Nature’s abundance

Walking on a Norfolk beach at the weekend I fell to wondering how many shells we had crunched through. Hundreds of thousands, I guessed, at least. This was just a typical square metre.

Quote of the Day

”I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr Tolstoy, unless I’m crazy of I keep getting better.”

• Ernest Hemingway, New Yorker, 13 May 1950.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | Free and Easy | Choral Scholars of University College Dublin | Arranged and conducted by Desmond Earley

Link

Shaun Davey’s music is wonderful.

Long Read of the Day  Why skyscrapers are so short

A fascinating piece by Brian Potter on how technology, economics and regulations determine the height of buildings.

Frank Dutton RIP

Good New York Times obituary of an heroic figure – a white South African detective who took on and exposed the crimes of apartheid policing.

Frank Dutton, whose investigations into some of the biggest criminal cases in South African history, from apartheid-era hit squads to more recent high-level government corruption, earned him a reputation as his country’s greatest police detective, died on Jan. 20 at a hospital in Hillcrest, South Africa. He was 72.

Mr. Dutton came to prominence in the early 1990s, a fraught moment between the 1990 release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the 1994 multiracial elections that elevated him to the presidency and officially brought apartheid to a close.

Mr. Dutton, who was white, and his colleague, Lwandle Wilson Magadla, who was Black, were working on a separate case when they uncovered evidence related to the 1988 killing of 11 Black South Africans in Trust Feed, a town in the province of KwaZulu Natal.

Trust Feed was dominated by the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Black activist organization. Initial investigations into the massacre had placed the blame on Inkatha’s rival, the African National Congress, and despite glaring failures by the police — they never interviewed two survivors, for example — a judge had ruled the case closed.

In a meticulous and dangerous investigation, Dutton and Magadla discovered that the murders had been a false-flag operation carried out by a police hit squad in an effort to drive a wedge between the two African parties.

Dutton went on under the Mandela presidency and afterwards to become South Africa’s leading and best-known cop.

Looking at the photograph, you wouldn’t want to mess with him.

Thanks to Ross Anderson for the tip.

How does Elon Musk get stuff done so quickly?

Interesting essay by Frederic Filloux. You may need to curb your instinctive hostility to (or scepticism about) the guy. But you’ll emerge wiser (or at least better informed) afterwards. At least I did.

The video included in the piece is fascinating, btw.

My commonplace booklet

From Private Eye (where else?)

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Tidal sinusoids

I’m reminded of the waveforms I used to see on oscilloscopes when I was an engineering undergraduate.

Quote of the Day

”If you’re going to invest in bitcoin, a short-time horizon is four years, a mid-time horizon is 10 years. The right time horizon is forever.”

• MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor talking to Bloomberg News

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Bell Bottom Blues (Live)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?

An unmissable New Yorker profile of Kim Stanley Robinson by Joshua Rothman. If you’ve never read Robinson, then can I respectfully suggest that you consider doing so. And if you want to think hard about climate change then his The Ministry for the Future would be a good place to start.

The opening chapter is set in 2025, in Uttar Pradesh in India, which is in the grip of a “wet-bulb” heat wave — a lethal combination of heat and humidity in which human sweat ceases to evaporate. In such conditions, even healthy people in the shade cook and die. The chapter is fiction but in recent years heat waves like this have occurred in Australia, India, Mexico, and Pakistan. The death toll in Uttar Pradesh appals the watching world, but little changes. Which leads to the depressing conclusion that it’ll only when the climate-change-induced catastrophes become unbearable that humankind will finally accept that what we know is coming is actually coming.

