Zombie Capitalism

In an airport shopping mall.

Quote of the Day

“Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”

• Dorothy Parker, discussing a job with a prospective employer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Rondo in B-Flat Major, K. 269 | Itzhak Perlman and the Berliner Phil

Link

Long Read of the Day

How mainstream journalism is failing American democracy

I’ve written before about how infuriating it is to see the accomplishments of the Biden administration consistently downplayed (and sometimes ignored) by US journalism, especially of the elite kind. Every fart of Trump and his crowd is earnestly recorded for posterity. Posh journalists go on anthropological expeditions into the lowlands of working-class Trumpism in order earnestly to ascertain what’s bugging these strange natives. And so on. But nobody goes to ‘Biden country’, wherever that is, on lavish expenses. The result is an increasingly skewed view of what’s going on the country as a whole, and the implicit validation of a myth of the inevitability of a Trump victory.

And while it looks as though he certainly will be the GOP candidate in 2024, that doesn’t mean he will win the election. But if he does indeed lose again, that media-burnished myth will serve to fuel another ’stolen election’ myth and its ensuing chaos.

As it happens, James Fallows is likewise pissed off with American journalism. (Indeed he’s been pissed off for a long time — ever since his book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy came out in 1996.)

This recent blog post of his expands some of these concerns more eloquently than I could and is consequently worth your time.

And while we’re at it, have a look too at Will Bunch’s column in The Philadelphia Inquirer on US media coverage of Trump’s most recent indictment.

It was a remarkable night of imagery over substance, yet there was little discussion of why this accused felon was getting a phalanx of dozens of motorcycle cops, comprising police who are drawn to Trump’s authoritarian bluster like moths to the light. Trump’s glowering mug shot instantly became the most talked about picture in American history — yet not one pundit was able to explain why tens of millions of everyday voters are so eager to return to the White House this man who attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, or why his poll numbers rise with each indictment. I guess the 20th-century author and socialist Upton Sinclair really nailed it when he wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Books, etc.

My Observer review of The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman.

What is it with wave metaphors? Technological determinists – people who believe that technology drives history – love them. Think of Alvin Toffler, who saw the history of civilisation as a succession of three such waves (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial). The idea is of immense power, unstoppable, moving inexorably towards us as we cower before its immensity, much as the dinosaurs must have done when they saw the mile-high tsunami heading in their direction.

Mustafa Suleyman says he is not a determinist, but at times he sounds awfully like one. “At its heart,” he writes at one point, “technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used. Yet in most discussions of technology people still get stuck on what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This is not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human.”

The oncoming wave in his title is “defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology”, and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original. Together, he thinks, these two “will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” Our future, apparently, “both depends on these technologies and is imperilled by them”.

Once you get past this hyperbolic prologue, the book settles down into a serious exploration of what the future might hold for us all. Suleyman’s credentials for the task are good: he was co-founder of DeepMind, arguably the smartest AI company around…

Read on

The only difference between a good migrant and a bad one is time

Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times columnist, has been visiting the Jewish cemetery in Dublin and written a fine piece with strong contemporary resonances which, alas, is behind the paywall.

So here’s the gist.

The Jewish refugees who came to Ireland in the late 19th century were fleeing the pogroms unleashed after the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II. Many of the ones who arrived in Dublin came from a shtetl called Akmiyan in the Kovno district of Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire.

“The accounts of their travails”, writes O’Toole,

are hauntingly similar to the stories that Sally Hayden tells so powerfully now of refugees trying to get to Europe: wading across rivers with children and bundles on their backs, walking hundreds or thousands of kilometres, paying off what would now be called traffickers, having to bribe officials to give them documents, evading border guards and criminal predators.

The Noyek brothers, Daniel and Abraham, created the wood products business that still thrives in Dublin today. But their descendant Davida Noyek recalled that on their long journey to Ireland “they met with experiences so unspeakable that they could never recount them even to their children. ‘It was terrible, you don’t want to know about it’ was to remain their only comment on the awful journey that lasted from 1894 until 1897.”

