I know many Crooked Timber readers will want to mark the passing of Harry’s father, Tim Brighouse. Harry has sometimes written here about his father’s pedagogy and influence, and more obliquely at his singularity and sheer loveliness. Today’s Guardian newspaper carries an obituary:

“Teachers and education experts this weekend paid tribute to Sir Tim Brighouse, “one of the great educators of this century” and “a delightful human being”, who has died at the age of 83.”

A life truly well spent is the best rejoinder to our inevitable mortality, and Tim clearly did so much for so many people with his. But I do still wish for the UK that it had been the sort of country, these last couple of decades, that could have put him in a position where he may have done even more.

Our sympathies, Harry, to you and yours.

Rightso! Novels. My three runaway favourite novels this year, which I recommend to you wholeheartedly, are Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors and, friend of this parish, Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz. Cahokia Jazz I want to write something dedicated about, and imminently, so let me tell you about the first two now.

Rumaan Alam’s apocalyptic Leave the World Behind came out in 2020, and a Netflix adaptation has just been released. Read the novel first. From what I’ve seen of the trailer (and it looks great), the film takes place during a more explicit and amped up catastrophe, making it a very different kind of beast. The novel is more subtle and mysterious about an unfolding disaster which, at first, only insidiously impinges on what starts as a class and race-based comedy of manners, with a high social capital white New York couple taking their perfect family to a perfect vacation house outside of New York, only to be disturbed one night by the house’s Black owners seeking refuge from the city. One of my sisters gave the book to me as we returned home from a holiday, and I read it straight through on a horribly delayed flight, barely even registering the usual Ryanair shenanigans and the misery of freezing, drunk-filled Liverpool Street night buses, I was so rapt. Ironic, really, how a book about an (at first) insidious apocalypse gets you through the falling down bits of broken Britain in the dead of winter.
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It’s time for my annual-ish reading round-up. Record-keeping has many benefits, chief amongst them, counter-intuitive insights. This year’s book diary has revealed that in a year I’d have said was pretty so-so, it turns out the number of books I really loved was unexpectedly high, about three times that of the previous two years. The number of books I read was pretty consistent, on average a book a week. In these increasingly short-form times, that starts to seem like a lot, but it’s average or slightly below average for bookish types. And I still outread fiction to nonfiction by about 8:1.

In 2022, rather shamefully, I read no non-English language book, and only six in translation, and no complete poetry collection. This year wasn’t much better. The only poetry collection I read beginning to end was Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs, and that’s largely because I read them aloud to our second dog, Molly, who seems to enjoy it. I read no books in Irish (though some poetry and a few short stories), but did manage Balzac’s Père Goriot in French. (In an act of completism or perhaps just insecurity, I then also read it in English and listened to a French audiobook. I enjoyed it a lot, perhaps especially as it’s so interesting and freeing to experience the much roomier concept of what a modern novel is, in the hands of one of that form’s creators.) [click to continue…]

This is my marmalade-making time of the year. Not because it’s the only time I can get hold of Seville oranges – I can get hold of the MaMade tins any time of year, and have only ever gotten fresh ones to use one time that I happened to visit a friend in Arizona who complained about the fruit trees outside that produced oranges that were inedibly bitter (I picked 10lbs and brought them straight home). It’s actually because of the grapefruit.

Only being able to get hold of MaMade (very inexpensive, at Amazon, makes excellent marmalade) gives rise to a problem. MaMade is only sold in a thin cut version. So, what if you like thick cut? I finally figured out the solution, which is to buy two white grapefruit, that are only available, here, December-February, and chop the rind roughly. You simply add that to the marmalade and you have a rough cut Seville orange marmalade with just a hint of grapefruit flavour, but really just a hint.

I’m not finished with the regular marmalade yet. I specifically like Oxford marmalade – once you’ve had that its hard to go back. And I like it bitter. Conventional recipes tell you to substitute black treacle or molasses for some of the sugar, but no recipe has gone far enough for me. And the 4lbs of sugar recommended to accompany a tin of MaMade makes for too sweet a result. So – I use 2lbs of sugar and 1lb of treacle/molasses, which gets exactly the flavour I want.

