My newspaper rightly pulled out all the stops to celebrate David Hockney — and to mourn his loss. He was a ‘national treasure’ in the same league as David Attenborough and Alan Bennett

Quote of the Day

”You will know you’re old when you cease to be amazed.”

• Noel Coward

Hmmm…. I’m getting there.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mumford & Sons + Friends Bonnaroo | Amazing Grace

Link

A venerable hymn given the bluegrass treatment.

Long Read of the Day

What would Muskism be without Musk?

Henry Farrell’s review essay on Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book,  Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed  which, appropriately enough, came out just before Musk became the world’s first trillionaire.

Both they and Henry are trying to get above the IPO fray to figure out what the longer-term consequences of the current madness might be.

It’s hard to even begin to articulate this question on a day where on the one hand Musk is enjoying his stock market apotheosis, and on the other is doing everything he can to stir up race riots. But what would Muskism look like without Musk? I take Slobodian and Tarnoff’s ultimate lesson as being that we need to move beyond Musk’s personality, and start thinking about Muskism or Muskismus (I like the German word, which is why this post has the German translation’s cover) as a mode of organizing production, as a generic ideology, as a set of political bargains, as a form of state-business fusion, or some weird amalgam of all four. If Muskism is going to change the world as its backers hope, it is highly unlikely to be because SpaceX manages to corner the entire global economy. If it fails, as I personally suspect it will, it is going to be because of the underlying contradictions that are getting papered over.

To figure this out, we might begin with the other businesses that seem to exemplify Muskism. Obviously, this would include Palantir, and a bunch of the defense-tech businesses funded by Musk’s adversary Peter Thiel. Thielismus starts from many of the same premises as Muskism, but with a different clatter of tacked-on lunacies (less cosmism; more prophecies of the Antichrist). Are there businesses that adopt some of the aspects of Muskism that Slobodian and Tarnoff acknowledge as useful (SpaceX has transformed the launch business) without all of the negatives? It would be useful to know: the waterfall approach to project management has not been good e.g. for Europe’s defense sector.

We might also want to ask whether Muskism is inextricably intertwined with US hegemonic power. What happens to the Muskist project if US hegemony fails? What happens to US hegemony if Muskism fails?

Do read it. We need more thinking on this level.

Books, etc.

After news of David Hockney’s death broke I went searching through my bookshelves to find this compendium of his work looking for this picture:

It was the most prominent early result of his experiments with photography. He began creating what he called ‘joiners’, images of scenes stitched together from hundreds of polaroid shots of a particular scene. As someone who’s been a keen photographer since my teenage years, I was fascinated by these works and fondly imagined that they would provide me with a way to create artworks that were more than just photographs.

Big mistake. Here’s the evidence — a joiner I did of the O’Connell monument in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin.

It’s ok but feeble and unimaginative compared with Hockney’s works in the genre. I discovered that making joiners work was exceedingly difficult. The art is in finding creative ways of assembling the individual pieces of the mosaic. Hockney had the art. I didn’t.

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Hopefully…

Seen in Arles on a Summer evening

Quote of the Day

There are three ways to make a living:

Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

• Jason Zweig

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | If this goodbye

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Five Books That Could Save America

Remarkable essay by Larry Lessig, someone I’ve known (and admired) for decades and who embodies my mantra (channelling my inner Gramsci) that what we need now is “realism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. The former starts with acknowledging that liberal democracy has failed to deliver for an awful lot of people.

Here’s how Larry sets out his stall.

I’ve long been skeptical that we, as a people, can recover from the catastrophe we now face. Most think that catastrophe is Donald Trump. I certainly believe Donald Trump is a catastrophe, but the catastrophe we face is deeper. And to cure it, if indeed it can be cured, we must work through its layers.

One layer is the corruption of money. A necessary but not sufficient condition for curing our deeper catastrophe is to end the corrupting influence of money in our politics. That’s possible, and we might be on the edge of a critical breakthrough, but even that breakthrough won’t be enough.

Because even deeper and profoundly more consequential is the corruption caused by engagement-based media. Cable news and social media render us inherently and unavoidably incoherent as a people. They profit by turning us into ignorant people who hate each other, and through this business model, they’ve earned endless profit. Solving the corruption of money won’t solve this. Given the extremism of the First Amendment, it’s not even clear we have the constitutional authority to solve this. But even if we did, there’s a third layer to our catastrophe that I’ve become convinced we must solve as well. And this layer, surprisingly (given my brand is pessimism), we could solve. At least, I think I’ve glimpsed a way.

