Cloistered

Somewhere in France (possibly Cluny), 2012

Quote of the Day

”I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Songbird

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy, But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo’

Nice Bloomberg column by Feargus O’Sullivan trying to set the artistic record straight.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

O’Sullivan is (rightly) pissed off by the way a president with a taste for gold-painted home furnishings prompts clueless media to “malign the good name” of a sophisticated, exuberant and frequently misunderstood European design style.

I particularly liked his comment about the new-look Oval Office “where the row of gold urns along the mantel looks less like a trove of priceless antiques than a set of beauty pageant trophies lined up for sale on eBay.”

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

An AI tool that’s genuinely useful

Yesterday’s Observer column on operating in a world where information is not just overabundant but scattered, disorganised and contextually disconnected.

I am writing this column in a text editor on my laptop. I also have a browser (Firefox) running that has – pauses to count – 18 tabs open. Each one represents a webpage containing information that I searched for when planning the column: websites, YouTube videos, a list of relevant podcasts to which I should have listened, pdfs of relevant reports, notes that I’ve made when reading through the sources I’ve consulted, lists of links that are conceivably relevant – etc, etc.

And, somehow, I have to weave a coherent narrative from all the stuff in those tabs. Cue violins?

Save your sympathy: I’m just an ordinary Joe facing what confronts millions of “knowledge workers” every day. As Steven Johnson, one of the world’s best science writers, puts it: “You find yourself in these situations where the job you were trying to do involves synthesising information that is scattered across 15 open tabs and a bunch of documents sitting on your drive, and, you know, wherever that is, all over the place.

We’re long past “information overload” and have moved onto something much worse: a phase of cognitive fragmentation, when information is overabundant — and also scattered, disorganised and disconnected, making it difficult to make sense of what’s happening.

Read on

Chart of the Day

Sobering, ne c’est pas? Helps to explain US isolationism, maybe. Link

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How India became a french fry superpower And no, I did not make that up. Link

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Deadwood

On the Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire with the spectacular folly in the distance.

Quote of the Day

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622: I. Allegro (Live)

Link

One of the first LPs I bought as a student.

Long Read of the Day

 Guest, Host, Ghost: A Dinner Party in Kyiv

Memorable meditation by Timothy Snyder on what the war in Ukraine means (or should be understood to mean) for the rest of us.

Excerpt:

The overloaded table was lit by candles. As the flames moved this way and that, I discerned, one at a time, the unframed canvases that climbed the high walls of the small room. My hostess was wearing a dress that resembled one in a portrait; my host was in uniform. The labor of war brings together people who would otherwise never meet. The apartment was full of a love that was both risky and mature. In candlelight the lip-reading that accompanies conversation in another language is harder. We had started in English and switched to Ukrainian, in part so that I could hear from a soldier back from the front.

I will call him Serhyi, since that was his name. He had been on active duty since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. He had been in the Donetsk airport and in Debaltsevo, two of the most desperate battles of that initial stage of the war. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, he had led special operations, including rescue missions. My host asked him to answer my questions. Serhyi spoke matter-of-factly, in an even tone, about acts of stunning physical courage, about the center of the largest war the world has seen since 1945. He was modest. He was doing the things he had to do, and that night one of those things was to talk to me…

Sergei was killed the following week.

Serhyi was married and had children. He had comrades and friends. This is their loss. He had a country that he served. This is Ukraine’s loss. In another sense, though, his death is a loss for those of us who do not notice. By resisting, Ukrainians have helped to make the world safer. They have held off a larger war in Europe. They have deterred China from adventures in the Pacific. They have made it less likely that other countries will develop nuclear weapons. They have defended what remains of a world order based upon law…

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

The truth about Tesla

Tesla makes money by making and selling cars, right? A splendid piece of investigative journalism by Sky News tells a more nuanced story. Turns out that,

Revenue from state subsidies accounted for at least 38% of Tesla’s profits of $7.1bn in 2024 as the company banked $2.8bn from trading “regulatory credits”, a state-level subsidy paid to encourage production of electric vehicles.

Accounts for the first quarter of this year show Tesla earned $595m from regulatory credits – almost 50% more than its net earnings of $409m – suggesting that without the subsidy Tesla would be operating in the red.

Where do these ‘regulatory credits’ come from?

In America, regulatory credits are an incentive intended to encourage car manufacturers to meet targets for EV production.

Several states, led by California, use them to enforce a “zero-emission vehicles mandate”, under which manufacturers are required to produce a certain proportion of EVs as part of their overall output.

