Mellow fruitfulness
Last year, our crab-apple tree produced very little fruit. This year it is overladen with fruit — every branch is bending with the weight. We used to make apple-jelly, but now we leave the fruit on the tree, because when the weather gets really cold the birds pick it clean.
Quote of the Day
”When they were young, they wanted to be rich. Now that they’re rich, they want to be young again.”
- Martin Rees, the Cambridge astronomer, on the obsession of Silicon Valley tech titans with combating ageing.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Waterboys | A Song for the Life
Long Read of the Day
The Inside Story on how King Charles Pulled the Plug on Andrew
More coruscating stuff from Tina Brown, the most readable commentator on the British royals.
Sample:
Things were getting sweaty for the king. Last week, he determinedly kept shaking hands and smiling outside Lichfield Cathedral as he was heckled by a man demanding to know if he had covered for Andrew. More ominously, there was talk in the House of Commons about holding a debate over the Andrew problem, or even requiring him to give evidence under oath, which would be an unprecedented invasion of royal prerogative. Start pulling on that string and who knows where you end up. The success of Britain’s constitutional monarchy depends on the unwritten pact that the royals are above politics. They will serve the public and do the government’s bidding, and, in return, Parliament will butt out of the royals’ business. It’s proved to be an especially good bargain for the British government, as was made dazzlingly clear at the Trump state banquet, when the royals proved yet again that they are the UK’s diplomatic superpower. No wonder the king raced to take the Andrew problem out of Parliament’s purview, sending royal warrants to Lord Chancellor David Lammy to formally remove Andrew’s titles, and Lammy, with full backing from PM Keir Starmer, who owes Charles big time for Trump whispering, was happy to oblige.
The king’s move was the smartest royal pivot since 1992, when Queen Elizabeth, during one of her least popular post-Diana moments, voluntarily declared she would be the first monarch to pay income tax…
Nice acerbic style.
Musk’s war on Wikipedia: a fight for a future without fact-checking
My latest Observer column:
So Elon Musk has entered the knowledge business with Grokipedia, an AI-driven alternative to Wikipedia that he claims represents “a massive improvement” – indeed, “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the universe”. It is supposedly based on a fantasy of Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, who believes that Wikipedia is “hopelessly biased” because an “army of leftwing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections”. The problem is compounded, he thinks, by the fact that “Wikipedia often appears in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training”.
Turns out that Sacks was late to the anti-Wikipedia party. Musk has been on the warpath about it since at least 2023, when, in a chat with his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “There’s an old saying that ‘history is written by the victors’ – it’s like, well, not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia. The losers just got a lot of time on their hands.” Yes, agreed Bibi: “History is written by those who can harness the most editors.” By 2024, Musk was urging users to “stop donating to Wokepedia [sic] until they restore balance to their editing authority”…
Books, etc.
I’ve never read this, but after coming on Ed Simon’s essay on it, I think it’s time I did. His column is at partly about the importance of ‘close readings’ of poems, passages, dialogue and even art. And after I read the essay, I was blown away by listening to Carl Sagan himself reading the highlighted passage from the book.
You can find the reading here, and if you do nothing else today, click to listen. It’ll take three minutes and 26 seconds out of your busy life. But you’ll remember it for a lot longer.
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