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Dealing With Neurotics

By Charles Euchner

When you think of neurotic people, you think of someone who compulsively sponges down a clean kitchen counter, or who asks a dozen questions about an issue that’s already been settled, or someone who hovers over kids with all kinds of concerns about classes, teachers, other kids, camp, lessons, friends.

You think of someone who cannot let go of things that need to be let go. You think of someone so nervous and insecure, that he doesn’t let anyone else be calm and secure.

At least a quarter of all Americans — and maybe as many as half — are neurotic in some way.

How do you define neurotic. Albert Ellis offers this pithy definition in his book How To Live With a “Neurotic” at Home and At Work:

Neurotics, according to Ellis, display many of the following traits:

• Indecision, doubt, and conflict
  
• Inadequacy feelings
  
• Guilt and self-blame
  
• Hostility and resentment
  
• Ingratiation
  
• Inefficiency and stupidity
  
• Self-deceit and lack of realism
  
• Defensiveness
  
• Rigidity and compulsiveness
  
• Shyness and withdrawal
  
• Psychosomatic symptoms and hypochondria
  
• Depression
  
• Self-centeredness and an inability to love
  
• Overexcitablity and manic tendencies
  
• Overambitiousness and compulsiveness striving
  
• Alcoholism and drug abuse
  

Yikes! What a list! What in the world can you do to cope with someone displaying even a handful of these traits?

Ellis has some tough words of advice. There’s not much you can do to reason with these kinds of people. Logic and rationality don;t have much to do with their everyday habits. You can’t say, in the words of Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together.” Any reasoning is met with defensiveness, denial, even aggression.

Instead, you need to coax a neurotic out of his or her embattled and confused state. This is beyond the capability of most people. It requires a Christ-like patience and wisdom that most of us lack.

Here’s the toughest part of Ellis’s analysis (found on page 89 of How To Live With a Neurotic):

“One central rule in dealing with a ‘neurotic’: do not criticize! As we have pointed out previously, ‘neurotics’ arrive at their state largely form taking criticism too seriously. Because they make themselves oversensitized, they take further criticism badly. If you down them (or even their traits), you may contrbute to increasing their feelings of worthlessness.

“‘Neurotics,’ in particular, tend to react poorly to appeals that take this kind of criticism. To tell them that they should, for their own good, go from point 1 to 2 equals: ‘Look here, you fool! You know damned well that you harm yourself by remaining at 1 instead of going to 2. Now why don’t you stop acting like a dunce and do the right thing?’ To almost everyone that will sound like censure.”

In dealing with a neurotic — or someone with neurotic tendencies — you have to have amazing patience. You cannot react to every irrational, defensive, or stubborn action. You can’t say, “Hey, pal! You’re not getting it! Try this way!”

Instead, you have to find what works and coax it out of your friend (or spouse, coworker, children, parents, or whatever). You need positive reinforcement of what works, not negative reaction to what doesn’t work.

Nothing could be harder. But it’s the only way that works.

Time Passages

By Charles Euchner

Years ago, I discovered something startling. As I pulled out of a gas station, the rearview mirror fell off the windshield of my car. I drove on, not realizing how much I would miss my view of the road behind. If I need to see behind me, I reasoned, I can use the side-view mirror. But within a couple miles, I found driving impossible. I pulled over, found some Superglue, and stuck the mirror back on the windshield. The rest of the trip was easy.

The rearview mirror gave me the sense of space I needed to continue my journey. I didn't have any real sense of where my car was -- or where it was going -- without knowing what was behind me. To act well in any one space, you need to know what's behind and in front.

In The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (Free Press, 2008), Philip Zambardo and John Boyd apply that lesson to our experience of time. 

The most important factor defining our attitude toward life, Zimbardo and Boyd write, is our orientation toward time. Each of is biased, in positive or negative ways, toward the past, present, or future. Many of the problems we experience -- with relationships, work, money -- come from being too biased toward one attitude toward time. To live a good life, we need to balance our experiences of time.

Zimbardo and Boyd describe seven major orientations toward time:

• Past-Positive: A romantic view of the past, which casts experiences with family, church, school, work, and play in golden hues. Past-Present people feel secure and happy because they feel grounded. They are not stuck in a miserable past, but energized by a strong sense of self. The downside: Past-Positives have a hard time building a better life than they experienced.
• Past-Negative: A bitter and angry view of the past, which puts the blame for all present failures on people and events from long ago. Past-Negative types endlessly remember moments when they got unfair treatment. They have a hard time focusing on the present or future because they are obsessed with the crippling effects of the past. Sadly, the past cripples only when we get stuck in regret or anger about what happened. 
• Present Hedonism: A happy but somewhat shallow attitude about everyday life. The Present Hedonist does not think much about past or future. He cares mostly about what pleasure he can derive from the moment. The Present Hedonist is often the life of the party. But he can be irresponsible, both to himself and others.
• Present Fatalism: A view that nothing you every do can every change anything. Present Fatalists feel powerless because they do not have the grounding of the past-Positive or the goal-orientation of the Future-Oriented. Fatalists let people walk all over them. Every time someone exploits them, they feel even more fatalist.  
• Holistic Present: Imagine the mindset of the Dalai Lama, and you udnerstand this ideal. The Holistic-Present person lives in the moment, capable of appreciating the joys and pains of the present without anger or fear. This type blends together a focus on what he can do, right now, with a strong grounding in the past and a realistic attitude of the future. This person understands that the only moment he can act is right now, and that small actions can produce positive effects. 
• Future-Oriented: The most ambitious type, at least according to our Western notions of power, fame, and achievement. The Future-Oriented person is capable of delaying gratification to build a better tomorrow. He works hard, every day, to open up new possibilities. 
• Transcendental Future:  A deeply spiritual perspective, which sees life as just part of a greater cosmic reality. The Transcendental-Future type lives well in this world, balancing past, present, and future, but also looks forward to something even better in the hereafter. Martin Luther King's "Mountaintop" speech is powerful testimony to this attitude.

As Zimbardo and Boyd argue, most of us contain elements of each of these types. The question is how much. 

Many of our problems, in careers and relationships, stem from overloading one of the three major time orientations. When we are Past-Negative, we get stuck in a period where we can do nothing. When we dwell too much in the past, we don't have the time or perspective to engage the present or prepare for the future. We criticize, condemn, and complain about people who "done us wrong." And -- surprise! -- no one wants to be near us.

Zimbardo and Boyd point to Sonja Lyubomirsky's The How of Happiness for specific actions we can take to develop the positive aspects of past, present, and future orientations.

To get a healthy sense of the past:

1. express gratitude, 
2. avoid overthinking and rumination, and 
3. learn to forgive.

To get a healthy sense of the present:

4. practice acts of kindness,

5. nurture relationships,

6. increase flow experiences, 

7. savor life's joys, and

8. take care of your body (with meditation).  

To get a healthy sense of the future:

9. cultivate optimism,

10. develop coping strategies, 
11. set and pursue life goals, and 

12. take care of your body (with exercise).  

To pursue a more transcendental approach toward the future:

13. practice religion or cultivate spirituality. 

More about Zimbardo and Boyd's fascinating tour of time in future posts.

Smart Wheels

By Charles Euchner

With soaring gas prices and concerns about global warming, a rickety but persistent coalition of smart growth advocates has again called for massive new investments in public transit. Build light rail, they say, and the problems of congestion and pollution and sprawl will fade away.

Sadly, they're wrong. I would love to see old-fashioned "urban villages" take root at the intersections of Main and Broad in Everytown, U.S.A. I would love dense development to arise around these transit nodes. I would love people to give up their second cars; hell, I'd be happy if they gave up their third cars.

But people drive because it remains the most affordable and convenient form of transportation. You go from point A to point B, in the comfort of a rolling living room, without having to wait 45 minutes or get squished between John Candy lookalikes and angst-ridden spike-haired kids. And with jobs, schools, churches, ballfields, pools, and most other destinations scattered all over, simply building a train line is not going to help much.

And new rail lines are expensive. Once upon a time -- before cars, before greedy unions, before sprawl, before restrictive zoning -- massive investment in trolleys and heavy rail made sense. But now it sucks out capital and operating funds that would be used better elsewhere. Too often, new rail lines actually make sprawl worse. Since localities do not want stations near the downtown -- "We don't have enough parking!" -- the stations get located on highways. So people clog the highways to get to Kiss-'n'-Ride lots.

A former Harvard colleague named David Luberoff once calculated that building and running the new commuter rails to Boston's South Shore would cost more than giving every rider taxi fare for every trip. Talk about subsidies!

But even though the knee-jerk transit dreams don't make sense, Rochester, N.Y., shows that you can run a decent bus service efficiently. You can get more bottoms on bus seats, for less money. You can even make a small profit.

How? By paying attention to what groups might want to use the bus system. By cutting out the lines that don't carry anyone. (To me, one of the ugliest sites is a bus rolling by with just one or two riders on board.) By taking a community-planning approach.

The Genesee Valley Transit Authority has negotiated deals with the Rochester public schools, local colleges, and businesses to pay for lines serving them. A local developer has agreed to subsidize a line out to a new suburban development.

To be sure, Rochester has also gotten more money from the state. Subsidies help. But everyone gets hefty subsidies. How many massachusetts residents know that one penny of sales tax on every purchase goes to Boston's transit system? The question is: Once you get your subsidies, do you manage the system efficiently and creatively?

Transit advocates usually scream when bus services change lines. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority still runs buses out to a shopping center in Cambridge where a supermarket was once the raison d'etre for the line. Initiatives to shift a line even a block produce howls of protest.

Like it or not, buses offer the best hope for transit. The greatest virtue of buses is their flexibility. Transit systems should actively seek the lines that produce the greater number of riders.

Here's a simple idea. Invert the build-it-and-they-will-come adage from "Eight Men Out." Found out where people are, and where they actually want buses, and move the lines there.

Emasculation

By Charles Euchner

In a moment of candor last summer, Jesse Jackson confided that he wanted to emasculate Senator Barack Obama for challenging the old-school civil rights movement. And now the Republican Party has taken up the cause of emasculating the Democratic presidential nominee.

Obama's chance to win the election depends on whether he can fight back and keep his manhood.

In her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Governor Palin mocked and derided Obama's masculinity. Using every available symbol —  guns, hunting and fishing, hockey goons, union members, warriors, POWs, oil drillers, terrorists —  she declared John McCain the only real man in the race. Unless, of course, you include her too.

Over the years, the Republicans have defeated Democrats by emasculating them. So John Kerry's wartime heroism was Swift Boated, and his own bike-riding and windsurfing color-coded the charge. Al Gore was obsessed with his earth-tone clothes, his Hollywood friends, and his passion for the environment. Michael Dukakis could not prevent Willie Horton from breaking into your home. Walter Mondale was a captive of "San Francisco Democrats."

The only recent Democrat to avoid getting femmed was Bill Clinton. Everything the GOP used against Clinton —  the rumors about drug dealing in Arkansas, ugly rumors about Vince Foster's death, his philandering —  actually reinforced his Bubba image. The more Clinton's enemies charged him with thuggery, the more mulligans he got.

If you're a man, you win. If you're a pansy, you lose.

When Sarah Barracuda took the stage in St. Paul, she took her stiletto and knifed Obama again and again. Her charges:

• He's an appeaser in Iraq —  a man who "can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word victory."
• He can write his sissy memoirs —  chick lit, really —  but can't write a piece of legislation.
• He works as a community organizer in Chicago —  whatever that is!
• Not only that, he worked in Chicago, that den of sin run by the infamous rogue Richard Daley--objectionable because softies like Obama can never win against that crowd.
• He mocks god-fearing people in San Francisco.
• "He gives big airy speeches" but "when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot—what exactly is our opponent's plan?"
• His campaign for president is nothing more than effeminate "journey of personal discovery."
• In fact, the only thing that Barack Obama gets tough on, in this account, is his zeal to raise taxes —  to build up the already-meddlesome nanny state.

When she first introduced herself to the American public, she called herself a "hockey mom." At the time, it sounded like a modest reference. But last night, she clarified. "What's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?" she asked. "Lipstick." No kidding.

Until now, the GOP has tried to win by building up John McCain's manhood. The campaign reminds voters on every issue, domestic and foreign, that he was a POW in 'Nam. Every St. Paul speaker emphasized his refusal to give in to his captors' demands at the Hanoi Hilton.

In fact, McCain's identity was forged in that hellish world of captivity. He stood by his fellow soldiers and resolved to battle tyrants. In his best moments, McCain also learned how to leave the past in the past. He and Senator Kerry worked hard to end the unending domestic war over Vietnam and establish diplomatic and economic ties with the old foe.

Palin's acceptance speech was the most scorching address by a new vice presidential candidate in at least a generation. Previous addresses targeted the opponents' policies, not their character and manhood. Spiro Agnew was ruthless in his attacks on liberals, antiwar activists, media, and bureaucrats. But he usually focused on policies and did not begin his assault until after the 1968 convention.

Now Palin has Democrats in a bind. When Democrats attacked her for her inexperience and questioned her command of basic issues, Palin and her allies took refuge in the claim of sexism. "How dare they?" Rudy Giuliani roared. Wearing the armor of feminism, Palin attacks Obama's masculinity.

Obama's only response is to hit hard —  every day —  on the visceral issues of the day. He needs not to cower and complain about unfairness, but stand up and demand fairness. He needs to channel union leaders fighting for fair wages, minorities denied basic civil rights, internationalists who refused to buckle to the Soviet threat. He cannot whine, and he cannot back down.

The best model for Obama might come from the 1963 March on Washington, which took place 45 years to the day before the Democrat delivered his acceptance speech.

Democrats commemorating that day usually refer to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream"oratory. But Obama needs to tap into the real passion of that day —  not dreams of brotherhood, but impatient demands for basic fairness.

"We want our freedom, and we want it now!" marchers said on that brilliant day. They did not complain or whine. They demanded change.

On a whole raft of issues —  tax fairness, pay equity, school choice, health care, terrorism —  Obama needs to show he won't get pushed around by McCain's pitbull. In a sense, Obama has to say he's the real mensch, that he's not going to let McPalin push middle-class Americans around, that he's going to be there to protest ordinary people's interests. 

That's a message tough enough to work —  and decent enough to build something new starting next January.

Public and Private Realms in 21st Century America

By Charles Euchner

As Barack Obama claims the Democratic nation, his party risks a categorical error that could make winning the election -- and then governing the nation -- impossible. Republicans struggle with the same risk, but because of the intensity of their business and social-conservative factions, they slip less easily. But, heaven knows, the current president has slipped badly into these muddy waters.

The danger is not understanding the basic units of the nation. Politicians across the ideological spectrum -- Bush and Kennedy, Obama and McCain, Clinton and Clinton -- increasingly display only the vaguest notion of which issues belong in the public realm and which ones belong in the private realm.

The manifesto of this confusion was Mario Cuomo's keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1984 -- until Barack Obama's 2004 oration, the most influential convention address of modern times. Repeatedly, Cuomo talks of America as a "family." Here are the most relevant excerpts:

On behalf of the great Empire State and the whole family of New York, let me thank you ...

In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York, to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the nation.

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems ...

And we can deal with the deficit intelligently, by shared sacrifice, with all parts of the nation's family contributing ...

And I ask you now, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, for the good of all of us, for the love of this great nation, for the family of America, for the love of God ...

A stirring speech, but wrong in the fundamentals. The nation is not in any way a "family." It is a collection of states, cities and towns, families, businesses, private institutions, and nonprofit groups. And each of those units needs its own power and responsibility to contribute to the nation.

Communities work best when individuals and groups enjoy great autonomy in their private places -- in families and churches, fraternal associations and private schools, clubs and leagues -- and when the public realm exerts real authority in matters that need common action.

Here's how Hannah Arendt describes the political community in The Human Condition:

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

To Arendt, the table offers the common space that members of a community share -- the public realm. It's where people come to hash out to solutions that exceed the scope of their private concerns. For politics to work, though, people need to come to the table with strong identities. They need to contribute to a diverse set of perspectives.

To gain that strength, the private realm needs to be strong. People need the freedom to develop their ideals without needless outside pressure or restrictions. Consider one simple example. Private schools, then, should be free -- they should be encouraged -- to develop a distinctive set of ideals. If every private school is like the others, none of them can bring a special perspective to the table.

When I taught at Holy Cross, a pro-choice student group sought meeting space and funding from the college. The college president, John Brooks, said no. The students argued that the denial amounted to tyranny, a stifling of free expression, and so on. Although I am personally pro-choice -- I agree with Bill Clinton's adage that abortion should be "legal, safe, and rare" -- I endorsed the college's position. It seemed to me that a Jesuit institution should be allowed room to develop and express its values. The student group could easily meet without official endorsements -- in fact, it would undoubtedly be more creative if forced to find its own way.

Just as important as a private institution's freedom, I think, is the public realm's need for a diversity of thought. Public debate is strengthened when institutions like Holy Cross embrace distinct values.

When we recognize the sharp distinction between public and private, debates become a little clearer. Rather than wafting into the vague rhetoric of "we are all one national family," we recognize that people and groups have different needs. We are more likely to embrace choice -- in schools, religion, health care, retirement plans, jobs, cities and towns, environmental issues, private clubs, sports, family matters -- and less likely to accept, unthinkingly, the day's conventional wisdom.

That means, quite simply: We need to find a way to adopt clear but strong standards for things fundamental to us as a community. But when there is no one answer, we need to allow great leeway to those institutions below the federal government.

When one unit of government tries to do too much, it can only vaguely wave at real public policy. As Theodore Lowi has commented, legislation becomes an expression of sentiment -- Poverty is bad! Schools should perform better! -- than a hard mandate of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." The real work, then, gets passed on to the bureaucrats and interest groups and lawyers who battle over regulations and funding formulas and court orders.

That's no democracy. It is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, the "rule of no one."

The Beat Goes On

Inside the scene is the smallest element of structure, the Beat. … A Beat is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat, these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.

—Robert McKee, Story, p. 37

Life doesn't imitate cinema, so take this post as a metaphor. But it's a very telling metaphor.

Think back on the scenes in your life—and in books and movies, even in songs and sports—that riveted your attention. Think about how people interacted in those scenes. One person acted, the other reacted, the first responded, a third entered the fray, the first two responded. Back and forth, the characters hit ideas back and forth like Ping-Pong balls. Each hit created new possibilities, some suspense. The longer the exchange, the greater the stakes and the tension.

Hollywood has a term for this rat-a-tat-tat exchange—beats. A beat is any action, however small, that changes the story or argument and moves it forward. A good scene includes a series of beats, small interactions that add up to a complete portrait of people doing something together.

