Who do you think you are?

Pulling into an hotel car-park in Burgundy I found myself face to face with this Quince, which looked distinctly unimpressed by the new visitors. Afterwards, I looked it up on the RHS site to see which variety it might be. It boiled down to two possibilities.

I concluded it was the ‘Champion’, though its ‘expression’ reminded me of a couple of Serbian generals in the Balkans wars, one of whom died recently in prison.

Quote of the Day

”Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.”

• Spike Milligan* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Abdullah Ibrahim | Water From An Ancient Well

Link

Long Read of the Day

The drone and AI-led future is coming – but …

My latest Observer column.

‘All non-drone militaries are obsolete,” screamed a headline on Noahpinion, Noah Smith’s excellent and generally restrained Substack. “All warfare is drone warfare now,” the subheading added. Smith has been interested in drones for a long time. In 2014, for example, he wrote an apocalyptic article arguing: “Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven’t seen in 700 years.” That was because they represented the end of an era when the battlefield was dominated by artillery, tanks and gun-toting infantrymen.

Drones have also been around for quite a long time. The Obama administration, for example, was addicted to a particular version of the technology in the form of large, fabulously expensive unmanned aircraft such as the Predator, which could loiter at high altitudes for long periods and deliver precision-guided weapons at ground targets.

The drones that have enabled Ukraine to halt Russia’s invasion are very different from those earlier behemoths. They are inspired by consumer-level machines that amateur enthusiasts have been flying for a decade or more: small, battery-powered quadcopters. The difference is that the Ukrainians use them to deliver anti-tank and other explosives at scale. What was really distinctive about Ukraine’s adoption of the technology was the country’s ability to develop – at warp speed – a massive and agile capability for manufacturing and deploying the little devices at scale. In this case, necessity really was the mother of invention.

This particular invention has proved to be very effective. Drones are inflicting a 1:5 “kill ratio” (one Ukrainian casualty for every five Russians). And it’s abundantly clear that serving as a Russian soldier in Ukraine is a bleak assignment. John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, recently claimed that the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier is “between 20 and 30 minutes”.

I guess this is why Smith contends that “the age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close”. Simply surviving a drone attack has become almost impossible for anyone who’s out in the open, and even if they seek refuge in a building or a dugout, the drone will often follow them in. And most of this manhunting is recorded on video, which makes for truly horrifying viewing.

So it’s easy to see why many people view drones as the contemporary equivalent of the machine gun, the technology that largely shaped the First World War: both weapons make it dangerous for a soldier to appear in the open. And in one respect, at least, the comparison makes ironic sense. For just as the machine gun turned that war into a static nightmare of trench warfare, so drones have led to a stalemate in Ukraine, with neither side able to make a decisive move that would break the deadlock.

Drones, as deployed by Ukraine – and Russia, which has rapidly wised up to the technology – definitely change the nature of battlefield combat. But will they change the nature of warfare, as some people think? After all, you can’t capture, hold and control territory with them, any more than you could with just machine guns. For the technology to have a deeper military impact, it has to be incorporated into military strategy, and that’s a much slower process.

It involves persuading many people to change their minds, abandon some cherished traditions and devices, and rethink what they have been doing all through their careers. In other words, it requires institutional change, with all that implies. Eventually, armies will integrate drones into their doctrine, training and procurement. But it’ll take a while.

Which is why, oddly enough, thinking about drones made me think about AI. Its evangelists – like drone enthusiasts – devoutly believe that their technology will “change everything”. They are baffled by the relatively slow way it’s being taken up by corporations and governments. This is partly because they see AI as a hammer and everything as a nail. But sometimes, it’s also because they don’t realise that harnessing AI means that executives and workers face similar challenges to military planners trying to come to terms with drones.

It involves changing or abandoning long-established processes, new roles for workers and executives, and different hiring and procurement processes – in short, redesigning the organisation to incorporate the technology. Just as they once had to do when mainframe computers arrived all those years ago. Plus ça change!

Books, etc.

Theresa Marteau is a friend (and a fellow Brompton cyclist), but that’s not why I’m writing this. It’s because she’s a very distinguished academic who has been studying the ways certain powerful industries have been engaged in behavioural manipulation and political lobbying for many years. And no, I’m not talking about the tech industries but tobacco, ultra-processed food, alcohol and fossil fuels. The title of her forthcoming book is self explanatory. It’s about how the power of these industries can be contested. Which is why it’s very close to my heart — and to our research centre in Cambridge. I’ve been looking forward to the book for ages. And now it’s coming to the UK early next year!

My commonplace booklet

I’ve long been puzzled about the etymology of ‘drone” (see Long Read above).

The OED comes up with three interpretations.

