What we did on November 5

Instead of burning effigies, we toasted marshmallows and roasted chestnuts.

Quote of the Day

The Sunday Times had a big scoop yesterday saying that the sure-fire way to become a Lord under the current Tory government is to donate at least £3m to the party. We’re back to Lloyd-George’s cash-for-titles days; the only difference is that the price has gone up.

The story reminded me of a conversation I had some years ago with a friend who is a life peer. He’s an intensely serious, academically-distinguished and dedicated individual who takes his role seriously and never misses a Lords debate for which his experience and knowledge are relevant.

One night, on the train back to Cambridge after a dinner we’d both attended in London, I asked him what it was like being a Lord.

“Well”, he replied, “it’s a privilege, but…” (pause) “it’s no longer an honour, given some of the people who are now in the House.”

Spot on.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel – Helpless / Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Singularity Is Here: Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies.

Eloquent essay by Ayad Akhtar on what surveillance capitalism is doing to us.

Embedded in this scheme of endless distraction is a deeper logic. The system has come to understand the fundamental value of always reaffirming our points of view back to us, delivering to us a world in our image, confirmation bias as the default setting. This is the real meaning of contemporary virtuality. In the virtual space, the technology combats and corrects our frustrations with reality itself—which defies expectation and understanding, by definition.

Thoughtful and worth your time.

How can we tame the tech giants now that they control society’s infrastructure?

Yesterday’s Observer column

Pardon me for a moment while I shed a few crocodile tears. The proximate cause of this grief is the news that the revenues of Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are down by an estimated $9.85bn in the second half of this year. Just to put that in context, as I write, the stock market valuations of the first three of these behemoths are $86.9bn, $930.36bn and $44.07bn respectively. YouTube is harder to estimate because it’s part of Alphabet, its holding company, but since that’s valued at $1.93tn (that’s trillion, by the way) we may safely assume that YouTube’s revenue decline was, as engineers say, “in the noise”.

And yet all these outfits were complaining loudly at the injustice that had been done to them by one of their peers – Apple. Why so? Well, back in April, the iPhone manufacturer introduced its grandly named app-tracking transparency policy via a tweak to its mobile operating system, which forced iPhone apps to ask for permission before they tracked the behaviour of users to serve them personalised ads.

Predictably, most users declined to be tracked, which meant that those who had hoped to target them were left floundering. ..

Do read the whole thing.

Is There a Method Behind China’s Tech Crackdown Madness?

Really fascinating article which sheds some light on something that’s been puzzling me for ages, namely the question of why the Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on the country’s social media companies. Was this triggered by the hubris of these outfits’ founders (who had forgotten that nothing, but nothing, is more important than the Party)? Or was there something more fundamental and perceptive at work — namely the strategic insight that these companies are, ultimately, not important and may be disposable in the long run. After all, basically they’re just doing tricks on the back of an old technology (the Internet) developed long ago in the US, whereas the Party realises that what China needs is the capability to develop the infrastructural technologies that will underpin the longer-term future.

This piece by Ruihan Huang and Joshua Henderson examined the 500 most valuable private companies on China’s Hurun list — about half of which are in the tech sector in the hope of identifying what companies were targeted and then speculating on the reasons why.

They concluded that:

• regulators almost exclusively targeted “bits” (software) companies rather than “atoms” (hardware) companies — which mean, essentially, what I call ‘platform’ owners in yesterday’s Observer column;
• crackdowns appear to be correlated with firm size; and,
• ‘regulatory’ actions were not always ‘political’ in nature but were vigorously pursued because of the available window of opportunity.

This chart just about sums it up:

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

This picture, showing Boris Johnson dozing his way through the opening speech of COP26, headed an interesting article in the Guardian about how Johnson was perceived by other major politicians at the conference. Apparently he couldn’t resist trotting out his usual jokes and antics — and even left gaps in his speech for laughter — but the laughs never came.

I’m not surprised. Johnson is basically a provincial, little-Britain act, which plays well to some audiences in a country where toffee-nosed clowns like Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are understood by people who read the Beano and the ‘Greyfriars’stories when they were kids.

But foreigners never read this stuff and so they don’t get it. In fact they are almost as amazed that a hitherto sensible and stable polity called the UK elected this clown as the rest of us were when the Americans plumped for Trump.

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! 

Many thanks to those kind readers who enlightened me about this lovely photograph. Euan Williamson identified both the bird (a rose-ringed parakeet) and the photographer, Petr Sochman, and thought that the parrot appears to be saying “Social distance, please!”

