I had a great time researching this one, mainly because I ended up visiting the White Mountain Apache tribe in remote Arizona.

But why did I go to the Apache? I could have chosen from 334 reservations and 565 tribes.

Well, there were a couple of reasons, some journalistic, others logistical. Also, just getting an interview with any tribal leader can be difficult — the tribes have been burnt so often by us whites, including by white hacks, that they don’t trust any of us. As Ronnie Lupe, the chairman (≈ chieftain) said to me:

“We see a white man snooping around, we all have the same thought: is he good or bad?”

I was the one snooping around.

But this post is really about the other reason why I chose the Apache, which is meant to be a bit frivolous and yet sentimental.

You see, it’s because I, a dual citizen, was once a … German boy!

All about Winnetou

Being a German boy means, statistically, being very likely to be obsessed with American Indians in general and the Apache in particular. Let’s just take my case.

In this grainy shot above from the mid 1970s, my friend Patrick and I (left) happened to be Sioux, Cheyenne or Arapaho. This is obvious from the:

• teepee (not wigwam or wikiup), and
• feathers

You see, we German boys took take these details quite seriously. When playing, one just does not mix genres between, say, the Iroquois/Mohawk and the Great Plains or southwestern tribes. God forbid.

But most of the time we did not wear feathers. Instead, Patrick and I looked more like this:

Here Patrick is dressed as Old Shatterhand and I (left again, with wig and paint) am the Apache chief Winnetou. (Our moms made the outfits, since you ask.)

Who are Winnetou and Old Shatterhand? I will tell you. But first, here is how we imagined them:

Click for credits

This is a poster for one of the Winnetou films that we were watching in the 70s. Here you see them, the two enemies-turned-blood-brothers and best friends, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. To us, they were the noblest heroes.

See if you can spot how Patrick and I tried to approximate the look of the characters (played by Lex Barker and Pierre Brice).

But long before those films, German boys had been reading the novels. They were written by Karl May, perhaps the best-selling German author of all time. (Take that, Luther, Mann, Nietzsche, …) May died 100 years ago this year.

In his imagination May dreamed up exotic worlds and heroes that have enthralled millions since. The best comparison I can think of for you Anglo-Saxons is this: Karl May was really Germany’s J.K. Rowling.

Here May is dressed as he imagined his hero, Old Shatterhand:

In any case, what does any of this have to do with my research for this week’s article?

Well, boys become men, and then sometimes foreign correspondents, based in the southwest. But they’re still boys.

I knew my story was fundamentally about a tragedy: the context and background is always the poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, diabetes and crime that is the fate of so many Native Americans on reservations. I was determined to see that reality, and yet to see, in my mind’s eye, another reality at the same time.

As I drove through the Salt River Canyon (picture the Grand Canyon but without people) to enter the vast Apache reservation I was of course imagining Winnetou again. Perhaps I was Old Shatterhand this time, riding to meet my friend.

Pascal

“I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” So Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, allegedly excused himself once. Or perhaps it was Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw.

It’s witty, it’s ironic, it’s true: that’s why any of them might have said it.

Here is how I know that: I write for The Economist, and most of our articles are short. I’ve opined on the subject of optimal length in writing before, but in this context, let’s just say that it is the shortening that takes all of the time.

Because I have so little time, I got into the bad habit of not shortening, and not cleaning up, my emails. You see, there were too many emails, and I was too busy to take time for any one of them. (Bear with me. You’re supposed to find an irony building.)

But why were there so many emails in the first place? Oh yes, because all sorts of people (mainly PR people, but also others) are writing me emails. And those are all busy, busy, busy people, with very little time. So their emails are long and sloppy. They refer to an attachment that is missing. They invite me to an event on the wrong date, or omit the date, or the place, even as they somehow find paragraphs of other things to say.

So then, since we are all so very, very busy, we shoot the emails back and forth to clarify this and rectify that, and the threads grow and take more of our time, making us even busier and requiring us to write even faster, thus making our emails longer and sloppier….

So, for a few months, I’ve been trying an experiment. I respond less fast, and often not at all. When I do email, I take more time. I actually read through emails before I push Send. I check that phone numbers and dates are correct, and that all the information is there. I think about what is extraneous and what I can cut.

Lo, the threads are getting ever so slightly shorter, the iterations fewer, the decisions more decisive.

Fewer words → more meaning
Less activity → more action

To my surprise, I am finding that, by slowing down, I have more time. If, like Pascal, I need to write a letter, I might now be able to make it … shorter. I hope I can keep this up.

Andres Martinez

Andres Martinez is a great journalist, writer and now think-tanker. And he’s had a career of Sophoclean ups and downs that could have been a storyline in my book.

He and I had drinks the other day. Now Andres has penned a “Drinks With” column about me on Zocalo Public Square, an intellectual gathering point for the Los Angeles area.

It’s more about me than about the book. But Andres does use a phrase I will steal from now on when telling people what type of book it is:

genre-bending

Thank you, Andres!!

There are reviewers, and then there are reviewers. And then there is … Mr Crotchety.

Who is Mr Crotchety?, you ask.

He (and I am reasonably confident that he is indeed both human and male, as allegedly pictured above) first presented himself to me in 2008, when he wrote a reader letter to The Economist about a piece I had written (about “Slow Food”). Here is that letter:

Date: 16 September 2008

To: letters@economist.com

Subject: slow food

Regarding: (11 Sep 08) Revolutionaries by the Bay

Many years ago I sat down in a Slow Food restaurant in New England. It seems like only yesterday when I walked out. The food was not memorable, but the service was glacially slow and inattentive (this was before global warming). Does the service have to be European also?

Mr. Crotchety

That set the tone for all that was to follow. Mr Crotchety, possibly encouraged by me, poured himself into the blogosphere and, under his increasingly notorious nom de guerre, began spreading his wit more widely.

Here on The Hannibal Blog, for example, we were soon turning the epic tale of Hannibal the Carthaginian into its … limerick version. (Read through the comments in that post, too: We expanded the mission to Zen Senryus.) In retrospect, it is hard to believe that both Polybius and Livy overlooked such an obvious literary device.

But Mr Crotchety never over-indulged himself with his blog commentary. Sometimes he crotched, sometimes he didn’t. Over time, I became aware that an entire subculture of the blogosphere was secretly yearning for one of his ambushes. They bestowed the ultimate kudos.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this same Mr Crotchety has now, via Sprezzatura, written his own and inimitable review of Hannibal and Me. Follow the link, and may the kvetching and crotching continue over there….

Fiammetta Rocco

Here is an 8-minute podcast of a chat between Fiammetta Rocco, our Books & Arts editor at The Economist, and me, about Hannibal and Me.

We were all over the place in our actual conversation, but our colleague Lucy Rohr did a Herculean job of editing it down to 8 minutes.

Topics covered: Tiger Woods and Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, plus some Meriwether Lewis and the rest of the gang.

(And if you want an amusing visual of how I tape these interviews with London, go back to this old post.)

And now: something completely different, and much more important — indeed, rather uplifting, in the spirit of the season.

We are, obviously, talking about … yogurt.

Way back in May, I wrote a story in The Economist called Red Tape in California: Beware of the yogurt. The title says it all, really. But if you need additional context, my favorite line from the article is:

The tale thus went from Kafka to Catch-22.

In a nutshell, it is the tale of a Zoroastrian father-daughter team (pictured above) in Orange County who make fantastically good “artisinal” yoghurt — or would make it, if it weren’t for California’s bureaucrats. Go read the rest.

Why do I bring this up now? Because there has been an epilogue, which is unfolding still.

A few weeks after the article appeared, Homa (the daughter) emailed me that

… we were requested by two news sources a Chilean newspaper “Las Ultimas Noticias” (a conservative daily based in Santiago), and Fox Business News “America’s Nightly Scoreboard” to give an interview…. We were written up in HaAretz, an Israeli paper, which was basically a translation of your article, except with the headline: “U.S. against Iran– now the scene of yogurt”… A film-maker has asked us for the movie rights, he wants to call the documentary: “The Curdled Crusaders” — Catchy. Tons of people have commented on our FB page and send individual e-mails of support. A few consultants who want to help us more to other states (Tennessee, Texas, Mexico). Some wanting to know where to buy the yogurt (clearly, they didn’t pay attention to the article).

Pretty good, don’t you think?

And now, just the other day, Homa emailed again:

Dear Andreas,

I hope this letter finds you well. There have been quite a few developments for us (specifically in the last three weeks) which most definitely relate back to the piece you wrote on us. Most pleasantly, Secretary of State for Oregon Kate Brown read The Economist piece in November and thought “This shouldn’t happen. Let’s get her to make it up in Oregon.” And so she invited me up, introduced me to regulators and business recruiters and even though their regulations are similar to California, their attitude has been: How can we make this happen for you?” It has been such a nice change.

Also, nine months of begging for an audience, Karen Ross of The CDFA has finally agreed to meet with us (today!) and tell us what exactly the public risk is of using already pasteurized milk.

Ironically, I’ve only made yogurt twice in this whole time. An ideal time, I figured, to experiment with the paleo diet.

Best,

Homa

I’m not the only one at The Economist to launch a book “this” year.

(As you know, my launch is technically on January 5th, but Hannibal and Me is already available for pre-order, so that counts as 2011.)

Here is a list of the books my colleagues and I wrote this year. A pretty broad range of genres and topics, wouldn’t you say?

ON SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001, I had already been a correspondent for The Economist for four years and, as we are wont, had moved around for the publication, just then finding myself living in Hong Kong and covering Asia. It was already evening in Hong Kong and I had just returned, somewhat tired from a long day, to my flat on the 25th floor of a skyscraper in “Mid-Levels”, with a view of Hong Kong, the harbour and Kowloon. Just then my assistant called and said simply: “Turn on the TV.” For the rest of my night, which for America was that endlessly long morning and day, I watched.

The next morning, I walked to my office and stopped by my usual coffee bar in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s expat playground. All the regulars were there, and in each conversation, people of various nationalities were trying to make sense of what this world was now to become—now, as of September 12th, as of the day after. Anger, worry, confusion, fear—all these emotions were mixed together. I knew right away that the main significance of this dreadful event lay in what would happen next, not in what had already happened. How would America react? China? Muslims? Everybody?

There was a lot of nonsense said in those early days, as always when people must talk about something but have little new to say. I was suddenly getting lots of eager advice to cancel a trip to Indonesia. A Muslim country, you see. I went, and it was my favourite trip ever to that mystical place, easier for the lack of other travelers and just as welcoming as ever. The Schadenfreude of many mainland Chinese was harder to stomach. The unfocused jingoism of some Americans (“nuke’em back to the stone age”) even harder.

The first casualty of war is truth, it is often said. Instead, it is nuance. Every individual flees to his in-group and becomes susceptible to its caricatures of the respective out-group, to what the Germans call a Feindbild, a perception of The Other as enemy. This is already an act of de-humanisation. Bad laws, more oppressive bureaucracy (at borders, in courts, in daily life), distrust in interpersonal relations invariably follow, just as one apocalyptic horseman inevitably rides close behind the one before.

Did September 11th teach us about the risks of terrorism? It should not have. The existential threat of a suitcase bomb, a rogue nuclear event, already existed before and exists still. On the other hand, September 11th itself killed about as many Americans as die each year as a result of texting while driving. Homo sapiens are bad at understanding risks relative to one another, and worse at responding proportionately. The world became a worse place on that day. In part because the terrorists made it that way. In part, because the rest of us then did the same.

__

For the regulars here, some of these thoughts might strike you as “in-character”, such as those on

• in- and out-groups, and telling “The Single Story” versus “The Other Story”; and
• our tragically flawed human risk perception

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

These words by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow popped into my mind this week, as I read an internal email from The Economist‘s “brand communications manager” that landed in my inbox. It began:

As more and more of you are doing broadcast interviews now, I thought it might be useful to re-circulate these hints and tips…

I have indeed, over the past 14 years, been doing more and more broadcast interviews, and made more than my share of mistakes. So I began perusing these tips with an open mind. Many were about the mechanics (wear plain shirts on TV, no patterns, no black; don’t fiddle with your hands; etc). But the important ones were about content. And, as I kept reading, I grew somewhat pensive.

That’s because, as I see it, the tips were simultaneously

1. good — ie, anybody doing media interviews is well advised to heed them — and
2. awful — ie, heeding them is what makes our political, public and personal conversations increasingly pointless and frustrating.

1) The tips

I was slightly suspicious of the Powerpoint-style pseudo-acronyms (this email came from the “business side”, after all), but could not argue with the advice:

Prepare beforehand – decide what it is you really want to get across, having stats to hand will usually be useful. Know your:

• Audience
• Messages (focus on three key things to say)
• Evidence (third party endorsement is good e.g. quotes or research)
• Negatives (what’s the “worst” question they could ask?)

(AMEN, get it? Oh dear.)

Then:

Get in early with your messages/evidence – don’t wait for the perfect question, it may never come

Translation: Ignore the question, just say whatever the heck you want to say, which is probably whatever you said in your last article in The Economist.

More tips:

Avoid being question-led so the interviewer gets a neat segment that fits their preconceptions but you don’t get to say anything really interesting or useful.

Add value. Don’t feel forced to answer a question at length that you feel is unclear or irrelevant. You are the expert, talk about what you think is most significant.

If you are asked a difficult question:

1. Acknowledge it (“I understand that view…” / “we need to look at this issue in the light of..”)

2. Bridge back and communicate what you want to say.

3. Don’t repeat any negative language – if the audience is only half-listening, that’s all they will hear.

4. Don’t fake it if you don’t know, bring the conversation back to where you feel comfortable.

Translation: In case you didn’t get the first translation, ignore the question (but be suave about it) and say whatever the heck you want to say….

2) The consequences

I did say, right up front, that I had contradictory reactions to this advice. I know too well how utterly demoralizing it is to be on the radio or on TV, and to go off on that tangent that might become so very sophisticated in just a few minutes but dies suddenly and ignominiously when the interview is … over.

‘Wait, you mean, you don’t want to hear all my complex thoughts on this issue?’

No, they don’t.

If you don’t seize the conversation, they, or it, will seize you.

On the other hand, what kind of “conversations” are we talking about?

The worst kind: the eristic kind, as Socrates would say, the kind that obstructs communication and discovery of truth.

And so we all — journalists, politicians, consultants, pundits — become “media-trained”, talking right past one another, just like ships that pass in the night.

