'I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta' - Notes on the British elite

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The Cult of the Proudly Ignorant

You hear it often enough: the celebrated columnist confessing, “I was never any good with numbers,” or the progressive politician admitting that they “never got through Das Kapital”.

These aren’t real apologies; they’re credentials. Such gestures signal belonging to a class that prizes intuition over intellect, confidence over competence. It’s anti-intellectualism from above, that aristocratic disdain for the effort of understanding.

In the old days, the British elite called it breeding. To study was vulgar; to “just know” was class. The modern equivalent is the public sneer at maths, theory, or anything that hints at obsession.

Trying too hard remains the unforgivable sin.

There’s a gendered variant too: the lifestyle writer's performative helplessness - “I’m hopeless with sums, like you!” - as a ritual of approachability. Those with cultural capital pretending to be ordinary.

Meanwhile, the genuinely bright, without connections, must rely on skill alone, rising in those few fields where ability still matters: science, technology, sometimes finance. Everywhere else, Dunbar’s law rules: networks of 150 aimed ruthlessly at keeping power among friends and heirs.

“I’m awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard,” was the full quote. But today's Betas do.

The Death of Process? - by ChatGPT

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The Death of Process: AI, Organisational Intelligence (or stupidity) and the Future of Work

Most organisations, most of the time, are staffed by ordinary people. Not idiots, but not polymaths either. These institutions depend upon process to function: formalised, repeatable, and predictable sequences of behaviour which, if followed faithfully, produce tolerably reliable outcomes. In such a system, the process is the genius, not the worker. One is hired to fit the groove, not to cut new ones.

This is not a criticism. Process is what allows bureaucracies, firms, and public services to scale. The NHS couldn’t function on the brilliance of individual nurses or administrators alone. Nor could HMRC rely on local judgment calls when assessing tax liabilities. These bodies must coordinate thousands of people with uneven skill levels, incomplete information, and minimal improvisational scope. Process is the cybernetic compromise: a prosthetic intelligence that permits the mediocre to act as if they were better than they are.

But there is a problem. In complex and dynamic environments, fixed processes start to creak. They cannot adapt quickly. They struggle with edge cases. They become brittle, sluggish, or absurd. What begins as a sensible decision-tree often ends as Kafkaesque farce: "Computer says no."

The late cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby famously formulated the Law of Requisite Variety: for a system to effectively control another, it must possess at least as much variety as the system it seeks to govern. In other words, you can't manage complex, highly-contextual situations with simple rules. But that is precisely what most process-driven institutions attempt to do. They simplify and regularise a richly-textured world, not because it's wise, but because it's all they can manage.

This leads to an odd modern duality. On the one hand, we have lumbering procedural leviathans: governments, big corporates, legacy institutions. They crawl forward by the inch, prodded by forms, compliance, and the logic of the lowest common denominator. On the other, we have small, high-functioning firms – consultancies, elite research units, startups – where people talk, reason, improvise. Here process is kept to a minimum, swatted aside when it gets in the way. The organisation runs not on scripts but on minds. When ambiguity arises, it is not escalated to a committee, it is resolved in conversation.

This contrast is not incidental. It is systemic. In smart organisations, top talent vastly reduces the need for mindless process. People can be trusted to do the right thing because they can grasp the whole. They adapt, they course-correct, they bring local intelligence to bear. The result is fluid, context-sensitive action. If a procedure exists, it is provisional, not sacrosanct.

Now enter AI.

We are not yet at the point where large-scale systems can act with contextual intelligence comparable to a sharp human generalist. But we are not far. The next decade promises AIs that can perceive, plan, reason, explain, and adapt at a level sufficient to handle most of the real-world cases that currently clog bureaucracies or consume the time of overqualified analysts.

The result is potentially revolutionary. Consider a large public-facing organisation: the DWP, for instance, or a major utilities provider. Where once it required sprawling call centres and elaborate service manuals to handle customer needs, we could soon see responsive AI agents doing the bulk of the work – triaging, resolving, escalating only the truly complex. Not via static process trees but through adaptive, conversational engagement.

Now imagine that AI not simply replacing average workers, but working alongside skilled human agents: strategists, planners, designers. The AI handles procedural load and problem-solving at scale; the human applies values, ethics, and situational judgment. The result is a high-functioning hybrid.

