Evening in Venice

Quote of the Day

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”

• Laurence Peter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | From Shaun Davey’s The Brendan Voyage

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Since we are all embarking on a voyage through unknown waters in 2022 I thought it might be appropriate to find music that celebrates a successful voyage into similarly unknown waters. This piece is the tenth movement of a landmark work composed by Shawn Davey in 1980 — the first musical meeting between two musical traditions — one represented by an Irish uilleann piper; the other — the classical tradition — represented by a symphony orchestra.

Davey composed the work to mark explorer Tim Severin’s epic voyage across the Atlantic in a leather boat, a replica medieval voyage which set out to prove that it was possible that the 6th century Irish Saint, Brendan, may have reached America before Columbus or the Norsemen. The voice of the medieval boat is represented by the uilleann pipes of Liam O’Flynn, the greatest piper of my lifetime, while the orchestra represents the Atlantic. And the piece marks the culmination of the voyage — the landing in Newfoundland.

Long Read of the Day

Zadie Smith on Joan Didion

Predictably, there have been lots and lots of articles, essays and obits of her, but the very best I’ve found so far is Zadie Smith’s piece in the New Yorker. A few samples:

Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes—as Didion has it, perfectly, in “The White Album”—“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She did that with her own sentences, too.

Or

Whether writing about the invention of “women as a ‘class,’ ” Haight-Ashbury, John Wayne, the death of her family, or her own mental breakdown, Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan.” This she located just beneath the seemingly rational or ideological topsoil, which she found to be “dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies.” That she is considered a personal essayist is another one of those literary ironies: even when the subject was Didion, she was still reporting, and no more likely to be sympathetic to her own feelings than to those of Joan Baez, Nancy Reagan, or a kid on acid. She was just another subject among many, prone to the petty delusions of all humans but—crucially—genuinely interested in drilling down into that hardpan, no matter what she might find down there. She wasn’t looking for approval.

Whatever about magical thinking, this is magical writing. Do read it.

How history repeats itself in tech

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The tech companies saw this coming, of course, and it was eerie to see how their responses echoed the playbooks of the tobacco and energy companies of an earlier period, as chronicled, for example, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. The other day, Andrew Bosworth, the incoming chief technology officer of Meta (neé Facebook) was asked whether he thought “vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media”. His reply, verbatim, reads: “I think Facebook ran probably the biggest Covid vaccine campaign in the world. What more can you do if some people who can get that real information from a real source choose not to get it? That’s their choice. They’re allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don’t have an issue with Facebook. You can’t put that on me.”

Sounds familiar? It’s what oil companies came up with when they invented the idea of the “carbon footprint” – ie your footprint on the biosphere, not theirs. It’s the displacement of responsibility strategy: since it’s a free country, nobody’s forcing you to do the thing that’s bad for you. Childhood obesity is the responsibility of the child or of his or her parents. Alcoholism happens because you don’t “drink responsibly”. Radicalisation of the mass shooter is not YouTube’s responsibility. It’s always your fault, not that of the manufacturer of the addictive product.

Do read the whole thing.

Saturday was Public Domain Day, 2022

The annual post from the wonderful Duke Centre for the Study of the Public Domain reminded us that,

On January 1, 2022, copyrighted works from 1926 enter the US public domain,   where they will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The line-up this year is stunning. It includes books such as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Felix Salten’s Bambi, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, and Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope. There are scores of silent films—including titles featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Greta Garbo, famous Broadway songs, and well-known jazz standards. But that’s not all. In 2022 we get a bonus: an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 2  will be entering the public domain too!

Given that Winnie the Pooh is a multi-billion dollar franchise, imagine the conference-room full of expensive IP lawyers in Disney HQ wondering how to stop what happens next.

And of course, Xi Jinping’s legal retainers will also be busy, given that images of Pooh Bear are banned in China since (for some unknown reason) they remind people of the great leader.

