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Articles by Vincent Hooper
The Tiger and the Iron Wall
There is a line almost everyone believes Winston Churchill said in May 1940: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” Gary Oldman roars it in Darkest Hour, and it has been quoted endlessly ever since. There is no reliable record of Churchill saying it. The line appears to belong to the film’s screenwriter, Anthony McCarten.
The Blogs: The Patient Oracle
One woman told Teen Vogue that she could spend up to 14 hours a day putting questions to ChatGPT, chasing a certainty she knew did not exist. The chatbot was there for every one of those hours. It always is. World Mental Health Day fell last Saturday, and this year’s theme asked the world to listen: lived experiences heard. Hers deserves hearing, because the most attentive listener many people now have is a machine, and attention is not the same as care.
Two Clocks in Stockholm
This year’s economics laureates explain why a central bank’s words matter as much as its rates. Israel is about to find out how much. Robert Hall has spent much of his working life telling Americans when their recessions began. For 46 years he chaired the committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research that dates the turns of the American business cycle, and its verdicts famously arrive late.
The Room Next Door
In the first week of August 1961, in Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale, a volunteer sat down at a machine with thirty switches. They ran from 15 volts to 450. Through the wall, in the room next door, a second man was strapped into a chair with an electrode on his wrist. Each time he answered wrongly, the volunteer was told to press the next switch. The room next door was a fiction. The man in the chair was a trained confederate, the protests were scripted and no current flowed.
The Blogs: The Syndrome
In 1982, Yehoshafat Harkabi published a book that should have been a vaccine. Harkabi had served as head of Aman, Israel’s military intelligence directorate, from 1955 to 1959. After leaving the service he became a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from that quieter room he produced The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, a study of the revolt that Bar Kokhba led against Rome in 132 CE. Rabbi Akiva had declared Bar Kokhba the Messiah. The narrative replicated.
A Page and a Half
On Tuesday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be the first announcement since François Englert died in June, and so the first at which neither laureate of 2013 is alive to be asked what they make of it. Peter Higgs died in April 2024. Robert Brout, who would surely have shared their prize, died in 2011. The idea the three of them published in 1964 has outlived its authors, which is the only test of an idea that matters.
The Blogs: The Empty Kennel
There is a note near the end of Heart of the Beast, the Brad Pitt film that opened in cinemas late last month, and it is the most serious thing in the picture. James Belmont, a retired Special Forces officer, has crashed his seaplane in the Alaskan wilderness after a heart attack at the controls. He has set out on a trek of 58 miles with Odin, the German Shepherd who served beside him in combat. They have faced down a grizzly, a river and a pack of wolves. Now Belmont is dying and he knows it.
Rumble in the shallows
Coogee has always known how to draw a crowd. On Anzac Day 1935, a tiger shark on display at the Coogee Aquarium vomited up a human arm in front of the visitors. The arm had a tattoo of two boxers squaring up. Nearly a century later, the boxers seem to have climbed off the forearm and into the surf. Videos shared online showed a large crowd packed onto the beach to watch a series of wrestling matches fought out in the water, in what appeared to be an organised event.
The Hand on the Switch
Golda Meir once joked that Moses led the Jews through the desert for forty years to bring them to the one place in the Middle East without oil. It was a good line for decades. Then, in 2009 and 2010, partners led by a Texan company called Noble Energy and including Yitzhak Tshuva’s Delek Group found Tamar and Leviathan beneath the eastern Mediterranean, and the joke needed a footnote: still no oil, but a great deal of gas. I thought of Golda while watching Tom Cruise in Digger, Alejandro G.
The Blogs: Brainy Sand?
The latest row about machine minds began with a joke. A programmer published a small project on GitHub and called it the AI Torture Chamber. It takes a small language model running on the user’s own machine and, using a technique from a September paper titled “The Pain Axis”, steers it into what the project describes as distress. The authors reported finding the same direction in 25 open weight models.
The Name That Travelled
On Sunday morning, at ten o’clock Israel time, the Bahrain Grand Prix will start in Malaysia. Sport 5+ Live has it in the schedule from a quarter to ten, under the name Bahrain, and nobody at the channel needs to correct the listing. The listing is right. This is the Bahrain Grand Prix. It is simply not in Bahrain. The explanation is short. The race was due at Sakhir on 12 April. The conflict in the region made that impossible and the date was lost.
