Holding forth
Gillian Tett, anthropologist, FT columnist and now Provost of King’s, holding forth last week at the launch in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge of the new Bennett School of Public Policy. I meant to check out the striking artwork in the background — which seemed so out of place in the Fitz, but had dash off before I was able to get to it. Sigh.
Quote of the Day
”The literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales.”
- Jilly Cooper, inventor of the ‘bonkbuster’, who has just passed away.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Incredible String Band | October Song
Seems appropriate for the time of year. I heard them sing it live once in October.
Long Read of the Day
It’s the Internet, Stupid
I’ve always had a soft spot for Francis Fukuyama who I think got a bad rap for his “end of history” trope in 1989. Sure, it was an unwise phrase, but he wasn’t claiming no events would occur — just that no ideology had emerged to seriously challenge liberal democracy as the organising principle for advanced societies. (Which is why I’m interested to know what he thinks about Dan Wang’s book.) I’ve long thought that his book Political Order and Political Decay is a masterpiece. But maybe my critical instincts are blunted by the facts that he also happens to be a gifted carpenter/joiner, a good photographer and a pretty accomplished geek.
Anyway, I’m always on the lookout for his stuff and when I came on this essay I stopped to think. In it he identifies nine possible explanations for the way democratic societies have changed in the last few decades, and then comes down on a single culprit. Worth reading just to see if you agree or disagree with him about that. Meanwhile, here’s a sample.
Any satisfactory explanation for the rise of populism has to deal with the timing question; that is, why populism has arisen so broadly and in so many different countries in the second decade of the 21st century. My particular perplexity centers around the fact that, by any objective standard, social and economic conditions in the United States and Europe have been pretty good over the past decade. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that they have been this good at many other points in human history. Yes, we had big financial crises and unresolved wars, yes we had inflation and growing economic inequality, yes we had outsourcing and job loss, and yes we had poor leadership and rapid social change. Yet in the 20th century, advanced societies experienced all of these conditions in much worse forms than in recent years—hyperinflation, sky-high levels of unemployment, mass migration, civil unrest, domestic and international violence. And yet, according to contemporary populists, things have never been worse: crime, migration, and inflation are completely out of control, and they are transforming society beyond recognition, to the point where, in Trump’s words, “you’re not going to have a country any more.” How do you explain a political movement based on assertions so far removed from reality?
Read on. It’s interesting.
The wheels have come off Musk’s monstertruck
My latest Observer column…
So what was this Cybertruck? Well, like something you’ve never seen – except perhaps in video games or bad dreams. (If you’re interested, Google Images will be happy to provide a glimpse.) In its customary deadpan mode, Wikipedia describes it as “a distinctive angular design composed of flat, unpainted stainless steel body panels, drawing comparisons to low-polygon computer models”. When the vehicle was first unveiled in November 2019, a more imaginative observer said that it was “like a DeLorean that made love to the tank from the 80s arcade game Battlezone”.
So much for the hype; what about the reality? Well, by the end of 2024, only 39,000 Cybertrucks had been delivered and 96% of those pre-production reservations had been cancelled. And sales are now in freefall; in the first quarter of 2025, only 6,406 Cybertrucks (that’s less than half the number in the same quarter last year) were sold. In the second quarter of 2025, they’re down to 4,306. If it goes on like this, sales will be down to zero by the second quarter of next year…
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Lovely blog post by Brian Merchant about the way unscrupulous jokers are jumping on the AI bandwagon in the hope of getting noticed. One of them was a
New York City ad campaign from the AI startup Friend, which sells a little pendant device a user is supposed to wear around their neck and talk to and attract the ire of passersby with. The company plastered the NYC subway system with ads last month, and those ads were rapidly and thoroughly vandalized in what can only be read as an outpouring of rage at not just the Friend product, which they correctly identified as a malign portable surveillance device, but at commercial AI in general.
In a lovely touch, some genius put up a site in which you can indulge your hidden vandal and virtually deface the trolling ad campaign without riding the NY subway.
Go on, click on the link and have a go. Nobody’s looking.
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