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.

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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.

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!

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.

  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!

Letting sleeping dog lie

Arles, 2012.

Quote of the Day

”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Never Going Back

Link

Long Read of the Day

Encounters with Reality

This is a thoughtful review essay by Regina Munch on Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience: : Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World

When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit purpose of “having a good time.” But that’s exactly what a cruise—at least this particular kind of cruise—is: a never-ending parade of convenient entertainment and diversion. Gorge yourself at breakfast; use the coupon in your welcome bag for a mid-morning massage; have lunch brought to your table at the pool; shop luxury brands on the promenade in the afternoon; go to a fancy dinner and a comedy show and max out that bar access card. On the days you actually alight on land, you’re met with a theme park version of Cozumel or San Juan, rigorously patrolled tourist markets selling souvenirs or even the cruise line’s private island devoted entirely to passengers’ seamless pleasure. (Royal Caribbean’s is called Perfect Day at CocoCay. To me, that feels like a threat—have a perfect day, or else.)

It’s all too easy, I remember thinking as I downed yet one more Shirley Temple. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I had the persistent feeling that I was being lied to. Surely such a quantity and variety of food doesn’t materialize from nothing; it’s prepared and served by people whose labor is carefully hidden from me, presumably because it would bum me out if it weren’t. One day, we disembarked in Mexico and saw police officers with machine guns guarding the limits of the tourist area. Something was being kept out—or in.

I was brought back to that week as I read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, which evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as “experiences” for ease)…

I was drawn to this because of an aphorism that’s been running round my head for decades — “Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” For years I wrongly attributed it to the philosopher Martin Heidegger until Seb Schmoller (Whom God Preserve) pointed out that it came from Max Frisch in his book Homo Faber.

Munch doesn’t entirely buy Rosen’s argument, which makes the essay more interesting than an ordinary book review.

Hope you enjoy it.

So many books, so little time

David Cleevely is an entrepreneur whom I know and admire but until now I never thought of him as an author. And then, just when we were away in France, he springs this on us: a really interesting book about the accidental encounters out of which great ideas and innovations come. By definition these accidents cannot be planned or anticipated, but that doesn’t mean that we simply have to sit around and hope that they will happen. David’s big idea — that it is possible to design spaces where such encounters can happen, and environments which increase the chances that, when they do, they lead to meaningful outcomes.

I’ve watched him in action for many years, during which he has done more than anyone else I know to create those kinds of environments in and around Cambridge. (He’s the founder of, among other things, the Cambridge Network and the Centre for Science and Policy in the University.) His book is essentially a distillation of what he’s learned over those decades.

Reading it is a bit of a revelation. I’ve always known that he can “talk the hind legs off a donkey” (as we say in Ireland); but nobody told me that he also writes well.

My commonplace booklet

“We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation… it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall.

Which is why face-to-face conversations are so important.

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Cloistered

Somewhere in France (possibly Cluny), 2012

Quote of the Day

”I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Songbird

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy, But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo’

Nice Bloomberg column by Feargus O’Sullivan trying to set the artistic record straight.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

O’Sullivan is (rightly) pissed off by the way a president with a taste for gold-painted home furnishings prompts clueless media to “malign the good name” of a sophisticated, exuberant and frequently misunderstood European design style.

I particularly liked his comment about the new-look Oval Office “where the row of gold urns along the mantel looks less like a trove of priceless antiques than a set of beauty pageant trophies lined up for sale on eBay.”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

An AI tool that’s genuinely useful

Yesterday’s Observer column on operating in a world where information is not just overabundant but scattered, disorganised and contextually disconnected.

I am writing this column in a text editor on my laptop. I also have a browser (Firefox) running that has – pauses to count – 18 tabs open. Each one represents a webpage containing information that I searched for when planning the column: websites, YouTube videos, a list of relevant podcasts to which I should have listened, pdfs of relevant reports, notes that I’ve made when reading through the sources I’ve consulted, lists of links that are conceivably relevant – etc, etc.

And, somehow, I have to weave a coherent narrative from all the stuff in those tabs. Cue violins?

