Hello! Welcome to week two of Notes from the Shire, where I write about interesting things I’ve read, discovered or done throughout the week. If any of this piques your interest, I’d love to hear your thoughts! 

Book Reviews 

I wrote on here not long ago about how I am beginning to regret committing myself to publishing a review for every book I read in 2026, since I have already read 10 books this year (humble brag), and I now have four book reviews outstanding already. The idea behind committing to a written review of every book I read was that, in having to summarise my thoughts and explain how I felt about them, it would deepen my understanding of the books I read. However, it has very quickly come to feel more like a chore than a deepening of my understanding.

I am also concerned that my fascinating personal blogs will soon get lost in a tidal wave of mediocre book reviews, since it is hard to focus on quality when faced with such quantity. I have therefore decided to stop publishing reviews on here. I will still attempt to review every book I read, but on Goodreads instead, in a more discreet and succinct manner – I’m not sure either of those words have ever been used to describe me before, but there is a first time for everything! 

The Void at the heart of Late-Stage Capitalism 

I can’t remember the last time I read an article as fascinating as Child’s Play by Sam Kriss in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine. Kriss interviews Roy Lee, the young Co-Founder of Cluely, an AI tool that runs (undetectably) in the background of your meetings, taking notes and advising you on what to say next. 

As an aside, I find it beyond terrifying that we’re already at the point where we’re basically able to outsource our cognitive efforts to AI – this tool essentially promises to relieve you of any efforts to think for yourself by providing you with a live script of what you should say next. At that point, why not just let the AI’s talk to each other and remove the need for humans altogether? We are not far from the end of days.

Anyway, the substantive point of the piece was the mindlessness of Lee, this supposed genius entrepreneur: 

Upstairs, Roy and his coterie were huddled around a laptop, fiddling with Cluely’s interface. “Remember,” one said, “the average user is, like, thirty-five years old. This is a totally unfamiliar interface.” Apparently, a thirty-five-year-old wouldn’t be expected to know how to use anything more advanced than a rotary phone. Another employee scrutinized the proposed new layout. “I think it’s bad,” he said, “but it’s low-key not worse. What we have is anyway really bad, so anything is better.” They started arguing about chevrons. Through all this Roy scrolled through X on his phone. Simultaneously baby-faced and creatine-swollen, he was wearing gym clothes, with two curtains of black hair swung over his forehead. Finally, he looked up. “So, number one,” he said, “we’re killing the chat bar on the left.” There was no number two. Meeting over.

This is the depth of genius on display from someone who managed to raise $20,000,000 in venture capital funding for this app. The idea of artificial intelligence taking our jobs is scary enough as it is, but knowing that its development is being spearheaded by people who seemingly cannot stay off their phone long enough to concentrate on a meeting being held at the company they own is a different level of terrifying. A significant chunk of the piece describes how farcical the situation at Cluely is – most of the employees live at the office, including Lee, and they stay up until 4am playing Super Smash Bros and working out. They seem vapid, self-centred and entirely detached from reality, which is funny, until you remember these are the people that capitalism is entrusting with our future. 

Ultimately, however, just like the rest of us, all Lee really seemed to want was to be loved, even if he was borderline psychotic in the way he went about it: 

Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco.

I concede that this is one extreme example, but the inherent narcissism of Gen Z, fuelled by social media, will surely be the end of us all some day soon. 

A country on the brink 

Whether our politicians are willing to admit it or not, we are currently de facto at war with the Russian Federation – although we don’t have troops on the front line in Ukraine (yet), we send them billions of pounds worth of equipment every year and train tens of thousands of their troops for combat. Couple Russian aggression in Eastern Europe (they’re also trying to destabilise the Baltics and Poland) with the rise of China, which continues to attempt to colonise the pacific and looks likely to invade Taiwan by the end of the decade, and the ongoing tensions between the Americans and Iranians in the Middle East, with Trump seemingly on the verge of launching a full scale war against Persia, and you cannot help but conclude we haven’t faced a world this dangerous since the early 1960’s. 

Timely, then, that Tim Shipman had the splash on the front page of The Spectator this week with his report on the perilous state of the British military. In 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis took the world to the brink of nuclear war, the United Kingdom spent 6.9% of GDP on defence. Now, according to Shipman, if you strip away spending on our nuclear deterrent (which seems to be included by MoD accountants to flatter the figures), we spend just 1.75% of GDP. There are countless shocking examples of our glaring weaknesses throughout the article; 

• One Type-45 destroyer spent eight years in port being repaired. 
• The army will have 148 Challenger 3 battle tanks by 2030, compared to Poland, which will have 980, and the Russians, who have around 12,000. 
• Finland, population 5.5 million, has 870,000 reserve soldiers. Britain, population 69.3 million, has 32,000 reserve soldiers. 
• Our army hasn’t been this small since the 1640’s. 
• The UK is projected to fall to 21st place in NATO rankings on defence spending – we were once second. 

There are dozens more examples like these once you start digging into the figures, but the substantial point here is that for a country that still likes to (questionably) consider itself a Great Power, supposedly able to project military strength across the globe, this is nothing short of a tragic, dangerous embarrassment. Starmer has set a target of spending 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2027, with a further, incredibly vague, target to increase it to 3% ‘after the general election’. This is patently not enough – we need 5%, and we need it yesterday. The first responsibility of any Government is the defence of the realm. 