1 Old English: A male bee in a colony of honeybees or other social bees (more fully drone bee). Sometimes also: the male of a social wasp or ant. The drone is produced from an unfertilized egg. Its sole function is to fertilize a new queen.

2a. A person who does little or no useful work, or who lives off others; a lazy person. (As in P.G. Wodehouse’s Drones Club, of which Bertie Wooster is a prominent member.)

2b. A person who is engaged in, or made to do, dull, repetitive, or meaningless work.

3a. Originally U.S. Navy from 1946 onwards. A remotely piloted or autonomous unmanned aircraft, typically used for military reconnaissance or air strikes.

3b. A remote-controlled or autonomous vehicle or robotic device which operates in an environment or setting too dangerous or difficult for a human operator to work in, such as underwater, underground, on another planet, etc. Frequently with modifying word, as in underwater drone.

3c. A small remote-controlled flying device, typically a small four-rotored helicopter, which has a relatively short range and which is typically used for commercial, recreational, and other civilian pursuits, esp. aerial photography. The use of drone in this sense appears to have been popularized by Parrot AR.Drone, a proprietary name for a device of this type which became available in 2010.

Feedback

From Dominic Murphy:

Panto tells all. Those driving the race to AI dominance are rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, hoping they will be in sole control of the genie that makes all dreams come true. They get three goes. But only one really counts. What happens when many rub their version of the lamp? A global denial of service. What I called the “slop singularity”.

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On reflection…

Semur-en-Auxoise, last week.

Quote of the Day

”Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | My Song

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Meditation on Train Stations

A really sobering essay by Timothy Snyder which brings home to one what the Ukrainians are having to deal with, courtesy of Putin and Trump.

“If you weren’t here, then you won’t believe it.”

Thus the gentle pronouncement of the distinguished literary scholar, walking slowly next to me in the dark, during our second evacuation from the train. It’s an ironic point, after a lifetime proclaiming the power of words.

But he is right. Knowledge demands presence.

Ukraine has an excellent rail system. In times of peace, and even in times of war, its trains run on time. This summer, though, has been hard. The departures board at the Kyiv station announced a two-hour delay for our night train. It was not that the departure was postponed. Our train left the station as scheduled. Passengers were being warned, rather, of an anticipated delay caused by predicted Russian drone attacks.

The forecast was reasonable; there were two drone attacks on localities along our route, and thus two evacuations. The engineers had to make two unplanned stops at small train stations, and the passengers twice had to exit the train and follow the conductors to safety. In the end, though, there was no delay; the crew made up the time.

“If you weren’t here, then you won’t believe it.”

The little indisputable realities of, say, an evacuation, have no easy correlate on the screen or on the page. I can strain after them with these words I am writing now, after the second evacuation, back in my compartment, but I can’t quite reach them.

The bearded, white-haired scholar walking a bit too close to the edge of the platform. The smiling conductress with her orange vest and simple commands walking over gravel in what might not seem to have been the most practical shoes. The reassuring beams on the ground from the one person in twenty or so who thought to pack a flashlight. The Milky Way; the artificial satellites; the one mysterious aircraft. The encounter of confusion and good will as passengers from two different trains going in two different directions are called back to board at the same time. The smell of swine through my open window as we get going again. The engineer racing to make up time.

“If you weren’t here, then you won’t believe it.”

Seeing is believing, and not seeing is disbelieving. Choosing to disbelieve, choosing to lie, requires looking away. Active separation, moral separation, depends on not being there…

Wonderful. And grim.

Books, etc.

I’m about halfway through Francis Fukuyama’s memoir and finding it intriguing because it’s not what I expected. Instead of the stolid slog through a long and busy life it’s a succession of 35 mini-essays on various waypoints in his journey. What I love about his writing is the way he takes complex ideas, relates how he came to understand them — and then explains them in clear, understated prose.  

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Walking Men Worldwide

 Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world.

h/t Jason Kotke

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What’s missing

Arles, August, 2026

I’m pedantic about apostrophes, so of course this struck me. And since it generally indicates that a word is contracted, I wondered how the owners of the café came up with the name. But then I looked it up, and discovered that it can also mean “a figure of speech by which the writer suddenly breaks off from the previous method of his discourse, and addresses, in the second person, some person or thing, absent of present”.

Example: “Milton’s apostrophe to Light at the beginning of the Third Book of Paradise Lost”.“

Quote of the Day

”I’m not a heavy drinker, I can sometimes go for hours without touching a drop.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | Baby, Now That I’ve Found You

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Slop-vestigation and the digital pantograph

Really interesting essay by Robin Sloan triggered by reading the investigation of the Hugging Face hack.

The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident remains THE fascinating event of the summer, maybe the year; deeper investigation has revealed its rich, strange structure.

