No smoke without …

On the other hand, it might just be letting off steam.

Quote of the Day

”AI is the asbestos we’re shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society.”

• Cory Doctorow

Nice metaphor.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Symphony nº 33 Hob. I: 22 Der Philosoph 1st movement: Adagio

Link

Long Read of the Day

Living without America

If you think that what’s going on in the US is nothing to do with you then can I respectfully request that you think again. Reading this remarkable blog post by my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser would be a good place to start.

Quentin sees a big problem looming on our horizons now:

Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta are all American companies. And (as the recent minor AWS outages demonstrated), a very great number of other organisations depend on infrastructure which is either physically in the USA, or is owned by companies which are.

And as Donald Trump seems ever more keen to become the new Putin, this may be a problem, and it may affect you. Sooner than you think.

There was a scare earlier this year when Trump regime imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court because he didn’t like them criticising Israel, and shortly afterwards the ICC prosecutor who was his main target lost access to his Microsoft services. Later, Microsoft denied that these were in any way connected, but further information has been scarce, and the thing that really worried people was not whether it actually happened, but the fact that it now seems totally plausible that it might. In October, the ICC announced that it was ditching Microsoft Office in favour of an Open Source alternative. Mmm.

This is a pattern that is starting to become more common, as the idea of ‘digital sovereignty’ becomes ever more desirable. The German State of Schleswig-Holstein moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice is one recent example. A ministry in Denmark has been doing the same thing. The Austrian Ministry of Economy started the adoption of Nextcloud, hosted on its own hardware, when its licence for Teams and Sharepoint expired. And just last month the main Belgian DNS registrar announced that it was leaving AWS, and put out a request for proposals from European alternative platforms. “The geopolitical reality is forcing us to think more carefully about our infrastructure”, they said. “Ten years ago, we made the decision to switch to AWS, which has certainly benefited our services. But the world has changed, and those benefits no longer outweigh the risk we run if the US suddenly imposes restrictions or tariffs on cloud usage.”

So let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland…

Do read on.

How the media made Nick Fuentes

My recent Observer column…

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes is an American political commentator, far-right white nationalist, activist and livestreamer. He hosts America First, a YouTube livestream. Like most of the far-right crowd, he specialises in provocation. One source reports a few choice examples of his rage-bait: describing Hitler as “awesome” is one, while calling interracial marriage “degenerate” is another, as is claiming marital rape is “impossible”. Also, describing women as “fundamentally lower” in intelligence and insisting that Jim Crow segregation benefitted black Americans.

His misogyny is pathological. In May 2023, he said that he wanted a 16-year-old wife when he is 30, “when the milk is fresh”. In November 2024, immediately after Donald Trump’s victory, he tweeted “Your body, my choice. Forever” on X, mocking the pro-choice slogan “My body, my choice” adopted by protesters before (and after) the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade in June 2022. Predictably, it went viral with 100m-plus views.

Basically, then, Fuentes is an equal-opportunity dog-whistler, so much so that many social media platforms have excluded him (but YouTube has had no qualms about hosting America First). His big break came in 2024, when Elon Musk let him back on X, where he now has more than 1 million followers.

Given the number of rightwing fanatics on X, you’d have thought that just adding one more might not be such a big deal. Big mistake. Fuentes is suddenly ubiquitous in American political discourse…

Read on.

PDF How the media made Nick Fuentes | The Observer

My commonplace booklet

Apropos Quentin’s piece above, for years I’d thought about Silicon Valley as a contemporary manifestation of what Joe Nye called ’soft power’ — the ability of a country to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Think Hollywood in the post-war period.

The way Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump after the election should have alerted me to a seismic shift. The commercial interests of the tech industry are now inextricably linked to US national interests — as defined by Trump. First signs of that were his warnings that European attempts to regulate ‘American’ companies like X and Meta would be interpreted as acts of economic warfare and dealt with accordingly. He has already imposed travel restrictions on five officials of the European Commission for “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

And then (as Quentin says) there was his sanctions on the International Criminal Court for, among other things, “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant”. Shortly afterwards the ICC prosecutor who was his main target mysteriously lost access to his Microsoft services. Microsoft denial that they were in any way responsible for singling out this individual. But their statement says only that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC” while carefully avoiding the case of the individual prosecutor.

