Autumn bouquet
What an imaginative gardener can rustle up in a few minutes, just before dinner guests arrive.
Quote of the Day
”Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.”
- Robert Reich
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Vaughan Williams | Symphony no. 5 in D. 3rd movement | “Romanza”
Sometimes, in times like this, you just need music like this to wash over you. It was premiered in 1943, in the middle of wartime, in the Albert Hall. I can imagine the impact it must have had on an audience traumatised by war.
Long Read of the Day
Elon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry about
My OpEd in the Observer of Sunday 20 October.
Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon…
Later Having seen how Musk has gone all-in for Trump, though, I now think he’s the most dangerous tech mogul in history.
Books, etc.
I’ve just finished reading Pauline Terreehörst’s riveting book on what she discovered in — and from — a vintage Gucci suitcase she bought at Sotheby’s in 2016. I’m hosting an event in my college (Wolfson) on Friday evening to celebrate the publication of the English edition, in which Pauline will be in conversation with Nicci Gerrard, the co-author of the Nicci French series of psychological thrillers. If you’re in Cambridge on Friday why not come along? To register, just click here.
My commonplace booklet
On a subject that’s of perennial interest — not just to me, but to some readers and colleagues — namely how to focus on what needs to be done when there are innumerable items clamouring for attention. I’m a fan of Dave Allen’s bible Getting Things Done — to the extent that I even bought and use a software package called Omnifocus which implements the Allen method on all my (Apple) devices.
I first heard about him from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve), who is the most productive person I’ve ever met. So when I saw a recent blog post by him about a trick he has invented for keeping track of things that the Allen method doesn’t really help with, I jumped to attention. Cory calls it “Keeping a Suspense File.
While good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.
That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.
My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well…
Smart idea. I’ve shamelessly copied it.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow When I saw this headline in The Register I thought it must be a spoof. But no. See the video for yourself.
Errata
Apologies for the various errors in Monday’s edition, and thanks to those who spotted them quickly.
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