Painterly ultra-realism

This is a painting by the Ukrainian painter Vladimir Orlovsky which I came across in Adam Tooze’s terrific blog. I looked hard at it, unable to believe that it isn’t a photograph. It’s not.

Quote of the Day

“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Concerto No 21 in C major, K 467. | II. Andante Herbert von Karajan and (I guess) the Berliner Phil.

Link

Funny how often this is now called the “Elvira Madigan” because of its use in the film.

Audio quality of the recording is abysmal I’m afraid. Apologies.

Long Read of the Day

Watching the detectives

Andrew Brown is a friend of mine, an experienced journalist and a bloody good writer. (One of his books won the Orwell Prize.) He also has a Substack, which I follow. Recently, he stumbled on some of his notebooks when, 40 years ago, he was shadowing London police officers as research for a book. This is an excerpt from one of them.

The superintendent’s face was ruddy and his fingers sunburned. He looked like an honest Labour politician of the ‘45 vintage, marked by good living well appreciated – say Jim Callaghan, but with George Brown’s eyebrows. I had been following the work at his station for a month or two and he had decided I could be trusted, a little bit. So he invited me to drink whisky with him in his office one afternoon. There was a desk, of course, chairs for visitors, a filing cabinet and display a cabinet full of gardening trophies; on top of that were two carved wooden hands, one with one finger upraised; the other with two fingers raised, not in a sign of peace.

He wanted to teach me how policing worked…

Read on.

I found it compelling. Hope you do too.

So many books, so little time

Fabers sent me a proof copy of Peter’s book last year and somehow it got lost in the chaotic piles in my study. I retrieved it yesterday and started to read — and am finding it unputdownable. It’s about an extraordinary Briton, Sefton Delmer, who was a gifted propagandist working for the British during the Second World War. It’s a good story, very well told by an author who knows a lot about propaganda. Such a relief to have found it at last.

My commonplace booklet

This comes from the remarkable material currently being published by the Economist drawn from archives of the magazine’s coverage of the final year of WW2 in Europe. The excerpt below came from one of their correspondents who was on a Bavarian country road in June down which thousands of defeated German troops and their officers were marching towards wherever they were to be incarcerated.

”Somewhere by the side of the road a man in the striped uniform of the concentration camp is trudging slowly home. A short time ago he was stopped by an SS officer, travelling with his orderly in a car. A sharp exchange of words and threats accompanied by violent gesticulation takes place. As an American jeep approaches the quarrel stops, and the SS officer’s car moves off. The ex-inmate of the concentration camp explains with some pride that he was an official of the Social Democratic party at Breslau. Yes, it is true. SS men occasionally bully people like this on the roads.”

The man heading to Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) faced an uncertain fate under Russian occupation. Until he was “dragged away to the concentration camp”, we wrote, “he had been a ‘Social-Fascist’ in the eyes of local Communists.”

”At the other side of the road, a tall, thin woman tries to explain something in broken English to two American officers. In her confused, unintelligible story two words keep on recurring: Gas-kammer. It turns out that seven years ago her child was classified by a Nazi doctor as mentally defective. The family doctor disagreed with the diagnosis, but his opinion was ignored. In accordance with the rules of ‘racial hygiene’ the child would have to be thrown into a gas-chamber, the Nazi version of the Tarpeian rock. The mother hid the child in a remote place, some two hundred kilometres away. The last time she saw the child it was nearly starving. Could she now get a permit from the Military Government to go and fetch her child?”

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Commuters

From Paul Day’s frieze in St Pancras Station in London.

Quote of the Day

”Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Prine | Souvenirs | Live from Sessions at West 54th Street

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The commander-in-cheat comes to Scotland

Lovely Observer column by John Niven on what can be learned from watching how Trump ‘plays’ golf. He is, says Niven, “the biggest golf cheat of the modern age”.

This is already well known in the golfing community and was documented at length by the sports writer Rick Reilly in his book Commander in Cheat. Trump cheats in every way possible: he improves his lie. He has his caddy drop a new ball if the old one is lost. He just doesn’t count shots he doesn’t like. (To be fair, this last offence isn’t unique to Trump. It is endemic with American golfers, many of whom will take a “breakfast ball” off the first tee, which simply means not counting your first shot if you don’t like it. They’ll take “mulligans” all over the course, which again means just not counting a bad shot.) All of this is how Trump manages to maintain a golf handicap of 2.8: even lower than Jack Nicklaus’s. If you believe that, I have some NFTs to sell you.

