Thursday 18 November, 2021

Posted on November 18, 2021 by jjn1

Self-portrait with Leica

I love this self-portrait by Ilse Bing. She was one of the leading European photographers of the interwar period — as this V&A summary demonstrates.

Quote of the Day

“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness”

Flann O’Brien

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | When You Say Nothing At All

Link

Magical!

Long Read of the Day

AI-tocracy

By Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

An NBER working paper that is both fascinating and depressing. The authors argue that the conventional wisdom which holds that autocracies are generally bad for innovation is wrong, or at least not universally the case. Their conclusion is that some advanced technologies can be sustained under autocracy when the tech and the authoritarian leadership mutually reinforce each other.

There’s a free pdf download if you’re a newcomer to NBER. And if you’re too busy, here’s the Abstract:

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat’s power; and (ii) the autocrat’s demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those benefiting it directly. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI, and increased AI procurement suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, control stimulates further frontier innovation.

If you wanted an argument for why facial recognition is a toxic technology, then this is a pretty good one.

Tech can’t fix the car problem

Good piece by Shira Ovide with interesting references. She’s been reading Peter Norton’s Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving.

Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn’t a cure-all.

Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)

The future of transportation needs to include more energy efficient and safer cars. But Dr. Norton also said that it would be useful to redirect money and attention to make walking, cycling and using shared transportation more affordable and appealing choices.

EVs are wonderful in their way. But they’re still cars. They’re so good, in fact, that they might make us even more infatuated with the automobile.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Are AirPods Out? Why Cool Kids Are Wearing Wired Headphones

The Wall Street Journal confirms that I am not cool. But then, I never was.

Also, none of my current Apple mobile devices has a headphone port.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wednesday 17 November, 2021

Posted on November 17, 2021 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”Poor Henry James! He’s spending eternity walking round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and he’s just too far away to hear what the countess is saying.”

Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Fox Chase

Link

Extraordinary piece which captures the dynamics of a fox-hunt.

Long Read of the Day

We have privatised our cyber security. The winners are the hackers

Stark warning in Prospect magazine from Ciaran Martin, the ex-GCHQ guy who set up the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. He uses as a case-study the successful hacking of the Colonial pipeline in the US.

Colonial, it should be said, broke no rules. And that’s the point. Insufficient protection of its pipeline—a critical national asset—caused social disruption that clearly met the threshold of a national security threat. But there is nothing—yet—in the regulations governing this critical sector that requires firms to do better (and Republicans in Washington are starting to push back against suggestions for tighter controls). The unspoken message behind the Colonial case is that businesses can choose how to respond, whatever the consequences, and the government will pick up the tab.

It’s a neoliberal wet-dream, in other words — just like the 2008 banking crisis. An unregulated private sector is allowed to run risks which eventually come to threaten the security of the rest of us. And then the taxpayer (in the shape of the government) comes to the rescue and no corporate executive goes to gaol.

Good piece, worth reading in full.

The erosion of the American republic (contd.)

Joe Biden achieved what many people thought would be impossible — the passing of a huge bi-partisan Bill to renew the country’s crumbling infrastructure. And guess what? Heather Cox Richardson takes up the story:

It is a historic bill, not least because it recalled times when the government just…functioned, with members of both parties backing the passage of a popular bill that reflected a lot of hard work to hammer out a compromise.

And yet, Trump loyalists have attacked the bill as “Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America” and have attacked any Republican who supported it as “a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters and a traitor to our donors.” Some of the Republicans voting for it have gotten death threats.

Tuesday 16 November, 2021

Posted on November 16, 2021 by jjn1

Little Gidding

Last Sunday morning I watched a televised conversation between Andrew Marr and the actor Ralph Fiennes, who is currently engaged in an amazing theatrical experiment — doing TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, his last great poem, as a combination of Shakespearean soliloquy and an intimate monologue. (Arifa Akbar has a nice review of it in the Observer.)