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Rose-coloured spectacles

A Blogger’s apologia pro vita sua

Link

Quote of the Day

”The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Giuseppe Verdi | Nabucco | Hebrew Slaves Chorus

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I wondered about the wisdom of having a ’slaves chorus’ at the very end of the year. But Wikipedia is very interesting about this particular piece:

Music historians have long perpetuated a powerful myth about the famous “Va, pensiero” chorus sung in the third act by the Hebrew slaves. Scholars have long believed the audience, responding with nationalistic fervor to the slaves’ powerful hymn of longing for their homeland, demanded an encore of the piece. As encores were expressly forbidden by the Austrian authorities ruling northern Italy at the time to prevent public protests, such a gesture would have been extremely significant. However, recent scholarship puts this and the corresponding myth of “Va, pensiero” as the national anthem of the Risorgimento to rest. Although the audience did indeed demand an encore, it was not for “Va, pensiero” but rather for the hymn “Immenso Jehova,” sung by the Hebrew slaves to thank God for saving His people. In light of these new revelations, Verdi’s position as the musical figurehead of the Risorgimento has been correspondingly revised. At Verdi’s funeral however, the crowds in the streets spontaneously broke into “Va, pensiero”.

Long Read of the Day

 The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

A truly remarkable Wired story by Megan Molteni chronicling how the WHO and the science-policy community ignored the possibility of aerosol transmission of infectious diseases like Covid and persisted in the venerable ‘droplet’ theory of contagion long after it was irrelevant. Nobody knows how many people died needlessly because of this misconception.

It’s a long read, and intricate, but a great example of how to tell a complicated story well.

(Many thanks to Horacio Queiro for spotting it.)

Niall Ferguson on changing his mind

At the beginning of this year, on January 10, just days after the then president had incited a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, I hypothesized that we might achieve herd immunity to Trumpism in 2021. “My earnest hope,” I wrote, “was that, having once been infected by the virus of antidemocratic politics, Americans have now acquired some resistance to it.” I thought that the coronavirus pandemic would be behind us by the end of the year, too.

I was wrong on both counts.

Not only has the shape-shifting virus found a way around our vaccines—I write six days after testing positive for Covid, despite three jabs of Pfizer—but a second wave of Trumpism also seems perfectly capable of reinfecting the body politic.

Trump remains amazingly popular among Republicans. Over 72% approve of his handling of the presidency. Asked about his personal attributes, 82% think him authentic and 73% honest and trustworthy. I kid you not. While only 53% are sure they want Trump to run for president again in 2024 (20% are against and the rest are not sure) Trump is miles ahead of the other potential nominees.

Source

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A real palace of culture

The National Library of Latvia in Riga, where I once gave a talk. Very striking building that dominates the skyline. But also very functional and nice to work in.

Quote of the Day

”His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin.”

• Daniel O’Connell on Robert Peel

Reminds me of the observation that Eamon De Valera’s smile was “like moonlight on a tombstone”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Alto Rhapsody | Op. 53 | Adagio | Kathleen Ferrier

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Very old and poor-quality recording. But perfect for an overcast post-Christmas morning. I first heard it after a recommendation from Alan Bennett. And I’ve always loved Ferrier’s voice.

Long Read of the Day

 Are Platforms Suppressing Evidence of Social Harms? Corporate History Suggests an Answer

It does. One of the things that’s become abundantly clear about the tech giants — especially Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet — as they try to get ahead of attempts to regulate them is the extent to which they are copying the playbook used by the oil and tobacco companies.

This fine piece by Stephen Maher lays it out nicely, and includes this quote from a famously revealing memo written by a tobacco company executive in the 1960s:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product.” Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health.

And the concept of a ‘carbon footprint’ was an invention by BP to shift responsibility for fossil fuel use way from the oil giants and onto consumers. Interestingly, Facebook is taking the same tack now: it’s not for us to judge what people see — that’s up to them.

Great essay. Worth your time.

Remembering Joan Didion

She passed away last Thursday at the age of 87. The NYT had a rather good obituary, but I’m sure there have been lots of others. I’ve always loved her cool, wry, observational style. And she wrote a really fine book about grief. She always looked so fragile. And yet at the same time she was tough as nails.

After news of her death broke, we watched Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, an impressive biographical documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The photograph above is a still from the film.

Books for New Year’s Resolutions

Tim Harford’s suggestions for those interested in self-improvement.

Some predictable choices — e.g. The Tao of Pooh, Dave Allen’s (invaluable) Getting Things Done and Marie Kondo’s book on tidying (which I cannot abide). But on the other hand Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism was new to me, as was Chris Anderson’s TED Talks, which Tim says is “is the best book on public speaking I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of books on public speaking.”

My commonplace booklet

• Vaughan Williams | March Past of the Kitchen Utensils. Perfect for a playgroup! Link

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Live in Venice

Quote of the Day

”If God had been a Liberal, we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments — we’d have the ten suggestions.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul McCartney, Sting, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Phil Collins | Hey Jude

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What you might all an all-star team.

