Have you ever felt that Monday seems yellow or that the number 5 smells like lemon? I think that most of us have correlated some days, numbers or random moments with a particular smell, color, shape. This happens only after we have experienced something and our conscience builds clever mechanisms to help our brain remember this special (good or bad) moment for us. So this doesn’t happen to most of us constantly and in a regular basis but only in special occasions.
But what is the case of people who unconsciously and automatically think of a color in the sound of Mozart for example? This is called synethesia and I find it one of the most interesting and peculiar human conditions that I have ever read about so I decided to make a somehow small research on it and write this post explaining in more details what it is and how it could connect to next generation marketing.
DEFINITIONS
Synesthesia is a harmless perceptual condition is which the stimulation of one sense triggers experiences in another sense. For example, hearing music might cause a synesthete to experience colors or textures. Or a sound might trigger a taste, or the concept of a weekday may trigger a color. It needs to be clarified that synesthesia is not a hallucination, but an internal experience. Approximately 4% of the population possesses some form of it and the scientific term for these people is synesthete. It has been reported that if someone has one form, such as colored letters, then he is quite likely to have another form, such as colored months.
Take a look at how a synesthete woman sees when she listens to a particular song.
Pretty cool, isnt it?
THE TEST
Before I write some words about the sources I found around synesthesia, you can check if you are a synesthete yourself by spending a few minutes in this scientific test which is 100% idiot proof, so believe me you cannot pretend to be synesthetes. Just for the record I am not synesthete, although I wish I were.
HOW IT STARTED
I first read about synesthesia last year in Mimis Androulakis’ (a Greek MP) book “7th sense”. (I have written about this brilliant book again some months ago here and you can read the whole book here) Unfortunately, the book is written in Greek and it is not translated. Androulakis had dedicated a whole chapter of his book to the condition of synesthesia and in a very brief description, and a quite draft translation, he had written:
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“Greek philosophers were the first to talk about the mathematic/musical principle of the universal harmony and they spent years trying to measure in quantifiable means the “color” of the music. Plato correlated the colors of the 8 celestial spheres with 8 music notes, Aristotle categorized the colors only judging by their brightness and 13 centuries later Neuton linked the sound waves with the light waves and found the same frequencies. A synesthete creates a specially tailored, personal alogorithm which functions as a converter of music to colors and shapes. Our senses are not an objective 3D photograph of our world. They convert the energy coming from external stimuli in electrochemical neural signs.”
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Androulakis also connects the phenomenon of synesthesia with art noting down that exceptionally talented artists are usually synesthetes. One of the most famous cases was Vladimir Nabokov, the famous Russian novelist and author of Lolita.
This is a part from his memoir, Speak Memory.
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The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a head of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that the colors were all wrong. We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine, and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever. Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more ore less irritating sounds. Under certain circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concern piano and wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones.
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But there are recent studies which actually prove what Androulakis was implying about artists and synesthesia:
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Scientists estimate that synesthesia is about seven times more common in poets, novelists, and artists than in the rest of the population.
In the last decade, this connection between synesthesia and art has drawn much attention from neuroscientists. And now several genetic and behavioral studies aim to pin down the biological mechanisms linking art and synesthesia, with hopes of answering even bigger questions about how every brain perceives art.
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DAVID EAGLEMAN
Last week, I watched a talk from David Eagleman about the source of hatred from a neuroscience point of view and I was more than lucky to have a brief talk with him. David Eagleman is considered the leading scientist in the field of synesthesia since he has published many books, held many conferences and given many interviews.
In the talk you can watch below, David Eagleman explains in very simple terms what synesthesia really is, how it works and all the mental processes behind it. Actually, he is trying to decode a tiny fracture of the mental processes because the human brain is made of millions of neurons whose interactions would need decades of research to be translated.
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I want to talk to you about brain, the most complicated device of the universe. It weights 3 pounds, and consists of billions of neurons and there are so many connections/synapses that if you could cut a cubicle milimetre of human brain tissue, you have more connections than stars in the milky way galaxy. If you lose your pinky nothing would happen, but if you lose a tiny small part of your brain your whole perception of the world would change.
Color does not exist in the world, it is a construction of your brain. An interpretation, a perception. I have taken this idea from the philosophical context to a purely scientific.
