Marbury

kindle transplant

For those that were asking, Born Liars is now available in e-book form. I downloaded a copy to my iPad via the Kindle app yesterday. Swish swish swish. Lovely.

the taste of 'expect'

Synesthesia is an unusual neurological condition in which the senses get mixed up with each other. For a few people, the stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to the stimulation of another, just as when you pluck one string on a guitar, another vibrates sympathetically. As a result, synesthetes can 'see' words (they literally see certain shapes or colours when they hear or pronounce certain words), 'hear' texture, feel that certain concepts are further away in space than others (1980 is further away than 1990), and so on. The emphasis and intensity of the condition varies from person to person. One of the striking things about it is that because synesthetes grow up like this, they assume, often until quite late in life, that everyone else experiences the world in the same way.

It's a fascinating phenomenon, and today I came across an amazing interview with a man called James Wannerton who has particularly acute and specific form of synesthesia: he tastes sounds, particularly words. One of his first memories of the sensation is from primary school:

I have very strong memories of sitting in assemblies. We were read the Lord’s prayer every morning: it had a taste of very thin crispy bacon.

Talking about it now, can you taste it?

Yeah. It’s quite strong as well.

Can you describe synesthesia?

It’s not an extra sense, but it does give me an extra perception. It’s like getting an eye-dropper of taste dripped on my tongue. I get a taste, temperature and texture. One of the ways I stop this affecting my concentration on a day-to-day basis is to eat strong-tasting sweets like Wine Gums, and drinking coffee.

Do you ever synesthetically taste something you’ve never eaten before?

It can be difficult to articulate a particular sensation and compare it to a foodstuff. These things are specific and very, very complex. When I’ve taken part in research, I could write maybe half a page of A4 on a particular word’s effects. Ever since I was young, I had a taste for the word ‘expect’ and I could never quite put my finger on what it was. One day, I bought a packet of Marmite-flavoured crisps. When I had one, it clicked – that’s the taste of “expect”! If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a bit tangy, slightly thick but crunchy. I get lots of metallic tastes that I can’t describe, other than saying it’s smooth or rough. The name David gives me a very strong taste of cloth, a bit like sucking on a sleeve.

He used to choose friends and even girlfriends on the basis of whether their name tasted nice or not. It's as good a rationale as any, I suppose.

Read the whole thing.

exit, diminished

I was this far from running.

One of the recurring tropes of American presidential politics is the Hamlet figure; a man (or woman, though it's usually a man) who plays the part of the reluctant candidate, adored by the media and by the power-brokers of his party, but who is too refined, too intellectual and too sensitive to make the leap into crude retail politicking. He thus strikes a hesitant, agonised pose on the sidelines, torn between duty to country and the desire to stay at home and read Montaigne. In the 1980s, Mario Cuomo performed this role for the Democrats. Obama was all set to play it in 2007/8 before, rather disconcertingly for everyone, he leapt in with both feet. Fred Thompson (kind of) played it for the GOP that same year.

This year, it was Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, generally considered to have done a good job there, and a man of famous intellectual heft. After many months of hinting that he wanted to run but didn't want to run (etc), this month he finally declared himself out. Personally, I thought he was an impressive figure and I was quite hoping he'd go for it, if only to force the other candidates to raise their debating game - and there's also the potential amusement factor of seeing a fastidious intellectual stoop to conquer - but there were a couple of things about the manner of his leaving that made me respect him less. First, the way he blamed his family for it:

But after weeks of deliberating in public and making clear that his wife and four daughters had deep reservations — caused in part by the knowledge that they would be exposed to intensive scrutiny over a period in the 1990s when Mr. Daniels and his wife, Cheri, divorced and then remarried — he said he was unsuccessful in swaying his family. In a statement on Sunday he said, “Our family constitution gives a veto to the women’s caucus, and there is no override provision.”

Well ho ho ho. This is the kind of joke that political insiders will applaud even as they wipe away a tear, but to me, it seems, well, unmanly. Having decided not to run (for whatever reason) he surely ought to take full responsibility for that decision rather than say 'Well, I'd love to but you know, 'er indoors...'

Second, this, from today:

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has taken himself out of the running for president, but he says he believes he could have defeated President Barack Obama for a second term. “Yes, I think so,” Daniels said when asked whether he could have beaten Obama on ABC’s “This Week.”

