Reds

Seen in our greenhouse last Summer. And hopefully this coming Summer too.

Quote of the Day

“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”

• Stanley Kubrick, 1963.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Aisling Gheal (Slow Air) and O’Farrell’s Welcome to Limerick (Slip Jig) | Traditional Irish tunes arranged and played by Steven Johnson.

Link

Beautiful piping.

Harry and Meghan expose a ruthless, racist anti-fairytale in their primetime Oprah interview

That’s the headline on the Independent story. As an Irish citizen rather than a British subject (contrary to popular belief, monarchical states don’t have citizens), I don’t have a dog in this fight. But the interview confirms two things we knew already. One is that the British Royal family is a dysfunctional tribe on an Olympic scale. The other is that British tabloid culture is vicious, racist, and xenophobic to a pathological degree. Poor Meghan is in the same boat as Diana Spencer was in all but one respect: she has been able to persuade her husband to dump the charade before it was too late.

‘This could be dangerous’: Why Tim Wu’s appointment has Big Tech rattled

As this Protocol piece points out, Biden’s appointment of the Columbia lawyer Tim Wu to the National Economic Council is “the most ominous sign yet that Wu’s signature warning is correct: The ‘antitrust winter’ is over”.

As special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, a newly-created position under Biden, he will work across the federal government to identify policies that could loosen the grip the major tech companies hold on the economy and encourage competition in the tech industry.

This is the first piece of unambiguously good news in this area that’s come out of the Biden administration. Up to now, those of us who watch this stuff closely have been increasingly concerned by the numbers of refugees from the tech companies who have found comfortable and sometimes powerful perches in the new administration. And of course the Vice President, during her time as Attorney General in California, took a relaxed view of the tech companies’ preemptive acquisition policies and never challenged them.

Wu is definitely smart. His book The Master Switch was a gem. But I wonder if he’s tough enough to make a difference. The New York Times seems to think that he might be.

How can Clubhouse stay ‘clubby’?

Idiotic question, discussed on Sifted by Ronjini Joshua.

I’ve been on Clubhouse since October; I was invited by an early member who was even the face of the app. But even in those five months, I feel the slow creep of the internet troll seeping into the platform. Clubhouse’s intimacy can create overfamiliarity or inappropriate behaviour. There are some users who have already become infamous for being provocative and offensive about sensitive racial, political or religious issues. Others have tried to use it as a pick-up platform, inviting women on stage only to proposition them.

If Clubhouse and others want to preserve and scale the magic of the early days, they should start treating online spaces more like physical ones: creating some filter over what people and behaviours are acceptable, and allowing the community to hold itself accountable.

Clubhouse is a tech business. That means it needs to grow fast, to achieve the powerful network effects that kick in when you’ve got a big network. It’s called the scalability problem in the business. But, writes Ms Joshua,

This scalability problem is already breaking Clubhouse. The more I use it, the more I see people ejected from rooms for either spurting out racist or sexist comments, or for shameless self-promotion.

When will tech commentators ever learn? Nothing that expands at Internet scale stays intimate. Period. Intimacy at scale is an oxymoron — like ‘military intelligence’.

Long Read of the Day

 Tech spent years fighting foreign terrorists. Then came the Capitol riot.

This is good and quite detailed. The TL;DR version — as seen by me, anyway — is that the social media companies discovered that they could be quite efficient and effective in controlling content that was either spectacularly illegal (child porn) or defined by the political establishment as hostile to the US (e.g. ISIS). But when it came to dealing with content produced by white domestic terrorists — ah, that was a different matter. Especially when one of them wound up being elected President.

But that’s just my summary. Do read the whole thing if you have the time.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Needledrop: listen to YouTube audio using a virtual vinyl turntable. Analog nostalgia gone mad. But also sweet: proof that if someone smart wants to code something, they can. Link.
• Earthrise — as seen from our moon. Eerie and lovely. Link.

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Pre-dinner drink in Provence in ye olde days.

Quote of the Day

”It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except possibly his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”

• Simon Gray, a fellow-playwright, on Tom Stoppard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Better”

Link

Long-time favourite of mine.

Long Read of the Day

O Lucky Man

Anthony Lane’s masterly New Yorker review of Hermione Lee’s biography of the playwright Tom Stoppard. A good friend of mine, who has very good judgement in these matters, has been encouraging me to read the biography for ages, but I held off partly because it’s a massive tome but also because I have too much else that needs to be read first. In the end, I caved in and ordered it. And then came on Anthony Lane’s lovely review. This is how it opens:

In 2007, the playwright Tom Stoppard went to Moscow. He was there to watch over a production of his trilogy—“Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” and “Salvage,” collectively known as “The Coast of Utopia.” The trilogy had opened in London in 2002, and transferred to Lincoln Center in 2006. Now, in a sense, it was coming home. The majority of the characters, though exiled, are from Russia (the most notable exception being a German guy named Karl Marx), and, for the first time, they would be talking in Russian, in a translation of Stoppard’s text. Ever courteous, he wanted to be present, during rehearsals, to offer notes of encouragement and advice. These were delivered through an interpreter, since Stoppard speaks no Russian. One day, at lunch, slices of an anonymous meat were produced, and Stoppard asked what it was. “That is,” somebody said, seeking the correct English word, “language.”

The meat, of course, was tongue, and the anecdote—one of hundreds that Hermione Lee passes on to us in her new biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” (Knopf)—is perfect to a fault. If any writer was going to be on the receiving end of so deliciously forgivable a mistake, it had to be Stoppard. Likewise, at a performance of his 1974 play, “Travesties,” how was he to know that the handsome fellow he was chatting with was not, as he believed, his French translator but was, in fact, Rudolf Nureyev? Is it somehow in Stoppard’s nature that Stoppardian events befall him, or is it only in his telling that they come to acquire that distinctive lustre? He emerges from Lee’s book as a magnetic figure to whom others cluster and swarm, and around whom happy accidents, chance encounters, new loves, and worldly goods are heaped like iron filings.

