Catch-up service:
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?

Scarlett Maguire, a pollster and one of Britain’s smartest political analysts, has issued a wake-up call to centrists. The centre is not where they think it is. Centrists are used to thinking of themselves as the inhabitants of a lush and large tract of land called “The Centre Ground”, with everyone else scrabbling around the edges. In fact, the centrists are isolated on a scrubby little verge in the middle of a motorway.

According to her data, the politicians who think of themselves as centrists are pitching to a group of voters - she calls them “liberal institutionalists” - who make up only 5% of voters. What is a liberal institutionalist? Think pro-Remain Tories, ageing Blairites. More specifically: voters who believe in a smaller state; who trust institutions and the mainstream media; who trust government; who are pro-business, pro-immigration (with controls), and loosely pro-globalisation.

This describes me, more or less. Me and about seven other voters, apparently. It is actually quite exciting to find out I’m in a tiny minority. Perhaps my very boring and vanilla brand of politics has finally become interesting and radical. Am I an extremist now?

I don’t know if I can claim that quite yet. I do accept, however, that whoever the median voter is, it’s not The Ruffian. Who is it then? According to this data, the median voter distrusts politicians; wants change; backs deportations; wants large reduction in legal migration; favours a wealth tax and wage ratios, is anti big-business. But also dislikes inflammatory rhetoric; worries about an unstable world; wants to see solutions over political point-scoring.

Let me get this straight: the median voter distrusts conventional politicians and most non-conventional politicians. They want lower taxes on their household and higher taxes on the rich. They want to cut public spending but only on migrants and scroungers. They want higher living standards, tougher regulation on big business, and much lower immigration. Oh and they’re also a big fan of pragmatic solutions. Sure.

In short, the median voter is all over the place. He or she holds what centrists would consider “extreme” views, and these views come in strange combinations. This is hard to swallow for centrists on both right and left.

Those on the right haven’t yet come to terms with how far left the electorate has shifted on economics. Many voters are under the impression that if we squeeze the rich and hit big business, we can pay for everything. Having lived through the financial crisis and austerity, they still believe that public spending is cut to the bone, and that we live in an era of rising inequality, when if anything the opposite is true. They’re not aware that Britain has the most progressive tax system in the developed world.

Similarly, politicians on the left have found it hard to accept how far they are from the median voter when it comes to immigration. The public isn’t satisfied with higher immigration, as long as it’s controlled and managed - the boilerplate position of even right-wing Labour MPs. Voters are furious about the relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants and want (or at least say they want) to cut legal immigration too. Left-wing politicians and commentators paint Shabana Mahmood as some kind of neo-fascist when in fact her position on this issue is well to the left of the median voter.

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In fact, all politicians with ambitions to govern are in a tough spot, since the median voter is not only charmingly inconsistent but also under some serious misapprehensions.

According to Scarlett Maguire and other pollsters over the last few years, voters are surprised to be told that we spend more on welfare than we take in income tax, or that we still have a huge Covid bill to pay off. They think we can spend more on the NHS and Defence if we just cut the salaries of MPs (or something). They think serious crime is rising, not falling. They have been allowed to forget that if you want higher living standards and better services, then the economy has to grow, which means big business has to thrive.

I don’t think this makes the country “ungovernable” but it certainly raises the difficulty level. You can see why even mainstream politicians are giving up on the median voter and targeting their base, or at least their ‘bloc’. The smaller the target group, the more internal consistency there is, the easier it is to shape a coherent set of messages. The trouble is that to win power - or enough power to get things done - you still have to win over voters and stakeholders from beyond your bloc, and you still have to adopt policies with a chance of working.

You might be able to impose a wealth tax on the very rich, for instance, but you’d soon find it would raise very little while slowing growth. You might slash immigration, but the NHS would collapse and GDP growth would be stymied. You might promise to spend more on lots of things but you will soon face a fiscal crisis. Pick your own examples of fantasy smashing into reality, but the most obvious one is playing out as we speak. A party that came into power on the impossible promise that it wouldn’t raise taxes but would deliver improvements in public services is now widely despised for its dishonesty. Was it worth it?

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I want to try and rescue centrism, but first I’ll say what I mean by it, starting with what I don’t mean.

Interpreted literally, “centrism” means aiming for the middle point of the political spectrum. Scarlett’s analysis suggests that it isn’t a viable approach anymore. I’m not sure it ever was. When the canonical centrists, like Blair or Cameron, talked about aiming for the centre ground, it meant compensating for the bias of their own party by pulling in the opposite direction, in order to reach voters who weren’t naturally aligned with them.

So Blair emphasised wealth creation and crime, Cameron social liberalism, and so on. Yes, they sought to stay close to the median voter, but it was a little more subtle than finding the middle point in a distribution and putting a flag on it. A strategy that merely tries to win back voters lost to more extreme competitors is a failure of ambition; the main parties should still be reaching to the other side as well as shoring up their flanks.

People who use the label “centrist” derisively (which is most people) use it to mean “starting with what the median voter wants and working back to political positioning”, or less kindly, “hollow opportunism”. Again, this isn’t true of Blair or Cameron, who were both true believers in their political missions, in some ways to a fault. There was actual content to their platforms: they had a philosophy, they had ideas, they had policies they wanted to see through. (Conversely, I don’t think of Robert Jenrick or J.D. Vance as centrists, even though they are plainly opportunists.)

A more charitable interpretation of the term is that it means “ambitious about winning power by winning over voters from beyond my base and then governing effectively, in a way that consolidates and expands my coalition”. (OK, not a great bumper sticker). Governing effectively will and should mean different things to different leaders, but centrism doesn’t set the direction. It’s a political method, not a philosophy. You need both.

Looked at this way, centrism isn’t dead, it just needs updating. It needs a lot of updating.

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“Centrism” is nothing without seriousness about governing, and on that count the centrists have, as Stalin said when the Germans invaded, “fucked it up”. Oh boy, have they fucked it up. Supposedly centrist leaders have presided over political chaos and national stagnation, which they have not only failed to alleviate but actively made worse. If the notion of a reassuringly competent Prime Minister, supported or at least accepted by the whole country, still resonated in 2024, it means less than nothing now.

The incumbent is like a custom-designed bot created to expose centrism as a lie. Starmer really is a hollow opportunist with no principles and no ideas. He really did rise to power in a mechanical way, sending two different messages to two different electorates without believing in either. All this might not have mattered if he then proved an effective PM. As it is, he is a shopping trolley in the guise of a technocrat; Boris Johnson without the bonhomie: weaving from side to side, pushed by whoever last took the handle, smashing into whoever happens to be nearby.

Still, painfully inadequate as both the Labour Party and the Tory Party have been, they remain the least bad options available. Despite some half-hearted efforts to get serious, Reform is still teeming with cranks, like the doctor who believes that vaccines cause cancer, and Suella Braverman. The Green Party wants to pull out of NATO, unilaterally disarm, kill GDP growth and legalise all drugs. Ed Davey - no.

That means centrism has to be revived. After all, it is the raison d’être of the main parties: their appeal to voters rests on a claim to be less extreme and more competent than the populists. To restore authority to that claim they will have to update their calcified assumptions about who the median voter really is, and to mercilessly interrogate their own thinking about what the country needs. They should be as critical of established wisdom, which means their wisdom, as the populists are. They have to understand and share the anger that voters feel about certain problems without letting it make them stupid.

Centrists, whichever party they’re from, will have to settle on a policy platform that tells and is framed by a coherent story about where Britain is now and where it needs to go. They will need to believe in it from the depths of their being, having sweated over it. Ideally they will have arrived at it through argument, so that they are fully aware of the case against, and have their enemies and potential converts in plain sight.1

To win elections, they will need to tell voters they’re right, for the most part, but centrists can’t substitute dishonesty for persuasion, where persuasion is necessary. Voters must be brought to understand that the only way to permanently reduce the cost of living is to increase growth, and that we can’t go on spending what we aren’t making.

Centrists will need to project urgency about the direness of our national predicament, something they tend to be poor at, since they came of age in more serene times and fancy themselves as calm hands on the tiller. They must not just project urgency, but feel it. The first error of the Starmer government was failing to cut short the 2024 summer recess. Some ministers have been rather too attached to their holidays, constituency work, family time. If the country is not in a crisis already, our leaders need to act as if it is.

The initial challenge is to demonstrate that the state can still do things. This is another sense in which centrists desperately need to update their mental model of politics. They need to recognise that one of Britain’s biggest problems is government itself, and that the proper response to this is not to complain about levers that don’t work or recalcitrant civil servants, but to have a bloody plan for power. A plan for the first week, the first month, the first year. Reality has a plan of its own, after all, and it is coming for you.

The populists have a vision but no plan. Starmer had neither. Whoever succeeds him, in the short or longer term, better have both.

Which brings me, seamlessly, to Michelangelo. (And after that, a Rattle Bag of excellent things - come on in…).

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Catch-up service:
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower

The couple in the picture went viral after a TV camera caught them apparently having a bad tempered row at a basketball game in Indianapolis. The man is gesticulating vigorously, the woman is looking off to the side with a face like thunder. She then turns fire on him, at one point quite clearly saying, “What the fuck are you talking about?”.

Sports Illustrated (among many other media outlets) got in touch with the couple. It turns out this was an exquisitely middle class row. They were arguing about the value of a liberal arts education, having been prompted by a discussion of the topic on a recent New York Times podcast. And while the exchange was robust, it wasn’t hostile.

I absolutely love the woman’s account of the argument, which is funny, fine-grained, and rather romantic. I have to quote it in full:

“Even saying that out loud, I can hear you yawning through the phone,” Grace told SI. ” … The thing is, Michael and I have been together for four years—wonderful, happy years. But that’s just what we do. We both just talk. He’s frighteningly smart. So what everyone witnessed was me listening to his well-articulated thoughts and responding with what you saw, which was ‘What the f--- are you talking about?’ I think that was probably to kill time while I thought of a rebuttal. Because that’s sometimes what you have to do. Sometimes you ad hominem, sometimes you just raise your voice, and other times you actually already have something to say. I think that I did a mix of the two while I sorted out my thoughts. That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that. That’s it. It’s so boring.”

Every group which spends time together has a culture, and a couple is just a small group. The woman is effectively telling us, “This is our culture. This is how we do things here.” Watch the clip without cultural context and you get a misleading view of what’s going on. I love that sentence near the end, in particular: (“That’s just how we always talk, and it’s fun, and we’re always just doing that.”). It’s such a beautiful description of a healthy practice of disagreement.

I don’t know what personal conflicts this couple will face in years to come, but I’m pretty confident they will be well-equipped to handle them. In my book on disagreement there’s a section on romantic relationships. I look at the evidence that couples who are more willing to have arguments with each other are more likely to stay together, and to overcome problems when they arise.

One reason for that is that habitual practice in low-stakes arguments makes it easier to deal with high-stakes conflict. The participants feel equipped to talk out their problems rather than avoid them, and to express frustrations rather than bottle them up. Another reason is that argument is a great way to keep yourself abreast of what your partner is feeling and thinking. Conflict is information. A third reason would be the one the woman outlines above: it’s stimulating.

Of course, some couples who argue a lot are making each other unhappy. Argument is destructive and corrosive if it involves unresolved resentment and bitterness. But if a couple likes and trusts each other, then an argument, even a heated one involving swear words, isn’t some some deeply unsettling event in the relationship, but just an everyday part of their culture. It’s boring. It’s fun.

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This week I’ve done a bunch of bite-sized posts - it’s one big Rattle Bag. Next up, I look at:

• Why AI hasn’t improved customer service (and what this tells us about how fast it will change the economy).

• What the latest Starmer scandal tells us about him (and about politics generally)

• How to buy happiness (a new study)

• Plus, an actual miracle of medical science; one of the best front pages ever; how to deal with conspiracy theorists; how to value Open AI; an intriguing theory of why The Beatles put Her Majesty at the end of Abbey Road, and more…
  

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Why Aren’t We Getting the Customer Service We Were Promised?

After LLMs suddenly emerged as the next big thing in 2023 it was frequently claimed they would soon transform customer service. That made sense to me. The CS systems of big companies are notoriously poor. The human agents inside them were following scripts and rules. The existing bots were extremely limited. If any industry was ripe for an AI upgrade, it was this one.