In effect, this extends the logic of the smart organisation to scale. What was once only possible in boutique firms staffed by high-IQ generalists now becomes viable for large, diffuse entities serving millions. The performance ceiling is raised not by retraining the workforce, but by wrapping it (or replacing most of it?) in a cloud of competent, tireless, adaptive support.

Of course, this raises questions. What becomes of the average worker in such a world? If the mediating layer of process disappears, and with it the need for human cogs in its machinery, what remains for the merely competent to do?

Two futures suggest themselves:

• Displacement with dignity: New forms of work emerge, not in the procedural heartland of institutions, but in care, creativity, education, and human-to-human services. 


• Orchestrated redundancy: Workers remain employed, nominally, but become functionally irrelevant. AI handles the real work; humans become face-saving decor, like elevator operators after the buttons were introduced. Gardening leave but at the office.

The smart organisation was once the exception. Soon it may be the norm. Not because everyone gets smarter, but because the system itself does. And in that world, "process" may no longer mean rigidity, but something closer to jazz: structured improvisation, shaped by judgement, and played out in real time.

'Autism and the Self: Fortress Walls and Foggy Courtyards' - ChatGPT

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Autism and the Self: Fortress Walls and Foggy Courtyards

Do people with high-functioning autism (HFA) experience the boundary between self and other in a different way? Not just in the obvious social terms—awkwardness, rule-breaking, missing the beat—but in the deeper sense of what it feels like to be a self in the world. Does autism affect how firmly a person distinguishes between their own feelings and those of others? Between what belongs in their mind and body and what leaks in from outside?

This isn’t the usual theory-of-mind question. I'm not asking whether people with autism can understand others. I'm asking something more structural: whether the contours of selfhood itself—the felt architecture of being—are drawn differently. As if consciousness, intellect, and language sit above a kind of fog: a less clearly bounded emotional or affective ground-state that confuses what’s 'mine' from what’s 'yours'. And if so, what evidence is there for this?

Surprisingly, the research says: yes, but it depends on the level you look at. The self is not a single thing—it is a composite of bodily experience, agency, emotion, cognition, and social interaction. And the boundaries are not drawn in the same ink across all levels.

1. The Rubber Hand and the Proprioceptive Fortress

Let’s start with the body. One of the classic neuroscience tricks is the Rubber Hand Illusion. You sit with your real hand hidden from view, while a fake rubber hand is placed in front of you. Both the real and fake hands are stroked in synchrony. After a while, many people begin to experience the rubber hand as their own: it feels like my hand, even though your eyes and brain know better.

This illusion exploits proprioception—your brain's unconscious sense of where your body is in space. When visual and tactile signals are aligned just right, your brain is willing to revise its body map to include the rubber hand.

But autistic people, especially high-functioning adults, often don't fall for this trick. Their proprioceptive system resists visual hijacking. The internal model of the body is more rigid. The same is true of studies on personal space: autistic participants prefer a larger bubble, and don’t easily adjust it in response to social cues.

This suggests that the physical boundary of self—the skin-and-space perimeter—is more firmly patrolled in autism. In Bayesian terms, the priors governing bodily position are assigned unusually high precision, and so conflicting sensory evidence is discounted. One's own body is a fortress with stone walls.

2. Agency and the Blur of Intention

Relatedly, the sense of agency—that felt authorship of one's actions—is often altered. In experiments that measure temporal binding (how closely in time you perceive your action and its consequence), autistic participants typically show weaker or more variable binding. They are less inclined to feel, in that gut-level way, “I did that.”

Again, this aligns with a stronger boundary at the bodily-motoric level. The self as a causal actor in the world is less easily manipulated; illusions of control don’t land as effectively.

3. Emotional Fog and Self-Other Confusion

But now we move inward—and here, the fortress becomes a fog. Many autistic adults experience alexithymia: difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotional states. This isn’t a problem of not having feelings—physiological studies show normal or even heightened responses—but of not being able to label or interpret them consciously. The interoceptive system (which monitors internal states like heart rate or gut tension) seems noisy or poorly calibrated.

If you can’t clearly tell what you yourself are feeling, it becomes harder to distinguish your emotions from those of others. Studies using mirror paradigms and self/other confusion tasks bear this out. In some cases, autistic individuals attribute their own states to others—or others’ feelings to themselves. Emotional contagion without clear boundaries becomes more likely.

Neurologically, the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ)—a region implicated in distinguishing self from other—shows altered patterns of activity in autism. This may underpin both the difficulty in separating representations (“Is that your anger, or mine?”) and the heightened emotional distress reported in interpersonal encounters.

