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.

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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.

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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!

The silence of the grave

A photograph taken on Saturday afternoon in the beautiful old churchyard where my beloved Sue lies buried. Her death from cancer in August 2002 left me and our two young children devastated. We’ve recovered as best we can, but for us, August is still a sombre month.

Quote of the Day

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Bird Song

Link

Long Read of the Day

Think before you post

An interesting blog post by Ed West, which makes for uncomfortable reading, not least because it highlights the inconsistency (and possible injustices) of sentencing policy in the British justice system, and partly because of the way that stupid or naive users of Twitter/X get fingered and punished while the Great Enabler of toxic misinformation, Elon Musk, goes scot free (and is fawned upon by a former British Prime Minister).

Julie Sweeney had spent a ‘quiet, sheltered life in Cheshire’ for most of her 53 years, living in the village of Church Lawton caring for her sick husband the past decade.

She had never been in trouble with the law before, but reading the news on July 31 about the clear-up at Southport mosque, Sweeney posted on Facebook: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’

For this she will spend 15 months in HMP Styal, a prison notorious for its menace, violence and self-harm. She cried as she was taken down, saying only ‘thank you, your honour’.

As he jailed Sweeney, Judge Stephen Everett said: ‘You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people. Instead, you chose to take part in stirring up hatred. It was a truly terrible threat.’ Although she had no intention of taking part in violence, ‘so called keyboard warriors like her, have to learn to take responsibility for their inflammatory and disgusting language’. A letter from her husband did not sway the judge’s heart.

You get the drift. Read on.

Books, etc.

The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Transcript of a fabulous interview by Sophie Roell of the political scientist Henry Farrell on the five key books he would choose for building a curriculum for a course on ‘the politics of information’. In the case of each, Henry explains its significance — and outlines the main thrust of its argument — with insight and conceptual clarity.

The books are:

1. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
2. The Market System by Charles Lindblom
3. The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon
4. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Wehl and Posner
5. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

Of these, I’ve read only #1 and #3.

It’s worth reading the transcript just to why Henry thinks each book is significant. For me, the most surprising thing was that he puts Uncanny Valley in the same league as Red Plenty. Which means that now I have to read the latter!

If Google’s monopoly is broken, it will be good for consumers – and the company too

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Earlier this month, a district court in Washington DC handed down a judgment in an antitrust case that has shaken up the tech industry. In a 286-page opinion, Judge Amit Mehta announced his conclusion. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Now I know that for normal, well-adjusted people, antitrust cases are an excellent antidote to insomnia, but stay tuned for a moment because this is a really big deal. Apart from anything else, it shows that an ancient legal warhorse, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, still has teeth. And to see it successfully deployed to bring an overbearing tech company to heel is a delight. After all, it was the statute that in 1911 broke up John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as well as American Tobacco, and AT&T in 1982. It was also used to prosecute Microsoft in 1998…

Do read the whole piece

Linkblog

OK, I know you’re busy. But if you have a spare 35 minutes and need cheering up, then can I respectfully suggest you make a coffee and watch this edition of the Daily Show on how Donald Trump can’t get over the fact that he’s not now campaigning against Joe Biden.

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Evolution

Of one thing at least we can be sure: ‘soapy Sam’ would not have approved of the graphic.

Quote of the Day

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gustav Mahler | Fifth Symphony, Adagietto | Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Phil

Link

The symphony was performed at the BBC Proms last night, with Mark Elder conducting the Hallé orchestra.

Footnote Bernstein once gave an intriguing talk at Harvard on the subject of ambiguity in the piece, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a musician.

Long Read of the Day

Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century 

Lovely piece by Ellen Wexler in The Smithsonian about an extraordinary photographer.

It’s a great story.

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives…

My hunch is that if she knew how famous and celebrated she has become, she’d be appalled!

Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI

Yesterday’s Observer column:

As enshittification unfolds, the experience of a platform’s hapless users steadily and inexorably deteriorates. But most of them put up with it because of inertia and the perceived absence of anything better. The result is that, even as Google steadily deteriorated, it remained the world’s dominant search engine, with a monopolistic hold in many markets across the world; “Google” became a verb as well as a noun and “Googling” is now a synonym for online searching in all contexts.

The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk threatens to upend this profitable applecart. For one thing, it definitely disrupts search behaviour. Ask a chatbot such as Perplexity.ai a question and it gives you an answer. Search for the topic on Google and it gives you a list of websites (including ones from which it derives revenue) on which you then have to click in order to make progress. For another, if users shift to chatbots for information, they won’t be exposed (at least for now) to lucrative search ads, which account for a significant chunk of Google’s revenue. And over time, experience with chatbots will change people’s expectations about searching for information online.

Overhanging all this, though, is the fact that generative AI is already flooding the web with AI-generated content…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

As regular readers know, I have been a keen photographer for ever, and so am partial to accounts of other photo-sufferers’ successes and tribulations. So you perhaps understand why I was a sucker for Jason Koebler’s essay, “Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film: A Rewarding, Infuriating Hobby”, not least because while I used to develop and print my own black & white films, I always shirked doing the same with colour rolls.

If you read the piece, you will perhaps understand why I shirked it!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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Gehry’s tower

For the new Luna Centre in Arles. Quite a building.