Long Read of the Day

The liberty of local bullies

Noah Smith revisits a great essay he wrote in 2011 on the misconceptions of libertarianism.

The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society – the government (the “big bully”) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.

In a perfect libertarian world, it is therefore possible for rich people to buy all the beaches and charge admission fees to whomever they want (or simply ban anyone they choose). In a libertarian world, a self-organized cartel of white people can, under certain conditions, get together and effectively prohibit black people from being able to go out to dinner in their own city. In a libertarian world, a corporate boss can use the threat of unemployment to force you into accepting unsafe working conditions. In other words, the local bullies are free to revoke the freedoms of individuals, using methods more subtle than overt violent coercion.

I’m always baffled by the way perfectly intelligent people are seduced by libertarian fantasies.

A Japanese photographer’s bittersweet archive of his late wife 

Transcript of a memorable interview with a remarkable photographer, Seiichi Furuya, which — among other things — is a reminder of the importance of photo books in a digital age.

E.O. Wilson RIP

The founder of ‘sociobiology’ passed away on Sunday. The NYT has a good obituary of him, which also include a fascinating, hitherto unseen video.

Link

My commonplace booklet

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Unicyclist plus friend and pooch

Seen one Summer evening in Arles.

A letter from Father Christmas

John Gapper is one of my favourite Financial Times columnists. His most recent column, a message from Father Christmas is a masterful interweaving of fairytale and Covid reality but, like most things in the FT resides behind a non-porous paywall. But I enjoyed it so much that I read it aloud to some members of my long-suffering family over breakfast. And then thought that there’s no reason why my equally-long-suffering readers shouldn’t hear it too. So here it is, if you’re interested.

Quote of the Day

”I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.” * LBJ

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Johann Albrechtsberger | Harp Concerto in C Major: Finale

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Long Read of the Day

 The Critic’s Critic: George Steiner and the art of hopeful failure.

Lovely essay in The Hedgehog Review by Richard Hughes Gibson.

George Steiner was called many things across his lengthy writing career—sage, pedant, philosopher, snob, the last great European intellectual, a “mimic” staging a decades-long “impression of the world’s most learned man”—but the title he always claimed for himself was simply critic. As we reflect on the meaning of Steiner’s work in the wake of his death in February 2020, that self-characterization cannot be forgotten. Steiner was in many ways a formidable scholar, and his commentaries on core texts (Antigone, The Brothers Karamazov, the poetry of Paul Celan) and enduring themes (tragedy, translation, the inhuman) will surely be cited for many years to come. Yet from the beginning of his career in the late fifties to his last notable works at the turn of the century, he was explicitly engaged in the practice of criticism — the goal of which was to reach the wider republic of readers (not just academicians) with his urgent dispatches on the state of the arts and culture. It was as a critic that he asked to be judged.

I knew and liked George, and so may be prejudiced, but I found this essay both fair and perceptive, especially in discussing the implicit contradiction in Steiner’s thinking between, on the one hand, his profound conviction of the humanising impact of the Humanities and, on the other, his view that it did not save us from the barbarism of the 20th century inflicted by ‘cultivated’ people who could run concentration camps by day but “come home from their day’s butchery and falsehood to weep over Rilke or play Schubert.”

Well worth your time.

Worried about super intelligent machines? They’re already here

Yesterday’s Observer column:

But for anyone who thinks that living in a world dominated by super-intelligent machines is a “not in my lifetime” prospect, here’s a salutary thought: we already live in such a world! The AIs in question are called corporations. They are definitely super-intelligent, in that the collective IQ of the humans they employ dwarfs that of ordinary people and, indeed, often of governments. They have immense wealth and resources. Their lifespans greatly exceed that of mere humans. And they exist to achieve one overriding objective: to increase and thereby maximise shareholder value. In order to achieve that they will relentlessly do whatever it takes, regardless of ethical considerations, collateral damage to society, democracy or the planet.

One such super-intelligent machine is called Facebook. And here to illustrate that last point is an unambiguous statement of its overriding objective written by one of its most senior executives, Andrew Bosworth, on 18 June 2016…

Read on

Also: Here’s a fuller excerpt from the Andrew Bosworth cited in the column:

“So we connect people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack cooordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”

My commonplace booklet

• How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home? Link

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The World Wide Cobweb

A present from Christmas past, when my kids were young.

