It depends on my mood. In the past I’ve (very) occasionally loved them. More recently, I’ve done my best to avoid them. (Now that I think about it, a lot depends on the workplace.)
Renunciation and inundation: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
I cancelled the month’s trial subscription to The Observer meaning to buy the printed paper occasionally — certainly not every week. Today was going to be a day I’d buy it but I woke up very late and all copies were sold. Maybe there’s something to be said for online subscriptions after all?
One summer in my early twenties, I was so poor that I was buying used books purely based on their length.
I found this piece by Erin Somers on the death of Martin Amis by following a link from Andrew Gelman’s post about her novel The Ten Year Affair 📖
Promises almost kept: Tana French, The Searcher; The Hunter
I hate at least two-thirds of the stuff that the Substack Notes algorithm feeds me but I don’t know how to find the kind of thing that would train it to show me something I’d like better.
Didn’t the EU just reach a trade trade agreement with Trump in August? If he can tear that up and impose new tariffs whenever he wants something else, how can there be any point at all in negotiating with him? EU considers retaliatory measures over Trump Greenland tariff ‘blackmail’
He was scrupulously fair and totally unreasonable.
Jo Ellison on the possible benefits of having a monstrous parent. FT, so probably paywalled.
I just updated last week’s newsletter post about John Carey’s book on John Donne, to fix some small errors. I had left a couple of items off the list of “Works cited”, because I was tired and in a rush. Sorry about that.
John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art
Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I’d told earlier weren’t true.
For that, I can almost forgive Sarah Moss’s preference for Jane Eyre over Wuthering Heights 📖
I didn’t know that Jessica Williams had become “disillusioned with the jazz world” towards the end of her life and experimented outside jazz. In fact, I had missed the news that she had died, though it doesn’t surprise me: I had read that health problems had stopped her from touring 🎶 🎹
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has said that an attack by the US on a Nato ally – in this case Greenland as part of Denmark – would mean the end of the alliance.
Surely that’s threatening him with exactly what he wants. Trump renewing calls for takeover of Greenland
Most of all, ChatGPT seemed to want me to write a book. ‘It doesn’t even have to sell,’ the chatbot said, diverging sharply from the view of my literary agent.
Henry Mance in the FT: Can ChatGPT help with a midlife crisis?
I was woken up by the blaring fire alarm in our apartment building at 5:50 this morning. I wasn’t able to persuade myself to get out of bed into the cold. Woke properly hours later: building’s still here. We’ve had a lot of false alarms and no real ones, which makes the fire alarm almost useless.
Anyone who didn’t see Wall-E as a warning can’t have been watching it.
It was kind of bleak, wasn’t it? I had some misgivings about my then very young nephews watching it but thought there wasn’t much point in trying to shield them from it. One of them now works in AI 🙁
I’ve often complained about how Substack has made a mess of their RSS feeds. It now seems that they’ve broken podcasts too. I was 30 minutes into Ian Leslie’s chat with James Marriott about books when I noticed the cookie consent buttons, tapped “Accept” — and jumped right back to the start! 😡
Kate Hudson is “a great performer who hasn’t yet made a great film”, it says here. Well, I thought that Gerry Stembridge’s About Adam (2000) was pretty great, though perhaps it was marketed poorly 🍿
Our tech overlords like the idea of being Thomas Edison, genius inventor-businessman, but they often have more in common with P.T. Barnum, genius of marketing and hype.
John Lanchester in the LRB on the AI bubble: King of Cannibal Island (paywall probably)
Emerson … thought her books were ‘imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.’
Lake and Palmer, however, weren’t so dismissive. Henry Oliver on why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years 📚
I can no longer claim never to have heard any of Taylor Swift’s music. A song that I now know to be “Cardigan” was playing in the supermarket earlier and I incautiously Googled the lyrics (which is how I now know it was “Cardigan”). Oh well, I always knew my innocence couldn’t last 🎶
It depends on my mood. In the past I’ve (very) occasionally loved them. More recently, I’ve done my best to avoid them. (Now that I think about it, a lot depends on the workplace.)
Roy Wood’s 20 best songs — ranked. I loved “Brontosaurus” when I was just discovering pop music; also “Fire Brigade” and “Blackberry Way”. Then “See My Baby Jive” a few years later made my schooldays more bearable. 🎶
They have a total value of plus or minus €220 million and we’re in the process now of receiving the offers on those properties.
Plus or minus €220 million is a very big range. Couldn’t he narrow it down a bit? Investors blocked from withdrawing cash from German retail property fund
Against self-slaughter: Three short novels by Muriel Spark
GHT1CD 💿
(Small things come in big boxes)
