Window box

Quote of the Day

”A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

• John Bennett (who was an editor at the New Yorker)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn & Mark Knopfler | An Droichead (the Bridge)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The End of US Democracy

Bleak conclusion from John Quiggin, an economist not given to hysteria.

When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.

Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.

The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done…

Yep. What’s so strange about this moment is that when one expresses a view like Quiggin’s in polite academic circles people tend to look awkward — as if they had suddenly realised that the person to whom they’d been talking was, er, not quite the full shilling. I’m wondering if this is what it was like living in Britain in the 1930s when Winston Churchill was widely regarded as a one-issue fanatic.

Of course it maybe just that people think that what happens in the US is not a problem for us. (Personally, I think they’re wrong about that.) Alternatively, maybe such widespread reluctance to engage with what’s happening signals passive acceptance of the idea that liberal democracy is on the way out and there’s nothing that we can do about it.

Does AI make us dull?

Sunday’s Observer column about an MIT experiment that shows what happens to the brain when writing an essay with the help of AI – and without it.

The project had four research questions: Did participants write significantly different essays when using LLMs, a search engine or only their brains? How did brain activity differ when using LLMs, search or brain-only? How did using LLMs affect memory? And how did LLM usage impact “ownership” of the essays?

What made the experiment distinctive was that all the participants were monitored by electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive method used to record electrical activity of the brain. They had to wear special headsets that placed electrodes on their scalps to detect and measure the electrical signals generated by their brains’ neurons as they fired. So it was possible to record the patterns of connections made in participants’ brains as they composed the essays…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Andrew Sullivan on “The consequences of Israel’s hegemony”.

There may be good reasons for backing Israel over Iran’s disgusting regime, or the Saudis’ foul dictators. Everyone is better off without an Iranian nuke. But we should be clear-eyed: This is the Israel we have gone to war for. It is not the Israel of the 20th Century. It is a belligerent, ethno-nationalist country, run in part by ugly racists and those who wish Israel were Arab-free. It may well use this new power for very destructive ends. I hope for an Israeli domestic political miracle that makes this no longer true. But I am not optimistic.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Watch this robot cook shrimp and clean autonomously Link

Yeah, it kind-of does it. But it wouldn’t cut it in a real kitchen. Also, I don’t like shrimp. And it doesn’t know how to properly wash a greasy pan. But apart from that, it’s interesting.

The link may come up with a paywall block. If it does and you’re using Firefox as your browser, then just clicking to toggle “Reader view” on should give you a readable version of the article. The embedded videos are not on YouTube, alas.

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!

There’s a new sheriff in town

Quote of the Day

“It’s no surprise that the National Security Council, which is the part of the US policy apparatus that specializes in ensuring consistency, has gone through so much chaos and upheaval in the first months of Trump’s term. So too, for many other parts of the government apparatus. Every administration is trying to build the plane as it flies. This may be the first administration that is yanking random pieces out of the engine, and chucking them out of the cargo bay in mid air.”

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

R.E.M. | Nightswimming

Link

Beautifully evocative of Eliot’s lines:

“The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/ which an age of prudence can never retract./ By this, and only this, we have existed.”

Long Read of the Day

Incoming from outer space: The geo-military radicalism of Iran v. Israel 2025

If you want an illustration of how inadequate journalistic coverage of the US/Israel war on Iran is, then this edition of historian Adam Tooze’s substack would be hard to beat. And it has implications for a Europe that is just waking up to what the next phase of war with Russia could be like. Drones are interesting tactical weapons and the Ukrainians have been amazingly inventive in adopting them. But they’re not where the real action would be if the worst happens. Which is why Europe is buying the Arrow 3 systems that are a cornerstone of Israel’s anti-missile defences.

Here’s how Tooze concludes his essay:

The fact of two military powers trading blows over a span of 1000 miles, over the heads of millions of uninvolved bystanders. Massive rockets roaring at hypersonic speeds into outer space … and being intercepted there.

Mark this moment!