It's a little unseemly to back out of a race and then go around boasting about how you totally could have won if you'd wanted to. In fact it's positively Trumpian. In the same interview Daniels expanded on the 'They stopped me from reaching my destiny' excuse:

“We've got young women, three of them that have been married not too long,” Daniels said. “They're looking forward to building lives, starting families and this was just a - a disruption that - that they were very, very leery of. And who wouldn't understand that?”

We're used to the 'I've got young children and I don't want to disrupt their childhoods' story. But to worry about the effect on your adult daughters? It reminds me of the old joke about a lawyer who is approached by a very, very old married couple about getting a divorce. He gently wonders why they've left it so long. 'Well, we wanted to wait until the children had died.'

no touching

Obama lets Dominique Strauss-Khan know where the boundaries are:

The picture is from a G20 conference in 2009. Spotted by Chris Rovzar.

clinton's warning

This week the Democrats won a Special Election in Western New York (NY 26) which many see as a bellwether for 2012. The reason it's significant is that the Democrats' candidate won by running against the House Republicans' budget plan, as designed by Paul Ryan, which proposes sweeping changes to America's welfare state, including Medicare. If it worked in NY26, it can work across the country.

That's the theory anyway, and whether or not it's true, many Democrats running for election or reelection next year will interpret it that way, and run hard against any GOP plans to reform entitlements. But will they have a plan of their own?

Bill Clinton, still regarded as the ultimate political strategist (we'll pass briefly over his contribution to Hillary's 2008 campaign), has a warning for his colleagues: don't get carried away. He's concerned - rightly, it seems to me - that if the Dems use this as an excuse to not come up with any reform plans of their own, the electorate will come to see them as fundamentally unserious about America's deficit problems:

“You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that the New York race means that nobody can do anything to slow the rate of Medicare costs. I just don’t agree with that,” Mr. Clinton said at a budget forum sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Instead, he said, “you should draw the conclusion that the people made a judgment that the proposal in the Republican budget is not the right one. I agree with that.” But Mr. Clinton said he feared that Democrats would conclude “that we shouldn’t do anything.”

...Mr. Clinton, with some passion, returned to the topic at the end of an hour-long interview. “I think the Democrats are going to have to be willing to give up, maybe, some short-term political gain by whipping up fears on some of these things — if it’s a reasonable Social Security proposal, a reasonable Medicare proposal. We’ve got to deal with these things. You cannot have health care devour the economy.”

Those on the left over here might do well to take the silver one's words as a warning to them, too. Labour can make short-term gains by attacking every cut the government makes. But unless the electorate believes that Labour has grasped the seriousness of the moment and has a credible plan to reduce the deficit, then it won't vote for them come election time. Yes, the party has a plan on paper (which isn't as dissimilar from the government's plan as it would have us believe) but until it is seen to have really confronted this central economic issue, it won't establish itself as an alternative government. At the moment, Miliband and Balls don't project any urgency when they mention the deficit. They need to  - and they can't fake it; before they convince the voters they're deadly serious the nation's finances, they will have to convince themselves.

Link to report of Clinton remarks.

Link to an interesting bit of backchat between Clinton and Paul Ryan.

the rapture is upon us

Well, my book is published today anyway, which is almost the same thing. And it's nearly half-price at Amazon. I mean really - Obamas, sunshine, and Born Liars in your grasp - how good can one day get?

2008 forever

This is how the president signed the guest book at Westminster Abbey today:

I suppose it *was* a good year for him.

are artists liars?

 

That's the question I take a hop, skip and a jump around in a piece for More Intelligent Life, based on some of the stuff in my book. Here's the opening:

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer forRolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”

Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control. Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

Read on...

failing better

There's been quite a lot of interest in the value of failure recently. In Japan, they are way ahead of us. A 70-year-old academic called Yotaro Hatamura has been called in by the Japanese government to help understand what went wrong at Fukushima:

Mr. Hatamura runs a consulting group, the Association for the Study of Failure, which studies how to apply lessons from past blunders to prevent future recurrences. He also heads up the government-financed Failure Database Project, which similarly investigates and draws lessons from famous foibles. Over the years, Mr. Hatamura’s failure-focused organization has also compiled several past analyses on nuclear-power plant accidents, including a study on Fukushima Daiichi and another Tepco-operated plant.

The academic gained a strong following in Japan with his 2000 best-selling book 'Recommendation Of Learning From Mistakes', a standout compared with the rows of books on success stories and a unique approach to business management that turned Japan’s traditional mentality on how not to make mistakes on its head. Mr. Hatamura has said that a major obstacle facing Japanese companies is to own up to their mistakes, examining minor errors and realizing the important lesson before it develops into a grave problem.

