The ‘Origins’ man

Listening to a terrific podcast conversation between David Runciman and Adam Rutherford about Darwin’s The Origin of Species sent me searching through my photo archive for this — a window of an antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

• William Faulkner

Something that nobody in Silicon Valley gets.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cathal Hayden and Eamonn McElholm | Farewell to Ireland

Link

Make America make again? Yeah, by manufacturing pipe dreams

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Trump’s obsession with tariffs goes back a long way. In his book Fear, about the first Trump administration, the journalist Bob Woodward told of how Gary Cohn, the president’s then chief economic adviser, repeatedly tried to explain to Trump that his “antiquated vision of roaring industrial chimneys and clanking steelworks busy with grateful blue-collar workers was no longer applicable, or indeed desirable, to an America reinventing itself in service industries and hi-tech products”. And when, exasperated, he asked the president why he held these views, Trump replied: “I just do. I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

So here we are. But instead of steel mills, Trump and his crew have now begun thinking that the Apple iPhone not only should, but could, be manufactured in the US. The other day, when the White House press secretary was asked whether Trump thought that iPhone manufacturing is the kind of technology that could move to the US, she replied: “Absolutely. He believes we have the labour, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it.”

This is, to put it politely, baloney…

Read on

Long Read of the Day

 Living in interesting times

Charlie Stross wondering if the US is moving into a “pre-revolutionary crisis”.

Of the anti-Trump demonstrations at the weekend, I have to say that despite estimates of 3-5 million marchers, my Sunday thoughts were, “it’s going to suck to be them.” The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.)

But all that has changed because Trump has completely shat the economic bed. I’m not going to re-hash the reasons why everyone stopped using tariffs as an instrument of trade policy, let alone taxation, nearly a century ago. But the epic stupidity of asking ChatGPT how to use tariffs to balance a trade deficit and then accepting its incorrect answer and using them to set policy is jaw-dropping even by Trumpian standards. But what happens next?

Well, maybe what happens next is already becoming visible to a sharp-eyed observer like Charlie:

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law. (This was part of the Project 2025 plan, incidentally.) SecDef Hegseth has already purged the top legal counsel for the Army, Air Force, and Navy to prevent them from blocking “orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Go figure where all this is going.

I love Charlie’s blog. And his intuitive understanding of what’s going on — typical of a fine sci-fi writer. He was the one who, ages ago, correctly characterised big corporations as “Slow AIs”, a metaphor I have ruthlessly borrowed for many talks since.

Apropos the title of his Substack post… *Heffers, the venerable Cambridge bookshop now owned by (I think) Waterstones, is selling some lovely offbeat greetings cards, of which this one is irresistible.

Needless to say, I’ve bought a few.

My commonplace booklet

Trump’s abrupt (possibly temporary) ‘retreat’ from his tariff impositions after the bond market reined him in, made me think of the DownFall Meme. I’m sure some jokers are already working on it in this particular context.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Cass Sunstein has a Substack. And it looks interesting (which is not surprising, given how smart he is). For a scholar of his his eminence he doesn’t sound pompous. I first thought that when I heard an anecdote he told about himself and his wife, Samantha Power. She was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2008 and whenever the UN was in session she and Cass stayed in a suite in a posh New York Hotel, where he discovered that he was known to the hotel staff as “Mr Power”. One morning, when she was at the UN, he went down to the Lobby and asked the concierge to call for a taxi for him. “Sure thing, Mr Power,” said the chap. “No, no”, said Cass, my name is Sunstein.” “Well now”, said the concierge, “that’s weird: you look just like Mr Power”.

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Jesus on the Mainline

Reminds me of Ry Cooder’s song.

Quote of the Day

”The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of ‘this too shall pass.’ But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.”

• David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker on 7 April.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Martyn | May You Never

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Colors Of Her Coat

Absolutely fabulous essay by Scott Alexander on “semantic apocalypses”. Yeah, I know it sounds pretentious and/or incomprehensible, but trust me it isn’t. It explores how we experience wonder, meaning, and beauty in a world where technology constantly makes extraordinary things ordinary.` He starts with an extraordinary disquisition on the colour Ultramarine Blue.

