If you’re superstitious this would not be a good day to walk under ladders.

Cross Words

My wife and I are cruciverbalists in the same sense that we are ornithologists. That is to say, we like watching birds, but often have trouble identifying them. Same with crosswords. Every weekday we do the Irish Times’s cryptic crossword, and sometimes we even manage to finish it. And (as often happens) when we finally realise that the solution to a clue which has eluded us for hours turns out to be obvious, the thudding noise you hear is the sound of one of us banging his or her head on the nearest available wall.

So why do we do it? Because we enjoy it — honestly. And it provides regular confirmation that as a couple we are more than the sum of our parts. I am an inveterate guesser, while she is a logician who refuses to accept my guess unless she can reverse-engineer the logic behind the solution. The only other thing that I bring to the party is extensive knowledge of disreputable slang of which she, as a well-brought-up girl who has led a sheltered life, is ignorant.

The nice thing about the Irish Times crossword is that the setter has a blog, in which the logic of the day’s solutions is explained after 10pm on the day of publication.

On April 30 Paul O’Doherty, the genial sadist (codename ‘Crossheir’) who has been tormenting us for the last decade, hung up his thesaurus — and penned a lovely reflective farewell which includes some stirring thoughts.

“To go back to the beginning”, he writes,

I can’t say I was an avid crossword doer when I started this job, although I had been setting crosswords for other publications since the early 2000s. I was, however, intrigued by the history of crosswords and the various conspiracy theories that revolved around them, particularly during the second World War. For instance, Dieppe was the answer to a crossword clue in The Telegraph two days before the Dieppe raid in August 1942. MI5 laughed it off as a fluke.

The British newspaper was also responsible for a number of suspicious solutions appearing in its crossword in the weeks up to D-Day: Juno, Gold, Utah, Sword, Omaha (Allied invasion beaches); Mulberry (D-Day portable harbour); Neptune (codename of Normandy landings); and incredibly Overlord (D-Day itself). What the general public didn’t know was that a copy of the Overlord plan had recently blown out of a window of military HQ at Norfolk House.

Not surprisingly, suspicion fell on The Telegraph setter Leonard Dawe, a headmaster at a school close to where US and Canadian troops were bivouacked. It transpired that Dawe had gotten them from school children when he asked them to suggest unusual words for his crossword. Little ears, how are you?

Then there was the time The Times setter Adrian Bell was investigated by MI5 days after the double agent George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs gaol – a car had been waiting in Artillery Lane for him. Bell had unwittingly included the following words in his daily crossword: gaol, rungate (a synonym for runaway) and artillery. And of course, British war-time code-breaking HQ Bletchley Park was always on the lookout for crossword doers – people with “twisted brains” to break the Enigma codes, for instance. As for myself, this week’s crosswords contain solutions that refer to … oh, I’d better not say!

You might ask what has it been like producing 178 clues a week over six days, every week, along with the Christmas Crossword and the odd speciality for a decade? Sometimes the clues come easy, on other occasions it takes hours, tinkering with nouns noticing they should be verbs, occasionally realising that a word is more American than is palatable and having to discard or reword.

After a while, the faithful crossword indicators take on a life of their own: anagram, deletion, reversal, homophone, heads, ends, tail, containment, local, repetition and archaic. They’re a bit like Sartre’s crabs after a touch of mescaline. They follow me in the streets, into my office, into my social life. Occasionally, they wake me up in the middle of the night poking me Shakespeare-like “mumbling of wicked charms conjuring the moon to stand auspicious mistress” or just telling me “hey Dumbo that anagram indicator needs changing”. Lads, it’s been a blast – I’ll miss you the most!

Lovely stuff.

My appalling profreading

Which brings me to something that keeps me awake at night: my terrible proof-reading. For reasons that escape me, but which can largely by explained by bad planning on my part, I am perpetually busy on academic and other pursuits. (At the beginning of the pandemic, for example, I co-founded a new research centre in Cambridge.) This means that my blog is invariably put together at the end of a long day. It’s usually the last thing I do before retiring (to bed, that is). And that means that I often miss glaring errors in my rush to press ‘Publish’.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote that Apple had “called time” on its landmark product, the “AirPod”, when of course I meant the iPod. And a few day’s earlier, introducing the transcript of an interesting interview with Thomas Piketty, I wrote “If, like me, you’re pessimistic about the ability of our democracies to arrest the shocking growth in equality in our societies, then this interview with Thomas Piketty is a must-read.” When of course I meant to say ‘the shocking growth in inequality.” And before that, I wrote about the splendid blog produced by the American historian “Heather Cox Robinson” when of course I meant Heather Cox Richardson. And so on.

