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Book Review: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review on March 14, 2018.

Steven Pinker wants us to stop being so pessimistic.

While it’s true that we are besieged every day by voices trumpeting the many ways things are bad and getting worse, Pinker makes a compelling case for why we need to adopt a more constructive outlook.

First, to believe that things are worse than ever is objectively wrong; second, by over-focusing on the negative, we waste energy that should be invested in solving fixable problems; third, in buying into the downward-spiral narrative, we reinforce it.

Case in point: the election of a president whose toxic brand of populism harks back to a golden age that never was. This book serves to disabuse us of mistaken nostalgia and point us all in a forward-looking direction.

Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, Harvard professor, and the author of a host of books on language, culture, and humanity. He brings us Enlightenment Now as a follow-up to his controversial 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

In that work, Pinker argues that human life held little value throughout the ages, and that the dramatic deepening in our understanding of human dignity can be traced back to the Enlightenment.

The author discovered the extent to which people refuse to believe the “good news,” no matter how tall the pile of objective evidence (oh, the quirky charms of human nature). Enlightenment Now takes another run at the argument and is organized into three sections: “Enlightenment,” “Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.”

“Progress” consumes the lion’s share of the book, with chapters devoted to topics such as health, inequality, the environment, peace, terrorism, democracy, quality of life, and existential threats.

Each chapter is an enthralling read on its own. Throughout, Pinker presents quantifiable specifics — with tables and graphs — to underpin his arguments on the substantive, measurable, global progress we’ve made in all these areas, many of which presented problems once thought to be intractable.

In the chapter on health, for instance, Pinker lists the estimated number of lives cumulatively saved by the discovery of blood types (1 billion); the chlorination of water (177 million); and the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox (131 million).

Pinker quotes Richard Carter to remind us of 1955, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe: “People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes…”

Our success in making infant and childhood death a rarity in the U.S. has led us to a place where people who’ve never experienced the horror of an epidemic dismiss the value of immunization and, in fact, make vaccines the villain.

It’s this general lack of perspective — we didn’t live through it; therefore, we can’t know how bad it was — that Pinker attempts to remedy. He’s fighting against the concept that, to be taken seriously, both people and institutions (like the news media) must focus on all that’s wrong. To highlight the many ways that things continue to improve is to be dismissed as a Pollyanna.

Pinker acknowledges there are true existential threats to our wellbeing: Climate change tops the list. The crisis seems to defy solution because of its enormity and complexity, coupled with the ticking clock of a fast-approaching tipping point.

It’s a huge problem, yes, but a solvable one, according to the author, if we agree to bring our collective ingenuity to bear. That willingness may have slipped forever out of reach, though, when climate change became a partisan issue.

For those who imagine Pinker as a liberal elitist, some of his positions may seem surprising. He is a fan of intensive industrial agriculture, arguing that density is far more productive and less wasteful of land and resources than small, organic farms. In the climate-and-energy debate, he is a proponent of nuclear power and of fracking.

He holds in contempt “the environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called ‘their customary indifference to starvation,’” who cause significant harm, primarily to developing countries, with their vilification of genetically modified foods. Humans have been developing GMOs (both accidentally and on purpose) for thousands of years.

Yet when discussing existential threats, the author reaches a bit, and his willingness to let technology solve our problems tends to skip past the Law of Unintended Consequences. Personally, I don’t need to be convinced of the improbability of an apocalyptic robot war, but I’m interested to hear Pinker’s thoughts on the more pedestrian threat of technology companies’ increasing control over information flow, which continues to ratchet up even as we experience the damage it causes.

Enlightenment Now might generally be preaching to the converted, but its thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of the state of Enlightenment-era ideas and values might spur some of the converted to greater engagement in problem-solving.

I can’t help feeling, however, that Pinker continues to be flummoxed that his rational arguments don’t carry the day, ignoring or discounting the streak of irrationality embedded in human nature. He seems nonplussed, for example, that even the most coldly rational people have trouble dismissing the existence of a higher power.

It’s not surprising. No matter that humanity and its attendant self-awareness is the random and improbable outcome of a long evolutionary trail, or that each of us is simply one of 108 billion creatures to be born human to date. Each of us still harbors that innate longing to know it is we who are special.

Book Review: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 21, 2018.

Bill Glassley spent his formative years in Southern California, skipping class so that he could surf. In college, he looked for a path that would allow him to keep surfing and maybe put in a little time as an oceanographer.

Unfortunately, he had to get through undergrad studies first. So he “reluctantly chose geology.”

He was uninterested until a professor, carting students on a required field trip, pulled over and gave an impromptu, mesmerizing lecture on the formation of a particular rock outcropping. Glassley was hooked. (Thank you, professor!)

Traveling along with Glassley here on his explorations of Greenland is likewise just as mesmerizing for those of us who didn’t know we were interested in geology. He is a thoroughly accessible guide whose wonder at the landscape that surrounds him is infectious.

Ten percent of the world’s fresh water sits frozen atop Greenland, rising to a height of 10,000 feet. The land itself is of relatively low elevation, having been ground down over billions of years and multiple ice ages; however, Glassley and his Danish colleagues, Kai Sørensen and John Korstgård, were seeking to prove that mountains the size of the Alps or Himalayas had existed on the land as of about 2 billion years ago.

