Lane Wallace : The Atlantic

'Red Tails': History, George Lucas-Style

2012-01-20T10:39:57-05:00

Simplifications and flashy effects aside, the incredible story of the Tuskegee Airmen gets its due, and some of the squad's veterans are pleased with the film.

Fox

I understand why George Lucas became so passionate about telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II that he spent 20 years and some $58 million of his own money bringing Red Tails, which opens today, to the big screen. Both the story, and the Tuskegee pilots themselves, are extraordinary.

At the beginning of World War II, blacks were not allowed to serve as pilots in the military. A 1925 U.S. Army War College report had gone so far as deeming them not just inferior, but also incapable of operating complex machinery. But the country desperately needed more pilots. So a small training program for black pilots was initiated at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was called the "Tuskegee Experiment" because the Air Corps brass fully expected the men in the program—many of whom were college-educated and quite accomplished—to fail. Some of the early white instructors in the program, in fact, tried to make sure that outcome came to pass.

"All of the instructors were volunteers," Lt. Col. Floyd J. Carter, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, told me. "Now, some of them volunteered because they believed in the program. But others volunteered to try to keep us from succeeding. They'd call us stupid niggers and try all kinds of things to provoke us into getting angry, or coming back at them. Because the minute you did that, you washed out."

There are some technical inaccuracies in 'Red Tails,' but one Tuskegee pilot told me the movie had actually brought back some memories that hurt.

In the early classes, only four or five men out of an initial group of 40 candidates made it through the training. The program was also in constant threat of being closed down. But it had just enough champions (including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt), and there was just enough discipline and determination on the part of people like Benjamin O. Davis, who became the commanding officer of the Tuskegee fighter pilots in Europe, that the "experiment" stayed alive. The first squadron of pilots was deployed to North Africa. But at the beginning of 1944, when enough pilots had graduated from the Tuskegee program to form an entire fighter group (four fighter squadrons), they were deployed to Italy, where the 332nd fighter group served as a segregated unit within the 15th Air Force.

This is point where George Lucas picks up their story. Red Tails is an action-adventure movie set on the Italian air field the 332nd used as its base from 1944 to 1945. Lucas also decided to focus on the action-adventure aspects of the story more than deep character development. As Lt. Col. Harry Stewart, another Tuskegee veteran, put it, "The movie did a good of of portraying the story. Lucas did it in his fashion, of course, with kind of a Star Wars glitter, but it did parallel the story of the real Tuskegee Airmen."

The pilots flew several different types of fighter aircraft, and flew both ground attack and air cover missions. They gained the respect of the Army Air Corps brass in Washington for their air-cover performance at Anzio and several other Allied beach landing operations in Italy—just as the movie portrays. But what they became famous for—indeed, almost legendary for—was their record escorting bombers on missions deep into German-occupied territory, including a massive raid on Berlin itself that Lucas makes the climax of the film.

To understand the significance of those bomber escort missions, one first has to understand just how dangerous it was to be a bomber pilot in World War II. In some of the early raids, fewer than half of the Allied bombers returned home from any given mission. There were some 8,000 U.S. heavy bombers lost in the European theater (each carrying 10 crew members)—more than twice the number of fighter airplanes lost there. And as the war progressed, Germany focused more of the Luftwaffe's efforts on shooting down Allied bombers. (One Tuskegee pilot told me that German pilots were awarded four kills for each four-engine bomber they shot down, as extra incentive.)

Against those efforts and odds, the only protection the bomber crews had was their fighter escorts—especially the P-51s, which were the only fighters with enough range to stay with the bombers all the way to their targets and back. Of course, fighter pilots being what they are, they sometimes got drawn off the bomber formations to chase down enemy aircraft. What made the Tuskegee Airmen so legendary was their reputation for doggedly and effectively sticking with the bombers, fighting off or discouraging enemy attacks, rather than going off to seek their own glory.

For many years, legend had it that the "Red Tails," (named after the bright red tail markings every plane in the 332nd carried) didn't lose a single bomber to enemy fire. The reality isn't quite that movie-perfect: Between June 1944 and May 1945, as many as 27 bombers might have been lost. However, that number (and some argue the number of bombers lost was less than that) still represents half the average number of bombers lost by other fighter groups. The reason for that achievement, according to every source and Tuskegee Airman I've consulted, was Col. Davis—who understood just how much was riding on how well his men followed their orders to protect the bombers. If they didn't turn in significant results on that front, it would give the group's critics a reason to shut them down—a threat the other fighter groups in Europe did not face.

"We stuck a lot closer to [the bombers], because if you didn't, you were going to catch it when you got back," Lt.Col. Bob Friend, who was Col. Davis's wingman, told me with a chuckle. "You'd have hell to pay."

As a result, by the end of the war, there were bomber crews specifically requesting the 332nd Red Tail pilots as their escorts.

Sadly, the Tuskegee Airmen continued to experience racism, even after their heroic exploits in the skies over Germany. Some 160 pilots were arrested and three Tuskegee pilots were court-martialed for walking into an officer's club at Freeman Field, Indiana, in 1945, despite a direct order from Washington that all pilots, regardless of race, were to be given access to the club. The records of the pilots were not cleared until 1995, even though the "Freeman Field Mutiny," as it was called, was considered a critical step in the Civil Rights Movement and the integration of the armed services.

So I get why George Lucas wanted to make a movie about these men. I also understand why he struggled for years to get a workable script, and why he really thinks the story needs to be told as—surprise!—a trilogy. There's just too much material in the story to fit into a two-hour movie. If this movie does well, Lucas has said he'd like to do a prequel (about the training) and a sequel (about what happened after the Airmen returned home). So Red Tails is a bit like Episode IV in the Star Wars series: a slice of the story, taken from the middle. And it helps if you understand that.

Like Star Wars in its time, Red Tails also offers some impressive special effects, particularly in the quality of its combat scenes, which are entirely computer-generated. The only "real" airplanes in the movie are on the ground. But Lucas manages to make the P-51 and bomber combat scenes much more exciting that way, while still feeling plausible, for the most part. So, OK. There are some technical inaccuracies. (The closure rate of a German jet fighter flying head-on with a P-51 Mustang, for example, would be somewhere around 650 mph, which means they'd be in either other's sights and gun range for about a blink of an eye. And the fighters would have been flying above the bombers, not in between them.) But that subtle shading of truth helped to convey the emotions of battle well enough that one Tuskegee pilot told me the movie had actually brought back some memories that hurt.

The character portrayals were also more realistic than I expected. I thought the two group commanders (Col. Bullard and Maj. Stance, played by Terrance Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) were disappointingly two-dimensional—especially when compared to their real-life counterparts, who were two of the first pilots to complete the training and went on to win honors including (for Col. Davis) a Distinguished Flying Cross. But when I asked about the other fictional pilots in the squadron, Col. Friend laughed and said, "Not only were there guys just like that, I could almost tell you who those characters were supposed to be! Even if they were two or three guys in one!"

The movie also has some flaws. Even biting off just a slice of the story, Lucas and screenwriter John Ridley clearly struggled with trying to fit too much material into too short a time. As a result, there are some awkwardly abrupt leaps in the story progression, and some heavy-handed dialogue that's used as a short cut for more time-consuming, dramatic exposition. The story itself is also a challenge, because it lacks not only a single Indiana Jones or John Wayne-type of central hero, but also a single event or mission to anchor the story and build tension around.

The Tuskegee Airmen weren't saving one soldier, or storming a beach, or taking out a Death Star. Their enemy and challenges were multifaceted, and their triumph was a series of quiet victories that evolved over the course of years. They proved they could be the equal of white pilots. They brought bomber crews safely home. They were instrumental in starting to change the attitude toward blacks within the military. They maintained their dignity in the face of continuing discrimination and humiliation, back home. And they went on to be exemplary role models and lead extraordinary lives of service, no matter where they went.

That's amazing stuff, but it doesn't fit a typical screenplay or story structure—which is doubtless one of the reasons Lucas struggled with the script for so many years. Another reason the film took so long to make it to the big screen, however, is that Hollywood (according to Lucas) was unwilling to back a movie with an all-black cast, because the studios didn't think a "black" movie had enough box-office and international sales potential to pay off.

For my part, I wished the film had contained some flashbacks that showed the difficult road the Tuskegee pilots had traveled to get to that base in Italy, and had further emphasized of the greater impact the group had. That said, it did a great job of portraying, in the style of the film Memphis Belle, a piece of the Tuskegee Airmen's experience as combat pilots in a global, all-out war, with George Lucas-style special effects and action sequences.

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There's also a kind of poetic parallel between the movie and the fighting group it portrays. The most extraordinary aspect of both is how long it took, and how hard their champions had to fight, just for them to exist. And if the movie and its "heroes" feel almost too "ordinary" at times, well, that is, in a way, the very victory the Tuskegee Airmen were fighting to achieve. They wanted to be seen as ordinary fighter pilots, no different from anyone else. And Lucas wanted to prove that he could take a story about black pilots, with all the major roles played by black actors, and make it into an "ordinary" big-screen, action-adventure movie that would appeal to anyone.

If those ordinary pilots had happened to rescue the Ark of the Covenant, blow up a Death Star, or save a Republic single-handedly, the movie would have a much more action-adventure-worthy satisfactory and punchy ending. But the ending of this story has one quality none of the others can match: It really happened. It happened to real people—some of whom are still alive to talk about it. Sure, maybe the happy scene with the bomber pilots in the Italian officer's bar didn't actually take place. But as Col. Friend said at the end of our conversation, "You know, I went to a bomber group reunion last year, in San Diego. And people came up to me, and they all said, 'I want to thank you for what you did for my grandfather. For my father. For me.'" He paused for a moment. "That felt really good," he said.

In case anyone's wondering, seeing their story finally make it to the big screen feels pretty good to them, too. It's been a long time coming.

Joe Paterno and the Truth Right In Front of Our Eyes

2011-11-17T14:55:00-05:00

We are biased to believe in the innocence of those we admire -- even when they have blood on their hands

Reuters

How on earth could Joe Paterno, the legendary coach at Penn State, not have been so outraged at the allegations of child abuse by his colleague Jerry Sandusky that he would have raged to the University to do something and followed up aggressively, or reported it to not just the University, but the local police?

"Shifting our view of someone to match the truth changes not only our future with them, but our past, as well. We are forced to examine every memory we have with them and readjust it downward."

Was it a big Penn State cover-up job to save the reputation of the football program? Did Paterno make a cold calculation to put friendship and football ahead of little boys? Did he just not care? Is he a moral coward?

I don't know. None of us do, really. Getting inside someone else's mind is almost impossible. It's also easy, from the outside, to say what should have happened, with an implied sense of certainty of "that's what we would have done" if we'd been in that someone's shoes. But to be in someone else's shoes isn't just to be in that person's situation. It's to have all the unique emotional ties, views, history, and complications that differ with each individual, but that all of us have within us.

Oddly enough, I find the Herman Cain situation informative in trying to figure out how those elements might come into play for Paterno -- or the rest of us. Gloria Cain went on TV Monday night to defend her husband. She knew him, she argued, and the man she knew could not have done the harassing of women that three different women say he did. Perhaps she was just touting a brave line, but she seemed sincere. And in truth, I think she probably was sincere--even though lawyers I've talked to who specialize in harassment and civil rights in the workplace say that companies do not hand out the equivalent of a year's salary unless they're facing a very credible and serious case.

Is Gloria Cain being willfully ...or subconsciously ... blind? If she is, she wouldn't be the first.

In truth, I've noticed a somewhat embarrassing tendency in myself to be much quicker to believe accusations of people I don't inherently like (or whose politics I don't inherently like) than those I admire or agree with. And that's true of people with whom I don't even have a personal connection. My guess is that many, if not most, of the people staunchly defending Cain, and judging the accusers harshly, like Herman Cain for one reason or another. And the first to jump on the "guilty" bandwagon were probably those who didn't like him, or his politics, anyway. Why? Because it's easier to believe bad things of, or be happy about bad turns of fortune for, people we don't like.

But if we like, admire, or want someone to remain professionally powerful because we think they'll do good things there, it's very, very hard to believe flaws that would not only force us to readjust our view of them in a negative way, but might also cost us their professional contributions. Just look at how slow ardent feminists were to believe any of the women who said President Clinton had had affairs with them.

I don't know Joe Paterno. And I'm not a huge fan of college football; indeed, I think colleges put far too much money and emphasis on that one sport. But I always thought Paterno was a pretty decent guy, based on a couple of specific data points I had on how he approached football. First, I always admired the fact that he wouldn't put players' names on their jerseys. There were no divas on the Penn State team, just team players. He was the only coach I knew of who did that.

Some 30 years ago, he also arranged for Penn State to play his alma mater, Brown University, where I was a student at the time. The game was played at Penn State, and the colleges reportedly split the gate, which would have been a huge fundraising coup for lowly-ranked Brown. But as a student, what I remember was, he didn't humiliate our team. Our guys didn't even come up to the shoulders of some of the Penn State starters. But Paterno put in his first-string, then his second-string, then his third-string players, allowing Brown to escape with a 21-38 score and its dignity intact. That act of restraint impressed me.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that showing restraint at a mismatched football contest or having a team approach to football players excuses or compensates for allowing, or enabling, child molestation to occur, to whatever degree it turns out that Paterno did that. What I am saying is that because I've had a positive view of him in the past, it's harder for me to believe the worst of him than it is for someone who didn't have that existing vision. And I don't even care for college football. So I imagine the same dynamic is at play on many levels in this case, including the students at Penn State who are so ardently defending Paterno, because they're far more attached to him than I am.

And attachment matters. If it's hard to negatively adjust our view of someone when all we have is a observer's notion of them or their work, even if the truth is in front of our eyes, it is orders of magnitude harder if we have an emotional or personal attachment to them. It's why spouses are often the last to realize that their mate is cheating on them, even when everyone else saw the signs clearly for some time. "How could you not know? And how could you not do anything?" incredulous friends find themselves asking a devastated spouse whose scales have finally, belatedly, fallen from their eyes. There are even spouses who manage to convince themselves that their boyfriend or spouse is not abusing their children, when the evidence is clearly there for them to see. How does that happen?

Many reasons, but two factors play a big part. The first is that, when we have a positive vision of what a person close to us is, if we then see or believe evidence that runs contrary to that, we have to let go of that vision -- and that's incredibly difficult. We thought our spouse, friend, colleague or admired public servant was "A." We invested in that image. We attached ourselves to it. Our confidence in our ability to judge people (which is what allows us to trust people in our lives) is intertwined in it, as well. So while an outsider can make the reality shift from "A" to a far less attractive "B" relatively easily, it's much harder for friends, relatives, and supporters to make that shift.

Making that shift also has consequences. Obviously, there are physical consequences, because we may have to leave a person we counted on for income, status, or a lifestyle. Our dreams of the future are shattered, as well. But the consequences go beyond even the messiness of all that. For shifting our view of someone to match the truth changes not only our future with them, but our past, as well. We are forced to examine every memory we have with them and readjust it downward. Cherished memories can become painful, tainted things that haunt us ever after in the middle of the night. Realizations of things that weren't true. That we missed. Of the consequences that we allowed to happen because of that.

So we make excuses. We come up with explanations that don't require that kind of painful shift.We rationalize and avert our conscious, rational, clear-seeing eyes. And we've all done it, at one time or another.

There are other factors in the mix as well, of course. I talked this week to a former director of a non-profit organization that worked with inner city kids in New York, who said the Penn State incident had made her rethink an incident many years ago in her own organization, when her staff suspected that one of the kids in their program was being abused at home. She reported their suspicions to the Administration of Child Services, as the law required--but never followed up to see if anything was done about it. She now wondered if maybe she shouldn't have done more.

How many people who report harassment, abuse, or other suspicions up the line, as required, then assume that what should be done is being done by someone else? I don't know the answer, but it's a question worth asking, as we decide who and how to judge.

We also don't always act, in the moment, as highly as we say we would, in the vacuum of a laboratory or our tranquil, distant living rooms. David Brooks reported this week on several studies that showed a huge gap between how people said they would react in a situation and how they actually responded, when researchers created just that kind of situation for them.

None of this excuses the lapses at Penn State. Clearly, the ball got dropped somewhere along the administrative line -- and potentially not just by University officials (if reports that the graduate assistant who witnessed the 2002 incident in the showers actually spoke to police about it at the time turn out to be true.) Egregious damage to children was left unchecked. And those responsible need to be held to account.

But if we don't always follow up as we should, or act as we should, or are tragically reticent to believe the truth in front of our eyes, it's not necessarily because we see the facts clearly and make a cold, calculating, conscious decision, for our own agendas, to look the other way. Perhaps, if Herman Cain is guilty of harassment, Gloria Cain's response was that of a hard-hitting political animal. And perhaps Joe Paterno consciously chose to put his football program ahead of children by how he reported the incident in question, or by not doing more to follow up. But it's also possible that their responses reflect a very human flaw and failing that all of us fall prey to, to some degree, when we are either too quick to judge someone we don't know or like, or too slow to believe the worst of someone we thought we knew well.

Behind the Playoffs: 'Field of Dreams' vs. 'Moneyball'

2011-10-14T13:55:00-04:00

The Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies are out. Was Billy Beane right about small-market teams?

At first glance, baseball's post-season this year would seem to dovetail nicely with the theme of the recently released Brad Pitt movie Moneyball, based on the Michael Lewis bestseller of the same name. The big money teams--the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Phillies--are out, and the networks are left to contemplate a World Series in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, or Dallas--a field of decidedly less-lucrative baseball television markets.

