Writer Didier Eribon: ‘My mother was unhappy her whole life’

Didier Eribon’s mémoire,The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, about his mother reviewed in the FT).

Did writing the book change his expectations of his own old age? “No, because it’s always too soon or too late. For now it’s too soon, and I imagine that when the time comes it will be too late. I don’t envisage my own old age. That characterises many people.” [emphasis added]

Daring Fireball: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

AI woes and arrogance at Apple. The link is to John Gruber (arguably the most perceptive observer of Apple).

Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn’t yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.

Trump is making Europe great again

As one leading French businessman put it to me, with more than a touch of ambivalence: “It is very clear. The Germans can’t sell their cars. So they will make tanks.”

Not in my lifetime, I once thought.

90 deaths at hospital in Brighton being investigated as possible manslaughter | Hospitals | The Guardian

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that Sussex police were examining possible corporate and individual manslaughter charges. The force is reviewing 90 deaths and more than 100 cases of serious harm with the help of a team of independent surgeons.

There is also internal concern in UHS at the inexperience of the current surgeons operating at the hospital. Only five of the 12 surgeons on the rota for emergency surgery are on the General Medical Council’s specialist register, inclusion on which is requirement for a consultant’s post.

The source said: “If you have one or two surgeons who are not on the register you can cope, but having a majority not on the register is unheard of because of the level of training and expertise required.”

Sex selection

The Economist has analysed data from the un’s World Population Prospects, a biennial report, and from China’s 2020 census. The data reveal that the sex ratio–the number of men for every 100 women–among men aged 23-37 and women aged 22-36 will hit a peak of 119 by 2027. (Those are the ages between which 80% of each sex gets married–see chart 1.) It is then predicted to remain high for decades. In 2012 the ratio was just 105.

It was brought about by the arrival in the 1980s of cheap ultrasound machines, which allowed parents across Asia to tell the sex of their unborn child. The widespread preference for sons opened the door to sex-selective abortions. In South Korea the sex ratio at birth hit a brief peak of 117 in 1994, before falling to 106 in 2012, where it has roughly remained. In India it was 109 as late as 2010 (in 2024 it was 107). In developed countries like America and Britain, it was around 105 in 2024. [emphasis added]

Timothy Garton Ash writing in the Guardian. Warning: compound noun!

The biggest German brake of all is a state of mind – a curious mix of being at once too comfortable and too fearful. As a lover of German compound nouns, I was delighted to see the German political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte capture this brilliantly by characterising Germany as a Wolferwartungsland (a country constantly expecting the wolf to arrive). But today the wolves are actually there: two big ones at the door, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and one small one, the AfD, already inside the hen coop. [emphasis added]

To see off those wolves, Germans need one quality above all: courage. Let them take advice from their national poet. “Property lost,” wrote Goethe, “something lost! … Honour lost, much lost! … Courage lost, everything lost!”

Nation at a crossroads: a reading guide to the 2025 German election

Some comments on an FT article by Paul A Myers.

Expanded opportunity to the east with an economically expansionist policy depends upon Europe maintaining hard power military strength along the eastern Nato border to forestall Russian brigandage while sustaining European suzerainty over Ukraine and certainly not permitting Russian domination. Future European economic growth depends on Europe democratically controlling Ukraine. The only European country capable of being at the center of such a European alliance to manage the challenges and potentially huge benefits is Germany, a Germany at the center of a more cohesive and integrated Europe.

Europe must lead in the management of foreign policies relating to all the regions on the periphery of Europe. The era of American leadership of European vital interests is over; it’s dying at a conference table in Saudi Arabia. [emphasis added]

Our – my – world has changed.

I don’t usually do politics with a capital ‘P’ here, although it wouldn’t take much reading to guess how I think about that world. Below are three quotes from the Economist’s editorial published today. In order, they are the first paragraph, a sentence mid way through, and the final paragraph.

How Europe must respond as Trump and Putin smash the post-war order

The past week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder.

It is trapped in an obsolete worldview of multilateral treaties and shared values.

All this sounds outlandish. NATO has been the world’s most successful alliance: its disappearance is hard to imagine. But the old things have passed away; all things have become new. Europe needs to face up to that before it is too late.

I don’t know what are the true historical comparisons, but the repeated appeasement by the UK against Hitler, pre 1938, and the carving up of Europe in 1945 at Yalta (effectively by the USA and Russia) come to mind. The optimism of 1989 and the Wall seems distant.

Nice quote (not verbatim) from Adam Tooze on his Ones and Tooze podcast on Foreign Policy (How scary is DOGE? 15-2-2025)

…rather than focusing on the stimulant effect of coffee which are real and tea I think the real thing to focus on is the displacement effect because up to the early modern period and beyond most Europeans most of the time were slightly or very drunk because the safe thing to drink was to alcohol.

The quote was not from the DOGE section, but the economics of coffee section which formed the second half of the show. Coffee bars, of course, became the genius loci.

David Allen, the Irish comedian, who hosted his own comedy show in the UK, featuring straight talking to the camera, armed with a G+T in one hand (or so we believed) and a fag in the other, interspersed with silly sketches, was required viewing in my childhood household. The best jokes were the ones at the expense of both the Irish (my mother and her descendants ), and Catholics in general (the family). WikiP says of him: “He was best known for his observational comedy. Allen regularly provoked indignation by highlighting political hypocrisy and showing disdain for religious authority.” Amen.

I got this one via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 today.

Quote of the Day:

”If it’s sent by ship, it’s cargo. If sent by road, it’s shipment.”

As they say in the US: we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.