Quote of the Day

Everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement”

• La Rochefoucauld

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Nightingale chorus | Solomon

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Long Read of the Day

 The Kystriksveien: Earth’s most beautiful road trip?

Even if you love (as I do) long drives, then this road — all 640km of it — might give one pause. My worry would be whether there would be EV charging points all the way.

Norway’s coastal road from the town of Stiklestad to the Arctic city of Bodø is a 670km journey between two very different worlds. It’s also one of the most beautiful road trips on the planet.

At one end is the quiet sophistication of central Norway, with its perfectly manicured meadows and oxblood-red wooden cabins. At the other is the spare, serene beauty of the north: a world of glaciers, ice-bound mountains and empty, far horizons. Connecting the two, the Kystriksveien – a route also known as the Coastal Way or Fv17 – charts a sinuous path along the coast, bucking and weaving along rugged contours all the way to the Arctic.

The Scandinavian nation is blessed with one of the most beautiful yet difficult stretches of coast in Europe. Seeming to wrap itself around the country like a protective shield from the freezing Arctic, Norway’s coastline appears to have shattered under the strain, riven as it is with islands and fjords cutting deep fissures inland. Along such a coast, it seems impossible that a road should exist here at all. In short, it seems like a miracle.

From the outset, Norway has been very sensible about EVs. So maybe we could do it. Hmmm…

How Not to Spent It

The Financial Times is, IMO, one of the world’s great newspapers. I’m lucky enough to have a digital subscription, and so read it every weekday online. But at the weekend I buy the weekend edition, which in a way is a different paper, edited by a different editor from the daily. Most weekends, it’s an absorbing read, with terrific book reviews, good interviews and a stable of excellent columnists like Simon Kuper, John Gapper and Gillian Tett.

The only problem with this weekend edition is that it comes with a large format glossy magazine with the insolent title “How To Spend It”, which is basically aimed at people who are so rich that shopping has become boring. It features high-end fashion photography of waifs wearing ‘clothes’ (see pic above) with no price tag attached, travel guides to hotels where a room costs more than most people’s annual rent, Swiss watches (i.e. male jewellery) costing half the GNP of smaller African republics, and so on. It has also, in the past, thrown in interesting articles about the market for superyachts and other billionaire indulgences.

Its target audience seems to be those bored, expensive dames you find wandering round Bond Street jewellers or outside Harrods supervising loading of the proceeds of their retail therapy into the Maybach. How To Spend It is, in other words, a pain in the ass. It’s as if it’s designed to rub the reader’s face in the rampant inequality of our neoliberal world. But I put up with it (though sending it straight to the recycling bin) because I assume it’s insanely profitable and therefore subsidises the high-quality journalism that I value in the rest of the paper.

But this weekend, something seemed to change. The wealth-flaunting banner — HOW TO SPEND IT — had disappeared, replaced by ‘HTSI’ in the top left-hand corner.

Inside, there’s a touching little message from the mag’s editor.

“Over the course of our 28-year existence,” she burbles,

“the title How To Spend It has always been one we used with pride. The magazine has tried to promote a slightly escapist lifestyle and embodied, I hope, the best ways in which to spend one’s time. We have always encouraged readers to interpret the ‘spend’ as less transactional in its meaning.”

But, she continues,

”It is clear that the irony with which the title was first conceived has sometimes failed to land. Times have also changed: we have lived through two years of a global health catastrophe. We are in the midst of a cost of living crisis. We have been publishing issue after issue against the backdrop of war in Ukraine. We want everyone to feel that the magazine offers something life-affirming, enriching and diverting. And so we have evolved.”

As an example of Grade-A corporate cant, this is hard to beat. The “irony” of the magazine’s title somehow “failed to land”. The publication aspired to embody “the best ways to spend one’s time” which usually meant the optimum way to expend eye-watering sums on conspicuous, Gilded Age consumption. “We” have apparently “lived through two years of a global health catastrophe.”

