Coming soon…

… to a hedgerow near you.

 ## Quote of the Day

”A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke

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I heard him play this one evening in the 1970s at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Suddenly the chap sitting next to me started to gently (and tunefully) whistle the counterpoint. Kottke looked down at him and grinned. Magical moment.

Long Read of the Day

 What Epstein Was Afraid Of

One of the most surprising things (to me anyway) is the way the QAnon conspiracy theory about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein seems to be tearing the MAGA crowd apart. What’s even more interesting is that the Trump regime seems unable to stamp out the madness out. I’d been ignoring the story until I tuned into an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast in which he talked to Will Sommer, a journalist who has written a book about the conspiracy theory. That led me to watch part of a Netflix series about Epstein which usefully documented how creepy and mysterious he was, and chronicled the investigative process that eventually landed the brute in prison, where he apparently committed suicide. Or — so the conspiracists wonder — did he?

Which is why I fell like a ravening wolf upon this riveting blog post by Tina Brown on that interesting question.

Here’s a sample:

Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein’s partner in crime), Brown writes.

knows all about the dangers around every unlit corner in prison, given the number of questionable deaths surrounding Epstein, including his own “suicide” in that now-closed sinkhole, the MCC lockup. It’s Craig Rothfeld’s opinion that the corruption and violence at the MCC, not to mention the cockroaches, mold, burnt food, and running toilet were all insupportable torments to a former master of the universe. His likely fate as a “chomo” (prison jargon for the hated tribe of child molesters) terminally terrified him. Former inmates told the Daily News in 2020 that Epstein was denied medical attention for his back problems because “he’s a pervert” and staffers “were treating him like crap. They were making him sleep on the floor. They wouldn’t let him sleep on a cot.” Inmates would “slide papers under the door [that said] We’re going to kill you, you rapist, you pedophile.’” He was constantly being extorted, ripped off, and was shelling out for protection. The inmates said, “He was giving thousands of dollars. Wiring it Western Union to inmates’ families,” and, “He was saying he’s going to kill himself because the government is trying to kill him anyway.” It was coming at him from all sides.

Rothfeld’s personal theory is that Epstein was presented with two options: Kill yourself or be killed — here’s some extra sheets. This would explain the photo of Epstein’s cell after his death. I have always wondered why it was strewn with so many sheets for a single inmate in a notoriously spartan prison…

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet

Google now spends more on physical capital like datacentres ($85 billion/year) than the entire UK defence budget ($79 billion/year). Source

Hmmm… I wonder where he got those figures from. The UK Defence Journal estimates that the UK spent $85.6 billion on defence in 2024/25 and plans to spend $90 billion in 2025/26.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Ukraine used a cargo drone to deliver an e-bike to a soldier stranded behind Russian lines. Link

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The man himself

Wonderful portrait of the artist by Hubertus Hierl taken in August 1966. Here’s his explanation of how it came about.

I was travelling around the Côte d’Azur for various newspapers and magazines, capturing the activities of young people with my camera. I was near Cannes. Posters announced a bullfight in nearby Fréjus on Sunday, August 7. I decided to go. What followed was a series of fortunate events: when the ticket seller saw my two Leica M3 cameras, he immediately handed me a press pass. As I walk around the oval arena, I suddenly spotted Pablo Picasso with his young wife Jacqueline among the spectators. I signalled to Picasso that I would like to take a few photos. Picasso was in a great mood, and gave me a friendly nod, letting me know that he didn’t mind. It didn’t stop with just a few photos! The whole scenario was just too much. The result was over 100 photos – the last coverage of Picasso out in public. On the occasion of Picasso’s 85th birthday (25.10.1966) the portrait went around the world. Of the many messages I received, the most moving one came from the elderly art historian Carl Georg Heise. ‘You have captured something remarkable: the age at which such a great life becomes its own legend – with strength, secret knowledge and the sadness of parting.’”

Quote of the Day

”Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

• Honoré de Balzac

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Thunder Road

Link

To get the full experience, you really have to listen to it on a good stereo system, with the volume turned up. He has a mesmerising connection to his (vast) audiences.

Long Read of the Day

 Everybody gets popped: Lance Armstrong’s Regime

We spent many evenings recently watching the various stages of the Tour de France and wondering why human beings put themselves through such torture. And then I read this LRB piece by David Runciman and began to understand.

Taking EPO was not without risks: the medical consequences were often unpredictable. It makes your blood ‘healthier’ in the sense that it makes it thicker, which can cause your arteries to clog up entirely if you are not careful. It is not clear how many cyclists died of heart attacks in the experimental phase of the EPO era, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the athletes were less adept at monitoring their reaction to the drug. They didn’t die on their bikes; they died in their sleep when the blood stopped moving (‘stories from that era tell of riders who set alarm clocks for the middle of the night so they could wake up and do some pulse-increasing callisthenics’). Why would super-fit athletes take such insane risks with their health? Part of the answer, as Hamilton explains, is that professional cycling is an inherently unhealthy sport.

