WEEK ONE: September 12-16…WEEK ONE BLOG ENTRY

WEEK ONE BLOG ENTRY:
What is the greatest movie of all time and why?

WEEK ONE READING:

On Writing

http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/a/advice.htm
Advice From One Writer to Another
"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write"
By Richard Nordquist,
When faced with a major project, whether it's designing a bridge or laying new tile in the kitchen, most of us like to rely on experts for advice. So why should a writing project be any different? As we'll see, professional writers have a lot to tell us about the writing process.
Some of the advice may be helpful, some of it encouraging, and some may do no more than raise a smile. Here then is some free advice--from one writer to another.
• "There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."
(Ernest Hemingway)
• "Writing is an adventure."
(Winston Churchill)
• "There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."
(H. L. Mencken)
• "Writing is just work--there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes--it's still just work."
(Sinclair Lewis)
• "Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped."
(Lillian Hellman)
• "English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education--sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."
(E. B. White)
• "Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
(Meg Chittenden)
• "I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
(Peter de Vries)
• "When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time."
(Michael Chabon)
• "Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter."
(Iain Banks)
• "The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work--especially his first full-length book--and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence."
(Paul Johnson)
• "Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write."
(Robert Penn Warren)
• "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. . . . Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
(E. L. Doctorow)
• "Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say."
(Sharon O'Brien)
• "I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early."
(Daniel J. Boorstin)
• "Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."
(Gene Fowler)
• "You fail only if you stop writing."
(Ray Bradbury)
• "Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy--it's the occurring that's hard."
(Stephen Leacock)
• "I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."
(Mark Twain)
• "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in the human condition."
(Graham Greene)
• "You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country."
(Robert Frost)
• "What this means, in practical terms for the student writer, is that in order to achieve mastery he must read widely and deeply and must write not just carefully but continually, thoughtfully assessing and reassessing what he writes, because practice, for the writer as for the concert pianist, is the heart of the matter."
(John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, 1983)
• "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
(Thomas Mann)
• "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
(Samuel Johnson)

WEEK ONE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:

After reading a bunch of random quotes about writing, how would you define good writing?

WEEK TWO: September 19-23…WEEK TWO BLOG ENTRY

WEEK TWO BLOG ENTRY:
The most beautiful place I've been in the world is...

WEEK TWO READING:

aS YOU READ THIS REVIEW, CONSIDER WHAT MAKES IT SPECIAL. EXAMINE THE TONE AND WORD CHOICE. ALSO, SINCE YOU'LL BE WRITING YOUR OWN RESTAURANT REVIEW, READ THIS AS AN EXAMPLE OF ONE WAY TO APPROACH SUCH A TASK.

Restaurant Review

http://www.bakersfield.com/news/columnist/tittl/x965388728/DINING-OUT-Save-our-restaurant-readers-plead

DINING OUT: Save our restaurant, readers plead
BY PETE TITTL, Contributing columniste-mail:
ptittl@bakersfield.com | Sunday, Jul 17 2011 06:00 AM
Occasionally I get called in like a restaurant superhero in the hopes that a favorable review by me could save someone's favorite restaurant. Unfortunately I don't get to wear tights and a cape, although I do apologize for planting that image in your brain over breakfast.
Two readers recently wrote about a humble northeast Bakersfield restaurant that is a favorite of theirs, the Original Hacienda Grill, located near the old East Hills Vons that's being swallowed by the Walmart next door.
Marsha Parr called it a "gem" and said the "food is excellent, authentic and varied. The service is very friendly and helpful and fast. The ambiance is comfortable and kitschy. I have been there about 6 times and have never had a bad meal, and neither have my 'companions.' I am afraid they will not stay in business, because the place is usually empty. This is partly due to the construction of the nearby Walmart off of Mall View Road. There are places to park near the restaurant, and if you enter from the east, you don't have to drive through the parking maze that is Walmart. They deserve to stay in business, and I thought that if you wrote a review, it would attract different customers. Please, please consider this, as we have so few options for really good restaurants on our side of town."
Parr went on to praise the "tasty vegetarian options: pot beans cooked without the ham hock, and veggie enchiladas. Shrimp mojo de ajo is great, as are all other dishes. Fish tacos are grilled tilapia, and fresh. Enchiladas suizas are excellent." Her friend Schifra Walder also wrote in as a former eastsider who moved to Springville six years ago and confessed to being shocked at the mall's decline. She liked the fun mirrors inside the restaurant.
All I have to say is that sensitive English teachers who seem bred to cringe at abuses of the king's language might not find that atmosphere so charming. A permanent wooden sign near the door says "Please have a sit."
A hand-lettered sign involving a certain type of coupon had so many misspelled words that I was seized by a need for a good red Sharpie. Avert your eyes if such miscues offend you. I did enjoy the mirrors used in the dining room to make a small space seem larger.
The menu has a lot of everything, from combo meals to seafood and fajitas, and we tried to get a representative sampling. I chose one of the specialties, the "roll grill" tacos ($10.95), while my companions selected the steak fajita burrito ($9.25) and the chili verde tostada ($8.25). If this were a baseball game, we'd say the kitchen is batting a sizzling .667.
The best choice really was my tacos, which I think featured that ability to make appealing vegetarian entrees praised by Marsha Parr. The entrée offers one steak, one chicken and one vegetarian grilled taco. The latter was the best, with onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cheese and even a few florets of broccoli mixed into the minced filling. Exceptional. The steak was solid, lean carne asada, and the chicken was breast meat mixed with cheese. The beans were notable for a pale color, some whole and some refried, and an honest taste not overly dependent on fat.
My companion's burrito was a massive creation, and the fajitas inside were praiseworthy for the nice mix and proportion of vegetables (red and green peppers and onions) and the way all the ingredients had been completely cooked together (the onions dark from caramelizing). The only flaw if you excuse the outsized portion was an untrimmed fat bomb he ran across right in the middle of it. Someone trimming the beef got a bit sloppy.
My companion's tostada was a disappointment. Now I know it seems like I'm Will Rogers when it comes to chili verde, in that I've never met one I didn't like, but this version of CV, while it had some heat, just seemed simple and dull. It was the only thing we sampled I wouldn't order again.
(It was somewhat similar to the salsa served with the chips, which also seemed to be missing some key ingredients -- cilantro, for example, would be nice).
Service was cheerful but absent for long stretches. Contrary to the reader reports, the restaurant was moderately busy late on a Sunday night.

WEEK TWO WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:

RESTAURANT REVIEW: (20%)
Go to any restaurant in town. As you eat, take notes on the ambiance, the food, and the service. You may choose any restaurant (from Taco Bell to Café Med), but you should use this writing assignment to explore your descriptive capabilities. Use sound, touch, taste, smell, and the look of the food and surroundings. The review should be approximately two pages in length, BUT YOU MAY CHOOSE TO WRITE MORE THAN THAT. You may use the first-person in this review.

