A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-sixth post of a series.

When I read Jeanette Winterson’s 12 Bytes in January, I was struck by “Winterson’s impassioned plea for science to involve writers. Precision, and perhaps even beauty, is essential in scientific communication, and is a dying art.”

This week, events have caused me to remember this. There is little more dangerous than imprecise language in situations where clarity is essential. I think people grasp this in acute short-lived emergency situations, but it feels like it’s often overlooked in longer-term fundamentals, like remits for organisations or lists of national priorities.

An active decision to use an imprecise fudged wording can be brilliant in some situations, and is often politically shrewd. On the other hand, unintentionally imprecise language leading different people to interpret fundamental statements differently can be disastrous.

I’m ever more convinced that when precision is needed, a talented writer is needed.

I keep hearing a radio ad for a security firm which says they have “personal identity restoration specialists.”

I imagine most of us could do with one of those after the last couple of years.

This week, the total number of Monkeypox cases ever diagnosed in the UK passed 1,000.

This week, the number of covid-19 patients admitted to hospital each day passed 1,000.

From the public attention paid to these developments, you’d almost think the two milestones were roughly equivalent, which is mind-boggling. To repeat: in the UK right now, more people are being admitted to hospital with covid every day as have ever been diagnosed with Monkeypox.

We shouldn’t downplay a growing outbreak of Monkeypox, but we also shouldn’t pretend covid no longer causes untold harm.

The beach Wendy and I visit most frequently is probably Sandhaven in South Shields… which has just been named The Sunday Times Beach of the Year.

This is from Lorna Arnold’s Windscale 1957, but replace “accident” with “pandemic” and I suspect this might accurately describe a mistake currently in train in many organisations:

The post-accident reorganisation was not entirely beneficial. The structure was cumbersome and overelaborate. Moreover, although the Authority had been seriously under-staffed, some people thought that the rapid expansion after 1957 went too far and left the Authority with major staff and organisation problems. Perhaps the Authority had not needed a massive increase in overall staff so much as a massive redeployment.

I’ve five books to mention this month, four of which were published recently.

The Union of Synchronised Swimmers by Cristina Sandu

This slim Finnish novel was translated by the author and published in English in 2019. The main characters are six young women on a Soviet but stateless piece of land between two rivers and working in a cigarette factory. They discover that they have a talent for synchronised swimming, and enter an international competition.

The novel interleaves their joint story up to the competition with individual chapters focused on each of the swimmers after the competition. The whole thing is written in a very sparing, subtle style, which really only hints at a theme of multiculturalism and the difficulty of leaving behind our formative experiences.

At just over 100 pages, this was a quick but very worthwhile read. I didn’t read the blurb until I’d read the book, and this is one of those times when I was especially glad: I think it gives far too much away.

Chums by Simon Kuper

In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.”

Kuper’s book serves to demonstrate the surprising degree of accuracy in the caricature of the current Government as a gang of privileged university friends playing political games. It also explores the degree to which this has been true in the past, and highlights the unhealthy degree to which our political classes have been drawn from a narrow background. His particular focus is on Oxford University, and specifically the arts and humanities degrees at that University. (I didn’t previously know that, traditionally, the upper classes look down upon science degrees as too ‘practically useful’.)

It was genuinely remarkable to realise that of the fifteen post-war Prime Ministers, only one (Gordon Brown) exclusively attended a university besides Oxford. Though admittedly, three didn’t attend university at all.

It’s not long since I read Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men, an angry account of the damage inflicted by private boarding schools, which skirts around similar territory. The tones of the two books are notably different: while Beard is viscerally angry, Kuper feels more inquisitive. He also comes up with some interesting suggestions on how to address the problems he identifies.

I’m glad I read this.

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown

This is absolutely not my usual kind of thing, but the combination of an unavoidable recent press launch of the book and the royal fervour surrounding the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee meant that it caught my eye. Tom Rowley’s recommendation in his weekly newsletters was the final push to click through and buy it.

The book focuses mostly on the relationships between Charles and Camilla, William and Catherine, and Harry and Meghan. Brown also covers Andrew in some detail.

