How Bad Is It?

by John Cassidy

After the prime-time drama of showdowns on Capitol Hill, agita in the West Wing, and a doomsday deadline averted comes the local news, wherein bad things happen to real people. Friday's payroll report for July showed that nearly fourteen million Americans are out of work, and more than six million of them have been jobless for more than six months. Those figures were slightly better than expected, but that just reflects how low expectations have sunk. Arriving a day after the Dow tumbled more than five hundred points-and just hours before Standard &Poor's took the unprecedented step of downgrading the U.S. bond rating-the figures confirmed, if further confirmation was needed, that the country is facing an immediate economic crisis. But, even after the rating downgrade, it isn't primarily a crisis of debt ceilings shattered, government spending gone wild, or any of the other hobgoblins that have dominated the discussion in the nation's capital. It is, as President Obama acknowledged again last week, a crisis of jobs and prosperity.

For more than two years, the unemployment rate has been close to or above nine per cent. (That is the official rate; if the government counted people who have given up looking for work or who have been forced to work part time, the rate would be sixteen per cent.) And it's not just the labor market that is frantically signalling distress. The gross domestic product, after growing modestly in 2009 and 2010, has hardly expanded at all this year. Consumer spending has stalled. In many places, house prices are still falling. On Wall Street, there is renewed talk of a double-dip recession.

A political system that responded rationally to the country's problems would be concentrating on creating jobs. Washington is moving in the opposite direction: toward austerity and job cuts. In the past few months, the 2009 stimulus program has started to wind down, and the Federal Reserve has withdrawn its emergency-support operation, which pumped money into the financial system. Now comes the debt ceiling agreement. The deal, which calls for more than two trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next decade, does less than nothing to promote economic growth or create jobs in the coming months, and next to nothing to solve the long-term fiscal challenges facing the country hence S&P's downgrade. In a statement, the ratings agency said, "The fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics."If the country is to be solvent ten or twenty years from now, there will need to be reasonable limits on entitlement spending and a substantial increase in federal tax revenues, which are currently languishing at fifteen per cent of GDP, the lowest level in sixty years. Yet neither entitlement reform nor revenue increases are dealt with in the agreement.

Still, the downgrade should not be allowed to distract attention from the unemployment crisis. What is needed, and what the system appears unable to deliver, is short-term action on jobs and credible long-term deficit reduction. About the best that can be said of the debt-ceiling agreement is that it doesn't entail major spending cuts for this year or next. Of the nine hundred billion dollars in cuts already agreed upon, just twenty-five billion- less than one per cent of the federal budget-are slated for fiscal 2012. The cuts get steeper in later years. Where those cuts fall, and whether they are accompanied by significant revenue increases, will be determined by a "super committee" of congressional Democrats and Republicans, which is to report back in November with recommendations on how to find another trillion and a half dollars in deficit reduction. If the members cannot reach an agreement, or if Congress rejects its recommendations, a series of automatic cuts will go into effect in 2013.

In pushing the government to the brink of default, the House Republicans adopted outrageous tactics. Those tactics worked politically, but at great cost to the country. The debt downgrade was a direct result of the political paralysis in Washington. In retrospect, the White House erred last December in not demanding a raise in the debt ceiling as the price of extending the Bush tax cuts. Failing that, Obama should have refused to bargain with the House Republicans and threatened, if necessary, to raise the debt ceiling by administrative order, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.

But this was more than a failure of tactics: it was a failure of strategy. After last year's midterm elections, when the Tea Party swept into Washington, the Administration moved toward fiscal conservatism, proposing four trillion dollars in deficit reduction over twelve years. This proposal depended on two assumptions: that Republicans would negotiate in good faith, considering tax increases as well as spending cuts; and that the economy was strong enough to sustain an expansion in the face of a shift to austerity policies.

Now that those assumptions have proved to be alarmingly false, the President, while not ignoring the imperative of long-term debt reduction, must return to the economics of growth. He has already put forward some proposals-extending the payroll-tax cut, passing new trade agreements, clearing away some of the red tape that businesses encounter-which would help, but not nearly enough. A substantive jobs bill is what's called for, and the White House should send one to Congress as soon as possible after it returns from the summer recess.

What sort of policies might make a real dent in unemployment? Providing subsidies to businesses that hire new workers is one. Extending extra tax cuts to firms that build new factories and offices is another. More radical ideas include investing in infrastructure projects, importing a version of the job-sharing scheme that Germany has used, and launching a national community- service program. Most of these things would involve the federal government's borrowing and spending more money, but that, of course, is what governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn.

On Wall Street, unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years. So suggestions that a new jobs package would spook the markets are without foundation. Even now, after the bond downgrade, the markets and credit-ratings agencies would probably embrace a carefully costed package that is limited in duration, because it makes economic sense. The quickest way to reduce the budget deficit is to get potential taxpayers back to work.
The real barrier to a meaningful jobs program is not the markets or the ratings agencies but the GOP. If the Republicans were to vote down a jobs bill, however. It would hurt not only the economy but also, potentially, their own prospects. Meanwhile. for a Democratic President, especially one who has disappointed many of his supporters, campaigning as someone who fought to create jobs, rather than as a copycat budget cutter, would seem a winning strategy.

reprinted from The New Yorker, 15 August 2011, p.29

Act 1, Scene 3

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

from "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare

How Did The Dog Become Our Master?

A Dog Story by Adam Gopnik

A year ago, my wife and I bought a dog for our ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had tried to fob her off with fish, which died, and with a singing blue parakeet, which she named Skyler, but a Havanese puppy was what she wanted, and all she wanted. With the diligence of a renegade candidate pushing for a political post, she set about organizing a campaign: quietly mustering pro-dog friends as a pressure group; introducing persuasive literature (John Grogan's ''Marley& Me"); demonstrating reliability with bird care.

I was so ignorant about dogs that I thought what she wanted must be a Javanese, a little Indonesian dog, not a Havanese, named for the city in Cuba. When we discovered, with a pang, the long Google histories that she left on my wife's computer - havanese puppies/havanese care/how to find a Havanese/havanese, convincing your parents - I assumed she was misspelling the name. But in fact it was a Havanese she wanted, a small, sturdy breed that, in the past decade, has become a mainstay of New York apartment life. (It was recognized as a breed by the American Kennel Club only in the mid-nineties.) Shrewd enough to know that she would never get us out of the city to an approved breeder, she quietly decided that she could live with a Manhattan pet store "puppy mill" dog if she could check its eyes for signs of illness and its temperament for symptoms of sweetness. Finally, she backed us into a nice pet store on Lexington Avenue and showed us a tiny bundle of caramel-colored fur with a comical black mask. "That's my dog," she said simply.

My wife and I looked at each other with a wild surmise: the moment parents become parints, creatures beyond convincing who exist to be convinced. When it carne to dogs, we shared a distaste that touched the fringe of disgust and flirted with the edge of phobia. I was bitten by a nasty German-shepherd guard dog when I was about eight - not a terrible bite but traumatic all the same – and it led me ever after to cross streets and jump nervously at the sight of any its kind. My wife's objections were narrowly aesthetic: the smells, the slobber, the shit. We both disliked dog owners in their dog-owning character: the empty laughter as the dog jumped up on you; the relentless apologies for the dog's bad behavior, along with the smiling assurance that it was all actually rather cute. Though I could read, and even blurb, friends' books on dogs, I felt about them as if the same friends had written books on polar exploration: I could grasp it as a subject worthy of extended poetic description, but it was not a thing I had any plans to pursue myself "Dogs are failed humans," a witty friend said, and I agreed.

We were, however, doomed, and knew it. The constitution of parents and children may, like the British one, be unwritten, but, as the Brits point out, that doesn't make it less enforceable or authoritative. The unwritten compact that governs family life says somewhere that children who have waited long enough for a dog and want one badly enough have. a right to have one. I felt. as the Queen must at meeting an unpleasant Socialist Prime Minister: it isn't what you wanted, but it's your constitutional duty to welcome, and pretend. The pet-store people packed up the dog, a female, in a little crate and Olivia excitedly considered names. Willow? Daisy? Or maybe Honey? “Why not call her Butterscotch?" I suggested, prompted by a dim memory of one of those Dan Jenkins football novels from the seventies, where the running-back hero always uses that word when referring to the hair color of his leggy Texas girlfriends. Olivia nodded violently. Yes! That was her name. Butterscotch.

We took her home and put her in the back storage room to sleep. Tiny thing, we thought. Enormous eyes. My wife and I were terrified that it would be a repeat of the first year with a baby, up all night. But she was good. She slept right through the first night, and all subsequent nights, waiting in the morning for you past the point that a dog could decently be expected to wait, greeting you with a worried look, then racing across the apartment to her "papers"-the pads that you put out for a dog to pee and shit on. Her front legs were shorter than her rear ones, putting a distinctive hop in her stride. ("Breed trait," Olivia said, knowingly.) All the creature wanted was to please. Unlike a child, who pleases in spite of herself, Butterscotch wanted to know what she could do to make you happy, if only you kept her fed and let her play. She had none of the imperiousness of a human infant. A child starts walking away as soon as she starts to walk-on the way out, from the- very first day. What makes kids so lovable is the tension between their helplessness and their drive to deny it. Butterscotch, though, was a born courtesan. She learned the tricks Olivia taught her with startling ease: sitting and rolling over and lying down and standing and shaking hands (or paws) and jumping over stacks of unsold books. The terms of the tricks were apparent: she did them for treats. But, if it was a basic bargain, she employed it with an avidity that made it the most touching thing I have seen. When a plate of steak appeared at the end of dinner, she would race through her repertory of stunts and then offer a paw to shake. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it!