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And it doesn’t stop here. Eagleman recently gave an interview in Guardian discussing this exact thing. Who controls our brain, why the reality is completely different from one to person to the other and why this doesn’t change our daily life at all.
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It is not contradictory to recognise that we are sealed off from most of reality, and that we can discover more of it by a process of careful experimentation. That is the endeavour of science. For example, you cannot see, hear or touch radio waves, but you can build machines to translate the waves into the biologically delimited language in which you can understand them. You can build such machines only because science reaches beyond what we know to discover new realms.
Neuroscience is uncovering a bracing view of what’s happening below the radar of our conscious awareness, but that makes your life no more “helpless, ignorant, and zombie-like” than whatever your life is now. If you were to read a cardiology book to learn how your heart pumps, would you feel less alive and more despondently mechanical? I wouldn’t. Understanding the details of our own biological processes does not diminish the awe, it enhances it. Like flowers, brains are more beautiful when you can glimpse the vast, intricate, exotic mechanisms behind them.
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SO WHAT ABOUT MARKETING?
Ok then. This is synesthesia, it is a condition that you are either born with it or not, it is pretty cool and it is more frequent in talented artists. How can this be linked to marketing and advertising?
At the beginning of this post I wrote on how most of us connect a specific taste with a shape, color or a day with a specific music. This is not synesthesia but a natural process of the memory. Another similar phenomenon is what we see when we close our eyes, or when we stare something for a long time. Androulakis calls this a “negative afterimage” and is really strong. How useful would it be for brands to plant these negative afterimages or random correlations to your brain? So for example when you see a bowl of fries you automatically think of Coca-Cola?
THE COLORS
The most innocent version of this marketing approach is studying the colors, what they convey and which feelings they trigger to people. For example, everyone knows that red is a color which communicates passion, love and strong feelings while blue is all about trust. This is why most banks have blue logos. You can read more about the value of colors in marketing here.
SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING
But as we move further we meet “subliminal advertising”. The most famous experiment around subliminal advertising is this of James Vicary in 1957. This guy planted super fast images during a film saying “Are you Hungry? Eat Pop Corn” and “Coca-Cola”. It was reported that the sales of these 2 products were suddenly on a big rise because people were “made” to crave for Coca-Cola and pop corn. Some years later, Vicary himself admitted that he had “cheated” on the findings to push his research but the deep essence was true. Subliminal marketing works, as you can read here and here, authorities have forbidden it. However, it was actually performed once more some 2 years ago by BMW. Take a look at it.
MEDIA THEORY
The story of next generation marketing trying to find new ways to lure customers continues in the media theory field. There are research papers (especially this one) which study the super fragmented media landscape of our era and its correlation on how we experience advertising while we are sitting in our couch or driving for example. This results to really useful consulting for media agencies on how they should implement their media planning strategies. So eg when should we have radio ads instead of TVCs and why? In an advertising world which is in a mess and people don’t yet trust science and technology, this is a goldmine.
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Today’s media encourages grazing, surfing, flipping, a perpetual flow of sight and sounds; a pastiche receptivity that mitigates against any form of tradition and not so traditional media engagement studies, particularly those at the purely cognitive level. Sound is often disregarded at TV studies. However, it is better suited that sight to communicate to a dispersed audience because such is experienced in ebbing flows that allow for attentive. The simultaneous media experience is a nonnarrative form with no beginning, middle or end, with one media flowing through the other – synesthesia.
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Digital advertising is in front of a critical crossroad for its future. Everyone might know that digital advertising will overlap the traditional in the next years but at the same time its sheer volume has caused great saturations to consumers. As this report from Upstream reveals, in 1996 the total ad impressions were 172 billion while now they are 5 trillion.
Digital marketers are aware of these figures and this is why they are in constant search of “stickiness”. Stickiness is an unofficial term of when an ad can get easily imprinted in people’s mind and as a result becomes viral.
The last days, there has been a great speculation about the virality of videos because of the tremendous popularity that Stop Kony video gained. Some people spoke about the essential creativity that an ad needs to display, others talked about originality, repetition etc. Some believe that when a marketing message supports a noble cause is more easily shared than an ad created by a global firm focused only on selling a product.
But what the real experts believe? I read 3 articles from different sources about different aspects of marketing stickiness and totally different ways of achieving it.
1.
