Marbury

holiday reading list

Barack Obama waves to the crowd after he and his daughter Sasha leave the Bunch of Grapes Book Store on Martha's Vineyard. Photograph: Getty Images

I'm off to France for a bit. Back w/c September 5th. Cameron and Obama publish their reading lists; I feel it only proper that I follow suit. Here are the books I'm taking with me (in cumbersome, heavy, loveable print format):

Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War

Gore Vidal, Lincoln

James Gleick, Isaac Newton

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men

I may take Tender Is The Night with me as well, and perhaps I'll pick up something at the airport.

I'd be happy to get through half of these. But I'm looking forward to opening all of them.

steve's steps

 

So Sculley wasn't kidding about Jobs's attention to detail. This is from the NYT's excellent presentation of Apple patents. Note whose name comes first on the list of inventors.

Description: We claim the ornamental design for a staircase, substantially as shown and described.

Inventors: Steve Jobs, Karl Backus, Rosa Sheng, Ben McDonald, Michael Waltner, Colleen Caulliez, James O'Callaghan, Graham Coult, GB, Damian Rogan, Scott Nelson, GB

Patented: August 26, 2003  Filed: July 15, 2002

(h/t: OL)

the minimalist

The man on the right is John Sculley, former Apple CEO (we can all be grateful that the man on the left dumped the bow tie for the turtleneck). Sculley took over at Apple in 1983, after Apple's co-founder and senior 'grown-up' Mike Markkula retired. The board didn't trust Jobs to actually run the company, and so, with Jobs's co-operation, they lured Sculley from Pepsi-Cola, where he had been a highly successful marketing executive. The two soon became locked in a power struggle, which Sculley won, forcing Jobs out. Sculley stayed for a decade, and while the company grew during that time it lost direction, failed to innovate successfully, and became, essentially, mediocre.

Last year, Sculley gave a remarkable interview about his time at Apple and his impressions of Jobs. With any animosity long-dissolved, Sculley is perceptive, candid, self-critical, and fascinating on the topic of Jobs's working methods. Better than anyone else I've read, he articulates what it is about Jobs that makes him different, that made him great. If you're interested you should really read the whole thing, but here's a taster:

I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed [there's a photo here]. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewellery...

...Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system. It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else. If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely different way of looking at things...

...What Steve’s brilliance is, is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put into the context of his design methodology — everything is design. An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

...Apple is not really a technology company. Apple is really a design company...that’s what makes it different. Look at the stores, at the stairs in the stores. They are made of some special glass that had to be fabricated. And that’s so typical of the way he thinks. Everyone around him knows he beats to a different drummer. He sets standards that are entirely different than any other CEO would set. He’s a minimalist and he is constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It’s not simplistic. It’s simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.

Most of the world is split into engineers and artists. Artists create or appreciate beautiful things. Engineers make things work. Jobs combined both sensibilities - he saw the whole of the moon. 

He even writes well. Very few CEOs are able to give speeches as good as this (and if you think it was ghostwritten you haven't been paying attention). In short form, you can see the Apple aesthetic in his resignation letter, which is elegant, economical, direct and - in his request to remain an Apple employee - touching. Apple will miss him. We all will.

liberal interventionism 2.0

Photo: Francois Mori/AP

The doctrine of liberal interventionism - military engagement with countries in which the population, or part of it, faces a mortal threat from its own rulers or fellow citizens - hasn't been very fashionable post-Iraq. The probable genocide that NATO averted in Libya may make it respectable again, especially if the Libyans succeed in a stable transition of power. But as per this interview with an Obama administration official, the Libyan example suggests at least one key refinement to the theory: there must be a viable indigenous resistance, capable of leading the effort:

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications... "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."

This is more than a question of military strategy, of course. As was noted by Emma Sky, a British adviser to General Odierno in Iraq, in her recent piece on that country, the psychological question of empowerment is key:

I sit with a good friend, a female member of Parliament, in a café in Baghdad. We reminisce about 2007 and how we worked together closely to help bring down the violence that ravaged the country. It seems such a long time ago... Iraq today is so far away from the vision that people had after the fall of Saddam. I describe to her my trips to Egypt and Tunisia and how people feel empowered because they removed their regimes themselves, with little bloodshed, are debating their constitutions, and new politicians are coming to the fore. She tells me that in Iraq people do not feel that same sense of empowerment. They did not remove Saddam themselves, many of the politicians who were put in power were Islamist exiles returning from abroad, there was little public debate over the constitution, and elections did not bring about change but kept the same dysfunctional arrangement in place.

