King’s re-framed

An unusual view of one of Cambridge’s iconic buildings.

Quote of the Day

”We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”   Jean Baudrillard

This insight, that reality has been replaced by representation, was what inspired the movie The Matrix.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | An die Musik, D. 547 (Live at Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2023) | Lise Davidsen

Link

Short and exquisite.

Long Read of the Day

 On Teaching Machines to Predict Death

Interesting essay by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad which examines how AI mortality-prediction models can perpetuate healthcare inequities and create harmful self-fulfilling prophecies.

The French poet Jean de La Fontaine has a famous quote that “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” We find echoes of this phenomenon in global literature, whether it’s Oedipus in the Greek Myths, Rostum and Sohrab from Iran, or the story of Kamsa and Krishna in the Hindu tradition. There are elements of self-full filling prophecy that we are seeing in the world of predictive modeling.

Consider the use of AI and machine learning models to predict risk of mortality in an ICU setting. Some of these models have extremely high accuracy and precision. They do in milliseconds what it would take a team of clinicians hours to synthesize. The predictive power of such models need to be contextualized however: A mortality prediction model is trained on historical data i.e., on what happened to patients who looked like this, had these labs, were managed in this way. But the historical data does not merely record biology, it also records medicine as it was practiced. This includes all its established patterns, its habits, its inequities, and its mistakes.

Consider a well known finding that has been often used as a cautionary tale: in a certain historical ICU dataset, patients with a diagnosis of asthma had lower predicted mortality than otherwise similar patients without it. This seems absurd, asthma is a serious respiratory condition. When researchers looked closely, they realized that the problem was not about asthma biologically but it was about care. Asthma patients were more likely to have their respiratory distress recognized early. They arrived with better documentation, better advocates, better access to specialists who knew them. The asthma diagnosis was not a protective biological factor. It was a marker of a particular kind of patient i.e., one who had navigated the healthcare system in a way that produced better documentation, faster escalation, more attentive management…

Remembering James Mayall 

On Friday I went to the Memorial event for James Mayall organised by his Cambridge college to honour the memory of an extraordinary man. I was there because I had been lucky enough to have had his friendship, and because he had changed the way I think.

I first got to know him in the mid-1990s when he was Professor of International Relations in Cambridge and I was writing A Brief History of the Future, on the origins of the Internet. He was emphatically not a techie but he was intrigued by the technology and the impact that a global network might have on the international system. And so we began to meet and talk.

He was one of the wisest people I ever knew. On the one hand he was a formidable scholar who wore his erudition lightly. But he also had a kind of worldly wisdom which came from having travelled very widely, and from working outside of academia. One felt sometimes that James had seen everything, good and bad, about humanity. Among other things, he had been a British Army officer who had served in Africa and elsewhere. And he looked like a handsome Brigadier whose sense of humour had not been surgically removed at Sandhurst.

On one memorable occasion he and I travelled to Seattle for a meeting of the Internet Political Economy Forum, a small discussion group of engineers and international relations scholars which had sprung up after the arrival of the World Wide Web. This particular meeting took place in the Whiteley Centre, a beautiful scholarly retreat on Friday Island in the Puget Sound. (Among its many attractions was the fact that one was transported to it by seaplane!)

One morning there was a particularly animated discussion in the conference room and at one stage James reached over to me and asked (in a whisper) if I’d brought any cigars. I nodded and he suggested we slip outside onto the deck overlooking the Sound for a breath of fresh air (and tobacco). We sat peacefully in the sunshine watching a mega-yacht owned, no doubt, by a Microsoft billionaire, dropping anchor. And after a while he asked, “Do you think that this technology will have the revolutionary impact on the world that your friends inside think?”

I answered — confidently — “yes” because this was indeed what I thought. James sat back meditatively puffing on his cigar and looking quietly thoughtful. After a few minutes, slightly irritated by his reticence, I said “What do you think, James?” He puffed away briefly and then replied: “We’ll see, dear boy, we’ll see.” And at that moment the first inklings of doubt entered my utopian soul! Where it has remained — and festered — ever since. And it’s why, when asked for a brief description of myself, I always reply that I’m a recovering Utopian.