But just because the big dollar teams are out doesn't necessarily mean that the success of those smaller-market teams is due to the kind of statistical maneuvering Lewis stressed in Moneyball. Not that managers don't look at statistics. Or that smaller-market teams don't have to get more creative in how they compete against teams with payrolls almost twice their size. It's just that writers, looking for a hook that will sell a book, sometimes focus overmuch on "the thing" or "the answer," when the reality is more complex than that.

Yes, the Oakland A's, the team Lewis profiled in Moneyball, made the playoffs five times in the early 00's--a record Lewis attributed to their rogue statistical approach to baseball. But as a couple of recent articles have pointed out, they never won a championship, and they haven't even made the playoffs since 2006. So--despite the fact that the philosophy highlighted in Moneyball has achieved guru-status fame in the business world--how powerful was that approach, really?

I found an interesting take on that question from--appropriately enough--a former MLB ballplayer who now coaches in the Rangers' farm team system. Casey Candaele might not be a household name, although he played nine years in the majors (Montreal Expos, Houston Astros, and Cleveland Indians) before joining the Rangers' coaching staff. But Candaele comes from memorable baseball stock. His mom was Helen Callaghan--the woman portrayed by Geena Davis in the hit movie A League of Their Own. After leading the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in batting average, homers, hits, doubles, and total bases in 1945, Callaghan got married and had five sons. All five played baseball, growing up, but Casey was the only one who went pro.

In an interview with his brother (writer and filmmaker Kelly Candaele) last week, Casey weighed in on the Moneyball philosophy. An excerpt here:

Question: Billy Beane and the people who agreed with his philosophy operated under the assumption that the old way of analyzing ball-players was mostly about a lot of talking and guessing and that they had a more scientific way of going about this. What was your sense of this?

CC: "I retired in 2000, so the Moneyball approach started a bit later. The thing that struck me about the movie is that the A's were actually pretty good. They had Eric Chavez, a young third baseman who had been playing for a number of years. Miguel Tejada had over 30 home runs and over 100 RBIs that year, I think. Jemaine Dye was on that team and had a great year. They also had Terrance Long, who was in the running for Rookie of the Year the year before.

But most importantly, and this is the film's major problem, I think--the A's had a great pitching staff. They had Tim Hudson, who led the league in ERA and wins a number of years in a row. They had Mark Mulder, who won 19 games, and Barry Zito, who won 23 and was on the top of his game. The pitching was outstanding, but the movie doesn't even mention those guys. So this team was not like the Bad News Bears.

In terms of the Moneyball philosophy, I guess it makes sense to combine people on the team who can get on base consistently with guys who can drive them in. And as it said at the end of the movie, the Red Sox used this philosophy and went on to win the World Series. The Sox had many great players at the time and they are not a small market team, so they spend money. So I don't think it is a matter of assembling a team of all players that have a high On Base Percentage, which is what the movie portrayed. You have to have some people who can drive those guys in quickly."

Question: What was realistic about the film?

CC: "What was realistic was that Beane made a decision about how to re-create the process of how to win in a small baseball market. In that respect, it was unique, as they were trying to find a way to compete, and they had a good year. But, as I said, they had a really good team those years."

In other words, the simple, win-by-numbers revolutionary secret that made Moneyball such a phenomenon ("You, too, can beat the Yankees (or any other competition) at just half the cost!") appears, on closer inspection, to be not quite so simple. That's true of most easy, secret formulas for success, of course. But in baseball, as opposed to business, happiness, health, or other fields where sure-fire strategies for success abound, I think we're actually half glad to discover that truth.

On the one hand, we don't want to think that money decides everything. So the idea of an outsider like Beane being able to beat the monetary odds and win appeals to us. On the other hand, we don't really want Beane's underdog success to be the result of some impersonal and predictable accountant's formula.

One of the reasons baseball retains such national appeal is its unspoken parallels to life and human attempts at achievement, in general. It is not only a product of our heartland sandlots, but also a metaphor--a microcosm of human striving, individual and collective effort and achievement, disappointment, defeat, comeback, redemption and ... sometimes ... unexpected victory.

If the game's outcome could be reduced to predictable, formulaic numbers, it would cease to resonate as a metaphor and salve for our own sometimes-frustrating and often unpredictable lives. It would also lose all its poetry. For poetry comes from those moments of perfection, discovery, alchemy and victory that catch our hearts and attention--and are so achingly and unforgettably sweet and magical--precisely because they defy expectation. Poetry is perfection stumbled upon, not perfection engineered.

One of the most perfect moments of baseball poetry I ever witnessed, in fact, occurred not in a traditional baseball stadium, but in the streets of lower Manhattan. And it involved a Candaele. Not Casey, but his brother Kelly.

Kelly had often said that he'd wished he'd inherited his mother's baseball swing. It was, he said, a thing of beauty; a seamless movement of power and grace that led to her success at the plate. He didn't, of course. Casey was the one who got the swing. Kelly went on to other pursuits of writing and film production. But the longing and legacy were still there, underneath it all.

One fall day a number of years ago, as baseball moved, once again, into its post-season games, I met Kelly for a late lunch in New York. After the meal, we wandered the streets of the East Village, taking the long route back the subway to enjoy the fall afternoon. A couple of blocks north of Houston Street, we came across a group of tough-looking teenagers playing stickball in the street. And with bravado I'd never have attempted, Kelly walked up to the guy at bat and asked if he might have a turn.

The response from the group was half-ridiculing, half-menacing. But it was clear they had no interest in the proposal. Tough street kids in New York do not let 40-ish, academic-looking old guys in on their stickball games. But Kelly persisted. He pulled out a $20 bill and offered it to the group in exchange for a single swing. The group laughed. Not only was this guy old, he was a sucker, too. But, hey. If he wanted to throw away his money, well, that was okay with them. They exchanged glances, nodded, and the batter took the money and handed Kelly the stick.

Kelly got in his stance, and the pitcher wound up and delivered the ball across the "plate." Kelly tensed his muscles, swung--and connected with nothing but thin air. The teenagers laughed, guffawed, and swaggered their ridicule all the way down the block. Watching from the sidewalk, I cringed in vicarious embarrassment. But Kelly was undeterred. He asked for another swing. The stickball players scoffed, reminding him that he'd paid for a single swing. I thought, for a moment, that it might turn ugly. But Kelly persisted, cajoling and friendly, until they agreed to give him one more try.

I shook my head, wishing he'd just quit and get us the hell out of there. But there he was, instead, calmly loosening up his shoulders, pulling the stick through a couple of practice swings, then poising it just above his shoulder, waiting for the pitch. The pitcher wound up, released the ball, and I braced for the humiliation that was surely going to follow.

But then, something magical happened. Kelly set the stick in motion, and there it was, out of the past--a swing that resonated with power, grace, and athletic perfection. His mother's swing. And it aligned perfectly with the fast ball delivered down the alley. There was a loud crack as stick and ball connected, and then all heads turned to follow the ball as it arced high and straight above the pavement ... right out of the ballpark. It cleared the blocks north of Houston, cleared the wide, multiple lanes of Houston Street itself, and finally descended back to Earth, bouncing off the pavement halfway down the block on the other side.

The stickball players stood, motionless, suddenly bereft of all taunts, menace, or cockiness, arms limp at their sides and jaws hanging open in stunned, wordless awe. Kelly himself was dazed for a moment, then just smiled, handed the stick back to the batter he'd supplanted, called out a cheerful thanks to the other players, and walked away.

No rational formula would have predicted that outcome. But that's what made it so poetic. And the possibility of victories like that, defying all the numbers, is a big part of what gives baseball its appeal. It might be harder to market that appeal to business audiences looking for a sure-fire edge, of course. But the truth is, what gives us hope, in the long history of human struggle, is that sometimes, we are more than the numerical sum of our parts. Yes, strategy matters. But so do intangibles like heart, will, and the magic that is created, sometimes, when the parts of a person, or the parts of a team, somehow click in ways stat sheets can't predict.

Whether it's the magic of the 1973 Mets, who went from the bottom of their division to the World Series in a matter of weeks on the strength of a relief pitcher's cry of "You Gotta Believe!" or the magic of a middle-aged man finding a perfect swing on a New York City street ... it's those moments in which we find not only only poetry, but a measure of hope, redemption and belief in possibility that helps us get through all the rest. And the fact that that kind of alchemy and magic is impossible to quantify, package and sell is precisely what makes it not only so powerful, but so valuable, as well.

Image credit: Universal/Columbia

Steve Jobs Was My Neighbor

2011-10-07T10:45:00-04:00

The man who inspired the world with his technology anonymously inspired one writer with the simple beauty of his home

A Palo Alto resident looks upon the flowers, candles, and apples placed on the sidewalk outside Steve Jobs's home / Reuters

The world is mourning the loss of Steve Jobs this week, and with him, the inspiration he provided to so many innovators, technologists, designers, thinkers, and everyday consumers. But in perusing some of the news coverage of his death, I came across one particular photo that stopped me in my tracks.

It was a picture of Jobs' house in Palo Alto, California -- a low-roofed, brick and slate cottage straight out of some English or French countryside -- with bundles of flowers and memorials piled up against its split-rail garden fence. And it stopped me in my tracks because I know that house. Really well. It was, in fact, an important source of inspiration for me, for the 7 1/2 years I lived in that neighborhood. It's just that, ironically, the inspiration it and its owner provided had nothing to do with technology.

I moved to Old Palo Alto in the aftermath of the dot.com bust, when rents in the area plummeted to merely expensive, instead of stupid, ungodly, unbelievably expensive. I rented a small writer's cottage a few blocks away from where Jobs lived, although I had no idea, until I saw that photo, that he (or anyone else I might have heard of) lived anywhere nearby. The cottage I rented had been built by Herbert Hoover in 1937, after he moved out to start the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a few blocks away. He built four small cottages on a piece of property near the campus for writers to live in while they worked with the Institution. I'm even told that General Douglas MacArthur lived in my cottage while he wrote his memoirs.

It was, in other words, quite literally a writer's cottage -- which seemed appropriate, seeing as that's what I do for a living. But when the muse didn't speak, or some personal or professional setback got the better of me, or I needed to de-stress, or I just felt too unhappy to produce anything useful.... I'd go walking in the neighborhood. Because Old Palo Alto is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods the city has to offer.

I heard somewhere that the eclectic designs of the houses there stem from the fact that the professors and professionals Leland Stanford recruited to teach at the new Stanford University, at the turn of the 20th century, all built homes there that reminded them of the various places from whence they'd come. That explanation might or might not be true, but the diversity was certainly there. Strolling under a canopy of grand and leafy old trees, I might pass an English Tudor house, and then a Dutch Colonial, followed by a southern Georgian, which would be next to a California Craftsman, which might be next to a mission-style hacienda, which might be next to... well, a medieval English cottage, compete with tousled and carefree-looking shrubbery and gardens.

The corner where Jobs lived, however, was my favorite corner and block in the entire neighborhood. If I was really upset or stressed, I might walk up and down the two blocks that framed his house multiple times, just because it was so beautiful, and somehow so calming that I'd always leave there feeling better. Reminded, in some wordless way, of the simple beauty in the world that existed before, after, and beyond career or relationship mishaps. And on more than one occasion, freed of the writers' block that had driven me away from my desk in the first place.

On numerous occasions, as I walked around that block, I would also see a slender man moving around inside the house. Unlike many houses in the neighborhood, the windows of that house were, at least on one side, almost right up against the sidewalk. Close enough for me to admire the furnishings, anyway, and see anyone walking through the rooms on that side. I never did anything but glance that way, but I honestly used to wonder what that man did for a living, that he'd be there in the late afternoon, calmly going about his business in that lovely and soul-soothing cottage.

I'm actually glad, now, that I didn't know. Because if I had, I couldn't have looked at that cottage, or the man walking around inside it, the same. Even if I'd tried. As it is, I find it both ironic, and oddly fitting, that the man who inspired the world with his technology anonymously inspired me, instead, with the simple beauty of his garden and his home. After all, simplicity and beauty were the two trademark qualities Jobs brought to all the personal technology he designed. It makes sense that a man who valued those things so highly would surround himself with them in his home life, as well.

The seemingly calm man I glimpsed as I walked down that block might not match at all with how the people who worked with him remember him, of course. But that's okay. They can have their Steve Jobs. I have mine. And I like being able to remember him that way: quiet, calm, and anonymous, surrounded by simplicity and beauty that changed with the seasons, but were always, somehow, inspiring.

Victims, Survivors, and Moving On From 9/11

2011-09-10T07:00:52-04:00

Dwelling on our own suffering makes us blind to the pain of others

Family members of victims console each other as they gather to pay their respect at the reflecting pool at Ground Zero during the eighth anniversary commemoration ceremony / Reuters

On Sunday, New York will pause to remember and honor the victims who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center 10 years ago. Not as grandly as we did on the first anniversary of the attacks, of course. But that's as it should be. The wounds were fresh then, so the drama and emotion were both much higher. More than 3,000 people died in a single morning, and the images of people voluntarily jumping to their deaths is seared in our collective memory; a graphic reminder of just how horrific the attacks and their damage were. But the damage of 9/11 went beyond those actually killed. And the challenges facing the survivors are more complex.

Some of the people participating in the anniversary events in New York (and in others commemorating those killed on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon) will be literal survivors of those attacks. Others will be family members who were, by association, either emotional victims, or survivors, or both, depending on how you look at it. In truth, all Americans are peripheral survivors, in that we were all traumatized by the events of that day and had our lives impacted and changed by their fallout.

And yet, while all that is true, and the honoring and commemoration of our individual and collective loss is both legitimate and appropriate, we should still approach our identification with being victims or survivors with a healthy dose of caution.

At the end of June, I attended an unusual summit conference sponsored by Google Ideas, The Council on Foreign Relations, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Titled the "Summit Against Violent Extremism," it brought together some 200 people who had been involved in, or had been affected by, violent extremism of one kind or another, from Islamic jihadists to nationalist fighters, to gang members, to neo-Nazi skinheads, to Colombian jungle rebels.

The organizers separated the attendees into two groups: "survivors" and "formers" (formers being former extremists). All of the attendees were now working actively to combat violent extremism. And the stories of loss among the survivors were heart-rending. But their inclusion in the conference implied a bit of moral preaching to the "formers": we, the victims, plead with you, the perpetrators, to feel our pain. And one of the most striking moments of the conference, for me, came near the end, when one of the organizers asked a former Islamist fighter (now a soft-spoken Imam in a London mosque who works actively against violent extremism) if he'd ever had someone with a survivor's perspective speak at his mosque.

"I would like to make a couple of points," the Imam answered quietly. "First of all, I HAVE suffered. My little brother was killed, and I have lost 22 relatives in war. So," he said, gesturing to a survivor on the same panel, "I know about personal suffering in the same way as you have done."

That one, simple interchange conveyed two powerful and cautionary lessons about the hazards of victim and survivor-hood.

When tragedy or violence strikes us, we are victims of it. And if we survive it we are, by definition, survivors. I nearly died at the age of 20 when the car I was in was struck at high speed by an angry, drunk young man who'd just lost his job. The path back from that darkness, physically and emotionally, was painful and long. The good news is, humans are remarkably adaptable and resilient. You go on from tragedies. You just don't go on intact, or the same. And the self that you drag and pull forward from a tragedy feels (and sometimes is) so battered and imperfect that there can be great strength from acknowledging the injustice of what happened (I was a victim) and the difficulty of coming back from that (I am a survivor). It can help a battered soul heal.

But if those labels become part of our longer-term identities instead of just phases of healing, the focus on our own pain and suffering can blind us to the pain and suffering of others. The suffering of a mother whose innocent child was killed in the Twin Towers, while unique, is not more or less than the suffering of a mother whose innocent child was killed by a bullet or bomb, regardless of who fired it, dropped it or set it off, in Iraq, Pakistan or any other place in the world.

The interchange at the conference was also a cautionary reminder about the dark places where a sense of victimhood can lead. Many of the "formers" were also victims, and survivors, of injustice and violence of a different sort. But their righteous sense of their status as victims took them down a road where, at some point, any reaction became, therefore, justified.

Nahum Pachenik, one of the "formers" at the conference who described himself as "born into conflict" as the child of Israeli settlement pioneers near Hebron, even joked a bit about the victimhood rivalry between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

"The two sides have very similar thinking," he said. "[They say] 'We are the victim.' 'No, WE are the victim.'No. We are MORE the victim.'"

Victimhood is wonderfully appealing, Pachenik said, because "in the victim position, you don't have to admit anything, because all of the responsibility is on the other."

Nevertheless, Pachenik finally came to the conclusion that if he wanted to move away from the stalemate of violence around him, he had to give up the comfort of victimhood for the tougher and more challenging path of knowledge. He now runs an organization that strives to promote better knowledge and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis... starting with learning each other's language.

"Knowledge," Pachenik said, "is the opposite of the position of the victim. Today, I believe it is more important to promote education. It's important to learn the language of the other. Because if you do that, there is, maybe, a place to meet."

The victims of 9/11 who did not survive will always be victims, and should be honored and remembered as such. But even they wouldn't want to be remembered, or identified, solely by the label of "victim." As for the rest of us... well, we are survivors. But we are -- and need to be -- far more than that if we want to stop the cycle of violence that helps cause attacks like that in the first place. It's a tempering point worth remembering, even as we pause to honor the lives and memory of those who died.

Remembering King's Other Dream

2011-08-29T15:30:00-04:00

Toward the end of his life, MLK's focus began to shift from ensuring racial equality to bridging the economic divide between the rich and poor

Reuters

The timing was coincidental enough to be eerie. But just as crowds gathered in Washington, D.C. last Friday to dedicate the site for a new memorial on the Mall to Martin Luther King, Jr., I stumbled across the April, 19, 1968 issue of Life magazine among a mountain of papers, books and magazines I was clearing out of my parents' house in New York. It was one of only two issues of Life magazine my mother had kept. But on the cover was a close-up of Coretta Scott King, "beautiful and veiled in grief," as the writer Gordon Parks described her, at the funeral of her husband. And the coverage inside talked not only of Martin Luther King' Jr.s death and its aftermath, but also about the legacy and work he was leaving behind him.

