Bread and Circuses

Arles, on a July evening.

Quote of the Day

”I was mistaken for a prostitute once in the last war. When a GI asked me what I charged, I said, ‘Well, dear, what do your mother and sisters normally ask for?’”

• Thora Hird

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Monday Morning | Live in Japan | December 1977

Link

One of the great rock bands of my lifetime.

Long Read of the Day

 Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal

If you’re puzzled about where we are now with Covid, then join the club. I’ve been trying to get a long view of the pandemic. My amateurish intuition is that it will become like a much more dangerous kind of flu — and one that we haven’t yet figured out how to live with it. Which is why I found this essay by David Wallace-Wells interesting.

Wallace-Wells has talked a lot to Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who used to be at Harvard and is now Chief Scientist at the online health portal eMed. This part of their conversation provided what looks to be a helpful metaphor:

Before the pandemic, Mina’s research was focused on the development of immunity in babies and children, and his mental model for our collective experience here is the same. “I’ve always said that we have to grow out of this pandemic,” he said. “We have to literally just build up enough immunity for us to get out of the pandemic as a human species.” Right now, he said, we are the equivalent of 2- or 3-year-olds immunologically speaking — having passed through “the real risk zone,” we are now for the first time able to navigate a world of viruses and bacteria without the same acute medical risks as before. “We know that 3-year-olds still go to the hospital a lot, but we know that given the same infections, 3-year-olds do a lot better than 1-year-olds. And that’s because of immunity.”

The novel coronavirus is no longer novel to us, in other words. Our immunity to Covid-19 is growing up. “That’s where we are as humans,” Mina says.

For many of us, he says, the process will continue. The immunological gains aren’t necessarily huge anymore, given how many times most of us have been exposed — and will be, going forward. “Those who get through it will probably actually have then seen the virus, maybe 10 or 15 times over the next five years,” he says.

My reading of it is that we will —— or should — be wearing masks for many more years.

It’s long, but worth your attention.

Meltdown

A nicely ironic take by Imogen West-Knights in Slate arguing that London’s hottest day ever brought on madness that far exceeded the temperature.

Sample:

The hotter it got, the more insane the advice trotted out to deal with the heat became. Don’t put an ice pop in any of the body’s less salubrious holes, carry frozen vegetables under your top on the train, rub yourself with a raw onion. And look, some of the heatwave madness is funny—of course it is. It’s funny to see videos of a burnt Englishman yelling at a passerby about their right to enjoy a cocktail in their own wheelie bin filled up with water undisturbed. It’s funny that Sky News ran splitscreen coverage of the heatwave with a livestream of the sun on one side like it was O.J. Simpson on the freeway. With all due respect to the animals involved, it is funny that Welsh pigs had to be lathered with suncream ahead of an agricultural fair. It’s funny that one cinema chain offered free tickets to ginger people. It’s funny that chocolate deliveries were suspended because makers remembered the summer of 1990 when the entire stock of a chocolate factory in Liverpool melted.

I really liked another of her observations:

Sir John Hayes, one of the nation’s large supporting cast of grisled Tory MPs and (yes) the former energy and climate change minister, said that “this is not a brave new world but a cowardly new world where we live in a country where we are frightened of the heat.” Hayes has been given a £50,000 salary by an oil company since 2018.

Sir Herbert Gusset, where are you when Britain needs you?

My commonplace booklet

ARIA — the ‘Advanced Research and Invention Agency’ (i.e. the UK’s attempt to learn from the ideas underpinning the US’s DARPA) is hiring. Link

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Indecision

Outside a café in Arles where I felt the kid wanted the adults to make up their minds.

Quote of the Day

”The newly published diaries of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, are meant to be an elegy for that place. They end up leaving the reader wistful, yes, but for a certain genre of politician. Smart, administratively able, undoctrinaire: Patten wasn’t even the outstanding member of a Tory cohort that included a lawyer who took silk at 40 (Ken Clarke) and the builder of a commercial fortune (Michael Heseltine). By way of comparison, Britain might soon be run by someone who tried to get the word “cock” into a parliamentary speech as often as she could. The crisis of democracy is the crisis of the restaurant trade and of Heathrow airport. You just can’t get the staff.”