This assignment must be emailed to me as an attachment by Friday, September 23
YOU ARE NOT PUTTING THIS ONE ON THE BLOG BUT ARE ONLY EMAILING IT TO ME.

WEEK THREE: September 26-30…WEEK THREE BLOG ENTRY

WEEK THREE BLOG ENTRY:
If you could travel to one place in the world, where would it be and why?

WEEK THREE READING:

Political Analysis

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/how-kevin-mccarthy-wrangles-the-tea-party.html?_r=1
July 13, 2011
How Kevin McCarthy Wrangles the Tea Party in Washington
By ROBERT DRAPER
Most mornings when he is in Washington, the House majority whip, Kevin McCarthy, wakes up at 6 a.m. on his office sofa — which is a slight improvement over the air mattress he once slept on, and probably better than the houseboat that a fellow Republican congressman, Lynn Westmoreland, has half-jokingly tried to convince him to share. McCarthy pulls on some ratty gym clothes, descends three flights of stairs and exits the building, where, when the weather is agreeable, he meets up with about a half-dozen other G.O.P. members on their mountain bikes. Together they cruise along the Mall, past the Lincoln Memorial, across a bridge and along the Potomac River. An hour later, McCarthy will shower in the House gym, head off to breakfast with some other gaggle of Republicans, attend the morning management meeting with Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the majority leader, huddle throughout the day with his whip staff and committee chairmen and conservative advocacy groups and random needy or disgruntled members until it’s finally evening and time to round up a bunch of other Republican colleagues for a dinner that can go on for several hours because McCarthy takes it upon himself to draw the others out from their professional shells with questions like, “What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you at college?” or “What was the first concert you went to?” By 11 at night, he is back on his office couch with his BlackBerry and the next day’s briefings, some 2,300 miles from his wife and son and daughter in Bakersfield, Calif. — and then asleep, in a federal building, by 1 a.m.
One of McCarthy’s morning cycling mates is Sean Duffy, a 39-year-old freshman and Tea Party sensation from Wisconsin who was once a county prosecutor and, before that, a professional lumberjack and star in MTV’s reality series “The Real World.” Several of the freshmen live in their House offices so as to pronounce themselves detached from the culture of Washington. Duffy also does so because he has six young children and thousands of dollars of debt accumulated during the seven months he spent without a salary before being elected to Congress.
McCarthy says that Duffy has more pressure on him than any other freshman. He arrived as the savant of the political season, a novice who forced the retirement of the 41-year Democratic incumbent and House Appropriations Committee chairman, David Obey. Within weeks of taking office, the Democratic attack ads began and now seem to accompany Duffy’s every vote. In June, Duffy became a “patriot,” the National Republican Congressional Committee’s euphemism for its most vulnerable incumbents. His town-hall meetings have been edgy. His young family misses him while he spends weeknights on a cot in the Longworth building. After Duffy delivered a painfully unfunny speech at the annual Congressional Dinner in February, McCarthy consoled him by saying, “I did really badly at that same event two years earlier.” Duffy had actually seen McCarthy’s speech on cable TV and thought it was pretty awesome.
McCarthy knows who the resident whiners are, and Duffy is not one of them. But the lumberjack who pledged in his campaign ads to “take the axe to Washington” occasionally looks as if a tree has just fallen on him. “Don’t overbook yourself,” McCarthy tells him. “Get more sleep. Are you doing things in person that you could do on the phone? Are you doing things that your staff ought to be doing?” But Duffy’s fretfulness stems in part from the path his own party is taking. He expressed discomfort to McCarthy over the votes in January to repeal aspects of Obama’s health care bill. The Republicans, he said, should have solutions of their own. McCarthy assured him that “there’ll be replacement legislation after the repeal, trust me.” Duffy stayed with his party on those votes. But he couldn’t vote to defund NPR, given his rural district’s reliance on public radio for weather updates and news.
“Then vote that way,” McCarthy said. And so with the whip’s blessings, Sean Duffy sided against his party.
The job of House Republican majority whip — which is to gather sufficient votes to pass the party’s agenda on the House floor — would seem, at first blush, inappropriate for someone who is approximately as menacing as a summer-camp counselor. The word “whip” implies coercion and brings to mind the dark, backroom persuasions of Tom DeLay, known as the Hammer (who, truthfully, was never that much of a knuckle-breaker, though apparently he loved having that reputation). In the end, there’s only so much control House leaders can exert over a congressman who answers to voters back home. Whips tend to recognize this and, at least in recent years, have relied more on cajoling than threats. McCarthy, who is 46, represents the affable extreme of this philosophy. In his sunny view, “A conference united around policies creates better legislation than using intimidation.”
Actually achieving that sort of unity is easier said than done — and particularly so because of the House majority’s freshman class. The 87 new members constitute more than a third of the 239-member Republican caucus and are the reason that the G.O.P. now controls the House. Nearly 40 percent of them are self-styled “citizen politicians” who have never held office and who rode into Washington on the Tea Party wave. Taken as a group, the freshmen are at least as conservative as the foot soldiers of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution, a 73-member mixed bag that would eventually produce eight U.S. senators, one TV star (Joe Scarborough), one felon (Bob Ney) and one correctional officer (Jim Bunn). The difference is that the class of 1994 was thoroughly beholden (for a couple of years, anyway) to Gingrich, while this year’s group harbors no particular allegiance either to Boehner or to the well-being of the Republican Party. As Tim Griffin, a freshman from Arkansas, put it to me, “A lot of us feel that we’re here on a mission, and the mission is now, and we’re not that concerned about the political consequences.” That mission — to throttle the role of the federal government in general and Obama’s progressive initiatives specifically — may seem more like a kamikaze pursuit to some of the freshmen as the 2012 elections get closer and their constituents become increasingly impatient for government solutions. For now, however, they and their Tea Party backers constitute the most formidable power bloc on Capitol Hill.
Boehner has responded to these realities with the laissez-faire mantra “Let the House work its will.” But neither he nor Cantor (who clearly intends to occupy Boehner’s post someday) nor the caucus’s comparatively moderate senior members want to see the G.O.P. freshmen vote the party over a cliff. And so to hold the caucus together, McCarthy’s delicate approach has been to acknowledge the independence of the hot-blooded new charges while instilling in them a sense of team loyalty — and thereby moving them, ever so gently, to a victory that will be enduring rather than Pyrrhic.
