Pieces of Cake

Seen in Waitrose yesterday.

Quote of the Day

Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has this lovely disclaimer on his website.

READ CAREFULLY

By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Alto Rhapsody Op. 53: III | Adagio | Kathleen Ferrier

Link

My favourite recording of this wonderful work, despite the antique audio quality.

Long Read of the Day

The cult of Winston Churchill

A bracing review by Priyamvada Gopal of Tariq Ali’s new biography of Winston Churchill.

Nobody’s perfect, indeed, but not everyone had the power to make such a worldview consequential for the lives of millions of people across the globe, often lethally so. At the heart of Ali’s account is this historical reality, one that is evaded in Britain today in favour of a burnished and bullish mythology in which both Churchill and his beloved British Empire emerge with untarnished courage and virtue. The “cult of Churchill” is a full-blown devotional practice, where anyone who demurs is met at the very least with shock and, more probably, tabloid denunciation. “Mythic Churchill,” as some historians have recently argued, has become a “serious fact of modern life” in Britain, “a constant point of reference in political discussion and popular culture,” and, one might add, in the culture wars constantly fomented by politicians.

For Ali, this fact impinges seriously on our ability to reckon clearly with Britain’s past. The cult itself, however, is of relatively recent vintage, assuming its quasi-religious nature during the Falklands conflict in 1982. One of the more astonishingly successful legacies of this propaganda exercise is the ongoing presentation of Churchill, a man of the hard right by any measure, as a figure who transcends political partisanship. This handy fudge enables the presentation of elite Conservative projects as above party politics. No matter how damaging the policy, we are always “all in it together.”

The truth, Ali argues, is that Churchill in his own time was far from a unifying figure; he was primarily interested in only two things: “glorifying colonial atrocities abroad” and “suppressing working-class revolts at home.” Today the British media celebrates his imperialism while quietly overlooking his domestic record.

An interesting read. Churchill was never popular in Ireland, for obvious reasons.

Hatpin through the brain

Jonathan Meades’s LRB review of Tina Brown’s new book about the British Royal family is a must-read, especially in this celebratory week. He’s moderately appreciative of the book, though he acutely observes that it inadvertently reveals that its author, who departed these shores for New York 40 years ago, hasn’t quite appreciated the way the country and its people have changed while she was away.

But his real target is ‘The Firm’, as the royals are known in their own as well as media parlance. And, believe me, Meades takes no prisoners. On balance, one feels that having one’s throat cut would be marginally less upsetting than being skewered by him.

One thing in particular struck me: he gets Princess Di absolutely right. Here’s the money quote:

The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner hairdresser, just as Kate Middleton had to put up with some crass digs about her taste in interiors being ‘very Buckinghamshire’ and her mother’s alleged failure to adhere to Alan Ross’s snobs’ charter on U and non-U. The Middletons have been further mocked for having commissioned a coat of arms. Certain patterns of behaviour recur. With a sure populist instinct Diana gave the people what she wanted to give them in controlled doses, achieving a sort of privacy that wasn’t notably private. She was manipulative, adroit and impressively active in determining how she was to be perceived. She got her retaliation in first. She taunted her putative tormentors. She used them to her advantage, whatever that was. It might be seeing off the rugby player Will Carling, a lover she was bored by. Carling’s friend Gary Lineker warned him: ‘That woman is trouble.’ The element of play in her dealings was perhaps an end in itself. She appreciated her power. She outmanoeuvred Charles – who, as Brown puts it, ‘spun furiously; he was just less good at it.’

This really rang a bell with me. I once observed Diana close up, completely by accident. I was the Observer’s TV critic at the time. Two of the country’s leading playwrights had asked me if they could pick my brains about a topic that then interested them, and about which I was something of an expert. I named my price: lunch at the Ivy, the London restaurant that serves as the posh canteen for the glitterati.