• Janan Ganesh, writing in the Financial Times on the implications for liberal democracy of talented people shunning politics as a vocation.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War | Acoustic Version

Link

This was one of the most delightful outcomes of my Matisse/Magritte mistake the other day — a link from Richard Mortier, for which many thanks.

Long Read of the Day

À la cashpoint

Yesterday morning I had a charming conversation in my best Franglais with one of the staff in the local pharmacy on the important subject of mosquito repellents. As we talked, I suddenly remembered a lovely memoir by my friend Quentin.

It goes like this…

About twenty years ago, my brother and I went on a cycling holiday in France. As we sat eating a baguette in the central square of a small town in the Loire Valley, we watched a wonderful scene play out before us. There was a bank on the square, which had a shiny new cashpoint (ATM) machine – something of a rarity back then, at least in rural France. As we munched our lunch, a family approached it hesitantly; a tall, gaunt father, a rather shorter and decidedly less gaunt mother, and a young boy. It was an outing which was to end in disappointment, because, despite the careful attention of the father and the suitably Gallic gesticulations of the mother, the machine swallowed the card and they departed empty-handed.

What I had forgotten was that, that evening in our tent, I had written a short (and most unworthy) homage to Miles Kington’s wonderful ‘Franglais’ sketches. When clearing out my filing cabinet this weekend, I came across a faded dot-matrix printout, and decided to post it here, if only for nostalgia…

M. Jones: Ah! Monsieur! Vous êtes le bank manager, n’est-ce pas?

M. le BM: Oui, c’est moi. Can I help Monsieur?

M. Jones: Peut-être. Votre super-electronique nouvelle machine de cashpoint a mangé mon card!

M. le BM: Ah oui, Monsieur. Si la machine n’aime pas le card, elle le mange.

M. Jones: That’s as peut-être. Mais c’etait un perfectly bon card, avec des jolies couleurs et un hologram.

M. le BM: Oui, Monsieur. Mais c’etait le card de la super-store just round le corner. Monsieur is holding notre cashcard dans son main gauche.

M. Jones: Oh. So je suis. Et voila pourquoi votre machine a mangé l’autre?

That’s just the beginning. Keep reading!

My commonplace booklet

 What human-made structures can be seen from space?

Good question. Link

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Our world today

Actually, our world as it was on Sunday 17th.

And the implication? We aren’t going to make it to 2050 without catastrophic collapse. The graphic comes from a sobering essay by Umair Haque, who’s never been a barrel of laughs. But I fear he’s right about this.

What’s the brutal truth I’m trying to get to? It goes like this. We’re not going to make it to 2050. Not even close to that far.

By “make it,” I don’t mean…some kind of dumb Marvel Movie. We’re all going to die tomorrow! Nope. I mean “Civilization as we know it.” I mean that things are going to collapse much, much faster and harder than we think. Isn’t that already the case? That’s the trend which every clear thinking person should understand very, very intently right about now.

Take a hard look at right now. Do you really think our civilization’s going to survive another three decades of this? Skyrocketing inflation, growing shortages, runaway temperatures, killing heat, failing harvests, shattered systems, continents on fire, masses turning to lunacy and theocracy and fascism as a result?

Seriously? Another three decades? Where every summer is that much worse than this one?

It’s eerie watching what’s going on against this background. The currently-governing UK Tory party is having a ‘leadership’ contest in which nobody is talking about this, just about who will cut taxes the most. And over in the US on Thursday, a single Senator from a smallish state who represents the coal industry, torched the bi-partisan Climate Bill.

I’ve thought for years that we need a theory of incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves. We’ve got two such systems already: our global heating system; and US democracy.

Quote of the Day

”Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.”

• Ambrose Bierce

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Impromptu Op 90 No 3 D 899 G flat major | Alfred Brendel

Link

What I turned to for solace after reading the Haque essay above.

