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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Morning on the river

A friend who has a houseboat in London took this yesterday morning. Beats living in an apartment any day.

Quote of the Day

”I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy — ‘Dear Jack. Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide’.”

• JFK, in a speech to journalists, Washington, 1958.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Shannon family and Tim Edey | Four jigs

Link

Sometimes, musical talent really does run in families. Consider the Shannons: this session was recorded in 2010 in Bofey Quinn’s restaurant, Corofin, Co. Clare. The musicians are: Sharon Shannon (Accordion), Mary Shannon (Banjo), Majella Shannon (Fiddle), Garry Shannon (Flute) with accompaniment from Tim Edey (Guitar). The music: 3 jigs — Dan The Cobbler, The Kilmovee (or Larrisey’s) and Calliope House.

Long Read of the Day

On the Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism

Fifty years after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, maybe Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism is ripe for a reassessment. Peter Richardson has written one which is due out on January 25. I’ve always preferred Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail to Thompson’s famous Las Vegas essay, partly because he was so perceptive about Jimmy Carter at a time when the rest of the press crowd overlooked the peanut farmer. I hadn’t known, though, that Thompson first came to prominence after being asked to write a piece about the Kentucky Derby with cartoonist Ralph Steadman providing the visuals. The two went to the race but didn’t bother looking at the horses.

It was a stroke of genius, a bit like going to the Folies Bergere in the 1930s and watching the audience.

Anyway, I found this an informative and enjoyable read. Hope you do too.

How does an electric car work?

Tyler Cowen (Whom God Preserve) was asked this question by one of his readers:

Say you were trying to teach yourself, to a 99th percentile layperson’s level, how, say, an electric car actually worked. How would you go about doing that, precisely?

Tyler’s answer

I am not sure exactly how high (or low) a standard that is, but here is what I would do.

1. Watch a few YouTube videos.

2. Read a book or two on how electric cars work, along the way finding an expert or mentor who could answer my questions.

3. If needed, read a more general book about electricity.

4. Try to explain to someone else how electric cars work. Try again.

I would recommend this same general method for many particular questions.

Hmmm…. A week or so after we took delivery of our Tesla, this helpful video on how the new Model 3 motors worked appeared on YouTube. I watched it diligently several times, and got the general drift but wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anyone without making detailed notes.

Being a practical sort of chap, though, I then got into the car, floored the accelerator and was able to confirm that the motors worked as advertised. Zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds. After a few minutes I was able to breathe again. Not recommended for persons of a nervous disposition.

My commonplace booklet

The Covid Derby: Wonderful spoof race commentary.

Note the authentic Irish accent. My countrymen have always taken a keen interest in the inequality of horses, whatever about humans.

Thanks to Christine Happel for spotting it.

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The view from my bike

Taken the other day.

Quote of the Day

Question: Stephen Hawking worried about unintended consequences of machine intelligence. Do you share his concern?

Answer: I worry about the unintended consequences of human intelligence, such as climate change, human-made pathogens, mass poverty, and environmental catastrophe. The quest for AI should result in new technology, greater understanding, and smarter decision making. AI may one day become our greatest tool in averting such disasters. However, we should proceed cautiously and establish clear rules prohibiting unacceptable uses of AI, such as banning the development of autonomous weapons.

• David Silver, chief architect of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, in an interview with Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Far Away Eyes

Link

Jagger with a faux Southern drawl. I never knew that the Stones were fans of country music. You learn something new every day.

Long Read of the Day

How did she do it? 

A terrific essay by Julian Barnes on the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. One great novelist paying tribute to another. She was an accident-prone grandmother, who fitted writing into the gaps in family life, and her first publisher dismissed her as ‘an amateur writer’. But, says Barnes, she became the best English novelist of her time. His essay explains why, making good use of Fitzgerald’s letters and of his own insights into the process of writing fiction. Sample:

In 1996 an old friend, Hugh Lee, made the bizarre complaint that he found her fictional children “precious”. Denying this, she replied that: “They’re exactly like my own children, who always noticed everything.” And having noticed, voiced innocence’s damaging truths. In 1968 the novelist reported a conversation with – or rather, denunciation by – her younger daughter:

“Maria has much depressed me by 1. Looking at Daddy and me and saying “What a funny old couple you are!” and 2. Telling me that studying art and literature is only a personal indulgence and doesn’t really help humanity or lead to anything, and, I suppose, really, that is quite true: she said it very kindly. My life seems to be crumbling into dust.”