On the appointed day I turned up to find the pair already seated at our table, pens and notebooks at the ready. They then quizzed me for an enjoyable hour and a half. During all of that time, neither noticed that at the table next to us was Diana, who was lunching quietly with a woman friend. So, from time to time, while my interviewers were scribbling, I had a chance to observe her closely. The key thing was that I could see her in profile — which was a revelation, given that most photographs show her face-on, big eyes and all. But in profile, her face looked unexpectedly angular. And, viewed from that perspective, she looked like a tough cookie. And my thought was: Christ! do the Windsors (neé Saxe-Coburg-Gothas) know what they’ve taken on?

We now know that they didn’t.

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Jubilee Souvenir

From the current Private Eye.

Quote of the Day

”Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ladyva | Boogie Woogie Stomp

Link

Well, it’s one way of getting people out of bed in the morning.

Long Read of the Day

 Digital Technology Demands A New Political Philosophy

Good essay in Noema magazine by Jamie Susskind (whose forthcoming book, The Digital Republic, I’m reading at the moment). In it he argues that we need an intellectual framework for thinking about tech power, and that republican ideas (which have nothing to do with the Republican party in the US, by the way) are needed.

But, he asks,

where are the digital republicans? To be a republican is to regard the central problem of politics as the concentration of unaccountable power and to regard the primary purpose of law as the reduction of that unaccountability. For the republican, the challenge presented by digital technology isn’t Musk or Zuckerberg; it’s the idea that people who command technologies will gain a degree of command of society, too.

What I liked about the essay (and like even more about the book) is his insight that the problem of tech power needs to be conceptualised at a higher level than our current preoccupations. This is because the unaccountable power that tech giants wield poses an existential threat for democracy itself. Such a challenge has to be addressed at the level of the future of democracy rather than in detailed arguments about particular regulatory instruments. The question is not how democratic institutions can be reshaped to accommodate digital power, but what democracies will allow these corporations to do — and what they will forbid.

Brandeis, privacy and Roe v. Wade

Zeynep Tufecki, one of the wonders of the networked world, has got tenure at Columbia, which is richly deserved. She was also recently a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Last month, she had an interesting OpEd in the NYT which, among other things, explores how digital tech will, in due course, be used to track and harass women seeking abortions in the US.

This passage caught my eye:

Now the Supreme Court seems poised to rule that there is no constitutional protection for the right to abortion. Surveillance made possible by minimally-regulated digital technologies could help law enforcement or even vigilantes track down women who might seek abortions and medical providers who perform them in places where it would become criminalized. Women are urging one another to delete phone apps like period trackers that can indicate they are pregnant.

But frantic individual efforts to swat away digital intrusions will do too little. What’s needed, for all Americans, is a full legal and political reckoning with the reckless manner in which digital technology has been allowed to invade our lives. The collection, use and manipulation of electronic data must finally be regulated and severely limited. Only then can we comfortably enjoy all the good that can come from these technologies.

But when I got to the penultimate sentence (“… must finally be regulated and severely limited”) I had the same sinking feeling that I get when reading the exhortations about gun control that regularly follow mass shootings. It’s not going to happen because tolerating unconscionable abuses is a systemic feature, not a bug, of democracy, American style.

Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

The consolations of blogging

The great thing about having a blog is that your readers know more than you do. They spot errors quickly but (unlike what happens in social media) they point them out gently. And sometimes they give the blogger the (unwarranted) benefit of the doubt.

When, for example, I recently referred to the fictional portrayal of Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the film The Devil Wears Prada, I inadvertently typed “Pravda”. Generous readers interpreted this careless typo as a brilliant satirical move!

Thus Nick masters wrote,

Lol John. The Devil Wears Pravda may be the best typo in history – the tell-all story of one lowly fashion assistant surviving a Russian Wintour.

And Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), observed

I LOVE ’The Devil Wears Pravda’! Immediately suggests an image of Anna Wintour in a Tristan Tzara cabaret c 1922, entirely outfitted in propaganda…

At which point I began to see a promising new career for me as a typo comedian who might go down in history much like the hapless William Spooner, the Warden of New College, Oxford. He was the chap who allegedly berated one student for having “tasted a whole worm” and another for having “hissed all my mystery lectures” and being “caught fighting a liar in the quad.”