Because Tesla only makes electric vehicles, it earns credits at no cost and profits from selling them to manufacturers producing petrol and diesel vehicles, which need them to meet any shortfall against state targets. 

Tesla’s total revenues in 2024 were $98bn, of which automotive sales made up $72bn.

And of course half of those cars were made in China. Wonder how that plays with Trump’s tariff obsessions.

Feedback

My puzzlement about the young woman in Wednesday’s photograph prompted some readers to rescue me from my ignorance. Diane Coyle, from whom nothing is hidden, was first off the blocks: “My guess,” she wrote, “would be the girl was recreating a scene from a manga or anime!”

And then, hot on her heels, came Marco Pagni.

“No doubt this is Frieren!”, he wrote. “This lovely manga currently on Netflix features a pretty innovative scenario about friendships and the passage of time. Worth watching…”

So of course, I dug it out. And now I wished I had stopped and spoken to the young woman and her friend. Sigh.

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Tourism, Instagram-style

Spotted outside Trinity College, Cambridge, yesterday. The young woman had just been photographed against the background of Newton’s tree and the windows of his room. God knows why. I wasn’t quick enough to grab that shot, but here she is inspecting the results on her partner’s phone.

Quote of the Day

”It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chuck Berry | Maybellene

Link

Alex Abramovich has a nice essay about it on the LRB blog.

Long Read of the Day

 The enshittification of American hegemony

Regular readers will know that I have a lot of time for Henry Farrell who is one of the sharpest observers of what’s going on in the world that I am paid to monitor. This essay came out yesterday and I was immediately struck by its title, as I hope you will be.

Here’s the core argument:

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the … platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. … For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. … So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network…

Musk’s chatbot praises Hitler and then admits it’s been hoaxed

My Observer comment piece from Sunday’s edition.

The deaths by drowning on 4 July of 27 attendees at an all-girls Christian summer camp in Texas gave rise to a mysterious spat on X. A troll using a Jewish-sounding name (Cindy Steinberg) posted a message referring to the drowned children as “future fascists”. To this Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot responded, describing the troll as “a radical leftist … gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids”, and going on to pose a rhetorical question: “How to deal with such vile anti-white hate? Answer: Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every time.”

How did a chatbot wander into such strange territory? As it happens, Grok has been there for a while – expressing praise for Hitler, for example, and even referring to itself as “MechaHitler”; calling the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk a “fucking traitor”, and obsessing over “white genocide in South Africa”.

What’s distinctive about Grok? Two things: it’s owned by Elon Musk; and it’s the only large language model (LLM) with its own social media account – which means that its aberrant behaviour is more widely noticed than the foibles of Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek et al…

Do read the whole piece

My commonplace booklet

Kerb charging

Having an EV is all very well if you are able to charge it at home. But many city-dwellers don’t have that option, and street-charging stations are clumsy and create obstacles for pedestrians.

So this German idea by Rheinmetall GMBH is neat: the charger becomes part of the kerb.

One panel is a basic interface with digital display, LED lights and a wireless NFC interface. A charging socket is concealed under a round stainless steel cap.

That cap unlocks once an EV owner is logged in via a QR code, allowing them to attach their car using a short cable to the waterproof plug. The charger is waterproof, space-saving – and modular for easy repair. And it is proving hugely popular.

Link

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Monday 14 July, 2025

Jeep lite

If you’re a recovering petrolhead (like me) one of the (many) pleasures of being in France is the number of beautifully-restored iconic vehicles one comes across. We found this one outside a petrol station in the Rhone alps on our way homewards from Provence.

It’s reminiscent of the 2CV generation of minimalist vehicles with no frills and easy repairability which were cheap to run and mostly designed for the warm and Sunny south.

Absolutely minimal interior. Such vehicles would, I guess, be illegal today; but they are a reminder of more innocent days.

Quote of the Day

”If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I’ve written, I feel the day hasn’t been totally wasted.”

• S.J. Perelman Me too.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Trio in E-flat major for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, K. 498, “Kegelstatt”, 1. Andante

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The law of unintended consequences strikes again

The economist Tim Harford is one of my favourite FT writers, and this week’s column (Gift article) by him about how hard it seems to be for governments to do joined-up thinking is a pleasurable must-read.

Here’s how it begins:

Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for each cobra skin, thus encouraging a thriving cobra-farming industry. The cobra story is probably an urban myth — or a policy wonk’s version of one — but there is more evidence of a very similar scheme for Hanoi’s rats in the early 1900s. Rat tails brought a bounty from the colonial government, and soon enough the city was crawling with tailless rats who had had their valuable tails clipped before being released to breed.

