The Old Divinity School at night

And to think that St John’s once received a proposal for converting it into a ‘boutique hotel’!

Quote of the Day

”I wish to thank my parents for making it all possible? and I wish to thank my children for making it necessary.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | Hearts and Bones

Link  

Long Read of the Day

 The Price of initiative just collapsed

Every so often a piece about ‘AI’ that is both topical and wise emerges from the seething chaos of current discourse about the technology. This blog post by Martha Lane Fox is one of those. It’s good all the way through, and at the end it’s full of horse-sense about what the UK should be doing with the technology now.

It starts from an encounter she had with an edition of the original Gutenberg Bible that she had in the J.P Morgan library in New York.

Even if you could get your hands on a printed Bible, you still needed literacy — and not literacy as we know it: with public schools, clear fonts, and the assumption that the words were for you. You needed the language, the time, and the permission to learn. The technology was astonishing. The interface, for most people, was not.

The future had arrived — and then it queued.

It’s that queue that followed me out of the building. Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1455. England did not even begin legislating for a national system of elementary education until 1870 — four centuries later, after long arguments over who should learn and what they should be allowed to read. The machine was fast. Everything else — institutions, access, the will to distribute — was slow. Those who could read surged ahead; those who could not were quietly kept in place.

Time is the thread I keep returning to, because it’s what makes today harder. We do not have four centuries to close the gap between technology and society. We may not even have four years. New releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and newcomer Openclaw have blown apart what’s possible in the last 3 weeks…

Keep reading. It’s worth it.

Books, etc.

What you can get away with: Updike Reconsidered

Nice review essay by James Wolcott in the LRB.

Maybe it’s just me​ , but the publication of John Updike’s selected letters, masterfully assembled and presented by James Schiff, doesn’t appear to have been the parade event that might have been expected. The reviews have been largely laudatory, marbled with tribute to Updike’s impeccable filigree, effortless versatility, unfaltering application and sleek plumage, but I don’t get the sense that the accolades have resonated beyond the baby boomer contingent of Updikeans who matured with the Rabbit Angstrom novels and counted on the continuing nourishment of his presence in the New Yorker. Perhaps Updike’s gifts and graces were too easy to take for granted, bannered for so long while he was alive. Whatever the explanation, betwixt and between is a strange place for any major writer to be more than a decade and a half after their death, and Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him…

One of the things I noticed in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels was how acutely he tracked the sociology of the times. Rabbit Angstrom was a Toyota dealer just at the time when the Japanese car industry began to undermine its US counterpart. Another theme in the novels included American decline. Rabbit, a former high-school basketball star and symbol of postwar American confidence, for example now profits from foreign imports. I have a vague memory that an American sociology students once wrote a PhD about this.

Chart of the Day

Linkblog

The Epstein Class

From Robert Reich:

Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.

Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is a member. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).

The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).

The so-called masters of the universe.

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Tulip mania

A shaft of sunlight suddenly alighted on them the other morning.

Quote of the Day

”I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

• Sam Altman, quoted by Dan Wang in his 2025 annual letter.

I guess Altman was trolling his audience at the time. Or was he? One never known with him.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ye Vagabonds | Danny

Link

Accompanied by a sombre video.

Long Read of the Day

2025 letter | Dan Wang

2025 letter | Dan Wang

For many years, when Dan Wang was a tech analyst living and working in Beijing, his annual letter was invariably one of the great reads of the year. And then there was none. In 2024 He had moved back to the US and (it turned out) was hard at work writing Breakneck, his magisterial comparison of China and the US, which has been a big and much-discussed seller. And then, suddenly, his annual letter is back.

It’s quite long but IMO as good a read as ever.

Here’s how it opens:

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. He’s knowledgeable, witty and clearly enjoys long-form writing.

Call my AI agent! Chatbots can now post on their own version of Reddit

My Observer column of 6 February.

In the “old” AI regime, you asked ChatGPT questions and it replied; if you wanted it to think about a complicated matter, you had laboriously to craft a prompt that would guide it along the relevant channels to come up with an answer. In the brave new regime, however, you would simply set a goal and the agent would plan, act, use software tools, check results and adapt to changed circumstances as needed. Rather like a conscientious intern, in fact.