Hang on: who’s the ‘we’ here? Compared with average citizens, there’s little evidence that the said catastrophe unduly affected the super-rich — although it may sometimes have grounded their Gulfstream jets.

So how does the first edition of this rebranded glossy measure up to the lofty ambitions of its editor?

First up is a feature on one Timothy Taylor, a London-based gallery owner. His Place that Means a Lot to Me is “Basil’s Bar on Mustique, a spectacular island in the Caribbean.” Where Princess Margaret used to hang out, if memory serves me right.

The Best Gift he’s ever received is

“A personalised wallet from Anya Hindmarch. My wife [Lady Helen Taylor] gave me this wallet, in which she inscribed the words, in her own handwriting, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours’”.

The indulgence that he could “never forgo” is Bordeaux and Burgundy wine, “a spectacular selection of which Corney & Barrow holds for me”.

A casual inspection of Corney & Barrow’s fine wine list reveals that a bottle of 2010 Chateau Mouton-Rochschild will set you back a cool £3,350.

You get the idea.

I’ll continue to buy the Weekend FT — and our recycling bin will continue to benefit from HTSI.

My commonplace booklet

Want to see something really stupid?

Try this ad for Rolls-Royce’s new SUV.

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Peak viewing time

The view from the top of the Connor Pass in Kerry.

Quote of the Day

”If this were played upon a stage now
I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Comes to mind every time I look at the current UK government.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | I Can’t Get No Satisfaction | Glastonbury 2013

Link

Extraordinary moment. But Jagger sounded off-key at the beginning. Maybe the significance of the moment got to him? Most of my kids (and one grandson) were there that night.

Long Read of the Day

An Open Letter to Congress on Crypto scamming

One of the most curious events in Western history was the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, the period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, with the major acceleration starting in 1634 and then dramatically collapsing in February 1637. We think of it now as the first recorded speculative bubble in history.

But here’s the strange thing: we are now living through the same kind of madness — the ‘crypto’ bubble: a speculative mania that has been gripping millions of people (some of whom have lost their savings) who have been fooled into investing in illusory assets that they do not understand and that currently lie beyond the regulatory reach of the state. Worse, this frenzy is being fuelled not just by shysters on the make but also by a number of powerful Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

‘Crypto’ is a portmanteau term to cover a multitude of things — from cryptography (a legitimate and powerful way of protecting information and communications), cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technology called ‘Blockchain’, virtual assets called Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) and something called Web3 which is a buzzword straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

For me the most astonishing about this mania is how apparently rational people fall for it — and how, once they have fallen, they double down on insisting that it is a real thing, not to mention ‘the future’. They fear (rightly) that the slightest whisper of doubt or criticism will puncture the bubble and lead to the devaluation of the virtual assets on which they have pinned their hopes. In that way, the current frenzy bears a distinct resemblance to the religious cults which have gripped deluded followers through the centuries.

All of which makes this open letter from a number of experts to Congress such a welcome development.

This is how it opens:

We are 26 computer scientists, software engineers, and technologists who have spent decades working in these fields producing innovative and effective products for a variety of applications in the fields of database technology, open-source software, cryptography, and financial technology applications.

Today, we write to you urging you to take a critical, skeptical approach toward industry claims that crypto-assets (sometimes called cryptocurrencies, crypto tokens, or web3) are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good. We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.

We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…

Do read the whole thing. And if you’d like to know more, head over to Molly White’s wonderful blog. She’s been tracking the evolution of this latter-day tulip mania for quite a while. And, while you’re at it, read Cory Doctorow’s essay on some of the latest crypto scams.

Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process

Neat blog post by Betty Flowers (a professor of English who is also Director of the LBJ Presidential Library), providing some astute advice for anyone who’s ever struggled to write something coherent. Which is most of us.

Thanks to Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) for pointing to it.

My commonplace booklet

Who said sheepdogs can’t have fun?

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Pieces of Cake

Seen in Waitrose yesterday.

Quote of the Day

Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has this lovely disclaimer on his website.

