Gondola

We’re reading Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, his fictional re-imagining of the life of Thomas Mann, at the moment, and have just got to the point where the subject makes his first visit to Venice, where he is immediately struck by the fact that the gondolas, with their shiny black splendour, remind him of hearses. And then I remembered this shot from one of our visits to the city and went digging for it in my archive.

Quote of the Day

”The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do”

• J.M. Coetzee

Yeah, but it’s not the only secret.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Professor Longhair & His New Orleans Boys | Mardi Gras In New Orleans

Link

Long Read of the Day

The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us

Terrific blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve). It’s a much more extensive analysis of the upsides and downsides of ‘AI’-powered text-to-graphics engines like DALL-E than I was able to do in my Observer column last Sunday. His argument is that humans are not ready for the coming deluge of video, audio, photos and even text generated by machine learning designed to grab and hold our attention. If you’re new to this important subject and want to see where it’s heading, can I suggest that you start with the column and then move to Charles’s essay?

Closer to the machine: an elegy for the humble gear-lever

Nice piece by Ian Bogost which will appeal to petrolheads. His car doesn’t have an automatic gearbox and he likes it that way. Manually changing gear makes him feel that he is operating his car, not just driving it. That’s why he’s had what the Americans call “stick shifts” for the last 20 years. But he senses that manual transmission is doomed, and not just by the move to EVs.

The manual transmission, however marginal it has become during the smartphone age, remains a vestige of direct, mechanical control. When a driver changes speeds, their intention can be fruitfully realized in gratifying action, meshing literal gears. Even when your hand slips and the gears grind, the device still speaks in a way you can understand.

To lament the end of the manual transmission is to eulogize much more than shifting gears. When the manual dies, little about driving will fall away that hasn’t already been lost. But we’ll lose something bigger and more important: the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating. Even if you don’t own a stick, or if you don’t know how to drive one, its mere existence signals that a more embodied technology is possible—that it once was common, even—and that humans and machines really can commune. The stick shift is a form of hope, but it’s one we’ll soon have left behind.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

Bull charges into bank but omits to make a deposit

You think I’m joking? Well, this is from The Times of Israel:

Financial institutions normally welcome a bull market, but workers at Bank Leumi in the central city of Lod were not amused on Monday when an angry bull bashed into several cars in their parking lot before charging through the hallways.

The bull’s owner, a resident of the city, was called to the bank offices to help extract the bovine. Video showed several people baiting the bull, trying to get it to charge down a corridor and into a makeshift trap they had made that would allow them to tie a rope around it.

The Lod Municipality said a city-employed veterinarian eventually stunned the bull to make it easier to restrain him…

The report includes an hilarious video of amateur toreadors trying to lure the animal into a trap.

The good news, as Quartz observed, is that it was a bank rather than a china shop.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The Bundle

Berlin, December 2016

Quote of the Day

”When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

• Czesław Miłosz

Makes me think of Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh | Dá bhFaighfinn Mo Rogha de Thriúr Acu

Link

Hollywood Inn, Co. Wicklow: Scottish Hebrides singer Julie Fowlis & Kerry singer Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh singing ‘Dá bhFaighfinn Mo Rogha de Thriúr Acu’ (0:00), Dhannsamaid Le Ailean (1:24) & Cairistion’ Nigh’n Eoghainn (2:16) with accompaniment from Éamon Doorley (Bouzouki) and Martin Ross.

Long Read of the Day

Joan Bakewell: ‘Life hasn’t got duller as I’ve got older. Less thrilling, perhaps’

She is one of my heroines, and this profile by my colleague Tim Adams does her justice.

Joan Bakewell sees David Attenborough from time to time. He has only one question for her: “Are you still working?” And, of course, she is. When we meet for lunch she is just about to embark on her fifth series of Landscape Artist of the Year for Sky – “Bake Off with oils” – that sees her “galloping around the country” from Loch Fyne to Broadstairs. She puts in 12-hour shifts beginning at seven in the morning – “by 7pm they know I’m ready for a drink”. She’s also in the House of Lords two or three days a week, when it is sitting, and she’s the president of Birkbeck, University of London. And then there are always new committees to chair, books to write. One of the reasons that Bakewell has long been such a seductive voice for the possibilities of ageing is that she has never shown the slightest interest in being past it.

