Visit ANCIENT Rome!

This qualifies as breaking news, if you’re writing my kind of book. Watch:

It arose out of this great project.

This where Fabius and Scipio walked. This is where the Romans bewailed their dead after Hannibal’s victories at the Trebia, at Trasimene and at Cannae. This is where Scipio celebrated his Triumph after defeating Hannibal at Zama…..

So, you know where I’ll be hanging out–Google Earth. Oh wait. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do the things I’m supposed to do before this came out. Should I take it out of sleep hours? Dangerous. Perhaps necessary, though.


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Hannibal, Aikido and Casanova

Bear with me, please. I’m trying, right now, to analyze Hannibal’s phenomenal skill at winning battles. And I’m trying to find parallels in other areas of life.

It occurs to me that Hannibal had some things in common with this Aikido Black Belt:

It further occurs to me that Hannibal had his way with the Romans rather as Casanova had his way with about 120 women.

You use the force of the opponent, rather than your own, to win. That seems to be the trick. This may or may not be obvious when looking at battle diagrams of Hannibal’s great victories, such as this one at Cannae:

I’m desperately looking for other examples or refinements of this idea. Any hints will be gratefully received. If you think I’ve gone bananas, please suggest remedies.


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Goldsworthy on The Punic Wars

And back again to the bibliography for my book.

We’re still in the “history” section, as opposed to the “biography” section, but we’ve mostly dealth with the ancient sources (Polybius, Livy and Plutarch). So now I’ll move into the modern writers.

Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy

If I had to choose just one book to give you a fun but thorough overview of Hannibal, it would be Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Punic Wars.

It’s actually a good idea to read the story of all three Punic Wars in one, because you can’t understand Hannibal’s war (the Second Punic War) without the other two. It would be as though a history student two-thousand years from now were trying to understand World War II without knowing anything about World War I or the Cold War.

Goldsworthy does a good job of minimizing the clutter (footnotes, parenthetical interruptions aimed at other academics and such) that usually makes academic books unreadable. He gives you great context. For instance, it’s probably not immediately obvious why sieges almost never worked in the ancient world (which is important, since Hannibal, at the crucial moment, decided not to lay siege to Rome). So Goldsworthy describes what it was like to attack and defend a city–all the tunneling and ramming and laddering and sulphur-smeared-javelin-hurling and so forth.

Being British, Goldsworthy also lets his sense of irony peek through on occasion, which brings relief. (Asked what his philosophy of life is, he tells his interlocutor here that “I’m English, so obviously do not have a philosophy.” That’s the sort of thing I mean.)

His more recent book is a biography of Julius Caesar, which I’ve also read and loved. But I’m forcing myself to leave Caesar out of my book because, as my wife has informed me, there are enough ancient dudes in it as it is.


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Kipling’s If

Rudyard Kipling’s If:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!


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Postscript on McCain

Read David Grann in The New Yorker on what I consider an epic, a Greek, a heart-rending tragedy: the transformation, under pressure, of a great man, John McCain.

This is a man who was once “more at peace when he was losing” and who, above all, was afraid only of one thing: losing his honor.

Thinking in terms of the underlying idea for my book, I can’t help but wonder whether his (unexpected) “triumph” in the primaries was in fact the great “impostor” of his life, leading to an all-encompassing “disaster.”

(To those of you who are new to this blog, those words are from a Kipling poem that inspired my entire book.)


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More on Hannibal’s elephants

Thanks to James Allen over at Electrical Wall for helping me reframe my understanding about Hannibal and his elephants. I now see that my own take missed the more existential connections the man had with his elephants.


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The “death” of blogging

The title is not meant literally, guys. It comes wrapped up in British irony. But I did write this piece in the current issue of The Economist about the topic.

I don’t usually use this book blog to point to my (day-job) articles. But I did get a few responses after the deadline from interesting people I tried to interview for this story. So, why not include their views here?

The tongue-in-cheek thesis of my little article is that

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death …

Blogging, in fact, may “die” as PDAs have died–by becoming invisible and ubiquitous, as a feature in almost every mobile phone today.

Evan Williams

Evan Williams

Here, now, is what Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and now boss of Twitter, emailed me on the subject (excerpts). There is confusion, he says, between two things:

1) There’s also now a commercial blogging world. Commercial blogs do not get most of the traffic (in aggregate), but they’re what a lot of people think of when you say “blog.” But the commercial blogosphere and personal blogosphere are really different worlds. Obviously they overlap, but the motivations and activity of one does not reflect that of the other. Gawker’s cost cutting has nothing to do with Cheri Block Sabraw‘s desire to write things for teachers.

2) There are now more casual ways to scratch the same itch that blogging has done for many people. I.e., Facebook, Twitter, and a slew of other social software alternatives. This is definitely effecting the personal blogging world. It has effected my personal blogging — and that of many people I know. Twitter is now my go-to place to share a thought or a link. I still blog on occasion when I have something I can’t squeeze into 140 characters, but that’s rare, and for many people Twitter (or something else) will suffice nicely on its own. However, does that mean they’re not blogging? We’ve never labeled Twitter a “micro-blogging” service, but that’s certainly one of the primary use cases.