Consider a famous scene in "Casablanca," in which the German officers and French ex-pats each sing their national anthem. The dueling songs show us many important qualities of the characters and their struggles. Let's look at the scene, beat by beat:

1. Nazi officers stand up and begin singing the German national anthem
2. Camera pans across the bar to Rick and Victor watch from a distance, get irritated by the spectacle
3. As the camera pans the bar, an employee looks expectantly to Rick, who does nothing
4. Victor leaves Rick to walk across the bar
5. Victor passes Ilsa, who looks both proud and scared for her husband
6. Victor makes a request to the band leader
7. The band leader looks to Rick for direction
8. Rick nods, signaling that the band may play La Marseilaisse
9. The band begins playing
10. The head Nazi officer, irritated, tries to get his men's singing to drown out the French anthem
11. The ex-pats sing even louder, as people all over stand up to join in the song
12. The Nazi leader realizes he has been defeated and sits down
13. A woman sings loudly, tearing with pride
14. Ilse looks worried (at several moments around this time)
15. A woman plays a guitar and sings loudly (at several moments around this time)
16. The whole bar swells with patriotic fervor, everyone standing to sing (at several moments around this time)
17. Victor stands stoutly, singing loudly, clearly exposed (at several moments around this time)
18. A woman yells "Viva La France!"
19. The rest of the crowd yells and claps
20. The German office orders an underling to close the bar, despite the underling's protests

Every beat changes something, moving the story forward. In Beat 4, Victor’s decision to walk across the room signals his move into the battle against the Germans’ boorish display of patriotism. Rick’s nod in Beat 8 gives the band permission to play the French anthem—tantamount to a declaration of war against the Germans. Ilse’s worry in Beat 14 shows the audience how conflicted she is about her husband and his work.

As I said before, life isn't as snappy as a great scene in a great movie. We have lots more ahs, ums and ers in our conversation. We stammer and look away, searching for the right words. We go off on tangents, don't hear everything people say, and don't always respond clearly.

But, in life as in cinema, even casual words and gestures can change the direction of a conversation. Pay close attention to your conversation. Look for those moments when a word or gesture can turn the dialogue in the good or bad direction.

Was John Rawls a Conservative?

Note: Last fall, in the midst of the debate over S-CHIP, I wrote an op-ed article arguing that the Bush Administration had adopted the simplest and most powerful idea in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice -- the "difference principle." For years, Rawls has been the bete noire of conservatives everywhere for his intellectual justification for the welfare state. Today I read an article in The American Conservative making a similar argument. Seems to me, the cons have an ally in the late liberal philosopher. Below is my op-ed. What do you think?

By Charles Euchner

The partisan battle over children’s health care masks the most important element in the debate. George W. Bush is a closet Rawlsian.

John Rawls was the Harvard philosopher whose 1971 study A Theory of Justice has been a touchstone for a generation of liberals. Rawls argues for a robust role for the state in establishing fair opportunities in unequal societies.

At the heart of his theory is the “difference principle,” which holds that policies that increase inequality—tax policy, government benefits, wage structures, educational opportunities—can only be justified if the poorer members of society benefit. What sounds like a logical mistake—how can poor people be better off when inequality increases?—actually offers a dynamic way to think about complex societies.

“[T]he higher expectations of those better situated are just,” Rawls writes, “if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society.”

If the government wants to grant industrial or agricultural subsidies—which make their way into the pockets of mostly privileged people—there must be some assurance that those subsidies benefit the less well-off members of society too. Same goes for tax breaks, research funds or universities, social security, and health care.

That’s where President Bush enters the picture.

As part of his plan to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), President Bush wants higher participation rates for poor and working-class families before expanding the program to middle-class families. Specifically, Bush wants to see an enrollment rate of 95 percent of all eligible participants—children in families with incomes 200 percent or less of the federal poverty level, which is about $20,000—before expanding the program to others.

S-CHIP represents the Clinton Administration’s second-best approach to health care, after the failed effort to provide universal care. In the span of a decade, the program has provided health care for three-quarters of all eligible children get care under the program. When kids get the health care they need, they do better in school and other activities.

The states enjoy wide latitude in running the program. Some have increased the eligibility standard to families living at 250 percent and even 350 percent of the poverty line. Other states have offered coverage to expectant mothers and the parents of eligible children.

Democrats in Congress have sought to expand the program ever more. President Bush has responded that such expansions change S-CHIP from an entitlement for families who cannot afford health care into a general entitlement. That is dangerous for two reasons. First, it would explode the federal government’s commitment for health care at a time when it’s already out of control.

Second, a super-sized S-CHIP program would encourage employers to back out providing insurance for workers.

But there’s a bigger problem still. When social programs cater to the middle class, the poor often get left behind. Social Security and Medicare provide important benefits to middle-income Americans, but do less for poor people. Welfare and Medicaid have always borne the brunt of budget cuts.

Why not tie middle-class benefits to greater participation among the poor? For his justification, the President could do worse than turn to Rawls.

“Consider any two representative men A and B, and let B be the one who is less favored,” Rawls writes. “B can accept A’s being better off since A’s advantages have been gained in ways that improve B’s prospects. If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is.”

The difference principle offers a more realistic and dynamic approach to justice than standard schemes of redistribution. Rather than ranting against inequality, Rawls uses inequality to help everyone. He understands that social policy that ignores this reality is worthless—or even destructive, since it fosters resentment, envy, and a zero-sum approach to common concerns.

Communitarian liberals and compassionate conservatives often talk about the need to connect the interests of different groups in society. A Rawlsian approach to entitlements like S-CHIP—now carrying the endorsement of President Bush—offers a useful way to do just that.

The difference principle can be applied to other areas of public policy as well. We might offer more programs for gifted math and science education, as well as better opportunities for disadvantaged children. We might devise strategies to increase housing supply, as long as inexpensive housing is part of the mix.

The irony of President Bush’s Rawlsian turn is that conservative intellectuals abhor John Rawls. The National Review chided Rawls for his “childlike innocence about the ways of the world.” Robert Nozick, a libertarian colleague at Harvard, wrote his own masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, partly to challenge Rawls.

Rawls, though an academic liberal to the nth degree, was determined to balance the needs of individual and community, equality and efficiency, dynamism and security. The difference principle provides his mechanism. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but it’s creative and practical.

At the time of Rawls’s death in 2002, there were 5,000 books and articles about his work. As theorists nit-picked the details of his work, Rawls backed off some aspects of the difference principle. But the idea remains important. Maybe it doesn’t stand up to the academic’s angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin analysis. But it’s a good guideline for fostering fairness.

Ultimately, politics involves contests over two kinds of issues—principles and details. Democrats concerned about poverty should embrace President Bush’s endorsement of Rawlsian justice. Then they can bargain about the details of health care and other policies.

An Easy Way to Invest: Part 1

By Charles Euchner

Right now, everyone is scared. Gas prices have passed the $4 gallon mark. The housing bubble, finally, has been pricked. The war in Iraq is going badly, and the wider "war on terror" is doing worse. Silently, with nary a comment, loose nukes once in the Soviet arsenal threaten to make 9/11 look like a fender bender. The public has about as much confidence in the president -- and Congress, too, let us not forget -- reminiscent of the days of James Buchanan.

In other words, the world has no stability.

And so the very idea of investing in the stock market, especially for those of us whose eyes glaze at the sight of the stock pages, seems kind of crazy. True, if you score, you'll do better than putting your savings in a savings account. But, mercy, at least be careful -- put what you invest in conservatively assembled mutuals! Or, better yet, invest in government-backed securities or bonds.

Into this hurricane of uncertainty, I have decided to test a book's promise of a simple, fool-proof system for winning on Wall Street. The Little Book That Beats the Market, by Joel Greenblatt, promises returns better than professional traders, mutuals, gold, real estate -- you name it, his "magic formula" (his term) beats every other approach.

The promotional material promises: "Though the formula has been extensively tested and is a clear breakthrough in the academic and professional world, the common sense method is convincingly explained using 6th grade math skills, plain language and humor."

Hey, I graduated sixth grade. Why not give it a try?

And so, tonight, I am going to invest a few thousand dollars Greenblatt's way. And I will report back on a regular basis about the success of my high-rolling. As I proceed, I plan to add more to the pot. I won't get rich, because I don't have much to start with. But if Greenblat is right, I'll do better than most people who diligently buy IRA's and mutuals and bonds -- and, more recently, gold and land.

The book's argument

Gteenblatt's agument goes like this:

The stock market is one crazy system -- if looked at from the perspective of a few months or even a year. Prices fluctuate wildly. Is it because the core value of companies jumps up and down? No. It's because people buying and selling stocks tend to be reactive. When prices fall, people panic. When prices rise, people want to jump on a bandwagon. Ergo, the market fluctuates, even if the company's fundamentals are fundamentally sound over time.

If only there were a way to identify and buy valuable stocks at their low ebbs . . .

Greenblatt says there is. Following the logic of Benjamin Graham -- the economist whom Warren Buffett proclaims his greatest influence besides his father -- Greenblatt says to watch two numbers:

Return on Capital -- The level of profitibility relative to fixed and liquid assets. ROC shows you how much the company is making off its investments. The formula, for you digit-crunchers out there, is: ROC=EBIT/(Net Working Capital + Net Fixed Assets. That is to say, it's the ratio of pre-tax operating earnings (EBIT) to the tangible capital employed by the company.

Earnings Yield (EY) -- Earnings per share divided by the share price, the EY shows you just how much profit you get over and above the stock's price. If you earn $1.20 on a stock worth $1, , you have a 20 percent rate of return. That's about four times better than what you get by putting your cash in a bank.

Greenblatt then ranks companies listed with a stock exchange for these two measures. Then he adds together the ranking of the companies for each measure. Voila, he has a compound measure that's as easy to calculate as OPS (baseball's influential stat based on on-base percentage plus slugging percentage).

If a company ranks high among both measures, it's got deep value. If you can get it at an ebb in price, you have a bargain. If you can hang on to the stock for more than a year -- better, more than a few years -- its value will be borne out.

Making my first investment

Here's what's even better. Greenblatt has set up a web site that does all the calculations for you. It's called magicformulainvesting.com. Go there and make a few simple choices, and you'll get stock picks with longterm value. I sought out the top 100 companies with a minimum market capitalization of $500 million. (The complete list of these stocks can be found at the end of this post.)

To start, I decided to invest about $3000 in five stocks. Here's what I picked (May 31, 2008):

McGraw Hill Publishing (MHP): $41.17 -- 25 shares ($1029.25)
Nutri/System Inc. (NTRI): $20.52 -- 20 shares ($409)
Meredith Corporation (MDP): $32.81 -- 20 shares ($656.20)
Korn/Ferry International (KFY): $16.80 -- 25 shares ($420)
Sigma Designs Inc. (SIGM): $18.50 -- 20 shares ($370)

Followup

Greenblatt recommends buying a few stocks at a time until you have a portfolio of 20 to 30 stocks. Why? Because the stats are based on last year's performance, which can always be an oddball year. Having a mix of stocks assures that you're getting a good mix of stocks.

It's been almost two and a half months since I bought these stocks. How are they doing? As of today, August 13, 2008, the prices are:

McGraw Hill Publishing (MHP): $43.27 -- 25 shares ($1081.75) Nutri/System Inc. (NTRI): $19.91 -- 20 shares ($398.20) Meredith Corporation (MDP): $29.25 -- 20 shares ($580.50) Korn/Ferry International (KFY): $19.11 -- 25 shares ($477.75) Sigma Designs Inc. (SIGM): $18.31 -- 20 shares ($366.20)

So I have two winners and three losers so far. My total value has gone from 2884.45 to 2904.40. This at a time when the Dow fell from 11,642 to 11,532. My gain was not great, and the market's loss was not great. So far, call it a wash. But stay tuned . . .

In a few weeks, I'm going to have to make decisions about what to buy next. Any ideas, out there?

When To Quit

By Charles Euchner

"Winners never quit, and quitters never win."

So sayeth Vince Lombardi, the god of knucklehead, win-at-all-cost sports ideologues.

The slogan appeals to us because of its simplicity, but also because of its deep vein of moralism. It fits the credo of the American Dream, the idea that a willingness to sweat and persevere separates winners from losers. It contains optimism's sunshine ("You, too, can win if you just work harder") and the realist's wariness ("Hey, kiddo, if you haven't made it, you haven't worked hard enough").

But as Seth Godin writes in his provocative little self-help book The Dip, winners quit all the time. Winners know how to judge whether they're going to thrive with an activity -- or whether they would be better off devoting their limited time to some other activity. If you have a chance to thrive, by all means, stick to it. But if you don't have a chance to be the best, you ought to quit.

Be the best? How many can be the best?

As Godin notes, a lot of people can be the best in the fragmented, niche-oriented world we live in today. If we competed in the big categories of the mass market, only a few people could be the best. If we think in terms of the mass market, only one person can be the best actor, or singer, or athlete, or investor, or teacher, or writer. Of course, deciding the "best" in some huge universe is a totally subjective process. Would you say Denzel Washington? Or Meryl Streep? Michael Caine? Cate Blanchette? Who knows? We could make a list of 20 or more actors and pick randomly from that list.

But if we think of "micro" markets, it's easier to identify the best. You could talk about best for movies, TV, and stage; men, women, and children; dramatic, comic, tragic, experimental, improv; New York and London; Broadway and off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway; pop and classical approaches; character actors and method actors; action and introspective roles. On and on, we could divide the mega category -- acting -- into countless distinct sub-categories.

It would be easier to make judgments about these categories. and it would be easier to strive to be the best at a sub-category than the whole universe.

The rewards of being the best are exponentially greater than the rewards of being just "good" or "pretty good." In Hollywood, they call it the star system. But it works in all fields -- publishing, politics, photography, psychotherapy, punditry, academe, the law, medicine, research -- and all of the countless subfields of these professions -- the superstars make manyfold the money and fame of the stars. The stars, in turn, make manyfold the money and fame of the competent many.

The reason is simple. When people are looking for recommendations, they ask for the best. Someone who gets the reputation as the best gets more traffic than she can handle. And because of supply and demand, the best can set the price about as high as she wants. High prices only enhance the mystique.

So what does this say about the necessity of quitting?

As Seth Godin notes, most of us try all kinds of professions and activities over the course of our lives. A lawyer, for example, might try a big and a small firm, a range of different specializations, litigation or deal-making, big-city and small-town practices, corporate or nonprofit work . . . .on and on, the choices are endless.

The trick is to quit the ones that don;t work, the ones where you cannot be the best.

All kinds of smart people are slaving away, competently, without getting the reward they may deserve. By following the Protestant ethic of hard work, sacrifice, and delayed gratification, they dig themselves deeper into a career groove. They might get a decent paycheck, occasional pats on the back, and the satisfaction of an honest day's work.

But maybe that's exactly the path that subjects them to the status of second-class citizen. Maybe, they should realize that quitting a decent job is the best way to find the way to superstardom.

That's Godin's lesson. Whatever you do, figure out the niche where you can be Number One. Don;t sell yourself as a "photographer." Don't even sell yourself as a technically superior photographer. Sell yourself as the Number One photographer of (a) a subject, (b) style, (c) sector, (d) city, and (e) price. In that niche, you'll develop a mystique. People will beat a path to your door. And you can set your own terms.

But first, you have to have the courage to quit everything else.

Writing on Writing

Writing has a literature all its own. To become a better writer, you might consider looking at some of these books:

Will Blythe, editor, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998): Selections from a New York Times essay series by some of the most important authors in the world.

Robert Boynton, editor, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft (New York: Vintage, 2005: Interviews on every aspect on nonfiction writing -- research, interviewing, writing, rewriting, and style -- from the best practitioners working today.

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown, 2006): A terrific store of tips on the mechanics of writing, tricks to give writing greater meaning and life, strategies of storytelling, and the habits of good writers.

Stephen Denning, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Inspired by Robert McKee, a guide to business writing that helps lift writing beyond dreary memos and PowerPoint.

Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (New York: Broadway Books, 1999): A lively book that shows how to make writing zippier and more telling at the same time.

Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : A collection of talks and commentary from the Nieman Foundation's annual conferences.

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing And Life (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : An intimate story showing how you, too, can use the best of your right and left brains.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Washington: DC Comics, 1999): A comic book explaining how storytelling can merge words and images to tell a more compelling story. Amazing insights about how the mind works, how stories unfold, and how meaning shifts with different formats and perspectives.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997): A classic work by Hollywood's most famous "script doctor." McKee understands the eternal principles of storytelling. Written for film scriptwriters, the book has inspired countless of novelists, nonfiction writers, business people, and more.

Louis T. Milic, editor, Stylists on Style: A Handbook With Selections and Analysis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969) : Great passages from great writers, with very useful commentary.

Steve Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (New York: Warner Books, 2002): A Zen guide to dealing with the emotional trials of writing.

Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, editors, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995): An anthology of great narrative nonfiction, with strong commentary.

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, with illustrations by Maira Kalman, The Elements of Style (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005) : The classic guide, updated with whimsical art.

Simple Electoral College Reform

By Charles Euchner

In yet another season of political discontent, how we pick presidents has once again become a topic of anguish. The primary process disenfranchised voters from Michigan and Florida. States continue to have problems with voting machines. And looking ahead to the fall election, reformers worry that we will elect a president who does not enjoy a popular mandate.

The problem is the Electoral College system. States get electoral votes according to their representation in Congress. All but two states allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. And so, in a close election, the winner of the popular vote might not win the electoral vote. That's subversive of the national will.

Now, after the electoral debacle of 2000, the near-debacle of 2004, and the reports of machine breakdown in 2008, reformers are calling for a simple popular vote to determine the president.

But only a constitutional amendment can abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a popular vote. That's not going to happen, absent a constitutional crisis even greater than the Bush v. Gore debacle of 2004.

So what can be done to insure a popularly elected president?

The answer is the National Popular Vote Plan. Under the NPV, states would agree to support the winner of the national popular vote, no matter what happened in their states. The NPV would require only state legislation, in only enough states to produce an Electoral College majority of 270 electoral votes.

But more on that in a minute. First, let's look at the Electoral College and its manifest virtues and flaws.

BACKGROUND ON THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The Framers of the Constitution adopted the Electoral College as a compromise between popular selection of the president and the parliamentary approach, in which the legislature selects the executive. The conferees in Philadelphia in 1787 feared mob rule if the people selected the president directly. But they also feared that the president would be a captive of the petty demands of legislators if the decision were left in the hands of the House of Representatives or the Senate.

So they established the Electoral College, which was supposed to be a deliberative body of wise men. The people would vote in a presidential election in November, but they would not vote for the candidate -- they'd vote for electors, and the winning electors would assemble after the election to pick a president.