Quote of the Day

”One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

• Salman Rushdie

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 / Part One | For The First Day Of Christmas – No. 4.

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Long Read of the Day

Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

Lovely essay by Tim Hartford:

Readers with long memories may recall the brief, inglorious UK fuel shortage of a few weeks ago, which was mostly caused by the rush to refuel for fear the pumps would run dry. Some petrol stations imposed a limit on how much you could buy — say, £25 of fuel and no more. It seems sensible enough, but a friend of mine (an economist) suggested this was the opposite of what was really needed. A maximum purchase encouraged more visits and more queues. Instead, petrol stations should’ve imposed a minimum purchase: nobody was allowed to buy fuel if their tank was more than a quarter full.

One can imagine snags and problems with implementing this rule, but the principle is delightfully elegant. Queues would disappear, as only people who actually needed fuel would be allowed to buy it. The self-fulfilling shortage would disappear. The solution is not to demand that drivers buy less fuel, but to insist they buy more.

All this set me wondering about other problems we could fix by reversing the usual logic and doing the exact opposite of what one might expect…

Is Omicron the beginning of the end, or merely the end of the beginning?

When Omicron arrived and its high transmissibility was realised I had a wicked thought: could this be the variant that gets societies to herd immunity? After all, if it spreads very quickly, but is relatively less severe for most ‘infectees’, might that not mean that — without anyone planning it — we might achieve a meaningful level of collective immunity. And having thought that, I immediately squashed the idea: after all, even if only a tiny proportion of those who catch Omicron has to be hospitalised, health services (already battered and exhausted by two years of non-stop crisis) might well be overwhelmed.

Yascha Mounk’s take on it seems to be heading in the same direction, though.

Muddy early data mean that, for now at least, the immediate epidemiological future is uncertain. We could be in for a few months of relatively mild inconvenience before Omicron goes out with a whimper. Or we could be about to experience yet another exponential rise in hospitalizations and deaths.

And yet I wager that, whatever course Omicron—or future strains of the disease—might take, we are about to experience the end of the pandemic as a social phenomenon…

His argument is that, whatever the dangers of the new variant, citizens of democracies have had enough.

The appetite for shutdowns or other large-scale social interventions simply isn’t there. This means that we have effectively given up on “slowing the spread” or “flattening the curve.” To a much greater degree than during previous waves, we have quietly decided to throw up our hands…serious restrictions like shutdowns are now thinkable only if we get into a situation in which the emergency is already plain for all to see.

Of course Mounk is only writing about the US, which has its own dysfunctional politics; but I wonder if lockdown exhaustion will be a big thing over here.

Christopher Locke, Rage in Peace

A remarkable firebrand of the early Web has passed away. Impossible to summarise his astonishingly varied career — except maybe by saying that he did to online marketing what Hunter S. Thompson did to journalism. Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve), knew him well and was one of his co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and has written a lovely obituary. And if you want an impression of what Locke was like, see his Mystic Bourgeoisie blog which he maintained from 2005 to 2014.

As we say in Irish, Ní bheidh a leithéad arís an. We shall not see his like again.

Trouble in SUVland

The IEA has an interesting paper on the environmental impact of SUVs. It says that these absurd vehicles are on course to account for more than 45% of current global car sales – setting a new record in terms of both volume and market share. Sales of the monsters “continues to be robust” in many countries, including the US, India and across Europe. The only good news seems to come from China, where the proliferation of SUVs is stagnating, mainly because of rising demand for small EVs.

The report has a nice payoff line:

If SUVs were an individual country, they would rank sixth in the world for absolute emissions in 2021, emitting over 900 million tonnes of CO2.

My commonplace book

 New submarine cable to link Japan, Europe, through famed Northwest Passage

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More interesting than you think. Read 2034: A Novel of the Next World War to get the idea.

Parallel reflections

On a country walk late yesterday afternoon we came on a pair of cygnets dabbling in a small lake. After a while, one of them began to swim away. As I watched him move into open water, I suddenly noticed the silhouette of the submerged curved branch in the background and took several shots trying to catch what Henri Cartier-Bresson famously called ‘the decisive moment’ — and then got this.

In a way, dear old HCB has a lot to answer for. Millions of photographers are forever looking for a way of capturing one of those moments. And mostly not finding them — so when it happens it’s worth celebrating.

