Two notes about Nien Cheng

From Kevin Chambers. of West Peavine, Oklahoma, on the death of Nien Cheng:

"I was sorry to hear about her passing.  Four years ago, after reading her book, I wrote to her and she invited me over to her apartment near the Washington Cathedral.  I was just finishing up Chinese language training in DC and was about to be posted to Shanghai.  I was surprised by how lively and sharp she was.  She was 90 but appeared to be 70.  She was very well informed about life in Shanghai even though she had been gone for decades.  When I asked her if she would ever return she said she had been invited by the Chinese government but she would never return to be used for propaganda purposes.  Besides, she said, it would be too painful.  She loved Washington.

"After living in Shanghai a couple of years I wrote to her and shared with her my view that Shanghai was a relentlessly materialistic city.  She replied that she had been told by her friends that it had become a city without a soul.  I offered to send her photos of the places she described in her book but she asked me not to.  She didn't want to look back."

From another reader, in response to my comment that over the years I had recognized Nien Cheng several times on the street in northwest DC but had never felt as I should interrupt her to say hello and say that I had been moved by her book:

"I did have the pleasure of meeting Nien Cheng and having a pleasant chat with her in her apartment in Washington.  She sent several Christmas cards to me over the years.  And yes, she was an elegant lady.  You've got that right.  It will have to be one of those things you always regret (and we all have them) because I can assure you, she would have appreciated your comment about how much you liked her book.  She would not have minded at all. She would have been deeply touched by you telling her so.  She exhibited surprise that anyone still remembered her book after so many years when I told her that very thing.  But being a person of faith, myself, I would like to tell you that I sincerely believe she is in a place where she knows how you feel.  She was a Christian of strong faith.  So hold your memories of seeing her dear to your heart.  I only got to see her once."

Nien Cheng

My wife just alerted me to something I had missed in the paper today: news that Nien Cheng had died in Washington this week, at 94.

Life and Death in Shanghai, her memoir of her life in China in the pre-Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her own imprisonment and torture by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was one of the first notable accounts of those years and remains a powerful work of modern non-fiction. Although it has been two decades since I read it, many of the scenes are still vivid. Soon after it was published in 1987, my wife and I were in Shanghai and traced the neighborhoods she had described.

Nien Cheng never returned to mainland China after she got out in 1980, and over the past twenty years she lived mainly in Washington DC. Several times while walking my wife or I had the amazing-each-time experience of passing on the sidewalk a tiny, increasingly frail, but elegant Chinese woman whom we knew to be her. I never dared to say hello or thank her for writing the book, which I now regret all the more. None of her family is left, but her book will endure.

Update: she had a MySpace page, which is here.

Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute

Because Alexander Hamilton has always been my favorite Founding Father; because I am in the "actually writing" mode and otherwise away from the internet; because no one else on the Atlantic's team has yet called attention to this; and because it is a very diverting four-minute interlude, here is Lin-Manuel Miranda's tribute to Hamilton from the "White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word" this past May. In case you have missed it.
 
For more, you can't go wrong with Ron Chernow's great 2004 biography. Now back to, ahem, work.

Appreciation of an appreciation (Soupy Sales dept)

Usually my theory is: if it is elsewhere on the Atlantic's web site, you've already seen it. But in case anyone missed today's wonderful appreciation by Erik Tarloff, about Soupy Sales in his prime, I hope you will check it out. It includes a seven-minute clip of one of the mid-1960s Soupy Sales programs, but Erik's description (he's a friend) does an even better job of conveying the tone, structure, and effect of the show.

This item also helped me understand, in an "OK, now that makes sense to me!" way, why my mother, who was then in her mid-30s and whose ideal afternoon would be to sit on the sofa reading Ivanhoe or some biography of Cromwell (she was in sunny Southern California but not of it), would usually join the kids to watch the Soupy Sales show when it came on. It's obvious in retrospect, but wasn't to me as a child, that it was not just a kids' show. In any case, worth reading.

This is heartwarming! (From Shaanxi to Carnegie Hall)

This summer I mentioned the mesmerizing experience of hearing lao qiang, "Old Songs," in a middle-of-nowhere rural theater in Shaanxi province in China. The patriarch and star of the troupe I saw was Zhang Ximin, more or less a traditional Chinese counterpart to BB King:

 

I don't know the author, but...

... I am biased in favor of this book:


Chris and Monique Fallows are a naturalist-photographer team based in Cape Town, South Africa, who produce documentaries and conduct adventure trips in hopes of protecting marine life, especially sharks. I don't know them, but there are not that many of us with the same name, so we have to stick together. I bought one of their books when I saw it at the bookstore of the wonderful Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town several years ago. I'll get this new one too. Maybe they'll do the same for mine!

Another of his shark pics, from their site.
 

This is good news

I emerge briefly from writing-induced blog exile to celebrate a well deserved honor for a comrade: our own James Bennet, editor of the Atlantic, being selected as AdAge's "Editor of the Year."

I have worked for five editors during my time at the Atlantic: Robert Manning, William Whitworth, Michael Kelly, Cullen Murphy, and now James Bennet. They have been different people with different styles dealing with different challenges in different times.  But all have been absolutely committed to the idea that this kind of magazine, with its determination to deal with serious issues in as interesting and news-making a fashion as possible, has a role in national life and can find an audience that will value what we do. I feel very fortunate to have been part of this institution for so long -- and I know that what makes it special are people who really do think all the time about improving the magazine. That describes everyone on the staff -- now, and over the years.

Industry "honors" like this are highly unscientific, hit-and-miss propositions. But when they work out, that's worth celebrating, as I do now.

If you feel like joining in, a subscription always makes the ideal gift! I'll save the full pitch for another time. (Andrew Sullivan has made his case here.) But, seriously, in the long run, enterprises like this have to figure out how to pay for what they do, and subscriptions make a big difference. Plus, the layout and pictures make magazines much better to read in print. Meanwhile, as members of the extended Atlantic family, please enjoy this nice bit of news.

Obama's Nobel remarks: four very skillful paragraphs

Six months ago I mentioned that it would be hard to improve on Barack Obama's impromptu press conference answer as to whether he believed in such a thing as "American exceptionalism." I think the same is true of his remarks this morning about the Nobel Peace Prize. Each of the first four paragraphs was surprisingly artful, given the obviously short notice on which he spoke:



Let's take them one by one:

"THE PRESIDENT:  Good morning.  Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.  After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, "Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday!"  And then Sasha added, "Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up."  So it's good to have kids to keep things in perspective."

No one is going to sound truly modest in these circumstances -- you've just won the Nobel Peace Prize -- but the obligatory opening bout of self-deprecatory humor can sound more or less forced. This is about as natural-sounding and effective as it can be, meanwhile offering a glimpse of both vitality/youth and as much normality as can intrude into an American president's existence.

"I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee.  Let me be clear:  I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations."

Surprised, yes; humbled, something that is necessary to say. But very effective to turn at once to the idea that this is not his reward and recognition but that of the country as a whole. It won't keep his detractors from talking about his narcissism and vainglory, but nothing would; it is what his supporters would want to hear, and probably what the prize committee had in mind. He has probably figured out to say at every turn that this is an award not for him but for America and its ideals. And he can leave unsaid the reality that, from the prize committee's perspective, it's an award for returning to those ideals after an unpleasant hiatus.

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace."

Again a compulsory note of modesty, which sets him up for the crucial following paragraph:

"But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build -- a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.  And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.  And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action -- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."

This was the most important and shrewdest thing he said, because it is where he acknowledges an uncomfortable fact that everyone knows to be true. Of course the award can't be in recognition of projects he has already achieved and completed, because there aren't that many of them. In these third and fourth paragraphs, Obama acknowledges that point -- but adds the news-analyst's argument that often the Nobel committee awards these prizes as encouragements, signals, or what it hopes will be momentum-changers. If other people are going to say that, Obama does well to signal his understanding of the point himself. And from there he's off to the rest of the (fairly brief) statement, enumerating the sorts of common challenges he has in mind.

My point here concerns rhetoric and persuasion. Agree or disagree on his deserving the award, but reasonable people have to note the skill with which he used this opportunity.

On a related topic: Jerome Doolittle, my one-time colleague in the Jimmy Carter speechwriting office, posted a set of tips early this morning for Republican reaction to the award. So far his predictions are holding up well.

About the Nobel prize, two years ago

The last time an American won the Nobel Peace Prize, two years ago, I posted an item that I think has more relevance now. That winner was of course Al Gore. The remarks began as follows:

"I am old enough... well, there are many ways to end that sentence, but for now: I am old enough to remember, from my school years, the disdainful reaction in my home town to the news that Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

"The reaction was, of course, racial at its root. This was a majority-white, minority-Hispanic small town with very few black residents, which went for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election that same fall. [And narrowly went for McCain over Obama last year, while California as a whole went strongly for Obama.]

"But the stated form of the objection concerned not King's race but his obnoxiousness as a man. He was a windbag. He was pompous and self-dramatizing, He was holier than thou. Plus, he had started getting involved where he didn't belong, in raising questions about the Vietnam War. Through the rest of Martin Luther King's life, the father of my best home-town friend always went out of his way to refer sneeringly to "Martin Luther Nobel."

"As is the case now with some similar complaints about Al Gore, the criticisms weren't about nothing...." [continues here]

The complaint about Obama will of course be that he has not yet "earned" the prize, and of course that criticism isn't about nothing. But there's something more at work too. More to come in this space too, about Obama's remarks, by this evening. Mainly noting this previous item in a parallel situation. It also included this disclaimer:

"There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and deKlerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time."

I keep waiting for SECDEF Gates to do something really stupid ...

... and I'm sure his time will come. (Most likely occasion of error: Afghanistan.)

But for the moment, he keeps offering surprises in the opposite direction. Including last week, with this speech to the Air Force Association convention, the ending of which is exemplary in two ways.

For one thing, it ends with what used to be known in speechwriting land as an "ending," rather than the boilerplate that has become standard in presidential addresses. The ending is nothing special, but at least he tried. (And he didn't take a shortcut with "God bless the Air Force.")

