Been off for a few days. Went to a birthday party at the weekend, at a pub I haven’t set foot in for almost forty years.
Partway down the Little Wakering Road. Go allll the way down that road and you’re into Barling Magna, where I lived with a girl for a year. We used to go to this pub for lunch at the weekends.
ACCESSIONS:
Ordered a bunch of magazines from the excellent MagCulture that arrived yesterday.
I do appreciate a thoughtful bit of packaging.
MONOCLE is there because I haven’t read an issue of it in about fifteen years and I was simply curious. I’ve read EYE and REAL REVIEW before. The others are new to me.
I need new inputs. And there are kinds of input you can only get from print. Going back to the source and back to analogue means going back to small magazines.
STATUS: after a crappy couple of days, I am trying to pull my focus together. READING:RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+). LISTENING: Ultimate Calm with Erland Cooper ft: Claire Rousay PAPERWORK: (pens pencils paper etc with amz)
Autumn is creeping in step by step. Colder starts to the day, now. The managed retreat begins. Played yesterday with Dirty Little Zine for making tiny photobooks to clip into notebooks. Dropped a frankly absurd amount of money on a shipment of magazines from Magculture.
The Real Danger May Be AI as Dumb as Us: “Some of the most concerning security risks from AI may come not from super intelligence but from what researchers sometimes call “jagged intelligence,” the way in which models can appear to be vastly more knowledgeable than humans in many respects but still lag bafflingly behind what we’d call common sense.”
OPERATIONS:all the things. My to-do list is ridiculous. STATUS: awaiting a delivery of stationery items and peering unhappily at my bank balance READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
I saw a straight razor and strop, plus a toothbrush stuck in a half pint of vodka. Stalin brushed his teeth with vodka.
This is the face of a mancub who blames me specifically for the drop in temperature and the loss of the sun.
I have sympathy: it’s dark and rainy, and so is my mood.
THE RUMOURS that emerged sounded like the opening of a thriller. A young woman working in a Siberian research lab supposedly breaks a test tube containing a lethal plague pathogen. She is dead within 48 hours. Authorities race to contain the situation. The questions outnumber the answers, breeding suggestions of conspiracy. The fears may prove unfounded: there may not have been a leak at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. But the world can be forgiven for its panicked interest.
STATUS: it’s an offline day – work and housework during day, out tonight READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
I said, “Have you ever had a hotfoot, Reggie?” Reggie laughed. His sidemen laughed. They went say what? in sync. I poured the bottle of scotch on his shoes. I flicked my lighter and dropped it on his feet. His shoes and socks immolated. His trouser cuffs torched. He screeched. I smelled scorched flesh. He flailed for a water glass. I tossed it out of reach. His trumpet man snatched at a belt piece. I caught his hand and pinned it flat to the table. I grabbed a steak knife and stabbed through flesh and tabletop. The blade severed bones and went in half hilt deep.
the Trump administration is turning to a new clique of defence upstarts that are reimagining how to wage war. They are led by Palantir, a software giant providing intelligence systems; SpaceX, whose Starshield satellite network provides reconnaissance and connectivity; and Anduril, an up-and-coming favourite that makes air and sea drones alongside anti-drone weaponry. This trio of so-called “neo-primes” have close ties with gung-ho figures in the Trump administration. And they are making the giants of the military-industrial complex increasingly nervous.
America’s legacy “prime” contractors have, in the government’s telling, grown stodgy, overpriced and risk-averse as a result of their lucrative sinecures. “If the [newcomers] are good and they get their sea legs, they’re going to win some of that business that otherwise would have gone through a traditional prime,” Mr Michael says.
n case you haven’t gotten around to reading Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, (because why would you do that to yourself?), the company best known for supplying AI-driven defense and surveillance software to the likes of the US Army, ICE and NYPD shared a 1,000-word X post this weekend covering its main points. The entire thing is both bizarre and deeply concerning. “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal,” one of the 22 points states. “It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”
The book is billed as “a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality,” and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: “Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public”; “National service should be a universal duty”; “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone”; and “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”
The Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, run by the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) at the University of Barcelona and led by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, has identified a papyrus containing a fragment of Homer’s “Iliad” inside a Roman-era tomb dating to approximately 1,600 years ago, in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, ancient Oxyrhynchus. The discovery is exceptional: it is the first time in the history of archaeology that a Greek literary text has been found deliberately incorporated into the mummification process
My colleagues’ takes are often quite diverse, but this year a chorus has emerged — of strategists proclaiming 2026 to be the year of nostalgia. Wired headphones, workwear (back, so soon), medievalcore, landlines for kids, #90s TikTok. Reading this year’s reports, I find myself agreeing with the observations — nostalgia is big right now, and there’s an opportunity for brands to tap into it.
But I also see nostalgia not just as a passing 2026 trend but a full-scale, post-digital revival — one that’s been a long time coming and will last beyond the end of the year.
OPERATIONS: aiming for another ten pages, plus other stuff STATUS: incoming, new plants for the local wildlife to destroy before I can get them in the ground READING: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: rewatched several episodes of TWIN PEAKS Season 3.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Leipzig, Germany-based artist Alexander Endrullat has traded traditional Intaglio printing plates for discarded laptops. His ongoing series titled Off the Grid emerged from a familiar yet annoying scenario: owning an older device that can no longer be updated, rendering it practically unusable. Endrullat’s frustration led him to a moment of impulsivity as he pushed his device through a printing press, coincidentally discovering the distinctive technique.