"The sense of people taking care of themselves, as opposed to their neighbors, is far stronger today than it was when King was assassinated"

There was, of course, discussion of the work he focused on in his "I Have A Dream" speech, given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. (The public dedication of the new Memorial was originally scheduled for yesterday, the 48th anniversary of that speech, but Hurricane Irene forced organizers to postpone it.) But by 1968, both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been passed, and King's focus was shifting from the basic cause of social and political equality for black people to the broader issue of economic equality -- for all poor people, regardless of race.

In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here, King noted that there were twice as many white poor as black poor people in the United States. "Therefore," he wrote, "I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination." Instead, he argued for better jobs, wages, housing, and education for all people suffering in poverty.

The Life editors also spoke of the "poor people's campaign" King was planning when he died. And In an article about a speech Coretta Scott King had given in his place, the day before his funeral service, Life quoted her as saying about her late husband,

He was concerned about the least of these (workers)... We are concerned about not only the Negro poor, but the poor all over America and all over the world. Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness. Our great nation, as he often said, has the resources, but his question was: "Do we have the will?" Somehow I hope in this resurrection experience the will will be created within the hearts and minds, and the souls and the spirits of those who have the power to make these changes come about.

Forty-three years later, with an African-American president sitting in the White House, it's easy enough to argue that significant progress has been made on the front of racial equality. But what of King's other dream -- of easing the burdens of the poor in a more equitable economic society?

In 1968, roughly 12-13 percent of the country was living below the poverty level. Today, that number is virtually unchanged. What's more, the disparity in income between the richest and poorest Americans has increased over the past decades. A 2010 Slate series on income inequality noted that in 1915, the richest 1 percent of Americans possessed 15-18 percent of the nation's income, and that today, that number has risen to 24 percent. And a few months ago, a PBS News Hour piece headlined "Income Inequality Gap Widens Among U.S. Communities Over 30 Years" looked more closely at the growing disparity of income by area in America.

Accompanying those hard numbers is an arguable hardening of attitude toward those less well off in the country. Perhaps we all feel closer to the edge than we did in the 1960s, and therefore less inclined to even the tables. But the sense of people taking care of themselves, as opposed to their neighbors, is far stronger today than it was when King was assassinated. It's hard to imagine today's Congress passing the Social Security Act of 1965, which raised Americans' taxes in order to make both Medicare and Medicaid possible.

The U.S. still has astounding financial resources. But the "will" Coretta Scott King talked about in that April, 1968 Life article still seems to elude us. Would King himself have been able to make a difference on that front, if he had lived? It's hard to say. But reading through that issue of Life, I was reminded again of the power Dr. King possessed to calmly but resolutely tweak the nation's conscience.

"King," the Life editors wrote, "insisted on the enlargement of the American dream of equality. Steady enlargement is the way it has always been kept alive... He bade white Americans face their simple duty of living up to their own best traditions in a context they had not been accustomed to... He asked to be remembered as a 'drum major for justice... for peace ... for righteousness.' Those old-fashioned abstractions have the force of continuity with what Americans have stood for, and often fought for, since their beginning. King insisted on non-violent means because he took the Sermon on the Mount seriously. But he attracted and defied violence because he took America seriously, and that can be a daring and unpopular thing to do."

King never tried to be a politician, necessarily mired in the messy, compromising bogs of campaigning or governance. His chosen role, instead, was to make it difficult for politicians to ignore his voice; a voice that argued convincingly for what was right; for what was just; and for how we needed to be, and could be, better. Not better off, but better members of the human race.

Would King's voice have made a difference in the economic inequality of today, or the tone of the debates raging over health care, taxes, and who should bear the burden for what? It's hard to say. But as the site for his memorial is dedicated in Washington, it's worth pondering his other dream... what he would have made of the arguments being waged over it today, and whether he would have thought us closer to, or further from, our better selves than we were the day he died.

The Berlin Wall: The Symbolic End of Communism's Utopian Dream

2011-08-15T17:00:00-04:00

From the moment the barbed wire first went up, the barrier was a monument to failure for the Soviet vision of a just society

Wikimedia Commons

Fifty years ago this week, the division of Germany into East and West was, literally, etched in stone with the erection of the infamous Berlin Wall. While the wall stood, there were any number of memorials to its brutality, cost, and tragedy -- crosses and flowers marking where loved ones had been shot by the guards on the Wall, attempting to cross from East to West. Nobody, of course, tried to flee across the other way.

But to me, the one image that always best epitomized the tragedy of the wall was a poster-sized photograph I bought at the Berlin Wall when I was an exchange student in Germany in 1978. It was taken the day the "wall" -- which was only barbed wire, to start with -- made the political border between the two halves of Berlin something more ominous. It showed a very little boy at the barbed-wire barrier, reaching his arms up toward an East German soldier, who had put his rifle over his shoulder and was reaching down, across the barbed wire, to pick up the little boy. The soldier's eyes were frightened, and he was looking not at the boy, but over his shoulder, as if to see if anyone was looking.

The story of the photo, related by the press photographer who took it, was that the boy's family had fled across the barbed wire, as many people did in those first, chaotic few days as the wall was being built. But the boy had gotten lost in the frenzy and inadvertently left on the wrong side of the wire. The soldier who chose to lift the boy over to join his family, instead of shooting him, as his orders required, was, in fact, seen by others and taken away. The boy got away safely. But the photographer was never able to find any trace of the soldier again.

That gut-wrenching division of families, friends, a culture and a nation has had many long-lasting consequences. On the 20th anniversary of the Wall's demise, I wrote about some of them here, and about how slow and frustrating the process of healing and change can be. Germany was divided for less than 50 years. Two generations. And yet, even today, the people raised in East Germany are struggling for social and economic equality with their western German counterparts. Having been wrenched apart so brutally, it is now a bit like some of the countries declared by decree after World War I -- dissimilar cultures struggling painfully to find enough common ground to bridge the differences.

The good news is, Germany actually does have a shared cultural and political history that dated at least from the time Otto Von Bismark unified the country in 1871 up until 1945. The bad news is, by 1990, when the country began to try to find its way back to that, there were very few people alive who had been old enough, back before the world wars, to remember that time. What's more, the DNA of East German society and culture actually did change, under its communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) government.

And that's the aspect of the story that has struck me the most, the past few weeks, and as Germany solemnly marks the half-century anniversary of the Wall's construction.

Three weeks ago, I was in Vienna, where I spent a few hours at the famous Cafe Central -- an elegant coffee house with tall, marble columns, chandeliers, and impeccably dressed waiters. The great and radical writers and thinkers in Vienna used to congregate there at the beginning of the 20th century. Three of the "regulars" who patronized the cafe between 1907 and 1914 were a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, and Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- later known to the world as the Marxist revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin.

Sitting there, I could imagine the young revolutionaries, in exile from Russia and surrounded by the opulence of the Hapsburg Empire at its height, arguing vehemently about how to right the wrongs of class and economic disparity in the world. They must have seen the world in very black-and-white terms -- it's almost a prerequisite in order to pursue the extreme means of bloody revolution to achieve your goals. But somewhere in the midst of that certainty and radicalism, there was an idea that the vast gap between rich and poor, and the ostentatious spending and decadence of the rich (a trait stunningly obvious in the gilt halls of 1907 Vienna) was wrong. And that some kind of cooperative society, where equality reigned and people took care of each other, would be a better option.

The dream in its ideal form didn't last long, of course. The revolution was wrought by factions, burdened by bureaucracy and characterized more by brutality than any cooperative utopia from almost its first bloody days. But when I left Vienna, I discovered that the taxi driver taking me to the airport was a recent emigre from Berlin. East Berlin. I asked him about how reunification was going, and he told me about some of the same problems I'd heard before: East Germans being second-class citizens, economic resentment on the part of the West Germans who had to pay to upgrade East Germany, and the like. But then, he said:

"You know, everyone sees it as the West helping the East. But it could have been done better. We could have helped them, too. But nobody wanted what we had to offer."

Intrigued, I asked him to explain. There was a long pause. Then he answered:

"For all the problems of the system, in East Germany, it wasn't all about consumerism. It wasn't how much you could buy, how much ahead of your neighbor you could get. We really did have more of a sense of helping each other out. Community really mattered more to us than things."

A century after those discussions in the Cafe Central, and 50 years after the dream had become such a nightmare echo of its original vision that the government felt compelled to build a wall, top it with barbed wire and armed guards, and back it up with an ominous swath of anti-tank defenses and mine fields in order to force people to stay in the society once envisioned as such a utopia ... some little seed of the dream still existed.

The ideal -- the idea of a fair, egalitarian society where people cared more about each other than about the stuff they could buy -- was, and still is, a noble idea. That the vision went so wrong, in Lenin and Trotsky's world, that it required dogs, barbed wire and walls to try to keep the "vision" intact is itself a tragedy -- one of many tragedies the revolution and its aftermath spawned, over the years. (One could argue, of course, that the bloody methods they employed were almost guaranteed to end badly, or even that humans don't really want that kind of egalitarian utopia.)

On the one hand, the building of the Berlin Wall was an admission of sorts that the glorious revolution, meant to be so attractive that workers around the world would flock to its banner, was a failure. A failure that would lead, not even 30 years later, to the dismantling of that very wall.

And yet, East Berlin and East Germany, walled off from the west, really did change. The values of the two cultures are not identical. How long, I asked my Viennese taxi driver, until he thought Germany would really feel like a single country again?

"At least two generations," he said.

Two generations. The same amount of time it took to be torn apart. Long enough for those who remember the way it used to be to grow old and die. As I got on the plane, I thought about how nice it would be if more of that East German sense of community over consumerism could, in fact, be absorbed into that "new" Germany.

Utopian ideas, it seems, die hard. Even when they're buried beneath a Wall.

What Tea Party Legislators Can Learn From Former Radical Extremists

2011-08-08T11:00:07-04:00

Members of Congress could lean a lot about the problem with rigid thinking, as outlined by former jihadists at a London conference

Reuters

At the end of June, Google Ideas (a new "think/do" tank funded by Google), the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Tribeca Film Festival sponsored a summit in Dublin, Ireland, that brought together more than 50 former violent extremists to brainstorm ways to combat violent extremism in the world. The participants ranged from former Neo-Nazi skinheads and former Northern Ireland IRA and UDA fighters to former Colombian rebels and former Islamist jihadists. Their politics, in other words, pretty much spanned the spectrum from left to right and represented political, religious, nationalist, and racist movements.

Given the broad range of causes and motivations represented by the participants, I asked Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas and the primary organizer of the summit, if there were any common threads or traits he'd observed in all the former extremists he had worked with to make the summit happen. He thought a long moment before answering. The "formers," he said, had vastly different ideologies, different stories and paths, and a wide range of personalities. Was there something they all had in common?

"They're all extremely fixed in their thinking," he finally said. "Or, at least they were when they were active participants in extremist groups."

It is, perhaps, not a good thing that my conversation with Cohen, and some of my conversations with the former extremists at that summit, have come to mind again over the past two weeks as I've watched the double-debacle of the national debt limit and FAA funding fights play out in Congress -- a "debacle" so egregious that it prompted Standard and Poor's to strip the U.S. of its top credit rating over the weekend. But the parallels are also warning signs worth pondering, as we consider where we want our legislators to go from here.

The former extremists at the Google summit had all walked some very difficult roads of hope, anger, naivete, disillusionment, regret, learning, and growth to get where they are today. But many of them spoke of initially being attracted to an ideology that seemed both simple and clear, and which seemed to provide answers to not only how the world was, but also how to fix it. They were young and idealistic. And there is, they acknowledged, a great appeal to simple, black-and-white approaches that reduce messy complexity to something more manageable, with a clear and "simple" fix.

Both the Colombian rebels and the Islamist jihadists had seen real problems and injustices around them and had initially joined activist or resistance groups in the hopes of creating a more fair and better society. That those ideologies were over-simplistic and naive was a problem, of course.

"We had a very sketchy idea about what this grand Islamic state was going to be," admits Noman Benotman, a former commander in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). "Everybody said, 'Yeah! An Islamic State!' But what's the meaning of an Islamic state? That means, for us, that it will bring justice. It will bring everything. Everything will be nice. Everything will be fixed. Everything will be perfect. But if you ask most of the jihadists, give me a 15-minute lecture about the Islamic state you are going to establish, they will fail. They will talk for maybe two minutes, and you'll wait the other 13."

But the real problem, many of them now say, was not the ideologies themselves, but when those ideologies became both rigid and sacred. Or, as Benotman said, when the ideology became not a means to an end, but an end in of itself; a sacred idol that had to be preserved, intact and uncompromising, at all costs.

"Ideology is a set of concepts and ideas," Benotman explained. "And it's created because it helps any group achieve their goals. Because you need a framework. Liberalism itself is an ideology. And it's extremely useful as a tool, or means. The problem is when [the ideology] becomes not a tool, but the end itself. That means the group starts to act to serve the ideology. To keep it. To protect it. That's the explanation for people who have no tolerance when you're disagreeing with them. Because it's not a difference of tools and means.You're talking about the end, itself. So it's impossible to have a discussion. If you disagree, you are not me. You are the other. You are the enemy."

Granted, there's a long distance between extremist groups willing to employ violence and sacrifice lives as a means of protecting their ideology, shunning any compromise or dissent, and legislators willing to sacrifice the credit rating and potential economic stability of a country, or the paychecks of 74,000 contractors and FAA employees, in order to protect the integrity of their ideology, shunning any compromise or dissent. But the ideological rigidity and unwillingness to compromise, no matter how reckless the consequences, echo similarly enough that we should all be a bit alarmed.

As Benotman said, ideology can be a very helpful in organizing people around a shared set of values or beliefs. And as a starting point, it can be very positive tool. But when any group, whether it's a righteous freshman class of Tea Party diehards or any other offspring of a political or social movement, become not only rigid in their thinking, but also willing to risk recklessly for the sake of keeping their ideological underpinnings intact, we should worry. Because ideology, especially in a democracy made up of differing constituencies and viewpoints, should only be a starting point. When it becomes something more rigid than that, it starts to become dangerous.

Abu Muntasir, a soft-spoken London Imam who once served as a major conduit for young Muslims in England wanting to get to the jihad training camps of Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that when we become righteous in our beliefs, "we are falling short ... before God."

Muntasir, like all the other former extremists at the Google summit, had learned the hard way where ideology can lead if it becomes too rigid, uncompromising, or a sacred end in and of itself. And all of them have walked very painful paths back from those places to give the rest of us a warning, like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Future, about where our own folly, hubris, and righteousness could lead. We, and all the legislators who represent us, would do well to listen.

As the Shuttle Mission Ends, Analyzing the Cost of Exploration

2011-07-08T07:06:26-04:00

Private industry has little reason to invest in endeavors where the result is not returns, but greater scientific knowledge or understanding

Sometime Friday, or in the next few days, weather and mechanics permitting, the very last Space Shuttle mission will depart the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. For some, this marks a great loss in our national vision, capability and space endeavors. To my mind (and I've written six books on NASA history, so I have at least a bit of background on the subject), the ending of the Shuttle program is merely an ending of a chapter -- and a less-than-overwhelmingly productive chapter, at that.

In an article on the closing down of the Shuttle program in Tuesday's Science Times, space writer Dennis Overbye called the Shuttle "the space truck to nowhere." Fun for the astronauts involved, somehow cool to think humans were still leaving the planet but ... with the notable exceptions of servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and a couple of other satellites ... an era rather devoid of any astounding expansions in science, understanding or capability." It's why commercial companies may well be able to take over the bulk of the relatively simple (relative being the operative word, there) low Earth orbit experiences and supply missions.

But exploration of the cosmos still takes an enormous amount of commitment and investment. Which is to say ... money. Federal, government money.

Leaving the planet is still a vastly difficult and risk-laden operation -- note the difficulty that the commercial space companies SpaceX and Orbital Sciences (who are developing commercial space vehicles and launch systems) have had developing successful rockets and launching them on schedule. But enabling humans to see the Earth from space and taking supplies to low Earth orbit are not cutting-edge exploratory missions. They're an engineering challenge, to be sure, but NASA has already greatly reduced the risks involved through its 30 years of testing, improving and flying the Shuttles. That's what NASA is supposed to do. Go somewhere first, and in cases where technology might hold promise for commercial development, reduce the risk of the technologies involved enough so that private industry can, in good stockholder conscience, take on the risk of developing commercial applications of that technology.

But what of the greater human mission of exploration? Of boldly going where no one has gone before? Of taking great risks to discover great new worlds, or capabilities or understanding? The sobering fact is that actually may be at risk -- but not because of the ending of the Shuttle program.

Along with the ending of the Shuttle program, this week also marked the one millionth observation by the Hubble Space Telescope. Over the past 20 years, the Hubble, as it's affectionately known, has opened the eyes of scientists and schoolchildren alike to just how vast, mysterious and glorious the universe really is. It's shown us, in various wavelengths, the composition of stars, exoplanets and patches of the cosmos we once saw only as black spaces in between the visible stars. It has changed the minds of scientists and physicists, let alone the average person, about whether there is, in fact, intelligent life and carbon-based life on other planets besides our own. We may not yet know how to get to those distant planets. But because of the Hubble, we now have a far better idea of how many of those places exist.

