Momma Pigeon

In the Summer of 2009, a pair of pigeons decided to have a family in our carport. This is the female, sitting placidly in the nest and paying no attention to her landlords.

Quote of the Day

”I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Killing The Blues | Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Link

Long Read of the Day

It’s Giving Enron

Really thoughtful blog post by Dave Karpf which provides an interesting way of thinking about the AI bubble we’re in. There are, he says, three big stories that one can tell about the dotcom crash:

1. The first is an overvalued-startup story. Think Pets.com. (and the dot-com crash of 2000.
2. The second is a telecom story. Part of the dotcom crash involved telecom firms burning a ton of investor cash, going bankrupt, and then selling off all that bandwidth at bargain basement prices.
3. And then there’s the Enron story.

Do read it. The Enron angle is really original, I think, and it sheds a new light on the strange new incestuous relationships the tech companies are entering into with chip manufacturers.

Books, etc.

107 Days, Zero ideas

I haven’t read the book, and after this review by Richard Aldous I don’t think I will. It’s a good critical review.

A lot of reading is about serendipity. When 107 Days by former vice president Kamala Harris arrived on the doorstep, I was already reading History Matters—a posthumous collection of essays by that master of presidential biography David McCullough. There he has a brilliant article on Harry Truman, another American vice president who was suddenly thrust into the political limelight—in his case when he became president after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. “He enjoyed being Harry Truman,” McCullough writes of the new president. “And again and again, he could reach down inside himself and come up with something very good and strong. He is the seemingly ordinary American who, when put to the test, rises to the occasion and does the extraordinary.”

Kamala Harris was the opposite. In so many ways an extraordinary and history-making figure, when she was put to the test she reached inside herself only to find the ordinary. And against Donald Trump that was never going to be enough…

My commonplace booklet

“The AI story is fascinating because of its wild complexity and its propositional stance toward this complexity. When I was reading the book Supremacy by Parmy Olson, I got mesmerized by the motivation differences between DeepMind’s three founders in the early days. “Legg moved in circles where the goal was to merge as many people with AGI as possible, Suleyman wanted to solve societal problems, and Hassabis wanted to go down in history having made fundamental discoveries about the universe.” They started arguing with each other—but the bigger picture they all acknowledged was the world’s complexity outpacing anyone’s ability to control it. AI is deeply embedded in problems that are fundamentally non-linear and unpredictable.”

Source

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Anyone home?

A neighbour’s lovely cat, who often patrols the locality to check up on who’s up and about.

Quote of the Day

”I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him twenty minutes to pass the salt”.

• Eric Sykes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joseph Haydn | Cello Concerto in C Major (1st mvt. Moderato) | JY Ahn

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Beware the Oligarchs’ Two Bubbles

Robert Reich on the AI and crypto bubbles in which we are currently immersed.

The flood of money into these two opaque industries — AI and crypto — has propped up the U.S. stock market and, indirectly, the U.S. economy.

AI and crypto have created the illusion that all is well with the economy — even as Trump has taken a wrecking ball to it: raising tariffs everywhere, threatening China with a 100 percent tariff, sending federal troops into American cities, imprisoning or deporting thousands of immigrants, firing thousands of federal workers, and presiding over the closure of the U.S. government.

When the AI and crypto bubbles burst, we’ll likely see the damage Trump’s wrecking ball has done.

I fear millions of average Americans will feel the consequences — losing their savings and jobs.

I don’t know about crypto, but the AI bubble looks to me like the real deal, and I wonder what will be left when it bursts.

Books, etc.

This looks interesting. It was recommended by Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve). It describes a world, he says, where

Climate change has got worse, and governments have shrunk. To the extent that government works at all, it works in the service of a collection of anonymous corporations whose interests are protected by aggressive intellectual property legislation and their own privately maintained police forces. In the countryside, many people live in ‘corpo-towns’ maintained by the corporations. (For those outside of their protection, ‘corpo’ is a term of disdain, or abuse.) There’s a large active underclass that looks after itself outside of the mainstream economy, living in places that are in a kind of liminal space, a nomansland, between city and country. Violence is never far below the surface.

