A plug for rural France

This volcanic plug near Le Puy-en-Velay is my favorite sight on our drive southwards through the Massif Centrale.

Quote of the Day

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 1010: II. Allemande | Yo-Yo Ma

Link

Long Read of the Day

 America’s descent into the suppression of dissent

Christina Pagel has been tracking the Trump administration’s actions across four domains of suppressing dissent. This is her latest account. It’s only when you see how it’s evolving that the extent of the threat to the republic becomes more and more obvious.

The number and severity of the administration’s actions to suppress dissent have increased each month. There is nothing to suggest either from the last five months or administration rhetoric that Trump will de-escalate. His cabinet and the Republican party has rallied firmly behind him. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to “liberate this city (LA) from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”; Senator Marco Rubio has backed aggressive measures—including revoking thousands of visas—to “protect national security”; and Stephen Miller has openly urged ICE to “intensify efforts” against what he terms agitators. Some commentators are warning that these crackdowns could be a dress rehearsal for potential unrest during or after the midterm elections. This hardening stance has already emboldened extremists, manifesting most tragically in the June 15, 2025, shooting of two Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota by a gunman posing as a police officer.

What might come next? If the trajectory continues to worsen, we might see the administration shift from crackdowns against specific protests to more institutionalised repression.

Yep. Watching what’s happening in the US makes me think of how people in Britain in the 1930s must have thought if they were following reports of what was happening in Germany.

My commonplace booklet

As LLMs come to be part of everyday life, too much of the attention seems to be on how students will be able to ‘cheat’ with them by getting AIs to write their essays. But not enough people are paying attention to how the existence of LLMs is affecting reading. That has already been transformed by the existence of earlier technologies — like eBooks. But how do LLMs come into the picture?

Joshua Rothman has a very nice essay about this in the New Yorker, in which the excerpt below stood out, partly because I follow Tyler Cowen and have always been amazed by the amount of reading he manages to do.

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines. It’s not exactly right to say that they “read,” in the human sense: an L.L.M. can’t be moved by what it reads, because it has no emotions, and its heart can’t race in suspense. But it’s also undeniable that there are aspects of reading at which A.I.s excel at a superhuman level. During its training, an L.L.M. will “read” and “understand” an unimaginably large quantity of text. Later, it will be able to recall the substance of that text instantaneously (if not always perfectly), and to draw connections, make comparisons, and extract insights, which it can bring to bear on new pieces of text, on which it hasn’t been trained, at outrageous speed.

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Temptation

Quote of the Day

”Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | True Love Knows No Season

Link

Long Read of the Day

Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy

Interesting piece by Julia Carrie Wong on the deep waters that the techno-fascist right are leading us into.

Here’s a sample

Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about “suicidal empathy” through his “public bromance” with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting – and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist “great replacement theory” – western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Apparently American catholics, led by that prominent convert, J.D. Vance, are also becoming sceptical about the value of empathy. If you think that evangelical christians voting for Trump is weird, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

My commonplace booklet

After a frantically busy Term we have run away to France and at the last minute I booked us into a hotel in Avallon — the Hotel de la Poste — about which I knew precisely zero other than (a) it would be a good overnight stay on the first stage of our annual slow drive down to Provence, and (b) it’s conveniently near a charging station. Upon arrival we find that:

• The place was built in 1707 and was one of the first Post Office relay stations
• It was one of the first restaurants in France to receive three Michelin stars in 1935
• Over the centuries it has welcomed inter alia: Louis Philippe, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Pablo Picasso, Liz Taylor and Josephine Baker.

Also, Napoleon stayed there on his way back to Paris after his return from Elba in 1815. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t pay for his room.

It’s ancient, friendly. unfashionable and doesn’t feel posh. A bit like this blogger, in fact.

Errata

Thanks to David Elliott and Bill Janeway for pointing out that Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza program dated from the 1960s and not 1996! It’d be nice to explain it as a typo, but I’m afraid that sloppy proof-reading is a better one.

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Back in the day

Irish writers Patrick Kavanagh (left) and Anthony Cronin in Dublin on June 16, 1954 preparing for the first public celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I was born in a country whose religious and civic establishments mostly regarded James Joyce, not as a pioneering modernist writer, but as “a filthy pornographer”. In 1954, the 50th anniversary of the day on which all the action in the novel takes place, a group of distinguished Irish writers decided that they had had enough of this philistinic nonsense. They rented a couple of antique horse-drawn cabs and staged a reenactment of the part of the novel in which Leopold Bloom and his friends drive to Paddy Dignam’s funeral.