This is a great read and a very perceptive review.

But now I have to go back to what I was reading before I wrote this — Kazuo Isiguro’s Klara and the Sun which I’m reading in an attempt to escape from the poverty of imagination that strikes us ordinary mortals when we try to think about what living with (or under?) intelligent machines might be like.

The US’s latest outbreak of hegemonic anxiety

This morning’s Observer column:

This week the American National Security Commission on artificial intelligence released its final report. Cursory inspection of its 756 pages suggests that it’s just another standard product of the military-industrial complex that so worried President Eisenhower at the end of his term of office. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be a set of case notes on a tragic case of what we psychologists call “hegemonic anxiety” – the fear of losing global dominance.

The report is the work of 15 bigwigs, led by Dr Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Alphabet (and before that the adult supervisor imposed by venture capitalists on the young co-founders of Google). Of the 15 members of the commission only four are female. Eight are from the tech industry (including Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos’s anointed heir at Amazon); two are former senior Pentagon officials; and the tech sector of the national intelligence community is represented by at least three commissioners. Given these establishment credentials, the only surprising thing is that the inquiry seems to have been set up during Trump’s presidency, which suggests that it was organised by the “deep state” during the hours of one to four AM, when Trump was generally asleep…

Read on

Putting things in perspective

Matt Webb has been reading Tracy Kidder’s lovely book, The Soul of a New Machine, published in 1981, about the creation of a new minicomputer by Data General. This led to an interesting reflection on change and progress.

It starts with a paragraph from the book about strange things called ‘transistors’.

“Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes. Other devices then in existence could do the same work, but transistors are superior. They are solid. They have no cogs and wheels, no separate pieces to be soldered together; it is as if they are stones performing useful work.”

Reading that, says Matt,

it’s so clear that 1981 is closer to 1947 (when the transistor was invented) than today.

Matter, without movement, can perform useful work! Solid state. This idea is insanity when you think about it, and Kidder in 1981 was able to call that out.

Two transistors make a NAND gate, and a NAND gate is both a physical thing and a mathematical operation and – with many connected together – can store numbers, add numbers, discriminate between numbers, and so on, numbers being both data and instructions to perform more operations.

The solution takes the material form of a circuit called a NAND gate, which reproduces the “not and” function of Boolean algebra. The part costs eight cents, wholesale.

The latest iPhone has 11.8 billion transistors. So the chip at the heart of each phone is $1.4 billion in parts, no margin. That’s 1981 prices, 2021 money accounting for inflation.

Matt thinks that Kidder’s book is “a terrifically told story mainly about personalities and teams, and also about computers”. It is.

As a kid building radios by hand in the 1950s, I bought a transistor for a circuit I was making. Yes, you read that correctly, “a transistor”. A single one. This is what it looked like.

And now my iPhone has 11.8 billion of the things. How did that happen?

I am a Neanderthal and I resent being compared to incompetent Republican governors

Lovely piece by Anna Book triggered by a report that the White House Press Secretary on Thursday defended President Biden calling the decision of two GOP governors to lift mask mandates as ‘Neanderthal thinking’ after some conservatives took offence to the criticism.

Look, this is nothing new. We’re used to it. There’s a long history here. We let you modern Homo sapiens romanticize our culture for your kids’ entertainment (Croods), appropriate our hard-earned achievements (controlling FIRE!), and relegate us to history as uncivilized brutes who lack intelligence and language (take a bow, H.G. Wells). But comparing us to someone like Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a step too far, Mr. President. You just crossed the line we drew in the sand, or more accurately, etched into the ice with our hand-crafted tools.

To describe the lifting of mask mandates as “Neanderthal thinking” is misleading and, quite frankly, insulting. It’s true that we didn’t have modern-day essentials like vegetable spiralizers and Pelotons, but we were never willfully ignorant. Is this a good time to mention the wind turbines?

See, contrary to popular belief, stupidity didn’t kill us. We probably died from a lack of immunity to new diseases, or as a result of climate change. Now, are we still the morons in this scenario? Because if you people are so intellectually superior, in the 40,000 intervening years, why haven’t you learned anything, like, gee, I don’t know, how not to flirt with extinction?

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Nabokov’s view

Trinity Lane, Cambridge, in winter. I think Vladimir Nabokov had a room looking out on the lane when he was a student here.

Quote of the Day

”The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former music is always greater than its performance — whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.”

• André Previn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | “Ch’io mi scordi di te… Non temer, amato bene | K. 505 | Magdalena Kožená | Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment | Simon Rattle | Jos Van Immerseel

Link

Wait until you’re two minutes in and then stop everything.

Long Read of the Day

The Frontiers Of Digital Democracy

If you’re interested — as I am — in using digital technology as a means of revitalising democracy rather than as a method of undermining it while making a few moguls insanely rich, then Audrey Tang is a really interesting figure — a talented Taiwanese free software programmer who is also minister without portfolio in the Taiwanese government. This must be the first time a serious geek has held such an important public office. This conversation gives a fascinating insight in the attempts Taiwan is making to use tech to enrich deliberative democracy. You might describe as an attempt to reinvent the consent of the governed.

Love persevering

Scott Galloway is an amazing man — prominent business academic, wealthy tech investor, expert on branding and marketing, opinionated as hell, often noisy. Like me, he thinks Facebook is a toxic corporation. He’s also wonderfully frank about what’s going on in his head. But the current edition of his weekly blog really brought me up short. The trigger for it was that earlier in the week, his family had to have their beloved dog Zoe put down. The post is about the impact this has had on the family — and on Scott himself.

Here’s an excerpt:

Zoe’s death has rocked our household. The other dog won’t come out of his crate, the nanny won’t stop crying, my oldest doesn’t want to come out of his room, and (most disturbingly) his 10 year-old brother is doing what we ask him to. We’ve been a bit self-conscious about our grief as we recognize that 500,000+ U.S. households haven’t lost a pet, but a dad, aunt, or other loved one in the last 12 months. But our grief persists.

