Look! No hands!

This is one of my favourite pictures. On a visit to Venice some years ago my wife and I were sitting outside a cafe when a young couple of acrobats arrived and started to perform. They were watched not just by us but by a fascinated group of local children who had hitherto been playing football. Eventually, the two performers invited the kids to join them. What followed was absolutely entrancing. This is one of the moments that has always stuck in my memory. A kind of ‘decisive moment’ (with apologies to HCB)

Quote of the Day

”It was almost impossible to believe that he was anything but a down-at-heel actor resting between engagements at the decrepit theatres of provincial towns.”

• Bernard Levin on Harold Macmillan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Gold Ring | with Sean Keane on guitar

Link

Long Read of the Day

Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write?

Entertaining New Yorker piece by Julian Luca on how digital technology enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Which is why writers, he says, are rebelling against their word processors.

(Full disclosure: I gave up writing in Microsoft Word many years ago. Of course stuff I write sometimes appears in Word format because the recipient can’t handle anything else. But the words are always generated as plain text in Ulysses or similar writing tools which can output the text in a range of proprietary formats.)

Luca’s piece chronicles a journey through this compositional jungle. If you’ve ever tangled with word-processing software then maybe you’ll enjoy the ride. Certainly I did.

The Economist’s country of the year… 

…is Italy. How come?

In Mario Draghi, it acquired a competent, internationally respected prime minister. For once, a broad majority of its politicians buried their differences to back a programme of thoroughgoing reform that should mean Italy gets the funds to which it is entitled under the eu’s post-pandemic recovery plan. Italy’s covid vaccination rate is among the highest in Europe. And after a difficult 2020, its economy is recovering more speedily than those of France or Germany. There is a danger that this unaccustomed burst of sensible governance could be reversed. Mr Draghi wants to be president, a more ceremonial job, and may be succeeded by a less competent prime minister. But it is hard to deny that the Italy of today is a better place than it was in December 2020. For that, it is our country of the year. Auguroni!

The Economist just loves technocrats.

What parking tickets teach us about corruption

Lovely column by Tim Harford.

Corruption is a function of many things: political incentives, formal legal institutions and culture. One of my favourite studies, by the economists Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, teased apart these different factors by examining the behaviour of diplomats in New York City. With most consulates located near the UN building in midtown Manhattan, diplomats lived a daily parking nightmare. Or at least they did if they felt any obligation to pay parking fines — but diplomats faced no legal consequences for ignoring those fines. Since all diplomats faced similar incentives, any difference in behaviour was most plausibly explained by a difference in cultural attitudes to breaking the rules.

Fisman and Miguel studied parking violations between 1997 and 2002, finding a strong correlation between unpaid tickets and more general perceptions of corruption. The worst offenders were Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan and Bulgaria. One Kuwaiti diplomat managed to accumulate two unpaid parking fines every working day for a year.

In contrast, the entire consulates of Denmark, Norway and Sweden did not pick up a single unpaid parking ticket — not one — in the entire six-year period. Given the temptations, that is impressive.

But no less impressive were the British diplomats. They, too, accumulated no unpaid fines. So we must not despair. The recent outcry suggests that there is still a price to be paid for breaking the rules, or for trying to rewrite them when convenient. And the evidence from New York is that British civil servants are beyond reproach.

But… here’s the nub of Britain’s current problem…

A certain Boris Johnson once worked as GQ magazine’s motoring correspondent. His editor noted that Johnson had cost GQ “£5,000 in parking tickets”, but he wouldn’t have him any other way.

Well, well. And — as Harford observes, if Johnson faced no consequences then, why would he expect consequences now?

Xmas Books – 1

I like giving books as presents, but have a rule: never give a book that you yourself would not want to get. So for the next few days I want to highlight books I’ve read this year that meet that criterion.

This is the most extraordinary book I’ve read this year. It’s a vivid account of what it’s like to grow up in a totalitarian state (in this case Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha) and then to experience an abrupt transition to so-called liberal democracy, with all the ambivalences that implies. Among other things it makes one understand why the European states formerly within the Soviet empire have had such trouble evolving into functioning democracies.

If you want some background before embarking on it then this conversation between the author and my colleague David Runciman would be a good place to start.