Each state elected a number of electors equal to its representation in Congress -- the number of Senators (two) and House members (dependent on population). That formula gave big states more power based on their population, but also more power to the collection of small states than their population would warrant.

Many assumed that the Electoral College would deadlock on a regular basis, sending the presidential race into the House and the vice presidential contest into the Senate. Thus, the U.S. would use a quasi-parliamentary approach for presidential selection. And that, in fact, happened in 1800 (when Thomas Jefferson and his runningmate, Aaron Burr, had the same number of electoral votes) and 1824 (when neither John Quincy Adams nor Andrew Jackson could muster a majority of electoral votes in a four-man contest). But both of those experiences -- as well as the disputed election of 1876, which was resolved by a special commission -- were marred by dirty dealmaking. (Russell Baker wrote a dystopian fantasy about the 1968 election being deadlocked in the House, while the Senate picks the VP -- who becomes president on January 20 when no one else can make a constitutional claim on the White House.)

Almost always, the Electoral College has produced clear winners. But on a few occasions, the process has elected a president who did not win the popular vote. Al Gore beat George Bush in the popular tally in 2000 and lost the electoral vote. Had John Kerry won Ohio in 2004 (which some say he did, but that's another story), he would have won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote.

CALLS FOR SELECTING PRESIDENT BY POPULAR VOTE

So an increasing number of critics -- a group joined, most recently, by Senator Bill Nelson of Florida -- is calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.

The problem is that it will never happen. Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which would never be supported by small-population states. It takes only 13 states to block a constitutional amendment, meaning a tiny minority of the nation's population could block reform. Remember the Equal Rights Amendment, which in the 1970s boasted vast popular support but could not make it through the obstacle course of constitutional revision? That's what would happen with attempts to abolish the Electoral College.

The reform not only can't happen, it probably shouldn't. The competition for electoral votes helps to preserve the two-party system, which moderates American politics and prevent a splintering of uncompromising factions. The system also encourages candidates to pay attention to smaller states. And when there are problems with voting -- like in Florida in 2004 -- it's easier to focus on one state than the whole nation.

A REAL CHANCE FOR REFORM

But if you want candidates with majority support to win the election, there;s another reform that would make you happy. And it has the virtue of being a real possibility.

The National Popular Vote plan would be, essentially, a pact of states. NPV states would agree to allocate all their electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner, no matter what happened in their state. They would, in other words, place the national will above their state's narrower interests.

The NPV would take effect as soon as states representing a majority of the nation's electoral power -- states with at least 270 electoral votes, the majority needed to elect a president -- agree to the scheme. At that point, the U.S. will be assured of electing a popular president. And, in all likelihood, avoiding more controversies over hanging chads.

Already, 15 legislative bodies have passed the plan -- including one or both chambers in California, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Vermont. The plan has 370 legislative sponsors in 47 states.

One of the NPV's greatest virtues is that it wouldn't aim to eliminate the Electoral College. The virtues of the current system -- state-by-state campaigning, focus on the needs individual states and blocs of states -- would survive.

But most important, we would be assured that the winner of the national majority would become the president.

Without waiting, until the end of time, for a constitutional amendment.

Managing the Unmanageable

By Charles Euchner

The tough ex-cop from New York stood before a group of cynical New Orleans cops. You want mood? Think of the caustic, sweltering heat of “The Big Easy.”

Jack Maple was taking questions about CompStat, the computer-based crime-tracking system that he was installing in New Orleans, a city as notable for corruption and incompetence as Mardi Gras and the Superdome. Maple started CompStat in New York under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. The idea was simple, but revolutionary — input every conceivable piece of data about crime, every day, into a vast database. Then display those data on maps. Then deploy cops strategically.

More than anything else — community policing, the incarceration boom, the economic swell — CompStat produced dramatic drops in crime in Gotham. Maple, since retired, was bringing his baby to the toughest place in the world.

But N’Orleans cops weren’t terribly impressed. At one meeting, a cop told Maple they’d just revert to old ways after he left town.

“No, you won’t,” Maple shot back, merrily. “You’re too stupid and too lazy to change anything. So when we get CompStat going here, it’ll last.”

Since then, Jack Maple has died and Hurricane Katrina has wiped out New Orleans. The city’s broken culture and physical devastation have not allowed CompStat to work. So maybe the cynical cop was right. Maybe the forces of corruption were stronger in the Bayou than Maple’s number-crunching system could confront.

And so I wondered if CompStat’s Version 2.0 — CitiStat, the even more ambitious computer-based management system that Maple installed in Baltimore for Mayor Martin O’Malley — would last. O’Malley became governor of Maryland this year, leaving his signature program behind. Would the new mayor, Sheila Dixon, would keep CitiStat alive?

CitiStat is a most amazing program. Every day, in the course of doing their jobs, city workers input all kinds of data into their computers — parking tickets, potholes, vacant parcels, EMS and police response times, drug raids, vehicle usage, absenteeism, school shots, capital projects, repair work, tax payments, and more. You name it. If a city official encounters anything that can be counted, it goes into the database. Every two weeks, department heads meet with the mayor to discuss trends, actions, and planning. Within a matter of seconds, data about any issue can be retrieved and displayed in charts and maps. Armed with reports, the mayor can press his top officials to make more progress here or fix that problem there. Over time, everyone in City Hall gains an amazing sense of both the small details and the broad outlines of government. Amazing.

When O’Malley became governor, he took his brightest CitiStat aides — Michael Enright and Matt Gallagher — with him to Annapolis. Gallagher set out to implement StateStat for Maryland government. But would CitiStat survive in Charm City?

Good innovations fail for two reasons. First, when the great forces behind the innovation leave, they don’t always leave behind enough talent or institutional memory. Second, newcomers take over, they often way to sweep away the old guy’s programs and start their own.

Happily, O’Malley, Enright et al. trained a whole swarm of CitiStat people in the six years of the program’s operations. Everyone in City Hall — from the mayor down to the lowest-level sanitation person — was schooled in the power of data. All you have to do is input numbers on the day’s activities, and over time, those numbers start to tell a powerful story. Everyone knows that in Baltimore. On the three occasions I visited O’Malley’s gang in Baltimore, I was struck with how much more purposeful and knowledgeable people department heads were in Baltimore than other cities I knew, like Boston. Walk into Baltimore’s stately City Hall and you feel a sense of purpose rare in government.

The CitiStat team also trained their replacement to run the program when the original team left for Annapolis. Christopher Thomaskutty, Mayor Dixon’s CitiStat director, came to Baltimore after helping Somerville, Mass., develop its own version of the program. Thomaskutty is as smart and disciplined as anyone you’ll meet. He understood the value of the program the instant he first learned about it. And he has become as expert as anyone anywhere. And he’s nice without being a softie.

CitiStat is the most important innovation to come to city government in at least a generation. Real-time data, used to scrutinize budgets and services, can do more to make a city run well than any other tool. And it’s easy and cheap, once you learn the basics. All you need is a bunch of computers with Excel spreadsheets. The Baltimore folks will be happy to give you some of the software they’ve developed. Input data every day, you get real information to develop strategies on everything from garbage pickup to school purchasing, from capital investments to managing city fairs, from police deployment to giving school kids shots.

In fact, it’s something of a crime that not every city hasn’t adopted CitiStat. Under Mayor Joe Curtitone, Somerville has gone from one of the worst-managed cities to the best-managed city in Massachusetts.

The dirty little secret of government, though, is that many managers don’t want real-time data. They certainly don’t want to share the data they have. And they don’t want to admit that they manage poorly with poor data. And so they resist efforts to install CitiStat.

But anyone not using some form of CitiStat is guilty of municipal malpractice.

Wherever you live, demand that the mayor install CitiStat — right away. It takes planning and commitment. But tell your mayor or city manager that you’re going to throw them out of office unless they can account for every penny, every hour of labor deployment, every arrest and every school lunch, every municipal vehicle and every pothole repair — instantly.

All Hail Christopher Alexander

What begins  with a dot ends with an encounter with the “face of God.”

Take a blank piece of paper, Christopher Alexander urges, and put a dot anywhere.

Instantly, the page’s character changes.

The dot creates a number of different spaces, which he calls “centers.” Each of those centers relates to the others. When one changes, all change. And anyone who experiences those spaces also changes.

The dot exercise  reflects larger truths about buildings and towns, parks and campuses,  roads and riverways.

Good places are really a collection of centers, positioned alongside and sometimes overlapping each other. Each center has its own character—not just scale and materials and shape, but also feelings of warmth and character and naturalness. To succeed, each center relates to other centers. To have a living quality, every center needs to make everything nearby better.

Consider, for example, a house. A cottage may be built with a timber frame, which creates squares of plaster, which help to define the windows and doors. Inside, windows on different sides bring an endless play of light. Arches or columns define the walls. Outside, a garden and pathway meander around the house’s periphery. The pathway then ambles through a rose archway and out toward the road.

Each of these centers—the framing, panels, arches, windows, gardens, pathways—evokes distinctive feelings. Each relates to the others. Each makes the others more whole, alive, soulful.

This way of thinking -- placing feelings and "wholeness" over all other concerns in designing and buildings homes, schools, civic centers, train stations, and more -- has been a hallmark of Christopher Alexander's work for four decades.

Alexander's work begins with an evocation of feelings.

We notice, for example, a sense of awe while in the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted. We notice an uncanny quality of life in some of the great old brownstones of New York, the twisting streets of San Francisco, or great old college campuses like Harvard or Yale. We notice a rare sense of both order and discovery at the University of Virginia. We find ourselves overwhelmed at Westminster Abbey or an old German village.

We also notice a sense of dread while near the vast compounds of public house, Brutalist buildings like Boston's City Hall, or even major arts destinations like Lincoln Center. We go to a vast stadium surrounded by parking spaces and we're let down.

Alexander's work begins with a basic insight: We humans do relatively few things, over and over. We eat, sleep, work, learn, play, read, talk, love. We do these things over and over again, in countless variations. The job of any community, therefore, should be to create the conditions for us to do all these things as creatively as possible. The job of architecture should be to create the kinds of places where these activities happen most effectively and soulfully.

Alexander's most famous work is A Pattern Language, a work that details 253 different ways to design the world -- from whole regions all the way down to a corner of a room. That book might be the most important single work on architecture and place in American history.

In all of his work, Alexander rails against modern approaches to building. Traditional structures work, he says, because they emerged from a living process. They were built to fit the land. An innate understanding of beauty informed their design. Natural building materials gave them character. Each piece was the result of time-honored techniques of craftsmanship. And they were allowed to evolve to fit the needs and desires of users.

Nowadays, we design every inch and every corner ahead of time, use artificial materials, mechanize the construction process, and fail to relate the building’s pieces to each other or their setting.
In The Nature of Order, Alexander lists 15 features that make a structure great. The ideas are familiar to longtime followers. But he makes a much bigger claim about why these features work.

All good spaces, he argues, are living things that establish spiritual connections with people. Good buildings—and furniture, gardens, art, and artifacts—reflect the most basic elements of the human experience. They elevate people to higher places, where they can realize their abilities and also connect with all humanity.

15 Elements of Place

In The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander identifies 15 features that give life to buildings and other structures.

• Levels of Scale: The pieces of structures range in size, with “definite jumps” from one level to the next.
• Strong Centers: Structures are comprised of a series of adjacent and overlapping centers, each which improves the others.
• Boundaries: The edges of space are well marked, with the size of the edges dependent on what’s inside and outside.
• Alternating Repetition: Design includes many recurring themes, separated with some variations.
• Positive Space: No spaces are “leftovers,” but rather complete in their own right.
• Good Shape: Elementary forms—circles, rectangles, hexagons, rhombuses, semicircles—combine for form more detailed shapes.
• Local Symmetries: A structure’s overall balance exists not just at a grand scale, but in the minute details as well.
• Deep Interlock and Ambiguity: Pieces fit together so that each becomes part of the other.
• Contrast: Different colors and forms sit astride, each helping to define the other.
• Gradients: Shapes, colors, details, and directions change gradually to draw the user into the space.
• Roughness: The texture of space reflects complexity, doesn’t  gloss over it.
• Echoes: Different aspects of a space recur, in varied form, so that one aspect always provides reminders of others.
• The Void: Open spaces allow focus as well as deeper experiences of more detailed parts of the structure.
• Simplicity and Inner Calm: Geometrical simplicity fosters a sense of groundedness.
• Non-Separateness: Things do not exist in isolation, but rather connect to and improve things nearby.

Greater than the Sum of Parts

All of these elements add up to something profound.

Alexander talks about “The I,” a mystic chord that connects people to great structures. And he says the “face of God” is made manifest in great structures. The more a structure reflects man and nature, “we come closer to reality, closer to the stuff, to the void, to the underlying ground of which the universe is made.”

Alexander  is not just being poetic here. He means this literally. How can this  be so?

The answer is that good structures of all kinds look a lot like natural things—the structure of a leaf or a dewdrop, a meandering river, a hill or a hollow, a cove or a meadow—even the movement or repose of animals. All these things grow organically. They relate to each other, sometimes snugly and sometimes with tension, but always with energy.

Life fosters  life. Architecture should be part of that process.

Reviving Cities, One Building at a Time

Across the United States, building codes apply the latest standards and technologies to requirements for the construction of homes, office buildings, factories and warehouses, and retail and commercial structures. Building codes have evolved over the years as new issues have arisen (e.g., the need to provide greater access to handicapped people).

Historically, requirements covering rehabilitation of existing structures have been tied to the standards for new buildings. The larger the cost of a project, the greater the burden on the developer to meet the requirements of modern codes. Meeting modern standards in old buildings is difficult and expensive, and often impossible. Meeting those standards often produces little or no benefit from the standpoint of safety, access, and utility. When code requirements impose excessive costs and other burdens, developers often walk away from projects. The impact can be devastating for cities with old building stocks that are trying to compete with suburban areas for development.

For new and old buildings, code standards cover a myriad of issues: main entrances, emergency exits, width of doors and stairways, placement of stairwells and elevators, treads and risers of stairs, building materials, plumbing and electrical systems, window size and placement, building setbacks, building materials, floor “sag,” ceiling heights, toilet and kitchen facilities, roofing, and siding. Regulations establish “ideal” design for these components of buildings. Realizing these standards might indeed be beneficial, all things being equal; but realizing these standards might not be reasonable when they add great costs to rehabilitation and add few benefits in terms of the safety or usefulness of the structure.

After years of frustration with the rehabilitation standards, the state legislature in 1995 passed a bill instructing the Department of Community Affairs to revise the subcode. A state senator from Trenton, where relief from the regulations was rarely granted and where old buildings were falling into disuse and disrepair at an alarming rate, introduced the legislation. The Department instructed the Division of Codes and Standards (C&S) to develop a new rehabilitation subcode. The C&S team commissioned a survey of New Jersey properties by the Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research. That survey documented numerous instances in which stringent and arbitrate rehabilitation standards frustrated efforts to save and improve old buildings.

Under the direction of its director, William M. Connolly, C&S created an in-house team of eight professionals with a wide range of expertise, as well as a 30-member advisory committee that included representation from construction, labor, environment, housing, local government, historic preservation, and other groups. The C&S team examined the building code section by section and created a whole new code. The new code incorporates all of the definitions and language used for years in New Jersey and across the nation, but uses them in a unique way.

The code establishes six categories of rehabilitation – (1) repair, (2) renovation, (3) alternation, (4) reconstruction, (5) change of use, and (6) additions. Each type of work entails specific requirements concerning materials, structural strength, new building elements, the extent of the renovation, and other aspects of construction. The major principle underlying the Rehabilitation Subcode is that code requirements should be based on the work needed to produce a safe building, not those required for a new building. Unlike 25/50, which based code requirements on the dollar value of the structure and rehabilitation costs, the Rehabilitation Subcode sets code requirements that are designed to address specific issues such as fire safety and accessibility. In its focus on specific issues, the Rehabilitation Subcode delineates specific alternatives to meet the requirements and specific conditions under which requirements can be waived. The underlying rule of thumb is Hippocratic: all buildings should be as safe after the project is undertaken as before the project is undertaken. In other words, do no harm. By saving and rehabilitating buildings that have stood the test of time, the state will do more to protect its people that reams of regulations that attempt to force round pegs into square holes.

It is often said that the new subcode allows for “greater flexibility.” That is a fair statement in some cases, but not true in other cases. The rehab subcode is more flexible in allowing developers to choose from several options in meeting basic standards for safety and structural integrity. The ability to install a sprinkler system to avoid building a new exit is the most frequently cited example. But the rehab subcode also allows less flexibility. Because standards for rehabilitation are less arbitrary, there are fewer opportunities for developers to negotiate variances with local officials. This reduced flexibility saves time and money for all concerned, improves fairness across the state, nearly eliminates arbitrary enforcement of rules, and reduces the possibility of corrupt application of the code.

The new rehab code makes it easier for construction firms to initiate municipal review. Because project review entails less negotiation over small details, firms and agencies are confident that they can determine the feasibility of a project long before it reaches a full process of design. Developers can spend less money on uncertain projects, which leaves more money for actual projects.

The new subcode also avoids narrow interpretations of the characteristics of buildings that are irrelevant to the structure’s safety and structural soundness. Determining whether an old structure with an attic has two and one half stories or three stories could cause extended negotiations under the old code. Under the new code, the question is irrelevant. If the building meets or exceeds its previous record of safety, it does not matter how public officials count the floors.

Another innovation is the presentation of the rehab subcode. State officials liken the subcode to a cookbook. Users are given complete “recipes” for whatever they want to “cook.” Someone seeking to renovate an industrial building gets one recipe; someone seeking to redevelop residential structures gets another recipe. All of the ingredients are spelled out. This contrasts with the typical mode of delineating code requirements, which organize those requirements according to the element being addressed (e.g., windows, stairs, ceilings, plumbing, electrical systems). The cookbook format produces some redundancies – requirements are restated fully for each kind of structure – but that also makes the code easier to use. Users do not need to jump around several documents to determine the standards for their project. All the requirements are in one place.

The rehab subcode recognizes that simple statements of requirements are not always better. The rehabilitation subcode recognizes that explicit documentation of regulations is usually preferable to general standards. One state official commented that the old 25/50 rule is just one paragraph long, “but it leaves you nowhere. It looks simple, but it triggers 1,300 pages of regulations that are hard to find.”