At first, I was fine playing the role of the stoic dad: “She lived a great life,” “This is what’s best for her,” etc. Then yesterday, on a livestream with Verizon and 60 of its communications agency partners, I started sobbing while describing the harm Facebook is doing to society. Despite all the macho and strength I aspire to project, there I was, 56 years old and a chocolate mess on a Zoom call with dozens of people who want confirmation that they should serve ads on Yahoo.

I think that most people who’ve had a pet over a long time will understand how one can experience grief when the animal passes away. Most of us try to put a brave face on it (certainly I have in my time), but the grief is real — especially when one has had to ask for a termination to put the pet out of agony. And so I admire Scott Galloway’s honest empathy.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Stephen Fry on his writing process. Interesting video. He uses the same software as I do (Ulysses) — not that that means anything. Link
• Walker ‘stunned’ to see ship hovering high above sea off Cornwall.. Wonderful story. The moral: if you see something really weird, take a photograph before it disappears. Otherwise people will think you’re losing your marbles. Link

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Bob Satchwell RIP

It’s been one of those weeks. Bob Satchwell, another old friend, has died. In one way he was the archetype of the old-style British hack, schooled in the ways of ‘Fleet Street’, when that was a synonym for Britain’s print newspapers and not much had changed since Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop. He had even been Deputy Editor of the News of the World in its heyday and, believe me, you can’t get more downmarket than that. And he had the bluff, boisterous style to go with it.

It was all on the surface, though. Beneath that hard carapace was a shrewd, intelligent, thoughtful and very nice man. He had been a student at LSE in the heyday of the student revolution. And he had in his time been a gifted and determined investigative journalist: his reporting as a youthful hack on a provincial paper, for example, brought down a corrupt Chief Constable in the north of England. Not quite Watergate, perhaps, but still a hell of an achievement in a society where Establishment villains are hard to unseat.

I got to know him when he was Editor of the local paper, the Cambridge Evening News. He became a great supporter of the Press Fellowship Programme that I run at my college (Wolfson) and eventually became a Senior Member of the college. I used to be puzzled by the fact that many of our overseas Press Fellows seemed to have an inordinately high opinion of British journalism and eventually twigged that it was because none of them ever read the tabloids. And so from then on, one anchor-point of the Programme was a breakfast seminar to which I brought all the newspapers of the day and Bob conducted a bravura analysis of the content and the machinations that underpinned it. The Press Fellows were simultaneously charmed by him and appalled by what they were learning about the realities of the British media landscape.

He and I argued all the time about those newspapers. As Director of the Society of Editors, the association of 400-odd British editors, he became the public advocate for the right of newspapers of whatever stripe to print whatever they wanted within the laws of libel and public order. He was also a fierce opponent of judges and lawyers who thought that injunctions were a legitimate weapon to use against inquisitive reporters. He had a Menckenian disdain for politicians of all parties, and always laughed when I accused him of defending the indefensible. And yet, however fierce our disagreements, we were good friends because we both respected what the other was trying to do. And he was terrific, rumbustious company, not least because he enjoyed a drink or three. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

”I’m all for bringing back the birch. But only between consenting adults.”

• Gore Vidal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Salieri: La Fiera di Venezia | Act 3 – Vi sono sposa e amante | Cecilia Bartoli · |Rachel Brown

Link

I’ve always thought that Salieri was given a bum deal by Peter Shafer.

Long Read of the Day

Death is a feature, not a bug

This is Doc Searls’s astonishingly vivid meditation on the planetary impact of our species. He sent me the link after he read my rant the other day about billionaires wanting to colonise Mars rather than sort out the problems of planet earth.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there. Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it? From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing. To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common? They are all products of death. They are remains of living things, or made from them.

It’s a sobering piece, written in 2018. Here’s the payoff line:

But why fuck up Mars before we’re done fucking up Earth, when there’s still some leverage with the death we have at home and that Mars won’t begin to have until stuff dies on it?

Like I said, sobering.

The legal SWAT team that prepared for anything Trump & Co might throw at democracy

An absolutely riveting New Yorker piece by Jane Meyer about Seth Waxman and two other former former Solicitors General of the United States who teamed up to anticipate — and combat — the worst that could happen before, during and after the Presidential election. They only thing they didn’t anticipate was the ‘insurrection’ of January 6.

Night after night, Waxman tabulated every possible thing that could go wrong. Having advised several Democratic Presidential campaigns, he was familiar with the pitfalls. But none of the nightmares conjured by Trump “corresponded with anything I’d worried about in earlier campaigns,” he said. He ended up with a three-and-a-half-page single-spaced list of potential catastrophes.

Eleven months before the Senate impeachment trial exposed an unprecedented level of political savagery, Waxman quietly prepared for the worst. He reached out to two other former Solicitors General, Walter Dellinger and Donald Verrilli, who served as the Clinton and the Obama Administrations’ advocates, respectively, before the Supreme Court. By April, they had formed a small swat team to coördinate with the Biden campaign. They called themselves the Three Amigos, but the campaign referred to them as SG3. Their goal: safeguarding the election.

The squads of lawyers the trio had assembled “produced thousands of pages of legal analysis, and what I call ‘template pleadings,’ ” in preparation for every conceivable kind of breakdown in the democratic system. “Some of these scenarios were beyond unlikely, such as federal marshals seizing ballot boxes, and federal troops at polling places. But we had to game out what someone of Trump’s ruthlessness and lack of concern for the law would do.”

Even before the Capitol riot, the group had prepared Supreme Court pleadings in case Trump strong-armed Vice-President Mike Pence into rejecting the certification of the Electoral College votes. “We were fully prepared to go to the Supreme Court by nightfall,” Dellinger said by phone from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke Law School. “We had paper filed and ready.”

And Waxman’s reflections now?

“The lesson we learned, is that the state of our democracy is perilous—even more so than we thought. I am very, very worried.”

He’s right to be. See the post below.

The Facts of Life

Remarkable column by William Kristol, normally the most conservative you could meet in a month of Sundays. He has come to the conclusion that the Republican Party has basically given up on democracy.