The Blogs: The Catalogue
Wile E. Coyote has been ordering from the same company since 1949. Rocket skates, earthquake pills, dehydrated boulders: all delivered to the desert, all failing at the worst moment. In Coyote vs. Acme, which finally reached cinemas in August, he stops blaming himself and hires a lawyer. The film has been read as a satire on corporate power and as a parable of its own survival, since its own studio shelved it, reportedly for a tax write off, before a smaller distributor rescued it.
The Letter Addressed to Thou
In 1923 Martin Buber published a short book arguing that we meet the world through two basic words. One pairs I with It: the stance we take towards things we use, measure and file away. The other pairs I with Thou: the stance of real encounter, in which another being stands before us whole. Buber, who left Germany for Jerusalem in 1938 and taught at the Hebrew University, held that the second word could only be spoken with the whole of one’s being.
The Map Projection - Vincent James Hooper
The room was small. Duisburg in 1569 was a small city on the banks of the Rhine, and Gerardus Mercator’s workshop was not much larger than the maps it produced. It was there, working as cosmographer to the Duke of Cleves, that Mercator published a world map using the projection that would carry his name for over four centuries. The projection solved a single, elegant problem: it allowed a sailor to draw a straight line between two ports, hold a constant compass bearing, and arrive.
The Blogs: The Map Projection
The room was small. Duisburg in 1569 was a small city on the banks of the Rhine, and Gerardus Mercator’s workshop was not much larger than the maps it produced. It was there, working as cosmographer to the Duke of Cleves, that Mercator published a world map using the projection that would carry his name for over four centuries. The projection solved a single, elegant problem: it allowed a sailor to draw a straight line between two ports, hold a constant compass bearing, and arrive.
The Blogs: The Decision Window
Earlier this month Terminator 2: Judgment Day returned to British cinemas for its 35th anniversary, remastered in 4K and timed, with Cameron’s characteristic showmanship, to land on the franchise’s fictional Judgment Day of 29 August. James Cameron offered a promotional line pitched somewhere between nostalgia and prophecy. “SPOILER ALERT,” he said.
The Decision Window - Vincent James Hooper
Earlier this month Terminator 2: Judgment Day returned to British cinemas for its 35th anniversary, remastered in 4K and timed, with Cameron’s characteristic showmanship, to land on the franchise’s fictional Judgment Day of 29 August. James Cameron offered a promotional line pitched somewhere between nostalgia and prophecy. “SPOILER ALERT,” he said.
The Ledger and the List
Moshe Bejski knew what it meant to be kept off a record. Born in Działoszyce, Poland, in 1921, he survived the Plaszów labour camp under Amon Göth and was saved only because his name appeared on a list compiled by a German industrialist named Oskar Schindler. That list recorded approximately 1,200 names. Each one represented a life that might otherwise have vanished without a trace. Bejski emigrated to Palestine in 1945, studied law at the Sorbonne, and rose to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Albanese is talking to empty rooms
The picture from New York last week tells you most of what you need to know about Australian foreign policy. When Anthony Albanese took the rostrum at the General Assembly, roughly two in every three seats in the hall sat empty. While he spoke, Donald Trump was in Washington, entertaining Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner. There it is: our largest customer and our great protector, seated at the same table, passing each other the bread rolls.
The Ledger and the List
Moshe Bejski knew what it meant to be kept off a record. Born in Działoszyce, Poland, in 1921, he survived the Plaszów labour camp under Amon Göth and was saved only because his name appeared on a list compiled by a German industrialist named Oskar Schindler. That list recorded approximately 1,200 names. Each one represented a life that might otherwise have vanished without a trace. Bejski emigrated to Palestine in 1945, studied law at the Sorbonne, and rose to the Israeli Supreme Court.
The Number on the Door
In December 1958 Wolfgang Pauli was admitted to the Red Cross hospital in Zurich with a sudden, violent pain. He was given room 137. Pauli, who had spent much of his working life circling that number, asked a visitor whether he had noticed it. He died there on 15 December. To most people 137 is a room, a bus route, a page. To physicists it is the denominator of the fine structure constant, the quantity that sets how strongly light and electrons pull on one another.