The new reality we have to contend with is not only that the US is no longer a reliable ally, but also that it is currently governed by a capricious and vengeful president who perceives no limits on his authority and can do what he likes. And if anyone doubts that if he were to instruct Microsoft to pull the kill switch on an individual — or an institution — I bet they would comply.

Which is a sobering thought when one works in a university that has handed over management of all its email services to, er, Microsoft.

In the meantime I’ve just figured out out to download and safely archive all of my Gmails, and am wondering if I should activate my Proton email account.

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Hoping for a bite

I’ve always been impressed by the phlegmatic endurance of these fishermen on the beach at Cley-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

”To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”

• Henry Kissinger

I wonder if Keir Starmer has got the message.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Waltzing Matilda )

Link

Long Read of the Day

 America’s world turned upside down

Bill Emmott’s reflections on 2025.

It has been a dark and stormy year, although not in as benign a sense as the much-mocked melodrama by Edward Bulwer-Litton from which this paraphrase of his opening line derives, nor as funny as the Peanuts cartoons that played on it. The year has blended dangerous geopolitical turmoil and extraordinary political destructiveness with a powerful surge of technological development that could presage either prosperity or calamity – or perhaps both.

As such, for this author the year’s principal themes are best evoked not by the purple prose of Victorian gothic fiction but by one famous quotation from an Ancient Greek historian and two famous book titles from past eras.

The Greek historian is Thucydides (who else?) and the quotation his poignant description of the might-is-right era of the Peloponnesian War, nearly 2,500 years ago. That was a time, as he wrote, when some felt that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.

This, certainly, is how the great powers of our time, Russia, China and, most shockingly, now the United States have been behaving. They believe that their strength and size entitles them to behave in ways smaller fry cannot. The rest of the world, they think, just has to put up with it.

Until 2025, it was generally believed that, for all its faults and occasional bullying behaviour, the United States had stood behind the international laws and norms that since the 1945 United Nations Charter have sought to protect the weak and constrain the strong. But in his second term in office President Donald Trump has shown no interest in laws or norms…

Great essay. Do make time for it.

Books, etc.

It’s that time of year when publishers persuade literary editors to highlight books that are coming out soon-ish. I usually approach these with a jaundiced eye, but some one in the FT’s list looked interesting.

January:

1. The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth by Nicholas Niarchos, Penguin Press
2. Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee.

March:

1. The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad (Allen Lane).
2. Muskism : A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (Allen Lane).
3. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby (Allen Lane)

June:

Land by Maggie O’Farrell, (Knopf). Particularly interesting to me because it’s a novel about the Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland during the Great Famine.

My commonplace booklet

Birdlife and death

What a dead Albatross chick ingested.

Remember Coleridge’s poem — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? An albatross starts following his ship. The sailors see it as a good omen because it seems to bring a following wind, but the Ancient Mariner suddenly and inexplicably kills the bird with his crossbow. Afterwards, when disaster strikes the ship, the crew force the Mariner to wear the dead albatross round his neck. The symbolism: the bird represents the natural world and something holy or even divine. Killing it was an act of spiritual transgression for which the killer should — and did — feel guilt. It’s great poem, with a contemporary resonance evoked by the photograph.

Source

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The world’s largest accounting body has decided to scrap remote exams to combat a rise in students cheating when sitting tests remotely

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, which has 257,900 members, will end its online exams from March, requiring candidates to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances, its chief executive Helen Brand told the Financial Times.

Remote invigilation was introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic to allow students to continue qualifying into the profession during lockdowns.

But the ACCA has concluded that online tests have become too difficult to police, particularly as artificial intelligence has made cheating more difficult to combat.

Link

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Crash landing

Family traditions around Christmas are funny. When my kids were small, Christmas didn’t properly begin until Santa had parachuted in (er, was suspended from the ceiling). They’re all grown up now, but the tradition endures. Accordingly, he will return to his bunker tomorrow (the last day of Xmas), and prepare for 2026. It’s daft, of course. But then many such traditions are.