When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one Writer to parody the Words which are written by most others, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle him, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that he should produce a representative Sample of the Words which impel him to the Mocking. He holds these Truths to be self-evident:

• that what follows is bad writing indeed and will make you cringe or smirk,
• that it is bad not in an egregious (and thus unrepresentative) way but in a small, ordinary, quotidian, commonplace (ie, representative ) way,
• that it serves as partial proof to the thesis advanced in the previous post about Writing with Fear (although the role of fear as the cause deserves to be developed in a later post).

I) The run-of-the-mill press release/PR email

Below I reproduce, the first PR email I saw in my inbox this morning. It is chosen for being the day’s first, not for being the day’s worst.

Hi, Andreas –

I’m reaching out with a new executive leadership announcement from [COMPANY]. [COMPANY] is continuing its expansion into the [OMITTED] sector with the addition of several new members to its key management team. … [COMPANY] announced today that it has added several key members to its senior management team. …

Exegesis:

1. For heaven’s sake, stop “reaching out” already. You can ask me, remind me, alert me, tell me, or you can simply … tell me without telling me that you will tell me, but keep your hands to yourself. Reaching out is in 2011 what proactive leveraging was circa 1995. (My colleague on The Economist’s language blog has covered this adequately.)
2. How is “continuing an expansion” different from “expanding”?
3. Since you mention the company’s “key management team”, please clarify which management team(s) is (are) non-key.
4. Thanks for repeating the phrase, thus adding depth. I notice that the “key members” are now being added to the “senior management team”. Are they key but junior? Or key and senior? Are any of the senior ones non-key?

II) Examples chosen by Johnny

The subsequent examples are taken from our Style Guide, which is written by Johnny Grimmond, who has long been both a key and a senior editor of The Economist.

(Johnny has made three other explicit appearances here on The Hannibal Blog — when he clarified like vs as, when he decried bad editing as ‘desophistication’,  and when he busted me for using “co-equal” – and one veiled appearance, when he was just being British as an after-dinner speaker.)

Herewith:

1) Pompous blather

From the Style Guide’s entry for Community (a concept to which I also devoted a post):

If further warning is needed, remember that community is one of those words that tend to crop up in the company of the meaningless jargon and vacuous expressions beloved of bombastic bureaucrats. Here is John Negroponte, appearing before the American Senate:

“Teamwork will remain my north star as director of national intelligence–not just for my immediate office but for the entire intelligence community. My objective will be to foster proactive co-operation among the 15 IC elements and thereby optimise this nation’s extraordinary human and technical resources in collecting and analysing intelligence. We can only make the United States more secure if we approach intelligence reform as value-added, not zero-sum….”

This short passage might be the motherlode of bad expression (“foster”, “proactive”, “optimise”, “resources”, “value-added”, “zero-sum”,…). And yet it is actually ordinary enough still to be representative.

Here is another example, this one from the entry for Jargon:

The appointee … should have a proven track record of operating at a senior level within a multi-site international business, preferably within a service- or brand-oriented environment…

Johnny seems to have found this in a job advertisement by … The Economist Group! I’m guessing that gave him a frisson.

Next example:

At a national level, the department engaged stakeholders positively … This helped… to improve stakeholder buy-in to agreed changes…

This phrase came out of a report from the British civil service.

In the next passage, an esteemed think tank, Chatham House, explained that

The City Safe T3 Resilience Project is a cross-sector initiative bringing together experts … to enable multi-tier practitioner-oriented collaboration on resilience and counter-terrorism challenges and opportunities.

In the next passage, some British policy maker tried to say that teachers who agree to test their students will get money from the government. Here is how:

The grants will incentivise administrators and educators to apply relevant metrics to assess achievement in the competencies they seek to develop.

Try to guess what this phrase was supposed to express:

A multi-agency project catering for holistic diversionary provision to young people for positive action linked to the community safety strategy and the pupil referral unit.

Answer: Go-karting lessons sponsored by the Luton Educational Authority (London).

2) Political correctness

Political correctness has it own entry in our Style Guide, but I will instead quote from the entry for Euphemisms, because I think Johnny just says it all here:

Avoid, where possible, euphemisms and circumlocutions, especially those promoted by interest groups keen to please their clients or organisations anxious to avoid embarrassment. This does not mean that good writers should be insensitive of giving offence: on the contrary, if you are to be persuasive, you would do well to be courteous. But a good writer owes something to plain speech, the English language and the truth, as well as to manners. Political correctness can go.

… Female teenagers are girls, not women. Living with mobility impairment probably means wheelchair-bound. Developing countries are often stagnating or even regressing (try poor) countries. The underprivileged may be disadvantaged, but are more likely just poor (the very concept of underprivilege is absurd, since it implies that some people receive less than their fair share of something that is by definition an advantage or prerogative). Enron’s document-management policy simply meant shredding. The Pentagon’s enhanced interrogation is torture …

Debate in progress

A while ago, I had a little email exchange with one of my editors in London (The Economist’s HQ). I had written an article and the question was whether or not I should also write a Leader (ie, an editorial). In other words, should The Economist, through my words, opine, and how exactly?

The editor wrote to me:

I was very intrigued by the idea, and there was a lot of interest in the meeting. The problem is the prescription. I think you’re inclined to [subject omitted]; but I’m not inclined to go as far as that….

As you see, I excised the actual topic of discussion, because it is utterly irrelevant to my point here. Here is what I replied:

I’ve actually (as usual) got no clear “prescriptions” in my mind at all. I just made up some stuff to pitch a Leader outline to you. I’m always surprised by how interested we at The Economist are in our own opinions. Personally, I’m 99% interested in understanding the problem, and quite flexible in the other 1%…

Because the editor and I know each other well, I knew my cavalier tone would not be misunderstood. (In the end, there was no space in that week for that Leader anyway.) But then I realized that my point was perhaps more fundamental. How so?

The searcher and the preacher as archetype

You know you’re in trouble when somebody begins a monologue with “There are two kinds of people…”. But we might indeed stipulate that, yes, there are two kinds of people: searchers and preachers. You might even consider them Jungian archetypes (about which we haven’t talked for a while).

The preacher:

• This sort really, really cares what he or she believes (rather than knows).
• It matters to him what his opinion is, and also what your opinion is. That is because, to preachers, individuals are defined by their opinions.
• Whether the opinions are based on good information or bad, whether they conform to reality or not, whether they acknowledge or exclude good alternatives — all this is by no means irrelevant, but of at best minor interest to a preacher.

The searcher:

• He might or might not be interested in his own opinions, because he is forever in the process of forming one. This process (essentially one of learning) is much more interesting than any opinion that might temporarily emerge from it.
• The searcher is also, as Walt Whitman might say, aware of the internal contradictions in any given opinion and quite intrigued by them, in an almost flirtatious way.
• Much more important is the search for good information and the discrimination against bad, and a proper understanding of all conceivable alternative views.
• If the preacher secretly hopes to achieve consensus on a single “story”, the searcher always hopes that all “other stories” keep circulating simultaneously. (As in: the Single versus the Other Story.)

And yes, of course, we’re all a bit of both, but in different proportions. Personally, for once, I’m not that confused about what I am: a searcher.

Which is to say: I have lots of opinions, but the opinion I’m proudest of is my opinion about my opinions. Generally, I’m quite suspicious of them. I interrogate them, and they answer back. Fascinating conversations.

Quite a few of us at The Economist are, individually, searchers. And yet, The Economist itself, as a whole, is clearly in the preacher camp. An interesting point to ponder.

It’s been an exhausting but satisfying and edifying week. I spent all of it speaking, rather than writing, and I learned a lot about the difference.

I) The written word

The occasion was my Special Report on “Democracy in California”, which was on the cover of the previous issue of The Economist, a cover as cheeky as one might expect of us (see above). The cover of the actual report (which is an insert of 11,000 words, eight chapters) looks like this:

It’s my fifth Special Report (we used to call those things “Surveys”). I usually urge people to read a Special Report on paper, or as a PDF, because it is really one single narrative, with each chapter leading to the next and none meant to be read in isolation. Online readers often land on one chapter and don’t realize it is part of something bigger.

Here are the chapters:

1. The People’s Will
2. Direct Democracy: Origin of the Species (I had the most fun with this one)
3. Proposition 13: War by Initiative
4. Stateside and abroad (this is a short box comparing other states and countries)
5. California’s Legislature: The withering branch
6. Education: A lesson in mediocrity
7. How voters decide: What do you know? (The second-most fun, and most suprising)
8. What next: Burn the wagons

I tried to remember and list all the sources here, but it’s inevitable that I forgot somebody, so apologies.

II) The spoken word

Once the report was published, two of my colleagues — Amy Jaick and Dayna De Simone, our brand enhancement geniuses — ferried me around California to “market” the report.

• It started with television (memorable chiefly because I was told to “park in Johnny Carson’s spot”),
• continued with radio and more radio,
• and then continued even more with lots of live-audience public speaking and debating, at UCLA, the World Affairs Council, the University of San Francisco, and on and on until I was numb and hoarse.

As you might remember, I’ve long been pondering the difference between the written and the spoken word, so it was constantly on my mind this week. The two are really completely different. You can write well but speak awfully, or speak well but write awfully. (You can also be good or bad at both, of course).

All of which is to say that this was really a great warm-up for the speaking I’ll probably be doing in January when my book comes out.

In particular, I now appreciate the importance and difficulty of being a good “accordion”. Which is to say: You have to be able to expand and contract at will — ie, to speak equally well about (in this case) all 11,000 written words in

• 1 minute,
• 2 minutes,
• 10 minutes,
• 30 minutes and
• 1 hour.

And that takes quite a bit of practice, especially since I don’t believe in using any written notes at all.

The only reason, as far as I can tell, why somebody might want to hear a writer speak (as opposed to just reading his writing) is spontaneity, which equals authenticity. If you’re speaking from written notes, how can you be spontaneous? Whenever I’m in an audience and a speaker uses written notes, the oratory is dead and boring.

So I speak “naked”, as it were, which can, admittedly, be a bit nerve-racking. I did get sidetracked a couple of times. But as the week went on I got better at my pacing. Every talk was partly the same and partly different, and Amy and Dayna gave me great feedback on what worked and what didn’t, so that “the speech” kept improving.

And the reaction from the various audiences was fantastic. At every event, we ended up having a lively debate. I was learning a lot from the audience. And learning is really my main hobby. So I guess it was a good week.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, until I had to advance from venting about the evils of distracted driving here on The Hannibal Blog to doing so in The Economist. So here it is. My rubric says it all:

Distracted driving is the new drunk driving.

The research and writing process had the usual frustrations (usual for The Economist, I mean): I talked to lots of people, read many tens of thousands of words of academic research, took more than 10,000 words of notes, and then…. reduced it all to 700 words.

Oh well. Out went a whole lot of nuance.

If you ask me to name the most interesting concept from the article, and about the whole topic, it is this:

The human brain cannot process communication (oral or written) with a person who is not physically present without drastically reallocating attention and thus compromising driving safety. This is a biological fact. All those who claim that they can call/text and drive are the modern equivalents of the people you might (if you’re older) recall bragging that “I can hold my liquor” before that started sounding ridiculous.

As Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary biologist and a delightfully belligerent blogger, puts it:

Any communication with parties who are not immediately present is evolutionarily novel, and the human brain is likely to find it cognitively difficult to handle.

Steering a large metal weapon at lethal speeds through crowded surroundings, of course, is also ”evolutionarily novel”. So we have a double whammy. Homo sapiens just didn’t do this stuff in the savannah.

And yes, this means that bluetooth (“hands-free”) does zero to reduce the risk.

Anyhoo, here is just a tiny sample of some of the research that, sadly, got little or no exposure in my article for lack of space:

• Carnegie Mellon Brain Research
• World Health Organization report
• Cell phone v drunk driving
• Naturalistic Driving Study
• Meta analysis
• Latest statistics (showing decline in traffic deaths overall)
• Department of Transportation data on gadget use
• State laws
• Pew Internet on “Teens and Distracted Driving”
• Pew Internet on Adults and Distracted Driving
•  National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on crash factors
• A list of even more research

Well, it’s time again for our (The Economist‘s) annual Christmas issue — a double issue (meaning that it is on news kiosks for two weeks instead of the usual one).

My piece in this one is called Migrant farm workers: Fields of Tears.

(The title of this post explains itself if you read the article.)

They even used one of the pictures I took with my dirty, sweaty, unsteady hand while picking grapes in August (I posted about it at the time). So, even though we don’t get bylines at The Economist, I did get a tiny picture credit in the bottom right!

The back story

In late October, I posted a cryptic and coy entry here, in which I talked about an exchange with one of my editors, after she told me that

The subject-matter is so emotionally strong that it will work better if the tone is flatter.

This was, in fact, the piece we were talking about and editing at the time. So now you can read it and judge for yourself if flattening the tone was the right decision.

Another point worth mentioning is that my first draft was, well, bad. The reason was one that you may find sympatico (during my research, we had a baby, so I had other things on my mind and took a shortcut, writing before I was ready). But a good editor owes it to the writer not to let those half-hearted pieces slip through.

So my editor called me on it. She has a beautifully frank manner, which sugarcoats nothing (and thus makes her praise, whenever it comes, uniquely credible).

Back I went, after my paternity leave, to finish the research (which was harder than it is for most of my pieces). And then I wrote what turned out to be the real piece.

During the frantic copy-editing in the final hours before the pages were printed, I thanked my editor for her intervention:

… you did me the honor of being frank, thus saving me from a bad piece and forcing me to turn it into a decent one. You’re the best editor I’ve ever had. It’s all about trust: the editor has to trust the potential of the writer (and demand that it be reached); and the writer has to trust the judgment and intention of the editor.

She replied with some touching personal comments, and then this summation, which tells you more about The Economist than you would ever understand simply by reading our magazine:

… I also think the genuinely nice atmosphere at the econ–in contrast to many other papers–is important here. People generally believe they’re working together, not against each other.

Well, my colleagues at The Economist got them (ie, Hayek and Keynes) to rap again, for one of our conferences. Afterward, our editor, John Micklethwait, (ie, my boss) interviewed them about how they came up with the idea. Video below.

My slightly more serious treatment of the subject, from the “continental” point of view (which produced Hayek, but not Keynes) is here.

