February 8, 2010 — steveneidman

America: A fearsome foursome

By Edward Luce

The team seen most often in the Oval Office
David Axelrod, senior adviser A former journalist on the Chicago Tribune who quit to set up a political advertising firm, Mr Axelrod, 54, is Barack Obama’s longest-standing mentor, from his days in Chicago politics. Always at the candidate’s side during the election campaign, he is the chief defender of the Obama brand. Still a journalist at heart, he describes himself as having been “posted to Washington”.

Robert Gibbs, communications chief

The most visible face of the White House for his sardonic daily briefings. Mr Gibbs, 38, is perhaps the least likely member of the circle – he is a career Democratic press officer from Alabama who quit John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and shortly afterwards went to work for Senator Obama. A constant presence during the campaign, he is also seen as a keeper of the flame.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff

The best story about Mr Emanuel, 50, concerns the dead fish he delivered to a pollster who displeased him. The least honey-tongued politician in Washington, he is also one of the most effective. Friends say he is relentlessly energetic, critics that he has attention deficit disorder. He has enemies but even detractors concede he may well achieve his aim of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House of Representatives.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser

An old friend of the Obamas, having hired Michelle to work in Chicago politics in the early 1990s, Ms Jarrett, 53, is probably the first family’s most intimate White House confidante. A former businessperson and aide to Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, she was briefly considered as a candidate to fill Mr Obama’s Senate seat. She was part of the circle he consulted before running for president.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

“There is an old joke,” says Mr Gergen. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

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February 4, 2010 — steveneidman

It’s the Phenome and Not the Genome: Put Your Money on Mortal Flesh

by Abraham Verghese

doctor-David McNew-big.jpg

Strong is your hold O mortal flesh . . .

From The Last Invocation, Walt Whitman

Is it just me, or are you also getting a bit tired of all the hype about the genome? Don’t get me wrong– it’s pretty incredible that in my lifetime we have mapped out the 25,000 plus genes in our DNA. What’s even more amazing is that the price for that chart of the human genome has gone from millions to less than $50,000 and now it takes only a few weeks. I bet by next year it might be a few hundred dollars and take a day! Companies like 23andMe (an innovative venture with a great marketing plan) offer to check you for genetic markers that predict your risk for certain diseases for just a few hundred dollars.

But the fact remains that for most of us, the genotype is much less relevant than the phenotype. What is phenotype? It is the things we can see, the outward or observable physical or biochemical characteristics and they are determined by both your genetic makeup and environmental influences. Your blond hair, your weight, your strange nose, green eyes and that funky shaped little toe of yours –all examples of phenotype.

So what do I mean when I say phenotype is more relevant than genotype? Well, let’s say a new patient, a male, walks into my office and he is in his fifties. Let’s say he happens to have the outline of a pack of cigarettes showing in his front pocket. As a male he already has one risk factor for coronary artery disease–just being male, alas. The cigarettes tell me that he is four times more likely to have a heart attack than his peers who don’t smoke. His risk of sudden death is at least doubled. Let’s say I notice he happens to be carrying more than 30 pounds of extra poundage above the belt line: that allows me to predict he has a higher chance of being at risk for diabetes, if he is not already frankly diabetic. Let’s say that I notice too the pale outline of a recently-removed wedding ring (I can’t help it, my eyes are always looking at the body as text–even when I am out of the hospital), then I know that his risk of death as a  recently divorced man can be double that of his married peers.

At this point, before he has even said a word or before I have examined him, I already know so much about his risk of death and disease. Once we talk and I learn more about his job, his stress, his heredity, his habits, his past illnesses, then my predictions get more accurate. Once he disrobes and I examine him, I might find other phenotypic markers that predict risk (such as yellow plaques related to high cholesterol on his eyelids or elbows; high blood pressure; skin tags and velvety darkened areas of skin that predict diabetes; narrowed blood vessels when I look into the back of his eye . . . the list could go on for pages). In short, I’ll have an excellent sense of my patient’s risk for death or disease. At that point, mapping his whole genome, sexy as it might seem, won’t tell me much more than I know and will probably matter much less than getting him to quit smoking, exercise and lose weight.