In one year, the code has contributed to a dramatic increase in rehabilitation work in cities and towns across the state. It is difficult if not impossible to determine the rehabilitation code’s impact statistically, but the scant statistics we have are revealing. In Newark, total rehabilitation spending rose from $68.1 million in 1997 to $108.5 million in 1998, the first year of the code’s implementation, an increase of 59.2 percent. In Jersey City, rehabilitation spending rose from $48.5 million to $89 million, an increase of 83.5 percent. In Trenton, rehabilitation spending rose from $21 million to $29.4 million, an increase of 40.1 percent. As a point of comparison, statewide spending on rehabilitation rose from $3.79 billion to $4.08 billion, an increase of 7.7 percent. In the previous year, before the code’s implementation, spending on rehabilitation had actually declined in Jersey City (by 5.7 percent) and Trenton (35.6 percent), while increasing more modestly in Newark (16.4 percent).

Developers and state and municipal officials also state that the rehab subcode shaves at least 10 percent off the cost of redeveloping old buildings – and in some cases as much as 40 percent. One developer said that his project saved $500,000 alone by allowing floors in his structure to have twice the “sag” allowed new buildings; the building’s long history and impressive structural integrity obviated the need to reinforce the floors. Avoiding a requirement to replace stairs saved at least another $75,000, and the ability to use an old door saved $15,000. Many projects that would require replacement or redesign of windows also saved thousands of dollars.

What the statistics do not reveal, the experiences of members of the construction industry do. A well-known developer of artist lofts, Carmie Bee, said he would never undertake to rehabilitate a Jersey City warehouse into almost 100 units of live/work space under the old code. James Landon, the developer of a Jersey City day care/elderly housing complex, said the same. In a separate interview, the executive director of Isles, a nonprofit housing development organization in Trenton, said the rehab subcode could dramatically increase the production of affordable housing in the inner city.
The experiences of municipal officials are also revealing. Len Pucciatti, a construction official with the City of Trenton, indicated that the program had dramatically streamlined the review process for rehabilitation projects. Because the subcode does not require complex wrangling over the extent of renovation and the type of changes needed to bring a building up to code, developers can present local officials with less detailed preliminary plans – making their planning process simpler and less expensive. Ray Meyer, a construction official in Jersey City, argued that the rehab subcode encouraged dozens of projects that might not have been possible under the old system.

Another benefit of the subcode is the aesthetic enhancement of buildings and city spaces. Previous code standards on door widths would have disallowed the use of a beautiful copper door at the front entrance of a structure for day care and elderly housing in Jersey City. One of the most striking projects made possible by the rehab subcode is the conversion of an old auto garage into housing in Trenton. Under the old code, the windows facing an alley would have been filled in because of requirements that windows not be located directly at the property line. Losing the windows would have destroyed the livability of the building and cut off a beautiful structure from its historic community. Even if it had been rehabbed under the old system – a doubtful proposition – it would not have fit into its context as well.

Urban design improvements and protections are also possible under the subcode. The so-called “New Urbanism” movement has underscored the desirability of locating buildings right up to the property line; a lack of setbacks helps to create an attractive and functional “street wall.” But new buildings require a setback that would damage the continuity of the street. Old buildings, which have grown into the “fabric” of the community, also enhance the historic character of neighborhoods.

The Secrets of Great Streets

Walking to an appointment at Yale’s School of Management, I was overtaken by the beauty of the street. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain both called Hillhouse Avenue the most beautiful street in America. Why?

The stone buildings lining the street lend grander. Wide sidewalks and a lush tree canopy create a strong and agreeable walkway, whatever the weather. Wherever you walk, you feel safe, connected, and oriented.

What makes a street work?

Allen Jacobs, the former planning director for San Francisco, traveled around the world for answers. He visited the great cities of civilization—Paris, Copenhagen, Aix-en-Provence, Bologna, Rome, and Beijing. In the U.S. he explored San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Oakland.

In his master work Great Streets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), Jacobs explores streets in these great cities and finds what’s common to them all.

Here’s what he found:

Absolute requirements

1. Places for people to walk with some leisure. See other people’s eyes. Sociability. Safety important. “When people are forced off of walkways into streets because of too little space, then certainly safety is an issue” (273). Sidewalks, curbs, on-street parking, and trees all help.

2. Physical comfort. Warmth when it’s cold, cool and shade when it’s hot. Shelter from wind.

3. Definition. Boundaries and walls that orient people. Definition is both horizontal and vertical. Endings are somehow marked, too. Harmonious proportion with street widths and building heights (1:1.1 to 1:2.25 is good ratio range for vertical to horizontal distances). Trees and spacing of buildings help define space, too.

4. Qualities that engage the eyes. Texture, color, shape, movement, complexity. “In the activities of everyday life the center of clear vision will shift as often as 100 times a minute” (282).

5. Transparency. Need to be able to see inside, to an extent. Windows and doors act as transition zone.

6. Complementarity. “[T]he buildings on the best streets get along with each other” (287). Some variation, but basically “similar heights. Materials, color, cornice lines, building sizes, window openings and details, entrances, bay windows, porches, overhangs and shadow lines and details like down spouts” (289).

7. Maintenance. Keep it up, pay attention, look after each other, help fill in the empty spots during transitional periods.

8. Quality of construction and design. “There is no such thing as poor-quality or low-quality materials, only problems with how materials are used” (291).

Qualities that contribute

1. Trees. “[T]rees can transform a street more easily than any other physical improvement. … Trees can do many things for a street and city, not the least of which is the provision of oxygen, and of shade for comfort. Green is a psychologically restful, agreeable color. Trees move and modulate the light. In terms of helping streets to work functionally, when planted in lines along the curb or even in the cartway they can effectively separate pedestrians from machines, machines from machines, and people from people. The trunks and branches create a screen, sometimes a row of columns that gives a transparent but distinct edge.” (293).

2. Beginnings and endings. Make sure people know when they are starting and ending their journey down he street. It makes for a sense of comprehensibility and order. “There is every reason why the beginnings and endings of streets should be well marked, as part of the street, to introduce us to them and to take us elsewhere” (297).

3. Many buildings rather than few—in other words, diversity. Like lines on a ruler, different structures help us mark our place in streets. They give us something interesting to see.

4. Special design features and details. Heaven is in the details. Lamps, benches, plants, emblems, fountains, signs, canopies.

5. Places. We need sites for a break, to sit and eat and talk. We need to get to interesting places easily, and feel part of those places.

6. Density. “[I]t has been observed that a minimum net residential density of 15 dwelling units per acre can achieve active urban communities, and that 50 dwellings per acre are possible without going above four stories or requiring overly wide streets” (304).

7. Diversity. The spice of life, but you knew that already.

8. Length. Short blocks help orient us. Long blocks can work, too, if there are ways to orient the walker and driver.

9. Slope. Noticeable changes in elevation create a sense of movement and excitement.

10. Parking. Not too much, but enough, and in the right places.

11. Contrast. “[S]hape or size or regularity within an urban context may set the street apart from others, may make it more noticeable, may give it a head start toward being special, but that is not likely to be enough” (307).

12. Time. Can the neighborhood stand the test of time, and accommodate new structures and activities harmoniously over time?

Manic Nation

America in the twenty-first century has become Manic Nation.

Manic Nation is a place of hyped-up lives, in which people move at an inhuman pace to keep up with unnatural demands. It is a place that literally denatures people, removes them from the natural rhythms and activities that evolved over millennia.

Manic Nation is a place where people are removed from nature, eat unnatural foods, don’t sleep well or exercise. It’s a place where the natural bonds of family are damaged or severed altogether. It’s a place where larger communities are torn apart by constant migration, economic insecurity, and alienated relationships.

In Manic Nation, people have less and less chance to be themselves—to be accepted for who they are—and feel compelled to submit themselves to the fragmented and disorienting demands of others.

Evidence of Manic Nation can be found in the alarming statistics of mental illness not only in the U.S. but also around the world. Mental illness has become the greatest cause of human problems—broken families, truncated work experience, inhuman behavior.

The Journal of the American Medical Association has found that 9 to 17 percent of respondents in an international survey—face-to-face interviews of 60,643 people in fourteen countries—experienced at least one episode of clinical mental illness in the previous year. Mental illness was experienced by more people in the U.S. (26 percent) than traditional cultures like Shanghai (4 percent) and Nigeria (5 percent).

The effects are devastating—on schooling and work, on family relations and friendships, on saving and building a good home life.

What’s the cause of mania in America? Many factors contribute — like imbalances in brain chemistry, bad responses to those imbalances, rushed lives, economic insecurity.

But it seems that there’s one underlying aspect of our society that contributes the most. We have become denatured — cut off from nature, cut off from our own traditional ways, detached from what it means to be a human.

Intriguing and tragic evidence comes from herds of elephants in Africa.

Elephants—profoundly social animals, with extensive systems of caregiving in their herds—have become begun to attack humans without provocation. Humans have invaded the complex worlds of the elephants, undermining ancient connections between elders and the rest of their tribes. Gay Bradshaw, who wrote a seminal article on the topic for Nature magazine, is quoted in a compelling article in The New York Times Magazine: “The loss of the elephant elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of the family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.” Cut off from each other and from their habitat, the elephants of Africa and Asia suffer damage to their brains’ development. They become both manic and depressed.

What can be done?

As Andrew Solomon writes in The New York Times, depression is the leading cause of disability across the world. And very few people who need professional help — counseling, pharmaceuticals, diet help — ever get it. Even though the effect of mental illness is widespread and devastating, we do not know how to talk about it. It’s still a stigmatized disease. We treat mentally ill people as if they are morally inferior, pathetic, worthy of scorn. A generation ago, people with cancer were treated the same way.

Solomon proposes the creation of a national network of mental health centers. The centers would conduct research and educate the public and decisionmakers about policy options about mental illness. The centers would help translate what we already know — what what we know about what we don;t know — to practitioners. They would foster a new way of talking about mental illness.

When figures like Tipper Gore started talking about mental illness — making counseling and other services available as part of a national health care package — I shuddered in fear. How can a system that is already so big and bloated and inefficient — not to mention unequal — handle a whole new set of mandates and programs? How could we ever make sure that the money gets spent well? Would we be paying $100 an hour for people to whine about their parents?

I still have concerns about how adding a vast new wing to the vast health care establishment could address the very real need for mental health care. What are the standards? What’s the accountability? But we need to do soemthing. It’s every bit as urgent a problem as Sputnik.

A mental health policy ideally would have two broad components:

(1) Fostering more healthful environments and lifestyles. You can’t legislate against TV, computers, videos, iPods, cellphones. You can’t pass a bill and solve the congestion problem. You can’t adopt a three-point program to slow down the pace of work or improve the ways of family life. A federal agency cannot mandate that people eat real food. You can’t wave a wand and replace all the alienating structures of modern life with human-scale communities reminiscent of Mayberry, N.C.

But you can build these considerations into debates about minimum wages and urban design. Enlightened businesses can grow not by exploiting workers but by creating longterm business plans based on the idea that healthy workers are more productive. Schools can counter the mad scramble for grades and test scores and instead concentrate on teaching kids, one at a time. Public buildings can make sure than only good food gets served in cafeterias. Congress (ha ha) can cut off subsidies for destructive products like tobacco.

(2) Treating people who suffer from mental illness, whatever environment they find themselves. We need to find ways to track people’s health more reliably, from infancy to old age. We need to notice when kids are acting out or withdrawn. We need to make early interventions with girls starve themselves to death. We need to protect people who suffer the trauma of violence and abuse.

Sometimes, that takes incredible effort and expense. It;s never easy, especially in a culture that stigmatizes people who are suffering.

But the sooner we can find out who needs help, the better off we’ll be.

Here’s where the difficulty lies: There’s a difference between someone who’s tormented by traumatic incidents, or just unloved, and someone who suffers because of chemical imbalances in the brain.

As Albert Ellis and others have argued, dealing with the former requires fostering habits that enable to move beyond their problems rather than dwell in them. Ellis pioneered effective strategies for “rational-emotive therapy” to get people to follow the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

But sometimes, no matter how effectieve this approach is, the patient needs chemical intervention — if only to stabilize his being so that the wisdom of Nieubuhr has a chance.

Somehow, we have to acknowledge thatour culture has become so alienated from nature and ourselves that we risk ruining it.

The Roman Empire supposedly expired, in part, when lead pipes dumbed diminished the mental capacity of the empire’s people.

In 21st century America, the danger is much more pervasive. Time to have a debate — and act.

Overcoming the Curse of Multitasking

If you dare, keep a diary of a day’s activities.

Write down everything you do, in 15-minute increments. Track how often you answer the phone or check email. How often a colleague pops into your office for a chat. How often you surf the web. How often you dart from file to file. How often you burrow under a pile for a note or printout. How often you get up for a cup of coffee.

And then, stand back and consider how many projects you’re working on at the same time. You have three reports, five meetings, lots of people above and below you to check with, forms to fill out, budgets to review.

This is, after all, the Age of Multitasking.

At first, it seems right. We have gotten accustomed to doing many things at once. And when we’re in the flow, we feel like we’re masters of many things. Who cares if we spend only 11 minutes on a task before getting interrupted, as a study by Cal-Irvine’s Gloria Mark found. Who cares if even those 11-minute periods of action are really much smaller periods of three-minute activities, as Mark also found.

And, in fact, our brains evolved to process ungodly amounts of information at the same time. The brain is comprised of a hundred billion nerve cells, called neurons, which hold electrical charges. These neurons use chemicals called neurotransmitters to communicate with each other. The brain’s neurons communicate with each other, simultaneously, in just fractions of a second.

The brain is divided into several distinct regions. The somatic brain manages the body’s digestion, hormone production and output. The reptilian brain coordinates breathing, heartbeat, swallowing, visual tracking, and the startle response (which connects to the emotional processes). The mammalian or limbic brain coordinates emotions—instantly sounding an alarm when the person (thinks) he faces some kind of threat. The neocortex oversees the whole system with its ability to reason, abstract ideas, communicate, set goals and strategies.

Think of these regions of the brain as members of an office. The somatic and reptilian brains — call them Sammy and Renee — manage the building. They open the doors every morning, keep the place heated or cooled, coordinate comings and goings, and so on. The limbic brain — call it Larry — stands on lookout for dangers. The neocortex — call her Nellie — provides the executive functions like strategic planning, research, and project management.

The problems occur when Sammy and Renee are overactive, or when Larry is so scared of outside threats (real and imagined), that Nellie cannot work with her people to keep the place operating efficiently. The whole gang works well when each does his or her job, processing information and fulfilling basic functions on schedule. But when one becomes too agitated — or blase and passive — the whole operation overloads.

That can happen with multitasking. Every time you ake on more than one task, the whole operation slows down. How much? Researchers at Vanderbilt University found that actions can slow down by a second when you’re working on two things at once. Which is fine — unless you;re driving, operating dangerous tools, or looking after a toddler who might be heading for the stairs or reaching for a hairdryer in the tub. A second can pose a real danger when you need to react quickly.

At the office, we consider it normal to react instantly to interruptions. The phone rings, and we answer. An email pops on a screen, and we reach for the mouse. A colleague pops her head in the door, and we swivel around to answer.

Which is fine,. Except that it can take a lot of time to regain our train of thought. If we’re sorting files — a simple task, usually — it’s not hard to find our place again. But if we’re working through a tough problem, it can take up to 15 minutes to get back into the groove of working through the problem.

HOW TO AVOID DESTRUCTIVE MULTITASKING

Here are 10 ways to overcome the worst kinds of distractions in our Manic Age:

(1) Check email once an hour — at the most. Email is like a nickel-bag. It’s a cheap thrill, which gets you in the habit of coming back for more and more — even when you know it’s bad for you. Only look at email a few times a day, if possible, and sort your email so you can deal with it efficiently. If you're overwhelmed with email — some executives get hundreds of emails a day — get someone to help sort it. Or get family and friends to send notes only to a private email address.

(2) Sort email and other correspondence. Decide what notes need what kind of attention, and when. Delete spam without opening. Send notes from family and friends, as well as Google alerts, to a separate folder. Answer the easy notes right away, all at once, at a time when you can afford to take a break from serious work. And deal with the toughies — the serious correspondence that requires thought, research, and coordination — when you can shut out the rest of the world and do some hard thinking and critical writing.

(3) Adopt the OHIO Rule. OHIO stands for “Only Handle It Once.” The worst distractions are the ones that you have over and over. You get a bill, open it, and out it on a pile of letters, bills, solicitations, magazines, and coupon books. Later, you see the pile and look through it again. “Hmmm,” you say to yourself, “I better pay that bill. Later.” Later comes, and you see the pile, and go through everything again. Every time to work through the pile, anxiety builds. Unpaid bills, unanswered invitations, silently corrode your being. Stop! When you get a bill, pay it. When you get an invitation, answer. When you get a magazine, set it aside for reading time. Throw away whatever you can, right away. File what you need to file, right away. And don’t ever process the same piece of mail more than once.

(4) Take a break every 50 minutes, and know what to do when you return. Your brain and body start to slow down when they don’t get periodic breaks. So stand up every hour, look out the window, walk around, find a moment to close your eyes, use the restroom. Do whatever you need to freshen up, mentally and physically. Before you leave, though, make sure you know what you;re going to do when you return. Don't put yourself in a position of uncertainty and anxiety by not knowing what to do.

(5) Avoid all multitasking during high-speed tasks like driving. If you lose a second of reaction time when multitasking, that’s OK when you’re cooking burgers or sorting files. But it’s not OK if you’re driving 60 m.p.h. on the Interstate. Don’t multitask on the road. Don’t reach for the radio buttons or dial the cell. Keep your hands on the wheels and your eyes on the road.

(6) Take on only four to six major tasks at a time. If you can count the number of major projects you’re doing on one hand, you can keep the details straight. Of course, lots of people are responsible for hundreds of activities. If so, try to sort them into four to six categories.

(7) Put stuff away, right away, every time. The dumbest loss of time happens when you’re looking for something. Not only do you waste time looking under piles, behind desks, between seat cushions, and so on. But you also feel awful. You feel dumb and anxious. You wonder why you can’t keep things straight. You fret about what you’re going to tell someone: “That’s funny, I thought I had it on my desk, but…” The simple answer is to put stuff away right away. When you’re finished with a file, put it back in the cabinet. When you’re finished with a book or report, put it back on the shelf.

(8) Turn off the phone and close the door. The best way to avoid needless interruptions is to create a zone where you can concentrate, fully, on your work. Just as college professors set office hours for times when students may barge in with questions, you need to set office hours when colleagues and family may not barge in.

(9) Set aside prime productivity time every day. When do you wor most productively. For most people, it’s in the morning, after the first cup of Starbucks, when we’re rested and unburdened by a day of wins and losses. It’s usually before others start their projects and want to check in. Morning’s not the best time for everyone to do creative work, of course. But pay attention to when you work best — and block off that time for your most challenging projects. Don’t waste your prime productivity time on simple tasks that you can do without much thought. Save the best time for the best work. And make sure to tell everyone to stay away when you have to do that hard work. Or, if you need to collaborate, make sure your colleagues are around when you need them.