“Kevin probably has a better handle on the freshmen than anybody else here,” Boehner told me. It’s an unlikely bond that McCarthy has forged with the new arrivals. His own rise to power was enabled by years of grooming in Bakersfield by his mentor, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas, whose retirement allowed his ambitious young aide to claim his seat. Once in Washington, McCarthy networked and fund-raised his way up the food chain, and in four short years became the third-ranking House Republican. His ascent, in other words, involves the very type of Beltway scheming that the class of 2010 plainly abhors. McCarthy has only attended one Tea Party rally — in Bakersfield, with Boehner in tow, though neither of them spoke at the event — and as a congressman has certainly been willing to turn the federal spigots to assist his farming constituents in the San Joaquin Valley. When I asked Duffy if he had a sense of where McCarthy lay on the ideological spectrum, he said, “That’s a good question,” adding, “the ideas that are coming to the conference — he believes in them. You can’t talk so passionately and . . . I mean, Kevin lives in California, but he’s not an actor.”
McCarthy is a man of indistinct calculations — “I don’t think being a congressman is going to define me,” he says cryptically — but he has won over the freshmen by making his own goals and beliefs beside the point. He recruited many of them, anointed them Young Guns and nurtured them during the 2010 midterm election cycle. Rather than being pawns in some kind of Karl Roveian überstrategy to achieve lasting Republican pre-¬eminence, the freshmen represent McCarthy’s more entrepreneurial approach to politics: seize upon a trend (in this case, government phobia), put all your money on it and then work hard to make the trend last. And like an entrepreneur, he casts the considerable strategic risk — that his troops are unseasoned, volatile and perhaps far out of the mainstream — as a virtue: “I believe we’re serving in a different time and place. Unconventional is positive. Unconventional gets rewarded.”
Sometimes late at night, the freshmen will drop by McCarthy’s other office, the one reserved for the majority whip behind a door marked H-107 on the first floor of the Capitol. The whip’s office is the unofficial retreat for the House Republicans — but particularly for the freshmen, 19 of whom bunk in their own offices across the street. Ostensibly, they amble into H-107 to filch one of McCarthy’s granola bars or to get some information on a pending legislative matter. The likelier reason is to relieve boredom or loneliness or the desire to duck out of sight for a while. At times the corporate-¬flophouse panorama resembles an airport frequent-flier lounge, complete with beer and wine. “This is what I want,” McCarthy told me. “I want them living in this office.” More to the point, he wants them to feel a connection to what his office and the Republican leadership are up to. The walls of H-107 subliminally reinforce this sense of belonging, covered as they are with framed images of freshmen alongside senior members, all in black and white like statesmen from some nobler era.
McCarthy suspects that he has an addictive personality, and it’s probably for the better that he shuns caffeine. Still, the substance he craves is human interaction. He never sits alone in his whip’s office with the door closed so as to summon thoughts or shut out the world. He never eats alone. If invited to a social function, he never fails to drag along at least one colleague. The floor of the House is his neighborhood bar: he sits down to chat with the freshmen women, then jumps into the aisle to receive Duffy’s volley of rabbit punches, then collars the liberal Democrat Dennis Kucinich to compliment him on his appearance on “The Colbert Report.” (“I didn’t know you were a ventriloquist! Pretty cool!”) Bill Thomas, McCarthy’s mentor, spent many hours talking with McCarthy about the tax code. But, Thomas says, “he was more interested in people — that was his forte, you could say.”
Routinely, during the day, McCarthy gathers some of his Republican colleagues in the conference room of H-107 to decide how they’re going to save America. In previous months, these “listening sessions,” as McCarthy calls them, focused on the Republican budget legislation written by Paul Ryan and taken to the House floor in April. The initiative would shrink the percentage of federal nonsecurity discretionary spending (relative to gross domestic product) to pre-Great Depression levels, convert Medicare to a sort of voucher system, shift more of the cost of Medicaid to states and preserve the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans. Several of the more senior members worried that the Medicare provision in particular was going too far. (McCarthy’s chief deputy whip, Peter Roskam, says, “One of them said, ‘It’s been great serving with you — I’m going to be a former member of Congress.’ ”) The freshmen overwhelmingly supported what Ryan was up to — to the extent that McCarthy and the House Budget Committee chairman would murmur to each other: “Wow. We can go further on entitlements. If we don’t, these guys probably won’t even support the bill.”
In the end, all but four Republicans voted for the Ryan budget plan. Immediately after the vote on April 15, Ryan sought out the whip on the House floor, shook his hand and told him, “Your listening sessions made the difference.” But a month later, a reliably Republican seat in the 26th District of New York fell in a special election to Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who campaigned relentlessly on her opponent’s support of the Ryan plan. Exultant Democrats (and some moderate Republicans) think that the House conservatives disastrously overreached and that the 2012 election will now be about — as Nancy Pelosi brazenly put it a few of weeks ago — “Medicare, Medicare and Medicare.” The Republican leadership sees it differently. A recent Bloomberg poll shows that a majority of Americans support cutting government spending and taxes. (The same poll indicates that far more Americans fear a full Republican takeover than a second Obama term.) With few exceptions, the freshmen have shown surprising poise and resolve after encountering anti-Republican “Mediscare” activism at their town-hall meetings. It’s for this reason that McCarthy believes the public will ultimately reward his party’s show of political fortitude. “We put our ideas out there,” he says. “They haven’t. That gives us protection.”
Of course, the current topic in H-107 has been the debt ceiling, the legal limit that the federal government is authorized to borrow, and which Congress has raised largely without incident 10 times in the past decade alone. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said that the government will be unable to meet its financial obligations by Aug. 2 unless Congress permits it to borrow more. The freshmen have not been shy on this subject, either. McCarthy informally polled them when they first came to town in November for orientation. All but four of them said they would vote against raising the ceiling, under any circumstances. Then McCarthy (along with Ryan and the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp) began conducting more listening sessions. The whip recognized that it would be counterproductive to lecture the freshmen about the economic hazards of not raising the debt ceiling. He also realized that it’s one thing to pass a budget — which in the end is a nonbinding political document — and another thing to throw America into default. And so McCarthy has urged them to consider raising the ceiling under certain conditions and thus to view this moment as a golden opportunity to force significant changes from the White House. “We all ran for a reason,” he tells them. “What’s most of concern to you? What is it that we think will change America?”
