Airstream on a stormy night

Eddington, near Cambridge

Quote of the Day

”Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the picture of man at twice its natural size.”

• Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, one of my favourite books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ralph McTell with John Williams | Streets Of London Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why I think an invasion of Taiwan probably means WW3

If you’ve been paying attention to the translations of Xi Jinping’s address upon obtaining a ‘Putin extension’ of his leadership, then this long post by Noah Smith makes interesting — and sobering — reading. In it he applies elementary game-theory to think through the consequences of a move by Xi to ‘reunite’ the lost province of Taiwan with the motherland. What’s nice about the post from a public-sphere viewpoint is that it’s an attempt to go beyond the generalities in which an invasion of Taiwan is usually discussed in the media.

If you don’t have time to read it, then maybe his conclusion might persuade you to save it for later:

I expect that U.S. defense planners and their Chinese counterparts are gaming out far more sophisticated versions of these scenarios, with far better-informed probabilities. And I think those will still be subject to mistakes and miscalculations. In the past, humankind has often been very stupid about blundering into wars — Putin’s invasion of Ukraine being only the most recent example. So I think the people warning about a war over Taiwan are far from alarmist; there are lots of reasons to be worried here.

Yep. We’ve been on a holiday from history for decades. Putin’s invasion should have brought us back to earth. But it may be just a dry run for something worse.

Magical thinking and the modern ‘conservative’ party

From a marvellous column by Matthew d’Ancona of Tortoise Media about the strange hold that Boris Johnson has on the Tory party…

(It’s behind a members’ paywall but some access is possible for non-members.)

My point is that Johnsonism is not an exogenous force. It emerged from the very heart of contemporary Conservatism and it flared up again dangerously over the weekend. At 6:15pm on Friday, the Press Association reported that Sir James Duddridge, International Trade Minister and Johnson’s former PPS, had been in contact with him. “He’s going to fly back. He said, ‘I’m flying back Dudders. We are going to do this. I’m up for it’.”

And there it was: “Dudders”. The trademark Wodehouse idiom, the jolly japes ahoy, Duddridge and Nadine Dorries referring to the prospective return of “the boss”. What larks!

And – like it or not – adrenaline coursed suddenly through the body politic. Johnson’s fans were thrilled that he might take up the reins so quickly. Those who were not so in love with the idea were no less captivated, checking their social media feeds with unhealthy regularity to see if there were any updates on the return of Sauron to Middle Earth (flying economy, to be fair).

The essence of this is that Johnson had again pulled off the Trump trick — of inserting himself at the heart of things — the classic narcissist’s manoeuvre. And the mainstream media fell for it — again. Sigh.

D’Ancona also perceptively remembered Neil Postman’s prophetic book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, in this context. When, many years ago, I was a TV critic it shaped my thinking about the medium.

My commonplace booklet

The Financial Times is a great newspaper, one that I read every day online (I’m lucky enough to have a subscription because of where I work). On Saturday, though, I always buy the weekend edition in paper form. It comes with a preposterous colour magazine, previously called ‘How To Spend It’, containing glossy advertisements showing starved but fashionable waifs wearing clothes costing thousands of pounds, ads for men’s watches costing more than the GDP of small island nations and features about super yachts and other trophy-possessions of the super-rich. Eventually, the incongruity of a serious paper becoming a puff-piece for the yacht-owning classes began to embarrass the paper, and so the offending magazine was renamed HTSI.

Last weekend, in a token gesture to the austerity that will be inflicted on ordinary citizens, the editors of the magazine had an attack of conscience and produced an edition about “How to spend it Wisely.”

Intrigued, I investigated how I might spend my money sensibly. The nice young woman on the front cover was wearing a “CELINE vintage wool jumper” costing £700. Someone else was wearing a “BEYOND REMADE post-consumer suede jacket” costing £795. Newly-wed billionaires setting up house could purchase a “PLASTICIET Mother-of-Pearl chair” made from plastic waste, a snip at 5,500 Euros. Or they could opt for a “CHARLOTTE KIDGER side table” made from “salvaged PU dust and resin composite”, available for £12,500.

I know, I know: the fabulous profits generated by this glossy trash subsidise the excellent journalism that I value so highly. But still…

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So who exactly do you think you are?

Our imperious cat, Tilly, in typically incredulous mood, photographed by one of her two domestic retainers.

Quote of the Day

Has anyone seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.”

