An evening sky

Quote of the Day

”Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”

• Jean-Luc Godard

It’s baloney, of course, but it makes a good sound-bite.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Wagner | Siegfried Idyll

Link

I know it’s long, but it’s beautiful. Just let it run while you do other stuff. It was a birthday present to Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869.

Long Read of the Day

Infirmity

Lovely essay by Venkatesh Rao on what he’s learnt about ageing from his elderly cat.

My 18-year old cat (around 80-100 in human years) is teaching me about infirmity and providing a sneak preview of my own future. He can no longer run but he can sort of hurry-walk. He can no longer jump, but he can just about manage to clamber up on the couch with a sort of still-elegant half-bound. But he prefers a ramp or stairs even for that.

And his mobility has a precarious quality to it. He can walk in a straight line, and make slow turns, but a slight unexpected sideways bump will topple him. And from some positions, such as being on his side on a slight slope, he has trouble getting up again. The days when he could stumble from a height and twist and turn in the air to land on his feet are long gone.

This quality of precarious nominality extends to all his life processes. Any change to his routine upsets him, and he has trouble coping and recovering. But he seems to have developed a curious kind of patience — sometimes grumpy, sometimes placid — for the coping and recovering too. There is a gentle, self-aware insistence on choosing life every day, despite the growing costs…

It’s a wise, reflective, thought-provoking essay which made me reflect on what I’ve been discovering about our last remaining cat — who is the same age as Rao’s. See below.

On not going quietly into that goodnight…

This is Tilly, who is now 18 — and therefore even older than me. Her sister (or perhaps I should say litter-mate), Zoombini died  almost a year ago and since then she has become more needy (which, given that she and her sister were inseparable, is understandable); but sometimes she is now also ostentatiously imperious. She’s in pretty good physical shape for her age, though, like me, she suffers from arthritis — so one of the standard comic routines in our household is watching her and me descending the stairs in slowly cautious lock-step.

My hunch is that she is less philosophical about ageing than is Mr Rao’s cat. Tilly sounds more like a cantankerous elderly person who doesn’t like getting old and wants to make her displeasure plain to all and sundry, including the domestic staff of her luxurious retirement home.

My commonplace booklet

Jason Kottke is taking break. He’s been one of the nicest presences on the Web for years, but he’s currently not in great shape. He needs a break. Here’s how he puts it:

There’s a passenger ferry that goes from Cape Cod to Nantucket and there’s a stretch of time in the middle of the journey where you can’t see the mainland behind you and can’t yet see the island ahead — you’re just out in the open water. That’s what I need, to be in that middle part — to forget about what I’ve been doing here for so many years without having to think about where I’m going in the future. I need open water and 5-6 months feels like the right amount of time to find it.

Here’s what Mozart would wish for him: Soave sia il vento

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Caterpillar pillar

Walking on a local footpath on Saturday I suddenly found myself entangled in a long — and virtually invisible — thread that had clearly been woven by a spider. Further investigation revealed another such thread, extending all the way from a bush above my head to the ground. And up this thread caterpillars were making their way upwards. At the lower end of the thread, however, there was what can only be described as a traffic jam. So I set my Summilux lens to its ‘Macro’ setting and took this photograph.

And as I did so I suddenly understood why the Blue Tits in our nest box are having no difficulty feeding their youngsters!

Quote of the Day

”I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

• Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Always stops me in my tracks.

Long Read of the Day

James Crabtree on Tom Cruise and America’s hegemonic anxiety

James has been to a preview of the new Tom Cruise Top Gun movie and written an absorbing piece about it in the Financial Times, where it’s behind the paywall. But he’s provided a pdf of it which you can get to here.

He starts by reflecting back to the original Top Gun movie, released in 1986 at the height of Reagan braggadocio and the faltering of the Soviet Union, reminding us that the original movie encapsulated the American arrogance of that moment.

But now, 36 years later…

as the US readies itself for a new era of military competition with China, it would be reasonable to expect Cruise’s sequel to brim with comparable, jingoistic self-confidence. Curiously, then, it turns out that Top Gun: Maverick is actually a rather anxious kind of blockbuster, filled with doubts about the durability of US power, and functioning in many ways as an elegy for relative American decline.”

And of course the movie has to walk interesting tightrope. The clear hegemonic rival to the US now is China — I mean to say, what other superpower’s aircraft would those fighter-pilot jocks be engaging in high-altitude combat?