With the Russian assault on Ukraine and the ramifications of the October 7 attack, 2023-2025 may well go down in history as the moment not only of the advent of drone warfare, but as the opening of a new era of missile and anti-missile combat. Against this backdrop, Israel’s conventional aerial bombardment of Iran, as dramatic and effective as it may be, is the “ground game” compared to the hypersonic contest raging on the edges of the atmosphere and beyond.

My commonplace booklet

Michael Moritz’s advice to Silicon Valley

Michael Moritz is one of the big-shot venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. He had some useful advice in the FT (Gift article) for his friends and clients in the Valley.

While Musk has left Washington with his reputation tarnished and his businesses impaired, the president’s family has inked deals for new hotels and golf courses around the world. Membership fees at Mar-a-Lago, his Floridian sanctuary, ballooned last year. And he is milking the enthusiasm of his supporters with his own controversial memecoin, launched days before his inauguration.

One word of advice for those in Silicon Valley who followed Musk’s lead and sided with Trump. Leave. Don’t delude yourself that you are working to make crypto a part of global finance, minimising artificial intelligence regulation, helping start-up companies or protecting the interests of Silicon Valley. You have no sway. You are just cannon fodder.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The mystery of tattoos. Economist Tyler Cowen has been in Paris, and one of his notes on the visit reads:

An amazingly high percentage of young women have publicly visible tattoos. I do not understand the logic here. I do (partially) understand tattoos as an act of rebellion, differentiation, or counter-signaling. I do not understand tattoos as an act of conformity.

Me neither.

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!

Wednesday 24 June, 2025

La creme de la café creme

Breakfast time in Provence.

Quote of the Day

“It’s easier being in each other’s presence, or in each other’s absence, than in the constant presence of each other’s absence.”

• Gianpiero Petriglieri, commenting on the abysmal experience of Zoom conversations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No. 4 (Allemande) | Charlie Zandieh

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker

If you like the New Yorker (and I do), you’ll enjoy this essay by Jill Lepore.

Sample:

It was [William] Shawn, though, who proposed printing the entirety of John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima after the bomb in a single issue of the magazine, one of the best things The New Yorker ever did, aside from publishing the entirety of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” in 1962. When Shawn first read Carson’s piece, he called to tell her that it might change the course of history. Carson hung up the phone, collapsed, and wept.

Ross ran a humor magazine; Shawn ran a literary magazine that elevated reporting. In the years of American prosperity that followed the Second World War, the cachet of The New Yorker meant that it was flooded with advertisers. Shawn, needing to fill a swelling magazine’s pages, ran it like a book club, publishing some astonishingly important journalism, from Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to Richard Rovere’s letters from Washington. But he also, especially as time wore on, ran no small number of staggeringly long and often mind-numbingly boring articles about little of consequence, or what Tina Brown took to calling the fifty-thousand-word piece about zinc—articles that, by the end of Shawn’s tenure, were no longer wending through pages of towering ads, avenues through a city of skyscrapers…

It’s a lovely piece, the product of long days slogging through the magazine’s archives in the New York Public Library.

I like the way she ended it.

As for the Punctuation Farm, it turns out that they’ve got livestock there, in the fields beyond the greenhouses where the periods, set in shallow pans, sprout into commas. “Readers are like cows—they just want to keep chewing what you feed them,” Bennet used to say. But writers are like sheep, woolly and steadfast and bleating. And the best editor, high in the hills, is like a shepherd, warding off the wolves, moving the flock to better pasture, rescuing lost lambs.

Personally, I’ve always liked being edited, and indeed one of the really nice things about writing for the Observer for so many years is that I’ve been edited by smart, careful and unsung sub-editors who have saved me from my naiveté, foolishness or carelessness more times than I dare to remember.

My commonplace booklet

Dave Winer on Bill Atkinson

Devoted readers will recall that my most recent Observer column was a tribute to Bill Atkinson, one of the software wizards of his era. But then I read this tribute by Dave Winer and I realised that I had only scraped the surface: I hadn’t covered Quickdraw. Dave, however, understood its significance and covered it beautifully.

I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer of the Macintosh OS called QuickDraw, which was a core innovation of the Mac, its graphic system. Every piece of software that ran on the Macintosh ran on top of QuickDraw.

