New beginnings
Quote of the Day
”The more machines start to ’reason’ the more unpredictable they will become.”
- Ilya Sutskever (in his NuIPS 2024 Keynote)
Just like humans, really.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest
Wonderful performance by the greatest piper of my lifetime, of the final movement of Shaun Davey’s orchestral suite, The Brendan Voyage.
Seems appropriate as we embark on our own hazardous voyage into a Trumpian future.
Long Read of the Day
Jimmy Carter: An unlucky President and a Lucky Man
A nice memoir in The Atlantic by the distinguished journalist, James Fallows, who worked for Carter.
Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.
But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.
What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person…
What Hunter Thompson saw in Carter
That he was much shrewder and tougher than people realised. Thompson spotted this way before anyone else. His epiphany came when covering a speech that Carter gave to the assembled worthies of the Georgia and Atlanta Bar in which he excoriated the legal profession in terms no normal politician would use. Thompson wrote it up in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the book that some people think won Carter the presidency.
Here’s a fascinating video about that epiphany.
As it happens, I once got into trouble because of Jimmy Carter. I told the story on my audio ‘Lockdown Diary’ for March 30, 2020.
If you’re interested, you can listen to it here.
My commonplace booklet
Why social media have an inordinate impact on contemporary politics
Insightful observation by Yascha Mounk. Basically, politicians and mainstream media forget that the people who inhabit Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky et al are a weird and unrepresentative sample of the electorate.
People spend an enormous amount of time and attention on social media today. But the real reason some platforms now influence everything including the contours of public discourse and the American presidential election is not that your cousin is addicted to Instagram; it is that key decision makers mistake the opinions of a small number of politically engaged—and ideologically extreme—people on social media for the views of the general public.
In decades past, newspaper editors knew that cranks and extremists were more likely to submit letters than average readers; they therefore took their opinions with a large grain of salt. Today, decision makers are obsessed with the modern-day descendants of those cranks. The recognition that Twitter and similar platforms do not represent the real world, however, might lessen the political influence of social media.
Feedback
My choice of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (composed as a birthday gift to Cosima) for Monday’s music slot prompted Tom Parkhill to send a link to an account of whom the Wagners had invited for Christmas that year — none other than Herr Friedrich Nietzsche who, it seems, had been in love with Cosima but Wagner had married her while the philosopher was on military service. Hmmm…
Cosima was … delighted with her Christmas gift from Nietzsche: the manuscript of The Birth of the Tragic Concept, an early draft of the philosopher’s own The Birth of Tragedy. In the evenings, Wagner read passages aloud. Wagner and Cosima praised it as being “of the greatest value and excellence.” Nietzsche purred…
He was the only guest and stayed eight days. I’m just thinking what a playwright like Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn could do with this account of Christmas Day in a villa on Lake Lucerne.
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