Links for January

Semiconductors, microplastics, Brian Eno

Here are the most interesting things I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to in the last month. These link posts have now been going for a full year, which means that I need a new convention to avoid repeated names – yippee! But first, some announcements:

You may have noticed that the blog name has changed. I was never quite happy with the old one, not least because it made it seem like I write more about philosophy than I really do. The name The Fitzwilliam, on the other hand, is the gift that keeps on giving.

Also, I will be in Taiwan from February 3rd to 23rd, with day-long layovers in Shenzhen and Shanghai on either side. If I have any Taiwanese readers, please get in touch. I’m also open to any recommendations and advice, as I’ve never been to East Asia before.

Blogs

Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang, the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. I mentioned in last month’s post that Chang’s autobiography has not been translated into English. That is still true: this post is based on a dodgy Google translation.

Chang’s family did not do any wonders for the reputation of strict Asian parents:

Chang still has no real interest in engineering, but (per his father) he thinks it will offer good career prospects, so he transfers to MIT to study mechanical engineering.

There are many great stories here. Chang entered the semiconductor business, despite not really knowing what a transistor was, because the job offer he received from a chip company was $1 a month higher than his offer from the Ford Motor Company. And, when he left Texas Instruments to work in New York, he lived in Trump Tower, and had Donald Trump himself as his next-door neighbour!

I didn’t know that germanium was more widely used than silicon to manufacture transistors until the 1960s. If I were directing the biopic, I would call it ‘Germanium Valley’, and cast Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Morris Chang.

Speaking of important texts untranslated from Chinese, I recently learned that the Chinese-language Wikipedia list of cultural sites destroyed during the Cultural Revolution has not been translated. This is much more extensive than the China section in the list of destroyed heritage page, and many of the sites seem extremely significant.

Ava Huang on taking “the wince” seriously, and how to sign up for her boutique matchmaking service.

Tales of an Ireland gone by: Sligo town used to have a solicitors’ office called Argue and Phibbs. Almost as good as the (sadly fictional) Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe.

Gavin Leech’s data science FAQ. This list and recommendations are quite outdated, but given data science’s reputation for hype and faddishness, perhaps this is a feature, not a bug? Also, see Gavin on the reliability of statistical estimators. It’s sad to see how much these old blogs have experienced linkrot.

From Seán O’Neill McPartlin: why Ireland needs more specific planning rules.

Zen koans about artificial intelligence:

In the days when [Gerald Jay] Sussman was a novice, [Marvin] Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

The best things Rebecca Lowe read in 2024.

Friend-of-the-blog Barra Roantree writes about Ireland’s fetish for procedures. The bats strike again: planning permission for hundreds of new houses in Dublin has been revoked by the courts because the developer failed to publish the results of a study about bats online quickly enough. And that was using the “fast-track” system.

Henry Oliver on why the children deserve Shakespeare:

Literature is, like all subjects, a body of knowledge. Your own response to a work of literature isn’t worth very much if you don’t know the difference between comedy and tragedy, lyric and epic. Whatever works of modern literature are should still be subject to this sort of knowledge acquisition. What good is it to study Zadie Smith without knowing something about the history of the novel, the nature of the comic genre, and the techniques of narrative? Knowledge of the texts and of critical technique are the equivalent of knowledge of chemical reactions and evolutionary processes.

Without those things, you aren’t really studying literature. You’re just passing the time. Dilettantism is the enemy of good schooling. Children should learn about free indirect style and prosody the way they learn about gravity and molecule formation. They should memorise important parts of the text the way they memorise equations and formulae . . . Despite widespread beliefs among many educationalists, based on ideological ideas, the empirical literature is clear. Learning means acquiring knowledge.

Dwarkesh Patel’s notes on China. One of the Chinese people Dwarkesh spoke to claimed that the current regime is far more liberal than what would result from a democratic election!

[W]e really need to do a better job with Chinese students studying abroad in America. These students will likely end up in influential positions back home, yet colleges treat them basically like cash cows. They often arrive bombarded with propaganda about America, which is reinforced by the prevalent discourse at universities. And they find themselves isolated by language barriers and cultural differences. Giving these future leaders a genuinely positive experience in America might be the best thing we can do to improve US-China relations in the long run.

The core readings on permitting reform in the United States.

Gavin Leech’s favourite essays.

A links roundup of new developments in infrastructure around the world. This piece has a nice map showing how, in the twelve years after 1995, Madrid tripled the size of its metro system, while having some of the lowest per-kilometre construction costs in the world. In that time, Dublin also tripled the size of its metro (i.e., three times zero is still zero).