Here’s what QuickDraw is. Software could do things at the pixel level, a dot so small it’s barely visible to the eye. What you’re seeing on the screen is made up of collections of those dots, forming lines, boxes, ovals and text, and later page layouts, beautiful photography, and the text you’re reading right now. The software that does all that, on the earliest Macs, is called QuickDraw. (Later a successor called QuickTime made the dots move and added sound, and now we have streaming.)

That’s the thing. You could tell from the API that the designers really understood the tech. It wasn’t the first time this had been done. And either Atkinson did it himself, working on it for years, or he “stole from the best” — probably a lot of both. The prior art came from Xerox in Palo Alto, and the experience came from being a hard-working dedicated hacker who didn’t give up until it was done. That’s like saying if he were a basketball hero, he was like Bill Russell or Steph Curry. We don’t talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.#

I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that’s, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person’s life.

Yep. Lovely piece.

Linkblog

Something a reader noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Cats’ acrobatic skills Link

Feedback

My TL;DR the other day saying that nobody ever learned to ride a bike by reading a manual prompted Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) to send me a link to Mark Twain’s essay, “Taming the Bicycle”. So I read it, and was then unable to do any work for several hours. If you read the opening, you can perhaps see why.

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down and bought a barrel of Pond’s Extract and a bicycle. The Expert came home with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—and skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the thing’s points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least injured. This was hardly believable. Yet the Expert assured me that it was true; in fact, the examination proved it. I was partly to realize, then, how admirably these things are constructed. We applied some Pond’s Extract, and resumed. The Expert got on the other side to shove up this time, but I dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves up again, and resumed. This time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind, but somehow or other we landed on him again.

He was full of surprised admiration; said it was abnormal. She was all right, not a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere. I said it was wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said that when I came to know these steel spider-webs I would realize that nothing but dynamite could cripple them. Then he limped out to position, and we resumed once more. This time the Expert took up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind. We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better…

I rest what might jokingly be called my case. Do read on.

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!

Millinery

One takes one’s hat off to them. Unfortunately, I was wearing only my Wikipedia baseball cap, so I couldn’t.

Quote of the Day

“In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore”

• Andre Gide

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | ‘Jesus on the Mainline’ and ‘Crazy ‘bout a Mercury’ | New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival ’90s.

Link

Two for the price of one. Wish I’d been there.

Long Read of the Day

 Not just for geeks – the UK’s tech policy blitz should matter to us all

Nice, grown-up commentary by Martha Lane Fox on the Starmer regime’s flirtation with AI.

Last week, the Prime Minister stood on stage at London Tech Week and declared Britain must be “masters of our fate” in technology. It capped off months of relentless tech related announcements: the £86 billion R&D accelerator programmes in the 2025 Spending Review, the £2 billion AI Opportunities Action Plan with its 50 measures, £1.2 billion for digital transformation across public services, £1 billion to expand Britain’s compute capacity twentyfold by 2030, and a rebranded AI Security Institute. Add in £187 million for workforce training and £25 million to attract elite AI talent, and you have possibly the most comprehensive tech policy blitz in British history.

I was in the audience and couldn’t help smiling as I watched, because the PM’s autocue broke. So while he was doing his best to paint a picture of a country powered by innovation, he had to contend with the most low key tech barrier. He did pretty well and was helped by Jensen Huang, the rockstar founder of Nvidia who joined him on stage. But beneath the razzle-dazzle, a deeper question lingered in my mind: why should any of this matter if you don’t run a startup, work in tech, or dabble in VC deals?

I think there is one simple reason – because tech policy is now national policy. It is shaping how your NHS appointment is booked, how your local authority approves planning permission, how your child’s homework might be marked. It determines how we spend public money, how we compete with global economies, and how safe or exposed we are as a nation. This isn’t just about apps and gadgets, it’s about power, sovereignty, and the future of public life…

Good stuff. Worth a read.

So many books, so little time

Two things infuriate me about the current ‘AI’ feeding frenzy.