Many of these refugees arrived in Ireland destitute, speaking only Yiddish and Russian, and with little idea of where they were. They were looked down on even by the existing Jewish community in Dublin, where the word was that Akmiyan was “notorious as a nest of horse thieves and smugglers”.

“And yet”, writes O’Toole,

by the time I was a kid in the 1960s, the children and grandchildren of these asylum seekers were the height of respectability. They came to our road on Sundays to visit the cemetery in nice (though unflashy) cars. They were elegantly dressed and well-spoken. We admired and slightly envied them as people who seemed both successful and decent.

You get the message. It’s in the title of his essay.

Chart of the Day

How Canada turned its forests into a carbon bomb 

Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

My commonplace booklet

The Only Surviving Recording Of Virginia Woolf’s Voice

Link

Fascinating: she sounds exactly as I imagined she would.

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The recumbent Bear

En route to Daniel O’Connell’s house in Derrynane the other day we passed a cyclist who had an intriguing passenger.

Later on, he caught up with us at a café in Glencar, and the identity of the freeloader was revealed.

Quote of the Day

“He drank port and put on weight, and attempted to behave in the manner of an Edwardian aristocrat. He was very conscious of what a gentleman should or should not do: no gentleman looks out of a window, no gentleman wears a brown suit. In fact, Evelyn’s abiding complex and the source of much of his misery was that he was not a six-foot tall, extremely handsome and rich duke.”

• Cecil Beaton on Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Violin Concerto Op.61 | I. Allegro | Daniel Hope

Link

The concerto was the second item in last night’s BBC Proms

Long Read of the Day

Life on board a British nuclear submarine

Stephen Moss spent a week on board a British nuclear submarine in 2012. His account is really interesting, if perhaps not exactly a recruitment plug. You have to admire the sailors who opt for this kind of work/life imbalance.

I ask Chief Johnson why he switched from surface ships to submarines. “I got drafted in 1983 and didn’t have any choice,” he says. “I tried to get out of it. I didn’t want to be a submariner. If you ask a general service chap what they think about submarines, they’ll say: ‘Horrible, dirty, noisy, you can’t have a shower, you’re always stinking.’ Well, in the old days that might have been the case – water was very restricted – but you can see yourself; conditions are not that bad. On my first boat, Spartan, at the back end of 1983, it all clicked – it was a completely different way of life from general service.”

He goes on to cite what most submariners say is what they like about life beneath the waves: the relative informality. There are, of course, distinctions between officers and ranks, but in so confined a space nothing like the rigidities of surface ships; the sense of being an elite, what one able seaman calls a “brotherhood”; the camaraderie that comes from knowing they rely entirely on each other. When a man, whether officer or rating, becomes a submariner, he is awarded a badge formed from two dolphins and a crown. The badge admits you to an exclusive club – there are around 3,500 operational submariners in the UK. It means that, in the event of an emergency, you will be a help, rather than a hindrance. Until then, in the uncompromising language of submariners, you are an “oxygen thief”.

Thanks to The Browser for spotting it.

Books, etc.

It’s as if Christmas had come early — three important and fascinating books are arriving all at once.

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman is a sobering read. (My Observer review of it comes out on Sunday.) The oncoming ‘wave’ in his title is “defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology”, and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and dangerous. Their rapid proliferation threatens to unleash “disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” His book is an exploration of how — and whether — this coming wave can be ‘contained’. What’s unusual about it is that its author is a real tech ‘insider’ (he’s a co-founder of DeepMind, still the top AI firm in the world IMO). But he’s also one of the few techies I know who has a conceptual grasp of the dangers to democracy (and maybe humanity) that might lie ahead.

Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman is the most surprising arrival. Two distinguished political scientists collaborate to uncover “one of the most sophisticated ‘empires’ the world has ever known”. It’s made up of fibre-optic cables and obscure payment systems and Farrell and Newman argue that the US has turned these ‘vital pathways’ of the world economy into tools of domination over foreign businesses and states, whether they are adversaries or allies. If it hadn’t been authored by Farrell and Newman I might have relegated to the ‘conspiracist’ shelf, but I’ve followed Henry for years and he’s one of the sharpest (and most sophisticated) scholars in the business. Comes out in the UK on September 7.

The Handover is by my friend and colleague David Runciman who has the great advantage of always being able to escape from “the sociology of the last five minutes” that mars most writing about technology. His book has a vast historical sweep and argues that what AI enthusiasts call a ‘singularity’ actually happened a long time ago, when we handed over control of our lives to two superintelligent machines — states and corporations. He’s the only scholar I know who has the capacity to find original entry points to the controversies that bedevil us now, and he and I have talked a lot about this stuff over the years. (Among other things, we ran a two-year research project on technology and democracy a few years ago, one outcome from which was his book How Democracy Ends.) His new book is coming out on September 7.

My commonplace booklet

Om Malik on the usefulness of writing with a fountain pen (well, any physical writing implement, really).

There has been enough academic research that reminds us that writing is a good way to boost critical thinking. It is also well documented that writing in a long hand is good for giving dimensionality and texture to writing. “Writing with a pen is like playing,” science fiction writer Neil Gaiman (and a fellow fountain pen enthusiast) once said in an interview.

“A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write, and hearing the sound you make while writing,” Audrey van der Meer of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, said when sharing her research on writing and memories. “These sensory experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better.” (Full study here.)

For me, it allows me to slow down and allow new lines of questioning and reasoning to slowly emerge out of the shadows. This is a remarkably different process when typing on a computer — I love my machines — but I really find that the sheer speed with which I type is glorious, but it does propel you into finish-line-oriented thinking. Of course, the act of writing allows me to use some of my favorite fountain pens. There is no better way to put a smile on your face that seeing your ideas rendered onto paper in a luscious terracotta color or your article taking form in a vibrant turquoise so reminiscent of the summer itself…

Linkblog

A mugshot to treasure

Rudi Giuliani poses for a Sheriff in Atlanta.

h/t Dave Winer

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Next Parish, America

The Blasket islands off the Kerry coast.

Photographed yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism is that some groups of capitalists will be trying to cut the throats of others as the ship is going down. That’s what’s happening with the climate crisis.”

• Jason Moore

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits | Skateaway

Link

Long Read of the Day

Place Pastness Poems A Triptych

A truly wonderful essay by Seamus Heaney in Salmagundi Magazine on the poetic uses of memory.

Sample:

“Old” was not an idea. It was an atmosphere, a smell almost, a quality of feeling. It brought you out of yourself and close to yourself all at once. “Old” drifted in the mind and senses when you came upon mossed-over bits of delph or fragments of a clay pipe plugged up with mould. You took such things for granted yet they swam with a strangeness. And the strangeness deepened when you actually dug such things out of the ground for yourself. My first archaeological tremor occurred when I was making holes for goalposts in one of our fields which had always been kept as grazing and was therefore always pure surface, pure present. When I dug down about a foot into the tight-packed ground, I came upon a hoard of soft red brick and white crumbly mortar, an unexpected cache that even to a six year old meant foundations, meant house, a living but obliterated past. I pestered my father to tell me who might have lived there and found that he did not remember any house on the site. Then I heard him questioning a neighbour about whose place it might have been, who was supposed to have owned that land in the old days, and the hole for the goal-post began to open down and back to a visionary field, a phantom whitewashed cottage with its yard and puddles and hens. The world had been amplified; looking and seeing began to take on aspects of imagining and remembering.

