Woman's Hour - Lists: How and why we make them, The psychology behind list-making, Lists in the public domain, Music and lists

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

To discuss the how and why of lists, Nuala is joined by Joanna Nolan, author of the book, Listful, and Lucy Ireland Gray, who put together a collection of about 200 shopping lists that she found discarded over the course of nearly 20 years in and around Hertfordshire, where she lives.We consider the psychology of lists - in particular why and whether lists are good or bad for our mental health and creativity. Artist Alice Instone, Joanna Nolan, author of Listful, and Madeleine Dore, the author of, I didn’t do the thing today: On letting go of productivity guilt, join Nuala.Lists in the public domain - with Nuala to discuss the good and bad of lists historically and in contemporary times, are journalist and writer Helen Lewis, author of Difficult women: A history of feminism in eleven fights, and writer Anne Sebba, author of 10 non-fiction books. Her most recent book is Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy.The place of lists in music - songs with lists, the charts, playlists and more. Nuala is joined by Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae, whose album, Black Rainbows, is out in September, and music journalist Jude Rogers, the author of The sound of being human: How music shapes our lives.Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Lucinda Montefiore

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Nuala McGovern and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Today, what do lists mean to you? Are you one of life's list makers? Part of a tribe of people obsessed with making lists? Or do you feel lists are an obstacle to your creativity? Getting in the way perhaps of more meaningful ways to spend your time? And what about those lists in the public domain?

Perhaps a list you've longed to be on, the music charts, the Sunday Times bestseller list, Forbes 30 under 30, or maybe the 50 over 50. And then there are also the opposite, the so-called blacklists, the hidden lists, the lists that can ruin a person's career or worse, bring their life to an end. We're going to be looking at the latter in modern and also historical times. Lists in songs, Gildedon, Sullivan's I've Got a Little List, Ariana Grande's Seven Rings, Paul Simon, 50 Ways to Leave Your

Loverover Billy Joel We Didn't Start the Fire you know once you start thinking about them you can't stop anyway we will also be talking to the Grammy winning singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey-Ray

who I know was having a little bop along to We Didn't Start the Fire and also music journalist and author Jude Rogers about songs with lists as well as those other important lists, the music charts and now playlists. So that is all coming up. But let us start with the humble list. We start thinking about it. They're just about every area of our lives.

Social media, print journalism, novels, poems, art, lists that tell you what to do, what not to do. So to discuss it in detail, I'm joined by two women who have spent a lot of time thinking about the place of lists in our lives. Joanna Nolan, author of the book Listful, and Lucy Arlen Gray, who put together a collection of about 200 shopping lists that she found discarded over the course of nearly 20 years in and around Hertfordshire, where she lives. Welcome to both of you. Are you a list maker, Jo? I am a list maker, yes. I now, since I've started sort of focusing on lists, make more and more.

I think it becomes something that it's a habit. It's reassuring. It's when you look at what your life encompasses and the kind of breadth and range that you're having to deal with on a daily basis. It's sort of your silent friend. Is it always a to-do list? Not always, but I mean, yes, there's a to-do list every day, for sure. And the fascination then from doing it yourself to creating this lovely little book that goes into, I suppose, the culture and history of lists. Yeah, so actually it didn't start with the actual sort of list itself.

It was during COVID. I was standing waiting to go into a supermarket and I took the list I had in my bag out, had my hands all gloved and sanitized. And I looked at the list and thought, this is weird because only I could read this list because it was full of sort of little abbreviations that I make, sort of linguistic in-jokes. I am a linguistics researcher, so I'm fascinated by all kinds of forms of language and the way we use language. But yeah, I was struck in that moment that really, it was so personally mine. And so then my whole project became to see whether that was reflected in other people's lists. And I would ask people, friends, colleagues, family. And it's interesting, when you go into a research project, you can't start with the number one question that you're interested in as the first question on your list and because

otherwise people realize that's what you're going for and what I was trying to do is get a picture of people's list making habits and then get into the nub of the language issue and actually people were way more interested in all the other questions I asked and they wanted to tell me that they would only make their list with a uniball eye pen and they could only make it in a certain location or on a particular scrap of paper or in a particular book. Yes, I actually found a list while I was prepping for this particular segment of my mother's shopping list at the bottom of a bag. And it could only be hers. The way she's written it, always like the torn off, discarded piece of an envelope is her way of doing it.

But you had, Jo, I'm going to read a little bit of your list. Nana's eye to eye, that's two letters I, puke and shrooms. Okay, you're probably getting my shrooms. Yes.

Bananas. Yes. Eye to eye and puke. So, eye-eye is short for a little expression that my parents-in-law used to say to their grandchildren, so my kids and various other children,

other grandchildren, which was they would walk in and see that there was broccoli on the table and they would say, eye-eye, eat up your broccoli. And so then that became abbreviated in my head to just eye-eye and then just the two eyes, the letter I. And puke is my ridiculous husband who thinks cucumber is disgusting. So cucumber abbreviates to puke and for him to puke. So that is your list. Nobody else will probably decipher that if they pick it up. But do you think women are keener list makers than men? So my data sample is skewed in that I asked way more women than men. But that was also because

if I asked a woman about a list, their eyes would light up, they would get all excited, and they would want to talk for so long or exchange emails for so long, you know, on such an extended basis about their list, their list making habits, why lists were so important to them, how they couldn't live without their list. And so I think perhaps both men and women make lists, but women make them with more enthusiasm. Men, perhaps it's a more functional, there's a purpose to it. It's more outcome related. They want to do everything on the list, whereas women are interested in the actual making of the list.

