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In a democracy, it is said, we get the government we deserve. The same can be said of bestselling guru prescriptives.
Malcolm Gladwell's new book What the Dog Saw, a compilation of some of his favorite New Yorker pieces, has drawn both praise and criticism. Personally, I'm not a big Gladwell fan. Shoot me. I'm told he's an interesting person. And he knows how to tell a good anecdote. But, at the risk of oversimplifying my critique of his work ... he oversimplifies.
The general thesis of Blink, for example, was "trust your gut ... except when you shouldn't." Okay ... but why can you trust your gut sometimes, but not others? What does that tell us about what "gut" instinct really is? And what does that mean in terms of how we process information in the world? And what do we do with that knowledge? The really interesting points are left dangling. Why? I don't know, but I suspect it's because they're complex and not easily summarized ... and might muddy the simple and easily-grasped ideas or conclusions that are a trademark of Gladwell's work.
If I'm not a fan of Gladwell, it's because I want to see robust logic behind an argument, depth to its exploration, and acknowledgment of the complexities and contradictions it may entail. Simple, neat answers don't appeal to me, because they don't resonate with what I've experienced in the world. But clearly, I'm an outlier in that regard.
Judging from the sales of not only Gladwell's books, but the plethora of "3 step," "7 habits," "9 insights" and other success-formula books on personal and business improvement, there's an almost ravenous hunger in the world for simple answers on how things work and how to get the game right. And that hunger has only gotten more intense as the world has gotten more complex.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Surely one part of our brain knows that the world, or even the world of business, is more complex than the raft of simple, success-formula books promises. And yet, like a woman who, despite multiple failed affairs, convinces herself that this married man will surely leave his wife, we ... or at least a good number of us ... keep buying the fantasy. We keep being drawn to simple-sounding answers and solutions--to the tune of almost $13 billion a year. Even when, or perhaps because, they don't pan out to be true, as a writer for The Economist pointed out in a recent column.
"The Three Habits ... of Highly Irritating Management Gurus" takes the writers of those "3-step" and "7-habits" books to task on several fronts. First, for repackaging stale ideas as breakthrough insights. Second, for using seemingly "model firm" anecdotes to prove their points without a lot of rigorous research--anecdotes that often prove embarrassingly untrue several years down the road. And third, for ... well, peddling those "three habit" success-formula lists and prescriptives.
But "the most irritating thing of all about management gurus," the author writes, is that "their failures only serve to stoke demand for their services. If management could indeed be reduced to a few simple principles, then we would have no need for management thinkers. But the very fact that it defies easy solutions, leaving managers in a perpetual state of angst, means that there will always be demand for books like Mr. [Stephen] Covey's."
Ironic, but true. If writers come up with list-based solutions, and oversimplified trends or observations, it's because there's a far larger audience for that kind of book than one titled, "Some interesting ideas that might prove useful to think about as you make your way through a very complex world."
But why is that? One would think that we'd rather have a book that offers realistic assessments and thoughts on the tough choices and complexities we face than simple panaceas that sound terrific or comforting but describe a world that bears little resemblance to the mess we generally find ourselves navigating.
If we don't, it's at least in part because humans are just so uncomfortable with ambiguity. There are all kinds of psychological studies on that point. We desperately want there to be a pattern, an orthodoxy, a model, or a formula we can simply implement or follow to find our way back to safe, clear, and happy endings. Even if we're told that real wisdom, strength and growth come from figuring it all out for ourselves, as we go.
What's more, this tendency may be getting stronger in the next generation. I interviewed a business school professor yesterday who told me that she thinks MBA students today have a far lower tolerance for ambiguity than students she taught 20 years ago. She attributed the shift to the fact that many of today's students grew up with tightly scheduled lives and activities, leaving them little experience in exploring the world without structure, expectations, or guidelines. I think another factor may be the pressure they feel to achieve and get the "right" answer.
But whatever the reasons are, if her observation is true, then it's cause for concern. Because there are dangers to oversimplification, as recent events in both our economy and Iraq have painfully reminded us. No matter what we might like to be true, successful leadership in an increasingly complex world is going to depend not on condensing it to simple terms, or finding the right prescriptive formula, but on getting comfortable enough with ambiguity and complexity to see a way through it. One thoughtful, creative and unique step at a time.
The front page of Sunday's New York Times carried an eye-opening story about statements a number of Congressional Representatives--both Republican and Democratic--had entered into the Congressional Record before the House vote on the health care reform bill. The eye-opening bit was that it turned out the statements had been written not by the Representatives themselves, or even by a member of their staffs, but by a couple of lobbyists paid by the biotechnology firm Genentech.
How did the ghost writing come to light? As with many a class cheating scandal, what let the cat out of the bag was that so many of the Representatives used the lobbyists' words whole cloth. And someone (presumably someone at the Times) noticed how, well, similar all the statements were.
The revelation should have been at least highly embarrassing to the Representatives involved. After all, if they'd pulled that stunt in a classroom--lifting someone else's words and presenting them as their own--they'd be slammed for cheating and plagiarism, and probably for violating the school honor code, as well. At the very least, they'd flunk the paper. At some schools, they might find themselves expelled.
Of course, one could argue that we don't hold politicians to the same standard as schoolchildren. After all, most national politicians have speechwriters who craft their public words for them. But, still. There's a line between having a staff person take your ideas and craft them more articulately, and taking a propaganda statement from a private, vested interest ... especially one that, in some of the cases, had given you campaign money ... and parroting it verbatim as your own words. Especially because the statements were submitted into the record at the request of the lobbyists, not because the politicians felt an innate need to add those particular words to the debate. It's duplicitous, because knowing the source changes how you consider the argument.
The staff people interviewed for the article argued that the lobbyists' statements reflected points of view supported by the Representatives in question. But surely, even if they didn't grasp the ethical implications involved, wouldn't those responsible have felt at least a little queasy about how it would look, if discovered? That it would risk the appearance of a member of Congress being little more than a Charlie McCarthy puppet mouthpiece of a lobbying or pharmaceutical firm? Not to mention a copycat puppet, repeating the same exact words as 40 other Representatives?
Apparently not.
"This happens all the time," one lobbyist said. "There was nothing nefarious about it."
"We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record. I asked for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There's not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry," one Representative's chief of staff shrugged.
That, to me, was the real eye-opening part of the article. I'm always fascinated when I read statements by people that reveal far more than the speakers intended about the lenses through which they view the world, especially in terms of what's "normal," "fair," or "right."
I had the same reaction when I read the resignation letter of an A.I.G. vice-president in the op-ed section of the Times last winter. The executive in question was part of the infamous London financial products division that is generally credited with doing more to bring down the global economy than any other single group of financial sorcerer's apprentices. But miffed that he was being asked to give back part of his hard-earned $750,000 post-tax bonus, he announced that he was going to give it all away and was resigning, because the request was so unfair.
His lengthy venting and argument made far less of an impression on me than the fact that this man actually thought it was a good idea to send his letter to the Times for publication. It was a fascinating window into the mindset of those whose sense of high-dollar entitlement and low concern for the impact of their risky, short-term profit schemes outside their own bonus goals had caused such immense and widespread damage. To him, $750,000 was the least he deserved for actions he still found no reason to fault. His view of normal had become so warped that he truly didn't see what he had done wrong.
The same seems to have been true of the Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot their Minneapolis, Minnesota, destination by 150 miles because they were so engrossed in a personal computer scheduling task that they forgot to fly the airplane. Speaking to the press right after the incident, the first officer said, confidently, "It was not a serious event, from a safety issue."