• P.G. Wodehouse

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Never Going Back Again

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Art of Dying

Peter Schjeldahl, the Art critic of the New Yorker has died from lung cancer at the age of 80. He had been given the terminal diagnosis in August 2019 and had undergone unexpectedly successful immunotherapy but never recovered entirely. In December 2019, the New Yorker published this unforgettable essay of his on the prospect of dying.

It’s a kind of unanticipated Apologia pro vita sua. Many years ago, he got a Guggenheim award to enable him to write a memoir. He spent most of the money buying a tractor for the farm he had bought in Delaware County, New York State. So, in a way, this essay is a kind of ruminative substitute for what the Guggenheim Foundation expected him to do..

The essay is long but memorable, IMO. I always liked Schjeldahl’s writing, even when I wasn’t interested in many of the exhibitions and works that he scrutinised. What I learned from his Apologia was that he had a pretty eventful life, scarred by alcoholism and other misadventures. It never showed in his writing, though, or if it did I was too dense to spot it.

He’s very good on the advantages of being an ‘unknown’ in competitive fields.

My uptown feats didn’t impress people whom I looked up to in the downtown art scene, where anti-bourgeois hardheadedness and minimalist disdain for the “literary” reigned. They were contemptuous of the Times. I was Peter the poet, a relative nobody. Advice to aspiring youth: in New York, the years that you spend as a nobody are painful but golden, because no one bothers to lie to you. The moment you’re a somebody, you have heard your last truth. Everyone will try to spin you—as they should, with careers to think of. For about a dozen years, I hung out, drank, and slept with artists who didn’t take me seriously. I observed, heard, overheard, and absorbed a great deal.

One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room…

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The US supreme court case that could bring (some) tech giants to their knees

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Two weeks ago, the US supreme court decided that it would hear Gonzalez v Google, a landmark case that is giving certain social-media moguls sleepless nights for the very good reason that it could blow a large hole in their fabulously lucrative business models. Since this might be good news for democracy, it’s also a reason for the rest of us to sit up and pay attention.

First, some background. In 1996, two US lawmakers, Representative Chris Cox from California and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, inserted a clause into the sprawling telecommunications bill that was then on its way through Congress. The clause eventually became section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and read: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

What those two politicians couldn’t have foreseen was that section 230 would turn into a get-out-of-jail card for some of the most profitable companies on the planet.

Do read the while thing.

On the importance of knowing what to want

The wisest man I’ve ever known was a distinguished lawyer who had won a Victoria Cross as a young officer in the First World War. I got to know him only towards the end of his long life, and treasure that memory. “The hardest thing in life,” he observed to me one day, “is knowing what to want. Most people never figure it out, and so wind up pretending that they wanted what they could get.”

This came to mind on Saturday reading Janan Ganesh’s column in the weekend edition of the Financial Times. “Knowing what to want,” said the headline, “is the ultimate life skill.” The peg for the column peg was Ewen McEwen’s latest novel, Lessons, which “is about a man to whom life just happens”.

Reflecting on the contrast between this and his own life-experience, Ganesh observes that

I have liked each of the last 17 years a bit more than the last. It isn’t a noble or profound life but it is fun, tranquil and so far in excess of childhood expectations as to still feel alien. How has it been achieved? I have a useful brain but nothing special. I have had some good luck, but not before I had some bad luck. As for hard work, I am of the Reagan view that while it never killed anyone, why take the chance?

“I have but one superpower,” he goes on: “knowing my own mind. For whatever reason I always had a picture of the life I wanted.”

Me too. Thanks to that wise old lawyer, I figured it out early, and was lucky enough to be able to make it happen.

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Welcome!

This week’s Economist cover. The magazine has a splendid first Leader on the subject (which, sadly, is probably behind a paywall) which begins thus:

In 2012 Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, two of the authors of a pamphlet called “Britannia Unchained”, used Italy as a warning. Bloated public services, low growth, poor productivity: the problems of Italy and other southern European countries were also present in Britain. Ten years later, in their botched attempt to forge a different path, Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng have helped make the comparison inescapable. Britain is still blighted by disappointing growth and regional inequality. But it is also hobbled by chronic political instability and under the thumb of the bond markets. Welcome to Britaly.

