‘Vassals’ in Congress Do Lobbyist Bidding

by Jack Abramoff, Bloomberg

As I built what became the nation’s largest individual lobbying practice -- with 40 employees at its peak -- I remained the only lobbyist in the firm who had not previously worked on Capitol Hill. Former Congress members and staff are everywhere on K Street, the lair of the lobbying world. Why? Because they have access.

That access was crucial to our lobbying efforts. If we couldn’t get in the door, we couldn’t present our client’s case to decision makers. Hill veterans also had expertise. They knew the Byzantine legislative process and how to make it work for clients. Access and expertise: That’s how the great lobbying machines work.

But that’s not all.

I had many arrows in my lobbyist quiver to endear our firm to Congress: two fancy Washington restaurants that became virtual cafeterias for congressional staff, the best seats to every sporting event and concert in town, private planes at the ready to whisk members and staff to exotic locations, millions of dollars in campaign contributions ready for distribution. We had it all. But even with these corrupting gifts, nothing beat the revolving door.

During my time lobbying, I found that the vast majority of congressional staff I encountered wanted to get a job on K Street. And why not? Their jobs on the Hill were only as secure as their boss’s re-election prospects. Even then, they were never certain when they would encounter an office purge. The other side of the rainbow -- K Street -- was heavenly. Salaries were much higher. Perks were abundant. And lobbying is a growth industry, no matter which party is in office. As young staff members got married and had children, making the jump to K Street was often on their minds.

As I cultivated relationships on the Hill, or as the firm’s lobbyists transformed their congressional friends into champions for our clients, I noticed the staff members craved a job on K Street far more than a fancy meal or a Washington Redskins ticket.

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Illustration by Andy Rementer

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Too Bad Not to Fail

[ed.  Also, if you're up for a good scare: The next financial crisis will be hellish, and it's on the way (Forbes).]

by William J. Quirk, American Scholar

In “Babylon Revisited,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1931 short story about the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash, Fitzgerald makes the point that such collapses are slips in morality as much as financial failures. Charlie Wales, the story’s emotionally fragile hero, returns to Paris in a desperate effort to regain custody of his nine-year-old daughter. “I heard that you lost a lot in the crash,” says the Ritz bartender. Implying his moral lapses, Charlie replies that yes, he did, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.” In fact, upper-middle-class people like Charlie hesitated during the first months of the market’s run-up—until early in 1928. That was when they joined the gambling frenzy, and that was when, as John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Great Crash, 1929, the “mass escape into make-believe, so much a part of the true speculative orgy, started in earnest.”

Eight decades later, stock-market investors like Charlie had no role in bringing on or profiting from the 2008 financial crisis. This time they stood on the sideline as major financial institutions engaged in a speculative orgy. Guided by no moral compass, the most sophisticated financial players in the world were betting big with one another about interest rates, commodity prices, and whether companies or governments would default.

Until the 1990s, investment banks—the institutions that help corporations and governments raise capital by underwriting and issuing securities—were organized as partnerships. Under that setup, the general partners risked their personal net worth on the solvency of their firms and regulated the bank’s activities with the knowledge that they were liable for any losses. When almost all the partnerships reorganized into corporations, investment banks became, in effect, liability casinos operated by croupiers unbridled by long-term financial responsibilities. The sole object was to maximize day-to-day profits.

Bankers bought and sold something few Americans had heard of before: derivatives. These instruments were hard to define, we were told, yet they were heralded as financial “innovations” designed to minimize risk and were reassuringly referred to as “insurance,” “protection,” or “hedging.” Other strange terms—“tranches,” “mezzanine,” “regulatory arbitrage,” and “repos”—surfaced at the same time.

