Beached!

The Law Faculty building in Cambridge. Designed (wouldn’t you guess) by Norman Foster, who also designed the Terminal building at Stansted airport. But it always reminds me of a beached cruise liner.

Quote of the Day

”If you want to get stuff done, dance to the available music.”

• Marlon Brando , advising the maverick film director, Tony Kaye.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Mannenberg

Link

Historic track, first released in 1974.

Long Read of the Day

The Perils of the Billionaire Bubble

Nice essay by Daniel Drezner on the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth and great power.

t’s been a little more than a year since I started my gig as Academic Dean at the Fletcher School. Looking back the biggest surprise — and let me stress here that it should not have been remotely surprising, given that I’m a political scientist, but sometimes I can be a bit thick — is how even a minute amount of power and status affects how colleagues treat you. Conversations that a year earlier would have been candid and blunt have become a bit more clipped. I don’t think I cut a particularly intimidating figure, but my administrative title matters, and my colleagues have reacted to that by being more circumspect.

This shift is understandable, but there is a danger that comes with it. Even within the academy, speaking truth to power can be a difficult thing. And without people willing to tell me that I have made/will make a mistake, a very scary feedback loop emerges. If no one tells me if I’ve made a mistake, that makes it easier for me to persuade myself that I am doing a great job, which in turn makes me more confident that I can take on more responsibility and power, which makes it even tougher for colleagues to offer constructive criticism, and then the cycle recurs.

The phenomenon I’m describing does not just apply to middle management. As I explained in The Ideas Industry, if you think speaking truth to power is hard, try speaking truth to money. Henry Farrell recently emphasized this point as well: “Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.” In other words, the dangerous feedback loop that I have encountered is several orders of magnitude worse for the wealthiest and most well-known people on the planet: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this past week each of their psychic self-confidence bubbles popped…

Perceptive piece. I’ve seen this aphrodisiac effect a couple of time, once with a politician (Tony Blair) and once with a tech mogul (Bill Gates). And once I’ve seen how charming it can be to meet someone (John Major) who had power but who had no aura, and was, in fact, a really nice, well-balanced man.

The Old Man and the Strait

Hemingway on Trump and his war with Iran

Lovely spoof by Carlos Greaves.

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.

After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.

It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.

That is the wrong word, he thought.

It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged.

The old man recalled the many ways his life had been rigged against him. Rather than being born a Kennedy, or a Rockefeller, he had been born to a family of modest centimillionaires. Having a Kennedy in his employ could not make up for those humiliatingly humble roots. Besides, the Kennedy working for him was the lowliest Kennedy. The one who bathed in filthy rivers and spoke like a dying truck motor.

The old man did not want to think about that Kennedy. Especially because of the lettuce that summer. The lettuce had also somehow been rigged.

Instead, the old man thought about how he had grown his father’s modest $400 million fortune despite all of the losers who had been out to get him. The bank that had foreclosed on his casino simply for failing to turn a profit. The regulators who had shut down his university simply for failing to provide students with a degree. The women who had accused him of rape simply for failing to get their consent. And, of course, the Congress who had refused to declare him the winner of the election against the other old man simply for failing to receive more votes.

The old man thought about how everyone was constantly rigging things against him. The Strait must be another one of those things. There could be no other logical explanation.

“I did everything right,” the old man said to himself. He considered himself a very stable genius.

After all, he had tasked his top military advisor with waging the war. The advisor was the sharpest military mind the president had ever seen on television. Or, at least, the sharpest mind willing to swear fealty to the old man. The advisor had tried many good ideas. He had injected the soldiers with hormones so that they would fight the way men used to fight before men had become soft. Yet the advisor could not open the Strait…

You get the idea. It made me laugh. Maybe the best way to deal with Trump is to take the mickey out of him. Except for the fact that he might not notice. When King Charles made the joke in his White House speech mentioning that the British, in their day, had also had a go at renovating the building (they burned it to the ground in August 1814) it wasn’t clear that Trump understood the joke.

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Who do you think your are?

Sitting quietly by myself in the garden of the Orchard in Grantchester yesterday, I was joined by this teenage Jackdaw, who gave me a hard stare. So I stared back and he kindly posed for his portrait.

Quote of the Day

”Let us do something, while we have the chance”.

• Vladimir, in Waiting for Godot.

This could be a good motto for American electors, coming up to the mid-terms.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fergus O’Farrell | Something right

Link

Long Read of the Day

Lionel Messi and the Baby in the Bassinet

As I was clearing away all the pieces about the World Cup that I’d collected during the competition I came on this essay by Michael Ignatieff on two great footballers, Lionel Messi of Argentina and Lamine Yamal of Spain, on whether great stars deserve fame and fortune.

