Parents’ Nightmare: A Misdiagnosis of ADHD

This story, from Tuesday’s LA Times, frightened and relieved me at the same time. 

Los Angeles Clippers’ center Chris Kaman is an exceptional person.  Only a few men at any given time are capable of playing center in the NBA.  There are hardly enough qualified centers to go around.  Physical gifts like size, speed and shooting accuracy must combine with the ability to process rapidly the flow of the game, the positions of all the players, the coach’s designs. 

Coming up as a ballplayer and student, Kaman had to learn all that, under the influence of powerful psycoactive medications he didn’t need — Ritalin and Adderall — from age 2 1/2 through high school for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  However,

Kaman, who had trouble remembering plays and concentrating on the court in college and in the pros, disclosed Sunday that he was misdiagnosed.

Kaman actually had an anxiety disorder that caused him to over-analyze situations and scenarios.

“Growing up, I had to take the medication my whole life,” said Kaman, who said he grew so frustrated taking the medication that he would come home from school and cry.

“I can’t take back time. I wish I could. But I can’t. It really bothered me to take the medication every day. I felt I had to take the medication to make me feel like a regular person. It was kind of backward.”

His misdiagnosis was discovered in July by Hope139, a 5-year old organization based in Grandville, Mich., that studies the brain. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, between 3% and 5% of children have ADHD, with symptoms that include hyperactivity and impulsiveness.

According to Hope139’s research of about 40,000 patients, up to 15% of those on medicine for hyperactivity do not have the affliction.

You got kids?  You get the impression as a parent that it’s a lot more than 3 to 5 percent of kids who are being diagnosed with ADHD. If your kid seems intelligent but gets bad grades, is rambunctious, talks too much, is forgetful, the ADHD diagnosis seems to linger in the air with every doctor visit.

Raising my son, I made up my mind to strap myself to the mast and get us through adolescent and not listen to any such diagnosis.  As frustrating as raising my son could be at times, I did not want him taking these medications.  I figured the cure to what seemed to be ailing him was merely to grow up.  Which, at 17, he’s showing signs of doing, to our relief.

What happened to Kaman is exactly what I worried would happen to my son:

The medication Kaman took had the opposite effect on him, said Dr. Tim Royer, the organization’s chief executive.

Kaman’s brain was already working in overdrive, and the medication provided an added stimulus. The dosage was increased to the point that Kaman’s mind became overloaded and he became less animated. “He stopped being a behavioral problem, but he got too much medicine and it shut him down,” Royer said.

Kaman stopped taking medication once he entered college at Central Michigan because he no longer had to sit in one place for more than a couple of hours.

But his concentration in college, and once he signed with the Clippers, was still lacking. He could focus on the man he was guarding but not on weak-side defense, or as Royer put it, “He could see the tree in front of him, but not the forest.”

How is this generation of parents, pediatricians and psychologists going to be judged?  Kaman’s story is going to become better-known soon, and we’ll all be taking a second look at how these medications were sold as the panacea to so many families.

Kaman is hoping to become a spokesman for children who are misdiagnosed or are simply looking for another alternative instead of taking medication for hyperactivity. “I’m using my resources as much as I can to try and help people,” he said. “I was trying to see if it worked first. I’m on a platform being in the NBA where I can help people.”
 

Union Station, Cathedral of Rail

After dropping my son off Thursday evening for his annual winter trip to San Diego, I walked back to my car, turned around, and saw this:

Isn’t it cool how Metro has revived this architectural gem? The lobby was full of people.  I remember when going to Union Station felt like coming to a Greyhound station.  My son’s 17.  Seventy years from now, he’ll remember it not as a museum, but as that lively place where he caught the train to Nana’s.

Life After (Faked) Death

Here’s a heartwarming family story for the holiday season. 

John Darwin, a British man, worried about debts from a failed career in rental properties, fakes death by drowning on a canoe trip.  His wife Anne knew he was thinking about going on the lam, but when he disappeared, she claims she thought he was really dead.

According to her account, Darwin began planning to fake his death in early 2002 because he believed it was the only way the couple could escape growing debts related to their apartment rental business.

She said she doubted he would go through with the plan and initially believed he had died when he disappeared in March 2002. But she said he returned to their family home in northern England in February 2003, looking dirty, thin and “disheveled.”

For the next three years, she told the newspapers, Darwin lived with her in their family home, spending most of his time in a small room in an apartment building they owned next door. She said his secret room was connected to their bedroom by a passageway that was knocked into the wall and hidden behind a large wardrobe.

“I was always on eggshells when friends and family came to stay in case someone wandered into John’s room and saw him,” she said, adding that he would often take walks disguised in a woolly hat and faking a limp.

He was hiding in his secret room, she said, on the day in April 2003 that she and their two grown sons returned home from the coroner’s inquest at which John Darwin was officially declared dead, she said.

The declaration allowed her to collect life insurance payouts of about $50,000 in cash and an additional $260,000 to pay off the mortgage on their house, she told the newspapers.

Anne Darwin said her husband insisted that their sons not be told that he was alive. But he said he missed the boys and would have her put them on speakerphone when they called so he could hear their voices, she said. Sometimes, when they asked her a question that she could not answer, she said he would write down an answer for her to read to them. 

Little side stories are coming out in the British press about this time in hiding. I especially liked this one, which has a very L.A. feel about it.  Even a dead man can be a NIMBY:

The Last Great Rock Band Performs

If you’ve seen the commercials for the University of Phoenix, you might have noticed the background music is this odd, distinctive clip of what sounds like a Phil Spectorish choir singing “hey-la, hey-la” over a fierce rock beat complete with flailing, Keith Moon-style drums. You’re hearing The New Pornographers. This is the most exciting moment from the most exciting song on the most exciting pop/rock album of the 2000s, in my opinion, Twin Cinema (2005).

As befits the waning power of formal structures that characterizes this era, the New Pornographers are more of a “project” than a band, although onstage Wednesday night at Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, they fit snugly in the pocket as if they’d been playing together nonstop for 10 years.  But looking at their history and personnel, you get the feeling they could vanish at any time, without rancor, just because the key members found something else to do.

So that’s one reason I made sure to go to their show this week promoting the new album Challengers. Neko Case’s solo career, which preceded her joining the NPs, has now achieved a level of esteem and is showing inklings of commercial viability, so she might not stick around. They already are forced to tour without her sometimes. In fact, her replacement, Kathleen Calder, is already a member of the band and on Wednesday night she helped fill out the big co-ed vocal sound that is the hallmark of this band.

Scary Oregon

Signs like this one are posted up and down the northern Pacific coast of Oregon.  My son has a lifelong fear of tsunamis, so when I told him about the sign, he urged me to leave immediately.

“You know what happens just before a tsunami, right?”

“Yeah, the tide goes way out, and–”

“I could just see you running out to take pictures instead of finding higher ground!”

“There won’t be any tsumanis while we’re here, I swear.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re leaving now, so stop worrying.”

I knew it would freak him out.  Long before I became a father, I was an older brother. It’s a hard habit to break.

The little guy, running away from the big wave…doesn’t look like he’s got much of a chance, does it?

P.S.  Just figured out, this was my 500th post!  That hardly seems possible.

Thoughts on Virginia Tech and the Rights of the Insane* UPDATED

The Virginia Tech tragedy is not a story about guns, it is a story about the rights of the insane. Cho Seung-Hui was clearly insane, as the tapes and writings now ubiquitous in the media show with painful clarity.  That he was both insane and potentially dangerous was known to university officials and law enforcement.  Despite his insanity, he continued to live in the dormitory and attend classes.

Anyone who lives in a big city like LA with a Skid Row knows there are thousands of crazy people sleeping in the streets and shelters who, if properly treated, could live productive, peaceful and perhaps even happy lives.   This has been going on for hundreds of years.

Unlike the Skid Row denizens, apparently Seung-Hui was functional. He hadn’t flunked out of school, for example. He managed to keep himself fed and clothed.  He knew how to operate a computer.  But the depths of his mental problems were at least glimpsed by officialdom — and then forgotten. Seung-Hui was given opportunities to receive treatment, but basically walked away without consequence.  The choice was his to make, completely, and he decided to go on being insane. 

In the past 40 years or so, we have decided as a society that to compel insane people to submit to involuntary treatment, to confine them, or even to keep track of them is both impossible and impractical.  

The good news is, of course, we don’t have insane people warehoused in bleak Dickensian asylums.  It’s also good news that people who are not insane are unlikely to fall into an institution like that through diagnostic or bureaucratic error.  “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” couldn’t happen in America today.

The bad news is, we haven’t thought of anything better. We’ve just walked away from the problem. An insane person only gets help if he or she is sane enough to recognize they need it; or if they have an aggressive relative who will intervene on their behalf, despite their resistance.

I have an insane person in my family. She is about 80 now. The last time anyone saw her was about 20 years ago. Occasionally she sends a postcard. She is wandering the streets of a major metropolitan area.  She didn’t lose her mind until after she was married and had raised children. But since then…there was nothing anyone could do. Her husband, her brothers, her children, various ministers and doctors, nobody, because she didn’t want help.

To my knowledge, she has never hurt anyone. But neither had Seung-Hui, until yesterday.

Dealing with the insane is one of the most tragic dilemmas our society faces.