Really? One hundred and forty-four passengers were aboard a plane being flown by two pilots who hadn't so much as looked at an instrument in over an hour (or they would have seen the alerts), or talked to a controller, and had no idea where they were, or what their fuel or any other status was, while blazing through airspace off flight plan, and therefore without permission and potentially into other aircraft flight paths, putting an entire national defense system on alert ... and it wasn't a serious event, from a safety perspective?
The FAA clearly saw it differently, revoking the pilots' licenses within days of the incident. But ... wow. How could the pilots themselves not understand the severity of the transgression?
The answer, I think, is the same in all three cases. It's something the pilots I flew with in Africa called "normalized deviance." In terms of bush flying in Africa, what that means is that a normal pilot, even with back-country training in the U.S., would consider a landing on a dirt airstrip that was half covered in water, deteriorating, crooked, and wedged in between ridge lines to be a very hazardous maneuver. But in Africa, most of the airstrips are like that. Most of the time.
At first, new pilots in Africa approach that kind of strip with caution. But humans are amazingly adaptable creatures. After landing on runways like that every day for several months, that "deviant" condition becomes the norm. It no longer generates the hesitation or discomfort it once did. So what pilots consider a "high risk" landing becomes something even further out of the box. The pilots' view of what "normal" is becomes skewed ... with the end result that transport/cargo aircraft in Africa have an accident rate 13 times that of the rest of the world.
It's similar to the "bubble" phenomenon people talk about with politicians: the skewing of "normal" perspectives and reactions by abnormal surroundings. To such an extent, in many cases, that those involved no longer even grasp that their view of "normal" has become warped, or at least detached from that of most other people.
That doesn't excuse the behavior, of course. And not everyone, even in the same circumstances, surrenders all connection with their old sense of right, normal, fair, or safe. But the Northwest pilots had probably spent so much time letting the airplane fly itself that they no longer saw anything wrong with that. The A.I.G. vice-president had been overpaid and judged only on his own financial "kill" rate so long that he'd obviously lost sight of what a "normal" salary was, or any sense of responsibility for how his actions might be connected to real people or harm done in the world. And the relationship between Congress and lobbying firms has evidently grown so cozy over time that the idea of providing an unedited mouthpiece for industry PR departments, even if "only" in the Congressional Record, doesn't even seem to raise much of an eyebrow on Capitol Hill anymore.
If that realization doesn't disturb us overmuch, perhaps it's because we're suffering from a kind of normalized deviance of our own, in terms of our expectations. And that, at least, should disturb us.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The movie 2012 opens Friday, predicated on the notion that on December 21, 2012, as the most recent Mayan long-form calendar cycle (5,125.366 years) comes to an end, along with a unique planetary/solar alignment and a high level of solar activity, the world will cataclysmicly end one era and enter another. With earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and all sorts of devastating destruction in the process.
The movie is not the only source of prophetic notions of doom, or at least cataclysmic change, that are gaining increasing play and attention as 2012 approaches. There are books, websites, and even several other movies scheduled for release on the subject with all kinds of angles, from secular and New Age to religious and indigenous folk legend.
Now, even if it were true that the Mayans had predicted some apocalyptic ending of the world at the end of their long calendar cycle (they had several calendars and ways of marking time; that was just one of them), it's a bit odd that we'd grab onto that one particular prophesy and belief system of theirs. After all, the Mayans also believed in human sacrifice, and we don't exactly leap on board that train in attempting to maintain civic and theological order.
But according to Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), the truth is, the Mayans didn't have any apocalyptic predictions for 2012. "There is NOTHING in ancient Maya records that predicts the end of the world; no apocalypse, no destruction, no cosmic clashes. Nothing," she says.
But, wait. What about Quetzacoatal returning and all that? Big sigh from the folks at FAMSI. In a fascinating paper available from the FAMSI website, Dr. Mark Van Stone, who has studied the Mayan culture for over a decade (and can read and write in Mayan hieroglyphs) provides an illuminating and entertaining cataloging of why all the doomsayers are off the mark and includes some great photo exhibits regarding the astronomical events scheduled for 12/21/12. Here's a sample, from his "9 Reasons Why The Mayan Prophecies Should Be Read Very Critically":
Though Aztec, Mixtec, and Maya sources provide us a number of narratives, different versions disagree. For example: the Aztec predict that this Creation will end on a 4-Movement day in a 2-Reed year, if it ends at all. The next possible Aztec end-date will be in 2027. Maya literature does not explicitly predict any end at all, and their so-called "end date" in 2012 is a 4-Ajaw [4-Flower in Aztec cycle] not 4-Movement. Mixtec Creation stories mention 2-Deer in 13-Rabbit, and other dates.
So perhaps in on the 2-Deer day in the 13-Rabbit year, under a 4-Flower Moon, we might have cause to worry -- except that it seems the Mayans never corrected written mistakes (the original, and literal, "carved in stone" approach). And the Aztec official responsible for a lot of how that culture's history was written apparently had a bit of a Machiavellian propaganda minister's streak in him. Which is to say, even what they did say should be taken with a handful of archeological salt.
December 21, 2012 is still a significant day for the Mayans. It's the equivalent of our Gregorian Calendar's December 31, 1999; the turning over of a new millennium and era of timekeeping. So it would be a big celebration. But that's about it. Of course, there were also a slew of predictions about disaster and doom surrounding our own "end of a cycle" mark at the end of 1999. None of which came true, as you may recall.
So why are we so drawn to these apocalyptic notions and prophecies of doom, gloom, and destruction (even if it eventually leads to a shining new era for the select few who are chosen or manage to survive)?
The answer apparently dates back to the very earliest days of human existence. "Apocalypticism," as it is academically known, arises from a deep evolutionary sense or need for social justice, according to Allen Kerkeslager, an associate professor in Religions of the Ancient World at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.
"The sense of social justice, fairness in dealing with each other, and a felt need to cooperate with each other was already in place long before our hominid ancestors reached the cognitive ability to reflect on it," Professor Kerkeslager says.
As long as humans lived in the relatively egalitarian hunting and gathering societies that dominated up until about 10,000 years ago, that need was sufficiently met and enforced, because the survival of the group depended on cooperation. But when humans moved into more agrarian societies with land ownership, where a more hierarchical structure evolved, disparities increased. So those who had less had to come up with a way to explain the differences and satisfy their need for an eventual leveling of the scales. Apocalypticism, according to Kerkeslager, fulfilled that need and gave people a way of still believing that the gods were good and fair, even in an unfair world.
"Typically," he explains, "[apocalypticism] involves claims to prophetic authority among the leaders of the movement, an emphasis on visions and other forms of direct experience with the gods, and prophecies of a future transformation of the world that will bring relief to the afflicted members of the apocalyptic group and destruction on their enemies."
Not surprisingly, the phenomenon typically springs up among groups who find themselves in the minority, threatened, or repressed unfairly--at least, in their own view of the world. The Christian Book of Revelation came about under perceived Roman repression of the fledgling faith. The Anabaptists of the 1500s came out of a society stressed by economic disparity between rich and poor. Native American cultures developed apocalyptic narratives in the 1880s and 1890s, when those cultures were in danger of annihilation.
Visions and prophecies have been found in writings dating as far back as 2,000 B.C., according to Kerkeslager, although not all cultures had an equal need for thunder and lightning delivery of justice. In a polytheistic culture like ancient Greece, the need for apocalyptic beliefs was less, because a multitude of warring gods could explain misfortune or disparity. You might simply be the casualty of a power struggle between Hera and Zeus.