READ CAREFULLY

By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Alto Rhapsody Op. 53: III | Adagio | Kathleen Ferrier

Link

My favourite recording of this wonderful work, despite the antique audio quality.

Long Read of the Day

The cult of Winston Churchill

A bracing review by Priyamvada Gopal of Tariq Ali’s new biography of Winston Churchill.

Nobody’s perfect, indeed, but not everyone had the power to make such a worldview consequential for the lives of millions of people across the globe, often lethally so. At the heart of Ali’s account is this historical reality, one that is evaded in Britain today in favour of a burnished and bullish mythology in which both Churchill and his beloved British Empire emerge with untarnished courage and virtue. The “cult of Churchill” is a full-blown devotional practice, where anyone who demurs is met at the very least with shock and, more probably, tabloid denunciation. “Mythic Churchill,” as some historians have recently argued, has become a “serious fact of modern life” in Britain, “a constant point of reference in political discussion and popular culture,” and, one might add, in the culture wars constantly fomented by politicians.

For Ali, this fact impinges seriously on our ability to reckon clearly with Britain’s past. The cult itself, however, is of relatively recent vintage, assuming its quasi-religious nature during the Falklands conflict in 1982. One of the more astonishingly successful legacies of this propaganda exercise is the ongoing presentation of Churchill, a man of the hard right by any measure, as a figure who transcends political partisanship. This handy fudge enables the presentation of elite Conservative projects as above party politics. No matter how damaging the policy, we are always “all in it together.”

The truth, Ali argues, is that Churchill in his own time was far from a unifying figure; he was primarily interested in only two things: “glorifying colonial atrocities abroad” and “suppressing working-class revolts at home.” Today the British media celebrates his imperialism while quietly overlooking his domestic record.

An interesting read. Churchill was never popular in Ireland, for obvious reasons.

Hatpin through the brain

Jonathan Meades’s LRB review of Tina Brown’s new book about the British Royal family is a must-read, especially in this celebratory week. He’s moderately appreciative of the book, though he acutely observes that it inadvertently reveals that its author, who departed these shores for New York 40 years ago, hasn’t quite appreciated the way the country and its people have changed while she was away.

But his real target is ‘The Firm’, as the royals are known in their own as well as media parlance. And, believe me, Meades takes no prisoners. On balance, one feels that having one’s throat cut would be marginally less upsetting than being skewered by him.

One thing in particular struck me: he gets Princess Di absolutely right. Here’s the money quote:

The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner hairdresser, just as Kate Middleton had to put up with some crass digs about her taste in interiors being ‘very Buckinghamshire’ and her mother’s alleged failure to adhere to Alan Ross’s snobs’ charter on U and non-U. The Middletons have been further mocked for having commissioned a coat of arms. Certain patterns of behaviour recur. With a sure populist instinct Diana gave the people what she wanted to give them in controlled doses, achieving a sort of privacy that wasn’t notably private. She was manipulative, adroit and impressively active in determining how she was to be perceived. She got her retaliation in first. She taunted her putative tormentors. She used them to her advantage, whatever that was. It might be seeing off the rugby player Will Carling, a lover she was bored by. Carling’s friend Gary Lineker warned him: ‘That woman is trouble.’ The element of play in her dealings was perhaps an end in itself. She appreciated her power. She outmanoeuvred Charles – who, as Brown puts it, ‘spun furiously; he was just less good at it.’

This really rang a bell with me. I once observed Diana close up, completely by accident. I was the Observer’s TV critic at the time. Two of the country’s leading playwrights had asked me if they could pick my brains about a topic that then interested them, and about which I was something of an expert. I named my price: lunch at the Ivy, the London restaurant that serves as the posh canteen for the glitterati.