It blows my mind to think of those grieving parents and how they must be reacting to the news; about how many dealings this guy had with police and mental health officials, how many people knew there was something wrong with him, and that he might be dangerous. And yet, even after the first shootings, no police officer thought to go check his room. He wasn’t on anyone’s list. “Hey, doesn’t that insane student live here? Should we go up and talk to him?” That question was never posed.

He was in a room in a dorm adjacent to the crime scene, calmly reloading his weapons and packing his ammo belts, undisturbed by anyone who might have suspected a connection. He was in America. He had the right to be left alone, and was able to go about making his murderous plans behind the shield of his rights.

(P.S. This post is based on a comment I left here, on Althouse.)

*UPDATE: One consequence of this policy vacuum in terms of the mentally ill is that the problem is left on the doorstep of professionals who have no competence to deal with it, but no choice but to deal with it — at fearful risk of their lives.  This is well articulated in today’s New York Times’ op-ed by Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor and author:

It’s a simple fact that, for every deranged murderer like Mr. Cho there are thousands more oddballs just below the breaking point. I know one quasi-psychopathic incompetent, for example, who remained on the campus payroll for over a dozen years simply because his supervisor was afraid of being killed if he was fired.

It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad.

Researchers at King’s College London have recently determined that if one identical twin shows psychopathic traits, the other twin, who coincidentally shares precisely the same set of genes, has a very high probability of having the same psychopathic traits. But among fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the chance that both twins will show psychopathic traits is far smaller. In other words, there is something suspiciously psychopath-inducing in some people’s genes.

What could it be? Medical images of the brain give tantalizing clues — the amygdala, the “fight or flight” decision-making center of the brain, may be smaller than usual, or some areas of the brain may glow only dimly because of low serotonin levels. We may not know precisely what set Mr. Cho off, but we are beginning to home in on the unusual differences in certain neurochemistries that can make people act in bizarre and dysfunctional ways.

Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

“Supreme Adequacy”

“BE ADEQUATE,” all in capital letters, were the words with which Lindsay Lohan ended her meandering tribute to director Robert Altman after his recent death. 

The e-mail, and indeed Ms. Lohan’s entire existence, gets attention because she is part of a celebrity cohort that would make a nun pine for the comforting rectitude of the Rat Pack — booze, broads, battered paparazzi and all. But I always feel a little sad for Lohan. Unlike Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Nicole Richie and their interchangeable sleazy parasite boyfriends, she had talent.  Because I was raising children during the 90s, I saw Lohan’s version of “The Parent Trap” a time or two.  She was 11 when she made it and did a fine job.  But nowadays, when Lindsay Lohan contemplates adequacy, she is looking up at an ideal that is fading away.

Jon Weisman found an interesting way to talk about “adequacy” the other day, in this post on his great blog, Dodger Thoughts.  About the Dodgers signing Luis Gonzalez to play left field next season, Jon said he is “not excited.” Gonzalez was once an excellent player, but his skills are in decline.  But then Jon added:

At the same time, I am very open to the idea that with superstar talent at a clear premium, there may be something to the idea of trying to dominate with depth, with supreme adequacy.

I like that idea.  Sometimes, “supreme adequacy” is a high enough goal for an organization — a baseball team, or anything else.   Things like genius or ”superstar talent” can’t be planned for; they are four-leaf clovers.  Truly great ideas — they’re rare. But you can assemble a team where everyone is adequate.  Not mediocre: Adequate.  Everyone knows their roles and performs their roles.  The roles are clearly delineated.  To be adequate is not easy, but it’s achievable. It’s not a mystery. 

Greatness is a mystery. There is nothing more awesome to me than observing a person who is extraordinary at … really just about anything.  But sometimes, people who think they’re special, aren’t.  And their striving to be seen as great becomes an obnoxious drama of self-delusion. 

Even the great have to master “supreme adequacy” first.  I think people used to know that, before celebrity became a goal in itself.  Maybe Altman’s death disclosed this truth to the befogged Ms. Lohan, and her subconscious is trying to point her back in the right direction. 

Have you heard the call to be supremely adequate?

A Generation of Wired Shadow-Boxers; or “Wii are the World”*

I raised a son and a step-son during the age of the video game console. I saw video-games become the contemporary symbol for all of what’s wrong with today’s youth, and joined in the worrying. One of the raps against electronic games was players were “sedentary,” just sitting on the sofa for hours pushing buttons rather than enjoying the fresh air outside. (“Fresh air,” a phrase only used by parents.)

Apparently, Nintendo listened to us. (I know I’m late to covering the Wii, but under the rules of blogging, if it’s new to me, it’s news.) Anyway, according to a couple of stories I saw today in the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo designed the Wii’s controller so that players’ body movements control the game, not just their button selections. You have to play it standing up.

And now, parents have a new worry: Their kids might hurt themselves.

But as players spend more time with the Wii, some are noticing that hours waving the game’s controller around can add up to fairly intense exertion — resulting in aches and pains common in more familiar forms of exercise. They’re reporting aching backs, sore shoulders — even something some have dubbed “Wii elbow.”

More fear:

Another hazard: collisions. All those flailing arms can sometimes inadvertently smack into lamps, furniture and even competing players. IGN.com, a popular site that reviews videogames, said one player testing the Wii lost her grip and sent the controller flying into a wall. Blaine Stuart of Rochester, N.Y., mistakenly whacked his fiancée, Shelly Haefele, while playing tennis and also accidentally hit his dog while bowling.

Even the physically fit are challenged by this thing:

Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn’t helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. “I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe — I had to go take a shower,” he says. And the next morning? “I had trouble putting my shirt on,” says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

Nintendo has several videos on Youtube that illustrate what players must do. Here’s one of them:

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think these kids were suffering from advanced case of Tourette’s syndrome. But this is obviously a coming thing. The Wii is outselling the Sony Playstation 3 so far.

And I want one.

*Update: I just came across a fascinating blog post by Michael Zack Urlocker, guest-blogging on his “brother” Michael’s site. Michael is a “disruption consultant,” which sounds like a growth industry to me. (Zack “is a pseudonym for a Silicon Valley software executive rapidly approaching his mid-life crisis.” He is also a busy blogger.) Zack analyzes Nintendo’s business strategy brilliantly.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a tidbit.

The Nintendo Wii is the runt of the litter when it comes to hardware specifications. It doesn’t have the HD graphics, surround sound or DVD drives of its more expensive competitors. But it’s outfoxed both Microsoft and Sony by packing more fun for a fraction of the price. Nintendo Wii sells for $250 compared to $500 for the Sony Playstation and around $400 for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Nintendo also includes throws in a set of 5 simple but addictive games dubbed Wii Sports with every console, making the Wii a much better value and a more complete offering out of the box. More importantly, Nintendo has parlayed their lower cost hardware into two further competitive advantages: games are cheaper to develop and they make money on every console sold. While it sounds like basic common sense, for the gaming industry this goes against all of the conventional rules.

It’s always instructive to watch a successful business innovation unfold before your eyes. “Zack” is a good guide to this one.

**Another Update.  I came across a blog that specializes in California insurance law and, after reading the same WSJ story I read, the writer came to this unsurprising conclusion about what the flailing arms and flying controllers might lead to:  

Sony has included warnings against these and other perils in the product manual [PDF], but little details like that never need to reach the jury if you pick the right venue and play your cards right.  So to our friends of the plaintiff’s bar we say: Fire up the word processors!  Nintendo’s put a shiny new cause of action under your tree! 

Don’t NOT Vote…

I’m back in Orange County today while my son attends another play at Cal State Fullerton, which, from hearing him talk, might be what you’d get if Stratford-on-Avon mated with Broadway. Uh, okay. Sitting and waiting in Starbucks, I pick up a discarded OC Register Sunday Commentary Section, and see a friendly face on the front page, Jill Stewart, who I just mentioned the other day. She has a great column today that begins this way:

Have you noticed how, the more money the union and corporate special interests spend to promote their particular candidate, bond measure, or tax, the less interested and less aware of these issues we voters seem to be?

Although record amounts are being spent in California to drag us out away from our plasma TVs and our favorite blogs, we, the electorate, are deeply uninvolved. We are stuck in our comfy chairs.

How true. I’m going to vote Tuesday, but I expect to have to spend a lot of time in the voting booth reading over some of the propositions, because with one or two exceptions (the oil tax and the cigarette tax), I don’t understand what most of them are. Which are the ones that were Gov. Schwarzenegger’s grand deal with the legislature, the infrastructure bonds that are supposed to prepare California for the wave of population that, er, actually started arriving 20 years ago? I have no idea.

The advertising has been more unhelpful than usual. There’s one proposition that has been called a “taxpayer trap.” That’s all they say: Vote no on the “taxpayer trap.” To make sure I get the point, there’s a huge graphic of an old-fashioned mousetrap with what looks like a house from Monopoly being used as bait. So, does that mean if I give into temptation and try to take that nice little house, I’ll be caught in the taxpayer trap? The ad gives no further information. Then there’s another one that, if I recall correctly, implores me not to be fooled: Such-and-such proposition is bad for the environment. Since I had not heard of this proposition, listed only by number, I figure it’s unlikely that I’ve been fooled — but maybe, subliminally, I have.

I vote in every election, so in fact I will do my homework. But, as Jill Stewart suggests, most voters see these ads and figure the safest place to weather the election is from that comfy chair. So many traps out there, so many people trying to fool you! And if you’re just going to vote no, why bother showing up at all?