She was a bit like one of Al Capp's Shmoos, in "Li'l Abner," designed to please people at any cost. (people who don't like Havanese find them too eager to please, and lacking in proper doggie dignity and reserve.) The key to dogginess, I saw, is that, though dogs are pure creatures of sensation, they are also capable of shrewd short-term plans. Dogs don't live, like mystics, in the moment; dogs live in the minute. They live in and for the immediate short-term exchange: tricks for food, kisses for a walk. When Butterscotch saw me come home with bags from the grocery store, she would leap with joy as her memory told her that something good was about to happen, just as she had learned that a cloud-nexus of making phone calls and getting the leash and taking elevators produced a chance to play with Lily and Cuba, the two Havanese who live upstairs. But she couldn't grasp exactly how these chains of events work: some days when she heard the name "Lily" she rushed to the door, sometimes to her leash, sometimes to the elevator, and sometimes to the door on our floor that corresponds to the door on the eighth floor where Lily lives.

But she had another side, too. At the end of a long walk, or a prance around the block, she would come in with her usual happy hop, and then, let off her leash, she would growl and hiss and make Ewok like noises that we never otherwise heard from her, it was a little scary at first, like the moment in "Gremlins" when the cute thing becomes a wild, toothy one. Then she would race madly from one end of the hall to the other, bang her head, and turn around and race back, still spitting and snotting and mumbling guttural consonants to herself, like a mad German monarch. Sometimes she would climax this rampage by pulling up hard and showing her canines and directing two sharp angry barks at Olivia, her owner, daring her to do something about it. Then, just as abruptly, Butterscotch would stop, sink to the floor, and once again become a sweet, smiling companion, trotting loyally behind whoever got up first. The wolf was out; and then was tucked away in a heart-drawer of prudence. This behavior, Olivia assured us, is a Havanese breed trait, called "run-like-hell," though "Call of the Wild" might be a better name. (Olivia spent hours on the Havanese forum, a worldwide chat board composed mostly of older women who call themselves the small dogs' "mommies," and share a tone of slightly addled coziness, which Olivia expertly imitated. Being a dog owner pleased her almost more than owning a dog.)

But what could account for that odd double nature, that compelling sweetness and implicit wildness? I began to read as widely as I could about this strange, dear thing that I had so long been frightened of.

Darwinism begins with dogs. In the opening pages of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin describes the way breeders can turn big dogs into small ones, through selective breeding, and he insists that all dogs descend from wolves. This was proof of the immense amount of inherited variation, and of the ability of inheritance, blended and directed, to take new directions. “Who will believe that animals closely resembling the Italian greyhound, thee bloodhound, the bulldog or Blenheim spaniel, etc. – so unlike all wild Canidae – ever existed freely in a state of nature?” Darwin wrote. Out of one, many.

Ever since, what we think Darwinism says had been structured in part by what we think it says about dogs. Darwin’s instinct was, as usual, right. Dogs do descend directly from wolves; the two species can still breed with one another (producing many scary-looking new back breeds). The vexed issue is how long ago they parted ways, and why. The biological evidence and the archeological evidence are at war: DNA analysis points to a very remote break between wolves and dogs, certainly no later than a hundred thousand years ago, while the earliest unequivocal archeological evidence for domesticated dogs dates to just fifteen thousand years ago or so.

One haunting scrap of evidence is a grave site in Israel, twelve thousand years old, where what is undoubtedly a dog is embraced in death by what is undoubtedly a woman: It suggests that the dog, completely doglike-smaller cuspids and shorter muzzle--was already the object of human affection at the dawn of the age of agriculture. The fullness of this early relation suggests the classic story of domestication, that of the master man and the willing dog. The historian of science Edmund Russell summarizes this story in his new book, "Evolutionary History": "Some brave soul burrowed into a wolf den, captured cubs, brought the cubs back to camp, and trained them to hunt by command." Before long, "people realized that tame wolves (dogs) could perform other tasks too.... Breeders manufactured each variety by imagining the traits required, picking males and females with those traits, and mating them." If you needed to rid your camp of badgers, you bred one long, thin dog to another until you had a dachshund, which could go down a badger hole. The problem with this view, Russell explains is that it implies a level of far-sightedness on the part of the first breeders that defies all evolutionary experience: "Wolves do not obey human commands, and it is to imagine that people persisted in raising dangerous animals for uncertain benefits far in the future." Tosee a Butterscotch in a wolf would have required magical foresight, as if our Paleolithic fathers had started breeding leaping mice in the hope that they would some day fly.

And so countering this view comes a new view of dog history, more in keeping our own ostentatiously less man-centered world view. Dogs~ we are now told, by a sequence of scientists and speculators-beginning with the biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, in their 2001 masterwork, "Dogs" – domesticated themselves. They chose us. A marginally calmer canid came close to the circle of human warmth - and, more important, human refuse - and was tolerated by the humans inside: let him eat the garbage. Then this scavenging wolf mated with another calm wolf, and soon a family of calmer wolves proliferated just outside the firelight. It wasn't cub-snatching on the part of humans, but breaking and entering on the part of wolves, that gave us dogs. "Hey, you be ferocious and eat them when you can catch them," the protodogs said, in evolutionary effect, to their wolf siblings. “We'll just do what they like and have them feed us. Dignity? It's a small price to pay for free food. Check with you in ten thousand years and we'll see who's had more kids." (Estimated planetary dog population: one billion. Estimated planetary wild wolf population: three hundred thousand.)

The dog maven Mark Derr, in his forthcoming book "How the Dog Became the Dog," offers a particularly ambitious and detailed version of how the wandering wolf became the drifting dog. He adds to the Coppingers' story many epics and epicycles, including a central role for Neanderthal dog-lovers. Though Dert's book, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, is sometimes a little fantastical, his motive, only half-disclosed, is touching: Derr isn't just a dog fancier, one realizes, but a kind of dog nationalist, a dog jingoist. He believes that what was an alliance of equals has, in very recent centuries, been debased to produce Stepin Fetchit dogs, like Butterscotch, conscripted into cuteness. Dogs began as allies, not pets, and friends, not dependents.

At a minimum, the theory of the drifting dog can point to some living proof, though not of a kind likely to bring joy to the dog-dignifiers. As the British anthro-zoologist John Bradshaw points out in his new book, "Dog Sense," even now most dogs drift-not as equals or allies but as waifs. In Third World towns, "village dogs" hang around, ownerless, eating garbage, fending for themselves, and getting beaten off only when they become nuisances. (There's a reason that it's called a dog's life.) The usual condition of a dog is to be a pigeon.

The catch is that, from an evolutionary point of view, these village dogs are already dogs. They illuminate the problem. Since the domestication of the dog predates agriculture, dogs couldn't have wandered into settlements; there were no settlements. They couldn't have wandered with hunter-gatherers, because other wolf packs would have marked and owned the next territory. There just doesn't seem to have been enough time for the slow development from wandering wolf to drifting proto-dog without the single decisive intervention of someone to nudge the wolf toward dogdom. "The scenario of self domestication is very hard to envision if people were still wandering seminomadica11y, and the evidence says they were," the anthropologist Pat Shipman says firmly in her book "The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human." Anyway, why didn't hyenas and foxes, which have been around for just as long, discover the same advantage in hanging close to people as wolves did?

One explanation, favored by Bradshaw, supposes a classic Darwinian mutation, a full-fledged "sport" of nature. At some point, a mutant wolf appeared, by chance, which was not just marginally tamer but far more biddable than any other creature. This sounds odd, but, as Bradshaw points out, dogs are odd, essentially unique - the only animal on earth that needs no taming to live with people while still happily breeding with its own. The ability of dogs to make a life with us isn't a product of their being man-bred; it was the change that let men breed them.

More is at stake here than a speculation about the history of one pet species. If the new story is more or less right, and dogs chose to become dogs (meaning only that the tamer, man-friendly wolves produced more cubs than their wilder, man-hating cousins), then the line between artificial and natural selection seems far less solid, and the role of man at the center less fixed. Indeed, Russell suggests that even our distinct breeds maybe more drifts than decisions: ''Unconscious selection probably played a more important role than methodical selection because it was simpler and brought benefits in the present.... Keeping the dogs best at a certain task in each generation would have steadily enhanced the desired traits." There maybe a providence in the fall of a sparrow; but there is Darwinian contingency even in the hop of the Havanese.

