Presidential

I'd have to toss a coin to choose between my two favourite moments from that trainwreck:

Trump pronouncing "Antifa", slavishly followed by Biden, like it was an island in the West Indies (AnTEEfah).

Biden shoehorning in a reference to Trump's alleged reference to WW1 dead as "losers" by pretending he was misremembering Trump's attacks on his corrupt druggie son Hunter as being attacks on his brave veteran son Beau: that's a courageous stratagem for a guy the GOPers are keen to paint as senile.

Top-down

Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

Possibly not the most interesting paragraph of Graeber and Wengrow's How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened) - that's more likely to be the discussion of seasonal variation in prehistoric political structures, or the article's various vigorous myth demolitions - but certainly the one that made me laugh.

Editing

GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed.

Which explains why this op-ed written by a computer program proceeds through a series of non-sequiturs to make no coherent conclusion, in case you were going to blame the poor AI for the Guardian house style.

Crazy

I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire crisis, calling the fire police department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down there's an emergency, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire police department! That would be bad."

C. D. Bales, from Roxanne, in the original, of course.

David Graeber 1961-2020

If pandemic related lockdowns, and the consequent paradigm of essential workers, has taught us anything, it's how right David Graeber was. Appallingly, I have to say 'was' now.

Trade Secrets

every time you see a photo of prawns in a recipe book, they are almost certainly the same six prawns

LRB Bookshop's Twitter feed with a work of bioluminescent genius.