Hayek

Ten years ago, I began a piece in The Economist about Hong Kong with a paragraph that was, in this particular context, intended to be surprising:

FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK and Walter Eucken parted company over the issue of power formation in the private sector. Hayek, a leader of the Austrian school of liberalism, believed that keeping government small was enough to preserve competition. Eucken, who founded the school’s German branch, felt that anyone with excessive power, whether a government or a company, could threaten economic freedom. It is a pity that neither was alive this week to analyse the case of Hong Kong….

Eucken (click for credits)

Our local readers in Hong Kong quite enjoyed this framing of what they considered their “little” hometown business controversies, since they don’t usually see their city connected to the big debates among Western intellectuals.

I, however, was fascinated by precisely those local controversies, for two reasons:

1. I consider Hong Kong the freest place in the world (and thus worth studying), and
2. I have a personal connection to that debate between Hayek and Eucken, which I’ll tell you about at the end of this post.

Liberalism vs Libertarianism

What reminded me of all this was a post the other day by one of my colleagues about the two isms, Liberalism and Libertarianism. He concludes that the difference is basically about the precise role of government and

which approach is likeliest to lead to the most freedom.

So, because I’ve been parsing Liberalism here on The Hannibal Blog for a couple of years now, I thought I’d add a “continental” twist for those of you who are connoisseurs of all things liberal.

Between Freiburg and Vienna

Mises (click for credits)

For a lot of “Anglo-Saxons”, in my experience, the first surprise is that that there is a continental twist at all. Surprise turns into shock when the twist turns out to be specifically Germanic. Could Germans really have much to say about freedom?

Well, yes, a whole lot. The liberal tradition is long and deep in the German-speaking countries. Obviously it suffered a near-death experience during the Nazi years, but then it came roaring back in the post-war years.

More to the point, a lot of what we now tend to think of as “Anglo-Saxon” ideas actually have an intellectual pedigree that goes back to these “Germanic” (mainly German and Austrian) thinkers.

Ludwig von Mises (above) was the first giant of the so-called “Austrian School”, and in turn influenced the even more gigantic Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek in turn influenced Milton Friedman, who in turn influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, thus re-branding Austrian Liberalism in the minds of many people as an “Anglo-Saxon” thing.

Rüstow

Walter Eucken, on the other hand, founded the so-called “Freiburg School” of Liberalism (after the university town where they hung out), which included liberal thinkers such as Alexander Rüstow (above) and Wilhelm Röpke (below).

Roepke

How spontaneous is order?

The first and most important thing to understand about all these thinkers is that they were friends. They liked each other’s company and liked debating one another. They viewed themselves not on opposing sides of anything, but on the same side: the side of individual freedom (which is what all classical Liberals agree on).

The subtlety that kept them busy (and I deliberately oversimplify) had to do with order. The Latin for order is Ordo, so the Freiburg School eventually even called themselves Ordoliberals.

Order, as opposed to anarchy, is necessary for individuals to be free. The question, however, is whether or not order comes about spontaneously.

Option 1: Yes

If the answer is Yes, as the “Austrians” basically believed, then the conclusion has to be that we simply need to keep government out of the equation entirely.

The “market” (and this could apply to more than material things — ie, ideas, culture, etc) will then “order” itself spontaneously, though competition. The prerequisite is merely the rule of law.

Option 2: Jein

The Ordoliberals did not counter that the answer is No. Instead, I would call their answer Jein (a contraction of Ja and Nein in German). Yes, markets can spontaneously create order. But that order is not always stable. Worse, that order could be of a sort that robs individuals of liberty.

What they had in mind were cartels, tycoons, cabals, and anybody else who amassed an unhealthy amount of power.

So whereas the “Austrians” worried almost exclusively about excessive government power, the Ordoliberals worried about all excessive power, whether in the private or public sector.

This led the Ordoliberals to the conclusion that government must, yes, stay limited, but must also supplement the “spontaneous” ordering of markets with “corrective” ordering. Government had to crack down hard on cartels and monopolies, for example.

My personal interest

I mentioned a personal connection to the debate. Well, I wrote my Master’s thesis at the London School of Economics about it (or rather, about an obscure aspect of it). My dad had once written his PhD thesis about another obscure aspect of it. And that was probably because his uncle and godfather was somebody by the name of Ludwig Erhard (“Uncle Lulu“). Here they are in the sixties, Lulu on the left, dad on the right:

And if Hayek influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and thus “Anglo-Saxon” policy, the Ordoliberals shaped Ludwig Erhard and thus post-war West German policy, for Uncle Lulu was West Germany’s first economics minister and then its second chancellor.

Postscript: Liberal v Libertarian (again)

So back to those two isms.

In essence, I think that Libertarians trace their evolution back to the Austrians featured here, and Liberals to the Ordoliberals.

However, those Austrian and Ordo-Liberals themselves, if we were able to bring them here today, would be puzzled by the debate. They would abhor some of the intellectual excesses committed in both names, and remind us that they were originally almost indistinguishable.

From time to time, I try to give you glimpses into the most distinctive aspect of our corporate culture at The Economist, which is, of course, humor.

So yesterday I received an email. A colleague had sent it to “All Editorial”, requesting some help with what appears to be a story idea he or she is developing. Here it is:

Dear all,

I’ve noticed a tendency for companies to expect/demand that their employees enjoy their jobs, and give visible signs of so doing–being happy, wacky, fun and funny…

Has anybody else come across examples of this depressing and obnoxious trend? I’d love to hear from you if you have….

I told you in the previous post that, for the first time, I deleted a post (it no longer matters what the post was about) because I came to the conclusion that it was badly written by my standards.

Upon further reflection, that made me realize that I have to “shrink” this blog. Now I’ll explain what I meant by that. (And yes, I savor the irony that I will talking about a “shrinking” a blog in a 2,000-word blog post.)

I) What I consider “badly written”

I write so much that the mechanics — syntax, grammar, flow — are rarely bad anymore. But that’s not what writing is about.

Ultimately, words deserve to be spoken or written only if they communicate what the speaker or writer wants to communicate. And that very much includes not only the substance denoted but also the tone, voice and other bundles of connotation.

We all know that perfect control over the meaning(s) of words, especially written ones, is impossible. That is why Socrates refused ever to write, and always only spoke. Just think of our ongoing debate about the words (and punctuation) in a phrase written 219 years ago:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Did the writer intend that only “a Militia”, and “a well regulated” one at that, was to have the right to bear arms? Or that “the people”, collectively and individually, should have that right, although it might also be, you know, nice if a Militia were around? Who knows?

This conundrum — that writers lose control over their words as soon as they make contact with any audience — led people like Jacques Derrida to suggest that we stop even pretending that we can control meaning: Words mean whatever anybody wants them to mean, so get over it.

I don’t subscribe to that. A good writer should have some control over his words, the way a good rider should be able to rein in his horse. Naturally, horses sometimes go berserk, as do words. But that’s when it’s time to kill a blog post.

That the now-deleted post had to be dispatched became clear not when it led to vigorous debate (as many posts here on The Hannibal Blog do), but when the comments looked to me, the writer, as utter non-sequiturs. I looked at some of them and could only say: “Huh?” How did the commenter read this meaning into this post?

This is when I remembered my Second Secret to Good Writing, which is empathy. Don’t blame your audience. Re-examine your words.

My words had not just evoked an unintended response, but in a few individual cases the opposite of the response intended. That should not happen to a good writer.

And so I decided that the words had to die.

II) Why might this have happened?

1) The issue of quantity

Less than a month ago, I wondered whether there was “a Laffer Curve” of writing — in other words, a point beyond which increasing quantity (of words written) decreases quality.

I was pondering that question because, over the past couple of years, the number of words I produce, and am expected to produce, has inexorably been increasing.

When I started at The Economist in 1997, we were expected to write articles for the weekly (print) issue. And that was it. (Quite enough, I thought.)

I first recall internal discussions about “blogs” in 2006. I might have had something to do with that, because I wrote a Special Report in 2006 about “the new media.” In it, I said that all the new media (including blogs) would collectively transform society, which they clearly have done. But I never said that individual news organizations had to add blogs.

But blogs we began having, even at The Economist. For a while we didn’t really take them seriously. But now we do. And we have more and more of them. And we are expected to “feed” them. So, in addition to the articles we write, we write blog posts.

We also do podcasts, and those often take a surprisingly long time (the logistics, not the actual talk time). And we do video pieces. Those take even more time to set up.

To take this week as an example, I produced two articles, two blog posts and one podcast … in four days (because on Friday I allegedly started a holiday.)

Our heritage, our “print DNA”, means that we will always put the utmost effort into the print-issue articles. So that’s still where the research, fact-checking, deliberation, travel, background reading, interviewing goes. (And real-life logistics have an annoying habit of not aligning perfectly with The Economist’s Greenwich-mean-time deadlines.)

But that doesn’t actually leave all that much time to produce all that other stuff.

Then add a personal blog in support of a forthcoming book, such as The Hannibal Blog.

Yup, now this amounts to a lot of words. Some of those words will not be redacted, honed, polished, and stress-tested as much as they should be. This must mean, from time to time, that some words are less than optimal.

Conclusion: Don’t produce more, perhaps less.

2) The issue of audience expectations

I recall an internal discussion once where the theory was put forth that the web audience is sophisticated. In other words, readers of blogs (whether on The Economist’s web site or WordPress) know that the medium is more intimate, conversational, relaxed, aphoristic and subjective. Blogs are essentially personal diaries, except public and social.

Readers, goes the theory, do not expect a blog post to be balanced, polished and fact-checked. They can discriminate between a blog post and an article.

Not only that, but they like to have that less formal window into the writer’s soul, they like hearing about what happened to him on the way to this-or-that, what he was thinking when so-and-so said something-or-other. It’s like knowing somebody by email and then seeing a handwritten note from him: the handwriting, with its imperfections, says something. Or like meeting a public figure and getting a peek behind the scenes.

Well, that’s the theory. The reality is that audiences get confused. Many readers/listeners/viewers merely see the brand, and do not discriminate among media. The brand could be The Economist or, at micro scale, The Hannibal Blog. But what if the human beings behind the brands straddle their boundaries? When is the writer allowed to speak personally, and when is he expected to be a journalist upholding a 160-year-old brand?

This is not a new issue. Correspondents of The Economist have always gone to dinner parties (OK, rarely) and often moderate panels at conferences, for example. When we’re chatting with our table neighbor, are we allowed to kid around and speak our minds? How about when we’re on a podium?

Blogging (and all its descendants, such as tweeting) is a genie that is out of the bottle and won’t go back in. I’m simply flagging a new tension. And a new need to make explicit to audiences what they should expect in which context.

Here on The Hannibal Blog, by the way, you get me, just me, my quirky, personal musings, which represent nothing else.

Conclusion: Don’t assume that readers let you speak “off-the-record”, be circumspect. If in doubt, say less.

3) The issue of scope

You may have heard people described as coconuts or oranges. Coconuts mix everything together inside, oranges come in neat sections.

Well, most people are coconuts, especially at The Economist. We have many interests, strange hobbies, and what’s interesting is what you get when you mix it all up. One of my favorite colleagues is simultaneously a connoisseur in the subjects of sailing tall boats, all matters Mongolian, Tango and bird watching, and that is only the beginning of a long list.

Should he stick to his beat in writing articles? Should he have a blog for each interest? On The Economist’s web site or on his own? Is it alright if he mixes it all together, the way it is mixed in his own soul?

In my case, for example, I started this blog about two years ago, intending to make it purely about the book I was writing. This was naive. I soon realized that the process of publishing a book takes a lot longer than the writing of it (and I now expect the book to be out next year). So what do you do in the mean time?

I was advised not to publish excerpts, because that would give the book away. So I began blogging about other stuff. All those other interests. Pretty soon, that included the whole dang coconut, even The Economist.

And again, it’s possible that some of you got confused.

I now face the interesting development that The Economist is constantly, almost every week, making available to me new “coconut straws”. Just one example: This summer we started yet another blog, called Johnson. It is about Language. I have not contributed to it yet, but it so happens that Language is one the big threads on The Hannibal Blog. Obviously, I have to rethink that. My future language posts should probably go to Johnson, not The Hannibal Blog.

Conclusion: Reduce this blog’s scope; become an orange; write about fewer and better defined topics. No politics.

4) The issue of fear

When you write you make yourself vulnerable. When you write on a personal blog you are even more vulnerable. Who knows what weirdos show up alongside the intended audience? Who knows who does what with your words?

That can lead to fear, and fear leads to the worst writing. And bad writing, for a writer, equals failure.

The most important prerequisite for being a good writer is therefore an ability to overcome fear and find courage. You must say something interesting, which invariably means that somebody somewhere could take offense (even when the topic might at first blush seem innocuous — no topic stays innocuous if it gets a large enough audience.) And you must say it clearly, which is to say simply and thus strongly.

This gets into one of the big topics in my book, the tension between tactics and strategy. Writing well (ie, with courage and risk) about many topics is like a country fighting a war on many fronts. You will eventually lose. Writing more timidly or carefully about all these topics is like fighting less fiercely on all those fronts. You will — again — eventually lose. So you must choose your topics (your fronts) strategically.

Conclusion: Again, write about fewer topics in each medium, such as this blog.

III) Postscript

I want to end by giving a little shout-out to two bloggers who, in their very different ways, have explicitly or implicitly addressed some of the issues above.

1) “Phil”

First, there is “Phil”. I don’t know what his real name is and I don’t need to know. He has several blogs, indeed he seems to keep switching blogs and starting new ones, to my ongoing confusion. His current “main” blog seems to be here.

Phil once observed, either in a comment here or in a post on his own blog, a phenomenon: Time and again, Phil finds an interesting new blogger, a strong and idiosyncratic voice, and follows that voice. After a while, that blog becomes popular. And then, as its audience grows, the blog becomes … bad.

(Phil, if you can provide the URL to your observation, I would like to link to it.)

So I speculate: Perhaps Phil, by starting new blogs all the time, is conflicted as we all are about gaining an audience. An audience gathers, and he runs away to start a new one. Because he understands, as we all do, that audiences are a threat as a well as a blessing.

2) “Man of Roma”

The other blogger who deserves a shout-out here is Man of Roma. He is a bon vivant and connoisseur of classical wisdom. And this summer he did something very civilized: He simply left (his blog, that is) and enjoyed himself, knowing that the audience that matters, which includes me, will be there whenever he returns.

ONE late November night in 1980 I was flying over the state of Utah on my way back to California.

