Category Archives: Uncategorized

The other context for newspapers

Thanks to Stephanie (courtesy of the Orlando Sentinel) for keeping me au courant on trends in reading that affect the newspaper industry. (Possibly another implicit endorsement of the Kindle?)


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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. 😉

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Storytelling in ads

Story-telling: So far in this thread about stories and their telling, we’ve had highbrow and lowbrow, ancient and modern, written and spoken. How far can we stretch it? I think that every form of human communication involves story-telling. So ads, if they’re good, are stories too.

Consider the following, which is arguably the most famous single ad:

Ira Glass would commend it for immediately making us fell that:

  • “something is about to occur”
  • we are “heading in a direction” and “can’t get out” of the story now
  • there is “a bigger, universal something” (Orwellian oppression vs individual expression)
  • there is “action, action, action … and then thought”. (IBM = Big Brother; Apple = freedom)

It’s good storytelling.

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Oh evolve!

Apropos of our recent discussions about Charles Darwin, I find this on our site.

If I may say so, this looks like sliding scale of [insert bias]. The US is down there with Turkey. “Old Europe” clustered at the top.

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Great, if not greatest, thinker: Nietzsche

I vote on values

I vote on values

In this, the fourth, post in The Hannibal Blog‘s search to find the world’s greatest thinker ever, let’s examine another criterion: In order to be the greatest, does the thinker have to be the most expansive–ie, largest–in scope?

My short answer is No, but, as with the previous criterion, there is a catch.

The answer is mostly No because the great is the enemy of the good. Intellectual overstretch is a problem, and most of the great thinkers in history were great precisely because they chose one well-defined are of human interest for their contribution.

The converse is also true. As you will by now have guessed, I am a fan of Einstein’s. But Einstein’s light began dimming at the exact point, in mid-career, when he began to look for a theory of everything, a grand unifying theory, an idea that would explain not just something but all things. Up to that point, he had chosen one thing at a time (light, gravity, time, etc) and had done, ahem, rather well.

So let’s begin a short and explicitly incomplete sub-series of posts on truly great thinkers who shed light on one particular area of interest. Consider these the “honorable mentions” in my search. (There will also be a runner-up, and then of course a winner. If you consider this suspenseful, I feel flattered.) I have no doubt that you will let me have it, as always, in the comments. Today:

Friedrich Nietzsche

Area of interest: The origins of “morality”

Why great: Because he exposed so much of bourgeois “values” as the hypocritical piffle that it is. With highly original and ingenious methods (tracing the evolution of words), Nietzsche described the process in which “healthy” and natural values become inverted and perverted in the process of “civilization”. The masses of the downtrodden feel ressentiment at the strong and healthy, and finally stage a slave revolt in which the high is redefined as low, the good as evil, the strong as cruel; and, conversely, the weak as good, the impotent as chaste, the poor as humble et cetera.

Comment: As with all thinkers, you don’t need to believe it all; but keeping Nietzsche in mind is fantastic armor against some of the glib moralistic bilge that assaults us daily.

Why some comments are good and others suck

The comments on The Hannibal Blog tend to be excellent–witty, funny, sophisticated–which is a great thrill to me because it suggests that my blog draws interesting (and I dare say erudite) readers.

By contrast, the comments on the website of my employer, The Economist, tend overwhelmingly to be banal, moronic and useless. There are gems in there, but on they whole the comments are so bad that, internally, we recently spent a long, long time discussing what to do about that.

So I was delighted when I came across a very well-thought-out post on the blog of Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a media economist. Given the publication I write for, it should have occurred to me to apply the logic of economics to the problem. Oh well, Nicolas beat me to it.

The problem is captured, as Nicolas shows, in this chart:

As Nicolas explains,

the more commenters you have, the more likely it is that one of them is a troll. … That’s why I drew the blue curve of the marginal value of a single comment. It decreases as an inverse function of the number of commenters, itself a function of the size of the audience.

Hence the red line: as the audience grows in size, the total value of comments increases more slowly.

Now for moderation. I’m assuming that the cost of moderating a single comment remains constant, so that the total cost of moderation increases linearly. Just look at the curve. At some point, it costs more to moderate comments that to get rid of them…

My point is simply that a larger audience automatically leads to a conversation of lesser value, relative to the number of participants.

The answer to the vexing issue of why The Hannibal Blog has great comments while The Economist has awful comments thus appears shockingly simple: The former has a small audience, the latter a large audience.

I will let this percolate through my morning brain. There may be concrete, real-world implications in this….


Traveling again, but….

… posting more or less as normal.

(Incidentally, I’m getting all confused between my British spelling for The Economist and my American spelling for the blog: Travelling? Traveling?)