How do you say “woke” in Japanese? – blog post by Hiroko Yoda. "Mostly, we render foreign words into Japanese using katakana. But 'woke' is uōku, the same as the commonly used transliteration of 'walk,' which can be confusing. Early on, many outlets did use variations of this (such as uōku bunka, 'Woke culture') with a big chunk of explanation, but it’s clunky. You might think a straight translation could work, like mezameta, 'awaken.' But this sounds like something a cult leader would exhort you to do. So that’s no good, either. More recently, some Japanese media outlets, including the Asahi, are attempting to translate the concept as 'something like ishikii takai kei.' This is modern Japanese slang for a 'highly conscious-presenting' person. Breaking it down, Ishiki is conscious or aware, and takai is high, which together feel positive. But the addition of the kei subverts things. It implies a sort of pose. So ishiki takai kei has a mocking, even condescending ring to it in Japanese. It made a certain sense, but something didn’t sit right. It made me wonder: why 'something like' ishikii takai kei? Why not exactly?... [In the first decade of the 21st century] the media described [a] bright new crop of grads as ishiki ga takai gakusei, or 'highly conscious students,' which was meant as praise: companies sought such types out, and the students adopted the phrase as a badge of honor among themselves. But then came the Lehman Shock of 2008. It triggered a global recession, Japan included.... And that led to the coining of ishiki takai kei – people who acted highly conscious, and making sure everyone around them knew it.... By 2010, the meaning of “highly conscious” flipped from its positive origins into a negative, similar to how “woke” would in English a few years later.... I don’t think ishiki takai kei is a good translation for 'woke.' 'Woke' refers to a state of mind about society. But ishiki takai kei is a statement about individuals — essentially, a style. It is far too light of a sentiment to convey the strong emotions 'woke' evokes among Americans, whether supporters or detractors. So what to do instead?... Tellingly, the Japanese Wikipedia page on the topic leaves 'woke' in English, not even bothering to use katakana. And I don’t see this as a cop-out. Quite the contrary. 'Woke' is a slippery thing, impossible to pin down without taking sides. Yet that’s exactly what ishiki takai kei does: in being condescending, it sides with the critics of 'woke.' But the job of a translation isn’t taking sides. It’s in giving readers the context to make their own decisions."
Getting The Essay Back: Two Memories – blog post by Richard Farr, referenced in John Naughton‘s Memex 1.1 blog. [Mr W., returning a student economics essay to him:] “Some knowledge is so well established that the only thing is to learn it... If I set you a question about demand elasticity, or inflation and the money supply, I’m probably trying to assess whether you have grasped, and can articulate, what is by general consensus the right answer. But I set this topic because it’s a debate between two working economists. It wears on its face the fact that there is no answer in the back of the textbook, that we are dealing with a problem not yet congealed into knowledge. … I know, and you know, that you don’t know which of them is correct. Alas, in your desperation to sound clever you have forgotten this…. You could have summarized Mishan’s case, then summarized Beckermann’s, and concluded by saying that it’s all jolly interesting. A common strategy. A safe, dull, strategy, B+ maybe, probably B-, all depending on the accuracy. Or you could have done the summary of both and then tried to outline a couple of reasons for being more persuaded by one than the other. That puts you in A/A- territory. But that’s not what you did, is it? You found both the summarising and the reasoning too much bother, so instead you postured a bit and sneered a bit and in the process didn’t even get Mishan right.…Your job is to work out how to disagree with [Beckermann] — or anyway raise doubts about what he says — without pretending you know more than you do. Combining intelligent scepticism with humility is not an easy skill to master. But you must master it. If you read widely, which I hope you will because life is better that way, you are going to encounter many clever, thoughtful, well-informed people who say apparently ridiculous things. The problem is, many of those things really are ridiculous but some of them are what you ought to abandon your existing prejudices and believe instead.” [Dr. D.’s advice on philosophy:] ”Stop coming to lectures….What you ought to be doing is reading more books, writing more about them, and trying to write more like them. If you want to get by, oh sure, keep coming to lectures, keep scribbling notes, and regurgitate. If on the other hand you want to spend your years here doing philosophy — which is supposed to be the point I believe — then stop coming to lectures, get advice on good things to read (I’ll give you a nice fat list) and get stuck into the almost impossible task of trying to write something that improves on what you’ve read.”