Oh, very interesting. Lucy, I'm going to bring you in. I was saying you made a collection of about 200 shopping lists that you found discarded over nearly 20 years, which I suppose has a specific outcome, but maybe gendered as well. What did you find? You couldn't actually tell what gender they were.

And in the same way that it was very difficult to distinguish which shop it came from. So Waitrose lists would look much like an algae list unless they'd put something specific to that shop in it. So you couldn't tell who they were specifically, but you probably could tell what sort of person they were, could you? Well, you could certainly tell what they were going to eat because I would pick the lists up and then I would drive home

and I'd give them to my daughter who was about 16, 17 at the time. And I'd say to her, well, what's going on on those lists? And she'd say, oh, they're definitely having stir-fry, Mum, or it would be somebody's birthday. And one of the phrases that used to come up quite a lot was a little something for, say, Andy or something. It was exactly what my mum would write on her list if she was she'd bought a main present, but she just needed something else. So it was you could build that picture of their life quite, quite, quite easily, although you'd probably get it wrong, actually.

Where did you find them? In the trolleys, in the basket, sometimes on the shelves. Most of the time they were on the floor. And the really interesting thing about it was that when I told people at work that the exhibition was happening, and now it's in Bishop's Dwarf, where most of the lists are from, somebody in the office sort of gasped and went, oh my word, you might have one of mine. It's like, but Christine, what would be the problem with that? Because it's only got your shopping on it. But they are very intimate, as Jo says, they're really intimate because they're only written for that person

or they're written by somebody who's doing their shopping. So they do have a very big personality. They reveal things. Yeah, they have personalities. And when I had my collection, I kept them in a box file. And when the museum wanted them to display them, it was like I was letting go of about 250 personalities. And I knew them quite intimately as specific lists. And I was strangely precious about them

considering they were bits of rubbish, because they were all rubbish. Well, yes and no. But because that person was concerned about their list potentially being on display, I suppose you were also harbouring some of that possessiveness. Well, and also, I thought, well, does it prove that you've just lobbed it on the floor and you haven't actually put it in a bin, which you might not want to be admitted to. Your degree was in archaeology? Yes.

Yeah. I mean, does this, do you see the connection? Well, I didn't to start with, but I think, yes, I think it's the same sort of thing that when you do go on an archaeological dig, you're making a a story out of what you find you may or may not get it right you'll get the general gist of it but you won't get the whole picture and I think that's what I like about the shopping list is that in the same way you know you could call them poetry in that you're building the picture round and what you read into it isn't necessarily what is actually true but

that's what resonates for you so for instance the one of the lists is written in this really spiky handwriting it looks like somebody's really either really old or really young and most people who see that list because the same most things on it are spelt incorrectly it just looks like a whole heap of effort went into it and lots of people who look at it will go, oh. And you think, why does that do that? But it does. That emotion.

Yeah, yeah. It's quite interesting. We feel perhaps that we can see something about the person if not pinpointed exactly. Jo, we are going to look in more detail at what lists do for us emotionally and psychologically. But what did you find out about the effects that lists have on people? Now, we talked about shopping lists, the to-do list,

but there's all sorts of bucket lists or, I don't know, a list of films you want to see. I mean, you can tell me what other sorts of lists seem to become rather prevalent as well. Well, I think the to-do list probably was what trumped everything else. I mean, shopping lists people would be happy to talk about a little bit and would be happy to show me one. But to-do lists, and it was not necessarily sort of what was on the list, but how it was ordered, how it was laid out. As you said, we're going to come on to how important they are to people.

But there was an idiosyncrasy to every element of the layout, the punctuation. People would say, oh, God, I couldn't use capitals in a list. It's so aggressive. But the list is for themselves. The list is for themselves. And this is the nub of it, right? It is almost the only thing that you write by yourself for yourself. You know, unless you're someone who journals, anything else you write,

it may be a list, but it's an instruction list to someone else. So this, it is so deeply personal and personalized what about though the crossing off okay so yeah just as every element um is very personalized and also people are very keen to shout down anyone else's list making strategy why so because if someone ticks off people say well why would you tick off you must scrub out or you must cross off. Scrub out versus cross off. Are those two different? I'm not clear.

But and then there are some people who will tick to indicate they've started a job and cross off once it's completed. Or, for example, a friend of mine who's an electrician will tick off if he has addressed it but not resolved it. I find when you tick off, it it just like a hydroheaded monster when you finish one thing it kind of gives rise to three or four more things but we do manipulate our own lists at times to to make us feel more productive or am I just speaking for myself here? No no not at all. Put things on just to cross them off. Okay so so that's really interesting. People will definitely do that. Other people will go, oh my goodness, I could never do that and be all askance about it.

And then some people will start a list with get up, make a cup of tea. And, you know, very quickly you can tick things off. One person who I talked to said that their first thing on their to-do list is make a to-do list. The minute it's done, you tick it off. You've done one of your things. I mean, it's a little meta, but... And what about the difference?

You did talk about people with pieces of paper or a certain pen or a certain notebook. What about digitally? There are, I think maybe it's going to be an age divide. I do know a lot of younger people who will make a digital list. People comment on how it's really not as fulfilling to delete a digital list as it is to take everything off. I do it digitally and then I have a logbook and I can look back at all the things I've achieved. So both. It's very important.

