America Love It Or Fix It by GOOD Worldwide, Inc.

This Issue: I

America

LIVING

EDUCATION

CULTURE

MEDIA

MOBILITY

ART & DESIGN

ENVIRONMENT

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BUYING

TECHNOLOGY

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BUSINESS & MONEY

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CONTENTS

Features

THIS IS THE CITY Lit nonsed tet, DAVID BENJAMIN am aliquam vel utpatio dunt lutpat landre feu faciliquatie.

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48 We

America

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50 The State of the Union

THE GREENEST MONTH Lit nonsed tet, quam am aliquam vel BEN JERVIS dunt lutpat landre feu faciliquatie.

Lit nonsed tet, quam am aliquam vel utpatio dunt lutpat landre feu faciliquatie JAMES SUROWIECKI ea augiamet. Lorerit utem vero dolenisi tisi esectetue modolor iuscili quisi. Et ad tisl in vel utat.

60 Top Ten Reasons Why I Love America

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62 The New American Family

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68 Border Film Project

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The Good Guide

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CONTENTS This text will explain this section of the magazine to the

reader, since s/he has never seen it before. But we also have to mention

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the icon/tag system too.

Contents

Up Front

12 HELLO

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14 LOOK

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Out Back

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104 STIMULI

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PORTRAITS

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112

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MORE INFO Duis dolortioIbh et ad tiniatum

Duis dolortioIbh et ad tiniatum erostin do-

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

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lortin hendit nim zzrit, con erostin veliquipit,

Contents

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senim nos et, quat.

LIVING

EDUCATION

CULTURE

MEDIA

MOBILITY

ART & DESIGN

ENVIRONMENT

SCIENCE

BUYING

TECHNOLOGY

HEALTH

BUSINESS & MONEY

POLITICS

GOOD Issue 001 Sep/Oct 2006

LOOK DETROIT

Blight Orange It began with a sign: a bright

orange traffic detour sign standing next to one of Detroit’s thousands of abandoned houses. Four local artists, a group calling themselves Object Orange (OO), realized that they could use the shocking color of the sign to draw attention to the city’s pervasive urban decay. They staged clandestine pre-dawn painting expeditions, covering blighted houses in buckets of Home Depot’s “Tiggerific” orange paint. “People become blind,” says OO’s Mike, who, like other members of the group, prefers to remain anonymous for legal reasons. “We want to make them take note, to understand what the community’s problems are.” Out of Detroit’s more than 7,000 blighted buildings, fewer than 2,000 are slated for destruction, leaving a long waiting list of abandonded properties that have become drug dens, prostitution hubs, and dangerous neighborhood playgrounds. Commuters have begun to take note of the orange houses, as have unhappy city officials. “They may believe that they are making artistic statements,” says James Canning, communications coordinator for the Mayor’s office. “But they are just trespassing and adding to the blight of the building.” Eyesore or not, the orange is noticeable. Four of OO’s first eleven orange houses were almost immediately demolished. Canning attributes this to coincidence and careful calculation (demolition plans are public record); the artists see it as a critical step toward re-invigorating their deteriorating city. “Our part is starting conversations,” says OO member Jacques. 14

MORE INFO To buy your own “Tiggeriﬁc”

Paints website at www.disney.go.com/

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

paint, or other fun colors like “Pooh’s Favorite

disneyhome/disneypaints.htm

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Look

Things” and “Tink Pink,” visit the Disney

LOOK A bold visual tour of creative ideas around the world.

Look

NEW YORK

Grease Lightening While pundits and politicians

debate the feasibility of ethanol, switchgrass, and other alt-energy sources, Los Angeles-based Lovecraft Biofuels is busy making cars run on vegetable oil. The

autohouse will convert any diesel engine in an afternoon, for about $700. They also have a handsome fleet of converted Reagan-era Mercedes Benzes for sale, going for about $6,000. Forget any preconceptions of flubber-like complexity: Lovecraft’s engine conversions are driven by founder Brian Friedman’s imperative to “simplify, simplify, simplify.” And business is brisk: the company performs about four conversions a day. As for fuel, a nationwide network of biofuel stations already exists: grocery stores. New vegetable oil is available in bulk (around $2.60 a gallon at Costco; cheaper if you buy expired stuff). Those willing to forge friendships with deep-frying restaurateurs can fuel up for free, collecting used cooking oil and filtering it at home. Friedman’s ambitions include developing a conversion kit for every kind of diesel engine, and he talks about a future fueled by vegetables—with vegetable-powered farm equipment harvesting crops, vegetable-powered machines turning those crops into oil, and vegetable-powered big rigs taking that oil to consumers. A utopian vision, yes, but with gas prices creeping ever skyward, it is also beginning to seem elegantly sensible. —MAC BARNETT

AUSTRIA

Daily Bread Text TK Our chicken nuggets come to us as perfect little packages, uniform in size and taste. So, too, our ﬁsh ﬁlets and broccolini and pre-cut carrots. This is one of the goals of industrialized agriculture: to deliver us the same food experience, over and over again. And while we 16

LEARN MORE www.lovecraftbiofuels.com

might appreciate that an actual living thing exists at the other end of this system, few of us have any inkling of what happens along the way. Enter “Daily Bread,” director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest documentary—a disturbing, and at times weirdly beautiful odyssey into Europe’s food factories. Geyrhalter says he made the ﬁlm to dispel some of the alienation that we feel toward our food, but the effect might be just the opposite. The world of high-tech food processing is far stranger than we LEARN MORE www.ourdailybread.at

possibly could have suspected. Giant hoses suck salmon out of holding pens. Sunflowers are made to wilt on precise schedules. High-speed assembly lines parade pigs around a factory floor. “Our Daily Bread” captures a sterilized, futuristic dreamscape where hamburgers are produced with the same mechanized efficiency as crayons. The film is like a Mr. Rogers fieldtrip gone wrong. You’ll never look at your nuggets the same way again. —PETER ALSOP

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

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Look

NEW YORK

Melting Shot New York City may or may

not be the center of the world, but NYChildren, a new photo series, is providing documentary 18

evidence that the Big Apple sits at the world’s crossroads. There are 192 countries in the world (by one estimate), and the project aims to capture an image of a child from each. The caveat? All the children must now live in New York. NYChildren is the work of photographer Danny Goldfield, who relies primarily on word of mouth and media buzz to find his subjects. He’s helped by the fact that the project is so democratic and approachable. “A lot of other socially conscious art projects show atrocity,” Goldfield says, “but this is something that touches people in a profound way, and it’s positive.” With each new picture, the project further exposes the

staggering diversity of the city. As the list of remaining countries becomes more obscure, Goldfield knows there is difficulty ahead— “People always ask about Vatican City: ‘How are you going to find a child from there?’”—but even if that last elusive child remains undiscovered, he says he’ll find satisfaction in having made the effort. “One day, I know I’ll finish it. Whether or not it will be complete, I can’t say.” —ZACH FRECHETTE

SHOWN HERE

STILL TO COME

Mauritania

North Korea

Lithuania

Africa:

Mauritius

Oman

Indonesia

Algeria

Mozambique

Qatar

Gambia

Angola

Namibia

Saudi Arabia

Oceania:

Japan

Benin

Rwanda

Singapore

Kiribati

Georgia

Botswana

Sao Tome &

United Arab

Micronesia

Tonga

Burundi

Principe

Emirates

Grenada

Cameroon

Seychelles

Nepal

Central African

Swaziland

Europe:

Norway

Tanzania

Andorra

Tunisia

Czech Republic

Samoa

10 Iraq Zimbabwe

Republic Chad

Nevis

Nauru Palau Papua New Guinea

Latvia

Solomon Island

12 Turkmenistan

Congo

Asia:

Liechtenstein

Tuvalu

13 Bolivia

Djibouti

Armenia

Luxembourg

Vanuatu

14 Iceland

Equatorial

Bahrain

Monaco

Guinea

15 Kazakhstan

Comoros

St. Kitts &

Bhutan

San Marino

16 Russia

Eritrea

Cyprus

Slovenia

17 Netherlands

Gabon

Jordan

Vatican City

18 Nigeria

Guinea-Bissau

Kuwait

19 Ireland

Lesotho

Laos

North America:

20 Estonia

Malawi

Maldives

Bahamas

MORE INFO Danny Goldﬁeld’s top ﬁve most

Djibouti, Liechtenstein, Swaziland, Vanuatu,

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

difﬁcult countries from which to ﬁnd New York

Vatican City

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Look

Children:

LEARN MORE www.nychildren.org

Look

NEVADA

The Y10K Problem In a man-made cave high on

a limestone cliff in the deserts of eastern Nevada, inventor Danny Hillis hopes to build what may be his most lasting creation: A clock that will keep time for 10,000 years. Hillis is best known for pioneering blazingly fast supercomputers. But his passion for designing the machines of the future eventually led to a dilemma: he could not imagine the future itself. His 10,000-year clock—the Clock of the Long Now, as he calls it—is an attempt to address that problem by expanding our collective imagination. After describing the clock in a 1995 Wired magazine article, Hillis and a group of friends set about building it. They completed a basic prototype in 1999, but a ﬁnal design is still in development. The completed version of the clock, which will chime once every 100 years, will likely keep time by synchronizing a pendulum to the sun’s position at noon. The design costs—which are kept private but likely run to millions of dollars—are covered by host of private donors, including many wealthy tech entrepreneurs. Even before the ﬁnal device is built, Hillis is achieving his goal. “The main point here is to help change the discussion around problems in the world that are basically unsolvable in the time spans we currently conceive,” explains Alexander Rose, the director of Hillis’s Long Now Foundation, which is building the clock. In a culture that can barely recall last week’s headlines, the clock will serve as a constant reminder of the enormity of time. “This is something to get people’s attention,” says Rose. “Once you have that attention, the conversa20

LEARN MORE www.longnow.org

SAN FRANCISCO

Reading for Treasure At 826 Valencia, a pur-

veyor of “pirate supplies”in San Francisco’s Mission District, the grand joke is that pirate supply stores are commonplace. Its website bills it as the city’s “only independent pirate supply store,” as though the streets were overrun with competing big-box chains. If selling eye patches seems a strange front for tutoring adolescents in writing (the true mission of 826, founded by author David Eggers in 2002) that’s sort of the point. “It’s liberating,” says store manager Anna Ura. Indeed, a huge tub of lard—apparently a pirate staple—goes far toward breaking down tired classroom codes. The purpose of 826 is to awaken in kids a sense of wonder about writing, and designer glass eyes ($25) and pirate dice ($1.75) are all part of the act. Adults seem to get a kick out of the place, too; the store attracts a steady stream of befuddled Valencia Street window shoppers. The San Francisco outfit is the first of a growing number of 826affliated tutoring centers across the country. Like 826 Valencia,

these centers do more than tutor in writing; they also supply accoutrement for budding superheroes, spies, explorers, monsters, and time travelers. And they all bear a common theme, central to the task of inspiring young authors. Your writing is just that: yours. —THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT

LEARN MORE www.826valencia.org

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

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Look

TRANSPARENCY ��

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TRANSPARENCY This text will explain this section of the magazine to the

SOURCES

www.hfcsfacts.com

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

reader, since s/he has never seen it before. But we also have to mention

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen

www.abcnews.com

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

that it was all put together by 2x4.

www.enfo.ie

www.usatoday.com

Transparency

��

SOURCES

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

www.sellthebride.com

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

www.weddingbrand.com

Transparency

www.davidsbridal.com

��

SOURCES

www.factﬁnder.census.gov

www.nces.ed.gov

www.intheknow.com

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

www.senate.gov

www.npr.com

www.bioguide.congress.org

www.students.com

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

www.census.gov

www.washingtonian.com

www.sen.ca.gov

www.en.wikipedia.org

Transparency

��

SOURCES

www.drummajorinstitute.org

www.census.gov

www.census.gov/poptest/estimates.php

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

www.broadcastingcable.com

www.californiaaggie.com

www.tv.com

www.en.wikipedia.org

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

www.mediabuyerplanner.com

www.fec.gov

www.americanidol.com

Transparency

��

SOURCES

www.crane.com

www.pbs.org (Secrets of Money Making)

www.treachery.net

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

www.goa.gov

www.idspackaging.com

www.munic.state.ct.us

www.rpatrick.com

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

www.moneyfactory.gov

www.sfpower.org

www.pueblo.gsa.gove

www.faqs.org

Transparency

��

SOURCES

www.forbes.com/lists/2005/53/U3HH.html

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

www.imdb.com/name/nm0385296/bio

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Hilton

goodmagazine.com

Transparency

Confessions of an Heiress by Paris Hilton

Transparency

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PORTRAITS

Photographs by OLIVIER LAUDE

The Tastemaker Dan Barber ﬁnds Haute Cuisine in New York’s back yard.