Towards the end of the conversation, Marr asked Fiennes to read a piece from Little Gidding, the last of the four poems that make up the set. It was spellbinding to watch and listen to him. And a reminder of what an amazing gift actors have of bringing text to life.

And so on the spur of the moment, I decided to get into the car and drive to Little Gidding, a tiny hamlet about 45 minutes’ drive away. I’d often seen signs to it when driving up the A1 and made the kind of mental notes one makes but never follow up. So this was a nice way of making amends.

We drove along country roads of decreasing width and eventually came to the sign. We turned onto a narrow straight road which was marked as a dead end (somehow appropriate for Eliot, I thought) and eventually came to a beautiful spot with one large house and a few smaller dwellings. And a tiny church set in what appeared to be the garden of the large (but currently apparently deserted) house. There was nobody around — although there were some cars parked near the smaller dwellings.

Somewhat to our surprise, the church was open, but as it was towards the end of a November day, it was pretty dark. But it was also extraordinarily peaceful. If you wanted to retreat from the world, this would be a pretty good place to do it.

And then I took out my phone and found the text of the poem, and read this:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire
Beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Quote of the Day

”However conservatism might be defined, placing the free market at its centre has been self-defeating. Margaret Thatcher’s political outlook was a blend of Burkean traditionalism with Hayekian libertarianism, a highly combustible mix. Unleashing the anarchic energy of free markets dissolves any social order that is based on traditional notions of duty and responsibility. Choice trumps other values, and everything is for sale. The result has been a culture of narcissism and the commodification of anti-capitalism. It is probably only an oversight on the part of their PR team that the Kardashians have not been marketed as daily readers of Karl Marx.”

John Gray, writing in last week’s New Statesman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel | Lascia Ch’io Pianga (from Rinaldo) | Michael Rieber (double bass) and Götz Schumacher (piano)

Link

This is the first instrumental version of the aria I’ve ever heard.

Long Read of the Day

How Does Britain Maintain Relevance in a Changing World?

With difficulty, I’d say. Terrific, perceptive essay by Tim Marshall on the Political Future of Post-Brexit England.

This is how it opens:

Britain’s instinct post-2016 has been to look to the United States. Given America’s continuing political and economic power, this makes sense; but there are now differences to the 20th-century rationales for doing so. In the Cold War, it wasn’t just politically unacceptable to do major trade deals with Russia, it was of limited economic value. But this is not the case with 21st-century China, which, along with the EU and the US, is one of the three modern entities with massive purchasing power. So another hybrid strategy will be required, one that sticks with Washington, but somehow leaves the door open for good political and economic relations with Beijing. It will be, as the diplomats in the Foreign Office like to say, by way of understatement, “challenging.” However, a clear indication of what the British believe to be their best option was seen in the summer of 2021 when its new aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, was dispatched to the South China Sea with ten US Marine Corps F-35 jets on board.

Don’t you just love that word — “challenging”?

Seán Quinn, the Streisand Effect, and improving the operation of the right to be forgotten

Very interesting blog post by Eoin O’Dell (Whom God Preserve), a distinguished Irish legal scholar, on the flaws in the so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ (RTBF).

Before you embark on it, it might be helpful to know a bit about the Quinn family which features in the story. The Wikipedia page on Seán Quinn, once allegedly the richest man in Ireland, is helpful in that context.

Footnote: The RTBF is a misnomer as the material of which a petitioner complains remains published on the Web. It’s just the right to have Google exclude that article or articles from its Search engine. Perhaps it should be known as The Right to be ‘Disappeared’, since in a comprehensively networked world if the dominant search engine can’t (i.e. won’t) find you then you have been ‘disappeared’ as Pinochet & Co used to put it.

A commonplace booklet

Airless tyres

Now here’s a really good idea.

