I have a stack of unwritten and partially-written blog posts in my “to do” list and my drafts folder. These include such vital topics as the war in Afghanistan, the future of Facebook and the spat between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. But because I am a great big gadget nerd, I am going to disregard all of those important topics tonight and, rather than finish one of those posts, I am going to write about the Apple Bloody Tablet or, as we now know we should be calling it, the iPad.

Throughout much of the 97-minute presentation a couple of hours ago in San Francisco, I was disappointed. The iPad seemed an impressive piece of kit, but essentially, just an overgrown iPhone. However, my dissapointment was grounded in the expectation of a price point around the $1000 mark, as frequently leaked in recent weeks (it’s now tempting to conclude that Apple was, in fact, tacitly allowing quite a bit of technical information to leak, the better to keep secret the real surprise: the price. When Jobs announced the starting price point of $499, I’ll admit my jaw dropped. Of course, it’s possible to spend almost double that on an iPad to get the top spec, and many Apple fanboys inevitably will. But that low starting price suggests that Apple is taking on the netbook sector head-on and ensures that the iPad will, at the very minimum, sell respectably.

After the end of the event, and having perused follow-up reports like Engadget’s hands-on with the device, here are some more thoughts.

It’s clearly an masterpiece of engineering. Innovations like the MacBook Air have made us used to ultra-thin screens, but nevertheless, a full-fledged computer with a 10″ touchscreen, no thicker than an iPod, is impressive by any standards. From close-up photos it appears to be extremely solid, essential for a product like this with aspirations to being carried around in people’s bags. Perhaps the most impressive part of the Apple presentation was actually when the screen flashed up a picture of Amazon’s Kindle. Seeing it, with its strange tilt-buttons and enormous frame-to-screen ratio, made it clear just how nice-looking the iPad is for its size.

It’s big. It wasn’t until I saw the shot of a iPad next to an iPod that I realised just how big. A 10-inch 4:3 screen with a broad frame makes it substantially bigger than the 10-inch 16:9 Samsung netbook I’m typing this on; and substantially larger than the Kindle, which by all accounts only just manages to be handbag-friendly. What does this mean? It means the iPad will be provide a rich experience for media and web browsing, but also that it’s destined primarily for the home rather than portable use - which is probably why they felt comfortable making 3G optional.

It may not be as satisfying a web experience as Steve Jobs wants us to think. At 1024×768, the iPad has a high enough resolution to show a standard 1000-pixel web page at full size in portrait mode. However, the presentation made it clear Apple expect users to primarily use the device in portrait mode - and it certainly looks like it would be more comfortable in that configuration. That means viewing web pages designed for a 1024-width screen with a 768-wide screen, slightly zoomed out. It’s likely that the user going to the New York Times website with the iPad in portrait will still need to zoom in to read stories, which isn’t really a sufficiently big leap up in user experience from the iPhone.

Why didn’t Apple cram in more resolution? After all, higher resolution would improve the iPad’s usefulness as an e-book reader, which is clearly supposed to be part of its attraction; and would have enabled the iPad to accurately boast HD video, although the fact that the iPad’s actual resolution doesn’t allow for HD didn’t stop Jobs bragging that it could play it for some reason.

It’s unlikely that it would have added much cost - Dell have introduced a high-resolution option to its Mini 10 netbook for just $40 extra. Obviously, higher-resolution touchscreen would cost more. But I suspect the real issue is users’ eyes.

A 10-inch screen running at 1024×768 produces a pretty standard pixel density - the number of pixels along an inch of screen line - of around 100 per inch. That’s relatively easy on the eye, but go any higher than that and some users report strain and headaches. Apple has had some of this trouble with its new 27″ iMac, which with a resolution of 2560×1440 boasts an unusual pixel density of around 110 ppi. And the iPad is designed to be held relatively close to the face, which could have made eye strain even worse.

Granted, my flatmate spends whole evenings surfing the web on his iPhone, so having to zoom in is clearly not an experience-destroying problem. But I do wonder if, in a future iteration, they shouldn’t try to get the portrait width up to 1024 pixels, even if it means an 11″ screen.

It’s far more of a gamble than the iPhone. We don’t know much about the level of investment that’s gone into the iPad, though leaks and rumours from Cupertino suggest it’s been substantial. But whatever money Apple has invested, it’s taking more of a risk with it than with its (probably bigger) initial investment into the iPhone.

