Obama: “Well, it is The Economist.”

So, as I said, we at The Economist and our readers have endorsed. Now Barack Obama has responded. Thanks to Celina Dunlop for pointing me to this exchange between him and Katie Couric (WordPress doesn’t let me embed the video, so click through):

Couric: The Economist, while endorsing you, has also said there are some legitimate criticisms of you that John McCain should be focused on. They say that you are one of the least business-friendly Democratic candidates in a generation, that you have no experience in the business world aside from year as a consultant, and that you’re too close to unions and trial lawyers.

Obama: Well, it is The Economist. And the fact that they endorsed me, how about reading all the good stuff they said about me? (laughter)

Couric: Well, that’s in another issue. (laughter) That’s later.


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The father of biography

Plutarch

Plutarch

Let’s get back to the bibliography for my book.

Right now–while we’re still dealing with the ancient sources–I’m going through the texts in chronological order. And after Polybius and Livy, that brings me to Plutarch.

You recall that Herodotus was the father of history. Well, Plutarch must be the father of biography. Like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, he was Greek. But Plutarch lived much later, in the first and second century AD–three centuries after Hannibal and Scipio. So I don’t use Plutarch because I think he has any scoops over Polybius, or more accurate information. Why, then, do I use (and love) Plutarch?

Because he was the first to take an interest in character. That’s what he wanted to capture: the characters of the great Greeks and Romans. For that he used the big events and deeds in their lives and, just as much, the tiniest but telling details. Occasionally, he may have stretched the facts a bit, but, hey, let’s relax about that and just enjoy.

In that respect, of course, Plutarch does exactly what I aspire to do in my book. I too want to capture how characters respond to success and failure, ups and downs.

Plutarch’s main work was his Parallel Lives (which we usually read in the John Dryden translation), in which he paired one great Greek with one great Roman. Alexander the Great, for instance, is paired with Julius Caesar, and so on.

Hannibal was neither Greek nor Roman, so we don’t have a Life with his name as title. But Hannibal, who is my main character, features prominently in several of Plutarch’s Lives: Fabius (who also plays a big role in my book), Marcellus (a Roman consul killed by Hannibal), Cato the Elder, Flamininus (conqueror/liberator of the Greeks and the man who finally hounded Hannibal into suicide).

Plutarch’s life of Pyrrhus, which I’ve quoted from, is one of my favorites, by the way.

The tragedy is that many of his lives are lost. And the loss that hurts most is, of course, the Life of Scipio, my other main character.


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The Economist endorses

Just in case you missed it, we at The Economist have endorsed, and so have our readers who may (as you should) “vote” in our global electoral college.

The cover says it all. As for the global electoral college, the world is currently “blue” by a landslide of 9,115 electoral votes to 203.


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More on parents and success

Thanks to Freda Zietlow for pointing me to this piece in the Wall Street Journal on the dysfunctional families of future presidents.

As you guys already know, in one chapter of my book I’m looking into the subtle and unsubtle ways that parents influence the future success and failure of their children. Hamilcar played a huge role in the life of his son Hannibal (my main character), and not just while Hamilcar was alive.

Now, the Journal‘s Sue Shellenbarger has this to say about US presidents and their parents:

The families that have produced U.S. presidents … show a striking tendency to be deeply flawed. The childhoods of past presidents have been marked to an unusual degree by absent fathers, mothers so overinvolved that they could easily have been the original helicopter parents, and in some cases outright dysfunction…

Childhood events that would destroy most children seem somehow to spark greatness in leaders-to-be, says Doug Wead, author of two books on presidents’ families. As two candidates with highly unusual family backgrounds vie for the presidency, Mr. Wead even sees Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama — to different degrees and in starkly different ways — fitting a pattern he describes as “Mama’s boys with absent fathers who were perceived by the sons as high achievers,” he says….

Some presidents’ families have been famously dysfunctional. Thomas Lincoln abandoned 9-year-old Abraham and his sister, 12, for several months in their frontier cabin right after the death of their mother, while he went to find a new wife, says Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author most recently of “Team of Rivals,” a book about Lincoln. When Thomas finally returned with their new stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, the couple found them “wild — ragged and dirty,” seeming barely human, the stepmother later wrote…

In another notably troubled family, Bill Clinton’s father died before Bill was born; his stepfather was a womanizer and an alcoholic who beat his mother, Virginia, according to biographer David Maraniss. Although Virginia, a warm, nurturing woman, made her son the adored centerpiece of the family, President Clinton said later that he often pined for his birth father…

Even the McCain family, with its tradition of distinguished military service, fits the pattern of an absent father and an overinvolved mother who fills the gap, Mr. Wead says. Sen. McCain’s father was a respected four-star Navy admiral and commander of Pacific forces in the Vietnam war, but he was mostly absent from home during Sen. McCain’s childhood. Sen. McCain reflects pride in his father and was taught to regard his long absences “not as a deprivation, but as an honor.”…


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Do you Poegle?