And this week, Trump’s disgraceful reputation was soiled even further (something I thought impossible, like Spud further soiling those bed sheets in Trainspotting) when he was caught – on camera – cheating at golf in Scotland. That’s right, the Dockers-Clad Sweating Oaf Sex Pest chose to cheat at golf at the home of golf. For a golfer, this is like a Catholic not only committing adultery but choosing to commit it in the Vatican. In the Papal Audience Hall. In front of the Pope. From behind. Using a condom. While singing Orange Lodge songs.

It’s a lovely piece which raises an interesting question for the R&A, the organisation that decides where the British Open is played every year. Trump has been lobbying them for years to have his Turnberry course chosen for that signal honour, so far without success. So now we will see whether the R&A has anything that might be described as a backbone. My guess is that they will cave, just as most organisations do when confronted by the Cheat-in-Chief.

My commonplace booklet

Tyler Cowen, the well-known US economist, was invited to 10 Downing Street recently to give a talk about AI. Afterwards he gave a talk at DeepMind, part of which was about how quickly he thought the technology would have a big impact on society. You can find the video and the transcript here, but it’s long, so I asked Claude.ai to give me a summary of the main points he made on this particular topic. Here’s what it provided.

Core Argument: The speaker believes in “slow takeoff” – not because AI models won’t advance rapidly, but because translating AI progress into improved living standards will take much longer due to institutional and practical barriers.

Household Budget Analysis: Tyler examines how AI will affect the major categories of household spending:

Rent (pessimistic outlook): • AI won’t lower housing costs anytime soon • The main constraint on housing is legal/regulatory, not construction costs • AI might even increase rents in tech hubs by making proximity to smart people more valuable

Food (slow improvement): • Even simple agricultural innovations historically take decades or centuries to spread geographically • Despite free trade and shared languages, US agricultural productivity improvements haven’t quickly spread to Mexico • AI-driven food innovations will happen but won’t meaningfully reduce food costs for typical families within 10 years

Education (complex and uneven): • Already millions of people are smarter due to AI, but distribution is highly asymmetric (maybe 5-10% significantly benefit now) • Educational institutions are slow to change due to their nonprofit structure and multiple stakeholders • Getting 2/3 of students to benefit could take 10+ years • Tuition costs likely won’t decrease – people will still pay similar amounts even if they get better education

Healthcare (long-term optimistic): • AI will eventually “cure everything” over 30-40 years • Regulatory barriers (like FDA approval taking ~10 years) will slow implementation • In the near term, healthcare costs may actually increase due to more available treatments • Living standards won’t improve much until later in life when serious health issues typically arise

Overall Conclusion: Even with massive optimism about AI model progress, the impact on GDP and living standards will be slow due to imperfect human institutions that change gradually. The bottleneck isn’t AI capability but implementation and adoption barriers.

It may be just confirmation bias, but that last para seems realistic to me.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Shannon Wheeler’s lovely cartoon in the New Yorker. Made me wonder what Julia Margaret Cameron used to say to her subjects.

Feedback

All the stuff about Trump in Monday’s edition reminded Steve Evans, a journalist on the Canberra Times, of the fact that Philip Roth in 2004 had published a novel, The Plot Against America which imagines “an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels”.

In 2017, after Trump’s election. Judith Thurman, a New Yorker writer had the bright idea of emailing Roth asking him if the scenario envisaged in his novel had now happened in the US. He responded:

“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—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’”

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End of the Valley

Langdale on a beautiful day.

Quote of the Day

“For Trump, everything is a shakedown, the way it was for Vito Genovese, who is Trump’s model of governance. Every crisis, foreign or domestic, is assessed for its financial opportunity, and crises are manufactured for this purpose. He doesn’t have a worldview but a cognitive handicap, the incurable myopia of infinite self-interest. Money is his country; and more money is his diplomacy, a kind of one-man imperialism. (America will withdraw from the world, but not from the world’s money.) The sole objective that comes even close to money is revenge, which is the only thing that Trump will pursue even without the prospect of remuneration.”