The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg: the dark side of Christmas – review by Sarah Bakewell in The Guardian. "Clegg approaches Christmas by a broad avenue, so we get chapters on Venice’s carnival, Saturnalia festivals in ancient Rome, the witchy shenanigans of Epiphany Eve (also known as Twelfth Night), and the wassails of January, in which good health is wished to apple trees by waving horses’ skulls at them. What all these celebrations share is a mood of maniacal excess and social exuberance. Practices include 'guising', or putting on animal disguises; 'mumming', or enacting plays; and 'knocking' – going around banging on doors, asking for treats, and even dragging out unwilling residents to join the merriment. The mayhem can spill over into violence, especially in the town of Matrei in Austria, where the Krampus-like 'Klaubauf' figures barge into houses and fight in the streets, to the extent that local authorities advise tourists to stay away and the hospital’s emergency department prepares for an influx of injured people. Even Clegg does not venture to Matrei, but the Krampus night she attends in Salzburg is only slightly less extreme. As she strolls amid the usual market scenes of fairy lights and glühwein stands, she is set upon by a Krampus who whacks her with two sticks. It’s all good festive fun – except that she still has the bruises and welts far into January.... In the 19th century, a shift took place towards more polite Christmas behaviour, especially in Victorian Britain. Santa Claus became portly and took to riding around with reindeer. The feasting became less about chaotic public drinking sessions and more about a family dinner presided over by the master of the house: it affirmed the hierarchy rather than upending it. The topsy-turvy elements of the season were transferred to other celebrations such as carnivals and pantomimes, and door-to-door knocking and treating became more associated with Halloween. In England today, the tradition of raucous Christmas home intrusions survives only in the (slightly) less scary form of doorstep carol singers."
Is it true that up to half of people have no inner monologue? I investigated – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "I have a voice in my head that won’t shut up.... Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you have an inner auditory narrator too. A lot of people do. I used to assume everyone in the world did until a tweet went viral a few years ago announcing that some people don’t.... Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has done pioneering work in this field, notes that most of us are very confused about our inner experiences.... What Hurlburt found is that when you do the beeper experiment [participants are given beepers and then told to jot down their inner experience whenever the beeper goes off], people have an inner voice roughly 25% of the time. What that means, he says, is that 'some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time'."
‘I became an optimist the night my wife died’: a science writer on loss and letting go of rationalism – article by Sumit Paul-Choudhury in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. "I was by no means happy or normal during my period of mourning, I just never doubted, even on my darkest days, that better times lay ahead – if I only worked towards them. Initially without really thinking about it, and later more deliberately, I cultivated the idea that the future would be bright. Eventually, I realised that I’d chosen to identify as an optimist. That was somewhat perplexing. As a trained scientist and a journalist, I was supposedly a hardened critical thinker, committed to solid evidence and rational argument. While I knew, and had been told, that I tended to expect the best out of life, I’d presumed that was because I actually had led a pretty charmed life. To still expect that, after the events of the previous year, felt as if I had given myself over to irrationality: the side of me that believed was winning out over the side that reasoned.... I began to investigate what form [a] pragmatic, well-reasoned version of optimism might actually take. And what I learned was that optimism, despite my earlier assumptions, isn’t necessarily the product of naivety. It isn’t an indulgence that we can only afford when times are good. It’s a resource we can tap into when the going gets tough – and then it can make the difference between life and death.... One way to make the case for optimism is to acknowledge that there are things we don’t know, that some of those unknowns are positive and that we have some ability to steer towards those positives. Optimism encourages us to seek them out. If, on the other hand, we have no expectation that our lot in life can be improved, we have no motivation to put in the thought and effort needed to improve it and those solutions go undiscovered. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism traps abound in human lives. Jobs you don’t expect to get, so you never apply; crushes whom you believe to be out of your league, so you never ask them out; games you expect to lose, so you never play. From this point of view, it’s not surprising that optimists turn out to be more successful than pessimists in almost every aspect of their lives. They tend to do better at school and at work; they have stronger relationships with family and friends; and they’re more resilient in the face of financial, mental or physical stress. It’s the stuff of cliche; 80% of success is just showing up. You miss every shot you don’t take."
