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Make a loose fist with your hand. Now press your thumb against the inside of the index finger. Or let it rest at the top. You should look like you would give someone an invisible cash note. Excellent. You do the Clinton -Thumas (or the Obama or Blair or the Cameron -Thraumen). Use this gesture to emphasize a point when speaking. It conveys strength and solution without the arrogance that is implied in a bump finger.
There our first lesson in politics in front of Donald Trump concludes. Next week: Commercial discipline. Come with a red phrase like “We are all together in this” and prepare yourself to repeat it, regardless of the context.
Young readers undoubtedly think that I hambe how robot and overworked politics has been in the recent past. Well, drag YouTube, friends. If nothing else, Trump’s rise has uncovered a widespread public weakness with uniformity and standardization. I wonder if the same revolt spreads into other fields.
Take my own world, the media. Why are podcasts doing so well? Because ultimately they are messy, elliptical, digestive and everything else that transmits theory. (In the case of Joe Rogan, perhaps the largest media figure in the Anglophone World, there can be no big difference between his on-air and off-air speech.) The close professionalism of the linear radio is now for millions of us now were imposed on it, not to be heard in comparison.
Even the favorite sport in the world, which for so long in the intellectual grip of the micromating perfectionist Pep Guardiola, may loosen. Arsenal, which is trained by one of his apostles, are impressive because the inside of a Swiss watch is impressive. The distance between the players is just like that. Free kicks and corners are choreographed according to ballet standards. Even in the open game, we know that a sequence of passed movements brings the ball to the right flank, where the opposition defenders then flow. At this point, a diagonal pass will release the replacement arsenal forward in the subpopulated left center zone.
It is the “most technical” football in the world, give or take that from Peps own Manchester City, another team that is easier to admire than to love. But both have disappointing seasons. A slightly free Liverpool flourishes with a not better squad. If you win out of the Premier League, the era should reverse the surveillance of the modern fans.
Years ago this column regretted the “Maverick’s death”. The argument was that in most industries there are so much data about which functions converge in the same way to do things. Songwriter know that they should check a catch in the first 30 seconds to stop Spotify listeners from skipping a track. New apartments have the same plan for the kitchen line. Football had become rigid. My mistake was not to be expected that people would be revolt at some point. How strange this policy, which is so often downstream of trends elsewhere, would go first. When I watched Trump’s oppressive opening speech, I had a consolation. A signal sends his success to other skilled sectors: there are rewards for deviation from strict form.
I write that in Los Angeles, where I lived. It has no dominant architectural style. It has no obvious center. (“Downtown” is something like a wrong name.) A dark shopping center could contain a jewel from a restaurant or a gallery. In its lack of patterns, it is more of life, more like the flow of experience than everyone except a city that I can imagine.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, various geniuses submitted a plans to rebuild the place according to the first principles. Most wanted to bring an euclidious order into the labyrinth. Her designs – full of right angles and other atrocities – did not come anywhere. Otherwise, London would now be a terrible network or (Christopher Wren’s idea) another European Piazza-and-Boulevard setup.
Well, La, London’s only rival than the least designed by the big western cities, has to change in many ways. Before his latest trauma, it had problems. Ultimately, the attraction of this place, as long as something looks into the human ID against structure and regulation against structure and regulation, cannot be dimem.
E -Mail Janan AT janan.ganesh@ft.com
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