“It is at such moments,” writes Barnes,

that writers have a small advantage over non-writers: the painful moment can at least be stored for later use. Twenty years later, here is Dolly, the plain-speaking young daughter of Frank Reid, owner of a printing works in pre-revolutionary Moscow. When Frank’s wife Nellie inexplicably abandons the family and returns to London, Frank asks Dolly if she wants to write to her mother. Dolly replies, “I don’t think I ought to write.” Frank, whose innocence means that he is devoid of self-righteousness, asks “Why not, Dolly? Surely you don’t think she did the wrong thing?” Dolly gives him a reply neither he nor we expect: “I don’t know whether she did or not. The mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place.”

This is a long read (nearly 5,000 words) but worth it.

Full disclosure: I’m biased. I’ve always been a fan of Julian’s work. And when his first novel, Metroland, came out decades ago, I gave it a rave review in The Listener (sadly now extinct). When an archive edition of the novel was published in 2010, my review was one of the contemporary documents included in that special edition.

Although he preceded me as the Observer’s TV critic after Clive James left for higher things, we had never met until one evening in the late 1980s we both found ourselves at a farewell dinner for Tony Howard, a great editor who had been a mentor for both of us. Julian was on the other side of a large table across which conversation was impossible. Eventually, I got up to go (I had a train to catch whereas most of the other diners lived in London). I made my apologies to Tony and walked towards the door. As I passed Julian he reached out a hand to stop me. “Thank you for the review”, he said. Just that. It was a reminder that writers never forget reviews, even those who say they don’t read them!

We are all polarised

(And that’s a problem)

One of the symptoms of our current malaise is how widespread the inability to ‘agree to disagree’ has become. I have a friend who regards climate change as a myth and thinks Greta Thunberg is a witch, and sometimes I have to remember that he’s also a good and generous soul (and excellent — if provocative — company). But in contemporary public discourse it seems increasingly difficult for people to accept that others with whom they disagree politically are anything other than stupid or wicked.

This has become particularly obvious in relation to attitudes towards ‘anti-vaxxers’. Almost everyone I know (that is to say, members of my ideological bubble) think they are misguided or just plain crazy. That’s too crude a response, I think. For one thing it assumes that all vaccine sceptics or opponents are the same. They’re not. Some have legitimate health reasons for being hesitant. Some undoubtedly are conspiracy theorists. Some are libertarians, ideologically speaking. But many are — for very good reasons — sceptical about anything that the neoliberal ‘democratic’ state tells them to do. Which means that any attempt to reduce the degree of vaccine hesitancy (to use the polite term) that doesn’t recognise the diversity of the phenomenon is doomed to fail.

This thought is sparked by discovering — courtesy of Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) — a paper that was published in The Lancet in (wait for it!) December 10, 2020. Its title: “The COVID-19 vaccines rush: participatory community engagement matters more than ever.”

It’s behind a journal paywall, I think, but the relevant bit for me was this:

From the outset it is important to distinguish between people wholly opposed to vaccination (anti-vaxxers) and individuals with limited or inaccurate health information or who have genuine concerns and questions about any given vaccine, its safety, and the extent to which it is being deployed in their interests before accepting it (vaccine hesitancy). In conflating and problematising the spectrum of those who do not accept vaccination, authorities might further erode trust and confidence, thereby exacerbating rather than resolving the factors underlying vaccine hesitancy. COVID-19 vaccines arrive as the social contract between some governments and their populations is being eroded and when many people, especially those in vulnerable groups, have little confidence that their government will protect them. In the UK, for example, a parliamentary report highlighted that more than 60% of Black people do not believe that their health is protected by the National Health Service to the same extent as White people.

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has further marginalised historically oppressed and excluded groups, including people with disabilities and growing numbers living in precarity. These groups have suffered disproportionate economic and health consequences, and have been largely excluded from social protection and resources needed to minimise their contracting the virus. The widespread impacts of the pandemic have illuminated the structural violence embedded in society. Now these communities are being asked to trust the same structures that have contributed to their experiences of discrimination, abuse, trauma, and marginalisation in order to access vaccines and to benefit the wider population.

The thrust of the paper’s argument was that neither government diktats nor contempt for vaccine refuseniks would do any good. Experience since 2020 seems largely to confirm this view. Different kinds of community-based initiatives (outlined in the paper) might, but as far as I know none of these have been adopted by the UK government.

Morals of this story:

1. Polarised thinking may make people feel comfortable in their righteousness; but it’s not a way of solving a problem.

2. Most of us are polarised in one way or another.

My commonplace booklet

From a nice essay, ”Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?”, by Kate Harding:

Not every piece of short nonfiction writing is an opinion piece, crafted to advance a particular argument. This is the first thing we all need to understand. What you’re reading now, for instance, is an essay—not an op-ed, a chapter, or a blog post. I’ll spare you the customary French translation here and simply note that I love the essay form because it’s an opportunity to watch someone—including yourself, if you write them—think deeply, out loud. To me, the signal pleasure of reading is finding partial answers to the question I have about everyone I encounter: What is it like inside your brain? I am incorrigibly nosy, and reading essays is a socially acceptable outlet for it.