I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.

And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia – something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.

And what about cameras? A whole industry of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes – totally destroyed. If you wanted to know what Paris looked like, no need to choose between Manet’s interpretation or Beraud’s interpretation or anyone else’s – just glance at a photo. A Frenchman with a camera could generate a hundred pictures of Paris a day, each as cold and perspectiveless as mathematical truth. The artists, defeated, retreated into Impressionism, or Cubism, or painting a canvas entirely blue and saying it represented Paris in some deeper sense. You could still draw the city true-to-life if you wanted. But it would just be more Paris.

Scott’s essay triggered all kinds of personal memories. Of the way Raymond Williams described his father as the kind of person who was always surprised when he turned a switch and the kitchen light came on. My grandfather was a peasant farmer in Connemara and he would have felt that too because electricity only reached his house late in his life. Or what I felt when I first read Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Or Max Frisch’”s observation that “Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My commonplace booklet

Alex Tabarrok had a nice blog post about the suspicions that Trump’s initial tariff levels were actually generated by ChatGPT or an equivalent LLM.

Alex thought that the White House staff should have asked the AI a different question:

Suppose the US imposed tariffs on other countries in an effort to reduce bilateral trade deficits to zero using the formula for the tariff of (exports-imports)/imports. What do you estimate would be the consequences of such a policy?

So he put it to OpenAI’s o1Pro, which came up with a pretty sensible analysis and a good conclusion:

In summary, a bilateral “deficit-equalizing” tariff policy would create severe distortions, invite retaliation, and do little to fix the structural causes of US trade deficits. Empirical evidence and standard trade theory both suggest it would reduce economic efficiency and likely harm US producers and consumers alike.

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The physicist in lyrical mode

Bernardo Huberman, speaking at a conference in Cambridge in 2012.

Quote of the Day

”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

*  H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dick Gaughan | Wild Mountain Thyme | Transatlantic Sessions | TG4

Link

Long Read of the Day

Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it

After Trump had been first elected in 2016 I asked American friends whether they were alarmed about it. Most of them were phlegmatic, citing examples of earlier duff presidents. Some talked about historic pendulum swings. And one asked if I was forgetting that the US was “a republic of laws”.

This led me to dig out the famous story about Ben Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and being asked by a woman “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied sharply, “if you can keep it.”

Which is what ran through my mind when I came across this essay in the Guardian by Laurence Tribe, the distinguished scholar of American constitutional law.

The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump’s rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country’s capital, followed first by the Senate’s abdication of its duty in Trump’s second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court’s gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power.

Rarely noted is how this frightening power to ignore federal criminal law has been conferred not only on the president but on his legions of loyal lieutenants, from public officials to private militias. Because the constitution itself gives presidents an unbridled power to pardon others – a power Trump reveled in employing to free from prison the violent insurrectionists that he had himself helped unleash – we now live under a system in which any president can license his trusted followers to commit crimes to consolidate his power and wealth, making clear that a pardon awaits them should they face federal prosecution. The upshot is that privateers in league with the president can safely ignore federal laws criminalizing corrupt evasion of rules designed to protect public health and safety while they casually usurp powers the constitution gave to Congress, moving so fast and breaking so much that not even genuinely independent federal courts can keep pace with the mayhem…

Worth a read. When the extent of Trump’s ambitions started to become this year, I began to wonder if we were looking at a revolution or a coup. The answer, I suspect, is some strange mixture of the two. Smart lad, that Ben Franklin.

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday. Looks interesting. I’m reviewing it for the Observer later in the month.

My commonplace booklet

”People complained for years that OpenAI isn’t open, and Altman has spent almost as long loudly declaring that open source LLMs are massively dangerous and a threat to whatever the listener thinks is most important. Altman, meanwhile, spends a lot of his time manoeuvring and positioning so, as Metternich said when Talleyrand died, “What did he mean by that?”

• Benedict Evans

Reminds me of a story about the day Elvis Presley died and a Hollywood PR guy was asked for his reaction to the news. “Good career move” was his immortal reply.

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’A crowd, a host of…

“…Golden daffodils”. And I wasn’t even wandering, lonely as a cloud, just walking through a college garden.