Still there’s a problem. With only 3/4ths the recommended level of sugar, how do you get the marmalade to set properly? One way is to add phenomenal amounts of pectin. But almost as good is just to simmer the concoction for much longer than recommended, just to reduce the liquid, until you have something that, while runny, is adequately viscous to stay on toast (or if you are Paddington or the late Queen, in a sandwich). I generally cook for about around 3 hours, most of it on a very low heat, but occasionally boiling it while stirring vigorously. You’ll end up with less than 5lbs of marmalade, but with an intense flavour so you use less at a time.

A student the other day revealed her obsession with grapefruit and that prompted to me attempt fully grapefruit marmalade.

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Back in the day, there used to be a lot more arguments across blogs. Perhaps we’ll see more of it happening again as Twitter continues its collapse into a dwarf star composed of degenerate matter.  To get things started, this seems to me to be a quite wrongheaded claim by Tyler Cowen.

In a deal months in the making, the University of Wisconsin System has agreed to “reimagine” its diversity efforts, restructuring dozens of staff into positions serving all students and freezing the total number of diversity positions for the next three years.

In exchange, universities would receive $800 million for employee pay raises and some building projects, including a new engineering building for UW-Madison.

“This is an evolution, and this is a change moving forward,” UW System President Jay Rothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “But it does not in any way deviate from our core values of diversity (and) inclusion.”

Here is the full story, via HB, it is rare that the real world is actually so Coasean.

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Another week another tedious attack on “wokery” in the New York Times. This is by the conservative David Brooks, but I’ve seen it endorsed by “class-struggle” anti-wokists. Anyway, Brooks helpfully lists the characteristics of wokery in bullet-points, enabling some immediate commentary:

“We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.”

I have no idea what this means, concretely, since it seems sensible to “emphasize” both, depending on the purpose and context. Climate change, to give an obvious example, both unites all human beings since it threatens us as a species and divides us since its immediate impact falls on the poorest and most vulnerable people, often living in poor countries, and not wealthy Americans, like Brooks.

“Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.”

The history of all hitherto-existing societies and all that. Not all human relations, obviously, but it seems futile to deny the pervasiveness of this kind of conflict. Often it is class-based, but nobody sensible denies that racial, gender and other oppression mark much of human history. Some crude Marxists, of course, think that these other conflicts as just epiphenomenal and that they would go away in a classless society. Well maybe they would, I’d note only that more sophisticated Marxists have thought we need to consider other identities non-reductively alongside class.

“Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.”

I dunno. What is it like to be a poor black woman? No doubt she can tell me of her experience and I can empathize, but I don’t think I can fully reproduce her first-person perspective. It just seems obvious that we need to hear from the oppressed themselves rather than just relying on how we represent them in our political theories.

“The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.”

This just seems to be a contingent claim about American society, rather than about every human society. It might be true, and if so, so much the worse for “American society”, which would need to be replaced by something else. The evidence so far doesn’t give much hope to those who think that bigotry and racism are going to disappear from that society. Obviously that’s bad news for American liberal nationalists, but they strike me as naïve (yes that was Brooks’s word) utopians anyway.

“Seemingly neutral tenets of society — like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy — are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.”

Again, not always, not only, but surely sometimes, and particularly when those “tenets” are articulated thoughtlessly by the likes of Brooks. Perhaps he could pay some attention to who gets to speak and who doesn’t; which voices are silenced and which not. And “meritocracy”? It seems he is even unaware of the satirical origins of the word.

The basic lesson is that Brooks, like other “anti-wokists” such as Mounck, attack implausibly strong versions of “wokery” in order to avoid having to take seriously the embarassing insights that they wish to deny. The other point to make about them is that, while trumpeting the claims of “universalism” against particular divisive identities, they fail to notice that their own American nationalism is a thoroughly anti-universalist identity and ideology. So it goes.

