In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I'll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut here include Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998) on the role of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) (a personal memoir on relating to how technology is increasingly fragmenting our attention), Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021) (a misleadingly named set of philosophic essays on feminism), Dana Heller et al.'s The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (2005), John Berger's mindbending Ways of Seeing (1972) and Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want (2006).

The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989) Paul Fussell Rather than describe the battles, weapons, geopolitics or big personalities of the two World Wars, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory & Wartime are focused instead on how the two wars have been remembered by their everyday participants. Drawing on the memoirs and memories of soldiers and civilians along with a brief comparison with the actual events that shaped them, Fussell's two books are a compassionate, insightful and moving piece of analysis. Fussell primarily sets himself against the admixture of nostalgia and trauma that obscures the origins and unimaginable experience of participating in these wars; two wars that were, in his view, a "perceptual and rhetorical scandal from which total recovery is unlikely." He takes particular aim at the dishonesty of hindsight:

For the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitised and romanticised almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. [And] in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war [seems] inaccessible.

The author does not engage in any of the customary rose-tinted view of war, yet he remains understanding and compassionate towards those who try to locate a reason within what was quite often senseless barbarism. If anything, his despondency and pessimism about the Second World War (the war that Fussell himself fought in) shines through quite acutely, and this is especially the case in what he chooses to quote from others:

"It was common [ ] throughout the [Okinawa] campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf."

It would take a rather heartless reader to fail to be sobered by this final simile, and an even colder one to view Fussell's citation of such an emotive anecdote to be manipulative. Still, stories and cruel ironies like this one infuse this often-angry book, but it is not without astute and shrewd analysis as well, especially on the many qualitative differences between the two conflicts that simply cannot be captured by facts and figures alone. For example:

A measure of the psychological distance of the Second [World] War from the First is the rarity, in 1914 1918, of drinking and drunkenness poems.

Indeed so. In fact, what makes Fussell's project so compelling and perhaps even unique is that he uses these non-quantitive measures to try and take stock of what happened. After all, this was a war conducted by humans, not the abstract school of statistics. And what is the value of a list of armaments destroyed by such-and-such a regiment when compared with truly consequential insights into both how the war affected, say, the psychology of postwar literature ("Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing."), the specific words adopted by combatants ("It is a truism of military propaganda that monosyllabic enemies are easier to despise than others") as well as the very grammar of interaction:

The Field Service Post Card [in WW1] has the honour of being the first widespread exemplary of that kind of document which uniquely characterises the modern world: the "Form". [And] as the first widely known example of dehumanised, automated communication, the post card popularised a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.

And this wouldn't be a book review without argument-ending observations that:

Indicative of the German wartime conception [of victory] would be Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans for the ultimate reconstruction of Berlin, which made no provision for a library.

Our myths about the two world wars possess an undisputed power, in part because they contain an essential truth the atrocities committed by Germany and its allies were not merely extreme or revolting, but their full dimensions (embodied in the Holocaust and the Holodomor) remain essentially inaccessible within our current ideological framework. Yet the two wars are better understood as an abyss in which we were all dragged into the depths of moral depravity, rather than a battle pitched by the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Fussell is one of the few observers that can truly accept and understand this truth and is still able to speak to us cogently on the topic from the vantage point of experience. The Second World War which looms so large in our contemporary understanding of the modern world (see below) may have been necessary and unavoidable, but Fussell convinces his reader that it was morally complicated "beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest," and that the only way to maintain a na ve belief in the myth that these wars were a Manichaean fight between good and evil is to overlook reality. There are many texts on the two World Wars that can either stir the intellect or move the emotions, but Fussell's two books do both. A uniquely perceptive and intelligent commentary; outstanding.

Longitude (1995) Dava Sobel Since Man first decided to sail the oceans, knowing one's location has always been critical. Yet doing so reliably used to be a serious problem if you didn't know where you were, you are far more likely to die and/or lose your valuable cargo. But whilst finding one's latitude (ie. your north south position) had effectively been solved by the beginning of the 17th century, finding one's (east west) longitude was far from trustworthy in comparison. This book first published in 1995 is therefore something of an anachronism. As in, we readily use the GPS facilities of our phones today without hesitation, so we find it difficult to imagine a reality in which knowing something fundamental like your own location is essentially unthinkable. It became clear in the 18th century, though, that in order to accurately determine one's longitude, what you actually needed was an accurate clock. In Longitude, therefore, we read of the remarkable story of John Harrison and his quest to create a timepiece that would not only keep time during a long sea voyage but would survive the rough ocean conditions as well. Self-educated and a carpenter by trade, Harrison made a number of important breakthroughs in keeping accurate time at sea, and Longitude describes his novel breakthroughs in a way that is both engaging and without talking down to the reader. Still, this book covers much more than that, including the development of accurate longitude going hand-in-hand with advancements in cartography as well as in scientific experiments to determine the speed of light: experiments that led to the formulation of quantum mechanics. It also outlines the work being done by Harrison's competitors. 'Competitors' is indeed the correct word here, as Parliament offered a huge prize to whoever could create such a device, and the ramifications of this tremendous financial incentive are an essential part of this story. For the most part, though, Longitude sticks to the story of Harrison and his evolving obsession with his creating the perfect timepiece. Indeed, one reason that Longitude is so resonant with readers is that many of the tropes of the archetypical 'English inventor' are embedded within Harrison himself. That is to say, here is a self-made man pushing against the establishment of the time, with his groundbreaking ideas being underappreciated in his life, or dishonestly purloined by his intellectual inferiors. At the level of allegory, then, I am minded to interpret this portrait of Harrison as a symbolic distillation of postwar Britain a nation acutely embarrassed by the loss of the Empire that is now repositioning itself as a resourceful but plucky underdog; a country that, with a combination of the brains of boffins and a healthy dose of charisma and PR, can still keep up with the big boys. (It is this same search for postimperial meaning I find in the fiction of John le Carr , and, far more famously, in the James Bond franchise.) All of this is left to the reader, of course, as what makes Longitute singularly compelling is its gentle manner and tone. Indeed, at times it was as if the doyenne of sci-fi Ursula K. LeGuin had a sideline in popular non-fiction. I realise it's a mark of critical distinction to downgrade the importance of popular science in favour of erudite academic texts, but Latitude is ample evidence that so-called 'pop' science need not be patronising or reductive at all.

Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court (1998) Edward Lazarus After the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that ended the Constitutional right to abortion conferred by Roe v Wade, I prioritised a few books in the queue about the judicial branch of the United States. One of these books was Closed Chambers, which attempts to assay, according to its subtitle, "The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court". This book is not merely simply a learned guide to the history and functioning of the Court (although it is completely creditable in this respect); it's actually an 'insider' view of the workings of the institution as Lazurus was a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun during the October term of 1988. Lazarus has therefore combined his experience as a clerk and his personal reflections (along with a substantial body of subsequent research) in order to communicate the collapse in comity between the Justices. Part of this book is therefore a pure history of the Court, detailing its important nineteenth-century judgements (such as Dred Scott which ruled that the Constitution did not consider Blacks to be citizens; and Plessy v. Ferguson which failed to find protection in the Constitution against racial segregation laws), as well as many twentieth-century cases that touch on the rather technical principle of substantive due process. Other layers of Lazurus' book are explicitly opinionated, however, and they capture the author's assessment of the Court's actions in the past and present [1998] day. Given the role in which he served at the Court, particular attention is given by Lazarus to the function of its clerks. These are revealed as being far more than the mere amanuenses they were hitherto believed to be. Indeed, the book is potentially unique in its the claim that the clerks have played a pivotal role in the deliberations, machinations and eventual rulings of the Court. By implication, then, the clerks have plaedy a crucial role in the internal controversies that surround many of the high-profile Supreme Court decisions decisions that, to the outsider at least, are presented as disinterested interpretations of Constitution of the United States. This is of especial importance given that, to Lazarus, "for all the attention we now pay to it, the Court remains shrouded in confusion and misunderstanding." Throughout his book, Lazarus complicates the commonplace view that the Court is divided into two simple right vs. left political factions, and instead documents an ever-evolving series of loosely held but strongly felt series of cabals, quid pro quo exchanges, outright equivocation and pure personal prejudices. (The age and concomitant illnesses of the Justices also appears to have a not insignificant effect on the Court's rulings as well.) In other words, Closed Chambers is not a book that will be read in a typical civics class in America, and the only time the book resorts to the customary breathless rhetoric about the US federal government is in its opening chapter:

The Court itself, a Greek-style temple commanding the crest of Capitol Hill, loomed above them in the dim light of the storm. Set atop a broad marble plaza and thirty-six steps, the Court stands in splendid isolation appropriate to its place at the pinnacle of the national judiciary, one of the three independent and "coequal" branches of American government. Once dubbed the Ivory Tower by architecture critics, the Court has a Corinthian colonnade and massive twenty-foot-high bronze doors that guard the single most powerful judicial institution in the Western world. Lights still shone in several offices to the right of the Court's entrance, and [ ]

Et cetera, et cetera. But, of course, this encomium to the inherent 'nobility' of the Supreme Court is quickly revealed to be a narrative foil, as Lazarus soon razes this dangerously na ve conception to the ground:

[The] institution is [now] broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange of their respective views or, for that matter, a meaningful explication or defense of their own views. It is of Justices who in many important cases resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions as they discard judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results. This is a Court so badly splintered, yet so intent on lawmaking, that shifting 5-4 majorities, or even mere pluralities, rewrite whole swaths of constitutional law on the authority of a single, often idiosyncratic vote. It is also a Court where Justices yield great and excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who in turn use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

Lazurus does not put forward a single, overarching thesis, but in the final chapters, he does suggest a potential future for the Court:

In the short run, the cure for what ails the Court lies solely with the Justices. It is their duty, under the shield of life tenure, to recognize the pathologies affecting their work and to restore the vitality of American constitutionalism. Ultimately, though, the long-term health of the Court depends on our own resolve on whom [we] select to join that institution.

Back in 1998, Lazurus might have had room for this qualified optimism. But from the vantage point of 2022, it appears that the "resolve" of the United States citizenry was not muscular enough to meet his challenge. After all, Lazurus was writing before Bush v. Gore in 2000, which arrogated to the judicial branch the ability to decide a presidential election; the disillusionment of Barack Obama's failure to nominate a replacement for Scalia; and many other missteps in the Court as well. All of which have now been compounded by the Trump administration's appointment of three Republican-friendly justices to the Court, including hypocritically appointing Justice Barrett a mere 38 days before the 2020 election. And, of course, the leaking and ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, the true extent of which has not been yet. Not of a bit of this is Lazarus' fault, of course, but the Court's recent decisions (as well as the liberal hagiographies of 'RBG') most perforce affect one's reading of the concluding chapters. The other slight defect of Closed Chambers is that, whilst it often implies the importance of the federal and state courts within the judiciary, it only briefly positions the Supreme Court's decisions in relation to what was happening in the House, Senate and White House at the time. This seems to be increasingly relevant as time goes on: after all, it seems fairly clear even to this Brit that relying on an activist Supreme Court to enact progressive laws must be interpreted as a failure of the legislative branch to overcome the perennial problems of the filibuster, culture wars and partisan bickering. Nevertheless, Lazarus' book is in equal parts ambitious, opinionated, scholarly and dare I admit it? wonderfully gossipy. By juxtaposing history, memoir, and analysis, Closed Chambers combines an exacting evaluation of the Court's decisions with a lively portrait of the intellectual and emotional intensity that has grown within the Supreme Court's pseudo-monastic environment all while it struggles with the most impactful legal issues of the day. This book is an excellent and well-written achievement that will likely never be repeated, and a must-read for anyone interested in this ever-increasingly important branch of the US government.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021) Adam Tooze The economic historian Adam Tooze has often been labelled as an unlikely celebrity, but in the fourteen years since the global financial crisis of 2008, a growing audience has been looking for answers about the various failures of the modern economy. Tooze, a professor of history at New York's Columbia University, has written much that is penetrative and thought-provoking on this topic, and as a result, he has generated something of a cult following amongst economists, historians and the online left. I actually read two Tooze books this year. The first, Crashed (2018), catalogues the scale of government intervention required to prop up global finance after the 2008 financial crisis, and it characterises the different ways that countries around the world failed to live up to the situation, such as doing far too little, or taking action far too late. The connections between the high-risk subprime loans, credit default swaps and the resulting liquidity crisis in the US in late 2008 is fairly well known today in part thanks to films such as Adam McKay's 2015 The Big Short and much improved economic literacy in media reportage. But Crashed makes the implicit claim that, whilst the specific and structural origins of the 2008 crisis are worth scrutinising in exacting detail, it is the reaction of states in the months and years after the crash that has been overlooked as a result. After all, this is a reaction that has not only shaped a new economic order, it has created one that does not fit any conventional idea about the way the world 'ought' to be run. Tooze connects the original American banking crisis to the (multiple) European debt crises with a larger crisis of liberalism. Indeed, Tooze somehow manages to cover all these topics and more, weaving in Trump, Brexit and Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the evolving role of China in the post-2008 economic order. Where Crashed focused on the constellation of consequences that followed the events of 2008, Shutdown is a clear and comprehensive account of the way the world responded to the economic impact of Covid-19. The figures are often jaw-dropping: soon after the disease spread around the world, 95% of the world's economies contracted simultaneously, and at one point, the global economy shrunk by approximately 20%. Tooze's keen and sobering analysis of what happened is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came out whilst the pandemic was still unfolding. In fact, this leads quickly to one of the book's few flaws: by being published so quickly, Shutdown prematurely over-praises China's 'zero Covid' policy, and these remarks will make a reader today squirm in their chair. Still, despite the regularity of these references (after all, mentioning China is very useful when one is directly comparing economic figures in early 2021, for examples), these are actually minor blemishes on the book's overall thesis. That is to say, Crashed is not merely a retelling of what happened in such-and-such a country during the pandemic; it offers in effect a prediction about what might be coming next. Whilst the economic responses to Covid averted what could easily have been another Great Depression (and thus showed it had learned some lessons from 2008), it had only done so by truly discarding the economic rule book. The by-product of inverting this set of written and unwritten conventions that have governed the world for the past 50 years, this 'Washington consensus' if you well, has yet to be fully felt. Of course, there are many parallels between these two books by Tooze. Both the liquidity crisis outlined in Crashed and the economic response to Covid in Shutdown exposed the fact that one of the central tenets of the modern economy ie. that financial markets can be trusted to regulate themselves was entirely untrue, and likely was false from the very beginning. And whilst Adam Tooze does not offer a singular piercing insight (conveying a sense of rigorous mastery instead), he may as well be asking whether we're simply going to lurch along from one crisis to the next, relying on the technocrats in power to fix problems when everything blows up again. The answer may very well be yes.

