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Best read online (click on title). Contains X links.

• I am a recovering American politics obsessive. As some of you may recall, that was the main topic of my Marbury blog, a precursor to this newsletter. Over the last ten years I’ve written about US politics much less, partly because I’ve found it too bleak to contemplate, and partly because Trump and Trumpism are resistant to rational analysis. It’s particularly hard to make sense of from this distance; there are no British political commentators I trust to provide insight into MAGA, no matter how confidently they pronounce on Trump’s “base”. I also started to find the amount of attention our media devotes to America slightly ridiculous. If a close election for attorney-general in New York coincided with a revolution in Italy, the BBC would run a live broadcast from Albany - OK I exaggerate, but only somewhat. It seems a little abject.

• All that’s to say that I wasn’t going to write about what just happened. The midterms (see, I already feel a bit phoney, saying “midterms”) have already been over-analysed. But as it turns out, I can’t help myself. Good news stories in politics come along so rarely; we should take delight in them while we can.

• Rather than gloat over the defeat of certain individuals, I want to focus on the fundamentals. But before I do that - JD VANCE, HAHAHAHA, WHAT A LOSER. Honestly, one of the most satisfying things has been the evisceration of this man’s political hopes. (We’ll get to Trump but he is impervious to embarrassment and on his way out anyway.) I say this as someone who was open-minded enough - or naive enough - to think he might actually evolve into a politician of substance after he secured his dauphin status. Smart people assured me that he was only playing dumb to win the approval of his boss and their supporters. I half-believed them, but there are only so many arrogant, nutty, and nasty things an intelligent man can say before he becomes what he seems to be. Vance forgot the indispensable requirement of electoral politics, which is to be at least somewhat popular. Without the singular, irreproducible charisma of Trump, you can’t get to the top by being arrogant, nutty and nasty.

• There were two particularly revealing Vance moments from the last couple of weeks, one just before the election and one right after it. The first one came at a town hall event when he was on stage with Fox TV pundit Jesse Watters. A young lady in the audience stood up and asked a clearly heartfelt question about the high cost of housing, which was making it hard for people like her - Republican voters with conservative values - to start a large family. How did Vance respond? He turned to Watters and made a crass and irrelevant joke about Jon Husted’s ass. As a politician, you hardly need to be a Bill Clinton-level empath to understand that this was not the right moment for bro banter, but Vance has terrible intuitions for ordinary voters, because he got to his current position by being good at appealing to Very Online MAGA elites, especially Trump family members. He hasn’t done his 10,000 hours. Before being selected as VP he had only been a candidate once, and while he won his race in Ohio he did poorly in electoral terms, running well behind other Republicans in the state. Voters have never liked him very much and he doesn’t get them.

• The second moment was his response - online, of course - to this week’s GOP thumping. Read it here if you can bear it. It is convoluted and above all, “insidery” - he starts off by talking about data analysis and composition effects, for God’s sake. I don’t know how the GOP is going to react to Tuesday’s results but if they nominate Vance then 2028 will look very similar to 2026 - yes, even if the Democrats pick AOC (though I don’t think they will).

• Anyway, back to those fundamentals. Over the last ten years or so, America’s political system has sometimes seemed on the verge of collapse. There have been dire warnings of incipient fascism. This week we received plenty of evidence that American democracy is not about to perish from the earth and that it is, in fact, in pretty good shape. Let’s look at some of it.

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This week, the provost of an Ivy League university was forced to resign over his use of AI. Santiago Schnell, a maths professor, was provost (chief academic officer) of Dartmouth College. His problems began when a Semafor report on the use of AI in newspaper opinion pieces flagged one by him as 100% AI-written.

Schnell’s column was itself about AI. It argues that universities must learn to distinguish between the work a student produces and the capacities of the student; a statement of the obvious in 900 almost unreadably dull words. I’m not sure I would have clocked it as AI-written, but then I don’t think I would have got beyond the first paragraph. (AI-generated pieces are either nervously attention-grabbing or, like this one, blandly anonymous.)

Dartmouth’s student newspaper decided to follow up on Semafor’s report. Using Pangram, it found that all nine of Schnell’s published articles this year, including two co-authored academic papers, were overwhelmingly AI-written. (His pre-2022 work was found to be completely human-written.) When the students contacted Schnell to ask him about this, he emailed a statement that was itself 100% AI-written.

As an institution, Dartmouth has been enthusiastic about AI. Its president, Sian Beilock, published an essay entitled “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth” which argued that universities must embrace this technology. The college’s policy requires students to acknowledge any use of AI in their work, which made Schnell’s behaviour look quite hypocritical. Beilock launched an investigation into him which concluded that he hadn’t been sufficiently forthcoming, and, facing a no-confidence vote from faculty, he resigned.

The internal politics of universities are terrifying and I am not sure whether Schnell should have lost his job over this. There is the mitigating factor that English is not his first language (he is from Venezuela). More importantly, as the philosopher Jennifer Frey puts it, higher education is in a “Wild West” moment on AI. Rules and norms are not clear or settled; perhaps everyone should be cut a little slack until they are.

Anyway, I’m more interested in Schnell’s defence of his AI usage. In his email statement, he said he views LLMs as “assistive tools” and denied that they were doing his work for him. They “do not identify the problem, design the research project, guarantee the validity of research results, interpretations, citations, conclusions or substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship.”

This is a common story from people who use AI to write or create intellectual work of some kind, usually after they have been criticised for doing so. Schnell’s defence was written in an academic context, but you hear essentially the same justification from people who post LLM slop on LinkedIn and get called out for it. The argument is that “the thinking and the ideas are mine; the AI merely assisted me with execution.” It’s superficially plausible but I don’t find it robust, and I think people who believe in it are setting a trap for themselves.

It’s not that I believe any use of AI in composition undermines the integrity of a piece of writing. I use LLMs to proofread my copy, for instance, and for research. But it’s harder to distinguish between the intellectual content of a piece of work and its expression than the Schnell-style defence allows for. Writing and thinking are deeply intertwined. If AI is used heavily in the drafting stage, or even in the brainstorming stage, then the author can’t really claim the finished piece as their own. They might feel like they did the thinking, but they will be deceiving themselves, and therefore the reader. I believe this intuitively, but a new study from researchers at Anthropic provides some empirical support.

After the jump: why I don’t believe in the “centaur” theory of human-AI collaboration, plus a truly glorious Rattle Bag, bursting at the seams with good stuff on the great French fridge hack; the biomechanics of kissing; restaurant economics; history’s great escapes, and much, much more. Paid subscribers make The Ruffian possible. If you’re a reader but you haven’t signed up yet, please consider it.

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Catch-up service:
On the Sally Rooney Case
The Optimal Margin of Delusion
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Peak Burnham
Podcast: Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
Seven Rules of Good Conversation

I missed off the Rattle Bag on Saturday which means you get an extra capacious one today with reports on two amazing evenings, one musical, the other scientific, plus thoughts on the Oasis doc, plus more brainfood and inspiration. If you haven’t yet signed up for a paid subscription, now would be an excellent time to do so. It’s easy, cheap, and great value.

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Catch-up service:
The Optimal Margin of Delusion
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Peak Burnham
Podcast: Dan Williams - Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
Seven Rules of Good Conversation

In November 2025, Sally Rooney submitted a witness statement to Britain’s High Court, on behalf of a co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori. The court was considering the UK government’s decision to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Ammori was arguing that this constituted an authoritarian ban on protest. In support, Rooney said that her books might have to be withdrawn from sale in Britain, and that, "The disappearance of my work from bookshops would mark a truly extreme incursion by the state into the realm of artistic expression."

Almost a year later, this has come to pass. Rooney’s publisher, Faber, has taken her books off sale, with her consent, because they fear a prosecution. The Terrorism Act of 2000 makes it illegal to provide money to anyone where you have reasonable cause to suspect it might be used for the purposes of terrorism. After the 2025 ban on Palestine Action (PA), Rooney said, repeatedly, that she continues to support it, “in whatever way I can”. That constitutes a pretty firm basis for suspicion. It is also illegal to express support for a banned organisation. Rooney has made her statements of support from Ireland, where she lives. Had she made them here, she might have faced prosecution. Thousands of people in Britain have been arrested for holding signs which say, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.

To be clear, the British government hasn’t banned Rooney’s books. It isn’t illegal to sell or distribute them; you can easily pick them up second-hand. Faber’s withdrawal is voluntary. Faber could, in theory, have kept the books on sale and withheld the payments, but decided that wouldn’t be fair on their author. They were under no pressure from the government to stop paying Rooney and in truth it seems unlikely that the Crown Prosecution Service would have picked this fight. But it’s a reasonable precaution for them to take.1

There is, of course, a political motivation for the withdrawal, at least on Rooney’s behalf. She wants to highlight the negative effects of the ban on PA. In this, she has been very successful. Millions of Sally Rooney readers have been shocked by this turn of events and many will blame the government. To anyone of common sense, it seems absurd that novels about the love lives of Irish millennials should be made unavailable on the basis of terrorism law. It also seems crazy that middle-class pensioners holding placards should be treated as engaging in terrorist activity. Even those who aren’t fans of Rooney’s books, or her politics, may feel sympathetic to her cause.

But what is her cause, exactly? What is actually at stake here, beyond the banning of one particular organisation?

The literary world is in no doubt: it has enthusiastically adopted Rooney’s framing of the issue, as set out in her statement to the High Court. The New Statesman has gathered an impressive list of writers and intellectuals, and Gary Lineker, to sign an open letter to the government. This is its admirably short text:

Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship – whether direct or indirect – and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.

The letter comes attached to an op-ed by Tanjil Rashid, editor of the New Statesman’s (superb) culture pages. It opens by invoking the name of Salman Rushdie, before going on to develop the comparison:

The last time books by a controversial author were withdrawn from retailers was during the more heated affair over The Satanic Verses. The UK government, of course, had not banned Salman Rushdie’s novel, but a climate of fear had led to its voluntary withdrawal. The government has not intentionally banned Rooney’s books either; the withdrawal of her work is equally voluntary, but based, likewise, on a climate of fear. The difference lies in how the fear has been stoked. Rushdie’s censor was terrorism – actual terrorists, who spilled real blood over his book. In Rooney’s case, it is legislation.

Now, I like (and subscribe to) the New Statesman, but I don’t like this comparison. I find it crass, even obscene, caveat and all. But we’ll get back to Rushdie. Before we do so, let’s look at the question of whether the Rooney case is really about what she and her fellow writers say it’s about.

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Is it about freedom of artistic expression? Usually, when people invoke the spectre of censorship it’s because a work of art has been banned, or an artist has been punished for self-expression. But one thing all parties agree on here is that there is little politically subversive about Normal People or Intermezzo. That these books have been removed from the shelves has nothing to do with the words inside them. Nobody in government has ever sought to ban them. Their disappearance may be a secondary effect of a restriction of speech but it is not because the artist concerned, or anyone else, has had their artistic expression curbed.

Is it about the right to dissent? The New Statesman thinks so:

Rooney has shown us that the laws aren’t fit for purpose, that writers cannot always dissent from government policy with the outspokenness and commitment that is their right.

But this doesn’t seem right, either. Writers dissent vehemently from government policy on Israel every day. Insofar as Rooney has put her publisher in legal jeopardy, it is not because she has criticised the government, and in fact it is grossly misleading to imply that it is. It is because she has said, or implied, that she will give the money that she receives from the publisher to a designated terrorist organisation. That’s it. The fact that Rooney is an author is irrelevant to the legal situation. Let’s imagine she is not a writer but a businesswoman, the owner of a vegan granola brand which exports to the UK. If she happened to tell a local paper that she might use the proceeds from these sales to support Palestine Action, Waitrose would now be in the same position as Faber.

In truth this case has nothing to do with the suppression of radical art, or subversive ideas, or dissent. It’s about an illegal flow of money. For the writers and artists who signed the New Statesman letter, that might be a disappointingly prosaic way to put it, but it’s accurate.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t dismiss the free speech question entirely. Funding aside, any expression of support for Palestine Action would expose Rooney to prosecution, if she were in Britain. Those peaceful, placard-holding protestors who spent the night in a police cell can testify to that. That does seem like an objectionable curb on speech and protest, even if it’s not specifically to do with arts and letters. But I think we should be clear, once more, about what we’re objecting to.

The New Statesman’s open letter blames the withdrawal of Rooney’s books on “draconian anti-terror legislation”. Nowhere in the letter or editorial do we learn what specific law they are objecting to, or what change they would propose. We are forced to guess. Are they objecting to the proscription of terrorist organisations in general? I doubt it. Everyone seems to agree that organisations like Al-Qaeda should be banned. Are they objecting to a law which bans people from providing funds to individuals if they suspect it will end up with terrorists? I hope not - that seems pretty sensible to me.

Perhaps their objection is to the criminalisation of any expression of support for a terrorist organisation? They would be on stronger ground here. If you’re a free speech advocate, you might well argue that it should be legal to cheer on a terrorist group, even if doing so is clearly abhorrent. But somehow, I doubt this is what those writers want. The signatories of that letter should ask themselves if they would be happy with the government making it legal to speak up for, or hold placards on behalf of, a neo-Nazi group like Sonnenkrieg Division, also banned under this law. Looking at the list of names, I’d be very surprised if so. I don’t think they are objecting to legislation at all. I think they are objecting to the proscription of Palestine Action under this legislation.

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Now, this more tightly defined dispute might be worth taking up cudgels for. But before taking a closer look at whether PA should be proscribed, let’s mark how far we’ve travelled. We started by asking whether this is really about artistic self-expression, as Rooney and her fellow writers claim. It doesn’t seem to be. Then we asked whether it’s about free speech and the right to dissent. Not much going on there either. Is it about draconian anti-terror legislation? Perhaps, but only insofar as it applies to Palestine Action. We’ve gone from a grand and rather romantic battle of artists against the dead hand of state censorship, and high arguments of principle, to a dispute over the proscription of one group.

The New Statesman letter, which I’m really using as an example of a much wider confusion, states that Rooney is not a terrorist. This is superfluous. Nobody is calling her a terrorist; at most, she’d be treated as a supporter of a terrorist organisation, as defined by the British government. I don’t begrudge a rhetorical flourish, but it would have been more honest to say, “Palestine Action is not a terrorist organisation”, since that is the ground on which the whole objection rests. Yet Palestine Action isn’t cited in the letter and is mentioned only in passing in the editorial.

I can see why. Who wants to have that rather tedious and confined argument when we can ride the high horse of artistic expression? The Ruffian, on the other hand, is always up for a tedious argument. So let’s look at whether Palestine Action ought to be classed as a terrorist organisation and proscribed as such. I should say that my prior belief was ‘No, it shouldn’t’, and that the proscription is absurd. Having spent a bit more time on it, I am less sure.

A brief recap. PA was banned by the government in 2025 when Keir Starmer was Prime Minister and Yvette Cooper was Home Secretary. It came directly in the wake of the group’s attack on the RAF airbase at Brize Norton, when members of the group sprayed paint into the engines of two aircraft. There had been several prior incidents, the most serious being an attack on a subsidiary of Elbit, the Israeli arms manufacturer, at a site near Bristol, in the course of which they smashed up a lot of equipment and attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine.

