by Ken Auletta

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After Saving The City, I thought it would be interesting to read about the collapse of 2008 and the failure of Shearson. Instead, I accidentally grabbed this well-written book about the Lehman Brothers’s decision to sell itself to American Express in 1983. This is a nicely-written take of feudal revolt in a staid Wall Street institution, with lots of infighting between bankers and traders. A good read, but irrelevant to the questions I wanted to pursue.

by Richard Roberts

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Revisited this fine book on a day when, once again, the world’s financial machinery appeared to be breaking down. A significant difference now is that the people in charge are fools and poltroons, some of them actively seeking to end civilization.

Here’s what I wrote before:

A fascinating and detailed study of the financial crisis that struck London in 1914 and engulfed the world. World Trade in 1914 was highly globalized – far more so than at any time before, and world trade only surpassed this mark recently. Back then, the Pound Sterling was the international reference currency, all major currencies were pegged explicitly to gold and implicitly to sterling, and trade was based on bills that could be settled for sterling in London and subsequently converted at the Bank of England to gold. (In practice, settled bills went into accounts and gold was only shipped for arbitrage.)

The problem was that, as war approached, everyone wanted safety, and so everyone bought up London bills. There were soon no bills available, and that meant if you wanted to make a routine transaction, like paying for a shipload of shirts you’d ordered, you couldn’t: you could have plenty of money but you couldn’t get any of the de facto international currency because there wasn’t any to get.

It’s a complex and technical story with some interesting characters, and Roberts tells it skillfully.

Amiability and the Web: lessons from Red Vienna and the origin of computing. a paper I’ll present at the 2025 ACM WWW Conference in Sydney on April 30.

From 1919 to 1934, the socialist city government of Vienna fostered a remarkable increase in art, public architecture, and scholarship despite desperate economic conditions. Throughout this period, the Vienna Circle, a philosophical discussion group, examined with new rigor the question of what can be known. Their work built the theoretical foundations of computing. Much of this work was carried out in Vienna’s distinctive cafés. This was not a quaint idiosyncrasy; the cafés were in the business of amiability. Parallels to the early Web and its precursors are not difficult to find, and the collapse of Red Vienna may parallel the current predicament of the Web.

When I wrote this last Fall, I was alarmed but did not foresee the collapse of institutions and the coarsening of public life on and off the Web that has already overtaken us.

by David Chang

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This memoir by David Chang. the chef behind Momofuku, is dominated by Chang’s chronic and nearly unmanageable depression. A problem is that Chang is a very thoughtful fellow with some very intriguing ideas about food, and these keep being pushed to the side as he writes about the experience of being depressed. It’s hard to find a narrative shape to depression, and Chang’s insights on the topic are limited.

A fascinating, lively, and rather hostile post-mortem of Doug Lenat’s CYC, by Yuxi Liu.

by Christine Brennan

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A portrait of U.S. Figure Skating at the end of the 20th century, the years after Harding/Kerrigan and just before the Salt Lake City Olympics made the old, corrupt 6-point scoring system insupportable. The early chapters have a certain air of John McPhee with quick cuts and interesting pacing. Later, as the World Championships approach, the book veers more closely to a sports exposé, and ultimately the author herself is declared persona non grata by the figure skating officials. Her employer, The Washington Post, fought hard for her, and her numerous colleagues rallied behind her; the past is a foreign country.

I spent the last six days at the World Figure Skating Championships, which showed up here in Boston. It doesn’t happen every day. It was a ton of fun.

I knew almost nothing about figure skating when we bought the tickets last year. I tried to study, although that was inevitably less successful than I’d hoped. Here are some observations.