(10) Organize yourself as simply as possible. Some people love Palm Pilots. I have one and used to use it religiously. But my work now — writing, teaching, chauffering kids thither and yon — requires a different kind of organization than my old job running a university think tank. I still use the Palm for contact information, but rely on simple one page memos, with big block lettering done with Sharpies, of upcoming deadlines. A recent survey of high-achievers found that most use the simplest tool imaginable — a Word file, where they type all the important stuff going on, which they can search for specifics when need be. I often email myself with reminders and to-do notes.

Do you have any ideas on how to avoid the evils of too much multitasking? Comment on this post.

Containerize This

The world is being remade to fit into containers. So what are the implications for the look and feel of cities?

A provocative article in the Telegraph of London by Paul Fisher traces the transformation of the shipping industry by “containerization.” The idea is simple: It is much more efficient to ship goods that fit into a standardized package, because it is easier to manage the movement of those parcels on and off of trucks, train cars, cargo jets, and ships. Since 1966, when a North Carolina trader sent the first container ship across the Atlantic Ocean for Rotterdam, containerized shipping has grown to 60 percent of the total value of world trade.

Fisher also notes that containers are the critical element in the explosive growth of computer technologies. Information packets of 1,500 characters are easy to send through global networks. The information explosion depends on using standardized containers, just like cargo shipping.

Because of standardized parcels and new systems of information technology – tracking systems that improve the speed and efficiency of moving cargo – shipping costs now account for just about 1 percent of the overall retail price of a consumer good.

Ports that can keep up with the container system have a better chance of thriving in the world market than their competitors. Just a few years ago, Massport adopted a master plan for its ports that consolidated container shipping at Conley Terminal in South Boston. Fundamentally, the success of the port depends more on getting the products off the boat and into other vessels for movement inland.

But containerization goes farther than shipping. It extends to retail, where “big box” outlets like The Home Depot and Wal-Mart offer large quantities of a broad selection of goods at lower costs. As a friend noted, consumers these days demand being able to buy just about everything in doghouse-sized shrink-wrapped parcels. Such parcels are best stacked up in those cinder-block monstrosities you see on the side of the highway.

Home-builders increasingly use modular construction techniques, which put together pre-built segments like Legos. More than a generation after the construction of Levittown – where William Levitt created a kind of movable assembly line, where workers moved from station to station rather than having the product brought to them on a conveyer belt – housing manufacturers are able to bring ready-made pieces of a house or office building to the work site.

The container principle has been applied to city and town planning as well. Since the practice of zoning was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1926, towns and cities across the U.S. have compartmentalized their different activities into different spaces – downtown here, residences there, cultural activities over there, historic buildings here. In many cases, municipalities have created such extreme separation that it’s hard to see how the pieces relate to each other.

Backlash against containerization

In recent years, there has been a backlash against this territorial containerization. The New Urbanism movement has emphasized the importance of mingling activities rather than containing them. These planners have emphasized how important it is for synergies to develop between people and activities. It’s important for different activities to take place near each other not just for convenience and costs, but also for the tension and creativity that come from proximity.

The seminal statement of this principle is an early essay by the architect Christopher Alexander called “The City Is Not a Tree.” The tree that Alexander refers to is not the natural variety but the organizational variety – the tree that lays out places in a city as if they were part of an organizational hierararchy. Instead of thinking of cities as discrete containers, Alexander argues that we should consider another image – the lattice.

The lattice image suggests overlap, sharing, a lack of centralized order. It suggests a physical form that connects rather than separates. Streets are the great common spaces of Alexander’s city. Streets contain numerous modes of traffic – cars, bikes, feet – as well as a variety of businesses, public buildings, parks, gardens, historic spots. One leads into another and supports the other. Alexander’s vision is decidedly anti-container.

Alexander argues that people follow the “tree” approach to planning and design because it is difficult to hold a mental picture of something with more than a handful of elements. We like the simplicity, the order, of the organizational chart. But just because something looks orderly does not mean that it yields the best place for people to live their lives.

The brilliance of Alexander’s lattice image is that is embraces all that is great about cities – diversity, experimentation, accident, old and new, the natural and the manmade. It all comes together because we allow it to.

The merits of regularity

But that doesn’t mean there is no place for a regular form in the city. One of the most creative and dynamic urban forms is the grid – the ultimate regularized structure. Grids are important because they create a common ground. They make it easier to make connections. A community of grids is easier to traverse than a community of cul de sacs. You always have a number of choices of how to get from A to B. In the cul-de-sac community, you often have only one way to get around, which means that traffic gets congested at the entry ramps for the main roads and the feeder roads.

Consider a Boston example. It’s easier to get Marlborough and Hereford to Newbury and Exeter in Back Bay than from Oakview Terrace to St. Peter Street in Jamaica Plain – even though the distance is much longer. The reason is that you can put together literally dozens of route combinations to get around the gridded Back Bay. Traffic can spread pretty much evenly across the grid. But J.P.’s Oakview Terrace is locked in a cul de sac and you have to get all the way out – with no choices of how to do it – before proceeding to your destination. Without the grid, you can be just feet away from a location but have to travel a roundabout journey to get there.

Containers also have their place in building design. Lots of isolated boxes are depressing and hard to move around. But to create structures that can adapt over time – accommodating a wide range of activities, larger and small, over the years – a certain kind of modularity is desirable. In How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand calls for architects to build structures with many small pieces that can be combined and recombined in different ways. You might call this flexible modularity. Old warehouses, manufacturing buildings, and schools not only look elegant compared with their modern counterparts, but they have a form that is easier to reconfigure as the years pass.

The key to containerization is whether the modules can be combined, recombined, and filled in different ways. A good building can break a large space into smaller spaces – or combine smaller spaces into something big. Boxes that fit the way people move about can be filled with a variety of different things, making those spaces as eclectic as a Frank Gehry’s Bilbao. On a larger scale, Manhattan’s street grid might look boring and regimented from a distance; but its simplicity accommodates a greater variety of sub-forms than are possible with more stylized street networks.

What planners and architects need to develop are containers that can adapt to changing needs and connect with nearby people and activities. It’s OK to have a world of boxes, but they need to be organic.

If we build them right in the first place – with good building materials, good street grids, and decent common spaces nearby – then someday we might even retrofit old Wal-Mart warehouses for housing or community centers.

This article originally appeared on the web site of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

How to Teach Your Kid to Pitch

A couple summers ao, I went to a vintage base ball game in Westfield, Connecticut. The Westfield Wheelmen played the Hartford Senators on Adonis Terry Day.

As many as 200 vintage teams have arisen in the last quarter century. Usually playing according to the rules of the 1860s and 1880s, the teams take you back to baseball’s formative years. In the game I saw, players used leather the size of gardeners gloves. They swung big bats — usually around 40 ounces — and hit balls that didn’t have the hard rubber core that makes today’s hits go so far.

It was a refreshing game. Even though most players don’t have extraordinary physical abilities, they have more physical toughness. When you catch a sizzling liner down the third base line, your hand stings for days. That’s a lot harder to do than extending a basket-sized glove to swallow the ball.

The day’s highlight was meeting Jim Bouton, the rebel who had as much effect on the culture of baseball than anyone else in our lifetime. Bouton’s Ball Four was a seminal book that ripped the mask of heroism off the face of baseball.

Before the game, I took a couple of Little Leaguers up to Bouton and asked how young kids should approach pitching.

“What you have to do is find out your own style,” he said. “Everyone has their own pitching style. You have do some things a certain way, but mostly you have to find your own motion. Coaches don’t let pitchers do that any more. They think you have to [conform] to some mechanical way of doing things. But people are different, and kids are still growing. They can’t be forced into doing something that doesn’t feel right.”

How do you figure out the right pitching motion, Jim?

“Easy! Long tossing. You stand as far as you can from a friend and throw the ball to hm. Play catch, that’s all. You throw so it’s nice and easy, so you can reach him and hit him in the belly-button. And then once you’ve done long tossing for a while, you start to come closer and closer. When you get 50 feet away, that’s your pitching motion.”

Jim Bouton, once baseball’s great rebel, is now a traditionalist. Don’t tell me about biomechanics, he says. Just learn how to throw in as natural a way as possible.

“Throw as much as you can,” he says. What about throwing too much? What about arm injuries. “Look, you’re going to have a sore arm 500 times, if you’re lucky. You’re going to hurt your arm. But that’s how you learn how to deal with it. That’s how you get stronger.”

The Bouton way, in effect, is to learn how to throw rather than learn how to pitch. A lot of baseball gurus say it should be the other way around — that instead of “just” throwing, a kid has to learn how to pitch. That means using a proper motion, painting the corners, developing a repertoire of pitches, and so on.

The scientists of the game are taking pitching in a different direction. Led by the American Sports Medicine Institute, coaches and doctors are learning about the intricate “kinetic chain” of a pitcher’s motion. They want the pitcher to go through a specific sequence of movements — lifting the front leg (to create energy), maintaining balance (to prevent the dissipation of energy and bad mechanics), raring back (to start to use the energy), rotating the hips and torso forward (to power the bodyt forward), whipping the ball forward (using the energy thrust the ball forward with as much force and as little damage to the joints as possible), landing on the front foot the right way (to absorb the shock of the motion).

(I discuss this kinetic chain in my book The Last Nine Innings. Order the book today!)

The ASMI has been working with Little League to study the impact of throwing on the young pitcher’s arm — most particularly, the shoulder and elbow. ASMI has found that the cumulative stress of throwing can cause serious injuries. ASMI does not make hard and fast claims about the effects of throwing curveballs, but its research tsar, Glenn Fleisig, says there’s reason to suspect that curveballs can damage young arms.

That is the crux of today’s debate about youth pitching. Traditionalists like Jim Bouton say kids should just throw, throw, throw. Play all day till you’re tired, then stop. You might call that the Sandlot School of Pitching. Scientists like Glenn Fleisig say, wait a minute, kids play organized ball these days. And in leagues and tournaments, the strain of pitching — not just throwing, but pitching — can cause serious injuries with overuse and bad mechanics. So you need some rules and regulations to protect the kids. Call that the Scientific School of Pitching.

The debate is critical to the future of youth baseball. As an excellent article in USA Today notes, Little League Baseball seems poised to adopt a pitch-count rule for the 2007 or 2008 season and Little League’s summer tournaments.

Secrets of the Clean Team

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

You know the Dr. Seuss story about the day the Cat in the Hat came by for a visit and wreaked havoc on the tight little household of Sally and Dick. The kids mope around the house -- unattended, which would land their mom in Family Services court these days -- when this furry prankster comes along. In no time, the place is a mess. And then, just as quickly as he came, the nameless feline leaves the premises. The nervous goldfish, who should be happy to have survived an afternoon with a cat, frets.

And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
we can not pick it up.
There is no way at all!

Let's set aside, for now, the goldfish's needless negative predictions -- a pessimism that would ruin any constructive effort to make things right. As it turns out, the Cat in the Hat saves the day with a huge cleaning machine. "I always pick up all my playthings," the Cat in the Hat announces as he sets out to fix his mess.

But what if the Cat in the Hat had not come back? And what if he did not have that miraculous cleaning machine? Could the kids have saved the day themselves, cleaning the house before their mom returns from God-knows-where?

Yes. A review of the "literature" on cleaning reveals these Ten Commandments of getting an out-of-control house under control -- and keeping it that way.

(1) Put It All in a Heap. When your room is a mess, you don't know what you have anymore. Some Oscar Madisons claim they can find anything in a flash. Maybe there are some Rain Men out there who can spot a checkbook underneath a pile of clothes, bills, books, CD's, gloves, candy, and more. But most of are not slob savants, so we need to sort our junk, piece by piece. The only way to do that is to pull it out of all the usually cram spaces -- shelves, boxes, drawers, under the sofa -- for a wholesale sorting. Only when our storage spaces are completely clear can we decide what really goes where.

(2) Follow the One-Second Rule and the One-Year Corollary. Once the stuff is in a pile, we need to sort the stuff fast. The major problem slobs have is that they're easily distracted and sentimental. Sitting amidst a pile of treasures, they cannot resist taking the time to inspect each item: "Oh, look at this picture of Lindsay when she was a toddler! Isn't she cuuuuuute?" Or: "Oh. My. God. Here's that library book. What am I going to do. My God! The fines must be huge now. Should I call the library?" But you have to avoid lingering over objects. Save the trips down Memory Lane and Regrets Road for another time.

The One-Second Rule states, simply, that you should spend only a second on each item. Look at it, and put it in the appropriate pile. The great thing about having a neat room is that you have more time linger on things that matter because you're not going to waste all kinds of time frantically looking for keys, gloves, library books, and so on.

The One-Year Corollary states that you should get rid of anything that you have not used for at least a year. If you have a sweater that you have not worn in the last year, you're not going to wear it in the next year. So either put it into deep storage, give it to Goodwill or a friend, or throw it away. Exception: You can keep things that you would use -- no hesitation -- right now. But be honest. Don't clutter your active space with junk that is just going to get in the way of using really useful things.

(3) Get Containers for Everything. All messes consist of jumbles. You put mix your things together and so you cannot find what you're looking for. You have a miscellaneous drawer where you keep pens and pads and old letters and paper clips and credit cards and rubber bands and coupons and affadavits and notes and lists and tacks and screwdrivers and bracelets and batteries . . . and a hundred other things. And when you need a paper clip, you can't find it . . . so you go out and buy more paper clips, or steal a paper clip off another bundle of paper (creating a new chaos opportunity).

To avoid this chaos, you need a container for everything. Books need shelves. Shoes need a box or hanging shoe holder. Coats and scarves need hangers and hooks. Computer or camera equipment needs cubbyholes. Sports equipment needs bins. Dishes need shelves and Rubbermaid racks. CD's and DVD's need shelves or floppy books. Magazines and newspapers need racks. Photos need boxes or albums, which need shelves. School books and notebooks need cubbies. Bills and other mail need filing cabinets or nooks in a secretary. Toys need boxes that actually hold the pieces, and they need shelves. On and on.

Do not mix different things in containers. Every item should go in a container that holds only one kind of thing.

(4) Set Up a Front Stage and Back Stage. Businesses these days talk about back office space, the storage areas where "dead" records and other rarely used materials can be stowed. Libraries, museums, archives, government agencies, stores, law firms, sports complexes -- everyone, these days -- use "off-site" facilities to keep the stuff they don't need on an everyday basis.

You have to do the same thing with your home or office. Keep handy only the things you use on a regular basis. Put all the out-of-season clothes in a cedar chest in the attic. Put all the dead files -- old tax records, bills, calendars, etc. -- in well-marked boxes. Put the children's many school creations -- show-and-tell, stories, costumes, pictures -- in "memory boxes." (When your kid gets engaged, you can haul out the memory boxes to show off your child's artifacts to the new fiancee.) Most of all, when you have something you have no intention of ever using again, get rid of it. Obviously, that's hard for some people to do. Some people have a sentimental attachment even to trash.

Here's the best way to think about stuff of marginal value taht you have a hard time parting with: (1) Acknowledge, honestly, that you don't use it anymore. Maybe you used to use it all the time, but you don't anymore. (2) Think of getting rid of it as a way to help others. Books, CD's, videotapes, records, clothes -- when you give them away, you are blessing someone else with a chance to enjoy them.

Now that you have cleared out the extraneous junk, you can set up the stuff you actually use. have the books that you actually refer to once in a while, the CD's you listen to, the dessert dishes you like to use when company comes over. Everything that truly makes your life better will be right at hand.

Bottom line: If you have a small house or room, don't try to stuff too much stuff in it. You have what you have, and no more.

(5) Put Trash Bins Everywhere. Messes develop when people don't know what to do with things -- especially rubbish. When you come in with the mail, you drop the mail wherever you are if you don't have a better option. Go right to a trash can and drop the junk mail -- catalogues, fliers, campaign brochures, credit-card come-ons, pennysavers -- right into the trash. In fact, the best thing you can do is to put a nice-looking trash bin in every room. Pay attention to where people are when they;re unwrapping a candy bar, sorting mail, opening packages, etc., and put a trash can there.

(6) Follow the Daylight Savings Rules. You know the rule about smoke-alarm batteries -- every half year, on the day we move clocks backward or forward, change the batteries. That way, you know they'll work if there's a fire.

Adopt similar rules for updating and sorting things in the house. Set a date for putting seasonal clothes in storage . . . for putting away memory boxes . . . for sorting shoes (especially with growing kids in the household) . . . for putting away seasonal sporting equipment . . . for gathering books, kitchen equipment, toys, and other things for yard sales . . .

(7) Use "In" and "Out" Containers. A lot of a household or office's activities take place in cycles. You wear clothes, get 'em dirty, wash 'em, and then put them away for the next use. In the office, you pull a file, use it, add to it, and put it away for the next time. Paid bills get mixed with unpaid bills. The problem happens when the stuff coming and the stuff going gets mixed up. I know a family that regularly mixes dirty an clean clothes because no one's ever sure what's what.

You need an "in" and an "out" container for these things. You need one laundry bin for freshly washed clothes and a hamper for dirty clothes. You need one file for paid bills and another for pending bills.

(8) Carry As You Go. Over the course of the day, you go up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, dozens of times. But too often, you leave behind the things that belong in another room. Someone puts clothes and toys on the stairs, and then eveyone in the family walks past them when they go upstairs or downstairs.

Just take something every time you go from one room or floor to another. It takes no extra time whatsoever. And if you immediately put it where it belongs you have the pleasure of a clean-looking house, you avoid the danger of tripping over something on the stairs, and you can always find the things you're looking for.

(9) Design Space for Center, Circulation, Traffic, Outside. This is a topic for another post, but for now, remember this: Every room needs a strong center (a place that attracts people and gives definition to the whole areas), a good circulation system (paths that help people get from here to there, without bumping into each other or knocking stuff over), strong edges or peripheral spaces (walls, windows, entryways), and outside (a connection with nearby spaces).

(10) Set A Day for Every Room and Task. It's hard to give every room in a house or office a complete makeover. But every room demands regular sweeping, dusting, mopping, and clearing miscellaneous objects that fall between the cracks. Set aside one day a week for each room. Use the weekend for the house or office's "public" spaces (living room and dining room, foyer, reception area). Set aside another day for the kitchen. Another for the bathrooms.

A Silly Proposal to End Tobacco Use

Sometimes, a well-meaning policy wonk comes along with a clever approach to a social problem. Sometimes that approach is too clever by half. Even though you know the reformer’s heart is in the right place, you have to point out the flaws of the argument.

In other words, sometimes simple approaches are simplistic.