We may not yet know how to land a human on an asteroid, as President Obama has challenged NASA and the nation to do by 2025. But a NASA satellite mission called "Dawn," because its mission is to search for information about the dawn of our solar system, has already reached a protoplanet called Vesta in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter -- and is sending back images and data from Vesta daily. We have missions and probes investigating comets, dark matter, black holes, solar flares and other mysterious and powerful phenomena and celestial bodies. We may be using robotic eyes, just as surgeons in one city are now experimenting with doing remote surgery on patients residing somewhere else. But what those eyes are discovering is far more compelling and assumption-shattering than anything the Shuttle ever produced, or the Apollo-era space folk even realized existed.

But exploration of the cosmos -- even through robotic eyes -- still takes an enormous amount of commitment and investment. Which is to say ... money. Federal, government money. Why government money? For the very same reason national laboratories, NASA, and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, were formed in the first place. Private industry has no incentive to invest in endeavors where either: a) the result is greater scientific knowledge or understanding, but nothing that has any hope of a fiscal return on investment, or b) cutting-edge technology whose development is so nascent that its incorporation into commercial products is simply too risky to attempt.

So the disturbing piece of news in Thursday's New York Times was not the article about the ending of the Shuttle program. It was the article just below it (for those of us who still read the print version of our daily newspapers) about the House Appropriations Committee's proposal to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope project -- the follow-on telescope being built to replace the Hubble when the Hubble inevitably wears out.

Granted, the Webb project is over budget and behind schedule. But it's worth remembering that the Hubble itself was initially supposed to be launched in 1983 and was significantly over budget by the time it actually reached space in 1990 -- and even then, it still had a defective mirror needing repair. Yet, the Hubble is now one of the few space efforts most people agree was a spectacularly productive investment and achievement, even with those problems. It's estimated that the Webb telescope will require $1.5 billion to complete. But to put that amount in perspective, that's only the equivalent of three Space Shuttle launches. And the Webb telescope holds the promise of far more return on investment, as far as frontier-expanding knowledge is concerned, than most of the Shuttle missions combined.

The Webb is in danger, of course, because of the current budget-cutting fervor on Capitol Hill -- a subject with many tentacles and complexities that go far beyond funding a space telescope. But I think it's worth pointing out that the great achievements of the Apollo Era, which we look back on so nostalgically, and yearn for so pointedly ... took place in a very different federal budget and tax environment. In 1961, when President Kennedy made his famous moon challenge, the top tax rate for the wealthiest individuals in America was approximately 90%, and federal tax revenues totaled 17.8% of the GDP, according to the Office of Management and Budget. In 1966, when the top individual tax rate was reduced to 70%, tax revenues were still 17.3% of GDP. In 2010, the top tax rate for individuals was 35%, and federal tax revenues totaled only 14.9% of the GDP -- the lowest percentage in over half a century, and a number that the OMB estimates will drop even further in 2011.

I recognize that a tax rate is not the same thing as an actual tax paid. And that statistics are surprisingly malleable to support almost any argument a person wants to make, depending on how you set the selection criteria. But no matter how you work the numbers, the point is, not only was there more federal revenue, relative to GDP, in the 1960s than there is now, there was also a much different level of acceptance when it came to individuals contributing to federal infrastructure, systems and programs through taxes. Including the exploration of space.

The wealthy may have grumbled, but there was no revolt over the higher limits on the highest portion of a person's income, and certainly no fight to reduce that rate to below 30%. Conceptually, the idea of the wealthy contributing a higher share of their income (even if in practice, the actual amount was reduced dramatically) to the nation's purposes, was more acceptable, and more accepted, in fact and real numbers.

One can point to companies like SpaceX, co-founded by Elon Musk, who made his money developing PayPal, as an example of wealthy individuals who invested their more closely-kept wealth in entrepreneurial ventures that create jobs. True. But the goal of SpaceX is a commercial utilization of space, not exploration with no financial return in sight. If we want America to explore new scientific horizons and be exceptional in its national efforts, we need to rethink our death grip on the "mine is mine" philosophy of income and taxes.

A CEO friend of mine in Silicon Valley, who worked as an advisor to a long list of top American companies, often said that you can't cut your way to growth. Even if that weren't true, I would never advocate exploring space at the expense of the basic Medicare and social services that provide a baseline protection to those humans right here on Earth who are most in need. Exploration is a luxury, not a necessity. But we have been most proud of our nation when it endeavored to do great things, and aimed higher than minimizing revenue and operating costs. That's a hard goal to get enthusiastic about.

The Space Shuttle era is ending. Whether anything extraordinary follows will depend, in large part, on whether we can once again get enthusiastic about giving the government the funds it needs not only to take care of the basics here at home, but to aim for the stars, as well.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The Value of Following Passion in a Jobless World

2011-06-09T16:05:06-04:00

Despite the economy, 2011 graduates shouldn't abandon enthusiasm. Their deep, serious desires might be what saves them.

As the high school and college graduates of 2011 head out into the world (or back to their parents' homes, as the case may be), one could forgive them for feeling a bit confused. On the one hand, they've just been told at commencement exercises that the world is theirs to make and shape, that they should follow their dreams and passions, and that they are our hope for the future. On the other hand, they've also been told that the job market is dismal, that they'd better get serious about picking a place to live and a field where they can find a job, and that they'd better not set their expectations too high.

Don Peck, deputy managing editor at The Atlantic, wrote a piece earlier this year listing the obstacles facing graduates in poor economic times and cautioning them about taking time in their early- and mid-twenties to explore instead of getting serious about a career. "The window for getting onto a good track, arguably, is narrower than it used to be," he said.

Passion is one of the most important elements in any effort to improve a community, build something of value in the world, and even survive tough times or a daunting economy.

New York Times columnist David Brooks went further than that. In a column last week, he argued that finding your passion and pursuing your dreams was something of a narcissistic endeavor, anyway.

"College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities," Brooks wrote. "But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to." Brooks also cautioned against what he called the "misleading mantra" of "expressive individualism" that encourages graduates to "find their passion and then pursue their dreams."

If I were a 22-year-old reading all this, the whole notion of adulthood would seem like a prison sentence worth trying to avoid. But more importantly, the entire premise upon which all this advice is based is false.

Passion, despite how often we use the term to tout company commitment or extol romantic excitement, is often misunderstood or confused with other motivations. Many people view dreams and passion exactly as Brooks painted it: as a hopelessly idealistic, selfish, or irresponsible choice that is diametrically opposed to commitment to others, responsibility, security, or success. But I have spent the past year and a half researching a book about passion and people who follow passionate paths in life, and nothing I've found backs up that premise or belief. Indeed, I would argue that passion is one of the most important elements in any effort to improve a community, build something of value in the world, and even survive tough times or a daunting economy. The fact that it also tends to lead to a sense of fulfillment within an individual is certainly one of its benefits—but it's not the driving force that compels someone down the passion road.

That's not to say that passion doesn't have its costs or risks. Passion is a very complex force that has many faces. But if we're going to throw the word around so much, and either extol graduates to follow it or caution them to steer clear of it, it's worth clarifying some common misconceptions about what passion is ... and isn't.

1. Passion is not the same thing as drive, ambition, greed, lust, or pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. While all of those things are powerful motivators, they operate differently than passion. Ambition, lust, greed, and pleasure are focused on getting external recognition or reward or satisfying one's own fleeting, narcissistic desires. Passion is a far more serious and far deeper motivator that compels one forward through hard work, sacrifice, and sometimes superhuman effort to accomplish a goal one views as important—not because of any external status or reward, but because it matters to the person pursuing it.

2. Passion is not incompatible with commitment and community. People pursuing passionate endeavors often speak of how "fulfilling" they find their work. But fulfillment isn't necessarily selfish. Fulfillment comes from a sense that what one does has a purpose, or generates a sense of meaning in one's life. And purpose and meaning rarely come from a life spent pursuing external rewards of money, status, power, or even hedonistic pleasure. It comes from building something of value, or having impact, or finding richness and art along a life path that has depth and significance.

To be sure, there are those whose passions lead them to make choices whose costs are borne by their family members. But there are also those whose passion leads them to make tremendous individual sacrifices for the sake of those around them. After all, passion, at its core, is an inspirational fire that is lit within a person by a vision of an alternative potential future—something other than what "is," something that, if he or she has the courage to pursue it, could become real. That vision might be personal, as with a romantic relationship or a dream of becoming a successful musician. But it can just as easily be a vision of a wrong righted, a community restored, a child healed, or a new and better piece of technology or scientific knowledge.

What's more, passion is all about commitment. To make a vision of an alternative future possible or real requires a tremendous amount of effort, with no guarantee of success. Passion, therefore, both requires and engenders commitment, almost above all else. Indeed, one of the reasons passion is so important in any transformative endeavor is because it is the element that keeps someone going when others would give up.

"Passion is essential to success," one Silicon Valley entrepreneur told me, "because passion is what leads to perseverance—especially when the dark times come. Anyone can have character when times are good. It's when times get tough that you need passion. Because that's what inspires you to keep going, to persevere. And without perseverance, you can't achieve anything."

3. In other words, passion is not a luxury that needs to be jettisoned in tough economic times. It is the most essential force a person can bring to a challenging job market ... not only because we tend to do our best when we're passionate about what we're doing, but also because passion is what inspires a person to keep pushing to find a way forward, no matter how tough the circumstances.

4. Passion is rarely found in a vacuum. Few people have a fire lit within themselves by sitting alone, staring at their navels. Passion comes most often from exploring and engaging with the world and imagining things that don't yet exist, but that inspire you to wonder, as Robert Kennedy once said ... why not? And beyond that, finding one of those possibilities that lights such a fire inside you that you will persevere through the challenges, effort, and dark nights to try to make it real.

So when we urge graduates to pursue dreams and passions, we are not telling them to satisfy selfish desires and neglect everyone else. We are challenging them to go explore the world and find something so compelling that they will dedicate their best energies to pursuing it. We do this knowing that the passionate roads are far from the easiest paths that they could take in life. Far easier to pursue a "steady" predetermined path or career that they will spend judging their accomplishments in dollars and counting the days until retirement. So why pursue the more challenging roads that are built and inspired by passion? Because that is how you save communities and transform the world. It's also the strongest weapon you can have for surviving tough times and standing out from the crowd.

Psychiatrist Victor Frankl, an Austrian Jew who survived four concentration camps in World War II, discovered that those who best survived the camps were the people who had a passionate reason they felt they needed to survive: some unfinished work or commitment to others that compelled them to find a way to stay alive. Someone who "knows the 'why' of [their] existence," Frankl concluded, "will be able to bear almost any 'how.'"

So if we encourage graduates to go in search of something that inspires that kind of commitment and passion within them, it's because on some level, we understand that truth. And we would wish them that strength, that courage, and that ability to imagine and work toward not only a meaningful life but also a better world.

At What Price the Moon?

2011-05-25T10:30:14-04:00

JFK challenged Americans to take to the skies half a century ago -- but as human space flight embraced rockets rather than reusable spacecraft, what did we lose?

Wikimedia Commons

Fifty years ago, on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress and laid out his famous challenge for the nation to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."

It was a lofty goal that set in motion the intense technology development of the Apollo era, and a moment we remember happily because, after all, we succeeded! Against all odds, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, a full five months before the challenge deadline.

Achieving that success took a tremendous investment and focus of money and national resources, of course--an investment that was available because, as Kennedy made clear in his speech, going to the moon was not just an interesting scientific endeavor.

With such a tight deadline, it became clear that more complex reusable engines and spacecraft would take too long to develop. Rockets won the day.

"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks [on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard had become the first American in space] should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take," Kennedy said, stressing that taking a "clearly leading role" in space might even "hold the key to our future on earth."

Why the moon? Because, Kennedy said, "no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind."

Kennedy was undoubtedly correct in that assessment. Furthering knowledge and understanding about the universe by increments is not nearly as inspiring a goal or as strong a competitive political masterstroke as "land a man on the moon, in this decade, and return him safely to earth." A moon mission has imagination, a clear victory point--and, as retired astronaut Story Musgrave likes to point out, all the elements of great project management: a clear focus, clear requirements, a clear goal, and a clear timeline in which to accomplish that goal.

The eight-year Apollo effort leading to the moon landing also sparked the development of all kinds of new technology: from rockets to life-support systems, from lightweight materials to protective coatings, and to really cool pens that wrote in zero gravity. It also undoubtedly inspired many school children in the 1960s to pursue engineering, in the hopes of becoming part of the grand space adventure when they grew up.

But while the moon landing was unquestionably inspirational--I still remember racing home from a camping trip to watch it on TV--and a decisive public-relations victory for the U.S. in its "space war" with the Soviet Union, it came at a price. In the late 1950s, NASA was working on other, more sophisticated ways of getting into space. The X-15 rocket plane (pictured below) incorporated exotic materials, the first throttle-controlled rocket engine and was designed to fly more than six times the speed of sound, at altitudes above 250,000 feet. Up at those altitudes, it used small bursts by hydrogen-peroxide thrust rockets for control (normal aircraft control surfaces, which depend on air pressure, would be useless outside the atmosphere) and then glided back for an unpowered landing on earth.

And yes, that's Neil Armstrong in that photo--Armstrong served as an X-15 test pilot before joining the astronaut corps.

The military was also working on a space plane project called Dyna-Soar, while other researchers at NASA worked on concepts for lifting bodies--highly efficient, if odd-shaped, spacecraft that could handle the heat of re-entry while still being controllable within the atmosphere. (see the examples below)

There was, in fact, a division within NASA between the "airplane" folks, who wanted to develop more sophisticated, reusable spacecraft that could fly into space and back, and the "rocket" folks who advocated the brute force of a rocket launcher with a capsule on top as the best (and fastest) way to get space capability. But with the tight deadline imposed by Kennedy's challenge to getting a man to the moon and back within nine years, it became clear that the more complex reusable engines and spacecraft would take too long to develop. The rockets won the day, and the funding and focus turned away from hypersonic space vehicles and space "flight."

The Space Shuttle did, in fact, incorporate some of the earlier design concepts from the airplane side of NASA--including its reliance on gliding back to an unpowered landing on earth. But concepts like a single-stage-to-orbit rocket engine, scram and ram jets for ultra-high-speed transport planes, and better reusable spacecraft designs never made it off the drawing board. If they had, we might now have commercial spaceflight vehicles hopping from Japan to Chicago on a regular basis. As it is, even the Shuttle has to rely on the brute force of disposable rocket engines to get out of the earth's atmosphere, at a cost of around half a billion dollars a pop.

The moon program also seemed to lock our collective imagination into a fixed formula for human spaceflight, and spaceflight as an engineering project, even if those missions had questionable scientific value (with notable exceptions like the launch and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope). After all, even the moon mission was primarily an engineering challenge, not a scientific research mission.

As Story Musgrave put it in the interview noted above,

We could have had multiple Voyagers landed or floating in the atmosphere on every planet and on every moon of every planet. That is what we gave up when we went with [the International Space Station]. If you sent multi-media robotic machines [into space], people would be unbelievably excited about going everywhere out there. And we could have gone everywhere. But we opted to stay in low-earth orbit and do a jobs program because we had no imagination.

Musgrave is not the only one of that opinion. John M. Logsdon, a space policy specialist who's written a new book on the subject (John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon), told a New York Times writer last week that despite having praised the Apollo program in an earlier book, he's since come to the conclusion that the Apollo program's impact on the space program has "on balance, been negative." Apollo, Logsdon said, was "a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet."

Certainly the human space flight program, and the International Space Station, have more than a few critics. And the money and focus on the human spaceflight side of NASA have deflected huge amounts of money and brainpower away from other research efforts. The question is ... could the situation have been different?

I'm a huge fan of the more sophisticated design ideas that languished at NASA in the post-Kennedy-challenge era, as well as many of the other technologies that could have been developed with that money. Not to mention the scientific discoveries we could have made if we'd put the effort there instead of sending crew after crew into the same orbit around the earth. The materials and mind-bending physics know-how required to build a spacecraft capable of really-distant space flight outside our galaxy still lie beyond our reach. But we might be closer if we'd put a big chunk of the human space flight budget toward that effort.

On the other hand, the prodigious Apollo funding would likely not have been approved for anything less clear, less politically impactful or less mesmerizing than putting a human on the moon. So in many ways, whether or not the Apollo money could have been better spent is a moot point. And there is something to be said--something pretty compelling--for having gotten a human off the planet, onto another celestial body, and back home again.

The issue with Apollo is just that it set expectations so strongly in one direction, and left NASA so geared up to pursue human spaceflight, that it was difficult to shift gears after the moon landing was accomplished. Important scientific and aerospace technology research has continued at numerous NASA Centers around the country (think Mars Rover, satellite and GPS technology, and a host of telescopes, safety technology, and aircraft design and efficiency improvements). But the human space flight side of NASA continued to get a big chunk of the budget pie, even after the Apollo program concluded and there wasn't another clear goal for humans to accomplish in space.

But if our focus never shifted to the amazing scientific discoveries that might have been found, it's at least in large part because what drove the Apollo program--as President Kennedy made abundantly clear in that speech 50 years ago--wasn't science. It was a strategic blow against the Soviet Union, and for the achievements of democracy, in a world where communism was seen as a real and growing threat. Period. Paragraph. End of discussion.

Still--one of the many intriguing parts of Kennedy's speech (and there are many) is how strongly he stressed to Congress and the American people that if they were not willing to sacrifice for this goal, and commit fully to its achievement, no matter what it took, then it would be better not to attempt it at all.

"If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all," Kennedy said. "There is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful."

Of course, it was easier to say that in 1961, before NASA had as many Center and work forces whose jobs would be endangered if the nation decided that, in fact, it would rather not bear all those burdens and pay all those costs.

But 50 years later, Kennedy's point is still valid. Some of the work in low-earth orbit that NASA used to do is being handed off to private industry. The great promise of NASA's current space program is now in the field of technology advancement and exploratory science. Of course, those developments might lead, some day, to another clear goal worth pursuing in-person, an exotic, distant place brought almost within reach that's worth a mighty, focused effort for humans to go explore.

