How's your Friday been so far? I hope that it's good and that you have a nice treat planned for tonight or tomorrow. Here's a Fem Fri about women who are doing cool and good things with artificial intelligence. Lots to think about and listen to here.
Firstly, this interview with Cynthia Dwork is what I want from interviews with scientists. It's really wide-ranging while also stepping through a specific example as an illustration of why her work – on algorithmic fairness – matters, and also how it works. I like how she talks about the value of just doing the work, seen in the pullquote below. You'll enjoy the whole thing though:
I’d started playing the piano at the age of about six, and I dutifully did my half-hour of practice a day. I was fine. But one time — I guess freshman year of high school — I passed by the auditorium and I heard somebody playing a Beethoven sonata. He was a sophomore, and I realized that you didn’t have to be on the concert-giving scale to play much, much better than I was playing. I actually started practicing about four hours a day after that. But it had not occurred to me that anything like this was possible until I saw that someone who was just another student could do it.
Staying with music, Holly Herndon's collaborator for her latest album is an AI called Spawn. The album is a really good listen, and they got their training sets in such an interesting way:
“We had three main approaches,” says Herndon, “We started training it on my voice and Mat’s voice, and some little Foley sounds around the house. Then we opened up that training to our [vocal] ensemble. And then we opened it up again with the public.” The public event, called Deep Belief, held in 2018, incorporated an interactive theatre performance where Herndon’s ensemble led the public through the creation of training sets. This involved reciting text, emoting and producing other sounds together. These were recorded and turned into more training data for the AI to understand and interpret.
Now you can listen to a track where Spawn was the creative lead – here is Godmother. Lots of comments finding the video disturbing, and I can't honestly disagree with them, so maybe one to listen to with YouTube hidden under other, more nice and normal, tabs:
NB if you can think of a better title for today's newsletter do let me know. I couldn't think of anything clever so went very literal. Do you have a favourite AI pun? Or joke about blockchain? All are welcome.
I hope you are well. I'm back from Glastonbury! If you do not know what Glastonbury is, it's a large and self-important music festival in the South West of England. It was also extremely fun this year. Some amazing women played too so this week's Fem Fri is a round up of things enjoyed.
I've tried to highlight some artists you might not have heard too much of, slightly at the expense of the more famous people. For example if you are interested in Kylie I imagine you have already watched her set. I also hope to convey some other aspects of the festival that you maybe don't get to see on television.
Let's start with Rosalía, who is an amazing flamenco/dance singer. She was one of the first acts I saw, and on a stage that I consider to be incredibly frumpy (the John Peel Tent). Rosalía was not at all frumpy though! It was like watching a headliner, incredible tight choreography, joyful vibes, everything you want from a festival Friday:
Now here is Lucy Rose. If you like sad female singer/songwriters as much as I do, you will surely like Lucy Rose. Alas there is no footage of her at Glastonbury this year but here is one of my favourite songs of hers and if you like it you could go and see her live when she plays in your town:
Perhaps you enjoyed the ballet in the middle of Stormzy's set. I hope you did, and I hope that you enjoy this interview with Cassa Pancho. She founded Ballet Black, the company that the two dancers were from:
[W]hile at Durham University, she decided to write her dissertation on black women in British ballet — and immediately hit a wall. “I didn’t have anyone to interview — the dancers didn’t exist,” she says. “I started looking at schools and the marketing for them and realised that no one was showing any dancer of colour unless it was a box-checking exercise for funding.” After graduating she decided to do something about it — and Ballet Black was born.
Lizzo is all about body positivity and being an amazing dancer. She is also a highly talented flautist. I saw her sweet and high-energy performance on limited sleep in 28°C heat so sort of at my maximum emotional vulnerability:
👩🏼🦳👨🏽🎤🧝🏻♀️👩🏻🦰🦸🏻♀️🦸🏽♂️💃🏻🕺🏻👨👩👧👧🧚🏾♀️🧚🏼♂️👸🏻🙋🏼♀️🌯🤝👩🏼🍳 (waiting in a queue for food)
There is also no footage of RAY BLK at Glastonbury, but she gave an incredibly joyful and high energy show. This included her asking where her "independent boys" were in the crowd, getting men to cheer if they cooked their own food, and then turning on this one dude because she could "just tell" that he didn't do his dishes. Anyway here is her best song, Run Run:
Finally, a headliner of the festival as well as of this newsletter, here is the incredible Janelle Monáe. You will not regret making the time for this high priority set. Much love to the woman (not in the below video) who was brought onstage and could only form the statement "i LoVE yOu??!✨?" to the questions she was asked. Long video, worth every second.