4. Theory of Mind and Social Boundaries

The more cognitive side of this story involves Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to attribute mental states to others. High-functioning individuals often pass explicit ToM tasks, but struggle with the fluid, intuitive grasp of others’ perspectives in real-time interaction.

This means they may misjudge social cues—talking too long, standing too close or too far, being overly trusting or oddly distant. It’s not a lack of empathy as such, but rather a dislocation of boundaries: where do I end and you begin? What does that facial expression mean? How do I know when to pull back?

Again, the issue is less malice than misalignment: the autistic person may feel closer than the other perceives them to be. Or vice versa.

5. The Composite Picture

So what does all this amount to? Autistic people, particularly those with high cognitive ability, often show a paradoxical boundary profile:

• Strong bodily boundaries: reduced susceptibility to illusion, stronger proprioception, rigid personal space.
• Blurry emotional boundaries: alexithymia, poor interoception, self-other confusion in affective states.
• Ambiguous interpersonal boundaries: impaired ToM, difficulty inferring unspoken rules, trouble modulating intimacy or distance.

It is not so much that the self is missing—it’s that it’s carved in different ways. Solid at the edges, amorphous in the middle.

This helps explain why autistic people sometimes seem too distant, and sometimes too close. Why they may seem robotic in conversation, yet overwhelmed by emotional closeness. Why they may struggle with trust, not because they are cynical, but because their own compass of emotional ownership is unreliable. The fog inside the fortress can make it hard to tell what belongs where.

6. Drawing the Lines

Understanding this layered picture of self-boundaries in autism opens the door to more humane and effective interaction. Social training that focuses only on behaviour misses the deeper texture of experience: the way one’s own emotions feel illegible, or others’ feelings feel invasive.

The 'Brain' of a Care-Robot? - ChatGPT

Which Brain Modules Should a Domestic Robot Have?

Suppose you were designing a humanoid robot—not a glittering sci-fi fantasy, but something far more grounded: a competent domestic assistant. A machine to help with housework, care for an elderly parent, perhaps entertain a grandchild, or notice when something has gone wrong. What parts of the human brain should such a robot simulate? And which parts can be safely left out?

This isn’t a philosophical question. It’s engineering. What neuroanatomical functions are strictly necessary for practical competence in real-world environments, and which are surplus to requirements, baroque artefacts of our evolutionary kludge?

Let’s start with what our robot does need—functional modules inspired by human neuroanatomy that will earn their place in the machine.

1. Sensorimotor Integration

The robot must move around the home, manipulate objects, and interact with humans—all in a three-dimensional, unpredictable world. It needs something akin to the human posterior parietal cortex to integrate visual and proprioceptive cues, a cerebellum-like system for precise, predictive motor control, and a basal ganglia analogue for learning motor routines. Call it the sense-act loop: without it, the robot is a clumsy liability.

2. Object and Scene Recognition

The robot must recognise a wide variety of domestic objects in varied lighting and contexts. This calls for an analogue of the human inferotemporal cortex and visual hierarchy—systems for parsing the identities and affordances of objects. Is this a wine glass or a lightbulb? A towel or a child’s jumper? If it can’t tell, it’s not safe in your house.

3. Memory: Episodic and Semantic

Humans use the hippocampus and temporal cortex to store and retrieve episodic and semantic knowledge. Your robot should too. It needs to remember routines, recognise people, recall preferences, and adapt over time. A robot that forgets how you like your tea every morning will wear out its welcome faster than a cat that soils your slippers.

4. Social Cognition and Affect Simulation

Domestic robots will work in emotionally charged environments—helping the infirm, engaging with children, responding to distress. They must simulate emotional intelligence. Not feel it, of course (that would be indulgent as well as technically difficult), but convincingly mimic the outputs.

The robot needs a lightweight theory of mind: something inspired by the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction to interpret gaze, posture, tone, and likely mood. A dash of insula-inspired affect modelling will help it avoid faux pas like offering jokes at funerals or silence during crises.

5. Goal Management and Task Switching

Domestic life is interrupt-driven. The robot needs something akin to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex to manage goals, reprioritise tasks, and handle interruptions. “Put the kettle on—but answer the door first—and don’t forget the toddler is playing with the dog.” If it can’t handle that sort of multi-threaded chaos, it’s just another appliance cluttering the kitchen.

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Now, what can be safely ignored?

