Optical illusion

At first sight it looked weird: a headless figure on a lovely beach. But then, on further inspection, it turned out to be just a trick of perspective.

Quote of the Day

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

*  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steeleye Span | All Around My Hat

Link

Long Read of the Day

The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search

Fascinating essay in Aeon about one of the first exercises in computerised information retrieval. In the Autumn of 1970 hundreds of students and academics at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system.

They were conducting their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database…

It’s easy to see why librarians of the 1970s set out to revolutionise search. Work across the academy was expanding to such a degree that, soon, there would not be enough human librarians to support all of it. Yet, to get the information they needed, researchers would face a time-consuming, physically involved process that required librarian intervention. While academic researchers could browse new issues of journals in their field, for a focused search of all that had come before they still had to consult with a reference librarian to look up the correct Library of Congress subject headings within a multivolume manual. Armed with a set of subject headings, the researcher would then search across the library catalogue for books and in citation indexes for journal articles, including subscription databases such as the Science Citation Index as well as hand-built bibliographies created by their university’s subject librarians. Finally, they would physically track down the correct books and bound periodicals that included articles they thought might be relevant – if the volumes happened to be on the library shelves.

It’s no wonder that SUPARS participants found the system compelling, despite its limitations. And given how familiar university librarians were with the challenges of search, it makes sense that the system they designed bypassed subject headings and citation indexes. What’s more surprising is that, of all the online search experiments that took place during this period – including commercially focused search systems like Lockheed’s Dialog, which has since become an enterprise product – SUPARS mimicked contemporary web search more closely than any other, prefiguring several primary features of web-search protocols we rely on more than 50 years later.

Fascinating essay, and a vivid reminder of how difficult and time-intensive scholarly research was 50 years ago. I sometimes think that the modern analogy for the BC/AD chronological distinction should be BG/AG — ‘Before Google’ and ‘After Google’. Or maybe it’ll be BGPT4/AGPT4.

No moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Reddit worked reasonably well on desktop and laptop computers, but was clumsy for mobile users, which led to the development of apps which made using the site easier. The most popular of these for Apple devices is Christian Selig’s Apollo, which interacts with the Reddit site via a free API (application programming interface) provided by Reddit.

But as of 30 June, Apollo will be no more. Why? Because Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, has decided that access to the API will no longer be free and Selig estimates that under the proposed new charging regime it would cost him $20m (£16m) a year to operate his app. “Going from a free API for eight years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days,” he said. “That’s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it’s just not economically feasible. It’s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.”

Do read the whole piece.

Turn Every Page

Thanks to Declan Deasy I found a way to watch Lizzie Gottlieb’s film about the long-term relationship between the biographer Robert Caro and his editor (and Lizzie’s father), Robert Gottlieb. (The film is available on Amazon.) Caro is the author of five best-selling books: The Power Broker (1974), about urban planner Robert Moses, and four volumes of a projected five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson), and each of these books has been edited by Gottlieb.

I enjoyed the film hugely, not least because I’m fascinated by the editorial process. I’ve been lucky to have had one great editor in my time — Toby Mundy, who is now a literary agent — and came to understand how someone can have your best interests at heart while still saying usefully critical things about your work.

The editor-writer relationship is complex and the film documents it well. As Sheila O’Malley puts it in her review,

Most editor-writer relationships don’t make headlines… But there are other famous partnerships—like Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald — where the editor plays such an important role they can’t just be relegated to the background. Ezra Pound didn’t “edit” T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land so much as he shaped it, and forcefully. You can feel Pound in that singular work. I’m sure, according to Pound, The Waste Land needed his heavy hand. But what is the editing process? There’s a mystique about it, even to those participating in it.

You can get a good impression of the film from its trailer.

My commonplace booklet

Elon Musk’s ultimate destination in full colour

It’s here, courtesy of the German Aerospace Center.

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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

A Note from the Publisher

Sounds impressive, eh? A bit like what one imagines Arthur Ochs Sulzberger might have written when he was publisher of the New York Times. My message today, though is more modest. It’s to say that from now on, this newsletter will come out three days a week rather than the current five.