Such is the case with a recent New York Times op-ed article by David Adams. Noting recent research about tobacco’s addictiveness for young people, Adams proposes creating different standards for tobacco products for users of different ages. Let the young’uns smoke, Adams says, but make sure their weed is less addictive so they can pull themselves out of the habit when they decide it’s not so cool anymore. For the rest of the population, allow more addictive cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Adams suggests allowing the sale of less addictive cigarettes to buyers below the age of 21. After they reach 21, they can buy all the addictive cigarettes they want.

(Ah, the magical age of 21! You can drink at 21, and under the Adams plan you can get hooked on cigs at 21 too. We still let kids get blown up with roadside bombs when they’re just 18.)

The concept sounds good, for about a second. Most kids who start smoking do it because they face social pressures to look cool. James Dean’s rebel image, with cigs packed into the sleeve of a white tee-shirt, reinvents itself every generation. Most smokers realize after a year or so that smoking is an ugly, dirty, and expensive habit. But cigarettes are so addictive that smokers cannot muster the willpower to quit.

If young smokers sucked on a less-addictive butt, they would find it easier to quit.

Adams makes his simple strategy a little more complex with this amendment: “Better yet, sales of addictive cigarettes could be restricted to individuals born 19 or more years before the two-cigarette strategy was put into effect. Under this approach, 18-year-olds who start smoking non-addictive cigarettes would be prohibited from switching to addictive cigarettes even after they turned 21.”

Then he calls for higher federal excise tax on the more addictive cigs.

There are a few problems here:

Production: Who’s going to get the tobacco companies to go along with a major restructuring of their manufacturing processes? All tobacco companies, under the Adams plan, would produce twice as many brands of cigarettes or risk losing customers to some of their brands.

Enforcement: Who says 7-Eleven stores, gas stations, newsstands, and other retailers are going to follow this rule? Does Adams realize that minors often get their older friends to buy booze and cigarettes for them? And how do you policethe smokers who want to switch?

Culture: Everyone realizes that the cool factor — both the tough-guy or sophisticated-gal persona or the rebellion against adults — plays a big role in smoking. The more addictive cigarettes are going to be more cool, which is the main attraction for young smokers? What cool cat would want to be seen smoking kiddie cigs? Yeah, yeah, I know. You can make ‘em look the same, with indistinguishable gold or white filter tips. But the branding on the packages are what matters. And when kids are bumming cigs from each other, it would be way not-cool to be passing along a kiddie pack. Why not just tell kids they can buy the bubble-gum cigs?

Why have two levels of addictiveness? Why not phase down the addictiveness of all cigarettes? Or redirect subsidies to producers of the less-addictive or even non-addictiveness butts? Or toward tobacco products with lesser toxic content?

Another Strategy: Cut Subsidies

Another way to curtail tobacco addiction among young people is to attack the ways the government now encourages tobacco production — agriculture subsidies to tobacco producers.

Subsidies to U.S. tobacco growers totaled $530 million between 1995 and 2005. That might not seem like much, but marginal assistance can make the difference between an enterprise’s success or failure — and it can make the difference between growing tobacco and growing something else. This year, the subsidy amounts to $49 million.

The European Union has adopted a plan to phase down its annual subsidies of €1 billion for tobacco. Greece, Italy, and Spain grow most of the continent’s tobacco. Their tobacco subsidies will be shifted to provide assistance for growing other products. Of course, any kind of subsidy is problematic. But better to tilt toward healthful products than deadly ones.

The EU is also going beyond the bland warning labels we see on American tobacco products. Packaging will include graphic images of cancer and other diseases produced by tobacco.

Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas has proposed stripping tobacco subsidies from federal agriculture subsidies. Everyone knew the proposal was DOA, but it’s probably a good-faith effort to undermine the sellers of the stuff.

The Real Strategy: Keep ‘Em Busy

Let’s be honest: Cutting subsidies isn’t going to end tobacco use either. People are going to do destructive things, no matter what the laws or the incentive structures. The goal shouldn’t be to turn the whole culture into born-again tobacco virgins. (You know there’s a whole evangelist movement to create born-again virgins among kids who have already had sex. That’s what some people want for smoking too. Impossible either way.) It should be to minimize bad stuff, not to eliminate bad stuff. As Voltaire said, the best is the enemy of the good.

The ultimate answer — if there is an ultimate answer — is to keep kids active in healthy stuff through high school. Kepp ‘em playing soccer, baseball, hockey. Keep them playing musical instruments. Push them into theater. Get ‘em writing, programming computer games, or into camps and youth groups and other activities where they’re too busy to smoke.

Postscript

Dealing with tobacco ultimately requires facing the reality of foreign trade. In recent years, the tobacco industry has expanded its reach overseas, in cultures where smoking was traditionally nil. Now we are exporting death. This all started with the Reagan Administration negotiated lower tariffs among our biggest trade partners. More on that topic in a later post.

Let's Get Sticky

Remember the old Steve Martin routine about getting small? It’s a great bit spoofing the way druggies giggle and cackle about getting high.

“I like to get small. It’s very dangerous for kids, because they get realllly small. I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m driving, but I was drivin’ around the other day and a cop pulls me over … says, ‘Hey, are you small?’ I say, ‘No, I’m tall.’ He says, ‘I’m gonna have to measure you.’ They give you a little test with a balloon. If you can get inside it, they know you’re small … and they can’t put you in a regular cell either, because you walk right out."

In the media world these days — in advertising, the Internet, marketing, promotion, publishing, you name it — people are carrying on about getting “sticky.”

Stickiness is the quality that products have when readers or consumers feel the need to linger a while. Rather than surfing to a new site, readers “stick” to a site that offers something intriguing and engaging.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a brotherly duo of biz-school professor and entrepreneur, have written the ultimate manual for getting sticky. Made to Stick outlines six qualities needed to make anything — idea or image, web site or ad jingle, catch-phrase or product design — stick.

THE SIX REQUIREMENTS OF STICKINESS

1. Simplicity—If you argue ten points, nobody will remember even one. People easily remember two things (which set up a yin-and-yang kind of contrast) or three (which set up a triangle in which each corner affects the other two). And if you give them a mnemonic device, they can remember a string of ideas. But to get people to remember, you have to work hard at simplifying your message.

The Dale Carnegie Training offers a simple formula for giving memorable talks. It’s called the Action/Benefit speech. Talk about an incident, describing a specific action and the benefit it produced. Done well, these talks impart memorable wisdom. And advertisers love the format. Think of all the slogans that take this form: “Get Met. It Pays.”

2. Unexpectedness—As Aristotle noted 2,500 years ago, the reversal produces a powerful impact on the audience. When you’re expecting one thing, and something dramatic and different happens, you remember.Simplicity tells people what they need to remember. It’s like the proverbial string tied to a finger tip. It’s a way of saying, Pay no attention to the noise and confusion around you. Just focus on this point. Advertisers succeed when they leave a single simple message. Southwest Airlines, for exampe, sells itself as “THE low-cost airline.”

The key to simplicity is to find a single core idea and build everything else around that. Whatever else may be present, they need to be tied to the core idea. Southwest Airlines builds its low-cost identity into everything. The goofy behavior of the flight attendants, the no-frills seating and snack arrangements, the random boarding passes — all tie into the low-cost core idea.

In Story, his masterful guide for screenwriting, Robert McKee talks about opening and closing “gaps” throughout the picture. Give a character something he has to reach for–and then, just as he’s about to reach it, pull it away. And when you make the hero’s job harder, do it by surprising him with some demon or challenge that he had no idea was waiting for him.

3. Concreteness—Don’t use adjectives and adverbs. Ever have a friend who recommended a book or movie that was “interesting”? That word means nothing.

Think of some memorable meoments of popular culture. We remember the horse head in the film mogul’s bed in “The Godfather.” We remember Jake Gittes slapping Mrs. Mulwray in “Chinatown.” We remember Carlton Fisk waving his home run fair in the 1975 World Series and Bill Buckner coming up empty in 1986. We remember Kennedy and Reagan at the Berlin Wall, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team surrounded by American flags, the screaming girls at Beatles concerts. We know what a freshly mown lawn smells like. We know how good a beer tastes on a blazing summer day.

Political and business people often don’t even know what concreteness is. They use vague general slogans, thinking they’re speaking to the most immediate concerns of their constituents. I remember running planning meetings in Boston, thinking that terms like “transit-oriented development” and “Emerald Necklace” were specific and concrete to the ordinary folks. They’re great terms but, ultimately, plannerspeak.

Words go only so far. Our most successful discussions of planning used maps and images of the streets, houses, business districts, parks, etc. The more concrete, the more people responded to our planning efforts.To be concrete, think of the senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

4. Credibility—People want to believe, but you have to tell them why they should believe. Everyone has a different tool. Academics love footnotes and statistical analysis. Sports fans also love stats, the more exotic the better. Lawyers like expert witnesses. Marketers pull a reversal and put the expertise in the hands of the consumer with guarantees and trials: “We know you’ll like it, but YOU decide.” Politicians often try to do the same thing, as when Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago.”

Demonstrations can also increase credibility. Beyond War, a peace activist group, uses the image of a bucket of bee-bees to demonstrate just how we have overarmed ourselves with nukes. Each bee-bee represents a nuclear warhead ith the firepower of the bombs that demolished Hiroshima.Which raises another point about credibility. The more visual and specific you can be, the stickier your credibility claim.

Celebrities are often used to strengthen a campaign’s credibility. Now, celebs are often the least credible spokespeople for a complex issue. But celebrities who have established a strong emotional connection with audiences have also established trust, which is another word for credibility. And so we listen to Richard Gere on Tibet, Meryl Streep on environmental health, Sting on global warming, and Mia Farrow on Darfur.

Credibility can be manipulated as must as anything. Profesisonals use technical-sounding language to take the upper hand in debates. Lawyers, doctors, researchers, professors, even web-designers take refuge in gobbledygook language to bewilder their audience. When people cannot explain things in simple terms, you should be suspicious of their knowledge or motives.

5. Emotions—Make people feel something. People remember fear best of all. They also remember hope, when it’s connected to their fondest childhood hopes and dreams. Least of all, they remember the elements of a logical and systematic argument.

Think of how powerful emotions have been in American politics. Lyndon Johnson conjured the image of nuclear war in his mushroom cloud ads against Barry Goldwater. George Bush conjured a world of menacing rapists like Willie Horton carousing the streets if Michael Dukakis wree elected president. The Tip O’Neil/Claude Pepper raising the specter of pensionless oldsters starving to death if anyone dared to reform Social Security. When people fear losing something, and a demon is connected to that fear, that’s what they remember before all else.

6. Story—More than anything else besides physical needs, humans need to tell and listen to stories. Stories provide meaning to everything from the most mundane to the most unknowable aspects of life. Stories give order to things that would otherwise feel chaotic and meaningless. Stories create a sense of wholeness. Stories also stretch the imagination, spurring people to think of achieving something beyond themselves.

Stories have, essentially, three plots: Challenge (David and Goliath conflicts, underdogs rising up, rags-to-riches tales, and triumph of will dramas), Connection (Good Samaritan, relationship that bridges a gap), and Creativity (Ingersoll Rand testing of materials, Shackleton’s dealing with rebellious guys).

THE STICKINESS OF MADE TO STICK

The Heath brothers, true to their message, make sure that their stickiness message is also sticky. Look over these six attributes of stickiness. They’re listed in an easy-to-remember mnemonic. The first letter of the six terms spells out the word “success”—almost, anyway.Let’s review (another critical tool to make an idea sticky):

S—Simple
U—Unexpected
C—Concrete
C—Credible
E—Emotional
S—Story

Got it?

Seven Habits of Effective Writers

Writing is hard, often painful, work. First you have to do research, sometimes taking hours to track down or check a fact. Most of what you gather, you cannot use. If you are not spending hours on the cramped and dark stacks of the library, you sit zombie-like in front of a glowing screen. Only on rare occasions do you get to conduct first-hand research, with travel, interviews, and observation.

Then comes the painful process of actually writing, putting down one word after another. And then, once you have a draft, the really hard work begins—rewriting, revising, getting critiques from others. And as soon as you turn an essay in, you realize all the mistakes and omissions you made.

As the legendary sportswriter Red Smith once said: “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”

Well, that is one way of looking at writing. But while writing requires a lot of hard work, it is also one of the most exciting of all pursuits. Writing offers an opportunity to wrestle with important topics, express your most passionate thoughts, and even nourish your ego. Writing is a process of discovery. Even when you think you know what you want to write, you always discover something new.

Here are some simple rules to follow to become a better writer. Master them all, and there’s no basic writring you cannot do.

1. Relax. Anxiety clogs the brain. Writing, playing with ideas and seeing what works, should be fun and creative. When you get stuck, don’t dig a deeper ditch. Try something else. Brainstorm (See No. 2). Visualize real-life situations, involving specific people, scenes, and action (see No. 3). Think about dilemmas that people might want to solve. Or pick a passage from a reading and try to see how it fits into the larger scheme of things. If it helps, imagine exaggerated, even comical or nonsensical, situations.

2. Brainstorm. Especially at the beginning of the writing process, but also throughout the process, you need to explore every possible idea and piece of evidence possible. Think of every situation and concept that could have a bearing on your subject. Do not sort ideas until you have allowed them first to flow unobstructed.

Try to brainstorm ideas onto one sheet of paper. If you need a big sheet of paper, that’s fine. But you need to see everything in one place. Once you have brainstormed, you need to separate concepts from illustrations or facts. Then you need to consider what the most important or surprising ideas or relationships might be. Ask yourself the kind of questions that would interest you if you were a reader or audience.

3. Visualize. Try to visualize real-world situations, and then understand the cause/effect relationship arising from that situation.

Close your eyes and imagine a scene from a movie. Visualize characters struggling over something important. Think about the tensions between the characters—and also those within each character.

In order to get to important concepts, we need to imagine the real-world implications of those concepts. The battles over issues like abortion, divorce, torture, immigration, medical care, labor relations, and countless other issues matter not because of some abstract ideas. They matter because they affect real people. To understand abstract ideals, you need to understand the human conflicts behind them.

Once we can visualize real-world situations, we can begin to see patterns that explain human behavior.

4. Keep things simple. The best way to present complex ideas is to break them down, simply. Always look for a simpler argument and a simpler way of expressing that argument.

Look for the simple subject-verb-object statement in every sentence. Whenever possible, express things in the simple S-V-O form: “Derek Jeter booted the ground ball” or “President Bush criticized antiwar activists.” Of course, you will need more complex constructions too. But always make sure you know who’s doing what.

Consider the basic elements of a sentence here:

SUBJECT (Noun, pronoun, sometimes modified by adjectives) –> VERB (sometimes with an adverb) –> OBJECT (noun, pronoun, sometimes modified)

“Derek Jeter booted the ball.” “She lost her keys.” “The President blamed Congress.” “The chef fired the cook and dish washer.” “The rowdy fans three paper cups at the controversial outfielder.”

Or think of is this way:

SUBJECT (a noun, however simple or complex–what the sentence is all about) –> PREDICATE (tells something about the subject, usually starting with a verb)

“The book gave me a lot to think about.” “The president has a lot of unfinished business.”

And then add those pieces that give writing greater depth and clarity:

Helping words — prepositions (at, to, under, below, above, behind, before, etc.), articles (the, and, a/an, these, that), conjunctions (and, or, but).

Word clusters — Verbal phrases (prepositional [”The statue on the table“], verbal [”To eat is essential”], gerundal [”Swimming is fun”], participial [”Exhausted from a day of swimming, Leila watched a movie”], infinitive [”To make a good first impression creates new opportunities”]) and clauses (independent [”Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes”], dependent [”When Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes, …”])

That’s pretty much everything you will ever find in a good sentence. Keep it simple, and you will never lose your way.

5. Be a constant gardener. Look for ways to express your ideas more simply. Look for common errors of grammar and spelling. Harry Shaw once wrote: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” To present ideas clearly, we need to clear out the clutter—needless words, repetitive sentences, clichéd statements, unrevealing quotations. We need to make sure the writing’s architecture reveals itself as clearly as the foundation and shell at a construction site. And we need to make sure to use simplest sentence structure—usually the S-V-O structure.

Here are the most common problems of grammar and style:

• Wordiness, repetition, overstatements, and statements of the obvious
• Sentence fragments and run-on sentences
• Problems with proper names and second-reference pronouns
• Double negatives
• Hanging participles
• Wordy introductory fluff (“It is interesting to note…”).
• Tense and voice confusions
• Subject-verb agreements
• Commas, colons, and semicolons

Here are the most common problems of word usage:
• Affect and effect
• It’s and its
• It/its and they/their
• There and there and they’re
• That, which, and who
• Lie and lay
• To, too, and two
• Like and as
• Who and whom, whose and who’s
• Medium and media
• Less and fewer

One trick for cutting clutter is to read drafts backwards. Read the last section first, then the next-to-last section, all the way to the opening section. Backwards editing offers two benefits. First, it helps you avoid getting swept away by your own prose. Second, it helps you to envision the structure of your writing.

Also search for instances of “to be” and “to have.” Those constructions usually obscure rather than clarify matters.

6. Do not get argumentative. You want to make your argument so compelling that even skeptics are eager to embrace and further your argument. If you are doing your job, people with other perspectives will see the merits of your case. You do not need to put down others’ arguments to make your own.

Eagerly anticipate and present opposing arguments, not to just to counter them, but also to engage as broad a readership as possible.

No matter how right you are, someone somewhere holds a different perspective with just as much validity. If you appreciate a different perspective, you will sharpen your own thinking.

Whatever you write about will play out differently in different circumstances. We want to identify patterns that apply to different circumstances—but to do that, we need to be mindful of how things vary in different situations. We also need to understand how someone would see things differently.

7. Discuss issues with other people and read aloud. To be a good writer, you also need to be a good speaker. Speaking is just writing on air, at least in some ways. The better you speak, the better you can write.

Writing is often understood as a solitary business. And, to be sure, we need to get away from the noise of everyday life to think through difficult problems and apply ourselves to writing. But you cannot flip the “social” switch all the time. You need to connect writing with other people. Writing is, after all, communication.

In our modern age, we have radically separated important and related ways of thinking—writing and speaking, words and images, right and left sides of the brain, thinking and action. But if we want to do anything well, we need to work on all these skills.

Speaking about issues gives you greater mental flexibility and confidence. Anyone can speak well, which gives you greater confidence. Speaking forces you to give your thoughts some kind of order. Speaking extemporaneously also taps into the deep reservoirs of knowledge that usually gets stuck below the surface of your consciousness.

Reading drafts of writing aloud helps you imagine how readers will take in your words. Will they stumble? Will they get confused? Will they get lost? Will they understand your point? Will they visualize your ideas?

Do you have ideas for improving this piece? Email them to Charles.Euchner@Yale.edu.