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An evening sky

Quote of the Day

”Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”

• Jean-Luc Godard

It’s baloney, of course, but it makes a good sound-bite.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Siegfried Idyll

Link

I know it’s long, but it’s beautiful. Just let it run while you do other stuff. It was a birthday present to Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869.

Long Read of the Day

Infirmity

Lovely essay by Venkatesh Rao on what he’s learnt about ageing from his elderly cat.

My 18-year old cat (around 80-100 in human years) is teaching me about infirmity and providing a sneak preview of my own future. He can no longer run but he can sort of hurry-walk. He can no longer jump, but he can just about manage to clamber up on the couch with a sort of still-elegant half-bound. But he prefers a ramp or stairs even for that.

And his mobility has a precarious quality to it. He can walk in a straight line, and make slow turns, but a slight unexpected sideways bump will topple him. And from some positions, such as being on his side on a slight slope, he has trouble getting up again. The days when he could stumble from a height and twist and turn in the air to land on his feet are long gone.

This quality of precarious nominality extends to all his life processes. Any change to his routine upsets him, and he has trouble coping and recovering. But he seems to have developed a curious kind of patience — sometimes grumpy, sometimes placid — for the coping and recovering too. There is a gentle, self-aware insistence on choosing life every day, despite the growing costs…

It’s a wise, reflective, thought-provoking essay which made me reflect on what I’ve been discovering about our last remaining cat — who is the same age as Rao’s. See below.

On not going quietly into that goodnight…

This is Tilly, who is now 18 — and therefore even older than me. Her sister (or perhaps I should say litter-mate), Zoombini died  almost a year ago and since then she has become more needy (which, given that she and her sister were inseparable, is understandable); but sometimes she is now also ostentatiously imperious. She’s in pretty good physical shape for her age, though, like me, she suffers from arthritis — so one of the standard comic routines in our household is watching her and me descending the stairs in slowly cautious lock-step.

My hunch is that she is less philosophical about ageing than is Mr Rao’s cat. Tilly sounds more like a cantankerous elderly person who doesn’t like getting old and wants to make her displeasure plain to all and sundry, including the domestic staff of her luxurious retirement home.

My commonplace booklet

Jason Kottke is taking break. He’s been one of the nicest presences on the Web for years, but he’s currently not in great shape. He needs a break. Here’s how he puts it:

There’s a passenger ferry that goes from Cape Cod to Nantucket and there’s a stretch of time in the middle of the journey where you can’t see the mainland behind you and can’t yet see the island ahead — you’re just out in the open water. That’s what I need, to be in that middle part — to forget about what I’ve been doing here for so many years without having to think about where I’m going in the future. I need open water and 5-6 months feels like the right amount of time to find it.

Here’s what Mozart would wish for him: Soave sia il vento

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Caterpillar pillar

Walking on a local footpath on Saturday I suddenly found myself entangled in a long — and virtually invisible — thread that had clearly been woven by a spider. Further investigation revealed another such thread, extending all the way from a bush above my head to the ground. And up this thread caterpillars were making their way upwards. At the lower end of the thread, however, there was what can only be described as a traffic jam. So I set my Summilux lens to its ‘Macro’ setting and took this photograph.

And as I did so I suddenly understood why the Blue Tits in our nest box are having no difficulty feeding their youngsters!

Quote of the Day

”I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

• Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Always stops me in my tracks.

Long Read of the Day

James Crabtree on Tom Cruise and America’s hegemonic anxiety

James has been to a preview of the new Tom Cruise Top Gun movie and written an absorbing piece about it in the Financial Times, where it’s behind the paywall. But he’s provided a pdf of it which you can get to here.