It would also be a positive story for AI, since in theory, everyone would gain. Companies would gain efficiencies by replacing staff with software. Fewer people would have to work in call centres (I’ve done it, it’s not fun). Consumers would get quicker, better service. That would all be something to lay on the positive side of the ledger, versus mass unemployment, cyberwars, and human extinction.

But it hasn’t happened, has it? Every time I struggle to navigate the website or app of my bank or an airline I think how nice it would be to have a Claude-style interface (in fact, I often resort to Claude, just as I learned that Google was a better way to search a particular website than the website’s internal search function). As it is, we’re pretty much stuck with the old system of call centres and dumb bots.

Why is that? I posed this question on Twitter/X this week and got some great answers from people who know what they’re talking about. I think these answers tell us something about the rate of change we can expect across the economy more broadly.

Read more

Catch-up service:
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp

Football, like team sports more generally, is a rich source of case studies in organisational psychology. This one tells us a lot about the nature of stress and the importance of leaders.

Here’s all you need to know. Manchester City have been the most successful team in English football for the last ten years. They are managed by the man generally regarded as the game’s greatest manager, Pep Guardiola, a mad genius, wildly innovative tactician, and ridiculously intense coach.

Mikel Arteta is a former Arsenal player, now their manager. When Arteta retired from playing, Guardiola hired him as his assistant at Manchester City, the apprentice to his sorcerer. After three years, Arteta took the Arsenal job and began to apply what he’d learnt from the master.

Arteta is intense too, and almost as tactically sophisticated, although he does everything in a more rigid, methodical way than his former boss. Within a few years, he transformed a club that was in danger of dropping out of the Premier League’s top tier, into the second strongest team in the country. In the race for the league title, Arsenal came second to City twice. Last season, for a change, they came second to Liverpool.

This year it seemed as if the stars had finally aligned. Arsenal have been top of the league and favourite to win the title since September. Manchester City have been, by their standards, inconsistent and sputtering. Liverpool are nowhere. Finally, Arsenal were about to win their first title since 2004, and the pupil was about to best his master.

But over the last few weeks, this prospect has been thrown into severe doubt. Manchester City are now breathing hotly down Arsenal’s neck. If they win their next two games, including their game against Arsenal, they will go top of the league with only a few games to go.

If this turnaround is completed, multiple reasons will be proposed for it, including differences in squad depth and the allocation of luck. But I think the real difference will be in team psychology, as derived from the team’s respective managers.

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Catch-up service:
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’

This piece is free to read. It’s followed, for paid subscribers, by a gloriously bulging Rattle Bag (making up for the one skipped last week).

I am grateful to NASA and the astronauts of Artemis II for providing a shaft of light in the darkness. The two biggest news stories this week have been a joyful voyage around the moon and a senseless war in the Gulf. It’s like a rather heavy-handed parable of humans at their best and worst. My feed was simultaneously full of the ravings of an actual lunatic who is somehow the most powerful person on earth, and a chorus of delight at the stunning pictures beamed in from space. Sometimes, the juxtaposition verged on comic:

The Artemis II story defied the timeline in a deeper sense. It feels as if it was dropped into the news from a bygone era; a benign ghost sent to remind us of how we used to feel about the future. It is a story about technology that empowers humans rather than threatening us with obsoletion; a story about what we have in common rather than what drives us apart; a story of American heroism. It couldn’t be more retro. You could call it a Generation X moment. All four members of the crew are aged between 47 and 50, which means that, like me, they grew up with a sense that that the world is getting better, people are basically good, technology is on our side, and progress is inevitable.

It helps that these individuals are so attractive and likeable (like all members of Gen X). They are not grifters using this as a stepping stone to wealth and influence, but true believers; the name of their craft, Integrity, does not seem like a bitter joke. Each of them travelled a long way to get to the launchpad, with setbacks and tragedies along the way. That they include a woman and a black man does not seem tokenistic but merely apt. I know there are conspiracy theorists who believe the whole thing is fake, and I’m sure there are culture warriors who hate it, but for most people, Artemis II is a chance to take a breather from all that and remind ourselves of what humans can do when they’re not at each other’s throats.

Above all, it is the pictures which amaze us; which provide us with a visceral insight into how vast and strange the universe is, how much there is to explore, and how dependent we are on the Earth’s atmosphere to protect us from the engulfing emptiness. The people with the most intense experience of this insight are, of course, the astronauts themselves. We are seeing our world through their eyes. Their training included photography, they are very aware of their role as narrators as well as pilots.

They are very good at it. Integrity crew member Victor Glover delivered a beautiful impromptu Easter message:

“In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.”

Although Glover’s speech was heartfelt and moving, the content of his speech was familiar. Astronauts who have seen the face of the earth often respond in the same way. Here is Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in space, speaking from aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984:

“Looking down at Earth. It’s very, very beautiful. There are wars going on, there’s pollution down there, but these are not visible from up above. It just looks like a very beautiful planet, particularly when you see it interface along the edge with space. There you suddenly get the feeling that, ‘Hey, this is just one small planet which is lost in the middle of space.’”

Here’s Albert Sacco, recalling his experience aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, in 1995:

”Once you get into space, I tell them about something I call ‘The Astronaut’s Secret.’ It’s a realization all of the astronauts have, which is that we are a member of the whole human family. It goes beyond being a citizen of the Earth—you are really a citizen of the universe. When you are in orbit, you ask yourself, ‘Why do people have the differences that they have down on Earth?’ You see that Earth is just a small part of a large universe, and you have a feeling about it that is hard to describe.”

These themes recur over and again in astronaut testimonies: a sense of the smallness, beauty and vulnerability of our planet, combined with a conviction that humans must transcend their petty differences and recognise the essential unity of our species.

In fact this response is so common that it has been given a sciencey-sounding name: “the overview effect”. The term was coined by American writer Frank White in his 1987 book, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. White interviewed 22 people who had been to space, identified these recurring themes, and concluded that seeing the Earth from space triggers a shift in awareness which fundamentally changes people for the better.

He crafted a grand narrative out of his materials. For White, the overview effect represents an evolutionary step change, latent in humans since the birth of the species. Space flight, he said, is aligned with the “general purpose” of mankind. It represented hope for the future; a chance to leave behind nation states and petty territorial disputes forever. He proposed that his readers become “terranauts”: evangelists for space science and technology, who will usher in the next stage of humanity’s evolution.

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Despite being full of junk history and dubious science, White’s book and his big idea proved remarkably popular, especially among elites. The overview effect was enthusiastically endorsed by environmentalists, peace activists, space industry advocates, and politicians. In 1997, President Bill Clinton cited it in a speech at a White House conference on climate change. It has been studied by psychologists and integrated into the research and development of space technology, including spacecraft design. In 2008, White founded The Overview Institute in Washington, DC.

Not everyone is aboard this ship, however. In 2014, a historian of science called Jordan Bimm published a waspish critique of the overview effect. He argued that rather than being a neurological phenomenon it is an artefact of America’s Cold War ideology. Bimm’s approach reminds me a little of Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Barthes examined a series of cultural stories and images which presented themselves as natural and universal, like the unifying goodness of wine in France. Using semiotics - the study of cultural codes - Barthes showed how these myths served particular political interests at particular moments. Scratch “nature” and you get history.

Bimm traces the overview effect’s provenance to those iconic photographs of the Earth which emerged from the moon missions - in particular, “The Blue Marble”, taken from Apollo 17 in 1972, which became perhaps the most reproduced image in history.1 In the 1970s and 1980s, it suited America to present its bid for global hegemony as a story of universal peace and harmony. Space exploration was a convenient means to embody and burnish this story - it was “manifest destiny” on a cosmological scale. The Russians or Chinese or Indians may not have been quite so moved by the astronauts’ rhetoric of universal human love.

It’s not that the astronauts were being consciously propagandistic, it’s that they knew the right thing to say. Bimm points out that it is not inevitable that humans respond positively to seeing the Earth from space, as White suggests. Test pilots and astronauts take part in an intense competition to be selected for missions, aware that every aspect of their performance and personality is being scrutinised. Consequently, they feel under pressure to exhibit pristine mental health, which translates as endless positivity. As a former NASA psychologist put it, “The expression of emotions such as sadness or fear is considered a weakness. The pilot/astronaut culture is overtly hostile to the expression of such problems—in themselves and others.”

You have to go back to the early days of high-altitude flight, before such norms were fully established, to find more negative self-reports. In 1956, aviation experts identified the “break-off effect” among pilots, defined as “a feeling of physical separation from the Earth when piloting an aircraft at high altitude.” Pilots spoke about feelings of isolation and loneliness, and of losing their connection with the world - something like the opposite of the overview effect. Bimm’s point is not that all astronauts secretly feel this; it’s that astronauts probably respond to space flight in a variety of different ways.2 But in order to claim that his sample of twenty or so individuals revealed a universal human truth, White had to exclude any negative experiences.

Frank White was influenced by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is one giant superorganism. That idea, which dates to 1974, originated in work Lovelock did for NASA on developing a method for detecting life on Mars. Bimm treats Gaia as a cultural artefact too, another response to a historical moment in which the promise of technological progress mingled with fears about communism, over-population, and pollution.

Although Bimm doesn’t discuss this, the cultural meme most obviously intertwined with the overview effect is the one we might loosely term “liberal globalism”: the idea that the world is moving gradually towards a consensus based on markets, democracy, international law, and social tolerance. That narrative reached its apogee in the 1990s and early 2000s and is closely associated with Bill Clinton, the early years of the internet, and America’s economic and military dominance. Fukuyama’s “end of history” (at least in its popular form) is a sibling of White’s idea. For White’s terranauts, read Ivy League liberals who saw themselves as the stewards of this inevitable progress.

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If this makes me sound cynical about this mission or these astronauts or any of those who have slipped the surly bonds, then it’s not meant to, because I’m not. I appreciate Bimm’s clear-eyed interrogation of White’s myth, but as myths go, I rather like this one. I’ll take it. A story about universality and co-dependence is preferable to the brutal zero-sum rhetoric that dominates political discourse today. That the overview effect isn’t scientific or ‘natural’ doesn’t make it meaningless. It might be a fiction but fictions can harbour important truths.

The rationale for Artemis II is also a kind of fiction. NASA’s story is that this is a step towards building a lunar base, which might help us get to Mars one day. We all know it’s not really about that. They’re lassoing the moon because they can, and the rest of us are thankful for the sublime spectacle of them doing so. Take a moment to enjoy Reid Wiseman’s pure, childlike, unfakeable excitement at seeing the moon up close, punctuated by the chuckling delight of his counterpart at mission control (“Copy, moon joy”). It’s enough to make a terranaut out of anyone.

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This is free to read so please share and ‘like’ it, if you liked. After the jump: a very juicy Rattle Bag, full of important stories and fascinating insights you may have missed…

Read more

Catch-up service:
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism

Last week Meta and Google were found liable by a jury in Los Angeles for harming a young woman’s mental health. The woman, known as Kaley, is 20. She testified that she started using Instagram and YouTube aged 9. “I stopped engaging with family because I was spending all my time on social media,” she said.

At one point she spent 16 hours straight on Instagram. She said she started feeling anxious and depressed from age 10 onwards and has been diagnosed with body dysmorphia. Her lawyers argued that the tech companies bore responsibility for her troubles, since they designed their platforms to be addictive.

It’s not often a British Prime Minister feels compelled to comment on the outcome of an American state-level court case, but Keir Starmer did so. He said the verdict showed the status quo on social media was “not good enough”, using it to highlight his government’s intention to restrict or ban social media for under-16s. The case for tougher regulation of social media is building a head of steam just at the point that it seems to be on the verge of being transformed, for better or for worse, by AI.

I’ll come back to this court case, but first I want to talk about another blow dealt to Meta’s reputation, this one in the court of public opinion. Sarah Wyn-Williams’s book Careless People was published last year and has been a massive bestseller. It’s the story of an idealistic lawyer and diplomat from New Zealand who joined Facebook early on and rose to a position of influence but became bitterly disillusioned with the company’s ethics.