Made by Michelin, it combines an aluminum wheel with a special “tyre” around it. Made with a plastic matrix laced with — and reinforced by — glass fibres. The company claims to be hoping to have them on the market by 2024.

Monday 15 November, 2021

Posted on November 15, 2021 by jjn1

Fuchsia

My favourite plant. Still going strong in the front garden.

Quote of the Day

Dominic Cummings on working with Boris Johnson:

“One morning in mid-January he called me into his study.

Johnson: Dom, I want to run something by you.

Do you think it’s OK if I spend a lot of time writing my Shakespeare book?

Cummings: What do you mean?

Johnson: This fucking divorce, very expensive. And this job. It’s like getting up every morning pulling a 747 down the runway. (Pause) I love writing, I love it, I want to write my Shakespeare book.

Cummings: I think people expect you to be doing the PM’s job, I wouldn’t talk to people about this if I were you…

You get the idea. Within a month of the election he was bored with the PM job and wanted to get back to what he loves while shaking down the publishers for some extra cash.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

Link

A favourite end-of-the-evening song in my part of the world. And if you want to hear what it sounds like at the end of a really big evening, try this.

Long Read of the Day The pandemic and the chronic erosion of trust

A fascinating Tweetstream by Michael Bank Petersen.

Public support for governments is decreasing across the democratic world. This is driven by voter fatigue with restrictions that drag on and on. Such fatigue is a major explanation of increasing radicalisation…

And so the argument builds.

This is an adroit use of Twitter to outline a complicated argument. The end-point is that if countries try to compel vaccination or to quarantine the unvaccinated (as, say, Austria is apparently doing now) then the political backlash could turn really nasty.

Not such a long read. But it gives one a different perspective on things..

DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The most interesting development of the week had nothing to do with Facebook or even Google losing its appeal against a €2.4bn fine from the European commission for abusing its monopoly of search to the detriment of competitors to its shopping service. The bigger deal was that DeepMind, a London-based offshoot of Google (or, to be precise, its holding company, Alphabet) was moving into the pharmaceutical business via a new company called Isomorphic Labs, the goal of which is grandly described as “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach”.

Since they’re interested in first principles, let us first clarify that reference to AI. What it means in this context is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitise a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications.

That said, this new venture by DeepMind seems more on the socially useful side of the equation. This is because its researchers have discovered that its technology might play an important role in solving a central problem in biology, that of protein folding.

Proteins are large, complex molecules that do most of the heavy lifting in living organisms…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Think Robots can’t dance? Boston Dynamics taught its robodogs to mimic the Rolling Stones on stage.

Video

Yes, DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet?

Posted on November 14, 2021 by jjn1

This morning’s Observer column:

The most interesting development of the week had nothing to do with Facebook or even Google losing its appeal against a €2.4bn fine from the European commission for abusing its monopoly of search to the detriment of competitors to its shopping service. The bigger deal was that DeepMind, a London-based offshoot of Google (or, to be precise, its holding company, Alphabet) was moving into the pharmaceutical business via a new company called Isomorphic Labs, the goal of which is grandly described as “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach”.

Since they’re interested in first principles, let us first clarify that reference to AI. What it means in this context is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitise a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications.

That said, this new venture by DeepMind seems more on the socially useful side of the equation. This is because its researchers have discovered that its technology might play an important role in solving a central problem in biology, that of protein folding.

Proteins are large, complex molecules that do most of the heavy lifting in living organisms…

Read on

Quote of the Day

Posted on November 13, 2021 by jjn1

However conservatism might be defined, placing the free market at its centre has been self-defeating. Margaret Thatcher’s political outlook was a blend of Burkean traditionalism with Hayekian libertarianism, a highly combustible mix. Unleashing the anarchic energy of free markets dissolves any social order that is based on traditional notions of duty and responsibility. Choice trumps other values, and everything is for sale. The result has been a culture of narcissism and the commodification of anti-capitalism. It is probably only an oversight on the part of their PR team that the Kardashians have not been marketed as daily readers of Karl Marx.

