called the Pilot. Pinsker skilfully takes us on a journey that is about far more than mere technology as the Pilot becomes part of everyday life, from schools to government offices.
The novel excels at integrating questions about the medical technology industry with genuine representations of queer love and family life. Every twist and turn of the novel has family at its heart. The differing opinions of the parents, mothers Val and Julie, on the Pilot sets up a tense family dynamic, fraught with arguments and difficult conversations.
Unlike Elon Musk’s Neuralink or other brain stimulation devices that are designed to help people with disabilities, the Pilot has one core function: multitasking. It also claims to enhance the attention span of its users. Val and Julie have to consider whether they want their children Sophie and David to opt for this little-understood procedure.
The first part of the novel revolves around the anxieties of deciding whether or not you want your child to have an invasive procedure for the sake of keeping up with classmates. It touches on the theme of accessibility as Sophie has epilepsy, leaving her unable to have a Pilot implanted. The discussion of discrimination throughout the novel does well to address concerns that technology which could give some people an advantage might leave others behind.
The pace of the novel lends itself to character-building, with the first two parts spending time helping us understand each character’s motivations. Pinsker gives us a glimpse inside the minds of the characters, showing us how little they communicate their innermost thoughts and how this affects their family.
The technology in We Are Satellites is similar to an existing brain implant meant to enhance memory. Instead of enhancing memory, the Pilot works by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction in the brain, which is responsible for reorienting attention.
The focus of the novel isn’t how the technology works, however, but the implications it has for society. The Pilot’s popularity leaves those who don’t have it – because they can’t afford it, they object to having wires in their brain or they have a disability – at a disadvantage. No Pilot means less by way of job opportunities.
“We can never really be sure about the full ramifications of having wires and electrodes in the brain”
Far from being a doomy, dystopian novel about terrifying technology, We Are Satellites takes a balanced look at the pros and cons while maintaining healthy scepticism towards the medical technology sector. Through David, we are shown we can never really be sure about the ramifications of having wires and electrodes stuck in the brain – and how hard it can be to communicate exactly what is going on in your own head.
Sophie’s involvement in the anti-Pilot movement becomes another source of turmoil for the family as she embarks on a mission to discover the truth about the technology – no matter what the cost.
The story increases in pace during its third part, with several incredibly captivating chapters packed with action and tension as we begin to understand Sophie’s mistrust of the Pilot.
We Are Satellites is a story about technology with family at its heart. It’s not just about whether we trust scientists to stick things in our brain, or even what happens when technology goes wrong. It’s about what brain-enhancing could do for us, who it would exclude and what happens when a family becomes tangled up within the debate.

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