Here Be Monsters

They did it for the simplest of reasons: adventure. Three friends, on a drunken dare, set out in a dinghy for a nearby island. But when the gas ran out and they drifted into barren waters, their biggest threat wasn't the water or the ocean—it was each other.

by  Michael Finkel

A crewman on a commercial tuna-fishing boat was the first to spot it: something shiny and metallic in the water off the ship's bow. The crewman alerted the navigator, and the 280-foot San Nikunau slightly altered course to avoid a collision. As the ship came closer, the object revealed itself to be a small boat, an aluminum dinghy. It was late in the afternoon on November 24 of last year. The New Zealand–based San Nikunau was in open water, a couple of days out of Fiji, amid the vastness of the southern Pacific—an expanse the size of a dozen Saharas in which there are only scattered specks of land.

The dinghy, fourteen feet long and low to the water, was designed for traveling on lakes or hugging a shoreline. There was no way it should've been in this part of the Pacific. If the San Nikunau had passed a quarter mile to either side, likely no one would have noticed it. Anyway, it appeared empty, another bit of the ocean's mysterious flotsam. But then, as the big ship was approaching the dinghy, something startling happened. From the bottom of the tiny boat, emerging slowly and unsteadily, rose an arm—a single human arm, skinny and sun-fried and waving for help.

There were, as it turned out, three people on the boat. Three boys. Two were 15 years old and the third was 14. They were naked and emaciated. Their skin was covered with blisters. Their tongues were swollen. They had no food, no water, no clothing, no fishing gear, no life vests, and no first-aid kit. They were close to death. They had been missing for fifty-one days.

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Legs

 

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Jerry's Last Stand

by Adam Nagourney

The 39th, and 34th, governor of California was making his first trip to Los Angeles since being sworn in, for an evening speech in February to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, and a swarm of reporters was waiting at Terminal A of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. Edmund G. Brown Jr. — he has always preferred Jerry — arrived from Sacramento not on a state aircraft (and certainly not a private jet, as was the preference of his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger) but aboard Flight 896 on Southwest Airlines. As Brown walked off the plane and into the terminal, he was essentially alone, save for a few police guards who hung off to the side. There were no press aides, no advance staff, no speechwriters, no policy mavens; in short, nothing like the bustling entourage of self-importance that typically buffers a chief executive.

Brown instantly found himself swimming in a sea of chaotic attention — “Governor, please come forward a little bit!” “Governor, could you look over here at the cameras?” — so he took charge: the governor staffing the governor. “O.K., O.K., can everybody now see?” Brown asked, as he wrangled a tangle of photographers, television cameras, radio correspondents and reporters into position. He settled a who-can-shout-louder face-off between two reporters by promising that each would get their turn, choosing the TV correspondent, John North of KABC, over a print reporter “because he’s older than you.” North shot back: “Thanks a lot — younger than you, though.”

Brown proceeded to answer the reporters’ questions with a display of self-confident humor and a command of facts, history and language that befits a man in the eighth decade of his life, as he likes to describe himself. The news conference ended, 22 minutes after it began, only when a reporter signaled the close with a clipped, “Thank you, governor.” Brown wandered down the terminal, trailed by two television reporters who wanted to book him for studio interviews. One handed him a business card, which Brown slipped into his shirt pocket. When the governor arrived at his waiting car, he laid a garment bag straight and neat in the trunk and climbed into the passenger seat.

Jerry Brown was already something of an oddity when he first was elected governor in 1974, succeeding Ronald Reagan, who, like Schwarzenegger, was an actor who became governor. Brown was, at 36, a symbol of the glamour and the restless adventurousness of California, as well as its quirkiness. But California and Brown have changed in the 28 years since he left the governor’s office, and now they are relearning each other. Government has new rules, new problems, new politics and new players. It has grown, particularly in California, more ossified and divided. Term limits, the new governor suggested to me a few weeks after taking office in January, have turned out to be a force for bad, feeding the paralysis in Sacramento. Over late-night glasses of pinot grigio and plates of brussels sprouts at a restaurant near the State Capitol, he talked about lawmakers who now spend so much time worrying about getting elected to another, higher office that they have little time to consider the staggeringly complicated legislation that lands on their desks or to build working relationships with other lawmakers.