The tone is waspish and gossipy, and the near-600 pages flew by. It’s clear that Brown has her favourites among her subjects, and I spent much of the time wondering how much of what I was reading could possibly be true, but I still found that I rather enjoyed it.

There were some pop culture references that were beyond me (“It was like Sean Penn in the old Madonna days”) and some strange commentary (“her hair never presented any unsettling surprises”), but this added to the gossipy charm. But I could have done without the hypocritical reporting in gruesome detail on events that had unsettled the family, followed by seeming chastisement of the press for the very reports the book repeated.

It’s not my usual cup of tea, but I downed it pretty quickly regardless.

Nothing But The Truth by The Secret Barrister

This is The Secret Barrister’s recently published third book. This volume focuses on an anonymised account of the barrister’s training at law school and through post-graduate training and their first few years at the bar. It is written in a similarly ironic, amusing style to the earlier books.

I enjoyed this, but less than the earlier books. The themes, especially of the under-funding of the justice system, are worthy. Reminding us of them is probably a valuable service, but it is also repetitious. I don’t think this book had anything new to say on the subject.

The discussion of the social makeup of the legal profession was more interesting: it reminded me countless similar discussions about the medical profession. It seemed as though the barriers to social diversity and inclusion remain even higher in the law than in medicine.

I’d still recommend The Secret Barrister’s books, but I’d recommend reading the earlier volumes first.

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

I bought this on publication because I’ve enjoyed a number of Barnes’s previous novels. This slim story is about memory, perspective, and the need to constantly re-examine history to truly understand it… or rather to continually misunderstand it, as Barnes might have it. A theme he returns to several times is that history must be misunderstood.

The titular character is an idiosyncratic lecturer in ‘culture and civilisation’, and our narrator is an adult learner who attends one of her courses. He strikes up a relationship—a friendship, perhaps—and ultimately becomes her biographer. A large section of the book is taken up by the narrator’s student essay on Julian the Apostate, which I found to be a slightly odd choice that took the wind out of the narrative sails.

I also struggled a bit with the eponymous Finch: at the start of the novel, we’re told that searching the internet for information about her life would be fruitless and would turn up no more than two out of print books. She was ‘not in any way a public figure.’

Yet later in the narrative, we’re told that she has written for the London Review of Books and been widely criticised in the media for a talk she gave at one of their events. This is surely contradictory: but I didn’t get the sense that we were supposed to judge our narrator as unreliable on basic facts. So, this confounded me, and really I wonder if I’ve completely misunderstood some key point about this book.

Barnes’s writing is as beautiful as ever, and I particularly the first part of the book, but by the end I felt more mystified than satisfied.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-fifth post of a series.

I went for a walk this week around some bits of Newcastle city centre that I don’t usually frequent. It reminded me how much Newcastle’s skyline has changed over recent years, and how change that seems gradual and unremarkable when observed daily can be enormously striking when seen only at wide intervals of time.

According to those irritating automated Microsoft Viva emails, in a typical week I spend 55 hours in meetings. I work 40 hours a week. I assume the system can’t smartly analyse a diary that is often double, triple or quadruple booked.

On an Internet forum I sometimes browse, a commenter said this week

The sort of thing you used to see on Club Reps or, dare I say it, the original Inbetweeners film, just don’t happen now because if you let yourself go in Kavos, Aiya Napa or Magaluf now, it’ll be all over the Internet within half an hour.

Despite everything I’ve read about things like China’s social credit system, or books like So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I have never properly considered the idea that social media platforms could operate as a moderator for ‘real life’ behaviour.

I took a circular walk round York’s city walls this week. I haven’t been to York all that much over the years, and wouldn’t say it’s a city I know well, but walking the walls nevertheless gave me a wholly new perspective on it.

The Times had an article this week recommending the 100 best books for summer 2022. I didn’t read it, but lamented that I’d be so much more convinced by a smaller number. In a world of endless choice, curation is key.

It’s hard to piece together a rationale written thought about the appalling consequences of the US Supreme Court’s decision that access to abortion is not a constitutional right. Reading through the original Roe vs Wade decision this week, as well as the Supreme Court’s latest, I was struck by how plain it was that the original judgement was finely balanced.