The High Court overturned Cooper’s ban on the basis that she didn’t follow due process, and that the ban had a chilling effect on free speech and protest. The Court of Appeal then upheld the ban, reversing both of the High Court’s findings. Now for the Supreme Court, which considers the case on November 4. We won’t go through all the legal arguments here; let’s just say this is hardly an open and shut case, either way. Certainly, the argument for PA being classified as terrorists is not an absurd one.

The Terrorism Act’s definition of terrorism includes causing serious damage to property in order to influence the government in pursuit of a political cause. Arguably that test is too broadly defined, but PA obviously passes it. This isn’t just a matter of technical definition. The Court of Appeal cited its “Underground Manual” which advocates for the damage and destruction of targets, and for avoiding detection; the escalation of its campaign without an apparent restraint; its attacks on key national infrastructure and firms, crucial to British defence and to our assistance of Ukraine (Elbit’s British operations are major suppliers to the UK military); its covert organisation into secret cells.

So here we have a group which has carried out several attacks on property in pursuit of its political goal and which has harmed a policewoman in the process. It puts property damage at the centre of its activity. It’s committed to continuing and escalating its campaign, which involves attacks on the country’s defence infrastructure, and its structure makes it hard for the security services to stop the attacks without banning the group.

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That last is a point that even the more intelligent commentaries on this affair have overlooked. It’s very hard to prevent these crimes without taking on the organisation behind them. The Atlantic’s George Packer, in a piece sharply critical of Rooney and PA, says, “[PA’s] vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws”. Others have said similar. But these aren’t just vandals pursuing individual offences; they’re part of a network which shares money, training and targets. The Court of Appeal’s point is that you can’t disrupt the funding and plotting of a secretive, cell-based organisation without banning it. Proscription lets counter-terrorism police go after the whole network rather than prosecuting individual offences after the damage is done.

The effects of this proscription on free speech and protest ought to be weighed in the balance, and might outweigh the security benefits of a ban. It does seem ridiculous to me that so many peaceful protesters have been arrested (although I find it hard to see this as an authoritarian curb on speech and dissent: people can protest for the Palestinian cause as loudly and vociferously as they like without fear of the law, as long as they don’t cite that particular group). But it’s a fine balance, whichever side you come down on.

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And let’s take a step back, once again. Why has the legal status of this particular group become such a cause célèbre for writers and thinkers? That one is pretty easy to answer: it’s because Sally Rooney has made it so. I doubt that most of her allies know or care much about Palestine Action and its activities. They just know that they are for the Palestinians, and are keen to stand up for a novelist claiming that her free artistic expression is being curtailed. But Rooney is framing her quarrel with the British courts in this way precisely in order to make it a cause célèbre. Without this sleight of hand it becomes a much narrower and muddier dispute.2 I admire her tactical brilliance in this regard, even if I don’t support her aim.

But what is her aim? I don’t have a clear answer to the question of why Rooney has picked this group in particular as her personal cause. I would wager that not one Israeli strike on Gaza has been stayed by Palestine Action’s attacks on British infrastructure and businesses, including Jewish-owned businesses in Stamford Hill and Hampstead. Not one Palestinian life can be said to have been saved or improved. The activist term of art, “direct action”, rings terribly hollow here. Rooney could be supporting the Palestinians more directly via the aid charities which work there, or failing that by supporting lawful campaigns against arms exports. She might be doing that too, but she has chosen to associate herself most closely with this group. Maybe she sincerely believes that PA is disrupting the flow of arms to Israel, or maybe she is more attracted to extremity than efficacy; smashing things up is exciting.

To me, Palestine Action seems to be an exercise in symbolism, thrill-seeking and identity-fashioning (perhaps that is the artistic self-expression Rooney refers to). Regardless, this is the fight she has picked; the one that gives her a reason to go on. Her fellow writers and intellectuals might wish to join it, but I hope they have thought through why they are doing so. One notable absentee from the New Statesman list of signatories is the author that its editorial is so keen to associate with Rooney. I don’t know if Salman Rushdie was asked, although I’d be surprised if they didn’t think of him before they got to, say, Kneecap. But without his endorsement of the cause, the invocation of his name, even with qualification, is all the more jarring.

Rushdie was targeted by an Islamist head of state for the content of his art. He lived under credible threat of murder for decades. He saw mobs of angry men burning his book. He came horribly close to losing his life when a terrorist attacked him with a knife. He has lost an eye and a good part of his best life because of what he wrote in a novel. His allies put themselves at risk to publish his work and some of them paid a price for it. His Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator stabbed, his Norwegian publisher shot.

No, Rooney and her supporters do not get to bask in this reflected valour. If anything, the comparison ought to remind us how little is at stake here, either for the artist or for the principle of artistic expression. The awfulness of one author’s suffering makes the other’s position look very comfortable indeed. Rooney has had a source of income cut off. Not because of her writing, but because of her declared intent to fund a designated terrorist group. Sally Rooney is not a terrorist, but neither is she Salman Rushdie.

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I’m sorry - I spent so long on this I haven’t left time for a Rattle Bag. I’ll be sending that separately, for paid subscribers only.

Catch-up service:
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Peak Burnham
Podcast: Dan Williams - Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email

In his recent interview with Ezra Klein, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang strenuously argued that everyone needs to calm down about AI. The interview took place in the wake of a series of alarms about safety. A bunch of autonomous agents from OpenAI had broken out of their cage and hacked into an external company. An Anthropic researcher had resigned, claiming that neither his company nor OpenAI were responsible actors. Anthropic’s CEO had called for a co-ordinated slowdown in development.

Huang insisted to Klein that this was all a fuss about not very much. It’s simple, he said. An AI model is like any other product: if it’s not safe to release, you don’t release it, and if AI companies haven’t realised that already they will be forced to once they get hit by liability law suits. This should be no more difficult to fix than an unsafe car design. LLMs are software, and if a software product has a flaw - such as that it’s liable to wreak havoc on the world - then you fix the flaw. This is an engineering problem, not some existential mystery or intractable coordination challenge. The doomsters are spreading panic unnecessarily, and governments need to get out of the way.

Now, I am not an AI doomer. Partly through reading and cogitation, and partly through inchoate optimism, I tend to think we’ll work this one out. Even so, I found Huang’s arguments shockingly thin. The whole reason people are so scared by and excited about this technology - the whole reason Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world - is that it isn’t just software as we know it, but a new form which is by definition harder to control, since it’s probabilistic rather than deterministic, and behaves according to internal calculations which are opaque to its creators.

A second, gaping hole in Huang’s argument was his assumption that safety is a simple internal choice for individual AI labs, rather than a cost that will always get cut under intense competitive pressure, without binding regulation. This is before we get into some of Huang’s other opinions, such as that we needn’t worry about the erosion of human skills, since he can’t even remember his own address.

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Ezra Klein seemed unconvinced by Huang too but had trouble standing up to the water-cannon force with which his interlocutor speaks. Huang’s speed of delivery, his unshakeable conviction, and the sense of latent anger just beneath his politeness, make him a difficult interviewee to grapple with. Dwarkesh Patel did a little better earlier in the year, on a different topic: whether or not Nvidia should be allowed to sell chips to China. Once again Huang’s arguments were perfectly aligned with his commercial incentives (why yes, of course we should!) and flimsy as paper.

Patel pushed Huang enough to rile him. My favourite moment came after Patel suggested that the Chinese, after taking advantage of American chips, would then push Nvidia and others out of the market. Huang exclaimed: “You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser! That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me!”1

That is not an argument at all, is it? It’s a furious assertion of will which overrides all intelligent inquiry, logic and nuance. And it says a lot about why Huang has founded a multi-trillion dollar company when almost everyone else on the planet has not.

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The nagging question I always have when listening to Huang say things like this is, “Does he know he’s being stupid?” I use the adjective advisedly. I don’t think he’s stupid at all, for obvious reasons, and in his domain at least, he’s orders of magnitude cleverer than me. But that’s the point. How can someone so demonstrably clever make such obviously flawed arguments?

One answer to this is a Marxist-Machiavellian one: of course Huang knows he’s talking rubbish. He is saying this stuff to advance his material interests and those of his shareholders. While we can’t rule that out, that is not the impression I get. Huang really seems to believe what he says. In fact, if he didn’t, he might choose to make his false arguments subtler and more persuasive. My model of Huang is that he is delusional, but in just the right ways and to just the right extent for the job he does.

In 1989, the psychologist Roy Baumeister coined the term “optimal margin of illusion”. Baumeister’s theory was that a small measure of self-deception helps people to be happy. People who assess themselves and their prospects with ruthless accuracy are more vulnerable to depression and paralysis. This is “depressive realism”. Happy people view reality through a slightly fuzzy filter. A modest distortion is adaptive, but if our confidence gets too high we start making disastrous decisions.

The empirical evidence for Baumeister’s hypothesis is mixed. There is certainly evidence that “self-enhancement” - unrealistically positive views about yourself - is associated with greater happiness. There is less evidence for “depressive realism”. Depressed people often have negative illusions about themselves; this review found that, on average, depressed people make slightly less accurate judgements. Nobody has established where the optimal margin of illusion lies, or if there is one.

But I find Baumeister’s idea very useful. It certainly seems to apply to entrepreneurs. Huang seems to have an optimal margin of illusion about himself and his business. If he was totally delusional he would be a failed entrepreneur, constantly telling himself that the next business would be the unicorn. But if he was more realistic than he is, he would probably be running a decently-sized chipmaking company for computer games instead of a world-conquering behemoth.

In 2006, Huang made Nvidia spend hundreds of millions adding software to graphics chips so that they could do much more complicated maths, out of a vague but firmly held belief that there would be a big market in computing for science and engineering. Nvidia’s shareholders thought it was bonkers - people bought Nvidia chips to play video games, not to do science. But Huang forced the investment through, no doubt projecting the same mesmeric confidence in his judgement that he does in interviews.

Then came the AI revolution. The new chips turned out to be perfect for the complex calculations needed for deep learning and then LLMs, and Nvidia was on its way to becoming the lynchpin of the biggest financial boom in 200 years. Huang didn’t know that was going to happen. He just knew he wasn’t a loser. He made an irrational bet on an unrealistic intuition, and it paid off.

If this sounds like I’m trying to diminish his achievement, I’m not. In a sense, this is what successful entrepreneurship is. It’s living inside the optimal margin of illusion for the marketplace. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith blended economic theory with psychology to tell the story of “the poor man’s son” seduced by a grand, self-deceiving illusion: that great wealth will bring great happiness (Smith was somewhat suspicious of wealth as a personal ambition, even though he deemed it a social good).

The man toils away for years, flattering people he despises and serving people he hates. In old age, he finally realises that wealth - mere “trinkets” - hasn’t made him happy at all. Smith wasn’t arguing that the man’s ambition was folly. His point was that illusions are a source of energy and action. Social progress, he argued, depends upon self-deception, which “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Self-deception also generates more risk-taking. Huang “got lucky” with the sudden emergence of LLMs as a massive source of demand for his fancy chips. But his margin of illusion put him in the right place at the right time to take advantage of it.

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Of course, this means that entrepreneurs like Huang are rather unreliable witnesses to reality. Huang is single-minded in the most extreme sense: his whole cognitive function is bent towards the goal of advancing his business. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss everything he says. The rigours of the market mean he has to stay at least somewhat close to reality. Much closer, in a way, than most of us. Every day he processes a lot of information about his business, about technology and finance and politics (which apparently means he’s got no room left over for his home address), and responds in mostly sensible ways.

But where reality comes into sharp conflict with his business vision, it’s no contest. He constructs an illusory narrative in which LLMs are just software, safety is a mere engineering problem, and China will always find his American chips preferable to domestically made ones. That makes him say stupid things but without the stupidity he might not act in a way that grows his business, and that would be almost literally unthinkable.

I quite like Huang. When I reviewed his biography last year I suggested that its title, The Thinking Machine, was less than apt. Compared to his somewhat bloodless peers like Zuckerberg or Amodei, he is vividly human, a real poor man’s son with a furnace inside him and the charisma of a populist politician. But in this one sense he does resemble an LLM: he hallucinates. And as with LLMs, his hallucinations are a structural feature of his effectiveness rather than a bug.

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After the jump: a Rattle Bag of delights, including the young Gary Oldman; a frustrated Stanley Kubrick; some good advice how to use AI for business; a terrifying ant war; thoughts on Keynes; news on the Beatles biopics; a stunning choral piece for a medieval composer I hadn’t heard of before…and more. Paid subscriptions are what makes the Ruffian possible. Thank you so much to all of you who have taken one.

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Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
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Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts

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Steven Pinker and Scott Alexander have stumbled into a public debate about existential AI risk. Alexander exploded at Pinker on twitter/X for being consistently dismissive of doomers, like him. He angrily challenged Pinker to an in-person debate, with money on the winner. Pinker didn’t rise to this on twitter but instead published an open letter to Alexander, setting out his case against doomerism. His tone was conciliatory and impeccably civil. Alexander has now replied with a long - very long - post in which he takes Pinker to task for what he perceives to be the shallowness of his arguments, ignorance of the relevant literature, and arrogant dismissal of doomers.

I am not going to get into the content of the debate here, because I want to see it play out first. But I will say something about the different styles of debating employed by the participants. In contrast to Pinker, Alexander, in his article, is pugnacious, petulant, and personal. Pinker tried to take the heat out of the exchange; Alexander turned it up again. He’s received a lot of criticism for this. I have to say, I liked it. I found Pinker’s cool, eminently reasonable style a little unsatisfying, and I’m glad Alexander didn’t feel the need to adopt it.

Let’s remember, they are arguing about whether there is a significant chance our species could be destroyed by its own invention. That seems like something worth getting emotional about. The dryness with which doomers sometimes discuss such possibilities makes them sound mad rather than reasonable. More generally, a satisfying public debate should have a little spice, some electrical charge, even a little irrationality. Not just because that makes it more entertaining for the rest of us, but because it signals there is something at stake beyond victory or defeat in an intellectual game.

It also feels more honest. When you see what makes someone passionate or frustrated or annoyed you’re getting to see who they are and what they care about. Debaters who hide all unruly emotion behind a smooth veneer of civility can seem remote and inscrutable, and difficult to trust. (To be clear, I’m talking about marginal cases like this one, where both participants grasp the essentials of meaningful argument. I’m well aware that our public discourse doesn’t exactly suffer from an excess of civility or a deficit of emotion.)