As a result, the freshmen have begun to move away from a hard “no” on raising the debt ceiling to a “yes, if.” In the conference room, several freshmen have said they’ll vote to raise the ceiling only if the president agrees to repeal his health care legislation. Or if Obama signs into law a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, after all 50 states have ratified it. Or if he’ll agree to mandatory caps on all nondefense spending. Or if he’ll enact the Ryan budget. The whip writes down all their ideas on a notepad. He never tells them that they’re being unrealistic — that two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the state Legislatures are unlikely to pass a balanced-budget amendment. McCarthy’s indulgence of their ideas isn’t just a patronizing gesture, however. Already in the budget talks supervised by Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats have signaled that they’ll agree to deep cuts and possible entitlement reforms — the kinds of concessions they would never have made on their own. By staking out a position far to the right, the House Republicans are tugging the White House and the Senate much farther in their direction than almost any Washington insider would have predicted. They’re winning, in other words. The question is whether McCarthy can convince the freshmen and their Tea Party benefactors to see it that way.
McCarthy’s tenacious optimism has been crucial to his party’s resurgence. On the night of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, he told beleaguered Republicans over dinner: “Let’s not act like the minority. Let’s challenge them on every single bill and on every single campaign — and let’s do it right away.” Before some of the newly elected Democrats could get comfortable, McCarthy began raising money to run attack ads in their districts. Later he oversaw the drafting of the Pledge to America, which became the de facto Republican campaign script for 2010. McCarthy’s gift for salesmanship proved decisive when Boehner appointed him the party’s chief recruiter for the midterm elections. Sean Duffy spoke with McCarthy constantly throughout the campaign. So did a South Dakota farmer named Kristi Noem — though she received what she calls “good messaging advice” covertly, as Noem’s entire campaign was based on her wholesale rejection of Beltway orthodoxy. McCarthy’s signature discovery was a folksy but canny cotton farmer and gospel singer from Frog Jump, Tenn., named Stephen Fincher who had never run for elective office but who would later acknowledge to me, with pitch-perfect understatement, that he “was blessed with the ability to raise money.”
McCarthy also went to work on another Tennessee recruit, a bald physician named Scott DesJarlais, and instructed him to shave his goatee. DesJarlais wanted to know why that was so important. “Michael Phelps shaves his entire body to gain one-tenth of one second,” McCarthy replied. “I think that goatee is costing you 5 percent of the vote.” The next time the men encountered each other, DesJarlais had shaved, and McCarthy decided he was serious.
Today the whiskerless doctor who campaigned against Obama’s “socialist” agenda and “the destructive consequences of unnecessary government meddling” is a congressman. Barely three months into his tenure, DesJarlais found himself signing a joint letter to President Obama to request “crucial” federal assistance for flood victims in his district. McCarthy’s whip office helped throw together a manual for DesJarlais and other freshmen representing disaster-stricken districts. The document, which includes contact information for FEMA and other federal agencies, implicitly strikes a note of caution: the government you bashed in 2010 is the government you may need in 2011.
One of the first freshmen to encounter a natural disaster was Renee Ellmers, a former intensive-care nurse. The North Carolina congresswoman texted McCarthy on the afternoon of Saturday, April 16, to inform him that she wouldn’t be able to make it back to Washington the next morning to be on ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour” with a panel of freshmen because a tornado had struck in Wake County. While Ellmers tended to victims at a Red Cross shelter late that evening, McCarthy suggested to her that she have ABC send a satellite crew to her in North Carolina instead.
Ellmers is one of the handful of freshmen whom McCarthy and the National Republican Congressional Committee didn’t recruit and didn’t assist but who won anyway — a fact she says she has since reminded him of “numerous times.” McCarthy, who can’t stand the sight of blood, appreciates the ex-nurse’s toughness. Ellmers is one of nine women in this high-testosterone freshman class and has to find her own way of being heard. She barraged McCarthy with e-mails and phone calls saying she saw little sense in the G.O.P. leadership’s decision in June to send the White House a message by bringing to the floor a “clean” (or condition-free) debt ceiling and then resoundingly voting it down. Sometimes when Ellmers is talking to the whip and doesn’t think she’s getting through to him, she claps her hands loudly in front of his face. Sometimes McCarthy giggles and claps back.
In contrast to Ellmers, Jon Runyan, of New Jersey, an immense former offensive lineman, is shy and ideologically temperate. One night, while hosting a dinner with several freshmen at an Italian restaurant on Capitol Hill, McCarthy sat next to Runyan and got him to open up. Runyan had been noticing how certain G.O.P. cable-TV perennials were bashing Boehner for negotiating with the White House and the Democratic Senate to avoid a government shutdown during the springtime budget battles. It was hard enough for Runyan and other freshmen to support the leadership without their own colleagues stirring ill feelings. “You know, when I was playing for the Philadelphia Eagles, we didn’t start losing ’til Terrell Owens joined the team,” he told McCarthy. “It only takes one guy to bring down a locker room.”
“You’ve got to tell that story to the conference tomorrow morning,” McCarthy urged him. Runyan did, and after he was finished, Michele Bachmann — who was guilty of the very infraction that Runyan was referring to — went up to the microphone to praise his speech.
Where McCarthy has prodded Runyan to speak up, he has cautioned Michael Grimm to exercise more restraint. Grimm is a natty former F.B.I. undercover special agent — the mobsters he infiltrated dubbed him Mikey Suits — who shares his Congressional office with a Yorkshire Terrier named Sebastian and as a result has needlelike teeth marks all over his hands. Grimm won election to his Staten Island and Brooklyn seat with significant Tea Party support. But some of his stands, like defending the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, have infuriated the right, and when the Heritage Action group gave him a low score, Grimm says he got angry. “I said, ‘Kevin, who’s our contact at Heritage Action, because I’m gonna call them.’ ” The pugnacious freshman later went on Fox to denounce the “extremists” in his party. “Within the conference, a lot of people came up to me and said, ‘Thanks for having the guts to say that,’ ” he says. Other colleagues, however, think Grimm’s outburst amounted to self-immolation. McCarthy has warned him: “Don’t do press for press’s sake. They’ll bring you up, and they’ll also bring you down.”
McCarthy nonetheless sees value in Grimm’s zealousness — “I’ll bet that guy eats an ice cream passionately” — and has deputized Grimm to keep tabs on the voting inclinations of a handful of other freshmen. Grimm was hesitant to join the whip team. “If there’s something I think is going to hurt my district or my country — whip team or no, I’m gonna vote my conscience,” Grimm says he told McCarthy. “I know as a whip you need to rely on me for certain votes. And I don’t know that I’ll be able to do that for you.”