She breezes into her chosen restaurant, the Orrery on London’s Marylebone High Street, already full of talk and smiles as she sits down, having done a bit of shopping downstairs in the Conran shop. The Orrery has the decor of a Dignitas clinic, white and hushed, with good linen and sharp cutlery and pristine glassware, but Bakewell brings with her a life-affirming attention. She is, you immediately forget, 89. She orders precisely – mozzarella to start and salmon fillet, water – and then gets on with the real business of lunch, conversation. Before our starters arrive we have discussed the voodoo nature of Nadine Dorries (“she sticks pins into stuff she doesn’t like”), the leadership prospects of Andy Burnham (“very impressive in person”), food fads (“I’m done with sourdough, give me a nice sliced white loaf”), the similarities between Liverpool in the 1960s and Quattrocento Florence (“creativity became infectious”), and the little pot of cod liver oil and malt that Bakewell always keeps in a drawer to remind her of stolen spoonfuls of comfort during rationing…

I’ve known her ever since I was the Observer’s TV critic many years ago. There’s only one word to describe her: life-enhancing.

The cost of convenience

My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer. In our Gadarene rush into the Internet of Things we are busily creating an attack surface of near-infinite dimensions.

Ever since people started to worry about computer safety, the issue has been framed as striking a balance between security and convenience. Up to now, convenience has been winning hands down. Take passwords. Everyone knows that long, complex passwords are more secure than simple ones, but they’re also hard to remember. So, being human, we don’t use them: in 2021, the five most commonly used passwords were: 123456, 123456789, 12345, qwerty and password.

In the era of mainframe computers and standalone PCs, this kind of laxity didn’t matter too much. But as the world became networked, the consequences of carelessness have become more worrying. Why? Because there is no such thing as a completely secure networked device and we have been adding such devices to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) on a maniacal scale. There are something like 13bn at the moment; by 2030, the tech industry thinks there might be 30bn.

The conventional adjective for these gizmos is “smart”. They can be “hi-tech” items such as smart speakers, fitness trackers and security cameras, but also standard household things such as fridges, lightbulbs and plugs, doorbells, thermostats and so on. From a marketing point of view, their USPs are flexibility, utility and responsiveness – in other words, convenience.

But smart is a euphemism that tactfully conceals the fact that they are tiny computers that are connected to the internet and can be remotely controlled from a smartphone or a computer…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

The rent for the five-bedroom Georgian mansion overlooking St James’s Park featured in yesterday’s edition is… £10,000 per week.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Riverside

The Rhone at Arles on a lovely Summer evening.

Quote of the Day

“Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy. It is, I suppose, one of their godlike qualities.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam Clancy | And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Link

First time I’ve heard this. Explains why my Aussie and NZ friends take Anzac Day so seriously.

Long Read of the Day

The Evolutionary Mystery of Menopause

Fascinating essay in Nautilus by David Barash, an evolutionary biologist who has specialised in animal behaviour and is now emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

Around age 50, women stop ovulating, a biological mystery because reproduction is the sine qua non of evolutionary success, and yet menopause occurs at an age when women often have a few decades of healthy life ahead of them. Men keep producing sperm (albeit fewer and less viable) into their eighth and even ninth decades. For women, it’s not about becoming unable to make eggs, since every girl is born with all that she will ever have, which await maturation and release. The “how” of menopause is well understood; it is brought on by a dramatic reduction in endocrine hormones, notably estrogen.

But why has selection favored this rapid and consequential decline, causing women’s endocrine machinery to poop out when it does? What are the ultimate, evolutionary reasons? If you like mystery stories, you’re in for a treat. Mark Twain noted that it was easy to stop smoking; he’d done it hundreds of times. It’s easy to explain menopause; there are many hypotheses, albeit fewer than a hundred. There is now a leading candidate, the grandmother hypothesis, which I first described in Nautilus in 2016, and which has been reinforced by two new studies…

Not my field at all. But I found it interesting. Hope you do too.

AI-generated art illustrates another problem with technology

Yesterday’s Observer column…

It all started with the headline over an entry in Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter in the Atlantic: “Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here?” This is an interesting question because Jones is an internet troll so extreme that he makes Donald Trump look like Spinoza. For many years, he has parlayed a radio talkshow and a website into a comfortable multimillion-dollar business peddling nonsense, conspiracy theories, falsehoods and weird merchandise to a huge tribe of adherents. And until 4 August he had got away with it. On that day, though, he lost an epic defamation case brought against him by parents of children who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre – a tragedy that he had consistently ridiculed as a staged hoax; a Texas jury decided that he should pay nearly $50m in damages for publishing this sadistic nonsense.

