Rats are us

 

Rats are us

They are sentient beings with rich emotional lives, yet we subject them to experimental cruelty without conscience. Why?

by Kristin Andrews & Susana Monsó 

 
In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling the rats and measuring their response. They found that the rats’ vocalisations more than doubled during tickling, and that rats bonded with the ticklers, approaching them more frequently for social play. The rats were enjoying themselves. But the discovery was met with opposition from the scientific community. The world wasn’t ready for laughing rats.

 

Ang Lee

Interview

Ang Lee: 'I know I'm gonna get beat up. But I have to keep trying'

This article is more than 4 years old

Ryan Gilbey

The celebrated film-maker’s new film pits Will Smith against his much-younger clone – a reverie on the ageing of both the star and the director

Thrusday 3 October 2019

Y

ou haven’t seen nerves until you’ve met Ang Lee on the day his new film receives its world premiere. This is Gemini Man, a frantic thriller in which Will Smith plays an assassin hunted by his own younger clone; where there’s a Will, there’s another Will, you might say. Parts of the picture were shot in Budapest, and it is here that the 64-year-old film-maker shuffles into a hotel suite overlooking the Danube. “Everything feels harder than you can imagine right now,” he sighs, sinking into an armchair. He picks up a glass from the table in front of him, then puts it down again. “Even lifting that was hard.”

Ang Lee / Life of Pi by Yann Martel / Review

Life of Pi – review

The versatile Ang Lee brings Yann Martel's tale of shipwreck and spirituality to the big screen in magnificent fashion

Philip French
Sunday 23 December 2012

T

he Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a US civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).

Review

Gemini Man review – Will Smith v Will Smith leaves audience in a coma

This article is more than 4 years old

The digital de-ageing gimmick adds little sprightliness to Ang Lee’s humourless thriller about a government agent on the run

Peter Bradshaw

Friday 4 October 2019

D

igital youthification and deepfakery is the new frontier in studio movies, taking regular live-action films into a deeper uncanny valley. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman features a young-looking Robert De Niro and now comes this very odd, dodgily acted, semi-intentionally bizarre action-thriller directed by Ang Lee and written by David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke. It stars Will Smith as Brogan, a special-forces assassin who discovers his corrupt government paymasters are harbouring a secret and subsequently finds there is a new and worryingly familiar-looking young assassin in town. It’s a youngster who has, to coin a phrase, started making trouble in the neighbourhood.

Ronda,  Spain

Legionnaires and penitents next to a sculpture of the crucifixion, known as the Christ of the Good Death

Photograph: Jon Nazca/Reuters

Good Friday commemorated across the world – in pictures

Colourful Easter processions and solemn re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ take place across globe

Pejman Faratin

Friday 29 March 2024

Valencia, Spain

Penitents of the Cristo Salvador (Christ the Saviour) brotherhood take part in a procession on the beach

Photograph: José Jordan

Zamora, Spain

Penitents of the Hermandad de Jesús Yacente brotherhood prepare to take part in a procession

Photograph: César Manso

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My writing day / Nicola Barker / ‘Each novel has its own specially designed notebook. These are sacred objects to me’

MY WRITING DAY

Nicola Barker: ‘Each novel has its own specially designed notebook. These are sacred objects to me’

The novelist on why she loves marker pens, Post-it notes and notebooks – and why she is a ‘clucky, agenda-driven mother hen’

Nicola Barker

Saturday 18 November 2017 10.00 GMT

I

work on an old apple laptop that isn’t online – it’s heavy and the keyboard is worn. It tells you if a word is spelled incorrectly (in American English so all my Ss need to be Zs or the page is covered in irritable red marks) but it doesn’t suggest alternatives. Every so often a key locks and you’ll look down at the screen and see or It also likes to impose random gaps and spaces on to the text (in geometric boxes) that are impossible to remove so you have to copy the narrative and open a new document. When I completed my last book, H(a)ppy, I suspected that I’d need a new laptop and I bought one and began working on it but this one was online. And it was way more portable. So I began slouching on the sofa (instead of sitting at my desk) and working whenever I felt the urge.

Reporter and poet … Gordon Burn.