But that’s an insight that dare not speak its name in Hollywood at the moment. Just think of that huge Chinese market…

Interestingly, as I read the piece, it also occurred to me that there’s a lesson here for Elon Musk, if he eventually goes through with his purchase of Twitter and begins to implement his promised robust encouragement of ‘free speech’ on the platform. After all, there’s a lot of anti-China ‘free’ speech on US social media. The Xi regime has no sense of humour in these matters.

And half of Musk’s Teslas are made in China.

Go figure. And thanks to James for the Long Read.

Facial recognition firms should take a look in the mirror

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems.

Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. It’s a US outfit that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service…

Read on

Just the job

Lovely blog post by my friend Quentin (Whom God Preserve):

A recent spam email in my inbox says:

I can set up a 15 minutes intro call with our Head of Customer Success if this email interests you.

Do people really have job titles as idiotic as “Head of Customer Success”? How would you live with yourself? Wouldn’t you cringe when anybody asked you your role? And what are you head of? A team of other little Customer Success people all the way down to Customer Success Trainees, perhaps? Would you hang your head in shame if one of your customers didn’t succeed at something?

Perhaps you could get away with never mentioning it, now that people don’t hand out business cards any more… until your company insisted on email signatures. Anyway, if you have that job title, I pity you… unless you asked for it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I rather like fun job titles. I remember a friend who had ‘Software Artisan’ on his business card, for example, and it raised a smile, while still actually saying something. The problem with the one in my email was the nagging worry that they were actually serious about it.

At one of my previous startups, I described myself as the CIO – the Chief Interim Officer. I wrote the software until I hired somebody better; did a bit of hardware until we got a proper hardware guy, sold things until we hired a sales team, and ran the company until I found a better CEO… at which point I’d hired myself out of a job and it was time to go and start a new company. That’s the peril, or joy, of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none…

Many years ago, in the early days of Apple, I knew a guy who was an expert production manager in a big British engineering company and he was headhunted by Apple to run their newish Irish subsidiary. When he joined he had business cards printed with his title: Production Director. After a few weeks in the job he flew to Apple HQ in California, where he was introduced to Steve Jobs. He handed Steve his new business card. Jobs scanned it, tore it up and handed back the shredded card. “In Apple you’re ‘management’”, he said, and walked away.

My commonplace booklet

Use Google maps to travel back in time (well no further back than 2007, when Streetview launched.)

New feature. Link

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Our new neighbours

We have a breeding pair of Canada geese in the village and they recently produced their latest brood — who started as tiny fluffballs and are already turning into lanky teenagers.

Quote of the Day

”He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.”

• William Hazlitt on Coleridge

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Maguires at Temple Bar Tradfest 2017

Link

A remarkable Irish family of musicians. This clip opens with an extraordinary long solo by Séan (then aged 11) on the bodhrán (pronounced ‘bow-rawn’).

Long Read of the Day

The Fiction That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Long, interesting essay by Morten Høi Jensen on the travails of those who write biographies of writers.

Sample:

On the whole, very little happens to writers in the practice of writing, even to those who, like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Mann, or Naguib Mahfouz lived in the thick of history, with all its peril and precariousness. Consider Mann: born four years after the unification of Germany, he lived through the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the postwar division of Germany. He was hurled into exile, stripped of his citizenship, put on an arrest warrant for Dachau, and surveilled by the FBI for alleged communist sympathies. In America, his social circle included Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. All of which amounts to an exceptionally fascinating life, but it tells us little or nothing about what finally matters: the fiction. In every account of his life, every time he sits down at his desk, whether in Munich, Küsnacht, Princeton, or Los Angeles, Mann disappears from view. We can reconstruct his punctilious routine, we can describe the texture of his desk, we can even name the various brands of cigar that he liked to smoke — but we cannot be present for the moment when the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain put pen to paper and chose this word over that word and refined this idea or that idea and generally brought his fictional world to life.

So, is literary biography just a form of higher gossip? Or a way of prolonging our intimacy with an author, as John Updike charitably put it? Read on for a sensitive exploration of the question.

The billable hour is a trap

Thoughtful column by Tim Harford.

Twenty years ago, M Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology, began an article with the observation that “Many lawyers are very unhappy, particularly lawyers who work in big firms. They may be rich, and getting even richer, but they are also miserable, or so they say.” Was this sad state of affairs caused by long hours or stressful work? Perhaps.

But Kaveny identified a more specific culprit: the “billable hour” — or even more precisely, the billable six-minute increment. By accounting for every moment of their working lives, and defining each moment as either “billable” or, regrettably, “non-billable”, lawyers were being tugged inexorably towards an unhappy, unhealthy attitude to the way they spent their time. Not all lawyers, of course. And not only lawyers, either.

