How doth our Hollyhocks grow?

Of all the plants in our garden the Hollyhocks are the most striking. This one is still flowering in late November. And it withstood Storm Bert!

Quote of the Day

”Dystopias may sometimes be grimly funny—but rarely from the inside.“

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková

Link

Long Read of the Day

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies” 

Terrific blast from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve):

Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It’s an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism’s mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual (“There is no such thing as society” – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government’s feet to the fire.

Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But “vote with your wallet” turns retail therapy into a form of civics.

This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that’s never you. That’s why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can’t win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots…

Thomas Kurtz RIP

A great computer scientist and mathematician has died at the age of 96. Together with a Dartmouth colleague, John Kemeny. He created BASIC, the first human-friendly programming language, and the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He and Kemeny had an idea that was then (1963) pretty radical: “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.” But to make that idea work, they had to design a programming language that was much less austere and arcane than FORTRAN and ALGOL.So they created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Critical features of the language were that it was small (and could run on early microcomputers like the TRS-80 Model 100 laptop) and that it was interactive by design.

In 1978 Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800. Later, in 1983, Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter (in machine code) for the TRS-80 which I think took up only 20Kb of RAM.

There’s an affectionate obituary of Kurtz on the Dartmouth site.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the Borowitz Report: 

Jeff Bezos has desperately tried to return the Washington Post for a full refund without success, sources close to the Amazon chief confirmed on Monday.

Bezos, who purchased the Post for $250 million in 2013, was reportedly kept on hold with customer service for 45 minutes before a human was finally available to speak to him.

Unfortunately for Bezos, the customer service rep informed him that he had failed to check the newspaper’s return policy when he purchased it.

According to the rep, Bezos cannot return the Post because he bought it more than a hundred days ago and it is now in damaged condition.

Feedback

1. Many readers were horrified by the evidence of my illiteracy provided in Monday’s edition that I was unable to distinguish between the Austens and the Brontes. But although I was of course mortified, the first email that arrived — from Bill Janeway — rendered me speechless with laughter. “When,” he inquired, “did Jane Austen move in with the Brontes?” Touché as we say in Ireland.

2. On the idea (in Monday’s Long Read) that liberal echo-chambers might have their uses, Joe Dunne reminded me of the old adage: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The looming shadow

Quote of the Day

“The best photographers know what not to photograph.”

• Bill Jay

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Wonderful Tonight

Link

Long Read of the Day

What If Echo Chambers Work?

This is a really striking essay because it addresses a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Years ago (2012 onwards, to be precise), the political theorist David Runciman, the historian Richard Evans and I ran a a research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ during which we saw the way conspiracists and alt-right groups had built powerful online networks over many years. We also realised that they had done this for rational reasons: in a media landscape dominated by traditional editorial gatekeepers they has effectively been kept out of public view for decades. But since the Internet had no gatekeepers it was a no-brainer to go there to hook up with likeminded folk. Which they did, on a massive scale.

After Brexit and the Trump victory in 2016 the mainstream world woke up to this, but rapidly adopted a disdainful view of the way in which those ‘deplorables’ congregated in online ‘echo chambers’ in which it was supposed that they would be caught in cognitive whirlpools and never have any substantive impact on the democratic world. That complacency was unwarranted from 2016 onwards, but important role that Elon Musk’s ‘X’ network played in Trump’s comeback should have put paid to that complacency.

The truth is that it’s the alt-right which has masterfully weaponised online media, leaving the liberal world speechless and dazed. So isn’t there a lesson here for us too? That’s the question this essay addresses. And it’s why I think it’s worth your time.

Bluesky feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways…

Yesterday’s Observer column:

As I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky. At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining.

The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power…

Read on

I’m @jjn1.bsky.social if you’re interested.

My commonplace booklet

Utility in Britain Offers Free Electricity to Grow Clean Energy

Isn’t it interesting that the New York Times sometimes seems to pay more attention to good stuff that’s happening in the UK than homegrown media do. This piece is a good example. It opens in Bronte country:

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October.