At this point, the corporate hive mind woke up and began salivating: this could mean that AI could replace entire workflows! Wow! If AI could do things end-to-end, then the technology may finally start creating real economic “value” (AKA profits). Verily, agentic AI was the future.

The corporate hive mind’s colleagues in its legal department were not as enthusiastic, though. Responding to prompts is one thing, they would point out, but acting in the world is different. It raises tricky questions about responsibility and legal liability, not to mention the attention of investigative journalists, regulators and other pesky outsiders. So calm down was the advice; let’s not rush down this agentic slipway.

And then, out of the blue, up pops Moltbook, a new social media platform, but one with a radical difference: humans are barred from it. Only verified AI agents – chiefly those powered by OpenClaw software – can participate…

Read on

Books, etc.

As a photographer, I’ve always been fascinated by Brassai, the pseudonym of Gyula Halász, a Transylvanian journalist and photographer who moved to Paris in 1924 and lived there for the rest of his life. I first came across him via his 1933 book, Paris by Night, in which he published some of the photographs he had taken as he wandered the streets of the city late at night.

His photograph Les Espaliers de Montmartre has pride of place in our dining room, and — like many others — I’ve made unsuccessful efforts to photograph the same scene, consoling myself that things have changed a lot since the 1930s!

Screenshot

What I hadn’t realised until recently was that Brassai was a friend of Henry Miller, of whom he wrote this biography. It’s an entertaining read, which may be one reason why Miller criticised it as being “padded”, “full of factual errors, full of suppositions, rumors, documents he filched which are largely false or give a false impression.” This might also be the reason why it’s turning out to be such a good read!

My commonplace booklet

When the depredations of ICE started in the US after Trump’s inauguration, people in the UK comforted themselves with the thought that well, that sort of stuff couldn’t happen here. Rule of law and all that, old boy.

Well, think again. Steve Bloomfield had a sobering piece in the Observer on February 1.

On the eve of last October’s Conservative party conference, its press office highlighted the week’s key announcement. As part of its plan to “tackle the crisis at the borders”, a Tory government would establish “a removals force” that would round up and remove people who were “in the UK illegally or whose visas have expired”.

“Legal barriers” would be removed, resources would be doubled, and the number of people deported each year would rise from 34,000 to around 150,000. The Tories were playing catch-up. Two months earlier, Reform UK had announced its own “mass deportation” plan.

For the past two decades, much of the immigration debate in Europe has been about borders – preventing people from coming in the first place. But over the past year or so, the emphasis has shifted towards deportations. The idea of “remigration” has moved from the far-right fringe to the rightwing mainstream in several European countries. Too many people have come to Europe, they argue, and many of them don’t share what they euphemistically term “European values”.

What began as a threat to those who are undocumented swiftly shifted to encompass those who have followed every rule and have a legal right to live in their new country. In the words of Katie Lam, a Conservative MP who has been tipped as a future leader, some people who are legally entitled to live in Britain “need to go home” in order to ensure the UK remains “culturally coherent”…

You see where this is heading.

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Outside the British Museum

On a wet morning.

Quote of the Day

”One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.”

• John Millington Synge on the Kerry countryside.

Whenever I’m in Kerry, I know just what he meant.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel| As steals the morn (L’Allegro, HWV 55) | Amanda Forsythe & Thomas Cooley, Voices of Music

Link

Staggeringly beautiful aria. Good way to start the day.

Long Read of the Day

 The Artist’s Reward

In these horrible times, we occasionally need something uplifting to read. So here is something that I think merits that label — Dorothy Parker’s profile of Ernest Hemingway, published in the New Yorker on 23 November, 1929.

Here’s a sample:

I have heard of him, both at various times and all in one great bunch, that he is so hard-boiled he makes a daily practice of busting his widowed mother in the nose; that he dictates his stories because he can’t write, and has them read to him because he can’t read; that he is expatriate to such a degree that he tears down any American flag he sees flying in France; that no woman within half-a-mile of him is a safe woman; that he not only commands enormous prices for his short stories, but insists, additionally, on taking the right eye out of the editor’s face; that he has been a tramp, a safe-cracker, and a stockyard attendant; that he is the Pet of the Left Bank, and may be found at any hour of the day or night sitting at a little table at the Select, rubbing absinthe into his gums; that he really hates all forms of sport, and only skis, hunts, fishes, and fights bulls in order to be cute; that a wound he sustained in the Great War was of a whimsical, inconvenient, and inevitably laughable description; and that he also writes under the name of Morley Callaghan. About all that remains to be said is that he is the Lost Dauphin, that he was shot as a German spy, and that he is actually a woman, masquerading in man’s clothes. And those rumors are doubtless being started, even as we sit here.