Wyn-Williams - we’ll call her SWW, her internal tag at Facebook (which later became Meta) - thought she would be helping Facebook change the world for better, as it connected citizens in every country to each other. She came to believe that the opposite was true, mainly because Zuckerberg and his pals were feckless, selfish, and immoral. Her charges against them are multiple, including a blithe tolerance for misogyny and brutal management practices. Her most serious complaint is that they knowingly allowed the platform to become a propaganda vehicle for malign political actors, including Donald Trump, and Myanmar’s military junta.

I suspect Careless People would have sold pretty well in any event but its popularity has been greatly enhanced by Meta’s decision to sue the author. The day before its British release date, a US arbitrator granted Meta an injunction which banned SWW from promoting her book and from saying anything negative about Meta. The ruling doesn’t concern the truth of the book’s claims - it’s not about defamation - but is based on an interpretation of her 2017 severance agreement with Meta.

You might think, hurrah, lucky author, rolling in $$$ thanks to Meta’s stupidity - and without having to do any promotion! (Though book promotion is actually fun, for the most part). That’s what I would have said until I met SWW briefly at a private event (we were both shortlisted for a prize which neither of us won). She was very nice - friendly, unpretentious, funny. She didn’t talk about Meta but she did say how weird it is to have a book out and yet not be able to speak about it in public.

Worse than that, though, her time and mental energy are being almost totally consumed by the legal dispute, which remains unresolved. She has got to know her lawyers very well since she has to spend so much time with them, an she has to pay their fees herself. I didn’t quite grasp the parlous position she is in until reading this piece by her publisher. SWW faces fines of $50,000 for every statement she makes that might be seen as “negative or detrimental” to Meta. These include statements made anywhere, even in the privacy of her own home in Britain. Yes, even speaking to her own family.

If Meta wins the case, those fines may apply to many, many statements in the book and could easily amount to millions of dollars. So not only is SWW engaged in a draining and expensive legal battle every day, she is living under the looming threat of complete financial ruin, pursued by a mega-corporation with bottomless pockets and an apparently remorseless will to destroy her. Her position is not to be envied. When people talk about the bravery of whistleblowers, this is what they mean.

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I have a lot of admiration for her as a person and, now that I’ve read the book, as a writer too. Careless People is very entertaining. I recommend you buy it, not just to spite Meta, but because it is enjoyable and fascinating. I do, however, have some criticisms of it, which I make below in my review. In short, I think it greatly exaggerates the case against Zuckerberg and Meta, blaming them for things for which they shouldn’t be held responsible. I suspect this is true of the Los Angeles court case too.

I don’t say any of this of out of sympathy for Meta or Zuckerberg - the way it and he are treating SWW is itself evidence of a company that lacks humanity and wisdom. But the widespread habit of blaming big tech for our social ills, from the deterioration of democracy to the mental health of teenage girls, is crowding out more realistic and honest analyses of our problems. You can think that scapegoating is bad even when you don’t care for the scapegoat.

Careless People is very much a book of two halves. Roughly speaking, the first half covers the author’s background as a UN diplomat for New Zealand; her fascination with the rise of this new media platform; her determination to land a job at a company she foresees will one day be a powerful player in global politics; her initial failure and then her eventual success at getting one, despite nobody at Facebook being quite sure what she will do, since at that point (2011) they were still not thinking of themselves as a company which needed relationships with governments outside America.

It also includes her progress to the centre of power at Facebook, as global corporate diplomacy becomes more and more important to its growth plans. SWW becomes responsible for arranging meetings between Zuckerberg and various heads of state, and getting governments to support the platform’s growth in their country, or at least not to ban or restrict it.

This first half is essentially a savage social comedy. SWW’s account of Facebook’s chaotic and unstoppable growth is brilliantly done, and she has a talent for closely observed satire. We get vividly drawn portraits of senior managers: those at the very top like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, but also her immediate bosses, and a whole gallery of supremely ambitious, supremely weird people.

The company is run by a clique of Zuckerberg’s friends from Harvard, who all resemble him in personality. Since it was SWW’s job to arrange meetings with politicians and officials, many of whom are also clever but cold and socially awkward, the potential for excruciating comedy is enormous, and SWW milks it with flair.

Here, to give just one small example, is part of her account of Facebook’s first meeting with representatives of the German government. SWW and her boss, Marne Levine, welcome them to Facebook’s office in Washington DC. The Germans are distrustful of Facebook, associating it with the kind of surveillance they left behind in 1989, so just getting this meeting was a coup for SWW. But it doesn’t go well:

As soon as the German delegation is seated in the meeting room, we start formal introductions. Marne explains her background…at the end of listing her Harvard and government credentials, she concludes with, “And I’m Jewish.”
The room is silent.
”I mean, I don’t bring that up because of the Holocaust.”
Absolute silence. As if every living thing in the meeting room has been frozen. I’m trapped in some terrible parody of diplomacy.
”It’s just I figured you already knew,” she continues. “We can discuss it if you wish?”

They do not wish, and SWW cuts in to move the discussion along.

Careless People is enjoyably bitchy about nearly everyone SWW worked with at Facebook, though in some cases scorn is mixed with praise. Despite hanging her former boss out to dry here she says she liked Marne. Sandberg comes off worse: she is portrayed as tin-eared, self-obsessed, and hypocritical, singing the virtues of female solidarity while making workhorses out of her female staff. In a now well-known scene on a private jet, Sandberg invites SWW to to share a bed with her and gets upset when she declines.1

SWW’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg - the most important person at Facebook, and therefore, in theory, the villain of the whole story - is more balanced. She shows him as cold-eyed, irritable, stingy with thanks, and surrounded by aides who let him win at board games, but allows him some redeeming features too.

At first, he is flippant about the diplomatic or political aspect of his job, which doesn’t interest him. But as Facebook’s growth comes to depend on adding users outside America he comes to see how important it is, and leans on SWW to help him navigate this world, a very different realm to Silicon Valley. He becomes interested in his own soft power, as almost a virtual head of state. On a visit to Indonesia, he asks SWW to arrange a ‘riot’ so that he can be ‘gently mobbed’. She obliges. He even instructs staff to help him explore a run for US president (a bizarre episode that I for one had memory-holed).

SWW paints Zuckerberg as both cynical and naive. She shows an ingenuous, childlike side to him, as with the delight he takes in learning Mandarin. There is kindness too. In 2015 she manages to get Zuckerberg a speaking slot at something called the “Global Citizen Festival” in Central Park, attended by sixty thousand people and broadcast live on TV. The bill features Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Big Bird. (SWW makes great play of a scheduling clash with the latter; this whole chapter is the last burst of pure comedy in the book.)

When Zuckerberg goes on stage to address the crowd, there’s a malfunction: a video of him speaking starts to play on a giant screen behind him (his staff had prepared the video in case he didn’t want to speak in person; his assistant submitted it in error). Paralysed by this, all he can do is stare out at his baffled audience, before edging back down the stairs at the side of the stage, still facing the crowd, and sweating profusely (a motif of the book is his over-active sweat glands).

It’s a complete humiliation and you expect him to turn around and blast SWW and his assistant. Instead, once he is backstage, he tells them, “This is my fault”. When SWW tries to take responsibility, he says, “Look Sarah, if I was good at speaking or even improvising, this wouldn’t be a big deal…I need to work on this stuff. It’s me, not you. Really.” He tells her she’s doing an amazing job, a message he reinforces in writing later on.

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As the narrative of Careless People enters 2016, the book’s sense of humour more or less disappears, and so does the nuance. Careless People becomes moralistic, prosecutorial and one-note, hammering repeatedly on how appalled SWW is at Facebook’s leadership. She arraigns them for platforming extremists, overriding democratic process, enabling human rights abuses, all in the ruthless pursuit of growth.

If that was what she felt at the time, the reader might wonder why she stayed on in her job, and why she helped Facebook’s leaders court dubious regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not that I can’t imagine how a good person might find herself caught up in facilitating something they don’t approve of, but SWW doesn’t give a satisfying account of her thinking other than that she was pregnant with her second child and had share options. Partly because of this, the switch into polemic mode feels contrived.

Much is made out of what seem quite minor incidents. For instance, there’s a story about a Facebook VP in Brazil who gets arrested after WhatsApp (owned by FB) refuses to hand over messages in a drug trafficking case. Zuckerberg wants to publish a note celebrating the bravery of his employee and the company’s refusal to betray the privacy of “our community”. That wouldn’t be wise, since the messages in questions were sent by an alleged drug trafficker. He would also have been jeopardising his employee’s safety by effectively confirming that FB and WhatsApp are the same company.

SWW goes very hard on Zuckerberg’s apparent lapse of judgement. She is “disgusted” with him for even considering such a note. She “truly sees him differently” after this. In fact, she says this is what makes her decide to leave Facebook (at some point).

But Zuckerberg, at least as far as I can tell - the author isn’t explicit on this point - didn’t post the note. He backed down after being warned off it by advisers. (The employee was released after 24 hours in jail). I’m sure it was unwise, maybe even reckless, to even consider it but to me this story just doesn’t justify such a big change in her view of him and the company. In the same chapter she suggests that if Zuckerberg was a good, caring boss, he’d have called Brazil’s president to lobby for his employee’s release - exactly the kind of abuse of democratic process she criticises him for elsewhere.

The slightly unconvincing moralising persists through the rest of the book. Zuckerberg is invited to a summit of world leaders that will take place in Peru shortly after a Zika outbreak there. He is unsure about making the trip because he is trying to conceive a second child with his wife, and Zika can harm unborn children. The official health guidance is to stay away. In the end he agrees to go but on condition Facebook can build a “controlled structure” on the site of the conference, where they can mitigate any risk of infection.

An extreme measure, perhaps, and not unreasonable given his personal circumstances - but SWW is appalled. She likens it to imperial exploitation: “before I know it I’m negotiating with Peruvians for some land near the conference to be dedicated to Facebook”. She says that Facebook had been accused of “digital colonialism” in the past and this was therefore “not a good look”. I would have thought a sensible adviser would say that such accusations could be safely ignored, given the importance of protecting the CEO and his wife from a dangerous illness.

There is a quasi-dramatic scene on the private jet later on in which SWW, by now too tired and disillusioned to worry about upsetting her boss, challenges Zuckerberg directly about his failings as a leader. Rather than getting angry or defensive, he asks her to name a specific example, and she cites his decision not to consider re-naming “internet.org” (an accessibility initiative for developing countries that FB co-sponsored, which was not neutral, as its name suggested, but, at least in part, a way of selling FB services).

Is that it? SWW was probably right that he should have agreed to call internet.org something else. But for our big confrontation moment - the moment our hero speaks truth to power - this seems anti-climactic to the point of bathos, as does Zuckerberg’s response: “That’s fair”. (By the way, this is to SWW’s credit: a less honest narrator might have distorted the encounter to glorify the narrator and condemn Zuckerberg, or indeed not included it at all).

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A crucial part of the book’s case against FB is that the company made Donald Trump president in 2016. SWW says Facebook “basically handed the election to Donald Trump”, and, even more nefariously, it “threw the election” to Trump. The problem with this is that it isn’t true, and Careless People doesn’t even try very hard to prove it is. I don’t expect a memoir or a polemic to have the same standards of evidence as work of political science, but I’d like a little more meat on the bones of such a punchy claim.

SWW tells the reader that FB “embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team”. Sounds bad! What the book doesn’t say is that FB also had a team assigned to Hillary Clinton - it offered identical support to both candidates. Like Google and other digital platforms, they were selling their services to high-spending advertisers. This seems like important context.

It’s true that Trump’s campaign made better use of Facebook than Clinton’s campaign, engaged with the FB team more deeply and and spent more on the platform. But those were choices made by the campaigns, not FB. SWW seems mad that Trump was allowed to use FB’s data-based microtargeting to tweak its messaging and raise funds. But that’s what FB does. That’s the business! She omits to mention that Obama made highly effective use of Facebook in 2008 and 2012. Do we say that Facebook “threw” those elections to Obama, or that he won “because of” Facebook?

A narrower version of the book’s claim might be that Trump used the platform in a uniquely dishonest way, and that Facebook allowed him to. But even this is undermined by the lack of a single example of “misinformation” in the book. Nor does Careless People make the case that the Trump campaign was more dishonest than Clinton’s or any other campaigns. Perhaps there is a case to be made there, but even so it would be secondary to the central claim on which this whole section rests.