The sense of achievement is almost one of the key motivators. Why do we need that? I don't know. And in fact, I saw on QI, Aisling B talking about how she confuses the making of the list as achieving it. So like the revision timetable, you take all this time to write out your revision timetable. You actually haven't done anything. You actually haven't done any revision, but you've already got that false, perhaps, sense of accomplishment. Or does it help with the impetus to carry on? Maybe that's too positive a spin.

That is the question. All really interesting. I want to thank Lucy Arlen-Gray, who put together a collection of about 200 shopping lists. You'll never look at your list in the same way again. And Joanna Nolan, the author of the book Listful, is going to stay with us because we want to continue

to talk about the psychology of lists, particularly thinking of everything we've spoken about so far, whether they're good, the lists, or bad for our mental health and creativity. To discuss these ideas further, our artist Alice Instone. Hello.

Good to have you on Women's Hour. And we've Madeleine Dore, the author of I Didn't Do The Thing Today on Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. Welcome, Madeleine. Thank you. Hello. So, Alice, you have a new exhibition coming up and it features many different types of lists and we'll talk about that in a moment.

But I want to talk first about your show in 2016 The Pram in the Hall. Describe that for our listeners. Well my children were quite young and I'd moved house and I found it very hard to make art and I flippantly said oh my art's gone into all my to-do lists, and I ought to exhibit them. And then I thought, actually, that might be quite interesting. I made a lot of the same discoveries that everybody was obsessed with their lists, and I started collecting lots of well-known women's to-do lists,

and I became interested in the truthfulness of our to-do lists because it was um you know a while back we weren't so aware of how what we see in social media isn't necessarily the truth and I thought that the to-do lists had a more honest version of people's lives they reflected my state of mind and I made artworks about that. And also it was amazing snooping, seeing what people were really getting up to. What surprised you? Because I know I am fascinated what is on other people's to do lists. Well, some of them were amazingly honest. You know, they had their ailments, they had worming the dog. Some of them were quite bizarre. I remember Emma Freud had Ring Fire Ball Man. Obviously, it must have been the party or something.

Maybe. I don't know. And people, you know, pop stars had pay parking fine. So from the mundane to the more creative, shall we say. Yeah, and so I was interested in the therapy element of it, how when we write something down, it closes this loop. Things no longer swirl around our heads. And that's something I've explored more in the new exhibition. And that show is opening in the autumn, also featuring lists in one piece called The Spell.

You included decades worth of your to-do lists. Yes. So, you know, Spell is a period of time, but it's also, you know, a magic list, really. A magic list. A magic list, something a witch might make. And I thought of this decade as a period of enchantment. It was relative youth and my children's childhoods. And so I put in my to-do lists and ash from things I'd burnt in the studio and hair from their first haircuts and cobwebs from the insects in the studio.

And, yeah, just it's a reflection on time passing and family and chores and the passing seasons and childhood. It sounds to me a lot from the female perspective, as you describe it there, Alison. I know it is coming from you. But I saw this list that was in Joe's book. It was included in Sean Usher's book of lists. This is Johnny Cash. Here's his list.

Not smoke. Kiss June. Not kiss anyone else. Pee. Eat. Not too much. Which is very simple. And I'm wondering, are women more performative? Do you think? Obviously, Johnny Cash was a great performer. But just that's such a straightforward, simple, some might say masculine list. women more performative? Do you think? Obviously, Johnny Cash was a great performer, but just that's such a straightforward, simple, some might say masculine list. Yeah, I adore Johnny Cash. Well, yes, I did find a big difference between men's lists and women's lists. Again, I found that women make a lot more lists than men. And I thought it was maybe to do with this multitasking problem that we have I'm not

someone who's very good at multitasking which is why I think I write so many lists and it's the fact that we are looking after our children and sometimes our parents and there's you know we're often the ones that write thank you letters or invite people for supper and then we're looking after the pets and then we're combining this with our work and the housework and the repairs and it's having things in so many different areas it's very hard to remember it all and so that was what was so strongly reflected in the women's lists is this complete you know wide spectrum of tasks that people doing and then also I was interested in that statistic that I think women are still doing, I don't know if it's still current, but still doing 85% of the housework even when they work.

And obviously lots of my work has been about feminism and I thought that the list was a really effective way of... I saw also Umberto Eco called the list us trying to grasp the incomprehensible, which I think is what you're summing up there, Alice, as well. All these things that we're trying to put some order on. Jo, have your to-do lists changed over the years? In terms of the content of them? Yeah, I mean, it's broader and broader and broader.

And I think also, speaking to Alice's point about, and what you said about possibly women's lists seeming a little bit more sort of performative. We're trying to make sure that we don't miss any of the unbelievable number of tasks that we feel we have to achieve. But also because we want the record that we can refer back to. And also because, as one friend said to me, she lists all her tasks to her husband every morning to say, this is what I have to do. And he'll say invariably to her, why are you telling me this? And she'll think, it's because otherwise you might not acknowledge quite how much I'm doing that goes unseen. Let's bring in Madeline, who's listening to all this. Now, I think I'm right, Madeline, in saying that you don't think lists are the answers to everything. What's your reaction to what you've heard so far?

