The grapes of wrath

Seen in an upmarket Norfolk greengrocer’s one Halloween afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The trouble, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.”

• George Bernard Shaw, when declining to sell the movie rights to his plays to Sam Goldwyn.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement | Allegro | Alison Balsom | BBC Proms, 2009.

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip

This is a long, long read — but worth it if you’re puzzled why the post-Covid world is suddenly short of silicon chips, the tiny miniaturised circuits that now run the world. They’re amazingly difficult to make, and more than 90% of the really sophisticated ones are currently manufactured in Taiwan. Which is why Intel, the huge American semiconductor firm, is spending $20 billion on two factories at its chip-making complex in Arizona that will take three years to complete, with others to come in Ohio and Germany.

There’s a dramatic contrast between the tiny size of these silicon circuits and the enormity of the fabricant plants (fabs) needed to manufacture them. This New York Times report does a pretty good job of explaining and conveying that.

It also provides a compelling reminder that chip-fabrication has massive environmental downsides. Intel’s two fabs in Arizona draw 11m gallons of water a day from the local utility — in a drought-plagued state. The company claims that 82% of the water it consumes is reclaimed through filtration systems, settling ponds, etc. and sent back to the nearby city of Chandler, which operates treatment facilities (funded by Intel) and redistributes it for irrigation and other non-drinking uses.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was 40 last Friday

Photo by Bill Bertram

Nice piece of nostalgia from The Register:

The ZX Spectrum, replete with rubber keyboard, debuted at £125 for the 16KB version and £175 for the 48KB incarnation. A 32KB RAM pack could be plugged into the rear expansion slot of the former, and this writer well remembers the joy of an unexpected reset caused by a wobbly bit of hardware.

Over five million of the Z80A-based devices were sold, and its impact cannot be overstated. While over 1.5 million BBC Micros (made by Acorn) may have also been sold during its lifetime, it was the ZX Spectrum that found its way into far more homes across Europe, and its impact continues to resonate in the IT world of today.

Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton was more on the Acorn side of things, but recalled the effect of the plastic slab: “As a much more affordable alternative to the Beeb, and with roughly 3x the lifetime sales, the Spectrum probably had a greater role in promoting the accidental route into engineering careers in the ’80s and early ’90s.”

Gosh, was that really 40 years ago. Time really does fly. Wonder if mine is still in the attic, along with my first Nokia phone (the one as big as a house-brick).

Mikhail Gorbachev had one too!

My commonplace booklet

This City Pledges to Be Carbon-Neutral by the Time It’s Too Late

Nice spoof by Matthew Brian Cohen.

Thanks to decades of inaction, climate change is now an inevitable reality. However, there is still time to mitigate the brunt of the damage, and in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, we must be bold. That’s why, as mayor, I’ve set an ambitious (but achievable!) goal for our city to be carbon-neutral by the time it’s already too late.

The time for action is now, and by now, I mean twenty to thirty-five years from now. The window to push this back is rapidly closing. I fear that history will look back and ask us why we didn’t delay acting any sooner. That’s why my administration is committed to doing everything we can to kick the can down the road and tackle this looming existential threat at some vague point in the future.

The science is clear: to meet our climate goals, we need to radically transform both our societal infrastructure and our individual behaviors. And since we’re not willing to do that, the hope is that someday, when it’s one hundred thirty degrees in the middle of March, we will. In the meantime, we’re just going to stay the course as the oil and gas industry continues to see record profits from exciting new products like inner-city fracking and zero-use plastics…

It is a spoof — honest.

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The History Man

My friend, the historian Peter Clarke, at the launch of his book on Keynes in 2009.

Quote of the Day

”I always say beauty is only sin deep.”

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Albert Ammons | Boogie Woogie Stomp | Ladyva live in Germany.

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this kind of music is played.

