The view from our window

We’re in the Lake District for a break. That’s Windermere in the distance.

More on that state funeral…

Perceptive and illuminating summing-up on the invaluable Tortoise Media morning newsletter (You have to become a member to receive it. IMO it’s well worth it.)

Planning.It was good and it paid off. The Duke of Norfolk spent 20 years on it. By the end 280 broadcasters, senior military and clergy were attending his meetings, which went on for hours. Sky positioned 275 cameras in Westminster Abbey and along the processional routes. The BBC had 213 more. There were no bad angles. Nothing went wrong, and no wonder: money was no object. Much more than the £8.4 million spent on the Queen Mother’s funeral will have been spent on her daughter’s, and whatever the total it will be seen as a good investment because ceremony is part of the British brand.

PR and self-censorship. In the past fortnight’s praise of duty and service there has been scarcely a murmur about untaxed income, cash for honours, suitcases of Qatari money or the eight-figure sum paid with the late Queen’s help to settle her son’s child sex abuse case. (Also file under: Manners. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.)

Covid. Commemoration of a 70-year reign and a 96-year life was always going to prod people to reflect on their own lives, loves, losses and mortality – but especially so after 180,000 deaths in varying degrees of lockdown.

Past. Forget for a moment holy oils and Arthurian legend, which will return to royal commentary with next year’s coronation. World War Two was the foundation of the Queen’s legitimacy. She and her parents were intimately associated with the war effort, eclipsing memories of the Abdication Crisis and rumours of Nazi sympathies in high places; forging the mantra of duty that served her (and, royalists say, her country) so well; and ultimately enabling her family to claim a stature it could never have claimed anywhere else in complicated northern Europe. It helped that Britain was on the winning side.

Quote of the Day

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think that it’s their fault.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Prelude (Suite No. 1 for solo cello) | YoYo Ma

Link

Long Read of the Day

What’s Breaking Democracy?

Terrific review essay on Project Syndicate by Bill Janeway on Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.

This is an enlightening essay. I can say that because I’ve read both books, and Bill found things in them that I had missed. This is how he opens the subject…

My colleagues Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson share an academic home at the University of Cambridge, and their new books share a common purpose: how to understand the dysfunctionality that has beset Western democracies. They explore that question in very different but complementary ways, offering deep insights into the disequilibrium dynamics of democratic capitalism. When read together, one sees clearly how the dissolution of Gerstle’s Neoliberal Order has stoked the disorder that Thompson analyzes.

The contrast between the two books owes much to the authors’ backgrounds. Gerstle, a historian of political ideas, ideologies, and cultures, writes from an American perspective. In The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, he tracks how initially radical political programs become institutionalized as all-encompassing “orders” when the opposition accepts their terms. Thus, the New Deal Order was established when the Republican Eisenhower administration chose not to try to repeal the Democratic Roosevelt administration’s central institutional reforms.

…

Thompson’s perspective is Eurasian, and her account … is driven by a granular analysis of the geopolitics of energy. Once oil began to supplant coal at the start of the twentieth century, the political economy of energy became international, and securing access to oil became a high priority for most countries. Thompson focuses presciently on Germany, which chose to become existentially dependent on Soviet and then Russian oil and gas. Strikingly, her book was completed just prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Why blog?

Advice from Robin Rendle:

Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm. How do you get started though? Well, screw the research! A blog post can anything, a half-thought like this one or a grandiose essay with a million footnotes. It can look like anything, too: you can have a simple HTML-only website or you can spend a month on the typography, getting every letter-spaced part of it just right.

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.

Or maybe they won’t. But you’ll never know unless you write that half-assed thing that’s in your head right now…

I agree wholeheartedly with his rule about self-hosting. It’s why this blog is also always available on my own site — https://memex.naughtons.org — and it will still be there even if the proprietors of Substack and I fall out.

Thanks to Om Malik (Whom God Preserve) for the link.

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!

Quote of the Day

”In this country, it is rare for anyone, let alone a publisher, to take writers seriously.”

• Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph, 1979

Despite that, Powell managed to sell quite a lot of books. I’ve never fully understood his charm, but perhaps that’s because I was not brought up as an English public schoolboy.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Four reels: Father Kelly’s; Reconciliation; Mountain Road; MacArthur Road

Link

A hyper-energetic performance at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. Caitlin Warbelow, Patrick Mangan, and Troy MacGillivray on fiddles with Johnny Cuomo and Jake Charron on guitars.