Jay Heinrich is a corporate guru. What do corporate gurus do? They get hired from big organisations to conduct seminars dealing with a range of issues from team building to creative strategies development. There are several gurus who specialise in different aspects (the only one I knew was John Kao, who is a famous academic). Heinrich specialises in effective and creative communication strategies and Businessweek reports the story of him being hired by Ogilvy (the masters of creativity) in order to inspire creativity. We learn that Heinirch is trying to solve every possible communication argument based on the 3 Aristotelian principles of ethos, pathos and logos and his strategy proves more than convincing.
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On the tube ride back to his hotel in Bloomsbury, Heinrichs grins, “Better to teach a man to fish than give him the fish.” He laughs. “And by the way, clichés—we call them ‘commonplaces’—are among the most useful devices in rhetoric if you use them right.”
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2.
Harvard Business Review recently had a dedicated article on the elements that an ad must have in order to become viral. The funny thing is that the article itself is written as a list, a technique which is famous to trigger people’s attention and desire to click/share something. The very small attention span that people have when they are online is the basic feature of the article.
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Although the Mr. Bean video initially succeeds in attracting viewers, it doesn’t keep them watching. That’s because the joy the video creates is delivered at a fairly constant level. We’ve found that ads that produce stable emotional states generally aren’t effective at engaging viewers for very long.
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3.
The US elections are close and United States is one of the few countries that allows the broadcasting of negative political ads. In other words, it is legal to display an ad which will focus on the bad policies/decisions of a candidate. Political campaigning, a very influential industry in US, is a really “tough sport”. It includes huge amounts of money, conflicts of interest, lobbying, individual sponsoring (something which is legal in US), crisis management, facebook ads but nothing is more influential than a perfect negative ad. New Yorker has a profile on Larry McCarthy, the most famous Republican adman, who reveals some of his secrets on how his ads have literally taken strong candidates out of the map. The interesting thing is that McCarthy is the leading ad strategist for mitt Romeny in 2012 elections.
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Indeed, McCarthy sees himself as a craftsman. He told an interviewer that what drives him is “what every ad guy is seeking: the Holy Grail of the perfect spot.”
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Daniel Everett is a famous linguistics professor and a christian missionary who lived for many years with an indigenous Amazon tribe. He managed to learn their language, Piraha, and came back to write a book which basically tries to bring down Universal Grammar. This is a term invented by the famous Noam Chomsky in 1960s and in a few words implies that that the knowledge we acquire through the language is embedded to the human mind and this is exactly what distinguished humans from animals. On the other hand, Everett supports that the structure of language doesnt spring from the mind but from the society. It seems a boring argument and the article is quite huge but it might actually prove that an Amazonian tribe can make us think in a different way fo human kind.
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As he writes in his book: “The discovery that humans are better at building human houses than porpoises tells us nothing about whether the architecture of human houses is innate.”
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2. The Story Behind the Olympus Scandal / Bloomberg Businessweek
Michael Woodford becomes COO of Japane firm Olympus, a company which manufactures a range of products from cameras to medical equipment. He travels to Japan to investigate a number of suspicious loans that Olympus had taken. Yakuza starts to get involved…
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Woodford hadn’t known any of the details of these transactions. “I thought this was something that needed to be looked into. It didn’t register as a massive fraud. If I had any suspicions, it was that it had to do with incompetence.” He returned to Tokyo the next week for a Friday board meeting. He assumed the allegations in the Facta report would be the matter at hand, but the article never came up. Woodford found that odd, but second-guessed himself. Maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. Perhaps this is nothing.
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3. Furniture Meets the Digital Age / NY Times
An article of NY Times about whether pieces of furnitures need to be redesigned to meet the needs of “digital man”. Philippe Starck is also interviewed.
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Mr. Rashid envisions a world in which furnishings “will start speaking or feeling the technology,” and cites possible near-future advances like upholstery that reacts to temperature, tiny speakers built into seating, and wallpaper embedded with liquid crystals that turn a wall into a giant TV screen. “That’s the epitome of dematerializing,” he said.
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4. The Digital-Physical / CraigMod
The full story of how the innovative and beautiful Flipboard app was created. Really insightful. (remember what I have written for FlipBoard here).
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We talked about what a wild journey we had been on. But, I piped up, I worried that the journey — and with it lessons we learned — seemed to be fading in the post-launch quickness that often characterizes Silicon Valley. What did we do right and wrong are great question, but even more generally: What did we do?
