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.

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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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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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5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses

I wasn’t sure if I should stay up to watch the England-Mexico match, which started in the early hours of Monday morning our time. I am not much use without sleep. In the end I decided that the England boys needed my support more than I needed a full night’s rest. I could not let them down. I did almost call it a night when the kick-off was delayed by an hour, but instead I heroically set my alarm and took a snooze until 2am.

I’m glad I stayed up. There must be a German word for the satisfaction of knowing that you avoided bitter regret, which is what I would have experienced had I woken to discover I’d missed one of the greatest football matches of my lifetime, and an English victory to set alongside Agincourt. There is already plenty of writing on the game itself which I won’t add to. Instead I want to focus on a tiny detail from that night, one that is almost totally irrelevant to the game, although it does say something about the spirit in which the game was played.

For those of you who haven’t been following, the match was played in Mexico City inside the legendary, almost mythical Azteca stadium, so far above sea level that it is virtually in orbit. The stadium was filled with a million (I may be exaggerating) home fans who cheered for their side and against the opposition at such a volume and intensity that it must have felt to the England players like a physical assault as they stepped out on to the pitch.

Having said that the atmosphere was essentially good natured, by all accounts. Players and observers reported that while the crowd was fiercely partisan it wasn’t nasty. The Mexico fans booed an Oasis song that was played before the match, but they did not boo the English national anthem. Underneath the pantomime hostility was a kind of respect, rooted in a shared love of the occasion.

Which brings me to the detail: a clip of the Mexican manager, Javier Aguirre, swearing at the England striker, Anthony Gordon.

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This is the day, 69 years ago, that Paul McCartney met John Lennon, at St Peter’s church fête in Woolton. John was 16 and eight months; Paul had just turned 15.

Actually, there is a little uncertainty about whether they’d met before; stories and memories vary and diverge. John was an unmissable local character, and even though they lived in different neighbourhoods and went to different schools, Paul had probably seen him around. In fact, he has been known to give an alternative account of the ‘first meeting’, involving a sweet story about a bar of chocolate.

But there’s no doubt that Woolton Fête was the first time they really engaged with each other, the first time they heard each other sing and play, and thus the moment at which the friendship, and the partnership, began. And this story begins with Paul walking into the field behind St Peter’s church to see John Lennon playing with his group, the Quarry Men.

Astonishingly, we have photos of that day, and almost of that very moment. This is one of those Beatles coincidences which no longer seem extraordinary because a kind of magical thinking sets in: ‘Of course we have photos from the day Lennon met McCartney - they were going to form the Beatles, right?’ But it didn’t have to happen. For one thing, it wasn’t very common for teenagers, or anyone, to be carrying cameras with them when they were out and about.

It’s lucky that we have photos at all, and it’s positively miraculous that we have photos of such quality. The one above, in particular (slightly larger image here) allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of McCartney as he joined the group of teenagers watching Lennon’s group play skiffle and rock ‘n roll.1 John is locking eyes with the camera, and therefore with us, and it is not so fantastical to imagine ourselves as Paul at this moment. We get a sense of John’s magnetism, his power. He’s coming to get us.

Even if we didn’t know this was John Lennon, and even if we didn’t know this was the day Paul McCartney saw him play, it would still be a great picture; one that captures the the nascent energy of the teenage British skiffle scene. The whole composition is worthy of a classical painting. It’s crowded with figures yet it doesn’t feel chaotic at all. John’s right hand is blurred from the energy of his strumming; his left hand makes a shape of a banjo chord on the guitar (he had been taught banjo by his mother Julia). Given how momentous the occasion it captures, I’d say it is one of the great photos of the twentieth century. And it was taken by an amateur with a cheap box camera.

The photographer, Geoff Rhind, was a classmate of Lennon’s at Quarry Bank High School. He happened to have been given a Kodak Cresta for his birthday, seven weeks before, he happened to take it along that day, he happened to have some film left in it, and he happened to take this marvellous shot. Geoff is now an artist, living in Dublin. He’s a true gentleman. Last year (on July 9) I did an event at the Pavilion Theatre in Dublin to talk John & Paul. When the book signing was over, I was introduced to Geoff, who had been kind enough not only to come along but to bring his print of this photo to show me. It was one of my favourite moments from the whole book tour.

A while back I wrote about all the photos I couldn’t use for John & Paul. Well, I could and did use this one, after a straightforward negotiation (via my picture researcher) with Geoff, who still owns the rights to it. He was pleased that we had done it the proper way, having several times seen it reproduced without his permission. So he came along to the event to say hello and to show me the print. I’m very grateful to him for doing so.

It made me appreciate the picture even more. It was Geoff who pointed out to me how good it is as a composition, even before we get to its subject. He didn’t do this to boast, but to marvel. He couldn’t believe he’d taken it - a kid, with no training, taking a snap of his mate. Yet there it is, and here we are.

Happy John and Paul day!

You can buy ‘John & Paul’ here, it makes an excellent holiday read.

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All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For John & Paul

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):
  
  “…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis).
  

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.
  

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• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

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• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

• Believing a cultural object to be good and valuable, but not liking it, is a kind of failure. For me, it’s quite common. I usually want to try again, to look for some other way in. That often comes from someone whose taste I trust, a friend or a critic. I am very pervious to enthusiasm.

• This decoupling of ‘what is good’ from ‘what I like’ may be less common than it was. There was lots of debate about what should have been on the Guardian’s Best 100 Novels list but to me the premise itself was confused. Neither judges nor readers seemed to make much distinction between the novels they liked best and the novels which are the best. Those ought to be two separate categories.

• The sociologist Jon Elster pointed out that we automatically adapt our preferences according to what’s available. That’s what the fable of sour grapes is about - the fox decides the grapes he cannot reach are bad grapes anyway. Most of the time this happens beneath conscious awareness; there’s an element of self-delusion to it. Elster therefore puts a higher value on conscious preference adaptation, because that involves human autonomy - the freely made choice. Acquiring a taste is part of what he calls ‘character planning’ - consciously designing the kind of person you want to be.

• You might argue that aspiring to like something because you’ve been told it’s good is hardly an autonomous act, but it is, as long as you have good reason to trust whatever the cultural authority you’re relying on, and as long as you ask your own questions of it during the engagement. It’s just a way of deciding where to allocate your time and effort, rather than letting the moment or the market decide for you.