A dialogue between a husband and wife on the extent to which culture and policy have become more hostile toward child-rearing.

What Shruti Rajagopalan read in 2024. A very strong list on the economics of trade and the history and economy of India. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages seems promising, as does Ashok Gopal’s recent biography of B.R. Ambedkar, the godfather of the Indian constitution.

The recently departed Daniel Dennett talks about his five favourite books. In this interview, Dennett discusses his various attempts to convince people of W.V.O. Quine’s thesis about the indeterminacy of radical translation. Dennett once illustrated this idea with the following mini-crossword, which has two equally valid solutions with no words in common:

I first came across this six or seven years ago in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, but I still haven’t set aside the time to figure it out.

I don’t know how worried I should be about microplastics in food and water. A new project launched by Nat Friedman (he of the Scroll Prize) has catalogued the presence of microplastics in California, and his team have just released their results.¹ Trevor Klee writes up his reflections. It’s interesting that, in their data, plastic chemicals in prepared foods consistently decrease after being microwaved. Hat-tip Chandhana Sathiskumar.

Alexey Guzey’s list of people who are going to change the world. And the Patrick Collison list of interesting persons.

Mr. Psmith on the calculus of variations and the importance of Lagrangians in physics.

Effie Klimi, a Greek (?) biotech founder in London, has started a blog. Here she is on scientific heroes who responded honourably to the misconduct of their close colleagues. 10,000 journal articles were retracted in 2023!

Fergus McCullough rounds up what he read in 2024. Only 43 books in a year, an amateur! Fergus kindly links me as an example of someone with “sophisticated taste” in film, though I don’t know if he’s aware that the highest rating I’ve ever given to a movie on Letterboxd was for The Muppet Christmas Carol.

I’m sure that some people find my cataloguing and ranking of my media consumption strange. All I can say is: If you think I’m weird, you should see Luke Muehlhauser.

I previously reviewed Asimov Press’s collected biology essays. Their new volume is available for pre-order, which is the first book to be available for purchase either in paperback or encoded in DNA. What a time to be alive!

The new tranche of film reviews from Scott Sumner. I also found Monster to be a standout film from 2024. Scott liked Gilda a lot more than I did, which means that he is right and I am wrong. From this list, So Long, My Son (China, 2019) looks exceptional, but he says that it’s challenging to follow unless you have “a Chinese wife to explain things”.

The best music Andrew Batson heard in 2024.

It was previously believed that the Royal Society archives in London contained no documents from Ada Lovelace. But four letters she wrote to the astronomer John Herschel have recently been found! Notably, they are not at all about computer science.

Matt Lakeman’s notes on Guyana. An excerpt:

Sometimes while writing these 25,000+ word posts, I feel the need to justify why anyone would want to read about a random country they may or may not have heard of. My pitch for reading about Guyana is that its history involves two death cults, diverse leadership (including individuals of the male, female, black, Indian, white, Chinese, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish persuasion), a semi-race war, a legal argument over the definition of the word, “majority,” CIA-backed regime change, a conspiracy to thwart a multi-national territorial arbitration, and the largest per capita oil discovery in the history of mankind.

And:

Unlike in the US thirty years later, the British slave owners [in Guyana] were financially compensated for their lost property by the British taxpayer.

Regarding whether ExxonMobil’s deal to drill for Guyana’s oil was exploitative:

If this sounds like a terribly lopsided deal in favor of the oil companies, it only became so post hoc. When the deal was signed, Guyana had been a bust for every oil company that came before it, so it was an extremely high-risk, high-reward endeavor for Exxon. The Guyanese government was basically selling a lottery ticket and the oil companies were never going to pay that high of a price for it. Maybe I’m a corporate shill, but I think the popular consensus that Exxon ripped off Guyana – see here for example – is unfounded.

See also his notes on Trinidad and Tobago.

In the last links post, I mentioned William Halstead, the surgeon who invented rubber gloves for the woman who later became his wife, to stop her hands from getting chapped. Anson Yu compiles further examples of inventions spawned from immense love. Should the Taj Mahal be on this list?

Speaking of last month’s post, it made it to the Marginal Revolution Christmas special. Elsewhere, Dan Schulz says some nice things about me.