Kaveny had several concerns. She noted that lawyers would focus on narrow short-term goals rather than broader or deeper values such as maintaining skills, mentoring young colleagues, or living up to the highest ideals of the law. She worried about the explicit commodification of time.

But perhaps more relevant today than ever is that the billable hour encourages us to view all time as fungible. If time is money, that’s as true for 6am on Christmas morning as it is for 2pm on Friday the 29th of April…

In my time I’ve met quite a few unhappy lawyers. And a Managing Partner at a big firm once told me that mid-40s ‘burnout’ of his colleagues was one of the problems he was increasingly having to deal with.

And then, of course, I fell to wondering how long it takes my subscribers to read this blog/newsletter, and how much they could be earning if they weren’t frivolously dodging work by being here!

My commonplace booklet

Julian Barnes never wrote an ugly sentence (IMHO). And this week I ran into yet another proof of that proposition — a review he wrote years ago of John Updike’s Golf Dreams. Since golf is the only game I’ve ever loved, I have a dog in this fight, but even so I loved both the book and Julian’s essay about it.

Here’s a sample:

You can see what enrages the non-golfist (a golfist, as opposed to a golfer, is anyone whose life has been, even once, long in the past, touched by the sudden beauties of the game). There’s the false, tailored landscape; the enormous pauses between brief and seemingly similar pieces of action; the wanky, transparently Freudian object of propelling a little ball long distances into a tiny hole (Updike has a poem about showering players whose ‘genitals/ hang dead as practice balls’); and the cloney nerdishness of the players. They wear terrible clothes; they seem to escape the general rule, clung to by sportists, that each sport throws up at least one player of high natural intelligence (we are thinking Gullit, not Gascoigne); and when they try to show ‘character’ – ie submit to marketing devices – they make fools of themselves. Look at Greg Norman: nice enough fellow by all accounts, but a complete wally when it comes to that ‘White Shark’ sobriquet and hat trim. A piece of hubris just made for Nick Faldo at Augusta.

Yet the game, as literary golfists keep trying to explain, has much to offer the non-golfist reader. There is the ambiguity of the setting, poised between rus in urbe and urbs in rure. There is the social mix of the players, wider than non-golfists imagine (though admittedly not that wide)…

And so it goes. Wonderful.

(I should perhaps explain that Julian preceded me as the television critic of the Observer, and that I once gave his first novel a — richly deserved — rave review.)

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Quote of the Day

”I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”

• Peter Ustinov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton with JJ Cale | Anyway The Wind Blows (Live From San Diego)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown

If you want to know why I am pessimistic about the world’s chances of avoiding climate catastrophe, then this extraordinary piece of reporting might explain why. The basic story is that the lure of colossal profits in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the IPCC’s view that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use will mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

Details of the projects being planned are not easily accessible but an investigation published in the Guardian shows:

• The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter.
• These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.
• The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.
• The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita.

It’s a long and depressing read. But a good piece of journalism.

An obsession with American politics pollutes British politics

Lovely Bagehot column in The Economist (which, sadly, might be behind the paywall) on the crackpot obsession that the UK’s governing and media elites (and to some extent its universities) have with the US.

Arguments over public policy are complicated by comparisons with America. Debates about the future of the National Health Service are polluted by the extreme and weird example across the ocean. The plethora of publicly funded health-care options in Europe is largely ignored. Liz Truss, now the foreign secretary, once campaigned against occupational licensing. It is a worthy aim, but the problem barely exists in Britain. In America a hairdresser faces at least 1,000 hours of training before being granted a licence; in Britain a fresh Kurdish arrival can set up shop and shear people for £8 ($10), communicating only with hand gestures. Worrying about occupational licensing in Britain is akin to an American senator having strident views on fox-hunting with hounds.

The same happens across the political spectrum. British campaigners alighted on a minimum-wage demand of £15 for little reason other than that American ones had demanded a $15 wage. “Abolish ice” (the American border force) became a slogan among left-wing Democrats calling for a less cruel immigration system; “Abolish the Home Office” was swiftly adopted in Britain. “Defund the Police” made little sense even in America, where law enforcement can call on enough munitions for a Latin American coup, let alone in Britain, where the police are largely unarmed. Fewer resources are the last thing the service needs.