AI manages a lot of services, and security, and confusing it about who you are as you go across town is an important part of surviving in this world…

One of the reasons why more people don’t worry about the direction of travel in our contemporary world is that we all suffer from imaginative failure — our inability to project forward. That’s why we need creative artist and novelists who can see round some of the corners that lie ahead. Many moons ago, two writers — George Orwell and Aldous Huxley — put forward two different visions on how things would pan out. Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear; Huxley that we would be undone by the things that delight us. As it happened, both were right: we got two dystopias for the price of one.

Feedback

Thanks to Diane Coyle and Robert Hanks for identifying the picture behind Gillian Tett in Monday’s photograph.

It’s Joy Labinjo’s An Eighteenth-Century Family.

Robert writes that it’s

part of the rehang a couple of years ago which added a number of works by women (mostly brought out of the vaults) and POCs (mostly new commissions). It’s an imaginary portrait of the writer and campaigner for abolition Olaudah Equiano and his family: he married Susannah Cullen, a Soham girl. I’ve a vague idea that it’s based on a portrait by Gainsborough of his own family. The rehang isn’t entirely successful, imo, but I do like this one.

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Holding forth

Gillian Tett, anthropologist, FT columnist and now Provost of King’s, holding forth last week at the launch in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge of the new Bennett School of Public Policy. I meant to check out the striking artwork in the background — which seemed so out of place in the Fitz, but had dash off before I was able to get to it. Sigh.

Quote of the Day

”The literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales.”

• Jilly Cooper, inventor of the ‘bonkbuster’, who has just passed away.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Incredible String Band | October Song

Link

Seems appropriate for the time of year. I heard them sing it live once in October.

Long Read of the Day

 It’s the Internet, Stupid

I’ve always had a soft spot for Francis Fukuyama who I think got a bad rap for his “end of history” trope in 1989. Sure, it was an unwise phrase, but he wasn’t claiming no events would occur — just that no ideology had emerged to seriously challenge liberal democracy as the organising principle for advanced societies. (Which is why I’m interested to know what he thinks about Dan Wang’s book.) I’ve long thought that his book Political Order and Political Decay is a masterpiece. But maybe my critical instincts are blunted by the facts that he also happens to be a gifted carpenter/joiner, a good photographer and a pretty accomplished geek.

Anyway, I’m always on the lookout for his stuff and when I came on this essay I stopped to think. In it he identifies nine possible explanations for the way democratic societies have changed in the last few decades, and then comes down on a single culprit. Worth reading just to see if you agree or disagree with him about that. Meanwhile, here’s a sample.

Any satisfactory explanation for the rise of populism has to deal with the timing question; that is, why populism has arisen so broadly and in so many different countries in the second decade of the 21st century. My particular perplexity centers around the fact that, by any objective standard, social and economic conditions in the United States and Europe have been pretty good over the past decade. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that they have been this good at many other points in human history. Yes, we had big financial crises and unresolved wars, yes we had inflation and growing economic inequality, yes we had outsourcing and job loss, and yes we had poor leadership and rapid social change. Yet in the 20th century, advanced societies experienced all of these conditions in much worse forms than in recent years—hyperinflation, sky-high levels of unemployment, mass migration, civil unrest, domestic and international violence. And yet, according to contemporary populists, things have never been worse: crime, migration, and inflation are completely out of control, and they are transforming society beyond recognition, to the point where, in Trump’s words, “you’re not going to have a country any more.” How do you explain a political movement based on assertions so far removed from reality?

Read on. It’s interesting.