HudZah compiles borderline unethical life hacks for attending a Canadian university. My favourite of these is that if you’re trying to access a Canadian government service, you can skip the queue by calling the French version of the helpline, and then speaking to them in English. Elsewhere, he reviews perfumes, tells you how to build your own hydroponic vertical farm, and compiles crime statistics from different neighbourhoods in San Francisco. A Renaissance man!

Rasheed Griffith’s reading of 2024. Desafortunadamente, no hablo español.

Use of the “.ai” domain now accounts for nearly 10% of Anguilla’s GDP.

Henry Oliver on the deep humanity of Seamus Heaney’s letters. This article is how I found out that Fintan O’Toole is writing a biography of Heaney; I look forward to it.

How the Greek and Roman Classics changed Irish poetry.

Peter McLaughlin’s year in books.

I have learned that the logician Peter Smith has a blog, where he has made many of his books about formal logic and other useful resources open access. If I have time, I may review his book about the philosophy of chaos theory.

Scott Alexander’s links for December.

52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2024.

A tribute to the late Zakir Hussain, the renowned tabla player and Hindustani classical musician. Here he is collaborating with the jazz guitarist John McLaughlin. I was fortunate enough to be at one of McLaughlin’s Indian-jazz fusion concerts, but regrettably never heard Hussain live.

Another great Indian, Manmohan Singh (prime minister from 2004 to 2014), has passed away. He was Finance Minister during the 1991 reforms, which put an end to the Permit Raj.

Grant Sanderson gives maths book recommendations, and writes some poetry. My favourite piece of mathematical poetry is this limerick composed by George Gamov:

There was a young fellow from Trinity

Who took the square root of infinity

But the number of digits

Gave him the fidgets;

So he quit math and picked up divinity

Music

Some new albums I’ve discovered this month:

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations (Grigory Sokolov recording). If you know anything about Bach’s Goldberg Variations, you probably know the Glenn Gould recording. But Nabeel Qureshi alerted me to this version by the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov. I don’t know enough to say whether it’s better, but it does seem to have more dynamic range and variation in tempo.

Nubya Garcia, Odyssey. Garcia’s new album, which also features the excellent Esperanza Spalding. My favourite part is the plucking in the strings section on ‘Water’s Path’ – though, on the whole, I liked this one less than her three previous albums. I’ve gone through this exact cycle several times of progressively losing interest in jazz musicians as they become more mainstream, though I don’t know if the correct explanation is a change in style of music, or regression to the mean in quality. Here is ‘The Message Continues’ live in San Sebastián.

Quincy Jones, Walking in Space. My second favourite solo Quincy Jones album, after this one. One of the tracks here is a cover of Benny Golson’s jazz standard ‘Killer Joe’, with a mesmeric walking bassline. The guitar licks on ‘Love and Peace’ are just incredible.

Herbie Hancock, Round Midnight (Original Soundtrack). The soundtrack to a 1986 film starring Dexter Gordon, which won the Oscar for Best Original Score. This might be one of the most star-studded jazz albums of all time, in that it features Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Freddie Hubbard, Chet Baker, and many others. My favourite track here is ‘Bérangère’s Nightmare’ –such a great use of reverb to create a spooky feeling. Here is a review of the vinyl from a man who looks remarkably like Mr. Clean.

There is another album, called ‘The Other Side of Round Midnight’, featuring tracks that didn’t make the cut for the original film, which are almost as good. It’s not on Spotify, but someone has compiled it into a YouTube playlist.

Tony Allen, A Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Fresh interpretations of some of the most well-known Art Blakey tracks from a fabulous Nigerian drummer. The original version of Moanin’ from 1958, with Lee Morgan on trumpet, is one of the tracks I would take to a desert island.

Papers

Christoph Koch, Modular Biological Complexity. Koch is one of the better-known figures trying to turn ‘consciousness studies’ into a respectable scientific discipline. He wrote this one-page article for Science about the difficulties of whole-brain emulation, arguing – if I’ve understood correctly – that because of exponentially increasing complexity, we must by necessity understand biological systems as being highly modular. Found via this Twitter thread.

James Cain, Infinite Utility. A short paper which makes a simple point. Imagine a world containing an infinite number of immortal happy people, which contains a Sphere of Suffering that expands at a finite rate. Once someone is inside the Sphere, they’ll be unhappy for the rest of time. So each individual will be happy for a finite time, and then unhappy for an infinite time. And yet, at any one moment, there are a finite number of unhappy people, and an infinite number of happy people. Now consider the opposite case: a Sphere of Happiness expanding in an infinite world of unhappy people. Which world is better?

