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A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Correspondence and criticism gratefully received and always read: robert@thebrowser.com. If you are not a paying subscriber to The Browser, and enjoy this letter, please do become a paying subscriber to The Browser, because that is how I earn the money to write this letter. This week: Crosswords, all-time-greats, rules for writers, New York salon, and books I have been reading.
MY PREFERRED UNIT of time is an hour. Whatever the diversion — a film, a book, a play, a conversation, a meal, a lecture, a museum visit, a train journey, an afternoon nap, a concert — an hour is always about right. More is too much. I get restive. The one-hour rule goes for crosswords, too. I will happily spend that time, and no more, with a cryptic crossword from The Browser, or, if I am in England, with one from the London Times. If I succeed in completing the puzzle within the hour, as I sometimes do, then so much the better. That is me. And then, above me by untold orders of magnitude, there is Dan Feyer, the crossword editor of The Browser. The cryptic crossword which Dan commissions and edits for each week's Browser Sunday Supplement ranks somewhere between the Mona Lisa and the Oracle at Delphi as a model of beauty and wisdom. It has no peer. The London Times crossword, though still of interest, is not what it was. The New Yorker crossword is still finding its voice. How does Dan do it? I can only imagine that, if ordinary mortals have a language instinct coded into their DNA, then Dan got a crossword instinct too. When he solves a crossword it is as though the answers appear to him unbidden, and the main constraint on his performance is the speed with which he can fill in the grid. Last month Dan won the 2023 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in a final that went right down to the wire — the last square on the last grid on the last day. Dan finished one second before the runner-up, Paolo Pasco. I find it awesome enough to think that, in a country of 360 million people, one person could be the best at solving any given task. But in Dan's case that is barely the half of it. The 2023 Tournament marked Dan's ninth all-American crossword victory in 13 years. Which makes him America's greatest crossword-solver ever. Dan is a bona-fide greatest-of-all-time, a GOAT. And I have touched his hem.
Might I have encountered a GOAT otherwise? I doubt it. How many GOATs walk among us in any field of human activity, large or small, vital or trivial? The list is very short indeed. We can probably agree that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time, that Phil Taylor is the greatest darts-thrower of all time, and that Reinhold Messner is the greatest mountaineer. We can probably also agree that Magnus Carlsen is the best chess-player ever, since he has the highest-ever ELO rating. Is he also the greatest chess-player of all time? Arguably. But if we take style, and character, and circumstance into account, then Carlsen has some serious rivals for GOAThood in the shape of Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fischer and Jose Raul Capablanca. Similarly, if we go strictly by the numbers, then Warren Buffett may well be the most successful investor of all time, and Jamie Dimon the most successful banker. But again, taking style, and character, and circumstance into account, are Buffett and Dimon "greater", say, than Crassus was in ancient Rome, or J.P. Morgan was in gilded-age America? Recency helps. Basketball was invented in 1891. Competitive darts dates from 1896. The first modern crossword was published in 1913. ELO ratings for chess were introduced in 1960. Given these limited histories, it is not so very surprising to find their respective GOATs in our lifetimes. If we consider more ancient passions, in which the heroes of today must contend with thousands of years of heroism before them, then the probability of finding a living GOAT diminishes almost to zero. And yet, I think, we have them. Songwriting is one such case. Without pretending to an exhaustive knowledge of all songs ever written, I contend there is a strong case for regarding Paul McCartney as the greatest songwriter of all time. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon also belong in any all-time top ten; as do Franz Schubert and Leonard Cohen. But it is remarkable to think that, given some 3,500 years of songwriting history, the greatest songwriter of all time may well be at work today and living in north London. Storytelling has almost as ancient a pedigree. Some hold that Homer was the greatest-ever storyteller, 3,000 or so years ago. But I do not consider it absurd to think that Dickens, and Borges, were Homer's equal in holding an audience; nor do I think it absurd to consider J.K. Rowling as the equal of Dickens or Borges. When one considers the proportion of humanity beguiled by her stories, it may well be that J.K. Rowling is the greatest storyteller of all time. Politics, as distinct from monarchy and tyranny, is a slightly younger and much more fragile tradition. The Athens of Pericles flourished briefly some 2,500 years ago, and was followed by a 2,000-year hiatus until the settling of what is now the United States. But in all of those 2,500 years has any politician surpassed Bill Clinton in the business of what one might call "retail" politics — showing up, shaking hands, remembering names, radiating enthusiasm, meeting and greeting, giving speeches, being liked, getting elected? I doubt it, though I carry a torch for Francois Mitterrand.