The wheels have come off Musk’s monstertruck

My latest Observer column…

So what was this Cybertruck? Well, like something you’ve never seen – except perhaps in video games or bad dreams. (If you’re interested, Google Images will be happy to provide a glimpse.) In its customary deadpan mode, Wikipedia describes it as “a distinctive angular design composed of flat, unpainted stainless steel body panels, drawing comparisons to low-polygon computer models”. When the vehicle was first unveiled in November 2019, a more imaginative observer said that it was “like a DeLorean that made love to the tank from the 80s arcade game Battlezone”.

So much for the hype; what about the reality? Well, by the end of 2024, only 39,000 Cybertrucks had been delivered and 96% of those pre-production reservations had been cancelled. And sales are now in freefall; in the first quarter of 2025, only 6,406 Cybertrucks (that’s less than half the number in the same quarter last year) were sold. In the second quarter of 2025, they’re down to 4,306. If it goes on like this, sales will be down to zero by the second quarter of next year…

Read on

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Lovely blog post by Brian Merchant about the way unscrupulous jokers are jumping on the AI bandwagon in the hope of getting noticed. One of them was a

New York City ad campaign from the AI startup Friend, which sells a little pendant device a user is supposed to wear around their neck and talk to and attract the ire of passersby with. The company plastered the NYC subway system with ads last month, and those ads were rapidly and thoroughly vandalized in what can only be read as an outpouring of rage at not just the Friend product, which they correctly identified as a malign portable surveillance device, but at commercial AI in general.

In a lovely touch, some genius put up a site in which you can indulge your hidden vandal and virtually deface the trolling ad campaign without riding the NY subway.

Go on, click on the link and have a go. Nobody’s looking.

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Gutenberg 2.0

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web — and the spiritual heir of Johannes Gutenberg as the second individual in history to revolutionise humanity’s information ecosystem. He’s always been a hero of mine. The photo was taken in September 2010 at a Royal Symposium that I attended at which we had a conversation about the way people misunderstand the Internet — a conversation that led me to write my second book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. Wonderful, wonderful man.

Quote of the Day

”Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

• George Eliot, writing of Dorothea at the end of Middlemarch

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ye Vagabonds | I’m a Rover

Link

We’re going to hear them live tonight. Can’t wait.

Long Read of the Day

Railways Redux

I keep looking for ways of putting the current AI investment bubble into historical context, and Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) has come up with the goods, or at least some of them — for which many thanks.

Victorian Britain’s railway boom was truly colossal. The first railway service in the world started running between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 and less than two decades later (by 1849), the London & North Western railway had become the Apple of its day, the biggest company in the world.

(See Christian Wolmar’s fabulous Fire and Steam for a beautifully written history of the railways.)

This boom led to a colossal crash in 1866. The crash was caused (here’s a surprise) by the banking sector, but in that case it was because they had been lending money to railway companies who couldn’t pay it back rather than American homeowners who couldn’t pay it back.

Then, as in our very own crash of 2007, the government had to respond. It did so by suspending the Bank Act of 1844 to allow banks to pay out in paper money rather than gold, which kept them going, but they were not too big to fail and the famous Overend & Gurney bank went under. When it suspended payments after a run on 10th May 1866 (as frequently noted, the last run on a British bank until the Northern Rock debacle), it not only ruined its own shareholders but caused the collapse of about 200 other companies (including other banks).

(The directors of Overend and Gurney were, incidentally, charged with fraud but got off as the judge said that they were merely idiots, not criminals.)

Read on to find out what Benjamin Disraeli said to the directors of the railway companies when their Directors went to see him in 1867 to ask for the nationalisation of the railway companies to stop them from collapsing.

(He’s right about Christian Wolmar’s book, btw.)

My commonplace booklet

I’ve always loved this time of year. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of my working life in universities. It’s the beginning of the Michaelmas Term in Cambridge and it was wonderful walking around the place last weekend to see a fresh crop of fortunate (and bright) kids trying to get their bearings, and getting used to the idea that maybe they’re really adults at last.

I vividly remember the exhilaration I felt walking into University College Cork to register for an engineering degree course in 1964, or arriving in Emmanuel College in Cambridge in 1968 — the kind of feeling once captured by P.G. Wodehouse as “having died and gone to heaven without the trouble and expense”.