On the appointed day I turned up to find the pair already seated at our table, pens and notebooks at the ready. They then quizzed me for an enjoyable hour and a half. During all of that time, neither noticed that at the table next to us was Diana, who was lunching quietly with a woman friend. So, from time to time, while my interviewers were scribbling, I had a chance to observe her closely. The key thing was that I could see her in profile — which was a revelation, given that most photographs show her face-on, big eyes and all. But in profile, her face looked unexpectedly angular. And, viewed from that perspective, she looked like a tough cookie. And my thought was: Christ! do the Windsors (neé Saxe-Coburg-Gothas) know what they’ve taken on?

We now know that they didn’t.

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Jubilee Souvenir

From the current Private Eye.

Quote of the Day

”Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ladyva | Boogie Woogie Stomp

Link

Well, it’s one way of getting people out of bed in the morning.

Long Read of the Day

 Digital Technology Demands A New Political Philosophy

Good essay in Noema magazine by Jamie Susskind (whose forthcoming book, The Digital Republic, I’m reading at the moment). In it he argues that we need an intellectual framework for thinking about tech power, and that republican ideas (which have nothing to do with the Republican party in the US, by the way) are needed.

But, he asks,

where are the digital republicans? To be a republican is to regard the central problem of politics as the concentration of unaccountable power and to regard the primary purpose of law as the reduction of that unaccountability. For the republican, the challenge presented by digital technology isn’t Musk or Zuckerberg; it’s the idea that people who command technologies will gain a degree of command of society, too.

What I liked about the essay (and like even more about the book) is his insight that the problem of tech power needs to be conceptualised at a higher level than our current preoccupations. This is because the unaccountable power that tech giants wield poses an existential threat for democracy itself. Such a challenge has to be addressed at the level of the future of democracy rather than in detailed arguments about particular regulatory instruments. The question is not how democratic institutions can be reshaped to accommodate digital power, but what democracies will allow these corporations to do — and what they will forbid.

Brandeis, privacy and Roe v. Wade

Zeynep Tufecki, one of the wonders of the networked world, has got tenure at Columbia, which is richly deserved. She was also recently a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Last month, she had an interesting OpEd in the NYT which, among other things, explores how digital tech will, in due course, be used to track and harass women seeking abortions in the US.

This passage caught my eye:

Now the Supreme Court seems poised to rule that there is no constitutional protection for the right to abortion. Surveillance made possible by minimally-regulated digital technologies could help law enforcement or even vigilantes track down women who might seek abortions and medical providers who perform them in places where it would become criminalized. Women are urging one another to delete phone apps like period trackers that can indicate they are pregnant.

But frantic individual efforts to swat away digital intrusions will do too little. What’s needed, for all Americans, is a full legal and political reckoning with the reckless manner in which digital technology has been allowed to invade our lives. The collection, use and manipulation of electronic data must finally be regulated and severely limited. Only then can we comfortably enjoy all the good that can come from these technologies.

But when I got to the penultimate sentence (“… must finally be regulated and severely limited”) I had the same sinking feeling that I get when reading the exhortations about gun control that regularly follow mass shootings. It’s not going to happen because tolerating unconscionable abuses is a systemic feature, not a bug, of democracy, American style.

Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

The consolations of blogging

The great thing about having a blog is that your readers know more than you do. They spot errors quickly but (unlike what happens in social media) they point them out gently. And sometimes they give the blogger the (unwarranted) benefit of the doubt.

When, for example, I recently referred to the fictional portrayal of Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the film The Devil Wears Prada, I inadvertently typed “Pravda”. Generous readers interpreted this careless typo as a brilliant satirical move!

Thus Nick masters wrote,

Lol John. The Devil Wears Pravda may be the best typo in history – the tell-all story of one lowly fashion assistant surviving a Russian Wintour.

And Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), observed

I LOVE ’The Devil Wears Pravda’! Immediately suggests an image of Anna Wintour in a Tristan Tzara cabaret c 1922, entirely outfitted in propaganda…

At which point I began to see a promising new career for me as a typo comedian who might go down in history much like the hapless William Spooner, the Warden of New College, Oxford. He was the chap who allegedly berated one student for having “tasted a whole worm” and another for having “hissed all my mystery lectures” and being “caught fighting a liar in the quad.”

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