Eleven years ago, I wrote on this blog in praise of Evernote:

My life runs on Evernote. It allows me to appear far more organised than I actually am. If anyone ever asks if I have a copy of something, I almost always know that the answer is ‘yes,’ and that I can find it in seconds with a simple search.

I stopped using Evernote many years ago, but I haven’t forgotten what it taught me. Evernote taught me the value of search over filing. I rarely file anything these days because search tools are generally too powerful to bother.

I realise in retrospect that much of the way I used Evernote–despite the above quote–was filing. For example, I would tend to have notes that combined emails and documents about a single topic. I wouldn’t bother with that nowadays: why bother to put all of that together in a single note when I could just search for the bits I need—usually emails—in their original location?

These days, I use OneNote—Evernote’s major competitor—the same way as I used to use a paper notebook: one ‘note’ per day. Anything I need to jot down during the day goes on the note—not in some separate topic-dedicated special folder. It doesn’t need to be filed because it is searchable. The only reason I use OneNote instead of Evernote is because that’s what my employers provide.

Evernote may not have stayed around in my life for long, but it’s clearly had a lasting impact on how I work.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s marvellous long essay in the latest edition of Harper’s, I Really Didn’t Want to Go. It recounts her experience on a Goop cruise, and makes frequent reference to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s essay about another cruise with the same line.

The latter essay was familiar in parts, so I think I must have read it at some point—though I can’t imagine it was in Harper’s, and I’m certain it can’t have been in 1996. I’ve never been on a cruise, but they do somehow seem to offer a rich seam of entertaining journalistic essays.

I’ve long enjoyed Jon Ronson’s work: his writing in the Guardian, his books, his various radio documentaries and, latterly, his podcasts. I was therefore excited to see that he has a new one out.

‘The Debutante’ profiles Carole Howe, a wealthy former debutante who became a spokesperson for the white supremacist movement before turning undercover informant on that same movement. She was—maybe—spying on neo-Nazis for the US government in the lead up to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma bombing. It has been hypothesised that if her information had been taken more seriously, then that bombing could have been prevented, saving 168 lives.

The series explores this over three hours or so, and… I just wasn’t that into it. Ronson’s skill as a journalist is normally found in bridging from highly specific individual cases to say something broader about society. Whether because of the relatively short series, or because the circumstances here are so extraordinary, it didn’t feel like Ronson managed that this time. The story never left the bizarre but narrowly drawn world of Howe.

I hope Ronson finds his form again soon.

Ordinarily, I’m a voracious reader. I typically have two books on the go at any one time. I usually get through about a hundred per year.

But occasionally, I have spells where I don’t read much at all. It’s as though I fall out of the habit, and just can’t bring myself to pick up a book. I find myself wondering how I ever found the time to read as much as I did.

These spells typically last about six weeks, and I’m about five weeks into one at the moment. I know it is starting to lift because, in the last few days, I have been reading again–albeit less frequently and for less long than usual.

I don’t understand why this happens. I haven’t spotted any great pattern to it. And it’s not something that really concerns me. But given how much I bang on in this blog about reading, and the books I’ve read, it seems reasonable to mention that it’s not always like that. Occasionally, my drive to read inexplicably evaporates.

It always comes back.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

I try not to rant about politics. It achieves nothing and it’s not great for my blood pressure. As I’m not willing to become a politician myself, what right do I have to throw mud from the sidelines?

But occasionally, the hypocrisy becomes too much.

The Conservative Party pushed voter ID laws through Parliament. One of the effects of this legislation was to disenfranchise millions of British citizens. The final number who were turned away from polling stations in the recent local elections hasn’t yet been collated.

Yet, yesterday’s right-leaning newspapers were inexplicably keen to celebrate that a Conservative MP who championed voter ID has written to ask the Leader of the Opposition—a man with no ability to change the law on voting before the next general election—

Why do you think it’s right to downgrade the ultimate privilege of British citizenship—the right to vote in a general election?

Huh?

The image is an unmodified version of an official Government portrait used under this licence.

Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to Scottish politics, especially given how much closer I live to the Scottish parliament than to the UK parliament. Humza Yousaf seemed to me to come from nowhere to be installed as Scotland’s First Minister.

I was therefore pleased to come across a decent profile of him in, of all publications, Le Monde. I enjoyed his line about his culture being ‘bagpipes and bhangra’ and his combination of a kilt with a sherwani. It also, perhaps, took an international paper’s perspective to note that we have a Hindu Prime Minister and a Sikh First Minister, which only underlines the unsustainability of our lack of separation between church and state.

I was also delighted to learn that he’s exactly two weeks older than me, so I haven’t yet reached the age where the country’s senior leaders are younger than me.

I’ve read two recent articles which were basically about rubbish meetings: ’How to be a superstar on Zoom’, a Bartleby column in The Economist , and ’How to escape the hell of bad meetings’, by Adrian Wooldridge on Bloomberg.

There is certainly a trend within my employing organisation in recent times for holding impractically large meetings via Microsoft Teams. These often seem to a mechanism for effectively broadcasting information which would be better communicated asynchronously, preferably in writing. In my personal notes, I’ve somewhat petulantly developed a habit of recording the number of participants in a meeting along with its length. None of these meetings would have been held pre-pandemic, when we were reliant on audio-only teleconferencing. In these cases, it seems to me that the technology is being used because it is there, not because there is a strong underlying need for it.