• Leon Wieseltier via Tina Brown’s splendid blog

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | As steals the morn (L’Allegro, HWV 55) | Amanda Forsythe & Thomas Cooley, Voices of Music 4K

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Permanent Stain

When Trump took office in January my first thought was to look out two texts which seemed potentially relevant. One was the obvious choice — Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, published in November 1790. The other was Ralf Dahrendorf’s thoughtful little book, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe, published in 1990, in which he pondered the various post-1989 ‘colour’ revolutions in Eastern Europe and wondered how many of those liberated states had a chance of evolving as functional democracies. Both were interesting reads, but of no use in interpreting what was happening in Washington.

The big question, as I saw it in those early weeks of the new regime, was whether we were witnessing a revolution or a coup. The catapulting of Elon Musk into the heart of the administration initially suggested the latter, and so for a brief period it seemed to be. But Musk imploded, as he is wont to do, and Americans are left with something much more worrying: that they have a full-blown revolution on their hands.

The strangest thing is that it’s all happening in full view. The most discriminating effort at monitoring what’s been going on is Christina Pagel’s heroic attention to detail as expressed in her ’Trump Action Tracker’ website. But for a literary assessment of what’s happening, the most eloquent I’ve come across to date is this essay by Andrew Sullivan, published on his blog the other day.

It’s long but (IMHO) worth it. Here’s a sample:

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

The inescapable implication of all this is that Trump will turn out to be the most impactful American president since FDR, and not in a good way.

America’s plan to use AI as a political weapon

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Software engineer turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s really big shots (and loudest mouths), was given the bum’s rush when he went to Washington. This convinced him, he said afterwards to Ross Douhat, that the tech industry was “no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with. And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like: ‘Yep, we’re for Trump.’”

Which explains how all the big tech moguls wound up with front row seats at Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. Sidling up to Trump, though, was also shrewd because it meant that, suddenly, there was a chance that their corporate interests might become inextricably intertwined with those of the US government, to their mutual benefit.

That it was a good bet – for the industry, anyway – was amply confirmed last week when “America’s AI action plan” appeared…

Read on

So many books, so little time

Frederic Jameson famously observed that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Which is why this new book by the New Yorker writer John Cassidy looks interesting.

The blurb says that Cassidy

tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams’s paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement…

Martin Wolf reviewed it pretty favourably in the FT at the weekend, agreeing with the book’s overall conclusion that its extraordinary adaptability is what has enabled capitalism to survive its perennial crises. Its “permanent revolution” is likely to continue because no compelling alternative has yet emerged. Sadly, Jameson was right.

I’ve just bought a copy. More when I’ve read it.

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Book haven

As regular readers know, I have a romantic view of libraries. I couldn’t live anywhere that did not have a decent one within easy reach — which is one of the many reasons for living in a university town like Cambridge. Last Saturday I urgently needed an arcane commentary on Pierre Bourdieu for something I was writing. Couldn’t find anything relevant online, so hopped into the car, drove for 20 minutes to the University Library, and went hunting in the stacks. As I walked back down with the book to check it out, I found myself in this corridor, and stopped to savour the peace and quiet of an institution which is dedicated to quiet contemplation. And felt lucky to have access to it.

Quote of the Day

“To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.”

• Louise Glück

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke and Doc Watson | Last Steam Engine Train

Link

Lovely jam session, especially when Chet Atkins gets going.

Long Read of the Day

 The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

Text of Steven Johnson’s Hearst Lecture. This is from 2010, but I was reminded of it during an email exchange with a reader of the newsletter. It had a big impact me at the time, and indeed reinforced my determination to continue keeping a paper notebook in addition to the usual digital tools.

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

”Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession…

Read on. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when I first read it.

My commonplace booklet

Cover of this week’s Private Eye.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Penguin that followed a teacher home A really heartwarming story from the BBC World Service. Link

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Coming soon…

… to a hedgerow near you.

 ## Quote of the Day

”A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke

Link

I heard him play this one evening in the 1970s at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Suddenly the chap sitting next to me started to gently (and tunefully) whistle the counterpoint. Kottke looked down at him and grinned. Magical moment.

Long Read of the Day

 What Epstein Was Afraid Of

One of the most surprising things (to me anyway) is the way the QAnon conspiracy theory about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein seems to be tearing the MAGA crowd apart. What’s even more interesting is that the Trump regime seems unable to stamp out the madness out. I’d been ignoring the story until I tuned into an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast in which he talked to Will Sommer, a journalist who has written a book about the conspiracy theory. That led me to watch part of a Netflix series about Epstein which usefully documented how creepy and mysterious he was, and chronicled the investigative process that eventually landed the brute in prison, where he apparently committed suicide. Or — so the conspiracists wonder — did he?