Well, I have to admit that I have a very strong affinity for a list. I love a list for all of the reasons that have been outlined. They're reassuring. They're soothing. They can have this very therapeutic sense, catharsis almost. It's a wonderful record for our days. So I'm very much a list maker myself. But I think there can also be this other side to a list where when we don't get through it, when we don't tick off every item, there can be this deflating sense that could come at the end of the day, almost as if the day's a failure because we didn't finish our to-do list.

And I think that's the very thing, that feeling that can be kind of counterproductive, counter constructive in a way. So I think it's really about having the list, but holding it lightly. Holding it lightly. Does anybody finish their to-do list? Yeah, so that's the very thing is that I think there can be this expectation in the Holding it lightly. Does anybody finish their to-do list? very list, that sometimes it is a shiftable thing. And that's okay. That's the very kind of nature of a list, actually, you know, completing it, this idea of perfection, it's striving for something that we don't actually ever reach. And so it's being okay with the incomplete and

seeing the things on our list as possibilities rather than failures if we don't get to them. Interesting. Jo? I was going to say, yeah, someone I spoke to referred to things that fester on the list, which is just, I mean, it's such a great word. Yeah, great. And then do you move it to the next list? I leave it down the bottom.

Okay, yeah. Never got done. And have you deliberately ordered your list as such? I guess I kept adding things to the top because it's digital. Okay. Well, the other day I said, just delete those. They're never going to happen. But it is so interesting that they can take up so much of our mind. And as we're talking about here,

soothing in some ways or feeling like we're getting control of something. But there are those that say that, in fact, the to-do list could be an obstacle to creativity. So, for example, if you do phone the dentist, get a birthday card and mail it clean somewhere in your house, that creativity is gone because the time and effort that's been taken up ticking things off. Madeleine, what do you think? Well, yeah, I think that going back to this idea of sort of having a little bit of space in our day and sort of this buffer can be really useful for things like creativity. We can sort of judge our days by how productive we are and that can have a very linear kind of trajectory to it. Whereas our days aren't linear, you know, they do shuffle and they do change. They vary just as we vary within them. And so I think that having a more creative measure for our days

really acknowledges that there is an ebb and flow to things, that we might have this intention to be doing something at a certain time, but that time might come where we do need to be somewhat flexible and open and malleable to things. And I think there can be a real insight and value to that very thing. You know, I think sometimes rather than productivity or getting things done, being the measure for a day, sometimes it's how we connect with people or, you know, even how an epiphany comes to our minds. It doesn't usually come through a to-do list. It comes from those moments of, you know, in the shower when we at least expect it,

when we actually allow our minds to wander, we can actually have those kind of breakthroughs. So there's many, you know, wonderful, juicy, delicious things that happen in our lives that, you know, we can't actually put on a list necessarily. We have to sort of allow them to be surprises in our days. Go ahead, Jo. I totally agree with that. And I think that lots of people do, and I've been guilty of it, go through your list to dodge something that you know is going to be harder, even if it's, you know, in a creative sense harder. And having said that, so many people said to me that by putting something on a list, it frees up headspace. It allows them to be creative because they don't have to remember. And I think that's a big part of it. And also in terms of sort of psychology and neuropsychology,

if you write down something that you need to do, you have generated, it's literally called the generation effect, you have generated a memory. So you have the resulting scribble on your piece of paper, but you also have stimulated parts of your brain that will log it as a memory. Let me flip back over to the other side with you, Madeleine. For those that are overwhelmed with to-do lists, with shoulds, for example, things they should be doing, what would you recommend? Well, interestingly, perhaps a list in terms of doing something I like to call a should inventory. And so that's sort of when you do have those shoulds rattling around or it does have that overwhelming feeling where you feel like sort of, I guess, that divided attention and a million different things. Making the most of that very cathartic feeling of writing a list out and in particular writing all of those shoulds out on the page and then you're able to kind of see them and identify, okay,

is this to-do list item something that's expired? Is it something that I've borrowed from somebody else in terms of something that, you know, from the outside looking in I've thought that this is something that I need to do with my life too and so it needs to go on my to-do list, kind of that comparison spiral that we can get into and add that to our to-do list? Or is it something that I have to do? Is it something that I want to do? And I think being able to kind of, you know, delegate things, say no to things, being able to kind of postpone things, you know, sometimes it can be a real beauty to kind of

putting things on hold and accepting that we can't do everything all at once. So that kind of inventory, I think, really just kind of distills down to the kind of the essentials and then being able to have more space for that. And, you know, it can be difficult to kind of let things go on our to-do list. Sometimes they can be really tied to the person that we are. We define ourselves sometimes by the things that we do. So there can be kind of almost an identity rattling when we do this sort of thing and learning to let go of these expired or borrowed shoulds can really kind of free up that or, you know, at least kind of help us untangle that overwhelming feeling. I think also you can turn the sense of duty on its head. I know that there are psychologists

who suggest creating joy lists or gratitude lists. And in fact, I was recently reading Abby Morgan's memoir entitled This Is Not A Pity Memoir. And it's all about this catastrophic incident that happened to her husband. And when he is coming back to a sort of semblance of health, she creates what she calls a list of firefly moments, these sort of sparks of light that her husband is in some way recovering. I mean, it's just beautiful. But I think you can have lists which don't necessarily have a should, ought to element to it. And I think those can be really positive. So great to kind of get into the psychology of lists. Thanks so much to Joanna Nolan. Her book is Listful.

Also to the artist, Alice Instone, and Madeleine Dorr, the author of I Didn't Do the Thing Today on letting go of productivity guilt. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies.

I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby.

