Friday Cocktail: Division Bells, the book that didn’t burn and energy from the air

Sip: after a long week of political squabbles, on a Division Bell

Weekend browsing:

• Is the future of clean energy making hydrocarbons out of thin air? (via @patrickc)

• One book that proved uncancellable: Ulysses turns 100

• The rise of America’s New Industrialists cuts across party lines. But where’s the UK equivalent? (See my earlier post on the need for an abundance agenda)

• The UK does, however, have a new and surprisingly ambitious £1.4bn space defence strategy

• Could one simple rule of thumb have saved Boris Johnson’s government from implosion?

Listen: to John Cale, singing Perfect

“I'm not perfect

But you're perfect for me…”

Have a great weekend.

Where have all the ideas gone?

In a typically thought-provoking aside, Tyler Cowen asks if, in the age of social media, ideas no longer need to spread through popular entertainment (like novels, films and hit songs). If so, has that left pop culture emptier and less interesting?

“Today you can debate ideas directly on social media, without the intermediation of music. Ideas become less simple and more baroque, while music loses its cultural centrality and becomes more boring.“

Music and, in particular, narrative have a long history of real world influence, from the novel that helped create the modern state of Israel to the role of optimistic sci-fi to inspire the scientists behind the Apollo programme. There are still plenty of people on both sides of the political debate committed to countercultural entertainment to advance their worldviews. So are they wrong, or is Tyler missing something? Perhaps the impact of common knowledge?

Read the post and make up your own mind.

Will the real me please stand up?

A fascinating London Review of Books essay by Joe Dunthorne on his experience of being impersonated on social media, and trying to communicate with his sleazy double.

“Real me and fake me seemed to have an instant sexual chemistry. I thought about texting but then I got worried because that would mean sharing my actual phone number. So I ordered a new sim card – ‘my burner’, as I made a point of calling it – then bought a little black box from a man called Igor on the internet that would allow me secretly to record both sides of a phone conversation. Only then did I send my impersonator a message on WhatsApp: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t text you straight away. I was nervous!’ and then ‘Shall we chat? Are you in the studio?’ (I loved the idea that I had a studio.) I got no reply. I noticed that his WhatsApp profile picture was different from his Instagram. There it was one of my author photos but here it was a spooky hooded figure sitting in front of a laptop, face obscured by a question mark, looking halfway between a hacker and the Grim Reaper.”

Read the whole thing.

For the love of… urban wine

I have a double life as a wine. A highly drinkable Riesling, in fact. It’s one of the specialities of Renegade, a winery set up under a railway arch in Bethnal Green, London.

Urban winemaking is a fascinating trend, enabled by improved cold chain transport of grapes, which allows high-quality wines to be made outside of the region where they are grown. Just like people, cities provide a place where different traditions of vinification can collide in unexpected and creative ways.

Unable to benefit from the usual appellation branding, urban winemakers are free to create new approaches that help them stand out. For instance, my wine combines old and new world techniques: grapes from Pfalz in Germany fermented with a strain of yeast common in Australian winemaking.

A new short video from The English Wine Collection is a great intro to what urban winemaking is all about, and why Renegade, and others, are making wine the London way.

The original bottling of my wine is mostly sold out now, but a new vintage with a rather different profile is set to drop later this year. I look forward to tasting what the wine renegades have come up with this time.

Watch the video on urban wine here. By the way, Renegade offer free delivery if you order online.

Waiting for Sue

As everyone waits for the report on parties at Number Ten from Sue Gray, here’s an interesting profile of Dominic Cummings, the “chaos maker” behind the drip-drip-drip of Boris-related scandal.

“[Cummings] believes that gifted people are repelled by politics. ‘When you talk to them, increasingly their attitude is: Politics is a shitshow, government’s a shitshow, we don’t want to get involved with that, you’re dealing with clowns, you don’t build anything.’ Instead, “a lot of these people prefer to build their own kind of walled garden where they can feel like they’re building something that’s worthwhile and creating wealth and doing their own thing and thinking increasingly: How do I insulate myself from politics and government? All of which is a very bad thing.’”