The comparison between the two countries is inexact. Between 2009 and 2019 Britain’s productivity growth rate was the second-slowest in the G7, but Italy’s was far worse. Britain is younger and has a more competitive economy. Italy’s problems stem, in part, from being inside the European club; Britain’s, in part, from being outside. Comparing the bond yields of the two countries is misleading. Britain has lower debt, its own currency and its own central bank; the market thinks it has much less chance of defaulting than Italy. But if Britaly is not a statistical truth, it captures something real. Britain has moved much closer to Italy in recent years in three ways…

And those ways are?

1. Political instability almost on the Italian scale.
2. Italy was the plaything of the bond markets during the euro-zone crisis; now the same markets are “visibly in charge” of Britain.
3. Britain’s low-growth problem has become more entrenched.

The analogy is particularly interesting for me. Way back in 1973, Ireland and the UK joined the EEC on the same day. A few weeks afterwards, I was in Dublin and went with a journalist friend to the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne hotel, where the Irish political elite used to gather for pre-dinner drinks and gossip. I asked a TD (the Irish version of MP) what joining the EEC meant to him. “It means”, he replied, “that when an Irish minister goes to Brussels he sits across the table from a British minister (pause) as an equal!”

A couple of months later I was at a political event in London and I asked the same question of a friendly Tory MP. What did joining the EEC mean for him. “It means,” he said, “that we are now just an ordinary country…”. He paused, for emphasis, “just like Italy”.

And here we are. The one piece of good news is that — as the Economist puts it — there is one reason to feel more hopeful about Britain: political instability here is just a one-party disease. “The Tories have become nigh-on ungovernable, due to the corrosion from Brexit and the sheer exhaustion of 12 years in power”. Yep. Which is why the country needs a general election.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what the country’s new constitutional monarch makes of it all.

Quote of the Day

”The object of war is not to die for your country. The object of war is to make damn sure the other sonofabitch dies for his”.

• General George Patton

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, Op 114, I. Allegro

Link

A much-needed calming influence after reading the latest update on the Westminster circus.

Long Read of the Day

 Globalism Failed to Deliver the Economy We Need

Terrific essay By Rana Foroohar.

The neoliberal philosophy is tapped out not only in the United States but also abroad — witness the backlash in Britain to Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ill-fated experimentation with trickle-down tax cuts. Offshoring to multiple countries was supposed to make manufacturing more productive and business more efficient. But many of those supposed efficiencies collapsed with any sort of global stress, from pandemics to tsunamis, port backups and other unforeseen events.

And complex supply chains resulted in any number of production disasters well before the global crises of the past few years; think about the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013, in which a factory making clothes for various global brands (which had no idea about downstream risk in their supply chains) collapsed and killed over 1,100 people. Meanwhile, free trade itself, which was supposed to foster peace between nations, became a system to be gamed by mercantilist nations and state-run autocracies, resulting in deep political divides at home and abroad.

Fortunately, the pendulum of the political economy eventually swings back, and philosophies that have outlived their usefulness give way to new ones…

I hope she’s right.

How to tax energy companies’ windfall profits

One of the many ironies of the current energy crisis is that although electricity is now much cheaper to generate from renewable sources than that generated by gas-powered stations, nevertheless the renewables companies are getting the same price for their electricity as are the gas generators. Which is why electricity prices have shot up. If you’re as puzzled by this as I was initially, then this explainer by Clemens Fuest and Alex Ockenfels may help.

Books, etc.

I’m reading my way (slowly) through Brad DeLong’s magnum opus, Slouching towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century and hope to write something about it soon. In the meantime, for those who are interested, Diane Coyle has a characteristically insightful review of the book on her blog. Highly recommended.

My commonplace booklet

Matt Pritchett is a genius. (And, as I’ve just discovered, also grandson of the writer V.S. Pritchett)

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Oh, No!

Seen on a door in (I think) Arles.

Quote of the Day

”I thought lacrosse was what you find in church.”

• Robin Williams

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

My Back Pages | Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton & George Harrison

Link

Long Read of the Day

Amsterdam: some impressions

Noah Smith went to Amsterdam and wrote a nice blog post about it.

One of my little dreams was always to be one of those bloggers who takes a three-day trip to a new city and draws sweeping conclusions about society and politics and culture from walking around and seeing some tourists and eating in a couple of cafes. And now that dream has finally been realized!

Ha. I kid. But since I was only in Amsterdam for three days (to see friends), I tried to look around and pay as much attention as I could, and perhaps formulate a few thoughts.

