Over at our research project I’ve been brooding on the conspiracy theories surrounding what happened to Building 7 in 9/11, and then fell to thinking about frame 313 of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK (which, at least until the advent of YouTube must have been the most-watched home movie in history). Here’s how Ron Rosenbaum, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, summarises the key sequence in the film:

As the motorcade approaches, we see JFK’s car emerge from behind a sign that had been temporarily blocking the view. Suddenly, we see JFK clutch his throat. Jackie leans over to attend to him. An instant later, in Frame 313, it looks like a lightning bolt strikes JFK’s head. We see it blown up and thrown back. Jackie frantically crawls over the rear seat of the open car and climbs onto its rear deck grasping at something that has been described as a piece of her husband’s shattered skull. If Frame 313 is the forensic peak of the Zapruder film, this sight is the almost-unbearable emotional heart of it.

Rewind to Frame 313: The visceral impression that the blast came from in front of JFK and blew his head backward is powerful. There have been arguments that this is a kind of optical illusion—the most convincing to me being that JFK had been hit from behind after the previous frame, 312, slamming his chin forward to his chest, and his head was rebounding backward in Frame 313.

And it would be so much easier to dismiss the impression of a frontal shot as an illusion, because otherwise you’d have to doubt the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was positioned behind the president, was the lone gunman.

But it would be a dozen years before most of the world would see Frame 313.

What brought Building 7 to mind was the parallel with the critical frames in the Zapruder film: any lay observer of the Building 7 collapse would probably conclude that it must have been an example of controlled demolition; and I guess that most lay observers of that awful moment in the Zapruder film would conclude that the shot must have come from the front rather than from the rear — and therefore that there must have been more than one gunman.

And here we come to one possible explanation for why some conspiracy theories can be so compelling: it is that non-conspiratorial explanations seem so implausible or far-fetched that the most rational approach is to reject them. And at this point I came on this intriguing short film by Errol Morris, the documentary-maker who won an Oscar for The Fog of War, his film about Robert MacNamara and the Vietnam War. Morris was the guy (I think) who first noticed that just as the motorcade reached the point where the President was shot, there was a man standing under a black umbrella (this on a brilliantly sunny morning), and this observation led to some pretty arcane conspiracy theories. But I will let him tell the story in his own words.

The JFK assassination is probably the most inquired-into killing in history. But intensity of re-examination can have various results. As John Updike observed in the New Yorker of December 9, 1967 when reviewing some of that re-examination,

“We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses – gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where a person is how the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for the absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”

Or, as Errol Morris puts it in the film:

“If you put any event under a microscope you will find a complete dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research with things sort of obeying natural laws, the usual things happen, unusual things don’t happen. And then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.”

I like his concluding riff:

“What it means is if you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right, is really obviously a fact which can only point to some really sinister underpinning, forget it, man. Because you can never on your own think of all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations.”

It’s also worth noting that in 1976, after frame 313 was finally shown on US TV, the House of Representatives set up a special inquiry to re-examine the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. In relation to the Kennedy assassination, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dallas and that JFK was therefore killed by a conspiracy. But that conclusion was largely based on acoustic evidence which was later challenged and discredited.

An interesting factoid: the part of the Guardian office in London where the investigative reporters’s desks are clustered is sometimes irreverently referred to as “the grassy knoll”.

Many years ago I worked (on the New Statesman) with John Williams’s mother. One day a lovely, long-haired boy appeared in the office with a present for his Mum. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on the lad, who was already prodigiously successful, earning more money than he knew what to do with. (He once tried to buy his mother a Range Rover, despite the fact that she didn’t drive.) Yesterday, I came on this video on YouTube which shows him exactly as I remember him. And playing one of my favourite pieces too.

As any university teacher (and administrator) knows, binge drinking by undergraduates is one of the curses of university life — which is why the decision by University College Cork to offer students the option of alcohol-free accommodation is such a good idea.

But then I was reading Parson Woodforde’s diary and found this entry for November 4, 1761 (when he was a Scholar at New College, Oxford):

“Dyer laid Williams 2s 6d that he drank 3 pints of wine in 3 Hours, and that he wrote 5 verses out of the Bible right, but he lost. He did it in the B.C.R. [Bachelor’s Common Room], he drank all the Wine, but could not write right for his Life. He was immensely drunk about 5 Minutes afterwards.

Plus ca change…

Seamus Heaney was my idea of what a great Irishman should be: deeply conscious and proud of his ancestry, yet alive to the vicious contradictions of our history. Alert to his eminence, yet never trading on it — a sensible move in a society famous for its “begrudgers”, the folks who are forever seeking to cut down any tall poppy that dares to raise its head. They called him “Famous Seamus”, but the epithet never did him any damage.

One of the few things that made me proud of my country in recent years was the discovery that, at the state banquet to mark Queen Elizabeth’s landmark visit to Ireland, Heaney was seated at the top table, opposite the Queen. It was such a lovely change to see that a country which for so many years vilified and ignored its writers (“the old sow that eats her farrow”, as Joyce put it) finally had the grace to recognise a native genius.

