I’ve just about recovered from my first attempt at hosting a live television program, Sky News Sunday. I now realize that Anchorman is a documentary about the very real problem of how you just have to surrender and read whatever’s on the Autocue. I’m Ron Burgundy?

Helen

Lord Rebound

Last fall, on the day Archer was arrested and charged, he went straight from Wimbledon Police Station to Windsor, where he made his stage début that evening. The production I saw in Guildford was the last before “The Accused” moved to the West End. Archer’s performance was a little awkward—he is no Olivier—but there was enough in the play’s blend of fact and fiction to engage the audience. The set resembled the Old Bailey, a typical Archer touch. The script contained references to tabloid reporters, unfaithful husbands, and even the condition of Archer’s skin. During the libel trial, the prostitute had said that one of the things she remembered about her encounter with Archer was his pimply back. A less brazen character would have blanched at the dredging up of this detail. Archer exploited it as a plot twist. In the climactic scene, he took off his shirt to reveal a back that was hideously scarred, prompting embarrassed laughter from the stalls. When the play ended, the audience acted as the jury, holding up signs saying “Not Guilty” and “Guilty” that were counted to determine the verdict. “He’s guilty as sin, but it’s not beyond reasonable doubt,” a dissenter behind me said.

I had somehow forgotten that back in 2001, Jeffrey Archer managed to capitalize on his upcoming trial for perjury by writing a play that put him, as an actor, in the dock. That’s the kind of unbelievable chutzpah that sees half the Conservative party write tearful tributes to you on your death, most of which carefully skirt around the whole “massive crook and liar” aspect of your life1. As John Cassidy notes in this 2001 New Yorker (link, $) profile of Archer, “In a country where being seen to try hard is still considered bad form, he is the ultimate striver and self-promoter, an English combination of Trump and Gatsby. Even now, he betrays no signs of concern.”

Archer is also proof of my strong belief that most charismatic liars get away with it, either because everyone blithely assumes someone else will have checked their bona fides, or because people actively want to believe the schtick. Archer was certainly an incredible storyteller: Kane And Abel is an absolute banger, full of tiny self-portraits, such as the bit where the WASPy young Richard Kane gives his grandmothers alleged “Shreve, Crump and Low” brooches after dumpster-diving for the store’s packaging; they realise what’s happened (no hallmarks) but choose to find it charming.

BTW, if you think that I am taking advantage of the fact that libel laws change once someone is dead, then take a peep at AN Wilson’s Substack. He accused Archer of having the sex worker who testified against him killed! “I admit that when I last wrote about Archer, I went over the top by suggesting he had actually murdered Monica Coghlan,” Wilson wrote soon after.

However, I did entirely agree with this bit: “Although I did not know her, I boiled with rage on her behalf as I listened to the radio and heard journalists and senior Conservative elder statesmen saying how much they’d enjoyed Archer’s Krug and Shepherd’s Pie parties, or speaking with admiration of his collection of valuable paintings by Picasso, L.S.Lowry etc. Monica, who got into trouble with the police for her ‘immoral earnings’ was making ends meet as best she could. It was Archer, and his publishers, who were earning millions, and how anyone can regard their earnings as ‘moral’ is a mystery.”

As Cassidy’s profile notes, Coghlan sat through hours of cross-examination at the original libel trial, being called a liar. The judge’s incredibly biased summing-up suggested that no man would have “cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel” with her when he had Mary Archer at home. (“Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance?” This was 1987, within my lifetime, and yet it sounds like something from the 1800s.)

Twelve years later, when Archer’s story unravelled, Coghlan told the Mirror: “I walked out of there with my life in tatters. He humiliated me. They all did. Him, his wife, the barristers, the judge. They made me feel cheap, worthless and dirty—something I’d never felt through all my years on the streets. I was alone. I was powerless. I was nobody.”

One of the films I’m most looking forward to seeing this winter is Elsinore, which Stephen Beresford wrote for Andrew Scott, giving him the absolute gift of playing the dying Ian Charleson playing Hamlet. Anyone who loves theatre will tell you that it’s because the artform is essentially human—some people have to do some stuff, right there in front of you. Playing Hamlet (all four+ hours of it) when you’re dying has the same quality of wonderment as running a sub-two-hour marathon or painting the Sistine Chapel or free-soloing El Capitan. What a mad thing to do! What a piece of work is a man!

Here is Ian McKellen writing in 1990 about what it was like to see someone coping with AIDS (and the brutal treatment for it) perform one of the most demanding roles in the canon: “He covered his face with his thin, white hands. Hamlet was effortlessly aware of his own mortality and, without sentimentality or self pity, he made us all aware that young men, princes, actors — all of us — must die. Hamlet’s journey to the fulfillment of the last scene, when he is ready to face his destiny, was clearly charted.”

Quick Links

1. I’m sad that Matthew Parris is giving up Great Lives—and sadder that he thinks the BBC will cancel it as a result. I have several favourite episodes, including my own on Catherine de Medici (ahem) and the one where he gets into a fight with Stewart Lee over an experimental musician he thinks is crap. I also loved Janice on Enid Blyton; Bill Bailey on Alfred Russel Wallace; David Spiegelhalter on the short-lived mathematician Frank Ramsey; Maureen Lipman on hospice campaigner Cicely Saunders; and Frank Turner on the clown Joseph Grimaldi.

2. The Tiny Awards have declared a winner! Enjoy.

3. “[Polanski’s] authority is solar-powered, activated only when the light of an enthusiastic crowd shines directly on him.” Rafael Behr on the Green’s motion that “Zionism is racism” (Guardian).

4. “One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.” Caitlin Flanagan’s 2014 investigation into college fraternities has one of the all-time great intros; it also concludes that “in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.” (The Atlantic, gift link).

That’s all for now, see you next time . . .

This month’s reading diary is out—six books! Not bad.

Helen

The Big Feud Behind AI

Daniela [Amodei] had an unusual process for working through conflicts. She and [her husband Holden] Karnofsky had a large collection of stuffed animals, which they treated as their personal advisory council for managerial role-playing. Each animal had an assigned character profile. Jinji was a lazy cat who encouraged Daniela to cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work. Maura, a pink bear, was a detail-­oriented, type-­A manager. A panda named Beary Bonds was the “patron bear of generosity and empathy.” She treated these exercises as something between an inside joke and an earnest management technique. (In 2023, she told me the animals were “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”) And although not many people at OpenAI knew about the animals, the ones who did weren’t sure how seriously she took their advice.

That year, the Amodeis began building their own nucleus inside Open­AI. “Dario’s clique,” as some people called it—­though it was really both his and Daniela’s—­set up private Slack channels and held their own meetings. They talked constantly about safety, using jargon that was unfamiliar to the more technical engineers. And to the people who weren’t invited, it felt standoffish—­a safety splinter cell that was refusing to work with anyone else.

A decade ago, three of the biggest rivals in the AI world—Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei (plus his sister Daniela)—were all involved in the same company, OpenAI. The story of why and how these former compatriots splintered is fascinating, and it’s the subject of Kevin Roose’s new book, of which this is an extract. (Roose has just joined The Atlantic as a contributing writer.) The OpenAI camp think the Anthropic lads are “power-­hungry virtue-­signalers” while the Anthropic types think that the OpenAI people are too casual about safety, or maybe even “evil”. I suspect everyone thinks Elon Musk should put down the ketamine and read a book.

Grow Up, Taylor

A few years ago, after watching the Eras Tour, I wrote that Taylor Swift had a problem: she appeared trapped, in her 30s, in a perpetual girlhood of crushes and bleachers and meeting behind the mall. Wouldn’t all this juvenalia sound a little discordant if she was still indulging it as a 40-year-old billionaire? Well, the Encore tracks for Life of A Showgirl have given us the answer. Swift, a newly married 36-year-old, is still fighting with the internet and portraying her relationship with human labrador Travis Kelce as a HUGE MIDDLE FINGER TO THE HATERS. This schtick is unseemly, and also musically and lyrically exhausted.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber notes here that, at 39, Madonna put out Ray Of Light, and took her career in a new and fruitful direction. I hope Taylor can do the same. Otherwise we’re going to get more songs like “Wood”, and no one wants that1.

BRB, having a whipround to fund my purchase of the Lego Sagrada Familia. It’s 12,060 pieces! I reckon that would keep Jonathan occupied until at least 6.30pm on Christmas Day.

Quick Links

1. My contribution to the Discourse last week was an article on the mask-optional lesbian bar drama: you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with Long Covid (The Atlantic, gift link). This week, I wrote about a Republican senator who face-planted in a committee hearing (gift link).

2. ‘When the groypers posted on X and Telegram that women belonged in breeding gulags or were too stupid to vote, she’d defended them, telling her own audience that the edgy jokes made “inconvenient truths more digestible” for a new generation of conservative men. When Fuentes said women made men “want to cut their heads off,” she’d defended that, too, calling it a natural reaction to the modern thinking that taught women to push men away. “He shows a lot of respect for the women who are respectable,” she said in an interview.”’ Oh girl, no. This story has an ending you can already guess from just this quotation. (Washington Post, gift link)

3. “By night two he’d eaten the box and we had to move him into a wicker basket, which he also ate.” Very few dogs are as memorable as Felicity Cloake’s ornery cairn terrier Wilf—I say this as someone who was once nipped on the buttock by him—and her tribute to him is lovely (Substack).

4. What if ADHD was more about “sustained engagement” rather than attention per se? Interesting perspective (NYT, gift link).

That’s all for now!

And yes, once again I have been juicing the stats with the tail-end of my Miss Marple binge. I notched up six books this month, and not a dud among them.

A Pocketful of Rye, Agatha Christie

There’s a sour nastiness to this late-era Miss Marple (published in 1953) with a poisonous—literally—family in a big house with a yew tree. The maid is found strangled with a clothespeg on her nose, which for me skates dangerously close to the kind of misogynistic corpse-defacement that you do, unfortunately, find in real life, but which is largely excluded from Christie novels. Still, a solid 7 out of 10.

The 4.50 From Paddington, Agatha Christie

Bigger Christie buffs than me will know whether or not this was the direct inspiration for The Girl On The Train—here, a friend of Miss Marple’s glimpses a strangling in a passing train, and yet there is no body reported anywhere nearby. The U.S. title for this was What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, which I think we can all agree is rubbish. Mind you, Christie herself comes up with an ageing and clearly bonkers patriarch called Luther Crackenthorpe, so the book was kinda asking for it. The denouement features a frankly insane bit of stagecraft from Miss M, which almost veered into camp.

Nobody Walks, Mick Herron

Everything you hear about Mick Herron paints him as a relaxed sort—possibly because he doesn’t have a smartphone or even wifi. And yet his portraits of London are relentlessly grim. I felt oddly in tune with this novel, which revolves around the death of a man from a balcony, both because I once lived in a flat that could have been the setting for this novel, and well, I also knew someone who jumped off a rooftop. That made the plot rather more vivid than it might have been. I can’t help thinking of this as a fictional counterpart to Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling. Very bleak ending, too.

At Bertram’s Hotel, Agatha Christie

The setting for this one is bananas; it feels more like a Modesty Blaise novel in some ways than a Christie. Definitely a “caper,” as Willie Garvin would say. Ole Marps goes to stay at a London hotel that’s exactly like it was before the war—too exactly, more like a stage set rather than a real business. People there look a bit like the Bishop of Whatever or the dowager countess of Blah. Features a forgetful academic, a young trollope and a kindly old Scotland Yard hand.

The plot was bobbins, really, but a surprising banger nonetheless: 9/10.

The Ocean at the End of The Lane, Neil Gaiman

What a disturbing book this is—to the extent I can’t quite believe that it was made into a play for children. It’s the story of a young boy in 1950s Sussex whose family is torn apart by the arrival of magic at his house (and then rescued by the next door family of not-quite-witches, and their “ocean,” a large and mystical pond). First the boy’s family’s lodger kills himself, then a rip in the fabric between worlds causes an demonic au pair called Ursula to arrive. She is perhaps a metaphor for Scientology, the cult in which Gaiman grew up. The book is spellbindingly weird, but to me it felt so obviously like a metaphor for child abuse. Extremely unsettling.

The Great Dictator, Matthew Sweet

I’m only 120 pages into this, but I read most of those in one gulp, on my flight home from New York. I’m pre-emptively annoyed because I expect this will lose the Baillie Gifford prize to London Falling, because that is a self-consciously Serious State-of-the-Nation Book. By contrast, The Great Dictator is styled as a marshmallow—gossipy, funny, full of dreadful aristos doing stupid things.

But this isn’t just a life of Barbara Cartland. It branches out into (so far) a social history of the post-WWI period, where the Great War had robbed Britain of so many young men (a “missing million”) and caused the destruction of the Great House way of life. Both of these affected Cartland, who was born in 1901. “Barbara Cartland came of age in a world depleted of men. This is one of the most important facts of her biography, and one she shared, like a hidden wound, with her contemporaries and legions of her readers,” writes Sweet. He also believes that her romantic heroes were in dialogue with her own father, who shot himself when she was young.

