Memorial Day
Monday was Memorial Day, which is always marked by a moving ceremony at the American Cemetery in Madingley, near Cambridge.
The ceremony is about remembering the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen who are buried or memorialised here, but also about celebrating the wartime alliance between the US and the UK — as you can see on the little flags marking every grave. But there was a strange undertone on Monday: here was an event celebrating the ‘special’ relationship between the two countries at a time when the US has ceased to be a reliable ally, and might turn out to be an enemy.
Quote of the Day
”I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.”
- S.J. Perelman
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
John Prine | All the Best
Long Read of the Day
Is it Possible to Read Walden When You Own a Smartphone?
Nice essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on trying to read Thoreau while simultaneously owning a smartphone — two activities that seem fundamentally at odds. As someone who reads a lot, I feel her pain.
Each time I return to the passage about the water level of Walden Pond, I have to mentally shift back down to first gear. And just like you can’t cram a car’s transmission from fifth to first gear without going through the gears in between, there’s an adjustment. A new kind of mind is required, almost. I have spent weeks on a single chapter in this way, until my mental gearbox is exhausted and the muddy hill seems less and less worth the effort.
This is the real explanation of what people mean when they say “I want to read more but I can’t find the time.” Being a reader of any kind in 2025, but particularly a reader of works like Walden, does not mean becoming a person who “has more time”; it means getting used to shifting down to first gear while the culture is racing past you in fifth gear…
That bit about wanting to read more but not being able to find the time, rings bells for me. In fact it was one of the reasons why, when I was designing this newsletter, I decided to always have a ‘long read’ of the day.
My commonplace booklet
Inside DOGE
At last, an interesting insider’s account of what it was like to be doing Musk’s bidding in the early days of the coup. I particularly liked this entry for Day 8:
The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I’d imagined. It was Elon (in the White House), Steven Davis (coordinating), and everyone else scattered across agencies.
Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible.
In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.
This reminded me of something Ted Chiang had written a while ago in the New Yorker:
I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide…
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