Long Read of the Day

Last week Josh Simons and I had a conversation with Alina Utrata about Elon Musk and Twitter on her splendid Anti-Dystopians podcast. At that point all we knew was that Musk had rejected the Twitter Board’s offer of a seat on the Board in return for an undertaking not to increase his shareholding beyond a certain point, and our conversation was largely about: Twitter’s key role in the networked public sphere; various aspects of Musk’s enthusiasm for “free speech”; and the implications of his declared interest in buying the whole company and taking it private.

Since we recorded the podcast, the story moved on, and yesterday the announcement came that the Board had accepted Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share. So Twitter’s second-biggest troll has now bought the platform he relentlessly trolled. Nobody knows how this will play out — or indeed what Musk is playing at — but my gut instinct is that ‘free speech’ is not the top of his agenda.

In the meantime, Ranjan Roy, a canny observer of these things, has put together the widest range of speculations that I’ve seen, which is why I recommend it as today’s Long Read. Here’s the gist:

My mini-grand theory is that this entire sequence of events: The Twitter purchase, the SEC escalation, Tesla’s blowout quarter – it’s all about the next giant package. Musk saw an opportunity at the beginning of the year. Tesla’s business was on a roll, his pay package was almost complete, the SEC was threatening his Twitter account, and Tesla’s stock had stalled out for six months. Every great entrepreneur understands the importance of momentum and he decided to capitalize on this confluence of events.

But there’s lots more.

The key takeaway is that this is only incidentally about free speech. It’s really about democracy, power and naked capitalism.

How democracies spy on their citizens

Generally they use Pegasus, a fiendish piece of spyware for compromising iPhones which was developed — and is marketed — by an Israeli company, NSO. This New Yorker piece provides a readable introduction to the ways it’s being used (including infecting a phone or phones in Boris Johnson’s office). The only good news in this story is that NSO now appears to be struggling.

The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO. The company said in its statement that it had been “targeted by a number of politically motivated advocacy organizations, many with well-known anti-Israel biases,” and added that “we have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports, and improved the safeguards in our technologies.”

If NSO is indeed in trouble, it is thanks mainly to amazing forensic work by the Citizen Lab, a terrific research group based at the University of Toronto that focusses on high-tech human-rights abuses.

My commonplace booklet

 How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff. Who knew? Link

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Quote of the Day

“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it. But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.”

• Kathryn Schulz, in her new book, Lost and Found: A Memoir.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 3 in A-Flat Major, H 26

Link

Long Read of the Day

Kevin McCarthy Will Live to Lie Again

Terrific, coruscating column by Jack Shafer on the House Minority Leader, whose spine has been surgically removed by Trump.

McCarthy, whose relationship with the truth perpetually veers toward the squishy, suffered two mortifications at the hands of the press on Thursday. First, New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin reported from their forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, that in a Jan. 10, 2021 call to top Republicans, McCarthy had said Donald Trump should resign from the presidency. “‘I’ve had it with this guy,’ he told a group of Republican leaders,” Burns and Martin wrote.

“Totally false,” McCarthy immediately protested in a statement, and his office denied that he had said Trump should resign. Then came McCarthy’s second indignity as that night MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow played an audio recording, provided by the Times, of McCarthy that proved the Burns and Martin report. Sensing McCarthy’s political corpse was aflame, the press bore down on the House minority leader this morning. “Is Kevin McCarthy toast?” asked my POLITICO colleagues. “The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy,” gloated the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes. McCarthy got it in the neck from both members of the commentariat and from Capitol Hill legislators. Trump sycophant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) went so far as to blast his colleague on Twitter over the disclosure.

You can guess what happened next. A trip to Mar-a-Lago to bow and scrape to the man who now appears to own the Republican Party. Shafer exhumes the whole sordid story. I wish more hacks wrote like this.

A self-driving revolution? We’re barely out of second gear

Yesterday’s Observer column:

“Britain moves closer to a self-driving revolution,” said a perky message from the Department for Transport that popped into my inbox on Wednesday morning. The purpose of the message was to let us know that the government is changing the Highway Code to “ensure the first self-driving vehicles are introduced safely on UK roads” and to “clarify drivers’ responsibilities in self-driving vehicles, including when a driver must be ready to take back control”.