And John Burke found the source of the picture — the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. Their current finalists for the 2021 awards are a hoot (or an hoot, if you’re as pedantic as I am).

The great thing about being a blogger is that your readers know more than you do.

Quote of the Day

”Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.”

*  Cecil Beaton, replying to Virginia’s dislike of a drawing he did of her.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Thomas Tallis | If Ye Love Me | The Cambridge singers

Link

Long Read of the Day

Much of what you’ve heard about Carter and Reagan is wrong

Great blog post by Noah Smith.

Revisionism at its best. Made me think again about both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

OpenLearn’s triumph

For many years I worked happily and productively at the Open University, one of the best ideas of Harold Wilson’s Labour government which evolved into a global pioneer of what used to be called ‘distance learning’. It was an astonishingly creative and lively place to work, and I was lucky to be part of it. The only British institution even remotely like the OU is the BBC.

Towards the end of my time there, some of my colleagues created OpenLearn, an online service which now offers over a thousand free courses and learning resources. This has been a Godsend to thousands of people who were locked down during the pandemic. This creative response to the pandemic has just been recognised by the Open Resilience Award by OE Global, Open Education Global is an international non-profit organisation that supports the development and use of open education around the world. I know that virtue is supposed to be its own reward, but sometimes it’s nice when the world recognises it too.

US blacklists NSO

The FT reports that

The US has added NSO Group, the Israeli military-grade spyware manufacturer that created software traced to the phones of journalists and human rights activists around the world, to a trade blacklist as it targets the growing surveillance threat posed by hacking-for-hire companies.

NSO and a competitor, Tel Aviv-based Candiru, were among four companies added by the commerce department on Wednesday to its so-called entity list, which would restrict exports of US hardware and software to the companies.

This is big news and long overdue. It’s also a massive endorsement of the work that Ron Deibert and his colleagues in the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have been doing for years. They have been tireless in the front line of the battle against the spyware industry. The Lab is one of the few examples of academic institutions which are having a real impact on the tech industry rather than just engaging in virtue-signalling. Ron and his colleagues marshal formidable technical expertise in the public — rather than the private — interest. You could call the Citizen Lab the NSA for civil society.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Two things…

• ”All this talk about Metaverse is an excellent way to refocus the attention to the future and away from its present problems. A video that essentially uses a video-game-like interface, Facebook can wash its hands off reality and whatever toxicity of the reality. After all, it is all just a game. You can’t be any angrier about fake information being shared in the metaverse than you can be angry about running over someone in grand theft auto.” (Om Malik on his blog)

• Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from. Nice video.

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! 

No Way!

I love this picture and wish it were mine. I think it was (deservedly) a prize-winner in a nature photography contest some years ago, but I can’t find any details and so can’t credit the photographer. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the idea of using it as my Zoom placeholder, but it gave the wrong impression to my colleagues, so I abandoned it. It’s always reminded me of that wonderful New Yorker cartoon which shows a male peacock, in full regalia, staring in astonishment at a distinctly unimpressed female and saying: “What do you mean — No?”

Quote of the Day

Fifty years ago, at a harp recital in Gloucester­shire, a retired British military officer with a clipped aristo accent came across a brown-skinned teenager. “I say, old chap, do you speak English?” the officer said.

As a story in Yale’s New Journal recounted, the young man —Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah—replied, “Why don’t you ask my grandmother?”.

“Who, may I ask, is your grandmother?” the retired officer said.

“Lady Cripps.”

Lady Cripps was Isobel Cripps, the widow of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Christian socialist and Labour politician who had been chancellor of the exchequer and the Crown’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he was known for his stalwart desire to relinquish Britain’s imperial possessions, from Calcutta to Accra.

I love this story, which comes from a Paris Review interview by David Remnick, Editor of the  New Yorker .

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

James Galway and The Chieftains | Over the Sea to Skye

Link

Nice arrangement of a familiar tune and an interesting combination of musical talent. For a gentle alternative try this recording by the Corries.

Long Read of the Day

Memory lanes: Google’s map of our lives

This is really charming — an essay about memories triggered by seeing people from one’s past when browsing Google Streetview.

Rather than offering a facsimile of the world we live in, Street View offers something more profound: the opportunity to spot loved ones on familiar streets, unaware that their errand or commute would be captured for posterity by the all-seeing eye of a camera-mounted Street View car.

Worth your time.

