Last night we had dinner with friends in a hilltop restaurant in Provence. We sat on the terrace, looking down on the valley below, with the blue remembered hills of the Luberon in the distance. It was one of those beautiful Provencal evenings — warm and comforting, with that marvellous light that brought Van Gogh, Cezanne & Co to this part of the world. All around us were the murmurs of conversation from other diners. At a nearby table was a large party of Spanish cyclists who had just returned from climbing Mont Ventoux. It was wonderfully peaceful and convivial, made even better by the company and two nice Cote du Rhone wines.

And then I suddenly thought that on an evening just like this, 100 years ago, there would have been parties of comfortable French bourgeoisie sitting in just such a restaurant as this, enjoying a quiet evening together, with no idea of what was to come, no real appreciation of the horrors that European nations were about to unleash upon one another.

And then I thought: surely it couldn’t happen again. Could it?. See Article 5 of the treaty that set up NATO.

Terrific NYT column by Nicholas Kristof. Sample:

If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.

Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.

We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.

Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America.

Whenever I write about the need for sensible regulation of guns, some readers jeer: Cars kill people, too, so why not ban cars? Why are you so hypocritical as to try to take away guns from law-abiding people when you don’t seize cars?

That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.

Interesting also that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution (the right to bear arms) was not viewed as being sacrosanct until comparatively recently. Kristof points out that “the paradox is that a bit more than a century ago there was no universally recognised individual right to bear arms in the United States, but there was widely believed to be a ‘right to travel’ that allowed people to drive cars without regulation.”

I asked a friend the other day whether he had read Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. “No”, he said, “though I’ve bought it”. Since he’s one of the most voracious readers I know, I asked him to explain. “Because I’ve read so many reviews of it”, he replied, “I think I know what I need to know about his argument”.

My friend is a very busy guy, and has to read a lot of stuff for his work, so I could sympathise with his conclusion.

The essence of Piketty’s argument is pretty straightforward — inequalities in wealth, which had declined over the period 1914-1950, are now again rising to Belle Epoque levels– and many of the innumerable reviews summarise it pretty well. But taking that utilitarian view of a book is a bit like straining dumpling soup through a colander. You get the dumplings, sure, but the soup escapes. And the nice thing about the Piketty book is that it’s very well written and in many places a delight to read. (Which of course is partly a tribute to its translator, Arthur Goldhammer.) So Piketty’s literary style, the allusions to fiction, etc. is the analogue of the soup.

Still, at least ‘Capital”s has sold in huge numbers. A couple of years ago, however, I came on another case of a really ‘big’ book: Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. I had an enjoyable conversation with Pinker before it came out, and the book had a huge (and no doubt very expensive) pre-launch PR campaign. For a couple of weeks, Pinker was everywhere. There were dozens of serious reviews. So it looked like it would be a really big deal in publishing terms.

And then a friend who is published by the same publishing house (Penguin) told me that its executives were discombobulated by the book’s poor sales in the UK.

My interpretation was that the publicity campaign had been too successful. As with Piketty’s book, Pinker’s main message — that, in the long view of history, the level of violence in human society has been steadily decreasing over a long period — is both intriguing and straightforward. So people felt that they didn’t need to wade through 1056 pages to get it. And so they didn’t buy the book.

Robert Hooke would have been 379 today. The British Library has marked his birthday with a nice blog post on how he did his remarkable drawings of tiny organisms while peering through a crude microscope. It includes this astonishing drawing of a flea.

… even huge corporations didn’t know about the Internet. Kevin Kelly pointed me to this Wired piece by Joshua Quittner that appeared way back when. This is how it begins:

I’m waiting for a call back from McDonald’s, the hamburger people. They’re trying to find me someone – anyone – within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.

It’s true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com either.

Yet.

“Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?” asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald’s media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago.

Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.

I explained a little bit about what the Big Thing is, and how it works, and about the Net Name Gold Rush that’s going on. I told her how important domain names are on the Internet (“Kind of like a phone number. It’s where you get your e-mail. It’s part of your address.”), and I explained that savvy business folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of: their own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like roadkill.com.

“Some companies,” I told Jane Hulbert, “are even registering the names of their competitors.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

I am not, I told her, recounting the story of The Princeton Review, the Manhattan-based company that sells SAT prep courses, and how it registered the name of its arch-rival, kaplan.com. Now the lawyers are working it out in court. Very ugly. (We’ll get to that later.)

“I could register McDonald’s right now,” I said, pointing out that the name is still unclaimed.

“You could?” she asked, then quickly answered my silence: “You could.”

“So could Burger King,” I said, and Jane Hulbert rang off, looking for some MIS person with the answers.

Those were the days.

From USA Today:

Strawberry fields may be forever, but a pine tree planted in memory of George Harrison will have to be replanted soon.

The original was killed by beetles.

The tree, planted as a sapling in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park in 2004 had grown to 10 feet in height.

The late Beatle, who died in 2001, was an avid gardener and lived his final years in Los Angeles.

A plaque at the base of what was called the “George Harrison Tree” reads, “In memory of a great humanitarian who touched the world as an artist, a musician and a gardener.” The plaque also contains a quote from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: “For the forest to be green, each tree must be green.”

Perhaps once the new tree is in place, the beetles will let it be.