When talent of such an extraordinary kind is in play, we enter a magic realm where normal rules and expectations cease to apply. Which is why we watch: we want our side to win, but just as much, we are held in our seats by the possibility of the unexpected, the unplanned, the instant of talent that transforms everything.

Extraordinary talent in any field—football, science, literature, art—always is a reminder to the rest of us that what makes human beings unique is that there are singular individuals among us. In no other species do singular individual members of the species do so much to define who we all are. Their achievements, whether in sport, science or art, set the expectations for everyone who comes after them. Doubtless, the attention and training provided these two young men at La Masia helped mature their talent, but their coaches knew, from the start, that these two had a prodigious natural talent. Their fans worship these talents and believe that they and other supreme sports stars deserve to be paid vast sums to display it.

This attitude towards the incorrigible inequality among individual human beings stands in contrast to the resentment we feel towards other social, economic, gender and racial inequalities. We admire and reward outsized individual talent, while we resent any outsized advantage that arises from birth, wealth, race, class or gender. The unearned privileges of ‘nepo-babies’, children born to fame or fortune, strike us as unjust and awaken resentment and scorn…

It’s an interesting piece which eventually gets to the hard problem that arises when siblings in the same family have greatly different abilities.

But it also reminded me of the way Messi choose to ignore the savage thuggery of his teammates after the final whistle. Instead of taking responsibility and using his status to help moderate their behaviour, he chose to sit sorrowfully on his own on the ground, thereby attracting most of the media attention from what was going on elsewhere. He may be a great footballer, but at that moment he looked like an irresponsible human being.

Books, etc.

Nolan’s Odyssey (contd.)

From Semafor:

Christopher Nolan wants you to see The Odyssey in 70mm, if you can manage to thwart crowds and scalpers to get a ticket — and that’s been a boon for IMAX and its oversized screens. In an earnings call Thursday, CEO Rich Gelfond said the film’s $52 million global opening weekend, sans South Korea, China, and Japan, was the biggest of its kind in the company’s history, with IMAX screens accounting for less than 1% of Odyssey showings but driving 20% of the film’s debut. A “fan frenzy” has pushed theater occupancy rates to “unheard-of” levels, he said, with Odyssey screenings selling out as many as seven or eight weeks into the film’s run and cinephiles packing the seats as early as 7 am.

As young consumers crave IRL experiences, audiences’ overwhelming enthusiasm has even carved out a new market for IMAX merch, Gelfond said: Popcorn buckets in the shape of the company’s famously cumbersome cameras sold out online in minutes.

My commonplace booklet

I’d been watching Searching for Sam, Adrian Dunbar’s fine BBC documentary about Samuel Beckett and was suddenly transported back to Ken Tynan’s unforgettable Observer review of the London premiere of Waiting For Godot. It was published in 1955, when I was a kid growing up in rural Ireland, and so I only discovered it in 1990 when I bought A View of the English Stage, a collection of Tynan’s columns. I can still remember the moment I came on the review, and how I was blown away by it. This, I thought, is what criticism is for: to illuminate a great work of art for those of us who are curious but can’t quite figure it out.

Maybe this excerpt gives an idea of what I mean.

A special virtue attaches to plays which remind the drama of how much it can do without and still exist. By all the known criteria, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. Pity the critic who seeks a chink in its armour, for it is all chink! It has no plot, no climax, no denouement, no beginning, no middle, and no end. Unavoidably, it has a situation, and it might be accused of having suspense, since it deals with the impatience of two tramps waiting beneath a tree for a cryptic Mr. Godot to keep his appointment with them; but the situation is never developed, and a glance at the programme shows that Mr. Godot is never going to arrive. Waiting for Godot, frankly, jettisons everything by which we recognize theatre. It arrives at the customs-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.

Its author is an Irishman living in France, a fact which should prepare us for the extra, oddly serious joke he now plays on us. Passing the time in the dark, he suggests, is not only what drama is about, but also what life is about. Existence depends on those metaphysical Micawbers who will go on waiting, against all rational argument, for something which may one day turn up to explain the purpose of living. Twenty years ago, Mr. Odets had us waiting for Lefty, the social messiah; less naively, Mr. Beckett bids us to wait for Godot, the spiritual signpost. His two tramps pass the time of day just as we, the audience, are passing the time of night. Were we not in the theatre, we should, like them, be clowning and quarreling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up – all, as one of them says, ‘to give us the impression that we exist’…

I was the Observer’s TV critic for eight years (and am still writing for the paper) but the thing that most delighted me when I was offered the role was the thought that giants like Tynan had been there before me.

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Bike park…

…well, maybe not.