The Bradleys plugged in their electric Kia, started a load of laundry and set to work on their most delectable energy-guzzling project: the Christmas fruitcake, which is made weeks in advance of the holidays. “As this takes four hours to cook in my electric oven, this is the perfect timing!” Laura Bradley said…

Funnily enough on Saturday we received a similar ping: free electricity (from Octopus) between 15:00 and 17:00. So the car went on to charge, the Christmas cake went into the oven, the dishwasher was stacked and turned on, and so was the washing machine. So whenever we hear rumours of storms coming westward towards the UK, we expect a ping. My only complaint that our EV can’t feed electricity back to the grid when it needs power to meet surges.

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An engaging blast from Tina Brown.

“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”

The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.

The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Autumnal contrast

Nature vs Norman Foster.

Quote of the Day

“It is not what we have as children, but what we are deprived of as kids that defines us and our behaviours for rest of our lives.”

• Om Malik

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | Feelin’ Bad Blues

Link

Music for those trapped in Trump’s America.

Long Read of the Day

Times Past

The historian (and incomparable blogger) Heather Cox Richardson was probably as keen as I was to get away from poring over the entrails of the US election, which may have been why she penned this lovely essay on another pivotal day in American history — the day clocks were reset — to ‘railway time’ — all over the US.

I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….

Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

Four More Years

An engaging blast from Tina Brown.

“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”

The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.

The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The Editor

Paul Webster is retiring as the Editor of the Observer after a long spell in the hot seat. There was a nice party for him in London on Thursday evening, which included quite a few witty speeches and, er, a certain amount of alcohol. He has been a lovely editor to write for — a good listener, full of ideas, and generous with them. And he trusted his journalists in a way that some editors don’t, which meant that one would do one’s utmost to help him out of tough spots.

I remember one Saturday afternoon years ago when my wife and I were on our way to France. Just as we were driving onto the shuttle at Folkestone, Paul rang. “Boris Johnson has just appointed Dominic Cummings as his advisor,” he said. “Can you do me a quick comment piece on him?” As the shuttle pulled out of the siding I opened my phone, wrote the piece on it and when we emerged 30-minutes later in Calais emailed it to him. There are not many people I would do that for. (Full disclosure: it was easier that it sounds because, unlike most people at the time, I had been reading Cummings’s blog for years.)

Quote of the Day

”Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.”

• Anthony Burgess

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Galway Girl | Music for A Found Harmonium | Sharon Shannon and Alan Connor

Link

You want virtuosity? Well, Sharon Shannon has it in spades.

Long Read of the Day

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? 

A rather good NYT column by David Brooks. Think of it as a conservative’s apologia pro vita sua.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels. . . .

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys…

Do read it for what it is: an elegant rendering of what can be seen with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. And its accurate coda:

We are entering a period of white water. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder.

Yep.

Elon Musk is not America’s new king. But he might be its new Thomas Cromwell

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Picture, if you will, the scene in Mar-a-Lago on election night at the moment when it’s become clear that Trump has won. The atmosphere is hysterical. Trump is in expansive form. He stands surrounded by his ghastly tribe of dependants, plus AN Other. In his victory speech, the president-elect praises his campaign staff, his prospective vice-president, and his family. Each gets a few seconds of adulation.

But AN Other gets a whole four minutes. He is Elon Musk, the richest manchild in history. Trump calls him a “super genius”, a “special guy” and a “star”. He has flown straight from Texas in his Gulfstream to bask in the adulation of his new lord and master. He has also paid several hundred million dollars, plus a month of his time, to be here. But now his time has come.

Hold that thought. We will return to it later…

Read on

Books, etc.

Jessica Mitford’s Escape From Fascism

I’ve never read Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, but this essay by Noah McCormack in The New Republic has persuaded me that it’s high time I did.

Much like the idea of Britain as a great power, the Mitfords are fading from popular consciousness. The combined star wattages of Lily James, Andrew Scott, Emily Mortimer, and Dominic West could not rescue the recent adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s delightful The Pursuit of Love from vanishing into the depths of Amazon Prime. Insofar as Jessica Mitford’s 1960 memoir, Hons and Rebels, is remembered at all, it is as a set of comic recollections; stories of the father, Lord Redesdale (“Farve” in the peculiar Mitford vernacular), whose antics included supervising all medical visits, including births, and grabbing doctors by the neck and “shaking them like a rat” if he did not like the course of treatment, or “Muv” telling Jessica (known as “Decca” in Mitfordese), “I should think a Communist would be much tidier, and not make so much extra work for the servants.”