The iPhone was essentially based on a gamble: that users would like multi-touch enough to upgrade to their first smartphone. The cost to consumers of enjoying the intuitiveness of multi-touch, in comparison to other phones and smartphones, was a somewhat higher price - offset by a 2-year contract - and a crap camera. In retrospect, consumers were clearly always going to bite Apple’s hand off.

This time, Apple is making a similar, but much riskier, gamble: that users will like multi-touch enough they’ll choose the touch-rich, but extremely limited, iPhone OS over a Windows netbook, the iPad’s most obvious competitor. Unlike upgrading to the iPhone from, say, a Symbian handset, switching from a netbook to an iPad as your second computer requires giving up a lot of capability - the ability to run more than one program at once; the ability to run most applications, at least until the App Store fills up with iPad-designed apps. Granted, the iPad version of iWork demonstrated today shows the potential is there for iPad software far more powerful than any iPod app. But it could be months or years before a range of software is available that can begin to replace the range of software available for Windows (or, for that matter, full-scale Mac OS X).

In addition, there’s a host of tasks people use netbooks for which the iPad just doesn’t seem to be able to do. Notably, there’s acting as a media hub. Like many people, when I got my netbook, I continued to use my desktop computer for managing photos, podcasts and my music collection. Then, as I found myself using the netbook more and more, I copied the collections over, for a while storing my media on both computers and trying to keep them in sync. But soon enough, I realised that I hadn’t used my desktop for several weeks. My netbook - a bog-standard Samsung NC10 with the usual 1ghz/1gb/160gb specs - had proven more than powerful enough to be my main computer. It’s the netbook I plug my phone, camera, and MP3 player into to charge and refill them.

By contrast, the iPad’s reliance on iPhone OS means it’s incapable of being, in Apple’s own parlance, a “digital hub.” You can’t plug an iPod into an iPad to manage the music on it - both have to be plugged into a Mac or PC. Even just getting pictures of an SD card will, by all accounts, require an additional kit. You can’t even transfer files to the iPad to use on those lovely iWork apps on a USB stick: no USB ports.

None of this is surprising. Apple’s “digital hub” strategy is designed to have a Mac in the middle. Granted, it may have made a lot of money from the gadgets - iPod, iPhone, and now iPad - around the edges. But it’s not going to give those items the power to render the hub redundant. Apple aren’t going to cannibalise its sales of $1000+ Macs to sell their $499 iPad.

But though it’s not a surprise, the iPad’s limitations - no multitasking, no media hub, no USB - are a problem because they make it impossible to even consider the iPad as your only, or even main, computer. Picture the scene: you’re at home, on your sofa, surfing the web on your iPad. You see your favourite website has put up a new episode of your favourite podcast, and you want to download it and put it on your iPod. Can’t do that with the iPad, so you go upstairs, get your laptop, and bring it downstairs. Ten minutes later, having downloaded and transferred the podcast, you realise you’re now surfing the web with your laptop, and the iPad is sitting unloved on the floor.

Apple have made their career as a company out of closed systems: the Mac is a closed system, in that the software doesn’t run on other manufacturer’s computers and Apple’s computers don’t (OK, didn’t until recently) run Windows. With the iPhone, Apple took the closed system a step further, allowing only those applications officially approved by Apple themselves to be installed. This works fine in the mobile phone world, where the whole idea of installable software is a new one. But it’s a very different proposition in the personal computer market, which for all Jobs’ talk of a “third category”, is ultimately where the iPad will compete.

The iPad seems to me like a sort of Bang & Olufsen version of a netbook: lush, beautifully put together, but actually no more useful than a cheaper one. The benefits of the iPad’s power are likely to be negated by the limitations of the software available for it being subject to Apple’s whim.

Will the iPad prove as successful as the iPhone? I doubt it; the iPhone has performed well in an existing product category, whereas the iPad is trying to create a new one. But what’s more, I hope not. For millions of people to spend much of their computing time, between iPhone and iPad, in front of a closed OS would be bad for innovation, bad for competition, and bad, ultimately, for users. Windows, as depressing as its dominance is, is at least an open platform for development with millions of applications, ranging from thousand-pound professional suites to 50k applets, available all over the place. iPhone OS couldn’t be more the opposite. And while that approach has worked in the mobile realm, it’s far from clear users will accept it in a home computer. And, in my view, they probably shouldn’t.

