Here’s a bit about the project:

“The aim is to create and publicise a historical record of history teaching as it has developed over the past century in English state schools. We’re looking at what history was actually taught and how ‘what history was taught’ changed and why, as well as how the experience and expectations of history teachers and students changed over time…

There has been no previous attempt to consider the development of history teaching across the twentieth century in the context of national and regional policy together with the ‘lived experience’ of those in the classroom. It is intended to publish the results of the Project for a range of audiences, both academic and ‘popular’, via printed and electronic means and also to create resources for use within the classroom.”

She’s looking for people who studied history at state schools in England to fill in the survey. You can grab it at the link below – if you fill it in, please return it to the email address at the bottom of the file. Thanks for your help!

Download the survey.

[1] Learning, that is. After the MA, she moved out of halls and bought a house.

“On Roads deals mainly with the motorway era, beginning with the first stretch of the M1, completed in 1959 and the subject of such excitement that it had four press openings… On the M1′s first weekend, “nearly all its overbridges were crowded with sightseers”, and the transport minister, Ernest Marples, sounded a note of Mr Cholmondeley-Warner when he advised that ‘on this magnificent road the speed which can easily be reached is so great that the senses may be numbed and judgement warped’… Moran is equally appealing on the psychology of driving, the ‘terra nulla of the roadside verge’, and motorway service stations with their ‘rich seam of English ordinariness and gone-to-seed glamour.’”

On Roads, by Joe Moran.

[also gives me a chance to test WordPress' Tumblr-style reblog feature]

   Photos from olvwu | 莫方 , sunshine莊信賢影像世界, PAPA GO!!!, nans0410 and Sunny Life. … Read More

via Flickr Blog

You know what you should eat if you go to Japan? Ramen, especially if you go in the Spring or Autumn (the best seasons to visit Japan, perhaps because they’re well suited to ramen). So what is it? A giant bowl of thick broth with noodles, sliced meat and other goodness. This article from the Guardian is a good introduction to Ramen, linking in particular to Ramen Tokyo, which seems a good place for English speaking seekers of the perfect Ramen restaurant to start. Ramen Tokyo links to Supleks, which is the Ramen database (in food, above all things, the Japanese are obsessives). Yes, it’s all in Japanese, but you can a) Use Google Chrome which will translate for you and b) learn a bit of Japanese. Ramen is worth it.

A couple of my favourite places for Ramen in Tokyo are the Ippudo chain, and Dokutsuya in Kichijoji.

If Star Wars had been a cartoon from the 60s, Darth Vader might have looked like this. 30 characters from Star Wars, all with a very Jestons sensibility to them, drawn by Ben Balistreri.

It’s always interesting to look at the choices a successful business makes, particularly, choices that are conscious limitations. So-and-so inc expanding into a new area or launching a new copycat product is fairly dull. Looking for new markets, consumers and money is a given in a modern economy. In contrast, a company opting to depart from received wisdom by not doing certain things, skipping certain processes, provided it’s not doing it for cost-cutting measures, is fascinating.

I’ve found myself reading a couple of articles about clothes retailers in the last 24 hours. One is about a place where I buy 90% of the stuff I wear, the other is a shop I can’t stand. Respectively, these shops are Uniqlo and Abercrombie & Fitch. Both are the centre of articles that have much to say about branding, management and choices.

A cursory sweep through the two pieces reveals both Unqilo and A&F have a founder/CEO who exerts strong control over the company:

“Tadashi Yanai, the founder and owner of Uniqlo, is the richest man in Japan, worth over $9 billion… [he is] clearly obsessed with control, [but] is also a deeply pragmatic manager, and fascinated by failure. In 2005, he announced a reversal of strategy for international expansion… Uniqlo works quickly, and the transformation was surprisingly fast. Uniqlo designed and built the Soho store in about eight months, with 150 workers working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week.”

“Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot… I got a firsthand look at his perfectionism in action when he invited me along for the final walk-through for the Christmas setup of his stores… Jeffries paused in front of two mannequins and shook his head… He stared at the jeans on the female mannequin. “The jeans are too high. I think she has to be lower.” A guy named Josh got down on his knees and started fidgeting with the jeans, trying to pull them down so they hung to the ground.”

However, differences in their approaches are soon apparent. A&F is a typical fashion retailer; it sells a very specific look, and builds up the emotional pull of that look via heavy, distinctive branding that appropriates a series of familiar ideas, images and style cues from the past. Uniqlo is quite unusual; unlike other fast fashion stores, customers expect to wear the clothes until they’re worn out and instead of building stores that are like sets for the movie of the brand, they focus on the way the clothes should be folded and the customer’s credit card is handed back to them. While both A&F and Uniqlo strictly enforce a personality, A&F seeks to sell a certain, specific fashion and style, whereas Uniqlo sells… well, it seems glib to say ‘clothes’, but that doesn’t seem far off:

“To Jeffries, the “A&F guy” is the best of what America has to offer: He’s cool, he’s beautiful, he’s funny, he’s masculine, he’s optimistic, and he’s certainly not “cynical” or “moody,” two traits he finds wholly unattractive… Much more than just a brand, Abercrombie & Fitch successfully resuscitated a 1990s version of a 1950s ideal, the white, masculine “beefcake”… A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair. While feigning casualness (many of its clothes look like they’ve spent years in washing machine, then a hamper), Abercrombie actually celebrates the vain, highly constructed male.”