It’s a great column, with a nice pay-off:

Comparisons between countries are healthy, but America is not the only benchmark. British politicians and policymakers can learn from nearer neighbours, too. France, a post-imperial power with the same level of population and wealth, offers an obvious analogue. Yet although the typical inhabitant of sw1 could regale someone with the life story of a 1950s planner from New York, he probably thinks Georges Pompidou was a painter. Bookshelf bingo needs new rules.

One of the consequences of this transatlantic obsession is this country’s apparent inability to learn anything from (continental) Europe, even though they do many things much better than we do here. Schools, for example. And technical education. And housebuilding. And pre-school care.

Truly, imperial afterglow is a very debilitating condition.

My commonplace booklet

Microsoft Excel on TikTok?

You think I’m joking? Well, see here

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Man’s best (and smarter) friend

This is one of my favourite photographs. One sweltering August afternoon we were driving along the seafront at Antibes on our way to Vence when we spotted this scene, and I stopped, grabbed my Leica and took a single shot. The dog’s owners were lying out under the blistering sun, cooking like sausages on a spit, while their clever mutt sat calmly in the shade watching them tenderly and wondering at the foolishness of humans.

Quote of the Day

“You have accused me of being a flatterer. It is true. I am a flatterer. I have found it useful. Everyone likes flattery; and when you I come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

• Benjamin Disraeli

It’s still the case apparently, at least according to Tina Brown’s new book.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Marley & The Wailers | No Woman, No Cry | Live at the Rainbow, 4th June 1977

Link

Beautiful, just beautiful, and with a lovely guitar accompaniment too.

Long Read of the Day

The significance of TikTok

If you’re puzzled by the TikTok phenomenon(and I guess most people over 30 are) then this startling blog post by Scott Galloway is unmissable. He has an enviable ability to get past the surface flashiness of online phenomena to the heart of the matter. Among other things, this piece explains why the tech giants are so freaked out by TikTok — and also why parents should perhaps be too.

For me, it’s also yet another reminder of how perceptive Herbert Simon was all those years ago.

Thanks to Pete for alerting me to it the moment it appeared.

About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors

Lovely piece by Cory Doctorow

Here’s a delicious story: CNN reports that Russian looters, collaborating with the Russian military, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment from a dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, collectively valued at $5,000,000. The equipment was shipped to Chechnya, but it will avail the thieves naught, because the John Deere dealership reached out over the internet and bricked these tractors, using an in-built kill-switch.

Since that story ran last week, I’ve lost track of the number of people who sent it to me. I can see why: it’s a perfect cyberpunk nugget: stolen tractors rendered inert by an over-the-air update, thwarting the bad guys. It could be the climax of a prescient novella in Asimov’s circa 1996.

But I’m here to tell you: this is not a feel-good story.

It isn’t — even though I laughed when I first read about it. The nub of it is that what John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere. Including in the USA. Which doesn’t amuse those farmers much, by all accounts.

But read Cory’s story to get the full effect.

My commonplace booklet

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

Russia permanently banned nearly 1,000 Americans, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, from entering the country in response to the United States’ support of Ukraine and its sanctions. It’s a largely symbolic move featuring a wide-ranging collection of Biden administration members, Republicans, tech executives, journalists, lawmakers who have died, regular U.S. citizens and even actor Morgan Freeman. One prominent name missing from the list: former president Donald Trump.

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The point of no return

Seen in the Orchard, Grantchester, years ago.

Quote of the Day

“Just as in London you are supposedly never more than 6ft away from a rat, in Mayfair you are rarely far from a serious human rights violation.”

• Caroline Knowles, in her book Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Miles Davis | So What

Link

Nine minutes of bliss.

Long Read of the Day

Permanent Pandemic

When Covid first arrived and it became clear that it would be an epoch-changing event, I fell to wondering what its historical forebears might be — events that, while dramatic enough at the time of their occurrence, led to consequences and changes of such magnitude that few people at the time could have foreseen.

I came up with two: the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914; and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US in 2001. The first led to a catastrophic war; the second to comprehensive surveillance in democratic societies as well as authoritarian ones. To that pair we now need to add Covid-19.

It’s the normalisation of the hitherto-unthinkable in states’ responses to the pandemic that has prompted this thought-provoking essay by Justin E. H. Smith in Harper’s. I think it’s outside the paywall, but I found that I had to access it using Firefox Focus because my regular browser (which does a lot of ad-blocking) triggered a “subscribe to read on” dialogue. Anyway, I hope you can get to it because it’s worth your time.