Warzel’s newsletter consisted of an interview with someone who had worked for the Jones media empire in its heyday and, as such, was interesting. But what really caught my eye was the striking illustration that headed the piece. It showed a cartoonish image of a dishevelled Jones in some kind of cavern surrounded by papers, banknotes, prescriptions and other kinds of documents. Rather good, I thought, and then inspected the caption to see who the artist was. The answer: “AI art by Midjourney”.

Ah! Midjourney is a research lab and also the name of its program that creates images from textual descriptions using a machine-learning system similar to OpenAI’s Dall-E system…

Read on

Marina Hyde on Britain’s next Prime Minister, Ms Truss

Gloriously acerbic Guardian column:

For now, Truss maintains the remorselessly upbeat demeanour of a holiday rep who regards herself as the life and soul of the booze cruise, and whose lower back is tattooed with the Chinese symbols for “Only depressing people get depressed”. The overwhelming vibe you get from her campaign appearances is that she is going to make destitution fun for people. The logic puts me in mind of the Depression-era dancehall marathons epitomised in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, where desperate competitors are given the opportunity to twirl, then lurch, then stagger their way out of poverty. Or to death – whichever comes sooner.

The fact that Liz will take over a country whose own sewage is literally lapping at its shores feels too on the nose – an image so hammily overdone it could have been crafted by recidivist newspaper columnist Boris Johnson. Which, in a more literal way, I suppose it was. We’re both the sick man of Europe and the dirty protest of Europe. Johnson – who wouldn’t dream of swimming in his own excrement, either literally or metaphorically – is currently on his second foreign holiday in a fortnight, displacing whole hogsheads of the Aegean in the cause of not giving a toss about what happens to the country he let down in the way he has always let everyone down in the end…

My commonplace booklet

From Saturday’s Financial Times.

Guess the weekly rent. Answer tomorrow.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

The Little Mermaid

Famous statue in Copenhagen. This photograph was taken by my wife while I was pontificating in the National Library.

Quote of the Day

“I never was a boy, never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature take her course.”

• John Stuart Mill

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Concerto No.5 in F-Minor for Harpsichord and Strings (BWV 1056) | Largo | Maria Joao Pires

Link

If you want a peaceful start to your day, then this is the right accompaniment.

Long Read of the Day

On Rich Friends and Poor Friends

Extraordinary memoir by Rob Henderson.

Is making the right kinds of friends the secret to upward mobility? Did having friends who—like me—grew up in poor and dysfunctional environments lead me to make bad decisions in my own early life? And if I had remained friends only with my childhood cohort would I remain poor?

A new book called Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, and some recent studies about how one’s childhood fri influence one’s income later in life, have caused me to look at why my earliest friends once meant so much to me—and to reflect on why we have drifted so far apart.

Now in his 70s, Dunbar has an almost melancholic sense of the nature of our friendships. Most friendships are “fickle things,” he writes but “special friendships are very few in number.” They are “the ones with whom we shared the ups and downs and traumas of early adult life, whose advice we sought in those moments of deep crisis, the ones we sat up with late into the night,” he says. “It’s as though this small number of special friendships are carved in stone into our psyches precisely because we engaged in such intense, emotionally passionate interactions.”

I can attest to that truth…

Do read on, it’s terrific.

My commonplace booklet

Quick ripostés

I admire people who are quick on their feet, and collect anecdotes about them.

Here’s one about Robert Menzies, once Prime Minister of Australia, and a formidable politician. When he was campaigning in an election once a woman shouted “I wouldn’t vote for you if you was the Angel Gabriel!”

Menzies turned to her, beamed, and said:

“Madam, if I were the Angel Gabriel, you would not be in my constituency.”

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Fishing, not phishing

Quote of the Day

“Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and The Village | She Runs Hot

Link

There’s a lovely version of this that Cooder did just with David Lindley, but I can’t find it. Growl.

Long Read of the Day

The efficiency movement

Marvellous essay by Rob Miller on the way all modern societies have been shaped by their worship of efficiency. It’s basically an engineering mindset (I’m an engineer, so I can say that, though I long ago gave up believing that efficiency was the only thing that mattered.) And, we discovered during the pandemic, it’s our obsession with efficiency (e.g. in global supply chains) that has made our so-called ’civilisation’ so fragile.

