Oi! Where’s our grub?
Screenshot
We have a bird box in our garden which is used every year by Blue Tits. On Saturday I noticed that the fledglings were getting shirty about the Deliveroo service being provided by their (exhausted) parents. This is a still from the video I made of their impatience. By the time you read this they will have flown the nest and hopefully have learned to feed themselves!
Quote of the Day
Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
- Carl Benedikt Frey
(Which is why so many young people are increasingly pissed off by the arrogant insouciance of techbros about the glorious future that AI will (allegedly) bring. See Brian Merchant’s blog post on “AI as the new Avatar of American capitalism” for some insights into this backlash.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Randy Newman | Losing You
Funny how music reaches parts of us that nothing else touches.
Long Read of the Day
A lovely essay by Henry Reichman in The Hedgehog Reviewon the way Gen Z literary culture reduces famous authors to symbolic mascots to be summarised in performative Instagram snippets.
In this case, the case study is the way Joan Didion is being somehow trivialised. She was a much more formidable author than you’d guess from anything you’ll find on social media. “But”, as Reichman observes,
if we wish to discard the aesthetics around her and probe her often incendiary, frequently incisive, and always entertaining commentary, we are faced with the question: What is it, exactly, that the works of Didion can say about our current political and cultural behavior fifty, sixty years on? Much of our political landscape in 2026 is fraught and bewildering, and the advantage of turning to a text like Slouching Towards Bethlehem at this moment is that it paints a timely portrait of an America struggling with deep societal conflict and teetering toward chaos. The places and events that Didion samples in the late Sixties—a time of unpopular foreign involvements, identity-based unrest at home, and a divisive, enigmatic national government—make right now an instructive time to read Slouching.
Right on.
Social media is turning us into mobile couch potatoes
Yesterday’s Observer column:
ext time you’re out in public and have time to kill, imagine you’re an anthropologist and do some people-watching. Notice that almost everyone who’s on their own — in a cafe, a train, waiting for a bus, queueing to board a plane — is looking at their phone. And what are they doing? Mostly scrolling or flicking endlessly through a feed of images, short videos or text messages. I once stood behind a young woman in a queue to board a delayed Ryanair flight, and for the best part of 30 minutes she simply scrolled through Pinterest images without stopping at a single one. She was clearly bored out of her mind.
Occasionally, you’ll see someone listening to a podcast or reading an article but even then they’re not typing or interacting with the device. And, like the woman in the queue, they often seem listless, displaying a quiet passivity that reveals an awkward truth: we have morphed into mobile couch potatoes — consumers of content curated by algorithms, transmitted by people we don’t know to be viewed on the tiny screens we now carry with us everywhere.
This passivity is a real phenomenon. The idea that the “unprofessionalised, uncommodified, unrefined masses” are quietly opting out of public posting — has hardened from speculation into something closer to empirical fact. Internal Meta charts unsealed during US antitrust hearings showed that the share of content posted by users’ actual contacts on Facebook fell from 22% in 2023 to 17% in 2025, and nearly a third of users now post less than they did just a year ago. On Instagram, it dropped from 11% to 7%.
There’s also the discovery that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline …
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