Rob Miller’s blog about creativity, sustainability, and uncertainty
Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB reviews Andrew Lownie’s new book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York alongside Virginia Giuffre’s autobiography, and in doing so eviscerates Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the cheap, tawdry corruption with which he has coasted through his adult life: “With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that…
In a lengthy article that is my new gold standard for analysing the actual consequences of introducing AI into an industry, Justin Curl, Sayash Kapoor, and Arvind Narayanan explore the effects of AI on legal work. Sayash and Arvind had previously authored AI as Normal Technology (also well worth reading), which argues that it’s a mistake by both boosters and doomsters to treat AI as some special…
The New York Times has developed a tool to download, transcribe, and summarise various right-wing podcasts, part of what they call the “manosphere”, in order to spot signs of division and discontent within Donald Trump’s base: “When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those…
One of my favourite YouTube channels at the moment is @saintcavish , Christopher St. Cavish’s explorations of Chinese cooking. Christopher is no mere visitor, dipping in briefly and superficially to a vast and almost-unknowable cuisine; he has lived in Shanghai for over twenty years, and so is able to delve deep into culinary traditions and gain access to remarkable places, like this visit to a…
Creatives’ social media accounts are awash with lo-fi, analogue aesthetics, most of which are created digitally, often with cookie-cutter kits that undermine the whole idea of what “analogue” is supposed to represent. Elizabeth Goodspeed understands why: “The practical reality is that most people no longer have the time, tools, or support to make fully analogue work, even if they want to. The…
Via Matt Webb , from his broader (and fascinating) post about the nature of work and what the roboticisation of domestic labour might take from us, comes this topical and counter-intuitive nugget about Olympians. How is it that they bring themselves to do the presumably mad levels of hard work and training that are required to get to the tops of their games? Well, because they enjoy it: “The very…
Dan Davies has written about how many systems (including the British constitution) use what he terms a “good chap” regulatory system: i.e. they rely on the system being mostly populated by decent people who obey the rules, even though they don’t technically have to. That has obvious flaws, like when someone (Boris Johnson, say, or more disastrously Donald Trump) comes along who decides not to be a…
A brilliant takedown of the menu icons in the latest version of MacOS, a version I’m still steadfastly refusing to upgrade to, from Niki Prokopov. Apple decided to do a thing that was both impossible and undesirable, then did it badly: “In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. “But even…
In mid-19th century Britain, deep in the throes of the industrial revolution, there was a pressing question: there was only so much coal in the world, so how did you avoid running out of it? Coal was what had made industry possible, “the material energy of the country, the universal aid, the factor in everything we do.” Running out would be a total disaster. Many people thought the answer was to…
A couple of months ago I made my first documentary film: Chain Your Heart to a Star . It’s the story of Fee Warner, who for 48 years has been visiting the site of Marc Bolan’s death in south-west London. There she has built, and continues to maintain, what has become a shrine to Bolan and T. Rex. The shrine is visited by people from all over the world, and is enduring evidence of the depth of…