The letters of Flann O’Brien: “The theme of this volume is money – how to get it and where it goes. There were all sorts of reasons O’Nolan needed cash: because on his father’s death, when he was 26, he became for some years the sole breadwinner for a family of 12 children; because he spent huge amounts on whiskey; because he married in 1948 and bought a house. The loss of his civil service job was a financial catastrophe that he attempted to mitigate by freelancing – writing columns, proofreading and reading manuscripts for publishers – and by selling his literary papers. Occasionally, in despair, he applied for low-grade administrative jobs. In May 1960 he told a prospective employer that ‘I am known to most people in Dublin who are concerned with publication and advertising work, and have been retained for advertising and “prestige” projects by Messers Guinness and the Hospitals Trust.’ It is tempting to argue that these job application letters are absent of personality because they are not personal. But they speak all too eloquently of the way O’Nolan thought about himself. He had no stable perspective on who he was or what he amounted to. He blithely assumed that he was sufficiently well known and admired as Myles na gCopaleen to run for the Senate (under his own name and without, apparently, bothering to canvas for votes) and yet applied in the same month for a pen-pushing job in Cork.”

The real Kazakhs: “Who are the real Kazakhs? Even by the end of Joanna Lillis’s wide-ranging survey of Central Asia’s wealthiest dictatorship, it’s hard to tell. The livestock-breeding culture of the Kazakh Khanate, a successor to the Mongol Golden Horde, was driven into the ground after its annexation by Russia in the mid-19th century as a result of successive waves of immigration and the Soviet policy of bringing its sprawling herds under state control.”

Remembering oppression fondly: “When I was a little girl, my country held its first democratic election after more than a decade of military rule. The bald, mustachioed general who had led Pakistan for my entire life had died in a plane crash a few months earlier. A woman, the daughter of a previously slain prime minister, led her party to an electoral majority, and on a pleasant December morning we watched her sworn into office. This, we were told, was history. This was democracy. This was the beginning of freedom. The people of my city, Karachi—particularly those who had voted for the new prime minister—decided to use their freedom right away. Large groups of them climbed onto motorbikes and into the backs of pickup trucks; they took over the city streets, waving flags and shooting firearms in the air. Everyone else, including my family, sat inside their houses, afraid. Within a few hours of the arrival of “freedom,” my father and grandfather and mother were nostalgic for the days of tyranny. Dictatorship, they decided, was safer and more orderly than the chaos of democracy. That sort of nostalgia is the subject of Dancing Bears, a new book by the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski.”

A history of blue: “French historian Michel Pastoureau, whose Blue: The History of a Color has just been released to English-speaking audiences, is one of our age’s great librarians of civilization. On its surface, Blue is a dull exercise in scholarly record keeping—but in fact, it is an exhilarating and richly informing book on how the European peoples from the Iron Age until today have decorated themselves and their cultural artefacts with the color blue.”

David Pryce-Jones on snobbery and royal biography: “Snobbery is pretty harmless, as much an entertainment as a vice. One side of me is quite prepared to believe that Kenneth was a snob, a complete snob, and nothing but a snob. He never mentions anyone lacking social significance, and his books praise obviously praiseworthy public figures such as Lord Curzon, King George V, and members of the Cecil family. Victor, the third Lord Rothschild, was a man just as distinguished as intimidating. Kenneth’s biography of him is a labor of love.”
Essay of the Day:

Alex W. Palmer writes about an investigation of a phone scam that led to an unexpected result:

“Brad Young, a lawyer at TripAdvisor, arrived at the company’s offices in Needham, Massachusetts, on October 12, 2015, to find an email from his boss, Seth Kalvert, the company’s general counsel. In itself that wasn’t strange. As a travel site built on crowdsourced wisdom, where hundreds of millions of ordinary people post reviews and rate businesses, TripAdvisor is susceptible to fakery meant to inflate the ranking of a so-so restaurant or stain the reputation of a storied hotel. Young oversaw a group responsible for fending off these efforts, so he frequently got questions from Kalvert about con artists, cunning new deceits, and other shady corners of the law.

“But this email was different. Kalvert’s wife had received a robocall offering an exclusive vacation deal as a reward for her loyal accumulation of ‘Trip­Advisor credits.’ That would have been nice if TripAdvisor credits were a thing, but they weren’t. The call was also odd because TripAdvisor didn’t engage in telemarketing, much less robocalling. Kalvert wanted Young to look into it.

“The anti-fraud team was, in Young’s words, ‘the company’s secret sauce,’ adept at tackling every deception the internet had to offer. But the hustle meant to entice Kalvert’s wife relied on old-school telephony. Cracking it would require an unusual set of skills. Luckily, Young knew just the person to turn to.

“Fred Garvin had joined TripAdvisor’s anti-fraud team eight years earlier. He’d been employed in a series of short-term jobs: mechanic, audio editor, anything that seemed interesting enough to hold his attention for a while. He was out of work when a friend saw an opening for a content moderator at TripAdvisor and urged Garvin to apply. He worked at home for a while, under the radar, but pretty soon managers started noticing his obsessive streak and a knack for what he called ‘research.’ As a kid growing up in a small New England town in the pre-internet era, he’d tracked down the addresses of celebrities so that he could request an autograph; he got a postcard signed by the B-52s and one from Mr. Bill, a famous Saturday Night Live character from the 1970s. (The name ‘Fred Garvin’ is another SNL reference, one of several professional aliases he adopted to protect his identity from the scammers and fraudsters he chases. It comes from an old sketch with Dan Aykroyd as Fred Garvin, male prostitute.) Garvin’s manager recommended him for a position with the anti-fraud team. ‘He’s the most cynical person I’ve ever met,’ she said. ‘He will question everything.’ He was a perfect fit.

“Young asked Garvin to look into the suspicious phone call. He said he figured it was probably the work of ‘some two-bit hustler’ and wouldn’t take long to sort out. Garvin, though, had only one phone call to go on, and a simple question: Who was on the other end of the line?”

Read the rest.

Photo: Nyköping Castle

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