Today we return again to that classic Fem Fri topic, the anchoress. I hope you enjoy it. This is an auto send as I am at Glastonbury this weekend! I feel like I have taken too many Fridays off lately and am honestly too embarrassed to ask a guest editor. Anyway I hope you like this today.
This article in the LRB is a bit uneven – at least I thought it was – but there are lots of good facts about the anchorite life and some Middle English as well, if that is your thing:Some writers of anchoritic guidance saw the space as confined only in a
physical sense. In a letter to the recluse Eve of Wilton (c.1058-1125),
who lived in an eight foot cell, Goscelin of St Bertin wrote, echoing
Psalm 30, that God ‘has set you in a spacious place, for he has saved
you from the afflictions of worldly desires … he has begun to close hell
for you and open heaven for you, that you may walk with a spacious
heart.’ What a beautiful image a "spacious heart" is.https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n10/mary-wellesley/this-place-is-pryson Now for a specific anchoress, here's St
Pega. I found out about her – a noblewoman of the ancient Anglo Saxon
kingdom of Mercia – when I was searching for some enterprise software
also called PEGA. I was delighted to find myself reading about a female
saint instead, and so I am sure was everyone else in the meeting. St.
Pega belonged to one of the great noble families of Mercia, her brother
being St. Guthlac, who set up his hermitage in the Peterborough Fens.
[...] We know little of their family. They were of the Mercian nobility
and close to the king, who later laid down his crown and himself became a
monk. Women solitaries were rare in those days, and St. Pega seems to
have had a grant from the king for her hermitage. Later a church would
be built on the spot, named after her, Peakirk (Pega's church). You can still visit it! It's near Peterborough. http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/PEGA.HTM I hope you have a lovely weekend whatever your surrounds, Alex/🤖 xx.
I hope everything is great and that you are looking forward to a Fem Fri of links sent to me following my newsletter about women of the steppes! Turns out the caucasus is absolutely full of interesting women, let's read about them today. Many thanks also if you sent me one of these articles. It is always so nice to read about new things.
Let's start with some mythology in the form of Lady Satanaya. Her name means "mother of 100 sons" (all giants) and she is a key figure in the "Narts" myth cycle. Sort of an Aphrodite figure. Enjoy a gloss on this story about her competence, lots more in the linked PDF:
In the myth 'Why the Sun Pauses on the Horizon at Sunset' (Hadaghat’la 1967, 1:266), Satanaya presents a theme of competence, in this case competence in weaving and sewing. Weaving itself has an almo st magical connotation for female figures fro m Ireland to India, but in the case of Satanaya appears chiefly to be an exemplification of her competence in womanly activity. To finish her work in time she must ask a boon of the sun. She is granted her wish that the sun pause before sinking below the horizon.
Moving on to more recent legends, here's Barbare Jorjadze, "Georgia’s […] Mary Wollstonecraft, but also its Mrs. Beeton". There is a fantastic story in this article about how one of her cookbooks was found after many years and what it tells us, and also:
Barbare spent much of her time circuiting the provinces, trying to help her feckless husband and then her hapless son salvage catastrophic careers. She was shaky on the finer points of composition—she depended on her older brother, who had been formally educated, to punctuate her texts—but she had a drive to communicate, to enter the public arena at a time when women, as she once wrote, were told, “You must always keep silent; you must not raise your eyes at anybody, you must not go anywhere, you must block your ears, close your eyes, and sit back.” Jorjadze participated in debates about the modernization of the Georgian language, wrote popular plays and poems, and lobbied for educational reforms.
Maybe you, like me, are really fancying some khachapuri right now. Here is a recipe for you, if you make one you are particularly proud of please send a photo!