Chart of the Day

Source: The Lancet

More on that Zuckerberg video about the Metaverse

You may have been wondering where Nick Clegg stands in all this. Well, this video has the beginnings of an answer.

Many thanks to the readers who suggested it.

A message from Will Shakespeare

Via Michelle Cohn in McSweeney’s:

Greetings, fair countrymen. It is I, William Shakespeare, sending word from beyond the grave. I have seen the influence of my canon, and I’ve relished watching many fine actors and theaters put on productions of my plays that have stirred hearts and minds alike. But I come to you from the afterlife with one humble request.

Please stop letting high schoolers put on Macbeth.

Macbeth is about status, it’s about ambition, it’s about the corruption of the human soul once it gives in to the spoils of evil. Nothing a bunch of pimply teens living in suburban Westchester have ever come in contact with. I mean, seriously, do you think a seventeen-year-old can realistically go from eating a pack of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to being one of the fiercest protagonists in literary history? Are you kidding me? The poor kid is probably wearing Calvin Klein underwear from Target, and he’s supposed to portray a tyrant? A murderous tyrant? I’ve seen these kids—they freak out if they see a cockroach. They come to rehearsal in basketball shorts, and then recite my immortal “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. God, it makes me want to cry.

Furthermore, I didn’t write the role of Lady Macbeth, one of the most iconic in the history of the theater, so that it could be played by a high school senior who sees this as her big chance to show the school her acting chops. I simply can’t watch another performance of my esteemed work where my villainous queen is clearly half thinking about getting high with the three witches at the cast party. I refuse to be witness to another “unsex me here” speech performed by a young waif who unironically reads Cosmopolitan for advice.

He is, though, keen on more teenage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “That play”, he thinks, “works much better, as high schoolers are a bunch of horny freaks anyway”.

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! 

Break Time

Bikers taking a break in a Derbyshire village, August 30th.

Quote of the Day

”Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes (violin) and Dennis Cahill (guitar) | Three reels (The Sailor’s Bonnet, Tommy Peoples’ and The Union Reel.

Link

Recorded in Dolan’s pub in Limerick, Christmas, 1999.

Long Read of the Day

“It Might Well Be Unsolvable”: Nilay Patel on Facebook’s reckoning with reality (and the Metaverse-size problems to come)

Transcript of an interesting, wide-ranging Vanity Fair interview with the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, a very experienced observer of the tech industry. The interview discusses how tech journalism covers the industry (badly, IMHO), the fact that even giant companies can fade away (remember GE?), whether we are at an inflection point with the technology and its corporate exploiters and — naturally — Facebook’s latest attempts to escape from the consequences of its actions.

Sample:

I think it’s the beginning of a reckoning with how being this connected affects us and affects our lives. I don’t know that we have built the social systems or the political hierarchies to deal with it. I think that has huge repercussions, especially in a country with a First Amendment like ours. I’m not sure the government has the tools it might need, and I am extremely unsure the government should have those tools.

So I think this is the beginning of that: How connected should we be, and who should be the gatekeepers of that connection? How do we hold those gatekeepers in line? No one knows the answer. It is the central challenge of our time. The literal reckoning with the shape of society that absolute connection has brought us, is upon us. And it is nowhere close to the end.

Interesting throughout.

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse

Given that you probably have better things to do than follow every twist and turn in the Facebook saga, you may have missed the most idiotic pivot to date — the attempted re-branding of the company as ‘Meta’ and the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s big new idea — the ‘Metaverse’. I was going to try and explain how fatuous this idea is but then thought that the most efficient way to get the idea across would be to suggest that you watch the lad himself doing it.

Link

So if you’re curious, do have a look. It’s 11 minutes long, but it speaks volumes about the delusion of using technology to escape reality.

Oh — and keep a sickbag handy.

Talking politics on Albania

My colleague David Runciman has a great podcast series called Talking Politics which has been running since 2015 and (deservedly) has a huge audience.

A couple of weeks ago he recorded a remarkable conversation with Lea Ypi about her book,  Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, which is the story of her childhood in Communist-run Albania and the effect on her of discovering as a teenager that all of her assumptions about her country and her family had been wrong.

It’s a truly extraordinary tale, and Ypi (who is now a Professor of Political Theory at LSE) tells it beautifully in the book. The podcast conversation, an exchange between two political theorists who eschew jargon, is terrific.

It’s almost an hour long, so you will need to set aside time for it. But it’s worth your while.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

I’m not an epidemiologist, but it has seemed obvious to me almost since the virus first arrived (and certainly after the first variants manifested themselves), that the world has changed and that we’ll never get completely free from this plague. So why not adjust to this new reality?