• I spent a good deal of effort trying to learn to recognize the jumps: toe loop, loop, flip, Salchow, Lutz, and Axel. This was a mistake. First, distinguishing jumps is hard because they happen fast. The speed is more evident in the arena than it is on video, where the camera focuses more tightly on the skater. But, in terms of the sport, distinguishing jumps doesn’t matter much. You do need to recognize the easiest jump (toe loop) and the hardest (Axel). The others are roughly interchangeable: a triple Salchow is worth 4.3 points, a triple Lutz is worth 5.9, and there were 148.39 points in Alyssa Liu’s long program.
• There is some very fine skating in the early groups, which never get shown on television. I also thoroughly enjoyed attending practice sessions, and would have gone to more of them if I had the endurance. The Boston Garden’s seats are OK for an arena, but competition was more than eight hours a day, and one must sleep occasionally.
• Jeremy Jacobs owns Boston Garden. He’s not popular with sports journalists, or with me. There was a lot of cheese-paring visible at the World’s: for example, doors opened only 30 minutes before events, which is not sufficient time to admit 17,000 people with lines running around the block. $13.00 hot dogs — bad $13 hot dogs — are absurd. They pretend that each concession stand is a separate business with artisanal this and that, but they’re all the same and they all have the same (absurd) prices. $8 root beer? The afternoon and evening sessions are so close together that no one can get dinner other than those $13 hot dogs. The Garden did open a pair of water bubblers if you knew where to look, but hid them in order to sell $6 Coke-branded water.
• Most breaks were wasted with silliness and ads for skin care products en Français. This could, in my view, be better used by providing pointers to future events, to local skating organizations, and more history. Tenley Albright and Kristi Yamaguchi are right there, and might have interesting things to say.
• Fans agree: kiss and cry is intrusive but it's part of the thing, but the “leader’s chair” is just sadism. That said, one gets the impression that the skaters like each other well enough. That may be acting — a necessary legacy of Harding/Kerrigan — but if it’s acting, they do it well.
• Lots of cheers for the Ukrainian skaters, and also for skaters from Israel.
• I was lucky to find (via Reddit) an excellent Discord of welcoming Figure Skating enthusiasts started for figure skating podcast The Roundup.
• Jackie Wong @rockerskating, provides an amazing service. He attends the warmup programs and the competition and tweets, almost in real time, what jumps people are attempting and what happened. In practice groups, he sometimes records the jumps by the four or five skaters noodling on the ice and waiting their turn. It’s cryptic but not hard to learn, and it really helps to get a feel for what you’re seeing.
• Figure skating fans uniformly use the skaters’ first names or initials: it’s always Alyssa and Ilia, never Liu and Malinin. This can be even more cryptic than learning that 3L(u,step) means that the skater didn’t get around on the triple Lutz and had to use the free foot to prevent a fall. “I’m sitting next to Minerva” is not a sentence I expected to see.
• Figure skating fans are quite involved in long-term narratives and dramas surrounding their favorite skaters, and their favorites are not necessarily the people who spend a lot of time on the podium. Jason Brown, for example: he skated a clean free skate with no hope of winning, but people were absolutely delighted. See also Wakaba Higuchi. Also Deniss Vasiljevs (Latvia).
• Ilia Malinin, on the other hand, is obviously a generational talent. In a sport in which the winner is frequently determined by a margin of a fraction of a point, he won the Men’s competition by 31 points, and this margin surprised no one.
• Figure Skating needs a really good blogger.
• Skaters often come out into the arena, either to watch or to loosen up outside the confines of the locker room. This doesn’t happen in other sports: you never see Tanner Houck in the bleachers.
• At the concluding exhibition, a pairs team (I think Metelkina and Berulava from Georgia) did a wonderful gender-reversed program. Pairs rules are frankly sexist and really ought to be revised, but in this climate it takes some courage to say so. And it takes some athleticism for a small woman to throw a 6'1 man for a loop.
• One of the welcoming fans from the Discord group mentioned that the sport owes a debt to 3-time champion Kaori Sakomoto (silver medalist this time) for taking the focus off child abuse and the 2022 Olympic meltdown. In a real sense, the sport is still trying to find a solution to the scandal of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, where corruption in judging upended the sport. The new format is better, but I wonder whether there is a proper sport waiting to be facilitated by better structure.

by Michael Kempe

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We know that some things are connected. For example, Mark Bernstein is the author of the weblog that you are reading. (And that sentence connects in a different way to the opening of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter night a traveller.) That some things are connected to other things cannot be denied, but are these connections exceptional and instrumental, or are they ubiquitous? As a rule, I find that people who believe in ubiquitous connection embrace tools like Tinderbox, while those who disagree do not.