Long Read of the Day

On Tossing the Canon in a Cannon

An interesting essay by Marie Snyder on the challenges of teaching an ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ course to the Instagram generation. A few students of her students this year were adamant that she shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic.

The problem is that that’s almost all of them!

There is, however, some benefit to tracing the dominant ideology to its origins, as has been tackled in book form by Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor, so that we can better chip away at the foundation. It can be useful to see what spawned exploitation, to see how long we’ve been thinking this way and how slowly our understanding of the world has changed as necessary words to the contrary were finally heard. We can infiltrate the enemy to deconstruct the arguments. But that shouldn’t be the entirety of an intro course.

We further benefit from controversial ideas in order to test the limits of our own thought-process by disputing them, either on our own or in discussions. We’ll have a limited knowledge, a dangerous naivety, if we only read what’s agreeable to us. I introduce some of Peter Singer’s controversial ideas, provoking them to find problems with the logic without leaning on amassing criticisms from social media, an unfortunate skill they’re developing outside of school even though unpopular opinions are not necessarily wrong. In my class, they have to look at problems with the position, specifically, premise by premise. Learning that bit of artistry is vital to counter the effects of wayward Instagram or Reddit threads; just imagine if it were mandatory!

Worth reading for the way it navigates through treacherous waters. Her’s is a dilemma I wouldn’t like to have.

My commonplace booklet

”I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?”. An interesting thread on Hacker News which, I guess, will resonate with many programmers working in the tech industry.

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The family that cycles together…

… stays together.

Spotted in Arles on Friday evening.

Quote of the Day

”Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.”

• Homer Adkins

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | Down To The River To Pray

Link

Long Read of the Day

Medium in the rear-view

There’s been lots of commentary about the ‘blogging’ platform Medium since it was announced that its founder and CEO, Evan Williams, was stepping down. Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) has written a perceptive post about it on his blog.

He’s taken on the three things that people regarded as distinctive about Medium:

• Its ‘clean’ look
• Users didn’t have to start their own blog to write a post
• It provided authors with a way of making money.

Dave thinks that the need for the platform to make money was the key flaw. Interestingly, it may also turn out to be the Achilles heel of Substack, the service I use to produce this newsletter version of my blog.

Do read Dave’s piece in its entirety because he’s the wisest guy around on this stuff. He was the blogger who best articulated the First Law of Online Writing: always make sure that anything you want to endure is hosted on a platform that you control. I used to write on Medium sometimes, for example, but I always made sure that anything by me that appeared there was also published on Memex — i.e. on the open Web. Same things applies to this newsletter version — it’s always on the Web, every day. So if, one day, the folks who run Substack turn nasty or greedy, well they can go whistle and I’d use a piece of open source software to create a newsletter version.

Monkeypox: What You Actually Need to Know

Really informative piece by Donald McNeil, just about the only journalist I would trust on a topic like this.

If there are two effective vaccines for this disease and one solid treatment, why are we losing the fight?

I blame several factors: shortages of vaccines and tests, the initial hesitancy by squeamish health agencies to openly discuss who was most at risk, and the refusal by the organizers of lucrative gay sex parties to cancel them over the past few months—even as evidence mounted that they are super-spreader events.

Also, something I didn’t know: the virus is related to smallpox, but it’s not nearly as lethal. The successful 25-year effort to eradicate smallpox held it in check (the smallpox vaccine also prevents monkeypox). But smallpox vaccination ended in 1980 because the old vaccines had some rare but very dangerous side effects. So…, well you can guess the rest.

Terrific piece by a great journalist who was — IMO — unfairly forced out of the New York Times.

My commonplace booklet

Two titans when young

Dave Winer found this when going through his (capacious) archives.