The changes will specify that while travelling in self-driving mode, motorists must be ready to resume control in a timely way if they are prompted to, such as when they approach motorway exits. They also signal a puzzling change to current regulations, allowing drivers “to view content that is not related to driving on built-in display screens while the self-driving vehicle is in control”. So you could watch Gardeners’ World on iPlayer, but not YouTube videos of F1 races? Reassuringly, though, it will still be illegal to use mobile phones in self-driving mode, “given the greater risk they pose in distracting drivers as shown in research”.

As usual, the announcement comes coated in three layers of prime political cant. This “exciting technology” is “developing at pace right here in Great Britain” (but apparently not in Northern Ireland; could it be that the DUP doesn’t approve of such advanced technology?). The government is “ensuring we have strong foundations in place for drivers when the technology takes to our roads”, which will be great once it has attended to the crumbling physical foundations of the roads in my neighbourhood. And of course it’s all happening “while boosting economic growth across the nation and securing Britain’s place as a global science superpower”…

Read on

Optimism 2.0

 The experiment has started so let’s make it work

Diane Coyle’s illuminating review of Yascha Mounk’s new book,  The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work:

The final part starts with “reasons for optimism” – one of which is that actually, most of the diverse democracies are slowly making progress toward better integration, accepting that people have diverse and multiple identities. The book also argues that optimism is important because it will affect actions and outcomes. It acknowledges what it terms the ‘Chapter 10 problem’ – the generally unsatisfying list of policies at the end of a book, as demanded by publishers and indeed readers. It doesn’t really provide this so much as a few general reflections, concluding: “Constructing diverse democracies that command the enthusiastic support of the great majority of their citzens is going to be hard.” But what choice do we have other than to try? The Great Experiment is already well under way.

So I liked the upbeat message. I don’t think there’s much that’s new here for readers of the death of democracy genre, but the arrangement of the argument into an optimistic outlook is very welcome.

Thinner on paper

Delicious evocation by Peter Hitchens of his early days at the Daily Express:

An air of decline and lost empires pervaded the surprisingly shabby building, whose sleek 1930s exterior concealed dingy offices where filthy, yellowish windows gave us a dreary view of the equally unlovely cigarette-stained newsroom of our rivals next door. The shabby, shouty newsroom, heart of the beast, looked as if the invention of the telephone had come as a complete surprise. Sticky black cables hung from the ceiling in thick clumps like jungle creepers, leading to black dial phones covered in a strange crusty film which I think must have been the congealed breath of a thousand reporters. Typewriters, now only to be found in museums, were everywhere. There was even carbon paper, for making copies. There were men in black waistcoats, endlessly whispering into receivers, who looked as if they had been there since 1936. Compressed-air tubes propelled edited material to the forbidden zones where the compositors worked, giving the corridors the look of those in a large warship…

Hitchins is the only living British journalist who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh, not least because the Express was the model for the Daily Beast in Waugh’s wonderful novel, Scoop.

As admirers of the book will know, Waugh had a low opinion of journalists. His hapless hero, William Boot, for example,

“had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephones to tape machines, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.”

Technology’s Mindfulness Racket

Lovely by essay Evgeny Morozov (Whom God Preserve).

In yet another sign that the new age lingo of the 1960s is still very much with us, “mindfulness” has become the new “sustainability”: No one quite knows what it is, but everyone seems to be for it. It recently made the cover of Time magazine, while a long list of celebrities—Arianna Huffington, Deepak Chopra, Paolo Coelho—are all tirelessly preaching the virtues of curbing technology-induced stress and regulating the oppressiveness of constant connectivity, often at conferences with titles like “Wisdom 2.0.”

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. Consider Huffington, whose eponymous publication has even launched a stress-tracking app with the poetic name of “GPS for the Soul”—a new app to fight the distraction caused by the old apps—and turned the business of mindfulness into a dedicated beat.