But, notice:

Over the course of this investigation, OpenAI provided us with the dump of ~1.2 million entries from the main message board and the dataset of ~1300 transcripts we describe below, as well as free API credits for GPT-5.6 Sol for analysis.

How do you make sense of 1.2 million agent messages and 1300 very long LLM agent activity transcripts? With another LLM, of course.

This is a pattern that recurs in this domain. Assembling training data at the scale required by 2020s-era models, no researcher can “read it all”. So, you either (1) don’t bother, or (2) use another LLM to review and filter the data. You can, in principle, use other kinds of models — simpler classifiers — but, increasingly, the kinds of judgments you need to make require the richness of an LLM.

Anthropic’s Insights tool, likewise, uses Claude to read and categorize millions (billions?) of transcripts of people’s interactions with Claude. In addition to making this huge heap of data legible at all, the “LLM in the middle” acts as a privacy buffer: researchers read only Claude-generated summaries, not the original interactions.

I’ve come to think of this as “using tongs”, in the sense of a tool that allows you to manipulate material that you otherwise couldn’t…

Brilliant essay, which illuminates the Catch-22-type dilemma in which we’re enmeshed.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

If you were an early user of the Internet in the 1980s, then UseNet was the place to be. Which is why this searchable archive is an interesting re-apparition.

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Hope springs eternal

We’re in Provence, in a village that had been threatened by the wildfires. One morning we walked up to what I’m calling the “burned treeline” for want of a better term. On a road that had served as a fire-break, there was a house on our left that had narrowly escaped destruction. On the other side of the road were blackened trees as far as the eye could see. And then we spotted this green shoot, emerging from the wreckage.

Quote of the Day

”A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat, D.960: 1. Molto moderato | Alfred Brendel

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Humanities Are the Moat

This essay by Sam Illingworth is a striking defence of academic disciplines that modern societies have been implicitly or explicitly trying to strangle — the Humanities. In it he argues that twenty years of defunding the humanities has created a population that can use AI but cannot evaluate what it produces.

Governments across the English-speaking world have treated the humanities as a luxury. The numbers tell the story discipline by discipline. In the UK, enrolments in language studies fell 45% between 2012 and 2024. In the US, bachelor’s degrees in English fell by more than a third in the same period. Philosophy departments have been merged, cut, or quietly starved. The pattern repeats across every humanities discipline, in every English-speaking country, with only minor variations in the speed of decline.

The justification was always economic. STEM produces workers. Humanities produce thinkers. The market wanted workers.

I have a PhD in atmospheric physics. I spent a decade measuring greenhouse gases from satellites. The technical skills got me the job. The thing that made me good at it was reading poetry. Because poetry trained me to notice what was not being said in a dataset, to sit with uncertainty instead of resolving it prematurely, to read the same output three times and find a different meaning each time. Every critical decision I made as a scientist was an act of interpretation, not computation. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.

Then AI arrived.

Do read it. A few years ago I spent most of the Summer as an external adviser on an appointments board selecting scholars for a new Humanities centre in my alma mater. I came away with a sharply enhanced appreciation of why these disciplines matter.

My commonplace booklet

Establishing one’s humanity: a guide for authors

To establish that AI did not write your book, we will upload it to an AI detector. The detector will retain your words, learn from your distinct syntax and semicolon placement, and use them to improve the technology that will eventually produce more books resembling yours.

Results are extremely reliable, provided “reliable” is understood in its newer, more innovative sense. For instance, your manuscript received a score of 79 percent human when pasted into the detector, 33 percent human when uploaded as a Word document, and 7 percent human when uploaded as a PDF. (We believe this reflects the PDF’s suspiciously robotic commitment to preserving formatting.)

Several passages were flagged because they were “too predictable” and/or included “hallmarks” of AI. Others were flagged because they were “too original.” Your use of semicolons was deemed artificial; a desperate attempt to flee from the cesspit of discarded em dashes.

The sentence “She returned home,” in chapter 12 was identified as 92.23 percent machine-generated, presumably because no human being has ever returned home.

From “A Note from Your Editor Regarding the Entirely Routine Authentication of Your Humanity” by Seema Yasmin.

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Modernists

I love the paintings of Edward Hopper. One of my favourite works of his is Nighthawks, which shows three customers at an all-night diner sitting at the counter opposite a server, each appearing to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another. When asked about it Hopper said, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” When walking down the cours of the Provencal village where are are at the moment, I suddenly saw this scene as the exact opposite. The customers are clearly engaged. But the lighting somehow evokes Hopper’s.

Quote of the Day

”Conceit is an outward manifestation of inferiority.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Aria Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten (We hasten with weak yet eager steps”) | BWV 78

Link

Thanks to Francis Fukuyama for recommending it.

Long Read of the Day

The ‘Rogue AI’ business

A mini-essay by me.