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021) Elizabeth D. Samet Elizabeth D. Samet's Looking for the Good War answers the following question what would be the result if you asked a professor of English to disentangle the complex mythology we have about WW2 in the context of the recent US exit of Afghanistan? Samet's book acts as a twenty-first-century update of a kind to Paul Fussell's two books (reviewed above), as well as a deeper meditation on the idea that each new war is seen through the lens of the previous one. Indeed, like The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Wartime (1989), Samet's book is a perceptive work of demystification, but whilst Fussell seems to have been inspired by his own traumatic war experience, Samet is not only informed by her teaching West Point military cadets but by the physical and ontological wars that have occurred during her own life as well. A more scholarly and dispassionate text is the result of Samet's relative distance from armed combat, but it doesn't mean Looking for the Good War lacks energy or inspiration. Samet shares John Adams' belief that no political project can entirely shed the innate corruptions of power and ambition and so it is crucial to analyse and re-analyse the role of WW2 in contemporary American life. She is surely correct that the Second World War has been universally elevated as a special, 'good' war. Even those with exceptionally giddy minds seem to treat WW2 as hallowed:

It is nevertheless telling that one of the few occasions to which Trump responded with any kind of restraint while he was in office was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

What is the source of this restraint, and what has nurtured its growth in the eight decades since WW2 began? Samet posits several reasons for this, including the fact that almost all of the media about the Second World War is not only suffused with symbolism and nostalgia but, less obviously, it has been made by people who have no experience of the events that they depict. Take Stephen Ambrose, author of Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers miniseries: "I was 10 years old when the war ended," Samet quotes of Ambrose. "I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper." If Looking for the Good War has a primary thesis, then, it is that childhood hero worship is no basis for a system of government, let alone a crusading foreign policy. There is a straight line (to quote this book's subtitle) from the "American Amnesia" that obscures the reality of war to the "Violent Pursuit of Happiness." Samet's book doesn't merely just provide a modern appendix to Fussell's two works, however, as it adds further layers and dimensions he overlooked. For example, Samet provides some excellent insight on the role of Western, gangster and superhero movies, and she is especially good when looking at noir films as a kind of kaleidoscopic response to the Second World War:

Noir is a world ruled by bad decisions but also by bad timing. Chance, which plays such a pivotal role in war, bleeds into this world, too.

Samet rightfully weaves the role of women into the narrative as well. Women in film noir are often celebrated as 'independent' and sassy, correctly reflecting their newly-found independence gained during WW2. But these 'liberated' roles are not exactly a ringing endorsement of this independence: the 'femme fatale' and the 'tart', etc., reflect a kind of conditional freedom permitted to women by a post-War culture which is still wedded to an outmoded honour culture. In effect, far from being novel and subversive, these roles for women actually underwrote the ambient cultural disapproval of women's presence in the workforce. Samet later connects this highly-conditional independence with the liberation of Afghan women, which:

is inarguably one of the more palatable outcomes of our invasion, and the protection of women's rights has been invoked on the right and the left as an argument for staying the course in Afghanistan. How easily consequence is becoming justification. How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as original objective.

Samet has ensured her book has a predominantly US angle as well, for she ends her book with a chapter on the pseudohistorical Lost Cause of the Civil War. The legacy of the Civil War is still visible in the physical phenomena of Confederate statues, but it also exists in deep-rooted racial injustice that has been shrouded in euphemism and other psychological devices for over 150 years. Samet believes that a key part of what drives the American mythology about the Second World War is the way in which it subconsciously cleanses the horrors of brother-on-brother murder that were seen in the Civil War. This is a book that is not only of interest to historians of the Second World War; it is a work for anyone who wishes to understand almost any American historical event, social issue, politician or movie that has appeared since the end of WW2. That is for better or worse everyone on earth.

This post marks the beginning my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I read and watched in 2022 that I plan to publish over the next few days. Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in the last year. I didn't get through as many books as I did in 2021, though, but that's partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels in particular, a fair number of those books that American writer Henry James once referred to as "large, loose, baggy monsters." However, in today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books that are typically filed under fiction, with 'classic' fiction following tomorrow. Works that just missed the cut here include John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor and possibly The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, or Elif Batuman's The Idiot. I also feel obliged to mention (or is that show off?) that I also read the 1,079-page Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but I can't say it was a favourite, let alone recommend others unless they are in the market for a good-quality under-monitor stand.

Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac Mona is the story of a young woman who has just been nominated for the 'most important literary award in Europe'. Mona sees the nomination as a chance to escape her substance abuse on a Californian campus and so speedily decamps to the small village in the depths of Sweden where the nominees must convene for a week before the overall winner is announced. Mona didn't disappear merely to avoid pharmacological misadventures, though, but also to avoid the growing realisation that she is being treated as something of an anthropological curiosity at her university: a female writer of colour treasured for her flourish of exotic diversity that reflects well upon her department. But Mona is now stuck in the company of her literary competitors who all have now gathered from around the world in order to do what writers do: harbour private resentments, exchange empty flattery, embody the selfsame racialised stereotypes that Mona left the United States to avoid, stab rivals in the back, drink too much, and, of course, go to bed together. But as I read Mona, I slowly started to realise that something else is going on. Why does Mona keep finding traces of violence on her body, the origins of which she cannot or refuses to remember? There is something eerily defensive about her behaviour and sardonic demeanour in general as well. A genre-bending and mind-expanding novel unfolded itself, and, without getting into spoiler territory, Mona concludes with such a surprising ending that, according to Adam Thirlwell:

Perhaps we need to rethink what is meant by a gimmick. If a gimmick is anything that we want to reject as extra or excessive or ill-fitting, then it may be important to ask what inhibitions or arbitrary conventions have made it seem like excess, and to revel in the exorbitant fictional constructions it produces. [...]

Mona is a savage satire of the literary world, but it's also a very disturbing exploration of trauma and violence. The success of the book comes in equal measure from the author's commitment to both ideas, but also from the way the psychological damage component creeps up on you. And, as implied above, the last ten pages are quite literally out of this world.

My Brilliant Friend (2011)
The Story of a New Name (2012)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)
The Story of the Lost Child (2014) Elena Ferrante Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet follows two girls, both brilliant in their own way. Our protagonist-narrator is Elena, a studious girl from the lower rungs of the middle class of Naples who is inspired to be more by her childhood friend, Lila. Lila is, in turn, far more restricted by her poverty and class, but can transcend it at times through her fiery nature, which also brands her as somewhat unique within their inward-looking community. The four books follow the two girls from the perspective of Elena as they grow up together in post-war Italy, where they drift in-and-out of each other's lives due to the vicissitudes of change and the consequences of choice. All the time this is unfolding, however, the narrative is very always slightly charged by the background knowledge revealed on the very first page that Lila will, many years later, disappear from Elena's life. Whilst the quartet has the formal properties of a bildungsroman, its subject and conception are almost entirely different. In particular, the books are driven far more by character and incident than spectacular adventures in picturesque Italy. In fact, quite the opposite takes place: these are four books where ordinary-seeming occurrences take on an unexpected radiance against a background of poverty, ignorance, violence and other threats, often bringing to mind the films of the Italian neorealism movement. Brilliantly rendered from beginning to end, Ferrante has a seemingly studious eye for interpreting interactions and the psychology of adolescence and friendship. Some utterances indeed, perhaps even some glances are dissected at length over multiple pages, something that Vittorio De Sica's classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) could never do. Potential readers should not take any notice of the saccharine cover illustrations on most editions of the books. The quartet could even win an award for the most misleading artwork, potentially rivalling even Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is revealed that the drippy illustrations and syrupy blurbs ("a rich, intense and generous-hearted story ") turn out to be part of a larger metatextual game that Ferrante is playing with her readers. This idiosyncratic view of mine is partially supported by the fact that each of the four books has been given a misleading title, the true ambiguity of which often only becomes clear as each of the four books comes into sharper focus. Readers of the quartet often fall into debating which is the best of the four. I've heard from more than one reader that one has 'too much Italian politics' and another doesn't have enough 'classic' Lina moments. The first book then possesses the twin advantages of both establishing the environs and finishing with a breathtaking ending that is both satisfying and a cliffhanger as well but does this make it 'the best'? I prefer to liken the quartet more like the different seasons of The Wire (2002-2008) where, personal favourites and preferences aside, although each season is undoubtedly unique, it would take a certain kind of narrow-minded view of art to make the claim that, say, series one of The Wire is 'the best' or that the season that focuses on the Baltimore docks 'is boring'. Not to sound like a neo-Wagnerian, but each of them adds to final result in its own. That is to say, both The Wire and the Neopolitan Quartet achieve the rare feat of making the magisterial simultaneously intimate.

Out There: Stories (2022) Kate Folk Out There is a riveting collection of disturbing short stories by first-time author Kate Fork. The title story first appeared in the New Yorker in early 2020 imagines a near-future setting where a group of uncannily handsome artificial men called 'blots' have arrived on the San Francisco dating scene with the secret mission of sleeping with women, before stealing their personal data from their laptops and phones and then (quite literally) evaporating into thin air. Folk's satirical style is not at all didactic, so it rarely feels like she is making her points in a pedantic manner. But it's clear that the narrator of Out There is recounting her frustration with online dating. in a way that will resonate with anyone who s spent time with dating apps or indeed the contemporary hyper-centralised platform-based internet in general. Part social satire, part ghost story and part comic tales, the blurring of the lines between these factors is only one of the things that makes these stories so compelling. But whilst Folk constructs crazy scenarios and intentionally strange worlds, she also manages to also populate them with characters that feel real and genuinely sympathetic. Indeed, I challenge you not to feel some empathy for the 'blot' in the companion story Big Sur which concludes the collection, and it complicates any primary-coloured view of the dating world of consisting entirely of predatory men. And all of this is leavened with a few stories that are just plain surreal. I don't know what the deal is with Dating a Somnambulist (available online on Hobart Pulp), but I know that I like it.

Solaris (1961) Stanislaw Lem When Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the strange ocean that covers its surface, instead of finding an entirely physical scientific phenomenon, he soon discovers a previously unconscious memory embodied in the physical manifestation of a long-dead lover. The other scientists on the space station slowly reveal that they are also plagued with their own repressed corporeal memories. Many theories are put forward as to why all this is occuring, including the idea that Solaris is a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories. Yet if that is the case, the planet's purpose in doing so is entirely unknown, forcing the scientists to shift focus and wonder whether they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their own minds and in their desires. This would be an interesting outline for any good science fiction book, but one of the great strengths of Solaris is not only that it withholds from the reader why the planet is doing anything it does, but the book is so forcefully didactic in its dislike of the hubris, destructiveness and colonial thinking that can accompany scientific exploration. In one of its most vitriolic passages, Lem's own anger might be reaching out to the reader:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own, but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primaeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us that we don t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains since we don t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned, and that reality is revealed to us that part of our reality that we would prefer to pass over in silence then we don t like it anymore.

An overwhelming preoccupation with this idea infuses Solaris, and it turns out to be a common theme in a lot of Lem's work of this period, such as in his 1959 'anti-police procedural' The Investigation. Perhaps it not a dislike of exploration in general or the modern scientific method in particular, but rather a savage critique of the arrogance and self-assuredness that accompanies most forms of scientific positivism, or at least pursuits that cloak themselves under the guise of being a laudatory 'scientific' pursuit:

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

I doubt I need to cite specific instances of contemporary scientific pursuits that might meet Lem's punishing eye today, and the fact that his critique works both in 2022 and 1961 perhaps tells us more about the human condition than we'd care to know. Another striking thing about Solaris isn't just the specific Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 episodes that I retrospectively realised were purloined from the book, but that almost the entire register of Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular seems to be rehearsed here. That is to say, TNG presents itself as hard and fact-based 'sci-fi' on the surface, but, at its core, there are often human, existential and sometimes quite enormously emotionally devastating human themes being discussed such as memory, loss and grief. To take one example from many, the painful memories that the planet Solaris physically materialises in effect asks us to seriously consider what it actually is taking place when we 'love' another person: is it merely another 'mirror' of ourselves? (And, if that is the case, is that... bad?) It would be ahistorical to claim that all popular science fiction today can be found rehearsed in Solaris, but perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch:

[Solaris] renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic ...] Possibly, it can be said that when one feels the urge for such a thing, one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again. Kim Stanley Robinson [...]