Long Read of the Day

What Makes Brain Fog So Unforgiving?

I’ve been thinking for two years that so-called ‘Long Covid’ is one of the most worrying — and under-discussed — consequences of the pandemic. Particularly terrifying is the “brain fog” which afflicts many sufferers. This startling essay by Ed Yong is the best thing I’ve read about it to date.

Here’s how it opens…

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted…

Worth your time.

Books, etc.

Roy Foster on Seamus Heaney

Roy Foster is an eminent Irish historian — and an accomplished biographer (his two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats is terrific); and Seamus Heaney was a great Irish poet and a Nobel laureate.

This book is a sensitive exploration of Heaney’s poetic journey, written by a scholar who both understands the cultural context in which the poet evolved and loves his work. “I remember”, he writes in the Preface,

”where I was sitting when I read ’North’ in 1975 and felt that authentic sensation of the hairs standing up on my head. Nearly twenty years later, I read ‘At The Well-head’ in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed by enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years. And reading ‘Album’ in his last collection, the attempts to embrace a lost father resonated to profoundly that my eyes filled with tears.”

It’s a truly wonderful book. I have a friend who also loves Heaney’s poetry, and had the great idea of reading it alongside the poems themselves. That’s really what it deserves.

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!

Floral tribute

Seen on a walk the other day. 

Quote of the Day

”Every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.

• Karl Popper in Logik der Forschung, 1934

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Cantata Ich habe genung BWV 82 | Mortensen | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

What made me think of it after watching the Queen’s funeral was one of the programme notes: “Death was seen as a deliverance from the earthly vale of tears, and as a chance to unite with your creator. So rather than being heart-rending, the music exudes a subdued melancholy.”

It was recorded for the ‘All of Bach’ project on February 1st 2014 in the Geertekerk in Utrecht.

Long Read of the Day

Form, function, and the giant gulf between drawing a picture and understanding the world

A characteristically sharp essay by Gary Marcus asking awkward questions about the sensation du jour — machine-learning systems that can generate interesting graphics in response to a text prompt. They are clearly brilliant at drawing images. But how well do they understand the world?

In assessing progress towards general intelligence, the critical question should be, how much do systems like Dall-E, Imagen, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion really understand the world, such that they can reason on and act on that knowledge? When thinking about how they fit into AI, both narrow and broad, here are three questions you could ask:

1. Can the image synthesis systems generate high quality images?

2. Can they correlate their linguistic input with the images they produce?

3. Do they understand the world that underlies the images they represent?

Seems to me that the answer to #3 is obvious: no.

Worth reading, though.

Remembering Philip

My notes yesterday about the Queen and her funeral led to some lovely emails from readers. David Vincent, the social historian (a draft of whose forthcoming book on the pandemic I am currently reading), wrote with a revealing account of a meeting with the late Queen’s husband:

The Queen and Philip paid a state visit to Keele around 2000. As Deputy Vice Chancellor I was allocated the deputy monarch to take around the campus. We arrived back in the main hall in which were assembled a hundred of the great and the good of North Staffordshire, standing around in groups of ten. We were meant to meet up with the Queen, but we had arrived first. Philip did not want to wait for her. So I took him through the hall, introducing him to each person – ‘This is Mr Blenkinsop of Allied Ball Bearings’ – with the aid of a crib sheet. When we arrived at the end, the Queen appeared, and Philip said he would take her round. I still had the crib sheet. Without it, he introduced her to each guest in turn, getting their name faultlessly correct. Back at the beginning, awestruck, I said to Philip (who was already about seventy), ‘how did you do that?’ ‘It’s the ties’ he said. ‘I remember each tie, and then the name of its wearer.’ I thought then, as I think now, that you can forget all the stuff about service and moral stature. Those two were just consummate professionals, really good at a really difficult job.

And Sheila Hayman reminded me of “Dining with a prince could leave you hungry for more”, a lovely piece she wrote for the Guardian in 2017 about her mother’s experience of lunch with Philip at Buck House.

Her mathematics weren’t as arcane as my dad’s, but her skills in running committees were second to none, and in addition to bludgeoning the Soviet Union into extending their olympiad to the entire world, she’d become president of the London Mathematical Society, of which the prince was patron. The lunch was her reward, but all she saw was an irritating requirement to obtain a hat.