• That’s why I still value distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It is good that classical music and theatre and fine art retain an aura of social desirability. Yes, this prestige can shade into fakery and snobbery and exclusivity, but if the high arts lose their aura altogether - and they have been losing it - the result won’t be some wonderful democratic expansion of appreciation, but obsoletion. In a raw battle for liking, there are simply too many cultural products with lower barriers to entry, even if they are ultimately less satisfying. The high arts depend on social prestige to gain the space and time they need for consumers to acquire a taste for them.

• I am not dismissing the value of discovered taste - the stuff we find ourselves liking without effort. As the aesthetic philosopher Kevin Melchionne puts it: “No matter how refined the taste I acquire, a personal canon dominated by acquired taste and relatively devoid of discovered preferences will lack the joy and excitement of personal discovery.” We should aim for a diverse portfolio of acquired and discovered tastes. But the reason I value acquired taste is that it’s a manifestation of individual agency in a tech-dominated world that is constantly tempting us to surrender it.

• Trying to close the gap between the person you are and the person you want to be is often called ‘pretension’. Pretending to like something is fine if it transforms into authentic appreciation over time, as it often does.

• The other reason we make the effort to unlock the door is more intrinsic. It’s curiosity. Even if you don’t ‘get’ a painting or an album on first or second listen, you may get a signal that says, “persevere”. You may sense that it’s worth staying with, and that the rewards will come. Many great novels are like this - they create the reader’s taste for them, teaching you to appreciate them as you go.

• This intrinsic motivation is less common than the extrinsic ones. It may be the preserve of people who have experienced the acquisition of a taste at least once before and so have learned to trust these signals, which are often quite faint. But in both cases, the taste formation is self-directed, the preference willed into being.

• Our aim in life shouldn’t just be to become a person of ‘good taste’, but to be a person with good and original tastes. Taste is never an entirely individual affair but your particular mix of preferences, discovered and acquired, should be unique to you. Cultivation of taste is self-cultivation. It’s a virtuous circle: the more individual your tastes, the better taste you will develop.

• All taste, in the sense of a decided aesthetic preference, is good. The enemy is not bad taste but anti-taste - cultural objects produced with no coherent aesthetic at all; which implicitly regard aesthetic considerations as irrelevant and inefficient. Meta is the great corporate champion of anti-taste, but anti-taste is on the rise everywhere: in the default minimalism of urban design, in the design of cars, in tech design, in bitcoin brands, in the spread of AI writing.

• I am depressed and revolted by anti-taste because I see it as a surrender of human will, and a premonition of a world without us. Sontag was right about the importance of taste. Anti-taste is anti-human.

  ---

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Catch-up service:
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
Podcast: Benedict Evans on AI and Jobs
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More

• I am joining Tom Holland and Samira Ahmed on stage to talk Beatles at the Chalke History Festival this evening. If you’re at the festival make sure to come and see us, it should be lots of fun.

• I have a piece in the New York Times this Monday on the fall of Keir Starmer.

I spent the latter half of this week on the Côte D’Azur, attending the annual advertising festival, ‘Cannes Lions’. Yes, this is the kind of hazardous duty I undertake in order to bring you The Ruffian. I don’t have much to do with advertising these days but I was there as a guest of Microsoft to talk about human-AI collaboration through the lens of the Beatles.

(The talk was based on an article I’ve written. Microsoft’s AI division is launching a new journal about the intersection between AI and the humanities, with some excellent contributors, and me. There’s a launch event in London, in a couple of weeks should you be interested.)

I spoke about what it means to be a creative collaborator, and whether AI is or can ever be one. I started from the proposition that a human collaborator is not like a tool. He or she does not simply do what you want. Imagine Paul trying to ‘prompt’ John and expecting John to just give him what he asked for. The most productive human collaborations involve challenge, argument, and complex emotional dynamics, and they are not easily replicated with machines.

I have not had time to write a full piece for The Ruffian this week, for which I beg your forgiveness. Instead I offer my impressions of Cannes Lions, plus a Rattle Bag of juicy links.

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In Pt II, for paid subscribers only, we get into the business of AI itself and whether the labs will end up ruling the world or surrendering advantage to the next wave of businesses.

We also talk about Britain’s position in a world where sovereign control over AI is ever more important, and how Benedict thinks about his own career, with implications for anyone hoping to make a living from their own mind.

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Catch-up service:
Podcast: Benedict Evans on AI and Jobs
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pain Is a Mind Game?

The line of ex-prime ministers at the Cenotaph ceremony is getting embarrassingly long. Since 2016, Britain has added four to the invite list and is about add a fifth. We wouldn’t wish for any of them to return to their former office. In any objectively scored league table of post-war British PMs, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer would all struggle to get out of the relegation zone. This run of bad leaders is one of the central mysteries of British politics, and perhaps we don’t ponder it enough. Is it an unlucky streak, like getting tails five times in a row when you bet on heads? That seems implausible. There is probably a shrinking number of talented candidates. Even so, you’d think we might get lucky now and again.

Some argue that our attritional democratic environment makes even good leaders look mediocre. I do not find this convincing. The idea that Britain in 2026 is ‘ungovernable’ and that, in more stable times, Keir Starmer would be acclaimed as a decent or even half-decent prime minister seems far-fetched. Starmer’s inadequacy transcends the moment. He has proved timelessly abysmal at the job. To a slightly lesser extent you could say similar of Theresa May, or - well, let’s not go on.

I want to be clear about what I mean by a “bad” prime minister. I don’t mean one who took decisions that turned out badly or who changed the country in ways I don’t like. On that basis, you might include Tony Blair for Iraq, or David Cameron for austerity or the Brexit referendum, or Thatcher or Attlee for whatever you think they got disastrously wrong. Your answer will depend on your politics.

That’s one way of looking at it, but I’m talking about something narrower and less value-laden; the day-to-day, month-to-month ability to do the job: to run No.10, to make sensible appointments, to set direction for ministers, to resolve internal conflicts by making tough decisions, to bring coalitions of MPs and voters together, to communicate clearly and persuasively, and so on. I disagreed with some big things that Cameron’s government did, but I never once thought, “This person is wildly unsuited to the job, by ability and temperament.” I have thought that about every one of his successors.

Operational competence is a prerequisite of achievement in office, regardless of whether we ultimately deem the achievement positive or negative. The reason that PMs like Blair or Thatcher are consequential at all is that they were at least reasonably good at all the fundamentals of the job, the best evidence for this being that they got re-elected. And yet, when we’re assessing and arguing over potential PMs, we tend to focus on their politics and underweight the question of competency. We argue about the direction this or that candidate would take the country, without stopping long enough to ask whether they’re capable of taking it in any direction at all.