I could go on praising this book for quite some time; perhaps by discussing the extreme framing devices used within the book at one point, the book diverges into a lengthy bibliography of fictional books-within-the-book, each encapsulating a different theory about what the mechanics and/or function of Solaris is, thereby demonstrating that 'Solaris studies' as it is called within the world of the book has been going on for years with no tangible results, which actually leads to extreme embarrassment and then a deliberate and willful blindness to the 'Solaris problem' on the part of the book's scientific community. But I'll leave it all here before this review gets too long... Highly recommended, and a likely reread in 2023.

Brokeback Mountain (1997) Annie Proulx Brokeback Mountain began as a short story by American author Annie Proulx which appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, although it is now more famous for the 2005 film adaptation directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Both versions follow two young men who are hired for the summer to look after sheep at a range under the 'Brokeback' mountain in Wyoming. Unexpectedly, however, they form an intense emotional and sexual attachment, yet life intervenes and demands they part ways at the end of the summer. Over the next twenty years, though, as their individual lives play out with marriages, children and jobs, they continue reuniting for brief albeit secret liaisons on camping trips in remote settings. There's no feigned shyness or self-importance in Brokeback Mountain, just a close, compassionate and brutally honest observation of a doomed relationship and a bone-deep feeling for the hardscrabble life in the post-War West. To my mind, very few books have captured so acutely the desolation of a frustrated and repressed passion, as well as the particular flavour of undirected anger that can accompany this kind of yearning. That the original novella does all this in such a beautiful way (and without the crutch of the Wyoming landscape to look at ) is a tribute to Proulx's skills as a writer. Indeed, even without the devasting emotional undertones, Proulx's descriptions of the mountains and scree of the West is likely worth the read alone.

Luster (2020) Raven Leilani Edie is a young Black woman living in New York whose life seems to be spiralling out of control. She isn't good at making friends, her career is going nowhere, and she has no close family to speak of as well. She is, thus, your typical NYC millennial today, albeit seen through a lens of Blackness that complicates any reductive view of her privilege or minority status. A representative paragraph might communicate the simmering tone:

Before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.

She starts a sort-of affair with an older white man who has an affluent lifestyle in nearby New Jersey. Eric or so he claims has agreed upon an 'open relationship' with his wife, but Edie is far too inappropriate and disinhibited to respect any boundaries that Eric sets for her, and so Edie soon becomes deeply entangled in Eric's family life. It soon turns out that Eric and his wife have a twelve-year-old adopted daughter, Akila, who is also wait for it Black. Akila has been with Eric's family for two years now and they aren t exactly coping well together. They don t even know how to help her to manage her own hair, let alone deal with structural racism. Yet despite how dark the book's general demeanour is, there are faint glimmers of redemption here and there. Realistic almost to the end, Edie might finally realise what s important in her life, but it would be a stretch to say that she achieves them by the final page. Although the book is full of acerbic remarks on almost any topic (Dogs: "We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves, now they are pugs with asthma."), it is the comments on contemporary race relations that are most critically insightful. Indeed, unsentimental, incisive and funny, Luster had much of what I like in Colson Whitehead's books at times, but I can't remember a book so frantically fast-paced as this since the Booker-prize winning The Sellout by Paul Beatty or Sam Tallent's Running the Light.

Review: Shutdown, by Adam Tooze

Publisher:	Viking
Copyright:	September 2021
ISBN:	0-593-29756-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	305

Shutdown is a history of the world macroeconomic response to COVID-19, covering 2020 and the very beginning of 2021. But wait, you might be saying. It's only the end of 2022 right now, and this book was published in September of 2021. That's not history, that's journalism. And yes, I think that's a valid critique. Shutdown is doing something rather odd, and I'm not certain it was a good idea, but I do think it has a (somewhat narrow) audience. Descriptions first. After an awkward introduction (more on that later), Tooze launches into an essentially chronological history in four parts: the initial viral spread and early political and public health response, the economic hard stop and macroeconomic response, the summer fallout and political complications, and the more-organized aftershocks of the fall. The early chapters are closer to a history, with a clear timeline and the tracery of cause and effect. The closer the narrative comes to the time Tooze was writing it, the more that clarity drops away. The last few chapters feel like a collection of simultaneous events that may or may not be related or have long-term significance. Everyone reading this lived through those events, and if you're at all like me, consumed far more news coverage of them than was healthy. The obvious question, then, is why read a book that rehashes all of that? For me, there are two answers: Tooze pays attention to more of the world than makes it into the local headlines and tries to synthesize a larger picture, and the focus of this book is the macroeconomic facilities used in the response. I remember the fights over school closures in the US. I didn't know about the impact of unprecedented Federal Reserve action on the bond market for emerging market government debt. If you're the sort of person who reads The Economist religiously (which I am not), you may not learn anything new here. If you're not, and you have a general interest in international finance, there were probably some wrinkles you missed. Even if you stay up-to-date on the more technical news, Shutdown provides an intermediate consolidation and restructuring. It's not ready to be a history in the traditional sense, but it's a first pass at putting events in order and tracing the implications for the global financial system. Read in that sense, Shutdown felt like a continuation of Tooze's Crashed, following the same themes of a hegemonic but unstable dollar system and a Federal Reserve that has increasingly taken on the role of backstop to the entire world (and how the only tools it has available tend to increase wealth inequality). If you've not read Crashed, read it first. I think it's the stronger and more thorough book (not the least because it had more time and data to construct a coherent history), and it's the best introduction to the international macroeconomic risks that Tooze traces in Shutdown. This book was, for me, an update of the Tooze's thinking in Crashed for the COVID era. Tooze is very good at clearly describing macroeconomic shocks. I recently read Lev Menand's The Fed Unbound, which is in part about the same intervention during the COVID shock that Tooze describes here, and yet it wasn't until I read Shutdown that I grasped that the Treasury purchases by the Fed had arguably crossed the political red line of monetizing government debt, even though the Fed probably had no choice and few people noticed in the middle of the crisis. This is where Tooze's background as a historian is helpful. Most people writing on this topic are either economists, who seem to take inferences like that for granted and dive into the technical debate, or journalists, who rarely understand the nuance and often jump to facile conclusions. Tooze is a historian with an extensive economics background; he can explain the mechanics while still focusing on the limitations of politics, which is the sort of analysis that I want to read. The problem with this book as a history is that it necessarily raises more questions than it answers. In the conclusion, Tooze writes:

A severe tightening in U.S. monetary policy or even a full-fledged taper tantrum would put global resilience to a stern test. So too would a violent escalation of geopolitical tension in one of the major regions of the world economy.

Both of those events have subsequently happened, which throws any tentative conclusions Tooze can offer into question. For another example, when Tooze wrote Shutdown, China's zero COVID policy was widely celebrated inside China and had enabled a fast economic recovery while the rest of the world was still in serious difficulty. Before Omicron, it was conceivable (if extremely risky) that China could continue to avoid a major COVID surge. In December of 2022, it's obvious they only managed to delay, and while delay meant vaccination and the price in deaths may well be smaller than was paid for the route taken by most of the rest of the world, the trade-offs are now even harder to analyze. There are, of course, other examples, the most obvious of which is the rise of global inflation simultaneous with a strengthening dollar. A history written from a distance of several decades would have included that aftermath. A snap history with a distance of only a few months cannot. The other problem with this book is that it's not as polished. Viking did an amazing job turning publication around in roughly six months, dramatically faster than publishing normally works, but there are parts that could have used more editing. The introduction, in particular, reads more like a blog post than an edited book, and while I'm a happy reader of Tooze's Chartbook, the recap of COVID's impact was a bit trite and Tooze's abstract musings on polycrisis could have used tightening and clarity. The meat of the book is better, but there is a messy stream-of-consciousness feel that is inherent in a book written to this tight of a timeline. I think the audience of this book is, narrowly, people who have read Crashed and want to follow that line of reasoning into the COVID era. Crashed is one of the better books on macroeconomic history that I've read, and I did indeed want to follow that train of thought, so I am part of that audience. This is not the sort of book that I would widely recommend, however. If you want to read it, you probably know that already; if you are new to Tooze's analysis, Crashed is the place to start. Rating: 7 out of 10

Wayland First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience. I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know. The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Hearing Aids I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.

One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail. I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.

The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter ISBN13: 9780062067777 Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know. Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether. One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.

Identity Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether. Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more. But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state. But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants. A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better. They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing. One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference. Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.

Pune Rains Lemme start with a slightly funny picture that tells as much about Pune, my city as anything else does.

Pune- Leave your attitude behind, we have our own

This and similar tags, puns and whatnot you will find if you are entering Pune from the road highway. You can also find similar similar symbols and Puns all over the city and they are partly sarcasm and ironic and partly the truth. Puneities work from the attitude that they know everything rather than nothing, including yours truly . What is the basis of that or why is there such kind of confidence I have no clue or idea, it is what it is. Approximately 24 hrs. ago, apparently we had a cloudburst. What I came to know later is that we got 100 mm of rain. Sharing from local news site. Much more interesting was a thread made on Reddit where many people half-seriously asked where they can buy a boat. One of the reasons being even if it s October, in fact, we passed middle of October and it s still raining. Even today in the evening, it rained for quite a while. As I had shared in a few blog posts before, June where rains should have started, it didn t, it actually started late July or even August, so something has shifted. The current leadership does not believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change or human activity induced climate change even though that is a reality. I could share many links and even using the term above should give links to various studies. Most of the people who are opposed to it are either misinformed or influenced from the fossil fuel industry. Again, could share many links, but will share just one atm. I have talked to quite a few people about it but nobody has ever been able to give a convincing answer as to why GM had to crush the cars. Let s even take the argument that it was the worst manufactured car in history and there have been quite a few, have the others been crushed? If not, then the reason shared or given by most people sounds hollow. And if you look into it, they had an opportunity that they let go, and now most of them are scrambling and yet most of the legacy auto manufacturers will be out of existence if they don t get back into the game in the next 2-3 years. There have been a bunch of announcements but we are yet to see. The Chinese though have moved far ahead, although one has to remark that they have been doing that for the last decade, so they have a 10-year head start, hardly surprising then. But I need to get back to the subject, another gentleman on Reddit remarked that if you start to use boat, and others start to use boat, then the Govt. will tax it. In fact, somebody had shared the below the other day

Different types of taxes collected by GOI

Many of the taxes that I have shared above are by the Modi Govt. who came on the platform, manifesto that once they come to power they will reduce taxes for the common man, they have reduced taxes but only for the Corporates. For the common man, the taxes have only gone up, both direct tax and indirect tax. Any reference to the Tory party who have also done similar things and have also shared that it is labor who had done large expenditures even though they have been 8 years in power, I am sure for most is purely coincidental. Incidentally, that is the same tack that was taken even by the Republican party. They all like to give tax benefits to the 1% while for the rest is austerity claiming some reason, even if it has been proven to be false.

Corporate Tax Rate, Revenue Loss to Govt.

The figures mentioned above are findings of parliamentary panel so nobody can accuse of anybody having a bias. Also, I probably had shared this but still feel the need to re-share it as people still believe that 2G scam happened even though there are plenty of arguments I can share to prove how it was all a fabricated lie.

Vinod Rai Mafinama in Uttarakhand High Court.

Part 2 of the same Mafinama.

How pathetic Mr. Rai s understanding of economics is can be gauged from the fact that he was made Chairman of IDFC and subsequently had to be thrown out. That whole lie was engineered to throw UPA out and it worked. There are and have been many such coincidences happening over the last 8 years, parallel stories happening in India and UK. This was just yesterday, about a year back Air India was given back to the Tatas, There was controversy about the supposed auctions as only Indigo was the only other party allowed to be at auction but not allowed to buy but more as a spectator as they already have 60% of the Indian civil aviation market. And there was lot of cheering from the Govt. side that finally Air India has been bought home to its true owners, the Tatas. The Tatas too started cheering and sharing how they will take down all the workers, worker unions and everything will be happy glory within a year. In fact, just couple of days back they shared new plans. Btw for the takeover of Air India, they had bought loans from the Banks and they are in the category of too big to fail. As I have shared couple of times before, RBI has not shared any inspection reports of nationalized or private banks after 2013/14. While by law, RBI is supposed to do inspection reports every 3 months and share them in the Public domain. And if you ask any of their supporter, for everything they will say UPA did x or y, which only goes to show morally bankrupt the present Govt. is. Coming back to the topic, before I forget, the idea of sharing their plans is so that they can again borrow money from the banks. But that is not the only story. Just one day back, Smita Prakash, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the present Govt. (she is the boss at Asia News International (ANI)) posted how Air India had treated her sister and other 21 passengers. Basically, they had bought business tickets but the whole cabin was dirty, they complained and they were forced to sit in economy class, not just her cousin sister but the other 21 odd passengers too. Of course Ms Smita became calm as her sister was given free air tickets on Vistara and other goodies. Of course, after that she didn t post anything about the other 21 odd passengers after that. And yes, I understand she is supposed to be a reporter but as can be seen from the twitter thread, there is or was no follow up. Incidentally, she is one of many who has calling others about Revdi culture (freebies to the masses.) but guess that only applies to other people not her or her sister. Again, if there are any coincidences of similar nature in the UK or when Trump was P.M. of the U.S. they are just coincidental .