This gets to your point of being nowhere and everywhere, I suppose. There are tons of active blogs on MySpace and on Facebook (even though they call them “Notes”). Maybe these are just the new blogging platforms (among other things). I suppose it is PDA-like that blogs are being subsumed into social networks, like PDAs got subsumed into smartphones.

But PDAs went away as stand-alone devices, because there came a point where they held zero advantage over a smartphone. With stand-alone blogs, that may be true for the most casual users, but not for millions of otheres. There are still many advantages to a stand-alone blog: Your own brand, domain, design, etc. Creating a meaningful, independent voice on web, on which can be launched a movement, a brand, a career, or simply a good story, is best done with a stand-alone blog.

Ev.

Charlene Li

Charlene Li

I also pinged Charlene Li, who is perhaps the best social-media analyst out there, formerly at Forrester, now at Altimeter Group.

If you think about blogging as a specific content publishing tool and formatting of content, then yes, it is being usurped by businesses and traditional media companies. In fact, traditional online content management systems and collaboration suites like Sharepoint are integrating blogging into their platforms.

But if you think of blogging as a “mindset”, then it’s not only healthy, but growing by leaps and bounds. In this way, I distinguish between a corporate blog that does nothing more than publish their press releases (but has not comments) and a blog written from a personal perspective but clearly associated and benefiting a company. Likewise, there are Twitter feeds from companies that are just RSS feeds, while @comcastcares is a genuine person at Comcast who is establishing a relationship with other Twitterers.

In the end, blogging grew because people used it as a way to connect with people and develop relationships. If it *evolves* into new formats, then it’s staying healthy, rather than stagnating.

Chris Alden

And I pinged Chris Alden, the CEO of Six Apart (WordPress’s biggest rival). Excerpts from his reply:

While the hypothesis that blogging is past its prime may be provocative,
it’s not supported by the facts. Our products continue to grow across
the board — we’ve seen more demand for blogging than ever before — and
I believe our competitors are growing too.

It may be that blog “hype” has passed its prime, as blogging has
followed the typical hype cycle and is now in the enlightenment phase
according to Gartner, but that is usually when the real growth actually
happens.

We are seeing an explosion of ways in which people and corporations are
using blogs, both for internal and external purposes, and individual
blogging, alive and well, is also evolving. Publishers, businesses, and
individuals now look to blog software and service to run much more of
their web site, in some cases using MT for their entire web CMS
platform, and integrate blogging and social media in a more profound
way.

It is of course true that newer services like Twitter have captured the
time and attention of many bloggers, and some have slowed their
traditional blogging in favor of communicating with friends through
tweets, not blog posts. But we view these as complimentary, not
competing, trends. More often than not, Twitter works in conjunction
with blogs, and many bloggers use Twitter as a new form of RSS — a way
to alert friends that there is a new blogs post. Very often Tweets refer
to blog posts, and vice versa.

We believe that blogging will have as disruptive an impact on the
mainstream social networks as it had on mainstream media. When it comes
to media, blogs were once seen as an adversary, but are now indelibly
part of the media landscape. The same type of adversarial thinking seems
to be in vogue where folks are assuming that we are seeing replacement
technologies battling it out. It sort of reminds us of the bricks/click
debates of the late 1990s. Of course we learned then that the answer
wasn’t either one or the other, but both.

In fact, blogging and social networking actually started together.
LiveJournal had both blogging and friending features, and was created in
1999. It so happens that blogging services, such as Blogger, TypePad,
and WordPress, then emerged focused on the publishing side. Then another
branch grew from that tree when Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook
focused on the social networking aspect…

The story isn’t about the passing of one trend to another, but the
evolution of blogging, and in some ways a return to its roots, and the
integration of blogging with many other forms of social media. …

Chris

Thanks to all three of you, and sorry I didn’t have time to get you into the article. (Two of you are mentioned, however.) I actually think that the four of us agree almost entirely, and that you’ve colored in the subtleties.

I mean, how could blogging be “dead” if even … Malaysia’s Mahathir now blogs!!!!


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Obama

My three-year old has been yelling “Obama” all day at kindergarten.

So it’s finally over. Enough with the blogging about it now, for a while (and back to my book). But, because it is a historic moment, this last post to mark it.

From us at The Economist, two pieces:

1) Congratulations to the winner, with a warning about the burden of high expectations. And perspective:

This week America can claim more credibly that any other western country to have at last become politically colour-blind…. America will now have a president with half-brothers in Kenya, old schoolmates in Indonesia and a view of the world that seems to be based on respect rather than confrontation.

2) Condolences to the loser, who used to be, and may be again, a man to like and respect, but who became tragic:


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Absent dads

And a follow-up on parents and success: Thanks to Mary Achor’s tip in the comments, this take by Doug Wead on “absent fathers” as a good thing in the life of children:


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