What a dog owner, with the full authority of fourteen months of dog, suggests might be missing from these accounts is something simple: people love pets. Bradshaw, though he likes the drifting-dog theory, observes that we needn't justify the existence of pet dogs in our early history by arguments about their value as food or tools. The norm even in the most "primitive" hunter gatherer societies is to take a pet even though--as with the dingo pups that the Aborigines take in Australia-it always goes "bad" as an adult, and is of no help in any task at all. (The dingoes are feral descendants of domesticated Asian dogs, with their social genes somehow wrenched awry.) For that matter, people do live with modern wolves-presumably made more paranoid by millennia of persecution - even now. As Bradshaw writes, "Humans will keep puppies purely for their cuteness." The most useful role a pet may play is to be there for the petting. The way dogs are used now might be the way we use dogs.

Another strange and haunting scrap of evidence about early dog and man is in the Chauvet cave, in southern France: a set of twinned footprints, twenty-six thousand years old, of an eight-year-old child walking side by side, deep into the cave, with what is evidently some kind of hound - a small wolf or a large dog. It may turn out that the tracks come from different times (though their paired strides seem well matched). But for the moment the evidence seems to show that the first dog in all the record was there as the companion of a small boy.

Or girl? Olivias have always wanted Butterscotches. The willing wolf may have wandered into the circle beyond the firelight, but the dog may well have first emerged on the safer side of the fire as the dream companion of a child.

The range of evolutionary just - so stories and speculations is itself proof of the way dogs have burrowed into our imaginations. Half the pleasure of having a dog, I could see, was storytelling about the dog: she was a screen on which we could all project a private preoccupation. In addition to the real dog, each child had a pretend version, a daemon dog, to speak to and about. Luke, our sixteen-year-old, imagined Butterscotch as an elderly, wise woman from the Deep South. "Lez not point the finger, childun," he would have her say when she did something naughty. Olivia had her as a hyper-intense three year-old, full of beans and naivete. "Oh, and then they took me to the Park, and then we had little scraps of steak, and, oh, Skyler-it was the best day ever," she would report the, dog saying to the bird, with the breathlessness of a small child. Even the grownups had a fictive dog who lived alongside the real one: my wife's dog was a year-old baby she had loved and missed (she especially loved the early morning off-leash hours in Central Park, when the dawn belongs to charging dogs and coffee-sipping owners); mine was a genial companion who enjoyed long walks and listening to extended stretches of tentatively composed prose. Once, I was playing recordings of Erroll Garner on piano, that bright, bouncing, syncopated plaintive jazz sound, and Olivia said, "That’s the music Butterscotch hears in her head all day:"

What music does a dog hear in her head all day? Our dog was so much part of the family that we took human feelings and thoughts for granted and then would suddenly be reminded that she experienced the world very differently. Once, we saw her standing at the top of the steps leading to the sunken living room of our apartment. She began to whine and, as she rarely did, to bark, stepping forward to intimidate some creature we couldn't see, then fearfully stepping back. We were sure, from the intensity of her barking that there must be a rodent down by the baseboard that the brave little dog had spotted. Finally, one of us noticed that I had thrown a dark shirt over the back of the white sofa; I picked it up and came toward her with it. She whimpered and then began to staunchly defy her fear by barking again. That was it! She was terrified of a piece of empty brown material. When we tried, the experiment again; she reacted again-not so strongly, but still

So, what music? There is a new literature of dog psychology, to go along with and complement that on dog history. There are accounts of bad dogs cured, like "Bad Dog: A Love Story," by Martin Kihn; of good dogs loved, as in Jill Abramson's 'The Puppy Diaries"; of strange dogs made whole and wild dogs made docile; of love lives altered by loving dogs, a sin Justine van der Leun's ''Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love." The most scientific-minded of the new crop is Alexandra Horowitis well-received "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know." (The title comes, winningly, from a fine Groucho joke.) Horowitz, a former fact checker in these halls, has gone on to become a professor of psychology at Barnard, and she's written a terrifically intelligent and readable book, a study of the cognition of those who don't quite have 'it. She details the dog's sensorium. Dogs have a wildly fine nose for scent we can detect molecules in parts in the million, dogs in parts in the billion. She explains why they sniff each others rear-there's an anal gland peculiar to dogs, its secretions as different each from each as a voice-and why that behavior remains mysterious: dogs don't seem to recognize the distinct smell of other dogs and always return to sniff again; yet no dog likes having it done to him.

On either side of the scientific dog writer, Horowitz or Bradshaw, one senses the phantoms of two alpha writers: Cesar Millan, television's "dog whisperer," and John Grogan, the "Marley & Me" memoirist- the pseudo-science of the dog as pack animal, on the one hand, and the sentimental fiction of the all-sympathetic dog, on the other. Horowitz tries to disabuse us dog owners of the Millanesque notion that dogs are really pack creatures looking for an alpha hound to submit to. Dogs, she explains, are domesticated animals, and to treat them as though they were still in a pack rather than long adapted to a subservient role in a human family is as absurd as treating a child as though it were "really" still a primate living in a tree.

Above all, Horowitz details the dog's special kind of intelligence. When other intelligent animals are presented with a deduction or (“object permanence" problem - a ball vanishes into one of two boxes; which box did it go into? – most of them solve the problem by watching where the ball goes. The dog solves the problem by watching where his owner looks. Dogs are hypersensitive to even the slightest favoring actions of the owner, and will cheerily search for the treat in the box the owner seems to favor even if they have seen the treat go into the other. This was the ancestral bet that dogs made thousands of years ago: give up trying to prey on the prey; try pleasing the people and let them get the prey. Dogs are the only creatures that have learned to gaze directly at people as people gaze at one another, and their connection with us is an essential and enduring one.

Yet Horowitz recognizes, too, the threat of the overly humanized view of the dog. She loves dogs in general - and her own mongrel hound, Finnegan, in particular - but throughout the book are rueful hints, perhaps partly inadvertent, that what the science shows is that the entire dog-man relation is essentially a scam, run by the dogs. Certainly, the qualities inherent in breeds - nobility, haughtiness, solidity, even the smiling happiness of the Havanese - are tricks of our mind, where we project primate expressions of inner mood into canine masks. The Havanese isn't happy and the Shih Tzu isn't angry and the bulldog isn't especially stolid or stubborn; they are just stuck with the faces, smiling or snarling, we’ve pinned on them through breeding. And the virtues we credit them with - whether the big ones of bravery, loyalty, and love or the smaller ones of happiness, honesty, and guilt-are just as illusory. "Maxie looked so guilty when I found her chewing the treat box that it was just hilarious," a "mom" will write on the Havanese forum-but these are illusions, projected onto creatures whose repertory of consciousness is very much smaller. Loyalty, longing, and even grief are, the evidence suggests, mere mimic emotions projected into two far simpler ones that dogs actually possess: adherence to the food-giver and anxiety about the unfamiliar.

We’ve all heard the accounts of dogs leaping to the rescue, pulling children from the water when the ice cracks, and so on, but Horowitz points out that, in staged situations of crisis, dogs don't leap to the rescue or even try to get help. If a bookcase is made to fall (harmlessly, but they don't know that) on their owner, they mostly just stand there, helpless and confused. The dog may bark when it sees its owner in distress, and the barking may summon help; the dog stays near its family, even when frightened, and that may be useful. But the dog has no particular plan or purpose, much less resolution or courage. This doesn't mean that the recorded rescues haven't happened; it's just that the many more moments when the dogwatches its owners lip beneath the ice don't get recorded. The dog will bark at a burglar; but the dog will also bark at a shirt.

Maybe, though, Horowitz and Bradshaw are too quick to accept the notion that the dog is merely a creature of limited appetite and reinforced instinct. Not so many years ago, after all, people in white lab coats were saying exactly the same things abut human babies - that they were half blind, creatures of mere reflex and associative training, on whom their dottle-brained moms were projecting all kinds of cognition that they couldn't actually process. Now psychologists tell us that babies are intellectually rich and curious and hypothesis-forming and goal-directed. One wonders if something similar isn't about to happen with pets. The experts, Bradshaw especially, tell us that Butterscotch sits by the door all afternoon because she has been unconsciously trained to associate Olivis’s afterschool homecoming with the delivery of treats. But what would be so different if we said that she sits by the door because she is waiting patiently fur Olivia, has a keen inner sense of what time she'll be home, and misses her because they play together and enjoy each other's company, which, of course, includes the pleasures of good food? This is the same description, covering exactly the same behavior, only the first account puts the act in terms of mechanical reflexes and the other in terms of desires and hopes and affections. Our preference for the former kind of language may look as strange to our descendants, and to Butterscotch's, as it would if we applied it to a child. (The language of behaviorism and instinct can be applied to anything, after all: were not really falling in love; were just anticipating sexual pleasure leading to a prudent genetic mix.)

But, if the reductive argument seems to cheat dogs of their true feelings, the opposite tendency, which credits dogs with feelings almost identical to those of humans and with making the same claims on our moral conscience, is equally unconvincing. In the forthcoming "Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy," Kathy Rudy, who teaches ethics at Duke, makes the case for dog equality just as strongly as Derr does in his more narrowly evolution minded book. Rudy believes that dogs have been as oppressed and colonized as Third World peoples have, and that what they need is not empathy but liberation. She has a confused notion of something that she calls "capitalism," and which is somehow held uniquely responsible for the oppression of animals, including dogs. Of course, only advanced capitalist societies have started movements for animal rights; precapitalist societies were far crueller to animals, as are non-capitalist modem ones. (Consider the state of zoos and animals in the Eastern bloc or in China.) But her love for dogs is evident throughout. She tells us that "it would not be an overstatement to say that most of the important and successful relationships I’ve had in my life have been with nonhuman animals," and she makes a passionate case for treating animals as equals in rights, not as commodities to be cynically exploited for research or even, I suppose, for family bonding.