The Uncosted budget India and the UK have many parallels, it s mind boggling. Before we get into the nitty-gritties, saw something that would be of some interest to the people here.

For those who might not be able to see above, apparently there is place in UK called Tufton Street where there are quite a few organizations that are shadowy and whose finances are not known as to how they are financed. Ms. Truss and quite a few of the people in the cabinet are from the same shadowy organizations. Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, the just-departed chancellor is and was part of the same group. Now even for me it was a new term to learn and understand what is an uncosted budget is. To make it much more easier I share the example using a common person who goes to the bank for a loan

Now M/S X wants a loan of say Rs. 1000/- for whatever reason. He/she/they go to the bank and asks give me a loan of say INR 1000/- The banks asks them to produce a statement of accounts to show what their financial position is. They produce a somewhat half-filled statement of accounts In which all liabilities are shown, but incomes are not. The bank says you already have so much liabilities, how are you gonna pay those, accounts have to be matched otherwise you are not solvent. M/s X adamantly refuses to do any changes citing that they don t need to. At this point, M/s X credit rating goes down and nobody in the market will give them a loan. At the same time, the assets they had held, their value also depreciates because it became known that they can t act responsibly. So whose to say whether or not M/s X has those number of assets and priced them accurately. But the drama doesn t end there, M/s X says this is the responsibility of actually Mr. Z ( cue The Bank of England) as they are my accountant/lawyer etc. M/s Z says as any lawyer/accountant should. This is not under my remit. If the clients either gives incomplete information or false information or whatever then it is their responsibility not mine. And in fact, the Chancellor is supposed to be the one who is given the responsibility of making the budget. The Chancellor is very similar to our Finance Minister. Because the UK has constitutional monarchy, I am guessing the terms are slightly different, otherwise the functionality seems to be the same. For two weeks, there was lot of chaos, lot of pension funds lost quite a bit in the market and in the end Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng was ousted out of the job. Incredibly, the same media and newspapers who had praised Mr. Kwarteng just few weeks back as the best Tory budget, they couldn t wait to bury him. And while I have attempted to simplify what happened, the best explanation of what has happened can be found in an article from the guardian. Speculation is rife in the UK as to who s ruling atm as the new Chancellor has reversed almost all the policies that Ms. Truss had bought and she is now more or less a figurehead. Mr. Hunt, the new chancellor doesn t have anybody behind him. Apparently, the gentleman wanted to throw his hat the ring in the Tory leadership contest that was held about a month back and he couldn t get 20 MP s to support him. Another thing that is different between UK and India is that in UK by law the PM has to answer questions put up to him or her by the opposition leaders. That is the way accountability is measured there. This is known as PMQ s or Prime Minister Questions and Answers. One can just go to YouTube or any streaming service and give Liz Truss and PMQ s and if they are interested of a certain date, give a date and they can see how she answered the questions thrown at her. Unfortunately, all she could do in both times were non-answers. In fact, the Tories seem to be using some of Labor s policies after they had bad-mouthed the same policies. Politics of right-wing both in the UK and the US seems so out of touch with the people whom they are supposed to protect and administer. An article about cyclists which is sort of half-truth, half irony shows how screwed up the policies are of the RW (right-wing). Now they are questions about the pensions triple-lock. Sadly, it is the working class who would suffer the most, most of the rich have already moved their money abroad several years ago. The Financial Times, did share a video about how things have been unfolding

Seems Ms. Truss forgot to add Financial Times in the list of anti-growth coalition she is so fond of. Also, the Tory party seems to want to create more tax havens in the UK and calling them investment zones. Of course, most of the top tax havens are situated around the UK itself. I wouldn t go more into as that would probably require its own article, although most of that information is all in public domain. Fracking I don t really want to take much time as the blog post has become long. There have been many articles written why Fracking is bad and that is why even the Tories had put in their Manifesto that they won t allow Fracking but apparently, today they are trying to reopen Fracking. And again how bad it is and can be found out by the article in Guardian.

I haven't posted one of these in a while. Here's the (mostly new) stuff that's come out that caught my interest in the past few months. Some of these I've already read and reviewed. Tom Burgis Kleptopia (non-fiction)
Angela Chen Ace (non-fiction)
P. Dj l Clark A Dead Djinn in Cairo (sff)
P. Dj l Clark The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (sff)
P. Dj l Clark A Master of Djinn (sff)
Brittney C. Cooper Eloquent Rage (non-fiction)
Madeleine Dore I Didn't Do the Thing Today (non-fiction)
Saad Z. Hossain The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (sff)
George F. Kennan Memoirs, 1925-1950 (non-fiction)
Kiese Laymon How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (non-fiction)
Adam Minter Secondhand (non-fiction)
Amanda Oliver Overdue (non-fiction)
Laurie Penny Sexual Revolution (non-fiction)
Scott A. Snook Friendly Fire (non-fiction)
Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race (sff)
Adrian Tchaikovsky Shards of Earth (sff)
Tor.com (ed.) Some of the Best of Tor.com: 2021 (sff anthology)
Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen Out of Office (non-fiction)
Robert Wears Still Not Safe (non-fiction)
Max Weber The Vocation Lectures (non-fiction) Lots and lots of non-fiction in this mix. Maybe a tiny bit better than normal at not buying tons of books that I don't have time to read, although my reading (and particularly my reviewing) rate has been a bit slow lately.

For many using Unix-derived systems today, we take for granted that /some/path and /some/path/ are the same. Most shells will even add a trailing slash for you when you press the Tab key after the name of a directory or a symbolic link to one. However, many programs treat these two paths as subtly different in certain cases, which I outline below, as all three have tripped me up in various ways¹.

POSIX and Coreutils Perhaps the trickiest use of the trailing slash in a distinguishing way is in POSIX² which states:

When the final component of a pathname is a symbolic link, the standard requires that a trailing <slash> causes the link to be followed. This is the behavior of historical implementations³. For example, for /a/b and /a/b/, if /a/b is a symbolic link to a directory, then /a/b refers to the symbolic link, and /a/b/ refers to the directory to which the symbolic link points.

This leads to some unexpected behavior. For example, if you have the following structure of a directory dir containing a file dirfile with a symbolic link link pointing to dir. (which will be used in all shell examples throughout this article):

$ ls -lR
.:
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 jacob jacob 4096 Apr  3 00:00 dir
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jacob jacob    3 Apr  3 00:00 link -> dir
./dir:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 jacob jacob 0 Apr  3 00:12 dirfile

On Unixes such as MacOS, FreeBSD or Illumos⁴, you can move a directory through a symbolic link by using a trailing slash:

$ mv link/ otherdir
$ ls
link	otherdir

On Linux⁵, mv will not rename the indirectly referenced directory and not the symbolic link, when given a symbolic link with a trailing slash as the source to be renamed. despite the coreutils documentation s claims to the contrary⁶, instead failing with Not a directory:

$ mv link/ other
mv: cannot move 'link/' to 'other': Not a directory
$ mkdir otherdir
$ mv link/ otherdir
mv: cannot move 'link/' to 'otherdir/link': Not a directory
$ mv link/ otherdir/
mv: cannot move 'link/' to 'otherdir/link': Not a directory
$ mv link otherdirlink
$ ls -l otherdirlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jacob jacob 3 Apr  3 00:13 otherdirlink -> dir

This is probably for the best, as it is very confusing behavior. There is still one advantage the trailing slash has when using mv, even on Linux, in that is it does not allow you to move a file to a non-existent directory, or move a file that you expect to be a directory that isn t.

$ mv dir/dirfile nonedir/
mv: cannot move 'dir/dirfile' to 'nonedir/': Not a directory
$ touch otherfile
$ mv otherfile/ dir
mv: cannot stat 'otherfile/': Not a directory
$ mv otherfile dir
$ ls dir
dirfile  otherfile

However, Linux still exhibits some confusing behavior of its own, like when you attempt to remove link recursively with a trailing slash:

rm -rvf link/

Neither link nor dir are removed, but the contents of dir are removed:

removed 'link/dirfile'

Whereas if you remove the trailing slash, you just remove the symbolic link:

$ rm -rvf link
removed 'link'

While on MacOS, FreeBSD or Illumos⁴, rm will also remove the source directory:

$ rm -rvf link
link/dirfile
link/
$ ls
link

The find and ls commands, in contrast, behave the same on all three operating systems. The find command only searches the contents of the directory a symbolic link points to if the trailing slash is added:

$ find link -name dirfile
$ find link/ -name dirfile
link/dirfile

The ls command acts similarly, showing information on just a symbolic link by itself unless a trailing slash is added, at which point it shows the contents of the directory that it links to:

$ ls -l link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jacob jacob 3 Apr  3 00:13 link -> dir
$ ls -l link/
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 jacob jacob 0 Apr  3 00:13 dirfile

rsync The command rsync handles a trailing slash in an unusual way that trips up many new users. The rsync man page notes:

You can think of a trailing / on a source as meaning copy the contents of this directory as opposed to copy the directory by name , but in both cases the attributes of the containing directory are transferred to the containing directory on the destination.

That is to say, if we had two folders a and b each of which contained some files:

$ ls -R .
.:
a  b
./a:
a1  a2
./b:
b1  b2

Running rsync -av a b moves the entire directory a to directory b:

$ rsync -av a b
sending incremental file list
a/
a/a1
a/a2
sent 181 bytes  received 58 bytes  478.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
$ ls -R b
b:
a  b1  b2
b/a:
a1  a2

While running rsync -av a/ b moves the contents of directory a to b:

$ rsync -av a/ b
sending incremental file list
./
a1
a2
sent 170 bytes  received 57 bytes  454.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
$ ls b
a1  a2	b1  b2

Dockerfile COPY The Dockerfile COPY command also cares about the presence of the trailing slash, using it to determine whether the destination should be considered a file or directory. The Docker documentation explains the rules of the command thusly:

COPY [--chown=<user>:<group>] <src>... <dest>

If <src> is a directory, the entire contents of the directory are copied, including filesystem metadata. Note: The directory itself is not copied, just its contents. If <src> is any other kind of file, it is copied individually along with its metadata. In this case, if <dest> ends with a trailing slash /, it will be considered a directory and the contents of <src> will be written at <dest>/base(<src>). If multiple <src> resources are specified, either directly or due to the use of a wildcard, then <dest> must be a directory, and it must end with a slash /. If <dest> does not end with a trailing slash, it will be considered a regular file and the contents of <src> will be written at <dest>. If <dest> doesn t exist, it is created along with all missing directories in its path.

This means if you had a COPY command that moved file to a nonexistent containerfile without the slash, it would create containerfile as a file with the contents of file.

COPY file /containerfile
container$ stat -c %F containerfile
regular empty file

Whereas if you add a trailing slash, then file will be added as a file under the new directory containerdir:

COPY file /containerdir/
container$ stat -c %F containerdir
directory

Interestingly, at no point can you copy a directory completely, only its contents. Thus if you wanted to make a directory in the new container, you need to specify its name in both the source and the destination:

COPY dir /dirincontainer
container$ stat -c %F /dirincontainer
directory

Dockerfiles do also make good use of the trailing slash to ensure they re doing what you mean by requiring a trailing slash on the destination of multiple files:

COPY file otherfile /othercontainerdir

results in the following error:

When using COPY with more than one source file, the destination must be a directory and end with a /

1. I m sure there are probably more than just these three cases, but these are the three I m familiar with. If you know of more, please tell me about them!.
2. Some additional relevant sections are the Path Resolution Appendix and the section on Symbolic Links.
3. The sentence This is the behavior of historical implementations implies that this probably originated in some ancient Unix derivative, possibly BSD or even the original Unix. I don t really have a source on that though, so please reach out if you happen to have any more knowledge on what this refers to.
4. I tested on MacOS 11.6.5, FreeBSD 12.0 and OmniOS 5.11 ²
5. unless the source is a directory trailing slashes give -ENOTDIR
6. In fairness to the coreutils maintainers, it seems to be true on all other Unix platforms, but it probably deserves a mention in the documentation when Linux is the most common platform on which coreutils is used. I should submit a patch.

(The below was written by Rob Pike, copied here for posterity from The Wayback Machine) Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assembler then, but the code in question was equivalent to something like this: This statement was a little shorter than what it should have been, which is but hey, it was easy. Two things resulted. First, a bad precedent was set. A lot of other lazy programmers introduced bugs by making the same simplification. Actual files beginning with periods are often skipped when they should be counted. Second, and much worse, the idea of a hidden or dot file was created. As a consequence, more lazy programmers started dropping files into everyone s home directory. I don t have all that much stuff installed on the machine I m using to type this, but my home directory has about a hundred dot files and I don t even know what most of them are or whether they re still needed. Every file name evaluation that goes through my home directory is slowed down by this accumulated sludge. I m pretty sure the concept of a hidden file was an unintended consequence. It was certainly a mistake. How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago? Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code. (For those who object that dot files serve a purpose, I don t dispute that but counter that it s the files that serve the purpose, not the convention for their names. They could just as easily be in $HOME/cfg or $HOME/lib, which is what we did in Plan 9, which had no dot files. Lessons can be learned.)