Leibniz (1646-1716) remains a central figure in the philosophical question of connectionism. Postulating that God is perfect and perfectly kind, Leibniz tried to deduce the natural laws that would follow. Famously, he reasoned that a perfect God would not create an inferior universe, nor one that inflicted unnecessary suffering on its inhabitants: ours must be the best of all possible worlds. Because stupidity and suffering are not hard to find, Leibniz concludes that they must be necessary, and intuits that they are necessary because paradise would not be paradise unless it were achieved by universal effort. So, for Leibniz, everything must be connected because it is God’s plan not to build a garden for his creation, but to allow his creation to build a better one.

In his work on automatic calculators and on languages, Leibniz discovered the trick of representing any text as a very large number. This is one of the crucial connections that Gödel and then Turing made in demonstrating the incompleteness of formal systems. Leibniz didn’t quite get there — he did not quite figure out that there is more than one infinity, and that focus on the one perfect God was a distratction. Still, Leibniz did understand that, if the events in life could be represented as texts (like the Sybil’s book), then eventually everything (and everyone) happening right now would happen again. (Leibniz eventually embraced the alternative view that events must be continuous in the way time seems to be, more like the Fate’s weaving than the Sybil’s writing.)

Petit mode d’emploi des médias sociaux à l’usage des personnes malveillantes, in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances.

by Alina Adams

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I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca “Bex” Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice doesn’t quite meet the technical requirements of the genre: there is no second body. Nor is it a thriller, because Bex never really leaves her element; she’s an intelligent and (mildly) analytical observer of a sport and a medium for which she feels little affinity, and even when she’s most worried, her concerns are chiefly about losing a job that she doesn’t much like. We have good — even great — books that flutz the formal requirements of the mystery, but I found it odd here because figure skating is so concerned with formal requirements.

The sclerotic idiocy of the American Labor movement will be on full display at the World Figure Skating Championships.

After their favorite skaters perform, some skating fans like to give them stuffed animals. Often, they make or modify these “plushies” for their particular skater. For example, one young woman has designed and sewn a plush Amber Glenn doll for Amber Glenn.

The Boston Garden is prohibiting stuffed animals, citing an agreement with the vendor union. Stuffed animals will instead be sold inside the arena. The unhappy attendees are calling this plushiegate.

Sure, this preserves union jobs — perhaps as much as 1/10 of a minimum-wage job per year.

This is a good way to demonstrate to thousands of young people that unions care only for other people — for people who are older, whiter, and richer. And it’s a good way to demonstrate how Democrats demoralize voters in order to protect unions who turn around and support Trump.

A ten-episode series about figure skating, although it is chiefly about living with bipolar disorder.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time later this month at the World Figure Skating Championships, so I’ve been doing a media diet of skating books, web sites, and films. This is a terrific ten-episode film, made with sense and (some) taste. The writers wanted to avoid the convention in which the star has exclusive narrative rights, and they do a wonderful job of providing separate arcs for the (inevitable) minority sidekick (with a brilliant performance by Amanda Zhou, who shamefully lacks a Wikipedia page), for little sister, for Mom, for everyone. These are not one-episode shifts of focus, like The Bear does, but prolonged arcs. Unfortunately, in the late episodes this forced too much narrative into too little space. Lots of really fine acting, notably the brilliant Kaya Scodelario.

Last weekend, Detlef Beyer hosted a terrific Tinderbox meetup to demonstrate his integration of Tinderbox with a variety of large language models.

The previous day, Detlef had run into a particular JSON reply that crashed Tinderbox when Tinderbox tried to parse it. The problem arise from quoted strings that contained new emoji from Unicode’s Supplementary Multilingual Plane. This is a group of 65,536 potential code points (not all are currently assigned) that represent characters you seldom encounter: cuneiform, Linear A, Mayan numerals, and many recent emoji.

Tinderbox 1 didn’t support Unicode, because Unicode was not then in widespread use. We started to get serious about Unicode in Tinderbox 4, and Tinderbox 6 was already pretty good at Unicode. Unfortunately, that Supplementary Multilingual Plane can cause headaches.

