Horses for courses

Unseen Camilla: the five ages of a future queen – from mistress to monarchy | Camilla (Queen Consort) | The Guardian

Public schools exist to create the material they need for the class they want to build. When Eton needed soldiers, it was a very harsh environment; later, when it needed shysters and chancers, it adapted successfully to produce Boris Johnson and David Cameron. The girls’ estate is no different – and in the 50s and 60s it needed hostesses and broodmares. The last thing you would have wanted them to emerge with was a bunch of O-levels.

A home that no longer feels like it

Farewell to Dubravka Ugrešić, a fearless prophet | Financial Times

In 1993, Ugrešić went into voluntary exile, first to Berlin and then the US, finally settling in Amsterdam and taking Dutch citizenship. In a 1999 article, she repeated what she had often said: “I myself am neither an émigré nor a refugee nor an asylum seeker. I am a writer who at one point decided not to live in her own country anymore because her country was no longer hers.”

Fellow writers relished her work — Susan Sontag called her “a writer to be cherished” — but unlike many of her contemporaries, Ugrešić predicted the future of publishing too. In 1997, she saw that literature had, fatally, acquired an “aura of glamour”, and that publishers wanted writers to be chiefly “content providers” (the term was new enough then to be carried in quotes). What would become, she asked, of the “outsiders, bookworms, romantics and losers” who used to make up the despised and neglected profession of writers?

Gosh, Mr Raab: how terrible

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite · Puny Rump: Sick Notes · LRB 13 April 2023

In a debate on the Labour government’s plans for National Insurance in 1946, Beveridge said that it ‘did frankly send a chill to my heart to realise that it was contemplated that the only way in which most people would get their sickness benefit would be through the post.’ Working through friendly societies would guard against malingering, but it would also make the system more humane: ‘I am not going to say a word … to suggest that civil servants are not human … But while civil servants are perfectly human, the unfortunate fact is that anything as big as the civil service, merely because of its size, tends to become inhuman.’

Gosh, Mr Raab.

Architect-speak

Jonathan Meades · Let’s go to Croydon · LRB 13 April 2023

Architects’ dialect comprises delusional boasts that cast them as philosophers and their trade as at best a social service, at worst a particularly dodgy branch of alternative medicine or new age bunk: sustainabulous, green, responsible, liminal, wellness, community, performative, holistic, participatory, community (again). Mind mange? Ghosts in the infrastructure? Boney’s or Bogey’s or the Bears’ advance through the gaps between the paving stones? Architecture will get it sorted. As Reinier de Graaf noted of a speech by Richard Rogers: ‘With each new sentence a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’

Intellectuals as protectors of integrity

Via Adam Tooze

On the courage of Vladimir Kara-Murza (his words below are via Tooze)

At one point during my testimony, the presiding judge reminded me that one of the extenuating circumstances was “remorse for what [the accused] has done.” And although there is little that’s amusing about my present situation, I could not help smiling: The criminal, of course, must repent of his deeds. I’m in jail for my political views. For speaking out against the war in Ukraine. For many years of struggle against Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. For facilitating the adoption of personal international sanctions under the Magnitsky Act against human rights violators.

Not only do I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it. I am proud that Boris Nemtsov brought me into politics. And I hope that he is not ashamed of me. I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court. I blame myself for only one thing: that over the years of my political activity I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in the democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and for the world. Today this is obvious to everyone, but at a terrible price — the price of war.

In their last statements to the court, defendants usually ask for an acquittal. For a person who has not committed any crimes, acquittal would be the only fair verdict. But I do not ask this court for anything. I know the verdict. I knew it a year ago when I saw people in black uniforms and black masks running after my car in the rearview mirror. Such is the price for speaking up in Russia today.

But I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.

The pleasure of electronic medical records

Digital Minimalism — An Rx for Clinician Burnout | NEJM

It’s easy to see how digital minimalism’s first tenet, “clutter is costly,” applies: the average patient’s EHR has 56% as many words as Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet. Moreover, half these words are simply duplicated from previous documentation.

Progress isn’t inevitable. Not even likely in some domains over working lifetimes.

The glory of science

The Economist

The great joy of science and technology is that they are, together, the one part of human culture which is genuinely and continuously progressive.

This is from the science and tech editor at the Economist who is standing down from that role at three decades. Science: Stop and starts — not continuous. And that is just for starters. Discuss!

Merde!

She said…

Is France on the road to a Sixth Republic? | Financial Times

It was said of US President George HW Bush that he reminded every woman of her first husband. Macron reminds every French person of their boss: an educated know-it-all who looks down on his staff.

“Honest” Boris

Johnson looks done for from TheEconomist

Boris johnson is an honest man. It is possible to tell this by the sheer number of times he declares his honesty.

In his written submission to the committee of mps investigating whether he intentionally misled Parliament over Partygate, the word “honest” popped up around 20 times in one form or another. In a three-hour hearing on March 22nd he offered yet more honesty, at one point even “hand on heart.” And little speaks more of honesty than declaring your honesty 20-odd times in two days.

Feels like it

The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb.

Absolute friends, John le Carré