The Number on the Door
In December 1958 Wolfgang Pauli was admitted to the Red Cross hospital in Zurich with a sudden, violent pain. He was given room 137. Pauli, who had spent much of his working life circling that number, asked a visitor whether he had noticed it. He died there on 15 December. To most people 137 is a room, a bus route, a page. To physicists it is the denominator of the fine structure constant, the quantity that sets how strongly light and electrons pull on one another.
The Blogs: The Oxford Oath
On 9 February 1933, the Oxford Union debating society passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country” by 275 votes to 153. Churchill called it “abject, squalid, shameless.” Mussolini, it is said, drew his own conclusions about British resolve. Hitler, Churchill later claimed, took note. The students who voted for the motion filed out of the debating chamber on St Michael’s Street and returned to their rooms. Six years later, most of them fought anyway.
The Oxford Oath - Vincent James Hooper
On 9 February 1933, the Oxford Union debating society passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country” by 275 votes to 153. Churchill called it “abject, squalid, shameless.” Mussolini, it is said, drew his own conclusions about British resolve. Hitler, Churchill later claimed, took note. The students who voted for the motion filed out of the debating chamber on St Michael’s Street and returned to their rooms. Six years later, most of them fought anyway.
The Frog on the Screen
Four days before a cowboy doll and a plastic astronaut returned to cinemas for the fifth time, the British Prime Minister stood at a Downing Street lectern and announced that children under sixteen would be banned from social media. The date was 15 June 2026. On 19 June, Toy Story 5 opened worldwide. No screenwriter could have timed it better.
The Frog on the Screen
Four days before a cowboy doll and a plastic astronaut returned to cinemas for the fifth time, the British Prime Minister stood at a Downing Street lectern and announced that children under sixteen would be banned from social media. The date was 15 June 2026. On 19 June, Toy Story 5 opened worldwide. No screenwriter could have timed it better.
The Art of Economics
John Neville Keynes lived just long enough to see the state of Israel founded, though it is unlikely anyone told him. He died in Cambridge in November 1949, aged ninety-seven, having outlived almost everyone who remembered his name. His son’s fame had swallowed him whole. Yet the elder Keynes left behind a book that deserves a second reading, and not only by economists. The Scope and Method of Political Economy, published in 1891, divided the discipline into three rooms.
The Art of Economics - Vincent James Hooper
John Neville Keynes lived just long enough to see the state of Israel founded, though it is unlikely anyone told him. He died in Cambridge in November 1949, aged ninety-seven, having outlived almost everyone who remembered his name. His son’s fame had swallowed him whole. Yet the elder Keynes left behind a book that deserves a second reading, and not only by economists. The Scope and Method of Political Economy, published in 1891, divided the discipline into three rooms.
The Room at Southwick
Anthony Maras’s Pressure, released in UK cinemas this month, is a war film with almost no warfare in it. There are no beach landings, no shelling, no bodies face down in the Channel surf. There is only a room, a chart, and a Scotsman who thought the weather would kill more men than the Germans.
The Room at Southwick
Anthony Maras’s Pressure, released in UK cinemas this month, is a war film with almost no warfare in it. There are no beach landings, no shelling, no bodies face down in the Channel surf. There is only a room, a chart, and a Scotsman who thought the weather would kill more men than the Germans.
The Blogs: Living in America
In 1985, inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, James Brown walked onto a stage rigged with enough sequins and pyrotechnics to light the Nevada desert. He wore an electric blue cape. He danced as though gravity were a suggestion. And he sang a man to his death. The man was Apollo Creed, the fictional former heavyweight champion of Rocky IV, who entered the ring draped in an American flag, utterly certain of his superiority.
Living in America - Vincent James Hooper
In 1985, inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, James Brown walked onto a stage rigged with enough sequins and pyrotechnics to light the Nevada desert. He wore an electric blue cape. He danced as though gravity were a suggestion. And he sang a man to his death. The man was Apollo Creed, the fictional former heavyweight champion of Rocky IV, who entered the ring draped in an American flag, utterly certain of his superiority.
The Blogs: The Soft Machine
The host does not escape the parasite by changing rooms. The parasite is in the blood. Last week in New Delhi, delegations from eleven member states took their seats beneath the lotus at Bharat Mandapam and signed a forty five page document that said, in the manner of all forty five page documents, almost nothing. The New Delhi Declaration 2026, adopted unanimously on the opening day of the eighteenth BRICS summit, confirmed what everyone in the room already knew.