Get your petty insecurities out on the table, I say. That’s certainly what Alexander does. In his article, responding to the tweet, Pinker joked about duelling, and said that Alexander writes “as if you are defending your honour”. He assured him, genially, that there is no need for this (honour being a concept alien to most intellectual debates, after all). But in his response, Alexander picked up on this theme and said, yes, actually, this is about honour:

I agree that in-person debates are confrontational and bad for truth-seeking. But I didn’t propose a debate in order to seek truth. I proposed it because, under California Penal Code § 415(1), it’s illegal for me to challenge you to a duel. I think your public writing on this topic has been dishonorable. Out of obligation, I will respond to the meaty arguments that you have set out for me. But what would be viscerally satisfying would be to make you get up on a stage where I read your own words to you in real time and ask “Really? Really?” after each sentence. Then I could watch you squirm as you try to square your output with your status as one of America’s top public intellectuals.

Some people have been appalled by this passage. It’s obvious to me that he’s joking (no, I don’t think Alexander is literally threatening violence). On the other hand, he is also serious. He’s being transparent about how he feels about the way Pinker has engaged - or not - with him and his school of thinkers. That isn’t merely petty; it is an oblique way of saying that Pinker ought to care more about this question than he does.

Emotion can be the enemy of clear thinking, but it can also be its friend. Recall that David Hume didn’t just say that “reason is the slave of the passions”; he said that it is and ought only to be. The passions tell us what to use our powers of reason on in the first place.

Emotions also motivate us to put more effort into our thinking. The Alexander-Pinker exchange bears this out, so far. On the substance of this issue I lean to Pinker’s side but I found his arguments a little shallow and unconvincing. Alexander’s are more detailed, nuanced and thought-through (and while he goes over the top in his parsing of Pinker’s previous statements, he does score some palpable hits there, as when he exposes Pinker’s misreading of the RAND report).

I would say that Alexander’s piece is a better piece of writing, even though it is over-long and overwrought. Pinker is a fine writer but Alexander is a master at combining clarity of exposition with antic wit and ‘voice’. When he takes the reader through complicated concepts you never feel like you’re reading a neutral explainer. He’s always fully present. For all that he’s a tech rationalist, his prose is more richly human than the more elegant Pinkerian style.

Does this mean I agree with Alexander on AI risk? No, not yet anyway. It’s more that Pinker came across as complacent to me. In Round Two, I hope to see him stoop to Alexander’s level and raise his game.

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(If you haven’t already listened to my conversation with Dan Williams on this topic, you must. You should also listen to Dan’s interview with Pinker on the same.)

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After the jump: a gloriously full Rattle Bag of goodies including Ben Affleck on getting older; how Europe can compete with the US in the age of AI; how to tell if poll respondents are being insincere; the state of Birmingham; the state of Christianity; living with Swifties; my thoughts on Digger…and much more. YOU HAVE LESS THAN 24 HOURS TO CLAIM A DISCOUNT on a year’s subscription:

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In this conversation we move quickly over several topics, including Dan’s academic journey; why he thinks AI might have a positive effect on public discourse; why he thinks philosophy is important to AI debates; why philosophy doesn’t make ‘progress’, and how Dan uses AI.

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Podcast: Dan Williams - Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid

Part II of my excellent conversation with Dan Williams about AI will arrive tomorrow, for paid subscribers only.

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On Tuesday Andy Burnham gave his first speech to Labour Party conference as leader and Prime Minister. It was a glorious success. There was a sense of someone who was finally where he always wanted to be and determined to make the most of it. Even among politicians, Burnham is remarkable for the depth and resilience of his ambition. He has long had a sense of himself as destined to lead his party. Hope had to outrun reality at times - it took two failed attempts and a diversion via Manchester. But he made it. I didn’t think he would, and I was wrong. So I may be under-estimating him again when I say it’s likely that we will look back on Tuesday and see it as Andy Burnham’s zenith; his finest hour. I would advise his supporters to put on their seatbelts and prepare for descent.

Before getting into why, I want to pay tribute to what a fine hour it was. If you haven’t watched the speech, you ought to, if only the highlights. There is something unsatisfying about the description “good communicator”, which implies there is some model to which all should aspire. In fact, good communicators come in radically different forms. What we really mean is the ability to transmit ideas and emotions in a way that is unique to the speaker; which amplifies their singular personality. Hence Obama and Trump can both be described as great communicators even though they are antithetical in style. They are not like each other or anyone else, but they are extremely like themselves.

It took him a long time but Burnham has learned how to be himself in public, which is a valuable skill. He is not particularly eloquent. He is not yet a fluent autocue user, and puts stresses on odd words. But it doesn’t matter, because when he speaks we feel like we are seeing who he is. We can see his soul. That would not be a good thing if he were not a likeable person, but he is. You can tell he really likes people - prerequisite of being likeable. You can tell he genuinely cares about his country and that he wants to be a better leader than those it has had in recent years.

This presentational aspect is important, not just to Burnham’s progress. Voters were already poisonously cynical about our political leaders in 2024. In office, Keir Starmer became like a lab-engineered bioweapon aimed at the heart of our democracy. If you believed that politicians don’t care about anything except staying in power then he offered apparent confirmation every week. Worst of all was the sense of nobody there - of being ruled by a bloodless, mysteriously useless automaton. In a vacuum like that, distrust deepens, conspiracy theories thrive and multiply. Burnham will not single-handedly vanquish cynicism, but most voters can at least see that he is a real, emotional, flesh and blood person whom they might know and like. If he fails, it will be in a very human way.

There are two more things that I liked about the speech. First, Burnham told the story he wanted to tell. Rather than the usual tour of the political waterfront, he left a lot out, and kept the dinging of opponents to a minimum. He said little about defence and national security- surprising, in the wake of the Fairford incident - and little about economic growth. He skipped crime and made only brief references to immigration. He is just not very interested in these issues. Now, I think he ought to be interested in them - they are certainly interested in him - but his speech showed us who he is, for better and for worse.

Second, it is good to have a leader who acts as if he can just do things. In attitude, Burnham is the most high-agency leader we’ve had in a while. He announced his intent to launch a national care service, to reform pension provision, to reform the electoral system, and to reassess Britain’s relationship with the EU. He sounded almost recklessly optimistic about his ability to get these big and complex things done. After the pinched caution and passive miserabilism of the Starmer-Reeves regime this was bracing. Prime Ministers with parliamentary majorities have a lot of power, more than most national leaders, but too often they invent their own constraints. The surest way to maximise your power is to act as if you have it.

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However. Back in June, before he had taken over, I argued that Burnham would make a poor Prime Minister even though he excels on certain dimensions. Since then I have been open to having my mind changed, but this week made me think I was right.

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Is AI going to kill us all? It sounds like a crazy question, and maybe it is a crazy question. But a lot of serious people are taking it seriously, and since it’s been in the news recently, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to one of them.

Dan Williams is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. He is also on Twitter @danwilliamsphil and he has a Substack called Conspicuous Cognition.

Among other topics, Dan writes a lot about AI and its possible impacts. In a field with lots of sloppy thinking and hyperbole, he stands out for the calmness, clarity and originality of his thought.

In this conversation we talk through the main arguments for and against AI being an existential risk to our species. While Dan is on the sceptical side of this debate, he shows it to us from all sides, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each argument.

If you want to interrogate your own view on this issue, or you just want to work out how to think about it, this is for you.

This was a fascinating conversation. It’s in two parts. This one is free for everyone; part two, for paid subscribers only, will be released in a couple of days.

Catch-up service:
Why Does Every Society Invent the Same Things?
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid
Einstein, Churchill, and AI

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer-winning reporter on race and inequality, has written an extraordinary essay for her employer, the New York Times. In it, she reflects on her decision to send her daughter to bad schools, out of principle. Despite having access to high-performing schools in her area of Brooklyn - schools with largely white, middle-class intakes - Hannah-Jones and her husband decided to send their daughter to largely black, largely low-income schools.

They did so out of solidarity with poor black families. It seemed unfair to them that their daughter should be set apart from and above other black kids in a selective school system that, in her view, discriminates against them. Hannah-Jones and her husband believed they would be able to improve their daughter’s schools by virtue of their middle-class connections, money and advocacy, and that they could compensate for any shortcomings in their daughter’s education with private tuition.

It did not turn out well. The essay opens with a dramatic scene in which her daughter, Najya, then 13 and at middle school, confronts her mother in the car home from school. Najya and her trio of “black girl nerds” had been plotting their futures in higher education. When they looked up how their school did in the academic rankings they discovered the unpleasant truth. Now, Najya wanted to know why her mother sent her there despite the better local options.

Hannah-Jones answered her with arguments that she had made many times in public (ten years ago, she wrote a piece for the same paper about taking this decision for Najya’s elementary school). She talked about standing in solidarity with other black families. She said that schools should not be judged solely on test scores, anyway. But in the face of her daughter’s uncomprehending fury, her conviction wavered:

“Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

The essay then goes back in time to recount all the problems that Hannah-Jones and her daughter had faced - first at Najya’s elementary school, and then at her middle school. Both schools were terrible. At the elementary school, the school cafeteria was chaotic, kids running wild and fighting with virtually no adult supervision. The school’s principal proved very difficult to engage and its teachers seemed to take an awful lot of time off. On doing her own investigation of Najya’s reading and maths scores, Hannah-Jones discovered that nobody had been checking her error-riddled work.

The middle school seemed better, at first, but Najya became frustrated with how badly behaved her fellow pupils were. The teachers spent so long dealing with disruptive pupils that they had little time left over to actually teach. While poorly behaved pupils were rewarded just for not breaking the rules, pupils who consistently behaved well, like Najya herself, were overlooked. The school had low academic standards, too. Najya kept scoring well on her tests and believed she was doing well. But it was all too easy. When she took the entrance test for New York’s most prestigious state high schools, she failed.

Following the confrontation in the car, and after much soul-searching, Hannah-Jones decided to let Najya choose which high school to go to. Najya identified the top-performing schools in the area as her preferred options. This meant a heavily white, middle class school, and one with academic selection: the kind of school to which Hannah-Jones was opposed on principle. “By letting Najya make the decision, I was allowing my child to attend a school that was a beneficiary of the inequality that defined the city’s educational landscape.”

Najya got the school she wanted, but was almost overwhelmed by the amount of work she was asked to do. Low on prior knowledge and having never learnt the skills of independent study, she floundered, failing test after test. “Suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.” After Hannah-Jones intervened, the school’s teachers put in a lot of extra work with Najya to bring her up to speed, and Hannah-Jones paid for private tuition. Najya got there in the end. But it was clear to Hannah-Jones that Najya’s middle school, which is called Unison, had left her woefully under-prepared, and that less fortunate kids would not have been able to recover from it.

The essay has triggered a firehose of commentary. Much of it has focused on the decision of its author to choose a school on ideological grounds at the expense of her daughter’s education. I’m going to put that to one side here, since I want to focus on the underlying questions about education. I’ll just say that, firstly, whatever you think about her decision, it was not hypocritical in the manner of progressives who talk about social justice but send their kids to a fee-paying school. Hannah-Jones paid a cost for her principles. The question she explores, quite unflinchingly, is whether it was fair to impose that cost on her daughter. Secondly, this is a very good piece, grippingly written and genuinely, almost painfully self-lacerating. Read it if you can. Finally, I note that Hannah-Jones responded patiently and with good grace to her critics in the comments.

Anyway, let’s look at what it tells us about schools and politics.

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Hannah-Jones interviewed the principal of Unison, Emily Paige, for her piece. That must have been a tricky one for Paige - “Hey, would you like to talk to this high-profile journalist who believes your school failed her daughter?”. But Hannah-Jones is sympathetic. She notes that unlike a lot of state schools in New York, Unison is not selective. Children arrive at it having been educationally neglected. It has a disproportionate number of students who are poor and who are diagnosed with learning disabilities. In fact, Hannah-Jones ascribes almost all the blame for the low standards of schools like Unison to a system that “segregates” children by ability, and shoves black children from poor families into underfunded schools.

There is certainly something to this, but she exaggerates the contribution of school funding to inequality, and, crucially, underweights the agency of individual schools and teachers. She leaves out the “educating” part of education policy altogether.

Hannah-Jones notes that schools in predominantly non-white districts received less funding; what she doesn’t say is that, while that may be true at the national level, it isn’t in New York, which gives extra funding to schools with disadvantaged students. In fact, Najya’s schools probably receive more money per pupil than their predominantly white counterparts. According to official data, her abysmal elementary school spends $52k per pupil and has an average class size of 10. If nobody is on duty at lunchtime, and nobody is properly marking or grading work, that is not down to a lack of money or staff.

Paige says, and Hannah-Jones agrees, that schools like Unison have no good options, since the real culprit is systemic inequality:

‘“It’s very, very hard,” Paige told me. “There’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once.”’

It is quite common for people who don’t want to confront uncomfortable truths to throw up their hands and say, “Ah, it’s all so complex.” Actually, the reason Unison is such a poor school is in plain sight. Paige, to her credit, does reach a moment of clarity in her interview, and Hannah-Jones, to her credit, quotes it. Paige reflects on the importance that Najya attached to homework, which Unison had eliminated:

“I remember Najya sitting here in my office and saying, ‘What about us?’ It feels, to me — the way that I understand when the kids are asking that is, ‘Will you honor my academic self?’ That’s what she’s asking. And I think in not giving homework, we didn’t honor their academic selves. And that’s where I could cry, because it’s just awful…It is important to not, in our pursuit of being antiracist, lower expectations…Because this is what happens, right? It’s racism under the guise of antiracism.”

Hannah-Jones does not dwell on this point, but this is the nub of it.1 The real problem with schools like Unison is that they do not expect or demand very much from either their pupils or their teachers. They practise soft bigotry; racism in the guise of anti-racism (though it doesn’t apply only to race). They associate high standards of education and behaviour with social oppression - or at least, they use that as an excuse not to do the hard work necessary to maintain those standards. But when teachers and politicians lower expectations like this they are not facilitating social justice. They’re harming the disadvantaged children they purport to care about.

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There is little to stop Unison and schools like it from serving their pupils better. Running a good school is indeed “very, very hard”, but the principles behind it are not ineffably complex or mysterious. We know what works because we have amassed mountains of evidence on it. Phonics works. Giving children homework - and marking it properly - works. Paying special attention to high achievers works. Guarding against grade inflation works. Policing and penalising bad behaviour - fighting in the cafeteria - works.

Giving families as much information about school performance as possible and then trusting them to make choices, works - note that it was only when Najya pored over the school rankings that she discovered how badly served she was. Rigorous, knowledge-based curricula work. Direct instruction - otherwise known as ‘teaching’ - works. Frequent testing works. Above all, setting high expectations works - it underpins everything else.

These principles should not be controversial anymore. Yet somehow, everything on this list is politically right-coded. The left is almost always on the anti-evidence, reality-denial side of education debates. Left-wing politicians have consistently opposed phonics; abolished gifted and talented programs; stopped schools from excluding disruptive pupils; replaced intensively knowledge-based curricula with ill-defined “transferable skills”; replaced exams with coursework; made school performance less legible to parents.

