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

Feedback

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!

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!

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

  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!

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.

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 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!

Galatea

Matthew Darbyshire’s lovely sculpture of Galatea greets one on embarking from the London train at Cambridge North station.

On Friday, which was a miserable day, some kind soul had the nice idea of giving her a wooly hat. Which of course made me wonder if I should wrap her in my winter overcoat. Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed.

Quote of the Day

”The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”

H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Thea Gilmore’s Midwinter Toast

Link

Long Read of the Day

So what really went on in Davos last week?

There’s an absolute torrent of reportage, speculation and opinionated commentary about Trump, Greenland, Mark Carney’s speech, whether we’ve now reached ‘Peak Trump’, etc. I’ve read more of this than is good for me, trying to find some nuggets of real insight, and I think I’ve found a gem — “Davos is a rational ritual” by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve). The title indicates that he was struck by Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s book on ‘rational ritual’ which argues that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form “common knowledge.” Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. From Chwe’s perspective, Henry writes,

what is more important than the vision of the past and future is where Carney said it and how he framed it. If you are planning a grand coronation ceremony, which is supposed to create collective knowledge that you are in charge, what happens when someone stands up to express their dissent in forceful terms?

The answer is that collective knowledge turns into disagreement. By giving the speech at Davos, Carney disrupted the performance of ritual, turning the Trumpian exercise in building common knowledge into a moment of conflict over whose narrative ought prevail.

Trump’s planned descent on Davos this year was an example of royal progress:

Swooping into Davos, and making the world’s business and political elite bend their knees, would have created collective knowledge that there was a new political order, with Trump reigning above it all.

Business elites would be broken and cowed into submission, through the methods that Adam [Tooze] describes. The Europeans would be forced to recognize their place, having contempt heaped on them, while being obliged to show their gratitude for whatever scraps the monarch deigned to throw onto the floor beneath the table. The “Board of Peace” – an alarmingly vaguely defined organization whose main purpose seems to be to exact fealty and tribute to Trump – would emerge as a replacement for the multilateral arrangements that Trump wants to sweep away. And all this would be broadcast to the world.

So what Carney did was to break the ritual protocol.

Do read it.

Guess who the US military just recruited? Private AI

My most recent Observer column…

On 12 January, Pete Hegseth, an ex-TV “personality” with big hair who is now the US secretary for war (nee defence), bounded on to a podium in Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in Texas. He was there to announce his plans for reforming the American war machine’s bureaucratic engine, the Pentagon. In a long and surprisingly compelling speech, he made it clear that he’s embarked on a radical effort to reshape the bureaucracy of the war department, and to break up its cosy relationships with what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” – the handful of bloated defence contractors that have assiduously milked the US government for decades while never delivering anything that was on time and within budget.

Predictably, one of the tools that Hegseth had chosen for his demolition job was AI, and to that end, three companies – Anthropic, Google and OpenAI – had already been given $200m contracts by the Pentagon to develop AI “agents” across different military areas. Given the venue and his host for the day, it came as no surprise to those present when Hegseth announced that Musk’s AI model, Grok, was also going to be deployed on this radical mission.

This did come as a surprise, though, to those outside the SpaceX hangar. Did it mean, mused the mainstream media commentariat, that this AI tool, which was mired in outrage and controversy for enabling people to create sexualised images of children, would be empowered to roam freely through all the archives – classified as well as unclassified – of the US war department?

Answer: yes…

Do read the whole piece. If you can’t access it, there’s a pdf here

My commonplace booklet

I’ve only been to Davos once, long before it was famous. I was on a walking holiday in Switzerland, and one day found myself in a nondescript town called Davos with nothing much going on. I bought myself a big Swiss Army penknife (which I still possess and use) and a pair of red walking socks, and thought no more of the place.

I was once invited to the gabfest, but declined the invitation, on the grounds that (a) I detested the people who attended it and (b) had no desire to go around dressed like an Eskimo in daylight while being expected to dress for dinner in the evening. Best decision I ever made.