Another example: I knew more from overhearing and piecing together than from being told directly that a number of my father’s family had died in their teens and twenties from “the decline,” as tuberculosis had been called in rural Ulster in those days. Names of uncles and aunts who might have been floated through the conversation. Johnny and Jamie and Maggie and Agnes. Agnes, I knew, had died young and her invalid pallor which I had never seen was intuitively present to me, again because of her association with an object. This was a little trinket which was kept wrapped in tissue paper and laid away with other specially conserved knick-knacks in the bottom of a sideboard in my parents’ bedroom. I knew there was something slightly taboo about rummaging in those shelves but I was drawn again and again to unwrap the thing because I knew that it had belonged to Agnes. It had obviously been bought at the seaside as a present for her. A little grotto about four or five inches tall, like a toy sentry box, all covered with tiny shells, a whitish gleaming secret deposited in the family sideboard like grave-goods in the tomb of a princess. To this day, I cannot imagine the ravages of disease in pre-inoculation rural Ireland except in relation to the slight white fact of that trinket.

It’s long, but worth it. And a reminder of what we lost with his passing ten years ago. The one thing that’s annoying about it is the way the poems he quotes are not typographically distinct. Don’t know if that’s just the magazine’s house style, but it grates on this reader at least.

Chart of the Day

My commonplace booklet

Turns out AI probably isn’t very good at writing malware

From The Register Comes a rare piece of good news…

Despite the hype around criminals using ChatGPT and various other large language models to ease the chore of writing malware, it seems this generative AI technology isn’t terribly good at helping with that kind of work.

That’s our view having seen research this week that indicates while some crooks are interested in using source-suggesting ML models, the technology isn’t actually being widely used to create malicious code. Presumably that’s because these generative systems are not up to the job, or have sufficient guardrails to make the process tedious enough that cybercriminals give up.

If you want useful, reliable exploits and post-intrusion tools, you’ll either have to pay top dollar for them, grab them for free from somewhere like GitHub, or have the programming skills, patience, and time to develop them from scratch. AI isn’t going to provide the shortcut a miscreant might hope for, and its take-up among cyber-criminals is on a par with the rest of the technology world, we’re told…

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Yeats’s country seat

On our journey southwards in Ireland the other day, we visited Thoor Ballylee, the 15th-century Anglo-Norman tower house that W.B. Yeats bought and restored in the early 1920s as a summer house for him and his family — which is why it’s now known as “Yeats’s Tower”. Visiting it is an unforgettable experience, especially if you like his poetry.

Inset into the wall is a stone on which is engraved a little poem. It’s now rather weathered and indistinct, so this bronze rubbing of it is more legible.

Among the feelings that the building evokes are admiration at the romantic thinking that sought to transform this brutal and unforgiving building into a home for a family. And to do so in the middle of a vicious civil war.

The best rooms in the house are the dining room on the ground floor, the living room on the first and the bedroom (complete with a splendid double bed) on the second.

In the living room there’s a small writing table facing the window, on which one can sit to write in the Visitors’ Book. It’s tempting to think that this might be W.B.’s writing table, but that seems unlikely, given that (a) most of his furniture and effects have been dispersed long ago, and (b) it’s nothing like the table as described in the opening lines of his poem, My Table:

Two heavy tressels, and a board

Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,

By pen and paper lies,

That it may moralise

My days out of their aimlessness.

Quote of the Day

“SACRAMENT, n. A solemn religious ceremony to which several degrees of authority and significance are attached. Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity. Some of the smaller sects have no sacraments at all— for which mean economy they will indubitable be damned.”

• Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill | Martin Rochford’s Green Gowned Lass

Link

Long Read of the Day

Eleven theses on globalization

Bracing post by the economist Branko Milanovic.

Here are the first two:

First, inequality and poverty. Globalization is a force for the global good: the globalization of economic activity has enabled production of many commodities and provision of many services to be done in the places where it is cheapest to do. It has released previously used resources for other activities. It has also mobilized capital and labor that was misused or unemployed. The effect was a significant acceleration in global rate of growth (when measuring global growth by using democratic and not plutocratic measures, which have gone up too) and a dramatic decrease in global income inequality and global income poverty.