This third layer was introduced most prominently by the first (and most famous) of the five books that could save America: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance describes powerfully and effectively the current incapacity of our system of governance. We’ve lost, as they evince and everyone notices, the ability, as a people, to do big things. The book maps a range of such failures. The common thread linking these cases is the emerging sclerosis of American governance. That, for Democrats especially, is existential, because Democrats especially proffer government to address the problems we all recognize as real.

This is a point I’ve long believed but never been able to articulate as powerfully or as effectively as Abundance does. It was the essence of my diagnosis after the last election: Democrats are obsessed with describing the 15 great geeky plans they’ve got for solving key problems in our society, never recognizing that the American public glazes over at the descriptions because the American public believes that government can’t do anything. We’ve been convinced by a line in Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Anyone trying to understand this layer must start with this book…

Read on. The strange thing is that most of what he says also applies to the UK in its current state of paralysis.

Books, etc.

See above!

My commonplace booklet

Quentin’s Law of Optimum Velocity

Nice blog post by my friend Quentin, who was musing on why he now likes to drive more slowly than he did twenty years ago.

He proposes a formula for calculating one’s optimum velocity:

Vmax = 120 – age

I daren’t tell you how low my optimum speed is. What’s yours?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

This made my day. A billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (Hmmm… sounds Irish) — who is the guy behind a new data centre in Utah which is twice the size of Manhattan — attacked two local girls who oppose it. Big mistake. Worth watching to see why.

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Bag Lady plus mutt

Part of Paul Day’s bronze frieze under his Meeting Place sculpture at the Eurostar station in St Pancras. Note the way the dog’s head has been fondly polished by passers-by.

Quote of the Day

”Never mistake activity for achievement.”

• John Wooden (famous basketball coach)

Applies to much of the ‘AI-slop’ currently being generated.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Picture In A Frame

Link

Long Read of the Day

How To Read A Novel: Or why fiction gives us an antidote to narrowband thinking.

Really thoughtful long essay by Steven Johnson. It was triggered by a question posed by Patrick Collison, the only known example of a civilised billionaire: why should we read classic novels?

I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events. It’s something we do so effortlessly that we rarely stop to think about how nuanced a skill it really is: creatively projecting forward into our possible futures based on our previous experience of the world. Narratives of all sorts allow you to parachute into other simulated experiences, which ultimately give you more data for your own simulations. But novels, I would argue, give you the richest simulation of the interior life of other people’s experiences: you get a ringside view of all that emotional and cognitive action. This is particularly true of the novel after, say, 1750 or so, when the novelists began adopting more of the inner monologues (both first-person and “close-third” perspective) that Shakespeare had explored on the stage.

It seems fairly obvious to me that there is practical utility in running these simulations. We accumulate wisdom that we can apply to our own lives by watching other people live theirs. Historical nonfiction—particularly if the author has access to the subject’s inner life through journals or correspondence—arguably has even more utility, in that the events in question actually happened in the real world, and not in the imagination of the novelist. (This is one reason I decided to write nonfiction instead of novels—the other being that I don’t think I’m a good enough writer to write novels.)

I’ve admired Johnson for ages, not just because he’s a marvellous non-fiction writer, but more recently because he played a lead role in the Google team that created NotebookLM — which IMO is the most useful and imaginative AI that we have (and one that I use all the time). So I think this essay is worth your time.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Link

Here’s the blurb:

The hardest choices are also the most consequential. So why do we know so little about how to get them right?

Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they’re also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums.

Steven Johnson’s classic Where Good Ideas Come From inspired creative people all over the world with new ways of thinking about innovation. In Farsighted, he uncovers powerful tools for honing the important skill of complex decision-making. While you can’t model a once-in-a-lifetime choice, you can model the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers. These experts aren’t just the master strategists running major companies or negotiating high-level diplomacy. They’re the novelists who draw out the complexity of their characters’ inner lives, the city officials who secure long-term water supplies, and the scientists who reckon with future challenges most of us haven’t even imagined. The smartest decision-makers don’t go with their guts. Their success relies on having a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider all their options in a creative, productive way.

My commonplace booklet

What Silicon Valley thinks of the rest of humanity 

Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar l salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.

Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect [the most extreme] scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.