I only live a couple of streets from Cummings and I can’t say I’ve ever seen him being followed by camera crews, but the rest of it is an interesting take.

Read the whole thing.

Friday Cocktail: flying cars, dying words and God’s big comeback tour

Sip: on a Last Laugh – a Last Word that tickles the nose

Weekend browsing:

• It’s always sunny in Philadelphia pretty much everywhere in the US, compared to Europe

• “A world that’s not supposed to exist”: the awkward persistence of God

• Pearls before swine: 50 very English phrases that are off to the knacker’s yard

• Flying cars, now officially airworthy (in Slovakia)

Listen: to Smile, sung by Uncle Kracker

“You make me smile like the sun

Fall outta bed

Sing like a bird

Dizzy in my head

Spin like a record

Crazy on a Sunday night”

Have a great weekend.

“You must do everything”: the philosophy of burnout

Ted Gioia, excellent as ever, on the influential German-Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han, author of The Burnout Society.

“You can do anything!

“That’s the mantra, and you hear it everywhere. All the messages circulating in our society seem to converge on that same imperative.

“But this soon turns into: You must do everything. The symptoms are everywhere—fitness programs, self-help podcasts, inspirational quotes on social media, vitamins and nutritional supplements, constant proclamations about self-actualization, weight-loss fads, life coaches, and countless other schemes for improvement. No boss would ever be as tyrannical as we are to our souls and selves.“

It’s not clear that Byung-Chul Han has a good answer to how to escape the treadmill of self-actualisation he identifies. But Gioia offers this excellent piece of advice: “Even if you work inside the system, you don’t need to let the system work inside of you.“

Read the whole thing.

Will you search through the loamy earth for me?

A real-life story straight out of Detectorists: a gold coin discovered in a field just sold for £648,000 at auction, changing the life of the family involved.

“Describing the moment he found the treasure, Leigh-Mallory said: ‘My trowel exposed the coin. The sun was shining over my shoulder and it glistened. My heart jumped; I thought: ‘This is gold.’ As I picked it up, the sun glinted on the king and my heart seemed to stop.’”

Any excuse to remind people just how wonderful Mackenzie Crook’s three-series (or will that be four?) masterpiece really is.

I’m writing this in the Suffolk countryside, not far from the locations where the show was filmed (I’ll be in the DMDC’s local on Friday), so perhaps I’m biased. But this unassuming, half-hour show about love has a way of quietly entering people’s hearts and staying there. Even hard-bitten critics think it’s one of the best TV series of the century.

Another viewing? Go on then.

Or just listen to the wonderful theme song.

Save the Blob

“If it had a mind, you could reason with it. If it had a body, you could shoot it. If it had a heart, you could kill it.” (Poster tag-line for The Blob, 1988)

There were some nonsensical anti-Whitehall headlines over the weekend about Boris v. the Blob, presumably all part of Operation Dogmeat or whatever they’re calling the campaign to save the PM’s skin this week. Nakedly self-serving attempts to whip up outrage seem to be par for the political course, but do they have to be crimes against language as well?

The Blob is a useful and important concept, for anyone interested in the culture war. It’s a sign of how unserious Boris Johnson is that his supporters garbled it so badly. “Boris v. the Blob” was used as shorthand for encouraging civil servants back to the office. But the Blob loses all meaning if made synonymous with Whitehall alone.

I traced the Blob to its origins, which lie in the battle for American educational reform, for my book The Long March. The Blob’s meaning later expanded, via Chris Woodhead and Michael Gove, to cover UK education and then other policy areas. But it has always referred to many different but likeminded groups with the power to influence policy coming together in an informal coalition that stymies needed reform. That is the very nature of the Blob. Whitehall can be part of the problem, but it isn’t the Blob all on its own.

Whatever happens to Boris, we must save the real meaning of the Blob. It’s an essential tool to think clearly about the problems we face.