But as cultures became monotheistic, the disconnect between a supposedly fair and just God, and an unjust world, became harder to explain away. Hence, Kerkeslager says, apocalyptic notions in the Hebrew Book of Daniel, which was written only three years after a Greek King named Antiochus had begun a brutal repression of the Jews in Jerusalem, including turning the Jewish Temple into a shrine for Zeus. The revolt of Jewish revolutionaries, including the restoration of the temple in 165 B.C. (the same year that the Book of Daniel was written) is the basis for the Jewish holiday of Hannukah. But at the end of the Book of Daniel, the author predicts that an apocalyptic end will come to the repressive Greeks 1,290 days after their desecration of the temple. Unfortunately, as with other apocalyptic prophecies, it didn't happen. So the last line of Daniel changes the date to 1,335 days.
The fact that that date, too, came and went, didn't seem to fluster believers, any more than a failure of the earth to end on January 1, 2000 has stopped people from believing that it might still happen in 2012.
"The stubborn and often surprising ability of apocalyptic groups to ignore or explain away the failures of their prophecies is one of the most well-known features of apocalyptic groups," Kerkeslager says--a phenomenon also known as "motivated reasoning," as I discussed in an earlier piece here.
So with all that knowledge and understanding, can we all breathe easy? Not quite. "The belief in an apocalyptic doomsday is still alive even in the most skeptical societies," Kerkeslager says, "because it is very much a real possibility ... The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and has sometimes been characterized by global transformations that have indeed had an apocalyptic scope." Some of those events were natural disasters that caused mass extinctions. But many civilizations, he points out, have brought about their own extinction "by practices that exhausted their natural resources and gradually undermined their ability to sustain their own populations." Including, ironically enough, the ancient Mayans.
So perhaps the Mayans did leave us a prophecy or warning worth heeding. Just not the one everyone's talking about. But in director Roland Emmerich's defense, I have to admit that it would be a lot harder to make a blockbuster action-adventure-thriller out of recycling your grocery bags and developing renewable energy sources than something that results in an aircraft carrier on a tidal wave wiping out the White House. Which is something spinners of apocalyptic tales figured out long before there were aircraft carriers, movies, or really cool special effects.
There's been a certain poignancy to Veteran's Day, in recent times, as the very last keepers of exactly what November 11th means close their aging eyes and leave us. At last count this year, there were perhaps five veterans of WWI still living. Add those too young to fight, and there are still only a handful who remember the end of the war and all that era contained and meant. The living memory of World War II is not quite so close to extinction, but it, too, is slipping away. The youngest WWII veterans ... assuming an age of 17 at the end of the war ... are now 81. There might be one or two who slipped in younger, but if the living memory of the war were a language, it would be classified as "moribund," meaning it had only a few elderly speakers left, according to the UNESCO "Atlas of World Languages in Danger of Disappearing."
We feel the ache and pressure, as time grows short, to try to preserve as much of the wisdom and as many of the memories from those veterans as we can, sensing that when the last of them leave us, we will be bereft of something important; a part of our heritage, story and learning that will leave us the poorer for its loss. There's even a Veterans History Project, organized by the Library of Congress, that's trying to collect as many veterans' stories as possible before time runs out.
Our parents' and great-great-grandparents' memories, after all, tell us not only of the world before our time, but of who we are and where we came from. They give us our pride, our shame, our sense of grounding and roots, and a sense of continuity that is a unique part of our personal narrative and identity. But what about the language those ancestors spoke? Is that an important part of the picture, as well? And does it need to be kept "alive" in the same sense that we want their stories remembered and retold?
It's a relevant question, because experts expect 90% of the world's approximately 7,000 languages will become extinct in the next 100 years as cultures mesh and isolated tribes die out. And the answer may well depend on where you sit when you view the question.
Some in the linguistic community are responding to the accelerating pace of language loss by scrambling to create a language database similar to the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project. Fifty internationally-renowned linguists are gathering at the University of Utah this week to take the first steps in trying to catalogue some of the world's endangered, seriously endangered, or moribund languages before they become extinct. They hope that the databases they help to create (and help direct funding to support) will provide the equivalent of DNA material that can be used to reconstruct languages, with all their cultural clues and connections, even after the last person with a spoken knowledge of them dies.
"The wisdom of humanity is coded in language," says Lyle Campbell, director of the university's Center for American Indian Languages. "Once a language dies, the knowledge dies with it."
But not all linguists agree. In a recent World Affairs article, John McWhorter, a linguist and lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, asked "would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history."
McWhorter's argument, which is long, asserts that while the death of a language is an artistic loss, our attachment to diverse languages itself is a bit perverse, given that he believes they grew up as a function of diverse geographical dispersion of people. Language, he believes, is not inherently linked to culture. And that as a matter of practicality in an increasingly global world, the use and existence of fewer languages is not only less work, in terms of learning and maintenance, but actually an advantage.
More than one aspiring national government, especially in its nascent stages, would have agreed with McWhorter on that last point. But not because language is separate from culture. On the contrary, efforts to stamp out regional languages and instill one, unified national language are undertaken because language is so inextricable and central to culture. So just as regional or tribal languages are seen as a threat to national loyalty and identity, a national language doesn't just make trade and communication easier. It also helps build another, unified, "national" identity, instead.
Unfortunately, that strategy doesn't always work. Or, at least, not without a cost. Pamela Serota Cote, whose doctoral research at the University of San Francisco focused on Breton language and identity, argues that looking at language as only a practical tool or as an outside connaisseur, as McWhorter does, misses the central importance of language to personal narrative and identity.
"We understand things, events, ourselves and others through a process of interpretation, which occurs in language," she argues. "The diversity of our languages represents the richness of our expressiveness of Being. This is how language, culture and identity intersect; it is also why the loss of a language is such a concern and why minority language rights is such an emotionally charged issue in countries around the world. Because language discloses cultural and historical meaning, the loss of language is a loss of that link to the past. Without a link to the past, people in a culture lose a sense of place, purpose and path; one must know where one came from to know where one is going. The loss of language undermines a people's sense of identity and belonging, which uproots the entire community in the end. Yes, they may become incorporated into the dominant language and culture that has subsumed them, but they have lost their heritage along the way."If the last living members of a community or culture who speak a particular dialect or language die, there are no descendants to be uprooted, of course. And, perhaps, there is nothing to be done about that. Serota Cote acknowledges for a language to be revived, there has to be a population left to learn it, and a strong desire among the young people to revive that connection with their heritage.
But in Brittany, which was gathered into France only after the Revolution, the language became endangered not because of low population numbers, but because national edicts mandated that French be the only language spoken or learned. Finally, in the late 1970s, a movement sprung up to revive the Breton language, which bears far more resemblance to the tongue of Brittany's Celtic settlers than French. Language immersion schools now teach the language to children wishing to learn Breton as well as French, and other cultural revival efforts in Breton music and dance have accompanied the language movement.
The result has been remarkable, even though only a tiny percentage of Bretons actually go through the language schools. The Bretons have not revolted against French rule. But the shame at being Breton has receded, much as the African-American "Roots" movement reduced the shame at being black by offering a narrative story and pride that the children of subsumed slaves had lacked. A high rate of alcoholism and depression has receded and, as Serota Cote observed, "every Breton I spoke with who has learned the language as an adult said they feel now that they have been able to close the gap and heal those past wounds of shame. Many described finally discovering their roots by learning the language. One Breton said that the language 'completes the whole.'"