And that’s the special-interest strategy, Stewart suggests: To keep turnout “horrifically low.”

Little wonder why voters will stay away Nov. 7, and why record monies spent will be inversely related to votes cast. I figure a cost of $52 per vote.

The sharp pollster Mark Baldassare, director of research at Public Policy Institute of California, tells me, “What is going on is that a lot of money is spent on directing relatively few people to vote, and telling the rest of them to stay home. Campaign consultants … buy a list telling them who the voters are, they winnow it down to the 50 percent they need, and they try to get as many of the other people not to vote. And it works. This is no accident, that we are spending more money and getting less voters.”

The special interests get a bonus from this system, too, Stewart says. For an initiative to qualify in the next election, it must collect signatures equaling 5 percent of the total votes cast for governor. With the 2006 gubernatorial race pretty much a wipeout, and an initiative ballot full of obscure traps and tricks, turnout will be low, and so the 5 percent threshold in 2007-10 will be easier to meet, leading to “an onslaught of ballot measures.”

Who benefits from these ballot measures? They aren’t serious attempts to change the law, for the most part, are they? Given the overwhelmingly persuasive influence of the “vote no, it’s a trap!” advertising, I figure that the odds are against almost any ballot measure now–the good, the bad or the ugly. So who benefits? The election industry, that’s who — TV and radio stations who get to sell lots of advertising, the media buyers and other consultants. A full slate of initiatives, no matter how doomed, means full employment in the campaign and elections industry.

Back in my Berkeley days, I used to stop many late nights at Top Dog, which was run by some hard-core libertarians. The inside of Top Dog was decorated with libertarian bumper stickers. One of them was, “Don’t Vote. It Only Encourages Them.” But after reading Jill’s column, I think that slogan is due for an update. Voting is the last thing “they” want you to do. Don’t NOT vote. It Only Empowers Them.

Bob Barker’s Weird Place in the Pantheon

The other day, I wrote what some readers must have thought was a very strange post comparing two famous octogenarians, Tony Bennett and Fidel Castro. The point was entirely personal. Here are two famous men who were part of my earliest memories, who still share this planet with me, and still do what they’ve been doing since I started paying attention to the world outside my sandbox.

If I’d thought of him, I might have added another: Bob Barker.

Bob Barker was my companion through the days and weeks of my youth in Illinois and Connecticut whenever I was too sick to go to school. I was healthy most of the time, but when I got sick, I got really sick. The way I remember it, both strep throat and pneumonia seemed to hit me at least once each winter, and put me in bed for a week or two. Actually in my parents’ bed, where it was easier for my mother to bring me juice and crackers, to make sure I took my medicine; and where I could watch TV.

Cartoons ended each day by 9. The Three Stooges and Soupy Sales wouldn’t come on until about 3. Soap operas, with their crescendoing organ accompaniment and long, meaningful looks, were a joke to me.

That left game shows: Allen Ludden hosting “Password.” Hugh Downs hosting “Concentration.” Art Fleming hosting “Jeopardy!” with Don Pardo as the off-screen announcer. Bill Cullen hosting “The Price is Right.” Gene Rayburn hosting “The Match Game,” in the innocent years before every question became a sexual double-entendre. Monty Hall hosting “Let’s Make a Deal,” with Carol Merrill massaging the air around the bedroom sets and convertible sofas they gave away as prizes.

Bob Barker hosted the strangest game show of the era, “Truth or Consequences.” Suave, Brylcreemed Bob would ask contestants an impossible question, and give them virtually no time to answer it. Then he would order them to participate in a humiliating stunt — cross-dressing was a typical theme, in an era when a man never wanted to be seen wearing an apron. But debonair Bob, he made it all seem okay. As a kid, I yearned to be that smooth.

Later, after I pretty much stopped watching game shows, Bob switched to “The Price is Right,” which is still on the air. (The only broadcaster to be on the air continually longer than Barker is the Dodgers’ Vin Scully.) Under Barker’s reign, “The Price is Right” became yet another show where Bob could be cool while the contestants embarassed themselves. A smart movie producer should have cast Bob Barker as the Marquis de Sade or Torquemada. Apparently, his act wasn’t universally admired, as he spent much of the 1990s battling lawsuits for sexual harassment and discrimination. However the litigation turned out, he is still on the air.

Barker turns 80 later this year. What prompted me to think about him was seeing the following video on YouTube; a clip from a recent episode of “The Price is Right” that, if you stay with it, will make you laugh. The title of the clip is “One of the Worst ‘The Price is Right’ Players in History.” So bad, that even the unflappable Barker has to take a seat.

Memo To My Teenage Son: Multitasking Isn’t Learning!

It’s actually pretty safe to say my son doesn’t read my blog.  Most of what I write about is incredibly boring, according to him:  Politics, PR, baseball, science…yawn!  So I might have to pay him to read this:

Multi-tasking affects the brain’s learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn,” said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

“The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember,” Poldrack added. “Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don’t learn as well as if you had paid full attention.”

Shouldn’t that be obvious? 

I’ll tell you something else:  If you want to know why business and government are making so many bad decisions nowadays, you can blame the same thing — this absurd faith high-level people have in their own ability to multi-task.  Writing an e-mail, while having a meeting, while reading a report, while monitoring a conference call…this is how busy executives feel important.  They even multi-task while they’re on vacation!  Because, my God, if that phone ever stopped ringing, if those e-mails stopped flying over the transom, you might cease to exist!

But back to my son, who tries to tell me he’s doing work when, in fact, five Instant Message windows are open and actual dialogues are taking place; and he’s playing music; and talking on the phone.  Here is a snapshot of his brain:

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain…. When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone’s name or your driver’s license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain’s hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson’s have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

“We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn,” Poldrack said. “Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn.”

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don’t multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.  (emphasis mine)

Because, dude, this is so on the test!

Renee’s Still Walking Away, 40 Years On* (With corrected lyrics!)**

My mp3 player, which can hold about 1400 tracks, now has three versions of “Walk Away Renee”: The 1966 original by the Left Banke, the epic 1968 version by the Four Tops, and a new, delicately respectful version by Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy that is mentioned prominently in every review of their new, Cajun-folk duet album, Adieu False Heart.

A little research shows that I could add versions by Latin jazz percussionist and Cal Tjader sideman Willie Bobo; British protest singer Billy Bragg (he mumbles recollections of lost love while he plays the song almost absent-mindedly on acoustic guitar); and the indie rocker Angie Heaton (who sounds like a female Neil Young from the “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” era), among about a dozen other covers. I also have a version by Marshall Crenshaw from his live acoustic album, “I’ve Suffered for My Art, Now It’s Your Turn.”

*(Update: A clip of the Left Banke lip-syncing “Walk Away Renee” on the show “Where the Action Is” is at the end of this post.)

Quite a journey for a song written by a 16-year-old lovesick kid; and for that kid’s unrequited teenage crush, Renee Fladen, who also inspired the Left Banke’s other hit, “Pretty Ballerina.” According to this nicely-written piece by rock and roll fan Tom Simon:

Violinist Harry Lookofsky owned a small storefront recording studio in New York City that he called World United Studios. In 1965, he gave a set of keys to his 16-year-old son, Mike Brown [real name: Mike Lookofsky], who helped out by cleaning up and occasionally sitting in as a session pianist. Mike began bringing in his teenage friends who tinkered with drums, guitars, amplifiers, the Steinway piano, and anything else they might find. Except for Mike, who had a background in classical piano, none of them were top musicians. But they could sing, especially one guy named Steve Martin.

By 1966 they started to call themselves the Left Banke. In addition to Mike and Steve, they included Rick Brand on lead guitar, Tom Finn on bass, and drummer George Cameron. Finn brought his girlfriend to the studio one day when the group had assembled for a practice session. She was a 5′ 6″ teenager with platinum blond hair. Mike Brown was infatuated with her the instant he saw her. Her name was Renee Fladen.

The group had begun recording songs, and Harry was particularly impressed with Steve Martin’s voice. Mike wrote a song about Renee. Although there was never anything between the two, Mike was fascinated by her and pictured himself standing at the corner of Hampton and Falmouth Avenues in Brooklyn with Renee, beneath the “One Way” sign. In his fantasy, he was telling her to walk away.

Harry played all the string parts on the Left Banke record Walk Away Renee. With Mike on the harpsichord and Steve Martin’s strong vocal performance, the song was a good one with a different type of sound to it. It came to be known as baroque rock, a style of music that included songs such as the Yardbirds’ For Your Love.

Harry took the song to ten different record companies before Smash Records picked it up. It entered the pop charts in the Fall of 1966 and remained there for ten weeks, peaking at number five. Early the next year the Left Banke followed up with another song written by Mike Brown called Pretty Ballerina, and it reached number fifteen.

(snip)

As for Renee, she moved to Boston with her family shortly after the Left Banke recorded Walk Away Renee, and no one in the group ever saw her again.

Dawn Eden, who is described on Amazon as “a Jewish-born rock journalist turned salty Christian blog queen,” claimed credit on her blog, The Dawn Patrol, for unearthing Renee’s whereabouts, at least as of the time of her posting the information in 2003. Renee Fladen-Kamm is a classical singer and vocal teacher in the Bay Area, who was a member of a medieval English music ensemble, The Sherwood Consort, although does not appear to be a member now. I can find no photo of Renee anywhere on the Internet; not on one of the numerous obsessed Left Banke fan sites, nor on any sites devoted to her own music. Perhaps that’s understandable, and prescient on her part to stay away from cameras. The real-life models for other popular works of art — I’m thinking of Alice Liddell of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — often wished their genius idolaters had never met them.