The famous Whitehall Study of British Civil Servants ranging in ages from 20 to 64 found that the lower grades of civil service had higher mortality rates from heart disease and from all causes than did people in higher grades, even after accounting for risk factors like obesity and smoking. (Yes, it was counterintuitive and that is why we do studies).  Stress was thought to be the factor responsible for this disparity.

The Whitehall studies are ongoing and one of the latest reports from that study made me think of Walt Whitman and reminded me that the phenotype is so relevant. In their report (titled, “Utility of genetic and non-genetic risk factors in prediction of type 2 diabetes: Whitehall II prospective cohort study” and appearing in the British Medical Journal, 2010 Jan 14;340:b4838), the scientists compared a panel of genetic tests for diabetes (common single nucleotide polymorphisms) with non-genetic or phenotypic findings like age, sex, drug treatment, family history of type 2 diabetes, body mass index, smoking status, HDL, triglycerides, fasting glucose.

What they found was that the phenotypic tests did better. Indeed the gene tests added little to the risk already determined by phenotypes. In their own words, “the addition of genotypes to phenotype based risk models produced only minimal improvement in accuracy of risk estimation  . . .”  Translation: use your eyes, take a good history, weight the patient and get a few simple blood tests, and you can predict risk far better than a panel of genetic tests. 

I am not a Luddite (I find I say that a lot) and indeed, I do think the genome studies will help us eventually understand more about causes of disease, and perhaps even point to particular treatments. But utill then the message for us in the trenches is: Strong is your hold O mortal flesh and that’s where the money (speaking diagnostically) is.

Posted in Healthcare, Law, Medicaid, Politics, Steven Eidman, abortion, business, culture, economics, economy, gender, physics, psychology, tehcnology. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

February 4, 2010 — steveneidman

Remembering Salinger

Dave Eggers

I first want to say that I think this is a very sad week for American letters. Howard Zinn was the embodiment of the term “living legend,” and his effect on how we see and teach history is immeasurable. And the man worked till the very end, it seems. He’d just done work at Mission High School here in San Francisco last year. He was an astonishing guy; it’s hard to think of what the landscape would look like without him.

To lose Salinger the same week is odd, given that his work and life serves as an interesting counterpoint. If Zinn was the archetypal engagé writer-historian-activist, Salinger was his opposite. And for decades I’ve wondered what exactly happened to Salinger to drive him away from publishing and people, from much of an active participation in the world. Clearly he was wounded by the attention he received, and I’ve always wondered exactly what the breaking point was.

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so. When I was about twenty I read the rest of the books and stories, and when I began to teach, about ten years ago, I usually included a Salinger story in every syllabus, usually demonstrating the use of dialogue to illuminate character. His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I like to think that had he continued to write and publish, he would have continued to evolve in bold new ways. The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. And always, no matter where the stories go (or don’t go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s. A few years back, when he backed out of the publishing of “Hapworth,” I wanted so badly to write to him, to say that we’d publish that and anything else he saw fit, and that we’d do it in whatever quiet and respectful way he sought. It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that—with the desire to just have the book look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. But I don’t think he ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.

To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up; the pressure on any story or novel would be too great. And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way “The Original of Laura” was found. But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.

Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.

I guess we’ll see.

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February 2, 2010 — steveneidman

J. D. Salinger

by Adam Gopnik

Posted in Politics, art, arts, celebrity, culture, history, literature. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

February 2, 2010 — steveneidman
Posted in Film, Politics, art, arts, celebrity, culture, history, psychology. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

February 1, 2010 — steveneidman

Claiming J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

 By Adam Chandler

Let me get this little bit out of the way right now: Louis Menand of The New Yorker wrote the following about “The Catcher in the Rye” ten years ago and I don’t think it’s been said any better and I have the good fortune of being wise enough not to try to.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.

Menand adds:

Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Alright, are we good? Good. So let’s start with what is generally (?) known of J.D. Salinger: American writer, famous recluse, Holden Caulfield, Mark David Chapman/Lennon, and perhaps some stories about the Glass family. And to that, add this: J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, grandson of a rabbi, son of a *ham* and cheese importer/father and a mother who hid her true Irish-Scottish (read: not Jewish) roots until after his bar-mitzvah.