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Your Stupid Rage

[ed.  A sports piece, but not a sports piece.  Rage seems to permeate every facet of our lives these days.]

by Brian Phillips

I am here to save your life, and I’m not kidding. This isn’t about the state of discourse on the internet, or nostalgia for some imaginary pastoral of 1950s civility, or making sure I don’t get yelled at in blog comments. This is about you, and how you are going to live in the world. I mean how you’re going to live as a sports fan, but let there be no limit to the revelation: I mean how you’re going to live in every other way, too.

I don’t care about role models, but you can’t tell the story of rage in soccer without talking about managers, so we might as well start with them. Because the truth is, as I am not the first to notice, that we are living in a world in which every coach of any importance reacts to all adversity by blaming someone else, hinting at plots, or gazing into the astral distance and knitting his brow in a way that suggests some dark mysterious flaw at the heart of the game. It isn’t just Mourinho (or Ferguson, or Wenger, or whoever’s in the headlines for it this week). There is an increasingly sweeping assumption abroad that the only thing that can keep a plan from succeeding is injustice, or to put it differently, that if things don’t go your way, it’s because something is wrong, maybe something big. That “something” is important, because it’s never really just about the referee. The anger of managers who are complaining in a press conference often has an abstract, gloomy, even melancholy quality just beneath the surface, which you could possibly explain away as the inevitable sadness of a loss, but which has recently struck me as a sign of something deeper: it’s as if the manager, while outwardly complaining about the referee, is inwardly transfixed by the apprehension of a vastly larger problem, a problem of which the referee is only the easiest piece to explain.

Reconsidering The Mushroom

A raft of potentially therapeutic pharmaceuticals got left on the shelf in the backlash against the 1960s recreational drug explosion. Researchers are raising their own consciousness about which psychedelics might have real value.

by Sam Kornell

Mike is hunched over a pile of soggy wood chips at the bottom of a glade in Golden Gate Park. It’s a clear winter afternoon and sunlight filters through the eucalyptus trees, landing on grass still damp from a recent storm. Mike sifts through the wood chips, slowly and deliberately examining the soil beneath. Two paper bags fill a pocket of his Patagonia fleece jacket.

Mike is a 28-year-old engineer at a prominent software company in San Francisco. He is soft-spoken and self-possessed; on weekends he drives his Subaru Forester to his time-share in Tahoe to ski. He donates to public radio, and he has made himself into an aficionado of the city’s Indian restaurants. He is, or seems, like a well-adjusted member of society.

But what he is doing — sifting through wood chips in a damp, obscure corner of the 1,000-acre park that bisects the western portion of San Francisco — is a felony. He is searching for psilocybin, the psychedelic mushrooms that grow wild in San Francisco and neighboring Marin County from fall to spring. If he finds any, he tells me, he’ll stuff them in the bags, put the bags in his backpack and backstreet home on his bike.

Not long ago, Mike agreed to take me on one of his mushroom hunts, and as he scoured the ground, he explained his affinity for psilocybin. We were in the lower section of Golden Gate Park near its terminus at Ocean Beach, and aside from an occasional jogger, the park seemed empty, a forest in the middle of one of the world’s most famous cities.

Mike told me doesn’t do mushrooms very often-maybe once or twice a year-but when he does, it’s because he wants to explore a problem in his life that has been troubling him. “When I take them, it may be because I have a decision to make, or maybe I suspect that my outlook toward something is not as healthy or as loving as I would like it to be,” he said. “Psilocybin allows me to see things with a fresh point of view. When I’m on them, [I'm] not as burdened by cynicism or other self-protective layers in my psychology.”

Is Mike delusional about the power of mushrooms to refresh his worldview?

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McJobs

How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker

by Andy Kroll

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?

Liveable vs Lovable

by Edwin Heathcote

Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well ... a little dull. Who would want to watch a film set in Vancouver? To see its skyscrapers destroyed by aliens or tidal waves, its streets populated by cops and junkies, its public buildings hosting romantic reunions? Yet Vancouver (original name, Gastown) has also spent more than a decade at the very top of the charts of the best city to live in the world. Can that really be right?

No. Not at all. In fact, Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more.

The big cities it seems, the established megacities of the US, Europe and Asia are just too big, too dangerous, too inefficient. So what do these top cities have in common? How exactly do you measure “liveability”?

