Diary – 4 June 2011

David Brooks opes his Diary

Eye strain. When preparing for my book tour I hadn’t realised how much stress it would put on my eye muscles. But the sideways glance seems to be à la mode among newspaper photographers. They tell you to turn your face nearly sideways to the camera, then pull your eyes all the way over so you can peer directly into it. From the inside it feels like they are turning you into a shifty-eyed Richard Nixon, but it must look edgy to photo editors. In any case, after a few minutes your eye muscles hurt.

I do whatever photographers tell me to do because if you can’t look good you should at least look devious (in France, though, I once refused to pose naked in a bathtub full of milk). I was especially pliable before the lensmen in the UK because I was having such an excellent time. I came to do a little reporting and to promote my book The Social Animal, which has been brilliantly published by Short Books. In the States, it was seen as a non-political book about brain research and personal fulfilment. In Britain, it was treated as the political class’s flavour of the month. I got to meet Ed Miliband, have a chat with David Cameron at No. 10, lead a seminar with members of his policy team in some sort of grand dining room there, and when I got home I had a call from Gordon Brown to talk about the way he is merging cognitive research with a new theory of human rights.

Why is cognitive research and thinking about human nature integrated into British politics but segregated from US politics? Well, in America economists form a phalanx between social research and the world of policymaking.