Quote of the Day

”A man with whom one cannot reason is a man to be feared.”

• Albert Camus

(Especially when he is President of the United States.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cher | If I Could Turn Back Time

Link

Sorry about the associated video.

Long Read of the Day

Blind Into Caracas

Brilliant blog post by James Fallows on Trump’s latest implementation of the Monroe Doctrine

Here are ten quick reactions to the most disturbing presidential press conference I have seen in my life.

1. Trump himself looked and sounded very bad. He slurred and slumped more than usual. His eyes fluttered many times toward seeming shut. He had trouble working his way through big words in the written script. His off-script riffs were from a very small span of his standard repertoire. (“We’re a respected country again, like never before,” etc.) Yes, he had probably been up all night. But even for him, he looked bad. When answering one of the many policy questions that Trump shunted to him, Marco Rubio found himself saying, “It’s a country run by incompetent, senile men.” He was talking about Cuba. But even as the words came from his mouth, with Trump standing with drooping eyes behind him (as shown above), you could see Rubio wishing he had phrased the point a different way…

You get the message. Read on.

If you have the time and the inclination (not to mention the stomach for it), a recording of the C-SPAN coverage of the press conference is here.

Books, etc.

If you’re looking for (as I was) for an insightful and well-written account of how liberal democracies are sliding into authoritarianism or even fascism, then this book by a formidable Turkish journalist would be hard to beat. I’m midway through it and already my notebook is full of notes and quotes. One of the great advantages Tempelkuran has is that she has lived through several of the phases down the slippery path to contemporary fascism.

My commonplace booklet

I had dinner in London with my grandson one evening just before Christmas and after we’d gone our separate ways I made my way through busy Soho streets to my next destination, an office ‘Christmas party’. En route, I was struck by the throngs of people hell-bent on celebrating Christmas. Every pub I passed was crammed, with massive overflows of drinkers standing on the pavement outside and mostly engaged in cheerful conversation and banter. Since I’d spent the earlier part of the day reading and brooding on the looming crises that are coming down the track I had sanctimonious thoughts about the cognitive dissonance that now characterises many liberal democracies. Which brought to mind a recent interesting column on this topic by the FT’s “View from Nowhere” columnist, Janan Ganesh, Here’s the money quote:

Of course, the price of looking away, of “defective imagination”, is that malign forces in the world go unchallenged. Better to engage. But there are two mistakes in this argument. First, it overrates how much sway we have over events. The most that most people can do about the deteriorating world is to vote sensibly every few years. If fellow citizens do otherwise, that in itself is beyond your control. Second, and more bluntly, your first duty is to your own sanity. Out there this winter, in the shopping, the drinking, the theatre-going, I no longer see mindlessness but the ultimate calculation.

Fatalistic realism?

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Frozen

Quote of the Day

”The conductor is a peculiar person. He turns his back on his friends in the audience, shakes a stick at his players in the orchestra, and then wonders why nobody loves him.”

• Viktor Borge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill | John Naughton’s Green Mountain

Link

I wish I could claim the credit for this reel, but, alas it was another JN. It’s sometimes known as Eddie Maloney’s.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for reminding me of it.

Long Read of the Day

 Philip Roth E-Mails on Trump

In 2004, Roth published The Plot Against America, a clever alternative history of the US in which an Aryan supremacist hero, Charles Lindbergh, unseats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election with catastrophic consequences for America’s Jews. The novel is narrated by a fictional character named Philip Roth, who describes the impact of Lindbergh’s presidency on a Newark insurance salesman, Herman Roth and his (Jewish) family.

On January 22, 2017, just after Trump had been inaugurated for the first time, the New Yorker writer Judith Thurman had the great idea of emailing Roth about whether the alternative reality articulated in his novel might actually have happened.

Here is how he replied.

It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

In February 2022 after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and video footage of what was happening began to appear I had an eerie epiphany: the thought that Europe’s ‘holiday from history’ is over. The footage reminded me of newsreel footage of WW2. The only difference was that now it was in colour.