Essays worthy of the name—i.e., distinct from diaries, journals, op-eds, and other forms with lower expectations for depth—have a certain quality that Virginia Woolf identified as belonging “to life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds.” In the opening essay of The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts describes a similar quality in Woolf: The ideas in A Room of One’s Own, he writes, “are, in fact, few and fairly obvious—at least from our historical vantage. Yet the thinking, the presence of animate thought on the page, is striking.”

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Quote of the Day

”Cooking is a minor art. I cannot imagine an hilarious soufflé, or a deeply moving stew.”

• Kenneth Tynan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ola Gjeilo | The Ground | Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.

Link

I was ambushed by this. There’s another performance here with the composer at the piano.

Long Read of the Day

The American polity is cracked, and might collapse.

So how should Canada prepare for Trump v2.0?

A striking OpEd by Thomas Homer-Dixon in the country’s leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail:

“I’m a scholar of violent conflict,”. He writes.

For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

Despite the dramatic tone of the headline over the piece, it’s actually a desperately serious piece. And both adjectives count. By exploiting people’s fear and anger, Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the Republican Party and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.

Homer-Dixon cites David Frum’s view that Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. He points to the viral circulation of ‘holiday photos’ showing Republican politicians and their families, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.

It’s the possession of 400 million guns in ordinary citizens’ hands that make political polarisation in the US more dangerous than in any other democracy.

All of which makes this a worrying and compelling read.

Anne Enright on Ulysses @100

2022 is the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses — so you can expect a lot about it in this space. But just for starters, the Irish novelist Anne Enright has a lovely essay marking the anniversary in the New York Review of Books, which is, alas, probably behind its paywall. But here, for your delectation, is how she ends the piece.

Recently, just to get the full experience, I sat on a bench near the Forty Foot, the swimming spot below the Martello tower where Buck Mulligan goes for his dip, and I read a page or two. It was a mild September afternoon. The day was so windless and still, I could hear a man address a quiet friend, one leaving, one arriving, both of them with their towels rolled.

“Hello there, young Thomas,” he said. “Were you aware that a certain gentleman is home this week? Your presence may be required.”

And it seemed to me a continuation of the book I held in my hand.

“I’ve been in since four,” the man went on, cheerfully. “Went for a walk, took a Barry White in the new jacks they have up there. Lovely.” The local council had recently reopened a nearby public restroom, so this good news was both personal and civic. It was also astonishingly male.

I felt a theory coming on. I wondered at the way male speech often confuses top and bottom, why Irish men are so happily described as “talking shite” or “bollocks,” or why an “old fart” is by default male. So many of the men in Ulysses are heard huffing and blowing, not to mention gassing about politics. Perhaps, for Joyce, speech was just another thing that came from the body and lingered on the air. If you ask me what Ulysses has to offer—despite the maleness of the text, despite the author’s perversion, despite the way it exists not on the page but in your reading of the page—the answer is still “Everything, everything, everything.”

Canon reaches the end of the DSLR line

Health warning: What follows may be of interest only to photographers, but it marks a significant moment in photographic history.

DSLR stands for ‘Digital Single Lens Reflex’, which just means that it’s a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) which has a digital sensor where film used to go.

SLRs first appeared in the late 1940s and Nikon was the first Japanese manufacturer to build them, and for many years Nikons (and Leica rangefinder cameras) were the preferred tool of professional photographers — especially war correspondents. The fact that Nikons and Leicas were built like tanks may have had something to do with it. It is said that Don McCullin’s life may have been saved by his Nikon F, which allegedly stopped a bullet during the Vietnam war.

Here, in comparison, is my beloved F3 (a later version of McCullin’s camera), which is in better nick — possibly because its owner has led a sedentary life in which the only dangerous activity involved was jumping to conclusions.

For 30 years, Nikon had the pro market largely to itself, but in 1987 Canon introduced an autofocus system that was much better than the Nikon equivalent (which was designed to be backwards-compatible with all existing Nikon lenses and was therefore clunky). Canon brutally decided to abandon its legacy kit and created a completely new system which was significantly better, and from the 1990s onwards Canons became the favourite of sports and news snappers.

When digital sensors appeared and DSLRs replaced their analogue predecessors, Nikon again took the lead, but Canon overtook it in 2012 and has been ahead ever since. Some marketing genius in Canon had the idea of encasing all the long lenses in their range in white plastic, which meant that sports fans watching on TV eventually only saw photographers with Canon gear.

The trouble with DSLRs, though, is that they still had that mechanical mirror that flipped up just before the photograph was taken, and I guess it was only a matter of time before the industry realised that digital displays would make that last bit of click-clunk redundant. Thus was born the ‘mirrorless’ DSLR, where the optical viewfinder is replaced by a tiny, high-resolution, digital screen.