But the true challenge Kennedy threw down in that 1961 speech still applies. Without a Soviet rival to "race," and without the imperative of a cold war threat to counter, do we really care enough about space for science and exploration's sake to pay the costs and bear the burdens for that effort to bear dramatic fruit? The jury is still out on that one, in part because I don't know that the country's been asked to sacrifice much for NASA's scientific efforts. But in any event, as Kennedy said, we shouldn't attempt something halfway. We should figure out what scientific, engineering, or technology goals we really do care enough about to pursue, get excited about, and focus on carrying those through to completion--and let the rest go.

The part of that 1961 speech that Kennedy is remembered for is the moon challenge. But his challenge to Congress and the nation to think about whether or not space was worth the effort, and to walk away unless "every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his pledge that this nation will move forward ... [without] undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel" is the part of the speech that has the most lasting relevance.

What goal, if any, do we care enough about to commit to that fully? Fifty years later, the question still lingers in the air, awaiting an answer again.

The Sex Difference in Sex Scandals

2011-05-19T16:30:00-04:00

Why do these kinds of scandals so rarely happen with female politicians?

Nearly two years ago, when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford admitted (finally, in a spectacularly embarrassing press conference) to having an extra-marital affair with an Argentine woman, a lot of questions were raised about why this kind of scandal so rarely happens with women politicians. One answer offered was simply that there aren't that many women politicians in office.

It's true, of course. Women only make up 16.4% of the current Congress, and 12% of the nation's governors. But in a 2009 Newsweek tally of political sex scandals since 1976, only one out of 53 instances involved a woman politician (former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who admitted to having an eight-year affair with a married rancher in the 1980s). So women aren't even holding up their fair percentage of the scandals.

Married people from all walks in life have extra-marital affairs. According to a 2006 report on American Sexual Behavior as part of the General Social Survey (GSS), an average of 16-18% of all married people have had an extra-marital affair. That's a considerably lower number than is often bandied about in the popular press, of course, which Tom Smith, the report's author, attributes to the lack of scientific rigor in the studies reporting higher numbers. He cites a number of studies that mirror the GSS results. But even in the GSS results, almost twice as many men had had extramarital affairs than women.

Why is that? Many reasons, to be sure. But the two scandals grabbing the headlines this week (the arrest of IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn for sexual assault and the admission of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to fathering a child with a member of his household staff), point to a couple of factors that help explain that gap.

One has to do with what we typically consider attractive and/or sexy in men versus women. For better or worse ... as a culture, we see competence and power as very attractive features in a man. The more power and competence a man and his position (and money) denote, the more attractive he will seem to a whole host of women. This, by the way, explains the appeal of the military flight suit. I single out the flight suit, as opposed to military dress uniforms, because there is nothing inherently attractive in what military pilots refer to as their "green bags." And yet, a pilot walking into a bar in one increases his chances of getting a date by an order of magnitude over a guy in a t-shirt and jeans. Why? Because the flight suit denotes competence and a certain level of power.

A woman pilot wearing a flight suit into a bar, on the other hand, will see her chances of a date fall. Why? Because (and again, this is a general trend, there are always exceptions), we don't see competence and power as sexy in a woman. If anything, they're threatening. When I bought my current airplane 12 years ago, (a simple, four-seat, single engine model), a male friend of mine congratulated me on the purchase, but then added,

"You know, Lane, this is not exactly going to help your love life."

Is that image changing? Of course it is. More and more men are waking up to the benefits and appeal of a smart, competent, independent and powerful woman. But as a culture, what makes a woman appealing is still her looks, not her power.

So how does this relate to political sex scandals? Well, one reason floated for the seemingly high number of politicians being caught cheating is that so much more opportunity may exist for them to stray. The theory goes that a politician (or star athlete, for that matter) will find a dizzyingly high number of adoring admirers at their disposal. And that theory may be true ... but I would argue that phenomenon is one known far better by male politicians than female ones. Why? Because the very features that make a male politician so much more attractive to people they meet (power and competence) make their female counterparts less sexually attractive, at least in many people's eyes.

But there's a second aspect of the power/sex connection that also helps explain the gap in sexual misconduct. And that's simply the sense of entitlement that some men have about sex, in terms of it being a kind of reward for achieving power, and a way of reassuring themselves about their hold on that power.

The link undoubtedly dates back to the days of conquering, raping and pillaging all being lumped together in the spoils of warrior combat. Win the battle, gain the power, and take the sex you want. That's not acceptable in today's more civilized society, of course, but a piece of it endures and surfaces more often than we'd like to admit. The atrocities in the Congo aside (where rape still IS a prevalent spoil of war), there's the bragging of Magic Johnson about having had sex with a thousand women, the six-game suspension of Steelers' quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for accusations of his assaulting and/or mistreating women, and even, on a much lesser scale, the dream many young men harbor of making it big on Wall Street so they can have a lot of women. I know women who have career aspirations on Wall Street, but none that involve making it big so they can have sex with a whole lot of men.

So even in consensual matters, there's a two-way dynamic with men in powerful positions that doesn't exist with women. Culturally, men are more likely to link power with a sense of entitlement about rewards that include sex, and there are many women who do, in fact, see a man as more sexually attractive if he's powerful. Hence you have Arnold Schwarzenegger having an affair with a member of his household staff, and President Clinton having an affair with a young White House intern. If President Clinton had been a janitor instead of the President of the United States, Monica Lewinsky would likely not have given him the time of day.

But that same link between power and sex lies behind sexual assault, as well. And that's where it really gets ugly. Any rape crisis counselor will tell you that rape (and sexual harassment, for that matter) is about power, not sex. Sex is just the tool -- a way for an attacker to reassure himself of his power. An insecure man may use rape as a way to prove power he doesn't feel he has. But there's also the case of powerful men so used to getting their way with women that they can't imagine or handle any other outcome -- which is one of the theories being floated to explain Strauss-Kahn's alleged behavior.

The link between power and sex for women, on the other hand, has been to withhold it, not to force it. The plot of the Greek play Lysistrata even revolves around an agreement the women of Athens make with the women of Sparta to withhold sex from their husbands until both armies agree to stop fighting each other. So if anything, the power/sex link for women, if there is one, is a deterrent, not a catalyst. But most women in positions of power are also still far more concerned with being taken seriously than being seen as sexually attractive individuals. For men, the two go together. For women, the equation still involves opposite pulls--especially for women old enough to be in positions of political power.

Most women intuitively understand this dynamic, which is part of the reason why some of these politicians' behaviors make us so uncomfortable. If a man falls in love with someone other than his wife, it's certainly bad, and we thank our lucky stars that we're not the betrayed spouse in question, but it's easier to dismiss it as a private matter. But when we sense a power imbalance in the relationship, it makes it harder to compartmentalize a man's professional talents from his personal behavior. If we believe a man has crossed the line into sexual assault, most women would agree to cut him off at the knees (hence the drop in support for the Pittsburgh Steelers last fall among the team's female fans). But even if the behavior stays this side of legality, like affairs with household help or consenting but powerless young women, I think it gives us pause that extra-marital affairs between equals do not. Why? Because the abuse of that power is something that almost every woman, at one point or another, has had to deal with in the world. And we know just how awful, unjust and destructive a force it can be.

Image: STR New / Reuters

Guiltless Coffee? The Drink May Actually Make Us Healthier

2011-05-18T10:28:32-04:00

Coffee is officially off the vice list as new studies show health benefits for ailments ranging from cancer to Parkinson's disease

I am not, by nature, a morning person. So ever since the age of 20, I have been a proud member of Coffee Achievers of the World--people whose daily intake of Morning Joe is an essential factor in getting the brain and body kick-started in the morning (or mid-afternoon, or before a college all-nighter). Getting a cup of coffee in the morning is such a high priority for me, in fact, that when I climbed a mountain high in the Himalayan mountains, I took a zip-lock bag of Coffee Singles along with me. I could handle yaks, glaciers, and whatever other discomforts the day had to throw at me, as long as I could start it with a steaming hot cup of Java.

As a result, I have also spent the past decades periodically defending my habit to non-coffee-drinking friends and the occasional health-fanatic doctor--because, as we all knew, coffee was bad for you. "Look," I'd tell the critics. "I don't have many vices. So I'm very attached to the few I have."

Well, huzzah and hurrah, all that is changing!

In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a group of Harvard researchers announced that they'd found that coffee consumption actually reduces the risk of prostate cancer, and particularly lethal prostate cancer, in men. Not only that, but a Swedish study published last week in Breast Cancer Research indicates that coffee could also help reduce a woman's risk for post-menopausal, ER-negative breast cancer.

How has coffee managed to go from a universally agreed-upon vice to at least a potential virtue in such a relatively short period of time?

All of that is in addition to other recent studies that have found links between coffee consumption and a decreased risk of gallstones, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease, as well as lower rates of disease progression in liver cancer and cirrhosis. Other recent studies have indicated that coffee may not even increase a person's risk of heart disease or stroke. Turns out that coffee contains antioxidants and compounds that can improve glucose metabolism and insulin secretion. It also seems to have an effect on sex hormones, which is why researchers looked at its impact on prostate and breast cancer.

There are caveats to the results, of course. The strong correlation in the Harvard study came from men who drank six cups of coffee a day, and the Swedish study results applied to women who drank five or more cups of coffee a day. What's more, a German study (the MARIE study) that was used to validate the Swedish research findings did not show a statistically significant link between coffee consumption and a reduced risk of breast cancer--a result the Swedish researchers think may have to do with the fact that Swedish coffee is boiled, while German coffee is filtered. Of course, boiled coffee has also been shown to raise cholesterol levels, so drinking huge amounts of Swedish coffee in an effort to ward off ER-negative breast cancer might not be such a terrific idea. The Swedish paper also notes that the scientific community is still divided in its opinion of the toxicity of coffee.

But still. How has coffee managed to go from a universally agreed-upon vice to at least a potential virtue in such a relatively short period of time? The Harvard researchers suspect that part of the issue is that coffee drinking has traditionally been associated with other high-health-risk habits--e.g. drinking more alcohol, smoking, and not exercising--that muddied the waters of what role the coffee itself was playing.

"The difficulty of being able to separate the effects of coffee on health from the effects of associated behaviors, such as smoking or alcohol use, is one reason that coffee was seen as negative for so long," said Kathryn Wilson, one of the Harvard researchers. "Until there were computers that could handle the necessary statistics, along with studies with larger sample sizes, it was very difficult to control for multiple factors at once to see their individual effects on health outcomes."

The caveats are important, too. As an article in the New York Times Sunday Business section this week pointed out, scientific studies do support Quaker's claim that eating oatmeal can reduce cholesterol ... but only if you eat three or more bowls of it a day. Same with Activa's claims that the probiotics in its yogurt help to stimulate digestion (at least three servings a day). A "healthy" diet trying to hew to the standards of all these studies would be a horrific gorge-feast of multiple pots of coffee and so much oatmeal, yogurt, and other supposedly "healthy" foods that there'd likely be nothing all that healthy, and certainly nothing balanced, about it.

And that's not even taking into account the changing views on what foods are even healthy. Eggs were bad, and then good. The big benefits of soy milk are now suspect, even as coffee is seeing a reprieve. Drinking alcohol is a health risk, but drinking a moderate amount of red wine is good for your heart. On the other hand, a 2002 study by Spanish researchers found that people who drank more than two glasses of wine a day had a dramatically reduced risk of getting a cold. The head could spin, trying to keep up with it all.

Given all of that, I asked the Harvard team what advice they had for the average person, based on their research results.

"I wouldn't recommend that men change their coffee consumption based on this study (or any single study)," Wilson answered. "[But] I think this study is part of mounting evidence that you don't need to feel guilty about your current coffee consumption."

Guiltless coffee. Is it possible? I might have to ponder that over a glass of red wine ... or another cup of steaming Java.

Image: kennymatic/flickr

Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We?

2011-05-10T10:24:49-04:00

New science suggests it might be possible to free ourselves of mental burdens—but would doing so destroy who we are?

In 1992, author George Saunders wrote a short story, first published in The New Yorker, called "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz." In it, he tells the tale of a clerk in a futuristic holograph-experience store who, in scanning the brain of a would-be armed robber he'd knocked out, accidentally downloads—permanently—all the youthful memories the man's mind contained. The clerk is horrified at his error ... until the robber regains consciousness. Then, freed of the painful memories of life experiences that had damaged him, the robber smiles and walks happily out of the store. The clerk ends up deciding to "offload" his own past memories as well, rewriting his past and leaving him free to start life all over again, without the scars.

The story is science fiction-fantasy, of course. Or it was when Saunders wrote it. But in a study published in the April 27 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, a team of UCLA researchers reported that they'd actually discovered a way to erase long-term memories—at least when experimenting on small marine snails and on the snails' neurons in petri dishes.

As hard as professionals might try to anticipate any collateral effects of erasing a traumatic memory, odds are good that there'd be some new and unexpected problems.

Not that small snails and neurons have all that much going on in the memory department, mind you. But that was the point, the researchers said. The study's goal was to isolate a protein kinase and process that snails and mammals share (which the researchers suspected played a key role in memory retention) and to test the effect of inhibiting that activity in an animal with a very simple neurological system.

When researchers prodded the snails' abdomens, the snails responded with a reflexive contraction. But normally, that contraction lasted only a few seconds. After "training" the snails with electric shocks associated with the prodding, however, the contractions lasted up to 50 seconds. A week later, prodding the snails still resulted in contractions lasting 30 seconds or longer, indicating to researchers that the snails "remembered" the electric shocks, and that the memory had been encoded into "long-term" memory in their systems.

If the researchers inhibited the activity of a specific protein kinase called PKM, however, the snails then responded to being prodded with only the standard two- or three-second contraction. Their memory of the electric shock training was effectively erased.

Clearly, there's a big gap between inhibiting long-term memory in the synapse between two neurons in a simple marine snail and inhibiting long-term memories in the highly complex structure of a human mind. Even if the PKM protein kinase were to prove pivotal in humans as well, and could be reliably inhibited, researchers would still have to figure out how to locate and target specific memories in the brain. Otherwise, all of a person's memories could be erased—not just the traumatic ones.

Nevertheless, the experiment is something of a breakthrough and could be the first step in developing therapies to "damp down" or erase traumatic memories in people suffering from debilitating cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Given that the U.S. Army suicide rate has reached a 27-year high, and that nearly 20 percent of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan test positive for PTSD (the Department of Veterans Affairs reported last year that over 170,000 returning veterans had been diagnosed with PTSD), the idea of being able to wipe out the traumatic memories causing all that pain is appealing.

Indeed, few adults reach the age of 40 or 50 without accumulating some memories that still make the heart ache in the middle of the night, even if the remembered event happened a very long time ago. But if we had the ability to erase those painful or traumatic memories, would we really want to do that?

Part of my hesitancy stems from the seeming inevitability of the Law of Unintended Consequences. As hard as professionals might try to anticipate any collateral effects of erasing a traumatic memory, odds are good that there'd be some new and unexpected problems created by the technique. But I also wonder if it's really possible to eliminate significant memories, even ones that are traumatic, and erase only the pain and damage—and not also an important piece of who that person is or has become.

When I was 20 years old, I was in a near-fatal car crash while living 10,000 miles away from my family, on the North Island of New Zealand. I went head-first through the front windshield of a car at high speed and, as I later came to describe it, spent the next nine hours fighting for my life, and the next 18 months fighting for my sanity. Struggling though the difficult, post-traumatic stress caused by a near-fatal trauma so far away from home cost me most of my friends, a significant relationship that I thought would last a lifetime, and a big chunk of my productive abilities for a year and a half. I had flashbacks, nightmares, and the psychologist treating me put herself on 24-hour-a-day call at one point, afraid that I might hurt myself. Having knowingly come so close to death, I also found myself both unable to plan for the future and afraid in ways I'd never been before. What's more, some of the life choices I made in the few years after the accident were less than ideal, and I probably would have made different choices had I not been struggling with the damage that experience caused.

And yet, for all the darkness of that time, that accident was also a transformative experience that still informs the way I walk through the world. Painfully aware that life could be wrenched away from anyone in an instant, I found myself unwilling to choose a business career that offered only the delayed reward of money or "security" down the line. If security didn't exist and life was uncertain, then I needed to find a life's work that was fulfilling in the process and made me as happy as I could be every day, so that no matter when it ended, I could say I'd spent whatever time I had well. Friends and family also became far more important than external career success. And I wouldn't trade that wisdom, or those choices, for anything in the world.

Just as important as my clarity in my own priorities, however, was the fact that I gained a first-hand, visceral understanding of what another human might be going through after combat, accident, attack, or loss. I have walked through life since that time with a better, deeper understanding of and compassion for others' pain, and a greater ability to reach people in pain, as a result of my own. And I'm not sure I'd be the same person in the world without that, or able to make the same contributions.

I have asked myself many, many times, over the years, whether or not—if I had the choice—I would wish not to have had that accident. The easy answer is yes. I wouldn't wish a nightmare like that on anybody. But it's hard for me to separate out the pain from the strength, the loss from the gifts. And in the end, I always come to the same conclusion: I would not be who I am today if it weren't for that accident. So to take it away would be to take away not only its shadows but an important part of myself.

We definitely don't want to erase someone's memory of a traumatic event. We just want to make it less of a fearful memory.

In the case of a suicidal soldier, or someone too damaged to go on with a healthy or happy life, perhaps the cost/benefit equation would be different. On the other hand, Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, a professor and director of the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Center at the Emory University School of Medicine, says that even in the case of severely traumatized veterans, erasing a traumatic memory would be unwise.

