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President Barack Obama shoots baskets with Bill Burton, Deputy White House Press Secretary, and personal aide Reggie Love before speaking at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio, Oct. 31, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Marbury will be on hiatus for the first half of this week, whilst I finish a book amongst other things.
Thomas Edison never went to university.
It may be that fewer people going into higher education results in a net gain for creativity. A new book by Andrew Robinson about the nature of creative genius argues that university contributes little to creative excellence, and indeed stifles it:
The academy's emphasis on specialization and its "inherent tendency to ignore or reject highly original work that does not fit the existing paradigm" is an impediment to creativity, Robinson argues. He points to several intriguing studies. One, by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, suggests that creativity flourishes best among those with the equivalent of two years of an undergraduate education—no less, no more. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, has also looked at the relationship between education and innovation. In his 1996 book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he argued that formal education has historically had little effect on the lives of creative people. "If anything," Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."
Moderate Republican (and Palin-scorner) David Frum has a shot at answering that question.
His five reasons are that she polarises (and thus provides fodder for a media that favours conflict), she surprises, she reveals herself (her life is a reality show), she talks unlike a politician, and she provides all the fun of the circus:
On the ground is a poodle performing a stunt. Above the clown’s head, dangling from a thin wire, is a piano. The piano is teetering, tottering, looking as if at any moment it might slip, crash to earth, and crush the dog. Impossible not to watch, right? And that’s the Palin show, only this time with the party of Lincoln as the little dog, and Sarah Palin as the piano.
I think this is pretty good but he misses out at least one very important factor: her looks. Truly attractive politicians, of either gender, are few and far between. The camera loves Palin, as do magazines; the media can't keep our eyes off her. And although I don't have the data to hand, I believe her support is far stronger amongst men than it is amongst women.
Another thing to note is that she's an astute marketer, who uses social media well and knows how to drop compelling memes into the culture; "mama grizzlies" being a brilliant example.
Look - Bo is all growed up!
The brilliant Nate Silver uses graphs and numbers and stuff to make a compelling case that we are ratcheting up security measures at airports at a time when the risk of violent attacks on aeroplanes is as low or lower than it has ever been.
And if you're interested in the statistics on plane crashes (and I mean, who isn't?) then check out this remarkable site.
A "Senior Brownite" gifts Dan Hodges with the following quote for his piece in the New Statesman:
"Ed Miliband's team are terrified of Ed Balls and Yvette. They think they're going to come and try and kill him. And the reason they think that is because they will."
Link to summary of article.
A private detective writes, rather charmingly, about how Facebook presents him with a conflict between being a normal person with friends, and an information predator:
Of course, I assured my new Facebook friends I will respect their privacy, because that’s what friends do.
But being an investigator makes the duality of uses for these media much more pronounced, because, bluntly put, it is an investigator’s job to pry into people’s quasi-private lives and use that information against them. In other words, there is good reason to be wary of befriending an investigator on Facebook when it comes to concern about one’s privacy. To illustrate my point, I had lunch with one of my business partners a few weeks ago, and we discussed a recent case where he used a Twitter search to identify a witness in an assault at a private event. The witness tweeted about the assault as it happened, and identifying this person and subsequently searching his Facebook page helped my partner find the party’s entire guest list. Naturally, much interviewing and subpoenaing ensued—and once again social media played a critical role in an investigation.
Am I being too harsh or is Ed Miliband's first post-leave interview a bit of a waste of space?
Given that he's been soaked in baby shit for the last couple of weeks it's perhaps unfair to expect him to say anything much on his first day back, but then again he shouldn't have done the interview if he didn't have something specific to communicate. As it is, the only headline it's generated is a negative one - the rumour of a clash between him and Alan Johnson over tuition fees. ("Appearing to disagree" with your shadow chancellor a few weeks after appointing them - and when the issue in question clearly in your sights at the time - well, it's not a good look.)