Of course, it was not until the deluge of tributes today that some (most) of us may have first sifted through his biographical information with any topical urgency. Now that we have, can we just concede that there is enough material in that early biography for a lifetime’s worth of not only storytelling–Great American or other–but a level of torture that is so specifically Jewish that, if amplified, it might give the entire Bernard Malamud canon a run for its money? (This is, of course, not even a slight knock on Malamud.)  

So why do we not place Salinger in the Malamud-Bellow-Roth-Mailer pantheon of 21st century Jewish American writers? Well, first of all, while we know about his roots, little is known about whether he identified as Jewish later much beyond his youth and, from the few interviews he gave in his long and winding life, not much has been parsed. We do know that later in his life he was partial to some eccentric ideologies.

Some literary authorities suggest that because Salinger so deftly camouflaged the Jewish experience in his writing it became unrecognizable. Therefore we, tortured as we are, couldn’t really claim him. Janet Malcolm, in a typically blistering essay, adds it’s not that Salinger didn’t find the Jewish experience salient or pure (she admits we’ll never really know), but rather, that because those edges were blurred the alchemy of solitude in his stories were made more universal.

Characters, beyond the obvious Caulfield, like Franny Glass exhibited symptoms of isolation and outsiderness that really feel particularly “Jewish” (gleamed from what is either known by us or found in the works of the aforementioned the Jewish greats). But they also feel human in a way washed of any explicit tribal suffering. This irked Jews like Maxwell Geismar whom Malcolm quotes:

“The locale of the New York sections is obviously that of a comfortable middle-class urban Jewish society where, however, all the leading figures have become beautifully Anglicized. Holden and Phoebe Caulfield: what perfect American social register names which are presented to us in both a social and a psychological void!”

To echo Malcolm, perhaps it resonated because it was a sting so bare and unadorned.

As for the rest of Salinger’s bio, well, a glancing over of it smacks of what many (or at least I, perhaps foolishly) would consider a very American experience: he hated high school on the Upper West Side, flunked out, hated military school, wrote about that, hated college, popped in and out of places, wrote banal and formulaic stories, they were rejected, wrote more, was published, was drafted for World War II (spoke German well enough to interrogate POWs and deserters), wrote about his service (“For Esmé — With Love and Squalor” is one of his best and most haunting), landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had a breakdown, was one of the first to walk into a liberated camp, befriended Hemingway all the while, published more brilliant stories, slipped off the radar more, experimented with Eastern religions, Christian Science, Dianetics/other crackpot philosophies, wrote more stories, then wrote ones without stark endings that were circular and so brilliant that people called them too weird to be enjoyed, had affairs with younger women, married a few times and had a few children (one delegate from both his wives and children wrote damning books about him calling him abusive, brooding, drinker of his own urine), sold the movie rights to a story for money, was dismayed by the outcome of the movie, never sold film rights again, had more affairs with younger women while locked up in the New Hampshire hinterlands, kept fellow reclusive friends, stopped publishing stories in 1965, remarried, stopped interviewing in 1980, sat quietly on a growing cache of unpublished work for 45 years, died at 91.

Perhaps this later Salinger biography (sparse in its convention, mythical in its hermeticism), the adult version of the one to which Menand so aptly links youth and Caulfield, is a reflection that says something about Jews in America. Something unspecific, something, like his work, inchoate and generally unsaid by the great Jewish American writers: we’ve arrived, our travails are universal, we don’t have to name our experiences so much. Or perhaps we do. I suppose once all of Salinger’s hidden treasures are pillaged and finally published, we can enjoy trying to claim him.

Posted in Jew, Jewish Interest, Music, Politics, Social Network, Steven Eidman, art, arts, business, celebrity, culture, economics, economy, history, psychology, school. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

Your Plane is Going Down. Now What?

February 1, 2010 — steveneidman

How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive

By Dan Koeppel

6:59:00 AM

35,000 Feet

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra­ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972, Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft and the body of another crew member, landing on—then sliding down—a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive.