If you run in educated liberal America circles (as I do), you find that Amsterdam is the one of the cities that everyone tells you to visit. Its only real competition in this regard is Tokyo…

It’s an enjoyable piece. I lived and worked in Holland for a year in the late 1970s and fell in love both with Dutch society and with its cities. I was living on my own at the time, and often drove into Amsterdam on a Sunday morning to spend the day browsing there, going to galleries, cafes (especially ones where chess was played) and walking the city.

Every Sunday morning in the Concertgebouw there used to be a chamber-music concert (badged, if I remember correctly, as Für Elise) at 11am. You bought a ticket, grabbed a coffee and sat around while musicians appeared and wonderfully relaxed performances were given. Wonderful.

A world first? A US Tech giant forced to unwind an acquisition

And it was a UK regulator that did it. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ruled that Meta has to unwind its acquisition of Giphy on the grounds that the takeover of the gif-creation website could harm social media users and advertising.

Meta had bought Giphy – the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter – in 2020.

The CMA investigated the sale and published its original decision in November 2021, ordering Meta to dispose of Giphy.

Meta, then called Facebook Inc, had been fined a record £50.5m for refusing to comply with the CMA during the investigation.

Meta had hoped its purchase of Giphy would improve finding gifs and stickers on its social networks Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.

While Meta maintained that Giphy would be “openly available” to other social networks, the CMA’s investigation found the buyout would harm competition in social media and advertising.

In a post-Brexit UK, the CMA is one of the few government agencies that seems to be working.

My commonplace booklet

After WFH (Working from Home), what next?

How about WFP?

In the UK, the Fuller brewery’s chain of more than 350 pubs now offers WFP packages that start at £10 per day and include lunch and a drink (non-alcoholic beverages are also available). A lunch and unlimited tea and coffee are typically included in the £15 per day bargain offered by Young’s, another significant brewery, which has 185 pubs.

Link

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On history repeating itself…

Yesterday’s rant about historical cycles set some Classics scholars thinking about the year 69AD (or, as we PC folks are supposed to say, 69CE) when the Romans had no fewer than four emperors in a single year.

This picture (from Wikipedia) illustrates that crazed succession with coins (clockwise from top left) Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian.

This set me thinking about the Tory party which — although it could not manage it in a single year — is embarked on a similar process.

The only difference is that we do not yet know who fits into the bottom left-hand slot.

Also, there was a nice letter from Anthony Black in the FT quoting what the historian Tacitus observed about Galba, the first of the Roman quartet. Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset, quoth he. “Everyone agreed he was capable of ruling until he ruled.” Mr Black thinks that this applies to Liz Truss, which is surely a mistake. I can’t think of anyone who thought she was up to the job even before she landed it.

(Image copyright Richard Mortel on a Creative Commons licence)

Another Classics scholar, upon learning of my interest in the Roman succession, added the useful information that Galba was bald, which meant that when Otho, having decapitated him, was unable to brandish the head in public by holding it by his victim’s hair, and so displayed it by holding it up by the nose.

The Tory party is famously ruthless when disposing of leaders who look like losers, but somehow this would be seen as too extreme for present circumstances.

Quote of the Day

”I don’t object to foreigners speaking a foreign language; I just wish they’d all speak the same foreign language.”

• Billy Wilder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Suite for Solo Cello No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1009: III. Courante | John Williams

Link

Long Read of the Day

William Shatner on going into space (for real)

From his memoir in Variety…

During our preparation, we had gone up eleven flights of the gantry to see what it would be like when the rocket was there. We were then escorted to a thick cement room with oxygen tanks. “What’s this room for?” I asked casually.

“Oh, you guys will rush in here if the rocket explodes,” a Blue Origin fellow responded just as casually.

Uh-huh. A safe room. Eleven stories up. In case the rocket explodes.

Well, at least they’ve thought of it.

When the day finally arrived, I couldn’t get the Hindenburg out of my head. Not enough to cancel, of course—I hold myself to be a professional, and I was booked. The show had to go on.

We got ourselves situated inside the pod…

Read on to read when he discovered.

My commonplace booklet

My story yesterday about how the code for PGP escaped CoCOM export restrictions reminded my friend Quentin of the T-shirts that were produced with the Perl code for the RSA algorithm on them, which meant that they were also classed as munitions? Then activists realised that it might not count unless it was in machine-readable form, so they printed the same bit of perl as a barcode on the shirt :-)

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Rooftop view

In my favourite Provencal village. And I didn’t use a drone to get the shot!