The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury: keep the glass half full – review by Huw Green in The Guardian. "Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout. The risk of a book called The Bright Side is that it evokes the farcical good cheer of Eric Idle’s character at the close of The Life of Brian... [But while] Paul-Choudhury ... is serious about optimism, ... he is never glib or Pollyannaish. His book is as much a careful examination of the misuses of optimism as its uses. Here ideas are picked up, explored, and critiqued. Different perspectives are presented, and what unfolds is a convincing case that, while we might frequently feel we have grounds for pessimism, a particular form of optimism is the only morally serious choice.... The Bright Side’s wisdom is allowed to emerge slowly, as it weaves back and forth through different historical and philosophical approaches.... Paul-Choudhury’s optimism is rooted in the idea of cautiously investing because you know that things could be better, rather than recklessly assuming that they will be.... With multiple expanding international conflicts, an ongoing global climate crisis, and the advent of Trump’s second term in the White House, it is a perspective that will be sorely needed in 2025."
‘A whole new world opened up’: the radical project taking Israel-Palestine into schools – article by Helen Pidd and Courtney Yusuf in The Guardian. "Inside most British classrooms, it’s as if 7 October never happened. Half a million pupils studied history at GCSE or A-level last year, but just 2,000 tackled the origins of the Middle East’s most contentious war: why Israel was born, what that meant for the Palestinians, and the decades of occupation and violence that followed. It’s not that children aren’t interested. They hear about it at home, in their communities and of course on social media, where a bitter and bloody 100-year-old schism is boiled down to 15-second clips. But inside school, it’s all just too difficult. Too dangerous, even. All of which made the scene in the hall at Lancaster Royal grammar school (LRGS) this month even more remarkable as pupils from the selective Lancashire state school came together with boys from an Islamic school to explore and debate key elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict. About 50 students aged 13 to 18 took part in the session, organised by Parallel Histories, an educational charity working with more than 1,000 schools across the UK and a further 400 worldwide.... The Parallel Histories method – developed by the late LRGS history teacher Michael Davies after he took pupils on what now seems an unimaginable school trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2014 – encourages children not to shy away from competing narratives but to lay them out, side by side. They are taught to examine the source evidence and debate alternative interpretations before coming to their own view. The curriculum and all teaching materials are available on the Parallel Histories website for parents – or indeed anyone – to examine.... On the day we visited, the youngest students, from year 9, were tackling the Balfour declaration ...The year 10s were doing the 1967 six-day war ... And the year 12s were examining who was responsible for the failure of the peace process right up to the present day. Each group was split into two, with half told they would be arguing the Israeli perspective and half the Palestinian view, with each using primary sources (letters, memos, speeches, etc) to make their case. Key to Parallel Histories is that the groups then swap sides ... and are forced to counter the arguments they have just been making."
‘Talking about the Palestinian story was forbidden’: a developer’s struggle to make a game about the 1948 Nakba – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "In the city of Nablus in the West Bank, Rasheed Abueideh owns a nut roastery, where he works to provide for his family. He is also an award-winning game developer.... However, Abueideh has not been able to raise funding for his next game through conventional means. The game he envisions, Dreams on a Pillow, is about the 1948 Nakba, told through a folk tale about a mother in the Arab-Israeli war, in which more than half the Palestinian population was displaced. He tells me that his game has been rejected almost 300 times, by publishers and providers of cultural grants, for being too controversial, too much of a risk. 'Talking about the Palestinian story was always forbidden,' he says.... 'Crowdfunding was our only option, but even that would not work for me because all the major crowdfunding platforms do not recognise Palestine,' says Abueideh. The team turned to LaunchGood, a Muslim-focused platform, where it met its funding goal on 7 January. It’s enough to cover at least half the game’s development costs, and he hopes that once the game starts to take shape, it will be easier to find the rest.... The folk tale that inspired Dreams on a Pillow tells of a mother who rushes into her home to retrieve her baby before fleeing, only to realise that she has escaped with a pillow instead. In the game, she spends her days trying to make her way to Lebanon after the massacre at Tantura, and the nights dreaming of the Palestine she knew as a child. Putting the pillow down lets her move through the game’s scenarios more freely, but invites nightmares and hallucinations. Abueideh estimates that it will take two years to complete; heartbreakingly, the crowdfunding page contains an assurance that 'a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank'."