In the Victorian era, social novels, by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others, awakened us to poverty and injustice. Modern “naturalists,” like Émile Zola, took a scientific approach, following the causal chains of everyday life, which might link a kitchen stove to coal miners working underground. Robinson brings these traditions to bear on our future problems, combining them with an unusual narrative style designed to dramatize civilizational transformation. “The Ministry for the Future” contains chapters that describe the daily habits of geologists and encamped climate refugees; one chapter is narrated by a carbon atom, and another by the market—both actors in the networks that shape our world. Other chapters are oral histories of the sort one might find in the work of the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, showing how ordinary people could have their attitudes reshaped by climate disasters. The goal is to capture what the literary critic Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”—an invisible scaffold, unique to its period, on which our emotions hang. In our current structure of feeling, a narrator suggests, the order of things is experienced as “unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes.” Like glaciers, structures of feeling shift with time—that’s how we so readily distinguish between the nineteen-sixties and now.

It’s a long read, but worth it.

Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) isn’t working

If you’ve ever tried to open a bank account, or moving a non-trivial sum of money from one bank account to another in the UK, then you will have found yourself (and your lawyer or accountant) enmeshed in some very tedious paperwork, all of it ostensibly designed to prevent bad actors like, say, Russian oligarchs from laundering their ill-gotten gains by, say, purchasing houses in Eaton Place. And the strange thing is that while you and I get enmeshed in this paperwork, London is the money-laundering capital of the world.

Your accountant, lawyer or banker is obliged to go through this rigmarole because of the ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) requirement of AML. In a terrific post Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) has a nice illustration of the downside of this laudable requirement. He is reminded, he writes,

of Faruk Fatih Özer, founder of the now-defunct Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, who vanished last year along with $2 billion in cryptocurrencies from the exchange, had fled not only with customers’ cryptocurrencies, but also with their identities. As David Gerard so eloquently phrased it, Özer paid the most “painstaking attention” to money-laundering compliance and was therefore able to take detailed Know-Your-Customer (KYC) data for hundreds of thousands of users with him. This data included scans of the customers’ national ID cards, once again proving that digitising identity is no substitute for digital identity.

Now, of course, the reason why Mr. Özer had such a treasure trove of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) was because regulators had forced him to obtain it. So maybe it should be up to the regulators to fix the problem! But what are they going to do? What will happen to all of the people whose identities were stolen in this way? Are they all going to be given new identities in a vast national witness protection programme while their old identities are cancelled? Will the authorities give everyone a new name and a new number, cancel their old ID cards and send them new ones?

Well, of course they won’t. Not only is this approach to money-laundering ineffective (see London), but it’s immensely wasteful. Dave says that UN estimates for the seizure of criminal assets globally are in the region of $1.5 billon while the Lexis-Nexis estimate for the global costs of AML compliance are in the region of $180 billion.

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To Infinity and beyond

Saturday morning last.

Quote of the Day

”Candy is dandy
But Liquor is quicker.”

• Ogden Nash, Reflection on Ice-breaking

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mahler | Fifth Symphony | Adagietto | Berlin Phil | Karajan

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Not Hating the Body

A truly extraordinary essay by Martha Nussbaum on body-hatred. An unlikely topic, you might think, though if you were brought up as a Catholic you might find resonances galore in it. Plato has a lot to answer for, and she holds him to account. But she has a much longer charge-sheet than that. And such a great intellectual range.

Let us consider other highly intelligent animals. Elephants fear death, and seek to avoid it for self and others, and even, as we now know, grieve the loss of loved ones with rituals of mourning. Mother elephants even sacrifice their lives to protect their young from speeding trains. That is how vividly they see death ahead of them, and how bad they think it is. But they stop short of body-hatred. They do not adopt a distorted attitude to their potentially crumbling frames that leads to projective aggression against other groups of elephants.