This kind of nonsense would not happen if I were to employ a proper proof-reader. But then I would have to pay her or his salary, which in turn would mean that I had — like Dominic Cummings, for example — to charge readers for the privilege of reading me. Which would be embarrassing because I might wind up with no readers at all. So you see the problem. It would be a case where the cure would be worse than the disease.

I can (and do) easily correct these excrescences on the online version once some kind reader has pointed them out at 7:02 am, but once I’ve pressed ‘send’ on this edition the error is set in virtual stone. Sigh.

Quote of the Day

“Right through our national life we have got to fight against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic.”

• George Orwell, 1941

Thanks to Sheila Hayman for reminding me of it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks op. 28 | Cristian Măcelaru | WDR Symphony Orchestra

Link

Long Read of the Day

Medieval Scholars Spar on a Modern Battlefield: Twitter

Lovely piece by Jennifer Schuessler.

Medieval Twitter can be a noisy and fractious place, where scholars post articles, memes and, not infrequently, fierce blasts at each other.

But over the past week, things turned hotter than a pot of boiling oil, as a dispute over a spiked book review spiraled into a conflagration involving charges and countercharges of racism, bullying and deception.

It started when Mary Rambaran-Olm, a literary scholar who focuses on race and early medieval England, accused editors at The Los Angeles Review of Books of “torpedoing” a strongly negative review she had written of “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe” because of their friendship with the fellow white scholars who wrote it. As the online furor grew, one of the editors posted a fierce rebuttal, accusing her of misrepresenting the situation, and saying the publication had killed the review because she refused to accept edits.

By the end of this week, some of the protagonists had either locked or deleted their Twitter accounts, as rubbernecks outside the profession started sharing screen shots and joking about the latest circular firing squad on academic Twitter.

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

How migrants of the 1947 partition introduced Delhi to the celebrated culinary tradition – Tandoor. Nice Twitter thread.

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Work in progress

In 2010, a we had a guest speaker for a project I was running in the Cambridge university library. He had done his PhD on Isaac Newton and before his talk the University Librarian arranged for its copy of Newton’s own annotated copy of his Principia to be brought out. Watching our guest’s delighted astonishment on being confronted by the object itself reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay on the ‘aura’ possessed by the original work.

As he was pondering it I snatched a photograph of the page.

Quote of the Day

”History teaches us nothing except that something will happen.”

• Hugh Trevor-Roper

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Joe Williams | Blues For Gamblers

Link

I once saw Sonny and Brownie in concert at the Corn Exchange many moons ago. Unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day

 Victory Day

James Meek in the LRB:

The strangest thing about the Victory Day parade in Moscow this year was the absence of victory. Normally it’s there, the victory over Nazi Germany, a safely won triumph, unchangeably in the past, veterans and the glorious dead honoured, the country rebuilt, and in his speech today Vladimir Putin went through the motions of commemorating it. But this year, for the first time since the original Victory, Russian troops are openly fighting a war against the descendants of their Ukrainian former comrades-in-arms, on land whose evocative toponymy casts doubt on Russia’s traditional representation of May 1945.

After the speech, after the military parade, Putin, as usual, went to lay a flower on each of a row of granite blocks outside the Kremlin walls commemorating the ‘hero cities’ judged to have shown special valour in the struggle against the Nazis. He laid the first flower on the monument to heroic Leningrad, his home town. He laid the second flower, without any noticeable hesitation, on the monument to heroic Kiev.

