I AM NUJOOD, AGED 10 AND DIVORCED

This week, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, Pultizer-Prize winning journalist Nicholas D. Kristof, who is also co-author of Half of the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, 2009), talks about an amazing new book, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced (Three Rivers Press, 2010).

In the book, the now 12-year old Nujood from Yemen recounts her life story, which involved being married off at the age of 10 to a man in his 30’s, and then courageously seeking to escaping this marriage by getting a divorce.

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced is already a bestseller in several countries, and is now available in the States in a paperback format. 

To have a free copy of this book sent to you, simply read the NYT article and book excerpt , then add your reactions and comments to this post to this and email us with your request.  Please be sure to include your full school mailing address.

A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED Edited by Susannah Carson

by Susannah Carson, author of  A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House, 2009).

“Can Jane Austen’s novels be considered the best novels of our time?”

“Why yes,” I responded, with the bewildered expression of someone who’s just been asked if she breathes air, “of course.”

But ever since that snippet of conversation I’ve been turning the topic over and over. Is it simply a devout preference? Or is it also a fact of literary history?

If we want to make the move from personal belief to universal truth, we’ll have to define our terms…

First, “our time.” We can parse that all sorts of ways, but let’s assume that “our” presupposes the Western Tradition and “time” dates from the end of the eighteenth century, when destiny became increasingly a matter of personal character: of manners, morals, and will. In other traditions (The Tale of Genji), in other times (the Aithiopika), novels portray a different sort of individual in a world full of different challenges and opportunities.

Next, “best novel.” That’s even trickier. It’s best not to stare at the word “novel” too closely for fear of falling into a bottomless debate about genre. Let’s go with the simple heuristic definition of “a long prose narrative.” We might still quibble about the details, but for the most part we all know a novel when we read one. Austen wrote six novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and the borderline-parody Northanger Abbey. Love and Friendship and Lady Susan, it has long since been decided, are just too short.

But the definition of “long prose narrative” will only tell us how to decide if a novel is indeed a novel; it won’t tell us if the novel is any good. Novels, we assume, are artistic creations, and therefore immune to anything stronger than purely subjective opinion. “I liked it.” “Well, I didn’t.” End of debate. Really, what more is there to say? Usually we feel it’s best to just back down, to agree to disagree.

To insist there’s some objective truth backing our preference seems at the very least uncivil. At the most, it rings out as a battle cry. “I liked it. It’s a good novel. In fact, it’s the best novel ever written.” We can almost hear the sword swishing clear of its scabbard. “I hated it. It’s disgrace to the written word.” Clang, clash, etc. How thrilling!

So these might be fightin’ words, but I do believe that some novels are indeed good, and that Jane Austen’s are the best.

Austen is the best novelist because we continue to read her. Women and men, young and old, scholars and those who read for fun. We read her in school, on the bus, at work, on vacation at the beach. We read her in translation, on Kindle, in gorgeously illustrated hard-bound copies. We read her alone, for solace; we discuss her at book clubs, for belonging. We read her and then re-read her. And then re-read her. And this frenzy of reading has been going on for two hundred years.

And we don’t just pick up one of her novels, flip through its pages, put it down, and get on with our lives. Rather, we allow ourselves to be changed. Sometimes, we even search out her novels in the very hope that they will change us. We think that they’ll make us better people, somehow—that they’ll help us turn into the people we want to be.

Sometimes that means we want to become more self-aware, more attuned to our own emotions, and more wary of our tendency to deceive ourselves (Alain de Botton). Sometimes we want more than simple awareness: we want real, solid lessons on how to become more “moral” (James Collins, C. S. Lewis), or on how to lead “the good life” (Louis Auchincloss). Sometimes we want to learn how to interact with other people: how to interpret what other people say and make ourselves understood (Benjamin Nugent). If we’re writers, then we study Austen to learn how to craft sentences, how to weigh sentiment, how to weave themes (Diane Johnson, Margot Livesey, David Lodge). Sometimes we look to Austen’s heroes and heroines for different models of gender. In our unisex times, her portraits of men being men and women being women are especially intriguing. Sometimes we enter Austen’s elegant world to learn more about it, sometimes simply to escape our own (Ian Watt, Lionel Trilling, John Wiltshire). And sometimes we step in to learn how to laugh (Eudora Welty, Eva Brann, Amy Heckerling).