He starts by reflecting back to the original Top Gun movie, released in 1986 at the height of Reagan braggadocio and the faltering of the Soviet Union, reminding us that the original movie encapsulated the American arrogance of that moment.

But now, 36 years later…

as the US readies itself for a new era of military competition with China, it would be reasonable to expect Cruise’s sequel to brim with comparable, jingoistic self-confidence. Curiously, then, it turns out that Top Gun: Maverick is actually a rather anxious kind of blockbuster, filled with doubts about the durability of US power, and functioning in many ways as an elegy for relative American decline.”

And of course the movie has to walk interesting tightrope. The clear hegemonic rival to the US now is China — I mean to say, what other superpower’s aircraft would those fighter-pilot jocks be engaging in high-altitude combat?

But that’s an insight that dare not speak its name in Hollywood at the moment. Just think of that huge Chinese market…

Interestingly, as I read the piece, it also occurred to me that there’s a lesson here for Elon Musk, if he eventually goes through with his purchase of Twitter and begins to implement his promised robust encouragement of ‘free speech’ on the platform. After all, there’s a lot of anti-China ‘free’ speech on US social media. The Xi regime has no sense of humour in these matters.

And half of Musk’s Teslas are made in China.

Go figure. And thanks to James for the Long Read.

Facial recognition firms should take a look in the mirror

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems.

Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. It’s a US outfit that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service…

Read on

Just the job

Lovely blog post by my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve):

A recent spam email in my inbox says:

I can set up a 15 minutes intro call with our Head of Customer Success if this email interests you.

Do people really have job titles as idiotic as “Head of Customer Success”? How would you live with yourself? Wouldn’t you cringe when anybody asked you your role? And what are you head of? A team of other little Customer Success people all the way down to Customer Success Trainees, perhaps? Would you hang your head in shame if one of your customers didn’t succeed at something?

Perhaps you could get away with never mentioning it, now that people don’t hand out business cards any more… until your company insisted on email signatures. Anyway, if you have that job title, I pity you… unless you asked for it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I rather like fun job titles. I remember a friend who had ‘Software Artisan’ on his business card, for example, and it raised a smile, while still actually saying something. The problem with the one in my email was the nagging worry that they were actually serious about it.

At one of my previous startups, I described myself as the CIO – the Chief Interim Officer. I wrote the software until I hired somebody better; did a bit of hardware until we got a proper hardware guy, sold things until we hired a sales team, and ran the company until I found a better CEO… at which point I’d hired myself out of a job and it was time to go and start a new company. That’s the peril, or joy, of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none…

Many years ago, in the early days of Apple, I knew a guy who was an expert production manager in a big British engineering company and he was headhunted by Apple to run their newish Irish subsidiary. When he joined he had business cards printed with his title: Production Director. After a few weeks in the job he flew to Apple HQ in California, where he was introduced to Steve Jobs. He handed Steve his new business card. Jobs scanned it, tore it up and handed back the shredded card. “In Apple you’re ‘management’”, he said, and walked away.

My commonplace booklet

Use Google maps to travel back in time (well no further back than 2007, when Streetview launched.)

New feature. Link

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Our new neighbours

We have a breeding pair of Canada geese in the village and they recently produced their latest brood — who started as tiny fluffballs and are already turning into lanky teenagers.

Quote of the Day

”He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.”

• William Hazlitt on Coleridge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Maguires at Temple Bar Tradfest 2017

Link

A remarkable Irish family of musicians. This clip opens with an extraordinary long solo by Séan (then aged 11) on the bodhrán (pronounced ‘bow-rawn’).

Long Read of the Day

The Fiction That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Long, interesting essay by Morten Høi Jensen on the travails of those who write biographies of writers.