My Commonplace booklet

The bottled-water racket

Henry Mance has a nice piece in the Financial Times arguing that “None of modernity’s silly purchases can compare with bottled water when there is drinkable stuff in the taps.”

He’s right, which is why when that bright smiling waitress asks you “Still or Sparkling?”, the correct answer is “Neither”.

The bottled-water fad, he says, is everywhere.

”Really, it should never have survived the farce that is Fiji Water: a US-owned brand of “natural artesian water” that is extracted more than 5,000 miles from America, while nearly a fifth of Fijians have no domestic access to drinking water. “

Spot on. Mine’s a glass of tap water. Cheers!

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!

Popping up

I know, I know, it looks as though we are starting an opium farm. But they just popped up in a part of the vegetable bed that was lying fallow with no encouragement from us.

Quote of the Day

”People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what’s wrong with it.”

• Noel Coward

I disagree. That’s exactly what’s right about it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dick Gaughan | Ruby Tuesday

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Hidden Cost of Automated Thinking

Thinking about the intrinsic inexplicability of LLMs reminded me of this lovely essay by the Harvard legal scholar Jonathan Zittrain about ‘intellectual debt’. And so I dug it out and re-read it. It’s as good as I remembered. And strangely prescient, given that it was published in 2019.

Here’s how it opens:

Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of instructions and precautions, a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure—make for anodyne reading. The subsection called “Mechanism of Action,” however, contains a sentence that might induce sleeplessness by itself: “The mechanism(s) through which modafinil promotes wakefulness is unknown.”

Provigil isn’t uniquely mysterious. Many drugs receive regulatory approval, and are widely prescribed, even though no one knows exactly how they work. This mystery is built into the process of drug discovery, which often proceeds by trial and error. Each year, any number of new substances are tested in cultured cells or animals; the best and safest of those are tried out in people. In some cases, the success of a drug promptly inspires new research that ends up explaining how it works—but not always. Aspirin was discovered in 1897, and yet no one convincingly explained how it worked until 1995. The same phenomenon exists elsewhere in medicine. Deep-brain stimulation involves the implantation of electrodes in the brains of people who suffer from specific movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease; it’s been in widespread use for more than twenty years, and some think it should be employed for other purposes, including general cognitive enhancement. No one can say how it works.

This approach to discovery—answers first, explanations later—accrues what I call intellectual debt. It’s possible to discover what works without knowing why it works, and then to put that insight to use immediately, assuming that the underlying mechanism will be figured out later. In some cases, we pay off this intellectual debt quickly. But, in others, we let it compound, relying, for decades, on knowledge that’s not fully known.

In the past, intellectual debt has been confined to a few areas amenable to trial-and-error discovery, such as medicine. But that may be changing, as new techniques in artificial intelligence—specifically, machine learning—increase our collective intellectual credit line…

Do read on. It’s good.

Books, etc.

Kieran Setiya has an interesting essay about David Edmond’s biography of “the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of”, Derek Parfit. I never knew him, but I’ve always been intrigued by him, partly because he was married to a lovely former colleague of mine, and also because he was an interesting photographer.

He was also, in some respects, a caricature of academic impracticability. One nice quote from Setiya’s piece captures this elegantly:

Parfit’s theory of personal identity as fundamentally psychological, not physical, is echoed in his relationship to his own body, which he treats, according to a friend and colleague, ‘like a mildly inconvenient golf cart he has to drive around in order to get his mind from Oxford to Boston to New York to New Brunswick’.”

That fits neatly with the image of him conveyed in “How to be Good” a memorable New Yorker profile of him by Larissa MacFarquhar published in 2011.

In the way that he moves and carries himself, Parfit gives the impression of one who is unaware of being looked at, perhaps because he spends so much time alone. He clutches his computer bag. He fidgets. His hair is white and fluffy and has settled into a pageboy of the kind that was fashionable for men in the fifteenth century. He wears the same outfit every day: white shirt, black trousers.

