Sip: on an Autumn Leaves
Weekend reading:
Listen: Dolly Parton sings Apple Jack
“Oh but he left me his banjo and it always takes me back…“
Payment processor Stripe is now a publisher, with the launch of Stripe Press, offering what looks like an intriguing collection of largely reissued titles, included such worthwhile authors as Tyler Cowen and Martin Gurri.
The site has an innovative layout as well. Give it a scroll.
UV-C and improved air filtration could make our indoor spaces much safer, and not just from Covid. But when will we catch up with Singapore?
See my earlier post: Give us air.
The new biography of John von Neumann, The Man From The Future, sounds absolutely terrific:
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.
I’ve been in Helsinki for the weekend – watching chessboxing and drinking beer. In honour of which, this theory from a Finnish-American photographer, based on Helsinki’s bus routes.
[T]he Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you'll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.
Craig Brown on the art of biography.
[T]he artificiality of the genre is helped neither by the slippery nature of memory, nor, indeed, by the slippery nature of biographers. Everyone who has ever written non-fiction will know that, from paragraph to paragraph, perhaps even from sentence to sentence, one is always obliged to pick a version of the truth: every available source has a slightly different tale to tell. It would be tedious to present each different version of each event, or the finished book would be impossibly long, and impossibly boring. So which to choose? And how do you know if it is the right one?
Via the newsletter of Dominic Cummings – a mischief-maker, but also a smart person who’s good at thinking ahead:
If you will live in the UK over the next 6 months take steps to ensure you and your family can cope with a ~4 week major disruption — e.g a cascade of logistics and energy failures. The only safe assumption is that the true situation is much worse than the media are telling you. This was true in spring 2020 and autumn 2020. It’s true now.
Babylon 5 is returning to TV, helmed by the original writer and all-round creative mastermind JM Straczynski. Babylon 5 was always ahead of its time: one of the first shows to make extensive use of CGI, and the originator of the multi-season story arc (sustained over five years!) paving the way for today’s golden age of longform TV. Despite the limits of the show’s budgets in its first iteration it had ambition, heart and prescience, with its rather darker take on spacefaring future that echoes a lot of contemporary themes. Straczynski also cut his teeth making The Real Ghostbusters far better than an animated kids show had any right to be. Prepare for something special.
An excellent slash disturbing Twitter thread on nuclear bombs that just… got lost during the Cold War.
See also the nuclear accidents that almost left Eastern England aglow.
Sip: on a Naked & Famous
Weekend Reading:
Listen: Breathin’ by the Asylum Street Spankers
“…loving you is just / Like breathin' in and breathin' out…“
Prohibition caused a drop of around 10% in patents filed, apparently due to the absence of opportunities to meet and talk over ideas in bars.
Sometimes words get away from you… This gardening correction is my new favourite. Although the NYT correction over the true author of Dracula is also pretty special.
Anne Applebaum decried “cancel culture” for the Atlantic
Rod Dreher sympathised but thought Applebaum was naive about the role of the left in what’s going on
Adam Gurri thought her piece was anecdotal and lacked substance
Tyler Cowen has attempted to look on the bright side of “wokeism”, suggesting it is the banner of an Americanised international class, and a net good, despite being “stupid and inflexible”. (NB: sometimes hard to tell if Cowen means what he says or indirectly provokes critics to state the flaws in the arguments he offers)
Rod Dreher didn’t like it at all
What’s the most important invention of the twentieth century, and why does no one use it any more? Matt Locke makes a good, brief case for the television schedule.
For nearly a century, a simple list, based around the hours of the day, structured the daily habits of millions of people, shaped the careers of politicians and celebrities, and powered a multi-billion dollar advertising industry.
The power of a timetable that coordinated millions of people’s viewing habits was huge. Not only because large numbers of people could be influenced by the same shows, but because everyone knew that everyone else was watching, generating common knowledge.
Common knowledge is a fascinating topic, vital for brand advertising but also for many forms of social coordination.
In Television is the New Television, Michael Woolff argues that effects like this are underappreciated and TV has more value than people realise even in an internet-enabled age.
But perhaps the interesting question is what happens when always-on streaming video leaves audiences fragmented and breaks the coordinating power of a shared schedule? And as algorithmic streams attempt to fill the gap, what does that do to our society?
Friday cocktail:
The Jasmine (or should that be Jasmin)
Weekend reading:
China has wiped one of the country’s biggest celebrities from its Internet
The return of living mammoths could be less than a decade away
Music:
“Come on home”: John Prine singing Summer’s End.
Have a lovely weekend.
A very good essay from The Atlantic exploring how we might rethink the way we ventilate buildings. It’s not just that the pandemic has created a new airborne risk but it’s made it clearer the risks that already existed that we were overlooking.
“‘We had done such limited research before on airborne transmission of common infections,’ Samet told me. This just wasn’t seen as a major problem until now.”
Norm Macdonald is no longer one of the funniest men alive. Scarce copies of his wonderful fabulist non-memoir, Based on a True Story are currently selling for $500 on Amazon.
Norm divided the crowd, but he had an unflinching commitment to the power of jokes to shock us out of our complacency and into moments of both childlike delight and darkly adult recognition. Beneath the under-stated, plain man exterior was a mind like a knife. He was well-read, thoughtful, and serious about his Christian faith. He focused all that talent on making people laugh. There was nothing like him.
The first nuclear near-miss at RAF Lakenheath, an American airbase in Suffolk, England, took place on 27 July 1956.
According to a top-secret US government telegram at the time: ‘Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officers says a miracle that one Mark-6 with exposed detonators sheared didn't go.‘
“Firefighters rushing to the scene were, according to historian Jim Wilson, met with a convoy of cars packed full of American women and children frantically trying to get away from what they thought was impending doom.