On not trying to be too clever…

When trying to think of a smart-aleck title for the wonderful trompe l’oeil artwork on the front of a house in Arles, I thought it’d be nice to adapt the title of Magritte’s famous ‘This is not a pipe’ painting of a pipe. And then typed “… as Matisse might put it.” A stupid error, of course, but sometimes the nice thing about being a blogger is the amusing (and tolerant) ways readers respond. So a flood of emails came alerting me to the mistake, but also pondering the significance of the mistake. After all, the original painting had a number of titles — “The Treachery of Images”, “This is not a pipe” and, apparently, “The Wind and the Song”. Magritte pointed out laconically that it was not a pipe but an image of a pipe — hence perhaps his ‘Treachery of Images’ title. Chris Patten generously observed that my readers think of me “as a medieval craftsman who deliberately creates an imperfection, so as to not offend God”. And Felicity Allen suggested that the mistake reflected not only the treachery of images, but also “the treachery of memory”.

I’ll drink to that last one. I’m a great believer in Mark Twain’s dictum that “The older I get the more clearly I remember things that never happened”.

Thanks to everyone who transformed what might have been an embarrassing morning into a lovely start to the day.

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Ceci n’est pas une fenêtre…

… as Matisse Magritte might put it.

Seen on Friday evening in Arles, the final waypoint on our slow journey to Provence.

Quote of the Day

”Negotiating with de Valera…is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.”

• Lloyd George

(To which de valera memorably replied, “Why doesn’t he use a spoon?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Harold Arlen | Stormy Weather

Link

A very early, and lovely, recording. You might have to turn up the volume a bit because the sound balance is a bit off.

Long Read of the Day

Is the World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?

One of the besetting sins of most journalism is that it is — inevitably — obsessed with what the sociologist Michael Mann once called “the sociology of the last five minutes”, which I guess is a really good description of ‘news’. But we need to escape that tyranny sometimes, because understanding the last five minutes often requires understanding how we got to them.

That’s why I liked this essay by Max Fisher. Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, he asks, or does it just feel that way?

Scanning the headlines, it’s easy to conclude that something has broken. The pandemic. Accelerating crises from climate change. Global grain shortage. Russia’s war on Ukraine. Political and economic meltdown in Sri Lanka. A former prime minister’s assassination in Japan. And, in the United States: inflation, mass shootings, a reckoning over Jan. 6 and collapsing abortion rights.

That sense of chaos can be difficult to square with longer-term data showing that, on many metrics, the world is generally becoming better off.

The idea that things used to be better than they are now is hard to shake off. But any attempt to make sense of our contemporary traumas requires us to

Consider the mid-1990s, a time that Americans tend to remember as one of global stability and optimism. If today were really a time of exceptional turmoil, then surely that world would look better in comparison?

In reality, the opposite is true. The mid-1990s saw genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. Years of war in Europe amid Yugoslavia’s collapse. Devastating famines in Sudan, Somalia and North Korea. Civil wars in over a dozen countries. Crackdowns and coups too numerous to mention.

Yep. This is an interesting piece. Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

N.I.M.B.Y. Membership Application

Painfully acute satire by Devin Wallace.

Question Three: What is your biggest concern about building new homes in your area? A. Decreasing property values. B. More people, specifically ones that don’t look like me. C. Option B but I feel more comfortable publicly choosing option A.

Question Four: Where do you think new housing should be built instead? A. The town on the other side of the railroad tracks. B. A brand-new city, that’s a thing we can definitely do, right? C. Mexico.

Question Five: Should all new housing be affordable to all? A. Absolutely! Especially because my own house is so expensive. B. Yes and new residents should be crowned the kings and queens of small, independent island nations in the Pacific. If that entirely reasonable request prevents new housing from being built, so be it. C. Are we still using affordable housing as a smokescreen? Can I re-check the box about people that don’t look like me?

You get the point?

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Meet Wurzel Gummidge

Natural and er, lifelike. In a field near where I live.

Quote of the Day

”He objected to ideas only if others had them.”

• A.J.P. Taylor on Ernest Bevin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

A classic track, IMO.