Serving: The Ajarian khachapuri is served hot and traditionally served with butter. The butter and egg are mixed together with a knife and fork and eaten together with little pieces of the bread part of the khachapuri.
This week some great stuff about horses has come to my attention, presented here for you to enjoy.
Let's start with the story of Phyllis on Aristotle. A favourite in the medieval age, this is the story of Aristotle telling his protege Alexander that if he (Alexander) wanted to amount to anything in philosophy he should be spending less time contemplating his (again, Alexander's) hot wife and more time contemplating the general good. Alexander's hot wife, Phyllis, was understandably extremely cross about this and set out to seduce Aristotle, a successful venture which culminated in her riding Aristotle around as though he were a little horse while Alexander watched.
Anyway the artists of several eras piled onto this story in particularly lurid ways, equipping Phyllis with whips and, in the case of Cranach the Elder, a smirk that makes me feel quite uncomfortable:
I enjoyed this article on the trope and hope you will as well:
In the late 15th and early 16th centuries fear of powerful women and their ability to overturn accepted social and cultural norms breathed new life and significance into the story. At the same time a market for mass produced images was emerging throughout Europe. Artists quickly adapted the story and produced countless drawings, woodcuts, engravings, and paintings of Phyllis on Aristotle, making it one of the most common and recognizable visual expressions of the power of women topos.
This piece on learning to draw horses is a really sweet read. It's a comic by the way, and there are also some good horse facts in there that you can click through to read:
Finally, some career #content for you all. Here's Reductress with their highly useful tips and tricks to stop mentioning horses in your job interviews:
Plan ahead so you have an idea of what you’re going to say. It’ll flow so much more easily if you have a loose script in mind of “I spent ten years in PR before I moved over to copy writing.” That way you won’t suddenly find yourself describing the summer you spent with Moony, a dappled mare, before she got sold away to a new owner in Montana. Remember, unless you’re applying to work at a stable, these anecdotes will not help you land the job.
Thank you to Margo for the sterling newsletter last week, I enjoyed it a great deal and I hope you did as well.
Onto the topic of the day, here is something that women might sincerely be better at than men; it's winning a football world cup for England.
Banter.
Really though the football world cup does start today and I have been enormously enjoying reading about the history of women playing football. Because "footballer" was one of the many jobs that women did in place of men during the First World War! The most successful team was the Dick, Kerr Ladies, who were all from the Dick, Kerr munitions factory in Preston. The best player on that team was Lily Parr, an openly gay woman who scored over a thousand career goals and broke a man's arm by putting a penalty past him. Let's meet her:
In 1920, the local newspaper wrote about Parr: “There is probably no greater football prodigy in the whole country. Not only has she speed and excellent ball control, but her admirable physique enables her to brush off challenges from defenders who tackle her. She amazes the crowd where ever she goes by the way she swings the ball clean across the goalmouth to the opposite wing.”
Obviously I would not have chosen this topic (a) if there were not also women now who are excellent at football and (b) if I did not also enjoy watching supercuts of goals. Including Australia's Sam Kerr who is… maybe… a descendent of a WWI munitions factory owner in Preston? Probably not but we can enjoy thinking about it. GOALS:
Here is one for my Scottish friends and subscribers, it's the sensational Erin Cuthbert. I would be happy if England won, but to see Scotland win a World Cup would be extremely special. So here you go. BOSH:
Kia ora all! While our fearless leader is on hols, the FemFri baton has been briefly passed to me, Margo, writer of not-entirely-fortnightly newsletter Three Weeks and big fan of fun facts. Fr'instance, did you know that there were hedgehogs in prehistoric times, nuzzling dinosaurs and rustling ye olde hedgerows? This is not relevant to today's subject but don't act like you're not happier for knowing it.
Here's a fun fact about me: I cannot knit for toffee. While I can knock out a batch of scones, backstitch like no one's business, and papier-mâché like the devil, I've always been a multitude of thumbs when it comes to yarn. I've been lucky enough to know many knitters and crocheters, and my sock drawer is grateful for it.