My favourite ever podcast, Literary Friction, is finishing after ten great years of monthly episodes interviewing authors and talking about books. I’d begun to guess something was up when, over the past few months, its hosts – Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt – remarked several times about how long they’d been going. Still, when they announced a couple of weeks ago that they’re wrapping it up at the end of the year, I was surprised and sad, a bit like when a couple splits up and you realise them being together was a hidden foundation of your little world. But in a para-social, internet-y kind of way. Well, nothing good lasts forever! If you’re interested in literary fiction, there’s a tremendous back catalogue of episodes.

Each episode has an author interview, then some discussion about a theme the book suggested, then some cultural recommendations. My favourite episode ever was probably the one with the poet Ocean Vuong about his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I’d not heard of him before listening to the podcast, and hearing him read his prose so softly and beautifully made me fall in love with the book. It became one of those books that you spot people reading on the Tube and can’t help smile at them. (Weird! I know. But only this past weekend I was walking to a WH Smith till with a Deborah Levy book and a woman came up to me to say how delighted she was by it. I’m so very much here for these awkward little encounters. Reminds me how, in the risible SF section of the same airport bookshop last year, I imposed myself on two American teenaged goths who were mournfully returning to a red state, and hand-sold them A Wizard of Earthsea.)
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Back in April, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Economy and Society and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences held a workshop on the political ideologies of Silicon Valley. It was a great event, in large part because it brought together a somewhat disconnected community. People had been thinking about Silicon Valley in history, in sociology, in cultural studies and political science among other disciplines. They had read across disciplines out of necessity, to keep up with the ideas – but they often hadn’t had a chance to meet the people they were reading. So this gave them an opportunity to talk. And as an unanticipated by-product of the meeting, we invited people who attended the meeting, and a couple of others, to write short pieces about their understanding of the ideology or ideologies of Silicon Valley.

If you want to read the seminar as a PDF, it is available here. If you want to remix it (it is made available under a a CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License ), then click here to download the .tex file. If you want to link to the entire seminar, it’s all at https://crookedtimber.org/category/silicon-valley-seminar/If you want to read the individual posts online, you can find them all below.

The participants in the seminar are as follows:

• Shazeda Ahmed is a post-doctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Digital Debates at the Global Public Policy Institute at Princeton University. From Algorithmic Monoculture to Epistemic Monoculture? Understanding the Rise of AI Safety.
• Finn Brunton is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. The Agar Plate of Cryptocurrency.
• Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. The Religion of the Engineers; And Hayek Its True Prophet.
• Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Silicon Valley’s Worldview is Not Just an Ideology; It’s a Personality Disorder.
• Louis Hyman is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations. Silicon Valley is the Detroit of the Future.
• Dave Karpf is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. The Church of Moore’s Law.
• Tamara Kneese is a Senior Researcher and Project Director of Data & Society Research Institute’s AIMLab, and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Observers Observed: The Ethnographer in Silicon Valley.
• Neil Malhotra is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Silicon Valley Liberal-tarians.
• Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. If It’s a Ponzi, Get In Early”: The Ideology of Scam Futures
• Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Silicon Valley Fairy Dust.

Within pretty broad limits[1], I’m an advocate of historical ‘presentism’, that is, assessing past events and actions in the same way as those in the present, and considering history in relation to our present concerns. In particular, that implies viewing enslavers, racists and warmongers in the same light, whether they are active today or died hundreds of years ago.

A common objection to this position runs along the lines:

Suppose that at some point in the future, the vast majority of people are vegans. They will judge you in the same way as you judge past enslavers, racists and warmongers. In anticipation of this, you should suspend judgement on people in the past.

I don’t buy this.
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‘Tis the season, so I designed a card. (You may purchase it here if you like. Or any other comparably inappropriate product. I do feel more people ought to confound loved ones by gifting them my socks.)

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