Errata

Many thanks to the readers who pointed out that Mark Carney’s speech at Davos on January 20 preceded Donald Trump’s on the following day instead of (as I had it) the other way round.

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!

Figures in a cloister

Cluny, Burgundy.

Quote of the Day

” The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good description of what liberals have been doing in 2025.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Morten Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | VOCES8

Link

Long Read of the Day

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos

Coming in the afternoon after Trump’s rambling, shambolic speech, Carney’s was an electrifying demonstration of what beautifully crafted rhetoric can do.

You can watch it here, but I recommend reading it in full here.

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and beginning of a harsh reality, where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraints.

But I will say, on the other hand, that other countries, especially middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.

The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.

It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won’t.

So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer…

Do read it.

And, if you’re interested in the Havel essay, you can find it here.

My commonplace booklet

The Morning After the Tantrum Before

The wittiest response to Trump’s rambling and incoherent Davos speech came from comedian Andy Borowitz, who specialises in a witty spoof headline every morning. Yesterday’s said it all:

Denmark Offers Trump Ownership of Room in Assisted Living Facility in Greenland

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote that,

”No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and deeply dangerous.”

It is. But it sparks another thought — about Joe Biden. For at least six months before the 2024 election we know that the people around him in the White House knew that his mental frailty was such that they should protect him from external scrutiny as much as possible. And in that they were mostly successful.

Now, Trump’s minders and enablers know that they have exactly the same problem with their boss. Because of his personality, though, they cannot keep him out of the public eye: his chronic narcissism makes that impossible. And the Davos shambles demonstrates the consequences of that. There will be more of this as the year progresses and the mid-term elections loom. This could mean that the MAGA strategy will now be to sabotage those elections, probably by using ICE to foment so much chaos that they have to be postponed on the grounds of a national emergency.

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!

Fontenay on an August evening.

The Abbey of Fontenay in Burgundy is one of the most peaceful and serene places I’ve ever visited. Last time I was here was in 1988 and it hasn’t changed. It was closed by the time we reached it, so we climbed a bank in the wood to get this shot over the wall.

Quote of the Day

”On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

• H. L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like A Rolling Stone (Live at Newport 1965)

Link

Long Read of the Day

A property developer’s view of Greenland

Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack is an unfailing source of historically-informed sanity. Her edition for January 16 contained a particularly revealing report on a conversation between Trump and some journalists.

Sample:

In an interview with New York Times reporters on January 7, Trump explained that he wants not simply to work with Greenland, as the U.S. has done successfully for decades, but to own it. “Ownership is very important,” he told David E. Sanger.

“Why is ownership important here?” Sanger asked.

“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump answered. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.”

Katie Rogers asked: “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?”

Trump answered: “Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.”

In a different part of the interview, Rogers asked Trump: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” Trump answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

“Not international law?” asked Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “I don’t need international law,” Trump answered. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people. I’ve ended—remember this, I’ve ended eight wars. Nobody else has ever done that. I’ve ended eight wars and didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty amazing.” After more discussion of his fantasy that he has ended eight wars,” Kanno-Youngs followed up: “But do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage?”

“Yeah, I do,” Trump said. “You know, I do, but it depends what your definition of international law is.”

My question: how did the republic get to this: a toddler as president?

My commonplace booklet

When I launched this newsletter in 2020 — at the beginning of the Covid lockdown — I guessed (correctly) that the daily news would be dispiriting and I stopped listening to Radio 4’s Today programme. And I decided that the newsletter should always have a musical alternative to the morning’s news as a kind of antidote.

It turned out to have been a good idea: the musical link is — still — often the most popular item on a day’s edition. In 2025, being hooked on mainstream media has definitely been bad for one’s mental equilibrium: it leaves one with a warped view of humanity.

This point was cogently argued by Martin Kettle, the Guardian columnist, in his final column for the paper, in which he relates what happened when he lost his wallet on a train.