Apparently Mr Hatamura concluded that the biggest lesson of Chernobyl disaster was that "bad things are bad". I love this. It is my new motto.

Perhaps our government should be consulting with Mr Hatamura. Then again, according to David Brooks, there's no need because everything is going just swimmingly.

 

when saturday comes

 
Two interesting and intelligent pieces of football commentary ahead of Saturday's final, which promises to be spectacular. Both concern Barcelona; one is about their star player, the other about the club's business practices.

The New York Times has a paean of praise to Messi, a singularly unconventional football hero. Messi doesn't have Beckhamesque good looks, or any of the dark charisma of Zidane, the stocky force of Maradona or the elegance of Cruyff. He's short and funny-looking, and he doesn't say much. It's as if Dustin Hoffman's special gift in Rainman was not memory tasks, but playing football. But it's Messi's slight stature and his mercurial movement that make him impossible to stop:

During the careers of the greats to whom Messi is most often compared — Pelé of Brazil and Diego Maradona, a fellow Argentine — the pace of the game was slower, with more space to operate and more chance for flamboyant playfulness in the flowing dribbles known as gambeta. Today, soccer increasingly relies on size and muscle and speed. The best players must be able to operate in claustrophobic spaces. That is the mesmerizing skill of Messi, slithering through these airless openings in top gear, changing direction, providing as well as scoring, his left foot tapping the ball on each stride with blurred and evasive touches. At such moments, the ball becomes an extension of his foot.

The second piece is from the Economist, which explore the secret of Barca's enormous financial success; it's a "cash machine", and the second highest-grossing football club in the world. It argues that the answer lies in its emphasis on sustaining a strong sense of values (it is 'more than a club') and on recruiting local talent - unlike the top teams over here, most of its players are from Spain, indeed, most of them are from the Catalan region:

Barça’s management style chimes in with the thinking of two admired theorists. Boris Groysberg, of Harvard Business School, has warned that companies are too obsessed with hiring stars rather than developing teams. He conducted a fascinating study of successful Wall Street analysts who moved from one firm to another. He discovered that company-switching analysts saw an immediate decline in their performance. For all their swagger, it seems that their success depended as much on their co-workers as their innate talents. Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, argues that the secret of long-term corporate success lies in cultivating a distinctive set of values. For all the talk of diversity and globalisation, this usually means promoting from within and putting down deep local roots.

Manchester United doesn't have the same record of recruiting local talent (though the spine of its team over the last ten years has been more British than not) but it does have the same emphasis on values and culture. When Ferguson bangs on about the 'history' of the club being important, he's not being sentimental or backward-looking. He knows that, however cynical modern players might be, they need something more than money to get them fully motivated (motivation being the central challenge of modern management and one that Ferguson excels at). They need to feel part of something bigger than themselves or their egos. MUFC, under Ferguson, provides that in a way very few other clubs can do. One of them is Barcelona. Saturday will be a contest of belief.

ed miliband's optimism

From a report on the Labour leader's speech on Saturday:

Contrasting his own vision of "better, optimistic politics" with that of the coalition, he said that all David Cameron was offering voters was "a shrivelled, pessimistic, austere view of the future".

From Miliband's speech today:

"I am worried — and every parent should be worried — about what will happen to our children in the coming decades."

It's hard to portray yourself as a sunny optimist when your speeches are full of foreboding and handwringing and talk of the Jilted Generation.

To be fair, it's always a tough challenge to be an optimist when you're the opposition leader near the beginning of a term and it's your job to persuade voters the country is going to hell in a handcart.

But Miliband's speeches seem to portray people as helpless victims of forces beyond their control: government cuts, unemployment, property prices, etc. Now of course this is true to an extent. But the best political leaders - the ones who do optimism well - give people back a sense of power. They applaud their aspiration and ambition. They don't do much handwringing. Neither do they claim that a government under their control would solve everything; they make voters feel that the party has got their back, rather than being on their back.

I don't think Ed Miliband has got this balance right yet. But then, frankly, I don't think he's saying much at all. He's still recycling the windy abstractions that got him through the leadership campaign. This, from his less-than-rousing peroration today, is how he defines his task:

A national mission which ensures Britain's next generation have a more optimistic future.