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Death(s) in Venice

Five Stolpersteine I came on in a street in Venice. Often one finds them outside a house where Jewish victims of the Holocaust lived prior to their arrest and transfer to death camps. They’re always sobering to encounter. Note that four members of the Vivante family were swept away to their deaths on August 7, 1944. Also sobering to think that the Allied invasion of Italy took place in September 1943 and Venice was liberated on April 29, 1945. But that was eight months too late for the Vivantes.

Yesterday’s missing link

The link to Kara Swisher’s interview with Neal Stephenson was missing. Apologies for not spotting the omission.

Quote of the Day

”Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.”

• H.L. Mencken on Los Angeles

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Richard | “Tutti Frutti” | Concert for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Link

Nobody slept in the back row that night.

Long Read of the Day Why culture wars are an elite device

An interesting New Statesman essay by Jan-Werner Müller, who is professor of politics at Princeton. He sees the crisis in liberal democracies as a product of two ‘secessions’ created by globalisation.

The first is of elites from dependence on the rest of society through their access to fancy schools, private health care, home-ownership in privileged enclaves and so on.

The other secession , Müller writes, is

even less visible. An increasing number of citizens at the lower end of the income spectrum no longer vote or participate in politics in any other way. In large German cities, for instance, the pattern is clear: poorer areas with high unemployment have much higher abstention rates in elections (in the centre of the old industrial metropolis of Essen it is as high as 90 per cent). This de facto self-separation is not based on a conscious programme in the way Thiel’s space (or spaced-out) fantasies are, and there is no “undiscovered country” for the worst-off. Tragically, such a secession becomes self-reinforcing: political parties, for the most part, have no reason to care for those who don’t care to vote; this in turn strengthens the impression of the poor that there’s nothing in it for them when it comes to politics.

How do these secessions relate to the crisis in democracy? Well, says Müller,

The promise of democracy is not that we shall all agree, and it does not require “uniformity of principles and habits”, as Alexander Hamilton had it. Rather, it is the guarantee that we have a fair chance of fighting for our side politically and then can live with the outcome of the struggle, because we will have another chance in a future election. It is not enough to complain that populists are divisive, for democratic politics is divisive by definition.

The absence of that ‘fair chance’ is the really corrosive force that is undermining our vaunted liberal democracy. Which may turn out to be the main reason why it’s doomed.

This is a long essay, which I hope is still not behind the New Statesman’s increasingly non-porous paywall, but it’s worth it IMO.

Chart of the Day

From Scott Galloway:

It took 42 years for Apple to reach a $1 trillion valuation — the first ever company to do so.

But it took just 2 years to add another $1 trillion in value.

Today, Apple’s market cap is roughly equal to all the world’s unicorns combined … and fast on its way to $3 trillion.

Hmmm… I should have bought Apple shares when Steve Jobs came back in 1997. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

A fascinating Twitter thread on why Omicron is so interesting — and so puzzling. According to a new lab study, Omicron infects & multiplies 70 times faster than the Delta variant and the wild type SARS-CoV-2 in the human bronchus, but not in the lung.

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Learning the craft

Trainee gondolieri in Venice.

Quote of the Day

”Social media can be vainer and more vacuous than any newsletter, and it is distracting into the bargain. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies, points out the sharp distinction between Google searches and Facebook posts. A sentence in a Facebook post beginning “My husband is . .. ” will tend to continue with “the greatest” or “my best friend”. A Google search beginning “Is my husband . . . ” usually continues “gay” or “a jerk”. What we say proudly on Facebook is very different from what we whisper to Google.”

• Tim Harford

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Morten Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | King’s College Choir | 2009

Link

One of the lovely thing about living in Cambridge is that one can go to Evensong in King’s on a winter’s afternoon and hear this kind of singing.

Long Read of the Day

He conceived of the Metaverse in the ’90s. He’s unimpressed with Mark Zuckerberg’s version.

Kara Swisher’s conversation with Neal Stephenson.

Transcript of a really fascinating exchange. It starts with the notion of a Metaverse (an idea that Stephenson launched many years ago in his dystopian novel Snow Crash) but rapidly gets on to discuss his new book, Termination Shock, which is about what happens when a super-rich billionaire decides to do something about global warming by effectively creating an artificial volcanic eruption (a giant sulphur gun).