This is a toy example in which a social welfare function that considers infinite values is sensitive to what the most fundamental unit of analysis is. If you consider conscious beings to be more fundamental, you think the Sphere of Happiness world is better. But if you consider time-slices of conscious beings to be most fundamental, you think that the Sphere of Suffering world is better.

John Nash, Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games. This is the 1950 paper where Nash proved his most famous result: that for any finite-player game, there must be at least one Nash equilibrium (although that equilibrium might involve ‘mixed’ strategies, i.e. ones that allow for some element of randomisation). What I didn’t know is that the entire paper is only five paragraphs long. I think this result is crucially reliant on Kakutani’s theorem, which is a generalisation of Brouwer’s fixed point theorem that guarantees the existence of a fixed point under certain conditions (a fixed point is a point that maps to itself). I read the annotated version of this paper on the Fermat’s Library website. Sadly, that page links approvingly to the scene from A Beautiful Mind which explains the concept of Nash equilibrium completely inaccurately.

Podcasts

From ChinaTalk: the most important Chinese pop culture developments of 2024. And, the best new Chinese music of 2024. See also, Molly Huang on what you learn doomscrolling the Chinese internet.

Andrew Roberts discusses the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and his biographies of Churchill and Napoleon.

Joseph Walker chats with Eugene Fama about market efficiency and asset pricing models. Self-recommending.

Sam Bowman on fixing housing policy in the Anglosphere, and the promise of GLP-1 agonists. One example he discusses is how the UK government’s own impact assessment concluded that the costs of mandating that new residential buildings over a certain height have at least two staircases are 294 times larger than the benefits, and yet they did it anyway.

The Rewatchables retrospective on Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I learned from this podcast that there is a famous scene in Home Alone 2 filmed on top of the World Trade Center, which was cut from versions of the film that aired between 2001 and 2018. That means, as a kid, I only ever saw the edited version which erased the existence of 9/11.

A two-part series with Jonathan Clements on the history of Taiwan. It’s interesting to see all the different ways throughout history that Taiwan was considered not quite Chinese, including the Manchus’ reluctance to include Taiwan as part of the Qing Dynasty. Supposedly there was a Chinese political joke that, when Hong Kong was ceded to Britain after the Opium Wars, China should have given them Taiwan too as punishment.

Those episodes were from Russell Hogg’s podcast Subject to Change. With Scott Sumner and Jasper Sharp, he also reviews six gems of Japanese cinema you should watch. I have not seen any of these.

From The Rest is History, the Munich Agreement and the Nazis’ road to war. Fact really is stranger than fiction: Joachim von Ribbentrop (from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) was a competitor at the Canadian national figure skating championship. Listen also to the historical background of Mozart and Beethoven, with musical accompaniment.

Scott Young and Spencer Greenberg on the extent to which learning efficiency can be improved. I will add that writing these links posts has significantly improved my retention and understanding of what I read.

From The Economist: a four-part series on Chinese asylum seekers to the United States and the astonishingly dangerous trips they are making across the Darién Gap.

Scott Sumner on monetary policy, the Great Depression, and his love of cinema. Elsewhere, Scott reflects on the conversation.

Henry Oliver and Tyler Cowen chat about Shakespeare and Dickens’ Bleak House. They both agree that Romeo and Juliet don’t really love each other, and that the play is really about perversion and the death drive.

The Macro Musings 2024 retrospective. The gold standard (ha!) in successfully running a podcast aimed at a small number of nerds.

Nabeel Qureshi on six things he wishes were better known. I wish I had gotten a chance to see Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives on a big screen; it went right over my head. I watched it with a friend, and she still mocks me about it. She reports that she fell asleep around the point where the Princess character had oral sex with a fish.

I’ve been enjoying ‘The Daily Poem’, which is exactly what it sounds like: a daily reading and discussion of notable poems. Here is Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Dickinson’s I Fear a Man of Frugal Speech.

Very Bad Wizards on how punishment norms have evolved.

Sometimes the podcast Conversations with Tyler rubs people the wrong way, because it can seem like Tyler is showing off his erudition. The counterexample to this is the annual retrospective, in which he willingly displays that he can barely remember basic details from the episodes.

The Ideas of India 2024 retrospective.