Well worth your attention.

Reading it, two thoughts came to mind.

• Efficiency is obviously important in many contexts. But there are some where it’s vital to sideline it. For example, our criminal justice system, with (a) its assumption of innocence until proved guilty, and (b) its insistence on due process, is woefully inefficient. It’d be much more efficient just to lock up suspects on the say-so of the Chief of Police. But democracies don’t do that because they have values that trump mere efficiency. In that case, inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.

• The most persuasive account I’ve found of how engineers’ obsession with efficiency (and its fellow-conspirator, optimisation) came to dominate the world is System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Meehan Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein. Alas, they’re better at diagnosing the illness than finding a cure. C’est La vie.

My commonplace booklet

 Why I Am Not a Painter

by John Mancini on McSweeney’s…

Toulouse-Lautrec died at thirty-seven. Van Gogh died at thirty-seven. Goya did not become famous until he was in his forties, at which time he also went deaf. Beyond the evidence of his paintings, little is known of the peasant Bruegel’s life. Duchamp gave up art for chess. In Tangier, Matisse contemplated suicide. Gaugin attempted suicide. Caravaggio threw stones at police officers. Derain was killed by a car. “There is something shameful,” said Degas, “about being known.”

“Impossible to get rid of him,” Picasso said of Degas. Giorgione died in his thirties. El Greco died broke. Vermeer died in debt to the baker. De Kooning ate a cigarette. “Everything he knew about art he got from me,” Michelangelo said of Raphael. “Ignorant,” he called Leonardo. “The only person who has the right to criticize me,” Matisse said of Picasso. “I have reached the happy age of impotence,” said Delacroix…

Right, that’s it! I’m selling my watercolour set on eBay. It’s tough enough trying to be a photographer.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Analog Surveillance

A ‘listening door’ used by the East German regime in the pre-1989 era. Photograph of an exhibit in the (unmissable) Stasi Museum in Berlin. Note the number of batteries required! Poor quality image because it was behind a glass screen.

Quote of the Day

“What’s a thousand dollars? Mere chicken feed. A poultry matter.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | The Single Petal Of A Rose

Link

Long Read of the Day

Electric Vehicles Are Way, Way More Energy-Efficient Than Internal Combustion Vehicles

Really useful summary of some recent research by the Yale Climate Connections project.

TL;DR version: in a fossil-fuel powered vehicle around 80% of the energy in the fuel is lost in engine and related inefficiencies. In an EV only about 11% of the energy is lost.

The details are interesting though, so worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of surveillance…

Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Floral dance, anyone?

Hanging on a wall in Aups.

Quote of the Day

”Pardon my long preamble. It’s like a chorus-girl’s tights — it touches everything and covers nothing.”

• Gertrude Lawrence

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?

Link

Thanks to John Newman for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning

Sobering blog post by Bari Weiss.

I have spoken on the same stage where Rushdie was set to speak. You can’t imagine a more bucolic place than the Chautauqua Institution—old Victorian homes with screened-in porches and no locks, a lake, American flags and ice cream everywhere. It was founded in 1874 by Methodists as a summer colony for Sunday school teachers. Now, it attracts the kind of parents and grandparents who love Terry Gross and never miss a Wordle. It is just about the last place in America where you would imagine an act of such barbarism.

And yet as shocking as this attack was, it was also 33 years in the making: The Satanic Verses is a book with a very bloody trail…

Weiss reminds us of the way prominent writers stood firm in support of Rushdie in 1989. Her piece includes a nice picture of Susan Sontag, Gay Tales, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer at a ‘Writers in Support of Salman Rushdie’ event in New York in 1989. I guess what she’s hinting at is that it’d be harder to muster that kind of courageous support now. But perhaps that’s just her grinding an anti-woke axe.

Still, it’s worth a read, given what’s happened.

Footnote: Writing in yesterday’s Observer, Kenan Malik succinctly expressed what I think Weiss was getting at:

Penguin, the publisher, never wavered in its commitment to The Satanic Verses. It recognised, Penguin CEO Peter Mayer later recalled, that what was at stake was “much more than simply the fate of this one book”. How Penguin responded “would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it”.

It’s an attitude that seems to belong to a different age. Today, many believe that plural societies can only function properly if people self-censor by limiting, in the words of the sociologist Tariq Modood, “the extent to which they subject each other’s fundamental beliefs to criticism”.