Quote of the Day

A poem for Boris

I could not dig:
I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

• ‘A Dead Statesman’, Rudyard Kipling (from ‘Epitaphs of the War 1914-18’). Chosen by Alan Bennett in his 2021 Diary in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gustav Holst | In the bleak midwinter

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My favourite Christmas carol.

Long Read of the Day

 This Scientist Created a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pandemic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It.

Yesterday I went to three pharmacies to try and get some more of the lateral-flow Covid test kits that the UK government says are an essential tool for families and workers trying to be careful about catching or passing on Covid over Christmas. None of the pharmacies had any supplies. They’d run out after the (predictable) surge in demand after the government had started recommending them in the run-up to the festive season.

This dearth will probably be rectified soon. It’s a reminder of why this Christmas feels so different from 2020. Then, we didn’t have any vaccines. And we didn’t have many DIY test kits either.

One reason why this terrific ProPublica story by Lydia DePillis is so interesting is that it reveals that the US could have had something like a lateral-flow test at the very beginning of the pandemic. Way back in early 2020, a Harvard-trained scientist named Irene Bosch developed a quick, inexpensive COVID-19 test. She already had a factory set up to manufacture it for $10 a shot. On March 21, 2020 — when the U.S. had recorded only a few hundred COVID-19 deaths — she submitted her test for emergency authorisation, a process that the Food and Drug Administration uses to expedite tests and treatments. But the go-ahead never came.

How did this happen? Well, as you might expect, it’s a long story. And it’s worth a read.

Chart of the Day

Why immigrants are important

One reason is that more of them start businesses than citizens of their host nations. These are the figures for the US. Wonder what they’re like for, say, the UK.

Stuart Russell’s Reith Lectures: ‘Living with Artificial Intelligence’

They’re terrific. And available on the BBC Sounds app and via the website. And if you’re too busy to listen, why not download the transcripts — also from the website?

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens died ten years ago this month and there have been a number of nice essays by writers and journalists who knew and admired him. This one by Graydon Carter, who was Editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, is the latest to come my way, and it’s lovely:

If you ever had the good fortune to spend time with Christopher, as I did over long lunches and even longer dinners, you would have been an audience to one of the more spectacular minds in recent history. There was nothing Christopher hadn’t read and couldn’t recall from memory. Late into the night and well into his cups, he could recite Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School—and precisely the way P. G. Wodehouse wrote it. Like all sane people, he considered Wodehouse the greatest practitioner of the English language.

I was often annoyed by Hitchens, but generally mesmerised by his prose, and so as a way of personally marking his passing I started to read my way through the archive of things he wrote for the London Review of Books. It’s an eye-opener.

A good test of a writer is when he or she tackles something that you think you know about and wind up seeing it in a completely different light when you’ve finished the piece. A instructive example in this context is his review of Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin, which I thought was terrific because it helped me finally to understand why so many people whom I took seriously seemed to be in awe of Berlin. But Hitchens saw through him, and yet wasn’t vindictive.

The anecdotal is inescapable here, and I see no reason to be deprived of my portion. I first met Berlin in 1967, around the time of his Bundy/Alsop pact, when I was a fairly tremulous secretary of the Oxford University Labour Club. He’d agreed to talk on Marx, and to be given dinner at the Union beforehand, and he was the very picture of patient, non-condescending charm. Uncomplainingly eating the terrible food we offered him, he awarded imaginary Marx marks to the old Russophobe, making the assumption that he would have been a PPE student. (‘A beta-alpha for economics – no, I rather think a beta – but an alpha, definitely an alpha for politics.’) He gave his personal reasons for opposing Marxism (‘I saw the revolution in St Petersburg, and it quite cured me for life. Cured me for life’) and I remember thinking that I’d never before met anyone who had a real-time memory of 1917. Ignatieff slightly harshly says that Berlin was ‘no wit, and no epigrams have attached themselves to his name’, but when he said, ‘Kerensky, yes, Kerensky – I think we have to say one of the great wets of history,’ our laughter was unforced. The subsequent talk to the club was a bit medium-pace and up-and-down the wicket, because you can only really maintain that Marx was a determinist or inevitabilist if you do a lot of eliding between sufficient and necessary conditions. But I was thrilled to think that he’d made himself vulnerable to such unlicked cubs. A term or two later, at a cocktail party given by my tutor, he remembered our dinner, remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the story. ‘After that I’m afraid Christopher rather gave me up. Gave me up for the Party.’)