Which is why I fell like a ravening wolf upon this riveting blog post by Tina Brown on that interesting question.

Here’s a sample:

Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein’s partner in crime), Brown writes.

knows all about the dangers around every unlit corner in prison, given the number of questionable deaths surrounding Epstein, including his own “suicide” in that now-closed sinkhole, the MCC lockup. It’s Craig Rothfeld’s opinion that the corruption and violence at the MCC, not to mention the cockroaches, mold, burnt food, and running toilet were all insupportable torments to a former master of the universe. His likely fate as a “chomo” (prison jargon for the hated tribe of child molesters) terminally terrified him. Former inmates told the Daily News in 2020 that Epstein was denied medical attention for his back problems because “he’s a pervert” and staffers “were treating him like crap. They were making him sleep on the floor. They wouldn’t let him sleep on a cot.” Inmates would “slide papers under the door [that said] We’re going to kill you, you rapist, you pedophile.’” He was constantly being extorted, ripped off, and was shelling out for protection. The inmates said, “He was giving thousands of dollars. Wiring it Western Union to inmates’ families,” and, “He was saying he’s going to kill himself because the government is trying to kill him anyway.” It was coming at him from all sides.

Rothfeld’s personal theory is that Epstein was presented with two options: Kill yourself or be killed — here’s some extra sheets. This would explain the photo of Epstein’s cell after his death. I have always wondered why it was strewn with so many sheets for a single inmate in a notoriously spartan prison…

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet

Google now spends more on physical capital like datacentres ($85 billion/year) than the entire UK defence budget ($79 billion/year). Source

Hmmm… I wonder where he got those figures from. The UK Defence Journal estimates that the UK spent $85.6 billion on defence in 2024/25 and plans to spend $90 billion in 2025/26.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Ukraine used a cargo drone to deliver an e-bike to a soldier stranded behind Russian lines. Link

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The man himself

Wonderful portrait of the artist by Hubertus Hierl taken in August 1966. Here’s his explanation of how it came about.

I was travelling around the Côte d’Azur for various newspapers and magazines, capturing the activities of young people with my camera. I was near Cannes. Posters announced a bullfight in nearby Fréjus on Sunday, August 7. I decided to go. What followed was a series of fortunate events: when the ticket seller saw my two Leica M3 cameras, he immediately handed me a press pass. As I walk around the oval arena, I suddenly spotted Pablo Picasso with his young wife Jacqueline among the spectators. I signalled to Picasso that I would like to take a few photos. Picasso was in a great mood, and gave me a friendly nod, letting me know that he didn’t mind. It didn’t stop with just a few photos! The whole scenario was just too much. The result was over 100 photos – the last coverage of Picasso out in public. On the occasion of Picasso’s 85th birthday (25.10.1966) the portrait went around the world. Of the many messages I received, the most moving one came from the elderly art historian Carl Georg Heise. ‘You have captured something remarkable: the age at which such a great life becomes its own legend – with strength, secret knowledge and the sadness of parting.’”

Quote of the Day

”Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

• Honoré de Balzac

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Thunder Road

Link

To get the full experience, you really have to listen to it on a good stereo system, with the volume turned up. He has a mesmerising connection to his (vast) audiences.

Long Read of the Day

 Everybody gets popped: Lance Armstrong’s Regime

We spent many evenings recently watching the various stages of the Tour de France and wondering why human beings put themselves through such torture. And then I read this LRB piece by David Runciman and began to understand.

Taking EPO was not without risks: the medical consequences were often unpredictable. It makes your blood ‘healthier’ in the sense that it makes it thicker, which can cause your arteries to clog up entirely if you are not careful. It is not clear how many cyclists died of heart attacks in the experimental phase of the EPO era, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the athletes were less adept at monitoring their reaction to the drug. They didn’t die on their bikes; they died in their sleep when the blood stopped moving (‘stories from that era tell of riders who set alarm clocks for the middle of the night so they could wake up and do some pulse-increasing callisthenics’). Why would super-fit athletes take such insane risks with their health? Part of the answer, as Hamilton explains, is that professional cycling is an inherently unhealthy sport.