Which is why Canon has looked in the mirror and decided that it can no longer see its future in it. Flipping mirrors henceforth belong in photo museums. It’s called progress. But it may also represent Canute-style futility. Most photographs today are taken by smartphone cameras, equipped with sensors that produce images that are computationally enhanced by powerful processing engines in the phones — with results that are sometimes as good as anything a relatively bulky Canon, Nikon, Panasonic or Sony can produce.

Which, I guess means, that traditional cameras may eventually become quirky devices used only by enthusiasts. After all, the First Law of Photography states that the best camera is the one you happen to have with you.

Errata

The link in yesterday’s edition to Joan Baez’s rendition of ‘The Battle Hill of the Republic’ should have been this. Apologies and thanks to those who tactfully pointed it out.

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Teasels

Amazing plants. Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Many single-species societies in nature are like a human society in the grip of civil war. A single human society at war with itself is a complex adaptive system, in the sense that it is composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies. But clearly, and this is a crucial distinction, the society suffering a civil war is not itself adaptive as a system. After all, it’s breaking apart.

• David Sloan Wilson, in an essay on E.O. Wilson

I was reminded of this as I pondered the chronic divisions in Washington four days ago.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

When I was putting together the January 6 edition of this blog last week, I thought of selecting a bizarre recording of the Soviet Red Army choir singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ but then rejected the thought for couple of reasons: it would have been a tastelessly ironic commentary on the anniversary of an ominous portent; and the fact that (as an ignoramus) I actually knew very little about the hymn. So I selected a more upbeat track instead.

Only later did I read Heather Cox Richardson’s blog post on the day. This is how it began:

Just before sunrise on a November day in 1861, Massachusetts abolitionist Julia Ward Howe woke up in the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. She got out of bed, found a pen, and began to write about the struggle in which the country was engaged: could any nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” survive, or would such a nation inevitably descend into hierarchies and minority rule?

Howe had faith in America. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” she wrote in the gray dawn. “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.”

She thought of the young soldiers she had seen the day before, huddled around fires in the raw winter weather, ringing the city to protect it from the soldiers of the Confederacy who were fighting to create a nation that rejected the idea that all men were created equal: “I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His day is marching on.”

Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic became inspiration for the soldiers protecting the United States government. And in a four-year war that took hundreds of thousands of lives, they prevailed. Despite the threats to Washington, D.C., and the terrible toll the war took, they made sure the Confederate flag never flew in the U.S. Capitol.

And guess what? Here’s a photograph taken on January 6, inside the Capitol. The emblem of white supremacy had reached the heart of the American government.

At which point, I regretted not having the hymn as the Musical Alternative of the day. So here it is, belatedly … sung by Joan Baez

Link

Later in the day I was reminded that I also chose this recording for the edition of 5 November, 2020 as I pondered the numbers who had voted for Trump. An equally sombre moment.

Long Read of the Day

Capital Is Not a Strategy

If you’re looking for an intelligent antidote to the current irrational investment bubble, then this essay by Bill Janeway on Project Syndicate is just the ticket. In it he points out that the apparently limitless supply of low-cost capital available to entrepreneurs and early-stage venture-capital firms has led to the proliferation of business models with little or no potential to generate sustainable, self-financed growth. A delusion — “capital as a strategy” — has taken hold. “In the low-friction world of internet-delivered or mediated services, start-ups are eager to spend ever-greater amounts of other people’s money to acquire customers, the goal being to emerge victorious in a winner-takes-all race.”

And the strange thing is that we all know how this is ultimately going to end.

Great read. Worth your time. And if you want more, there’s the new edition of Bill’s book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy which, as it happens, I’ve been re-reading for something I’m working on at the moment.

Why the craze for crypto art really is beyond satire

Yesterday’s Observer column:

On 24 December, the movie Don’t Look Up began streaming on Netflix following a limited release in cinemas. It’s a satirical story, directed by Adam McKay, about what happens when a lowly PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her supervisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover that an Everest-size asteroid is heading for Earth. What happens is that they try to warn their fellow Earthlings about this existential threat only to find that their intended audience isn’t interested in hearing such bad news.

The movie has been widely watched but has had a pasting from critics. It was, said the Observer‘s Simran Hans, a “shrill, desperately unfunny climate-change satire”. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw found it a “laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed satire… like a 145-minute Saturday Night Live sketch with neither the brilliant comedy of Succession … nor the seriousness that the subject might otherwise require”.

Those complaints about crudity and OTT-ness rang a bell. It just so happens that a distinctly over-the-top satire published in 1729 attracted comparable reactions…

Read on

The UK’s kleptocracy problem

How servicing post-Soviet elites weakens the rule of law

Bracing report by Chatham House on how London has become the money-laundering capital of the world. The UK does, of course, have laws against that kind of thing. But the report shows that failures of enforcement and implementation of the law – plus the exploitation of loopholes by professional enablers (including some of the City’s fanciest legal firms) – have meant that little has been done in practice to prevent kleptocratic wealth and political agendas from entering Britain.