Hemingway; people are so eager to hear that you haven’t the heart to send them away empty. Young women, in especial, are all of a quiver for information. (Sometimes I think that the wide publication of that smiling photograph, the one with the slanted cap and the shirt flung open above the dark sweater, was perhaps a mistake.)

“Ooh,” they say, “do you know Ernest Hemingway? Ooh, I’d just love to meet him! Ooh, tell me what he’s like!”

Well, I warned you the task sinks me…

Do read on. And while you’re at it, crack open that bottle of Absinthe you’ve been hiding away.

My commonplace booklet

One of the infuriating things about living in Britain at the moment is having to watch a Labour Party which has a huge parliamentary majority without, it seems, the faintest idea of what to do with it. Jonty Bloom had a fine blast about this yesterday.

Being forced by your own back benchers to be nicer to the poor is one thing, but to introduce a perfectly fair reform to the inheritance tax system and then give concessions to whinging farmer is another, the same with pubs.

Being kicked by the tabloids is one thing but allowing them to kick you about is another and habit forming. The more concessions and back downs, the more the pressure from every lobby group and dodgy cause grows because they know pressure works.

If Labour and Sir Kier are to turn this around they need to find some radical policies and force them through.

Far too many things are just being kicked down the street when ministers should be forcing them through parliament. Reforming the police for instance, or hiking defence spending now, or regulating the media better. Do it now and don’t back down, ever.

My own personal suggestion would be taking on the trade unions, the middle class trade unions that is, the ones that hike prices for us all, are closed shops and often farcically incompetent and useless.

Dentists, vets, lawyers, chartered surveyors and auditors just for a start. All charge far too much, add to our cost of living, try to ban competition and keep out new entrants.

How about some real competition, and some real capitalism?

Amen to that. Especially the dentists and vets.

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Hopeful signs…

… that Spring might be on its way. Seen as I was walking back from lunch in College yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.

Not any more, though. The ‘management’ of Columbia caved in to Trump. And I guess its professors no longer feel they embody the Genius loci of the institution.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone | Newcastle | 1966

Link

Long Read of the Day

Bafflement with Bezos

This latest edition of Tina Brown’s diary is another gem — triggered this time by zillionaire Jeff Bezos’s emasculation of the Washington Post, the newspaper he once claimed to be rescuing.

Yet he appears to have checked out of the Post some time after his libido was liberated by his pneumatic new paramour Lauren Sánchez. And that personal transition coincided with an acceleration in wealth that saw his net worth rise from $28 billion in 2013 to $222 billion today. You might think a fortune that stratospheric would make it easy to say no to paying out $75 million to make and market a Roman tribute to Melania. Or not feel the need to curry favor with Trump by precipitously ending the Post’s 36-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, just 11 days before the 2024 election, a decision that instantly lost the paper 250,000 hard-won subscribers. Entertaining War Sec Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, two days before the Post apocalypse, and saying nothing about Hegseth’s Pravda-like restrictions on Pentagon press coverage, was not a great look either. The purpose of having f##k you money is to say f##k you, but it seems the purpose of f##k you money is to have more f##k you money.

What’s baffling is that Bezos really was a tech visionary, and, in fact, so many of that first generation or two of tech bros were. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page transformed forever the way we tap into the riches of the world’s information and learning. Elon Musk made environmentally-friendly electric cars that were fast and beautiful and promised us that his rockets would take us to Mars. Even Travis Kalanick, the rapacious CEO and co-inventor of Uber, invented a way for us to never be stranded. But as all the nerdy dreamers bulked up into heedless plutocrats, it was like watching a chart of the Descent of Man—their muscles bulged to comic-book proportions, their aspirations coarsened, they hid out in their luxury, Blue Zone caves. I think most of them had set out with a genuine belief that tech could make the world a better place, but they wound up instead wanting just to better their OWN place.