Here, in brief, are my conjectures for living GOATs, asterisked where I accept that I am going out on a limb: Crossword solver: Dan Feyer
Basketball player: Michael Jordan
Darts thrower: Phil Taylor
Mountaineer: Reinhold Messner
Chess player: Magnus Carlsen*
Songwriter: Paul McCartney*
Storyteller: J.K. Rowling*
Retail politician: Bill Clinton*
Investor: Warren Buffet*
Casino gambler: Edward Thorp
Poker player: Doyle Brunson
Tennis player: Serena Williams
Percussionist: Evelyn Glennie
Magazine editor: Anna Wintour And here are some conjectures for GOATs no longer living: General: Napoleon (runner-up, Julius Caesar)
Scientist: Galileo (runner-up, Albert Einstein)
Mathematician: Euler (runner-up, David Hilbert)
Painter: Picasso
Mnemonist: Solomon Shereshevsky
Confidence trickster: Bernie Madoff
Evangelist: St Paul
Harmonica player: Toots Thielemans
Soprano: Maria Callas
Motivator: Steve Jobs I say "motivator" for Steve Jobs, because he was surely the greatest something in history — the problem is saying quite what. Not exactly the greatest-ever engineer, nor the greatest-ever designer, nor the greatest-ever salesman (though perhaps he was), nor even the greatest-ever chief executive, but some mash-up of all of those things. Richard Feynman and the Buddha present similar problems. I have hesitated to call GOAT on any major sport save basketball, since the metrics are so many in sport and the passions so intense. But perhaps we can agree that the greatest soccer player of all time is one of Pele, Maradona, Cruyff, Messi and Ronaldo — which yields a two-in five chance of a living GOAT. Film stars are even more a matter of taste. But using solely the criterion, "Would you go to see the film because this actor was in it?", my GOATables would include Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, Brad Pitt, and Tilda Swinton. Which leaves us with the Leonardo da Vinci problem. Arguably, Leonardo made the greatest paintings of all time. But they were few in number and his influence on the history of art was much less than that of Picasso. Leonardo may well have been the most observant and creative person who ever lived, and perhaps the cleverest person too. But we would be hard-pushed to specify concrete ways in which Leonardo changed our understanding of, or enjoyment of, the world. Perhaps we can say that Leonardo was the greatest intellect of all time — a department in which his competition would include Isaac Newton, J.W. von Goethe, Benjamin Franklin and Frank Ramsey. I see blue sky there between Leonardo and the rest of the field, though it is terrifying to think what Frank Ramsey might have achieved had he not died at 26.
Modesty forbids me to claim that my argument with Henry Oliver, about George Orwell's rules for writers, was the greatest argument of all time, but I am fairly certain that it was the greatest argument to take place in central London on the evening of 25th April. My thanks again to Phyllis Richardson and all at City Lit for hosting us, and to Sarah Leipciger for moderating. Henry argued that Orwell's rules were bad for writers. I argued that they were good for writers. From the finely-balanced show-of-hands vote at the end, I judge that we fought one another to a draw. Still, I am inclined to award Henry a victory on points. I began the evening thinking that he could not possibly make a respectable case against Orwell's rules; I ended the evening thinking that he had made a very fine case indeed. If you have time, please do judge for yourself. Below is a video of the event, with links to the various segments, amateurishly recorded on my iPhone. The sound is on the quiet side, but with the volume turned up, the proceedings are all there: 0m 0s Phyllis Richardson, our host, welcomes us all to City Lity
1m 20s Sarah Leipciger, our moderator, introduces the topic and the speakers
3m 12s Henry begins his presentation
15m 13s Robert begins his presentation
41m 0s Sarah opens the session to Q&A What I came to understand in the course of the discussion was that Henry and I were arguing mainly about a trade-off. Should one encourage Orwellian rules which might save mediocre writers from their worst errors, if those same rules had the effect of dissuading great writers from originality and experimentation? Before the debate I would have said Yes, presuming that great writers would ignore such rules while mediocre writers would gain from them. Now, thinking more about what a rule-driven culture the West has become, I am not so sure. I was also taken aback, but on reflection persuaded, by a comment made over drinks after the debate, to the effect that most writers do not want to be perfectly understood. They want a margin for error. For this, too, I had not allowed. But of course it makes perfect sense.
