Memorial Day

Monday was Memorial Day, which is always marked by a moving ceremony at the American Cemetery in Madingley, near Cambridge.

The ceremony is about remembering the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen who are buried or memorialised here, but also about celebrating the wartime alliance between the US and the UK — as you can see on the little flags marking every grave. But there was a strange undertone on Monday: here was an event celebrating the ‘special’ relationship between the two countries at a time when the US has ceased to be a reliable ally, and might turn out to be an enemy.

Quote of the Day

”I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Prine | All the Best

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is it Possible to Read Walden When You Own a Smartphone?

Nice essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on trying to read Thoreau while simultaneously owning a smartphone — two activities that seem fundamentally at odds. As someone who reads a lot, I feel her pain.

Each time I return to the passage about the water level of Walden Pond, I have to mentally shift back down to first gear. And just like you can’t cram a car’s transmission from fifth to first gear without going through the gears in between, there’s an adjustment. A new kind of mind is required, almost. I have spent weeks on a single chapter in this way, until my mental gearbox is exhausted and the muddy hill seems less and less worth the effort.

This is the real explanation of what people mean when they say “I want to read more but I can’t find the time.” Being a reader of any kind in 2025, but particularly a reader of works like Walden, does not mean becoming a person who “has more time”; it means getting used to shifting down to first gear while the culture is racing past you in fifth gear…

That bit about wanting to read more but not being able to find the time, rings bells for me. In fact it was one of the reasons why, when I was designing this newsletter, I decided to always have a ‘long read’ of the day.

My commonplace booklet

Inside DOGE

At last, an interesting insider’s account of what it was like to be doing Musk’s bidding in the early days of the coup. I particularly liked this entry for Day 8:

The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I’d imagined. It was Elon (in the White House), Steven Davis (coordinating), and everyone else scattered across agencies.

Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible.

In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.

This reminded me of something Ted Chiang had written a while ago in the New Yorker:

I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide…

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The Canadians have landed

Mom plus three fluffballs. Seen on an evening walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rufus & Martha Wainwright | Sweet Thames, flow softly

Link

Long Read of the Day

Harvard Derangement Syndrome

This is Steven Pinker’s commentary on Trump’s assault on Harvard. I’ve never been much enamoured of the institution — which I habitually caricature as “a hedge-fund with a nice university attached”, so what I liked about the essay stemmed from the fact that its author has a track record of being vocal about some of its deficiencies. In that sense you could view the essay as a model of how civilised discourse might be conducted in an ideal world. It won’t have any impact in the parallel universe that is Trumpland, of course, but it’s an engaging and serious read.

Sample:

In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

Microsoft shutting down email accounts of Trump’s foes should be worrying to us all

This week’s Observer column:

On 4 February, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump after his inauguration. Two days later, with impeccable timing, his host issued one of his decrees – AKA executive orders – imposing sanctions on the ICC on the grounds that it had “abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister of defence Yoav Gallant”.

The decree goes on to threaten any person, institution or company that provides “financial, material, or technological support” to the ICC with sanctions backed by the full might of the US government.

As far as I know, only one senior official – the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – has, to date, been thus sanctioned, but he is likely to be joined by others in due course. And that’s where things may become sticky for people in other jurisdictions who imagine they are immune to the wrath of King Donald.

Khan, who is a British subject, has already lost access to his bank accounts, which is what happens when you’re sanctioned. More interestingly, though, Microsoft has also blocked his email account…

Read on

So many books, so little time

I’m indebted to Alice O’Flynn for alerting me to this book and its remarkable author. I’ve just opened my copy, and this is how it starts:

Dear Reader: It seems, of all the books in all the world, you’ve picked mine. A most cheerful title that has the word fascism in it. Democracy is there as well, so it is easy to guess you are not in a good place. Kindly let me take the load off. After all, this is going to be quite a bumpy ride on a freight train, during which I’ll show you how your country can be lost.

Or not. It all depends on what you and I decide to do after this trip. So let’s start with some fun facts, shall we?

My commonplace booklet

I stumbled on the CSPAN recording of the Cabinet meeting that Trump called to mark his first 100 days in office, and watched it for a while until the sickbag beckoned. Contemplating it, the thought that came to mind was: “this is what it must have been like in Henry VIII’s court”. Every Cabinet member’s ‘report’ commenced with cloying testaments of the Great Leader’s sagacity, genius and inspiration.