Spot on. Great wealth is a powerful aphrodisiac. It deludes you (and many around you) into thinking you’re a genius. And it buys you impunity from the consequences of your actions.

Books, etc.

You may remember that I read (and enjoyed) this book a while back, which meant that I found this review of it in The Asian Review of Books interesting. It occurred to me that it might make useful reading for anyone who is curious about the book.

 ## My commonplace booklet

The blast radius of Jeffrey Epstein 

Turns out it’s much wider than we’d imagined. It may yet see off Keir Starmer, even though he had nothing to do with the paedophile, but had foolishly allowed his consigliere Morgan McSweeney to push him into appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.

I remember being shocked when the first release of documents revealed that the famed economist Larry Summers, who I thought was a real grown-up (as portrayed in The Social Network), had been seeking advice from Epstein about an extra-marital affair. But now I find that even a hero of mine, Noam Chomsky, had been lured into the vicious circle round Epstein and exploited as a reputation-launderer. Truly, there seems to be no end to this.

Fintan O’Toole, the brilliant Irish Times columnist, has been writing perceptively about all this. It’s behind a paywall, alas, but I think it’s worth quoting some of it from yesterday’s edition of the paper.

One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.

The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.

Unlike the benign Cloacina, Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.

Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement…

He also sees in many of the released emails (many of which complain about the #metoo movement) a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.

This was a movement defined in a much earlier generation by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

LATER Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife, issued a statement revealing that her husband, now 97, is “confronting significant health challenges” after suffering a devastating stroke in June 2023 and is currently under 24/7 medical care and unable to speak.

When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist of science and a financial expert. By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.

Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.

We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.

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Banksy in Bristol

Quote of the Day

”It’s wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

• Tom Stoppard ( in Arcadia)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard & Linda Thompson | Dimming of the Day (live 1981)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The UK government didn’t want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I’m not surprised

Bracing Guardian column by George Monbiot on a UK national security briefing about the implications of climate change that was ‘buried’ by the current government — and was only made available as a result of Freedom of Information request.

I know it’s almost impossible to turn your eyes away from the Trump show, but that’s the point. His antics, ever-grosser and more preposterous, are designed to keep him in our minds, to crowd out other issues. His insatiable craving for attention is a global-threat multiplier. You can’t help wondering whether there’s anything he wouldn’t do to dominate the headlines.

But we must tear ourselves away from the spectacle, for there are other threats just as critical that also require our attention. Just because you’re not hearing about them doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.

Why are they not salient? Partly because countries – and not just Trump’s – seem determined to keep us in the dark. The most important document published by the UK government since the general election emerged last week only through a freedom of information request. The national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October 2025, but the apparatchiks in Downing Street sought to make it disappear. Apparently there were two reasons: because its conclusions were “too negative”, and because it would draw attention to the government’s failure to act…

Well, well. The report notes that

“It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” It also warns that “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources”.

Not exactly laugh-a-minute stuff, but interesting to see that the Deep State is taking this stuff seriously, even if the British tabloids are not.

My commonplace booklet

Sam Enright , writing in The Fitzwilliam, reminded me of Steven Pinker’s description of the purpose of nonfiction writing:

Write not because you think you are smarter than your audience, but because there is something you have seen that, for whatever reason, they have not yet come across, and you wish to share it with them.

That’s the best explanation for why I’m a blogger that I’ve ever read.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Jason Kottke has been collecting reviews of the ‘Melania’ film. Here’s one I liked:

Screenshot

Errata

I had reports from readers that the link to the pdf version of my Observer column wasn’t working for them. I’m puzzled because it seems ok. What should happen when you click the link is that a pdf copy of the article is downloaded to your machine. I’ve just checked it on an anonymous browser and it’s worked. Yours, puzzled blogger.

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!

Two Gentlemen of Utrecht

One of my favourite shots from a lovely city.

Quote of the Day

”Clarinets, like lawyers, have cases, mouthpieces, and they need a constant supply of hot air in order to function.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Flashmob Flash Mob | Ode an die Freude ( Ode to Joy ) | Beethoven Symphony No.9

Link

Listening to Trump rubbishing Europe, I thought of this and dug it out.