Quakers have always had trouble with the symbolism of hats; in George Fox’s day they refused to take them off, and by now apparently having to put one on was an issue, especially when it involved the outlay of cash on something that would never be worn again. A week of mulling later, she dashed up to Peter Jones in her lunch-break, and came home triumphant, waving some offcuts of ribbon and lace, which she stitched together in 15 minutes before pinning it to her hair as she left.

Naturally, I was waiting by the front door when she got back, already planning my outfit for the first date with Prince Edward…

It’s worth reading just for the denouement!

My commonplace booklet

Carl Sagan’s Keynote Address on the threat of global warming — given in 1990. And here he is in 1985 testifying before Congress on climate change.

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Thought for the day (without the God stuff)

A few random thoughts sparked by events of the last few days.

1. I saw the Queen only once in person, quite by accident. It was on one Holocaust Memorial Day and I was on the train from Cambridge to King’s Cross. That particular train had originated in King’s Lynn and was non-stop from Cambridge to KX. I had work to do and wasn’t therefore paying much attention to what was going on around me, though I did notice a couple of police officers at the end of our carriage and vaguely wondered what they were doing there. But I had a deadline to meet, opened my laptop and didn’t look up until we pulled into King’s Cross. When I alighted from the train I noticed that there was a bit of activity at the end of the platform, so stood to one side looking up and down. And then saw a familiar figure walking alone down the platform — the Queen, small, perfectly coiffed and quietly assured, immaculately dressed and carrying a handbag the way ladies did in the 1950s. And a few yards behind her the Duke of Edinburgh, loping languidly along. They had come down from Sandringham, having embarked at King’s Lynn and were doubtless on their way to some ceremony or other. Using the ‘ordinary’ train was, I think, a response to some earlier controversy about the cost of the Royal Train.
2. What struck me was that she was what my mother would have described as “perfectly turned out”. For two decades, said a fashion expert, Lauren Indvik, in the FT, “she almost invariably appeared in a single-breasted collarless coat in a bright, solid hue.”
3. I met the Duke once, when he was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and came on a visit to my college. Lots of Fellows were asked to turn up to meet him and I duly obliged. The thing I noticed was the efficient way he ‘worked the room’. He spoke to nearly everybody in a conscientious but slightly detached way. As he talked, I remembered an old story (or was it a joke?) that in the 1960s he usually asked the same question every time he was obliged to visit or open an industrial plant: “how much of this equipment is made in Britain?” Since I don’t make anything other than trouble for the editors and lawyers of the Observer, I was clearly of no interest to him.
4. Thinking of ‘working the room’, I once observed Bill Clinton doing it at a function in London that I attended. It was after he had stepped down from the presidency, and I was there because he had once written a personal reference for a Masters student I was supervising. Like the Duke, Clinton made sure he spoke to everyone present. The difference was that, for the brief moment that you had his attention, he seemed to be totally focussed on you.
5. Earlier last week I was struck by a point Ethan Zuckerman made in his recent essay that media responses to events like the Queen’s death tend to go through three phases: the pre-ordained reactions, the obituaries written years before they needed to run, the reactions from world leaders and luminaries; then there’s a set of unanticipated reactions to the event, as people who weren’t booked years in advance take advantage of the event to promote narratives they feel are important, hooking an OpEd to the news hook, or using the historical moment to remind people of an underexplored chapter of history (more or less what I’m doing now); and then there’s a third wave, in which we debate whether or not speech in the second wave is acceptable in a democratic society.
6. On this last point, it struck me that mainstream media got two things wrong. One: they underestimated the impact of the Queen’s passing on ‘ordinary’ people. YouGov reported last week that 44% of their respondents had admitted to crying or welling up in response to the Queen’s death. And two: their relentless narrative about how Charlie would be such a huge let-down after his mother’s sterling reign that it would eventually lead to hard questions being asked about the continuance of the monarchy.
7. My reading of the last few days is that Charles has played a blinder, wrong-footing almost everyone — including, hilariously and deliciously, the DUP in Northern Ireland. He may turn out to be a more formidable operator than the media expected.
8. Admittedly, he was helped by circumstances beyond his control. As a canny Scot was heard to observe in Edinburgh, his mother was smart to die in Scotland, thereby giving everyone north of the border a chance to display how attached they were to the monarch even if they are repelled by Johnson, Truss, Rees-Mogg & Co.
9. For these and other reasons, I think that any ideas British republicans might have about the monarchy withering away as memories of Elizabeth II fade are pipe dreams. I say this in a detached frame of mind, because — as an Irish citizen and not a British subject — I don’t have a dog in this fight. I happen to think that monarchy infantilises the people over whom it ostensibly reigns, but it’s clear from the obsequies and commemorations that a lot of people hereabouts rather like being in that state. And who am I to deny them their pleasures.
10. Finally, I have been deeply impressed by the way ‘The Firm’ (the in-house colloquialism for the royal family) choreographed every detail of the Queen’s death and burial for maximum impact. Those who run that show are darned good at it. And as I watched their preparations play out I was reminded of a story a friend of mine once told me. He had been briefly the editor of one of this country’s national newspapers, but had been abruptly sacked by his proprietor. One day, his lunch diary was booked solid for three months ahead. The next day all those entries had been cleared — except one — lunch with the Palace press officer and a colleague. When they met for lunch, my friend told them what had happened to his diary, and asked him why they, alone, had still wanted to take him to lunch. “Well”, one of them replied, “one never knows when you might come in useful”. That sums it up nicely. And I’m sure the new boss of The Firm understands it perfectly.