Second, China. The most important positive effects, largely due to globalization and international trade, have been achieved in China. China explains most of the decrease in global inequality and poverty. But these advances have been realized by the application of non-standard or non-neoclassical policies. This has created the first dilemma for the supporters of globalization and neoliberalism. To defend globalization they have to praise China, but they find Chinese policies distasteful. Thus their comments are most of the time contradictory.

You get the idea.

The world has a big appetite for AI – but we really need to know the ingredients

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

There’s an old saying that no one would ever eat a sausage if they knew how sausages were made. This is no doubt unfair to the meat-processing industry, for not all sausages are, as some wag famously observed, “cartridges containing the sweepings of the abattoir floor”. But it’s a useful cautionary principle when confronted by products whose manufacturers are – how shall we put it? – coy about the details of their production processes.

Enter, stage left, the tech companies currently touting their generative AI marvels – particularly those large language models (LLMs) that fluently compose plausible English sentences in response to prompts by humans. When asked how this miracle is accomplished, the standard explanations highlight the brilliance of the technology involved.

The narrative goes like this…

Do read the whole piece

My commonplace booklet

Britain: a failing state?

From the current Private Eye

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• A reputable opinion poll finds that most Americans want to slow down artificial intelligence. So a yawning chasm has opened between citizens and the governing and tech elites of US society.

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In the bay

A photograph triggered by a song (see today’s music choice).

Quote of the Day

” A pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the rarest of treasures.”

• Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Otis Redding | The Dock of the Bay

Link

Long Read of the Day

90’s tech culture was a jumbled mess

Dave Karpf has been combing through the first five years of WIRED magazine’s product reviews and pondering what he’s found. This is interesting for people like me who were reading Wired (and BYTE, of blessed memory) in the days when all things digital were deemed exotic. The section of the magazine that has captured Karpf’s retrospective imagination was called “Fetish: technolust” (and no, I am not making that up).

The section was weird then. Now it looks bonkers.

Here’s what Karpf discovered, first off, in the November 1994 issue of Wired’s technolust closet:

That’s four product reviews. Each gets a short paragraph. In the upper-left corner, they review an ergonomic keyboard. $99. Sure. In the upper-right corner, there’s a review of the latest clock radio. $179.95. Uh-huh. Lower-right, a high-end boombox. $999.95. Note from the future: That tapedeck is going to age poorly.

And then in the lower-left corner, they blurb the 43-foot Scarab Superboat, “the world’s fastest offshore V-hulled vessel.” $500,000.

Karpf makes three observations at this point:

(1) What early WIRED was engaged in here was aspirational marketing. The editorial team had an idea of the ideal “netizen,” an image they wanted to project. The product reviews were a winking attempt to will that consumer base into being.

Second, this is the result of the strange mashup of 70s counterculture and 80s yuppie culture that Fred Turner highlights in his classic book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. These reviews have a lineage that dates back to the Whole Earth Catalog, but aimed at Gordon Gekko-types.

Third, many of the product reviews left me thinking about just how strongly people must have felt the effects of Moore’s Law at the mass consumer level, back then.

Wired was really weird in those days. But eventually it grew up.

Karpf is a good guide to those crazy days.

But, but… The spirit of tech fetishism lives on in one unlikely location: the gratuitously annoying ‘How to Spend It’ colour supplement of the Weekend Edition of the Financial Times, which has a resident nerd with an eye for analog record turntables costing more than the GDP of Ecuador and similarly desirable objects.

Chart of the Day

China heading to be the world’s biggest car exporter soon

From the Economist.

Books, etc.

Just caught up on this novella by Claire Keegan. It’s a pitch-perfect capture of some aspects of life in mid-1980s Ireland. You can read it in a sitting, and you may find yourself doing just that. It’s spare, elegant and moving. And it reminded me of something Steve Jobs once said — that you know something is perfect when nothing more can be pared away from it.