There’s some background that may help to explain this. I’ve been a blogger (on memex.naughtons.org) ever since the early days of the Web. When the pandemic arrived in March 2020 and I was suddenly confined to barracks by order of the UK government, I fell to wondering what an academic and blogger could usefully do, and hit on the idea (which I got from the great Dave Winer) of producing a version of my blog as a daily newsletter. Thus was born the one you’re reading now.

In the first 100 days of the pandemic, this went out seven days a week, and also included a daily audio diary in which I recorded my thoughts and experiences of that weird period. (I subsequently published the transcripts of the audio diary as a Kindle book.) It was an exhausting task, though, given that at the same time I was setting up — and initially running — a new research centre in Cambridge. As this settled down and the pandemic eased, I moved to publishing the newsletter edition five days a week. But now that I’m embarking on a long writing project I’ve decided that publishing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday will give me the time I need for other stuff that I need to do. So please don’t panic tomorrow or Thursday when you don’t find something from me in your inbox!

And thank you for reading.

John

Quote of the Day

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kathryn Tickell | ‘Lads of Alnwick’

Link

I ran into a reader yesterday who wondered why I seemed only to be interested in Irish Uileann piping. What about the much sweeter Northumbrian pipes? Well, here’s a fine example.

Long Read of the Day

Techno-Narcissism

Scott Galloway on the nauseating hypocrisy of the AI-bros.

It’s notable today that many of the outspoken prophets of AI doom are the same people who birthed AI. Specifically, taking up all the oxygen in the AI conversation with dystopian visions of sentient AI eliminating humanity isn’t helpful. It only serves the interests of the developers of nonsentient AI, in several ways. At the simplest level, it gets attention. If you are a semifamous computer engineer who aspires to be more famous, nothing beats telling every reporter in earshot: “I’ve invented something that could destroy the world.” Partisans complain about the media’s left or right bias, but the real bias is toward spectacle. If it bleeds it leads, and nothing bleeds like the end of the world with a tortured genius at the center of the plot.

Land Grab

AI fearmongering is also a business strategy for the incumbents, who’d like the government to suppress nascent competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress we need an entire new federal agency to scrutinize AI models, and said he’d be happy to help them define what kinds of companies and products should get licenses (i.e., compete with OpenAI). “Licensing regimes are the death of competition in most places they operate,” says antitrust scholar and former White House senior adviser Tim Wu (total gangster). Similar to cheap capital and regulatory capture, catastrophism is an attempt to commit infanticide on emerging competition.

Real Risks

Granted, we should not ignore the dangers of AI, but the real risks are the existing incentives and amorality in tech and our ongoing inability to regulate it. The techno-catastrophists want to create a narrative that the shit coming down the pike is not the result of their actions, but the inevitable cost of progress. Just as the devil’s trick was convincing us he didn’t exist, the technologist’s sleight of hand is to absolve himself of guilt for the damage the next generation of tech leaders will levy on society.

Spot on. Do read it.

Books, etc.

Book Review: ‘What an Owl Knows,’ by Jennifer Ackerman

Interesting review by Jennifer Szalai of what looks like an interesting book.

Perhaps one of the main reasons owls have been burdened with so many cultural stereotypes is that they are so distinctive — even a young child can identify their shape — while also being enduringly mysterious. In “What an Owl Knows,” Ackerman explains that the “new science” she refers to in her subtitle has required technological innovations: cameras, drones, DNA analysis, satellite transmitters. We can now see owls inside their nests or migrating over the Great Lakes. But even the most sophisticated gear can do only so much. Getting physically close to owls presents some stubborn challenges. Researchers wanting to protect their heads from an owl swooping down cannot wear a hard-hat helmet, because that could kill a bird on impact. A researcher who got whacked by a big female protecting her nest recalls feeling blood streaming from the back of his skull and pulling out a piece of talon.

Daniel Ellsberg RIP

The great whistleblower of my generation has passed away at the age of 92.

From the NYT obit:

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.

It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.

  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 ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The man himself

Jaques-Emile Blanche’s portrait of James Joyce, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Quote of the Day

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John McCormack | Love’s Old Sweet Song

Link

This was recorded in October 1927 with Edwin Schneider at the piano. McCormack was a contemporary of Joyce and suggested in 1904 that he should enter the national singing competition (the Feis Ceoil) that he (McCormack) had won the previous year. Dermot Bolger, the Irish theatre director, has written an entertaining account of what happened:

McCormack encouraged Joyce to enter the 1904 Feis, hoping that Joyce would emulate his success and enjoy a similar year in Italy, away from his poverty in Dublin.