Sample:

On the whole, very little happens to writers in the practice of writing, even to those who, like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Mann, or Naguib Mahfouz lived in the thick of history, with all its peril and precariousness. Consider Mann: born four years after the unification of Germany, he lived through the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the postwar division of Germany. He was hurled into exile, stripped of his citizenship, put on an arrest warrant for Dachau, and surveilled by the FBI for alleged communist sympathies. In America, his social circle included Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. All of which amounts to an exceptionally fascinating life, but it tells us little or nothing about what finally matters: the fiction. In every account of his life, every time he sits down at his desk, whether in Munich, Küsnacht, Princeton, or Los Angeles, Mann disappears from view. We can reconstruct his punctilious routine, we can describe the texture of his desk, we can even name the various brands of cigar that he liked to smoke — but we cannot be present for the moment when the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain put pen to paper and chose this word over that word and refined this idea or that idea and generally brought his fictional world to life.

So, is literary biography just a form of higher gossip? Or a way of prolonging our intimacy with an author, as John Updike charitably put it? Read on for a sensitive exploration of the question.

The billable hour is a trap

Thoughtful column by Tim Harford.

Twenty years ago, M Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology, began an article with the observation that “Many lawyers are very unhappy, particularly lawyers who work in big firms. They may be rich, and getting even richer, but they are also miserable, or so they say.” Was this sad state of affairs caused by long hours or stressful work? Perhaps.

But Kaveny identified a more specific culprit: the “billable hour” — or even more precisely, the billable six-minute increment. By accounting for every moment of their working lives, and defining each moment as either “billable” or, regrettably, “non-billable”, lawyers were being tugged inexorably towards an unhappy, unhealthy attitude to the way they spent their time. Not all lawyers, of course. And not only lawyers, either.

Kaveny had several concerns. She noted that lawyers would focus on narrow short-term goals rather than broader or deeper values such as maintaining skills, mentoring young colleagues, or living up to the highest ideals of the law. She worried about the explicit commodification of time.

But perhaps more relevant today than ever is that the billable hour encourages us to view all time as fungible. If time is money, that’s as true for 6am on Christmas morning as it is for 2pm on Friday the 29th of April…

In my time I’ve met quite a few unhappy lawyers. And a Managing Partner at a big firm once told me that mid-40s ‘burnout’ of his colleagues was one of the problems he was increasingly having to deal with.

And then, of course, I fell to wondering how long it takes my subscribers to read this blog/newsletter, and how much they could be earning if they weren’t frivolously dodging work by being here!

My commonplace booklet

Julian Barnes never wrote an ugly sentence (IMHO). And this week I ran into yet another proof of that proposition — a review he wrote years ago of John Updike’s Golf Dreams. Since golf is the only game I’ve ever loved, I have a dog in this fight, but even so I loved both the book and Julian’s essay about it.

Here’s a sample:

You can see what enrages the non-golfist (a golfist, as opposed to a golfer, is anyone whose life has been, even once, long in the past, touched by the sudden beauties of the game). There’s the false, tailored landscape; the enormous pauses between brief and seemingly similar pieces of action; the wanky, transparently Freudian object of propelling a little ball long distances into a tiny hole (Updike has a poem about showering players whose ‘genitals/ hang dead as practice balls’); and the cloney nerdishness of the players. They wear terrible clothes; they seem to escape the general rule, clung to by sportists, that each sport throws up at least one player of high natural intelligence (we are thinking Gullit, not Gascoigne); and when they try to show ‘character’ – ie submit to marketing devices – they make fools of themselves. Look at Greg Norman: nice enough fellow by all accounts, but a complete wally when it comes to that ‘White Shark’ sobriquet and hat trim. A piece of hubris just made for Nick Faldo at Augusta.

Yet the game, as literary golfists keep trying to explain, has much to offer the non-golfist reader. There is the ambiguity of the setting, poised between rus in urbe and urbs in rure. There is the social mix of the players, wider than non-golfists imagine (though admittedly not that wide)…

And so it goes. Wonderful.

(I should perhaps explain that Julian preceded me as the television critic of the Observer, and that I once gave his first novel a — richly deserved — rave review.)