Thus Marc Reisner began his 1986 book Cadillac Desert, quoted to this day in the West’s perennial water wars.

I remembered his lines this week as I myself was flying back from Utah to California, and also looking out of my window at the desert below, baked dead by the July sun.

[This note is cross-posted from my note on The Economist's Democracy in America blog.]

As Mr Reisner did then, I looked down and contemplated the barren mountains, mesas and buttes and the endless empty expanses of salt and sand, one of the most inhospitable wastelands in the world.

This is where Brigham Young and his Mormons had decided to make “a Mesopotamia in America”, as Mr Reisner put it. Then, in the early 20th century, the federal Bureau of Reclamation took over their work and dammed the West’s rivers to impose the will of America upon this desert.

There, on the horizon, I espied the result: Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir, formed as the pathetically small, snaking trickle of the Colorado River runs into the Hoover Dam and backs up.

As Mr Reisner put it:

Thanks to the Bureau—an agency few people know—states such as California, Arizona, and Idaho became populous and wealthy; millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best; great valleys and hemispherical basins metamorphosed from desert blond to semitropic green.

The people in the states below my aeroplane are today among the most conservative in America. The tea-party movement thrives here. Big government is the enemy.

How ironic that the people are only on that land because big government first subdued it.

Then again, “subdue” may be a word from another time and worldview. The water wars have never really stopped (Californians will vote on another water bond in November, in the never-ending effort to bring water from where it rains to where the people live). And in the long run, as Mr Reisner might say, the desert may yet subdue the people.

I find that a great test of whether your instincts are liberal (as classically and correctly defined to mean freedom-loving) is how you approach the question of legalising marijuana.

In the current issue of The Economist I try to summarize the debate in California about Proposition 19 in November, a ballot measure that would legalize cannabis for those 21 or older.

And in an accompanying podcast, I interview an opponent and a proponent of legalization, both carefully chosen, in an attempt to get beyond mere gut instincts to clarify the arguments for and against. I wonder how you guys would interpret that conversation.

You’ve probably heard of the Laffer Curve. Economist Arthur Laffer allegedly sketched it on a napkin during a 1974 meeting in Washington that included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

It is a thought experiment intended to show that if you raise the tax rate beyond a certain point you actually end up collecting less tax revenue. (At a tax rate of 100%, for instance, nobody would bother earning income at all anymore.)

Well, the curve just popped into my head as I was contemplating something completely different: The quality of my writing — or of anybody’s writing.

Look at Laffer’s curve above and replace Government Revenue on the Y axis with Writing Quality, and Tax Rate on the X axis with Words Written.

Up to the peak

In general, I have noticed that my writing in the past always improved when I wrote more.

So, at The Economist for example, I noticed ‘being on a roll’ every time I finished a Special Report (those 12,000-word inserts). Then, when I wrote my book in my spare time, I again noticed that all my writing seemed to improve. When I added this blog, my writing seemed to get better again. And so forth.

Why might this be the case?

Perhaps because when you write too little (which applies to most people), you are too timid with your words, too diffident that you actually have something to say. As you write, you discover that you do have something to say, and the words come more easily and fluidly.

Or perhaps you feel less less uptight about your words as you write more of them, and you become looser as a result. Who knows?

So far, the advice for most writers and bloggers would therefore seem to be:

Write more.

Down from the peak

But of late, I’ve also been wondering whether one can write too much.

At The Economist, for example, we’ve been adding all these blogs, not to mention the “multimedia” content. So now we’re expected to “feed” those as well.

Internally, we’ve resolved that readers come to blogs with different expectations of polishedness (as opposed to quality, which should stay high). It’s OK to shoot from the hip.

Still, I wonder about the Laffer Curve. When do I start writing so much and so often that my writing gets worse?

Writing = Vita interrupta

That’s my silly word play on Coitus Interruptus. What I’m trying to say that writing is always and necessarily the second step in a process.

The first step must be:

• thinking,
• reporting,
• experiencing
• living

Then you interrupt that first step and write about it. But if you write too much, you cannibalize the thinking, reporting, experiencing and living, do you not?

Perhaps then it’s time to

write less.

Olivia Judson

Olivia Judson, a science writer and New York Times blogger, used to be a colleague of mine at The Economist in London when I started there in the late 1990s. She then left and went on to do lots of very interesting things. This always thrilled me vicariously because it offered proof that there is indeed life after and outside of The Economist.

So I enjoyed reading her final blog post, in which she muses about her writing process as she leaves to take a book sabbatical. It’s a good read for any writer, whether the subject is science or not.

(Thanks to Dan Braganca over at the Renaissance Roundtable for the heads-up.)

About her job, Olivia feels rather as I feel about mine:

It’s like owning a pet dragon: I feel lucky to have it, but it needs to be fed high-quality meat at regular intervals . . . and if something goes wrong, there’s a substantial risk of being blasted by fire.

Which is in part why she’s decided to take some time off:

to ensure a supply of good meat in the future [by] reading, reflecting, and replenishing my stash of ideas.

Ahhh. Replenishment. I have my moments of yearning for that, too.

She also talks about how she gets and nurses ideas and writes. And again, I might have used the exact same words for myself:

For me, ideas are capricious. They appear at unpredictable (and sometimes inconvenient) moments — when I’m in the bath, falling asleep, jumping rope, talking to friends. They are also like buses — it’s never clear when the next one will come, or how many will arrive at once. So it’s important to catch them when they do appear: to that end, I have a list. It’s not well-organized — my desk is littered with scraps of paper and post-it notes, covered in scrawls like:….

The only difference for me is that I recently disciplined myself to move my list from scraps of paper to a Google Doc, which I share with my editor and colleagues so that they can see, whenever they please, what my list looks like at a given moment. (However, they never remember actually to look, so perhaps I’ll end up back on paper.)

She also touches on some of the things that I like to talk about here on The Hannibal Blog, such as the issues of length in writing and the risks of investigating and developing story ideas without knowing whether they will work:

having an idea is one thing; developing it is another. Some ideas look great from the bathtub, but turn out to be as flimsy as soap bubbles — they pop when you touch them. Others are so huge they can’t easily be treated in 1,500 words or less, or would take two or three months to prepare. Still others — luckily — are just right. But I don’t usually find out which is which until I begin to investigate them.

Best of luck, Olivia.

Credit: CLUI.org

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a fascinating and provocative outfit and has so much to say — albeit in an oblique way — about America, as I said in the previous post.

Who else would study, with the same quasi-scientific rigor and implicit irony, the following?

• Yucca Mountain (above), America’s preferred dumping ground for nuclear waste,
• Cathedral Canyon (below), a random crack in the desert turned into religious shrine,
• Emergency training centers such as Del Valle, California (all the way at the bottom), and
• the thousands and thousands of other non-obvious but telling places in America

And yet, we decided not to run a piece on it in The Economist. At least for the time being.

Why?

Credit: CLUI.org

I decided to let you peak into the process because I think it might give you a useful glimpse into

1. writing, and
2. The Economist

Specifically, the issue involved all of the writerly themes that you guys and I have been writing about:

• length
• momentum
• authorial voice and tone,
• the First Person point of view

Here is what happened

After my visit to the CLUI, I did indeed write a draft, at about 700 words, for our US Section. And I sent it off.

I had an unsure feeling. I felt that I had not done justice to the CLUI or the places I had chosen as examples.

1) Length

Our pieces in The Economist are short, and they are best when they compress complexity into a dense and yet simple and forceful narrative. The CLUI, however, seemed to need the opposite: not to be compressed but to be expanded and developed. It seemed to need length.

2) Momentum

Worse, I had not spotted an underlying narrative in the CLUI (or the Museum of Jurassic Technology, for that matter) at all. This, in fact, is my criticism of the CLUI: They are so meticulous about their neutrality that they forget to do storytelling.

In fact, the Center’s name is a misnomer. It is not the Center for Land Use Interpretation but the Center for Land Use Observation. The interpretation is what is missing.

3) Voice

So I felt that to do this justice, I would have had to make it a humorous-but-profound story about a search for something elusive.

When you’re searching in vain, the story is about doubt, uncertainty, futility. Not things that The Economist is naturally good at, even though I excel at them personally.

4) The First  Person

To be really fun, moreover, a search narrative would have to be about me, the searcher. Me looking for answers and getting confused. Me on a CLUI bus in the desert with other searchers…

The First Person: Definitely not something that The Economist is naturally good at.

(Since we have no bylines, we also have no First Person. It is banned. The most you might see is “As your correspondent took his seat…”. Yuck.)

Conclusion: This really wanted to be a New Yorker piece.

A few weeks later, I got an email from my editor. He essentially said the same thing:

The problem with the piece as it stands is that it poses a lot of questions, but does not answer them. I appreciate that that is part of the philosophy the point of the CLUI, but it doesn’t really satisfy as a US section article. It reads too much to me like a long list of interesting and not-so-interesting places…

What is it, in fact, that we learn about American culture from the landscape, other than its uses are many and various? That America (like every other country) cherishes, abuses and neglects its physical space? …

I think this piece could benefit from being longer… Such a longer and more narrative piece would not, I think, work in the US section.

In a way, this was reassuring: My editor and I had come to exactly the same conclusion independently.

There was another upshot: Another editor had read it and expressed interest in a longer and more narrative version for our Christmas Issue, the one occasion every year when we really let our writerly hair down.

Did I want to expand the piece for the Christmas issue?

Opting for easy

This is when experience kicked in (13 years at The Economist now).

My experience told me that it was time to move on.

I did a risk-benefit analysis. I could sink a lot more time and effort into this story in the hope that a forceful narrative might emerge out of it. Or I could write the many easy and obvious stories that were offering themselves to me like streetwalkers.

In case you’re wondering, there is pressure on us to perform. We’re supposed to write something in every issue, on average. In fact, the last sentence in that same email from my editor was:

PS: that said, I am therefore in the market for a piece from you next week! Can you call me on the mob once you’re up and about?

And so I moved back into streetwalker alley, where it has been easy pickings and obvious stories since.

How judge ye?

Credit: CLUI.org

Credit: Bloomberg

Here is a little relief on the light side, reblogged from my post on The Economist’s Democracy in America:

NO SOONER had Carly Fiorina won the Republican nomination to challenge Democrat Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat than the race became hair-raising. Probably unaware that a microphone was on, Ms Fiorina relayed “what everyone says” about Ms Boxer, which is, of course: “God, what is that hair. So yesterday.”

Hair has factored in politics at least since the Roman Republic. The enemies in the Senate of an up-and-coming young general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, tried to derail his rise by implying that he grew his hair un-Romanly long, in the Greek style that seemed soft and suspicious; Scipio went on to defeat Hannibal anyway and, balding, became Rome’s saviour. Julius Caesar was famously touchy about his receding hairline. And Julian the Apostate, Rome’s last pagan emperor, grew a shaggy beard to make an anti-Christian statement which became so controversial that Julian wrote a satire called Misopogon, “The Beard Hater”, in his own defence.

Hair remained political for the Holy Roman Emperors, from Charles the Bald to Frederick I Barbarossa (“red beard”). In the modern era, Kaiser Wilhelm II twirled his mustache just so. China’s top Communists have always amazed with hair that is ink-black at any age. Ronald Reagan’s was impressive, though he is now arguably outdone by Mitt Romney, who during the 2008 campaign warned fellow Republican Mike Huckabee “Don’t touch the hair.”

Women have it harder. Their hair, above all Hillary Clinton’s, is more analysed and yet they are not supposed to bring it up, lest they seem petty or catty. This was the charge against Ms Fiorina last week. Please. “My hair’s been talked about by a million people,” responded Ms Fiorina defiantly. Of late, that’s because she lost all of it while fighting and beating breast cancer. Her hair is now growing back. It is a short, strong statement.

Well, you should finally start to see some changes.

Our new home page will go live at the beginning of July. You can see a mock-up here, and you can take tell the web designers what you think about it here.

How do genuine liberals (as correctly defined) view the world? As a collection of individuals.

How do conservatives view it? As a collection (clash?) of cultural communities.

Socialists? Economic communities (or blocks).

Communists? Classes.

Fascists? Tribes, nations or races.

People have drawn many diagrams to depict the political spectrum. But they don’t make sense to me. So I drew my own (in the new Google Draw. Try it.) Here it is:

This way of looking at the spectrum might help you to explain “left” and “right” to a child, should you ever need to. (More about the historical and arbitrary origins of “left” and “right” in a subsequent post.)

If you view the spectrum not as a matrix or a line but as a loop or circle, things become clearer. Liberalism then reveals itself to be not the “place in the middle,” the “split-the-difference” no-man’s-land of compromise and moderation, but the extreme and radical opposite of collectivism, which includes everything from Nazism to Communism.

Yes, Liberals care most about freedom, whereas collectivists tend to care more about “equality” (insofar as it pertains to the group of interest to the respective collectivist — ie, the class or the tribe.)

But the debate is not merely about the desired outcomes — freedom vs equality — of policy. It goes deeper. It is a debate about the unit of analysis. What — or rather whom — do we care about? What matters?

As a liberal, I instinctively choose individuals. People matter.

Now, it’s easy to lampoon this instinct. The caricature usually involves a quote from Margaret Thatcher, when she allegedly said:

There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals.

Here is what she actually said. As you can tell, it doesn’t come close to Ayn Rand in shrillness.

Individuals do form families and other groups, and liberals do care about those. But those are groups that individuals volunteer to form. (By contrast, I never volunteered to be American, German or middle class. Most of the time, I’m not even sure what those group memberships are supposed to mean.)

Let’s talk about Arizona

Enough prologue. Let’s talk about the new Arizona law against illegal immigration.

In my article in the new issue of The Economist, I try to analyze how the law and the backlash against it might affect American politics. My editor wrote a “leader” (ie, opinion editorial) to go along with it. And both of those pieces follow a short piece I whipped up the other day, when the law was first signed.

Now, it may not surprise you to learn that, in addition to the hundreds of, shall we say, passionate comments on our website, I have also been getting reader letters.

I have already regaled you with you my cavalier amusement at the tone of the American reader letters I get. But I must say, the mail bag of late has taken another turn for the worse. I leave it to your imagination.

So let’s step back and try to understand why I, and The Economist, would instinctively be

• for more open borders,
• for more liberal migration laws,
• for freer movement of people.

Is it because I love Latinos, as some of my reader letters suggest (albeit in a different vocabulary)?