Here’s a sample:

Even tyrants would be foolish to pass down an iron law when a low-key change of norms would lead to the same results. And there is no question that changes of norms in Western countries since the beginning of the pandemic have given rise to a form of life plainly convergent with the Chinese model. Again, it might take more time to get there, and when we arrive, we might find that a subset of people are still enjoying themselves in a way they take to be an expression of freedom. But all this is spin, and what is occurring in both cases, the liberal-democratic and the overtly authoritarian alike, is the same: a transition to digitally and algorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.

What do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have in common? An unhealthy Twitter habit

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Why do billionaires tweet? Is it because they no longer have to earn a living? Or because they’re bored? Or because they spend a lot of time in, er, the smallest room in the mansion? Elon Musk, for example, currently the world’s richest fruitcake, has said that “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne”, adding that “it gives me solace”. This revelation motivated the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to do some calculations, leading to the conclusion that more than 8,000 tweets over 12.5 years suggests that, on average, Musk “poops” twice a day. (I make it 1.75 a day, but that’s just quibbling.)

So why does Musk tweet so much? One explanation is that he just can’t help himself. He has, after all, revealed that he has Asperger’s. “Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things,” he said on Saturday Night Live, “but that’s just how my brain works”. Understood. It may also be a partial explanation of his business success, because his mastery of SpaceX and Tesla suggests not only high intelligence but also an ability to focus intensely on exceedingly complex problems without being distracted by other considerations.

There are, however, darker interpretations…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

“The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”

Lovely poem by Clive James, from his Collected Verse 1958-2003.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

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No rolling

Dartington Hall, May 2021

Quote of the Day

”There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is the naked ape self named Homo sapiens.”

• Desmond Morris, in the Introduction to his best-seller, The Naked Ape.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi as you’ve never heard him played before

Link

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

Let them eat Pasta

Striking polemic by Jack Monroe, author of  A Girl Called Jack: 100 delicious budget recipes who also runs the Cooking on a Bootstrap blog. Her post is about aspects of the UK that many of us never see, or choose not to.

Stylistically, Monroe takes no prisoners.

The point is, it’s a whistle stop tour of penury and chaos on this hellscape island right now. Pensioners sitting in their winter coats with the heating turned off. Single mothers going to bed at 8pm when their children do, because there’s naff all to do in the cold and the dark on their own. (I did this ten years ago when my son was two, and it absolutely breaks my heart that a decade later, nothing has changed except the numbers of people living like this have increased exponentially.) Low-paid workers who stock the supermarket shelves relying on top-up benefits for their poverty wages in order to actually buy any of the produce that they’re handling, day in, day out. Teachers setting up food banks in their classrooms, and sneaking lunches to the children in their care. A mother in Hackney living in hazardous, mouldy, collapsing accommodation with her children for almost three years after her upstairs neighbours flat poured water through her ceiling, basically being told to shut up and put up with it. Nurses skipping meals to feed their kids. If you’re not already painting your placard and preparing to chain yourself to the railings outside Number 10 Downing Street – provided you can afford the train fare and some decent waterproofs and a bobble hat and to miss a couple of days off work – if you aren’t raging into the small hours of the morning at the flagrant injustice of Partygate superimposed on the backdrop of the food bank queues; if you aren’t reminding every mealy-mouthed Minister who bleats about ‘green shoots of economic recovery’ that those green shoots are fertilised by the bodies of the thousands who have lost their lives after cuts and failures and deliberate cruelty by the Department of Work and Pensions, what will it take to turn this stinking failure of a rotten ship around? Powered by the fumes of needless austerity ideology, the Titanic of our times, with the working classes held below deck to drown as the electorate drink taxpayer-funded champagne and dance with the taxpayer-funded band and laugh and laugh and laugh about it all, and ensure their taxpayer-funded £60k a year vanity photographer is on hand to capture their best angles at all times.

I get it, it’s exhausting. This shit-by-degrees, the chipping away at the threads of what was once a halfway decent social safety net. The cold, the hopelessness, the hunger, the shame, the gaslighting, the lies, the ‘compassionate Conservatism’ that’s anything but, the stealthy shift of responsibility from the Government to the voluntary sector to try to catch people as they fall, the sugarcoated ‘neighbourhood collection points’ in the supermarkets that their own staff eye up at the end of their shift, wondering which of the donated goods will end up in their food bank parcel that week.