Sometimes we read Austen because we want to figure out how love works: how to earn respect, and how to bestow it. We turn to Austen to find out what the mutual exchange of esteem looks like (Harold Bloom). Although Austen’s novels all end happily ever after, they’re anything but cookie-cutter romances. They’re about men and women who, at the beginnings of their stories, are somehow not open to love. They’ve managed to get in the way of their own happiness, whether because they’re too witty, proud, reserved, bitter, wild, imaginative, staid, or self-involved. Throughout the course of the novel, they then learn whatever it is they need to learn about themselves and how to relate to others: how to be compassionate, steadfast, hopeful. And for this, Austen rewards them with the love of the one person in their world worthy of them. So although in form these are stories about love, in essence they are stories about self-discovery.

There are elements of these lessons about life and love Austen in almost every modern love story, for we also get Austen indirectly from authors and filmmakers who have read Austen—or who have read others who have read Austen. She’s present every time sparks fly between a spirited heroine and a stuffed-up hero (You’ve Got Mail, What Women Want, and of course Bridget Jones’s Diary). Every time a matchmaker ends up matched (Amélie, Clueless, Cold Comfort Farm). Every time a quiet, hopeful heroine beyond her first bloom finds love (Moonstruck, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, As Good As It Gets), or two lovers get a second chance (Love Affair, Philadelphia Story). Austen influenced what we expect out of a love story, as well as what we long for most in love.

Can Jane Austen’s novels be considered the best novels of our time. I say “yes”. And maybe it is a preference after all. But, if it is, it’s a preference shared by so very many readers, viewers, writers, and simple lovers over the course of the last two hundred years that this cultish preference has become an astonishing phenomenon of literary history. Of all the novels of our time, Austen’s sacred six have had the greatest impact on how we live and love today. 

Susannah Carson is a doctoral candidate in French at Yale University. Her previous degrees include an M.Phil from the Sorbonne Paris III, as well as MAs from the Université Lyon II and San Francisco State University. She has lectured on various topics of English and French literature at Oxford, the University of Glasgow, Yale, Harvard, Concordia, and Boston University.

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SWITCH by Chip & Dan Heath

Brothers Chip Heath, professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and Dan Heath, a consultant to the Aspen Institute, have followed up their bestselling and course-adopted book Made to Stick with a groundbreaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives—how to change things when change is hard.

In Switch, the Heaths have written a thoroughly engaging narrative about the difficulty in bringing about genuine, lasting change—in ourselves and in others—especially when we have few resources and no title or authority.  The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting review that discusses the book’s message within the context of one reviewer’s personal life challenge, and in a recent video review social and new media  maven Chris Brogan called the book ”a must read”.

Check out their reviews by clicking on the links above, and start reading the book here; then post a comment: what do you think of the authors’ message?  Do you see applications in the classroom, among faculty/administration, or within your larger discipline?  Can we really flip the switch?

WHY WE HATE US by Dick Meyer

by Dick Meyer, author of Why We Hate Us: American Discontent and the New Millennium  (Three Rivers Press, 2009).

Since publishing Why We Hate Us: American Discontent and the New Millennium, the single question I have been asked the most is, “Will Barack Obama lead Americans to hate us less?”

The basic argument of my book is that Americans have developed a broad, enduring distaste and suspicion toward the main institutions and directions of our public culture. This holds true for politics, government, journalism, business, entertainment, marketing, law and even the clergy. Increasingly, Americans feel alienated from their culture and susceptible to its coarseness and toxicity.

So understandably there was great hope attached to the election of Barack Obama, hope that extended beyond politics. That hope, however, was no match for the decline of pubic trust in American institutions that has marched on relentlessly since the time of Watergate. And President Obama is no match for the effects of the worst economy since the Depression.

The president has been able to maintain his personal popularity. And he has lifted Americans confidence in government as a whole marginally. But there is no broader halo effect. There is no evidence that Americans are becoming more impressed and partial to the rest of the culture.