When Margaret Thatcher commented that “the facts of life are conservative,” she wasn’t adding “the facts of life” to a list of arguments for conservatism. She was saying she was conservative because the facts of life are what they are.

And one of those facts of life is that a dangerous, anti-democratic faction—which pretty clearly constitutes a majority—of the nation’s conservative party is not committed in any serious way to the truth, the rule of law, or the basic foundations of our liberal democracy.

My only question is: what took him so long?

Many thanks to Hamid, who alerted me to the piece.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• A murmuration of starlings briefly create the image of a giant bird. Yes, you read that correctly. According to a reputable dictionary a murmuration is “starlings returning to their winter roost in a swirl after feeding”. The video is extraordinary. Link

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Jonathan Steinberg RIP

Jonathan (centre), on his 80th birthday with his brother and fellow-historian Chris Clark

Jonathan died today. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s, so I suppose it was a relief because he hated getting old and it must have been agonising for someone who had the sharpest, most retentive memory of anyone I knew, to lose it. A mutual friend wrote to me the other day about spending a day with him last summer:

We spent the first hour and a half watching a video of him delivering a lecture about Bismarck [of whom he wrote a magisterial biography] and handling questions with great verve and wit. He was transfixed by it. When it was finished, he said, looking at me intensely, “That man, Jonathan Steinberg, no longer exists. He belongs to the past. And Bismarck belongs to the past. They both belong to history.”

Theres a great sadness implicit in that story, but also a great consolation: it was Jonathan at his succinct best, able to say things that more fastidious scholars would habitually avoid.

He was a great historian but also a very dear friend whom I’ve known and loved for decades. It’s impossible to succinctly sum up his life or even his career(s). He came from a German Jewish family in New York, where his father was a celebrated Rabbi who I think expected Jonathan to follow in his footsteps. But the draft stopped that idea and he served in the US army during the war, coming home home determined to live in Europe. Sigmund Warburg, the great banker, spotted his talent and brought him into the bank and I think thought of him as his possible successor. But history claimed him in the end, and for most of his life he taught in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Trinity Hall and a member of the History Faculty which — in my opinion — never properly appreciated him. In the end it was the University of Pennsylvania that gave him the professorial Chair he deserved.

Mostly, our friendship revolved around lunch, which started around 12:30 and often went on until 3 or 3:30, after which I would come away with a long list of things I should read, because he seemed to have read everything, in several languages. I never came away from those long conversations without learning something. I think that one of the reasons we got on so well was that we were both ‘insider-outsiders’ as he put it. That is to say, we both liked and valued Cambridge, but were never entirely ‘of’ Cambridge. Which meant that we were able to properly enjoy the more comical aspects of an ancient institution while appreciating its many good sides. In one famous episode, a tramp had wandered into the Senior Combination Room of his college and the other Fellows didn’t quite know what to do about the intruder — who had settled himself in an armchair and was enjoying a cup of coffee. It was Jonathan who solved the problem by indicating in best New Yorker style that the guy was out of order and had better scram while the going was good. Whereupon he did. Afterwards everyone relaxed, but nobody said anything. It was a case-study, Jonathan said, on the English disease of politeness and the avoidance of embarrassment. “If I hadn’t done something”, he said afterwards, “they’d have elected him Master before they’d have kicked him out.”

He wrote like an angel, with a lovely pellucid style. For years he had a delightful column in New Society. And he occasionally wrote for the London Review of Books. If you want to get a flavour of what he was like, see this lovely LRB diary piece he wrote in 1984.

He was a wonderful, life-enhancing, generous friend. I was lucky to have known him. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

“I can’t see the sense of making me a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). They might as well make me a Commander of Milton Keynes. At least that exists.”

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | Man of the World | 1969

Link

He doesn’t half sound gloomy about his condition, though. Thanks to John Darch for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

How Law Made Neoliberalism

Insightful long essay by Yale scholars Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, and David Singh Grewal.

These crises are often analyzed in terms of the political economy of neoliberalism, an ideology of governance that came to predominate in the 1970s and ’80s. Neoliberalism is associated with a demand for deregulation, austerity, and an attempt to assimilate government to something more like a market—but it never was as simple as a demand for “free markets.” Rather, it was a demand to protect the market from democratic demands for redistribution.

This analysis of neoliberalism too often overlooks the critical role that law plays in constituting neoliberalism. Law is the essential connective tissue between political judgment and economic order.

Many people recognize that the law has changed in anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ways in recent decades—for example, that Citizens United amplified the role of money in politics, or that the construct of “colorblindness” has become entrenched in constitutional doctrine and helps sustain structural racism. In our view these are not isolated changes, but part of an orientation—an ideology about markets, governments, and law that has become foundational to our legal infrastructure. We call this orientation the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis” in legal thought.

Under the Twentieth-Century Synthesis, areas of law that concern aspects of “the economy”—for example, contracts, corporations, and antitrust—were given over to a “law and economics” approach that emphasized wealth maximization. Meanwhile, other values—such as equality, dignity, and privacy—were supposed to be realized in constitutional law and areas of public administration. Shaped by these ideological currents, constitutional law turned away from concerns of economic power, structural inequality, and systemic problems of racial subordination. Other “public law” areas did the same. The result was that deep structures of power at the meeting place of state and economy were shielded from legal remedy and came to seem increasingly natural… En passant: I’ve often thought that tech companies are what the wet dreams of neoliberals must be like. Take those End User Licence Agreements (EULAs) for example. Although you’re supposed to belong to a ‘community’ (e.g. Facebook’s 2.2B users), actually you’re being treated as an atomised individual for whom everything in your feed is ‘personalised’ (i.e. targeted). Which brings to mind Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation about there being “no such thing as society — only individuals and their families”.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

•  How to have an (indoor) exercise bike without breaking the bank. Helpful piece. I have an exercise bike in the old-fashioned sense — it goes on roads. And isn’t networked. But then I’m lucky to live where that’s easy and safe. Just checked the other day and I’ve done nearly 5,000 miles on it. Link

Errata

Apologies to Andrew Curry for getting his first name wrong yesterday. Unforgivable, especially given that I read his blog every day. And thanks to Doc Searls for alerting me.