In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' novels that I enjoyed reading the most in 2021. But in the very last of my 2021 roundup posts, I'll be going over some of my favourite movies. (Saying that, these are perhaps less of my 'favourite films' than the ones worth remarking on after all, nobody needs to hear that The Godfather is a good movie.) It's probably helpful to remark you that I took a self-directed course in film history in 2021, based around the first volume of Roger Ebert's The Great Movies. This collection of 100-odd movie essays aims to make a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema, and I watched all but a handul before the year was out. I am slowly making my way through volume two in 2022. This tome was tremendously useful, and not simply due to the background context that Ebert added to each film: it also brought me into contact with films I would have hardly come through some other means. Would I have ever discovered the sly comedy of Trouble in Paradise (1932) or the touching proto-realism of L'Atalante (1934) any other way? It also helped me to 'get around' to watching films I may have put off watching forever the influential Battleship Potemkin (1925), for instance, and the ur-epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) spring to mind here. Choosing a 'worst' film is perhaps more difficult than choosing the best. There are first those that left me completely dry (Ready or Not, Written on the Wind, etc.), and those that were simply poorly executed. And there are those that failed to meet their own high opinions of themselves, such as the 'made for Reddit' Tenet (2020) or the inscrutable Vanilla Sky (2001) the latter being an almost perfect example of late-20th century cultural exhaustion. But I must save my most severe judgement for those films where I took a visceral dislike how their subjects were portrayed. The sexually problematic Sixteen Candles (1984) and the pseudo-Catholic vigilantism of The Boondock Saints (1999) both spring to mind here, the latter of which combines so many things I dislike into such a short running time I'd need an entire essay to adequately express how much I disliked it.

Dogtooth (2009) A father, a mother, a brother and two sisters live in a large and affluent house behind a very high wall and an always-locked gate. Only the father ever leaves the property, driving to the factory that he happens to own. Dogtooth goes far beyond any allusion to Josef Fritzl's cellar, though, as the children's education is a grotesque parody of home-schooling. Here, the parents deliberately teach their children the wrong meaning of words (e.g. a yellow flower is called a 'zombie'), all of which renders the outside world utterly meaningless and unreadable, and completely mystifying its very existence. It is this creepy strangeness within a 'regular' family unit in Dogtooth that is both socially and epistemically horrific, and I'll say nothing here of its sexual elements as well. Despite its cold, inscrutable and deadpan surreality, Dogtooth invites all manner of potential interpretations. Is this film about the artificiality of the nuclear family that the West insists is the benchmark of normality? Or is it, as I prefer to believe, something more visceral altogether: an allegory for the various forms of ontological violence wrought by fascism, as well a sobering nod towards some of fascism's inherent appeals? (Perhaps it is both. In 1972, French poststructuralists Gilles and F lix Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus, which plays with the idea of the family unit as a metaphor for the authoritarian state.) The Greek-language Dogtooth, elegantly shot, thankfully provides no easy answers.

Holy Motors (2012) There is an infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 film collaboration between Luis Bu uel and famed artist Salvador Dal . A young woman is cornered in her own apartment by a threatening man, and she reaches for a tennis racquet in self-defence. But the man suddenly picks up two nearby ropes and drags into the frame two large grand pianos... each leaden with a dead donkey, a stone tablet, a pumpkin and a bewildered priest. This bizarre sketch serves as a better introduction to Leos Carax's Holy Motors than any elementary outline of its plot, which ostensibly follows 24 hours in the life of a man who must play a number of extremely diverse roles around Paris... all for no apparent reason. (And is he even a man?) Surrealism as an art movement gets a pretty bad wrap these days, and perhaps justifiably so. But Holy Motors and Un Chien Andalou serve as a good reminder that surrealism can be, well, 'good, actually'. And if not quite high art, Holy Motors at least demonstrates that surrealism can still unnerving and hilariously funny. Indeed, recalling the whimsy of the plot to a close friend, the tears of laughter came unbidden to my eyes once again. ("And then the limousines...!") Still, it is unclear how Holy Motors truly refreshes surrealism for the twenty-first century. Surrealism was, in part, a reaction to the mechanical and unfeeling brutality of World War I and ultimately sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Holy Motors cannot be responding to another continental conflagration, and so it appears to me to be some kind of commentary on the roles we exhibit in an era of 'post-postmodernity': a sketch on our age of performative authenticity, perhaps, or an idle doodle on the function and psychosocial function of work. Or perhaps not. After all, this film was produced in a time that offers the near-universal availability of mind-altering substances, and this certainly changes the context in which this film was both created. And, how can I put it, was intended to be watched.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) An absolutely devastating portrayal of a character who is unable to forgive himself and is hesitant to engage with anyone ever again. It features a near-ideal balance between portraying unrecoverable anguish and tender warmth, and is paradoxically grandiose in its subtle intimacy. The mechanics of life led me to watch this lying on a bed in a chain hotel by Heathrow Airport, and if this colourless circumstance blunted the film's emotional impact on me, I am probably thankful for it. Indeed, I find myself reduced in this review to fatuously recalling my favourite interactions instead of providing any real commentary. You could write a whole essay about one particular incident: its surfaces, subtexts and angles... all despite nothing of any substance ever being communicated. Truly stunning.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Roger Ebert called this movie one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come. But whilst it is difficult to disagree with his sentiment, Ebert's choice of sad is somehow not quite the right word. Indeed, I've long regretted that our dictionaries don't have more nuanced blends of tragedy and sadness; perhaps the Ancient Greeks can loan us some. Nevertheless, the plot of this film is of a gambler and a prostitute who become business partners in a new and remote mining town called Presbyterian Church. However, as their town and enterprise booms, it comes to the attention of a large mining corporation who want to bully or buy their way into the action. What makes this film stand out is not the plot itself, however, but its mood and tone the town and its inhabitants seem to be thrown together out of raw lumber, covered alternatively in mud or frozen ice, and their days (and their personalities) are both short and dark in equal measure. As a brief aside, if you haven't seen a Roger Altman film before, this has all the trappings of being a good introduction. As Ebert went on to observe: This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. Furthermore, we can see some of Altman's trademark conversations that overlap, a superb handling of ensemble casts, and a quietly subversive view of the tyranny of 'genre'... and the latter in a time when the appetite for revisionist portrays of the West was not very strong. All of these 'Altmanian' trademarks can be ordered in much stronger measures in his later films: in particular, his comedy-drama Nashville (1975) has 24 main characters, and my jejune interpretation of Gosford Park (2001) is that it is purposefully designed to poke fun those who take a reductionist view of 'genre', or at least on the audience's expectations. (In this case, an Edwardian-era English murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, but where no real murder or detection really takes place.) On the other hand, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is actually a poor introduction to Altman. The story is told in a suitable deliberate and slow tempo, and the two stars of the film are shown thoroughly defrocked of any 'star status', in both the visual and moral dimensions. All of these traits are, however, this film's strength, adding up to a credible, fascinating and riveting portrayal of the old West.

Detour (1945) Detour was filmed in less than a week, and it's difficult to decide out of the actors and the screenplay which is its weakest point.... Yet it still somehow seemed to drag me in. The plot revolves around luckless Al who is hitchhiking to California. Al gets a lift from a man called Haskell who quickly falls down dead from a heart attack. Al quickly buries the body and takes Haskell's money, car and identification, believing that the police will believe Al murdered him. An unstable element is soon introduced in the guise of Vera, who, through a set of coincidences that stretches credulity, knows that this 'new' Haskell (ie. Al pretending to be him) is not who he seems. Vera then attaches herself to Al in order to blackmail him, and the world starts to spin out of his control. It must be understood that none of this is executed very well. Rather, what makes Detour so interesting to watch is that its 'errors' lend a distinctively creepy and unnatural hue to the film. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud used the word unheimlich to describe the experience of something that is not simply mysterious, but something creepy in a strangely familiar way. This is almost the perfect description of watching Detour its eerie nature means that we are not only frequently second-guessed about where the film is going, but are often uncertain whether we are watching the usual objective perspective offered by cinema. In particular, are all the ham-fisted segues, stilted dialogue and inscrutable character motivations actually a product of Al inventing a story for the viewer? Did he murder Haskell after all, despite the film 'showing' us that Haskell died of natural causes? In other words, are we watching what Al wants us to believe? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the film succeeds precisely because of its accidental or inadvertent choices, so it is an implicit reminder that seeking the director's original intention in any piece of art is a complete mirage. Detour is certainly not a good film, but it just might be a great one. (It is a short film too, and, out of copyright, it is available online for free.)

Safe (1995) Safe is a subtly disturbing film about an upper-middle-class housewife who begins to complain about vague symptoms of illness. Initially claiming that she doesn't feel right, Carol starts to have unexplained headaches, a dry cough and nosebleeds, and eventually begins to have trouble breathing. Carol's family doctor treats her concerns with little care, and suggests to her husband that she sees a psychiatrist. Yet Carol's episodes soon escalate. For example, as a 'homemaker' and with nothing else to occupy her, Carol's orders a new couch for a party. But when the store delivers the wrong one (although it is not altogether clear that they did), Carol has a near breakdown. Unsure where to turn, an 'allergist' tells Carol she has "Environmental Illness," and so Carol eventually checks herself into a new-age commune filled with alternative therapies. On the surface, Safe is thus a film about the increasing about of pesticides and chemicals in our lives, something that was clearly felt far more viscerally in the 1990s. But it is also a film about how lack of genuine healthcare for women must be seen as a critical factor in the rise of crank medicine. (Indeed, it made for something of an uncomfortable watch during the coronavirus lockdown.) More interestingly, however, Safe gently-yet-critically examines the psychosocial causes that may be aggravating Carol's illnesses, including her vacant marriage, her hollow friends and the 'empty calorie' stimulus of suburbia. None of this should be especially new to anyone: the gendered Victorian term 'hysterical' is often all but spoken throughout this film, and perhaps from the very invention of modern medicine, women's symptoms have often regularly minimised or outright dismissed. (Hilary Mantel's 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost is especially harrowing on this.) As I opened this review, the film is subtle in its messaging. Just to take one example from many, the sound of the cars is always just a fraction too loud: there's a scene where a group is eating dinner with a road in the background, and the total effect can be seen as representing the toxic fumes of modernity invading our social lives and health. I won't spoiler the conclusion of this quietly devasting film, but don't expect a happy ending.

The Driver (1978) Critics grossly misunderstood The Driver when it was first released. They interpreted the cold and unemotional affect of the characters with the lack of developmental depth, instead of representing their dissociation from the society around them. This reading was encouraged by the fact that the principal actors aren't given real names and are instead known simply by their archetypes instead: 'The Driver', 'The Detective', 'The Player' and so on. This sort of quasi-Jungian erudition is common in many crime films today (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Layer Cake, Fight Club), so the critics' misconceptions were entirely reasonable in 1978. The plot of The Driver involves the eponymous Driver, a noted getaway driver for robberies in Los Angeles. His exceptional talent has far prevented him from being captured thus far, so the Detective attempts to catch the Driver by pardoning another gang if they help convict the Driver via a set-up robbery. To give himself an edge, however, The Driver seeks help from the femme fatale 'Player' in order to mislead the Detective. If this all sounds eerily familiar, you would not be far wrong. The film was essentially remade by Nicolas Winding Refn as Drive (2011) and in Edgar Wright's 2017 Baby Driver. Yet The Driver offers something that these neon-noir variants do not. In particular, the car chases around Los Angeles are some of the most captivating I've seen: they aren't thrilling in the sense of tyre squeals, explosions and flying boxes, but rather the vehicles come across like wild animals hunting one another. This feels especially so when the police are hunting The Driver, which feels less like a low-stakes game of cat and mouse than a pack of feral animals working together a gang who will tear apart their prey if they find him. In contrast to the undercar neon glow of the Fast & Furious franchise, the urban realism backdrop of the The Driver's LA metropolis contributes to a sincere feeling of artistic fidelity as well. To be sure, most of this is present in the truly-excellent Drive, where the chase scenes do really communicate a credible sense of stakes. But the substitution of The Driver's grit with Drive's soft neon tilts it slightly towards that common affliction of crime movies: style over substance. Nevertheless, I can highly recommend watching The Driver and Drive together, as it can tell you a lot about the disconnected socioeconomic practices of the 1980s compared to the 2010s. More than that, however, the pseudo-1980s synthwave soundtrack of Drive captures something crucial to analysing the world of today. In particular, these 'sounds from the past filtered through the present' bring to mind the increasing role of nostalgia for lost futures in the culture of today, where temporality and pop culture references are almost-exclusively citational and commemorational.

The Souvenir (2019) The ostensible outline of this quietly understated film follows a shy but ambitious film student who falls into an emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man. But that doesn't quite cover the plot at all, for not only is The Souvenir a film about a young artist who is inspired, derailed and ultimately strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is also partly a coming-of-age drama, a subtle portrait of class and, finally, a film about the making of a film. Still, one of the geniuses of this truly heartbreaking movie is that none of these many elements crowds out the other. It never, ever feels rushed. Indeed, there are many scenes where the camera simply 'sits there' and quietly observes what is going on. Other films might smother themselves through references to 18th-century oil paintings, but The Souvenir somehow evades this too. And there's a certain ring of credibility to the story as well, no doubt in part due to the fact it is based on director Joanna Hogg's own experiences at film school. A beautifully observed and multi-layered film; I'll be happy if the sequel is one-half as good.