John Gray, writing in this week’s New Statesman

Friday 12 November, 2021

Posted on November 12, 2021 by jjn1

Cafe society

Quote of the Day

”He only feels life through his brain, or through sex, and there is a gulf between these two separate departments.”

Ottoline Morrell on Bertrand Russell (she would know, since she had a long affair with him)

She was an interesting, generous woman and quite a good photographer. Some of her pictures are on her Wikipedia page.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | French Suite No.2 in C minor BWV813 | András Schiff

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Internet’s Unkillable App

Well, of course I was bound to enjoy this paean of praise by Dave Pell in which he argues that the noisier our digital lives get, the more popular the humble newsletter becomes. I’m hoping that you might like it too.

Cave paintings. Petroglyphs. Smoke signals. Carrier pigeons. Telegraphs. The Pony Express. Airmail. Blogs. Myspace. Human modes of communication come and go, each replaced by a new technology and a faster method of delivery. But somehow, the humble newsletter survives. In an era with countless ways to reach out and bombard someone, newsletters have not only endured; they’re more popular than ever (and not only as some artisanal relic kept alive by the same people who keep buying vinyl LPs). More and more writers—including, ahem, some excellent ones right here at The Atlantic—are competing to entice us with the perfect subject line and the most sublime greeting…

Read on.

Mario Vargas Llosa: How I Lost My Fear of Flying

A lovely little essay by a great writer:

There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And begin to tremble.

It happened to me, after many years getting on and off aircraft as often as I change my shirts…

Frank Pasquale on digital capitalism

Frank Pasquale is one of the geniuses in my line of business and this 16-minute Keynote is a paradigm of a perfect Keynote talk: just the right length and profundity. And memorable because you come away with the central message he wanted to get across.

Try it.

Thursday 11 November, 2021

Posted on November 11, 2021 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.”

W.H. Auden

He was right, as you can see here! But good for him.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | My Girl Josephine

Link

Long Read of the Day

Shortage nation: why the UK is braced for a grim Christmas

Nice explainer by Tim Harford on why we run out of petrol when supplies are constrained rather than just putting up the price of a gallon (as economists would recommend).

In the textbooks, a “shortage” doesn’t mean dry pumps or empty shelves: it means that prices spike. They might double or triple. Some will find it impossibly expensive to drive, and others might find their finances ruined because they have no choice but to buy fuel they cannot really afford. But there are no queues; there is always petrol available to those who are willing and able to pay.

Ah, those dreamworld textbooks. The real world is a different place.

An instructive read.

More on Alexis Madrigal’s experience of Covid

Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve) was not impressed by Madrigal’s experience (mentioned in yesterday’s edition). He writes:

Madrigal’s piece gave off such an extraordinary vibe of terrified Eloi wandering too close to the Morlocks. He and his entire family are vaccinated. He caught something that affected him no worse than a bad cold as the price of a fun fancy weekend in New Orleans. And yet we get paragraph after paragraph of freakouts, and the whole family panicking, because of this enormous catastrophe which disrupted his life for a whole week. Right at the end, he asks the only interesting question, which is how will society cope when Covid becomes low-level and endemic: the only possible answer is “better than you did, chum.”

Someone I know who lives in Hong Kong has just sent me pictures of the building opposite where he lives cordoned off by police, and everyone in it tested because someone who lives there tested positive. That’s the price of zero covid and Chinese societies can pay it, for the moment. But there is no way in hell America could be run like that. Poor people just aren’t part of their health planning. So the Eloi are going to remain in a state of ineffective terror while the disease, presumably, slowly loses virulence as it spreads through the Morlocks.

An honest government ad

Link

Nice surprise appearance by Greta Thunberg at the end.

H/T to Andrew Curry — who, incidentally, warns that it’s “not safe for work”. Can’t think why. Readers of this Blog are hardened viewers, surely.