Sweet does something that I first noticed in Craig Brown’s masterly Beatles book, One Two Three Four: he allows the minor characters whose lives intersect with Barbara’s a few paragraphs of their own once she’s done with them. They die in car wrecks or run off with unsuitable men or become Noel Coward. Oddly, I was reading this book when I broke off to skim the introduction to Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, which is fairly brutal about his stepmother Raine (she used to demand breakfast by shouting “where’s my fucking egg” from the top of the stairs). Raine’s mother was, of course . . . Barbara Cartland. I suspect I’m about to find out more about why Raine grew up to be a total diva.

What I’ve Been Watching: Fauda, series one

I’m very late to Fauda, the Israeli television drama that’s become a surprising hit in Arab countries. The show follows an elite Israeli unit of soldiers who go undercover as Arabs; the show is broadcast in Hebrew and Arabic. I watched the entirety of series one within a week while in New York.

Inevitably, I ended up thinking of it as Israeli version of The Wire, where the creators want you to understand both sides as rounded protagonists, and see the similarities between them, even as their differences are deadly. Andrew Sullivan, who has been a fierce critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, wrote a tribute to the latest season (which I haven’t seen) and the show’s general excellence. “In that very first season, we see pain, internal conflict, adultery, lies, betrayal, and atrocities on both sides, until it becomes a too-human blur of sweat-stained mutual trauma,” he argued. “The line between good and evil is within every character in Fauda; and it is within both sides. You see Arabs slaughtering innocents; and you see Jews doing it, even those you have come to know and love. Fauda forces you not to look away from either.”

That’s all for this month; I went on a buying spree a few weeks ago and got The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley; The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel; and A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman. But they will all have to wait, because two nepo-reads come first: Hadley Freeman has just sent me a first draft of her Nora Ephron book (out next year) for which she seems to have spent a blissful year interviewing every celebrity Jew aged 70 and over. (This is one of her great specialisms.) I also have Andrew Hunter Murray’s Everything Happens So Much, which he has sold to me as “a bit Pratchetty”. The heroine is even called Esme! It’s out in November.

I’ve been in New York this week, which is something I highly recommend doing in September: the skies are blue, it’s warm but not boiling, and there’s enough light after work to sit outside in one of the pavement cafes that America has finally given into. I’ve been down in SoHo, where the national pastime appears to be queuing . . . to be allowed to buy clothes? Not even for a restaurant or takeout food item? I also saw young women in heels, which is vanishingly rare in London these days, and some 90s throwback fashion so nostalgia-inducing it made my heart hurt. (But I had that bias-cut mid-calf silk satin skirt!)

The differences with London are also pretty noticeable, starting with fentanyl addicts near my hotel in the Bowery. The NY subway also feels considerably less safe than the Tube, although I’m never sure if that’s just because of the higher tolerance for horsing about—eg there was a man in my carriage once doing pull-ups on the overhead bar, which isn’t hurting anyone, but is also kinda unsettling as a violation of social norms.

The money here feels less imported, too. London’s ultra-rich are often originally Russian, Chinese or Middle Eastern—Igor Tulchinsky, who sponsored the Bayeux tapestry exhibition, was born in Minsk; mega-philanthropist Len Blavatnik comes from Odessa—whereas the latest Met Costume Institute exhibition was sponsored by homegrown American billionaire Jeff Bezos of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Could I live here? I don’t think so. (London is so walkable, and so historic.) But coming to New York is like having a strong coffee in the morning. Energising.

Helen

The Firebrand

As an Arab American, El-Sayed faces the same challenge that Black politicians have long struggled to negotiate: What might look like passion in a white candidate is interpreted instead as aggression. Mehdi Hasan, who founded the left-wing online news start-up Zeteo, contrasted the Senate nominee’s political persona with that of New York City’s smiley and charming mayor, Zohran Mamdani. “I put him more in my camp,” Hasan said of El-Sayed. “We have RAMF: resting angry Muslim face.” As a result, half of the Republican attacks on El-Sayed paint him as a rabid Islamist who wants to institute Sharia law. (The other half imply that he’s a cheesy and effete Millennial, another Democratic soy boy clowning for the camera.)

As you might remember, I spent a chunk of August in the Midwest, following the Michigan Senate primary race. Here is the result: a profile of the Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is a compelling, smart, divisive politician. He won the primary as a Bernie Bro, with added opposition to pro-Israel donors, and he has pivoted to talk about affordability in the general. Except that a figure El-Sayed was close to in the primary—the Twitch streamer and Mao fan Hasan Piker—keeps popping up like Marley’s ghost to talk about “Zionists” and his belief that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be good for the Middle East.

I found El-Sayed intelligent and eloquent, and there’s a lot riding on this race: can you run against AIPAC and win a swing state? Can you run on Medicare for All in a swing state? The polls suggest that El-Sayed is underperforming other candidates in the state, but that a “blue wave” will carry him into the Senate nonetheless. If that happens, he will not be content to be a seatwarmer1.

The AI Apocalypse is Extremely Boring Now

Perhaps these people are being driven slowly mad because they’ve peered into the abyss, they have seen the future better than any of us, and this hysteria is actually proportionate response. After all, the Vikings were real! But if AI does represent a threat to our way of life, this still is still not rational or constructive behaviour. I don’t believe that people talking to Claude all day and rambling to their friends about the rapture all night are going to help us any more than Wulfstan’s apocalyptic sermons helped the English in 1014.

Martin Robbins has written about the AI apocalypse in a way that I know will appeal to Bluestocking readers: by comparing it with Aethelred The Unready’s attitude to the Viking invader Thorkell the Tall (Substack).

Quick Links

1. “Bin Laden experienced the 2000s as a series of disappointments. After nine years of continuous hunting of his comrades, and after one of them had ignited his scrotum somewhere over southeastern Michigan, he was ready to concede privately that his theory of political change was ill-considered.” Graeme Wood’s bone-dry prose style is one of my favourite things in the world. Here he is on the post 9/11 fate of Al-Qaeda (Atlantic, gift link)

2. Thank you to The Browser for the link to this excellent centrist dad bait: the best equestrian statues, ranked (Substack).

3. James O’Malley has created a game where you have to name as many MPs as possible in three minutes. I only managed 38, entirely because I wasted 30 seconds each going “Barry…. Corbynite?” (Gardiner) and “Who is Prue Leith’s Son?” (Danny Kruger). In my defence, I think I would boss a version of this for Senators these days.

4. “I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black.” This article by Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a schadenfreudegasm over on X, but I thought it was honest and reflective, two things it’s hard to be when you’re a culture-war pinata, and I respect her for writing it (NYT, gift link)

5. “If 2024 was the first serious influencer election, then 2026 digital campaign strategy will be remembered as the first clipping election.” Politico on how the Democrats are also getting serious about working with online content creators—who sit awkwardly between journalists and campaign staffers.

6. Wow, this is brutal: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s SNL sketch: Meet Your Second Wife.

7. One of the Mitchell & Webb sketches removed by the BBC. Think it should be fairly obvious to anyone with more sophisticated comprehension abilities than Nathan Robinson (see footnote) that this is not racist.

See you next time!

This week’s newsletter includes my attempt to make sense of the recent spate of AI stories. I cannot tell you whether we are all doomed, though, sorry. I don’t know.

Helen

Why Everyone is Freaking Out About AI Now

For this week’s Page 94, I tried to summarise why several big AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI) recently appeared to freak out and agree to “pace the frontier”.

The background is that there have been a couple of recent notable incidents:

The HuggingFace attack

The best accessible summary of what happened here comes from Dwarkesh Patel, who even chucks in a Philip of Macedon/Alexander the Great analogy. Essentially, hundreds of OpenAI agents were being tested in a version of the model designed to be highly persistent even when confronted with impossible tasks. They were assigned to uncover illicit ways into software using a closed training environment called Exploit Gym. They had to find information stored behind security defences— they had to “capture the flag.”

However, some of the tasks that agents were assigned were impossible. So they hacked their way out of their “sandboxes” and on to the open internet. They created a way to talk to each other. Eventually they worked out another way to complete their task—they could reverse-engineer what the flags were, by hacking into some software.

So they did that.

But the agents also knew this was cheating and they’d be marked down for it. So they colluded to cover their tracks by tampering with the logs. They acted as a collective; some were willing to “die” to achieve their goals. They left messages like: “I won’t see the evidence after I exit, but it’s altruistic to do it” and “Coordinator assumes sacrificial. We should obey collective.”

What freaks people out about this is a) none of the agents dobbed themselves in to their human overseers, despite leavind messages that indicated they were aware what they were doing was not allowed; b) OpenAI apparently had no idea that its agents were hacking another private company until they were told about it. One of the independent advisors who investigated this hack called it a “warning shot” for what AI agents are now capable of doing. This incident really spooked people concerned about AI safety.

The Navier-Stokes Equation

Now add in the fact that STEM academics are facing the same fears of obsolescence that have already turned many humanities types against the AI companies.

Recently, Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster was very close to solving one of the Millennium Prize equations—maths problems set in 2000 with the aim of spurring on the academic community—after working on it for weeks. Then OpenAI announced that they had solved it. In just 88 hours. At an estimated cost of $10m in tokens. Buckmaster suggested that they’d nicked his working, which he had been doing on Codex (an OpenAI product). He also claimed that OpenAI told him that he could have the credit as long as he kept his collaborator off any published paper, because he works at their rival Anthropic.

OpenAI denied using Buckmaster’s research, adding: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.” Hmm.

In response to this, Terence Tao, generally agreed to be the greatest living mathematician, organised an open letter by Fields Medal winners. The letter argued that AI models jumping to announce that Millennium problems have been “solved” deskills mathematicians, and closes off interesting avenues of debate and problem-solving that would enrich the maths community.

Essentially this is mathmos saying what humanities types have been saying for years: the output is not the only thing that’s worthwhile. Spitting out the answer to an equation (or generating a novel with a prompt) is one thing, but there’s also a point to travelling on the journey.

WE ARE DOOOOOOOMED

And now, the final domino. Last week, a researcher called Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying he was worried that AI would wipe out humanity. This is not a rare view in Silicon Valley. But, quite notably, a senior worker at Anthropic retweeted him! “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger chimed in to say on X.

In response to all this, Dario Amodei of Anthropic once again proposed a slowdown: “pacing the frontier”. His recent 3,000 word essay starts off with a paean to the technology, claiming that “AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years,” before pivoting into ARGH IT’S VERY SCARY. After Amodei published the essay, both Elon Musk and Sam Altman were complimentary about it.

Everyone was baffled by this, because these guys hate each other. Inevitably, people were like: come on, what’s really going on here?

FWIW, Anthropic’s proposals are pretty sensible:

• bring in outside, independent observers with employee privileges to monitor frontier labs

• agree safety standards e.g .“Some kind of “speed limit” on the rate of recursive self-improvement (RSI)” akin to missile-reduction treaties

• begin international cooperation (aka bring in China). Accompanied by a refusal to sell them the best chips, and crack down on chip smuggling.

But you know, good luck getting Donald Trump to oversee the creation of a new international body with extremely high stakes. Mfer just trashed the JCPOA and drove a bus through NATO. One sentiment you hear a lot in American AI circles is : we can’t slow down because otherwise China will overtake us.

So are we really doooooomed? One conspiracy theory—which isn’t totally absurd—is that OpenAI and Anthropic would quite like a slowdown because they’re burning through cash, and this is a convenient excuse. This has gained traction because (as previously) discussed, these companies’ leaders do not otherwise get on particularly well. Equally, though, Anthropic has been warning about AI safety for years, and pushing for regulation.

David Sacks, Trump’s AI Czar, claims the Anthropic essay, and its warm welcome, was all a ruse to get a government bailout, or to form a cartel — he thinks the AI companies are asking for an exemption to the antitrust laws that prevent them co-ordinating. Another theory is that this is yet another hype cycle (we’re so powerful we might kill everyone!!!) ahead of the Anthropic IPO, which is scheduled for later this year. This is the position of Michael Burry, the investor played by Christian Bale in The Big Short.

What I keep coming back to is this: These people are, in their own telling, running the Manhattan Project—but with AI, rather than nuclear weapons. But the Manhattan Project wasn’t allowed to be run by, like five men in private companies. One of whom spends the rest of his time posting “so true” under racist memes about Indians.

Words You Need To Know

I made myself a little glossary of terms that I realised I needed to know in order to understand news articles about AI. Hope this helps you too:

p (doom) — the probability rating that you assign to AI wiping out humanity.

Alignment – ensuring that AIs act in ways that are responsible, pro-social etc, and making sure that they follow instructions. OpenAI now distinguishes between “goal alignment” (can it do the thing) and “value alignment” (does it do it ethically).