goodbye nancy wake

Born in New Zealand, raised in Sydney, Nancy Wake never liked being at home. After twice running away from her family, she made the trip to London just as soon as she was old enough, and shortly afterwards moved to Paris, where she worked as a journalist. She was living in France and newly wed when the Germans invaded. Through a chance encounter with a English officer she joined the resistance, later becoming a spy for the British in occupied France. She proved to be an invaluable asset for the Allies; a resourceful, brave, and utterly ruthless warrior. The Economist has published a wonderful obituary, to be read in full. The Wikipedia entry is also good, and from that I take this priceless snippet:

On the night of 29–30 April 1944 she was parachuted into the Auvergne, becoming a liaison between London and the local maquis group headed by Captain Henri Tardivat. Upon discovering her tangled in a tree, Captain Tardivat greeted her, remarking "I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year," to which she replied, “Don’t give me that French shit.”

what goes up

Photo: Louafi Larb/Reuters

While I share in the general feeling of satisfaction and relief in the toppling of Gadaffi, it's perhaps too early to celebrate. It felt very exciting to watch Saddam's statue being toppled, but that turned out to be a cheap thrill, or a very expensive one. The pictures from Tripoli aren't filling me with confidence for Libya's immediate future. The rebels do not exactly strike me as a disciplined fighting force; more like a rag-tag collection of young men on a massive adrenaline and testosterone high. Kind of like our own rioters, but armed with AK-47s and hand grenades.

Every high contains its own down, and I hope this one isn't too destructive. Which brings me to something I've long wondered about. When these guys fire their guns into the air in celebration, as they frequently do, what happens to the bullets? They have to land somewhere, right? Or on someone. According to this BBC report, this is a much-documented problem:

Examples of fatalities due to celebratory gunfire abound. Three people in the Philippines died due to stray bullets fired to welcome the arrival of the new year 2011. In 2010 a Turkish bridegroom killed three relatives when he fired an AK-47 at his own wedding. In the same year, Jordan's King Abdullah II ordered his country's authorities to clamp down on the practice after two people were killed and 13 more injured in one incident. When the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in 2007's Asia Cup, three people were killed in Baghdad amid widespread gunshots as fans celebrated. Celebratory gunfire in Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 was blamed for 20 deaths.

The practice is not restricted to Asia and the Middle East. A US study found that 118 people were treated for random "falling-bullet injuries" at one Los Angeles medical centre between 1985 and 1992, resulting in the deaths of 38. Additionally, the government of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia also ran a poster campaign with the slogan "Bullets Are Not Greeting Cards - Celebrate Without Weapons". In 2005, Serbian authorities warned their citizens that "every bullet that is fired up must come down" ahead of New Year's Eve.

Studies suggest that, although the velocity of a falling bullet is lower than that of one which has just been fired, it is still sufficient to be fatal.

it's london, stuff happens

Photo: Independent/David Sandison.

From an interview with the city's greatest living chronicler, Peter Ackroyd:

Speaking in a book-lined office near King's Cross, London, within walking distance of where the rioting began, Mr Ackroyd resolutely refused to see a new epoch dawning. "I can't get at all worked up about these most recent phenomena," he said. "They simply show a pattern of activity in the city that will endure as long as the city itself endures. I don't like those commentators who keep on saying that London will never be the same again. London is always the same again. I remember those comments were made very loudly after the [July 2005] terrorist attacks – 'London will never be the same again, London has lost its innocence' – it was all nonsense. London was exactly the same again the following day."

More good sense here.

how boredom produces riots

Illustration via Katherine Miller.

One of the explanations of the rioting I find intuitively credible is that they were the product of massive boredom. If you're a young man without a family to look after or a regular job to report to, then there's really very little to do except play computer games or hang around in shopping malls. The massive injection of adrenalin that comes from being in the proximity of disorder and violence must be very, very difficult to resist or control.

Some have argued that this means it is folly to cut funding for youth clubs; at least it gives bored young people something to do that doesn't involve gangs, drugs or petty theft. I'm not sure of the merits of this argument because I really don't know how much, or how, these clubs are used by their intended audience. More to the point it also raises the question of what we mean by boredom.

The authors of a new study on that topic propose that boredom is more than a simple lack of stimulation; rather, it is a lack of meaning. Bored people are people who find it hard or impossible to extract meaning from the situation in which they're in. They can't fit what they're doing into a larger narrative of purpose. Giving bored people something to do - a game of table tennis, for instance - will only work as a short-term antidote to this more profound problem. It's not that short-term antidotes aren't appealing. Bored people will seek out sensations. It's that they are, well, short-term.