Well, yes it is. I do love them. Though no more so than I love Eskimos, Wasps and Tibetans. I love them all, but only as individuals.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when only diplomats carried passports. Other people moved freely where they wanted to go. Just read Casanova’s memoirs.

This sounds like an ideal world: Free individuals and families moving wherever they want to go, with a minimum of hassle (besides the natural stress of moving).

I admit that this was before some countries had welfare states which might attract poor migrants and thus be overwhelmed. This issue — whose taxes pay for whose benefits in a given land — must be addressed.

And I also admit that this was before terrorists (who already existed) had access to weapons of mass destruction. So this issue — how do we keep murderous migrants out — also must be addressed.

On the other hand, I do not admit that immigrants in general, whether legal or illegal, are more likely than natives to commit crimes, because research proves this not to be true.

Garden of Earthly Delights

So what would a liberal Utopia look like?

All individuals anywhere would be free to move to and live where they please, within basic and minimal parameters to address the two issues above.

Americans, for example, would be allowed to go to Latin America or Europe to pursue careers, loves and dreams. Latin Americans and Europeans would be just as free to come to America to do the same.

This would apply to the “high-skilled” migrants, such as Indian graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), probably the best university system in the entire world today. And it would apply equally to “low-skilled” migrants, because they, too, have contributions to make and dreams to pursue.

Is this realistic? Probably not.

But is it desirable?

That depends whether you view the world largely as tribes, classes or, as I do, individuals.

Larry Brilliant

You remember me mentioning the chat I had with Larry Brilliant, the man who helped to eradicate smallpox, at our (The Economist‘s) recent “innovation summit” in Berkeley?

The video of it is now on our site.

It’s about 14 minutes, and after a brief warm-up we talk about how to think about the worst threats facing the world.

As usual, there were some snafus: I had recorded an “intro” and “outro”, but we lost the recordings, so the voice you hear at the beginning and end is not mine. But then it’s me talking to Larry.

Larry is a bit of a Renaissance Man — interested in many things, like The Hannibal Blog — so it took us a bit to focus the conversation. Regrettably, some of the most interesting parts of our chat occurred after we turned off the camera. It turns out that Larry, like me, is fascinated by the Bhagavad Gita and Arjuna, so we discussed that for a long time.

Anyway, if you have 14 minutes and want to be scared, check it out.

If you’re taking a 12-minute cappuccino break, watch me give this “teaser” about my book at our (The Economist‘s) recent innovation conference in Berkeley.

(You’ll also find most of the other sessions on video now, including those with Arianna Huffington, Jared Diamond, Matt Mullenweg, et cetera.)

I’m not good at “teasers” or “elevator pitches”, especially since I tried to tell a story in my book that would keep you reading for 100,000 words. But I’m constantly being told that I now have to practice condensing that story into two seconds for some occasions (cocktail parties, elevators), two minutes for other occasions, 10 minutes for yet others, and so on.

So, er, I’m practicing. (Even while determined not to give too much away yet.)

Your feedback would be welcome. Do I snare your interest or do you say ‘so what’? Are there howling non sequiturs, or does it make sense? And so forth.

At the time, I tried to reply to all emails for the simple reason that I was raised to be polite. If somebody sends you a message, it behooves you to answer.

That day’s email chain put an end to that gentilesse. I will reproduce it below, with all the names XXX-ed out to protect the individual.

It started on September 11, 2007. This PR woman emailed me (Subject: “Quick Q”) to ask whether I covered a certain industry segment in which she had a client she was hoping to introduce me to.

On September 12 at 10:58 PDT I replied:

Sure. But I’m not planning an article right this second

At 11:02 PDT — in other words, four minutes later — her reply showed up in my inbox, except that it was addressed to her client. She must have accidentally hit Reply instead of Forward.

In any case, I now saw my email (the one she thought she was forwarding), which she had edited:

[Client's first name],

With your permission, I am going to set up a lunch with you and Andreas – in early October.

XXX

From: Andreas Kluth [mailto:andreaskluth @ economist.com]

Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 10:58 AM

To: XXX

Subject: Re: Quick Q

Sure. But I’m not planning an article right this second. Let’s plan a lunch in October?

AK

This was strange, and I thought it appropriate to point it out. So I sent one more email to her:

Er, XXX, there is something highly bizarre going on. Today I replied to your email with the first and second sentence in the email trail that allegedly comes from me below. I did not write the third sentence and i don’t sign with AK.

I don’t recall asking for a lunch in October

A

And, not entirely to my surprise, I never got another peep from this lady (who had been firing off emails at a rapid clip).

***

What was I to make of this?

On one hand, I like to consider myself, whenever possible, a Cavalier, not a Roundhead. Basically, that means smirking at life, not frowning.

On the other hand, I was somewhat puzzled and miffed.

If the exchange had not been so utterly trivial and boring, one might have called this fraud. But it was simply too petty. Did this woman really think that her client would be impressed if he saw an email from me to her with (as opposed to without) my initials? Did she really think that she could somehow insinuate me into a lunch in October that I had never suggested?

***

So I took a look at my inbox as it was at that time. In 2007, I received more than 500 emails a day — 90% from PR people — on a weekday. This robbed me of a lot of time and thus made me less productive. PR people were interfering with my work and life.

Worse: they were also calling. My phone (at the time I had an actual — as opposed to virtual — phone) was constantly ringing, and it was usually an intern at a PR company, announcing that she was updating their database and asking me whether I was so-and-so at this-and-this address and so forth.

I realized, of course, that my habit of replying was part of the problem: Whenever I answered an email or phone call, I confirmed my presence to them, and they would put me on their automatic distribution lists of press releases. (These emails then as now did not necessarily have a one-click unsubscribe button).

Seriously: When was the last time anybody read a press release?

So I decided to interrupt the vicious cycle.

Genuine (meaning bespoke) emails and emails from people I personally knew, I still answered. The rest I ignored.

That did not restore my inbox to health, but it arrested its deterioration.

Then, a month later, Chris Anderson wrote a blog post that got quite a lot of attention. (Chris had been a colleague at The Economist — in fact, I replaced him as Hong Kong correspondent in 2000 — but by this time he was editor-in-chief of Wired)

Chris took a two-pronged approach:

1. He whacked any unsolicited and inappropriate email into his Spam filter, and
2. he published a blacklist of prime offenders.

I decided that the blacklisting was too harsh — the modern equivalent of a pillory — but that the spam-filtering was a great idea.

So I have been doing the same: If I get an automatically distributed press release, or even just a really inappropriate email, it goes straight into our corporate Postini. (And Postini, of course, “learns” this way which emails to consider spam, so that my click indirectly helps other journalists.)

***

Over time, this solved the problem. My inbox now often looks like this:

And I have become productive again.

Not only that, but I have learned to love email again! It has actually become useful to me.

Those people, including PR people, who ought to be able to reach me can now do so more easily than ever. The others no longer bother me as much.

And etiquette is making a comeback. Every new technology causes a change in social protocols. Our grandparents used to have to learn when and how to call people — and simultaneously how to be called – without being rude. Now PR people and the rest of us are figuring out how to be civil in the Internet era.

Breaking news

Almost six years ago, I tried in The Economist to start a movement for simplicity and against complexity. In this Leader (ie, editorial, to everybody but us), which accompanied this Special Report, I wrote:

“LIFE is really simple,” said Confucius, “but we insist on making it complicated.” The Economist agrees. Unfortunately, Confucius could not have guessed what lay ahead. The rate at which mankind makes life complicated seems ever to accelerate. This is a bad thing. So this newspaper wants be the first to lay down some new rules. Henceforth, genius will be measured not by how fancy, big or powerful somebody makes something, but by how simple.

Alas, that was easier said than done.

But ever since then, I have been obsessed with simplicity, as you may have noticed if you have been reading The Hannibal Blog (for instance here and here).

This means that I palpitate with excitement whenever I encounter other people who share my obsession. Well, Alan Siegel, a brand consultant, appears to share it. Watch (less than 5 minutes!):

Ed Catmull

One of my favorite sessions at our “innovation summit” this week in Berkeley was a talk between Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, and my friend and colleague Martin Giles, who took my former beat (“Silicon Valley”) a year ago.

Ed had a soulful, unpretentious, I-got-nothing-to-prove credibility, and Martin did a great job drawing him out but otherwise not interrupting or interfering (that, in essence, is a moderator’s job).

As in any real, good conversation, the chat meandered and is hard to summarize. But the heart of it was about how to “manage” creative types so that they stay creative. Managing creativity, of course, is sort of an oxymoron. But that’s what Pixar, with its unbroken record of box-office successes, seems to be doing.

So, how?

It comes down to many, many extremely subtle gestures and techniques. For example:

Commerce vs art

There is a tension between “commercial” success and “artistic” purity, and Catmull believes that the leader’s job is to ensure that “no side wins”. The tension, in other words, is part of the secret sauce.

Geniuses or teams?

Pixar tries to “protect each film-maker’s vision”, by putting the brain daddy of each project in charge of a team. But Catmull realizes that the notion of one single, over-arching genius idea is “a myth”, and that Pixar’s films are really thousands of ideas, and thousands of problems solved. For that, you need a team.

So everything depends on how well that team functions. Catmull sees one of his main roles as observing teams, and intervening when they are dysfunctional. If the leader loses the confidence of his team, Catmull replaces the leader. He would get rid of a genius, if that genius could not work in a team, he said.

Criticism and power

But even when a team does work, and the leader stays in charge, that director must get honest and hard feedback from his peers. How does one do that? (Finding tough but constructive criticism is also one of the hardest challenges for a writer.)

You put the director in meetings of his peers, but you ensure that nobody has more power than he does. In other words, people may suggest or critique, but cannot order him to make any changes. It is up to the director to absorb the comments and to incorporate or address them in the film. (Again, this is also, in my opinion, the way a writer should relate to his “editor”.)

If the group does this well, Catmull will invite others to make the meetings bigger, so that the newcomers can observe the good dynamic and spread it to other teams and Pixar’s wider culture.

However, he then pays extra attention to see if the original group of critics starts performing, which would kill the magic.

If the group critiques badly — which usually means that they are being too polite — Catmull will take individuals aside and confront them: Why did you not say what you really meant? He calls bullshit on them. So people know that their credibility is on the line.

From fear to context

There was no silver bullet, no single secret or list of “ten steps”. There never is in real life. Instead, the conversation offered a fascinating glimpse into our new, modern work culture.

In the past, workers clocked in and had managers look over them with the tools of power. Bosses ruled with fear, implicit or explicit.

In a creative economy — and Pixar, like The Economist, represents it in the extreme — that would never work. You cannot frighten or threaten people into creativity.

Instead, all you can do is choose people well — for their talent and their teamwork — and then set and maintain a certain context that allows their creativity to come out.

In case you’ve been wondering whether I might have disappeared: No, I haven’t altogether disappeared; I’ve merely been deeply immersed for several days in our “innovation summit” at Berkeley’s Haas School.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found it to be easily the best conference by The Economist ever, and one of the best conferences anywhere. More intimate than TED, and just as stimulating. I’m still processing all the ideas I got.

Here is the line-up – from the likes of Jared Diamond (above) and Clay Christensen to Arianna Huffington; from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (below) to Pixar’s Ed Catmull.

And even including yours truly: I got to give a 13-minute “Flash of Genius” about … my book.

Matt Mullenweg

My friend Vijay Vaitheeswaran conceived, put together and moderated most of the conference. He did a fantastic job — suave, funny, incisive.

I’ll be decompressing intellectually in several subsequent posts.

Larry Brilliant

Among my personal highlights: I did a “Tea with The Economist” (ie, a short video chat) with Larry Brilliant (above) about the Bhagavad Gita, eradicating smallpox, the worst threats to humanity today and … optimism.

All sessions will be out on video shortly, and I’ll point you to them.

Throughout, the atmosphere was characteristic of The Economist: insightful, thoughfult, intellectual but also humorous, spontaneous, irreverent and quirky. Here, for instance, is our logo, propped up professionally behind Larry as I was interviewing him:

Thirteen years ago, soon after I joined The Economist, I was riding down in the elevator (“lift”, according to our style guide) of our “Tower” at 25 St. James’s Street in London.

There were two or three of us. We were silent. Drab weather. Nothing to say.

Just before the door opened, one of the others turned toward me, with expressively furtive, even dirty or intimidating, body language. Was he about to flash open his trench coat? Confess to a crime? Attack me?

I have doubts about free trade,

he said, and ducked out into the drizzle and its pin-striped shadows.

It’s because our United States editor from London is visiting me in California, and I’m taking him from one meeting to the next — all day long, three days in a row.

My mission on these occasional editorial visits is to orchestrate an exciting local experience, so that my editor and I get in front of the most interesting people from different walks of life and talk freely and spontaneously about what’s on their minds. Our interview partners include the high and mighty and the obscure but insightful.

I’ve done this for editors when I was stationed in Hong Kong, in Silicon Valley, and now in L.A. It’s exhausting (the scheduling and logistics mostly) but fun. I’ve already filled a notebook.

Starting tomorrow night, I’ll again be quicker to reply to you all.

In this case, I lobbied passionately for one of the ideas, leading the editor, who happens to be the same one I’ve previously highlighted for her British humor, to comment that

I sense an obsession, and feel it may be good to indulge it.

With that, she upped my word count by 20%.

This is another instance not only of charm and British humor but also of good editing. Even if you are a writer editing yourself, it is good advice:

Sense your obsession, then indulge it. It may be infectious.

I climbed into our closet yesterday, with a laptop and a Flashmic. This was much less kinky than it might appear. In fact, I did so in the line of duty.

At The Economist, as at most other media organizations, we correspondents are being encouraged to produce occasional videos alongside our reporting pieces. So I did that this week: I wrote a piece about California’s “petition industry” for ballot initiatives, and produced an accompanying video.

Allow me to regale you with the rather comical process involved, and with some observations about technology.

First, I should point out that print journalism is as distant from video journalism as a Bach concerto from a a Salsa bar. You can excel at one and suck at the other. I stipulate that The Economist has been quite good at print for 167 years, but that we have not transferred that success to other media (for instance, when we tried to do television in the 1990s).

That said, multimedia seems to be the future, so it makes sense for us to buy a call option (ie, to risk a small amount for the potential of a big upside).