For the most part, failed prime ministers do not fail because they’re socialists or neo-liberals or conservatives, but because they are situationists. I don’t mean in the sexy French sense, but in the sense that they are captives of whatever situation they find themselves in. Bad prime ministers don’t make things happen; things happen to them. They stand outside No.10, say some fine words, then go inside and kneel down before the real boss: events. (By which I mean not just unforeseen events, but all the economic, political and institutional forces that constrain and batter you from day one).

Why do these leaders submit so meekly to this master? Because they cannot execute on the fundamentals of the job. The first of these fundamentals is a strong sense of purpose or mission. What everyone in this bad run has had in common is that they didn’t know what they wanted to do with power (and I mean across the board, from the economy to foreign policy to immigration and welfare). Either that, or they “knew” but only in the vaguest sense, Liz Truss being the obvious example. Having a clear direction without having a sensible plan can be nearly as bad as having no direction at all, and maybe worse, especially when you are short on necessary leadership abilities. Johnson knew what he wanted to do at first - get Brexit done - but after it got done, he was clueless. Yes, he had to deal with the pandemic, but he dealt with it in his hapless, myopic style, which would have revealed itself under any circumstance.

After this primary failing, bad prime ministers also tend to lack one or all of the following three things: the personal ability to bring voters and MPs onside; the intellectual ability to deal with the demands of a very complex job; the temperament to make tough decisions under pressure. Some, like Starmer, fail on all four dimensions. Others have had one attribute in abundance (Johnson had personal charisma, Sunak was clever) but fall short on the others. Nobody on our post-2016 list has had the first or fourth.

Now, how do we think Andy Burnham will do?

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Let’s start with where he scores well: the personal. Andy Burnham is a likeable guy. He seems ‘normal’, which is unusual for a senior politician, and an art in itself. You only have to watch his Makerfield launch video to see how voters in Manchester feel about him, and how he responds to them. He’s warm and funny and, in certain contexts at least, at ease in his own skin. He has the rare ability to speak from the heart in public, plainly and directly. In private, according to those who know him, he is the same; he is friendly, courteous, caring, asks questions and listens to the answers.

Banal as it may sound, Burnham comes across as genuinely nice, and that counts for quite a lot. I can well imagine that as and when he replaces Keir Starmer in No.10, the nation will greet him with a smile of relief. At last, a national leader who doesn’t grate on our nerves every time we hear his voice! At last, a leader who sounds like someone we might know. Burnham’s charm will give him a head start. It will buy him some time. But when you’re prime minister, events move fast and they are out to crush you. To stay ahead of them, other qualities are required.

I said Burnham is at ease with himself ‘in certain contexts’. He’s very good at talking about football or music, and all the non-political stuff. He’s also good at presenting his political views, so long as he’s speaking to a sympathetic audience and isn’t pushed to go beyond generalities. He is superb with voters on the doorstep, partly because voters tend not to know or care much about policy. He is comfortable talking about how politics is broken, and Labour needs to change; about how government has forgotten about the needs of ordinary voters, especially those outside London. Put together a reel of such moments and you would say, this is a first-rate communicator.

But take a look at Victoria Derbyshire’s Newsnight interview with him from a couple of weeks ago and tell me if you see a great communicator at work. I see someone tense, dry-mouthed, bumbling, brittle and evasive, unsure of his footing at every step. This wasn’t even a punishing interrogation. None of the questions were very hard to predict or prepare for. Derbyshire didn’t probe him much on policy, other than tax cuts for small businesses, in response to which Burnham gingerly set out one position (cut business rates) only to end up half-assenting to another (reverse the national insurance rise).

As and when he becomes prime minister, his interviews will only get tougher. In the age of social media it is possible that political leaders can minimise the importance of this kind of public appearance and maximise the friendly, superficial kind. Burnham will have a good prime ministerial TikTok game. But a successful prime minister still needs to be convincing in both contexts.1 If nothing else, performance in interviews is a proxy for actual grasp of policy and government. If a PM is short on that, they are likely to fail. Burnham is desperately short on it.

That’s a little surprising, given that he’s been in politics all his adult life and has been a cabinet minister. But he does not seem to have ever worked hard at understanding the trade-offs and complexities involved in national government nor to have had much appetite for doing so. As health minister, he was liked by officials but known to be indecisive and incurious about policy detail. He made party-pleasing noises about being anti-privatisation but essentially passed through without touching the sides. Once he became mayor of Manchester, he no longer had to even bother with that onerous stuff. On national issues he could make gestures in the politically expedient direction without having to square them with his record or his plans.

The result is that he can sound startlingly vacuous. We all know the remark about not wanting to be “in hock” to the bond markets, without seeming to understand what bond markets are or why we are in hock to them, but it was hardly an anomaly. He mouths the phrase “fiscal rules” without ever giving the impression that he knows what they are or why they matter. Here’s how he answered a question about the EU, during Labour’s conference last September:

Journalist: “Rejoin the EU or stay out?”

Andy Burnham: “I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union. I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.”

I’m sorry to break the flow of my Flaubertian prose, but - fuck me. I believe in the unions of all kinds. It’s like something from an essay by a primary school pupil. That’s the extent of his thinking, on one of the most important geopolitical questions of the age? I’m just not sure how you get from there to prime minister-level within a year, or ever. (I need hardly add that as soon as the byelection campaign started, he said he didn’t actually want to rejoin at all).

Burnham doesn’t have a burning mission or purpose except in the vaguest sense. He has a genuine and noble wish to do right by voters who feel alienated and let down by successive governments. But he doesn’t have a serious analysis of what’s gone wrong with the country, which is why he leans on empty phrases like “forty years of neo-liberalism”. In terms of philosophy and policy he travels light. That’s why his sudden acquiescence to the whole Starmer-Reeves programme was frictionless and why his u-turns arrive with the frequency of his beloved buses.

So far, his own policy agenda is embarrassingly thin: public control of utilities that are already tightly regulated (presumably more public ownership is attractive because the British state runs everything with Singaporean efficiency?); more social housing in a country that already has an exceptionally high stock of it; various tax cuts and spending promises that he makes or rescinds on a daily basis; no plan to deal with our parlous fiscal situation.