More important is this peroration, which starts with an appreciation of Billy Mitchell and goes on to say:

"It strikes me that the significance of Mitchell and his travails was not that he was always right. It's that he had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed, understood the implications of that change, and then pressed ahead in the face of fierce institutional resistance.
"     The transformative figures of American air power - from Mitchell to Arnold, LeMay to Boyd - had this quality in varying degrees. It is one I look for in the next generation of Air Force leaders, junior and mid-level officers, and NCOs who have experienced the grim reality of war and the demands of persistent conflict. These are men and women we need to retain and empower to shape the service to which they have given so much."

Whoa! To have John Boyd -- fighter pilot, theorist of combat, unbelievably persistent thorn in the Air Force establishment's side from the late 1960s through his death a dozen years ago -- become part of an offhand, last-name-only allusion to the "transformative figures of American air power" is something like the moment when establishment economics began including "Keynes" in their list of major figures.* Gates had done homage to Boyd before, for instance as discussed here. But this is a further, interesting, and deserved step. The Gates-misstep watch perforce continues.
______
* For as much more as you would like to know about John Boyd, you can follow the links in this previous item, or of course read Robert Coram's wonderful biography Boyd. On the Keynes comparison, I don't mean that Boyd ideas have affected as many people in as many countries through as many decades as Keynes's have; but the vindication of ideas previously considered total heresy is comparable.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy

I have nothing of substance to contribute to the assessment of his career right now but just wanted to add my respect, sympathy, and sadness. The most impressive and winning aspect of his personality was the way he kept on going, with good humor, despite defeats and tragedies of all sorts and vanished ambitions. With his physical bulk he made me think of some big, proud, beautiful animal -- a bull in the ring with lances hanging out of its neck, a lion or elephant that has been tattered or wounded but not brought down. As everyone has noted, his most impressive and dignified period was after he realized he would never be president but would still bring campaign-scale passion and charisma (overused term, but right in this case)  to causes he cared about.

I realize to my surprise how vividly I can remember the dramatic moments of his progression through the news. The summer night forty years ago, when I was sitting with college friends in a Northeast Washington backyard when word started circulating that Kennedy, still in his 30s, had been in some kind of traffic accident on Martha's Vineyard. The chilly fall day ten years later, when I was watching TV with friends in DC and saw in real-time astonishment that Kennedy hemmed and hawed but could not answer Roger Mudd's simple question, "Why do you want to be president?" before his run against Jimmy Carter. The unforgettable speech on the floor of the Democratic convention the following summer, when he thundered "The dream will never die!" In the hall you could feel how completely star power had drained from the beleaguered sittingformer* president Carter. (The only thing I've seen at a convention remotely as electric: Barack Obama's keynote/debut speech in 2004.) And, in keeping with the lanced-bull image, his unbelievably brave speech in favor of Obama at last year's convention. This was brave not in its content, as his opposition to the Iraq war and original endorsement of Obama had been; it was brave in the most elemental sense, that he insisted on walking to the stage unassisted and collecting himself for what was his last real public performance. The point is the way he commanded attention over his long public life.

A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life -- the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick -- but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul. And his big, open heart. A powerful, brave, often-wounded animal at last brought down.
___
* Rushed Freudian-error typo. Former president now; sitting president then.

Kenneth Bacon, 1944-2009

The extended Atlantic Monthly family lost one of its members yesterday, with the death from cancer of Kenneth Bacon, at 64. His daughter Katie was for a decade a crucial editor on our staff, including playing a large part in establishing our web site in the 1990s.

Her father Ken was a well-known and universally respected figure in the journalism and policy worlds. First as an accomplished reporter, serving for many years with the Wall Street Journal; then as public-affairs spokesman for the Defense Department in the Clinton Administration, when he was distinguished by telling the truth even in difficult circumstances; then as president of Refugees International. I knew him in all those roles and particularly admired his efforts before, during, and after the Iraq War to mitigate the damage to civilians in the area. Only three weeks ago, he wrote a trenchant essay in the Washington Post about what his dealings with melanoma had taught him about reform of the health care system.
 
Sympathies to his family. Our public life is much better for his role in it.

You learn something every day

In this case, about the history of the LA freeways. Recently I mentioned the I-10 / I-405 interchange in west Los Angeles, familiar to many headed to LAX --especially before the completion of the Century Freeway, I-105, in the 1990s.

From reader BF, now living in Pennsylvania, this recollection of that very interchange:

I wanted to pass on two things. First, that during the decade I was navigating the freeways in LA, the soaring transition from the Santa Monica Freeway west to the San Diego Freeway south was always the high point. The designer of that interchange launched your car into the sky, banked it over 8 (10?) lanes and landed it full speed in the southbound lane.

Second, is that the designer, Marilyn Jorgenson Reece, was the first female civil engineer licensed in California. This link describes the dedication ceremony when CalTrans named the interchange for her. [Link is here.]

Here, from the linked CalTrans website, is Marilyn Reese as she looked during construction; below, a clearer sense of the design she had in mind.

The designer:


Her work:

On Memorial Day

Consider the Map the Fallen project, here. It is an overlay on Google Earth that provides details on the lives and deaths of 5600+ U.S. and coalition men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sample:

 

I hope they're not just taunting me

Given the torments that await those who try to bring cheese into China (see here, here, here, and here), it is with mixed emotions that I see the banner ad now running on many parts of the Atlantic's site, including mine.

Nonfiction writing class: how it should be done

Suppose you were writing about the financial-policy mistakes that helped bring on the Great Depression. And you wanted to dramatize the damage done by adherence to the gold standard, which meant that the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, etc could issue only as much money as they happened to have gold in their vaults.

As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way -- or you could write this:

"Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy -- a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton -- that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to 'earmarking' the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abernon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, 'This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.' "

This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the "small rubber tires" detail and mot juste "trundling" term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.

News as art

From my misspent years in DC, I believe I can identify every person in this photo (just now, from Doug Mills of the NYT):


But why didn't I take more Fine Arts classes in college? Then I would know exactly which Old Master tableau this lineup so powerfully reminds me of. The human dramas suggested by these faces. This is an impromptu work of art.

In case you haven't heard quite enough about the King Air landing....

... you have come to the right place. For completeness' sake, three more very informative links, the first two of them from immediately after the flight last week:

1) From the federal government's FocusFAA site, interviews with and pictures of the Ft. Myers controllers whose voices you hear on the tapes of the final minutes of the flight.

2) Also from Focus FAA, an interview with the passenger-pilot himself, Doug White.

3) From the unauthorized FAA Follies site, this very informative post by controller Paul Cox. Worth reading for several reasons -- among them the controller mood revealed in the comments; Cox's arguments about how the FAA needs to change under Obama; and his explanation of the mentality with which controllers should face this kind of life-or-death emergency. Cox uses an analogy to sports, saying that as a kid he was only a so-so baseball player:

One thing I didn't really understand was how the coach used to say that you had to be out there WANTING the ball to be hit towards you, because in the infield, I didn't....

One dirty little secret about controllers is that for the vast majority of us, when we hear someone say "emergency", we WANT to be the one plugged in and working that sector or position. We WANT to have someone call with a wing on fire or an engine out or lost or stuck on top of clouds, so we get something interesting and captivating to do while we're plugged in.

Yeah, we consider a "save" to be just part of the job, just another day's work, and it is... but every truly good controller I know WANTS to be in that chair when that call comes in. (And as a side note, to the weak sticks and trainees out there... if you don't want those emergency calls, well, that's a good sign that ATC is probably not the job for you. For the sake of the flying public, go do something else, okay?)

Until I became a controller, and had that almost-jealous feeling watching someone work an emergency, I didn't really get what the coach meant when he said you gotta WANT the tough situation placed in your hands. Now I know just what that feels like.

As far as I am concerned, there is such a thing as Enough about this case, and it's now been reached. (But thanks to John Dowd for these links.)

King Air pilot-passenger landing: yet more tape, yet more heroism all around

Via the Naples News in Florida, this update on the first 14 minutes of transmissions between Douglas White, the low-time single-engine pilot who found himself in control of a twin-engine King Air whose pilot had just died, and the controllers who talked him safely to the ground.

The segment released last week covered the final minutes of the flight, when White brought the plane in for a safe landing. These preceding minutes are if anything more dramatic. They open with White's desperate "emergency" call and also include the coordinating actions between Miami and Ft. Myers controllers to try to get White the information he needed. (Last week's audio is here, in a full 21-minute version that includes dead-air time with no transmissions; the new portion is here.) As the Naples News story says about the team effort recorded in this new tape:

Miami air traffic controller, Lisa Grimm, a commercial-rated pilot with multi-engine ratings, scrambled to coordinate the emergency with the Fort Myers TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) and with the other controllers at the Miami air traffic control center...

Fort Myers air traffic controllers Brian Norton and Dan Favio took over for Grimm, when White's plain reentered Fort Myers TRACON airspace...

Favio then contacted friend and King Air pilot Kari Sorenson in Connecticut, to help relay the necessary procedure information to White, so he could land the plane.

That was the hardest part of the ordeal, according to FAA officials, because the information transfer needed to occur by relaying the information among four people

The full sequence of recordings make clear the calm, inventive, above-and-beyond, and yes heroic efforts of everyone involved in the process, notably including the controllers. It is too bad the tapes were released separately because they are part of one narrative and emotional whole. Some of the events and tone in the final-approach tape seem quite different in light of what came before.

For instance, the amazing sangfroid of White as he brought the plane to a landing is a credit both to him and to the reassurances and detailed instructions he had received in the newly-released tape. The surreally calm and casual tone of the final-approach controller also seems to follow naturally from the initial segment and be exactly right in the circumstances. Air traffic controllers are not, as a rule, themselves pilots, and talking an inexperienced pilot down to the ground is something they are not trained to or expected to do. That they accomplished it in this case is a credit to everyone involved -- White and all the controllers. Any pilot who got in trouble would thank heaven for this kind of help.