It’ll be interesting to see if this model catches on. Many blogs comment boards, though open to the public, are dominated by a hard core of users. The Guardian’s Comment is Free site, where frequent commenters are often too busy arguing with each other (or commiserating each other on the deaths of loved ones) to talk about the posts they’re commenting on. The site has occasionally promoted an arch-commenter to contributor. But any attempt to let commenters produce posts without moderation would be a disaster because the site is open to anyone who registers.

A serious current affairs blog with a wide range of contributions both from full-time bloggers and members of the public - but with processes to ensure only serious, thoughtful people can register - that might be really something. In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep trying to pass my ‘audition’ to be an approved commenter on Lifehacker.

Ever since the concept of the ’social network’ website was coined in the early 2000’s, it’s been abused as much as it’s been used. Properly understood, a social network is a website whose primary purpose is to enable people to build connections and communicate with each other through those connections. Though Facebook is now considered the sine qua non of the medium, it began with Friendster and encompasses MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn as well as smaller, specialist sites like the British, gay-focussed Thingbox.

But because social networks evolved around the same time as other Web 2.0 services, it’s often used as a catch-all term. [Read more →]

Lowering your personal carbon footprint and saying you’re reducing climate change is like fitting a burglar alarm and saying you’re talking crime. You’re not, you’re just opting out of the problem

Palm warned that after seven or eight apps, depending on footprint, we’d have to start closing some items to save memory, but we’ve taken the Pre up to 12 apps and beyond (including four browser windows, email, SMS / AIM conversations, the AccuWeather app, Pandora streaming in the background, dialer, and more) with no issue.

- Engadget

This makes me very happy.

No doubt you’re already aware that you can watch 4oD Catch-Up on our new improved channel4.com (and if you haven’t tried it yet, what are you waiting for?). All the content is streamed which makes it really easy to use, you shouldn’t need to download anything - simply find what you want to watch and hit “Play”. Oh, and non-Windows users will be pleased to know that 4oD Catch-Up on channel4.com is now Mac and Linux compatible.

From around the end of June you’ll also be able to watch all our archive programmes on channel4.com. Which means all your favourites will be in one place and available for free.

- Channel 4 email to 4oD users

A quiz, dear reader. Does this represent:

(a) the end of months of brand confusion within Channel 4 between the download-based 4oD service and the streaming-based Catch-Up?

(b) a victory for consumers on a par with iTunes’ abandonment of DRM?

(c) a bit of an embarassment for the BBC?

(d) all of the above?

And the answer is (d), sort of. While the sheer range of stuff available on 4OD has always been impressive, the software was horrible, thanks both to the nasty, malware-esque Kontiki peer-to-peer software underpinning it and the bizarre Internet Explorer-based front-end Channel 4 put on top. One can’t blame Channel 4 for quickly switching, for the most popular, recent content, to a streaming system instead. The BBC made the same switch in the first few months of iPlayer. But while the BBC only ever offered recent programmes, Channel 4 still had that archive available. So 4oD struggled on, unloved and uninvested in, as a download service with horrible software. To confuse matters further, the 4oD name was also used in introducing Catch-Up streams and on digital TV.

Now Channel 4 has finally rationalised its offering, in the way that probably offers the simplest solution for consumers: the archive material is being integrated into the streaming service, creating a single portal for both recent and archive Channel 4 shows. Best of all, the pay wall is coming down. And the whole thing steals the thunder of the BBC, who are dragging their heels over their longstanding plan to make archive material available online.

This doesn’t mean that the new 4oD will be as pleasurable to use, or as popular, as the iPlayer. But it does mean 20 years of classic C4 programming instantly, freely available for consumers without any software installation. That’s a good thing.

Jacqui Smith’s down-to-earth nature and soft approach seemed a breath of fresh air in the early days of Gordon Brown’s government. Now she’s stepping down, her tenure appearing, to many, one of disappointing underachievement. The parallels with the government she served in are inescapable. 

Bet you a tenner I’ve got one of them almost word for word.

- Stephen Bayley: Reject the Prince of Pastiche and his ludicrous architectural prejudices [Observer]

Filing this one away in case I ever forget why reading just the headlines and the standfirst of news stories never really tells you what’s going on:

Swine flu could affect third of world’s population, says study

Researchers say swine flu will spread around world within nine months, as UK confirms three more cases

The swine flu virus will infect a third of the world’s population if it continues to spread at its current rate, scientists warned today, as three more cases were confirmed in the UK.

