Interesting links and quotes: cat massacre, Hunter Biden, diamond factory, political gender gap, superiority of C18th

Plus more links and quotes

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital. This week in The Times I wrote about the genius of Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, which tells the story of an Irish rake fighting and philandering his way through eighteenth century Europe.

When it was first released in 1975 it was criticised as off-puttingly cold and formal. But, I argue, what is now clear is that Barry Lyndon is a film that really understands the strangeness of the past, which was often a remarkably cold and formal place:

Barry Lyndon is almost unique among historical dramas in unblinkingly confronting the fact that the pre-industrial past was an alien world; intensely formal, rigidly hierarchical and arbitrarily violent. The peasant population lived in conditions of constant near-starvation and the wealthy navigated a world of Byzantine social rules and suffocating paranoia about matters of honour.

In his superb study of eighteenth century manners In Pursuit of Civility (one of my all time favourite history books) Keith Thomas points out that laughter was widely frowned on as socially inappropriate. The past is a profoundly alien place and we must never forget it.

I saw Barry Lyndon again at the Prince Charles cinema on Tuesday night. This time round I was particularly struck by how little Kubrick tries to psychologise about his characters. Lyndon himself, played by Ryan O’Neal was criticised when the film was released as a blank or a cipher or a puppet. It’s not really clear why he is so ruthlessly driven. This is strange to modern viewers who live in a world shaped by the obsessive inwardness of the Romantics and by the Victorian novel. We want a psychological wound or a formative trauma. But it is very true to the mental world of the early eighteenth century. The first English novels — Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe — are characterised by outward action not inner drama.

I also wish I’d had space in the piece to mention Leonard Rossiter’s splendid performance as Captain Quinn. Rossiter’s portrayal of Quinn’s over-inflated sense of his dignity as an officer and a landowner is possibly the funniest thing in the film. There must have been so many annoying men like this in the eighteenth century:

Mass-produced diamonds
Totally fascinating piece in the Financial Times about the explosion of China’s industrial production of diamonds which increasingly poses a threat to the old mining companies like De Beers.

On a sweltering summer afternoon in Zhengzhou, capital of the central Chinese province of Henan, Feng’s Jiaruifu diamond factory hums with energy. Inside, 600 machines, each larger than an African elephant, simulate the crushing geological pressure and diabolical heat deep in the Earth’s surface, where diamonds grow. The machines can turn out three-carat diamonds, the size of a large engagement ring, in just seven days. “We can mass-produce diamonds,” Feng says, proudly pointing to the rows of machines. He has another two factories working around the clock. “Currently, I produce about 100,000 carats a month,” he adds.

… and I write four opinion columns a month. Puts my contribution to the economy somewhat in perspective.

Why are young women increasingly left-wing?
Very interesting article by Sam Freedman on the increasing numbers of young women voting for radical left parties. The shift of young men towards radical right wing parties has been much discussed in recent years, but Freedman suggests this more often overlooked story may prove just as politically consequential:

In Germany, earlier this year, 34% of 18-24 year old women voted for Die Linke, driving the left-wing party’s dramatic resurgence and helping them get back into the Bundestag. In Spain, at last year’s European elections a poll found 59% of 25-30 year old women saying they’d vote left-wing. In Australia, according to a 2024 analysis, Gen Z women are by far the most left-wing voter segment.

Despite the focus on young men, the split in their vote between left and right is broadly stable over time in most countries. We are seeing a shift within the young male right-wing vote from traditional centre-right parties to radical right parties, but that’s something happening with men in every age group. Conversely young women are both genuinely shifting leftwards, and within the left-wing vote towards more radical parties like the Greens or Die Linke. This is not happening with older women where trends are either stable or where there’s a far less dramatic leftwards shift.

How to read and why
I’m a long standing fan of Russ Roberts’s brilliant EconTalk podcast so I was thrilled to be invited on to talk about how to read and why. I argued that the proliferation of social media, podcasts and short form video only emphasises the fact that books are the greatest information technology ever invented:

The Great Cat Massacre
This week I finished Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre — a possible contender for the best history book I’ve read this year. Darnton is one of the greatest living historians of the eighteenth century. His subject in this book (which partly inspired my column) is the strangeness of the past.

Again and again, he points out that in the eighteenth century people thought and felt in ways that are totally alien to modern sensibilities. He cautions that whenever we are tempted to think people in the past were “relatable” or “just like us”, it’s worth remembering that torturing and burning cats was one of the most popular amusements in eighteenth century Europe:

Children used to attach cats to poles and roast them over bonfires. In the jeu du chat at the Fete-Dieu in Aix-en-Provence, they threw cats high in the air and smashed them on the ground. They used expressions like “patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out” or “patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled.” The English were just as cruel. During the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vestments, and hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside

Our ancestors were terrible people.