“That’s not what our whipping is going to be about,” McCarthy responded, according to both men. “It’s not going to be about forcing leadership’s will on the members.”
Grimm put the whip’s assurances to the test April 1, when the Republican majority brought to the floor a transportation bill that would have removed prevailing-wage protections for federally financed construction projects. “We’d really like to have you on this,” McCarthy told Grimm.
“Kevin, I can’t do it,” Grimm replied. He reminded McCarthy that his father had been a union man for 45 years. “I’m not gonna turn my back on my father’s friends that I grew up with and respect.”
McCarthy is aware that some senior members might not be amused by the freshman class’s willingness to go its own way. He organizes dinners that include old and new members. Hal Rogers, a 30-year congressman and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the dinners were a way “to disabuse them of the view that we’re ogres and help them understand what we do and don’t do.” Still, the old bulls can deliver some comeuppance to the insurgents. Grimm’s vote to include a pro-union amendment in the transportation bill made the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman, John Mica, “very upset,” Grimm says. “And I get his point: You want me to help you and work with you on things — but you can’t work with me?” Another committee member says: “They’re starting to wake up. I’ve had a bunch come to me and say, ‘I have a horrible flooding problem, I have a bad bridge.’ And I say, ‘Well, then, you shouldn’t have voted for the earmark ban!’ ”
Even McCarthy’s light touch can send a signal of reproach or reward. Last month, the entire G.O.P. House conference traveled to the White House to meet with the president. After Obama’s remarks, McCarthy, Boehner and the other leaders each asked him a question. Then one question came from a pre¬selected freshman. It was Reid Ribble, a former roofing contractor from Wisconsin. McCarthy had heard Ribble tell a story over dinner about a seemingly absurd regulation forbidding laborers from drinking water out of a plastic bottle while up on a roof — necessitating that they make frequent trips up and down the ladder, where accidents most often occur. The whip loved it and pushed for Ribble to have the chance to address the president.
There was, however, something else for the majority whip to love about Reid Ribble: he had never crossed the G.O.P. leadership on anything important. There was not a chance that leadership would award this moment to someone like Justin Amash, the only freshman to vote against all four of the continuing resolutions; or to Allen West, who in a press release expressed “disappointment in my own leadership” over a financing bill that appeared to be using U.S. troops as a political pawn; or to Raúl Labrador, who in a closed-door conference accused Boehner of “abandoning” conservatives. They and other dissidents are, of course, perfectly free to visit on their own with the president at the White House anytime they wish — if they can.
At 6 o’clock on the afternoon of May 24, just before the polls closed in the western New York special election, where it looked as if the Democratic candidate Kathy Hochul was going to eke out a victory, I dropped by H-107 to see if the whip was experiencing any misgivings over where the Republicans were headed. I found the freshman Rick Berg and Jason Chaffetz, a sophomore, in McCarthy’s office, taking turns tossing a foam ball into a basketball hoop fixed to a door. Chaffetz lobbed me the ball, and I badly misfired. “The way we play,” Berg consoled me, “just hitting the wall counts as a basket.”
My next shot missed the wall. McCarthy let out a high-pitched cackle. By then it was clear that New York’s 26th Congressional district was going to fall to the Democrats, in no small measure because of Hochul’s attacks on the Ryan budget plan. But McCarthy didn’t seem worried. We walked together out of his office, and he took me into the conference room to admire a painting that covered its northern wall. It was a work on loan from Steve Penley, an artist celebrated by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and other conservatives for his patriotic themes. The canvas depicts a take on Emanuel Leutze’s classic rendering of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776, before the Battle of Trenton.
“Now, you know why this was famous,” McCarthy said to me as he pointed to the characters in the painting. “This guy is an African-American. And this is a woman. And this is a Native American. Now, no way would they be able to vote, right? But it symbolizes everyone in America rowing in the boat together. So when we do our meetings here,” he concluded, referring to the freshmen as well as senior Republicans, “we’re all in the boat together!”
I had to ask him, though: where exactly was the boat headed? And who, for that matter, was navigating it? In April, when the Republican leadership decided to back a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning, 59 Republicans defected. The Democratic minority whip, Steny Hoyer, told me with barely disguised pleasure, “The back-benchers were leading, not the leaders.”
Even if Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy were content with the ideologically drastic direction their boat was taking, a number of their Republican colleagues were clearly not on board. One of them was the Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette, a member of the Tuesday Group, the House G.O.P.’s moderate coalition. LaTourette expressed to me his fear that the Republican majority has misinterpreted its mandate from the 2010 midterms. “In the three majority shifts I’ve been a part of, everyone has misread the tea leaves,” he said. “We lost in 2006 because 58 percent of the independents voted Democrat, but we had some in our party saying it was because we weren’t conservative enough. Then Pelosi’s crowd got tossed out, and you had Kucinich and the progressives saying it was because they weren’t bold enough. And now here we are, voting every week on abortion or to do away with NPR. I refer to it as feeding the alligator. You stop feeding them, and then they eat you.”
So was McCarthy really all that sanguine about the boat’s journey? He listened to my skeptical questioning — nodding indulgently, as if I were one of his apple-cheeked Young Guns. Then he gestured to the wall-length canvas. “Just as they planned the surprise attack on the Hessians on Christmas, we’ve got a plan, too,” he insisted. “And we believe where we’re going is where people want us to go. The thing is, history has already judged these guys in the boat favorably. We’ll be judged in the long term and in the short term”— meaning, next year at the polls.
“I do know the final place that we’re getting to,” McCarthy said. He would not say where that place was. I followed him up a staircase onto the second floor of the Capitol, and thereupon he waded into the sea of Republicans convened on the House floor. It was a sound-and-fury kind of afternoon, legislatively speaking: there were two Democratic amendments to strike down, a couple of other bills to set aside as unfinished business and ultimately nothing to send over to the Senate that would stand a chance of becoming law. That was the fruit of the day’s paddling — and beyond that lurked the invisible destination. Maybe they would get there, or maybe along the way an alligator would make a fine dinner of them all. Until then, at least one man in the boat was smiling.
Robert Draper, a contributing writer for the magazine, is writing a book about the U.S. House of Representatives.
Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