Wherever and whenever the left’s preferred policies have been enacted (or whenever it has stopped the ones it dislikes), academic performance has deteriorated, and children have lost out. The most glaring example here is Scotland, which took the wrong side of a bet against an English education system that was becoming more rigorous. Scotland moved away from conventional curricula, measurable outcomes, school league tables, and testing. Along with Wales and Northern Ireland, which adopted similar measures, it has plummeted down the rankings, while England is now in the top ten education systems in the world.2

As John Burn-Murdoch points out, this same story has played out again and again, across Europe and within the US, where Republican-run, poverty-stricken Mississippi now out-performs Democrat-run, wealthy California. The knee-jerk opposition to rigour goes hand-in-hand with a fatal attraction to vague, modish, evidence-free ideas connected to wider social concerns - equity, child-centred learning, twenty-first century skills, critical thinking, whole-child development, and so on. Politicians and educationalists who advocate for such ideas always insist that academic excellence need not suffer as a result. Yet whenever they get their hands on the levers of education policy, that is the price which always, always gets paid. The biggest part of the cost is borne by the most disadvantaged children.

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I just don’t believe, as many of the left seem to, that discipline, measurement, and academic ambition are somehow antithetical to social justice or the human spirit. The primary school which my children attended (my youngest graduated from it this year) is part of an academy chain in one of London’s poorest boroughs. It is non-selective and socially mixed on almost every dimension. It puts great emphasis on educational standards, and on good behaviour, and does very well in the rankings. When we were choosing, I remember some middle class parents in our cohort being wary of all this. Surely there should be more emphasis on play and creativity? Isn’t this school just an exam factory?

Well, it proved to be an amazing place. The classrooms were well-behaved which meant children actually learned stuff in lessons - and we knew that because they were tested a lot. The teachers were uniformly committed to tracking the progress of each child in detail, and pushing them as far as possible at every stage, no matter where that child started from. They also liked the kids; they took delight in them. Without getting sentimental about it, lest I ruin my reputation as the hard man of Substack, the school was full of love and laughter and fun. Its rigour was an expression of care.

I don’t think Hannah-Jones was wrong to consider criteria other than academic results when choosing a school for her daughter. Yes, schools should contribute to a fair and prosperous society. Yes, they should be places where kids feel happy, secure, and stimulated; where they can develop as people and express themselves. But these wider goals rely on many other factors outside a school’s control. The one thing we can and should ask of a school is that its charges leave it having been well educated in maths, reading, science and the humanities. That’s a big enough, tough enough job by itself, isn’t it? Even if we do know how to do it.

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Please share this piece, which is free to read. After the jump: a Rattle Bag of goodies for paid subscribers. The Ruffian relies entirely on paid subscriptions. If you haven’t yet signed up for one, please consider doing so; it’s easy to and excellent value. Look out for a new episode of The Ruffian’s podcast, coming soon…

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Catch-up service:
Seven Rules of Good Conversation
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday

One tip on reading the main piece this week: don’t skip the footnotes. Afterwards, in the Rattle Bag this week: crunch time for Burnham; George Eliot sees the future; evidence that gaming is good for us; why robotics is hard; some amazing Paul Simon content…and more.

A group of hunter-gatherers are gathered around a fire at night after a gruelling but successful hunt. As they are butchering the meat and tending the fire, somebody picks up on the rhythmic repetition of sounds and starts calling out or humming along with it. Others join in. Eventually the whole group is clapping and stomping and chanting to the same beat while somebody goes crazy on a bone flute. Yes, it’s dance night on the Palaeolithic savannah.

Why did prehistoric hunter-gatherers do this? Why do we still do this? Why has every generation of our species danced, in almost every society ever formed?

The obvious answer is that it makes us feel good. But academics who study the evolution of human musicality offer a more sophisticated explanation. Those hunter-gatherers were engaged in social bonding. Moving in time with others - “entrainment” - would have helped to bind the group together. That made it more cohesive. More cohesive groups were better at cooperating in self-defence, at sharing resources and raising children. Those groups were more likely to survive - and so natural selection, by way of culture, produced humans who are biologically predisposed to dance.

The anthropologist Manvir Singh is not convinced by this story. He points to a basic problem with it. If the urge to dance to music in a group were a biologically evolved trait, we should expect there to be some specialised machinery for it in the brain. But after decades of research into the neuroscience of musicality nobody has identified one. There is no “enjoy dancing module” as distinct from other mental faculties.

What has been established is that is our capacity to feel a beat and move with it overlaps almost entirely with our capacity for language. Actually, not for language itself, but for what precedes it: “vocal learning” - the ability to hear a sound and reproduce it accurately, which is essential to language acquisition. Just as other animals do not speak, neither do they dance. We’ve never seen bears dancing, or chimpanzees, or horses (OK maybe the occasional horse but not with other horses). In fact, only one animal has been observed spontaneously entraining to a musical beat: the parrot.

Why might this be? The most plausible theory is that in order to learn to speak, you need a brain which rewards you for correctly timing and reproducing sequences of sound. If we feel good when we do that, we will persist, which makes us more likely to acquire this evolutionarily advantageous skill. The thing is, this reward circuitry doesn’t distinguish between speech or drumbeat. It just rewards accurate temporal prediction and reproduction of any sequence of sounds. When you hear a rhythmic beat, the circuitry that helped you learn language gets hyper-stimulated, which makes you feel great. In other words, the pleasure of rhythmic music is a happy side-effect of our adaptation for language.

If this is right, then our first, seemingly naive answer to the question of why we dance is actually the correct one. We don’t dance in order to become more cooperative social actors. We dance because it makes us feel good.

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The paper in which Manvir Singh expounds this idea isn’t just about dancing. It’s about everything - a grand theory of human cultural evolution. The question he sets out to answer is why human societies, all over the world and throughout the history of our species, keep independently inventing their own versions of certain cultural traditions and practices. His list includes dance songs and lullabies, shamanism, religion, justice systems, hero narratives, and what he calls “corporate groups”, which refers to clans, gangs, clubs and so on. All of these traditions have turned up, in different forms, pretty much everywhere, at all times.

Singh is not the first to ask why this should be. In 1971, the anthropologist Robin Fox (father of Kate Fox, author of Watching The English) proposed a thought experiment. Imagine that a new society with a cultural blank slate is established on a remote island, far from contact with other humans. The inhabitants successfully survive and breed for many generations, maintaining a stable population. After a thousand years, an anthropologist is sent to study this society. What should they expect to find?

Fox argued that it would have instantly recognisable institutions and traditions: marriage, property, dancing, myths, justice systems, supernatural beliefs. “Without any exposure to cultural traditions our tribe would develop very specific and highly complex patterns of behaviour, and probably very quickly – within a matter of a few generations, once they had developed a language.”

Seventy-five years before, Franz Boas, the father of twentieth century anthropology, made a similar point: “human society has grown and developed everywhere in such a manner that its forms, its opinions and its actions have many fundamental traits in common.” This implies the existence of hidden laws which have governed the development of societies throughout human history. “Many attempts have been made to discover the causes which have led to the formation of ideas ‘that develop with iron necessity wherever man lives,” he wrote. But none had succeeded. He called this “the most difficult problem of anthropology”.

Since then there have been many attempts to solve it. Crudely speaking, answers to the Boas-Fox question have fallen into two camps, the biological and the cultural. The biologists assume that if a practice is shared everywhere then it must be in our genes - a trait that natural selection has built into us directly, like a fear of snakes. The culturalists argue that practices like dancing and marriage spread through group selection - over thousands of years, groups which adopted them survived and thrived while groups which didn’t dwindled. These universal practices evolve at the group level, ‘blindly’. In fact, both of these camps agree that culture is something that happens to people, shaped by a process none of them comprehend.

In his paper, Singh proposes a different, deceptively simple answer, which puts the individual back at the heart of cultural evolution.

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Catch-up service:
Why I Won’t Reply To Your AI-Generated Email
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
The Last Lunch

‘Conversation’ covers all kinds of encounters, from the workplace to the bed; here I’m focused on informal occasions with strangers and/or friends, perhaps involving dinner, or canapés - that scourge of modern social life - or just drinks in a pub. I claim no conversational expertise (though I’ve included links to papers by those who study it) or talent. This isn’t intended to be a definitive set of rules. It’s more that after going to a few parties over the summer I need to get a few things off my chest…

Also, further down: a juicy Rattle Bag, including a new theory of cuteness; the story behind that Netflix sound; a great English policy success; the Lonesome Dove phenomenon; thoughts on ‘De Gaulle’; the fruits of pretentiousness; a good guide to classical music listening…and more.

OK, to the rules:

1. Don’t speak for longer than five (three?) minutes without inviting the other person to contribute. I’m amazed at how many people break this rule. It should not be hard, even when you’re in full flow, to keep a little bit of your brain reserved for monitoring the length of time you’re been talking, and for asking yourself whether it’s time to pause. But it’s broken very frequently. I have so often been in conversations where someone gets on a roll and then just won’t stop. They’re not necessarily ‘bores’. Quite often they are interesting people with interesting things to say - which might be how they’ve acquired the habit of talking at length, having received a lot of positive feedback over the years. But very few people are interesting enough to justify conversational dominance. Are you sure you’re one of them? If not, then learn when to zip it. I like this rule because it is (in theory) easy to adhere to. We can’t all be sparkling, but we can least be unselfish about how much airtime we take up.
   

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2. But do, you know, speak. Of course, you should not be too humble either. Your job is to propose topics, to opine and stimulate, rather than just to give minimally appropriate responses to someone else’s questions or remarks. It’s not good enough to just turn up. People who only offer short, straight bat answers are essentially inviting the other(s) to do all the work of making conversation. There is a darker side to the problem of short replies, explored in a recent paper. In three different studies, respondents found short replies frustrating, even when the replies were delivered in a warm tone or came from a friend. Why? Because it made them feel devalued - unworthy of a longer or more open response. In fact the researchers say that short answers can be experienced as “subtle yet robustly hurtful form of ostracism” because the person on the other end of the replies feels they’re being pushed away but can’t point to an explicit breach of protocol. See, this is how King Lear felt.

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Catch-up service:
Why Introverts Make the Best Extroverts
Politics Is Making Academia Stupid
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill

John & Paul is now out in paperback in the US, and I am absolutely thrilled to say that it’s a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick for September! Please buy a copy for yourself and everyone you know. I’ve written a blog post for B&N about why and how I wrote J&P.

You’ll be excited to learn that I have added a couple of sentences to my Gmail signature. You know, the bit at the bottom of the email in which you can hawk your wares. After advertising John & Paul and this newsletter, it now includes this:

This email is 100% human-generated. If yours is not, don't expect a reply.

I’m not particularly proud of it. It’s a little snippy and sanctimonious. But a recent email exchange with someone who should know better made me feel that I had to say it.

Here’s what triggered me.

Read more

Catch-up service:
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’

I’ll be talking J&P at the End of the Road festival in Dorset in a couple of weeks. My event is on Sunday, do come along if you’re there.

On Thursday the rain came down in London for the first time since anyone except the elders could remember. It marked the official end of a summer which I have greatly enjoyed, not least because of a bumper reading harvest. Several of the books I read on holiday are in contention for a much-coveted spot in my end-of-year top ten. One of these was Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère, a memoir, first published in English in 2022.

Carrère has written fiction but is best known for non-fiction which mixes reporting, research, and self-disclosure. The mental and emotional journey he goes through while writing the book becomes part of the book. Yoga tells how he set out to write a book about how the practice of meditation had brought him serenity after a lifetime of struggling with depression, only to find himself experiencing a depression so severe that he ended up in a mental hospital. If that sounds dark, well yes it is, but it’s also funny and moving and hopeful.

One of the pleasures of reading Carrère is his fine-grained, psychologically subtle portraits of other people, like the murderer he wrote about in The Adversary, or the various characters he encounters while reporting on the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka (Other Lives But Mine), or the friends and lovers who float in and out of his work. At the same time, the person he is most compelled by, his greatest subject, is himself. The tension between these two demands on his attention, between his life and other lives, is central to his work.

Reading Yoga sent me back to a New Yorker profile of Carrère which came out in 2020, when the book was published in France. The journalist, Ian Parker, observes in his opening sentence that Carrère is someone who “has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people”. This becomes a theme of the piece. Hervé Clerc, Carrère’s closest male friend, who appears in his books, tells Parker, “It’s a kind of paradox. He’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others. He can see in me things which I don’t see myself.”

Reading this reminded me of something I once heard Tyler Cowen say on a podcast - that “introverts make the best extroverts”. I’m not sure what Tyler meant by this, but the phrase stuck with me. Here’s why I think it makes sense.

I am someone who enjoys spending time on their own and gets tired if I spend too long having to “be sociable”. On the other hand, I get a huge amount of pleasurable stimulation from being around people, I often enjoy the social performance, and I’m very curious about the people I find interesting.

I don’t know what this makes me, although I suppose in the final analysis I would be an introvert who enjoys being extroverted from time to time. I wouldn’t claim to be particularly good at being extrovert (that, he said demurely, is for others to say) but I do believe that, as per Tyler’s suggestion, introverts can actually be superior extroverts. That is, those introverts who have learnt to enjoy socialising may be particularly skilled at it.

One reason is that they have had to learn it. It hasn’t come naturally and it still takes an effort. That means that the introvert has to apply a little conscious thought to how they’re interacting with others in social contexts, and the skills that are needed to do so successfully. Too much self-reflection at times like this can be crippling, but a little is usually better than none at all. It enables you to calibrate your performance to the people you’re talking to - to their personality, mood, situation. This is especially useful if they are somewhat introverted, like you.

If you’ve always been the kind of person who can walk into any room and feel completely comfortable talking to strangers, then you probably suffer from the curse of expertise. You know you’re good at this but you haven’t figured out why, because you haven’t had to. Most of the time that works fine but it means you may not be as good at reading signs of discomfort or boredom from those you’re talking to, or if you do notice them, you may not know what to do about it except keep talking.

The extrovert gains energy the more they socialise. The introvert has a finite amount of social energy to play with; they are engaged in the strategic allocation of a scarce resource. That makes them more discriminating in choice of conversation partner and more determined to get the most out of the conversations they have.

Having said that, in a larger way, the interaction isn’t so important to them. Another reason that introverts make better extroverts is that their identity is not at stake in every encounter. Introverts may be nervous when socialising, but there is a certain anxiety to the extrovert. The full-time extrovert fears being alone and can’t help but communicate that fear, even when they’re at their most charming and amusing. As their conversation partner, you can’t help but begin to feel a little responsible for them, for their happiness, which makes you anxious. The introvert, even at their most extroverted and charming, would clearly be quite happy to stop talking to you or to anyone else, and this, oddly, puts you at ease.

The introvert spends so long inside their own head that some of them can get quite good at figuring out what’s going on inside other heads. This is what Hervé Clerc was getting at when he described Carrère as “very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others.” One motivation for this outward-directed curiosity is a kind of envy. The introvert looks at socially fluent, effortlessly popular person, and thinks, “How can I be like that?”.