Books

Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehaviour. Thomas Schelling was a game theorist at Harvard, and this book compiles some of his essays, with a loose theme of unexpected macro behaviours arising from simple assumptions about ‘microfoundations’. Chapter four is about his famous model of racial segregation, showing that when people have even mild preferences for living near others of the same race, it can lead to extremely high observed levels of segregation.

Most of the essays didn’t stick with me, but my favourite was chapter eight, the text of Schelling’s 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, about how the use of nuclear weapons has been avoided. I didn’t realise just how strongly John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State, pushed for the use of nuclear weapons during the Quemoy Crisis, when the People’s Republic of China was threatening to invade the Kinmen islands. It truly is a miracle we haven’t blown ourselves up.

Peter Waller, The Lost Tramways of Ireland – Dublin. A picture book of the beautiful tram system which existed in Dublin roughly from the 1870s to the 1940s. I will certainly be reading the Belfast edition. The book has some photos of the Hill of Howth Tram, which was – fun fact – the last double-decker open-air tram in the entire world. You can now see one of them restored in the Ulster Transport Museum.

Steve McCurry, India. A beautiful picture book of India from 2015, with an introduction written by William Dalrymple. One of his best photos was taken in Rajasthan of a stepwell, a traditional water management system throughout the Indian subcontinent:

I also liked this one of a monk drinking Coca-Cola at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, where the Buddha allegedly became enlightened. Total American cultural victory:

Dwarkesh Patel, Gavin Leech, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of Large Language Models. Heavily annotated transcripts of some of Dwarkesh’s podcasts, published by Stripe Press. That description doesn’t do the book justice, because it’s almost half new material, when you add up the chapter introductions, glossary, and appendix of essays, which include ‘Will Scaling Work?’ from Dwarkesh, and excerpts from Gwern’s essay about the scaling hypothesis. There’s an old book from the 1990s, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks, to which this book is a kind of spiritual successor. I recommend pre-ordering it now.

The version of this book that I read defined the ‘strong scaling hypothesis’ as “The current prevailing hypothesis in AI, which holds that LLMs can achieve human-level intelligence with sufficient data and compute, at a cost potentially in the range of trillions of dollars.” And Dwarkesh is at a 60% chance that large language models get us to AGI by 2040. I have no specific evidence to contradict this, but does the median employee at a frontier AI lab really believe that LLMs will be enough to reach human-level general intelligence? What is the basis for saying this is the “prevailing” hypothesis? Has anybody explicitly surveyed them on this question?

The possibility that a strong version of the scaling hypothesis is true, and that intelligence is – or can be – “just” statistical associations and heuristics all the way down, reminds me of the story about the Frenchman who, in his old age, is horrified to learn he’s been speaking prose all these years. You’re telling me I’ve just been a multilayered Bayesian statistical optimiser this whole time?!

Robert Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. A short, palette-cleansing collection of essays and interviews about Caro’s process for researching and writing The Power Broker and his five-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Except for some hints in the endnotes, those books give essentially zero insight into how Caro came to know the things he writes about. For example, Working describes what it was like to interview Robert Moses in person, before he figured out that the tone of The Power Broker would be negative and refused to continue speaking with him.

It’s peculiar to read a book where the author is so aware of his own mortality. In this case, Caro has written significant sections of a longer memoir, but acknowledges that he’s unlikely to live long enough to finish it. Volume five of the LBJ biography is still unfinished, and volume four only reaches the first few days (!) of his presidency (the original plan was to write three volumes). There is a Metaculus market on whether the fifth volume will be published during Caro’s lifetime. Is this what people meant when they talked about the negative ethical consequences of prediction markets?

A great piece of Power Broker lore (p.66) is that Caro was only able to get access to Robert Moses’ files, and thus write the book, because of misplaced carbon copies. Although in principle the New York City Parks Commissioner has an office next to Central Park, in practice Moses worked from an office in Randall Island, and ran his empire through memos and communiqués. But he forgot to have the carbon copies also brought over from the Central Park office, which Caro got access to via a friend.

Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. An overview from 2002 of the field of anthropic reasoning, which I discussed briefly in a recent talk. My understanding is that this book was based on Bostrom’s PhD thesis, and was edited by no less a figure than Robert Nozick.² Bostrom is a Swede, so, despite this being an academic philosophy book, it opens with an adorable dedication:

This book is dedicated to my father–tack pappa!

There is also a website associated with this book where you can read it for free. The idea of having a website associated with a specific philosophical argument is hilarious to me, which he pulled off again with simulation-argument.com. I’ve been trying to get Julian Gough to read this book, because I think that the anthropics literature is tied up with the case, insofar as it exists, for cosmological natural selection.