40 GOOD Sep/Oct 06 Portraits

PORTRAITS A collection of people doing things that matter.

Dan Barber might be hungry for change, but he’s far from starving. In fact, he’s eating pretty damn well. Barber, 36, is the creative director of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture—the $30 million David Rockefeller-founded and -funded experiment in local, sustainable, organic farming just an hour north of Manhattan—and the chef of the center’s critically acclaimed seasonal American restaurant, Blue Hill. By serving up some very, very good grub, Barber is changing how people think about what they eat. “Until pretty recently,” the native New Yorker says, “the less pleasure you got out of food, the better it supposedly was for you and for the land. This movement has turned that on its head: good taste and clear ﬂavors follow good farming.” Trained in kitchens from the south of France to Alice Waters’s legendary Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, Barber opened the original Blue Hill in New York City in 2000. Mr. Rockefeller quickly became a fan and invited Barber to join him at Stone Barns.

The center opened in the spring of 2004 as a full-service restaurant, a working farm, and an education center that offers yearround public programs to people of all ages. These three interlocking elements illuminate the connections linking land, farmer, food, and diner. “You are making food choices on an everyday basis,” Barber says, “but those decisions have larger tributary effects on the world.” Barber and Stone Barns advocate for a food revolution, but they do so with a candied carrot, not a macrobiotic stick. A thoroughly delicious meal at Blue Hill spurs people to action. “People come and experience the pleasures of this kind of agriculture and this kind of food and leave here and apply it to their own communities,” says Barber. And in many ways, Stone Barns owes its success to what Barber calls the pleasure factor: “You can be greedy for good food and do good for your community, your environment, and your health. The more hedonistic you are, the better.” —ANDREW SESSA

“Until pretty recently, the less pleasure you got out of food, the better it supposedly was for you.”

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SEE ALSO

www.bluehillnyc.com

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X-Man Peter Diamandis is throwing money at the world’s biggest problems.

“We’re living in such a risk-averse society that it’s killing us.”

If we locked the geniuses of the world in a room ﬁlled with computers and Red Bull, all of mankind’s problems could eventually be solved. Global warming, AIDS, the inexplicable need for a Hummer h2—these are what Dr. Peter Diamandis calls the “grand challenges of our time.” Solutions, he says, are out there. Barring that dream scenario, Diamandis, 45, founder of the L.A.-based X Prize Foundation, advocates another way: offer the geniuses a lot of money. He has

created a new punk-capitalist ethos by using cash-prize competitions to foment scientific innovation, free from the constraints of lawyers, lobbyists, and CEOs. “We’re living in such a risk-averse society that it’s killing us,” says Diamandis, a graduate of both MIT and Harvard Medical School. “Breakthroughs that could benefit mankind are being slowed by the establishment. Instead, these prizes are open to the most brilliant minds on the planet.” Diamandis, a lifelong space travel buff, was the brains behind the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which led to the world’s first privately-funded manned spacecraft leaving the earth’s atmosphere in October, 2004. That same spacecraft (soon to be available for public spaceflight through Virgin Galactic) did it again two weeks later—making NASA look like an ossified dinosaur. These days the New York native has more terrestrial goals in mind. Early this year, Diamandis announced two new prizes in the works for next year. The Automotive X Prize will be awarded to a team that can build a car that gets at least 100 miles per gallon, while the Genome X Prize will find a cheap method to sequence the human genome (an advance which could potentially cure everything from cancer to diabetes). Think he won’t be around to enjoy the fruits of these innovations? “My personal goal is to live until age 700,” says Diamandis, ever faithful in scientific advances yet to come. “So I still feel pretty young.” —KEN LEE

A Tree Grows in the Bronx the privilege of the already privileged: earth-friendly ofﬁce towers and hybrid cars don’t come cheap. By that measure, the South Bronx, one of the poorest and most polluted urban areas in the U.S.,

be one of the last to go green. Thanks to Majora Carter, it might be one of the ﬁrst. Carter, 39, is the founder and Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), a community organization devoted to urban renewal and environmental justice. “There is absolutely a perception on some level,” says Carter, “that ‘It’s already so bad in the South Bronx, are they really going to notice if it gets worse?’” For decades, the area has served as a place to quarantine New York City’s power plants, scrap-metal yards, and sewage treatment centers.

LEARN MORE www.ssbx.org

LEARN MORE Majora Carter won a MacArthur

“genius grant” in 2005.

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Majora Carter is greening the borough, one roof at a time. Sustainability is all too often

42 GOOD Sep/Oct 06 Portraits

LEARN MORE www.xprize.org

Carter hopes to replace some of these polluters with environmentally friendly businesses that employ South Bronx residents. SSB runs a three-month training program to prepare community members for jobs in the local environmental economy, like river management or brownﬁeld restoration – coaxing back a healthy ecosystem in areas that have suffered contamination. SSB also works to persuade property owners to install green roofs—carpets of shrubs, crops, and wildﬂowers—in place of conventional tar roofs. Green roofs last longer, conserve energy, and purify the air—they also provide green-collar jobs for local residents. “These are not only meaningful things that have an impact on the quality of life of people who live here,” says Carter, “but they’re the kind of projects that capture the city’s imagination about what the city can be.” Her most ambitious project is to convince city authorities to build a state-of-the-art recycling complex in a location where, in 2012, a new power plant would likely be constructed. It’s all part of her plan to make the South Bronx the inspiration for a new wave of sustainability. “Until everybody can afford a green roof, we’re not going to rest,” says Carter. “If we’re not doing it here, as far as I’m concerned, we’re completely short shrifting our responsibility as a nation.” —ADAM BRIGHT

“They’re the kind of projects that capture the city’s imagination.”

Portraits

North of the Border Chris Simcox is taking immigration into his own hands. “Migrant-hunting vigilantes,”

is how former Mexican President Vincente Fox described the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) when it began conducting “border actions” in April, 2005. But Chris Simcox, 45, the executive

director of the MCDC, prefers to see his organization as a kind of benevolent patrol, or as he puts it: “a large neighborhood watch group.” Despite this benign description, Simcox considers the border a “war zone.” “We’re not against immigrants,” Simcox says. “We’re against illegal immigration, which is a problem of national security.” Simcox co-founded the MCDC in 2004, after patrolling the border between Arizona and Mexico for two years with an organization he founded called Civil Homeland Defense. These border patrols were ﬁrst launched in response to the

“What we’re ﬁghting has nothing to do with race– it’s about rule of law.”

D.I.Y. Venture Capitalists Matthew and Jessica Flannery are helping the third world— with PayPal. Try connecting two people

September 11th attacks: if the government cannot prevent immigrants from crossing the border, he wondered, how will it manage to stop well-planned terrorists? Armed with little more than binoculars, cell phones, and water, the MCDC are hardly outfitted for law enforcement. When they come across illegal immigrants, the official MCDC policy is to call the Border Patrol and wait. Simcox says that most of what they end up doing is search and rescue. “We’ve given out thousands of gallons of water to illegals,” he says. “We’ve contacted emergency services, gotten people medical attention.” Even if the MCDC is saving lives as it claims, its mission remains wildly controversial. For immigrant-rights groups like La Raza and the Immigrant Solidarity Network, the MCDC is little more than a hate group peddling nativism. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Simcox “a celebrity extremist.” Despite these condemnations, the publicity-savvy MCDC has become an important enough player in the immigration debate that they can’t be written off simply by denouncing their motives. And Simcox says that accusations of racism have started to get old. “What we’re fighting has nothing to do with race—it’s about rule of law.” He even quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: “I judge a person not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.” But only, it would seem, if that character has a green card. —SARAH GOLDSTEIN

from opposite sides of the planet, one hoping for a small cash infusion, and one looking to do something productive with their disposable income. Chances are, good things will happen. At least that’s the premise of Kiva—a pioneer microfinance website that Matt and Jessica Flannery launched in 2005—and so far it’s working. The first website to link individual lenders with borrowers in developing countries, Kiva makes it possible for anyone with a few extra bucks to help an impoverished stranger jumpstart their career. Would-be investors log on to Kiva, scan through profiles of low-income entrepreneurs—say a man who wants to open a shoe shop in Honduras or a goat farmer in Uganda—and shell out as little as $25, via PayPal, to the recipient of their choice. While some of the loans accrue interest, most are simply paid back over the next year. Whether it’s a loan or an investment, the money provided through Kiva is a vital influx of capital for fledgling businesses around the world. The idea for Kiva came to Matt and Jessica, 29 and 28, as they were traveling in East Africa several years ago. Jessica was working for a non-profit, assessing the impact of small startup businesses on rural communities. “Something so small as wanting to personally invest in them is what started Kiva,” recalls Matt. After the couple returned home to Palo Alto, California, they spent more than a year research-

LEARN MORE www.minutemanhq.org

LEARN MORE www.kiva.org

ing and planning Kiva before the website went live in November 2005. By the end of this year, the organization is set to raise $1 million from more than 10,000 lenders for entrepreneurs in 25 developing countries. “I’m doing something that my whole body and soul is behind,” says Matt, who quit his job as a TiVo computer programmer the month Kiva launched. “I feel like my life is a lot more integrated.” “We were going to do this any-

way—no matter how many other people cared,” Jessica adds. “But to see other people respond is just the most exciting and afﬁrming thing.” —CATHARINE LIVINGSTON

“This is the pullquote from the subjects, in which they say something.” 45 goodmagazine.com Portraits

Minister of Information Jimmy Wales is putting all of human knowledge at our ﬁngertips—with your help.

“[It’s] an anti-credentialist’s dream of an online, open-source encyclopedia.” 46

LEARN MORE www.wikimedia.org

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

MORE INFO www.wikipedia.org/wiki/jimmy_wales

Portraits

“One of the biggest problems of the digital divide is the cost of access to information,” says Jimmy Wales, 40, the visionary founder of the controversial, dynamic—and occasionally comically inaccurate—website Wikipedia. “We seek to make that cost as close to zero as possible.” In pursuit of freeing information, what began as an anticredentialist dream of an online, open-source encyclopedia—which blares the reminder that “anyone can edit,” from the top of most pages—has turned into something grander: a quest to make the known world visible to everyone. By placing the passionate

amateur, the geeky fanboy, and the autodidact on the same footing as Ph.D.s, Wikipedia has grown exponentially to over 130 different languages, and the English-language site alone is home to over 1 million articles, more than three times the number housed at Britannica Online. The umbrella Wikimedia Foundation now encompasses not just Wikipedia, but also sites that provide definitions, quotes, and open-source music files, images, texts and videos—all of which can be modified by anyone with internet access. With the growth of the foundation, the idea that the sites will one day represent the sum total of human knowledge has become more realistic. That means good things for those who could never afford a $100 reference book. “Our specialty is in providing free content,” says Wales. “We hope that creative NGOs and entrepreneurs in developing countries will did see an opportunity to distribute our content for a radically lower cost than any traditional encyclopedia.” The site’s newfound influence has also established Wales as a kind of demigod. He’s the final arbiter in the often-furious debates surrounding Wikipedia content, and has the power to block users, and even communities, from contributing—this year, abuse by congressional aides led to a total ban on contributions from Capitol Hill computers. But incidents like these are just growing pains; a reminder that open-source is still an experiment. For all the problems inherent in a website that anyone can edit, the vitality of the content makes the experiment an important one, and Wales defends Wikipedia’s egalitarian roots and fanatically loyal community. After all, he says, “would you prefer to live in a world with Wikipedia, or without?” —ANNA WEINBERG

LEARN MORE amandaunboomed.blogspot.com

Over the past two years

Cyberspace Oddity Amanda Congdon vlogs her heart out.

