Fascinating piece in the Guardian by a Dutch anthropologist who is doing fieldwork in London’s financial district. Excerpt:

As I said, it’s a captivating world, and often all too human. This is what a lawyer said about dress codes in the City. We were sitting in a restaurant called L’Anima, a soberly decorated place near Exchange Square, one of the largest clusters of offices in the City. He scanned the tables around him and said: “Mostly lawyers here, I think. I see no trophy wives or trophy girlfriends, no extravagantly dressed women. I see men who keep their jackets on, which is what we tend to do as lawyers – many lawyers would not want to be the first to take it off and most lawyers I know leave it on anyhow. Keeping the uniform intact makes you look solid. I see inconspicuous ties, which is also a lawyer thing. This restaurant serves very good quality food but the restaurant is not flashy, I believe only this week the Sunday Times called the interior ‘boring’. Boring is good, for lawyers. We sell reliability, solidity and caution. We want our presentation to mirror that. And we often charge hefty fees, so we don’t flash our wealth because then clients are going to think: wait, am I not paying too much?”

He then proceeded to compare this to the outfit of an M&A banker. These may dress in a very flashy way and drive very expensive cars. The reason is, they are selling companies for their clients, making these clients very rich. If an M&A banker radiates wealth and success, potential new clients will not think: am I paying too much? Potential clients will think: this guy has made other people very rich, he must be very good, I am going to hire him so he can make me very rich too.

I hadn’t realised until last night that Jeff Jarvis had been at Ground Zero on the day. He lived to tell the tale in a sobering set of six audio files. It’s the most gripping account I’ve heard of what it was like to be there.

(I originally blogged this in 2006, but felt it worth re-posting today.)

Like everyone else, I can remember exactly where I was when the attacks of 9/11 started. After watching the TV coverage for a while and it became clear that it was a terrorist attack, I wrote in my diary: “Today means the end of civil liberties for my lifetime”. In an interesting New York Review of Books piece David Cole is less pessimistic. But his tally of the aftermath and implications of the attacks is worth a read. Looking back, what’s most striking about the decade is how wasteful it has been in both resources and lives. The US (and the UK) got themselves enmeshed in one necessary war (Afghanistan), which they then screwed up by getting involved in an unnecessary one (Iraq). Air travel has been transformed from a convenience to an infuriating, inefficient nightmare. State surveillance has increased a thousandfold, and ‘security theatre’ has become a way of life not just for real security authorities but also for the millions of jobsworths who wear uniforms in corporate foyers. Every time I’ve queued at an airport in the last decade, or been told by a cop that I can’t take a photograph in a public place, my first thought is that bin Laden won hands down.

And just think of the cost of all this:

How much are we spending on counterterrorism efforts? According to Admiral (Ret.) Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence under both Bush and Obama, the United States today spends about $80 billion a year, not including expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (which of course dwarf that sum).1 Generous estimates of the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Blair reports, put them at between three thousand and five thousand men. That means we are spending between $16 million and $27 million per year on each potential terrorist. As several administration officials have told me, one consequence is that in government meetings, the people representing security interests vastly outnumber those who might speak for protecting individual liberties. As a result, civil liberties will continue to be at risk for a long time to come.

Cole’s main point is that most of the heavy lifting in dragging the US government back to towards a law-abiding position was done by civil society groups and activists.

These developments suggest three conclusions. First, the values of the rule of law are more tenacious than many cynics and “realists” thought, certainly than many in the Bush administration imagined. The most powerful nation in the world was forced to retreat substantially on each of its lawless ventures.

Second, there is no evidence that the country is less safe now that the lawless measures have been rescinded. Bush administration defenders often assert that its initial responses were driven by necessity, but the fact that we remain reasonably secure under a more law-bounded regime refutes that claim. Indeed, even some of Bush’s own security experts now recognize that our success rests on resisting overreaction. Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents Bush and Obama, maintained at the Aspen Security Forum in July that the way to defeat terrorism is “to maintain a cultural resilience,” and that if we do not overreact, “our basic principles that have held our country together…can continue to do so.”

Third, the choice to jettison legal constraints has inflicted long-lasting costs. The principal reason that we have yet to bring any of the September 11 conspirators to justice, ten years after their abominable crimes, is that we chose to “disappear” and torture them, thereby greatly compromising our ability to try them. And the decision to deny those at Guantánamo any of the most basic rights owed enemy detainees turned the prison there into a symbol of injustice and oppression, exactly the propaganda al-Qaeda needed to foster anti-Americanism and inspire new recruits and affiliates.

He finishes by quoting one of America’s greatest judges, Learned Hand, who once observed that

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can ever do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Yep.