You can read the whole story in my book. Or this article and this one are two recent contributions that understand what’s really going on.

The London Undergound made interesting

If this blog is committed to anything it’s a belief in the sheer interestingness of the world. Here, then, is a guide to the London Underground offering an interesting fact about every station.

Did you know that Barking station has a direct freight service running 7,500 miles direct to & from the city of Yiwu, on China’s east coast? It’s true.

Go look up your local stop.

Friday Cocktail: Blasphemy, Tom Baker, spaceplanes & more

Sip: on a Cosmonaut

Weekend browsing:

• The real Lord of the Flies is a lot less depressing

• A new spaceplane aims to launch before 2030

• A life in the day of Doctor Who (a memorable read)

• How many coma patients are conscious?

Listen: to Blasphemy, Coldxman

I feel with my heart, but think with my head,

Mix up the parts and we’ll all end up dead…

Have a great weekend.

Time for abundant ambition

As Britain shakes off its Covid restrictions, it’s time to think big and act accordingly. Yet here we are, arguing about parties.

Britain has plenty of problems more pressing than Boris Johnson’s lack of moral character. For a sketch of a more fruitful agenda, Derek Thompson’s recent Atlantic essay on an American abundance agenda is well worth a read.

In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

This is the abundance agenda.

This is the cutting-edge political thought we need in the UK too. An agenda that embraces the great realignment and rides roughshod across the turf of both right and left. See also: Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance.

Read the whole thing.

Making the BBC worse

The BBC licence fee may be on its way out. Amid the partisan takes, Ed West offers a sobering assessment for conservatives of how a commercial BBC could be even more political and still dominate the market.

It could well be that a privatised BBC is even worse. We wouldn’t get a more impartial broadcaster aiming to steer a middle course, we’d get something like CNN, liberal-leaning but with far fewer constraints. The BBC would be far more biased as a private enterprise, and with its huge archives and cultural capital, it would still be a powerful force.

Without a state broadcaster, we’d end up with the American problem of having a “‘neutral’” (heavily ironic double scare-quotes) and a conservative media. Because of Britain’s size and its heavily urban population, the dominant broadcaster would still steer to the Left, but would try to maximise its revenue by flattering the metropolitan prejudices of its audiences. As in the US, conservatives would be the punchline, and now there would be no redress because, unlike the old BBC, it wouldn’t be burdened with the responsibility of caring what you think.

As I’ve written elsewhere, when you lose a culture war, even the blessings of private enterprise won’t save you from the consequences.

Read the whole thing, before Ed follows the trend and restricts his Substack to paying subscribers only.

Fighting Words

As the situation in the Ukraine continues to deteriorate towards full-scale conflict, a strikingly robust and well-informed piece by the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is worth a read.

The British Government is not in dispute with Russia and the Russian people – far from it – but it does take issue with the malign activity of the Kremlin.

So, if one cold January or February night Russian Military forces once more cross into sovereign Ukraine, ignore the ‘straw man’ narratives and ‘false flag’ stories of NATO aggression and remember the President of Russia’s own words in that essay from last summer. Remember it and ask yourself what it means, not just for Ukraine, but for all of us in Europe. What it means the next time…

This piece is striking not just for its clarity and bluntness, but also for being a detailed essay responding, as the quote above shows, to an essay published on the official Russian government website by President Putin last year. Indeed, it echoes that essay explicitly by also being published directly on the UK government site.

It’s fascinating, in passing, to see rival governments conducting one thread of a key geopolitical dispute by publishing directly on their own official websites, rather than by placing their commentary in friendly media as has been traditional. Tech’s publishing revolution continues, also visible in how Bradley’s piece has been shared on Twitter by allies, like the former president of Estonia Toomas Ilves.

But of course, the main concern right now is the threat of a real war breaking out. Britain seems in no mood to look weak. Here’s one summary of the stark choice we seem to have finally reached.