JG Ballard in Shanghai

J.G. Ballard's death this past weekend is sad news for many reasons, among them that the most lasting image he will have left of himself was as a child. I was never that interested in his bleak, "Ballardian" speculative fiction, but Empire of the Sun, based on his life as a boy captive of the Japanese in Shanghai, was a beautiful and heartbreaking book, converted by Steven Spielberg into an appropriately beautiful movie.

I read the book just before my first visit to Shanghai in 1986, and saw the movie the following year after another trip to the city. In those days the foreign "concession" mansions of Shanghai, in which expat families like the Ballards had lived before the Japanese arrived in 1937, were mainly derelict. Some stood vacant; some were occupied by numerous families, one per room; some had been converted to Party or government offices. Now, two decades later, some have been razed to make way for apartments or office blocks, some have been spiffed up and gentrified into high-rent lodging, some have been converted into shops or restaurants.

In the 1980s my wife and I were not able to figure out which house had been Ballard's -- nor the one where Nien Cheng lived during the Cultural Revolution horrors described in Life and Death in Shanghai. But we know now, thanks to a tour guided by Shanghai history expert Patrick Cranley, that Ballard's childhood home at 31A Amherst Avenue has reappeared, on Pan Yu Road, as the fancy "SH 508 Restaurant." This is how it looked, inside and out, last month (note high-rise in the background, on site of former mansion):




The attic where he played as a boy, now a private dining room:

Another view of the impressive passenger-pilot landing

From Dave Kammeyer, a pilot-reader who was more impressed by the pilot-hero in this recent case than with the much-celebrated air traffic controller.

I heard the audio of the King Air pilot the other day, and found it very interesting.  You didn't mention it in your post, but frankly, when I imagined what would happen in a similar situation, I thought that the controller would be a lot more helpful.

It was like pulling teeth just to get a proper approach speed from the controller.  As a pilot of little single engine aircraft myself, I was imagining the information I would need to get the plane on the ground, and things that I would want from the controller would be:

1. Flap and gear deployment speeds, which eventually were provided 2. The appropriate flap settings 3. The appropriate power setting for approach, which was never provided 4. How to operate the various controls, which the pilot figured out without any help from the controller

When I read the press accounts of the incident, they were really just NATCA [air traffic controllers' union] press releases, which heaped huge praise on the controller, who kept his cool, but failed to provide timely critical information.  In this case I think that basically all of the credit belongs to the pilot, who figured out how to make an adequate approach without much help.

Imagining the situation where a non-pilot passenger was forced to take control in the same situation, I don't think that this controller could have gotten them on the ground.  I don't understand why they didn't patch a King Air pilot onto the radio directly...

I will admit that some of the same thoughts occurred to me when listening. The controller was faultlessly calm, supportive, and reassuring, and for that he deserves great praise. But the real above-and-beyond performance here was by Douglas White, who suddenly was in charge of a high-powered twin-engine plane with a dead man slumped across the controls to his left. If Tom Wolfe were re-writing the intro to The Right Stuff, which so memorably begins with evocation of the slow, confident drawl of airline pilots who can't be ruffled by anything, he could do worse than to recreate this recording of a man landing an airplane he had never flown before, while returning from his brother's funeral, with his loved ones aboard.


Update: Jorge Guajardo, a pilot-friend who in his day job is Mexico's Ambassador in Beijing,  notices one other intriguing element of the recording.

Continue reading "Another view of the impressive passenger-pilot landing" »

Dramatic listening: passenger-pilot landing the plane

For real-life drama fans, the air traffic control tapes of Douglas White being talked through the landing of a King Air airplane, after the professional pilot dropped dead at the controls, are riveting and, to put it mildly, admirable. An AOPA Online interview with White, including links to the recording plus the picture below, is here. The recording itself is here.

As news stories pointed out, White had a pilot's certificate but had done his limited amount of flying in an entirely different kind of airplane -- with one engine rather than the King Air's two, with different avionics and control systems, with much slower operating speeds. Plus, he had flown previously from the left seat -- the normal seat for the pilot -- rather than the right ("shotgun"), where he happened to be sitting when the pilot died.

In one sense landing any kind of airplane is the same, in that you're gradually slowing the aircraft as it comes closer to the ground. The most crucial information, which varies by model of plane, is the right speeds for the different stages of the approach. The speed at which you should initially descend. The speed below which you can safely lower the landing gear and the first "notch" of flaps. The speed at which you can fully extend the flaps. The "final approach" speed as you're bringing the airplane right down to the ground. The stalling speed, which you  must always keep the plane above so that it doesn't just fall. In the recording, this info is what White keeps asking of the controller -- about an airplane whose basic up/down fast/slow right/left controls he understands but whose speeds he doesn't know.

The calm of all involved is incredible. All the more so after the emotional relief/breakdown you briefly hear from the pilot after he and his family are safely on the ground.

Alan Klapmeier on hope for general aviation

One of the heroes of my book Free Flight, and of this excerpted Atlantic cover story, was Alan Klapmeier, who with his brother Dale founded and ran the Cirrus Design aircraft company of Duluth, MN. Ten years ago, when I was spending time with them in a mainly-vacant hangar in Duluth, they had not delivered the first airplane to the first customer and were in promising-startup mode. Through most of the years since then, their mainstay SR-22 propeller plane has been the most popular single-engine plane in the world. More than 4,000 of them are in service in North America, Europe, South America, Australia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other places too. Like all airplane companies from Boeing on down, Cirrus has had to cut way back in the past year.

Manufacturing people are not always eloquent about their work and its implications. Alan Klapmeier is a dramatic exception. He is an interviewer's dream: able -- and all too willing! -- to talk for hours about why he made this decision versus that one, why he believes in his work, what his vision of the future is and how he plans to get there.

Klapmeier is still chairman but no longer CEO of Cirrus, for reasons I'd know more about if I were on scene to talk with him. But via the Cirrus owners' site I found this link to a speech he delivered recently at the Atlanta Aero Club. Index of Aero Club speeches here; direct link to video of Klapmeier's appearance here. From the video: 



People who are interested in aviation will be interested in the whole hour-plus presentation. Klapmeier talks about the real-world barriers to the expansion of general aviation; Cirrus's upcoming models including its new jet; the problem of icing in small planes; and many other topics.

People who don't care about aviation but are interested in human nature, innovation, technical progress, and the kind of advances on which future U.S. prosperity depends might want to watch at least a few minutes. I think they give exposure to an impressive person who can not only "do" but also talk engagingly about what he is doing. We're used to encountering this kind of person in. say, the biotech or software world. This is a sample from the world of producing tangible, highly-complex physical objects -- working, by the way, in the only manufacturing category (aerospace) in which the U.S. has long produced a significant trade surplus.

The first eight or nine minutes, in which he discusses why small aircraft became an oddball specialist taste, give an illustration. (Forgive the first 45 seconds, in which he is fiddling with the projector.) From about minute 20 through minute 30 he talks about the problem of icing and pilot safety. From minute 30 onward, he talks about Cirrus's new "personal jet." From minute 45 onwards, an entrepreneur's perspective of Wall Street, derivatives, etc. But right at minute 37:00 through about 43:00 you get a full view of the entrepreneur's passion that I encountered when I first met him. This may give a little taste of why I thought I had come across an interesting story after that first visit to Duluth.

For the Netflix list: 'Smartest Guys in the Room'

In case you missed this the first time around (as I did), highly recommended: Alex Gibney's 2005 documentary on Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room. Apart from its original, intrinsic interest in telling the sordid tale of Skilling, Fastow, Lay, et al, the film has surprising new resonance now.

On the one hand, the sums involved in this previous-world-record-scandal now seem quaintly small. Enron was a $60 billion (or whatever) corporation that went bust. Ooooooohh, say it isn't so!  That is practically a rounding-error financial disaster now, except when achieved by a single person like Madoff.

But the fundamental dynamics of the fraud are very, very similar to what we've heard about from a dozen other institutions in the past year. And -- the part that really got my attention -- the second-tier villains in the Enron story, the enablers and blind-eye-turners for the active fraud Enron had underway, included many that have emerged in full villainy since then, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and boosterish business journalists prominent among them. Also: if you happened to be living in California during the Enron-intensifiedinduced rolling blackouts of nearly a decade ago, as I was, you will find yourself wishing that mob justice could have been applied to the Enron team. You'll also wonder why a guy named Lou Pai is not as notorious as the rest of them -- and how he escaped with his fortune mainly intact (and accompanied by what the film refers to as his "stripper girlfriend").

Worth seeing a first time -- or a second or third, with the new eyes of 2009. Alex Gibney, the director, is known to the world as last-year's Oscar winner for  Taxi to the Dark Side and within the Atlantic as the brother of our colleague James Gibney.

Contraband cheese and other random jet-lagged notes from the road

1) In addition to the other advertised virtues of a three-day visit to San Francisco -- interesting conference, successful visa renewal, family-reunification, etc -- also got to see this evening a special screening of Kevin Rafferty's fabulous documentary movie, "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29." Rafferty previously made very good political documentaries like Feed and Atomic Cafe. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in the subject matter -- no interest in Harvard, no interest in Yale, no interest in football, no interest in the year 1968 when the game was played - I predict that you will find this narrative gripping. Really high-class story telling and human portraiture. Among other benefits: fodder for wondering whether Tommy Lee Jones (lineman on the Harvard team) is poetic or merely hostile/aphasic. Also: the name Michael Bouscaren will not leave your mind once you have seen this film. Similarly J.P. Goldsmith -- but in his case, in a good way.

2) Huzzah and welcome to the Atlantic Food Channel! It is produced by the renowned Corby Kummer, known to the world as an expert food-and-living writer but known to me as the person who has edited my articles at the Atlantic lo these last 25+ years.  A fascinating array of articles for its launch -- and I say this as the most non-foodie member of the Atlantic's staff.

3) First impression of the vaunted Kindle 2: it needs a cover, and (unlike the Kindle Classic) it doesn't come with one. ("Needs" = to keep the screen from being scratched when you're toting it around.) I ordered the cheapest one available and will report back on all things Kindle-related.