Indeed, our disenchantment has grown.  One strand of that, a positive development in my view but a cynical development to others, is what I call the “Madoff Effect.” Bernie Madoff is now the greatest crook in the history of American money. The coincidence of his capture and the collapse of the financial system in this country has guided many Americans to see our economic plight in essentially moral terms. The human vice of “greed” is seen as a deeply ingrained character flaw in the people who run our financial system – greater than the greed of past generations.

I agree with this assessment, but I might put it in rather fancier terms. Moral thinking and ethical practice in America since the 1960s has been marked by the growth of relativism and narcissism. The notions that there can be moral clarity, that some things are right and others wrong, that clear codes of conduct can and should apply to professional conduct, have become quaint, square and naïve. These ideas are all obstacles to doing what you wish to do and that, in a “culture of narcissism,” is simply intolerable.

The Baby Boom generation that grew up in this climate now runs the economy that has just collapsed. They have levels of education and training beyond any prior generation. They created a financial elite more “elite” than any prior generation. The gap between the mega-rich (say the top .01 percent of earners) and the mere super-wealthy was never greater than it was in the early years of the 21^st century. An extraordinary percentage of that wealth was not garnered by risk taking entrepreneurs and business owners, but by employees of large institutions.

By 2009, it was clear that the financial system that motored this boom was not just unstable, but unethical. In other words, mini-Madoffs – credentialed with M.BAs and clad in Saville Row — had seized control of the nation’s largest financial institutions and compared to prior generations were considerably less constrained by their fiduciary responsibilities, professional ethics codes, social conscientiousness and a traditional American/ Puritan ethic.

Vietnam and Watergate destroyed public trust in political institutions in ways that lasted three decades and counting. The crash of ’08 will likely do the same for economic institutions, which weren’t exactly beloved going in.

Have there been any counters to this trend? 

Journalism is in full crisis. The number of professional journalists shrinks by the week. The quality and depth of news coverage is in retreat is evidenced by the embarrassingly excessive coverage of Michael Jackson’s death.

Traditional religions are losing membership, though alternative practices, especially evangelical Christianity, are growing. Americans continue to be nomadic in where they live, furthering the decline of neighborhoods and geographic communities. People spend ever more time in front of electronic screens, bonding with e-commerce sites, social media friends and video games instead of eye-to-eye contact with fellow Homo sapiens.

Hollywood continues to stick to its recipe of constantly chasing profits by increasingly the vulgarity and violence of what it produces. The marketing arts have become ubiquitous and there are have quadrants of our lives anymore that have not been declared commodities susceptible to marketing.

So, do we hate us less than we did? Not yet.

Dick Meyer is currently the editorial director of digital media at National Public Radio.  Meyer was also a reporter, producer, online editor, and columnist at CBS News in Washington for more than twenty-three years.

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

A few years ago, in a conversation with my husband’s oldest brother, I said that I thought the only solution to illegal immigration was to help create jobs in the handful of countries that send about four in every five undocumented immigrants to the U.S.

My husband’s brother, assuming I was talking about U.S. foreign aid, got very angry. He reached for his pant pocket and yanked out his wallet. He slapped it down on the picnic table. “This is my money!” he told me. No one, he said, was going to use his hard-earned cash to help a bunch of people in another country he didn’t even know.

In times of economic crisis, his is a sentiment that is certainly shared by some Americans. Many, as evidenced by the comments to my piece, at least wonder if assistance aimed at countries like Honduras or Mexico only lands in the fat wallets of corrupt officials.

Having lived as a teenager in a country rife with corruption (Argentina) I certainly share this concern.

Still, I argued to my husband’s brother, the cost of doing nothing is potentially greater if Americans keep their wallets closed.

It’s true that sometimes places like Honduras seem hopeless. Last year, Transparency International ranked 180 countries for corruption, beginning with the cleanest, No. 1 ranked New Zealand. Mexico was No. 89; Honduras fared even worse, at No. 130. (The U.S. was No. 19).