The challenge of melding and balancing past and present; tribal roots and unified national identity is one many nations struggle with. Too much tribal loyalty can breed division, but too much focus on an unified whole can destroy not only colors in the cultural fabric of a country, but an important sense of identity and narrative continuity among its diverse citizens. And language, like family or cultural memories, can play an important role in that narrative.
Sometimes language dies because an entire population dies out. That's still a loss, just as every plant and animal that becomes extinct is a loss to the richness of the planet's tapestry of existence. But in cases where the language wanes not because of physical extinction, but because of cultural subsumption, the loss of a language is a far more personal tragedy ... at least to those within that culture. For someone inside a lost or dying culture, a language can be like the memories of our grandparents--not required, or even convenient, for efficiency of operation in a modern, globalized world, but essential for our sense of roots, security, identity, pride, continuity and wholeness.
Life moves on. World War I is a distant memory, even for the elderly. Many Americans don't even know the real origins of "Veteran's Day." But imagine, for a moment, if we'd lost more than just the memory of the day's origins. Imagine if, along with losing those who remembered the world when Armistice Day was first celebrated, or even what the experience of WWII meant, we were also losing the language through which those memories had been lived and recorded. Chances are that any arguments about the accidental origins of that language, or its obscure use in the commercial world, would suddenly seem far less important to us than keeping that link with our heritage and past alive. No matter what anyone on the outside thought.
(Photos: Kevin/Flickr and pardeshi/Flickr)
(Photos: Kevin/Flickr and pardeshi/Flickr)
In the extensive coverage surrounding the 40th running of the New York City marathon this past weekend, more than one piece questioned whether marathon races had lost their elite edge. An op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday bemoaned the change in coverage from the pure, rarefied competition between the elite runners to human-interest stories about less professional athletes who competed. Cameron Stracher, who wrote the piece, argued that the long lag in U.S. marathon champions was due, at least in significant part, to this shift in coverage and "narrative," which lessened the public's excitement and inspiration to reach for the top levels in the sport. "As the running boom matured," Stracher wrote, "the story line shifted from the race itself to the race as 'event.' ... The marathon may be an event, but at its heart it is a race--a competition among highly trained athletes."
A similar theme ran through an article that ran a few days earlier, under the title "Plodders Have a Place, But Is It in a Marathon?" A number of elite runners are apparently irritated at the slow runners and runner/walkers who, they believe, have watered down the significance of running, or finishing, a marathon. "It used to be that running a marathon was worth something," the cross-country coach at the college of New Rochelle was quoted as saying. "There used to be a pride in saying you ran a marathon, but not anymore."
On the other hand, marathon organizers argue that the increasing participation levels and appeal of marathons, driven by those amateur runners, is what's kept the sport healthy and alive.
Ah, the dilemma of exclusiveness.
If I'm vaguely amused by the complaints, it's because they mirror so closely a debate that's raged for decades--sometimes unwittingly--in the pilot community. In the very early days, flying an airplane really did take an excessive level of both risk-taking and talent. So to be a pilot was to be part of a very exclusive club. You suffered greatly to get there, but then you got to wear your wings with immense pride.
It's still a hefty effort to get a pilot's license, but the difficulty has decreased significantly over time. First came electrical systems and more reliable engines. Then came the advent of the tricycle gear airplane design, which made takeoffs and landings far easier and safer than they were with the old, skittish tail wheel designs. But the advent of the nose wheel airplane also prompted grumbling among the "old" set about how now anybody could be a pilot.
It's still a hefty effort to get a pilot's license, but the difficulty has decreased significantly over time. First came electrical systems and more reliable engines. Then came the advent of the tricycle gear airplane design, which made takeoffs and landings far easier and safer than they were with the old, skittish tail wheel designs. But the advent of the nose wheel airplane also prompted grumbling among the "old" set about how now anybody could be a pilot.
The club was becoming less exclusive. On the other hand, it was also becoming a booming industry. The explosion of general aviation in the 1950s and 1960s was due in no small part to the fact that so many more people felt capable of becoming part of it. Industry advocates have long dreamed of creating airplanes and systems safe and easy enough that every person in America could become a pilot and have access to a small airplane, because it would transform both the size of the industry, and the size of the support it receives. One would think that pilots, who depend on that support, would echo this sentiment. But even today, there's resistance among a lot of pilots at the thought of flying becoming, well ... pedestrian. After all, if everyone can do something, it's not such a point of pride that I can.
But I would caution marathon elitists to be careful what they wish for. Familiarity is critical to engagement, engagement is critical to audience, and audience is critical to sponsorship and publicity. Stracher argues that stories of great Yankee baseball rivalries, focused only on the playing field, is what inspires people to want to play ball. I disagree. I think the fact that people do play ball, in sandlots and schoolyards and on the streets of New York, is why there is such an audience for watching the best of the best battle it out.
For years, the sponsors of air racing--the fastest sport on earth, where pilots fly almost 500 miles an hour only 40 feet off the ground, in 90-degree bank angles--have struggled to figure out why they can't get more than a tiny audience to watch. Why is it that NASCAR races, which have many of the same elements, but less speed and risk, are so much more popular? Answer: because almost everybody owns a car. Hardly anyone (less than 0.1% of the population) owns an airplane. Millions of people can imagine themselves zooming around a NASCAR track. Very few can identify with a race pilot's world.
By the same token--as more and more people have taken up running and long-distance running, more people can imagine themselves sprinting across that finish line and can identify with the pains, injuries, and disappointments of a marathon champion. That there are now many more wannabes is actually a good thing, in terms of the long-term survival and health of the running and marathon industry.
But there's also something else at play, which Stracher alludes to when he notes how "the running boom matured." Everything is new only once. Back in the days of the barnstormers, when aviation itself was new and few people had been exposed to it, flying had a romantic appeal to the public that it will never have again. Pilots today are not held up as high as the heroes of old, when few people had even experienced flight.
Familiarity may bring engagement, but it also famously breeds contempt. Or at least a tempering of the initial romantic ideas and breathless excitement it once generated. Just like any human romance, if our interaction with something continues on long enough, it matures from a passionate love affair into something more like a marriage. Not that we can't still get weak in the knees from time to time, but movements, like relationships, change and mature. And that's okay, because maturation brings other benefits.
Back in the 1970s, running as a popular sport was a brand-new and exciting wave. Running shoes themselves were a a radical new concept. And those leading the charge inspired an entire nation to get off its duff and hit the streets. That's impressive. So now it's a mature sport, with many more participants. That's known as success. So, OK. Maybe that also means it's not quite as exclusive or exciting as it once was to run a marathon at all.
But running it in 2:09 is still an Olympic feat. Nothing takes away from that. And with six American men finishing in the top ten in Sunday's race, it's hard to argue that the changes in the sport and how we write about it have killed our competitiveness. Whatever the reason for the dearth of U.S. male champions between 1982 and Sunday's victory by American Meb Keflezighi, it's obviously more complex than that.
But running it in 2:09 is still an Olympic feat. Nothing takes away from that. And with six American men finishing in the top ten in Sunday's race, it's hard to argue that the changes in the sport and how we write about it have killed our competitiveness. Whatever the reason for the dearth of U.S. male champions between 1982 and Sunday's victory by American Meb Keflezighi, it's obviously more complex than that.