Do not say, please, that it is because they are less aware. We are finding out more all the time about their communication systems, their social organization, their capacious and nuanced awareness. But we do not find disgust. That pathology appears to be ours alone. In her beautiful memoir, Coming of Age With Elephants, Joyce Poole, one of our greatest elephant researchers, describes the way in which her human community impeded her “coming of age” as a fulfilled woman and mother. The researcher group was highly misogynistic and racist. They deliberately broke up her happy romance with an African man. When she was raped by a stranger, they treated her as soiled and did nothing to deal with her trauma. In elephant society, by contrast, she observed better paradigms of inclusive friendship, of compassionate and cooperative group care. The memoir ends when she returns to the elephant group after a two-year absence, carrying her infant child in her arms. The matriarchal herd not only recognize her, they understand her new happiness. And they greet her with the ceremony of trumpeting and defecating by which elephants greet the birth of a new elephant child. No body-hatred, no disgust, no projective subordinations.

Nussbaum’s also good on the absence of body-hatred in James Joyce’s great character, Leopold Bloom. Recall that, early in the day chronicled in Ulysses, he

ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

When Mr Kernan pompously observes that the liturgical trope I am the resurrection and the life “touches a man’s innermost heart”, Leopold thinks:

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

A long read, for sure. But worth it.

Chart of the Day

Source: Quartz, which adds the comment:

The findings go against the grain of reports of an ongoing “techlash”—a wave of hostility to technology, its numerous breaches of privacy and security, and its disconcerting pace of disruptive change. Edelman’s newest numbers suggest that tech has perhaps benefited from an overall cross-sector rise in trust. But it also follows a period in which technology has proven even more indispensable to our lives during the pandemic.

Hmmm…

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Bikers

Wonder what the collective noun for a mass rally of bikers is.

Quote of the Day

”In answer to: Inside every thin woman there’s a fat woman trying to get out. I always think it’s: Outside every thin woman there’s a fat man trying to get in.”

• Katharine Whitehorn (of blessed memory). She was one of my favourite colleagues on the Observer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joseph Haydn | String Quartet No. 62, Op. 76 No. 3 “Emperor” |2nd movement.

Link

Well, if you’re going to have a national anthem, make sure it’s a decent tune.

Long Read of the Day

 Oh, 2022! by Charlie Stross. Since it’s the weekend, I thought it might be appropriate to suggest a really serious read. It’s a blog post by Charlie Stross, a gifted and successful SciFi writer, and it’s about how to think about the future.

Here’s a sample:

Nobody in March 2019 imagined that by March 2020 the UK would be in lockdown and they’d be storing corpses in refrigerator lorries in New York and Milan. It’s not entirely a black swan; anyone who knew about the history of pandemics knew to expect something like it in due course, and indeed Laurie Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for her book, The Coming Plague in 1994, which predicted more or less exactly what we’re living through today. What she didn’t predict in 1994 (writing in 1991-93) is almost more interesting than what she did — nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we’d be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later. If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it’s quite likely we’d be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.

Luckily both SARS and MERS are far less contagious than COVID19, but don’t count on this continuing. Those viruses still exist in animal reservoirs, and we know COVID19 circulates between humans and other species and can hybridize with other viruses. The worst easily-imaginable COVID19 variant would be a MERS/COVID19-Omicron hybrid — call it the Omega strain — with the lethality of MERS and the contagiousness of Omicron, which is worse than the common cold, somewhere around the same level as chickenpox. (We don’t remember how awful chickenpox was because (a) we’re generally vaccinated in infancy and (b) it’s not a killer on the same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox.) But the so-called “childhood diseases” like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. There’s a reason public health bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns against them, despite these campaigns being so successful that deaths from these diseases are so rare, leading perversely to an upswing in vaccine denialism.

I found it houghtful and perceptive. I remember at the start of the Covid crisis, in 2020 listening to a New York Times podcast interview with Don McNeil, then the Times’s expert on epidemics. He said that the only parallel with what was coming down the line was the 1918 Spanish Flu. And, in that context, he pointed out that the shortest time it had taken us to come up with a working vaccine up to that point was four years.

At that point I realised that Covid might be really, really serious. And up to now we have consistently under-estimated the threat of the virus. Which is why Charlie’s Omega variant idea reminded me of McNeil’s sombre assessment.

What should Labour do about Brexit?

Great post by Jonty Bloom.