The ice itself presents a challenge to that kind of discovery, since only a small fringe of land is accessible; however, the ice is “receding faster than plants can take hold,” so there are opportunities for exploration. Their selected research area on the west side of the world’s largest island was a spot about 100 miles wide at the widest point — where the ice begins — and 250 miles long.

When Glassley first accompanies Sørensen and Korstgård to Greenland, the expedition is motivated by the desire to quell a controversy over interpretations of the “areas of intense deformation” studied and reported on during earlier fieldwork. Based on work done in Greenland since World War II, a community of geologists had carefully crafted a theory of the collision of two small continents.

The space in between the landmasses, which is eaten up as the continents approach and finally meet, has to go somewhere. That somewhere, eventually, is up. If that’s true, where are the mountains? Well, even in geology, 2 billion years is a pretty long time, and, as Glassley observes, “Erosion always wins.”

Unfortunately, all the work of Sørensen, Korstgård, and their predecessors had been summarily dismissed as flawed by a team that had been in the field for a single season and cherry-picked its data. Most distressingly, that rebuttal had gained traction within the geological community — apparently, false equivalence happens in more than just politics and journalism.

Though A Wilder Time describes the men’s exploration and explains their findings —their original theory is vindicated, and then some — it is the author’s joy and sense of wonder at the land he’s exploring that makes this slender notebook so compelling.

When the team finds what turns out to be “the very edge of one of the continents involved in the collision,” formed of rock that is 3.3 billion years old, the discovery is also one of the most visually stunning:

“Bands of pink, white, gray, tan, and black, some no more than a fraction of an inch wide, some several feet thick, draw the eye along stretched-out, languid, folded forms, flowing as though the bedrock had once been as soft as butter…From a scientific point of view, it is a treasure. From an aesthetic point of view, it is a masterpiece.”

Glassley is a careful observer of everything around him, and he shares that with us, from the utter silence he experiences on his first midnight walk, to the dense velvet carpet of moss that hides man-eating spaces in between the rocks he’s traversing, to the phenomenon of a stream of fresh water visibly layering on top of denser salt water below, which he is drawn to touch: “[M]y fingers penetrated the slithering boundary layer. Painlessly, I watched as flesh disassembled into a dance of swirling abstractions, my fingers becoming nothing I knew.”

Clouds of mosquitoes and ice-water bathing aside, he makes us long to be there, too.

Book Review: Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

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You don’t need to read the New Yorker to instantly recognize a Roz Chast cartoon: Her lumpy, myopic Everymen and Women with perpetually bad hair always look as though they are vibrating into dust from the general angst of daily life. Her humor isn’t terribly edgy, but rather sharply observant of the quotidian, perfectly capturing the idiocy and indignities we all suffer.

In her latest book, Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York, we see a rare side of Chast as she shares her sense of joy about the place in the world she loves the most: Manhattan. The book started out as “a small booklet I made for my daughter before she left her home in Suburbia to attend college in Manhattan,” the place where Chast had spent her first years as an adult and always felt the most at home.

“Or maybe, that it’s the place where I least feel that I don’t fit in.”

Perhaps what’s most surprising about Town is how well it would actually serve as a guidebook. It offers basic, concrete information about how Manhattan is laid out, how to use the various forms of transportation, and how to puzzle through getting from where you are to where you need to be — all without a hint of condescension. (“A term you’re going to hear a lot is CROSS-STREET.”) Her primer on the various subway lines is reason enough to use this as your go-to reference.

She shares which parks and museums top her list of places to visit, and her reasons why Grand Central Terminal is her favorite building in the city. This is the book that any loving mother who’s also a world-famous cartoonist would sketch by hand for her college-age daughter heading into unfamiliar territory. I, as a hopeless rube from DC suburbia who’s spent a cumulative total of perhaps six days in Manhattan, plan to bring a few of Chast’s pages with me the next time I venture into the Big City.

As a bonus, this love letter also gives us a bit of insight into the formation of Chast’s talents as that sharp-eyed observer. She confirms what we have suspected all along, that she is a hopeless people-watcher, a voyeur:

“I like to watch and eavesdrop on people…I like to look at people, but in the sly, indirect way that people look at other people in the city.”

Her preferred mode of transportation is walking, because of all that is out there to be discovered: “There’s SO MUCH MATERIAL…If you’re feeling antsy or out of sorts, pick a street and walk across it from coast to coast. Any street will do. (Wear comfortable shoes.) The more nondescript your street is, the greater chance you have of making your own discoveries.”

As a random example of the sorts of discoveries you can make if only you open your eyes, she offers up a wild selection of standpipes. These are included as a series of photographs so we won’t think she is making them up. Of a blinged-out gold-and-red assembly that absolutely resembles the torso of an S&M-favoring stripper, she says, “This one goes by the name of ‘Trixxxi’.”

Ah, yes. Only in New York.

It’s also somewhat of a healing relief to accompany Chast on this journey in which she shows off the geography that brings her joy, especially for those who were with her through her much-lauded but harrowing memoir of 2014, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? There, she offered not only an unflinching account of her parents’ decline through advanced old age into death, but also of her isolated childhood and painfully fraught relationship with her mother.

In Town, George and Elizabeth Chast take minor and benign roles as the middle-aged, mildly bickering parents who only rarely and reluctantly take the subway trip from Brooklyn “into town” to see a play and then immediately return home, brooking no exploration.