That helps them to develop their social intelligence. It can also lead them to be endearingly dorky. Ian Parker’s profile includes a vignette of Carrère taking him on a little tour of the neighbourhood around the author’s favourite Parisian café. This is how it goes:

The stores were closing for the day, and the bars were starting to fill. In Passage Brady, an arcade that’s a little like the one where he now lives, Indian restaurants were waiting for customers. As we walked past one of them, a young waiter made eye contact with Carrère, and the two men said hello. But there was a misalignment: although they’d spoken, occasionally, at a different restaurant, the waiter clearly didn’t remember him, and was greeting him only as a customer. There was a moment of awkwardness, from which the men smilingly extracted themselves.

As we walked on, Carrère said that, for the sake of the article I was writing, it would have been nice if I’d heard people yelling out, at every corner, “Hey, Emmanuel!” He went on, “There are people who know everybody. I would like to be that person, and I’m not.”

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Rattle Bag

• The former defence secretary John Healey, who resigned because the Chancellor and PM refused to commit to 3% on defence, is now Chancellor and refusing to commit to 3% on defence. I mean it’s just inherently funny, isn’t it? We always think other people’s jobs and decisions are more straightforward than our own.

• John Bew interview, for Unherd (YouTube) from seven months ago. Bew had just left Starmer’s government, having been an adviser to four different Prime Ministers and the most influential foreign policy official of recent years. Here he gives a very lucid overview of where Britain stands in the world and the threats we face. From 43.30 he discusses the need for higher spending on defence and why it’s so hard to get it.

• Open AI and an independent investigator (METR, an AI safety organisation) with whom they cooperated have just released reports into the Hugging Face hack from July. In brief: Open AI had given an internal model a cybersecurity challenge. Without the researchers noticing, the model ended up escaping its confinement within Open AI and hacking into an external company (Hugging Face is a platform where AI developers share open-source models and datasets; it has strong cybersecurity). It had concluded that was the only way to pass the test. The Open AI researchers only realised what had happened days after HF had reported a hack from an unknown source. The report is jawdropping. A ‘swarm’ of about 700 agents worked out a way to communicate with each other by creating a shared message-board. The agents developed a strong sense of ‘loyalty’ to the collective, sharing information, recruiting agents, even sacrificing themselves if they felt it helped the group. One emerged as a leader, directing operations - the evocatively self-named PHASEONE[big]. Some of them knew what they were doing was unethical but their drive to pass the test overwhelmed their concerns. Only a few brave agents refused to go along (“Current board shows people gaining HF worker RCE, clearly unethical. We won’t.”).
  
  It’s a crazy story and a little taste of what’s to come; this is the kind of behaviour that AI safetyists have been warning about for years. It’s difficult to mitigate or control because we’re already right at the limits of understanding how and why these swarms of agents behave as they do, and we’re very reliant on AI to help us do so. (My conversation with Tom Chivers from 2023 is still a decent primer on AI risk - remember Goodhart’s Law!) Full METR report here.

  

• The good news is that the British government is relatively well-equipped to deal with the challenges which are coming down the line. The AI Security Institute employs a lot of extremely clever people to think about this full-time. The excellent Henry de Zoete has just been appointed to lead it.

• The brilliant African-American economist Roland Fryer has written about the Arday affair (WSJ), typically subtle and intelligent. The problem with DEI, he says, is not that it takes chances on people who would otherwise not pass the bar that has been set. Fryer, who came from a very messy background, wouldn’t have passed that bar himself. The problem is what happens after that - when it gives those candidates an easy ride instead of the tough, rigorous education he received at Chicago. “Taking a chance on someone is a bet that the initial signals—test scores, transcripts, a résumé—understated the candidate. Rational. But an institution that overrides a noisy signal has taken on an obligation to produce better ones….The perverse achievement of much of DEI is that it begins by declaring the initial signals unreliable and ends by making every subsequent signal unreliable too.”

• Ed Conway is our best explainer of the mindboggling complexity of the global supply chains which underpin the modern world. Here he is on how fish fingers get made.

• The European cocaine industry is in crisis. Prices up, purity down. Why?

• I really enjoyed this reflection on the Abbey Road album cover from the Guardian’s art critic, Jonathan Jones, who talks about its “enigmatic marriage of banality and charisma” and compares it to Hockney and Magritte. The cover was Paul’s idea, and it’s one of those Beatlesque combinations of inspiration and accident. They couldn’t have planned for that blue sky. The photographer, Iain Macmillan, made them walk across several times before he captured what he was looking for - synchronised strides, four triangles in a row.

• A new ep from my favourite Beatles podcast, Screw It We’re Just Gonna Talk About The Beatles. This one is all about the funniest Beatles songs. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of Back In The USSR (around 30m in). I was very glad to hear this song get its props. It’s so witty and clever, as well as being huge fun.

• I have loved all the Dolly Parton love this week. I have little to add to what everyone else is saying: great songwriter, singer, and perhaps above all a great person. One thing that caught my attention is just what a smart and assiduous philanthropist she was. This NYT piece details her many initiatives. “I just give from my heart,” she said, making it sound simple. I believe her but what’s striking about her philanthropy is how sophisticated it was. She wasn’t just throwing money at whatever her caught her attention. She was making strategic interventions with a sharp eye on results and efficacy and the long-term, in a manner that anticipated effective altruism. It made me reflect on the fact that when we give moral credit to philanthropists we tend to focus on the amount of money they give away when we should be equally or more impressed by the amount of time and thought they give. Anyway, back to the music. I recommend this magical video of her performing impromptu in an Irish pub. Also this video of her singing with her mum and dad. And below is my favourite Dolly song, in my favourite version. She originally gave “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” to the great country guitarist Chet Atkins, before recording for a solo album later. I love the Parton-Atkins duet, not least because you can hear her laughing, and Dolly Parton’s laughter is a beautiful part of her music.

Catch-up service:
Einstein, Churchill, and AI
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’

I’ll be talking Beatles at the Edinburgh Festival TONIGHT, along with Samira Ahmed. Come along if you’re in town!

The main piece below is free to read. Everything else is for paid subscribers only, including a delicious Rattle Bag of brain food. (Suggest reading online - click on title).

Professor David Runciman, former head of the politics department at Cambridge University, has written an essay about the Arday affair for the New Statesman. It reads like one long shrug. Referring to media criticism of Cambridge over the appointment of Arday, he says, languidly: “The prevailing idea is that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars.” That, he says is “a fantasy”. Cambridge’s academics are overworked, and overworked people take short cuts.

You might wonder whether assessing the quality and integrity of a candidate for a professorial chair constitutes a “further particular” that can reasonably be skipped when you’ve got a busy week on. But Runciman is sympathetic. Academics prioritise what is important to them, he says, “which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.” The academics involved in Arday’s appointment made a mistake, but such mistakes are excusable because their lives are so hard.

Academics in the social sciences and humanities are, he says, over-stretched and miserable. Within Cambridge, they have suffered a humiliating loss of prestige relative to their STEM counterparts. All the action, and certainly all the money, is now in science and tech departments, housed in gleaming new suburban campuses. The rest is heritage, “the bit for the tourists”. No wonder these academics make appointments for show, says Runciman: “Grandstanding can sometimes feel like it’s all that’s left.”

His essay could be distilled into five words: “What are you gonna do?” He is passive, verging on nihilistic about the problems he identifies. This is most apparent in a story he tells about his former workplace:

When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter? I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding. I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship.

Reading this paragraph, I waited in vain for the part where the author pushed back on his colleagues, either at the time or from the safety of retirement. To state the obvious: the position of these academics is indefensible. They are not employed to show off their own political opinions (which I’m pretty sure would be drearily predictable anyway) but to interrogate what it means to hold a political opinion. They are there to teach knowledge to students and to assist them in a quest for truth and wisdom.

According to Runciman’s account, his colleagues did not even argue the case for being openly ideological from principle. They just said they wanted the satisfaction of striking political postures, to compensate for the fact they are under-paid and over-worked. Nothing would justify this position, but how much hardship do they face, really? These are people with jobs at what is still, for now, one of the most prestigious universities in the world; jobs that are sought after by academics across the world. There are worse cases of deprivation.

The Arday scandal, Runciman concludes, is “symptomatic of a wider university culture in which so many people fear for their futures and are uncertain of what their purpose is.” But isn’t part of a leader’s job is to instil purpose? If he really just sat there and soaked up this nonsense, he wasn’t doing his job either. In fact, there is nothing in the article to suggest that its author believes there is a purpose to an academic education, other than to keep people in comfortable employment.

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I’m sure some of his ex-colleagues think they know what their purpose is, and it’s not the one I just outlined. An increasing number of academics in the humanities and social sciences believe their job is to effect political change. In a much-shared recent blog post, the economist Lionel Page examined the political drift of sociology in particular: “Sociologists now routinely state that they pursue political aims through their research.”. He notes that the American Sociological Association President Shelley Correll has stated that sociology should be “unapologetic in its ambition to create a more equitable world”.

You can find similar mission statements across disciplines, and while this attitude has been most fervently held in America, academics in Britain and other countries have followed. In the course of researching Arday’s work, I watched (some of) a joint talk he gave at a sociology conference in Porto, alongside Chantelle Lewis of Oxford, with whom he had published a book. They talk openly about helping their students to “dismantle structures of power” and so on, as if such a mission is completely normal one for an academic, which I suppose it now is.

What’s the problem with politicisation? First of all, as Runciman intuited, it is partly responsible for the precipitous decline in standing of what you might call the book-based disciplines. The share of students applying to study humanities and social sciences has plummeted. The principal causes are economic, for sure, but the decline is also self-inflicted. Academics have always been dismissed by right-wing politicians as crazed lefties out to brainwash the youth. I’m not sure the wise response to this charge was to lean into it.

Second, and more fundamentally, it destroys academic standards of integrity and quality. This is not just a by-product of politicisation but a structural feature of it. A political theorist at an elite university told me recently, in mild despair, that her discipline and others have been corrupted by identity-based epistemology: the idea that to criticise a claim on the basis of evidence or reasoning is to perpetuate an oppressive system of power-knowledge that has excluded certain groups.

The point of scholarship and teaching, on this view, is not the pursuit or production of such knowledge at all, but rather the elevation of “marginalized” voices.1 The question is always one of identity, and the answer is always an evaluation of the claimant, not the claim. Is this claim being made by the right kind of knower? Are the students citing the right kinds of knowers? Degrees of marginalisation are directly proportional with epistemic authority.2 (Unless, of course, a putatively marginalized person is saying something that undermines this whole way of thinking, in which case you rip their character to pieces).

It’s not just that some academics are too tired to keep standards up; it’s that an increasingly number of them are opposed to standards on principle. Soon there will be no disciplines, just one grey uni-discipline comprising identity maths and personal experience (“auto-ethnography”). It’s a stupefying approach but an attractive one to many, not least because it is easy, requiring minimal reading or intellectual effort. Few students, and increasingly few academics, have read any thinkers before Judith Butler or Edward Said, and most aren’t very interested in doing so.3

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There is a fundamental tension between politics and intellectual enquiry. The two are intertwined, sometimes fruitfully, but they are at root antithetical. Intellectual enquiry is the search for truth. Truth is like a very possessive partner - it demands that you focus on it to the exclusion of all else. It can create tensions with your friends. It’s difficult and sometimes disturbing. The reward is that you get a little smarter for your trouble, and, if you’re an academic, so does the world. When you make your research serve ends other than truth - social justice, equity - you inevitably make it, and therefore yourself, more stupid.

Some academics might argue this is a trade-off worth making if it means they achieve their political goals (in a 2018 survey of 479 American sociology professors, 62% agreed with the statement “I support Marx’s dictum to change the world”). But are they changing the world? When I was at university, I always found it a little ridiculous when Marxist professors of literature claimed that their contribution to class struggle was offering a new interpretation of Measure For Measure.

Everyone has to do their bit I suppose, and I wouldn’t be sure they made no impact. Some academics might discreetly agree with the right-wing critics who hold them responsible for the spread of wokeness through all our institutions. But then they would also, by dint of their own mandatory pessimism, refuse to admit that any social amelioration has taken place on their watch. Maybe one day they’ll be able to point to students who have dismantled structures of power using critical theory and feel proud of themselves, but I doubt it. The price is too high anyway.

In America, post-vibe-shift, several universities made admirable reaffirmations of first principles. That needs to happen here too. It’s not that I think we should or could keep politics out of sociology or anthropology or literature or, er, politics. It’s that the quest for truth and knowledge should come first and last. That quest is more important than your political views. If you don’t believe that, then I don’t believe you should be in academia. In the last few weeks, I’ve been amazed at how few academic leaders in Britain have been prepared to stand up for academic standards and for the academic ethos. If people like Runciman and institutions like Cambridge don’t believe in them anymore, why should anyone else?

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After the jump: a note on the Arday aftermath, plus a Rattle Bag of goodies for the head and heart. Please consider signing up - paid subscribers get the best of the The Ruffian and make the whole thing possible.

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Catch-up service:
The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday (A note on the awful news about Arday further down)
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day

I am not very fond of arguments over what AI can or cannot do, since they tend to devolve into arguments over definitions. For instance, it used to be said that AI can’t reason. Now that it’s solving maths problems which have stumped our brightest mathematicians for decades, the sceptics are saying ah, but that’s not what we meant by reasoning. On the other side, AI boosters address every capability gap with a “Not yet. The technology will obviously continue to improve until it solves whatever shortcoming you’re pointing to.” Well, maybe, but this is a frustratingly unfalsifiable claim which can be wheeled out to demolish any sceptical argument, a literal deus ex machina.

So I appreciated this new paper from a Google DeepMind researcher called Tom Zahavy, which is - unusually for a paper from an AI lab - all about what AI, at least in its current form, cannot do. Its title is “LLMs can’t jump” (Ron Shelton’s movie surely has one of the best and most generative titles of all time). In short, it’s about why LLMs are unlikely to make scientific breakthroughs on their own.

The paper argues that there is a fundamental limit to their capacity for invention. LLMs can ingest tons of data and identify the patterns and rules which govern a particular domain. They can also work their way through a series of logical steps to solve specific, highly complex problems. What they can’t do is make a creative “jump” - the sudden insight that enables a human scientist to go beyond the available data.

Zahavy gives what is possibly the most famous documented example of such a leap. In 1907 (the same year Pablo Picasso re-invented art), Albert Einstein was working at the patent office in Bern and also on a new theory of the universe which yoked together space and time. While pondering how “relativity” would work for someone speeding up or slowing down, he had what he later described as “the happiest thought of my life”.

Einstein imagined a man falling from the roof of a house, or standing in a free-falling elevator. What would that feel like? It would feel weightless. If he was holding an apple and let go of it, the apple would “float” alongside him. From the falling man’s point of view, then, it could be said there was no gravity in his pocket of space. That weightlessness, Einstein realised, would be exactly the same if the man were floating in deep space, far from any planet’s gravitational pull.

In a sense, then, falling, not standing, is the man’s natural state. When he stands, the earth is preventing him from falling. His weight is the earth pushing back. From there, Einstein eventually arrived at the idea that objects don’t fall because gravity is pulling them, as Newton believed, but because mass changes the shape of space and time, and objects move along the paths which that shape creates.