WEEK THREE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:

Consider the image of McCarthy painted by Draper in this article. Is it positive? Negative? Powerful? What do you think of McCarthy after reading this article?

WEEK FOUR: October 3-7...WEEK FOUR BLOG ENTRY

WEEK FOUR BLOG ENTRY:
You see a star. Make a wish. What is it?

WEEK FOUR READING: AS YOU READ, WRITE DOWN ANY QUESTIONS THAT COME TO MIND.

Immigration

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-deportation-story,0,6963488.htmlstory
Could he be a good American?
Guatemalan man with a U.S. family is threatened with deportation.
Richard Fausset
June 4, 2011
Reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C. — On a bright Saturday morning, Emily Nelson Guzman packed a beet-red Prius for the journey that would take her once more to Lumpkin, Ga., with its forlorn town square and sleepy barbecue joint and the nation's largest immigration detention center.
Her husband was there, locked away. Nineteen months earlier, federal agents had arrested him in his yard.
She loaded into the Prius a bag holding the old tight jeans she could finally squeeze into again, the ones she would model so he could see, through the visitation window, how much weight she had lost.
She loaded in another bag, full of action figures -- the Shazams and Spider-men and Power Rangers her little boy pretended to be when he fantasized about setting his father free.
THE NEW LATINO SOUTH
The Latino population in the South has grown dramatically over the last decade. This is one in a series of occasional stories chronicling the lives of Latinos in a changing region.
Pedro Guzman's bag, a small Old Navy backpack, had already been packed and stowed away in a locker at Stewart Detention Center. It was the only luggage he would be allowed to take to his native Guatemala if a federal immigration judge, in a hearing two days hence, rejected the argument that Pedro had transformed from gang member to good American, a family man who had earned the right to live in the United States.
At the hearing, Emily would have a chance to vouch for his character. So would her mother. So would Pedro himself.
Emily's mother, Pamela Alberda, brought out a bag of turkey sandwiches from her boyfriend's house. The boyfriend improvised something on the piano. The music spilled out into the driveway, urgent and sad, like the day itself.
“I really, truly do not know what will happen,” Emily had written on her blog. “He will be freed or sent to a country he does not know.”
She is a family therapist, 34, white and Midwest-born, with a voice as plain as milk. A dozen years ago, she fell in love -- and discovered that the object of her affection had been smuggled across the border by his mother when he was 8 years old.
She also discovered that his immigration issue would not be solved by marrying a U.S. citizen.
A wife's devotion
When Emily met Pedro, he was a sweet kid at a bus stop, a 19-year-old high school dropout on his way to one of his two restaurant jobs, a lost soul who escaped the street life of San Luis Obispo and had gone to Minneapolis hoping for a fresh start.
He had covered up his watch on that first meeting, giving himself an excuse to ask the time. She answered in a confident Spanish perfected during a study-abroad year in Mazatlan.
Soon there was passion and friendship, and trust. He told her about his old life: He had run with a gang, but it was minor-league hooliganism, he assured her. It was San Luis Obispo, after all, not Los Angeles.
There was a small wedding, despite her parents' initial reservations, and a move to North Carolina. In between came Logan, now 4 years old, with his big brown eyes and head of loose black ringlets and little fists that pounded his mother when his father's absence drove him to fits.
Emily knew that most women in her position didn't have the means or the connections to publicize their cases.
But she had her blog, “Bring Pedro Home.” He had been the subject of a postcard campaign and an online petition drive. They had retained an Atlanta lawyer who arrived at hearings in a big silver BMW.
And she had formed alliances with the South's small core of pro-immigrant activists, the Mennonites and liberation theology types with their earnest bumper stickers and their belief -- inspiring to some, naive to others -- in a justice that transcends borders.
The drive from North Carolina would take her through a changing South, where pro-Dixie bumper stickers vie for attention with the billboards for restaurants named El Molcajete, and roadside signs like the one in Columbus, Ga., asking, Necesita un Trabajo? Need a Job?
Lumpkin's Stewart Detention Center is itself a sign of the region's transformation, with 1,400 detainees, most of them culled from Georgia and the Carolinas, a rotating cast of Juans and Miguels and Manuelitos. Somebody's father, somebody's son. The ones who were angels and the ones who should probably be kicked out. The ones who fell somewhere in between.
Activists have targeted the privately run detention center and had held up Pedro, 31, as an example of the kind of good person being ground down by a misguided immigration policy. Emily told them about the injustice of his case -- about the judge who declined to grant Pedro legal residency, or even bond, citing two marijuana arrests from when he was a teen.
And yet, despite her allies and advantages, Emily had never felt more pessimistic about Pedro's case as they rolled out of Chapel Hill. She knew there was a kink in his story of redemption.
Unfortunate events
The day before they left North Carolina, Emily took Logan to his therapy session. She and a social worker watched him play Candyland, and invent the rules as he saw fit. This was something he could control, unlike the situation with Pedro.
In a previous session, he reconstructed the night in September 2009 when immigration officers came to his house. A crowned prince action figure, hidden inside a dollhouse, served as his father.
They had come on a Friday at 4 a.m. and banged on the door, but Pedro did not come out. They returned Monday morning. The boy watched as Pedro, surprised, made a brief and hopeless attempt at flight. He watched as his father was handcuffed and loaded into a black SUV.
Pedro had been legal once, with an annually renewed work visa. But when he reapplied by mail in 2008, he was sent back a letter of rejection.
His elderly mother, for reasons not fully clear, had recently been denied legal residency. And because she had filed a 1988 asylum application listing Pedro as a dependent, his fate was tied to hers.
His mother left the United States for good, and the government sent a letter ordering Pedro to court. He says he never received it. The government then ordered him deported.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn't help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Instead, Pedro took hope in a Clinton-era immigration law that extended legal resident status to some immigrants from a handful of troubled countries. To prevail, he needed to show that his deportation would create an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for him and his family. He also needed to demonstrate good moral character.
In December 2009, the immigration judge cited the pot convictions, both misdemeanor possession cases, in ruling that Pedro's character was suspect. Since then, one case has been vacated and the family's attorney, H. Glenn Fogle Jr., has successfully appealed the immigration judge's ruling, winning Pedro another chance.
But two days before the road trip to Lumpkin, Fogle had sent Emily a worried email. He had been taking a closer look at Pedro's papers. What was this about a hit-and-run from 2008?
The hit-and-run. Her heart sank. She thought it was a non-issue, something that wouldn't appear on Pedro's record. It wasn't something she tended to bring up when she told his story to her activist allies.
Emily told her lawyer that the incident wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she knew that “hit-and-run” could sound bad to a judge.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 75% of the people who appeared before an immigration judge in the last fiscal year were ordered removed. Before the email from her lawyer, Emily had put Pedro's chances at 50-50. Now, she had to admit to herself, it seemed more like 10-90.
And yet the trip to Lumpkin was still on. If nothing else, she and Logan needed one last visit before Pedro was put on a plane for Guatemala City, alone, with his one allotted bag.