And then, quite by accident, I read Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times column (sadly paywalled) on sycophancy.

The Romans understood that the key to “imperial republics evolving into dictatorships” is sycophancy. The empire enters its decadent phase of chaos and barbarism when its elites succumb to the allure of obsequiousness. The great Roman historian Tacitus tells us that the republic died when “they all rushed into servitude – consuls, senators, and knights. The higher the rank, the greater the hypocrisy and haste”.

He also tells us that even the tyrannical emperor Tiberius was disgusted by the slavering: “Clearly, while he objected to the freedom of the people, he was also sickened by such abject submission from his ‘slaves’.” And here there may be a warning to those who think that the appropriate response to Trump’s emperor act is to play along with abject submission.

Spot on. Also, any world ‘leader’ who chooses to visit the Oval Throne Room for his or her moment of glory deserves everything that’s coming to him/her.

Here’s the latest victim, the South African president, as seen by ‘Gado’, the pen-name of the brilliant Kenyan cartoonist, Godfrey Mwampembwa.

Thanks to Msani Kym for spotting it. _

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Saturday morning, wet

The view from our hotel room in Kent.

Quote of the Day

“Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.”

• Joan Robinson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Byrds | The ballad of Easy Rider

Link

Long Read of the Day

What fires burned at Auschwitz?

This is an astonishing essay by a great historian on how “the association of the Holocaust with industrial modernity has become an entrapping cliché”, starting with the Holocaust of Eichmann’s railway timetables, moving through “the Holocaust of the blueprint” (archetypical industrial artifacts for murdering people at scale, designed by German architects and engineers) and ending with the notion of the camps as ‘death factories’.

This is grim stuff and it’s a long read, but I found it illuminating. It caught my eye because I had written about the ‘blueprint’ aspect of it in the early 1990s after the Auschwitz archives (which had been transported to Moscow by the Russians after the liberation of the camp) had been opened to foreign scholars and I was in touch with one of them.

What fascinated me was what could be gleaned the archives of the architectural firm that designed the camp buildings, and of Töpf, the mechanical engineering firm who designed the furnaces. In these documents one saw the workings of highly professional architects and engineers grappling with the increasing needs of a very demanding client — The SS. And of course the question those documents raised was the obvious one: what was going through the minds of these professionals as they went about their professional duties? It led me eventually to propose that engineering and architectural schools should have ethics as a core part of their curricula.

RIP Alan Yentob

The most creative and interesting TV executive and film-maker I’ve ever known has died at the age of 78. I was the Observer’s TV Critic between 1987 and 1995 and so he and I often came into contact. What I liked about him was the way he would sometimes phone me late on Thursday evening if a programme of his was about to be screened. He knew that I would be writing my column the next morning and wanted to, er, draw it to my attention, but the resulting conversations were invariably funny, barbed, gossipy and enjoyable. What impressed me most was that he was doing his own PR, not delegating it to a minion.

There will be obtuaries everywhere this week, I guess, but here’s the BBC’s one. And when there’s a memorial service I will be at it.

May he rest in peace.

So many books, so little time

Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books

Dontja just love this — from Ars Technica.

On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper’s uncredited “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system.

The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia said. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors…

Books, etc.

At the moment, Trump is attempting to rule by decree (aka Executive Orders), many (if not most) of them which to have little legal validity. And, funnily enough, American judges at the federal level have been pointing this out. I had been hearing about this but hadn’t any idea of how extensive such refusals have been, which is why this chart is so interesting.

When I mentioned to my friend David Runciman after Trump’s inauguration that it looked to me that Trump was under the delusion that he was a monarch rather than the president of a republic, he recommended that I have a look at an interesting book by Eric Nelson, a lad whom Quentin Skinner regarded as one of the smartest students he’d ever taught. Which is how I came to his book, The Royalist Revolution, a revisionist interpretation of the American revolution which argues that a great many of the ‘founding fathers’ of the revolution saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. Nelson interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favour of royal power ― driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.