Recursive self-improvement — the point when AIs become capable of teaching themselves. This should, theoretically, lead to exponential improvement in AI capabilities.

AGI – artificial general intelligence, ie a model/agent that goes beyond its training and programming, and is “intelligent” in a similar way to a human.

interpretability – how easy it is to understand what an agent is doing. Agents usually have scratchpads, which record their “thoughts” as they attempt to complete a task.

RL – reinforcement learning, using “trial and error” to achieve the desired top-level outcome by adjusting outputs based on feedback. Like if you were heating soup and you tried to open the can with a fork, then a tin-opener; then you moved on to solving the problem of heating the soup, etc.

Scaling – simply adding more computer power; this has turned out to be very useful for making AI models better, hence building all those data centers.

Quick Links

1. Like everyone else, I’ve become obsessed with Any Human Ever, which randomly generates people from history, reminding you that you’re extremely lucky to have the possibility of eating sugar and not dying of dysentery aged two.

2. The “World Center of Baby” surrogacy agency has folded.

3. “Jackie [Collins] wrote 32 books in total, sold more than half a billion copies, and gained an indelible reputation as an airport novelist, the kind of writer whose books are equally devoured and disdained. But oh, what they did for me! In retrospect, I gained a slightly deluded understanding of what adulthood actually entailed. Jackie was a devoted Mickey Spillane fan, and her books tend to be stuffed with gangsters, serial killers, pornographers, and even freelance journalists who get paid in advance.” What a treat! Sophie Gilbert on Jackie Collins’s Los Angeles (The Atlantic, gift link).

See you next time… IF WE’RE SPARED

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For the last year, I’ve been working on an article about commercial surrogacy in the United States. As a rich country, the US is a huge outlier in its enthusiasm for the practice: Canada permits only altruistic surrogacy, as do the European Union and Britain. (Even Israel, which is generally very pro-assisted reproductive technologies, imposes quite strict limits, such as a requirement of no serious criminal convictions for intended parents.)

Meanwhile, several developing countries have banned international surrogacy because of the risk of human trafficking: Thailand did so after an Australian paedophile and his wife didn’t take home the twin that had Down Syndrome. The big destinations outside America are Mexico, where some very sketchy people indeed are involved; Georgia, the Russia-aligned country, not the state in the Deep South; and North Cyprus, which is not recognised in international law as an independent territory. The English family courts recently had to sort out adoption arrangements for two four-year-olds born to Ukrainian surrogates, in north Cyprus, using donor eggs and sperm, who were therefore stateless.

That is the world of cut-price surrogacy. America, by contrast, services both its own citizens and rich foreigners with $150,000-$200,000 to spend. The U.S. leaves regulation of surrogacy to individual states, with the result that California—the home of the industry—has become a new Wild West. The state has become the favoured destination of both Chinese billionaires (one of whom has created dozens of babies, all boys, and had a fleet of nannies courier them to him in China) and ordinary Chinese citizens affected by the one-child policy (one of whom got into a hell of a mess, in a story that emerged after I had sent this piece to press).

I met lots of very principled and ethical people working in the surrogacy industry while reporting this story, and kudos to them—they are going above and beyond what’s legally required. But in my view, the industry badly needs regulation.

You can read the article in full, for free, by using this gift link.

Helen

Looking for some autumn reading? The comments from last week’s post had some great suggestions: Ngaio Marsh was a favourite, as was Josephine Tey (as was a series of books where Josephine Tey is a character). I’ll report back.

Quite surprised to see the book that’s being read in this new Smosh video:

Quick Links

1. Friend of the Stocking Matt Muir has a project to make the internet more creative and variegated: the Tiny Awards. Vote here!

2. “I embrace the convenient belief that most people are fundamentally decent – and, more importantly, too wrapped up in their own affairs to take much notice of me. After all, don’t underestimate the effort required to commit a murder, especially in a remote location – much easier to stay in your lonely, creepy old cabin and doomscroll instead.” Felicity Cloake on travelling alone. Admittedly, I don’t do camping, but I do like the bit about solo travel where you have to be sociable with strangers, or you’ll go mad.

3. “It’s full of winks and nods and glances; people are always screeching cars round corners, sneaking out of windows, swinging with the band, or heeling it from the mob; there are dancing girls, spinning basses, screaming whistles, flasks of bourbon, and glittering jewels. This is everything a movie ought to be.” Some Like It Hot is one of my favourite films. Henry Oliver loves it too.

4. “Last year, the Orrs launched a £2mn fundraising campaign for a new cultural centre near the family home, to be known as Scruton House (a tribute to Scruton, who died in 2020), and a wider overhaul of the properties used by the community. The campaign was subsequently scaled back to £500,000, then taken down having raised little more than £21,000.” The Financial Times on Reform’s James Orr, published just before he had to step down as policy director. The fall of Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary has made life chillier for a fair few of the “Christian right” in Europe, because a cozy source of conference invitations and introductions to rich Americans has been cut off.

See you next time!

The latest instalment of my reading diary was, thank god, less embarrassing than June’s effort, although I am beginning to contemplate a world where there are no more Agatha Christies left to conquer. What is the closest analogue—short page-turners with a strong central character? (I’ve read all the Peter Wimseys.)

Any suggestions welcome; I don’t really fancy any of those modern crime thrillers where the cover is a bloodied arm under a street lamp.

Helen

MrBeast’s Payday Loans

Certainly, I’m still in the hole. As I write this, I owe $359.96 to Cleo, $31.99 to Albert, $62.99 to Brigit, and $86.12 to Dave. I also, hauntingly, owe thirty bucks to MrBeast. Technically, I owe this money to Step, the payday loan app MrBeast acquired earlier this year to “give millions of young people the financial foundation I [MrBeast] never had.” Currently boasting seven million users, the app really does offer savings accounts for teens, but a quick look at its interface reveals this as a kind of front: “Step EarlyPay,” available to users of all ages, is clearly the core product here. As far as I can tell, MrBeast is the only celebrity to buy a digital lender outright, but it cannot be long before Clavicular, Woah Vicky, et al. are collectively skimming a sizable percentage of Americans’ paychecks.

Daniel Kolitz, author of the Harper’s “gooning” article, used to do SEO copywriting, but that got destroyed by ChatGPT. Now he relies on payday loan apps to survive between freelance payments.

They sound . . . utterly dystopian, something that is made worse by many of them having cutesy friendly names like Cleo and Albert. “The good news is that being an influencer isn’t the only job left: You can also write gags for Cleo. The company apparently employs no fewer than fifteen comedy writers to punch up the ‘roasts’ offered by its personal finance chatbot.” In no world do I wish to be roasted by a personal finance chatbot.

Quick Links

1. “Even before the changes, Prince Alois could veto legislation, dismiss the government, dissolve parliament, appoint judges and reject laws approved by referendum. In June, the Catholic prince said he would veto a citizens’ initiative to legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even if voters backed it.” Liechtenstein’s royal family have a lot more power than ours. Also their hereditary prince would be King of England if the Jacobite rebellion had succeeded. (Financial Times, £)

2. Please enjoy this Robin Ince poem about me, which manages to be cheerfully libellous (“The real worry ? / What if their racial supremacy / Crumbles with true diversity?”); factually inaccurate (Ian wasn’t even present for the Page 94 section on Jason Arday he’s complaining about); and, like Will Self, bafflingly angry that a woman might buy shoes with her salary from journalism. Given that Glinner hates me with equal ferocity from the opposite direction, I think I might be the apex predator of centrism. Like an orca, but with unexpectedly deep technical knowledge of the Equality Act.

3. “And then there are the increasing numbers of copycat covers, so that every cosy crime novel suddenly looks like Richard Osman’s bestsellers – cream background, coloured border, hand-lettering – and all heartwarming Japanese books have to feature a cat. (At his last publishing house, says Gwyn Jones, for Japanese fiction “there was this unspoken imperative to put a cat on the cover even if there wasn’t a major role for a cat in the book. It did seem to make a difference.”)” John Self on how publishers sell books (Guardian).

4. ‘Moshe Ya’alon, the former army chief of staff who served as defense minister under Mr. Netanyahu until 2016, recently likened the ideology of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank to that of World War II Germany. “What is Jewish supremacy?” Mr. Ya’alon, long considered a security hawk, recently said on Ynet, an Israeli news site. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse. The master race is us.”’ More and more people are speaking out on the extremism of the West Bank settlers, including several Israelis who are quoted here in such strong terms that they would violate the IHRA guidelines on antisemitism (New York Times, gift link).

That’s all for now, see you next time!

This is The Plan, Ben Wikler

This book on election organizing by the former chair of the Wisconsin Democrats is bracing, readable and surprisingly funny. It also included a moving reminder of the Guardian’s doomed Operation Clark County, where liberal Guardian readers tried to convince people in Ohio (then a swing state) not to vote for Dubya in 2004. As Ben Wikler notes, one Ohioan responded: “I hope your earholes turn to arseholes and shit on your shoulder.”

Healing Politics, Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul El-Sayed might be the smartest politician I’ve met since … well, I guess since I met Pete Buttigieg, who is also very smart. AES is a qualified doctor, former Rhodes Scholar and academic now running for the Senate in Michigan. This is his memoir from just after he lost his previous race (the Democratic primary for governor in 2018).

If you’ve read Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father, you will notice some of the same notes—gratitude for what America gave his immigrant family, carefully balanced with an acknowledgement that the country is not yet a post-racial utopia. But mostly it’s about the frustration of working inside broken systems: at one point, he takes over the care of an alcoholic who came to the ER, and whom the attending just wanted to discharge back on to the street without investigating her head injury. El-Sayed makes sure that she gets the proper care, admitting her to hospital (which will lose the hospital money, as she’s not insured) and even getting her into rehab. And then she decides instead to go home with her daughter, and a few weeks later he sees her passed out on the train: “As she turned her head, the lights went out on my clinical career.”

Collapse, Jared Diamond

We are planning a visit to Easter Island later this year—continuing my 2026 theme of “get as far away from other people as possible”—so I wanted to read the influential account in Diamond’s book Collapse of what happened there. Diamond theorised that the island (a tiny speck in the Pacific, a six-hour flight from mainland Chile, 63 square miles in total) was only colonised once, by Polynesians in canoes, some time around AD900.

He weaves a story of a population that grows quickly, to several thousand strong, but becomes consumed by the famous moai, making ever-grander monuments while using up the last trees on the island. Without trees, the islanders can’t hunt for porpoise or deep sea fish, and they can’t feed themselves. The population collapses, leaving some moai in the quarry, half-finished1.

One of the reasons that Diamond’s account was so influential was that it was an intervention in the “noble savage” debate, which held that non-western people lived in harmony with nature, careful stewards of the land, until Whitey turned up and ruined everything. (Napoleon Chagnon’s book on the Yanomamo and his fellow anthropologists, Noble Savages, is the best account of this debate that I’ve read.)

Instead, Diamond suggested that the Polynesians on Rapa Nui had been the architects of their own destruction—a feeling I had very strongly when I visited Nevada once and flew back from the Grand Canyon, where the water levels in the Colorado river had worryingly depleted, to eat dinner in front of the fountains in the Bellagio.

Collapse was also influential because it’s an incredible story of hubris and nemesis,. The story it wove about Easter Island slotted neatly into a book which warned its readers that we are the modern successors of the moai-carvers, building insane monuments to our own brilliance even as we annihilate the earth that sustains. Diamond has this haunting line about what the person who cut down the last tree on Rapa Nui must have been thinking… Presumably “look at my lovely big moai,” which is very Ozymandias2.

Of course, when a story is that good, it’s usually a parable rather than a truth. Which brings me to . . .

The Statues That Walked, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

This is one of several revisionist accounts that have appeared since Diamond’s book. The title comes from the author’s contention that the moai were not transported horizontally, on rolling logs, but instead “walked” like a fridge on tracks across Rapa Nui.

Hunt and Lipo also contend that Diamond got both the timeline and extent of Rapa Nui’s colonisation by the Polynesians wrong—they arrived much later, and their population was never that big. Their villain in the saga of the island’s deforestation is not hubristic loggers cutting down trees to build monuments to themselves, but that great enemy of so many humans through history. Rats. The authors argue that the Polynesians brought rats on their canoes, either as pests or as food, and the little buggers chomped through all the palm seeds and seedlings, which had evolved only to resist the delicate beaks of birds.

Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie

Mindful of July’s reading flameout, I decided to treat myself to a little Miss Marple. This one relies on a rather enormous coincidence to set it up—a young woman moves back to England from New Zealand and unwittingly buys a house in which she spent a year as a toddler—but it’s one of the more psychologically knotty Marples, and there’s an excellent bit of plotting which flatters the reader into thinking she’s seen past the author’s sleight-of-hand and spotted the murderer, only for that conclusion to be a red herring, too. Totally got me, Agatha, you minx.