My commonplace booklet

 What government is for

A post from Andrew Curry’s terrific Substack blog (which I can’t recommend highly enough). He’s been reading Michael Lewis’s 2018 book, The Fifth Risk: Undoing government, which is a riveting account of how Trump and his crowd tried to undermine and in some ways break essential parts of the Federal government. Partly this was motivated by corruption or malice, but to an astonishing degree it revealed how little the Trump crowd knew about what government is for — what it actually does.

Andrew picks out a few items from Lewis’s book which illustrates what went on. But for the full story, it’s worth getting the book.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Breakfast for one

The terrace of a very upmarket German schloss where I happened to be staying. (Someone else was paying: I was giving a talk.)

Quote of the Day

“Machine learning is money laundering for bias.”

• Maciej Cegłowski Link

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Robert Schumann | The Merry Peasant | Guitar | Harald Stampa

Link

I’m temperamentally suspicious of anything that suggests that peasants and serfs were actually jolly chaps and chapesses, contented with their miserable lot. But the devil, as usual, has a good tune. Normally, it’s a popular piano piece, so this guitar version makes a nice change.

Long Read of the Day

What happens when AI reads a book

Fascinating essay by Ethan Mollick. Granted, he’s been an enthusiast for LLMs from the outset, but he’s smart, resourceful and with a lively curiosity. He’s a believer that these generative AI tools are good at augmenting human capabilities and he’s consistently written about how he uses then in his teaching at Wharton.

This essay is about experiments he did with Claude, one of the biggest (token-wise) LLMs around. Basically he fed it the text of one of his books and then started to question it about what it had found.

Phil Mickelson’s habit

Phil Mickelson is a formidable golfer, and golf is the only sport in which I have the slightest interest. So I follow it a bit. I knew he was a keen gambler, but naively assumed it was like having side-bets on horses as my late father-in-law used to do.

How wrong can you be? An astonishing memoir by a guy who used to be his gambling partner tells a very different story. Here’s a snapshot of Phil’s gambling habit between 2010 and 2014:

• He bet $110,000 to win $100,000 a total of 1,115 times.
• On 858 occasions, he bet $220,000 to win $200,000. (The sum of those 1,973 gross wagers came to more than $311 million.)
• In 2011 alone, he made 3,154 bets — an average of nearly nine per day.
• On one day in 2011 (June 22), he made forty-three bets on major-league baseball games, resulting in $143,500 in losses.

And, summing up:

He made a staggering 7,065 wagers on football, basketball, and baseball. Based on our relationship and what I’ve since learned from others, Phil’s gambling losses approached not $40 million as has been previously reported, but much closer to $100 million. In all, he wagered a total of more than $1 billion during the past three decades.

Makes you wonder how he managed to play any golf, let alone play it as well as he does.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

Voyager 2 signal found by Deep Space Network.  Link

A signal from Voyager 2 has been detected by NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) over a week after communications with the distant probe were lost, the US agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Tuesday.

The disco-era spacecraft was detected by Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex’s 70-metre dish, Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43), after a long-shot search.

The five-storey tall dish is the sole facility capable of reaching Voyager 2. It takes over 18 hours for a signal to travel from the probe to the dish, covering a distance of over 19 billion kilometres.

”The Deep Space Network has picked up a carrier signal from [Voyager 2] during its regular scan of the sky. A bit like hearing the spacecraft’s ‘heartbeat,’ it confirms the spacecraft is still broadcasting, which engineers expected,” explained JPL.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Why food tastes different in France?

Quote of the Day

“Why bother dethroning DeSantis as the heir apparent when he’s already doing such a good job of it himself? Nobody has needed to reboot as frequently as DeSantis since the days of Windows 95.”

• Jack Shafer in Politico.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The theme from’Chariots of Fire’.

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Curse of Cane

David Edgerton’s review of Ulbe Bosma’s  The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years. It’s a very good review, by a distinguished historian with pretty exacting standards.