It’s easy to dismiss such policy blunders as a thing of the past, but the Straits Times and Climate Home News recently reported on a striking scheme in Melaka, Malaysia, where locals were selling cooking oil that would eventually be used to supply European producers of aviation fuel. The underlying idea of turning a waste product, used cooking oil, into something that can be blended into aviation fuel seems as appealing as getting the cobras out of Delhi. Cooking oil starts tasting bad after being used for frying three to five times, but as an input to aviation fuel, used oil is perfectly good.

At this point two intriguing forces intersect: European governments are demanding that airlines use more biofuels from sustainable sources — used cooking oil being one — while the Malaysian government subsidises cooking oil…

You can perhaps guess what comes next. Read on to check!

Cloudflare to AI web crawlers: pay for content or be blocked

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The big news of the month is that a large tech company has declared war on the AI industry. On 1 July, Cloudflare, a leading cybersecurity and content delivery network (CDN) provider, through whose servers about a fifth of all internet traffic passes, declared “content independence day”. From that day onwards, AI web crawlers – the bots that tech companies use to scrape online content – will not be able to access sites running on Cloudflare’s servers without paying compensation to the owners of those sites.

Why is this a big deal? Several reasons…

Read on

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The Reader

I love the way this chap was able to block out the chaos and bustle of a busy railway station.

Quote of the Day

”Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ludovico Einaudi | Maria Callas

Link

Long Read of the Day

Attention is All You Need

As someone who wishes that Neal Postman were still around and writing about what social media is doing to society, I was thrilled to see that Kevin Munger has taken a Postman-like approach to analysing the significance of the decline in reading in younger generations. What I like about the essay is the way it tries to break away from the ‘sociology of the last five minutes’ that characterises much of the public discourse of this question.

Sample:

We need to appreciate that we don’t have any ground to stand on when it comes to understanding humanity and our relationship to media technology. This is Flusser’s idea of groundlessness, the fact that we are no longer grounded as a civilization because of our changing media technology. We have no stable point from which to evaluate how we experience the world and how other humans in different societies with different mixtures of media technologies appreciate the world.

This means that it’s impossible to make evaluations of whether a change in media technology (or, if you like, progress in media technology) is going to have good or bad effects on us. What we can say is that it will change us. It will change who and what we are. Lacking a stable point to evaluate this from either a positivist descriptive angle or through a normative angle of how humans should be, we don’t have any ability to evaluate whether a given change is good or bad. It is simply a change. It re-writes the rules of good and bad…

Worth your time.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Archaeologists Just Pulled Pieces Of The Lighthouse Of Alexandria Out Of The Mediterranean Sea Link

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was built during the third century B.C.E. in the early years of the reign of Ptolemy I of Egypt, after he declared himself pharaoh.

Sitting on the island of Pharos near Alexandria’s harbor on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, the lighthouse was one of the tallest man-made structures on Earth, standing at over 300 feet tall. Considered a technological marvel at the time of its construction, the lighthouse proceeded to stand tall for the next 1,600 years.

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On reflection…

Seen yesterday in a small town in Burgundy.

______________________________ 

Quote of the Day

”That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”

• Dorothy Parker

__________________ 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Chorus Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme from Cantata BWV 140

Link

“Wake up, the voice calls us”. I keep wanting to say this to Keir Starmer.

_____________________ 

Long Read of the Day

Emerson, AI, and The Force

I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson ever since, many years ago, I came on “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, his wonderful essay on computer operating systems. Recently he was invited to give a talk at a conference organised by the Laude Institute in San Francisco, and afterwards tidied up his script into this thoughtful essay on AI and education.

Here’s how it opens:

The most relevant aspect of my work to the theme of this meeting was my novel The Diamond Age, which was published about thirty years ago. At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance…

Do read on. It’s worth it. And if you’re tempted to open ‘In the Beginning was the Command line’, then set aside some time because you’ll be hooked. And if you’re really pushed for time, go to the section of the Hole Hawg. You’ll find it on page 36 onwards.

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Dreaming…

… of making a sale perhaps? Seen in a Provencal market.

Quote of the Day

”New money shouts. Old money whispers.”

• Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mick Flannery | Boston

link

Long Read of the Day

Big Serious Books Can Really Be Your Intellectual Friends

A lovely essay by Brad DeLong that he had dug out of his archives in which he muses about the importance of books he has read in the past.