It is, to start with, extremely dangerous: cyclists crash all the time, breaking bones and risking permanent injury. Then there is the need to eat the bare minimum consistent with surviving the demands of a long race. Along with having thick blood, the other crucial requirement for a Tour de France rider is to be extremely thin. Hamilton says that during his doping years he also had a borderline eating disorder, which meant he spent far more time thinking about the food he was keeping out of his body than he did about the drugs he was putting in. The truth is that long-distance road racers only feel healthy when they are on their bikes: the rest of the time they feel horribly out of shape. They are achy, wheezy, bent up; they walk like old men; they sit when other people are standing, and they lie down when other people are sitting. When Hamilton was at the height of his cycling powers, he infuriated his wife by being unable even to take a short walk with her to the shops: he never felt fit enough.

The other thing cyclists need is an extraordinary tolerance for pain…

You bet. On one of the closing stages of this year’s Tour, there was an horrendous high-speed crash. One of the cyclists slid agonisingly along the wet road and I think came into contact with a kerb. Turned out he had broken his collarbone. And then a few minutes later, what do I see but him on his bike, steering with his left hand and pedalling furiously to catch up with the peloton. Sacre bleu!

So many books, so little time

This was a gift from a dear friend, a writer who has great taste in books. I’d never heard of it and so opened it not knowing what to expect. What I find is extraordinary — a set of stories about the question of whether some of the twentieth century’s greatest minds drove themselves mad in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe. Reviewing it, the critic John Banville described it as “a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present”. In that sense it reminds me of Francis Spufford’s wonderful Red Plenty which likewise blends fiction and fact. I see that Ruth Franklin had a long essay about Labatut in the New Yorker in 2021, but I’ll leave that until I’ve finished the book

Paying geeks $200m but slashing jobs – this is what an AI bubble looks like

Sunday’s Observer column:

The AI bubble continues to inflate at a stupendous rate. Trawling through company filings and public statements from Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, xAI, CoreWeave and Oracle reveals that, collectively, these outfits propose to spend between $477bn and $498bn on building what they call “AI infrastructure”: datacentres, high-end graphics processing units, land purchases, construction, etc. As the US politician Everett Dirksen supposedly said in another context: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”

If you thought that it’s hard to imagine a business model that could produce decent rates of return within a reasonable timeframe from investments on this scale, you’d be spot on: there isn’t one. This isn’t about mundane stuff such as return on investment, but about something much grander: world domination, or words to that effect.

What we’re seeing is a seismic shift in the tech industry that’s been triggered by AI. The big companies have realised that AI has become the strategic core asset…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Nicholas Carr…

A few months ago, as part of my annual physical exam, I had blood drawn for a routine panel of tests. Late the next day, my phone vibrated to let me know the results were available through my doctor’s “patient portal” app. I signed in (entering a six-digit code to authenticate myself), clicked on the Results tab, and was greeted by a long list of numbers. There must have been two dozen of them, each a measure of some important metabolic function, each occupying a poi nt within a range of points. Blood, that most vital and visceral of substances, had been turned into an array of data on a computer screen. Blood had been rendered bloodless. Maybe I was in a morbid mood—medical tests will do that to you—but as I scrolled through the numbers, I couldn’t help feeling I was looking at a metaphor for something larger, something central to the human condition today. What is datafication but a process for transforming the living into the dead?

Link

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Full steam ahead

A photograph of Brandon Head in Co. Kerry which momentarily looked like a giant locomotive trailing clouds of steam.

Quote of the Day

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

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ronald Binge | Sailing By | BBC Symphony Orchestra

Link

The the background soundtrack for generations of Radio 4 listeners: it’s the intro music for the late-night Shipping Forecast, among other things.

Long Read of the Day

 The Making Of Dario Amodei

A good profile by Alex Kantrowitz of someone who (IMHO) is one of the most interesting person in the ‘AI’ race.

Dario Amodei doesn’t hesitate when I ask what’s gotten into him. The Anthropic CEO has spent 2025 at war, feuding with industry counterparts, members of the government, and the public’s perception of artificial intelligence.

In recent months, he’s predicted that AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs. He’s railed against a ten-year AI regulation moratorium in the pages of the New York Times. And he’s called for semiconductor export controls to China, drawing a public rebuke from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Underlying his efforts, Amodei says, is a firm belief that AI is moving faster than most of us appreciate, making its opportunities and consequences much closer than they appear. “I am indeed one of the most bullish about AI capabilities improving very fast,” he tells me. “As we’ve gotten more close to AI systems that are more powerful, I’ve wanted to say those things more forcefully, more publicly, to make the point clearer.”