"Remember the move Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?" Professor Rothbaum asked. (In the movie, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play ex-lovers who choose to erase their memories of one another.) "They erased their memories of each other, and then they made all the same mistakes all over again. The point is, we are meant to learn from dangerous and painful situations and experiences. So we definitely don't want to erase someone's memory of a traumatic event. We just want to make it less of a fearful memory. It will always be a bad memory, a traumatic memory. What we're working to do is to let people learn from it without it being something that interferes with their lives."

Dr. Rothbaum and her colleagues are also conducting research that involves inhibiting a neurological response, in the hopes of helping PTSD patients. But Rothbaum's research focuses on the use of the antibiotic D-cycloserine, which has been shown to reduce fear levels, with PTSD patients. And the end point isn't just to make a memory less fearful. The end point is to reduce a patient's fear of looking at the memory enough so that the patient is more able and willing to confront it, sort through it, and reframe it in a way that allows them to go on with their lives.

To remember or forget? It might be a tough choice for anyone in pain to make. But Dr. Rothbaum may be right. Even if ignorance is bliss, 'twould be folly not to become wise.

Image: philip.bitnar/flickr

Why Do Women See the World in Shades of Gray?

2011-04-28T13:04:05-04:00

A study finds that the sexes interpret the world differently, with men more likely to judge it in black-and-white terms
It has long been asserted--at least in by those inclined to stereotype—that women are more complex than men. But according to a new research study, women may see the world in more complex ways, as well.

In a study scheduled for publication in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, three researchers from the University of Warwick in England asked a group of men and women to categorize natural and manufactured objects as being "part of," "not part of," or "somewhat part of" a particular category. All of the object/category pairs in the study were selected because they defied easy categorization (e.g. is a tomato a fruit? Is billiards a sport? Is a computer a tool?). Nonetheless, the male subjects were far more likely to assert that the objects were completely in or out of a particular category. The women, on the other hand, were more likely to reject absolute answers in favor of the "somewhat" (or "it's not that simple") option.

It might be that difference, and that willingness to see the world in complex shades of gray, that give women an edge in leading the future's companies.

Lest anyone take the results as an indication of indecision or unwillingness on the part of the women to take a stand on anything, the researchers also tested to see how confident each participant was about his or her categorization. Interestingly, the participants who were most confident in general chose "somewhat part of" as an answer less often than the others. But there was no difference between the sexes in their levels of confidence about their choices. The women were just as absolutely sure the answers were complex as the men were sure they were simple.

Granted, the study sample size was small: only 113 subjects. But still. What do we make of the possibility that men may, as a group, categorize the world in more black-and-white terms, while women see it in more shades of gray? What accounts for that difference? Dr. Zachary Estes, one of the study's authors, isn't sure.

"To speculate a bit, this sex difference is almost certainly a combination of biological predisposition and social environment," he said. "[But] whether the male tendency for absolute judgments is related to assertion, or simplicity, or anything else like that, we simply don't know yet."

In terms of socialization, it's true that our society (and, indeed, many societies) judges men in terms of their competence—which implies, or requires, clear and confident knowledge about subjects. Men are also judged in terms of their ability to command, which requires assertive judgment calls. So given the same set of ambiguous calls to make, it's not surprising that men lean toward more absolute judgments.

Having to maintain a command attitude also influences how a person pursues or processes information. As I've written elsewhere, a commander has a very different agenda and approach than, say, an "explorer." Explorers don't seek to control the world around them. They seek, instead, to understand it. As a result, explorers take the information available to them as a starting point, seeking ever more information that might clarify or expand their understanding. They also have to be comfortable with ambiguity, since the world of the explorer is one that remains largely unknown. The challenge of commanders is very different. Their task is to take whatever information is available in any given moment and winnow it down to a clear, unambiguous decision point.

How does this relate to the research of Estes and his colleagues? Because women may feel less pressure to command, and more freedom to explore, than men do—leaving them more open to seeing or accepting shades of gray.

Of course, there might also turn out to be a biological or neurological component that explains the difference, similar to the brain differences I wrote about recently between people who call themselves conservative vs. liberal. Or perhaps women are more inclined to stay a bit neutral in their judgments for social or psychological reasons. Learning to couch their opinions a bit might help women build a wider social circle or avoid harsh recriminations from bigger, stronger, and more powerful members of the opposite sex.

But whatever the roots of Estes's findings, their implications are intriguing to consider. A former boss of mine once said that he thought the real division between people's world views wasn't conservative vs. liberal. It was between people who saw the world in black-and-white terms and those who saw it, instead, in complex shades of gray.

"The more people see the world in black-and-white terms," he said, "regardless of whether they're on the right or the left, the harder it is for them to change their views on anything. There are only two options for them, and the distance to the other possible viewpoint is too far. People who see the world in shades of gray, on the other hand, can adjust their views more easily, if they get new or conflicting information, because all they have to do is shift to a slightly lighter or darker shade."

So does that mean women are more likely to alter their opinions if presented with new information? It's an interesting possibility that has implications for the boardroom as well as the voting booth.

"Successful" CEOs have traditionally been seen as strong, decisive leaders who take charge—very much the commander role. But in a fast-changing, complex and global market, adapting quickly to change and fostering creative innovation are increasingly important survival skills for companies to master. And those strengths often come more naturally to people who are more comfortable with ambiguity and who see the world, or at least CAN see the world, from multiple viewpoints, or in multiple shades of gray.

Estes says that if he conducted his research among a group of men and women in an executive boardroom, the results might show very little difference in the inclination of men and women to make absolute judgments, because "that might be precisely why [the women] are accepted into an executive role in the first place." But ironically, it might be that very difference, and that willingness to see the world in complex shades of gray, that could give women an edge in leading the companies of the future.

Image: igor.gribanov/flickr

From Fort Sumter to the Moon

2011-04-12T14:22:17-04:00

Today, April 12th is most likely to be notable as the day most procrastinators get around to starting their taxes. But this day also has a significant place in history. For in the early hours of two different April 12th mornings, 150 and 50 years ago today, the opening volleys of two different wars were launched.

The Civil War was an attempt to hold onto a lifestyle of the past. The space race was an effort to control the world of the future.

On April 12, 1861, the opening shots of the American Civil War were fired by Confederate soldiers on Ft. Sumter in South Carolina. Exactly 100 years later, the first human shot in the Cosmic Cold War conflict known as the space race was fired by the Soviet Union as it launched Cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin into space.

The weaponry and goals were different, of course. Cannons versus rocket engines -- which represents a staggering advancement in technology in just 100 years, in and of itself. But in many ways, the Civil War was an attempt by the Confederacy to hold onto a lifestyle and world of the past. The space race was an effort to control the world of the future.

The Civil War was more bloody, of course. But make no mistake about it -- the huge amounts of money and effort that both the Soviet Union and the United States poured into their space programs would not have been invested there if control of space weren't seen as a critical military goal for both countries.

On the other hand, it's possible to see the firing of a rocket carrying the first human into space as an example of some of the better things we can do with technology, rather than simply using it to fire bullets and cannonballs at each other. The best and the worst that humans can rise or sink to ... all connected to an object fired in the early morning hours, and commemorated on the same calendar day, 100 years apart.

Are Liberals and Conservatives Hard-Wired to Disagree?

2011-04-12T13:29:54-04:00

New research from London suggests we have different brain structures based on our political leanings

Last week's Congressional brinksmanship over the budget illustrated, once again, just how polarized the different camps in Congress have become. Granted, some amount of the distance between the public stances legislators took can be explained by a combination of maneuvering for votes back home and posturing for political gain in the constant power struggle that is Washington. But still. Watching the two sides argue, it was clear that they didn't just differ on details. There are entirely different worldviews behind each camp's budget proposals ... different enough that one might wonder if they're really all experiencing the same reality.

Well, according to neuroscientists in Britain ... they might not be.

In a report published last Thursday, neuroscience researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London announced that they had found evidence that liberals and conservatives actually have different brain structures.

If experience influences brain structure, could a person exposed to high levels of threats over time develop a larger right amygdala to better respond to them?

Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Ryota Kanai and colleagues conducted MRI scans of 118 college students whose self-reported political views ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." Many areas of the subjects' brains showed no difference based on political orientation. But the subjects classifying themselves as "liberal" had a higher volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex of their brains than study participants who classified themselves as "conservative." The anterior cingulate cortex is believed to play a role in helping people cope with and sort through uncertainty and conflicting information, as well as affecting their levels of emotional awareness and empathy. The "conservative" participants, on the other hand, had a higher volume of gray matter in the right amygdala region -- which is thought to play a big role in identifying and responding to threats.

The brain is incredibly complex, of course, and we are still only in the baby stages of understanding how and why it works the way it does. But in theory, someone with a larger amygdala would very likely be quicker to see threats and feel fear, whereas someone with a smaller amygdala but larger anterior cingulate cortex, given the same stimuli, would be more likely to consider other possibilities or explanations for that stimuli. The "larger anterior cingulate cortex" group would also be more likely to look at people the first group saw as threatening and see, instead, people in need of a helping hand.

This is not the first time researchers have looked for physiological or psychological underpinnings for our political viewpoints or worldviews. In his 2009 Atlantic article about the longitudinal Grant Study that followed 268 Harvard students throughout their lives, Joshua Wolf Shenk reported that "personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included 'sensitive,' 'cultural,' and 'introspective') and Republicans ('pragmatic' and 'organized)."

Indeed, Kanai said the MRI research was sparked by other recent psychological studies that found correlations between participants' functional behavior (accurately sorting through conflicting information, recognizing threats) and their stated political beliefs. In the MRI-based study, Kanai said, "We show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure."

But what does that mean? Are we hard-wired to disagree with each other from birth, because our brains process data from the world in fundamentally different ways? That question remains to be answered. It's possible that brain structure is set early, but it's also possible that it's influenced by experiences and environment. Kanai and his colleagues note in the report that other research efforts have already shown that brain structure "can exhibit systematic relationships with an individual's experiences and skills," and "can change after extensive training." And people certainly have been known to change their worldviews as they get older.

Clearly, Kanai and his colleagues are just scratching the surface of a very complex subject. But their research does raise some interesting questions. If experience does, in fact, influence brain structure, could a person exposed to high levels of legitimate threats over time develop a larger right amygdala to better respond to them? In other words, if you took someone who was a professed liberal and sent them to the front lines in Afghanistan for three years, would they return with a larger right amygdala, developed from an urgent need to identify and respond to threats every day? And along with that change in brain structure, would their political views shift to the right, as well? And what about children raised in a war zone? Do a great number of them end up with large right amygdalas? And, in turn, does that make them more likely to see the world in terms of threats and more absolute answers, with less tolerance for conflicting explanations or information, and less ability to feel empathy? If so, it might go a long way to explaining some of the entrenched positions in, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Of course, that still doesn't explain people who've lived fairly secure lives but still see the world in terms of threats to be defended against, or people who've grown up in the middle of chaos and conflict and become peacemakers, overflowing with empathy and tolerance of conflicting complexity, even to a fault. What's more, few of us in mid-life see the world in as absolutely black-and-white clear terms as we did when we were 20. So another interesting follow-up would be to do a longitudinal study of brain structure over people's lifetimes, to see how those areas change. In fact, Kanai and his colleagues say as much in their report. "It requires a longitudinal study," the researchers conclude, "to determine whether the changes in brain structure that we observed lead to changes in political behavior or whether political attitudes and behavior instead result in changes of brain structure."

In any event, the University College study provides some biological proof for an important point: namely, that all of us see the world through lenses. None of us has a completely objective view of reality or truth -- a point that all of us would do well to remember. Imagine, for example, the difference in tone the debates in Congress might have if every legislator began by saying, "I recognize that I may view the same data differently than my colleagues because of the particular lenses or biases I have. But this is what I believe..."

Would it make a difference in the outcome? Possibly not. But somewhere in the recognition that our take on any given situation is not the only view, or the "right" or "obvious" or "logical" or "objective" view, but only our point of view ... lie the seeds for a more open, civil, and productive discussion.

But then, of course, that's just my point of view.

Image: melanieburger/flickr

The Poison of Unhappiness

2011-04-08T10:38:23-04:00

A new study from the U.K. confirms the conventional wisdom: friends and exercise make us happy. But it also shows how unhappy people drag us down.

The idea that unhappiness leads to bad consequences is not a new one. But several recent studies have added a bit of nuance to the long-standing general beliefs of "Think Well, Be Well" and the impact of positive thinking on a person's recovery and health.

In the longitudinal, 70-year "Grant Study" of Harvard undergraduates that formed the basis of the June 2009 "What Makes Us Happy" cover story in The Atlantic, researcher George Valliant found a clear link between depression and health problems. Of the men in the study who reported signs of depression at age 50, 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by age 65.

But correlation is not the same thing as causation. Did the depression cause the illness or early death? Or did the two simply go hand in hand? Both Valliant and the authors of a new book, The Longevity Project, came to the same conclusion: sadness does not make you sick any more than happiness makes you well.

The Longevity Project is based on the results of a longitudinal study instigated by psychologist Lewis Terman (and therefore known as the "Terman Study"). The Terman study followed a group of 1,500 Californians over eight decades, starting in 1921. All of the children selected for the Terman study were judged to be of high IQ and, therefore--at least in theory--people who had high potential for living long, happy, successful, and productive lives. The Grant Study participants, all of whom were students at Harvard, were considered to have the same potential.

Although Valliant focused on what factors led to a happy and productive life, and Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, the authors of The Longevity Project, looked primarily at what factors led to a long life, both investigative teams found that being bright didn't guarantee anything. They also came to the same conclusions about health and happiness: namely, that there were certain lifestyle patterns that seemed to lead to both happiness and health, just as there were other lifestyle paths and patterns that seemed to lead to both sadness and sickness. But being sad and being sick were both separate, resultant outcomes of those lifestyles, rather than a cause-and-effect pair.

All three researchers concluded that one of the biggest factors in both a happy life and a long life was having strong and healthy social connections. Beyond that, the people who tended to have "happy-well" outcomes were conscientious, emotionally healthy individuals who set and actively pursued goals; who incorporated strong social networks, exercise and "healthy" eating/drinking habits organically into their everyday lives; who were optimistic but not to the point of being careless or reckless; social enough to form strong networks, but not so social as to pursue unhealthy habits for peer approval; and who felt engaged and satisfied in their careers, marriages, and friendships.

According to Friedman and Martin, however, there's one area where unhappiness does seem to play a causal role. It may not directly sicken or shorten the life of the person experiencing the unhappiness. But it apparently can be toxic for people who have to live with that unhappy person. Unlike the Grant Study, which interviewed only the Harvard men, the Terman study also interviewed the spouses of the people in the study, to gauge their impact on study participants' lives. And in the Terman study, women married to unhappy men tended to be unhealthier, and live shorter lives, than women married to happy men. Oddly, the reverse was not true. The happiness of the woman had very little effect on the lifespan or happiness of her husband.

The explanation Friedman and Martin came up with for this initially puzzling result was that--especially for the Terman subjects, who were all born around 1910--a man married to an unhappy wife could get away from her influence through work and outside activities. But a woman in that era, married to an unhappy man, was more likely to be trapped in a world poisoned by that unhappiness.

Unhappiness may not directly sicken or shorten the life of the person experiencing it. But it apparently can be toxic for people who have to live with that unhappy person.

Those results are echoed in the "first-wave" findings of a new longitudinal study just getting underway in Britain. In 2009, the U.K.'s state-funded Economic and Social Research Council commissioned a longitudinal research study called "Understanding Society" to follow 100,000 people in 40,000 households over the next few decades to try to determine what factors lead to improved family lives.

The first-wave (e.g. first-year) findings of that study have just been published. And one of the data points the study reported was that the happiness of children in a household (aged 10 to 21, living at home) is significantly affected by the happiness of their mother--or, at least her happiness in terms of her marriage. Only 55 percent of children whose mothers reported that they were unhappy in their marriages said they were completely happy at home, versus 73 percent of those whose mothers reported being very happy in their marriages. The happiness of the fathers was less significant.

There are a lot of caveats that need to be applied to the U.K. study, of course. First, the results represent a single, self-reported data point, not a long view over time. So it's a bit early to give too much weight to the British results. The Grant and Terman studies also included quantifiable health and death data as well as the interviewer's interpretation of each individual's responses as a check to people's self-reports. What's more, the U.K. study report didn't note what percentage of the study group's mothers worked or stayed at home all day, or who did the primary caregiving for the children involved, so the data is lacking a bit of context.

Generally speaking, however, women still tend to spend more time with children than their husbands do, and provide a greater share of the childcare. And if Friedman and Martin's conclusion is correct, that unhappiness poisons those who are, for whatever reason, trapped in its company and under its influence ... then the Understanding Society results make sense.

The Understanding Society study is only in its first year, of course, and it's not clear how much detail will be collected from each subject over time, given that the study size is so large. In any event, it will be years before the researchers can determine the long-term impact of the parents' unhappiness is on the children in the study.

But the Terman study and the first-wave survey results of the Understanding Society study both make it clear that while unhappiness itself may not what makes unhappy people sick, it might very well be toxic to the people around them. And that's regardless of what other healthy personality, lifestyle habits, or other factors those people may have going for them. Unhappiness, in other words, may be a bit like second-hand smoke. And while it may not be quite as directly lethal, it's a whole lot harder to regulate.

Image: Kreutziana/flickr

Should Lying Be Illegal? Canada's Broadcasters Debate

2011-03-23T16:00:10-04:00

Honesty seems like such a no-brainer of a requirement. But it's caused a great deal of controversy in Canada over the past few weeks--controversy heightened by the upcoming launch of a new, politically conservative Canadian television channel called Sun TV.

The controversy centered on Section 1.1, Subsection 3 of Canada's Broadcasting Act of 1986, which specifies--among other things--that:

A Licensee shall not broadcast ... d) false or misleading news.