And now I find that Dr Anthony Fauci was saying much the same thing in a White House Briefing on October 13:

It is going to be very difficult — at least in the foreseeable future and maybe ever — to truly eliminate this highly transmissible virus. And again, as I mentioned, we’ve only eradicated one.

So, what are we looking for?

We’re looking for a level of control of the virus that would allow us to be able to essentially approach the kind of normal that we are all craving for and that we all talk about.

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! 

Poplars

Seen on a recent cycle ride on a perfect Autumn day.

When I was a kid, William Cowper’s The Poplar Field was one of my favourite poems.

And I still love the trees: they’re the Cypresses of the East Anglian landscape.

Quote of the Day

“Once you build it, who is going to augment reality? Who is in charge of that project? If I’m standing at the United States Capitol and you’re standing there, and we’re both looking at the Capitol, what are we seeing—what is the label on that building? Is it the “home of democracy,” or is it “where Donald Trump got screwed”? We’ll actually live in different realities.”

• Nilay Patel, Editor of the Verge in an interview by Vanity Fair, talking about augmented reality spectacles.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

R. E. M. – Everybody Hurts (Live at Glastonbury 2003)

Link

Wonderful. Wish I’d been there on the night.

Long Read of the Day

 Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago

Wonderful essay by Ethan Zuckerman on the absurdity of Mark Zuckerberg latest attempt to avoid responsibility for the toxic mess that has made him a zillionaire. Sample:

So, after watching metaverses spring up and crumble for 27 years, and after building one myself, I feel fairly well equipped to offer context for what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with his firm’s pivot to “Meta.” In his heavily produced keynote video for Facebook Reality Labs, Zuckerberg starts by acknowledging that this is a bizarre time for the company to be launching a new product line—Facebook is under more scrutiny than ever for its ill effects on individuals and societies, and for the company’s utter unwillingness to address these issues.

But why bother with that mess? Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “Now, I know that some people will say that this isn’t a time to focus on the future. And I want to acknowledge that there are important issues to work on in the present. There always will be. So for many people, I’m just not sure there ever will be a good time to focus on the future.” Allow me to translate: Fuck you, haters.

Unmissable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

What you need to know about COP26

(According to Leslie Hook, the FT‘s Environment reporter)

Six years ago in Paris, countries came together and all agreed to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius. But they actually left a lot of the fine print to be figured out later, and that later is right now. So there’s a lot of nitty-gritty questions like, how do you report your emissions of your country? Like, what form do you use? Who audits that report of your emissions? Another topic is how can countries exchange carbon offsets? Trade carbon offsets, buy and sell carbon offsets between each other? What’s the framework governing that global carbon market? So we’ve got some really thorny details to be worked out in Glasgow. That’s kind of the fine print of the summit.

So basically this is the “moment of truth” for the Paris accord. Will the accord really have solid rules that mean that there’s no loopholes, everyone’s on the same playing field and that it has real teeth?

Tall order, Ne c’est pas?

Wall Street’s Tesla dilemma

The problem is — as I wrote in my Observer column on Sunday — that the company’s share price, like the Peace of God in the Bible, “passeth all understanding”. That’s mainly because it’s driven by what professionals disdainfully refer to as “retail investors” (ie schmucks like you and me) who think that Tesla, like Bitcoin, might be a good bet.

As the professionals see it, Tesla shares are trading at around 130 times the company’s future earnings, compared with 21 for the S&P 500 index. Which is daft. Time and again, big fund managers reckon that the stock simply must be at its peak, and in their world you never buy at the peak. So they don’t. But the shares keep going up and they keep missing out.

What makes things worse for them is that since December 2020 Tesla has been a member of the S&P 500 index. This sucks yet more money in to the shares through passive investment by index-tracking funds. So we’re getting to the point where fund managers will have to buy Tesla shares against their supposedly better judgement.

Does that remind you of anything?

It reminds me of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and of a sensible and successful fund manager, Tony Dye, who refused to buy into the madness and lost his job as a result. Shortly after he was ejected, the tech bubble burst, and the fund he had been managing survived and thrived.

Which perhaps goes to confirm the wisdom of Keynes’s famous doctrine of the 1930s: “An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety”.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

I was mesmerised by this — Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu playing Chopin’s Etude in C sharp minor, Op. 10 No. 4 in the first stage of the 18th Chopin Competition — and thinking that surely the video has been speeded up. But it hasn’t.