• One is the way we casually accept the proposition that LLMs — which have supposedly ‘read’ everything that’s ever been published — thereby have access to all the knowledge that humans have accumulated over millennia.

• The other is the chronically-impoverished, unidimensional concept of ‘intelligence’ that’s implicit in “artificial intelligence”.

Both assumptions are ludicrously untenable. The ‘knowledge’ ingested by LLMs is simply the kind that has been written down. But that’s just the tip of a very big iceberg. It ignores all kinds of knowledge that humans have acquired — knowledge that is almost never written down or even expressed explicitly. Tacit knowledge and craft knowledge are just two obvious examples. Knowing how to ride a bike is another.

Secondly, the pathetically narrow concept of ‘intelligence’ implicit in the ‘AI’ frenzy is astonishing in its ignorance. Has nobody in Silicon Valley ever read Howard Gardner? Many years ago he published Frames of Mind in which he argued convincingly that intelligence is not a single ability but a collection of distinct types. He identified eight of these: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He suggested that all humans have different strengths and learning styles across these areas. An update on his thinking can be found in a more recent book, Multiple Intelligences.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I’m enjoying Simon Roberts’s book. He’s an anthropologist, and a persuasive explainer of the various ways in which our bodies acquire, retain and deploy information. The implication: we should learn to trust the instincts that inform the most crucial decisions and actions in our lives.

TL;DR version. Nobody ever learned how to ride a bike by reading a manual.

  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!

A plug for rural France

This volcanic plug near Le Puy-en-Velay is my favorite sight on our drive southwards through the Massif Centrale.

Quote of the Day

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 1010: II. Allemande | Yo-Yo Ma

Link

Long Read of the Day

 America’s descent into the suppression of dissent

Christina Pagel has been tracking the Trump administration’s actions across four domains of suppressing dissent. This is her latest account. It’s only when you see how it’s evolving that the extent of the threat to the republic becomes more and more obvious.

The number and severity of the administration’s actions to suppress dissent have increased each month. There is nothing to suggest either from the last five months or administration rhetoric that Trump will de-escalate. His cabinet and the Republican party has rallied firmly behind him. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to “liberate this city (LA) from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”; Senator Marco Rubio has backed aggressive measures—including revoking thousands of visas—to “protect national security”; and Stephen Miller has openly urged ICE to “intensify efforts” against what he terms agitators. Some commentators are warning that these crackdowns could be a dress rehearsal for potential unrest during or after the midterm elections. This hardening stance has already emboldened extremists, manifesting most tragically in the June 15, 2025, shooting of two Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota by a gunman posing as a police officer.

What might come next? If the trajectory continues to worsen, we might see the administration shift from crackdowns against specific protests to more institutionalised repression.

Yep. Watching what’s happening in the US makes me think of how people in Britain in the 1930s must have thought if they were following reports of what was happening in Germany.

My commonplace booklet

As LLMs come to be part of everyday life, too much of the attention seems to be on how students will be able to ‘cheat’ with them by getting AIs to write their essays. But not enough people are paying attention to how the existence of LLMs is affecting reading. That has already been transformed by the existence of earlier technologies — like eBooks. But how do LLMs come into the picture?

Joshua Rothman has a very nice essay about this in the New Yorker, in which the excerpt below stood out, partly because I follow Tyler Cowen and have always been amazed by the amount of reading he manages to do.

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines. It’s not exactly right to say that they “read,” in the human sense: an L.L.M. can’t be moved by what it reads, because it has no emotions, and its heart can’t race in suspense. But it’s also undeniable that there are aspects of reading at which A.I.s excel at a superhuman level. During its training, an L.L.M. will “read” and “understand” an unimaginably large quantity of text. Later, it will be able to recall the substance of that text instantaneously (if not always perfectly), and to draw connections, make comparisons, and extract insights, which it can bring to bear on new pieces of text, on which it hasn’t been trained, at outrageous speed.

  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!

Temptation

Quote of the Day

”Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | True Love Knows No Season

Link

Long Read of the Day

Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy

Interesting piece by Julia Carrie Wong on the deep waters that the techno-fascist right are leading us into.