So a cameraman, Eric Salat, and I joined John Grubb, Tyler Vanderbilt and the team of Repair California as they collected signatures to put two measures on California’s ballot later this year. Eric then sent the footage back to London, where Marguerite Howell edited it. The first thing she did is to take me out. (You still see me briefly in a few frames.) That’s because, for the time being, we must stay on brand, you see. Meaning: anonymous. Apparently, you are allowed to hear my voice in the “voice-over”, as long as you don’t know my name.

Now, about that voice-over:

Marguerite wrote a “script” that would fit with the footage she selected. The first thing we had to do was to edit that script together. In the old days, we would have emailed a Word document back and forth. This time, I just clicked on “Open as a Google Doc” in my Gmail, then “shared” the doc with Marguerite.

This meant that we were now able to edit the script together — she in London, I in California — as though we were typing at the same computer. We weren’t even pressing “save” or “refresh” in the browser. Whatever change one of us made, the other saw in almost-real time.

“Please tell the others in London how easy life could be,” I begged Marguerite, aware that some of our colleagues are not yet ready to abandon their … typewriters.

Then it was time for me to read the script out loud. Skype is not good enough for this sort of thing, so I used the Flashmic, with Marguerite on speaker phone.

“You sound hollow, echo-ey,” she said. “Can you go somewhere with fewer bare surfaces?”

I took the laptop and mike and sat on our bed, amid the pillows and blankets. Still not good enough.

“There’s always the nuclear option,” said Marguerite. “Would you consider climbing into your closet?”

I did. Miraculously, that took care of the echo.

On cue, some of my wife’s items, stacked in a female way, descended on me from above — the sound effects of which Marguerite on speaker phone seemed to enjoy. It occurred to me that I was lucky my wife’s high heels were on the other side of the closet — I was in the hiking-boot section.

Once you actually voice-over, you have to keep fiddling with the script to fit the timing of the video footage, and I kept thinking how cool it was that I could simply look at my laptop screen, without even touching it, to see Marguerite in London change my words in the Google Doc.

I have been on American radio a few times, where producers always pester you to exaggerate and over-enunciate your syllables, CNN style, and to say words with shock and concern, especially when those words are banal. I’ve never mastered that tone. Now, however, to my pleasant surprise, Marguerite said: “Don’t worry about that. Just speak however you feel.” Great place, The Economist.

And so it was done.

Now, a few closing remarks:

1) Don’t despair (yet)

You will be tempted to point out all the obvious ways in which our website is bad at displaying multimedia content. For instance, I was not able to embed the video in this blog (even though there is a deceptive “embed” button?!). I was barely able to get the permalink — in fact, I’m not sure the link works even now. The print story does not obviously refer you to the video, nor the video to the story. Et cetera.

Rest assured, that those and other shortcomings are just as apparent to us as to you. And we are fixing them.

The problem, I am told, is our existing content-management system, which we are phasing out, with difficulty. The new system is called Drupal, and it rocks. Soon, very soon, the website will be great, in all the obvious ways.

2) Technology conclusions

Based on this little experience, I am able to endorse two technologies.

1. Google Docs, and cloud computing in general.
2. Closets.

Toward the end of my three-page article about “Socrates in America” in the Christmas issue of The Economist, there are these two lines:

Socrates almost certainly was an atheist. As was his wont, however, he cared more about debating, with a man named Euthrypho on the steps of the courthouse before his preliminary hearing, what piety even meant.

(This refers to one of the two charges against Socrates at his trial, which was disbelief in/disrespect for “the gods of the city.”)

By the placement of these lines, and by the word count I devoted to them (1% of the total words in the article), readers should be able to tell how interested I, as the writer, was in this particular point.

Ie, not very.

To quote I.F. Stone in The Trial of Socrates on the matter:

It was the political, not the philosophical or theological, views of Socrates which finally got him into trouble. The discussion of his religious views diverts attention from the real issues….

But I should have known better. After all, the word atheism appears!

It is a word that makes many people, but Americans in particular, go ballistic. Indeed, it is something of a Rorschach test: Mention it, and people immediately project their ideas, fears, and beliefs into the conversation. Whatever the conversation was about, it is now about something else.

Readers react

One of the online commenters, somebody named “RPB2″, tries to refute the possibility that Socrates was atheist by quoting him (presumably from English translations). Thus Socrates says in the Apology:

For I do believe that there are gods and in a far higher sense than any of my accusers believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me.

And in the Phaedo, he says:

In this present life I believe that we most nearly approach knowledge when we have the least possible bodily concerns and are not saturated with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us.

In the Republic, he says:

[Society's leaders] must be able to see the one in the many, to appreciate and realize the great truth of the unity of all virtues, have a genuine knowledge of God and the ways of God, and must not be content to rest on faith in traditions, but must really understand. Only in this way can they order all things for the benefit of all

From this RPB2 concludes:

You really have to work to find an atheist here; and thus, sadly, one can see that this article indicates that erudition often does not equate to understanding.

Another commenter, Michael  Bessette, offers RPB2 his support:

… Socrates repeatedly invokes not only gods, but “the god”, as in this famous passage from the Apology: “Athenians, I honor and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you” (29d). Socrates further asserts that he has been specially chosen by “the god” to persuade the people of Athens of their ignorance (23b) and that abandoning this mission would mean also abandoning his god (30a)…

… the most extraordinary statement in the piece is its labeling Socrates an atheist.  No one can read the accounts given by Xenophon or Plato without recognizing the philosopher’s piety.  His own pilgrimage to Delphi attests to this; and many, many statements exceptionlessly confirm it.  Indeed, he comes across as being very close to monotheism; for, as my tutor remarked years ago, whenever in the Memorabilia he is most earnestly referring to the divine , he speaks of “the god” (ho theos) rather than of “the gods” (hoi theoi).  To call Socrates an atheist for his coolness towards the conventional polytheism of the state is as misleading as it would be to so label Jesus because of his confrontation with the priesthood of the Temple…

Discussion

Let’s examine some of these points.

First, what does it prove if Socrates uses, in the writings of Plato or Xenophon, the word “gods”? Not a whole lot, I submit.

All sorts of atheists today scream Goddammit every time they hit the rush hour, and atheist starlets stammer Ohmigawd, ohmigawd when accepting their Oscars. We have to distinguish between a word as figure of speech, as familiar trope to facilitate communication, and as intended content.

What I find curious in the quotes above is the capitalization of the word God. It’s a loaded capital letter, to say the least. In fact, let’s use this occasion to parse some terms:

1) Monotheism:

Is it possible that Socrates believed that there was only one god? I believe we can rule this out. The Greeks did not have that concept. (Even the Jews, who invented it, were just developing at this time, in the century following the Babylonian captivity, as Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God explains quite well.)

2) Atheism:

Admittedly, the same is true for our modern concept of atheism–ie, the Greeks did not have that concept. If somebody was “godless”, that meant he had been abandoned by one god or goddess or another. It did not meant that he denied their existence.

3) Polytheism

Aphrodite

Polytheism is how the Greeks (and most of the world at the time) understood divinity. Alas, this is a concept that has become quite alien to us (unless you happen to be, say, Hindu), so we are the ones struggling to understand it.

Polytheism was an infinitely stretchable and flexible spiritual instinct. A polytheist had mental room not just for many gods and goddesses but for new gods and for other people’s gods. Even the Greek pantheon included many gods and goddesses (Aphrodite, eg) “imported” from Mesopotamia and thereabouts, for instance.

4) Pantheism

So polytheists were also, by implication, pantheists. They had an expandable pantheon of gods, and divinity was to be found everywhere and in everything.

Zeus

Put differently, gods and goddesses were often personifications of things. Zeus/Jupiter/Thor/Baal of thunder, for example. Hermes of humble door-thresholds, among other things. Hestia of the hearth. Helios/Apollo of the sun. Kronos of time (→ Chrono-logy). And so on.

Names of things in effect became potential divinities. Sophia could be thought of as a goddess of wisdom, tyche (Roman fortuna) could not just mean luck but be the goddess of fortune, and so forth.

(In fact, I.F. Stone, believes that Socrates’ indictment for “impiety” referred specifically to two such personifications/divinities: The “gods of the city” of Athens may have been understood to be Peitho, a personification of “democracy” and thus a political concept, and Agora, which meant not only marketplace but also assembly, and thus dovetailed with Peitho.)

It was, in other words, a rich and metaphorical way of expressing ideas and telling stories. Eloquent people at the time were as unlikely to avoid using tropes of divinity as we are today to avoid metaphors.

“Science”

Having said all that, there was something interesting that happened in the Greek world at around this time, and we might think of it as the beginnings of “science”.

The Greeks traditionally relied on their religion (their “myths” to us) to explain the world. And they relied in particular on the corpus of stories in Homer and Hesiod.

Thus, if summer turned to winter (a perplexing process, if you think about it) it was because Persephone returned to her husband Hades, thus making her mother Demeter, the goddess of fertility and grain, so sad that she turned the earth barren for half a year. If somebody went into a rage and killed innocent people, it was because a jealous god or goddess possessed him temporarily (eg, Hera possessing Hercules). And so on.

Heraclitus

But, starting about 200 years before Socrates’ trial, some (mainly Ionian) Greeks rejected these mythological explanations and tried to use direct observation of nature (physis in Greek, as in physics) and reason (logos) to explain the world.

These were the so-called “pre-Socratics”, such as Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and Heraclitus. They wanted to know what things were ultimately made of (fire, earth, water, etc) and how they changed. They wanted to understand the world better and differently.

So they ignored the gods. I don’t think they boycotted temples and sacrifices and other fun cultural activities, just as even Richard Dawkins today might sing along to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But the gods ceased, for them, to explain anything. In that sense, you might say, using a modern term, that they were atheists.

Pre-Socratic Socrates

Now let’s talk about Socrates. The first thing to know about him, as silly as it sounds, was that he spent the first half of his career as a pre-Socratic philosopher. (Obviously, “pre-Socratic” is a term we invented, not the Greeks). This is to say that he also tried to do “science”, to inquire into the nature and causes of the physical world and its phenomena.

Aristophanes

This is the Socrates, aged about 40, whom Aristophanes mocked in his comedy The Clouds. In that play, Socrates runs a “thinkery” where he examines how far flies jump and how they fart–presumably, with the Athenian audience, including Socrates, in stitches.

And Aristophanes has the Socrates in that thinkery argue that “Zeus does not exist.” ”If no Zeus, then whence comes the rain?” he is asked by Strepsiades, a country bumpkin. Socrates offers another explanation for rain, and Strepsiades admits that he had always thought it was “Zeus pissing down upon earth through a sieve.” But at the end of the play, he burns down Socrates’ Thinkery, saying “strike, smite them, spare them not, for many reasons, But most because they have blasphemed the gods.”

Now, folks, this is humor. I get that. But there is more to it. Aristophanes was describing a new (proto-atheistic) worldview in a hilarious way. Socrates would, twenty-four years hence, at his own trial, say that this (ie, The Clouds) is where the charge of impiety originated.

The Socratic “turn”

At about the time of The Clouds Socrates had a wrenching midlife crisis. Apparently, he came to believe that he was not very good at being a philosopher–ie, he became frustrated by his inability to explain nature satisfactorily.

So he made his famous “turn”: away from questions about nature and toward the humanistic subjects of ethics, politics and meta-physics (literally: “beyond nature”). It is not much of an exaggeration to say that he invented all three as subjects.

Hades and Cerberus

But he brought with him his pre-Socratic proto-atheism, by which I mean his tendency to ignore myth and gods as explanations for anything.

For example, on his own deathbed he gives a moving (but confusing) speech about death and the immortality of the soul. As it happens, this should not have been necessary: Greek religion gave detailed information about what happened after death. You took a gold coin with you, went down to Hades, past Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog. Then you gave your coin to Charon, the boatman, who ferried you across the river Styx, where you would henceforth hang around as a shadow. Lots and lots of heros (Hercules, Odysseus….) had already been down there and come back to tell us about it.

But no, Socrates had none of that. No Thanatos, no Hades, no Charon. He used his reason alone. Again, I consider that proto-atheist.

Theism, Deism …

Did Socrates ever go one step further and deny spirituality or divinity? No. I doubt he was interested in that.

Did he really believe, as he claimed when addressing his jury, that his own personal daimonion (“little divine thing,” whence our daemon) talked to him to warn him of danger? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Did he consider himself a proto-atheist? Perhaps, perhaps not. The one time he could have spoken about the matter explicitly, during his trial, he reverted to form (ie, Socratic irony and dialectic) and maneuvered his accuser, Meletus, into defining atheism as both believing in unorthodox gods and no gods at all, which is impossible at the same time. He was a wise ass, in short.

So we do not know, and we will not know.

What we can agree on, I believe, is that Socrates was a highly unusual man with unusual opinions and extremely unorthodox views about everything, including religion. Whatever he believed, neither atheists nor theists today can claim his support to wage their ongoing battle.

In this respect, in fact, Socrates reminds me of another non-conformist I admire: Albert Einstein. Einstein also studied physis and inadvertantly ended up “beyond” it, in meta-physis. And Einstein also had notions about religion that still divide lesser minds today. Was he an atheist? A believer? Everybody wanted to know. So Einstein penned an answer, which concludes (page 387 in this biography):

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

I believe Socrates might have said the same exact thing.

The Procrustean Bed, again

And so, I have spent as many words again on that one little sentence as I wrote in that entire article. Would I change the little sentence?

I’ve posted before about the Procrustean Bed that page layouts represent to writers: you must either stretch or, more often, amputate your text in order to fit the space an editor gives you. Socrates in America: Arguing about Death was not an article about religion. It was about how we talk to one another and the tension between individualism and democracy. Religion only came up en passant, and so I was forced to commit a journalist drive-by shooting.

When I said

Socrates almost certainly was an atheist

I had all this and more on my mind. Given another chance, I would say

Socrates may have been an atheist

or perhaps

Socrates’ views on religion were unorthodox to say the least.

And then I would have done just what I did: I would have moved on.

After a few days during which my children had a monopsony on my attention, I am now browsing through the Reader Letters I got in response to my two articles in the Christmas Issue of The Economist. There were a lot!

I want to respond at length to some of the more thoughtful ones, because there is a theme. But in this post, I simply want to share with you a cavalier smirk at … the tone of those letters.

I’ve been getting and reading Reader Letters throughout the more than twelve years I’ve been writing for The Economist. Because I’ve changed beats and location, the demography of the writers has changed during that time. I used to get a lot of ‘Asian’ letters, for instance, then a lot of ‘techie-geekie’ letters, and now a lot of ‘American’ letters.

