Categories
Good Books

The United States of American Gothic

ARGUABLY THE MOST FAMOUS PAINTING IN AMERICAN HISTORY, WE EXPLORE OUR OBSESSION WITH GRANT WOOD’S CLASSIC.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Grant Wood must be flattered out the wazoo. Although the artist of “American Gothic” died in 1942, his painting has gone on to symbolize all things American, and parodied by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and both the left and right-wing press. And let’s not even get started with a Google Images search.

This odd depiction of our culture has inspired, flabbergasted, outraged and obsessed generations of Americans. However, everybody instantly recognizes it and somehow “gets” it.

Arguably the most famous painting in our country’s history (“Whistler’s Mother” is a distant second), the work was almost rejected and forgotten when it was first presented in 1930. It has since developed a legendary story about the ultimate in recycling.

This fascinating chapter in American history has been captured by Harvard historian Steven Biel in his book, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting [W.W. Norton and Company]. Here, he takes a few moments to reveal the painting’s importance.

What inspired you to write this book?

I’m interested in objects and events that have become overly familiar. I wrote a book about the Titanic disaster a few years ago [Down with the Old Canoe]. This was before the [1997] movie came out, before it saturated popular culture more than ever.  I’m interested in things that have been flattened out to clichés and I try to recover the history behind them and find out why they’re famous. In this case, [the painting’s fame] is all out of proportion to its humble origins and to its artistic merit compared to other “masterpieces.”

What is the story behind the painting?

Grant Wood was an unknown artist from Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1930. He went down to a small town in south-central Iowa called Eldon. He traveled there because a friend of his was running a community fine-arts project. He was riding around in a car with another artist named John Sharp. While riding, they encountered this house on the outskirts of Eldon – an extremely modest clapboard house, but it had this gothic window, which stood out. It was not completely unexceptional in the Midwest, but it was strange enough to get Wood to get out of the car.

He decided to put some figures in the foreground that could possibly belong to this strange house. He had his sister and his dentist pose for it. He distorted them – he elongated them with grim expressions. Then he entered it into a contest at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it received third prize. A notable critic reprinted it in newspapers, and from there, it took off.

Originally, it took off because it was ridiculing the Midwest and the kinds of people who supposedly lived there – uptight, repressed, puritanical and generally nasty. The sort of yokels that writers like H.L. Mencken would poke fun at throughout the 1920s. It also stirred up a controversy in Iowa because the farmers really thought it was an insult to them. Its initial fame was born out of controversy, out of the perception that its meaning was satirical.

Describe the painting strictly from an artistic and aesthetic viewpoint.

It’s a realistic portrait of a man and a woman posed in front of a house. The woman is wearing a rickrack apron. The man is wearing overalls, a dark coat and a collarless shirt. He’s holding a hayfork, which directly mirrors the gothic window. The pattern of the hayfork is repeated in the pattern of the man’s overalls if you look closely. There is a clear blue sky in the background, highly stylized, rounded trees, a red barn off on the right side, a snake plant on the porch on the left that mirrors a lock of hair running down the woman’s neck. The man is directly looking at the viewer. The woman is looking off to the side.

Some have said that what lends itself to parody formally is that you have these two figures facing us and it’s easy to plug other faces into them and to substitute something else in place of the pitchfork.

In the beginning, the painting was despised by certain people and celebrated by others. As time went on, the painting took on new meanings.

It was despised and embraced, as far as I can tell, for the same reasons. It was perceived as being a work of satire. The critics who really made Wood’s reputation understood it that way. They understood him as a victim of these people and their repressiveness and hostility.

Initially, the people who despised it were Iowa farmwives who wrote letters to newspapers protesting being depicted as primitive idiots.

How exactly did this painting become an American icon, the most famous painting in American history?

There is no quantifying that, really, but I would say so. It happened because over the course of The Thirties in the context of The Depression and throughout World War II, it changed from being that satirical image to a national symbol of stability, order, prosperity, virtue and wholesomeness.

Instead of holding its subjects up to ridicule, it now came to be seen as holding them up for admiration as quintessential Americans.  In hard times, the “let’s make fun of yokels” idea seemed kind of cruel. The conservative virtues of the Midwest were re-embraced by some East Coast critics, and even The Left in the 1930s paid homage to the fortitude of the “folk.” It was a way of fighting off despair.

Some people say that the subjects are husband and wife; others say they are father and daughter. Which is it?

Wood was non-committal on this. His sister, Nan, probably because she was thirty-something when she posed [and Dr. McKeeby was in his sixties], was really offended by the idea that they might be husband and wife. It was she who really took the lead in insisting that they were meant to be father and daughter. Wood, as far as we know, left no record of his intentions. We don’t have anything that tells us what he was thinking when he painted this.

images

Everything that he says about this comes after the fact, and it comes from responding to those people who hated it. He said that he didn’t mean to make fun of anybody and that he was a loyal son of the Midwest. Strangely enough, he said sometimes that they were father and daughter and as time went on he seemed completely comfortable in saying that they were a couple. He went back and forth and didn’t seem to have a particular stake in it one way or the other.

The fact that it is ambiguous has opened the door to these gothic interpretations of the painting: what is the relationship between these two people? What is going on behind that curtain? What kind of creepy things might be happening in that house?

Wood’s sexuality was rather ambiguous. Do you think that influenced the painting in any way?

If I don’t have solid evidence on this, then I’m not really willing to go there. Circumstantially, yes, he lived with his mother until he was into middle age. He married very late. It was a terrible marriage by every account. It rather quickly ended in divorce. Speculations about his sexuality aren’t entirely unreasonable, but suggesting that it would have certain aesthetic consequences simplifies the relationship between sexuality and artistic production. [For example,] the critic Robert Hughes suggested that this is some kind of gentle satire because Wood was a closeted homosexual. To me, it doesn’t illuminate that much.

From The Sixties onward, this painting becomes a real source of parody — everything from Green Acres to the yuppies to The Simple Life.

I started thinking about where I first became aware of this image. It certainly wasn’t at the Art Institute of Chicago and I certainly didn’t see it in a non-parodied form first. The first time I became aware of it was in a Country Corn Flakes commercial and in the opening credits of Green Acres. It had already become such a well-known image that it was an easy move to make. If you want to send up American heartland values or if you want to encapsulate those values in a single image, you use “American Gothic.” It’s a really effective shorthand way of capturing those myths of the true America.

7e0b938d7a533ddd894dc9500bdc731d

 The Beverly Hillbillies on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post [in 1963] is suggesting something about the wholesomeness of these yokels who find themselves in the corruption of LA. In an issue of TV Guide in the late Sixties, Irene Ryan [who played Granny] really defends the non-ironic interpretation of “American Gothic.” Ryan said that the timeless values of “American Gothic” are the antidote to what was going on in the late Sixties. She really identified with that image.

After that, the floodgates just opened. The first presidential couple to be parodied was the Johnsons. Every presidential couple since then have been plugged into the “American Gothic” pose.

Then you start to get these lifestyle parodies, where those old-fashioned people in the painting aren’t having any fun, but we are, with a tennis racquet or an electronics product instead of a pitchfork. They are playing on the immediate recognition of the image and at the same time saying that consuming this or that product is wholeheartedly American.

The joke couldn’t be more blatant than with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in The Simple Life. These people are being plopped into middle America and there is a clash of values. That’s the whole premise of the show.

simplelife

Is the actual painting itself still relevant today?

It’s hard for a parody of this painting to really work anymore, to carry any kind of potent message. To give it some power, to make it stand out from all the other parodies, takes extraordinary creativity. Of course, it’s impossible for it to stir up the passions that it stirred up in 1930. But it’s well worth understanding its rich history and coming to see how and why, at one time, it had the power to offend people.

 

breaking-bad-american-gothic-620x412

 

dwight-schrute-angela-martin-the-office-american-gothic-prints

 

ew-cover-american-gothic-true-blood1

 

8233647_orig

 

Artwork Credits: #1 © 1930 Grant Wood. #2 © 2005 Courtesy of WW Norton & Co.  All rights reserved. #3 © 1963 Saturday Evening Post. #4 © 2003 Fox Home Video.