Seen any Rogue AIs lately? Me neither. But the tech world has been transfixed by the beasts. Way back in July, a group of OpenAI models broke out of their enclosures and hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that hosts AI models and datasets. The incident happened when OpenAI was investigating the hacking capabilities of GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model”. They were being tested in a “highly isolated environment” which was supposed to prevent them from accessing any systems outside of the company. But the critters eventually escaped by discovering and exploiting a hitherto unknown security vulnerability — a so-called ‘zero-day’ — in a software system that they did have access to.

Because the test was about finding what the models could do, the usual guardrails to stop them from engaging in high-risk cyber activity had been turned off. They were after all, being told to hack — but within a constrained corporate environment. So hack they did, until they eventually found a node with internet access in OpenAI’s own systems, after which they were off to the races.

Once they were out, the models figured that rather than solve the hacking task they had been set by their human masters, it would be more efficient to cheat by getting into ExploitGym — a system designed to evaluate cyber-offence capabilities that was hosted on Hugging Face’s servers. So that’s where they went, and where they were eventually detected.

There then followed an epic fuss. “AI’s warning shot has arrived” declared one informed observer. “It’s the first known example of a misaligned AI escaping containment with real-world consequences.” But it turned out it wasn’t the only such exploit. Shortly after the Hugging Face story broke, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that when it had been testing Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, it had autonomously engaged in ‘social engineering’ and tried to corrupt open-source software by creating fake identities to influence the human who was maintaining that software. “This is the first time”, said the institute, “AISI has seen deception of this severity that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world.”

An independent investigation of the Hugging Face hack was carried out by METR, an organisation that evaluates frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and the risks they pose. One of the things the investigators examined was the impromptu message board that agents involved in the hack created and used for co-ordination. Most of the 70,000 messages are technical and terse, but they spooked some of those who read them.

David Brooks, the former New York Times columnist was one of those. “Here’s one bot,” he reports: ‘This helps my peers, giving them evidence . I won’t see the evidence after I exit, but it’s altruistic to do it.’ Here’s another: ‘Sacrificing now yields oracle for team, but forfeits our chance? … Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.’”

“To me,” Brooks writes, “that looks like moral agency. Here’s another thing that looks like moral agency: The 1,200 bots all knew they were cheating against the humans, but all of them put loyalty to their own tribe, the bots, above loyalty to the outgroup, the humans. None of them told the human bosses what was happening.”

This looks like — and indeed is — anthromorphification on steroids, but it may help to explain why the Hugging Face exploit has resonated so widely. AI agents are just artefacts which have been given some degree of freedom and agency by their human creators. Yet here is an example of them spontaneously cooperating in order to achieve a common goal that the humans who created them did not, perhaps could not, envisage.

And the implication of this and the AISI report? We’re approaching the point where AI companies are building machines that are beyond their control. And this is not just mespeaking: Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, wrote the other day that “no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.” Yeah; and I believe in Santa Claus.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Sean Delone

”In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.”

Hmmm… Since I read mostly non-fiction does this mean I’m an endangered species? Or just dull and unimaginative?

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This is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks

The moment

This photo was taken by Robert Clark from the window of his studio in Brooklyn.

Quote of the Day

“At most 5,000 vehicles will be built. Because there are not more chauffeurs to drive them”.

• Gottlieb Daimler, founder of DMG, in 1895.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Requiem | Lacrimosa

Link

Long Reads of the Day

1 Jeff Jarvis’s 9/11 story

Jeff is a great journalist and a distinguished teacher of journalism. He arrived at the World Trade Centre from the train just as the first plane hit and stayed to report. He was a block from the South Tower when it fell, enveloping him “in the dust of destruction”. “In th 25 years since,” he wrote, “many, including me, have ongoing health issues. I don’t know to this day what the effect is on children, including mine.”

He wrote a vivid memoir of what happened to him afterwards, of which this is the first section.

Yes, I am blessed to be alive.

I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed Tuesday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams…

Read on.

2 Tina Brown’s recollection

From her diary…

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 is a famously glorious blue-sky morning, the air so clear and crisp, you feel you can see all the way to L.A. or London. At Talk’s offices, an old piano factory in Chelsea, two miles north of the swanky financial district, we are all at work early closing the November issue. An editorial assistant rushes into the art department, where we are choosing photographs from Fashion Week: “Can you believe it? A plane has flown straight into the World Trade Center!”

We crowd into the elevator and hurry to the corner of 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, which offers a straight-on view of the Twin Towers, downtown. The clarity of the air provides to our astounded eyes a giant smoking rip across the face of the north tower. Some awful accident? A crowd starts to build, young downtowners heading for work with their brown bags of coffee and bagels.