It's a long story, settle in. Available now. And now let's move on from personal lists to lists in the public domain. There are lists for practically every area of life. Music, books, wealth, power, for example. But there is also another darker side of lists. And with me to discuss this historically and also in contemporary times, our staff writer for The Atlantic, Helen Lewis,

and she's author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in Eleven Fights, and the writer Anne Seba, author of 10 non-fiction books. Her most recent book is Ethel Rosenberg, A Cold War Tragedy. Anne, let me start with you. We're talking about bad lists, lists you would not want to be on, and that happened to Ethel Rosenberg. Could you explain how a direct chain of events led to her being named as a spy and ultimately to her execution. It was a time of enormous fear of communism, a sense in America that they and the Allies had won World War II, but they were in danger of losing the peace. Why? Because of this fear of communism rearing its ugly head after the Soviet Union exploded a bomb in Kazakhstan in 1949 and China after the Civil War became communist.

And then in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea with the help of the Soviet Union. So there was this fear of one big communist movement, and it was going to take over the world and that America was in danger because it had been too soft on the communists. And this fear of homegrown commies started to rear its head. So that, of course, gave a huge opening to populists and demagogues in a divided America to be strong and to show that America could be strong in the face of communists. So they went after many communists. And that's when you start having lists. So Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, said there were 55,000 communists. And most famously, Joe McCarthy said he had a list of 205 communists who were working in government.

And that was really the start of it. And it gathered pace. So they started to look at all the communists whom they knew, card-carrying communists. And back to your question, Ethel probably never had a card. They never produced a card. But as the wife of a known communist, and they had other information on Julius, she was brought in to face charges as a lever to make her husband talk and to name names, to name names that were on this list. Now, of course, it's much more complicated. And that's why I really am on your list of people who don't like lists. I'm aware of the dangers of these lists because it doesn't allow for nuance. It's so polarising. It's so binary, if you like. So Ethel is deemed a communist, therefore she must be evil. And that's really the danger because they went down that route. They charged her with conspiracy to commit espionage, hoping it would have the effect of making Julius talk and it didn't. And in the end, the US Deputy Attorney General had to say she called our bluff.

So Ethel lost her life. Ethel was electrocuted, partly because she, well, mostly because she was loyal to a man who was on the list. But there was no evidence against Ethel herself. Helen, you're listening to Anne there. Do you agree with her about the danger of lists? I think she makes a really good point, though, which is about the fact that, you know, Tony Benn had these questions about power, you know, who's given it to you and who's, you know, who's named you exercise it. And then the most crucial one is, how can we get rid of you? And I think there has to be a version of that for lists too, which is who makes the list, who controls the list, and how do you get off the list? And Ethel Rosenberg seems to be somebody who had no access to that list. It branded her one thing. And there was nothing she could say to exonerate herself. There was simply

no way for her to get off that list. And I think that's why so many people feel a kind of creeping sense of unease about lists. Is there a form of control over people that they don't have any say in or access to themselves. You have written Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. That's a sort of a list. It is a list. And it is a kind of classic women's magazine list, you know, sort of 37 tips to do X or Y. The reason I did it is it, in the nicest possible way, the book is a kind of ragback, you know, it looks at everything from the suffragettes to the second wave in the 70s. And actually having a list allowed me to bring together some very disparate things. And that's, you know, that is the kind of the upside of lists, the joy of lists.

They allow you to make connections, perhaps, that you might not have otherwise have made. Now, when those are the wrong connections, that's when it becomes sinister, obviously. Do you think it's also for us to be able to understand a little bit more that a list of outcrop of that 19th century craze for classifying everything, you know, from Linnaeus and Darwin and Galton and others. The idea that the world has now become so complicated that you need to find some way to, you know, to make sense of it, to simplify it. And now that has had some incredibly good effects. You know, if one of the things that we know is that IQ, average IQs have risen throughout the 20th century, and that's because we've become better at abstract thinking.

Lots of other things, but that's one of them. And the way that, you know, classifying the world. So there are benefits to the idea of being able to think like that. But I can also see lists as a reaction to complexity. Things are dangerous and complex, as you were saying, with the idea that there is a kind of looming communist threat. And the list then become a kind of protective way. If we can only just write down who the bad people are, then we'll be safe. And that's, I think, again, the dark side of lists. You are working on another book about the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Do lists feature in that? Of course they do.

Even though you don't like lists? Well, I'm a historian. I have to write about what I find. And I don't necessarily like what I find. There's no question that lists deepen fear and paranoia. And in the hands of some kind of populist leader or demagogue, they're very useful. So, of course, I have suffered from lists. Once Jews were told to register and a few brave Jews decided they wouldn't and then they didn't have to wear the yellow star. But it was a process. You go on a list, you wear a yellow star, you're taken to a camp, you're killed,

and looters take your flat. So you want to keep off those lists if you can. But most people don't have access to the means to get off the list. There are a few good lists, one should say, in all of this wartime. Of course, there are things like Schindler's List. That's the one we know about where Jews could be saved. But it's not something you'd particularly want. You'd rather not be on the list in the first place. But it's this reduction to making people one thing, they're Jews, so they go on a list, and we have to kill them. I mean, that was Hitler's final solution. So you