In full polemic mode, SWW says she can’t imagine how she’d would feel if she created the company that enabled Trump to win the presidency: “I honestly think I’d have a nervous breakdown…It’s so ugly. What a thing to be responsible for.” Let’s remember, we are talking about a democratic election here, not some atrocity. But anyway, the central claim is false. Trump didn’t win the election because of Facebook.

Advertising campaigns, for all the vast amounts of money that candidates spend on them, generally make little difference to electoral outcomes. We should be suspicious of any claims that they are decisive, even though it’s in the interests of campaign operatives and media owners to say they are. There’s no evidence that 2016 was any different. As far as researchers can tell, Trump-supporting misinformation did not change minds.

The definitive account of the 2016 election, by three political scientists, gives short-to-no shrift to the Facebook dunnit view. Unorthodox as he was Trump won (the electoral college) for normal reasons: voters like to switch parties after two terms; his opponent was very unpopular; voters were angry about illegal immigration. He also dominated the media, but the most crucial channel in that regard was TV.

Careless People is on firmer ground when it comes to the final crisis of the book: the genocide in Myanmar. In late 2016 the country’s military junta incited mass violence against the minority Rohingya Muslims, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Anti-Rohingya propaganda and hate speech spread online, through Facebook. Almost the whole of the internet-connected population used it, because the company was ‘first in’ when the government liberalised internet access, thanks in part to SWW’s efforts.

The regime exploited the FB algorithm to seed and spread lies about the Rohingya. Meanwhile, FB devoted almost no staff to moderating content in the country, despite repeated warnings from SWW and others that it should. That was a genuine dereliction of duty. It doesn’t mean that FB caused the genocide, or that the genocide wouldn’t have happened without it - the historical roots of the violence go deep, and it’s hard to imagine that better content moderation would have averted it.

But the platform does seem to have contributed to the conditions for the violence and even intensified it, albeit inadvertently. You can see that Zuckerberg’s attention would have been elsewhere - the company made very little money in the country. He and his senior team would have had plenty of higher priorities to focus on than the rumblings of a country of which they knew very little. The underlying issue is that Zuckerberg has always been unwilling to accept responsibility for how FB is used, rather than just for the services it offers.

This at the core of the recent US court case too. Was Facebook/Meta responsible for Kaley’s sixteen hour stint on Instagram, or for her social media-induced isolation from her family? I don’t know enough about the case to have a firm opinion on it, but my general instinct is that however clever, sophisticated and appealing these apps are, they are not overpoweringly magical amulets which users cannot resist. Calling it addictive, rather than habit-forming, seems highly dubious to me.

In its response to the verdict, Meta said: “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.” I agree with this. Bad teen mental health can’t even be linked to a particular form of media. Analogies with tobacco are facile and misleading; the evidence that cigarettes do harm is much, much stronger than the case against social media (and even the latter’s strongest critics don’t claim it gives you cancer). These apps are just one aspect of the user’s environment and even when they contribute to bad mental health, they’re less important than other causes, like genetics, chronic stress, or abusive relationships.

None of this is to say that social media use shouldn’t be constrained or regulated by parents, schools or governments. Personally I think it should. But this tendency to blame society’s ills, from Trump to depression to genocide, on, not just one form of media, but one bad company, even one bad man, should be resisted. Mark Zuckerberg is lacking in empathy, imagination and taste, and, like many CEOs, it’s hard to see what he cares about other than winning. But he’s not evil and I don’t think the last ten years would have gone better if Facebook had been under different management. He was under-prepared for the social and political consequences of connecting everyone in the world to everyone else. But weren’t we all?

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Sorry this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter. The Rattle Bag will return next week!

Catch-up service:
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism

I have been appointed ‘cultural adviser’ to a fast-growing startup, which is rather exciting and slightly daunting. I might say more about that at some point but for now I’m using it as an excuse to write about a subject I’ve been interested in for a while: the many ways in which well-meaning advice can backfire - particularly personal advice, between family members, partners or friends. There’s a rich seam of psychology research devoted to this very question.

Imagine that someone you’re close to is very stressed about something. Maybe your girlfriend is worried that she’s about to get fired from her job, maybe your daughter feels she is being ostracised from her friendship group, maybe your friend has had worrying medical news. Let’s say you want to help this person feel less stressed, by changing the way they think about the situation. What’s the best way to do that?

A new paper from a group of psychologists led by Yitong Zhao, at the University of Toronto, identifies two commonly used approaches, which they call decommitment and commitment.

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Catch-up service:
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Centrism’s Anger Problem

In a recent podcast interview, the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen claimed to have “zero” level of introspection, or at least, “as little as possible”. He also proposed a grand historical theory of introspection as a kind of life-sapping disease imported from Austria in the early twentieth century. For this he was savagely pilloried on Twitter/X, where he is something of a Main Character, with over two million followers.

That is fair enough, given that much of what he said was plain silly. It’s fun to put a billionaire in the stocks, especially one who came out for Trump in 2024 and has apparently infinite regard for his own sagacity. But actually, I think Andreessen made an interesting point here, one which got buried under the discourse avalanche. This post is an attempt to rescue it.

You can watch the relevant clip here, This is a summary: his interviewer, David Senra, asks him to elaborate on his dislike of introspection. Andreessen says: “I find people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” Senra agrees, noting that one of his observations from reading biographies of successful entrepreneurs is how little they introspected: “Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like, I’m going to keep building WalMart…”

Andreessen then embarks on his drunk history riff:

“All of the modern ideas around introspection and therapy were manufactured in the 1910s and 1920s…Great men of history didn’t sit around doing that stuff at any prior point. It’s all a new construct. First, Western civilisation had to invent the concept of the individual, several hundred years ago. Then for a long time it was, the individual runs and builds things - empires, companies, technologies - and then this guilt-based whammy showed up from Europe, from Vienna, Freud and that movement - the individual needs to self-criticise, feel guilt, look backwards, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.”

This is the section that really, uh, resonated with people. Scornful counterpoints came thick and fast. If we’re talking about great men of history, they don’t get much greater than Napoleon, who loved to dwell on his stormy emotional life, after Goethe. Benjamin Franklin was methodical about improving his own character and habits. Abraham Lincoln was beset by self-doubts and anxieties, and wrote eloquently about them. Introspection was hardly invented by Freud. Shakespeare created the most famously introspective character in literature. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine and Aquinas all wrote about their inner states.

And yet I think the critics overplayed their hand. Many presumed a wider definition of “great man” than the one implicit in Andreessen’s statement; he was talking about doers rather than (just) thinkers, and mostly entrepreneurs. Their definition of introspection was also too wide. Napoleon’s emotional flamboyance is not evidence of self-analysis, or self-questioning. Self-improvement, whether practiced by Franklin or Aurelius, is not the same as self-discovery. Aquinas was interested in himself only insofar as he was one instance of God’s creation, the human. None of these figures believed themselves to have an inner life that was unique and fascinating in its own right.

Second, the critics seemed to imply that prolonged, self-lacerating introspection is a permanent feature of the human condition. But it’s not. This is a big subject but in short Andreessen was right to suggest that it is a cultural invention that originated in Europe, even if he was a few hundred years and a couple of hundred miles out. Its true progenitor was Martin Luther in Wittenberg, not Freud in Vienna. It was the Protestants who popularised the idea that to be enlightened requires a relentless scouring of the inner self.

That’s not good news for Andreessen’s overall thesis, of course, since the rise of capitalist entrepreneurship went hand-in-hand with the rise of Protestantism. Introspection and the work ethic are historical twins. But I still think he and Senra were on to something. I’m often struck by how many high achievers are unencumbered by self-reflection. To take an example close to home, I’ve read or watched countless interviews with Paul McCartney, and he is at his least interesting on the topic of Paul McCartney. It isn’t that he doesn’t have a rich inner life. It’s that he puts it into his work - into the songs. His therapist is his guitar.

Top sportspeople are interested in their mental life only insofar as it affects their performance. Few of them go deeper than that (Andre Agassi being a notable exception). Introspection is positively harmful when your aim is to reach a state of flow. The same goes for successful politicians. When asked in a recent interview about how certain personal tragedies had affected his formative years, Tony Blair shrugged and said, “I don’t spend a lot of time psychoanalysing myself.”

Introspection and self-doubt are in tension with the speed at which entrepreneurs have to move. If you sat next to Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg and asked them about the wellsprings of their motivation, do you think that, even if they were being completely candid, they would have anything interesting to say? They’d much rather talk about the next project, or the next deal.

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Market economies reward acting over thinking at the margin, and America has the most dynamic economy in history. In fact, Andreessen was describing a distinctively American attitude to life - a Frontier mindset. Alexis De Tocqueville observed that Americans “seldom indulge in meditation” and “entertain very little esteem for it.” He was struck by the fleetness with which they experimented and innovated, unburdened by contemplation, convention, or rules. Sarah Wyn Williams, the New Zealand-born author of Careless People (my current read) characterises the spirit of American capitalism as “forward motion without introspection”.

I often think about Tyler Cowen’s playful remark: “People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels—it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.”

More broadly, I’m also sympathetic to Andreessen’s view that introspection is a hindrance to happiness…

After the jump: the therapist who says that introspection isn’t good for us and why I’m shallow and boring. Plus a glorious Rattle Bag.

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Catch-up service:
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers

In 1995, Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher and apostle of post-modernism, published a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. It consisted of three essays he wrote for the French newspaper Libération in 1991, while the Gulf war was, in fact, taking place.

A brief recap: what we now call the first Gulf War was provoked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The first President Bush assembled a coalition of allies (including the Soviet Union) to put economic and diplomatic pressure on Saddam. When that didn’t work, he sent in troops and missiles. America drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Bush chose not to force Hussein out. The rest is people saying “the rest is history”.

I remember the day the war started. Here in London there was a sense of foreboding, of terrible forces being unleashed, even if the action seemed legitimate and necessary. I don’t feel that there was quite the same moment here when Trump announced the beginning of “major combat operations” in Iran. Perhaps that’s because it isn’t a land war with troops and tanks rolling into battle. But it’s also to do with the suddenness of the event, the confusion over why it’s happening, and the way that the current US president imposes his own sense of dizzy unreality on all of us.

As a leader, Bush Sr. was more or less the opposite of Trump - slow, cautious, painstaking. When he said that America would draw a line in the sand, the world could be fairly sure that he would follow through.1 With Trump, you never know what’s going to happen next, or indeed what just happened. At the start of the year he launched a strike on Venezuela with even less warning. So the attack on Iran seemed less like a discrete and momentous event and more like the latest video in a never-ending doom-scroll.

This is why people have been raising the name of Baudrillard, who died in 2007. When his book on the Gulf war was published in English it met with howls of derision and moral outrage. If Twitter had been around, he would have been cancelled. The influence of post-modernists in the academy seemed to be at its height (in retrospect, it was just the beginning) and his book was a flashpoint in the battle between doughty Anglo defenders of reality and feckless French philosophers who denied there was any such thing.

To some extent, the moralising was justified. Real people were being killed by real bombs in the Middle East, as Baudrillard wrote his think-pieces from the safety of Paris. But if the title of his book was hyperbolic, his actual argument was a bit more nuanced. Baudrillard wasn’t claiming that no military action had taken place in the Middle East, but that the war’s true raison d’etre was spectacle. Its violence and casualties were fodder for what today we’d call a reality television show, created and produced by the American government. It was content.

In his view, the television narrative of reality was now shaping reality itself. America wanted a new show and it got one. Not because cynical politicians were manipulating a duped public, but because everyone, politicians and generals included, was lost inside the simulation. The spectacle had swallowed the real.

I should say, I don’t believe he was right about that war. His explanation for it seems superfluous. There were obvious reasons, economic and geopolitical, for America not to allow Saddam Hussein to colonise Kuwait. Bush, whatever his flaws, was a serious statesman, with a formidable foreign policy team. This was not an administration which went to war for the pictures.2

But perhaps Baudrillard was simply ahead of his time. His argument applies with more force to the current Gulf war, and the current moment.

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Catch-up service:
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Bodies Behaving Badly
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers

John &Paul is at number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a THIRD week running. Hurrah.

Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish filmmaker, wrote in a workbook for three hours every morning, a rigorous version of the practice that is now called “morning pages”. He started at 9am, and finished when his clock struck for midday, even if he was midsentence.