If you’re thinking ‘Well, he’s been in campaign mode, it will be different now he’s preparing for government’ then I wonder whether you would have said the same about Starmer and Reeves, who had years. You can’t just rig this stuff up from nothing after a couple of away-days.

I am sceptical that Burnham has the intellectual capacity to “learn on the job” and certainly not at the speed he would need to do so if the job is not to overwhelm him. It’s not the hardware that’s the problem - as a young man, Burnham was clever and diligent enough to scale the British establishment from the outside. It’s the software he’s been running for the last thirty years, narrowly designed for advancement within the Labour Party. His instinct has always been to please the party, and you don’t do that by challenging its worldview or assumptions. But unless you do, your intellect and curiosity will atrophy.

Now that Burnham is pitching for the most powerful job in the land, he is suddenly being asked to think outside the realm of Labour boilerplate. But it’s too late. I cannot see Andy Burnham coping with running a government while trying rewire it, which he will have to if he wants to get anything done. I can’t see him getting to grips quickly with big hairy problems in energy, defence, AI, housing, social care, justice, and all the others that will be hammering on his door every day, while America staggers around like a drunk giant and China and Russia try to undermine and weaken us. Nor is he part of a network of talent who can help him meet the moment; for the most part, he will be relying on the same people who are in charge now, plus a few newcomers from Manchester and some aged lefty think-tankers.

Beneath this deficit of ability is a more profound one: one of temperament, or character. Burnham is a people pleaser. To some extent that’s a good thing - politicians have to please people. But it can be a very bad thing in a leader. A crucial attribute of an effective Prime Minister is a willingness to upset people - to size up who they will have to disappoint or anger to get something done, and either assuage them or make them irrelevant. Avoid these trade-offs and you only end up angering everyone, as Keir Starmer has just discovered yet again.

If a Prime Minister in our system has ‘one job’ it’s to be the tie-breaker - to take the decisions that can’t be resolved by ministers and officials. Starmer’s single biggest operational deficit has his consistent failure to play this role. I find it hard to believe Burnham will be any better. Would he have broken the deadlock between Defence and the Treasury? Would he have even grasped the issues involved?

He wants to be Andy, mayor of Britain. But a Prime Minister is not a mayor. The decisions are bigger, more complex, and more contested, by an order of magnitude. I’m not convinced that overseeing an upgrade to Manchester’s bus system qualifies you to chair the national security council or to act as First Lord of the Treasury. Mayor Burnham did not have to make decisions - on, say, immigration - which were bound to be hated by big parts of his electorate. In fact, you could say that’s why he became mayor. He had got about as far in national politics as an inveterate pleaser can.

His second Labour leadership campaign in 2015 was agonisingly bad, especially for those of us who wished him well. (Many of the people now talking him up either weren’t paying attention back then or have erased the trauma from their memory). He wanted the party establishment to like him and he wanted the Corbynites to like him. By trying to please everyone he lost everyone’s respect, shrinking as the campaign went on. His lack of a core idea or philosophy was painfully apparent in every shifty, oily interview. He has become a more relaxed and adept public performer since then but that’s partly because he hasn’t had to straddle divides and interests on a national scale.

Burnham is an emotional man who cares about others and cares about what others think of him. This is part of what makes him appealing. But an effective Prime Minister must have a sliver of ice in the heart; at some level they have to be a killer. Burnham is soft in the middle. There is a fundamental weakness which emanates from him like cheap aftershave whenever he is put under pressure. Events will brutally expose it, and over time the affection of voters will curdle into contempt. His national ratings have already started to decline. If he becomes Prime Minister he will be very unpopular within a year.2 I doubt that he will ever be hated as widely and coldly as Starmer is. Many voters who like him now will still like him then, but they will feel sorry for him, which may be worse. They will see that he’s a good man in the wrong job.

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Here’s the worst thing: I believe all this and yet I also think Burnham should become Prime Minister. There are Labour MPs I think would do a much better job, like Streeting or Mahmood, but they are simply not going to be elected by their party. The reasons I prefer them are the same reasons their party doesn’t. So for the time being, that leaves Starmer or Burnham, and while I don’t think Burnham will be much of an improvement, Starmer has to go.

But I don’t want to put aside my astonishment at the calibre of national leaders we get. Although I can see how it happened, I find it unbelievable that Andy Burnham is the person that Britain, a great country, is installing as prime minister, amidst war in Europe, major technological disruption, violent unrest across the country, and a public sector coming apart at the seams. Is this really the best we can do? Apparently it is.

Even more astonishingly, he may represent a slight upgrade. At least Andy will raise a smile from time to time. But among elites at least, there is a strong tendency towards magical thinking at these moments. Let’s not fool ourselves with debates over whether Andy Burnham is going to “change Westminster” or take the country in a different direction. As Joshi Herrmann said in his superb, definitive profile, there is no “Burnhamism”, nor will there ever be. We have that pretend conversation because we don’t want to face up to the truth about what’s coming next.

I really, genuinely hope I’m wrong, but this is how I see it. Once in No.10, Burnham will rejig the cabinet, disrupting and slowing whatever progress this government has started to make on delivery. He will then find himself forced to the right by our fiscal position and set against his own party without wanting to confront them, while fighting multiple fires he doesn’t understand, one of which may become a full-blown crisis. At some point, everyone will conclude that this Prime Minister is also unsuited to the job, by ability and temperament, and on a Remembrance Sunday in the not-very-distant future, the line of former prime ministers will lengthen once again.

Still, maybe the next one will be better?

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The Rattle Bag returns next week…

For this episode I’m delighted to welcome Benedict Evans to discuss AI and jobs and much else besides. Benedict is an independent technology analyst who has spent 25 years thinking about tech-based industries. He’s worked in Britain, Silicon Valley, and New York, where he’s now based. He’s is one of the most respected voices in tech, which is why his newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers. In a field dominated by spurious assertions he is distinguished by his deep knowledge and understanding of the history and economics of technology, and his forensic mind.

This conversation is in two parts. In part one, free for all, we focus on AI and jobs. There’s a lot of wild hype around this topic. Benedict is the antidote to it. He breaks the question down and provides a framework for thinking about it. Part two, for paid subscribers, will be coming soon. I was recovering from a horrible cold when we recorded this so I was rather groggy, but it’s OK because Benedict was brilliant. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Catch-up service:
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game?

Tickets still available for my choir’s concert at Cadogan Hall, near Sloane Square, on Wednesday night: A Night at the Opera. It’s a brilliant program of selections from different eras, with huge tunes, and amazing soloists. You’re guaranteed to enjoy it. And you can get home in time for the football (well, the second half).