Still, the central illustration on the front cover is Chast’s interpretation of a photo taken of her and her mother when little Rosalind was perhaps 4 or 5. (The photo itself is on the last page of the book.) The sketch shows a smiling mother and daughter holding hands in front of a subway-token booth, dressed and ready for an adventure, going into town.

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 5 December 2017.

Write Now: What Makes a Good Editor?

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In this space back in June, “Too Big to Edit?” pondered why books from seasoned authors often compare unfavorably to their newcomer counterparts. I argued that the heart of the difference is the investment in editing and, in that column, anticipated the release of What Editors Do as a helpful reminder to cost-cutting publishers that good editing makes good books.

Peter Ginna edited this compendium of discussions from editors representing every possible facet of books and the book-publishing process. If you’d like to know what his job entailed, you can find out in chapter 20, “Reliable Sources: Reference Editing and Publishing” by Anne Savarese.

There, you’ll learn that reference works typically start out as ideas that later get married to authors, and that’s just what happened with Editors. Ginna was recruited to spearhead this book by yet another editor, Mary Laur, and he notes, “We got almost dizzy contemplating the complexities of my editing editors writing about editing, and her editing my edits of the editors…”

The result is a revealing look behind the curtain not just into the myriad details of what it means to be an editor, but also into the publishing world as a whole.

As I look back through my highlighted and Post-It-noted copy, here are some of the primary takeaways I’m chewing on:

To the reader, great editing is visible only in its absence. This is the unfortunate paradox of editing: When it’s done well, the reader doesn’t notice it. We only know that the author gave us a great book. As contributor Matt Weiland says in “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” “I aim to be useful to the author but invisible to the reader.”

It’s possibly only in comparison to other, less-polished books by the same author that we might come to understand why every author and every book needs solid editing.

To the author, great editing includes remembering who the author is. Last week, I went to hear Alice McDermott in conversation with longtime Washington Post columnist Bob Levey at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She shared an anecdote about her first agent suggesting an editor she thought would be good because “he doesn’t want to be a writer. He’ll let you be you.” As Alice explained, she had exactly 100 pages of a novel at that moment, “and if he’d told me to put a murder on page 101, I would have done it.”

Several contributors here make a similar point about being sure the editor is supporting the author in achieving the author’s best book, and not attempting to make it the book the editor thinks it ought to be. This is an especially delicate dance for a fledgling author: figuring out what’s worth protecting against a seasoned acquisitions editor who knows what sells. Which leads us to the next point.

“I love it. Now let’s change everything.” It’s fascinating to read the discussions of book acquisition that many of the contributors describe here, since acquisition is a black-hole mystery to would-be authors. A number of editors describe the beginning of book acquisition as “falling in love” with a manuscript, and then getting others on the editorial staff to fall in love, too. As Ginna says, “Unless you’re passionate about a book, publishing it is a mistake.”

The editors then go on to describe, post-acquisition, the process of developmental editing, which often entails stem-to-stern reworking of the manuscript. Plots that don’t hold together, characters that wander aimlessly, and dialogue that no human would ever utter all need fixing. With that kind of heavy-lifting needed to make a book workable, I could only wonder, “What exactly were you able to fall in love with in the first place?” I’m guessing that this is another difference between debut manuscripts and contract deliveries: few editors would invest that kind of effort in a debut.

Like effective journalism, effective editing requires a long apprenticeship. In “Widening the Gates: Why Publishing Needs Diversity,” contributor Chris Jackson says, “Publishing, it turns out, is a job you can learn while doing, if people are willing to help a little.” In fact, according to What Editors Do, it’s a job you can only learn while doing, because there’s nothing else out there that teaches it.

The defining characteristic of would-be editors is a love of books, but after that, it’s a learn-by-working-with-the-master sort of thing. Unfortunately, shifting economics and business models mean the opportunities for that kind of apprenticeship are shrinking. What does the future hold for readers if we end up with successive generations of amateur editors?

The dirty little secrets of publishing for the most part remain secret. Recently, I spoke to a young woman who had been summarily laid off by one of the Big Five publishers in a major cost-cutting move. Many of the people let go had worked at the company for their entire careers.

Like the tyranny of the editorial calendar, these are not the stories you will generally find in Editors. However, there are a few chapters that take on some of the uglier truths of publishing in general. Which leads to my next point.

Aspiring authors, read this book. Also, prepare to be depressed. Far more than a description of editing as a career, Editors is a window onto the business end of publishing. Business equals bottom line, profit-and-loss sheets, sales targets, and return on investment. I’m sorry, did you think we were talking about great literature?

Yes, actually, Jeff Shotts does think we’re talking about great literature. Shotts is the executive editor at Graywolf Press, one of the best-respected and most successful independent presses in operation. In his contribution, “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and Community,” he comments on how the Big Five equate quantity with quality and have sacrificed literature for sales.

Within that reality, “It cannot be exaggerated how rare and how valuable it is for an editor to have the freedom to take on books based on their literary quality and their capability for social change.” But that is generally what indie presses do.

Life is still too short to read bad books. As Jane Friedman describes in “A New Age of Discovery: The Editor’s Role in a Changing Publishing Industry,” much of that role is to “filter and amplify.” That is, in the deepening slough of published material, editors need to help readers wade through the muck to discover what is truly worth their time.

Even if you’re neither an aspiring author nor editor — perhaps just a lover of books — it’s worth your time to read this one. It explains a lot.

This column originally appeared in the “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 2 November 2017.

Book Review: Her Body and Other Parties

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 31 October 2017.