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! 

My friend Jonathan’s Memorial was on Saturday in his college. It was a celebration which did him justice — attended by lots of his friends, former colleagues and students. There was poetry by Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, a beautiful remembrance by his brother David (also a distinguished academic), a warm and affectionate speech by Christine Carpenter, a nice memoir by Arthur Kiron, his colleague and neighbour at the University of Pennsylvania, and — finally — an appreciation by Chris Clark, a great historian and a former student of Jonathan. There was also music by Alexander Goehr (who was present to hear it) and it closed with Unfinished Business, that lovely poem of Primo Levi’s:

Sir, please accept my resignation
As of next month,
And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.
I’m leaving much unfinished work,
Whether out of laziness or actual problems.
I was supposed to tell someone something,
But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve forgotten.
I was also supposed to donate something 
—  A wise word, a gift, a kiss;
I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.
I’ll do it in the short time that remains.
I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.
I was meant to visit Distant cities, islands, desert lands;
You’ll have to cut them from the program
Or entrust them to my successor.
I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;
To build myself a house,
Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.
Mainly, I had in mind A marvelous book, kind sir,
Which would have revealed many secrets,
Alleviated pains and fears,
Eased doubts, given many
The gift of tears and laughter.
You’ll find its outline in my drawer,
Down below, with the unfinished business;
I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a shame,
It would have been a fundamental work.

He was a truly lovely man. If you’re interested, you can find my tribute to him here on the day he died.

Quote of the Day

“There is a Pythonesque sketch waiting to be written about a judge passing a sentence of imprisonment for attempted suicide: ‘Let this be a lesson to you and to any others who may be thinking of killing themselves.’ In fact, by the mid 19th century the law had got itself into such a tangle that a person injured in a failed attempt at suicide could be indicted for wounding with intent to kill, an offence for which Parliament had thoughtfully provided the death penalty.”

• (Sir) Stephen Sedley in the LRB, at the beginning of a coruscating examination of the absurdities and contradictions of British legal and legislative attitudes to assisted dying.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dvořák: Serenade for Strings in E, Op.22 – 1. Moderato

Link

Not a bad way to start November.

Long Read of the Day

 The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way

Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review essay on Nicole Pelroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race which, if anything, is more alarming than the book itself. Put succinctly, the message of both book and essay is that the online world we have built is catastrophically insecure. And yet we continue to ignore this reality. Perhaps that is because not to ignore it would be to force us to come to terms with it. In that sense it’s more like the climate crisis than like anything else. And yet we stand a slightly better chance of dealing with the pervasive insecurity of the online world that we do of fixing the climate.

Here’s how the essay concludes:

The arrogant recklessness of the people who have been buying and selling the vulnerability of the rest of us is not just part of an intelligence-agency game; it has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades. Move fast and break things; the money will trickle down; click, click, click, click, buy, buy, buy, like, like, like, like, expose, expose, expose. Perlroth likes a piece of graffiti she once saw: “Move slowly and fix your shit.” Lock down the code, she’s saying. Bar the door. This raises the question of the horse’s whereabouts relative to the barn. If you listen, you can hear the thunder of hooves.

But it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Hertz’s supercharged Tesla deal could haul us into the electric vehicle age

Yesterday’s Observer column:

On Tuesday, Hertz, the car-rental firm that recently emerged from bankruptcy, announced that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 cars from Tesla for what knowledgeable sources estimate to be worth $4bn. On learning this, my first thought was that if this is what insolvency is like, please direct me to the nearest bankruptcy court. My second thought, though, was that this could be a significant moment on the road to wider adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

The reason is, as anyone who has rented conventional cars will know, is that the best way of having a realistic test drive of a vehicle is to rent one for a week or two on holiday. As Teslas become available via Hertz, many more people will have a chance to experience what an EV is like. This is important because, generally, only geeks and masochists (like this columnist) are early adopters of novel technology and normal cautious consumers regard EVs as rather exotic and peculiar, not something you’d rely on for commuting or the school run.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that a key factor in changing people’s minds about EVs is word of mouth: someone you know has taken the plunge and has given you a ride in theirs. This was the driving force behind the widespread adoption of the Toyota Prius hybrid in the last decade and it seems to be happening now with EVs, which may account for the fact the Tesla Model 3 was the biggest selling new car in the UK in September, despite the fact that the company spends zilch on overt marketing or advertising.

Do read the whole thing.

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!