Amanda Congdon slowly became one of the most inﬂuential and farreaching personalities on the Web. It didn’t hurt that the former-model, 24, lights up the pixels, but it was her whimsical demeanor when talking about BitTorrent that made her the media darling of internet geeks the world over. Congdon’s fame stems from the quirky, bite-sized video reports she ﬁled as the anchor and cowriter of the video-blog (vlog) Rocketboom. Collecting internetbased stories that ran the gamut from the totally absurd to the politically serious, Rocketboom positioned itself as a web alternative to traditional broadcasting. Says

“I’m only interested in projects where I’ll be more than just the ‘face.’” Congdon, “We like to cut out most of the middlemen that mainstream media is accustomed to, since, after all, content is king.” On a given morning, viewers could be treated to anything from a grainy clip of a mesmerizing performance by the European hacky-sack champion to Congdon posing as a young Republican debating the pros and cons of owning a Hummer. As many as 350,000 people watched Congdon on Rocketboom every day; the show was getting about as many viewers a poorly-rated cable news show, but for a fraction of the cost. Even as Rocketboom started selling ads, proving that vlogging was a ﬁnancially viable medium, it stayed true to its lo-ﬁ sensibility: “It’s an integral part of the show to be low maintenance,” Congdon says. “The raw, honest material is one of the things that draws people.” In early July, after a falling out between Congdon and co-producer Andrew Baron, Congdon left Rocketboom. “After working as a producer, writer, and host,” she says, “I’m only interested in projects where I will be more than just the ‘face.’” With such a rabid fan base, don’t expect her to stay off the radar for long. TV and book projects (plus more vlogging) are all in the works, allowing Congdon to continue to showcase the unique wit that has elevated her to the upper-echelon of internet celebrities. —DAVID HIRSCHMAN

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Portraits

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America

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The State of the Union by JAMES SUROWIECKI MORE INFO Duis dolortioIbh et ad tiniatum

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America

In the summer of 1867, Paris was ﬂooded with visitors to the Exposition Universelle, the fourth of what would eventually come to be known as World’s Fairs. Inside the Palais du Champ de Mars, the massive iron-and-glass main hall, people could wander among tens of thousands of exhibits from around the world featuring everything from exotic foods to new perfumes to fantastic new technologies. As historian Arthur Chandler describes it, in a single day one could learn about the massive machines French engineers had used to dredge the Suez canal, and about revolutionary advances in the production of steel, before marveling at the giant cannon that Krupp, the German arms maker, had brought to Paris. And then, if you were of a certain mindset, you could worry about the Americans. The U.S. government had committed itself to putting on a good show in Paris, in part as a way of winning more customers for American products, but also as a way of convincing skilled workers that the U.S. was the best place to ply their trades. And put on a good show the Americans did, with exhibits that included Samuel Morse’s remarkable new telegraph, demonstrations of the country’s rich store of natural resources, and Cyrus

McCormick’s reaper. Although the Americans had less exhibition room than ﬁve other countries, they ended up winning four grand prizes at the Exposition. They also made some observers very nervous about what the future might hold. In the wake of the Exposition, the brothers Edmund and Jules Goncourt wrote in their journal that the fair represented “the ﬁnal blow in the Americanization of France, industry triumphing over art, the steam engine reigning in the place of the painting.” The relentless pursuit of technological progress guaranteed the eradication of quality and, ultimately, the destruction of culture. And, for the Goncourts, that pursuit of progress was quintessentially American. As critic Rob Kroes has put it, America became the symbol of everything that was unsettling and dismaying about the advent of the modern world. Accompanying the dismay, though, was also a deep respect for the fruits of American ambition and inventiveness. The French government had actively encouraged American participation in the fair, with the French commissioner in charge of the Exposition saying (with perhaps a touch of exaggeration) “had been very much astonished by the marvels of ingenuity and skill which he had observed in the United States.” And the crowds that thronged through the American exhibits – as well as the judges who awarded the prizes –must also have been impressed by what they saw. A world with telegraphs and mechanical reapers, it seemed, was surely better than one without them. Almost a century and a half has passed since the Exposition Universelle, but the profound ambivalence America provoked there seems, in some important respects, surprisingly familiar. Today Americanization – a word the Goncourts apparently coined – may be associated more with McDonald’s, Hollywood, and the cult of the free market than with agricultural machinery, but the fears of many about the threat of American culture and American power running roughshod over local customs and creating a lowest-common-denominator world are not very different from those the Goncourts articulated. In addition, those fears have been compounded by people’s worries about America’s tendency to act alone, and the fact that its overwhelming military power means there is no external check on its behavior. Since 2002, the Pew Research Institute has been conducting an annual Global Attitudes Survey, in which it polls thousands of people in countries about the world on a wide range of questions, including their attitudes toward their own countries, toward their neighbors, and toward the United States. And what those surveys show is that the skepticism and dislike of America currently runs both wide and deep. This is not solely or even principally due to the policies of the Bush administration, although they have undoubtedly made things worse. Instead, it stems from the distrust of American

power, both military and economic, and, particularly in Europe and Latin America, from concern about the way American businesses are affecting the world. Perhaps the most troubling thing about these results is that they show that although hostility to America in the past was typically pegged to bad policies, with people drawing a clear distinction between the American government and Americans, today the hostility tends to reach beyond the government, and attach itself to Americans as a whole. In other words, in a lot of the world, they don’t like us. They really don’t like us. (Thankfully, there are still a few places in the world – Great Britain, Canada, and Poland – where a majority of the people have a favorable view of the U.S. And Indians absolutely seem to love the U.S.) If there is one trait that seems to characterize American behavior – and that contributes, in large part, to global distrust – it’s unilateralism, the American unwillingness to be bound by anything outside of one’s own will. This has been accentuated in recent years – think of the decision to go to war in Iraq without a U.N. resolution, the refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and the initial decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions in the war in Afghanistan – but this is hardly something that the Bush administration invented. On the contrary, there is a deep strain of American thought that rejects the idea of being fettered, in any way, by non-Americans, and that sees going it alone as the only reasonable course of action. (An argument can be made that this stems in part from the individualism and distrust of government that characterize American culture more generally.) And while this doesn’t necessarily make the U.S. unique, there are two factors that make American unilateralism especially troubling. First is simply the breadth of American power. While no one is nostalgic for the Cold War, a surprisingly large percentage of the world’s population seems to think having a nation that could meaningfully challenge American hegemony would be a good thing. The second factor is that the U.S., paradoxically, played a major role in creating many of the international institutions that it regularly circumvents or ignores. In other words, American unilateralism often smacks of hypocrisy. Take, for instance, the question of free trade, which is the one cause that, more than any other, the U.S. has been unremittingly committed to over the past decade and a half. Without the U.S., much of the good work that has been done in lowering trade barriers and doing away with subsidies in the global economy would never have happened. Yet in 2004, in order to placate voters in steel-producing states, the Bush administration slapped tariffs on foreign steel. These were tariffs that the administration knew were in violation of World Trade Organization rules, and that it would eventually be sanctioned for.

But neither the W.T.O. rules nor the U.S. commitment to free trade mattered next to the need to look after local political interests. So Americans are hypocritical, power-hungry, self-serving – and you can add to the list “violent” and “greedy,” two adjectives that majority in many countries associate with the United States in the Pew surveys. And yet, when you look closer at the facts, you see ﬂashes of the ambivalence that characterized the French reaction to the American exhibits in 1867. Majorities in many countries, for instance, including almost all the developed countries and India, also describe Americans as “hardworking” and “inventive.” A study of global opinion leaders in twenty-four different countries found that American technological and scientiﬁc prowess, and its economic dynamism, were deeply appealing, and that the vision of America as a land of opportunity had a powerful hold on people in most parts of the world. And obviously one of the reasons why Americanization is often seen as so threatening is precisely because so many people in other countries are drawn to American products, technology, and culture. Generalizations about countries, let alone about many countries, are always dubious, even with the plethora of data that we now have on hand. But it seems to fair to say that at the heart of much of the world’s relationship to America is a profound, and not necessarily resolved, mix of attraction and repulsion. The stereotypical view of Americans, by contrast, is that they feel no attraction to the world at all. And there is something to this. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, pollsters who have done much of the work for Pew and who have written a book based on that work called, tellingly enough, America Against the

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America

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World, most Americans “downplay the importance of America’s relationship to other nations” and are “indifferent to global issues,” even in the midst of a war. They also tend to exhibit “an inattentive self-centeredness unmindful of their country’s deepening linkages with other countries.” It isn’t really that we can’t see ourselves the way others see us: most Americans know that the U.S.’ global reputation is not good (in some countries, by contrast, people are ar more optimistic about their reputation than they should be), and American also tend to agree with the rest of the world about their own country’s violence and greed (especially greed). The difference is that it doesn’t seem to matter much. Most Americans are happy with their country, if not with their president, and most think that the good things about the place outweigh the bad. The same is true, as it happens, of most places in the world. In fact, while Americans are usually thought of exceptional in their self-regard, people in many countries have a similarly positive view of their own societies. Nor does Americans’ self-regard translate, as many assume it does, into a desire to remake the rest of the world. While American policymakers over the past few years have, at least rhetorically, emphasized the need to spread American values – which are often, of course, thought of as “universal values” – most Americans describe themselves as uninterested in that kind of

If there is one trait that seems to characterize American behavior, it’s the unwillingness to be bound by anything outside of one’s own will.

missionary work. This is unsurprising. American exceptionalism has historically manifested itself in two different forms: on the one hand, the desire to evangelize the rest of the world, showing it the truth and converting it to the American way, and on the other, the desire to remain aloof from the rest of the world, free of entangling alliances and complications. If the Bush administration seems in thrall to the first vision, most Americans seem to be more comfortable with the second. Exaggerating for effect, then, the rough picture we’re getting is that the rest of the world is unhappy with and distrustful of the U.S., while Americans – although they’d probably prefer to be liked – don’t really care. And there is truth in this picture. And yet once you start to look beneath the surface – and, in particular, to look not just at what people say, but at what they do, and at the everyday reality of their lives – it becomes impossible to accept the notion of this fundamental alienation between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The fundamental paradox of American existence today, in fact, is that for all the unilateral actions and rhetoric, and for all of the supposed indifference to the rest of the world, the U.S. has never been more reliant on, and never derived more value from, other countries, in large part because of the integration of the global economy over the past three decades. While in much of the world globalization is seen as synonymous with Americanization, in the U.S. there is no evading the fact that it is truly globalization, and that it is a complete illusion to imagine ourselves as somehow separate from everyone else. The most obvious way in which this is true is the concrete financial reality: the U.S. now buys six hundred billion dollars more a year in foreign goods and services than it sells of its own goods and services, which means that every year we sell six hundred billion dollars in stocks, bonds, and property to foreign investors. Our well-being, in other words, depends heavily on the work of people in other countries, and on the willingness of foreigners to invest here. More than that, though, more and more of what we consume – from fashion to culture to cuisine – is influenced by, or comes from, abroad. And the same is true, in reverse, of much of the rest of the world. They may dread the voraciousness of American consumerism and materialism, but without our seemingly bottomless appetite for the stuff that people make, plenty of economies would grind to a halt. We are not the breadbasket of the world. We are the consumer of last resort. And as the historian Charles Maier has put it, if America is presiding over an empire, it’s an empire of consumption. And while a relationship defined by buying and selling may seem to be a resolutely shallow one, it also is a fundamental one. But the global ties go beyond the financial. The remarkable renaissance of American business over the

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America

past two decades, for instance, is impossible to imagine without the impact of management techniques imported from abroad (most notably from Japan), including the emphasis on quality is difficult to imagine without the impact of the management techniques that we imported from Japan, including the emphasis on quality, the focus on lean manufacturing, just-in-time production, and a greater emphasis on involving workers in the decisionmaking process. And for all the talk and concern over outsourcing and offshoring, millions of Americans now work for foreign companies in the U.S., including workers at some of the most productive factories in the world (like Nissan’s and Toyota’s). Abroad, meanwhile, the hostility to the U.S. has had surprisingly little effect on American companies, even among firms whose appeal seems fundamentally tied to their status as American icons. McDonald’s, for instance, is now more successful in France than it is anywhere else in the world, with the exception of the U.S., while Starbucks has expanded globally faster than anyone could have imagined. And although American companies have not remade the world in their image, as the spectre of Americanization seemed to promise, they have created tremendous value by sending their technological and managerial savvy abroad – just as foreign companies did in the U.S. More than enough has been written about the way American companies are changing places like Bangalore and Shanghai. But the benefits of American know-how are being felt even in Europe. European divisions of

For all of Americans’ studied indifference to the outside world, in our everyday lives the connections are getting stronger, not weaker. American companies, for instance, are significantly more productive than similarly-sized divisions at European firms. Of course, no one is too surprised that the allure of profit can make indifference disappear. But outside of the realm of commerce, there are important connections between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The Bush administration’s Millennium Development Challenge foreign-aid project, while underfunded, represents a meaningful attempt to rethink the politics of foreign aid while expanding the U.S. commitment. And the same is true of the increased funding for the global fight against AIDS, and the American commitment to pay for a malaria vaccine if one is ever developed. At the same time, much of the most important work in the field of public health and economic development is being done in the non-profit sector, most prominently by the Gates Foundation, but also by scores of smaller groups that are trying to take the skills and techniques of American entrepreneurialism and apply them to the problems of the developing world. Of course, none of this means that the problems created by American hegemony, or by the war in Iraq, or by the Bush administration’s penchant for going it alone, have gone away. But what it does mean is that for all of the public hostility toward the U.S., and for all of Americans’ studied indifference to the outside world, in our everyday lives the connections are getting stronger, not weaker. And that will, in the long run, likely matter more than the political policies or even the military actions do (especially since young people around the world have a significantly more positive view of America, and of globalization, than older people do). But in the meantime, it might be useful for Americans to hurry the process along by taking heed of something Gertrude Stein once wrote: “Don’t you forget a country can’t live without friends. I want you all to get to understand other countries so that you can be friends, make a little effort, try to find out what it is all about.”

