A tale of two cities’ disappearing

What is the following description about?

… they threw timbers from one [house] to another over the narrow passageways, and crossed as on bridges. While war was raging in this way on the roofs, another fight was going on among those who met each other in the streets below. All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement … No one dared to set fire to the houses on account of those who were still on the roofs, until [the commander showed up]. Then he set fire to the three streets all together, and gave orders to keep the passageways clear of burning material so that the army might move back and forth freely.

Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled.

Nor was this the end of their miseries, for the street cleaners, who were removing the rubbish with axes, mattocks, and forks, and making the roads passable, tossed with these instruments the dead and the living together into holes in the ground, dragging them along like sticks and stones and turning them over with their iron tools. Trenches were filled with men. Some who were thrown in head foremost, with their legs sticking out of the ground, writhed a long time. Others fell with their feet downward and their heads above ground. [Army transports] ran over them, crushing their faces and skulls, not purposely on the part of the riders, but in their headlong haste. …

The Americans taking Fallujah in 2003? Street fighting in World War II? Nope. It’s the Romans wiping Carthage off the map, as described by Appian here.

The year was 146 BCE, and in that same year the Romans also destroyed Corinth in Greece. One city gone in the west, one in the east. A very Roman gesture.

In the previous post in this thread, I talked about Alexander looking west from his deathbed in 323 BCE and seeing a mighty city, Carthage, but not seeing a city called Rome, because there was nothing much to see yet. In this scene, 177 years later, that nation of which Alexander had not heard, Rome, was laying waste and subjugating the two great Mediterranean civilizations that Alexander had known, the Carthaginian-Punic and his own, the Greek.

Clearly, a lot had happened in those intervening years. Events that we today see all around us–by what we see, speak and think, and by what we do not see, speak and think. I will explain that in the next post.

And just as a reminder: The story of what happened between those dates–Alexander’s death and Rome’s domination of west and east–has, of course, everything to do with the main characters in my book: Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio.

Those who don’t get Twitter

I wrote about Evan Williams and his innovations, including the then-young Twitter, way back in 2007. And it’s my job to be up to date. But I must say that I just don’t … get it this time. Not the technology part, but the sociology. Why?

My editor feels the same way, and we feel guilty about it. So it came as a great relief to see that Jon Stewart is on our side.

The view west from Alexander’s death bed

You're next, Carthage

One month before his 33rd birthday, on June 11th, 323 BCE, Alexander died in a sumptuous palace in Babylon, in today’s Iraq. He had been drinking with his friends and might have been poisoned. Or he might have had malaria, or typhoid fever, or any number of other ailments.

In twelve short years–during his twenties (what were you doing in your twenties?)–this young man had completely changed the world. Indeed, you might say that he had unified the world for possibly the first and only time. (I’m talking about the world known to him). Recall that the Greeks had had, for at least a century and a half, a keen sense of East (alien, soft, depraved) and West (Greek, civilized), with assorted barbarians living on the periphery. Alexander brought East and West and its major civilizations together into one realm, with a remarkably cosmopolitan vision of governing by including rather than oppressing the non-Greeks.

But that is not the subject of today’s post. Instead, I want to choose June 11th, 323 BCE as the date with which to begin a new thread on The Hannibal Blog: In the next series of posts I want to “set the scene”, the historical context, for the main plot and main characters in my forthcoming book.

What did Alexander not see to his west when he died?

This is the question of today’s post. The answer should be surprising. If it is not, I will help you to be surprised in the coming posts.

First, a map of what we think he should have seen (click to enlarge):

What Alexander saw was Carthage. This man, who was said to have cried once when he thought he had run out of countries to conquer, was apparently planning to conquer the entire western Mediterranean when death intervened, and the western Mediterranean, as far as Alexander knew, was a pond with two main cultures: 1) His own (Hellenistic) and 2) the Carthaginian-Punic one. So he was planning to take on Carthage, that mighty and wealthy port on the tip of northern Africa, settled by Phoenicians whose mother country (in today’s Lebanon) already belonged to Alexander’s empire. Once he had Carthage, Alexander would truly be able to say that ruled the whole world.

And here is what he did not see: Rome! Alexander had apparently never even heard of the place. Rome may have been among a few Italian towns that sent representatives to his court, but he personally seems never to have taken note of the place. And why should he have? It was a sleepy town in the middle of Italy. Clearly not of any consequence. More in the next post.

Meet The Eco Team

And here is my piece in this week’s issue, Primates on Facebook, translated into Chinese. Brought to you …. not by The Economist, but by a group of enterprising Chinese amateurs (in the literal sense of lovers) called The Eco Team.