In 2024, the book remains uproariously funny but is clearly a tragedy. It begins with the fact that all homes are marked by the children who live in them but that Mitford’s was perhaps unusual because “in the windows, still to be seen, are swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle.” It ends when Mitford is pregnant with her second child and her beloved husband, a fellow upper-class Marxist renegade, volunteers for the Canadian Air Force in 1940 (his death in 1941 over Hamburg is mentioned only in a tasteful footnote)…

My commonplace booklet

From ”Ten Tips for Reporting in an Autocracy” In the  Columbia Journalism Review

Do not underestimate the power of exposure. Change does not happen overnight. You will never know where the tipping point will be. Remember that autocrats have a limited shelf life. When they fall, we are often surprised how brittle they had been. Take comfort in the fact that of forty populist governments between 1985 and 2020, only seven led to authoritarian rule, mostly because of weak institutions. This makes reporting on the erosion of democratic institutions especially urgent.

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Sunset in a wing mirror

Seen while driving on a Summer evening in West Cork, many years ago.

Quote of the Day

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

• Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

Prescient, eh? Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bud Powell Trio | Blues for Bessie

Link

Long Read of the Day

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

A lovely, clear-sighted view of the technology by Drew Breunig, who cuts through the noise and extracts the signal.

We talk about so many things when we talk about AI. The conversation can roam from self-driving cars to dynamic video generation, from conversational chatbots to satellite imagery object detection, and from better search engines to dreamlike imagery generation. You get the point.

It gets confusing! For laypeople, it’s hard to nail down what AI actually does (and doesn’t) do. For those in the field, we often have to break down and overspecify our terms before we can get to our desired conversations.

After plenty of discussions and tons of exploration, I think we can simplify the world of AI use cases into three simple, distinct buckets: * Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously. * Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work. * Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Let’s break these down, one by one…

Read on.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for pointing me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) is an Elder of the Web and one of the most perceptive observers of the online world.

I’ve just read a lovely tribute he’s written to his long-term friend, Paul Marshall, who has passed away.

Paul also taught me to believe in myself. 

I remember a day when a bunch of us were hanging in our dorm room, talking about SAT scores. Mine was the lowest of the bunch. (If you must know, the total was 1001: a 482 in verbal and a 519 in math. Those numbers will remain burned in my brain until I die.) Others, including Paul, had scores that verged on perfection—or so I recall. (Whatever, they were all better than mine.). But Paul defended me from potential accusations of relative stupidity by saying this: “But David has insight.” (I wasn’t Doc yet.) Then he gave examples, which I’ve forgotten. By saying I had insight, Paul kindly and forever removed another obstacle from my path forward in life. From that moment on, insight became my stock in trade. Is it measurable? Thankfully, no.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom-Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group Tuesday. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

One member of the Facebook group said that they asked the AI bot “how do you cook Sarcosphaera coronaria,” a type of mushroom that was once thought edible but is now known to hyperaccumulate arsenic and has caused a documented death. FungiFriend told the member that it is “edible but rare,” and said “cooking methods mentioned by some enthusiasts include sautéing in butter, adding to soups or stews, and pickling.” The situation is reminiscent of Google’s AI telling people to add glue to pizza or eat rocks on the advice of a Redditor named Fucksmith.

Link

Time was when ‘magic mushrooms’ used to cause hippies to hallucinate. Now the ‘hallucinations’ of an AI can kill you, it seems.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Listening to the Universe

A radio telescope of the astronomy lab at Lord’s Bridge near Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own — that is, the written word. All the honours he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre explaining his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Double Violin Concerto in D minor – 2nd Movement, Largo Ma Non Tanto (BWV 1043)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Is Donald Trump a fascist?

