Russell Hogg

When I was teaching at a high school in Alaska, we read Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" together. Paragraph by paragraph. We spent six weeks on that one story. Here's what paragraph-by-paragraph close reading actually looks like: I'd read a passage aloud. Then I'd ask, "What is the Underground Man really saying here?" Silence at first. Then someone would venture an interpretation. Someone else would push back. Within ten minutes, they'd be arguing about human nature, about pride and spite and self-deception. People hear this and assume I was working with exceptional kids. I wasn't. I was working with kids who had never been asked to grapple with genuinely profound ideas before. In my experience, when you treat young people as capable of serious intellectual work, and take the time to train them how to read difficult texts, they learn how to do so.

Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans. 'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex. If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services. Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men. Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.

A science fiction novel I'm reading reminds me of one of my least favorite authorial contrivances in that genre. Our heroes' spaceship assumes standard orbit around an alien world, they start listening to electromagnetic traffic, and more or less instantly start getting video of the aliens below. No. No, it's not going to work that way, not at all, unless you arrive during a ridiculously short window after the locals invented radio. This assumption is a hangover from the analog technology of my youth. The problem is that it's highly unlikely that the locals are still using analog audio and video. If they were, this contrivance is reasonable. There are only a limited number of ways to do that, and it shouldn't be all that difficult to deduce the parameters from looking at the shape of the waveforms. Once they've gone digital, though, all bets are off. There are huge number of possible ways to write digital audio and video codecs, and you can't figure out what encoding is being used from the shape of the waveform. The really good ones look like white noise, because the better your video compression is the more statistically random the compressed blocks are. Aliens arriving in orbit around Earth today would still be able to crack audio with passive listening, because broadcast radio has not gone to spread spectrum digital. But the window for video started closing in the first decade of this century and is now pretty much shut. There's no way around it. Your visiting spaceship is going to have to capture a local video receiver, peel the hardware, and disassemble the firmware. This is not a particularly difficult task, but it is one that requires getting up and close and personal with alien artifacts. Okay, I'll stop waving my cane now.

Jeff Bezos has $222 billion. If he paid my wealth tax this year, we could fund insulin in America for everyone who needs it plus free school lunch for every kid in Texas—and have plenty of money left over. And Bezos would still have $215 billion dollars to spare.