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5. The Story Of A Suicide / New Yorker
The story of 2 freshmen students, who share a university room, and how a tweet and a PC camera can lead to a suicide.
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Clementi’s death became an international news story, fusing parental anxieties about the hidden worlds of teen-age computing, teen-age sex, and teen-age unkindness.
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How come that you are reading this blog? You either clicked on it because you are following me on Twitter, or because someone else retweeted it/posted it online and actually recommended it to you. I could advertise it using Google Adwords, draw a search optimisation strategy or use any other kind of online advertising software.
All these advertising methods are the commonplace nowadays (I have written about them here and here) as it is a matter of time that digital advertising will overtake the traditional one. Out of all these digital advertising strategies there is one which stands out and has the potential to create huge revenues for the companies which will fully grasp it.
The act of posting, sharing and recommending articles/photos/videos in social media is a really powerful tool for advertisers because the tendency to follow our friends’ recommendations is deeply embedded in our minds. This happened in offline world, when a friend disapproved of a product/movie we would never try it even if its ad budget was huge, and it certainly happens in online world too. Some things, like how we define friends and how we can distinguish which piece is truly shared or sponsored, have changed but the deeply rooted need to trust people around us is -and probably will be forever - still there (I have written for the really strong connections of online communities here).
Data prove this argument and actually some days ago Monday Note, a blog dedicated to media business, posted a really insightful number. It reported that it is the first time that Facebook created more traffic for Guardian than Google did. This finding was really shocking as it brings to surface something that everyone was talking about but no one believed it would happen that soon.
Advertising is the main source of revenues of most creative industries and especially social media and news outlets are heavily dependent on finding the secret recipe of how online customers should be targeted.
During the past 2 months, I had the chance to read big articles about the ad strategy of 3 really successful online players and I found out that all of them face the same kind of problems, how people will click -name it ZMOT, point of conversion-, and are trying to solve them with different methods.
1.
New Yorker had a very detailed report on how YouTube will develop the next years, how it plans to persuade people to spend more time on it daily and finally how it will evolve from a site in which you watch content posted from others to a site with original content - your online TV.
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A prominent Hollywood insider told me, with a note of nostalgia in his voice, “I can tell you what YouTube is not going to do—generate shows like ‘Friends,’ ‘24,’ and ‘C.S.I.’ The world of TV I grew up with, where hit shows threw off hundreds of millions for the creators and networks—that’s not going to happen.” But others think it will; all it takes is a hit.
I wondered if there was any danger to the brand, in moving so decisively from the user-generated anarchy of the old YouTube to YouTV, where control and surveillance are centralized in the heart of the Googleplex. In its attempt to increase watch time, attract more viewers, and provide advertisers with as customized a customer as possible, YouTube risks alienating its core constituency—Chad Hurley’s “everyday people.”
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It is evident that according to how Youtube will decide to move on with its content strategy will bring a shift to every part of the advertising chain. Sellers, buyers, prices etc. Its total redesign of the the homepage is indicative of the “sharing” element I outlined at the beginning. It displays the videos that your friends (from Google + of course) have watched.
2.
Bloomberg recently had a big profile report on Twitter and its attempts to lure advertisers on its platform. Despite its spike on user registration numbers, Twitter was really lacking a coherent ad strategy till now and its revenues were really problematic in comparison with the hype and the potential it has. The last months Twitter has hired ad executives and business strategists, who have put into actions several ad features for advertisers like promoted tweets and sponsored trending topics but none of these seem to take off.
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Over the past six months, Twitter has tried to give advertisers such as GM a variety of new ways to spend money on the service. Last September it began allowing advertisers to send promoted tweets to targeted subsets of people even if they are not following those brands on the service. That same month it began accepting political ads from candidates and political action committees and designating them with a distinctive purple check mark. On Feb. 28, Twitter announced it would also start sending promoted tweets to mobile phones, beating Facebook in the race to make money from exploding mobile Internet use. Later this month, Twitter will open the doors of its ad network to corner bakeries, taco trucks, and other small businesses, which will be able to funnel ads onto the service by submitting bids at Twitter.com without having to talk to a salesperson.
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3.