Which then led me to think of the way Covid robbed two generations of students of that magical first year experience. It was truly horrible to see the impact of that deprivation on those cohorts of young people.

Feedback

Brad DeLong had a nice take on Neal Stephenson’s essay, “Show it, don’t tell it” which was the Long Read on Wednesday:

“Neal Stephenson tells us: Dickens could do in 15 words what “show it, don’t tell it” would need 15 sentences of paragraphs to accomplish. It works for a reader willing to do the work of coöperating with the author in the construction of the fictional world portrayed—which requires spinning-up and running a Sub-Turing instantiation of the author on one’s own wetware to converse with. That is perhaps the most important piece of learning to read, and of becoming a front-end node to the real ASI that is humanity’s collective mind.”

NOTE ASI = ’Artificial Superintelligence’

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900+ and still going strong

A really venerable parish church bathed in Autumnal sunshine and currently acquiring a new roof.

Quote of the Day

”The great tragedy of our age is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

• Isaac Asimov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | French Suite No.3 in B Minor, BWV 814 – 3 Sarabande | Keith Jarrett

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Say it, don’t show it

Lovely essay by Neal Stephenson.

I’m generally not very interested in meta-writing, which is to say, writing about how to write. But for the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows:

‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.

If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head…

Do read on. Among other things, it explains why so many people still read Dickens, Jane Austen & Co.

Books, etc.

For at least some of us, Dan Wang’s book is unputdownable. The TL;DR summary of it is that it’s a comparison of two superpowers — the “Engineering State” (China) and the “Lawyerly State” (the US). An (exceedingly crude summary) of that underlying idea is that China is able to ‘build’ important stuff like infrastructure, because its government is dominated by engineers; whereas the US is a society dominated by lawyers who are skilled at stopping or slowing down initiatives that their clients dislike.

It’s a vivid contrast, but because so many people are disenchanted by the lack of state capacity in liberal democracies they may be tempted to draw the wrong conclusion from the TL;DR summary. Wang’s searing accounts of the cruelty of the ‘one-child’ policy and the brutal way the Xi regime screwed up Covid should be enough to give any China-boosters pause.

The conclusion that I’m drawing as I read is that a world in which we have to choose between two such dysfunctional Leviathans is not one to look forward to.

My commonplace booklet

 Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

Interesting Pew survey.

In many countries around the world, a fifth or more of all adults have left the religious group in which they were raised. Christianity and Buddhism have experienced especially large losses from this “religious switching,” while rising numbers of adults have no religious affiliation, according to Pew Research Center surveys of nearly 80,000 people in 36 countries.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Conkers, anyone?

Picked up on a walk yesterday. When I was a kid, all these would have been rejected as possible contestants in a game.

Quote of the Day

“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”

• Cory Doctorow

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Gotta Serve Somebody

Link

Extraordinary lyrics with a contemporary relevance.

Long Read of the Day

Trump bagging TikTok for his investor pals

My latest Observer column…

So fervid was the atmosphere that a bipartisan bill waltzed through the US Congress at a time of increasingly rancid polarisation. It was called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act and passed in April 2024. One of its provisions was that TikTok must either divest from ByteDance by 19 January 2025 or be banned in the US.

Note the date: the day before Trump 2.0 took office. With his customary cunning, he spotted a risk – and maybe also an opportunity. Instead of having 150 million enraged addicts on his inauguration day, he could harvest their plaudits as the knight in shining armour. He declared that the next day he would issue an executive order to delay enforcement of Congress’s edict. And in return, TikTok responded that, because of this assurance, it would keep the servers running. The only question about these cosy arrangements being: who was playing whom?

Who indeed?…

Read on

Books, etc.

This is a really interesting book by a distinguished Spanish philosopher which tries to answer a critical question that’s relevant to humanity’s current predicament: why don’t we listen to warnings?

One of the key distinctions he makes is that of between predictions and warnings.