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America

The Top Ten Reasons Why I Love America by GARY SHTEYNGART illustration by TAMARA SHOPSIN

I love how people treat me with respect in America. Sir this and sir that. I’m 33 but I look like I’m fifty so when I walk into a store service people practically get down on their knees and beg me to share my old man’s wealth. I can live with that. I love how this is such a big country but when I travel around it everyone speaks a fairly standardized kind of English. Sure there’s the famous Southern drawl, but from what I understand the influx of Yankees into the sunbelt is slowly killing off Southern culture and diction. Sweet! I love how young this country is. I don’t have to study what happened two thousand years before Christ to fit in around here. Federalist Papers, the cotton gin, Underground Railroad, “Let’s go Yan-kees! Let’s go!” and I’m golden. I love how I can dress all informal in America. I don’t even own a freaking tie! And if someone gets married or dies, screw them. I’m an American. I’m wearing my duck cufflinks and my “sports blazer” whatever the hell that is. I love how American women smell. Whether they’re native or immigrant, small or elephantine, everyone smells like the height of freshness even in the summertime. I can respect that. I love how cute and powerless the American intelligentsia is. Keeps it honest. I love how American can be so

innocent abroad. On the rare occasion the dollar rebounds they can still act pissy with the waiter, but when I see a middle-aged couple in some freaky country these days it’s like “H-h-h-h-help us, mister. We’ve just been r-r-r-r-robbed and s-s-s-s-stabbed.” And I just wipe their blood off with my sports blazer and say “Dere, dere, li’l chile, no cry you.” I love how every tiny thing I do in America they give me money. Little musings, over-used anecdotes, mindless gum ﬂapping. Anything I do – money. I don’t know what I’m getting for this article but I’ll bet ya it’s gonna be a lot of money. And money means I can indulge in my passions and pursuits and contribute to this nation’s idea of itself. Or as the youth like to say, “Whatever.” I love how most Americans believe some supernatural higher power is going to lift them up into paradise once they expire, but at the same time they work ninety hours a week to invent new technologies that make my earthly life long and comfortable, although, come to think of it, largely static and meaningless. Four p.m. cheeseburgers with extra onions and tepid American sex on a day when the stock market’s closed. I love it.

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GARY SHTEYNGART is the Russian-born author

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Debutante’s Handbook. He lives in New York.

America

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Exactly one year ago today as I’m writing this, I

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was sitting in my home office, in my underwear, when my wife Regina burst through the door. It was a different office, a different home, and a different city than we live in now, though it very well might have been the same pair of underwear. Regardless, her news punctured the false cocoon of peace and security I’d weaved around myself. She was on her cell phone. “Elijah put a rock up his nose at school!” she said. “They can’t get it out!” I shot up and ran into the other room, because that’s where my pants were. “Call his doctor!” I said, forcefully. On the way to school, I talked to the physician’s assistant at his pediatrician’s office. She was very sympathetic. She made us an emergency appointment. We got to school, and there was Elijah, two-and-a-half years old, looking totally fine, if sounding a bit nasal. “I put a rock up my nose, daddy.” “That’s what I heard.” “We have to go to the doctor,” Regina said. “No! I don’t want to go doctor with a rock up my nose! I want a popsicle!” “Well, we have to.” So we did that, but the rock was so far up Elijah’s nose that the P.A. couldn’t extract it; apparently, the only doctor who could was 10 miles north, in a dreadful suburb where we never dared to tread. Whereas Elijah’s usual pediatrician’s office had a decorating scheme revolving around Beanie Babies and Green Eggs And Ham posters, this specialist’s office mostly had photos of punctured eardrums. Elijah’s face took on a thin film of fear. The doctor came in. He was a tall, goofy guy who was wearing one of those metal headbands with the big circle on it. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny. “Is this our Rocky?” he said. I concluded that he was probably trying to be funny. He asked me to sit in his examination chair and to put Elijah in my lap. My chair was for a kid and his chair wasn’t, so when he leaned in, our thighs were touching. This was quite awkward for me, as I’m sure it was for him, but I tried to focus on keeping Elijah still. The doctor put drops up Elijah’s nose. Elijah flinched, but he didn’t lose his mind. This was reserved for when the doctor inserted an inch-thick suction tube up Elijah’s left nostril. Elijah screamed like he was dying. The other sound in the room was that of my heart breaking. The rock popped out. The doctor showed it to me. It was no more than an inch in diameter, reddish brown with little white flecks, basically circular, with some irregularities. Upon a closer look, it resembled a tiny hamburger patty. After we were done, I gave Elijah a little talking-to.

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The American Family Grows Up Ci bla feu facilis erillao re con ex er sum at, quat ad ero elessi. Ureet, conse quisim zzrizzril ullan. by NEAL POLLACK photographs by JOAQUIN TRUJILLO

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America

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“You’re never going to put a rock up your nose again, are you?” “No, daddy.” “Are you going to put anything up your nose again?” “Hercules!” Hercules is our Boston Terrier. “OK. Besides Hercules.” “Hercules sits on my butt!” “Elijah, I’m serious…” “Let it go,” Regina said. “I think he gets it.” That ended up being an expensive little lesson. Our health insurance, which cost us a few hundred a month, had a “surgery deductible.” If any of us required surgery, we had to pay the ﬁrst $1,000—each. We knew about the deductible, which is pretty much standard in most of the crappy health plans Americans have these days. But we weren’t aware that, according to Blue Cross, sticking a tube up a child’s nose to extract a rock is “surgery.” Elijah’s little escapade cost us $600. Since I’ve become a family man, I’ve suspected

that the family, such as it stands, is under attack. Many politicians claim this as well, though their claims are based mostly on scanty anecdotal evidence gleaned from watching crappy TV, combined with a fear of poor people. Instead, I’ve had to learn through hard experience that middle-class American families are being forced to live, almost entirely, without a net. Let’s go back to health insurance. We recently moved from Texas to California, for various reasons. Blue Cross denied us coverage because Regina had a little thyroid problem and because I was on antidepressants, both problems that had been treated in Texas, while we were under Blue Cross insurance. Somehow, we’ve managed to retain our prescriptions under the Texas coverage, but that’s only because the bureaucracy hasn’t caught up with us yet. Meanwhile, we bought Elijah a policy here, but we

just got word that his premiums have gone up. Also, certain things that were previously covered aren’t covered anymore, or only covered partially. We haven’t even used the coverage yet, and we’re already being denied. The message here is that health care, for all but the richest families, is an unaffordable luxury. How did this happen? When I was a kid, my parents certainly had their financial problems. But there was never any doubt that they’d be able to afford to send me to the doctor. They also raised me in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the country, in a town that permitted no commercial real estate, in a dead-silent neighborhood where you could see the stars at night, in a house with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and copious fruit trees. I make as much money, even in relative terms, as my father did at my age. But until recently I’ve never lived in a house that didn’t have city buses rumbling down the street at all hours. We brought my son home from the hospital to a house down the street from the city’s only day-labor center. I regularly chased prostitutes off my front lawn. In Los Angeles, our situation is somewhat better. The neighborhood is a little nicer than before. But we rent. Affording to buy an even remotely tolerable house is beyond our means. If we wanted a fixer-upper next to an auto-body shop, which we don’t, we’d still have to find a way to finance $550,000. The beer trucks only drive down our street if there’s construction on the main commercial road. Because of that, my son thinks this is a “quiet” neighborhood, and that breaks my heart. Education is another source of continual anxiety. My parents may have worried that I wasn’t being stimulated quite enough in school, or that I had some lazy teachers, but they didn’t have much doubt, overall, that I’d get a decent public education that would prepare me for college. They certainly didn’t have to worry about financing my education before college. My wife and I, on the other hand, have had to make serious cutbacks in order to send our son to preschool. We rarely get babysitters, we don’t go out to eat, and we don’t buy new shoes. None of this is tragic, but let me emphasize this again. We’re making sacrifices to send our son to preschool. When it comes to sending him to elementary school, we’re faced with even more difficult choices. Our current neighborhood, which we don’t like that much anyway, has one decent charter school and a bunch of unacceptable options. There are neighborhoods and suburbs nearby with better schools, but we can’t afford to buy houses there. We don’t even know if we can afford to rent in those neighborhoods. All of this adds up to an increasingly empty feeling that I’m not going to be able to provide for my kid like my parents did for me. The conclusion I’ve reached, one that I never even considered before I had a kid, is that

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America

society has failed the family. No structures exist to help us, and no, the marriage deduction doesn’t count. The nuclear family, a mostly modern creation to begin with, seems like it’s begun to fade into the realm of myth. Regina and I had Elijah in Austin, Texas, a perfectly fun, laid-back place to have a kid, but also 1,000 miles from any extended family. Any larger community we felt was limited to an occasional babysitting swap night we did with another couple that we liked. This hardly formed the basis of a revolution. But we had no idea that we were living at the front of a wave. A quiet reinvention of the whole idea of the American family was underway. Out of our struggles, and those of thousands of families like us, Family 2.0 was being born. The current generation of parents is laidback but not permissive, strict but not authoritarian, involved but not hyper-involved. We’re reacting, in large part, to the dual excesses of the Baby Boomers. We neither have the means or the desire to spoil our children, and we lack the energy to become full-on Soccer Moms and Dads. The parenting norms of the past don’t seem to apply to our lives. Instead, we’ve begun to pull together a new parenting culture. As it does with almost everything else in the contemporary world, the Internet is leading the way. When we had Elijah, the online parenting community had just begun to flower. Regina spent a lot of time on the urbanbaby.com message boards, seeking friends, tips, and support. But what she found, while occasionally helpful, was mostly anonymous complaining and backstabbing. There was something impersonal, and even a little sinister, about the whole thing. This manifested itself most fully when I published an article on Salon.com about how Elijah got expelled from his first preschool for biting. It was a nasty episode full of mistakes on our part, and on the school’s. But it didn’t warrant the explosion of vitriol against us. We were called “people who shouldn’t have children,” and Regina got an email that compared Elijah with a serial killer and threatened to call child welfare on us. But that was two years ago, a lifetime on the Internet. Online parenting culture has evolved. “Mommyblogs,” with their confessional style and easy access to family photos, put faces to the previously anonymous posters, and made nasty side-commenting much more difficult, and much less likely. The “daddyblogs” appeared later, but they, too, presented a different side of fatherhood, self-effacing and cynical, but also nurturing. Suddenly, thousands of mothers were publicly relating their doubts, fears, and joys, and fathers were publicly trying to figure out their own changing roles in a world where family is constantly in flux. Blog coalitions evolved naturally. Mommyblogs

evolved into group blogs, and then daddyblogs followed suit. Soon, families in Seattle and Boston, Utah and Los Angeles, and all points in between, were sharing experiences, stories, and even resources. The culture continues to evolve. Websites openly calling themselves part of the “Family 2.0” movement have begun to spring up, online parenting communities that mimic MySpace in their intention, but are slowly starting to find their own way. In the physical world, the social life of families is slowly but inexorably changing as well. An organization called Baby Loves Disco, started by a Philadelphia record producer and stay-at-home dad, has been, for the last year, staging massive parties in a half-dozen cities. Hundreds of families from San Francisco to Boulder to Brooklyn gather in nightclubs. A DJ spins dance hits from the 70s and 80s. The parents drink at an open bar, while the kids eat healthy snacks and drink from juice boxes. There’s a “chill-out room” full of books and puzzles, shaky eggs for everyone to enjoy, bubble machines, balloons, and lots of other surprises. It’s a simple concept that’s perfect for its time. Parents and kids are having fun together, and meeting other families, under the innocent guise of a party. At best, it’s the basis for a new kind of community. At the very least, it’s a hell of a lot better than having to watch your kid throw himself around a jumpy castle for an hour. I don’t know where all this is leading. Will it just be easier for families to meet other families that are “like” them? Will baby-sitting co-ops and community gardens emerge? Will there be a family-oriented nightclub party circuit? Any number of directions is possible. An organization called Moms Rising presents one possibility. Through their website, www.momsrising.org, they’re leading the political component of the Family 2.0 movement, campaigning for affordable health care and schooling, flex time and fair wages for work-athome parents, and better after-school programs. Their comprehensive, thoughtful campaign was born out of the same sort of quiet desperation that my wife and I felt upon discovering that society would offer us no help in finding an affordable place to live, locating a school, or vacuuming stones out of our kid’s nose. I imagine, or dream of, a society where my kid can live in a safe, comfortable neighborhood, be assured of decent, affordable health care, and attend a good public school. The institutions of our society may be moving against those desires, but the people aren’t. We’re very early in the process, but a generation is rallying itself, slowly but inexorably. I’ll be joining them as soon as I pay my $400 gasoline bill from last month. For that, I don’t blame anyone but myself. It’s my own damn fault for moving to L.A.