It’s a scenario aspiring authors can only dream about: Your first book is finally due for publication, the buzz is building, people in the know discuss it a bit breathlessly and say things like “hotly anticipated,” and then, the unimaginable happens. The book, your book, is longlisted for the National Book Award — before it’s even released.

Welcome to the world of Carmen Maria Machado.

Machado’s short stories have appeared in a host of big-name venues and garnered numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, which is why folks have been awaiting this first collection. Her work is brazenly unapologetic, or perhaps unapologetically brazen. Her fearlessness, combined with some spellbinding writing, delivers stories that are at once discomfiting and revelatory.

Included with the advance reading copy of Her Body and Other Parties was a bookmark — a short length of green satin ribbon, which matched the ribbon featured on the book’s cover, which, in turn, matches the ribbon that features prominently in the first story of Machado’s collection, “The Husband Stitch.” And what a story it is. A grad student could write her entire thesis on it, unpacking layer after layer and holding each up to the light to understand its composition.

She could start with the “husband stitch” itself, a reference to men wanting doctors to sew an extra stitch or two in closing up their wives’ mid-childbirth episiotomy to make things “nice and tight” once again.

From the narrator’s recurring suggestions for what to do “if you are reading this story aloud,” including, “force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able”; to her description of her voice as “high-pitched, forgettable” and all other women’s voices in the story “interchangeable with my own”; to the mentions of the ribbons — in different colors and placement — worn by other women: There is much to unpack.

The narrator’s own ribbon is around her throat, and it is a source of enduring fascination for the boy who eventually becomes her husband. She only has two rules for him, and after they get married, there is only one rule: He cannot touch her ribbon. Eventually, their beloved son is drawn to the ribbon also, and she has to scare him to keep him from trying to pull at it. In this happy family, the ribbon is the one consistent source of tension.

Her husband cannot leave it alone, figuratively or literally, and though we understand her position when she asks, “Am I not allowed this one thing?” by now we cannot leave it alone, either. Our fingers itch; we want to know, too, and we are as heedless as he when she says, “You think you want to know, but you don’t.”

There is something fantastic in each of these stories, less magical realism than the physical embodiment of an otherworldly dread. “Eight Bites,” for example, very literally answers the question, “When you lose weight, where does it go?” It’s impossible to tell whether the baby in “Mothers” is real or an extended fantasy about the children the narrator wishes she and her lover had brought into the world.

The narrator of “Difficult at Parties” is suddenly able to hear the thoughts of all the people in the porn DVDs she buys for herself and her boyfriend, though that’s not the disturbing element at the heart of the story.

And while a mysterious virus is steadily wiping out all of humankind in “Inventory,” the wasting affliction in “Real Women Have Bodies” only targets women — and incidentally offers a fine metaphor for any woman who has ever pondered, “I know I’m here; why do I feel as though I’m invisible?”

What to make of “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU,” in which the author rewrites 12 seasons of episodes and provides them here with titles and synopses? In this retelling, Detective Benson is haunted by all the women whose murders remain unsolved, but Machado actually gives us a lovely story arc with a gratifying resolution. (I doubt even she could have done anything redeeming with “Criminal Minds.”)

Though Machado’s stories have been featured in “Best Women’s Erotica,” the suggestive elements are matter-of-fact and organic to the stories, never an end in themselves. The narrator in “The Husband Stitch” is not shamed by her desires, whether or not society considers them unseemly.

In relating a story in which a girl asks her lover for an act so perverse, he and her family have her committed, she says, “I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?”

Except for “Heinous,” all the stories are in first-person, and Machado never puts names to her narrators. The closest she comes is in “The Resident,” which feels the most autobiographical of the stories. That’s not only because the narrator’s initials are C.M., but because it features a favorite trope of young authors: writing residencies.

Machado appears to pick the subject precisely for the cliché, though, and the dread here is much more grounded in the stuff of everyday. That includes being thrown in with dreadful people, such as Lydia, whose “feet were bare and filthy, as if she were trying to prove to everyone she was an incorrigible bohemian.” When the inevitable smackdown arrives, our heroine delivers the coup de grâce by bellowing, “I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”

C.M. permanently disposes of the notes for her residency novel (along with her laptop, to ensure there is no going back), perhaps signaling that Machado herself is committed to the short story as her literary vehicle of choice. Good. It’s perfect for her tightly wrapped fiction. Plus, it offers her readers time to come up for air before plunging into the next intense tale.

Book Review: Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 18 October 2017.

In a campaign and early presidency that has been filled with alarming pronouncements, Donald Trump’s branding the independent press “the enemy of the American people” raised its share of eyebrows. However, it’s the question of how that independent press is going to survive into the future that has veteran journalist Bob Schieffer concerned.

Much of what he and co-author H. Andrew Schwartz address in Overload are issues that have been brewing since the birth of cable news and have kicked into hyper-drive now that everyone holds instant news in the palm of their hand. But it was the 2016 presidential campaign that truly underlined for Schieffer the magnitude of what is at risk.

It turns out that Overload is a manual of sorts for both journalists and civilians who care about maintaining a thriving fourth estate and who are making a good-faith attempt at participating in the well-informed citizenry that the Founding Fathers knew was crucial to a functioning democracy. It’s their aim to help that audience, as the subtitle says, “[Find] the truth in today’s deluge of news.”