Quote of the Day

”Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos”.

• Werner Herzog 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline

Link

My favourite recording of this particular number.

Long Read of the Day

Is 2026 going to turn out like 1999?

Fabulous blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones.

His answer to the question is: “Only if the market fails to come to its senses about SpaceX and Tesla”.

I am getting all nostalgic about 1999, the year when I first started paying somewhat obsessive attention to the share prices of technology companies, a habit which has endured to this day. As a BBC TV business reporter, watching the stock market had been part of my job for a decade by then, but this was different. In the US, and to a much smaller extent in the UK, companies suddenly needed to have one simple thing at the end of their name to send their shares rocketing – the suffix .com.

All the traditional ways of valuing a company had been blown away by the arrival of the Internet as a consumer proposition. Suddenly, you did not need profits or even substantial revenues to be a valuable business. You just needed eyeballs – in other words, an online audience whose attention you could monetise. It was an exhilarating time to be a journalist covering the startup scene, and eventually I got my first book, Dot Bomb, out of the experience.

As share prices grew and grew, the warnings from those who had been watching the stock market for longer than a couple of years got ever louder. But the true believers scoffed at these Cassandras, claiming they just didn’t get it – the “dot coms” were going to change the world and the old rules of investment did not apply.

And among those evangelists for the dot coms were many of the analysts at investment banks. Somehow, their lengthy reports on tech companies who were being wined and dined by another branch of the bank, always seemed to end with a “buy” recommendation.

Then, of course, in the Spring of 2000, it all went pop…

Rory used to be the BBC’s Technology correspondent and he wrote a terrific book about it. As someone labouring in the same vineyard, I used to marvel at the clarity and ‘unforcedness’ of his prose. He’s still doing it, which is why this perceptive view of the AI madness is well worth your time. In the end the laws of economic gravity applied in 1999. They still do now — but of course this is not investment advice, merely a recital of mundane common sense!

My commonplace booklet

My son and grandson were lucky enough to get tickets for the screening on Christopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey at the weekend, and I wondered if I should feel envious. But then I read Armand D’Angour’s critical review of the film and wondered if I should just keep reading Emily WIlson’s translation.

Here’s a sample of his piece;

While the epic’s multiplicity runs deep, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is an action film, replete with unabashed violence. It is essentially designed to entertain a modern audience familiar with movies such as Lord of the Rings. There are some passing moral reflections about the decline of ‘civilisation’ and about the guilty conscience of a ruthless military leader, but these are brief moments, unconvincingly tacked on to the storyline. With its monstrous creatures and robotic foes, and its scenes of fighting, death and destruction, the film is almost uniformly grim and gory, set at a pitch of intensity that scarcely varies for nearly three hours, during which the heroes never seem to change out of their armour and crested helmets. There are no moments of lightness, humour, or laughter, and little room for comradeship, intimacy, or character development, even though the film begins, faithful to Homer, with young Telemachus’s quest to find his missing father. Nor, disappointingly, does the story feature any music or musicians: absent are the bards whose performances give the Odyssey its most self-referential moments, such as when Penelope demands that Phemius stop his ‘distressing song’ about a hero’s return, and when Odysseus weeps to hear his own story sung by Demodocus. In their place, an orchestral score is in turns sweepingly heroic and thuddingly percussive, interspersed with a few quieter, more sentimental moments (including in the Siren’s Song and the reunion scene with Penelope the unmistakeable sound of the piper Callum Armstrong’s sinuous aulos, ancient double pipes).

So maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. This isn’t Homer’s story at all, but Christopher Nolan’s. So maybe I should go to see it.

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Non-musical chairs

I keep thinking that I must do something about these aged chairs, which have stood outside through wind, hail and rain for many years. There’s something touching about their quiet endurance, and now I need to make amends. Sanding them down and a coat or two of paint or preservative is the least I can do.

Quote of the Day

”The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”

• Erich Fromm

 ## Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird | Live at Dolans

Link

She’s a charismatic musician who lights up every room she enters.

Long Read of the Day

Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence

If you want to know what the world might be like if the techlords of Silicon Valley get their way, then this essay by the economist Branko Milanovic is just the ticket.

(Spoiler alert: there’s no good news here. And yet democracies could stop it happening if they got their acts together.)