I’m fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and have followed for years various theories about what was in the drink that was consumed there. Ergot has often been floated as the active ingredient, but ergotism fucks people up and can easily be fatal:
The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret religious rites in ancient Greece honoring the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and aimed to remove the fear of death. The ceremonies included days of fasting, rituals and the drinking of kykeon, a concoction associated with profound mystical experiences.
While written records list ingredients such as barley, mint and water, some scholars have proposed that the potion also contained hallucinogenic substances derived from ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Now, scientists have new experimental evidence that priestesses may have used this highly toxic fungus to create psychedelic hallucinations.
Briefly opened IG and decided that’s a bad idea. If IG is a drug, it’s a crap one. Rediscovering following the brush to some extent. From the Kluge book I’m currently reading:
Commentaries are not linear narratives. They work vertically. They are mines, catacombs. The working form of commentary is closer to the idea of collecting than to that of shaping. Closer to the poetics of the Brothers Grimm than the dramatic or novelistic form. Putting this particular form of narration to the test excites me.
Not least respect for the principle of FRAGMENTATION, respect for the particular and for the individual (and its defence against the merely generally available), speaks for attempting something like this over and over. Observing our ‘torn reality’ grants permission to the incomplete message.
To keep up with the algorithmic behemoths of the Big Five in Silicon Valley, any modest means will do.
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
Accessions:
This has been sitting in my wishlist for a while, and last night I decided to pull the trigger, because sometimes you’re just in the mood for a great writer writing about writing.
OPERATIONS: across several things today STATUS: Today’s watch is the Dan Henry, which is a strong signal that I’m going to be pretty disconnected READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING: great episode of Night Tracks
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Big fog day. I remember a morning, not long after I started school – probably five years old, maybe six – blanketed in thick fog. Got to school, and my classroom was a couple of floors up. And everyone was at the windows. Because the top of the fogbank was lower than the height we were at, so we could look down on the roof of the fog, and it was like walking around above the clouds. I remember that sense of surreal altitude, and that we were seeing something rare. We just walked upstairs to look down at the tops of clouds.
A recent NATO report defined cognitive warfare as the “manipulation of the enemy’s cognition,” involving “the use of all knowledge, strategies, and available tools to impact human behavior…. with the end goal of manipulating and altering decision-making.” Under this definition, the systems associated with technological innovation offer ripe pickings for cognitive-style warfare. Now that humans have fashioned this highly vulnerable domain, defined by the ever-deepening and increasingly structured union of humans and machines, we can no longer ignore the opportunities and threats we have built into it.
Cognitive warfare. “The Innovation System as a Disruptive Battlespace,” sure, great title. But. COGNITIVE WARFARE.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
I suspect that there are various spirits within me. My sister and my father are two among many. They haunt me on different floors and almost never at the same moment.
OPERATIONS: Basically, all the things. STATUS: One of those days where you just wake up exhausted. It’s a damp day. Email is full of delivery notifications. Also I have to start wrapping Xmas gifts and do a small repair on a sack – a few years ago I bought a personalised gifts sack for herself from Fortnum’s, and one of the letters of her name has started peeling off. Am I the arse who buys personalsed large gift sacks from Fortnum and Mason? I am. READING: THE CELESTIAL HUNTER, Roberto Calasso LISTENING: UNCLASSIFIED LAST WATCHED: A episode and a half of THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA, which I do not need to see any more of
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The Dash was a privateer schooner that vanished in 1815 and soon entered local legend as a ghost ship.
For over two centuries, eerie sightings of the Dash have tied it to omens of death and supernatural lore.
By blending history, poetry, and folklore, the ship’s story has become one of New England’s most enduring maritime hauntings.
Here’s a “Dr. Strangelove”-sounding idea: drop three consecutive nuclear missileson the same target.
The Chinese military simulated this shock and awe scenario in a miniaturized lab experiment in order to see what kind of damage would happen, according to the South China Morning Post, and published their findings earlier this month in the science journal, Explosion and Shock Waves.
They found that striking a target with multiple nuclear munitions in rapid succession leaves a bigger crater and causes way more destruction than a single detonation — duh — but the scientists claim that the research is relevant because it’s the first laboratory test to accurately simulate the damage from such a brutal attack.
But the true value from this test is probably that the military could glean data from the paper to build better bunkers that could withstand such anapocalyptic situation — a matter that’s on everybody’s mind as China and the United States size up each other’s weapons arsenal amid rising geopolitical tension.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons – identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.
…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.
if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.
And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.
We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.
Don’t be put off by the list of acronyms in the front. I didn’t have to refer to it once, because Fishman takes pains all the way through to keep clarity and context. It is a really well written book, very readable, very well structured, very recommended.
Supercat in flight here is rolling around on the lawn in the late summer sun, after having come to get me at 10.10 to tell me it’s morning and he needs his snack before we go outside. And then drooling on my face when I gave him some fuss.
OPERATIONS: I have to lock down the newsletter and ten pages of script today, no time to fart around. And I just got two big chunks of art to look through, which I probably need to do first. STATUS: Inbox 98, barely 7 hours sleep, Gmail on iOS has stopped popping notifications AGAIN. Today I am back in a heavy workshirt for the first time since the end of May, as the chill starts creeping in. Putting the Apple Watch on because I have a feeling I’m going to need help keeping up today…. READING: OUR DEBTS TO THE PAST by Ed James (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Dark Ambient Noisescapes
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