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NEAL POLLACK’s memoir, Alternadad, will be

tributor to many publications, Pollack lives in

published by Pantheon in January 2007. The

Los Angeles, with his family.

goodmagazine.com

author of several books of satire and a con-

America

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Last year, three friends gave hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: the undocumented migrants crossing the desert and the American civilians trying to stop them. The result? A portrait of the border like no other.

On the Line photographs from the BORDER FILM PROJECT 68

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America

Every day in small towns

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and desert stretches along the Arizona-Mexico border, a literal battle informs a political and social one. While the public, the president, Congress, and the courts debate the future of U.S. immigration law, thousands of migrants take the very real action of illegally crossing the border into this country. Waiting to greet them is a volunteer outfit of border patrollers who call themselves the Minutemen. The Border Film Project—a three-person team made up of a Rhodes scholar, a filmmaker, and a Wall Street analyst—hatched a plan to simplify the complexities of immigration and show the realities on the ground. They handed out hundreds of cameras to both sides, cleverly encouraging their safe return with pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes and zerobalance gift cards to be recharged upon successful completion of the project (Wal-Mart cards for the migrants, Shell Gas for the Minutemen). The beauty of their approach is its refreshing evenhandedness. Put cameras in the hands of those affected and let the stories tell themselves. No agenda, no censorship. The goal is to raise awareness of that porous, spongy thing we call the border. You can see more of the resulting photography at forthcoming exhibitions—at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and at DiverseWorks in Houston—and a book is slated for release early next year. In the meantime, GOOD offers you the first published images from the Border Film Project.

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70 GOOD Sep/Oct 06 I

America

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THE GOOD GUIDE

to THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS Introduction by JOEL STEIN Midterm elections are so uninteresting that political scientists have been able to write an equation for them: Y1= B0+B1P1+B2(∆E1)+u1. Edward Tufte’s 1975’s Economic Theory of Midterm Elections states that those lawn signs, local ads, and even the candidates themselves are irrelevant: people vote for or against the president’s party based solely on his approval ratings and their disposable income. The equation is more accurate than pre-election Gallup polls. And an easy way to outwonk your dorkiest friends. You want to end an argument with a poli-sci major, just start doing math. The reason midterms are the only time political scientists get to act like real scientists is simple: Even the few people who care enough to vote don’t care enough to research the candidates. Assuming you don’t have a vested interest in sugar subsidies, you don’t really care who your Congressperson is. No less your local judges. Whoever invented voting for judges was obviously an incredibly smart criminal. I know, you truly believe Tufte’s equation doesn’t apply to you. You’re different. You care deeply about politics. You do not. What you care deeply about is getting in red-faced screaming ﬁghts about why the president is pure good or pure evil. This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with the fact that you’re an angry person. Politics just happens to be the socially acceptable way for you to vent that anger. If you were one socio-economic notch less intellectually

aspirational, you’d be screaming at sports radio shows instead of “Meet The Press.” Compared to arguing over George W. Bush, fighting about your Congressperson is, adrenaline-wise, a major letdown. First of all, you have to find out stuff about your Congressperson. Even more challenging, you have to seek out an opponent who also knows something about your Congressperson. Having done that kind of research, you might as well just run for Congress yourself. Only about half of Americans vote in Presidential elections and that comes with prime-time debates and, thanks to campaign finance laws, tons of slick mud-slinging television ads financed by vicious interest groups. So it makes sense that midterm elections always lose almost exactly 15 points from the previous presidential election. That means about a third fewer voters. And they largely vote for incumbents. Because,

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HERE IS A QUESTION ABOUT SOMETHING see page 79

ANOTHER ONE see page 79

HERE IS ONE MORE QUESTION see page 79

77 goodmagazine.com The Good Guide

while you hate politicians, it just so happens that your Representative happens to be a good guy. Particularly since he’s running against someone you’ve never heard of who belongs to the party you don’t like. You’re starting to see how this works. So if the incumbents have such an advantage, and any deviation in your vote depends – mathematically – on the president’s approval ratings and your bank account, why are these people spending so much time and integrity fund-raising to ﬁnance their campaigns? Are they really that stupid? Is all this corruption and time and money completely wasted? Is the best political textbook ever written actually No Exit? Yes, in the macro-sense. But your guy, he doesn’t really want to be in the House of Representatives. Because being in the House sucks. If D.C. is like high school, Congress is the prom committee, only there’s no prom. This is a place so boring that Dennis Hastert was charismatic enough to be elected leader. Not only do you have no power, but you have to beg the

public every two years for a job where you eat lunch in a cafeteria. So your Rep is not playing to win so much as to beat the spread. If he can capture the outliers, if he can beat Tufte’s equation by a percentage or two, if he can exceed expectations, then he can run again if he loses, or run for a bigger ofﬁce if he wins. One where lobbyists take him to lunch at the Palm. This year voting will seem exciting because of a giant shift against the President, which, according to Tufte’s equation, means that incumbents will fall. It will make everyone feel hopeful, like the system is working. And it is, in that when change is desired, the House changes violently. Entirely new adults in suits get to have cafeteria lunches. Really, your research into the candidates won’t matter. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. No, you won’t affect who wins. But, with just a little bit of investigation, you can break free of Tufte’s equation. You can impact whether someone exceeds his polling numbers—thereby controlling the future of his career. Democracy may

THE RACES Historically, the number of voters participating in midterm elections is even lower than when the frenzy of a Presidential race brings shockingly few citizens to the polls. The 2006 midterms, however, are vitally important, since they will determine whether the next two years will herald a drastic transition in how our country is run. For the ﬁrst time in more than a decade, it is within the realm of statistical possibility that Democrats could take control of either one, or both, chambers 78

THE SENATE 1

THE HOUSE 3

MINNESOTA

OHIO

DEWINE (R) v. BROWN (D)

ALLEN (R) v. WEBB (D)

Truly unpopular Democrat Mark Dayton (the only senator to close his ofﬁce during the anthrax scare) wisely decided to retire rather than get trounced in this election, so this seat up for grabs. Prosecutor Amy Klobuchar will try to hold on to the seat for the Democrats. She’ll be running against Rep. Mark Kennedy, who is being hammered for having sided with the White House position in 98% of his congressional votes. Since neither candidate offers anything particularly exciting, this race will be a signiﬁcant referendum on how the people of Minnesota judge the policies of both parties without factors like charisma clouding their decision.

Mike DeWine is seen as one of the weakest Republican senators because he is too liberal. After fighting off conservative primary challengers upset at his membership in the “Gang of 14” who compromised on filibusters in the Senate, DeWine may still be tainted by a growing scandal in Ohio state politics that—no joke—involves the buying and selling of rare coins. Rep. Sherrod Brown, who forced the withdrawal of popular anti-war Iraq vet Paul Hackett from the primary, is hoping that anger at the President, and a conservative backlash against DeWine’s more liberal policies, will finally give national Democrats a reason to forgive Ohio for 2004.

cmbent Virginia Senator

KENNEDY (R) v. KLOBUCHAR (D)

2 MONTANA

BURNS (R) v. TESTER (D) In a recent Vanity Fair article,

convicted briber Jack Abramoff claimed that he received every appropriation he requested from Burns’ committee. The senator’s constant mention in connection with the everwidening Abramoff scandal has many Montanans up in arms. His opponent, state legislator Jon Tester, won an insurgent primary campaign, trouncing the Democratic establishment’s candidate. It will be difﬁcult for a novice to unseat a professional and long-serving politician like Burns. But Tester’s authentic Montana persona (which includes a combination of pro-gun and conservationist positions, in the mold of über-popular Democrat governor Brian Schweitzer) could prove just the thing to incite an upset.

4 PENNSYLVANIA SANTORUM (R) v. CASEY (D)

If you Google incumbent Senator

Rick Santorum, one of the top results will be an unprintable sexual excretion maliciously named “santorum” by syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage. Santorum, number three in the Republican leadership, is one of the Senate’s most conservative members, and his negative comments on issues like homosexuality have riled Democrats as much as they’ve rallied Republicans. Democrats would like nothing more than to remove him from power. They’ve ﬁelded Bob Casey, Jr., the pro-life son of a beloved ex-governor, who has surged ahead in the polls, much to the chagrin of some women’s groups and traditional Democratic fundraisers.

VIRGINIA

George Allen is a conservative poster boy often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in ’08. Opposing him is newly-minted Democrat James Webb. Democrats hope that Webb’s mélange liberal (anti-war, pro-choice) and conservative (pro-gun, Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy) positions will so befuddle the state’s swing voters that they will give up trying to ﬁgure him out and simply elect him. Webb’s recent party shift may strike some voters as opportunistic, while Allen’s blatant Presidential campaigning may turn off others. In the end, it may come down to Virginia’s sizable population of military voters deciding how much more war they are willing to stomach.

6 WASHINGTON

Most people don’t know who represents them in Congress. Even fewer people can name the challenger to their current representative—one of the reasons why it’s rare for a sitting representative to lose a House race. Should the Democrats miraculously grab 15 seats from the Republicans, you’ll be hearing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2007, a vision of the future that is ratcheting up the GOP fundraising. Here are 15 races that, unlike most of the 435 House elections, have outcomes that may be in doubt.

CONNECTICUT 2nd DISTRICT EASTERN CONNECTICUT

SIMMONS (R) v. COURTNEY (D) If Democrats want to take back the house, the best targets are moderate Republicans who serve in Democratleaning districts. Rep. Rob Simmons is a prime example. If his district decides they’ve had enough of the Republican party line, Joe Courtney is in, despite the fact that Simmons doesn’t very often toe that party line.

CANTWELL (D) v. McGAVICK (R)

First term Senator Maria

Cantwell won her last election by 2,229 votes, out of 2.5 million votes cast—a mere .09% of the total. This tenuous margin of victory puts her at risk against challenger Mike McGavick, a former insurance CEO and chief of staff to Washington’s last Republican senator. McGavick hopes that the absence of Bush’s name on the ballot will keep him from being negatively associated with a national party that is increasingly unpopular in the state. Based on his poll numbers, his dreams may come true. Keeping this seat is the linchpin of the Democrat dream of winning back the Senate

FLORIDA 22nd DISTRICT INCLUDING WEST PALM BEACH

SHAW (R) v. KLEIN (D) As of June, state Senator Ron Klein had raised more money than any other House candidate in his attempt to unseat 13-term Rep. Clay Shaw. But Shaw is a savvy vet of these House races, and the 22nd was redistricted in 2002 to give Shaw an edge against Democratic challengers—even popular, well-funded challengers.

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GEORGIA 8th DISTRICT INCLUDING MACON

MARSHALL (D) v. COLLINS (R) Mac Collins lost a Republican primary in the 2004 senate race, and is looking to get back to Washington. Rep. Jim Marshall’s district has been maliciously redistricted since he won his seat, and now leans more Republican than when he was ﬁrst elected. Couple that with Collins’ large war chest, and Marshall faces a tough test.

IOWA 1st DISTRICT (OPEN) WESTERN IOWA

BRALEY (D) v. WHALEN (R) The ﬁght for this open seat in Iowa may be an indication of how things will settle nationwide on election night. The district has been controlled by Republicans for a long time, but has been turning bluer in recent years. If Braley can claim the seat, Washington, D.C. might look different come 2007.

IOWA 3rd DISTRICT INCLUDING DES MOINES

BOSWELL (D) v. LAMBERTI (R) Iowa’s hallowed place as the starting gate for presidential races means that its local races get a lot of attention from presidential candidates who want an Iowa friend come primary season. Sadly, incumbent Rep. Leonard Boswell has been hampered by health problems, making Lamberti’s wellﬁnanced campaign to unseat him seem a bit heartless.

POLITICAL NASCAR As our nation’s fastest growing sport, NASCAR races attract droves of wealthy, elitist politicians hoping to cement their blue-collar, regularguy credentials. Watching a NASCAR race, you may notice the uniforms of the drivers and crew are nearly covered with logos of the many companies who pay to support the racer and his team in exchange for a ﬂeeting visual of their brand on national television. If only politicians were willing to be so transparent about who supports their campaigns. In the 2006 midterms, Senators Hillary Clinton (D-

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ILLINOIS 6th DISTRICT (OPEN) CHICAGO SUBURBS

DUCKWORTH (D) v. ROSKAM (R) Tammy Duckworth lost both legs in Iraq, and her critique of the war has propelled her into a tight race with Peter Roskam, a well-funded state senator. It’s a historically Republican district with an open seat, so Duckworth is going to have to get lucky.