As for Michael Brown, nee Michael Lookofsky, he was described on this fanzine as

both brilliant and aware of his talent, but extremely nervous and very difficult to deal with -a clear evidence of this were his attempts to form different groups after The Left Banke, which he kept deserting due to differences with the other members or when he realised he wouldn’t be able to work comfortably. I tried to contact him but it was impossible; he’s currently living with his sister, who sees to it that no one reaches the musician.

I’ve loved “Walk Away Renee” since the first time I heard it 40 years ago on WABC. It came out during an outrageously fertile time for pop music. In the top ten during the same month were memorable hits like the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” the Association’s “Cherish,” Neil Diamond’s “Cherry Cherry,” the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” plus some wacky one-hit wonders like “Psychotic Reaction” and “96 Tears.” What made a great pop hit in those days was the purity of emotion, and nothing was more affecting than this minor-key lament:

**(lyrics corrected…by the lyricist!)

AND WHEN I SEE THE SIGN THAT POINTS ONE WAY
THE LOT WE USED TO PASS BY EVERY DAY

JUST WALK AWAY RENEE YOU WONT SEE ME FOLLOW YOU BACK HOME
THE EMPTY SIDEWALKS ON MY BLOCK ARE NOT THE SAME
YOU’RE NOT TO BLAME

FROM DEEP INSIDE THE TEARS THAT I’M FORCED TO CRY
FROM DEEP INSIDE THE PAIN THAT I CHOSE TO HIDE

JUST WALK AWAY RENE YOU WONT SEE ME FOLLOW YOU BACK HOME
NOW AS THE RAIN BEATS DOWN UPON MY WEARY EYES
FOR ME IT CRIES.

YOUR NAME AND MINE INSIDE A HEART UPON A WALL
STILL FINDS THE WAY TO HAUNT ME THOUGH THEY’RE SO SMALL

JUST WALK AWAY RENE YOU WONT SEE ME FOLLOW YOU BACK HOME
NOW AS THE RAIN BEATS DOWN UPON MY WEARY EYES
FOR ME IT CRIES.

As  I write, I have a music-obsessed 16-year-old son of my own. Every chance he gets, he sneaks onto his grandmother’s Mac to compose his own music on Garage Band, and otherwise contents himself with figuring out chords and melodies on a little electric keyboard, and multi-tracking his vocal harmonies on his own disappointingly Windows-based computer. Sometimes he’s inspired by girls, sometimes he’s inspired by the music that inspires him — these days it’s Broadway composers like Stephen Sondheim, but I still hear some Danny Elfman in there too. If he fantasizes about being famous, or writing a song that famous performers will sing 40 years from now, he’s never told me so. He writes music like he does everything else; because he feels like it and can’t stop himself. It’s not a job.

That’s what I imagine Michael Brown was like, too. He just had to write those songs about Renee, and when she was gone from his life, essentially he was done.

“End Times”: Imagine a World With No Lollipops

It’s hot, I’m slow, I only got to this story this morning, but I was not exactly charmed by it:

STEAL a toddler’s lollipop and he’s bound to start bawling, was photographer Jill Greenberg’s thinking. So that’s just what Greenberg did to elicit tears from the 27 or so 2- and 3-year-olds featured in her latest exhibition, “End Times,” recently at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The children’s cherubic faces, illuminated against a blue-white studio backdrop, suggest abject betrayal far beyond the loss of a Tootsie Pop; sometimes tears spill onto naked shoulders and bellies.

The work depicts how children would feel if they knew the state of the world they’re set to inherit, explained Greenberg, whose own daughter is featured in the show. “Our government is so corrupt, with all the cronyism and corporate lobbyists,” she said. “I just feel that our world is being ruined. And the environment — when I was pregnant, I kept thinking that I’d love to have a tuna fish sandwich, but I couldn’t because we’ve ruined our oceans.”

What nonsense! Jill Greenberg is living in the lap of the lap of luxury, and she thinks it’s “end times.” What a gassy title for her exhibit — claiming for herself the final word before the curtain comes down.

Oh, how I wish there was a time machine, so I could take Greenberg back to, say, New York in the so-called Gilded Age, or London in the 1830s, or really almost anytime in history prior to her own cozy lifespan. Mozart had six siblings; he was one of two to survive infancy, and that was a common ratio, even among relatively comfortable families like his, until only about 100 years ago. If a stolen lollipop is Greenberg’s metaphor for the cruelties that our society will visit upon the next generation of children, she is completely ignorant of history.

The future’s so bright for our society’s kids, on the whole, they won’t even notice the lollipop is missing. There is plenty to worry about, of course, and any parent worries for their child’s fate. 9/11 will happen again. Wars won’t stop, and the weapons of mass destruction loom as a threat. And then, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, there’s “plain old death,” dogging all our steps. But as a society, we are heading into a period of unimaginable prosperity, when many festering problems will find sustainable solutions.

Before you get the vapors, be assured: I’m no denier of global warming. We have a lot of environmental problems, serious ones. And fortunately, we have serious people investing their lives in addressing them. On this blog, I honor the scientists who are working to understand, characterize and hopefully reverse global warming. But I have less respect for people like Jill Greenberg, who prefer to wallow in the apocalypse.

In terms of human impact, the environmental conditions that Jill Greenberg or her toddler are likely to encounter anytime in their lives will be enviable compared with what most people in the history of the world have faced. The bleakest environments are in the poorest countries, there is no scenario in which her child will face those conditions unless she volunteers to do so. There is such hubris in her saying “we’ve ruined our oceans.” Sure, the oceans are polluted. But be grateful that your child is growing up at a time when scientists are able to monitor environmental conditions, and people can organize globally for change. Greenberg acts like she’s just discovered this problem — epiphanies of a tunafish sandwich — and nothing’s being done. Which is partly true. She, herself, is doing nothing. She’s taking pictures and trying to depress people. What good does that do?

Likewise the incantations of “corrupt…cronyism…corporate lobbyists..,” like that’s something new and unique to our era. Is she serious? Is she saying this in a national publication like the LA Times? Let me throw a few names at her: Boss Tweed. Mark Hanna. J.P. Morgan. Albert Fall. Billy Sol Estes. Bobby Baker. Richard Nixon. Spiro Agnew. Thomas Keating. All of these names and many more are in Wikipedia if she wants to look them up.

Just to pick a juicy one: Is she familiar with Sam Giancana? One president, Eisenhower, used the murderous Mafia chieftain in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. Another future president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, got Giancana to help him wrangle labor votes for John Kennedy’s successful 1960 election. When Giancana was found years later with a bullet in his head, the CIA chief actually had to deny having anything to do with it. If there is a political scandal today that rivals two presidents trucking with a Mafia capo, I want to know about it.

Anywhere in the vicinity of money or power, Ms. Greenberg, you will find corruption, and that’s been true for 3,000 years. And yet, somehow, we keep making babies, and most of them grow up to enjoy the blessings of this rare and unusual planet.

Okay, but the story’s absurdity doesn’t stop there. It seems like the Internet has gotten ahold of Greenberg long before I did. The complaint? That she’s hopelessly naive? That she’s spoiled by prosperity? That’s she a doom-porn addict? No. They’re mad at her because she took the lollipops away from the kids before she photographed them in order to make them cry.

Bloggers such as Andrew Peterson called Greenberg’s lollipop technique abusive and exploitative, while Greenberg, her husband, Robert Green, and gallery owner Paul Kopeikin defended the work, the process and one another. The conversation, cycling between rational and hyperbolic, says as much about Net communication as about the art in question.

“Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse,” Peterson wrote under his pseudonym Thomas Hawk at ThomasHawk.com, a blog that focuses on new media and technology. For Peterson, Greenberg’s technique was “evil.”

At this point, I change sides, and become Jill Greenberg’s defender. Child abuse? Is this man insane? When you pollute the English language by relating something as benign as a photographer’s trick to the hideous violence and cruelty visited upon children all over the world by abusive parents and other authority figures, you dishonor the real victims.

But the vortex of stupidity didn’t stop there. Greenberg’s husband, Robert Green was so offended by the comments on ThomasHawk.com that he searched until he found the real identity of the previously anonymous blogger, and outed him. As if the idiocy of his comments wasn’t enough to hang him! He had to be cyber-stalked?

We’re in a bad stretch in the politicized culture of America. It might not be the “end times,” but I still wish I had my lollipop.

Let’s Make a Deal

This is very strange thinking indeed:

(T)he New York court also put forth another argument, sometimes called the “reckless procreation” rationale. “Heterosexual intercourse,” the plurality opinion stated, “has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not.” Gays become parents, the opinion said, in a variety of ways, including adoption and artificial insemination, “but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse.”

Consequently, “the Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples.”

To shore up those rickety heterosexual arrangements, “the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.” Lest we miss the inversion of stereotypes about gay relationships here, the opinion lamented that straight relationships are “all too often casual or temporary.”

The words in quotes are from the state of New York’s 4-2 decision upholding that state’s ban on gay marriage. They are cited in an op-ed that the NY Times ran this morning by Yale Law School Professor Kenji Yoshino.