According to one report one airman dashed from the gates of the base to get a taxi, and told the driver: ‘Go anywhere, just get away from here!’“
What to read, 20 years after 9/11? Some of the best writing I found is about its heroes:
The story of Rick Rescorla, whose foresight and self-sacrifice saved 2,700 lives.
“People like Rick, they don’t die old men. They aren’t destined for that and it isn’t right for them to do so. It just isn’t right, by God, for them to become feeble, old, and helpless sons of bitches. There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.”
The better-known story of Todd Beamer, who helped stop Flight 93 from slamming into the US Capitol.
“They said the Lord’s Prayer together in full, and other passengers joined in. Beamer then recited Psalm 23, concluding, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.’ Immediately after, he turned to his co-conspirators and asked, ‘Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.’“
This amazing 10-minute documentary narrated by Tom Hanks about the improvised boat evacuation of Manhattan – bigger than Dunkirk, the largest sea evacuation in history. The boatlift got 500,000 people off the island in less than nine hours!
And a heart-rending account by Tom Junod of how the NYPD and NY fire departments deal with the loss and hold onto the memory of that terrible day:
“what happened on September 11, 2001 wasn't really a memory there – it was more like an amputation, something you wish you could forget but instead must live with. You have no choice in the matter, because you have to manage the prosthesis and you have to go to physical therapy and you have to stay away from the pain pills. It's not something you talk about every day, but it's something your kids have to see every day with terror and pride, and something maybe their kids dare to ask you about, when they're sitting on your knee. That's where the memory comes in – when you tell the story and try to reassure them, try to reassure yourself, that they can't inherit your limp, only your resolve.”
But 9/11 isn’t about heroes, though it showed us them. It was an act of mass murder that showed us things we didn’t want to see, and still don’t.
And for all the hard questions of how to respond, with the time for heroism long past, the only human answer remains grief:
Where you’ve gone, there will be a
I’ve noticed a strange absence of good pieces on 9/11 in the run-up to the anniversary. Perhaps they will turn up today, or perhaps we’re all battle-weary. Has the failure in Afghanistan emptied out our ability to talk about the whole thing? As Henry James once wrote, “The war has used up words… and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms.” For more on the fascinating rabbithole of semantic satiation, try here.
There is still good writing on the culture war however. Including this. My favourite sentence: “It is like a series of whodunnits where the murderer is ‘the capitalist hegemony’ every time.”
A very different twenty year anniversary: the launch of The Office, a bleak sitcom with an edge of snobbery that grew into a great – and remarkably universal – love story. “Besides the US, The Office has also been adapted in Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Israel and, most recently, in India.” Gervais’ more recent effort After Life is also excellent, and won Best Comedy at the National Television Awards.
Music: That’s The Way The World Goes Round. Happy enchilada.
Good news: Huge advances are taking place in fusion, meaning the prospect of endless clean power could be closer than we think. In particular, startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems and MIT took a big step forward this month, successfully powering up an unbelievably powerful magnet.
“I think we’re going to look back and think about how we got there, and I think the demonstration of the magnet technology, for me, is the time when I believed that, wow, we can really do this.”
Better news: Fresh from its success with Covid-19, mRNA vaccine technology is being used to develop powerful anti-cancer treatments, one of which is already moving into human trials. In mice, the treatments shrank 17 out of 20 tumours to nothing within 40 days.
More like these, please.
I love reading, but I’m greedy. Why shouldn’t it be easier? Easier to remember what you’ve read and connect your cross-platform discoveries. Easier to get into the flow of reading. Easier to take notes and highlight. Maybe even easier, somehow, to manage your TBR pile. Well, maybe it’s about to happen.
I’ve been using Readwise for a while to get better access to highlighted passages from my Kindle. Now they are rolling out a comprehensive reading app which promises to replace alternatives like Instapaper and Pocket with something even more powerful. They’ve written a blog post explaining what they are up to and I haven’t been so excited since the Kindle launched. If you’re a serious reader, you probably should be too. Who wouldn’t want this?
“…blazingly fast, full-text search of your entire library of books, articles, annotations, and highlights. You can find whatever you're looking for, even if all you can remember is a single word. Even offline.”
And it’s hard to argue with this:
“…the technology industry thus far has focused on building out hardware and distribution infrastructure rather than reimagining what a reading application could be.”
If you’re a reading nerd like me, you’ll want to read the whole thing. Or for the impatient, join the waitlist for early access.
“…all just as immortal and fathomless as myself”. There are only eight concertina-makers in the world. Bob Tedrow is one of them. From the Whitman, Alabama series of videos, which is one of my favourite things in the world. And since there are some banjos in this video, you might also want to check out Britain’s own master of claw-hammer banjo, Dan Walsh, who I was lucky enough to hear play this weekend at the Maverick festival in Suffolk.
Plato was onto something. Possibly also Glenn Reynolds. I found this on Twitter, but was it just bait in the algorithm’s trap?
This cartoon (found on Twitter, ironically enough) is both funny and dangerously true. For a deeper dive, start with Luke Burgis’ book, Wanting.
I was on LBC this morning, as a follow-on to my article for the Telegraph yesterday. I talked with Nick Ferrari about the Boris tax and how it is no answer to the (very real) problem of social care. The proposed NI hike will not only hit the wrong people at the wrong time, but it isn’t even a solution, just extra money with no detail of how to spend it. There are better and fairer answers. (Frankly, just raising income tax would be fairer than the NI hike.) One interesting attempt was Damian Green’s paper in 2019, which recommended a state pension-type model.