For the three decades after 1991, it didn’t make much difference to the original Victory that Russia accepted, however grudgingly, Kyiv’s being the capital of another country. But now that Putin has invaded the other country, now Putin seeks to beat Kyiv, to capture Kyiv – in Russian nationalists’ fantastical construction, to liberate Kyiv – Putin isn’t just setting himself the task of achieving victory. He makes the original Victory contingent on victory over Kyiv, and if he doesn’t achieve it, that foundational moment, in the top-heavy ideological framework of Putin’s Russia, is no longer Victory with a capital V. It’s just one victory in a mundane cycle of historical wins and losses.

Good, thoughtful, realistic piece.

Chart of the Day

Seems that now trust in, or distrust of, science depends on your politics — at least in the US.

Source

My commonplace booklet

Apple calls time on the AirPod

On Tuesday, Apple announced it had phased out production of its iPod Touch, bringing an end to a two-decade run of a product line that inspired the creation of the iPhone and helped turn Silicon Valley into the epicentre of global capitalism. Link

My grandson and I have a plan to resuscitate my old iPod Classic, and I’ve got the spare parts for the job. Now all I have to do is wait to him to come from Italy so we can do it together.

Cult of Mac has a nice illustrated history of the iPod over its lifetime. It really was a breakthrough product — the spiritual heir heir of the Sony Walkman. (I still have one of those too. Maybe I should open a museum.)

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The river at dusk

Taken walking back from dinner yesterday evening

Quote of the Day

”What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Acute observation. I’ve seen umpteen confirmations of it in my lifetime.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Corelli | Concerto in D Major Op. 6 No. 4 | Adagio

Link

I spent most of yesterday online, interviewing candidates for senior academic jobs. Listening to this seemed a good way to prepare for it.

Long Read of the Day

 The lady vanishes

Very nice essay in Aeon by Ann-Sophie Barwich on how the history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse, pictured here in Peter Mennim’s beautiful portrait, is a case in point.

Mary was a Fellow of my college, Wolfson. She was quiet and reserved, with a lovely smile, but so eminent that she unwittingly terrified me. Once, I brought a philosopher friend to lunch and when he noticed her at the table he seemed dumbstruck to actually see her in person.

The essay is good on her views on the merits and uses of metaphor in scientific thinking (a favourite obsession of mine in trying to communicate ideas to lay audiences).

Hesse’s philosophical ideas about science were remarkably modern. She is often described as a ‘moderate’ between the ‘conservative’ scholars of logical positivism and ‘radical’ philosophers such as Feyerabend or Kuhn in the historical literature. This presents a remarkable misapprehension concerning the novelty of her ideas. Instead of obsessing over the justification of scientific knowledge, she highlighted the need to think about its generation. How do scientists develop their ideas about the world and come to discover new things? Hesse considered the use of metaphors and analogies in scientific models. Metaphors were analysed as a conceptual tool, and one might say a cognitive scaffold, to redescribe the nature of a scientific object by comparing the properties of a metaphor with its target phenomenon.

Consider the analogy between billiard balls and gas molecules. The positive part of the analogy is the properties we know from billiard balls with which we can also describe gas molecules. Of course, there also is a negative analogy since some properties of billiard balls certainly do not apply to gas molecules. Meanwhile, Hesse was explicitly concerned with the importance of neutral analogy: those properties of billiard balls that may or may not apply to gas molecules. Metaphors in their neutral analogies, she recognised, act as a cognitive tool for learning about the yet unknown dimensions of scientific phenomena. Hesse did not refer to metaphors as cognitive tools herself. This is admittedly modern terminology. Yet Hesse notably engaged with the cognitive conditions involved in creating scientific knowledge. At the same time, she was classically philosophical in style. Models and Analogies is partly written as a Platonic dialogue between two scientists of different persuasion: a Campbellian (from Norman Robert Campbell, who argued for the crucial role of models in scientific thinking) and a Duhemian (from Pierre Duhem, who favoured the logic of scientific theories as the principal characteristic of the special status of scientific knowledge).

For Hesse, metaphors were not passive representations of things but constituted conceptual tools actively shaping scientific thought: ‘It is still unfortunately necessary to argue that metaphor is more than a literary device and that it has cognitive implications whose nature is a proper subject of philosophic discussion.’ The cognitive power of metaphors, in her view, resided in their capacity to create similarity. The use of metaphors is an act of co-creating, not discovering, similarities between a metaphor and its physical target system. Such an act of metaphorical co-creation is inevitably shaped by cultural context…

It’s an interesting read that does something to offset the selective memory of historians of ideas.

