Waiting, waiting…
… for a train which did turn up — eventually.
Quote of the Day
”If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you are a human being.”
- Leo Tolstoy
(Which neatly rules out Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Ennio Morricone | Theme from Cinema Paradiso | Renaud Capuçon
From the soundtrack of one of my favourite films.
Long Read of the Day
I stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it in October 2022. Like many people I then tried tried Mastodon but was unimpressed and only recently joined Bluesky — like millions of other refugees from Twitter/X.
And when I say millions I mean it. There’s a fascinating online counter that’s updated every second. As I write this (in the evening of 21 November), the service now has over 21 million subscribers, and they’re joining at the rate of 4.22 users per second! So something’s definitely going on.
Which is why I found this NYT column (gift article) by Paul Krugman, the American economist and Nobel laureate, interesting, especially because of the way he contrasts the fate of Twitter/X with that of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.
I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.
But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.
Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis…
Broadly speaking, his experience mirrors mine. It’s worth a read, especially if you are thinking about signing up for Bluesky. (For a second opinion, try Ian Bogust’s essay.)
Behind all this, of course, is a bigger question: does this ‘Xodus’ signal the beginning of the splintering of social media?
Books, etc.
For those seeking an understanding of what sliding into fascism is like, then Paul Lynch’s prizewinning novel of how it might happen might be hard to beat.
Here’s the blurb:
The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times…
My commonplace booklet
In Grandpa’s footsteps
This week I discovered — to my delight — that the actor David Suchet is a passionate photographer, and that he uses the same kit as I do (Leica cameras). His grandfather, James Jarché, was a press photographer, and Suchet set out to retrace Grandpas’s steps and photograph some of the places James had recorded. Here is a charming video of his trip to the former coalfields of South Wales. It’s 14 minutes long and (IMO) worth every second.
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