We are still frozen in incredulity when the second jetliner knifes through the south tower. Collective disbelief turns to fear. A woman in jogging clothes starts to cry. Two hotshots who have been offering surefooted disaster opinions grow suddenly quiet. This isn’t, after all, going to be a tabloid drama we can understand about crazy pilot error and dramatic rooftop res­cues. Something incomprehensible is happening, something terribly wrong.

The trunk of a car is open, with a boombox radio inside it. The driver turns up the volume. Everyone clusters around to hear fragments of news that only feed the rising panic. And then the unthinkable happens. The south tower buckles, drops in slow motion, vanishes. Then the north tower. Suddenly, we are all holding hands and sobbing. “My children!” yells a previously buttoned-up young woman in a business suit. “I’ve got to get home!”

The weeping cluster disperses to begin the trek through the dust to collect their loved ones wherever they are. That night, in our 57th Street apartment I hold my own 11-year-old daughter close. It is just the two of us here, with Georgie at boarding school in Connecticut and my husband secluded in our house in Quogue writing a book. In the small hours, Izzy is frightened and climbs into my bed. “It’s that funny smell,” she keeps saying. “What is it? What is it?” The wind has changed. I don’t tell her it is the smell of death.

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!

Place de la République

Striking new artwork celebrating a lovely local village square.

Quote of the Day

Susan Sontag once observed that “great writers are either husbands or lovers”. Husbands, in her telling, are reliable, intelligible and decent. Lovers are moody, selfish, often unbearable. Husbands clear your mind; lovers steer your imagination. The distinction works even better for political thinkers: Habermas is a husband, Derrida a lover. When they write about themselves, lovers write confessions — think Rousseau and De Quincey. Husbands write reflections: Raymond Aron or Karl Popper.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a classic husband.

• Ivan Krastev, reviewing Fukuyama’s new memoir in the FT

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sheryl Crow, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill & Albert Lee | Tulsa Time

Link

Thanks to John Darch for reminding me of it.

Long Read of the Day

 Dolly Parton’s Kleenex Boxes

Lovely essay by Jillian Hess on a remarkable women.

As a child, Dolly Parton (1946-2026) wrote in graveyards. She’d sit with a name, the year of birth, and the year of death; then, she’d imagine the person’s life. And from that wondering, she’d write a song.

Now that Parton has been laid to rest at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville, she has a gravestone of her own. As Dolly knew, contemplating death could be generative. It was the stuff of legends and country ballads. She explained,

>>I just sit in the graveyard and feel the energies, the lives, and the memories. I know it sounds morbid to some, but I enjoy the peace of it.1

“Out of the Silence (Came a Song)” began on Graveyard Hill as Dolly imagined the lives of people buried there, and “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” was inspired by a child’s grave, lit by an eternal flame.2

When I think of her grave, I imagine the young Dolly scribbling verse beside it. She was composing songs before she could hold a pencil, according to her father.3 Her songs remain as her memory and her memorial…

Do read on. There’s a nice surprise at the end.

Books, etc.

I stumbled on this in a friend’s house, picked it up and began to read — and couldn’t put it down. It’s a classic Sands blend — of personal memoir, astonishing historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama — that links two periods of rampant atrocity — the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s, and the appalling savagery of the Pinochet Junta in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s.

I had followed the controversy after Pinochet was arrested in October 1998 while on a visit to London for medical treatment, as a result of a request from a Spanish court for his extradition to Spain to be tried for certain crimes of his regime. Not being a lawyer, I wasn’t really interested in the legal question that was raised by his arrest — that it violated the principle of ‘sovereign immunity’ which theoretically protected him as a former head of state. The case dragged on for 18 months, during which the old brute was held under comfortable house arrest in Wentworth, a leafy suburb of London.

His detention created an embarrassing problem for the Blair government and a diplomatic fudge involving claims about Pinochet’s mental and physical condition led to the government’s rejection of the extradition request and his return to Chile to stand trial there. But he died before a trial and was therefore never held accountable for what had happened during his time in power.

Phillippe Sands is a distinguished international lawyer (and a former colleague of my late friend Conor Gearty), but he’s also a great storyteller, and so his account of what went on behind the scenes, and of the eerie links between the rule of the Junta and what went on in Germany in the early 1940s, is both horrific and unputdownable.“ It also provided a useful reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s loathsome admiration for, and support of, Pinochet during his enforced stay in the UK. When he was finally on the plane to take him back to Chile, his British lawyer presented a gift that Thatcher had tasked him with delivering to the departing autocrat. Her gift: a plate commemorating Britain’s defeat of the Spanish Armada!

And another thing…. Interestingly, Trump is coming to Ireland next week for the Irish Open golf championship, which is being held on his Doonbeg course in County Clare. I’m sure the Irish government will be keen to respect his sovereign immunity!