Sample:

The third issue is whether AI would create a significant surplus population. I prefer to use the term surplus population to a more neutral term of higher unemployment because it reflects better what may be the effects of a general purpose technology. It might create people who are basically unemployable and whose skills belong to a revolved era. These may be skills and knowledge that are entirely made redundant by the deployment of the AI; or people whose skills require a “retooling” for the needs of a new economy that would take five or more years. In either case, such people are over a medium- to long-term a surplus population. If the surplus population becomes large, for example reaching 15 or 20 percent of the labor force it would create political problems. The issue will then be how to solve this political problem. It may be dealt within the existing system of unemployment benefits with the proviso that in the case of the surplus population unemployment benefits might run for years rather than for six or nine months as they do nowadays. Or through, as many people argue, universal guaranteed income. Both would require a change in the way the welfare system is organized and funded. We would have to accept the possibility of people who would never work during their lifetime or might work for very little time in some subaltern occupations.

Money transfers however do not eliminate the political issue of a large surplus population. It would be naïve to believe that simply giving people money to survive would make them happy. Surplus population could create a permanent pool of malcontents who would be politically difficult to handle, a malleable population who would be there to be exploited and used by political operators. The very presence of a large group of people who have nothing to do and lots of free time to plot rebellions would by itself be politically destabilizing.

“Surplus population” is an interesting euphemism. It basically means people who have little or no economic value

Books, etc.

I was blown away by the Economist’s Tocqueville Road Trippodcast, and particularly by some of the excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s own account of his journey through the New World, that I felt ashamed that I’d never read it. So, guess what, when I opened my eyes on the morning of my birthday, there it was — all 722 pages of it! And, rather to my astonishment, it’s an entrancing read. He was such a perceptive observer of the country to which he had been dispatched to see what all this democracy stuff was about.

My commonplace booklet

From the Borowitz Report…

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report). Seeking relief from the latest tariffs slapped on his nation’s goods, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told Donald J. Trump on Tuesday that the orange air blanketing regions of the United States was intended as a “spectacular tribute” to the US president.

“We Canadians were thinking of something special we could give you for your birthday, and this is what we came up with,” Carney said.

“We thought that turning the skies above Washington orange would be a spectacular tribute to you, much as the Reflecting Pool is an amazing tribute to Greenland,” he added.

After Trump agreed to drop the tariffs, Carney thanked him, adding, “I would urge you to go outside and breathe in as much of that beautiful orange air as you can.”

Linkblog

We do the Irish Times cryptic crossword every morning and are often puzzled by the expressions that come as solutions to clues. Yesterday, the solution to the clue “Man will hide outside unfinished fort as quickly as possible” (4,3,7) was “Hell for leather”. It’s an expression I knew from my childhood onwards, but how did it originate?

Answer:

Screenshot

Link

So that snippet has now been added to the warehouse of useless information known as my brain.

Errata

In my piece about Rory Smith’s essay on the England-Argentina match, I mistyped Rory’s point about England inviting Argentina to spend the match camped “20 years from their goal”. So many hanks to Niall O’Sullivan for pointing out that the distance was measured in yards, not years.

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The art of conversation

What French cafes are for.

Quote of the Day

”Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops; it’s easier to get away with murder.

• James Carville

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Shenandoah

Link

Long Read of the Day

From Cockburn to clickbait

Lovely essay by my friend Andrew Brown.

Claud Cockburn, one of the finest hacks there has ever been, wrote that journalism is very simple: it is a mixture of advertising and entertainment and to succeed you need only decide who you want to entertain and what cause, as it were, you wish to advertise. He had no time for journalism as the pursuit of abstract truth, and – as a member in good standing of the British imperial class and an intermittent Stalinist – he would have laughed at the idea that journalists had a sacred duty to democracy until tears of neat whisky streamed down his cheeks.

Cockburn wished to lose his illusions without losing hope, as he wrote admiringly of a Stalinist friend. His energy, optimism, and courage are still inspiring; he was also an excellent stylist, whose plain and forceful manner concealed a great deal of art. He cared more for the English language than for all of his causes and most of his wives. So if there is any guide who can lead us, like Virgil, through the descent into dreadful clickbait hell, Cockburn is the man.

He must have inspired many people into journalism with his autobiographies, but I don’t think he ever set out to be a journalist. What he wanted was to savour the variety of the world and to write about it. Working for the Times offered the least constrained way to do this. “The press, sir, and the gentleman from the Times” as a Victorian flunkey is said to have introduced journalists to the Prime Minister.

So he started off respectable; what makes him timely, though is that he invented – at least in English speaking countries – a form of journalism that did not depend on advertising and was aimed squarely at an elite audience. To put it another way, he invented Substack 80 years before Substack did…..

Do read on. I love it partly because it’s such a readable account of why the journalistic trade (for it is a trade and not a profession) is in trouble. But also because I knew and admired Claud Cockburn, who (with his wife, Patricia) were very kind to me when I was an undergraduate in Ireland. (They lived in Youghal, a seaside village near Cork, where I studied.) The last time I saw him was after my graduation; he asked me what I intended to do next. I replied that I was thinking of journalism. At this, he grinned wickedly and said, solemnly: “One word of advice: make sure that early in your career you libel somebody famous!”