Long Read of the Day

Mitt Romney on wishful thinking

You can tell how screwed the US is when Mitt Romney sounds like someone with gravitas. Could this be the same Mitt Romney who initially appeared to cosy up to Trump? Shurely not. Still…

What accounts for the blithe dismissal of potentially cataclysmic threats? The left thinks the right is at fault for ignoring climate change and the attacks on our political system. The right thinks the left is the problem for ignoring illegal immigration and the national debt. But wishful thinking happens across the political spectrum. More and more, we are a nation in denial.

I have witnessed time and again—in myself and in others—a powerful impulse to believe what we hope to be the case. We don’t need to cut back on watering, because the drought is just part of a cycle that will reverse. With economic growth, the debt will take care of itself. January 6 was a false-flag operation…

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The Lone Wolf

A solitary breakfaster, photographed from my room at a luxurious German Schloss I stayed in a few years ago. (For the avoidance of doubt: a big corporate outfit was footing the bill for my stay.)

Quote of the Day

”Golf had long symbolised the Eisenhower years — played by soft, boring men with ample waistlines who went around rich men’s country-club courses in the company of wealthy businessmen and were tended by white-haired, dutiful men of colour.”

• David Halberstam in his great book, The Best and the Brightest.

Footnote: I changed the word used to describe those dutiful attendants in the book. Times — and sensibilities — change.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Arty McGlynn, Christy Moore and Rod McVey | The Point, Dublin | 1997

Link

Amazing quartet. No wonder we miss Liam.

Long Read of the Day

 Elon Musk is an honorary Facebook Boomer

Life’s too short to be obsessed about Elon Musk, so it’s good of Charlie Warzel to focus on him so that the rest of us don’t have to. His current column, in which he argues that Musk’s conspiracy theorising about Twitter bots reminds him of the madness that grips aged family members who are constantly getting into arguments on Facebook about stuff they don’t really understand.

Back in April, in response to the news that the Tesla and SpaceX founder was mulling an offer to buy Twitter, I argued that Elon Musk was a master of pseudo-events. “Musk commandeers the attention, legions speculate,” I wrote. “But ultimately we end up where we started. The only winner is Musk.”

It’s three months later, and we are, in so many ways, back where we started. Musk is trying to pull out of the deal, arguing through his lawyers that Twitter is not being cooperative and that he believes the platform is not being honest about the number of bots and spam accounts. If you’re interested in the particulars of Musk’s justifications and what the legal battle between Twitter and Musk might look like, you can read more at length about it here. But I’d like to talk about Elon Musk’s obsession with bots and how it actually illustrates the ways he is an extremely shallow thinker when it comes to online dynamics.

In short, Elon’s bot obsession is like Facebook-addled Boomer behavior.

Musk’s bot excuse is obvious bullshit…

Yep. And it will probably cost him more than the $1B breakup fee.

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Seeing to infinity and beyond

From Tortoise Media’s indispensable daily Sensemaker newsletter…

This image, the first produced by the James Webb telescope, “shows the infrared light put out by galaxies formed over 13 billion years ago, which appear as red smudges. To think about: the picture covers a patch of sky equivalent to holding up a grain of sand at arm’s length.”

Which kind of puts our mortal coil (not to mention the nauseating Tory ‘leadership’ race) in perspective.

Quote of the Day

”He was born to be a salesman. He would be an admirable representative of Molly Royce. But an ex-King cannot start selling motor-cars.”

• The Duchess of Windsor on her husband, the former Edward VIII

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Strauss | Four Last Songs | #4 | Im Abendrot | Reneé Fleming | BBC Proms 2001

Link

I love these songs, and keep coming back to them.

Long Read of the Day

Mark Twain, Tech Prophet

The Atlantic (to which I subscribe) has just made its entire archive — 165 years of Atlantic journalism — available online. Nearly 30,000 articles, reviews, short stories, and poems, published between magazine’s founding in 1857 and 1995, the year it launched its website (a site that included, from its start, articles that originated both in print and on the web) are now accessible to subscribers, researchers, students, historians, “and that blessed category, the incurably curious”.