4) Latest China-related travel tip: Word from the home office in Beijing is that the customs authorites at PEK airport have launched a new crackdown on contraband.... cheese. My wife and I always lug cheese back when we're coming to China from any other country, because practically everywhere else there is a better, cheaper selection. But now, apparently, the luggage-sniffing beagles at the airport are trying to sniff out any cheese secreted in a suitcase, and vacuum-packs or triple-plastic-bag wrapping are no protection. WTF!?!? But there is no point tempting fate. So we'll go cheeseless for another while, and hope that the beagles are not looking for ground coffee.

5) Media notes: interview this morning with KQED here, and on All Things Considered here. That is all.

Frankie Jose / "Damaged Culture" link update

In an item yesterday about the distinguished Filipino novelist F. Sionil "Frankie" Jose, I mentioned that I'd taken a road trip with him to the northern reaches of Luzon and written about it in the Atlantic in 1991. Thanks to our web team, especially Cotton Codinha, that article is now online, here.

I hadn't looked at the article in a very long time and was disconcerted to find that the comparison I used yesterday to describe Jose's gusto was the very same one that came to mind 18 years ago. I hope that this unintended self-plagiarism says as much about the rightness of the comparison as it does about the limits of my imagination. It comes at the end of this part of the original article:

José is a short, plump, nearly bald man of sixty-six, who would not look out of place wearing the baggy shorts and basketball-style undershirt of the typical Chinese shopkeeper in Southeast Asia. When I see him, I am reminded of a little boy--in the way he carries his body, in his quick and unconcealed switches from desolation to glee. On our five-day trip last summer, when he was driving me and a young Soviet academic to see the sights of his youth, we passed a railroad siding where the teenage José had been held by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. "I was so scared," he said, his face clouding like a ten-year-old's. "I was so little and skinny then--ho ho ho!" he roared, slapping his round belly. We stopped every few miles so that José could see whether the cane-sugar sweets, or the little roasted birds, or the other regional delicacies were as tasty as he recalled. When he was not planning the next meal, he sat watching women with a blissful look. "Ah, I tell you, Jim, the eye never dulls!" he said in a restaurant after four stunning young women walked by our table "Only the flesh becomes weak--ho ho ho!"

Eventually I asked him how his wife, Tessie, whom he married forty-two years ago, after both had been students at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, feels about the adoring descriptions of young women that fill his work. "She knows I am devoted to her," he said, serious for a moment. "And she forgives me my pecadeeeeyos!" A rich roar of laughter. This, I thought, is what it must have been like to be on the road with Rabelais.

Because Frankie Jose has been so centrally involved in debates about the effects of Philippine culture on the country's political and economic destiny, for the record I include a link to my 1987 article "A Damaged Culture," which also cites Jose's works. This article generated a lot of heat, and some support, in the Philippines. From what I can tell similar debates still rage.

Frankie Jose

For the next few days I am back in Shanghai, my original home town in China, but earlier this week, while away from the internet, was in the Philippines. There the happiest discovery was that F. Sionil Jose, the writer and political theorist universally known as "Frankie," is still in fine,  feisty shape. This picture makes him look more torpid, and less jovial, than he really is. Click for larger, including detail of the poster on the window of his bookstore.

 

Frankie Jose is the main reason I watch the Nobel Prize lists each fall: I'm waiting to see if the Literature panel has gotten around to giving him his award. For decades he has been his country's leading novelist, renowned especially for his "Rosales" series of novels, which depict much of the Phillipines' troubled 20th century history. To compare him to Solzhenitsyn would be misleading, in that Jose rarely goes more than thirty seconds in conversation without breaking out into a guffaw. (This picture is in one of the atypically sober-looking moments.) In his life and in his writing, he has a large dose of Rabelais. If Bill Clinton were a major novelist, he might be a model.

Every time I've met Jose over the last 20-plus years, he's said, "Jim, I am getting so much fatter!" -- with a big laugh, because he loves food (among other pleasures) so much. But Jose has a deadly-serious claim to being the conscience of his nation - at legal and physical risk during the Marcos years and as a sobering voice in the years since then. An article in Time last week emphasized his impact and role.

Back in 1991 I wrote* about a trip with Jose through his native Ilocos region of the Philippines. It is not yet on line in our archives. (If our web team can put it up, tThe link will go is here. For now, you can find an expanded version only in Looking at the Sun.) What was remarkable, I thought and still think, was his management of contradictions: his dark view of the Philippines' predicament and his sunnyness as a person; his role as intellectual and artiste with connections around the world, but also as locally-rooted political activist -- and practical-minded businessman and entrepreneur, with his renowned publishing house and bookstore called Solidaridad.

 

Solidaridad is in the same site I remember, on Padre Faura avenue in the old Ermita section of Manila. Its stock of books from around the world is better than I remembered, and more extensive than anything I have seen in China.

If you haven't read any of Jose's books, you have a treat ahead. And Nobel committee: get cracking! Frankie is full of vigor and witticism now, at 84, just as he was in his early 60s when I first met him. At this rate, he could go for decades. But why wait to give him his due?

___
With his wife Teresita, to whom his latest novel, Sherds, is dedicated, and his recent visitor:


* "The Ilocos: A Philippine Discovery'' The Atlantic MonthlyMay 1991

Better news out of the midwest: Mischke back in business

Previous bad news entries reported the dethronement of St. Paul's own Tommy Mischke as a radio talk-show host. My profile of Mischke from eight years ago in the Atlantic is here; it included this photo of the artist at work:



As reported in MinnPost.com and Czerniec.com, Mischke is back in business -- as of today. Details of the first webcast, which will be weekdays from 2pm to 4pm Central time starting March 4, are in the two previous links plus at CityPages.com, which will host the show. Enjoy.

Alison Des Forges

Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.

In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:
 

America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya. Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana."

Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing. "This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take care of my children." She hung up the phone.

A proud father notes, #2

Lizzy Bennett, Tom Fallows:



Married yesterday, February 15, 2009, Kamalame Cay, the Bahamas.

Previously in the "Proud Father" series: Annie Kaufman and Tad Fallows. This has been, ups and downs, an eventful year.

John Updike

When a figure of this stature passes, it may seem presumptuous for his mere readers to say that they are saddened by the news. But I suppose it would be worse to say nothing, and this is sad news indeed. That fact that most startled me in the first death notices is that he was "only" 76 -- startling to me because he has been a central cultural figure during virtually all of my conscious life, which covers a pretty long time. My entire freshman class in college was made to "read and discuss" Updike's early book The Centaur. Then, it seemed like part of the American canon. Now I realize that he'd written it only a few years earlier, when he was barely 30.

I'm sure everyone else will mention this, but his conversation about Barack Obama (with Sam Tanenhaus of the NYTBR) only three months ago, here [bad link fixed], is a marvelous brief moment. And some of his Atlantic oeuvre is here. It's customary to say that someone will be missed. In Updike's case it's more important that he will be remembered.

Trouble in the software business: this time, it's serious!

Via my friend Bruce Williams, an accomplished aviator, flight instructor, and technology guy,  I hear that the first-ever, 5000-person cuts Microsoft has just announced in its work force include the team responsible for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Williams himself, who was a major figure on that team across six versions of the program over 15 years, presented the news on his website under the headline: The End of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Sigh. Further reflection the news here and here.

Of course there are other flight simulators. I've always loved X-Plane, even before its creator, Austin Meyer, started flying a real-world Cirrus airplane (fancier version of the kind I used to own). Still, there was something magical about even the earliest versions of Flight Simulator, with the familiar opening shot of a little plane ready to take off from the sadly now defunct Meigs Field in Chicago. At this fascinating site you can see screen shots from those embryonic versions, which provide a startling reminder of how much imagination you needed to apply when using the earliest computer games:
 
 

(See if you can detect any change in graphics in the intervening years: below is a screen shot of Flight Sim X, via Tom Bukowski at Smugmug.com:)

for

I don't mean to make light of real pain and hardship caused by software layoffs and those in all other industries. But the end of the FS era is poignant enough on its own to deserve a mention.

Not from the Atlantic, but worth reading all the same!

1) A very interesting collection of very short essays from the Washington Monthly, in which 19 writers and academics answer the question: what book do you really hope our new reader-president will take time to read? Disclosures: I am a proud alumnus of the Washington Monthly, and I have a brief item on the list. But I was surprised and impressed by the recommendations in general and in turn recommend that you read it.

2) An extensive "Oral History of the Bush White House," by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This is a timeline recreation of the last eight years -- not all the big moments and turning points, but a lot of them -- in the words of original participants. I read this two days ago on the flight from Beijing to Washington (don't worry, it only took 20 or 30 minutes of the 13 hours of reading time, with plenty left over to watch the Chinese pirate video of Pineapple Express) and was both riveted and newly shocked about our recent history. Several of my Atlantic Voices colleagues have already reported similar reactions.

If I had been shown this project with no names attached, I would have guessed immediately that Cullen Murphy was involved. During his twenty years as the Atlantic's managing editor, I worked with Cullen on dozens of articles. He had many inspired, favorite approaches, of which one of the most favorite was the careful recreation of "familiar" events, which usually led to surprising results. Two of my Iraq-policy articles -- Blind Into Baghdad, and Bush's Lost Year -- grew out of exactly this approach. This latest package shows the power of this simple idea.

When you're done with those two, return to our great Jan-Feb issue.

Two quick followups about the airplane in the Hudson

1) As mentioned yesterday, the captain of the airplane -- the one you can identify in the cockpit because he or she is in the lefthand seat, and the one you can identify in the terminal because (usually) he'll have four stripes on the epaulet or uniform sleeve rather than three for the first officer - is getting deserved credit for handling the situation with such coolheaded competence.

But, as mentioned in passing at the end of the previous note, he's not the only one who deserves praise. Another reason US airline travel is so safe is that flight crews -- typically, the two people in the cockpit plus the rest of the staff in the cabin, plus dispatchers and others on the ground -- are so systematically trained to support each other, work together, and check or offset each other's errors. Along with the cabin attendants and the New York rescue crews, the first officer, Jeff Skiles, undoubtedly played an important part in getting the airplane down safely and deserves celebration. The safe outcome involved good luck -- the time of day, the nearness of potential rescuers, the absence of congested river traffic at that moment -- but it was mainly attributable to an extremely high level of well-trained professional performance by all involved. That is why it is fine to consider it "heroic" rather than "miraculous."  People did what they were trained to do, very very well.