ILLINOIS 8th DISTRICT NORTHERN SUBURBS OF CHICAGO

BEAN (D) v. McSWEENY (R) Rep. Melissa Bean has money in the bank, and the weight of incumbency, but millionaire businessman David McSweeny has a chance in this slightly Republican district. However, McSweeny had some business ties with Enron, which won’t endear him to many voters.

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INDIANA 8th DISTRICT SOUTHWESTERN INDIANA

HOSTETTLER (R) v. ELLSWORTH (D) Rep. Jim Hostettler once claimed that abortions and breast cancer are medically linked. He was also arrested for trying to carry a gun onto a plane. Pro-life, pro-gun Democrat Brad Ellsworth is just the kind of challenger that this conservative district might choose to replace their volatile congressman.

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LOUISIANA 3rd DISTRICT SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA

MELANCON (D) v. ROMERO (R) In this district hit hard by Katrina, Rep. Charlie Melancon is running against state Senator George Romero, who has grabbed a bunch of cross-the-aisle endorsements.

ALBUQUERQUE AND VICINITY

Patricia Madrid, New Mexico’s attorney general, is ﬁghting to take this seat in a district that went for Kerry by a slim margin in 2004. Wilson is popular, but may be dragged down by New Mexicans’ low opinion of her party.

Bullhead City

Kingman

Lake Havasu City

Surprise

Peoria Goodyear

NEW YORK 24th DISTRICT (OPEN) CENTRAL NEW YORK

THE “DANGLING MODIFIER”

ARCURI (D) v. MEIER (R) Twelve-term congresswoman and moderate Republican Sherry Boehlert retired, leaving a vacuum in this fairly conservative (for New York) upstate district. State Senator Ray Meier is well liked, but District Attorney Michael Arcuri may be helped by having Democrats on the ticket (Clinton for senator, Spitzer for governor) who will win in a landslide.

artist remarked that one of the new districts resembled a salamander. The “Gerrymander” (pronounced with a soft G) was born. To this day, politicians constantly ﬁddle with the shape of districts—for reasons both noble (to consolidate the voting power of minorities) and selﬁsh (to pack their district with supporters). Whatever the cause, new versions of the Salamander are rampant. We’ve compiled four of the strangest looking districts out there.

Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard G, like “gun”) signed the Declaration of Independence and took a principled stand by refusing to sign the Constitution until it was amended to include the Bill of Rights. Sadly, for a man of such importance to the founding of our country, he is remembered only for the political maneuver that bears his name. While Gerry was governor of Massachusetts, his party radically changed the state’s legislative districts to ensure future electoral success. A local

NEW MEXICO 1st DISTRICT WILSON (R) v. MADRID (D)

THE HOUSE

GERRYMANDERING: A FIELD GUIDE

Palm Beach Gardens West Palm Beach

Boca Raton Deerfield Beach Coconut Creek Oakland Park Cooper City

THE “CLAM DIGGER”

NORTH CAROLINA 11th DISTRICT INCLUDING ASHEVILLE

TAYLOR (R) v. SHULER (D)

ARIZONA’S 2nd

TENNESSEE’S 7th

The gerrymander to end all gerrymanders. Most of the district is huddled in the northwest corner of the state, but a narrow corridor connects it to a large block farther east. The corridor consists of the waters of the Colorado River, and nothing else—you must own a houseboat to live in this part of the 2nd. What accounts for this oddity? The eastern block includes a Hopi reservation, which objected to being represented by the same politician who represented a neighboring Navajo reservation. Apparently, this was the best solution anyone could come up with.

What seems to have happened here is that, upon discovering that the white suburbs of Memphis did not contain enough people to constitute a congressional district, the gerrymanderers simply decided to also include the white Nashville suburbs. That Nashville is halfway across the state didn’t seem to matter at all. And once you’ve gone that far, why not throw in Clarksville while you’re at it.

Nashville Brentwood

Lexington Bolivar Savannah

Germantown

THE “TENNESSEE STRADDLER”

FLORIDA’S 22nd

NORTH CAROLINA’S 12th

The district is so mixed up with its neighbors that a two-mile drive will take you through parts of 4 different districts. The 22nd consists almost entirely of beachfront property, running 90 miles up the length of Florida’s Gulf Coast. The several forays it makes inland were added to get a few more Republicans in the district (it was formerly never more than 3 miles wide) because its Republican representative only eked out a victory in 2000.

By combining the African American enclaves of several cities (Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro), the district has the second-highest minority population of any of the state’s districts. However, it has far fewer minorities than when it was ﬁrst created in 1992. The original district, called “political pornography” by the Wall Street Journal, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1996, at which point it got wider and shorter, but still retained the essence of its ridiculous appearance.

Winston-Salem

Thomasville Lexington

High Point

Salisbury

Charlotte

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Taylor made the ill-advised decision (later retracted) to come out against using federal money to pay for a memorial to the passengers of United Flight 93. Conservative Democrat (and former college football star and pro football burnout) Shuler is coming on strong.

OHIO 18th DISTRICT SUBURBS OF COLUMBUS

NEY (R) v. SPACE (D) Ney is the member of Congress most often implicated in the Abramoff scandal, though Ney claims he was duped, rather than bribed, by the free golﬁng trips. Challenger Space has pledged to accept absolutely nothing from lobbyists if he is elected to replace the scandal-plagued incumbent.

PENNSYLVANIA 6th DISTRICT W. SUBURBS OF PHILADELPHIA

GERLACH (R) v. MURPHY (D) Lois Murphy is challenging Rep. Gerlach again after losing to him in 2004. Gerlach needs to be as moderate as possible while still appearing conservative. His district isn’t happy with the war, but isn’t particularly liberal at heart either.

THE “INTESTINAL TRACT”

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TEXAS 17th DISTRICT INCL. WACO & COLLEGE STATION

EDWARDS (D) v. TAYLOR (R) This district includes the western White House in Crawford, and the president won it by 70% in 2004, yet it’s represented by Democrat Chet Edwards. Proving that Democrats aren’t the only party that can beneﬁt by ﬁelding Iraq vets, recently returned soldier Van Taylor is proving a formidable challenger for Edwards.

VOTING MATTERS In the current political climate, where electoral math minimizes the importance of all but a few key states months before a presidential election, it’s no surprise that more and more people are becoming disillusioned about politics. How could my vote matter, they wonder, when elections are decided by millions of votes? One vote is just a drop in that puddle. But, more often than you might think, elections (especially congressional elections) are decided by the slimmest of margins. Take, for example, the 2002 election for U.S. Representative in Colorado’s 7th district, which encompasses some suburbs of Denver and a large slice of the surrounding countryside. Once all the votes were tallied (and lawsuits decided) the Republican candidate, Bob Beauprez, beat Democrat Mike Feeley by 121 votes—.07% of the 163,477 cast. What kept 121 extra Feeley supporters inside on election day? Maybe a few people decided to forgo vot-

ing to instead go see Rebecca Romijn-Stamos dance in lingerie in the election-day opening of Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale.” Because Denver’s football team had the week off, some could have missed lastditch campaign ads that surely would have aired had there been a telecast. A snowstorm and police shootout in the city the day before the election added other reasons to stay inside. And, surely, a campaign visit by George W. Bush the week before ﬁred up the local Republicans. And this is not a lone example. In the 27th District of New York, almost 300,000 people cast their ballots for their representative in 2004. The election was decided by 3, 774 votes. And, that same year, only 129 voters separated the winner from the loser in the Washington gubernatorial race, an election in which 2.7 million people voted. The next time you think your vote doesn’t matter, stop for a moment and think of poor Mike Feeley.

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next issue: THE GOOD GUIDE to SUBJECT TK 84 GOOD Sep/Oct 06 The Good Guide

PROVOCATIONS

“This generation, accused of indifference and greed, is awakening.”

Jeffrey Sachs says: We are the generation that can end poverty. In his inaugural address

JEFFREY SACHS is author of The End of Poverty, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also co-founder of Millennium Promise (one of our Chose Good partner organizations), an organization devoted to achieving the Millennium Development Goals through global action and partnership.

a half a century ago, President John F. Kennedy laid down a basic principle: “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” Peace or violence; building or destruction. It’s our choice. It’s our fate. Kennedy’s choice was clear. He declared “to those people in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves.... If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the free who are rich.” The Peace Corps was the first step of that pledge. Yet Kennedy’s message was drowned out by assassination, then Vietnam, and later Watergate, the tumultuous end of the Cold War, Bosnia, and now Iraq. We’ve chosen wrong, time and again. We’ve gambled not only with war, but also with the climate and the ecological support systems upon which our lives depend. But as another voice said in the early 1960s, “the times they are a’changing.” Go to a campus today, and you will find students organizing for a saner future. Students are fighting for global justice, for the control of AIDS, malaria, and TB, for the end of violence in Darfur, for help to the poorest of the poor. Students are training themselves with the tools that they will need to join the effort. This generation is traveling to the world’s troubled areas, especially those in poverty or under threat of environmental ruin, to see, to learn, to talk, and to contribute. This generation, accused of indifference and greed, is awakening to the much greater riches of challenge and action to improve the world. What John Kennedy said in 1961 about our power to do good is truer today than ever before. The internet age is the age of global empowerment. Places out of

reach just a few years ago are now part of a global soci ety. No village, no rural hamlet, no mountain redoubt is beyond reach. This binds us in a common fate, and in a common purpose. With communications, the flow of information, and the tools of modern science – medicines, insecticide-treated bed nets, improved seed varieties, ecologically-sound pest management, small-scale rainwater harvesting – farm families living in hunger and desperation in the poorest parts of the world can overcome extreme poverty, hunger, disease, and isolation. This isn’t speculation and hope, but fact. In recent decades, hundreds of millions of people around the world, mainly in Asia, have broken the seemingly inexorable cycle of poverty. The past generation of rural families in China and India benefited from irrigation systems, trade routes, and reasonably healthy environments. They are enjoying improved health, access to education, and a chance to participate productively in a global economy. They show what can happen. In Kennedy’s time, nearly half of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, that figure is around one-sixth. That one-sixth of humanity, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, must not be blamed for their continuing crises. The poorest of the poor can’t get out of the mess on their own, and they often face challenges that their luckier counterparts did not face. They must grapple with rain-fed agriculture, droughts, lack of roads and rail, and miserable burdens of malaria and other tropical diseases. Their problems are not hopeless – far from it – but harder than elsewhere. We are the first generation on the planet that can truly aim to end extreme poverty. “We” includes all of us. “We” includes old and young, rich and poor, American and people from the rest of the world. An interconnected world, a global society, will rise or fall to the extent to which we work together rather than tear each other apart. The world has its demons of division. We must urgently find a compass of common purpose. It is one thing to see suffering when there is no solution. That is the cruelty of a cold universe. But when solutions are at hand, suffering is not only a tragedy, but a risk as well. To leave mass suffering unattended is to signal that life itself, anywhere, is without value. Our children will be safe when children everywhere are safe, and when they are empowered to pursue their hopes

Karrie Jacobs asks: Can a good, inexpensive house be built? When I set out on a road trip to

KARRIE JACOBS, the founding editor of Dwell, is a columnist for Metropolis. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home, by Karrie Jacobs. Copyright ©Karrie Jacobs, 2006.

ﬁnd the perfect $100,000 house in July 2003, the median American home price was $168,000. By July 2005, it had soared to $206,000. In late 2005 it had risen to $220,000. And those median prices sound like bargains. In New York City, the median is $750,000, and the average selling price broke a million dollars in 2004 and kept heading upward. When I tell people at cocktail parties that I’m searching America for the perfect $100,000 house, they generally think that I’ve left a zero off. But then, when they’re done making fun of me, they ask with undisguised longing, “Well, did you ﬁnd it? Where is it?” The answer is yes; I found several. But this trip wasn’t a reality TV show, where there is a winner rewarded in a stagey ceremony in which I hand out longstemmed roses. Rather, it was my attempt to answer a question: Why is it that typical American house can be cheap or it can be good but it can almost never be both? Custom homes, the kind of architect-designed palaces in the pages of magazines, almost always went for upwards of half a million dollars—and often much more. It occurred to me that there was no challenge in building an aesthetically perfect palace if you could spend a million dollars on it. The trick was getting results for a tenth of that price. Certainly commercial homebuilders—the companies that routinely bulldoze open desert and plop down a brand new subdivision of Spanish or Colonial or Tudor homes—know how to build cheap. One of their

houses might, depending on the location, easily go for $100,000 or less. A handful of homebuilders are even dabbling in modernism by building subdivision houses they call “lofts.” But mostly that means they’re adding “Modernist” to their laundry list of historical styles for sale. And style isn’t the issue—not for me, anyway. The modernism that I love, that I care about, isn’t a historical movement that peaked in the mid-twentieth century and is currently enjoying a major revival, but is rather a frame of mind. It’s a way of thinking that involves an ongoing investigation of methods and materials. It’s a design philosophy that values comfort but doesn’t confuse it with excess. It’s a strategy that views the most important elements of design as space, daylight, and the surfaces with which we routinely come into contact. Occasionally, when I have expressed my views about housing, I’ve been accused of being Marxist or socialist, which is strange because I think what I’m being is American. The amalgam of innovation and egalitarianism that I admire is—or used to be—an essential part of the fabric of this nation. Recently I was following a team of architects and planners who were helping to rebuild the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. One of them, a Rhode Island-based planner named Bill Dennis said to a gathering of small-town ofﬁcials and residents, “Remember, the people who built this country weren’t rich, yet they built great towns.” I wanted to stand up and cheer.

