I think I’ve given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it’s nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised… easy. That’s why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees. Johnny Decimal, everybody.

A fellow foe of the Grand Narratives that organise our collective consciousness is Roland Barthes, who as it turns out, really had the hots for one of his students. He was down so bad that he started rambling about love at length during his packed lecture series. Sorry Ro.

For a while, Britain has been maintaining the remnants of its prestige by emphasising its timelessness, the bottomless vagaries of its arcane lore that stretch back to time immemorial, when Arthur and the dragon… so on and so forth. What this means in practice is that the civic structure is all en-cacked with faux-ancien fairytale nonsense. Here’s an example: a parliamentary report on how weird the legal fictions around resigning from the House of Commons are.

Being a recent immigrant to Germany (we know!) where the last reactor has just been deactivated, I have thought of myself as a relatively unmitigated nuclear power booster. It’s cheap, it’s carbon neutral. This write up about how the output patterns of the other renewable sources mean that nuclear might not have a place in our energy future is the first thing written about it that’s given me pause.

Mary Gaitskill has the only interesting conversation with a Chat AI that I’ve seen so far. Worried about the implications of it all? Don’t worry: proof that the world has been ending since the moment it began.