At first glance, it seems such an obvious, common-sense requirement that I was a little surprised that the Canadians had felt a need to put it in writing, or that anyone could possibly argue against it. But with a little more thought, I realized how profound the stricture really was. I also began to wonder why we don't have a similar requirement here in the U.S--and how different our public discourse might be if we did.

The controversy over the Canadian rule erupted in January, when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada's equivalent to our FCC, proposed amending the rule to prohibit only:

...any news that the licensee knows to be false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.

The root of the proposed amendment apparently goes back 10 years to a Canadian Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the free speech right of a Holocaust denier named Ernst Zundel to espouse those views. The Canadian Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations subsequently asked the CRTC to review its "false and misleading news" prohibition to determine if it violated free-speech guarantees.

The CRTC dragged its feet for 10 years. But then, this January, the proposed amendment was announced. Why the sudden action after 10 years of inaction? That's part of the controversy. The CRTC chairman says they were ordered to to it by the regulatory committee, but one of the committee co-chairmen says that's not true.

Our particular public seems to reward, rather than punish, outrageous or one-sided news providers.

The controversy was also heightened by the impending launch of a new, privately-owned Canadian television station called Sun TV, now scheduled to go on-air April 18th. Sun TV is owned by Quebecor, the same company that owns the Toronto Sun tabloid newspaper, which has a reputation as a right-wing publication. The station is being promoted as a feisty, "controversially Canadian, hard-news" television version of the paper (according to Quebecor's president) and an outlet that will "take on mainstream media" (according to its vice president).

Critics accused the CRTC of looking to change the rules to give Sun TV more leeway in what it broadcasts. But both the CRTC and the parliamentary committee deny any correlation between the two events. And it is true that the committee had been requesting a review of the rule for a decade. In any event, a huge public outcry ensued, and the parliamentary committee finally looked into the matter itself and concluded that a broadcast station did not have the same rights and freedoms as an individual and, further, that a broadcasting license was a privilege, not a right. The committee pointed out that stations already had to comply with numerous restrictions and conditions to get and maintain their licenses, including limits on the content of their broadcasts. Consequently, the CRTC withdrew its proposed amendment. Canada will continue to require stations to refrain from broadcasting "false or misleading news."

Or, at least, the rule will remain on the books. Apparently, the CRTC has never actually taken any action against a station pursuant to that rule. One of the arguments for the amendment, in fact, was that the CRTC lacked enforcement capability, and had never enforced the rule anyway. But the CRTC does have the ability to revoke a station's license--which might give a station owner at least a little pause before allowing its on-air talent to present unsupported theories as fact or get too overzealous in their conclusions or spin on the news.

But the question remains ... why don't we have a similar requirement here in the U.S.? Traditionally, both broadcast radio and television and cable television stations have been subject to regulation, including content regulation, by the FCC. Although that regulation originated from the fact that airwaves were extremely limited, and not accessible to everyone, the regulation continued even after the birth and expansion of cable television, because courts recognized that television and radio are "uniquely pervasive" in people's lives, in a way print media are not. Indecent speech is already prohibited on broadcast television and, at least in theory, on cable (although courts' opinions on the best remedies for enforcing that goal seem to vary). Before its repeal in 1987, both broadcast and cable stations were both subject to the "Fairness Doctrine," which required the stations to present a balance of both sides to any controversial issue.

So given that we've long recognized that a broadcaster or cablecaster has power beyond an individual citizen or even print media, and therefore does not warrant quite the same "free speech" or "free press" rights without restriction (as the Canadian parliament just concluded) ... why can't we have a restriction on broadcasting (or cablecasting) false or misleading news?

One reason is probably the same reason the Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. It's laughable now, with the explosion of narrow-interest fringe websites and narrow-audience, right-wing and left-wing cable shows on Fox News and MSNBC, but in the deregulation atmosphere of the 1980s, the FCC's rationale for getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was twofold: first, that the Fairness Doctrine inhibited the broadcasters' right to free speech, and second, that the free market was a better regulator of news content on television than the government. Specifically, the FCC said that individual media outlets would compete with each other for viewers, and that competition would necessarily involve establishing the accuracy, credibility, reliability and thoroughness of each story ... and that over time, the public would weed out new providers that proved to be inaccurate, unreliable, one-sided, or incredible.

One wonders, really, if the FCC had ever studied human behavior or the desire of people to have their individual points of view validated. Far from "weeding out" providers of one-sided, or even incredible information, we now revel in what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof once called "The Daily Me"--a selection of news outlets that never ever challenge our particular points of view.

As we pick and choose our news broadcasters and commentators, one would be hard-pressed to argue that it enhances the quality of our public—or even our personal—discourse.

Contrary to the FCC's theory, our particular public seems to reward, rather than punish, outrageous or one-sided news providers. And while that may make each of us feel nice and righteous as we pick and choose our news broadcasters and commentators, one would be hard-pressed to argue that it enhances the quality of our public--or even our personal--discourse. Especially given the questionable "truth" of many of the statements or inferences made on those highly targeted outlets. In theory, we could all fact-check everything we hear on the TV or radio, of course. But few people have the time to do that, even if they had the contacts or resources.

But forget about the Fairness Doctrine. Imagine, instead, if all those broadcasters were simply prohibited from broadcasting (or cablecasting) "false or misleading news." Is it unacceptable censorship to require someone to be basically honest in what they broadcast as "news"--and which we are more likely to accept as truth, because it comes from a serious and authoritative-sounding news anchor?

Think about it. We prohibit people from lying in court, because the consequences of those lies are serious. That's a form of censorship of free speech, but one we accept quite willingly. And while the consequences of what we hear on television and radio are not as instantly severe as in a court case, one could argue that the damage widely-disseminated false information does to the goal of a well-informed public and a working, thriving democracy is significant, as well. What's more, if we really thought everyone had the right to say whatever they wanted, regardless of truth or consequences, we wouldn't prohibit anyone from yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre that wasn't actually on fire. We wouldn't have slander or libel laws. We wouldn't have laws about hate speech. And we'd allow broadcasters and cablecasters to air all words and all images, no matter how indecent, at all times.

Ah. But what if a broadcaster or cablecaster didn't know the information was false? I suppose you could prohibit only knowingly airing false or misleading information. But on the other hand, if a station were at risk for sanction or a license revocation for getting it wrong (even if the FCC rarely enforced the measure), it might motivate reporters and anchors to do a bit more fact checking--and even, perhaps, a bit more research into alternative viewpoints--before seizing on and running with a hot or juicy scoop or angle.

It's odd, really, that the idea of requiring news broadcasters to be fundamentally honest about the information they project across the nation and into our homes sounds radical. Surely we wouldn't argue that we want to be lied to and misled, would we?

Would we?

Radical or not, it's worth thinking about.

The Rocky Road to Discovery

2011-03-08T08:13:32-05:00

The breakthroughs we remember, of course, are the grand successes: Apollo 11 landing on the moon; the Concorde making supersonic flight available to commercial travelers; Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne capturing the Ansari X prize for achieving "space" altitude twice in two weeks in a privately-funded spaceship.

But as the $424-million failure of the Orbital Sciences Corp's Taurus XL rocket last Friday underscored, the road to discovery and technology advancement is a rocky one, littered with failures, dead ends and ideas ahead of either their time or the technology of the day.

Take, for example, the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed.

Forty years ago (March 7, 1971), a prototype of a new class of aircraft, so odd-shaped that John McPhee of The New Yorker dubbed it the "Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" (see image below) completed its one and only successful test flight at the FAA Test Center in New Jersey. The craft was an early attempt at a hybrid airship that would rely on both an aerodynamic shape and internal helium to lift heavy cargo loads at low cost, and into remote areas where large cargo planes could not land.

The Aereon 26, as the craft was officially called, was actually the second attempt at such a craft to take flight. A very primitive version of a dynamic airship was built and flight tested during the Civil War by Solomon Andrews -- the same inventor who gave us the combination lock. Not surprisingly, Andrews' design was highly impractical -- as many first attempts are.

A century later, the Aereon Corporation took Andrews' original three-hulled design and idea and revamped it with the aid of 1960s computer-aided-design (CAD) tools. The shape deemed "optimal" by the computer for a cargo hybrid airship was a puffy, deltoid design that evolved, through several unsuccessful versions and several years of model and wind tunnel tests, into the Aereon 26.

Unfortunately, for anyone who loves weird and wonderful flying machine ideas, the Aereon 26 was still ahead of its time, and that first test flight turned out to be a kind of one-hit wonder. Funding for further development or testing of the pumpkin seed never materialized, and the prototype now sits forlorn and largely forgotten in a New Jersey hangar, hoping for some philanthropic museum to rescue it from decay. The company still exists, but with a staff of one -- William Miller, the president who oversaw the Aereon 26's development and who, 40 years later, is still trying to find a home for the prototype and funding for related projects.

What makes the Aereon story particularly interesting, however, is that while the Aereon 26 may have fizzled, the idea of a hybrid airship is once again in vogue (a development I wrote about in an Atlantic article last year). And this time, the idea, the need and the technology may be aligned well enough to generate success. Five years ago, Lockheed-Martin successfully test-flew a prototype of a tri-hulled, aerodynamic airship called the P-791. And last year, the Army awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for a hybrid airship for reconnaissance work in Afghanistan. The Long-Endurance, Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), as the vehicle is called, is expected to make its first flight this coming summer.

If successful, the LEMV will bring not only a new capability (long-endurance surveillance) to the military, but a new class of aircraft as well. And it could eventually lead to a successful cargo version of a hybrid airship -- which will be the one everyone remembers, of course.

And yet ... just as shadow is inextricably linked to light, the failures, glitches and concerted efforts ahead of time or technology are an integral part of any eventual technological discovery or advance. Yes, we successfully landed on the moon. But a whole lot of rockets and concepts proved themselves wrong before we developed enough knowledge and technology to get it right. And even then, sometimes ... like last Friday ... we still fall short. (Which is, or should be, a cautionary reminder to advocates of commercial space tourism.) And sometimes, as in the case of the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, a good idea just has to wait a few years, or a few decades, for technology to catch up enough to bring success within its reach.

Do Sports Helmets Help or Hurt?

2011-02-19T08:00:41-05:00

After years of too little attention, the subject of head injuries in sports, and how to prevent them, is now what Twitter would call a "trending topic."

First came the turnaround in attitudes toward NFL player head injuries, and the helmet-to-helmet tackles and hits that increase the risk of those injuries. Then came the discussion about skier Lindsey Vonn's continued participation in the World Cup last week, despite clear indications and admissions on her part that she was still skiing behind the course and "in a fog" after suffering a concussion in a training accident. And now, there's the U.S. lacrosse league debating whether or not the girls -- who now only have to wear protective eye gear—should be required to wear helmets as well.

Girls' lacrosse has dramatically different rules than the boys' game: body checks are illegal, as are certain stick checks, and there is a regulated safety zone around each girl's head. Nevertheless, research quoted in a New York Times article today concluded that when it comes to concussions, lacrosse ranks third in female sports (behind basketball and soccer). In addition, despite the less-aggressive nature and rules of the girls' game, girls' lacrosse has an in-game concussion rate only 15 percent lower than the boys.

Improving safety has had more to do with changing a group's culture and attitudes about high-risk activities than with any technological advance.

So if concussions are an issue in girls' lacrosse, the argument goes, we should require girls to wear more protective headgear. After all, the boys' helmets, intended to reduce skull fracture and intracranial bleeding, are thought to reduce the number of concussions, as well.

But does the addition of extra safety gear actually reduce the risk of the injuries it is designed to prevent? Well, yes ... and no. Which is what fuels the debate on the issue.

Taken by itself, it's easy enough to prove that wearing a helmet, like wearing a seat belt, decreases the chance or severity of injury in an impact. But humans are far more complex creatures than crash test dummies. And so the true impact of safety equipment becomes far more complex, as well.

In his 1995 book Risk, British researcher John Adams spelled out several reasons why safety equipment does not always increase safety the way its designers or legislators think it will. The first is a phenomenon called "risk compensation," in which humans respond to additional safety equipment by taking greater risks than they did when they felt less protected. For example, Adams said, while seat belts unquestionably gave a person better protection if they were in a collision, the chances of being in a collision went up in places with seat belt laws, because seat-belted drivers took more risks in how they drove.

For all the time and discussion space we devote to the goal of eliminating accidents or injuries, Adams suggests that people have "risk thermostats," and that we all adjust our behavior to maintain the level of risk in our lives that we find acceptable. We all compensate for the extra margin provided by safety equipment to some degree, and some of us will push the new boundaries further than others. All of which means that safety equipment often doesn't make as much of a difference as its proponents believe it will.

Indeed, there are many who argue that mandatory helmets, and increasingly strong helmets, have actually exacerbated the problem of head injury in sports ranging from boys' lacrosse and ice hockey to professional football. So perhaps helmets for female lacrosse players really are a bad idea, as U.S. Lacrosse (the sport's governing body) argues.

So what's the solution? In many cases, improving safety has had more to do with changing a group's culture and attitudes about high-risk activities than it does any specific technological advance -- especially in individual sports or hobbies.

A prominent example is the Cirrus Design company (a company profiled by James Fallows in his Atlantic article and subsequent book Free Flight). In an effort to build a safer aircraft, Cirrus included a full-airplane parachute and vastly improved "glass" cockpit displays in its Cirrus airplane. But when the airplane was first introduced, it actually had a significantly higher-than-average fatality rate, because pilots -- comforted by the extra technology and safety systems -- "compensated" by pushing the aircraft into weather they wouldn't otherwise have undertaken. In the end, the company was able to bring its accident rates down by requiring additional training and working to change the culture of its buyers—at least to some degree.

"I think helmets encourage you to push the limits of whatever the rules are," one high school athlete said.

The field of SCUBA diving also vastly reduced its accident rate over several decades by changing its group attitudes toward risk. Once upon a time, diving was a macho sport where the toughest regularly pushed the limits. Today, attitudes about pushing the limits have changed. Dive without a buddy, push your depth or time limits, and a diver today is likely to be seen as stupid, not brave.

Notably, the NFL is now taking a similar approach toward head injuries. Instead of simply improving the cushioning in players' helmets, the NFL is trying to change the league's culture, rules and consequences related to hits to the head, or tackles "leading" with a player's helmet. How well that works remains to be seen, of course. But the popular image and standard for what's "admirable" and "acceptable" in tackling technique has already changed dramatically, even in the breathtakingly short span of a single season.

But girls' lacrosse already has a restrictive set of rules regarding contact. And most of the concussions its players suffer come from accidental contact and falls, not intentionally aggressive maneuvering. So is it a different case? Could helmets actually make it safer?

"I think helmets encourage you to push the limits of whatever the rules are," one high school athlete responded, when I asked the question. "If you're only allowed one kind of hit, you'll hit as hard as you can in that one way. But given that girls' lacrosse has so many rules restricting contact, [helmets] might actually help."

Of course, given the complexities of how humans assess and respond to risk, and the fact that lacrosse players are unlikely to be timid or risk-adverse by nature, it's also a fair bet that whatever safety margin helmets provide would—at best—be narrowed by some amount by compensating behavior on the part of the players. Which means at some point in the future, U.S. Lacrosse, like Cirrus and the NFL, may find itself compensating for that compensation through more complex solutions than the seemingly-simple answer of a helmet.

One More Note About Integrative Thinking

2011-01-30T15:22:44-05:00

A reader sent me the following note in response to my post on innovation not being about math, but about more flexible, "integrative" thinking:

Most schools where I live seem to tout their 'integrated' curricula. It's certainly the case at every public and private school I've visited in the last few months (our son is entering kindergarten next year). Usually this integration takes the form of choosing a theme (fall harvest, civil rights, sea life, etc) and weaving it into project for each subject (art, science, history, etc). While far better than the old silo approach to class work, this integration trend strikes me as stopping short of truly encouraging integrative thinking. Perhaps the structure of the classes alone isn't enough to foster the type of innovation our country now requires. It seems like the methodology of integrated teaching ... might be just as important.

Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (whom I mentioned in the post) would agree. Some of his thoughts on the subject, from an interview I did with him last year:

Where I don't agree entirely with lots of the efforts to be multi-disciplinary is that I think you have to build a basic science of multi-disciplinarity. I've come to believe from my work on this, and on this issue in business, that we have a flawed, implicit theory about interdisciplinarity. That you can be interdisciplinary by being taught multiple disciplines and being taught critical thinking. And I think that's an excellent start, but it's not enough.

Critical thinking is still much more based on which is the better model. I don't think you're taught to tear apart a model of marketing that's based on the basic science of psychology and a finance model that's based on the science of economics. I think it is an absolute fantasy that if you teach people critical thinking, they'll be able to think productively across models. I think [thinking across models] in and of itself is a discipline you have to learn, that's separate from what you're taught in critical thinking. I think there's a discipline, a basic science of interdisciplinarity, that's as much a discipline as neuroscience, as biology, as chemistry, as literature, as law. And I believe it can be built, and we're building it.

Obviously, there's far more on this subject that could be said, and should be discussed, but just thought I'd add a little more information/clarification about what the difference is -- at least how Martin sees it--between multidisciplinary studies and true interdisciplinarity, and critical thinking versus integrative thinking. Food for thought, as I sign off from Jim's blog on this site, and return to my own.

This post originally appeared on James Fallows's blog.

Challenger, 25 Year Later

2011-01-29T12:17:17-05:00

Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger--an event that itself marked the end of a new generation's innocence about the wonders and safety of space travel. I say "new generation" because the Apollo generation had already had one of those moments, when Apollo 1 caught fire on the launch pad during a test, and its three crew members--Guss Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee--burned to death before rescue crews could get to them.