There is something not-there about him, an unphysical, slightly androgynous quality. He lacks the normal anti-social emotions—envy, malice, dominance, desire for revenge. He doesn’t believe that his conscious mind is responsible for the important parts of his work. He pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray. Parfit is less aware than most of the boundaries of his self—less conscious of them and less protective. He is helplessly, sometimes unwillingly, empathetic: he will find himself overcome by the mood of the person he is with, especially if that person is unhappy.

After he married Janet Radcliff-Richards, writes MacFarquhar,

Parfit lost his heart to a beautiful eighteenth-century house near Avebury, a Neolithic henge monument in Wiltshire. He had to have it — he bid the price up and was terribly anxious until the deed was signed. Then, happy to have won his house, he sat in his study with the blinds down. Ten minutes away, there was a glorious bluebell wood, and he loved bluebell woods — one of his fears about global warming was that it would get too hot for bluebells — but Richards couldn’t get him to go there. It existed: that was enough. Eventually, she realized that her need for human company, modest as it was, was greater than he was capable of meeting. They sold the house, she bought a house in London, and he went back to his rooms in All Souls. From then until he retired, more than ten years later, they spent very little time together, although they spoke on the phone several times a day.

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet

I’d often wondered where the term “GI” came from and had always assumed it meant something like “General Induction” as a way of describing military draftees. Turns out, its etymology is much more interesting, as I discovered yesterday when visiting the new exhibition at the American Cemetery in Madingley (which, by the way, is really worth a visit if you happen to be in Cambridge.

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!

A new villager arrives!

Spotted on an evening walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

“I think there are two realities. Yes, AI is far better than a lot of people realize. And yes, it is still pretty bad at a lot of stuff that a lot of people care about (and it may stay that way). Anyone making bets about the future on either side should bear that in mind.”

• Will Douglas Heaven, writing in MIT Tech Review

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Felicity Lott RIP

Mozart | *Ach, ich fühl’s | Die Zauberflöte | Felicity Lott

Link

Wonderful soprano, now gone, alas.

Long Read of the Day

Muskism as Fordism

When Elon Musk first started making cars I remember thinking that he was the spiritual heir of Henry Ford. Why? Because Musk invented not just a new kind of vehicle, but also a new way of making cars. Henry Ford did the same, with the Model T and the production line. The comparison was, in a way, just the cheap throwaway line of a newspaper columnist. But what’s fascinating about this Long Read by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff is what they do with this parallel. It’s long but really worth your time. So brew some coffee and settle down.

Sample:

Musk’s startlingly literal belief in the power of the internet reflects a kind of memetic determinism. The internet does not just reflect the world: in the last decade, for him, it has become the world. Offline processes are downstream from things that happen on the web, and specifically on the platform that Musk himself owns and frequently manipulates toward his own political preferences. This point of view is not pure delusion. One similarity between Musk and Ford is the extreme illiquidity of their personal wealth. Almost all of Ford’s fortune was in his Ford stock, which was privately held until almost a decade after his death. Unlike other tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew S. Mellon, Ford was not diversified, and remained distant from Wall Street, seeing it as the domain of parasites—and, notably, he believed, Jews. Musk is similarly idiosyncratic in the structure of his wealth. It is almost entirely held in the stock of his own companies. As he put it in an interview, “if Tesla and SpaceX went bankrupt, I would go bankrupt too immediately.”

This is key to understanding the political economy of Muskism. Musk’s business model is built not around steady production or long-term profitability, but around the continuous projection of outsized promises—of pending technological breakthroughs, planetary salvation, and financial windfalls. These claims generate asset price inflation through the harvest of attention. Because, a “A bicycle bell that outsmarts even smart headphones stock price is only ever the price that people are willing to pay on a given day, it can change very quickly—as Tesla’s often does, swinging 10 percent or more from day to day. The bubble needs to stay inflated. Over time, this strategy matured into an outright control of the means of narrative production: Musk eventually acquired a global media platform to propagate belief in his own future lucrativeness…

My commonplace booklet

I’m a cyclist and am constantly appalled by seeing cyclists and pedestrians wearing noise-cancelling headphones as they cycle on busy roads or walk on crowded pavements. Why do so many young people want to isolate themselves from their environment when they’re outdoors? And don’t they realise that wearing noice-cancelling headphones in such circumstances implies a tacit death wish?