Quote of the Day

”I don’t think there was ever a piece of music that changed a man’s decision on how to vote.”

• Artur Schnabel

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Billy Taylor Trio | I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Link

Long Read of the Day

Deja Vu all over again.

I know history isn’t supposed to repeat itself, but sometimes one can’t help feeling that it does.

Exhibit A: Readers with long memories will remember that in October 1956, Anthony Eden, a Tory prime minister, launched an invasion of Egypt after cooking up a conspiracy with the French and the Israelis. His aim: to show how the British Empire dealt with an upstart Arab Colonel and coup leader who had the temerity to nationise the Suez Canal (a critical strategic waterway owned by the British and the French). The Eisenhower administration, which had opposed the invasion, threatened to start selling America’s holdings in British government bonds. The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, told Eden that the Yanks were serious and that the country’s foreign exchange reserves would be unable to sustain the value of the pound sterling if the threat was carried out. British, French and Israeli troops were withdrawn. Egyptian sovereignty and ownership of the canal was confirmed by the United States and the United Nations. Eden resigned in January 1957, and Britain discovered that its days as a great imperial power were over.

What brings this to mind is a fine column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland which suggests that that particular message hadn’t got through to some people in the Tory party. Here’s the money quote:

This week Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist of Deutsche Bank, told a Commons committee that Britain was facing a unique form of trade shock: “We haven’t seen this kind of trade deficit since 1955, since national account records began.” It was odd, because I too had been thinking about the mid-1950s, specifically the Suez crisis of 1956. The failure of that military adventure is now seen as the moment when a bucket of cold reality was thrown into Britain’s face, a humiliation that stripped the country of its imperial delusions, forcing it to accept that it was no longer a global superpower that could act alone. For a while, Britain learned that lesson: just five years after Suez, the country was knocking on Europe’s door, asking to join the club.

But some, especially in the Conservative party, never shook off the old delusion. By 2016, it was back, the Tories high on Brexit talk of a global Britain once again sailing the world’s oceans, free of the constraining hand of the EU, ready to return to its rightful grandeur. The Tories have been breathing those fumes for six years, and the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget was the result: the Suez of economic policy, a disastrous act of imagined imperial sovereignty.

As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the world’s reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britain’s place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it. Yep.

Exhibit B: The US has declared economic war on China. Not your old-fashioned kind of war, mind, but a modern one in the field of semiconductors, i.e. the core technology of the digital world. The Biden administration announced sweeping export controls on China’s entire chip sector. There are three main planks to the policy:

1. A ban on the export to China of specialised chips used for AI, or equipment to make these chips
2. Restrictions on exports of high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China
3. Making a new list of Chinese companies that can be quickly banned from buying various U.S. exports without a special licence.

“The primary purpose of these export controls,” writes Noah Smith, in a fine analysis of them,

is not to protect U.S. industry or to stop the leakage of intellectual property to economic competitors. Their purpose is to kneecap China’s semiconductor industry — to slow down the country’s push for technological self-sufficiency.

Well, well. Now spool backwards to the Cold War, when the policy of the US and its allies was to deny the Soviet Union access to cutting edge technologies of the day, especially those involving digital technology. The tool for doing this — CoCOM (the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls — was established in the early years of the Cold War and maintained until at least 1994. And, funnily enough, it mostly worked, though it had some counter-intuitive effects.

The one that struck me most forcibly involved cryptographic software. When in 1991 Phil Zimmermann came up with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) a program that used public-key cryptography to enable anyone to protect the privacy of their emails with military-grade security, it was initially defined as a munition under CoCOM rules, which meant that anybody seeking to export it from the US would require a special licence. But one day I was in the stacks of the university library looking for a reference on cryptography when I stumbled on a thick blue hardback volume with the letters ‘PGP’ on the spine. It turned out to be a facsimile of a lineprinter printout of Zimmermann’s code! It seems that while nobody in the US could export a magnetic tape or computer disk with the code, nobody had thought that it would be just as effectively exported via Gutenberg’s ancient technology!