In some ways, however, the Challenger shock was greater, because the shuttle program had been sold to Congress and America not as a space exploration mission, but as a safe, reliable "Space Transportation System" (hence the numbering of shuttles STS-6, STS-82, etc.). Recall that promoters promised that the new, reusable space vehicles would be able to launch every two weeks--a promise that never even came close to coming true; indeed, never had a realistic chance of coming true. Even today, we are not at the point of having safe, reliable space transport at our disposal. And Challenger is still a valid, cautionary tale about how we view NASA's role in research and innovation, and the expectations we put on the agency.

In my mind, what makes the Challenger story so tragic isn't that there was a civilian teacher on board. It was the disconnect between what insiders knew at the time and what the public was being told, or sold. Yesterday, the NPR program All Things Considered aired a piece of an interview that Christa McAuliffe, the "teacher in space" who was killed in the Challenger explosion, gave a few days before the launch. In the interview, McAuliffe said she believed that the shuttles were safe. It's jarring to hear her voice, so chipper and cheery, asserting what we all know now to be dreadfully untrue.

But if the public thought the shuttles were safe, the shuttle commanders never had any such illusion. Every shuttle commander I've ever interviewed has underscored, vehemently, the uncertainty and risks shuttle flights entailed. And Commander Dick Scobee, Challenger's commander, apparently knew the risks, as well. Barbara Morgan, the back-up teacher for McAuliffe, was also interviewed on the All Things Considered segment. Morgan had trained with the crew, just like McAuliffe, and the NPR host asked her if she had thought about the risks. Morgan answered that she'd thought mostly about the excitement about going into space, and what it would mean. But, she added, Commander Scobee had sat her and McAuliffe down at the beginning of the training and talked to them about the risks.

I got a little more specific answer when I met Barbara Morgan at a NASA event a number of years ago. Scobee, she told me then, told the crew down at the beginning of training that they should consider the Space Shuttle a one-way ticket. They might return home again, but the risks involved were so high, they shouldn't expect that. And if they weren't okay with that notion, they shouldn't go.

Regardless of how they were sold to the public, the truth is that the space shuttles were experiments in exploration, every time they launched. And if they'd been positioned that way, the pressure to launch on schedule might not have been so great, on that cold January day, 25 years ago. And the Challenger accident might not have happened.

But the dangers of selling NASA as an agency that manages successful space flights--regardless of whether the vehicles are carrying humans to near-space or robotic missions to Mars--go beyond increased risk of accidents. It also keeps NASA from doing the very thing that NASA was created to do; namely, to take on the cutting-edge, high-risk challenges of aeronautics and space exploration that nobody else can, or has the incentive, to do.

We look back fondly on the audacity and innovative, explorer's spirit that energized the early days of the U.S. space program--and which led to so many kinds of innovation and discovery. But part of the reason those breakthroughs happened was that NASA's work back then was a) less public and b) more tolerant of failure. Getting to the moon was an astronomical target, after all. Failure was expected, along the way to success--if success was even a plausible or attainable goal.

Apollo 1 was the one early space program failure that became highly visible, because human astronauts were lost in the process. But fully one-half of the Atlas rockets used in the Mercury program blew up or malfunctioned. The ones that blew up just didn't happen to have humans on board. And the people involved accepted the risks that came with exploring this new territory.

Scott Crossfield, a NASA test pilot who was the first pilot to fly the X-15 rocket plane (an early idea for a "reusable launch vehicle" that eventually flew six times the speed of sound and above 300,000 feet) told me once that when he discovered the X-15 was being equipped with a $5 million ejection/escape system, he told the designers he'd fly it sitting on a tomato can if they'd give him the $5 million.

"I fully expected to die flying one of those airplanes I was testing, one day," he said with a shrug.

The point isn't how cavalier or macho the early test pilots or astronauts were. It's that all of the folks working on NASA projects back then were painfully aware that they were working at the risky and unpredictable edge of knowledge. Yes, amazing advancements were made. But not without cost. Aside from the many rocket, system and technical failures along the way, no fewer than eight American astronauts died in training accidents during the 1960s: five while flying jets and the three men in Apollo 1. Not to mention the number of test pilots who were killed advancing aeronautical technology during that same era.

And yet, despite the failures and the deaths, there were no cries to shut the space program down. Part of the reason may have been fear of Russian dominance in space, which was more intolerable than the loss of a few astronauts. The accidents and failures also didn't play out on television, in real-time, in front of an audience of millions. But part of it was also an acceptance--not only on NASA's part, but on legislators' and the public's part, as well--that we were pushing into the unknown. Success or results could not be predicted with certainty. Surprises were going to ambush us. And just as with previous generations of explorers, there were going to be losses along the way. That acceptance gave NASA room to maneuver. To experiment, try higher-risk approaches and, in the process, push the boundaries of knowledge outward in ways we still admire.

Today, on the other hand, NASA's efforts are all very public, and they are expected to succeed. Not after a string of failures, but right out of the gate. Just like the shuttles were expected to deliver so well that they could be forced onto a launch schedule more suitable for a production aircraft than an experimental space vehicle. And so--at least in the human space flight program--we get missions with negligible scientific benefit that make us wonder what our investment is really getting us, instead of bold discoveries and innovative advancements. What's more, we still get failures and accidents, because even timid space flight and exploration is still a journey into the unknown. We may have learned how to get satellites to distant locations and a space vehicle to low earth orbit, but that's not the same as really knowing or understanding those realms. (And yes, this has implications for commercial space flight, but that's a topic for another day.)

There are other problems that NASA has and faces, of course (See this post I wrote earlier this year on the subject). But the issue of risk and failure is worth thinking about, because successful innovation, exploration and discovery don't happen in a vacuum of sunshine. "We choose to go to the moon and do the other things," President John F. Kennedy said in his famous space speech in 1961, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The death of the Challenger astronauts, like the death of the Apollo 1 astronauts, was a heartbreaking tragedy. But the legacy of Challenger shouldn't be to make NASA so safe that nothing ever goes wrong. It should be to recognize and respect the scope of the challenges still posed by exploration off the planet, and to shift our expectations and demands of NASA accordingly. It should also be to encourage the agency to take on more of the hard and risky problems that only a willingness to endure failure ever allows you to solve.

This post originally appeared on James Fallows's blog.

Innovation Isn't About Math

2011-01-28T17:00:06-05:00

President Obama's State of the Union speech this week was -- among other things -- a call to action for strengthening innovation in America. "The first step in winning the future," he said, "is encouraging American innovation.... We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." And then, "if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas -- then we also have to win the race to educate our kids."

Without question, there is a link between education and innovation. But the link that typically gets made after that by people speaking about education and innovation -- which President Obama made, as well -- is that in order to get more innovation, we need to focus more on math and science education.

To be clear: Math and science education are important. But the assumptions underlying the focus on math and science, in relation to innovation, are: that innovation is a technical process, or at least takes place most importantly in technical fields; and, that the first step (math and science education) will automatically lead to the second (innovation). Neither of which is necessarily true.

First of all, while scientific and technical innovation is certainly important -- inventing a better solar cell, cancer drug, or information-sorting software -- many of the problems facing the world go beyond the technical sphere. The innovations that led to Seoul being named the "Design Capital of the World" in 2010 had more to do making the city far more "livable," from creating better traffic flow, signage, and even the kind of automatic phone "tree" answering systems citizens encountered when they called city agencies, than it did about any technological innovation. And while a better solar cell would be a huge asset in our search for an alternative to fossil fuels, the problems behind the health-care system mess in the U.S. aren't going to be solved by math or science. Like many of the "sticky problems" in the world, it's a complex, system problem requiring a broader kind of innovative thinking.

Which is, in a way, the point. Innovation experts and consultants stress repeatedly that innovation isn't a matter of subject knowledge. It's about thinking in flexible, integrative, and multidisciplinary ways, across many fields and types of knowledge. It's about being able to synthesize and integrate different perspectives and models; of understanding and taking into account different human, cultural and economic needs, desires, values, and factors and, from all that, glimpsing a new way forward that nobody else managed to see.

And while it's absolutely true that core knowledge in various disciplines is an important piece of that process, a number of educators are beginning to realize that the problem isn't a need for greater focus on math and science. It's a need for better integration among all subject areas, and a need to foster the kind of "integrative" thinking required to make good use of all that knowledge.

Randy Swearer, the current Provost of Philadelphia University, and the former Dean of the Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York, put the challenge this way, in a recent email:

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that you can't teach innovation effectively in the silo structure that is pervasive in academia. The departmental system, process of tenure and promotion, and even physical organization of campuses have traditionally been about specialization in both research and teaching. The liberal arts have been viewed as the 'anti-venom' for this specialization. But this approach compartmentalizes both disciplinary and professional specializations on the one hand, and the liberal arts, on the other. It has also erected a kind of conceptual firewall between these kinds of knowledge. In my view, the dichotomy between specialized studies and general studies is anachronistic, lazy, and intellectually bankrupt. It might have had some basis in an industrial economy, but certainly not now.

Innovation fuses these two modes of knowing and learning. True innovators are adept at taking very specific areas of knowledge (technologies, scientific discoveries, social phenomena, etc.) and constantly reframing them in broader social, cultural, or political contexts. Innovation thinkers also know that in order to find opportunities to act, to make a difference in the world, they must collaborate--and be damn good at it. Higher education has failed miserably at teaching students to deeply and effectively collaborate in order to innovate. Obama's call for innovation, at least in the realm of higher education, implies that the world I work in must radically change--fast.

This point -- that it's the specialization of subject matter, from English and History to math and Engineering, that impedes innovation, more than a lack in any particular subject area -- is made in even greater and stronger detail in an article by William M. Sullivan, a former senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Another advocate of the need for teaching "integrative" thinking in order to foster innovation is Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The main web page of the school now touts Rotman as "redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum built around Integrative Thinking." (For a better idea of what "Integrative Thinking" is, at least as Martin describes it, see this short interview he gave on the subject in 2008.)

Fostering innovation, in other words, isn't just a matter of improving the quantity or quality of math and science education. It's a matter of restructuring how we approach and teach all our subjects, from the liberal arts to math, science and engineering. And it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself.

That focus flies in the face of subject-knowledge test scores as a gauge of educational excellence, of course. But that is the Sputnik-level challenge we face, if we really want our talent for innovation to match the increasingly complex, "sticky" problems we need to solve in the century to come.

This post originally appeared in James Fallows's blog.

Of Airplanes, Fences, and National Security

2011-01-27T18:05:54-05:00

Although I've written about aviation for over 20 years now, I rarely write about it on The Atlantic's site because Jim Fallows already does such an excellent job of covering the topic here. But I do want to add a few words to what Jim's already said (all of which I wholeheartedly agree with) in response to Jeffrey Goldberg's "Private Plane, Public Menace" dispatch piece that ran in this month's Atlantic.

After getting a ride in a friend's corporate jet, Goldberg concludes that privileged "general aviation" airplanes threaten national security because their passengers aren't subject to the same TSA security that airline passengers are, and he argues that we need to impose that kind of security at general aviation facilities and airports.

I disagree with Goldberg's position on a couple of different levels. First, his description of what constitutes "general aviation" is skewed. And second, attempts to impose TSA-type security at small airports are not only, as Jim said, "wrongheaded" -- akin to attacking a fly with a clumsy and ineffective sledgehammer -- but they are also destroying one of the most valuable resources that airports offer America.

To understand why I agree with Jim that TSA-style security measures are neither required in the world of general aviation, nor the best approach to what security risk does exist in that world, it helps to understand, first, what "general aviation" really is. From there, it's easier to understand why the risk is not what many people imagine, as well as what's wrong with taking a TSA approach to security for every airplane and every airport across America.

So, what is "general aviation"? The way Goldberg describes the world of non-airline flying: "'general' being a euphemism for 'private,'" and private, in Goldberg's eyes, being a euphemism for "toys of the spoiled rich" -- is not uncommon among non-pilots. It describes a segment of aviation that is very visible, and which surely does exist. But that segment is also a very small piece of the picture.

Corporate or individually-owned jets constitute only 4 percent of privately owned aircraft. (Another 3 percent are jet engine-powered propeller planes, akin to the smallest of commuter planes.) The overwhelming majority of private aircraft are less-expensive and less-powerful piston-engine airplanes, and a whopping 68 percent of all private airplanes are single-engine piston aircraft.

In addition, most of those piston-powered, single-engine airplanes are not the shiny new models pictured in the magazines. Almost 90 percent of general aviation aircraft are more than 20 years old. Every airplane has to go through a thorough mechanical inspection every year, and essential parts (like engines) are replaced at set times. So the age of most planes isn't a safety issue. But it is reflected in their cost and value.

A brand-new Cirrus might carry a price tag of a half a million dollars, but my first airplane -- a 1946 two-seat Cessna that I bought in 1986 for only $5,000, could still be bought today for under $15,000. And my current airplane, 1977 Grumman Cheetah, which has a larger piston engine and four seats, has a current market value of around $30,000. Or about the price of a new Saab sedan.

What's more, many of those piston-powered single engines aren't the performance machines people imagine them to be. To fly coast to coast in my own single-engine airplane, for example, takes -- west to east, when the winds are predominantly at my back -- 30 flight hours. Which generally equates to six days, given that I don't fly in bad weather and limit my "pilot-in-command" time to about six hours a day, because I don't have an autopilot. In other words, you could drive the distance in less time.

There are also pilots like Jim, who have faster airplanes and "instrument" pilot ratings that permit them to fly in bad weather, allowing them to get a lot more utility out of their airplanes. But only 15 percent of licensed pilots have a current instrument rating. For the rest of us, flying isn't something we do for utility's sake.

So why do pilots sacrifice and scrape together the money to fly, if not for a useful purpose? The reasons vary, of course. But for many, many pilots, it has to do with remembering something we all used to know, back when we were still young enough to believe that anything was possible and dreams could come true. "Three year olds," I once wrote in an essay on the subject, "may not know much about physics, investment banking, literature, or even the meaning of life, but they understand something very important about living.... [They understand] that life is in the ever-changing moment of the present, that joy is more important than possessions, and that dreams are the lifeblood of a heart and soul."

Unfortunately, as we grow older many of us find, or are told so many times that we start to believe it, that anything is not possible and dreams are for dreamers; irresponsible luxuries not related to putting food on the table. We live long enough to know the demons of disappointment and the restrictions of life's boundaries. Little by little, we lose that three-year-old belief in magic, dreams, and possibilities. And little by little, an important piece of our hearts dies.

And that is why many pilots fly. The exact incidents that draw future pilots to airports differ widely. But for many of them, the reason they stay is that in some way they can't even quite articulate, airplanes and flight bring that piece of their heart back to life. After all, flight itself a metaphor for freedom and possibility. A couple thousand feet up in the air, all the limits and disappointments of daily life fade away beneath an endless horizon and the thought, remembered again, of how unbelievably beautiful and vast the world is; how full of possibilities and roads still untraveled.

It's why airports are -- or can be -- such magical places. On a practical level, they're all a valuable part of our national transportation system. But they are also community resources; places where anyone can go, watch, sense, and perhaps recapture a little of that childhood belief in dreams, freedom, and possibilities.

Why does that matter in a discussion of national security? Because when we fence small airports off behind 14-foot barbed-wire barriers and rigid TSA procedures, we separate them from the communities they were built to serve, and separate communities from a resource that might offer them something even more valuable than transportation. We also kill the magic itself. It's hard to imagine someone wandering out to the airport pictured below and seeing it as a place full of dreams and possibilities. And yet, post-9/11 Homeland Security funding is leading to far more fences like this one:

1. It's a rare airport fence that can't be gotten around, if you know your way around. The high fences and intimidating signs make airports seem unapproachable by community people, but they tend to fall more into the realm of "security theater" (which Jim has talked about many times) than a real deterrent for someone intent on getting access to an airport or airplane for nefarious reasons.

2. Despite the public's fears of a rogue pilot with terrorist intentions, most general aviation airplanes are extremely limited in the damage they can inflict. There's a reason the 9/11 attackers chose 767 airliners filled to the brim with fuel for transcontinental flights for their weapons. Something smaller wouldn't have been effective. Recall that in the same week as a van driven by an elderly man went out of control in Herald Square, New York, killing half a dozen people, a small airplane flown by a suicidal teenager crashed into an office building in Tampa, Florida, doing serious damage to a desk.

3. The power of human connections. Aviation is a small community, and individual airports are like very small towns. Strangers stand out. And pilots look after each other. A private plane is also a different environment than an airliner. Airliners carry a large number of people who don't know each other. So the risk of a lone terrorist making their way on board is real. That's not the case on a private plane. You know your fellow passengers. What's more, if you blow up an airliner, you kill a lot of innocent people who are on board with you. That's not the case with a private plane--which is another reason they're less attractive as a target.

But what about Goldberg's fear that a group of terrorists could charter an aircraft large enough to do some amount of damage on the ground, if they incapacitated the pilots? It could happen, of course -- with or without TSA procedures. But here I think Jim Fallows is correct in arguing for the power of internal HUMINT (HUMan INTelligence) over TSA robo-screeners. Charter operators I've talked to say they take a number of measures to make sure their customers aren't going to turn out to be nightmares: they don't take cash, they do background credit checks, and they also pay a lot of attention to their gut when it comes to accepting potential customers. After all, the operators have a multi-million dollar asset to protect. If something about a potential customer, or their behavior, doesn't smell right, they don't take the job.

The bottom line is that there's some level of risk in a lot of places (see my earlier post on this subject). But by overreacting with a sledgehammer to the relatively small risk that general aviation airplanes pose, we lose something that is perhaps even more important to preserve, in this post-9/11 world: a connection and access to places that have the ability to remind us that fears and limits can be overcome, and dreams and possibilities are still worth believing in.

This post originally appeared on James Fallows's blog.