From a review in The New York Times of Graham Swift’s memoir, Making An Elephant:

But probably the most affecting essay is his recollection of fishing adventures with Ted Hughes, who showed him some of his favorite stretches of river in Devon. Swift recounts that “once, when I said goodbye to him to come back to London and made that glib and flimsy remark, ‘Back to the real world,’ he said, without any trace of sentimentality and almost sternly, ‘No, this is the real world.’ ”

Something to ponder.

Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle – life – 19 December 2008 – New Scientist

Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The visionaries: Meet the men who predicted the crash – Profiles, People – The Independent

…I say listen to negative rather than positive advice. When you go to a book store there are plenty of publications telling you how to get rich, but none telling you how not to go bankrupt. To put it another way, if you want to get rich, avoid being poor. Negative advice is more robust than positive advice; it is rarely respected, though, unless you present it in a digestible form. For instance, various journalists recently asked me my opinion of the financial crisis, and I said I didn’t know. All I said is that the banks are being piloted by people who know a lot less about the risks than they think they do. That’s negative advice. 

from an interview with Nassim Taleb.

My love-hate relationship with working in offices | Technology | The Guardian

What technology has changed is the speed and density of the links that bind external workers into the social mesh of the office. The mixture of email, instant messaging, texting and just plain telephone calls mean that a mid-range mobile phone now offers much more computing power for journalistic purposes than the entire resources of a national newspaper could 10 years ago – and I can put it in my pocket. Laptops are nicer to read and write on, but this is still an astonishing development. If all that journalism needed were technology, then everyone in the western world could be a journalist now.

Yet there is still one huge advantage to offices which working at home can never approach. Just as you generate your own efficiencies at home, so do you generate your own inefficiencies: all the perfections of my software and hardware are the result of hours spent not writing. In an office, there are politics and gossip. Outside it, you have to make your own entertainment, but this is as easy as opening a new browser window. There is a law of the conservation of busywork that operates all across the universe. So it does not matter that we could now in principle work more efficiently on a desert island than in the most modern and impersonal office. In the end, technology can never supply the pressure towards productivity supplied by a room full of fellow workers, all apparently busy – even if they are just emailing gossip and YouTube links to one another.

The pressure towards productivity… hmmm some truth to that, but I think it’s more than a question of environment. Motivation, interest, meaning, habit. They all play a part.

Even a Bullingdon baronet can struggle in the rarefied air above democracy

Much has been made of Rothschild’s private nature, and he seems to have an instinctive grasp of how to turn any weaker personality traits – perhaps even catagelophobia, the fear of being ridiculed – to his advantage, cultivating an air of quiet steel, rather in the way that Charles Saatchi or Kate Moss have long traded on the intriguing power of saying nothing at all.

Osborne has betrayed himself as the opposite – a blabbermouth who picked a fight with Mandelson on ground on which he was so compromised that a regional sales rep whose Vauxhall Astra glovebox contains a copy of The Art of War could tell you that defeat was inevitable. Even more staggering, for a chap who has known Rothschild since they were at prep school, was Osborne’s inability to realise that leaking details of conversations that took place while he was enjoying Rothschild’s hospitality would incense his host.

Corfugate is primarily a tale of club rules broken. Not literal clubs, in most cases – though Bilderberg Group meetings have been mentioned – but the deck-shoed networks of the super-powerful, who sweetly allow politicians the illusion of being allowed to run things, and even to start the odd war, so long as they think it will bring down the price of oil. Most of the politicians ever allowed within a sniff of this world learn its mores, just as Mandelson has. They are pathetically grateful to be asked to Rupert Murdoch’s annual retreats; they allow Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud to buy them £34,000-worth of private jet travel, as Cameron did on this same Greek trip; and they don’t do anything so vulgar as to mention in the register of members’ interests that they had a meeting with Mr Murdoch while they were there.

This is nothing new. John Campbell’s brilliant biography of Margaret Thatcher chronicles forensically the manner in which Thatcher treated Murdoch as a powerful Reagan-like friend and ally, given free access to her, and invited several times to spend Christmas at Chequers. And yet, she never once mentioned Murdoch in her memoirs.

Whatever goes on in the rarefied air above democracy will always be politicians’ dirty little secret. If it wasn’t such a dirty big one, that is. The only mystery is why we seem to restrict use of the word oligarch to Russians. Oleg Deripaska, the man Osborne allegedly solicitied for a donation, is described thusly, though not Mr Murdoch, or indeed Mr Freud. Let us end this reticence. What greater credit to our meritocracy, after all, than an erstwhile popstar press officer’s rise to princemaker?

Letter from California: Jumpers: The New Yorker

Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

• Interesting feature in The Times following up on Ken Baldwin.
• Discussion of Baldwin, the bridge and the causes of suicide in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Parliament climate change protesters threaten further disruption – Telegraph

A new coalition of groups known as the Climate Suffragettes, which includes stalwarts of middle England the Women’s Institute as well as more extreme environmental movements Climate Rush and Plane Stupid, are calling for reform of environment policy, a halt to building more coal fired power stations and an end to airport expansion. 

Wearing Edwardian clothes and handing out cake, the protest started peacefully in Parliament Square with speeches from each group, however arrests were made when individuals attempted to recreate the “rush” on Parliament and get through police lines at St Stephen’s Entrance. It is understood one person was taken to hospital with an injured foot.

The labour market is looking unchanged on Chichele Road in north London. There were around 40 men looking for casual work at 7.45am, Tuesday 9 October.

Waiting for work.

Fascinating case of Clark Rockefeller, erstwhile German citizen Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

The man with the eccentric accent, the tantalizing hints of family fortune and the impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market is actually Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who grew up in Germany, came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and never left, not even contacting his family back home for the last 20 years.

More information

• Long feature on Gerhartsreiter, in Vanity Fair, 2009
• How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust (187.81 kB)
  from Boston.com
  
• Video news report from 2008, NECN

Catherine Townsend: Sleeping Around – Catherine Townsend, Columnists – The Independent

…my passion for British men was reignited this week after I agreed to a blind date with an American. “This guy is a writer too, and he’s really emotionally aware,” my friend Victoria said.

I should have known that this would be the death knell for our date. Much as I love dissecting my feelings over cocktails, I want to be fantasising about leaping into bed on a first date, not lying on a therapist’s couch.

But Ben was handsome and fit, and within 20 minutes he had clasped my hands in his. “So, Cat, tell me something you’ve never told anyone.”

Of course, this is really shorthand for, “Tell me a mildly embarrassing story that makes you look cute in the end,” so I told him a funny childhood anecdote and said, “Over to you.”

“Well, when I was a boy, I used to dress up as a little girl, and my dad would beat me with a wooden spoon until I bled.”

I looked for a punchline, but there wasn’t one, so I panicked, reached for the bar snacks and smiled. “Peanut?” I was trying to defuse an awkward situation with humour, which is probably why British men and I get along so well.

Ben probably would have been Canadian journalist Leah McLaren’s dream date. I read this week that she is cashing in on the portrayal of English men as drunk women-haters who are too polite and repressed ever to make a move by turning one of her pieces, headlined “The Tragic Ineptitude of the English Male”, into a television drama in Canada.

Maybe I’m the one with the problem. Ben understands intimacy and had no problem giving me his attention, but for me, it was too much, too soon.