As for the complaints about the slower participants ... there's clearly some line that has to be drawn at the end, so the timers and volunteers who operate a marathon can go home. But I'd hesitate to make broad statements about what's going on at the back of the pack. The saying about being kind to strangers you meet, because you know not what burdens they carry, comes to mind.
I sat next to a man named Donald Arthur at a Bronx Rotary Club dinner last spring who had completed more than 30 marathons, en route to his goal of completing a marathon in every state. He'd only started participating in marathons recently, after a heart transplant gave him life and the ability to exercise again. He wasn't young, and even with his new heart, he couldn't run the 26 miles. Given his age and health, it was amazing he could finish a 26-mile course at all. But his zeal for the races was electric, even if he experienced them differently than the top competitors. For Donald, a marathon is a competition not against other humans, but against fate, death, and limits; a chance to prove and celebrate, over and over, that he is fully alive again.
I asked him what his favorite marathon was, and his eyes lit up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. "Oh, New York!" he exclaimed. "I mean, the one outside of Denver was so beautiful, to be in the midst of those hills and nature all around you like that. But New York has all those people, cheering you on! I wave at them, and they wave back, and it's like nothing else." Donald has time to wave, of course, because he's not trying to break a six-minute mile. Does Donald Arthur's participation diminish the New York Marathon? I don't think so. He's just experiencing and running a different race, against a different opponent, back there at the back of the pack.
A marathon is a race, to be sure. But is it an elite event only for "highly trained athletes?" I don't think that's written in the definition or rules anywhere. The original marathoner, after all, was a Greek soldier simply trying to deliver a message. And I'm not sure there's anything wrong with a marathon meaning different things to different people. It's almost inevitable, with 40,000 participants.
Perhaps the best way to view today's city marathons is as a more efficient version of the multiple levels in other sports: Little League, sandlot and stickball games, NCAA leagues, pick-up Saturday games, semi-pro leagues, farm teams and the Major Leagues all wrapped up into one. No wonder they're such a party. And for those who still yearn for something more rarefied; the excitement of watching only the best of the best compete without anyone else in the backfield, running still offers its own equivalent of the World Series. It's a small, highly exclusive club known as the Olympics.
(Photo: Martineric/Flickr)
I have often felt a little envious of my professional musician friends. Not for the obvious reasons (getting to play in a band and get paid for it, or the accompanying status/sex-appeal), but because they had such a direct line to an audience's emotions. Writers can certainly influence a reader's emotions, but only by engaging the person's mind, first. The words have to be processed intellectually before they can be understood and felt emotionally. It's a quiet, thoughtful impact, even when it happens. A far cry from having an entire audience jump to its feet, almost involuntarily, and start moving in response to the rhythm, harmony, and energy issuing forth from the stage. A brilliant orator might bring an audience to its feet, but the response would be to an idea, even if the idea was emotionally expressed. And the crowd would know what it was cheering about. Ask someone why a piece of music moves them, and they will probably find it harder to explain. For music speaks to a place deep inside of us that feels more than thinks; that knows resonance without questioning the details; that can hear and be comforted by the outpouring of heartbreak and survival in a blues ballad without even knowing the words.
But some researchers suspect that music and words may be more closely linked than I ever would have thought. So closely linked, in fact, that the study of music may actually be able to help ameliorate the language deficits of children with dyslexia.
How is that possible? The exact mechanism of the process isn't clear yet, but researchers at Harvard University have apparently seen a correlation between early-childhood music training and "enhanced motor and auditory skills, as well as improvements in verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning," And that correlation, they say, is even more pronounced in children with dyslexia. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the researchers, told the Acoustical Society of America that the results "suggest that a music intervention that strengthens the basic auditory music perception skills of children with dyslexia may also remediate some of their language deficits."
Those results are also supported by another paper being presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting next week. Dr. Laurel Trainor and colleagues at McMaster University in West Hamilton, Ontario, have conducted several studies of children to gauge the impact of musical training. In one study, they compared two groups of children: one who were starting music lessons, and one who were doing other activities, like sports. They tested the electrical activity in the children's brains for a year and found that while both groups changed as the children developed, the children taking music lessons changed more ... especially in the areas "related to attentional processing."
"This is significant," Trainor wrote, "because it suggests a mechanism whereby music lessons could affect other cognitive processes, such as language and mathematical skills."
Now granted, music lessons involve a more focused learning process than simply sitting back and enjoying a collection of sounds. But there may also be a link between language and the evolution of music itself--which might help explain the ability of music to impact language processing.
"the avidity with which our auditory sense seeks to organize ambient noise into a meaningful acoustical pattern--a likely consequence of our dependence on language--could help explain our distinctly human musicality."
And a love of music is, apparently, a uniquely human trait. Other mammals, Angier notes, do not really appreciate music, despite the prevalent myth about music's power to soothe the wild beast. "If you give monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly," reported Dr. Josh McDermott of the Center for Neural Science at NYU.
A similar thought was put forward in an article last December in The Economist on the evolution of music. It explored various theories about why we like and react to music, from sexual selection to group and community bonding. The sexual selection theorists believe that expertise in music evolved because it provided a courting advantage, similar to a peacock's colorful tail--which would certainly seem to be true in terms of musicians' ability to get dates after performances, at least in the rock and roll world. Music may also have evolved as a way to bring groups together as a community.
But according to Dr. Steven Pinker, a language theorist at Harvard, our appreciation for music may have evolved as a side-effect of our focus on sounds--a focus necessary to develop a complex language. As the article put it, just as a body that's designed to seek sugar and fat for survival finds itself enthusiastic about cheesecake, even though cheesecake itself isn't required for survival, "a brain devoted to turning sound into meaning is tickled by an oversupply of tone, melody and rhythm." So in the course of learning to distinguish nuances of difference in tone, sound and shape of vowels, consonants, and complex verb forms, we may have developed a delighted appreciation for all sounds and tones.
But even if all those correlations and theories are true, they still don't fully explain why music resonates so directly and brings forth such a range of emotions in people. Why do particular musical sounds move us so? The sounds in a word--even a really good word like "inexplicable"-- don't have the same effect. Researchers are looking into that one, too. But perhaps it's because we have been surrounded by sound far longer than we have known words: Our mothers' heartbeats and swishing blood and fluid even before we were born. The singing of birds, rain on a tin roof, the creaking of a porch swing, or the rustling of leaves by a gurgling brook. The cry of another child, the terrifying crack of lightning, or the scary howl of an animal nearby.
In the end, maybe the reason we respond to music more viscerally than language is simply because music was actually the first language we ever learned ... before thought, before words, when emotion was all we knew.
Note: I will be offline for the next week finishing a book project, returning November 3rd.
(Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
On Friday, the latest biopic about Amelia Earhart -- this one a $20 million feature film starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere -- opens in theaters nationwide. As a woman pilot myself, I suppose I should be excited about having attention turned, once again, to one of our own. The fact that I'm not says nothing about my enthusiasm for women pilots or pioneers. It's just...enough about Amelia, already.
Amelia Earhart was a remarkable woman for her time. I give her a lot of credit for not wanting to be defined by her gender. She sent her husband a note on their wedding day informing him that she did not intend to stay faithful to him. That's not exactly standard. She took risks, which takes a certain amount of courage. She pursued feats of flight at a time when very few women did. All well and good.