Surviving a plunge surrounded by a semiprotective cocoon of debris is more common than surviving a pure free-fall, according to Hamilton’s statistics; 31 such confirmed or “plausible” incidents have occurred since the 1940s. Free-fallers constitute a much more exclusive club, with just 13 confirmed or plausible incidents, including perennial Ripley’s Believe It or Not superstar Alan Magee—blown from his B-17 on a 1943 mission over France. The New Jersey airman, more recently the subject of a MythBusters episode, fell 20,000 feet and crashed into a train station; he was subsequently captured by German troops, who were astonished at his survival.

Whether you’re attached to crumpled fuselage or just plain falling, the concept you’ll be most interested in is terminal velocity. As gravity pulls you toward earth, you go faster. But like any moving object, you create drag—more as your speed increases. When downward force equals upward resistance, acceleration stops. You max out.

Depending on your size and weight, and factors such as air density, your speed at that moment will be about 120 mph—and you’ll get there after a surprisingly brief bit of falling: just 1500 feet, about the same height as Chicago’s Sears (now Willis) Tower. Equal speed means you hit the ground with equal force. The difference is the clock. Body meets Windy City sidewalk in 12 seconds. From an airplane’s cruising altitude, you’ll have almost enough time to read this entire article.

7:00:20 AM

22,000 Feet

By now, you’ve descended into breathable air. You sputter into consciousness. At this altitude, you’ve got roughly 2 minutes until impact. Your plan is simple. You will enter a Zen state and decide to live. You will understand, as Hamilton notes, “that it isn’t the fall that kills you—it’s the landing.”

Keeping your wits about you, you take aim.

But at what? Magee’s landing on the stone floor of that French train station was softened by the skylight he crashed through a moment earlier. Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren’t bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won’t “open up and swallow your shattered body.”

With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don’t relax. This is not your landing pose.

The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal War Medicine noted “distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury.” Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver’s landing stance—feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips—best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls. Martial arts were deemed especially useful for hard-surface impacts: “A ‘black belt’ expert can reportedly crack solid wood with a single blow,” the authors wrote, speculating that such skills might be transferable.

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity’s banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo—starting from 9842 feet—fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls. But neither will help with the toughest part: sticking the landing. For that you might consider—though it’s not exactly advisable—a leap off the world’s highest bridge, France’s Millau Viaduct; its platform towers 891 feet over mostly spongy farmland.

Water landings—if you must—require quick decision-making. Studies of bridge-jump survivors indicate that a feet-first, knife-like entry (aka “the pencil”) best optimizes your odds of resurfacing. The famed cliff divers of Acapulco, however, tend to assume a head-down position, with the fingers of each hand locked together, arms outstretched, protecting the head. Whichever you choose, first assume the free-fall position for as long as you can. Then, if a feet-first entry is inevitable, the most important piece of advice, for reasons both unmentionable and easily understood, is to clench your butt.

No matter the surface, definitely don’t land on your head. In a 1977 “Study of Impact Tolerance Through Free-Fall Investigations,” researchers at the Highway Safety Research Institute found that the major cause of death in falls—they examined drops from buildings, bridges and the occasional elevator shaft (oops!)—was cranial contact. If you have to arrive top-down, sacrifice your good looks and land on your face, rather than the back or top of your head. You might also consider flying with a pair of goggles in your pocket, Hamilton says, since you’re likely to get watery eyes—impairing accuracy—on the way down.

7:02:19 AM

1000 Feet

Given your starting altitude, you’ll be just about ready to hit the ground as you reach this section of instruction (based on the average adult reading speed of 250 words per minute). The basics have been covered, so feel free to concentrate on the task at hand. But if you’re so inclined, here’s some supplemental information—though be warned that none of it will help you much at this point.

Statistically speaking, it’s best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft. Over the past four decades, there have been at least a dozen commercial airline crashes with just one survivor. Of those documented, four of the survivors were crew, like the flight attendant Vulovic, and seven were passengers under the age of 18. That includes Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, a 2-year-old wreckage rider who lived through the crash of a Boeing jet in Sudan in 2003, and, more recently, 14-year-old Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor of last June’s Yemenia Airways plunge off the Comoros Islands.