The trouble with arguments for treating animals as equals is that the language of rights and responsibility implies, above all, reciprocity. We believe it to be wrong for whites to take blacks as slaves, and wrong for blacks to enslave whites. Yet animals themselves are generally far crueller to other animals in the wild than we are to them in civilization; though we may believe it to be unethical for us to torment a lion, few would say it is unethical for the lion to torment the gazelle. To use the language of oppression on behalf of creatures that in their natures must be free to oppress others is surely to be using the wrong moral language. A language of compassion is the right one: we should not be cruel to lions because they suffer pain. We don't prevent the lion from eating the gazelle because we recognize that .he is, in the fine old-fashioned term, a dumb animal-not one capable of reasoning about effects, or really altering his behavior on ethical grounds, and therefore not rightly covered by the language of rights. Dogs, similarly, deserve protection from sadists, but not deference to their need for, say, sex. We can neuter them with a clear conscience, because abstinence is not one of their options.

This is why we feel uneasy with too much single-minded love directed toward dogs - with going canine, like Rudy in her dog-centered love life. It isn't the misdirection so much as the inequality, the disequilibrium between the complex intensity of human love and the pragmatism of animal acceptance. Love is a two-way street. The woman who strokes and coos and holds her dog too much unnerves us, not on her behalf but on the dog's. He's just not that into you.

The deepest problem that dogs pose is what it would be like if all our virtues and emotions were experienced as instincts. The questions about what a dog is capable of doing - how it sees, smells, pees, explores - are, in principle, answerable. The question of what goes on in the mind of a dog - what it feels like to be a dog - is not. In this context, Horowitz cites a classic article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, "What Does It Feel Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel's point was that the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be one. He writes: “It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”

Though we can know that dogs live by smells, not by words, we can't really imagine what it would feel like to be a creature for which thoughts are smells. We, creatures of language who organize our experience in abstract concepts, can't imagine what its like to be in the head of a being that has no language. To have the experiences while retaining our memory of humanness would make us a human in a dog suit, not a dog. We would have to become a dog, for real; then, reborn as a human, we couldn't explain to ourselves, let alone someone else, what it's like to be a dog, since the language of being - like isn't part of what being a dog is like.

Yet, for all the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us and them, dogs have found a shortcut into our minds. They live, as Horowitz and Bradshaw and Rudy, too, all see, within our circle without belonging to it they speak our language without actually speaking any, and share our concerns without really being able to understand them. The verbs tell some of the story: the dog shares, feels, engages, without being able to speak, plan, or (in some human sense) think. We may not be able to know: what its like to be a dog; but, over all those thousands of years, Butterscotch has figured out, in some instrumental way, what its like to be a person. Without language, concepts, long-term causal thinking, she can still enter into the large part of our mind made up of appetites, longings, and loyalties. She does a better impersonation of a person than we do an approximation of a dog. That it is, from the evolutionary and philosophical point of view, animpersonation, produced and improved on by generations of dogs, because it pays, doesn't alter its power. Dogs have little imagination about us and our inner lives but limitless intuition about them; we have false intuitions about their inner lives but limitless imagination about them. Our relationship meets in the middle.

One day, around Christmas, I got a mixed box of chocolates-milk for Olivia, darks for me - and noticed, in the evening, that some were missing, and that Butterscotch had brown around her muzzle. "She's eaten chocolate!" Olivia cried. Chocolate is very bad for dogs. She went at once to the forum. "My hand trembles as I write this," she typed, "but my baby has eaten chocolate!" Blessedly, we got an avalanche of counsel from Havanese lovers all over the world: check her, watch her, weigh a chocolate, weigh the dog, keep an eye on her all night. Finally, I put her to bed in her back room, and promised Olivia I would monitor her. Olivia chewed her lip and went to bed, too.

It can't really be dangerous, I thought; I mean, these creatures eat out of garbage cans. At four in the morning, I went in to check on her. She stirred at once, and we looked at each other, shared that automatic enigmatic gaze that is the glue of the man-dog relation. I stayed with her until the light came, annoyed beyond words at the hold she had put on our unwilling hearts. She made it through the night a lot better than I did. Dogs aren't the Uncle Toms of the animal world, I thought as dawn came; they're the dignified dual citizens who plead the case for all of mute creation with their human owners. We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints "love out to the horizon," circle after circle-but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don't look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn's worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable- toward, I don't know, deep sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual. What's terrifying is the number of bad stories to which I was once inured, and which now claim my attention. A friend's dog had leaped from a window in a thunderstorm and only now could I feel the horror of it: the poor terrified thing's leap. Another friend's dog had been paralyzed, and instead of a limping animal I saw a fouled friend, a small Hector. My circles of compassion have been pried open.

We can't enter a dog's mind, but, as on that dark-chocolate night, I saw that it isn't that hard to enter a dog's feelings: feelings of pain, fear, worry, need. And so the dog sits right at the edge of our circle, looking out toward all the others. She is ours, but she is other, too. A dog belongs to the world of wolves she comes from and to the circle of people she has joined. Another circle of existence, toward which we are capable of being compassionate, lies just beyond her, and her paw points toward it, even as her eyes scan ours for dinner. Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit within their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it's like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate. The deal that the dog has made to get here, as all the dog scientists point out, is brutal. I’ll act all, you know, like, loving and loyal, if you feed me. Yet don't we make the same deal - courtship and gentle promises of devotion in exchange for sex, sex in exchange for status? Creatures of appetites and desires, who need to eat, and have not been spayed, we run the same scam on each other that Butterscotch runs on us. And a scam that goes on long enough, and works more or less to everyone's benefit, is simply called a culture. What makes the dog deal moving is that you two, you and your dog, are less the willing renewers of it than just the living witnesses to a contract signed between man and wolf thirty thousand years ago. What's in the fine print that you don't read is that if you accept the terms it no longer feels like a deal.

Butterscotch, meanwhile, seems happy. She’s here, she's there, a domestic ornament; she takes a place at the table, or under it, anyway, and remains an animal, with an animal’s mute confusions and narrow routines and appetites. She jumps up on visitors, sniffs friends, chews shoes, and, even as we laughingly apologize for her misbehavior and order her "Off!," we secretly think her misbehavior is sweet. After all, where we are creatures of past and future, she lives in the minute's joy: a little wolf, racing and snorting and scaring; and the small ingratiating spirit, doing anything to please. At times, I think that I can see her turn her head and look back at the ghost of the wolf mother she parted from long ago, saying, "See, it was a good bet after all; they're nice to me, mostly." Then she waits by the door for the next member of the circle she has insinuated herself into to come back to the hearth and seal the basic social contract common to all things that breathe and feel and gaze: love given for promises kept. How does anyone live without a dog? I can't imagine.

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker, 8 August 2011, p.46

The Worst Pies in London

(spoken) A customer!

Wait!
What's your rush? What's your hurry?
You gave me such a --
Fright, I thought you was a ghost!
Half a minute, can't cher sit?
Sit you down, sit!
All I meant is that I haven't seen a customer for weeks!
Did you come here for a pie, sir?
Do forgive me if me head's a little vague --
Ugh! What is that?
But you think we had the plague!
From the way that people
Keep avoiding --
No you don't!
Heaven knows I try, sir!
Ick!
But there's no one comes in even to inhale!
Right you are, sir, would you like a drop of ale?
Mind you, I can't hardly blame them!
These are probably the worst pies in London!
I know why nobody cares to take them,
I should know,
I make them,
But good? No!
The worst pies in London,
Even that's polite!
The worst pies in London,
If you doubt it, take a bite!
Is that just disgusting?
You have to concede it!
It's nothing but crusting!
Here, drink this, you'll need it!
The worst pies in London...
And no wonder with the price of meat
What it is
When you get it
Never
Thought I'd live to see the day
Men'd think it was a treat
Findin' poor
Animals
Wot are dyin' in the street!
Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop!
Does a business but I notice something weird.
Lately all her neighbors' cats have disappeared!
Have to hand it to her --
Wot I calls
Enterprise
Poppin' pussies into pies!
Wouldn't do in my shop!
Just the thought of it's enough to make you sick!
And I'm tellin' you, them pussycats is quick!
No denying times is hard, sir
Even harder than the worst pies in London!
Only lard and nothing more --
Is that just revolting,
All greasy and gritty?
It looks like it's molting,
And tastes like,
Well, pity
A woman alone,
With limited wind,
And the worst pies in London!
Ah, sir, times is hard,
Times is hard!

5 Common Interview Questions - and how to answer them effectively

While there's not always one right way to answer an interview question, some approaches are better than others. Here are some questions from the survey that you may face in your next interview, along with tips on how -- and how not -- to answer them:

"Can you tell me a little about yourself?"