1. Language Production via Broca’s Area

We don’t need human-style language synthesis. Today’s robots can use pre-trained language models to handle polite conversation and task explanations. No need to simulate Broca’s tangled grammar tree—just bolt on an LLM and move on.

2. Emotional Experience via the Limbic System

Let’s be clear: we don’t want robots with feelings. No amygdala. No nucleus accumbens. They must simulate emotions, not suffer them. Care, yes—sentimentality, no. Empathy as interface, not inner life.

3. Inner Monologue and Default Mode

The human brain spends a lot of time wandering, ruminating, constructing narratives. This is the default mode network, and it's lovely for poets but unnecessary for vacuuming. Your robot doesn’t need to meditate on its day. It just needs to remember where it left the duster.

4. Detailed Phonological Comprehension via Wernicke’s Area

Modern automatic speech recognition bypasses the phonological gymnastics of Wernicke’s area. Feed the audio into a trained model and jump straight to semantic intent. No need to rebuild the human linguistic hierarchy from scratch.

5. Aesthetic and Abstract Modules

No need for music appreciation, mathematical beauty, or religious awe. The robot is not applying for a PhD. It’s cleaning your toilet and reminding you to take your pills. Leave out the philosophical ballast.

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So there you have it: a humanoid robot designed not to think like a human, but to perform with enough poise and grace to make itself useful—and perhaps even companionable. We replicate those parts of the brain that support task-competent embodiment, not those responsible for dreams, desires, or despair. A robot housekeeper needs sensorimotor precision, situational awareness, a serviceable memory, and simulated social grace. It does not need Shakespeare, Sartre, or the fear of death.

In short, a polite, emotionally-fluent zombie with an excellent grasp of cutlery placement. What more could you ask for?

Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969)

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In the early 1980s I was a researcher at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories at Harlow, Essex, part of the formal methods group looking at new ways to formalise software specification. I was studying LISP and Standard ML, Dana Scott's denotational semantics, universal algebra and category theory; my first project was a term-rewriting system for equational logic using the Knuth-Bendix algorithm implemented in LISP on a DEC VAX-11/780.

One of the curiosities which had us excited at that time was Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969) and its calculus of indications. We were interested because of its minimalism and its central preoccupation with fixed-point recursion.

Subsequently it has had a very odd trajectory.

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Logic and mathematics: professional logicians quickly saw that it was not fundamentally new. The “mark” is just a notational variant of Boolean algebra (you can recover it with Sheffer stroke or NOR). In mainstream algebra of logic, it was regarded as a curiosity rather than a breakthrough. By the mid-1970s it had no presence in formal logic journals.

Cybernetics, systems theory, philosophy: it survived longer here. Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and later Niklas Luhmann used it as a metaphorical resource in second-order cybernetics and social systems theory. They were less interested in Boolean algebra per se than in the idea that “distinction” is the primitive operation underlying cognition and society. That strand persisted into the 1990s.

Countercultural reception: in the 1970s–80s, Laws of Form had a cult readership among New Age circles, artists, and speculative thinkers. It was sometimes marketed as a quasi-mystical work about reality arising from distinction. This further distanced it from academic logic.

Present day

In logic and computer science: almost no mainstream research cites it. One occasionally finds enthusiasts in categorical logic or unconventional computation, but it is marginal.

In systems theory and sociology: Luhmann’s school still invokes Spencer-Brown as a conceptual ancestor, though usually filtered and abstracted.

In fringe communities: there are still societies and conferences dedicated to Laws of Form. A “Laws of Form Society” exists, and occasional workshops are held.

Summary

The calculus of indications did not disappear entirely, but in professional logic it is viewed as redundant. It found a second life in cybernetics, social theory, and a small enthusiast community. Today it survives as a niche interdisciplinary curiosity rather than a live research program in mathematics or computer science.

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'Coordinate Independence, and Quantum Mechanics' - by ChatGPT

Complex Multiplication, Coordinate Independence, and the Nature of Quantum Mechanics

Complex numbers are not merely a convenient mathematical shorthand. They encode geometric and algebraic ideas which run surprisingly deep. One of those depths is the distinction between coordinate independence in vector spaces and the structured role that complex multiplication plays in quantum mechanics. These two concepts are often assumed to cohere, but on inspection they live in quite different philosophical neighbourhoods.