When you listen to someone talk, what’s going on? The straightforward answer is that you’re receiving information from them. But we all know it’s not as simple as that.

You’re also guessing at what’s on their mind, which may not be the same as what they’re telling you. Not because they’re lying, but because we very often don’t put everything we feel into words - at least not into the words we ‘publish’.

So you’re listening for gaps, for lacunae. You’re also alert to the non-verbal signals they’re sending, like tone and pitch of voice, movements of eyes, face and body. You know that some of these signals are sent intentionally, others unintentionally, though you’re not always sure which is which.

As they speak, and you listen, you’re also processing all this information, explicit and implicit, and placing it in context. You’re fitting it together with what you already know, about this person and about whatever it is they’re talking about.

At the same time as you’re listening and processing, you’re also communicating. You’re using words, non-verbal sounds, movements of face and body, to show that you’re taking on board the information they’re sending and that you’re in tune with whatever it is they’re feeling, or with whatever it is they expect you to be feeling, in response to what they’re telling you.

You’re also anticipating how they are feeling about this conversation, and how they’ll feel about it afterwards. Listening to someone talk is one thing; making them feel heard is another.

I could go on. All I’m saying is, listening is complicated. It’s a complicated operation. It can be hazardous, too. A study of teachers in Israel found that those who rated themselves as excellent listeners were more likely to suffer burnout. It’s a wonder we do it at all (although let’s face it, not all of us do) though most of us think we’re pretty good at it, better than we actually are. A study of everyday conversation found that 71% of respondents rated themselves above-average listeners.

Despite the importance of good listening, in our personal and professional lives, it’s still something of a mystery. Psychologists who have attempted to identify and define it have come up with surprisingly few concrete answers. A new paper presents a survey of the literature to date and it does so in the spirit of humility. Guy Itzchakov and Graham Bodie list ten “puzzles of interpersonal listening”, drawing on multiple studies and papers to show how the field is riven with contradictory theories and conflicting findings.

Despite this, there are endless books and online articles offering confident instruction on ‘active listening’. Lists of behaviours, rules and tips, all ostensibly grounded in science. What Itzchakov and Bodie show is that once you look deeply at the evidence, you find that there is no rule of listening that can’t be fruitfully broken; no ‘do’ that can’t become a ‘don’t.

That doesn’t mean the field offers nothing of value - it’s full of rich findings, even if they don’t resolve themselves into a neat and universally applicable model of good listening. It just means we should be sceptical of any such rules. What the Itzchakov and Bodie paper shows is that even the most earnestly practiced listening techniques can backfire.

Here are 5 ways in which the rules of ‘active listening’ can go wrong.

1. BE SILENT. A popular rule is that the listener should let the speaker do 80% of the talking. This one seems like common sense: if you want to listen well, then you need to stop talking. But the 80:20 rule is arbitrary at best. A study of 250,000 sales conversations found that they went best when the salesperson (the ‘listener’ in this situation) spoke for 43% of the time - that is, over twice as much as the rule suggests.
   
   Managers and employees tend to have different ideas of what constitutes the optimal amount of listening and speaking. Managers believe that employee motivation rises if they (the manager) listen more. They think a conversation has gone well if they listen for 70% of the time. But employees tend to favour a 50:50 balance of speaking and listening. People with depressive tendencies can interpret silence as rejection or indifference. Brief pauses are OK, but long pauses can make the listener doubt the speaker’s competence or to suspect they’re disengaged.
   
   Listeners speak to gain understanding, and refine their own thinking. They might offer stories of their own to demonstrate understanding. As Itzchakov and Bodie put it, ‘speaking can serve listening” by showing how the listener is attuned to the speaker’s mind. It’s not easy, is it? Speak too much, and you dominate a conversation which is meant to be for the listener’s benefit. That’s not good. But speak too little, and they might think you’re not listening.
   

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2. ASK QUESTIONS. Questions are useful because they can elicit valuable information, and because they demonstrate interest and curiosity. They show that you actually care about the what the speaker knows, thinks, and feels. Listeners who ask follow-up questions are consistently rated as more likeable.
   
   But a simple “ask questions” rule can lead you astray. Too many questions can sound like an attempt at domination or control. Questioning can become interrogation and put the speaker on defence. Leaders sometimes forget that if you’re going to ask questions, you really have to listen to the answer. (This paper calls that “disrespectful inquiry”).

   
   One of the most annoying use of questions is as a pretext for the question-asker to talk about themselves:
   
   How was your weekend?
   ”It was OK-”
   ”Well, mine was amazing! [Drones on about it for ten minutes]
   
   Behavioural psychologists Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans have coined the unfortunate neologism “boomerasking” for this habit. Boomeraskers believe they’re great people who have demonstrated curiosity; their interlocutors think they’re insincere and self-obsessed.
   
   Question-asking is not inherently good or bad. It depends on the spirit in which the question is asked, and how the answer is treated.
   

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3. DON’T JUDGE. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of modern psychotherapy, introduced the concept of “unconditional positive regard” to the therapeutic relationship. A good listener withholds judgement in order to help speakers feel safe and accepted.
   
   It makes perfect sense. There’s clearly a trade-off between judgement and curiosity. Once you make up your mind about someone, you tend to stop thinking about what they’re saying. And as soon as my interlocutor believes that I think badly of them, they tend to stop talking honestly and freely, so the conversation either comes to an end or becomes a row.
   
   But, as Rogers himself recognised, we can’t help but make judgements.

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Catch-up service:
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand

The highlight of last week’s holiday in Madrid was a trip to the Prado. It is a perfect size for a national art museum, large enough to feel grand without sprawling like the Louvre. The layout is simple, organised around one long central gallery with rooms opening off it. The collection, rather than being a confusingly eclectic mix of every era and tradition, is concentrated on Spanish, Italian and Dutch painters from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.

I loved seeing Tintoretto’s depiction of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. It’s a vast canvas with a stunning trick of perspective: on whichever side you stand, it seems to be pointing towards you. He also does this crazily radical thing of putting his central subject at the far edge instead of in the centre, perhaps to emphasise Jesus’s humility.

But my favourite part was hanging out with Velázquez. I knew it would be. I am no art expert but I know what I like, and I really like Velázquez. I’m not qualified to tell you why he’s so great, but to me he is something like the Roger Federer of art; the one who makes the hardest things look effortless. There’s a lightness, grace and fluidity to his brushstrokes that makes everything he depicts shimmer, as if on the verge of dissolution.