The authors of this study were particularly interested in one insidious side-effect of boredom: by stimulating us to find purpose, it can bolster our tendency to divide the world into 'us' and 'them'. In an attempt to find meaning in their lives bored people will intensify their allegiance to whatever group they see themselves as aligned to, and intensify their animosity towards those groups to whom they see themselves opposed.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers, who are from the University of Limerick, gave 47 Irish students a highly repetitive computer-based task. Half the subjects had to perform this task for twice as long as the others. Unsurprisingly, this left them feeling bored and meaningless. They were then given a fictional scenario to read, in which an Englishman beats up an Irishman and later admits he “was acting on anti-Irish motives.” They were asked what sentence the Englishman should serve. The bored participants "allocated substantially more months of prison” than the others. This was one of a series of experiments which were "consistent with our hypothesis that bored people seek meaningfulness by negatively evaluating the actions of an out-group member that are targeted against an in-group member,” the researchers write.

So it appears that boredom does two things at once: it encourages sensation-seeking, and it fuels hostility. That is pretty much a recipe for a riot.

h/t: Miller-McCune.

the corporal jones theory of the riots

There's been much debate over the 'root causes' of the riots. Inequality? Family breakdown? Welfarism? Consumerism? Tony Blair?

Much of this discourse has taken the form what we can now call Greenfieldism, after Susan Greenfield, who recently responded to criticisms of her evidence-free speculations about the rise in autism diagnoses by saying, "I point to the increase in autism and I point to internet use. That is all." So now we have:

"I point to the rise in one-parent families and I point to the riots. That is all."

"I point to widening inequality and I point to the riots. That is all."

Etc. Oddly, enough, these hypothetical root causes are usually the same problems that the author has been complaining about/campaigning against for a while.

Perhaps the real problem here is that we're looking for "root causes" that don't exist or that inevitably represent massive over-simpifications. We have an inherent tendency to see patterns - causes, explanations - in everything, and we hate randomness. But that doesn't mean that randomness isn't the best way to 'explain' some social phenomena. Cities are incredibly complex systems; riots are incredibly complex manifestations of a complex system. When you have enough complexity, sometimes weird stuff will happen, and you can't draw a straight line to a cause.

I find myself increasingly drawn to what might crudely be called the "shit happens" hypothesis. It goes something like this: "Big cities will experience breakdowns in order from time to time. That is all." The extraordinary thing isn't that that they occur but that they don't happen more often. Bagehot at Economist has provided some historical perspective on moral panics. Iain Roberts suggests we should think of riots like earthquakes.  Christopher Dillow provides one political/philosophical framework for this way of thinking about it. But I haven't seen it better expressed than in a superb piece entitled Are Riots Normal? Or 'Don't Panic, Captain Mainwaring'. It's by Leif Jerram, a lecturer in urban history at Manchester University. I urge you to read it in full, but here's an extract:

Louise of Louise’s Hair by the bus depot in Wolverhampton came out of her shop and shouted at the 200 or so rioters to leave her alone – and they did. Louise is black, a woman, speaks with a mixture of a West Indian and Wolverhampton accent. According to most of the hackneyed theories we have, she shouldn’t be powerful, in control, confrontational, dynamic, or even a businesswoman at all. Yet she drew a line in the sand and confronted 200 young men with sticks and rocks, and they just left her, and her shop, alone.

I say this not to heroise Louise, but to randomise her. The randomness of Louise is clear – we couldn’t set up a programme to produce Louises; we couldn’t train them; we couldn’t station them around a town if we could. We’ve got no idea whether Louise is a good or bad person in other areas of her life. We can’t define why Louise was successful in getting the rioters to move on, when the police could not. It was a random person in a random moment exercising random effects. So why, then, should we expect to be able to understand the rioters?  

Link to piece.

deep diving

Photo: Alexsey Druginyn

It seems so obvious that it might not seem worth saying, but it is: the New York Times is a superb, world-beating newspaper. There are many reasons for that but one of them is that it consistently publishes reports like this one, into the Russian government's obsession with polling. Without breaking big news, it tells you a lot about contemporary political culture in Russia, and does so with style and wit. In the very first sentence, we learn that this post-communist government retains a "chief ideologist". We then discover that the whole government, despite being generally unbothered by democratic niceties like free elections, has an appetite for polling data that even New Labour might have balked at. Mr Putin is a particular fan of it. He uses it to guide his less-than-subtle image-making. Indeed, it's to polling that he partly owes his appointment in the first place:

One option is to reach back to the autocratic populism that became known as “the Putin phenomenon.” Social science was part of that from early on; one factor in Mr. Putin’s selection as president was a survey that showed that Russians’ most-admired figures were fictional tough guys — the undercover spy Max Otto von Stirlitz and the homicide detective Gleb Zheglov, said Igor V. Zadorin, who headed the Kremlin’s in-house sociology department at the time.

