Memento mori

I’m writing a piece about what great wealth does to those who possess it. The context is the current crew of tech zillionaires in Silicon Valley and their pathetic obsessions with life extension or even ‘synthetic immortality’. And then I remembered Frans Hals’s 1612 portrait of a wealthy man of his time, with the skull signifying that nothing lasts forever. Carpe diem and all that.

Quote of the Day

”AI’s use by high-school and college students to complete written assignments, to ease or avoid the work of reading and writing, is a special case. It puts the process of deskilling at education’s core. To automate learning is to subvert learning.”

• Nicholas Carr

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Hot House Flowers | Lakes Of Ponchartrain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Tom Stoppard’s Ordinary Magic

Lovely tribute to a great playwright by Henry Oliver.

Stoppard’s genius was to make a confluence of the highbrow and the lowbrow. Jumpers is a satire of academic philosophy, written in the sort of dialogue critics inevitably call dazzlingly clever; but it contains a set of gymnasts, who make human pyramids on stage, and, at one point, the philosopher opens the door with half his face covered in shaving cream with a tortoise under his arm and a bow and arrow in his hand.

Such moments are the essence of farce, which demands the question: “how did we get here?”

Stoppard’s art is full of such moments, sometimes involving half-shaved philosophers and tortoises, sometimes moments of great beauty such as the head-spinning twists of Arcadia or the Joycean magic of Travesties, and sometimes with periods of true philosophy, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

In these moments, the confluence of high and low is revealed as the essential structure of Stoppard’s work. We can never quite say what is farcical and what is serious…

Very nice piece.

Books, etc.

All the books Cory Doctorow reviewed in 2025

Córy Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) is both an inspiration and a cause of desperation to lesser beings. If you want to see why, cast an eye on his blog, his lectures, essays and novels. Or examine his list of what he read (and wrote about) in 2025. I often wonder when he sleeps, if indeed he does. The books I personally most regret not noticing from his current list are Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents and Ron Deibert’s Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy. So you can perhaps guess what’s on my Xmas list.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Simon Willison’s fascinating blog post comparing the energy consumption of a brief exchange with an LLM with that of watching a Netflix stream. He’s such a careful and open researcher.

Feedback

Thanks to Ian Clark, who pointed me to “the (disputed) antipodean origins of the flat white”.

Looks like yours had chocolate on top, which I believe is a no-no, but then almost anything goes these days I suppose.

Yep.

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