Quote of the Day

”Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

JJ Cale | Call Me Breeze

Link

Wow! I didn’t want it to end.

Long Read of the Day

Snookered

Rabbithole warning. I’ve just read this lovely essay by Kieran Setiya. Trouble is, it’s a meditation on a New York Review of Books essay by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. So if you embark on the first, you’re going to wind up reading the second. But here’s the thing: the journey is worth it.

Rooney is writing about the great snooker player Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan. Setiya starts with an admission — that he doesn’t have “Rooney’s verbal gifts, and a video is worth a million words, so if you want to know what he can do and you have five minutes to spare, watch this”.

It’s a video of O’Sullivan clearing a snooker table with a display of skill that is simply mind-blowing.

And of course you watch it, and you’re hooked.

Setiya concludes that

Rooney’s questions — “Why do we call O’Sullivan a savant?” and “How is what he does even possible?” — are, I think, related to one another. A picture holds us captive. We have an idea of how one would have to do what he does — by mathematical physics and physical translation — and that can’t be how he does it. So it can’t be done.

We’ve been snookered and our task is to escape the trap, a task that involves more than mere description: we have to uproot the sources of our puzzlement in misconceptions of mind and body, as Rooney indicates.

But my question at the end of all this was: ‘How on earth does Rooney do it?’ She’s a phenomenon in her own right.

Genetic data: another asset to be monetised – beware who has yours

Yesterday’s Observer column

Ever thought of having your genome sequenced? Me neither. But it seems that at least 15 million souls have gone in for it and are delighted to know that they have Viking ancestry, or discombobulated to find that they have siblings of whom they were hitherto unaware. The corporate vehicle that enabled these revelations is called 23andMe, which describes itself as a “genetics-led consumer healthcare and biotechnology company empowering a healthier future”.

Back in the day, 23andMe was one of those vaunted “unicorns” (privately held startups valued at more than $1bn), but is now facing harder times. Its share price had fallen precipitately following a data breach in October 2023 that harvested the profile and ethnicity data of 6.9 million users – including name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates and mitochondrial DNA – and there have been internal disagreements between its board and the CEO and co-founder, Anne Wojcicki. So on 24 March it filed for so-called Chapter 11 proceedings in a US bankruptcy court in Missouri.

At which point the proverbial ordure hit the fan because the bankruptcy proceedings involve 23andMe seeking authorisation from the court to commence “a process to sell substantially all of its assets…

Read on

So many books, so little time

Long-term readers will remember how, during the pandemic lockdown, I was blown away by Zachary Carter’s biography of John Maynard Keynes. It’s really two biographies — one of the man himself, the other of his thinking and its impact on the world, and it’s enthralling. So imagine my delight in discovering a video of a long conversation between Paul Krugman and Carter about the book (and lots of other interesting stuff).

It’s long but (about an hour), if you’re interested in the history of ideas, unfailingly interesting.

Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) wrote a fine review of the Carter book, alongside Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, one of the few humans Keynes regarded as a genius.

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Not quite a host, but…

Quote of the Day

”A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’ ”

• Chet Haase

This is a profound joke and it captures the essence of LLMs. In algorithmic culture, the right choice is always what the majority of other people have already chosen. So if you want the median view of what the Internet knows about anything, ask an LLM.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Divertimento No. 15 in B-Flat Major, K. 287: II. Andante grazioso con variazioni | Conducted by dear old Thomas Beecham

Link

Vintage recording, as you can tell from the audio quality. But lovely schmaltz all the same.

Long Read of the Day

Why are we mathematicians?

I’ve always thought that life is a Markov chain (or a random walk if you’re not a mathematician). I’ve never met anyone who had an interesting life that was planned — which is why I regard the term ‘planned career’ as an oxymoron.

Not surprisingly, then, I was much taken with this reflective essay by Keith Devlin, prompted in part by something I mentioned on March 24.

The fact is, life experiences can have a profound effect on our choice of career and how we pursue it, experiences that, on the face of it, have nothing to do with the work we choose to do and how we go about it. As instructors, we should be aware of the possible effects of the life-context that comes with every student we teach.

