Perhaps he’s been reading Richard Susskind’s book?

Tired of the World Cup? Watch this instead.

As Bloomsday approaches, references to James Joyce in the more cerebral end of the media crop up with increasing frequency. Today, I stumbled (courtesy of The Irish Times) on a fascinating literary discovery — an unpublished Introduction to an edition of Joyce’s great collection of short stories, Dubliners written by Anthony Burgess who in addition to being an accomplished novelist, critic, composer and all-round polymath was one of my colleagues on the Observer Arts pages back in the 1980s.

There are fifteen stories in Dubliners, fourteen of which are memorable and one of which — “The Dead” is a masterpiece. It’s the story of a New Year’s Eve party in the Dublin home of a pair of cultivated, musical, bourgeois spinsters. It is, writes Burgess, “a convivial evening in the Irish manner, full of song, quadrilles, bottled beer and food”. The central characters in the story are the spinsters’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife Gretta.

Burgess sees Gabriel as “a sort of James Joyce, though plumper and more complacent”.

He is a literary man, a college teacher, contributor of a bookish column to the Dublin Daily Express. He is Europeanised, unsympathetic to Ireland’s patriotic aspirations, conscious that his own culture is deeper and wider than that which surrounds him in provincial Dublin. He has married a girl of inferior education – “country cute” was his mother’s description of her – but he does not despise her.

Gretta is a quiet beauty, and Gabriel is a possessive husband. Because they live some way out of the city, they have booked a hotel room for the night. As they go to the hotel in the early hours, a wave of desire comes over him: the possessive wants to possess. But Gretta is distracted. Towards the close of the party the tenor Bartell D’Arcy had sung a song called The Lass of Aughrim, and she is thinking about the song. A young boy she once knew in Galway — and who had been in love with her — used to sing it. His name was Michael Furey, and he died tragically young.

Gabriel carelessly asks whether he died of consumption, but Gretta replies, “I think he died for me,” she replies, weeping.

This is how Joyce writes it:

“It was in the winter,” she said, “about the beginning of the winter which I was going to leave my grandmother’s and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn’t be let out, and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly”.

She paused for a moment, and sighed.

“Poor fellow,” she said. “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.”

“Well; and then?” asked Gabriel.

“And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then.”

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:

“Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother’s house on Nun’s Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see, so I rad downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.”

“And did you not tell him to go back?” asked Gabriel?

“I implored him to go home at oncw and thold him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree”.

“And did he go home?” asked Gabriel.

“Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!”

She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downwards on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

What follows is one of the most moving passages in the whole of Joyce’s work. It was beautifully captured in John Huston’s magnificent film adaptation of the story. This afternoon I found a clip of that closing scene.

Anthony Burgess thinks that this wonderful short story is the pivotal moment in Joyce’s development as an artist.

“The complex of emotions that now takes possession of Gabriel’s soul”, he writes,

requires more than the technique of realistic fiction for its expression. The Joyce we meet now is not the young chronicler of the earlier Dublin lives. We are in the presence of the author of Ulysses. As Gabriel analyses his tepid little soul, we see that his name and that of his long-dead rival have taken on a terrible significance: Gabriel the mild angel, Michael the passionate one; that dead boy, possessed of an insupportable love, was rightly called Furey.

Gabriel becomes aware of the world of the dead, into which the living pass. That world goes on with its own life, and its purpose is to qualify, literally to haunt, the world of those not yet gone. The living and the dead coexist and have strange traffic with each other. And there is a sense in which that, dead, Furey is more alive, through the passion that killed him, than the living Gabriel Conroy with his scraps of European culture and his intellectual superiority.

Meanwhile, in the all too tangible world of Dublin, the snow is coming down. More, it is, perhaps impossibly, “general all over Ireland”, and it serves Joyce’s symbolic intent more than a concern with meteorological plausibility. For “the snow is falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.