The question on everyone’s mind. Here’s David Runciman’s take on it. As ever, he’s judicious. Here’s a sample:

In Paxton’s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, he identified a willingness to summon up the violence of the streets to intimidate and if necessary overpower established institutions as a defining characteristic. It is what distinguishes fascism from other kinds of authoritarianism. Illiberal authoritarians invariably want to control government institutions but they aim to do so from the inside by bending them to their will. They are wary of conjuring up an independent source of power in violent paramilitaries and other kinds of street politics. True fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler have no such compunction. Their political authority was built on establishing parallel party structures – from the Blackshirts to the SS – willing to bypass the institutions of the state whenever necessary and answerable to the leader personally. It is what marked them out from other dictators of the period. Stalin in the Soviet Union simply replaced state institutions with their Bolshevik equivalents, which monopolised all political coercion. Franco in Spain worked with existing state institutions – and the Catholic church – to keep a lid on political chaos. Hitler and Mussolini called up the chaos of untamed violence when it suited them.

In that respect, Project 2025 is not a fascist document. It has a lot more in common with the governing philosophy of illiberal authoritarians such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, including in its strong embrace of traditional Christian values. Its approach is more consistent with the goal of getting sympathetic judges on the courts than a private militia into gear…

Do read the whole piece. I can’t help thinking, though, that the terminological argument about whether Trump fits the definition is beside the point — which is that he is very bad news for the US and for the world

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I finished reading Richard Evans’s book and went to the launch event for it in my College last night. I found the book compulsively readable and informative — but also disquieting because earlier in the week I had watched (a) a BBC Panorama report based on travelling to Trump rallies with some of his most dedicated fans, and (b) watching a video of his Madison Square Garden rally. In both I heard and saw echoes of the behaviour of Hitler and his entourage, right down to the use of the ‘blood libel’ of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of ‘real’ Americans (whoever they may be). The overwhelming impression I had, though, was that Trump worship has the overtones of a personality cult, much as public worship of Hitler was.

My commonplace booklet

From Charlie Warzel…

”Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

AI datacenters are keeping coal-fired power stations busy

From The Register:

With AI still the hot new trend, demand for compute to operate it is pushing the growth of bit barn capacity along with the need for ever more energy to power it all. This growth is having some unintended effects, at least in America.

In Omaha, one power company has had to abandon plans to stop burning coal to produce electricity because of the need to serve demand from nearby datacenters, according to The Washington Post, picking out Google and Meta in particular.

It claims that rising energy demands from those facilities mean that two coal-burning generators at the North Omaha power plant cannot be decommissioned without risking a power shortage for that district…

But don’t fret: According to Sam Altman & Co, AI will ‘solve’ climate change in due course.

Yeah, and pigs will fly in close formation.

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Waiting for dinner

Cote d’Azur, 2010.

Quote of the Day

”The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. “

• Bertrand Russell

Thanks to John Seeley for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kathleen Ferrier (Contralto) | What is life? | Orfeo ed Euridice | Gluck

Link

This is a remastering of a 1946 recording of Gluck’s Orpheo that stopped me in my tracks one dark November day in 1977 in the Netherlands. I was living there on my own and working at home for the afternoon when I suddenly heard an announcement on the national radio station that it was about to broadcast a long-lost recording of a 1946 recording of the opera with Ferrier singing the title role. Never having heard the opera, I stopped — and did no further work that afternoon. What I didn’t know until later was that many other people in Holland had done the same, because Ferrier had been extraordinarily popular in the country in the post-war years. The audio quality of the original recording was pretty poor, so this remastered version is an improvement, but you can still hear that it’s a vintage performance.

Long Read of the Day

To Be or Not to Be

Sobering blog post by Timothy Snyder about the prospect facing Ukraine.

“To be or not to be.” President Zelens’kyi of Ukraine once told me that “everything is in Shakespeare.” Early in the war he quoted that famous line from Hamlet to the British parliament. It is certainly a propos right now. It applies, in different ways, to his administration and to that of Joe Biden. Will Ukraine win and survive? And will the Biden team assist and be remembered?

Ukrainians and Americans both want peace. Indeed, no one can possibly want peace more than the Ukrainians. For the past two weeks, Ukrainian leaders have tried to persuade American journalists and the Biden administration of how this can come about, tried to convey a simple strategic truth: Russia will make peace only when Putin believes that Russia is losing. They are now presenting what they call a victory plan to try to get into that position.

This is realism. Using the word “negotiations” in any other sense is misleading, since the Russians themselves have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal. There is a thought which one hears outside of Ukraine to the effect that one can simply choose negotiations at any point without appropriately altering the power position. This is not realism. It is wishful thinking…

You cannot choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state.