Sample:

Swisher: First of all, what does “Termination Shock” mean to you? Explain it to people who have not read the book yet.

Stephenson: Sure. So there are a number of ideas kind of under the heading of so-called geoengineering, meaning technological interventions in climate to blunt the effects of having too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, basically. One of the kind of hypothetical drawbacks that’s been talked about is that if somebody were to begin intervening in the climate to hold down the temperature, and then they stopped, that it would create a so-called termination shock. Meaning that the climate would very suddenly snap back to kind of what it ought to be with unpredictable and kind of violent — presumably violent results. So “termination shock” is just a phrase that one hears sometimes when people are talking about geoengineering and climate change that I thought sounded cool.

Worth reading in full. Stephenson is an amazingly perceptive and imaginative writer. I’ve been following him ever since I first read his famous essay, “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, which is what convinced me that it was possible to write interestingly and elegantly about computers. If you’re tempted by it, book some time out: it’s 78 pages long and, IMHO, still wonderful.

Real-world data show that filters clean COVID-causing virus from air

An interesting Nature report of an experiment conducted in our local hospital:

Earlier experiments that tested air filters’ performance assessed their ability to remove inactive particles while operating in carefully controlled environments. As a result, “what was not known was how effective they would be in a real-world ward setting for clearing SARS-CoV-2”, says study co-author Vilas Navapurkar, an intensive-care unit (ICU) physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, UK. Hospitals have turned to portable air filters as an attractive solution when their isolation facilities are full, Navapurkar says, but it’s important to know whether such filters are effective or whether they simply provide a false sense of security.

To determine how the filters stand up to real-world conditions, Navapurkar and his co-authors installed them in two fully occupied COVID-19 wards — a general ward and an ICU. The team chose high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, which blow air through a fine mesh that catches extremely small particles. The researchers collected air samples from the wards during a week when the air filters were switched on and two weeks when they were turned off.

In the general ward, the team found SARS-CoV-2 particles in the air when the filter was off but not when it was on. Surprisingly, the team didn’t find many viral particles in the air of the ICU ward, even when the filter there was off. The authors suggest several possible reasons for this, including slower viral replication at later stages of the disease3. As a result, the team says that measures to remove the virus from the air might be more important in general wards than in ICUs.

Looks like a really useful experiment which suggests that HEPA air cleaners provide a cheap and easy way to reduce risk from airborne pathogens.

Isn’t it funny, though, to think back to March 2020 when few were taking seriously the idea that Covid-19 was mostly transmitted by airborne aerosols rather than by droplet-infected surfaces? And even now, surface-disinfecting hygiene-theatre still goes on.

My commonplace booklet

Every Schubert Song, Ranked by Jeffrey Arlo Brown, after listening to 40 hours of lieder.

Heroic is the only word for it.

Link

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Sydney opera house as you’ve (probably) never seen it before

Quote of the Day

”The outlaw glamour that comes from being on the wrong side of the Zeitgeist is one of the quiet pleasures of ageing.”

• Janan Ganesh (writing about W.G. Seabald) in the FT, 11/12 December, 2021.

Yep.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Address

I’ve read this a few times before (and you can too — here).

But I’d never heard a recording of it, until now. Here’s the Link.

It’s 22 minutes long, but when you’ve heard it you might see why many of those graduating students in 2005 have never forgotten it.

Richard J. Evans on Tory ‘cancel culture’

Absolutely splendid dissection in the LRB by a distinguished historian of the current obsession of the Tory party to airbrush slavery out of the the Great British historical narrative.

Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’. The National Trust’s plans (as well as the National Maritime Museum’s scrutiny of Nelson’s involvement with slavery) were, Longhi alleged, ‘a form of Marxism applied to our cultural and heritage sector’ by people ‘who want to apply today’s standards to events and people of decades and hundreds of years ago’. It was entirely wrong, he said, to use taxpayers’ money ‘to effectively besmirch our heroes to suit their left-wing woke narrative’. In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’. The Telegraph, the Express and the Daily Mail all reported that displays at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton would carry out ‘historical interrogation’ of ‘Austen’s tea drinking’ and its links to slavery. This, the papers solemnly declared, was ‘woke madness’. In fact, Austen’s father was a trustee of an Antigua sugar plantation, worked by enslaved people. The museum responded: ‘We are increasingly asked questions about this by our visitors and it is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that exists on Austen’s connections to slavery and its mention in her novels.’