BuzzFeed is the latest Internet global sensation. It is a website which creates interesting news stories of various content backgrounds based on the principle of listicles (about which I have written here), aggregates pieces with great viral potential and has created online “stickers” like LOL, OMG and WTF which help people share the news in social media. Buzzfeed’s founder Matt Stopera, the guy who also co-created Huffington Post, has fully grasped the tendency to share and follow our friends’ recommendations and has created specially tailored algorithms which can identify which these stories are. Moreover, he has hired respectable journalists - like an editor from The Politico - to create original, high quality content amongst pieces like “the 5 most notorious urban legends. In this way, he manages to target many different keywords in SEO strategies managing to lure more and more people in his website. The most innovative card he has brought to the table, though, is the “branded content”. These are stories, curated by advertisers like BBC, which totally fit the website’s content and aesthetics. As Bloomberg says, which has an extensive report on Buzzfeed, Stopera might have found the perfect ad model for the “Facebook Era”.
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BuzzFeed’s top advertiser is General Electric (GE). One of GE’s branded-content campaigns featured brief “factory flyover” videos of GE-built power plants shot from a helicopter. Once the ads appeared, BuzzFeed and GE commissioned a study from the analytics company Vizu measuring consumers’ sentiment toward GE, depending on how they were exposed to the ads. The study found that people had a higher opinion of GE if they happened upon the videos through a shared link on a social network than if they saw it directly. “We all understand that if our friend—or a community we are a part of—shares something with you, you’re going to accept it and embrace it differently than if it were through paid placement or if you happened to stumble upon it,” says Paul Marcum, director of GE’s global digital marketing and programming.
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Read here my thoughts - somehow similar to the branded content of BuzzFeed- on how traditional advertising could evolve in order to engage consumers much more effectively.
1. A CONVERSATION WITH PETER THIEL - THE AMERICAN INTEREST
Francis Fukuyama, the famous political theorist, is interviewing the hugely successful investor/tech theorist/Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel (you can read his great profile in New Yorker). They are discussing about technology and its impact in life, how we can live longer and many many other stuff.
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I don’t agree with the Steve Jobs commencement speech. I’m deeply skeptical about any sort of rationalization of death. It’s tricky to make the ethics too consequentialist, because even if it were true that longevity is bankrupting the welfare state or the healthcare system, we can’t unlearn the things we’ve learned
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2. GAZPROM’S EMPIRE AT THE END OF THE EARTH - BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
All big publications have started focusing on Russia during the last weeks because of the social uproar against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic way of politics. Bloomberg managed to get deep into Gazprom, the biggest supplier of gas in the world. This article uncovers the really tight links between Gazprom and the Russian government, it reports from its northern gas extraction site and reveals how US are facing Gazprom’s global success. Like a good Hollywood spy movie.
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Europe’s dependence on Gazprom for natural gas gives the Kremlin power to leave millions in the cold should it choose to do so (as it did to Ukraine after pricing disputes in 2006 and 2009). A deep freeze in Russia this winter has increased domestic demand for fuel, producing a shortfall in natural gas supply to Europe. Over the last year, as European customers have been squeezed by surging gas prices (generating Gazprom’s record earnings), some of Gazprom’s Western clients have demanded arbitration.
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3. RAIS BHUIYAN, AMERICAN - ESQUIRE
The 2011 December issue of Esquire (US) was dedicated to the American of the Year. Most stories were not really good, but the story behind Rais Bhuiyan is really breath-taking. How a Bangladeshian in his way to live the American dream got shot by a racist after 9/11, how he managed to thrive and why he cried when his “almost” murderer was killed at the death penalty.
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Bhuiyan returned to Dallas a different man. “I could feel that I’m not worried about myself anymore,” he would later explain. “Instead, I started thinking about this guy, Mark Stroman, who is waiting behind bars for the last nine years to die.”
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4. CITIZEN PHILOSOPHERS - BOSTON REVIEW
A high-school teacher in poor Itapua, Brazil, managed to teach the students “philosophy”, a real milestone in their way to become good citizens.
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But can philosophy really become part of ordinary life? Wasn’t Socrates executed for trying? Athenians didn’t thank him for guiding them to the examined life, but instead accused him of spreading moral corruption and atheism. Plato concurs: Socrates failed because most citizens just aren’t philosophers in his view. To make them question the beliefs and customs they were brought up in isn’t useful because they can’t replace them with examined ones.
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5. DO SPORTS BUILD CHARACTER OR DAMAGE IT - THE CHRONICLE
Mark Edmundson is trying to find out, citing both personal experience and scientific research, if sports can have a positive effect in a child’s personality or not. A really interesting view.