Speaking only of the latter category, I might generalize that 60% of my mail now serves only one purpose: to inform me that I am:

• stupid,
• malicious, and
• ignorant.

Furthermore, that I (as well as The Economist generally, along with all ‘the media’) pursue an insidious ‘agenda’. That agenda is usually

• pinko-Commie-gay-activist, although quite often it is
• Fascist-rightist-capitalist.

Every now and then a letter writer manages to accuse me of both excesses simultaneously (on top of ignorance, see above, which is a constant).

For example, one New Yorker has taken the trouble this week to write separate letters in response to each of my articles (I have linked to those pieces elsewhere. They’re not the point here.)

In one letter he informs me that

… Minorities have more than enough protection. I have ben practicing law for 40 plus years and am amazed that a magazine of the Economist’s stature would allow the drivel contained in “The Tyranny of the Majority” to be spread on its pages. Is the Economist afraid to print a dissenting opinion from its gay activist orthodoxy?

In his other letter, he suggests that

The author of this Socratic exegesis should have his head examined. He does not define “values.” He is untruthful, ignorant. … The author of ARGUING TO DEATH, like the Economist itself, owes readers facts, not legal-sounding fabrications and unelucidated jibberish [sic] gussied up as “values.”

And thusly, a Happy New Year to all of you. More gibberish anon from your favorite ignoramus. Check in often in 2010 so you miss none of the drivel.

Some of you may have noticed that my thread on Socrates was going strong all through the summer and then, seemingly, stopped. Something similar, you might have thought, occurred with my thread on America.

Well, no, the two threads did not stop. They went into overdrive, albeit in a different form. Indeed, they became a story–what we call a “Christmas Special”–in the new holiday issue of The Economist.

It is called “Socrates in America: Arguing to death“. Please think and smirk as you read it (which also, of course, goes for almost anything you read on The Hannibal Blog).

(A similar, though less pronounced, process led to my other piece in that issue, a sort of polemic against direct democracy. That idea occurred to me after amusing myself, here on The Hannibal Blog, in my thread on freedom, with posts such as this one on James Madison.)

Thank you!

But what am I saying! Nonsense. It was not I, amusing myself. It was we, amusing ourselves.

And that is the point of this post. It is, first, to say Thank You to you, who come here to comment, to teach me, challenge me, tease me.

Those of you who have been readers for a while will see yourselves in my story in The Economist. Cheri will recognize, in the ninth paragraph, the gem that she herself sent to me. Jag will spot, further down, his pun on the Greek word idiotes. Mr Crotchety, who offends the gods by not having his own blog, will see his own worldview–irreverent, humorous, incisive–throughout the piece, since he trained me well in it. Phillip S Phogg, with his deep erudition, subtly worn; Solid Gold Creativity, with her sensitivity and philosophy; Thomas Stazyk, Thecriticalline and the Village Gossip, with their almost poetic thought processes;  Peter G, with his outrageous wit; Steve Block with his precision mind; Douglas with his forging inquiry; …. the list goes on and on and on.

Those of you who come sporadically, such as Vincent and Kempton; those of you have come recently, such as Man of Roma, Susan and Dafna; those of you who disappear for a while and resurface months later; and the many, many more who don’t comment at all but just read: all of you have enriched this blog and my mind and my writing.

You are all now co-authors of stories in The Economist and of a book in the making.

Academy 2.0

Which leads me to another insight: Socrates was wrong about one thing, as he himself would gladly concede if he were given a WordPress account: the written word is not inimical to good conversation; text is not necessarily dumb and dead.

What we do here is dialectic, defined as good conversations. What we have here is the Academy that Socrates’ student Plato founded in Athens. Where they ambled in circles and joked and teased and inquired and contested and thought, we do the same thing here on our blogs, minus the ambling.

And there is something new and special about these conversations. I have debated in many settings–the famous “Monday morning meetings” at The Economist in 25 St. James’s Square, London, being a notable one.

When you practice dialectic in those settings, in the flesh, you are always aware who is speaking as well as what is being said. Often this adds an impurity into the mental flow. Are we paying more attention to somebody of higher status or rank, less to somebody who is new? Are we distracted by a twitch, a snort, a sniffle? A curve, accentuated by a fabric, reminiscent of a …

Here there is none of that. With one single exception, I have met none of you in person. (And is that not amazing?) Here, the only thing that matters is what, not who.

Put differently, here in this modern and more pure academy, we all feel safe:

• safe to contradict ourselves,
• safe to take intellectual risks,
• safe to fail and advance,
• safe from embarrassment.

We exist on our blogs, between which we skip and link and flit like thoughts across neurons, through our words and associations, our minds and thoughts alone.

Here, we are each equal with Socrates.

That stud on the vase is supposed to be Theseus, the Athenian hero who went on to slay the Minotaur, dealing with a ruffian named Procrustes.

Procrustes was famous for his bed. He invited passers-by to spend the night and to lie* in his bed. The bed was always too short or too long. So Procrustes “adjusted”, not the bed, but the guest as he was sleeping. He either stretched the guest (Procrustes = ‘the stretcher’) or cut off his legs.

Theseus eventually dealt with Procrustes by making him, Procrustes, fit his own bed. So there.

But from this myth we have the great term Procrustean bed. It applies whenever we force something into a size or a result (as with statistics) that is not natural and thus incorrect or inelegant.

I was thinking of the Procrustean bed once again while writing my piece for The Economist this week.

You recall my musings on the subject of a text’s optimal length, and how important it is neither to go under or over it. Well, in most print media, and certainly in The Economist, lengths are fixed in advance. What determines wordcount is the line count in the page layout of the print edition, which is done before the editor even has the “copy” (article) in question.

In my 12 years at The Economist I have, as you might expect, become very good at writing ‘to length’–ie, at delivering copy that fits exactly (thus evading any Procrustean tendencies by editors). Often I even enjoy the discipline of that constraint.

But it increasingly strikes me as bizarre, indeed unsustainable: We invariably cut good stuff out of articles, add unnecessary words to ‘turn lines’, or even entire paragraphs to fill a page when a chart shrinks. Sometimes this means sacrificing color and detail, or even logical connectors. Other times it means adding noise to signal.

And what happens next? People read the print edition, then pulp it. So much for the beautiful page layout.

But the same text survives forever online, where it faces no obvious layout constraints. Thus, all posterity reads a suboptimal text, stretched or amputated as Procrustes’ guests were.

The ancients (Homer, Virgil, etc) did not have this problem. They (or rather, their slaves) wrote on scrolls, which scroll as our web pages do, into infinity if necessary. Perhaps our evolving media habits will take us back to that future.

I began the previous post with a parenthetical slur on Americans (of which I am half-one), propping myself up on two creaky stereotypes:

1. that Americans can’t (really) speak English, and
2. that political correctness is in part to blame.

Specifically, the issue was which of these two words was correct in the specific context:

• Sex, or
• Gender

Well, I thought I might regale you once again with the opinion of Johnny Grimond, our (The Economist‘s) doyen of usage and author of our official Style Guide, in which style quite often becomes a window into a very British, ironic and sophisticated worldview. Here is Johnny on the matter:

Gender is nowadays used in several ways. One is common in feminist writing, where the term has a technical meaning. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” argued Simone de Beauvoir: in other words, one chooses one’s gender. In such a context it would be absurd to use the word sex; the term must be gender. But, in using it thus, try to explain what you mean by it. Even feminists do not agree on a definition.

The primary use of gender, though, is in grammar, where it applies to words, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.) So do not use gender as a synonym for sex. Gender studies probably means feminism.

See also Political correctness

That said, I seem to remember reading somewhere–and I wish I knew where–that Sandra Day O’Connor started using gender instead of sex when she got to the Supreme Court, because she was worried that the word sex would conjure up all the wrong images in her (male) colleagues’ minds during deliberations.

Down under in Melbourne, Solid Gold Creativity has embarked on an intriguing investigation into sex (or “gender”, as the Americans among you might prefer in this context) in journalism.

She found that only 27% of the articles in The Monthly, an Australian magazine, were written by women. Counting only “major” articles, defined as those longer than 3,000 words, 20% were written by women.

With a research assist from Phillip S Phogg, she then turned her attention to America, where she found that women wrote:

• 27% of the articles in The Atlantic Monthly, and
• 30% of the articles in the New Yorker.

(Both of those are five-issue averages.)

So, naturally, I offered to supply the relevant metrics for The Economist.

At first, I started counting the articles in our current issue by author’s sex. (You out there cannot know who the authors are, of course, because we don’t have bylines, but I have an internal list to aid me.) Then I realized that this doesn’t give a good picture, because we are too small. If one or two people are on holiday, that skews the numbers. Then a freelancer writes the odd piece; or somebody writes a big piece and a box to go with it; or several people collaborate on one story, and on and on.

So instead I counted the editorial staff, both total journalists (ie, correspondents + editors) and editors. (I defined as editors only colleagues who actually edit a section in the magazine or a part of the website, not those who have editor as part of their title on their business card.)

Here is what I found:

Of the 84 journalists (I tried to correct for those on sabbatical, those half-retired, and so forth) 19, or 23%, are women.

Perhaps more interesting: Of the 21 editors, 8 are women, or 38%.

In other words, those women who do work at The Economist have twice the chance to become an editor that men at The Economist have. Innaresting, ain’t it?

And if I had excluded the website from the numbers and counted only the magazine, the share of women would have gone up both among total journalists and editors.

That said, the percentages are still well below 50%.

Now, I quite like something that Solid Gold Creativity said in her comments:

… I’m not so interested in the “reasons” for this absence of female thinkers/writers. I can always think up a hundred reasons why something is one way or another. My interest is not “why”; my interest is what’s so…

In that spirit, let’s find out more…

The World in 2010, our (ie, The Economist‘s) annual sister publication, is now out. This is a magazine in which we and our invited guests take shots at prognosticating the coming year.

My piece is this one on the Constitutional Convention that California is all but certain to call in 2010.

For you regular readers, this (ie, other constitutional conventions) is what I was researching in September when I eulogized James Madison.

On a more general note: Those of you who go to The Economist‘s website a lot might already have started noticing some changes. There will be more over the coming month or so. These changes have been long in the making and were partially cooked up at our powwow last year.

One great thing is that, even though much of the site will be behind a subscriber wall, all incoming links will in future take you directly to the article, whether or not you are a paying subscriber. This means I can keep sending you there.

the very opposite of the blandness (and dare I say, triteness?) which permeates some (but not all, I hasten to add!!) of the Economist’s erudite and worthy pages.

• Bland
• Trite
• Worthy

Ouch. No publication, writer or editor would want to be caught anywhere near those adjectives–especially the devastatingly faint-praising worthy.

Well, one of the minor purposes of this blog (besides the main one, which is to talk about my book once it comes out) is to let those of you who are fans/foes of The Economist speak truth to power in a safe setting.

Furthermore, this is the time for me to admit that I myself occasionally feel as Phillip Phogg does. And that frustrates and saddens me.

It also makes me think deeply about such evergreen writerly topics as style, voice, tone, and storytelling, because that’s what this seems to be about.

The Economist appears to succeed in part because it promises and delivers to its readers analysis that is:

• disciplined, not florid;
• terse but deep;
• occasionally quirky but not self-indulgent.

Permit me to contrast that with, say, The New Yorker, which promises, and mostly delivers, storytelling that is

• florid (and not necessarily disciplined);
• often deep but above all long;
• occasionally quirky and unapologetically self-indulgent.

What that means for me as a writer for The Economist is that I usually do the same research as writers for the New Yorker but then leave most, or even all, the “fun stuff” on the cutting floor to maintain the discipline of, say, a 600-word note.

This is frustrating. As a writer, I often know that I could spin a thrilling yarn out of my experiences during research but as a correspondent for The Economist I know that much of it is inadmissible. (There are exceptions, such a piece I have written about Socrates for our upcoming Christmas issue, which arose out of a thread here on the Hannibal Blog and is almost pure, unadulterated fun.)

One device that writers for the New Yorker (just to stay with that example) have but that we lack is the First Person, ie the “I”. I have said before that I consider the First Person “treacherous” for young writers because it subverts discipline. It is a good idea to learn to write without using “I” and “me”. That said, I have also discovered, on this blog and in my book manuscript, that the First Person makes certain things easier. One of those things is authenticity. Another is fun.

But it goes beyond the First Person and into storytelling. Occasionally, we do great storytelling in the pages of The Economist. But often we don’t, because that is not always the main objective.

I still love Ira Glass’s analysis of good storytelling. It requires, he said:

• humanity
• suspense
• surprise
• momentum (or “direction”)

But implicit in those elements is detail, also known as color. I have said before that color can be excessive and is best used sparingly, as in a good Rembrandt painting. But sparing does not mean monochrome.

Perhaps, when we fall short at The Economist it is because we overdo the sparing. Perhaps we should do more First Person narrating (which does not necessarily require us to give up our anonymity). Perhaps we should paint in more color.

In the next post, let me try to illustrate what I’ve been talking about in this post by looking at the back story behind one of my pieces in the current issue of The Economist.

For instance, an editor might remark, as she anglicizes an acronym I use, that a word “either has to look odd to us [Brits] or odd to them [Yanks], and we opt for them.”

Well, this week I woke up on Monday to get a message from our editor-in-chief that he would quite like a three-page (3,000-word) Briefing on California’s water wars, since the piece that was meant for that slot was not ready to run this week. Due to the inhumanely inconvenient times zone I am in (ie, California, when my bosses are in London), this meant I had to deliver the piece the following day (Tuesday) for London to be able to wake up to it on Wednesday and publish it on Thursday, ie today. This is the piece.

So I wrote the piece in quite a hurry and sent it. Then, on Wednesday, I worked with the fact-checker and map guy, Phil Kenny. He came up with a great map, the clearest depiction of California’s water infrastructure I have yet seen:

The editors are then supposed to send me the “subbed” (jargon for edited) “copy” (jargon for text) and, this being The Economist, forgot to do so. So I went to a yoga class. By the time I came back, it was late at night in London.

In our process, a correspondent sends his article to a section editor, who subs the piece and then sends it on to the editor-in-chief or a deputy, who then sends it through to a “night editor“.

I had heard that our night editor last night was Johnny Grimmond, the author of our style guide. Johnny guards our quaint British usage as Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld, watches over Hades. You can call him, as you can call me, a pedant, and we would be proud of it.