One of those involved in Colonial Countryside is Corinne Fowler, a professor of postcolonial literature at Leicester University and co-author of a list of 93 National Trust properties built on money earned from plantations run by enslaved workers, or from slave ownership, or furnished with the lavish compensation paid to former slave owners after abolition. She feels that academics pursuing work like hers are being misrepresented, maligned and intimidated. ‘I think we should all be worried when academics are targeted in this way, when the evidence can’t be disputed.’

Evans points out that the National Trust’s director-general, Hilary McGrady, reported that complaints had only been received from 0.05 per cent of its 5.6 million members, and that a great many members had voiced their support of the Colonial Countryside project.

There was no ‘revolt’ of the membership, as had been claimed in parts of the right-wing media. A 2020 survey found that more than three-quarters of the trust’s members thought it should do more to educate visitors on its properties’ colonial connections. The resignation in October of the trust’s chairman, Tim Parker, widely hyped in the same places as a victory against ‘wokeness’, was coincidental (his two-term tenure had come to an end, having been extended for a year because of the pandemic).

It’s a great piece, worth reading in full.

Did Apple Really Embrace Right-to-Repair?

As the ‘Right-to-Repair’ movement gathers momentum, Apple — a long-term believer in not allowing owners of Apple kit to tinker with it — has started engaging in what one might call repair-washing. Last month, for example, it announced that it would make Apple parts, tools, and manuals — starting with iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 — available to individual consumers so that they can do their own repairs. This, it says,

will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools. Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.

IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the leading engineering institution, had the good idea of interviewing Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit (Which God Preserve, because I use it regularly) and a champion of the right to repair.

Why now? Is it because of the kind of lobbying you’ve been doing?

It’s clear that this is in response to pressure from lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating this. So there was pressure coming from all sides. They are trying to kind of get ahead of it.

Is it your sense that they’re genuinely trying to get repair parts into people’s hands at fair prices—that this represents a change in their philosophy. Or do you think they intend just to make repair parts available in theory so that they satisfy any future regulations?

I think it’s going be a little bit of both. But we’ll have to wait and see. After two decades of seeing them stymie repair options at every turn, I’ve got some skepticism. But they’re going to make the service manual available publicly. That’s a huge step. That’s exactly the right thing to do.

There is, however, a catch with the software that they’re saying they’re going to provide: They’re saying that you’re going to have to buy the part from Apple in order to use the software to “pair” the part.

Tell me about this pairing of parts that gets done in the Apple devices.

This is the totally new concept that Apple’s kind of inventing. It’s another way for them to keep control of things and it’s kind of novel. Imagine you had two coffee makers and you wanted to take the jar from one coffee maker and use it the other one, but you couldn’t, unless you have the manufacturer’s permission. Apple has been doing it with the major parts that you need to repair a phone. So that’s the battery, the screen, and the camera.

So I couldn’t take a battery out of a phone that I sat on and put it into a working phone of the identical model that has a weak battery?

That’s the idea. I can’t say that 100% the case. You still can do that right now, but you get warnings—basically the equivalent of a check-engine light. You have to have Apple’s blessing and permission to turn that off.

So this is a little bit like printer ink cartridges, where companies put a chip in the cartridge so that you couldn’t buy an aftermarket replacement cartridge.

It’s worse: It’s like saying if I have two identical printers, I can’t swap the cartridges between them, even if they’re both genuine cartridges. You can’t salvage parts in this regime. And this is what all of the recyclers do. They may use 10 broken phones to make three of them work.

Two steps forward, one step back. But these control-freak corporations (John Deere, we’re looking at you) are going to find this Right-to-Repair movement a bigger challenge than they anticipated.

My commonplace booklet

Elon Musk named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ Link.

That’s interesting. Wonder if they read my Observer column about him.

Even more interesting: Time magazine is still going? Who knew?

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In a topiarist’s garden

Quote of the Day

“If I don’t like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them”

• John Mortimer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Nulla in mundo pax sincera | Marie Lys

Link

13 blissful minutes before breakfast.