It made me wonder how something so fundamental could be left to rest on such shaky foundations, and how the immediate response to the judgement wasn’t to work to firm up the legal footing. But then, just look at how many fundamentals of democracy in the UK are on based on shaky foundations, and how our response to a Government which openly attempts to knock them down hasn’t been to immediately work to strengthen them.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-fourth post of a series.

For at least 800 years, there has been a tradition of fairs being held on Newcastle’s Town Moor. For most of the last 140 years, The Hoppings has been an annual event, in recent years usually lasting nine days in early summer. Several hundred travelling attractions gather, creating Europe’s largest travelling funfair and attracting a million or more visitors. This year’s event opened this week, and Wendy and I went for our annual walk and gawp.

For the first time in years, I had a full day of face-to-face meetings outside the office this week. It made me feel oddly nervous: I’ve forgotten how to be out of the office, how to be unplugged from email, how to work without being constantly immediately available. I used to have days like this most weeks, and yet I’ve fallen out of practice.

Tech journalists have been falling over themselves to praise DALL-E, the impressive tool which uses artificial intelligence to generate images in response to prompts. TNW’s Neural newsletter transformed my view on this by pointing out that while these models triumph with complex imagery where many outputs are reasonable (such as “the sea at night”) they completely fail with simple, specific prompts (“two squares that are different colours”).

Of course, the models aren’t designed for the latter. Yet, as a casual observer, I suppose I unconsciously assumed that they’d work for it because—from a human linguistic perspective and from a “drawing” perspective—they seem far simpler.

On reflection, my built-in assumptions were obviously inapplicable to an absurd degree. The experience taught me that it’s easy to overestimate artificial intelligence by falsely ascribing methods to its work. It reminded me of examples I read about in New Dark Age.

I’ve been working on my annual revalidation appraisal paperwork lately, and it’s made me realise how poor my perception of time is these days. There are events that seemed to happen last week but actually were months ago. There are projects which feel like I worked on them years ago, but which I actually did in the last twelve months. There’s one bit of work which I was certain I did in November or December last year, and was frustrated by my inability to find some of the documents… I actually completed it in October 2019.

I think this is attributable to the formlessness of the last couple of years, the tedium of constant COVID, constant overwork and constant exhaustion. Dare I say that things are—hopefully—starting to look up?

I’ve mentioned Charlotte Ivers’s Sunday Times column before, but this week’s is especially brilliant.

All the normal rules of politics say he must go. All the experts say he must go. All the rules of the land, our traditions, our unwritten constitution, say he must go. Dammit, the rules of gravity say he must go. And Johnson will look at all these rules and think: what if I just … don’t?

And so he doesn’t. And nobody calls his bluff. Just as they haven’t, time and time again: over the wallpaper, the parties, the — oh, I don’t know, I’ve forgotten half the things we were furious about a few months ago, which I suppose means he has won. Again. Anyway, Johnson just does not go. And there aren’t any structures in place to remove him, because the structures were not built for people like Boris Johnson: people who simply ignore them.

I don’t use my car very much, which means I don’t often buy petrol. While I’m vaguely cognisant of fuel price rises, I was surprised to be charged the better part of £60 to fill up my small car.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-third post of a series.

It’s 14 years this week since I graduated. I know because this post popped up in my memories. Like much of this blog, I have no memory of writing it. I found myself nodding along and agreeing with myself as I read it.

Wendy and I enjoyed dinner at Newcastle city centre favourite Blackfriars this week. The restaurant is based in the friary’s original 11th-century refectory, making this nearly 800-year-old space (reputedly) the UK’s oldest purpose-built dining room in public use. It’s a mind-blowing length of time to contemplate, but the food was great.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-second post of a series.

Occasionally, I take a bus home from work. This is usually if I’m too tired or too late to walk, or if the skies have opened. The bus runs every 15 mins and I can track it from my phone. Recently, it has been re-routed, and stops just metres from my work desk and metres from my front door. If I’m working late, I’m frequently the only person on the bus.

Basically, I have a chauffeur now.

I’m currently reading Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers. She quotes Queen Mary: “You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.”