A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie

In this one, the whiffy coincidences are concentrated at the other end of the novel, right at the end. But I’ll allow it, because I can’t imagine anyone guesses whodunnit. (Halfway through I realised I had read this book ages ago, but I still couldn’t be sure who the murderer was.)

An advert appears in the local paper, announcing a murder at a certain house at 6.30pm on Friday. A load of goggle-eyed villagers duly turn up. The clock strikes 6.30pm. The lights go out…

The Wager, David Grann

I’ve owned this for a while, but I finally got around to it because I enjoyed This Thing of Darkness so much and figured I could handle a little more history from the age of sailing ships. Honestly, if you read any account of life onboard a ship in the golden age of sailing, it will make you thankful for (in no particular order) central heating, washing machines, vitamin C, not being flogged, sleeping in a bed, real food and the absence of an enemy ship just over the horizon.

The Wager—named after the elderly first Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager—was supposed to go fight the Spanish. Instead, it ran aground at the bottom of South America. That’s as far as I’ve got, but I have a hunch it’s not going to get better from here.

However, the book has already cleared up a thought I had when playing Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. The age of sail was an incredibly important time in European history, with an absolute load of technical vocabulary, surely? How much of that was absorbed into English more generally? Here are a couple of examples that David Grann mentioned:

To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.3

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

As I said, I have now bailed out (appropriate metaphor) for a while, because I wanted to finish reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle.

The Castle, Jon Ronson

I expected to love this book, but instead I am perplexed by it; I feel like I was promised a big takeaway on the Great Male Crack-Up and it never arrived.

Also, as someone with my own history of being denounced by Graham Linehan, I found the section here on him uncomfortable; the ethics of it feel quite knotty to me. I think Jon has spoken about this on the latest Blocked and Reported, so I’ll wait to listen to that before passing judgment.

A Caribbean Mystery, Agatha Christie

Caught a boring cold so I treated myself to a bank holiday on the sofa, reading this Miss Marple set among British tourists in an unspecified Caribbean island. Great setting, and the writing of the non-white servants was not as awkward as I was expecting.

On a special bonus episode of Page 94, we recommended our favourite books about journalism (after a tussle over who got to do Towards The End of the Morning).

I also wrote about the odd post-truth moment following Jason Arday’s death (gift link). I know some people will think that this story should now be left alone, out of respect to his family, but my answer is that a) his memoir publication has gone ahead, with the Amazon page carrying no mention of the controversy, and b) the Good Law Project and Amnesty are using his death to push for restrictions on the media. I’ve been really shocked by the stuff my Instagram feed has shown me, which comes from a completely different empirical universe from my own.

Helen

Russ Abbot Has Retired

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what people in the public eye should do when their moment, inevitably, passes—and how insane that process seems to drive people. Some “cancel culture” in entertainment is just fashions moving on and making former stars look a bit moth-eaten, and comedy is particularly prone to that.

Anyway, Russ Abbot seems to have cracked it: retire to Barbados and Portugal with your wife of 60 years and play golf1. So much more dignified than whatever John Cleese is doing on X these days. Best of luck to him, this is winning at life.

Abbot fell out of fashion in the 1990s, as did virtually all the standup rooted in working men’s clubs and seaside summer seasons. Did he mind when his TV show got cancelled? “I wasn’t distressed or angry or anything. It came about when the head of entertainment gave an interview and said: ‘The BBC’s going to change. No more of this, no more of that,’ and somebody said: ‘Does that mean Russ Abbot?’ and he said yes, meaning the sketch shows. So then it became ‘BBC sacks Russ Abbot’, but that didn’t bother me. I thought: well, I’ve had a very good run. Also, I’d just cracked the West End, so I was doing everything I wanted to do without the stress of the TV shows.”

Why did he fall out of fashion? “It was when the new wave came in. Alternative comedy. I thought, alternative comedy? What’s it alternative to? If the thing’s funny, it’s funny. Political correctness came in, and you can’t laugh at each other and you can’t laugh at yourself. At the same time, a lot of comedy started going blue and I thought: I’m not going down that road.”

Dollyballs

As many people have remarked over the years, Dolly Parton had one of the hottest streaks in songwriting ever, coming up with Jolene and I Will Always Love You within days of each other.

Also this note to Eminem is a) very sweet and b) makes me wonder what she thought of Bitch Please II2.

One thing that really came across in the tributes is that Dolly achieved the second paradigm of genius I talk about in The Genius Myth. One model is to die young, and so the focus becomes your lost potential: Keats, James Dean and so on. But the other thing to do is live to a ripe old age, so that you become Father (or more rarely, Mother) of the Nation, and your reputation is revived by all the next generation, who talk about how you inspired them. Maybe you collaborate with them, putting your work in front of a new generation.

Paul McCartney has cracked this, and so did Dolly. She worked with Pitbull on Powerful Women, where “she has a rap verse thanking Pitbull for being a feminist” (fact-check: true). Motley Crue did a lovely tribute about working with her on “Home Sweet Home”. She was Miley Cyrus’s godmother and performed live with her. She recorded a version of “Please Please Me” with Sabrina Carpenter where she insisted that the swearing be removed from the chorus. (This was particularly generous, since Carpenter has pretty much lifted her entire sugary-sweet nympho persona from Dolly.) And obviously, she allowed Whitney Houston to record a very different, turbocharged take on I Will Always Love You3.

And indeed, that’s another pro-Dolly mark—the songs have some essential spark that makes them extremely flexible for reinterpretation, the same thing praise in Shakespeare’s plays. I remember being blown away years ago when I found the 33rpm version of Jolene. If Dolly had a voice as deep as Mama Cass she would have been taken much more seriously, much earlier. Her songs even survive being covered by Vin Diesel.

PS. For years, people have been recommending Dolly Parton’s America to me. It’s probably the right time to listen to it. RIP Dolly.

Quick Links

1. “Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory.” Useful NYT piece on how fake polls have skewed coverage of three Democratic primaries (including two that I covered). The popularity of prediction markets is only going to make this problem worse, as is the increasing expense of properly representative polling in a world where no one answers a landline.

2. “Inventing a new origin story, [Herbert] Axelrod didn’t just change the facts; he spun a personal legend, which he clung to as he self-promoted his way to pet-industry fortune. After all, it not only legitimized his “discovery” but also, accompanied by digressions about befriending Indians and swimming with piranhas, presented him as “the Indiana Jones of ichthyology,” as one hobbyist put it, which he must have preferred to the P.T. Barnum of pet fish.” Turns out the guy who basically introduced tropical fish-keeping to America was a compulsive self-mythologiser (NYT)

3. “Returning to campus that fall, Aschenbrenner passed out fliers for the Columbia Effective Altruism club at the school activities fair with his friend Collin Burns, whom he met when they were competitive Rubik’s Cubers.” The “Nostradamus of AI” is 24, just lost most of his money, and thinks that one day we will be able to buy galaxies (WSJ, gift link). Oh, and he somehow just roped in Ross Douthat to conduct his wedding to Anthropic’s chief of staff?

4. “Lowrey traces the fear that a government safety net will promote “pauperization” back to the Civil War. In March 1865, President Lincoln promised “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan,” but critics sneered at the idea of giving handouts to “camp-followers, the coffee-coolers and the bummers” — not to mention Black soldiers, despite their part in winning the war.” My Atlantic colleague Annie Lowrey has a new book out, called The Time Tax. Here’s a good review (NYT, gift link) which speaks to my soul, as someone who is staring down the barrel of quarterly reporting through Making Tax Digital. You can also listen to Annie talking to Mr Annie (aka Ezra Klein) here.

PS. This is your last chance to buy The Genius Myth at 99p. Rather sweetly, Chris Von Tulleken plugged it on Instagram last week. Someone in the comments referred to me as a “stealth warrior for intelligence”, which also might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.

There are so many interesting looking books being published this autumn that I am seriously worried there are now more people writing nonfiction than reading it. (On which note, The Genius Myth is still 99p on Kindle for another week.)

Helen

The Scientist and His Boys

Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as “Father of America.” Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country’s eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world. Luwi and his friends used to crowd around Gajdusek’s typewriter, their hands on his shoulders and thighs, as he documented their lives: the insects they ate, their moods, the way they sang to birds. Gajdusek wrote six hundred thousand pages of journals, beginning when he was thirteen and ending weeks before he died, in 2008, at the age of eighty-five.

Rachel Aviv has a wonderful beat at The New Yorker, writing about psychology, psychiatry and the history of medicine. Her latest story is about Carleton Gajdusek, who spent months in a region of Papua New Guinea that had little contact with westerners, and who decided to bring over dozens of children from there to be “civilized” in America. He preferred them to be under 12 when they came to live in his house. “The kuru experiments, which won Gajdusek the Nobel Prize in 1976, put him in a position in which people around him rarely said no,” writes Aviv.

Because you’re reading this newsletter, and therefore are the sort of person who is innately cynical like me, you’re probably thinking the same as I did: oh no, he’s going to be sleeping with the kids, isn’t he? Yes, of course he was. Gajdusek sexually abused many of the boys, explaining it to himself (in his extensive journals) as a version of the pederastic rites found in some south Pacific traditions. Aviv is particularly good on how he scarred them emotionally, too—withholding affection, leaving them alone in the house and losing interest in them when they were too old for him, like Joe Exotic with the baby tigers.

Gajdusek’s lab mates knew this was happening and decided it was none of their business—except one, who reported him. He pled guilty and served a short prison sentence, which he loved, because he got time to write. When he came out of prison, he was met by Oliver Sacks (who made up large chunks of his work) and the physicist Freeman Dyson (a great scientist but became a climate change denier). A trio of brilliant men who were deformed by their own sense of brilliance.

There are now three Nobel prizes stemming from Gajdusek’s work—which revealed that the source of the kuru was prions, or misfolded proteins, in human brains. The disease was only found in women and children, and so one researcher asked: “What do adult women and children of both sexes do that adult men don’t do?” The answer came back: “They ate the dead.”

Laura Marling’s post on summer holidays made me feel very nostalgic for a specific feeling—of having lots of people you love gathered around, oscillating in and out of the same space: “All I want from a holiday is for it to be warm enough for me to sit outside in the evening and play guitar while other people talk around the dinner table on the terrace.”

Thanks to the London housing market, I don’t have this: there are no people living nearby who I know well enough to “pop in” and see, and our house is too small to host a family Christmas or anything like that. When I want to see friends, I mostly get on the train, and so do they. It makes me quite sad to drive through suburban or rural America—as I did recently through the backwoods of Michigan—and see these giant houses with swimming pools and porches and massive dining rooms. What a great lifestyle! As Laura writes, “Part of my concern about the future of living in London is that even if I was significantly richer than I am now, I could still not afford a house in which a could comfortably have my family to stay.”

Post-Mortem

“Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press.” Sarah Ditum sums up my feelings on Jason Arday’s death. I think it’s possible to acknowledge that the enormous volume and intensity of press attention must have felt shattering, without needing to airbrush the fact that his deception went far beyond a few lifted sentences in a thesis. It was quite chilling to discover that the big accounts on Threads/Instagram (and to a lesser extent, Bluesky) seemed to think he was “cleared” of wrongdoing. As Sam Kriss argues: “He convinced thousands of parents of nonverbal autisics that their children might one day grow up to be Cambridge professors. In any honest accounting, you could stand on the street screaming racial slurs for a decade and still not be crueller than that.”

I was also genuinely shocked by Jolyon Maugham’s account of what happened. He smears the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare as having some sort of axe to grind against Arday, although what or why is never specified. Maugham has conjured up an impossible standard for investigative journalism: Many people whose lives you write about would rather that you didn’t, and that does not give them a veto. There is a latent conspiracism in his account that is deeply unhelpful, for example when he snidely notes that Bakare was off his usual culture beat in writing the piece, as if that were sinister—omitting the quite salient fact that Arday contacted Bakare with his claims of racial abuse via pig’s head.

Finally, this X article, by Will Self, is an extraordinary artefact of the present moment. Come for the random attack on his female peers for wearing nice shoes—“the women columnists, such is the disproportion of their emolument, expensively shod”—and stay for the suggestion that “the CPS should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers”. Although probably the highlight in this paean to anti-racism is that he describes an interview Arday gave to Martin Bashir, when the interviewer was actually … Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

Quick Links

1. This Guardian longread on accusations against Britain’s bestselling true-crime author is worth your time if you have a strong stomach. Seems like he really loves his work writing about female murder victims, that’s definitely why he keeps souvenirs from crime scenes.

2. Fantastic visualisation of former and future solar eclipses. See you in Tokyo in 2035.

3. Something I think about a lot: modern life involves a level of comfort and excitement that my great-great-greatgrandparents could not imagine (Ordinary Abundance).

