Reading room
The library in Oxburgh Hall, a stately home in Norfolk with an interesting history.
Quote of the Day
”Confronted with computers that can produce fluent essays, instead of being astonished at how powerful they are, it’s possible that we should be surprised that the generation of language that is meaningful to us turns out to be something that can be accomplished without real comprehension.”
- Paul Lay, writing in the London Review of Books.
Which raises the question: if machines can produce fluent essays without understanding a word of the subject matter, why did we build assessment systems that evaluate students on their ability to produce such essays?
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mary Black, Emmylou Harris and Dolores Keane | Sonny
Interestingly, it doesn’t mention Liam O’Flynn on the Ulieann pipes.
Long Read of the Day
Britain’s elite needs a history lesson
Really interesting essay by Alastair Benn, triggered by a Bloomberg podcast in which the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, was interviewed by Mishal Husain, a former host of the BBC Today programme. It was, writes Benn, “one of the longest, in-depth interviews conducted in recent months by a British political leader, ranging widely across foreign policy, the money markets, immigration and state failure”. “The most revealing aspect,” writes Benn,
came right at its end: ‘Is it true you read constantly?’, Husain asks Farage. He responds that he has just finished Mr Balfour’s Poodle by Roy Jenkins, a blow-by-blow political history of the constitutional crisis between the Commons and the Lords triggered by Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. Farage reflected that the text had shaped his thinking on the potential for constitutional chicanery should Reform win a parliamentary majority.
‘In the early 20th century’, Husain cuts across: ‘Why were you interested in that?… You’re going back a hundred years to find the answers to that.’ The tone – really? The past? The early 20th century? A hundred years ago? History? – speaks to a deep problem in British public life: a political and media class, often interrelated, cut off from an historically informed understanding of the nation’s institutions…
He’s right. If Reform were to emerge from the next election with the largest number of MPs, the disunited Kingdom could have an interesting constitutional crisis on its hands.
En passant, this is the first interesting thing I’ve ever heard about Farage.
My commonplace booklet
From LFI
The Fondation HCB in Paris has an interesting exhibition.*
The Monument by Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010). From 1975 to 1986, the German photographer documented the creation of the Marx-Engels Monument in East Berlin. The project was initiated by the newly founded GDR after World War II, and eventually entrusted to sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt in 1973, who collaborated with several other artists. Bergemann began taking pictures informally, before receiving an official assignment from the Ministry of Culture in 1977. Over the course of eleven years, she recorded every stage of the process, from the earliest models to the inauguration of the vast double statue on April 4, 1986. Out of more than 400 rolls of developed film, Bergemann selected twelve images whose visual language was far removed from official aesthetics, and consolidated them under the title Das Denkmal (The Monument). Viewed from a post-communist perspective, her ironic deconstructions of these heroic figures seem remarkably farsighted. By maintaining a rigorously objective style, she managed to evade censorship while bluntly conveying the obsolescence of an ideology.
Hmmm… a reason to catch the Eurostar before Christmas?
Errata
Apologies to Branko Milanovic (whose new book I’m reading) for misspelling his first name with a ‘c’.
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