It’s a long, long read which will shock only those who have been vacationing on Mars. If you’re pressed for time, just see the Summary. Or, better still, Cory Doctorow’s acerbic analysis, especially this paragraph:

As interested as oligarchs are in being associated with the charitable sector, they’re even more interested in funding the UK Conservative Party itself. The Tories’ co-chairman Ben Elliot has formalized a “cash for access” arrangement where major donors are invited to private events and dinners with ministers and the PM. Elliot is a natural to court oligarchs for the Tories; his day job is running a “luxury concierge service” called Quintessentially, which provides “services” to the ultra wealthy. Elliot’s spox says that this work is “entirely separate” from his work as co-chair of the Tories.

All of which puts Boris Johnson’s wallpaper wheeze into context. By comparison with what his funders facilitate, it’s really small change. That’s no reason to ignore it, but it provides an ironic commentary on his fatuous declaration at COP26 that Britain is not a corrupt state.

My commonplace booklet

Don’t throw apple cores out the car window

I’m normally pretty scrupulous about not littering, but one thing I have done in the past is to throw apple cores out of the window onto roadside verges. After reading this piece by Katherine Martinko, though, I won’t be doing it from now on. Turns out that a study of apple trees along the sides of the M9 and A9 highways in Scotland by Dr. Markus Ruhsam, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, has revealed that more than half have sprouted from supermarket apple varieties that have most likely been pitched out a car window in passing. This is a concern because the cultivated varieties cross-pollinate with wild apples to create hybrids that could lead to the eventual demise of wild varieties.

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King’s Chapel

An unusual view of an iconic building.

Quote of the Day

”So, we are watching people in Kazakhstan try to recover the right to have a say in their own government on the anniversary of the day that Americans came perilously close to losing that right. “

• Heather Cox Richardson on yesterday’s edition of her terrific blog.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

“God Bless America” | Flash Mob with Denver Brass

Link

I was going to put up a recording of the Soviet Army choir singing (ponderously) The Battle Hymn of the Republic but, in the light of the near-death experience of said Republic a year ago, I thought our American friends could do with a boost instead.

Long Read of the Day

My plan for today’s reading was creatively disrupted by an email from Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) about the background story to yesterday’s Musical Alternative (the Rolling Stones ‘Start Me Up’ track.) Dave pointed me to Brad Chase’s memoir, “The Windows 95 ‘Start Me Up’ Story”, which is utterly fascinating, not least because Brad was the senior Microsoft executive who negotiated the deal with Jagger & Co over use of the song.

It’s a great read. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The story of the infamous Downing Street Christmas party

Beautifully told by Ros Atkins. I missed it first time round.

Unmissable.

Such a Positive Dream

Deborah Friedell, writing on the LRB blog about the trial and conviction of Elizabeth Holmes.

On Monday, twelve jurors in San Jose agreed, unanimously, that Elizabeth Holmes was guilty on four counts, including ‘conspiracy to commit wire fraud’ against investors in her company, Theranos. On the charges that she defrauded patients, she was found not guilty. On other charges, regarding particular investors, jurors were unable to reach a verdict. It was a win for the prosecution – Holmes will go to prison – though the mixed bill suggested it had been a near thing. One of the jurors (an actor with a Daytime Emmy for writing the Tiny Toon Adventures theme song) gave an interview to ABC News, reported more fully on The Dropout podcast. When it began deliberating, the jury was divided on ‘most everything’, he said. ‘It’s tough to convict somebody, especially somebody so likeable, with such a positive dream.’

Holmes’s invention was science fiction: her ‘Edison device’ was never capable of running hundreds of medical tests, concurrently, from a single drop of blood. Her defence was that she was very young (nineteen when she dropped out of Stanford to start Theranos), and her older, more experienced subordinates hadn’t told her – in non-technical language that she could understand – that she was deluded. If she hadn’t intended to deceive anyone then she was guilty of incompetence but not fraud. Her lawyers also suggested that her investors should have been more discerning: it wasn’t Holmes’s fault if they weren’t good at their jobs.

Nobody who read John Carreyou’s  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup would have been in any doubt about the outcome. Presumably Holmes’s defence team tried to ensure that none of the jurors were familiar with it.

My commonplace booklet

• What news and events did people search most for on Google in 2021? Link
• John McPhee has a nice story about a young Vassar graduate named Eleanor Gould, “who, in 1925, bought a copy of the brand-new New Yorker, read it, and then reread it with a blue pencil in her hand. When she finished, the magazine was a mottled blue on every page—a circled embarrassment of dangling modifiers, conflicting pronouns, absent commas, and over-all grammatical hash. She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was ‘Find this bitch and hire her!’”