Do: Prepare for this popular question -- which is often the first one asked -- by developing an incisive summary of your career. Your sound bite should be succinct but include enough detail about your pertinent skills, work experience, accomplishments and goals that the hiring manager can quickly see what you bring to the table.

Don't: Give your life story, discuss leisure pursuits or describe aspects of your professional background that aren't relevant to the position you're interviewing for.

"Why do you want to join our company?"

Do: Walk into the interview with beyond-the-basics knowledge of the company. Read its website and marketing materials and relevant news stories to gain a good grasp of its mission, history, reputation and corporate culture. The more information you collect, the more specific you can be about why you're an excellent fit.

Don't: Answer in the context of your financial needs. Saying, "I hear you provide good pay and benefits" or, "Frankly, I need a job" won't score you any points.

"What's your biggest weakness?"

Do: View this as an opportunity to demonstrate your self-awareness, sincerity and problem-solving prowess. Mention an area where you could improve and spotlight the steps you've taken to do so.

Here's an example: "In the past, I sometimes overextended myself. Reading time-management books has helped me, though. Now, I make prioritized to-do lists, I've learned it's OK to delegate and I volunteer for extra projects only when I'm caught up on core responsibilities."

Don't: Offer a transparently fake flaw ("I care too much about my work.") or pretend to be perfect ("Weaknesses? None come to mind."). And, of course, don't be your own worst critic by citing countless shortcomings.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"

Do: Position yourself as an ambitious but flexible realist. One way to do this is to speak of your desire to continually take on broader responsibilities and grow professionally no matter what role you're in. You also might emphasize your commitment to lifelong learning by mentioning your interest in attaining advanced industry certifications.

Don't: Focus on an overly lofty objective. For instance, boldly proclaiming you intend to be the firm's next chief financial officer when you're an entry-level accounting candidate certainly shows drive, but it's not a practical five-year objective. In addition, steer clear of fanciful daydreaming ("I'll be counting my lottery winnings on a Hawaiian beach.").

"Why are you looking to leave your current employer?"

Do: The interviewer is trying to figure out if you truly want the position, or if you're looking for any way out of a bad job. Reiterate what you like about the role you're seeking rather than gripe about the one you hope to vacate. Make it clear you're chasing a great opportunity, not running away from an unpleasant situation.

Don't: Speak ill of your current employer. Regardless of how unhappy you are with your job or company, never act bitter or resentful in an interview. Hiring managers seek candidates who are loyal, positive-minded and team-oriented. They aren't inclined to hire people they perceive to be potential headaches.

Finally, despite your best efforts, you can't anticipate every question you'll be asked.

"How would you define your personality in one word?" or "How will you behave if you get blamed for something you didn't do?" were just two of the unique questions that popped up in a survey of hiring managers.

If an interviewer throws you a curveball, maintain eye contact, take a deep breath and pause to consider your response. Many of your competitors will fluster easily. Set yourself apart by keeping your cool in the hot seat.

Remembering the Freedom Riders

Mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested on May 24, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi, after arriving from Montgomery, Alabama. They were arrested after going into a whites-only waiting room and refusing to move on when asked to do so by police.

Remembering the Freedom Riders

by Calvin Trillin

Last fall, at a gathering in Santa Fe on the subject of storytelling, I met a woman whose name sounded familiar. It turned out that I had last encountered her precisely fifty years before. She was then a six-year-old African-American girl, Ruby Bridges, being escorted into William Frantz School, in New Orleans, by federal marshals every morning, and I was a reporter standing across the street from the school, observing a gang of women who were spewing obscenities and racial epithets at her. I remember "black ape" as one of the phrases they were particularly fond of Morning after morning, I stood amidst those women, some of whom seemed to have settled comfortably into their role as featured players on the evening news. When I approached one of them with a question during the second week, her response was "I only speak to Martin Agronsky" -then a well-known correspondent for NBC. Ever since, I've had on the wall of my office a photograph, taken by a Life photographer, of a worried-looking little girl flanked by two men wearing U.S. Marshal armbands. In Santa Fe, I told Ruby that it was nice to see her all grown up.

The desegregation of the New Orleans schools took place toward the beginning of a year I spent in the South, in the Atlanta bureau of Time--from the fall of 1960 to the fall of1961. It's a period now being recalled in any number of half-century commemorations, because a lot happened in that twelve-month span. The public schools of New Orleans and Atlanta were desegregated. A federal judge ordered two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, into the University of Georgia. Sit-in movements succeeded in desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities in Atlanta and Nashville. Freedom Riders made their way through the South in an effort to demonstrate that Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were routinely flouted on buses and in waiting rooms. Both before and after those twelve months, there were extended periods-from the Montgomery bus boycott, in the mid-fifties, until the first sit in, in 1960, for instance-when the civil rights story faded from the front pages. The country had not yet begun to see segregation as a moral wrong that had to be addressed rather than as a regrettable regional peculiarity. The reporter I replaced as the junior man in the two-man Atlanta bureau had left six months before I arrived; the reporter in that position when I returned to Atlanta early in 1963, just before the brutal response of police dogs and fire hoses to demonstrations in Birmingham shocked the nation, told me that, as far as he could tell, the civil-rights story had pretty much petered out.

During the year I was in the South, I occasionally worked on something other than civil rights. During the first burst of national coverage of the John Birch Society, whose founder famously believed that § Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist conspiracy, I was dispatched to Macon, Georgia, to look into the early life of the man the society was named after. (I concluded that it had probably been named appropriately: as an undergraduate at Mercer University, a Southern Baptist school, Birch had managed to provoke a heresy trial of several professors.) Now and then, I was assigned to contribute to what was called a "business roundup" -phoning around to bankers to hear what they had to say about interest rates or inflation or the housing market. Mostly, though, I'd be at the airport early in the week for a flight to some-, place where Jim Crow was being threatened. (Air transportation was one reason for the bureau's location: it used to be said that when you die in the South you might go to Heaven, but you'd have to change planes in Atlanta.) Atlanta itselfwas going through sit-ins, boycotts, mass meetings, and an impending school desegregation. Even on weekends, I was on what we sometimes called the Seg Beat.

I wonder whether I would have remained in reporting if I had spent twelve months in the South when the civil-rights story was in one of its dormant periods twelve months of nothing more exciting than the occasional folksy conversation about interest rates with Mills B. Lane, Jr., of the Citizens & Southern National Bank. Time was then practicing what was called "group journalism," so that the correspondent in the field filed a long report for the writer in New York, who used it (among other sources) to write for a senior editor, who sometimes rewrote the piece with the fluidity available to someone who is working without the encumbrance of having read the original file. It was said that Time was a great place for a reporter to work unless he read the magazine. But I never felt that 1'd been wasting my time on reporting that didn't show up in the finished product, because I found myself building knowledge on a single subject: race. Any writing requires a leap of confidence-you have to convince yourself that somebody is going to be interested in what you put down on the page and believing that you know more about the subject than most of your readers do can work wonders for your confidence.

Once I'd accepted the job, I had, of course, done some reading. I knew from W. J. Cash's "The Mind of the South" that the scene then conjured up by the phrase "antebellum South"-a cultivated plantation owner composes poetry at his Louis XIV desk while dozens of his slaves sing in the cotton fields-was drawn from Hollywood rather than from history, even if most white Southerners accepted it as gospel. I knew from C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" that physical separation of the races was not something that had always been part of the fabric of life in the South but a system that had been installed in the eighteen-nineties, after Reconstruction. Mainly, though, what confidence I had came from dealing with the subject week after week. I heard so many sermons in black churches that I began holding what I called the Martin Luther King Extended Metaphor Contest. (King himself was ineligible, since he would have won in a walk every week.) I knew all the verses to 'We Shall Overcome." My expense account included items like "trousers torn in racial dispute" and "after prayer-meeting snack, Tuskegee, $3.75." I could calibrate a white Southerner's racial views by the way he pronounced the word "Negro." I'd been exposed to enough Ku Klux Klan terminology to know a kleagle from a klaxon from a klavern. I had watched ordinary people make momentous moral decisions-a white mother in New Orleans deciding that she had to walk her first grader past that gang of screaming women outside William Frantz School in defiance of a white boycott, a Greek-immigrant diner owner with tears in his eyes telling black sit-in students in Atlanta that, as much as he sympathized with their cause, serving them would mean the end of his business. I was deeply immersed in what my daughters call my Boy Reporter Mode. I loved it.

The University of Georgia has celebrated two anniversaries of its desegregation. At the fortieth, a building was renamed the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building. During a panel at the fiftieth, last January, Robert Cohen-a civil rights historian who taught for a time at Georgia and is now at N.Y.U.-said that, given the academic and cultural constrictions of Jim Crow, he thought that what had happened a half century before was not that the university was desegregated but that it was freed. Under Jim Crow, Cohen said, Georgia could never have hoped to attract enough professors of distinction to become a firstrate university. How many prominent musicians and artists were going to visit a campus that had, for instance, withdrawn an invitation to Dave Brubeck when it turned out that his combo included a black bass player? Cohen didn't even have to mention how an all-white Georgia football team would have fared in today's Division 1 competition. What he was saying, it seemed to me, was that desegregation had freed a place like the University of Georgia to become part of the United States. In the year I was there, the South-a region where people were constantly being told that what stood between them and the "mongrelization of the races" was racially designated drinking fountains-sometimes seemed like a foreign country.