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Quote of the Day

”I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”

• Peter Ustinov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton with JJ Cale | Anyway The Wind Blows (Live From San Diego)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown

If you want to know why I am pessimistic about the world’s chances of avoiding climate catastrophe, then this extraordinary piece of reporting might explain why. The basic story is that the lure of colossal profits in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the IPCC’s view that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use will mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

Details of the projects being planned are not easily accessible but an investigation published in the Guardian shows:

• The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter.
• These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.
• The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.
• The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita.

It’s a long and depressing read. But a good piece of journalism.

An obsession with American politics pollutes British politics

Lovely Bagehot column in The Economist (which, sadly, might be behind the paywall) on the crackpot obsession that the UK’s governing and media elites (and to some extent its universities) have with the US.

Arguments over public policy are complicated by comparisons with America. Debates about the future of the National Health Service are polluted by the extreme and weird example across the ocean. The plethora of publicly funded health-care options in Europe is largely ignored. Liz Truss, now the foreign secretary, once campaigned against occupational licensing. It is a worthy aim, but the problem barely exists in Britain. In America a hairdresser faces at least 1,000 hours of training before being granted a licence; in Britain a fresh Kurdish arrival can set up shop and shear people for £8 ($10), communicating only with hand gestures. Worrying about occupational licensing in Britain is akin to an American senator having strident views on fox-hunting with hounds.

The same happens across the political spectrum. British campaigners alighted on a minimum-wage demand of £15 for little reason other than that American ones had demanded a $15 wage. “Abolish ice” (the American border force) became a slogan among left-wing Democrats calling for a less cruel immigration system; “Abolish the Home Office” was swiftly adopted in Britain. “Defund the Police” made little sense even in America, where law enforcement can call on enough munitions for a Latin American coup, let alone in Britain, where the police are largely unarmed. Fewer resources are the last thing the service needs.

It’s a great column, with a nice pay-off:

Comparisons between countries are healthy, but America is not the only benchmark. British politicians and policymakers can learn from nearer neighbours, too. France, a post-imperial power with the same level of population and wealth, offers an obvious analogue. Yet although the typical inhabitant of sw1 could regale someone with the life story of a 1950s planner from New York, he probably thinks Georges Pompidou was a painter. Bookshelf bingo needs new rules.

One of the consequences of this transatlantic obsession is this country’s apparent inability to learn anything from (continental) Europe, even though they do many things much better than we do here. Schools, for example. And technical education. And housebuilding. And pre-school care.

Truly, imperial afterglow is a very debilitating condition.

My commonplace booklet

Microsoft Excel on TikTok?

You think I’m joking? Well, see here

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Man’s best (and smarter) friend

This is one of my favourite photographs. One sweltering August afternoon we were driving along the seafront at Antibes on our way to Vence when we spotted this scene, and I stopped, grabbed my Leica and took a single shot. The dog’s owners were lying out under the blistering sun, cooking like sausages on a spit, while their clever mutt sat calmly in the shade watching them tenderly and wondering at the foolishness of humans.

Quote of the Day

“You have accused me of being a flatterer. It is true. I am a flatterer. I have found it useful. Everyone likes flattery; and when you I come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

• Benjamin Disraeli

It’s still the case apparently, at least according to Tina Brown’s new book.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Marley & The Wailers | No Woman, No Cry | Live at the Rainbow, 4th June 1977

Link

Beautiful, just beautiful, and with a lovely guitar accompaniment too.

Long Read of the Day

The significance of TikTok

If you’re puzzled by the TikTok phenomenon(and I guess most people over 30 are) then this startling blog post by Scott Galloway is unmissable. He has an enviable ability to get past the surface flashiness of online phenomena to the heart of the matter. Among other things, this piece explains why the tech giants are so freaked out by TikTok — and also why parents should perhaps be too.

For me, it’s also yet another reminder of how perceptive Herbert Simon was all those years ago.

Thanks to Pete for alerting me to it the moment it appeared.