On June 1, 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania rose in the Constitutional Convention to offer the motion that would create the American presidency. The new federal executive, he proposed, should “consist of a single person”, and this chief magistrate should be vested with sweeping prerogative powers…The people of America did not oppose the British King but the parliament — the opposition was not against an Unity but a corrupt multitude… The colonists, on this view, had rebelled against a “corrupt multitude,” not a monarch”.

Implying, I guess, that the president should be free to govern as an unimpeded monarch, rather than as primus inter pares with the Congress and the Courts as the the Founders supposedly intended. Which Trump is obligingly doing. Arise, King Donald.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A transcript (and audio recording) of Trump’s Commencement Address to West Point graduates the other day. Not something I’d normally recommend, but some people were using it as evidence of dementia. I don’t think it is — it’s just him rambling on as usual. He always reminds me of maudlin drunks one used to encounter in rural pubs.

Feedback

Friday’s piece about the VW Beetle ad and honesty in advertising generallysparked some interesting email. The one that struck me most was this lovely advertisement for the Citroen 2cv.

The 2cv was a genuinely iconic vehicle. I always thought that if we lived in Provence, it would be an essential purchase. (though perhaps not as our only vehicle.)

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Mellow yellow

Industrialised agriculture in technicolor.

Quote of the Day

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

• Groucho Marx

I’ve got a list of people in British politics at the moment who fit that bill.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Domenico Scarlatti | Sonata in D major K96 |Christian Zacharias

Link

Long Read of the Day

Submission

Blistering essay by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books. It opens with Trump’s attack on Columbia University and the institution’s surrender, and goes on from there.

That Columbia was first on the list was predictable, not just because of the scale of the protests there but because of Trump’s personal animus against the university. More than 25 years ago, Columbia’s then president, Lee Bollinger, turned down a Trump development project, the price of which would have been – by coincidence – $400 million. ‘Destroy Columbia University’ was among the proposals advanced by Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute last December, in an article headlined ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education’. Eden advocated arresting Bollinger: ‘Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.’ Trump is also aligned with right-wing Zionists in the United States who loath Columbia for having been the home of Edward Said (the ‘professor of terror’) and for its Middle East Studies programme, which they called ‘Birzeit on the Hudson’.

There’s nothing surprising about Trump’s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump’s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out ‘reforms’ – and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.

It’s a great piece — which has also made me think that I should read Houellebecq’s book.

So many books, so little time

I went to an interesting talk yesterday by the author (and a subsequent discussion) and came away intrigued by some of the ideas that came up. One in particular was the shrewdness of focussing on the automobile as the core of her inquiry, because (a) we’ve been grappling with that technology for a century, and (b) so-called ‘AI’ as embedded in self-driving cars poses similar challenges above and beyond the wheeled vehicle involved.

It’s a very generative idea, not least because we knowthe extraordinary lengths industrialised societies had to go to accommodate the needs of automobile technology (just think of the physical architecture of cities, or motorway networks). And if AI pans out as its evangelists hope, then societies will have to go to a new set of extraordinary lengths to accommodate it.

Also, she made me think about the significance of the different terms used to describe this new variant on the car: self-driving (but who’s the ‘self’ here?); driverless (less what?); autonomous vehicle (same thing as autonomous weapons?). And so on.

Conclusion: worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve)

Ads used to be this great

Look at this, for an idea of what a product says to the prospect.

It makes you laugh. When you laugh inside an idea forms.

”Ain’t it the truth.”

That gets you ready to read the pitch, which is stuff you wouldn’t have read or even considered if they hadn’t said something so true right up front.

He’s right. The Beetle was not a beautiful car. I had two of them and they were the only cars I really loved. And we drove all over Europe in them for years without a single breakdown.

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Truffles, anyone?

Provence, 2011.

Quote of the Day

”There are many people for whom ‘thinking’ necessarily means identifying with existing trends.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Boccherini | La música nocturna dels carrers de Madrid (Night Music of the Streets of Madrid) | DeltaChamber Music Festival, 2023

link

Extraordinary piece with an interesting history.

Long Read of the Day

Law ≠ Power

An interesting essay by the legal scholar Rebecca Roiphe on the strange irony of seeing the liberal critique of law as the servant of the powerful has resulted in its weaponisation by Trump and his enablers.