If the New York legislature actually thought about marriage that way when it was written into state law in 1909, how should they react to the failure of that policy to prevent huge increases in illegitimate births, divorce and children being raised by one parent? The “benefits of marriage” aren’t turning out to be nearly enticing enough to prevent these things.

To take the court’s thinking to its logical conclusion, the Legislature confronts two possible choices. Either dump marriage altogether as a failed social experiment; or, up the ante:

“Hello, I’m from the New York State Legislature. I see you two kids are in a ‘family way.’ Will you stay together and raise your offspring for the next 18 years?”

“Hell, no.” “No can do.”

“Let me see if we can change your minds. We here in New York have this gift we want to give you to see if we can keep you together. It’s called ‘marriage.’ It’s wonderful. You’re legally bound to each other for life! Unless one of you wants to get out of it. So, will that get you two lovebirds to stay together?”

“No.” “I thought you said you had a gift.”

The Legislature convenes a special session.

“Okay, we’ve met and we really want to get you guys hooked up more permanent-like. So here’s what we’ve come up with: All the benefits of marriage, PLUS a brand-new refrigerator/freezer, a convertible couch — very handy for those nights after a little tiff — a set of steak knives, and a matched pair of bowling balls! We’ll even throw in a coupon for five free games at the Bowl-a-Drome!”

“You would do that for us?”

“We will do that, because we care about the children of New York.”

Well? Doesn’t that follow from what the court found?

The decision — which Yoshino said was based on similar reasoning from an Indiana state court ruling — also shows a surprising evolution in the stereotype of gay parents. Not too long ago, it was assumed that gay parents adopted children in order to convert them to the gay lifestyle. Now gays have to deal with a whole new stereotype: The perfect parents!

Being an imperfect parent myself, I’m not sure this stereotype is the road to popularity for gays and lesbians.

“Look at Billy. Always dressed so nice for school. I hear his report card was all A’s. And did you see that nutritious lunch he was eating?”

(Sigh.) “Yes. Well. His parents are gay.”

“Gosh, I wish I was gay. My Bobby won’t do his homework, and he’s always teasing his sister.”

“Don’t worry. Kids are strong. They can handle adversity. And there’s always vocational school.”

Yoshino describes the court’s decision as a “hostile ruling delivered in friendly terms,” and he’s surely right. Nonetheless, I like the idea of forcing anti-gay bigots to admit that children adopted by a gay or lesbian couple might be getting a better upbringing than their own kids are.

The L.A. Syndrome Strikes Again

The U.S. Constitution, the governing document of the most powerful country in the history of the world, can be printed readably in a book not much bigger than your fancy new Razor phone. The Los Angeles City Charter can be printed readably in a book you could fit in the trunk of your car as long as you didn't have too much other stuff in there. To figure out who does what is a matter for arcane speculation — and usually requires an expensive lobbyist.

But that's the L.A. syndrome. Real accountability is to be avoided. We share power because everyone wants a share of the power. We diffuse power because that creates more fiefdoms, more trolls at the bridge to collect tribute, and more places to point fingers.

I was shocked that Antonio Villaraigosa was willing to take on the teacher's unions and the educational bureaucracy by telling voters during last year's mayoral election he would work to get the massive Los Angeles Unified School District under his control. The idea didn't seem typical of Villaraigosa, because — like most elected Democrats in California — he obeys the unions, and the unions enjoy a big slice of the power to run LAUSD.

Giving the mayor control of the schools sounded like an idea that a poll-taker brought to Villaraigosa as a magic bullet to win his campaign for mayor. But that's why we have elections. It's the one time when those in power have to address what's really on our minds, rather than what benefits them.

After Villaraigosa took office, his first step was in a reverse direction. He seemed to want to lower expectations, and find a way to redefine the status quo as reform. This was what cynics expected. But then the mayor surprised me, and shifted back into forward gear. He seemed genuinely committed to making a major change.

I envisioned a titanic struggle that would consume most of Villaraigosa's first term, because the interests favoring the status quo, or worse, at LAUSD are not trifling. I figured the mayor would have to hold hearings all over the city to document the failure of the current system of education governance. He would probably put a respected education expert on his City Hall staff, create a powerful coalition of stakeholders that would include business leaders, community leaders, civil rights leaders, parents, and use his considerable charisma and PR skills to unite the city behind him for this 15-round fight with the entrenched special interests who control LAUSD.

But no. The mayor wanted something approved this year. A consummate Sacramento player, Villaraigosa looked at the the reform process as just another legislative deal. And so that's what we've got. Not reform. Not accountability. Just more diffusion of power in a hasty compromise that looked good in a windowless conference room in the state capitol building, but will be hellish in practice. The Los Angeles Times' editorial today is eloquent in describing the mess the mayor and his negotiating partners have created:

Under the proposed bill, details of which are not yet public, the school board would be in charge of student achievement — or at least parts of it — while the mayor would control about three dozen poorly performing schools. Both would have a role in hiring the superintendent. Schools would be in charge of their curriculums. Instead of creating a clean line of accountability — the chief advantage of having a mayor run the schools — this deal divides responsibility so confusingly that even the main players would have trouble figuring out who's in charge of what.

The school board would be a "broad policymaking body," the mayor says, "not a management body." Yet decisions about curriculum would be made at the local school level. The superintendent, meanwhile, would be charged with carrying out the policy set by the board — but he or she could be fired by the mayor. The superintendent would have power to sign contracts — except the biggest contract, with the teachers union, which would be negotiated by the board.

Most schools would be under the authority of the elected board, but a few dozen would be essentially run by the mayor. The mayor says that if these schools improve, the Legislature may be more willing to give a future mayor more direct control. Maybe so. But the rest of the plan would so damage the district that this experiment hardly seems worth it.

"Fragmentation is failing our kids," the mayor explained in his State of the City address in April. "Voters need to be able to hire and fire one person accountable to parents, teachers and taxpayers. A leader who is ultimately responsible for systemwide performance." Under this plan, fragmentation is increased, accountability diminished. Who's in charge of the schools? Any answer that requires more than one subject and one verb is no answer at all.

Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn's LA Times-sponsored education blog, School Me, has an even pithier take on some of the plan's details:

It's good that teachers will gain more control over cirriculum–unless the bad ones protected by union aversion to firing use their freedom to dodge responsibility. And who's going to step in? The board? LA's mayor? Superintendent-in-waiting Jackie Goldberg?

Another thing: The mayor wants responsibility for shaping up three "failing" schools. If that means yanking good teachers from good schools, what will parents whose kids get the lemons say? And to whom do they complain? The mayor of South Gate?

But that's how it goes in L.A. Who's in charge of air pollution? Who's in charge of economic development? Who's in charge of transportation? Who's in charge of airports? Who's in charge of energy? Who's in charge of public safety? Who will respond if Avian Bird Flu becomes a crisis? Answer: Everyone and no one.

Happy Father’s Day Gift to All Dads

Whether you're a father yourself or you're getting in touch with your father today–or, if you're like me, both–I'm sure you are struggling to find the words to express the deep meaning of the relationship being honored. There is so much to be grateful for, on both sides. My son pisses me off on almost a daily basis, but he has also enriched my life more than any other person I can think of. He always surprises me, and fills my heart with joy. My father has been so generous, supportive, kind and loving, especially through my most recent ordeal, and I admire how hard he worked to sustain the magnificent family I'm a part of. At the same time, he drives me crazy.

So you struggle to find the words to say on this day. Sometimes the words don't come because you're trying too hard. So, just to give you a little break, I invite you to view this ridiculous video. If you've already seen it — millions have — then watch it again. It might be good therapy. If you've never seen it, well…click here. (Hint: "Mentos.")

..and Happy Father's Day to all!

Is Copying Writing? Sometimes.

I'm frustrated to read that high school teachers are assigning fewer term papers due to the prevalence of on-line plagiarism. I understand the problem: Kids cut and paste chunks of the Internet into their assignments and claim the work is their own.

It's ethically dubious to be sure. But as long as you don't plagiarize an entire work, doesn't copy/paste assembly at least serve the minimal purpose of showing a student what good writing is?

Read the biographies of our greatest writers. They all started by copying or mimicking the works of their heroes, sometimes word-for-word. They wanted to see what made their sentences sing, what made their thoughts cohere, where the rhythm of their prose came from.

Originality is an overrated attribute in students. It's sentimental, e.g. "out of the mouths of babes." Not every child is born with original thoughts or ways of expressing them. Students gain knowledge by experiencing the original thoughts of others, and will eventually develop the confidence to present their own. Or not. But by copying from well-written sources, at least they'll get a feel for the way good writers organize their thoughts on paper.

What the kids are allegedly doing is relatable to hyperlinking, no? So why not reconfigure the assignment to require hyperlinks? I think a kid would have a harder time plagiarizing Internet copy if you made them link to their research sources. Teachers could set up class blogs, where students would post their work, links and all. If anyone suspected plagiarism, it would be a simple matter to highlight a few lines of text and run them through Google.

I hate to break it to everyone who wants to think we did things the right way in the olden days, but some kids used to copy material straight from the encyclopedia long before the the personal computer arrived. They scribbled the words on 3×5 cards, and then got those same words onto the page via a typewriter (defined in Wikipedia as "a mechanical, electromechanical, or electronic device with a set of 'keys' that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a document, usually paper.") It was laborious work, but for some kids, it was necessary.