Lovely reflective piece by David Carr in the New York Times on our changing media ecosystem. Sample:

“For the past six months, my magazines, once a beloved and essential part of my media diet, have been piling up, patiently waiting for some mindshare, only to be replaced by another pile that will go unread. I used to think that people who could not keep up with The New Yorker were shallow individuals with suspect priorities. Now I think of them as just another desperate fellow-traveller, bobbing in a sea of information none of us will see to the bottom of. We remain adrift.”

Quite so.

In my defence, I should add that I often read the New Yorker and the Economist on an iPad.

We’re in Provence, where there have been some dramatic thunderstorms, followed by this lovely peaceful evening.

The only really unpleasant aspect of the German team’s demolition of their Brazilian opponents in the world cup was the inane commentary of the British TV commentators and pundits. They were as staggered by the comprehensiveness of the Germans’ superiority as were the wretched Brazilian spectators, but lacked the verbal sophistication to articulate a single interesting or original thought. Instead what came flooding out was the incessant burbling of tired cliches. The Germans were “clinical”, “ruthless”, “relentless”, “efficient”, etc. etc.

What these hapless pundits were doing, of course, was expressing the subliminal prejudices of many of their fellow-countrymen (I was going to write ‘fellow-citizens’ until I remembered that Britain doesn’t technically have any citizens; it only has subjects — one of the USPs of living under a monarchy) about Germany. It’s as if Brits are living in a time-warp from which most of the rest of the world has long escaped. You’d never gather from reading the British tabloid media that, in almost every aspect of modern life that matters, Germany has long ago met the criteria for a modern, liberal, democratic, prosperous and sustainable society, whereas Britain remains chronically addicted to imperial afterglow, public and private debt, an overweening financial services industry, housing bubbles, corrupt campaign funding, short-termism and circuses like those provided by Premiership football.

Roger Cohen had a nice piece in the New York Times the other day which makes this point rather well. The world-beating German football team, for example, is the product of long-term planning, of nurturing homegrown talent. And this is typical of the country. Germany, Cohen writes,

does not believe in quick fixes. It is worth repeating because it is an idea that sets the country apart in an age where a quick killing, tomorrow’s share price, instant gratification and short-termism are the norm. Germans on the whole think what the rest of the world builds is flimsy. Anyone who has felt the weight of a German window, or the satisfying hermetic clunk of one closing, knows they have a point. The German time frame is longer.

Why Germany differs in this may be debated. Having plumbed the depths of destruction and evil, having understood the depravity into which a “civilized” country may descend, Germany had to rebuild from the “Stunde Null,” or “Zero Hour,” of 1945. It had to hoist itself up step by step; and it had to build into its reconstituted self the guarantees that ensured no relapse was possible. This took planning. It took persistence. It involved prudence. Even before all this the first German unity of 1871 came only after centuries of strife at the European crossroads. Geborgenheit is an untranslatable German word but no less important for that. It means roughly warmth, home, trust and security, everything that is so precious in part because it may go up in smoke.

Perhaps German success is the result of the immensity of past German failure. I think that has something to do with it, even a lot. Whatever its roots, German success is important and instructive.

It is. Much of what I find admirable in German society is the product of what the BBC commentators found awe-inspiringly weird about the German performance: careful preparation, long-term thinking, persistence, a pride in doing things well. I’m a photographer and I’ve always used Leica cameras, for example. I also use terrific cameras made by Nikon in Japan, but what’s striking about the German cameras is the extent to which those who make them are involved with the products they create. This video for example showing how the Leica M9 is assembled makes the point, as does this video of how the Rohloff Speedhub is made.

Of course one can find examples of wonderful products made in many other countries (think of Rolls-Royce aero engines or Maclaren racing cars in the UK, or Nikon and Canon cameras and lenses in Japan) but these are nowadays, exceptions that tend to prove a rule, whereas in Germany this high-tech engineering culture seems more pervasive.

There is also a radical difference in the managerial culture of German enterprises. Cohen writes:

If you talk to business leaders of the German Mittelstand, the small and medium-sized companies at the heart of the country’s economy, you are transported to another world. You sit in stark boardrooms, so devoid of indulgence they resemble classrooms, with unassuming people leading billion-dollar companies, and they speak of loyalty, 10-year plans, prudence and quality. If one word induces a look of horror, it is debt. The notion of making money with money, of financial engineering rather than engineering itself, is alien.

The contrast with the Anglo-American mindset into which the UK seems increasingly locked is stark. I know which I prefer.

Nice opening to a piece by Nick Bilton about time-wasting on social media.

One day in the early 1920s, a young Ernest Hemingway rushed along the streets of Paris seeking shelter from a downpour. He soon came upon a warm cafe on the Place St.-Michel and ducked inside.

After hanging his rain jacket, Hemingway ordered a café au lait, pulled out a notepad and pencil from his pocket and began writing. Before long he had fallen into a trancelike state, oblivious to his surroundings as he penned a story that would later become the first chapter of his memoir, “A Moveable Feast.”

If Hemingway were alive in 2014, he might not have finished what he started writing that day. Realistically, he probably wouldn’t have even put a pen to paper.

Instead, he might have ducked into the cafe, pulled out his smartphone and proceeded to waste an entire afternoon on social media. Perhaps he would update his Facebook to discuss the rogue weather, snap a picture of his café au lait to post on Instagram and then lose the rest of the afternoon to Twitter…

Bilton is now trying to reform. His first step is to read a book first thing into the morning before he switches on his computer. Well, it’s start.