Here’s how it opens:

There are urgent, human voices behind the books on your shelf. Let Niccolò Machiavelli remind you: the best intellectual company is always within arm’s reach. Don’t ask “what if your library could talk back?” Recognize that it can and does, if you have the right kind of mind to engage in deep, close, active reading. Shift from thinking of yourself as engaged in an academic ratrace. Instead take the black squiggles on the page that is the information code, and from them spin-up a SubTuring instantiation of the mind of the author of the book, and run it on your wetware. And argue with it.

Thus books transform from dry texts into lively interlocutors—and being able to see that shift might just save your sanity. Treat your books as people, not objects.

Then step into the ancient courts of ancient thinkers, and find yourself among true friends.

And afterwards, you feel like Dante claimed he had felt:

I saw the Master of the Men who Know,
seated in philosophic family….

There all look up to him, all do him honor:
there I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
closest to him, in front of all the rest;

Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance,
Diogenes, Empedocles, and Zeno,
and Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus;

I saw the good collector of medicinals,
I mean Dioscorides; and I saw Orpheus,
and Tully, Linus, moral Seneca;

and Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,
Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna,
Averroés, of the great Commentary.

I cannot here describe them all in full;
my ample theme impels me onward so:
what’s told is often less than the event…

Musk and co should ask AI what defines intelligence. They may learn something

Sunday’s Observer column:

In 1999, two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, came up with an interesting discovery that is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to a cognitive bias where individuals with low ability in a specific area overestimate their skills and knowledge. This occurs because they lack the self-awareness to accurately assess their own competence compared with others. The US president is a textbook example, but so too are many inhabitants of Silicon Valley, especially the more evangelical boosters of AI such as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Both luminaries, for example, are on record as predicting that AGI (artificial general intelligence) may arrive as soon as next year. But when you ask what they mean by that, we find the Dunning-Kruger effect kicking in. For Altman, AGI means “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. For Musk, AGI is “smarter than the smartest human”, which boils down to a straightforward intelligence comparison: if an AI system can outperform the most capable humans, it qualifies as AGI.

These are undoubtedly smart cookies. They know how to build machines that work and corporations that one day may make money. But their conceptions of intelligence are laughably reductive, and revealing, too: they’re only interested in economic or performance metrics. It suggests that everything they know about general intelligence (the kind that humans have from birth) could be summarised in 95-point Helvetica Bold on the back of a postage stamp…

Read on

So many books, so little time

If you love libraries then you might enjoy this little Japanese novel which I came across in a French bookstore. It’s about a disparate group of individuals who are, in one way or another, drifting, and who visit a particular library in search of answers to questions that bother them. In a way it’s an endearing tribute to the transformative power of libraries. And to this blogger, whose life was transformed in the 1950s by a Carnegie library in a small Irish town, it resonates.

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Horsepower

Interesting artwork outside a gallery in the Var.

I liked the detail of the animal’s ‘head’.

Quote of the Day

“So long as men worship Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable”

• Aldous Huxley (in Ends and Means, 1937)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Big Bill Broonzy | Summertime Blues

Link

Seems appropriate when posted from a place where it’s 35 degrees today!

Long Read of the Day

The fight for Europe’s future – ‘

Really sobering assessment by Timothy Garton Ash.

Europe is in the early years of a new era. The continent is now witnessing a great struggle between two Europes: liberal and anti-liberal, internationalist and nationalist, the Europe of integration and that of disintegration. Who wins will be decided by the strength and skill of domestic political forces, but also by external developments over which Europeans have little or no control.

This still nameless new period of European history began on February 24 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beginnings in history, as in romance, are crucial. In the first seven years after 1945, the US-led west created most of the key international institutions we have to this day, including the UN and Nato. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1952, set the course for what eventually became the European Community. In the first seven years after 1989, Europe and the US effectively decided to extend the existing Euro-Atlantic order, including Nato and a European Community that was deepened to become today’s European Union, to much of the eastern half of the continent.

The two overlapping periods in which this order was created and extended, but then eroded — the postwar (ie after 1945) and the post-Wall (ie after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989) — came to a simultaneous crashing end with the start of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. The institutions still exist, but the context is transformed. Now we’re in this new era’s Year Four — the counterpart, if you will, of 1949 for the postwar and 1993 for the post-Wall.