Schools' primary objective should be: Every student a competent writer. It's my anecdotal impression that teaching good writing is not given a high enough priority in high school.  There are virtually no careers where you can get by without being able to present and organize words to express ideas to others. In the real world, many of those words are "boilerplate," which is a non-judgemental way of saying plagiarized (sometimes self-plagiarized). Your ability to choose the right words to copy, and to put them in the right place, is part of your education as a writer.

Don't misunderstand: To present someone else's words as your own is unethical. I'm disgusted by things like Cheathouse.com, where entire papers are available at a price. But, as the Times article points out, the same Internet that makes it easy to steal someone else's words, makes it easy to detect it when you did (just ask Ben Domenech.)

Here's tonight's interesting factoid:

The school also fights fire with fire, paying more than $2,000 a year to use Barrie's Web-based Turn It In, which checks a student's paper against a database of 17 million essays and papers. (John) Barrie's Oakland-based company, IParadigms, calculates that the odds of stringing the same 16 words together in the same order as somebody else is less than one in a trillion.

Wow. All over the world tonight, people are blogging, each entry unique, like a snowflake.

Standing on the Shoulders that Stood on the Shoulders of Giants

I've been listening avidly to a CD from 2004, A.C. Newman's The Slow Wonder. Newman writes about 75 percent of the songs on the New Pornographers' disks, including vehicles like "Bones of an Idol" and "Laws Have Changed" for that wondrous chanteuse, Neko Case. Newman's style is unmistakable, but he never repeats himself. That, to me, is the sign of a timeless pop talent.

Listening to Newman, you can pick up some of his influences, especially Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney. Like his mentors' best music, Newman's songs are light and enjoyable on the surface, but the melodies are laid over a structure of complex harmonies, driving beats and odd arrangements that recall Wilson's masterpiece, Pet Sounds.

The difference is that each of Newman's major influences were, themselves, the products of the music that came before them. Brian Wilson listened to Chuck Berry and the Four Freshman. Newman was born two years after Pet Sounds came out. McCartney listened to English music-hall tunes and Little Richard. Newman was born the year "Hey Jude" was released. Bacharach worshipped Dizzy Gillespie and studied under French orchestral composer Darius Milhaud. These writers built some of the greatest pop music ever heard by synthesizing distinct, even incongruent strains of authentic, music never intended for wide audiences.

American/British pop music is omniverous. Over the years it has absorbed all sorts of folk traditions, adopting sounds second- and third-hand, then going abroad to find more untainted sources to borrow. By now, if there is a unique sound anywhere in the world that hasn't been incorporated into a pop or dance tune, extremely shy people must be making it. That makes today an extremely challenging time for pop music writers. The rise of a talent like A.C. Newman proves there is room for originality, but he will never have the luxury of melding his style with something no one's heard before.

This is all a long prologue to writing a few words about my son. One of my readers asked me to go back to a topic I've written about once – my 15-year-old son's artistic pursuits. So here goes.

Since he was very young, this boy has gone from obsession to obsession, and these obsessions have been the source — the only source, really — of his creativity. The interesting problem for me, as a parent, is what happens when my son is not obsessed.

He started with a pen, drawing with what I thought was prodigious skill during his first 12 or 13 years. But he refused to take an art lesson. He knew what he wanted to draw–Disney characters, and sometimes characters of his own. He figured out how to draw them, and worked very hard at it. "You need art lessons. You need to learn shading," I'd admonish him. A few days later, he'd show me another drawing, this one with shading. "Your drawings are two-dimensional, we should get you an art class to learn to show dimension." Within days, he had figured out dimension. Anything to avoid art lessons.

Eventually he moved his drawings into the computer. He learned how to use Flash and then other animation programs. He still takes digital animation classes in school, where he is a source of frustration to his teacher, as he gives himself more difficult assignments than she gives him–and then can't finish them.

Over the past year, his interests shifted to drama, particularly musical theater. He got cast in one musical, then another, and now he's in another. Animation, the dream of his young life, took second place. Then third place. For years, he's had a little electric piano in his room. He had taken piano lessons years ago, but I stopped them when it was apparent he would never practice. I was never sure he even learned to read music.

Now, he's trying to write his own musicals. Strange stories about murder and neglected children, with ominous, dissonant songs that he's writing on a keyboard I didn't realize he knew how to play; digging into an old rhyming dictionary to help with the lyrics; using his animation programs' audio features to record multi-tracked vocal harmonies. My wife and I frequently will be sitting in bed late at night, suddenly aware of these spooky sounds — like bees stuck in molasses — coming from next door. It's the artist at work.

My son's latest inspiration is Stephen Sondheim, lyricist for West Side Story, and composer/lyricist of a string of challenging, highly original shows like Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, and Into the Woods. Sondheim — like Brian Wilson, like Burt Bacharach, is a writer who created something by blending traditions. He was taught first by Oscar Hammerstein II, composer of classic shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel and South Pacific, then by Milton Babbit, whose claim to fame is a body of atonal and electronic works in the 12-tone style pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Many of Sondheim's musicals express the duality of his influences. He is steeped in the emotions, the staginess, the razz-ma-tazz of Broadway, but ofttimes his songs are dark, bleak and tuneless. Sweeney Todd, his greatest work, is about a murderous, avenging barber and the woman who bakes pies out of the resulting corpses. There are beautiful love songs in this show, but the melodies reflect the madness and blood-lust of the hero and heroine.

My son has memorized many of Sondheim's songs, and sings along with them on his mp3 player while he's doing his homework. He's familiar with other recent shows by newer composers, like Urinetown, Avenue Q, Rent, Wicked, and of course the Disney movie musicals — but he asked me the other day whether Carousel was any good. To my son, the shows that comment on, satirize, steal or upend the canon of musicals from Broadway's golden age are the canon. The classics — he admires the ones he's heard, but he feels no urgency about learning from them.

Just as A.C. Newman, asked about the influences on the New Pornographers, said this (emphasis mine):

“Various unintentional influences have crept into our work, some of which are quickly removed: The Moody Blues, Tubeway Army, Wings, always Wings, never The Beatles, Eno of course, you can’t play ebow without sounding like Eno, Modern English, middle period post-Gabriel Genesis, The Stranglers, the vocal inflections on “Dreadlock Holiday” remain a steady influence, we’re still trying to find a way to insert some dub/white reggae in the mix, just as an intellectual exercise, to see if we can do it without being dropped from the label. I know it sounds awful but it will all work out.”

To music fans of my generation, anyone who prefers Wings to the Beatles is demonstrably insane (and Newman is at least half-joking). But then, I wasn't born in 1968. Likewise, it makes perfect sense for my son to see Stephen Sondheim as Square One, and to hear his once-controversial music not as the end of musical evolution, but as the starting point. To an artist with fresh eyes and ears, any point can be a starting point.

When my son takes his creations out into the world, he'll face stiff competition from people who gave themselves over to their teachers more, who know more, and who have made the sacrifices needed to develop basic techniques that he skipped over. He knows that, but so far, he hasn't changed course. The obsessed might be maddening at times, but they've got a kind of integrity, and from where I sit, a few feet from his bedroom door, it's amazing to watch it play out.

Mother Russia Wants More Children

The news that Vladimir Putin's government in Russia is offering 250,000 rubles — the equivalent of more than two years' income for the average Russian worker — to mothers who agree to have second children reminded me of one of the first news stories I ever wrote, for an undergraduate journalism class at Berkeley in 1976.

That was during the time of the refuseniks – dissident Russian scientists, engineers, writers and academics, most of them Jews, who were trying to emigrate but were denied permission by the Communist government. I was assigned (or I assigned myself) to cover an event featuring Professor Gail Lapidus and a scientist who, after waiting almost a decade, finally had gotten out. I recall his first name was Martin, but I would butcher his last name if I tried it now.

At the time, Lapidus' research was focused on the role of women in Soviet society. Then, as now, the Russian population was aging and its economy stagnating, in part because its women were declining to have children. Here is what a Russian woman of today told Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor:

"A child is not an easy project, and in this world a woman is expected to get an education, find a job, and make a career," says Svetlana Romanicheva, a student who says she won't consider babies for at least five years. She hopes to have one child, but says a second would depend on her life "working out very well." As for Putin's offer, she says "it won't change anything."

Back in 1976, the notion of economic incentives was heresy. So, as I recall Professor Lapidus explaining, the Soviet government tried to trick women into having kids by getting them drunk.

Hearing this as a college student who spent at least a few hours each month at parties comprised of cheap beer and wine and dozens of single men and women at their reproductive peak, it seemed quite funny that the Soviets would use the same tools, but call it social engineering for the good of the People.

On long train trips, Lapidus said, at a certain point in the evening, the fellows behind the bar — acting on official instructions — would just start pouring drinks for passengers, in hopes that romance, and pregnancy, would ensue. Lapidus was very serious about this, but I'll never forget the sneaky little smile on "Martin's" face as she told the story. I guessed (but of course didn't write) that Martin had been a passenger on the Soviet Love Train a time or two.

“Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!”

For me, April 2006 has been a month of extreme darkness and extreme light, a time when one could attest to the worst suspicions about the nature of humanity — or the brightest vision of it.

Part of my problem in life, perhaps, is a temperamental refusal to see the worst in people. In high school, my smart-ass comments earned me the title of Cynic. In response, I spent the next 30 years of my life trying not to be one — maybe to a fault.