He often doesn’t bother with backgrounds, presenting his figures in blank space, and sometimes leaves the edges of his figures unfinished or blurred. Not only does this make other painters look like dutiful plodders but it conveys a sense of souls floating in time and space, captured in oil and powder for a fleeting moment. The courtier portrayed below, so jolly and so sad, is a vital presence yet also a fragile one, as if about to disappear into the void he stands in. There’s always mystery in a Velázquez painting. He never tells us anything, only gives hints and poses questions.

He’s also an X-ray machine. He zeroes in on a person’s inner life and character, generous but unsentimental. Without flattery, his portraits bring out what is most noble or beautiful about his subjects, while reminding them and us that, however grand we may be, we’re just passing through.

Unlike his older contemporary, Rubens, who was an artistic megastar, féted across Europe, Velázquez wasn’t famous in his lifetime. He spent most of his professional career at the Spanish court, working for his lugubrious-looking patron, Philip IV. His artistic reputation grew steadily after his death until it overtook even Rubens.

Velázquez’s most famous painting, and the painting that plenty of critics would vote for as the GOAT, is Las Meninas (above, top). I’d seen it once before and now feel lucky to have seen it twice. At the Prado it is on the back wall of a large room, so you view it from a distance as you approach.1 You can, if you like, do what Kenneth Clark liked to do: repeatedly walk towards it until the figures dissolve and all you can see are Velázquez’s loose, louche brushstrokes. Clark was trying to work out the exact point that the spell was cast; when the painting stopped and the illusion began. He never could.

Las Meninas is so complex that I can’t do it justice here. If you’d like to read more about it I’d recommend this BBC piece by the art critic Kelly Grovier. The book that really fed my Velázquez obsession was The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming, one of the most satisfying nonfiction books I’ve read.

In plain terms, here’s what we’re looking at: the artist himself painting his patrons, the king and queen of Spain, in the company of their five year-old daughter and assorted attendants. In the dim room, the little princess shines, under the eyes of her parents, just out of frame. We can only see the king and queen in a mirror, and that’s because, in the illusory space of the painting, they are standing where we’re standing.

This is what makes Las Meninas so disorienting and enchanting. Both the artist and the Infanta are gazing at us. It’s our gaze which lights up the Infanta, now long gone from the world. It’s us that Velázquez is so coolly appraising, and while we stand in front of his painting, it’s us that he’s creating. Meanwhile, a servant waits, slightly impatiently, to usher us into the next room. We have an appointment that can’t be missed.

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Velázquez weaves together the mundane and the ethereal, the worldly and the transcendent. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the red cross painted on his chest. The cross marks him as a Knight of Santiago, an ancient and exclusive Catholic order. Las Meninas was painted in the 1650s, when Velázquez was in his fifties (he died at the age of 61), at a time when officials were thwarting his efforts to join the order. By this stage he was a highly valued courtier but he longed for the aristocratic prestige that came with membership. He kept prompting the king to make applications to the Pope on his behalf and spent a lot of time poring over his family tree, searching for evidence to prove he was worthy.

It’s funny and oddly reassuring that a supreme artist should care so much about worldly status. What he did with the brush was worth infinitely more than membership of any society. But it didn’t seem like that to him, or perhaps it did, but only fleetingly. Reading about Velázquez’s social climbing reminded me of Shakespeare. The two artists are often seen as kindred spirits, with the same miraculous ability to see into any human soul. But both had these worldly worries too.

When he was a young man, Shakespeare spent years petitioning the College of Heralds to grant his father a coat of arms. He was finally granted it in 1596. It clearly meant a lot to him. In practice it meant he got to put “gentleman” after his name (though not “sir” before it - he was still ranked below knights). The motto he chose for his coat of arms, Non Sanz Droict (Old French for "Not Without Right") is surprisingly lame. I often think that if I could meet anyone from history, it would Shakespeare, but I’m haunted by the thought that the author of Hamlet would only want to talk to me about how he came to choose a specific shade of gold for his escutcheon.2

Michelangelo also suffered from chronic status anxiety, despite being the most acclaimed and wealthy artist of his time. He was obsessed with the supposedly aristocratic origins of his family, the Buonarroti. According to what his biographer, William E. Wallace, calls “the creative genealogy of the day”, the Buonarrotis were descended from the counts of Canossa, an ancient and legendary family. Michelangelo believed that “imperial blood” flowed in his veins.

Being known only by one name sounds rather chic to us but Michelangelo might not have been so pleased to hear how he is referred to now. In his world, being able to use a surname in correspondence was a sign of status. After 1526, he stopped signing letters Michelangelo “sculptor” and started signing them with patronymic and surname: Lionardo di Buonarroto Buonarroti Simoni.

He was very keen that his relatives should burnish the family’s image. In a letter, he urges his nephew to acquire a larger, more impressive house: “I say this because a noble house in the city brings much honour, because it is more visible than other possessions, and because we are citizens descended from one of the noblest families.” (You can imagine his nephew wincing at once again having to read Uncle Mike droning on about the need to keep up appearances).

Michelangelo saw himself as an aristocrat who made art rather than an artist with aristocratic connections. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social status of artists increased, partly thanks to the grandeur of Michelangelo) and because it became more legitimate to attribute nobility to achievement and virtue, rather than just to birth. But Shakespeare and Velázquez still remained stuck in the liminal zone, convinced that it was their work which made them great but uncertain if anyone else saw things quite the same way.

Both were capable of reflecting on the ironies of their position. In The Tempest, Prospero, with whom Shakespeare seems to identify, floats far above the concerns of mere mortals, yet is also desperate to remind everyone he is the real Duke of Milan. “Every third thought shall be my grave”, he says. I take this to mean that when he’s not having deep thoughts about mortality he’s obsessing over how the hell to recover his kingdom and his title.

In Las Meninas, the artist, having arrived at court thirty years earlier as a mere servant, steps boldly into the frame while relegating his master to a blurry image at the back of the room. It’s as if he’s reminding Philip that the king’s prestige is built on Velázquez’s image-making. But the painting doesn’t quite tell us if Velázquez is an all-powerful magician or a member of staff.

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This one is free to read so feel free to hit the green button and share. After the jump: why I doubt that the Nowak case was really about anti-racism. Plus a Rattle Bag of good things, including my thoughts on the new McCartney album. The Ruffian depends on paid subscribers. Please consider taking one out, it’s very good value, and very high status.