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Bath time, West London

Quote of the Day

”I played the young Earl of Dudley and was beheaded in the third reel — not, in my opinion, a moment too soon.”

• John Mills, on his role in the 1936 film, Tudor Rose.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like A Rolling Stone | Live at Newport 1965

Link

Long Read of the Day

Critical Thinking isn’t Just a Process: Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying

Another fabulous essay by Zeynep Tufecki in which she uncovers the ambiguities in the accounts of Trump’s brush with Covid.

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

Terrific from beginning to end.

What is it with billionaires and Mars?

Adam Curry has a nice post about this.

It is hard to talk about Mars these days without noticing that it has become a fixation for those Silicon Valley billionaires who seem to think it’s going to be a solution to the pressing questions of the ‘Grand Problematique’ that we have here on our current planet. Elon Musk is probably the poster child here, although Bezos and Branson are also playing around with space. Musk’s SpaceX corporation explicitly talks about colonising Mars. (Its four minute promotional video is here). If a goal is a dream with a deadline, SpaceX has even set some pretty aggressive deadlines: sending a cargo ship to the planet by next year, humans by 2024.

That’s not going to happen, of course: the launch window only comes round every 26 months, for one thing, and there is a huge range of technological issues still to overcome. But even more cautious observers think we might only be 10-15 years away from a manned flight to the planet. And in the meantime the Off-World project, run by Proudly Human, is conducting a series of extreme habitation experiments on earth to learn about how best to prepare for extreme conditions on the Moon and Mars.

Adam also quotes Jim Adams (ex-NASA) comparing where we are with space exploration at present with the early days of global exploration:

“The best way to look at it is, if we were to compare where we are in terms of space travel to the days when Europe was dominating the oceans, you know, the Spanish galleons and that sort of thing; we’re still looking at how to build good canoes.”

I have a theory about this hubris. Great wealth does strange things to people — and to those around them. It’s a combination of aphrodisiac and reality-distortion field. Immensely rich (or powerful) people think they are rich (or powerful) because they’re very special. And the people around them think that if someone is immensely rich or powerful they must be smart. And so there’s a kind of positive feedback loop that intensifies with time.

That’s bad enough when the wealthy are middle-aged. But when the money arrives at a point when the recipient is barely out of short trousers — as, for example, with some of the Silicon Valley crowd, then not only do they think they’re geniuses, but so too do those around them, not to mention the journalists who fawn upon them. Live like that for a while and you go bananas.

That’s why political leaders go crazy after a while. They’re surrounded by people who admire them, or look as if they do.

I once had an interesting demonstration of this.

In early 1996 I was given the job by my university of explaining the World Wide Web to the then UK Prime Minister, John Major. We set up a networked computer in the bowels of the Department of Trade and Industry in London and at the appointed hour the swing doors opened and in came the PM, flanked by four cabinet ministers and a cohort of minders, personal assistants and sundry satraps. (The government was launching some daft IT initiative later in the morning.) I greeted him and explained what we’d been asked to do, answered his questions about what one could do with the web (charmingly, he wanted to see if you could find furniture on it) and so on. While one of my colleagues guided him through the idea of a search engine etc. I noticed that everyone around was smiling. And I remember thinking that this is how every day is for him. Same goes for the super-rich. No wonder they go nuts.

The amazing thing about Major, though, is that he didn’t go crazy (unlike Thatcher before him and Blair afterwards). In fact he remained a perfectly normal person. On the day after his 1997 defeat, for example, he went off to watch cricket at the Oval.

Australia vs Facebook: Who won?

Nic Stuart (one of our Press Fellowship’s alumni) has a pretty good answer in his column in the Canberra Times: What’s most important, he writes, is that the ‘agreement’ between the government and Facebook

sets an atrocious precedent: Facebook chooses the news you see and Zuckerberg will decide how it distributes the pittance it decides is “appropriate”.

Labor’s hitching a ride because it’s not interested in real reform. The last thing it wants is to get Facebook, or big media, offside before the coming election. But the biggest joke of all is hidden in plain sight. This legislation allows the Treasurer to decide if the deals between Facebook and the media companies represent “a significant contribution” to the sustainability of news.

That’s why Facebook’s on top of the winners podium. Its business model is secure and untouched. Shuffling in second are the lethargic, old media; behemoths getting money for nothing. Third is the government with Frydenberg [Australia’s Treasurer] given the chance to regale everyone at dinner parties about how he “faced down” Zuckerberg over six telephone conversations.

So who’s lost? Well you, obviously, but at least you’re not coming last. That place is reserved for journalism.

Great column.

Incidentally Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute at Oxford, has a very good analysis of this on the The Lawfare podcast. Well worth a listen.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Who is still buying VHS tapes? Link
• Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Not Suitable

Seen on a favourite Donegal beach

Quote of the Day

”Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.”

• Konrad Lorenz, 1965.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Piano Quintet, Op. 44 in E-flat | In modo d’una marcia | Un poco largemente | Agitato

Link

Long Read of the Day

Touching the future: Stories of systems, serendipity and grace

Lovely essay by Genevieve Bell. Here’s how it begins:

The future is not a destination. We build it every day in the present. This is, perhaps, a wild paraphrasing of the acclaimed author and futurist William Gibson who, when asked what a distant future might hold, replied that the future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. I often ponder this Gibson provocation, wondering where around me the future might be lurking. Catching glimpses of the future in the present would be helpful. But then, I think, rather than hoping to see a glimpse of the future, we could instead actively build one. Or at the very least tell stories about what it might be. Stories that unfold a world or worlds in which we might want to live – neither dystopian nor utopian, but ours…

Long read; and worth it.

How one US state is regulating facial recognition technology.

Massachusetts is one of the first states to put legislative guardrails around the use of facial recognition technology in criminal investigations.