Predictions call out what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only possible continuation of the present. Warnings, instead, point towards what’s to come and are meant to involve us in the possibility of a radical break, a discontinuity with the present signalled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront.

This distinction is illuminating for anyone struggling to interpret our response to climate change or (in my case) to AI. Which is why I was delighted when the book arrived last week.

My commonplace booklet

On Friday, we went to my friend Conor’s funeral in a packed London church and then returned home to find the current issue of the London Review of Books on the doormat, and in it his final essay for the magazine.

It’s a clinical examination of how the UK Supreme Court is systematically diminishing the influence of human rights law through various legal mechanisms and case decisions, particularly in relation to trans rights and privacy cases. In it, he fingers Lord Reed, the Supreme Court’s president, as a key figure in this shift and points out that other judges are increasingly following suit.

The essay is a poignant reminder of what a great scholar he was — and also of the extent of our loss. May he rest in peace.

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School Trip

Quote of the Day

”There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”

• Johnny Cash

Today sees the funeral of my dear, dear friend Conor Gearty, so you can guess what’s been on my mind.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No. 6, BWV 1012: IV. Sarabande | Abel Selaocoe

Link

Appropriately consoling for a sombre day. YoYo Ma has some very interesting things to say about it here.

Long Read of the Day

 Nightmare on Pennsylvania Ave – and Prince Harry’s new Gambit

If you want to see what a great columnist is like on full throttle, then this blast by Tina Brown would be hard to beat.

It can’t be real: A power-engorged president Beta testing martial law by sending troops into made-up emergencies in American cities, a certifiably insane head of Health and Human Services with zero medical background unleashing disease on America, a boatload of Venezuelans whose identities and intent we still don’t know after eight days, blown up by the U.S. military on the unproven premise they were fentanyl-smuggling fiends; ICE agents, like Brownshirts, breaking car windows to extract petrified immigrant. Swimming behind each increasingly fascistic executive order by an intellectually lazy president is the pallid, malevolent face of cartoon villain Stephen Miller, working late in his office on his deportation quotas.

And as morning dawns, we are freshly assailed by the coarsening of American public life, circling the drain. We no longer even blink when the sitting vice president tweets at a citizen who called the Venezuela strike a war crime, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” or the White House press secretary sneering about a network news anchor, “She’s stupid. You can put that on the record” or the Treasury secretary, who is supposed to be Wall Street’s grown-up in the room, threatening to punch a top housing finance official “in the fucking face.”…

And then there’s this:

We have the morally blank cohort of centibillionaire tech bros and their ilk summoned to a White House dinner celebrating America’s AI dominance. It swiftly turned into an on-camera ring-kissing of their fat-fingered host, who prodded them to declare titanic investments in AI in the U.S., all thanks to DJT. How gratifying that Meta’s slippery salamander Mark Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic, apologizing to Trump for his hesitant reply pledging $600 billion through 2028. “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.” What a worm.

Read on. It’s worth it.

My commonplace booklet

The NYT’s Kevin Roose visited an unnamed liberal arts college recently. Here are his takeaways:

1. The “students don’t read” meme appears to be real. Profs there don’t assign full books anymore, even to English majors, because nobody will read them. Only chapters/essays, and even that’s pushing it. (Not a literacy issue, per se — more of a focus/time management issue.)

2. The job market for computer science grads is as bad as people say. Their top CS student from last year is still looking for work.

3. AI adoption is ~100% among students, ~50% among faculty. Still a lot of worries around cheating, but most seem to have moved past denial/anger and into bargaining/acceptance. Some profs are “going medieval” (blue books, oral exams), others are putting it in the curriculum.

4. There is a lot of anger at the AI labs for giving out free access during exam periods. (Not from students, of course, they love it.) Nobody buys the “this is for studying” pitch.

5. The possibility of near-term AGI is still not on most people’s minds. A lot of “GPT-5 proved scaling is over” reactions, even among fairly AI-pilled folks. Still a little “LLMs are just fancy autocomplete” hanging around, but less than a year or two ago.

