Commentator and consultant Anatole Kaletsky talks with Browser editor Robert Cottrell about lessons learned from 2020, in a Zoom conversation for Browser subscribers and friends which took place on Sunday 20th December 2020, introduced by Uri Bram. This is a lightly edited transcript. Errors and omissions are those of the editor.

ROBERT: Anatole, you and I have known one another for a very long time, and I don't think we've seen a year like this past one. Do you think it's a year to remember or a year to forget?

ANATOLE: The answer depends on who you are. For some people it has been quite a profitable year; very profitable for Jeff Bezos; and a surprisingly prosperous year for many people in the financial sector in Europe, people who've managed to carry on doing their jobs, or, at least, receiving their salaries. But for most people it has been an

involved: china, taiwan, hong kong, united states

The Chinese, despite having a reputation for opacity, are in fact quite meticulous in announcing their big moves well ahead of time, as they did with Hong Kong.

Thanks to Huawei and the trade wars, the retaking of Taiwan has now moved inside the Overton window of PRC policymaking: we're no longer hearing open-ended rhetorical proclamations of "one China" at party conferences; we're deep into think-tank debates and policy papers about cost-benefit analysis for Chinese supply chains (control of Taiwan Semiconductor would spare China from having to attempt a Manhattan-project-sized 2-10 year struggle to reach those levels of precision on their own).

I also sense the loose beginnings of an explicit timeline — "within Xi Jinping's term", which is in theory could mean his lifetime, but I think when people say that sort of thing they tend to mean five years.

I'm persuaded that

involves: paywalls, Granta, Medium, Agnes Callard

My friend and colleague Jacob Silkstone, the Weekend Editor of The Browser, has been compiling our year-in-review issues which go out from Christmas Day to New Year's Eve, and also running some quick numbers on the pieces we have recommended throughout 2020. He reports:

In 2020, the Browser featured writing from 533 different publications.

The remarkable thing here is that almost every day of the year featured at least one publication unique to that day (on Christmas Eve, for example, we featured Bright Wall Dark Room for the first time all year).  

The majority of publications (344) cited were cited only once during the year.

The publications we recomended most often were:

1 New York Review Of Books (49 times)
2 Paris Review (37)
3= Aeon (35)
3= Guardian (35)
5 LitHub (23)
6 MIT Press Reader (21)

Granta was featured heavily in the

involves: watches, time, predictability, punctuality  

I don't get the point of habitually setting your watch five or ten minutes fast, as some busy people claim to do. If you know that your watch is five minutes fast, you will surely compensate for that (or, worse, have a little argument with yourself about compensating) whenever you need to know the exact time (much more on this at Quora).

With smart watches, on the other hand, I do see a possible point in having a watch that shows the wrong time: I have in mind an app that would make an Apple Watch run fast by a margin that varied randomly within boundaries specified by the user; between zero and ten minutes, say.

The wearer of such a watch would, I think, be logically obliged to behave as though the watch was accurate, even while knowing it to be inaccurate, because the

involves: hirschman, revolution, cancel, hacking

If Albert Hirschman were alive today and working on a new edition of Exit, Voice And Loyalty, I wonder what additional strategies he might think worthy of inclusion for dealing with failing relationships between individuals and institutions.

Revolution is surely an obvious option; it may be seen as an edge-case of Voice, or an inverse of Loyalty, but it deserves a heading of its own, because of its scale and finality, and because modern revolutions are as much interventions from without as they are eruptions from within.

Cancel is the strategy of the moment; we might explain it to Hirschman as a form ostracism, and thus an inversion of Exit. In Herta Muller's words: "If only the right person would leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country".

And what about Hacking — taking covert action to make an institution work better, or

involves: cognition, categories, lists, Borges

"To recognise a chair or a dog, our brain separates objects into their individual properties and then puts them back together. Until recently, it has remained unclear what these properties are. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now identified them, and found that all it takes is 49 properties to recognise almost any object"
— News release from the Max Planck Institute
— Full paper (paywalled)

The Max Planck Institute does serious science. Two of its directors shared Nobel prizes in 2020, in chemistry and physics. A paper from this source, claiming to have discovered the building-blocks of human perception, demands to be taken seriously.

And yet, at first read, it appears almost ridiculously flimsy, starting with the notion of "49 properties". In real life there is never 49 of anything, though there may be 48 or 50.

involves: psilocybin, liberalism, happiness, morality

"Evidence suggests [that] clinically administered psilocybin actively shifts political values, just as it shifts many other nonclinical characteristics. One study reported that the treatment decreased authoritarian political views in patients. That trial also detected another effect previously reported in healthy participants: Psilocybin use leads to increases in the personality domain of openness, itself a predictor of liberal values"
— Scientific American

I am largely a liberal, in both the British and American senses, so this strikes me as excellent news; I want other people to be liberals too, to agree with me on the means and ends of life and government, so we can all be friends. Let us all take this psilocybin.

And yet, if I am a liberal, I want other people to feel free (perhaps even be free) to have their own opinions, their own beliefs. I would not want to beat another