In what the journal Science described as the “first quick and dirty analysis” of swine flu, a study by researchers at Imperial College London predicted the virus was likely to cause an epidemic in the northern hemisphere in the autumn.

One of the authors, the epidemiologist and disease modeller Neil Ferguson, who sits on the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee for the outbreak, said the virus had “full pandemic potential”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “It is likely to spread around the world in the next six to nine months, and when it does so, it will affect about one-third of the world’s population.

OH MY GOD. WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

“To put that into context, normal seasonal flu probably affects around 10% of the world’s population every year, so we are heading for a flu season which is perhaps three times worse than usual –

Oh.

– not allowing for whether this virus is more severe than normal seasonal flu viruses.”

That strikes me as rather a large “not allowing”.

So: scary headline, story that confuses more than reassures. Standard stuff, really.

I’m surprised we haven’t heard more objections to this clause of the proposed European Union Definition of Antisemitism:

Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include… Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Strikes me as problematic, to say the least.

I don’t have the time today to do a complete, detailed response to Philip Pullman’s silly piece in the Times a few weeks ago, which has just come to my attention. But let me just quickly tee up the most obvious objections. The piece invokes William Blake to argue that civil liberties are so under threat in today’s UK that democract is effectively a sham.

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

This is a kind of ad hominem argument: that is to say, it doesn’t put forward an argument at all, but simply presents a widely admired author as being on one side of an issue and expects its readers to follow suit out of sheer admiration. It’s the trick every politician pulls when invoking Lincoln, Reagan or Churchill in their speeches: somebody you admire once believed something similar to what I believe in superficially similar circumstances, so you should agree with me. There’s not one sentence - in a 1100-word article - of actual argument against the slew of liberty-infringing laws the article rails against. The effect - the removal of the article’s rhetoric from the reality of the issues at stake - is deepened by the fact that the figure invoked is not even a politician, philosopher, or moralist. He’s a writer - a gifted one, certainly, and one whose writings touched on issues of morality and the role of the state. But not a true political thinker of any stature. There’s not a philosophy being invoked, to which many people nowadays subscribe, which this writer invented or embodied. This simply tells us that a great poet disliked tyranny. Should the fact that Blake diagnosed and condemned sham democracy give us pause today? Well, let’s see what else he advocated. A proto-socialist, he railed against the excesses of capitalism at least as surely as those of government. Do the Times readers enjoying this article subscribe to those aspects of his views, too?

Not that Pullman ought to be concerned with any of this: he is himself, after all, an author. An author, to be precise, of children’s books - highly enjoyable ones, admittedly, with some interesting, if jumbled, religious allusions. But children’s books nonetheless. For him to look to other writers for inspiration in constructing his view of the world, and of politics, is perfectly natural.

But for a serious national newspaper to print it is not. This is a complex issue, deserving of a detailed, nuanced analysis. The list of allegedly freedom-restricting statutes Pullman reels off at the end of the article is just that, a list, and each individual bill contains its own balance between the needs of security and those of liberty. You might well think the government has got that balance consistently wrong. Let’s have a look, citing examples, providing evidence. This is the debate that’s needed; this is the debate it’s a newspaper’s job to provide. Not to give a platform to an author delivering what amounts to a rallying cry for the converted - not intended to win over doubters, but to inspire true believers with the faith that a poet they like would be with them.

Assuming, of course, that Blake would be with them. For an argument could easily be constructed that to compare the democratic situation in Blake’s time with ours now is so callously unfair as to border on the offensive. How can the lines “You are not to be trusted with laws / So we shall put ourselves out of your reach” not mean something utterly different in an age of universal suffrage? No-one can know for sure how Blake would have responded to the threats - both to security and to liberty - that we face today. Even detailed, clear philosophies like those provided by Locke or Marx are hard to apply usefully a century or more on from their writing.

And if this article ignores the immense progress in freedom made in recent centuries, the modern liberty movement also takes a disastrously narrow view of freedom in the context of the present. What about the many positive steps in the last decade? The adoption of the Human Rights Act? The loosening of alcohol licensing is probably a more regular source of joy in the lives of many britons than the presence of CCTV is a worry. What about my freedom to marry my boyfriend? The freedom to travel easily across Europe? The freedom of women and men to work part-time? Blake’s vision of liberty was broad enough to econompass practical, as well as legal, freedom. Why isn’t Pullman’s?