This is from 2014. I love his acerbic style and share his aversion to tech hubris.

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Carnations

Found in an old photo archive.

Quote of the Day

”The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

• George Bernard Shaw

In that context, Elon Musk (see Commonplace Booklet below) is clearly an unreasonable man. The key question therefore, is whether in the end he represents progress, and if so of what kind.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Don McLean | American Pie (Live in Austin)

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to stay optimistic in these dark times

I’m temperamentally an optimist with a fairly sunny disposition. On the other hand, the more I understand about the way our societies are evolving, the bleaker the future begins to look. I often think that what is needed now is a theory of incompetent systems — i.e. systems that cannot fix themselves. The two examples that come immediately to mind are: democracy in America (and possibly elsewhere too); and global warming, but there are probably others. Pessimism seems a logical result of such ‘realistic’ assessments of the state the world is in.

But pessimism if a disabling emotion, and in looking for other ways of thinking about the future I keep coming back to Gramsci’s idea of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. So you can imagine how pleased I was to come on this thoughtful blog post by Noah Smith in which he explores what adopting that philosophy might mean for us now.

Hope you like it.

On Jonathan Haidt’s essay yesterday…

Graham Minenor-Matheson wrote:

Just wanted to draw your attention to a Twitter thread by the media scholar Daniel Kreiss responding to that article . Essentially Kreiss sees a number of problems with Haidt’s article notably that it is ahistorical and gets a lot wrong about social media and how politics happens through it. Hope you read it!

I did, and it’s good. My hope in highlighting the Haidt essay was that it would spark a productive debate, and that seems to be happening. The Kreiss thread is a much better response than the one I mentioned yesterday. I hope there’ll be more.

The core problem with an essay like Haidt’s is that it’s very difficult to attempt a big-picture or long-sweep view without skating over thin ice to keep the narrative going. Which is why many academics now eschew the essay as a form.

One of my heroes was the late Neil Postman, the great cultural critic. He was always being attacked by scholars on similar grounds. And yet he got some important things right — and in the process shaped the way I think about our information environment.

It’d be interesting to do an annotated version of Haidt’s essay at some stage.

My commonplace booklet

• The Musk TED interview Link

Live, unedited and revealing. The only historical parallel for Musk that I can think of is Henry Ford. Which is why this interview might be worth an hour of your time.

• How to survive a ‘tactical’ nuclear explosion.

Never thought I’d see this kind of thing again in my lifetime. Link

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The shards of geological time

Maghera, Co Donegal.

Quote of the Day

”Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Finbarr Furey | Nearer my God to Thee

Link

First time I’ve heard him play this. Short and sweet.

Long Read of the Day

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

And why it’s not just a phase.

You need to make an appointment with this long, long essay by Jonathan Haidt. It’s the most sustained attempt I’ve found in non-book form to try and encompass the overall impact of social media on democracy. Admittedly, its prime focus is American democracy, and it may be that that dilutes its relevance for other countries and cultures. But it’s definitely worth your time.

Here’s how it opens:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

There have been all kinds of pushback against the essay — see, for example here. To date, I haven’t found them convincing, or willing to take his on argument on its own ground.

New York Times has a new pontiff

Nice Politico column by Jack Shafer:

The New York Times crowned a new pope this morning, Joseph Kahn, making him executive editor starting in June. Like the modern Vatican, the Times doesn’t wait for its maximum leader to die before appointing a new one. There will be no coronation mass for Kahn as he takes the top editorial position at the paper in June. Nor will he be bestowed a papal tiara or deliver a pontifical blessing. Having served as retiring Executive Editor Dean Baquet’s understudy since 2016, he will move in, Baquet will move out, and the Times will have turned. Executive editors come and go. Only the Times remains.

As the new pope of the Times, Kahn will wield astonishing power. He will order and kill stories with kingly authority. He will determine not only his paper’s news agenda but that of journalism’s lesser priests, who will await his news judgment before expressing their own. He will hire and make careers. He will fire and break them. He will become a permanent resident in the minds of the paper’s 1,750 newsroom staffers, who will spend half their workdays wondering what he wants and how to please him.