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Vulture Culture: Pemex LOLC

[ed. Give it a little time, this video seems a bit bandwidth heavy.  Music by Pretty Lights - Finally Moving]

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Asking the Wrong Question

If you've given up on romantic love, is no-strings sex a viable option?

by Greta Christina

I don't usually write this column as an advice column. But I make occasional exceptions. And last week, someone wrote a comment in this blog asking for advice... a comment that I (a) felt compelled to answer, and (b) couldn't answer in just a few words.

The commenter had responded to a call for sexually-themed New Year's resolutions by saying that she'd had a terrible experience with someone she met on the Internet, someone she'd traveled across the world to be worth who turned out to be, shall we say, unworthy of her affections. She had vowed to never get emotionally attached to a man again. And she asked this:

So this puts me in a quandary: how "palatable" to a potential male partner would I be if I told him I just wanted some awesome sex without a relationship or any bullshit "I love you's" that we both know he probably doesn't mean anyway, and if he does, he only means it when it's convenient for him to truly love me?

For the moment, I'm going to set aside the question of whether it was wise for this commenter to uproot her life for the sake of an Internet romance with someone in another country thousands of miles away. (Actually... no, I'm not. I'm going to address that question right now; it's a moot point for this particular questioner, but it may not be for someone else reading this. No, this is not a wise move. Internet romances can be great and do sometimes lead to successful physical-world romances; but they have to be treated with great skepticism, serious caution, and very careful timing. And the farther you have to travel for them, the more true that is. As Dan Savage has said: If you fly across the country or across the world to meet the virtual love of your life, don't treat it as romantic destiny -- treat it as an adventure, and frame it so you'll have a good time on your trip even if your lover turns out to be a loser. If you uproot your entire life for someone in another country you've never met... well, it sucks if they turn out to be a jerk, but you're the one who uprooted your life for someone you didn't really know, so yes, you do bear some responsibility. Also, play it every bit as safely as you would if you were meeting an Internet date in your home town: meet in public for the first time, and make sure someone you know knows where you are and how to reach you.)

Anyway. Back to the question at hand. If the question were simply, "Are there men who want casual, non-romantic sex with no strings attached?" the answer would have to be a vigorous, "Yes! Of course! What planet have you been living on that you even have to ask that question? The world is loaded with men who would treat this offer as a gift from every god they'd ever imagined. And while some of these men are selfish game-players, others are decent, ethical men who'll be as honest with you as they can about what they do and don't have to give. Be careful -- but go for it."

But I don't think that's the right question here.

I don't think that's the question I should be answering.

The question I think I should be answering is one that this commenter didn't ask. It's one that she assumed she knew the answer to. And I think the answer she's come up with is wrong -- seriously wrong.

One Hundred Years of Mississippi Blues

“You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future,” writes Bob Dylan in his book Chronicles of Robert Johnson, the blues genius whose work is still celebrated, 100 years from the day he was born. Johnson’s 29 songs were prescient in the way they would shape folk, rock, blues, and soul—as was his groundbreaking style of playing and singing them—and this week marks the beginning of his centennial year. Had he not died in 1938 at the age of 27, Johnson would be turning 100 on this Sunday, May 8th—supposedly—since the facts as we know them are still being contested, over 70 years after his death. But as the calendar opens on events scheduled for Johnson’s home turf of Greenwood, Mississippi, and across the country, in his honor we thought we’d look at his blues and revisit the well-worn folk legend about his meeting the devil at midnight at the crossroads, while we also check on the state of the 21st century blues from the perspective of a contemporary Mississippi blues player, Cedric Burnside.

From old-time and ragtime, to uptown Chicago strut, Delta picking, and hill country stomp, the root of all blues can be found in Johnson’s songs, which have served all forms of folk, rock, and even soul-jazz; he has survived homages by artists diverse as the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones, to Gil Scott Heron, the White Stripes and Keb’ Mo’, and satirists like Tenacious D. Indeed there is something supernatural about the way Johnson’s music, as well as the Faustian myth surrounding him, has survived time, outstretching the work of musicians from here to Yazoo, but there is obviously more to his achievements than a simple midnight pact made on the hallowed ground where Highways 61 and 49 now stand.