Trump has declared war against the American legal system—and, for the most part, institutions have caved to him. Collectively, nine firms have agreed to donate almost a billion dollars in legal fees to the administration’s preferred causes. As heinous as Trump’s actions are, and without minimizing the severity of his attacks, it is important to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth—that legal institutions themselves bear a significant measure of blame. In the recent past, law schools and the profession as a whole have had an unfortunate tendency to portray the law as nothing more than an instrument of power. And the profession is now experiencing buyer’s remorse in seeing how similar that doctrine is to Trump’s vision…

Worth your time.

(Note for non-mathematicians: the symbol ≠ in the title means “is not equal to”.)

So many books, so little time

I came across this recently, when musing on the absurdly impoverished view of ‘intelligence’ that is implicit in current discourses about ‘AI’.

It was this review by the anthropologist Gerald Lombardi that alerted me to it.

In The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them, Simon Roberts aims to resuscitate the human body from the sepulchre of Western thought, where Descartes and his successors presumably buried it, and to correct popular misconceptions about how we generate knowledge. In the author’s words:

“Our intelligence does not just arise from our brains… nor can it be programmed as a set of rules or propositions that enables us to think in particular ways or perform particular actions. Instead, our understanding of the world arises from our bodies’ interactions with and perceptions of the world – and it is through these interactions that our bodies acquire knowledge.”

My commonplace booklet

The FT journalist Melissa Heikkilä had the nice idea of asking the various big LLMs for their opinions on a number of tech moguls. Here’s what they ‘thought’ about Mark Zuckerberg, the Supreme Leader of Meta (neé Facebook):

ChatGPT4o 

Mark Zuckerberg is a relentless, data-driven leader who prioritizes scale, control, and long-term dominance, often at the expense of public trust. His greatest weakness is a persistent tendency to downplay ethical risks and social consequences in pursuit of aggressive growth and platform expansion.

Meta Llama 4

Mark Zuckerberg is a transformational leader who embodies multiple leadership styles, including autocratic, laissez-faire, servant, and visionary leadership, making him a unique and effective leader. Mark Zuckerberg’s greatest weakness might be his reported tendency to be a bad listener and overly controlling at times, which can impact his ability to effectively lead and manage his team.

Grok 3

Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary but controversial leader who drives innovation at Meta with a focus on connectivity and technology, though his leadership has faced criticism for privacy scandals and centralized control. His greatest weakness is a perceived lack of transparency and accountability, especially in handling user data and addressing ethical concerns around AI and social media.

Claude Sonnet 3.7

Mark Zuckerberg is a determined, product-driven leader who maintains tight control over his company’s direction, blending technical understanding with relentless competitiveness. His greatest weakness is a tendency to prioritize growth and competitive positioning over addressing the societal implications of his platforms, repeatedly underestimating how technologies his company deploys can amplify harmful content, privacy violations, and social division.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership style is often described as transformational, visionary, and at times, aggressive, focused on innovation and growth while encouraging a relatively flat organizational structure. Based on available information, a notable weakness attributed to Mark Zuckerberg includes facing criticism regarding privacy issues, the spread of misinformation on his platforms, and a perceived lack of accountability.

Deepseek

Mark Zuckerberg is recognized as a transformational and visionary leader who fosters innovation by empowering employees, though he can also be seen as aggressive and demanding in pursuing long-term objectives. His greatest weakness is often identified with Meta’s ongoing challenges concerning user data privacy, content moderation complexities, and the erosion of public trust and increased regulatory scrutiny.

Interesting: none of them thought to mention how creepy he is.

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Lending a hand

Quote of the Day

”Life is a picnic on a precipice.”

• W.H. Auden

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Overture to Egmont | Kurt Masur and the Gewandhaus Orchestra

Link

Moving fast and breaking things wasn’t always a recipe for destruction

This week’s Observer column:

Reid Hoffman’s best-known book is Blitzscaling, which he co-wrote with Chris Yeh. When Hoffman talks about its striking title, he acknowledges its unsavoury echoes of the blitzkrieg, the innovative form of warfare practised by Germany in the 1940s. “Before blitzkrieg… armies didn’t advance beyond their supply lines, which limited their speed. The theory of the blitzkrieg was that if you carried only what you absolutely needed, you could move very, very fast, surprise your enemies, and win.