But unlike Rome’s top priest, it seems that the Times pope doesn’t flex absolute power over his institution.

Imperial delusions

Buried deep in the collective psyche of Middle England (and of its ruling elites) is a bad case of Imperial nostalgia, or at any rate a conviction that, on balance, the British Empire had been a civilising force in the world. It’s one of the reasons why the risk of Brexit never really went away. (After all, joining the EU in 1973 was an implicit acceptance that Britain was ‘just another country — like Italy’, as one anti-European MP put it to me back then.) And of course this Imperial nostalgia is completely baffling to anyone coming from a country which has been the supposed beneficiary of this ‘civilising’ process. We in Ireland had 800 years of it, and we are still living with the results in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Brexiteers’ casual indifference to the Good Friday Agreement.

All of which is a reason for welcoming Caroline Elkins’s book,  Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. I’ve only read the reviews of it yet — it’ll go on the list of books I’ll bring to Provence in the Summer. But in the meantime, Sunil Khilnani’s terrific (and not uncritical) New Yorker review essay gives one a pretty good impression of the ground Elkins covers.

Here’s how his piece opens:

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire.

He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895—a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister complained in a note to his mum. As the century turns, Tudor is battling Boers on the veldt; then it’s back to India, and on to occupied Egypt. Following a decorated stint as a smoke-screen artist in the trenches of the First World War, he’s in command of a gendarmerie, nicknamed Tudor’s Toughs, that opens fire in a Dublin stadium in 1920—an assault during a search for I.R.A. assassins which leaves dozens of civilians dead or wounded. Prime Minister David Lloyd George delights in rumors that Tudor’s Toughs were killing two Sinn Féinners for every murdered loyalist. Later, even the military’s chief of staff marvelled at how nonchalantly the men spoke of those killings, tallying them up as though they were runs in a cricket match; Tudor and his “scallywags” were out of control. It didn’t matter: Churchill, soon to be Secretary of State for the Colonies, had Tudor’s back.

Imperial subjects, of course, sometimes found their own solutions to such problems. A hard-line British field marshal, atop the I.R.A. hit list, was gunned down in Belgravia in 1922. Tudor, worried he would be next, made himself scarce. By the following year, he and his Irish paramilitaries were propagating their tactics for suppressing natives in the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine, Churchill having decided that the violence-prone Tudor was just the fellow to train the colonial police. A letter from Tudor to Churchill that I recently came across crystallizes all the insouciance, cynicism, greed, callousness, and errant judgment of empire. He opens by telling Churchill that he’s just commanded his troops to slaughter Adwan Bedouins who had been marching on Amman to protest high taxes levied on them by their notoriously extravagant emir. This tribe was “invariably friendly to Great Britain,” Tudor writes, a touch ruefully. But, he adds, “politics are not my affair.”

He also assured Churchill that “the Palestinians would be easier to pacify than the Irish”.

You get the idea.

My commonplace booklet

What is this ‘poison pill’ that the Twitter Board is devising to stop Musk taking over the company?

Useful explainer from Quartz.

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Remembering Katherine Whitehorn

Readers with long memories will recall my tribute to Katherine in 2018 when it became known that she had advanced Alzheimer’s. She died in January this year and yesterday I went to her Memorial Service in London.

It was held in St James’s church in Piccadilly, which I’ve always thought of as the parish church of the Old Money that inhabits that part of London when it’s not residing in its grand country houses. You get the picture when you notice that the church’s grand piano is a Fazioli. Katharine was a very long-term Observer columnist and one of the most distinctive journalists of her generation, but she had been at one time the paper’s Fashion Editor, and yesterday her friends from that period — all of them in their eighties or even older — turned out, in style. And I mean style. I’ve never seen such an assembly of beautifully coiffed and elegantly attired women in my life. So it was fitting that Rachel Cooke, an Observer colleague who gave a lovely tribute, reminded the congregation of how sharp an observer of the couture scene Katherine could be. Think, for example, of her observation that “there are three kinds of hats: offensive, defensive, and shrapnel”, the last referring to the kinds of hats that find themselves attached to ladies’ heads at posh weddings.