It was quite a holiday. A supposedly civilised continent which had been responsible for the two biggest and most destructive wars in history had lived in peace for 76 years. The collective memory of the horrors of warfare had more or less been erased and with that amnesia came a strange complacency — the feeling that such things as shelling of civilian apartment blocks on the European continent were unthinkable.

And here we are and the complacency continues despite the certainty that if Ukraine falls then Poland and the Baltic states will be next. And after that…? Fill in the blanks. The idea that a dictator with romantic fantasies of a Russian empire to rival the old Soviet one might stop at the Oder is magical thinking.

The strange thing is that Putin can be stopped in his tracks — as the Ukrainians have done a pretty good job of demonstrating. The idea that a country with an economy only the size of Italy’s could manage warfare on this scale against serious opposition is implausible. But at the moment most of Europe doesn’t seem to be thinking about how to provide that kind of opposition, and only a few (led by the countries most immediately at risk — Poland and the Baltic States) are seriously contemplating the steps needed to start building the capability that is needed.

This week’s Economist has a sobering article about this — particularly the worrying growing divide in Europe over military preparedness for potential conflict with Russia. It’s probably behind a paywall, so here’s a summary, courtesy of Claude.ai

The central tension: Western European countries are struggling to accept what their security chiefs are warning —that they exist “in a space between peace and war.” While countries near Russia (Baltics, Poland, Nordics) take war readiness seriously, those farther away like France and Spain remain skeptical.

Two main responses are emerging:

1. Military service reforms: Germany is creating a database for potential mobilization starting in 2026. France announced voluntary paid service for young adults. These follow Nordic models–Finland and Norway have long had conscription, while Sweden reintroduced it in 2018 as part of “total defence.”

2. Civilian preparedness: Nordic and Baltic countries actively prepare their populations–Sweden sends households detailed survival guides and holds annual “preparedness weeks.” Lithuania does similar. Most Western European nations have nothing comparable, with Spain and Italy barely discussing the issue publicly.

The gap: A December poll showed 77% of Poles saw high war risk versus only 34% of Italians. Yet across Europe, 69% on average believed their country couldn’t defend itself against Russia — including majorities in every nation surveyed.

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Who you lookin’ at, mister

Brancaster Staithe, Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

• Hunter S. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Ring Them Bells

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Personal reflections on a Trumpian 2025

Christina Pagelis a mathematician and a physicist and Professor of Operational Research at UCL. She is also the most diligent monitor we have of the Trump regime’s relentless assaults on American democracy. In this piece she looks back on a pretty grim year.

I started to track Trump’s actions to help me make sense of it, and then to help others make sense of it. I’m continuing because it’s become a contemporaneous record of what is happening – a bearing witness to the loss of American freedom, tolerance and democracy. It’s also there as a warning for us and the populist anti-democratic movements in our countries, that are also increasingly adopting the language and symbols of white supremacy.

As someone with German parents, who lived through the 2nd World War and grew up in a Germany grappling with the enormity of its crimes, I had believed that the imagery of the Nazi years was gone for good. Seeing it return via the US Department of Homeland Security social media feed has been horrifying. …

Do read it. Her TrumpActionTracker now stands at over 2100 recorded actions and informs thousands of visitors every week.

My commonplace booklet

The Fishburne Effect

Great cartoonist. You can follow him – and order some of his collected work — at The Marketoonist website.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Jesse Welles | Join ICE

Neat satirical recruitment song. Video here.

Here’s the first verse:

Well, if you’re lookin’ for purpose in the current circus
If you’re seekin’ respect and attention
If you’re in need of a gig that’ll make you feel big
Come with me and put some folks in detention

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Shaggy dog?

Ireland, December, 2025. Think of it as my homage to Martin Parr, the great celebrant of ordinary life, who died this year.

Quote of the Day

”One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.”

• Viktor Borge  

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beatles | Lady Madonna

Link

One of my favourite tracks.

Long Read of the Day

 A Positive Sign for Flying in the Future…

Remarkable story from James Fallows, a great American journalist and an ultra-knowledgeable aviation-geek.