It is real snow, but it is also a metaphysical substance that unites humanity in time, not space. Space becomes itself a symbol. When Gabriel thinks of setting out on his “journey westward” he is to take not a train but a time machine. The west is where passion took place and a boy died for love: the graveyard where Michael Furey lies buried is, in a sense, a place of life.

“The Dead” is magic”, Burgess concludes, “whereas the preceding stories are merely literature”.

Yep.

From a Guardian Press Release.

Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and his long-time producing partner Moritz Borman today announced they have purchased the rights to ‘The Snowden Files, The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man’, published by Guardian Faber and written by Guardian journalist Luke Harding.

Stone will write and direct the film, drawing from Harding’s critically-acclaimed account of events surrounding the Guardian’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of the disclosures provided by Edward Snowden, as well as additional materials from the Guardian’s US team who broke the story.

Stone has commenced writing the screenplay and Borman is fast-tracking it as a major European co-production to start filming before the end of the year. Harding and other Guardian journalists will also act as exclusive production and story consultants.

Hmmm… Hope it’s better than his JFK film.

Now, we scientists … take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure — that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes that this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle. Permit us to question — to doubt, that’s all — not to be sure. And I think it is important that we do not forget the importance of this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. Here lies a responsibility to society.

Richard Feynman

I’ve often wondered why the obituaries in the Economist are so good. Now, thanks to a terrific piece by Isabelle Fraser I know: they’re written by a brilliant writer, Anne Wroe.

The subject of the week’s obituary is decided on Monday, and it must be written and polished by Tuesday. This 36-hour window is a marathon attempt to consume as much information as possible. “I just sort of feed it all in. Make a huge great collage in my mind. And then it compresses down terribly: there must be millions of words in there and it just comes down to a thousand.”

Often, Wroe is stepping inside the mind of someone who was utterly obsessive about something, and briefly, their passion must become of great importance to her as well. “There was one man I wrote about who was a carpenter, and he specialized in making drawers. It’s quite difficult to get drawers to go in and out smoothly, and you can understand how that could become an obsession. So I had to learn how to make them as well, and find out which woods were best. I had to be just as enthusiastic about how to do it as he was.”

“I think the hardest one was when I did Ingmar Bergman,” she says. “I had to spend the whole night watching the movies, and by the end I was suicidal. They were so dark, and they were getting darker and darker.” She compares it to an Oxford tutorial essay, a kind of fast-paced cramming. “The writers are horrifying; I absolutely dread it when the writers die. There’s such a lot to read!”

Wroe insists on only reading source material by her subject. “I never go to any books written by anybody else. I go to the words on the paper, their diaries. I think it’s the only way to do it, because that’s the voice that has disappeared.”

The row over Thomas Piketty’s book is fascinating. Well, it is to me anyway. First, there was a wave of broadly admiring reviews — so much so that the American Right became alarmed. There’s an amusing round-up by Kathleen Geier of the dafter ones here. Megan McArdle, for example, wrote a daft piece in Bloomberg View (which opened thus:

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read. To be clear, I intend to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It is sitting on my (virtual) bedside with a big stack of other (digital) books that I intend to read. But it’s far down in the queue, and I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in — not on the book itself, but on its topic. How much does inequality actually matter?

For this, she was roundly satirised by Fredrik deBoer’s non-review of her non-review. True to form, the Wall Street Journal employed a hedge-fund manager to review Piketty’s work as “less a work of economic analysis than a bizarre ideological screed.” Who knew?

The two most serious reviews I’ve seen are the ones by Larry Summers and the former Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, both of whom were respectful but critical. Of the two, King is more sceptical. “The claims made for Piketty’s book are exaggerated”, he writes.

It gives a fairly complete description of what we know about changes in the distribution of income and wealth over several centuries. Piketty has some important things to say about recent developments in inequality and where they might lead. But his enthusiasm to portray his work as a theory of capitalism detracts from them”.

For my money, though, the most interesting development was the critique of Piketty’s data mounted by Chris Giles, the Financial Times Economics editor. Giles made lots of specific complaints, but the essence of his criticism focussed on his assertion that Piketty’s estimates of wealth concentration in the US and the UK were too high.