After therapy, Emily and Logan returned to their little wreck of a rental home in Durham. Pedro had been the cook, the housekeeper, the fix-it man. Now vegetation clogged the gutters. The mailbox was bent sideways and full of carpenter bees. The doorknobs had broken on the bedroom and bathroom doors. Not knowing how to fix them, Emily removed the knobs, leaving holes with naked bolts.
She met her mother and mother's boyfriend, Milo Fryling, 49, at a Thai place for dinner. Pamela, 54, is a preschool teacher and puppeteer who wears “Life is Good” T-shirts. But she had taken a dimmer view of a system that refused to free the father of her grandson.
In November, she was arrested for criminal trespass during a pro-immigrant rally at the detention center.
“I woke up this morning,” she said to her daughter, “and thought, 'There's going to be no justice.'”
The Carolinas passed in a blur of rest stops and billboards. Then it was into Georgia, where, a day before, Gov. Nathan Deal had signed an Arizona-style bill to crack down on illegal immigration.
They arrived in Lumpkin long after dark and spent the night at El Refugio, a modest rental house activists offer as a “refuge” for families visiting the detention center. With its bunk beds, frayed paperbacks and National Geographic maps of Latin America, it had the feel of a backpacker's hostel. Lumpkin has no hotels.
The next morning, they were among the first visitors at the detention center, a white, blocky complex ringed by fencing and concertina wire. More visitors would come soon, mothers and brothers and aunts and sisters, dressed smartly, as if for a casual church service, all murmuring in Spanish.
Pedro emerged from a door, on the other side of the visiting room's glass partition. His big dark eyes matched his son's.
The boy beamed. With feet planted on a table, he slammed the top of his head against the glass. His father did the same. They smiled, and then slammed again, in unison, like bucks in the woods, the vibrations the next best thing to a touch.
Emily stood and pirouetted in her tight jeans. Pedro grinned and bowed at the waist for comic effect. The boy commandeered the phone. Emily let him spend most of the hour talking about things important to a boy.
Pamela spoke to her son-in-law briefly. We love you, she said.
Pedro told her he figured his chances were slim. Pamela did not correct him.
“We're just trying to be realistic,” she said.
The boy and Pedro played hide-and-seek until the guard announced that time was up.
“Hide under the table,” Emily told Pedro in Spanish. He ducked.
Logan pretended to wonder where he was.
They returned to El Refugio and rested. At one point, Milo wandered Lumpkin looking for a piano. In an unlocked church, he found a Steinway, and banged out pieces from a Methodist hymnal.
In the morning, Pamela read Milo a letter she had written to God:
“I know that we are not perfect and that Pedro has made mistakes in his life. But the price he has paid has been greater than he deserves. In a world where people fight and argue and are often filled with hate and fear, this small family are loving and faithful.”
The hearing was in a tiny detention center courtroom, its wooden pews scratched with “Jorge,” “Cancun XIII,” “Zacatecas,” “LA.”
Pedro, dressed in blue prison garb, took the stand. There were three small tattooed dots on his left hand, above the thumb. Mi. Vida. Loca. My crazy life -- reminders of his life in the streets.
Pedro told Immigration Judge Dan Trimble that he couldn't remember when he left Guatemala. He had no friends or family there.
He described his work history: restaurant upon restaurant, group home worker, truck driver, and, after his work permit was denied, stay-at-home dad -- “the best job I ever had in my life.”
There was the question of the pot busts -- teenage indiscretions, he said, that he deeply regretted.
Soon after his move to Minnesota in 1999, there was a misdemeanor charge of theft. “I don't remember doing it,” he said.
There was another arrest for destroying property around the same time. Pedro said it was a big misunderstanding, that he was only going to retrieve his own stuff from a drunk roommate.
He described how he met Emily, and how she had taught him to be a better man. He spoke of his bond with his son. Deportation, Pedro said, would mean “taking my soul away, everything I worked for, everything I made.”
He explained the hit-and-run from 2008. It was nighttime on a North Carolina country road. He felt a thump on his FedEx truck, and thought it was a deer. He stopped, looked around, called out. Nothing. He returned in his truck, and a second time, with Emily.
A police officer met them at the scene and said Pedro had hit a man. It was a cyclist, a physician training for a triathlon. The man had cuts and bruises, and what his lawyer, Edward J. Falcone, would later describe as a “fairly significant” head injury. (Falcone says the cyclist has ongoing neck and shoulder pain.)
Pedro was booked at the station. He later pleaded guilty to failing to stop after an accident with an injury. It went on his record as a misdemeanor.
Pamela testified next, describing how Pedro had been caring for her elderly and ailing mother.
Then it was Emily's turn. She deposited the boy on Pamela's lap and took the stand. Logan's eyes were blank and glassy, like a doll's.
Her voice was small. And soon it cracked.
Emily said she and Pedro had changed each other for the better. She said he was a compassionate man and a better father than anyone she knew.
The boy was suffering, Emily said. He was in therapy. He didn't understand why this was happening.
She told the judge she had battled depression, attempting suicide at 16.
She said she no longer needed antidepressants after she met the sweet Guatemalan boy at the bus stop. Now she could feel the black dog nipping again.
I need Pedro, she told the judge. Logan needs him.
Aminda Katz, the Department of Homeland Security's attorney, laid out the case against Pedro Perez Guzman dispassionately.
There was arrest after arrest after arrest. There was a $915 fine, apparently for a probation violation. There was a matter of tax filings. He had started working in the late 1990s when he dropped out of school to help his mother. But the IRS had filings only back to 2002.
This, she argued, was not good moral character.
As for an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship,” she said their ordeal would not be any worse than it was for many of the other families who have a loved one deported.
The judge took a break, and the family waited, pleased to at least have it over. Pedro was separated from them now only by the court's low bar.
The judge returned. He told them he had considered both sides carefully.
The family suffered, he said, while Pedro was detained. It would only get worse if he were sent to Guatemala.
Pedro, he said, “appears to have been rehabilitated.” He would grant relief.
There was a collective shriek of joy.
Moments later, the judge asked the federal attorney if she cared to reserve the right to appeal. Yes, she said.
“No!” Pamela shouted.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
The government would decide whether to keep fighting to have Pedro deported.
The next morning, Emily and the family were driving the Prius back to North Carolina. The attorney was drafting a motion to free Pedro on bond. Then Emily's cellphone rang. She yelled at Milo to turn the car around.
The government had decided not to appeal.
Back in Lumpkin, a Volkswagen Passat, driven by a Mennonite pastor, roared into the dirt driveway of El Refugio. Its bumper sticker read “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Pedro emerged from the car in jeans and a polo shirt.
The Prius skidded up in a cloud of dust. Emily and Logan dashed toward him. Then Pamela and Milo.
Crying was the only sound. They rolled in the grass. They formed a circle, fell to their knees and prayed.
The boy told them to stop crying. He had things to tell his father. About the concrete chair he found behind the house that looks like a throne. About the big deep hole over by the storage shed. About how Pamela and Milo were getting married, and about how he heard that cicadas can sting you.
Eventually, it was time to go home. Pedro grabbed the backpack he would have taken with him to Guatemala.
It was stuffed. With letters from Emily, and pictures of his American family.