“Like the mass-fashion brands, [Uniqlo] delivers a low-cost product that shares qualities of high-end retail. “Uniqlo is a bit of a different animal,” says Luca Solca, who covers retail for Bernstein Research. “And what’s different about Uniqlo is that they have chosen fabric, rather than fashion, as the area where they want to excel. Uniqlo has sixteen takumi, or textile “masters,” on staff, none with less than twenty years’ experience. They specialize in areas like dyeing or sewing, and work with more than 70 factories, mostly in China. A typical order will be around a million units of denim, fleece, or cashmere… [and it] further increases its buying power by offering a smaller selection of fabrics, across a more limited selection of clothes styles, than most other retailers. Uniqlo disguises the limited variety of products it makes by offering them in almost every color imaginable.”

In the shadow of this conversation, anyone with an interest in technology will surely by now be itching to put their hand up and say “oooh! Apple!” Because of course, the Jobs-mob famously don’t bother with focus groups and they love to design products that lack the tick-box or expected features such as memory card readers, USB ports and support for Flash.

I suspect reading these two articles, Apple detractors would say the company is closer to A&F – nut-job CEO, obsessed with style who wants to impose an embarrassing and deeply inauthentic fashion lead orthodoxy – whereas those more favorably disposed towards Apple will surely see something of Cupertino’s approach (and aesthetic) in the Uniqlo way of doing things. This is true for both the positive and negative aspects of Uniqlo, from its commitment to quality (selling jeans that use selvage denim) to the slightly creepy way the employees are indoctrinated (they have six stock phrases to speak, for instance).

What I like about Uniqlo’s approach is that while it’s clearly a fashion retailer, it’s not fixated on selling a certain style, but focusses instead on what lies beneath that: fabric, quality, fit and use, attaining excellence in these areas by intentionally selling fewer items, something which runs contrary to the success of fast fashion chains such as TopShop. This puts me in mind of the (internet) truism that states newspapers made the mistake of thinking they were in the business of printing on paper, when really, they were in the business of providing people with information, perspective and entertainment.

• The Hold Steady, Heaven is Whenever – out May 3rd, you can stream it all from The Guardian.
• The National, High Violet – out May 11th, you can download the song Bloodbuzz Ohio from their site.
• Band of Horses, Infinite Arms – out May 17th, you can download the song Factory from their site.

All release dates are for the UK version.

Previous a capella 60s pop: The Beach Boys

Yet it’s the reason why this is the case, the one that’s on the tip of your tongue – yes, Wikipedia – that reading A Terrible Beauty brings to mind. The book is divided into four parts, and within these, 42 themed chapters. They are roughly chronological, but if a later development, discovery or idea fits a theme, it will be mentioned ahead of time, giving a beautiful sense of the uneven march of history. That said, so far, so traditional narrative. What’s very Wikipediary (!) about the book is that the people mentioned are all picked out in bold type when they first appear, enabling you to zip through the text and start reading when someone’s name catches your eye. Despite the fact it all ties together very well when you’re reading sequentially, it’s startlingly easy to just open the book and start reading. That’s how I first got into it; I was staying at a friend’s house, and it sat on the bedside table in the spare room.

The page I opened it at was 530, with its piece on Germaine Greer, immediately presenting one of Greer’s killer lines:

“Her book, The Female Eunuch, did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of its thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud’, she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’”

So it continues, brisk but not hurried, economical without being threadbare:

“Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women (Greer is very tall herself). In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality.”

The conclusion to this section has stayed with me since I first read it, a sentence that completely embodies the book’s title:

“As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.”

It was this line that came to me today as I read two pieces about the future of computing and the internet.

The first was Nick Carr, writing about Cory Doctorow’s negative reaction to the iPad. Doctorow raged against the iPad, and its exceedingly limited (in his view) vision of computing. It is a common view among geeks. The iPad is far more closed than a traditional computer, in their eyes, outrageously optimized to funnel users into passive consumption of pre-approved content rather than the creation of new and exciting works.

Here is what Nick Carr has to say about their position:

“What these folks are ranting against, or at least gnashing their teeth over, is progress – or, more precisely, progress that goes down a path they don’t approve of. They want progress to, as Bray admits, follow their own ideological bent, and when it takes a turn they don’t like they start grumbling like granddads, yearning for the days of their idealized Apple IIs, when men were men and computers were computers… While progress may be spurred by the hobbyist, it does not share the hobbyist’s ethic.”

And here, in his conclusion, is the terrible beauty:

“Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”

The second post I read was by Clay Shirky, on the evolution of complex business models:

“About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now. To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, ‘It is not free, and is not going to be,’ Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users ‘just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online’, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.’

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.’”

Both Carr and Shirky’s conclusions feel true.

I would recommend A Terrible Beauty without hesitation; as I hope this post shows, it is an excellent book to think with, and brilliant for filling in the gaps in your knowledge.

(1) It’s pre Apple, too. Steve Jobs doesn’t even get a mention. Bill Gates and Paul Allen are limited to a single sentence.