I’ve had two Toyota Prius cars so far and they’re easily the best cars I’ve ever owned (and I’ve had a lot of reputable automobiles in my time, including a Jaguar MK II, several Volkswagens and about five of those oh-so-sensible Swedish makes), so I’m a bit puzzled by the media firestorm about the recalls. Of course it’s a PR disaster for the company — and I’m sure they’ve handled it badly. (They could learn a thing or two from the way Amazon handled the Orwell-deletions on the Kindle, for example.)

As far as the sticky-accelerator problem is concerned, I can’t see why it should be much of a threat to any competent driver. As an 18-year-old learner-driver said to me the other day, “why don’t people just put the car into neutral, switch off the engine and coast to a halt?” So is this firestorm a symptom of headless-chicken hysteria, or am I missing something?

The Guardian has made a valiant attempt to explain the Prius braking ‘problem’ in today’s issue. Having run the animation it occurs to me that some of the scandalised Prius owners who’ve been talking to the media may not have used an ABS system before. At any rate, the ABS on my Prius behaves exactly as the ABS on the Saabs I owned before switching to Toyota — and I remember being disconcerted when I first braked in an ABS-enabled car.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for the Guardian link.

Very nice animated explanation by the Guardian.

Well, up to a point. Interesting piece, though.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

The London Review of Books has a terrific review by Toril Moi of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Connoisseurs of these matters (of whom I am, coincidentally, one, having once been married to someone who wrote an M.Phil dissertation on Beauvoir’s ‘presentation of self’ in The Second Sex) will know that the book has an interesting translation history. The original English version (by H.M. Parshley) was lively and readable, but had been heavily abridged by its publisher. Many years later, after much fuss, the publishers eventually commissioned a new translation. In an extensive review, Toril Moi leaves it for dead. In summary:

After taking a close look at the whole book, I found three fundamental and pervasive problems: a mishandling of key terms for gender and sexuality, an inconsistent use of tenses, and the mangling of syntax, sentence structure and punctuation.

Moi has some delicious examples of the crassness of the new translation. Here’s one:

Even the most famous sentence in The Second Sex is affected. Parshley translated ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient’ as ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Borde and Malovany-Chevallier write: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.’ This is an elementary grammatical mistake. French does not use the indefinite article after être (‘be’) and devenir (‘become’), but no such rule exists in English. (Comment devenir traducteur? must be translated as ‘How to become a translator?’) This error makes Beauvoir sound as if she were committed to a theory of women’s difference. But Beauvoir’s point isn’t that a baby girl grows up to become woman; she becomes a woman, one among many, and in no way the incarnation of Woman, a concept Beauvoir discards as a patriarchal ‘myth’ in the first part of her book. ‘I am woman hear me roar’ has no place in Beauvoir’s feminism.

And another:

The book is marred by unidiomatic or unintelligible phrases and clueless syntax; by expressions such as ‘the forger being’, ‘man’s work equal’, ‘the adulteress wife’, and ‘leisure in château life’; and formulations such as ‘because since woman is certainly to a large extent man’s invention’, ‘a condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman’, ‘alone she does not succeed in separating herself in reality’, ‘this uncoupling can occur in a maternal form.’

And this:

A character in Balzac’s Letters of Two Brides is made to kill her husband ‘in a fit of passion’, when what she really does is kill him ‘par l’excès de sa passion’ (‘by her excessive passion’). In the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’, Beauvoir quotes the famous line from Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage: ‘Ne commencez jamais le mariage par un viol’ (‘Never begin marriage by a rape’). Borde and Malovany-Chevallier write: ‘Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.’

At one point, Beauvoir discusses Hegel’s analysis of sex. In the new translation, a brief quotation from The Philosophy of Nature ends with the puzzling claim: ‘This is mates coupling.’ Mates coupling? What does Hegel mean? It turns out that in Beauvoir’s French version, Hegel says, ‘C’est l’accouplement’; A.V. Miller’s translation of The Philosophy of Nature uses the obvious term, ‘copulation’.

And my favourite:

In a discussion of male sexuality, Beauvoir points out that men can get pleasure from just about any woman. As evidence she mentions ‘la prospérité de certaines “maisons d’abattage”’, which Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate as ‘the success of certain “slaughter-houses”’. But for a prostitute, faire de l’abattage is to get through customers quickly; as the context makes abundantly clear, a maison d’abattage is not an abattoir, but a brothel specialising in a quick turnover.

Overall, it looks as though the new translation is, linguisticall speaking, a car-crash. And Moi’s piece provides a delicious confirmation of the worth of serious journals like the LRB.

Fascinating anecdote in The Online Photographer blog about an encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I had expected to encounter the gentle soul of a poet. Instead, the quirky man to whom I was introduced was edgier than I could ever have imagined, possessed of a sharply caustic intellect that, I realize in retrospect, might actually have been calculated to put people off—or perhaps just people like me. He was, I’d been told, an aristocrat. He talked of his growing frustration with (or maybe it was disdain for) photography, and his concomitant need to return to his roots: drawing and painting, the few examples of which I’d seen had left me cold, left me wondering how a great master in one field would fail so completely to recognize his mediocrity in another. But no matter. If Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to be full of himself, I was sure he’d earned the right. Genius is as genius does.

At one point, a young man with a Nikon F appeared at the open door. I paid him little mind; at ICP, one regularly encountered young people carrying cameras, all eagerly shooting each other’s nooks and crannies as they earnestly went about learning how to make incisive pictures. But this fellow was different; he seemed barely out of his teens—if indeed he was—and he appeared to be genuinely starstruck. It is not often one gets to meet one’s true-life hero in the flesh.