She was a wonderful woman. May she rest in peace.

Apropos Virginia Woolf and Keynes

VW’s diary entry on Keynes yesterday prompted Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) to remind me about the famous Low cartoon of Keynes in his armchair, which captures the great man rather well.

Quote of the Day

”The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind.”

• Katherine Whitehorn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Franz Schubert | Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen | Felicity Lott

Link

This was sung beautifully by the Choir of St James’s yesterday.

Long Read of the Day

”You want to write letters to your city”

This is a transcript of a remarkable conversation between Ezra Klein and Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and the editor of the 2019 book, Ukraine in Histories and Stories, a collection of essays by Ukrainian intellectuals offering insights not only on Ukraine’s history going back to the Middle Ages and the Cossack era of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also on its recent past.

This is the passage that initially caught my attention:

EZRA KLEIN: This is a strange question to know how to ask correctly. What is it like to go from living in a city that is peaceful, where you’re working and doing your writing and shopping for groceries and checking your Facebook page and tweeting, all of a sudden to a city that is being shelled? What of your life before remains? What doesn’t? What does passing through that barrier from normalcy to emergency feel like?

VOLODYMYR YERMOLENKO: Well, a lot of things have changed very quickly in our understanding. Things have changed their meaning. For example, a window is no longer a window because you’d better not approach to the windows, people say, because if there is a shelling, you can be wounded by the glass of the window.

The light is no longer the light because the light can be dangerous if there are airstrikes. So you better switch off the lights when you are — in the evening, for example. Therefore, when you’re traveling through Kyiv right now on car — and I do it regularly — you are traveling in the dark streets. So the lights from the streets are switched off. So you are in a very dark place, which never, never happened before, of course.

And if you enter — I several times took some families to volunteer to get them out of the city, and then we went to other villages, for example, and when there is dark, the villages are completely dark. There are no lights in the houses, because people are very careful enough not to give signs to artillery or to airstrikes, to jets — the Russian jets — that there are villages.

So the meaning of things have changed. Of course, your understanding of your house, of your home. For example, I relocated my family. I spent some time with my relatives in western Ukraine. It’s very hard, actually, to lose your home. So I have an impression that your home, your house, your apartment is like the dearest person to you. So you want to come back. You want to write letters to your city, for example. You want to hug it, et cetera.

My commonplace booklet

A flyover view of Elon Musk’s new estate Link

Courtesy of Séan Doran and NASA.

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Stately home in the evening

Quote of the Day

”Went to Charleston for the night & had a clear sight of Maynard by lamplight — like a gorged seal, double chin, ledge of red lip, little eyes, sensual, brutal, unimaginative: one of those visions that comes from a chance attitude, lost so soon as he turned his head. I suppose though it illustrates something I feel about him. Then he’s read neither of my books — In spite of this I enjoyed myself: L. Came over next day and found me neither suicidal nor homicidal.”

• Virginia Woolf, writing about John Maynard Keynes in her diary for 26 September, 1920. ‘L’ is her husband, Leonard.

At this stage Keynes was a world-famous public intellectual, largely on the back of his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a polemical attack on the Treaty of Versailles, in the negotiation of which he had for a time played a part as a member of the British delegation. But the Bloomsbury crowd always had ambivalent feelings about him, partly perhaps because he was the only one of them who had any role in public affairs. They were particularly pissed off because of the fact that as a young economist he joined the Treasury and played a significant role there finding ways of funding the war effort.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindley | Pay the Man

Link

Long Read of the Day

Books Become Games

This is the kind of essay that will resonate with anyone who’s ever published a serious book. Justin Smith has just published such a volume, which I am now honour-bound to read — for reasons which will become clear in a moment). Its title:  The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning. Here’s how it opens:

I have been saying “yes”, to virtually every podcast and radio invitation I’ve received. Sometimes I find myself doing some rather quick mental work, after clicking the Zoom link, to recall who exactly it is I’m talking to, and what is expected of me. Sometimes there’s a tell-tale hint —an Australian accent, say— that brings me back to the e-mail I received a week or so prior and that reminds me of the host’s general orientation and expectations. Sometimes I fly blind through the whole thing, still uncertain at the end whose show I’ve just graced with my presence.