2) I noted the silly error in an initial NYT report saying that "airliners are not meant to glide." Aerodynamically, every airplane is designed to glide - that is, descend gradually and under control even without engine power, rather than plummeting straight down if the engine stops. I mentioned that all pilots routinely practice gliding as part of  "engine-out" drills. Several readers pointed out the more obvious illustration: virtually every airplane of any size glides down to the runway when it comes in to land.* Airline passengers can notice this by hearing the dramatic cutback in engine noise and power when the airplane is on its final approach. Yes, there is a difference between gliding toward a landing at "idle power," with the throttle pulled all the way back -- versus gliding with dead engines, with no power to call on for final adjustments or if conditions change. Still, gliding is normal, not an emergency in itself.
____
* Shorthand for the underlying explanation here. An aircraft's "total energy" is the combination of its airspeed and its altitude. When sitting on the ramp, a plane has total energy of zero. While in flight. it can trade one form of energy for another: with no adjustment in engine power, it will speed up if it descends, trading altitude for velocity. Or, again with no change in engine power, it can make the opposite trade off: climbing higher into the air, but at a lower speed.  Because gravity is always trying to pull the airplane down, and because wind resistance (drag) is always trying to slow the airplane down, the engine must be running to keep the airplane in "straight and level" flight -- that is, with a constant speed and altitude.

The process of landing the airplane involves steadily reducing the plane's total energy - its airspeed plus altitude -- toward their lowest possible level by the instant of touchdown. As the airplane descends toward the airport, it will naturally speed up -- unless power is reduced at the same time. Mile by mile and then foot by foot, the pilot manages the plane's speed, altitude, and power -- toward the ideal of having it reach its lowest possible flying speed (stall speed) when its wheels are just above the runway's surface. There are variations for different kinds of aircraft, which land with different amounts of power and different margins of speed above their absolute minimum flying speed, but this is fundamentally why typical flights end in a glide.

Most impressive nomination yet, IMHO

In several previous dispatches (here, here, and here) I emphasized what good news it was that Barack Obama had chosen Steven Chu as his new Secretary of Energy. I based this on Chu's own reputation and record:

 Because he is an eminent physicist, Chu's very presence in the job would hearten proponents of more emphasis on pure science. Because he has devoted his attention in recent years to the technological advances and the international cooperation necessary to deal with climate issues, he would both symbolize the important of this challenge and potentially lead the Administration's efforts. There were many other virtues of this choice.

I said all this without having any idea of the kind of team that would surround Chu at DoE. But if this report, on Al Kamen's Washington Post site is correct, he has made an inspired choice for his Deputy Secretary and closest working associate. This is Susan F. Tierney, of Boston.

She has been a leader in energy, environmental, and climate-change issues for decades, in academia, government, and business. Her bipartisan bona fides are such that she was appointed a commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities by Governor Mike Dukakis, and then Secretary of Environmental Affairs by Governor William Weld. She was an assistant secretary at DoE during Bill Clinton's first term, and since then has worked as a consultant at the Analysis Group and served on countless national and international commissions dealing with energy, environmental, and climate issues. She is an honest a person as you will find in public life, and is a skilled manager. Assuming Kamen's report is correct, this is another superb choice.

___
I am not an expert on energy or climate issues, but about Tierney's character and temperament I feel very confident in my assessments. I have known her as long as any person on earth has, since I was just under two years old when she arrived in the household as my little sister. Her mother and father would be extremely proud; her sister and two brothers, plus her husband and two sons and many others, are proud enough to make up. Really, her only failing is that she has never, once, given me any inside info of any sort on any topic that she has been working on. Sisters!

In case you were wondering, about that airplane in the Hudson

Yes, it is right to view the pilot, CB Sullenberger, as a hero for the mental composure and technical skill he showed after he (reportedly) lost power in both engines.* Plus to celebrate the combination of luck and teamwork by aircrew and rescuers that allowed everyone aboard to get out of the airplane alive.

During my days of amateur piloting, I was always amazed by the rigor and discipline of professional airline crews. Every two years, those of us in the amateur business were required to go through Biennial Flight Reviews in which you'd fly with an instructor who would simulate various problems to see how you'd react. ("OK, you've just lost power, tell me where you're going to land." Or, when you're ten feet above the ground preparing to land, "A deer just stepped onto the runway - GO AROUND [abort the landing] now!") Many amateur fliers choose to get, or are required by insurance companies to get, "recurrent training" every six or twelve months.

But airline crews are drilled and tested and measured again and again and again, without letup, throughout their working careers. In their full-motion simulators, they're trained to respond to every disaster, and combination of disasters, that might possibly befall an airliner. Loss of power just as the airplane is taking off. Engine fire at low altitude. (Contrary to general assumption, problems at low altitudes are usually more dangerous than ones high altitude,  since you have less time to deal with them before the airplane hits the ground.) Hydraulic failure along with the fire. Plus, being in the middle of a thunderstorm. And so on.

Some professional pilots are "smart" in the normal sense; some are not. Some are likable and admirable; some are bores or boors. But all of them are made to develop and maintain reflex-like responses to these emergencies. They are also forced to think through the decisions they would make if faced by disasters they will probably never encounter through their whole flying careers.

Why is riding a commercial airliner in the US statistically about the safest way you can spend your time? Partly it's because of the advanced, powerful, and multiply-redundant nature of the machinery, and because of the regulatory standards to which it's held. But the airlines' extraordinarily safe record also says something about the skill, responsibility, and judgment of (most) people flying the craft. As it happens, nearly all flights are routine, and it becomes tempting to think of their crews as glorified bus drivers. But they're conditioned to think, at every stage of every flight, What would I do if XXX went wrong, right now?

And birds? Birds are a much more serious worry for people flying airplanes than you would think, no matter the size of the plane. Obviously it's bad for the bird when it hits a hard metal or composite structure at hundreds of miles an hour. But it's surprisingly bad for the plane too. This detail in a recent NYT story rang true to me: "The impact of a 12 pound bird hitting a plane traveling at 150 miles per hour is equal to that of a 1,000 pound weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, according to experts on bird strikes."

Coastal airports are often near water; most airports are surrounded by a lot of grass; the combination means that flocks of birds often assemble where they can do themselves and the airplanes real harm. At an airport in Maryland I once aborted a takeoff in a small propeller plane -- the only time I've had to do so -- because, out of nowhere, dozens of Canada geese suddenly appeared in front of me. It's all too common, when approaching airports near water, to have to concentrate on flocks of seagulls (or crows, even away from water) in hopes that they will, by the very last instant, get out of the way and allow you to land.

And ditching in water? This is something that very few amateur or professional pilots have ever practiced for real.

To deal with an extremely serious problem -- failure of both engines, at least as now reported; to consider various options (on to Teterboro? back to LGA? what about the water?) while the plane is inevitably descending and each passing second narrows your choices; to decide on and commit to a course of action; and then to carry it out flawlessly .. all this deserves admiration, study, and thanks. So, yes, he's a hero. And one of several who emerged that day.

____

* And not to react in the somewhat grudging spirit of an initial report on the NYT site:

In a few weeks, a close comparison of radar tapes and cockpit audiotapes will establish where the plane was when that clipped, urgent conversation took place, and other investigators will try to figure out why this one plane, flying through some of the world's most congested airspace, was the only one to report a bird problem. [Perhaps because it was the only one that was hit???] The twin-engine plane is supposed to be able to fly on one engine.  But from early indications, it appears the pilot handled the emergency river landing with aplomb and avoided major injuries.

This story also said, as an aside, "Airliners are not meant to glide, although occasionally they have to." In fact, every airplane is designed to be able to glide, and controlling them in a glide, without power, is something that everyone routinely practices (as part of an "engine-out" drill.) 

Mr. Solter

In discussing the deaths of my parents I've mentioned that people who pour themselves into one small community or local cause "deserve" more recognition from the world at large than they often get. I realize that applying this principle fully would mean talking about billions of people who have lived worthy lives. But since another example has just come up I will mention it.

Fresh Air update, concluding family comments

Webcast of yesterday's interview on Fresh Air available online here.

After we'd discussed the People's Bank of China, RMB/$ exchange rates, the "financial balance of terror" between China and the US, and similar worthy topics, Terry Gross asked me in the closing moments about the deaths of my parents. Specifically, why I'd written on this site about my father's death two months ago today. (My mother died unexpectedly, and relatively young, in her sleep nearly five years ago.)

I didn't know she would ask this but in retrospect am glad that she did. As I fumbled to explain in real time, part of my instinct in making a private matter public was the sense that people with the virtues of my parents -- talented, loving, curious, hopeful people who poured their heart and effort into the betterment of their small community and the well-being of their family -- deserve more celebration than they typically get, precisely because they have chosen not to operate on a broad public stage. My parents were very well known in our home town but unknown outside of it. It gave me heart to think that people who had never encountered them might hear something about the lives they led.
 
As my siblings have taken turns cleaning out our dad's house, they have come across hundreds of pictures that none of us had ever seen before. Parents are always old to their children. When parents have lived to an objectively advanced age and then physically run down, as my dad did, it is startling to be reminded how vigorous and, yes, beautiful they had once been. My mom and dad's youth is what we are discovering after their deaths.

Thus, and as the real end to this commemorative series, three pictures I had never seen while my parents were living, part of a huge collection that my brother-in-law Bryan Neider is digitizing from old, brittle prints. The first are of my parents in the late 1940s, around the time of their wedding when she was 20 and he was 23. (His wedding ring is visible in the second shot.) Then, one of the rare pictures of my dad in which he's not smiling. Here he is wearing his game face, as the four-quarters, every-play offensive and defensive lineman known as Tiger Jim. These are people we never knew and are meeting now.

Another very impressive Obama pick

No, not Pastor Rick Warren; I'm with the multitude thinking this is one of Obama's rare clumsy steps.