My commonplace booklet

Why are watches usually set to 10:10 in advertisements?.

Ross Pomeroy investigates. It seems that since the 1950s advertisements for analog watches often have the time set to 10:10. Why?

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Quote of the Day

”Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”

*  Evelyn Waugh

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Little Richard | Good Golly Miss Molly | Muhammad Ali’s 50th Birthday

Link

They don’t make them like that any more. (Ali died in 2016, Little Richard in 2020.)

Long Read of the Day

Cars Are Here to Stay

Sobering essay by Alex Trembath

As knowledge economy workers increasingly crowd into walkable, expensive urban cores, lower-income Americans are crowded out into suburbs and exurbs. Increased housing construction and affordability would certainly reduce these pressures. But as civil rights attorney Jennifer Hernandez recently wrote, the policies and regulations put in place to reduce car dependence and invest in transit often come at the expense of these low-income communities. Even a radical acceleration of densification is unlikely to reverse these dynamics:

Public transit, the “solution” wealthy Whites imagine will supplant personal vehicles, does not work for many people in less-affluent communities of color, where housing, employment, and other opportunities are often more dispersed and many more jobs can be accessed in a 30-minute drive than a 30-minute ride on public transit. Unlike affluent residents in the keyboard economy, workers of color more often have multiple jobs, commute during non-peak hours, and simply cannot use transit to “balance work, child care, elder care.”

It is easy and credible enough to blame the fossil fuel and auto industries and the legacies of redlining and racial covenants for the land use and transportation infrastructure arrangements we have in the United States today. But there are legitimate reasons that more and more people, in the United States and abroad, continue to sprawl outwards. Housing will always be more affordable and more spacious in the suburbs, amenities that remain attractive to many people here and around the world.

And switching to EVs won’t fix that fundamental dependence on cars.

Inflation is worse than we think

Blog post by Samuel Gregg, arguing that the way our societies measure inflation is partly designed to understate it.

In 2011, the last time inflation was on the rise, the then-president of the New York Federal Reserve, William Dudley, ventured into a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, to give a speech explaining why inflation wasn’t a big deal. Finding that he wasn’t making an impact, Dudley famously picked up an iPad 2 and told his audience, “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful.”

“I can’t eat an iPad!” someone in the audience shouted back.

I was reminded of this story recently while standing in the checkout line of my local grocery store. An elderly neighbor standing in front of me saw the total price of her purchases flash up on the screen. For a moment, her eyes registered shock. Then I heard her mutter, “That sure doesn’t feel like $150 worth of groceries.”

I was thinking this the other day when it was announced that inflation in the UK is running at 10% — which seemed to me to be an under-estimate.

China’s Bizarre Authoritarian-Libertarian COVID Strategy

By Alex Tabarrok

It’s difficult to understand China’s COVID strategy. On the one hand, China has confined millions of people to their homes, even to the extent of outlawing walking outside or having food delivered. Many thousands of other people have been taken from their homes and put into quarantine centers. On the other hand, vaccination is not mandatory! I can understand authoritarianism. I can understand libertarianism. I have difficulty understanding how jailing people, potentially without food, is ok but requiring vaccinations is not. (Here’s a legal analysis of China’s vaccine policy.) Moreover, put aside making vaccines mandatory because as far as I can tell, China has only recently started to get serious about non-coercive measures to vaccinate the elderly.

He’s right: the strategy is weird.

My commonplace booklet

How I would learn to code (if I could start over) Link A nice illustration of why so many people turn to YouTube to learn stuff — in this case programming in Python.

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Getting to first base

Base of a table in one of my favourite cafes.

Quote of the Day

“It is outrageous that five unelected, unaccountable and relatively unknown political operatives masquerading as impartial jurists can so profoundly alter our lives.”

• Maureen Dowd (also see below)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Ombra mai fu (from Xerxes) | Andreas Scholl

Link

I still remember the first time I heard this. It was on a beautiful, sunny early-September afternoon and we had driven over the Simplon pass from Switzerland into Domodossolo, a small town in in northern Italy. My wife and our son had gone off looking for a cafe, but I was tired and opted to sit quietly in a small church, when an elderly man in the gallery suddenly started to play it on the violin.