I’ve often reflected on the challenge in medicine of the disparity in the sense of occasion between the doctor and the patient. For the doctor, a consultation is one of a long series to get through; for the patient, it may be a significant life event. Meeting that moment is, I think, a key and underestimated skill of being a good doctor.

How much more is that true for the royal family, who must always be bright-eyed and sparkling, even if this is the twentieth worthy community project they’ve visited in a given week.

In a online meeting at work this week, a colleague who I don’t know very well introduced themselves partly through reference to their Twitter account (“Some of you may also know me from Twitter, where I frequently tweet about a topic irrelevant to this meeting…”)

I was caught off-guard by how many immediate, strong, conflicting reactions this provoked in me. It’s been playing on my mind far more than it deserves to, and I still can’t figure out what I thought about it: it was somehow intensely irritating, totally unremarkable, oddly refreshing, and many other things, all at the same time.

Given that I can only remember to use the current name of my employer about 50% of the time, I’m hardly a shining example of how these things ought to be done.

Another Tina Brown quote, this time referring to the Duchess of Cornwall: “There was honesty in her countryside complexion and crinkly, smiling eyes. Her hair never presenting any unsettling surprises.”

I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a complement or an insult. I wonder if my hair has ever ‘presented unsettling surprises’?

1: According to a Survation poll, almost a quarter of people who vote Conservative think Boris Johnson is lying when he denies saying that he would rather “bodies pile up in their thousands” than impose a lockdown.

I really struggle with understanding the cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously believe that (a) the Prime Minister is openly lying to the public and Parliament with the support of his ministers and MPs; (b) the Prime Minister thinks that thousands of British citizens dying is the preferred one of any two options in Government; and (c) the Prime Minister and his party are the best people to lead the country.

I don’t understand politics.

2: Dominic Raab, a man who studied law at Cambridge, is on the Sunday morning shows hawking the line that “there’s no separate body or individual that has power over [the Prime Minister]. That’s why we have elections.”

He must know that this is constitutionally illiterate, yet he’s choosing to say it anyway because—presumably—he values the pursuit of power over truth.

I don’t understand politics.

3: According to Laura Kuenssberg, “Politicians, even really honest ones, regularly say things they don’t quite believe. The public knows this. We don’t expect our politicians to be angels.”

What is the point of public service if not to speak the truth and honestly strive to do what you think is right for the electorate you serve?

I don’t understand politics.

4: On 22 February, the Prime Minister told Parliament “that the contracts [for procurement of PPE] are there on the record for everybody to see.” In fact, many of the contracts had not yet been published: for example, this one wasn’t published until 8 March. It seems that rather than the Prime Minister simply correcting the record, his inability to admit straightforward errors means we now have to debate whether the original—obviously incorrect—statement was misleading.

I don’t understand politics.

5: “Used to walking and having more time to slowly take in the landscape, travelers found that the railroad bombarded such perceptual openness, producing a sort of exhaustion; in fact, an 1862 medical journal described the experience in these terms: ‘The rapidity and variety of the impressions necessarily fatigue both the eye and the brain.’”

I don’t understand politics… but that has very little to do with this.

6: A failure of diplomacy so great that it involves threats of cut electricity supplies and the deployment of Navy ships with machine guns against one of our nearest neighbours is thought to boost the electoral prospects of the political party responsible (“A cynic would be forgiven for thinking the PM won’t believe his luck that his robust response to perceived French aggression is leading the news just as Britons go the ballot box.”)

I don’t understand politics.

7: “May 7th was a bleak day for Sir Keir Starmer, who took over as Labour leader a year ago from the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn after the party’s worst election performance since 1935.The campaign was overshadowed by allegations that Mr Johnson had improperly sought donations to refurbish his flat. Labour’s candidate, Paul Williams, was a family doctor who has worked in clinics during the pandemic, which has hit the town hard, and witnessed the government’s early missteps in managing it. None of that mattered much.

“Voters think Mr Johnson a better candidate for prime minister than Sir Keir by 40% to 24%, according to BMG Research, a pollster. He enjoys particularly high support among Brexiteers and those with fewer qualifications. His faltering response to the pandemic, and an often-chaotic turnover of personnel in Downing Street, left Tory MPs in despair, but he will survive in office for as long as they believe he is their best chance at re-election.”

