Sources and Methods #14: Gregory Johnsen

 
 

Gregory Johnsen 101:

Gregory on Twitter

Gregory on Buzzfeed

Gregory's book

Waq al-Waq

Show Notes:

3:39 -I’ve had the idea of writing the book since 2002, and the book wasn’t finished until 2012, so it’s been a 10 year process and the last four of those are writing… I had to throw

4:31 - One of the things that’s really benefited me is reading people who are much better writers than myself. I really love Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, which is on Al-Qaeda and the leadup to 9/11. And I think he does an excellent job of telling a very complicated story in a way that’s very readable, and it has narrative, and it has drama.

5:01 - When I first started writing, I was obsessed with sentences, with making really beautiful sentences. And then I started going back and looking at books I really enjoyed and found that the sentences were often very simple, but that the narrative as a whole just sort of carried you along.

5:50 - Something that keeps people reading that page, it’s what I try to do.

6:40 - I’m trained as a historian, not a journalist or a writer....But I don’t tend to enjoy most of the academic writing that I read. It seems almost designed to keep people out - the language that’s used, the theories discussed, the sentence structure…. the academy does not reward readability.

10:22 - Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land is one of my favorite books, and my favorite book on Yemen.

14:55 - Junior year in college, I studied at the American University of Cairo.

15:34 - [On having someone to review your work] Any time you have an audience that you know particularly well, and an audience that knows writing structure and writing form, you can see yourself progress over the years

17:45 - Yemen is a very small country, so the longer you go there, the more people you meet, and eventually you start to meet people who know different things. It’s also a country that’s built on personal relationships, so the longer I spent there, the more people came to see me as I grew in my understanding of the culture and history and language… At one point, I’d been chewing qat with a guy for six months, seven months… and one day out of the blue, he’s like ‘hey, you know, my family has all these old records from the Ottoman period in Yemen that if you ever want to take a look at you can just swing by the house and we’d show you all these things.’ And that’s sort of how things in Yemen work, once people trust you.

19:04 - One of the things that also helped was the amount of stuff that Al Qaeda itself published. They would publish these ‘martyr biographies’ that would go into incredible details about this person’s life… all of these things were really sort of excellent resources for me as I’m going through this material...obviously you have to be careful with how you handle this kind of material, but they aren’t the only source, so you can do a lot of triangulation. And there are also Yemeni journalists that sit down with Al Qaeda, and I was able to know these [Yemeni journalists] who were welcome and gracious… I couldn’t have written the book without the help of all of these Yemenis who were just so incredibly giving.

22:40 - Fieldwork is essential.

22:50 - The American Institute of Yemeni Studies

29:44 - I scribble things on scraps of paper that then end up in Ziplock bags, which is as disorganized as it sounds… and then I use Microsoft Word, and I sit down and write.

31:46 - I don’t typically do a lot of outlining, but I do do a lot of re-writing… I’ll be at my desk by 9am and just write until - well, I know myself well enough by now to know the point at which I’m not going to get any more productive work done, and that’s usually around 4pm or so, and then I go for a run, and then the day is over… The next day, I typically read back through everything that I have, and as I read back through it I tend to find places that just don’t work… and then I spend time fixing those.

37:38 - Buzzfeed is one of the few media organizations I’m aware of that would fund something like [his fellowship] to the degree that they did and give me the flexibility and the freedom - things that I really value.

39:50 - Gregory’s great story about one sentence: 60 Words and A War Without End

50:57 - I could not have written the book that I did without Arabic [language abilities].

Greg’s Books:

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. Thompson

Matt’s Book: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Greg’s Film: It’s a Wonderful Life

Alex’s Book: Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy by Jonathon A. C. Brown

Greg’s Music: Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony:


Sources and Methods #13: Paul Clammer

 
 

Paul Clammer 101:

Paul Clammer's website/blog

Paul on Twitter

Paul on Facebook

Paul's Haiti Travel Guide (Facebook site and Amazon)

Lonely Planet Guide to Afghanistan

Show notes:

Kabul Caravan - backpacking in Afghanistan immediately after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001

Lonely Planet realized they hadn’t had an updated version of their Afghanistan book since 1978 and was curious about an updated version.