The Wrestler (2008) Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is long past his prime, but he is still rarin' to go in the local pro-wrestling circuit. Yet after a brutal beating that seriously threatens his health, Randy hangs up his tights and pursues a serious relationship... and even tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter. But Randy can't resist the lure of the ring, and readies himself for a comeback. The stage is thus set for Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is essentially about what drives Randy back to the ring. To be sure, Randy derives much of his money from wrestling as well as his 'fitness', self-image, self-esteem and self-worth. Oh, it's no use insisting that wrestling is fake, for the sport is, needless to say, Randy's identity; it's not for nothing that this film is called The Wrestler. In a number of ways, The Sound of Metal (2019) is both a reaction to (and a quiet remake of) The Wrestler, if only because both movies utilise 'cool' professions to explore such questions of identity. But perhaps simply when The Wrestler was produced makes it the superior film. Indeed, the role of time feels very important for the Wrestler. In the first instance, time is clearly taking its toll on Randy's body, but I felt it more strongly in the sense this was very much a pre-2008 film, released on the cliff-edge of the global financial crisis, and the concomitant precarity of the 2010s. Indeed, it is curious to consider that you couldn't make The Wrestler today, although not because the relationship to work has changed in any fundamentalway. (Indeed, isn't it somewhat depressing the realise that, since the start of the pandemic and the 'work from home' trend to one side, we now require even more people to wreck their bodies and mental health to cover their bills?) No, what I mean to say here is that, post-2016, you cannot portray wrestling on-screen without, how can I put it, unwelcome connotations. All of which then reminds me of Minari's notorious red hat... But I digress. The Wrestler is a grittily stark darkly humorous look into the life of a desperate man and a sorrowful world, all through one tragic profession.

Thief (1981) Frank is an expert professional safecracker and specialises in high-profile diamond heists. He plans to use his ill-gotten gains to retire from crime and build a life for himself with a wife and kids, so he signs on with a top gangster for one last big score. This, of course, could be the plot to any number of heist movies, but Thief does something different. Similar to The Wrestler and The Driver (see above) and a number of other films that I watched this year, Thief seems to be saying about our relationship to work and family in modernity and postmodernity. Indeed, the 'heist film', we are told, is an understudied genre, but part of the pleasure of watching these films is said to arise from how they portray our desired relationship to work. In particular, Frank's desire to pull off that last big job feels less about the money it would bring him, but a displacement from (or proxy for) fulfilling some deep-down desire to have a family or indeed any relationship at all. Because in theory, of course, Frank could enter into a fulfilling long-term relationship right away, without stealing millions of dollars in diamonds... but that's kinda the entire point: Frank needing just one more theft is an excuse to not pursue a relationship and put it off indefinitely in favour of 'work'. (And being Federal crimes, it also means Frank cannot put down meaningful roots in a community.) All this is communicated extremely subtly in the justly-lauded lowkey diner scene, by far the best scene in the movie. The visual aesthetic of Thief is as if you set The Warriors (1979) in a similarly-filthy Chicago, with the Xenophon-inspired plot of The Warriors replaced with an almost deliberate lack of plot development... and the allure of The Warriors' fantastical criminal gangs (with their alluringly well-defined social identities) substituted by a bunch of amoral individuals with no solidarity beyond the immediate moment. A tale of our time, perhaps. I should warn you that the ending of Thief is famously weak, but this is a gritty, intelligent and strangely credible heist movie before you get there.

Uncut Gems (2019) The most exhausting film I've seen in years; the cinematic equivalent of four cups of double espresso, I didn't even bother even trying to sleep after downing Uncut Gems late one night. Directed by the two Safdie Brothers, it often felt like I was watching two films that had been made at the same time. (Or do I mean two films at 2X speed?) No, whatever clumsy metaphor you choose to adopt, the unavoidable effect of this film's finely-tuned chaos is an uncompromising and anxiety-inducing piece of cinema. The plot follows Howard as a man lost to his countless vices mostly gambling with a significant side hustle in adultery, but you get the distinct impression he would be happy with anything that will give him another high. A true junkie's junkie, you might say. You know right from the beginning it's going to end in some kind of disaster, the only question remaining is precisely how and what. Portrayed by an (almost unrecognisable) Adam Sandler, there's an uncanny sense of distance in the emotional chasm between 'Sandler-as-junkie' and 'Sandler-as-regular-star-of-goofy-comedies'. Yet instead of being distracting and reducing the film's affect, this possibly-deliberate intertextuality somehow adds to the masterfully-controlled mayhem. My heart races just at the memory. Oof.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) I ended up watching three films that feature sand this year: Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Woman in the Dunes. But it is this last 1964 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara that will stick in my mind in the years to come. Sure, there is none of the Medician intrigue of Dune or the Super Panavision-70 of Lawrence of Arabia (or its quasi-orientalist score, itself likely stolen from Anton Bruckner's 6th Symphony), but Woman in the Dunes doesn't have to assert its confidence so boldly, and it reveals the enormity of its plot slowly and deliberately instead. Woman in the Dunes never rushes to get to the film's central dilemma, and it uncovers its terror in little hints and insights, all whilst establishing the daily rhythm of life. Woman in the Dunes has something of the uncanny horror as Dogtooth (see above), as well as its broad range of potential interpretations. Both films permit a wide array of readings, without resorting to being deliberately obscurantist or being just plain random it is perhaps this reason why I enjoyed them so much. It is true that asking 'So what does the sand mean?' sounds tediously sophomoric shorn of any context, but it somehow applies to this thoughtfully self-contained piece of cinema.

A Quiet Place (2018) Although A Quiet Place was not actually one of the best films I saw this year, I'm including it here as it is certainly one of the better 'mainstream' Hollywood franchises I came across. Not only is the film very ably constructed and engages on a visceral level, I should point out that it is rare that I can empathise with the peril of conventional horror movies (and perhaps prefer to focus on its cultural and political aesthetics), but I did here. The conceit of this particular post-apocalyptic world is that a family is forced to live in almost complete silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound alone. Still, A Quiet Place engages on an intellectual level too, and this probably works in tandem with the pure 'horrorific' elements and make it stick into your mind. In particular, and to my mind at least, A Quiet Place a deeply American conservative film below the surface: it exalts the family structure and a certain kind of sacrifice for your family. (The music often had a passacaglia-like strain too, forming a tombeau for America.) Moreover, you survive in this dystopia by staying quiet that is to say, by staying stoic suggesting that in the wake of any conflict that might beset the world, the best thing to do is to keep quiet. Even communicating with your loved ones can be deadly to both of you, so not emote, acquiesce quietly to your fate, and don't, whatever you do, speak up. (Or join a union.) I could go on, but The Quiet Place is more than this. It's taut and brief, and despite cinema being an increasingly visual medium, it encourages its audience to develop a new relationship with sound.

Following on from last year's round-up of my reading, here's a look at the fiction I enjoyed in 2021. I managed to read 42 books in 2021, up from 31 last year. That's partly to do with buying an ereader: 33/36% of my reading (by pages/by books) was ebooks. I think this demonstrates that ebooks have mostly complemented paper books for me, rather than replacing them. My book of the year (although it was published in 2019) was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: A short epistolary love story between warring time travellers and quite unlike anything else I've read for a long time. Other notables were The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel and Robot by Adam Wi niewski-Snerg. The biggest disappointment for me was The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which I haven't even finished. I love KSRs writing: I've written about him many times on this blog, at least in 2002, 2006 and 2009, I think I've read every other novel he's published and most of his short stories. But this one was too much of something for me. He's described this novel a the end-point of a particular journey and approach to writing he's taken, which I felt relieved to learn, assuming he writes any more novels (and I really hope that he does) they will likely be in a different "mode". My "new author discovery" for 2021 was Chris Beckett: I tore through Two Tribes and America City before promptly buying all his other work. He fits roughly into the same bracket as Adam Roberts and Christopher Priest, two of my other favourite authors. 5 of the books I read (12%) were from my "backlog" of already-purchased physical books. I'd like to try and reduce my Backlog further so I hope to push this figure up next year. I made a small effort to read more diverse authors this year. 24% of the books I read (by book count and page count) were by women. 15% by page count were (loosely) BAME (19% by book count). Again I'd like to increase these numbers modestly in 2022. Unlike 2020, I didn't complete any short story collections in 2021! This is partly because there was only one issue of Interzone published in all of 2021, a double-issue which I haven't yet finished. This is probably a sad date point in terms of Interzone's continued existence, but it's not dead yet.

Recently I ve been curious about how hibernation works on Linux, as it s an interesting interaction between hardware and software. There are some notes in the Arch wiki and the kernel documentation (as well as some kernel documentation on debugging hibernation and on sleep states more generally), and of course the ACPI Specification

The Formal Definition ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is, according to the spec, an architecture-independent power management and configuration framework that forms a subsystem within the host OS which defines a hardware register set to define power states. ACPI defines four global system states G0, working/on, G1, sleeping, G2, soft off, and G3, mechanical off¹. Within G1 there are 4 sleep states, numbered S1 through S4. There are also S0 and S5, which are equivalent to G0 and G2 respectively².

Sleep According to the spec, the ACPI S1-S4 states all do the same thing from the operating system s perspective, but each saves progressively more power, so the operating system is expected to pick the deepest of these states when entering sleep. However, most operating systems³ distinguish between S1-S3, which are typically referred to as sleep or suspend, and S4, which is typically referred to as hibernation.

S1: CPU Stop and Cache Wipe The CPU caches are wiped and then the CPU is stopped, which the spec notes is equivalent to the WBINVD instruction followed by the STPCLK signal on x86. However, nothing is powered off.

S2: Processor Power off The system stops the processor and most system clocks (except the real time clock), then powers off the processor. Upon waking, the processor will not continue what it was doing before, but instead use its reset vector⁴.

S3: Suspend/Sleep (Suspend-to-RAM) Mostly equivalent to S2, but hardware ensures that only memory and whatever other hardware memory requires are powered.

S4: Hibernate (Suspend-to-Disk) In this state, all hardware is completely powered off and an image of the system is written to disk, to be restored from upon reapplying power. Writing the system image to disk can be handled by the operating system if supported, or by the firmware.

Linux Sleep States Linux has its own set of sleep states which mostly correspond with ACPI states.

Suspend-to-Idle This is a software only sleep that puts all hardware into the lowest power state it can, suspends timekeeping, and freezes userspace processes. All userspace and some kernel threads⁵, except those tagged with PF_NOFREEZE, are frozen before the system enters a sleep state. Frozen tasks are sent to the __refrigerator(), where they set TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE and PF_FROZEN and infinitely loop until PF_FROZEN is unset⁶. This prevents these tasks from doing anything during the imaging process. Any userspace process running on a different CPU while the kernel is trying to create a memory image would cause havoc. This is also done because any filesystem changes made during this would be lost and could cause the filesystem and its related in-memory structures to become inconsistent. Also, creating a hibernation image requires about 50% of memory free, so no tasks should be allocating memory, which freezing also prevents.

Standby This is equivalent to ACPI S1.

Suspend-to-RAM This is equivalent to ACPI S3.

Hibernation Hibernation is mostly equivalent to ACPI S4 but does not require S4, only requiring low-level code for resuming the system to be present for the underlying CPU architecture according to the Linux sleep state docs. To hibernate, everything is stopped and the kernel takes a snapshot of memory. Then, the system writes out the memory image to disk. Finally, the system either enters S4 or turns off completely. When the system restores power it boots a new kernel, which looks for a hibernation image and loads it into memory. It then overwrites itself with the hibernation image and jumps to a resume area of the original kernel⁷. The resumed kernel restores the system to its previous state and resumes all processes.

Hybrid Suspend Hybrid suspend does not correspond to an official ACPI state, but instead is effectively a combination of S3 and S4. The system writes out a hibernation image, but then enters suspend-to-RAM. If the system wakes up from suspend it will discard the hibernation image, but if the system loses power it can safely restore from the hibernation image.