• Jasmine Sun

Notes on AI, Labor, and China 

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Plan B(ee)

This giant scabious (Cephalaria gigantea to you and me) sure knows how to attract customers. Suggests that “Busy as a bee” is an accurate simile.

Quote of the Day

”If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.”

• Red Adair, the famous oil-well fire specialist

Thanks to Euan Williamson, who was reminded of it when he read Derek Bok’s quote about the cost of education in Friday’s edition.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | True Love Knows No Season

Link

North American folk song composed by Norman Blake. This is the first time I’ve heard Christy Moore sing it.

Long Read of the Day

What Our Youthful Book Typologies Say About Us

This is a lovely essay by John Warner about how we are influenced by books we’ve read in our youth. It was sparked by the fact that at the end of his podcast Ezra Klein asks his guest to name three books they would recommend to the audience.

Warner was struck by one choice of Ian Bremmer, “an expert in foreign policy who spent 90 minutes describing in gory and depressing detail what is apparent to even grade schoolers, the Trump Administration is a colossal shit show.”

When they got to the books, Bremmer said:

Well, first, I’ve got to start with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because when I was in high school and college, there were basically three kinds of kids: There were the J.R.R. Tolkien kids that were way too dorky. Then there were the Ayn Rand kids, who you don’t trust to run anything. And then there were the Douglas Adams kids, and those were kind people. They were curious, they were interested, and that was a universe that really appealed to me.

At this, Warner writes,

“I laughed because, well…this seemed pretty true, true to my experience at least, and also because as someone who has re-read the five books in the original “trilogy” (Douglas Adams readers will get this reference) multiple times, and even wrote some stories in high school trying to ape Adams’ strange humorous mix of the manic and dry, I felt a bit flattered by the taxonomy.

I could not get into Tolkien or really any fantasy that involved orcs and swords and stuff. I was cool with magic and evil (see The Dark is Rising) but epic battles bored me. I didn’t meet any Randoids nor read any Ayn Rand until college, and thankfully I’d both developed a sufficient conscience and care towards my fellow human and taste in literature to be utterly immune to her charms by that time.

Klein followed up: “I love this typology. There’s no book I’ve reread more than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Which struck me, because I could never get into the Tolkien stuff either.

Read on. It’s an interesting essay. And it made me want to re-read ‘Hitchhiker’…

Books, etc.

See today’s Long Read!

My commonplace booklet

Robert Shrimsley on how to escape the World Cup

The reality is that there is no escape. The coverage is as comprehensive as a major royal event. There’s no good complaining or being snotty about it. You just have to try to zone out and seize the opportunities it offers: emptier theatres, late tables at fancy restaurants. An England match is the perfect time to visit the shops, though the Panama game doesn’t start till 10pm so it will have to be the Tesco Express.

And this is a problem for fans and haters alike (the kick-off times, not the Tesco Express part). Because this World Cup is taking place in the US, Canada and Mexico — though, sadly, not Greenland, which failed to secure statehood in time — some of the matches will be in the middle of the night. Thankfully, Germany vs Curaçao is at a reasonable hour, but the poor old Scots fans will have to be up at 2am to see if they can dispose of Haiti. (By the way, if any Scots are heading State-side for the tournament, I hear there’s a camper van for sale somewhere.)

Link (£)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Spurious correlations

Whenever you’re looking for spurious correlations, this is the place to go. For example, the correlation between the number of UFO sightings in South Carolina 1975 — 2011 and the number of successful Mount Everest climbs over the same period.

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England’s Green and Pleasant Land

Impending showers included.

Quote of the Day

”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

• Derek Bok (President of Harvard 1971-91)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Whitacre | Sleep | Voces8

Link

Hypnotically beautiful. Like a lullaby for a peaceful death

Long Read of the Day

The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI

Lovely essay by Jasmine Sun on why secrets, live presence, and a distinct voice matter more than ever in an AI-saturated world, and what independent creators need to build careers that machines can’t replace.

Here’s how it opens.