Or was it, as some would have claimed, simply a section of this country where the presence of two societies was out in the open and codified? For black people, the Jim Crow practiced in the Deep South was, of course, a different order of misery from the form of racial separation that existed in the rest of the country, but it wasn't as if the rest of the country was casually integrated. Kansas City, Missouri, my home town, was largely segregated black people had their own movie theatre and restaurants, for instance----even though it was segregated without signs and rhetoric. When I graduated from high school, in 1953, the schools in Missouri were legally segregated, and, given the absence of speeches connecting that fact to the preservation of the Kansas City Way of Life, I wasn't even aware of it. The board of education referred to in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, was, of course, in Topeka, Kansas-sixty miles down the road, in what had been an antislavery state. At Yale, the first place I'd lived outside Missouri, there were perhaps four or five black students in my class of a thousand or so, and it was taken for granted that a corps of black retainers from New Haven served white students in clubs and societies. The father of Constance Baker Motley, the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the University of Georgia case, was for a time the chef at Skull and Bones. I had never lived in a state whose United States senators warned about the mongrelization of the races, but when I spent that year in the South antimiscegenation laws were still in force not only in Missouri but in such states as Wyoming and Indiana.

The rhetoric did make a serious difference in the views of white Southerners. It seeped through the defenses of people who thought of themselves as independent and enlightened. It was an article of faith among Southern white people, for instance, that non-Southerners simply couldn't understand the situation, partly because they didn't understand black people. A remarkable number of white people I met in the South-not just obvious bigots but respectable, decent people who may themselves have even thought that change had to come-believed racial incidents occurred only because of meddling by outsiders. Yankee reporters were, of course, part of the meddling process. ('Where you from?" was the first question asked of a reporter who encountered a deputy sheriff "I work out of the Atlanta bureau" was not considered a satisfactory answer.) If resistance to change included violence, the press was not just resented but targeted-particularly members of the press who were recording the violence in pictures. In Atlanta, Time shared an office with Life, and I used to say to Donald Uhrbrock, a Life contract photographer, "When we get in one of those situations, at best I don't know you. At worst, I'm one of the people chasing you." Even in the relatively progressive confines of Atlanta, where I had college friends who were natives and where there was an abundance of Yankees in southeastern branch offices, my presence at a social gathering could cause some strained questions or an argument or, worst of all, an attempt to enlighten me about "the Negro" with what I came to think of as yard-sale anthropology. Once, when there was no answer to a phone call I'd made on the Fourth of July to a friend who was studying in Paris, it occurred to me that he might be at the U.S. Embassy's annual Independence Day party. Before I realized where I was, I found myself wondering why the Embassy didn't have such a party in Atlanta.

There were two major commemorations of the Freedom Rides anniversary this spring, one in Jackson, Mississippi, and one in Chicago. (The Chicago event had originally been set for Washington, D.C., where the Freedom Rides had begun. But Oprah Winfrey, who wanted as many Freedom Riders as possible to be either in the audience or onstage for the taping of a show dedicated to the anniversary, offered to fly everyone to Chicago and pay for two nights in the convention-center hotel.) In simplest terms, the Jackson gathering-which was officially co-hosted by Governor Haley Barbour and Bennie Thompson, a black congressman from Mississippi-was a commemoration of a historical period, in the spirit of reconciliation and even apology. The Chicago gathering was a reunion organized by people who believe that the struggle is still going on. One of its organizers, the Reverend Jim Lawson, who fifty years ago had instructed the students of the Nashville movement on the principles of nonviolence, still gives classes in nonviolence. Two others, Diane N ash, a leader of the Nashville movement, and C. T. Vivian, a minister who was active in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, are still working with a project in Neshoba County, Mississippi. A fourth, Ralph D. Fertig, was recently the plaintiff in a Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act. I wasn't surprised to hear that those four organizers of the Chicago gathering had distributed a letter explaining, in strong language, why they wouldn't be attending the Jackson event. Even within the movement, the Freedom Rides were contentious from the start.

They came along at a time when the civil-rights story in the South was shifting. Before the sit-ins gained traction, the story was often covered from the white side ofthe street. There were a few black lawyers, like Constance Motley, bringing legal cases, mostly in school desegregation; there were a few black students involved in desegregating the schools. But the story was mainly about how white people would respond to pressure to change. Would the governor who had campaigned on a platform of "not one, no not one" close the University of Georgia if Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were ordered in by a federal judge? Would business leaders in Atlanta or New Orleans find some peaceful accommodation to school desegregation and thus avoid the turmoil that could lead to the economic stagnation expressed as "another Little Rock"? Increasingly, during the year I was in the South, the impetus moved to the black side of the street.

In Montgomery, during the Freedom Rides, I heard Martin Luther King say that while Brown v. Board of Education had been the legal turning point in the movement, the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins were the psychological turning point. With hundreds of black students from local universities risking injury by sitting nonviolently at whites-only lunch counters, it had become more and more difficult to claim that both white and black people would be content with the Southern Way of Life if outsiders would just stop interfering. To put it another way, black people-particularly, young black people got tired of waiting and took matters into their own hands.

King said that the Freedom Rides were an extension of that psychological turning point. Under the sponsorship of the Congress of Racial Equality, the campaign had begun on May 4,1961, when two buses embarked from Washington, D.C.; it was abandoned ten days later, in Birmingham, after the riders on one bus were attacked by a mob there and the other bus was firebombed in Anniston, sixty miles or so to the east. Within days, students from the Nashville movement appeared in Birmingham to take up where CORE had left off-riding from there to Montgomery and eventually on to Jackson. But at the beginning many black leaders in the South had not, in fact, seen the Freedom Rides as an extension of the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-in movements. Privately, people like Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. in Mississippi, expressed serious reservations or even outright hostility.

CORE, which had its headquarters in New York, was not unknown in the South. Jim Lawson was a member. John Lewis, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, was on both a CORE bus from Washington and the bus that Nashville students rode from Birmingham to Montgomery. There was a CORE chapter in New Orleans. By and large, though, those of us on the Seg Beat thought of CORE as a Northern organization. It was led at the time by James Farmer, an imposing man with a mellifluous voice-we sometimes called him "the black Orson Weiles"-and the most cynical view of the Freedom Ride was that it was an attempt by Farmer to gain some standing for CORE in the South, where there was jockeying for influence among the N.A.A.C.P. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

As many critics within the movement saw the Freedom Rides, a group of out-Mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested on May 24, 1961, in Jackson, Mississippi, after arriving from Montgomery, Alabama. They were arrested after going into a whites-only waiting room and refusing to move on when asked to do so by police. Riders had come up with away of reinvigorating the old lie about a peaceful South being beset by outside agitators-leaving the locals to deal with whatever repercussions were left behind. White liberals were particularly incensed. In Montgomery, where first the press and then the Freedom Riders were set upon by a mob when the bus from Birmingham arrived at the Trailways station, a local man I thought of as open to the proposition that black people ought to be treated as hill citizens said to me, "I was sickened today. For the first time, I was ashamed of being from this town. But this is not sympathy for those nuts. I hate them." It occurs to me now (it didn't then) that if people were going to show that Supreme Court decisions on desegregating interstate waiting rooms had been ignored in the South, those people would have to be outsiders either where they got on the bus or where they got off the bus. Most of the people on those first CORE buses did live in the North, but Farmer rejected the outsider label from the start. 'We don't believe we're outsiders," he said, "because we're Americans."

A Gallup poll in the spring of 1961 found that only one in four Americans approved of the Freedom Ride. (The Kennedy Administration, for a variety of reasons, simply wanted it to go away; one of the speakers at the Chicago gathering referred to John and Robert Kennedy as "the brothers grim.") There had been a similar pattern with the sit-ins. Partly because sitting in at a department-store lunch counter involved consciously breaking the law-and in a privately owned establishment where the proprietor presumably had a right to decide whom he would serve-it had been opposed by some people in the movement, not to speak of many people outside the movement. (The same poll indicated, at a time when the Nashville sit-in movement had pretty much completed the desegregation of the city, that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed the sit-ins and other demonstrations would hurt rather than help the chances of Negroes being integrated in the South.) The sit-in movement, though, had an almost romantic appeal-polite, well-dressed black college students sitting peacefully at a lunch counter while hooligans harassed or even attacked them. Once, when I was allowed in the Atlanta jail to interview some students who had been arrested at a sit-in, I could hear the faint sound of singing grow louder as a guard and I walked toward the cell where they were being held; by the time we reached the cell, the freedom songs, echoing off the jailhouse walls, sounded like a full church choir. I can still conjure up the scene in my mind; I can still hear the singing.