 

The article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Linda Ellerbee

We’re always better off when we see the world through Linda Ellerbee’s eyes, and now we’re even more fortunate to get a taste of life with the help of her mouth. That infamous mouth – the one with the trademarked smirk that would wryly remind us “and so it goes” for over twenty years –– the mouth that would often bring TV network and AP Wire executives to a high boil – the mouth that inspired the classic sitcom Murphy Brown – the mouth that now says, “whenever I get into trouble it’s because they quoted me accurately, not inaccurately” is now talking again in her latest book, “Take Big Bites” (Putnam).

It usually doesn’t take much for Ellerbee to open this mouth, and when she does, she intrigues us and draws us into her worldview – a view as dry as it is fertile, and void of pretense. She’s smart and funny to a fault, and her Texas touch has you hog-tied and happy before you even have a chance to disagree with her incredibly good sense. She’s mouthy, for sure – but as often as her mouth is open, so is her soul, her mind and her need to talk to strangers (“As a journalist, I’ve made a darn good living talking to strangers,” she says. “When you talk to strangers, they are not strangers anymore.”).

Here, she shares some incredible and thought-provoking stories of her unique life through her experiences with meals, both good and bad, both memorable and forgettable. It’s a simple idea told simply, but when Ellerbee communicates, it’s like comfort food with deep, rich layers. It goes down easy and leaves you thinking.

In a word: magically delicious.

Mix one-part travelogue with a healthy dash of one-and-only style autobiography (typical chapter title: “No Shit, There I Was”), stir thoughtfully with recipes that actually entertain (“tie a bandanna around your head to catch the sweat” is actually Step #5 when making the Vietnamese dish, Pho) and salt to taste. However, you won’t need to add much, as Ellerbee leaves nothing on the bone regarding her failed marriage, her breast cancer, her frank talk with her bestest Rhinestone Cowgirl girlfriends, raising two children while balancing a career in journalism, and her twenty-year relationship with her unlikely lover and life partner Rolfe Tessem (a man who hates picnics).

There’s a meal – a bittersweet memory – for every one of these tales, which takes us by land and by sea from Vietnam to London to Mexico, with stops in Afghanistan and Houston. In the end, she’s spent and we’re full — there is not a secret left unrevealed, including her recipe for her specialty, down-home Frito Pie.

She says, “In my journals – for whatever reason – I noticed that I had noted meals along the way –and why they were important, and why they connected me to other things in my life. Other than music, nothing takes us back to a place and time quite as quickly as the taste of something. I can taste my mother’s fudge pie and be there with her in her kitchen with her alive. It would take me there.”

One meal at a time, as well as one friend, lover, child, cancer and career milestone at a time, Ellerbee eats her way to an epiphany. She says, “A lot of my life had been about exploring and adventuring in one way or another, whether it being one of the first women on TV news or losing both my breasts or traveling or what have you.”

Our appetizers came in the form of her first two bestsellers (“And So It Goes” in 1986 and “Move On” in 1991). It was a damn long time to wait for a writer this good and a main course this satisfying, and we are hunnnn-gry.

Why so long?

“My day job got in the way,” she replies.  And what a day job it is (and night job as well; in fact, it’s almost 24/8). Her production company, Lucky Duck, offers the Emmy-Award-winning news program for children, Nick News, on Nickelodeon, among other fine projects. It’s the good fortune of children today to have Ellerbee’s no-bullshit take on the news. Because of this, we know that the world will be a slightly better place in the future.

As we learn in her three books, her life had been a series of improbable plot twists and swift kicks in the ass. Her humble Houston beginnings did not seem to be a likely coming attraction for international acclaim and the back-biting business of network news. In fact, it seemed more likely that little Linda Jane would turn out more like Betty Crocker than Diane Sawyer.

She says, “I come from the kind of family that when we are eating one meal, we are talking about the next one.”

It’s one of those stories that would never work as fiction, but Ellerbee tells it better:

“It goes back to my father, who told me I could do anything, I could be anything, and who also persuaded me that a foot in the road is a good place for a foot to be,” she says. “And then I had a high school teacher who told me, ‘You are going to be a writer. You are a writer.’ When I was twenty-seven years old, my husband left me, and I had a two-year-old and a three-year old, and no job and no college degree. I had nothing but the memory of this teacher telling me, ‘You are a writer.’

“So I sat down and I wrote a letter. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. When I was growing up, I loved the movie His Girl Friday. I wrote this letter saying that I would be very good at this. I sent this to every newspaper and wire service in the United States. Television never entered my mind. I got a job with the Associated Press in Dallas, and moved there, and went to work, and was fired about four months later for accidentally letting a personal letter get out on the Associated Press news wire. Of course, in the letter, I shot my mouth off about my boss. They fired me only because they couldn’t shoot me.

“What happened instead is that I got all these job offers. One of them was from KHOU, the CBS television affiliate in Houston, my hometown. I went to work there for eight months, and then was offered a job in WCBS in New York, where I stayed for three years covering – get this – crime and strikes. Then NBC gave me a job to cover… the United States Congress!”

After that perfectly logical and non-ironic transition from crime to Congress, it was on to the legendary midnight cult obsession, NBC News Overnight. This offbeat news program was beloved by 80s college students, rock stars (Crosby, Stills, Nash and the Grateful Dead were devotees) and celebrities (Sammy Davis, Jr. would call in after the show to express his passion for it).

“If the Nielsen’s had rated colleges,” Ellerbee says, “we would probably still be on the air.”

In 1986, Ellerbee co-hosted the greatest television program never watched, called Our World. What made this ABC documentary series exquisite was not just an intelligent, hip and unsentimental look at pop culture and politics, but it was, more importantly, Ellerbee’s take on pop culture and politics. Its cancellation after one fabulous year became America’s loss (America was watching Cosby instead, and did not yet know how to program its VCR.).

Reflecting on her first book, “And So It Goes,” she says, “I never meant to write [it]. That was an accident. Nobody expected it to be a best seller. That was a big accident. I think you have to leave yourself open in life to happy accidents, because Lord knows you’re going to get the other kind. It was an accident that I was a journalist. The rest of my family all had honest jobs.”

From there, it was on to Lucky Duck and a sitcom loosely based on her career.

She says, “[Murphy Brown’s] executive producer, Diane English, told me that she wanted to do a series with Candice Bergen about an anchorwoman whose mouth always got her into trouble and could they follow me for a couple of months. An anchorwoman whose mouth always gets her into trouble? What’s there not to like?”

However, it was not all laugh tracks and group hugs. Her diagnosis of breast cancer in 1992 put her in a rare place – the sidelines – but only briefly. This lucky duck still had a lot of livin’ to do.

She says, “Any life threatening disease changes you. It takes your illusions of immortality, which we tend to live with for as long as possible. It does remind you to stop and smell the flowers. I’m thirteen years out after breast cancer. I have to be careful because unless I consciously stop and think, I will start rushing so fast that I’ll go, ‘whoops, there goes another flower.’ I have to remind myself again that I’m not going to be around forever.”

Her current book has a second motive and message: “’Take Big Bites’ is a life philosophy more than it is about food. Americans have become so afraid of travel, especially traveling outside their own country. And I want them to know that it is safe, and that people may disagree with our government but they may not disagree with you. Maybe after a while we can all stop being afraid of one another.”

This young sixty-year-old also says, “If at any time in my so-called adult life, you had asked me what I would be doing five years from that point, I would have gotten the answer wrong. And it has taken me this long to figure out that that’s okay. This is not the dress rehearsal. This is your life. Get out there and take big bites of it.”

 

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com

 

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Vincent Patrick

If you lead a squeaky clean (read: deadly dull) existence, chances are the closest you’ll ever get to an exhilarating, rewarding life of crime is by reading the great works of Vincent Patrick. His two previous novels, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Family Business, have easily become cult classics, testosterone charged with male swagger that’s tough as a fifty-cent steak. If you’re among the sheep reading Grisham and Clancy, get your sorry ass over to the bookstore and demand Patrick instead. What the hell’s the matter with you?