Meanwhile, the supermarkets boast record profits for their shareholders; profits that would eclipse the top-up benefits their staff need to supplement their poverty-line wages. Read that again: the supermarkets could increase the hourly pay of every single member of staff to a baseline that would mean they wouldn’t need to apply for supplementary support, and they would STILL turn over millions of pounds in profit for their own pockets. But what should we expect, when the head of Tesco, John Allan, bleats that £2,500,000,000 just isn’t enough for him. Oh, diddums.

She really has it in for a Tory supporter called Kevin Edger who hit out at a report from BBC Panorama about a nurse who said she sometimes skips meals so she has enough to feed her three children. He tweeted in response: “Yet you can buy a big bag of dried pasta, that would feed a family, for about £0.50… “If you shop and cook properly, you can eat healthy meals really cheaply. I would love to see how she spends her salary…”

Here’s Monroe’s riposte:

A 500g bag of budget pasta is, as we established, 29p. That’s 5 meals there of 100g of plain pasta, with no butter, no salt, no sauce, and no nutrition, and a whole 147 calories per gruesome meal. That’s only 441 calories per day, but hey, it’s not as though nursing is a physically demanding job that requires you to be on your feet all day every day and night, working shifts, is it? (Note, this is sarcasm. My mother was a nurse.) Operating at a calorie intake lower than half that of the guidelines for Auschwitz prisoners is apparently perfectly sustainable according to the Magic Pasta Brigade. So I have a challenge for them all. Walk to your local Asda or Tesco and pick up three packets of Magic Pasta for just under a quid. That’s 15 meals, apparently. Eat nothing but 3 meals each consisting of 100g of plain pasta for five days straight. Nothing else. No salt in the cooking water. No butter. No oil. No pepper. No sauces. No proteins. No vegetables or fruits. No snacks. No Mcdonalds. No wine. No other meals. Nothing in the storecupboard. No help. No cheating. No tea. No coffee. No squash. No energy drinks. Just five straight days of this Magic Pasta that you all trumpet as the answer to everything. And come back to me five days later, when you’re skinnier but somehow also horribly bloated, when you’re exhausted, when your brain is foggy from the lack of calories and nutrition, and your sleep is all over the place, and you’re going to bed earlier and waking up starving and shattered to your bones, when your skin is breaking out in spots, and you can’t seem to stay warm, and your mental health has taken an absolute nosedive because of the monotony of your pitiful existence and the lack of variation, flavour, texture, social eating opportunities, and any ounce of joy that you had five days previously feels like a distant fever dream and you haven’t had a decent shit in what feels like forever.

You get the picture. This Edgar guy’s Instagram account says it all.

Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times

Lovely rant by Amber A’Lee Frost in, of all places, the Columbia Journalism Review.

Here’s how it opens:

very morning that I’m not hungover, I wake up around 8am, because that is when my two cats start howling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, and walk barefoot and unwashed (mug in hand) through my apartment building’s common hallway to the front door, where I pick up my New York Times and my Financial Times.

I then walk back to my apartment, look at the front page of the New York Times for approximately five to eight seconds, and throw the whole thing in the garbage with contempt. I drink my coffee and proceed to read the entirety of the Financial Times, excluding the particularly dense bits of the Companies & Markets section. If it’s the weekend edition, I even read most of House & Home, whose editors seem to have an incredibly generous definition of “real estate,” making room for topics like homelessness and wildlife conservation. I take care to read the kidding-not-kidding op-eds from wealthy people demanding that children be banned from restaurants and art museums.

Funny to see a Marxist preferring the Pink bible of capitalism to the Grey Lady. As it happens, I agree with her.

Worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

The Bertrand Russell essay “In praise of idleness” prompted some nice emails. Pascal Desmond sent an excerpt from an essay by Derek Mahon on the Irish poet Louis MacNeice — “MacNeice, the war and the BBC”.

His attitude to radio work underwent a subtle change during the later 1950s. This was related to important changes within the BBC itself, where administrative persons, and other, more disciplined departments, looked with increasing disfavour on Features, which began to be seen as something of a spoilt child. Time-and-motion experts were called in and presented everyone with a questionnaire. When the sardine man came to collect MacNeice’s he found that the poet, who liked to sit with his feet on his desk and gaze out the window, had left several blank spaces. What, inquired the sardine man, were you doing in the blank spaces? “Thinking”, replied MacNeice laconically.

As UK universities became more obsessed with neoliberal metrics, many of us became increasingly irritated by demands that we accounted for our every waking moment, rather as if we were lawyers counting billable hours. I used to leave most of my returns blank, not least because I did a lot of my thinking while driving to and from work, or while washing up or just while staring into space.

But then, of course, I had tenure. Younger academics didn’t.

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