For me to pull out the old caricature of latte-sipping Islington liberals as the only people worried about these things would be engage in an ad hominem argument of my own. But like most stereotypes, it containts a kernel of truth. Only those whose lives are free of discrimination and material want can afford to take  such a narrow view of freedom.

Imagine if, instead of criticising each other in op-eds, engaging in showpiece letter-page spats or sprawling, hard-to-follow blog arguments, the thinkers of our time actually discussed things directly with each other? Rebutting and responding to each other in real time? And they let us watch? Wouldn’t it be, just, the best thing?

Don’t let the ramshackle presentation and iffy video quality put you off. If it plays its cards right, and maybe smartens up a little, the rapidly-growing Bloggingheads might just be the most important thing ever to happen anywhere (at least, since the last thing I said that about).

A case in point: This exchange - between semi-repentant neocon David Frum and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation (American think tanks always have three-word names, and one word is always “America”) is the best broad-reaching analysis of the current Middle East situation I’ve seen coming out of the recent Gaza debate. It provides a great impression of what the practical road to a palestinian state might look like - and a fantastic insight, for those of us used to the European viewe of the issue - an incredibly useful view of the conservative take on the current state of play and how we got here. There’s an audio download and podcast subscription options also available.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ch.9

Substitute “George and Dick” and you’re pretty much there, no?

Fitzgerald, of course, also said “There are no second acts in American life.” A world nervously hopes that he’s proven right in this case.

Funny how political change is aided by acts of god. Would Tony Blair have become PM if John Smith hadn’t died? Surely not. And I wonder: if Hurricane Katrina hadn’t begun the total breakdown of Bush’s popularity, would Obama have become president?

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a short post paying a small tribute to the man I believe is one of the least-sung heroes of the Obama campaign: Governor Howard Dean. Today I sat down to do it and realised this is in fact the very day he hands over to successor Tim Kaine.

Look at this display of front pages covering Obama’s inauguration. What words were selected by more newspapers than any others to summarise the new president’s message to the nation? “Hope over fear.”

Sound familiar? It’s because you heard it throughout the spring of 2004. “Hope not fear” was the  primary slogan of Dean’s campaign. After a year of hearing Obama talk about hope, it’s easy to forget just how radical-sounding this was. In 2004, fear was everywhere in America. Citizens, prodded by regular government threat alerts, feared terrorist attacks. Families feared for their sons and daughters in Iraq, which was just beginning to look insoluble. And the Democractic party feared to attack the war, or President Bush, for fear of sounding weak and unpatriotic. But Dean attacked the war. Dean attacked Bush. And Dean talked unashamedly, unapologetically, about hope.

Dean’s campaign may have failed, and probably rightly. But it provided the first shot of adrenalin that re-started the beating heart of the Democratic party: the grass-roots organisers and volunteers whose energy, four years later, propelled Obama to the nomination and, ultimately, the White House. As the first real internet candidate, Dean laid the groundwork for Obama’s breathaking fundraising organisation. As the first major-party electoral candidate to run against the war in Iraq, he helped set in motion the tectonic shift in public opinion that doomed Clinton and made Obama the Democratic front-runner. And by daring to offer full-throated criticism of President Bush, at a time when the party leadership was too craven to do so, he began the process of breaking down the post-9/11 conspiracy of silence that allowed so many disastrous missteps - Iraq, torture, wiretapping - to happen unchecked.

That same party leadership fought hard to prevent Dean becoming DNC Chair. But, as the grassroots predicted, his leadership was a revelation, galvanising volunteers and transforming fundraising. The 2006 mid-term victories that began the tide that swept Obama to the Presidency? Down in no small part to the smarts and passion of Dean. And that “50-state” strategy that enabled Obama to redraw the electoral map and end, in a stroke, a thousand hand-wringing worries about “divided America”? The brainchild of Howard Dean.

As a presidential candidate, Dean was a failure. But in both that role and his role as DNC Chair, he helped re-inspire a party slouched in despondency - and in his unapologetic passion for progressive politics, he helped Obama re-inspire a nation.