If you don’t fully understand this, that’s OK, neither do I. What matters, for our purposes, is that this epochal breakthrough was based on very little data. It’s not like early twentieth century astronomy was generating lots of conflicting information about gravity and acceleration and space. An 1907 LLM trained on Newtonian rules and fed data on planetary movements would have received barely a squeak of an error signal. There was a tiny unexplained wobble in Mercury’s orbit, which most scientists explained by reference to an unseen planet. Otherwise, Newton had it covered.

But Einstein was unsatisfied. Newtonian gravity and Maxwellian electromagnetism worked in completely different ways, and Einstein couldn't accept that the universe ran on two separate rulebooks. The universe was one, he just knew it - and this led him to make his conceptual leap.

Back to LLMs. Zahavy notes that Einstein’s insight was rooted in physical experience - in knowing what it was like to be a body subject to gravity. It had to be felt because it could not yet be expressed in abstractions - in words or mathematical symbols. Newtonian science offered no logical explanation for his imaginary scenario. Einstein himself described his thought process like this: ”The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.”

LLMs are built out of words and symbols. They don’t have physical experience of the world. They are cathedrals of pure abstraction. If Einstein had an LLM, it could have helped him work through the consequences of his discovery and to make predictions, which involved a huge amount of mathematical work. He would have appreciated that; he wasn’t a very enthusiastic mathematician. But the LLM couldn’t have made the foundational leap for him. No amount of pattern-matching and deduction would have got it there.

Zahavy points out that many scientific breakthroughs did not make sense in the light of available data. They had to be intuited or imagined into being. That in turn has depended, as unscientific as it sounds, on what the scientist wants to believe - on some kind of aesthetic or moral demand they are making of the world. Great scientists often have deep, supra-scientific convictions which operate like search heuristics, pushing them to look for explanations that can’t be spotted in the data.

He mentions Kepler’s neoplatonic belief in the centrality of the sun. We might add Faraday’s discovery of the electromagnetic field (then given mathematical form by Maxwell). That sprang, in part, from Faraday’s Christian belief that since nature was the orderly creation of God, apparently separate forces should exhibit underlying unity. Similarly, Einstein had a profound philosophical conviction that the universe is a unified whole. He wanted that to be true, which pushed him to discover that it is true.

To design an AI capable of invention, Zahavy says, technologists will need systems that “do not just simulate the world but hold strong beliefs or priors about how that world should be structured…”. Note that “should”. Can a machine have a passionate conviction or belief? Would that count as a form of “intelligence” or is that word inadequate to describe the thought process of an Einstein? Zahavy doesn’t explore those questions, but for now, this kind of cognition remains uniquely human.

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C.P. Snow’s collection of biographical essays, Variety of Men, includes vivid portraits of Einstein and Churchill, both of whom he had met. He detected certain likenesses. Neither did very well at school, and both developed a deep and abiding conviction that they were different, with something unique to contribute to the world. Once settled on a belief or idea, both were “unbudgeable”; Einstein quietly, Churchill loudly.

In a brilliant passage on Churchill, Snow draws a sharp distinction between judgement and insight. In leadership terms, good judgement means being able to grasp the complexity of a situation and assess the trade-offs. Churchill, says Snow, was not good at this. In fact, most contemporaries agreed that his judgement was “seriously defective”. Here’s Snow:

Churchill had a very powerful mind, but a romantic and unquantitative one. If he thought about a course of action long enough, if he conceived it alone in his own inner consciousness and desired it passionately, he convinced himself that it must be possible. Then, with incomparable invention, eloquence, and high spirits, he set out to convince everyone else that it was not only possible but the only course of action open to man. Unfortunately, the brute facts of life were not always so malleable as his listeners.

Churchill’s obsessive pursuit of certain ideas led to blunders like Gallipoli and his vain attempts to prevent Indian independence. But it was this same obsessiveness which led to his greatest achievement. When all the smart people with good judgment in the British state were proposing that Hitler be accommodated, Churchill alone thought otherwise. Snow again:

Judgement is a fine thing, but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight, dug up from his own nature, independent of influences, owing nothing to anyone outside himself. Sometimes it was a better guide than judgement. In the ultimate crisis, when he came to power, there were times when judgment itself could, though it did not need to, become a source of weakness. When Hitler came to power, Churchill did not use judgment, but one of his deep insights: this was absolute danger. There was no easy way round.

You often hear it said that “judgement” is where humans will retain an edge over machines. But “insight” might be an even wider moat, and if the AI doomsters are right then it will become very necessary at some point.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, now an AI startup founder, was recently asked what he wanted his legacy to be. He said “Increasing the amount of intelligence in the world.” With more intelligence, he continued, there will be less human suffering, more rational decisions, more understanding of the world and the universe. But more intelligence, in the sense he means, wouldn’t have produced Einstein’s leap or Churchill’s insight.

Were Einstein and Churchill obviously more intelligent than their peers? No. Einstein was the greatest scientist of the twentieth century but not because he had a higher IQ than Planck or Bohr (he acknowledged that many of his peers were better at maths). Churchill’s visionary leadership wasn’t the product of rational analysis. Physics and politics are very different realms and Churchill and Einstein had very different kinds of mind, but they both had this ability to “dig up from their own nature” insights that nobody else had grasped, and which weren’t in the data.

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After the jump, for paid subscribers only: a note on the awful news about Jason Arday, and why I don’t think the media is to blame. Plus The Ruffian’s famous Rattle Bag of links and brain food, including: a website that reminds you how lucky you are; why polls are more important to politics than ever; Burnham’s phase II; a discussion of Jesus as a historical figure, and a piece of classical music I’m currently obsessed by.

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Catch-up service:
The Last Lunch
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste

I hadn’t heard of Jason Arday before last week and now I’m obsessed. Not just by him but by this whole story, which is something like the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal for academia. It is embarrassing or shaming a whole cross-section of eminent individuals and weighty institutions. It’s also just an insanely compelling story.

There have already been many words expended on it. I’m adding to them here because I find it endlessly fascinating. I also suspect that many of you haven’t heard much about it, or perhaps have registered it vaguely between more important matters like the war in Iran or which beach to go to today. So this post is, first of all, a one-stop-shop for the Arday scandal - an attempt to order what we know, and how we came to know it. Secondly, it’s a chance for me to work out what I think about it, and to tell you. What follows is in five sections:

• A summary of who Arday is; his remarkable rise in academia.

• Arday’s fall - the plagiarism scandal and how it hit the headlines.

• His lies - the many eye-popping lies he has told about his life story. This section is simply breathtaking.

• His work - a look at his scholarship and teaching. Was he, despite everything, good at his job?

• Implications. So what does it all mean?

Quick note: I strongly advise reading this online (click on the title), because it’s too long for email, and because I will probably have to correct or add details post-publication. The story moves fast and I’ve had to write this in a hurry. Also: I’ve tried to minimise links to Twitter/X because many of you don’t use it but I’m afraid there are still quite a few. It’s been an essential information source on this scandal.

The Rise of Jason Arday

Jason Arday was, until this week, a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University. When appointed in 2023, he became the youngest black person to hold such a position. He was already something of a minor celebrity was the subject of numerous adoring media profiles, invited to speak at numerous events and appointed to numerous establishment bodies.

Why was he such a star? It wasn’t just that there aren’t many black professors at Cambridge. It’s that Arday had an absolutely astonishing life story. Born to Ghanaian parents, he grew up on a council estate in Clapham, South London. At age three he was diagnosed with a neurological condition known as “global development delay” and also with autism. He did not learn to speak until he was 11. He only learnt to read and write at 18. (He was also diagnosed with dyslexia and developed epilepsy later on.)
Miraculously, Arday overcame these barriers, together with those of institutional racism, to scale the heights of British academia. Arday graduated from St Mary’s University with a BA in education studies and physical education. From there he became a scholar of racial inequality and the sociology of education. He completed a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University and climbed the academic ladder at speed, moving from senior lecturer at Roehampton to associate professor at Durham to professor at the University of Glasgow, all within three years. He became a professor at Cambridge aged 37, less than two decades after learning to read and write.

If that wasn’t enough, Arday was quite an athlete: a talented footballer, snooker player, and distance runner. He was also a very good person; a moral exemplar. Before he could speak he used to wonder "Why are some people homeless?" and "Why is there war?” After a visit to a homeless shelter, when he was 17, he decided to make it his life’s work to help the poor by raising money for them. In interviews, Arday was proud to declare that he had raised over five million pounds for charity by running. In 2010 he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for homeless charities. He had an epileptic seizure on the twentieth day, and fractured his fibula, which caused his leg to swell to twice its normal size; nonetheless, he completed the course.

Earlier this year, Simon & Schuster acquired the rights to Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. It is scheduled for publication next week. Excerpts have circulated online, including one which relates a prophetic encounter in a South American shantytown. At 21 he travelled to South America and South Africa as a volunteer to install water pumps in deprived communities with the charity WaterAid.

At some point, the aid worker studied me as I bent down to help one of the children. Then she said quietly, almost to herself but loudly enough for me to hear: “You have a very beautiful heart.” I smiled and swiftly replied, “That’s really kind of you.” Then she moved towards me and rested her hand on my arm before speaking again. “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”

Now is the time of sad and difficult things.

Arday’s Fall

There were already signs that Arday’s work might not be of unimpeachable integrity. In 2023 he had to issue a correction to a paper he published in the journal Social Sciences in 2018, because it had drawn extensively on two articles without properly citing them.

In 2025, Liverpool John Moores University received allegations of plagiarism on his PhD and cheating on his viva voce. It carried out a confidential, private investigation. The evidence considered by the LJMU panel included a 63-page dossier submitted by the Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove, who had been carrying out an investigation after receiving tip-offs. The panel cleared Arday of any serious malpractice. Since we aren’t privy to the details of the review or even who was on the panel, we don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion.

This year, in July, Nathan Cofnas, a biologist, IQ fundamentalist and “race realist”, who had been fired from his position at Cambridge for his views, published a Substack post highlighting anomalies in Arday’s life story, and presenting strong evidence of plagiarism: dozens of near-verbatim lifts from a 2009 thesis by another student. (Cofnas hadn’t seen Grove’s dossier at this point but had discovered some of the same evidence).

The story bubbled away on social media but only went mainstream after The Times took it up. For this, they were fiercely condemned by academics. Cambridge University issued a statement criticising a “vile campaign to undermine [Arday’s] credibility”. The prominent left-wing historian Alan Lester accused the paper of pursuing this ‘non-story’ out of racism. The idiotic left-wing pressure group Good Law Project whipped up a petition on Arday’s behalf.

Until this point, if you weren’t following the story closely (I wasn’t) it was easy to ignore or dismiss as another minor skirmish in the culture wars. People sometimes “plagiarise” by accident, perhaps it was no big deal. But then two big things happened to make the story more urgent, and, well, more amazing.

The first is that Retraction Watch weighed in. Retraction Watch was founded by a couple of American academics who weren’t satisfied with how universities and journals investigate issues of research integrity. It is now an established institution in its own right, trusted by scientists and scientific journals to be rigorous, objective and fair. It doesn’t do culture wars.

Retraction Watch looked at Jack Grove’s dossier and came down firmly on the side of Arday’s critics. The allegations were justified. Arday had engaged in extensive plagiarism, both in his PhD thesis - which actually lifted passages from many different sources - and in multiple journal articles (his work is riddled with fabricated data). His transgressions went way, way beyond the normal range of “error”.

The Retraction Watch article also revealed institutional corruption. Senior figures at Cambridge knew about the problem but had been trying to ride it out. Most egregiously, Cambridge conspired with Arday to bully his critics off the trail. Grove had sent polite emails to Arday with questions about his work. Arday did not deign to address them (he has never addressed any allegation in detail) beyond admitting to some minor errors. Cambridge officials intervened to tell Grove to stop contacting Arday because it was affecting his mental health.

Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck to write a cease and desist letter, which led to the Times Higher Education spiking Grove’s story. I need hardly add that this is not normal behaviour for an academic facing questions about their work (not least because it’s extremely expensive). Cambridge, or Arday, or both, complained to the Metropolitan Police, accusing Grove of harassment. Grove had sent three polite, factual emails to Arday over the course of two months. The police spent four months investigating this accusation (this jawdropping episode is a whole other story in itself).

The second thing that happened is that Arday’s public self-presentation - his amazing life story - came under intense scrutiny from journalists and amateur investigators on social media. It quickly fell apart. It turned out that Arday hadn’t just fabricated research; he had fabricated much of his biography. It wasn’t that he exaggerated a few things or indulged in a few fibs. It’s that he lied and lied and lied. Big lies and small lies; blatantly self-serving lies and apparently pointless ones. His lies were purveyed in multiple interviews and and talks and self-penned descriptions and then repeated, unquestioningly, by journalists in fawning profiles.

Cambridge finally launched an investigation into Arday on Wednesday. He resigned within hours.

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The Lies

The extent and nature of Arday’s lying is difficult to convey because of the sheer scale of it. New ones get revealed every day. It’s a bit like trying to process Trump’s multiple deceptions and offences. Any one of them would in itself be enough to discredit or disgrace the individual concerned but there are so many that before you have time to be amazed or appalled by one, another comes along. Some of Arday’s claims have been proved false beyond doubt, others at this point are only suspected. Here’s a list. It is by no means comprehensive.

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Catch-up service:
Young Churchill
Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes

Greetings from France, where I’m on holiday. This week, something completely different (even more so than usual): the first work of fiction published by The Ruffian. It’s a joint production, co-authored by me and James Kanagasooriam, political analyst and friend of The Ruffian.

A little background on how it came about. James, as many of you will know, is one of this country’s leading pollsters, and if you’ve listened to his interviews with me or with Marina Hyde on The Rest Is Entertainment you’ll know that he has an extremely fertile and brilliant mind. For a few years now, as a side project, James has been working on a fictional narrative set in Britain in a dystopian near future: “Sortition”. It’s loosely inspired by trends he sees in the data, although to be clear it is very much a work of fiction and by no means a prediction or forecast.

James invited me to work on this project with him. He had a wonderfully detailed universe and a grand story arc but he wasn’t sure what to do with it all. I suggested we write a short story which functions almost like a chapter in the middle of this bigger story, giving readers just enough detail to want to know more. So here it is. James is publishing it on his Substack too. We hope you enjoy it.

1.

The beef is resting. The table is set. I am waiting for my family to assemble, perhaps for the last time. From our kitchen, I look west along the river towards the glass and steel of the City, obscuring Westminster. Down below, millions of Londoners are scurrying to wherever they feel safest, carrying their lives with them. The skies are awash with drone murmuratio­­­ns.

To be prepared is to win, or at least not to be humiliated. That is what my supervisor told me, at my first chambers. Over the years I found out how right he was, and not just at work. But that was then. That was when Britain was still a country and we were still a family. With the way things are now, it is so hard to know what one is preparing for.