I learned about this in the New York Times today and find it very funny. Basically, a 39-year-old Chinese insurance broker who wants to beef up his English got a group together that translates my magazine just for fun. Without asking us for permission, of course, although my boss has apparently met the guy and winked.

Ah, how that takes me back to my memories of trudging around China, dodging the waiban (Foreign Affairs Bureau), those kind people who assigned “drivers” and “translators” to me whenever I wanted to interview, well, anybody. And that time when I walked for an eternity to get to a 5-star hotel to see my piece in that week’s issue, only to discover that it was among the pages that had been, ahem, torn out by some accident in the delivery process.

The Eco Team, apparently, is also careful not to translate those articles in The Economist that might, you know, be interesting in that way in China.

Anyway, I’m glad that people are learning the sort of English somewhere that complies with our style guide. 😉

Primates on Facebook

I got 500 friends on Facebook

A lot of bloggers are picking up my piece in today’s issue of The Economist on the possible bio-sociological conclusions to be drawn from Facebook data. A few examples are here, here, here, here and here.

The point of the piece: to add a tiny bit to the research debates about human group size.

Just a few words on the backstory of this article: I got the idea in December while chatting to Sheryl Sandberg, the COO (“chief operating officer”) of Facebook. We were just shooting the breeze when I thought of the Dunbar Number, one of my favorite talking points, and a conceit that I’ve used before. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, hypothesized that primates form groups to the extent that their brains can compute the many relationships among group members. I think what I like about it is the originality of extrapolating from the ratio of neocortex size to group size among other primates to Homo Sapiens.

Anyway, we all went off over the holidays, and when we came back from the break, Larry Yu at Facebook put me in touch with Cameron Marlow. He had got some complicated PhD title that amounted to, in his words, “computational sociology” and is now the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook. (Since Mr Crotchety and I think alike–great minds?–he serendipitously emailed me an article about the rise of computational social scientists that same week. If you don’t know Mr Crotchety, you haven’t been reading The Hannibal Blog enough.)

What I wanted from Facebook was numbers that might advance the debate on human group size. It was really difficult. Marlow and his team came back with one set of charts that I could not decipher without help. “Simpler“, I said, which will not surprise regular readers. Eventually, they produced a chart that I thought was simple enough.

Here it is: economist-median-network-size (Incomprehensibly, WordPress does not allow me to embed an PDF chart into my blog, so please click through.)

I like it. It shows three diverging lines: the blue for the number of people we track passively (by clicking on their profiles or status updates, say); the green for the number of people to whom we respond (by commenting on a status update, say) but who don’t respond back; and the red for the number of people with whom we communicate two-way (by chatting, emailing, exchanging wall posts, etc).

The conclusion: the more active or intimate the network, the smaller and more stable, no matter how many “friends” you have on Facebook. I wrote my piece around that chart.

To my surprise, my editor then took an extreme interest in gender differences. So I went back to Facebook and had Marlow produce another chart, this one: active-relationship-size-by-gender

It was still simple, but broke out the same information by gender. Yes, just as you thought, women are more social than men.

To my surprise, the editor didn’t go with any of the charts. What can you do? So I went back to Facebook to get actual numbers. (It was like getting blood out of a stone at this point.) And so we ended up putting those numbers in the text.

Long story short, the piece has no chart but it still gets the point across: No matter what technology you use, we still seem to interact with the same small number of people as ever before. Hence the rubric (subtitle):

Even online, the neocortex is the limit

Anyway, if you’re interested look at the charts and see if that gives you more ideas.

Lavinia and Aeneas

Ursula LeGuin

You’ve heard of Dido and Aeneas (and Purcell, Virgil and all that). Well, a well-known author named Ursula LeGuin decided to pick one of the most obscure but potentially interesting characters of the whole Aeneid and give you Lavinia and Aeneas. The novel is called Lavinia, and I just finished it.

The book came to my attention through my wife. Her book club, having heard that NPR considers the book one of last year’s best, decided to read it. So my wife read it. “You would get more out of this,” she kept saying to me, since there was all this, you know, ancient and Roman stuff in it. I was intrigued.

But when she finished it she and her book club weren’t so convinced. My wife’s verdict: “Sloooow start, but she made the Aeneid accessible to me.”

So I picked it up. And this came to mind:

Always avoid cliché.

So I remember Alfred Hitchcock saying in some interview I once saw. The Hannibal Blog has of late been exploring what makes good storytelling good. But I haven’t said much about the enemies of good stories. I think cliché is the most dangerous of them.