Here’s how it opens:

One week ago, something happened for the first time in the century-plus history of civilian air travel. An airplane whose systems detected a problem with its human pilot found its own way toward a suitable airport not in its original flight plan…

Read on. In a way it puts concerns about self-driving cars in perspective.

Books, etc.

If you’re puzzled why a book published nearly half a century ago is suddenly flying off booksellers’ shelves, then join the club. But John Self’s thoughtful piece about it in the Observer made me think that maybe I should have a look.

The story of So Long is simple on the surface. An unnamed narrator in old age – ostensibly Maxwell himself – is looking back to his childhood in rural Illinois in the 1920s. He is traumatised by the death of his mother in the 1918 flu epidemic and by the loss of a friendship following a terrible crime.

The immediate appeal of the book is in its deep hooks: there is a murder (a pistol shot rings out on the first page), a love triangle, the impenetrable mysteries of the human heart. But the novel is also about shame and atonement and … about “what it means to have lived an adequate life”… <hr< 

My commonplace booklet

 On deathbed advice/regret

Interesting blog post

A common social media trope is posting advice from people on their deathbed. Usually about things they didn’t do. “I should’ve been more there for my loved ones” is a classic tune, “I should’ve cared less about what other people think” is another hit, usually culminating in the banger conclusion of “I should’ve done [a super specific personal thing like opening up a hobbyist store or buying a house in their favorite hinterland].”

I don’t value this kind of advice much, it’s too cheap. Just like complaining is just so cheap…

Yep. Although I liked the undertaker who once said that he never heard a dying person say that the wished they’d bought more stuff.

Feedback

The O Sole Mio story continues…

Chronis Tzedakis writes:

On the matter of the Venice gondoliers’ choice of tunes, I too remember the ‘Just One Cornetto’ advert, though not with too much affection. Apparently purists shudder at the sound of ‘O Sole Mio’ in Venice, since it is a Neapolitan song. According to anecdotal evidence, an American tourist paid a gondolier to sing it and they have obliged ever since.

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Xmas a la Edward Hopper

(Courtesy of Alex Tabarrok)

Quote of the Day

“The biggest blind spot of economics is the economy.”

• Dan Davies

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Christmas Oratorio

Link

Wonderful music for this time of year. It’s an hour and a half long, but worth it if you have the time. If not, at least stay with Part 1 which lasts for 26 minutes. Part 21 starts at 00:26; Part 3 at 00:54 and Part 4 at 01:18

One of my long-term dream projects is a road-trip through Germany, ending at the Thomaskirche, Bach’s church, in Leipzig.

Elizabeth Braw has a nice essay about the Oratorio in Engelsberg Ideas.

Long Read of the Day

How the media made Nick Fuentes

My Observer column of 12 December:

Fuentes is an equal-opportunity dog-whistler, so much so that many social media platforms have excluded him (but YouTube has had no qualms about hosting America First). His big break came in 2024, when Elon Musk let him back on X, where he now has more than 1 million followers.

Given the number of rightwing fanatics on X, you’d have thought that just adding one more might not be such a big deal. Big mistake. Fuentes is suddenly ubiquitous in American political discourse. He started popping up in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Politico and other respectable outlets. He has also spawned a large group of followers called “groypers”, after a cartoon amphibian named Groyper, which is a variant of the internet meme Pepe the Frog. Groyper is depicted as a rotund, green, frog-like creature, often sitting with its chin resting on interlocked fingers…

Read on

PDF version here

My commonplace booklet

Fame at last!

I had an email from a friend asking if I knew that I was now an exhibit in the British Library. He sent this pic as evidence. I was puzzled. But then I zoomed in and understood.

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Come in!!

Quote of the Day

“The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot.”

• John Banville, in his novel The Infinities

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | I Know that my Redeemer Liveth | Messiah

Link

Long Read of the Day

You Can Look It Up: A threnody for the dictionary

Lovely essay in Commentary by Joseph Epstein.

If you love dictionaries (and who doesn’t?) then this is for you. And Joseph Epstein writes beautifully. Here is is, for example, on Kory Stamper to for 20 years was an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster.