All of which is just a way of said that the Škoda Duobell, a bicycle bell that can get an alert even into noise-cancelling headphones, looks like a welcome innovation. What’s even cooler about it is that it provides an analogue solution to a digital problem. It’s a mechanical device that deceives ‘smart’ headphone algorithms and increases the probability that pedestrians will detect its sound.

So what I want to know now is where I can buy one. It doesn’t seem to be on sale yet. Growl.

Chart of the Day

I think it was Keynes who said that markets can remain buoyant for longer than you can remain solvent. But the current insane discrepancy between corporate valuations and reality goes way beyond that. The SpaceX IPO filing says, at one point, “We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.” .

(h/t Adam Tooze)

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!

Welcome to Cambridge

Quote of the Day

”The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan & the Grateful Dead | Pledging My Time | (May/June 1987 Rehearsals)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The “Learned Helplessness” Of 2026

What happens when a mad king rules and liberal democracy disappears into thin air. Prescient (and utterly depressing) essay by Andrew Sullivan.

Here’s a sample:

If I were to describe my own state of mind observing the world and America right now, “learned helplessness” is pretty close. You may well be feeling it too. Each day, you read the news and see something completely beyond belief and yet feel utterly disempowered to do or even say anything about it. And then another story hits you again. And another. Again. And again. Trump shocks and shocks and shocks you some more. Even after all these years, you take it in the gut each time. And he feels nothing. This has been his entire life.

What the mad king announced this week — that he has not just pardoned but will now financially reward all the thugs who attacked the police and desecrated the Congress on January 6 — is the latest shock from the Trump taser. Another one hits when you find out he’s also exempted himself and his entire family from any past or future tax audits by the IRS. Then another one, as we learn he is making countless stock trades for huge amounts in companies very much affected by federal policy:

The new financial disclosure reports cover the first three months of 2026 …showing a cumulative value of between $220 million and around $750 million. The purchases included ​securities linked to companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle, Broadcom, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.

Trump does not have a blind trust; it’s a revocable one managed by his sons and an old buddy. And if you think Trump maintains a saintly distance from how his own money is invested, well, you should join the administration. It’s where amoral tools like Todd Blanche belong. It’s hard to put it better than Derek Thompson:

Within one 24-hour period, Trump: got out of a $100 million IRS fine, secured “immunity” from all future tax investigations for his family and friends, created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters, and was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion. … Nobody even tries to defend it.

As for the “learned helplessness”, is it just a confirmation that fear is viral, or a revelation of a deeper truth: that most people are not interested in politics (or indeed in governance), which explains why liberal democracy rots from within. Sigh.

Ukraine has taught us that drones are the new machine gun

My latest Observer column

wo truisms: armies are always preparing for the last war; and military necessity is the mother of invention. Britain learned about the latter with radar in the late 1930s. The Ukrainians did the same in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded their country, and they have turned out to be very fast learners. In particular, they spotted the potential of drones; specifically consumer models adapted for military use. Their imaginative use of the technology has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as five to one on Russian forces in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. More than 96% of those casualties are estimated to have been caused by drones.

This means that the age of the infantryman is coming to an end. Ukraine has shown that drones can incapacitate battleships and disable tanks, but their most devastating lesson for Russian soldiers is that being seen in the open is like signing your own death warrant. Surviving or avoiding a drone attack has become an almost impossible task on the battlefield. If you doubt that (and have a strong stomach), then a video montage of Ukrainian drones hunting down Russian troops – even in the interiors of buildings into which they have fled – should give you an idea of what the technology can do, and why the enemy’s mortality rate is so high.

Coincidentally, drone capability on the battlefield seems to have rendered even the most skilled humans redundant…

Read on

May be behind a paywall. Pdf version here.

Books, etc.

This might be interesting. Here’s the blurb:

Liberalism has always suffered from messaging challenges. It simultaneously implies a pursuit of individual liberty and social equality, two projects often regarded as at odds. Or: Liberal means the opposite of conservative. Except when it doesn’t. The list goes on.