In retrospect, trying to ban the export of computer code might have had a Canute-like charm. But, as Noah Smith explains, doing what the Biden Administration has decided on will have a really damaging impact on the targeted adversary. “For the past two or three years”, he writes,

China has been embarked on an all-out effort to build a domestic chip industry that can rival that of the U.S. and its East Asian allies (Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan). China’s effort has involved plenty of waste and mismanagement, but also some startling successes. China analysts have expressed confidence that the country would eventually be able to achieve its goal of self-sufficiency, probably more quickly than scoffing Americans expected.

This was probably why Biden took action now. If he had withheld the threat of semiconductor export controls as insurance against a possible future invasion of Taiwan, there’s a good chance that by the time China was ready to attack, it would have largely immunized itself against this economic weapon.

Interestingly, the US measures seem to involve not just the export of kit but also the export of know-how that resides in the brains of US citizens. Smith says that the new export bans include a rule that U.S. citizens aren’t allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry. They have been given a bleak choice: give up your job or lose your US citizenship. It seems that many have already made their decision. Smith’s hunch is that the rationale for this is because working for Chinese companies is deemed to represent an export of intellectual property to those companies.

It’ll take time to figure out how this new kind of economic warfare will pan out. But for now it looks awfully like going back to the early years of the Cold War. History repeating itself. Somehow, though, I can’t see Xi’s China imploding like the Soviet empire did.

My commonplace booklet

Harvard’s endowment fund has lost money for the first time in six years

From Quartz…

Harvard University’s endowment is worth $2.3 billion less than last year.

The Harvard Management Company (HMC)—a nonprofit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University that has managed the University’s endowment portfolio since 1974—posted a 1.8% loss on its investments in the year ending June 30, 2022, a financial report released Thursday (Oct. 13) shows.

One’s heart bleeds for the poor dears.

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A rose by any other name…

On our kitchen windowsill yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been.”

• Lytton Strachey on Dr Arnold in Eminent Victorians

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Variations on a Theme of Mozart | Alrio Diaz

Link

This has been on my ‘Favourites’ playlist for years.

Long Read of the Day

A Locus of Care

Justin E. H. Smith’s tribute to his late colleague Bruno Latour is a thing of beauty. It is also an insightful and generous reflection on his work.

This is how it opens…

Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the eastern Mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. Legends of her late-life migration to Southern Gaul had already been circulating for some time when the discovery of her skeletal remains in Saint-Maximin was announced in 1279, and the basilica was subsequently built up around this gravesite. In the fourteenth century the Genoese Dominican author Jacobus de Voragine tells the full story of Mary Magdalene’s shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, and of her subsequent long career of miracle-working throughout Provence. Europe was made Christian not just by real-time conversion, but also a great deal of retroactive inscription of Biblical personages, apostles, and early Church Fathers into the ancient history of what was not yet a well-delineated cultural-geographical sphere.

In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour.

“It’s nice, they give us a choice.” With this simple, gentle affirmation, our beloved old master, so often derided in the Anglosphere for his role in landing us in the current “post-truth” desert, seemed to sublate all the irony of the contrasting accounts of the skull’s origins, into something that was, well, true — and not only true, but good: a good and true method for navigating the perilous terrain on which the truth-claims of these only purportedly non-overlapping magisteria have done their best to coexist for the past five centuries or so…

Do read the whole thing. It had a particular resonance for me because many years ago my wife and I had been astonished by seeing the (hideous, IMO) skull and the rival interpretations of it. We had been staying in the former monastery next to the basilica and had wandered into the building as casual tourists wondering why such an impressive church had been constructed in a relatively modest Provençal town.

Smith’s summing up of Bruno’s significance seems to me to be spot on:

Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism. I am convinced that his comment about the skull in the crypt provides a key to his whole way of thinking. We have a choice — that’s what it all comes down to. Constructionism was never a matter of “just saying whatever”, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments, or out of our data, like a new sort of Divine Law. We have a choice as to how read the world, and it’s going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good.

It’s a great read and worth your time.

What are tech billionaires’ text messages like? Just as petty as ours, it turns out

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Most of the documents relevant to the case come varnished with three coats of prime legal verbiage, but one set turned out to be delightfully clear: the text messages exchanged between Musk and his buddies that had to be disclosed during the “discovery” process of the hearing. They come in exhibits H and J of his lawyers’ 151-page submission as 35 pages of messages, averaging 21 texts per page. That’s roughly 735 instances of pure, unadulterated billionaire-talk.