Quote of the Day

”Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

• C.S. Lewis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cillian Vallely & Alan Murray | The Lark in the Morning

Link

Long Read of the Day

An Icon, Not An Idol

Andrew Sullivan’s summing up of Elizabeth II. Best one I’ve read. Sample:

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992, in which one son, Andrew, divorced, a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids, a daughter, Anne, separated, another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and your house burns down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

Great stuff. Do read it.

So how come Charlie is King?

The Economist explains:

The legal basis for succession stretches back to the 17th century and James II, the last Roman Catholic king of England. When Protestant bishops recoiled and invited William of Orange to invade, James fled to France. The throne went to his daughter Mary, a Protestant who had married William, and Parliament passed two acts: the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701. These established that the monarch rules with the consent of Parliament, and set out numerous conditions that a successor must meet. A British monarch needs to be a descendant of Princess Sophia (the nearest Protestant heir to William of Orange, who became William III), and in communion with the Church of England. Until 2013, when Parliament passed a new Succession to the Crown Act, younger male heirs would jump ahead of their older sisters in line to the throne (Spain and Monaco’s royal families still use this male primogeniture), and anyone married to a Catholic was banned, even a dyed-in-the-wool Anglican.

Charles ticks all the boxes.

That’s what’s so nice about ‘Global Britain’ — modern, forward-looking, cosmopolitan and so on.

Will today’s tech giants reach a century?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

question: what’s the average lifespan of an American company? Not any old company, mind, but one big enough to figure in Standard and Poor’s index of the 500 largest. The answer is surprising: the seven-year rolling average stands at 19.9 years. Way back in 1965 it was 32 years and the projections are that the downward trend will continue.

Remember that we’re talking averages here. The trend doesn’t mean that no companies currently extant will get to their first century. Some almost certainly will, as some have in the past: AT&T, for example, is 137 years old; General Electric is 130; Ford is 119; IBM is 111; and General Motors is 106. But most companies wither or are gobbled up long before they qualify for a telegram from the president.

With that thought in mind, let us examine the giant tech corporations that now straddle the globe and overawe our legislators. Apple is 46 years old; Amazon is 28; Microsoft is 47; Google is 24; Meta (née Facebook) just 18…

Read on

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Ideology and tunnel vision

Ideology is what determines how you think even when you don’t know you’re thinking. It’s what makes some courses of action seem ‘obvious’ while others are, literally, unthinkable.

Since the 1970s, ruling elites in most western democracies have imbibed a particular ideology — neoliberalism. This is a particular way of viewing the world, a view that:

• Atomises people (“there is no such thing as society; there are only individual people and their families”, as Thatcher used to put it).
• Prioritises the interests of corporations over those of civil society.
• Undermines agencies of collective action like trade unions.
• Imposes market logic on everything — even when doing so is a catastrophic error, and
• Systematically undermines state capacity. When a British government faces a problem, its reflex response is not to see how public sector organisations might be harnessed to tackle it, but to outsource the work to corporations, even when they are manifestly incompetent or, on occasion, corrupt.

