Rumour has it that President Biden will announce his intention to seek a second term this week. Before the media inaugurate an exhausting 18 months of Groundhog Day, beginning no doubt with a punditry pageant about his age, keep two things in mind: the right candidate is the one who can win (this is true of all elections) and, even if he does win, he needn’t serve more than a minute of that second term to have still won.

Last week offers three exceptional quotes to share. The first is from Adam Gopnik’s review of Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World (2023), a history of the English Revolution, in the New Yorker (“What Happens When You Kill Your King”):

History is written by the victors, we’re told. In truth, history is written by the romantics, as stories are won by storytellers. Anyone who can spin lore and chivalry, higher calling and mystic purpose, from the ugliness of warfare can claim the tale, even in defeat.

The second comes from Jaron Lanier’s point of order about artificial intelligence from the online edition of the New Yorker (“There Is No A.I.”):

The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.

The third is a bad data blooper observed by the Economist’s Bagehot columnist in celebration of St. George’s Day (“If English nationalism is on the rise, no one has told the English”):

Chroniclers of English nationalism leapt on the 2011 census, which showed that a whopping 58% of residents in England identified as English only. Skip forward a decade and this number plunged to 15%. What caused this shift? A botched survey. In 2011 “English” was the first option and “British” was the fifth; in 2021 “Britain” came top of the list. If the patriotism of Englishmen does not extend to the lower box of a census form, it may not run deep.

Finally, a podcast recommendation: Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me improves on the now well-established form. I am not a member of the intended demographic but here’s to learning beyond the safe confines of that which is produced exclusively for your own personal context and comfort.