Crew survival may be related to better restraint systems, but there’s no consensus on why children seem to pull through falls more often. The Federal Aviation Agency study notes that kids, especially those under the age of 4, have more flexible skeletons, more relaxed muscle tonus, and a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat, which helps protect internal organs. Smaller people—whose heads are lower than the seat backs in front of them—are better shielded from debris in a plane that’s coming apart. Lower body weight reduces terminal velocity, plus reduced surface area decreases the chance of impalement upon landing.

7:02:25 am

0 Feet

The ground. Like a Shaolin master, you are at peace and prepared. Impact. You’re alive. What next? If you’re lucky, you might find that your injuries are minor, stand up and smoke a celebratory cigarette, as British tail gunner Nicholas Alkemade did in 1944 after landing in snowy bushes following an 18,000-foot plummet. (If you’re a smoker, you’re super extra lucky, since you’ve technically gotten to indulge during the course of an airliner trip.) More likely, you’ll have tough work ahead.

Follow the example of Juliane Koepcke. On Christmas Eve 1971, the Lockheed Electra she was traveling in exploded over the Amazon. The next morning, the 17-year-old German awoke on the jungle floor, strapped into her seat, surrounded by fallen holiday gifts. Injured and alone, she pushed the death of her mother, who’d been seated next to her on the plane, out of her mind. Instead, she remembered advice from her father, a biologist: To find civilization when lost in the jungle, follow water. Koepcke waded from tiny streams to larger ones. She passed crocodiles and poked the mud in front of her with a stick to scare away stingrays. She had lost one shoe in the fall and was wearing a ripped miniskirt. Her only food was a bag of candy, and she had nothing but dark, dirty water to drink. She ignored her broken collarbone and her wounds, infested with maggots.

On the tenth day, she rested on the bank of the Shebonya River. When she stood up again, she saw a canoe tethered to the shoreline. It took her hours to climb the embankment to a hut, where, the next day, a group of lumberjacks found her. The incident was seen as a miracle in Peru, and free-fall statistics seem to support those arguing for divine intervention: According to the Geneva-based Aircraft Crashes Record Office, 118,934 people have died in 15,463 plane crashes between 1940 and 2008. Even when you add failed-chute sky divers, Hamilton’s tally of confirmed or plausible lived-to-tell-about-it incidents is only 157, with 42 occurring at heights over 10,000 feet.

But Koepcke never saw survival as a matter of fate. She can still recall the first moments of her fall from the plane, as she spun through the air in her seat. That wasn’t under her control, but what happened when she regained consciousness was. “I had been able to make the correct decision—to leave the scene of the crash,” she says now. And because of experience at her parents’ biological research station, she says, “I did not feel fear. I knew how to move in the forest and the river, in which I had to swim with dangerous animals like caimans and piranhas.”

Or, by now, you’re wide awake, and the aircraft’s wheels have touched safely down on the tarmac. You understand the odds of any kind of accident on a commercial flight are slimmer than slim and that you will likely never have to use this information. But as a courtesy to the next passenger, consider leaving your copy of this guide in the seat-back pocket.

Posted in aviation, physics, tehcnology. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

Is Anti-Bankism the New Anti-Semitism?

February 1, 2010 — steveneidman

How to Think About: Jewish Bankers

By Michael Kinsley

Goldman Sachs, the huge and hugely profitable investment bank, has become a symbol of the financial excesses that helped to bring on the current recession. Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?

If you believe that Goldman has done nothing wrong, then any criticisms of Goldman or use of the firm as a symbol of the crisis are obviously unfair to Goldman. Furthermore, they would raise the legitimate question of “Why pick on Goldman?” and the possibility that anti-Semitism is part of the explanation. Similarly, if you believe that anything Goldman did wrong was done wrong by lots of others, the question of “Why pick on Goldman” arises, as does the same obvious answer.

Unfortunately for Goldman, it is not obviously blameless in the crisis. It was never so reckless that it risked going under. It borrowed only [sic] ten billion dollars from the Federal government, even that under duress, and paid it back as soon as possible, with interest. But the firm engaged in complex transactions that amounted to betting against its clients. Throughout the crisis, it enjoyed an implicit government guarantee on the grounds of being “too big to fail.” The government bailed out one of Goldman’s biggest borrowers–the insurance company AIG–saving Goldman billions in losses. And its profits and executive bonuses revealed, at the least, a lack of sensitivity at a time when millions are losing their jobs.