News in the 17th Century 

There was a fascinating piece by John Gallagher in the latest issue of The London Review of Books on the creation of the modern postal system in medieval Europe. What I found most remarkable is the similarities between the problems we face now, with the rise of social media and artificial intelligence, and the problems created by postal systems and newspapers in the 17th century – namely, the overwhelm we feel at the sheer volume of information we’re inundated with, as well as the impossible task of deciphering what is true and what is false: 

Giuseppe Maria Mitelli also made an engraving showing a pedlar overloaded with news. He cries his wares to the street: news of all kinds at a good price. A basket hanging from one arm overflows with broadsides; there are news-sheets pinned to his boots and his hat. News from London and Buda, maps of battlefronts and images of wonders and marvels fill the frame. But this time the pedlar’s audience flies from him in disgust. One man turns away, covering his eyes. Information overload – the comparing of sources, the weighing of hearsay and gossip, the endless expectation of newer news that might tell a very different story – must have been exhausting when it wasn’t exhilarating. It’s easy to empathise. One member of the pedlar’s audience is already leaving; we can see only his retreating feet. Another puts his fingers in his ears: ‘Non voglio udir più nove, nò, nò, nò,’ he complains. ‘I don’t want to hear more news, no, no, no.’

I won’t regurgitate the whole piece here, but it does seem to serve as a reminder that the problems we face today are neither new or unique, even if they do seem to be multiplying far quicker than previously – consider that it took two to three centuries to firmly establish a postal system in Europe, versus the two decades it has taken for the vast majority of the world to get their hands on a smartphone. Apt, then, that the piece is titled ‘Quickly Quickly Quickly’, since: 

a letter might be marked with the words cito cito cito – ‘quickly quickly quickly’ – to spur on its carrier or adorned with a sketched hangman’s noose as a warning to anyone who threatened to delay or disrupt its progress.

Finally, I think it is incredible to consider quite how slow the pace of life was in the 17th century compared to today: 

For those who lived in London around the middle of the 17th century, it would take six days for news to arrive from Edinburgh, eleven from Paris, 28 from Venice and 44 from Lisbon.

In a world where we are available instantly via text or phone call to everyone we know at any hour of the day, it might do us good to remember that 400 years ago, it would have taken a week for a letter to get to a friend in Scotland! 

Digital Detox 

Readers who follow my blog closely will be aware of my crusade against the monopolisation of our attention spans by Big Tech, including my own efforts to disengage with modern technology as much as I can, so it was interesting to see an article in The Times on Thursday reporting on a study that has discovered that a two week ‘Digital Detox’ can be as effective at boosting mental health as antidepressants: 

US and Canadian researchers recruited 500 adults, splitting them into two groups. The first had browsing blocked for two weeks, while the second were able to use their smartphones fully. The groups then swapped so researchers could compare them.

During the block they were able to send text messages and make calls on their phones and use the internet on other devices. Participants socialised more and spent more time exercising and pursuing their hobbies. It pushed them to spend more time in nature and cut down on reading the news and watching YouTube and streaming services.

The effect on wellbeing was greater than antidepressants and similar to receiving cognitive behavioural therapy. When tested for attention span, there was a boost equivalent to reversing ten years of age-related cognitive decline after detoxing for two weeks. Participants’ sleep also improved.

You can find the study itself here if you’re interested. Even I was taken aback by the strength of these findings, although I am conscious that there is still relatively little research in this area, yet that’s hardly surprising when you consider how many rich & powerful people have an interest in maintaining our ignorance. 

Nonetheless, I think the evidence against social media companies is beginning to stack up, and not just regarding the theft of our attention spans – the Financial Times reported on Wednesday that in 2019, Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) brought in 18 independent experts to assess the impact of beauty filters on Instagram, after accusations that they were negatively impacting the mental health of young people. When all 18 experts agreed that the filters constituted a wellbeing issue, Zuckerberg ignored them and kept the beauty filters in place anyway. It has also been reported that internal emails from around that time show Instagram staff saying things such as “IG [Instagram] is a drug . . . We’re basically pushers”. 

These billionaires know exactly what they’re doing – they are knowingly and willingly destroying our mental health to profit from us – don’t let them get away with it! Delete your accounts! Free yourselves! 

Signed Copies Only 

A charming piece in The New Yorker this week from Casey Cep that told the story of a 90 year old bookseller from Alabama. Incredibly, his bookstore, The Alabama Booksmith, only sells signed copies of books, but does so at the standard retail price. Cep explains how he gets his hands on so many signed copies: 

How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.

There’s a plucky, entrepreneurial, American dream type vibe about the piece, and I am genuinely amazed that this business model can be profitable in the age of Audible and Amazon. This can partly be explained by the fact “he maintains an email list with five thousand or so devoted customers from around the world”: 

Almost every Monday afternoon, Reiss e-mails the list about that week’s select titles, and since roughly a thousand of the recipients are regular buyers, many of them respond right away, and Reiss stays at the store until nine or ten at night handling their orders.

A wonderful example of the persistence and strength of good old fashioned bookselling! 

Let us end with some quotes

To round off, I’ll end with some quotes I found throughout the week that I quite like: 

• “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also—he is always getting ready to live” – Epicurus (via Seneca’s letters) 
• “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do” – Carl Jung 
• “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” – Friedrich Nietzsche
• “More is lost by indecision than by a wrong decision” – Cicero 
• “To philosophise is to learn how to die” – Michel de Montaigne

Until next week!

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