Chiaroscura
Light and dark on the Dingle peninsula.
Quote of the Day
”Academia: the only profession where people are paid to think slowly.”
- Chris Anderson
Suits me perfectly.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Beethoven | Quartet in G major for Strings, Op.18, No.2, II. Adagio cantabile
Long Read of the Day
Putin, the once and future Chekist
Very interesting essay by Gordon Corera on what really drives Putin.
Britain’s Cabinet Office Briefing Room is one of the most sensitive sites in government, a place where ministers, spies and top officials gather to handle emergencies. In October 2005 it hosted its first foreign leader as a visitor. That leader was Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It seems extraordinary now but this was a time when the UK government was still actively courting the Russian leader as a figure who could bring stability to Russia and predictability to its relations with the West.
Putin was being briefed by senior British police and intelligence officials about the 7 July terrorist bombings a few months earlier. Putin was engaged throughout the presentations, taking notes and asking questions, an official note of the meeting reveals. He took a particular interest in how security services should take on threats. To defeat terrorists who are willing to die for their cause, security officers must also be prepared to die, Putin told his British hosts. He then had a tense exchange with one of those speaking to him. Eliza Manningham-Buller was then head of MI5. ‘He was clearly hostile to me,’ she told me recently. ‘He said something like: “It’s the duty of people like you to stand between the terrorist and their victim. And you failed.”‘
Other than her recollection of the Russian leader’s ‘rather sinister looking eyes’, what is telling about the exchange is how it reveals an essential aspect of Putin’s character. Putin was speaking to Manningham-Buller as one security service operative to another. But Putin’s definition of an operative does not mirror that of an MI5 or FBI officer. Putin was and always will be something different – a Chekist.
It is only by understanding what a Chekist is and the phenomenon of Chekism that you can truly understand the Russian leader…
Chilling, but also revelatory.
My commonplace booklet
Hal Varian has retired from Google, where has been the company’s Chief Economist since 2002. He was a distinguished academic before he went over to the other side. I first knew about him when my friend, David Livesey suggested I have a look at Information Rules, the book he co-authored with Carl Shapiro. It came out in 1999 when the first Internet boom was reaching its zenith and the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley believed that they were operating in a ‘new economy’ to which the laws of economics did not apply. The book’s advice to these embryonic titans was: “Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not.” Their book introduced and explained the economic concepts that were needed to navigate the evolving network economy.
He wrote a couple of bestselling economics textbooks before he left academia, but remained quietly detached about them, sometimes quoting a friend’s aphorism that “Having a successful textbook is like being married to a very wealthy person you don’t like much anymore.”
There’s a nice photograph of him at his retirement ‘do’.
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