Here’s a sample

Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Apparently American catholics, led by that prominent convert, J.D. Vance, are also becoming sceptical about the value of empathy. If you think that evangelical christians voting for Trump is weird, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

My commonplace booklet

After a frantically busy Term we have run away to France and at the last minute I booked us into a hotel in Avallon — the Hotel de la Poste — about which I knew precisely zero other than (a) it would be a good overnight stay on the first stage of our annual slow drive down to Provence, and (b) it’s conveniently near a charging station. Upon arrival we find that:

• The place was built in 1707 and was one of the first Post Office relay stations
• It was one of the first restaurants in France to receive three Michelin stars in 1935
• Over the centuries it has welcomed inter alia: Louis Philippe, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Pablo Picasso, Liz Taylor and Josephine Baker.

Also, Napoleon stayed there on his way back to Paris after his return from Elba in 1815. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t pay for his room.

It’s ancient, friendly. unfashionable and doesn’t feel posh. A bit like this blogger, in fact.

Errata

Thanks to David Elliott and Bill Janeway for pointing out that Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza program dated from the 1960s and not 1996! It’d be nice to explain it as a typo, but I’m afraid that sloppy proof-reading is a better one.

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!

Back in the day

Irish writers Patrick Kavanagh (left) and Anthony Cronin in Dublin on June 16, 1954 preparing for the first public celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I was born in a country whose religious and civic establishments mostly regarded James Joyce, not as a pioneering modernist writer, but as “a filthy pornographer”. In 1954, the 50th anniversary of the day on which all the action in the novel takes place, a group of distinguished Irish writers decided that they had had enough of this philistinic nonsense. They rented a couple of antique horse-drawn cabs and staged a reenactment of the part of the novel in which Leopold Bloom and his friends drive to Paddy Dignam’s funeral.

Thus was born Bloomsday, which has, er, blossomed into a worldwide celebration of the day. In the 1980s, appalled that a literary city like Cambridge studiously ignored the great day, I decided to host a lunch at which participants would read passages from the novel and have the same lunch that Leopold Bloom enjoyed in Davey Byrne’s pub, namely a glass of Burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich. And I’ve done that ever since.

Which of course reminds me of an ancient Irish joke:

First man: “Do you like gorgonzola?” Second man: “No, but I hear that his brother Émile is a bloody fine novelist.”

Quote of the Day

”What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

• Joseph Weizenbaum, on discovering how his ‘Eliza’ program (written in 1996) seemed to seduce some of its users, or at any rate imbued the program with human qualities.

And guess what: AI Chatbots are even more persuasive than Eliza. Which is why they are worrying tools for spreading misinformation.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Enya | I dreamt I dwelled in Marble Halls

Link

An unusual and striking rendering of a song that was popular in Joyce’s own day.

Long Read of the Day

Bloomsday Explained

Lovely Paris Review essay by Jonathan Goldman.

“Bloomsday,” the James Joyce scholar Robert Nicholson once quipped, “has as much to do with Joyce as Christmas has to do with Jesus.” The celebrations of Ulysses every June 16—the date on which the novel is set—attract extreme ends of the spectrum of literary enthusiasm. Academics and professionals mingle with obsessives and cranks, plus those simply along for the ride. The event can be stately and meticulous or raucous and chaotic—or, somehow, all of the above.

A telling instance came a few years ago, when the Irish Arts Center arranged a Bloomsday picnic in New York’s Bryant Park, under the rueful shadow of the Gertrude Stein statue. (Stein disliked Joyce.) Aspiring Broadway types were enlisted to circulate in period costume before bursting into popular songs from 1900-era Ireland. I spoke to one of the performers, a young Irish actor who had recently moved to New York. Had she read Ulysses? “I plan to,” she said, and in my memory, she adds, “I’m told it’s a grand book by them that knows.” The kicker was when the Irish finance minister, in town for summit meetings, got up to say that his government would take as inspiration the balanced daily budget that appears in Ulysses. The problem? Leopold Bloom’s spreadsheet in Ulysses works out only because he omits the money he’s paid to Bella Cohen’s brothel. No one pointed out the irony.