WEEK FOUR WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:

What questions do you have for the author? The questions might be about content or form or anything that comes to mind. After we amass a few, I’ll send the author the link and maybe he can respond.
In addition, what other thoughts did you have as you read this piece?

WEEK FIVE: OCTOBER 10-14...WEEK FIVE BLOG ENTRY

WEEK FIVE BLOG ENTRY:
Where do you see yourself in five years? In ten years?

WEEK FIVE READING:

Modern Technology

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
What the Internet is doing to our brains
By Nicholas Carr
Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

WEEK FIVE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:

So, answer the question, is google making us stupid? Do you agree with the author?

WEEK SIX: OCTOBER 17-21...WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY

WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY:
Can values be taught in school? Should values be taught in school?

WEEK SIX READING:

MORE MODERN TECHNOLOGY

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/02/27/i-can-t-think.html
I Can’t Think!
The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.
by Sharon Begley | February 27, 2011 10:0 AM EST

Illustration by Matt Mahurin for Newsweek
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.
This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”
So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.
The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.
The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.
Decision science has only begun to incorporate research on how the brain processes information, but the need for answers is as urgent as the stakes are high. During the BP oil-well blowout last year, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, estimates that he got 300 to 400 pages of emails, texts, reports, and other messages every day. It’s impossible to know whether less information, more calmly evaluated, would have let officials figure out sooner how to cap the well, but Allen tells NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone that the torrent of data might have contributed to what he calls the mistake of failing to close off air space above the gulf on day one. (There were eight near midair collisions.) A comparable barrage of information assailed administration officials before the overthrow of the Egyptian government, possibly producing at least one misstep: CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress that Hosni Mubarak was about to announce he was stepping down—right before the Egyptian president delivered a defiant, rambling speech saying he wasn’t going anywhere. “You always think afterwards about what you could have done better, but there isn’t time in the moment to second-guess,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “You have to make your decision and go execute.” As scientists probe how the flow of information affects decision making, they’ve spotted several patterns. Among them:
Total Failure to Decide
Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply, whether to factor it into an impending decision. But decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. The clearest example of this comes from studies of financial decisions. In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and colleagues found that the more information people confronted about a 401(k) plan, the more participation fell: from 75 percent to 70 percent as the number of choices rose from two to 11, and to 61 percent when there were 59 options. People felt overwhelmed and opted out. Those who participated chose lower-return options—worse choices. Similarly, when people are given information about 50 rather than 10 options in an online store, they choose lower-quality options. Although we say we prefer more information, in fact more can be “debilitating,” argues Iyengar, whose 2010 book The Art of Choosing comes out in paperback in March. “When we make decisions, we compare bundles of information. So a decision is harder if the amount of information you have to juggle is greater.” In recent years, businesses have offered more and more choices to cater to individual tastes. For mustard or socks, this may not be a problem, but the proliferation of choices can create paralysis when the stakes are high and the information complex.
Many Diminishing Returns
If we manage to make a decision despite info-deluge, it often comes back to haunt us. The more information we try to assimilate, the more we tend to regret the many forgone options. In a 2006 study, Iyengar and colleagues analyzed job searches by college students. The more sources and kinds of information (about a company, an industry, a city, pay, benefits, corporate culture) they collected, the less satisfied they were with their decision. They knew so much, consciously or unconsciously, they could easily imagine why a job not taken would have been better. In a world of limitless information, regret over the decisions we make becomes more common. We chafe at the fact that identifying the best feels impossible. “Even if you made an objectively better choice, you tend to be less satisfied with it,” says Iyengar.
A key reason for information’s diminishing or even negative returns is the limited capacity of the brain’s working memory. It can hold roughly seven items (which is why seven-digit phone numbers were a great idea). Anything more must be processed into long-term memory. That takes conscious effort, as when you study for an exam. When more than seven units of information land in our brain’s inbox, argues psychologist Joanne Cantor, author of the 2009 book Conquer Cyber Overload and an emerita professor at the University of Wisconsin, the brain struggles to figure out what to keep and what to disregard. Ignoring the repetitious and the useless requires cognitive resources and vigilance, a harder task when there is so much information.
It isn’t only the quantity of information that knocks the brain for a loop; it’s the rate. The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. “We’re being trained to prefer an immediate decision even if it’s bad to a later decision that’s better,” says psychologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University. “In business, we’re seeing a preference for the quick over the right, in large part because so many decisions have to be made. The notion that the quick decision is better is becoming normative.”
‘Recency’ Trumps Quality
The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume outsize importance, regardless of their validity. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”
Part of the problem is that the brain is really bad at giving only a little weight to a piece of information. When psychologist Eric Stone of Wake Forest University had subjects evaluate the vocabulary skills of a hypothetical person, he gave them salient information (the person’s education level) and less predictive information (how often they read a newspaper). People give the less predictive info more weight than it deserves. “Our cognitive systems,” says Stone, “just aren’t designed to take information into account only a little.”
The Neglected Unconscious
Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal, analytical assault. So while we’re likely to think creative thoughts in the shower, it’s much harder if we’re under a virtual deluge of data. “If you let things come at you all the time, you can’t use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment,” says Cantor. “You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.” That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns. In contrast, a constant focus on the new makes it harder for information to percolate just below conscious awareness, where it can combine in ways that spark smart decisions.
One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the discovery that some of our best decisions are made through unconscious processes. When subjects in one study evaluated what psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands calls a “rather daunting amount of information” about four hypothetical apartments for rent—size, location, friendliness of the landlord, price, and eight other features—those who decided unconsciously which to rent did better. (“Better” meant they chose the one that had objectively better features.) The scientists made sure the decision was unconscious by having the subjects do a memory and attention task, which tied up their brains enough that they couldn’t contemplate, say, square footage.
There are at least two ways an info-glut can impair the unconscious system of decision making. First, when people see that there is a lot of complex information relevant to a decision, “they default to the conscious system,” says psychologist Maarten Bos of Radboud. “That causes them to make poorer choices.” Second, the unconscious system works best when it ignores some information about a complex decision. But here’s the rub: in an info tsunami, our minds struggle to decide if we can ignore this piece … or that one … but how about that one? “Especially online,” says Cantor, “it is so much easier to look for more and more information than sit back and think about how it fits together.”
Even experience-based decision making, in which you use a rule of thumb rather than analyze pros and cons, can go off the rails with too much information. “This kind of intuitive decision making relies on distilled expertise,” says Kessler. “More information, by overwhelming and distracting the brain, can make it harder to tap into just the core information you need.” In one experiment, M.B.A. students choosing a (make-believe) stock portfolio were divided into two groups, one that was inundated with information from analysts and the financial press, and another that saw only stock-price changes. The latter reaped more than twice the returns of the info-deluged group, whose analytical capabilities were hijacked by too much information and wound up buying and selling on every rumor and tip—a surefire way to lose money in the market. The more data they got, the more they struggled to separate wheat from chaff.?
Which brings us back to the experimental subjects Angelika Dimoka has put in an fMRI scanner. The prefrontal cortex that waves a white flag under an onslaught of information plays a key role in your gut-level, emotional decision-making system. It hooks up feelings about various choices with the output of the rational brain. If emotions are shut out of the decision-making process, we’re likely to overthink a decision, and that has been shown to produce worse outcomes on even the simplest tasks. In one classic experiment, when volunteers focused on the attributes of various strawberry jams they had just rated, it completely scrambled their preferences, and they wound up giving a high rating to a jam they disliked and a low rating to one they had found delicious.
How can you protect yourself from having your decisions warped by excess information? Experts advise dealing with emails and texts in batches, rather than in real time; that should let your unconscious decision-making system kick in. Avoid the trap of thinking that a decision requiring you to assess a lot of complex information is best made methodically and consciously; you will do better, and regret less, if you let your unconscious turn it over by removing yourself from the info influx. Set priorities: if a choice turns on only a few criteria, focus consciously on those. Some people are better than others at ignoring extra information. These “sufficers” are able to say enough: they channel-surf until they find an acceptable show and then stop, whereas “maximizers” never stop surfing, devouring information, and so struggle to make a decision and move on. If you think you’re a maximizer, the best prescription for you might be the “off” switch on your smart phone.
February 27, 2011 10:0am