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Sports are many things, and one of those things is an imitation of heroic culture. They mimic the martial world; they fabricate the condition of war. This fabrication is in many ways a good thing, necessary to the health of a society. For it seems to me that Plato is right: The desire for glory is part of almost everyone’s spirit. Plato called this desire thymos and associated its ascendancy and celebration with Homer.
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Edge is a weblog curated by John Brockman, one of the most famous intellectual thinkers and “cultural impressarios”. He is a very influential figure in the US as he has successfully combined art, design and science in all of his works and if you quickly google his name you will find dedicated profiles of his in various publications like the NY Times and The Guardian. This page here, has everything you need to know about him.
Edge quickly became on my favorite bookmarks. You can find posts about neuroscience, essays about art, videos from academics on engineering and generally very interesting stuff.
So when Brockman publishes a book under the title “This will make you smarter” is something worth taking a look at. It is a book in which Brockman is “talking” with 151 big thinkers and asking advice on how people can enrich their “cognitive toolkit”. I havent read it yet (just ordered it) but I found out some points which make it essential to read.
- David Brooks has written the introductory note on this book. David Brooks is a NY Times columnist (and many other significant things at the same time) whom I find the most interesting across every newspaper I am reading. I started reading NYT half a year ago and during these 6 months he has written about the war in Iraq, Facebook IPO, financial crisis, behavioral economics etc. Make full use of the free articles that NY Times allows you to read before you hit paywall and check on Brooks. You can also check his TED talk at the end of this post.
- Maria Popova, the girl who curates the beautiful and useful Brainpickings, wrote a review about “This will make you smarter” and she had some details on the people who are interviewed or quoted. The famous neurologist Daniel Kahneman (I have written about him here), the founder of Wired Kevin Kelly are just 2 of the 151 essayists featured in the book.
1. STEVE BALLMER REBOOTS, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Person figures behind technology giants were always interesting pieces both for the journalists and the readers. Since Steve Jobs died everyone and Bill Gates resigned, Jeff Bezos is one of the few remaining enigmatic characters. The other one is Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. He used to create PR disasters, he was losing his words on stage and he was the one to blame for all the wrong corporate decisions (especially in the mobile industry). Now, Microsoft is in a phase of total revamp. Skype, Nokia Lumia, the highly anticipated new Windows and the highly profitable Kinect have boosted Microsoft. And he loves it.
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At a Microsoft store in the Bellevue Square mall, Ballmer darts from one display area to another, extolling the virtues of the merchandise. He knows the specifications of each item—price, screen technology, touchpad sensitivity—and has opinions on everything, including the music playlists displayed on the computers. Lady Gaga, he likes. “Gnarls Barkley, I hate,” he says.
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2. ALAIN DE BOTTON: A LIFE IN WRITING, GUARDIAN
Alain de Botton is a social observer, an ideas man, a philosopher. He became famous by writing pop science books about how to use simple philosophical dogmas to ease our everyday life and he has also created a “school of life” in London. I have read 2 of his books and the truth is that I didnt like them, reaching to the same conclusion that many did. I didn’t learn anything new and I felt like I was reading the same thing all over again expressed with different words. No matter what, he is an interesting man, he has studied the core message of religions all over the world and this Guardian interview is perfectly structured. Worth reading it.
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Can’t society get to where De Botton wants it to go without plundering religion? He argues not: “Politicians want people to be nice neighbours but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.”
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3. THE CIVIL ARCHIPELAGO / NO EXIT, NEW YORKER
It is amazing how New Yorker journalists manage to extensively draw the profile of influential personalities and at the same time explain in full details how these personalities affect the countries that they govern/live in. The last 2 months New Yorker profiled Vladimir Putin, Nikola Sarkozy and Dilma Roussef. Unfortunately, the piece for Brazil’s president is behind a paywall, so enjoy the other 2.
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Personally and politically, Sarkozy is such a singular figure that he can seem easy to caricature, but caricature thrives on exaggeration, and he is so overstated that he leaves the caricaturist little to work with. French Presidents are expected to possess an aura of aesthetic and intellectual refinement that dignifies the nation.
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4. DO DRONES UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY?, NY TIMES
A big opinion article of NY Times about the effect that drones (unmanned aerial systems) have in democracy and America’s constitution. Really enlightening.
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The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.
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