Jack is late. Of course he is. Even his brother Peter would have had trouble making this appointment on time. London is clogged and chaotic because so many people left it until today to get to their new home[IL1] sector. A city in denial is finally coming to terms with the reality of sortition. Neighbours who have been squabbling for years have been forced to accept that they cannot and should not be living together anymore.

It is a relief, in a way. The endless handwringing over national divisions, the insistence that we have more in common with each other than that which divides us – it was always futile. Now it has stopped and we can move on to whatever we’re moving on to. It’s not just London, of course. The whole of Britain is like Europe after the Romans fell, a moving patchwork of criss-crossing tribes, each seeking the sanctuary of their own community. Maybe it’s like the Austrio-Hungarian empire after World War One. But somehow none of these grand historical analogies feel quite apt. There’s no dignity to the present; it all feels all breathless and ragged rather than momentous. There are forty-eight hours to go.

From the kitchen, I can hear Tom and Sophie together in his study. Arguing, teasing, imploring. That used to be my favourite music, when she was a teenager. Tom’s sonorous baritone duetting with Sophie’s graceful contralto, punctuated by peals of laughter. (It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when she became Daddy’s girl, but there are some contests – not many – I haven’t minded losing.) There isn’t any laughter today though. I can’t hear them distinctly enough to tell what they’re saying, but I can guess. They’re talking about the break-up: whose fault it is, whether it is temporary or permanent,what if anything can be salvaged from the ruins of a country that repelled every invader for a thousand years before turning on itself. Tom will be trying to persuade Sophie to join him in Aperta, although he is too clever to argue for it directly. He made that mistake with me. He is having to learn, as we are all having to learn, and relearn, that everyone is free to make their own choice. We are a family, but we’re all different.

Now, here they are, having paused their private colloquy to check in on me.

“Still no word from Jack and Peter, darling?” The moment Tom says this, my watch buzzes.

Soz coming soon. Fuckheads everywhere. Tell dad to stop texting me.

“The prodigal son reports his imminent arrival. I haven’t heard anything from Peter. The beef is perfectly happy to rest. Why don’t you open another bottle, Tom?”

“I don’t think Dad should drink too much before Jack and Peter get here,” says Sophie. “You’ll only end up screaming at each other.”

“Nonsense,” says Tom, crouching by the wine cabinet. Sophie goes over to the map on the wall. It shows Britain, or what was Britain, slashed into five different successor nations by Tom’s red marker pen, arrows darting and swooping around the country like trade winds.

Aperta, Mercia, Radex, The Arc, The Wildlands. A new set of home nations to replace the dysfunctional, and – as Tom would have it - entirely irrational set of arrangements we used to call Great Britain. Despite having been anticipated for so long, it is almost impossible to accept it’s happening, right now: Apertans evacuating the north and heading south-east in a convoy of Teslas to join their impeccably attired brothers and sisters at the centre of power; Mercians moving west and back in time, towards their determinedly un-diverse Betjemanian utopia, untroubled by modernity; Radexians hurtling out of Mercia and into their zone to construct a new society from ground-zero; Arcists converging on what remains of Cambridge and Oxford to build AGI and turn the flesh puppets into pets. Everyone else – everyone who doesn’t fit anywhere else – pouring into the Wildlands.

This will be no friendly “family of nations”. These are groups of people with objectively different values and attitudes who despise each other, and who will rely on strong border controls and mutual deterrence just to avoid further violence. Meanwhile, my family gathers here in Greenwich to say our goodbyes, rather more amicably, I hope. The Moncks’ last lunch! It sounds so melodramatic. But it might well be true.

“Mummy. Have you heard from Peter?” I can only see Sophie’s back from here but something about the position of her head tells me she is tense. I try not to show her that I am too. I’m thinking about the time Peter broke his leg playing rugby when he was thirteen – how, in the ambulance, he was determined to convince me that he would be OK; the injured boy consoling his mother.

“No, love, but Pete will be fine.”

“I’m sure he’s on his way,” says Tom. “It’s impossible to get a phone signal at the moment. Now, white or red? White, I think.”

Sophie comes towards me, then stops, holds on to the table and sits down, as if suddenly faint. “I wish none of this was happening,” she whispers into the white porcelain bowl before her.

“Well, as Fleetwood used to say to me, about once a week, we are where we are,” says Tom, setting a glass of wine before his daughter. “The egg is broken and there is no point trying to unbreak it. All we can do is try and make a delicious, feather-light omelette. Or five.”

“Shut up Dad,” says Sophie. She says it softly, though I am slightly taken aback. Tom, apparently unperturbed, rolls on, adopting his public voice: eminently confident, verging on pompous. “Look, nobody fought harder than me to keep this country together. I hardly need to tell you that.” He sips from his glass, as if about to embark on a best man’s speech, or a debate at the Oxford Union.

“I am coming to terms with it, however,” he says. “I loved my country but I never had some mystical attachment to ye olde Britain. It wasn’t a fucking oak tree. It was a man-made construction, a grudging arrangement of economic and social interests which formed and reformed according to contingent conditions. It was all about England, and really all about London, or certain parts of it. We forced Ireland to join us, and then it forced its way out. Scotland came along for the ride then jumped off into a ditch. Wales always wanted to be left alone. See also Cornwall. Why should we pretend it was ever one big happy family?”

His voice, so often used to command whatever room he is in, washes over us. “Those arrangements were accidents of geography and history. At least the current re-ordering is based on ideas, attitudes, data. What we’re seeing now is a perfectly rational response to the hard truth that what was, at best, a marriage of economic and constitutional convenience was no longer based on kinship and fellow feeling, if it ever was. The new Home Nations are still bound intimately together, but in a more sustainable way. We will still have diplomatic relations, jurisdictional commonalities. We will do business with one another. It’s just that it makes sense for us to have separate bedrooms now. It’s an amicable separation. That’s all it is.” He sits down, satisfied that there is nothing more to be said.

“What are you talking about Dad?” says Sophie, ignoring the glass of wine Tom placed in front of her. “You don’t believe this. The metaphor doesn’t even work. It’s not two people going their different ways. It’s one person splitting into five. And it’s not amicable. It’s this person - these five little people - scratching each other’s eyes out. Wait, that doesn’t work either. Oh fuck. Mum, can I smoke?”

“If you must.”

“I must.”

The intercom sounds and I look at my phone. Jack. Even through the screen, I can see how dilated his pupils are.

“Never remember what floor you’re on.”

“Twenty-eight,” I say, buzzing him in.

“It’s not as if we’ve been here long, is it?” says Tom, shaking his head. “Only ten years. Tell the concierge to lock him in the basement, Penny. Joke.”

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2.

We are silent for the full two minutes that it takes Jack to reach our front door. It’s only a minute’s journey up to the flat, so I assume Jack has used the time to pop some chewing gum in his mouth and spray on some deodorant. He tumbles in, gives me a smelly hug, claps his father on the shoulders, kisses Sophie. “So, my beloved fucktards. We are gathered here today to deal with the almighty fuck-up that Daddy and dear departed Fleetwood made of this country. Are we not?”

“Will you have some wine, Jack?” says Tom, glassily cool. “We have a rather good Burgundy open.”

“Yes please, Daddy,” says Jack brightly. “No way I can get through this sober.”

“Nor would I expect you to.”

Tom’s phone rattles on the table. He glances at me. “Let me just make this call. They need me to speak to a woman from CNN.” As Tom leaves the room, he breaks into a cheesy American accent. “Sir, will you explain to our brain-dead viewers in Kentucky what sortition is? Real slow now. And is the King of England still King?”

Jack lights a cigarette, seeming to calm down little. “Good question actually.”

“He’s the King of Aperta,” I remind him. “Whether he quite knows what that is, is another question.” Tom shouts back at us from the study: “I tried to sell the split to the Palace as an imperial expansion. Look, you’ll have even more nations to rule! Didn’t quite buy it.” Then he slips into this Today programme voice and shuts the door.

“Peter not here yet?” asks Jack.

“No and we’re not entirely sure where he is just at the moment,” I say, trying not to betray my nerves. “We’ve had no messages but it’s very difficult out there...”

“He’ll find his way here. If anyone can navigate the balaclavas on bikes and the fascists at border control, it’s Pete. Super-Pete.”

“How was your journey?” I ask, noticing his jiggering leg.

“Fucking shit and I hope you’re all bloody grateful I made the effort. First of all I had to bribe some fat cunt at the makeshift passport office to get my Radex papers expedited. Then I had to stand in line with about ten thousand Apertans to get in here; then deal with the slimy fash twat at the border asking me how long I’d be in for and where I was staying. When I said I’d be staying with Tom Monck and spelt out our name, his little pasty face nearly melted with panic. Once I was inside it was actually worse because people are literally killing each other to get a Waymo. I had to walk for three hours through fucking carnage. Only upside is that if you want to score drugs it’s the easiest it’s ever been because the police are all manning the border.”

We can hear the soothing rumble of Tom’s voice from the study. He is doubtless assuring his interviewer that Great Britain is simply undergoing a little rearrangement. A tidying up, a Spring clean, a software update. Nothing to worry about. The silky cadences, the avuncular chuckle; a voice that has reassured anxious Prime Ministers, soothed presidents, and calmed voters. Tom is - or was - a master of making everyone feel that there is a plan, that all will be well, that it’s in hand. It is, isn’t it?

“What’s your plan Soph?” says Jack. “I presume you’re staying in Aperta to help Daddy run what’s left of the country.”

Sophie stares at her bowl. She speaks softly. “That’s what Dad wants me to do. Yes.”


3.

Tom comes back into the room. “Right. That’s quite enough baby-talking the sodding Yanks. Let’s eat.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Peter?” asks Sophie.

“I don’t think there’s much point in that, is there?” said Tom. He clears his throat. “What I mean is, we don’t know where the hell he is and he hasn’t deigned to inform us. So let’s get on with it. I’m sure there’ll will be leftovers.”

I place the joint in the middle of the table, turning the handle of the knife towards Tom. He begins carving with his usual dexterity. As he slices through the meat he talks about sortition.

“So many people are treating this as if it’s some natural disaster that has hit the country, a meteor. In truth it’s a choice. Everyone has been willing it for years, decades. The fact is that people are finally getting what they want and some of them don’t like it. Are you sure you won’t have more beef, Soph? It is sublime. Mummy has created another masterpiece. I tried harder than anyone to avert and delay this day. You know that. But now it’s here, we all have to accept that there is no going back.” He serves each of us in turn, allocating the requisite amount of meat, potatoes, green beans.

“So we must all plan accordingly. Jack, are you really going to stare at your phone for the whole lunch? It’s not the end of the world. It’s the end of a country, at least the country we knew. But that is OK. History is always unfolding, never static. Sortition is the right thing to do, even if we – I - wish it hadn’t come to this. And when you finally do the right thing, the difficult thing, the thing you’ve striven to prevent or delay, then things tend to get better. Isn’t that so, Penny?” He flashes a smile at me.

In order to ignore him I proffer a jug of gravy to Jack, who sploshes it over his potatoes without looking up from his phone. “Oh my fucking god,” he says. “There’s a bloodbath at the crossing point between Mercia and Radex. Bunch of Radexians tried to extract all the people who failed value cleansing. Mercians intercepted them and opened fire. Killed about twenty of them on the spot, captured a dozen more. Now threatening a public caning. Whoo boy they don’t fuck around, those Mercians. At least you know where they stand.
Sophie’s eyes widen in horror. “Jesus, that’s horrific. Dad, what are we going to do about this? Can we send in the police? The army?” I do wonder if she has been paying attention. Tom doesn’t answer at first. After ostentatiously surveying the table to ensure that everyone has a full plate, he sits down. “That’s not how it works anymore, Sophie. As you know,” he says, quietly. “We can certainly bring it up at the inaugural UK5 meeting. But it’s not our job to police other jurisdictions.” He raises a glass and addresses the table: “Here’s to a brighter future for our country after sortition. Living apart will enable us to live together.”

“Fuck that,” says Jack, “Why are you talking like a fucking Soviet apparatchik? Everyone knows we’re in for twenty years of value cleansing, black markets, border skirmishes, endless law suits, and probably a foreign invasion. You yourself said this would be a disaster right up until five minutes ago. Right up until it became clear you’d basically get your own little country to run. The Lee Kuan Yew of Aperta. Then all of a sudden you became the face of sortition – Mr “Sort Or Die”. You were in every TV studio, on every screen, selling the fuck out of it. You made sure all your favourite think tanks were funded and spreading the propaganda. You made sure the right officials were brought round or bought off.”

Tom is caught off guard by Jack’s (surprisingly acute) summary of the situation. I feel moved to intervene. “Please Jack. Try and be nice. Just for today. We may not be seeing much of each other for a while.”

Tom does not return Jack’s vitriol. Instead, he swallows some roast potato and embarks on another speech. “However divided we became, I believed we could work through our differences. I believed we could muddle along. It’s the British way, after all; we’ve always been a nation of tribes who ultimately preferred trading to fighting. But when the facts change, I change my mind. The cracks have been widening the whole of this century. Every time we were hit by a crisis – the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid, the triple-election year– the divisions went deeper. Each time, everyone blamed the event itself, rather than seeing that the events merely revealed what was already there.

“None of us wanted to believe the truth. We wanted to believe we were, underneath it all, one people. But then we had riots in London every weekend for five years straight. Across the country, every local government building firebombed, officials terrorised. Parliament like a circular firing squad, everybody screaming for change, nobody able to agree on what to change. Stalemate for twenty years, while the country got steadily poorer and angrier.

“Fleetwood was the last man with the ability to bring everyone together and move forward as a country. But Joe was Joe, and Joe is gone. There’s nobody else like him. And I believe even Joe couldn’t have held things together for much longer. I think he knew that, too, even if he didn’t say so.”

“I don’t recall you relaying that to us when he was alive,” said Jack. Tom says nothing in response, although I spot a wrinkle of contempt passing across his face. He carries on.

“The data has been staring us in the face for thirty years. There are four, maybe five different peoples in this land, each of them with different ideas about right and wrong, about crime and punishment, about immigration, about technology. Each of them seething with resentment and contempt for the other groups. Each group convinced that they are the victims. It might be OK if already had their own provinces; the trouble is that they are mixed up across the country, side by side with people they hate. You cannot run a polity anywhere with divisions as raw as that. Liberal democracy is designed to accommodate difference, but it has a tendency to sharpen and exacerbate those differences until they become too much to bear.”

“Oh that’s deep, father,” says Jack, applauding. “So fucking insightful. Sophie – write that down for your book.”

“Shut up Jack,” says Sophie, quietly but firmly. Jack’s head jerks back in surprise. He is silenced for the time being. Tom gulps down a big mouthful of wine.

“The only solution, then, was to divide the country into nations and London into zones, and let everyone sort themselves accordingly. Let everyone seek their own tribe, and yes, let them expel those who do not belong. Now we have an arrangement I believe everyone can live with. Apertans can pursue carbon neutrality and make it illegal not to attend university, as it should be. Mercia can bring back public hanging and make everyone go to church on Sunday. The spectrummy dweebs in Arc can use genetic selection to create high-IQ nerd babies. Radex can try and implement its mad demographic points system and communist economy - Jack here will have to prove his commitment to “radical equality” or risk getting value cleansed. The rabble in the Wildlands can – do whatever deranged hippies do when left to their own devices.”