1. The difference between soft and mechanical off is that mechanical off is entered and left by a mechanical means (for example, turning off the system s power through the movement of a large red switch)
2. It s unclear to me why G and S states overlap like this. I assume this is a relic of an older spec that only had S states, but I have not as yet found any evidence of this. If someone has any information on this, please let me know and I ll update this footnote.
3. Of the operating systems I know of that support ACPI sleep states (I checked Windows, Mac, Linux, and the three BSDs⁸), only MacOS does not allow the user to deliberately enable hibernation, instead supporting a hybrid suspend it calls safe sleep
4. The reset vector of a processor is the default location where, upon a reset, the processor will go to find the first instruction to execute. In other words, the reset vector is a pointer or address where the processor should always begin its execution. This first instruction typically branches to the system initialization code. Xiaocong Fan, Real-Time Embedded Systems, 2015
5. All kernel threads are tagged with PF_NOFREEZE by default, so they must specifically opt-in to task freezing.
6. This is not from the docs, but from kernel/freezer.c which also notes Refrigerator is place where frozen processes are stored :-).
7. This is the operation that requires special architecture-specific low-level code .
8. Interestingly NetBSD has a setting to enable hibernation, but does not actually support hibernation

Review: Crashed, by Adam Tooze

Publisher:	Penguin Books
Copyright:	2018
Printing:	2019
ISBN:	0-525-55880-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	615

The histories of the 2008 financial crisis that I have read focus almost exclusively on the United States. They also stop after the bank rescue and TARP or, if they press on into the aftermath, focus on the resulting damage to the US economy and the widespread pain of falling housing prices and foreclosure. Crashed does neither, instead arguing that 2008 was a crisis of European banks as much as American banks. It extends its history to cover the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, treating it as a continuation of the same crisis in a different guise. In the process, Tooze makes a compelling argument that one can draw a clear, if wandering, line from the moral revulsion at the propping up of the international banking system to Brexit and Trump. Qualifications first, since they are important for this type of comprehensive and, in places, surprising and counterintuitive history. Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University and the director of its European Institute. His previous books have won multiple awards, and Crashed won the Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction on foreign policy. That it won a prize in that topic, rather than history or economics, is a hint at Tooze's chosen lens. The first half of the book is the lead-up and response to the crisis provoked by the collapse in value of securitized US mortgages and leading to the failure of Lehman Brothers, the failure in all but name of AIG, and a massive bank rescue. The financial instruments at the center of the crisis are complex and difficult to understand, and Tooze provides only brief explanation. This therefore may not be the best first book on the crisis; for that, I would still recommend Bethany McClean and Joe Nocera's All the Devils Are Here, although it's hard to beat Michael Lewis's storytelling in The Big Short. Tooze is not interested in dwelling on a blow-by-blow account of the crisis and initial response, and some of his account feels perfunctory. He is instead interested in describing its entangled global sweep. The new detail I took from the first half of Crashed is the depth of involvement of the European banks in what is often portrayed as a US crisis. Tooze goes into more specifics than other accounts on the eurodollar market, run primarily through the City of London, and the vast dollar-denominated liabilities of European banks. When the crisis struck, the breakdown of liquidity markets left those banks with no source of dollar funding to repay dollar-denominated short-term loans. The scale of dollar borrowing by European banks was vast, dwarfing the currency reserves or trade surpluses of their home countries. An estimate from the Bank of International Settlements put the total dollar funding needs for European banks at more than $2 trillion. The institution that saved the European banks was the United States Federal Reserve. This was an act of economic self-protection, not largesse; in the absence of dollar liquidity, the fire sale of dollar assets by European banks in a desperate attempt to cover their loans would have exacerbated the market crash. But it's remarkable in its extent, and in how deeply this contradicts the later public political position that 2008 was an American recession caused by American banks. 52% of the mortgage-backed securities purchased by the Federal Reserve in its quantitative easing policies (popularly known as QE1, QE2, and QE3) were sold by foreign banks. Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse unloaded more securities on the Fed than any American bank by a significant margin. And when that wasn't enough, the Fed went farther and extended swap lines to major national banks, providing them dollar liquidity that they could then pass along to their local institutions. In essence, in Tooze's telling, the US Federal Reserve became the reserve bank for the entire world, preventing a currency crisis by providing dollars to financial systems both foreign and domestic, and it did so with a remarkable lack of scrutiny. Its swap lines avoided public review until 2010, when Bloomberg won a court fight to extract the records. That allowed the European banks that benefited to hide the extent of their exposure.

In Europe, the bullish CEOs of Deutsche Bank and Barclays claimed exceptional status because they avoided taking aid from their national governments. What the Fed data reveal is the hollowness of those boasts. The banks might have avoided state-sponsored recapitalization, but every major bank in the entire world was taking liquidity assistance on a grand scale from its local central bank, and either directly or indirectly by way of the swap lines from the Fed.

The emergency steps taken by Timothy Geithner in the Treasury Department were nearly as dramatic as those of the Federal Reserve. Without regard for borders, and pushing the boundary of their legal authority, they intervened massively in the world (not just the US) economy to save the banking and international finance system. And it worked. One of the benefits of a good history is to turn stories about heroes and villains into more nuanced information about motives and philosophies. I came away from Sheila Bair's account of the crisis furious at Geithner's protection of banks from any meaningful consequences for their greed. Tooze's account, and analysis, agrees with Bair in many respects, but Bair was continuing a personal fight and Tooze has more space to put Geithner into context. That context tells an interesting story about the shape of political economics in the 21st century. Tooze identifies Geithner as an institutionalist. His goal was to keep the system running, and he was acutely aware of what would happen if it failed. He therefore focused on the pragmatic and the practical: the financial system was about to collapse, he did whatever was necessary to keep it working, and that effort was successful. Fairness, fault, and morals were treated as irrelevant. This becomes more obvious when contrasted with the eurozone crisis, which started with a Greek debt crisis in the wake of the recession triggered by the 2008 crisis. Greece is tiny by the standards of the European economy, so at first glance there is no obvious reason why its debt crisis should have perturbed the financial system. Under normal circumstances, its lenders should have been able to absorb such relatively modest losses. But the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis was not normal circumstances, particularly in Europe. The United States had moved aggressively to recapitalize its banks using the threat of compensation caps and government review of their decisions. The European Union had not; European countries had done very little, and their banks were still in a fragile state. Worse, the European Central Bank had sent signals that the market interpreted as guaranteeing the safety of all European sovereign debt equally, even though this was explicitly ruled out by the Lisbon Treaty. If Greece defaulted on its debt, not only would that be another shock to already-precarious banks, it would indicate to the market that all European debt was not equal and other countries may also be allowed to default. As the shape of the Greek crisis became clearer, the cost of borrowing for all of the economically weaker European countries began rising towards unsustainable levels. In contrast to the approach taken by the United States government, though, Europe took a moralistic approach to the crisis. Jean-Claude Trichet, then president of the European Central Bank, held the absolute position that defaulting on or renegotiating the Greek debt was unthinkable and would not be permitted, even though there was no realistic possibility that Greece would be able to repay. He also took a conservative hard line on the role of the ECB, arguing that it could not assist in this crisis. (Tooze is absolutely scathing towards Trichet, who comes off in this account as rigidly inflexible, volatile, and completely irrational.) Germany's position, represented by Angela Merkel, was far more realistic: Greece's debt should be renegotiated and the creditors would have to accept losses. This is, in Tooze's account, clearly correct, and indeed is what eventually happened. But the problem with Merkel's position was the potential fallout. The German government was still in denial about the health of its own banks, and political opinion, particularly in Merkel's coalition, was strongly opposed to making German taxpayers responsible for other people's debts. Stopping the progression of a Greek default to a loss of confidence in other European countries would require backstopping European sovereign debt, and Merkel was not willing to support this. Tooze is similarly scathing towards Merkel, but I'm not sure it's warranted by his own account. She seemed, even in his account, boxed in by domestic politics and the tight constraints of the European political structure. Regardless, even after Trichet's term ended and he was replaced by the far more pragmatic Mario Draghi, Germany and Merkel continued to block effective action to relieve Greece's debt burden. As a result, the crisis lurched from inadequate stopgap to inadequate stopgap, forcing crippling austerity, deep depressions, and continued market instability while pretending unsustainable debt would magically become payable through sufficient tax increases and spending cuts. US officials such as Geithner, who put morals and arguably legality aside to do whatever was needed to save the system, were aghast. One takeaway from this is that expansionary austerity is the single worst macroeconomic idea that anyone has ever had.

In the summer of 2012 [the IMF's] staff revisited the forecasts they had made in the spring of 2010 as the eurozone crisis began and discovered that they had systematically underestimated the negative impact of budget cuts. Whereas they had started the crisis believing that the multiplier was on average around 0.5, they now concluded that from 2010 forward it had been in excess of 1. This meant that cutting government spending by 1 euro, as the austerity programs demanded, would reduce economic activity by more than 1 euro. So the share of the state in economic activity actually increased rather than decreased, as the programs presupposed. It was a staggering admission. Bad economics and faulty empirical assumptions had led the IMF to advocate a policy that destroyed the economic prospects for a generation of young people in Southern Europe.

Another takeaway, though, is central to Tooze's point in the final section of the book: the institutionalists in the United States won the war on financial collapse via massive state interventions to support banks and the financial system, a model that Europe grudgingly had to follow when attempting to reject it caused vast suffering while still failing to stabilize the financial system. But both did so via actions that were profoundly and obviously unfair, and only questionably legal. Bankers suffered few consequences for their greed and systematic mismanagement, taking home their normal round of bonuses while millions of people lost their homes and unemployment rates for young men in some European countries exceeded 50%. In Europe, the troika's political pressure against Greece and Italy was profoundly anti-democratic. The financial elite achieved their goal of saving the financial system. It could have failed, that failure would have been catastrophic, and their actions are defensible on pragmatic grounds. But they completely abandoned the moral high ground in the process. The political forces opposed to centrist neoliberalism attempted to step into that moral gap. On the Left, that came in the form of mass protest movements, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, and parties such as Syriza in Greece. The Left, broadly, took the moral side of debtors, holding that the primary pain of the crisis should instead be born by the wealthy creditors who were more able to absorb it. The Right by contrast, in the form of the Tea Party movement inside the Republican Party in the United States and the nationalist parties in Europe, broadly blamed debtors for taking on excessive debt and focused their opposition on use of taxpayer dollars to bail out investment banks and other institutions of the rich. Tooze correctly points out that the Right's embrace of racist nationalism and incoherent demagoguery obscures the fact that their criticism of the elite center has real merit and is partly shared by the Left. As Tooze sketches out, the elite centrist consensus held in most of Europe, beating back challenges from both the Left and the Right, although it faltered in the UK, Poland, and Hungary. In the United States, the Democratic Party similarly solidified around neoliberalism and saw off its challenges from the Left. The Republican Party, however, essentially abandoned the centrist position, embracing the Right. That left the Democratic Party as the sole remaining neoliberal institutionalist party, supplemented by a handful of embattled Republican centrists. Wall Street and its money swung to the Democratic Party, but it was deeply unpopular on both the Left and the Right and this shift may have hurt them more than helped. The Democrats, by not abandoning the center, bore the brunt of the residual anger over the bank bailout and subsequent deep recession. Tooze sees in that part of the explanation for Trump's electoral victory over Hilary Clinton. This review is already much too long, and I haven't even mentioned Tooze's clear explanation of the centrality of treasury bonds to world finances, or his discussions of Russian and Ukraine, China, or Brexit, all of which I thought were excellent. This is not only an comprehensive history of both of the crises and international politics of the time period. It is also a thought-provoking look at how drastic of interventions are required to keep the supposed free market working, who is left to suffer after those interventions, and the political consequences of the choice to prioritize the stability of a deeply inequitable and unsafe financial system. At least in the United States, there is now a major political party that is likely to oppose even mundane international financial institutions, let alone another major intervention. The neoliberal center is profoundly weakened. But nothing has been done to untangle the international financial system, and little has been done to reduce its risk. The world will go into the next financial challenge still suffering from a legitimacy crisis. Given the miserly, condescending, and dismissive treatment of the suffering general populace after moving heaven and earth to save the banking system, that legitimacy crisis is arguably justified, but an uncontrolled crash of the financial system is not likely to be any kinder to the average citizen than it is to the investment bankers. Crashed is not the best-written book at a sentence-by-sentence level. Tooze's prose is choppy and a bit awkward, and his paragraphs occasionally wander away from a clear point. But the content is excellent and thought-provoking, filling in large sections of the crisis picture that I had not previously been aware of and making a persuasive argument for its continuing effects on current politics. Recommended if you're not tired of reading about financial crises. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson

Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-593-13506-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	327