His workbook was a freeform diary in which he wrote down every thought, feeling or experience, no matter how trivial or dark or socially embarrassing. The point was to be utterly free. Since some of his workbooks have been published, we can see that ideas for films, or scenes from films, often germinated in these sessions.

Here’s part of an entry from July 4, 1976, on a day when he was worrying about a film he wanted to make:

I think it’s the form that worries me the most. I can’t find the form, it’s not coming to me on its own. Or rather it is, but I find it tedious and uninteresting. And I’ve no inclination to write it down like that. I wish I could just skip all the mediation, all the practical circumstances and transitional phases.

My little grandson Lukas, whom I didn’t know, drowned yesterday. He was only four years old.

A small bird, greenish gray in colour, flew into my windowpane and broke its neck.

I sit in my tower and life goes on outside.

The shocking parenthesis in which he reports the death of his four-year-old grandson was not an aberration. Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his essay on the workbooks, describes Bergman as an introvert with “an almost pathological lack of empathy”. We’ll get back to that, but for now it’s the last line of Bergman’s entry I want to draw your attention to. I think we can all learn something from him about towers.

Anyone engaged in a creative project - and I use the term loosely enough to encompass, say, a Substack newsletter - needs to be able to be both open to the world and its stimulations, and able to isolate themselves from them. In fact this doesn’t only apply to creative work. I started writing this post when reflecting on how to cope with the alarming news which blares out of our screens every minute.

We used to live in a world where the news came on the hour or in the morning paper. Now, like everything else, it’s a firehose that never stops. You can cut yourself from news altogether (a perfectly reasonable option) or you can choose to remain open to it. But if you do the latter you still have to find a way to retreat from it now and again. Otherwise you just get stuck inside an information regimen which you don’t control, losing all distance and perspective.

That isn’t healthy. It doesn’t do any good to be worrying about things over which you have no control and only superficial knowledge. I’m fond of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s response to the young Andrew Sullivan, when the latter told him he wanted to be a journalist: "I consider the need to know the news every day a form of mental disorder." Oakeshott no doubt appreciated Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time.”

To get distance and perspective on the world you need a tower.

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Catch-up service:
A Deep Dive Into ‘I Feel Fine’
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Bodies Behaving Badly
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
The Stamina Gap

John &Paul is at number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list for a second week running!

Today I report on what I heard or overheard at Social Science Foo Camp, an annual convention of techies, academics, and assorted oddballs, this year held at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View outside San Francisco. (Also in attendance: Helen Lewis, who writes about it here). These snippets are taken from my notes which are incomplete and messy and frankly unreliable. Some are from presentations, others from canteen chats. To stay on the safe side, I haven’t attributed them except for one or two.

This is intended to be impressionistic than anything rigorous - I want to give you a feeling for the kinds of conversations that were going on. There were conversations about culture and art as well as technology although inevitably the conference was dominated by AI. I haven’t used quotation marks but where these are first person you should assume someone other than me is speaking unless I use my initials.

Best to click on the title above and read this online.

1. Tech exec: I’ve been in conversations with the top people at all the major companies developing frontier models. The common theme is that none of them have a clue how this will play out.

2. We should have a strong industry norm against making AI conscious. Anthropic’s ‘constitution’ for Claude is endowing (and even enacting) an AI with consciousness, and therefore ‘rights’. This will lead nowhere good.

3. We don’t even know what it would mean for an AI to be conscious - we don’t even know what it means to say humans are conscious. There are 22 competing theories of human consciousness in the scientific literature! Six major theories and a host of niche ones. The lack of consensus is striking - few if any major areas of scientific research are like this.

4. The chimp-pig hypothesis originated by Eugene McCarthy (not present at Foo) argues, contra Darwin, that humans are the result of interbreeding between those two species. (See also this report in Pig Progress). (IL: The speaker who presented McCarthy’s theory was not arguing for it, merely suggesting that it’s interesting and provocative, as Darwin’s theory was in 1859, and that this is therefore an opportunity for us to feel what it feels like to encounter a strange idea.)

5. AI “reasoning models” (models like DeepSeek and OpenAI o3 which show extended chains of thought before answering) aren’t just reasoning for longer; they’re engaging in internal debate. This study finds that they simulate multiple different internal voices or perspectives, with distinct personalities and areas of expertise. These voices argue with each other, question each other, and eventually reconcile differences. The researchers call this a "society of thought." That is, AI seems to be spontaneously reproducing the mechanisms of human intelligence, including debate and productive disagreement.

6. Another study used machine learning to map the intellectual perspectives of millions of scientists, inventors, screenplay writers, entrepreneurs, and Wikipedia contributors against each other. They found that collaborations between diverse thinkers were more successful - but in a specific way. Background diversity — having lived different lives or trained in different fields — was actually detrimental to creative achievement. What counted was perspective diversity: the most successful collaborations happened when partners had a common language but divergent approaches. (IL: I’m going to call this the John & Paul theory of creative collaboration.

7. There has been a long running dispute between Wikipedia editors over whether an entry titled “Longcat” is actually about a long cat, or about an internet meme depicting a long cat. This actually goes quite deep.

8. When an AI performs poorly or messes up a task you give it, make a note and try the same prompt in six months’ time. This is a good way to get a feel for their progress.

9. The vibe-coding apps are not, in fact, easy to use. You need technical domain knowledge and intuitions rooted in software engineering - and a lot of LLM usage - to get the best out of them. They don’t replace expertise, they amplify it.

10. When we give scientists an AI and a scientific problem to solve they feel better about what they’ve done but haven’t always done better. When we give them a cloud of AIs with different viewpoints to work with, they feel better and they do better. They’ve understood the problem at a deeper level.

11. Analyst at major investment bank: My team’s written reports have become more complex and in-depth since LLMs. It wasn’t a conscious shift, just a response to the fact that it’s now so easy to get instant analyses of, say, the economic impacts of an American attack on Iran. So we have to offer something better.

12. One of the questions we should ask when designing or using AI systems is do we only want the ‘probably right’ answer - or do we want the user to have understood the answer and why it might be wrong?

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13. On the one hand, AIs increase individual agency because people will be able to do X (something they didn’t have the capability to do before). But they may also reduce agency because people will feel that everyone else can also do X.

14. Culture is “the unconscious patterning of human behaviour”. (Original source: Edward Sapir).

15. The whole history of America and the modern world is embodied in the banjo, an instrument that originated in Africa, entered America through blackface minstrel shows, migrated into the upper class of American and British society as a fashionable parlour instrument before shedding that identity entirely and becoming a hillbilly/bluegrass instrument. Earl Scruggs, who created the three-finger roll technique in 1945, is one of the most influential musical innovators of the last century. (IL: hat tip to the wonderful Alison Brown).

16. Time-locked LLMs - LLMs trained on data that only goes up to, say, 1492 or 1913 - are still at an early stage but will be a fascinating tool for exploring historical perspectives.

17. Will human-made things need the stamp of human craft, William Morris-style? Or will norms simply evolve, as they did in photojournalism? When digital photography emerged some in the photojournalist community believed they might have to stick to analogue film to prove veracity. In fact ethical norms have sufficed to regulate the field.

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18. We can train people to use AI for writing in a way that doesn’t harm the quality or individuality of their writing. But they’ve already had years of experience. How will we do it for people who have grown up using LLMs to write?

19. Arnold Schoenberg, notwithstanding his reputation for austere music, was a warm and affectionate father and much loved teacher. He has three living children.

20. AI safety only needs one rule: the allocation of electricity to each agent is proportional to the wealth (or well-being) of the poorest person. So they cease to exist if people are impoverished. The physicality of AI is the only way to force alignment. All abstract principles can be gamed but energy will remain the fundamental constraint and we should use it.

21. Cognitive resonance - when the AI feeds back to you what you already think. (Opposite of cognitive dissonance).

22. I had a toxic person in my life that I’d been emailing back and forth for years. I had this nagging feeling that I needed to meet them face-to-face to resolve our differences. But then I found a better way: I gave the AI all of our emails and then did a role-play with this person - after that I realised I didn’t need to meet with or talk to them ever again.
    
    After the jump, more snippets from Foo including some fascinating insights into how human memory works. Plus: my thoughts on the BAFTA brouhaha, plus the Gorton by-election, plus a Rattle Bag of juicy links and stories. If you haven’t already, seize the day and take out a paid subscription. It’s easy to do and excellent value, though I say so myself. The Ruffian is 100% human-crafted.

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Catch-up service:
Pitfalls of AI Journalism
Bodies Behaving Badly
Centrism’s Anger Problem
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?

I realise that not all Ruffian subscribers are Beatles fans but even if you’re not I hope you’ll find this interesting, because it’s about how musical ideas travel and collide in time and space.

Oh and a quick piece of celebratory news: the UK paperback of John & Paul hit number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list last weekend! Thanks to everyone who bought a copy.

The Beatles released I Feel Fine as a single in November 1964. It became their sixth number one of that year. I Feel Fine is like a magic box. Take the lid off and inside you can glimpse the whole history of twentieth century music.

It was recorded in October in the middle of a schedule that was crazy even by Beatles standards. In the previous nine months they had made a movie, A Hard Day’s Night, and an album of the same name. They had toured America, Britain, Europe, and Australia. Now they had to record a second album in time for the Christmas market.

Beatles For Sale included several rock n’roll covers they knew by heart and could knock out at speed. Its Lennon-McCartney originals had a downbeat or reflective flavour (No Reply, I’m a Loser, I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party, I’ll Follow The Sun). The Beatles were getting sick of being treated like cash cows and they were tired. Their mood is evident in the weary defiance with which they stare out at us from the album’s cover, and in the mordant joke of its title.

But with the exhaustion came a certain frazzled, giddy liberation. You can hear it in the wildness of the rock n’roll covers like Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey, which threaten to tip into chaos. And you can hear it, in a different way, in I Feel Fine, the title of which sounds almost ironic in context. (I Feel Fine wasn’t on the album, it was released only as a single, though it’s from the same sessions). The song is so effortlessly enjoyable that we tend to think of it as a throwaway. But it was a major step forward for the group in several ways.

I Feel Fine was originated by Lennon. It the first Beatles track to be built around a guitar riff (a repeated phrase or figure played on lead guitar). It was a trick they would use in a few singles, including Day Tripper and Ticket To Ride, also originated by Lennon. John wanted The Beatles to keep up with and exceed the efforts of groups like The Who and The Kinks who had followed in their wake but had a rockier, more riff-based sound. The Kinks’ You Really Got Me had just been a big hit. He started playing around with a riff from an R&B song the Beatles used to play at the Cavern which John in particular loved: Watch Your Step by Bobby Parker (1961).

You can hear how similar the riff is, although Lennon and the Beatles subtly transform it. We’ll come back to that but first, let’s marvel at how influential Parker’s riff was. Not only did it inspire I Feel Fine (and Day Tripper) but a host of subsequent rock songs, from Led Zeppelin, The Yardbirds, the Allman Brothers, and more. Watch Your Step was also covered by many artists, including Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, The Spencer Davis Group, and Carlos Santana. It was an enormously generative song.

Watch Your Step was itself heavily influenced by a couple of prior songs. Parker said he came up with the song after playing around with the riff from Manteca, a 1947 hit by the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Parker said, “I started playing [‘Manteca’] on my guitar and decided to make a blues out of it.”

The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Manteca “one of the most important records ever made in the United States.” Why? Because it successfully combined Latin rhythms with jazz, inaugurating one of the most fruitful cross-pollinations of in twentieth century music.

The transatlantic slave trade distributed West African musical traditions across the Americas, where they evolved differently depending on local conditions. In the U.S. South, they fused with Anglo-Celtic folk and hymn traditions to produce blues, gospel, and eventually R&B. In Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean and in South America they fused with Spanish and Portuguese forms to produce samba, calypso, mento, and so on.

After the war, New York, in particular Harlem, became a point of convergence. Black jazz musicians and Cuban/Puerto Rican musicians were playing together, listening to each other, living in the same neighbourhoods. It was in Harlem that Dizzy Gillespie came across the Cuban drummer Chano Pozo, a legend in his home country. Gillespie had already attempted to introduce Afro-Cuban rhythms to big band jazz, but it was only after getting together with Pozo that he struck gold.