One of the core classes in Tinderbox is Parser, which provides services for parsing actions, parsing export templates, parsing JSON (from Web services) and RIS (from reference managers), and lots of other little chores. My recent(ish) fix moved the internals of Parser to be Unicode-aware. Each parser needs explicitly to adopt the new way of doing things: the parts of the system that predate Unicode also predate test-driven development!

I think it’s time to make sure that everything has in fact adopted the new way. It’s a big refactoring, because it tends to ramify in surprising ways, and also because the New Way changes the architecture significantly. The core problem is that Parser, in the nature of things, reads character by character — and thinks that a character is a unichar, a 16-bit code point.

Our supplementary code plane contains unusual characters that don’t fit in a unichar! So we need two unichars, or four utf-8 bytes, to hold them. So, where we used to return a plain old unichar, now we return a bundle that might contain a unichar or might contain the longer character code:

The upside of this is that, once we are working with explicit TbxCharacters, we can make them do more work. For example, we could have methods that ask the character whether it's a backslash, or a quotation mark.

I usually wait to write about refactoring, if I write about them at all, only after they’ve succeeded. I thought it might be interesting to try this, and then see how things turn out.

Update: Two very long days later, the refactoring is mostly done. It was a bear; Monday evening, I left the office with a broken build. I almost never do that — I’d estimate perhaps once every two or three years — but dinner was urgent and something was breaking 132 tests. I managed to restore sanity on Tuesday morning by backing off some recent changes that I’d made with too much confidence; as usual, straying from conservative test-driven work had led me astray,

Nice email from a user to report that they, too, had experienced this crash and that they appreciated the imminent fix.

by Gabriel Kreuther and Michael Ruhlman

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A beautifully-produced and evocative book by an Alsatian farm boy who became a famous New York fine dining chef. The book combines two separate books. The first is a nice cookbook about traditional foods in Alsace with an emphasis on home cooking. The second is an ambitious cookbook that takes ideas from traditional dishes and adds elegant ingredients and modernist technique. It makes for good reading.

by Jennifer Ackerman

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An engaging, informal treatment of the natural history of the owl. People like owls, because owls look like people. (In some places, people mistrust owls for the same reason, thinking that they prophecy death and disaster.) They’re fascinating creatures with some curious habits; Burrowing Owls, for example, like to decorate their burrows with pretty little things. Some owls keep blind snakes as pets in order to help clean their nest. Some male Snowy Owls summer in the arctic and then, when the cold really sets in, fly even further North to hunt ducks and geese.

We’re learning a lot from some ingenious equipment — remote cameras, tiny little owl-sized backpacks, in-flight brain scans. I’d hoped to learn more about what owls know, because a lot of progress is being made right now in animal cognition. We just don’t know very much, alas, not yet.

A Pattern Language is a hypertext built around the Christopher Alexander classic. Very cool! Via Dave Gray.

by John Vinci, ed.

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This fascinating (and gorgeous) book examines Adler & Sullivan’s lost masterpiece. Built in 1891, this was briefly the world’s tallest building. Demolished in 1961, it had become an unwanted derelict, soon to be replaced by a grimy parking garage.

John Vinci, the editor, had recently finished college when he got a temporary job with photographer Richard Nickel, to work on salvaging some of the building’s amazing terra-cotta and plaster ornamentation. This three-man crew worked just steps ahead of the wreckers, but their notes offer fascinating insights into how the building worked, how it was built, and how its design was compromised by neglect and bad taste. Chris Ware, the comic book artist, designed the book, and it’s simply amazing.

My paper on “Amiability and the Web: Lessons from Red Vienna and the Origin of Computing” has been accepted for the History of the Web track of this year’s WWW Conference! So it looks like I’ll be heading to Sydney at the end of April.

Boiling Point (2021) is a decent British movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant.

Cooked (2025), also known as Umami, is a decent Turkish movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant. It seemed sensible to drop in and continue the binge.

What makes it really interesting is that Cooked is a very faithful remake of Boiling Point. The changes are slight, which makes them especially intriguing.