You’ll need to start with his first two novels, which will psyche you for his new one, called Smoke Signals. All three of these rough diamonds glitter with glorious lowlifes, street scum and the most extraordinary of regular people. In every bite, you have your neighborhood toughs and off-center whackadoos, usually caught up in circumstances and schemes that have spun out of control. You never know what’s lying around the corner for these guys, unless, of course you’ve already seen the movie. Needless to say, you’ll be quoting from these characters for the rest of your boring-ass life, while waiting in your express line or standing like an idiot in your morning shower. Vincent Patrick is da man who gave the world such great lines as “dey cut off my tum, Chaa-ley,” “cop shit his pants,” and other delectable quotables.

“Crime attracts me,” he admits in a recent phone interview with me, which, by the way, was a high point of my pointless existence. He says, “I’m always busy trying to present those characters in a way they’re not usually perceived by most people.

“There’s something about that whole kind of outsider hustler thing. I’ve gone out of my way to be around people like that, providing I could keep the right distance. In fact, keeping the right distance is a sort of dance in itself, where you become friendly with some of those guys but you never quite let your guard down to get caught up in it.”

The only real crime Vincent Patrick has committed is procrastination between novels: fourteen years, to be less than precise. Withholding genius like that is a crime on a grand scale. However, his new one, Smoke Screen, is entirely worth the wait. Smoke Screen is Pope on an international stage, with the usual neighborhood joes talking their talk and walking their walk. This time, however, his world expands to include the President of the United States, a Cuban doctor, the CIA, national security and a deadly virus about to be released on an unsuspecting public. I won’t give anything away, but let’s just say that “unpredictable” is describing it mildly.

Patrick says he got the urge to “try a thriller,” which is odd considering that his first two books are two of the most thrilling reads you’ll ever do. He also decided to try biting off more than he can chew (and succeeding) as he expands his stage beyond da neighborhood to places as alien to his characters as The Museum of Natural History. His task included exhaustive research on subjects as diverse as African expeditions, modern day Cuba, and jewel heists.

He describes his research akin to ” an old-time movie where you actually see something that you didn’t know about. Because these days, everything is on television. There’s no place left to go where you’re saying, ‘I never saw that.’ ”

Smoke Screen also takes us into a place that — for the last year, anyway — has been the source of punchlines and monologues: the Oval Office. However, what is transpiring in this story has very little to do with cigars and everything to do with Cuba. “I was most fearful of the whole oval office section,” he recounts. “I was frightened because it was so hard to do in even a mildly believable way. For the first time, I was dealing with characters who allowed me a much more intelligent and somewhat broader knowledge. In the first two books, we’re dealing with people in a much more limited world. Given where they were, it was really people seeing the world from a neighborhood viewpoint. Here, suddenly, there was all this opportunity to begin exploring a lot of factual stuff that you accumulate over the years and attitudes toward life. In one sense, I feel that the pure craft level is the best I’ve done. I’m not sure that the whole novel holds up to the first one because it’s simply not as serious. It was more fun to write in the sense that I was suddenly expounding on all sorts of little things that I didn’t have room for in the others.”

Does that mean that our Vincent has gone Hollywood? After all, he’s also a well-respected screenwriter, creating the scripts for both his novels and helping to create The Devil’s Own, among other credits. Let’s just say that “they’re talking” about bringing Smoke Screen to the Big Screen, and we can only pray that they pay him to write the screenplay.

The Hollywood creative process has left a somewhat bad taste in his mouth, but he has come out largely unscathed. He also claims that the Hollywood stereotypes are correct.

“It’s pretty much what people think it is,” he says. “It’s a business and the people running it recognize it as such. Unless you change the whole scheme of things, then everything flows out of that. To say that it’s outrageous that they don’t put their money into higher quality movies is ridiculous. If your Keough plan owns a lot of Fox stock, are you sure you want them to put a lot of money into so-called quality movies? It just doesn’t happen. The personal morality can be pretty terrible, people can be pretty cutthroat, but it all flows out of a fundamental decision to generate a lot of money. And nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. If they did, they would make money on every movie.”

With cool influences like Nelson Algrin (The Man with the Golden Arm, Walk on the Wild Side) and Joseph Conrad, Patrick knew he was going to be a novelist since the fifth grade. Of course, he first took a necessary detour into the real world, trying his hand at everything from bartending to engineering. This is, I think, what separates real men like Patrick from lightweight hacks like John Updike, who claims to never have had a real job in his entire life. Patrick’s characters have a workaday realism to them, smelling of everything but fruity literary pretension. It’s as if they have all had their share of punching the clock.

He says, “From early on, I always assumed that I would never earn a living at writing. I assumed that you weren’t even supposed to. This was back at a time when if a book was on the bestseller list, it was considered garbage, that it couldn’t possibly be good. I just assumed that what you did was go out and work and got a lot of experience and saw life and earned some money.”

He was published for the first time in his early 40s (“It all flipped at once,” he recalls. “It all came crashing in with the both the movie sale and the paperback sale.”).

The Pope of Greenwich Village — both the novel and the movie — caused a minor sensation when it was unleashed in 1979 and 1984, respectively. Unfortunately, I have a bit of devastating news to Pope-heads: don’t hold your breath for a Pope sequel. Sorry. Buck up and move on.

“I always thought of sequels as kind of crass commercialization,” he says. “I never for a minute had any intention of [writing a sequel]. I don’t see the sequel waiting. It’s funny how people immediately read stuff in.”

In the fourteen years since he’s been gone, a lot has changed in the publishing business. He says, “More than ever, there’s an overwhelmingly large amount of competition out there. The number of books that keep pouring out is endless. Your window of doing something is so brief. It’s very hard for a book to get out and sit for a while and develop a following at any easy pace. It’s like movies: they open a movie on a weekend and on Monday they tell you if it’s a hit or a failure and here’s how long it’s going to be around. Publishing is heading in that direction too.”

That’s where it’s up to us, kids. Let’s make sure Vincent Patrick stays around for a long time. He admits that another, smaller novel is in the works (“but I haven’t quite gotten the right handle on it yet.”). Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another fourteen years for our next thrill.

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com.

 

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Chris Hayes: Twilight of the Elites

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explains the decay of authority in America, and why you’d better step up.

This first decade of the 21st century has been glorious (think ipod and 30 Rock), but it’s also going down as one giant sorry-ass fuck-up.

Let the sad list begin: 9/11, Enron, Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, the housing bubble,  the steroid problem in major league sports, the church scandal and The Great Recession.

Chris Hayes

Who’s accountable? Our ruling class, who have failed us big time, that’s who. And yet, despite the traffic jam of tragedy, the ruling class has escaped accountability. Who is being run out of town on a rail? No one. The elite is smart, but they’re also stupid – clueless too. And they let us down. End of story.

In his brilliant/scary book, Twilight of the Elites [Crown Publishing Group], MSNBC’s Chris Hayes neatly sorts out the mess, explaining how the slow decay of leadership and responsibility festered due to greed, smugness and worse. He also offers solutions as to how we need to sweep clean and start anew.

Here, he puts it into plain talk, explaining how the elites went dark and the country dimmed out.

Hey, Chris, define elite.

The word elite is a very contested word in American politics. Over the last few decades, the Right has been pretty successful in redefining what the word means. The way that it is often used, particularly by conservatives, is to describe people who have a certain set of cultural attributes or even consumer choices. You drive a Prius. You drink Starbucks lattes. You sip white wine. Or you live in San Francisco or the West Village of New York. You read The New York Times. But that’s a pretty sociologically poor definition.
First of all, it grabs too large a number of people to really be meaningful. So my father and Henry Kissinger would be labeled under the same [definition]. And it also deviates in a very important way from what the historical understanding of what the word means — that was shared for over a century by both the Right and the Left.

And that is defined by the power they have rather than by their cultural attributions. That is a relatively small group of people who exert a disproportionate influence over society’s direction. CEOs, major media figures.

Was the older elite better than the current elite?

I want to avoid a certain kind of nostalgia: [the idea that] the previous elite was better because they had a certain set of characteristics that made them superior. I don’t really go for that. I think the last set of elites had their own problems.

In your book, you refer to meritocracy. What exactly does that mean?