can't write about the Holocaust without writing about lists. And they're incredibly complicated. I think one of the most heinous crimes really of the of the Nazis, among many, but, you know, haven't got all day, all week, is really the way he made Jewish leaders collaborate in order to put people on a list. And do you save the children? Do you save the elderly? Who do you save? Do you save your friends or do you save those with influence? There's no possible answer to this, which is why lists are morally so impossible to accept. You were on a bad list. Is that fair to say? Do you want to tell us that experience? Yeah, so I write a lot about feminism, gender, transgender issues, and that landed me on The Gland,

which is an American LGBT organisation, list of kind of, well, I guess they would say transphobes. It's a characterization I regret, but I was next to Rush Limbaugh because of alphabetization. Who is a conservative American radio host. Extraordinarily conservative American radio host, you know, referred to women as feminazis. And that, you know, I find that very sad, because I think that my kind of cautious criticisms of self-idea are miles away from the ravings of kind of some sort of shock jock. But the fact that we are together on a list for some people means that that is a kind of thought terminating cliche. You know, what do you need to know about Helen Lewis?

Oh, she's on the glad list. And that to me has been a, you know, something that's kind of followed me around. And there's no way for me to get off that list. That was my next question. You know, I'm on that list forever. And, you know, I'm grouped together with a lot of people I don't feel I have anything politically in common with, I would probably have major, major disagreements with. But that is enough. And the other really sad thing that it's taught me is, when you're on the list, people don't look very much further, they assume other people have done the research and

that you wouldn't be on there for no reason. You know, there's no smoke without fire. And I think that probably brings us be on there for no reason. There's no smoke without fire. And I think that probably brings us back to your communists. People assume there's no smoke without fire. If you're on the list, you must have done something. And that's absolutely where I agree with you because what lists do is simplify people and reduce them to one thing. And anyone who has any interest in the world or history or philosophy knows

that you can be many more than one thing and more than one thing at once. And it's this reduction to simplicity. It's such a blunt tool to put people on the list that I think it behoves any of us who write about them just to be wary of their effect. You mentioned good lists as well in serious circumstances like Schindler's List. There was also the power of Jess Phillips, for example, reading out aloud in the House of Commons, a roll call of women that was compiled by Karen Ingala-Smith for her work with counting dead women, recording the names of women killed, or the perpetrator or suspect is a man. And I feel I have seen that heard that as well, in other movements like Black Lives Matter,

for example. How do you see their significance? When you're talking about people being reduced to something, in some ways, that is an acceptance. And you'll know this better than me, but I'm pretty sure that Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, you know, keeps rolls of everybody who was killed. And it keeps a list of righteous among the nations, which is Gentiles who helped out Jews during the Second World War. And we have in our town centres, First World War memorials. You know, we have lists like that, because it's the way of keeping those people alive and keeping them in our memory. And those I would say are good lists, but they are lists that exist for a very sad reason, which is usually of people who one characteristic about them

was the only thing that mattered, whether it was they were soldier or they were Jewish. So they're a reflection of the same process that we're talking before, but an attempt to kind of alleviate it by keeping those people in our memory. Well, I think we're talking about memorials, really, rather than lists, aren't we? Of course I'm in favour of memorials and and I would have mentioned Yad Vashem you're absolutely right that does keep a list if you

like or a memorial of people who have done done good things and of course that that's to be praised but I think it's slightly different than what we were talking about of lists of people while they're alive and where that can lead to. And that's where I have worries, not the memorials. But after people are dead, there's not much you can do for them other than remember them. I think also in our culture, and looking back, lists have been around for a very long time, but they do seem even more ubiquitous. Well, there's a lot of internet to fill with content. I think that would probably be my first assumption.

But I do also think they are, and this kind of comes back to what Anne's been saying, they're easy in a way that we should be suspicious of. They allow us to organise the world. They allow us to throw things together. They allow us to kind of cohere different things in ways that are appealing, but should be something that makes us suspicious. You know, I'm just thinking about the kind of, you know, online content where you have, you know, you just people throw things together, aggregation we call it, you know, we have like 10 top moments from X TV show,

and that's kind of quite cheap and lazy content. And the list itself becomes a substitute really for the deep thought of thinking about the connections between these things and anything other than a superficial way. Any list you'd like to be on? I mean, the top 100 wealthiest people would probably be the Sunday Times Rich List. Can I make a bid for that one? Actually, no, because quite a lot of those people

don't seem to be particularly happy with all their yachts and gold. They spend their time challenging each other to cage fights, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say. No, maybe I think probably better to stay off, while you're alive, best to stay off all lists, I think. I think I'd agree with that, stay off all lists, or else be on such a wide variety of lists that nobody can actually pin you down.

Thanks so much to Anne Seba. Her most recent book is Ethel Rosenberg, A Cold War Tragedy and to staff writer for The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, also author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Now, let us turn to lists and music and to my two next guests, Grammy winning singer and songwriter Corinne Bailey-Ray. Corinne has a new album coming out in September, Black Rainbows, and music journalist and author Jude Rogers. Jude's book came out last year. It's called The Sound of Being Human, How Music Shapes Our Lives.

Well, I want to begin by talking to you both about songs with lists in them. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, for example. Let me start with you, Jude. What do you think of them? I'm a big fan. It's funny, when you first think about lists in songs, you almost think to yourself, oh, it's quite lazy. You know, we make our lists all the time.