Long Read of the Day

The World Order Reset

This extraordinary blog post is a really long read, but it left me brooding all weekend. It’s by ’N.S. Lyons’ which is a pen-name for someone who is probably someone in the foreign policy establishment, but who seems relatively detached from it and has a helicopter’s-eye view of how geopolitics might pan out from now on. It’s basically an exploration of what the puncturing of the myth of Russian military superiority and competence means, first for China and then for the West.

As I read it, I was sometimes reminded of George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ which, in a way, shaped the architecture of the Cold War world.

Worth your time, but you need to make an appointment with it and brew some coffee.

How Russia and Ukraine are finding new ways to use tech in the war

Yesterday’s Observer column

One of the few welcome surprises of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was the speed and apparent effectiveness of western governments’ imposition of conventional sanctions on his country. In short order, half of Russia’s $600bn foreign reserves held in western financial institutions was immediately frozen. The country was expelled from Swift, the vast messaging network that banks use to transfer money across the world. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard abruptly ceased to work in Russia. There was an immediate ban on technology transfers from the west. Then there was the sudden sanctioning of Putin-friendly oligarchs and those who service them in London, though Ben Elliot, the Tory co-chair and Quintessentially, the “concierge service” for the super-rich that he runs, seem to have been exempted from the strictures.

Trebles all round, then? Only up to a point: some of the successes involve measures that in other contexts are deeply toxic. Russian troops, for example, have been nabbing high-end John Deere tractors in Ukraine and shipping them back to Mother Russia. But when the lucky beneficiaries of these wondrous machines attempt to start them up, they discover that John Deere has remotely “bricked” them – ie turned them into multi-ton paperweights. Which is why many western farmers detest John Deere. Having paid a fortune for their new tractors, they find that they are not allowed to repair them themselves and any attempt to download bootleg software to diagnose malfunctions may get them into legal trouble on intellectual-property and user-agreement grounds.

Similarly, Ukraine has been using another toxic technology – facial recognition – to identify dead Russian soldiers…

Read on

Marilyn Monroe v. Samuel Alito

Fighting talk from Maureen Dowd:

Then Variety sent out a news bulletin that Kim was actually wearing Marilyn’s dress. I had last seen the crystal-strewn souffle concoction back in 1999, at a Christie’s exhibit for an auction of Marilyn’s property. It sparkled amid detritus such as sombreros, see-through nighties, and lighters from Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva lodge. The “nudest dress,” as the designer Jean Louis called it, was reverently displayed in a room by itself, lit from above like the Pieta.

As I was contemplating the comeback of this sartorial symbol of American seduction, I got another news bulletin: The Supreme Court was going to yank away the right of women to control their own bodies, strapping us into a time machine hurtling backward.

The two simultaneous emails were a perfect distillation of America’s bizarre duality — our contradictory strains of sexuality and priggishness…

A terrific read. Especially in her view that “Alito is a familiar type in American literature: the holier-than-thou preacher, so overzealous in his attempts to rein in female sexuality and slap on a scarlet letter that one suspects he must be hiding some dark yearnings of his own”.

Also relevant, perhaps: this (crudely-scanned) chart in Friday’s Financial Times.

My commonplace booklet

Intriguing typographic analysis of the leaked US Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade. Does it given any hints to the identity of the leaker? Link

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How to stitch together a fractured Northern Ireland

Wonderful graphical summary of the fractured polity of Northern Ireland.

Source: Quartz newsletter.

Quote of the Day

”The taste was of that little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I used to say goodbye to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.”

• The famous passage in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things past, (in the translation by Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin).