Books, etc.

You’ll be hearing a lot about Dave Eggers’s new book. He’s a truly remarkable writer. His book The Circle provided the most insightful glimpse I’d ever seen of what it’s like to work inside a tech giant. But his reportage is also shrewd and perceptive. Way back in the Summer of 2016 I was on holiday in Provence and brooding on the upcoming US election. As a devout reader of the New York Times I was reassured on a daily basis by Nate Silver that Hilary Clinton was on track for election. And then I read a very long piece by Eggers who had been to a Trump rally in California and had spent a lot of time talking to attendees who seemed to him to be ordinary Americans. And I started to wonder if the pollsters might be missing the picture. But then I looked at the NYT polling figures and thought “Nah!”. The rest turned out to be history, as they say.

Let’s teach Meta a lesson

For the background see here.

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I Protest

A lone demonstrator outside the old Chinese Embassy in London in the winter of 2014.

Quote of the Day

The first step in AI enterprise deployment was giving everyone Copilot, which mostly failed and is continuing to fail. The next step was pilots and trials to find and build point solutions and individual use cases. Almost all big companies are doing this, and it can work up to a point, but outside of some very specific industries (say, law), buying or building pieces of software one at a time is unlikely to move the needle for the entire company. To do that, you would need to rethink and reengineer whole workflows, processes, and, indeed, entire functions. You have to move beyond using the new thing as just doing more of the old thing.

That isn’t something that any big company does quickly – it takes time even to work out what you might want to do, and it involves a lot of work in working out what the process should be, and then going out and plugging it all together. That creates a paradox, if you like, that automation requires a lot of manual labour.

• Benedict Evans

He’s one of the best tech analysts around, with a knack for going right to the nub of the matter.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya | Water from an Ancient World

Link

Long Read of the Day

Context-collapse and its implications

This transcript of a conversation between Derek Thompson and University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard made me sit up because it was about a question which has bothered me for a long time: why is there so much negativity around? There are lots of simplistic explanations for this — for example the journalistic mindset that bad news is the only kind of news that the public likes to read, see or hear. (It’s often expressed in the mantra “If it Bleeds, it Leads.”). Mostly these explanations boil down to the view that our world-views are largely shaped by the media ecosystem in which we live and breathe.

What’s interesting about this long conversation is that Callard has an overarching theory about how negativity invariably triumphs. Midway in the conversation Thompson has a go at summing up the story so far:

For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.

It worth reading the whole piece, though. It’s also a reason why we need theories in our attempts to understand complex issues, even if — as in this case — her theory is unfalsifiable, which means Karl Popper would have given it a thumbs-down!

Books, etc.

Oddly, this might turn out to be the book of the year because of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming movie adaptation. It’s an immensely readable translation. My copy came with nicely rough-edged pages — which gave it an antique feel.

My commonplace booklet

For me, one of the best things about the World Cup has been my Observer colleague Rory Smith’s daily dispatches on it. Here he is on Monday, thinking ahead to the semi-finals:

And then there is England against Argentina, two teams that encapsulate exactly what football is: entirely irrational, a beautiful and inexplicable chaos, defined not by strategy or tactics or even necessarily talent but driven by a self-belief so deep-seated it borders on delusion, an iron refusal even to countenance defeat, and a sense of destiny so potent that it could be used to start whole religions.

It is no good trying to work out which of these teams is favourite: an Argentina side that seems to need to stand on the edge of the abyss simply to feel alive or an England team that has played what you would call ‘well’ for precisely 75 minutes in this whole tournament and that is now held together by sticky-tape, fumes and Jude Bellingham’s bottomless Madridismo.

  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!

Norman Conquest 2.0

The British Museum in Bloomsbury, seen on a rainy afternoon a while back (when Britain still could make the rains run on time). From today it’s the temporary home of the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England, which I’ve always thought must be the most thorough colonisation in European history. The tapestry will be exhibited from 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027.

Quote of the Day

”Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | When You Say Nothing At All

Link

Wonderful!

Long Read of the Day

Chip Off The Old Block

There are two kinds of people in the world — those who have children and those who don’t. The latter group, especially when they congregate online, tend to have very definite ideas about how children should be brought up which, when you think about it, is a bit like Trappist monks having strong opinions on alternatives to the missionary position in intercourse.

The former group know that bringing up children is like perpetually sitting an exam and failing, or at least not getting full marks. I speak with some authority on this question, for I have four kids and although they’re all grown up and fledged I still worry about them. And as I get older is suppose they will worry about me. That’s life.