Sadly, (as McPhee admits) it’s not true. But, as the Italians say, “if it isn’t it ought to be.”

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Turn left for history

A nice signpost on the North Norfolk coast.

Quote of the Day

”I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.”

• Dorothy Parker in the final edition of her New Yorker ‘Constant Reader’ column.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rolling Stones | Start Me Up

Link

I love this track, not to mention the video of the boys poncing about. But the funniest thing about it is that Microsoft bought the rights to use it in 1995 as the launch music for Windows 95. Which in a way was appropriate, given that Win95 was the first operating system which obliged its unfortunate users to press the ‘Start’ button in order to shut the PC down.

Long Read of the Day

The Lost History of the Electric Car

An excerpt from Tom Standage’s most recent book,  A Brief History of Motion: From the wheel to the car to what comes next. As usual, one discovers that there is nothing new under the sun. When the idea of powering vehicles with gasoline emerged, for example,

Some people did raise concerns about the sustainability of powering cars using non-renewable fossil fuels, and the reliability of access to such fuels. Today, electric cars, charged using renewable energy, are seen as the logical way to address these concerns. But the debate about the merits of electric cars turns out to be as old as the automobile itself.

In 1897, the bestselling car in the US was an electric vehicle: the Pope Manufacturing Company’s Columbia Motor Carriage. Electric models were outselling steam- and petrol-powered ones. By 1900, sales of steam vehicles had taken a narrow lead: that year, 1,681 steam vehicles, 1,575 electric vehicles and 936 petrol-powered vehicles were sold. Only with the launch of the Olds Motor Works’ Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1903 did petrol-powered vehicles take the lead for the first time.

Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, a Detroit Electric rather than one of his own Model Ts. And for a time the early EVs were seen as “women’s cars”, possibly because “some men may have liked that electric cars’ limited range meant that the independence granted to their drivers was tightly constrained”. I’m reminded of Ithiel de Sola Pool’s story of how some British men in the 1920s were reluctant to have a telephone installed in their homes because it would allow their wives to have conversations with men to whom they had not been properly introduced.

This is an informative essay which I much enjoyed.

What a Tory donor and a lavish lunch in Mayfair tells us about British politics

Lovely column by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian on how corruption works in Tory circles.

A woman must lunch somewhere. When the prime minister told Liz Truss to examine every road post Brexit, her thoughts naturally turned to Mayfair and Hertford Street. Perhaps that nice caff at No 5. We are after all lunching with that nice American trade envoy, Katherine Tai. Perhaps two measures of dry gin; three bottles of Pazo Barrantes Albariño, a Spanish white wine, costing a total of £153; and two bottles of the French red Coudoulet de Beaucastel, costing a total of £130. Perhaps a £3,000 bill.

Besides, the proprietor of 5 Hertford Street is Robin Birley, half-brother to Boris Johnson’s mate Zac Goldsmith, and buddy of Michael Gove and David Cameron. And he tipped Johnson 20 grand for his “leadership” campaign, wherever that went.

Surely such generosity calls for a kindly nod and wink. 5 Hertford Street posted substantial losses last year, so the money might come in handy. Birley even halved the bill if it could be paid straight away.

Truss’s civil servants were against having such a luxurious lunch but were apparently overruled by their boss.

Worth filing away for later in the year, when Truss will be a leading contender for Boris Johnson’s job when the party eventually dumps him.

The ‘Metaverse’ delusion

From a Fast Company blog post:

”The Facebook version of Metaverse hype is based on a self-serving premise that people will choose to, or even have the option to, escape the “real world” in order to interact in a synthetic one (and sponsored by…). This ignores where things are already headed. What computing has already done for us is add to our existing environment.

In most situations, we don’t want to go into our computers, but rather, we want computers to work in our world, where life happens: at the dinner table, on the train, hanging out with friends, etc. Besides the continued hype around augmented reality, the mobile phone has had the practical effect of bringing all of what computing offers into our literal hands. Wearable mobile computing, and perhaps one day, mixed reality will allow us that value, heads up and hands-free. And, like its predecessors, it will profoundly change how people behave. Whatever the interface, the future of computing is not escape. It is about us, and the amplifying force it has on our own abilities, in the world we already live in.”

Er, hopefully. But I’ve just got a new book by the philosopher David Chalmers predicting that, within a century, we will have virtual worlds that are impossible to distinguish from non-virtual ones. He also seems to believe that humans can live meaningful lives in virtual reality, which makes me wonder what he’s been smoking. But I need to read it first. It’s officially out on January 22.