Many years later, reviewing Personal Impressions for the New Statesman, I mentioned the old story of Berlin acting as an academic gatekeeper, and barring the appointment of Isaac Deutscher to a chair at Sussex University. This denial had the sad effect of forcing Deutscher – who had once given Berlin a highly scornful review in the Observer – to churn out Kremlinology for a living: as a result of which he never finished his triad or troika of Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin biographies. In the next post came a letter from Berlin, stating with some anguish that while he didn’t much approve of Deutscher, his opinion had not been the deciding one. I telephoned Tamara Deutscher and others, asking if they had definite proof that Berlin had administered the bare bodkin, and was told, well, no, not definite proof. So I published a retraction. Then came a postcard from Berlin, thanking me handsomely, saying that the allegation had always worried and upset him, and asking if he wasn’t correct in thinking that he had once succeeded more in attracting me to Marxism than in repelling me from it. I was – I admit it – impressed. And now I read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff proposes that the foxy Berlin always harboured the wish to metamorphose into a hedgehog. All I know is that I was once told – even assured of – one small thing.

Carter’s tribute is gracious and affectionate, without being smarmy. This is how it finishes:

Christopher was also a spirited defender of free speech, whether it came out of the mouths of monsters or political idiots on the right or the left. His across-the-board defense often made people uncomfortable back in the day. I’m not sure he’d survive the current cancel-culture mobs—let alone the op-ed page of The New York Times. That very fearlessness would be his undoing if he were on the speaking-circuit prowl today.

One thing I do believe: The Christopher Hitchens I knew and adored wouldn’t be like the majority of us, huddling in our trembling silence, terrified of saying what we really think, and shaking our heads in the belief that the world has gone mad and the other side is the one destroying America. Christopher would be out there on the front lines. I just wish I knew which front lines he’d be on.

My commonplace booklet

Ten Things to Say Instead of “No Thanks, I Don’t Drink”

Useful advice for the office party season from Lindsey Adams.

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That’s the spirit!

Brighton, May 2017

Quote

“Adventure is just bad planning”

• Roald Amundsen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | At the Window

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Simple, beautiful and one of my favourite piano tunes.

Long Read of the Day

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3

This essay by Tim O’Reilly is the best thing I’ve seen so far about the breathless speculation of What’s Next in tech. Tim was the guy who coined the phrase ‘Web 2.0’ five years after the burst of the first Internet bubble. Now he’s turned his attention to the hype about crypto and blockchain as the next iteration of the Net.

Crypto enthusiast Sal Delle Palme puts it even more boldly:

“We’re witnessing the birth of a new economic system. Its features and tenets are just now being devised and refined in transparent ways by millions of people around the world. Everyone is welcome to participate.”

“I love the idealism of the Web3 vision”, writes Tim, “but we’ve been there before”.

We sure have, and this is a great overview.

He draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, particularly her view that a true technology revolution must be accompanied by the development of substantial new infrastructure. Which gives O’Reilly the important question to ask about Web3 boosterism. If it is a genuine revolution what will it leave behind ?

I realise that this stuff is an acquired taste for those of us who try to understand the tech industry. But if that’s what floats your boat, you’ll want to read the essay.

Search engines and conspiracy theories

This looks interesting:

Abstract: Web search engines are important online information intermediaries that are frequently used and highly trusted by the public despite multiple evidence of their outputs being subjected to inaccuracies and biases. One form of such inaccuracy, which so far received little scholarly attention, is the presence of conspiratorial information, namely pages promoting conspiracy theories. We address this gap by conducting a comparative algorithm audit to examine the distribution of conspiratorial information in search results across five search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex. Using a virtual agent-based infrastructure, we systematically collect search outputs for six conspiracy theory-related queries (“flat earth”, “new world order”, “qanon”, “9/11”, “illuminati”, “george soros”) across three locations (two in the US and one in the UK) and two observation periods (March and May 2021). We find that all search engines except Google consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results, although the share of such content varied across queries. Most conspiracy-promoting results came from social media and conspiracy-dedicated websites while conspiracy-debunking information was shared by scientific websites and, to a lesser extent, legacy media. The fact that these observations are consistent across different locations and time periods highlight the possibility of some search engines systematically prioritizing conspiracy-promoting content and, thus, amplifying their distribution in the online environments.

