Stairway to…
… who knows…
Quote of the Day
”No solution to the problem of poverty is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Albinoni | Adagio in G Minor for solo cello and cello quartet
See below for why I chose this for today.
Long Read of the Day
Use it or lose it
Margaret Heffernan takes on the challenge of AI.
I used to carry about 100 phone numbers in my head: family, friends, my office. Now I carry just one: my husband’s. I can do this because I have effectively outsourced my memory to my phone. I’m comfortable doing so because I backup my phone and if, in a real emergency, I don’t have it, I can call my husband.
Other kinds of outsourcing I am not happy with. No matter how well AI agents might get to ‘know’ me, I wouldn’t want it to email my friends or fix a time I can have lunch with my daughter; I’d regard it as crass and impersonal—because it would be crass and impersonal. In the same way, podcasters who invite me onto their show, and then invite me to schedule myself don’t get a reply: I have zero appetite for so transactional an exchange.
The smarmy automated invitations to save me time by letting AI summarize long documents (wow at least 10 pages!) just make me mad at the addiction-peddling of Microsoft, a company that, if it truly respected my time, would devote real resources to improving their messy software…
I’m with her on Microsoft software.
The new Ofcom chair’s first task is to tame Elon Musk
My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer
The former television mogul Michael Grade comes to the end of his four-year term as chairman of Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, later this month. In classic British fashion, the government compiled a shortlist of possible successors drawn straight from central casting: a doughty baroness and a brace of knights. The baroness, Margaret Hodge, was thought by some to be too ancient (though she is of the same vintage as Lord Grade). One of the knights, Jeremy Wright, a Tory MP with a real track record of caring deeply about online harms, was thought to be deemed too dangerous for a timid government. So the position appears to have gone to a City grandee, Ian Cheshire, who has spent his life running big retailers and sitting on the boards of Barclays, Debenhams and BT.
As far as I can see, his only obvious qualification for running a media regulator was that he had once been chairman of Channel 4. Presumably, he at least possesses those accessories so prized by the British establishment: a “safe pair of hands”. Which is good, because he’ll need them.
He inherits a powerful agency that has, since its foundation in 2003, been attracting commitments the way a trawler attracts barnacles…
Do read on
Books, etc.
Screenshot
Just downloaded this on the recommendation of a colleague because it touches on things I’m trying to think about at the moment.
My commonplace booklet
RIP a fine journalist 
Yesterday, I went to the funeral of a fine journalist in our local church. Burns won two Pulitzer Prizes and a host of other awards during his 40-year career at the New York Times. One of the Pulitzers was for his reporting of the destruction of Sarajevo and the barbaric killings in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.
The music at the service was comforting in the Anglican tradition, with Abide with Me, Guide me, O thou great redeemer and Jerusalem (an echo of the last night of the Proms), but the really heart-stopping moment was when a young cellist, Santi Lowe, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, as a tribute to Vedran Smailovic, a musician whom John had immortalised in his reportage. Here’s what he wrote:
A Cellist Honors Sarajevo’s Dead
As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.
Each day at 4 p.m., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo’s dead.
The spot he has chosen is outside the bakery where several high-explosive rounds struck a bread line 12 days ago, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. If he holds to his plan, there will be 22 performances before his gesture has run its course.
I really love the cello. And the resonances it triggers when played in a small country church are breathtaking. Reminds one of those recordings of Pablo Casals playing the Bach Cello suites in the crypt of Sant Miquel de Cuixà, France, in 1950.
The New York Times obit of John Burns is here.
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