Two Gentlemen of Utrecht
One of my favourite shots from a lovely city.
Quote of the Day
”Clarinets, like lawyers, have cases, mouthpieces, and they need a constant supply of hot air in order to function.”
- Viktor Borge
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Flashmob Flash Mob | Ode an die Freude ( Ode to Joy ) | Beethoven Symphony No.9
Listening to Trump rubbishing Europe, I thought of this and dug it out.
Long Read of the Day
Baby Shoggoth Is Listening
Brilliant essay by Dan Kagan-Kans in The American Scholar in which he asks why are some writers tailoring their work for AI, and what does this mean for the future of writing and reading?
Although it has been discussed far less than the replacement of human writers, the replacement of human readers by artificial intelligence has lately become a real possibility. In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI. Already some writers are preparing for this world and advising others to do the same. There aren’t many of them so far, but they’re interesting enough, and in some circles influential enough, for us to start looking at what exactly is happening, at how writing for AI is done and why anyone would want to do it.
This strange discussion has only a few precedents; it leads, as so many discussions about AI do, toward speculation about hilarious absurdities. Sometimes, these hilarious absurdities—talking computers, hundred-billion-dollar server farms—become reality much sooner than even the speculators imagined. Will the same happen here? I fear it might. Will it be bad? Certainly. Although: It’s just possible that writing for AI might not be quite as bad as “writing for AI” sounds…
Do read on. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Chart of the Day
The speed of the US’s slide into autocracy
Screenshot
Sometimes, a chart is worth a thousand words. John Burn-Murdoch is the FT’s data specialist, and he’s a star.
My commonplace booklet
“There is still no strong pan-European leader — either of the historical sort, sitting on the bank notes, nor in the present-day geopolitical sense, who might counterbalance Trump.
Maybe this is a virtue. Narcissistic populist cults are dangerous, after all. But the grim truth is that, because it is so hard for a technocratic federation to grapple with a personality-based aggressor, the EU currently looks like the Boy Scouts taking on the mafia.”
- Gillian Tett, FT 31.01.2026 in a column about choosing images for new Euro banknotes.
Feedback
Re Joni Mitchell’s recording featured in Wednesday’s edition, Nick Halpin wrote that “The Diana Krall live performance in Paris of “A Case of You” is very poignant (and stunningly well recorded). So I dug it out and here it is.
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