As a lifelong fan of the New York Knicks I can’t help feeling quite excited about their recent victory in the American professional basketball championships, their first in 53 years. Here’s a film about it:
And here’s Mayor Mamdani’s celebration speech, another good one:
A joyous midsummer to you all!
Stuart Russell is a new columnist for the Guardian and one of those rare individuals who is a highly competent scientist with a strong sense of social responsibility and to judge from wikipedia, he seems to know what he’s talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell
Let’s hope he can help us find ways to control the AI genie as it grows more dangerous every day. As he puts it in his first column:
“The kind of regulation we need is not new: a licensing regime that requires a minimum safety standard before a system can be built and released. This is how we handle nuclear power, airplanes, buildings, elevators, hairdressers and sandwich makers. Is it too much to ask of trillion-dollar AI corporations, who claim to be building the most dangerous technology in history?”
Here’s the whole article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/17/anthropic-ai-rsi-fable
*****
We’ll be open tomorrow but closed on Friday and Saturday and next Thursday, as well, to celebrate the coming of summer. After all it only comes once a year.
One of the real pleasures of living in Malmö has been my weekly – and sometimes more – visits to the restaurant, Davidshall, which is just down the street from our apartment and where a good beer and a good meal and a few laughs were always available, and just the right way to relax after a busy afternoon at the shop. So if you haven’t been there and even if you have you really owe yourself the chance to partake of one last dinner there before the place closes at the end of June. Thanks Sascha and Oleh for the delicious memories!
Some years back Thomas Piketty, a French economist, published a book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, which explained and documented the rise of global inequality. Unlike most academic books, it managed to reach a large audience and helped to change the way that economics was perceived in the wider world. Now he and his colleagues in Paris at the World Inequality Lab have published a report that shows what can be done about global inequality:
Here is the whole report:
https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world
Pope Leo has released his first encyclical – about artificial intelligence – and let us hope that it might have some real influence in the real world. It is something that used to be common practice among governments and “think tanks” and universities, as well as churches and many other institutions both formal and informal, namely a “technology assessment”.
As a professor in technology, environment and society in Denmark, I was actively involved in many a technology assessment – it was much more common practice there than in Sweden – and part of my job was to teach engineering students about TA and help them carry out their own assessments by learning to take into account the broader contexts of their technical projects (you can read about it in my books, Hubris and Hybrids and The Making of Green Engineers). Believe it or not, there was even once an Office of Technology Assessment within the hallowed halls of the United States Congress that produced reports on information technology and biotechnology and many other so-called emerging technologies until it was shut down in the early 2000s, as were similar offices elsewhere. As technological development morphed into “Bigtech” its promoters stopped wanting to be assessed and saw to it that they weren’t.
The idea behind TA was to investigate the pros and cons of new technological developments in a comprehensive manner, with the participation of a wide range of “experts”, even the likes of me, whose expertise was mainly in criticizing and questioning the ways technology was being developed. Such technology assessments were routinely carried out in several countries and in the European Union itself as part of the official policy-making process, and they often included government-funded programs to facilitate a variety of forms of what was termed “public engagement”. Rather than jailing critics it was once common practice for policy-makers to listen to what they had to say. Oh those were the days!
Anyway, it’s good to see that technology assessment still exists, at least at the Vatican. One of the few bright spots in the world these days is the willingness of the new pope to take on the challenges that humanity faces and actually provide some leadership and moral guidance even, or perhaps especially, for us non-believers. Now let us see if all the Catholics out there will actually follow their leader’s lead and take some meaningful steps to control, regulate and further assess artificial intelligence, the new tower of Babel that the pope refers to in the encyclical.
Here’s a piece by Jill Lepore that provides a good introduction to the encyclical:
And here is the encyclical itself:
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.htm
And here’s Pete’s old song that encapsulates its message:
They make a lovely pair, the lilies of the valley and the wild strawberries and when they bloom together it’s hard not to count your blessings and think that better times are on the way, which brings to mind another Eva Cassidy song.
It’s too early for the barley in Sting’s song but the rape fields are at their golden best this time of year in southern Sweden. Here’s one right near our country house.
And yesterday I walked through a meadow with another shade of gold at Tjörnedala in Baskemölla.
The British newspaper The Guardian, which has become my main source of information these days as most other newspapers have succumbed to the bad taste and bad vibes that characterize our times, has asked a number of writers and critics to choose what they consider to be the ten best novels published in English and, from those lists, has compiled a longer list of the top 100 best novels of all time. I am pleased to see that we have many of them in the shop and actually sold three of them yesterday. So take a look and come and get ’em.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time
A young woman came into the shop yesterday and asked if I had any books about Joe Hill and I said I did and showed them to her – a biography and a novel – and we started talking and listening to records – I had Finn Zetterholm’s Joe Hill record which she had never heard – and I asked if she knew that Phil Ochs had written a song about Joe Hill and she said she did and that she really liked his songs and that it was a pity that he was so forgotten, which was music to my ears as those who know me or have followed this blog can well understand.
And since yesterday, April 9 was the very day 50 years ago that Phil Ochs killed himself it seems only fitting to honor his memory by playing his song about Joe Hill.
As they both would have said, don’t mourn, organize. Rest in peace, Phil. Here’s a documentary about him.
Eileen Laurie will be in the shop tomorrow night with a display of her artwork – linocuts and risoprints using plant dyes, as well as pen and ink paintings and watercolours – that will be on sale at Andy’s Corner. So do come by and take a look!
AndrewJamison