Link

Though police have been using facial recognition technology for the last two decades to try to identify unknown people in their investigations, the practice of putting the majority of Americans into a perpetual photo lineup has gotten surprisingly little attention from lawmakers and regulators. Until now.

Lawmakers, civil liberties advocates and police chiefs have debated whether and how to use the technology because of concerns about both privacy and accuracy. But figuring out how to regulate it is tricky. So far, that has meant an all-or-nothing approach. City Councils in Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis and elsewhere have banned police use of the technology, largely because of bias in how it works. Studies in recent years by MIT researchers and the federal government found that many facial recognition algorithms are most accurate for white men, but less so for everyone else.

That’s why a new law in Massachusetts is interesting: It’s not all or nothing. The state is trying to strike a balance between allowing law enforcement to harness the benefits of the tool, while building in protections that might prevent the false arrests that have happened before.

A police reform bill that goes into effect in July creates new guardrails: Police first must get a judge’s permission before running a face recognition search, and then have someone from the state police, the F.B.I. or the Registry of Motor Vehicles perform the search. A local officer can’t just download a facial recognition app and do a search.

It’s a start, but not enough. I think public authorities need a statutory body that will decide whether, and under what conditions, they are allowed to procure this technology.

News site Stuff left Facebook. Seven months later, traffic is just fine and trust is higher

Link

Very interesting talk by Sinead Boucher, an alumna of my college’s Press Fellowship Programme and now CEO of Stuff, New Zealand’s top-ranking news and media site. In July 2020, she decided that Stuff would walk away from its audience of over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram. This followed a move to stop advertising on the platform the year before after the Christchurch shootings. It was meant to be a quiet, internal experiment, but word of the decision was leaked to the public. The response has apparently been overwhelming public support, but what’s even more interesting is that Stuff’s unique visitors are up 5% year-on-year. However, she reckons that, given it was a strong news year, it would probably be more accurate to consider this as flat — i.e.no change either way.

“If we said, look, there was an election and a pandemic, we think we could have expected to grow more, then we think being off Facebook has probably cost us between 5% and 10% growth. But it hasn’t been disastrous by any means.” Instead, the site’s direct and search traffic has gone up. They’re still seeing between 10-11% of their social traffic being referred organically by Facebook because readers still share story links on their own news feeds.

This is interesting and puzzling. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago Facebook caused a stir when the Australian government pushed ahead with a Bill that would force social-media companies to engage in negotiations with conventional publishers about payment for their use of conventional news content. FB abruptly pulled all news content from its site, a move which attracted worldwide attention. After a few days, though, the company restored news content after some secret conversations with the government. It’s not clear (to me anyway) who blinked first. Were Australian politicians getting too much heat from constituents pissed off by not being able to access news on their Facebooks? Or were conventional media outlets panicked by seeing their ratings drop off a cliff? I think it’s unlikely that Facebook was much impacted by dropping news from their service: the revenue loss would have been loose change to them. Or could it be that the company was spooked by world reaction to this revelation of their untrammelled power, especially with the various actions and inquiries going on in the US, the EU and the UK? Personally I think that unlikely. Facebook has been a pathologically sociopathic organisation from the beginning: it’s never shown any sign of being really moved by public reaction to anything it’s done before.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How famous economists might have looked — according to an AI image analysis tool. Link
• Fisher-Price: My Home Office. Toddler’s WFH kit. Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Link
• The Mars Perseverance Rover is powered by a hardened version of the same processor that powered the first iMac. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Two gentlemen of Utrecht (and an inquisitive horse)

Quote of the Day

”No branch of contemporary thinking is more fuelled by nostalgia for an irretrievable past than progressive liberalism. Implicitly or explicitly, the liberal project is a restoration of the world order of the post-Cold War period, before it was jolted by the financial crisis. The message of the virus is: ‘Forget it.’ Whatever its merits and faults, that world has gone for good. The leaders of China, Russia and India appear to have grasped this fact. Whether Western leaders will do so, or instead remain trapped in liberal denial and nostalgia, remains to be seen.”

• John Gray

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bonnie Raitt & Norah Jones | The Tennessee Waltz

Link

Long read of the day

 5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

Great essay by Zeynep Tufecki, consistently the wisest commentator on the pandemic and the virus.

The pandemic has given us an unwelcome societal stress test, revealing the cracks and weaknesses in our institutions and our systems. Some of these are common to many contemporary problems, including political dysfunction and the way our public sphere operates. Others are more particular, though not exclusive, to the current challenge—including a gap between how academic research operates and how the public understands that research, and the ways in which the psychology of coping with the pandemic have distorted our response to it.

Recognizing all these dynamics is important, not only for seeing us through this pandemic—yes, it is going to end—but also to understand how our society functions, and how it fails. We need to start shoring up our defenses, not just against future pandemics but against all the myriad challenges we face—political, environmental, societal, and technological. None of these problems is impossible to remedy, but first we have to acknowledge them and start working to fix them—and we’re running out of time.

A last, a genuinely world-beating British product.

From the New York Times:

British government scientists are increasingly finding the coronavirus variant first detected in Britain to be linked to a higher risk of death than other versions of the virus, a devastating trend that highlights the serious risks and considerable uncertainties of this new phase of the pandemic.

The scientists said last month that there was a “realistic possibility” that the variant was not only more contagious than others, but also more lethal. Now, they say in a new document that it is “likely” that the variant is linked to an increased risk of hospitalization and death.

The British government did not publicly announce the updated findings, which are based on roughly twice as many studies as its earlier assessment and include more deaths from Covid-19 cases caused by the new variant, known as B.1.1.7. It posted the document on a government website on Friday.

Hackers are finding ways to hide inside Apple’s walled garden

One of the reasons I use Apple stuff is because it’s generally been more secure than the alternatives. But there’s a worrying paradox: the iPhone’s locked-down approach to security means that if sophisticated hackers get in then it much harder to detect and eliminate them, as this sobering account by Patrick Howell O’Neill suggests.