The word Zeitenwende, catapulted into the English language by the then German chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech to the Bundestag on February 27 2022, is sometimes translated as “turning point”. But the whole point is that it’s not a point. The change from one era to another may be kick-started by a dramatic event on a single day, but it takes years for the character of the new era to be shaped and recognised — and even longer for it to acquire a lasting name. You want to know what really became of the Zeitenwende? Come back in 2029…

It’s long, informed and wise. Brew coffee, read and ponder.

So many books, so little time

I’m reading this extraordinary book by Phillip Steadman, and am blown away by it. Phil is an architect and back in the day he and I were colleagues in the Technology Faculty of the Open University. He went on to the Bartlett School at UCL and eventually I went back to Cambridge but we’ve kept in touch. I first realised that in addition to being an architect he was a perceptive art critic when he published Vermeer’s Camera in 2001. In that book he made a persuasive case that the great Dutch realist painter had used a camera obscura to assist him in his work.

This was, I think, a controversial proposition in some art-history circles at the time, but what made Phil’s book special was the way he used geometrical analysis to show that a particular Vermeer painting (Lady Seated at a Virginal) had been painted from several viewpoints, which suggested that the artist had used a booth-type camera obscura when creating it. This idea was later taken up by an American film-maker who made a documentary film — Tim’s Vermeer — about the process Vermeer might have used in creating that particular work. If you’re interested, Philip gave a fascinating lecture about the research that went into the book.

Now he’s done much the same thing for Canaletto, the artist whose paintings of Venice shaped the way we have imagined the city. The book charts the analysis of how Canaletto worked, and Philip and an Italian colleague built a mobile camera obscura to reproduce many of the scenes that figure in the artist’s work. It’s a striking example of how to be scrupulously scholarly while also being readable and accessible.

My commonplace booklet

In last Friday’s edition I quoted Tyler Cowen’s puzzlement on visiting Paris at the number of young women there who sported publicly visible tattoos. Turns out that it’s not just in Paris. We’re much further south and it seems to be a trend here too. Something’s up.

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All the news that’s fit to wear

Quote of the Day

”Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

• Vint Cerf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Aria | Lang Lang

Link

Long Read of the Day

Our gilded age

I chanced upon an account of the grotesque extravaganza of Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice (spoiler alert: keep a sickbag handy) and it reminded me of a remarkable article by Sarah Churchwell in the Financial Times. In it, she argues that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, published a century ago, has some eerie resonances with our current gilded age of billionaire excess.

She writes of Dan Cody, for example, the multimillionaire tycoon in the novel, who becomes Jay Gatsby’s early mentor.

Such figures, having already grabbed the world’s spoils, can to a great extent shape the destinies of those around them. In fact, images of despoliation shape The Great Gatsby from beginning to end, from narrator Nick Carraway’s description of “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” at the start, to the “vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house” at the novel’s bravura close.

Gatsby reaches beyond the moral failures of its characters to expose carelessness as a political force. This includes not only the oligarchy’s immunity from consequence, but also the way extraction was equated with success. The unheeding brutality of so-called world-builders has returned most recently in the dark fantasies of Trumpism, and in Silicon Valley’s fatuous motto, “move fast and break things”…

Great stuff. Worth a read. It also has some wonderful juxtapositions of stills from the various film versions of The Great Gatsby and photographs from the Trump inauguration and other contemporary excesses.

So many books, so little time

Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve) is a great reader who believes (as I do) that writing marginal notes in a printed book is a good way to draw attention passages that might be worth referring back to.

But what do you do when you’re reading an eBook on a tablet?

In a nice blog post, he outlines a solution he’s found to the annotation problem. It’s an app called Nebo which, he says,

can read accurately some really foul handwriting. It’s much better than the handwriting recognition built in either to Windows or the iPad OS. Despite some oddities of formatting, I’d guess the error rate, even on my handwriting, is about one word in fifty. So what I do now is to use the split screen on the iPad with whatever I am reading down one side, and Nebo on the other. Both the Kindle app and Zotero will allow you to attach notes to highlighted text, so I write the notes on the Nebo side and then copy and paste them into the reading side. Of course it’s more faff than simply writing onto the margins of a paper, but I think it is worth the extra effort to have something that can so easily be brought into whatever I am writing. This may be wrong. Perhaps the discipline of typing up handwritten notes would fix things yet more firmly in my aged brain.

I’ve used Nebo for ages and can testify to its ability to manage my handwriting. And I also have to agree with Andrew’s parting shot:

Of course none of these tricks is really a substitute for the thing you have to do if you are to understand a worthwhile book, which is to read it at least twice over, carefully.

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