It was at Kings that I had an experience that completely changed my life and career as an academic mathematician; in particular, my approach to college-level mathematics teaching. But it was only when I was chasing down that philosophers and children puzzle that I became aware of that early influence. (That’s like a week ago!) In fact, it was more than “became aware”; it hit me like a thunderbolt.

What was that life-changing experience? I met a girl…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

A new novel is published amid a boom in dystopian fiction

Interesting review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.

How do you concoct a plausible fictional near-future, in which people’s reliance on technology has gone too far? If you read “The Dream Hotel”, a gripping new novel, you can discern one recipe. First, take a big handful of “1984”, with Big Brother and the surveillance state reimagined with private-sector incentives. Sprinkle in the rational irrationality of Joseph Heller’s and Franz Kafka’s best works. Next mix in a dollop of “Minority Report” (2002), a film starring Tom Cruise in which law enforcement solves “pre-crimes” before people commit heinous acts.

So far, so Orwell. However, “The Dream Hotel” is intriguing and (mostly) satisfying, even if the ingredients feel familiar, for what the novel says about the creep of technology and the trade-offs people make for convenience.

Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American novelist and former finalist for a Pulitzer prize and National Book Award, tells her dystopian tale by combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s terms of service, medical reports, meeting minutes and customer-service email chains from hell. The novel’s protagonist is Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum who returns from a work trip to London and runs afoul of bureaucrats at immigration control, who say her “risk-assessment” score is too high and that she could pose a threat to her husband’s life. Sara becomes “Retainee M-7493002”, held at a facility for what is supposed to be 21 days of monitoring but stretches much longer.

What went so wrong? In retrospect it was a mistake to get the “Dreamsaver”, a small implant invented by a medical-tech firm in Silicon Valley that Sara agreed to have installed during a desperate period of sleep deprivation…

Brings Musk’s Neuralink to mind, does it not?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Buying sunglasses in Brazil. Lovely essay by Christopher Sandmann on learning to bargain, which reminded me of how much I hate countries where haggling is a way of life.

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Gateway to Heaven?

Walking through Selwyn College the other day on my way to a conversation elsewhere with Audrey Tang (one of the most remarkable people I’ve met) I was struck by this framing of the college’s chapel as I went in through the gate.

Quote of the Day

”The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

• H.L. Mencken

Now of which prominent public figure(s) could this now be said?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Gershwin Prelude No. 2 | Matthias Lang

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Imperialism Has No Clothes

Historian Timothy Snyder had a nice essay which I heartily recommend about J.D. Vance’s ludicrous foray to Greenland, .

I particularly liked this bit:

As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the United States and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.

So consider. The US is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five…

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

The heading on Monday’s edition caused a flurry of nice emails. Some pointed out that Monday was in fact March 31. All were too polite to voice their suspicion that it might be a sign that I was losing what might loosely be called my mind. More suspicious readers wondered if it might be some kind of weird April Fool’s joke.

John Seeley was one of the latter. “So this is the joke,” he wrote, “given that it is March 31?”

This could operate at various levels …

• It was your mistake but was funny anyway.
• It was your joke and it was amusing that people did not notice and thought that it was April 1 … in turn making April 1 jokes incorrectly so the joke was on them …

Since my lips were sealed on the matter, he had the good idea of asking Claude.ai, the LLM that I mostly use, about it.

He prompted the machine thus:

Someone writes that it is April the first when it is not, but indicates that they think it is April the first. In how many different ways is that funny? Please explain.

Claude replied:

This scenario is funny in several ways, each playing on the confusion and implications of someone incorrectly believing it’s April 1st (April Fools’ Day):

Dramatic irony – The humor comes from us knowing something the person doesn’t. They think they’re being clever by acknowledging April Fools’ Day, but they’re actually mistaken about the date itself.

Meta-prank – They’ve inadvertently pranked themselves. While attempting to participate in a day of pranks, they’ve become the victim of their own confusion.

Misplaced confidence – There’s humor in someone confidently declaring “it’s April Fools’ Day!” when it isn’t, especially if they’re using it as justification for pranks or skepticism.

Role reversal – On April 1st, people expect to be fooled by others. In this case, the calendar has “fooled” the person about what day it is.