Liberal bard Deirdre Nansen McCloskey understands these rhetorical troubles. Equality of Permission is her stirring and career-defining intervention on this essentially contested yet critical topic―a forceful case for liberalism as our best hope, and an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival. McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: “equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions,” lightly administered.

The state, McCloskey argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents―an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. Equality of Permission evangelizes for a better, and earlier, version of liberalism―that of John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Henry David Thoreau―as against a top-down quest for an unattainable utopia. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny.

Brimming with energy and erudition, drawing on wisdoms from Alexis de Tocqueville to Mae West, Equality of Permission is McCloskey at the peak of her powers―brilliant, lacerating, garrulous, funny, worldly, and warm. Amid intense debate over the use and abuse of government institutions, McCloskey shares her singular vision for a true democracy, one grounded in respect and conducive to universal human flourishing.

Coming out in November, after the US mid-terms!

  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!

A tale of two kisses

Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph of two carefree lovers outside the Hotel de Ville in Paris is 1950 must be one of the best-known images in the world. The picture, he later said, “represented a perfect fantasy. It encapsulates the world’s view of Paris as the city of love and freedom.”

And now, another Parisian kiss, this time from May 14, 1941. It shows a woman saying goodbye to her husband, probably for good.

That day, some 3,700 foreign-born Jews obeyed a summons by Paris police with a notice, printed on light green paper (it became known as the “green ticket roundup”), for what they believed would merely be a check of their immigration and identity papers. The operation was organized by a man named Theodor Dannecker, the envoy of Adolf Eichmann in Paris. A photographer with the Nazi propaganda unit in the city was on hand to observe.

Source

Note that the policemen in the picture overseeing proceedings are French gendarmes, not SS thugs. You can perhaps see why some of us balk at the notion of “European civilisation”. Europe, after all, is the continent that — in a single century — hosted two of the bloodiest wars in human history.

Quote of the Day

”If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Francesco Geminiani | Concerto Grosso nr 11 E major (after Corelli op. V)

Link

New to me, and lovely.

Long Read of the Day

Homer Simpson may be the best AI commentator we have right now

An insightful essay by Martha Lane Fox.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a bit like alcohol.

The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Not my line. Homer Simpson’s. But it may be the most accurate description of this entire AI moment.

Public debate about AI swings constantly between two extremes. On one side: the evangelists. Productivity boom. Unlimited growth. A new industrial revolution. On the other: the alarmists. Mass unemployment. Social collapse. Machines replacing humans.

Most people are not living at either extreme. Neither am I.

But one thing feels increasingly clear: the next challenge in AI is not simply capability. It is legitimacy.

Partly because of this, I am chairing a new taskforce for the Mayor of London looking at AI, jobs and the future of work across the capital. We are intentionally keeping it practical, evidence-led and short-term. No mission creep. No speculative AGI debates.

The focus is on what is already changing inside organisations before it fully appears in unemployment statistics: hiring, training, progression, management and job design.

Because the labour market is already shifting…

Do read on. She’s a fountain of common sense about the technology.

My commonplace booklet

AI aces a literary prize?

From the Guardian:

A few syntactical tics – and the verdict of an AI detection platform – have sparked a furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI.

The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true.

“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, said.

The Serpent in the Grove was named as the winning entry for the Commonwealth prize from the Caribbean on Saturday and published in Granta magazine.

Hmmm… I’n not convinced by the so-called ‘AI detection’ machines either.

Chart of the Day

What people use ChatGPT for.

Screenshot

Source: OpenAI

Feedback

Readers have pointed out that my Observer column on Sunday was behind the paywall. For a pdf version, see here.

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!

Oi! Where’s our grub?

Screenshot

We have a bird box in our garden which is used every year by Blue Tits. On Saturday I noticed that the fledglings were getting shirty about the Deliveroo service being provided by their (exhausted) parents. This is a still from the video I made of their impatience. By the time you read this they will have flown the nest and hopefully have learned to feed themselves!  