And this is the dilemma of Lavinia: Fantastic conceit for a novel! Really. Exactly the sort of idea that I have time for; indeed not that far away conceptually from the book idea that I myself had. But what a shame about the corny bits.

Here is the genius of the conceit: Aeneas survives the sack of Troy and escapes with his father and son (but not his wife, who perishes in Troy) to wander the Mediterranean. He has a torrid affair with Dido, the wily queen of Carthage, but leaves her and she burns herself (presaging, I might add, what Scipio’s–and Aeneas’–heir will one day do to all of Carthage). Aeneas ends up in Italy, Latium, where his destiny is to found a people, later to become Rome. But it’s not easy. He has to make alliances and fight local wars first. Enter Lavinia. She becomes his second wife (after Creusa in Troy), with whom he will sire the Roman race.

Virgil only mentions her in a line or two. So does Livy. And yet she seems to be so important. A Rutulian king named Turnus had the hots for her and felt upstaged when Aeneas swooped in, and that–ie, she–is what set off the bloody wars. (Shades of Helen?) Oh, and Lavinia is implicitly the mother of the Roman race.

So LeGuin bravely sets out to make Lavinia come alive. And she succeeds in part, but only after page 100 or so. For the first 100 pages LeGuin colors in this woman about whom we know nothing by making her the eternal damsel in distress, slightly hippie, slightly dreamy, chaste but yearning, right out of a B movie. Everything about this Lavinia is a cliché.

Once Aeneas arrives on the scene and we finally have some mythological material to work with (Virgil’s), it gets good. But what gets good is, in effect, the last part of the old Aeneid.

More accessible, yes, as my wife said. In fact, she recommends the book, and so do I, by a hair.

Still, the last word that wants to roll of the tongue of the reviewer is the one that is so devilishly hard for the storyteller to avoid, the one that no storyteller wants to hear said: cliché.

Traveling again, but thinking of Hannibal ….

And I’m on the road again. But I’ll try to keep posting. In particular, I’m trying to think of ways to get back on message, the main “message” being the book that I’ve just delivered to my editor at Riverhead.

You recall that my dilemma is the following: I’m not ready yet to start giving away parts of the book as such. (I don’t have a publication date yet and want to start doing that closer to the time.) But I love the story and topic so much that I started an entire blog with the intention of discussing it, not just ahead of but forever after the book launch.

So maybe I’ll start by setting the scene, in a more cerebral and less narrative way, for the main plot and the main characters. The main plot, you recall, takes place during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, and the main characters are Hannibal and Scipio. (For some of the more modern characters that appear inside the individual chapters, browse my tags.)

Since the Punic Wars are not exactly common knowledge nowadays (I was born in the wrong generation, by the way), I might start by setting those in context on The Hannibal Blog. What were they? Why were they? How are they still visible all around us today?

Would that be fun?

PS: One of you has let me know via email that he is working on a graphic book about Hannibal. How cool is that? Whenever you’re ready (I don’t “out” people who contact me via email), please share the excitement here on The Hannibal Blog. I’d be honored and want to be the first to link to you…

A paperless German anthropologist named Andreas Kluth

Claude la Badarian

On the even lighter side (and still off message, but not much longer): one of you has made me aware of an author named William Monahan, who wrote this sentence in the final installment of his serial story Dining Late with Claude La Badarian (reviewed here):

I was able to convince the police, after a few minutes difficulty on the landing (I was coming back from the shower, inconvenienced by precarious towel, soap-on-a-rope in the form of Sneezy the Dwarf), that I was not “Claude Le Bandarian,” blackmailer, but a paperless German anthropologist named Andreas Kluth.

I would be flattered, but No, as far as I know, I cannot have inspired this reference. (Paperless? I try. German? Largely, but that’s between us. Anthropology? More as object than subject. Andreas Kluth? Unequivocally.)

I admit that my name is not exactly household. But you do notice that I couldn’t get the .com or .net domains. I’m aware of a municipal politician somewhere in Germany who has my name. He must be the anthropologist. 😉

Obama and I; Obama and me; Obama and … myself?

Psst, are they cheering you and me or you and I?

So-and-so “graciously invited Michelle and I,” he says. “The main disagreement with John and I,” he begins. Obama, Obama. You and I need to have a word. (But which one?)

All of you know by now that I’m a lover of, yes, Obama, but also of language, words and style. On the spectrum between grammar fundamentalists and libertines, I am closer to the fundamentalists (in this and only this in life!).