Virtually every expert agrees that the locked-down nature of iOS has solved some fundamental security problems, and that with these restrictions in place, the iPhone succeeds spectacularly in keeping almost all the usual bad guys out. But when the most advanced hackers do succeed in breaking in, something strange happens: Apple’s extraordinary defenses end up protecting the attackers themselves.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab. “You’re going to keep out a lot of the riffraff by making it harder to break iPhones. But the 1% of top hackers are going to find a way in and, once they’re inside, the impenetrable fortress of the iPhone protects them.”

Interestingly (and something I didn’t know), Google’s Chromebook—which limits the ability to do anything outside the web browser—might be the most locked-down device on the market today. And Bob Lord, the chief security officer for the Democratic National Committee, famously recommends that everyone who works for him—and most other people, too—only use an iPad or a Chromebook for work, specifically because they’re so locked down. Most people don’t need vast access and freedom on their machine, so closing it off does nothing to harm ordinary users and everything to shut out hackers.

The direction of travel seems clear: we’re probably looking at the end of what Jonathan Zittrain saw as the ‘generative’, fully programmable computer.

Citizen Lab found that hackers were targeting iMessage, but no one ever got their hands on the exploit itself. Apple’s answer was to completely re-architect iMessage with the app’s biggest security update ever. They built the walls higher and stronger around iMessage so that exploiting it would be an even greater challenge.

Ryan Stortz, a security engineer quoted in the piece thinks that this is what will happen.

“We are going to a place where only outliers will have computers—people who need them, like developers. The general population will have mobile devices which are already in the walled-garden paradigm. That will expand. You’ll be an outlier if you’re not in the walled garden.”

Four causes of ‘Zoom fatigue’

Interesting research at Stanford into why working online is so tiring.

Basically, four reasons:

1. Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense. Both the amount of eye contact we engage in on video chats, as well as the size of faces on screens is unnatural.

2. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Most video platforms show a square of what you look like on camera during a chat. But that’s unnatural. “In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback – you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. No one would ever consider that.

3. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. In-person and audio phone conversations allow humans to walk around and move.

4. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats. In regular face-to-face interaction, nonverbal communication goes on all the time and each of us naturally makes and interprets gestures and nonverbal cues subconsciously. But in video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive signals.

So what should one do?

Switch off your camera as much as you can; wear a wireless headset or ear-pods so that you can walk around a bit; and mute your microphone except when you’re required to speak.

Oh, and don’t under any circumstances schedule back-to-back video meetings.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How TikTok led to a run on Feta cheese.. Cheese suppliers have been swept up in the video recipe phenomenon known as baked feta pasta. Link
• A Grizzled, Months-Old Chrome Tab Welcomes a Fresh-Faced New Tab to My Browser Window. Lovely imaginary by Simon Henriques. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Happy Birthday, John Brockman!

Today is the 80th birthday of John Brockman (Whom God Preserve), pictured here at one of our extended lunches in London. He’s the literary agent who saw that there was a gap to be filled between C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ and encouraged some of the world’s leading scientists to think about writing books. He’s one of the most interesting people I know, and there was a nice virtual party for him online tonight with a number with speakers including Stewart Brand, George Dyson, Ian McEwen and a trio of Nobel laureates celebrating the role he has played in their writing careers.

Here’s an interesting photograph of the young Brockman with two friends.

Quote of the Day

“It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the ‘beehive state’, which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark.”

• George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jarleth Henderson, Uilleann pipes, and Andy May, Northumbrian pipes.

Link

This is lovely — a friendly competition between two piping virtuosi who play different instruments. The music starts about 2 minutes in, but the banter beforehand is worth hearing.

Reminds me of the duelling banjo sequence in John Boorman’s great film Deliverance, but without the menace.

Long Read of the Day

Neuroprivacy as a Basic Human Right

If you think (as I do) that facial-recognition technology is toxic then this article suggests that even more toxic tech may be on its way. The whole point of what we now call ‘surveillance capitalism’ is to surveill people so intensively that their future behaviour can be accurately predicted and those predictions exploited for commercial or other gains. Initially, the surveillance was only of online behaviour (the digital ‘breadcrumbs’ that we leave behind), but then it moved to learning from what we do with our smartphones, and then into our homes with so-called ‘smart’ devices which monitor our indoor lives. The next frontier involves getting right inside our heads — monitoring brain activity for some as yet unspecified purposes.

Fanciful? I don’t think so. This essay suggests that we need to start thinking seriously about the implications of this emerging technology. Fortunately, some people are — in the Chilean parliament, no less. Late last year the country’s lawmakers voted unanimously to adopt a new bill that enshrined “neuro-rights” for the country’s citizens by giving neuronal data the same status as donated organs, which are illegal to traffic or manipulate under the country’s constitution.

Read on.

If the evolution of machine-learning and facial-recognition has taught us anything, it is that democracies need to get ahead of this game.

Thanks to Sheila Hayman for alerting me to this.

Uber’s UK supreme court defeat should mean big changes to the gig economy

My Observer column this morning:

Move fast and break things” was famously the mantra of Silicon Valley tech companies. It was passionately embraced by Uber, the ride-hailing company set up to put taxis out of business. Unfortunately for it, one of the things it broke was UK employment law – which led the UK supreme court to issue a judgment on 19 February confirming that this was indeed the case.

Uber (for those who, including this columnist, have never used it) is a technology platform that puts customers seeking a taxi in touch with drivers who own cars and are willing to provide rides. Everything that happens in that process, other than conversations between customers and drivers, is controlled by the platform. Uber’s case – and business model – depends on drivers being regarded as self-employed contractors, ie cheap. The case decided by the court hinged on the question of whether drivers were indeed merely contractors, or “workers” entitled to a minimum wage and holiday pay – protections they were unable to enjoy while Uber classified them as self-employed…

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Happy ‘farmily’: portraits of people and their animals. Lovely idea, nicely executed. Link
• Quentin’s blog moves into its third decade. It’s always been a delight. Link
• Museum Alive: 3D animations of extinct creatures. Fascinating app brings scientifically accurate 3D models and animation of now-extinct creatures to life in augmented reality, with a commentary by David Attenborough. It’s a sobering demonstration of the computing power of contemporary handheld devices. Sadly, for IOS (i.e. Apple) devices only. £2.99 in UK. Here’s a link to the trailer.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

The underwater Barbican

Quote of the Day

”At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”

• Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall| Under my skin | Live in Paris

Link

Long Read of the Day

 On the Digital Night Shift: Training a Bot Named Carey

An extraordinarily vivid essay by Lydia Parr.