Chart of the Day

Every year, Knight Frank releases data on what it takes to join the 1 per cent in different countries. I always find this data and the disparity between countries to be fascinating. In the UK, $1.8m gets you into the top 1 per cent. Compare that with $280,000 in Brazil or $60,000 in Indonesia.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Hand-build wooden Apple 1 goes on sale

Anyone interested in an Apple I hand built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak circa 1976 has until 11:30 am PST today to make a bid as the rare computer goes up for auction at John Moran Auctioneers outside Los Angeles, California.

The vintage machine is one of the few Apple-I versions encased in koa wood, from the Acacia koa tree that is endemic to Hawaii and was fashionable in the 1970s. The computer was made during the company’s garage start-up days and is only one of six known remaining Koa wood case Apple-I machines in existence.

Link

Oddly enough, my maternal grandfather was a John Moran. And he was also an auctioneer, among other things. He never sold anything like this, though.

Wednesday 10 November, 2021

Posted on November 10, 2021 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

Virginia Woolf

Good question.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cannonball Adderley | One for Daddy-O

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Politics-as-Sports’: Why It Matters

This long essay by James Fallows is terrific. In part, it’s a reprise of an idea he first put forward in the book Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, which I first read avidly when it came out in 1997 (and still have on my shelves).

This is how the essay begins:

This post has a simple purpose. It is to clarify and illustrate an important point about journalism of this moment. Once you start noticing the pattern I’m talking about, I predict you’ll see it everywhere.

Read on to see why.

How one ratings agency assesses corporations’ preparations for, and risks from, climate change

Moody’s, one of the big ratings agencies has just published an assessment of how prepared various industrial sectors are for the proposed transition to a zero-carbon future. The report

assesses the outlook in a scenario of rapid emissions reduction for carbon-intensive sectors – the ones whose transformation will be vital to the world’s ability to halve emissions by 2030 and achieve a net zero economy by 2050. Incorporating insights from across Moody’s, it analyzes these sectors’ exposure to climate risk and their relative ‘transition readiness’, and models the likely impacts on their default risk.

It’s an 18-page document, but here are the overall conclusions:

Progress: Momentum in automotive and utilities demonstrates that rapid improvement in companies’ positioning for a rapid transition is possible in some of the most carbon-intensive sectors.
Challenges: Many carbon-intensive sectors and companies are less well-positioned for a rapid transition – leaving the world off track for 1.5 degrees C.
Risk: Variations in disclosure within and between sectors mask hidden climate- related financial risks. In some key instances company-level disclosures do not fully reflect the true level of exposure.
Pressure: Sectors that are least prepared overall for rapid transition also have the widest range of potential default risk outcomes for individual companies. Competitiveness is set to intensify within sectors as some companies position themselves to prosper in a zero-carbon future.
Opportunities: Early action by companies during the 2020s can halve their probability of default compared to delayed action, while enabling the global economy to chart a smoother path to net zero. By contrast, delayed action in the 2030s increases default risk as less progress this decade is likely to lead to higher degrees of intervention and a less orderly transition later.

TL;DR version: Lots of bankruptcies ahead. On the other hand, given the abysmal failure of Moody’s and their peers to spot the 2008 banking catastrophe, I’m not sure we can take this seriously either.

Johnson nailed

Sam Knight has a nice piece in the New Yorker about Boris Johnson’s, er, performance at COP26. Knight gets him bang to rights:

He is, more than anything, a facile student in a perpetual essay crisis: staying up late, scribbling unwieldy, fancy-sounding analogies to get through another assignment. Something something Sophocles. It’s mostly wordplay and bullshit.

Bingo! Got him in one.

Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive

Alexis Madrigal (a writer I’ve been following for years) is a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project. He was ultra-careful for 18 months. Then he got COVID at a wedding.