Instead: John Holdren, who according to AAAS's Science Insider site will become the president's main science advisor, as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Unlike, say, the inspired choice of Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is no fancy multi-level symbolism in the selection of Holdren. His nomination is more comparable to that of Steven Chu at the Department of Energy: he is a figure of unquestioned eminence in his field, with significant experience not just in hard science but also in the application of science to public policy.

And like Chu, much of his recent professional attention has been directed at energy and climate questions. Holdren has also worked extensively on nuclear nonproliferation, and seven years ago won the $250,000 Heinz award largely for that effort. Noting the wide range of disciplines and pursuits that have engaged him (he has also directed Woods Hole Research Center), Holdren said in his Heinz acceptance speech:

One might wonder from the array of interests of mine that have just been mentioned, whether I simply have a short attention span, but I do like to think that there is some method in this madness. I think that many, if not most, of the great problems of the human predicament - population, resources, environment, prosperity, security - are not separate problems, but are intimately interconnected. And I believe if they're not all addressed and solved together, they won't be solved at all.

After the jump, some quotes from Holdren on energy and climate change from an Atlantic article by Mark Sagoff back in 1997.

Here's the only reason I can think of to worry about this pick: Knowing how bureaucratic politics works, but not myself knowing much about Holdren or Chu personally, I can imagine their shared roles as scientists-in-chief working very well, if they're a natural team, or not so well, if they are in the slightest degree turf-conscious or jealous. We'll see.
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Coda (for now) to the Mischke saga

David Brauer, of MinnPost.com, has posted a two-part Q-and-A with Tommy Mischke, the recently-deposed radio humorist-genius of KSTP in St. Paul. (Previously on this subject here, here, and -- eight years ago in an Atlantic article - here.)
(Mischke, as "shown" in our magazine story in 2000:)


The really surprising part of the interview is Mischke's description of exactly why he was fired "for cause" and with no warning, severance, benefits, phase-out period, etc. That's in Part 1 of the interview. In Part 2, he talks about the economic future of radio, the choices available to people like him who don't fit the standard AM political-talk mold, and various other challenges that will sound uncomfortably familiar to people in print journalism. Worth reading for culture-of-media purposes even if you've never heard of Mischke and don't care about life in "good old St. Paul, big-time Minneapolis" as Mischke always refers to "The Cities" on his show.

Actually, one other point. I hadn't looked at my article on Mischke for lo these past eight years, but I did so just now. After the jump is one passage that tries to convey the on-air effect. And, for another long interview with Mischke from three years ago, go to the MischkeMadness site here.
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Mischke CD, video news

Last week, this report on the unceremonious canning of my bar-none favorite radio humorist, T.D. "Tommy" Mischke of St. Paul.

Three cheerier or at least schadenfreude-ish updates now:

1) Dave Brauer, of MinnPost.com, has this testimonial from Mark Moeller, of the local retailer R.F.Moeller Jewelers, that has had Mischke do personalized ads for them over the last 15 years, about his pulling his ads in protest.

Mischke "made a profound difference in my business. Not a day goes by -- not a day -- where someone doesn't walk into a store and say 'Mischke sent me.'" I pressed Moeller to tell me how much of a hit KSTP was taking for this. "It was well into seven figures" he says of his ad buys over 15 years.

2) A YouTube video that Moeller and Mischke produced, called "Don't Jump, Tommy," whose purpose Mischke explained this way in a note to me:

So, here's what I ended up doing over the weekend. I had a lot of listeners writing me, concerned that, because of my occasional bouts of depression, this firing business could be sending me right over the edge. I wanted to address that and, at the same time, help out Mark Moeller who has stood by me through all this despite being telephoned daily by KSTP management in an effort to lure him back on the air.

Mischke is more derelict-looking in this video than in real life.

3) Mischke's latest music CD (not radio-humor CD) is available here. I haven't heard him sing other than in comedy bits on the program, but i will order this on faith. His humor CDs, which I have heard, will soon be available; stay tuned for details.

My last words on the Steven Chu front

Previous words on Chu here and here.

1) A great 57-minute TV interview with Chu, conducted in 2004 by Harry Kreisler of UC Berkeley as part of his generally-great "Conversations with History" series.

An even more impressive pick than Shinseki (updated)

Steven Chu, as the new Secretary of Energy.

More to say about the whys and wherefores later. For the moment: the ability of an incoming administration to select such people, and -- even trickier -- convince them it will be worth their while to move to Washington and wrestle with the most complicated politico / technical / diplomatic problems, given all the hassles and built-in frustrations and lack of privacy in governmental life, is both surprising and encouraging. Very good news.

Update: to flesh out a point made while I was rushing out the door earlier: obviously a Cabinet position is "a [bleeping] valuable thing," as the still-governor of Illinois might put it, and many people scheme and scramble for the offer. Also, I am not in the camp of people who feel very sorry for those who accept the "burden" of public service in high appointed office. It's a great challenge, a great opportunity, and a great thrill.

My point was that there are real trade-offs in public life: making all of your finances public, for example, or realizing that while you're in office everything you do or say is on the record and potentially embarrassing. Precisely the kind of person who is not actively scheming for the job, who already has a very good position (as Chu does), and who may give some weight to these personal tradeoffs, is the kind of person an administration may not manage to attract. When that person brings unusual eminence ot the job, as Chu does, then it's worth noting this achievement.

Really bad news out of Minnesota: end of The Mischke Broadcast (updated)

I have done approximately one zillion articles for the Atlantic since my first one (about Lloyd Bentsen, then a presidential hopeful) back in 1975. In a very few cases, I've loved everything about the process: learning about the subject, interviewing sources for their views, letting other people know about what I've discovered, and -- when everything works right -- connecting readers with an experience, an idea, a source of information, a phenomenon that they hadn't known about but then find interesting or enjoy.

I am skipping over the "writing the article" stage, which is always unpleasant and simply must be endured.

One of the experiences that was most delightful all the way through was learning about the St. Paul-based radio humorist/musician/raconteur T.D. "Tommy" Mischke, whom I wrote about nine years ago in this article. Mischke is handsome enough, but he avoids being photographed -- except in shots like this, which we used to illustrate the article:



I first learned about him when I was making a lot of long, late-night drives from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to Duluth, for reporting that led to this article, and I was scanning the radio for something worth listening to.

I actively looked forward to those drives once I had discovered The Mischke Broadcast on KSTP-AM, which mixed story-telling, political commentary, humor, music, and listener calls in a bizarre and addictive way. For samples, which require Real Player to listen to, there is this bit, in which Mischke interviews an expert on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (if you can listen, you'll learn why it's funny) and this bit of extended, real-but-unbelievable Fargo-esque surrealism, involving a character name "Bocky."

I have kept in touch with Mischke and occasionally appeared on his show.

The black news today is that KSTP has pulled the plug on the show. Info here and here and, with a lot of background details, here. I really hope that Mischke can find another home or vehicle. He is a talent and a mensch.
 
UPDATE: Two more items on the Mischke firing from MinnPost.com's David Brauer here and here.

Vox militis* on Shinseki

I am grateful for a flood of mail from active-duty and retired military people, and their families, expressing admiration and excitement about Barack Obama's choice of Eric Shinseki as his Secretary of Veterans Affairs. (On the merits and symbolism of the choice, here; on the politics, here.)

Below, from reader Larry Senechal of Seattle, a representative note of appreciation. After the jump, from a currently-serving Army officer, a representative complaint -- which may surprise many people outside the military.

First, the appreciation:

I'm an old former Marine, infantry type.

General Shinseki is old school General Officer corps,  unlike many Generals and senior officers who go through the revolving door to become Defense contractor lobbyists, media analysts and Defense contractor employees. It seems when this happens "Duty, Honor, Country" are secondary to  making money. In my opinion after 37 years of service to this country, this doesn't seem appropriate payback to a country who gave them so much and continues to do so with their OWN legacy costs to the American taxpayer. The stories of just how corrosive this has been on the military services and our Defense policy abound and have yet to be dealt with effectively.

 My father was a retired senior Army Officer as was my father-in-law and both highly decorated infantry commanders. My dad often lamented the growing "revolving" door and the poor leadership of many in the General Corps and the dileterious effect it was having on the Army. When the military first started using bonuses during the Clinton years to keep captains and majors in the service, he observed that the retention problem said less about the attractiveness of the private sector and more about the quality of senior leadership who seemed more committed to their careers and less to the men they commanded. I didn't fully appreciate and understand his remark at the time. I now do after the last eight years.

Imagine my surprise when I read an article at MSNBC quoting  Shinseki stating,....""You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader," he said. "You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance."

Next, the complaint.
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How it should be done: Terry Gross with Bill Ayers

It's conventional chattering-class wisdom to say that Terry Gross of Fresh Air is a "great interviewer." In the early days I think that wisdom originated to some significant extent in male-listener fascination with the sound of her voice. But a broadcast I just heard was not only a reminder that she is, in fact, truly a great interviewer but also a demonstration of what that means in practice.

The broadcast in question was her 43-minute session yesterday with Ayers, the person presented by GOP campaigners as Barack Obama's closest and most influential friend. Ayers himself came across, inevitably, as a more complex character than the campaign caricature: more sympathetic in some ways, not necessarily in others. But much of what Ayers "reveals" comes out precisely because of the way Gross posed and sequenced the questions. If he had just been parked in front of the microphone by someone who said, "Well, how can you hold your head up?" or "So, tell us about Barack Obama," the results would have been much duller.

At the most obvious level, Terry Gross succeeds in this interview simply by avoiding the two most common, and laziest, styles of today's broadcast interviewers: surplus aggressiveness, long ago made familiar by Mike Wallace and now lampooned by Stephen Colbert;  and lapdogism, most recently on display in Greta Van Susteren's sessions with Sarah Palin and the default mode of Larry King Live. Both of these extremes reflect the confusion of toughness of manner --  do you interrupt, are you scowling, are you borderline impolite -- with toughness of inquiry, which is something altogether different and can happen under the most polite and civil auspices.

She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

If you have this standard in mind -- is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? -- you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.
 

Last in this commemorative theme

My dad's former medical office, the Beaver Medical Clinic in Redlands, California. Flag at half-staff this week.