Pozo came to him with an idea for a piece based on a repeating, Latin-inflected riff made up of interlocking bass and horn vamps. With Pozo playing the drums it sounded irresistibly exciting. Gillespie added a beguilingly melodic be-bop bridge with opulent harmonies, turning Pozo’s vamp into a complete piece of music. Manteca had its premiere at Carnegie Hall. It was an immediate success, and a big hit. It still sounds like dynamite.1

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After Manteca, Latin and Afro-Cuban rhythms increasingly found their way into jazz. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, they could be found in pop, too, in hits like Under The Boardwalk and Stand By Me. The young Beatles played Latin-inflected songs like Bésame Mucho and Till There Was You.

Ray Charles brought Latin beats into R&B. Along with Manteca, Bobby Parker cited What’d I Say by Charles, from 1959, as a big influence on Watch Your Step. What’d I Say combines Latin rhythm with twelve-bar blues. Charles and his band were drawing on rhythmic ideas that had been circulating through American popular music for over a decade by that point. Parker then took the feel and energy of What’d I Say and combined it with his Manteca-like riff to make Watch Your Step.

The Beatles adored What’d I Say. It was a staple of their sets in Hamburg and Liverpool, though it was only after Ringo joined that they were felt they were playing it properly. In early 1962, Ringo subbed in for Pete Best in Hamburg. The group opened their set with What’d I Say. McCartney later recalled this as the moment he and the other Beatles realised what they had been missing.

Which brings us back to I Feel Fine. John had his variation on Parker’s riff and an idea of how the song would go. He enlisted the group to help him work out the rest of it. The lyrics are simple and have the feel of being written at speed. It’s unclear who out of he and Paul contributed what to the song, and at this stage they were working so closely that the question is moot, although both agreed it was mainly John’s song.

Structurally speaking I Feel Fine is closer to Manteca than Watch Your Step or What’d I Say. Those last two tracks have the same structure: they repeat the main idea over a 12-bar blues chord progression. They are repetitive, albeit in a deliberate, concentrated way. They want to lock you in to the groove until you lose your mind. What’d I Say is a very long track, over five minutes. On stage in Hamburg, the Beatles liked to make it longer still.

I Feel Fine has a very different feel. It’s two minutes long and it isn’t a twelve-bar blues. Rather being heavy or intense, it’s deliberately light. It’s pop. This different sensibility is manifest in what Lennon does with Parker’s riff. Instead of going around on the same three notes over one chord at a time, he creates a more open, more playful figure which spins us through different chords before settling down. Rather than locking us into a groove, it opens us up. The Beatles were already capable of writing more sophisticated lyrics. But the simplistic, frictionless words of I Feel Fine are perfect for a song which aspires to flight.

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Like Manteca, I Feel Fine has two parts: the main section, dominated by the riff, and a melodically expansive bridge which offers a contrast in feel (“I’m so glad…”). We could just as well call it the chorus. Whatever it is, it works. I’ve heard the song a thousand times and this section still feels likes the sun coming out. It is the perfect complement to the bluesier, sexier verse, like someone beautiful and cool taking off their Ray-Bans and just grinning. The vocals are a major contributor to this magical effect. Paul and George join John for one of those glorious technicolour three-part Beatle harmonies.

The bridge is made up of two simple musical phrases: “I’m so glad” and “She’s my little girl” which are then repeated with varied words (“She’s so glad/She’s telling all the world”) - though not quite. A straight repeat of that melody would have worked fine and in the hands of lesser songwriters, that’s what we would have got. But the Beatles introduce a melodic variation on that second phrase - “She’s telling all the world” - a delicate little turn that skips up before descending with the elegance of Fred Astaire dancing down a staircase. It’s a phrase which gestures to jazz and Broadway, while returning us seamlessly to the bluesy, rocking verse.

When Lennon brought the song to the studio, he told Ringo, “I’ve written this song, it’s lousy.” You can see why John would have dismissed it. It was just a riff, a simple two-part structure, and lyrics about nothing very much sung to a narrow melody that is barely a melody at all. But the difference between the mediocre and the sublime can be surprisingly slim, a matter of execution. It was only once they went to work on it as a group that the song really came to life. It didn’t happen immediately. Judging by the outtakes, I Feel Fine evolved rapidly from the version they began with. In the small number of hours they had, they changed the song’s rhythm, its key, its bassline, and its vocal arrangement.

The crucial advance came when Ringo landed on the What’d I Say beat. His ability to nail that rhythm owed much to his love of swing and jazz. Before he introduces it to I Feel Fine, John isn’t swinging his vocal line in the way he does in the final version. I Feel Fine sounds, well, fine, but not nearly as good as the song we know. Once the song was infused with Latin jazz, with Ringo making it sound so effortless and spacious, and John and George playing that killer riff in unison, the Beatles knew that they had their next single.

Millions of teenagers in Latin American countries now heard the music of home refracted back to them by the world’s biggest pop group. We can get an idea of what that meant by hearing the way Gloria Estefan talks about the Beatles:

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I Feel Fine opens with a brief snatch of feedback before the famous riff kicks in. That metallic whine may not sound like much now, but it was momentous: the first time electric feedback had been deliberately used on a record. By 1964, guitarists like Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix were using feedback on stage and would soon make flamboyant use of it in the studio. But at the time of I Feel Fine, the idea that you’d put feedback on a record was outrageous. Recording engineers considered it an ugly waste product to be avoided at all costs. The Beatles had to persuade horrified EMI technicians to break their own rules.

That shows us that by 1964 the Beatles had already assumed control of their creative output in a way that few if any pop acts had done before. They were also beginning to treat the studio as an instrument in itself, rather than as a place to translate live performances on to vinyl records. The inclusion of a couple of seconds of feedback at the start of this feather-light pop song leads to Tomorrow Never Knows and Strawberry Fields Forever, two years later. It was the harbinger of a revolution in twentieth century music which followed a pattern identified by Brian Eno:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature…It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it.”

It’s worth going a bit deeper on how the I Feel Fine feedback came about. The version most often told is that John propped his switched-on guitar against McCartney’s bass amp and got intrigued by the resulting feedback noise. He and Paul then decided to put it on the record. That’s a fair summary, but it misses out some illuminating details.

Feedback is what happens when amplified sound loops back on itself. When the strings of a switched-on electric guitar vibrate, the guitar converts those vibrations into electrical signals, which the amplifier plays through its speaker. Feedback happens when the guitar is close enough to the amp that the sound waves from the speaker cause the guitar strings to vibrate again, which causes the guitar’s pick up to send an electromagnetic signal back to the amp, and so on: the cycle repeats and intensifies, until the amp overloads and you get that familiar screech.

That’s not how the feedback we hear on I Feel Fine was produced, however. This sound is a little more controlled than normal feedback noise. It has a fairly stable tone, a definite pitch. It’s essentially an A, a note which is in G Major, the key of the song, and thus leads nicely into the riff that starts the song proper. It’s part noise, part music. A very Beatles way to break the frame.

What seems to have happened is this: Lennon’s semi-acoustic guitar (a Gibson Jumbo) was very close to, or leaning against, McCartney’s bass amp. John liked the sound this produced and invited Paul to experiment with him, and they ended up producing this more sophisticated form of feedback.

This is how it works. Paul hits an open A string on his bass. The sound waves from Paul’s amp physically vibrate the strings of John’s Gibson. These sympathetic vibrations are strongest at the harmonic frequencies of Paul’s note. John then holds his vibrating guitar up to his own amp, which amplifies those vibrations, further excites the strings, and creates this relatively controlled, musical feedback. They made different versions of it for different takes.2

In other words, the brief but revolutionary noise at the start of I Feel Fine is not quite the straightforward studio accident it is often presented as, but the result of purposeful experimentation - and the sympathetic vibrations between John and Paul.

Nobody executed quite like the Beatles. All those years of playing and creating and living together enabled them to spin a little masterpiece out of thin air. Of course, that air was actually thick with virtual collaborators, some of whom they knew and loved, like Parker and Charles; some they would have counted as competitors, like The Kinks, and others they didn’t know much if anything about, including a bullfrog-cheeked jazz trumpeter and his Cuban sideman. I like to imagine the latter two in particular being present at the recording of I Feel Fine, invisible except for their cigar smoke.

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The best available mix of I Feel Fine is the one from the 2023 Red album, as remixed by Giles Martin. It’s the one where you can hear Ringo’s drumming in all its glory.

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Acknowledgements: it was an episode of the brilliant Beatles podcast, Note By Note, which revitalised my interest in the song, and this piece owes a debt to their analysis. I also drew on insights from A History of Rock Music In 500 Songs (the song is covered in the episode on Ticket To Ride) and from Gary Giddins’ essay on Manteca in his collection, Faces In The Crowd.

Greetings from San Francisco, where I’m attending a conference on tech and society, hence the slightly unconventional posting schedule this week.

Every bar-chart tells a story. This is an analysis, run by a company called Pangram Labs, of all the articles written by one journalist over the last six years. Pangram’s app is designed to identify text that was generated by an AI.

The journalist is a sports reporter for a national newspaper; those spikes in output are associated with big sporting events, including the Winter Olympics currently underway. The story this chart tells, which may or not be accurate, is of a high-output journalist succumbing to the siren call of AI.

If the analysis is correct, then at beginning of this year, the journalist started using AI to finish pieces. Then he started using it not just to tidy up drafts, but to draft. That final bar suggests that most of his dispatches from the Winter Olympics have been heavily assisted by AI.

I’ve taken the journalist’s name off the chart, although it’s easily discoverable, since there’s been a fuss on X about this (I do use his name after the jump). I don’t like the public shaming aspect of this. The only reason this story is worth dwelling on is because it confronts us with choices we’re all having to make.

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Catch-up service:
Centrism’s Anger Problem
George Eliot’s Blind Spot
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
How Not To Use AI
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?

I’ve had a very busy but very fun week, which included my birthday on Tuesday and a hugely exciting night talking John & Paul at Union Chapel in Islington, on Thursday. Thanks to those of you who came along, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Thanks to Intelligence Squared, to Waterstones, and to Helen Lewis for being such a perceptive, funny and charismatic conversation partner.

Since I knew this week was going to be busy I had the good sense to ask a very talented writer called Aled Maclean-Jones to prepare a guest post for me. I recently linked to Aled’s terrific pieces on the Swiss watch industry and Tom Cruise. For The Ruffian, Aled has written about bawdy writers and messy bodies. This is free to read. Enjoy!

One of my favourite Youtube binges is the Channel 4 series After Dark. First broadcast in 1987, the concept was achingly simple: take the extra time at the end of each evening’s schedule, add some knackered old sofas and a well-stocked drinks cabinet, invite a few luminaries, and let them talk. The subjects ranged from War and Peace, to the death penalty (featuring an actual hangman), to the life of Sigmund Freud. The show lasted as long as the conversation did. When they’d wrapped, that was it until morning.

It became known for two things. First, the breadth and erudition of its guests. Norman Mailer, Patricia Highsmith, Edward Said and AJ Ayer (booked for the ‘Football Crazy’ episode) were among the hundreds who, during the show’s four-year run, graced the tired couches of West London. Second, the bad behaviour. In a 1988 episode simply titled “Sex,” Andrea Dworkin and Anthony Burgess declared all-out-war. In another, a young Billy Bragg trolled a Tory MP until they walked off set. Most famously, Oliver Reed turned up, drank himself blind, insulted every guest, and threatened to expose himself on live television. Not long afterwards, the show was taken off air.

Today, it feels like a relic from a cruder, baser time: Clive James discussing Proust in a pool with the bunnies at the Playboy Mansion; Robert Hughes cruising around Wall Street in a red convertible firing potshots at Le Corbusier and extolling the virtues of shit; and Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens locked in debate in the Gay Hussar over what, just what, made Margaret Thatcher so alluring.

Yet enter any eighteenth-century coffee house and it’d be clear this was in a long and august tradition. From Tristram Shandy’s circumcision at the hands of a window sash, to Gulliver’s first instinct for extinguishing a Lilliputian fire, the path to sincerity ran through crudeness. These writers saw their bad behaviour as engaging with an essential truth: ribaldry was not an addendum to a thriving intellectual life, but a fundamental part of it.