If we think this last campaign was tough for us to get through, consider what it was like for a guy who’s been in print and broadcast journalism for 60 years. According to Schieffer, he used the phrase “I’ve never seen anything like it” so often in his television appearances that his colleagues started a drinking game over it.

He ticks off the grim statistics of the many newspapers that have folded, the number of states lacking a single newspaper that covers its congressional delegation in DC, and the fact that, in the best year for newspaper circulation in ages, several venerable dailies still ceased publication.

The worry is that, outside of DC, New York, and L.A., regional news outlets are simply disappearing. Where will citizens find (possibly) non-partisan information on local and state candidates, and who will keep an eye on those candidates once they become elected officials?

Still, though the details here are often disheartening, it’s not all bad news, and there is something comforting about reading words of encouragement from someone who is one of the acknowledged greats in the business and has — certainly after the last two years — truly seen it all.

The authors discuss the newspapers that are doing things well, primarily by realizing that putting ink onto newsprint should not be their only — or even their primary — focus; the broadcast and cable networks and staff that seem to have a guiding set of principles; and even radio’s continued contribution in the form of the venerable NPR.

They share contributions from some of the other media greats. Very helpfully, the authors provide a roundup of the best or best-known examples of media outlets, including the “natively digital” news websites like Politico, Slate, and (yes) Breitbart, as well as podcasts and newsletters.

There is much here to consider, but the question remains unanswered as to how media outlets make enough money to survive in an online world whose participants generally expect content to be free. Even with plummeting print ads, newspapers still typically make more money in print than in online advertising.

Also, how does a legitimate outlet that needs paying subscribers to stay afloat compete with fake-news purveyors who spread their content for free in order to further a partisan agenda? In fact, as the authors point out, fake news is wildly remunerative, with one former writer reporting that he made $10,000 to $30,000 a month churning out fake articles.

The other issue in the constant, instantaneous, and thoroughly interconnected news-iverse is that incorrect information, once distributed — whether innocently or with malice aforethought — can never be called back. That’s why it’s disturbing to know that BuzzFeed’s editorial policy is, “When in doubt, publish,” and the Daily Beast advises its reporters that 70 percent certainty in a story’s accuracy is good enough, on the premise that wrong information can be corrected as quickly as it was disseminated.

Tell that to the folks at Comet Ping-Pong in DC.

Even for the media outlets that work hard to get the facts right, it’s worth noting that not all facts are of equivalent value to an informed populace, nor of equivalent cost to report. It’s extremely easy to report factually what a candidate says, but exponentially more demanding of time, resources, and tenacity to be able to report the degree to which there is any truth behind the words themselves.

Overload ought to become required reading in journalism curricula. Indeed, in his afterword, Schieffer offers a final teachable moment by illustrating what journalistic tenacity actually looks like to those who would learn the lesson.

David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post recently won the Pulitzer Prize for the reporting he did on Donald Trump’s charitable giving. This was a journalist’s hearing the words the candidate said and then deciding to see whether those words held true, and his paper being willing to let him.

After the campaign, Fahrenthold wrote an article describing exactly how he got the story, which involved months of dogged pursuit that included calling 300 different charities. With the Post’s permission, Schieffer reprints the article in full.

Schieffer and his contributors posit that reputable journalists are still out in force, and they remain on the side of “the fundamental ethical principles of journalism — telling verifiable truth, maintaining independence from sources and subjects, disclosing conflicts of interest, and serving the needs of citizens.”

Given that, it’s possible to imagine that we the people can survive even this.

Book Review: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 16 October 2017.

In Unbelievable, Katy Tur had me at her dedication. Rather than “For Mom” or “For Pooky-Bear,” it’s “For the love of God.”

Amen, sister.

In life, timing is everything, for good or ill. (“If I hadn’t decided to turn right at the corner just then, I never would have [met my soulmate] [been hit by that dump truck].”) Tur was a young NBC foreign correspondent living the life in London and spending romantic weekends in Paris, when a quick trip back to the States just happened to coincide with NBC’s decision to put someone on Donald Trump’s improbable (“ridiculous,” “hilarious”) presidential campaign.

Learning she was about to be tapped to follow him full-time, she called a veteran of earlier campaigns for advice. He told her to accept. “If you hate it, at least it will be short.”

Sure, it was funny at the time.

Trump’s bizarre love-hate relationship with Tur reared its head at the first campaign event she covered, just two weeks after his entry into the race. In the rain in a donor’s back yard in Bedford, New Hampshire, she was startled to hear him call her out, mid-speech, with a telling complaint, “I mean, Katy hasn’t even looked up once at me.”

Tur covered Trump longer than any other reporter, despite never having done political reportage before; without wanting to, she became part of the story she was covering. By not backing down in the face of personal attacks from her assigned candidate, or from the resulting death threats from his followers, she earned the respect of her colleagues, her own hashtag (#ImwithTur), and equal footing with her hero, Andrea Mitchell, as one of the indomitable “road warriors” of the campaign.

Plus, unlike most of the seasoned political reporters she found herself among, Tur, living as she was on a steady diet of packed and screaming Trump rallies across the U.S., never discounted the candidate’s chances of winning.

Tur takes an inspired approach to telling a story that we just finished living through — at least from our view in front of the stage. She slingshots back and forth between accounts from the long campaign (“May 23, 2015: 535 Days Until Election Day”) to the minute-by-minute ticking clock of Election Day itself. The stomach-clenching suspense is unexpected.