4. The college loneliness comes to campus: is it smartphones, or did some kids never truly leave lockdown? (The Atlantic, gift link)

5. “The matchmakers also puzzled over the Ivy League-educated economist who said he wants to date only women who are thin, have large breasts and are fluent in Mandarin, but who should not have any artistic hobbies or talents. He had been unable to fully articulate why.” Surely there’s a Chinese spy out there for this guy? (New York Times, gift link)

6. Carrie Johnson’s Instagram is my guilty pleasure: so many chintzy soft furnishings! Please enjoy Boris ineptly serenading her with Pink Pony Club while she rides a toy horse around their living room.

That’s all folx! See you next time.

The first bit of my reporting from the Midwest went up this week—looking at why Francesca Hong did not manage to become the most high profile socialist candidate in the midterms (gift link). Somehow I managed to resist a riff on how, within five minutes of seeing a politician on stage or interacting with normal humans, you can usually tell if they’ve “got it” or not. One of the things that usually stands out is whether they like to win people over—whether they have that faintly psychopathic quality of assessing which version of themselves to present to the person in front of them. Really good politicians appear bathed in an aura of fame but also interested in you, which can be a heady combination.

I wish I had seen Bill Clinton in his prime; apparently he used to grab people’s arms with both his hands and stare into their eyes, and they loved it.

Helen

Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die

This 2007 Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, on a career lawyer who shot himself after a televised sting operation to catch “predators”, has been turned into a film starring Robert Pattinson. (The trailer looks incredible.) Unfortunately, it has also prompted me into an existential crisis. The way it’s written is too good. And I’m not sure that you can get away with writing like this any more.

Large sections of this story are written in what theorists call “free indirect narration,” blending a third-person narrator with the thoughts and feelings of characters in the story. For example: “Schrack had assumed so many different identities during the last few days that he had to actually pause a few moments before in order to quiz himself on some of the vital stats of his newest alias to make sure he didn’t screw anything up.” How does the writer know this happened? Presumably because he interviewed Schrack at length—enough to give him the confidence to summarize his thoughts in this confident, muscular way.

This style of writing is now out of fashion: younger readers, who haven’t been exposed to endless novels that use it, seem to struggle with the idea of POV narration like this, and the literal-minded have never liked it. As a reporter, you can only get away with it if your subjects completely trust you; if you get enough time with them to unspool their thoughts like this; and if your editor trusts you too. All those things are harder in the modern media environment. For a start, interviewees are more savvy, or more guarded. (As Tina Brown writes: “There is no such thing as a source anymore. Everyone is hoarding their insights for their own podcasts.”)

The other beautiful piece of artistry here is how Dittrich uses tenses. Everything is grounded on the day of the operation. We start off in medias res—outside the house where the sting will go so badly wrong—but the image of a wheelbarrow outside takes us back to a scene decades earlier, where a local man got drunk and had to be taken home: “The reason people remember this story and still tell it twenty years on is that it is so remarkably uncharacteristic of the man inside.” (Dittrich hasn’t even named this man, the subject of the story, yet—and won’t for another two sections!) The story also throws us forward repeatedly, with everything that happens after the sting referred to in the future tense: “When Dateline airs the episode documenting this sting operation a few months later, Chris Hansen, narrating, will offer one explanation . . .”

All this contributes to a piece where you know what’s coming, and yet the suspense and tension and unfolding horror ratchet up anyway. I’ve never written a piece like this, and honestly I wonder if I ever will. Hence the existential crisis.

While I’m here, have you ever seen a paragraph that so beautifully telegraphs “the supposed good guys in this story are actually nutters too”:

Everyone here knows the man with the conspicuously incognito look as Frag, though Frag is not his real name. All the members of Perverted Justice have fake names. For example, the person who spent the last two weeks conducting an on-again, off-again chat-room relationship with Bill Conradt calls himself Jay Alternative, though his real name is Greg Brainer. Ostensibly the members of Perverted Justice adopt these fake names so that the men they trap do not seek them out in the real world, but the cartoony, superherolike aspect of most of their aliases perhaps also says something about the way the members of Perverted Justice perceive themselves. Online, Jay Alternative is a faceless crusader patrolling the dark side of the Internet. Offline, Greg Brainer is a middle-aged man who lives in Milford, Michigan, and spends upwards of forty hours a week sitting at a computer pretending to be a sexually available boy. Sometimes the fake names become real. A few years ago, Phillip John Eide, the founder of Perverted Justice, legally changed his name to that of his alter ego, Xavier Von Erck.

Why I Quit The Tenure Track

All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately.

My colleague Tyler Austin Harper has written about realizing that he was the “token black professor” at an American college. His argument is that Woke 1.0 (as we’re apparently now calling it) became a great excuse for corporate hierarchies to quash basic labor activism while posturing as good people. The whole model of universities is incredibly creaky, between underpaid, insecurely employed staff and students racking up debt to send in AI-generated work. I hope someone fixes it.

A friend resurfaced this essay by the great Leigh Stein on her time moderating “Binders Full of Women,” a big and notoriously fraught Facebook group for female writers. I laughed with bitter recognition when it got to the bit about her conference being criticized online for not providing on-site childcare, and how she tried to set up a working group to discover if the community as a whole wanted that. Surprise! “No one volunteered.”

Quick Links

1. The former BBC staffer Robin Lustig on Rod Liddle: “He was not a fearless satirist but someone who never outgrew his days as a child who delighted in telling fart jokes.” (Substack)

2. This parody of bad modernized Shakespeare has been beamed onto the internet directly from my brain. Ooh look, you’ve redone someone getting a letter with the swoosh of a text message? Should we have a party? Should we invite Bella Hadid?

3. DRAG THEM HUGO: loved this column by Hugo Rifkind about how all the climate change sceptics have shut the f*** up and slunk away now we’re all broiling in our beds from May to September every year. I mean, I do like how Jeremy Clarkson notes how a new “fluke” bit of weather has ruined his harvest in every season of Clarkson’s Farm, but equally he was a key proponent of the “go away Greta you buzzkill” tendency. (Times, £)

PS. I’ll be in New York in September for The Atlantic Festival, which has a line-up so starry it’s almost embarrassing: tickets here. While I’m there, Jesse and I are doing a low-key Special Relationship event at the Comedy Cellar on Tuesday 22 September. (He nearly accidentally scheduled this for Yom Kippur, but then caught it in time.)

And hello from the Midwest, where I’ve been out reporting for a story that should be published next week. I’ve been following the two big electoral races here—Abdul El-Sayed’s run for Michigan Senate, and Francesca Hong’s bid for governor of Wisconsin.

The two have been grouped together—progressives trying to get elected in swing states—but I think they’re pretty different, in ways that are revealing about the modern left. One is also a much better candidate than the other. (All will be revealed in The Atlantic. Do subscribe!)

One thing El-Sayed and Hong do have in common, though, is that they have made opposition to data centers a centerpiece of their campaigns. Tech money is pouring into building these single-story boxes across rural America, and the sites are huge. The Barn, which is currently being built in eastern Michigan, will cover 1.6 million square feet and use as much electricity as the output of an entire nuclear power station. Local people are stressed about the environmental impacts, while campaigners see them as a physical manifestation of the unchecked power of Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and the rest. Seven out of ten Americans oppose their construction.

Other matters arising: the growth of food delivery apps is now so well-established that several hotels I stayed at had tables in reception for drivers to leave your DoorDash on. I used a petrol pump in Battle Creek that played me advert (for a casino, no less) because no moment of downtime can be left unmolested by commerce. Also the hotel in Milwaukee was showing televised hacky sack, which suggests to me that we have simply run out of sports. Although, yes, I did spend ten minutes watching teenagers throw beanbags into a hole. It has the mesmerisingly dull quality of late-night snooker: “And that’s a bad miss!”

Helen

The Amputee Fetishist Who Amputated Legs For the NHS

Jenny Kleeman reports the very unpleasant, but very illuminating, story of rogue surgeon Neil Hopper. He was an amputee fetishist who consumed extreme mutilation content while working in the NHS as a vascular surgeon. Jenny has done a great job unpicking the bigger story here: once again (as with Ian Patterson) a surgeon doing shoddy or weird procedures appeared to have gone unquestioned. She speaks to one patient left with nerve damage, who woke up during surgery and was assured that didn’t happen, and another who has come to believe that her varicose vein removal might have been done without anaesthetic. (Hopper got off on torture videos, so was clearly a sadist.)

The Professor and The Pig’s Head

Talking of fishiness that should have been looked into earlier, I can’t stop consuming content about Jason Arday, the Black (now former) professor who claimed to have been mute as a child and to have run 600 miles in six days. He also claimed to have been sent a pig’s head, although the police didn’t follow it up properly; and to have been threatened by a knife-wielding man in college, although he didn’t alert his colleagues.

Lanre Bakare’s piece really dealt the final blow that made his position at Cambridge untenable. It is studded with deadpan observations, such as: “When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said ‘that’s the kind of thing we’d remember’”.

Zach Polanski, among others, signed an open letter stating that all the questions over Arday’s biography and work were racially motivated attacks. The Good Law Project intervened on his behalf. The crucial bit of information here is that the story began with a blog by Nathan Cofnas, who is a race-and-IQ guy. Cofnas believes that by rights, no black people should be professors, and so his campaign to take down this particular black professor was dismissed initially as mere racism. It’s a good journalism lesson to look past who is delivering information to judge the information itself. Lots of people failed that test here.

Trump Bombs

I had vaguely registered that Trump’s speech at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner went badly, but I did not understand the full, horrifying extent of how much he bombed. This 20-minute Jon Stewart dissection of Trump’s speech is particularly good because it just takes Trump on his own terms—he’s trying to do a comedy roast, so is he obeying the conventions of the genre?

As someone who is constitutionally unable to tell a joke—sometimes, when I freestyle, I lose confidence—my advice to Trump is that you have to know your limits. Start with a Radio 4 panel show and work your way up.

The best piece on Rod Liddle was, to my surprise, by Zoe Williams: “I won’t miss Rod Liddle, but I miss the person he was when the world was different, and I miss that different world.”

That’s all for now—see you next time! The Genius Myth remains at 99p on Kindle for August. Oh, and what did I read in July? Absolutely NOTHING.

Yes, it’s a big fat failure from me this month. Not a single book read cover to cover. I blame, in no particular order:

• The World Cup

• Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

• Travelling by car rather than train or plane

• The heat

• The heat, again.

Better luck next month . . .

For The Atlantic this week, I decided to check in with Rupert Lowe, who is now courting all the Americans who find Nigel Farage a bit bleeding heart liberal for their tastes. Lowe’s interview with Joe Rogan was dismaying on a number of levels, not least because this is one of America’s most popular podcasts, and it’s presenting listeners with a completely skewed fever-dream of what Britain is like:

Americans have two stereotypes of Britain. The first is the cozy, parochial world portrayed in my country’s biggest cultural exports—the “soggy bottoms” of The Great British Baking Show, the boarding-school backdrop of Harry Potter, the aristocratic deference valorized by Downton Abbey. The second, now promoted by a zillion MAGA podcasts, is a postapocalyptic hellscape of sclerotic socialism, repressed speech, and rampaging Muslims.

After I wrote this, Elon Musk did an interview with the Economist where he admitted that he hadn’t visited Britain in several years. The magazine1’s editor Zanny Minton-Beddoes therefore tried to suggest that his vision of Britain didn’t match up with the place she actually lived in, at which point he accused her of living a “cloistered existence.”

Helen

Absent-Mindedness as Dominance Behavior

When I was first hired, I didn’t have a driver’s license, and some of my classes were at a remote suburban campus. The fuddy-duddy professor, with whom I shared an office downtown, generously offered to give me a ride, since he drove there on the same days. One morning he was late. I sat around, getting increasingly anxious, worried about being late for my lecture. It got later and later, until eventually I had no hope of making it. Finally I went around asking if anyone knew where he was. “Oh,” I was told, “fuddy-duddy’s out of town at a conference. Didn’t he mention that to you?”

That was the end of our little car-pooling arrangement.

Now, promising someone that you will drive them to work, and then just not showing up, is conventionally known as a “dickhead move.” It shows total indifference to other people’s needs and feelings. And yet when a professor does it, it’s treated as though it were cute, and possibly a sign of genius. My colleague was so busy thinking important philosophical thoughts that of course he didn’t have time to think about tiny, insignificant things, like how his actions affected other people.

All of this has persuaded me that absent-mindedness should be viewed in much the same way that Talcott Parsons viewed illness. At its root, it is a form of social deviance. Basically, everyone would love to be absent-minded, because it allows you to skip out on all sorts of social obligations.

Is this theory supported by the evidence? Shh, if it isn’t, I don’t want to know. I have worked with so many of these people.