Save your sympathy: I’m just an ordinary Joe facing what confronts millions of “knowledge workers” every day. As Steven Johnson, one of the world’s best science writers, puts it: “You find yourself in these situations where the job you were trying to do involves synthesising information that is scattered across 15 open tabs and a bunch of documents sitting on your drive, and, you know, wherever that is, all over the place.

We’re long past “information overload” and have moved onto something much worse: a phase of cognitive fragmentation, when information is overabundant — and also scattered, disorganised and disconnected, making it difficult to make sense of what’s happening.

Read on

Chart of the Day

Sobering, ne c’est pas? Helps to explain US isolationism, maybe. Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How India became a french fry superpower And no, I did not make that up. Link

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Deadwood

On the Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire with the spectacular folly in the distance.

Quote of the Day

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622: I. Allegro (Live)

Link

One of the first LPs I bought as a student.

Long Read of the Day

 Guest, Host, Ghost: A Dinner Party in Kyiv

Memorable meditation by Timothy Snyder on what the war in Ukraine means (or should be understood to mean) for the rest of us.

Excerpt:

The overloaded table was lit by candles. As the flames moved this way and that, I discerned, one at a time, the unframed canvases that climbed the high walls of the small room. My hostess was wearing a dress that resembled one in a portrait; my host was in uniform. The labor of war brings together people who would otherwise never meet. The apartment was full of a love that was both risky and mature. In candlelight the lip-reading that accompanies conversation in another language is harder. We had started in English and switched to Ukrainian, in part so that I could hear from a soldier back from the front.

I will call him Serhyi, since that was his name. He had been on active duty since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. He had been in the Donetsk airport and in Debaltsevo, two of the most desperate battles of that initial stage of the war. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, he had led special operations, including rescue missions. My host asked him to answer my questions. Serhyi spoke matter-of-factly, in an even tone, about acts of stunning physical courage, about the center of the largest war the world has seen since 1945. He was modest. He was doing the things he had to do, and that night one of those things was to talk to me…

Sergei was killed the following week.

Serhyi was married and had children. He had comrades and friends. This is their loss. He had a country that he served. This is Ukraine’s loss. In another sense, though, his death is a loss for those of us who do not notice. By resisting, Ukrainians have helped to make the world safer. They have held off a larger war in Europe. They have deterred China from adventures in the Pacific. They have made it less likely that other countries will develop nuclear weapons. They have defended what remains of a world order based upon law…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

The truth about Tesla

Tesla makes money by making and selling cars, right? A splendid piece of investigative journalism by Sky News tells a more nuanced story. Turns out that,

Revenue from state subsidies accounted for at least 38% of Tesla’s profits of $7.1bn in 2024 as the company banked $2.8bn from trading “regulatory credits”, a state-level subsidy paid to encourage production of electric vehicles.

Accounts for the first quarter of this year show Tesla earned $595m from regulatory credits – almost 50% more than its net earnings of $409m – suggesting that without the subsidy Tesla would be operating in the red.

Where do these ‘regulatory credits’ come from?

In America, regulatory credits are an incentive intended to encourage car manufacturers to meet targets for EV production.

Several states, led by California, use them to enforce a “zero-emission vehicles mandate”, under which manufacturers are required to produce a certain proportion of EVs as part of their overall output.

Because Tesla only makes electric vehicles, it earns credits at no cost and profits from selling them to manufacturers producing petrol and diesel vehicles, which need them to meet any shortfall against state targets. 

Tesla’s total revenues in 2024 were $98bn, of which automotive sales made up $72bn.

And of course half of those cars were made in China. Wonder how that plays with Trump’s tariff obsessions.

Feedback

My puzzlement about the young woman in Wednesday’s photograph prompted some readers to rescue me from my ignorance. Diane Coyle, from whom nothing is hidden, was first off the blocks: “My guess,” she wrote, “would be the girl was recreating a scene from a manga or anime!”

And then, hot on her heels, came Marco Pagni.

“No doubt this is Frieren!”, he wrote. “This lovely manga currently on Netflix features a pretty innovative scenario about friendships and the passage of time. Worth watching…”

So of course, I dug it out. And now I wished I had stopped and spoken to the young woman and her friend. Sigh.

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