He’s written a compelling piece about the experience. He was double-vaccinated and is ok. But it was the impact on his family that was the killer punch. His conclusion:

Right now most policies appear designed to make life seem normal. Masks are coming off. Restaurants are dining in. Planes are full. Offices are calling. But don’t be fooled: The world’s normal only until you test positive.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

This catalogue dropped through the letterbox the other day. At first I thought it was a spoof, because it was beyond parody. But it’s genuine.

Here, for instance, is one of the items women can order for their semi-house-trained male companions:

Tuesday 9 November, 2021

Posted on November 9, 2021 by jjn1

Ely Cathedral

Seen on a November afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.”

Clement Attlee’s description of communism.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Elegy for String Orchestra, Op 58 | Roger Norrington

Link

Long Read of the Day

Ecological Leninism ·

Long review essay on Andreas Malm’s post-pandemic climate politics by historian Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books the other day. Sobering stuff, especially when one realises that even if all the 132 nations which signed up to the Paris Accords kept their promises, the world is still on track for warming of 2.7 degrees Centigrade. Given that most of them haven’t, that figure of 2.7 is now a lower bound. Which is leading many thinkers to wonder what the politics of approaching catastrophe might be like. Not pretty is the answer, and Malm is pretty bleak about that, which is why Tooze’s take on his views is interesting.

The carbon clock is ticking. Governments and official agencies assure us that all will be well, that they can balance the risks. Some insist that technology will save us. We have achieved the impossible before, we will do it again. But why believe them? Progress towards decarbonisation has been limited. Fossil fuel interests remain stitched into global networks of power directly descended from the age of imperialism. Their political outriders may be cynical hacks, but public support for the fossil fuel status quo is all too real. The carbon coalition seems death-driven, defiant of expert advice. Centrist liberals are loud in expressing outrage, but shrink away when push comes to shove. There are periodic waves of protest. Children boycott school. There are demands for a new social contract and a just transition. A minority, tiny as yet, calls for rebellion.

With only minor alterations, this could be the portrait of a nation sliding towards defeat in a major war: relentless time pressure; limited resources rapidly running down; over-confident technocrats; promises of wonder weapons; pro and anti-war factions at loggerheads; desperate young people calling for a halt to the madness…

Felicity Allen on portraits and portraiture

As part of the ‘People Like You’ research project artist Felicity Allen was offered a residency in which to develop a new series in her Dialogic Portraits work, to consider with her sitters questions of traditional representation (such as portraiture) and ideas of the self associated with digital culture. She produced a series of portraits, shown here in Rooms, and made audio recordings with the sitters, both of which form the basis for a mesmerising 12-minute film, Figure to Ground – a site losing its system. She does portraits in watercolour, which in itself is interesting, because as a medium it somehow lacks the ‘authority’ of oils. She sent me the link out of the blue yesterday (we met once, ages ago, at a mutual friend’s party), and suddenly a busy morning was deliciously interrupted. Hope yours is too.

We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One

Hmmm… This could be interesting.

On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society. It can become most acute in the one place—the university—that is supposed to defend “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized. At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite.

Among the luminaries involved are Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot, Peter Boghossian, Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, Gordon Gee, Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen. They also claim as supporters a motley crew of journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

I guess that most of these elegant dudes (and they are, interestingly, mostly dudes) will not be giving up their comfortable perches in conventional institutions to sample the delights of Austin. They’ll be more like visiting profs, presumably.

Still, there’s something quaint about a group of dissidents from elite universities setting up another elite institution. My hunch, though, is that they’ll get plenty of funding from wealthy libertarians (Peter Thiel?) so maybe this academic bird will fly.

It’s also reminiscent of the New College of the Humanities which was founded by the philosopher A.C. Grayling in 2011 and is still in business, though now owned by a subsidiary of Northeastern University.

My hunch is that Harvard, that hedge fund with a nice university attached, won’t be too bothered by this University of Austin.