This comes to mind as the Truss administration tries to grapple with the soaring cost of heating one’s home this winter. The reflex strategy is to pay colossal subsidies to energy companies so that they will reduce the bills consumers pay. The end-result of this will be a massive boost to the already ballooning profits of these corporations.

But it is also an irrational, wasteful and iniquitous way of tackling the problem because, among other things, it amounts to a subsidy to well-off consumers while probably not doing enough to help poor households. A much more efficient and fairer way to help people through the energy crisis would be to subsidise average consumption, while leaving those who exceeded it to pay the market price for electricity, gas or oil.

In the UK at the moment, the average household consumes 3,731 kWh of electricity in a year. That comes to 10.23 kWh per day. So wouldn’t it be smarter — and fairer — to subsidise consumption up to that level, and let households which consume more face the market rate? And pay for the subsidy by a windfall tax on energy companies.

It won’t happen, of course, for the simple reason that it’s ‘unthinkable’.

Growl.

Quote of the Day

“When it’s 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London”.

• Bette Midler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Link

Wonderful song.

Long Read of the Day

The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere

Marvellous essay by Ethan Zuckerman, one of the wisest observers of the online world known to me. He’s currently developing a new course on “The Digital Public Sphere” for his lucky students at the University of Massachusetts. The new course — which I’d certainly want to attend if I were over there — is based on three principles:

1. Democracy requires a robust and healthy public sphere.
2. The public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics.
3. As technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well.

The obvious change we’re all focussed on at the moment is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere driven by social media. The consequence of this is a huge diversification of viewpoints expressed in the public sphere. The thing I liked about Ethan’s essay is the way he uses a recent controversy over criticism of the late Queen – to explore the nature and significance of the transition from a broadcast-dominated to a networked p public sphere.

Worth your time and attention.

My commonplace booklet

“Russian police arrest man for holding up blank sheet of paper”

My admiration for the barrister who was questioned by police for holding up a blank sheet of paper in Westminster the other day prompted Patrick O’Beirne to email that there was a precedent for this kind of protest — in Novosibirsk of all places!

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Acrobatics

Venice, 2017. I love this photograph because of the expressions on the faces of the children.

Quote of the Day

”The story of an empire dying from the poisonous fermentation of the fruits of its initial success.”

• Clive James on Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Hmmm… remind you of any other empires?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris | Our Shangri-La

Link

Long Read of the Day

’Things fall apart’: the apocalyptic appeal of ‘The Second Coming’

Very nice essay by Dorian Lynskey on the enduring fascination with Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.

Written in 1919 and published in 1920, “The Second Coming” has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. While many poems in Yeats’s corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (“no country for old men”; “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”), “The Second Coming” consists of almost nothing but such lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeats’s greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in “In Memory of WB Yeats” (1939), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

The poem provides, says Lynskey, an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it, which is perhaps why Fintan O’Toole has proposed the “Yeats Test”: “The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.”

Great read, IMO

My commonplace booklet

Morisson’s Law of Holiday Busyness

A nice exposition on Quentin’s blog of a universal law that explains why one is always especially busy in the run up to going on holiday — and immediately upon one’s return. It explains why, sometimes, I have half-dreaded the thought of going away!

  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!

Venice: the last mile

Quote of the Day

“Objects or practices are liberated for full symbolic and ritual use when no longer fettered by practical use. The spurs of Cavalry officers’ dress uniforms are more important for tradition’ when there are no horses, the umbrellas of Guards officers in civilian dress lose their significance when not carried tightly furled (that is, useless).”

• Eric Hobsbawm in The Invention of Tradition.

I kept thinking of this when watching the preposterous ceremonial charades surrounding the declaration of Charles as King. How many overweight, elderly white males in bejewelled and braided dresses does a country need? And how many of them need suspender belts to keep up those black tights? Also, I’ve just remembered that the new Queen Consort’s ex held the magnificent title of Silver Stick in Waiting. (I am not making this up.) Wonder what he did with his stick?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | The Good Ship Kangaroo

Link

An old (1980) recording of one of my favourite songs by Planxty, the best traditional group of my lifetime. Comes with a nice explanation of the song’s origin.

Short Read of the Day

Defeat by Truth is Victory

Here is a touching sermon by the current President of Harvard, a hedge-fund with a nice university attached, to mark the beginning of the Fall semester.