Just as enjoyable, and just as educational, was my evening in New York attending the Browser Salon organised by Uri in the Chelsea studio of Jessica Anne Schwartz on 4th May. My contribution to the event was to prepare a series of Browser-like newsletters, each of which included at least one fictitious article summary, composed by me for the occasion, and lurking incognito among actual article summaries culled randomly from real-life Browsers in years gone by. (To support the illusion, I attributed my fictitious summaries to real publications and, in some cases, real journalists.) The job of the audience, divided into five or six ad-hoc teams, was to spot the spoofs. How would you have done? Test your intutions on the summaries below. Are all of them real? Are all of them fake? Are some of them real, and, if so, which is (or are) the fake(s)? Solution at the foot of this letter. Birds Of ParadiseBrett Martin | GQ | 16th November 2022 | U
Ortolans were every gourmet's dream. The dying President Mitterrand ate them as his final meal. Then France declared them a protected species in 1999. Now the gourmet's have a new ally. A French start-up called Ortolab says that its lab-cloned ortolans are identical to their natural counterparts. But it will edit a gene or two if that is necessary to place the lab-grown birds outside the scope of current law. Language, But Not As We Know ItPaul May | History Today | 15 October 2022 | U
Linguists have been struggling for decades to read the Voynich Manuscript, an illustrated text in an unknown script dating from the 15th century. But an AI trained on Google Books says that scholars are wasting their time: "Voynichese" script has no traits or patterns in common with any human script ever — a strong indication that the Voynich language is one of the world's earliest-known hoaxes. Peter Thiel's Political PlansBlake Masters | Stanford Journal | 6th April 2010 | U
Wide-ranging conversation in which Thiel compares the state of American politics to Thomas Kuhn's model of science revolutions: "The anomalies accumulate until the paradigm collapses. A struggle will follow to establish a new paradigm, and I want that paradigm to be all about radical personal freedom. But first the existing political paradigm must collapse, and I want that to happen sooner than later." Lost In SpaceAngel Ferrara | Smithsonian Magazine | 1st June 2010 | U
The Richard Nixon Memorial Library in California has found a draft of the speech that President Nixon would have given if a Soviet astronaut had reached the Moon first. Nixon would praise the landing as "an achievement for all mankind", while warning against any Soviet claim to Moon ownership: "The nations of the Earth should share God's Universe, and all it contains, for our common benefit" A Shakespeare Too Good To Be TrueJC | Times Literary Supplement | 25th April 2023
Christie's declares that it will be selling a previously unknown 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays which is identical in every detail with the First Folio in the Bodleian. Shakespeare scholars are perturbed. The printers of the First Folio were a famously messy bunch, correcting errors and reshuffling plays even between copies. No two First Folios have ever been identical. Is this a First or a Fake?
Books I Have Been ReadingThe Middle Kingdoms: A New History Of Central Europe
by Martin Rady I grabbed this after seeing it praised by Tyler Cowen, and it has all the makings of a classic — confident authorial voice, mastery of perspective, lively prose style, wears its learning lightly. Whatever your prior interest in Central Europe, you would need a heart of stone to resist a book with lines like this: Besides his distinctive false nose (the result of a duelling accident), Tycho Brahe kept an elk in his lodgings as a drinking companion.
———————— The Life And Games Of Mikhail Tal
by Mikhail Tal One of the reasons that I read books is to find out how the world looks through other people's eyes, and especially through the eyes of people with interests and experiences very different from my own. I shall never know what it is like to be a bat, but I now know more about what it is like to be a chess player, thanks to this memoir by Mikhail Tal. Tal's account of his life is interspersed with his accounts of his chess games; the balance is about half-and-half, and I have to admit that I am skipping the chess game because I having nothing like the chess skills needed to understand the twists and turns. My first thought on reading Tal is that, to be a first-class chess player, you need a fabulous memory. It seems that Tal can remember every move in every game that he has ever played, not to mention every move in every game in every text-book on which he has been able to lay his hands. My second thought is that Tal experiences each chess game as a story, a continuum of expectations and entanglements which reveals and resolves itself over time. For Tal, some games are adventure stories, some are mystery stories, some are epic poems. All are full of unexpected reversals, surprise endings, missed clues, moments of tension, moments of bathos, and even comic interludes. I wonder whether one has to be born with a such a faculty, or whether one can develop it. ———————— Herodotus: The Histories
translated by Tom Holland. I am hooked. Tom Holland's 2013 translation into modern, colloquial, dignified English is a revelation. When I last made a run at Herodotus decades ago it was G.C. Macaulay's translation, which must have seemed affectedly antiquarian even when it was published in 1890, and which, a century later, read to me like nonsense on stilts. Compare, for example, these passages, the first in Macaulay's translation and the second in Holland's translation, from the tale of Gyges: And when Gyges was come, the woman said to him these words: "There are now two ways open to thee, Gyges, and I give thee the choice which of the two thou wilt prefer to take. Either thou must slay Candaules and possess both me and the kingdom of Lydia, or thou must thyself here on the spot be slain, so that thou mayest not in future, by obeying Candaules in all things, see that which thou shouldest not. Either he must die who formed this design, or thou who hast looked upon me naked and done that which is not accounted lawful"
“Gyges", she said, "you have two courses open to you, and which one you opt for is entirely up to you. Either you can kill Candaules, marry me and become the king of Lydia – or else you can be struck down on the spot by this, my dagger, so that I can at least be sure that never again will you be sweet-talked by Candaules into gazing at what is not yours to gaze upon. One of two people must die: either the man whose idea this whole business was, or else the man who saw me naked, in defiance of all propriety"
I will forbear from praising at greater length the content of Herodotus's Histories, since other people have been doing that fairly consistently for the past two-and-a-half thousand years. Let me say only that this is my sort of history, life as an onrush of brute facts — "one damned thing after another", to misquote Arnold Toynbee. Fabulous to read, if probably rather wearisome to live through.
— Robert
(As for the Browser posts quoted above, they are all invented — though it is a puzzle to me why somebody hasn't brute-forced the Voynich with AI, or cloned ortolans for posh restaurants.)
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