Temporal displacement – They’re celebrating a holiday on the wrong day, similar to putting up Christmas decorations in July.

Social awkwardness – The person might perform April Fools’ behaviors (pranks, jokes, skepticism) that make no sense to others, creating uncomfortable but amusing situations.

Unintentional honesty – If they announce “This is an April Fools’ joke!” when it isn’t April 1st, they’re accidentally telling the truth about their statement being false, creating a paradoxical layer of humor.

Misaligned expectations – The person might be extra vigilant against being pranked on a day when no one else is trying to prank them.

Each of these perspectives offers a different lens on why such a mistaken belief creates comedy through the collision of expectations and reality.

I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed by this. Thanks to John for thinking of it.

Satire rules OK

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The Hepworth View

The grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge with Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the foreground. Photographes last Friday afternoon during a break from the unmissable annual conference of the Bennett Institute.

Quote of the Day

“I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons; it’s irresistible if you come to them as a scientist, to feel it’s there in your hands to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding, to perform these miracles, to lift one million tons of rock into the sky. It’s something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles I would say – this is what you might call technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

• Freeman Dyson in the film, The Day after Trinity.

I’ve been thinking about this after listening to the Sam Altmans of this world raving on about the hypnotic attractions that ‘AI’ has for them.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Low, Low, Northern Moon | from the Midnight Well album by Thom Moore, Janie Cribbs, Gerry O’Beirne and Mairtín O’Connor.

Link

Long Read of the Day

When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed

My column from yesterday’s Observer :

At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.

So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.

Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”

And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia…

Read on

LATER Christina Pagel (a Professor at UCL who did great critical work during the Covid pandemic) has been casting a beady and informed eye on what the Trump regime is doing to universities. Her latest post provides a wider perspective on the topic of my column. Here’s how it opens:

A colleague and I would like to write an academic paper on the potential impact of US funding cuts to global health programmes. Our ideal co-author is an international expert newly based in the US, and they would like to do it. But we are all worried that doing so will expose them to the risk of having their academic visa cancelled, being detained and eventually deported – no matter how solid the science and how academic and dry our language. We are especially fearful because they are brown.

My colleagues who have been writing about the new administration, or the situation in Gaza, in academic journals, on substack or on social media are cancelling work trips to the US. I too would not feel safe to go now, given how openly I have criticised the administration. Even a 1% chance of being denied entry or shipped to a detention centre is too high.

When I said these words out loud to my husband today I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in. Foreign scientists in the US are scared to publish anything perceived as critical for fear of being bundled off the street to a detention centre. Foreign scientists abroad are scared to go to the US because they have voiced criticism of the state. The US is actively cracking down on perceived dissenters and foreigners are the most vulnerable to arbitrary detention and lack of due legal process. The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke…

It has. Worth reading the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Reading stuff about how Generative AI systems sometimes regurgitate biases that’s implicit in the material on which they were trained reminded me of Safiya Noble’s pathbreaking book, which was published aeons ago (in 2018, to be precise) and yet remains pertinent. Time for a new edition, perhaps, this time with a different subtitle: “How Search Engines and AI reinforce racism and legitimise discrimination”?

Feedback

Tony Stevenson writes from Melbourne with a different interpretation of the ‘Signalgate’ affair.

I expect decisions were taken in person and orders executed over secure military channels.

The Frat Pack are running their own parallel channel that contains a subset of the Attack Orders. It wasn’t used for making decisions, just sharing them.

Info mainly relayed over Signal so that Hesgeth can pump up his own importance and relevance. Hardly necessary to include Secretary of the Treasury in Attack Plans. Even the poorest student of military planning would know that people are included on a need to know basis. Hesgeth to boost his own importance defies even that simple rule.

Joint Chiefs of Staff would have been across all details of the attack and in all relevant official top-secret comms.

Wisely these clowns didn’t invite him to their emoji laden insecure side-channel. I expect if the Admiral had been invited he would have refused due to OpSec.