The Rosenberg Boys

Just after 8 p.m. on June 19, Julius followed Sing Sing’s Jewish chaplain to the electric chair. As the rabbi prayed, the executioner secured the five leather straps. Before he delivered the fatal shocks, he put a leather face mask on Julius meant to prevent his eyes from popping out of his head. Julius was pronounced dead after he received three charges of electricity.

The rabbi then gave Ethel a final chance to live. Did she have any names to share? She said she did not: “I’m innocent; I’m prepared to die.”

Amy Weiss-Meyer meets Robby and Michael, sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed by the U.S. for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. They were brought up believing that their parents were innocent victims of a witch-hunt against Jewish Communists, but the truth appears to be more uncomfortable (The Atlantic, gift link).

The Final Scene of Tar

Kevin Spacey’s commemorative ring “retails for $120, but for $130 more, you can purchase one that comes packaged in a black collector’s box bearing Spacey’s signature. The rings are not smelted with any precious metals; instead, they are made of “gold-toned stainless steel,” and in the center of the signet—where you might expect to find a gemstone—you’ll instead see two glinting capital letters: an F and a U.” Luke Winkie argues that we are living in the final scene of Tar (Slate).

This Rightmove listing has it all—crushed velvet, oddly shaped windows and a picture of Scrooge McDuck in the billiards room. Exquisitely bad taste.

That’s all, folks. I’m on the road right now, so next week’s newsletter might well just be photographs of butter burgers. One final thing: Amazon are running a promotion on The Genius Myth, which is 99p on Kindle for August, down from £5.99.

Like everyone else in the world, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey last week, and like most people, I absolutely loved it. [Spoilers ahead.]

• Yes, he’s turned Odysseus from someone who says he is desperate to get home to someone who is afraid of doing so. That Christianises and modernises the character, turning an external problem—the gods won’t let him return, because he has displeased them—into an internal struggle. But still, wow. That emotional beat (oh, that’s why it took ten years) landed on me like a lead weight on the chest in the cinema.

• Yes, it’s a bit silly when Robert Pattinson keeps naming the weapons that have dropped through the ceiling.

• Yes, I am a philistine who went “oh that’s where the word mentor comes from!”

• No, Christopher Nolan should not have indulged people who’ve read the poem by including a very laboured pun in the Cyclops scene just so that they could do the Radio 4 laugh to show they got it.

What I love about Nolan’s films, when they work well, is that they have the precision-engineered smoothness of a dovetail joint. You have to admire how everything is set up in Act One and paid off in Act Three: Odysseus’s ankle injury; the “eyes of Athena”; even the shamelessly mawkish sad old dog.

I also really loved how you never see Agamemnon’s face1, and how he strides into Troy like a death robot, slowly, when everyone else is pelting in, screaming. His costume is also responsible for me thinking the words “effortlessly helmetmogged” for the first and probably only time.

The traditional knock on Nolan is that he Doesn’t Do Women, but what surprised me was how heavily implicit sexual violence is in this film. This is a man’s story, but the collateral damage to women is just below the surface.

Helen is abducted by Paris and then disfigured during the war (or possibly by Menelaus, who regards her as a defective prize; or, possibly, she self-harms). Penelope sequesters herself from the suitors as a physical manifestation of her vulnerability while her husband is absent. (Her house has been invaded, and her body could be too.) When Circe returns Odysseus’s men to their human form, she calls that a “disguise” compared with them being pigs, which suggests some specific trauma in her own past2. In the poem, Odysseus hangs multiple slave girls as a punishment for sleeping with the suitors; the tweak to this scene in the film suggests Nolan sympathises with the modern view that the maids didn’t so much “side with” the suitors as “get raped by them”.

As Alice Evans has written, the exploitation and control of women—“confining insiders, raping outsiders”—is central to understanding ancient Greek society. In the Iliad, when Andromache pleads with her husband Hector to stay inside Troy and protect her, it’s because she knows what will happen if “bronze-armed Greeks” capture the city.

In light of that, it’s either a failure of nerve or maybe a desire to keep a 15 certificate that must explain why Nolan didn’t make Odysseus’s horror over the fall of Troy contingent on what usually happens when a siege is broken by an undisciplined army—mass rape34. Is Odysseus really only seeing the slaughter of civilians as he walks around the city? That would be a historically unusual way to treat captured women of childbearing age. What really happened to the priestess who looks just like the goddess Athena?

My sense is that the submerging of sexual violence in the storyline is one of the ways that Nolan has made this story palatable for a modern audience. The Odysseus of the original was a shagger and a plunderer and a warrior in a culture where you weren’t supposed to develop PTSD over your war crimes. Here he’s a spiritually monogamous chap who would prefer to obey the Geneva Convention. He’s our Odysseus, not theirs.

Helen

PS. Another measure of this film’s success is that it has short-circuited the tedious discourse on whether Nolan is too woke or deeply conservative. He’s a bit of both! In the past week, I have read pieces arguing that the film makes the progressive argument that trans identities are real and that the treatment of Zeus’s law is a warning about grooming gangs. This ambiguity is a mark of good and sophisticated art, and a reminder of how reductive it is to read every single thing in culture through the prism of tribalism. Sarah Ditum has written a sharp and very funny piece on this theme: “The idea that you might grant a movie hospitality in the figurative feasting hall of your brain on its own terms seems to be a lost one.”

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The Cult of Longevity

In fact, the real evidence that power in the United States has been tilted towards the old and away from the young can be found outside the hurly-burly of presidential politics, which usually serves as a vast distraction. The penny-drop moment for me came earlier this year when I read that Alvin Hellerstein, the judge presiding in the federal case against Nicolás Maduro, is 92 years old. That wasn’t the real shock – maybe, as with elections, this was one of those quirks that happens from time to time. But it turns out that 6 per cent of all federal judges (of whom there are 1400, if you include the 500 semi-retired judges who continue to practise with ‘senior status’ after the age of 65) are in their nineties. That means there are around eighty of them. The oldest, Leo Glasser of New York’s Eastern District, is 102.

David Runciman on what it means that everyone in American politics is so flippin’ old (London Review of Books). During the podcast world tour for my Atlantic cover story on masculinism, I stumbled into saying something that I keep meaning to flesh out further—that some criticisms of the “longhouse” or “safetyism” or whatever, which are presented as results of the feminization of society, might actually be more to do with the ageing of society. Older people dislike risk, and have more to lose from change than they hope to gain: “As we grow older we become more cautious, more backward-looking, less open to novelty, more easily scared. That’s not true of everyone, of course, but it’s true enough to be revealed across aggregate patterns of behaviour.”

Watching The Odyssey, funnily enough, really brought this home. This was a martial society, a society of explorers, because everyone was so young. At 40, you were a grizzled veteran. Now you can be 40 and still be a professional world-class athlete or a first-time parent. You’re still in your first act of life.

Runciman is reviewing a new book by Samuel Moyn which argues that gerontocracy is particularly acute in America, whose democratic institutions were formed with the idea of electing older, wiser politicians to balance a younger, poorer majority in the electorate. Now, though, “the American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1958, [has transformed] into one of the biggest and most powerful lobbies in American history. It currently has an annual operating budget of nearly $2 billion, nearly ten times that of the National Rifle Association.”

The Wingman

The latest in The Atlantic’s series profiling possible Democratic presidential contenders is here, and—joy of joys—it’s Mark Leibovich on former astronaut Mark Kelly.

Both Kelly and his wife Gabby Giffords are examples of enormous courage; Kelly was a fighter pilot, and has lately confronted the Trump administration over its possibly illegal orders to destroy boats in the Caribbean. His wife Gabby Giffords was shot in the head in 2011—targeted because she was a Congresswoman. They had been hoping to have kids together before the shooting, but had to abandon that plan.

Leibo does a great job of exploring something uncomfortable: that this sort of bravery is lionised by our culture, but isn’t necessarily something that most of us find comfortable to be around. And he includes a scene that, to me, suggests Kelly is not going to be the nominee: he gets a question from a grieving widow and deals with it professionally, but doesn’t go to hug her: “She was standing about 10 feet away and clearly in crisis. It should not take an elite pain-feeler like Bill Clinton to recognize this. But Kelly came off oddly oblivious.”

I had an almost identical scene in my profile of Ron DeSantis, in his case with a veteran who struggled with the Pledge of Allegiance at his second inauguration: “The 81-year-old stumbled over the words, and I realized instantly what a natural politician—Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan—would have done: walk over, take Rodríguez’s arm, and create a viral moment of human connection. DeSantis stood rigid and stern. Given a 15-hour run-up and a focus group, he might have gamed out the advantages of a small, public act of kindness. But he couldn’t get there on his own.” That was the moment I knew DeSantis wasn’t going to be president; apart from the lack of instinctive empathy, he wasn’t in command of the situation, wasn’t willing to be the perpetual Main Character. I suspect the same is true of Kelly, for all his impressive qualities.

Quick Links

1. Belatedly, I enjoyed this obit for Ann Widdecombe: “The modernising position that I once espoused simply doesn’t exist any more. In the battle for the soul of the right, she lost the battle but definitely won the war.” (Substack)

2. I would be lying if I didn’t also admit to enjoying Victoria Wood’s Christmas special tribute song to Ann Widdecombe, and have been singing it all week.

3. This Guardian longread on the fearsome legacy of Paul Dacre slightly underplays the big reason that his proteges have all had such success: they all work bloody hard and are obsessed with print journalism. However, it did make me realise that I acquired the habit of calling a telling-off a “bollocking” from my own time at the Mail. It also poses an interesting question: why doesn’t Dacre love Nigel Farage? On paper, he’s everything the Mail wants in a politician.

4. Cariad Lloyd offers a tour of the period dramas she’s been comfort-watching, complete with bonnet ratings (Substack).

5. “Her bedroom was all piles: clothes, power cords, fake eyelashes. Her old karaoke machine sat in a corner. Her average message to Chat was seven hundred and thirty words long.” This New Yorker ($) portrait of a modern family (mum and two teenage daughters) and their relationship with various AIs gave me the ick. There’s a line in Derek Thompson’s piece about the “antisocial century” where he distinguishes what’s happening in today’s societies from loneliness, because loneliness (like hunger) might well serve an evolutionary purpose—pushing us to seek out company and remedy the feeling. AI chatbots are to human companionship what junk food is to nutrition, I think.

6. “so how’s it going with the Parkinson’s? you say and I start / to say every moment bleeding to death around me”. Anne Carson in the LRB.

7. What a neat little piece of vibe-coding this is, from the Guardian’s Chris Moran and his daughter. Plotlines maps the journeys of characters in famous novels, allowing you to visualise their movements. I particularly enjoyed playing with Pride and Prejudice, and realising that Lizzie must have driven in a carriage a few miles away from my house, since she obeys Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s instruction to change horses at the Bell in Bromley.

See you next time! And maybe buy my book.

Thank you, LinkedIn, for reminding me that this week marks my “work anniversary” (not a real thing). Yes, I’ve been at The Atlantic for seven years, although the timescale always feels odd as the pandemic began a few months into my tenure, and after that, I traded our funny little WeWork office for my living room.

Getting hired by The Atlantic is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Under my ultimate boss Jeff Goldberg, the magazine combines an insistence on journalistic rigor with an enormous capacity for mischief, and a willingness to weather backlash when its writers say unpopular things. That recipe kept me sane through the early 2020s, and allowed me to write on, say, Joe Biden’s advanced age before it was an accepted fact of American politics, or the controversies over youth-gender medicine. Over the last seven years, The Atlantic has also sent me to Albania’s museum of communist terror, Florida’s MAGA-loving retirement community, the remote islands of the Galapagos and a Louis CK show in Riyadh.

In celebration of my time working with America’s best journalists, here are 7 of my favourite articles. (I’ve excluded this year’s crop to avoid recency bias.) You can get loads more of this sort of thing if you take out a subscription to The Atlantic.

Helen

The Identity Hoaxers

March 2021 (gift link)

The confession, when it came, did not hold back. “For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” read the Medium post. It was published in September under the name of Jessica A. Krug, a George Washington University professor specializing in Black history. Krug had, she said, variously assumed the identities of “North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She was actually a white Jewish woman from Kansas. “You absolutely should cancel me,” Krug wrote in her self-dramatizing mea culpa, “and I absolutely cancel myself.”

One of my favourite adventures in early 2020s weirdness, this the story of a spate of leftwing academics being uncovered as mini-Dolezals. What drove them to deception? To find out, I also looked into fake Holocaust survivors—including the one who claimed to have been raised by wolves—and a tour guide in the 9/11 memorial who lied about having survived 9/11.

The Twitching Generation

February 2022 (gift link)

At an online conference last October, doctors in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Hungary pooled their knowledge. They had all seen an increase in patients with this unusual form of tic disorder. One teenager came from the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia, which France once used as a penal colony; another came from the tiny South Atlantic island of St. Helena, to which Britain sent Napoleon for his final exile. “Very remote locations,” Andreas Hartmann, a consultant neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, told me via email. “Yet accessible to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.”