4:47 - Fundamentally, the research tools that you use are the same, whether you're writing a guidebook about Afghanistan or San Francisco. The main difference I find is whether you’re writing a guidebook from scratch.

7:41 - When you’re writing a new book, Google isn’t all that helpful. It’s asking a whole lot of questions of a whole lot of people when you’re there, on the ground.

9:10 - With LP, we also get a lot of feedback from readers. When you read the book you often think the travel writer has gone out and discovered these new places but often I find that when you’re actually in the field, you’ often trying to catch up with what the travelers are doing this second. And of course you’re balancing this with what can be found online instantaneously.

Chief Burger in Kabul

10:43 - I find Open Street Maps the most effective tool, more than Google Maps, I find those are often the most up to date. With that, the notebook I carry with me is always full of these little sketches, that’s the hotel, that’s the intersection.

12:17 - It’s absolutely essential that you think about the people who will be using your product at the end of it.

16:17 - [Guidebooks] are really about the process of demystifying travel...it’s about providing a toolkit that people can go out and understand, and enjoy themselves doing it.

17:09 - Travel can be a force for good in understanding the world.

18:56 - For me, the best to use a guidebook is to read it in the morning, workout roughly what you want to do, and then put it down and go out and explore.

20:42 - Put down the smartphone (as you travel) and look up.

25:31 - Travel is one of the biggest industries in the world, if not the biggest industry...I think you can go to the most obscure places in the world and you’ll find people traveling there for whatever reasons.

26:01 - Even if a country isn’t ready for tourism, it can still be useful for people going there for work.

29:34 - On a personal level, [I love writing guidebooks because] it allows me to talk with lots of interesting people - museum curators, journalists, activists, artists, ngo workers, and I find that fascinating and feel very lucky to be able to do that.

31:34 - There’s definitely a list of cliches you need to avoid - like ‘the land of contrasts’ but it can be hard when you have 200 hotel reviews to write. That’s one of the biggest challenges - to not repeat yourself.

38:42 - As with so many industries, the Internet has been an incredibly disrupting force… and I do think it’s a major challenge...many people are working on integrating more up to date content with print materials.

But I do think it’s kind of information overload, so guidebooks can work as cultivators of this information, so you can trust what you read there.

40:01 - Tripadvisor.com

42:23 - (On how the industry is changing) When I started doing guidebooks, it was very much I would write a chapter in a Word document, send that. Now I write them in a content management system, so those reviews...can be plucked out (into other mechanisms).

41:10 - I actually use the same booking websites as a lot of other people - Skyscanner.net etc… Twitter is an excellent tool when you’re going somewhere, following hashtags on topics. Following bloggers is also… a really great tool.

44:44 - Most practical tip: take a lot less stuff than you think you need, ideally you can get everything in your carryon luggage.

46:27 - I still find that the easiest way doing research on the ground is the notebook in the pocket.

54:08 - (Advice to aspiring travel writers) - It’s essential that you read as much as you can...so really, read as much as you can, because travel writing has its own set of cliches that we were talking about. And then it’s a case of setting yourself writing exercises...It’s really a case of getting yourself out there… and write and put yourself out there and get feedback and keep going.

Paul’s picks:

Book: Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

Film: 20,000 Days on Earth (Trailer)

Paul’s Song: I Pity The Country by Willie Dunn

Matt’s Pick: How Children Succeed by Paul Tough

Alex’s Pick: Toki Pona, a language of 120 words.

Memrise Toki Pona course

"What happened when I tried to learn Toki Pona in 48 hours using memes" (The Guardian)

"Lessons from two days of Toki Pona" (Memrise Blog)

"Toki Pona - A personal learning adventure" (Memrise blog)

Sources and Methods #10: Jason Lyall

 
 

Jason Lyall 101:

Personal Website (you can find links to all his research here)

Yale Professor Page

MISTI USAID Page

Jackson Institute at Yale

Institution Social and Policy Studies

Show Notes:

3:58 - I’m interested in the effectiveness of violence - when it works, whether it works - and what it does to the victims. And I’m interested in insurgents and how they react to violence, and how does it affect them? Do they ramp up their attacks, or scale down their attacks?