James A. Fallows, 1925-2008

This has been a good week for America but a rough week for certain Americans. Barack Obama's grandmother. Michael Crichton, and the book critic John Leonard. Many others, but of importance to me: my father, James A. Fallows, yesterday, November 7.

After the jump, an obituary prepared for his hometown newspaper (and my first journalistic outlet), the Redlands Daily Facts. His son-in-law, Jack Tierney, paid him an eloquent tribute here, and I previously posted a letter from one of his former patients, here. Below, images of the active, enthusiastic, joyful man I will remember, engaging in two of his favorite activities: camping out while trail-riding in the California canyons, and winning a tennis point.



 

Formal obituary below.
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A thought for Michael Crichton

I am sorry to be in a commemorative mode, but I can't let the day pass without saying something about Michael Crichton.

In the car this afternoon I turned on the radio and heard a news report ending ".... Crichton was 66." Was? That Michael Crichton has died in his 60s shocked me not simply because I'm now concentrating on the mortality of my father, in his 80s, but also because he always looked at least  20 years younger than his chronological age. I'd corresponded with him recently and didn't know he was sick.

Crichton had his enemies, especially after his recent anti-global-warming book (which I chose not to read). That he was married five times suggests that his personal life was not entirely tranquil. And he was hyper, hyper aware that in America he was regarded as a "genre" writer whereas in Italy, for example, he would be listed among the big names of Quality Lit.

But I was honored to have met him 20 years age, when I was living in Japan, and to have been a friend since then. He seemed unassuming, funny, charming in every way -- the unusual famous person who was genuinely considerate of one's spouse and kids. Very earnest about his political causes, including a very prescient argument fifteen years ago about the impending decline of the "Mediasaurus," now known as MSM. And, there is no way around it, incredibly talented. At one point in the 1990s, he was responsible for the #1-rated TV show (ER), the #1 box office movie (Jurassic Park), and the #1 best selling-novel -- and I'm not even sure now which of his novels it was. He must have been the only person in history to have paid his way through medical school by writing successful novels.

I loved hearing from him about oddball "practical" matters. For instance, height: he appeared to be nearly 7 feet tall, and explained to me (6'2") that up until 6'6" height was an advantage, but after that it was a big inconvenience -- door frames, beds, airplane seats. Or, getting ready for book writing bursts: He said he removed complications from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat. He was a tech enthusiast, and the most passionate Mac advocate I have encountered.

He will be missed.

Non-political, highly personal: my dad

On Election Day, I am at the bedside of my father, James A. Fallows MD, who is nearing the end of his extraordinary life. Six months ago, when he first seemed mortal, I was grateful for the opportunity to talk about him at the college he attended for two years -- before being rushed straight to medical school for service as a Navy doctor -- and from which he received his honorary bachelor's degree 60 years later.

Just now I have received a note that expresses more vividly than I could what a life well, fully, and joyously lived can mean. I share it now, with the writer's permission, at a time when my dad himself can no longer appreciate it but while it is not yet purely retrospective.
 
The note begins:

My name is Erin Cox-Holmes, and I'm a fan of the Atlantic ...As I was trolling sites today, waiting through the nail-biter until the results came in, I happened upon your site. And, as I always do when I see your name, I thought of your dad.

It continues below:

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'My Beijing Birthday,' now in Beijing

Last week I mentioned how much I enjoyed and admired the documentary film My Beijing Birthday, which was having a special showing in Hong Kong.

This week it's having another screening in Beijing -- tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 28. Details below.

The trailer for the film, here, which I didn't mention before, will give you an idea of the approach and tone, including the before-and-after of kids who were playful tots in 1996 and have changed in heartening and heartrending ways since. I can't recommend this highly enough.

EVENT DETAILS:

Date:       Tuesday 28th October 2008

Time:       18:00 Registration

                18:30 Screening 

Venue: Saatchi & Saatchi

The Penthouse 36/F Central International Trade Centre Tower C

6A Jianguomen Wai Avenue, Beijing, China 100022

Non-politics: David Allen's 'GTD Times'

It was only four years ago that I wrote in the Atlantic about David Allen, the "productivity expert" and inventor of the influential Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to life. I say "only" four years because it feels as if Allen and his outlook have been with me for a much longer time.

It's hard to top the wonderful LifeHacker blog as a source for practical tips about gadgetry workplace tools, habits, and shortcuts, many in the GTD spirit. But for the last six months, David Allen's organization has been operating its own "official" blog, called GTD Times. I like it -- and as a sample, I direct your attention to this recent post, arguing that you really do become dumber and slower if you try to do too many things at the same time. This applies not only to that modern plague of texting-while-driving (or walking) but also to having a zillion IM and other popup windows on your screen while you work. For doubters, there is a sobering online test to demonstrate the point, taken from the book The Myth of Multitasking.

What other point was I going to make? I forget, I was thinking about something else...

Tom Wales, October 11

Seven years ago today, Tom Wales, a federal prosecutor, was shot and killed in his home in Seattle. He was 49. Although local law-enforcement officials quickly identified a leading suspect, charges have never been brought and the case is not closed. The universal assumption is that his killing was related to cases he had prosecuted and his publicized leadership of gun-safety efforts. This made him apparently the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.



For more about Wales's career and character, and about the mysteries of the case and the suspect, see this authoritative article by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker last year. Last month Dateline NBC did an update on the unanswered questions, with transcript here.  I did an online item about the case and its possible overlap with the Bush Administration "fired U.S. attorneys" allegations early last year on this site.

Memory of Bush-era disputes will naturally fade as the Administration itself does. I hope the memory of who Tom Wales was and what he stood for lasts as long as possible.

A day of conciliation

Before these items get too far out of date, let me say:

1) I generally am on the opposite side from David Frum on questions of politics and public policy. But I have to admire the sobriety and fairmindedness with which he makes this case about the future of the Republicans.

2) As Thomas Friedman knows, I am more impressed by the many ways in which the world is not at all  "flat" than those in which it is. (When I asked him about this on TV two years ago,  he quite charmingly explained that "In the columnist game, you don't sell things 51 - 49.") But having complained about the broad brush he used in that case, let me do homage to the very great precision of his column yesterday on patriotism a la Sarah Palin. It is an achievement to bring into exact focus something that other people have been generally talking-around for a while. He did so in that column.

3) I have no past disagreements to mention in the case of a blog called "Delaware Liberal." But I have to admire its author Jason's headline-writing skill. He refers to an article of mine that the Atlantic published as "The $1.4 Trillion Question." His improved headline is: "I, For One, Welcome Our Chinese Banker Overlords."

At last for Mike Mussina!

My sons adopted Mike Mussina as their favorite player when he came up to the Orioles in 1991 and seemed an ace of limitless promise. At the time, the Orioles were classy and great, and were the only available "local" team for kids in the DC area.

Since then, Mussina has been very good, and has become extremely rich, but has had a kind of asterisk for coming within an inch of a number of unquestionable milestones. Eighteen wins in his first full season, then 19 wins in two other early years. But not 20, for various hard-luck reasons. A perfect game taken well into the ninth inning -- I still remember the screams around the TV in our living room when that blew up. Number two in Cy Young voting one year (behind Pedro M), in the top handful seven other times -- but never the winner. Going from the Orioles, whose descent into mediocrity seemed to deny him a chance at the world series, to the unlovable Yankees just as their era of dominance was ending and just in time to join their gradual descent.

Today, it looked like one more "what might have been" moment. Starting with 19 wins, in his last appearance of the season, he took a 3-0 lead into the seventh. And then, as in the bad old Orioles days, the bullpen came within one run of letting him down. They escaped (thanks to 9th-inning Yankee offense) which meant that he escaped -- and ends up 20-9. Whew!  What happens from now on with Moose is impossible to say, but for now, congrats.  

Yellow Sheep River

The new issue of the Atlantic is in subscribers' hands and up on the web. It includes my story on a touching and quixotic effort by two businessmen / idealists to bring the good parts of modern technology to a remote village in Gansu Province called Yellow Sheep River. Here is one of the people I write about, Kenny Lin, on horseback near a Tibetan prayer-flag structure in the 11,000-foot highlands outside Yellow Sheep River.

 

There's an accompanying slide show, here, narrated with my best Beijing-air-induced chronic rasp, that gives an idea of how completely different China's far western regions look from the images of Shanghai and Beijing now familiar on TV.

The story talks about an odd-sounding but intriguing effort to lift children from rural poverty via ...blogging! In effect, it gives them scholarships that allow them to stay in (public) school, and in return they chronicle their lives in words and pictures on web sites, developing tech skills along the way. Here are some the children he is trying to help:



The main Chinese site for this project is here; the English language version is here. It includes an easy way to sponsor students for this work, as my wife and I have done and will continue to do.

A proud father notes

Annie Kaufman, Tad Fallows:



 Married today, August 31, 2008, Pasadena, California.

Endurance champ (flyweight division)

Yesterday I mentioned that because I couldn't find a USB stick, I had rigged up a clumsy ad hoc network just to transfer one file.

It turns out that the USB stick wasn't actually lost. It was.... only resting, deep in a pocket of some pants that had gone into the wash. The pants have now come out of the wash -- in specific, a trip through the washing machine and the dryer, though not the ironing board. Of course only after all that was the USB stick discovered.

With a sense of doom, I tried it -- and it still works fine! All the files that were on there before are on there now, and perfectly readable. I just used it to make another file transfer: no problem. It even passes the performance tests for "ReadyBoost" service as temporary RAM under Vista.

So if you're looking for the USB stick that, in the words of the ancient Timex slogan, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I say: look no further than the PNY Optima Attache 8GB model. This genuinely surprises me. And think of the seconds you'll save not having to empty your pockets.

PS the reddish background in the picture above is not some lush grosgrain but the back cover of Bowl of Cherries, a racy recent comic novel about teenaged lusts, the war in Iraq, modern college life, etc. It is the first novel from Millard Kaufman, who was born in 1917. He is said to be at work on his second. Endurance champ of a different sort.