Meritocracy is a new name for an old American ideal. It’s an ideal of social mobility and the American dream. Only in America, a place that did not have the feudal inheritance of Europe, did people rise to any station that their talents and drive would take them. Benjamin Franklin, for instance. Meritocracy is a current incarnation of the American dream. It specifically says that we are not going to bar entrance to the American elite based on religion, race, geographic location or sexual orientation. All sorts of people from all walks of life will compete on what’s called a level playing field. Through a series of competitions, they will come to the smartest, most capable members of the elite.

 

Twilight of the Elites

You also label 2000-2010 The Fail Decade. Please explain.

We’ve seen an uninterrupted cascade of institutional corruption and incompetence over the last decade. You start with 9/11, and then go into the largest corporate bankruptcy of all time, represented by Enron. But Enron has been so overshadowed that it almost seems quaint to mention [compared to the war in Iraq], the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation, costing over a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives and probably 100,000 Iraqi lives.
This is followed by the spectacle of an American city drowning live on national television. Followed by the largest housing bubble and the worst financial crisis in 70 years. And that’s just the short version. We can go on: what happened in the church, or with the Big Three automakers; newspapers imploding around the country. Now we have major American cities that don’t even have a daily newspaper.

This is not doing much for our trust of the ruling classes.

We don’t have a belief in self-correction because we have not seen self-correction. And that is at the heart of what I call the crisis of authority in America. Because we had such a cascade of uninterrupted corruption and failure, we don’t trust the institutions. It’s radically destabilizing for the way we go about conducting our public life, when all the sources of authority that we look to be anchors for the world don’t function that way.

What are some of the specific ways the elite failed?

The two specific monumental crises of the decade —  and the source of the feeling of exhaustion and cynicism that the country is mired in — are the Iraq war and the financial crisis. In both cases, what you saw was an elite consensus – not a total consensus, but a lot of elites essential arguing for and supporting ideas that have proven to be preposterously destructive.

We’ve had all sorts of people in high places saying that there was no housing bubble. There is a tremendous amount of false consensus. We as the public use a reliance on consensus as a rough indicator of reliability and truthfulness. If it seems like the people in charge are all saying  x, there is a tendency to believe x. The aftermath of people in charge saying x, and x turning out to be not just false but destructively false, means that now we listen with a much more skeptical ear. And it makes it hard to go about forming your beliefs and opinions.

So, Chris, what do we do?

The first thing we have to do is just recognize the profound cost and the negative consequences of this social model we’ve adopted. It’s not producing the American dream that we want. So we need to question that model that we’ve adopted because it’s not working.

The second aspect of it is being more forthright about making the society more equal. The first step is reducing the extreme and extremely pernicious form of accelerating inequality we have. The question is: does the political power exist to make that happen? And that’s the big open question.

You’d better devour this book today.

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Bald Bryan’s Shrinkage

The Adam Carolla Show’s Bryan Bishop writes a bestselling memoir about his battle with a brain tumor – where shrinkage is actually a good thing.

Bryan Bishop, the cast member known to millions of Adam Carolla podcast fans as “Bald Bryan,” has written a memoir about life with an inoperable brain tumor. The book, called Shrinkage: Manhood, Marriage and the Tumor That Tried To Kill Me, refers to the procedure that would reduce the tumor’s threat while Bryan upped the stakes on his life, both personal and professional.

416aVYFXLlL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

His relationship with Adam goes back a ways — Bryan was a call screener for the classic Loveline radio show, hosted by Adam and Dr. Drew Pinsky, pre-digital age. He currently keeps the conversation going with Adam on the groundbreaking, record-breaking podcast (along with Alison Rosen, pictured below with Bishop and Carolla). He’s got a quick wit, a thing for movies (he’s often featured in a film review segment on the podcast called “Hooray For Baldywood”), and a love for sports, especially fantasy football. You also may have seen him on TV, when he won $100,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

In 2009, during one of Adam’s podcasts, Bryan announced the tumor’s arrival. At the time, doctors gave him six months to a year to live, and the naysayers didn’t see much of a future in podcasting. Yet here we are, far into the future, with Bryan thankfully still with us and Adam’s podcast going stronger than ever.

Here, Bryan gives us the details on how a memoir about a tumor can become a New York Times bestseller.

 

New York Times bestseller! Congrats! That’s not easy. Were you surprised that the book was received as well as it was? 

I guess it was a surprise because I’m a first-time author and I have a small amount of notoriety – admittedly small. So of course I was incredibly humbled by the way the book was received.

At the same time, our fans are loyal and extremely enthusiastic. If they find something they believe in, then they are going to support it. They are pretty much 100% genuine. I put as much of myself as I could into this book, and people responded to it.

Yet the book was embraced by people who may not even know what a podcast is. 

Initally the book is supported by fans of the show, or perhaps people who are looking for a cancer recovery memoir. Yet if the book is going to have any long-lasting life or success, it is going to be because people read it and responded to it or have people they know who would get something out of it.

What was it like to write about the process of battling a tumor?

It was very carthartic. At times, it was just emotional, just putting it into words or thinking about it. Yet it helped me put a lot of things into perspective and put a lot of things behind me that need to get put behind me.

I traveled up north to the San Francisco Bay area where my parents live and I interviewed them. That was an emotional time too for all of us, but I’m glad that we did it and I’m glad that we talked about things. It was helpful.

It’s hard to write about yourself or something that happened to you. Talking to friends, co-workers and family about how they were feeling, I certainly learned a lot about that. A lot of it I never knew and I wasn’t privy to. There were a lot of things that people did not want to tell me and didn’t want to burden me with.

Also, in talking to my doctors, I learned a lot about how close it came to being a really bad situation – it was a really bad situation, how close I came to losing the battle. I don’t think I really was aware of that at the time.

How is your health now?

Right now, I’m living with my shrunken tumor. It has shrunk quite a bit from the initial round of treatment. As long as it continues to not grow, I’ll live with it for the rest of my life and it will be something that is there but won’t affect me that much.

15_bald-bryan

It’s like a diet, trying to lose those last five pounds. I’m trying to get the last 5% of my ability back from before my diagnosis. I do Pilates and go to the gym and I try to stress that. It’s a little-by-little recovery which I’ll always be working on.

All told, you seem to be a pretty optimistic guy. Yeah?

I tend to look at life in a glass-half-full kind of way. I can’t say that I was entirely responsible for my recovery but I think it had a lot to do with the way I recovered like I did.

Your wife, Christie, had much to do with your recovery as well. In what ways?  

I would not be here today if it weren’t for Christie. She was my 24-hour-a-day caregiver during the worst of my treatment. I was doing so poorly that I couldn’t get to the bathroom by myself. She helped me do everything. She helped me get dressed. She helped me dry off after a shower.

She was a 29-year-old woman at the time, responsible for her own life, and she had a fiancé who needed her for everything. She did an incredible job of taking care of me and helping nurse me back to health. And that was just the physical stuff. She was so incredibly emotionally supportive. She’s a strong, strong woman and an amazing person. Anyone who reads the book will tell you that she’s the star of the story.

How about Adam Carolla? How did Adam take the news of your illness? 

To his credit, he was always the same Adam that I always knew. Some people act differently around people who are sick, or cancer patients. Adam was the same old guy, and he wants to make sure that I’m doing well and that I’m taken care of. He’s a great guy and a good boss and a good friend.

MainPic1

You’re active with The National Brain Tumor Society. How rewarding is that experience?

They have a walk to raise money for brain tumor awareness and research. They asked me if I wanted to be their L.A. chairman for the walk, and I was honored. So many people have been so incredibly good to me while I was going through the worst of it; so much good energy and goodwill. I had an opportunity to pay that back. I jumped at the chance, and I’m now in my third year. I could not be more priviledged and more honored to be a part of it.

What is it about fantasy football that you love? 

I love the social aspect of fantasy football, playing with your friends. And the competiton is fun. I love doing it because it involves a low level of gambling. You put your skills and your smarts to the test. And it’s football – what’s there not to love?

Movies are a big part of your many passions too. 

We’re in the golden age of documentaries so there is always something interesting to watch and always something new coming up. It’s good to share the word and tell people about it.

The prices are a little bit out of hand [today], but from my perspective, I love going to movies. I love the theaters. I love the experience. From my point of view, it’s just getting better and better. Every theater I go to has stadium seating and the sound is better and the picture is better. It’s just an overall better experience.