Along the way, she fills in the backstory of her from-birth training as a newshound and pulls the curtain back on the less-than-glamorous life of a press-corps journalist.

For those who still experience the election of 2016 as a raw, open wound, Tur’s intimate recounting may need to be read through splayed fingers. The rest of us just want video of the drunk Trump press corps’ early-morning election-day plane ride, with CNN’s Jeremy Diamond attempting to sled in the aisle during take-off, and Jim Acosta and Tur taking selfies with a passed-out Mark Halperin.

The author’s storytelling is earthy and accessible, and — as in the chapter, “Pop the Trunk. I’m Going to Run for It,” about dragging a couch-sized suitcase a mile through the snow to LaGuardia to beg her way onto an already-closed flight to Iowa — helps us to laugh through some of the otherwise truly chilling episodes she recounts of Trump’s whipping up his crowds against the “lying, disgusting” media, which often included his pointing out “back there…little Katy.”

In one telling episode, at a rally just days before Christmas in 2015, Tur spends a lovely, impromptu half-hour in the ladies room with a hair dresser and Trump supporter who offers to help her get her hair TV-ready. During the rally, Trump ruminates on the idea that Vladimir Putin kills reporters, and considers whether he might do the same. “I hate them, but I would never kill them.”

As usual, Trump’s press corps is corralled together behind barricades, as Tur observes, “caged in the center of the arena like a modern-day Roman Colosseum.” She notes the poinsettias, the wreaths, the holiday sweaters, “and the crowd is cheering about the idea of killing journalists…[T]o the lady who curled my hair in the bathroom, who is now somewhere in the crowd that is laughing at the idea of Trump killing me: Thanks, my hair looks great.”

Tur proved her mettle during a long and painful campaign, surviving that and much more — not the least of which was Trump’s grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her, apparently because he liked her relatively softball coverage of him moments before on “Morning Joe.”

Unbelievable.

Book Review: The Ninth Hour

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 5 October 2017.

Novelists are often drawn back to the same time and place again and again in their work, to an emotional geography that formed them as people and as writers. For Alice McDermott, that place is among the working-class Catholics of 1950s-era Brooklyn and Long Island. Her work consistently involves the quietest stories focused on lives of little note.

And yet.

In the Catholic canon, the Liturgy of the Hours, such as vespers and lauds, marks the time of day for certain prayers; none, the ninth hour of the day, 3 p.m., is the time for mid-afternoon prayers. It is around that time on a cold and rainy February day that a young man sends his pregnant wife out to do the marketing so that he can close up their tiny apartment, kill the pilot light, and lie down in the bedroom for a permanent nap.

We see the aftermath of the explosion and fire through the eyes of neighborhood nun Sister St. Savior. Despite her desperate need for a toilet after a day spent begging at the Woolworth’s for the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, the nun walks into the house rather than pass by, and immediately takes matters into her capable if arthritic hands.

Thus begins the story of Annie, the new widow, her daughter, Sally (christened St. Savior), the nuns of the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters, and the various characters that inhabit their work-weary neighborhood.

As unassuming a writer as McDermott is, she sometimes surprises readers with her willingness to break rules. In her 1998 National Book Award winner, Charming Billy, she got away with using a first-person narrator for a closely told story, the bulk of which took place before the narrator was even born.

Rebel McDermott is here again, this story narrated by an even more captivating “we,” signifying the children of Sally and her husband, Patrick Tierney, who grew up together. The Tierney children — how many? boys? girls? — tell this story in intimate detail, describing their grandfather’s last solitary moments, Sister St. Savior’s internal considerations of God, and countless other hidden moments. It’s a delicious little twist of narrative expectations that McDermott pulls off effortlessly.

The story unspools gradually, alluding to certain incidents and episodes, returning to them, adding flavor and depth at each pass. Sally and Patrick’s children recount the stories they grew up hearing. That their grandmothers, Annie and Liz, were fast friends from before their parents were born means the stories of the two families bleed into each other to become one.

Many of the stories involve the residents of the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor — primarily Sisters Lucy, Illuminata, and Jeanne — women who understand what needs to be done and simply do it. They are by necessity practical and tough, and have few saintly illusions about life. Their devotion to God is primarily manifest in the unceasing labor they pour into easing the suffering of others.

If Lucy is brusque and unsmiling while Jeanne’s eyes twinkle perpetually on the brink of laughter, both women prove themselves equal to any task, starting with making Annie’s apartment habitable again and finding the money to employ her to help Illuminata with the convent’s mending and washing. They also see things clearly, including the developments between Annie and the convent’s milkman, Mr. Costello.

Sally grows up in the warm embrace of Annie, the various sensibilities of the convent nuns, and the messy, tumultuous household of Liz and Michael Tierney and their six children. Sally and Patrick knew each other from infancy, and in Patrick’s stories they were destined for each other.

One of Patrick’s favorite stories involves Red Whelan, Aunt Rose, and the lasting enmity between his father and grandfather, for whom young Patrick is named. The Tierneys paid Red Whelan to take the elder Patrick’s place in battle during the Civil War.

When Red came back missing an arm, a leg, and an ear, the Tierneys bestowed on him permanent residence in their third-floor bedroom, and their young daughter Rose to be his lifetime caregiver. So much given to ensure the future of a son on whom all hopes rested. As Aunt Rose later said, “Weighed down all his life by the burden of gratitude.”