Thus was born Bloomsday, which has, er, blossomed into a worldwide celebration of the day. In the 1980s, appalled that a literary city like Cambridge studiously ignored the great day, I decided to host a lunch at which participants would read passages from the novel and have the same lunch that Leopold Bloom enjoyed in Davey Byrne’s pub, namely a glass of Burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich. And I’ve done that ever since.

Which of course reminds me of an ancient Irish joke:

First man: “Do you like gorgonzola?” Second man: “No, but I hear that his brother Émile is a bloody fine novelist.”

Quote of the Day

”What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

• Joseph Weizenbaum, on discovering how his ‘Eliza’ program (written in 1996) seemed to seduce some of its users, or at any rate imbued the program with human qualities.

And guess what: AI Chatbots are even more persuasive than Eliza. Which is why they are worrying tools for spreading misinformation.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Enya | I dreamt I dwelled in Marble Halls

Link

An unusual and striking rendering of a song that was popular in Joyce’s own day.

Long Read of the Day

Bloomsday Explained

Lovely Paris Review essay by Jonathan Goldman.

“Bloomsday,” the James Joyce scholar Robert Nicholson once quipped, “has as much to do with Joyce as Christmas has to do with Jesus.” The celebrations of Ulysses every June 16—the date on which the novel is set—attract extreme ends of the spectrum of literary enthusiasm. Academics and professionals mingle with obsessives and cranks, plus those simply along for the ride. The event can be stately and meticulous or raucous and chaotic—or, somehow, all of the above.

A telling instance came a few years ago, when the Irish Arts Center arranged a Bloomsday picnic in New York’s Bryant Park, under the rueful shadow of the Gertrude Stein statue. (Stein disliked Joyce.) Aspiring Broadway types were enlisted to circulate in period costume before bursting into popular songs from 1900-era Ireland. I spoke to one of the performers, a young Irish actor who had recently moved to New York. Had she read Ulysses? “I plan to,” she said, and in my memory, she adds, “I’m told it’s a grand book by them that knows.” The kicker was when the Irish finance minister, in town for summit meetings, got up to say that his government would take as inspiration the balanced daily budget that appears in Ulysses. The problem? Leopold Bloom’s spreadsheet in Ulysses works out only because he omits the money he’s paid to Bella Cohen’s brothel. No one pointed out the irony.

The admixture of expertise and fanboyism that marks Bloomsday, perhaps unique among literary gatherings, is remarkable…

It is indeed. And I am guilty as charged. But do read the essay.

So long, Bill Atkinson, and thanks for the epiphany

Yesterday’s Observer column…

I still remember the moment when I first encountered his work – a moment that James Joyce might have described as an epiphany. It was at a workshop for academics in Cambridge organised by Apple UK in 1984 to introduce its new Macintosh computer. In a stuffy conference room were a number of tables on which sat chic, cream-coloured machines with 9in screens and separate keyboards. Each had been set up displaying a picture of a fish, and I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen.

Picking up courage, I clicked on the “lasso” tool and selected a fin with it. The lasso suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!  I pulled down the edit menu and clicked on “cut”. The fin disappeared. Finally, I closed the file and then reloaded it from the disk.

As the edited image reappeared, I had the kind of feeling that Douglas Adams had experienced when he had done the same operation – “that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation”, as he put it when talking to US tech journalist Steven Levy. In the blink of an eye, all the Teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays that had been defining parts of my experience with computers were consigned to history. I had suddenly seen the point – and the potential – of computer graphics…

Read on

So many books, so little time

I’m a sucker for diaries. Always have been. But Alan Clark’s three volumes, of which this is the last, were the best political diaries ever, partly because they were shameless, but also because of how revealing they could be. He was not a nice man: old-fashioned terms ‘cad’ and ‘bounder’ come immediately to mind. But his great saving grace is that he doesn’t seem to have been a hypocrite. When accosted by revelations of appalling behaviour that would have ended any other politician’s career — like the affairs he had with virtually the entire female side of a particular family — he would cheerfully plead guilty as charged. But this cad/bounder, was a dazzling diarist. The writer he most reminded me of was Samuel Pepys, who was also no angel. This final volume goes all the way to Clark’s death from a brain tumour. He kept it going until he could no longer focus on the page. You had to admire him for that alone.

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Smoke signals

The Orchard, Grantchester.