Long Read of the Day

Visualising the end of the American republic

In his book, How Democracy Ends, my colleague David Runciman makes the point that democracies don’t fail backwards (which is why, for example, analogies with the Weimar Republic or the Colonels’ coup in Greece are misleading.) If our democracies fail, they will fail forwards — which is why concerned citizens need imaginative vision to see where the danger comes from.

This sobering essay by George Packer argues that to fend off the threat by the Republican Party — which increasingly looks like now a subsidiary of the Trump organisation — US citizens will need to practice “envisioning the worst”. For example:

If the end comes, it will come through democracy itself. Here’s one way I imagine it could happen: In 2024, disputed election results in several states lead to tangled proceedings in courtrooms and legislatures. The Republican Party’s long campaign of undermining faith in elections leaves voters on both sides deeply skeptical of any outcome they don’t like. When the next president is finally chosen by the Supreme Court or Congress, half the country explodes in rage. Protests soon turn violent, and the crowds are met with lethal force by the state, while instigators firebomb government buildings. Neighborhoods organize self-defense groups, and law-enforcement officers take sides or go home. Predominantly red or blue counties turn on political minorities. A family with a Biden-Harris sign has to abandon home on a rural road and flee to the nearest town. A blue militia sacks Trump National Golf Club Bedminster; a red militia storms Oberlin College. The new president takes power in a state of siege.

Few people would choose this path. It’s the kind of calamity into which fragile societies stumble when their leaders are reckless, selfish, and shortsighted. But some Americans actually long for an armed showdown…

Do read it.

Elon Musk: Henry Ford 2.0?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Enormous wealth, like power, acts as an aphrodisiac that warps people’s perceptions of those who possess it: it’s as if they’re surrounded by a reality distortion field. Similar force fields have enveloped Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their time and now it’s Musk’s turn. Because he’s uncommonly voluble on social media, especially on Twitter, where he has 65.7 million followers, his every utterance is assiduously parsed by besotted fans (all of whom call him “Elon”, as if he were a buddy of theirs). This gives him an influence way beyond that of any other corporate executive, influence that, on some occasions, even affects global financial markets through what the normally sober Financial Times calls the “Tesla-financial complex”. A closer examination of his Twitter feed, though, yields an impression of a really complex individual: a baffling combination of formidable intelligence and ungovernability – part visionary, part genius, part fruitcake and part exploiter of tax loopholes and public subsidies. And it raises the question: what (or where) is the real Elon Musk?

The answer, I suspect, lies in his mastery of the business of manufacturing complex products…

Read on

Finding time to write

A nice impressionistic piece about the day jobs that some writers have.

Here’s the construction worker on when he writes:

On breaks I write first drafts on my cellphone with my thumbs—sitting in the work truck or in the machine shop. At the end of the day when everybody else is fighting to get out of the parking lot, I write for twenty more minutes. It adds up. When I get home, I edit that day’s work on a laptop or retype it on my typewriter. Later I retype that back into the laptop again and then send it somewhere.

Makes me feel guilty if I have writer’s block, sitting in a comfortable, book-lined study.

What is Trump really worth?

Nice column by Jack Shafer:

What is Donald Trump really worth to a business?

He’s known for making lavish claims about what his “brand” is worth. Others have punctured his estimates as wildly inflated, especially since the reputational hits he took at the end of his presidency. But now we have a new kind of answer, thanks to investors. The Trump aura alone — at least to a media startup — appears to be worth a neat $1 billion.

That’s how much secret financiers are investing in Trump’s newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, which is going public by merging with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition. TMTG, as Bloomberg Opinion’s Timothy L. O’Brien and Matt Levine explain, has no products, no revenue, no cash flow, no known intellectual property, no big names attached and no “clear business plan,” only a wispy promise to build a new social media network (Truth Social) to take on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

And yet the company has excited traders enough to boost its current market value to more than $2 billion. You might think that this means the Trump brand is actually worth $2 billion, but you’d be wrong: The speculative run-up of the stock is a reaction to the $1 billion the Trump brand attracted, not to the Trump brand alone.