Nevertheless, my "always look on the bright side of life" mentality lets me be joyful when joy is called for. And joy was clearly called for last Friday night when I watched my son perform opening night of his high school's production of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," the 1962 Stephen Sondheim musical.

We had 15 members of my family in the audience, many of them visiting for Easter. The auditorium was loaded with friends of cast members, friends who cheer insanely when said cast member first appears, and then again when they take their curtain call. My son had more than a few girls screaming for him, like he was a Beatle.

He first opens his mouth when he sings a line or two in the show's first and most famous song, "Comedy Tonight." It was a startling moment: When did he become a baritone? Does it have anything to do with the sudden sprout of dark hair above his lips?

He has one big number, fairly early in the show. The show is a bit risque (although compared to what kids can see on cable TV after school, it's chaste). His song has more than its share of suggestive lines, which is not too surprising, since he's a brothel-keeper introducing his flock. But I wasn't expecting him to be so lecherously funny. In real life, my son is rather chivalrous and would never say such things, but onstage, he was way too convincing. Maybe he has a secret side.

What am I saying, of course he has a secret side!

At the end of the show, of course, I'm in tears. Not just proud of my son, I'm proud of everyone on the stage, and grateful that they have such a marvelous director/teacher who has given each of them exactly what they need to succeed when the spotlight goes on. This is a cast of kids who trust each other, and trust that if they work hard and do what their teacher tells them, the audience will love them.

Teachers are no longer given automatic respect anywhere in society — not from kids, not from parents, not from government. When Hillary Clinton wrote "it takes a village to raise a child," her advocacy for teachers and other social support systems had the perverse backlash effect of elevating the role of parents as the sole appropriate source for childhood instruction and character development. But I look at my son's drama teacher as a critical partner in raising him right now. She has taught him the values of responsibility, teamwork and being prepared far more effectively than I have managed to do so far.

At the end of the show, I gather with much of the audience outside the doors from which the actors will emerge. I've gotten used to sharing him with his friends and fans. He hugs his fellow actors. He hugs his cheering section. Someone gives him flowers. Finally, he catches my eye, comes over and hugs me — but just for a nanosecond. In high school, you're barely supposed to acknowledge that you even have parents. He's a bit more demonstrative with the 14 other family members who've come to see him. He is clearly elated. He worried about the show all week, but he knows the cast did a good job because he heard us laughing. If you're onstage in a comedy, you measure every laugh.

My wife and I hang around for a few minutes, watching the hug-fest. Eventually, the cast and many of their friends will go off to a cast party. I'm sure it was a celebration, although, of course, he tells me nothing of what went on there.

The big, tuneful opening number has been running through my head all weekend. This could pass for my credo:

Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!

Old situations,
New complications,
Nothing portentous or polite;
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!

Deep Down, We’re Altruistic

Well, here’s a hopeful finding from the world of science to begin a Friday:

Psychology researcher Felix Warneken performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers, such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Sometimes he “struggled” with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.

Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books, each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds but only if he appeared to need it. Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken’s face and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over, grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet and eagerly handing back the pin.

Warneken never asked for the help and didn’t even say “thank you,” so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise if they helped. After all, altruism means helping with no expectation of anything in return.

And this is key the toddlers didn’t bother to offer help when he deliberately pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor, Warneken, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, reports Thursday in the journal Science.

To be altruistic, babies must have the cognitive ability to understand other people’s goals plus possess what Warneken calls “pro-social motivation,” a desire to be part of their community.

“When those two things come together they obviously do so at 18 months of age and maybe earlier they are able to help,” Warneken explained.

Warneken is from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.  This AP story is based on an article in Science.

Get ‘em While They’re Young

One of my problems with the Democratic Party is that it seems to re-invent itself every election based on polls, vogue issues and the policy preferences of the person who happens to win the presidential nomination. All kinds of things are wrong with running a political party that way. The Republicans’ current run of success can be attributed in part to the party’s philosophical consistency, which if nothing else conveys commitment, even if it sometimes leaves them looking out of touch. Democrats don’t like being out of touch, but being too “in touch” can make you seem like a chameleon.

At least one Democrat is thinking ahead, however: Jeremy Zilber, author of the new children’s book, Why Mommy is a Democrat. Here’s a sample page:

The sample pages on Zilber’s website do a better job of explaining core Democratic values than any speech John Kerry or John Edwards made during the 2004 campaign.

As a political scientist, Zilber is surely aware of the cliche that the Democrats are the “mommy party,” while Republicans are the “daddy party.” In troubled times like now, these identities don’t do the Democrats much good. But I give Zilber a lot of credit for being unafraid to steer right into that reputation; I expect this book to be very successful. The worst nightmare of a committed Democratic activist is for their child to grow up and become a Republican. I’m not sure this book will prevent it, but why not go down fighting?

But — maybe this conveys my ambivalence — imagine Harry Truman’s reaction to a book like this.

(I have to admit; I found out about this book via Powerline, which could barely keep its pants dry chortling about it.)

A Math Tale

Please, please, read this op-ed by Karin Klein from last Saturday’s LA Times.  Especially if you have a kid (like I do) who battles with math, but even if you don’t, the story is uncommonly touching. It’s a reminiscence prompted by the Times’ series on high school drop-outs. It starts like this:

Johnny Patrello was a greaser. I was a dork. And yet, despite our rigidly stratified school culture, we came together in the spring of 1968 at Walt Whitman Junior High School, where I tutored Johnny in algebra.

Klein makes a public policy point, to which I say amen:

What I learned from Johnny — aside from the fact that greasers could be sweet-natured and very, very smart — is that schools are structured to help administrators feel organized, not to help children learn.

Young children’s skills are all over the map, yet we corral them into second grade, third grade and so forth, where everyone moves at one pace in all subjects. Better to group them according to their skills in each subject, without the “grade” labels, and let them move on to the next skill when they have mastered the one they were on. If they’re not getting it, give them extra tutoring, but don’t push them forward until they’re ready. This way, there is no failure — only progress.

But her piece is not a lecture. It’s beautiful, sad and inspiring, and worth your time today.

(Thanks to Dodger Thoughts’ Jon Weisman for pointing me to it.)
 

Hail the Post-Modernist Prophets!

When I was in college, certain very alienating movements in art and literature were just getting momentum: Deconstructionist literary theory, and indeterminate (a.k.a. “chance”) music. Both of these theories attacked the notion of authorship.

According to deconstructionists, a literary work should be read strictly as a product of the assumptions that the author brought to it. The appropriate way to understand any literary work was to “interrogate” it. In the left-wing hothouses that college campuses became by the late 1980s, the result of such interrogation was to dethrone the classics because they and the society they inevitably represented, were ridden with racism, sexism, homophobism, elitism, cultural imperialism, beautyism, comprehensiblism and so forth.

Texts by great writers from Shakespeare to Saul Bellow should not be “privileged” over, say, a newspaper article, a rap song, or even a grocery list, according to deconstructionist theory. And certainly, the primacy of Dead White European Males as subjects for literary study needed to be overturned in favor of a more representative canon of authors.

Advocates of indeterminate music propounded similar ideas. Composer John Cage’s most famous work is 4′33” which is comprised of three silent movements. When it is performed, the audience experiences its own breathing, coughing, foot-shuffling and butt-shifting, as well as air circulation and any outdoor noises, as music. This was, obviously, contrary to the kind of music theory I was taught in school. Music is organized sound, by definition. It could be improvised, as in jazz, but not unplanned.

I considered myself opposed to deconstructionism, and was also more conservative in my music tastes (although the one John Cage concert I did attend was an enjoyable novelty). I tended to dismiss these schools as aberrations, newness for newness’ sake, a dead end artistically.

Well — I think I might have been wrong.

This occured to me tonight as I sat in an auditorium for a presentation to parents of high school sophomores. A couple hundred people were in the room, and most of them forgot to turn off their cell phones. So, throughout the presentation, I heard a random assortment of ringtones. They don’t sound like telephones anymore. They’re very individual: Funny sound effects, pieces of songs, bird chirps, human voices.

After a while, I started to like it. It was an odd, peaceful sort of music that was composed by the random decisions of people far away from this auditorium deciding to call someone inside. It was the kind of music John Cage would have loved, and I have to admit, he probably anticipated.

As for literary deconstructionism: I think the Internet is rapidly changing reading habits. What are hyperlinks but answers to anticipated questions? Authors don’t just write on the Web — they aggregate. The appropriate word for anything that appears on a Web site — whether it’s text, video, sound or graphic — is “content,” a very deconstructionist-sounding word.

Not only are most Web authors content-aggregators; they subject content to very skeptical interrogation. Andrew Sullivan’s word for it is “fisking,” after a British writer named Robert Fisk (whose work Sullivan objected to, and would rebut line-by-line. It is not a technique Fisk invented; if anything, he is its unwilling victim.) All content is taken apart for analysis, and it’s done just as aggressively by the right as by the left. Whether you read Patterico, or DailyKos, you are reading a writer who takes a piece of text — a speech, a news article — and deconstructs it. Conservatives’ search for “liberal bias” is not much different from the original deconstructionist obsessions with racism and elitism.

You don’t just find deconstructionism on political topics. Many websites are devoted to deconstructing advertisements, television shows, gossip and other products of pop culture. These sites — Defamer, Adrants, Television Without Pity, FARK, MetaFilter, Gawker, to name just a few — are often said to be “snarky,” another Web-culture word that combines irony, skepticism and a sort of insider/outsider viewpoint that says “I’m immersed and yet distant. I despise, and yet I celebrate.” Nothing is sacred in Snarkytown, but anything can be worshipped.