Bawdiness requires two things: humour and the body. Both need to exist together to truly earn the epithet. You can be funny without being embodied. Think of the cerebral, comic rages of Thomas Bernhard, his narrators almost always minds in fury, not bodies in the world. The same goes for the inverse. Ben Lerner’s recent NYRB essay about his heart surgery is as embodied as they come: ‘I suddenly became aware of a space — the pleural space — inside my body that I did not previously know existed, that hadn’t existed until they pulled something out of it.’ Genius? Yes. But not funny.

What makes this blend – wit and the flesh – so intoxicating? I suppose it’s the only way we can access both parts of us at once: our official and unofficial selves. In his 1965 study Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin distinguished between the classical body and the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the classical body is closed, smooth, complete: the ideal we present to the world. The grotesque is open, rough, imperfect: who we actually are. You cannot have one without the other. The contradiction makes the whole.

From this unholy union comes truth — or so the bawdiest of writers have always insisted, in defence of their bad literary behaviour. Henry Miller, responding to criticism of Tropic of Cancer, argued that the purpose of his rude, crude tour of Paris was ‘to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality.’ Years later, Somerset Maugham found himself reviewing another such tour: Tom Jones, romping and rollicking his way through Fielding’s picaresque masterpiece — eighteenth-century England as told by a sub-editor at The Sun. He located Fielding’s achievement in a similar place: ‘he had described, for the first time in English fiction, a real man.’

My examples so far reveal the problem. It’s been a list of men behaving badly. No wonder bawdiness came to seem like a casualty worth accepting, collateral damage in the pursuit of a kinder world.

But at heart, the bawdy is a question of style, not content. You can be bawdy and woke, a combination often found in today’s most successful comedians, from the crude, bewitching body horror of Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman to the alt-left podcast perennial Stavros Halkias. Bawdy and tender: think of Deborah Levy’s throbbing, poetic memoirs in which desire and domesticity happily coexist. Or bawdy and intensely highbrow: as in the case of Geoff Dyer, for some time the sole plougher of the male bawdy furrow in literary culture (the LRB review of his most famous novel is enjoyably titled ‘How Dare He’).

Yet these are the exceptions. For the past few decades, the bawdy has been in exile. In 2021, Raquel Benedict coined the sharpest shorthand for the now homeopathic levels of desire that define most media: ‘everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.’ Directors and producers regularly decry the death of the big screen comedy. The same goes for literary life, in which a cooler, sharper sensibility has for some time been ascendant. You’ll find no greater admirer of Sebaldian intrigue, or Cuskian chill, than I. But at some point, you miss the books that make you feel something in your body.

Thankfully, the wait is now over. Turning over Miranda July’s All Fours, I’m told to expect a ‘profound and bawdy’ tale. July’s exploration of the distinction between ‘mind-rooted and body-rooted fuckers,’ in which hands are pissed on, bodily fluids shared, and tampons erotically inserted, comfortably fits the bill. The same goes for Jen Beagin’s ‘satisfyingly dirty — and perhaps a little deranged’ Big Swiss, with its ‘scenarios that might make even Philip Roth’s protagonists blush.’ Harriet Armstrong’s debut, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, combines digressions on Žižek and Louise Bourgeois with reflections on pencil-based penetration.

The observant reader will have noticed what these novels have in common. They are written by women. For while the male author has spent the past few decades retreating from the body, women writers have found theirs much harder to leave behind. It’s fitting. The most foundational figure in the English bawdy tradition was a woman: Aphra Behn, whose Rover, a sort of Restoration version of the Inbetweeners movie (median line: ‘this one night’s enjoyment with her will be worth all the days I ever passed in Essex’) and whose poem ‘The Disappointment,’ about premature ejaculation (the ‘excess of love his love betray’d’), out-bawdied even the most committed rakes of seventeenth-century London.

Where Behn led, and the men fled, a handful of writers stayed the course. Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick veers like a trolley between lust and RB Kitaj, masturbation and Genet’s The Prisoner of Love. When asked what drove her to write it, Kraus replied: ‘I consciously set out to see if I could say “cunt” and “Kierkegaard” in the same sentence.’

More recently, Patricia Lockwood keeps the end up for the tender and bawdy: in her memoir Priestdaddy, a debate over whether to touch semen-stained sheets (chapter title: ‘The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place’) becomes the unlikely vehicle for a mother-daughter reconciliation. And, as one reviewer wrote of Sheila Heti – that great admirer of Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade’s – most recent work, The Alphabetical Diaries, ‘Heti writes so creaturely, so bodily, that it feels like a whole new genre is being formed as we read.’

There’s an obvious case for this return, and a less obvious one. The rude and the ribald captivate us. They demand our attention, something literary culture is sorely in need of. I remember watching a documentary once in which Jeff Koons was asked what his role as an artist was. He said it was to give art the attention it deserved in an ever more crowded world. He had a point. Mistake austerity for seriousness, dryness for depth, the absence of pleasure for intellect, and you end up with the kind of books that, once you put them down, you can never pick back up again. People will still come for the ideas. They just want to have some fun getting to them.

As for the less obvious: there simply are things in life, often indeed, the highest of things, that can be said only irreverently. These things, unsurprisingly, mainly relate to the body. This is perhaps most nakedly clear in All Fours. As July said in an interview shortly after the book was published: ‘Where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here.’ Whatever else might be said of All Fours, the tale of paunches slapping against stomachs, of shitting ‘everything that could come out,’ of ‘the whole body was tits,’ you won’t fail to have noticed by the end.

Fortunately, there are now signs men are re-entering the arena. After winning the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay described his motivations for writing Flesh: ‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.’ His István is not quite at Tom Jones levels, but is not far off: sleeping his way to London oligo-royalty, leering at his wife’s topless friends, and roughing up a stepson. Benjamin Myers last year followed up the resolutely un-bawdy Cuddy with its polar opposite: a retelling of Klaus Kinski’s infamous 1971 Berlin performance as Jesus. In this the actor – half prophet, half pervert – simultaneously attempts to tell ‘mankind’s most exciting story’ while raging at the ‘interminable skid marks’ and ‘naive overweight hogs’ of the world. Knausgaard’s latest novel will, at some point, have involved a debate with translator Martin Aitken over how best to render the phrase ‘touching cloth.’

Looking again at the back cover of All Fours, it seems I missed a bit. ‘Profound and bawdy and deeply human.’ The last is the one that really matters. Bawdiness endures not because of the thrill of transgression but because it is the ultimate way into the real, the embodiment you cannot aestheticise away. Break open the bone and suck out the marrow. Truth, yes, but a different kind. As Geoff Dyer put it: ‘Logic aims to arrive at a truth by eliminating contradictions. This style achieves truthfulness by their accumulation.’

It’s a return we should welcome, a reminder that intelligence works best when it isn’t embarrassed by its own body. And that joy and seriousness are simply the same thing at different temperatures. There’s more to a sofa, a wine bottle, and a loose prompt than we give them credit for. I’ll leave the last word to Lord Byron, writing to a friend in 1819, unsubtly humble-bragging about Don Juan. ‘It may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?’

It was. It is. It will be again.

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Please share this piece freely as it’s free to read. You can read more of Aled’s work at his Substack, Rake’s Progress.

Next, for paid subscribers (if you haven’t made the jump yet this is a good time to check it out, a free trial is available, it’s all very easy…):
- Thoughts on the persistence of our Prime Minister
- How to think about those alarming ‘AI will take all the jobs’ pieces
- The misuse of focus groups by Dominic Cummings and others
- A Rattle Bag of juicy links, including the first-ever painting by a genius, what I’ve been reading and watching and listening to, and a consideration of the lobster.

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Catch-up service:
George Eliot’s Blind Spot
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
How Not To Use AI
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?
How The Mad Men Lost The Plot Again

I’ll be talking John & Paul with Helen Lewis at Union Chapel, London, this Thursday February 12. Still a few tickets left.

There is an argument that the (further) disgrace of Peter Mandelson has been magnified out of all proportion. Mandelson was fired from his government post several months ago. These latest revelations will rightly ensure his permanent exclusion from civic life, and possibly his inclusion in jail, but they shouldn’t be the dominant story of the day. Britain has much bigger and more urgent problems than the question of how to withdraw an honorary title from someone who can make no use of it anyway.

Yes, the affair raises a question mark against the Prime Minister’s judgement, but the page is already dense with those. The marginal value of this one is near zero. Why aren’t we obsessing over our chronically sluggish economy; our failure to build houses and infrastructure; the state’s financial punishment of young graduates; the bloating of our public sector and simultaneous decay of our public services? Fixating on a cache of emails from over a decade ago is the mark of a country that doesn’t want to face up to its present, let alone its future. An avoidance tactic.

The fact I am even entertaining this point of view tells you I am a centrist. Insofar as that baggy term means much at all, it refers to one who puts hotheaded emotion aside in order to get things in proportion. Centrism, at least as I’m using it here, is not an ideological position so much as an attitude or style which prioritises competence and pragmatism; which focuses on sturdily tangible problems and feasible solutions.

This describes the approach of many or even most British politicians, although not any of the popular ones right now. When Prosper UK, a new movement of centrist Tories, launched last week, its co-founders Andy Street and Ruth Davidson declared themselves in favour of “sound finances” and “evidence-based policymaking”. They sounded like faint voices from a bygone era, and were immediately overrun by events.

Centrists find themselves impotent in the face of stories like Mandelson. They can condemn his offences and point to the mistakes of process and judgement. What they can’t do convincingly is express or channel the anger and disgust that voters feel about it, because they feel it obscures more substantive questions.

Strong emotions have no place in centrist praxis. When centrist politicians survey the scene, they see cynical populists, ideological extremists, and click-driven media whipping everyone into a frenzy. Their response is to invite everyone to calm down and be sensible. But some things are worth getting angry about. In fact, some things demand it. If the Mandelson affair isn’t doing it for you, try this.

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Ever since I wrote a book about the trait of curiosity I’ve taken an interest in the science of learning and education. In the book, I criticised the popular idea that teaching children facts and knowledge somehow gets in the way of their curiosity and creativity. All evidence points in the opposite direction. And yet a thousand Ted Talks have been launched on the idea that we should dispense with fact-based curricula, with instructional teaching, with learning by rote, with classrooms of kids sitting in rows, and so on. Such practices are said to be relics of the industrial age which must to swept away so that kids can follow their curiosity, wherever it takes them.

This remarkably seductive narrative is almost completely unsupported by evidence - either the evidence of what works in school systems around the world, or evidence from cognitive science. It persists because it taps into some old and potent myths about learning.

I recently read a new book called Instructional Illusions which tackles some of these myths head on. I’m delighted to have one of the book’s authors, Carl Hendrick, on the pod. Carl began his career as an English teacher in an inner city London school, before moving into education research. He is a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam where he leads research projects that bridge cognitive science, educational psychology, and classroom practice.

We talk about what so many ‘education experts’ get wrong; about why they consistently underestimate the importance of hard work and focused learning; why intrinsic curiosity is overrated; why having fun in the classroom shouldn’t be confused with actual learning, and lots more. I hope you enjoy our conversation (and maybe learn something). This one is for paid subscribers only.

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Catch-up service:
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
How Not To Use AI
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?
How The Mad Men Lost The Plot Again
How To Do Politics When Nobody Knows Anything

I’ll be talking John & Paul with Helen Lewis at Union Chapel, London, next week on February 12. I think there are still some tickets left. The paperback edition of John & Paul is now available.

I’ll be on the BBC R6 Cerys Matthews show tomorrow between 11am and 12pm.

I recently finished my first book of 2026: Middlemarch. You know what, guys? Middlemarch is a really good novel. It took me a while to admit this. I spent the first two hundred or so pages in a grump, partly because it has recently become fashionable to go on about how much you love Middlemarch, and also because Eliot’s style can be quite hard going. Her sentences tend towards the ornate and convoluted, even more so than Henry James, and demand quite a bit of re-reading. Some verge on the pompous.

Middlemarch also takes a while to build momentum. There is, famously, a lot of business - financial, legal, political - in the book. Middlemarch is dense with information about the web of obligation and influence in which its characters are enmeshed, and readers may be forgiven for nodding off during passages on estate cultivation or hospital funding. But Eliot knows what she is doing. Her pacing reminds me of the way that long distance runners husband their resources strategically so as to destroy their opponents in the final lap.