The admixture of expertise and fanboyism that marks Bloomsday, perhaps unique among literary gatherings, is remarkable…

It is indeed. And I am guilty as charged. But do read the essay.

So long, Bill Atkinson, and thanks for the epiphany

Yesterday’s Observer column…

I still remember the moment when I first encountered his work – a moment that James Joyce might have described as an epiphany. It was at a workshop for academics in Cambridge organised by Apple UK in 1984 to introduce its new Macintosh computer. In a stuffy conference room were a number of tables on which sat chic, cream-coloured machines with 9in screens and separate keyboards. Each had been set up displaying a picture of a fish, and I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen.

Picking up courage, I clicked on the “lasso” tool and selected a fin with it. The lasso suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!  I pulled down the edit menu and clicked on “cut”. The fin disappeared. Finally, I closed the file and then reloaded it from the disk.

As the edited image reappeared, I had the kind of feeling that Douglas Adams had experienced when he had done the same operation – “that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation”, as he put it when talking to US tech journalist Steven Levy. In the blink of an eye, all the Teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays that had been defining parts of my experience with computers were consigned to history. I had suddenly seen the point – and the potential – of computer graphics…

Read on

So many books, so little time

I’m a sucker for diaries. Always have been. But Alan Clark’s three volumes, of which this is the last, were the best political diaries ever, partly because they were shameless, but also because of how revealing they could be. He was not a nice man: old-fashioned terms ‘cad’ and ‘bounder’ come immediately to mind. But his great saving grace is that he doesn’t seem to have been a hypocrite. When accosted by revelations of appalling behaviour that would have ended any other politician’s career — like the affairs he had with virtually the entire female side of a particular family — he would cheerfully plead guilty as charged. But this cad/bounder, was a dazzling diarist. The writer he most reminded me of was Samuel Pepys, who was also no angel. This final volume goes all the way to Clark’s death from a brain tumour. He kept it going until he could no longer focus on the page. You had to admire him for that alone.

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Smoke signals

The Orchard, Grantchester.

Quote of the Day

“The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Symphony No. 36 in C Major, K. 425 “Linz” – (1) Adagio – Allegro spiritoso

Link

Many years ago I drove from Cambridge to Vienna on my own, and I had all the Mozart symphonies on cassettes to keep me company. I played this on the A1 autobahn as I passed Linz on the last lap of the journey.

Long Read of the Day

An Ugly New Marketing Strategy Is Driving Me Nuts (and You Too)

Perceptive blog post by Ted Gioia on what comes after enshittification: the annoyance economy.

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

>Do NOT try to close.

>Do NOT try to sell.

>Do NOT try to persuade.

>Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

Read on. It’s sharp.

Right on cue, YouTube is now becoming even more annoying. Same strategy: pay to avoid the ads.

So many books, so little time

Evelyn Waugh was a nasty man but an annoyingly good writer. And he could be very funny. His novel Scoop, for example, is the funniest thing ever written about old-style British journalism. But I’m discovering that his letters were often in the same league.

Here’s. An example — a letter he wrote to his wife in 1942 when his army unit (3 Commando) was on training in Scotland.

So, No. 3 Cmdo, Commando, were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him, and he was very grateful and he said, don’t spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no, of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes, sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir, I worked it out by mathematics, and it is exactly right. Well, better put in a bit more. Very good sir.

And when Col. D. Slater, D.S.O., had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern, better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don’t want to disappoint Lord Glasgow.” Very good sir.

Then they all went out to see the explosion, and Col. D.S.D.S.O. said, you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it half an acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7 and a half not 75.

Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle, what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.

So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.

This is quite true.

Feedback

Marco Pagni emailed about the ‘Ode to Joy’ story in my and Andrew Brown’s comments on Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death to say that I should have a look at Slavoj ZiZek’s experimental movie The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, in which he has interesting things to say about the ‘Ode’. So I did, and he does — mainly about the various powers and groups who have used Beethoven’s symphony as an anthem or theme tune. Spoiler alert: some of these users are unsavoury.

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!