Now, Putin is using polling to decide just how much he ought to demonise the United States in his upcoming electoral confrontation with Medvedev.

Do read the whole thing. This may be my favourite paragraph:

With summer in its last lazy stretch before the true beginning of campaign season, measures are clearly being taken to shore up the leaders’ listless ratings. Last week a camera crew followed Mr. Putin to the bottom of a bay in southern Russia, where he was filmed in full scuba gear retrieving two amphoras, long jars with handles common in ancient Greece and Rome. Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Putin said that they dated from the sixth century A.D., and that he had followed the instructions of archaeologists to locate the site. It was about six feet below the surface.

Link to piece.

the return of the repressed

Just one more point about that Oborne piece. He says the "moral disintegration" of society is as bad at the top as at the bottom. But what about the bit in between? Oddly enough, the class to which Oborne belongs - the middle class - gets off scot-free.

Oborne isn't alone in making this omission. When commentators bemoan the state of our society, they often point to the state of the poor or the state of the rich. The middle-class get off relatively easily. Indeed, we are coddled. We are the poor, benighted "squeezed middle". There, there. Don't let those bullies from the mansions or the estates put you off your granola.

Having said that, it's not as if the middle-classes aren't world champions at self-loathing. It's just that, under stress, our guilt is externalised on to hate figures. In this country, of course, there is one particular figure on to whom middle-class people of left and right can legitimately displace their anxieties; a man who stands in for everything the middle-classes secretly despise about themselves and their peers. Here is the opening paragraph of the column Oborne wrote next:

The rioters who have rampaged through the streets of Britain over the past seven days were the children of Tony Blair. Many of them were born under Tony Blair. They went to school under Tony Blair. They learnt their system of savage values and greed under Tony Blair. They are the product of the policies of Tony Blair.

on going to hell in a handcart

Peter Oborne is going to hunt you down and make you more moral.

In the national Heated Debate about the riots, there is barely a senior politician or columnist who doesn't start - and in some cases finish - with the observation that the riots are one more manifestation of a failure to "play by the rules", exhibited by the rich and powerful as much as those at the bottom. This ubiquitous meme was brilliantly captured by Peter Oborne's much-read commentary of last week: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as at the bottom. Here's an extract:

Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up. 

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington...Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Oborne writes with such power, such brutal clarity, that it's almost impossible not to be swept along with him, even when he drags in Hackgate and the expenses scandal, declares the problem is "barbarism" and finishes, virtually frothing at the mouth, by pronouncing the need for Britain to have "a moral reformation". Yes! Yes! Let's turn the clock back! Let's get Back to Basics! Hang on a minute, I seem to have turned into a Tory.

I'm not the only one. Oborne's article was widely applauded by people on the left despite the fact that, being a very traditional Tory, he aspires to a very different kind of society than they do. But in this piece, he skilfully hits the sweet spot at which the hot buttons of left and right converge. Traditionally, the left get exercised about social inequality; the right about personal morality. Here, the two are brought resoundingly together in a narrative of moral decline. But after the exhilarating rush of moral indignation has worn off, I'm left with some dull questions. Like, is any of this stuff true? I mean, is there evidence for it? Or is it just a good story?

First of all, does the link between the bankers and the looters amount to more than a satisfying analogy? Is what the bankers did really equivalent to the criminal, intentional destruction of property and - in some cases - persons? In any case, is there in any meaningful sense whatsoever a causal link between the rioters and the bankers? I haven't seen any evidence that people at the bottom of the social hierarchy spend a lot of time fretting over those at the top. It seems to me we're more likely to envy or imitate the people next door than those that might as well be in a different universe altogether.

Second, has there really been a "terrifying decline in standards" amongst our rulers? Can it be plausibly argued that the politicians and billionaires of, say, the 1970s, were more decent, rule-abiding people than today's? Or did we simply hear a lot less, and possibly care less, about their misdemeanours? Oborne says it's become acceptable for politicians to lie and cheat. It only takes a moment's thought to realise how absurd this is; it wasn't called an "expenses scandal" for nothing. I'd say it's become far less acceptable for politicians to deviate from a path of strict moral probity than ever before, because we're much more likely to hear about it, and we're much more likely to hit them hard for it. What Oborne is actually decrying is greater transparency in society, not a decline in standards.

