Gregg Wager

Listen to the Mockingbird. Let early birds catch worms, but Mockingbirds sing catchy ear worms. Tone-deaf historians and criminologists continue to neglect music and thereby ignore an important soundtrack to events.

At the start of 2023, Nick Cave got angry. Angry at artificial intelligence for making a mockery of his career. Songwriting has long been associated with the inherent ability to be soulful. But now one Google search will throw up endless AI capable of making lyricism universal: Audoir for song lyrics and poetry, Jarvis for banishing writer’s block, and ChatGPT for anything, everything and more. To put it plainly, the 65-year-old singer had had enough of being simulated.

Allard Lowenstein during his time in Congress. [Source: wnyc.org] The name Allard Lowenstein (1929-1980) may not mean too much to political activists today, but in the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known liberal figure associated with many of the progressive causes of the day. For this reason, it would come as something of a shock to many of his contemporaries to discover that he appears to have been an asset of the CIA.