Someone on CNN just got rounded on by his colleagues for saying that he thought Obama’s speech lacked a truly memorable line on a par with “ask not what your country can do for you” or the oft-misquoted “We have nothing The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And I suspect he’s right: it was lacking a money shot, as it were. But I think that may be deliberate. For while the tasks facing Roosevelt and Kennedy in those speeches were straightforward, Obama’s was highly complex - too much so to be summed up in a single, memorable phrase.

Roosevelt’s task was to reassure a nation in the midst of crisis. That reassurance - a message of, to use the modern slogan, Hope - was all that people needed to take away from his inaugural. For Kennedy, the task was also simple: to stir a complacent nation into a greater level of engagement with the Cold War, the battle against poverty, and assorted other challenges, and in doing so add a sense of history to what was in fact a squeaked-through election victory.

By contrast, Obama’s speech had a double aim: not only to reassure the nation that it could weather the current crisis, but also to impress the seriousness of that crisis on the nation. Remember, when Obama first began selling his message of change to the nation, the financial crisis had barely begun. The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, of failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, were those he promised to deliver America from. As the election continued, the crisis became central to Obama’s speeches and the number one issue for voters. But the true depth of the crisis has become clear only since the election. Just these last few days, the dire news from Bank of America and Citigroup show the bottom has not yet been reached.

Yet the true scale of the crisis, it seems, hasn’t truly hit home. Roosevelt addressed a people who had seen three long years of decline. They knew the extent of their woes, and were desperate to hear good news. While the period since Obama’s election may have seemed interminable, it was merely weeks, much of which has been spent on business-as-usual bickering about the Warren selection, the Burris farrago, Geithner’s tax returns and the like. In recent days Obama’s hopes to quickly secure his stimulus package have been stalled by increasing conservative concern about waste, partly a result of the supposed “failure” of last autumn’s bailout.

All of this is reasonable scrutiny. But none of it is commensurate with a sense of dire emergency. Plans on the scale of Obama’s require a sense of urgency of the kind which was seen after September 11. So the speech had a dual purpose: to provide the sense of hope which we associate with Obama, but also to lay out clearly to Americans, perhaps for the first time, the full scale of the challenge ahead.

Hence the blunt tone of the first few lines. Declaring himself “humbled by the task before us,” he spoke of taking the oath “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. The summing-up of the state of the union that followed was remarkably bleak:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.  Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.  Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered.  Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. 

This from a man who was ridiculed last year as a happy-clappy peddler of loose promises! Even when the tone of the speech turned to the positive future, the tone was of gritty determination rather than high-flown dreams.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and they are many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this, America -  they will be met.

At times, the tone was almost chastening. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “our collective failure to make hard choices.” His main biblical reference was almost damning: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For an America that has been coddled with praise for years by a simplistically patriotic president, this is a remarkable change of tone.

The next siginificant passage reminded this “childish” America of the sacrifices that brought us to this point. 

It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. 

This is the voice of a serious man with a deep sense of history. This is not feelgood stuff.

As the speech went on, Obama talked in more hopeful terms about his goals, and the shopping list is daunting:

We will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But strikingly, the climax of the speech brought the tone back to one of marked uncertainty. More than once, he associated the current crisis with the question of the survival of the United States itself. First he recalled Thomas Paine’s words, read aloud to George Washington’s troops before one of the final battles of the War of Independence:

In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”*

Then in his closing paragraph he openly, albeit briefly, raised the spectre of the end of the American experiment:

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [My emphasis]

This rhetoric is not aspirational. If this is an example of the audacity of hope, it is a hope tempered with a profound sense of foreboding at the scale of the task ahead. If this is inspiration for the future, it’s also deeply aware of the journey that has led us here. And if this is a message of reassurance for the people, it’s also one of responsibility.

It’s a nuanced message. A mature message. Even a conservative one. It reinforces, once again, my suspicion that Obama may truly be what he appears to be: a uniquely serious, thoughtful and determined man, potentially a remarkable leader.

These times require no less.

Read the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech

*Paine’s original words were “to meet and repulse it.”

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in "Defiance"

Two films currently out demonstrate the tensions thrown up by the globalisation of culture. Take first Edward Zwick’s film Defiance. On paper, this sounds like a worthy winner, Oscar material: the tale of three Jewish brothers who take up arms - quite vigorously, by all accounts - against the Nazis in the forests of Belarus. With an solid cast - Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and not-totally-unknown Liev Schreiber play the brothers - it’s picked up respectable reviews and should have been a success. Casting aside the old myth of Jewish quavering in the face of tyranny, it was to show the world that once provoked, Jews can make implacable enemies.

