Gehry’s tower
For the new Luna Centre in Arles. Quite a building.
Quote of the Day
“I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”
- Garth Gibbs, a famous Daily Mirror journalist who would not have been out of place in Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful satire on journalism, Scoop. (A copy of which, incidentally, David Cameron kept on his desk before he was Prime Minister, presumably as a handbook for dealing with the British tabloids.)
For readers who do not follow the excesses of these vile rags, I should explain that Lord Lucan was an elegant and dissolute peer who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny with a lead pipe and was never seen again, despite the efforts of many tabloid journalists — all coincidentally on lavish expenses — to locate him in foreign parts.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben (Zaide) | Lucia Popp
Sublime, utterly sublime.
Long Read of the Day
The AI summer
Nice essay by Benedict Evans, one of the shrewdest observers of the tech industry writing today.
Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.
Worth reading from start to finish. The reason we’re in an AI bubble is that while everyone and his dog is talking about how revolutionary the tech is, it’s not at all clear whether — and how — this apparent potential will actually be realised. Evans thinks that history suggests that the big payoffs might be a long time coming.
Books, etc.
Top ten of the NYT’s top 100 books of the 21st century.
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
- Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The only ones I’ve read are nos. 5,8 and 9. My kids are appalled that I still haven’t read Wolf Hall, and don’t regard my protestations that I’ve seen the dramatisation as satisfactory justification. I’m pretty sure they’re right.
Errata
Apologies to Belinda Kitchin for getting her surname wrong — as ‘kitchen’. Of course I’d like to blame it on Apple autocorrect, but careless proofreading is a more plausible explanation.
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