I immediately knew that Johnny would pounce on one particular phrase of linguistic interest. The water legislation currently being negotiated in California contains a very important phrase that is also ugly and stupid in a characteristically American way. Which is to say that, in the same way that Americans gave the Anglophone world the word proactive (why not active?), the legislators in Sacramento now want to impose on the state’s environmentalists, farmers and urban water users

co-equal goals.

While doing my interviews for this story, I had kept a straight face every time the phrase came up, because I am keen not to appear, you know, loony or snippy. In my article I refrained from any overt pedantry. But I knew that Johnny, in the safety of his London office in the wee hours, would not. His cursor, I was sure, would find the pompous American redundancy faster than you can swat a greasy Hamburger with a cricket bat.

And so I asked a colleague with access to the system to send me the copy. My eyes skipped over the paragraphs until they alit on the one in question. I started grinning even before I read the new sentence:

The details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its main feature is a phrase, “coequal goals”—though how coequal goals differ from equal ones is not clear.

Well, I’m off to another powwow of The Economist. This time it’s not a biggie, as last year’s was, but a little gathering of the US-based correspondents (politics+business+finance).

In case you’re wondering: that’s 17 of us, plus the US editor, plus the editor-in-chief. (I only say that because I have found that our readers tend to be surprised when hearing how few of us there are.) So 19 of us will decide the current direction, and thus future course, of America. That should take us only a short working day or so, so I hope to be back here blogging anon.

More than three years ago–it seems like three decades–I wrote an eight-chapter Special Report in The Economist in which I tried to envision the future of the media. (It starts here, for those of you with a subscription.)

In it I argued that we (society) were in the midst of a transformation equal in significance to that started by Gutenberg’s printing press during the Renaissance. One media era was ending, another starting:

• Old: Media companies produce content & captive, passive audience consumes it.
• New: Everybody produces content and shares, consumes, remixes it.
• Old: Media companies lecture the audience (one to many).
• New: The audience has conversations among itself (many to many).

To show you how long three years can be, consider:

• As part of my Special Report, I did our (The Economist‘s) very first podcasts–a word that many of the editors in London had not even heard yet. Today our podcasts are among the most popular on iTunes.
• During my research for the Report, I heard the word “YouTube” for the first time (the company had just been founded). When I sent the Report to the editor, it contained one single reference to YouTube. Four (!) weeks later, when the Report was published, YouTube had already become the biggest story of that year (2006).
• I had never heard of Facebook (not to mention Twitter). And so on.

How I use the media today

All of this sounds quaint today, so I thought I might share with you how my personal media habits have changed since my Report, and then answer some questions:

• Does my 2006 thesis hold up?
• Would I refine it today?
• Is there a media “crisis”?

1) More efficiency in my work life

Back in 2006, I still subscribed to a lot of paper newspapers and magazines, as all journalists used to do, in order to “keep up” with the competition and to be informed. Those things piled up on my floor and made me feel guilty.

Today I have no paper subscription at all! I have precisely two electronic subscriptions on my Kindle, one newspaper (The New York Times) and one magazine (The Atlantic).

I use my Kindle in the morning over my latte to catch up with the global headlines, the mass market “news”. It is almost relaxing. It takes maybe 15 minutes. Later in the day, if I am driving, I will listen to NPR in the car. That represents my entire consumption of “mainstream” media through their traditional distribution channels. I do not own a TV set.

After I put down my Kindle, my work starts. This means that I open my own, personal “newspaper”, which is my RSS Reader. Here is what it looked like yesterday:

In my RSS reader I mix “feeds” from the “head” and the “long tail”, from the LA Times to small blogs on California politics and obscure research outfits such as the Public Policy Institute of California.

The important thing to note here is that I have

1. disassembled many disparate publications and information sources, including sources not traditionally considered “news”, and
2. reassembled them as only I can for my own productivity. I have thus replaced “editors” and will never, ever allow them back into this part of my life.

I probably spend an hour or so reading inside my RSS reader. This is not so relaxing. I consider it work. This is my deep dive into stuff I need to know to cover my beat (ie, the Western states). I don’t worry about printing or filing anything because I tag the items, knowing that I can search for them in future. (And yes, that means that my office is now paperless.) Sometimes I hit “share” and my editor can see what I’m reading.

Then I’m done for the day, and I move on a) to do research for my stories and b) to take occasional study breaks for fun with the other media….

2) My intellectual life: Social curation

In my “private” (ie, non-Economist) existence, I now essentially live the vision that I sketched in my Special Report. Which is to say that I am simultaneously the audience for other “amateur” producers of content and an amateur producer myself. This is simply a highfalutin way of saying:

• I blog (right here) for motivations that are not remotely commercial, and
• I read other blogs for intellectual stimulation, and
• I occasionally post to my Facebook news feed, and
• I glance into the Facebook updates of people I know.

Through the blog, Facebook and the old-fashioned medium of email, I now have a spontaneous and unplanned but remarkably efficient and bespoke system of social curation for my media content.

I can easily spend an hour or two a day just following the links that you guys, ie my blog readers, provide. Virtually all of you on this blog have never met me in person but you have a keen sense of my intellectual tastes by now, and you provide links that are, for the most part, stunningly relevant. Sometimes you bring to the surface specific research papers or articles in obscure journals that I would never have discovered in the previous media era.

On Facebook, I find that the connections are of the opposite nature: Most of my “friends” I really do know in offline life, but many understand my intellectual tastes less than my blog readers. But my Facebook friends nonetheless are in my social circle, so their links tend also to be obscure, risqué, ironic, or moving–in short, more interesting and enjoyable than any content the media companies used to dish up for me in the previous era. Ten years ago, for instance, I would probably never have seen this stunning Ukrainian artist perform the Nazi invasion of Ukraine with sand:

The things to note here are:

1. My social curators also disassemble and reassemble the sources of content. They mix Jon Stewart clips (mainstream media, commercial) with homemade music ensembles (amateur, non-commercial) into one bespoke media flow.
2. My online and offline friends have thus become what media editors used to be, and they are far better at it than their media-conglomerate predecessors ever were. I will never allow the old editors back into my life.
3. It goes without saying that I “time-shift” and “place-shift”, which is just a highfalutin way of saying that I “consume” this content wherever and whenever (laptop + iPhone) I happen to be.

3) My intimate media

The final layer is what Paul Saffo in my Special Report called the “personal” media. These are media produced by family members and very intimate friends for defined and tiny audiences.

Example: baby pictures and clips on my private family web site. The site is protected and only grandparents and dear friends have access. The motivation is thus the opposite of the traditional media:

1. The audience is deliberately kept small (whereas media companies want large audiences)
2. The intent is to share and preserve personal memories.

Because the capture and sharing of such intimate media is so much easier than it ever was, I spend much, much more of my media time immersed in them. Where do I find this time? Easy. As Clay Shirky has been saying for years: We have a surplus of time, once we get rid of the crap in our lives.

Conclusion

So, to answer my three questions:

• Does my 2006 thesis hold up? Yes, I believe it does. We all have the equivalent of many Gutenberg printing presses in our pockets and on our laps, and we use them to tell stories to one another as never before.
• Would I refine it today? I would pay more attention to video and audio as opposed to text in the mix.
• Is there a media “crisis”? No!

It is that last point that may come as a surprise. I am in an unusual position in that am both a professional and an amateur writer. So I must be aware that the news industry is dying, right?

I am indeed aware that it is shrinking. But is that a problem? There are indeed two crises:

1. A money and profits crisis for owners of media capital.
2. An employment crisis for journalists.

But those are two constituencies that the rest of society need not care about. For society as a whole, I believe there is no crisis, once we stop being hysterical and examine our media habits.

What I have discovered in my own personal media behavior is that I am today better informed than I have ever been before. But much of the information I consume no longer comes from journalists.

Instead, much, much more of it now comes from universities and think tanks in my RSS reader and iTunes University, from scientists and thinkers and other experts at conferences such as TED, and from you, who are a self-selected and thus qualified bunch of editors.

Speaking purely as a consumer of the media and a citizen, I believe that there is no media crisis–indeed, that we are entering a second Renaissance.

Nina Hartley

For my piece in the current issue of The Economist, I had the pleasure of talking to, among other people, the equivalent of Meryl Streep in the porn industry: Nina Hartley. She is 50 and says she loves sex more than ever, on camera or off. She has been at it (the camera part) since 1984.

A somewhat unfortunate part of my job, as I am increasingly discovering, is that the most interesting parts of my research and my conversations often fall well outside the realm of what can make it into my articles. Yes, of course, readers might care about how the porn industry is doing. But they’re human so they must also be curious about, well, sex. After all, it’s not everyday that you get to talk to somebody who does it for a living.

In my case, I was just a tad shy for the first few moments. It helped that I have never “consumed” Nina’s “content” so I had no visuals to distract me. Still: How would I talk to somebody who views having sex as I view writing?

It turned out that Nina was very easy and very interesting to talk to. The conversation ranged just as it would have ranged with anybody else. Our health care debate drives her “mad.” California can’t govern itself. That sort of thing.

Performing sex on camera, she said, is

a highly paid form of blue-collar work… sort of like farm labor.

Everybody is an independent contractor and there are no benefits. No benefits. It’s important in such a conversation not to reach for the double entendres.

About the porn industry, Nina was somewhat nostalgic and sentimental. In the 80s, when she started, it was apparently a glamorous sort of thing. The product was hard to get and had rarity value, the production took place in a subculture that considered itself revolutionary. There was a frisson, a pioneer spirit, a certain excitement.

Now it’s seedy, cheap, everywhere. She wouldn’t start again today if she were young now.

So why is she still in it?

In large part because she actually likes the sex, she told me. She thinks that women increase their sensitivity in middle age. At least that is happening to her.

My enjoyment of sex has increased, but for most [performers] it goes down, especially the men.

I asked her if she meant that doing it on camera makes people “numb.” Sometimes, she says. Many performers stop having sex in their private lives altogether. The men basically have to, since they couldn’t have private sex, then perform as well the next day on camera, and any hint of “having trouble” might kill their career. But they also genuinely lose interest.

Nina sees her role now as “mentor” as well as actress, so she counsels the young performers not to let that happen.

Frankly, it amazes me that it–burning out–hasn’t happened to her. She must be a modern Aphrodite.

As most of you know by now, I am an admirer of British irony and wit, the subtler instances of which I occasionally highlight or dissect, as here, here, and here. At its best, it is a matter of tone, not a matter of telling jokes. And it is best delivered casually.

Today happens to be our weekly deadline day at The Economist, and I am right now (thanks to the London time zone that I am forced to observe in California) finalizing my piece in the next issue with one of our editors, Ann Wroe, who happens to be one of my favorites (and who is a successful book author in her own right).

In the piece, I quoted an American think tank whose name starts (as they all seem to do) with “Center For The…”

Ann changed it to “Centre For The…”. I asked: Do we change words to British spelling even when they are names?

And she replied:

Yes, words are anglicised even within proper names; it either has to look odd to us or odd to them, and we opt for them.

Cintra Wilson

Snooty, bitchy and arrogant? Or edgy, witty and incisive? In short, bad writing or good? That is the question.

That’s Cintra Wilson in the little mug shot above, and I would have absolutely no interest in, or knowledge of, her if she had not just re-inflamed some old kindling for all writers. Do not mistake this post as being about the content of the text I am about to refer to–I neither know nor care about fashion. In this post I care only about the issue of writer’s voice.

Background:

Cintra wrote a review in the New York Times of a J.C. Penney store that has opened in Manhattan. The review was, shall we say, scathing. Penney, she said, is a

dowdy Middle American entity

that, in essence, has no right to be on this island of skinny snobs. The clothing is full of polyester, the racks are full of sizes 10, 12 and 16, but not Cintra’s 2; and, perhaps most damningly, the store

has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on.

Reaction:

Perhaps predictably, the country appears to have gone to war against Cintra. Bloggers are attacking her, for example here, here and here. Tenor: Cintra is an asshole; go shop at J.C. Penney just to spite her!

The New York Times, meanwhile, appears to have been receiving bags (gigabytes) of hate mail, decrying the newspaper’s

fat hatred, class bias and nasty humor.

The journalist, her editors, and the entire damn publication must be “smug”.

In response, Clark Hoyt, the Times‘ “public editor” or ombudsman (a bizarre and navel-gazing role, by the way) pens a characteristic mea culpa, oozing sudden humility on the newspaper’s behalf.

He does a great and succinct job of summarizing the eternal and underlying tension that is relevant for all writers when he asks:

What is the difference between edgy and objectionable? Or, as one reader … put it: How do writers “navigate the fine lines between observation, satire and snark.”

He even prompts the newspaper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, to say that

he wished it had not been published.

Wow. Cintra must be up there with Judith Miller and all those articles in the run-up to the Iraq War if she deserves editorial disavowal.

Cintra, meanwhile, has apologized on her blog and is back-peddling.

Exegesis:

So let’s contemplate Clark Hoyt’s question: How do we navigate that fine line?

Allow me to remind you that the publication that I happen to write for, The Economist, is accused of smugness on an hourly basis. And every time somebody calls us smug, somebody else is simultaneously calling us “refreshing” or “incisive” or something even more flattering.

Furthermore, I am right now trying to figure out just what my appropriate voice is in the book that I am writing.

So, just a few observations:

1. Navigating that fine line is just one of the things that makes good writing so incredibly hard. Because yes, it really is hard, otherwise a lot more people would be doing it. So remember that, readers, when you write your angry (snarky!) hate mail to us journalists.
2. Would you really–I mean really–prefer to shut up the Cintras out there, to sanitize them, to edit in the “on one hands” and “on the other hands”, to give 50% of the article to those who say that Iraq did have WMD and 50% to those who say it did not, because, you know, 50-50 is “balanced” and 10-90 might offend the heartland? You get my drift.
3. Or would you prefer an authentic, damn-the-torpedoes, honest voice, one that tells it as its owner sees it and is prepared to explode with the torpedoes?
4. Bill Keller: If you really do wish that Cintra’s piece had not been published, why did you not, as editor, nix it? Since you did not nix it, what the f*** are you doing now disavowing your writer?
5. There is an easy way to address the reaction to pieces such as Cintra’s: Publish more pieces by other writers with an equally authentic but different voice. This would indeed be edifying for your readers. But do not dilute the copy that comes across your desk into the lukewarm bilge that would, at last, be the end of good writing.