+++ UPDATE +++ James Spencer VoiceCoach who knows more than a thing or two about public speaking writes to me about the piece below: This is one of the best critiques of quantifying communication that I’ve come across in the vast flotsam of internet public speaking commentary. You also address, specifically, […]
My guilty secret is out, thanks to the Guardian: “When we started, we didn’t know about linguistics and speech science. So we spent six or seven months behind closed doors just reading about this,” Gupta says. The AI algorithm has been modelled on data collected from 3,000 publicly available speeches, […]
What was President Trump’s speech in Poland really saying? Views differ. Even though anyone listening to the speech might think that Trump pushed back hard against Putin in the speech, it was a stunning victory for Putin: The initial reaction to the speech was far more positive than to his previous attempt […]
On 6 July President Trump gave a hefty speech in Warsaw. Here’s the official text. And here is a video of him delivering it. How was it as a speech? First, the speech is some 3700 words long, delivered in 36 minutes. Just over 100 words per minute. Quite a […]
My new Telegraph piece just up (££) looks at the big forces in play as President Trump sits down with President Putin today. A free highlight or two: Vladimir Putin was sworn in as Russia’s President in May 2000. He has led Russia as either President or Prime Minister since […]
I’ve been busy latterly. Hence this article over at Telegraph Premium (££) on North Korea and its missiles. Maybe you’re too mean or too poor to pay for that? Here are some highlights: Pyongyang has one Great Demand: achieving global acknowledgement/status. Since 2003 when it left the Non-Proliferation Treaty framework […]
I appear (as if by magic) on CNN International Edition to opine on President Trump’s visit to Poland. You want sweeping outlandish generalisations? Here they are. Many “Western Europeans” are comfortable with largely secular, post-modern, liberal-technocratic integration that dilutes national identity. Indeed, for some European federalists, diluting national identity is not […]
My new piece at DIPLOMAT looks at the practical diplomatic options open to Julian Assange as he peers out of the window of the Ecuador embassy in London and tries to see the sky: Right at the heart of diplomacy is a simple idea: good manners. To be precise, the […]
My post below on the proliferation of useless ‘diplomacies’ prompts Shaun Riordan into further action: … Simply asking what diplomats do, and then assigning the title of diplomat to anyone else doing it (or describing as “diplomacy” anything where people are doing diplomat-like things) won’t wash. Many people gather information, […]
Remember how to train your diplomat? Thus: Busy new areas of Diplomatic Theory are being invented by the social science industrial complex. Diplomacy is sliced and diced to create new specialities and plump research grant opportunities. Economic Diplomacy. Commercial Diplomacy. Climate Diplomacy. Once these new specialities float off as part […]