Corruption was often evident as I reported Enrique’s Journey. For example, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, I spent days trying to reach one city’s mayor. I was trying to get him to recount the heart-warming details of how he had helped save Enrique, the migrant boy I was writing about, when Enrique was nearly beaten to death in Mexico by bandits.

The mayor wouldn’t return my calls. Finally, I sat on the stoop to his office one morning until he arrived, and he reluctantly let me in. He explained that most reporters in Mexico only tried to reach him when they wanted a bribe—to withhold publication of something negative they had unearthed about the mayor.

Studies show that corruption slows economic growth, reduces domestic and foreign investments, and limits competition.  Indeed, studies have shown that foreign aid does not raise per capita income in poorly governed countries. Too often, aid ends up in dictators’ pockets (or in their Swiss bank accounts), money that helps tyrants stay in power.

That said, in recent years giving nations, recognizing this problem, have begun attaching anti-corruption conditions to foreign aid, measures that require goal-setting and vigilant monitoring. Also, donors are increasingly recognizing that corruption thrives in nations with weak institutions, and money is being targeted to bolster those institutions, such as the police and judicial systems.      

The Millennium Challenge Corp., begun by the U.S. government in 2004, only allocates aid if a country can meet certain criteria showing they are working toward promoting free markets and low corruption. In its first year, Honduras and El Salvador were among 17 countries that were eligible. By last October, a total of $109 million had been spent in Honduras to improve transport routes (by helping to build a highway and three secondary roads), and to give nearly 6,000 small farmers technical assistance in producing and marketing high-value crops. (Following the coup in Honduras last year, all funding ceased.)

In addition to these measures, the U.S. could work to circumvent corrupt governments and help create jobs and improve schools by directly funding non-governmental organizations in places like Honduras that have track records for getting things done.

In its trade policies, the U.S. could favor goods from countries that send the largest numbers of undocumented immigrants to the U.S.

If, for example, the U.S. imports medical scrubs from Honduras and also from Malaysia, why can’t our trade policies favor scrubs from Honduras if we know that will generate employment in a country that sends the second largest number of illegal immigrants to the U.S. each year (only second to Mexico)?

Why not use trade policies to help reduce migration?

Many microloan programs around the world have proven quite successful at helping women begin small businesses that provide employment. Why couldn’t the U.S. help provide loans to programs that have good track records in places like Honduras?

On my website, I also suggest many ways in which individuals can help create jobs south of our border. There are suggestions on how to buy fair trade coffee, clothing and gifts. These products ensure that the people producing them are paid a living wage. I list many other non-profit groups that are doing good work in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere to create jobs so fewer women feel forced to leave their children.

Some readers have gone through these groups to provide a microloan to an individual woman in Honduras. Others have demanded that their college cafeteria start serving fair trade coffee. A staff member at an Illinois university took what was perhaps the most deeply personal approach. She said Enrique’s Journey prompted her to quit her job and start a café in Honduras, where she now employs 10 people.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS by Tracy Kidder

Tracy Kidder, author of such bestselling books as the college common reading classic Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World  and the new, critically-lauded Strength in What Remains, has penned an interesting op-ed in The New York Times about the current crisis in Haiti, offering some much needed historical context. 

You can read the article here.

LOST TO THE WEST by Lars Brownworth

by Lars Brownworth, author of  Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization (Crown, 2009).

There are few words as controversial—or as misunderstood—as ‘crusade’.  Those who doubt that need only remember nine years ago when President George W. Bush casually used it to describe the War on Terror.  The ensuing firestorm caused frantic verbal backpedaling, and resulted in the President spending the next seven years repeatedly explaining that he was not waging a war against Islam. 

Yet for all the disbelief and outrage, most people today know only a few basic ‘facts’ about the Crusades.  They are largely regarded as an exercise in hypocrisy, an unprovoked assault into the Middle East by an expansionist West.  Goaded on by the Pope, the knights of Europe sewed crosses onto their shirts and smashed their way into Jerusalem, committing horrendous atrocities in the name of a supposedly peaceful religion.  The shocking events traumatized the Islamic world, poisoning relations and leading many Muslims to conclude that the West—and Christianity in particular—was out to destroy them.  The chance for peaceful co-existence was lost, and it has been war ever since. 

