special marks for the handwritten note though

I am really very certain that's not the point I am making, at all. Do you know the meaning of the phrase "lame duck"?

thanks. I liked Egan's Goon Squad but The Candy House I think is one of my least favourite novels of the past couple of decades.

what if your starting premise is that settling space is really, really hard?

consider me intrigued...

Working is Robert Caro's worst book by some margin. it's also brilliant. The two are not mutually exclusive.

alas no. But some of my favourite writing is Italian in translation. so I'm game if there has been a translation...

Who has a book recommendation? (it really really helps if you explain *why* you think is so good)

Bread and circuses.

There's a ton of attention on AI models and mathematics. If you're looking for an account of humans vying with advanced maths, absolutely go read Cédric Villani's book "Birth of a Theorem", which details his grappling with a problem that ultimately won him the Fields medal. It's so, so good.

Congratulations Robin. Well deserved.

The age of super-intelligence will be 97% of the workforce unemployed, 3% journalists falling out of restaurants pissed as newts at 4pm.

There's clearly an AI prompt of "find me the email address of every journalist in the universe, and include it in my distribution list even if it is completely unrelated to their interests". Honestly it's become an absolute deluge in recent months. No point in even unsubscribing it's so dense.

If you're going to read a trashy novel – and everyone should read the odd trashy novel – you can do a lot worse than Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, who just died. I remember reading it age 15 (not so terribly wise in retrospect) pretty much in one sitting, it's like 600 pages long.

not reading much into this tbh. Some of it is rotation from first term dragging on through the summer. Some of these people are not terribly relevant (even the Cabinet has outer tiers...). Some seems like natural attrition i.e. if people serve in cabinets for 3 years, you lose 33% a year.

The ability to organise real-world facts into compelling narratives is recognised by readers. Somehow the Nobel overlooks it. Svetlana Alexievich (2015) is the one notable exception (Ernaux a bit as well, some might argue). But it should be a recurring theme, not a one-off.

I like novels as much as the next guy (or indeed poetry and drama and even music, which occasionally get the Nobel). But the prize far too rarely goes to writers of non-fiction. In a time when storytelling steeped in reality is both popular and important, that is a regrettable oversight.

The litterature Nobel this week will go to yet another novelist (I bet). It should instead go to an author who had mastered some element of non-fiction. How about Robert Caro, the greatest living biographer? Karl Ove Knausgård, the memoir maestro? Or Emmanuel Carrère, the non-fiction novelist? 🧵