Exclusive or not, this is one Clubhouse I was happy to leave

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In March 2020, a new app suddenly arrived on the block. It was called Clubhouse and described as a “social audio” app that enabled its users to have real-time conversations in virtual “rooms” that could accommodate groups large and small. For a time in that disrupted, locked-down spring, Clubhouse was what Michael Lewis used to call the “New New Thing”. “The moment we saw it,” burbled Andrew Chen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, “we were deeply excited. We believe Clubhouse will be a meaningful addition to the world, one that increases empathy and provides new ways for people to talk to each other (at a time when we need it more than ever).”

The app could not have come at a better time for social media, he continued. “It reinvents the category in all the right ways, from the content consumption experience to the way people engage each other, while giving power to its creators.” His firm put $12m of its (investors’) money behind Chen’s fantasies and followed up a year later with an investment that put a valuation of $1bn on Clubhouse, which would have made it one of the “unicorns” so prized by the Silicon Valley crowd.

This endorsement by an ostensibly serious venture capital firm undoubtedly helped to boost the hype about Clubhouse, but the main drivers – snobbery and elitism – had little to do with funding…

Do read the whole thing.

Video of the Day

Marvellous recent talk by Huw Price on how and why the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which he co-founded, came about. Existential risks are events of very low probability which, if they were to occur, would pose an existential risk to human society. For many years, these were ignored (and sometimes ridiculed) by conventional science, so in setting up a scholarly centre to study them the first problem Huw and his colleagues had to solve was how to make the subject academically ’respectable’. The fact that the Centre now thrives is a reflection of how successful they were in doing this.

The talk is 23 minutes long, and worth your time IMHO.

Full disclosure: I know and admire Huw, and also was able to observe CSER evolve from the very beginning because it was incubated in CRASSH, the interdisciplinary research centre in which our Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is based.

My commonplace booklet

A Brooklyn Bar menu generator

Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”It is not certain that everything is uncertain”

• Blaise Pascal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Tune for a Found Harmonium

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this lady plays.

Long Read of the Day

The links between one Oxbridge college and the slave trade

Oxbridge colleges are, by and large, wealthy institutions, with endowments that have increased over many centuries. One implication of this is that most of them would inevitably have benefited from slave-holding families who sent their sons to Oxford or Cambridge. Until very recently, though, this sordid connection between prestigious institutions and slavery was, er, not discussed. Thankfully, things have changed a bit, but there’s a lot more to be done.

Which is why this report is interesting. It’s on the website of Gonville and Caius, one of Cambridge richest colleges, and is the outcome of a pretty thorough investigation of Caius’s links with slavery over several centuries. “In total”, it concluded,

twenty-seven students from slavery backgrounds attended Caius from the early eighteenth century until the emancipation of enslaved persons was made legal in Parliament on 1 August 1838. Though this figure was probably higher, these new arrivals at the college came from several locations throughout the British Empire, with three from Virginia, another two from South Carolina, two from Nevis, eight from Barbados, one from British Guiana, three from Jamaica, one from St. Kitts, one from the Virgin Islands, and the remaining six students from various locations in England (including Norfolk, Surrey, and London). The families of these students had various relationships to slavery and the slave trade. The vast majority, twenty-six students, were the descendants of the landed enslaver class. The remaining student, John Baylor III, had family relations involved in both slaveholding and slave trading (Baylor later named his plantation “Newmarket” after the famous racecourse near Cambridge). These Caians arrived predominantly in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the 1760s (three students), 1820s (five students), and 1830s (nine students) the three most popular decades for attendees. The figures were small, but the average admittance of Caians in one decade of the eighteenth century was around seven students, so Americans were not alone in not choosing Cambridge for their educations…

It’s a fascinating and worthwhile read. Earlier scholarly histories of the college had paid attention to its contributions to the campaign for the abolition of slavery, but had omitted to look at the other side of the coin. And it’s really good that the report is up-front on Caius’s website.

My commonplace booklet

The consolations of Blogging

Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who evolved into a fine journalist (and a senior editorial figure on the Financial Times), told a revealing story in her column this weekend. When she started out as a journalist she “sometimes felt as though the media operated a bit like Moses on Mount Sinai with his biblical tablets of stone: once a day, we writers descended from our mountains, handed over our stories, then scurried away”. Then, writing “felt like a one-way process: journalists presented readers with news; only sporadically was the information flow reversed.”