Joyce’s Feis Ceoil dreams were not shattered by McCormack, but by Joyce’s erratic preparations. He took his singing seriously enough to rent a large room from a family on Shelbourne Road – they unwitting joined Joyce’s long list of patrons as he was tardy at paying rent.

He even conned the famous Piggott’s shop into delivering a grand piano – being careful to be out when it arrived, thereby avoiding tipping the workmen who hauled it upstairs.

However he didn’t make any attempt to learn how to read music – despite knowing that the Feis rules required him to sing an easy but unseen song on sight.

Joyce’s voice so impressed the distinguished judge that he was a shoo-in for the gold medal until he stormed off stage in high dudgeon when he was presented with a sheet of unseen music and asked to sing from it. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, he disqualified himself. The stymied judge could only eventually present Joyce with a token bronze medal.

Joyce claimed that he had thrown the medal into the river Liffey in disgust, but in fact he gave it to his aunt Josephine and somehow it wound up later in the possession of Michael Flatley, the celebrated Irish dancer and the artist behind Riverdance.

Joyce was indeed a genius, but much of the time he was what in Dublin would be known as a right royal pain in the ass. There’s a famous story in his brother’s memoirs of him accosting W.B. Yeats, the greatest Irish literary figure of the day, outside the National Library in Kildare Street, and saying to the great man “I regret that you are too old to be influenced by me”.

Long Read of the Day

Misreading Ulysses

The text of novelist Sally Rooney’s T.S Eliot Lecture, delivered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022.

It’s terrific. Here’s a sample:

Joyce’s prose is famous, in this novel and elsewhere, for its density, its radical novelty, and for its exquisite and unexpected beauty. For this reason, I think, Ulysses is a book that is often experienced “partly.” If you ask a person whether they have read, for example, Crime and Punishment, the answer is pretty much always yes or no. But if you ask whether someone has read Ulysses, the answer is often “bits of it, but not the whole thing.” What gives Ulysses this quality—this “bits of it” appeal—is that so many passages of the work can yield a rich and immersive pleasure even outside the context of the overarching narrative. In the history of the English novel, this style represents a definitive break from the established nineteenth-century tradition. Even the word style is misleading, because throughout the novel, as you probably know, Joyce cycles through any number of distinctive styles, using and discarding them as they suit his purposes. In a sense, then, maybe my plot summary was beside the point: maybe the real pleasures and triumphs of Ulysses are on the level of the sentence. To an extent, I think, but not entirely. Joyce’s language is certainly very beautiful, but he wasn’t the first or only talented prose stylist of his generation—and there’s more going on in Ulysses than fine writing.

The brilliant novelist and critic Anne Enright recently wrote: “Apart from everything that you could possibly imagine, nothing much happens in Ulysses.” It’s very true. We might sense something daringly lifelike in the way that Ulysses rejects the contrivances of traditional plots and structures. And maybe it is this quality, this sense of “faithfulness to reality,” that gives the book its special place in literary history. Here are some of Bloom’s thoughts, for instance, as he walks toward Sweny’s pharmacy to get a special lotion made up for his wife:

He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair. O well, poor fellow, it’s not his fault. When was it I got it made up last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must have been or the second.

None of this mental fretting on Bloom’s part serves any of the usual purposes of novelistic prose. Nothing in the plot of the book actually depends on whether he gets the lotion made up for Molly or not. On the contrary, he’s just thinking, the way we all think, aimlessly, doubling back, worrying, forgetting, remembering. In our real lives, thoughts don’t occur to us in service of some grander narrative or final meaning: we just wake up, think all day long, and then go to sleep.

A very sharp and perceptive lecture.

Books, etc.

Dan Mulhall, the former Irish Ambassador to the US (and before that, to the UK) is the only high-profile diplomat I know who tweets about literature — especially about Joyce, Yeats and Seamus Heaney. He’s currently the Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College — you can find his big lecture here. I’ve read and enjoyed this perceptive and unpretentious guide to Ulysses. And look forward to his forthcoming book on W.B. Yeats.