And then, of course, there’s Heidegger’s view that “technology is the art of arranging the world so that we do not have to experience it”…

My commonplace booklet

”What is the difference between “further” and “farther”? In the dictionary, look up “further.” It says “farther.” Look up “farther.” It says “further.” So you’re safe and can roll over and sleep. But the distinction has a difference and [fact checkers'] know what’s O.K. “Farther” refers to measurable distance. “Further” is a matter of degree. Will you stop pelting me with derision? That’s enough out of you. You’ll go no further.”

From the chapter on fact-checking in John McPhee’s wonderful book on the writing process.

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The Year of the Tiger

Quite so.

Quote of the Day

”My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people”

• Patricia Highsmith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Arethra Franklin | Bridge over Troubled Water

Link

Long Read of the Day

On Swapping Gear For Watches

Lovely piece by Conrad Anker which will resonate with any reader who is cursed (or blessed) with a collecting gene.

Tech Predictions (contd.)

Further to yesterday’s sceptical piece about the foolishness of trying to predict the future, Simon Roberts reminded me of Rodney Brooks, one of the most distinguished thinkers about AI and robotics — and also one of the field’s most valuable sceptics.

Way back on January 1st, 2018, Brooks made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1st, 2050. And every January 1st since, he has been evaluating how his predictions (and their attached dates) are faring.

“I made my predictions,” he writes in his latest assessment,

because at the time I saw an immense amount of hype about these three topics, and the general press and public drawing conclusions about all sorts of things they feared (e.g., truck driving jobs about to disappear, all manual labor of humans about to disappear) or desired (e.g., safe roads about to come into existence, a safe haven for humans on Mars about to start developing) being imminent. My predictions, with dates attached to them, were meant to slow down those expectations, and inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance.

I was accused of being a pessimist, but I viewed what I was saying as being a realist. Today, I am starting to think that I too, reacted to all the hype, and was overly optimistic in some of my predictions. My current belief is that things will go, overall, even slower than I thought four years ago today. That is not to say that there has not been great progress in all three fields, but it has not been as overwhelmingly inevitable as the tech zeitgeist thought on January 1st, 2018.

His assessment is long and absorbing — and worth your extended attention, but a few things stand o out for me.

• Self-driving cars: oodles of hype (including a lot of nonsense from Elon Musk) but “very little movement in deployment of actual, for real, self driving cars”. He recommends Peter Norton’s  Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving as an antidote — as do I. It’s out in the UK at the end of the month, but the Kindle version is available now.
• Recently someone used the fact that Brooks’s predicted date for when electric vehicles would account for 30% of automobile sales in the US was “no earlier than the year 2027” as proof that he is a pessimist whose predictions about autonomous vehicles could not be trusted. Brooks points out that “EV sales in the US were 1.7% of the total market in 2020 (up from 1.4% in 2019). We’ll need four doublings of that in seven years to get to 30%. It may happen. It may happen sooner than 2027. But not by much. It would be a tremendous sustained growth rate that we have not yet seen”.
• Back in 2018 Brooks predicted that “the next big thing” to replace Deep Learning as the hot topic in AI would arrive somewhere between 2023 and 2027. “I was convinced of this,” he writes, “as there has always been a next big thing in AI. Neural networks have been the next big thing three times already. But others have had their shot at that title too, including (in no particular order) Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, the primal sketch, shape from shading, frames, constraint programming, heuristic search, etc. We are starting to get close to my window for the next big thing. Are there any candidates? I must admit that so far they all seem to be derivatives of deep learning in one way or another. If that is all we get I will be terribly disappointed, and probably have to give myself a bad grade on this prediction”.
• He’s (rightly) very critical of the ludicrous hype around big natural language models. “Overall”, he writes, “the will to believe in the innate superiority of a computer model is astounding to me, just as it was to others back in 1966 when Joseph Weizenbaum showed off his Eliza program which occupied a just a few kilobytes of computer memory. Joe, too, was astounded at the reaction and spent the rest of his career sounding the alarm bells. We need more push back this time around”.

We do, and some of us are doing our best. And it’s great to see someone willing to put his own guesses to the critical test.

Meanwhile, the venerable Gartner Hype Cycle still remains the best source of common sense about the Next Big Things in tech.

Commonplace Booklet

• “The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.” (From Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee.)
• Direct action works — ask this elderly Berlin resident who found a swan on the pavement. Well, it was a cygnet (i.e. a teenage swan) really. But still…

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Lightness visible

The UK countryside is a bleak place for a photographer at the moment — various shades of brown predominate, and everything is unbelievably muddy. (You should see our boots after a long riverside walk the other day.) Still, sometimes one gets a break, as with this shot taken yesterday morning on a cycle ride.

Quote of the Day

”The Times’s Kat Lay and Henry Zeffman reveal, almost unbelievably, that the sole distributor of tests to pharmacies took delivery of 2.5 million tests before Christmas then shut for four days before they could be distributed.”