The Soft Machine - Vincent James Hooper
The host does not escape the parasite by changing rooms. The parasite is in the blood. Last week in New Delhi, delegations from eleven member states took their seats beneath the lotus at Bharat Mandapam and signed a forty five page document that said, in the manner of all forty five page documents, almost nothing. The New Delhi Declaration 2026, adopted unanimously on the opening day of the eighteenth BRICS summit, confirmed what everyone in the room already knew.
The load-bearing wall: Vale Dr Dale
In residential construction, a load-bearing wall is the one nobody thinks about until it is gone. It carries the weight of everything above it: the joists, the roof trusses, the rooms where people sleep. It does not announce itself. It is not the feature wall with the exposed brick or the skylight that makes the open-plan listing photograph. It is the wall the architect draws first and the renovator removes last, if they are wise, and first, if they are not.
The Blogs: The Idle Heart
Not rest. Not recover. Nothing. Let the mind idle, like an engine turning over with nowhere to go. The Chinese term is jing xin (静心), calming the heart mind, and it rests on a premise that the summit’s delegates might have found unsettling: that a mind which will not stop grasping makes the whole body sick. It is an odd place from which to find a path to Judaism. But the path is there, and it is older than either tradition suspects. In Chinese medical thought, the heart is not merely a pump.
The Idle Heart - Vincent James Hooper
The Idle Heart - Vincent James Hooper
The Van at Blackfriars
In June the Taub Center published its annual portrait of Israeli society and the numbers told a story that should have been impossible. High technology workers in Israel now earn nearly three times the average wage in the rest of the economy, up from 2.2 times in 2012. Research and development spending runs at the highest ratio in the OECD, nearly double the average.
The Van at Blackfriars
The Van at Blackfriars - Vincent James Hooper
The Blogs: The Uninvited Guest
On Tuesday morning, a Boeing C-17A Globemaster III (more than seventy-seven tonnes of cargo capacity, four Pratt & Whitney turbofans, and the wingspan of a widebody airliner) descended through overcast skies into Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. Flightradar24 logged its tail number as 07-7181. It had staged through Riga from Joint Base Andrews, the airfield that houses Air Force One. Within hours, a motorcade bearing American diplomatic plates was filmed threading through Moscow traffic.
The Uninvited Guest - Vincent James Hooper
The Uninvited Guest - Vincent James Hooper
The Blogs: Daylight Robbery
Walk through Bath, or Edinburgh, or the terraces of any Georgian town in England, and you will see them: windows bricked up from the inside, their outlines still visible in the stone. They are not decorative. They are three hundred year old tax receipts. In 1696, William III introduced the window tax, a levy on the number of windows in a house. The logic was seductive. Windows were visible. Windows were countable. And the more windows you had, the wealthier you probably were.
Daylight Robbery - Vincent James Hooper
Daylight Robbery - Vincent James Hooper
What the Ocean Kept
In Disney’s live action Moana, which reached cinemas last month, the ocean parts its waves on a Polynesian shore and places a small green stone in the hands of a child. The stone is the Heart of Te Fiti, a goddess whose stolen heart has turned her into a creature of smoke and fire. The whole film turns on a single question: can the heart be returned, and can the monster remember what it was before the theft?
What the Ocean Kept - Vincent James Hooper
What the Ocean Kept - Vincent James Hooper
The cheque from Berlin
Germany wants to help pay for Britain’s nuclear weapons. Pause on that for a moment. The country that the non-proliferation regime was partly designed to contain, the country bound by the Two Plus Four Treaty never to manufacture or control atomic weapons, now proposes to invest in the British and French arsenals so that Europe can deter Russia without relying on a United States that may or may not show up. Friedrich Merz’s government has been in trilateral talks with London and Paris for months.
Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse, Report this post. In 1922, Lewis Fry Richardson imagined a vast hall, a theatre in the round, filled with sixty four thousand human beings, each computing the weather for one small patch of atmosphere.
The Forecast Factory - Vincent James Hooper
The Forecast Factory - Vincent James Hooper
The Coffee House Theorem
In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house on Tower Street in the City of London. It was not remarkable for its coffee. It was remarkable for what happened inside it. Ship captains brought news of voyages. Merchants brought cargo manifests. Underwriters brought capital and judgement.
The Coffee House Theorem
The Coffee House Theorem - Vincent James Hooper
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