One public intellectual I had always assumed would not become a parent is Scott Alexander, who is (and has been for years) one of the most interesting bloggers around. I discovered the other day that he has become a parent and looked forward to his reflections on the experience. And lo! — he has begun to write about it here.

It’s lovely. Here’s a sample:

When I was young, my OCD was much more disabling. The worst was my closet door. I had to close it seven times every night before I was satisfied. It’s been decades since I was that bad; my children can’t know anything about it. But lately, my son has taken to obsessively closing the door to the cabinet in his room at night. One evening, after he must have shut it ten or twenty times, I almost yelled at him: “COME ON! YOU KNOW YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO IT SEVEN TIMES!” But maybe he doesn’t know; maybe the genetic transmission isn’t that high-fidelity.

The good news is that all of this gives me a new ally in all my little quarrels with my wife. I’m hypersensitive to being startled when I’m drifting off to sleep; I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and scream, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.

Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.

The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless – my son refuses to sleep if there’s even one toy on the floor. My wife’s and daughter’s room look like a trailer park after a tornado. To my son and my dismay, they both hum wherever they go…

He’s already sitting the exam.

Books, etc.

As someone who’s written 50 newspaper columns a year since the mid 1980s, I have a keen interest into other labourers in the same vineyard, partly because a newspaper column is a particular kind of literary artefact — something you sculpt to fit into whatever space your Editors have allocated rather than construct to a blueprint — and it’s interesting to see how others do it.

Umberto Eco, who in addition to being a best-selling novelist and a serious literary scholar also had a charming column in a major Italian newspaper, L’Espresso. I was first alerted it to it by a wonderful column in which he compared the Apple Macintosh with the IBM PC, a metallic box with a text-based screen which ran under the MS-DOS operating system.

“I am firmly of the opinion”, he wrote, in La bustina di Minerva” (“Minerva’s Matchbook”), published on September 30, 1994.

that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant … It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”

Carlo Rovelli is also Italian and cut from the same cloth. In his case he’s a distinguished physicist, but also a someone who writes for newspapers. This little book collects 50 of his essays in a volume that’s a delicious travelling companion.

“An article in a newspaper”, he writes in the preface,

has something in common with a Japanese koan or a European sonnet: limited in size and form, it can transmit little more than one piece of information, a single argument, one reflection, a single emotion. And yet it can speak about everything and anything.

The pieces collected here, which were published in various newspapers over the last decade, speak of poets, scientists and philosophers who have influenced me in some way, of travels, of my generation, of atheism, of black holes, telescopes, psychedelic experience, intellectual surprises … and much else. They are like brief diary entries recording the intellectual adventures of a physicist who is interested in many things and who is searching for new ideas – for a wide but coherent perspective.

It’s a delight.

My commonplace booklet

Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work

This is a long  academic article  that caught my eye. It’s on Open Access, which means that anyone can read or download it. It caught my eye because I’ve been puzzled about why some organisations are still so hostile to allowing employees to work from home.

The title gives the game away. The basic findings of the research are that (i) narcissistic leaders (executives, middle managers, supervisors) tend to resist remote work; and (ii) that their resistance stems from the fact that remote working interferes with their need for power and status.

As far as I know, there is no cure for narcissism, even when the sufferer is President of a powerful country.

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PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!

Screenshot

As the front page of British tabloids used to put it.

Quote of the Day

”When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cavatina (from The Deer Hunter)

Link

Long Read of the Day

We’re using the wrong pronouns for AI

Interesting essay by Matt Ridley

Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.

His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.

That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers. Where most of the AI debate borrows its metaphors from software and science fiction, the runaway program, the bottled genie, the god in the machine, he reaches instead for the living world. He looks at the field the way a zoologist looks at a coral reef, and what he sees is not one emerging titan but a habitat beginning to fill up with competitors.

The difference is anything but cosmetic.

It is.

The six principles of AI – a king’s speech for Andy Burnham

My recent Observer column

ow that we’re into regime change in the UK, I began to wonder whether Andy Burnham had done much thinking about AI. If he has, he’s been keeping it to himself. But then he has a lot on his plate just now. So I thought it might be helpful if I came up with a king’s speech for him on the matter. After all, he’s already “king of the north”. So this can be used to inspire his new southern subjects after his impending “coronation”. Here’s how it goes.

“My government will be committed to building a vibrant AI-using democracy based on six principles:

1 Reclaiming democratic sovereignty

We must ensure that the democratic process remains more powerful than the corporations now owning and controlling the technology.