Like so many popularly accepted storylines, this one depends on a short view of history.  The Crusades were indeed filled with atrocities on both sides, and Christians did indeed seize Jerusalem from its Muslim masters, but Christendom’s contact with Islam goes back much further than the eleventh century.  It began in the year 628 when Muhammad allegedly sent a letter to the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Emperor Heraclius inviting him to convert to Islam or face the consequences.  If he did indeed get such a letter, the emperor is not likely to have paid any attention.  The Arabs had never been remotely threatening in the past, and he was preoccupied with a bruising war against Persia.  Muhammad, however, was no fleeting Arab strongman.  He united the squabbling tribes of Arabia and inspired them with a new vision of a world divided between those who had submitted to Islam (Dar al-Islam) and those who had yet to be conquered (Dar al-Harb).  Prevented from fighting each other, they spilled outward in the first great wave of jihad.

Six years after Heraclius had supposedly disregarded Muhammad’s letter, the Muslims reached imperial territory and Syria and most of Palestine fell in rapid succession.  When the Byzantine army tried to reclaim its lost provinces they were lured into the desert and massacred.  Land that had been Roman for centuries now found itself part of the Caliphate and was used as a springboard for further attacks.  Then in 637 the greatest blow fell.  Christendom’s holiest city Jerusalem, which had managed to hold out for four months, surrendered to the advancing Islamic army. 

The loss profoundly shocked the Byzantines, and they continued to fall back before the onslaught.  Within half a century Muslim armies had taken the rest of Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa.  At one end of the Mediterranean they had crossed over into Spain, and at the other they were beneath the walls of Constantinople itself poised to obliterate the Christian Empire.  Thanks to a secret weapon called ‘Greek Fire’ and a resourceful Syrian shepherd named Konon, the city was saved, but its days of greatness seemed over. 

For the next three centuries, however, Byzantium stubbornly clawed its way back.  By 976 two of their emperors had marched down the Levantine coast, and nearly managed to re-conquer Jerusalem.  Unfortunately for the empire, both of these soldier-emperors were assassinated before they could complete their work, and the imperial recovery was cut short by the arrival of the Turks.  The Byzantine army was broken in 1071 trying to defend Armenia, and Asia Minor was flooded with Turkish settlers.  Once again lands that had been Christian for nearly a millennium were wrenched from their orbit and absorbed into an expanding Islamic state. 

It took a decade for Byzantium to staunch the bleeding.  Under the deft guidance of an emperor named Alexius, the empire managed to hold the line in Asia Minor, but its armies were too hopelessly shattered to mount a counteroffensive.  Desperate for reliable troops, Alexius took pen in hand and wrote a letter to the Pope asking for a few mercenaries. 

What he got instead was the First Crusade. 

The Crusader’s conduct as they entered Jerusalem made it a black day for their faith, but it was hardly the defining moment in the long conflict between the two religions.  Nor, despite later attempts to cast it as such, was it somehow responsible for Muslim animosity against the West.  That struggle had been flaring for centuries before the first Frenchman knelt on the field of Clermont and swore to liberate Jerusalem.  The Crusades—and the larger conflict that they were part of—can’t truly be understood without first knowing the story of Byzantium.  The continuing tragedy is that here in the West, it remains largely unknown.   

Lars Brownworth, a former high-school history teacher, is the creator of the podcast phenomenon “12 Byzantine Rulers” that iTunes named as one of the “podcasts that define the genre.” Brownworth and his podcast have been profiled in the New York Times, Wired, and USA Today, and were featured on NPR.

HIGH by Brian O'Dea

Brian O’Dea, author of HIGH: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009), responds to comments posted to his “Legalize All Drugs Now!” essay from September 23rd, 2009.

I was interviewed recently by a young reporter who grew up in the midst of the so called “drug war”.  As far as she was concerned, it is perfectly alright for our government to wage a war against the weakest of our citizens, even though her entire premise for it being acceptable  was built on a foundation of lies, untruths, omissions, and a complete disregarding of the facts.  Numbers issued by the DEA have notoriously distorted the facts for years (a simple example is found in their excessive valuation of the drugs they seize), and even only recently, under extreme pressure from LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition –LEAP.CC) have they changed a blatant lie on their home page regarding marijuana.