There was a notable occasion recently when I sat in a meeting where twenty participants spent half an hour ‘discussing’ whether some minor changes should be made to a document, or whether this was a poor use of time. This was ten person-hours spent discussing whether a task that would take roughly two person-hours was worthwhile. The irony struck no-one.

The close of the Economist article:

The right way for companies to respond is to make meetings shorter and more relevant. Whether you are on camera or in the room, it is always easier to listen when there is something worth hearing.

Well, quite.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

One of the joys of the London Review of Books is coming across a piece of writing about an esoteric subject which is so well put together as to be arresting. Emily’s Berry’s piece on the LRB Blog about using a lumber extension machine is exactly that. It’s short, funny, intriguing, memorable, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Five years ago, I wrote a post trying to answer a question posed by an Economist headline: ‘How much would you pay to keep using Google?’

At the time, I used a number of Google service and concluded that I’d happily pay a small fee to use them each month. Five years on, much has changed. I wouldn’t pay to use Google’s services today, and barely use any of them. I thought it worth setting down some thoughts as to why.

Fundamentally, at some point in the last five years—I can’t pinpoint exactly when—Google ‘crossed the creepy line’ for me. Instead of feeling delighted by how the company anticipated some of my needs, I began to feel a little stalked. Worse than that, I had the distinct feeling that Google was increasingly trapping me in a filter bubble, serving up only recommendations and search results that aligned with my preconceived ideas, and filtering out anything that might have challenged me. I began to feel a bit weirded out as Google’s analytics and adverts would follow me around the web. In Love Island parlance, Google was giving me ‘the ick.’

There was no great epiphany; over time I just drifted away from Google’s services.

Five years ago, I’d already mostly moved my search activity from Google to Bing; these days, my default search engine is DuckDuckGo. And, to allow you a peek behind the curtain for a moment, I actually had to go and check that to write this paragraph. When using a browser, I search from the address bar, so I’m not used to typing in a search engine’s URL. I’ve used a variety of providers over time: sometimes I like to use Ecosia because planting trees makes me feel good. Occasionally, I like to use Neeva because I like their ad-free approach. But mostly: I don’t give it a great deal of thought. There’s no significant difference in the quality of results as far as I can see.

When I wrote the previous post, I used Gmail. No more, not least because the web interface has become a bloated mess. I used Proton Mail for a while, but the tight security of the service cost me in convenience, and I ended up moving to and sticking with Fastmail, which has also replaced my use of Google Calendar. I thought that moving my email archive would be a pain, but it was elementary with Fastmail—so simple that I can’t even remember doing it.

Half a decade ago, I said I’d ‘definitely’ pay for Google Maps. These days, I’d undoubtedly pay to avoid using it for most purposes: it seems to have the highest number of junky, inaccurate points of interest of any service I use. For simple navigation, I tend to use Apple Maps—and also often end up using Apple Maps for default on the web because it is built into DuckDuckGo.

I had forgotten that I ever used Google Drive or Google Photos. I use iCloud for storing personal documents, and a variety of cloud services for saving photos, my hope being that at least one of them will stick around for the long term. Likewise, I don’t have a Chromebook, and my default browser is Safari. I do use the Chrome browser at work, but only because the installation of Edge is so locked down on my laptop as to prevent me from using a password manager extension—and Chrome is the only offered alternative.

Which just leaves YouTube. I’m not a frequent user of YouTube for the simple reason that I don’t watch much short-form video, but it is my go-to service for that purpose. I don’t use it enough to have the app on any of my devices. The website is profoundly irritating with its endless ads and trickily worded promos for subscriptions.¹ I’d prefer to use an alternative if I knew of one.

I’m also struck that three of the five ‘newer’ Google services mentioned in that post—Allo, Duo and Now—have already closed, underlining the danger of integrating any new Google services into any part of one’s daily life or workflow.

I wouldn’t pay to use Google’s services nowadays: I wouldn’t even be tempted if they paid me, like Bing Rewards. Yet, it strikes me that I pay for many products where Google offers approximate equivalents for free (Fastmail, Neeva, iCloud, photo storage). As I said last time: ‘I am only one person, and I’ve no idea how typical I am in this context, but I wonder if my change in behaviour represents a wider portentous shift for Google’s fortunes?’

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

1. Asking users to click ‘skip trial’—implying immediate payment—to dismiss subscription ads is clearly intended to confuse. ↩

I thoroughly enjoyed the opening article in the latest n+1, in which the editors review the environment in which we currently read journalism online. Sweeping in scope and full of humour and common sense, the central conceit is that Twitter is no longer a useful platform for discovering quality journalism:

Twitter was unproductive, depressing, and a big waste of time, but until recently it never made anyone feel quite this stupid. The Musk era has been defined by a relentless barrage of idiocy, which has seeped into the infrastructure. The sense of chaos, the eternal return of memes and controversies, the algorithmic de-emphasis on tweets that link out to anything other than tweets, the emergence of the most annoying people in new and surprising contexts (Bari Weiss and Musk: a true signature collab) — all of it is too much, especially when all one wants is interesting articles.

I left Twitter years ago. I also enjoy reading quality journalism, and this article resonated with me because I, too, found myself subscribing to Air Mail and Semafor and the London Review of Books and The New Yorker and the New York Times. And I, too, found that the pub walls changed the experience, not necessarily for the worse, and I, too, wonder whether quality journalism can survive like this. And it’s interesting to read a thoughtful, detailed critical analysis of these fleeting thoughts—even while not agreeing with every one of its points.

It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.