Oh, and btw, while we were diverted by the abovementioned security theatre, the world’s bankers were robbing us blind.

I’m not a bike geek but one of the most useful things I’ve ever bought is a Brompton folding bike. I got it about five years ago and it was fairly expensive at the time (and is even more so now). But it’s been a wonderfully liberating device. It usually lives in the boot of the car, and gives me amazing freedom from traffic jams in town. It also means that I no longer have to use the Tube when I go to London.

It had one flaw, though: the saddle that it came with was pretty mundane and uncomfortable. So this year when my kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday, for once I had an answer: I wanted a Brooks B17 leather saddle.

It’s a beautiful object which is hand-made in the English midlands.

There’s a quaint but informative company video on YouTube which explains how it’s done.

Oh — and it’s very comfortable.

Hi!, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Seen in our village playground.

My friend Jonathan Steinberg has written a wonderful biography of Bismarck, which I’m reading in the Kindle edition and thoroughly enjoying. This passage about Bismarck’s time as a country squire and his behaviour as a host (or even an host) made me laugh out loud:

One night after a long journey, Herr von der Marwitz and a friend showed up unannounced at Kniephof [Bismarck’s estate]. Bismarck welcomed them, set out the usual fare, and the visitors and their host sat late and drank a lot.

He apologised in advance that he would not be able to see them at breakfast because he had to be in Naugard by 7am. The guests needed to go there too and, though Bismarck strongly urged them to sleep as late as they liked, they eventually agreed that Bismarck would wake them at 6.30 in the morning. They drank on and eventually went to bed. The friend said to von Marwitz, as they climbed the stairs to the guest room, ‘I have had more drink than I am used to and I want to sleep it off tomorrow morning’. ‘You can’t do that’, Herr von Marwitz said. ‘Wait and see,’ replied the friend who pushed a huge chest of drawers against the door.

According to von Marwitz’s account,

“At 6.30 in the morning, Bismarck knocked at the door. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from the room. Bismarck turned the doorknob and pushed the door against the heavy chest. A few minutes later he called out from the courtyard. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from us. Two pistol shots crashed through the window-glass and knocked plaster onto my friend, who crept to the window and stuck a white handkerchief out on the end of a stick. In a few minutes we were downstairs. Bismarck greeted us with his usual heartiness without a word about his little victory.”

Hmmm… This might work with teenagers. I’ll need a gun licence, though.

Aw, isn’t this lovely? When members of the hacktivism group Anonymous appear in public to protest against censorship and corruption, they wear plastic masks of Guy Fawkes, the celebrated 17th-century terrorist. But guess what?

Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

Groucho Marx, where are you when we need you?

There’s a lovely review by Jacob Heilbrunn of Adam Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography in The National Interest.

Of the best-seller that launched Trevor-Roper on the public stage — The Last Days of Hitler — Heilbrunn writes:

It was a piece of sleuthing that had been assigned to him by the secret services. Trevor-Roper’s friend Dick White, a brigadier commanding the counterintelligence bureau (later the head of MI5 and MI6), hit upon the idea of the inquiry and encouraged Trevor-Roper to carry it out beginning in September 1945. The idea was to dispel Stalin’s propaganda efforts to suggest that Hitler had escaped and was in hiding (in fact, the Russians had dug up his body in May 1945, and legend has it that Stalin used Hitler’s skull as an ashtray). Trevor-Roper displayed real initiative: it was a onetime opportunity to make history himself. He interviewed numerous Nazi bigwigs and tracked down Hitler’s last will and testament. He formed the fullest picture of Hitler’s final days, demonstrating beyond doubt that the Nazi leader had expired by his own hand in April 1945 and that his and Eva Braun’s corpses were doused with gasoline by his lackeys and set on fire. The skill with which Trevor-Roper fashioned his intelligence report bears comparison with the greatest historians:

“In the absolutism, the opulence, and the degeneracy of the middle Roman Empire we can perhaps find the best parallel to the high noonday of the Nazi Reich. There, in the severe pages of Gibbon, we read of characters apparently wielding gigantic authority who, on closer examination, are found to be the pliant creatures of concubines and catamites, of eunuchs and freedmen; and here too we see the élite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences.”

Trevor-Roper’s most basic insight was that, for all its pretensions to totalitarian control, the Nazi system was, in essence, an inefficient and chaotic court system that consisted of rival paladins each seeking Hitler’s blessing.