A party in power for 11 years, a Government mired in scandal, and a set of leaders who have gifted us one of the world’s highest covid-19 death rate, result in a record by-election swing in a constituency which has never previously supported the governing party. It’s an unbelievable achievement for the Conservative party, a miserable failure for the opposition, and further proof (as if any were required) that…

I don’t understand politics.

8: “Think about that common, and distinctly modern, Shakespearean truism also found in children’s stories, self-help books, and everyday advice: “To thine own self be true.” We are urged not only to discover that real, authentic version of who we are, but to remain faithful to it at all costs. It leaves little room for having more than one self, despite the many contexts we find ourselves in that draw on our different sides and different strengths. Advice to be true to some essentialized version of your self runs the risk of discouraging change and flexibility.”

9: “Medicine has the authority to label one man’s complaint a legitimate illness, to declare a second man sick though he himself does not complain, and to refuse a third social recognition of his pain, his disability, and even his death. It is medicine which stamps some pain as ‘merely subjective,’ some impairment as malingering, and some deaths—though not others—as suicide. The judge determines what is legal and who is guilty. The priest declares what is holy and who has broken a taboo. The physician decides what is a symptom and who is sick.”

10: In the editor’s letter in the latest Wired, Greg Williams talks about how Apple’s “business model happens to coincide with both governmental and consumer appetites for increased privacy.”

I think he’s wrong: in the UK context, it doesn’t feel to me like there is much governmental appetite for increased privacy. From voter identification, to sharing location history in the covid-19 app, to backdoors in encryption technologies, to calls to prevent anonymous publishing on social media, it feels as though the government is suspicious of the motivations of those who value privacy.

11: I’m on a bit of a Kishi Bashi phase at the moment.

12: “The Queen was leaning over a man injured by an IRA bomb, asking him how much sight he retained. ‘Not a lot’, said the Duke, ‘judging by that tie.’”

13: I learned how Pete Adlington designed the cover for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and The Sun.

14: “It is impossible to read these pages without bemoaning that, in the nation’s worst crisis since 1945, Britons are governed by someone so obviously unsuited to the job. Over the past year, the man who urged the nation to ‘take back control’ refused to take decisions and sought to displace responsibility wherever possible (‘we are following the science’). In his masterly recent portrait of Johnson in the Guardian, Edward Docx describes the prime minister as a clown whose rise to power was built on persuading the audience to collude in the secret that all human endeavour is no more than a complicated joke. Johnson, on receiving bad news in his daily meetings, tends to keep his head bowed. He then looks up quickly, his eyes darting around the room, to find someone to join him in a rueful smirk. The NHS needs more ventilators? Let’s call it ‘Operation Last Gasp’. The temperament behind that humour guided the country on its bleakly circular trajectory.”

15: “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”

16: Motherland is one of those comedies which divides Wendy and me: I think it’s brilliant, while Wendy is less keen.

17: Almost third of people in Newcastle have worked from home. I’m surprised it’s that high, even considering the pandemic.

18: “The education secretary Gavin Williamson just said: ‘The record number of people taking up science and engineering demonstrates that many are already starting to pivot away from dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt.’

“He’s genuinely gleeful about people not studying art. That’s what it means to the people in power, and that heinous attitude trickles down through every facet of society.

“We are now decades after the YBAs, half a century after Jackson Pollock and a hundred years after Duchamp’s urinal, and public perception of art still hasn’t moved on. People still look at a drip painting or a Rothko and think ‘I could do that’. Art is frozen in the past, in a world where the more a painting looks like a photo the better it is, and that’s been done on purpose.”

19: FiP played The Tibbs’s cover of Santa Baby this morning. I like my music eclectic, but Christmas tunes with breakfast in May is pushing it.

20: I learned about jury nullification, and the principle that “jurors should aim to strike a balance between following their own sense of justice and respecting the accumulated cultural knowledge represented by the law.”

21: I read a bit about how to approach pronouns in the workplace, but it didn’t help me understand the person whose email signature has “she/them” listed in place of the more usual “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them” combinations.