Then events provided rather better evidence of that fact.

Now, Defiance is caught up in the maelstrom of the Gazan conflict. The film has taken a measly $4 million worldwide so far, after a fortnight of release. This is despite heavy advertising in London (and, I assume, other major cities). Now, I can’t say for certain that this is less than expected, or that its popularity has been hit by the Gazan affair. But it seems almost impossible that it wouldn’t be, at least in Europe.

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in "Slumdog Millionaire"

By contrast, Slumdog Millionnaire has combined critical and commercial success with its fairy tale of modern India. Much of the praise has accrued to its director, Danny Boyle. But I noticed at the end of the film an interesting credit: “Co-director (India): Loveleen Tandan”. My god, I thought to myself. Is it all a sham? Has Boyle just stuck his name on a project from his cosy editing suite in Scotland while an Indian director does all the work? My suspicions deepened when I read that many of the actors didn’t speak English. Surely Tandan must have played the leading role in working with the young cast.

Fortunately, the story seems less suspicious than that. Slumdog is in fact Tandan’s directorial debut - she’s known as a successful casting director, having cast films including Monsoon Wedding and Brick Lane. And it was in that capacity that she came on board Slumdog. As the challenges of finding an Indian cast became clear, however, her influence led to decisions that really shaped the film. It was Tandan who suggested that the film would benefit from being partially in Hindi - the fact which gives much of it a gritty intensity which balances its vibrant pallette and fairy-tale plot. Tandan also wrote much of the Hindi dialogue. Boyle, to his credit, saw her capacity to ensure the film’s serious engagement with its Indian location and actors, and made her co-director.

Slumdog seems to be a genuinely successful example of global collaboration. But I can’t help but wish Tandan’s contribution had attracted more press attention. Let’s hope if, as seems likely, the film garners some Oscar nominations, Tandan is there on the night to pick up her share of praise.

UPDATE: It transpires that Defiance was only released in most US cities and some of Europe yesterday. Making that $4 million figure less disastrous. It’ll be interesting to see how its opening weekends are affected by the ongoing Gaza situation.

On the Today programme a few days ago, the Israeli ambassador to the UK expressed his hope that the crisis in Gaza would lead the people of the beseiged strip to reject the leadership of Hamas. Pro-Israeli commentators - especially in the US - have repeatedly said that it’s the Gazans’ responsibility to make peace possible by choosing a government that wants peace.

But leaving the moral validity of this argument aside, it’s clear that it’s a fantasy. One British journalist on Today recalled speaking to a long-time Fatah member who told him, “we are all Hamas now”. The Israelis, like the US in Iraq, are underestimating the power of nationalism. It doesn’t matter how terrible a government is - its people won’t reject it at the behest of any foreign power. Indeed, support for bad governments is usually strengthened by such pressure.

The furore over Obama’s selection of Rick Warren is emblematic of one of the wider stories of the 08 election: the death of the myth of the ’60s “rainbow coalition” of minorities. The idea that women’s rights, racial civil rights and gay rights were all in some way complementary was always, of course, the fantasy of liberal straight white males. Minority members knew it wasn’t so simple. The Civil Rights Movement was strained by sexism, leading black and white women alike to leave it for feminism. And obviously, gays and blacks have had their issues - the black community voted heavily for Prop 8.

In truth, the relationship between minority rights struggles has always been more competition than coalition. They all vote Democrat, but beyond that there’s little love lost, as the furious feminist response to Obama’s popularity among liberals shows. But liberals keep invoking civil rights as the central objection to the Warren choice. Of course, in the UK, we have legally equivalent civil unions, everyone uses terms like ‘husband’ and ‘wedding’, and everyone seems fairly happy. But even if you accept the gay-marriage movement’s contention that the symbolic effect of the word ‘marriage’ is vital to equality - a view recently endorsed by the California Supreme Court, prompting the Proposition 8 farrago - to compare that symbolic difference with the brutal treatment of blacks in the segregated south is so fatuous as to border on the offensive.

I don’t blame the gay community for being worried - Obama wouldn’t be the first president to talk a good game on civil rights and not live up to it in office. But I find the assertion that Obama, as a member of a “minority”, should have some special sympathy with the gay cause to be silly and hopelessly naive.