It is surely significant, however, that Trevor-Roper had not alighted upon the topic of his own accord. The criticism for the rest of his life would be that he never produced anything that matched it. Perhaps Trevor-Roper stumbled into his work as a historian more than he, or anyone else, really cared to admit. What’s more, the Nazi era turned into a lucrative gig for Trevor-Roper; as Sisman underscores, he was repeatedly called upon over the decades to attest to the reliability and provenance of Nazi documents, a task he was prepared to undertake as long as it was accompanied by an imposing fee. The Last Days alone paid for his Bentley.

I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by Trevor-Roper, particularly by his mordant wit and elegantly mannered literary style. He spent most of his life in Oxford and lost no opportunity to assert its superiority over Cambridge, but then astonished everyone by accepting the Mastership of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His time there made Tom Sharpe’s great comic novel about Peterhouse, Porterhouse Blue, look like a publicity brochure. Trevor-Roper spent much of his time at war with the Fellows, and the mutual contempt with which both sides regarded one another was a thing of wonder.

A friend of mine, a liberal American historian whom we will call X, was astonished once to receive an invitation to call upon Trevor-Roper Arriving at the palatial Master’s Lodge on Trumpington Street, he was ushered into the great man’s study. The dialogue then went something like this:

T-R: “Ah, X, good of you to call by. I would like to seek your advice”.
X: “How can I help?”
T-R: “I was wondering if you knew of any black, lesbian American historians”.
X: “I’m afraid that nobody matching that description comes to mind.”
T-R: (Thoughtfully) “Pity.”
X: “Might I ask why you are seeking such a person?”
T-R: “The Fellows are seeking to appoint a College Lecturer in history and I was looking for a candidate who would really annoy them”.

At this point the telephone rang. T-R picked it up and listened intently for a moment. Then, noticing that my friend was still there, he motioned for him to go, explaining “it’s my gardener”.

There’s a great screenplay to be written about T-R’s time in Peterhouse and Alan Bennett’s just the man to do it. He must know the background pretty well: after all, he played Trevor-Roper in the film of Robert Harris’s book, The Hitler Diaries.

I love this. It’s Hunter Thompson’s letter to the Editor of the Vancouver Sun, seeking journalistic employment. This is how it begins:

Sir,

I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.

Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley. By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand.

If I do decide to move forward, you can be sure I’ll bring the same energy and commitment I’ve applied in my previous roles. I’m not one to shy away from challenges, but I’ve learned the value of aligning with organizations that have a clear sense of purpose and vision. Whether it’s tackling investigative pieces or crafting features that resonate with readers, I’m all about delivering work that matters.

I’ll also mention that a good measure of my success has come from leveraging resources like those offered through outstanding services at www.JVStoronto.org. Their career support has been invaluable in guiding me toward opportunities where I can thrive and contribute meaningfully. It’s all about finding the right fit—both for myself and the team I’m joining.

And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you. I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.) Nothing beats having good references. Further down he writes:

The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you. Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews. I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations. I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of. Now the question: if you got a letter like that would you hire the guy? I would.

When it comes to seeking employment, especially in a field as demanding and unpredictable as journalism, Hunter Thompson’s letter to the editor captures a rare and raw honesty that’s often sorely missing from most cover letters. He lays bare his discomfort with blindly walking into unknown territory, offering both a glimpse of his personality and a warning: if you want a piece of him, you’d better know what you’re getting into. His unapologetic self-awareness cuts through the typical corporate nonsense, a refreshing departure from the usual desperate pleasantries that make it clear someone is simply trying to fit in, even if they’re not actually a good match for the role.

This kind of approach may not work for everyone, but it gets straight to the heart of what Thompson values—working for an organization with a clear sense of purpose, where his energy can be put to real, meaningful use. He’s not interested in signing on for mediocrity; he’s after something with teeth, with substance. And that’s a lesson worth taking with you into any job search—don’t just apply because the job is there. Make sure it aligns with your vision, your goals, and, importantly, your integrity.

Now, in the world of recruitment, there’s a certain level of candor and vigor that should be mirrored in the process, and that’s exactly what you’ll find with a broadacre recruitment agency in Australia. Just like Thompson’s letter, a good recruitment agency doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of the job market or the challenges of finding the right fit. They take the time to understand your capabilities, your quirks, and your aspirations, offering more than just a matching service. They push the envelope, ensuring that every connection they make is not only viable but actually exciting for both parties involved.

Whether you’re stepping into a completely new industry or making a calculated jump into a familiar one, the goal should always be the same: you deserve an opportunity that challenges you to grow, that makes you feel aligned with the work you’re doing, and that offers a platform where you can truly thrive. Agencies that get this are invaluable—after all, they’re not just placing people into roles; they’re helping to shape careers, just like Thompson was looking to shape his own career at The Sun.