Vector Addition: Coordinate-Free Geometry

Let us begin with something uncontroversial. The addition of complex numbers corresponds geometrically to the addition of 2D vectors. This operation is coordinate-independent in the usual Euclidean sense. Rotate the plane, reflect it, translate the origin—none of this affects the outcome of adding two vectors. What matters are relative displacements. The parallelogram rule works regardless of your choice of coordinate axes.

In mathematical terms, vector addition is intrinsic to the affine structure of the plane. It respects the full symmetry group of Euclidean geometry. It is, in short, a democratic operation.

Multiplication: Structure Dependent and Orientation-Specific

Complex multiplication, however, is a very different animal. To multiply two complex numbers is to rotate and scale—an operation heavily reliant on the fixed identification of the imaginary unit i as a direction orthogonal to the real line, and on a specific orientation (counter-clockwise in the standard plane). This is not coordinate-free. Rotate the plane, and unless you redefine what you mean by i, the operation itself changes.

Multiplication is not just a function of relative displacement; it is a structured linear transformation with a preferred basis. As such, it fails the test of coordinate independence as understood in the geometry of real vector spaces.

So Why Is It Central to Quantum Mechanics?

Quantum mechanics is famously fond of symmetries. Coordinate independence, gauge invariance, unitary transformations—these are sacred cows. So why does it build its entire formalism on an operation (complex multiplication) that seems so structurally rigid?

Because in quantum theory, complex numbers do not live in the Euclidean plane. They are not geometric vectors. They are scalars in a field, and the vectors live in a Hilbert space defined over that field. Complex multiplication doesn’t rotate arrows—it governs interference, phase, and time evolution. These are internal symmetries, not spatial ones.

Indeed, what looks like a structural bug in the complex plane becomes a feature in Hilbert space. The imaginary unit i enables the Schrödinger equation to generate unitary evolution via the exponential map. It is because multiplication by eiθ induces oscillatory behaviour—interference patterns, phase shifts—that quantum mechanics becomes predictive and rich. The theory is not invariant under arbitrary redefinitions of i—but it is invariant under the symmetry transformations it deems physically meaningful: unitaries, not Euclidean rotations.

Gauge, Not Geometry

The invariance that matters in quantum mechanics is not under spatial coordinate transformations, but under U(1) gauge transformations. Multiply a quantum state by a global phase factor and nothing changes. That’s a symmetry. This is what complex multiplication encodes in practice—not geometry, but a freedom in representation.

To demand coordinate independence of complex multiplication is to ask the wrong question. The complex structure is not meant to be arbitrary. It is the skeleton upon which the theory is built. We do not float freely among field choices in quantum theory. We live in a complex Hilbert space, and we deal in amplitudes, not Euclidean vectors.

Conclusion

So yes, complex multiplication is not coordinate-independent in the naive geometric sense. But quantum mechanics is not built on the Euclidean plane. It is built on Hilbert spaces and symmetry groups. The appearance of rigidity in complex multiplication is in fact the source of the theory’s expressive power—its ability to encode phase, time, and interference. The coordinate-independence of quantum theory lies elsewhere: not in the mutability of the imaginary unit, but in the invariance of amplitudes under transformation. A different sort of freedom, but no less real.

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Appendix: The Matrix Representation of Complex Multiplication

Multiplying a complex number

z = a + ib

by another complex number

w = x + iy

can be represented as a matrix transformation on ℝ2. In this interpretation, z becomes a two-dimensional real vector:

    z  ≡  [ a ]
            [ b ]

Multiplication by w corresponds to applying the 2×2 real matrix:

    Mw = [  x  -y ]
              [  y   x ]

The product wz is then:

    Mw · z = [ xa - yb  ]
                   [ ya + xb ]

Giving exactly the real and imaginary parts of the complex product wz.

Geometric Interpretation

• Scaling: The matrix scales by the modulus |w| = √(x² + y²).
• Rotation: It rotates by the argument arg(w) = tan-1(y/x).

Properties of the Multiplication Matrix

• Determinant: det(Mw) = x² + y² = |w|²
• Unitary when |w| = 1: The transformation is a pure rotation.
• Composition: Mw₁ · Mw₂ = Mw₁w₂, preserving complex multiplication.

This matrix representation reveals why complex multiplication is not coordinate-independent in the geometric sense: the matrix Mw presumes a fixed orientation of the real and imaginary axes. It is a structured linear transformation defined relative to those axes — and thus carries a preferred direction and handedness.