Even if Goldman did nothing in particular wrong, its status as one of only two remaining huge investment banks on Wall Street (the other is Morgan Stanley) might make it a legitimate focus, especially given its reputation, even before the crisis, for ruthlessness.

Is it legitimate to think of Goldman as a Jewish firm? Messrs. Goldman and Sachs, who founded the firm in the nineteenth century, were Jewish, as have been most of its partners since then, almost all of its leaders, and its current CEO (Lloyd Blankfein). It was founded because Jews were excluded from other firms. At this point Goldman is a publicly traded stock that anybody may own, and probably most of its employees are not Jewish. (Just as Jews are more than welcome at “gentile” firms like Morgan Stanley).

Is it legitimate to talk about Goldman as a Jewish firm? That’s a different question. Many American Jews think “Jewish” when they hear the words “Goldman” and “Sachs,” but still cringe whenever they hear the connection made in public, especially by non-Jews. Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.

But what about comments about Goldman Sachs that draw on the classic stereotype about Jews and money, without making any explicit connection to it being a Jewish firm? That depends on which stereotype you mean. There is the stereotype that Jews thrive and tend to predominate on Wall Street and in the financial professions generally. This is true, but so what? There is no mystery or conspiracy involved. Jews in Europe were excluded from many occupations for centuries. They couldn’t own land and be farmers. Here in the United States they couldn’t climb the executive ladder at big corporations. They were not welcome at investment banks run by Protestants. So they founded their own.

The stereotype that Jews gravitate toward, and often do well in, finance is so innocent that, ironically, bringing it up is suspicious. What does it have to do with anything?

Rush Limbaugh brought it up the other day. He said on his radio show that President Obama may be appealing to anti-Semitism with his recent populist criticism of banks and bankers. “There are a lot of people,” Limbaugh said, “when you say banker, people think Jewish.” He didn’t mention Goldman Sachs. Abe Foxman, longtime head of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, declared that Limbaugh’s remark was “offensive and inappropriate” and “borderline anti-Semitic.” Limbaugh and his defenders protest that Limbaugh clearly was referring to other people, “people who have–what’s the best way to say–a little prejudice about them,” and not endorsing such views himself. And the transcript bears him out.

By Foxman’s standard, even to mention that many bankers are Jewish is anti-Semitic (even though it’s true), and attributing this view to others (while professing to be worried about it) is no excuse This may be over-the top. We live in a culture of umbrage, in which everybody seems to be taking offense at something somebody else says. Foxman is one of the nation’s foremost umbragists.

However, Limbaugh’s supporters make too much of the fact that, read literally, his remarks took the form of defending Jews against unfair maligning. There can be something creepy about “philo-semitism,” or a professed special fondness for Jews. Even when it is sincere (as it may well be in Limbaugh’s case), it rests on an acute feeling of “otherness” about Jews that makes many Jewish Americans rightly uncomfortable.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite. (Many of Goldman’s harshest critics, unsurprisingly, are Jewish. Jews can be anti-Semites, too.)

Then there is this oft-quoted passage at the beginning of a lengthy rant against Goldman Sachs by Matt Taibbi last July in Rolling Stone: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and–to some critics– even seems to reference the notorious “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.

Taibbi claims to have been utterly blindsided by accusations that his article was anti-Semitic. He says he finds the idea “ludicrous.” He denies any relation between his words and classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. His critics find this impossible to believe. Could such a sophisticated writer (the article skewers Goldman with great skill and style) actually not know about the stereotypes and ancient lies that this passage echoes, and could he actually be surprised that there would be people calling his article, fairly or otherwise, anti-semitic? It may be possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker without being an anti-Semite. But is it possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker and then be surprised when you’re called an anti-Semite?