Terry Kilmartin was my first editor at the Observer, and although he was ‘just’ the Literary Editor was actually a central figure on the paper. He was born in Ireland but educated in England and in 1939 deemed unfit for military service because he had only one kidney. But somehow he managed to get into SOE, the legendary ’Special Operations Executive’ and I think parachuted into France in 1944 to do clandestine sabotage with the French Resistance in preparation for the Allied invasion on June 6.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Sonata for Violin Solo No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1005 | III. Largo | performed by Ray Chen

Link

Long Read of the Day

Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed for Wealth Redistribution

If, like me, you’re pessimistic about the ability of our democracies to arrest the shocking growth in inequality in our societies, then this interview with Thomas Piketty is a must-read. What I liked most about it is that the interviewer, David Marchese, kept asking the questions that I would have asked in his position. I came away not entirely convinced by Piketty’s optimism, but less dogmatic in my pessimism.

Here’s the concluding exchange:

Marchese You know, I do find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that after 40 years of worsening inequality, you — the inequality guy, Mr. r>g — are publishing a book saying we’re on the right track historically. It’s sort of cold comfort to know we’re more equal today than we were 100 or 200 years ago. Really give me a reason to feel as optimistic as you do.

Piketty “Give me a reason to be optimistic?” By looking at my historical evidence, by thinking about the big picture, I have become more optimistic. I was a bit puzzled that many people looking at “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” came away with a pessimistic conclusion. I’m trying to show that the key in history is not the big catastrophes but the positive political construction of an alternative, and this process started with the French Revolution, the U.S. revolution. This process toward more equality is more deeply rooted in our modern ethos and modern political cultures than most people believe. I remember in 2014 having a public discussion with Elizabeth Warren in Boston. I was talking about a progressive wealth tax with a rate of 5 percent per year or 10 percent per year on billionaires. She looked at me like, Wow, that’s too much. Joe Biden today, a centrist Democrat — who voted for the Tax Reform Act of 198611 — is coming in with a wealth tax. Things can change pretty fast.

Do give it your time. The interview is also nicely footnoted. I wish all web-pages were like that.

More on McLuhan…

My observation the other day that Marshall McLuhan’s views about media applied even more to our digital age than the broadcast TV era of his time rang some bells with readers.

Andrew Arends, for example, was reminded to this wonderful clip from Woody Allen’s film, Annie Hall.

And Doc Searls sent a link to “What does the Internet make of us?” — a terrific blog post he wrote in 2019 in which he applied McLuhan’s “tetrad of media effects” to the technologies we use today. That poses four questions to ask about a technology:

1. What does a medium enhance?
2. What does it obsolesce?
3. What does it retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to its extreme (for example, by becoming ubiquitous)?

It’s such a good essay that it deserves to be a Long Read of the day soon. So it’s in the queue.

The future of the forecourt

Really interesting meditation on Quentin’s blog based on a brainstorming session about what happens to petrol stations in an EV era.

We discussed other possible uses for the sites, which, despite some problems, do have the merit of being close to good road links, and often close to towns.

One idea was that they might become last-hop delivery hubs. Instead of fuel tankers rolling in during the night to top up the tanks, it would be big Amazon trucks coming to offload their parcels. Then a fleet of smaller electric vans would zip out from there during the day, doing the deliveries.

Someone else pointed out that there’s another service to which people often need quick and easy access while travelling: the loo! Yes, petrol stations are ideally placed for public conveniences, but up to now, that part of any visit has not always been very inspiring! Apparently one gas station chain in the States made their toilets a feature, advertising that they had the nicest bathrooms in the business! I thought this was very smart: there’s not much else to distinguish one station from another, so this was a cunning way to make your visit one of choice (as well as necessity!) Could you, we wondered, actually dispense with the petrol station, and instead draw people to your roadside retail experience through the quality and cleanliness of the adjacent WC?

Lovely post.

My commonplace booklet

The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, a celebration of the designs and work of Ray and Charles Eames has opened in Petaluma, California. This write-up by Anne Quito ensures that if I ever get to California again, I’ll be an eager visitor.

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Wheel of Fortune?

Liverpool, Spring 2010

Quote of the Day

”The text box of Twitter still prompts every user with “What’s happening?” What’s happening, invariably, is that they are looking at Twitter. This simple fact accounts for perhaps 99 percent of the acrimony on there, which is rarely about events in the outside world and frequently about the content of other tweets.”

• Willy Staley in the New York Times

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Three numbers from Jimmy Yancey’s final recording session | Mournful Blues | How Long Blues | 35th and Dearborn

Link

Recorded just eight weeks before his death from diabetes on July 18 1951.