We just, you know, throw these things out there. But a lot of list songs, I think, are quite sophisticated, really. You know, they have this sort of nursery rhyme rhythm about them, but they're often quite trying to tell people quite, You know, they have this sort of nursery rhyme rhythm about them, but they're often trying to tell people quite profound or deep things in a catchy way. I love 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I love that song. And that was in response to him and his partner's relationship breaking down. And he thought he'd just try and write something that was quite funny and had a sort of slightly different flavour to it.

The Billy Joel, We Didn't Start the Fire, is just, I just love that. That is him going from his, the year of his birth in 1949 and trying to kind of do a list of cultural moments. So you get people, you get things that happened and quite a random mix of things. But it's a song that, you know know sticks in your head and it lasts because it just gets your brain firing in so many different directions I think. I saw Corinne when we were playing it at the beginning you were having a little bop to that one what about you have you ever had a list Corinne in any of your songs and welcome? Well when I thought about it I thought

actually there are a few lists in songs and there's a list of similes in songs sometimes so in like a star there's you know just like a star across my sky like oil on my hands and there are some there are some songs with lists in that written but I also really do enjoy a list song myself and I thought about it I thought of get here by Alita Adams where she talks about oh yeah you can get here by railway you can get here by trailway airplane you can reach me with your mind you can reach me the caravan and and then that classic song from hair which nina simone sang you know i ain't got no where she took my chin got my necks got my boobies you know if you're having a bad day you can think yeah i have got my boobies on my chin i'm never gonna listen to songs like um you know jay-z's song 99 problems where he sings in the

chorus you know if you're having girl problems i feel bad for your son you know i've got 99 problems but the leap ain't one and he goes through you know he talks about the social conditions and bad housing and police brutality and the fact you can't get played on the radio. It's a really clever way of making a list that it's not about the things that other people are singing about, like how their girlfriend is this, that and the other. So, yeah, I think it can be really useful. The words can be shorthand for things you get. You can cram a lot of concepts and images in a short space of time. So that definitely kind of pushes back, Corinne, on what some have said, you know,

listing things is lazy on the part of the songwriter, for example. I think if we get to hear the song and it connects, then it must have worked. I'm sure there were lots of really bad list songs that we never got to, but we can all relate to that, to, you know, the cramming of things into the small space yeah so we've heard a few of both your favorites when it comes to that but i suppose we can't really talk about music and lists without talking about the charts uh the very important

list perhaps more once upon a time maybe it's playlist now you you tell me. But let's talk about you, Corinne. What did it feel like when Put Your Records On shot straight to number two in February 2006? It was such a surprise for me. And I'd always been a big chart watcher as a young person. You know, I'd always watched Top of the Pops. And then I used to listen to it at the same time on Radio 1 and have a tape player that had record and play and then pause. So when you heard your favourite song, you could kind of quickly unpress the pause and catch your song.

And that was my way of kind of getting the songs I really loved without paying for them, I guess, which wasn't so good. But yeah, I couldn't afford to buy singles, you know, I grew up with my parents my parents records but this was my songs and so yeah getting to go to you know getting the silver medal of going to uh number two you know it's fantastic thinking about charts as that particular week no song was bought more than of course madonna's song and madonna's song to be fair had an abba sort of excerpt in it so i thought you know you can't really be madonna times ABBA so I was very grateful to get a number two. And for people who weren't the silver was you the gold was Madonna sorry that was number one but how does that feel I mean is it I mean it's amazing to get a number two but is it frustrating in any way? Oh no I mean I never had any huge expectations

about any of my things I always felt like my and have always felt like what I do is always slightly sort of out of steps so that that particular moment you know I was everything's music was really big and I was just doing something on acoustic guitar and it was soulful and it was very sort of interior you know about my thoughts and feelings and I didn't realize it would connect in the way that it did so well it's a great one uh going back to you jude what about the charts what role did they play in your life or play oh they played an absolutely massive role in my life i was very similar to corinne you know home taping is killing music and all that i was there i've still got loads of um shoe boxes with very 80s designs on with my old charts cassettes

it's funny i kept listening to the charts until probably my early 30s. You know, I wrote a piece for The Guardian about them in 2007 when Downloads came along. And, you know, holding on to this love of the charts and what they meant, I loved this idea that the charts seemed like this amazing democracy of all kinds of different people and occasionally somebody quite unusual or unexpected

would get to number one and number two you know like what Corinne was saying something that wasn't part of the plan or was plugged by a big label just would magically do something like that but I don't know if it's age and other demands um I don't but I think it's partly my my losing my love of the charts a little bit when downloads came along and I think it's because my losing my love of the charts a little bit when downloads came along. And I think it's because the charts now is about a collection of songs, not about a collection of singles. Of course, there still are singles.

But if you look at the charts all summer, actually, have been dominated by stuff off the Barbie soundtrack. And that's interesting because of Barbie as a cultural phenomenon, of course. But a little part of me is like oh you know I wanted to go to Woolworths and see those singles all laid out and you know they're not that there wouldn't be 10 different songs from the Barbie soundtrack as singles there would be this little lover's rock song there would be this boy band song there would be this there'd be this that diversity a little bit more with how the charts were made up you know the

charts were never perfect there were always people you know record labels doing little you know naughty things to push records in different ways but um it was such a wonderful way to find out about different people and just different music when you were growing up you know to watch top of the pops to listen on a sunday or a tuesday or whenever the charts came out when you were little and my son is into his music now, but not the charts. He's into making his own playlists. So let's talk about playlists because that is very much a list. The clue is in the title.