It’s time to put up or shut up. Either we back Kyiv — by giving it full military support and smashing Russia with sanctions, or we have the guts to tell the Ukrainians that we are abandoning the non-Nato east to Russia and start to draw real red lines that we will actually enforce. It’s time to back Ukraine — or, once and for all, just tell these people, who have suffered so much to defend our interests, that they are on their own for good.

Hollywood’s new silent era

Via Bari Weiss, an insight into the American film industry’s new culture of self-censorship:

“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you…

Timur Kuran’s classic on preference falsification Private Truths, Public Lies remains the most important unread book of our times.

Read the whole thing.

Friday Cocktail: Nova Scotia

Sip: on a Nova Scotia

Weekend browsing:

• BREAKING: most MS is triggered by glandular fever

• You’re WEIRD, accept it

• A brief history of the antifascist revolution

• The future of energy

Listen: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, 662

“There’s a sound in the ground, and it cuts right through –

well, you can only find it right here in the 662.”

Have a great weekend.

For the love of God, look up

In less than a week, a giant space rock bigger than the Empire State Building will zoom past Earth. I don’t know, maybe someone important should look up and wonder if we are taking big risks seriously enough.

In a good piece by Matt Yglesias, he argues that the disaster-movie-satire Don’t Look Up, which has been a recent sensation on Netflix, works better if you extend the metaphor beyond climate change – to, say, comet strikes or even supervolcano eruptions.

I don’t want to tell you that there has never been a story in the mainstream press about supervolcanoes, but there really aren’t very many. There’s no mainstream constituency at all to fund a larger scientific effort to understand supervolcano risk and how to mitigate it. And a candidate for office who goes on “Meet The Press” to say one of his top priorities in Congress is improving U.S. efforts to tackle supervolcanoes would be roundly mocked.

There are some catastrophes that we know have a real change of happening (including pandemics and, yes, even supervolcanoes), that we don’t prepare for properly. What if we get another Carrington event – only worse. Do you know just how big solar storms can get?

Of course, the idea of total control is a delusion. Some things can’t be stopped. Maybe Elon Musk is right that we need a second planet as a backup, stat. But meanwhile here on Earth we barely try. Even in the middle of a devastating pandemic, we somehow can’t summon the attention to pre-empt the next outbreak.

Here’s Dominic Cummings in his email newsletter January 7:

As many have pointed out, despite the enormity of the covid disaster, we are still allowing extremely dangerous research to continue in labs without adequate safety regimes! And of course there is practically no mainstream media coverage, just like in 2019 when I blogged on it!

And we are failing to build many things we should be building, here and across the world, to help detect future natural or manmade pandemic threats and ensure they are suppressed one way or another. Follow @kesvelt and @geochurch for details.

And here’s Matt Yglesias again, saying something very similar:

What’s particularly frustrating about this is that we have a clear success story in Operation Warp Speed. Instead of treating that as a one-off, it should be a foundation for continued, ongoing research into super vaccines targeting whole virus families, new generations of antiviral drugs, a better understanding of air filters, designing new iterations of masks, the whole deal. If you went on TV to talk about comets, people would laugh at you. But people on TV are talking about the pandemic all the time. So why can’t we talk about forward-looking pandemic policy?

Read the whole thing.

Meritocrats v the people

An important essay by Adrian Wooldridge on how meritocracy has created one of the most important divisions in modern life.

The biggest division in modern society is not between the owners of the means of production and the workers, as Karl Marx posited. It is not between the patriarchy and women or the white races and non-white races, as the post-modernists posit. It is between the meritocracy and the people, the cognitive elite and the masses, the exam-passers and the exam-flunkers. The winners are becoming intolerably smug. The losers are turning in on themselves, with an epidemic of suicides and drug addiction reducing the life-expectancy of working-class Americans for the first time in a century. And the tumbrils are beginning to operate.