My commonplace booklet

 Remembering Robert Gottlieb, Editor Extraordinaire

David Remnick, Editor of the New Yorker  has written a lovely piece about one of his predecessors, who has just passed away. It’s graceful and memorable, like everything Remnick writes.

This is how it opens:

Early this year, Film Forum, the redoubtable revival house on West Houston Street, drew overflow crowds for a documentary about two elderly men squaring off over semicolons and commas. The film, “Turn Every Page,” starred the semicolon-deploying biographer Robert Caro and the semicolon-averse editor Robert Gottlieb, who for many years was the head honcho at Simon & Schuster and then at Alfred A. Knopf, and from 1987 to 1992 was the editor of The New Yorker. Their relationship—intense, wary, mysterious—lasted a half century. It began with “The Power Broker,” Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, which, to its author’s agony, Gottlieb trimmed by some three hundred and fifty thousand words.

Audiences at Film Forum thrilled to the climactic scene in which Caro and Gottlieb sit side by side in an antiseptic office, intently reviewing a manuscript page from Caro’s study of Lyndon Johnson. These two secular Talmudists are hunched over the page, sharing a pencil and arguing about matters of punctuation, syntax, rhythm, and clarity. There is a deep bond between them, a distinctly unsentimental partnership in which everything is about purpose, choices, and decisions, never sloppy praise or even encouragement.

In a Paris Review interview, Caro said, “In all the hours of working on ‘The Power Broker,’ Bob never said one nice thing to me—never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, ‘The Path to Power,’ the first volume of the Johnson biography. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, ‘Means of Ascent,’ he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, ‘Not bad.’ ”

You see what I mean? The annoying thing is that I haven’t yet been able to get to see the damned film.

In the meantime, the trailer is here!

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Yet another one

Wonderful plants, orchids. One can see why some people go crazy about them.

Quote of the Day

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides.”

• Artur Schnabel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Acker Bilk | Burgundy Street Blues

Link

I’m still looking for the Boilermaker Jazz Band’s version. But this will do for the time being.

Long Read of the Day

 What Will Come From This Indictment?

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate asking if this moment means (i) that the rule of law in the US is finally going to prevail over Trump, or (ii) if it has become irrelevant?

An intriguing and troubling essay.

We’ve officially reached peak Schrödinger’s coup. Democracy is either alive or dead inside that box, and everyone is too afraid to look inside and say which it is.

And this in turn puts us all in the unenviable position of having to reckon with two conflicting truths: Yes, the legal walls are closing in. And as they do so, for some the power of these legal walls is crumbling before our eyes. It’s blinding: The more criminal trouble Trump finds himself in, the more his political capital rises. The law may in fact be powerless in the face of that simple truth. I used to fret that politics would always, always outrun the law; that a Trump lie, or threat, or boast would make it twice around the world while the justice system was still just putting its socks on. But increasingly, I think we’re not even running the same course, or playing on the same field, or moving toward the same ends. The more the “rule of law” triumphs, the stronger the forces that hate the rule of law actually become.

And that, of course, is the endgame for the Trump team. “What I have been hearing from Republicans that I’ve spoken to is frustration, a growing frustration,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told Fox News Sunday. “The trust in our Justice Department has been eroded, as well. These are core institutions in a democracy that must have the people’s trust. When you see things like this that have political overtones, it’s very frustrating for people.” His remarks are honestly tame compared to those of many of his fellow Republicans who are in Congress. They have made the unprecedented decision to attack the law itself…

My feeling is that in a polity dominated by two political parties, if one gives up on democracy then the game’s over. That has happened with the Republicans in the US. And they have lots of heavily armed fanatics to back them up. 2024 will be a decisive year, either way.

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

 What sort of bicycle?

Nice sermonette from Seth Godin, about how we wind up using stuff that no longer makes sense.

  This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

An arboreal puzzle

On a walk the other day we came on a tree which seemed to be encased in fine white wool and wondered what it was. My guess: pussy willow; but what I know about plants could be written in 95-pt Helvetica Bold on the back of a postage stamp.

Quote of the Day

“I always say beauty is only sin deep.”