The intriguing thing is how much better Google seems. Which is annoying for those of us who generally use a non-tracking search engine.

My commonplace booklet

• The Chrysler Turbo Encabulator. A truly wonderful spoof video. To my astonishment, Chrysler still exists. (H/T to Ben Evans)

• Ginsberg, Didion, Sontag: Inside the Apartments of New York City Literary Legends, c. 1995 Link

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My sceptical friend

When I joined him on the floor of my study a few years ago, he gave me a suitably quizzical look. He’s now a strapping young lad, but still, I hope, sceptical.

Quote of the Day

”If you decided to come back, that choice is yours. But I can tell you it won’t be viewed as for your own safety. The safest practice is to stay exactly where you are. If you decide to return with your packages, it will be viewed as you refusing your route, which will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning. The sirens are just a warning.”

• Text from an Amazon manager to a delivery driver after the driver suggested she return to base for her own safety as a tornado ripped through the area. (Source: Bloomberg).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edvard Grieg | Wedding Day at Troldhaugen Op.65 No.6

Link

I’ve often heard this piece but didn’t know (until today) that it was by Grieg. And it makes one think that it must have been an interesting wedding!

Long Read of the Day

There is no ‘Them’

An entertaining but ultimately implausible protest by Antonio García Martínez against the ‘othering’ of West Coast tech billionaires by US East Coast elites.

Thus was I sitting at a very well-appointed and welcoming shabbat dinner table this past Friday. The specific host family and guests are not directly relevant, other than to mention these are extremely media savvy people who in fact make a living in The Spectacle (much as I do) and are by no means the ‘normies’ that techies often dismissively cite.

The conversation was wide-ranging and generally warm…until we got to the topic of technology, and I suddenly felt as I did in the late 90s when backpacking around Europe. Cut to scene at a youth hostel in Belfast or Brindisi, and I was the lone representative of a hegemonic entity that had defined and marked everyone’s lives, and I had a lot to answer for. In the case of backpacker me, it was the United States of America and its assumed depredations throughout the world; in the case of shabbat guest me, it was me as emissary (and, worse!, defender) of ‘Big Tech’ which has wrought so much turbulence in our lives.

In the same way that the hostel scenes possessed their own ironies that still gleam in distant memory—one Spanish dude who was letting me have it about evil America was literally wearing blue jeans and eating McDonald’s—this scene also had its odd juxtapositions…

Like everything he writes, it’s sparky and readable.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

Christmas Books – 3

This is an extraordinary book which I read (and reviewed) when it first came out in 2019, but have been re-reading recently because its author is this year’s Reith Lecturer. So you could view his book as the extensive background reading for the ideas that he has distilled into the four lectures of the series.

What makes it remarkable is that Russell is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of artificial intelligence — among other things he’s the co-author (with Peter Norvik) of what is still a canonical textbook of the field — who also believes that his discipline is incubating an existential threat to our species.

The slow death of democracy in America

It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. Larry Lessig (Whom God Preserve) is the latest scholar to chronicle and explain what’s happening. He has a long and depressing essay in the current edition of the New York Review of Books which I fear may be behind their paywall. If it is, here’s his conclusion:

For most of this year, President Biden defended the filibuster and stood practically silent on this critical reform. He has focused not on the crumbling critical infrastructure of American democracy, but on the benefits of better bridges and faster Internet. Democratic progressives in Congress were little better on this question. Although Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren all supported the For the People Act, in the public eye the issues they’ve championed have overlooked the country’s broken democratic machinery: forgive student debt, raise the minimum wage, give us a Green New Deal…. As a progressive myself, I love all these ideas, but none of them are possible unless we end the corruption that has destroyed this democracy. None of them will happen until we fix democracy first.

It may well be that nothing could have been done this year. It may well be true that nothing Biden could say or do would move Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, the two who are apparently blocking reform just now. Yet we have to frame the stakes accurately and clearly: if we do not “confront” those “imperfections” in our democracy, “openly and transparently,” in the State Department’s words, we will lose this democracy. And no summit will bring it back.

I’ve known and admired Larry since the 1990s, and will never forget the sombre telephone conversation he and I had in 2000 just after the Supreme Court had given the Presidency to George W. Bush. His 2011 book,  Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It was a prescient warning of the dangers ahead, and things have got steadily worse since it was published.

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