The company’s CEO is a guy called Nunes — a soon-to-retire Republican member of Congress who has degrees in agriculture science and lots of experience running his family’s dairy farm, but no tech background. How’s that for the CEO of a ‘media’ company! Somehow, I don’t think that the Fox News crowd are all that worried.

The key question — as Shafer says — is who’s put up the money. Who are these ‘investors’? The Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund? Some Russian oligarchs? The Koch brothers? Since Trump will run for president in 2024 it’ll be important to know who will have him on the hook. And for what?

It could be, of course, that said ‘investors’ have simply been had: that their investments will really just fund Trump’s debts and campaign costs for 2024.

My commonplace booklet

• Byline TV looks interesting.

• Pondering the current obsession with the ’metaverse’ idea I was suddenly reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams (of blessed memory): “There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” (Thanks to Quentin for reminding me.)

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Ike and LBJ

I love this picture.

Quote of the Day

”More knowledge of a man’s real character can be gained by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.”

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Christmas Time Is Here

Link

On balance, I thought it might be a good idea to play this before Christmas is cancelled again!

Long Read of the Day

What Google’s trending searches say about America in 2021

One of the most sobering books I’ve read is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies: What the Internet can tell us about who we really are. He’s a data scientist who worked for a time at Google, where he learned that people’s Internet searches reveal things about them that they would never, ever entrust to another human being.

Which explains why at this time of the year there’s a good deal of interest in trying to extract meaning from records of what people have searched for most in the preceding twelve months. This piece on Vox by Rani Molla is the first compendium I’ve seen so far.

Each year, Google puts out lists of top trending searches in the United States, giving readers a tantalizing view into America’s collective id.

Rather than simply show what people searched for the most, these lists highlight the words and phrases people are searching for this year that they weren’t the year before. In effect, these searches speak to our latest fears, desires, and questions — the things we were too embarrassed to ask anyone but Google.

As Google data editor Simon Rogers put it to me last year, “You’re never as honest as you are with your search engine. You get a sense of what people genuinely care about and genuinely want to know — and not just how they’re presenting themselves to the rest of the world.”

The lists are, as you’d expect, all over the place, but Molla notes a few common themes that rose to the top, “offering a glimpse of what it was really like to be an American in 2021”.

Do read the whole thing.

Wikipedia (contd.)

My mini-rant about Wikipedia yesterday has sparked several interesting emails, for which many thanks. They prompted me to reflect on why I value it so much, and why I think it’s such an amazing phenomenon.

Two thinkers set me off on this track, many years ago. One was James Boyle, a great legal scholar who gave a lecture at my invitation in Cambridge on the significance of the public domain in a networked world. (James was one of the founders of Creative Commons, and his 2009 book —  The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind — is a masterful survey of the enclosure of the digital commons.) In his Cambridge lecture, he highlighted the improbability of a project like Wikipedia getting off the ground and prospering. Crudely paraphrased, his thought-experiment went roughly like this: “What, you mean anyone can write and edit entries? Anyone????? C’mon, give me a break”. This was the origin of the old joke about the project: that Wikipedia works really well in practice, just not in theory.

The second wake-up call (for me) came from Jonathan Zittrain’s book (also published in 2009), The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It. One of the most striking things about the book was the amount of attention he paid to the governance structures of Wikipedia — in particular the elaborate process of discussion that goes into editing entries, resolving arguments, the fact that the revision history of every entry is publicly available etc. Why did these people — all unpaid volunteers — create such an elaborate structure?

The answer of course is that they somehow intuited that we would be moving into the polarised world we now inhabit — where lies, propaganda, misinformation, etc. would become rife, and where people felt entitled not only to their own opinions but also their own facts. And in fact, if anyone’s interested in knowing how best to work within this social-media-fuelled maelstrom, then the Wikipedia methodology provides a useful way through it.

The big thing about Wikipedia, though, is that it’s the only surviving illustration of how the early promise of the Internet — that it could harness the collective IQ of humankind — might be realised. As I write, it’s the seventh most-visited site on the Web and the only non-commercial site in the top 100. In other words, it’s one of the wonders of our networked world.

Apple’s sweetheart deal with the Chinese state

An interesting story that broke in The Information this week says that Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, signed a secret $275 billion deal with China in 2016 to neutralise threats that would have hobbled its devices and services in the country.