His answer: Accept it, and make it work without letting fantasy get in the way. And then get on with doing sensible stuff. Like: * Make sure to sign up for all the EU schemes on offer, research, space, student exchanges and a dozen more. * Promise to remove the billions of pounds worth of Customs red tape that the Conservatives have loaded on British business. * Negotiate in good faith over Northern Ireland and all other issues and accept compromises that work smoothly if not perfectly. * Accept EU standards for chemicals and everything else — reinventing the CE mark is a total waste of time and a huge unnecessary expense for British industry. * Get business people the right to travel and work temporarily in the EU at any time. * Negotiate equivalence for services including accounting, insurance and the City. * Accept EU agricultural standards, which alone would burn tons of red tape in one giant bonfire.

And do all this quietly, efficiently and without wittering on about sovereignty.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

Source

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Evening in Arles

Quote of the Day

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Zoë Conway and John Mc Intyre | Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa (I Will Find Solace)

Link

Extraordinary song, extraordinary location for a recording. Lyrics and translation from the Gallic here.

Long Read of the Day

Cory Doctorow’s review of Saul Griffiths’s  Electrify: An Optimists Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future.

Sample:

For Griffith, the roadmap is pretty straightforward. From now on, every time we replace a vehicle or renovate a building or swap an appliance, we should be buying electric. Every new roof should include solar panels. New housing should be energy efficient and shouldn’t even have a gas hookup. All of this should be financed with low-cost, long-term loans comparable to the government-backed mortgages that created the post-war middle-class (but without the racism that created Black housing precarity and poverty).

No more fossil-fuel plants should be built, period. Existing extraction and refining programs should halt, now. Existing plants should be decomissioned and replaced with renewables and batteries. This should be federally funded, as should the new jobs for fossil-fuel-sector workers, whose labor the electrification project can handily absorb, with room to spare for every un- and under-employed person in America.

The stuff we’ve been told is impossible with renewables – like maintaining base-load – is revealed as a largely solved problem (big batteries, which will get smaller and cheaper over time).

I came away from the review adding Griffiths’s book to my reading list.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for spotting it.

Lucy Mangan on ‘Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the paedophile’

A bracing review of the ITV documentary which was screened on Monday.

I didn’t watch it because I was usefully employed on other things, but I found this passage — about Maxwell’s friendship with Prince Andrew both revealing and unsurprising.

Maxwell’s relationship with (no longer His Royal Highness) Prince Andrew. They first met when she was at Oxford University and moving in circles that included prime-minister-to-be Boris Johnson. During the years she was with Epstein, she had – according to Andrew’s former protection officer Paul Page – such free access to the palace that his team assumed she and the prince were having “an intimate relationship”.

Page also reveals that the prince keeps “50 or 60 soft toys” on his bed and a laminated photo of them at his bedside. If the maids don’t put them back in exactly the order shown, he shouts, screams and becomes “verbally abusive”. You could argue that this is not relevant to the claims mounting against him as a result of his friendship with Epstein, of course. That’s the friendship (as we are shown again in a clip of the infamous interview with Emily Maitlis, which becomes no less excruciating with the passage of time) Andrew claimed endured after Epstein’s conviction for child abuse because of “my tendency to be too honourable”. On the other hand, what could be more relevant than such glaring proof of how deep the childishness and sense of entitlement runs in the man?

Yep. That’s what being in a royal family does to people.

Cyber Insurance Will Not Cover Cyber Attacks Attributable to Nation-States

Well, well.

Major insurance firm Lloyd’s of London has issued a bulletin indicating that its cyber insurance products will no longer cover the fallout of cyber attacks exchanged between nation-states. The insurer said last week that damages from “cyber war” between countries would no longer be covered, and that this definition extends to operations that have “major detrimental impact on the functioning of a state.”

Link

Chart of the Day

Welcome to Appworld: a parallel universe.