22: “The [Chernobyl] disaster is both history and myth: it has been exhaustively investigated, yet the basic facts have still not been established. The death toll, for example, has been fixed at just two from the explosions themselves and a further 29 from radiation sickness during the three months afterwards: close to Soviet reports at the time, and far short of the thousands claimed by Western media and intelligence sources. But the long-term figure can only be guessed at. The United Nations’ estimate in 2005 of four thousand deaths is at the low end of a spectrum which extends, in Greenpeace International’s estimate, to ninety thousand. Assessments of the present and future risk continue to diverge. According to Igor Gramotkyn, the current director of the Chernobyl power plant, the site will be a no-go area for at least 20,000 years; other sources think it may be habitable in three centuries, and observe that populations of wolves, bears, beavers and otters are already thriving. By 2000 3.5 million Ukrainians were claiming state benefits as radiation sufferers; yet dozens of elderly former residents have returned to live (and die) in the exclusion zone, and the World Health Organisation has determined that radioactivity-related mutations and birth defects are statistically insignificant.”

23: “Green Man Authority” is a thing.

24: It’s been an exceptionally wet May… so far. It’s sunny today, though.

25: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones.”

While the span of a lifetime makes this true in a longitudinal sense, I’m not sure I wholly agree with this as a philosophy: in books, as in life, I think a varied diet is important. Junk food is fine sometimes, and bad books can be fun.

26: Gordon Brown’s government is the only one in British history not to have included anyone who went to Eton.

27: It’s easy to forget, but important to remember, the net positive impact of the internet during the COVID-19 pandemic.

28: Preparing for an appraisal after the most challenging year of my career to date has proven to be a surprisingly emotional process.

At a time when I’m frankly exhausted, it’s making me sit alone in a room while I drag up raw memories of unacceptable interpersonal behaviour, frustration with being left repeatedly in invidious positions, working under enormous pressure to unrealistic expectations, the realisation that I’ve had fewer sets of consecutive weekends off in the last year than I have fingers on one hand, the weird psychological instability caused by people insisting that fiction is fact, and much more unpleasantness besides.

In recent years, I’ve grown to be a bit of a secret fan of appraisals, supporting (as they do) reflection on practice and future plans. But this year, I’ve found the process of preparing for the meeting really quite traumatic. Rather than helping me reflect and learn and spot connections, it’s made me brood and relive events that I could not control and that were bad enough to live through just once, thanks.

For some, this must be the experience every year. And, for all the benefit it brings, I don’t think that’s worth it.

I think we need to do medical appraisals better, in a way that is perhaps more like counselling, and doesn’t involve sitting alone revisiting traumas in an unsupported way.

29: It’s depressing to see how widely this completely fictional April Fool’s interview with Eric Carle in The Paris Review came to be reported as fact in so many of his obituaries: “My publisher and I fought bitterly over the stomachache scene in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The caterpillar, you’ll recall, feasts on cake, ice cream, salami, pie, cheese, sausage, and so on. After this banquet I intended for him to proceed immediately to his metamorphosis, but my publisher insisted that he suffer an episode of nausea first—that some punishment follow his supposed overeating. This disgusted me. It ran entirely contrary to the message of the book. The caterpillar is, after all, very hungry, as sometimes we all are. He has recognized an immense appetite within him and has indulged it, and the experience transforms him, betters him. Including the punitive stomachache ruined the effect … I don’t recognize childhood obesity. No one should. I see children doing what they like, which is eating, and doing it without the shame or remorse later drilled into them by Judeo-Christian ethics.”

30: Duncan Stephen has written a great blog post about why content is more important than technology, and I’m simultaneously delighted by his clear explanation and depressed that it is necessary. I’m fed up of having arguments in the public health world where people excitedly say that they give people information X through medium Y, but want to spend more time tinkering with Y than actually making X both technically accurate and practically useful. And that’s before we even get to the question of whether Y is better than long-standing medium Z from the point of view of the end user, even if Y is more cost-efficient (and whizzy) than Z.

31: Eighteen months of daily lessons is enough… for now.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-first post of a series.