Posted in Antisemitism, CEO, Democrats, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, Obama, Politics, Steven Eidman, Wall Street, banks, business, culture, economics, economy, history, psychology. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

January 31, 2010 — steveneidman

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Greg Milner

 

In 1978, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe collaborated on an art show in New York that poet-critic Rene Ricard dubbed “Diary of a Friendship.” That could have been the corny subtitle of Just Kids, but the book⎯which is only occasionally corny and often deeply affecting⎯has none. Smith appends nothing market-friendly like “My Life with Robert Mapplethorpe,” probably for the same reason she uses, on the cover, a faded portrait of them taken at Coney Island in 1969 in lieu of a Mapplethorpe art photo. This is not a memoir of what these two became; it’s about their becoming.

They met in 1967, on the day Smith showed up penniless in New York. She headed for Brooklyn in search of old friends, knocked on the wrong Fort Greene door, and there he was, “pale and slim, with masses of dark curls.” Smith had a knack for this sort of fateful encounter. Long before she forms a band or cuts a record, she dates Sam Shepard and Jim Carroll, befriends Harry Smith and Johnny Winter, sings one of her first songs to comfort a distraught Janis Joplin, meets Jimi Hendrix outside a party both are too shy to enter, and gets chatted up in an Automat by Allen Ginsberg, who mistakes her for “a very pretty boy.” When she finally does perform with musicians and makes a big local splash, she frets that it is all coming too easily.

Smith depicts herself not so much a scenester as a sober (in both senses of the world) observer. For all its period detail and depictions of semi-voluntary squalor, Just Kids is hardly a Please Kill Me-style tell-all, but it is a vivid portrayal of a bygone New York that could support a countercultural artistic firmament. Even the geography remains unexplored. When Mapplethorpe decides he needs an embryo in formaldehyde for an art installation, the two find one by combing the ruins of the old City Hospital on Welfare (soon to become Roosevelt) Island.

Like her music, Smith’s rarified idea of the Artist (“I did it for poetry, I did it for Rimbaud,”) is occasionally grating, but much of the power of this book comes from her ability to recall lucid memories in straightforward prose. Even with all their relationship’s permutations (romantic, Platonic, maternal)⎯especially when Mapplethorpe begins to confront his sexuality⎯it comes off nearly devoid of melodrama. Just Kids makes a convincing case that faith in another’s expressive capability can form a bond as strong as any physical or emotional commitment. Smith nudges Mapplethorpe toward photography. Mapplethorpe urges her to put poetry to music, and bankrolls her first recording session.

If there was a point where their relationship really came to fruition, it was with the iconic photo Mapplethorpe shot for the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses. In appropriately gender-bending terms, she describes the result as “my aural sheath swathed in Robert’s image.” “When I look at it now, I never see me,” she writes. “I see us.”

Posted in Music, Steven Eidman, art, arts, celebrity, history, rock 'n roll. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

iPAD Thoughts

January 28, 2010 — steveneidman

First Impressions of the New Apple iPad

by Walter S. Mossberg

It’s about the software, stupid. While all sorts of commentators were focusing on how much Apple’s new $499 iPad tablet computer looks like an oversized iPhone, the key to whether it can be the first multi-function tablet to win wide public acceptance probably lies in whether consumers perceive it as a suitable replacement for a laptop in key scenarios. And that, in my view, depends heavily on the software and services that flow through its handsome little body.

I have only spent a short time hands-on with the iPad–too short to fully run it through its paces and formally review it yet. But, after attending the rollout of the new device today, and trying out some of its features for myself, I have some first impressions.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs positioned the iPad as belonging to a new category of device between the smartphone and the laptop (since the netbook, in his view and mine, is really just a small, cheap laptop). But, as the demos unfolded, I kept thinking it was more like a hybrid of the two. 

It uses the iPhone’s basic user interface and physical design. But, taking advantage of a 9.7″ screen and a fast Apple-designed processor, the iPad adds some user interface elements and functionality that aren’t available–or at least typical–on smart phones, but look more like computer software. For instance, its photo program works more like iPhoto on a Mac than the photo app on an iPhone, and it will be available with a touch version of Apple’s iWork productivity suite, which is Apple’s take on Microsoft Office. This is a much more powerful program than the phone-based office suites for the iPhone or BlackBerry, and Apple (AAPL) is only charging $30 for it.

Posted in CEO, Computers, Music, Social Network, arts, business, celebrity, culture, economics, economy, tehcnology. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »
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