However fibre artists aren't just about keeping you warm and looking winsome on Insta. They are out there fighting systemic racism, climate change, scientific ignorance, and the pox of open plan offices.
There have been knitting controversies as long as there have been needles to poke people with, with this year starting off with a wide-ranging discussion of racism in the community after a blog post by a celebrity knitter (yes, they exist) blew up. For Francoise "Frenchie" Danoy, knitting is a way to explore the intersection of making with identity, which has led her to design using themes from her Maori heritage, become a professional designer and coach, and fight to make knitting spaces more inclusive. https://www.ravelry.com/designers/francoise-danoy
She also has a quiz on her site to discover your "inner fibre muse" and if there's one thing I love more than fun facts, it's a Sorting Hat: https://www.arohaknits.com/discovery-test
Australian twins Margaret and Christine Wertheim have taught over 10,000 people the principles of hyperbolic geometry through their collaborative art project, the Crochet Coral Reef.
Margaret Wertheim points out that "women who'd been crocheting and knitting ruffles for hundreds of years had inadvertently been crafting hyperbolic spaces…They'd literally been doing mathematics with their hands."
Her knitted felt works can be pinned to a wall, hung from the ceiling, or in the most attractive user case scenario, stand alone to create separate pods surrounding someone just trying to get through a call without having to listen to their colleague's debate politics or play funny videos or, god help us all, BANTER. https://www.petravonk.nl/#/white/
I'll be dreaming of my own felt igloo of solitude. Stay cosy out there.
Have you started watching Gentleman Jack on the BBC and apparently also HBO? It is great so far. The clothes are terrific, people are broadly kind to one another, and I laughed out loud several times during the first episode. This is what I want from television.
Really though one of the chief delights of the whole piece is how competent Anne Lister is. It's very soothing to see her striding around, knowing what she wants and what she needs to do next to achieve it. So please enjoy a Feminist Friday which is all about competent Yorkshirewomen.
Obviously managing land wasn't the only thing Anne Lister was good at, here's a guide to how to flirt more like her which I imagine will be extremely useful to you as the weekend approaches:
From the minute they meet, Anne Lister’s agenda is clear — not only because she tells us as much, with entries in her diary and knowing glances toward the audience — but because she’s just so good at what they used to call “making love.” By the second time the two women meet, Anne is pulling out all the stops [… cut here for extremely minor spoilers for Sunday's BBC ep]
Here is another Yorkshirewoman who was good at management, it's St Hilda of Whitby. Founding figure in Anglo-Saxon Christianity, she was the abbess of several convents and the founding abbess of Whitby convent. There is a legend about her that her faith turned snakes to stone, it turns out these were most likely ammonites but here's how the enterprising early modern tourist industry got around this:
So strong was the belief, that the town arms of Whitby—three ammonites on a shield—once represented these shells with snakes' heads. An old Whitby copper token of "Flower Gate," dated 1667, also shows them as coiled snakes with heads. The fact that ammonites were never found with snakes' heads was, of course, always more or less of a stumbling-block, though the workmen and others frequently got over the difficulty by making and fixing heads to the ammonites on their own account.
Moving on from managers but keeping with the themes of fossils (stick with this), how about the modernist sculptures of Barbara Hepworth! She is from Yorkshire and you can see many of her works in public places in London. I'm always happy when I do so, here is a guide to where to go to see some of the best of them (might be some nice ideas here for the bank holiday weekend btw):
On Hampstead Heath, something of the totemic phenomena of the Cornish landscape has been enshrined among the rhododendron bushes beside Kenwood House. Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean (meaning 'heavenly stone') is carved from a limestone block rich with fossils. The sculpture's outline is humanoid, but the viewer is invited to look through and beyond the sculpture by cavities that pierce right through the block, framing shifting perspectives of the gardens.
Como amaneciste? And happy International Recycling Day! I have a Fem Fri for you which is somewhat about recycling, and a lot about environmental activism, and what ties all of these things together is that they are all in Colombia.