The Science of Racism by Keon West: evidence that speaks for itself – review by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. "Professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies. West’s book poses a central question: 'Is racism still enough of a feature in our society that it has detectable, significant effects on how people are treated and what their life outcomes are likely to be?' To answer this, he delivers a truckload of research – 'specifically testable, verifiable, quantitative evidence published in peer-reviewed scientific journals' – to show how racial bias affects everything from kindergarteners’ doll preferences to getting a job, a date, or decent medical treatment.... This facts-over-feelings approach is persuasive. The Science of Racism is that rare book on a difficult topic that has the potential to bridge the divide between opposing ideologically entrenched standpoints.... Some of the research he highlights is ingeniously executed. In one study, teachers were asked to watch footage of a group of preschoolers and spot challenging behaviour. There were, however, no naughty kids in the videos. The researchers were actually tracking the teachers’ eye movements. They found that the teachers spent the majority of the time watching the (perfectly well-behaved) black preschoolers, and in particular, little black boys. In West’s own research, he took real crime stories from the news but swapped the perpetrator’s names to either white, Christian-sounding names or Arab Muslim names to test participants’ reactions. Despite identical misdemeanours, West found that 'participants rated the criminals’ behaviour as both worse and more terrorist-y when they thought the criminal was Muslim'."
The Last Dance: Chinese funeral business is backdrop for arresting, life-affirming drama – review by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "[It starts] out as a prickly comedy in which wedding planner Dominic (Hong Kong standup icon Dayo Wong) switches to the funeral business,... [and] must get to grips with his new business partner: ball-breaking Taoist priest Master Man (Michael Hui), who performs the 'breaking hell’s gate' rites that liberate departing souls. The veteran is unimpressed by the commercially oriented newcomer, who is so keen on flashy gimmicks that he commissions a paper Maserati for the funeral of someone who died in a car crash. It becomes apparent, though, that Man’s traditionalism is covering up his own grief and leads to his unbending treatment of anyone in his vicinity. Growing into the job, Dominic realises that the two of them are complementary: 'Taoist priests transcend the soul of the dead. Agents transcend the soul of the living.' And just as his protagonist freshens up the departed, Chan is skilled in breathing naturalness into melodrama; not just through macabre contrast, but also by earning the twists and contrivances through patiently handling Dominic’s transition to compassionate undertaker in a string of attentively written consultations. As deftly portrayed by Wong, his obsequious grin hides an inner strength – and Hui matches him with effortless irascibility."
We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher: the pain of grief and joy of living – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "[Beecher uses the title] as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof. In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths.... Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents.... But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: 'Little losses, against the vast loss of John.' ... What it means to be alive is a thread glinting through the book, the question weightier for Beecher than it might be for someone who has not known grief intimately at such a young age. Is being fully alive best expressed in physical abandonment (through drink, sex, dancing) or punitive discipline of the body? She tries both, repeatedly returning to the shocking contrast between her own youth and the immediacy of death....Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty."
I set out to study which jobs should be done by AI and found a very human answer – article by Alison Pugh in The Guardian. "What is the value of being seen by another human being, outside of your friends and family?... The benefits of human interactions have long eluded measurement, making them easy to ignore, while the skills of connecting to others have long been presumed to be innately feminine, making them easy to devalue.... [But] all sorts of occupations – from teaching, therapy and primary care, to sales, management and the law – rely on seeing others to help students learn, patients heal, or consumers buy.... Reflective, witnessing work is so important that it deserves its own name: after five years of interviewing and observing scores of practitioners and their clients at work, I’ve come to call it 'connective labour'.... These kind of results – dignity, purpose, understanding – are profound for the individuals involved.... Of course, human beings also misrecognise each other, as judgment and bias can poison these interactions, drawing out shame in moments of considerable vulnerability. But as therapists told me, if people seek only to avoid shame – say by opting for an AI companion or counsellor – then they might never be free of it. ... For some, AI might be better than nothing, while others view AI as better than humans – yet both opt for technology to solve problems largely created by inadequate staffing and unremitting drives for efficiency, and both reflect the fact that what humans actually do for each other is not well understood. Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a 'connection criterion' to help us decide which AI to encourage – the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language – and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships."