Perhaps the most iconic post-modern site on the Web is “Post Secret,” which is the third most popular blog right now according to Technorati. Post Secret is nothing less than the deconstruction of the human soul. People send in 4″ by 6″ postcards, on which a shameful secret, hope or fantasy is confessed, anonymously. It is random from the standpoint of the reader in that no one postcard has any relationship to any other.

Each postcard is, in a sense, a work of art, but artistic technique is not “privileged.” If all you know how to do is take a photo of your hand holding a piece of paper with your secret, it is posted right next to an accomplished graphic. The secret is the point. But it also the point that so many Web-surfers want to read these secrets. Here are the most recent postcards’ messages:

• I feel guilty being served by black people.
• I am a nobody. I want to be somebody.
• If you ate, in one sitting, enough food to make your stomach look like this… (photo of bloated stomach)…you would have to throw up too.
• When my parent treats me well, I feel guilt…like I don’t deserve it.
• If he dies in Iraq…I will be lost.
• I used to be an anarchist. Now I read the Wall Street Journal every day.
• I am not the sum total of all my failures.
• I couldn’t orgasm because you looked too much like Jesus.

To me, the brief confessions of these anonymous authors, especially when aggregated in the huge numbers Post Secret collects, is high art. So there you have it. I embrace deconstructionism and randomness, and the demotion of the author. Never would’ve believed it.

The Myth of Multi-tasking

Last night, our dog got sick. My wife and I had already stayed awake ’til 2 a.m., because I’d had too much caffeine and she was unwinding from a difficult day. At 4, we both awoke due to a strange, powerful odor that turned out to be…well you can guess.

We cleaned it up, I walked the dog and got back to sleep after 5, to be awoken again by our son at 7, who told us the dog had done it again. We cleaned that up, we walked him around the block and went back to sleep hoping he was done. He wasn’t. More of the same ensued until we managed two uninterrupted hours of sleep, rising for good shortly before noon. I had a busy afternoon scheduled, so I’d hoped to do some writing, e-mailing and other chores, but the dog ate my morning.

I was moved to share this fascinating account when I read the Times‘ Calendar story about BlackBerry addicts. It’s been more than a year since I surrendered my BlackBerry. Probably for that reason, I missed the news of a Supreme Court ruling against manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM), creating a real possibility that all U.S. BlackBerries will be shut off in a few weeks while a big-bucks patent dispute gets worked out.

The BlackBerry’s pending demise has the potential to rival the Year 2000 bug as the biggest waste of time and money in the history of Corporate America. I can imagine the e-mail traffic from panicked executives to underlings, the desperate searches to see if old pagers work, the contingency plans scrawled on dry erase boards. Stock analysts surely are up late tonight preparing lengthy research papers for clients to read tomorrow before dawn. What will be worse for stock prices? The potential for war with Iran? Or the Great BlackBerry Blackout of 2006? In years to come, children will sit at their grandparent’s virtual knee and ask, “where were you when it happened?”

Apparently, many will answer: “In the fetal position.” From the Times:

Pamela Rosenberg actually cheered when she saw on the news that RIM was in trouble — to the chagrin of her husband, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, he of the dual BlackBerrys.

“We can’t have a nice dinner or go to a movie without him getting e-mails,” says Pamela Rosenberg. “It’s constant, all day and all night, in the middle of a conversation.” Rosenberg rues the day she made her husband promise to get rid of the laptop he once toted everywhere; that was the day he purchased a BlackBerry. “At least with the laptop he couldn’t hide very far. Now I find him hiding out with it in the dressing room closets. I have to take my hand and put it over the BlackBerry if I want to get his attention.”

In his own defense … well, actually, Scott Rosenberg mounts no defense. Guilty as charged. “We were on a family vacation once,” he says, “and everybody was having dinner. I excused myself to go to the restroom, but I didn’t use the facilities. I just went in there and wrote on my BlackBerry for half an hour. Then I came back to the table and said I had a stomachache. My uncle looked at me and whispered: ‘BlackBerry.’ “

That guy — I came close to being him. I was tethered to that thing. I checked it obsessively. I practiced how to type a BlackBerry note with my hands under the conference room table without moving my shoulders so no one would notice that the meeting I was actually attending didn’t have my full attention.

When BlackBerry messages were in the air, few conversations had my full attention. If a conversation was especially important, I had to hide my BlackBerry in my desk, lest I click it unwillingly, like Dr. Strangelove’s not-quite-suppressed salute.  Some of my associates were more brazen. “I’m totally listening to you,” they’d say, as their thumbs flew across the buttons and their faces mugged the words they were forming in their minds.  

What does this have to do with my incontinent dog? Well, only this. You who read and write on your BlackBerry while on the phone, while talking to your staff, while attending client meetings, while driving for Christ’s sake, stop kidding yourself. Technology might have given you the superhuman power to be in two places at once, but that doesn’t mean you’re “multi-tasking.”

Was I multi-tasking last night when I was cleaning up after my dog — was I sleeping and taking care of him at the same time? Well, I’m exhausted, so “no.” My dog, like your BlackBerry, demanded my attention and pulled me away from the sleep I was supposed to be getting.

After a year away from the damn BlackBerry, I’m persuaded the concept of multi-tasking is a myth with which the overbooked try to reassure themselves they’re not just being rude.

You’re not multi-tasking. You’re making a choice. If you’re helping your kid with his homework, once a new BlackBerry message arrives and you look at it, your homework aid has stopped. You’re now in the grasp of whoever e-mailed you and expects a rapid response. Quality time with your kid ends at that moment. If you’re driving on the 405 and get a brilliant idea you want to tell your client about right away, if you start typing it on your BlackBerry, you’ve effectively fallen asleep at the wheel and your car is driving itself. You know how well that works.

The human mind’s attention is the scarcest of all resources, and there are no hidden reserves of new attention you can tap, not even in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve. If you are on the BlackBerry, you are on the BlackBerry. It’s a great tool for downtime, but it takes you away from what you’re supposed to be doing if you unholster it during a meeting or a conversation — or your life.

What will happen if the BlackBerries all get shut off?  Maybe our expectations of rapid response will have to be adjusted. Maybe people will finish one task before they start the next. Maybe meetings will be shorter because everyone physically in the room will be there mentally too. Maybe there will be fewer stupid accidents on the freeway. Maybe family members will find their time together more enriching.

I’m ready to name this first decade of the 21st Century the Age of Distraction from Distraction. A few weeks off from the BlackBerry might make it a bit clearer what we’re letting these unreal rapid-response expectations do to our minds, our business encounters and our personal relationships. In the end, we might thank the Supreme Court for a healthy and timely intervention.

Sprawling Thru the Wreckage

Instapundit pointed me to a review by the Chicago Sun-Times’ architecture critic Kevin Nance of Sprawl: A Compact History, by Robert Bruegmann.  The point of the book, I gather, is “everything you know is wrong” — a popular theme for non-fiction books. 

For example, we know that sprawl leads to lengthier (and lengthier) commutes.  And that’s wrong. Er, no, actually that’s right. It’s our current transportation system that’s wrong:

 ”The problem is that we have an old-fashioned 19th-century technology, the internal combustion engine using fossil fuels. Let’s solve that problem — maybe by creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles — and stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work. Instead, let’s see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them.”

Probably isn’t fair for me to comment without reading the book, but…are we supposed to take this seriously?  Cars today are far more efficient, and less polluting, than they were 40 years ago, but those gains have been largely offset by the vast increase in numbers of vehicles trying to reach regional centers of commerce, and the increasing distance they have to travel to reach them.  

Sprawl is a matter of degree. The more miles between home and work, the worse its effects are.  As each ring of suburbs is added, the challenge to serve those far-flung areas becomes less feasible and more expensive.  The miles of new roadway will never catch up with the increased population of vehicles.  Mass transit systems cannot affordably be designed to serve all those new areas, and voters in the unserved areas become–understandably–unwilling to fund a system that doesn’t directly benefit them.  And what’s true about transportation systems is also true about the other basic services: water, electricity, sewage.

It’s not just the environmental effects that have made sprawl such a nemesis.  So many households in far-flung suburbs are structured like this: Dad works full-time, and is away from home between the hours of 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.  Mom’s doing the same. Nannies or older relatives have to come in to get the kids to and from school. As the kids get older, they take on this role for themselves. They come home from school to a fridge, a TV, a computer, and a stern note from Mom to stay in the house until a parent arrives home. 

Eventually, a parent shows up–utterly exhausted from a day at the office plus four hours of driving. No time to prepare dinner?  Fast food. No time to help with homework? Oh well.  No way to get them to Little League or soccer practice?  They can play video games. Kids taking drugs, or having sex, in these empty houses?  Gee, I never knew, I didn’t notice anything had changed.  

I wish I could be like Mr. Bruegmann, and snap my fingers to create a solution to all these problems as facile as “creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles.”

Sprawl is so ingrained in our lifestyles in Southern California–and all over the country–that it will take generations to transform it into something more sustainable. And that assumes developers and home buyers are ever convinced to stop fostering it. So, perhaps books like Bruegmann’s are helpful in beginning to conceive how America can cope with the problems of its own device. But the cheerleading seems misplaced.