David Graham’s been digging in the archive and thinks that a short story by Mark Twain published a 1878 issue may contain the first literary reference to a telephone — “along with striking insights into modern dating”.

The Times Literary Supplement’s always amusing NB column—which also unearthed this image of Proust playing air guitar on a tennis racket—has been searching for literary firsts, such as the earliest mention of a telephone. TLS readers came up with Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, which premiered in May 1878. But Mark Lasswell of The Weekly Standard came up with an even earlier reference: Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” a short story that The Atlantic published in its March 1878 issue. As Lasswell notes, that makes it just 24 months after Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first patent for a telephone.

The story is weird enough to deserve more than a mere footnote for early phone adoption…

Do read on

My commonplace booklet

”How to streamline the hiring process” is an article by Atta Tarki, Tyler Cowen and Alexandra Ham in the Harvard Business Review. If you’ve ever been involved in making hiring decisions (and I have been over the last two years in particular) you’d sometimes wish that some of your colleagues took these rules (suggested by the authors) to heart.

1. Reduce the number of interviewers in your process. If you have more than four or five interviewers, chances are that the costs associated with the additional complexity in your process have exceeded the benefits they produce.

2. Be explicit about whose decision it is. Steer your organizational culture away from a consensus-oriented approach. Instead, for each role make it explicit whose decision it is, who else might have veto power, and that other interviewers should not be offended if a candidate is hired despite not getting their approval. And then keep repeating this message until most of your colleagues adapt to this new approach.

3. Ask interviewers to use numerical ratings when evaluating candidates. We’ve experienced that doing so helps hiring committees focus on the holistic view rather than on one-off negative comments. Having interviewers submit their ratings before getting input from their colleagues will have the further benefit of reducing the chance of groupthink in your evaluations.

4. Remove the “Dr. Deaths” from your hiring committee. Track which interviewers turn down the most candidates, and if they are not better at picking good hires, communicate with them that they will be removed from the hiring committee if they don’t correct their behavior.

5. Change your culture to reward those who spot great hires, not penalizing those who end up with an occasional poor performer. You can further do this by emphasizing the difference between good decisions and good outcomes. Sometimes a fully logical bet will result in a poor outcome. If needs be, call out those spreading negativism.

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Valery-sur-Somme

We’re getting ready for our slow drive down to Provence and I was suddenly struck by this lovely Degas landscape while looking for something else. At one point on our route we cross the Somme.

Quote of the Day

”If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

• Rudyard Kipling

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | I’m the Fool

Link

Long Read of the Day

At dinner the other night someone jokingly (I think) asked me what I saw as the next looming tech catastrophe and I replied “TikTok”. This provoked astonished puzzlement, as I don’t think anyone present except me (we are all d’un certain age, as the French say) was really aware of the service. But I was serious. And so is Scott Galloway, who has written critically about TikTok before. On his blog this week, he has a post with a nice twist on a metaphor from ancient history — “Trojan Stallion”.

The most mendacious enemies hide in plain sight. And this enemy is in your pocket. Social media now captures and holds more of our attention than all traditional news outlets. The hand that holds the social graph has its grip on how the next generation of Americans and Europeans feel about capitalism, democracy, and BTS.

But, no, this post is not about Mark Zuckerberg.

Do read on.

What it takes to run Q&A at scale

Stack Exchange is one of the wonders of the online world — a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows the sites to be self-moderating. The most popular site on the network is Stack Overflow, the one I find most useful.

Stack Exchange handles 1.3 billion page-views per month and they’ve recently published an interesting graphic showing what’s needed to make the service work so briskly. Among other things, it’s a reminder that convenience doesn’t come without environmental costs.

My commonplace booklet

“The five best biographies ever written”

This interesting list by Anne Wroe, the Obituaries Editor of the Economist (and also an accomplished biographer) is a nice antidote to the standard list of poolside reads that most newspapers compile at this time of year.

I think it’s outside the paywall and hope I’m right.

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Shepherd’s delight?

Driving home the other evening.

