Kubrick in Venice

I took this photo to mark the moment I realised that Kubrick had been a serious photographer before he went into movies.

Quote of the Day

“Money doesn’t talk, it swears/ Obscenity, who really cares.”

• Bob Dylan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Nimrod

Link

Long Read of the Day

Glowing lava hardened into memory: The ends of Reinhart Koselleck’s war.

A truly remarkable translation by Adam Tooze of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s memoir of the ends (plural) of the Second World War as he experienced them. “The bells that rang out on May 9th, 1945, rang in the peace,” he wrote. “The question was, which peace for whom?”

The end of World War II in Europe on the night of May 8-9th 1945 was experienced in different ways. It depended on the side you were on, on the place you were in, your nationality, gender, social class and age.

Born in Görlitz Saxony in 1923, Reinhart Koselleck would later become a brilliant historian of the Enlightenment and the early 19th century, as well as preeminent theorist of history – some would say philosopher of history – of his generation in West Germany. He was the editor and intellectual inspiration behind the multi-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – a massive dictionary of conceptual history. His work best-known in English is Futures Past: On the semantics of historical time.

Do read it. It seemed to me to be the most appropriate piece to choose for yesterday’s anniversary.

So many books, so little time

This arrived yesterday. Subject matter: “The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley’s foolish obsession with immortality, AI Paradise and limitless growth”. Which means, I guess, that it’s about how extreme wealth rots your brain. I thought that was an old story. Maybe I’ve missed something.

My commonplace booklet

Life Imitating Art

Well well. The day before the Pope’s funeral, we watched Conclave, the film based on Robert Harris’s thriller of the same name.

And guess what? We weren’t the only people wanting to get up to speed on what happens next. Politico reports that “Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave’ the movie for guidance on the actual conclave. The 2024 movie is proving a useful primer for clerics about to take part in the real thing to choose the next pope”.

Errata

Re the photograph of the nameplate of the Dutch law firm in Wednesday’s edition, my friend Gerard writes:

I’m afraid that’s incorrect, sir.

This firm whose brass plate you have photographed is located in Utrecht (not The Hague) at Nieuwegracht, just around the corner of my house. The Atlas figure on the brass plate is a picture of the Atlas statue which happens to be (for reasons unknown to me) on the roof of the house where the firm takes office.

With English having become a kind of official second language in Holland (in shops, restaurants and cafes in Amsterdam, even when one is clearly Dutch, one is standardly addressed in English – preferably its TikTok dialect), Boor, Boor & Boor will have had more comments on its name, similar to the one you made. So, a few years ago, the firm was renamed “Booor advocaten” (three o’s indeed). I’m not sure it’s an improvement. The website – www.booor.nl – mentions that the firm was founded in Utrecht, in 1945, and is currently led by three senior lawyers, all female, none of who has the surname Boor.

I’m sure that there will be more where that came from. For example, another reader told me about Argue & Phibbs, a legal firm in Co Sligo. And there’s a well-known architectural practice in Cambridge called Pleasance Hookham & Nix.

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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Legal niceties

This is (or was when I photographed it in January 2011) the brass plate of an august Dutch law firm in The Hague. It brought to mind Private Eye’s cod London law firm, Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Run, of blessed memory.

Quote of the Day

”Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | I’m Beginning To See The Light

Link

I’m glad someone can.

Long Read of the Day

Kim Jong Trump

Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the date of the unconditional surrender of Nazi forces in Europe on May 8, 1945. The historian Adam Tooze had a nice piece (Gift article) on anniversaries in the Financial Times. But he didn’t anticipate how Trump would exploit the anniversary, so he’s written an interesting Substack post as a follow-on.

Basically, Trump has decided to appropriate not only VE Day but also Armistice Day (November 11) for his own purposes!

Screenshot

This isn’t just trolling, but also historical revisionism on steroids. Tooze does some nice work on itemising the extent of Trump’s authoritarian delusions, and both of his pieces are worth reading.

Also, just to underline what Trump learned from Kim Jong Un in his first term, there is going to be a huge military parade in Washington on 14 June, which happens to be the US Supreme Leader’s birthday!

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

Matt, the Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist is a genius. He’s also just about the only reason for buying the paper.

Linkblog

Following the Trump Administration’s new-found interest in managing universities, Ryan Weber, has been getting on board with the new reality

Introducing Our University’s New, Totally Reasonable Criteria for Promotion and Tenure

Teaching

Teaching is a cornerstone of this university, as evidenced by the mission statement posted on our website, which currently leads to a 404 error page. We have no idea how to evaluate teaching, so to receive tenure, you must accomplish all of the following, plus several additional things we haven’t thought of yet:

1. Lose a month of sleep over one negative student evaluation despite receiving thirty-seven positive comments from the same class.

2. Win at least three teaching awards from our university and at least one teaching award from another university you don’t work at.

3. Get students to embrace at least three disappearing cultural touchstones from your youth, such as Rocko’s Modern Life, the Cabbage Patch dance, that “Summer Girls” song by LFO, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Twins.

4. Inspire at least twenty students to throw their lives away by going to graduate school…

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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Over there

On the Donegal coast.

Quote of the Day

Last Friday’s ‘Quote of the Day’ prompted Kevin Cryan to email me about one of the most widely shared anecdotes about Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22.

At a party in the Hamptons, a friend of his remarked, “Joe, you know, this hedge fund manager makes more money in a single day than Catch-22 has made in its entire history.”

Heller, without missing a beat, replied, “That may be true, but I have something he will never have.” His friend asked, “What’s that?” Heller grinned and said, “Enough.”

