Pun Salad

This is third entry (and, according to the WSJ reviewer, the final entry) in Tana French's series featuring the protagonist Cal Hooper, a divorced Chicago ex-cop who has moved to the small Irish village of Ardnakelty.

Cal is somewhat less of a out-of-water fish in this book. He has accumulated a sorta-fiancee, Lena. And Trey, the semi-feral teenager in the previous books has become a sorta-daughter. But Cal feels, correctly, that situation is precarious on all counts. Ardnakelty runs on gossip and rumor, it seems. And that goes into full gear when young Rachel Holohan, goes missing; Cal finds her in a local river, an apparent suicide.

Which might have been the end of it, but Rachel was engaged to Eugene, son to Tommy Moynahan, a local rich bigshot. And it turns out that Tommy has a secret scheme in the works to mess with Ardnakelty's bucolic scenery. Did Rachel know too much about it?

Ms. French is one of the few writers that I consider to be auto-buys at Amazon. Here's a paragraph I snipped out of my Kindle version, describing the search for Rachel:

They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse. They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers. The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass. The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure. Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag. A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.

I don't know about you, but those little tossed-off details, compactly told, put me there. It's only one example of how Ms. French describes characters and their environment. If you want to see a writer at the top of her game, there you go.

Katherine Mangu-Ward says yes because AI Companies Learn the Word No.

Fine, but that's a lot of organizations that you hope will be responsible, leakproof stewards of potentially dangerous information. But the folks at Anthropic are pretty smart, I assume they've considered that, and I suppose there are safeguards. Right?

Also of note:

• "Hey, sorry we killed your company." I assume none of the perps will be saying that anytime soon. The WSJ editorialists look at Spirit Airlines and the Antitrust Left. (WSJ gifted link)

  The demise of Spirit Airlines is a tragedy for its 15,000 or so employees, though at least taxpayers weren’t forced to pay for a bailout. But the airline’s closure shouldn’t pass without giving dubious credit to the main culprits: The antitrust theorists of the Biden Administration.

  Recall how Timothy Wu, Jonathan Kanter, Lina Khan and others on the left sought to revive long discredited theories of antitrust that view nearly all mergers as anti-competitive. Mr. Kanter tested that view on the airline industry, with disastrous results.

  I still watch Saturday Night Live, and their "Weekend Update" commentary was full of contempt for Spirit Airlines, who dared to offer bare-bones low-cost service to the plebes. You wouldn't have caught Colin Jost flying with the hoi polloi!

• It's Orwellian! Nicholas Clairmont is not a fan of The Inversion of ‘Animal Farm’. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell’s timeless classic Animal Farm, a “fairy story” aimed at young readers, has sold some 11 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1945. Its allegorical subject, Soviet communism, is not subtle. After all, the book begins with a speech by a pig who stands in for Karl Marx and, after an egalitarian revolution by animals that take over the farm, features a power struggle between a Trotskyist pig and a Stalinist pig and ends with the pigs installed as dictators indistinguishable from the human overlords their revolution originally sought to do away with. According to Orwell's preface, not published until 1972, one of the four publishers who originally rejected the book explained to Orwell that the issue was that Animal Farm took as its subject the evils of a country that was then an ally of both Britain and the U.S. “If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right,” the publisher wrote. “But the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.”

  This unnamed publisher may have been a patsy and a discredit to literary freedom, but at least he knew how to read at an eighth-grade level. Sadly, this is more than can be said for the makers of a new version of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, the actor and motion capture specialist famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

  It's been a long time since I read Animal Farm, and I had not read Orwell's preface linked above. An excerpt from the latter:

  I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

  By the known rules of ancient liberty.

  The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

  It was nice of Orwell to say that USA "liberals" did not fear liberty back in 1943. I'm pretty sure he couldn't say the same today.

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