According to the Guardian’s report,

The five-year agreement was made when Cook paid visits to China in 2016 to quash a host of regulatory action against the company, the report said, citing interviews and internal Apple documents.

Cook lobbied Chinese officials, who believed the company was not contributing enough to the local economy, and signed the agreement with a Chinese government agency, making concessions to Beijing and winning important legal exemptions, the report added.

Some of Apple’s investment in China would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the report said, citing the agreement.

The most interesting revelation, though, was this:

“Outside of the deal, Apple made other concessions with the Chinese government to keep business running. By early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping had directed Apple Maps to make the Diaoyu Islands, or Senkaku Islands, which China and Japan both claim to own, look big even when zoomed out; regulators said they’d refuse to approve the Apple Watch if Apple didn’t comply, according to internal documents viewed by The Information.”

When you sup with the Devil, best to use a long spoon. And don’t navigate using Apple Maps when travelling in that part of the globe?

I wonder what effect, if any, these revelations will have on the sainted Cook’s reputation.

My commonplace booklet

How to read canonical literature

Tyler Cowen is one of the most omnivorous readers I’ve come across. Someone asked him how he does it. Here’s the gist of his answer:

1. Assume from the beginning that you will need to read the work more than once, or at least read significant portions of the work more than once. Furthermore, these multiple readings should be done back-to-back (and also over many years, btw, after all this is the canonical). So your first reading should not in every way be super-careful, as you don’t yet know what to look for. Treat the first reading as a warm-up for the second reading to follow.

2. The first fifty pages very often should be read twice, in a single sitting if possible, even on your “first reading.”

3. Assemble three to five guides to the main book you are reading, or significant fairly general contributions to the secondary literature. Consult those works throughout, and imbibe an especially large dose of them between your first and second readings of the classic itself. But you shouldn’t necessarily read those books straight through, or finish them. They are to be pillaged for both conceptual structure and particular insights, not to be reified as books in their own right.

4. Always be asking yourself how the classic work you are reading is engaging with other classic works you might know or know of. Starting with the Bible, but not ending there.

5. Find people to talk to about the book.

He missed out the sixth and most important rule: arrange for the day to be redefined as 36 hours. Oh – and give up on sleep: it’s a waste of valuable reading time.

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Quote of the Day

“Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

A phenomenal musician who lights up every venue she plays.

Long Read of the Day

Lina Khan’s Battle to Rein in Big Tech

Classic New Yorker profile by Sheelah Kolhatkar of one of the most interesting young women in America, who is now Chair of the FTC. If you don’t know about Khan, then this is a good place to start.

After years spent publishing research about how a more just world could be achieved through a sweeping reimagining of anti-monopoly laws, Khan now has a much more difficult task: testing her theories—in an arena of lobbyists, partisan division, and the federal court system—as one of the most powerful regulators of American business. “There’s no doubt that the latitude one has as a scholar, critiquing certain approaches, is very different from being in the position of actually executing,” Khan told me. But she added that she intends to steer the agency to choose consequential cases, with less emphasis on the outcomes, and to generally be more proactive. “Even in cases where you’re not going to have a slam-dunk theory or a slam-dunk case, or there’s risk involved, what do you do?” she said. “Do you turn away? Or do you think that these are moments when we need to stand strong and move forward? I think for those types of questions we’re certainly at a moment where we take the latter path.

“There’s a growing recognition that the way our economy has been structured has not always been to serve people,” Khan went on. “Frankly, I think this is a generational issue as well.” She noted that coming of age during the financial crisis had helped people understand that the way the economy functions is not just the result of metaphysical forces. “It’s very concrete policy and legal choices that are made, that determine these outcomes,” she said. “This is a really historic moment, and we’re trying to do everything we can to meet it.”

The inner lives of cats: what our feline friends really think about hugs, happiness and humans

Nice piece by Sirin Kale on a question that perplexes most cat-owners: what does their pet think of them? (My own answer: not much.)

Despite the fact that cats are the most common pet in UK households after dogs, we know relatively little about them. This, says Dr Carlo Siracusa of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, “is partly due to practical problems.”

Dogs are easy to study: you can take them to a lab and they will be content. But cats are intensely territorial creatures. “The behaviour of a cat is so modified by its environment that if you move it to a laboratory,” says Siracusa, “what you’ll see is not really reflective of what the normal behaviour of the cat is.”