Cara is valuable because, in most places, she's dead. In the world of Earth Zero, as the employees of the Eldridge Institute call it, a scientific genius named Adam Bosch developed the ability to travel between parallel worlds. This ability is not limitless, however. One restriction is that the parallel world has to be very close; large divergences of history render them unreachable. The other restriction is that anyone who attempts to travel to a world in which the local version of themselves is still alive is rejected: physically mangled in ways that result in a very short remaining lifespan. Earth Zero has not found a way to send information between worlds without sending people there physically to collect it. Those people are traversers, and their value lies in how many of their parallel selves have died. Each death in one of the 380 worlds Earth Zero can reach means another world that person can traverse to. They are the transportation system for a network of information-gathering nodes, whose collected contents are mined for stock tips, political cautions, and other information of value. Cara is dead on 372 worlds, and thus provides valuable savings on employee salaries. These related worlds are not so much post-apocalyptic as a continuation of current wealth disparity trends, although it's also clear that the climate has gotten worse. The Eldridge Institute, which controls traversing, is based in Wiley City, a walled, climate-controlled arcology of skyscrapers with a dome that filters out the dangerous sun. Its citizens are rich, with the best social support that money can buy. They are not interested in immigrants, unless they are extremely valuable. Cara is not from Wiley City. She is from Ashtown, the encampment in the desert outside of Wiley City's walls. That's part of the explanation for her death rate; in Ashtown, there are only a few ways to survive, particularly if one is not from the stiflingly religious Rurals, and most of them are dependent on being in the good graces of the local warlord and his Mad-Max-style enforcers. Being a traverser gets Cara out of Ashtown and into Wiley City, but not as a citizen, although that's dangled vaguely as a possible future prize. She's simply an employee, on a work permit, who enjoys the comforts of Wiley City for exactly as long as she's useful. Meanwhile, she juggles the demands of her job, her attraction to her watcher Dell, and her family in Ashtown. She is profoundly, aggressively cynical. Cara is also not precisely who people think she is. The Space Between Worlds pulls off a beautifully elegant combination of two science fiction subgenres: parallel universes and time travel. Both have been part of science fiction for decades, but normally parallel universes are substantially different from each other. Major historical events go differently, Nazis win World War II, Spock has a goatee, etc. Minor deviations are more often the subject of time travel stories, as travelers attempt to tweak the past and influence the future. Johnson instead provides the minor variations and small divergences of time travel stories in a parallel world framework, with no actual time travel involved or possible. The resulting story shows the same ripple effect of small differences, but the future remains unwritten and unconstrained, which avoids the stiflingly closed feeling of most time travel plots. Against that backdrop is set a story of corporate and personal intrigue, but one with a far deeper understanding of class and place than almost all of science fiction. Cara is not from Ashtown in the normal sense of science fiction novels written by comfortably middle-class white authors about protagonists from the wrong side of the tracks, who show their merit and then never look back. Cara is from Ashtown in a way that means she misses the taste of its dirt and understands its people and feels seen there. Wiley City knows very well that she's from Ashtown, and doesn't let her forget it. This type of ambiguous relationship with place and wealth, and deep connection to where one comes from, is so rare in science fiction, and it's beautifully written here. Cara wants to be in Wiley City over the alternative; the potential loss of her job is a real threat. But at the same time she is not at home there, because she is not visible there. Everything is slightly off, she has no one she can really talk to, and her reactions don't quite fit. No one understands her the way that her family in Ashtown does. And yet, by living in Wiley City, she is becoming less at home in Ashtown as well. She is becoming an outsider. It takes about 70 pages for the story in The Space Between Worlds to really get started. Those first 70 pages is very important background information that the rest of the story builds on, but they weren't that engrossing. Once the story kicks into gear, though, it's a tense, complicated story that I had a hard time predicting and an even harder time putting down. It's not perfect (more on that in a moment), but Johnson weaves together Cara's sense of place, her family connections, her sense of self, and her internal moral compass to create a memorable protagonist in a page-turning plot with a satisfying payoff. She uses our ability to look in on several versions of each character to give them additional satisfying heft and depth. Esther, Cara's highly religious sister, is the most delightful character in this book, and that's saying a lot coming from someone who usually doesn't like highly religious characters. I do have some world-building quibbles, and came up with more when I mulled over the book after finishing it, so you may need to strengthen your suspension of disbelief. The passive information gathering via traversing made a lot of sense; the bulk import of raw materials via the industrial hatch makes less sense given the constraints of the world. (Who is loading those materials into the other side? Or are they somehow traversing them directly out of the ground? Wouldn't someone notice?) The plot also partly hinges on a bit of lost technology that is extremely difficult to square with the rest of the setting, and felt like a transparent justification for introducing Mad Max elements into the setting. The quibble I noticed the most may be unavoidable given the setting: alternate worlds with slightly different versions of the same characters creates a potential explosion in cast size, which Johnson deals with by focusing on the cross-world variations of a small number of characters. I like all of those characters, but it does give the story a bit of an incestuous feel. The politics of every world revolve around the same ten people, and no one else seems to matter (or usually even has a name). That said, a small cast is a better problem to have than a confusing cast. Johnson does a great job helping the reader keep all the characters and relationships straight across their alternate world variations. I didn't realize until after I finished the book how difficult that probably was, which is the sign of a job well done. I do also have to complain about how completely dense Cara is when it comes to Dell, but I won't say any more than that to avoid spoilers. There are some things I figured out way before Cara did, though, and that made her behavior rather frustrating. This is an extremely impressive first novel that does some lovely things with genre and even more impressive things with social class and mobility. It's a little rough in places, you have to bear with the first 70 pages, and the ending, while a fitting conclusion to the emotional arc, seemed wildly unbelievable to me given the events of the plot. But it's very much worth reading despite those flaws. Johnson respects her characters and their culture and their world, and it shows. This was one of the best science fiction novels I read in 2021. (Content warning for physical and emotional partner abuse.) Rating: 8 out of 10

A new maintenance RcppSMC release 0.2.6 arrived at CRAN yesterday. It chiefly updates the code to comply with g++-11 which default to C++17 which brings us std::data(). And if one is not careful, as we weren t in three files, this can clash with other uses of data as I tweeted a good week ago. Otherwise some JSS URLs now sport the preferred shorter doi form. RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021. This release is summarized below.

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.6 (2021-12-17)

• Updated URLs to JSS for the new DOI scheme upon their request
• Adjusted three source files for C++17 compilation under g++-11

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new release 0.4.18 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. This release, the first since March of last year, contains two contributed pull requests improving or extending the package, some internal maintance updating the CI setup as well as retiring an old-yet-unused stub interface for RPC, as well as an update for UCRT builds on Windows. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has more details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.18 (2021-12-15)

• Support string_view in FindMethodByName() (Adam Cozzette in #72).
• CI use was updated first at Travis, later at GitHub and now uses r-ci (Dirk in #74 and (parts of) #76).
• The (to the best of our knowledge) unused minimal RPC mechanism has been removed, retiring one method and one class as well as the import of the RCurl package (Dirk in #76).
• The toJSON() method supports two (upstream) formatting toggles (Vitali Spinu in #79 with minor edit by Dirk).
• Windows UCRT builds are now supported (Jeroen in #81, Dirk and Tomas Kalibera in #82).

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

It's been a while since I've posted one of these, and I also may have had a few moments of deciding to support authors by buying their books even if I'm not going to get a chance to read them soon. There's also a bit of work reading in here. Ryka Aoki Light from Uncommon Stars (sff)
Frederick R. Chromey To Measure the Sky (non-fiction)
Neil Gaiman, et al. Sandman: Overture (graphic novel)
Alix E. Harrow A Spindle Splintered (sff)
Jordan Ifueko Raybearer (sff)
Jordan Ifueko Redemptor (sff)
T. Kingfisher Paladin's Hope (sff)
TJ Klune Under the Whispering Door (sff)
Kiese Laymon How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (non-fiction)
Yuna Lee Fox You (romance)
Tim Mak Misfire (non-fiction)
Naomi Novik The Last Graduate (sff)
Shelley Parker-Chan She Who Became the Sun (sff)
Gareth L. Powell Embers of War (sff)
Justin Richer & Antonio Sanso OAuth 2 in Action (non-fiction)
Dean Spade Mutual Aid (non-fiction)
Lana Swartz New Money (non-fiction)
Adam Tooze Shutdown (non-fiction)
Bill Watterson The Essential Calvin and Hobbes (strip collection)
Bill Willingham, et al. Fables: Storybook Love (graphic novel)
David Wong Real-World Cryptography (non-fiction)
Neon Yang The Black Tides of Heaven (sff)
Neon Yang The Red Threads of Fortune (sff)
Neon Yang The Descent of Monsters (sff)
Neon Yang The Ascent to Godhood (sff)
Xiran Jay Zhao Iron Widow (sff)

An updated version 0.2.2 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself) is now on CRAN. I should dub this the due to Brian Ripley release. He sent me a detailed five-point email a few days ago which detailed a change I could not have tested ( no access ), a change I would not have known ( somewhat obscure C language bit-level manipulation ), a change I had missed (how my build setup failed for M1mac), another advanced C level fix, and one more simple fix I actually knew. Speechless. The man (I presume) does not sleep and is just so generous with his time and expertise. So based on the input I rejigged the package over the weekend and made two more (substantial) changes. First, extending on what 0.2.0 brought, I will no longer attempt to use an external libdieharder library (or build one on the fly) that was issue one. Now we just declare all C files as dependents of the package shared library, and things are simpler and more consistent. Sadly, that also implies everything is in the package so I had to edit out a metric ton of stdout or exit() reference with the appropriate R C API hooks to appease the CRAN Policy deities. Win some, loose some. But the package is now simpler, and cleaner, and should be in good standing. (Or so one hopes. Earlier today, and within hours of it hitting CRAN, I got an issue ticket from a motivated user about yet another ( mostly harmless in the Douglas Adams sense) compiler warning Good now too.) Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at the most recent diff. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Someone is Wrong on the Internet If you look up how to only forward ports with ssh, you may come across solutions like this:

ssh -nNT -L 8000:example.com:80 user@bastion.example.com

Or perhaps this, if you also wanted to send ssh to the background:

ssh -NT -L 3306:db.example.com:3306 example.com &

Both of these use at least one option that is entirely redundant, and the second can cause ssh to fail to connect if you happen to be using password authentication. However, they seem to still persist in various articles about ssh port forwarding. I myself was using the first variation until just recently, and I figured I would write this up to inform others who might be still using these solutions. The correct option for this situation is not -nNT but simply -N, as in:

ssh -N -L 8000:example.com:80 user@bastion.example.com

If you want to also send ssh to the background, then you ll want to add -f instead of using your shell s built-in & feature, because you can then input passwords into ssh if necessary¹ Honestly, that s the point of this article, so you can stop here if you want. If you re looking for a detailed explaination of what each of these options actually does, or if you have no idea what I m talking about, read on!

What is SSH Port Forwarding? ssh is a powerful tool for remote access to servers, allowing you to execute commands on a remote machine. It can also forward ports through a secure tunnel with the -L and -R options. Basically, you can forward a connection to a local port to a remote server like so:

ssh -L 8080:other.example.com:80 ssh.example.com

In this example, you connect to ssh.example.com and then ssh forwards any traffic on your local machine port 8080² to other.example.com port 80 via ssh.example.com. This is a really powerful feature, allowing you to jump³ inside your firewall with just an ssh server exposed to the world. It can work in reverse as well with the -R option, allowing connections on a remote host in to a server running on your local machine. For example, say you were running a website on your local machine on port 8080 but wanted it accessible on example.com port 80⁴. You could use something like:

ssh -R 8080:example.com:80 example.com

The trouble with ssh port forwarding is that, absent any additional options, you also open a shell on the remote machine. If you re planning to both work on a remote machine and use it to forward some connection, this is fine, but if you just need to forward a port quickly and don t care about a shell at that moment, it can be annoying, especially since if the shell closes ssh will close the forwarding port as well. This is where the -N option comes in.

SSH just forwarding ports In the ssh manual page⁵, -N is explained like so:

Do not execute a remote command. This is useful for just forwarding ports.

This is all we need. It instructs ssh to run no commands on the remote server, just forward the ports specified in the -L or -R options. But people seem to think that there are a bunch of other necessary options, so what do those do?

SSH and stdin -n controls how ssh interacts with standard input, specifically telling it not to:

Redirects stdin from /dev/null (actually, prevents reading from stdin). This must be used when ssh is run in the background. A common trick is to use this to run X11 programs on a remote machine. For example, ssh -n shadows.cs.hut.fi emacs & will start an emacs on shadows.cs.hut.fi, and the X11 connection will be automatically for warded over an encrypted channel. The ssh program will be put in the background. (This does not work if ssh needs to ask for a password or passphrase; see also the -f option.)

SSH passwords and backgrounding -f sends ssh to background, freeing up the terminal in which you ran ssh to do other things.

Requests ssh to go to background just before command execution. This is useful if ssh is going to ask for passwords or passphrases, but the user wants it in the background. This implies -n. The recommended way to start X11 programs at a remote site is with something like ssh -f host xterm.

As indicated in the description of -n, this does the same thing as using the shell s & feature with -n, but allows you to put in any necessary passwords first.

SSH and pseudo-terminals -T is a little more complicated than the others and has a very short explanation:

Disable pseudo-terminal allocation.

It has a counterpart in -t, which is explained a little better:

Force pseudo-terminal allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine, which can be very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services. Multiple -t options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty.

As the description of -t indicates, ssh is allocating a pseudo-terminal on the remote machine, not the local one. However, I have confirmed⁶ that -N doesn t allocate a pseudo-terminal either, since it doesn t run any commands. Thus this option is entirely unnecessary.

What s a pseudo-terminal? This is a bit complicated, but basically it s an interface used in UNIX-like systems, like Linux or BSD, that pretends to be a terminal (thus pseudo-terminal). Programs like your shell, or any text-based menu system made in libraries like ncurses, expect to be connected to one (when used interactively at least). Basically it fakes as if the input it is given (over the network, in the case of ssh) was typed on a physical terminal device and do things like raise an interrupt (SIGINT) if Ctrl+C is pressed.

Why? I don t know why these incorrect uses of ssh got passed around as correct, but I suspect it s a form of cargo cult, where we use example commands others provide and don t question what they do. One stack overflow answer I read that provided these options seemed to think -T was disabling the local pseudo-terminal, which might go some way towards explaining why they thought it was necessary. I guess the moral of this story is to question everything and actually read the manual, instead of just googling it.

1. Not that you SHOULD be using ssh with password authentication anyway, but people do.
2. Only on your loopback address by default, so that you re not allowing random people on your network to use your tunnel.
3. In fact, ssh even supports Jump Hosts, allowing you to automatically forward an ssh connection through another machine.
4. I can t say I recommend a setup like this for anything serious, as you d need to ssh as root to forward ports less than 1024. SSH forwarding is not for permanent solutions, just short-lived connections to machines that would be otherwise inaccessible.
5. Specifically, my source is the ssh(1) manual page in OpenSSH 8.4, shipped as 1:8.4p1-5 in Debian bullseye.
6. I just forwarded ports with -N and then logged in to that same machine and looked at psuedo-terminal allocations via ps ux. No terminal is associated with ssh connections using just the -N option.

A week after the 0.2.5 release bringing the recent Google Summer of Code for RcppSMC to CRAN, we have a minor bug-fix release consistently, essentially, of one line. Everybody s favourite OS and toolchain did not know what to make of pow(), and I seemingly failed to test there, so shame on me. But now all is good thanks to proper use of std::pow(). RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package now features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021. This release is summarized below.

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.5 (2021-09-09)

• Compilation under Solaris is aided via std::pow use (Dirk in #65 fixing #64)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.