Like many hacks, I’ve done very little work this morning, because I’ve been glued to the live feed from the Leveson Inquiry. Why? Because the Dirty Digger, aka Rupert Murdoch, has been giving evidence under oath. At the heart of his questioning by Robert Jay Q.C., Counsel for the Inquiry, was Jay’s attempt to obtain from Murdoch an acknowledgement that he wielded political power. Predictably, Jay failed to elicit from the Digger any acknowledgement to that effect.

I suspect that — unless a smoking gun appears (e.g. a documentary trail proving that Murdoch obtained a commercial advantage as a result of a solicited political intervention) — Jay is on a mission to nowhere. Whenever the questioning strayed onto dangerous ground this morning — e.g. discussion of the Sun front-page headline saying “It was the Sun wot won it!” after John Major unexpectedly won the 1992 General Election — Murdoch went to great pains to point out that he had delivered a “bollocking” to the editor responsible, Kelvin MacKenzie. And the reason is obvious: if newspapers were claiming to exert such direct power over the electoral process, then they would be in trouble — even in such an enfeebled democracy as ours.

And yet it’s obvious even to the dogs in the street that Murdoch wields enormous power. The reason the Leveson Inquiry can’t get to it, though, is that it’s working with the wrong conceptual framework. If you want to understand the power that Murdoch actually wields, then a good place to start is Steven Lukes’s wonderful book, Power: A Radical View, the best analysis of the phenomenon I’ve every encountered. Crudely stated, Lukes’s view is that power comes in three varieties:

1. the ability to compel people to do things they don’t want to do;
2. the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; and
3. the ability to shape the way they think.

The problem with the Leveson Inquiry is that it’s looking for evidence of #1 and/or #2, whereas in fact #3 is the one they want. And cross-questioning the chief suspect is not the way to get at it.

Peter Checkland and SSM7, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Last Friday, I went to Lancaster to take part in a symposium organised by the Lancaster University Management School to honour my friend and mentor, Professor Peter Checkland (seen here with a photograph of himself inspecting an ancient Indian locomotive). It was a stimulating, intriguing and enjoyable event. The pdf of my contribution is available here. (It explains the enigmatic heading over this post, btw.)

Lovely piece by Professor Mary Beard, responding to the sneering of the Sunday Times‘s TV ‘critic’, one A.A. Gill, who focussed on her appearance rather than on her TV programmes, Meet the Romans.

So what of my revenge?

First, I’d like to invite him to a tutorial in my study at Cambridge and ask him to justify and substantiate his opinions. We could talk them through. Possibly then he would learn a little about the crass assumptions he’s making and why they don’t amount to anything more.

Next, for my Roman-style revenge on Gill, I’d force him to watch each of my programmes from start to finish. And to ensure he did so with appropriate diligence, I’d ask Clare [Balding — a BBC sports commentator who has also been abused by Gill on account of her appearance] to be on hand to enforce the penalty.

And as Gill is also a food critic —and I’m certain there is a veritable battalion of angry chefs and restaurateurs who would gladly volunteer to help with this bit — I’d force-feed him, like a goose destined for pate de foie gras, his least favourite dishes, while he sat and learned about the Romans.

And then we’d talk about them — and I mean about their substance, not just about my lack of lipgloss.

According to Wikipedia, Gill is a “recovered alcoholic” and has acute dyslexia, which means that all his ‘writing’ is dictated. I’d often wondered if this might explain his curious style.

From the Digger’s twitterstream:

Hmmm… I wonder who owns those Channel Island “billions”. Could it be a reference to the Barclay twins — owners of the Telegraph group?

Surely not.

Lovely piece about Jim Marshall by William Weir in The Atlantic.

When Jim Marshall designed his first amplifier in 1962, he used the 12AX7 vacuum tube, a seemingly slight deviation from the 12AY7 tubes of the popular Fender amps—because Marshall couldn’t find any in Britain at the time. This accident of geography meant that customers of his music store suddenly had a little more crunch in their guitar sound. In rock and roll—a genre forever entwined with technology—a mere vacuum tube begat a major shift in the music’s history.

Marshall, who died last week at 88, also had the fortune of having a 20-year-old Pete Townshend for a customer. Townshend told Marshall he wanted to hear himself over The Who’s audience and rhythm section. Thus was born the first 100-watt amp. Add to that two cabinets, each bearing four speakers—together, the components came to be known as the Marshall stack—and Marshall secured himself a permanent spot on any history-of-loudness timeline.

Loudness is strictly a psychological phenomenon referring to how the brain perceives the strength of a sound. But exactly why loudness appeals to so many of us is still a mystery. In his book, Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin suggests that very loud music saturates the auditory system, causing neurons to fire at maximum rates. Studies have shown that louder music causes us to shop more and work out more enthusiastically.

Adam Gopnik has a lovely piece about Albert Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (sadly, behind a pay wall) in the course of which he neatly evicerates the hypocrisy of a certain celebrated caste of French intellectuals:

For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatise the agonising preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafes and late-night boîtes and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafes and libraries and secondhand bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the College de France who maintains that there should be no professors at the College de France does not really believe this, or else he would not be one. This isn’t a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, still less Phnom Penh, ever had. Sartre’s great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The apostle of ideas in action didn’t think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better. Nice work, if you can get it.

Here’s an acronym that, I am reliably assured, is common parlance among IT Support staff:

PICNIC

It stands for “Problem in chair, not in computer”.

You have been warned.

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for enlightening me.