At any rate, I digress, let’s return to the interview.  At the one minute fifty-six second mark, in response to my call for legalization, the interviewer repeats yet another false maxim of those fighting the drug war: “And then you’re dealing with an increase in addiction and drug related crimes…”  This is right out of the DEA playbook and the facts tell another story.  Does she know this?  I hope not, and tend to think she and others are unaware of the lack of veracity in this argument.  However, quite the opposite is true, as is proven in Portugal, where all drugs have been legalized – decreased drug addiction since legalization, decreased crime rate related to addiction, increased number of addicts seeking help, the age of youth starting to use drugs has risen by over one full year.  I hope this addresses one of the concerns raised by a commenter in response to my original piece on this blog.  Amy wonders if legalization will: “… encourage young kids to just try heroin once, and become addicted for life?”  It should be pointed out here, too, that legal drugs are much harder to get than illegal ones.  Money is the only barrier between me and any illegal drug.

There, in a nutshell, is the hill we have to climb.  Mainstream media promotes the lie, and in doing so, creates sensational style journalism (probably the absolute wrong word to use here, because authentic journalism it is not) which pleases advertisers and their phony stance on, well, just about everything.

A great example of the hypocrisy we are dealing with can be seen in society’s acceptance of alcohol, which can be a harmful and dangerous drug for both the user and those in their environment.  We drug test all of our athletes, but not for alcohol and tobacco, two of the most damaging drugs in the entire pharmacopeia.  Both of these drugs have been aimed at our youth for generations and we hear no hue and cry from the media about that.  Students at my son’s school can be seen sporting T-shirts emblazoned with one booze logo or another, and this is for some reason tolerated if not condoned.  Sporting events aimed at our youth are also often sponsored by alcohol manufacturing companies of one stripe or another and, yet again, this is considered acceptable.

In the prisons where I have been, I have taken my own version of a straw pole, and have discovered that in every instance over 90% of the individuals in prisons for violent offenses were under the influence of alcohol when they committed their acts of violence.  Not heroin.  Not cocaine.  Not PCP, or mescaline, or meth.  Don’t get me wrong.  I can speak from experience when I say that being hooked up on these drugs in a nightmare, and not recommended, but with their addiction, problems arise when the supply is withdrawn, when there is no access to supply due to financial constraints primarily, and banks get robbed in an effort to find money for the drugs.

Another responder to my piece, Jess, says “Alcohol… [is] a harmful drug to those who abuse it….”  I would go one step further, Jess, and say that with alcohol, violence oftentimes results as symptoms of inebriation.   Women, children and motorists are all too often innocent victims of alcohol, yet we cheer its presence among us.  I would argue that if we supplied a heroin addict with his fix, we would see quite the opposite effect: the abuser would be subdued and satiated and would not be prone to lashing out at others, which includes robbing a bank.  .  In fact, federal prisons are filled with junkies who robbed banks for one of two reasons, a) to get money for the drug, or b) to get caught and locked up so they could have a safe place to get off the stuff (this method of quitting doesn’t always work, as all of the federal prisons I have experienced have heroin on the yard).

Another poster, Mikaila, makes a tremendously important point, “Drug illegalization is a great example of this… in terms of race-based eradication efforts.”  Federal and state prisons are filled with young black men serving disproportionately higher sentences than their white counterparts.  The crack laws were aimed specifically at the black community.  For years this disparity has been there, white youth receiving five years for a coke where a black person will get fifty.  Concerned citizens have been trying to overturn this bad law for years, but to no avail It is truly a law against the impoverished black community, nothing less.

Getting back to the interview: In this country there are approximately 180 directors of all the major media outlets, directors who cross pollinate onto other corporate boards.  These individuals act as the gateway to the information we get to consume (for the most part).  All too often, the axe they are grinding is to be used as a weapon assailing the truth before it gets to us.  When the media that is consumed by most Americans is perpetrating and perpetuating the lie, is cooperating in it, then it becomes a gargantuan task to properly inform the public.