It is, to start with, extremely dangerous: cyclists crash all the time, breaking bones and risking permanent injury. Then there is the need to eat the bare minimum consistent with surviving the demands of a long race. Along with having thick blood, the other crucial requirement for a Tour de France rider is to be extremely thin. Hamilton says that during his doping years he also had a borderline eating disorder, which meant he spent far more time thinking about the food he was keeping out of his body than he did about the drugs he was putting in. The truth is that long-distance road racers only feel healthy when they are on their bikes: the rest of the time they feel horribly out of shape. They are achy, wheezy, bent up; they walk like old men; they sit when other people are standing, and they lie down when other people are sitting. When Hamilton was at the height of his cycling powers, he infuriated his wife by being unable even to take a short walk with her to the shops: he never felt fit enough.

The other thing cyclists need is an extraordinary tolerance for pain…

You bet. On one of the closing stages of this year’s Tour, there was an horrendous high-speed crash. One of the cyclists slid agonisingly along the wet road and I think came into contact with a kerb. Turned out he had broken his collarbone. And then a few minutes later, what do I see but him on his bike, steering with his left hand and pedalling furiously to catch up with the peloton. Sacre bleu!

So many books, so little time

This was a gift from a dear friend, a writer who has great taste in books. I’d never heard of it and so opened it not knowing what to expect. What I find is extraordinary — a set of stories about the question of whether some of the twentieth century’s greatest minds drove themselves mad in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe. Reviewing it, the critic John Banville described it as “a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present”. In that sense it reminds me of Francis Spufford’s wonderful Red Plenty which likewise blends fiction and fact. I see that Ruth Franklin had a long essay about Labatut in the New Yorker in 2021, but I’ll leave that until I’ve finished the book

Paying geeks $200m but slashing jobs – this is what an AI bubble looks like

Sunday’s Observer column:

The AI bubble continues to inflate at a stupendous rate. Trawling through company filings and public statements from Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, xAI, CoreWeave and Oracle reveals that, collectively, these outfits propose to spend between $477bn and $498bn on building what they call “AI infrastructure”: datacentres, high-end graphics processing units, land purchases, construction, etc. As the US politician Everett Dirksen supposedly said in another context: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”

If you thought that it’s hard to imagine a business model that could produce decent rates of return within a reasonable timeframe from investments on this scale, you’d be spot on: there isn’t one. This isn’t about mundane stuff such as return on investment, but about something much grander: world domination, or words to that effect.

What we’re seeing is a seismic shift in the tech industry that’s been triggered by AI. The big companies have realised that AI has become the strategic core asset…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Nicholas Carr…

A few months ago, as part of my annual physical exam, I had blood drawn for a routine panel of tests. Late the next day, my phone vibrated to let me know the results were available through my doctor’s “patient portal” app. I signed in (entering a six-digit code to authenticate myself), clicked on the Results tab, and was greeted by a long list of numbers. There must have been two dozen of them, each a measure of some important metabolic function, each occupying a poi nt within a range of points. Blood, that most vital and visceral of substances, had been turned into an array of data on a computer screen. Blood had been rendered bloodless. Maybe I was in a morbid mood—medical tests will do that to you—but as I scrolled through the numbers, I couldn’t help feeling I was looking at a metaphor for something larger, something central to the human condition today. What is datafication but a process for transforming the living into the dead?

Link

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Full steam ahead

A photograph of Brandon Head in Co. Kerry which momentarily looked like a giant locomotive trailing clouds of steam.

Quote of the Day

”To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”

• Henry Kissinger

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ronald Binge | Sailing By | BBC Symphony Orchestra

Link

The the background soundtrack for generations of Radio 4 listeners: it’s the intro music for the late-night Shipping Forecast, among other things.

Long Read of the Day

 The Making Of Dario Amodei

A good profile by Alex Kantrowitz of someone who (IMHO) is one of the most interesting person in the ‘AI’ race.

Dario Amodei doesn’t hesitate when I ask what’s gotten into him. The Anthropic CEO has spent 2025 at war, feuding with industry counterparts, members of the government, and the public’s perception of artificial intelligence.

In recent months, he’s predicted that AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs. He’s railed against a ten-year AI regulation moratorium in the pages of the New York Times. And he’s called for semiconductor export controls to China, drawing a public rebuke from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Underlying his efforts, Amodei says, is a firm belief that AI is moving faster than most of us appreciate, making its opportunities and consequences much closer than they appear. “I am indeed one of the most bullish about AI capabilities improving very fast,” he tells me. “As we’ve gotten more close to AI systems that are more powerful, I’ve wanted to say those things more forcefully, more publicly, to make the point clearer.”

Amodei’s outspokenness and sharp elbows have earned him both respect and derision in Silicon Valley…

Worth a read.

So many books, so little time

Reading muscle

Diane Coyle’s review of Edward Tenner’s Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge

There are loads of aha! moments in the book. One of my favourite essays is ‘The Importance of being Unimportant’, arguing that the highest profit margins come from essential components that are a small proportion of the total cost of the finished product – bicycle valves for instance. This introduced me to the work of Edwin Mansfield, who estimated that stronger sewing thread had “contributed more to productivity and well-being than any other innovation, including information technology.” (And who knew that Kenneth Clark of Civilization fame was so rich because the former inherited money from the IPO of the Coats thread-making business.)

Which is interesting because I’ve been re-watching the re-run of Clark’s Civilisation TV series on iPlayer and wondering how he could afford the magnificent Saville Row suits he wore — with collar and tie even in the sweltering heat of Mediterranean countries! Now we know where his money came from.

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!