4:40 - Counter insurgency is not a new practice. But it’s often been approached in a fairly crude fashion. What we’re trying to do is bring some new literature to the table from spatial economics literature or survey literature and better understand it.

9:00 - Study looking at artillery fire that the Russians were lobbing more or less randomly into populated settlements. They were doing this as a way of trying to separate the people from the insurgency, showing people what the consequences of continued support for the insurgency would be. Most of our theoretical literature would say that indiscriminate violence is incredibly counter productive and would not be be effective - would generate new insurgents and new grievances - so you should see this uptick in violence. What’s interesting in the Russian case is that you don’t see that uptick. It actually seems to have decreased insurgent violence in the periods after the shelling. So it’s an outlier case... And I would say it is what has led to the dismantling of the insurgency in Chechnya.

12:12 - I think the way I would read that paper - we should not assume that violence has any one kind of effect. We should be looking for the different effects, and looking for the conditions of those effects.

14:30 - The metrics used in this research is really good for short term effects, but entirely different methods may be necessary to take the long term view and understand those effects. The field lab I run is trying to merge those two perspectives.

17:58 - We’re not good at trends, we’re not good at regional patterns, we’re not even good at generalizability inside the same case we’re studying - and these are problems.

22:00 - It is possible to get the data in difficult areas, but you have to be really really smart and careful. You can do it, but it takes a tremendous amount of time. And the risk of failure is incredibly high. In Afghanistan, I’ll typically have two or three projects going at the same time with the understanding that one of them will likely fail.

23:04 - If you adopt the right methodology, you can get more data than we ever thought possible.

26:22 - I have a love/hate relationship with the Asia Foundation. I know what they’re trying to do, but I have questions about how they’re doing it.

27:32 - The latest Asia Foundation Report here.

27:49 - Surveys for me are about mapping patterns down, rather than getting really deep insights into what a particular concept means.

29:00 - For local level questions or regional questions - I think these are a nice middle ground, using a mid-range methodology, where I can do lots of things but not everything - is the way to go.

29:35 - Smart polling should be a key part of our toolkit, but the thing that we usually lack is baseline data. By the time we start caring about a place, it’s too late to run baselines. So we’re forever behind, because we never know what was there before. So I’m a big proponent of using smart, tailored surveys. Specific questions. Specific areas.

30:54 - With that, these surveys just measure attitudes, not behavior. Important to remember that.

33:01 - In Afghanistan, I think we vastly underuse SMS as a tool.

36:40 - Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan (co-authored by Lyall and includes the Endorsement polling technique). A primer on  the list technique in polling.

45:55 - Bombing to Lose? Airpower and the Dynamics of Violence in Counterinsurgency Wars, published in August 2014 by Lyall, found:

Evidence consistently indicates that airstrikes markedly increase insurgent attacks relative to non-bombed locations for at least 90 days after a strike.

We’d be hard pressed to find an example where an insurgency could be destroyed from an air - where air power alone has actually done this.

55:56 - I build project-specific infrastructure when I get to work. Sometimes I’m working with satellite imagery. Each project has it’s own methodology, research. A problem I’m having right now is that there’s too many platforms in play - we’re working to get everyone on the same

1:00:40 - Morning Routine:

  • I knock off around 2 or 3AM. The last thing I do is write a note to myself about what I should be focusing on the next day. If I don’t get centered quickly, I find that I lose the day, getting distracted by email, etc.

  • So that note shows me - which I keep with me - what I need to do, what I have to get through that day, it’s like my touchstone.

  • I set aside an hour or two every Friday about what I want to accomplish the following week, and these notes each morning help preserve my space to think.

  • It’s often a physical sticky - it tells me what I’m doing, and where I am in the master plan. Otherwise I write these things in Evernote.

1:04:22 - Also use:

  • RunKeeper, to remind myself to keep working out.

  • I’m a big fan of turning off my social media, letting it go dark. I use a software blocker often for up to a week at a time to keep me off of it.

Jason’s Book: The Peripheral by William Gibson. And The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.  

Jason’s Film: Guardians of The Galaxy

Jason’s Song: Alt-J’s Taro