Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, ⊕ [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is a testatemnt to how good it was that I finished it. More than that: I am eager to read it again.

Re-reading is necessary to make more sense of the whirlwind of names, dates and events that are just too darn similar, even with Palmer’s attempts to give them cute and memorable nicknames. I know there was a Battle Pope, and a Battle Pope 2, and a very very very (…) bad Pope, but would I be able to tell you their actual names and origin stories?

Fortunately, the thickest, middle part of the book — a bit of a slog, going through biographies of 15 people, some of whom I was already familiar with, most of them new — was there mostly to make the ending more understandable, even if you weren’t on a first-name basis with the protagonists. And the ending is a breezy 200 pages that could have been a book of its own, about virtue, politics, virtue politics, great forces, great people, progress, “progress”, and plagues ancient and modern.

Less fortunately for me, this is the kind of book that makes you want to read many more. The recommended reading list looks absolutely delicious, never mind that I am now watching out for a good translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. Ars longa…

The book is a quick read if you are familiar with Doctorow’s other writings, and/or have listened to a few of his interviews. He is nothing if not consistent and, in the case of AI, consistently correct.

Style

You may, if you feel particularly carmudgeonly, argue that this is a book that could have been a blog post. You would be off by only a degree: each chapter does in fact resemble a piece or three from Pluralistic, his decades-old blog. You may notice that each daily article there starts off with an appropriate picture collage of Doctorow’s own making. “Reverse Centaur’s Guide” is his blog post collage. But he is so good at hiding the seams.

Substance

No arguments there. AI of the day, which is to say LLMs, are a real technology with real uses that is overhyped beyond any reason. Unless Anthropic and/or OpenAI do great a general supper-intelligence — which they won’t — we will witness (if we are lucky) or suffer their fall.

There are now material ways in which LLMs have improved my life.

At work, it is mostly by transcribing the first patient visits so that I can focus on listening to the person in front of me rather than scribbling in a notepad or staring at a screen while nodding my head pretending I am paying attention. ⊕ [Note: It is not that you get worse at multitasking with age, it is that you realize you were never particularly good at it so you stop pretending. ] Occassionally, for someone recently discharged and with a million notes, tests, and imaging data in the aftermath of their hospitalization, I may use EPIC’s crude but useful built-in summarization tool. I will even use OpenEvidence in preparation for a visit, but I maintain that free and unrestricted search through NCCN, NEJM and JAMA archives would have yielded the same result, and with fewer linguistics tics.

Personally, I have barely moved from my original use case, which was solving household problems. Having installed Meta’s Muse, sandboxed, locked out of any personal information, I do understand agents have their uses:

• Sorting out children’s school emails from two different institutions and for three separate grades and turning them into something actionable.
• Filtering out automated consulting requests and pre-filling answers on availability and general experience.
• Dealing with the administrative wonders that are part of being a small landlord in DC.

In other words, infrastructure-of-life stuff, the exact opposite of what the big mind of Muse espoused. Plans for self-hosting are in progress.

If your reaction to the above was largely negative, you should read the book. Doctorow makes a much better case than I ever could for why it is not morally abhorent to use this new technology. After all, are you boycotting the interstate system because Hitler championed the first autobahn?

📚️ Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino helped me clarify why I liked some authors and not others. ⊕ [Note: Incidentally, M. John Harrison’s latest book is on the short list for the Booker prize this year. I eagerly await October 13 and its US debut. ] There are in fact five memos, named in order Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. The final one, Consistency, was not to be: Calvino died, aged 61, before finishing.

The more I think about Dan Wang’s book Breakneck the less I think of it. Wang presents America as a country of lawyers — orderly, slow, nothing gets done — and China as a country of engineers, moving fast and breaking things, some of the breakages being described in detail. If only America was ruled more by engineers, or China had more lawyers involved, and we’d have two great countries instead of two deeply flawed ones.

I would suggest that the true dichotomy Wang described is not one between lawyers and engineers, but one between rule of law and rule by law. If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

📚Still reading Inventing the Renaissance, and Lorenzo de Medici’s brother Giuliano of course had a mention. Still, I wasn’t prepared for his bust being quite so metal.

This is at the (not Smithsonian!) National Art Gallery in DC, which has a rich collection of renaissance works.

📚 Some 18th century childhood doodles in a 17th century William Shakespeare first folio, as seen in the Folger collection. Kids will be kids!

Glenn Fleishman is singlehandedly keeping me interested in Kickstarter. Just this week he has set up another campaign: the proposed book title is “That One Matt Bors Comic” and it is a book about a meme which was supposedly viral but I don’t remember seeing until two days ago. Still, the concept is interesting and I would like to learn more.

And just as I finished backing Fleishman’s, I noticed that Cory Doctorow also a campaign. It is for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a book based on a similarly-named essay about “reverse centaurs” — people whose job it is to augment AI instead the other way around — i.e., potentially, all of us proles. Yes, even doctors. Particularly doctors.

Note that the anti-enshittification (anti-platform?) crusader Doctorow used Kickstarter. The company is indeed a “public benefit corporation” of around 60 employees and an interesting history of unionization. A dissenting opinion from senior staff that forming a union would be “misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers” is a delightful example of cognitive dissonance in people who tell themselves that they are good but also want to run a successful business.

Another Mother’s Day treat: a 40-minute video essay about “The Giving Tree”. Before watching, “The Giving Tree” was one of my least favorite children’s books — hate may not be too strong of a word to describe how I felt about it — but it is in fact nuanced, intentionally sad, and perfect starting material for some serious conversations.

The author, Shel Silverstein, seems to have been quite the character and I would now very much like to get his book of children’s poetry which has some fascinating illustrations. He also wrote the words for “A Boy Named Sue” and was an accomplished musician himself, though from the brief soundbite I heard his voice is an acquired taste.

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

📚 Finished reading: Dark Gods by T. E. D. Klein, a short story collection you’d get if you transported H.P. Lovecraft from 1920s New England to 1980s New York City, then asked him to water down the weirdness and narrow the horror from Cosmic to Upper East Side. Which is to say, I wasn’t impressed.