Unlike other jurisdictions where technology leaders have used their unconscionable wealth to crush state regulation, the UK will establish binding national guardrails that require companies to disclose alarming incidents and prohibit the release of models that pose an “unreasonable risk of critical harm”. We will vigorously reject any new “aristocracy” of techno oligarchs who seek to determine how we live and work. Instead of direct action and violence becoming the only way for the public to find leverage, we will create institutional channels for meaningful community input on – and response to – the technology’s trajectory.

2 Rebuilding state capacity

My government will use AI primarily to augment state capacity and improve the provision of public services. We will do this by prioritising the use of the technology to assist human decision-making by providing officials with better and more timely information.

Read on

pdf download here

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  UK could run out of air-con units

BBC story

I’m surprised it hasn’t already!

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A rose by any name…

… is still ravishing.

Just noticed these as I was sitting at the table, with my favourite picture (HCB’s Rue Mouffetard) in the background.

Quote of the Day

” We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

America’s AI Policy Is Truly Chaotic

A nice commentary by Francis Fukuyama on what the chaos monkeys in the White House are up to with AI.

This year has been a crazy time with regard to Washington’s treatment of artificial intelligence, and the pace has picked up in the last couple of weeks. This train of events began in February when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the leading AI firm Anthropic, a “supply chain risk,” meaning that neither the Pentagon nor its contractors could use Anthropic models without risking legal liability.

Then, in April, Anthropic announced that its latest Mythos model was so powerful that it would be released to only a handful of organizations. Mythos, it was claimed, had extraordinary abilities to break into computer systems, and these early organizations were asked to use it to test and secure their systems. In June, Senator Mark Warner told the Senate Banking Committee, “thank God it was Anthropic. When the head of the NSA and Cyber Command came and said, ‘This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours,’ … we are not going to solve this problem if we rely on a less ethical CEO operating on the basis of plain voluntary testing alone.”

Experts later added caveats to this description of Mythos 5’s capabilities, but it is clear that the politics of AI regulation has shifted dramatically in the past month. The Trump administration came into office last year being advised by tech bros like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who opposed any form of AI regulation. The latter in fact created an organization called Leading the Future that put significant money behind lobbying against AI regulation. The Trump White House nonetheless intervened against Anthropic, but only for what looked like typically bad political reasons. The company, according to Hegseth, was too “woke”; otherwise, the administration’s default position was to oppose all regulation.

Read on. Even the monkeys understand a national security problem. Or do they?

Books, etc.

I read this biography when it first came out in 1995, but was reminded it at our annual Bloomsday lunch on June 16, when we were talking about Ulysses. It came up because in 1922 the literary critic F.R Leavis (who was then a junior lecturer in Cambridge) had referred to Joyce’s masterpiece in his lecture course on “Modern Problems in Criticism”). Ulysses had been banned in Britain since December 1922, when a copy was seized at Croydon Aerodome. Later on, Leavis astutely stirred the pot by asking his bookseller, Galloway & Porter (of blessed memory), to write to the Chief Constable of Cambridge asking if a copy of Ulysses could be supplied. In the book, Leavis’s biographer provides an hilarious narrative of the ensuing farce, which is straight out of Gilbert & Sullivan, but without the music.

The Home Office was disgusted at the prospect of “boy and girl undergraduates” reading Ulysses, the work of “a dangerous crank”. Active steps would be taken to prevent the lectures taking place. Another comedy character, the Director of Public Prosecution, was then brought in. At his behest the Chief Constable discovered that Leavis did not hold the post of University lecturer, though he did give lectures for the English Faculty, and that “he also takes pupils privately”. Worse still, he was also planning a course on criticism to be attended by both men and women!

Behind these scenes was the new Home Secretary, William Johnson-Hicks (nicknamed ‘Jix’ by some wags), who among other things was an evangelical president of the National Church League and, accordingly, someone whose sense of humour had presumably been surgically removed at birth.

The Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the university’s Vice-Chancellor saying that “the contemplated inclusion of this book in the Leavis lectures must be avoided”. He confessed himself unable to “make head or tail” of Joyce’s novel but was nevertheless able to discern that its closing pages (Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy) were obviously gross and indecent since they constituted the “reminiscences of an Irish chamber-maid”.

Which perhaps explains why I have embarked on a second reading of this fine biography.

My commonplace booklet

There’s the Constitution, and then there’s the actual constitution

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

For example, the ordinary Constitution may seem to say that birthright citizenship exists because it uses words arranged in that order. But the higher Constitution—the enlightened one visible only to people who have freed themselves from the tyranny of thought-out and legally pressure-tested sentences—reveals a more nuanced principle: Citizenship shall apply automatically at birth unless someone loud and male on any number of primetime cable news shows feels skin color makes them uncomfortable.