About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors

Lovely piece by Cory Doctorow

Here’s a delicious story: CNN reports that Russian looters, collaborating with the Russian military, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment from a dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, collectively valued at $5,000,000. The equipment was shipped to Chechnya, but it will avail the thieves naught, because the John Deere dealership reached out over the internet and bricked these tractors, using an in-built kill-switch.

Since that story ran last week, I’ve lost track of the number of people who sent it to me. I can see why: it’s a perfect cyberpunk nugget: stolen tractors rendered inert by an over-the-air update, thwarting the bad guys. It could be the climax of a prescient novella in Asimov’s circa 1996.

But I’m here to tell you: this is not a feel-good story.

It isn’t — even though I laughed when I first read about it. The nub of it is that what John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere. Including in the USA. Which doesn’t amuse those farmers much, by all accounts.

But read Cory’s story to get the full effect.

My commonplace booklet

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

Russia permanently banned nearly 1,000 Americans, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, from entering the country in response to the United States’ support of Ukraine and its sanctions. It’s a largely symbolic move featuring a wide-ranging collection of Biden administration members, Republicans, tech executives, journalists, lawmakers who have died, regular U.S. citizens and even actor Morgan Freeman. One prominent name missing from the list: former president Donald Trump.

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The point of no return

Seen in the Orchard, Grantchester, years ago.

Quote of the Day

“Just as in London you are supposedly never more than 6ft away from a rat, in Mayfair you are rarely far from a serious human rights violation.”

• Caroline Knowles, in her book Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Miles Davis | So What

Link

Nine minutes of bliss.

Long Read of the Day

Permanent Pandemic

When Covid first arrived and it became clear that it would be an epoch-changing event, I fell to wondering what its historical forebears might be — events that, while dramatic enough at the time of their occurrence, led to consequences and changes of such magnitude that few people at the time could have foreseen.

I came up with two: the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914; and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US in 2001. The first led to a catastrophic war; the second to comprehensive surveillance in democratic societies as well as authoritarian ones. To that pair we now need to add Covid-19.

It’s the normalisation of the hitherto-unthinkable in states’ responses to the pandemic that has prompted this thought-provoking essay by Justin E. H. Smith in Harper’s. I think it’s outside the paywall, but I found that I had to access it using Firefox Focus because my regular browser (which does a lot of ad-blocking) triggered a “subscribe to read on” dialogue. Anyway, I hope you can get to it because it’s worth your time.

Here’s a sample:

Even tyrants would be foolish to pass down an iron law when a low-key change of norms would lead to the same results. And there is no question that changes of norms in Western countries since the beginning of the pandemic have given rise to a form of life plainly convergent with the Chinese model. Again, it might take more time to get there, and when we arrive, we might find that a subset of people are still enjoying themselves in a way they take to be an expression of freedom. But all this is spin, and what is occurring in both cases, the liberal-democratic and the overtly authoritarian alike, is the same: a transition to digitally and algorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.

What do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have in common? An unhealthy Twitter habit

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Why do billionaires tweet? Is it because they no longer have to earn a living? Or because they’re bored? Or because they spend a lot of time in, er, the smallest room in the mansion? Elon Musk, for example, currently the world’s richest fruitcake, has said that “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne”, adding that “it gives me solace”. This revelation motivated the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to do some calculations, leading to the conclusion that more than 8,000 tweets over 12.5 years suggests that, on average, Musk “poops” twice a day. (I make it 1.75 a day, but that’s just quibbling.)

So why does Musk tweet so much? One explanation is that he just can’t help himself. He has, after all, revealed that he has Asperger’s. “Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things,” he said on Saturday Night Live, “but that’s just how my brain works”. Understood. It may also be a partial explanation of his business success, because his mastery of SpaceX and Tesla suggests not only high intelligence but also an ability to focus intensely on exceedingly complex problems without being distracted by other considerations.

There are, however, darker interpretations…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

“The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”

Lovely poem by Clive James, from his Collected Verse 1958-2003.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

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