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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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.

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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 Laura Spinney

Rocio Montoya
YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world live in urban environments, and that number is growing. But you may also have wondered what “quality of life” really means. Which qualities? Whose life?
These same questions occupy Anu Ramaswami. Trained initially as a chemical engineer, she is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments. It is fiendishly difficult to compare cities, she says – or even, for that matter, to define them.
Ramaswami wants to persuade people that cities aren’t concrete jungles that stop abruptly at their official limits, but complex, dynamic systems that extend much further and, like living organisms, have their own metabolism. Only by thinking of them in this way can we start to make them more liveable, she says.
Laura Spinney: Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing?
Anu Ramaswami: Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 … More

By Annalee Newitz

Helen Sessions/Alamy
IN LATE May, Amazon bought 97-year-old movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion. Although that is a huge amount of money, there is something almost routine about the transaction at this point. MGM owns some of the rights to James Bond and a few other popular franchises, so there is talk about how big tech is about to ruin more nice things.
Obviously, Amazon is trying to lure more customers to MGM’s catalogue, and sure, it is possible that Amazon will ruin our love for Agent 007 with a romcom about wacky high jinks when James Bond marries a surveillance drone. … More