“Yuppies” | Iain Sinclair |LRB

The Filofax will lie in peace alongside the weaver’s bobbin.

Iain Sinclair in the London Review of Books v 14 number 27 February 1992. Reprinted in the LRB 2025 diary.

My father who worked for William Collins (stationers and publishers) would have loved that I read this in a desk diary rather than the abomination that was the Filofax.

The Parrot in the Machine | James Gleick | The New York Review of Books

I retired just as COVID happened. I would like to claim omniscience, but it was just luck or the repaying of debts by the lord creator. Although I am a long time FaceTime user, I describe myself as being part of the preZoom or preTEAMS generation. I have also stayed away from LLMs (large language models), although I had a professional interest in AI and (image) diagnosis in dermatology for a couple of decades.

The following is from the ever insightful James Gleick.

Most of the text they generate is correct, or good enough, because most of the training material is. But chatbot “writing” has a bland, regurgitated quality. Textures are flattened, sharp edges are sanded. No chatbot could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog comes on little cat feet (though they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). And when synthetically extruded text turns out wrong, it can be comically wrong. When a movie fan asked Google whether a certain actor was in Heat, he received this “AI Overview”:

No, Angelina Jolie is not in “heat.” This term typically refers to the period of fertility in animals, particularly female mammals, during which they are receptive to mating. Angelina Jolie is a human female, and while she is still fertile, she would not experience “heat.”

Nature Briefing

Who says facts are dull and boring?

For more than 90% of our planet’s history, it was without oxygen — and thus without flames. That’s one of that revelations that have stuck with science writer Laura Poppick after writing her new book, Strata.

Matt Stoller on monopoly power

The Water Cooler Giant Primo Brands: When Customer Service Signs Off as ‘Joseph Stalin’

Over the past couple of months, several readers encouraged me to look into a company called Primo Brands, America’s number one seller of bottled water, or in its own corporate-speak, “healthy and sustainable hydration solutions.”

EU retaliation against Trump drug tariffs would be bad idea, says industry | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

Oelrich said data showed that a quarter of drugs in the past 10 years approved by FDA in the US had not made it to Europe because of non-tariff barriers, such as differing national regulations and pricing. “Many of the biotech companies are not even bothering engaging in Europe. For them it makes no sense,” he said.

Amazing: deciding how much you are willing to pay for a drug is viewed as a non-tariff barrier. It’s called the market.

Britain is dangerously exposed to the whims of despots – New Statesman

“We have (at the time of writing) only experienced a slight whiff of the inflation such escalation could produce. Shipping rates on oil from the Middle East to China more than doubled from Israel’s attack on Iran on 13 June to Iran’s attack on Qatar ten days later. Liquefied natural gas can be highly explosive, so it seems reasonable to pay someone a bit extra to drive millions of cubic feet of it along a coastline bristling with weapons. .

(Sadly, that’s not what happened; the higher rates will be pocketed by shipowners and insurers, not sailors, because risking one’s capital is usually compensated more generously than risking one’s life.) Overall, these higher shipping rates added about $1.40 to a barrel of oil, according to Bloomberg. [emphasis added]

Outside shocks don’t tend to topple stable well-managed countries. What they do is pitilessly expose underlying weakness.

Andrew Marr in the New Statesman, 27 June 2025

Edmond Gordon writing in the London review of books 26th of June 2025, reviewing various books on tennis including the one by the retired Irish tennis player, Conor Niland.

Every successful player compromises their entire childhood to make it, the former Irish number one, Conor Niland writes in The Racket, his memoir of life as a journeyman pro. But so does every unsuccessful player too.

It isn’t just tennis, either. Be careful what you wish for.

Citizens have a right to insist, as the price of trust in a democracy, that officials not give reason to doubt their trustworthiness.

From Ethics in Congress (1995), Dennis Thompson, Alfred North Whitehead

Testing