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.

On the whole, maybe the world would have been better without the sweet stuff.

Worth a read.

A tsunami of AI misinformation will shape next year’s knife-edge elections

My column in yesterday’s Observer.

The consequences of a Trump victory would be epochal. It would mean the end (for the time being, at least) of the US experiment with democracy, because the people behind Trump have been assiduously making what the normally sober Economist describes as “meticulous, ruthless preparations” for his second, vengeful term. The US would morph into an authoritarian state, Ukraine would be abandoned and US corporations unhindered in maximising shareholder value while incinerating the planet.

So very high stakes are involved. Trump’s indictment “has turned every American voter into a juror”, as the Economist puts it. Worse still, the likelihood is that it might also be an election that – like its predecessor – is decided by a very narrow margin.

In such knife-edge circumstances, attention focuses on what might tip the balance in such a fractured polity. One obvious place to look is social media, an arena that rightwing actors have historically been masters at exploiting…

Do read the entire piece.

My commonplace booklet

Fleeting encounters in Mrs. Dalloway’s London

A data scientist who loves Virginia Woolf’s novel gathers data from it to show how space and time are used in its construction.

Neat: I’m reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture on Ulysses.

“Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings”, he said,

“instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.”

Here’s his one.

Source: OpenCulture

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Tunnel vision

Quote of the Day

”The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that’s the way I likes it!

• Grandpa Abe Simpson on the metric system.

(Relevant to today’s Long Read below.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | String Quartet No. 7 in D Major, D. 94 | 1. Allegro

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why America is going backward: Being the richest nation in history isn’t enough

Interesting Salon essay by Mike Lofgren on trying to disentangle the chicken-and-egg relationship between reactionary politics and the decline of intellectual and cultural life that he thinks characterises contemporary US society. (And also perhaps what lies beneath Trump’s apparently enduring electoral support.)

Lofgren thinks at least part of the answer might lie in the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who posits a distinctive human trait he calls “the right-wing authoritarian personality”.

Altemeyer has emphasized that the right-wing authoritarian harbors a peculiar mix of traits: aggression, submissiveness and conventionality. It may be this brew of behaviors that determines such disparate matters as America’s penchant for violence, its inability to reform itself politically and perhaps even its refusal to adopt the more rational weights and measures used by the rest of the world. Economic issues may play a role, but the jaw-dropping difference between the U.S. and other countries in the polling data suggests that deeper and more terrifying psychological forces are at work.

It seems to me that Trump is a racing certainty to be the Republican candidate for president next year. In which case, as the Economist puts it in this week’s issue, that election will be a referendum on whether or not democracy survives in America, and it turns every voter into a juror on that question.

Chart of the Day

Ideological leanings of Large Language Models

I found this — and the research that went into it — really interesting.

Source: Tech Review

My commonplace booklet

Julia Evans on how to encourage productive commenting on the Web

Wonderful blog post, full of good sense.

Linkblog

Something I noticed while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

 HiRISE Mars 4K (NASA): Chaos, Reconsidered

Fascinating high-res overflight video of the terrain within a Martian impact crater.

NASA commentary reads:

Aram Chaos is terrain that is located within a massive 280 kilometer-diameter crater. It consists of darker volcanic rocks that were disrupted as a result of water and/or magma withdrawal in the subsurface. Some of the materials made up of different kinds of sulfates that formed when water filled the crater.

This clip uses the enhanced color red-green-blue filter of the HiRISE camera. Blue in enhanced color images often represents basalt, indicating a volcanic origin.

This is a non-narrated clip with ambient sound. Image is less than 1 km (under a mile) across and the spacecraft altitude was 271 km (168 mi). For full images including scale bars, visit the source link.

Music: “Freeing From Sin” by Medusa Jacobi (used by permission).

Also interesting: the clip was made using Final Cut Pro for iPad. Amazing that a tablet exists that can run that software.

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