— which, Kevin wrote, “highlights his wit and ability to poke fun at himself … proving that for him, success wasn’t just about financial wealth, but about creating something enduring and meaningful”.

It does. But Heller’s answer also triggered an epiphany I had way back in the 1980s. I remember asking myself the question how will I know when I earn enough?. And one gloomy November afternoon, sitting in our house in central Cambridge, I came up with the answer: “when I can buy hardback books in Heffers (then the leading bookshop in town) without worrying about the price.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Delorentos | Home Again

Link

Long Read of the Day

This is going to be a week of anniversaries related to the Second World War, and I thought it might be appropriate to start with a striking essay by a great military historian, Anthony Beevor. His books — on the battle of Stalingrad, and the taking of Berlin — are masterpieces, though very grim reads in places.

This essay isn’t grim in that sense. But it’s a vivid reminder that hindsight is really the only exact science.

Eighty years ago this week, American troops liberated Dachau concentration camp just north of Munich. German forces in Northern Italy surrendered. And Hitler dictated and signed his last will and testament in the bunker. Yet although the Third Reich was collapsing on every front, the end of this war, which had killed millions of human beings, still depended on the life of just one man.

The Allies had made a fundamental mistake when they believed after the bomb plot of July 1944 that an army which had tried to kill its own commander-in-chief must be in a state of collapse. What they could not grasp was that the failure to kill Hitler meant that he, the SS, Gestapo and Nazi Party would force everyone to fight on until his death. It was once again the problem of democratic confirmation bias, which prevents us from properly understanding the mentality of dictators and their entourage.

The Allies, or more specifically the Americans, made a similar mistake understanding Stalin. Roosevelt, with the arrogance of his great charm, thought he could make Stalin a friend. Eisenhower also thought that he could win Stalin’s trust by passing on his plans for the western Allies’ advance across Germany. Both were misled in return…

Hope you enjoy it.

So many books, so little time

Screenshot

Just bought this. Two reasons: (a) I really liked her earlier book The People’s Platform; and (b) Ethan Zuckerman has chosen it as a set book for his course on ‘Defending Democracy in a Digital World’ at Mass Amherst.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Jensen Chang: ”First thing to understand: 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese”. Link

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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!**

En vacance…

In France, in the days of The International Herald Tribune (of blessed memory).

Quote of the Day

”At the end of the day, real wealth isn’t about flashing cash. It’s about moving through the world with an invisible safety net most people don’t even realize they’re missing.”

• Ashley Fike in Vice

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ernest Chausson | Pièce Op. 39 (1897) | Anssi Karttunen (Cello), David Lively (Piano)

Link

New to me, but I was struck by its peacefulness. And I love the cello.

Long Read of the Day

 AIxDemocracy: What are the politics of AI?

Wise and thoughtful lecture by Ethan Zuckerman. In a way, it’s really a helpful introduction to a MUCH longer piece by Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor (which is almost too long even for this section of the blog). But even if you don’t follow that link you’ll get a lot from Zuckerman’s piece. Sample:

Let’s posit for a moment that the next age is unfolding, the age of AI. What might we expect a public sphere transformed by AI to mean for democracy?

I’m going to constrain that question by embracing some language proposed by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton, the authors of an excellent book called AI Snake Oil. Their book is not nearly as hostile towards AI as the title might suggest – it’s helpful in understanding why some areas of AI, like image generation, are developing so quickly, and others are making little if any progress, like prediction of uncommon events. Arvind and Sayash released a paper last week called “AI as Normal Technology”, which is simultaneously a description of how AI is now, a prediction of how it will evolve in the near future and a proposal for how to regulate and live with it.

Their core idea is that while AI may be important and transformative – they offer comparisons to electricity and the Internet as similarly transformative general technologies – it’s not magic. They dismiss both the scenarios where artificial general intelligence makes most human jobs obsolete and necessitates universal basic income and the scenario where superintelligent AIs unleash killer robots to exterminate the planet’s population as unlikely and worthy of less consideration than a scenario where AI is important, but ultimately just another technology.

What does the future of AI and democracy look like if you take scenarios that are fun to think about, but unlikely to happen, off the table?

Great piece. Worth your time.

So many books, so little time

Abundance” is a book for an alternate timeline

Ezra Klein is an interesting commentator on what’s going on in the world, and he’s now co-authored a new book with Derek Thompson.

Screenshot

It’s on my to-read list, but so are many other titles at the moment and life is short, so I thought I’d read some of the reviews and then decide whether to move it up the list or not.

This review essay by Dave Karpf has caused me to press the ‘pause’ button. It’s thoughtful, fair and well-informed. But…

There is a jarring, stray passage in chapter 4 of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance:

Today NIH, along with NSF, are irreplaceable. If these institutions had never been created or expanded, the lives of millions, even billions of people around the world would be shorter than they are today, and people would be sicker. If they disappeared tomorrow, the world would instantly be worse.

But it is precisely because the NIH stands above every bioscience institution in significance that we should scrutinize the way it shapes the practice of science in America and around the world. (page 152)

Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.

As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can…

My commonplace booklet

BlueSky thinking…

I’ve been on Bluesky for a few months, largely because I abhor Musk’s megaphone. In practice, you get what it promises on the tin — a feed produced by people you follow rather than a farrago that’s algorithmically curated to increase the profits of the platform you’re on.

And it’s fine — but it’s still an attention-sink. Ethically, it’s properly social-media rather than the anti-social media of X, Threads, Instagram, et al. But life is short and I hate scrolling. Result: I now look in on my feed only now and then. And I still can’t understand how so many people appear to be on it all the time: how do they get any work done?

  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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!