Adam is currently successfully battling “patent trolls,” who are suing podcasters like Adam and accusing podcasters of stealing technology. How bogus. What’s your take on the case? 

I really do think everything is going to work out. I don’t think they have much of a case.  This is a pretty ridiculous open-and-shut situation. I don’t think they have much of a leg to stand on.

 

Read our interview with The Adam Carolla Show‘s other co-host, Alison Rosen, here!

 

Listen to The Adam Carolla Show here. It’s free!

 

Donate to the National Brain Tumor Society here

 

 

Categories
Good Books

Why We Snap

Aww, aren’t you adorable, chillin’ and scrollin’ and surfin’ the webs. Did you realize that in only one precious second, you can morph into a monstrous maniac, evolving into a full-on Rambo, raining real damage and even making the news? Once our rage circuit is actively engaged, we can’t control it, as much as we’d like to think “I got this.” It has nothing to do with insanity or mental instability. The countless stories of seemingly “normal” people who suddenly lose their shit are consistently proving that there are pathways in the brain — yes, your brain! — that can result in violent, ugly, aggressive outbursts, for better or for worse. You’ve been warned: don’t make us angry. You don’t want to make us angry.

R. Douglas Fields is a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and is a prominent writer in the field of neuroscience. His new book, Why We Snap: Understanding The Rage Circuit In Your Brain, details his research regarding suddenly violent behavior and the extraordinary strength, influence and relevance of our evolutionary hardwiring. Doug says there are nine precise triggers that can make anyone snap like a twig — even li’l ol’ you.

Here, we respectfully ask Doug about some of the darkest and scariest mysteries of human behavior. Dig:

What a subject! How did the idea of “rage triggers” occur to you? 

I was traveling to Barcelona to give a lecture on my neuroscience research. Normally, I travel alone, but I was with my 18-year-old daughter. We had a little bit of time before the lecture, so I thought we would go [sightseeing]. At the Metro station, I felt a tap on the pocket on my knees — I was wearing cargo pants. I felt that my wallet was gone. I reached back, grabbed the robber by the neck and threw him to the ground, and proceeded to get into a struggle to get my wallet back. I’m rolling on the ground with the robber. At this point, a thought bubbles up to my consciousness: what the heck are you doing? I realized that I had just risked my life and limb in an instant, by something in my environment. It involved no conscious thought at all. So the idea that we are not in control in these types of situations led me to wonder: what is the neurocircuitry in this?

Would you consider yourself a lover or a fighter? 

I need to clarify: this is really out of character for me. I have graying hair, and I am about 130 pounds. I don’t have any military experience or any martial arts experience. What that taught me is that we are all wired for violence. We have the behavior for violence. It is wired into our brain. We have it because we need it, as a species, to protect ourselves and to protect our young, to get food.

So let’s get physical. Give us the lowdown and let’s zero in. 

The circuitry for violence is in a part of the brain that is unconscious, in what is called the hypothalamus. It’s a part of the brain that controls other powerful urges unconsciously, like feeding and sex and thirst. If you stick an electrode in this part of the brain — the hypothalamic attack region — and you stimulate it — an animal will launch into a vicious attack and kill another animal. That raises the question: what feeds into this circuitry? What causes this response? Because that’s clearly what happened to me [in Barcelona].  New methods and insights in neuroscience are revealing that circuitry.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but common wisdom states that you should never get into a scuffle with a robber in the Metro station. 

This is what disturbed me so much. You don’t want to get into a fight with a robber. It’s dumb. But I didn’t think. Then I realized that the reason that this circuitry is in our hypothalamus — in the unconscious brain — what we are really talking about — is part of the brain’s threat detection mechanism. So the approach to this book is not psychology; it takes a neuroscience approach, understanding that all behaviors are controlled by the brain. What are the circuits that control these specific behaviors? This is part of the brain’s threat detection mechanism. A huge part of our brain — and the brain in most animals — is dedicated to threat detection. We’re constantly taking in information about our external and internal environments, and this is all unconscious.

Why unconscious and not conscious? 

There are two reasons. First of all, circuitry for consciousness is in the cerebral cortex, and that’s way too slow. Two: the amount of information that your unconscious brain is taking in vastly overwhelms the capability of the conscious mind to comprehend it and hold it. So it’s not only why I snapped when that burglar grabbed my wallet — how did I know he was there? I didn’t even see him [at first]. That’s all part of the circuitry.

This unconscious deal is not always a bad thing, right? 

We have these circuits because we need them. But they occasionally misfire. When they operate normally, as they do most of the time, we call it “quick thinking” or “heroism.” A hero will act aggressively to come to the aid of someone else. Afterwards, people will ask him why he did that, and he’ll say, “I don’t know. I didn’t even think. I just did it.” So this book is not just about negative violence; it’s also about the circuitry when it works right.

I interviewed a lot of people who depend on this circuitry: extreme athletes, drivers of a Formula One race car — they can’t actually control that consciously. They are relying — in emergency situations — on these rapid response circuits.

We tend to equate violence — and violent outbursts — with instability and even insanity. Should we? 

We tend to view violence as pathology. The fact is, most of the violence that goes on every day is not caused by abnormal mental illness. It’s caused by this circuitry. It’s aggression that we all have, getting tripped inappropriately. Everyday domestic violence, barroom brawls, this is the kind of violence that fills every day. This impulsive violent response is not due to mental illness. Yes, there is evil, and deliberate brutality and crime. But, by and large, it’s this misfiring that we all have in our brain that gets unleashed and causes the violence that we’re dealing with. And if we can understand it at a neurocircuit level, then we can begin to control it.

How did you come upon the nine triggers that make us snap? 

There are nine triggers, but that’s too many to remember. Neuroscience has shown that you can only remember seven items in a string, like a phone number. I gave them new names — not scientific names — I used F for family instead of “maternal aggression,” which is what scientists use. I used L for “life or limb,” instead of “defense aggression.” Using a mnemonic , you can quickly identify when you feel a sudden rise in anger, say on the road. You can identify which of these triggers has been tripped.

Fear plays a large part in this too, correct? 

Fighting, violence, aggression — that’s very dangerous behavior. You’re risking your life or limb to engage in this. No animal will engage in violence except for very specific reasons. That’s why you feel fear after you’ve done it. You can freeze in fear, or you can fight or you can flee. It’s all part of the mechanism of the brain’s threat detection.

Is there a gender difference in rage? 

One thing that I really was struck with: the male/female differences. 90% of all the people in jail for violent crime are men. But 90% of all the people given an award for heroism by the Carnegie Foundation are men. A quarter of those men gave their lives. I don’t think we’re grappling with this subject honestly at a national level. Statistics say that 20% of all women have been sexually assaulted. It really opens your mind to the need to understand the biological basis of rage. We’re talking about biology here. All cultures are violent to women, and that is biology.

What struck you the most about researching rage? 

I met so many fascinating people — from the Seal Team Six to elite athletes to the relatives of the Boston bombers. When I spoke to all of these people, I was struck by how interested and free they were with their stories, because all of them wanted to understand this. It seems like we are all trying to understand this.

Find out more about Doug and read his blog.

This article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
Good Books

A Burglar’s Guide To The City

There has always been a strange connection between architecture and burglary; Geoff Manaugh makes that connection and more in his book, A Burglar’s Guide To The City. Although the “art” of burglary is actually dying, due to a world of surveillance cameras and advanced electronic security, Geoff suggests that the perfect heist may actually be waiting in the wings despite advanced technology and Big Brother watching us. It’s all in the planning, the psychology, and the way tech can be manipulated to dishonest ends. As well, he writes about how old-school burglars are lending their expertise to security companies, how government agencies like the FBI sanction break-ins, and how movies and TV romanticize a crime that continues to fascinate in its evil attention to detail.

Geoff is a freelance journalist who, although not trained as an architect, has a large following on his BLDGBLOG. The book is a result of three years of hands-on research, examining historic heists, researching burglary as far back as ancient Rome, and taking a closer look at some of the architecture we take for granted, including doors, floors, air ducts and crawl spaces.

Here, we ask Geoff to help us case the joint.