Amodei’s outspokenness and sharp elbows have earned him both respect and derision in Silicon Valley…

Worth a read.

So many books, so little time

Reading muscle

Diane Coyle’s review of Edward Tenner’s Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge

There are loads of aha! moments in the book. One of my favourite essays is ‘The Importance of being Unimportant’, arguing that the highest profit margins come from essential components that are a small proportion of the total cost of the finished product – bicycle valves for instance. This introduced me to the work of Edwin Mansfield, who estimated that stronger sewing thread had “contributed more to productivity and well-being than any other innovation, including information technology.” (And who knew that Kenneth Clark of Civilization fame was so rich because the former inherited money from the IPO of the Coats thread-making business.)

Which is interesting because I’ve been re-watching the re-run of Clark’s Civilisation TV series on iPlayer and wondering how he could afford the magnificent Saville Row suits he wore — with collar and tie even in the sweltering heat of Mediterranean countries! Now we know where his money came from.

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!

Pictures from an Exhibition

If you’re a photographer, Arles is the place to be in July and August every year.

Quote of the Day

“The key issue that unites all the problems of AI is the choice of objectives that AI pursues, and the question of who controls these objectives. Control of these objectives is determined by control over the resources that are required for building AI — data, computational infrastructure, technical expertise, and energy. I call these resources the means of prediction.”

• Maximilian Kasy, in the foreword of his forthcoming book, The Means of Prediction

This is spot on for the story of what Britain’s Labour government is now trying to do with AI. The original socialist ambition was to gain public control of the means of production. Now Starmer is moving to hand over control of the means of prediction to a small number of US corporations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Greenshine | Sandy River Belle

Link

Lovely tune, recorded in a bar in Cork, so audio quality suffers a bit. But it has the atmosphere of a live gig. The Big Sandy River marks the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, then flows into the Ohio, so there are hundreds of versions of the tune — in the US and beyond.

Long Read of the Day

 Academia: The Questions Are Big! It’s the Curricula That Got Small

If, like me, you work in Higher Ed and are interested in the current discourses about ‘AI’ in the classroom, then this essay by Timothy Burke is a must-read. It builds on a remarkable draft paper by T.J Kalaitzidis which argues that AI exposes what was already broken about higher education, especially in institutions that claim they’re built around the idea of “liberal arts”. If that is indeed the case (and personally I believe that it is) then any institutional or academic response which assumes that things can continue as they were before the arrival of this technology is doomed to failure.

Most of us force students to quickly commit to the course of study that a discipline offers and then, as [Kalaitzidis]] puts it, “enforce behaviorism”, e.g. to perform the signs of disciplinary commitment in advance of actually being able to reflectively consider or understand that discipline, and those signs turn out to be measurable repetitions of what the discipline knows and does, so that we can prove via tests, grades, metrics and assessments that the discipline has been learned step by step, in measured increments. Kalaitzidis writes, ““Assessments measure retention, reproduction, and formal compliance. Rubrics reward correctness within predefined bounds. Curricula scaffold students towards compliant outcomes, not transformative ones…despite overtures to critical thinking, students find success in stimulating insight, not generating it. Successful students understand the game and play it well.”

They do. Which is why they think ChatGPT and its ilk are terrific.

So many books, so little time

The Economist has a nice essay (behind its paywall) about why Ernest Hemingway “remains the most famous American novelist of his century, judged by mentions in Google’s corpus of books. His Wikipedia page also gets more views than those of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. Why?”.

Three factors, according to the Economist:

1. Nobody had written like him before.
2. His heroes attracted famous admirers — including, apparently, JFK.
3. His life had a legendary arc: married four times; drank hard; feuded with rivals; was wounded in the first world war; reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second; ran with the bulls in Spain; and survived a plane crash in Africa.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Tom Lehrer’s Copenhagen concert

It’s long (50 minutes) and wonderful, but a good way to remember him at his peak. Forget about culture wars and enjoy the satire. Think of it as an hour well spent.

Link

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Blues

Quote of the Day

”The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver.”

• George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and the Band | Forever Young

Link

My favourite recording of the song.

Norah Jones also did a lovely cover of it at a memorial event for Steve Jobs.

Long Read of the Day

I’m 53 years old. I’m 36 in my head.

