The joys of travel
An exhausted young couple trying to catch up on sleep in a crowded departure lounge.
Quote of the Day
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks”
- Dorothy Parker
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Renaldo Hahn | A Chloris | Susan Graham with Roger Vignoles
I’d never heard of Hahn and so went digging. He was a Venezuelan composer who died in 1947 and had been Director of the Paris Opera. Proust portrays him in his novel Jean Santeuil .
Many thanks to Margaret Stobo for suggesting it.
Long Read of the Day
Twitter’s ragebait champagne v Threads’s sparkling annoyance
When Elon Musk completed his court-mandated acquisition of Twitter, many thousands of its users fled from the platform. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Meta (neé Facebook) set up a pale imitation called Threads. The other week the company announced on the first anniversary of Threads’s launch that the platform now had 175 million users. Impressive, eh?
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it. Not to Charles Arthur, who has done a penetrating analysis of Threads’s actual performance, and of how Meta has distorted the platform to achieve that 175 million figure.
Note the two figures that aren’t in the Threads number: the 100 million that it hit in the first week. This is actually bad news: it means that in the 51 weeks since, there have only been another 75 million users added, ie only a little more than a million per week, culled from Instagram and Facebook, which have more than a billion users each (though with a lot of overlap). In other words, perhaps one in a thousand users peeled off each week to join the people already there.
The other number that isn’t being revealed is daily active users…
It’s a terrific piece of journalism. And it shines a light on the essence of the social media business model — the amplification of outrage.
Footnote Interesting also that three days ago the European Commission announced that it is investigating X/Twitter for breaking the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
We don’t need ‘scientific’ research to tell us that smartphones are bad for kids
Yesterday’s Observer column:
Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. In his day job, he’s a professor of ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. But outside academia, he’s a compelling campaigner. His mission: to alert us to the harms that social media and modern parenting are doing to our children. And his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, pulls no punches. It is, said the New York Times, “erudite, engaging, combative, crusading”, which possibly explains why it has been on the newspaper’s nonfiction bestseller list for 14 weeks (it is now at No 2).
Haidt writes of a “tidal wave” of increases in mental illness and distress beginning around 2012. Young adolescent girls are hit hardest, but boys are in pain, too, as are older teens. He sees two factors that have caused this. The first is the decline of play-based childhood caused by overanxious parenting, which allows children fewer opportunities for unsupervised play and restricts their movement. This translates into low-risk childhoods in which kids don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. The second factor is the ubiquity of smartphones and the social media apps that thrive upon them. The result is the “great rewiring of childhood” of his book’s subtitle and an epidemic of mental illness and distress.
Haidt’s prescriptions for these ills include banning smartphones from schools…
My commonplace booklet
If it’s true that journalism, as the cliché puts it, is “the first draft of history”, then podcasting is the second draft. When used well, it’s an extraordinary medium for journalists because: it gives them time and space to tell complicated stories; has much more intellectual bandwidth than broadcast media (which always have to cater for the lowest common denominator); and harnesses a more intimate channel to the listener (most people listen on headphones).
All of these features were in evidence last week as I listened to The Belgrano Diary, Andrew O’Hagan’s riveting podcast series on what some people regard as ‘Britain’s Watergate’ — the Thatcher government’s attempts to conceal the truth about the sinking of an Argentinian warship during the Falklands War.
(The Watergate metaphor isn’t really accurate, though: that scandal drove Richard Nixon from office, whereas the Belgrano cover-up rescued Margaret Thatcher from electoral oblivion. So even if history rhymes, it certainly doesn’t repeat itself.)
In memoriam
My first thoughts on hearing of the assassination attempt on Trump and then seeing Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph, with its Iwo Jima overtones, is that the American Republic’s experiment with democracy is ending. Trump, the Vietnam draft-dodger, will now metamorphose into Trump, the indomitable battle-torn hero, and the rest, sadly, will be history.
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