nextwavefutures

[nextwavefutures]

‘In Which We Serve’: it’s everybody’s war

‘In Which We Serve’: the point of Noel Coward’s naval drama is that it’s everybody’s war. New post on Around The Edges.

I watched In Which We Serve (1942) after seeing a sequence about the film in a documentary, Mad About The Boy, about Noel Coward. The documentary first: I don’t think I had understood how big a star Noel Coward was in the middle of the 20th century, since I had remembered him from my childhood only as a Las Vegas entertainer. In Which We Serve was written, produced, and co-directed by Coward,…

[nextwavefutures]

Soft simulations and the next attack on the Capitol

Soft simulations, game design, and the next attack on the Capitol. New post at The Next Wave

Storyville: War Game was shown last week in the UK on the BBC, and is a documentary film about ‘gaming’ the future. In fact, it is gaming a very specific future: after the violent attack on Capitol Hill in 2021, it games the 2024 American Presidential election in the event that the election result is disputed. It was directed by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber: It’s on BBC iPlayer, for readers who…

[nextwavefutures]

Dusty among the royalty

Dusty among the royalty—a star in decline finds a way to connect with her audience. Her Royal Albert Concert, 1979. New post at Around The Edges.

The film of Dusty Springfield’s 1979 concert at the Royal Albert Hall is billed as “the pop diva at the height of her career”. But although royalty was in attendance, in the shape of Princess Margaret, the description is definitely not right. By 1979 Dusty was on a long slow slide from her last big hits in 1971. Her career had been beached musically by punk and disco. Her personal life was…

[nextwavefutures]

Designing organisations that work

Designing organisations that work—the lessons of Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model for organisational design. New post on Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine.

Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon. The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way…

[nextwavefutures]

The Glass Pearls

Emeric Pressburger is best-known for his long film collaboration with Michael Powell. But his 1960s novel, The Glass Pearls, is a dark surprise. New post on Around the Edges.

The Glass Pearls is one of two novels written by Emeric Pressburger after his long film-making partnership with Michael Powell was dissolved. It’s an extraordinary book, for several reasons. Image by The Reading Den, whose review is here. The first is the subject matter. The novel was published in 1966, and is about a Nazi war criminal living under an assumed name in a London boarding house, 20…

[nextwavefutures]

Everyone goes to Rick’s

Everyone goes to Rick’s. And so do all of film’s narrative archetypes. Watching Casablanca again: new post at Around The Edges.

It’s possible, even probable, that everything that there is to say about Michael Curtiz’ 1942 film Casablanca has already been said. Bogart and Bergman, as Rick and Ilsa, and Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Heinreid, the love triangle at the heart of the story. And Casablanca itself, thronging with Second World War refugees trying to get to America, under the keen eye of the corrupt chief of…

[nextwavefutures]

Hitchcock’s ‘Suspicion’

Suspicion is set in Britain, but it is one of Hitchcock’s American films. Johnny Aysgarth is played by Cary Grant, and he is posh but poor, chancing his arm and using his charm, and quite a lot of class privilege, to get by. Joan Fontaine plays Lina, who has money. So it’s a classic Hitchcock story. (Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion) As the plot unfolds, Aysgarth owes his cousin…

[nextwavefutures]

Basho, the haiku, and the Narrow Road

Basho, the haiku, and the Narrow Road—new post on Around The Edges.

Basho’s book Narrow Road to the Deep North is about a 1500-mile walk up one side of Japan, across, and down the other side, towards the end of the 17th century. He was 45 at the time, but not ageing well, and he was mostly accompanied by his ‘disciple’ Sora. The roads were not good and there were potential dangers.  His walk was intended to acknowledge his literary influences, and Basho prepared…

[nextwavefutures]

Keeping students in school, instead of failing them

18% of Britain’s school students leave school without any qualifications—all but unemployable. A new coaching and mentoring programme seems to make a difference. New post at The Next Wave.

I was at a meeting at Mansion House in London earlier this month organised by New Capital Consensus, which is a research group looking at how “to identify the behavioural, political and regulatory levers necessary to release billions of pounds of private, long-term investment capital to green the UK economy and tackle structural inequalities.“ I’ll come back to this macro economic question on…

[nextwavefutures]

Wrestling with Britain’s ‘stagnation’ crisis

I’ll write more here soon about the some of the structural questions raised by the UK General Election, notably the continuing decomposition of the 2024 Conservative party. But one of the lessons of the general election campaign has been is the inability of politicians to talk about difficult issues, especially about economics. Because this chart (taken in this version from the Financial Times)…

[nextwavefutures]

The Plato experiment

The Plato experiment—reading Jo Walton’s ‘novel of ideas’, The Just City

I’ve become a bit of a fanboy of Jo Walton. I read her ‘Small Change’ trilogy a couple of years ago—an alt-history fiction that starts, in effect, with the equivalent of Halifax winning the argument in Cabinet when Churchill comes to power. (Five Days in London is a brilliant narrative of that critical week). As a result Britain negotiates a peace treaty with Germany in 1941. Of course, as…

[nextwavefutures]

Changing the ‘toxic’ discourse on migration

Changing the ‘toxic’ discourse on migration requires building a completely different set of narratives. New post on The Next Wave

The Rethinking Migration and Mobility report that I co-wrote for the International Organisation for Migration has been published. My fellow authors are my SOIF colleagues Paul Raven and Iman Bashir. It’s a thinkpiece which is intended as a contribution by the IoM to the United Nations Summit of the Future As I think I have mentioned here before, Iman and I facilitated a workshop with a group of…

[nextwavefutures]

Cybernetics and the science of managing our crisis

I first came across the work of Stafford Beer in the 1990s, first around the edges of some reading about the Allende government in Chile, where he and Fernando Flores tried to build a cybernetic information system for the government2. And then, because these things come in pairs, I was able to commission a workshop on behalf of a UK government department (in 1998) that used Beer’s Syntegration…

[nextwavefutures]

Understanding systems thinking

I’m a member of the Agri-Foods for Net Zero network, and it runs a good series of knowledge sharing events. (I’ve written about AFNZ here before). Last month it invited one of Britain’s leading systems academics, Gerald Midgley, to do an introductory talk on using systems thinking to explore complex problems. All of the images here are courtesy of Gerald Midgley, who generously shared his slides…

[nextwavefutures]

The talkin’ 1962 Bob Dylan London blues

It was Bob Dylan’s 83rd birthday yesterday, and this post was written after listening to the great British folksinger Martin Carthy reminiscing about hanging out with Dylan in late 1962 when he visited London for a few weeks. Carthy is an almost exact contemporary of Dylan’s, and this is a story of two 21-year olds finding their feet in the world. It was first published a few days ago at…

[nextwavefutures]

‘The American’

‘The American’ is George Clooney as a hitman. At the start of the film, he is lying low in the wilds of Sweden after a job which may have gone wrong. But someone who doesn’t have his best interests at heart tracks him there and suddenly there’s a string of bodies lying in the snow, including a woman he had been living with. “Don’t have friends” says his controller, the sinister Pavel, as he…

[nextwavefutures]

Ginger Rogers, comic actor

A slightly updated version of an older post. ICYMI, something to make you smile.

Ginger Rogers was well-established as a leading lady when she made Vivacious Lady in 1938—she’d started young and had already made five of the nine musicals she starred in with Astaire, for example. But people also knew that she could act, especially comedy. From the description, I’d expected the film to be a “showgirl confounds the stuffy world of academe” story—the classic fish out of water.…