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Catch-up service:
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand

Lucky for you I was on holiday last week, otherwise this might have been an actual essay.

For those of you blissfully unaware: last week Tony Blair published a 6k word essay about where Labour is going wrong. He followed it up with a media round. The result was an entire discourse explosion; endless counter-essays, interviews, podcasts, columns, posts. The current Prime Minister and the two most likely candidates to succeed him felt compelled to write lengthy pieces in response.

That a man who left political office almost twenty years ago can still bend elite discourse to his will is partly because he is polarising and therefore perfect for the age of outrage. But it’s not just that; it’s also because he has something interesting to say - a rare commodity in British politics.

The essay’s political philosophy is shallow. It makes sweeping assertions that are hard to stand up. It fails to address the current political landscape in any detail. It is also head and shoulders above anything written by any current Labour politician, before or after its publication. In that sense it succeeded in its minimal task. It has exposed the problem that has been obscured by all the leadership chatter: Labour isn’t thinking.

The response from Labour MPs and left-wing pundits has for the most part been defensive, sneering, and superficial. Much of it is ad hominem. I suspect it is rooted in insecurity. I want to say to these people: calm down. Be more confident. If Blair’s piece is outdated, irrelevant and compromised, as you claim, then you can happily ignore it and him. If, however, he makes important points, then why not acknowledge them, before moving on to what he gets wrong or misses out?

I don’t believe Blair set out to convert his party to a particular political strategy or policy program. He just wants it to grow up and get serious about the problems facing the country. It’s spectacularly pointless to insult him or to loudly declare “nothing to see here”, just as it would be useless to pretend his piece provides answers to all Labour’s problems. The point is to use his piece to improve your thinking and your arguments. That’s how productive political debate is meant to work. It’s called the dialectical method, comrades.

It is Blair’s style of argument, as much as the argument itself, which matters. The way he starts from first principles (what is Labour for?) and moves from step to logical step, expressing his ideas cleanly and simply. The way he takes care to separate policy from political strategy from tactics and communication. The way he looks outwards to the world rather than inwards to the party. The way he is excited about the future rather than nostalgic for the past. The way he assumes that the right policies will be good for everyone and not just for ‘our people’.

Many Labour people have forgotten how to argue in this manner, if they ever learnt it. And anyway, they don’t want to have to think through the difficult and unpleasant things that come with the responsibility of governing. How many Labour MPs have done real thinking about how to help the private sector create wealth; how to give our AI sector a fighting chance; how to cut the welfare bill? How many of them have thought deeply about Britain’s economic and diplomatic relationship with China; about our defence capabilities, or our energy strategy, or about how all these questions interact? No - they would much rather sing the old songs about inequality and neo-liberalism and propose more ways to redistribute all the income we don’t have, while taking pot shots at colleagues.

Blair is asking Labour MPs and ministers to engage intelligently on these questions and others - questions which, even two years into government, they have mostly failed to confront or even consider in depth. That’s the reason so many of them find his piece so bothersome. It reminds them that they know and care too little about the job they’re supposed to be doing.

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The most worrying thing about the responses is that they reveal quite how much Labour politicians are now operating in an alternative reality. Burnham thinks the cause of Britain’s housing crisis is that Thatcher sold off council houses. This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start, but a simple refutation is that we already have an exceptionally high proportion of social housing. If you want to make this argument, you have to explain this fact.

Or take Burnham’s “forty years of neo-liberalism” line which he stubbornly repeats after Blair called him on it, or Streeting’s contention that inequality is the most urgent problem we face. British income inequality is the lowest it has been since 1986.

Wealth inequality is higher but it’s driven by an ageing population and sky-high house prices (and thus housing shortage). Burnham cites the financial crisis, rightly, as a pivotal economic disaster for us. But the share of income flowing to the richest 1% is now lower than it was in 2008. The tax system is much more redistributive than it was at the start of the century, partly due to fiscal drag, and is one of the most progressive in Europe. The top 1% pay a substantially greater share of income tax than they did twenty years ago.1

We have one of the highest statutory minimum wages in the world relative to average income. It is set at 65% of the median British income, higher than the EU average. Our housing and energy sectors are struggling under accumulated weight of regulations that have been accreting for decades. Our biggest supermarket is currently fighting, and so far losing, a legal battle to pay different wages to workers doing different jobs, because it somehow contravenes Labour’s equality legislation.

I know “neo-liberalism” is a baggy concept, but can it really stretch this far?

Of course not. It’s just a slogan or buzzword used to avoid thinking about the hard questions. Voters are feeling miserable because their living standards aren’t rising. But that's not because all the income is going to the rich, and it’s not because the government isn’t taxing or regulating enough. It’s because their incomes aren’t rising. And that’s because they’re living in a low growth country.

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To his credit, Burnham at least adopted the right tone in his essay. He welcomed Blair’s intervention and praised his piece. He didn’t sound put out or threatened by it, even if his own ideas fell woefully short of convincing. Starmer was civil, though his piece revealed the same blind spots he has exhibited as Prime Minister, and he is anyway beyond redemption at this point. Wes Streeting adopted the most petulant tone of all three, perhaps because he fears being associated with Blair. That might have been excusable if he had anything of substance to say but to me his piece reinforced the impression of a talented tactician who hasn’t matured at the rate that his fans, including me, hoped he would.

Tony Blair doesn’t have all the answers to Labour’s predicament or to Britain’s malaise. But he’s asking better questions than anyone else.

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Catch-up service:
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism

The Ruffian is running a limited service today, as I’ve been on holiday this week, in Madrid. (Great to get away from rainy old England.)

I recently wrote a short piece for the Guardian on the Beatles; a commentary on some photographs of the group’s last official gig, in 1966. Writing it got me thinking about all the pictures of John and Paul I wasn’t able to use for John & Paul, for reasons I’ll explain. In lieu of a full-fat Ruffian what follows is the first in an occasional series on this theme.

The picture above is one of a small group of photos taken on the night of March 18, 1965. The Beatles were staying at the Marietta Hotel, in Obertauern, Austria, where they were shooting skiing scenes for the movie Help! After dinner, John and Paul went for a drink in the bar (George and Ringo seem to have been elsewhere) and persuaded the house act - a group called Jacky and the Strangers - to let them take over for a while. And they just jammed. (Btw this post was written without notes to hand so if there are any mistakes I apologise, will correct later).