But now, apparently, it’s very different for those who labour in the mainstream media. Readers are always “constantly reacting, commenting on articles in real time.” Tett illustrates this about what happened after she wrote a story recently about the “social silence” that enabled Harvey Weinstein to get away with his foul predatory practices. She ended the column by asking her readers where they had seen analogous instances of ‘social silences’ and seemed surprised when dozens of examples flooded in.

It was, she writes, “illuminating”, which makes one wonder if she should go back to anthropology for a while to gain a better understanding of the world she now inhabits. For what she had delightedly discovered is something that every blogger knows — that information-flow in the networked public sphere is always a two-way street, and that often your readers know more than you do.

Here’s the most recent case in point for me. On July 29 I wrote from Provence about how nice it was for a recovering petrolhead like me to come on iconic vehicles like the Citroen 2CV, and the WW2 Jeep, and how I still hoped to see a properly restored Citroen DS19. For the next few days my email inbox was an utter delight, as readers jostled to update me on these important matters.

In short order, I learned more about the history and engineering background of the 2CV than I would have believed possible. I found myself looking for — and finding on YouTube — The Tin Snail, Patrick Uden’s marvellous Channel 4 documentary about the car’s history. “It’s worth noting”, he wrote,

that the 425cc 2CV engine is a piece of precision engineering designed to run on poor fuel and with no maintenance. It is loosely based on the German military 750cc BMW and Zundapp engines, which were – in turn – based on the British WW1 Douglas 350cc flat-twin engine (Douglas also invented and built the first disc brakes).

Unlike the German engines, the 2CV engine has no gaskets and is milled to precision ‘face-fits’ like an aircraft engine, thus making it fit for use in small planes. It cost as much to build as the whole of the rest of the car.

In my original post, I mentioned that in Provence I always look out for the WW2 Jeeps which one often sees there. Once again, readers knew better. The Jeeps I enjoy seeing were probably built after the war under licence by the French company Hotchkiss as the M201 and used by the French military and oil exploration companies in north Africa.

And, doubtless peeved by a French company building an American Jeep, Citroen produced an all-wheel-drive version of the 2CV. Improbably, it was a 2CV with two engines – one at the front and one at the back. But, wrote Patrick,

the engines were not connected and had to be ‘synchronised’ by the driver. The rear engine meant the fuel tanks were moved from the back to under the front seats, so the filler projected through the front doors! The spare wheel was mounted above the front engine through a hole on the bonnet.

Like this:

And Stephen Pickles wrote to ask if I’d ever seen the 2CV racing speedboats.

Which, of course, I hadn’t!

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Racegoers

Believe it or not, they were waiting for the Tour de France the year it started in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”Technology is a great servant but a terrible master.”

• Sherry Turkle

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Concerto For Lute And Plucked Strings | I. Moderato | DZO Chamber Orchestra

Link

We watched Wes Anderson’s magical film The Grand Budapest Hotel the other night and went to bed with bits of the soundtrack running through our heads. Hence this choice. One of the most striking things about the film is Robert Yeoman’s stunning cinematography. Time and again one sees shots that, if printed as stills, would win awards in photographic exhibitions.

Long Read of the Day

Seriously Susan

This piece by Melinda Harvey in the Sydney Review of Booksis an illuminating review of Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag. What I loved about it is the freshness of the literary form she adopted for the review — an adaptation of the catechismic approach James Joyce famously deployed at one point in Ulysses.

– What do we want from biography?

Facts, certainly. Names, dates, places. What happened. Some setting of the record straight.

– More than that.

To go back in time. To see the individual in their context.

– More than that.

For the act of reading to take on the intimacy of a meeting. For the page to become flesh.

– More than even that.

To go inside. To understand what made a person tick.

– What made Susan Sontag tick?

According to Benjamin Moser, an alcoholic mother. But there was also a dead father and a desert childhood – both senses. What made Susan tick might have been shame.

– Why ‘shame’?

You get the idea. Read on to get the full impact.

David McCullough RIP

NYT obituary

Wonderful writer. I loved his histories of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and his biography of Harry Truman. All still on my shelves.

My commonplace booklet

 Joël Robuchon’s Legacy Explained in Eight Dishes

How to make mashed potatoes into a work of art, plus seven other secrets of the Michelin trade. Heaven for foodies. But for us lesser beings, life’s too short.

Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!