The UK government has ‘agreed to drop’ their demand for access to Apple user data, says the US

A timely comment in the FT on the UK security / government agencies.

Underlying problem: poor culture of hiding incompetent public snooping behind a veil of secrecy.

20 years back their public image was like James Bond; now it’s Slow Horses (ironically an Apple TV product)

Amen.

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once. James Joyce on Paris.

Question: Would I make more progress on my book if I decamped? ‘Why think, just do the experiment!’ was John Hunter’s advice to Edward Jenner (of vaccination fame). Hmm.

Blighty newsletter: Are 100m Britons too many?

Wales could certainly benefit from more inhabitants. Its 3.2m people are outnumbered three-to-one by sheep. The country’s population density of 150 people per square kilometre places it 44th in the world, sandwiched between Ghana and Indonesia. Wales could happily welcome a few million more, and few people would notice. Live in Abergavenny and want to find a mate that isn’t woolly? Probably best to go to London. 

Operation Rubific, the portrait of failure

“There are two kinds of British scandal. The old kind resemble the plays of Henrik Ibsen: studies of character failings and personal humiliation brought about by greed, desire and dishonesty. Think of the disgrace of John Profumo, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken. The new owe more to Joseph Heller: portraits of institutional failure, in which the craven, the cynical and the helpless are trapped in crises they cannot control.

They are less salacious but far more corrosive, and they have piled up at alarming speed: from the negligence that saw patients treated with disease-ridden blood products to the bureaucratic inertia that led to the fire at Grenfell Tower and the fumbled response to the covid-19 pandemic. On July 15th another was exposed. In the High Court Sir Martin Chamberlain cancelled a super-injunction, applied contra mundum (against everyone), which had rendered a government programme called Operation Rubific a state secret…

The court papers read like a parody of 1950s Whitehall: low-level incompetence, an impulse to secrecy, a fixation with upholding institutional reputations and an aversion to accountability. The only riddle is which part of the state emerges most damaged…

The pattern of recent institutional scandals is unmistakable. They begin with low-level carelessness. Crises are massaged rather than confronted; a preoccupation with the “optics” of a policy triumphs over whether the policy is any good. So often, the first instinct of officialdom is to cover up, and then to lawyer up, and then, when that strategy is exhausted, to reach for the chequebook. And even then, names go unnamed; no one gets fired; and no one, ever, takes the blame.”

And still it will go on, and on. The Economist

Nicole Flattery · Priests are human too: John Broderick’s ‘Pilgrimage’

Colm Tóibín remembers seeing Broderick in the bar of Buswells Hotel in Dublin: ‘He was wearing a beautifully cut three-piece suit with elaborate stripes. He was alone and he looked desolate.’ He remained a Catholic throughout his life and even considered a late vocation to the priesthood, but instead descended into alcoholism.

“Yuppies” | Iain Sinclair |LRB

The Filofax will lie in peace alongside the weaver’s bobbin.

Iain Sinclair in the London Review of Books v 14 number 27 February 1992. Reprinted in the LRB 2025 diary.

My father who worked for William Collins (stationers and publishers) would have loved that I read this in a desk diary rather than the abomination that was the Filofax.

The Parrot in the Machine | James Gleick | The New York Review of Books

I retired just as COVID happened. I would like to claim omniscience, but it was just luck or the repaying of debts by the lord creator. Although I am a long time FaceTime user, I describe myself as being part of the preZoom or preTEAMS generation. I have also stayed away from LLMs (large language models), although I had a professional interest in AI and (image) diagnosis in dermatology for a couple of decades.

The following is from the ever insightful James Gleick.

Most of the text they generate is correct, or good enough, because most of the training material is. But chatbot “writing” has a bland, regurgitated quality. Textures are flattened, sharp edges are sanded. No chatbot could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog comes on little cat feet (though they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). And when synthetically extruded text turns out wrong, it can be comically wrong. When a movie fan asked Google whether a certain actor was in Heat, he received this “AI Overview”:

No, Angelina Jolie is not in “heat.” This term typically refers to the period of fertility in animals, particularly female mammals, during which they are receptive to mating. Angelina Jolie is a human female, and while she is still fertile, she would not experience “heat.”

Nature Briefing

Who says facts are dull and boring?

For more than 90% of our planet’s history, it was without oxygen — and thus without flames. That’s one of that revelations that have stuck with science writer Laura Poppick after writing her new book, Strata.

Matt Stoller on monopoly power

The Water Cooler Giant Primo Brands: When Customer Service Signs Off as ‘Joseph Stalin’

Over the past couple of months, several readers encouraged me to look into a company called Primo Brands, America’s number one seller of bottled water, or in its own corporate-speak, “healthy and sustainable hydration solutions.”

EU retaliation against Trump drug tariffs would be bad idea, says industry | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

Oelrich said data showed that a quarter of drugs in the past 10 years approved by FDA in the US had not made it to Europe because of non-tariff barriers, such as differing national regulations and pricing. “Many of the biotech companies are not even bothering engaging in Europe. For them it makes no sense,” he said.

Amazing: deciding how much you are willing to pay for a drug is viewed as a non-tariff barrier. It’s called the market.