Kory Stamper’s Word by Word, published in 2017, is an account of how dictionaries are made. Ms. Stamper went to work for Merriam-Webster in 1998, and remained there for nearly 20 years, 10 of them as an associate editor. Merriam-Webster, she informs us, requires no qualification for becoming a lexicographer apart from a college degree and English being one’s first language. But she makes plain that without a love of language, one really isn’t fit for, or likely to last long in, the job. She qualified on this count, too.

Ms. Stamper doesn’t hold with the distinction between prescriptivist and descriptive, at least when it comes to the making of dictionaries. “We don’t just enter the good stuff,” she notes. “We enter the bad and ugly stuff, too. We are just observers, and the goal is to describe, as accurately as possible, as much of the language as we can.” She views Standard English as another dialect, one of many, and writes:

”We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go; it heads straight for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy… . But we can never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.”

Lovely stuff.

Footnote. A threnody, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a song of lamentation for the dead”.

My commonplace booklet

My childhood memories of Christmas are not terribly fond ones, perhaps because my parents weren’t very good at celebrations. But the memory of one particular Christmas Eve remains vivid. I was six or seven years old. We were living in rural Ireland, a country which, in the 1950s, was not unlike rural Poland before the Berlin Wall came down — poor, backward and priest-ridden. One Christmas my parents decided that we would spend the festival at her parents’ home in Mayo, a long way from where we lived in Kerry. They were relatively wealthy, had a large house and a lively household of aunts and uncles, so it was an exciting prospect for me and my siblings.

Since Da’s job required him be in his office in the morning, it was relatively late in the afternoon before all of us — parents, three children and a dog — were ready to squeeze into our Morris Minor and set off to drive northwards as night fell. Soon, we were travelling in total darkness on almost deserted roads. I remember snuggling down under a rug, entranced by the fact that the only light came from the speedometer that constituted the vehicle’s instrument panel and imagining that my father, silhouetted in that faint glow, was the pilot of a plane flying into the darkness of space.

But the memory that most stood out (and remains) was the way that every rural dwelling that we passed in that enveloping darkness had a single lighted candle in its window.

Now, there’s a threnody for you.

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Trump in a nutshell

Lovely New Yorker cover.

Quote of the Day

“While generative AI can do amazing things, it is also perhaps the most wasteful use of a computer ever devised. If you do 1+1 on a calculator, that’s one calculation. If you do 1+1 in generative AI, that is potentially a trillion calculations to get an answer. That consumes a huge amount of chip capacity and electricity.”

• Andy Wu

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Still, Still, Still | Bryn Terfel

Link

A lovely folk song (and lullaby) from Salzburg circa 1865.

Long Read of the Day

Stop Thinking

Interesting little essay by Karl Schroeder.

Sample:

There’s a certain kind of person who only thinks by understanding. You probably know one or two. This is also how Large Language Models such as ChatGPT reason. They may seem creative, but are always drawing on already-established links between ideas (tokens, actually, in their giant lookup table). Spectacular though they may be, they only respond to prompts with connections that somebody already made; they are engines of understanding, not of what George considered the superior mode: reason.

Reason is not “thinking harder.” It is a fundamentally different mode of cognition, that recognizes and works through contradictions rather than trying to avoid or suppress them.

Where understanding sees fixed categories, reason uses systems thinking and sees problems holistically. It’s aware that issues arise from interdependent, evolutionary processes…

Which suggests that is the idea of ‘reasoning’ by LLMs might be a bit, er, problematic.

Books, etc.

I started reading Ian McEwen’s latest novel last night and am blown away by it. It provides a dystopian but riveting picture of what the world might be like when the catastrophic futures that we are currently piling up for ourselves come to pass, and the few future historians look back at our era. Here’s excerpt from a rave review in the New York Times:

Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.

This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind…

My commonplace booklet

Simon Kuper has a thoughtful and disturbing column in the weekend edition of the FT about the implications of democracies’ response to the way right-wing populists are astutely fanning the flames of anti-immigration rhetoric.