But she was far from the only one, and far from the best at what she did. She was only the best known -- which was a feat, indeed, but one that was more the result of her husband's publishing and marketing savvy than an organic result of her own accomplishments. And on some level, I think a lot of women pilots chafe at the title of "most famous woman pilot" being conferred on a woman who, in the strictest reading of things, skimped on navigation preparations, got lost and crashed. Nobody bestowed that level of fame on the fliers who died attempting to span the Atlantic before Lindbergh.
But she was far from the only one, and far from the best at what she did. She was only the best known -- which was a feat, indeed, but one that was more the result of her husband's publishing and marketing savvy than an organic result of her own accomplishments. And on some level, I think a lot of women pilots chafe at the title of "most famous woman pilot" being conferred on a woman who, in the strictest reading of things, skimped on navigation preparations, got lost and crashed. Nobody bestowed that level of fame on the fliers who died attempting to span the Atlantic before Lindbergh.
But it's not just that. It's that there are so many other really accomplished women pioneers who get lost in Amelia's disproportionate shadow. Women in Aviation, International has a Hall of Fame that lists the bios of dozens of women who were Earhart's contemporaries. Interestingly enough, Earhart herself was not inducted into the Hall of Fame until five years after its inception, and her entry is not as compelling as some of the others.
Take, for example, the entry for Elinor Smith. Who? Right. That's the point. Elinor Smith soloed in 1926, at the age of 15, and three months later set an altitude record of 11, 889 feet. In 1927, she became the youngest licensed pilot and, at the age of 18, became the youngest male or female pilot to be granted an air transport license by the U.S. Department of Commerce. That same year, she set two endurance records, a refueling record, and the women's world speed record--that last one in a military airplane. In 1930, Smith was selected by licensed American pilots as the "Best Woman Pilot in America." During the Depression, she worked as a stunt pilot for the movies (no mean feat for a woman in those days) and did aerial fundraisers for the homeless and the needy. And, by the way, lived to tell the tale.
Or take Louise Thaden, who got a job as an office manager for Beech Aircraft in order to learn to fly, soloing in 1928. Later that year, she set the world's altitude record for women by flying above 20,000 feet -- the first U.S. woman to win that title. The following year, she set the solo flight endurance record and the woman's world speed record--the only woman to ever hold all three of those records simultaneously. The next month she became the fourth woman in the U.S. to get her air transport license, and later in 1929 she won the first Women's Air Derby--beating Amelia Earhart. In 1936, the year before Earhart's ill-fated world flight, Thaden became the first woman to beat all the men in the highly competitive Bendix Transcontinental Air Race, establishing a new transcontinental speed record for women and winning a Harmon Trophy--aeronautics' highest honor--in the process.
There were also women whose impact went far beyond record flights. Take, for example, Nancy Love. In 1942, long before Jacqueline Cochran achieved fame for her role in organizing and leading the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs), Love pulled together women who were already commercial pilots, with at least 500 hours of flight time, to form the precursor organization, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Love was the first woman to fly the P-51 and P-38 World War II fighters, as well as a B-25 and B-17 bomber. In 1946, she was awarded the Air Medal and a citation for her leadership in women flying military aircraft. If women can fly in the military today, it's in no small part because of Love, who first proved women were up to the task.
It's also because of women like Barbara London, who was one of Love's 28 recruits and who became the commander of the Los Angeles WAFS/WASP squadron. By the time the WASPs were sent home in December 1944 and forbidden to fly any more military aircraft (a very long story behind that one), London was proficient in every single Army trainer, bomber, and fighter we'd built--one of only two women to achieve that distinction. Devastated at being sent home, she signed up for the new Air Force in 1947, hoping for the chance to fly again. She stayed in the service for 20 years, hoping the rules would change, but they didn't change in time for her. She was allowed to wear her flight wings, but she was never allowed to fly. Undaunted, London started an air charter service on the side and taught both her daughters to fly. And one of her daughters, who learned a lot about persistence from her mother, went on to become the first woman pilot hired by Western Airlines. If I'm going to look for a role model for women, I don't have to look further than Barbara London.
The list goes on and on. From Bessie Coleman, who became the first African-American pilot in 1921 by traveling to France to take flying lessons, because blacks were forbidden to fly in the U.S., and whose answer to how she got past all the barriers facing her was, "I refused to take 'no' for an answer," the list of women pilots who persevered against all odds to open doors and achieve great things is long and distinguished. So is the list of sacrifices those women made. When I flew in my first and only transcontinental air race, in 1992, I met a woman named Ruby Sheldon, who was already elderly but still flying and grabbing hold of life with two hands. She told me in a matter-of-fact manner about how, in the post-war years, no companies would hire women as pilots. Unwilling to give up her dream of being a commercial pilot, she ended up flying cargo helicopters off of ice floes north of the Arctic Circle, because that was the only job she could find.
If none of these women's names are household words, it's not because they weren't worthy. It's because none of them had George Putnam as a husband.
Earhart is still an interesting study, as most record-setting adventurers are. Last month, in fact, Judith Thurman wrote a fascinating piece on Earhart in The New Yorker, worth the reading for anyone intrigued by the Earhart story. But if Thurman's sources are to be believed (and I think they are), Earhart's unfinished world flight was, in many ways, a poetic and appropriate ending for her life. For beyond a craving for adventure and attention, it seems Earhart was a restless dilettante, afraid of getting old and rarely finishing anything she started.
As for the great mystery surrounding her disappearance ... I don't know a lot of pilots who think it's such a great mystery. I've flown in the South Pacific. It's a horizon-to-horizon stretch of unmarked nothing. And in the 1930s, it was far easier to get lost and crash there than it was to reach any destination safely. Sir Gordon Taylor, one of my all-time flying heroes who made pioneering flights across the Pacific and surveyed air transport routes for the Allies in early World War II, wrote about the challenge of navigating the Pacific in his autobiography The Sky Beyond:
"To reach our destination and, in fact, to reach land at all," Taylor wrote, "[the navigator] had to be exactly right in the work that was ahead of him. ... When he has made his allowances for variation of the compass due to earth's magnetism, for deviation due to its effect through the iron in the aircraft, and for the drift of the air in which the aircraft is flying, he still has to contend with the fact that the pilot may not steer the course given to him."
Perfection, across 15 or more hours, is hard to accomplish. And imperfection meant that you died, because finding a lone aircraft in the Pacific is even harder than finding a lone island. On one of Taylor's flights, he reached the Hawaiian Islands with only five minutes of fuel left. On another, he never found the right island, and survived only because that flight left him enough fuel to return to a radio-equipped checkpoint behind him. And Taylor was a master pilot and navigator.
Why, then, do so many people still have such trouble accepting the overwhelmingly probable answer that Earhart and Noonan got lost, crashed, and sank with or soon after the plane? I suspect it's because we want so badly for them to have survived. We let go of our heroes, and all of the dreams we infuse them with, very reluctantly (as I've written about before, here and here). And in many cases, we like the fantasy possibilities better than the reality.
But it's time. Past time. Amelia Earhart was an interesting, adventurous, and accomplished woman who lived and died unconventionally. But so did many of her peers ... who had every bit as compelling stories and accomplishments. Instead of telling the same story over and over again, I wish someone would fund the telling of some of those other women's stories. "Barbara" might not have the same ring as "Amelia," but the story of her life--a woman without any power or money connections who became the best there was, then had her wings taken away, but got up off the mat again and made it possible for her daughter to succeed where she had been thwarted--is a movie I'd be far more interested in going to see.