Quote of the Day

“The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Symphony No. 36 in C Major, K. 425 “Linz” – (1) Adagio – Allegro spiritoso

Link

Many years ago I drove from Cambridge to Vienna on my own, and I had all the Mozart symphonies on cassettes to keep me company. I played this on the A1 autobahn as I passed Linz on the last lap of the journey.

Long Read of the Day

An Ugly New Marketing Strategy Is Driving Me Nuts (and You Too)

Perceptive blog post by Ted Gioia on what comes after enshittification: the annoyance economy.

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

>Do NOT try to close.

>Do NOT try to sell.

>Do NOT try to persuade.

>Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

Read on. It’s sharp.

Right on cue, YouTube is now becoming even more annoying. Same strategy: pay to avoid the ads.

So many books, so little time

Evelyn Waugh was a nasty man but an annoyingly good writer. And he could be very funny. His novel Scoop, for example, is the funniest thing ever written about old-style British journalism. But I’m discovering that his letters were often in the same league.

Here’s. An example — a letter he wrote to his wife in 1942 when his army unit (3 Commando) was on training in Scotland.

So, No. 3 Cmdo, Commando, were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him, and he was very grateful and he said, don’t spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no, of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes, sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir, I worked it out by mathematics, and it is exactly right. Well, better put in a bit more. Very good sir.

And when Col. D. Slater, D.S.O., had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern, better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don’t want to disappoint Lord Glasgow.” Very good sir.

Then they all went out to see the explosion, and Col. D.S.D.S.O. said, you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it half an acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7 and a half not 75.

Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle, what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.

So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.

This is quite true.

Feedback

Marco Pagni emailed about the ‘Ode to Joy’ story in my and Andrew Brown’s comments on Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death to say that I should have a look at Slavoj ZiZek’s experimental movie The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, in which he has interesting things to say about the ‘Ode’. So I did, and he does — mainly about the various powers and groups who have used Beethoven’s symphony as an anthem or theme tune. Spoiler alert: some of these users are unsavoury.

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Anyone for punting?

Quote of the Day

”Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

If Ever I Would Leave You | Trumpet Solo by Sal Grippaldi

Link

Long Read of the Day

What John McPhee Taught Generations of Writers and Journalists

My battered copy of an invaluable guide.

Peter Hessler’s essay on a beloved mentor and tireless proponent of ‘Creative Nonfiction’. Sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but it’s anything but.

Sample:

I first became a McPhee reader in the margins of the essays that I submitted for class. He marked every paper in pencil, in a tight left-handed script. He crossed out words, and he drew boxes around phrases, and he inscribed long comments that sometimes ran perpendicular to the text. “You can’t make a silk purse out of this,” he wrote, in response to one of my poorly executed descriptions. Next to a sentence with oddly formal phrasing, he remarked, “This could be said with several pebbles removed from the mouth.” Once, when I used a subject’s name four times in the span of two sentences, McPhee wrote, “Listen to the character’s name thudding like horseshoes. Vary it. Use pronouns here and there.”

Other comments thudded in a way that made horseshoes seem soft:

“This sort of thing is irritatingly repetitive.”

“The incongruity in this line isn’t artful, it’s just awkward.”

“I wish you would listen more critically to the rhythms and sound of the prose.”

“You are extraordinarily repetitive for someone who writes on your level.”

“This is lame cleverness.”

But…

there were also many instances of praise, when John McPhee wrote in the margins “yes,” or “ah,” or “a fine moment.”

Lovely. Do read it.

So many books, so little time

In a way, I’ve been avoiding this book for years. But I’ve always kept it on my desk or on a nearby shelf, awaiting the moment when I could confront it. Its author, the historian Otto Dov Kulka dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. But for a long time he set to one side his personal experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. In the book he brings together the personal and historical, in a devastating — and yet sometimes poetic — account of the concentration camps and the private mythology he had constructed around those experiences.

There’s one searing passage when he recalls how a harmonica somehow came into his possession.

I learned to play it and I played things that entered my mind, including one of the melodies we sang in the children’s choir… and a young Jewish prisoner from Berlin comes up to me — I was then a boy of 11 — and says, “Do you know what you are playing?” And I tell him: “Look, what I am playing is a melody we sang in that camp which no longer exists.” He then explained to me what I was playing and what we sang there and the meaning of those words. I think he also tried to explain the terrible absurdity of it, the terrible wonder of it, that a song of praise to joy and to the brotherhood of man Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was being played opposite the crematoria of Auschwitz, a few hundred metres from the place of execution, with the greatest conflagration ever experienced by that same mankind that was being sung about was going on at the very moment we were talking and in all the months we were there.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Elon Musk discovers Trump doesn’t stay bought Nice piece on why even vast amounts of money doesn’t buy you appreciation from Trump. Couldn’t happen to a nastier guy. Link

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Mary Poppins en famille

Arles, 2017

Quote of the Day

”The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.”