“Occasionally, when I have expressed my views about housing, I’ve been accused of being Marxist or socialist.”

PROVOCATIONS Essays to stimulate thought and action.

GOOD Sep/Oct 06

Author portraits by Robin Cameron.

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Provocations

Jonathan Greenblatt asks: Do companies give a damn?

JONATHAN GREENBLATT is the co-founder of Ethos Water and a former vice-president of consumer products at Starbucks Coffee Company.

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If you read the business press, corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) is the new new thing. At a time when oil conglomerates are “earning” record profits and the dust is still settling from the Enron verdict, social responsibility has become the latest mantra of corporations looking to redeem their public image. It’s now vogue for captains of industry to claim they are motivated not only by a desire for better earnings but also by a desire to save the planet. But if you believe that BP stands for anything other than “Better Profits,” you might be interested in this bridge I’m trying to unload... Certainly we should applaud companies that genuinely are interested in sustainability. A number of firms have found religion and are accomplishing extremely worthwhile results through a newfound sense of local and global citizenry. But unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are simply flying the banner of CSR, without any real intention of changing how they conduct business. In one camp are firms who introduce CSR by way of apology—as a response to critics, whether actual or perceived. But, for example, no matter how loudly Coca Cola trumpets its participation in the UN Global Compact or its environmental reports, it can’t quiet accusations of reprehensible labor practices in developing countries or abuses of water resources in India. The Coke boycott (www.killercoke.org), fast spreading across American college campuses, suggests that not everyone is buying the company’s message. In the other camp are businesses that see CSR as a clever means to sell yet more of their goods. Such efforts should be acknowledged for their true aim: the narrow pursuit of profit, albeit dressed up with a bit of lipstick to attract new consumers. Cereal companies may tout the use of non-genetically-modified rice in their products, but they still bury their cereal in sugar and relentlessly advertise it to children. Because of such naked deceptions, corporate social responsibility runs the risk of joining other management fads from the ages—in the dustbin. And if treated merely as a cosmetic, it is doomed to fail. The desire to do the right thing must be bound up in the very fabric of a business, helping to guide its efforts to increase r

“CSR runs the risk of joining management fads from the ages in the dustbin.”

Kurt Vonnegut asks:

evenue or reduce expenses, or else the business will invariably make short-term decisions that drive immediate proﬁts at the expense of good long-term behavior. Authenticity cannot be cooked up after the fact: it must be present from the beginning. Some businesses have gotten it right. Standouts

include General Electric, which is pursuing profitable innovation in green markets with its cross-cutting EcoImagination campaign; Patagonia, with its clothing and gear designed to enable its customers to enjoy an outdoors lifestyle while educating them at the same time; and Working Assets, with its affordable long-distance service emboldened by consumer-driven philanthropy. A deep-rooted ethical commitment inspired these initiatives. The profits came later. Among other pioneers, I would highlight Ford, for the company’s revolutionary redesign of its River Rouge plant—converting a dilapidated manufacturing complex in Dearborn, Michigan into a model of environmental responsibility. Or Starbucks, for its bold decision at an early (and unprofitable) time to provide its entire workforce, primarily part-time employees, with complete health care coverage and stock options (full disclosure: I once worked for Starbucks). These decisions—to construct a production facility that supports the surrounding ecosystem or to plan for healthy workers—seem like short-term costs, but they are sensible when considered in the long-run on their own merits, not just as one-time PR tactics. They are socially responsible solutions to familiar business problems: managing manufacturing costs and reducing employee turnover. CSR does not stand for Corporate Spin and Rhetoric. It cannot succeed as a marketing plan to placate critics. Companies need to build brands and implement business strategies that are grounded in an ethical framework. When thoughtful behavior inspires a corporation from the start, the company can win on multiple levels. And when managers throughout the organization are rewarded for putting sustainability first, the company has a much better chance of creating success that serves the needs of all stakeholders.

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Provocations

Uzodinma Iweala asks: Am I American enough for you?

UZODINMA IWEALA is author of the critically acclaimed “Beasts of No Nation.” He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I’m tired of Americans questioning my “Americanness.” In March of last year, I flew into the United States via London on British Airways. After landing in Washington D.C., I found myself face to face with a U.S. Customs Service officer. His shoulders slouched. His belly hung over a belt heavy with a radio, shiny handcuffs, and a sinister black gun. Even his handle bar mustache seemed to sag. “Passport,” he said without looking at my face. I handed him my navy blue American passport with its golden eagle stamped on the cover. He opened it, flipped through, and then said rather rudely, “So why are you here?” “Excuse me?” I asked, unsure of how to respond his question. “Uh… I live here?” “Look, son. Why are you here?” he asked again with more of an edge to his voice. My passport quivered in his hand. I tried again, “I live here.” It’s only when his fleshy fingers slid along his belt and came to rest just atop the black handgrip of his gun that I realized he was asking a very different question. He had seen the name of a foreigner stamped inside an American passport and wondered why I had citizenship in his country. On the surface the immigrant or children of immigrants from the developing world may seem to face the same challenges as the wave of European immigrants who came before us. Differences in language and culture provide an obstacle to assimilation into mainstream American society. There is one issue that makes our immigrant experiences profoundly different that those of European immigrants of the early twentieth century: the way we look. Unlike white Europeans who look just like white Americans, the African, Asian, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant—for the most part—does

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not fit America’s picture of itself. Thus we have a much harder time gaining acceptance into this supposedly welcoming country. America definitely has issues with acceptance of non-white Americans as real Americans. No matter how long you have lived in the states, if you don’t have white skin, the public automatically assumes you aren’t fully American. During the 1998 winter games, MSNBC ran a headline announcing Tara Lipinski’s win over Michelle Kwan: “American Beats out Kwan.” Never mind that Michelle Kwan was born in Torrence, California. Never mind that she had never lived in any other country. What makes Tara Lipinski more American than Michelle Kwan? Both come from immigrant families. Both represented the United States very well in the Olympics. And yet the media, which ran a similar headline during the 2002 Salt Lake City games, seems to have a different idea. On a personal note, I have been told countless times, when I’ve been critical of the United States, “If you don’t like it, you should just go back to where you came from.” My response: “You mean to Potomac, Maryland?” Granted, new immigrant families complicate matters by holding on to cultures and traditions from abroad. I have often heard other Americans say of people like me, “They don’t want to be like us. They just want to use what we have without giving anything back.” While I will be the first to admit that immigrant communities need to reach out to other Americans, it’s a little absurd to expect us to do all the work. As has been said before, the ideas that we bring from abroad help to make America great. Furthermore, the majority of immigrants who come to the United States, whether legally or illegally, make major contributions to the country, economically and otherwise. The founder of Ebay—now an American—was born in Paris to Iranian parents. And how many immigrants have become citizens after giving their lives fighting for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many immigrants would do that for any other country? Immigration is a wonderful thing that must, of course, be managed properly. I understand that all countries need to regulate the influx of people. But America is strong because its policy of acceptance has allowed different people with different languages, cultures, and ideas to exist together in society—unlike in some other Western countries where one must pass a test to certify a certain level of Europeanness even before assuming resident status. So to get back to the officer and his question: “Why are you here?” I said, “ Sir. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I just want to go home.”

STIMULI

Nic Harcourt on music NIC HARCOURT is

Earlier this year I made my ﬁrst visit to MIDEM,

the music director

an international music industry conference that takes please each year in Cannes, France. At the conference, just like at every other recent industry shindig, from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas to CMJ in New York City, the overwhelming majority of panel discussions, and conversations in bars and clubs, have focused on one thing: how will things shake out in the music business as new technologies remove control of music delivery from record labels and radio stations? Notice that I didn’t mention MTV. This is because the station pretty much removed itself from the music game several years ago, largely dropping videos in favor of game shows and dubious reality programming. MTV says that it made the programming switch because no one wants to watch music videos any more. Fair enough. Generation (ﬁll in Madison Avenue’s current half-decade demographic description here) isn’t watching videos. They’re not listening to commercial radio because it a) doesn’t play the music they want to hear and b) pretty much sucks anyway. They are not buying CDs because they can download the music they want (sometimes paying, mostly not) or rip it from a friend. So where is the music business heading? Can it actually survive the current chaos and uncertainty in any recognizable form? The simple answer is that the jury is on a long sabbatical, and nobody knows. What we do know is that the internet and digital revolution have thrown almost every aspect of the music business into the air and the chips are yet to fall. In the ’90s, the record and radio industries systematically squeezed any last vestige of creativity out of their respective businesses in a constant kowtow to the bottom line. The record industry focused on Divas (Christina Aguilera), Boy Bands (’N Sync), and Alternative Rock one-hit wonders (The Verve Pipe). As a result of federal deregulation, corporations gobbled up large numbers of radio stations, and the once eclectic landscape of radio became a wasteland of homogenized jingles, shortened playlists, and beer and mattress commercials. By the end of the decade, tuning across the

of KCRW and the host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

radio dial for anything remotely original became a futile exercise. Drive across the United States and you’ll find the same cookie-cutter radio formats in every market. Non-commercial radio (i.e public and college) has become the last bastion of original music programming on the radio dial, as the audience has turned away from commercial radio in droves. Listeners have found other alternatives as well. Internet and satellite radio now attract significant audiences because they offer a choice. And that’s really what the current state of play is all about: consumers having the freedom and technological resources to make their own choices. The industry is still grappling with the fact that music lovers will no longer be spoon-fed whatever flavor record labels are pushing that month. Do the labels have a future? Yes they do, but it will involve a very different way of doing business. Early adopters have moved forward in their embrace of digital streaming and new media, and are using technology to make their own playlists. The record industry must adapt or die. Radio advertisers are beginning to shift their budgets to target new media consumers,. As for satellite radio, I’ve always believed that there are only enough potential subscribers to support one company, and I still believe that to be the case. Both Sirius and XM spend more money than they make. I failed math badly, but I still know that only the U.S. government can get away with a financial plan like that. There are still more choices around the corner. Digital radio, a new technology that allows existing radio frequencies to be split into up to six streams is becoming more and more accessible, and it’s only a matter of time until the web becomes truly wireless and you’ll be able to listen to web radio in your car. Bad news for the music industry is, paradoxically, good news for artists. The web has allowed them the freedom to develop and find a fan base in a way they could never have before. In recent years, I’ve known several musicians who refused traditional major label contracts (Damien Rice, Bright Eyes, Jem) in order to retain control of their musical visions, instead cutting

deals that gave the artist access to marketing and promotional support. I’m sick of hearing boomers bemoan the lack of exciting new artists while they drop a couple hundred bucks to see (enter old fart band name here) in concert. The truth is that there are many vital young musicians writing and recording important songs today, but you have to look for them. Corporate America isn’t going to discover them for you. The world has changed; there are no pop stars anymore. But there is a wealth of amazing music that you can discover. For a music fan, there’s never been a more exciting time.

Breaking it down: The web has allowed them the freedom to develop and ﬁnd a fan base: The Arctic Monkeys are probably the best example of internet buzz creating sales for an unknown band. Their debut release “Whatever People Say, That’s What I’m Not” (on Domino records) became the fastest-selling U.K. release of all time. Here are some other artists who’ve used the web to ﬁnd an audience:

album for Polygram he quit the band, citing disappointment in the commercial direction they were heading. He has since emerged as a mainstream artist in his own right.

Bright Eyes: The band stayed with indy record label Saddle Creek even after signiﬁcant commercial success.