Source: App Annie’s annual report

My commonplace booklet

A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

So you’ve acquired a new thing. And now you want accessories. Ask yourself: Will the potential experience be worth the cost to the supply chain?

Nice short piece by Paul Ford.

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Tree, RIP

Quote of the Day

”God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.” * Picasso

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Oscar Peterson | C Jam Blues | Live in Denmark,1964.

Link

Oscar on Piano, Ray Brown on Bass, Ed Thigpen on Drums

Long Read of the Day

Amid the hype over Web3, informed skepticism is critical

It is, and this is a pretty good example. It’s by Elizabeth Renieris, a researcher on the ethical and human rights impacts of technology in Notre Dame , Harvard and elsewhere. I’ve been collecting critiques of the Web 3 madness, and this was a welcome find.

“Increasingly apparent in the Web3 discourse,” she writes,

is a kind of imaginative obsolescence: As one vision of the future rapidly replaces the next, the technologies and systems now in place suffer decay and disrepair. Our imaginations and resources are once again diverted from fixing or rehabilitating what exists. Meanwhile, familiar problems, inevitably, resurface. Imaginative obsolescence also upends efforts at effective technological governance — and perhaps that is exactly the point.

Like its predecessors (Web 1.0, “the era of static webpages,” and 2.0, the internet of social media and user-driven content), Web3 is imagined as being apolitical, open, decentralized and inclusive, its proponents even using the same rhetoric as the cyberlibertarians of John Perry Barlow’s day. This ethos — characterized by free speech absolutism and free market ideals — has enabled all manner of online harms, including rampant mis- and disinformation, racism, discrimination, hate speech and harassment, concentrations of power, toxic business models and limited accountability. While it may be early, Web3 is quickly encountering many of the same challenges, even as it purports to be immune to them.

A good — and timely — read.

And if you’d like a constantly-updated display cabinet of Web 3 madnesses and scandals, see software developer Molly White’s Web 3 is going just great site.

Photographer finds polar bears that took over abandoned buildings

This remarkable image on the photography site Petapixel made lots of us sit up, first of all because of its haunting painterly quality, and secondly because everyone knows that getting close enough to polar bears to take a picture like that is a bad career move.

The explanatory blurb reads:

A Russian photographer has captured a fascinating series of photos showing polar bears that have taken over the abandoned buildings of a meteorological station on an island between Russia and Alaska.

In September 2021, photographer Dmitry Kokh traveled through islands in the Chukchi Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean that sits between Russia and Alaska.

“Being the farthest and most Eastern part of Russian Arctic, this place is very hard to get but also difficult to forget,” Kokh writes. “We traveled by the sailing yacht along the coast and covered more than 1,200 miles of untouched landscapes, villages lost in time, spots with various fauna and seas full of life.”

The Petepixel post included ten more photographs taken by Kokh, some taken from vantage points suicidally close to the bears, and each one more charming than the last. There’s something about polar bears that evokes the same emotions in human animals that pictures of cats and Koala bears do.

Needless to say, some of the comments below the story were sceptical. Surely the image was photoshopped? “At least 4 grown bears all together in this house is surprising”, said another. “Also wondering how this photographer got so close to them. Probably just a brave/lucky person. Is it likely the photographer is keeping these as pets of some sort? Or luring them into the house with food?” And so on.

Fortunately, the penny dropped quickly. The pictures were stills from footage shot by a drone. It’s worth watching (three minutes), not least because it’s a reminder of how good drone footage can be nowadays — as anyone who reads Quentin’s blog will know.

My commonplace booklet

Standing on the edge of a cliff, I took my time setting up my tripod and camera in anticipation of a sunset. The light would soon be bathing the mountains in front of me, illuminating the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar rivers. One of the most beautiful sights my eyes had ever seen, the two tributaries have very distinct colors at the place where they join. The Indus is jade green, while the Zanskar has cyan blue hues. I had big plans for capturing the magic of this place in a photograph. After futzing around with my gear for a while, I had my composition and focus set. All I had to do was press the shutter when the time was right.