This led at least one of my journalistic colleagues to proclaim gleefully at breakfast that “Piketty was getting a bit of a pasting”, a characterisation that was hotly disputed by me, for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was typical of the journalistic mindset which portrays every public debate as a football or boxing match in which there are “winners” and “losers”, whereas this was a debate about the second most important issue that faces democracies (the most important being climate change).

My reading of Giles’s criticisms was that they were typical of the kind of thing one would find in a reviewer’s report for a peer-reviewed journal. Criticisms of data, and of the inferences drawn from them, are par for the academic course. And of course they were only possible because Piketty published all his data precisely so that critics could pore over them at will. Giles’s analysis, in contrast, was hidden behind the FT‘s impenetrable paywall.

And, in a way, the most depressing thing about the whole spat was the way the FT played it. What its Economics Editor did was perfectly appropriate. But his newspaper chose to present it, not as a contribution to an important debate, but as an expose.

Simon Wren-Lewis, an Oxford Economics professor, expressed this view very well on his blog:

When an academic, or student, thinks they have found a mistake in an academic paper or book, what do they do? Check their calculations again and again, or course. Ask someone else to do the same, maybe. But then they will write to the authors of the original work, and ask them to comment. What they will not do, in that letter or email, is to give the original author a deadline of one day to respond. That was how much time Chris Giles of the Financial Times gave Thomas Piketty to respond to his long list of alleged errors and unexplained adjustments.

I think it might have been very different if Chris Giles had written a piece about the difficulty of interpreting wealth inequality data, and had wanted to get clarification of what Piketty had done and why. I suspect in that case the paper would have given Piketty more time to respond (what was the urgency?), and the article would have benefited greatly from that dialog.

But that was not the article that Chris Giles chose to write and the Financial Times chose to publish. Instead they wrote an exposé, in much the same way as you would expose some wrongdoing by a politician. (Is an academic making a spreadsheet error the equivalent of a politician having an illicit affair?) The phrase they use in football is playing the man and not the ball.

, in the unlikely event that I ever warranted a headline story, I know I would not want to be treated in the way Giles treated Piketty. There were only two possible justifications for writing a story of that kind. One was if the paper had clear evidence that Piketty had fiddled the numbers to get the results he wanted, and it is obvious they did not have that evidence. The other is that they had found so many simple mistakes that this discredited Piketty as an academic. Again this was not the case. 2

I also get very cross with academics who suggest that, because his book had become a bestseller and he had accepted invitations to talk to White House staff, he somehow deserved this kind of treatment. This seems to me like hypocrisy at its worst. Given this treatment, both Thomas Piketty’s initial response and his more detailed response issued yesterday are remarkable and impressive in their restraint.

In its handling of this issue, the Financial Times, in my opinion, has damaged its brand.

One of the interesting questions arising from the Sunday Times report of the allegations that the success of Qatar’s implausible bid to host the 2022 World Cup may have owed something to, er, bribery is how Al-Jazeera would report it. Al-J is not only based in Qatar but funded by its ruler, which means that there are, effectively, two Al-Jazeeras. The first is the network that does interesting journalistic work across the world. The other is the one that, er, covers domestic news and politics in Qatar, and I’m told that it is pretty tame by comparison with the international version.

The World Cup bribery story is therefore a tricky one for the network, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how it was covered in Al-Jazeera English. I had to dig for it on the website, but eventually found this deadpan report.

Qatar’s World Cup 2022 organisers have vehemently denied allegations by a British newspaper that the country bribed FIFA officials to gain the right to the tournament.

The organising committee’s statement on Sunday said that it “always upheld the highest standards of ethics and integrity in its successful bid”, after claims in the Sunday Times that a total of $5m was paid by a Qatari official to FIFA members.

The piece also carries this quote (presumably from the aforementioned committee:

“We vehemently deny all allegations of wrongdoing. We will take whatever steps are necessary to defend the integrity of Qatar’s bid and our lawyers are looking into this matter.”

Lawyers, eh?