My hero: Gordon Burn by David Peace

Gordon saw and he felt. He empathised, animated and illuminated people. He is a writer other writers read

David Peace

Saturday 7 September 2013

Reality without imagination is only half of reality, argued  Buñuel. And it is this argument between reality and imagination that runs through every sentence Gordon Burn ever wrote, equally in his non-fiction and in his fiction. A reporter and a poet, Gordon saw and Gordon felt. And he empathised. And animated and illuminated people as elusive and familiar, as real and imagined as Steve Davis and Peter Sutcliffe, Damien Hirst and Duncan Edwards, George Best and Rosemary West, Alma Cogan and Madeline McCann, Gilbert and George and Tony and Gordon. All our obsessions are here: sport and crime, art and politics, celebrity and fame, sex and violence, death and silence, the surfaces and the depths. And like BS Johnson or WG Sebald, Derek Raymond or Eoin McNamee, Gordon is a writer other writers read. And learn from and are inspired by. Particularly the first and the last novels, Alma Cogan and Born Yesterday, which show the opportunity and potential for a truly modern novel. And there is no greater testimony to Gordon's continued influence and relevance than the inaugural shortlist for the prize founded in his memory: How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright, The Footballer Who Could Fly by Duncan Hamilton, People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry, Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers and Myra, Beyond Saddleworth by Jean Rafferty. Fictions and non-fictions. In all their glories and in all their deceits. Everything real, everything imagined. In the cross-hairs, asking for truth. And so I hope Gordon would have approved. Because it is an honour to be one of the judges for this prize and it was a privilege to have been his friend.

 David Peace's Red or Dead is published by Faber. The winner of the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize will be announced on 19 October in Durham Town Hall at a special event during the Durham book festival.

THE GUARDIAN

Polar Vortex is enchanting

POLAR VORTEX IS ENCHANTING

"Winner of the LDComics Rosalind B. Penfold Prize

Short-listed for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition

"Splashes of color interrupt the blue haze of Dorrance’s poignant memoir, which hovers over her mother as she develops dementia and follows Dorrance’s journey home to the Midwest to care for her one winter."

― The New York Times Book Review

Polar Vortex by Denise Dorrance review / Hazards of a homecoming

 

Graphic novel of the month

Comics and graphic novels

Polar Vortex by Denise Dorrance review – hazards of a homecoming

The American cartoonist’s story of a trip to tackle her frail mother’s needs is funny, wise and magical

Rachel Cooke

Mon 26 Feb 2024 09.00 GMT

Denise Dorrance’s graphic memoir, Polar Vortex, is enchanting, every page lovely to look at, so funny and plangent and full of sly wisdom. But it’s also (dread word) strikingly relevant. Its principal subject being old age, by rights it should bring vast crowds of new readers to comics. There can, after all, be few people now who haven’t at least some experience of caring for – or just worrying about – an older relative, as the author does in her book; even those who aren’t yet there know full well what lies ahead: the care bills that will have to be paid, the attics that must be cleared out. After I finished reading it, I thought of my own boxes of photographs, my heaving bookshelves. To whom am I leaving the burden of sorting them out? I pushed the thought away, but it cannot be avoided for ever.

Dorrance has lived in London since 1995, but she was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in Polar Vortex, her first full-length graphic book, she returns to it, somewhat reluctantly. Her elderly, widowed mother is in hospital after a fall; decisions need to be made. On paper, this sounds a bit grinding. Please, no commodes! But Dorrance has a delicate touch, and a feeling for the rich territory on which she finds herself.

A page from Polar Vortex. Illustration: Denise Dorrance

There is a lot going on, and not all of it has to do with her mother’s dementia. When we go home, we become children again – even, sometimes, at the moments when we most need to be adult – and she’s amusing about this. Then again, what constitutes home, when you’ve been away for so long? She gives us lots of fish-out-of-water jokes: culture clashes born not only of her metropolitan sophistication, but of what the locals regard as her Englishness (they can’t get enough of her accent, which to their ears makes her sound like the queen).

The weather is bad – the book’s title refers not only to hard emotional terrain, but to an incoming storm that will deposit many feet of snow – and this gives her pages a kind of reverse-fairytale feel. The whiteness casts a spell; introversion is impossible when distractions cannot easily be trekked to (especially if you’re wearing, not layers of nylon padding, but a woollen London coat). In her drawings, as expressive and as deft as those of Alison Bechdel or even Posy Simmonds, Dorrance plays up to this. Death appears, like a pantomime villain; the Cedar Rapids hospital, red-brick and Victorian-looking, rises in the blizzard like some impenetrable castle.

But she’s creative in so many other ways, too, deploying old photographs, postcards and letters – and even, at one point, a wagon train – as a means of pacing the narrative. When it comes to her mother’s (limited) options post-hospital, the ghost of the cheesy TV host Monty Hall appears to turn the whole thing into a primetime quizshow (“Number two! Become a resident at Living Care!”). It is all, in short, magical: a triumph of art and feeling. I loved it. I can’t say enough good things about it. Buy it for everyone you know.

• Polar Vortex by Denise Dorrance is published by New River (£18.99).

    THE GUARDIAN