The best way to enjoy Tom Vanderbilt's new book, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," is to forget the psychobabble title and merge like a commuter into the text itself. Like real traffic, it's sometimes slow going. But it's also a delightful tour through the mysteries and manners of driving. Think you do it well? Vanderbilt thinks not.
The big idea: "Driving," Vanderbilt writes, "is probably the most complex everyday thing we do in our lives." Yet most people zip around without ever realizing that their driving is based on faulty perceptions and folksy "superstitions" about life on the road.
Examples: Women can't drive? Actually, men are the terrors: they speed more, honk more, drink more, wear seat belts less and are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents. Nice people merge early? Waiting until the last second to change lanes when traffic bottlenecks actually helps things flow more smoothly. The other lane is moving faster? On the contrary, manic lane changers make up only four minutes of lost time—while the stress of cutting all those people off, Vanderbilt notes, probably takes more time off their lives.
Conclusion: Don't expect traffic nirvana any time soon. Confronted with bad driving all around them, most people give their own wheel-work two thumbs up—and don't see a need to change. Even if they did, they'd still be human. And that, says Vanderbilt, is exactly the problem.
When Life is Like a TV ShowAs a director of psychiatrics at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, Joel Gold has seen thousands of delusional patients. But a few years ago, he began noticing a different sort of paranoia: young white men who believed they were the subjects of their own reality-TV shows. Some, says Gold, who with his brother has written a preliminary paper and hopes to author a larger study, seemed pleased by their roles—excited by the anticipated million-dollar payout. Others were tormented. One came to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen—believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he'd be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top, and finally be released from the "show."
Grandiose, paranoid delusions are a staple among schizophrenics and psychopaths. Typically, they apply to one aspect of a patient's life—say, irrationally believing a spouse is cheating. But these patients, much like Jim Carrey's character in the 1998 film "The Truman Show," believe their entire lives are being broadcast, and that everyone is in on the joke. The numbers are small—Gold has observed only five firsthand and has heard from or about more than a dozen since—but he and others think "The Truman Show Delusion," as Gold now calls it, is the pathological product of our insatiable appetite for self-exposure. Delusions are often related to the larger cultural and political climate: during the cold war some people thought they were being monitored by the KGB. Today, some might think Al Qaeda is after them. When all it takes is a Webcam and the click of a mouse to be seen and heard by millions, and with hundreds of surveillance cameras capturing our movements each day, it's not necessary to go on "Big Brother" to feel like you're in the public eye. "If you have a predisposition to paranoia, going on YouTube and seeing some guy doing something can really shake you up," says Gold. You could think, "Is the world watching me?" Perhaps the key to sanity is knowing that while the whole world isn't watching, someone probably is.
A Life in Books: Darin Strauss, Guggenheim fellowMy five most important books
-Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
-Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
-Collected Stories, VS Pritchett
A book to which you always return: Herzog, Saul Bellow
A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed: Portnoy's Complaint. "It was important to me, but the humor has dated badly."
Anything But Crocs
Lessons From Locke
Earlier this summer, Wendy Kopp flew round trip from New York to L.A. in one day. Kopp, the founder of Teach For America—the national teaching corps that recruits high-performing college grads to teach in low-performing public schools—wanted to personally welcome some 700 new recruits to summer boot camp. When she took the podium, the teachers-in-training started cheering before she could finish saying her name. Then it was rapt silence as she exhorted them to engage in the battle for educational equity, first as quality teachers, then as leaders of the systemic reform needed to close the appalling achievement gap between the richest and the poorest students. It was a rousing call to arms not unlike the one I heard the summer of 2005 when I began to follow four TFA recruits through their first year of teaching.
Today TFA is not only the postgrad destination of choice for many of America's top college seniors, it's also a magnet for reform-minded philanthropists. Despite a battered economy, TFA is on target to raise $110 million in fiscal 2008, a 40 percent hike over the previous year's record intake. The number of applicants has spiked to a record high—now 25,000 college seniors compete for the privilege of taking on one of the toughest jobs on earth. Among the candidates: 11 percent of seniors at Yale, 10 percent at Georgetown and 9 percent at Harvard. This summer, 3,700 corps members who were carefully culled for their leadership skills through TFA's data-driven, envy-of-Wall Street selection model underwent an intensive, five-week crash course in teaching. In a few weeks, they will begin their two-year classroom commitments.
They will be assigned to schools like Locke High School in Watts, where I spent my year as an embed. At Locke, a school hemmed in by competing gangs, 2 percent of ninth graders are proficient in algebra; 11 percent read at grade level. Too many can't read at all. I learned that when a friend asked me to visit the school months earlier. As I sat in her classroom, she carefully enunciated the word "cat" while holding up a finger for each sound in the one-syllable word. "Cuh-A-Tuh," intoned Ms. Levine: "CAT." Her embarrassed ninth graders reluctantly repeated the exercise. It was excruciating to watch. When I later realized that Locke would be a training site for TFA's L.A. summer institute, I wondered: what could be learned about how we educate our most impoverished students through the teaching experiences of our most privileged?