Quote of the Day

Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

• Carl Benedikt Frey

(Which is why so many young people are increasingly pissed off by the arrogant insouciance of techbros about the glorious future that AI will (allegedly) bring. See Brian Merchant’s blog post on “AI as the new Avatar of American capitalism” for some insights into this backlash.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Losing You

Link

Funny how music reaches parts of us that nothing else touches.

Long Read of the Day

A lovely essay by Henry Reichman in The Hedgehog Reviewon the way Gen Z literary culture reduces famous authors to symbolic mascots to be summarised in performative Instagram snippets.

In this case, the case study is the way Joan Didion is being somehow trivialised. She was a much more formidable author than you’d guess from anything you’ll find on social media. “But”, as Reichman observes,

if we wish to discard the aesthetics around her and probe her often incendiary, frequently incisive, and always entertaining commentary, we are faced with the question: What is it, exactly, that the works of Didion can say about our current political and cultural behavior fifty, sixty years on? Much of our political landscape in 2026 is fraught and bewildering, and the advantage of turning to a text like Slouching Towards Bethlehem at this moment is that it paints a timely portrait of an America struggling with deep societal conflict and teetering toward chaos. The places and events that Didion samples in the late Sixties—a time of unpopular foreign involvements, identity-based unrest at home, and a divisive, enigmatic national government—make right now an instructive time to read Slouching.

Right on.

Social media is turning us into mobile couch potatoes

Yesterday’s Observer column:

ext time you’re out in public and have time to kill, imagine you’re an anthropologist and do some people-watching. Notice that almost everyone who’s on their own — in a cafe, a train, waiting for a bus, queueing to board a plane — is looking at their phone. And what are they doing? Mostly scrolling or flicking endlessly through a feed of images, short videos or text messages. I once stood behind a young woman in a queue to board a delayed Ryanair flight, and for the best part of 30 minutes she simply scrolled through Pinterest images without stopping at a single one. She was clearly bored out of her mind.

Occasionally, you’ll see someone listening to a podcast or reading an article but even then they’re not typing or interacting with the device. And, like the woman in the queue, they often seem listless, displaying a quiet passivity that reveals an awkward truth: we have morphed into mobile couch potatoes — consumers of content curated by algorithms, transmitted by people we don’t know to be viewed on the tiny screens we now carry with us everywhere.

This passivity is a real phenomenon. The idea that the “unprofessionalised, uncommodified, unrefined masses” are quietly opting out of public posting — has hardened from speculation into something closer to empirical fact. Internal Meta charts unsealed during US antitrust hearings showed that the share of content posted by users’ actual contacts on Facebook fell from 22% in 2023 to 17% in 2025, and nearly a third of users now post less than they did just a year ago. On Instagram, it dropped from 11% to 7%.

There’s also the discovery that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline …

Read on

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!

Word-processing, old-style

Quote of the Day

”One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Start Me Up

Link}

One of my favourite tracks. Microsoft payed a fortune for the rights to use it on the launch of Windows 95. Which was a rather nice joke, given that you had to press ‘Start’ not only to boot up, but also in order to shut down, your Windows PC.

Long Read of the Day

Will our Hyper-Gilded Age Usher in Genuine Populism?

Lovely essay by Paul Krugman.

It’s clear that we are not experiencing a mere replay of the reign of the robber barons. We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the “malefactors of great wealth” called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.

Some widely used measures of inequality suggest that income disparities, which soared in the 1980s and 1990s, have plateaued since then. But the concentration of wealth at the top is continuing to soar. Today’s oligarchs control a huge share of America’s wealth — much larger than their share even at the end of the 1980s. …

Tellingly, unlike the robber barons of yore, many modern plutocrats show little sense of gratitude for their good fortune, little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works…

More important than the stinginess of the superrich, however, is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale…

Actually, it’s bought political power. Which is where the question of a populist backlash comes in.

Books, etc.

This is one of the two great books about the banking crash of 2008. (The other is Adam Tooze’s Crashed.) I read it ages ago and had forgotten about it until the other day when I had a conversation at breakfast with one of our Press Fellows about good reporting of the banking industry. So I took it down from the shelf and started to re-read. And then was reminded of why I was so riveted by it first time round. One of the things that makes Tett such a good commentator (she’s an FT columnist) is that she was trained as an anthropologist and so can sniff hypocrisy and greed at 50 paces.