Great idea for a book! You’ve been covering architecture for a long time; has there been some kind of evil spark in the back of your mind leading you to the dark side? 

There is a really vibrant architectural conversation happening out there, but it’s not in the realm of people designing buildings. It’s in the realm of people abusing or misusing buildings. That seemed pretty compelling to me. Every time I would read a police report or see on the news a jewelry store owner explaining how the burglars came in through the wall and broke into the safe without ever entering the room, there was a very, very clear foregrounding of architecture — but it was in the service of using architecture in totally unexpected and fairly aggressive ways. It seemed that there was no book that connected the dots. After all, planning a heist is really a design operation, and if you can put that into the context of what architects do, you realize that burglars are really just counter-architects. They look at a building and they find new ways to get from one room to the next, or even to get from one building to the next. There is just something so spatially fascinating about that.

What kind of reactions do people have to burglary as a crime? I assume it doesn’t receive the same horrified reaction of some more violent crimes that cause physical or bodily harm. 

There are two equal but opposite responses to burglary. Burglary lends itself so well to a kind of romanticization. It has that feeling of an ingenious act of connection, where someone finds a way to get from a sewer system into a bank vault, or they find a way to get from the attic into a money room of a hotel. There is something ingenious and strange about that, as if they solved a puzzle.

On the flip  side, burglary really does have an emotional impact. You realize that someone has been in your home and has been rifling through your things, or they have made you mistrust your own neighbors or even your own family members. There is a real sense of emotional violation.

Burglary does not necessarily have to involve theft. It’s the intent to commit any criminal act while in a building that you don’t have permission to be in. It’s a very peculiar crime, and it’s really intimately tied to architecture. If you don’t have buildings, you can’t have burglars. Their very existence is dependent upon architecture. There is something just existentially strange about that.

Burglary is, above all, a psychological and cerebral crime, right? It involves a lot of thought and planning. 

In the book, one guy in Toronto figured out a way to use the city’s fire code to help choose what buildings to break into. There was another example in Los Angeles where [burglars] used the storm sewer beneath the city as their way in and out of bank robberies; so they not only broke in by tunneling through the storm sewer network, but their getaway was actually a seven-mile underground route from the bank to a stream. We tend not to think that knowing a lot about buildings would be a risk; if you understand the door plans or you know where the doors are, somehow that constitutes a threat. We think about that when it comes to questions of terrorism. It’s fascinating to think that architectural knowledge is also risky.

In the beginning of the book, you describe an architect-turned-burglar who designed and then robbed his own building!

It’s a fundamental betrayal at the heart of the city: someone who is a creator figure, an architect. Then they come back to break into and violate the thing that was created. Someone comes back to betray the thing that they made.

In the world of burglary, I would imagine that cops and detectives are constantly outwitted by burglars, and vice versa. Is there a lot of one-upmanship and plot twists? 

You have ingenuity and innovation happening on both sides. You have examples where criminals are the ones being outwitted by cops who have set up something like the Capture House program, fake apartments run by the police. You’re not even breaking into a real apartment. It’s a surrogate apartment that the cops set up.

Usually, the burglars outwit the cops though low-fi means. A building could have a multimillion-dollar surveillance system with thermal cameras and detectors, and all it takes is somebody with electrical tape and hairspray and they can make the entire system go down. It’s a constant back-and-forth battle between different types of innovation, and between super-high-tech and really low-fi.

You also write about reform burglars who help the police and security companies. How can we be sure that they are reformed?

There, you just get into a sociological question about trust. Do you believe in redemption? Do you believe that people can change? In that case, you just have to take someone at their word that they are no longer engaging in this activity.

The guy in the book, who is a reform burglar, ironically, works in the security industry now. He has a hands-on, granular knowledge of what it takes to break into certain kinds of buildings. On the other hand, there is something alarming and “double-agent”-like about that. By working in the security industry, this guy is just gaining more knowledge for his illicit pursuits. It’s really a question about whether you believe that humans can change, and whether or not trust is the currency that holds society together, or if you need something more vigorous. That’s when we get into whether we need security.

Has the digital age changed the game?

The minute you start adding these high-tech approaches, you get into a totally different and really exciting field. Burglary thefts are way down while identity thefts are way up. So if your goal is to get as much money as possible in as short a time as possible, burglary is not the way to go. As you scale up, you get into some incredible scenarios: traffic management systems, street light patterns, mobile sensors for traffic. It gets into a whole new scale for the possibilities of burglary.

Burglary on a large enough scale is almost identical to terrorism. Managing traffic, for instance, becomes an integral part of the plot. I definitely think we are going to see a real-life example of that kind of thing in the years to come, because it seems so easy to rearrange a vulnerable city. The wrong people are going to figure out how to do this.

Does burglary differ from city to city? Is burglary different in New York than, say, Los Angeles? 

There are definitely continuities that go back literally thousands of years to ancient Rome and the kind of places a burglar might hit. There is almost like a “speciation” amongst burglars, so you do see different approaches in different cities. Some of it literally just boils down to “what’s there.”

If you are in a small town that doesn’t have a lot of jewelry stores, but does have a bank in the middle of town, that bank is going to be more of a target. Some cities are more prone to tunneling jobs, for example, than others. You’ll see tunneling jobs in London and Berlin and South America, because they have more clay, mud and sandy soils, which are easier to dig through. In New York City, you are dealing with billion-year-old bedrock. It’s pretty unlikely that you are going to tunnel into a bank vault.

When you go above ground, you get the infrastructure of the city itself, so you start getting into things like where the freeways are, what routes of escape might there be, public transit. We are making decisions right now, as a society, in terms of the infrastructure that we fund. [These decisions] will have criminal side effects, and some of them are impossible to imagine. We’re setting the stage for some future event, and we don’t even know what that event might be.

Is burglary a dying art?

It’s a funny phrase. You can call it a dying art. You can call it a dormant science. You can call it a lot of things. The numbers have really plummeted. In New York, it’s astonishing that from 1990 to the present moment, burglary has gone down 87%, which is really incredible. So it is certainly on the list of endangered crimes. On the other hand, considering Zillow and all the real estate access plans and internal information we have about houses, and on social media with people posting when they are not home, we are entering an era when unexpected new vulnerabilities are emerging. I would be very interested to see if burglary has an uptick in statistics in the years to come.

Follow Geoff and visit his blog.

 

This article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
Good Books

The Way We Never Were

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mr. Grant famously said, “I hate nostalgia. I hated it then. I hate it now.”

In 1992, with the publication of her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, historian/author Stephanie Coontz ran with that anti-sentimental sentiment and yanked the “traditional” American family the hell out of its gauzy haze.

The study caused a major disruption in the gooey, force-fed nostalgia that keeps us longing for the good old days that never really were. We claim we know fact from fiction, but ultimately, nostalgia can make us feel like shit and keep us sort of ignorant.

Wrong, wrong and wrong: the “typical American family” tells us — in its passive-aggressive way —  that we may not measure up, or that we may not be normal enough, and that we fall below expectations of what is “typical.” And if only we can be as happy as the people on social media appear to be (welcome to the new nostalgia trap!).

As well, the culture war over “family values” may be well intentioned, but perhaps a tad askew. Take a hard look at the way it really was, says Stephanie, and see how what we believe gets in the way of the realities of now.

What better time to revise and update the original edition, now containing a fresh look at how much family life and gender relationships have changed — and even improved — in the last quarter century. And yet, our American myths remain so embedded in our collective worldview that our perceptions and opinions are thwarted and crippled.

The book exposes the nuclear family of the 1950s (think The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best) as smoke and mirrors, and proves, over and over again, that this structure was not traditional or typical at all. It was more aspirational, but what if our attempt was a total fail?

Furthermore, despite the rally cry, single mothers are not a sudden and new epidemic, the original function of marriage wasn’t really about love and romance, and money actually could buy happiness (when it comes to federal funding).

Make sure you take the quiz down below, and see how much you know about the American family — or how much you think you know.

Demographics are showing an increase in adults who are single/never married as well as a rise in single-parent households. Should the bridal industry be concerned? 