The thought was triggered by his observations of the kafala system in which migrant workers are treated in the Gulf states — as second-class citizens with few, if any, human rights. He sees an analogous system emerging in an ageing Europe that needs immigrants to staff sectors from cleaners to care but doesn’t want them.

”The new trend, as seen for instance in the UK, is to give immigrants time-limited visas for specific sectors, reduce their right to bring family members and make wait longer, decades, in some cases, before they can get permanent settlement.”

This internal contradiction — of ageing societies desperately needing immigrants while their governments (which must understand the contradiction, and presumably worry about it) — are nevertheless terrified of taking openly about it in public.

Feedback

The O Sole Mio trope is a gift that keeps giving. As in this from Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve):

I too have heard O Sole Mio sung in a fake Venetian canal but by a Chinese fake gondolier in the Macau Venetian Casino. The whole place was a ghastly prefigurement of hell, or, if you like, being trapped inside a 3D model of a conversation with ChatGPT. (The gondolas have electric motors and move inside a tiny L shaped canal. In the adjoining room, the walls are painted with trompe l’oeuil shopfronts, and on the ceiling are projected scudding clouds.)

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His last resting place

W.B. Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff Churchyard, Co. Sligo. We always visit it when driving north or south on the N15. Despite the tourists it’s still a magical place, with Ben Bulben in the background.

Quote of the Day

”What’s the difference between a maths PhD and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

• A famous old joke about academia. Especially relevant nowadays.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

HAIM | Down to be wrong

Link

Weird video, but catchy song.

Long Read of the Day

Why stablecoins – crypto for adults – have suddenly become a big deal

My recent Observer column…

Why are stablecoins suddenly such a big deal? Because they are digital natives that sit comfortably on blockchains: shared digital ledgers that everyone can see and no one can secretly change, and which automatically keep a permanent record of every transaction. That means that they are useful for monetary transactions, especially of a cross-border kind.

These normally require wading through bureaucratic treacle involving banks that have to correspond with one another, payment processors such as Swift and paying fees to everyone along the way. In principle, stablecoins could bypass most of this. On a blockchain, for example, there are no opening hours. Anyone can send a transaction at any time that clears in minutes and no bank approval is required. In other words, stablecoins could transform any multistep international transfer into a single blockchain transaction at a very low cost. Which is why – eventually – a lot of international trade is likely to be conducted in stablecoins.

But which one(s)? At the moment, there are about 250 of them, and since everything that happens on digital networks eventually winds up as a monopoly or oligopoly, it’d be useful to know which coin is likely to become dominant in the next few decades…

Read on

NOTE. The Observer has recently introduced a paywall, which means that from now on the Web version of my column may be only fully available to subscribers. I’ve decided to follow a practice that some columnists on other papers (like Tim Harford on the FT) have adopted: to provide a copy of the column on their blogs a few days after its publication in the paper. If that’s of interest you can find a pdf of the above column here.

Books, etc.

Yesterday I gave a keynote address on “What Machines Don’t Know” to an AI conference in Cambridge yesterday. The Abstract for the talk reads:

Large Language Models are cultural technologies and, as such, moderately useful. But they (and those who build them) have two blind spots. One is their embodiment of a ludicrously narrow concept of ‘intelligence’. The other is the delusion that when one has ‘read’ everything that’s been written, one knows everything worth knowing.

When I was preparing the talk I dug out one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read — Howard Gardner’s 1983 book arguing that the idea of intelligence being measured by a single number is nuts: there’s a multiplicity of different intelligences — Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Emotional, etc.). And of course I also ranged over the question of what kind of knowledge is embodied in LLMs. (Answer: only knowledge that has been written down.) It was useful to be motivated to dig out Howard’s book, and refreshing to read the passages I was looking for. Sadly though, it was also an argument supporting my book-hoarding habit!

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From Michael Higgins on O Sole Mio(as featured in Wednesday’s edition):

I too have heard a gondolier singing that song – on a canal through the inside of a casino/shopping centre in Las Vegas. With the passengers restrained by seat-belts and warning sign about the water depth – 24 inches I think.

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!