Long Read of the Day

 Love is Space: Notes on Marriage and Creativity

Lovely essay by Andrea Bajani on Writing, Solitude, and Forgiveness

On the US Supreme Court leak

From Heather Cox Richardson…

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan’s team made a conscious effort to bring evangelicals and social conservatives into the voting base of the Republican Party. The Republicans’ tax cuts and deregulation had not created the prosperity party leaders had promised, and they were keenly aware that their policies might well not survive the upcoming 1986 midterm elections. To find new voters, they turned to religious groups that had previously shunned politics.

“Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” political operative Grover Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.” To keep that base riled up, the Republican Party swung behind efforts to take away women’s constitutional right to abortion, which the Supreme Court had recognized by a vote of 7–2 in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and then reaffirmed in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Although even as recently as last week, only about 28% of Americans wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, Republicans continued to promise their base that they would see that decision destroyed. Indeed, the recognition that evangelical voters would turn out to win a Supreme Court seat might have been one of the reasons then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings for then-president Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Leaving that seat empty was a tangible prize to turn those voters out behind Donald Trump, whose personal history of divorces and sexual assault was not necessarily attractive to evangelicals, in 2016…

Yep.

We’re the Supreme Court, and We Should Have Used Protection

Lovely spoof by Joanna Castle Miller on the draft judgment that somehow ‘leaked’ out.

We wanted to address the controversy about our recently leaked majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade.

A lot of folks have been taking to social media and talk shows to discuss how this leak will cause dissent in the court, inspire riots in the public square, and threaten the future of our institution.

In their own unique and unforgettable way, each storyteller examines our crisis of access to care in ways that are at turns haunting, heartbreaking, and outright funny.

Well, that may be so, but if we didn’t want a decision to come into the world at this moment, we should have abstained from writing it in the first place.

Abstinence is the only true way to stop a majority opinion from being leaked to the press. But did we let that stop us? No, we gave in to our base desires and wrote as if there would be no consequences…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

• Astra Taylor (Whom God Preserve) has invented a new term: technocratutopian It describes a lot of the nonsense we seen in neoliberal democracies. Nice Twitter thread here.

• Molly White’s Blockchain collection She is the best critic of the crypto craziness writing today. And she has now corralled her best essays on it into one place.

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Stone-age Tablets

Very sharp piece of social observation, this. One of the saddest sights I’ve seen was of a young child, aged between two and three, playing with a picture book and trying to manipulate it with her fingers as if it were an iPad. She was growing up in a family where all of her siblings had screens from a young age. It was one of those moments for biting one’s tongue. But it was also, as my companion wisely observed, “none of your business”.

Quote of the Day

”The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium … result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology.”

• Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media.

I’ve increasingly come to the view that McLuhan’s thinking is actually more apposite to networked media than it was to the broadcast media that were the focus of his original work. Also I love the fact that every weekday I cycle past where he lived (on Grange Road in Cambridge) when he was writing his PhD dissertation.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Titanic | Hymn to the sea

Link

Haven’t seen the film, so this is the only thing about it that I know. (Apart from what happened to the actual ship, of course.)

Long Read of the Day

The Renewable-Energy Revolution Will Need Renewable Storage

Can gravity, pressure, and other elemental forces save us from becoming a battery-powered civilization?

Long and informative New Yorker article by Matthew Hutson on why a world powered by renewable energy sources won’t be possible until we find better ways than batteries to store energy so it’s available when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The most interesting aspect of the piece is the diversity of searches currently under way to solve the storage problem.

Perceptions

Have a look at this.

And then at this.

Neat, eh?

How Hitler’s rocket scientist foresaw the colonisation of Mars

This, truly, is stuff you couldn’t make up.

It’s about Marsprojekt, a science-fiction novel written in 1948 by Hitler’s rocket scientist, Werner Von Braun (who had been snaffled by the US at the end of the war instead of being tried for the use of slave labour). The novel was originally published in German but in 1953 was published by in English by the University of Illinois Press as The Mars Project.

Von Braun was — as every baby-boomer knows — a key figure in the development of the US Space Program. Less well known is that he also envisaged a manned trip to Mars following the success of the moon mission.