It’s a beautiful moment. The two of them were in the middle of a global maelstrom of fame and already tiring of the stress and boredom it imposed on them. And here they found this little escape hatch - a place where they could sing and play together for the sheer sweaty joy of it, just like they used to.

We don’t know exactly what they played, but apparently it was covers of old rock’n roll songs - the kinds of songs they played when they first became friends. They look drunk or stoned or both and I imagine it was pretty sloppy, but what fun.

After a few numbers, the manager restored order. After all, he pointed out, he had hired Jacky and the Strangers, not the Beatles.

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I love this picture and the others taken on the same night - see below. In fact, I originally wanted to use one of the pics below for the cover of John & Paul. That proved impossible, for reasons I’ll say more about.

But first, I want to give some background on the process of selecting photos for my book, and indeed for any book. This was the first book I’ve written in which photos were involved. I’m pleased with the selection we ended up with but my God what a hassle it was. Along with getting the Notes section in order it was one of the less enjoyable parts of putting the book together and certainly the most expensive.

Photos were often an important source of evidence for the story I was telling, or the argument I was making. With the Marietta pics, and in several other places in the book, I had to describe photos that I couldn’t include, in the knowledge that readers could, if they wished, easily look them up online. This is one of the odd aspects of this business - a photo can be all over the internet but if you want to use it in a book, you have to pay. And it really is you, the writer.

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Catch-up service:
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?

On Wednesday 17 June, my choir will be performing a selection of operatic classics, with some stellar soloists. It’s going to be a brilliant night, full of huge tunes and amazing singing (not me). Tickets are available here. It’s at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. Come along!

This week: two funny stories about AI and writing, plus a juicy Rattle Bag including notes on maybe the best gig I’ve ever been to.

Having posted on it recently, I wasn’t going to return to the topic of AI and writing for a while. But this week has delivered a pair of stories so juicy that it’s impossible not to comment on them. First up: a prestigious literary prize was awarded to a story that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT. (As far as I can work out this story was broken by friend-of-The-Ruffian Nabeel Qureshi, on his X account.)

The story is called The Serpent In The Grove, by Jamir Nazir. It was awarded a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and published in Granta. The award dispenses five prizes to five different Commonwealth regions; Nazir, or “Nazir”, is the winner for the Caribbean region.

The Serpent In The Grove is set in an enchanted farmhouse (of course it is) and concerns a troubled marriage. You can read the whole thing, but here’s how it starts:

How do people know it’s AI-generated? They don’t know for certain, not yet anyway. But LLM prose has a certain flavour, and boy is it powerful here. This story is full of its stylistic and syntactical tics: weird metaphors which make no actual sense (“the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret”; many “not x, but y” sentence structures; over-use of certain words like “hums” and “quiet”.1 The entirely vacuous solemnity. The sense of someone, or something, straining to sound deep without having anything to say.

The grove ain’t forget.

Of course, all these things can be true of human-generated literary fiction, and none are infallible markers of LLM writing. But when they’re brought together like this, the flavour is unmistakable. Consider also that the only current internet presence of the author is a LinkedIn profile on which every post is clearly written with AI.

The AI-detection service Pangram deems The Serpent In The Grove to be 100% AI-generated. I sometimes think these mini-scandals are cunningly planned PR campaigns for Pangram; they certainly make the most of them. After this one broke, they ran all of the Commonwealth Prize’s winning stories since 2012 through the model. It found them all to be human generated, except for one in 2025 and three in 2026, of which Nazir’s is one.2

The response from the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, has essentially been to shrug and say, “Who knows?”

We asked Claude, it wasn’t sure, so whatareyagunnado.3 Anyway maybe it’s racism. A separate statement, this one from the Commonwealth Foundation, said, confusingly, that they would never feed stories to an AI model because then the evil AI would steal the content. Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, agrees with Rausing. Rausing is one of our greatest philanthropists and Leith one of our best critics. I find their attitudes bewilderingly passive.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s reasonable to assume the story is AI-generated based on reading alone. The Pangram analysis is confirmatory evidence. But a little due diligence would have worked wonders here. Have any of the prize administrators actually talked to Nazir? Have they tried to track down the nameless “books published and others forthcoming” referred to in the capsule biography he has provided for them? I am sure the prize runs on a shoestring but even so, none of this requires much effort. Behind the AI’s output is a real person, a dab hand at prompting. Somebody is getting paid the prize money. The point is not to engage in a witchhunt, but to do justice to all the authors who went to the trouble of writing their own story.

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I’ve been wondering why the prize administrators and judges are so slow to pick up on AI-inflected prose, whereas tech people can see it right away (especially those tech people who, like Nabeel, are voracious readers of literary fiction). I think it’s because literary people don’t spend much time reading LLM-generated writing. They just don’t use AI very much. The literary world has a fierce hostility to this technology, rooted in the fear that it’s about to destroy their livelihoods. If they used it more (but not to do their writing for them!) they would have better intuitions for what is AI writing and what isn’t.

They would also know that just asking Claude for a view isn’t enough, since the general models tend to equivocate on such questions and to be sensitive to the prompt (if they sense you want Answer A, that’s where they’ll lean). They would know that if you’re going to consult with AI, it’s much better to use a specialist model, trained specifically for this task.

Pangram works by taking millions of examples of human writing and generating an AI version of each one - a ‘synthetic mirror’. To distinguish between them the model is forced to focus on and recognise the stylistic fingerprints of machine writing. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for writers to take a passage or scene from a favourite novel and prompt an LLM to do a version of it. They’ll soon get to know that distinctive flavour.

Right now, book people appear to be hostile to AI in general and lenient about its use in literary prizes. That seems like the wrong way around. Mishaps like this one should only remind us that literary fiction is relatively safe from AI. Indeed it has one of the biggest moats of any white collar endeavour. If fiction goes into terminal decline, it will be for other, broader reasons, and not because AIs can fake it. A story that isn’t written by a human has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.

Once people know a story or a book is AI-generated, they lose any interest they had in it (except perhaps, in these early days, some morbid fascination). The reader has to believe a story is written by a human in order to care about it. Yes, The Serpent In The Grove is terrible writing and shouldn’t have won an award, and yes, much handcrafted fiction is bad. But all these questions of quality are subordinate to that axiom. An AI-generated story simply can’t be ‘good’ in any sense but the most superficial.

It’s the mathematicians I feel sorry for.

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Right, on to the second screw-up of the week. This one is even funnier.

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