“I have to say, I’m a big fan of Robert Johnson’s music, and always have been, but when it comes down to him selling his soul to the devil, I don’t believe in no type of stuff like that,” says Burnside. “I think he really buckled down and practiced a lot and came out blazing,” he says. Burnside is right about Johnson’s devotion to his music rather than the devil, according to the Johnson scholars who’ve studied his life and music for at least 50 years now. But there is enough drama, dirt, and lowdown on him to fuel a legend of his likeness and many more like him, drawing as it does from existing folk tales as well as details drawn from the hard scrabble lives of other blues players and the lives they led as black men in the post-slave/pre-civil rights South. As grandson of the late R.L. Burnside, the rural South is something that Cedric knows all about; he worked alongside his granddad who sharecropped for food and shelter until Cedric was nine or 10. As for what he knows about Johnson, he learned that from his grandfather, too. He says Johnson’s works ring true to his experience in the rural blues.

“Some people that ain’t used to the blues and don’t listen to it much, they might see a movie on television, and it might have blues songs in it and the scene might be sad or violent, and that’s what their interpretation of the blues is, but it’s really way different. It’s a deep music. It’s soulful. I think it’s good for you,” he says.

Happy Mother's Day

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Mario Batali's Spaghetti alla Carbonara

by Mario Batali

A true carbonara has no cream, and it can be slightly tricky in its execution. The key is to toss and thoroughly mix the cooked pasta off the heat with the cheese, eggs, pepper, and pasta water, to create a creamy yet not overly thick sauce. I like to separate the eggs and present the individual egg yolks in nests of pasta; then each guest stirs the yolk into the pasta to cook it and form an even creamier sauce. Be sure to use the best—quality eggs you can get.

• 3 tablespoons Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
• Pancetta, or good Bacon
• 1 pound Spaghetti
• 1 ¼ cups freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
• 4 large Eggs, separated
• Freshly ground Black Pepper

Bring 6 quarts of water to boil in a large pot, and add 2 tablespoons salts.

Meanwhile, combine the olive oil and guanciale in a 12- to 14-inch sauté pan set over medium heat, and cook unti the pancetta has rendered its fat and is crispy and golden. Remove from the heat and set aside (do not drain the fat).

Cook the spaghetti in the boiling water until just al dente. Scoop out ¼ cup of the pasta cooking water and set aside. Drain the pasta.

Add the reserved pasta water to the pan with the pancetta, then toss in the pasta and heat, shaking the pan, for 1 minute. Remove from the heat, add 1 cup of the Parmigiano, the egg whites, and pepper to taste, and toss until thoroughly mixed.

Divide the pasta among four warmed serving bowls. Make a nest in the center of each one, and gently drop an egg yolk into each nest. Season the egg yolks with more pepper and sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup Parmigiano over the top. Serve immediately.

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The University Has No Clothes

by Daniel B. Smith

Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.

As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture—an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.

It’s no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-­image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York–based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column “8 Alternatives to College” something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it. “What am I going to do?” he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. “When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?” To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant ­prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”

Like Altucher, Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist with strong misgivings about college. Unlike Altucher, he’s a billionaire and Silicon Valley royalty. In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, and six years later, he made the first angel investment in Facebook. (In The Social Network, he is the imposing figure who conspires to oust Eduardo Saverin from the company.) A passionate libertarian—he was a generous supporter of Ron Paul in 2008 and is the main funder of the fringe Seasteading Institute, which aims to establish experimental political communities on offshore platforms—Thiel is deeply skeptical of top-down R&D and anything that smells like groupthink. At PayPal, he hustled $100 million in venture capital just ahead of the dot-com crash, which he anticipated, and he made another well-timed bet for his Clarium Capital Management hedge fund against the housing market in 2007. In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—­hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.

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Essential Egg Techniques

I really liked Saveur's roundup of egg-cooking tips for their practicality and the clear illustrations. I'm in charge of breakfast in our family, and I get up early every morning for it. I love getting everything (cappuccinos and a babycino, porridge, toast) hot and on the table at the same moment, which requires the planning, forethought and experimentation of a really hard Portal level. Adding eggs -- which require a lot of close attention and precision timing -- is a great challenge for days when I'm feeling cocky.

How to cook soft boiled eggs »

How to make fluffier omelets »

How to cook the perfect sunny-side up egg »

How to create delicious scrambled eggs »

A helpful trick for peeling hard boiled eggs »

The very best way to crack eggs »

Essential Egg Techniques (via Lifehacker)
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How To Fight Fair

by Anna North

Some of us avoid conflict with our loved ones because we don't want to piss them off or rock the boat. But having healthy arguments can be an important part of a relationship. Here's how to do it. 

