Tennis, theology and a politburo of bullshit
hello,
Late again. I hang my head in shame.
Thank you to everyone who came to Interesting. I have just booked the Conway Hall for next year; 20th May 2026. World Bee Day. You heard it here first.
Here are 5 things.
I have never wanted to recommend something as much as I want to recommend this podcast interview about the Old Pope and the New Pope with Colm Tóibín. Gossip, theology and tennis. Tóibín is tremendously informed and deeply skeptical. He’s enthused and waspish. He seems to watch popes like twitchers watch birds. And then he tops the whole thing off with enormous enthusiasm for Yannick Sinner. Honestly. Have a listen.
This episode of the Guardian Football Weekly podcast contains a delicious demolition of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and alerts us to one of the most useful framings in recent years, also referenced here by Jonathan Wilson.
“It was the Irish journalist Dion Fanning who coined the term “politburo of bullshit” for the gaggle of earnest men staring impassively down from the stand at Old Trafford on another shambles.”Politburo of bullshit. Brilliant. (There’s an excerpt in my tiny podcast.)
If you want to think about AI beyond the obvious this Sippey post contains a couple of very useful links. And an excerpt that includes this quote from a young woman who’s been interacting with ChatGPT:
“What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us.
“And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”
The absolute best song of the year so far; New Direction by Estelle. Starts off with a feint to something jazzy and then bounces into an irrepressible dancey, funky, pop thing. It sounds like Quincy Jones did it between Ai No Corrida and Off The Wall. A song and a groove. Uplifting. Joyous. And then a middle-8 rap bit with disturbing eco-content.
“What you gon' do when the town on fire?
What you gon' do when the water don't work?
Get up and rebuild from the dirt”Compression again. A movie’s worth of vibe in three sentences.
“My earliest memory is in a flat full of leftists in Strasbourg reading Marx, smoking, talking about revolution. My father was a graduate student there; my mother had dropped out of university, mistakenly thinking love would be enough. I remember the light, the mood, the cigarettes.”
PROMOTIONAL NEWS
For some reason, I have some art exhibiting in this show at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow. More explanation in this blogpost. Or go direct.
I’ll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 1008 of you. ISO 1008 specifies the nominal sizes and aim dimensions, with their cutting tolerances, of black-and-white and colour photographic papers in sheets for pictorial use. It also specifies a method for checking the squareness of the sheets and straightness of their edges, and establishes a rule for package marking.)