“Once you got halfway to your destination, you had to decide whether to turn back or to abandon the lines and go on. Once you made the decision to move forward, you were all in. You won big or lost big. Blitzscaling adopts a similar perspective.”

It’s about prioritising growth above everything else. It involves taking more risks than is prudent, making mistakes all the time but learning and recovering from them quickly, stressing people out with the aim of getting so many users that potential competitors lose their nerve. And it’s not for the faint-hearted: those seeking a healthy work-life balance need not apply.

Which, oddly enough, describes what it’s like to work for Elon Musk, who is possibly the most difficult boss on the planet…

Read on

Long Read of the Day

The Last Humanist: Nicholas Carr on What the Digital Age Can’t Replace

Screenshot

Erik J Larson’s long, thoughtful review of Nicholas Carr’s new book.

In an era where “content” is measured less by substance than by shareability, Nicholas Carr remains a rare figure: a cultural critic who engages the digital age without succumbing to its tempo. His work resists the attention economy even as it dissects it, a kind of elegant irony that seems increasingly scarce. Carr writes not to provoke but to understand—a posture that feels almost antique in the age of the algorithm. If most Internet writing today is tuned to the viral frequency of outrage or affirmation, Carr’s essays hum at a different register: explanatory, deliberate, steeped in a long view.

Reading Carr, one is reminded of an earlier generation of critics—Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag—figures who treated technology not merely as a suite of tools but as a cultural atmosphere. Like them, Carr asks how our instruments change us. And like them, he brings a literary sensibility to his diagnosis, eschewing jargon for prose that is as precise as it is lucid. If Carr sometimes seems out of step with the dominant cultural tempo, it’s because he’s marching to a longer rhythm. That’s exactly what makes him so essential…

In the early days of the Web, Carr was one of the network’s most persuasive public intellectuals. Like Larson, I saw him as a continuation of the cultural criticism practised by Neil Postman, Eric Mumford, Marshall McLuhan et al. I read everything he published, and photographed him at a book-launch event for him in October 2010 at Toppings wonderful bookshop in Ely.

But then — as Larson observes in the essay, he disappeared from view. So it’s thrilling that he’s back in print, and Superbloom has joined my reading list.

My commonplace booklet

Neal Stephenson has a Substack. If you want to know why this is interesting news, try it. It is, he says “Mostly about the intersection of tech and art, with some excursions, digressions, and tangents”. Which, for those of us who admire his work, is reason enough. I first discovered him when I read his essay on Linux — “In the Beginning Was The Command Line” — aeons ago.

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!

Lake view

Killarney, sometimes known as “Ireland’s Lake District”.

Quote of the Day

”A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.”

• Thomas Macaulay

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (as Evelyn Waugh might have said).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sibelius | Impromptu for Strings Op. 5

Link

Mesmerising. And fascinating to follow the score.

Long Read of the Day

 Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

One of the things that really bothers me at the moment is the way Humanities teachers and scholars seem to be freaked out by LLMs and ‘AI’ generally.

Which is why I was exhilarated to find this fabulous New Yorker essay by D. Graham Burnett. It’s long, but worth it. Here’s how he sets it up:

Let me offer a dispatch from the impact zone. When I first asked a class of thirty Princeton undergraduates—spanning twelve majors—whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Same with my graduate students. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), I got nowhere.

It’s not that they’re dishonest; it’s that they’re paralyzed. As one quiet young woman explained after class, nearly every syllabus now includes a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wants to risk it. Another student mentioned that a major A.I. site may even be blocked on the university network, though she was too nervous to test the rumor.

In one department on campus, a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually have barred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I. (It was ultimately revised.) Last year, when some distinguished alums and other worthies conducted an external review of the history department, a top recommendation was that we urgently address the looming A.I. disruptions to our teaching and research. This suggestion got a notably cool reception. But the idea that we can just keep going about our business won’t do, either.

On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular…

It is. And we have to get past what Henry Farrell calls “the AI Fight Club” to use these tools as the ‘cultural technologies’ that they are.

So many books, so little time

Reid Hoffman was in Cambridge last week, and I went to an event in which he was the star guest and was intrigued by one of the books he’s written or co-authored over the last decade.