“Monsieur Cartier-Bresson,” the young man exclaimed in what sounded like his best prep-school French as he brought his Nikon to his eye, moved in and squeezed off a series of exposures with, I think, a 105mm lens. At the last ka-thunk of the mirror, Cartier-Bresson sprung to his feet, literally sprung as if his wiry body had been coiled tight, just waiting for a reason to release itself.

“You must not photograph me!” he shrieked, his English suddenly crystal-clear. “No one is allowed to photograph me! Everyone must know that…”

The kid apologised and withdrew, but C-B pursued him.

Such a show of respect was apparently too little, too late for Cartier-Bresson, whose face by now was beet-red. He chased the young man out the doorway into into a corridor, screaming at the top of his lungs that without his cherished cloak of anonymity he could not continue to go unnoticed among the people of the world. Encumbered by fame and celebrity, how could he photograph freely? He would be recognized at every turn.

My final mental image of the sad turn of events is of a raging Frenchman having a full-out tantrum, his arms waving, his charged body literally jumping up and down, his intense eyes suddenly turned wild, right in the face of this by-now completely humiliated and defenseless young man who, at first backed against a wall, now slid down to the floor, his body sobbing, his trembling hand reaching out, if memory serves, to offer what I took to be a partially exposed roll of film as penance.

I could not help but reflect on all those unsuspecting individuals whose identities, whose very souls, had been captured, dissected even, by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s revealing eye.

I think that’s unnecessarily generous. Cartier-Bresson made a handsome living, and established a great artistic reputation, mainly by photographing people without their permission — in many cases immortalising their fallibility. Think, for example, of those guys he photographed peeing against a wall. Or the couples picnicking by the banks of the Marne. Much though I love his work, if he’d tried that hysterical act on me I’m afraid I’d have been tempted to tell him to go f*** himself. And photographed him as he did so.

Hmmm…wonder if my local dealer knows about this. Just in from CNN — Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius – CNN.com.

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — Toyota's consumer woes deepened on Wednesday, and for the first time on native soil.

Japan's Transportation Ministry has asked Toyota to investigate brake malfunction complaints in Japan on its Prius, the gasoline-electric hybrid car which was the best-selling vehicle in the country in 2009, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association.

Ministry officials said 14 complaints regarding brakes in the new Prius model has been filed since July. Toyota officials said the Prius has received similar complaints from North American car dealers and that the company is investigating.

If, like me, you’re irritated by the smugness and irrelevance of the WEF, then this post by Jeff Jarvis will strike a chord.

The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting at Davos was “rethink, redesign, rebuild.” When a friend recited that list for me, I responded that given the institutions there, the more appropriate slogan is “replace.”

Last year when I arrived at Davos, I wondered whether we were among the problem or the solution. This year, I wondered whether we were among the future or the past. Well, actually, I don’t wonder.

We were among the disrupted. The only distinction among them is that some know it, some don’t. At Davos, I fear, most don’t.

I ran a session with international organizations about transparency and new ways they can govern themselves. I didn’t get far. “Oh, yes, we understand Twitter and all that,’ they said. “We have people who do that for us.” Don’t you want to read what your constituents and the world are saying about you? “We don’t have time.” Oy. I invited a young disrupter into the room who talked about his ability to organize efforts to help people quickly — not so much breaking rules but discovering new ones — but he didn’t get far either.

I sat in a session about the future of journalism that was set in the past. No fault of the moderator, the panel pretty much issued the same old saws: The internet is filled with trivia, sniffed one: “The stuff that goes on the web is just suffocating.” The free market will not support a free press, declared another. (How do we know that already?) Thus their conclusion: The only hope for journalism is state and foundation support, said a few. Oy again.

At the end of the week, I sat in on a session trying to brainstorm under WEF’s theme of the three re’s. They said the point of the exercise was to get soundbites (as they used to be known; tweets as they are now known) and that’s what they got: PowerPoint (actually, Tumblr) platitudes. There were good points: We need to change what we measure, said one table, for now we get what we measure (true from media to economies). But there was also insipidness: “We are what we allow to happen.” And: “Ecology means caring. Equity means sharing.” Put that on your T-shirt and wash it.

What’s nice about Jeff’s account is that he’s clearly not seduced by the complacency that seems to infect most hacks who receive an invitation to the Swiss smugfest.

As a Toyota owner, I have a particular interest in this.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The Lexus ES 350 sedan, made by Toyota, had hit a sport utility vehicle, careened through a fence, rolled over and burst into flames. All four people inside were killed: the driver, Mark Saylor, an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law.

It was the tragedy that forced Toyota, which had received more than 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, to step up its own inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.

Yet only last week did the company finally appear to come to terms with the scope of the problem — after expanding a series of recalls to cover millions of vehicles around the world, incalculable damage to its once-stellar reputation for quality and calls for Congressional hearings.

It’s sobering, this. Toyota has for two decades been the world’s best car manufacturer. But something clearly went very wrong. Success does strange things to organisations. And it leads to hubris:

At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes.

As recently as the fall, Toyota was still saying it was confident that loose floor mats were the sole cause of any sudden acceleration, issuing an advisory to millions of Toyota owners to remove them. The company said on Nov. 2 that “there is no evidence to support” any other conclusion, and added that its claim was backed up by the federal traffic safety agency.

But, in fact, the agency had not signed on to the explanation, and it issued a sharp rebuke. Toyota’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate,” the agency said. “This matter is not closed.”

We have two Toyota cars, and they’re the most reliable and efficient vehicles I’ve ever owned, with the possible exception of the old VW Beetles I had in the 1970s. Even so…