The Freedom Ride was a tougher sell, even after the baton was passed in Birmingham from CORE to the Nashville movement. It appeared that the South's disregard of Supreme Court rulings on interstate transportation could be dramatically demonstrated only if the Freedom Riders who integrated bus stations were met with violence-whether the violence was described by Southern politicians as "looking for trouble" or by nonviolent theoreticians as "cleansing the soul with blood." A number of places in Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia had simply allowed the Freedom Riders to mill about in the whites-only waiting room until their bus left, and then returned to segregated business as usual. Jim Lawson was blunt about the violence. "Chances are that without people being hurt you cannot solve the problem," he said.

By the time the Freedom Ride was stalled for a few days in Montgomery, a united front had formed, but there remained differences in how to proceed. While people like Martin Luther King were trying to convince Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the federal government was obligated to provide protection for the Freedom Rides, people like Jim Lawson, who had volunteered to be on the first bus into Jackson himself, were arguing that protection should be declined, since the issue was not whether black people could use desegregated facilities as long as they travelled in a heavily armed caravan. I had witnessed what would happen without protection. We'd followed the bus by car from Birmingham to Montgomery, where the police escort melted away at the city limits and the Freedom Riders arrived at a station that didn't have a policeman in sight. (Yes, Don Uhrbrock, the Life photographer, was among the first to be assaulted; when the attackers went for his camera, he had the presence of mind to give them a blank roll of film that he had palmed, keeping the roll that provided Life with a full-page picture of one of them pulling back his foot to kick a TV cameraman who had been knocked to the ground.) At a mass meeting in Ralph Abernathy's church during the Montgomery hiatus, it was, in the opinion of many, only an unorganized but eventually effective perimeter of U.S. marshals that prevented the mob from storming the church or burning it down.

In Chicago, fifty years later, Lawson, who has spent much of the intervening time as the pastor of a United Methodist church in Los Angeles, sounded absolutely unchanged in attitude. 'We did not desegregate America," he said. 'We did not dismantle the system." The letter that he and three other organizers of the Chicago event sent to explain why they wouldn't be attending the Jackson commemoration argued, in effect, that the struggle needed especially to be continued in Mississippi ("A lot has changed in the state, but be assured, racism is alive and we1J in Mississippi"). The signatories said that the Jackson commemoration was part of an effort in Mississippi that amounted to "stealing the legacy of the civil rights movement so they can profit from tourism." Some dismal statistics in living standards and education and criminal justice were presented.

At the time, Haley Barbour was still thought of as a potential Presidential candidate. Although that candidacy wasn't mentioned, the letter tapped into a widespread concern that Barbour could use the commemoration as a cover with those minority voters who suspect that he is not truly reconstructed. A few months later, that would have become a particular necessity for him because of an interview in which he credited the Citizens Council with keeping the peace in his home town of Yazoo City during the times of trouble. The Citizens Council, which was founded specifically to resist desegregation, kept the peace in the sense that it favored economic intimidation over violence-having a potential troublemaker fired, say, or kicking his family off land they'd farmed for generations. Barbour made it sound like some benign United Fund committee. Others called it the uptown Klan.

In 1961, Mississippi was thought of as the most intransigent of the Southern states. A few years later, Nina Simone, who could exude a level of anger that made someone like Jim Lawson seem rather accommodating, started singing a song called "Mississippi Goddam." Ray Arsenault, who has written the definitive history of the Freedom Rides, and who spoke at both commemorative gatherings, likes to tell the joke about the 1964 Freedom Summer volunteer from the North who has finished his training in Ohio and finds himself terrified on the night before he's supposed to leave for Jackson. He kneels and says, "God, please send me a sign that you'll go with me to Mississippi." Finally, after a long pause, a deep voice from above says, "I'll go as far as Memphis."

Actually, I felt physically safer in Mississippi than I did in Alabama. In 1961, Mississippi's approach was still dominated by the Citizens Council, which was conscious of how violence could mar the image of a state that was sending speakers north to present itself as a peaceful place to do business. That approach was backed up by the State Sovereignty Commission-a government agency that had evolved into a sort of cornpone Stasi, with investigators who monitored people's writings and contacts and even their love lives. For a Yankee reporter in Mississippi in 1961, there was a feeling of being watched rather than pursued. Once, when I'd arranged an interview with the mayor of Jackson, I arrived at his office to find that local reporters were there as observers; so were the chief of police, the chief of detectives, the city attorney, a city councilman, and the mayor's secretary (to make a transcript). The story in the next day's paper began, "Mayor Allen Thompson told a Time magazine reporter yesterday... "I felt relatively safe in Mississippi, but also uneasy. I wondered if I was imagining that people I didn't know seemed to recognize me on the street. When I was ready to file a story overnight, I tried to do it from Memphis or New Orleans; 1'd phone my office and say, 'I’ve slipped over the border." After the Freedom Ride finally left Montgomery, I wrote in my Time file, "The brutal, chaotic bumbling of Alabama gave way to the well-oiled, kid-glove, image-conscious performance possible only in a monolithic police state."

As the first bus was about to pull out of Montgomery for Jackson, Claude Sitton, the Southern correspondent for the Times, and I were standing in the Trailways station discussing whether it was appropriate for reporters to be on it. In questions about when a reporter would be crossing the line from reporting on to participating in the civil-rights struggle, I tended to take my cues from Claude, whose sympathy was expressed in the fairness and scrupulousness of his reporting. I didn't pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides-the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people who acted on such a belief should have their houses burned down-had an equally compelling case to make. It wasn't like trying to remain objective while covering the Michigan-Ohio State game. But at mass meetings I would never have put any money in the collection cup. When, at the invariable end of the meeting, people in the congregation locked arms to sing 'We Shall Overcome," I always edged away toward the exit. Still, I thought we should be on that bus. I reasoned that it was a public bus and we had a right to buy tickets. Also, other reporters were buying tickets. Claude agreed that we should be on the bus, and we sat down just a couple of seats in back of the driver. When the bus finally left the station, there were more reporters on board than Freedom Riders. The passengers also included a small contingent of Alabama National Guardsmen. The bus moved out in a caravan of seventeen state-police cars.

At the Mississippi line, the Alabama escort withdrew. We were joined on the bus by some Mississippi National Guardsmen under the command of Lieutenant Colonel G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery, who later had a long career in Congress. Montgomery said that his orders were to take the bus directly to Jackson without stopping. In what I suppose was a reflection of my confidence that Mississippi was going to handle things in a Citizens Council rather than a Klan manner, I fell asleep. Then I felt Claude poking me. Reverend C. T. Vivian had asked for arrest stop, and Colonel Montgomery was answering in the negative. Vivian, who was sitting right across the aisle from us, began asking how Montgomery rationalized the acts he had to perform every day. I still remember snatches ofthe speech almost word for word. "What do you tell your wife when you get home?" Vivian said. "What do you say to your child? What do you say to your God when you pray? Or do you pray?" 1'd never imagined that a request to leave the room could be made with such eloquence. A Canadian reporter was so moved that he stood up and began shouting at Montgomery to stop the bus. Claude spoke sharply to the Canadian reporter. As I remember his words, he said, "Sit down and shut up. You're a reporter."

A photograph that was prominently displayed this spring at the Mississippi gathering shows a bus moving through downtown Jackson. Except for a policeman every ten or fifteen feet, the street is virtually empty. The bus is framed in the foreground by two policemen with German shepherds-presumably Rebel and Happy, the dogs that the Jackson police department borrowed on such occasions from the Vicksburg police department. (When Jackson police broke up a gathering of black people outside a courthouse a month before the Freedom Rides-the crowd had gathered in support of some Tougaloo College students who'd been arrested in Mississippi's first sit-in-it was alleged that a minister named S. Leon Whitney had been bitten, an allegation that the Jackson police vigorously denied.) The police contingent inside the Trailways station was under the command of Chief of Police Detectives M. B. Pierce, whom 1'd dealt with before. I suspected that Pierce had been chosen for his unflappability; he would only smile whenever I said to him, "I forget, Chief: was it Rebel that didn't bite Reverend Whitney or was it Happy that didn't bite Reverend Whitney?" When the Freedom Riders went into the whites-only waiting room, they were asked politely by the police to move on, and when they refused they were, just as politely, arrested-a policy that was also followed when a second bus pulled into the Greyhound station a few hours later, and followed for the next few months as people from all over the country showed their support by taking a bus to Jackson and serving ninety days in Parchman Prison. There were three black reporters on our bus, but when they came into the whites-only waiting room they were not bothered. Chief Pierce called that to my attention. "Professional courtesy," he said.

In Jackson this May, the Freedom Riders were praised for their bravery and their effectiveness. (The wrong they sought to demonstrate had indeed been corrected: under pressure from Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, the Interstate Commmerce Commission, In September of 1961, mandated that that 'Whites Only" signs be removed from interstate facilities.) Haley Barbour's speeches were cordial and complimentary and, in at least one case, apologetic. The speakers who shared the podium with Bardour at one event or the other included Jackson's black mayor and its second black female chief of police. As the commemoration began, an article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger recalled some of the smears against the Freedom Riders in 1961. Senator James Eastland had called one CORE rider "a Communist agitator and organizer of the most dangerous kind." (1'd heard Murray Kempton, a columnist known for sounding gracious even ifhe was describing a mobster, say of the same person, "A lovely man. A brave man. Of course, he'd walk a mile to get beaten up.") The editor of the Jackson Daily News, the Clarion-Ledger's sister paper, had referred in his column to the Freedom Riders as "deranged mammals." The Clarion-Ledger article was written by Jerry Mitchell, who over the past twenty years has won renown (and a MacArthur Fellowship) for stories that brought to justice civil-rights-era criminals like Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of Medgar Evers. The Jackson airport now bears Evers's name.