Screenshot

It’s a book he wrote in conjunction with GPT-4, so it’s a kind of ongoing conversation between human and machine. I’m half-way through, and am impressed. It’s an example of a creative partnership at work. Not quite Lennon and McCartney, but interesting nevertheless. We’ll see a lot more of this, and it was astute of Hoffman to spot it early.

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!

Floater

An experiment in depth-of-field.

Quote of the Day

”Never underestimate the confidence of a mediocre man.”

• Rebecca Solnit

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Miles Davis | Autumn Leaves

Link

I know, I know: it’s not Autumn. But I really like this piece.

Long Read of the Day

 Blitzscaling for tyrants

Terrific essay by Henry Farrell on “the lightning-fast path to tearing down due process” currently being followed in the US.

Here are some features of DOGE’s approach to changing government:

DOGE looks to scale through data. Humans don’t scale well – hiring and firing take time and come with a lot of politics. Data and algorithms can be scaled up much more easily.

DOGE is highly tolerant of mistakes. You can’t build big and build quickly without making messes along the way.

DOGE looks to overwhelm the opposition before the opposition can even figure out what is happening. Scale up fast enough, and you will be able to set the rules of the game before the other players even realize that there is a game to win.

DOGE relies on a small elite team to completely reshape a much larger organization.

DOGE is hostile to regulation. Rules are made to be broken.

Guess where those ideas came from. Read on…

My commonplace booklet

The French company Mistral has released its own chatbot. It’s called Le Chat, which is nicely ambiguous.

I really enjoyed how the company demonstrated its image-generation capacity.

Corporate nomenclature

Sheila Hayman (Who God Preserve) pointed me to (where else?) Wikipedia.

A popular poster for The Three Stooges features the Stooges as bumbling members of such a firm, with the actual episode using the name “Dewey, Burnham, and Howe”. The 2012 Three Stooges film uses this example, among similar ones such as proctologists “Proba, Keister, and Wince”, divorce lawyers “Ditcher, Quick, and Hyde”, and attorneys at law “Kickham, Harter, and Indagroyne”. In the film Heavenly Daze, Moe and Larry deal with a crooked attorney named “I. Fleecem” (I fleece ’em). Catherine O’Hara used the phrase in the premiere 1986 edition of HBO’s telethon “Comic Relief”, and Soupy Sales claimed that it was the name of his law firm in 1972. “Sue, Grabbitt and Runne” recurred in the British satirical magazine Private Eye. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, of NPR’s Car Talk radio program, named their business corporation “Dewey, Cheetham & Howe”. In 2001, a banker in Texas, who had experience coming up with gag names for staff training, reported a cashier’s check to the FBI when he noticed it was payable to “Howe” or “Howie Dewey Cheatham”, leading to the client’s conviction for money laundering and fraud.

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The Loner

Quote of the Day

”I drink to make other people more interesting.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Sonata in G Major HWV 363a | IV. Bourreé

Link

I heard my wife playing this yesterday and thought it’d be a cheery way to start the week.

Long Read of the Day

Two long reads today, both about the Catholic Church and strange things that are going on around it. One is Colm Toibín’s LRB essay about the street-wisdom of the late Pope Francis. The other is Róisín Lanigan’s fine Observer column about the creepy way Catholicism is suddenly cool and chic for reactionary conservatives in the US and elsewhere. These two trends come together in the person of J.D. Vance, a recent high-profile convert to the Church of Rome.

Toibín is very perceptive on the late Pontiff’s dislike of Vance & Co, who came to Rome ostensibly to see him.

Since the pope was ill, he had every excuse not to see Vance. While it’s tempting to claim that the sight of Vance, all humble and obsequious, might have hastened Francis’s demise, it would be more plausible to suppose that seeing Vance for a few minutes, and hearing his expressions of gratitude, allowed the pope to die slightly more content. The footage of Vance being received by the ailing and unsmiling pope, with Vance looking like an attack Chihuahua who had lost the will to live, must have given the pontiff and his followers some comfort. The meeting ended with a gift of Easter eggs for the three Vance children and Vance saying that he would pray for the pope. Vance’s prayers go far. Attentive readers will know that the last time Vance’s prayers were reported, they had been to seek the ‘victory’ of US military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. He did this in a Signal chat with other members of the Trump administration on 15 March, a chat that was shared with the editor of the Atlantic magazine.