There is no way around the fact that the media – traditional and social alike – are sleepless drivers of our reflexive collective pessimism. We live in a country where failure, risk and danger are deemed ever present and on the increase. Our media endlessly reports terrible cases of cruelty, exploitation, greed and anger. As a result, no one in my profession would ever think my wallet story was worth sharing, except perhaps at Christmas.

I think that description of mainstream media as the “sleepless drivers of our reflexive collective pessimism” is spot on. It’s a big problem for contemporary democracies.

(Many thanks to John Seeley for alerting me to Kettle’s column.)

Feedback

The East Anglian double rainbow in Monday’s edition prompted Don Higgins to go “snap!” and attach this photograph he had taken at Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. “I hadn’t realised until I took this pic,” he writes, “that the colours in the outer rainbow are in the reverse order to the main one”.

I hadn’t ever noticed that, so asked ChatGPT about it.

The two rainbows are formed by different numbers of internal reflections inside raindrops: * The primary rainbow comes from one internal reflection. * The secondary rainbow comes from two internal reflections, which flips the order of the colours and also makes the rainbow dimmer (more light escapes the drop).

  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!

Doubling Up

A rare sight in the fens of East Anglia.

Quote of the Day

”Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I’ve seen statues of him on people’s pianos.”

Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Ombra mai fu | Andreas Scholl

Link

I still remember the moment when I first heard this. It was in September 1972 when my wife and I and our young son were on holiday in the Valais region of Switzerland. One afternoon, on impulse, we decided to drive through the Simplon pass to Italy. We wound up in Domodossola, a small town near the border. My wife wanted to explore the town and so she and our son went off while I sought refuge in the local church. (I was tired after doing the long drive). The church was beautifully peaceful, illuminated by shafts of the evening sun coming through two of its windows, and I settled down on a pew to think and perhaps to doze.

And then I noticed that I was not alone. Up in the organ loft an elderly man and a teenage boy with a violin were engaged in a lively conversation. Turned out that I was sitting in on a music lesson. The piece that they were rehearsing was Ombra mai fu. I had never heard it before, and I listened entranced as the pupil played it maybe 20 times, with his teacher commenting after every performance about vibrato and expressiveness and tone. It was a magical moment — what James Joyce might have called an epiphany. And it still comes back to me whenever I hear the tune.

Long Read of the Day

 The Work Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs

Nice elegant essay by Ed Simon on how writers often (usually?) have to to suffer unrelated toil just to be able to pay the bills.

”Writing is tiring, stressful, and often disappointing, like any job. There is, for us lucky few, a remunerative quality to the craft which identifies it as labor, with Stephen King arguing in On Writing that if you “wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce and if you then paid the light bill with the money” then you are a genuine writer. Even though how we think about the literary life is gauzy and sentimental, it’s still a job where you put your hours in.

But, if writing is work, there is also the vocation about it, the sense that should never be forgotten that it’s not just labor, but a privilege. To put some words after the other and then have another human being spend a few minutes with those words, whether in agreement or disagreement, is an incomparable honor. To be able to arrange these blocks of words, engineer those sentences, and build those paragraphs so that an order emerges, no matter how shoddy, is the closest thing to mysticism that I can imagine, so that to merely call it a “job” seems a diminishment (though I appreciate the checks).”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The UK is wedded to US tech. Time for a divorce

My most recent Observer column…

Over several decades, we Europeans constructed a way of living that is totally dependent on technologies run by corporations that describe themselves as “global” but are all, in fact, American. It’s as if, having abolished feudalism, we reintroduced it in the cloud; we diligently tilled our data, while Silicon Valley collected the rent. And for a long time, although we might have had occasional qualms, it seemed like a manageable deal. After all, the US was an ally that – as Winston Churchill allegedly said – could always be relied on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted all the alternatives.