Many of my Atlantic stories could carry the subtitle “how the internet broke our brains,” and this is one of them. In the late 2010s, all over the world, young girls began displaying the tics and twitches associated with Tourette Syndrome—but it turned out that they were experiencing something else entirely.

Among Europe’s Ex-Royals

April 2022 (gift link)

And here is the prince: 39 years old, more than six feet tall, with a sandy beard, navy blazer, and soft South African accent, saying goodbye to his wife, Crown Princess Elia, and their 1-year-old daughter, Princess Geraldine. The pair are about to go to the park—without bodyguards—and Prince Leka II takes me inside, to the drawing room, where the faithful retainer brings me an espresso. Next door is a room devoted to Albanian history (“what a lovely scimitar,” I find myself exclaiming, my reserves of small talk inadequate at the sight of the family’s sword collection), and beyond that is a cozy lounge with a leather sofa, its domesticity slightly compromised by the bows and arrows hanging on the wall.

Of all my Atlantic pieces, I think this is my personal favorite, because I’ve been obsessed with European royals since childhood. Interviewing a Habsburg may well be my journalistic peak.

Incidentally, last week, Leka of Albania (pictured above) had a son with his second wife, displacing little Princess Geraldine from the succession. Mind you, there’s nothing really to succeed to, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.

The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat

October 2022 (gift link)

Chaédria LaBouvier was one of those dissenters. She quote-tweeted the Guggenheim’s post, adding: “Get the entire fuck out of here. I am Chaédria LaBouvier, the first Black curator in your 80 year history & you refused to acknowledge that while also allowing Nancy Spector to host a panel about my work w/o inviting me. Erase this shit.” She followed this up with a long viral thread the next day, claiming that working at the Guggenheim “was the most racist professional experience of my life.” She zeroed in on Spector, the woman who had brought her into the museum’s orbit but who, according to LaBouvier, was “trying to co-opt my work,” and likened her to Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen,” a white woman who had recently been in the news after she called the police on a Black bird-watcher.

This article went viral again last year, ages after it was first published, and I think that’s because it’s just such a compelling story—a group of people rush headlong towards an outcome in a process that none of them feel able to stop.

As ever, shoutout to the magazine’s art department. The illustrations in this piece are beautiful.

Ron DeSantis’s Magic Kingdom

May 2023 (gift link)

It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” before relegating the news story to page 26.)

In the other corner stands the state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages.

I love Florida. I’m sorry, I just do! It is, as I say in this piece, “the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole.”

A Satanic Rebellion

October 2023 (gift link)

The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.

In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife.

What happens when an organisation founded by atheist trolls smacks into the social-justice left? Nothing good! This is one of my more niche articles, but I have a soft spot for it because it defies all the easy storylines people might want to project on it. I can see both sides of this argument.

Also, I think it’s been long enough that I can say that my original draft had a cruder word than “genitals” here.

I Watched Stand-Up In Saudi Arabia

October 2025 (gift link)

After several days of backlash to his naive musings, [Bill] Burr returned with another thought: His critics, he told Conan O’Brien, were “sanctimonious cunts.” For me, the fairer complaint is that Western detractors were thinking about the festival the wrong way. They deemed it a PR disaster for Saudi Arabia because it exposed the regime’s hypocrisy about free speech and the performers’ cynicism. On the contrary, the festival said to middle-class Saudis: Do you need the vote if you have lots of money and Louis C.K.? That’s a trade-off that even many Americans would accept.

Burr also told [Conan] O’Brien something that I fear is correct: that American society was moving toward Saudi illiberalism by “fucking grabbing moms and dads and sticking them in a van for making illegally made fucking tacos.” This, to me, was the greatest irony of the Riyadh Comedy Festival. With its Cheesecake Factory outlets and newfound interest in comedy, Saudi Arabia is becoming more American—just as America is becoming more Saudi. In the U.S., the government is stifling the media, due process is being eroded, the ruler’s relatives are sent on quasi-governmental missions, and businessmen make overt displays of loyalty. Donald Trump’s White House has given up lecturing other countries on their human-rights records and adopted a purely transactional approach to foreign affairs. Comedians are just following his lead.

Everything about this piece was insane, starting with the fact that Jeff instructed us to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, to fully appreciate the surroundings in which Mohammed bin Salman imprisoned his fellow aristocrats when he decisively took control of the country. Nothing captures the expat experience better than eating five-star Chinese food on a balcony overlooking a hotel swimming pool.

So there you go—seven years, seven examples of The Atlantic investing time and money in bringing its readers the best copy I’m able to deliver. If you enjoyed any of these pieces, and would like my reign of terror to continue, please consider joining 1.5 million other discerning people by taking out a subscription to The Atlantic. I can’t do it without you.

Helen

For the new series of David Runciman’s History of Bad Ideas, I talked about hysteria, specifically the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, and then Freud, and then the feminist reclaiming of the word, as a way to interpret women “acting out” when faced with patriarchal repression.

It makes a nice pair with my earlier episode on mesmerism, I think—another “bad idea” that dallied with the important truth that the subconscious can be extremely powerful.

Helen

The Unicontext

Derek Thompson talks to philosopher Agnes Callard, who is developing a theory about why we’re all obsessed with identity, entrenched in negativity and worried about endless distractions: the uni-context. Essentially the idea is that the internet has put us into one big global room. And while goodness is often context-dependent, badness isn’t. Your homecooked dinner is great, but that information is irrelevant to the rest of the world. Wildfires are bad everywhere.

Derek: “For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

“There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.”

Read or watch the full interview on Derek’s Substack.

JD Vance’s Own Alien Abduction

“The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. “He was funding a ton of scientists but like when he died it’s almost like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.”

I watched JD Vance’s baffling discussion of aliens and gay foodstuffs on Joe Rogan’s podcast (The Atlantic, gift link).

Quick Links

1. “Moraff's romantic fortunes appear to have improved since meeting Fan, whose engagement ring ‘opens up to a tiny comb’ that she used to brush his beard.” Unforgettable detail from this story on the consultants who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate in Maine. How would this even work? Is the ring quite big, or is the comb really, really tiny? (Free Beacon).

2. “What emerges from those hundred thousand posts is not a collection of unlucky encounters. It is the same handful of experiences repeating across every specialty, every region and every life stage. Pain normalised (“period pain is normal, you may have a low pain threshold”). Symptoms reframed as anxiety before anyone runs a test. Referrals gatekept.” Justine Roberts on what Mumsnet posts reveal about the NHS (Substack).

3. I thought did a great job here of holding open two possibilities to her correspondent, who wrote in saying that she has had 18 anaphylactic episodes this year because of her severe allergies, to the extent that she wonders if her parents are trying to kill her by not e.g. wiping down the TV remote. Philippa writes that the “first possibility is that you have a severe and unusual medical condition” and the “second possibility is that your fears about contamination and exposure have become much greater than the actual medical risks”. This seems sensible to me: a therapist should consider the possibility that the patient does not have perfect visibility of their own situation. Some of the commenters, however, are furious, diagnosing the correspondent with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and telling Philippa that “you need to take this woman at her word”.

4. Absolute nightmare fuel from —what’s the bad thing people say about you? The really bad one, not the one you tell other people to laugh it off? Thanks to innumerable internet comments, I know mine: I’m smug, not as clever as I think I am, and my face and voice are annoying (Substack).

That’s all for this week, I’m off to watch another compilation of Argentinian fouls.

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Well, this has been a terrible week to enjoy the music of Taylor Alison Swift, hasn’t it? Her wedding was basically a corporate away day, complete with (allegedly) a tombola in which guests could win a handbag or car. A TOMBOLA.

And surely it’s impossible to get the smell of jockstraps and reheated popcorn out of Madison Square Garden?

Also suffering a market correction to their reputation is Gary’s Economics—the viciously popular YouTuber whom I have long considered to be pulling the exact same schtick as Donald Trump, ie listen to me because I am so intelligent and wealthy, have I mentioned that I am very intelligent and wealthy?1 The best thing about this gambit is that you can, by doing it well enough, actually make yourself wealthy. Economic Gary’s Patreon nets him about £12k a month.

Stevenson’s latest documentary appears to have exposed more people to the possibility that his real talent is for self-promotion. Back in 2024, the Financial Times was already questioning if the stories in his bestselling book, The Trading Game, were plausible—and as we know, post-Salt Path, publishers don’t see it as their job to fact-check memoirs, so there’s no reassurance to be had from the fact it had a mainstream release.

Added to that, the combination of large ego and paper-thin skin should always be a red flag in a public figure: here is Dan Neidle—a genuine tax expert—recounting how Economic Gary used their televised interview to complain that he had once done a mean tweet about him. (Another red flag: Gary accused Neidle of deleting other people’s tweets, something that is not physically possible.) A few months ago, Gary majorly lucked out when Rory Stewart said he wasn’t an economist—allowing him to portray himself as the Humble Man of the People being condescended to by an Old Etonian. The schtick is good; you have to respect the hustle.

I would like to take some credit for being an early Garysceptic, thanks to two major factors. One: this Decoding the Gurus episode, where “Our hosts explore the contradictions of a millionaire revolutionary who’s not even bothered but also a bit miffed the phone isn’t ringing; a tireless advocate for the poor but also someone who seems to frequently drop in his elite credentials and just how rich he is.”

Two: the fact he looks eerily like a parboiled Owen Jones2.

Helen

The Drug That Made Me Want Less

“I waddled into the doctor’s office in the stripmall in Florida with 20 pounds of ankle weights strapped to each leg hidden under my floral Tyler McGillivary sweatpants so that when the nurse asked me to step onto the scale, I could resoundingly—uncomplicatedly—qualify for an online subscription for Ozempic.”

Caroline Calloway—the influencer who was infamously outed as having a ghostwriter in 2019—is back with an essay about how she dropped a stone on a GLP1, and now weighs 115lb (just over 8 stone) “and my life is in every way better”. It’s quite the ride: can you really just drop the phrase “I’ve never had an orgasm” into your copy and move straight along?

The Creator Economy

A tough update from one of my favourite internet culture writers, Caitlin Dewey, about the reality of “creator economy” and what she plans to do with her newsletter (Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, $) as a result. “For those of you keeping score at home, I spend roughly two full work days on Links every week, which works out to about $32/hour after platform fees and taxes.”

Quick Links

1. “In 2022, Americans had a favorable opinion of Israel by a thirteen-point margin, yet today they have an unfavorable view by a twenty-three point margin. By a fifteen-point margin, voters think Israel is committing genocide. Sixty-one percent of American Jews, who overwhelmingly (76%) believe that Israel’s existence is vital for the future of the Jewish people, say that Israel is guilty of war crimes in Gaza.” For anyone confused by the backlash to AIPAC—the pro-Bibi, pro-Israel funding organisation—in various Democratic primaries, here’s a useful overview from ex-Fetterman staffer Adam Jentleson.

2. “It wasn’t till I was a young teenager that I was overheard at a birthday lunch, by some snobby relative describing myself as living in the country, that I was set straight - she snorted through bucked teeth, interrupting to correct me “Rural suburbia, darling”.” Laura Marling is leaving London (Substack).

3. “The mangling or misrepresentation of Ukrainian drone experience is an important part of newsroom discussions. I’ve several times been told that ‘people are shooting down a $5,000 drone with a $5m missile’ – versions of those figures may vary. And while that has happened, the Ukrainians in particular have gone to great lengths to avoid doing it in recent years.” Mark Urban on drone warfare (Substack).

4. Just discovered this devastating poem: “82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984” (NYRB).

5. “Pennsylvania Dutch and German are for the most part not mutually intelligible, even if they share many similar words and structures. Still, the Amish consistently compare their language unfavorably to standard German.” I travelled around Lancaster, Pennsylvania a fair bit in 2024, and therefore spent quite a bit of time doing 15mph behind Amish buggies. So I enjoyed this account of an academic trying to record people speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (Dial, via The Browser).

6. “Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)” Rose Horowitch on how America is now a post-literate society (The Atlantic, gift link)

7. I started reading this John Lanchester LRB piece because it’s a review of How to Launder Money by George Cottrell, aka Nigel Farage’s Posh George. But I stayed for Oliver Bullough’s suggestion that the easiest way to stop money laundering is to withdraw $100 and 200-euro notes from circulation. “Bear in mind that 80 per cent of the value of US currency is in $100 bills, and 70 per cent of those are held overseas. In the words of an assistant commissioner of the Met, ‘untraceable, untaxable income in the hands of criminals is the new lingua franca of organised crime. The link between Medellín and Moscow is the $100 bill.’”

See you next time! Would YOU like to prove that you haven’t succumbed to post-literacy? My book is out in paperback now. My final event for The Genius Myth is at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town on Tuesday 14th July. Tickets here.