Source

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Origins

The Industrial Revolution begins.

Coalbrookdale by Night, Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1801

The painting depicts the Madeley Wood (or Bedlam) furnaces, which belonged to the Coalbrookdale Company from 1776 to 1796. It’s come to symbolize the birth of the Revolution in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire.

Quote of the Day

”Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Feat | Easy to Slip

Link

Long Read of the Day

 A masterpiece of Ryder Cup drama with a truth Donald Trump could never understand

Even if you hate golf this fine report by George Simms about the circus in New York State last weekend might cheer you up.

In his endless benevolence, Donald Trump arrived just before midday, a futile attempt to avoid inconveniencing fans, with one calling it “the most disorganised event I’ve ever been to”. And in a way he was always here, an endless shadow cast by not only the lingering prospect of his arrival but by an event seemingly designed for him, taking time out from his busy schedule of curing autism and failing to end whichever conflict has grabbed his eye this week.

In his home state, in a county which voted for him last year, playing a sport with largely right-leaning fans and overwhelmingly conservative players, this was Trump Day of the Trump Ryder Cup. As both Bryson DeChambeau and the White House Press Secretary have claimed, it would not be happening without him, having averted a minor rail strike. Even European fans now do jingoism through a Trump lens with “Make Europe Great Again” caps and T-shirts depicting Luke Donald in the Oval Office reading: “There’s a new Donald in town.”

(Note for non-golfers: Luke Donald was the captain of the European team that won the cup.)

Books, etc.

Tim Wu’s new book comes out on November 6. It’s about the way tech platforms have become the greatest machines for ‘wealth extraction’ that humanity has ever seen. He thinks that we are heading into a ‘two-class age’ where many industries become divided into two groups: the extractors and their agents on the one side; dependent businesses, consumers and employees on the other. And it’s also about the question that is rarely asked: just what happened to the broad spread of prosperity and democracy many expected to follow the Internet revolution. Instead we’ve wound up with intolerable levels of inequality and rising autocracy.

I’ve read nearly everything Wu has written. His book The Master Switch changed the way I think about digital technology.

My commonplace booklet

I have to give a talk about AI to a non-specialist audience later in the month, so I’ve been collecting examples of what LLMs can (and cannot) do. Here’s one I took from Simon Willison’s terrific blog. He gave Claude Sonnet 4.5 this picture and asked it to describe it:

The machine’s response:

This image shows a large gathering of pelicans crowded together along what appears to be a waterfront or shoreline. The birds are densely packed, creating a chaotic scene with dozens of brown pelicans visible. Their distinctive long bills and pouches are clearly visible among the mass of feathered bodies. In the background, there’s calm water and a dark tree line or forested area. The lighting suggests this was taken during early morning or late afternoon, giving the scene a golden, warm tone. The pelicans appear to be resting or congregating together, which is typical behavior for these colonial seabirds.

Not bad, eh?

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The last rose…?

Quote of the Day

” Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rory Gallagher (&Taste) | I’m Moving On

Link

Long Read of the Day

 ’Til ChatGPT do us part: how chatbots are breaking up marriages

My latest Observer column…

My eye was caught by a vivid headline: “ChatGPT Is blowing up marriages …” it began. Below it was an intriguing piece by Maggie Harrison Dupré based on conversations with more than a dozen people who said that AI chatbots played a key role in the dissolution of their long-term relationships and marriages. “Nearly all of these now-exes,” Dupré writes, “are currently locked in divorce proceedings and often bitter custody battles.” She also reviewed AI chat logs, records of conversations between spouses, social media posts, court records and other documentation.

One of the couples she spoke to had been together for 15 years. “We’ve had ups and downs like any relationship,” said the husband, “and in 2023 we almost split. But we ended up reconciling, and we had, I thought, two very good years. Very close years.”