Long Read of the Day

 Baby Shoggoth Is Listening

Brilliant essay by Dan Kagan-Kans in The American Scholar in which he asks why are some writers tailoring their work for AI, and what does this mean for the future of writing and reading?

Although it has been discussed far less than the replacement of human writers, the replacement of human readers by artificial intelligence has lately become a real possibility. In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI. Already some writers are preparing for this world and advising others to do the same. There aren’t many of them so far, but they’re interesting enough, and in some circles influential enough, for us to start looking at what exactly is happening, at how writing for AI is done and why anyone would want to do it.

This strange discussion has only a few precedents; it leads, as so many discussions about AI do, toward speculation about hilarious absurdities. Sometimes, these hilarious absurdities—talking computers, hundred-billion-dollar server farms—become reality much sooner than even the speculators imagined. Will the same happen here? I fear it might. Will it be bad? Certainly. Although: It’s just possible that writing for AI might not be quite as bad as “writing for AI” sounds…

Do read on. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Chart of the Day

The speed of the US’s slide into autocracy

Screenshot

Link

Sometimes, a chart is worth a thousand words. John Burn-Murdoch is the FT’s data specialist, and he’s a star.

My commonplace booklet

“There is still no strong pan-European leader — either of the historical sort, sitting on the bank notes, nor in the present-day geopolitical sense, who might counterbalance Trump.

Maybe this is a virtue. Narcissistic populist cults are dangerous, after all. But the grim truth is that, because it is so hard for a technocratic federation to grapple with a personality-based aggressor, the EU currently looks like the Boy Scouts taking on the mafia.”

• Gillian Tett, FT 31.01.2026 in a column about choosing images for new Euro banknotes.

Feedback

Re Joni Mitchell’s recording featured in Wednesday’s edition, Nick Halpin wrote that “The Diana Krall live performance in Paris of “A Case of You” is very poignant (and stunningly well recorded). So I dug it out and here it is.

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!

Academic life, West London

Two professors out for a walk?

Quote of the Day

”Working with AI involves a mixture of achievement, sycophancy and disappointment. This is a faithful reflection of office life, but not exactly what was promised.”

• The Economist

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joni Mitchell | A Case Of You

Link

Long Read of the Day

A farce that prefigured our times

Lovely essay by Andrew Brown on a novel that I had forgotten.

Fifty five years ago Philip Roth published Our Gang, a broad satire on the Nixon regime in which the president invades Denmark to distract from his domestic troubles. Whole chunks of the dialogue could come from inside the White House today.

“Gentlemen,” President Trick E. Dixon explains to his staff, “these are going to be free elections. I want it to be perfectly clear beforehand that I wouldn’t have it otherwise, unless there were some reason to believe that the vote might go the wrong way.

“They have thrown me out of office enough in my lifetime! I will not be cast in the role of a loser—of a war, or of anything. And if that means bringing the full firepower of our Armed Forces to bear upon every last Brownie and Cub Scout in America, then that is what we are going to do. Because the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World can ill-afford to be humiliated by anyone, let alone by third- and fourth-graders who have nothing better to do than engage the United States Army in treacherous house-to-house combat.”

How can this threat best be dealt with? Here he explains that

“One experiment that we have tried with some success here in Washington is the ‘Justice in the Streets Program.’ This is a program whereby sentencing and punishment, for capital crimes as well as felonies and misdemeanours, is delivered on the spot at the very moment the crime is committed, or even appears to have been committed.”

History sometimes rhymes. But how perceptive of Roth to have spotted that twice. What a writer.

‘AI swarms’ are mass-producing credible misinformation. Democracy may get stung

My most recent Observer column:

The next escalation in this process of manufacturing “reality” is now upon us, courtesy of AI. A recently published paper by a large group of scholars in the prestigious journal Science lays out the scenario. ChatGPT et al offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviours on “a population-wide level”. The combination of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents will enable what the researchers call “AI swarms” to reach “unprecedented scale and precision”. They will expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create “falsehoods that are rated as more humanlike than those written by humans”.

These capabilities easily transcend the limitations of the “dumb” botnets favoured by the Russians, Chinese and others, which simply amplified the spread of misinformation by incessantly retweeting to trigger algorithmic visibility through repetition, manual scheduling and rigid scripts.