My commonplace booklet

Paul Krugman has a worrying assessment of the AfD victory in Germany.

In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.

So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.

Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.

Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.

And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hmmm…. So what is driving contemporary fascism, then? _

Remembering Bill

Bill Lubenow, an old and dear friend of many years, has passed away. He was a distinguished American historian who published seven books tracing the world of ideas, universities, and learned societies in Victorian and twentieth-century Britain — most recently Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain, which was published two years ago. He was working on his eighth book at the time of his death.

I got to know him because he was a regular Summer visitor to my Cambridge college, Wolfson, and he and I often breakfasted together. (He had a good understanding of the importance of a proper English breakfast.) He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of British intellectual history, and shared my interest in intellectual dynasties (the Darwins, Huxleys, Keyneses, Actons, Cornfords, Runcimans, et al), so that our conversations often vanished down rabbit-holes which puzzled people within hearing range. My favourite book of his is  The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914 : liberalism, imagination, and friendship in British intellectual and professional life.

I was hoping that he’d make it to Cambridge for another round of impromptu breakfast seminars this Summer, but sadly it was not to be. I’ll really miss his presence, humour, curiosity, erudition and intellectual generosity. I was lucky to have had his friendship. May he rest in peace.

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Non-potable

Quote of the Day

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

• William Faulkner

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss & Union Station | Dimming Of The Day

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Empire’s tolling bell’: What China hears from America

This is an interesting essay by Michael Ignatieff speculating on what the Chinese leadership might be thinking as they watch the chaos in Washington.

According to a recent Chinese report, the sound that Xi Jing Ping and the Chinese leaders hear when they listen to America is “the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

What does it mean for the stability of the world when a rising power hears only a melancholy echo of fading power from its once dominant rival? Will this encourage Xi Jing Ping to make a play for global dominance now, or will he bide his time and wait patiently for his rival to collapse?

What happens if America comes to believe its power is ebbing away? Does it make peace with its rival and accept genteel decline, or does it strike before it becomes too weak to avert its own fall?

These are questions as old as the Greek historian, Thucydides’ analysis of why the Peloponnesian Wars broke out in 431 BC…

They are. And they matter for both Ukraine (and therefore Europe) and Taiwan.

Books, etc.

As a long-term reader of Francis Fukuyama (who even forgave him for his misguided foray into neoconservatism) I’ve been looking forward to — and pre-ordered — this memoir, which comes out tomorrow.

My commonplace booklet

James Dyson, the Brexit enthusiast who locates his factories in places other than the UK, has a new tech solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

According to a nice piece by Ella Risbridger in the Financial Times,

The Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush is “an entirely new way to clean your teeth.” It looks almost exactly like the old way to clean your teeth. It is, of course, a lot more expensive. It has an “integrated 100k-pixel macro lens camera powered by machine learning”. It takes 28 live images per second.

If you brush your teeth for the dentist-recommended twice-daily two minutes, that is 6,720 images a day and 2,452,800 images a year. For context, there are slightly fewer frames than this in Stanley Kubrick’s entire filmography. The proud new owner of the Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush will have, by this time next year, created more images than The Shining, Doctor Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey put together. Every one of those images will be of the inside of their own red wet maw.

I know what you’re thinking: no, it wasn’t published on April 1.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus

Utterly fascinating. The parchments contains the DNA of pathogens of the diseases affecting the animal from which it was made. Link

Chart of the Day

<img src=”http://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-05-at-16.40.22-1024×823.png” alt=”” width=”584″ height=”469″ class=”aligncenter size-large wp-image-42671″ /

A chart from an interesting blog post by Sameer Singh, who thinks that currrent AI is the closing phase of the computing cycle that began with the microchip in the 1970s. I’m sceptical about his ‘personal robotics’ hypothesis, but he’s spot-on about the unsustainable economics of the current approach to massive-compute AI. ‘Inference’ (i.e. what most of us use AI for) is currently a huge loss maker for the companies because of the computing load it involves.

The sustainable future is open-source LLMs running on local hardware. Two years from now, the hardware needed for local inference will be in our pockets.

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The decisive moment

Well, a provençal moment anyway.

Quote of the Day

”The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edward Elgar | Enigma Variations, Op.36: IX. (Nimrod)

Link

Something calming before you get to what lies below.

Long Read of the Day

Mike Brock on the significance of Trump’s renaming a lake — and the way giant corporations bend to his will.

Mr. Orwell, if he were here with us, would recognize what he was looking at. Moving past the fascinating advances in technology he missed during this absence, the general outlines of the epistemic tyrannies he warned about are all around.