• Thomas Macaulay

A thought that sometimes came to mind during the three days of the Beyond Neoliberalism conference last week.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder | Statesboro Blues

Link

Just the ticket for a Monday morning.

Long Read of the Day

A Reality Check for Tech Oligarchs

If, like me, you sometimes wonder what Silicon Valley’s oligarchs are smoking, then this review essay (Gift Link) by John Kaag in The Atlantic is for you. His subject is Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which has just arrived on my desk, but the review is interesting in its own right, if only because it provides a glimpse of the madness that grips these people who envision a “vibrant utopia” in which humanity

”has harnessed technology to transcend all of its limits—old age and the finite bounds of knowledge most of all. Artificial intelligence oversees an era of abundance, automating labor and generating wealth so effectively that every person’s needs are instantly met. Society is powered entirely by clean energy, while heavy industry has been relocated to space, turning Earth into a pristine sanctuary. People live and work throughout the solar system. Advances in biotechnology have all but conquered disease and aging. At the center of this future, a friendly AI—aligned with human values—guides civilization wisely, ensuring that progress remains tightly coupled with the flourishing of humanity and the environment”.

This quasi-religious vision, apparently,

“is based on two very basic beliefs. First, that death is scary and unpleasant. And second, that thanks to science and technology, the humans of the future will never have to be scared or do anything unpleasant. “The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever,” Becker writes. (One reason for the interest in space is that longevity drugs, according to the tech researcher Benjamin Reinhardt, can be synthesized only “in a pristine zero-g environment.”) This future will overcome not just human biology but a fundamental rift between science and faith”.

Worth a read. It’s a testimony to the way immense wealth, acquired early in life, drives people mad.

RIP Sebastião Salgado

A truly great photographer has passed away.

From the Obituary in LFI:

His work is defined by impressive black and white images, predominantly published in series. He was an ambassador for humanity, a fighter for justice and a resolute activist. His pictures are dedicated above all to the disadvantaged all over the world, to those affected by wars and crises, but also to the forces of nature. Salgado was a cautioning voice and a precise observer; he saw his images as a call to take more responsibility for the world and our fellow human beings. His photographs show people’s misery and suffering, the destruction of social relationships, but also the dignity and pride of every individual. His images were often shocking, but he was also able to convey the magical beauty of the world.

The FT also had a good obituary:

His work was politically and emotionally challenging. Salgado has been criticised by some for the beauty of composition with which he depicted people in extreme states of suffering. Salgado said that he sought to preserve the dignity of his subjects, and that he didn’t know how to shoot an “un-composition”. He also said there had been instances when he had put his camera down rather than take a particular shot. He once described seeing 10,000 people die from cholera in a single day in a refugee camp in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. John Easterby, the former director of archiving at Magnum, believed that Salgado’s images forced viewers “to look at the unlookable”.

AI: the new globalisation that will create a world of have-nots and have-yachts

Yesterday’s Observer column:

One of the most pernicious misconceptions we have about digital technology is that it is – somehow – weightless, frictionless and dematerialised. You press a button on your phone, launch an app and there it is. What you don’t realise is that you just triggered an interaction with an unfathomable infrastructure of network towers, fibreoptic cables and huge aluminium sheds located somewhere else on the planet. The technology may seem magical but, in reality, it has a heavy material footprint. And it’s about to get much heavier.

How come? Our networked world is morphing into one in which machine-learning systems – AKA AI – will be everywhere. And that’s bad news for the planet, because AI systems are insatiable consumers of parallel computing power and, accordingly, very power-hungry.

Read on

My commonplace booklet

You can perhaps see why I like writing for the Observer!

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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Memorial Day

Monday was Memorial Day, which is always marked by a moving ceremony at the American Cemetery in Madingley, near Cambridge.

The ceremony is about remembering the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen who are buried or memorialised here, but also about celebrating the wartime alliance between the US and the UK — as you can see on the little flags marking every grave. But there was a strange undertone on Monday: here was an event celebrating the ‘special’ relationship between the two countries at a time when the US has ceased to be a reliable ally, and might turn out to be an enemy.

Quote of the Day

”I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Prine | All the Best

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is it Possible to Read Walden When You Own a Smartphone?