Fifty years before, Ross Barnett, then the governor of Mississippi, had called the Freedom Riders "outside agitators trying to stir up our people for no good cause whatsoever," but in his dealings with the press at the time he'd soundedjust as cordial as Haley Barbour. On the day after our bus's arrival, Barnett began his press conference by saying, "I'm pleased to say we're grateful indeed for your presence here. I extend a most cordial welcome to the great and sovereign state of Mississippi." For the reporters who were in Jackson to cover the Freedom Rides in 1961, Mayor Thompson had arranged a tour of the city-including what were then sometimes called "Supreme Court schools," schools built after Brown v. Board of Education for black children in an effort to demonstrate that "separate but equal" was something other than a joke. Thompson also gave us badges indicating that we were honorary members of the Jackson, Mississippi, police force.

One of Barbour's speeches was at the unveiling of a plaque that marked the old Greyhound station now restored as an architect's office) as a stop on what the state is calling the Mississippi Freedom Trial-a tourism scheme that is joining the Mississippi Blues Trail and the Mississippi Country Music Trail. 'We have to put our past in front of us if we're going to put our past behind us," Barbour said. Civil-rights history buffs can soon be guided to, among thirty or so other places, the university where Clyde Kennard applied for admission in the fifties, only to be framed and thrown into jail. They can see where Medgar Evers was shot, in 1963, and where another N.A.A.C.P. leader, Vernon Dahmer, was killed, in 1966, when the Klan firebombed his house. Barbour said that he has also managed to get the legislature to appropriate twenty million dollars for a civil-rights museum in Jackson-there is already such a museum in Birmingham-and he promised that it would be "a sensationally popular attraction." Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the Chicago-reunion organizers had in mind when they wrote, "Mississippi white racists have discovered the millions of dollars that can be derived from tourism pertaining to the legacy of the civil rights movement." Another way to look at it, of course, is as evidence that Mississippi, after half a century, is definitely part of America: it has figured out how to turn its history, even its horrific history, into an industry.

In both Chicago and Jackson, some of those in attendance were carrying around a large book called "Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders," by Eric Etheridge, one of the organizers of the Jackson commemoration. They were trying to get as many signatures of Freedom Riders as they could. Occasionally, one of them would approach me and say, 'Were you a Freedom Rider?"

"No, I was just a reporter who was on the bus," I'd say.

Some of them insisted that I sign anyway, and eventually I decided that they were probably right in assuming that, after fifty years, the line between reporter and participant was not as bright as I thought it was when I worked in the South. In Chicago, I greeted, say, John Lewis, a sharecropper's son who had grown up to be a congressman, more like an old comrade-in-arms than like someone I'd mentioned in a couple of articles. We had been together at the T railways bus station in Montgomery, where there was a distinct absence of what Chief Pierce called professional courtesy." I'm no longer as certain as I once was about how bright the line was even back then. During Charlayne Hunter's Drst semester at the University of Georgia, she was isolated in a dorm full of hostile coeds, and we spoke on the telephone from time to time. Once, she was talking about an uncomfortable train ride she'd just had from Savannah to Atlanta, and I said that 1'd always heard that the train she'd been on-a well-known train called the Nancy Hanks-was particularly luxurious. “Not where we have to sit," she said. What flashed through my mind had nothing to do with the knowledge I had built up on the subject of segregation in interstate versus intrastate transportation and how long it would take to desegregate the latter. What flashed through my mind was "They can't make her sit back there."

When one of the sessions in Chicago ended with people linking arms and singing 'We Shall Overcome," I made my usual quiet move toward the door. Suddenly, I felt someone lock arms with me. Instinctively, I started to pull my arm away while looking around to see who it was. It was an older woman in a wheelchair. Was I really going to wrest my arm away from an older woman in a wheelchair? I stayed. Then I joined in. It turns out that I still know most of the verses.

The New Yorker, 25 July 2011, p36

Friendship Has Its Limits

by Erin Biba

Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it-cursor hovering over the Share button-you likely considered how your friends were going to react.

"People are going to like this," you thought. "Maybe I'll even get a few comments." Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? I'm taking bets on the answer. And my money is on never.

Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you're influencing - or trying to influence - how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you've never met. In the end, it isn't who you really are. It's the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn't about having a conversation with people you know. It's about advertising yourself. It's not social; it's media.

Real conversations don't happen in public. You don't go to a party and loudly tell strangers about your recent bout of crippling depression. Or the fact that you just can't seem to trust people enough to make a true connection with a partner. No, the kinds of conversations you have in mixed company are edited for content. You tell people what you think they want to hear.

Mostly that means telling them interesting bits that are designed to make them like you. Like that time you locked yourself out of the house in your pajamas on a rainy night. (You're so funny and humble! We all just love how you can laugh at yourself!) The world of social media is just like that. Even a closed network (like an invitation-only Twitter feed or a private Facebook profile) is a group of people you've decided you want to like you. They don't want to hear about your irritable bowel syndrome. Not now. Not ever.

The idea that we're having a "conversation" online gets even more absurd as your network gets larger. You might have heard of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He's got a number. According to Dunbar, humans are cognitively capable of connecting with only 150 or so people at any given time. In other words, your brain is only big enough to hold personal information about a limited number of people. Everyone else is just noise. Even Facebook agrees with Dunbar, sort of: It doesn't allow users more then 5,000 "friends." The assumption is that once you're linked to that many people, your network is no longer populated by real connections. Your real friend would call you in tears to pick her up from a car accident; your Facebook friend would simply post a photo of her cast and a sad-face emoticon. You feel sorry for her, but you don't experience the panic that comes from witnessing someone's distress firsthand.

Dunbar isn't the only one who believes that managing relationships on a large scale is impossible. In 2009, sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst concluded a long-running study looking at how we manage our real-world social networks. Over the course of seven years, we replace 48 percent of our friends with new ones, Mollenhorst found, though the total number in our network never changes. In other words, there's only so much room for new people in your life. And you're certainly not replacing one of your IRL friends-who actually knows you-with some random person who started following you on Twitter.

Those randoms, by the way, end up being a substantial part of our audience. In a study by UK gadget website Good Mobile Phones, which queried more then 1,500 Facebook users, 60 percent of participants said they no longer knew 20 percent of their "friends," and 50 percent responded that they actually speak with only 20 percent of them. The average Facebook user has only about 130 friends. So, if we're spending most of our time online talking to people we don't even know, how deep can the conversation ever get?

Dan Schawbel, a branding consultant, says we are all constantly building our brands online, whether we like it or not. "The Internet is your permanent record," he says. But while many of your witticisms and clever observations remain for posterity, searchable by Google, the conversations around them are fleeting. The public Twitter replies get replaced by new ones, and comments on your Facebook feed shrink to make room for fresh ones. All that really counted was your initial post and how it affected everyone's opinion of you.

The best evidence that social media isn't really about personal connection? Marketers love it. It seems like every business from taco trucks to GE is hoping to use social media to put a personal face on its brand. The truth is, my personal Twitter feed isn't all that different from @wired, the brand central station of this magazine's social media presence. We both post links to stories we think our followers will like. We both update with anecdotes about people we know. And we both choose our words carefully before we post them to be sure they mesh with how we want the public to perceive us.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It's what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It's another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They're just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.

PS: You should totally follow me on Twitter (@erinbiba). Everyone agrees I'm way more hilarious and adorable there than in real life.

PPS: You can follow my editor on Twitter (@ablackshear). Everyone agrees that he's not that funny or witty.

by Erin Biba
Wired, August 2011, p83

This Beautiful Life

Written in high-definition prose, Helen Schulman’s new novel, This Beautiful Life (HarperColins), presents every parent’s nightmare. The family quartet of This Beautiful Life is a compact Upper West Side enlightened, progressive nuclear unit. The father, Richard, is a super-competent Mr. Cool; his wife, Elizabeth, is a harried multi-tasker navigating the treacherous lanes of playdates, private school, and competitive motherhood; their children are adopted Chinese daughter Coco and tousled teenager Jake. The house of cards (shown on the cover) symbolically collapses with just one mouse click after a nubile eighth-grader sends Jake a skeevy video, Jake thoughtlessly forwards it to a classmate, and the video goes viral. Before you know it, cultural warfare has broken out and The New York Observer, the New York Post, and Gawker have turner werewolf on everyone involved. Far more intense and specifically observed than any soap opera or morality lesson, This Beautiful Life astringently peels away the panic and dissatisfaction of staying apace in Manhattan’s fast track in the ago of Bloomberg, where maintaining the trappings of success itself becomes a form of serfdom.

review by James Wolcott
Vanity Fair, August 2011, p48