I’ve always loved his poetry, especially the way he captured the tactility of things — the smell of sodden flax, the heft of a spade or the weight of a sod of turf. Here he is writing about helping his mother fold the bedlinen:

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

He evoked wonderful responses in people. After he’d had his stroke he was rushed to hospital in Letterkenny in Donegal. Bill Clinton was in Northern Ireland at the time on peace process business, and when he heard about Heaney, he secretly changed his schedule and raced to Letterkenny, astonishing the hospital staff, and no doubt the poet himself. At that moment Clinton went up a mile in my estimation. I cannot imagine a contemporary politician who has that kind of sensibility.

Seamus will have one hell of a funeral. And, who knows, maybe Clinton will come.

A key ingredient of a democratic society is the existence of free media that can hold power to account. One essential requirement for free media is the ability of journalists to protect the identity of their sources – a contemporary equivalent of the sanctity of the confessional in earlier times, but with a public interest dimension. The existence of comprehensive surveillance – plus the legal intimidation that goes with it (a la Miranda) – makes it impossible to protect confidential sources. That’s why WikiLeaks’s development of a secure, anonymous drop-box was such a significant innovation. But, given what we now know about the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ, I don’t think any journalist could now, in good faith, give an undertaking of confidentiality to any source with whom s/he communicated electronically.

One big puzzle for me is why so many journalists – at least in Britain – don’t seem to appreciate how radical the threat to journalism has become. After all – as Peter Preston pointed out in a terrific column yesterday – the next David Miranda might be working for the Daily Mail.

In the British case, there are probably local factors at work – in particular the visceral hatred that the tabloid press has for the Guardian. [Full disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is a sister paper of the Guardian.]

You think I jest? A few years ago, one of the people who worked most closely with Tony Blair when he was prime minister observed to one of my academic colleagues that during the Blair premiership one rule-of-thumb for news management in Downing Street was that “the best way to bury a story was to have it published on the front page of the Guardian“. When my colleague expressed puzzlement, he explained: “because then the Daily Mail wouldn’t touch it”.

I’ve always been amused by the term “management science” which seems to me as absurd as the term “yoga science”. This hasn’t stopped universities and their business schools using the term, though (see this Google search result for UK universities). I’ve been similarly amused by the big-selling business books that one finds in airport bookstalls — so amused, in fact, that I once proposed that people should be able to trade air-miles for an MBA degree. So it was refreshing to find this admirably acerbic post by Freek Vermeulen in – guess where? – the Harvard Business Review!

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense.

Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring “management thinkers” and “gurus” (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn’t make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism.

A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using “objective, quantitative data.” Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let’s write a book about that and become rich.

In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, to name a few classic examples, followed that formula — including the getting rich bit. One piece of advice to come out of such tomes, for instance, has been to create a strong, coherent organizational culture, like most of high-performing firms studied. However, we now know from academic research that a strong culture is often the result of a period of high performance, rather than its cause. In fact, a very coherent culture can even be a precursor of what is called a competency trap, where firms get stuck in their old beliefs and ways of doing things. Not coincidentally, the list of superior companies frequently starts unravelling when the book is still at the printer’s.

Right on! Worth reading in full.

I’m writing something about online anonymity and came across this intriguing talk by the founder of 4Chan.

“The reason there are conspiracy theories”, runs an old adage, “is because sometimes people conspire”. They do, which is one reason why the sneering condescension with which people talk about conspiracy theories is, well, unwise. It may make statistical sense (because the majority of conspiracy theories are unfounded), but it’s not good epistemology, because sometimes conspiracy theories are well-founded.

The critical difference is between theories we believe to be well-founded and those we believe to be unfounded or mistaken. To take just one obvious example, the official US explanation of the 9/11 attacks is, in a literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it says that a certain group of Al-Qaeda operatives conspired to launch a daring attack on the United States, an attack that could have been foiled if key government agencies had been more perceptive and acted more decisively. My guess is that most people prefer this explanation to the alternative conspiracy theories for various reasons — the scale of the investigation, the membership of the Presidential Commission, etc. But in the end it comes down to preferring one theory over another.

An example is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be correct was the theory that the British, French and Israeli governments had colluded to invade Egypt in order to overthrow Colonel Nasser and seize back control of the Suez Canal (which Nasser had nationalised).

And this week, another conspiracy theory focussed on the Middle East has turned out to be well-founded. Malcolm Byrne, the director of research at the US National Security Archive has confirmed that the August 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s populist prime minister, and reinstated the Shah of Persia — an obnoxious puppet of the US and the UK who was to remain in power for another twenty-six years, before fleeing the country in January 1979.

As John Cassidy reported in a recent issue of the New Yorker, “Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran”.

Theories about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup (which served as a template for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries), have been around for decades, and were often ridiculed by establishment figures. But an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, now confirms that the conspiracy theorists were right all along. “The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet”, the report states, “was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”.

The moral? The fact that a particular explanation of an event or a phenomenon is a conspiracy theory doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong. It may turn out to be the best explanation in the long run.