On the grounds that life is too short to be reading Musk’s text messages as well as his interminable Twitter stream, I’m ashamed to say that I had shirked the job of diving into the Delaware trove. But Scott Galloway, a prominent blogger, podcaster and NYU professor, is made of sterner stuff and took the plunge, seeking, as he put it, “a glimpse into the bowels of tech power”. And his conclusion from analysing private conversations between “some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world”? Simply that “bowels” was the correct metaphor…

Read on

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 Trump Outmaneuvers New York Lawsuit By Changing Name To Donald 2

Breaking news from The Onion:

PALM BEACH, FL—In a cunning attempt to outmaneuver the fraud lawsuit brought against him by the New York state attorney general, Donald Trump reportedly changed his name on Friday to Donald 2. “I’m not sure who these charges are referring to, as there is no such person named Donald Trump—I’m Mr. 2,” said 2, the former president, who confirmed that his driver’s license as well as his passport and all official personal documents now read “Donald J. 2.” “I’m Mr. 2, that’s me. I have no connection to this case. It’s an entirely different guy, though I do have it on good authority that if there were a Donald Trump, he’d be totally innocent.” At press time, 2 added that perhaps the lawsuit was referring to a certain 44-year-old businessman named Donald Trump Jr.

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Always On

France, July 2022

Quote of the Day

”The cruellest lies are often told in silence.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and The Band | Forever Young

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Photographers in the 1970s Redefined the Medium

Nice anniversary essay in Aperture by Geoff Dyer.

I became interested in photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and looking at these old issues of Aperture, I see how much my sense of photography was a direct consequence of what was happening before then, in the 1970s. Photographers were busy taking photographs, making work, but interesting photographs are always being taken, great work is always being made, whatever the decade. In the ’70s, though, photography was being examined and defined in a way that harked back to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering inquiries into—and tireless lobbying on behalf of—the “idea photography” at the beginning of the century.

Books by Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Roland Barthes (whose Camera Lucida was published in French in 1980) were intended for the intellectually curious general reader rather than the specialist, and certainly not for practicing photographers. As Tod Papageorge later remarked, “Garry Winogrand never read Roland Barthes, and found whatever he’d seen of (Janet) Malcolm’s and Sontag’s original articles about photography in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books grimly laughable.” (How about photography curators? Well, there weren’t many back then, a point we’ll return to shortly.) These back issues of Aperture show the cultural texture and grain of the times, the work being done at the coal face of photographic life. As revealed in discussions and portfolios of documentary photography, color photography (as exemplified by William Eggleston), snapshot aesthetics, and so on, what we see, close-up and from a distance (of forty to fifty years), is a landscape of awareness…

It’s basically a hymn of praise for John Szarkowski, head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography, and the man who really shaped the perception of photography as a major artistic medium in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Musk, the budding diplomat

Jack Shaffer on Musk’s ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine:

This month, Musk dialed in additional attention to himself. Presumably, there haven’t been enough headlines about his on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter, his alleged romantic interludes, his dope smoking on Joe Rogan, his Tesla overpromising and all the other publicity stunts to stoke his sense of self-importance, so he’s drafted himself as a citizen-diplomat to end the Russian war on Ukraine. What better venue to promote his plan than on Twitter, where on Oct. 3 he proposed a 43-word peace plan that essentially sounded as if it had been scripted by Vladimir Putin, an HPD case if ever there was one, while sitting at his long table.

Great stuff. Worth reading.

Cliff edge looms for UK’s financial system

If you are — as I am — the lucky beneficiary of a supposedly gold-plated pension, you may be thinking that the market chaos triggered by the Truss administration economic ‘plans’ is nothing to do with you, then it might be wise to think again — as Richard Partington explains in yesterday’s Guardian.

It has a rather interesting graph:

Kwarteng’s mini-budget is widely seen as the trigger which set off a “doom loop” in bond markets last month as pension funds became snarled up in complex derivatives they had bought to guard against rising interest rates.

Schemes responsible for the money of pensioners across the UK had ploughed more than £1tn into so-called liability driven investment (LDI) funds. The schemes in question are the gold-plated defined benefit pension schemes, where the employer has promised a set level of pension each year, regardless of the fund’s performance.

Many used hedging arrangements to help ensure against shortfalls. Pensions are among the biggest buyers of government bonds, and as the value of those bonds fell, they faced demands for extra cash to cover the hedges. To raise that cash, they sold government bonds, sending the value of those assets even lower, requiring them to sell more bonds.