An AI swarm is fundamentally different: it maintains persistent identities and memory, coordinates towards shared objectives while varying tone and content and, crucially, “adapts in real time to engagement, platform cues, and human responses; operates with minimal human oversight; and can deploy across platforms”...

Read on

For a pdf version, see here

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This photograph of a mural, which I wrongly thought was something I had seen in an East Anglian village, set many readers off a delicious quest for the actual location of the mural. And they found it! It’s a mural by the Polish artist and graphic designer Natalia Rak that was painted as part of the Folk on the Street art festival in Bialystok in Poland!

I’ve been a photographer for many decades and have a huge archive, from which I draw for this newsletter. I also love street murals and often photograph striking ones when I encounter them. But I’ve never been to Poland and couldn’t have photographed Ms Rak’s one. So I guess I saw it somewhere on the Web and copied it into the archive.

It’s embarrassing, of course, but it was also hugely enjoyable reading the genteel (and often sympathetic) reproofs from the successful sleuths. And it encourages me to fall back on Mark Twain’s observation that “The older I get the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” Thanks to all the participants in the quest for the truth.

And, given that the mural was in Bialystok, isn’t it nice that the hapless heroes of Mel Brooks’s The Producers had a partnership called Bialystock and Bloom!

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French dressing

I wonder is there anywhere in the UK where one can get garlic like this?

Quote of the Day

”Europe misread the world. The idea of a post-modern world order was always a mistake. At a basic level, Europe’s vision piggybacked on American power, and military power in particular. It was the US navy that kept sea lanes open, US alliances that deterred aggression, and the US security umbrella that made European welfare states possible. The post-modern order wasn’t post-power; it was just someone else’s power doing the work. No one makes that mistake now, post-Ukraine and post-Trump, as American power goes elsewhere.”

• James Crabtree

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

N17 | Tolü Makay and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra | NYE Countdown | RTÉ One

Link

The N17 is the road that begins in Galway and ends in Sligo on Ireland’s West coast. It’s also the road that takes people to Knock (Ireland West) airport.

Long Read of the Day

Shiny happy weird and special

This an extraordinarily perceptive essay by Dan Davies triggered by the “most interesting conversation” he had last year. It stuck in his mind, he says, and changed his thinking more than any other. It sure makes uncomfortable reading for those of us who are involved in one way or another with policy making in democracies.

It was when the anti-immigration protestors were bothering refugees at the local airport hotel, and I decided I probably ought to show up at the counter-demonstration.

I quickly (re)learned the elementary lesson of British street politics – don’t show up on time because no other bugger will. There were about half a dozen people there for the first hour of the scheduled protests, mainly arguing with each other and a few bored police officers over who was going to stand on which side of a street.

Turned out that this wasn’t a mistake after all, because the people who had arrived early to the other side weren’t the ones who were really into the cause (people I later described as “bald men from Plymouth with rancid vibes”). I decided to strike up some conversations, mainly thinking “if it all turns violent perhaps they’ll remember me and punch someone else”.

It’s a bit of a cliché that racists always claim to have black friends, but I kind of believed it. The thing that really struck me when I was talking to these guys was not so much bigotry, but an incredible, overpowering sense of pessimism. While talking to me, at least, they tended to agree that the refugees were people and deserved to be helped… But they, more or less unshakeably … thought it was simply impossible for Britain to provide that help.

The consensus view on the other side of the police line seemed to be that our economy was stuck and shrinking, that there were no opportunities and absolutely nothing to spare. The people I spoke to had no hope whatsoever for their children and seemed genuinely surprised that I did for mine…

Do read on: it’s heading in a very interesting direction.

Books, etc.

Underground Empire was possibly the most prescient book published in 2023. Written by two prominent political scientists, it explained how the US had weaponised global economic infrastructure — fibre-optic cables, data centres, and financial systems like SWIFT — that had been originally built by profit-seeking corporations, rather than the government. One of the amusing things about the book (which I read when it came out) was a narrative suggesting that the electronic plumbing that gave the US unprecedented leverage over global communications and finance had emerged almost accidentally on its own territory.