When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

That is what is really valuable. There’s a reason that robotic startups are paying thousands of people to strap little cameras to their heads so that they can fold T-shirts all day and try to take in the world from a human point of view. There’s a reason that data companies like Mercor are paying Redditors $100 an hour to write up their niche hobbies and explain the intricacies of being a knitter, or playing Magic the Gathering. There are all these details and tacit knowledge that you only know by doing, that AI hasn’t had access to yet because it’s just not in the data. AI can summarize, and it can remix information already out there, but it can’t see stuff. It can’t feel stuff. It can’t break news. And the thing that writers can uniquely do is all of that. You can go out into the world, and you can take that knowledge and you can make that public or you can sell it, and that is something that is really valuable…

Read on. It’s good and, in a way, encouraging.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

US Developers Revive Wild Plan for Nuclear-Powered Floating ‘City Ship’ for 80,000 People Circling the Globe

Screenshot

Plans for the Freedom Ship, a vast floating city concept designed to carry up to 80,000 people while continuously travelling the globe, are being revived once again, re-entering debate around the feasibility of ultra-large maritime living projects and the regulatory questions they raise.

Originally conceived decades ago, the project has long existed more as an engineering vision than a deliverable construction scheme. Its latest iteration again highlights the tension between technological ambition, commercial viability, and international governance challenges at sea.

Apparently it will be a mile long and too big to dock anywhere. I think it should be called the SS Peter Thiel, because he was an early advocate of ‘seasteading’. And if you are beginning to think that humanity is losing the plot, then join the club!

Link

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Galway Bay

I love this picture, which was taken on the northern shore of Galway Bay with the barren hills of the Burren on the other shore.

Quote of the Day

”The British have long had a taste for bad books, but they like them well written.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

John Field | Nocturne No. 6 in F Major, H. 40 (“Cradle Song”) | Elizabeth Joy Roe

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote

Terrific long read (Gift article) by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic on masculinism, which she says has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

She starts with Douglas Wilson, “a twinkly, avuncular” guy

who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.

There’s a political and ideological side to this. Wilson has been propelled to fame because Trump’s ‘Secretary for War’ invited him to lead a ‘Worship Service’ in the Pentagon.

This isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys…

It’s an interesting piece. There was a time when the rise of the white-male-supremacist right was explained by America’s election of a black president, but Lewis thinks that its roots go deeper than that — to males’ fury at their loss of status in society over a couple of decades. “The pithiest short version of that”, says Laura Field, the author of a book on the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, “is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Lewis quotes a troll named Nick Fuentes, who she regards as Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir.

“Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

This is a very long piece, but it’s a stunning piece of reportage. Among other things, I marvelled as Lewis’s stamina as well as her ability to converse with a long list of unspeakable male creeps.

Don’t call the midwife: smartphones are dialling down global birthrates

Sunday’s Observer column

Sometimes, a number is worth a thousand words. One such number is 2.1. It’s called the “replacement rate”: the number of children born to each woman that keeps a population stable without immigration. And in more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, that average number of births has fallen below the replacement rate. In 66 countries, according to a study by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, the average is now closer to one than two. And in some it is zero.

Combine that with the fact that people are, on average, living longer, and you have the makings of the perfect storm that lies ahead for many societies. Exhibit A in this context is Japan, which currently has about 100,000 citizens aged 100 or more. In 1963 there were just 153 centenarians. The replacement rate in Japan has fallen from four in 1950 to 1.15 now, with consequences that are sometimes, er, awkward. The country now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants, for example. And each solitary Japanese infant born today could have as many as 16 great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention in due course…

Read on

Also available in a pdf version here

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King’s re-framed

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

Quote of the Day

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

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

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

Short and exquisite.

Long Read of the Day

 On Teaching Machines to Predict Death

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

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

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

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

Remembering James Mayall 

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Commonplace booklet

The bottled-water racket

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

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

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

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

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

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Popping up

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

Quote of the Day

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

• Noel Coward

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

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dick Gaughan | Ruby Tuesday

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Hidden Cost of Automated Thinking

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

Here’s how it opens:

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

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

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

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

Do read on. It’s good.

Books, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

After he married Janet Radcliff-Richards, writes MacFarquhar,

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

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet

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

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A new villager arrives!

Spotted on an evening walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

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

• Will Douglas Heaven, writing in MIT Tech Review

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Felicity Lott RIP

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

Link

Wonderful soprano, now gone, alas.

Long Read of the Day

Muskism as Fordism

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

Sample:

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

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

My commonplace booklet

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

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

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

Chart of the Day

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

(h/t Adam Tooze)

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Welcome to Cambridge

Quote of the Day

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

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

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Long Read of the Day

The “Learned Helplessness” Of 2026

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

Here’s a sample:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine has taught us that drones are the new machine gun

My latest Observer column

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

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

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

Read on

May be behind a paywall. Pdf version here.

Books, etc.

This might be interesting. Here’s the blurb:

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

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

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

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

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

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