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | Fantasia on Greensleeves

Link

Music for a bucolic moment, ne c’est pas?

Long Read of the Day

 Blood and the Machine

John Ganz on the swerve in Silicon Valley towards what he calls Reactionary Modernism.

Last April, I wrote that we were witnessing the tech capitalist class’s turn to reactionary politics. This was largely inspired by Musk’s plan to purchase Twitter, which I took to be more of a political project than a business one. Or rather, I believed that the political and business cases were intertwined: the owners wanted to reassert direct control of their businesses, break the power of employees they viewed as “woke,” and that this was undergirded up by a larger social and political ideology I called “bossism” at the time, basically a rather crude, hierarchical vision of society run by a “natural” elite. In July, I wrote that the proper name for Peter Thiel’s politics was Fascism. In October, I wrote about the connection between Musk’s bossist program and his apparent tolerance or even encouragement of Kanye West’s antisemitism.

I believe these takes have largely been borne out by the facts and this reactionary turn in Silicon Valley continues to crystallize. Musk has now attempted—albeit in a rather ham fisted way—to use his platform directly for politics with his endorsement of Ron DeSantis. He has given Tucker Carlson a new home. Of course, none of this is really new. Observers have long noted that alongside the ostensibly liberal utopian aspirations of the “California ideology” there has been a darker current of authoritarian thought. See for instance, Corey Pein’s 2014 classic in The Baffler, “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.” Then there was also Mark Zuckerberg’s literal Caesarism. But it seems like this species of reaction has become an increasingly dominant political tendency within the tech industry…

Interesting piece. The idea that the Valley was a haven for technophile Democrats has long passed its sell-by date.

I crashed Henry Kissinger’s 100th-birthday party

Jonathan Guyer wondered why the US elite love K but for some reason won’t say why. His report is entertaining:

On Monday evening at the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street entrance, several men were on their knees meticulously installing a red carpet over the stone steps as a half-dozen security guards in suits looked out from behind the velvet rope.

I was there to crash the 100th-birthday party of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of State to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who historians and journalists say is responsible for countless atrocities. He prolonged and expanded the Vietnam War with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people. He helped empower genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. He enabled juntas that overthrew democracies in Chile and Argentina. He’s often called a war criminal, and the long-running social-media joke is that he’s still alive while so many better humans are dead.

And he’s been having a lot of birthday parties.

When I heard that there was one happening in Manhattan with a secret guest list and that he would be attending in person, I decided to go as well. I would stake out the scene and document the guests for history’s sake — or at least for what’s left of Twitter.

Includes some absurd pics of these posh invitees, and some funny stuff about the current American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, not wanting it to be known that he was there.

When I was a TV critic, I used to describe Kissinger as “the patron saint of gravel mixers”. Clearly, I wouldn’t have been invited.

My commonplace booklet

The Apple Watch was supposed to put makers of expensive wristwatches out of business. Guess what?

From Om Malik

The watch has stopped being just a watch — it is either a connected health device that also shows time & plays music. Or it is just a very expensive piece of jewelry and a symbol of advertising one’s wealth.

It seems the Swiss watchmakers have figured out that instead of trying to boost volumes, just boost the prices. And they are doing so by concentrating on the “whales” who are immune to the vagaries of real-world economics.

Whether it is Indian cricket players, American ball players, Chinese millionaires, Middle Eastern oil barons, or Crypto bros — this demographic just wants to show off their wealth. And what better way than some gaudy piece on the wrist?

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Remembering Z

Two years ago we said our goodbyes to Zoombini, the most remarkable cat I’ve ever known. She was a deeply intelligent creature with a need for human contact which was sometimes almost eerie. When we sat down for breakfast every morning, she would come from wherever she had been in the house and stand looking up at us in wide-eyed astonishment. The clear message was: why am I not in on this? In the end we caved in and set up a high stool between us on which she would sit or stand alertly watching proceedings. It was as if she felt she had a right to be in on all our deliberations, including the cryptic crossword we do most mornings.

When she died we had a proper family wake for her in the garden, complete with drinks and stories about her many adventures. So she was given a proper sendoff and is buried in a corner of the garden that she had made her own. But we miss her, still.