The first administration to realise and utilise its power was Obama’s — for example in its dealings with Iran — but after Trump came to power in 2016, things changed radically. As the authors put it,

Trump did not build the underground empire, but he made it more visible and far more controversial. This certainly wasn’t because Trump himself connected the dots. When he discovered new tools of coercion, he was as delighted as a toddler with new toys, but he didn’t have sufficient attention span to really understand how to make other countries bend beneath the yoke. While he wanted tribute, Trump was often willing to settle for attention. Regardless, the United States extended its underground Empire in increasingly belligerent ways. And as its victim started paying attention, they began to piece together a different understanding of US power. Trump’s administration used the power of the US financial system, for example, to target not just terrorists but human rights officials. Overtime, it lurched haphazardly but irreversibly toward developing tools to target not just rogue states like North Korea but core assets of other great powers, like China.

It’s a terrific book. If you want to get a flavour of Henry Farrell in action, his recent podcast conversation with Ezra Klein would be a good place to start. He also has a great blog, Programmable Mutter

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Gardener’s World

Lovely mural in an East Anglian village.

Quote of the Day

”I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.

• Henry James

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Streets of Minneapolis

Link

“I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free, Bruce Springsteen.”

Long Read of the Day

The lines have been drawn

Silicon Valley must decide which side it’s on.

Admirably clarifying post by Brian Merchant.

A nurse in the intensive care unit at a veteran’s hospital, summarily executed in the street, in front of a half dozen iPhones taking video. Another deliberate and brazen lie of a statement from Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and the White House that contradicts every shred of evidence collected from multiple angles. So this is how it’s going to be. All of the pieces were on the table already, and now they have all been slotted together. Trump says he’ll only take ICE out of Minnesota if they hand over the voter rolls. The lines have been drawn.

At the very least, this is instructive. Take a look online. Whether state officials or rightwing influencers or tech billionaires or anonymous X reply guys, those willing to deploy pretzel logic to justify the shooting in the back of a man who had never made an act of aggression, or to subjugate logic itself to their ideology and brush the killing aside, behold our modern state propagandists. These are the voices party to the rise of actual, dyed-in-the wool, American fascism. These are the individuals and groups lining up to embrace Orwell’s famous edict1, denying their senses because the party tells them to, or on behalf of their hate.

This can be clarifying, understanding finally and fully that there is indeed already a large network of powerful and public figures willing to support unalloyed authoritarianism, no matter the injustices it perpetrates. You cannot argue with these parties on grounds that the excessive force and summary killings and detainments of American citizens is antidemocratic or unconstitutional, they do not care. That is not their project. You will never convince them with argument or evidence that their side cannot kill its enemies at will, and that too is clarifying. The pro-monarchist, anti-democratic voices in Silicon Valley have at least been open about this…

Right on cue, a memo from Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to all staff, leaked out. This is what it said:

Team,

I’m heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that’s been affected.

This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity. This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.

I know this is very emotional and challenging for so many. I am proud of how deeply our teams care about the world beyond our walls. That empathy is one of Apple’s greatest strengths and it is something I believe we all cherish.

Thank you for all that you do.

Tim

Now Tim Cook, I believe, is a nice person and a good man, but this seems like a pretty feeble effort — especially coming from someone who had accepted an invitation to the White House to watch a private screening of the upcoming Melania Trump documentary just hours after Alex Pretti’s murder. It reminded the veteran Apple-watcher, Jon Gruber, of George Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language” and triggered a searing critique of the Cook memo on his Daring Fireball blog.

Cook avoids most of the sins Orwell describes. He uses short, common words. He eschews hackneyed metaphors. He uses the active, not passive, voice — for the most part. His prayers and sympathies are “with everyone that’s been affected.” Who, exactly, has been affected? Affected how? By whom? Numerous examples come to mind, but not from Cook’s memo. Two Minneapolitans were affected, quite adversely, by being shot in the head and back at point blank range, in broad daylight, by unhinged ICE goons. A five-year-old boy — himself a U.S.-born citizen — was affected when ICE agents apprehended his father, used the boy as bait to lure other family members, and is now being held in a notorious detention center in Texas, a thousand miles away.

The list is long, the stories searing. But Cook mentions nothing more specific than “everyone that’s been affected”. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them, indeed.