Nice essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on trying to read Thoreau while simultaneously owning a smartphone — two activities that seem fundamentally at odds. As someone who reads a lot, I feel her pain.

Each time I return to the passage about the water level of Walden Pond, I have to mentally shift back down to first gear. And just like you can’t cram a car’s transmission from fifth to first gear without going through the gears in between, there’s an adjustment. A new kind of mind is required, almost. I have spent weeks on a single chapter in this way, until my mental gearbox is exhausted and the muddy hill seems less and less worth the effort.

This is the real explanation of what people mean when they say “I want to read more but I can’t find the time.” Being a reader of any kind in 2025, but particularly a reader of works like Walden, does not mean becoming a person who “has more time”; it means getting used to shifting down to first gear while the culture is racing past you in fifth gear…

That bit about wanting to read more but not being able to find the time, rings bells for me. In fact it was one of the reasons why, when I was designing this newsletter, I decided to always have a ‘long read’ of the day.

My commonplace booklet

Inside DOGE

At last, an interesting insider’s account of what it was like to be doing Musk’s bidding in the early days of the coup. I particularly liked this entry for Day 8:

The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I’d imagined. It was Elon (in the White House), Steven Davis (coordinating), and everyone else scattered across agencies.

Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible.

In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.

This reminded me of something Ted Chiang had written a while ago in the New Yorker:

I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide…

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The Canadians have landed

Mom plus three fluffballs. Seen on an evening walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rufus & Martha Wainwright | Sweet Thames, flow softly

Link

Long Read of the Day

Harvard Derangement Syndrome

This is Steven Pinker’s commentary on Trump’s assault on Harvard. I’ve never been much enamoured of the institution — which I habitually caricature as “a hedge-fund with a nice university attached”, so what I liked about the essay stemmed from the fact that its author has a track record of being vocal about some of its deficiencies. In that sense you could view the essay as a model of how civilised discourse might be conducted in an ideal world. It won’t have any impact in the parallel universe that is Trumpland, of course, but it’s an engaging and serious read.

Sample:

In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

Microsoft shutting down email accounts of Trump’s foes should be worrying to us all

This week’s Observer column:

On 4 February, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump after his inauguration. Two days later, with impeccable timing, his host issued one of his decrees – AKA executive orders – imposing sanctions on the ICC on the grounds that it had “abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister of defence Yoav Gallant”.

The decree goes on to threaten any person, institution or company that provides “financial, material, or technological support” to the ICC with sanctions backed by the full might of the US government.

As far as I know, only one senior official – the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – has, to date, been thus sanctioned, but he is likely to be joined by others in due course. And that’s where things may become sticky for people in other jurisdictions who imagine they are immune to the wrath of King Donald.

Khan, who is a British subject, has already lost access to his bank accounts, which is what happens when you’re sanctioned. More interestingly, though, Microsoft has also blocked his email account…

Read on

So many books, so little time

I’m indebted to Alice O’Flynn for alerting me to this book and its remarkable author. I’ve just opened my copy, and this is how it starts:

Dear Reader: It seems, of all the books in all the world, you’ve picked mine. A most cheerful title that has the word fascism in it. Democracy is there as well, so it is easy to guess you are not in a good place. Kindly let me take the load off. After all, this is going to be quite a bumpy ride on a freight train, during which I’ll show you how your country can be lost.

Or not. It all depends on what you and I decide to do after this trip. So let’s start with some fun facts, shall we?

My commonplace booklet

I stumbled on the CSPAN recording of the Cabinet meeting that Trump called to mark his first 100 days in office, and watched it for a while until the sickbag beckoned. Contemplating it, the thought that came to mind was: “this is what it must have been like in Henry VIII’s court”. Every Cabinet member’s ‘report’ commenced with cloying testaments of the Great Leader’s sagacity, genius and inspiration.

And then, quite by accident, I read Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times column (sadly paywalled) on sycophancy.

The Romans understood that the key to “imperial republics evolving into dictatorships” is sycophancy. The empire enters its decadent phase of chaos and barbarism when its elites succumb to the allure of obsequiousness. The great Roman historian Tacitus tells us that the republic died when “they all rushed into servitude – consuls, senators, and knights. The higher the rank, the greater the hypocrisy and haste”.

He also tells us that even the tyrannical emperor Tiberius was disgusted by the slavering: “Clearly, while he objected to the freedom of the people, he was also sickened by such abject submission from his ‘slaves’.” And here there may be a warning to those who think that the appropriate response to Trump’s emperor act is to play along with abject submission.