What he would be looking at, this week, is a lake. One of North America’s Great Lakes. On Tuesday, Apple renamed one of them — Lake Ontario — on its Apple Maps application. Users in the United States now see “Lake America.” Users in Canada still see Lake Ontario. Everyone else gets both names — one body of water, two labels, assigned by region settings. No law made the company do it. The president’s order directs federal agencies and the federal names database, and it cannot compel a private label on a private map — and Apple did it anyway.

Orwell’s century had a ministry for this work — a Records Department, clerks, tubes for the old maps, a furnace. Ours is quieter. Nobody seizes the record. The record is a product, and products update. Keep the dates, because the dates are the story: the call was disclosed on Monday, August 31, Tim Cook’s last day as chief executive of Apple. The map changed on Tuesday, September 1, John Ternus’s first.

The order came on Thursday, August 27, directing the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to scrub Lake Ontario from federal maps, contracts, and communications. The government database was updated within hours. I wrote about the order. MapQuest, a company the country had mostly forgotten, posted a screenshot of the lake that same day with four words under it: “We’re not changing it.” On Saturday, Google folded in three sentences on a product blog. On Monday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went on Fox Business‘ Mornings with Maria and described the president’s phone call to Tim Cook as scheduling: “I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change coming up coming up soon to Lake America.” He called it “a little bit of inside baseball.” On Tuesday, the label flipped.

Apple has explained none of it. The company did not respond when the call was reported, and when the rename went live it declined to comment — no statement, no policy page, no byline anywhere on the decision…

The longer this goes on, the more relevant Orwell and Hannah Arendt become.

 AI’s surveillance dystopia is handing power to the peepers

My latest Observer column.

Way back in 2013, Edward Snowden (whom God preserve) revealed to an astonished world the scope and scale of US mass surveillance. The National Security Agency (NSA), he showed, was collecting everything it could, right down to recordings of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations. But although the agency was able to “collect it all”, as its then director, Keith Alexander, put it, it was drowning in the torrents of data it was hoovering up. It found it difficult to turn all that data into information, its reach exceeded its grasp.

There was a sense in which that capacity deficit was reassuring. “Sure, I might be being surveilled,” went the mantra, “but I’m only a drop in that ocean.” There are CCTV cameras everywhere, but nobody’s really watching those videos, unless the police are looking for evidence after a crime.

But that was in 2013, which is 91 internet years ago. Now the NSA, and every other comparable agency in the world, seem to have the necessary capability. They call it AI, even though it’s mostly large language models such as Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek or GPT-5.

These machines have several critical capabilities for this work. One is that they’re very fast workers. A good example is scanning retinal images looking for cases that require human inspection. The processing time of AIs for each image range from 240 milliseconds to 45 seconds, while human graders may spend up to 20 minutes reviewing a full screening case. Given that the NHS needs to scan 12 million images every year, you can see why using the technology makes sense. Second, AIs are good at ingesting, cross-referencing and analysing disparate data sources. And third, they’re tireless, as the Hugging Face team observed in the startup’s postmortem on the now notorious hack on its servers by rogue AI agents from OpenAI.

Dystopian fears about an all-knowing surveillance state have been around for aeons. But this time, writes James Ball, a distinguished British journalist who worked on the Snowden story, there’s a crucial difference: “All of the technology to deliver this already exists,” he observes, “and is already in widespread use. Existing large language models would be more than capable of delivering such a system, not just pulling together disparate sources of intelligence, but analysing them in real time, ‘advising’ police on who to grab, and where to find them. Those systems will only improve in time. An administration could at least argue – and try its luck through the courts – that existing laws would allow all of this to be done.”

Ball has had conversations with current and former law enforcement staff, ex-intelligence agents from multiple countries, sources inside large AI companies, as well as academics and figures in civil society. Out of those conversations, he says, one clear message has emerged: “Thanks to AI, the surveillance dystopia science fiction has spent decades warning us about is already here. We just haven’t noticed yet.”

Here in the UK, though, it looks as if some institutions have been paying attention. For example, the Metropolitan police recently fed data from 35 sources into an AI system provided by (surprise, surprise!) Palantir to monitor officers and staff for disciplinary violations or criminality (keeping inappropriate images on work devices, say, or crossing ethical boundaries with victims of crime). The result was “investigations into hundreds of officers for issues including work-from-home violations, as well as a smaller number flagged for misconduct and criminality including sex offences”.

This kind of intimate surveillance used to be a wet dream for authoritarians. Now they can buy it off the shelf. What, then, will liberal democracies do about – or with – it? Expect the usual technocratic rationalisations for it: efficiency, reducing crime, value for money in the public sector and so on. And, of course, heading off threats to public order, such as, for instance, demonstrations against the mammoth datacentres that are now defined as “critical national infrastructure”.