Books, etc.

Cultural Amnesia

This is one of my favourite books — the result of a lifetime’s reading and note-taking by a great cultural critic. Clive was my predecessor-but-one as the Observer’s TV critic, and indeed was the writer who made television criticism into something that could be both insightful and readable. Like me — but with much more energy — he was an autodidact and this book represents a really touching attempt to read everyone worth reading before one dies, and then trying to communicate something of the essence of each. It consists of 106 short essays on writers, artists and thinkers — from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, taking in Walter Benjamin, Camus, Miles Davis, Fellini, Freud, de Gaulle, Hazlitt, Hegel, the Manns (Thomas, Heinrich, Michael and Golo), Proust, Sartre, Trotsky, Waugh and Wittgenstein. There are some inclusions that initially raise eyebrows — for example Hitler. Why him? Because “one of the drawbacks of liberal democracy… is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence”.

If I had a bookshelf in my bathroom, then this would be on it. Instead it sits in the study. And over the years, dipping in to it has been one of the joys of life. The first time I saw Wes Anderson’s film, The Grand Hotel Budapest, for example, I learned that it was partly inspired by the work of Stefan Zweig, about whom I had known precisely nothing. But Clive understood his significance. And now I do too.

What the Truth-Social flop says about Trump

Nice column by Jack Shafer, wondering why did only 3.9m of Trump’s 89m Twitter followers follow him to his personal Twitter-clone?

Trump’s deranged outrage style once contained real entertainment value — which explains why moderates and liberals followed him on Twitter even if they wouldn’t vote for him. But in his post-presidency and especially in the weeks following the Mar-a-Lago search and investigation, the show has gone stale. Vainly, he has sought to top himself by sharing QAnon-related material on Truth Social, denouncing the FBI like a madman trapped in a bunker, and calling for his reinstatement as the “rightful winner“ of the 2020 election. He’s become a carnival geek biting the heads off of snakes, which can be a fabulous show the first couple of times you see it, but after that, meh. Could today’s Trump devise enough fresh outrage to produce even a brief TikTok?

The interesting question — impossible to answer given the unreliability of US mainstream media’s coverage of politics — is whether Trump is really heading for the rocks.

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The Queen is the story, not the rudderless UK

The media circus round Buckingham Palace has to be seen to be believed. TV networks from all over the world. My son Pete (who lives in London) cycled to the Palace on Friday out of curiosity and sent me a short video which gives you some idea of the scene. The death of no other monarch on earth, he surmised, would have attracted that kind of attention.

He’s right. The Brexit crowd will doubtless interpret this level of attention as evidence for their conviction that the UK still really matters to the world. If so, it would be a be a serious misjudgement. The late Queen, not the UK, was the story – a head of state who played by the rules, even as they were being torn up by ‘her’ clueless Prime Ministers.

Apropos that… after the Queen had passed away the current clueless PM stood outside Downing Street and said that she had been “the very spirit of Great Britain”, clearly unaware that Elizabeth II had been queen of the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Which made one wonder (a) what the DUP loyalists over in Belfast made of their exclusion, and (b) how Truss will handle the upcoming crisis over the Northern Ireland Protocol which her predecessor signed and was trying to break before he left office.

Quote of the day

“In 1864 a notice was pinned to the rails of Buckingham Palace in the manner of an advertisement: “these commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business”.

• David Cannadine in “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, 1820-1977”.

Long Read of the Day

The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor

From Politico, the most interesting obituary I’ve read. It’s by ‘Otto English’ which is the pen name used by Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London.

TL;DR summary: To provide the United Kingdom with the monarch she felt it needed, Queen Elizabeth II sacrificed an ordinary life and the other things most of us take for granted.

Worth your time.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Karl Jenkins | Benedictus | 2Cellos | Live, Zagreb

Link

Somehow, appropriate for this moment.

Tesla gave us tech on wheels, so how come it forgot to include the service centres?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The first thing one learns when purchasing a Tesla, as this columnist did in December 2020, is that the neighbours immediately begin to hold one personally responsible for Elon Musk. The co-founder and now Supreme Leader of the company is, one finds, widely regarded by non-techies as a fruitcake with a bad Twitter habit, so it follows that anyone who buys one of his cars must be a devotee of the world’s richest nutter and therefore not properly earthed.