But even if Vance went away with his tail between his legs just as Francis ascended to heaven, his antics make clear how deeply divided American Catholicism is. By concentrating on the plight of immigrants and by openly opposing the Trump regime, the Church has, for the main part, embraced the poor. The problem is that many American Catholics are not poor; they include six members of the Supreme Court – all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also shows how little Catholics in America have in common with one another. These justices may agree on the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth and the Assumption, on transubstantiation and the divinity of Jesus, but hardly on abortion law, the death penalty and the right to shoot up a school.

In an interview on his way to Francis’s funeral, Trump boasted that he received 56 per cent of the Catholic vote at the last election. Which he did, a 9 per cent increase on 2020…

At this point, I suddenly remembered something an academic friend had told me. He had been on a fundraising tour for his (Irish) university a couple of years ago, and one of the events was a lunch with a group of ultra-rich Catholics in Texas. At one stage, he mentioned Pope Francis admiringly, only to be interrupted by the wife of one of the potential donors who shouted that “Francis is a communist!”

Cue Róisín’s column. She’s been wondering where all these new catholics are coming from. Answer: from the political Right

I would not mind the Catholicism boom if it was strictly down to this perception of coolness. In some circles of the internet, being a young Catholic is simply a kind of cosplay, a new genre for theatre kids who a decade ago might have been dressing up as the Doctor or running Sherlock blogs or saying that they believe themselves to be wolves. There’s an odd sexual undertone to it all, sure: kneeling by bedsides; twiddling Rosary beads between cleavage; dressing solely in slip dresses and knee socks; communicating that you’re not allowed to have sex before marriage while constantly oozing a sort of Nabokovian, Virgin Suicides vibe from your every alabaster-skinned pore – but it’s ultimately harmless. It’s dark academia for bored Protestants who spend too much time on Pinterest.

The aesthetic appeal is understandable, but sadly, that’s not all there is to it. Some newbies take Catholicism Very Seriously Indeed. They know the theology. They’ve read the Bible (nobody I know has ever read the Bible). They love Latin Mass (again, weird). They think we need to go back to basics, toughen up, remember our fire-and-brimstone roots. For those on the right, Catholicism can offer a fast-track to a number of things; not just traditionalism and aestheticism – a sort of mystic chicness – but also a cloak for less than savoury unpopular opinions. The alliance between the Catholic church and the new Republican era in the US is not just theatrical and embarrassing, it’s chilling. It’s emboldened the public endorsement of reactionary and sinister ideas, particularly from the pro-life lobby.

These are interesting essays, not least because — as Toibín notes at one point — in an interview on his way to Pope Francis’s funeral, Trump boasted that he received 56 per cent of the Catholic vote at the last election. Which he did, a 9 per cent increase on 2020.

Lessons of Europe’s blackout moment

This week’s Observer column:

Electricity grids are the most complicated large machines in the world – systems into which millions of different units (generators) inject power, which is then distributed to billions of end users. Grids are also the most critical machines societies possess because, when electricity is cut off, suddenly nothing, but nothing works.

If you doubt that, try talking to any one of the 768,000 Irish citizens who were abruptly disconnected by Storm Éowyn in January – some of them for up to 17 days. Or ask Ukrainians, whose grid Vladimir Putin has been trying to destroy since 2022.

In some ways, though, grids are also surprisingly delicate, and therefore potentially fragile. This is because they are synchronous machines: every component part has to be in sync with all the others. How come? Basically, because the electricity they transmit and distribute comes in the form of alternating current, or AC, which periodically reverses direction and changes its magnitude continuously with time.

In Europe, this happens 50 times a second, or at a frequency of 50 hertz, which means that every device on the system has to keep time with that metronome. If it doesn’t, bad things happen very quickly…

Read on

My Commonplace booklet

The historian Niall Ferguson had an interesting reflection on Trump’s attack on Harvard.

The pen is sometimes mightier than the sword, the gown more powerful than the crown. King James II learnt this the hard way in 1687 when he attempted to impose a new president on the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford. The college still celebrates its victory over the last Stuart monarch each year at its Restoration dinner.

