Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers, aristocrats, nobility and the dreary functionaries of government too. All of this to say, did you know you can read what all the royals are up to on any given day in the Court Circular?

This catty profile of a dominant British literary agent is also of that milieu. He’s an incredibly crass man who can get anybody on the phone and takes all his meetings in a grand hotel bar. It’s a compelling portrait of someone outrageous from a bygone era. Another outrageous upper crust guy on my mind is Lord Aspinall. There were a couple of recent episodes of Behind The Bastards about him. He basically scammed his way into the aristocratic set, got weirdly into exotic animals, and probably helped his friend Lord Lucan get away with murder. He was also friends with a bunch of fascists. By the way, remember: fascists don’t always sound like fascists.

Before I move off of English elites, here’s a good write up of the stitch up that killed Joan of Arc. I confess I didn’t really know the story, but it’s much more complicated than “burned by the Catholic Church for being a woman in charge”. Now for two more things on the topic of: “it’s complicated, actually”. First, the latest in a tradition of blog posts from people who’ve had to write strict schemas for things that interact with the messy, human world that is full of exceptions to rules is this post about the horrible edge cases in music metadata. Second, this post on Tumblr disrupts our (Western, English-speaking) notions of what a haiku actually is, for the better.

You know what no, here’s one more link about how things are stubbornly complicated. Humans are intrinsically stubbornly complicated. This beautiful illustrated piece in The New Yorker challenges the notion presented by AI positivists that we ourselves are just sufficiently complicated stochastic parrots and nothing more. It doesn’t so much make the argument that there is something about human language acquisition or consciousness that is verifiably different from an arbitrarily advanced artificial intelligence, but it makes the argument that we are humans and that’s enough. There’s also just something about the way that toddler is rendered that is so tender and sweet.

It looks like we’re in the very online zeitgeist section. Gimlet represents a particularly optimistic micro-moment in the modern digital media landscape that is now certainly gone. The Decline and Fall™️ is described well here. The Dirt newsletter featured a dance-focused cultural critic who has written a few popular pieces of analysis lately. Dance is front and centre of pop culture, but goes unspoken and under-analysed a lot of the time.

Surely it’s a natural transition now from the zeitgeist section to the doom section. Something’s fucky in the Danish intelligence services. If you want to be a spy all by yourself, open source satellite imagery is just a Python script away. Alternatively, practice your secret codes at the Waffle House. Here’s an idea: pray to be saved from the end of the world.

Okay I’m left with the pieces that don’t hang together at all. Here’s one more piece about Borges’s literary estate, about which I seemingly cannot read enough. Here’s a fancy candle that goes bong (thanks Robin Sloan), and here’s Balkan vernacular architecture.