Are print books really about to disappear, overtaken like horse-drawn carriages in the age of Detroit and the Ford Model T? Truth is, nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows what the future is going to hold, no matter how sure they sound in their predictions. Nevertheless, the point remains that a greater number of readers are switching over to ebooks in one format or another. So beyond the basic question of "will print books go away" (which I personally doubt, but again, nobody really knows the answer to), the questions I find more intriguing relate to if or how digital reading changes the reading experience and, perhaps, even the brains that do the reading.
Electronic readers like Kindle are too recent a development to have generated much specific, targeted research yet. But a montage of essays titled "Does the Brain Like Ebooks?" that appeared on the New York Times website this week offered some fascinating information and viewpoints on the subject. The collection had contributions from experts in English, neuroscience, child development, computer technology and informatics. And while the viewpoints differed, there was some general consensus about a few points:
1. Clearly, there are differences in the two reading experiences. There are things electronic books do better (access to new books in remote areas of the world, less lugging around, and easier searching for quotes or information after the fact). There are also things print books do better (footnote reading, the ability to focus solely on the text at hand, far away from any electronic distraction, and--oh, yeah. No battery or electronic glitch issues.)
To those factors, I would add two more: First -- I think it's important to remember that Kindle doesn't actually give you a book. It gives you access to a book. For people who don't want to cart around old volumes or make multiple trips to the library, that might be considered a good thing. But at least one potential downside to this feature became painfully clear to many Kindle readers this summer when Amazon reached into its customers' Kindle libraries and took back two books for which the company realized it did not possess the copyright. Ironically, the books were by George Orwell -- including 1984, his book about the perils of centralized information control. Access goes both ways.
Second ... one of the writers of the Times essays, Prof. Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that he didn't think anyone really made serendipitous discoveries while browsing the shelves of a physical library (so losing a physical library wouldn't be a loss, at least in that sense). Perhaps not, because most people go to libraries with specific search goals in mind. But bookstores, on the other hand ... there I'd disagree. I often browse the aisles of my local bookstores, just to see what's new and what might catch my eye. Most of the books I buy, in fact, are items I discovered while browsing ... something that, ironically, electronic "browsers" do not allow.
Browsing, to my way of thinking, is what I do in Filene's Bargain Basement. The clothes there are a jumbled mass. So even if you go in looking, potentially, for a shirt, you might end up with a pair of slacks that just happened to be hanging nearby. Same with a bookstore. Same, in fact, with the print version of the New York Times I get every morning. I scan the pages just seeing what might catch my eye to read. Sometimes it's a photo that catches my eye, sometimes it's a leading paragraph, sometimes it's a headline, and sometimes it's a callout. Or, sometimes, I'll be reading one article and another on that same page will catch my attention--one I never would have sought out on my own. And my knowledge and understanding of the world is far better and broader for all those serendipitous juxtapositions.
Electronic media and browsers have many good qualities, but they're lousy for that kind of unspecific window shopping. Browsers don't browse. They help you do specific searches. Looking for a black coat, or that article Sam Smith wrote two months ago on synthetic sneaker soles? The internet is great. Not sure what you want? Heaven help you. So to lose physical collections of books, either in stores or on individual bookshelves, would make it harder to make those delightful side discoveries that take us out of our narrow fields of focus and interest and, potentially, broaden our minds.
2. In the case of adults, we probably process information similarly in both electronic and print formats ... with two important distinctions. The first distinction is that electronic books, with hyperlinks and connections to a world web of side-roads, offer far more distractions to the reader. In doing a research paper, this can be useful. But it also offers temptations to divert our attention from a deeper immersion in a story or text that our brains are poorly equipped to resist. (Apparently we change tasks, on average, every three minutes when working in an internet-connected environment.)
"Frequent task-switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read," cautioned Sandra Aamodt, the former editor of Nature Neuroscience and another of the Times essayists.
The second feature of electronic reading, which may compound this first effect, is that there is evidently something about an electronic medium, with its "percentage done" scale and electronic noises or gizmos, that makes us crave and focus on those rewards. Which is probably why electronic games are more addictive than board games. After a couple of rounds of solitaire with real cards, I'm done and ready to move on to something else. But I removed the solitaire software from my computer almost 20 years ago when I realized that I couldn't seem to tear myself away from it, once I started playing.
Is our comprehension and, more importantly, what Proust apparently called "the heart of reading"--"when we go beyond the author's wisdom and enter the beginning of our own," as one of the essayists, put it, impacted by a heightened drive to make progress through a text? If so, that would be a bad thing. So it seems a point worth studying further.
3. Most adults, however, at least have the ability to process longer and deeper contemplative thoughts from what we read, even if we don't always exercise that ability. But according to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and child development specialist at Tufts University, that ability to focus attention deeply and for a concerted length of time is learned, not innate. Children apparently have to develop neural pathways and circuits for reading, and those circuits are affected by the demands of the reading material. Chinese children learning a more symbolic and visual language, for instance, develop different circuits than English-speaking children.
So electronic reading ... especially with hyperlinks and video embeds and other potential distractions, could potentially keep young readers from developing some important circuits. As Wolf put it in her essay:
"My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps videos (in the new vooks). The child's imagination and children's nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. the attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."
Interesting enough, the one computer scientist in the group was of the opinion that the best use of electronic books and capabilities was to enhance print books, not to replace them. But it's all interesting food for thought ... and, hopefully, more research as electronic readers find their way into more households and hands.
(Photo: Flickr/oskay)
"It seemed like a good idea at the time."
This sheepish and quintessential explanation of really bad ideas put forth into the world was uttered, I'm sure, by the backers of the Ford Edsel, New Coke, Clear Beer, OK Soda, and numerous other marketing fiascos. It was also undoubtedly mumbled by publisher Katharine Weymouth, or whoever in the Washington Post marketing department came up with the quickly-retracted idea, this past summer, of charging advertisers up to $250,000 to mix with the newspaper's editors and administration officials.
However, as Politico reported at the time, Weymouth said that the paper, which lost $19.5 million in the first quarter of the year, would "begin to do live events in ways that enhance our reputation and in no way call into question our integrity."
All well and good. Lord knows, the publishing industry is in a combination of flux and freefall these days, with all sorts of new ideas being generated to attract readers and income, from non-profit news gathering to restructured revenue models that are far more multi-media and complex. And nobody's quite sure, at this point, how it's all going to settle out.
But not every idea is a good one.
Take this email I received last week from the Washington Post, headlined:
I'm guessing that I received the email because I've signed up to get daily news headlines and links sent from the Post to my email account. Perplexed, I scrolled down past this lively cartoon television set dressed in a suit and holding a microphone:
to see the following invitation issued to me and, I assume, everyone else on the Post's mailing list:
Where to start?
There are, absolutely, many talented thinkers and writers out there who simply haven't been discovered by the mainstream media outlets yet. I find wonderful writing on individual websites and in small publications every day. So if the Post wants to bring some of those voices into the fold, or give new writers a chance, I'm all for it. It's the approach that disturbs me.
Reality show entertainment, for better or worse, is here to stay--for at least the foreseeable future. It's cheap to produce, and there seems to be a market for the competition and contestant hope/humiliation/victory stories it provides. (Even if some of the drama is artificially created, as I discussed in a previous post.) But no matter what else reality shows are, they're entertainment. And not even high-level entertainment, at that.