My commonplace booklet

To infinity and, well…, lunch 

Screenshot

A kind reader sent me this wonderful pic by the great wildlife photographer, Yanny Liu.

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

The Wedding Party

Quote of the Day

”Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Waft her, Angels, through the skies (Jephtha) | Thomas Cooley | Voices of Music

Link

Long Read of the Day

Freedom of Navigation

A salutary read by Scott Galloway about the systemic implications of Trump’s private war on Iran.

Since the start of the war, prices of urea and ammonia — the two most common nitrogen fertilizers — have risen by 65% and 40%, respectively. An estimated 30% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the strait, further straining already crimped global fertilizer production. In Russia, the world’s No. 1 fertilizer exporter, plants have been targeted by Ukrainian drones; one recent attack temporarily knocked out 5% of Russian production capacity. China, the second-biggest exporter, banned exports to guard domestic supply. In the U.S., higher fertilizer prices will hurt some farmers more than others, depending on their location and whether they bought fertilizer ahead of the spring planting season. U.S. futures markets have already priced in higher fertilizer costs, but if the strait remains closed into the summer, next year’s food prices will rise.

For poor nations, the crisis is here. An estimated 500 million farmers produce 70% of the world’s food supply on farms smaller than 24 acres. Their margin for error is zero. The longer supply chains remain jammed, the worse it gets. One analytics firm estimates that a six-month disruption will spike global food prices by 12% to 18% above pre-war levels by the end of the year. Germany’s Kiel Institute predicts food-price inflation will reach 30% in Zambia, 11% in India, and 8% in Venezuela within a year. By midyear, the World Bank estimates 45 million people, mostly in developing nations, will experience acute hunger. According to Michael Werz of the Council on Foreign Relations, we’re witnessing a “slow-motion famine machine.” Compounding the suffering, wealthy nations cut development assistance 23% from 2024 to 2025. As a UN official told the Economist, “The humanitarian shock absorber isn’t there anymore.”

As always with Galloway, it’s a brisk read. Here’s his payoff para:

The nightmare scenario isn’t worldwide toll booths or even simultaneous blockades. We can tolerate higher prices and more frequent disruptions. What we shouldn’t tolerate is a descent into gangsterism. In the U.S., Donald Trump has undermined capitalism and the rule of law. (See: TikTok, tariffs, deploying prosecutions to attack Fed independence and political opponents, etc.) Trump’s strategic incompetence in Iran is exporting gangsterism to the world. In effect, we’re trading in our world policeman badge for regional protection rackets. That’s not the art of the deal, but the illusion of the steal. The question isn’t whether America has the economic and military firepower to prosper in Trump’s gangster paradise, but what we lose when we abandon the rules-based order we helped create. A: Everything.

In an AI abundant age, the rarest commodity will be people to verify its output

My most recent Observer column…

Way back in 1971, the economist (and Nobel laureate) Herbert Simon made an eerily prescient observation. The world was entering an era when information was becoming abundant and he was wondering what the long-term implications of this “infoglut” would be.

His answer was simple. “A wealth of information”, he said, “creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Interestingly, Simon was thinking about this before the internet that we use today existed.

His seminal thought – that attention would become the scarce (and therefore valuable) commodity of the networked world – turned out to be the basis for a huge industry built on capturing and monetising human attention. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Google founders and a host of other tech bros have made billions from it. And we’ve been living with the consequences of that ever since.

But now there’s a new general-purpose technology on the block – AI – and it raises the same question that preoccupied Simon decades ago: what will be superabundant in an AI-dominated world? And what will be scarce? The most intriguing attempt at an answer I’ve seen so far has recently come from a trio of American researchers in a paper with the enigmatic title “Some Simple Economics of AGI”…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Harvard is diversifying by hiring more crackpots.

Lovely piece of satire by Richard Amesbury in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

On behalf of the university, I’m pleased to announce our earnest and long-overdue commitment to diversifying our faculty. No, not the reckoning we broadcast to great fanfare in 2020, which we have repudiated in exchange for federal funding. No, I refer instead to “viewpoint” diversity.