The rest of the interview is full of vacuities and contradictions. Miliband reacts to Johnson's suggestion that the 50p tax rate policy is temporary with a resounding statement of principle:
"One of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning and that I care about is that Britain is a fundamentally unequal society and that's the reason I said what I said about the 50p rate...it's about values and fairness and about the kind of society you believe in and it's important to me."
Gosh, so that's that then. It stays! Hang on...
"Put it this way, I took the view that I did in the campaign, that remains my view. And when I think about the next election – is our policy going to be to reduce the 50p rate for people on £150,000? I don't think it is. But obviously, we'll decide that nearer the time."
So, er, maybe not then. He seems to have only half-realised that hanging your principles on a tax rate is silly. Throughout the interview he seems to be playing to his own members rather than to the voters. There's lots of very vague stuff about how the party must change but very little about his vision for the country. This is the closest he gets...
Is Britain materially better off than it was 20 to 30 years ago? Yes, absolutely it is. But for some people the gap between the dreams that seem to be on offer and their ability to realise them is wider than it's ever been before, and it seems much more of a struggle and that's what interests me. How do you close that gap between the dreams that are apparently on offer and people's ability to realise them?
...which sounds like the opening of a particularly tedious sociology essay.
But the worst part is when he tries to explain how he wants Labour to change with reference to Michael Lewis's book The Blind Side, which is about American football. I've no idea if the extended metaphor he uses makes any sense if you've read the book or understand the sport. But I do know it's a bizarre and almost perversely obscure way for the leader of a British political party to explain what they're about.
Ed Miliband became leader because he said he was against Bad Things like "spin". But the truth is he clearly needs someone around who can help him express himself in language people understand. Who will be his Alistair Campbell?
Probably because somebody else was crossing it:
We investigated social information use by pedestrians in a potentially dangerous scenario: at a road crossing. To judge a safe gap in traffic, pedestrians can use social information, such as the crossing behavior of others, and follow others across the road. We tested if pedestrians followed others in this scenario by analyzing pedestrian starting position and crossing order. First, we found that neighbors of a crossing pedestrian tended to cross before other waiting pedestrians and that this tendency was significantly higher in observed pedestrians than in a null model: a simulation in which pedestrians did not follow each other. Also, by fitting the null model, we found that on average a person was 1.5–2.5 times more likely to cross if their neighbor had started to cross.
Link to study.
Like all attorney-generals, Eric Holder has to perform a high-wire act. The job entails being a member of the president's team, and the nation's top law enforcement officer, supposedly above the political fray. It's a particularly difficult wire to traverse when the White House is trying to push you off it. This terrific profile by Wil Hylton for GQ reviews Holder's bruising, chastening first two years. It contains lots of great colour, like this on Holder's relationship with the recently departed chief of staff:
I am actually joking about the cretin, although the author of this absolutely blistering polemic will be getting called worse for a while:
So why is it that all politicians...are such lying liars? Why are they all, with the same caveat, such cowardly cowards? What’s so wrong with democracy that it only elevates to public office scoundrels and never the pure? It’s a puzzle.
It occurs to me that, just for laughs you understand, it might be worth taking a look at these questions through the other end of the telescope. What if it were the case that our democratic system does not systematically and dysfunctionally send just the scum of the earth to Westminster? What, instead, if it were true that many people were living lies and using politicians as a means of exorcising their own demons of guilt and frustration; politicians the vessel for their own imperfections?
I've often thought similar things. It's absurd, as well as self-defeating, to keep moaning about politicians being liars. People like saying it because it makes them feel good about themselves and gives them a vent for their anger. But if politiicans are dishonest it's because we, the voters, force them to be. In fact they do a pretty good job of resisting the pressure on them most of the time.
Anyway, read the whole thing, it's great.
Only problem is, it's by an MP. A shadow minister, no less, having a Bulworth moment. We all know the one thing you can't do as a politician is insult the voters, even - especially - when we deserve it. Apparently the whips are having words.