The global establishment is, above all, a meritocratic establishment: it consists of people who have done well at school and university and who have gravitated to jobs that require both intellectual skills and evidence of those intellectual skills in the form of credentials. There are various sub-divisions within this elite: people who work for universities and NGOs like to snipe at people who work for business and banks, but in fact all members of the global elite have more in common than they like to think.

They routinely marry other members of the meritocratic elite: the marriage announcements in the New York Times read rather like marriage announcements between blue-blooded families in the high Victorian age, with the lists of university degrees (Harvard and Yale marries Brown and Columbia!) replacing lists of family pedigrees. Only two out of every thousand marriages are between a partner with a university degree and a partner with primary qualifications only. They usually share a common outlook. They pride themselves on their cosmopolitan values partly because they live in a borderless world – they are forever hopping over borders, in their business trips and foreign holidays – and partly because liberal immigration policies provide them with all the accoutrements of a cash-rich and time-starved lifestyle, cleaners, baby-sitters and exotic restaurants. They like to demonstrate their sympathy with racial and sexual minorities: businesses are now busily importing affirmative action schemes and gay-friendly policies from universities. But they don’t give much of a damn for the old-fashioned working class: whether they will admit it or not, many exam-passers think that those left behind deserve their dismal fate not just because they are less intelligent than the exam-passers but because they are less enlightened as well.

The populist movement that is sweeping the world is, more than anything else, a revolt against meritocracy. The groups that are driving the rise of populism have disparate material interests: they consist of traditional working-class people, Main Street business people such as real-estate agents and old-line manufacturers, and older voters who came of age before the great university expansion of the 1960s. But they are united by their common opposition to the meritocratic elite with their cosmopolitan values and habit of valuing intellectual achievement over physical skills.

Read the whole thing.

A reason to be cheerful

For all the political chaos and the ongoing misery of the pandemic, important human progress is still being made. The New York Times reports that a heart from a gene-edited pig has been successfully transplanted into a human patient.

“This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”

The internet wants you to be angry. Don’t give in without remembering all the reasons to be optimistic. Here’s a whole bunch more.

Remembering Roger Scruton

Happy new year. I kicked off 2022 by reviewing a collection of the late Roger Scruton’s journalism for the Sunday Telegraph. It was a pleasure, not least because it reminded me just what a good writer he was.

Here are three sample paragraphs that caught my eye:

Nevertheless the victims of Communism tried to hold on to the things that were sacred to them, and which spoke to them of the free and responsible life. The family was sacred; so too was religion, whether Christian or Jewish. So too was the underground store of knowledge – the forbidden knowledge of the nation's history and its claims to their loyalty. Those were the things that people would not exchange or relinquish even when required by the party to betray them. They were the consecrated treasures, hidden below the desecrated cities, where they glowed more brightly in the dark. Thus there grew an underground world of freedom and truth, where it was no longer necessary, as Havel put it, 'to live within the lie'.

(Spectator, 2014)

Left to his own in a godless universe, modern man sees no reason to deny himself and desires only the excuses that will justify him in the eyes of creatures like himself. And since he recognizes no authority higher than science, it is to science that he turns for his exculpation. The sciences that are chosen as his idols are those which are most prodigal of excuses, which rain down upon him a stream of whitewashing explanations and which tell him in one and the same breath that he deserves our sympathy and that he cannot be blamed.

(Times, 1986)

I first encountered hunting in my early 40s. It was quite by chance that I should be trotting down a Cotswold lane on a friend's old pony when the uniformed centaurs came galloping past. One minute I was lost in solitary thoughts, the next I was in a world transfigured by collective energy. Imagine opening your front door one morning to put out the milk and finding yourself in a vast cathedral in ancient Byzantium, the voices of the choir resounding in the dome above you and the congregation gorgeous in their holiday robes. My experience was comparable. The energy that swept me away was neither human nor canine nor equine but a peculiar synthesis of the three: a tribute to centuries of mutual dependence, revived for this moment in ritual form.

(Telegraph, 2012)

The book will be out later this month but you can pre-order it here.