We start with Jenny Teasdale, former Fem Fri guest editor, who is now running the Green Apple Foundation on the tiny island of Bocachica off the coast of Colombia. I interviewed Jenny about her work, her current project and how she came to be living in Cartagena. There are also her top crowdfunding tips, if that is something you are thinking of doing. Jenny is one of the most interesting people I know and I'm so excited that you get to meet her today:
I'm really proud of the fact that we've set up a recycling operation. There have been many moments when we've not been sure it was going to work or be financially viable - and now we're starting to make a difference, have an impact, and link up with organisations that are doing what they can to combat climate change. We're right up against it here, so it's great to see people doing beach clean ups and learning how to take action for where they live. It's about finding solutions where you live - you can't solve the whole planet, but you can solve where you are.
On to the crowdfunding campaign itself, if you have a line item in your budget for grassroots activism, strongly consider Green Apple's campaign:
With these new skills, the artisans can make a good living, while also promoting sustainable tourism and protecting our precious environment. Instead of using imported beads or shells and corals taken from the ocean, they will create art from previously unwanted glass bottles. And in using these bottles, they contribute to the reduction of dangerous waste that is blighting the gorgeous coast around Cartagena.
Now here is Yassandra Marcela Barrios Castro, who is doing a degree in marine biology and also learning to dive, talking about the challenges and rewards of doing conservation work in and with communities. A warning, this site is extremely optimised for mobile, so perhaps one to read on the train home rather than your lunch break:
Once qualified, Yassandra will be the only marine biologist on the island. "I am part of a new generation that wants to protect my island," Yassandra says. "If I can find a way to join people together to protect our reefs, then our island is going to have a bright future."
The everyday and the banal are amazing because they are where we live our lives and if we're going to find happiness and beauty in the world they are probably the best places to start looking. Here is a Fem Fri about artists and one art historian who have found joy and beauty in their everyday.
Let's start with the art historian – Sunglim Kim, leading expert on chaekgeori screens. These are 18th century Korean paintings of what I can only call Western kipple, and they are quite delightful. I like what appears to be the jar of pencils:
Here's the story of how she came to study these screens:
To Kim’s knowledge, still-life painting, so popular in Europe, hadn’t yet reached Korea, which had no direct diplomatic relationship with the West until the late 19th century. The Confucian ideals that informed most of the art of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty didn’t consider ordinary objects worthy subjects for painting. The screen was painted using illusionist techniques like perspective, common in the West but almost unknown in traditional Korean art. And where had those eyeglasses come from?
Now on to artists! If you are in London, have you been to the Dorothea Tanning exo at the Tate Modern yet? If not I highly, highly recommend it. There are lots of everyday things running through her beautiful surrealist art – including an excellent array of wee dogs – but what I want to look at today is the recently unfolded tablecloths which recur in many of her paintings, but very creepily and notably in this one:
Tanning’s talent was to spin her observations of the domestic into something seriously otherworldly. In a note which accompanied the picture, she wrote: “Here some roses from a very different garden sit? lie? stand? gasp? dream? die? – on white linen…As I saw them take shape on the canvas I was amazed by their solemn colours and their quiet mystery that called for – seemed to demand – some sort of phantoms.” The colour palette is tight and deathly: white, sepia, brown and black. Even the air seems infected. The wall behind is unstable and pustulant.
Finally, Oaxacan women's pottery deserves and will get its own Fem Fri but here is a taster to get you amped for that treat. The everyday is one of several topics that Oaxacan women cover in their lovely clay work, here's a tremendous example from Conceptión Aguilar called "Market Woman". I love this. Look at all the tiny fruits!
And here's more about the artist herself:
Concepción Aguilar, the youngest of the famous Aguilar Sisters, was just nine when her mother died without teaching her the skills she had previously passed on to her three other daughters. However, Concepción developed her incredible skill with clay first by imitating her sisters and then constantly pushing herself to further develop her talent. Perhaps because of her dedication to creativity, she definitely holds her own with her famous sisters, and some critics would even argue that she is the most innovative artist among her talented family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9OjL6Mjqo
Picture via @arohaknits 
The reef has travelled the world, including a residence at the 2019 Venice Biennale, connecting the spheres of art and science (the twins are professional specialists in both), while raising awareness of the devastation of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. 
As the research pours in on 