A school friend recommended this essay in The Atlantic. I remembered it when having a convivial lunch with two of my kids and one of my grandsons the other day. A couple of weeks earlier we’d had a family get together to celebrate my birthday and at lunch the kids roared with laughter when they realised that I am actually a year older than I thought I was.

Here’s how the essay opens…

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.

As one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon. (There’s a study for everything.) As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative…

Lovely essay. Do find time for it. And thanks to Ivan for spotting it.

The machine began to waffle – and then the conductor went in for the kill

Yesterday’s Observer column…

A few weeks ago, when researching a column about the conception of “intelligence” that’s embedded in supposed “AI”, I put the following question to Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. “Large language model [LLM] machines like you are described as forms of artificial intelligence. What is the implicit definition of intelligence in this description?”

The machine speedily provided an admirably lucid reply. “The implicit definition,” it admitted, “is remarkably narrow and reflects several problematic assumptions,” and it then went on to outline some of those. “LLMs,” it concluded, “represent an implicit belief that intelligence is fundamentally about processing and manipulating symbolic information” and “treat intelligence as pure computation that can happen in isolation from the messy realities of lived experience.”

Impressed by this, I remarked in the column that “I couldn’t have put it better myself”. Upon seeing this admission, an alert reader sniffed confirmation bias and set about conducting an experiment himself with Claude…

Read on

Tom Lehrer R.I.P

The great musical satirist has gone to the Great Cabaret in the sky. There’s a nice obit in the New York Times. But if you want to remember him at his best, just dig out videos of some of his performances. Like this one.

I loved the idea that he always had one foot in academia and the other in a more frivolous world — that of entertainment. And his explanation of why he eventually stopped writing satirical songs: ““Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

May he rest in peace.

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Fading beauty

I love the graceful way roses fade.

Quote of the Day

”An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.” * Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Buckets of Rain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Wrecking Balls

For most of my time as a newspaper columnist, Tina Brown has been a ‘media star’. Coming from me, that’s normally not a compliment, but it’s true. So when she finally decided to ‘retire’ from whatever high-profile editorial job she finally had (The Daily Beast?), I felt obliged to subscribe to her Substack. This edition (from last January) which I happened upon yesterday in a search for something else, explains why. It has the kind of energy that few journalists can muster.

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed.

The real punch, though, comes further down the piece:

Why are all these male human wrecking balls so driven by the need to be seen and heard in the first place? Social media has made everyone a star in their own mind, but I am tired of the futile inspection of their repetitive homicidal motives on cable news, their broken marriages, their financial failures, their normal if withdrawn interactions with their stunned neighbors. I am tired of the implication of guilt because none of us noticed another killer in our midst about to blow. I am angry that the military doesn’t care enough for the PTSD soldiers decommissioned with the adult equivalent of shaken baby syndrome.

But have any of these sullen, kamikaze psychos ever observed the loneliness and financial desperation of half the women on their street? Their lives of domestic abuse cohabiting with men like them? Women have been used to being ignored since time immemorial and yet, most of the time, they slog on, trying to keep it together for the sake of the kids…

Great stuff. Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

Et. Tu FT?

From Om Malik:

A month ago, I reported that Apple was in the final stages of acquiring the rights for F1 streaming following the success of its movie about the sport. Almost a month later, the Financial Times reported the news. As a matter of principle, I am not linking to the report.

As is the case with establishment media, they almost never credit independents, blogs, or newsletters. It is such a shame. As a loyal FT reader, I think a little less admirably of them.

Me too. He’s right about mainstream media. I’ve been a columnist and an academic all my working life. So I “have a foot in both graves” as Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Editor-in-Chief of the Observer when I was the paper’s TV Critic, once observed. But I’ve also had a blog for a very long time. Most of my journalistic friends were incredulous about my blogging — and about blogs generally. Their view was that anyone who writes without being paid for it was weird.

Linkblog

Weird things one finds on the Internet…

From AP

 A classical drive: Road rumble strips play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in UAE emirate of Fujairah

FUJAIRAH, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The humble road rumble strip, used around the world to alert drifting drivers to potential hazards or lane departures, can play Beethoven on a mountain highway in the far reaches of the United Arab Emirates.

For nearly a kilometer (a half mile) along the E84 highway — also known as the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Road — motorists in the right-hand lane coming into the city of Fujairah can play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony where the rubber meets the road.

Wouldn’t work on the roads near me.

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