In the four days after Kwarteng’s ill-fated speech – before the Bank’s emergency intervention – 30-year bond yields rose by more than the annual increase in 23 out of the last 27 years. Some funds came close to the point of collapse.

And, as far as I can see, those hedging arrangements that some (many?) of the pension funds made are almost entirely unregulated. We’re back in pre-2008 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO) territory.

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Miss Potter’s view

The view from one of the first-floor rooms in Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s cottage in the Lake District. It’s an nteresting house.

Quote of the Day

”Applause is a receipt, not a bill.”

• Artur Schnabel, explaining why he never did encores.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ladysmith Black Mambazo | Homeless Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

The internet is already over

This long piece by Sam Kriss is quite something. His style reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson, so fasten your seatbelt. Here’s a sample to get you in the mood.

You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but so will everything I despise. These days, it repeats itself whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive. Meet The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending…

I enjoyed it. But then I always enjoyed Hunter’s journalism.

Remembering Bruno Latour

Tuesday’s piece about him prompted a few people to ask “Yes, but what was he like? in person” One answer is provided by this video of his Inside lecture/performance that he did in New York in 2018. It’s just under an hour long, so you need to make an appointment with it.

Sciences Po, where he had a Chair (and was a dean for years) has a nice tribute to him on its website.

My commonplace booklet

‘The Owner of This iPhone Was in a Severe Car Crash’— or Just on a Roller Coaster

If, like me, you have an Apple Watch then, if you have a fall or are in a serious car crash, the watch will call emergency services if you don’t display signs of life or activity immediately after the event. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. But what if you’re one of those masochists who like going on heart-stopping funfair rides? The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about a woman who did just that.

On a sunny September Sunday, Sara White and her family headed to Kings Island amusement park outside Cincinnati.

The 39-year-old dentist zipped her two-day-old iPhone 14 Pro securely in her fanny-pack (‘bum’ for British readers), buckled into the Mystic Timbers roller coaster and enjoyed getting hoisted 109 feet in the air and whipped around at over 50 mph.

Afterward, she looked down at her phone. The lock screen was lined with missed calls and voice mails from an emergency dispatcher asking if she was OK.

During the ride, Apple’s new car-crash detection triggered and automatically dialled 911. The call to the Warren County Communications Center featured an automated voice message from Ms. White’s iPhone: “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash and is not responding to their phone.”

The message is repeated seven times during the call. As the phone made the call and played the automated message, it also picked up background audio from the scene—in this case cheers, music and other amusement-park sounds.

According to the 911 report, a team was sent to the ride but didn’t locate an emergency. When Ms. White realized what happened—ironically, when in line for the bumper cars—she called back the number to tell them she was OK.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

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Autumn leaves

Seen on a walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”

• David Sarnoff

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Concerto for two violins in D minor BWV 1043 | Sato and Deans | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Dose of Rational Optimism

That’s the title of Zachary Carter’s review in Dissent of Brad DeLong’s magisterial  Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which I’m currently reading — and learning a lot in the process. Carter describes it as “a rise-and-fall epic” but thinks that “it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall”. I’m not far enough in to know whether that’s a fair judgement, but since I loved his book on Keynes and Keynesianism, which came out during the lockdown, I’m taking his review seriously.

This is how it opens:

Humanity, the Berkeley economist argues, spent nearly the entirety of its history condemned to poverty by an insufficient supply of calories and a chronically excessive birth rate. But in the “long twentieth century”—the period between 1870 and 2010—an almost miraculous transformation took place: more and more people lived longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before. Arenas of intellect and creative expression that were once accessible only to the most privileged of elites became the common experiences of mass cultures. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction.

In the grim morass that has followed the financial crisis of 2008, it is refreshing to receive a dose of rational optimism—however tempered—from a serious intellectual examining our place in the grand scheme of history. DeLong does not avert his readers’ eyes from the brutalities of imperial conquest, genocide, and revolution gone awry, which define the political milieu of the era under his microscope. But his narrative is fundamentally hopeful: people can accomplish amazing things on a colossal scale. Not that long ago, we did so all the time.

This perspective is refreshing precisely because everyone, DeLong included, knows that something has gone terribly wrong…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

The TINY cheap EV you (might) actually want!

Who said the bubble-car was dead? Nice video.

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