A brief piece of snark about this book: What is the point of books written by a single person using the pronoun ‘we’ instead of ‘I’? The ‘royal we’ is enforced by some academic journals, but to me, it seems distracting and stupid. What am I missing?

Michael Palin, Brazil. Ah, how I love these travelogues. I’m not an audiobook person; I only listen out of desperation when I have brought my Kindle, but not my phone, with me somewhere. The front cover of this one was simply Michael Palin smiling while giving a thumbs-up in front of the Brazilian flag. That pretty much sums up his attitude toward Brazil, and also the emotional depth of this book. One of the most interesting places he visited was Fordlândia, the (now mostly abandoned) city founded by Henry Ford in northern Brazil, built in the style of midwestern American suburbs. If anyone has made a Portuguese-language miniseries set in Brazil during the rubber boom, I would watch it.

Films

Lizzie Gottlieb, Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. A documentary about the relationship between Robert Caro and his editor, and more generally the backstory of his books. Gottlieb died in 2023, a year after this film came out, so the final volume of the LBJ biography will be the only Caro book without him as editor. Some of Caro’s exploits have become the stuff of journalistic legend, like moving with his long-suffering wife to the Texas Hill Country so that he could get a better feel for the upbringing of Lyndon Johnson.

My favourite part of this documentary recounted how Caro tracked down the truth about the 1948 Texas Senate election. The beginning of LBJ’s Senate career has always been controversial, in that he won the Democratic primary against Coke Stevenson with votes that were only “found” one week after the election. When they were found, those votes were also in perfect alphabetical order. Most historians believed that Luis Salas, the election judge responsible for overseeing the count, was dead, and that it would never be known for sure whether the election was stolen. But Caro discovered after multiple years of listening to gossip from Hill Country people that Salas had fled to Mexico, and he was eventually able to track him down. Salas confessed, and described the exact method by which he helped fabricate the results. My sense is that most historians have accepted that Caro demonstrated fairly conclusively that LBJ stole the election.

I was disappointed by how similar this film was to the book Working; if you’ve already read it, and Caro’s books themselves, it adds essentially nothing. Still, it was fun.

Martin Scorsese, Casino. A vintage De Niro and Joe Pesci gangster movie, loosely inspired by the story of the Stardust resort. This is the film where I finally realised who James Woods is; up until now, he’s only been a Simpsons cameo to me.

Bong Joon-ho, Mother. Everybody loves Parasite – I love it so much that I also watched the black-and-white re-release and read the storyboards. But the other Bong Joon-ho films I’ve seen, Okja and Snowpiercer, are his most American movies. Were it not for the suspicious number of Korean side characters, you wouldn’t even know the director was Korean. So I was really looking forward to this one, and it did not disappoint. Kim Hye-ja’s performance is exceptional and disturbing. I’m still thinking about it.

Gary Hustwit, Eno. I finally got a chance to watch this documentary, from the director of Helvetica, which is having a limited release in art-house cinemas. Here is the trailer. It is billed as the first generative feature-length film. Note that this is different from generative AI: each time it’s shown, a stochastic algorithm assembles a new version of the film from hundreds of hours of footage and music. I watched it with a friend who had been to a previous screening, and he reckoned there was about 50% overlap between the two versions. I thought Eno was incredibly fitting for its subject matter, and I was pleased to see that it has been shortlisted for an Oscar. My favourite part was when Brian Eno talked about his passion for John Conway’s Game of Life, although, of course, the particular version I saw will never be seen again…

From YouTube, I have learned that Vishy Anand, the five-time world chess champion, has appeared in a Subway ad. I also came across this great video in the BBC Archives from 1974 about efforts to promote tourism in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. At 5:30, the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Tourism Board is asked whether Belfast is a safe city to visit, and he tries his best:

It's not really, uh, I'm afraid to say, a great tourism centre at the moment... I read last week that there are nine murders a day and a thousand muggings a day in New York. Well, I reckon we're better than that.

At 12:15, a German woman says that she and her husband visited Belfast early in the morning “Because, we thought, at seven o’clock, the terrorists have to sleep”.

1. Technically they catalogued ‘plasticizers’, which are chemical additives to plastics, not the plastics themselves.

2. It seems that Nozick also edited another volume in this ‘Studies in Philosophy’ series from Routledge, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision by Daniel Ellsberg (more famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers)… quite the intellectual crossover!