As I waited, I peered over the edge and saw a group of off-duty paramilitary servicemen taking selfies with their backs to the scene. They were capturing the moment using nothing but the cameras on their smartphones. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was, standing high above, with a camera rig that cost as much as a second-hand sedan, waiting for the perfect light as I took great care to keep my own shadow out of the frame. And there they were, recording the same moment with faint regard for the quality of the light or the image itself. Instead, they were letting the chips figure it all out as they strained to document their own presence.

That moment reinforced for me the extent to which the iPhone had changed not just the act of photography, but the very notion of photos. Before other smartphones followed suit, it marked the introduction of a new language and the beginning of a new volume in the annals of visual communication.

From Why the iPhone is today’s Box Brownie camera by Om Malik (whom God Preserve).

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Why Bitcoin is bad for the environment

And a serious Bitcoin-mining outfit will have hundreds if not thousands of these.

Source: a terrific presentation by Ron Ballard.

Quote of the Day

”Newspapers help you to forget the previous day.”

• Elias Canetti

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Fish and the Bird | Live

Link

Interesting to hear his take on an old Irish song.

Long Read of the Day

Omicron Has Created Two New COVID Attitudes –

COVID has always divided Americans, writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. But the Omicron wave is even dividing the vaccinated.

A nice exploration of the paradoxes uncovered by the pandemic.

To understand how ideologically scrambling the Omicron wave has been, consider this: Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.

In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true —for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats.

He draws a comparison between two tribes: the ‘Vaxxed and Done’ crowd, and the ‘Vaxxed and Cautious’ lot. He’s not quite sure when he fits on that spectrum. Me neither.

So how about reading it and deciding where you are?

Lost Time: remembering Proust (and others)

I was struck by an intriguing volume published by New York Review Books three years ago. Here’s the background:

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

The volume includes an 8-page colour insert of Czapski’s lecture notes. Here’s one:

I was immediately reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful Lectures on Literature, which I devoured decades ago. As an engineering student I found them a riveting and illuminating approach to authors of whom I knew little — Flaubert, for example, Proust and Kafka. So I dug out the battered copy that still stands on my bookshelves — and of course was immediately lulled into re-reading his lecture on Joyce’s Ulysses. Here’s a photograph of his annotated copy.

Is it any wonder that no work is being done around here? I was supposed to be doing my tax return.

Long-term impacts of childhood bereavement

My excerpt from Simon Kuper’s memorable piece about the wider impacts of the higher mortality rates of unvaccinated people rang bells. One reader emailed that:

Kuper’s observation that ‘bereaved children are often cast into depression’ struck a chord with me. My father was 11 or 12 when both his parents died of flu in 1918, and despite all his efforts to counter it, depression was with him all his adult life until he died too soon at 69.

It rang bells for me too. We’ve had experience of this in our family and, coincidentally, I’d been reading Maxine Harris’s book about childhood bereavement and had come on two recent academic articles — “The Burden of Bereavement: Early-Onset Depression and Impairment in Youths Bereaved by Sudden Parental Death in a 7-Year Prospective Study” and ” Persistent Impairment: Life After Losing a Parent”.

I’ve often thought that the worst thing that can happen to a parent is having to bury a child; and the worst thing that can happen to a child is having to bury a mother or a father. We’ve had both in my extended family.

My paternal grandparents, who were modest farmers in rural Ireland, lost three children in a single year (1921). As you can imagine, the family burial plot in Connemara can be a sobering place to visit.

My commonplace booklet

From Noah Smith:

“For a future to feel optimistic, it should feature the following elements:

• Material abundance

• Egalitarianism — broadly shared prosperity, relatively moderate status differences, and broad political participation

• Human agency — the ability of human effort to alter the conditions of the world…”

How many of these does digital tech, as currently owned and managed, promise?

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Monday 17 January, 2022

Boss Cat

A friend’s lordly cat, presiding over a dinner party on Saturday evening.