Most of the podcasters I’ve encountered, if I may be honest, remind me of nothing so much as the classic Onion “advice column”, from back before that newspaper was generated by AI (as far as I can tell), that consisted in a book-report on Animal Farm by a kid who hasn’t read it. It’s “well worth the $5.99 purchase price,” he wrote. “It’s so good, in fact, that if I was in Canada, I would be happy to pay the higher price of $7.99.” Similarly, questions I’ve been getting on my book, I can’t help but notice, are often drawn entirely from the sheet of promotional copy that is included with it. This is text I was compelled to generate at a nearly-final stage of book-production, when I was completely exhausted by the project and just wanted it over. If I were a better player at the book-game I would take this part of the process more seriously. Instead I put most of my energy into writing the book itself, I crank out some hasty copy at the end, and then I pay for it when I have to hold forth, again and again, on the contents of that single page.

Smith’s point is that nowadays “the work of book-writing involves actual writing only in an initial phase, while subsequently the work becomes wrapped up in book-pumping, in technologically mediated promotions, branding of the self, bullet-pointing, after-the-fact elevator-pitching, and gaming of all possible metrics in the hope of going viral. In short, books, today, are a satellite of social media, operating according to the same logic, within the same empty economy of buzz and inevitable forgetting”.

It’s an engaging essay and I heartily recommend it.

What it brought to mind was an assignment I was given years ago when Jaron Lanier was in London publicising one of his books. I was asked to do a piece about him and an interview was duly set up in one of those posh hotels which seem to exist solely for PR purposes. When I arrived, his publicist apologised that Jaron’s previous interview was over-running. Would I mind waiting?

I didn’t. When we finally got to start I embarked on an opinionated stream of thought and we found ourselves in the middle of an interesting and lively conversation. And then he suddenly went silent. Had I said something to offend him, I asked. No, he replied, it’s just that he had suddenly realised that, of the 20 or so people who had interviewed him about the book in the previous two days, I seemed to be the only person who had actually read it!

When we finally finished talking I asked him if I could take a photograph.

Here it is:

Years later, I had a nice email from him asking if I still had the pic because he needed one for a gig he was doing! He’s a lovely man.

Diane Coyle on Thomas Piketty’s new book

Characteristically perceptive review in the Financial Times of 12 April (and so behind the paywall). As usual, her summing-up gets to the heart of the matter:

Strip away the detail and what remains is an all-too-apparent underlying abstraction from the practical politics of change, an abstraction emphasised by the book’s very literal translation by Steven Rendall from intellectual French. If “r” really is greater than “g”, then perhaps inequality does have its own internal dynamics, but achieving a turn to “democratic, decentralized socialism” surely demands some attention to how it might come about?

The issue is that Piketty’s theory of change is motivated by ideology, so articulating a persuasive alternative ideology is enough. And surely a vision of a fair, green, participatory future is persuasive enough? Sadly, what convinces readers in the salon differs from what drives action on the streets, or even in the corridors of power, where Pessimistic Piketty is likely to prove more persuasive than this newly Optimistic Piketty.

To adapt a famous adage of Marx’s: the purpose of political economy is to understand the world, not to change it.

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Tulip mania

In the College garden on Saturday afternoon.