James had thought he could insert a Roman Catholic as president. The fellows refused, instead electing one of their own number, John Hough. The king would not stand for it, though he picked a less controversial candidate for president: Samuel Parker, the Bishop of Oxford. He even went to Oxford in person and harangued the fellows, as Macaulay recounts in his History of England. “You have not dealt with me like gentlemen,” exclaimed the King. “You have been unmannerly as well as undutiful … Go home. Get you gone. I am King. I will be obeyed. Go to your chapel this instant; and admit the Bishop of Oxford. Let those who refuse look to it. They shall feel the whole weight of my hand. They shall know what it is to incur the displeasure of their Sovereign.”

On October 20, three royal commissioners (with three troops of horse) arrived at Magdalen. Bishop Parker was forcibly installed. On November 15, twenty-five fellows were expelled and declared incapable of receiving any future ecclesiastical employment. And yet the king had overreached… Hough was restored to the presidency on October 25, 1688, and the fellows to their seats at high table. Just 11 days later, at the invitation of a group of Protestant aristocrats, James’s son-in-law William of Orange landed at Brixham. On December 23, James fled to France.

So here’s the question du jour: who will be the USA’s King Billy (as he is still known to some in Northern Ireland).

Corporate nomenclature

The flow of intriguing business names continues. John Skrine mentioned Wright Hassal. Andrew Arends thought that the American firm Dewey, Cheetham and Howe might be a contender. Euan Williamson cited Bodgit & Scarper (allegedly a haulage firm).

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Apologies for intruding on your Saturday morning.

Thank you for the messages wondering why my Observer columns had suddenly disappeared from this newsletter — and indeed apparently also from the Web. Some wondered darkly if it might have had something to do with the fact that the Guardian had dumped sold the Observer to Tortoise Media?

If it’s any consolation, I too initially wondered what had been going on.

As it happened, the move from one proprietor to another was involved, but the disappearance of the columns from the online edition of the paper was accidental. Tortoise had done a herculean task in creating a new Observer website from scratch under fierce deadline pressure and tagging my ’Networker’ column seems to have been one of the tasks that was accidentally overlooked.

So here are two of the ‘missing’ columns.

AI can crunch data but to evolve, it needs the human factor – learning by experience

24 April 2025

Artificial generative intelligence has taken another step forward with chatbot maker OpenAI’s latest model but it will only become truly smart by interacting with its environment OpenAI, that curious profit-making nonprofit oxymoron run by Sam Altman, recently released its newest large language model (LLM), coyly named o3. Cue the usual chorus of superlatives from Altman’s admirers. Tyler Cowen, a prominent economist who should know better, kicked off early on the theme of artificial general intelligence (AGI). “I think it is AGI, seriously,” quoth he. “Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be?”

So, I dutifully asked it lots of questions, and pushed back a bit on some of its answers, and found it quicker and a bit slicker than other LLMs I regularly use. It’s multimodal – that is, it handles text, images, and audio input and output. It produces near-human speech, engages in lively interactions, and seems quite good at the kind of knowledge tasks that researchers use to test LLMs.

It can “see”, and seems to understand, images (charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs). But was it as close to AGI as Cowen thinks? Answer: no – unless one accepts the ultra-narrow definition of AGI that OpenAI uses; that it can “outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. The “G” in AGI is still missing…

Read on

Why US scientists are suddenly using ‘burner’ phones (please destroy after reading)

Sunday 4 May 2025

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a supposedly independent agency of the US federal government that was set up in 1950 to support fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.

Today, it funds about a quarter of all federally supported basic research that goes on in American colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the main source of federal funding.

And in recent decades, it has devoted billions of dollars to attract more women and members of other underrepresented groups into the Stem fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

On 18 April, though, the research community that depends on the agency had a nasty shock. Henceforth, the NSF announced, those latter initiatives were “no longer aligned with its priorities” and it was terminating any existing grant designed to improve the demographics of the scientific workforce.

Oh, and grants related to “misinformation/disinformation” were also being axed because that kind of research “could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the US in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate”.

So if you were a researcher thinking of applying for funding to estimate the percentage of AI-powered bots now operating on X (neé Twitter), forget it…

Read on

Enjoy the weekend. Normal service resumes on Monday.

John