But then “the whole ChatGPT thing happened”…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

 Famous IVF memoir had hidden ghostwriter who spun breakthrough into emotional quest, archives reveal

I’ve just come across a fascinating account of the research that reveals how a Welsh poet turned the story of the first ‘test-tube baby’ into a moving narrative that helped draw attention to the women involved.

A Matter of Life, co-authored in 1980 by geneticist Robert Edwards – who spent much of his career at Cambridge and went on to win the Nobel Prize – and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, tells how their research led to in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The book is the basis for last year’s Netflix film Joy.

A study of Dannie Abse’s archive in the National Library of Wales by Prof Nick Hopwood from the University of Cambridge reveals how Abse overhauled reams of rough and underwhelming text submitted by the duo to a publisher that had bought the doctors’ story of the “baby of the century” in the hope of a quick bestseller…

Over the weekend we watched Joy, the 2024 movie which was based on the book and shows what a great storyteller can do with the tale of how a momentous scientific advance gets made. We watched it on Netflix. It’s a fabulous movie — fascinating, close to the bone at times and deeply moving. Highly recommended.

My commonplace booklet

One of the eerie things about our current moment is the way many (most?) people in Britain seem to think that what’s going on the US has nothing to do with us. Which is why this report of a speech by Chris Hewett, CEO of the Solar Trade Association, to the Solar & Storage Live trade show in Birmingham the other day, struck a chord.

Having condemned the “malicious lies” spouted against renewables by Donald Trump, Hewett turned his attention to Reform Party.

“Nigel Farage wants to subsidise fracking in Lincolnshire. He wants to send the Welsh working class back down in the coal mines. His sidekick, Richard Tice, has been sending threatening letters to investors in solar and battery sector, saying if Reform were to win power at the national level, it would cancel CfD contracts. He’s actively saying he wants to stop billions of pounds of investment into the UK economy in the energy sector, and the consequence of that would be that Britain remains hooked on expensive oil and gas from petrol states like Russia, like the Middle East, like the US.”

Reform councils are not simply opposing solar farms, Hewett noted. “They are now cancelling solar rooftop projects on public buildings. So again, that means they would rather see schools have high energy bills paid for by the taxpayer, rather than reaping rewards of investments and renewables, which will mean they can employ more teachers. Make no mistake, if Reform get their hands on national in the power national level, they will want to threaten all your jobs,”

Now of course he’s a spokesman for the solar industry preaching to the converted, but still…

Feedback

Thanks to Paul Pearn who, in response to my puzzlement at this year’s fruitfulness of our crab-apple tree, wrote:

John, it’s a simple answer. If the tree is producing fruit then there is not enough energy to grow fruiting spurs for the next year.

So it was a sign of drought-induced stress.

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Red Plenty

Last year our crab-apple tree produced almost no fruit. This year it’s exactly the opposite. We’ve been wondering why. Last year we had a dry Spring and a wet Summer. This year’s been the exact opposite, with many trees being clearly stressed by the drought.

Quote of the Day

”Every day, Computers are making people easier to use”

• Dave Karpf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Sharon Shannon, Donal Lunny | Goodbye

Link

Quite an assembly of talent on that stage in Washington.

Long Read of the Day

Argentina on two steaks a day

Nice piece of travel writing by the inimitable Maciej Ceglowski.

Here’s a sample.

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don’t forget to drink water).

The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day…

Read on. He’s a really interesting guy — an uber-geek who’s also a gifted writer. And he’s the creator of an essential tool for my workflow — Pinboard.in — one of those rare online services that has an honest business model.

Books, etc.

I’ve been reading Dan Wang’s book about China and the US, in which — of course — there’s a lot about Apple. This whetted my appetite for Patrick McGee’s deep dive into how exactly Apple managed to achieve what most Western companies couldn’t — to have a major manufacturing operation in China without having to enter into a joint partnership with a local company. If you want to get a feeling for the interesting complexity of this, then Nicholas Colin’s podcasted conversation with McGee is a great place to start.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!