Hence the bitter and permanent break between father and son when young Michael, carelessly throwing away a generation of advancement that came at such a cost, insisted on marrying a mere immigrant servant girl — Liz.

The final insult, in the end, is that Red survives the old man. “I wonder if it irked my father, to see Red Whelan outlive him,” Michael tells Patrick. “I wonder if he thought, as he lay dying, that perhaps for three hundred dollars more Red Whelan would take his place again.”

As told to the children, the story is an object lesson in being sure the thing you think you want is worth the price you have to pay to get it. It’s the same object lesson that Sally learns when she thinks she wants to become a nun, and yet again when she thinks she wants to spend her mornings with miserable, self-pitying Mrs. Costello.

Sister Jeanne tells the children stories, too, in her old age but still with a twinkle in her eye, discussing with them the ideas of God’s sense of fair play and the joys of Heaven, something she is certain will be denied to her. How sweet, stalwart Jeanne could permanently be out of God’s grace is the central mystery of this story, while the reader’s central question, for her and several other characters, is, “Was it worth the price?”

McDermott, the master of understated storytelling, leaves us to ponder the answer.

A Lesson in Every Object

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This column originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 28 September 2017.

In June 2013, author/philosopher/videogame-designer Ian Bogost and Loyola University New Orleans associate English professor Chris Schaberg introduced a series of books and essays called Object Lessons, described as “a series on the hidden lives of ordinary objects.”

Bogost and Schaberg serve as the series’ editors, while the 2,000-word essays are published in no less a venue than the Atlantic (in their online Technology section), and the 25,000-word books are published by Bloomsbury.

Bogost explained the origin of the idea as having grown out of the concepts he explored in his book Alien Phenomenology; in particular, “a call for more frequent and more sustained attention to specific things.”

As he described it in the announcement of the series, “Each Object Lessons project will start from a specific prompt: an anthropological query, archeological discovery, historical event, literary passage, personal narrative, philosophical speculation, technological innovation, anything really — and from there develop original insights around and novel lessons about the object in question.”

Since then, 31 installments have been published, with at least 15 more in the offing, and the team continues to solicit proposals for additional projects. Besides being beautiful little hand-sized objects themselves, showcasing exceptional writing, the wonder of these books is that they exist at all. A couple guys champion the idea of establishing an open-ended essay project to a pair of big-name publishers, and they say yes! To essays!

The list of existing and forthcoming books is a random walk through a heap of objects, from the large-scale and encompassing (Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton) to the small and specific (Sock by Kim Adrian); things of which we have too much (Waste by Brian Thill) and too little (Silence by John Biguenet); things whose time has come (Drone by Adam Rothstein; Pixel by Ian Epstein) and gone (Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly; Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton); things that are a phenomenon of modern life (Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee); and the things modern life is excising (Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz).

I wonder what object lesson lies in realizing that the two most politically charged objects in the series are head coverings: Veil (by Rafia Zakaria) and Hood (by Alison Kinney).

To read a few of these books is to understand generally what you will find in any of them. That’s in no way dismissive. The writing is uniformly excellent, engaging, thought-provoking, and informative. Each one uses its base object as a jumping-off point to range widely through a surprising collection of interrelated topics.

So, if a book called Sock makes you think, “Twenty-five-thousand words on socks? Uh, no,” then you’re unclear on the concept. You’re also missing out on a thoroughly delightful discussion of, among other things:

Why humans no longer have fur, but instead have many sweat glands and a layer of fat.
Georges Bataille’s essay fragment “The Big Toe,” which posits the subject body part as the true evolutionary launch point for humanity, because its forward orientation enabled bipedalism, which in turn allowed us to develop and exploit the opposable thumb.
How tracing the evolution of clothing lice (a.k.a. body lice) as a distinct species from both head lice and pubic lice, allows us to date the emergence of the use of clothing by humans.
The many delicate, nuanced adjustments needed throughout the body to keep humans from pitching forward onto our faces with every step.
Foot odor, which is not caused by the quarter-million sweat glands in our feet, but rather the poop from the bacteria that flourishes in our laced-up shoes and feasts on dead skin.
The distinction between a partialist — one whose sexual obsession is aimed at a part of the body — and a fetishist — one whose obsession is focused on an object — so that it’s no longer considered entirely correct to speak of a “foot fetish.” (Author Adrian addresses many facets of our complicated sexual relationship with feet, though one imagines that Sock serves as the hors d’oeuvre for this subject ahead of Summer Brennan’s forthcoming Object Lesson, High Heel.)

Imagine, then, that the less-prosaic of the Object Lessons are at least as wide-ranging as Sock. For me, it’s illuminating to understand the reason each author chose the subject she or he wrote about. The whimsical Eye Chart arose from author William Germano’s lifelong issues with myopia, while Anna Leahy’s project, Tumor, is informed by her intensely personal experiences of her father’s death from liver cancer and her mother’s from pancreatic cancer.

After digesting several of the OLs, I began to consider what mine should be. It didn’t take long to decide: Paper Route. True, it’s not an object quite like Remote Control (by Caetlin Benson-Allott) or Personal Stereo (by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow), but I’d argue it’s as much an object as Jet Lag or Traffic (by Paul Josephson).

Like many of the OLs, the launch point here is from my own personal narrative. I’ve had a job since I was 9, and that first one was delivering the now-defunct weekly Montgomery County Journal. Later, I progressed to delivering the now-defunct daily Washington Star.