I’m still of the opinion that Twitter is on the wane in terms of its cultural influence, even if not in terms of other measures. I wondered a few weeks ago “whether by this time next year we’ll still see the same constant exhortations by television and radio programmes to follow their people on Twitter.”

The Political Editor of the BBC said this week, “my focus is on television, radio & the BBC News website and app. I’m less fussed about Twitter, to be honest.”

Confirmation bias is a cruel trickster, but it really does look like this fits into the trend that I think I’m seeing.

The man is obviously unfit to lead. His ability to cling onto office after so many resignation-requiring failures is something quite atrocious. But no-one besides him thinks he can win another election, which seems to me to make a “bet the house” early surprise poll a better prospect than being binned by his own side for an electable alternative.

Monkeypox, monkeypox monkeypox monkeypox, monkeypox monkeypox. Monkeypox.

Clowns do not develop. Purposelessness pervades. The emphasis is on anti-meaning. There is a deliberate fracturing of cause and effect.

Just three to mention this month.

New Dark Age by James Bridle

This is a well-researched reflection on the relationship between humans and computers, published in 2018. Bridle’s central point, I think, is that we often don’t have a great understanding of how technology we rely upon undertakes its work, and the development of new technologies like artificial intelligence clouds this further. In turn, this reflects back on us, clouding our own understanding of the world around us.

There were two specific points in this book which challenged some pre-existing conceptions I had held.

The chapter on YouTube transformed my understanding of the site. I had no idea that, for example, violent parodies of Peppa Pig are on there, and can be served to children by YouTube’s algorithm (which continually plays back to back videos if left—I hadn’t even clocked that!) I also hadn’t realised how much bizarre autogenerated content existed on the platform. I had thought that there was some reasonable content moderation, possibly because I hadn’t understood the true quantity of uploaded material.

I also had no idea that the NSA had cracked some prime number factors commonly used in encryption, nor that mathematical developments like this are routinely kept out of scientific journals—harming the development of the science—effectively as a cyber warfare strategy. I was a bit bowled over by that revelation, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been so naive.

Throughout, Bridle writes with real perception and clarity. This book has changed and better informed my view of technology as an adjunct to human thought. There was a lot to ponder in here.

House Arrest by Alan Bennett

This is a slim selection of diary entries from March 2020 to March 2021, capturing Bennett’s experience of lockdown and the pandemic, including the re-making of his Talking Heads TV series. As always, Bennett also shares gossipy anecdotes from earlier in life and reflects with horror on the state of modern politics.

This is a very short book, but brought half an hour or so of the unique joyful warmth that always runs through Bennett’s diaries.

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

I picked this up after seeing it featured in a New York Times piece which called it “a turning point for the genre” which had sold more than 1.3 million print copies. It’s also won numerous awards. I was disappointed.

The plot concerns a romance between the twenty-something son of a female President of the United States and a similarly aged Prince of the United Kingdom, younger brother of the third in line to the throne. There are many interesting questions to dissect in this scenario, but none of them are addressed in this frothy romance.

I found this superficial and poorly researched: there was a section where I struggled to follow the geography until I realised that the author thought that Buckingham Palace was in Buckingham, which was a part of London. Somehow, there is a lot of discussion of the political impact of religious objections to the relationship in the States, but no mention of the monarch’s role as Head of the Church of England. The writing is also unforgivably clunky in parts.

I think, at heart, this just wasn’t the book I expected it to be. From a “turning point for the genre” I think I expected something more considered, grounded in reality and exploratory, but instead this just seemed like a ten-a-penny by-numbers romance.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twentieth post of a series.

I’ve been reading Simon Kuper’s Chums this week. He writes, “Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train.”

That feels familiar.

There is a remarkable, powerful article in the latest Prospect (originally published in Die Zeit) bringing together a victim of torture at Guantánamo Bay and his torturer. There are so many layers to it that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it.

I mentioned in February that I had a preference for paper notebooks as I’d found nothing quite as “glanceable.” One suggestion in response was to try OneNote with a window either docked or “pinned” on top of all other windows, and actually that seems to work pretty well. I haven’t used my paper notebook for a month or so.