Quote of the Day

“I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

• Garth Gibbs, a famous Daily Mirror journalist who would not have been out of place in Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful satire on journalism, Scoop. (A copy of which, incidentally, David Cameron kept on his desk before he was Prime Minister, presumably as a handbook for dealing with the British tabloids.)

For readers who do not follow the excesses of these vile rags, I should explain that Lord Lucan was an elegant and dissolute peer who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny with a lead pipe and was never seen again, despite the efforts of many tabloid journalists — all coincidentally on lavish expenses — to locate him in foreign parts.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben (Zaide) | Lucia Popp

Link

Sublime, utterly sublime.

Long Read of the Day

The AI summer

Nice essay by Benedict Evans, one of the shrewdest observers of the tech industry writing today.

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

Worth reading from start to finish. The reason we’re in an AI bubble is that while everyone and his dog is talking about how revolutionary the tech is, it’s not at all clear whether — and how — this apparent potential will actually be realised. Evans thinks that history suggests that the big payoffs might be a long time coming.

Books, etc.

Top ten of the NYT’s top 100 books of the 21st century.

1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
8. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The only ones I’ve read are nos. 5,8 and 9. My kids are appalled that I still haven’t read Wolf Hall, and don’t regard my protestations that I’ve seen the dramatisation as satisfactory justification. I’m pretty sure they’re right.

Errata

Apologies to Belinda Kitchin for getting her surname wrong — as ‘kitchen’. Of course I’d like to blame it on Apple autocorrect, but careless proofreading is a more plausible explanation.

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Brief encounter

Quote of the Day

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Wachet auf from Cantata No 140 | Sonny Landreth

Link

I love this Cantata (who doesn’t?), but I’ve never heard it played like this before.

Long Read of the Day

AI as Self-Erasure

A really thoughtful (and thought-provoking) essay by Matthew Crawford in The Hedgehog Review.

I was at a small dinner a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seated next to me was a man who related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride. It can be hard to come up with the right words for such an occasion, and he wanted to make a good showing. He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface.

To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense. I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living.”

LLMs, Crawford argues (perceptively, IMHO), won’t return us to a pre-linguistic state, but they do point to a post-human one. This is because words have significance for us, but they don’t have for a machine (or a parrot for that matter).

Do read on. I was often reminded as I read it of my feeling that the subliminal thrust of this technology is what Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger described in their  perceptive book as the re-engineering of humanity in order to make it more amenable to the needs of machines.

I was also reminded of an observation what I used to attribute — wrongly — to Martin Heidegger, but which in fact came from Max Frisch in his book Homo Faber:

“Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for alerting me to Crawford’s essay.

Chart of the Day

From Azeem Azhar’s newsletter.

Traffic to traditional news outlets in the US is collapsing and it’s not just them – only 22% of people globally now rely on publisher websites as their main source of news, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The long-awaited platform shift is happening, but to what? The picture isn’t clear. Social and video platforms are on the rise, but the landscape is fragmented. The gatekeepers of control have also changed. Where media moguls like Rupert Murdoch once controlled content, now it’s a mishmash of tech platforms, in a more dislocated ecosystem than we’ve seen in the past decade.

These platforms, which prioritise engaging content, have led to the rise of news influencers. 66% of people worldwide watch short news videos on a weekly basis. At the same time, news avoidance is at an all-time high.

The focus on the individual has mixed effects. The journalistic model isn’t necessarily dead, it’s changing.

Yep. But to what?

My commonplace booklet

Every year the highlight of our Summer is a slow drive down through La France Profonde until we reach Provence: small roads, rural villages, small hotels. This year we noticed something unusual: at the entrance to many rural villages the village sign had been neatly turned upside down. The care with which the operation had been carried out meant that vandalism could be ruled out as an explanation. So eventually I resorted to search engines, and found this useful BBC report, which explained all.

The name-bearing roadside plaques have been unscrewed, flipped, then meticulously screwed back on.

It’s a campaign by farmers to draw attention to what they say is their increasingly precarious way of life.

Starting with a protest in the southern Tarn department in November, it has now spread all over the country.

”We were trying to think of a way of denouncing all the contradictory instructions we keep getting,” said Philippe Bardy, head of the FNSEA farmers’ union in the Tarn.

”Where we come from, if someone tells us to do one thing one day and then the opposite the next, we say we’re walking on our heads. That’s where the idea came from.”

Farmers cite specific grievances such as the increasing cost of farm diesel, late payment of EU subsidies, burgeoning bureaucracy and competition from imports.

But Philippe Bardy adds: “There is no other profession that suffers such a mental load.

”On one side, the minister asks us to change our practices, to make them more ecological. On the other, he tells us to produce as much as possible so France can achieve food sovereignty…

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From Quartz Daily Brief

”People who live in the U.S. are just too swamped to take a holiday — or so they say.

Despite only receiving an average of 12 vacation days a year, more than half of Americans said they didn’t use all of their vacation time last year. The top reason? “Life is too busy to plan or go on vacation.”

Twelve paid holiday days a year! I had a friend who was a talented but underpaid researcher in Cambridge. He had a growing family (4 energetic boys) and needed to earn more, so he went to work for a big pharmaceutical company in the U.S. where he rose quickly to become a VP for R&D. Despite that seniority, he had only 14 days holiday allowance, and told me that on the first of these fortnight-long breaks his American colleagues were pissed off that he never once opened his laptop.

(In the end he decided he’d be better working for a big pharma outfit in Switzerland, where they take proper holidays.)

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