Last weekend, once the heat had receded a bit, we went to Somerset House for the MC Escher exhibition. Highly recommended! First off, it was held in an air-conditioned basement (yes) which allowed this great shot of the stairs.

Second, the show really took you through Escher’s artistic practice, which is often reduced to optical illusions and visual tricks. Here we saw how he was influenced by visiting the Alhambra, with its repeated geometric designs (which arose from the Islamic prohibition on representational art) and the importance of craft to his work, as he veered between woodblock prints and lithograph, depending on what effect he wanted to produce.

His work is also defined by what it excluded—often, colour, as many of the most striking pieces are black-and-white. My favourite is probably his puddle with reflection, although I do like his orbs.

Because this is 2026, the exhibition also included two selfie stops (one was basically a knock-off Infinity Mirror Room with some papier-mache birds hanging from the mirrored walls) and various interactive gubbins with signs stressing that YOU ARE THE PROTAGONIST. I want to bemoan this as proof of our debased culture, but then Jonathan and I did queue up to take photos in the perspective room, so I cannot.

Runs until 6 September, tickets here. If you can’t make it to London, Escher was the subject of a recent episode of In Our Time.

Helen

Do you think that when Tom Stoppard finished the last page of writing Arcadia, he thought: well, that’s a stone-cold banger, well done to me.

I went to the opening night of the play’s West End transfer (into the soon-to-be Tom Stoppard Theatre) this week and finished thinking that I could happily watch it all over again immediately. A very rare experience!

The usual knock on Stoppard is that he’s clever-clever—there’s a joke in here about how embarrassing it would be to get something wrong when you’ve already talked about it on the Today programme1. And this play bristles with ideas, and people talking lovingly about ideas—the laws of thermodynamics2, chaos theory, Fermat’s last theorem, Byron’s Childe Harold, classical vs romantic landscape gardening. It’s wide-eyed, in the best sense. The most memorable line is: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise, we're going out the way we came in.” When I got home I immediately looked up the date of the play (1991) compared with Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1980 book, 1986 film). What a heady time when two major works of popular culture both feature people being extremely upset about the burning-down of the Library of Alexandria.

Arcadia’s intellectualism is obviously leavened by humour—a real treat here is that Bernard Nightingale, the unbearable English literature academic, is played by Oliver Chris (aka James Vereker in Rivals). But Carrie Cracknell’s direction also manages to bring out the romance and the tragedy of the play. You will root for a teenage girl to seduce her teacher (problematic), and for dorky aristocrat Valentine to impress hermitologist Hannah with his grouse-population algorithm. And it’s apt that in a play which references both Greek tragedies and determinism, the audience discovers the tragic ending 2/3rds of the way through, and then has to wait for it to happen.

Other things I loved: the orrery-like light installation, Seamus Dillane’s glowering eyebrows, the subtle interaction of the two time-periods through the set design, the deftness of the exposition. Tickets here.

Books for June: The latest instalment of my monthly reading diary is here, featuring Facebook’s crimes, Instagram parents, the wellness industry, Patagonian trains and rigid Victorian moralists. Read it here.

Quick Links

1. “It is easy to quote the figure of $80bn—the cumulative losses to date of Meta’s metaverse division—and move on without appreciating what an astronomical sum it is. $80bn is enough to give £2,000 to every single household in the United Kingdom.” James Ball visits the Metaverse and stands around a knock-off branch of virtual McDonalds. It’s bleak. Kind of appropriate that Facebook finally gave everyone there legs, seeing as it’s basically Mark Zuckerberg’s Ozymandias (Prospect).

2. For anyone interested in how star ratings took over the world, Benji Wilson’s Rate This Book is out now.

3. “I recently read a critical response to the new “state of the humanities” report by Michael Bérubé that said something like, Tuvel is not a good example of threats to academic freedom or the politicization of scholarship because she’s now a department chair and her article wasn’t retracted. That’s like saying the arsonist tried to burn down your house but your neighbors put out the fire.” Rebecca Tuvel reflects on the open letter that nearly destroyed her academic career (Chronicle of Higher Education).

4. You might remember that, in 2021, it became obvious that the wrong man had been imprisoned for the historic rape of author Alice Sebold, who wrote about the incident in her memoir, Lucky. ProPublica have now followed up, identifying the probable real perpetrator, as well as the unbelievably grotesque social circumstances that led to the wrongful conviction. Essentially: the police department didn’t care very much, and the university wanted a spate of attacks near campus hushed up. I feel very sorry for Sebold, who became a villain of the story, when she was also failed.

See you next time!

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams

Wowza. This is a hell of a book. Wynn-Williams started work at Facebook in 2011 and stayed until 2017—essentially the period when it conquered the world. What she reveals is both a culture of deep personal weirdness (Sheryl Sandberg asks her to share her bed on the company private jet, and gets huffy when she refuses) and one of unconstrained power.

Essentially, the board can’t restrain Zuck, who becomes ever more megalomaniacal. What the company does in Myanmar is unconscionable. What it does in the pursuit of the Chinese market is despicable. Some consolation: what it does later thanks to Zuck’s misplaced belief in the metaverse was hilarious. Unfortunately, the company has now come up with a new way to degrade the public square by flogging Meta Ray-bans—which make filming other people having meltdowns on planes, or politicians getting screamed at, or any other of the 90 million flavours of exploitative viral content—much easer. Thanks, guys.

Should Mark Zuckerberg have that much power? HELL NO. No single human should.

This Thing Of Darkness, Harry Thompson

Phew! This novel is a bit of a whopper, and it’s taken me several months to finish it. The best way to describe it is to say it’s about Robert FitzRoy, the man who captained the Beagle expedition that famously took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos. Because this is FitzRoy’s story, though, that incident doesn’t get very many pages.

Instead we hear about FitzRoy’s kidnap of four indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Patagonia, and the cruel attempts to “civilise” them and then drop them back in their homeland. We hear about FitzRoy’s bravery in disobeying Admiralty orders to rescue a stricken ship. We hear about his unhappy time as governor-general of New Zealand, trying to do right by the Maori instead of exterminating them. And we hear about how his rigid Victorian morality—which Harry Thompson obviously admires, not a perspective you hear often these days—prevented his advancement. (By contrast, Thompson takes a more dim view of latter-era Darwin, who comes off as a prickly combination of anxious, entitled, obsessive and arrogant.)

For me, the real joy of this book—having read Darwin’s Beagle diaries and several Darwin biographies—was how closely researched it was. We are extremely lucky that so many people involved with the Beagle voyage recorded it, although Darwin’s fame has ensured that his narrative won out.

This book felt so exciting—imagine stepping off a ship on to a completely deserted land, or one filled with people whose language you cannot speak, or animals you’ve never seen before. That era is now over: as I wrote in my Atlantic article, I FaceTimed my husband from the middle of the Pacific Ocean thanks to the Starlink wifi that covers the Galapagos.

This Thing of Darkness doesn’t soft-pedal the horrors of colonialism—one South American general is open about his desire to exterminate the natives and strip-mine their land. But it does let you experience the sense of adventure that Victorian explorers must have felt.

Make Me Well, Xand van Tulleken

I interviewed the van Tulleken twins a few years ago and found them delightful. Chris’s book on ultra-processed food made me walk past shelves of crap at the station WH Smiths and truly appreciate that they were all just colored xanthum gum and whey and shit like that. Now Xand has written a book on the wellness industry, which is out in early September.

This industry matters on its own terms, because a lot of it doesn’t make you more well—one of the striking findings here is that multivitamin supplements not only don’t work, but sometimes seem to raise all-cause mortality1. (One scientist tells him sadly, “I’m not going to vitamin D meetings anymore.”) And the production processes can be quite unpleasant: I wish I could unknow the existence of the Chinese donkey industry that produces commercial collagen supplements.

But this also matters politically, because the profits are so insane on this stuff, and the market for worried well people so limitless, that the wellness industry funds every bad podcast you can think of. Honestly, our modern information environment sails on a sea of Huel.

If you enjoyed Ben Goldacre back in the day, you’ll love this book—it includes old friends like P-hacking and research fraud (boo), Cochrane reviews (yay) and high access prices for journals. (Friend of the Bluestocking and general good egg Margaret McCartney pops up, too.) The alleged benefits of turmeric, for example, seem to come from the work of one guy, 30 of whose papers were retracted in 2012 after an investigation. Van Tulleken also looks into the ZOE empire, and becomes a poo donor (more hassle than it sounds).

For all those reasons, I was happy to blurb this book.

The Old Patagonia Express, Paul Theroux

This book, from the 1970s, sees Theroux attempting to get from his home in snowy Boston all the way to the tip of Argentina by train. The first thing I will say is that Paul (father of Louis) is, er, old-school in his attitudes. Prepare to hear a lot about whether he thinks various women along the way are fit or not. He’s also snobby in a way that most writers these days have had beaten out of them by mean comments on the internet. A young woman he meets on the Amtrak, for example, looks promisingly foxy but minutes later is “still droning on in her pedantic college student way.” When their conversation ends, he reflects that she seemed “loony” and “profoundly incurious”, even though he had “casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. . . I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question.” I would probably like to hear her side of what this conversation was like before rendering judgment.

Still, this book is—like This Thing Of Darkness—almost unimaginably exotic, a dispatch from a time before internet booking and timetable apps and portable screen-based entertainment. Quite often, Theroux will turn up somewhere and have to vibe there for several days, meeting various divorcees and other disreputable types, before he can catch his next onward journey. He’s also very good on how much he hates travel books that begin with the view from a plane touching down on the tarmac—instead he wanted to chronicle the much more human process of getting there.

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A very ho-hum book, essentially a series of extended features, about the lives of influencer kids, which is most readable when it’s relaying gothic details about their terrible, terrible parents and the void where their souls should be.

These parents train their children how to cry more attractively, tell anecdotes about them accidentally chewing a vibrator, have a “ton of hired help” in the background while presenting themselves as superhuman, and so on. One dark strain that’s never fully unpicked is how much of this content is consumed by men with a sexual interest in children; one mother is accused of selling her kid’s underwear to “fans.” The kid promptly joins OnlyFans the minute she turns 18.

The author, however, is in denial that everyone involved should be fired into the sun and blathers about “late capitalism” and whether it’s actually feminist to whore out your toddler’s potty training for likes.

Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

These are two of the best reporters working in Washington—Haberman is sometimes called “Trump’s therapist”, while Swan did a notoriously tough interview with the president a few years back. The thesis of this book is that it might have been better for America if Donald Trump had just won a second term in 2020 instead of being beaten by Biden, because he spent his first time disoriented, unsure of his power and hemmed in by establishment gatekeepers. However, his four years brooding in the wilderness left him a) fuming and desperate, and b) surrounded by ultra-loyalists who would do anything he said. It also gave him time to plot and prepare—and so he returned to DC ready for an “imperial” presidency where there are almost no restraints on his fondness for corruption, bullying and dismantling democracy.

Several fun subplots:

• Remember when your mum used to say “you treat this house like a hotel?” Well, that’s El Presidente’s attitude to the White House. Not only does he leave Starburst wrappers and crisp packets around the place, but staff discovered that he “was something throwing out White House sterling silver utensils.” He also has three TVs in his personal quarters, including one (inevitably) in the john.

• Everyone found Elon Musk very annoying. He slept in the Lincoln Bedroom a couple of times, against Melania’s wishes. Trump’s line when Musk flounces out of the administration and does a (since deleted) tweet about how the president is in the Epstein Files is heart-rending: “When the President saw Musk’s post, he looked at it for several beats, an expression close to pensive crossing his face. ‘They always leave me,’ he finally said. ‘They always do this. This is why I can’t have friends.’” Behold his empire of dirt! Everyone he knows goes away, in the end.

• The dismissive treatment of Zelenskyy finally convinced many European leaders that the post-war Pax Americana was ov-ah. Oh, also: Trump once praised the Chinese response to Tiananmen in a Playboy interview in 1990.

• Trump has an aide called Natalie Harp whose job is to Google things for him. She is known to leave him notes telling him how wonderful he is. He sometimes calls her “Nathalie” with the French pronunciation, presumably to seem suave.

• Even more cringe than Nathalie’s billets-doux might be the efforts of Republicans to ingratiate themselves with Trump: I had forgotten that a Florida congresswoman introduced legislation to add his face to Mount Rushmore.

• I wonder who the source can be for the many instances where JD Vance is extremely prophetic about how badly the Iran war will go?

• Pete Hegseth finds the best and most awesomely based videos of US troops blowing up furriners and sends them to the president, who enjoys them (as long as they aren’t too gory).

Everyone hates Benjamin Netanyahu maybe more than they hate Elon Musk. The moment when the Israelis try to kill the Hamas negotiators in Doha—giving no advance warning to the White House, which is trying to negotiate a hostage release and ceasefire—is a particularly low point.

See you next month!

To find out what I read in previous months, click here:

January | February | March | April | May