A common problem with novels is that they start with a bang but lose momentum and end with a whimper. Middlemarch takes its time as Eliot sets up its central tensions and conundrums, and moves her characters into place for the book’s climactic crisis - Bulstrode’s disgrace. By the middle of the book I was already enjoyably absorbed, but after the crisis broke Eliot had me in an iron headlock. For the last 200 or so pages I was utterly, helplessly riveted and deeply moved.

Middlemarch is most interested in its female characters. I like David Frum’s framing of it as a kind of nineteenth century Sex and the City: the story of four women searching for fulfilment and love in different ways. Celia Brooke chooses a conventional path: marriage to a slightly dull but jolly rich baronet. Her sister Dorothea wants a morally meaningful life of service, and is dissatisfied with the options that society offers her. Rosamond Vincy, daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer, desires social elevation and lots of nice things. Mary Garth wants little but a warm home, useful work and a decent husband.

I noticed that Eliot doesn’t treat all four with an even hand. For those who haven’t read Middlemarch, it’s important to know that Eliot isn’t shy of addressing the reader directly. She presents us with little homilies and often discusses her characters at one remove. (The essayistic tendency, common in nineteenth century novels, always strikes me as cheating somehow). So we know where she stands, and she is sympathetic to all of her characters except one. This intriguing irregularity got me thinking about Eliot and about the role that beauty has played in our history, and in human evolution.

The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers only (free trial). Please support The Ruffian, it’s the only way this thing works. Many thanks to those of you who already do. Recommendations, shares and gifts are encouraged. Also after the jump: a Rattle Bag of the fascinating, important, and beautiful.

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The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?
Best of The Ruffian 2025
How The Mad Men Lost The Plot Again
How To Do Politics When Nobody Knows Anything
When The Mind Outlasts the Brain

• I’ll be talking John & Paul with Helen Lewis at Union Chapel, London, on February 12. Book your tickets! The paperback edition of John & Paul is now available for pre-order.

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“A pair of scissors, no less than a cathedral or a symphony, is evidence of what we hold good and therefore lovely, and owes its being to love.” Eric Gill.

I’ve been reading Craftland by James Fox, an exploration of Britain’s last great craftspeople: blacksmiths, wheelwrights, bell-founders, cutlers and coopers (one of the book’s joys is the music of occupational names, more of which later). Most of the things we buy and use are mass-produced, mostly overseas, but not all. In British workshops and homes and warehouses there are still humans engaged in intimate and purposeful negotiation with physical materials.

There is, inevitably, an elegiac tone to the book. Many of these arts and crafts are remnants of once great industries which supported thriving communities, and some are dwindling to nothing, as the last inheritors of an institution or tradition give up or die. But there is energy here too: the defiant, quixotic energy that comes from people who choose to swim against the tide. Anyone producing chef’s knives or watches in Britain today is doing so because they believe in what they make - because they are obsessed by it.

Craftland offers insights into the future as well as the past. It is a close-up study of human work which arrives in a moment when we’re all trying to understand what that means - what kinds of work are specifically and indelibly human. It also serves as a reminder that everyday objects are more multi-faceted and intricate than we think, as is the work involved in making them.

Take scissors. A good pair of scissors is a wondrously complex little machine. As Fox puts it, it involves “a dance of two perfectly calibrated parts that touch but don’t touch, meet but don’t meet, their movements aligned to within a hair’s breadth.”

In Sheffield, Fox goes to visit the workshop of a scissors-making company called Ernest Wright. At one point in the nineteenth century, Sheffield had at least sixty scissors manufacturers employing thousands of skilled ‘scissormen’. Ernest Wright is one of two still in existence. Founded in 1902, it thrived right up until the late twentieth century; in the 1970s it was one of the world's leading scissors brands. By the turn of the twenty-first century the business was in inexorable and harrowing decline. In 2018, Nick Wright, a member of the fifth generation of the family to run the business, committed suicide, and Ernest Wright Ltd went into administration.

That might have been that, as with so many of Britain’s industrial businesses, except in this case two Dutch entrepreneurs called Paul Jacobs and Jan Bart Fanoy came to the rescue. In a way, Ernest Wright had been a victim of small success: in 2016, it had run a crowdfunding appeal to restart production of a classic model of kitchen scissors called the Kutrite. The Kickstarter went viral and a flood of orders came in, which the company struggled and failed to meet. Jacobs had been one of the 2000 or so backers, most of whom never received their scissors.

Saddened to hear of the company’s demise, he and his partner decided to buy the Ernest Wright brand, its IP and machinery; to renew the lease on its premises, and to revive the business. Jacobs and Fanoy upgraded the machinery, built a decent website, renovated the building. Jacobs told the local paper at the time, “We should not throw away good quality things and this is a good quality thing. In software it’s never tangible. I have no knowledge of making scissors. But I wanted a product I could feel and touch.” Ernest Wright is now a profitable concern again, serving people who love artisan scissors. I had no idea that such people existed; now I think I might be one of them.

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Each pair of EW scissors is the result of at least seventy discrete processes. Craftland describes how the blades are “rumbled” smooth by porcelain beads, dried in a warm bath of maize and walnuts, and burnished with Italian cotton. Once the blades have been prepared by the “grinders”, they are passed to the most important people in the whole process: the ‘putter-togetherers’, or ‘putters’ for short. The putter connects and aligns each pair of blades.

When Jacobs and Fanoy took over, they rehired a handful of staff, including two veteran putter-togetherers with over a hundred years of experience between them. Eric Stones and Cliff Denton are still working, passing on their skills to younger craftsmen. It takes years to become a master putter-togetherer. Why - isn’t it just a matter of screwing two parts together? Well, no. Here’s Fox (who talks to one of the young putters, Neil Wilson):

A correctly assembled pair of scissors needs it bows aligned, its blades curved, its points crossing, the cutting tension firm and even all the way along. If these relationships are even marginally off, the scissors won’t cut properly. Such subtle calibrations can only be made by hand, once the two halves have been joined. To complicate matters further, every pair of blades is unique: a singular problem demanding a bespoke solution. “No machines can handle that,” Neil says. “You can’t even learn it in a book.”

You can’t learn it in a book. This is tacit knowledge. Of course, most scissors aren’t made to this standard and don’t need to be. But it’s interesting that the production of quality scissors is harder to automate than you might think. It reminds me of the debate over which jobs AI will displace. You can automate some jobs to a better standard, some to an an inferior but good-enough standard, and some won’t be automated for a long while yet. In the good-enough cases, there is still likely to be a premium sector, within which firms pay high wages for exceptionally skilled humans, whether in manufacturing or knowledge work or entertainment.

Many of the jobs we imagine to be straightforward, like truck-driving, have hidden complexity. This applies to the putter-togetherer, and not just in scissor-making. In the ad industry it was constantly predicted that account managers would become obsolete since they didn’t actually produce anything, but just ran around making sure that clients were happy and the agency team was doing its job.

But account people are still very much with us, since the good ones don’t simply pass along information or instruction but make finely calibrated judgements about people, in order to align the moving parts of a complex project - one which follows a template but is subtly different each time. You could say the same about many PAs and chiefs of staff and heads of operation. Putter-togetherers are everywhere, and they won’t be easily dispensed with.

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‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a bottom stainer’. At the back of Craftland is a long list of (mostly) extinct occupations, and it is quite glorious. I present a selection after the jump. Also after the jump: the online scam, aimed specifically at authors, that I nearly fell for. Plus thoughts on Carney’s speech; Andy Burnham; Hamnet; the commercial value of humanities degrees; why we read novels, and more. The Ruffian is an artisan, hand-crafted product which is dependent on paid subscriptions. Do sign up if you haven’t already, it’s quick and easy and cheap, and it will bring you many good things.

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Catch-up service:
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?
Best of The Ruffian 2025
How The Mad Men Lost The Plot Again
How To Do Politics When Nobody Knows Anything
When The Mind Outlasts the Brain
My Ten Favourite Books of the Year

I’ll be talking John & Paul with Helen Lewis at Union Chapel, London, on February 12. Book your tickets now! The glorious paperback edition of John & Paul is now available for pre-order.

This time a year ago I wrote about how I use ChatGPT and Claude. It’s time for an update. That post included a list of mundane tasks along with a few principles I’d learnt for getting the best out of it. Since then millions more people have started using these apps and we’re all learning more about how and how not to use them.

We learn from both direct experience and observation. People are often not very transparent about how they incorporate AI into their work. As with plastic surgery, we tend to notice the botched efforts more than the successful ones. It’s been funny to watch these bloopers come in, as they do with increasing frequency. Mayor Brabin’s fantasy map, above, is from a few days ago. Earlier this week, a senior British police chief was forced to admit that he took a controversial decision based partly on fabricated evidence dreamed up by Microsoft Copilot. Last month, McDonald’s had to pull an AI-generated ad because it was so creepy.

I offer this advice partly so that you can avoid such embarrassment but mainly to help you get more out of the technology while offering a commentary on its strengths and flaws. Here are three big “Don’ts” which together form a mini-exploration of what LLMs seems to be good and bad at for people like me who use it for non-technical tasks. After that, I have some great tips gathered from readers, who answered a call on the networks.

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1. Don’t use it to write for you. It is unfair to pick this example just because it popped up in my LinkedIn feed the other day, but I now see so many posts written like this:

Staccato sentences. Hysterical metaphors. This isn’t X—it’s Y. Let that sink in. These and other of AI’s stylistic markers are not in themselves the worst thing in the world but there are two fundamental problems with them. One is that they advertise the author’s use of AI. You might ask why that’s a problem, since we all use some kind of technology to write. But if your aim is to show people that you’re a smart or interesting thinker - which I presume is the aim of most people on LinkedIn, and most writers to some extent - then you probably want readers to feel that these are your words, and your thoughts. And for better or worse people have an instinctive aversion to signs of artificiality in human communication, just we do to over-filled lips and frozen foreheads. That reaction might fade over time as we all become physical-cognitive cyborgs who look and sound identical but for now it still applies.

The second problem is that these quirks have become clichés already. Clichés are themselves are a form of artificiality, the original slop. They mark the absence of the writer’s mind. So a cliché that’s obviously from an AI is a kind of double absence. Your job as a writer, even of social media posts, is to sound as present as possible in every sentence. That becomes more important, and more valuable, the more that your peers rely on AI. People are now starting to write and talk like AIs spontaneously; the singularity is already happening at the level of language.

I don’t use AI to generate drafts. That practice seems self-defeating to me, since the drafting of a thought is the thinking of it (I wish this weren’t true, I resent it, I can’t fight it). You can give it a detailed prompt with your initial thoughts and ideas in it, but the resulting draft will still come out emptier, less you, than it would if written from scratch. Maybe you believe you can make it your own in the editing process, but I find that once a draft is generated it just kind of squats there in front of me, blotting out my own words. Its oily tone is very difficult to eradicate, like rising damp.

Oh before we move on, here’s Nabeel’s AI-generated Homer (so I guess this is a human faking ChatGPT faking a human?):

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This week I received my first copies of the UK paperback of John & Paul and I want to share my joy with you. It’s a glorious thing, isn’t it? I really loved the British hardback and am sad to say goodbye to it, but my publisher, Faber, has done it again: this design is stunning. And yes, it’s rather nice to see all those nice quotes from the reviews emblazoned on front and back. (This edition is just for Britain. If you’re in the US or elsewhere then there’s no change. I hope you’ll be interested to see this one anyway).

The cover photos, picked by the designer, are perfect. (They appeared on the inside cover of the UK hardback). They were taken in Liverpool in 1965 for a Granada TV special on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership; a show I refer to in the book. There’s a tenderness to them - the one on the front in particular - and an avidity, which I find touchingly boyish.

The new edition also includes a fun Q&A with me conducted by the excellent Kate Mossman.

It’s on sale at the end of the month and available for pre-order here. It’s even nicer in real life. Pile up the pre-orders and we can get back in the bestseller lists.

If you’re in or around London you can come and see me talk J&P with the brilliant Helen Lewis at Union Chapel in Islington next month.

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Oh and we got this lovely write-up in The Times, from their list of the best New Year paperbacks:

This edition of The Ruffian is exclusively for Founding Members/God Tier subscribers - that is, you and the other subscribers who are generous enough to pay the highest rate for this newsletter.

You’re not supposed to have favourite subscribers, like you’re not supposed to have …

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