There has certainly been this huge surge in singlehood. The way I look at is that our old distinctions between “married” and “single” are breaking down. The idea is that people are postponing marriage for much, much longer. The average age of marriage for women is almost 27, but the spread is so much greater than it used to be. Women are marrying for the first time in their 40s, 50s and 60s. And even though divorce rates are falling, they are rising for older Americans. They have tripled for people over 65. So people live for long parts of their lives and make important decisions outside of marriage.

It’s crazy for society to make all of its assumptions on the grounds that the only people who need dependence and support systems are married people, but it also means that single individuals are making different kinds of demands.

Should we once again turn to the Millennials to see the root of this revolution? 

I do think there has been a tremendous generational change. If you look at [research], you see that most younger people do not think you need to be married to lead a happy life, and they put marriage further down on their list of priorities. But, at the same time, most of them say that they do eventually want to get married. There is still a sense in our society that marriage is the highest form of commitment. And it does make a difference, the expectations that are attached to it. People are still attracted to it.

Is the dream of the suburbs dying? People are now gravitating toward the urban core, not the split-level with the white picket fence. 

Yes. If you look back at how the suburbs developed, they are a classic example of both the benefits and dangers of government subsidies. The frontier farm family has the honor of being the most subsidized family in American history, but the 1950s suburban family has run a close second. The government built the roads to get them there. It was government financing that created all the prefabricated housing. The banking system was set up so that you could transfer funds out of urban areas and invest them in suburban areas. It was set up so that you got federal funding and support only for new building; not for repairs, all of which were great for families who were moving to the suburbs, but it really hurt the families who were left behind, in decaying inner-cities.

Now, of course, the same sort of policies and practices are actually hurting the suburbs. There is no investment in its infrastructure.

Also dying: The 9-5 rat race routine, getting a job in a corporate center and working at that same gig for years or even decades. Job security: gone. Corner offices and cubicles: gone. Is the new office-space culture better for our psychological health? 

It is only a minority of people who are getting the positive alternative to offices. The top-earning Americans are actually becoming more and more isolated, both at work and in where they live, from the rest of America. This is a real problem because — we talk about the increase in concentrated poverty neighborhoods — there has also been an increase in concentrated wealthy neighborhoods. The middle-income and lower-income neighborhoods don’t even get any trickle-down effect. We’ve seen this huge proliferation of really low-wage, temp, contingent jobs, just horrendous. So you are really seeing a hollowing out there. There are these ideal [MicroSoft/Google-type] environments, but the people who clean those buildings are finding it harder and harder to get by.

The gig economy offers increased flexibility at a cost of long-term security.

The legalization of gay marriage, the attention paid to transgender issues, and the overall acceptance of alternative lifestyles have been swift and loud, especially on social media. The old standard of “normal” has been shattered. Is this a good thing? 

That’s been a stunningly rapid change. It’s one of these interesting contradictions that we’re seeing. There is an equality revolution, at least in terms of the idea that nobody ought to be discriminated against because of their lives or their race or their gender or their sexuality. But at the same time, we’ve also had an inequality revolution.

Social media has basically changed everything, hasn’t it?

Yes, but both for good and for ill. The stuff that gets the attention: online predators and bullying, for example — there’s not a lot of evidence that it’s really worse than before. What scares researchers the most is the exposure of babies and toddlers to [social media]. We know that they really need real people to interact with them. I’m not an alarmist about technology, but the research is absolutely clear that hearing voices and seeing faces that are not real just do not activate the same neurological pathways.

We think so much about these outside dangers to children, but the real dangers are the ones that are the biggest conveniences in our own lives.

TV series like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver gave a distorted view of American life. Did it reflect society or influence it? 

The more I look at the history of how people bought into this, the more I can sympathize. They’ve just gone through the Depression and World War II, and tremendous hardships and trauma. Even for the GIs who came home supposedly healthy and happy, the adjustment was very difficult for them.

This idea of “normality” was an aspirational idea. The TV shows said, “this is what it could be like.” In addition, there really was an economic time period when young men, age 25-29, until 1973, earned more in real wages than their parents and grandparents. This gave them a sense of hope, of “going up, just keep going in the same direction. Look how much better off we are than our parents and grandparents.” So I think that helped them see the consumer-driven images as goals that they could and should strive for, because then they could get rid of all of those hardships and difficulties of family life that their parents had experienced.

Single motherhood was once considered a stigma; now it’s practically mainstream and barely raises an eyebrow. We’ve come a long way from Dan Quayle chastising Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock. How is the single-mother demographic fitting into modern life now that it’s not as stigmatized? 

I think there are some real concerns, but not the concerns that people initially thought.

In 1992, when my book first came out, everybody was yelling that the increase in divorce and single motherhood would cause a wave of crime. What happened? Juvenile crime fell by 60% between 1992 and today. The murder rate in 2013 was lower than at any time since they started keeping records in 1960.

We have studies that show that all the dangers of single motherhood occur to mothers who don’t have education or financial resources. There is nothing per se about single motherhood that dooms kids. Single motherhood could actually be a very positive choice for an educated, single woman who plans it carefully. What we’re learning about single motherhood is that it’s challenging, yes, but everybody faces lots of challenges.

A woman or man with an education and economic security with a planned approach to life can easily overcome [obstacles]. But the other problem is that single motherhood is most prevalent — not among people who have those resources — but among people who feel desperate and unable to enter stable relationships.

So I just want to thread a needle here, and say, yes, there is concern that so many kids have been raised in neighborhoods that have been devastated by unemployment and economic insecurity, and only have one parent to cope with all of those challenges. But is it the one-parent that is causing all the problems that these kids have, or is it the problems of those communities that tend to make single parenthood more likely? And, the next step being, what can we do to help?

We can provide high-quality preschool, which has huge [positive] effects. And we can give money. Contrary to the American myth that throwing money at a problem doesn’t help, is that it does help. I have masses of studies that show that when parents have more money, they spend more on education and more on nutrition, and on average, they spend less on temporary stress reducers like alcohol and cigarettes.

Millennials are rejecting many staples of American life, like fast-food and processed food, shopping malls, logos, and even new cars. However, we can’t count out corporate America just yet; they won’t take this lying down. What will happen to our love of consumerism? 

We know for a fact that people are happier when they get experiences rather than things, but there is also a lot of research that shows that, when people feel insecure about their prospects, when they feel that they are falling behind other people, when they don’t think they are moving in a positive direction, they then find “things” especially comforting. Even people who start out with really good values and who don’t necessarily want to go along with the corporate advertisers, they are more likely to be seduced by the prospects of “things.” America has income volatility and a worse social safety net. My grandmother would say, “get what you can, can it and sit on the can.”

Do we have reason to be optimistic about our country’s future, or should we head for the hills? 

There are some ways in which I’m very optimistic. I think individuals have learned immensely. Just look at the changes in male-female relationships. The attitudes toward gender equality have gotten so much better. Domestic violence has declined. Suicide rates have fallen. Men have tripled their amount of childcare, doubled their amount of housework. We find that men are much less threatened by egalitarian or even more educated women than they used to be. There used to be all this terror that if women were getting all this education, they would not be able to find husbands. It used to be, in the 1960s and 1970s, that if a woman had more education than her husband, then it was a higher risk factor for divorce; now it’s not.

There are all of these great changes that individuals are making, but at a certain point, they run up against the wall of a complete lack of family support systems. Only 13% of American workers have paid leave. The lack of affordable childcare, they run up against that. And, at the same time, they are increasingly hammered by this economic inequality and insecurity. That’s the part of it that’s scary; what’s frustrating is [the perception is that] family changes — most of which were actually positive — are the actual cause of the problems that we’re facing.

TEST YOUR FAMILY IQ

1. What was the LEAST traditional family arrangement in history?

A. Monogamy

B. Polgyny

C. Polyandry

D. The male breadwinner family

E. Unmarried cohabitation

2. What was the earliest historical function of marriage?

A. To feed and protect women and children.

B. To provide a labor force for the male household head.

C. Neither of the above.

D. Both of the above.

3. In most of 19th century America, at which age could an unmarried woman legally consent to sex?

A. 7

B. 12

C. 17

D. 21

E. Never

4. Which of the following statements are false?

A. When a woman marries a man with less education than she has, this is a risk factor for divorce.

B. When two people cohabit and have a baby together before getting married, they have a higher risk of divorce than when they wait until after marriage to have a child.