Father's Day evening tribute to my own dad

A month ago I made a crazed out-and-back trip from Beijing to the U.S. East Coast, stopping in LA, to fulfill an obligation many years in the making. This was to give a commencement speech at Ursinus College, outside Philadelphia. I mention it, on this Father's Day, because it directly concerned my father, and because some of the homilies involved were rounded up in today's NYT selection of "the future lies ahead"-ish thoughts from Commencement speeches. Pensees of mine are nestled in there between those of Clarence Thomas and Jessica Lange.

Here is a transcript of the whole thing, in its 11-minute entirety. Happy Father's Day!

Why isn't Bireli Lagrene a household name?

I know, it's a cliche: cranky Boomer-era guy thinks kids today should like jazz better. Still, as a Father's Day indulgence I'll express my surprise that more people in the US don't know about the French/Gypsy jazz guitar phenom Bireli Lagrene.

He's a star in Europe, but I don't see that he has really entered the US consciousness or appeared on any of the main interview or talk shows. (Fresh Air bookers???) Maybe he doesn't speak English? He can sing with a completely convincing American accent -- Frank Sinatra's accent, to be specific -- but everyone sounds American when singing. If language actually is the barrier, he could fake it, with the ever-appealing French accent. Or just play.

A search on YouTube for Bireli Lagrene will turn up a rich assortment of his concerts in Europe, in such different styles as this in the cool, slow mode and this with warp-speed virtuoso fingering and much in between. And here, via the Amazon listing for his wonderful Blue Eyes CD of Sinatra songs, is a minute-long sample in Windows Media format of I've Got You Under My Skin. For me, all of these are slow to load, but I think that a China problem.

This is the kind of thing you like or you don't. My theory is: you should. But that brings us back to the first line of this post.

Tim Russert

It is of course precisely the vitality and at-the-center-ness of Tim Russert that makes his sudden death so shocking. I am very sorry for his family.

Like many other people in political journalism, I have had differences with him over the years about his particular concept of "tough" questioning and the effect it had, because of his great influence, on politicians and the DC journalistic culture. Such issues are for another day.

What I liked and admired most about him as a journalist and human being was his sense of permanent child-like wonder, which is in fact the essence of this business. Reporters never quite think of themselves as grownups, because they're always so excited about the next thing they get to see or the next puzzle they get to figure out. Rather, if people don't feel this way, they find some other line of work.

Even he ascended past the level where he would routinely be called a "reporter," Tim Russert always retained that sense of openness and curiosity about what he'd learn in the next interview or see at the next event. In turn this made him seem un-stuffy to people who knew him only from TV, and approachable when you dealt with him in person. I am sorry that his weekly CNBC/MSNBC interview show was not as well-known as Meet the Press, because it showed more of his open, omni-interested nature than some of the Sunday morning inquisitions did. Still, the overwhelming reaction to his death shows that his essential character came through. This is sad news.

Charlie Moskos

I was surprised and saddened to get an email message a few hours ago saying that Charles Moskos had just died, at 74.

The email from his wife of 41 years, Ilca, began: "Charles C. Moskos, of Santa Monica, Calif, formerly of Evanston, Ill, draftee of U.S. Army, died peacefully in his sleep after a valiant struggle with cancer." That sentence is a kind poetry, evoking whole aspects of his life in a few words.

"Formerly of Evanston" recalls his four decades as a popular and dedicated professor at Northwestern. See this article from the campus paper when a diagnosis of prostate cancer forced him to drop his classes two years ago.

"Draftee of U.S. Army" alludes to the great passion of Moskos's intellectual and public life: restoring the bond between the armed forces and the general public that was the best side effect of the conscript military into which he was drafted after graduating from Princeton in 1956. Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army the following year -- that was a sign of how broadly the armed forces drew from society through the Fifties and early Sixties. Moskos was tireless in conducting studies and devising policies about improving the civic-military bond. His efforts included two articles in the Atlantic, in 1986 and 1990.

That he died "peacefully" is a relief; that he struggled "valiantly" is consistent with everything else about his life. He had a very generous spirit and was always ready to laugh at himself. The one subject, in my experience, that he considered No Laughing Matter was the excellence of Greek-Americans, as compared with any other subset of humanity. As Ilca Hohn Moskos said in her message, "He was an academic, but not pretentious, funny, but not silly." A very good man.

Hamilton Jordan

I am surprisingly moved and saddened at the news that Hamilton Jordan has died of cancer, at age 63.

Wikipedia photo of Jordan in his 30s:

Actuarially the main surprise is that he lived this long: his first serious encounter with cancer happened nearly 25 years ago, and he had many subsequent bouts. And to the extent that people remember him at all from the Jimmy Carter era (nearly half of today's living Americans had not been born at that time), they may think of him as the wise guy/bad boy of the Administration.

Compared with that image, I thought he was a surprisingly sweet-hearted, decent, and serious person.* My impression is probably colored by the career and identity he fashioned after Carter and his team were turned out of office, when Hamilton tried hard and earnestly to write serious books and grappled for years with his disease. Eight years ago I wrote this review in the Washington Monthly of one of Jordan's books, No Such Thing as a Bad Day. This ending of the review is a little crabbier-sounding than I might write today, but I still mean its basic point:

An unstated operating assumption of the permanent D.C. establishment is that outsiders like Jordan are essentially brought into town on sufferance, for tryouts. They can adapt, "make it," and survive when their time with the administration has ended--or they can be drummed out of town and dismissed as losers. In D.C. terms, Jordan was in the latter category; he worked for a losing administration, and he didn't cut it in society. Yet this book suggests that he has become a more substantial person than most who dismissed him--and even before he went through this transformation, he was a more complicated person than the "Hannibal Jerkin" caricatured in the press. This has made me think of the damage done to other people hooted out of town. (Gary Hart?) If you're thinking of a midsummer gift for a favorite columnist or Style section writer, consider this book.

I feel bad for Hamilton and his family.

---
* Jordan vastly outranked me in the Carter White House hierarchy, he as chief of staff and me as a less-influential-than-the-title-suggested head speechwriter. But he was an aspiring tennis player and I was on call as a partner and practice-player, the one time in my life that sports has provided upward mobility.

Edward Seidensticker

While flipping through newspapers that had piled up through the last two weeks, I spot a small item just before turning the page*: Edward Seidensticker has died. Actuarially this cannot be a huge shock -- he was born in 1921 -- but it is a loss.

Seidensticker is usually described as one of the great translators of Japanese literature into English. That he certainly was. His translations of Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and other books were generally credited with helping Kawabata become the first Japanese winner of the Nobel prize for literature. He also did important translations for the man who should have won the prize, Yukio Mishima, including the last volume of Mishima's unforgettable Sea of Fertility four-volume saga. (And, yes, the Tale of Genji and so on.)

I met Seidensticker half a dozen times for meals and drinks in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was urbane, arch, ever-amused in a cosmopolitan way. That tone comes through in his under-appreciated nonfiction books about Japan itself -- histories of Tokyo like Low City, High City and Tokyo Rising, and an archness-incarnate book about living as a foreigner in Tokyo: This Country Japan.

Although he would be the last person to describe himself as typical of anything, he illustrated two larger trends. He learned Japanese to serve as a Marine Corps translator during World War II, part of an important generation of American scholars, businessmen, journalists, and diplomats who became Japanologists thanks to wartime experience. And, to be careful in phrasing a point he did not publicly discuss, after the war many Western homosexuals found the Japan of the Fifties and onward a more comfortable and attractive environment than their homelands at that time.

He was a talented, honorable, and accomplished man.
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* This is something that never happens when you're reading newspapers strictly online. Yes, there are many other means of unexpected discovery on the internet, but they're different from the same process with actual newspapers. Subject for another day: why online access is indispensable but in some ways worse than what it is replacing.

Final words on Friday Night Lights

As mentioned earlier, my wife and I were having some trouble seeing how things turned out for Coach Taylor and the Dillon Panthers in the new series Friday Night Lights. Thanks to our Shanghai-based friend Tom Carter, we got .AVI files of the final two episodes, which allowed us to watch them on a laptop computer (hey, the rigors of the foreign-correspondent life) without the 30-seconds-on, 45-seconds-off herky-jerky effect of watching "streaming" video from NBC's own site while based in China.

So now we know the first-season fate of Coach, Mrs. Coach, Smash, Riggins, Buddy, Tyra, Landry, Lyla, Street, Matt Saracen, and all the rest of the Dillon population. (An important virtue of the series: every one of these people, plus many more, comes across as a fully-rendered non-cliche character. Eg Tyra's mother, Matt's father and grandmother, Riggins's neighbor and her son, Smash's mother and girlfriend, Jason Street's parents, Herc, and Coach and Mrs. Coach's daughter.)

Concluding remarks:

1) I cannot easily come up with a more impressive series on network TV than this one.

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Free Flight update #3: Bruce Holmes to DayJet

A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.

Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:

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David Halberstam

The news of David Halberstam's death is a surprisingly shocking blow. In general, a man's passing at age 73 cannot seem wholly unnatural or out of sequence. But it was hard to think of Halberstam as being as anything but young. He was as full of ambition and energy and enthusiasm and spark as anyone I know, of any age.

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Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: A nice man, not just an eminent one

I ran into Arthur Schlesinger perhaps ten times in my life. The first was 40 years ago, when he came to visit his son Andy during Andy's freshman year in college. I wandered by, from my room around the corner in the same freshman dorm, and was astonished to see the man whose A Thousand Days I had studied only a few months earlier in high school social studies class in California. With the Kennedy administration still in living memory, he was a real celebrity in those days, not just a successful writer, but he was unaffected and approachable to his son's new classmates.

The last time I saw him was a year or so ago, at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, a kind of Friar's Club for one-time presidential speechwriters.

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Homage where homage is due: Charles Peters

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a very nice column of tribute to Charles Peters, my original employer in the magazine world and, for me and a large number of other people in journalism, something like Chairman Mao without the starvation and mass terror. That is, an inspirational and consequential figure whose doctrine had its oddities and whose personal habits did too, but whose influence can't be ignored. Fortunately Charlie's influence, unlike the Chairman's, was overwhelmingly to the good.

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