Lessons emerged on a daily basis. Some of the most important:
The American system of education is broken. America has been wrestling with the problem of declining student achievement ever since 1983, when the government issued the report "A Nation at Risk," which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" that threatened our country's future. Twenty-five years on, the tide is in. The United States truly is a nation at risk—our graduation rate ranks 19th among top developing countries. At Locke, 1,000 ninth graders were enrolled in 2001. Of the 240 who graduated four years later, only 30 were eligible to apply to a California state campus. Note to Obama and McCain: do the math. The impact an uneducated populace has on the integrity of the country's social fabric and the health of the economy cannot be underestimated.
It's the teachers, stupid! The single most important factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher. And yet, we have no effective system to attract, train, retain and promote high-caliber candidates for our schools. Today's teachers score in the lowest quartile of college grads and too many of the schools that train them are diploma mills. By making its program highly selective and attaching status to the job, Teach For America has proved that it is possible to get the best and the brightest into our classrooms. But no one—not TFA, not the districts, not the unions—has figured out how to keep them there. TFA's most recent alumni survey indicates that one third of former corps members are still teaching K–12. Critics charge that the recruits' short forays into the classroom exacerbate the critical issue of staff churning in our neediest schools and gibe that TFA really stands for Teach For Awhile. But the truth is, up to half of all the country's 3.5 million teachers bail within five years. Low pay, low status and low satisfaction undoubtedly drive many out. The transformation of teaching into a financially rewarding profession with high standards of admission—and accountability—would go a long way toward establishing staff stability.
Teach For America recruits can't close the achievement gap, but its alumni might. TFA knows that it will take systemic change to zap the gap. It's banking on its alums—in whatever field they eventually choose—to lead the charge. Some already are. In Washington, D.C., the reforming schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, is a 1992 TFA alum. The founders of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the wildly successful chain of 57 charter schools, are 1992 TFA alums, too. Nationwide, there are now 360 school leaders and 16 elected officials who got their start in public service with Teach For America. By 2010, the ranks of America's next generation of leaders will be seeded with 20,000 high-achieving alums who will have seen the crisis in our classrooms firsthand. If, as Francis Bacon once said, knowledge in itself truly is power—if by knowing the profundity of the problem TFA alum will be empowered to find its solution—then Wendy Kopp's battle for educational equity will be won. Big ifs.
Cleaning Up The House
Last October, the month before Joey Specter was expecting to give birth, part of the ceiling in her and her husband's Brooklyn apartment started to flake off. Annoyed, but with their minds occupied, they weren't too concerned. Until the day after they brought the little bundle home from the hospital and Specter's husband went to work sweeping up the flakes. "He just poked the ceiling a few times and a huge chunk of it collapsed," Spector says, exposing a vast black growth that looked like mold, accompanied by an "awful, earthy smell." Panicking, they searched online for help, coming across a listing for an environmental consultant who came to test the air. It turned out to be toxic black mold.
While much environmental debate is over how fast the ice caps and forests will disappear, the great indoors look more likely to get to you first. Airborne particulates coming from mold, dust, lead paint and building materials are causing heightened concern as people develop higher sensitivities to things in the air. Home-inspection companies have been around for decades, looking for things like asbestos and mold, but increasing awareness about home-based allergens has led to a brisk upswing in the home-inspection and consulting industry.
Micro Ecologies, the firm that responded to Specter's black-mold problem, usually gets calls from people wondering why their living room makes them sneeze. What comes next isn't cheap. A full home consultation with a lab analysis can cost around $1,000, depending on the size of the residence and extent of the problem, says Arthur Lau, a general manager of the company. A different company comes later to fix the problem, which can be covered by insurance.
The industry keeps a loose hierarchy of dangerous particles. Asbestos, the building material found in the 1970s to lead to forms of cancer, has always ranked first, although it's rarely found in newer homes. But consulting experts agree that the more prolific, and growing, culprit is mold. The fungus—of which 200,000 species are known to exist—often enters homes through an open door or window before taking haven in dark, moist environments like wall cavities or under carpeting. Most homes have small amounts of hidden mold that are usually harmless to nonallergic people, says industrial hygienist Victor D'Amato, especially in humid regions like Florida or the Northeast. Simply living in an environment also means things like dead skin cells, animal dander and carpet fibers will float in the air, often in small, unaffecting doses. The Centers for Disease Control call floating things like mold spores "respiratory irritants" that could cause different levels of allergy-like symptoms. Floating particles affect all people differently, depending on the quantity inhaled and the susceptibility to lung irritation. Longer-term exposure in higher doses could cause breathing difficulties like asthma.
The consultants NEWSWEEK spoke with said they consider mold a harmful substance worth removing from your home, even though science hasn't yet linked spore inhalation, of even the toxic kind, to much more than varying levels of allergic irritation. But a lack of regulation in the environmental home-consulting industry poses a more immediate problem. Investigators disagree on testing methods, like whether cursory air samples or visual inspections are the better way to spot a problem. Both can be inconclusive if done quickly. More important can be finding the source—often a leaky pipe or poor ventilation.
The wider concern is about consultants' certification. Asbestos inspectors are required to be certified by state and federal health agencies, but anyone can inspect for other irritants. "It is possible to become a certified mold inspector in the amount of time it takes you to print a business card," says Owen Seiver, a consultant and professor of environmental health at California State University Northridge. "It's hard to know who's doing it right." When something strange is growing in your ceiling, that's not a comforting thought.
My Super Ex-Jewelry
Get rid of jewelry from your ex-es
-ex-cessories.com
-exboyfriendjewelry.com
No comments:
Post a Comment