Much criticism has already been leveled at the field of journalism for leaning too far toward entertainment, especially in the realm of cable television; of caring more about the entertainment/sensation factor than a serious dissemination of information, news, and analysis. But, you know, that's TV. Print journalism--especially print newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have tried to hold themselves to a higher standard. Or so I thought. Certainly I know journalists at all those publications who take their job of researching, analyzing, and writing complex and important stories very seriously. They work hard at their craft, and try very hard to get it right.
I'm sure some would beg to differ, but to my way of thinking, if a paper wants people to take its content and writing seriously, turning the recruiting of new writers into a hyped reality-show entertainment contest seems like an appallingly bad idea. It certainly doesn't seem like an event that "enhances the Post's reputation." And I'm not even sure what it does for the paper's integrity.
I'll even go out on a limb and wager that the paper's editorial director didn't come up with this plan because nobody could figure out a better way to find new columnists. Just off the top of my head, I can think of several better ways to find new writers and give them a chance:
1. Actually advertise for the position, even if it's unpaid.
2. Ask the paper's current editors and writers what writers, blogs, websites, or other sources they read and respect, and recruit from there.
3. Sift through the writing of laid-off journalists who would give a lot for the chance to write for the Post, but wouldn't on their worst day submit themselves to a reality-show humiliation experience. There are a lot of talented people on that list.
4. Ask interested readers to submit 10 sample columns, and select the gems that shine through.
Clearly, the Post isn't doing this as the best way to get good writers on the staff. It's an entertainment/buzz ploy. But even on that front, I"m not sure the Post's reality show will be all that entertaining. Typing isn't much to watch. And if I want to see pundits go after each other, I can turn on CNN or any other cable station and watch polished professionals in the ring.
But the biggest question I have about this new marketing approach is how its advocates think it fits with the paper's identity. What, exactly, is the Post trying to market itself as? Is it a serious news publication that we're all supposed to read for its high-quality, professional reporting and analysis? If so ... this contest doesn't exactly burnish that image. If the paper wants to be a hip, fun, entertaining, and light-hearted good time ... well, this fits, but I'm not sure "writing lite" is what Ben Bradlee or Katharine Graham spent all those years trying to achieve.
The world is changing, and so is the publishing industry. But chasing younger, hipper trends isn't always a successful strategy--especially for a product whose success has been built on something more long-lasting, mature, and revered than the youth vote. Just ask the folks who came up with New Coke.
In every field, there are artists who rise above the rest of us. I look up and marvel at the beauty of the stars. My Uncle Ned, who's a Harvard/University of Michigan-trained PhD astronomer, sees and marvels at astrophysical processes that go far beyond my surface appreciation of a pretty night sky. The same is true of art, music, cooking, botany, architecture, and almost every human endeavor. William Safire, who died Sunday at the age of 79, was an artist in the field of language. And his voice will be missed.
Artists and experts don't just know more about their subjects; they actually see them differently. Which has its pros and cons. Painters don't just see objects, they see a mix of light and shadow. Ever since becoming a pilot, I no longer see clouds as just pretty puffy things in the sky. I see high Cirrus, which means I may need to depart earlier than planned, because a change in the weather is coming. A breezy day isn't just nice. It means turbulence in the pass.
The ability to appreciate far more layers of detail means that far more details can also irritate. My brother David can appreciate many more fine points of a symphony than I can. But he'll also be bothered by the fact that the horns in the second movement came in just a tad too late. And once you understand the technical elements of a subject, it can be hard to look at it without that magnifying lens. There's a line near the end of the movie Men in Black where the Tommy Lee Jones character, about to have his memories of aliens erased, says that it's going to be nice to be able to look up and see just a beautiful starry sky again.
As they delve further into the details of their art, artists also run the risk of getting lost in their own personal forest of specifics and language, leaving the rest of us too far behind to follow. Which is fine, as long as you don't care about communicating any of your ideas or the wonder of your discoveries to the rest of the world. I interviewed a NASA scientist once who insisted that to say the satellite he'd worked on had a near-equatorial orbit was untrue. It was, he said, a low-to-mid-inclination orbit. I explained that the book was for a lay person audience, and most people didn't inherently know what a low-to-mid-inclination orbit was, unless we explained it further. "Well, any intelligent person knows!" he exclaimed.
The same possibility exists with language. There are purists who, I suspect, are writing more for their own enjoyment than the comprehension of the audience. They're in love with multi-syllabic words, even if only six people in the audience know or can envision what those words mean. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, any more than with a jazz artist who cares more about reaching the pinnacle of intense self-expression than commercial success. In fact, I think it's important to have some purists out there, if only to remind the rest of us that the world contains magnificent mountains beyond the familiar, local hills we see and use everyday. It's just important to be clear about the goal, and be okay with the consequences of your choices.
William Safire was fascinated almost to the point of obsession with the details of words, leading to many arcane debates with his readers over seeming minutiae of nuanced word origin, usage or meaning. Live by the sword, die by the sword. And there were undoubtedly times when his own love of little-known words kept readers away from the ideas he was expressing. But he also asked and explored thought-provoking questions--including, in this 2008 blog entry, whether perhaps Pliny the Younger was the world's first real blogger. And in a world where the instant-word-factory-assembly-line crunch of blogging and email, and the word-annihilation of texting and Twitter (LOL if u no wht i mean), the presence of those who still love, explore, and use the full depths and twists of the English Language--or any language--becomes even more important if the art is not to die out.
I'm not a purist of language; I'm as concerned with getting the point across as I am with the beauty of the words I put together to do it. But I am still a practitioner of the art; a member of the symphony, if not its artiste solo perfectionist. And so I truly appreciate those whose passion skill and knowledge act as a beacon for the rest of us, pulling us further along than we otherwise would have gone.
Ammon Shea, a dedicated word-lover, wrote a book last year about the year he spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary, cover to cover. (Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages). His obsession for the task drove those around him nuts, and I can't say as I have the passion required to follow in his footsteps. But I loved his book, and all the discoveries he allowed me to share. To think! There's actually a word for a fear of dinner parties! Who knew?
I also don't have the stamina of a William Manchester, whose biography of Winston Churchill stretched over three volumes--the last of which had to be completed by someone else, because Manchester suffered a series of strokes that left him, in his last years, unable to write. In commenting on the tragedy of a man whose life's work was the loving caress of words having lost his ability to find them, essayist Roger Rosenblatt recited one of Manchester's passages about Churchill's funeral:
"When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bare-headed Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been and no longer were, and would never be again."
Manchester, Rosenblatt noted, most likely "had only the scantiest idea where that sentence would end when he began it. Only when he caught up with it could he know. But then, there was another sentence running ahead of him. There was always another sentence. And now there isn't." I still look at Manchester's words ... and Rosenblatt's framing of them ... and feel as if I've been blessed with a combination of master performances so beautiful and perfect that if it they'd been played out in a concert hall, I would have shouted aloud, "Bravo!"
Communication doesn't have to be taught. We learn it instinctively as small children. But the art of language; exploring words and crafting them together with rhythm, poetry, and meaning, is a learned and practiced skill that few ever master as well as Manchester, Keats, Shakespeare, or Safire. Like master chefs, musicians, athletes or scientists, they show us what's possible, and add a layer of nuanced beauty to a sometimes overly practical world.
I didn't always agree with Safire's detailed focus or opinions. And sometimes his immersion in his art may have stood in the way of getting his point across to a broader audience. But maybe, the point he really wanted to get across was simply how much richness there was in this language we use everyday, if only we'd take the time to explore and savor the forest with a little more attention and depth. And on that point, his message was inimitably, powerfully, and exceptionally clear.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Lane Wallace
