Naomi Alderman

The FT magazine, always good, is BLOODY BRILLIANT this weekend

Imagine that you live in a village in Pakistan or a shack in Lagos, Nigeria. You’ve been waiting decades for your dysfunctional state to deliver you electricity. Then you see the neighbours putting solar panels on their roof. You inquire: a basic home system, using Chinese photovoltaic panels, starts at about $170. A YouTube video teaches you how to install it, or you hire a local who has trained themselves to be a technician. Now you have lights and can charge your phone. Over time, you pay instalments of a few dollars a month to buy enough panels to run a fridge, plus a battery to store energy for the night. Meanwhile, solar mini-grids power your local clinic and school. In a rare piece of global good news, solar is finally taking off. It accounts for three-quarters of all new capacity of the world’s power plants, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, tells me. He marvels, “This is amazing, beyond the wildest dreams.” Elon Musk concurs: “Solar is everything . . . Compared to the sun, all other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.” The solar revolution can slash emissions, boost developing economies and give almost everyone on earth electricity. This revolution is driven not by green ambitions but by falling prices. The best solar offered “the cheapest electricity in history”, said the IEA in 2020, and it’s much cheaper now. Prices of panels have dropped 99.3 per cent since 1975, and by 95 per cent just since 2007, reports Our World in Data. And prices continue to fall, as China exports surplus panels — often older, simpler models — to Africa in particular. Meanwhile, the cost of battery storage systems has plunged 93 per cent since 2010. And unlike with oil or gas, solar prices won’t spike because of war in Iran. Once you’ve installed panels, your daily fuel is free. Some homes even produce surplus energy to resell into the grid. Solar is the most bottom-up, democratic energy source. In many countries i…

Brilliant article in the FT today by @simonkuper.bsky.social

Solar is finally cheap enough to be making a massive difference, it’s cheap manufacturing in China that’s doing it. self-interest predictably gets us much much further than self-sacrifice and scolding

Oooooh. I didn’t even do history A-level but I am quite tempted

Whoever thought of the idea that you start getting BAFTA movies to watch at the start of October and then they all vanish from the app at the start of March was a genius and I salute them.

Hey everyone, copy Naomi and come study Classical Studies with us 😊

I've long been of the opinion that one of the bricks in the wall fixing the "productivity crisis" is making access to the OU and similar opportunities cheap and straightforward.

sometimes I just think about the time I found three people being mean about me on here and just quietly blocked them all without engaging whatever, and it makes me feel very happy. just a soul-deep contented feeling. lovely.

unembarrassed enthusiasm about learning new things is genuinely the best way to live

Sigmund Freud has entered the chat, holding a copy of Oedipus Rex

yes I am a painfully earnest and sincere person. I don't know how to be another way.

I secretly think being ironic and sophisticated all the time is a way of avoiding your own life.

that Michael Young was responsible for the creation of the two unalloyed goods for British life of Which Magazine, the Open University *and* also Toby Young will never cease to astonish

yes it goes along with 'the only value in a human is if you are a productive capitalist unit'.

yes what else are we going to do?! sit around and scroll Instagram from now until death? only learning makes sense.

Someone will say, sniffily, "eternal student". And you just go 'OK' and walk off and talk to someone else.

But a load of people will go "oh I've always wanted to do something like that".

I don't know why, but I think it's constructed as ever so slightly embarrassing in our (English? Western?) culture to be interested in education as an adult?

I think it's because we associate education with childhood so strongly. Anyway, that's all you have to get over. A few people will go "why?"

the OU course is so good at making this clear! they get you to calculate rocket trajectories and 'how far can I fly my glider' by using quadratics and trigonometry

I started with the OU seriously at 39. Since then I've done a full BA in Classics, plus a couple of modules in eg Biology and Art History, then an MA in Classics, now starting on some Maths.

I made a decision to be this person, and I am grateful to Naomi-age-39 for it. The time goes past anyway.

it's *lovely* when you get a run of days or weeks or months when you can do something totally consistently. it's really nice and you make great progress.

but inevitably something will come along to break your consistency. so the more important thing is to have the skill of coming back.

this is so encouraging. & I agree.

and also: life is not about perfection, it is constant rupture-and-repair. it's that rupture/repair cycle that makes things stronger.

"don't break the chain" is IMO not great advice. better advice is: "practice & get good at returning to things after a break".

also the OU is SUPERB at creating study materials that make it very straightforward. they are designed for people like us, they are incredibly cleverly done. I actually feel I understand some of it better now than I did at 16.

honestly, genuinely, if you could speak OK French and do calculus and prac-crit a poem when you were 17 you can definitely still do it today. it will take you a maximum of a handful of months to get back any of those things, and it is really joyful.

brains are not like bodies in this way.

solving a quadratic equation is fun
doing algebra in general is fun
working with surds and remembering "oh yeahhh, I can treat the number 5 as root5 x root5 and solve this" is fun

it is the same fun as logic puzzles and sudoku. if you like that, you would like this.

I can tell you that you would, actually, love it. It does not take that long (I reckon about 30-40 minutes most days, and I personally can do it with the telly on, YMMV).

And you don't have that horrible feeling that a bit of your actual brain has rotted away when you weren't looking.

it has made me happier even than I anticipated to get back my skills in trigonometry via a first-year maths module with the OU

it feels so *bad* to think "I used to know that perfectly, but now I can't remember it" and so nice to "oh yeahhhhhhh, I remember this, I can do this now".

I think this is a bit unfair to Aristotle who spend a load of time wandering around a lagoon observing the life cycles of fish and birds.

But: Diogenes fully correct.

also a key insight for me in life: a lot of people really don't like thinking and try to avoid it

it's INCREDIBLY much the Daniel Kahneman insight that when asked a difficult question we all have a tendency to reach for an easier-to-answer question instead

"what do the British people really think about this?" - difficult
"what are people on Twitter saying about this right now?" - easy

Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change Google and others are committing $100 million to combat climate change.

The perfect headline doesn’t exi…

went out for a walk, open-mouthed in the sun. I definitely swallowed a fly.

(I do know why. Because it flew right into my throat and then what are you going to do? Tried to spit it out, no good.)

some of the most useless, and in fact harmful therapy I ever had was with someone who was SIMPLY TOO STUPID to understand what I was saying to her. a real slow-blinker.

(there was other harmful therapy with someone not stupid at all which is a real story, boy howdy. and some very good therapy.)