This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a fixed standard. Please keep up. We have moved beyond that. This, too, is the genius of conservative legal reasoning: It can stand athwart history yelling breathlessly about original meaning, then sprint blindly toward the nearest convenient exception.

Naturally, the left keeps making the same tedious mistake. They point to text. They grunt their little grunts about precedent. Then they act wounded when five or six conservative justices consult the super-secret invisible Constitution and discover that the real meaning was hidden inside a special project that culminated only recently, in 2025. Please do not confuse this reading as lawlessness. It is advanced reading. So advanced, in fact, that it no longer requires reading.

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Street scene, London

Snatched in true Cartier-Bresson style. And in B&W too.

Quotes of the Day

The American republic celebrated its so-called 250th birthday on Saturday.

Here are two excerpts from speeches marking the occasion.

First, Trump, speaking in Dakota near Mount Rushmore.

Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot and pillage our nation. Our heroes died to win, build, and to save, and to build truly a great country, the greatest country ever in the world.

So, on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American heritage, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. Don’t let them take too much of your time. You know they’re wasting your time, don’t you?

But we’re not going to let them take too long or too much of our time as they play their games and send them into exile. We will send them quickly away and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country.

We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.

We do that. We’re not going to lose an election for 100 years. The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work. Communism is a loser. It always was, and it is right now.

Then Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York.

”We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”

Interestingly, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out in the FT, the United States was not created until final ratification of the Constitution, which did not happen until 1789.

The Constitution that gave birth to the country 13 years later made no mention of either human equality or of democracy. It provided for a complex separation of powers that would guard against a centralised state with tyrannical authority.

So what Trump was celebrating was the more or less complete breakdown of that ‘separation’ of powers that has happened on his watch.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Whoza Mtwana

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Anguish of Choice

Long but fascinating Aeon Essay by Skye C. Cleary on one of the most remarkable public lectures of the 20th century — Jean-Paul Sartre’s talk on “Existentialism is a Humanism”.

On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment.

While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left.

The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’.

The morning after the lecture, Sartre met with Beigbeder at Sartre’s unofficial office, the Café de Flore. Beigbeder apologised for the chaos, and explained that, between advertising, space rental and the damage to club – including 30 broken chairs and a destroyed box office, meaning that they were unable to sell tickets – they were having trouble coming up with the payment they’d promised Sartre. Sartre had read the morning papers over coffee and croissants and interrupted: ‘As for my fee, forget it! Besides, it looks like we were a success!’

One headline read ‘Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist’. The papers reported ‘elbow fights’, ‘nonexistential angst’ and ‘a No Exit situation’ where the mob feared ‘dying of suffocation’. Critics accused Sartre of being ‘too scholarly’, but he was charismatic. His ‘cool’, his ‘courage’, his ‘grit’ and the force of his presence were striking.

By the autumn of 1945, the atrocities of the Second World War had been exposed: the gas chambers, the camps, the friend betrayals, and the avalanches of banal evils. Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, wrote that people ‘had discovered History in its most terrible form.’ Sartre was popular because, according to Beauvoir, ‘there existed, at least at first glance, a remarkable agreement between what he was offering the public and what the public wanted.’ In post-liberation Paris, people realised they needed to reconstruct both their buildings and their moral foundations…

If, like me, you were once fascinated by Sartre but found him hard going, then this piece is a delight.

My commonplace booklet

In recent years I’ve got out of the habit of flying, partly because of a dislike of airport security theatre and general hassle. But last week I had to fly to and from Ireland for a funeral. On both flights I had a window seat and so fell into meditating on what I could see from that vantage point.

Which of course mainly consisted of clouds, which have always been an interest of mine because I’m a keen photographer who is constantly on the lookout for interesting cloudscapes. But I also had to do some thinking about them when I was preparing a lecture on “The Materiality of AI” for the Royal Geographical Society back in February. It turns out that the idea of the cloud (as in ‘cloud computing’) does a lot of heavy lifting in obscuring the weight of the industry’s footprint on the planet.

When you think about it the cloud — a soft fluffy object — is a brilliant metaphor for concealing the hard reality of a technology that is powered by submarine cables and data centres.

But in actual fact a real cloud is something that does exactly the opposite: it makes a physical reality — water vapour — visible.

This was brought forcibly brought home to me on both of last week’s flights. As the aircraft began its descent to its destination it had to break through dense banks of cloud. And as it hit them it perceptively shuddered: heavy object going fast meets physical resistance.

So I did some digging. It seems that an inch of rainfall falling on an acre of ground deposits 3,630 cubic feet of water on the surface. That’s about 103 metric tonnes, or the weight of two fully loaded articulated trucks. When you think about it in those terms, delightful fluffy clouds pack quite a punch

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