• From Politico’s daily newsletter, yesterday

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile

Alex Ross’s marvellously erudite and perceptive New Yorker essay on ‘Weimar on the Pacific’ and the “excruciating dissonance” that German intellectual and artistic émigrés in L.A. felt between their circumstances and the horrors unfolding in Europe.

It’s particularly good on Thomas Mann, a difficult character whose publisher Alfred Knopf projected as the “Greatest Living Man of Letters” — which enabled Mann to take on a new public role as spokesman for the anti-Nazi cause.

“Because he so manifestly stood above the partisan fray, Mann was able to speak out against Hitler and be perceived as a voice of reason rather than be dismissed as an agitator.”

Essays like “The Coming Victory of Democracy” and “War and Democracy” remain dismayingly relevant in the era of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump. In 1938, Mann stated, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem.” At such moments, he said, the division between the political and the nonpolitical disappears. Politics is “no longer a game, played according to certain, generally acknowledged rules. . . . It’s a matter of ultimate values.” Mann also challenged the xenophobia of America’s strict immigration laws: “It is not human, not democratic, and it means to show a moral Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of mankind if one clings with bureaucratic coldness to these laws.”

It didn’t last, of course.

Those exiles who remained in America felt mounting insecurity as the Cold War took hold. McCarthyism made no exceptions for leftist writers who had been persecuted by the Nazis. Brecht left in 1947, the day after he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and later settled in East Germany. Feuchtwanger longed to return to Europe but, having never been granted U.S. citizenship, chose not to risk leaving.

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.”

I learned a lot from this piece. Hope you do too.

Crystal Balls

It’s that time when everyone and his dog sets about making predictions for the coming year.

Not this blogger, though. As Scott Galloway says:

Making predictions is a shitty business. The events leading up to the realization of any prediction make it seem less extraordinary. And when you get it wrong, you’re an insufferable numbskull. The value of a prediction is in the act of making it, not the prediction itself. Contemplating what may happen encourages us to take responsibility for decisions we make in the present. Also, revisiting a prediction and asking why it did/didn’t come to fruition provides insight into the machinations of our world and whether we are progressing or regressing.

Politico’s London Playbook (an essential daily newsletter, IMHO) had an interview with Tom Standage, the Deputy Editor of the Economist, in which he said some interesting things. For example:

• His paper was “more worried” about Russian troops building up on the borders of Ukraine than about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2022.
• Taiwan, though, is “the country to watch this year”. At the “sharp end between the two great political groupings,” it is also a place that “matters to business in a way that it never did before,” Standage explains. It has chip supremacy — the Taiwanese chip company TSMC makes the chips that go into the iPhone and that power Google and Tesla’s AI systems.
• Re Taiwan, there will be Chinese saber-rattling, but that won’t translate into military conflict. But if that prediction turns out to be wrong, the implications could be huge. “Fragile” chip factories could very easily be sabotaged. “You could take all of the engineers out that run them in a single airplane,” he says. “If that were to happen, there would be consequences beyond the geopolitical consequences. It would have a big impact on lots and lots of big tech companies,” Standage warns. “That would affect China itself because the tech supply chains are so intertwined,” he says.
• U.S. President Joe Biden is “likely to do very badly” in the U.S., and the prospect of former U.S. President Donald Trump coming back “may take a big step closer.”
• Future of Ireland. Next year will mark the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Free State — it marked the end of the three-year Irish War of Independence. While Standage doubts anything will change next year, the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party is expected to do well in next year’s Northern Ireland Assembly election. Standage says Irish unification is no longer in the “realms of science fiction,” adding: “I think it was Star Trek that predicted Irish unification in 2024 in one of its episodes in the 1980s. At the time that was so outlandish that it wasn’t shown in Britain. But actually, you know, that timeline is looking more plausible.”

My commonplace booklet

Source

Note: Lucid (of which most people I know have never heard) is a manufacturer of an all-electric, high-performance, very expensive luxury EVs. According to this source it expected to deliver “fewer than 1,000 cars in 2021”. Note the market capitalisation and then check the definition of irrational exuberance.

Errata

Yesterday’s edition was a proof-reader’s nightmare.

• First of all, on January 2, 2022, it wished readers a ‘Happy 2021’.
• Secondly the Long Read (Zadie Smith’s wonderful piece on Joan Didion) repeated one of the excerpts.
• And Duke University’s celebration of Public Domain Day 2022 was re-dated to 2021!

I’ve always admired Sam Johnson’s candid reply to the lady who asked him, indignantly, how he could have mistakenly defined ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’ in his great dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam”, he said, “pure ignorance.”

In my case, the corresponding reply to a question about how it was possible to make three such glaring errors in a single edition would be: incompetence, Madam, pure incompetence.

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