Until now. The Ofcom investigation into X isn’t just a regulatory issue; it could also be a test case to see if we can hold tech platforms accountable when doing so will enrage the regime in Washington. The answer will reveal whether we’re still sovereign nations capable of protecting our citizens, or whether we’ve essentially become digital client states where US corporate interests trump our own laws. Kissinger’s quip about friendship being fatal wasn’t meant as a technology policy prediction. But as we acknowledge how comprehensively we’ve embedded US tech into our critical infrastructure, it’s clear that we should have been paying more attention to the implications of where we were headed…

Read on

If you need a pdf version, you can find it here

Errata

Tom Roper emailed to point out that wasn’t Gramsci who originated the motto “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” but Romain Rolland. According to a scholarly article by Francesca Antonini published in 2019, Gramsci explicitly attributed it to Rolland in an article published in L’Ordine Nuovo, 3–10 April 1920.

Brooding on the depressing tsunami of authoritarian madness emanating from the US, I felt that ‘pessimism’ was the wrong sentiment, because it’s intrinsically disabling. What’s needed now in Europe is realism of the intellect as well as optimism of the will. And a good place to start is by accepting that we now inhabit a radically changed world; lamenting the disintegration of the US-crafted post-war order is a fruitless, indulgent waste of time. What was once ‘unthinkable’ is now happening, day by day by day.

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!

S&M Footwear?

Quote of the Day

”Only Donald Trump could make us miss hypocrisy. “

• Jeremy Shapiro, former US official now research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elvis Costello | I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came

Link

Long Read of the Day

Can UK Health Trust US Tech?

Rory Cellan-Jones, the former BBC Technology correspondent and now a gifted podcaster and campaigner for healthcare for Parkinson’s (from which he suffers), was spurred to write this blog post after reading Quentin’s “Living without America” essay the other day.

It would not take more than a few hours for us to realise how totally dependent we are – at home and at work – on American technology. Tens of thousands of my photos and videos would be trapped in the iCloud, my email account, provided by Google, would become inaccessible, even this Substack would sputter to a halt – Google’s AI Overview (something else I wouldn’t be able to access) tells me most of Substack’s servers are located in the United States.

This set me thinking about the digital revolution finally happening in UK healthcare and how reliant on American technology it is. Just a few years ago, a rift with the US would not have been a big problem – so glacial was the pace of change that most medical records were still on paper.

But now the big hospitals are moving to electronic patient records and the supplier of choice for many is Epic, a huge, quite quirky American company whose EPR systems receive lots of praise but not for their openness. Sign up to Epic and it wants everything in your hospital to work on its software, not someone else’s…

He’s right about the improvements we’re seeing in the NHS because of electronic patient records (I can personally testify to that), but there is a downside that we’re just beginning to appreciate. My forthcoming Observer column contains more on that subject.

Books, etc.

I went to a great talk last night by the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik about his latest book, which addresses the three great challenges that face us:

• Climate change;
• Creating meaningful jobs that will ensure the continuation of the stable middle class that’s essential if liberal democracies are to endure;
• Reducing global poverty.

Despite the grim times we’re currently living through, he said that it was basically an optimistic book because he saw lots of good things happening across the world which lie below the radar of politics-obsessed mainstream media. His goal, he said, was to try and persuade us that his optimism was not deluded.

To judge from the Q&A with a sizeable cohort of Cambridge academia, I’d say he had 85% success. But for me the really useful and memorable takeaway was his powerful argument that relying on manufacturing for a renewal of a sustainable middle class is now a pipe-dream. It is possible, he argued, to create new, meaningful jobs for people, but they won’t be in manufacturing. Even China, the manufacturing centre of the world, is discovering this unpalatable truth.

Rodrik, fielding audience questions

I loved his talk and have ordered the book. As he was talking I kept thinking of Gramsci’s famous mantra — that what we need is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. I’ve been trying to replace “pessimism” with “realism” (because pessimism is so disabling) and it occurred to me that his book might fit that bill nicely.

  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!