How does that differ, do you think, or how you see him? How old is he, if you don't mind me asking? He's nine. Right. So let's talk about that. Yeah, I wrote about this recently, you know, is his relationship with music different because of streaming? And it's not really. It's still intense. It's quicker to make a playlist than to make a tape, obviously. You know, although I do have very fond memories of those days where you're trying to find a track that's about 90 seconds long to stick at the end of side one or side two.

But my son does still order his songs it's interesting he's got a top 10 in this massive playlist um and he's very I don't know maybe you know I don't know his nature or nurture but he's still interested in like saying these are the musicians that mean something to me and I want to put them in order because these things mean something to me there are a lot of football chants in there at the moment, which I don't count, but it shows something about him and his age. But then there's, the thing I'm jealous about

is that his playlist is so incredibly diverse and he'll hear things from friends in school, but one of his big favourites at the moment is an amazing Iranian-Israeli artist called Liraz, who he heard once, because we had Radio 3 on on a Saturday afternoon and he heard her on Music Planet. He saw her at WOMAD recently and met her, you know, and that is because he's found something randomly

and he can put it in his playlist. If you told the nine-year-old me, you know, this is 1987 when it was all Rick Astley and the early days of Kylie, I would have just, my mind would have been blown. Speaking of Kylie, she made it back up the charts with Badam Badam. Oh, yeah. Right. And let me turn back to you, Corinne, because how important do you feel a number one or a chart is anymore? You know, we had also Kate Bush actually was on Woman's Hour

because she had running up that hill back as a number one due to Stranger Things. Do you feel they still have significance? I think they are vastly different than they were before streaming. I think what streaming has done is made us atomise from one another. You know, so you what we what your neighbours listening to you is is completely different to what you're listening to. You know, I remember the sort of top of the pops era where it was perhaps three generations in a house all listening to the same thing.

And, you know, maybe one person was saying they didn't like it, one person was saying, you know, my mum used to always say, this is another old one, and she would sort of sing along the 70s version. Mum, it doesn't go like that. But I felt like there were um brilliant artists and confrontational artists artists who presented themselves in a different way you know when you think of the brilliant queer and trans musicians that are all over certain parts of the internet

now that's brilliant for those people that are able to engage with them and to learn from them and to enjoy their music but perhaps if you're not in that particular algorithm because of your age or just because you have never clicked on the those particular things you're sort of missing out on the influence of people who might be considered more alternative or radical or fringe or outside of your wheelhouse so I think the thing of the echo chamber nature of how we stream means we're missing so much stuff. It's just hard to keep up with everything. And I think there's a statistic that there's more music released this week than there ever was in the whole of the 1970s.

So there's different ways to get to music, but there's just also so much music. What I'm thinking as well, you talk about the algorithms, Jude, I'd be curious for your thoughts on this, because you may or may not be exposed to certain music, just depending on the algorithms that are employed on you, I suppose. For example, I don't know, I'm going to say dinner party, evening list, or Saturday Saturday morning barbecue or take your pig chewed. I mean, what do you think about that in the context of how we're consuming music, those sort of lists? I have very mixed feelings about them. And, you know, I'm the kind of person who will find these lists or get my Discover Weekly playlist or whatever things are suggested to me.

And I'll know half of them or I'll think that's not like that and I'll just spot the, you know, the way that computers aren't like human beings. And, you know, I still, if I want to listen to stuff, I'll go and listen to a DJ I really like. You know, I'll listen and I think that's why radio is still so massively valuable and is still very popular is that people want a human being to recommend different things.

You know, as Corin says, music is good when we just serendipitously chance upon something new, you know. So I think that's a little worrying. Then again, you know, I do use playlists. I make playlists for certain moods. And I think people do make playlists for moods. I have one called Instant Sunshine. If I'm having a terrible day, you know know it's got loads of Motown on it it's got loads of kind of early

90s of house music it's got loads of stuff that will just instantly perk me up we all have those songs I think what's worrying is when we just look to those algorithms to get our moods pepped up all the time because they just don't work and we need that you know the accidental contact with things accidental contact it's interesting how important is it to get on a playlist though do you think as an artist it's just it's really important it's so important because that's how you get heard you know that's the shop window so it's gonna it is hard it's hard to get a playlist and sit in similarly you know i just i've made this record and it's going to, it is hard. It's hard to get in a playlist. And similarly, you know, I've made this record and I've made this punk song called New York Transit Queen.

It's less than two minutes long. And we got to be like top of the playlist for all new punk, which is so much fun because it was all these like gnarly bands, American bands, like, you know, mostly perhaps white, perhaps male, perhaps super young bands. And then there was just a picture of me in this like flouncy black dress and it said, all new punk. That was a photo they used.

And I thought, are people thinking, is she a punk artist? But, you know, the song is a wild punk track and I'm glad it fits there. But, you know, other songs don't necessarily find their mark because you can't say that it belongs to any of these headings or or even it it gives a particular mood or even it almost like to get on a playlist you have to find your friends you have to find songs that are similar to you and sometimes when you're an artist you want to make something that's not that similar to stuff that's your aim you know so interesting Corinne Bailey-Ray thank you so much as i

mentioned a new album coming out in september black rainbows also thanks to music journalist and author jude rogers and in fact thanks to all my guests today talking about lists and wherever you are i hope you have a lovely bank holiday and that you do not allow your to-do list to dominate your day unless it's bringing you joy. Back again tomorrow, as usual, just after 10am. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. From BBC Radio 4, a new fiction podcast.

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