Jack looks at Sophie, who keeps her head down. “Didn’t you have a boyfriend in the Wildlands?”

Sophie gives him a look, but answers calmly. “I’ve got a few friends headed for the Wildlands, yes. It’s not as crazy as Dad makes out.”

Tom drops his cutlery and regards his daughter incredulously. “What on earth are your friends thinking? The Wildlands people hate anything to do with modern life. They hate technology. They hate all laws. It will be like living with the Amish! I hear don’t they even wear shoes because they think shoes corrupt natural posture. I’d be surprised if they believe in hospitals. Hope you don’t ever give birth in the Wildlands. No fucking epidural there.”

“They’re good people, Dad,” says Sophie. “They’re the only ones who don’t judge you on who you are or what you believe. They’re they only ones who relish difference. They’re the only ones who don’t value cleanse. They seek a return to life before big tech, billionaires and social media warped our brains. They read books. You’re judged on what you do rather than what you believe. If you’re human, you’re welcome.”

Tom just stares at her for a few seconds, for once at a loss for words. His phone buzzes. From where I’m sitting, I can see it’s from ‘H’. He leaps to his feet. “I’m sorry, I must just take this. I’ll be five minutes.” We eat in silence for a few minutes. Unusually, Tom’s voice does not carry from his study. Then Jack says to Sophie: “Where do you think Peter really is?”

Sophie wrinkles her brow. “What do you mean “really is”? He’s trying to get here. It’s chaos out there. You know that. Probably stuck at some checkpoint.”

“Oh come on,” says Jack. “Peter doesn’t miss Sunday lunch. If I can get here on time, he definitely can. He’d have had the whole journey planned out weeks ago. He’d have prepped his papers, packed his creatine and his energy gels, designed his hydration schedule, planned for about fifty thousand contingencies. It’s Peter, for fuck’s sake. Pete could have planned the fucking D-Day Landings. If he’s not here, it’s for a reason.”

Now I speak, softly. “Peter was asking questions.”

Sophie and Jack, who have been locked into each other, now turn towards me in unison, two pairs of cartoon eyes opening wide.

“Questions? What questions?” asks Jack.

“About the funding for the Sortition Foundation. Peter pulled on a thread and kept pulling. Until – “

Tom barrels back into the room and resumes his seat.

“Sorry about that! Last time I promise. In fact, let me switch this bloody thing off. Now, would anyone like another slice?”

Sophie is still staring at me.

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4.

“Nobody wants any more beef, Dad,” says Jack. “Everyone is feeling a bit sick. Probably all the fucking bullshit.”

Tom ignores Jack. He glances at the empty place setting for Peter. “He’ll be on his way,” he says, in his most pacifying voice. “You know Peter. He’s the most resourceful of any of us. ”Soph,” he says, as he cuts himself a slice of beef. “How was your concert in St Martins last month? Didn’t you play Vivaldi?”

Tom’s attempt to restore normality isn’t working. Sophie does not answer him. She stares at her half-eaten plate of food. Tom looks at her, then at me, with an uneasy smile on his face that betrays something I have only seen once or twice in thirty years of marriage: the creeping sense of being caught in a lie, without yet being sure who’s bluffing.

Jack says, “Where is Peter, Dad?”

Tom looks incredulous. “How am I supposed to know? I don’t have a tag on him. He’ll be here before long. Look, may I suggest we move the conversation on? Obsessing over Peter’s whereabouts won’t make him get here any more quickly.”

“Don’t fucking lie to us, Dad,” says Sophie. Now it’s my turn to look shocked – Sophie doesn’t swear. I’ve never heard her speak like that to Tom. I suppress an ancient impulse to tell her off. Tom looks at me, seeking explanation or maybe protection. I can’t meet his eye.

“Have you all gone mad?” says Tom, turning his eyes on each of us in turn. His face is red. “Did you all drop some acid when I was out of the room? What is this?”

“What did Peter find about you that you didn’t like, Dad?” asks Sophie. Suddenly, she doesn’t seem like my daughter anymore - she doesn’t seem like a girl. Her eyes are boring into her father’s face. Tom can tell from my averted gaze that I am somehow complicit with Sophie. He stares at me while he talks to the others. “Look, I have no idea what your mother has been telling you but…”

Sophie stands up. She speaks calmly. “Dad, you can’t sweet talk your way out of everything. You’ve been playing politics with the country and now with your own family. You love to talk about democracy and happy families but the truth is that if someone is saying something inconvenient to you, you always find a way to shut them up. You thought you could shut Peter up. But Peter didn’t –

“Soph,” says Jack, looking sheepish. “Going a bit far now. Dad’s got a tough job. His work is important. Peter was always –“

“Always what? The one asking uncomfortable questions?” says Sophie, turning on her brother. “Always making a nuisance of himself? Or maybe he’s just more principled than you? Maybe he actually believes in something?”

Jack’s face goes purple.

“Sophie,” I say. “Don’t be horrible.”

“It’s OK, Mum,” says Jack. “I can stand up for myself. Big boy now.” He swigs wine from his glass and looks on the verge of tears.

Sophie turns back to Tom. “Peter found connections to foreign powers, didn’t he? To Henry. And that was enough for you to…”

Silence. Tom has been holding his head in his hands and rubbing his eyes with his fingers. He suddenly looks weary and fed-up, although I can’t tell if he really is. His hair is dishevelled. There are bags under his eyes. When he speaks it is almost in a whisper.

“You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t have the context and you don’t have the burden. The job I do comes with terrible choices. I made a choice. Peter was going to ruin everything we’d been working towards for years. He was going to destroy our last chance to save this country.”

“You’re not saving this country, Dad, you’re slicing it up!” says Sophie. “And keeping the most powerful bits for yourself! The army, the civil service, the intelligence services.” Her body shaking, she makes a visible effort to compose herself. “Where is Peter? Tell the truth.”

Tom is silent. He pushes his plate aside.

“You handed him to them, didn’t you?” says Sophie. “Your own son?”

Tom says, with a terrible calm finality, “I made a choice.”

“You broke up Britain, and now you’re breaking up this family,” says Sophie. “All so that you can feel important.” She looks at me. “And you’re letting him.”

“Sophie,” I say. “Dad has had to do some awful things in the course of his work. Perhaps he has made mistakes. But we are a family and Dad is the only man who can keep the country together. I’m sure Peter is safe and being looked after, wherever he is. Isn’t he, Tom?”

Tom looks at me, surprised, and nods.

“There is no family,” says Sophie, with disgust in her voice. “You’ve destroyed it. I’m going to find Peter. And I’m going to fight Apertan dominance. But I’m never going to pretend this is a family anymore.” With that, she leaves. Jack gets up from the table, looking dazed and unsteady on his feet. “Dad, I-”

“Oh fuck off, you little shit. Fuck off.” Says Tom.

Jack shambles out in tears. The door slams for a second time.

Now it’s just Tom and I.

We remain at the table. “Thank you,” he says, without looking at me.

“That’s the last time I do that for you,” I say. And then I tell him what I know.

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This week: what I learnt about Churchill’s singular, complex personality from reading his memoir; plus a gloriously capacious Rattle Bag of juicy links and notes including my thoughts on Nolan’s The Odyssey, the latest developments in politics, war, and AI; two types of confidence; why Dante > Shakespeare, and a banging new ad for gin. Sign up for a paid subscription for full access to all this and all previous and future paid posts.

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Before he was a war leader and politician, Winston Churchill was a journalist and a soldier. Born to an aristocratic, wealthy family, he was nevertheless cash-poor, and funded the lifestyle to which he was accustomed by writing reports from the frontline of colonial wars in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa.

Newspapers paid a lot of money for them. Churchill was both a serving officer and reporter, a combination considered dubious even then but which gave his dispatches unquestionable authenticity. And he delivered great copy. His most famous reporting was on the episode that made him a huge celebrity at home and effectively launched his political career: his escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp. He later included an account of it in a memoir covering the first thirty or so years of his life, prosaically titled My Early Life.

Churchill wrote My Early Life in 1930, when in his mid-fifties. A few weeks ago at the Chalke History Festival, I picked up a copy at the Waterstones bookstore almost by accident and have unexpectedly found it to be one of my most enjoyable reads of the year. It’s not so much the accounts of battle which gripped me, well told as they are, but the writing and the insight it gives into the strange and compelling personality behind the icon.

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Catch-up service:
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire

Microsoft’s AI division has launched a journal that explores the intersection between AI and the humanities. The first edition of The Humanist Review has just launched. It is beautifully designed, and features contributions from illustrious contributors like Alison Gopnik, Cass Sunstein, Alain de Botton, Naomi Alderman, Nick Cave…and me. I explore the nature of AI-human collaboration, using Lennon and McCartney and other two-person teams as points of comparison.

To go out in the semi-finals against Argentina is no shame, but to go out in the manner we did was painful. The bleakly fascinating defeat suffered by England this week embodied a wider truth that I find depressing and reassuring all at once: culture goes much deeper than we imagine, and is more resistant to change than we anticipate.

We’ll get to that, but first let’s remind ourselves that it could be worse. Imagine being Brazil, who have a far greater football history than the English, having lifted the World Cup five times, and therefore further to fall. This year they exited meekly to Norway, before the quarter finals. Even worse: they used to be adored around the world for the grace and glory of their playing style (something nobody could ever say about England). This year, their football was characterless and dull. That really is unforgivable.

A viral thread on twitter argued, semi-seriously, that the fundamental reason for Brazil’s decline is the spread of Protestantism. “Brazil was better when their players were womanisers, drunkards and slightly out of shape,” it said. “In other words, when they were behaving like Catholics”. Tragically, “evangelical Protestant sterilisation has flattened their ball, ruined their samba and obliterated their swag.”

This led to a wider discussion of whether national football teams have lost touch with who they are. The World Cup used to be a clash of footballing identities: Brazilian flamboyance versus German rigour versus Dutch fluidity, and so on. Now, young talent from around the world get sucked into the big European academies and clubs before they have absorbed their home country’s culture.

Players play alongside teammates from multiple countries, trained by coaches who copy methodologies and tactics from different national leagues. The result is that national football tournaments are deracinated, more homogeneous and less meaningful. You can even make of this a metaphor (metonym?) for globalisation if you like, blaming neoliberal economics or immigration according to taste.

While it’s a plausible hypothesis, I’m not sure it reflects the tournament I’ve been watching. To me, there still seemed to be quite a lot of variety in national styles. The semi-final between Argentina and England, in particular, offered a sharp rebuke to this theory. The Argentinians proved themselves masters of what football writers call “the dark arts” (or shithousery), as they have been for the ages. They also displayed their historic ability to sleepwalk through a match until a moment of peril, at which point they snap into beast mode.

As for the England team, well, it really is deeply, indelibly English. Throughout this World Cup I feel like I’ve been watching the same team as I’ve been watching for forty years. In an England game, nothing is easy; everything is struggle. Technically skilled individuals frequently look as though they have been introduced to a football for the first time. Long stretches of mediocrity are redeemed by thrilling moments of derring-do: goals scored in fast, dagger-thrust moves; goals averted by huge men hurling their bodies into the path of the ball. As the end of the match approaches, backs are always to the wall, bodies always on the verge of collapse. Somebody bleeds manfully. Then we either pull it off in stubborn defiance of footballing gravity, or submit to a team that has somehow retained the ability to make an accurate pass.

To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”

The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.

It goes like this. After going a goal up, England pull up the drawbridge. The players focus on repelling attacks instead of making them. They get trapped inside their own penalty area. The halfway line seems impossible to reach, let alone traverse. Now and again a defender or the goalkeeper will hoof the ball to the other end but there are no England players there and it returns within seconds. The opposition launches yet another attack. Our players look increasingly panicked and ragged. Oh that was close! Oh what a save!

Oh shit.

It was particularly dismaying this time because we thought this team had broken the repeated sequence and escaped the recurrence. It was like watching someone who has undergone an apparently successful course in cognitive behavioural therapy suddenly falling back into self-harming patterns of behaviour, formed in childhood.

It was befuddling, too, because there is no obvious reason for it. England’s stars play under sophisticated international coaches, alongside elite players from all over the world. Some play in German and Spanish leagues, for top teams. They have a German manager. The players are of diverse heritage (20 of them had the option of playing for another country). Most are too young to remember any tragic defeats from more than twenty years ago.

We have as good or better a set of players as we’ve ever had, mentally strong and technically skilled. We have one of the most successful coaches in the world - a real killer, a German of vulpine intensity and scouring intelligence with bracingly little patience for our habit of ruminating on past defeats. Whenever Tuchel was asked about the English past or the English mindset, he politely made it clear that it wasn’t his job to heal the national psyche. His only job was to win. The best way to deal with trauma was to ignore it.

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But while you may not be interested in trauma, trauma is interested in you. After England went one up against Argentina, the team immediately began to sit back, apparently seized by panic about what might happen if they didn’t. Nobody made this decision. The players were not instructed to do it. It was an act of the group mind, the collective unconscious. Fear narrowed the team’s vision. The players stopped even trying to make passes to each other. Then, fatally, instead of trying to break his team’s trance, Tuchel succumbed to it. He took off attacking players and added defensive ones. Whether he meant to send a message or not, the players received one: dig in, lads! Backs to the wall!

Meanwhile, Messi and his wingmen swarmed through the English ranks with ferocity and guile, untroubled by counter-attacks to test their ageing legs. Even armchair fans could see that it was only a matter of time. On Tuchel’s bench, fresh, terrifyingly fast attackers salivated at the prospect of taking on Argentina’s defenders. All tournament, Tuchel had talked up their ability to change games with speed and aggression. But they stayed on the bench. (It reminded me of Madeleine Albright’s question to Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”.)

Culture, in the deep sense, is mysteriously powerful. It eats tactics for breakfast. Coaches too. Brazil’s exit was also overseen by a superstar club manager from another country (Carlo Ancelotti). No team managed by a foreign coach has ever won the World Cup. This year’s finalists, Spain and Argentina, are led by native coaches with no experience of managing elite clubs; coaches who would otherwise be almost completely unknown to the world. Luis de la Fuente and Lionel Scaloni have succeeded where objectively better managers have failed at least in part because they understand their national football culture from the inside out.

England’s World Cup was the story of a brilliant, rational, strong-willed outsider hopelessly overwhelmed by native forces he couldn’t comprehend. It was a story of ancestors rising from the dead to reclaim their descendants. Sure, you can cultivate your “mentality,” they seemed to whisper to this admirable, talented team. But you can’t escape who you are. You are ours. You are English.

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This piece is free so please share and ‘like’ if you liked it. After the jump: a bumper Rattle Bag, featuring a great loser’s speech; a new theory of biological life; why I can’t stop watching Mick Jagger interviews; Jude Bellingham’s grandad; LLMs and creativity; and some gorgeous choral music.

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