Yep. Which is why what happens in the US on November 5 really matters. And not just for Ukraine. Because if that falls to Putin, then Poland will be next. Europe’s holiday from history will be over.

Snyder is a good historian and has been spending a lot of time in Ukraine, which is a good reason for taking him seriously.

Books, etc.

In the shack with Robert Caro 

Nice piece by Austin Kleon about Robert Caro, the remarkable biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, about where he writes, and with what.

He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Caro is a truly amazing writer, endowed with a work ethic and a doggedness that’s, well, superhuman.

My commonplace booklet

How power corrupts

If you still believe that British politics is relatively free from corruption then you clearly don’t read Private Eye or subscribe to Open Democracy and Peter Geoghegan’s journalism. And now there’s Simon Kuper’s new book. So, as an added treat, here’s a transcript of a conversation between Peter and him.

Sample:

Peter: What surprised you most when you were researching the book?

Simon: The degree and the shamelessness with which politicians and especially the Tory party were taking money from autocracies, or people with links to autocracies – and then the impunity of it. I realised that the UK has almost no laws about political corruption. I’d research all this material and think, “What?! Another Russian spy donating to the Tories?” or “Boris Johnson really flew to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He made Lebedev Junior a Lord? Cameron lobbies for Chinese interests? Blair lobbies for everyone? And this is just allowed?” It was the gap between all the stuff that was happening and the absence of any sanction that kept astounding me.

Linkblog

Things I encounter when drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened. An interesting sidelight on the automation vs employment debate. Link

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Trompe-l’œil

Arles, 2022. Caused me to do a double-take.

Quote of the Day

“If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.”

• Julian Barnes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 1 in E Flat Major, H.24 | Elizabeth Joy Roe

Link

I love all Field’s Nocturnes, but most of all this one.

Long Read of the Day

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

Slightly hyperbolic headline but still an interesting journalistic investigation by Kate McCusker into why my country seems to breed good writers.

“The Irish just chat about everything. We love telling tales and yarning. There’s no other country where you could talk for an hour about the weather,” says Aisling Cunningham, 57, the owner of Ulysses Rare Books on Duke Street in Dublin.

Sure enough, I have been here for 50 minutes and we have talked at length about everything from the biblical rains of Donegal to why more people who stop into her antiquarian bookshop end up leaving with a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners than Ulysses itself. (Cunningham reckons it’s because the former is more accessible – although there is also the small matter of the Shakespeare and Company first edition of the latter costing just short of €30,000, about £25,500.)

I am in Dublin to find out why Ireland, a country that you can drive the length of in a few hours, punches so far above its weight when it comes to literature. It has contributed four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010; and it’s home to a booming network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals and (whisper it) decently funded libraries…

One of those libraries played a key role in the education of this blogger.

My commonplace booklet

I spent more time than I should have watching the main speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. What struck me was the level of oratory on display, particularly in speeches by Kamala Harris, Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tim Walz. Even Joe Biden seemed energised and eloquent. And I was left struggling (and failing) to think of any British (or European) politician who could deliver a speech as good or as eloquent as any of these.

A knowledgeable historian friend to whom I said this afterwards observed that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life might have something to do with it. I wonder.

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I Love Nice

Actually, I don’t. Taken at 11pm outside the bus station in Nice during an interminable wait for my grandson to arrive from Florence.

Quote of the Day

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.”

• Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise.

Hmmm……see below.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny & Paul Brady at The Embankment in 1976

Link

I think the two tunes are ‘Munster Buttermilk’ and ’Tripping up the Stairs’. The incorporation of the Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music in the mid-1960s was a major event, and the instrument was subsequently retuned by Andy Irvine who, according to Wikipedia “replaced the octave strings on the two lower G and D courses with unison strings, thus reinforcing their lower frequencies” making it an Irish bouzouki!

Long Read of the Day

Steve Bannon’s Dangerous “Dharma” Boston Review

This is a transcript of an interesting interview that Deborah Chasman had with the documentary-maker Errol Morris marking the release of his new documentary on Donald Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, “who is loathed on the left at least as much as the president himself”.

