Lawrence Kay

What I read in 2026:

AI is going to extend my mental acuity far beyond what I could have reasonably expected a few years ago. Do it right, and my agents will be an extension of me that will prompt and remind me of ideas, keeping me going between the ears for years.

69) Attempts a delicious telling of a story through food, but lost me at about halfway through the second course. The exposure to Taiwanese culture was a joy. Who the author was, who the translators were, and how they all connect, was beyond me to understand.

68) Misunderstood for its deterministic physical-conditions-to-human-development rather institutions-to-development argument, when it only compares its view to a racial one. The steel, germs and geography points are insightful and persuasive, but they have to lead to an analysis of how different cultures treat the combinatorial expansion in ideas through institutions. Perhaps people in the 1990s explained that through race, but serious academic study didn't to the degree that Diamond argues against. Recommended, nonetheless.

61)

In other words, Starmer is the first PM to receive the Légion d'honneur since Churchill (there were wartime concessions) because none of his predecessors would have thought themselves able to accept it if offered, for otherwise the French give the LoH freely to foreign leaders.

I'm a Francophile but mostly like to see France win as a public defence against the racialist illiberalism that they are so often subject to. Rajoy has the opinions that dominate among nearly all the fancy, white collar professionals I know, and I loathe them. lemonde.fr/en/football/ar…

Would an elite player like Digne sit in his feelings of embarrassment and fear, like I would? Or would he get himself out of it quickly, meaning that being beaten by an opponent is just about skill?

🧵1/ Before refrigeration, the smallpox vaccine was a live virus with no shelf life. So how did the British move it across 19th-century India? They chained it through the arms of children. Vaccinate one, wait a week, harvest the lymph from the blister, use it on the next.

I hope that our nations prosper together and we will be able to defend our way of living - as Western civilization. I urged all our Allies to come to Ukraine to learn to be strong as we are. However, I made a CRITICAL mistake of offering ALL OF THEM beers on me in Ukraine 😅

The paper is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

This specification from @joshgans is going to dominate everything. The task of orchestrating human inputs and evaluation, alongside embodying it in an orchestration of agents, is enormous. There are surely, surely, very few pre-AI organisations that are up to it.

This must be cutting across the beliefs that Reform voters had about Farage, in a way that he won't be able to recover. He'll be moving from being seen as a wheeler-dealer that made it, to the type of guy that wouldn't finish the building job you hired him for.

Working with agents is an extraordinary upgrade in the quality of my day and that of so many other people. Mornings are now catching up on the news and tasks completed. Days are making frontier knowledge usable. Evenings are rich entertainment.

Britain has one of the world's best restaurant industries, perhaps the best. One notices it almost immediately, going anywhere else. The service will be slower, the menus confusing, and the food not as good. Great food is British culture, now.

It's extraordinary to me that anyone would think of listing Westminster's Regency Cafe. Yes, it's popular, but that's because it's half the price of everything else in the neighbourhood. There's no need to fetishise low prices as 'authentic culture.' youtu.be/yM8_-uNjR6o?t=…

The rise and fall of wokeness: DEI commitments in corporate securities disclosures filed with the SEC. To me this seems a trailing indicator; most other measures of wokeness take off well before 2019 and peak in 2020 or 2021. But the shape! That's what a moral fashion looks like.

🚨 UPDATE: The white British man arrested over the suspected murder of Ann Widdecombe has been re-arrested on suspicion of preparing or instigating acts of terrorism

There is corruption within the wider Tower Hamlets planning & licensing system, and I hear stories regularly but unless somebody blows whistle hard to prove The previous Mayor John Biggs had to be told by a lawyer to report corruption to the Police but they left it so late Police did nothing

🚨 BREAKING: Counter Terror Police are now leading the investigation into the suspected murder of Ann Widdecombe after "new information and evidence came to light"

@EBL2017 I do. Thanks for the reminder!

Tielemans is a big game player. He was world class for Belgium in the World Cup and scored the opener in Villa's Europa League final. Also, do you remember that FA Cup final winner? Just watch this… 👇

I’ve unveiled a secret project today. One that we’ve been working on for the past year. Something that can add a billion pounds a year to the economy of the north while making the environment better. And we think we can deliver it at no cost to government. Ambitious, right?

We're doing that thing again, where we work on vaccines to help some of the world's poorest people fight horrendous diseases. We did the same in developing the only early COVID vaccine that could be transported to them. We're such awful, awful people.