Sirius: 4.7 million subscribers; growth strategy focused on recruiting high proﬁle names like Howard Stern

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: A New York-based band whose singer, Alec Ounsworth, has a warble not unlike that of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Through word of mouth, MP3 trading, college-radio airplay, and positive reviews on hipster blogs, message boards, and websites such as pitchforkmedia.com, they’ve sold close to 100,000 copies of their eponymous selfreleased album—most of them packed into padded envelopes and mailed by the band members themselves.

South by Southwest: founded in 1987, one of the biggest music festivals in the US

Christina Aguilera: debut album in 1999; can sing pitches above the whistle register CMJ: College Media Journal, has an annual music festival in New York

Jem: Her 2002 demo track became one of the most requested songs at KCRW long before she had a record deal ’N Sync: famously graduated Justin Timberlake to superstardom

Sandi Thom: This 24-year-old Scottish singersongwriter had spent six years driving her band around the U.K. doing gigs that attracted less than two hundred people. Her breakthrough came when she invested $100 on a webcam and webcast a concert from her living room in Tooting, London for 21 consecutive nights. The ﬁrst night drew an audience of 70; by the second week she was performing for 160,000. She launched her own hit “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)” before somebody smart at Sony/BMG signed her—the single became a smash in the U.K. and Europe.

Damien Rice: Irish born singer, former member of Juniper. On the eve of recording their ﬁrst

Sebastian Clarke: His self-released album “Songs From A Van” was in fact

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Stimuli

What is he talking about? Charles Peterson: Photographer who captured the love beads and the Fenders Chris Ware: Author of Jimmy Corrigan Dangling Man: Saul Bellow’s account of a man on his way to war

Dan Pearson on graphic novels

Daniel Clowes: Author of Eightball comics

DAN PEARSON

Crumb was a spooky cat who hung out with the

is a freelance

editors at Oui in the ’70s. Parents didn’t want him near their kids. He was an outsider on the inside, who filtered his times through the tectonic movement in his loins. There was, however, torture in his art, because it was about sex and love and revolution. That mattered. It was real. Two decades later, the comic book artists of the ’90s, beaten down with their own white manhood at Wesleyan, Davis, and Reed, would come to embrace Crumb and his boldness. It was only natural, in the cultural vacuum of that decade; they had finally tired of living on politically correct eggshells. Grunge and Gen X had turned out to be no more than a grand recruiting scheme by Microsoft and Intel, with super cool photos by Charles Peterson. Kurt Cobain’s primal scream had seemed real (and it was). But he would have been the first to tell you the underground had run its course, and no one should have depended on him for cultural insight. Yet the scream worked because what else was there to talk about? Peace? Prosperity? No drama there. The generation needed something primitive, honest, something from deep within reminding them that they hadn’t been reduced to characters in Tron. In Crumb and others, this new generation found a creative way to make love to the world again, without having to string crossbows with Ted Nugent. The comics they produced were serious, secret, subversive. You couldn’t find them on the shelves of Borders. It was Kurt Cobain’s voice, this time without the Kurt Loder commentary. It stood on its own, with characters who were aimless, diffident. The readers either embraced it, or knew that it shouldn’t be mythologized. Or both. Hate. Love and Rockets. “Hey,” the

writer, who lives in Stonington, Connecticut. He’s not going to lie to anybody: he lived for a while on a kitchen ﬂoor in Portland, Oregon surrounded by stacks of 1970’s Playboy magazines and mousetraps baited with Creamy Jif. This is how he became strong. Every year he ﬁnishes dead last in a March Madness pool, because he always picks with his heart.

Eightball: Groundbreaking graphic novel, portions made into “Ghost World” and “Art School Conﬁdential”

hipsters at Powell’s or Reading Frenzy thought, “That’s me.” And it was them. But then, while Generation X got lost rubbing itself into a ﬁt of cultural onanism, things got serious. The generation was cut off from the entire discourse, and was left to sort through all its closets of ironic t-shirts and space-age bachelor pad music for something that couldn’t be corrupted, something that could keep itself proud in the face of so much degradation. But come the second Bush administration, you couldn’t just wallow in your own self worth, you had to make a difference because it was getting way worse than you could have ever imagined. So Generation X sought a symbolic anchor to its old frivolity, some landmark, some sense that its artists had made something lasting of their brief peace and prosperity. Jimmy Corrigan, Eightball—at a sidelong glance the comics of that era seem insigniﬁcant. Look closer, though, and they offer a portent, even then in the prosperous, happy times of the ’90s, that everything was not all right. And now that time has proven that things are not, in fact, all right, the comics seem richer and deeper still. See the characters of Clowes and Ware? See them shaking and perspiring? It was about more than doing covers for Estrus singles. It was about fear, and loathing, and pain, and more than that, it was about isolation. What, the generation had to ask itself, did we accomplish with our privilege and opportunity? What is our Dangling Man? Who is our Jasper Johns? Tough to say. But you can be pretty sure nobody wants to go down in

history as the one who threw it all away for Counting Crows. Generation X has grown up, but we still see ourselves in the pages of the graphic novel. We are still the outsider, the aimless wanderer, even with our kids, and our giant haul of Williams & Sonoma wedding-registry loot, and the Krupps panini maker running double shifts on the ciabatta. We refuse to concede to convention, we refuse to believe that the way it is the only way it can be. We’re sensitive, but realistic. We’re artistic, but not affected. We’re organizing team meetings, but we’re still subversive. And strangely, we’ve been embraced by the establishment. Our comics are no longer mimeographed by friends in exchange for weed or guest-list comps at Kinko’s. They’re running full color as New Yorker covers or New York Times Magazine installments. See. We put our vision on the front page. We won. Full circle. We were there all along. We never left ourselves. We mattered. We matter.

Estrus: Record label recording and distributing garage rock Hate: Peter Bagge comic chronicling Generation X

Jimmy Corrigan: The bleak urban saga of a a taciturn nebbish. R. Crumb: Seminal comic artist, immortalized in Terry Zwigoff documentary Reed College: Liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon; students make a lot of banana bread with shakes Ted Nugent: Avid bowhunter, former sex-addict, penned line: “When in doubt/I whip it out.” Tron: 1982 science ﬁction movie in which life becomes a game of Pong

University of California-Davis: Not Berkeley, but Harvard graduates end up there for postdocs Wesleyan: Prestigious college in Middletown, CT. Harder to get into than Bennington, but same amount of orgies, hard drugs, and sophomores with literary agents

Love and Rockets: Rare literary graphic novel without references to author’s morning routine Oui: Porno mag popular in the 1970s. Powell’s: America’s largest used bookstore, Portland, Oregon. Reading Frenzy: Alternative bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Jasper Johns: Precursor to pop art; hung with people who made unlistenable music that appealed to Brian Eno and Can.

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senim nos et, quat.

iquipit, senim nos et, quat.

senim nos et, quat.

Stimuli

Michael Silverblatt on books MICHAEL

How did it start? First it was a friend saying, “I

SILVERBLATT

don’t read as much as I used to.” This was someone who read Gravity’s Rainbow as soon as it came out, but all these years later still hasn’t opened Mason & Dixon. Maybe he owns David Foster Wallace’s essays or subscribes to McSweeney’s but he simply doesn’t have time to read everything now. Of course, he never read everything anyway. He just knew about everything new and smart and hot. A few years later he says: “I just don’t have time to read anymore.” Well, hell, who doesn’t know him? The ﬁrst horrible job, the ﬁrst baby, the house that needs renovating, the hours spent googling on the computer. No time. Then later still: “I don’t read.” This in the same proud voice of someone who, when asked for a match, says a little too quickly, “I don’t smoke.” Or, holding a hand over the wineglass, says to the waiter, “I don’t drink.” Then the nadir. Last month I had a conversation that boiled down to: “What do you do?” “I host a public radio show about books.” “I hate reading.” I felt like I’d been spat at or slapped. I fought the impulse to say, “Well, I hate you.” But soon I met a whole brigade of reading haters. My niece hates reading, an art dealer I met hates reading, the publisher of a brand new magazine hates reading. So, after crawling out of a puddle of tears, I began to wonder why people hate reading. Why do they say it so calmly? Why do they say it to me? Once they would have hid the truth and pretended to be interested. I think the answer I came up with is interesting, and

produces and hosts KCRW’s Bookworm and thinks he likes to stay awake in bed with his eyes closed. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

I want to tell it to you, and I want you to listen and to stop laughing at me. Sit down. I think you have never been taught to read. I know I shouldn’t say this to you (you’re very nice) but I know it to be true, or true in so many cases that the exceptions don’t matter. In 1962, poet-critic Randall Jarrell published his essay “The Schools of Yesteryear.” In it, he examines the Appleton Readers, once the most popular school readers used in American public schools, and he found that in 1880, the ﬁfth grade reader contained works by Byron, Coleridge, Cervantes, Dickens, Emerson, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Shelley, Thoreau, Mark Twain and “simpler writers such as Scott, Burns, Longfellow, Cooper, Audubon, Poe, Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving.” Fourth graders were reading Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and poems by Wordsworth. If you’re thinking to yourself, “How could that be? I didn’t encounter anything like this until college,” well, that’s exactly Jarrell’s point. A decision was made about how to teach reading that, by the 1950’s, ensured Americans would not know their own (or any other) culture. We’re all consequences of that decision. Remember second grade? We opened our class readers and read something like: See the dog run! Go, dog. Go! Go, go, go. And in case you missed the point, this was accompanied by a bright picture of a dog . . . going. We were given more and more of this, readers and workbooks and special projects, and the sure thing is that these

words were not written by a writer but by a committee, a committee of reading specialists whose assignment was to create a program to guarantee that everyone would be able to read by the fourth grade. “Able to read” means, of course, able to recognize simple words, a skill of sorts but not to be confused with reading. We were taught to recognize words but not to enjoy reading, and we weren’t given anything of value to read. So we learned not to read, but to respond to a reading technology. What did the technology leave out? Only everything. The crucial thing it omitted is the rich and valuable experience of incomprehension, the most important element of reading. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age, with re-reading. I would bet you my entire library that after elementary school you never read the school reader again, except perhaps to laugh at it. Why would you re-read “Go dog, go?” It has nothing to tell you about dogs, or running, or going (whatever that is). It teaches you effective word recognition, but reading isn’t done with just the eyes, or the eyes and the lips, it’s done with the mind. “Go dog, go!” doesn’t engage the mind, not even a child’s mind. All it does is give the child the experience of achievement, instant and complete understanding—in other words, the usual American virtue of immediate gratiﬁcation. If the teacher read you a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in third grade, and then you struggled to read it out loud with the rest of the class in fourth grade, and you read the complete play in seventh grade—you would have the incredible experience of discovering that the mind comes to terms with its own incomprehension. The clearing of the fog of incomprehension is the yardstick of growth, every kind of growth: emotional, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, human growth. By now it isn’t just one generation of kids that wasn’t taught to read, their parents weren’t taught either. “A new ﬁgure has conquered the social stage. This new species is the second-order illiterate,” writes Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a brilliant German culture critic, in his essay “In Praise of Illiteracy.” “It contributes to the second-order illiterate’s sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a secondorder illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. . . . The ideal medium for the second-order illiterate is television.” By now second-order illiteracy has become so

common that we elect second-order illiterates to ofﬁce. Our president is only the most obvious example. Other second-order illiterates seem to identify with and to be consoled by the second-order illiteracy of their leaders. They like direct statement (they learned from that school reader) and have low tolerance for complex argument—really for complexity of any kind. I don’t have a solution, but I’ll make a deal with you. If you will compromise and admit that you don’t hate reading, I promise never to recommend a book that will waste your time. Maybe, gradually, I can persuade you to do good: to help change the way reading is taught in this country. Maybe we can alter our future.

Some more information: Gravity’s Rainbow (1974): by Thomas Pynchon, the paradigm for the difﬁcult novel of its time.

Mason & Dixon (1997): also by Pynchon.

Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: The ﬁrst appearance of the phrases “kindred spirit” and “paths of glory.” William Wordsworth: Father of Romantic poetry. A Midsummer’s Night Dream: Shakespearean comedy about young lovers lost in a forest.

David Foster Wallace: American writer, author of the novel Infinite Jest (1996). McSweeney’s: edited by Dave Eggers; the best literary magazine in which to find new fiction. Randall Jarrell: probably the most sensitive critic of poetry in his time. “The Schools of Yesteryear:” to be found in Jarrell’s collection A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962).

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: German author, poet, editor; has written eloquently about the phenomenon of modern terrorism. “In Praise of Illiteracy”: delivered as an acceptance speech by Enzensberger when he won the Heinrich Boll Prize for contributions to German literature.

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MORE INFO Duis dolortioIbh et ad tiniatum

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iquipit, senim nos et, quat.

senim nos et, quat.

iquipit, senim nos et, quat.

senim nos et, quat.

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