Quote of the Day

”I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound, if I can remember any of the damn things.”

• Dorothy Parker

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | La Nozze Di Figaro | Cherubino’s aria,  Voi Che Sapete | sung by Cecilia Bartoli.

Link

Long Read of the Day

Retrofitting Leninism

Terrific essay in Noema by Dimitar Gueorguiev.

A spectre is haunting our democratic world — the prospect of political failure fuelled by cultural civil war. Overwhelmed by the ceaseless tsunami of feedback signals unleashed by digital connectivity, democracies are fragmenting into so many ‘subjectivist’ tribes that a governing consensus seems increasingly elusive. The open societies hailed by Francis Fukuyama and George Soros could be spinning out of control.

And the strange thing is that the super-connectivity that is fragmenting the West is consolidating control in China, where the Leninist form of governance that failed in the industrial age has been given a new lease on life.

“Thanks in part to the advent of digital technology,” Gueorguiev writes, “China’s leaders are now at a point where they believe they have the tools to overcome and move past the computational challenge of managing ever more complexity by deepening control through connectivity.”

This is a really interesting piece. The complacent view of democracies in the analogue age was that autocracies and totalitarian states were ultimately bound to fail because central authorities could never match the complexities of their societies. (This complacency stemmed, I think, partly from political scientists’ extrapolation of a cybernetic principle — Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety — and partly from reading too much Hayek.). But it was probably plausible in the pre-digital era.

However Gueorguiev’s essay raises the thought that maybe Xi Jinping & Co have read some of the cybernetics literature and have concluded that mastery of digital technology and its comprehensive deployment on a colossal scale will enable them to escape the analogue trap.

Fascinating read about an increasingly important topic. The thing about China is that it really is an alternative system to the Western liberal democracy one. In fact it’s the only alternative game in town. Russia is a pain in the ass which has to be challenged mainly because it has nukes — and, for the moment, fossil fuel reserves. But it isn’t an alternative system. Xi and his colleagues are building one of those.

Blockchain: full of democratic promise? Or just another tool of big corporations?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

It’s easy to see why the blockchain idea evokes utopian hopes: at last, technology is sticking it to the Man. In that sense, the excitement surrounding it reminds me of the early days of the internet, when we really believed that our contemporaries had invented a technology that was democratising and liberating and beyond the reach of established power structures. And indeed the network had – and still possesses – those desirable affordances. But we’re not using them to achieve their great potential. Instead, we’ve got YouTube and Netflix. What we underestimated, in our naivety, were the power of sovereign states, the ruthlessness and capacity of corporations and the passivity of consumers, a combination of which eventually led to corporate capture of the internet and the centralisation of digital power in the hands of a few giant corporations and national governments. In other words, the same entrapment as happened to the breakthrough communications technologies – telephone, broadcast radio and TV, and movies – in the 20th century, memorably chronicled by Tim Wu in his book The Master Switch.

Will this happen to blockchain technology? Hopefully not, but the enthusiastic endorsement of it by outfits such as Goldman Sachs is not exactly reassuring…

The cruelty of vaxenfreude

From a remarkable column by Simon Kuper in the FT…

For each unvaccinated American death, about nine people lose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. Probably the most distressing thing about Covid-19 is its relentless orphaning, which recalls the HIV epidemic in Africa or the Great Flu of 1918. Think of the children of Kevin and Misty Mitchem, a couple in their forties who chose not to be vaccinated and who died of Covid within days of each other in October.

Losing a parent young is one of the great life traumas. Bereaved children are often cast into depression (which is why my own chief life goal is to plug on until my kids are at least 18). Yet when the parent is an antivaxxer taken by Covid, the child may feel shamed into silence over an unnecessary death that some people will always regard as farcical.

Meanwhile, antivaxxers will tend to blame the victim’s supposed physical weakness or pretend that the death wasn’t from Covid-19. They can’t easily change their mind about the disease, because that would mean giving up their antivax identity and the community that comes with it.

