“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.”

I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing students. They seemed nice, if mad – but in roughly the same proportions as professional writers, so probably for the good. I may stand before them again. Kureishis’s hypothesis, therefore, struck me as worth testing.

Wikipedia’s index of School Shootings lists a total of 68 incidents between 1966 and 2008, 47 from the USA, 7 from Canada and 14 from the rest of the world. Of these, the majority are Middle or High School students studying no major subject, and a high proportion are security personnel, police, or outsiders (be particularly afraid of Custodians). Of the remaining 12 incidents in which the Major subject of the perpetrator is known, we find a strong bias towards the hard sciences and business:

• Mechanical Engineering (2)
• Physics
• Music
• Law
• Management
• Business Information, later switching to English
• Nursing
• Sociology
• Electronics
• Computer Science
• Commerce

Of these, only one was committed by a student with any connection to literature: Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator of the worst of all such attacks, the massacre at Virginia Tech. Cho had recently changed his major to English, after several years studying Business Information, a combination of Management and Computer Science.

We found no writing students at all, nor even the suggestion that some of the perpetrators were struggling authors on the side. As much as we admire Mr Kureishi, we must must find his hypothesis demonstrably false, much to the relief of Creative Writing teachers – himself included – everywhere.

*

If you’d like to know more about this issue than the rather flip approach I’ve taken, I recommend Mark Ames’ excellent Going Postal, which I had the privilege to publish last year. Ames’ conclusions are fascinating and highly readable, both on the real causes of school and workplace violence, and on the corrosive societal and educational system that breeds such causes. (Also: that’s me on the cover.)

Tom pointed to this hilarious/depressing news story about the National Lottery’s ‘Cool Cash’ scratchcard:

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The worst part is that Camelot (the company that runs the Lottery) has withdrawn the scratchcards – effectively admitting that it’s not OK to rip off fools, even in the name of charity.

But as my friend Ed pointed out, they missed a trick here: we need more difficult questions, not fewer ones. Studying should be rewarded. People who worked hard at school should have a better chance of winning a rollover.

In this spirit then, booktwo is proud to put forward its suggestions for new Lottery scratchcards, ones which we believe will do more to improve the nation than all that cash for the Olympics can possibly do. It being booktwo, we obviously had to focus on improving the literacy rates among British lottery players, so here goes:

I expect my cheque from the Department for Education Department for Children, Schools and Families any day now.

The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

Google Interiors by Sandra Niehaus:

I realized with a shock that George’s hat was a dense cluster of tiny cameras, forming a rounded beehive of angled, glittering eyes. “We’re from Google Interiors, a new venture sponsored by Google to make every home interior in the world searchable on the internet.”

Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford:

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google by Bruce Sterling (!):

This is Macbeth’s world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those “Three Weird Sisters”, who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great – only, in real life, it totally sucks?

The Nine Billion Names of God by Kathy Kachelries:

“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”

And finally, the grandaddy of Google Fan Fic, EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (an oldie but still a goodie):

In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. … At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.”

(See also: Armando Ianucci’s Tesco vs. Denmark: from “Every Little Helps” to “We Control Every Aspect Of Your Lives”.)