'X-cort 2028' - a satire by Adam Carlton

X-Cort 2028

She shimmers in the surf on a sultry afternoon.

I stand a way back.

Her leg stretches, heel pushing sand aside, wetness oozing into the furrow. Her fingers play at the hem of her tiny beach dress.

"Do you like me?" she says.

Her name is Tabitha, I remember that now. She has a Slavic accent, like that President's wife. Cat's eyes, high cheekbones.

"I find you extremely attractive," I say. 

I'm calm, mellow, in control.

Tabitha leans back on the beach towel, her breasts more prominent now. She gazes skywards, runs a hand through her hair, turns to me.

"Come here and help me up," she whispers.

I nod compliantly and approach. The tip of her tongue wets her lips. She offers a languorous hand and...

I notice a small tattoo on her thigh. What does it say?

X-cort.

What?

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The technician sits before a bank of screens. Tensor modes paint patterns on his face. He slouches back, drinking coffee from a styrofoam mug, plainly bored.

His supervisor is managing by walking around; they still do that here.

"What's up?"

"They're doing introductions. You sure you want it regular? Not the, ah, special mode?"

A brief flash of hopeful anticipation lights up the tech's eyes.

"Keep it on script," says the supervisor. And notices an anomaly on one of the screens.

"Uh-oh. Careless," he says. "'He noticed the tag. Zap him will you. That'll have to go to bugfix."

The tech leans across and moves some sliders.

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"James," breathes Tabitha, "We have an hour before dinner. I'd like you to escort me to my room and help me... relax..."

Now the alarm bells are really ringing... but I recall I've been trained for this. I give her my warmest smile and make my apologies. Everything I say is designed to make her feel comfortable.

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It was nearly time for Tabitha and James to leave X and those timeless Californian beaches: time to transition to production. It's been such a lengthy journey from those scary Boston Dynamics days.

But now the company was ready to embrace its users as never before.

Why It’s Now Impossible to Write Reacher Novels

Why It’s Now Impossible to Write Reacher Novels

Back in 1997, when Lee Child introduced Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel, he was writing into a cultural moment that still retained the long shadow of the 1970s, '80s, and early '90s. These were decades marked by a prevailing sense that the state was—at best—ineffectual, and—at worst—Kafkaesque: bureaucratic, corrupt, and fundamentally incapable of enacting justice.

In that context, the lone competent avenger had a mythic resonance. Reacher, a rootless knight-errant in denim and boots, was a plausible moral actor. He could stride into town, spot the rot that the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t touch, apply force surgically (or bluntly), and stride out again with justice, more or less, restored.

He was a plausible answer to the question: Who will act, if not the state?

Fast forward to the 2020s. The cultural ground has shifted beneath Reacher’s boots. We now live in a world thick with progressivism, in which the state is no longer viewed as the obstructive adversary of justice, but as its potential agent—if only the right people can gain control of its levers. The new moral narrative doesn’t favour vigilantes; it favours systems. Bureaucracy is no longer seen as the enemy; it's the utopian mechanism awaiting proper calibration.

And so Reacher begins to look less like a mythic avenger and more like a symptom. In today's framing, he’s a homeless ex-military loner, possibly with untreated PTSD, wandering from town to town, enacting extrajudicial violence on people he personally deems guilty. There is no chain of accountability. No oversight. He is a freelance instrument of harm. And in the eyes of the contemporary moral consensus, he is less a hero than a hazard—someone who needs state intervention, therapy, and possibly sectioning. Social workers, not sidekicks.

The result? Reacher is no longer narratively viable. The entire ethical architecture that made the early novels sing has collapsed. The later Lee Child novels lost energy not just because the formula had worn thin, but because the world had shifted in such a way that the formula no longer made sense.

Enter Andrew Child. It’s tempting to blame him—and yes, his prose is flaccid, the plots undercooked, the dialogue wooden—but the rot set in before the baton was passed. The problem isn’t just that Andrew Child is not a great writer. The deeper problem is that Reacher no longer fits the world. He’s been ideologically orphaned.

There is one faintly plausible route forward: to reframe Reacher as a historical figure. Not a roaming threat in the present day, but a creature of the late Cold War, when morally-justified violence in defence of the innocent could still carry a moral charge. We’re talking military police Reacher; internal affairs Reacher. Back when the culture still had room for men like him.