Then there are people who won’t discuss the cause of death for fear of politicising a tragedy. (A new trend in parts of the US is to keep Covid-19 out of the obituary.) So children may not have anyone to talk to about the worst moment of their lives.

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Why I never bought the idea that Boris Johnson was a lovable clown

Watching his contortions over ‘Partygate’ I keep thinking of my beloved mother-in-law, Elsie Pinniger, who was in an unprotected care-home in late April 2020 and, well, you can guess the rest…

For the first 100 days of the pandemic, I kept an audio diary. This is the entry for the 9th of May — Day 49.

Link

The transcript is in 100 Not Out: A Lockdown Diary — a Kindle version of the diary.

Quote of the Day

”An aristocracy is like cheese; the older it is the higher it becomes.” * Lloyd George

Now why does this make me think of the Duke of York? And which hill will he be marching down next?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace – A Mexican Serenade | Joshua Rifkin

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putin’s Challenge to Western hegemony

If, like me, you’re puzzled about what’s happening — or likely to happen — in Ukraine then this long, long blog post by Adam Tooze is for you. As I read it I became increasingly mortified by how little I actually knew about the Ukraine, or about how Putin’s strategy had evolved over a decade or more.

Some (of my) takeaways:

• Tooze’s astute view of Russia as a “strategic petrostate” with huge foreign currency reserves which give Putin enormous freedom of manoeuvre (and run counter to Western media delusions of how he is running out of road).
• As a state, Ukraine is a basket case and what makes it vulnerable to Russian power is “not just its geography, but the division of its politics, the factional quality of its elite and its economic failure”.
• NATO’s expansionism post-1989 was a colossal blunder, the consequences of which continue to haunt Europe.
• The key factors governing what happens next are: Russia’s geopolitical concerns about America’s stance; Biden’s preoccupation with China, not Russia; Ukraine’s disastrous economic position; and Putin’s own political clock (both he and Biden face elections in 2024.)

But that’s just what I got from the piece. You may get more.

Unexpected pleasures

Two lovely literary surprises came my way this Christmas.

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who works mainly in the field of quantum gravity but is also a best-selling writer of accessible books about science. I first became interested in him when I read Ian Thomson’s review of Helgoland, his most recent book, which is an explanation to explain quantum mechanics to human beings. The title comes from the fact that the theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland.

Intrigued by this (but still baffled by quantum physics) I went looking at other books Rovelli had written and came on this lovely collection of 46 short pieces, 13 of them published in Corriere della Sera (which surely must be one of the most interesting newspapers on earth, given that Umberto Eco also used to be a columnist on it). It’s a reassuring reminder of what a nice genre the newspaper column is, something that — as someone who has written 50 of them a year since the 1980s – I obviously appreciate.

John McPhee is one of the New Yorker writers I’ve admired for many years. What I hadn’t known until recently is that he also teaches a course on ‘Creative Nonfiction’ at Princeton. This little book is a masterclass in the art of long-form journalism which makes one envious of his students, and it led me to buy several copies to give away as gifts to people who I thought would appreciate it. They do.

My commonplace booklet

Perils of a blind date

From the Guardian:

A Chinese woman has become an overnight sensation after she posted video diaries documenting her life after being stuck at a blind date’s house.

Wang went for dinner on Sunday at her blind date’s residence in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, where a recent outbreak of Covid cases sent thousands into quarantine in parts of the city. As she was finishing her meal, the area was put under lockdown.

She was unable to leave her date’s house as result, she told the Shanghai-based news outlet the Paper this week, saying she had gone to the city for a week-long trip to meet potential suitors from the southern province of Guangdong.

Wang quickly shared the bizarre experience with friends on social media. “I’m getting old now, my family introduced me to 10 matches … The fifth date wanted to show off his cooking skills and invited me over to his house for dinner,” said Wang in one of the videos.

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