Quote of the Day

”A state led by Sunak, Gove or Truss with reforming zeal would be an unpleasant place to live. But it’s also damaging to be governed by intellectually deficient, personally ambitious, corrupt or simply uninterested ministers. Fewer ministers than ever care about their departments, as the internecine vortex of Westminster and dreams of a slot on Question Time suck in most of their attention. This has been especially true since 2016, though the problem is of longer gestation. It doesn’t entirely explain why Britain, after twelve years of Conservative government, is run-down, stagnant, expensive, underpaid, unequal, corrupt, socially fractured, backward-looking, hungry and fearful. But it doesn’t help. It will take far more than dislodging Johnson to change that.

• James Butler, writing in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

B.B. King | The Thrill Is Gone | with Slash, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Ronnie Wood and Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall.

link

Long Read of the Day

Journeys of the Pyramid Builders

By Daniel Weiss. Nice long read for a hot summer afternoon from Archaeology Magazine.

On a summer afternoon around 4,600 years ago, near the end of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, a boat crewed by some 40 workers headed downstream on the Nile toward the Giza Plateau. The vessel, whose prow was emblazoned with a uraeus, the stylized image of an upright cobra worn by pharaohs as a head ornament, was laden with large limestone blocks being transported from the Tura quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. Under the direction of their overseer, known as Inspector Merer, the team steered the boat west toward the plateau, passing through a gateway between a pair of raised mounds called the Ro-She Khufu, the Entrance to the Lake of Khufu. This lake was part of a network of artificial waterways and canals that had been dredged to allow boats to bring supplies right up to the plateau’s edge.

As the boatmen approached their docking station, they could see Khufu’s Great Pyramid, called Akhet Khufu, or the Horizon of Khufu, soaring into the sky. At this point in Khufu’s reign (r. ca. 2633–2605 B.C.), the pyramid would have been essentially complete, encased in gleaming white limestone blocks of the sort the boat carried. At the edge of the water, perched on a massive limestone foundation, loomed Khufu’s valley temple, known as Ankhu Khufu, or Khufu Lives, which was connected to the pyramid by a half-mile-long causeway. When the pharaoh died, his body would be taken to the valley temple and then carried to the pyramid for burial. Nearby stood a royal palace, archives, granary, and workers’ barracks.

After offloading their cargo, the men anchored their boat in the lake alongside dozens—if not hundreds—of other boats and barges that had brought a variety of materials necessary to complete construction of the pyramid complex…

An antidote to the condescension of hindsight, and our hubris about how smart we are compared to those who went before us.

Britain’s electric dreams may be dependent on Chinese goodwill

Rare earth elements hold the key to a carbon-free future, but a new report reveals the UK’s shortcomings and vulnerabilities

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In his book Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, Saul Griffith, an American inventor, entrepreneur and engineer, sets out a plan for decarbonising the US: electrify everything. From now on, every time people replace a vehicle or renovate a building or buy an appliance, they should be buying electric. Every new roof must have solar panels, all new housing must be energy efficient and shouldn’t contain a gas cooker. All that’s required to make this happen is a collective national effort comparable to the mobilisation of the US economy for the second world war. And it could be financed with the kind of low-cost, long-term loans reminiscent of the government-backed mortgages that created the postwar American middle class. QED.

Reading Griffith’s engaging, optimistic book, a wicked thought keeps coming to mind: HL Mencken’s observation: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” But Griffith is too smart to be caught in that particular net. There is, though, one serious difficulty with his grand plan and it goes by the abbreviation CRM.

It stands for “critical raw materials”. It turns out that an all-electrical future won’t be possible without secure supplies of certain elements we extract from the Earth’s crust…

Do read on

I had an email from a reader in Canada pointing out that his country has lots of these elements, which is good news if true, but didn’t seem to figure in the surveys which triggered by column.

My commonplace booklet

 BORIS JOHNSON FREAKS OUT AFTER GIULIANI ARRIVES IN LONDON TO HELP HIM Link

Thanks to Andrew Laird for spotting it.

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