Crooked Timber

A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but even if I didn’t know them!). My, recent, error/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget…

So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering “the edge of the galaxy”. They were referencing this recent paper, which… doesn’t really say that. But it’s an interesting paper anyway, so let’s discuss.As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a flat spiral containing several hundred billion stars. And spiral galaxies don’t exactly have an “edge”. We can’t see the details of the Milky Way, because we’re inside it. But…

In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on to point out that it’s “highly unlikely that this fact contributes much in way of meeting people from very different social networks.” Rather than bringing us back into the substance of this…

The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my…

A number of commenters have mentioned a possible malware problem with the site. I’m looking into it. In the meantime, don’t enter any of your data into something produced by a CAPTCHA

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion. Always and everywhere, controlling for education and other variables,…

I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There may be worse examples than Education, but I doubt it. The advice is to the newest Secretary of State for Education is simple: before you do anything significant read…

I just learned about The Fandom and Social Connection Initiative and I’m intrigued. The idea is to study the possibility that sports fandom can be an antidote to the “connection recession,” as traditional “third places”—like churches, civic organizations, and bowling leagues—play a diminishing role in our lives. The researchers think their early findings suggest that sports fandom can motivate people to connect, including connecting across racial, economic, and political divides. Here’s an…

… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems. An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out. I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are…

In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, demanding their removal from the neigbourhood. In one wave of riots, a hotel was set on fire, and the occupants feared for their lives. Recently in…

As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out As far as military dependence is concerned, the “indispendable nation” has already been dispensed with. The US no longer has either the…

Academic publishing has long been dominated by commercial players. That fact is well-known, as are many of the problems. But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.” Until two weeks ago, I’ve held a role as co-editor of an interdisciplinary journal, which allowed me to see some of the problems from close. But I’ve also learned more and more about solutions.* What follows are some personal reflections on these issues – if you’re…

Here’s another episode in my memoirs of being an activist. You can read it at substack, or here!: Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money (a difficult combination to pull off, frankly, and not one I would recommend). My dad had a brilliant idea, resisting which is something about which I have lifelong regrets, which was to go and live with Harry Ree for…

Well, that was interesting. Some quick thoughts below the cut.So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe. There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.One is Left / green concern about emissions. Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing. It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action. A surprising lot of northern…

It’s hard not to feel glum as I write this post on the 250th anniversary of my country. I remember celebrating the 200th as a teenager. As I recall it, it felt like the country was ready forward to better times. The Vietnam War and Watergate were over. Americans celebrated the 200th with exuberance. Today, the stagnant, possibly toxic state of the Reflecting Pool, along with Trump’s hijacking of Congress’s America250 funds for his personal Freedom250 group to create an empty and lifeless Great…

There was a renewed burst of enthusiasm for nuclear power a few years ago. In Australia, where I live it was confined to the political right and didn’t last long, but elsewhere support was broader. Most notable was the 2023 commitment by more than 20 countries, led by the US, UK and France, to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the three countries mentioned, that would imply building 330 GW of new capacity as well as replacing retiring capacity. So far, this commitment has produced only…

I start with characterizing a term, ‘Humphreys opacity’ (or, if you prefer, ‘epistemic opacity’):1 this involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. (For more on the origin and nature of this characterization, recall this post.) In what follows, I set aside to what extent such Humphreys opacity is the effect of features of physical…

For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this for very severe storms in the past. Today, we have it for heat. In Utrecht, it’s right now 37 degrees Celsius, but due to high humidity levels, it feels like 40. In the South-East of the Netherlands,…

There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit. In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to…

One Spring Monday in 1852 around thirty gold buyers gathered for the evening at Mrs Black’s Royal Hotel in Bathurst, which was (and is) just on the other side of the Blue Mountains from Sydney. Probably not ordinarily the most collegiate of petty capitalists, the gold buyers gathered to debate the role of the local branch of the Union Bank of Australia in undercutting their business. The bank had begin purchasing gold at a slightly higher rate than individual gold buyers could do, bringing…

Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway. Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! If you like them, I’ll also be posting them on a substack. Here goes: We moved to Oxford in the…

I was doing a deep dive into early Canadian history, because reasons, and found a couple of fun stories to share. Because hey — this Sunday is National Indigenous Peoples Day!The Bad OverwinterSo a recurring thing in early Canadian history was the Bad Overwinter. A group of Europeans — usually French — would show up in Canada with a shipload of trade goods. They would hang out with the Indians for a bit, and then would decide to leave some guys behind over the winter. Maybe they wanted to have…

Sometimes people that know and like each other, and that would never employ snark with each other, can still talk entirely past each other online. Carlo Ludovico Cordasco (Sheffield) wrote a fruitful and prudent sub-stack post (here) on the ‘longstanding debate on AI and deskilling.’ As he notes it was prompted by my Kvetching about a 2 June announcement by The University of Chicago’s President that it has a contract with Anthropic to give all of its students, and all of its staff and faculty,…

The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying. This was prefigured by the rise of Bitcoin and other forms of crypto. Revealingly, no…