Here’s how it begins…

During the day, four days a week, I go to my local community college and tutor human students in the mysteries of the English language. At night I train bots. Rather, I train a single bot, just one, working remotely to parse messages with it. To comply with our company NDA, I’ll call this bot “Carey.” I work the late shift because Carey never sleeps, and she needs supervision even after I sign her over to the next scheduled trainer. She doesn’t sleep, have a body, or get paid, but she has other human qualities: a veneer of gender, an affinity for exclamation points, and a memory far better than mine. She answers client questions by chat at a speed I’d be unable to mimic, which is why she was created. I can’t tell you what our products are: suffice it to say that they’re necessary.

Most people I mention this night job to tell me I’m training the bot to replace me. Humans, I’ve learned, can be obsessively fearful of entities that pose no real threat to us, like zombies and vampires—which don’t exist—or robots—which haven’t actually ever done anything we haven’t programmed them to do. I joke back that maybe bots should replace us, and not just at work. My husband and I live in one of the most violent cities in America, and we can see that it’s people ourselves—not bots—that cause harm: countless robberies, territorial drug disputes, police shootings. Thirteen children gunned down, drive-by-method, in north city early last month. Last week, another still-at-large suspect put a bullet through the neck of a random café patron where I sometimes sit to train Carey. Even just last night, in a hold-up at a nearby south city dive bar, the patron being robbed lit a cigarette in the middle of it, so unsurprised was he…

Stephen Sedley: The Compensation Culture Myth

(Sir) Stephen Sedley is a retired judge and a very sharp cookie. He’s on top form in the current issue of the London Review of Books reviewing  Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies, a fine book by an accomplished legal blogger who goes by the pseudonym the Secret Barrister about the way British tabloid newspapers have systematically twisted the truth about law and legal cases over half a century.

The book, Sedley says, is

a synoptic survey of what the average tabloid reader has been led to believe is going on in our legal system: sick babies condemned to die by NHS death panels (an invention of the US insurance industry, used to denounce Obamacare), their decisions rubber-stamped by unelected, out-of-touch judges; illegal immigrants spared deportation because they have a pet cat, thanks to the EU’s (sic) human rights act (see Letters, 27 September and 11 October 2018); extravagant taxpayer-funded compensation for cleaners who trip over mops; ‘jackpot figures paid to litigious employees aboard the gravy train of the discrimination industry’; the most expensive legal-aid system in the world (this fiction a speciality of the arithmetically challenged former minister Chris Grayling), put at the disposal of jihadists and other public enemies, with early release from their comfortable accommodation for the few who do go to prison, while householders who have a go at a burglar face jail.

Each of these urban myths is documented by SB, who attempts chapter by chapter to explain how the law today deals with home, work, family, health, human rights, personal liberty, due process and democracy. It’s an advantage, in doing this, that she has previously demonstrated that she is no apologist for the present legal system. Her case is that the media repeatedly takes aim at false targets and by doing so ignores and perpetuates the law’s real iniquities.

Although there’s been a lot of attention to the supposed role of social media in the Brexit fiasco (and I have no doubt they played some role in it), focussing on them conveniently diverts attention from the fact that for decades the newspapers that most people in the UK read have been geysers of misinformation, lies and politically-motivated propaganda about the EU, the NHS, the criminal justice system, ethnic minorities, foreigners and others.

I remember being asked to give a talk on “fake news” to sociology students in 2017, and some of them were a bit surprised that I spent a good deal of time talking not about social media but about the British tabloids.

I started with the front page of the Sun newspaper in the days after the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 people died and 766 were injured. The paper claimed that Liverpool fans had picked the pockets of dying victims, had urinated on police officers and had beaten up a police officer giving the kiss of life to an injured victim. All of those claims were complete falsehoods.

My point: British tabloids were pushing fake news before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

Russian diplomats arrive from virus-hit North Korea on rail trolley

From Yahoo! News:

Eight Russian diplomats and family members — the youngest of them a three-year-old girl — have arrived home from North Korea on a hand-pushed rail trolley due to Pyongyang’s coronavirus restrictions.

Video posted on Russia’s foreign ministry’s verified Telegram account showed the trolley, laden with suitcases and women, being pushed across a border railway bridge by Third Secretary Vladislav Sorokin, the only man in the group. They waved and cheered as they approached their homeland, the culmination of an expedition that began with a 32-hour train trip from Pyongyang, followed by a two-hour bus ride to the border.

”It took a long and difficult journey to get home,” the ministry said in the post late Thursday, speaking of the final stretch. “To do this, you need to make a trolley in advance, put it on the rails, place things on it, seat the children — and go,” it said.

”Finally, the most important part of the route — walking on foot to the Russian side.”

Sorokin was “the main ‘engine’ of the non-self-propelled railcar”, it said, and had to push it for more than a kilometre.

Once on Russian territory, they were met by foreign ministry colleagues and were taken by bus to Vladivostok airport.

Remember those silent movies of the Buster Keaton era.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How to play classical music with a “passionate virtuosity, instrumental acrobatics, charm and a great sense of fun”. Just don’t bring companions of a nervous disposition. Link
• Analog nostalgia grows and grows. Dispo, a new photo-sharing app that mimics the experience of using a disposable camera, is taking off. Yes — a disposable camera. Link
• The Computer History Museum organised a party on Clubhouse of people who had known Steve Jobs to celebrate what would have been Jobs’s 66th birthday. The recording is on YouTube. Nice. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!