Set the scene.

If you know you're going to bring up a difficult subject with someone you love — whether it's a family member, partner, or close friend — it's a good idea to choose the right setting. I spoke with Victoria Pynchon, cofounder of She Negotiates and co-author of A is for Asshole: The Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution, who advocates having tough conversations over food. She says, "everyone's right when they say 'break bread together' — that is the best way to begin a difficult conversation." For partners, I also recommend a setting where you can touch each other — a hug or stroke of the hair can signal more powerfully than words that you still love someone even if you might be upset about something. For this reason, I'm not such a big fan of bringing up potentially conflict-producing subjects in the car — save long drives for giving your kids the sex talk. 

Be optimistic.

Conflict is scary for lots of people, but if you approach it with the attitude that something good will come of it, you and your loved one will be a lot less freaked out. Says Pynchon,

Whenever you're going to begin a conversation with someone about a difficult topic, I would preface it for them, and then I would create [an] atmosphere of hope and safety by being very positive about the ability of both of you to work the problem through, and provide assurances that nothing bad is going to happen. People are conflict-averse because they're afraid that the discussion will go out of control, that it will end in shouting or recrimination, so [...] give assurances to your conversation partner that you know that the two of you can have this conversation without it going out of control, in an even tone, and that it's not your intention to cause strife but rather your intention to improve the relationship.

Hmmm.

 

J Roddy Walston and the Business

Rainbow

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Saturday Night Mix

Coming Up Short

by Jason Paur

KNIK RIVER, Alaska – Unlike other places where speed may dominate pilot discussions, up here it’s all about how slow you can go. It’s directly related to how quickly you can get off the ground and how little room you need to land.

It’s called STOL, or “short take-off and landing,” and here in Alaska it is synonymous with flying.

This weekend pilots from throughout Alaska and across North America will converge on the coastal town of Valdez for the annual Fly-In & Air Show. The big event is Saturday’s STOL competition.

A typical pilot in a small single-engine airplane might use 1,000 or 1,500 feet to land on a paved runway, bush pilots often need just a few hundred feet. Sometimes less, because most of the time bush pilots aren’t landing on a runway or anything resembling one.

At the STOL competition in Valdez, takeoffs and landings are measured in tens of feet. Pilots pull up to a line and try to get off the ground with as little ground roll as possible. They also try to touch down as soon as they pass a line on the ground in the shortest possible distance.

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Woman of the World

by Jonathan Alter 

It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S. government dared call it that. Muammar Qaddafi was ramping up his genocidal threats, pledging to show “no mercy” toward his own people (whom he described as “rats”) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Inside the White House, the president quickly settled on an American bombing campaign, but he and the secretary of state thought strongly that Great Britain and France should be seen as taking the lead. They agreed that there was no choice but for Hillary to sit down in person with both British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’m sorry, Hillary, but you’re going to fly over the Atlantic again,” said Obama, who was about to leave on his own foreign trip, to Brazil. So only hours after landing from Tunis, she was headed back to Paris.

By then it was clear that the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was creating tumult not just in the Middle East but inside the Obama administration. Not since the fall of Communism, in the late 80s, has a U.S. administration faced a chain reaction of foreign crises that seemed so much out of its control.

At first, Hillary looked clairvoyant: in January, when the street protests were still small in Tunisia, she lectured decrepit dictatorial regimes at a conference in Qatar that “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” Within days, demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a vibrant plea for greater freedom that swiftly spread to Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, and eventually even Syria.

But if Madam Secretary could be ahead of the curve, she was also sometimes behind it, caught in a dizzying series of upheavals that left her both exhilarated and exhausted. In early February, Hillary said the regime of Hosni Mubarak was “stable”; he was gone 17 days later. When she felt White House officials were pushing too hard in public statements for Mubarak to resign, Hillary complained to President Obama, who was unmoved. Yet on the big picture, especially the need to isolate the menacing regime in Tehran, the president and his secretary of state fully agreed. They understood immediately that, for all the facile accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy, a one-size-fits-all foreign policy wouldn’t work. Doctrines, they felt, were for the doctrinaire.

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