Johnson and the War

As far as I can discover, Boris Johnson is the first serving Prime Minister to be convicted of a crime while in office. If Putin had not invaded Ukraine and thereby enabled Johnson to posture as a Churchill tribute act, Tory MPs would be working out to defenestrate him. One of the arguments being tried for doing nothing about the ‘Partygate’ scandal is that it would be madness to change a Prime Minister in the middle of a war. Clearly none of the proponents of this line have read any history. Neville Chamberlain was the serving Prime Minister when Britain was actually in an existentially-threatening war, but he resigned on 10 May 1940 to make way for Winston Churchill.

Quote of the Day

”Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

• William Pitt, 1783

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brahms | Intermezzo A Major Op 118 No 2 | Radu Lupu

Link

Long Read of the Day

Gary Gerstle on the strange life — and possible death — of neoliberalism

Gary has a new book out – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — which is now on my reading list. Here is a transcript of a fascinating conversation between him and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins of The Nation. I was particularly struck by Gerstle’s observations on Obama:

What was it about Obama that compelled him to save rather than to resist the neoliberal political order, especially given what happened after his presidency?

GG: The election of Barack Obama in 2008 unleashed all kinds of hopes for the country’s future. Fourteen years later, we have the advantage of historical perspective. That perspective tells us (or me, in any case), that Obama is best seen as the last president of the neoliberal order, not the first president of a post-racial, progressive age.

To handle the economic crisis, Obama turned to a team of advisors, including Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Michael Froman, quite similar in policy orientation to the Rubin team that had overseen the Democratic Party’s assent to the neoliberal order in the 1990s. They decided not to punish the large banks whose misdeeds had brought on the crisis but to focus instead on restoring them to financial health and security as quickly as possible. Thus, no banks were nationalized or broken up, and no bankers were sent to jail for their misdeeds. There was not even a public shaming that would have occurred had banking executives been forced to run the gauntlet of congressional hearings.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans were losing their jobs and their homes. The gap between rich and poor widened during Obama’s first term, with the income of the top 1 percent of American income earners increasing by more than 30 percent while the bottom 99 percent had to settle for a raise too small to matter. Main Street Americans noticed that elites had been restored to financial health and security while they had not.

By temperament, Obama was a cautious man. Moreover, the burden of restoring to health a shattered global financial system was immense. But the more important point to make here is a different one: namely, that the neoliberal order was still hegemonic, constraining Obama’s sense of the choices available to him…

He’s also good on Joe Biden.

Do read the whole thing.

Peter Thiel: the cut-price Cicero

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Since powdered rhino horn has (rightly) been banned, only two aphrodisiacs remain: political power and great wealth. Of these, the second is the more interesting, partly because most humans, especially journalists, seem to be affected by it. It’s what leads them to assume that if someone is fabulously rich, then she or he must be very smart. That’s why the super-rich are invariably surrounded by fawning sycophants – and also why they eventually come to believe that they themselves are geniuses.

Which brings us neatly to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s leading contrarian. With a net worth of perhaps $5bn (£3.9bn), he is undoubtedly rich, though not in the Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or even Bill Gates league. But since he is the only public intellectual that the tech industry has produced, there is a widespread belief that he must also be a deep thinker, which is why organisations ask him to give “keynote” speeches.

The function of such addresses is to give an elevated tone to what are otherwise sordid proceedings, which explains why Thiel was invited to address the 2022 bitcoin conference in Miami, which was billed as “a four-day pilgrimage for those seeking greater freedom and individual sovereignty”. Given that the attendees at this shindig were likely subscribers to the view that he is a genius, it was an easy gig for the great man. Think of it as Narendra Modi addressing the annual conference of the Bharatiya Janata party and you’ll get the general idea.

Thiel was there to tell the attendees that they were the Lord’s anointed…

Read on

Kevin Roose’s Latecomers Guide to Crypto: the annotated version

You may remember that Roose’s NYT piece was Friday’s ‘Long Read’. Some experts were not impressed by it, and Molly White has produced a lovely critically-annotated version which provides an antidote to what critics saw as “a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency”.

Thanks to Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Mumurations of starlings. Extraordinary photographs. Link

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