My friend and colleague Justin Hendrix and his co-author have just started their Poegle site.

And I am shocked–shocked!–that you don’t know what a Poegle is. A Poegle is, of course, a poem made with the input of Google. It is apparently the most avant-garde form of poetry, but one with a long heritage.

They’re running a contest on the site, so you can submit your own Poegles. If you win, you get a plastic segmented jump rope, which is essential.

Eventually, the Poegles will be published as a book. Have fun.


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Hannibal’s Y chromosome

Click on this map and read about the latest in this fantastic research effort called the “genographic project“. The dots show the areas of the Mediterranean with the highest frequency of the Phoenician haplotype.

They swabbed the cheeks of men from Syria and Cyprus to Malta and Morocco to have a closer look at the Y chromosome of these guys. (The Y chromosome is passed from father to son, and so a good marker of paternal descent. Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother, does the same trick for maternal descent.)

The result, as the New York Times article puts it, is that

as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor…

These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C.

Now, why is this exciting for the Hannibal Blog? Because Hannibal was a Phoenician, as I explained here when arguing that Denzel Washington, as much as I love that man, would not be the most ethnically correct choice of actor for this “African hero”.

Carthage, to remind, began as a Phoenician colony. The Roman word for Phoenician was Punic, hence the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. In Punic itself, the name Phoenicia means “land of purple”, because they loved that color and exported its dye.

Carthage’s mercenaries came from the other peoples of northern Africa at that time, the Numidians and the Libyans. The Numidians, as I said here, were the ancestors of today’s Berbers, and you might as well picture them looking like Zidane. The Libyans, as I said here, were not today’s Libyans, but “white” Mediterraneans. The Arabs, of course, showed up fully 900 years after Hannibal.


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I’m crushed: Only 3 out of 5

As you know by now, I’m a humor snob. So I’m gutted to discover, after taking the New Yorker‘s test for advanced readers, that I only scored three out of five. Being a Yoga snob as well, the last one threw me off. But even with that allowance, I’d only be four out of five. And so my Friday morning begins with a crisis.


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Backlash moment

I’ve been flying a lot this week, on a route that GoGo now covers (see map). Each time at the gate, a male-female pair of hip, young marketers (the woman in each case being smarter, hipper, attractive and Indian) offered me and the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types in the boarding queue a promotion to get connected via WiFi on the flight.

My reaction progressed in two steps:

Step 1) This is great! I will get on the flight, log on, snap a photo or two of the airplane aisle and then blog it right from my seat so that you all can see what a connected urban nomad I am. En passant, I would be corroborating my own thesis in my special report in The Economist on that topic (ie, “nomadism”).

Step 2) What utter nonsense! Have you lost it, Andreas? This is the last redoubt you have for reading. For the next few hours it is you and your biography of Meriwether Lewis, which is 500 pages and must be read and absorbed for you to make progress in one particular chapter of your own book. For once, no kids tugging on you, no phone ringing, no email alerts. Instead, deep, linear immersion. And you are thinking of giving that up just because… you can?

So you had no posts from me while I was in the air. And I’m guessing that you’re no worse off for it.

Incidentally, I noticed that the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types also passed on this opportunity for uninterrupted mid-air connectivity, after the same moment of initial temptation. Have we reached the point of backlash? A civilizing counter-trend?


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Spaces between words

Marc Davis

Marc Davis

The good conversations are always the impractical ones, I’ve discovered. Either I do a focussed interview of somebody and I end up with the right quotes and facts in my notebook, ready to write a story. Or I … have fun. The notebook winds up chaotic, but I end up thinking about all sorts of interesting things.

My lunch on Friday with Marc Davis, Yahoo’s “social media guru” was a good conversation. Yes, we dutifully got around to talking about how technology might a) make all people permanent producers of “content” (photos, text, video) and b) connect them socially. But first we indulged ourselves with the fun stuff.

Marc, it turns out, is a student of words. He studied at the University of Konstanz with Wolfgang Iser, author of such works as Der Akt des Lesens (The Act of Reading). We talked a lot about what communication is and whether it is even possible.

It is possible, of course, but there is an arbitrary dimension to it. A spews out words (in text, audio or video, or in person) and perhaps other gestures. B receives them and does something with them (or not). (Mis)communication happens somewhere between A and B.

As Marc puts it, it happens in “the spaces between words.” A has to say the words, but B has to put something into those spaces.

This immediately reminded me of my drawing and painting classes in college. “Look at the negative spaces,” my teacher kept saying. He meant: Don’t just draw the leg and hip and waist and so forth. Look at the shape of the empty space surrounding them. And it’s true. If you draw the empty space it’s always a better drawing.

The spaces between words are a little different, of course. They are for somebody else to fill in. So the skilled writer/storyteller/communicator uses words in such a way as to create empty spaces for the other person’s imagination and projection. The writer cannot control what the other persons puts in there, but can shape the space.

That is really difficult. It takes the second secret of good writing, ie empathy, to do it well.


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