But there is another reason that cats are under-researched. “There’s a stigma,” says Siracusa. Cats have been unfairly maligned through much of human history. In the middle ages, cats were thought of as the companions of witches, and sometimes tortured and burned. “They have been stigmatised as evil because they are thought to be amoral,” says the philosopher and writer John Gray, author of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. “Which in a sense, cats are – they just want to follow their own nature.”

Thanks to Rob for spotting it.

Footnote: John Gray’s book on the subject of cats is lovely, btw. It opens with a story about a philosopher friend who believed that he had trained his cat to be a vegan. (He omitted to notice that his cat went out every night.)

This philosopher, Gray writes,

only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than trying to teach his cat, he would have been wiser if he had tried learning from it. Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.”

Amen.

Chart of the Day

Useful way of thinking about a topic that is usually smothered in vagueness (not to say vacuity). It comes from a new report by the Reuters Institute looking at the trade-offs news organisations navigate when trying to increase trust in news. It’s the fourth instalment from the Institute’s ‘Trust in News’ Project and is based on our conversations with 54 journalists and newsroom managers in Brazil, India, the UK and the US.

It’s an interesting and worrying report — worth reading in full if you work in media. The nub of the problem, unsurprisingly, is that in an industry which is fighting for its life (in the sense of economic viability) ‘trust’ or trustworthiness may come down the list of priorities.

Here are some of the authors’ reflections on what they found.

What we find here is nuanced. On the one hand, these conversations reveal a great deal of pessimism and concern about the impact of external forces on news organisations’ abilities to forge trusting relationships with their audiences. Most focused on what they see as the highly corrosive impact of negative criticism on digital platforms, which they increasingly depend on to broaden their reach, but which also serve to amplify bad-faith criticism about independent reporting and the institution of journalism more generally. Many also expressed grave concern about the level of vitriol and toxicity in these spaces, some of it egged on by political leaders with their own reasons for antagonising the press.

Some of these concerns are well-supported by academic research, especially the important role played by elite cues, polarisation, and the distance audiences may feel from the professional practices of journalism. Others centre on very real risks that have yet to be the subject of much academic investigation. However, it is important to recognise that while many journalists may feel relatively powerless to move the needle on trust (and much academic research suggests external factors are more important for trust in news than the things individual journalists or news organisations have control over), much of the public sees journalism and news media as powerful institutions (see, for example, Palmer 2017) and are unlikely to accept that the root of the problem lies elsewhere, or that they have few options at their disposal. Thus, giving up on building trust may look like a lack of real interest in the issue.

Supporting Wikipedia

I use Wikipedia a lot, and always have. And I donate to it regularly. If, like me, you write newspaper columns, a link to the relevant Wikipedia entry often frees one from having to break the narrative by pausing to explain something in detail. Regular financial donations are a way of expressing my appreciation for using it as a resource.

In the early days, though, some people — especially academics — were very sniffy about it. I remember an occasion when the Vice-Chancellor of an ancient university made a dismissive comment about Wikipedia and then was astonished to find a very distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society interrupting her to say that the Wikipedia pages on his arcane speciality were the most accurate and up to date reference on the subject. Why? Because he had written them. Result: one very embarrassed Vice-Chancellor.

As time went on, I noticed that people tended to have two kinds of views about it — (a) dismissive because they had found a glaring error in a page; or (b) gushing with praise. I developed a strategy for dealing with both types.

For (a), the dialogue would go something like this.

Me: “So you’ve found a glaring error on a subject you know about?”

Critic: “Yes. Elementary mistake”.

Me: “So why haven’t you corrected it?”

Critic: Flustered (sometimes), irritated (often), defensive (much too busy)

For (b), things were generally simpler.

Me: “I’m glad you think highly of Wikipedia”.

Gusher: “Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Me: “So when did you last make a donation to ensure that it keeps going?”

Gusher: Er…

Correction

The link to Colin Dickey’s essay on Mrs Galloway the other day was faulty. The correct link is: https://lithub.com/the-work-of-living-goes-on-rereading-mrs-dalloway-during-an-endless-pandemic/

Apologies for the error.

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