I do wonder if the ‘desire’ for the Frat Pack to have this on their personal devices is due to the way we’re all ‘wired’ now; expecting real-time feeds of ‘everything’. Going to a secure location and logging into a secure terminal to maintain OpSec would be so much less convenient for Frat Pack and those who want to spy on them.

My interpretation of the Signal chat was that it provided evidence that — as I put it — “the monkeys were running the Zoo”. Tony’s view seems to be that they’re boasting that they’re running it. Either way, the Trump shitshow is still a Zoo.

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St Pancras

My favourite railway station.

Quote of the Day

”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

• Hunter S. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Neil Young | The Loner

Link

Long Read of the Day

Heather Cox Richardson’s deep dive into the Signalgate affair

This is a brilliant Substack post by a prominent historian who was one of the first big Substack stars, and who has continued to cast a beady and informed eye on what’s happening in Washington.

Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.

Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified…

It’s a genuinely long read and I was wondering whether I should compose a TL;DR summary for it. As an experiment I outsourced that task to Claude.ai — an LLM that I sometimes use.

Here’s what it came up with:

• The document describes a significant national security breach involving Trump administration officials using Signal, an unsecure messaging app, to discuss military strikes on Yemen

• Key details of the breach include: – Officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth uploaded precise attack details on a Signal chat – The group chat included national security reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz – Multiple high-ranking officials initially denied sharing classified information, including Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe

• Significant revelations from the leaked screenshots: – President Trump was not part of the strike discussion – Vice President J.D. Vance expressed concerns about the strategic messaging – Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ultimately green-lit the operation – The former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Charles Q. Brown Jr., was controversially fired by Trump, with Hegseth suggesting his appointment was based on race

• Potential security vulnerabilities exposed: – NSA warned in February 2025 about Signal’s vulnerability to Russian hackers – Some officials’ personal contact information and passwords were found to be publicly accessible – Officials were using non-government communication systems, potentially violating record-keeping laws

• Consequences and reactions: – American Oversight filed a lawsuit against several administration officials – The Atlantic published the screenshots, revealing the officials’ previous denials as false – Senator Tammy Duckworth called for Hegseth’s resignation – House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demanded Trump fire Hegseth

• The administration attempted to create distractions, including signing a controversial executive order about elections and announcing new car tariffs.

That’s not bad: it spotted that the President was never involved in the decision-making about the attack. But it misses one important point, namely that the Signal group did not include Admiral Christopher Grady, who is currently acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In other words, the US’s highest-ranking military officer was excluded from the group planning a US military operation.

This last point led me to my own TL;DR summary:

In Washington the monkeys are now running the Zoo.

Books, etc.

This arrived yesterday and looks interesting. David Mindel is the Professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT, but he’s also the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at the same institution. Since AI is now on its way to becoming the latest General Purpose Technology (GPT) that humans have invented — a technology that may underpin most of what comes next — he’s had the idea of using the history of the very first GPT — steam power — as a way of thinking about how to remake a reindustrialised future.

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Light, shade, colour

I tried this in black and white, but it works better in colour.

Quote of the Day

”People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?”

H.L. Mencken

I used to think that Mencken was too cynical about governments. But now he seems spot on — at least in relation to his own country.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry Mulligan | Night Lights A

Link

After two intense days at a conference on technology and the hollowing out of democracy, I needed a soothing antidote to the current madness. This did the trick.

Long Read of the Day

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

A truly astonishing article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.

U.S. national-security leaders included him accidentally in a group chat on Signal about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. He didn’t think it could be real — until the bombs started falling.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining…

It sure does, and he does a pretty good job.

Worth your time. I found it riveting.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

My colleague Diane Coyle is one of the wisest people I know. She’s also an amazingly prolific writer. Her new book comes out on April 1, but she gave a talk about it last week in Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab which provides a useful preview.

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy? Coyle makes the case for a new framework, one that takes into consideration current economic realities.

Coyle explains why economic statistics matter. They are essential for guiding better economic policies; they involve questions of freedom, justice, life, and death. Governments use statistics that affect people’s lives in ways large and small. The metrics for economic growth were developed when a lack of physical rather than natural capital was the binding constraint on growth, intangible value was less important, and the pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply. Today’s challenges are different. Growth in living standards in rich economies has slowed, despite remarkable innovation, particularly in digital technologies. As a result, politics is contentious and democracy strained.

Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail. Only with a new approach to measurement will we be able to achieve the right kind of growth for the benefit of all.

I’ve pre-ordered it. GDP/GNP are absurd ways of measuring a modern economy. And running it is like driving a car while looking only into the rear-view mirror.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn Link Now comes the problem of choosing names for them.

Errata

Many thanks to all the readers who tactfully emailed to point out that my little reminiscence about a favourite French Chambre d’hote in Monday’s edition revealed that I didn’t know the difference between a fir tree (Sapin) and a rabbit (Lapin)… Just goes to confirm that there is no limit to my ignorance. But I do try to learn from my mistakes.

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Inhumanity in numbers

This striking table greets one at the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Rise Up exhibition which explores the battle to abolish the British slave trade and end enslavement between 1750 and 1850, as well as the aftermath, its legacies and the ongoing struggle for equality and social justice today. It’s a brilliantly curated and sobering exhibition which we went to on Saturday. I need to go back for a second look, because it needs time for thought and reflection. And it powerfully reinforces my scepticism about the idea of ‘European Civilisation’.

Fittingly, before you enter the show, the museum has a prominent notice which admits that the wealth of the man whose bequest of his library, art collection and £100,000 enabled its founding in 1816 — Richard FitzWilliam, the seventh Viscount FitzWilliam — probably derived from one of his ancestors, who had been a slave-owner. This interesting fact, however, doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the institution’s Wikipedia page.

Quote of the Day

“Problems are like toilet paper. You pull on one and ten more come.”

• Woody Allen* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mendelssohn | Songs Without Words | No. 1 In E Major, Op. 19: Andante Con Moto | Daniel Gortler

Link

Leaves one speechless.

Long Read of the Day

 A curious tendency among Western philosophers?

Intriguing essay on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog by Doug Muir.

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Read on to find out. I failed the test.

Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri?

Yesterday’s Observer column was about Apple’s announcement that the promised ‘AI’-enhanced to its Siri personal assistant tool would be significantly delayed. I was alerted to this by John Gruber’s wonderful Daring Fireball blog, and my column ended thus:

For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that “what Apple showed regarding the upcoming ‘personalized Siri’ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called “Knowledge Navigator” video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.

Until – says Gruber – now.

Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn’t in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company. If there’s one thing Jobs’ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It’s clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Do read the whole thing.

Later. A reader emailed me suggesting that there was one significant moment when Steve Jobs presented a device that worked in demo mode but wasn’t actually anywhere near ready for sale — the first iPhone. The story is told in a 2013 New York Times article

My commonplace booklet

I came on this old postcard in a book the other day and it triggered a whole stream of memories.

We have been going to Provence every Summer (except for a two-year Covid break) since 2003. When the kids were young we used to fly to Toulon and rent a car, but as they grew up my wife and I realised that we were now free to drive down, and thereby discovered one of the nicest road movies there is — a leisurely (three-day) drive through rural France, avoiding motorways and staying in small hotels and chambres d’hote. The first day of the journey takes us from Calais to northern Burgundy. The second to central France, near Thiers. And the final day takes us to Arles, which is still one of the wonders of the world (and a delight if you happen to be a photographer).

The first year we did this trip, we stumbled on a lovely hilltop Bastide near Thiers as a Day Two stopover. It had the improbable name of Le Sapin Bleu and had been beautifully restored by pair of ex-pat Brits. It was one of the loveliest houses I’ve every been in, and over the years our hosts became friends, to the point that sometimes they would ask us to bring stuff that ex-pats love but are unobtainable in rural France.

And then Covid struck and they decided that the game was up, even for a lovely rural B&B, so they sold up and left to seek their fortunes (and maybe also their widely dispersed families) elsewhere. Even though we eventually found a nice alternative on the outskirts of Thiers, we still feel a pang when driving past the sign to the road that leads uphill to it.

Feedback

My pic of the learned sign forbidding that attachment of bikes to railings sparked some lovely emails, for which many thanks. But Euan Williamson’s response, summarising the Scottish approach to such prohibitions, rally takes the biscuit!

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