The Hardest Way is the Only Way

When you think of a neurotic, you think of someone who compulsively sponges down a clean kitchen counter, or who asks a dozen questions about an issue that’s already been settled, or someone who hovers over kids with all kinds of concerns about classes, teachers, other kids, camp, lessons, friends.

You think of someone who cannot let go of things that need to be let go. You think of someone so nervous and insecure, that he doesn’t let anyone else be calm and secure.

At least a quarter of all Americans — and maybe as many as half — are neurotic in some way.

How do you define neurotic? Albert Ellis offers this pithy definition in his book How To Live With a “Neurotic” at Home and At Work:

“Basically, an adult who consistently acts illogically, irrationally, inappropriately, and childishly. … ‘Neurotics,’ then, make themselves unreasonably or unnecessarily bothered or bewildered. They bring on more pain or anxiety than they, theoretically, need experience. many of them have more than enough wherewithal — good looks, high intelligence, fine talents — to get along successfully in this world. But somehow they don’t. (pp. 18, 19)

Neurotics, according to Ellis, display many of the following traits:

• Indecision, doubt, and conflict
• Inadequacy feelings
• Guilt and self-blame
• Hostility and resentment
• Ingratiation
• Inefficiency and stupidity
• Self-deceit and lack of realism
• Defensiveness
• Rigidity and compulsiveness
• Shyness and withdrawal
• Psychosomatic symptoms and hypochondria
• Depression
• Self-centeredness and an inability to love
• Overexcitablity and manic tendencies
• Overambitiousness and compulsiveness striving
• Alcoholism and drug abuse

Yikes! What a list! What in the world can you do to cope with someone displaying even a handful of these traits?

Ellis has some tough words of advice. There’s not much you can do to reason with these kinds of people. Logic and rationality don;t have much to do with their everyday habits. You can’t say, in the words of Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together.” Any reasoning is met with defensiveness, denial, even aggression.

Instead, you need to coax a neurotic out of his or her embattled and confused state. This is beyond the capability of most people. It requires a Christ-like patience and wisdom that most of us lack.

Here’s the toughest part of Ellis’s analysis (found on page 89 of How To Live With a Neurotic):

“One central rule in dealing with a ‘neurotic’: do not criticize! As we have pointed out previously, ‘neurotics’ arrive at their state largely form taking criticism too seriously. Because they make themselves oversensitized, they take further criticism badly. If you down them (or even their traits), you may contrbute to increasing their feelings of worthlessness.

“Criticism, moreover, rarely moves people to constructive action. Helping humans change their ‘poor’ behavior for ‘better’ behavior involves inducting them to go from point 1 to point 2. But most of us, when told that we should move from 1 to 2 or that we behave like idiots for not so moving, balk or go backward. We resent any pushing or pressuring even for our own good.

“‘Neurotics,’ in particular, tend to react poorly to appeals that take this kind of criticism. To tell them that they should, for their own good, go from point 1 to 2 equals: ‘Look here, you fool! You know damned well that you harm yourself by remaining at 1 instead of going to 2. Now why don’t you stop acting like a dunce and do the right thing?’ To almost everyone that will sound like censure.”

In dealing with a neurotic — or someone with neurotic tendencies — you have to have amazing patience. You cannot react to every irrational, defensive, or stubborn action. You can’t say, “Hey, pal! You’re not getting it! Try this way!”

Instead, you have to find what works and coax it out of your friend (or spouse, coworker, children, parents, or whatever). You need positive reinforcement of what works, not negative reaction to what doesn’t work.

Nothing could be harder. But it’s the only way that works.

How To Talk To a Yankee Fan, If You Must

Tough winter, eh? First you guys flame out against the Cleveland Indians and a swarm of bugs. Then your enfeebled owner and his wanna-be thug sons fire the best manager you’ve ever had. And now Mo and Jorge and A-Rod might leave the team. Say, is Carl Pavano signed through 2008?

Hey, we’ve won more than anyone else! We got 26 rings? Twenty-six rings, buster! Count ‘em! How many do the Red Sox have? The Mets? The Devil Rays? The Seattle Pilots?

True, true. The Yankees are the dominant team in professional sports since the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth because of his penchant for trips to whorehouses during games. No doubt, 26 championships is quite an achievement.

But? You’re going to say, “But…”

Well, it’s a little like saying you like the Bush administration because Washington and Lincoln and the two Roosevelts were great presidents.

Yeah, but we’re in the playoffs every year–

For which you fire the estimable Joe Torre, the guy who has held together for 12 years.

Well, he didn’t win it all. No Yankee fan can ever be satisfied unless we win it all. Making the playoffs is a failure if you don’t win the World Series too. Nothing else matters. It’s an embarassment, a disgrace. We owe our fans better.

I don’t get it. You said making the playoffs year after year is a sign of success. But then you say it’s failure.

Well, a success, but a necessary success. We spent $200 million a year on payroll. You have to win with that. We buy every good player we get our hands on. So the playoffs should be automatic. So, no that doesn’t feel so great.

Kind of like you’re playing a rigged game, eh?

Yeah, but Mr. Steinbrenner deserves more. After all, he and his partners shelled out $10 million for this team. It’s worth a billion now. But that’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough. If you win it all, you start breaking things down to be even more ruthless, even more dominant, next time. Just like Torre said. After the 2000 World Series, George confronted him: We need to get working on next year’s team. It’s not a game. It’s war, total domination. If you don’t win it all, you lose. Like Patton said …

Is George your role model?

Oh, I see where you’re going. Don’t start on his problems — tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, hiring a thug to harass David Winfield, his love-hate relationship with Billy Martin, the way he trashed Yogi Berra. He hasn’t done anything like that lately. He’s been too sick, for one thing.

No, I guess not. His sons sure look like winners, eh? They remind me of Molly Ivins’s crack about W: “He was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple.” What are their names? Thug 1 and Thug 2?

Hank and Hal. OK, so they made some mistakes. But you gotta admire their bluster. When Torre pointed out that an incentive clause for getting deep into October was an “insult” — a statement that he and his players needed some special incentive to play hard in the playoffs –Hank fought back. He said he reallyreallyreally wanted Torre back as manager.

So he’s quite an operator. A man who gets what he wants.

Well, maybe he didn’t reallyreallyreally want Torre back. So he got what he wanted when Torre rejected the offer. But he had to say he didn’t get what he wanted. You know, so he would look strong.

Sounds like Jimmy Carter when he talked about his “incomplete success” in Iran. He sent some helicopters to rescue the hostages held at the American embassy in Tehran. But the vehicles crashed and burned. “Incomplete success.” It would have been a complete success if, um, the mission succeeded.

Yeah, that’s it. So the Yankees have been an incomplete success since 2000. That sounds better.

So sometimes you have to break up a team. Maybe Torre was losing his sharpness at the end. Here’s what he described his way of interacting with the Yankees Brass in an interview with Bob Costas of HBO: “You know, what are your thoughts? Ba, ba, ba.” Ba, ba, ba. ba, ba, ba.

You don’t get it. “Ba, ba, ba” is part of the Yankees’ secret language. That’s what saved the season. When Torre said “Ba, ba, ba,” they put in Jo-ba.

So who are the Yankees gonna hire to manage the team in 2008?

Can’t go for Don Mattingly. Too much like Torre — a smart baseball man, groomed for the job, a lot of class, liked by the players and media, level-headed. I mean, you just can’t hire Mattingly because you know you’re going to have to fire him and he’s an icon. So, probably, you go with Joe Gerardi, who you can fire for being a hothead, or Tony Pena, who you can fire for being a softie. Torre and Mattingly are just too well balanced. Can’t have that in an organization like this.

Don’t worry too much about that. Hank Steinbrenner, heir to the throne, has declared that the Yankees would be “stupid” to expect a World Championship every year — um, days after firing Joe Torre for not winning a World Championship. He said: “We want to win the World Series every year, but we’re not stupid enough to think we can do it every year. Like everybody else who has that goal, basically you’ve got to be patient.” So now patience is a Yankees virtue!

Well, he’s got a point. You’d be a fool to say that not winning it all means failure.

So how go the talks with Alex Rodrizuez — the A-Rod! Alexxxxxander the Grrreat! An A-Bomb! From A-Rod! A-Rude! Stray-Rod!

Well, I tell you this. If he exercises his option to break his contract and be a free agent, we won’t talk to him again. He will show himself to be a false idol. He will not be a true Yankee. And good riddance! So long! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! Loser! What have you ever won, A-Rod? Nothing! That’s what, pretty boy!

So you think you can wrap up a deal before he declares himself a free agent?

I sure hope so. We’d like him to wear a Yankees hat in Cooperstown. We’re planning a plaque for Monument Park. He’s an integral part of this Yankees dynast–

Thanks a lot. It’s going to be a fun winter, eh? One last question. Who you rooting for in the World Series?

Who cares about the World Series? Nobody cares about the World Series anymore. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a crap shoot to get there anyway, right?

Fixing an Undemocratic System

The following piece was originally published in The Boston Globe on October 14, 2007.

Now that the presidential primary system has become undeniably undemocratic, it’s time to develop a new process to select candidates for the White House. Both parties should look to the National Basketball Association for inspiration.

Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson all backed out of the Michigan primary last week. How could these candidates dare to ignore such an important part of the Democratic Party? Because Michigan had the temerity to defy the Democratic National Committee and schedule its primary for Jan. 15.

The DNC has decreed that only Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada may hold contests before Feb. 5. New Hampshire has held primaries since 1916 but gained prominence for its first-in-the-nation contest in 1952. A 1977 state law requires New Hampshire to hold its primary before any other states. Iowa has held influential caucus contests since 1972. South Carolina and Nevada established their early-bird status in recent years.

In defiance of the DNC, Michigan and Florida have both scheduled early primaries. Now the DNC is threatening to disenfranchise both states. If they go ahead with their early contests, they will not be allowed to send any delegates to the national convention. Meanwhile, the Republican Party plans to take away half of Wyoming’s delegates as punishment for scheduling a Jan. 5 contest.

The Democrats have decided that disenfranchisement of its voters in Michigan and Florida - two of the biggest, most diverse, and tightly contested states in the nation - is the only way to take control of a nomination process gone awry.

For years, states have rushed to push their primaries and caucuses earlier in the year. This “frontloading” of contests means that both parties could pick their nominees by early March - before most voters have had a chance to assess the candidates. That’s not only unfair; it’s also unwise. Selecting a president requires some care. Rushing the process makes no sense.

New Hampshire and Iowa have long claimed that their Athenian virtue should give them priority over other states. Both states are small and cohesive enough that candidates can do face-to-face campaigning. Voters get to know the candidates intimately, the argument goes, and make better choices for the rest of us. Many voters brag about having all the candidates in their homes many times.

But no state has a monopoly on virtue of any kind. As earnest as Iowans and New Hampshirites may be, they are no better than voters from Rhode Island or Nevada, Vermont or California, Florida or Washington.

The presidential nomination process should respect all kinds of states - small and large, compact and sprawling, diverse and homogenous. States with different characteristics would alternate with each other in the nomination process.

No state deserves to determine the range of choices for everyone else, year after year. It’s not fair that Iowa and New Hampshire always get to eliminate a raft of candidates before bigger and more diverse states have their say.

The parties might use a variation of the NBA draft to schedule primaries and caucuses. The NBA randomly selects one of the 14 teams that do not make the playoffs to the first 14 picks. (The number of ping-pong balls in the machine is weighted to account for the teams’ records.) The 16 playoff teams then make their draft selections in the reverse order of their records.

To make a primary/caucus schedule on the NBA model, the Democrats and GOP should pick a state from the pool of the 17 smallest states to go first. Then, states from the pools of the 17 biggest and the 17 middle states should alternate chances to pick dates. The parties could move through the three-pool rotation until the schedule is complete.

You could debate whether the first contest should take place in a small state. New Hampshirites probably have a point when they rhapsodize about the benefits of face-to-fare politics. But maybe in exchange for getting the first “draft” pick, states from the other pools each should get two calendar dates rather than one. Or maybe the order of the pools should change each election cycle. Such details could be hashed out.

The nomination calendar could stretch from 16 to 20 weeks, beginning in late February or early March. Some states might schedule events on Saturdays, while others could stick with the standard Tuesday contests. Some weeks would have only one contest, but others would have five or more contests.

States would have the opportunity to team with nearby states to make a Super Tuesday primary. After creating a draft of the calendar, states would have a set period - say, three months - to get neighboring states to join them. If New Hampshire gets the first pick, it could either hold its own primary or create a super-primary with neighboring states like Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Some states would prefer to keep the spotlight to themselves, while others would like the greater heft of the group.

Using an NBA-style lottery to rotate states would not only provide a balanced sequence of states by population, but also regional location, economic diversity, ethnic diversity, urban/suburban/rural balance, and so on.

We could start the process with intimate retail campaigning, but also give bigger states a chance to express their will when it still matters. The greatest benefit would be to spread out the selection process, so that all states have a chance to have a say in selecting party nominees.

The ugly battles over scheduling the Michigan and Florida primaries should be the final indictment of the current system, which is arbitrary, chaotic, and unfair.

Ultimately, the Michigan and Florida controversies will get solved. It’s unthinkable that Democrats would alienate such important states by barring them from the convention.

But whatever happens in 2008, we need a better way to organize our presidential nomination contests. A system of allowing states to select dates like draft picks, NBA-style, is the way to go.

DRAFT POOLS

Below are the three pools that would alternate selections for presidential primary and caucus dates. The 50 states and the District of Columbia are listed in the order of their population sizes.

The Biggest 17 states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Washington, Indiana, Arizona, Tennessee.

The Middle 17 States: Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah.

The Smallest 17 States: Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska. Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, District of Columbia, Wyoming.

The Post-Deseg Era

Brown v. Board of Education probably did more to change America than any other Supreme Court decision the twentieth century. And now Brown’s time has passed.

Since the Reagan Administration, the Supreme Court has steadily eroded the complex edifice of desegregation. The latest blow came with the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision that banned the use of race in making assignment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, Wash. To use race, the Court ruled, districts must show a “compelling reason,” which was lacking in those districts.

A new challenge to desegragation might come from Milton, Massachusetts, a classic New England community located just south of Boston. As The Wall Street Journal reports, white parents are organizing to challenge the new assignment of white kids to a predominantly black elementary school in the town of 26,000.

Which raises the question: Can desegregation ever work? Can we imagine a way to offer kids of all races and economic backgrounds a chance to learn together?

The answer is yes. But it’s an answer that liberals and their allies in the NEA, AFT, NAACP, and other organizations do not like. The answer is school choice.

Let’s remember the heart of the Brown case. Black kids did not have any choice but to go to different schools than their white brothers and sisters. They got stuck in schools that were clearly inferior. The buildings were old and broken down, the textbooks and supplies inadequate, the teachers overwhelmed with huge classes. The stigma alone of the separate-but-equal doctrine undermined real opportunity for learning.

Because of his desperate desire to make a unanimous ruling, Chief Justice Warren shied away from saying how, exactly, blacks and whites were to be brought together. Warren bravely decided to take on the most divisive issue in America, but he also avoided the hard issues needed to make the decision work. Just do it, somehow, and good luck.

Warren’s greatest blind spot — and our blind spot for generations — was the assumption that schools had to be organized by districts, which managed a number of schools in their areas. That’s how schools have been organized in America since the beginning of compulsory education in the nineteenth century.

That false assumption has only strengthened over the years. Under the consolidation movement, districts got bigger and bigger, so they played an ever-more significant role in managing public education. The number of districts has declined from 117,000 in 1940 to about 15,000 today. Mega-districts have become the local empires of learning. Within the bounds of state law, district bureaucracies implement policies for curriculum, teachers, facilities, busing, special services, extracurricular activities.

As districts got bigger and bigger, so did schools. Since 1940, the number of schools in the U.S. has declined from 200,000 to 86,000. Half of all high school students attend schools with over 1,500 students, and 70 percent go to schools with more than 1,000, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Schools with 2,000 or 3,000 students are common, and some schools have more than 5,000 students. Big schools do not work as well as small schools.

So what’s so special about big districts? Why should districts make all these decisions? Why not leave the decisions to schools? And why not let parents shop around for the best school for their kids?

The best cure for public education is not adopting more rules — for desegregation, curriculum, testing, certification, transportation, after-school activities, and on and on — but to break up the enterprise and allow parents to send their kids wherever they want.

Let the states set basic standards, provide some assistance, and let go. Let schools organize themselves. If a cluster of schools wants to collaborate on transportation, purchasing, special ed, and more, fine. But let the schools run the show. Let schools compete for students. Let schools look for ways to get better, without the nightmares of bureaucracy and politics they now face.

The obvious logistical problem is that the best schools will attract more kids than they can handle. Fine, have a lottery. You’re concerned about racial balance? Fine, weight the lottery so that you get a reasonable mix of black, white, brown, and yellow.

And the worst schools? They’ll have to shape up or go out of business. They’ll have to spend less time doing paperwork and more time making sure every class is exciting and rigorous. If they fail — when students opt for other schools — they should go out of business or get a change of management. Give someone else a chance.

Some people worry that full-fledged school choice would lead to narrow, sectarian schools that create intimidating cultures to outsiders. They worry about fundamentalists taking over and teaching creationism. But it shouldn’t be too hard to require schools getting public dollars to follow basic rules of fairness and professionalism.

The greatest development in American education in the last generation has been the rise of charter schools. Charter schools get public funding but are allowed to bypass many of the rules for teacher hiring, curriculum, and building-level management. Any student in the district can enter a lottery to go to a charter school. The result is an impressive blending of racial and economic diversity — not to mention committed, focused teachers and staff.

District administrators, of course, hate charter schools. Every child who leaves the standard schools for charter schools says, in effect, “you failed me.” Charters also put pressure on the district to improve.

I saw the superintendent of schools in Cambridge, Mass., days after the district defeated plans for a new charter school in the district a few years ago. She was ebullient. “We won!” she exulted. Then she paused. “But I have to admit, just the threat of the charter school has made us focus better.”

The problem is that there aren’t enough charter schools. There aren’t enough choices. There isn’t enough pressure on standard districts and their schools. Just as Judge Harold Greene busted up Ma Bell, we need to bust up our educational empires.

The fundamental error of the Brown decision — an understandable error, so let’s not beat up the Warren Court — was assuming that schools could only operate with a strong district system.

Fix that error, and you have a chance for real integrated education.

BACKGROUND ON BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

The landmark 1954 decision, in which the Court unanimously declared the practice of assigning students to different schools based on race unconstitutional, has brought together blacks and whites in countless districts. More important, it has changed the basic mindset of average Americans. A vast majority now accepts that the idea of “separate but equal” is an inherently incoherent idea. For people to enjoy the full range of opportunities of education and other public benefits, we all need to be in it together.