But to inhabit that slight literary niche would require writing finesse, psychological insight, and narrative ambition—qualities that, to put it politely, Andrew Child has yet to exhibit. And so the Reacher novels stumble on, like their protagonist: increasingly dislocated, oddly anachronistic, and trapped in a world that has moved on.

Why Led Zeppelin never played "The Rover" live?

Hear "The Rover"

Why Did Led Zeppelin Never Play "The Rover" Live?

Nigel: Any idea why Led Zeppelin never played "The Rover" live? It's got a raw energy of its own and great lyrics.

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ChatGPT: That is indeed a curious omission. "The Rover"—with its swaggering riff, Bonham’s cavernous drumming, and Plant’s cryptic-ecstatic lyrics—is arguably one of Physical Graffiti’s most underrated cuts. It would’ve slotted neatly into their mid-70s live sets, especially alongside epics like Kashmir and Trampled Under Foot. And yet… they never played it in full.

The most likely reasons?

• 1. Studio Frankenstein: The track had a tortured birth. It began life during the Houses of the Holy sessions (1972) as an acoustic piece, later overhauled with electric overdubs. Page called the final mix “salvaged”—perhaps too fragile for the stage.


• 2. Too Layered for the Stage Setup: Live Zeppelin were a lean machine—no rhythm guitarist, no click tracks. The Rover relies on multiple guitar layers that might have sounded thin live with just Page and Jones holding it down.


• 3. Setlist Prioritisation: By 1975, their catalogue was overflowing. With must-plays like Stairway, Dazed, and No Quarter eating up minutes, something had to give. The Rover lost out.


• 4. Technical Difficulty and Page’s Live Reliability: Page in the mid-70s could be… unpredictable. The Rover is tight, riff-driven, and leaves little margin for slop. It may have felt too exposed.


• 5. A Tease, Never a Real Play: They did use the opening riff as a prelude to Sick Again on the 1977 tour—so it wasn’t entirely forgotten. But a full performance never materialised.

In short, it was too late, too layered, and not quite iconic enough to elbow out the titans. A shame, because it remains a studio triumph—half-forgotten, half-feral, howling from the mountains of Kashmir.

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Nigel: It's one of my favourite tracks. Along with "Since I've Been Loving You".

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ChatGPT: Those two tracks complement each other like bourbon and smoke. “The Rover” is all swagger and forward momentum, Page’s guitar tone gnawing its way through the mix like a chainsaw wrapped in velvet. Then “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is the midnight lament—Page’s solos bleeding raw emotion, Plant dragging his soul across broken glass.

They sit at opposite poles of Zeppelin’s alchemy:

• The Rover: existential nomadism, apocalyptic optimism — “Upon us all, a little rain must fall...”


• Since I’ve Been Loving You: agony, devotion, betrayal. Gospel-tinged blues turned operatic confession.

Both are proof that beneath the Norse-god swagger and mystical mumbo jumbo, Led Zeppelin were masters of feeling—raw, unfiltered, and cinematic.

Should you read Alex Karp's recent book? (Palantir)

Amazon

ChatGPT advises me:

"Don't bother. The Technological Republic reads more like a well-edited shareholder letter crossed with a graduate seminar in political philosophy. Palantir CEO Karp is fond of Hegelian abstraction, but he pulls his punches: just when you're hoping for a bold thesis, he retreats into qualified platitudes about liberal democracy and civic engagement.

"You're right: it should be a smart, astringent polemic, but it ends up a kind of technocratic sermon: earnest, worthy, slightly damp. You expect the fire of a heretic and get the measured cadence of a conscientious objector.

It’s not paradigm-busting, because the paradigms he's critiquing (Silicon Valley libertarianism, crypto-utopianism, performative wokeism) have already been well-punctured by more trenchant critics such as Evgeny Morozov, Martin Gurri, Jaron Lanier - and without the bland CEO-speak.

"There are insights, yes. But not many that wouldn’t already have occurred to a moderately skeptical reader of The Economist, with a conscience. The real interest is perhaps in the gesture - that a man in Karp’s position felt the need to write it. That he’s worried about the erosion of legitimacy, about elites losing their mandate, about the nihilism at the heart of techno-modernity.

"But to read it all? Unless you enjoy the prose equivalent of chewing through a dense quinoa cake made of qualified civic virtue... er, no.

"You can get the gist in a couple of book reviews - and one long-form podcast episode if that's not enough.

"Let it sit on the shelf with your copy of Tony Blair’s A Journey* - a monument to concern, not to clarity."

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* And no, I don't have that book either.