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Political consultancy and the Mitt Romney video
The New Yorker has an interesting piece about the invention of political consultancy. It sprang immediately to mind when I read this quote from Mitt Romney, in a transcript of a secretly recorded video at a fund-raiser: I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular…
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Communicating counterterrorism
This is from a very modest, practical and illuminating speech by a career US diplomat, until recently tasked with using “public diplomacy” for counterterrorism purposes. Lessons from Previous Attempts …Previous messaging projects had a spotty record in the way that they tapped into the intelligence community to inform their work, failing to establish systems and…
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Davos 2012
I attended a Civil Society event where I spoke with representatives from human rights organizations, the union/labor movement, and NGOs working to address some of the hardest problems in society. I had a lunch with a university president talking about the role of technology in higher ed. I had dinner with an esteemed physicist, an…