The mind/body revolution: how the division between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illness fails us all – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian, based on Camilla Nord's The Balanced Brain, and Monty Lyman's The Immune Mind. "A conceptual division between mind and body has underpinned western culture, and medicine, for centuries. Illnesses are 'physical', or they are 'mental'. But, Nord writes, there is no 'separate category of illness, one that is confined to the mind and does not involve biological changes. This category does not exist.' Not only that, she says, but the reverse also applies: there is no purely 'physical' ailment in which your brain does not play a role.... It is one thing to understand that food poisoning might come along with misery, for instance, or anxiety with higher heart rate and perspiration, and quite another to accept the science that shows, as she puts it, that 'everything is physical and psychological'. As Monty Lyman argues in his eye-opening tour of recent advances in immunology, ... this revolution could be transformative for the millions of people for whom ... misguided dualistic approaches 'are causing … preventable and relievable harm'. Currently, 'physical' and 'mental' medical services often have different budgets and administrations. They may occupy different buildings, and may not share notes.... It can be more difficult ... to access NHS funds for someone with severe dementia whose 'body' is still healthy than for someone experiencing the opposite. People with major mental health disorders (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression) often die years earlier – up to a decade or even two earlier – than those who do not. 'People often think, "Well, that’s because they’re committing suicide,"' says Mark Edwards, a professor of neurology at King’s College London. In fact, 'they’re dying of cancer, heart disease, complications of diabetes and respiratory problems'... One way in which [thinking] is beginning to change is through an understanding of the brain as a place of predictive processing.... Many illnesses, in this model, arise from maladaptive – or even over-efficient – processing. So, for instance, an injury that the brain has had to respond to in the past makes it more sensitive to a repeat of that injury in the future. This, writes Nord, can 'cause your brain to unconsciously predict physical symptoms, and rush to defend against them. 'Sometimes these predictions might be so strong that they generate the symptoms they anticipate.' ... And prediction is, of course, the model we use to understand the functioning of the immune system: identification of a threat, followed by the dispatch of cells specifically adapted to neutralise that threat – ie, inflammation. We usually assume such threats to be 'physical' as opposed to 'mental' – bacteria, or a virus – but it is increasingly clear, says Lyman, that the immune system does not differentiate: the threat could just as easily be emotional distress, environmental challenges, childhood trauma or 'even being sedentary'. The resulting inflammation does not differentiate either."
Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – article by Edward Docx in The Guardian. "Ogres are one of the most ancient archetypes in human narrative and they have been with us since we first started telling stories.... They are everywhere present in our stories because, of course, they are part of our struggle to understand ourselves. They represent the recurring preoccupations and apprehensions of the human psyche.... Most of the time, we repress these traits in order to get along, and yet they persist – as drives and urges, as conscious and subconscious fears. In other words, ogres are not just monsters in tales but archetypal representations of the elemental aspects of our being. Indeed, if we step for a moment across one of the many footbridges between story and psychology, then we can see that ogres represent … the primal; also known as the id.... This is also the world of Trump. Trump is the nearest any modern politician comes to pure id.... It is here that he makes his powerful appeal; and it is here that he connects.... The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about 'values' – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.... When times are precipitous and the polity is bitterly contested, human beings tend to back away from 'argument' and 'ideals' and edge back towards the dependable 'truths' of the id. And the story world – where Trump broadcasts loud and clear – is so very powerful here because it darkly enchants; and because it occludes the complex world of actual issues, actual policy, actual debate, actual solutions. You don’t need a ground game when you’ve got an id-game. You don’t need leaflets about policy when you’re the latest main character in an ancient human saga all about wealth and food and sex and anger and fear and power and vengeance."
The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age – article by Chris Hayes in The Guardian, based on his book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. "The traditional model of communication [in which you gain attention then persuade people with evidence and argument] has fallen apart.... The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen. Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.... Imagine [says US writer George Saunders] being at a cocktail party... And then 'a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.' The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well: 'Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general ("We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!"), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking ("Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?"), the gossipy ("Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!"), and the trivial ("Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?").' ... It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump... Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse. There was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.... Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds ... Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by 'emails', while Trump’s featured 'Mexico' and 'immigration' among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience."
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