Her sister lives on and is now 19 pushing 20, and in reasonably good shape. She’s lovely in her way, but is a completely different presence in the house.

Quote of the Day

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

• Ray Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ashokan Farewell | Jay Ungar & the Molly Mason Family Band.

Link

Jay Ungar’s beautiful, haunting tune was made world-famous by Ken Burns’s memorable Civil War documentary series, which led me to assume that it was a tune composed during the Civil War. But no, it was composed by Jay Ungar in 1982, and since then everyone and his dog (including, would you believe, the Royal Marines Band) has recorded cover versions. But this one, featuring the composer and his friends, is the one I like best.

Jay and Molly Mason are amazing musicians. During the pandemic the Library of Congress asked them to do a concert from home. Which they did — and the recording is terrific. It’s nearly 40 minutes long, so you might need to brew some coffee and cancel your next appointment.

Long Read of the Day

What if We’re Thinking About Inflation All Wrong?

Terrific New Yorker article by Zachary Carter (who wrote an interesting book a while back on Keynes and Keynesianism) about what happened to Isabella Weber, an economist who wrote a thoughtful article in the Guardian suggesting that price controls might be an effective way of clamping down on the rampant price-gouging that’s gone on in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Cancelling Christmas was, of course, a disaster. Raised in West Germany during the reunification era, Isabella Weber had been working as an economist in either Britain or the United States for the better part of a decade. An annual winter flight back to Europe was the most important remaining link to her German friends and family. But in December, 2021, the Omicron variant was surging, and transcontinental travel felt too risky. Weber and her husband drove from the academic enclave of Amherst, Massachusetts, to a pandemic-vacated bed-and-breakfast in the Adirondacks, hoping to make the best of a sad situation. Maybe Weber could finally learn how to ski.

Instead, without warning, her career began to implode. Just before New Year’s Eve, while Weber was on the bunny slopes, a short article on inflation that she’d written for the Guardian inexplicably went viral. A business-school professor called it “the worst” take of the year. Random Bitcoin guys called her “stupid.” The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called her “truly stupid.” Conservatives at Fox News, Commentary, and National Review piled on, declaring Weber’s idea “perverse,” “fundamentally unsound,” and “certainly wrong.”

“It was straight-out awful,” she told me. “It’s difficult to describe as anything other than that.”

Guess what? The point of Weber’s Guardian piece had been that if price-controls were the way the US economy got through the Second World War without runaway inflation, might not those ideas have a contemporary relevance. But it turned out that however disdainful Nobel Laureates like Krugman were, governments outside of the US were very interested in her ideas, and became even more so after Russia invaded Ukraine and the world found itself with a real war on its hands. Krugman eventually apologised, but he ought to have been ashamed of himself.

Carter tells the story well, but he doesn’t address two questions that struck me about it.

1. weren’t there overtones of crude male sexism in the disdain of the economists who attacked her for having the temerity to suggest a radical idea?
2. doesn’t the whole story demonstrate how an academic discipline’s slavery to its conventional wisdom — its reigning paradigm in Kuhnian terms — makes it collectively stupid?

Or, to put it more crudely: an ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking.

Anyway, the piece is worth your time.

China and physics may soon shatter our dreams of endless computing power

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

This ability to cram more and more transistors into a finite space is what gave us Moore’s law – the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years or so – and with it the fact that computer power has been doubling every two years for as long as most of us can remember. The story of how this happened is a riveting tale of engineering and manufacturing brilliance and is brilliantly told by Chris Miller in his bestselling book Chip War, which should be required reading for all Tory ministers who fantasise about making “Global Britain” a tech superpower.

But with that long run of technological progress came complacency and hubris. We got to the point of thinking that if all that was needed to solve a pressing problem was more computing power, then we could consider it solved; not today, perhaps, but certainly tomorrow.

There are at least three things wrong with this…

Do read the whole piece

Chart of the Day

The tech commentariat has been scathing about the $3,500 cost of Apple’s new gadget. But actually it isn’t all that expensive by historical standards. It is pricier than the iPhone was when it launched; but it’s significantly less expensive than an IBM PC was in 1981, or the Compaq ‘portable’ after which I lusted in 1983.

h/t to Azeem Azhar.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!