Interestingly, there was a time, not so very long ago, 2005 to be precise, that this view of Musk was held by sensible German men in suits, who laughed at the idea of this jerk building automobiles. Didn’t he know that making cars is hard and that BMW, Mercedes, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest had spent the best part of a century figuring out how to do it profitably at scale? Sure, he might be able to produce expensive toys for Silicon Valley types – but real cars?

The industry’s derisive scepticism reminds me of 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone…

Read on

Whatever happened to Rudi?

Interesting NYT piece by Andrew Kirtzman on the accelerating self-destruction of the hero of 9/11.

Rudy Giuliani led a terrified city through the deadliest attack in its history. As a reporter covering him from a few feet away that morning, I ran with him from the hurricane of ash and debris following the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, trekked a mile up a Manhattan avenue as he and his aides searched for safe harbor and watched his security detail break into a firehouse with a crowbar.

He gave orders to aides calmly and decisively, reassured a frightened police officer, shushed a cheering crowd and spoke to the world from a tiny office. Like countless others, I was grateful that someone had taken charge, undaunted by the madness of the situation.

These images often come to me when I try to reconcile that brilliant leader with the confused, widely ridiculed figure facing potential indictment for trying to subvert the 2020 election.

Mr. Giuliani is virtually alone at this desperate hour…

The thing that finally did for him, of course, was hooking up with Donald Trump. Sad but inevitable.

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Lest we forget

Three Stolpersteine — literally ’stumbling stones’ on the pavement outside an apartment block in Berlin, commemorating three people who had been taken from the house and murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmno. One finds these lovely memorials all over the place — and not only in German cities.

Quote of the Day

”The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.”

• Paul Ehrlich

(And, this blogger adds, take photographs as you dismantle the device with which you intend to tinker.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Erbarme Dich | St Matthew’s Passion | Jonathan Peter Kenny (Counter-tenor), Clare Salaman (Violin), Thangam Debonnaire (Cello).

Link

The clip is from a remarkable production directed by Jonathan Miller, who can be seen talking about it here in his usual mesmerising way.

Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link and the background.

Long Read of the Day

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?

Interesting article by Finnish journalist Melissa Heikkilä in MIT Technology Review reporting what she discovered when she started asking Large Language models like GPT-3 questions about herself — and others. Since these models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet she wondered what they knew about her.

If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.

Tech companies such as Google and OpenAI do not release information about the data sets that have been used to build their language models, but they inevitably include some sensitive personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

That poses a “ticking time bomb” for privacy online, and opens up a plethora of security and legal risks, warns Florian Tramèr, an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who has studied LLMs. Meanwhile, efforts to improve the privacy of machine learning and regulate the technology are still in their infancy.

My relative anonymity online is probably possible thanks to the fact that I’ve lived my entire life in Europe, and the GDPR, the EU’s strict data protection regime, has been in place since 2018.

But when she started asking the models about relatively public figures, things got really interesting.

Do read it to find out.

Footnote: Out of idle curiosity I started asking OpenAI’s text-davinci-002 model questions about me. On the grounds that I have been a blogger forever and a newspaper columnist since the 1980s I figured the model would have some information about me. Turns out I was wrong.

Comments:

• I’m not a British journalist, though I live and work in Britain. I’m also an academic (a professor) but that didn’t figure in the model’s knowledge base.

• I do write for the Observer

• I have four children, not two, and one of them is named Pete

• I was not born in ‘Dublin, Ireland’ but in Mayo.

• I am not married to Emma Duncan

So a success rate of one out of five.

My commonplace booklet

The outsized power of small acts of kindness

I’ve always thought that generosity is a good default mode in life, but until I read this piece in Axios I didn’t know there was academic research to back that up.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments with different acts of kindness — such as offering someone a ride home or covering the cost of someone’s cup of coffee. In one experiment, study participants at an ice skating rink in Chicago on a cold winter day gave other skaters hot chocolate for free. Then both parties were asked to rate how much the gesture was worth. The givers consistently undervalued how much the hot cocoa meant to the recipients.

I’ve also noticed that people are inordinately grateful when you compliment them on something they’ve done well. A few years ago, a female colleague in a different department received a really big, prestigious research grant. So I wrote her a note congratulating her on the achievement. Later she told me that I was the ONLY person in the entire university who had written to her.

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