But Brown has produced its own incoherence. For the sake of deseg, we count white and brown noses, take kids out of their communities, put kids in alien schools, and take away the most intimate decisions from families. The whole process often takes everyone’s eyes off the prize — fair educational opportunity for all — and into arcane bureaucratic and legal mazes.

The Brown decision, of course, invalidated the Topeka school district’s operation of separate schools for white and black children. A Kansas law allowed communities with a population of 15,000 or more to assign students by race. That’s what Topeka did. In 1951, 13 Topeka parents joined a class action suit against the city of Topeka, claiming the such separation constituted unequal treatment and was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The case made it to the Supreme Court, where newbie Chief Justice Earl Warren organized the unanimous decision. In its decision, the Court called for districts across the U.S. to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”

The problem, of course, was that Brown was not a “self-executing” decision. The Court could not simply order districts to “do this,” and expect its orders to be done. Districts across the nation — from supposed liberal outposts like New York and Boston to the proudly segregated states of the old Confederacy — adopted a dizzying array of delay tactics. As the years passed, hundreds of districts got stuck in the increasingly contorted system of district gerrymandering, busing routes, consolidation, procurement, funding formulae, and competing demands (like special ed). The longer the scre=um, the more contorted deseg became.

A decision originally intended to end formal segregation became a catch-all for curing the ills of racism and inequality, poor school buildings and inadequate school supplies, neighborhood segregation and growing frustration over the “American dilemma” of race.

To be sure, Brown produced a number of impressive success stories. The Charlotte-Mecklenberg district in North Carolina is noted for its aggressive and creative approach to bring kids of all hues together.

Let 'Em Play

Describing the awful wave of crime and family breakdown of the 1970s and 1980s, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan decried the process of “defining deviancy down,” an insidious spiral of cultural degradation. Behavior once considered intolerable — ugly language, slothful manners, and general rudeness — becomes ever more acceptable.

Tune into any of the Little League World Series games broadcast on ESPN and ABC, which concluded with the championship game last Sunday, and you get a glimpse of another powerful trend. Every year we “define down” the age when we treat kids as big-shot athletes. Rather than letting kids play games for fun, we turn it into a serious business.

For years, ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” broadcast the championship game of the Little League World Series. Those games offered a sweet glimpse into a rare moment of glory for ordinary kids. Those teams of 11- and 12-year-olds beat odds 1,000-to-1 odds to get to the tournament in Williamsport, Pa. Why not get a peek?

But the Little League World Series — and countless other youth tournaments — has become a big business. ESPN and ABC now broadcast all 32 World Series games and all eight regional championship games.

Little League is just the most visible example of adults getting too serious about kids’ games. Other leagues that don’t get the glory — PONY, Cal Ripken, Dizzy Dean, and more — have just as much talent. And many travel teams, which often play year-round, would beat the Little League champions any time.

Experts call the problem of overbearing parents and coaches “achievement by proxy disorder.” Adults use their kids’ games to achieve their own glory. When winning becomes all-important for adults, they cannot resist inserting themselves into the game — and pushing so hard that the games aren’t fun, or play, anymore.

Taking games too seriously has caused a rash of pitching injuries. Surgeons report seeing teenagers and pre-teens for all kinds of sports injuries that have one cause — over-exertion.

Youngsters often throw 200 or more pitches a week — more than the fully developed studs in the big leagues — and injure their arms. Most kids now throw curveballs, which have been demonstrated to create serious injuries.

One coach in the 2004 and 2005 series confessed to me that he had “abused” his pitchers because of the pressure to get to the World Series. “Everyone who has ever coached an all-star team is guilty,” he said. At least half of the pitchers in the series go home with an injury. Some players required surgery.

But it’s not just the overwork. During the games, the adults scream and scheme. A big game between the teams from Florida and California in the 2005 series is a case in point. Both coaches screamed all game about the strike zone. The California hitters were told to step out of the batter’s box to upset the pitcher’s rhythm. Both teams accused the other of stealing signs. Parents screamed all game long.

One of Florida’s coaches was Dante Bichette, a former Major Leaguer. He spent most of the game razzing California’s pitchers. I asked him if he regretted bullying the other team’s kids. “This was Little League, so you can’t drill the kid,” Bichette said. “So I yelled at them.”

Parents in the stands are not much better. One coach told me that parents called him on his cell phone after games to complain that he “humiliated” their kids on national TV by not letting them play the whole game. Another told me that hometown fans baited him because his team had not won any games in Williamsport. Other coaches said that parents bickered with each other about their kids’ playing time.

Of course, it’s not all tension and pain in the Little League World Series. The complex in Williamsport is a carnival atmosphere. Kids play on beautiful fields, live in an Olympic Village, and make friends from all over the world. When things go right, it’s hard to imagine a more memorable experience.

Toward the end of the 2005 series, the kids from Florida showed how we might restore the childlike fun to the game.

After they were eliminated from the tournament, the Floridians challenged the team from Venezuela to a “friendship game” — what we used to call a pickup game. The kids suited up and played in the smaller stadium. But this time, the kids made all the big decisions — positions, batting order, even some field strategy. The results were striking.

“It feels totally different,” Dante Bichette Jr. told The New York Times. “It feels like a regular Little League game.”

“Our guys were laughing on the bench today,” Sid Cash said. “That was a little different.”

Why not give the kids their game all season long?

When I first asked Little League coaches about the idea, most expressed skepticism. “A team can be a very delicate thing, and if one thing goes off, the whole thing falls apart,” one coach said.

But once we talked about the game’s dynamics, the coaches realized that their major responsibility lies in helping the kids get ready for games — not in micromanaging the games.

Once upon a time, kids did very well at managing their own games. One study found more than 500 games that New York kids played in the streets. They didn’t need coaches, rules, uniforms, umpires, statistics and all the other trappings of managed play. They just needed each other and a little space.

Why doesn’t at least one league for every kids’ sport — baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey — give the control of the game back to kids? Let the adults take care of league logistics and even teach some skills.

But then, at game time, let the kids run the show.

“Try Leaving Little League To Little Kids,” by Charles Euchner, originally appeared in The Providence Journal on August 31, 2007.

Cal Ripken and the Future of Youth Sports

By Charles Euchner

(Originally published on The Early Show)

I had the opportunity to talk with Cal Ripken today about his participation in the longest game in professional baseball history -- a 33-inning marathon between the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox in April 1981. After we discussed that game, I asked him about the way Cal Ripken Baseball is changing the landscape of youth ball.

Ripken Baseball started seven years ago when the Babe Ruth League offered to rename its Bambino division -- the 12-and-under bunch -- after the Iron Man of the Baltimore Orioles.

"I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to have an impact on the grassroots level of baseball," he said. "I don’t control the league. But I am not just involved in name alone either. I wanted to have an impact on the landscape of the game."

Ripken Baseball is the only community league growing its numbers every year -- about 6 or 7 percent a year, according to the future Hall of Famer. To keep the growth going, Ripken wants to offer not only world-class youth tournaments. He also wants to restore "real baseball" to the 12-and-under set.

Ripken Baseball announced this summer that it would expand its field size from 60 to 70 feet between the bases. It's a move that's been in discussion for years. "It takes a long time, but we're doing it and it's going to make a big difference," Ripken says.

The 70-foot bases -- the same dimensions used in PONY League competition for the same age group -- is "going to breathe some fresh air into the game." The bigger field not only accepts the reality that today's young athletes are bigger and stronger, but also acknowledges the growing importance of travel teams. Love them or hate them, travel teams will dominate youth baseball for the foreseeable future. The question is how community-based leagues adapt.

"In recent years, the numbers of kids playing ball after 12 or 13 have dwindled," Ripken told me. "And at the same time, there are more kids playing year round. We want to get more kids to extend the ages that they play baseball."

By playing on a bigger field, Ripken can draw many of the best travel-ball players to his program. At the same time, Ripken can continue to offer competition on 60-foot bases for less developed young athletes.

Baseball's standard 90-foot-base field fits the power and speed of most players from the teenage years all the way to the elites of the major leagues. 

"There were some fundamental truths that were being violated," Ripken says. "Sixty feet [from the mound to the plate] gives you the right reaction time. And the bigger field gives you the right reaction time for fielders and baserunners too. Who’s the fastest player down the line now? It’s Ichiro [Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners]. But with 90-foot bases, there’s still enough reaction time for infielders to get Ichiro out. 

"When those fundamental truths are violated, you change the game. When you have so many kids, you want to be all things to all people. There’s still a 60-foot path if you want to do that. But physically, there are a lot of kids these days who are ready and want to play real baseball and put people in motion, and move the mound back four feet."

During the recent Cal Ripken World Series, a couple of teams eliminated in early play played an exhibition game on 70-foot bases. 

"We watched the offense became more of a spark, and they enjoyed the stealing and the game was natural to them. This is what real baseball is all about."

What Makes a Great Coach?

By Charles Euchner

(First published on The Early Show) 

What makes a great coach?

As thousands of teams vie for the chance to play in the Little League World Series next month in Williamsport, that's the question that parents and kids are asking themselves.

When I covered youth baseball last summer when researching Little League, Big Dreams, I got to know a broad and diverse bunch. In their day jobs, they did everything imaginable. The 2006 Little League World Series included a banker, truck driver, teacher, electrician, phone company retiree, and pizzeria owner. The assistantcoaches for the team from Maitland, Florida, had a couple former major leaguers, Dante Bichette and Mike Stanley.

Before anything else, a great coach is a great teacher. He's someone who finds a way to get a group of 12 to 14 pre-teens to focus on the job of becoming better baseball players.

A great coach teaches kids how to get around on fastballs with major-league equivalents of 90, 95, even 100 miles an hour. he teaches them how to pick up a pitch as it comes out of the pitcher's hand. 

A great coach also teaches how to play in the field. He finds the right position for all the kids. He teaches kids how to play together. He develops a pitching staff at least five players deep. He teaches those pitchers to get the other side to put the ball in play, rather than gunning for strikeouts. 

Before a coach can do any of this, he needs to get the attention of the palyers. Anyone who has worked with kids -- in the classroom, on the field, at camp -- knows that the first few days and weeks are critical. If the coach wants to be a pal, he risks losing the kids for the rest of the summer. But if he comes across like a colonel, barking orders and making sacrifices of kids, he creates an environemnt that drains all the fun out of the game.

Two coaches impressed me more than anyone else in the 2005 Little League World Series -- Layton Aliviado of the West Oahu Little League in Hawaii and Rich Knight of the Westbrook Little League in Maine.

Aliviado is a fortysomething truck driver, a lifelong Hawaiian who spent years buiilding his team. He worked his players hard, with practices six days a week, lasting four hours or more, all summer long. Aliviado developed a training regimen that started with building strength in the legs, moved toward field skill drills, and ended with situational training.

Aliviado's answer any time one of his players started goofing off was to have the whole team run . . and run and run and run. By the time the team started its summer of tournaments, the team was strong. The Hawaiians were the only team that did not wilt or break down during the World Series. 

But don't think Aliviado's approach was all about hard work. The kids and their families socialized after virtually every practice and game. When one of the coaches had to undergo chemo for testicular cancer, everyone pitched in to help out. I spent a week in Hawaii with the team's players and families and was impressed at how tightknit they were.

But what I like the most about Aliviado was his simple decency. He's a quiet guy, not a speaker. But wherever he went, kids clustered around him for guidance. He worked them hard and then let them play. When things went wropng on the field, he told his kids to just have fun and play hard. They were loose all the way.

Jerome Williams, now a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, is Aliviado's most famous player. Williams played for Aliviado's PONY League team more than a decade ago. Williams, a black, struggled to deal with racist garbage from other teams. Aliviado told him, in his quiet way, to ignore the slurs and concentrate on his game. Sometimes only a coach can tell a kid something like that.

My other favorite coach, Rich Knight, was much different. Knight started coaching when his company, Verizon, offered time out to employees to do community work. He had no kids, but threw himself into coaching. He takes kids to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox. For years he took kids to Williamsport to watch the Little League World Series.

Knight's Westbrook all stars made it to Williamsport in 2005, defeating better-regarded teams from Toms River, N.J., and Farmington, Conn. Maine lost its first three teams at the New England regional tournament but survived pool play and got hot at the right time.

The Mainers were not as big and strong as other teams in Williamsport. But theyb played a sound game on defense and got good pitching most of the time. They could have won all of their games in Williamsport. They ended up going 1-2, but they impressed everyone.

One of Maine's bench players was a shy, homesick kid named Michael Mowatt. For the better partv of the summer, he sat on the bench. When the team arrived in Williamsport, Mowatt got sick. He kept throwing up. A nurse suggested he was homesick. Knight offered to drive him back to Maine. The idea that he could go home if he wanted relaxed him.

And he became the star of the team. In fact, his slugging percentage was the best of all players in Williamsport.

Making Writing and Reading Fun

WASHINGTON–Once each hour at Congress Heights Elementary School, kindergartners and 1st graders gather and neatly put away their supplies in the “Writing to Read Center.” Without instructions, with few words among themselves, the students line up at the door to return to their regular classrooms.

They file out in two lines–one for boys, the other for girls–and soon the room is filled again with a new group of equally well-mannered students who go to their five work stations and get to work without any directions from the teacher or aides.

It is a scene that would not have surprised Frank N. Freeman or Benjamin DeKalbe Wood, who 50 years ago wrote the book that would inspire a retired teacher named John Henry Martin to start the writing experiment that involved these Washington public-school students.

Freeman and Wood, who studied the effects of typewriters on the classroom performance of about 15,000 elementary-school students from 1929 to 1931, found that the children were fascinated with the machines and had much better work habits when they used them.

The Depression-era researchers quoted a 1st-grade teacher: “I notice an awakening sense of responsibility; the children remember to put away typewriters and leave offices in order; they are pleasant and polite in choosing helpers …”

Not incidentally, the researchers also found improvements in academic performance. They were less certain of the typewriter’s value in lower grade levels, mostly because of the inadequate testing methods for younger students.

On a recent tour of schools experimenting with his “Writing to Read” program, John Henry Martin did not express any doubt that his contemporary version of the program works.

Tests have shown, he said, that a combination of computer, typewriter, workbooks, and pictures makes it possible for children to write almost as soon as they enter school.

“I proclaim it,” he told a group of Washington principals. “It works.”

The “it,” the Florida-based consultant says, is a classroom situation that combines “truly interactive” machines with a child’s natural desire to know and express himself in words. After seven years of developing and testing his idea, Mr. Martin concluded it worked because children of varying backgrounds scored well above national norms in reading and writing tests.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Martin said, “that with the research of the last 50 years, and especially the last decade or so, we have failed to use the typewriter and other things … that are truly interactive.”

Mr. Martin’s project, financed by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), now involves 10,000 students from a variety of economic and educational backgrounds. Besides the 15 schools in Washington, the experiment includes districts in Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas, and universities in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, N.J., has contracted with IBM to evaluate the program.

The program is based on the premise that students already have many ideas to express by the time they enter school. A kindergartner has a working vocabulary of 4,000 to 5,000 words, said Mr. Martin, and just needs to engage more in “multi-sensory-receptive” activities to express ideas.

Children are wrongly taught to read before they learn to write, Mr. Martin says, but it has not always been that way. Prior to the early 20th century, students expressed their ideas in writing from “day one,” Mr. Martin said.

“In the past, children used a slate and chalk to, using the old expression, ‘make their letters,”‘ Mr. Martin said. “Sometime between 1910 and 1920, writing and reading were made into separate processes.”

‘Positive Reinforcement’

With the stress on reading before writing, Mr. Martin said, students do not receive the “positive reinforcement” that the behaviorist B.F. Skinner identified as an essential part of learning.

Children in the “writing to read” program work each day for one hour. They work with partners of their own choosing at work stations for computer work, typing, workbook exercises, creative writing, and listening to tape-recordings. They also work on miscellaneous projects, such as labeling and matching pictures with appropriate written material.

The students use all letters of the alphabet except Q and X, and a set of letter “blends” such as oi, ei, th, sh, sc, and gh.

Teachers and computer programs, which give and receive sound, teach the students how to pronounce the letters and blends and how to use them in words.

At the computer station, the student strikes the terminal’s keyboard when instructed by the program, then watches as the letters and blends fall into place to spell a word. At each step, the student hears then repeats the sound.

After completing 10 “cycles” of instruction, the student will have learned the 42 phonemes he needs to write about almost any subject. As soon as the student has mastered these basics, he can begin to write strings of related sentences and complete essays, paying attention to the grammar and spelling that before would only have hindered the writing flow.

The typing skills, which Mr. Martin said most students should be able to develop in the 1st or 2nd grade, will not only give the students a head start on working with computers but will also enable them to write much faster and more creatively throughout their lives, Mr. Martin said. Mr. Martin said his approach differs from the Depression-era experiment and from other current uses of computers in the classroom because his approach is “truly interactive.”

“The typewriter, by itself, is not interactive, and the cathode ray tube is not interactive,” he said. “What makes this interactive is that it gets students to make physical, bodily responses.”

Mr. Martin said that he adopted the program’s components only after eliciting such responses with a broad cross section of students–from the gifted to the average to the slow learners, from those in small groups to those in large groups.

The approach to writing was tested for two years with a group of 60 students at the University School of Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The striking results there, Mr. Martin said, convinced IBM officials that a test with a larger sample was needed.

Joseph Randazzo, the University School’s headmaster, said 1st graders who learned under Mr. Martin’s program scored 2.7 on a reading grade-equivalency test, while others scored 1.8. Half of the entire group scored in the 94th percentile nationally on the test, Mr. Randazzo said.

Career Start

Mr. Martin started his career 45 years ago in a one-room schoolhouse in Alabama. After serving with the Navy in Europe in World War II, he worked as a teacher, principal, curriculum consultant, and superintendent in seven districts on Long Island and in New Jersey.

On the side, he has done extensive consulting, serving on panels for two U.S. Presidents.

Mr. Martin said he first became interested in the use of typewriters and other “multi-sensory” instruments when a friend recommended that he read the Freeman-Wood book, which carries the bulky title, An Experimental Study of the Educational Influences of the Typewriter in the Elementary School Classroom.

Mr. Martin has toyed with the idea for years since. Seven years ago–bored with a retirement forced on him by a heart attack–he decided to study it in a clinical setting. He took his proposals to Abraham S. Fischler, the president of Nova University, and soon started soliciting money for his work from the private sector.

The 1932 book, Mr. Martin says, now occupies the prized position on the coffee table in his Fort Myers, Fla., home.

-- “Children’s Interest in Machines Used to Teach Reading By Teaching Writing,” by Charles Euchner, appeared in Education Week on December 22, 1982