Wikileaks reveals…the importance of table manners

Julian Assange, photographed outside Ellingham Hall

Wikileaks has radically changed the way I see our world. Not the way I see war, liberty or the role of the state – a lot of the material Wikileaks leaked, was, frankly, unsurprising – but the way I see table manners. Wikileaks' leadership team retained what sanity they had, thanks to a regimen of strict table manners.

This thought comes from the excellent documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks. In it, there is a period when the Wikileaks inner circle of about fifteen people are stuck in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, on journalist Vaughn Smith’s country estate. They can’t leave Ellingham Hall; the MI6, CIA etc. are out to get them. So they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, with just each other for company, united only by their distrust of the outside world, each day melting into the next, as weeks run into months which run into years.

How did they manage to keep things civilized? By enforcing very strict rules on table manners. Vaughn Smith and his housekeeper enforced strict table etiquette, three meals a day, for over five hundred days of maddening claustrophobia.

Must have been the same dynamic in colonial officer’s messes, and up in the tea plantations.

Agnieszka Radwanska endorses Cheesecake Factory: the return of real marketing

Aga Radwanska @ Wimbledon

Aga Raswanska now endorses Cheesecake Factory. 

Refreshingly, she actually likes the Cheesecake Factory. She isn't just endorsing a random brand because they paid her lots of money.

She has been writing about visits to Cheesecake Factory restaurants on her blog for a couple of years now. "Can you imagine we tried almost every kind of cheesecake there during Indian Wells and Miami? Well except one — peanut butter... because I don't really like peanut butter," she wrote. "It's very close to the hotel, which is dangerous, because we could end up going there every night. We went yesterday. Maybe we'll try to cut down to every second night.". The Cheesecake Factory marketing people picked up on this, and an endorsement deal resulted. 

This feels like what celebrity endorsements ought to be about: not cynical money-making by a "media property", but a well known person sharing her genuine enthusiasm for a brand.  

Aga Radwanska @ The Cheesecake Factory