The Mars Project outlined, in 48 chapters, the engineering requirements for a huge space expedition involving a flotilla of 10 spacecraft with 70 crew members that would return after spending 443 days on Mars before the trip back to Earth.

Now comes the really interesting bit:

Chapter 24 of this science fiction work is titled, “How Mars in Governed.” In one passage of that chapter, the book states: The Martian government was directed by 10 men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and had the title of “Elon.” Two houses of parliament enacted the laws to be administered by Elon and his cabinet. The upper house was called the Council of the Elders and contained 60 people who were named to those positions for life by Elon.

The reason he wrote the book, Von Braun writes in the Preface, was “to stimulate interest in space travel.”

In what can only be described as a remarkable coincidence, the world’s richest man — part tech genius and part fruitcake — plans to colonise Mars.

And his first name? Why, Elon.

Like I said, you couldn’t make it up.

My commonplace booklet

• On unlikely headlines: My Observer column on Sunday mentioned the 1930s competition in The Times for the dullest headline (alleged winner: “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many Dead.”) and prompted Joe Dunne to write in about a competition held in Ireland many years ago for “the most unlikely headline” in Irish publications. The winner? “FARMERS HAPPY”.

• On “thingamajig”: Re yesterday’s Quote of the Day, Anne Kirkman writes: “Thingamajig: A character in C.S. Lewis’s book, “That Hideous Strength”, remarks on the difference between men and women which makes them unable to work together. Apparently men would say “Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl on the top shelf of the green cupboard” and women would say “Put that in the other one in there” He calls this a phatic hiatus. Lovely phrase but I don’t agree with him.” Hmmm…

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Ship ahoy!

This photograph seems to me as close to perfect as one could hope for. It shows my friends Quentin and Rose in their new sailboat on Grafham Water early on Sunday morning. It was taken by Douglas Smart with a Google Pixel phone, and is reproduced with his kind permission. It’s also a reminder that the best phone is always the one you happen to have with you at ‘the decisive moment’.

Quote of the Day

“Put the thingamajig in the whatyoumaycallit”.

• An exchange between an elderly aunt and my wife when she was a child

My father often used whatyoumaycallit when he was too busy to search for the precise word. The strange thing is that one invariably knew what he meant. It was all about context. Which is one reason why machine translation is difficult.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Antonín Dvořák | Rusalka | Song To The Moon

Link

Ravishingly beautiful IMHO.

Long Read of the Day

Twitter is not the public square — it’s just a private shop

My take on the Musk-Twitter saga, from Sunday’s Observer..

On Friday 8 January 2021, Twitter kicked Donald Trump off its platform and an eerie calm enveloped parts of our global public sphere. Depriving him of his online megaphone was a compelling demonstration of how a tech platform had acquired an awesome power – the ability effectively to silence an elected president.

But what kind of power is it really? Many years ago, in a landmark book, Power: A Radical View, the sociologist Steven Lukes wrote that power comes in three varieties: the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; the ability to compel them to do what they don’t want to do; and the ability to shape the way they think.

This third capability is clearly the kind of power that a society’s communications media wield…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From yesterday’s Politico London Playbook…

The scoop everyone wanted: Just what was Parish googling? The Sun’s Harry Cole is among several who quote pals of the MP suggesting he searched for “Dominator combine harvester” before taking part in some career sadomasochism. For research purposes, Playbook googled that phrase last night and found … lots of pictures of tractors.

Note for non-UK readers: Neil Parish is a Tory MP who resigned after he had been seen watching porn on his phone in the Chamber of the House of Commons.

To my (suspicious) mind the Sun story looks like another of those specialities of British tabloid newspapers: making up a funny story to kick a public figure when s/he’s down, knowing that the victim is unlikely to sue for defamation. It reminds me of what they did to Tory Cabinet minister David Mellor in 1992, when his affair with actress Antonia de Sanchez was ‘exposed’. The story was spiced up with an allegation that Mellor, who was apparently a supporter of Chelsea FC, wore the club shirt while cavorting in bed with the lady. It was, of course, baloney. Then, as now, the price of a ‘free press’ is torrents of BS.

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