Those of us who know enough to seek beyond and around any of these fabrications are responsible for speaking out at every opportunity.  If we choose not to do so, then we are participating in this horribly damaging exercise targeting the weakest among us.  We are part of the problem of vastly overcrowded prisons filled with a great disproportion of minority groups, and poor people.  I, for one, cannot bear to live my life with that burden.  If we do not speak out, we are treating these struggling individuals as our scapegoats, foisting our own imperfections on their backs and hustling them off to the gulags.  Can you live with that?

We must speak out at every opportunity; we must challenge the status quo, we must subvert the dominant paradigm.  Thank you to those who have taken the time to listen to me and to share your thoughts. 

To these people and everyone else for that matter, I say:
Find your voice, my friends, and then use it.

Brian O’Dea is the author of High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler (Other Press 2009).  He is currently working as a film and television producer and lives with his family in Toronto.

The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley

by Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why and a contributor to TIME Magazine.

One of the strange things about influenza pandemics is that they happen in slow motion, giving us time to reflect.
Looking back, it’s clear that one major challenge was (and will be) striking the elusive balance between reasonable mobilization and overreaction. We want people to wash their hands and stay home when they are sick; we don’t want people to stone buses carrying a sick passenger from another country.

How do we dial up—or down—our response to a pandemic in real time? It might help to shape public warnings and communication according to how the brain actually works.

We know that the brain does not conduct purely rational assessments of risk (i.e. probability multiplied by consequences). We know, thanks to the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, that people rely on emotional shortcuts, called “heuristics,” to make choices. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts. And the shortcuts, while useful, lead to a slew of predictable errors.

In one study, Kahneman and Tversky found that a majority of subjects judged a deadly flood triggered by a California earthquake to be more likely than an equally deadly flood occurring somewhere else in North America on its own. The notion of a California earthquake resonated more than the prospect of a flood—and so it was assigned a higher probability.

In fact, the chances of a flood occurring for some other reason is far greater. But that kind of workaday flood does not trigger the same cascading series of emotional shortcuts. It is less scary for a reason, which isn’t to say that it’s rational.

But how does the brain assess the risk of a pandemic influenza? We know that in general people assign more risk to things that they dread. Dread matters more than almost anything else.

So to manipulate dread (to boost or lower dread when needed), we need to understand what causes it. After talking with many risk experts, I have started to imagine dread as a sum of many other, powerful factors. With apologies for oversimplifying a complex topic, I think it is helpful to think of dread as an equation that looks something like this:

Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness

So if public-health officials need people to take hand-washing warnings more seriously after a few months of warning fatigue, it will help to amp up the “imaginability” of the threat. The best way to do this, according to decades of risk research and centuries of journalism, is to tell a very specific, vivid story. The brain will pay much more attention to a story about a young, healthy pregnant woman who died of the new influenza virus than to a statistic about the potential lethality of the pandemic.

Alternatively, if some people are overreacting to the threat, we should be able to ramp down the dread factor. We can lower the sense of uncontrollability by repeatedly reminding people that they actually have the ability to keep themselves safe—by washing their hands often, covering their coughs and staying home when sick. It also helps lower the scale-of-suffering component if we repeatedly put the situation into perspective, reminding people (as CDC officials did to good effect last spring) that very few people have died from this flu—compared to the approximately 36,000 people who die of regular flu-related causes in the U.S. each year.

If this sounds coldly manipulative, that’s because it is. But if ever there was a place for manipulation, it is in preventing mass-casualty catastrophes. We should use all the tools of movie-makers, marketers and casinos to save ourselves, provided we stay within the safe havens of honesty, accountability and transparency.

Pandemics are unpredictable, maddeningly so. But we know a lot about human behavior in the face of unpredictable threats. We know that the public responds very well to repeated, clear, consistent and honest warnings—that come from through many different channels, from the news media to the mayor to the President. We know that even if we can’t predict the course of H1N1, we can predict what factors will create and destroy dread, and that may matter just as much.