So I side with Naomi Baron, a linguist whom I quoted in this story in The Economist decrying the “linguistic whateverism” that is taking over (American) culture. It would make snobs out of people who care about the difference between who’s and whose, it’s and its, I and me, like and as, and so forth.

And so we come to Obama. First–still speaking about grammar–he is of course vastly preferable to the alternative. (Check out these speech diagrams comparing Obama and Palin.) And even though he entered his presidency with a grammatical stumble, that was John Roberts’ fault, not his. (Steven Pinker called it “blowback” for Roberts’ fundamentalism, since the chief justice apparently could not bring himself to “split the verb” and thus mangled the oath of office.)

But Obama is no grammar saint either. Bloggers have been pointing it out, and now Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, the authors of a forthcoming book about language, are opining about it in the New York Times.

One issue is subjects and objects; another is pomposity and naturalness. In turn:

I object

Nobody could possibly invite “Michelle and he” but quite a lot of people would love to invite “Michelle and him“. That is because the inviter is the subject and first couple are the objects (direct, in this case).

Nor could anybody give a fistbump to “Michelle and he”, although I would personally love to give one to “Michelle and him”. In this case the object is indirect (the fistbump being the direct object), but English doesn’t distinguish.

Oh puhleeze

Americans increasingly don’t see it that way, of course. To them you say the word me (him, her, them) whenever you’re being informal and the word I (he, she, they) whenever you’re being formal. Now that is pompous. It’s like eating a hamburger with fork and knife. It’s overcompensating, because a toff is watching.

Saying myself is not the answer, by the way. I cannot invite “Michelle and himself”, only “Michelle and him.” But, he could invite himself, although he is unlikely to be so presumptuous.

But it’s me

That brings us to the old chestnut: Which is correct: It’s me or It’s I?

The problem here is that the is is not an action verb but a linking verb.It is being linked to me or I, but neither it nor I are obviously the subject or object. So let’s see how other languages deal with the problem:

C’est moi. OK, the French think it should be it’s me.

Es bin ich. Oops, the Germans think it should be it am I.

Damn foreigners. They’re Old Europe anyway.

So the answer is that it doesn’t matter. And since there is the puhleeze factor to consider, I lobby for it’s me.

Now, I did say that is is not an action verb. There is of course one exception to that rule:

Great thought: Continuous partial attention

The Hannibal Blog only pretended to close off the thread on great thinkers by anointing a winner (Patanjali). This is a blog about a forthcoming book (mine), but also about ideas, so I will keep highlighting the best thinkers I come across.

Today: Linda Stone, formerly a researcher at Apple and Microsoft, and now simply a thinker and a liver of life.

Her idea is called continuous partial attention. It has been the bane of our existence in the rich world for the past two decades, and it is not multitasking. The good news is that the age of continuous partial attention is almost over. I will explain below, but if you have time, watch Linda:

Let me flesh that out a bit with the notes from my interview with her in 2006. (I ended up quoting her, but only tangentially, in this concluding chapter of my Special Report on new media in The Economist.)

From about 1945 to 65, we lived in an era when we “we suppressed our creativity” in order to pay full attention to whatever we were doing. The cultural icon was I Love Lucy: she “talked on the phone with her whole body and did nothing else! Everything in that era was focused on company or family. You were committed. You stayed put.”
From 65 to 85, “we questioned authority and asked for creativity.” This era became “all about me and my personal expression.” We wanted freedom. Divorce went up, commitment down. We paid attention only if we saw a payback. And so we began multitasking. Our motivation was to become more productive so that we might have more opportunities in life.
From 85 to 2005 we became “narcissistic and lonely and reached out for connection“. Technology increasingly allowed us to be “always on” the network, via email, cellphones, WiFi etc. Our motivation shifted from creating opportunities to scanning for opportunity. So we began to pay continuous partial attention. Instead of Lucy, we had Seinfeld, talking on the phone while doing other things, such as making out with his girlfriend. He was not multitasking; he was paying partial attention in case something better came along.

This is the important but subtle key to understanding Linda’s idea. Continuous partial attention (think SMSing while you’re in a meeting) does not come from a desire to be more productive and efficient but from

desiring to be a live node on the network and fearing that you’re missing out on something.

Now the good news

Starting about now, says Linda, we are entering a new era. That’s because we are “overwhelmed” by technology, and

longing for protection and meaningful connections, quality over quantity.

So we consciously forgo some opportunities to savor others, such as dinner with friends. We reassert our power over technology and the network by making our gadgets filter our world to keep out the noise. As Linda says,

The real aphrodisiac in this next era is attention…. What we’re moving into is an era where we value ownership of our time” [and] “discover the joy of focusing”

Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history

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