It was never my idea to get the paper route, and I was not always a willing or gracious participant, but I had to save for college since, in my household, it was a given that 1) we kids were going to college, and 2) we kids needed to find a way to pay for it.

Thus, Paper Route, should it ever exist as an OL, will address certain obvious topics, though I would hope to make it more than just a misty-eyed elegy on the disappearance of both paper and news, or a grumpy lecture on the value of hard work and saving money (and walking barefoot uphill both ways in the snow).

Some of the less-obvious paths I’d like to explore include debt, higher education, the plummeting participation of able-bodied men in the workforce, and the need to recognize licensed trades as being of equivalent value to college degrees in a healthy, functioning economy and society.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Book Review: Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution

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This review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 30 August 2017.

For those of us who aren’t evolutionary biologists, it may come as a surprise to learn that there is such a field as experimental evolution. (Is now the time to admit not knowing about evolutionary biologists, either?)

This and other surprises both fascinating and a bit discomfiting await the non-expert reader of Jonathan Losos’ Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, a thoroughly accessible analysis of whether evolution is one big crapshoot or rather mundanely predictable. No spoilers here, but the evidence presented on both sides makes for some thought-provoking reading.

Losos made his early bona fides as the Lizard Guy, doing lots of undergraduate, graduate, and later fieldwork with anoles in the Bahamas (he agrees that it’s a tough life but somebody’s got to live it).

He is now a professor of biology and director of the Losos Laboratory at Harvard, and Curator of Herpetology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Being a university professor, he publishes often in scholarly journals, but also writes for a popular audience in places like the New York Times.

The great proponent of evolution as an unpredictable and unrepeatable series of happenstance is Stephen Jay Gould, who posited that you could hit the rewind button on evolution and replay it infinitely and never get the same outcome twice.

This is a concept known as “contingency,” in which any outcome is dependent upon the tiniest factors all lining up in exactly the right sequence. Yet much of the evolutionary record — as well as plenty of extant species, including those anoles — illustrates the concept of convergent evolution, where similar environmental pressures in disparate locales give rise to virtually identical evolutionary adaptations.

(Personally, I am crushed to learn that I missed out on the “Shetland pony-sized” pigmy elephants that apparently evolved independently on islands around the world, “some recent enough to have coexisted with modern humans: Malta, Corsica, St. Paul off the coast of Alaska; Flores, where they lived with Komodo dragons; even the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.” What?)

On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of once-and-done species that evolved a single time and remain unique, including most of New Zealand’s fauna (where mammals never evolved), a good chunk of Australia’s, and, lest we forget, us.

The Gould Camp would say we’re a one-in-infinity outcome, while others, like Dale Russell, theorize that, even if that asteroid had missed Earth and mammals had never gotten their evolutionary shot, it’s completely plausible that evolution and selection would have favored dinosaurs that were big-brained and bipedal, eventually resulting in — voila! — the dinosauroid.

Evolutionary biologists are probing the “contingency vs. determinism” theories through both lab and field experiments to assess evolution’s general predictability. One of them, Rich Lenski, took Gould’s “replay the tape” challenge literally, establishing a long-term evolutionary experiment (LTEE) with E. coli that started in 1988 and continues today through tens of thousands of generations.

By starting with a single parent strain and growing 12 separate colonies under identical conditions for years, Lenski was seeing whether they all behaved identically. The findings over time from this and other LTEEs offer some surprises but generally show significant predictability.

While many of us tend to think of evolution as an eons-long process, we also intuitively understand that rapid genetic changes give rise to such organisms as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pesticide-resistant insects.

Fast changes happen in larger creatures, too. Losos introduces us to many examples of field-based experiments in evolution that demonstrate just how quickly natural selection works to change the make-up of a given population.

His long-running work with anoles had already documented examples of consistently convergent evolution in which nearly identical lizards evolved on different islands to fill nearly identical ecological niches.

His later work took that a step farther and put genetically similar anoles on tiny, lizard-free islands to see what would happen. When the populations did not get wiped off the map by hurricanes, they evolved in ways the research team found to be fairly predictable.

In Trinidad, experimental evolution fieldwork with guppies demonstrated how predation pressure affects coloration. Again and again, experiments showed that, under low predation, male guppies quickly became more brightly colored, apparently something that held appeal for female guppies. Under high predation, issues of attractiveness were thrown out the evolutionary window as duller colors helped males to survive long enough to mate. (Better dull but alive than sexy but dead, as evolutionary biologists like to say.)

The speed with which these changes occur — within a few years or even just a few seasons — is pretty stunning, but it’s also a little worrisome how the researchers choose to jigger around with wildlife, introducing species where they weren’t, including adding predators into the mix where they previously hadn’t been.

Losos discusses this somewhat, arguing that the introductions mimic what often happens naturally. Still, it sure feels like we’ve seen this “Man Monkeys with Nature: Bad Outcomes Ensue” movie before.

So why do we care about evolutionary predictability, anyway? As Losos points out in discussing diseases such as cystic fibrosis, any level of predictability is better than none if it gives us hint in advance about how these diseases might shape-shift in the face of drug therapies.

All this goes to presume that a reader is willing to face the concept of evolution in the first place. Losos notes that the National Science Foundation asks evolutionary biologists, when writing up the description of their funded grants for public release, to avoid the “E” word so as not to trigger an ugly backlash.

Indeed, it seems that however it is we humans came about, we still haven’t evolved a consistently open mind or a thicker skin.