For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education. Many ideas that enjoy enormous popularity among billionaires—cryogenic immortality, disregard for punctuation, the Antichrist—have scandalously been excluded from our labs and classrooms.

No longer. We solemnly vow to dismantle systemic barriers to inclusion—such as shared governance, apolitical job searches, and the discriminatory practice of vetting ideas—and to ensure that all viewpoints, however dubious, enjoy equal footing in the academy.

We have found, to our consternation, considerable groupthink within the professoriate on matters that are otherwise widely debated. This academic monoculture stifles heterodox viewpoints on disputed questions such as the safety of vaccines, the square root of four, and the earth’s topology.

Moreover, campus surveys suggest that many students feel compelled to self-censor. Out of fear for their grades, they often respond to exam questions by drawing on what their professors have taught them, thereby reproducing expert opinion. We affirm that, henceforth, no student shall have their preconceived notions challenged or be pressured to reject falsified hypotheses.

As befits the nation’s most expansive—and expensive—marketplace of ideas, we commit to putting substantial resources behind ideas that are presently viewed with skepticism by scientists and scholars. By leveling the intellectual playing field, we seek to achieve a more democratic university to bring about a less democratic world.

That’s where billionaires like yourself come in…

  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!

Alliums ahoy!

Some striking white ones in the Orchard in Grantchester on Friday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

• Picasso

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Louis Armstrong | What A Wonderful World

Link

The BBC put on a wonderful — and moving — celebration of David Attenborough’s 100th birth in the Albert Hall on Friday night, which ended with a recording of him reading the lyrics of this song against a backdrop of clips from his many films.

Long Read of the Day

In the belly of the MrBeast

Remarkable analysis by Kevin Munger of MrBeast, the world’s most successful YouTuber.

One nice thing about studying social media through the lens of creators and influencers is that some of them are quite forthcoming about their experiences; that’s the nature of the gig. But others are more committed to their persona, to maintaining some distance between themselves and the content.

The most famous of these is, of course, the world-conquering MrBeast, owner of the most-subscribed YouTube channel (343 million). MrBeast rose to fame through outrageous acts of charity, and occasionally engages in stunt-giving. This is a meaty phenomenon for wordcels trying to understand MrBeast; we can bring any number of critical frames to bear on questions of whether this is altruistic, whether it actually has good effects, what the normative experience of the viewer is…what it means to fit out 2,000 amputees with new protheses, like in the most recent video.

This is a mistake. As I argued in the conclusion of The YouTube Apparatus (now free to download!), “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content…

Read on. It’s eye-opening. And an example of media ecology done well.

Books, etc.

Many years ago I read and enjoyed Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals so when the TV adaptation, The Durrells appeared we tuned in and watched it. And then I got the book which incorporates it and two of his other books. Turns out that the TV adaptation is only loosely related to the books, so the exercise turned into a reflection on the differences between the two media. The most glaring inconsistencies were in the portrayals of the long-suffering Mrs Durrell, the mother of this extraordinary tribe, and Spiro, the Greek taxi-driver who became the family’s loyal friend and retainer. In the books, Ma Durrell is portrayed as a modest peace-maker who mostly has her nose in a cookery book, whereas in the TV adaptation she becomes a glamorous model who is lusted after by a series of unsuitable males. And Spiro is transformed from a scowling but helpful gargoyle into a handsome and desirable chat.

Like I said, different media for different folks.

My Commonplace booklet

Gilded Age 2.0

Mr and Mrs Moneybags at the Met Ball

Screenshot

Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Where in the world are the Nibmeisters?

This is not the kind of question that keeps 99.9999% of humanity awake at night. A nibmeister is someone who can improve or reform a nib. Nibmeisters are like the alchemists of the pen world; they can take a nib that isn’t functioning properly or isn’t to your liking and turn it into gold (not literally, unless it is gold, but you get the picture). And if you’re a fountain-pen geek like this blogger, it’s important to know where the nearest one is. Turns out there are just two of them in the UK — and you can find where they are here!

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! <hr<