Highly recommended

The podcasting genius of Hunter Biden
Brilliant Helen Lewis piece on Hunter Biden’s appearance on Andrew Callaghan’s podcast. In the old media world a president’s black sheep son casually rambling on in a self-pitying about his crack cocaine and alcohol addiction and swearing a lot would have been a PR catastrophe. But, Lewis argues, this, er, raw authenticity is exactly what the new world of podcasting demands:

Everything that was bananas about Hunter’s interview by old media standards—the insults, the frank discussion of drugs, the weird segues, the desire to lean into controversy—had previously been embraced by the Trump campaign. Last year, Trump’s most human moment was talking with Theo Von about his brother’s death from alcoholism, an exchange that also featured Von, who is now sober, joking about the low quality of cocaine these days and Trump nodding solemnly, as if this were something his tariff regime might address. In the interview with Callaghan, Hunter Biden talks about how making crack requires only “a mayonnaise jar, cocaine, and baking soda.”

As Lewis says, Republicans had cornered the market in this raw confessional authentic stuff. Biden is a rare example of a Democrat who can do it too. Hunter Biden for president?

The economics of super-intelligence
The Economist tries to predict what will happen to the economy if/when AI companies reach super intelligence. Even achieving human-level intelligence that could be effectively implemented would transform the economy beyond recognition:

In labour markets the cost of using computing power for a task would limit the wages for carrying it out: why pay a worker more than the digital competition? Yet the shrinking number of superstars whose skills were not automatable and could directly complement AI would enjoy enormous returns. The only people doing better than them, in all likelihood, would be the owners of AI-relevant capital, which would be gobbling up a rising share of economic output.

Everyone else would have to adapt to gaps in AI’s abilities and to the spending of the new rich. Wherever there was a bottleneck in automation and labour supply, wages could rise rapidly. Such effects, known as “cost disease”, could be so strong as to limit the explosion of measured GDP, even as the economy changed utterly.

I’m increasingly persuaded by the seemingly wild predictions for AI. Silicon Valley is pouring unimaginable sums into developing it and, as the Economist article points out, AI advances are fast outpacing predictions made even a few years ago.

After all if you’d predicted what the industrial revolution would do to the global economy you would have sounded mad:

Before 1700 the world economy grew, on average, by 8% a century. Anyone who forecast what happened next would have seemed deranged. Over the following 300 years, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, growth averaged 350% a century.

Reader poll: what is your favourite century?
I am coming to the belated realisation that I have a special affinity for the eighteenth century. This may already have been obvious to Cultural Capital readers. I could read about it basically endlessly.

In a way it’s odd as it was a relatively unexciting time for the visual arts (unless you find e.g. Watteau, Fragonnard, Boucher etc amazingly profound painters) and until Wordsworth arrived it was fairly dismal for poetry. And yet there’s so much stuff that fascinates me: the Enlightenment, the Romantics, Mozart, Rousseau, Dr Johnson, Pope.

I increasingly believe everyone has a century they feel especially drawn to.

What is yours?

(Substack only let me include five centuries. Sorry to fans of the twentieth century and the middle ages. Feel free to make your case for your favourite century in the comments.)

Boreas Abducting Oreithyia by Francois Boucher - not a masterpiece of artistic profoundity … look at that preposterous dive-bombing baby

Should we all be taking ozempic?
Derek Thompson interesting on the mysterious miracle of ozempic and other GLP 1 drugs:

They prevent strokes, heart attacks, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and Parkinson's disease. They’re associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma. Arthritic patients on the drugs experienced relief from knee pain that was “on par with opioid drugs.” A small study found that they reduce migraine headaches by 50 percent. And emerging research suggests they might even slow the rate of memory loss among people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Reading mania
One final dispatch from the eighteenth century. In The Great Cat Massacre Robert Darnton has a very good chapter on the extraordinary reactions of eighteenth century French readers encountering Rousseau’s sentimental (and nowadays virtually unreadable) novel Julie for the first time:

The abbé Cahagne read the same passages aloud to friends at least ten times, each time with bursts of tears all around: “One must suffocate, one must abandon the book, one must weep, one must write to you that one is choking with emotion and weeping.” The novel drove J.-F. Bastide to his bed and nearly drove him mad, or so he believed, while it produced the opposite effect on Daniel Roguin, who sobbed so violently that he cured himself of a severe cold. The baron de La Sarraz declared that the only way to read the book was behind locked doors, so that one could weep at one’s ease, without being interrupted by the servants. J.-V. Capperonnier de Gauffecourt read only a few pages at a time because his health was too weak to withstand the emotion. But his friend, the abbé Jacques Pernetti, congratulated himself on being robust enough to get through all six volumes without stopping, despite the pounding of his heart.

Rousseau helped trigger a revolution in the way people in Europe thought and felt. This was the first stirring of the romantic movement (see above). But as Darnton points out, modern people who live in a world saturated by screens and entertainment just can’t grasp how incredibly emotionally involving novels were for the readers who encountered them in the eighteenth century.

And finally…
Let me know what you’re reading, what podcasts you’re listening to (or anything else) in the comments below. Last week’s comment section was full of fascinating recommendations.

Until next week,

James