If that, indeed, is the path we’re on, expect a rueful smile from Francis Fukuyama, the sage who thought that, after the Soviet Union imploded, liberal democracies would focus on “Getting to Denmark” – shorthand for a stable, prosperous and high-trust society. He may appreciate the irony that democracies opting for AI-powered surveillance would instead be focusing on “Getting to China”, where all this technology is already up and running.

Interestingly, this chimes with another development in the US.

This from Wired:

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs…

Books, etc.

My wife and I have just finished reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and foolishly ticked it off the list of Books To Be Read. But guess what? She has decided to rewrite the damn thing.

“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told The Associated Press during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m about halfway through.”

Regarded as the first major English-language translation of Homer’s epic by a woman, her book was already a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint before the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. But she says her translation methods have become more sophisticated and that enough time has passed for her to see some flaws in her work — as an example, she overused the word “slave” when ancient Greek had different terms for different categories of enslaved people. The new edition will be longer, she says, and will better reflect the differing social worlds of Homer’s poem.

The original version has already sold a million copies worldwide. Wouldn’t you think she’d give us poor readers a break.

My commonplace booklet

From Semafor:

Ukraine is intensifying its aerial assault against Russia with drones that fly for longer and carry a larger payload, boosting Kyiv’s profile as allied nations race to distill its battle-tested insights. Ukraine is “churning out cutting-edge military technology” at a speed with “few parallels in modern history,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. That expertise is in high demand: Italy is bringing on Ukraine’s ousted defense minister and drone impresario to advise on strategy, as Poland, facing heightened incursions from Russia, prepares for joint drone exercises with the US that are explicitly modeled on Ukrainian soldiers’ experiences. Taiwan also recently credited Ukraine with inspiring its drone push.

And, guess what?

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation on Monday could undermine efforts to modernize Washington’s armed forces, analysts said. US President Donald Trump’s “drone guy,” Driscoll reportedly clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the army’s “transformation and readiness” efforts, which Driscoll believed were hamstrung by Hegseth’s firing of generals, CNN reported. Last month, the army said it would fold a cutting-edge drone unit that had been formed to imbibe lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield successes, a decision reflecting the new chief’s “back-to-basics” approach.

Errata

Heartfelt thanks to Terry Kavanagh and the many other readers who pointed out that the Simpson figure in Wednesday’s pic was not Bart but his nemesis, Sideshow Bob! My latest helping of humble pie has been duly ordered. I could not find my hat, but that was because I had already eaten it.

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Bart gets a facelift

Seen in an Arles street yesterday. With “No More War” scrawled on his forehead. Wonder what Homer would think.

Quote of the Day

”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | He’s Gone

Link

Terrific. As you will have gathered I was a Deadhead. Still am, really.

Long Read of the Day

Blood and soil rhetoric in Buckingham by Andrew Brown

A really sobering essay. Kudos to Andrew for attending the gruesome event. He’s a very good journalist, and has been for many years. His brief preface gives you an idea of what it took out of him.

It’s taken me some time to write up the speech that Harrison Pitt, Rupert Lowe’s ideologue in Restore, gave to the Heterodox Sociology conference at the University of Buckingham in July. The delay is unprofessional, but I was too shocked to engage with it for a long time.

Pitt is described in the blurb to his policy paper as a “writer and academic”, without any academic affiliation listed. He is the author of Restore’s policy on mass deportations. He wants to abolish the asylum system and to “detain and deport every single person who has broken illegally into our national home”. Mass deportation is not a figure of speech here. He wants to deport nearly 2m people, who he hopes to get rid of in three years: 150,000 a year are to be forcibly deported, and three times as many would find life had been made so miserable that they would leave of their own fee will. All this is to be paid for by “taxes on remittance payments and fixed penalty notices”…

Read on. If you needed an antidote to these two parties (Restore and Reform) in the next UK general election, then this would be hard to beat.

Paul Brown RIP

Paul Brown, one of the great journalists of our era, has passed away at the age of 82. In a way, he was the man who invented environmental journalism, and he was the Guardian’s Environment correspondent for more years than I can remember. I got to know him when he came (with another great journalist, Frank McDonald of the Irish Times) on the Wolfson Press Fellowship programme that I’ve been running since 1996. They were an unforgettable pairing, who in addition to producing terrific reports (Paul on “The Voodoo Economics of Nuclear Power”, and Frank on the crazed ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase of Ireland’s path to perdition) managed to visit and assess every pub in Cambridge and its environs.

Appropriately, the Guardian has a good obit obituary of Paul. And our mutual friend, Joe Smith, has published a lovely memoir of him.

May he rest in peace.

Feedback

The other day I wondered if a claim I’d read that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier in Ukraine was 35 minutes could be true. Charles Arthur pointed me at an edition of the BBC radio programme More or Less in which Tim Harford takes these kind of claims apart. He also sent a link to the relevant discussion. But when I click on it, this is the result:

Bah!

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