Morris is a great director who made The Fog of War, a memorable series of interviews with Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who oversaw the US’s war in Vietnam. In more recent times, he made a film on Donald Rumsfeld, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. So the obvious first question put to him by Ms Chasman is: what draws him to obnoxious characters?

Errol Morris: In the case of the two secretaries of defense and now Bannon, they’re people who have wielded enormous power. It’s the power and the destructiveness combined that is fascinating. The psychology of these people is hard to parse. With Rumsfeld, I felt I put my finger on it: at the heart of it was this almost impossible vanity and self-satisfaction. I call him the least Jewish person I’ve ever met because of his lack of self-knowledge, lack of self-loathing, guilt, remorse. All that was left when you sieved everything out was this enormous pleasure at himself and his own sense of righteousness—“I am right, and you are wrong.” McNamara was never trying to convince you that he was smart; he just was smart, and tortured.

Bannon has this odd career because you would assume, having been tossed out of the Trump administration, that that would be more or less the end of him; he might appear as a pundit on Fox News and otherwise we wouldn’t hear from him again. But of course that’s not what has happened. And that in itself is really interesting, this life after life. It bears out a lot of his claims, one of which was that he saw himself as bigger than just a political advisor to Trump. Evidently, bigger means he wants to take his message—his crusade—global; he’s in love with the Crusades and he himself has started yet another. He wants to destabilize Europe and he’s having some success. He wants to put an end to the European Union. He wants to put an end to the euro. He wants to undermine the May government, the Merkel government, and the Macron government and install right-wing administrations in their place. And he’s already been successful to the extent that he played a major role in the political coalition that now governs Italy…

‘dharma’, btw, is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The principle or law that orders the universe.” (No, I didn’t know either, but it’s an interesting interview despite that.)

Footnote: For an intriguing little film by Morris that conveys what he’s like, see this New York Times video on “the umbrella man”. He’s also written a rather good book on documentary photography, Believing is Seeing.

My commonplace booklet

Venkatesh Rao’s definition of ‘intellectual menopause’ from his essay on the subject.

Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Is the Gartner ‘hype cycle’ generalisable?

The Economist decided to do some empirical work.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to test whether a hype cycle is an empirical regularity. “Since it is vibe-based data, it is hard to say much about it definitively,” notes Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania. But we have had a go at saying something definitive, extending work by Michael Mullany, an investor, that he conducted in 2016. The Economist collected data from Gartner, which for decades has placed dozens of hot technologies where it believes they belong on the hype cycle. We then supplemented it with our own number-crunching.

We find, in short, that the cycle is a rarity. Tracing breakthrough technologies over time, only a small share—perhaps a fifth—move from innovation to excitement to despondency to widespread adoption. Lots of tech becomes widely used without such a rollercoaster ride. Others go from boom to bust, but do not come back. We estimate that of all the forms of tech which fall into the trough of disillusionment, six in ten do not rise again. Our conclusions are similar to those of Mr Mullany: “An alarming number of technology trends are flashes in the pan.”

Interesting. I have found the Hype Cycle to be a good way of opening a conversation about tech, but maybe it doesn’t capture the overall reality of tech evolution. As the Economist notes, cloud computing went “from zero to hero” in a straight line. And the same may be happening with solar power. But how will the ‘AI’ bubble play out?

Feedback

Thanks to a reader, Melwyn Godinho, I discovered that the BBC World Service’s Moving Pictures documentary strand had a lovely episode about the picture which had led Wednesday’s edition of this blog. From it I learned how much more there is to the painting than I had imagined. As a result I’ve been brooding on it all week.

Great works of art do that — they have a way of burrowing into one’s consciousness, so that you can’t stop thinking about them. I was the Observer’s television critic for many years, and when I decided to move on to other things I was asked to name the best TV productions I’d seen during that time. And I used that criterion — of whether a work had taken up a space in my head — to decide. Top of the list was Edgar Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, which chronicled life in Germany from 1918 to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate. The family’s personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events in Germany, and when I was watching it, week by week, I simply could not get its characters — and their stories — out of my head. Other works that had the same effect included Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Alan Plater’s The Barchester Chronicles (and especially Alan Rickman as Mr Slope) and Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!