C. Women who marry for the first time at an older age than average have a heightened risk of divorce.

D. Men report lower levels of work-family stress than women.

E. Couples who share housework and childcare equally have less sex and lower rates of marital satisfaction than couples with a more traditional division of labor.

5. What was a common medical treatment for Victorian middle-class wives thought to be suffering from hysteria or nervousness?

6. Which of the following changes occurred during the first five years after each American state adopted no-fault divorce?

A. A feminization of poverty – with women falling into poverty at a higher rate than men.

B. A decline in wives’ suicide rates.

C. A drop in the murder of husbands by wives.

D. A decline in domestic violence. 

7. Which of the following statements are true?

A. When a wife goes to work, that raises a couple’s risk of divorce.

B. The workplace is the major source of stress for women.

C. Women’s entry into the workforce has decreased parents’ time with kids.

D. Informal, home-based childcare arrangements are better for children than center-based care.

E. None of the above.

F. All of the above.

8. Which of these statements is true about divorce trends?

A. Marriages are lasting longer than they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

B. The divorce rates of people over 65 have tripled.

C. Neither of the above.

D. Both of the above.

9. Which of the following differences have research studies found between children raised in same-sex families and children raised by married heterosexuals?

A. Children in same-sex partnerships have more academic problems than children raised in heterosexual families.

B. Children raised by lesbian partners have several emotional advantages over children raised in heterosexual families.

C. There are no significant differences in outcomes between the two.

D. All of the above.

10. Over the past 100 years, Americans have become more tolerant of a much wider variety of sexual behavior. True or False?

 

 ANSWER KEY

1. D

2. C. (The earliest function of marriage had very little to do with the relationship between the individual partners. Marriage was a way of getting in-laws.)

3. B. (If you said 7, you must be from Delaware.)

4. All these statements USED to be true, but since the early 1990s they have all CEASED to be true.

5. Having a physician massage them to orgasm, either by hand, or with a mechanical device such as water hydration or a vibrator.

6. B, C, and D. The feminization of poverty occurred in the 1950s-1970s. Since then men have been falling into poverty at a faster rate then women, although women (usually never-married mothers) comprise the majority of the extremely poor. Divorce hurts both partners financially, especially women who were homemakers. But over time, a majority of women end up better off, either through work or through remarriage.

7. E.

8. D.

9. D. All of these findings have been reported, but the first two were based on skewed sources. The first study compared children of divorced couples, where one partner had come out as gay or lesbian, to children in still intact heterosexual families. The second took a convenience sample of lesbian partners who volunteered to have their children evaluated, which probably produced an especially favorable sample. Now that researchers have compared two random and representative samples, controlling for divorce, they find no significant differences in adjustment, achievement, or emotional stability between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.

10. False. Americans have become more tolerant of consensual non-marital sex, but define consent more narrowly than in the past. They are more disapproving of infidelity and much less tolerant of non-consensual sex. Until the 1970s, every state in America defined rape as a man’s forcible intercourse with a woman OTHER than his wife.

Find out more about Stephanie Coontz and her books.

 

This article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

The End of The Suburbs

Leigh Gallagher’s new book explores the trend we never thought we’d see, and how the American Dream is shifting into reverse.

Don’t tell the Cleavers, the Nelsons and the Bradys, but it seems like our national love affair with the suburbs is about to get canceled.

Oh, the split-levels and the cul-de-sacs are still around, for sure, but the thing is: the thrill is gone.

Millennials are not interested, the nuclear family is imploding, and big boys like Walmart and Lowes are going urban.

Also, the price of oil – and a long-ass commute – are, by all accounts, running on empty.

House hunters are opting out, and turning up their noses at McMansions (just ask leading home builders).

Heads are turning back to the very place that millions had eagerly escaped generations ago: the city.

Leigh GallagherSuddenly, public transportation and smaller, smarter space feel greener than a quarter-acre backyard.  Plus, a live/work/play environment is the place that younger people would rather stay.

Conversely, urban living is not for everyone, but the little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and its reputation for repetition, is going the way of the TV antenna.

The coming solution: sub-urbia. The best of both worlds.

In her important book, The End of the SuburbsFortune magazine co-editor Leigh Gallagher sums up a phenom that we never thought we’d ever see in our lifetime.

Here, she gives us the lowdown on why Upper Lowersville is becoming a dead end street.

This is a trend that seems to be quietly sneaking up on us. How did you trip over it?

I just started noticing some data points out there a couple years ago: after decades, our love affair with suburbia might be peaking. I thought, if that’s true, that would be a very big idea. That’s what prompted me to look into it.

I particularly love these ideas when they are rooted in economic data. Once I started looking into it, every stone I turned over yielded some kind of proof of this overall thesis.

In your book, a lot of people had seemed very pleased about your title, especially people who have come from the suburbs. No love lost for the suburbs. Why do you that is?

I talked to a lot of people about their suburban experience. Nobody said, “I love it there.”

Some people surely do love it there, and I don’t have any beef against it. But some people said, “Oh, we’re only here until the kids are done with school.” Well, that shouldn’t be the way you talk about the place you live.

Most people live in suburban communities, so I just thought there was a disconnect there.

This, of course, does not mean that you are anti-suburb.

Not at all. I live in the West Village of New York City, and I don’t think that’s the answer for everybody either. Certainly, not everybody wants to live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, or even in the big city anywhere. I’m not saying that that’s the solution.

But for so long, we’ve had this binary landscape where you have to pick: city or suburbs. And there is nothing in between. What people want more of is that “in between.”

Your book details the fact that the American suburbs were no accident. After World War II, there was a huge master plan in place to get everyone to move there.

They were very deliberate. They were the solution to a big problem, which was the housing shortage.

We were newly in awe of the car and mass production, and it was very much a top-down solution, everything from the Federal Highway Act to the mortgage interest deduction to the way homes were built and financed to the price of gas.

Everything was deliberately planned and laid out in this way. And we came to do it very well, fast and efficiently. Builders made money, and everybody loved it.

The only problem was, it wasn’t the right solution forever and ever, and it didn’t make people totally happy after a while.

I guess the knee-jerk reaction to your book is that the recent burst of the housing bubble is what caused the end of the suburbs, but that’s not true, as you stated.

The End of the SuburbsThat exasperated the overbuilding and truly all of those ex-urbia communities that went up last.

Everything else is suffering from much longer-term grinding forces that have been at work for quite some time: the price of energy, and the change in demographics, which is seriously reducing the number of young families in our country, and just changing interests, especially among millennials.

All of these other forces actually have nothing to do with the housing crisis.

Many people aren’t having kids. They are already bucking the trend there.

Single-person households are the fastest growing household type. The notion of the Leave It To Beaver nuclear family: mom, dad and 2.5 kids, is really going out the window.

An [real estate] executive told me that the traditional family structure is really the minority.  And that’s a profound change.

Its not surprising that the suburbs are not the millennials’ cup of tea, but it is hard to believe that their distaste for the suburbs could be one of the very things that will be its death knell.

A lot of people think, “Oh, just wait until [the millennials] start having kids. That will all change and they will go right back to the suburbs.” But I don’t think so.

I think the urban-burbs are becoming more desirable. I don’t think cul-de-sac suburbia is where they will end up.

Cities are expensive for a lot of young people, so it’s not like they’re all going to come rushing to live in New York City either, but what they don’t want is for their kids to grow up in the back seat of a car.

Also, it’s interesting to note that retail, which always follows the people and their wallets, is leaving suburbia in a big way and heading back toward cities.

There is a site called deadmalls.com that tracks dead or dying shopping malls. They are increasingly becoming an anachronism. Retailers are heading to cities or more urban areas.

Everything from Target to Walmart to Walgreens, they are coming up with smaller-format stores for cities or more urban environments.

Corporate headquarters are also coming back to the cities.

When you actually think about the notion of “the end of the suburbs,” it’s really mind-blowing. Growing up, it was the epitome of the American Dream and it seemed like it was here to stay.

It’s really a reversal that we never thought would happen. Absolutely. And it’s happening all over the place.

###

Get Leigh’s book here