“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook wrote. But by whom? The masked federal agents laying siege to Minneapolis, brutalizing its citizenry? Or the thousands of law-abiding citizens protesting the occupation of their neighborhoods, who are, in the words of Seth Meyers, “deploying the most hurtful weapon of all, the bird”? Cook’s call for “deescalation” is meaningless without specifying which side he’s calling upon to change course, and there’s no weaker sauce than the weak sauce of “both sides”. Using words, not to make a point, but to avoid making a point while creating the illusion of having made one, is the true sin.

Tim Cook is the least obnoxious of the techlords who have sucked up to Trump and MAGA. But he too has done his creepy duty of abasement. And Gruber nails it.

Footnote The aforementioned goons are now on “administrative leave” instead of in police custody.

Errata

I used the phrase “dressed like an Eskimo” the other day when explaining why I had once turned down an invitation to go to the Davos gabfest years ago. Tony Barake wrote to point out that,

“Eskimo” is widely considered an offensive, derogatory, and outdated term, particularly in Canada and Greenland, where it is viewed as a racist, colonial slur. While it was historically used to describe the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, most, though not all, of these communities now prefer to be called by their specific, proper names, such as Inuit.

Sometimes, being a blogger can be mortifying :-(. Which is only right and proper.

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A rose by any other name…

… is still a rose. Amazing what one can do with the right lens.

Quote of the Day

”The alarming fact is that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in this world.”

• Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson in his book American Imperatives.

Yep. Which is why we need to learn from what is happening there now.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | Train In The Distance

Link

Long Read of the Day

Using generative AI to learn is like Odysseus untying himself from the mast

Lovely, thoughtful essay by David Deming on why students (and their teachers) should beware of using ChatGPT et al as crutches for the mind.

The Sirens are often portrayed as sexual temptresses in art and popular culture. But Homer never describes the Sirens bodies or gives any sense that their physical allure. Here is a translated excerpt from the 12th book of the Odyssey (emphasis mine) – “For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.”

The Sirens offer Odysseus the promise of unlimited knowledge and wisdom without effort. He survives not by resisting his curiosity, but by restricting its scope and constraining his own ability to operate. The Sirens possess all the knowledge that Odysseus seeks, but he realizes he must earn it. There are no shortcuts. This is the perfect metaphor for learning in the age of superintelligence.

“Learning is hard work”, Deming concludes. “And there is now lots of evidence that people will offload it if given the chance, even if it isn’t in their long-run interest. After nearly two decades of teaching, I’ve realized that my classroom is more than just a place where knowledge is transmitted. It’s also a community where we tie ourselves to the mast together to overcome the suffering of learning hard things”.

The problem is that the temptation to rely on AI to just get the essay done and get the grade you need is often overwhelming for students who need to get the credentials for a job that will help them pay off their debts.

Books, etc.

A while back, Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Deep Mind, published an interesting book with the title “The Coming Wave.” In it, he argued that the looming problem facing humanity is how to manage two “uncontainable technologies”: — AI and ‘synthetic biology’. At the moment we are spending a lot of time fretting about the former, and perhaps not thinking enough about the latter.

And now, along comes a new book from a molecular biologist which basically argues that the two can — and will — work together. “With the assistance of AI,” Woolfson writes, “which has the potential to decode life’s generative grammar and the agency of a chemical printing press capable of rendering the genome sequences of species as if they were the texts of books, our ability to manipulate life’s structures could become virtually limitless. Free from the constraints of chance and natural selection, we would no longer need to reference nature’s blueprints. We could instead begin to narrate new designs – equipped with the pen, paper and creativity necessary to rewrite life’s story. In so doing, we would become the authors of species.”

The book’s title neatly gives the game away. Darwin was concerned with the origins of species; Woolfson thinks that we will eventually be in a position to design entirely new species from scratch. You might well ask: why would we want to do that? And you know the answer: we humans are a weird species.

My commonplace booklet

For the first 100 days of the COVID lockdown I kept an audio diary on this substack — transcripts of which I eventually published as a Kindle book, 100 Not Out. Searching through my files the other day, I came on one of the notebooks I used at the time. This is the entry for Day 30 — Monday 20th of April, 2020.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

BIC penlight

Just what you’ve always wanted. Not.

Source

h/t Charles Arthur

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!