There seems to exist a universal human impulse to look back longingly to a golden age, and to bemoan our descent from it. If we're not careful, this impulse can distort our view of the present; in the language of psychologists, it's a powerful cognitive bias. The Daily Telegraph has built a brand on it; Tories have built a political party on it. Progressives ought to know better. No doubt, some things were more morally admirable twenty or forty (or a hundred? Why not a hundred?) years ago. But an awful lot of stuff wasn't. Even the poorest in our society live more comfortable, less fearful lives than they once were allowed to. Over the last two decades at least, crime has declined. Women are more equal with men than ever before. People from ethnic minorities, gays, and the disabled are treated with more respect than ever before.

This story of moral decay is a seductive one. But it's got no more bearing on reality than Harry Potter.

are england's cricketers english or german?

 
In a month of fairly appalling news, the success of the England team has provided some respite. It might not be absurd, either, to be inspired by it when considering the seeming intractability of Britain's social and economic problems. After all, the England team was ranked worst in the world at the end of the last century. That it is now ranked the best is the result not of luck or individual brilliance (though those things played a part) but of intelligent long-term planning by the relevant institution (the England and Wales Cricket Board), combined with a set of players and coaches who put cooperation - the team ethic - above everything else. Perhaps most importantly, everyone involved, from the field to the boardroom, has displayed grit - the steely determination to overcome setbacks and stay the course; England's progress from its 1999 nadir has been bumpy and uneven, but the direction of travel always remained consistent. In a nation that sometimes seems to have lost confidence in its ability to shape events rather than haplessly react to them, this is something to savour and reflect on.

It's inspiring partly because we've forgotten that such qualities are part of our national character. A few people have commented that this team is more like a German team than an English one, in its relentlessness, its work ethic, its commitment to winning at all costs. But perhaps that just goes to show the idea of a 'national character' can limit the potential of a nation as well as provide sustenance to it. At some point, English footballers came to believe in the stereotype of glorious losers who huffed and puffed before being overcome by wilier or better-organised foreigners. England's cricketers have been less willing to concede that the latter are characteristics of nations other than our own.

Then again, we've always been a lot more German than we like to think. 

a reading guide to the riots

 

Photoshop from here.

In case you're wondering what caused these riots and how to stop them happening again, then don't worry: commentators on the stupid right and the stupid left have all the answers you need. Or, you know, not. Never have so many pronounced with so much passionate intensity on a subject about which they know so little. 

At a time like this, certainty is in inverse proportion to credibility. Unless someone admits at the outset that they're puzzled by what happened in the last few days, then they're simply not serious. Whenever you come across a columnist or politician 'explaining' these riots, remember that they probably don't know what they're talking about; Max Hastings doesn't know anyone that lives on a council estate, and nor does Harriet Harman. So when they call these people "beasts" or imagine that the rioters were staging a protest against cuts in tuition fees or the bank bailouts, then they are, to put it plainly, talking out of their bottoms. I'm particularly suspicious of all commentaries that boil down to This Just Proves What I Already Believe or a string of dog-eared clichés dressed up in bad sociology. 

These riots are not inexplicable but they are unprecedented in nature and complex in causality. It's going to take a while to come up with some credible theories of what happened. In the meantime the best responses - the ones really worth reading - are coming, not from newspaper offices or Westminster, but from street-level. These are the ones that contain what is, right now, a rare and essential ingredient: first-hand knowledge of what the lives of these people are like. There is simply no substitute for that. It doesn't give you the answers, but you can't get to the answers without it.

A few examples: Camilla Batmanghelidjh (although I suspect her focus on poverty tells only part of the story). Maurice McLeod, who was a kid in Brixton when the 1981 riots happened. And this, from a youth worker who works near where I grew up in South London. It's quite long but worth the read - the penultimate paragraph in particular:

When we saw my boyfriend’s bike being stolen by two hooded monsters, we ran out to get in back. I saw the youth in their faces, and shouted ‘stop I’m a youth worker!’ After some reasoning he gave the bike back. My boyfriend walked back to re-chain to our friend’s bike, but I remained. I couldn’t just let them go without asking why? He told me ‘what man, I gave the bike back?’. I replied, ‘I don’t care about the bike. It’s just a bike. I care about you. What about you? What are you good at?’ He looked at me, his smaller friend silent the whole time. ‘What are you good at!’ I yelled. ‘Nothing’. Tears pricked my eyes. Familiar tears. The ones I leave the classroom sometimes to have in the toilet. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say nothing.’ He had no words for me. ‘You’re better than this. You’re better than being a thief.’ He was silent. What he didn’t do was run away or get angry. He didn’t pull out whatever it was he cut the bike lock with and he didn’t jab it in me. He simply looked at me, without any answers. 

UPDATE: This is also worth reading.

UPDATE ii: This is by far the best piece of analysis I've read.

no commentary required

Background here.