We live in a world of ‘up and to the right’. Much of the stresses and strains we are facing can be connected to that gap between expectation of continued possibility and a biophysical world of life that is generally not well matched to such rapid and sustained growth. And yet, this is what is wanted.

In a nuanced and thoughtful piece, Philip Zelikow judges: Indeed. And yet, the tendency is for analysts to mix empty platitudes with unearned certainties. Conflict as content, triviality prevails. Faced with a troubling array of possible futures, grimly marching towards November, there is a need to escape social media circularity, and instead move outwards in thought. With that in mind, some points and provocations.

To these questions posed by Guillaume Pitron could be added: how much energy was required to create this note and podcast? What inputs are required for you to be able to read and listen to it? These are things we simply do not think about: the whole digital experience feels ‘light’, it is in ‘the cloud’. But that cloud is very real and very heavy. Look at these charts and then wonder: what resources are needed for this growth to be possible?

Bruno Latour, ‘I am interested in Europe as an ecological problem’ (2019): - Tony Judt, ‘The Way Things Are and How They Might Be’, London Review of Books (2010) : - Sam Knight, ‘What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?’ The New Yorker (2024): - Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024): - Adam Curtis, Interview with Jacobin (2023):

This week I am teaching on how humanitarian crises are understood and seen, or more often, not seen. In a prior note, ‘the meaning grinder’, I considered the perverse dynamic in which conflict is flattened out and turned into content. It ended with gesturing towards the value of silence.

The world is presently a strange mix of the old - building things and destroying them - and the new - technologies that replicate human thought and intelligence. A year ago I wrote a series of notes on ‘reckoning with AI’. To recap some conclusions: Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Nothing I have seen in the intervening period has led me to revise these judgments.

This year the cherry blossoms have been late to arrive. Waiting, waiting, with expectation, they have finally appeared. Matsuo Basho in Spring 1688: And yet, with the clouds and the rain, the blossoms scatter too soon. Basho a few years and seasons later: More than a century passes, and with it, many seasons, and Kobayashi Issa pens: The deep appreciation of the seasons is one of the most distinctive features of Japanese culture.

Ernst Jünger , On the Marble Cliffs ( 1939): - Hannah Arendt, ‘From an Interview’ (1978): - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964): - Arundhati Roy, ‘Intimations of an Ending’ (2019): - Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is Not Enough (1952): - Albert Camus, ‘Are We Pessimists?’ (1946): - Pankaj Mishra, ‘Welcome to the age of anger’ (2016):

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, this time recorded in-person during a trip to Australia in February 2024. Donald Horne famously described the country as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.’ That depiction could easily be applied to much of the West over the last few decades. Central to our conversation is the issue of scale, prompted by a rare interview with Vaclav Smil.

A central theme of these notes is thinking through and thinking with : searching out and identifying fragments, frames, clues, people, texts: whatever might assist in reckoning with our collective conditions. We need partners, collaborators, aids and inspirations. With that in mind, this note engages with a series of artists and artworks, classical and contemporary, centred around a recent Europe trip.

Tolstoy’s depiction of the jumbled mix of good and bad, continuity and change, is one that still holds. Invariably, though, our attention is drawn to the specific ideas now appearing and perishing. With the new year, the content monster rolls on, with previews replacing reviews, all while the trendlines remain in place.