What does that mean? How does it define him and the direction of the party? (And why not 'better' future instead of 'more optimistic' future?)

Is that good enough after nearly a year of leadership?

Perhaps the best thing for Ed right now would be to take a long honeymoon, during which - on the beach, perhaps - he can do what he should have done before running for leader and work out what he wants to do with the leadership.

Then maybe, one day, he'll get to have his long-delayed political honeymoon.

the pleasures of taking offence

You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill — he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

In the Observer today Rachel Cooke writes brilliantly about the synthetic outrage generated by Ken Clarke affair this week. In her opening paragraphs she neatly retells the story of what actually happened in a way that reminds us just what a very small molehill this was. She then notes something about the tenor of the response:

I listened to those who said they were offended by Clarke's comments and I read their columns, too, and what I picked up was, in the main, not shock or upset, but a delicious kind of delight. Even as they wrung their hands you could feel them tapping their toes. When Ed Miliband stood up in the House of Commons and demanded that Clarke be sacked – this is the same Ed Miliband who, last October, told the Labour party conference that he would support Clarke in his quest to reform our creaking penal system – there was something so unconvincing and hammy about his performance that I laughed out loud. Note to the Doncaster Civic theatre: your MP would be seriously good in panto.

Cooke is exactly right. These days, too many journalists and politicians behave like the people who leave comments on political blogs (not this one, of course): they turn up the rancour to eleven, accuse the object of their criticism of the worst possible motives, and shout about how offended they are (or how some other person or group is offended). 

Partly this is driven by the contemporary imperative to grab attention and share of clicks. But it's also, as Cooke identifies, a form of emotional gratification. We enjoy feeling offended (at least, we enjoy feeling this fake kind of offence; real offence, as Cooke says, isn't enjoyable at all). We love the feeling of being on the righteous side against some exaggerated enemy. And we keep coming back for another hit. So when offence-takers distort the facts and bend statements out of context and make no effort to see things from a perspective other than their own, it's partly because they're not thinking straight. They're under the influence of a tremendous moral rush.

Having said that, I've been impressed by some of the more considered and sober counter-reponses to that original firestorm, like that from Cooke and - most sober and affecting of all - Suzanne Moore.

vulgarity

 

So, Born Liars is published next week. I had great fun reading from it last night, for a terrific audience at Tales From Paradise in Kensal Green. Now, I know it's bad form to quote from your own good review, but you know, whatevs. This is my favourite bit from the first review of Born Liars, in the Daily Mail:

Most popular psychology books follow a depressingly familiar path: there’s some dodgy, if eye-catching, theorising at the beginning, then a raft of dubious statistics with a few not-terribly-good anecdotes to back them up.

Born Liars, however, is in quite a different league. It’s erudite yet wears its learning lightly and is full of terrific stories.

It will also make you see yourself, and the world around you, in a new light.

It's also available on pre-release at Amazon at nearly half-price, right now. I'm just saying.

Link to review.

it's definitely taking a while to sink in

Newt Gingrich never stops giving:

"It's going to take a while for the news media to realize that you're covering something that happens once or twice in a century, a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas," said Gingrich. "I expect it to take a while for it to sink in."

Bless.

spy kitty

Sadly the above photo isn't real, but part of a Slate production, created in response to the news that the team which carried out the bin Laden operation consisted of 79 SEALS and one dog. (This brilliant account of the action reveals that the dog was called Cairo. Apparently, Cairo is furious about being outed and is concerned that he may now forever be a terrorist target).

OK, so unlike dogs, cats aren't widely used by the military. Yet according to the science writer Emily Anthes, there was a spy cat, once:

In the course of researching my book on animals and biotechnology, I discovered the strange tale of “Acoustic Kitty.” In 1961, the CIA launched a covert operation by that name. The goal: to turn a tabby into an unwitting spy by wiring it up with electronic recording equipment. The idea was to release the cat near Soviet compounds and hope that the creature wandered onto windowsills or park benches or other places where it could record secret discussions.

Of course, to be an effective spy, the cat couldn’t have wires winding all over its fur. And so, the experts decided that they’d have to hide the electronics inside. In a series of what must have been gruesome operations, officials slit open an unfortunate feline and slipped a microphone, an antenna, and a set of batteries inside.

When the cat was ready for its first official test, the agents released the tabby near a Soviet meeting place in Washington, D.C. The cat immediately wandered into the road, where he was promptly squashed by a taxi. 

Whoops.

(More here)