Spot on. Also, any world ‘leader’ who chooses to visit the Oval Throne Room for his or her moment of glory deserves everything that’s coming to him/her.

Here’s the latest victim, the South African president, as seen by ‘Gado’, the pen-name of the brilliant Kenyan cartoonist, Godfrey Mwampembwa.

Thanks to Msani Kym for spotting it. _

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Saturday morning, wet

The view from our hotel room in Kent.

Quote of the Day

“Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.”

• Joan Robinson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Byrds | The ballad of Easy Rider

Link

Long Read of the Day

What fires burned at Auschwitz?

This is an astonishing essay by a great historian on how “the association of the Holocaust with industrial modernity has become an entrapping cliché”, starting with the Holocaust of Eichmann’s railway timetables, moving through “the Holocaust of the blueprint” (archetypical industrial artifacts for murdering people at scale, designed by German architects and engineers) and ending with the notion of the camps as ‘death factories’.

This is grim stuff and it’s a long read, but I found it illuminating. It caught my eye because I had written about the ‘blueprint’ aspect of it in the early 1990s after the Auschwitz archives (which had been transported to Moscow by the Russians after the liberation of the camp) had been opened to foreign scholars and I was in touch with one of them.

What fascinated me was what could be gleaned the archives of the architectural firm that designed the camp buildings, and of Töpf, the mechanical engineering firm who designed the furnaces. In these documents one saw the workings of highly professional architects and engineers grappling with the increasing needs of a very demanding client — The SS. And of course the question those documents raised was the obvious one: what was going through the minds of these professionals as they went about their professional duties? It led me eventually to propose that engineering and architectural schools should have ethics as a core part of their curricula.

RIP Alan Yentob

The most creative and interesting TV executive and film-maker I’ve ever known has died at the age of 78. I was the Observer’s TV Critic between 1987 and 1995 and so he and I often came into contact. What I liked about him was the way he would sometimes phone me late on Thursday evening if a programme of his was about to be screened. He knew that I would be writing my column the next morning and wanted to, er, draw it to my attention, but the resulting conversations were invariably funny, barbed, gossipy and enjoyable. What impressed me most was that he was doing his own PR, not delegating it to a minion.

There will be obtuaries everywhere this week, I guess, but here’s the BBC’s one. And when there’s a memorial service I will be at it.

May he rest in peace.

So many books, so little time

Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books

Dontja just love this — from Ars Technica.

On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper’s uncredited “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system.

The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia said. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors…

Books, etc.

At the moment, Trump is attempting to rule by decree (aka Executive Orders), many (if not most) of them which to have little legal validity. And, funnily enough, American judges at the federal level have been pointing this out. I had been hearing about this but hadn’t any idea of how extensive such refusals have been, which is why this chart is so interesting.

When I mentioned to my friend David Runciman after Trump’s inauguration that it looked to me that Trump was under the delusion that he was a monarch rather than the president of a republic, he recommended that I have a look at an interesting book by Eric Nelson, a lad whom Quentin Skinner regarded as one of the smartest students he’d ever taught. Which is how I came to his book, The Royalist Revolution, a revisionist interpretation of the American revolution which argues that a great many of the ‘founding fathers’ of the revolution saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. Nelson interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favour of royal power ― driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.

On June 1, 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania rose in the Constitutional Convention to offer the motion that would create the American presidency. The new federal executive, he proposed, should “consist of a single person”, and this chief magistrate should be vested with sweeping prerogative powers…The people of America did not oppose the British King but the parliament — the opposition was not against an Unity but a corrupt multitude… The colonists, on this view, had rebelled against a “corrupt multitude,” not a monarch”.

Implying, I guess, that the president should be free to govern as an unimpeded monarch, rather than as primus inter pares with the Congress and the Courts as the the Founders supposedly intended. Which Trump is obligingly doing. Arise, King Donald.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• A transcript (and audio recording) of Trump’s Commencement Address to West Point graduates the other day. Not something I’d normally recommend, but some people were using it as evidence of dementia. I don’t think it is — it’s just him rambling on as usual. He always reminds me of maudlin drunks one used to encounter in rural pubs.

Feedback

Friday’s piece about the VW Beetle ad and honesty in advertising generallysparked some interesting email. The one that struck me most was this lovely advertisement for the Citroen 2cv.

The 2cv was a genuinely iconic vehicle. I always thought that if we lived in Provence, it would be an essential purchase. (though perhaps not as our only vehicle.)

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