What are derivatives? They are financial contracts whose value is derived from a security such as a stock or bond, an asset such as a commodity (crude oil, sugar, copper, etc.), or a market index. Derivative is used to cover contracts of many different kinds, some dating back hundreds of years; others, until the 1990s, were unknown to man. Midwestern grain farmers, in the early 19th century, sometimes sold their crops while they were still growing. That is a futures contract, a kind of derivative, the likes of which have been traded on the Chicago exchanges since Civil War times. They are helpful to all parties. Southwest Airlines, for an­other instance, can assure itself the price of jet fuel in the future by entering into a contract—a derivative.

A synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO), the subject of the Security and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs this April, is also a derivative. But before you can have a “synthetic” CDO, you have to have an actual CDO. What’s that? Say that a person who is a poor credit risk takes out a mortgage he can’t afford. Thousands of such mortgages are collected into a security—a mortgage-backed bond. Then a number of those bonds are collected into another security. This is a CDO that is sold to investors. A “synthetic” CDO refers to an actual CDO with no underlying asset, meaning, in this case, no mortgages. It is essentially a wager, and, like any bet, it requires two sides: a “long,” who is betting that housing prices will go up, and a “short,” who is betting that housing prices will decline. The short bettor, by means of a credit default swap (CDS), agrees to pay the interest owed to the long bettor. In return, the long bettor agrees to pay the principal of the CDO if it defaults. Goldman was the bookie who put the bets together; Rube Goldberg would have blanched at such a grotesque contraption.

The problems with derivatives are abundant and far-reaching:

• There are no caps on the numbers, which generally are immense—big enough to bring down world markets. The derivatives market is $600–800 trillion—about 10 times the $70-trillion output of the world economy.
• The terms are so complex that they are only dimly understood by the parties entering into them as well as by the regulators who are supposed to police them; in fact, no one knows how to regulate them.
• By putting the economies of U.S. allies in jeopardy, they can too easily undermine American national interests.

September 2008 was when we learned that the big banks were earning most of their profits from dealing in derivatives and, by the way, that the financial statements they were issuing were worthless because derivatives were extensively used to evade accounting, legal, and regulatory requirements. The air of mystery and impenetrable lingo were no help when the banks went bust and put the real economy at so dangerous a risk that the U.S. government committed $23.7 trillion in cash and commitments to bail them out. The bailout was outrageous on its face, even before details about what the banks were doing were made public. Then we learned that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, which are charged with regulating U.S. currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), whose mission is to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, hadn’t adequately scrutinized the banks or their derivatives.

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Photo: New York Stock Exchange Advanced Trading Floor, New York, 2001 (Eduard Hueber, courtesy Asymptote Architecture)

In My Father’s Kitchen

by Chris Wallace, Paris Review

I used to joke that I have daddy issues with Jacques Pépin, because it was he who really raised me. My parents divorced when I was a year old and, until I was thirteen, they split custody in every conceivable way. It was my father’s habit to write in the mornings and watch his favorite cooking shows in the afternoon, with a drink, while preparing dinner. On the days I was with him, I watched too. Usually it was Julia Child, or the Frugal Gourmet; later it was Jacques, and then Jacques and Julia. Recipes and technique were like my nursery rhymes and I grew up—“spoiled rotten,” my dad would say—only ever eating perfect pie crust. By the time I was eleven, my knife skills were impeccable, my Caesar salad the best ever (in my family, hyperbole is hereditary). When my mother invited my high school girlfriend and her parents for dinner I served a traditional osso buco and risotto Milanese. It was a success—my culinary coming out party—and one in which my father, who felt he deserved the credit, took particular pride.

As a Depression baby, my father was raised by a generation of people who wouldn’t utter a sound if their hair were on fire. He spent most of his childhood in the kitchen, with the family cook, because he was afraid to go anywhere else in the house. The Wallaces do their suffering in silence. My father’s father, David Frederick Wallace Sr.—Fred, he was called—went off on drinking benders, leaving the family for days at a time. He died of liver failure at just fifty-seven. Fred’s father committed suicide and the family never spoke of it. The thought of my own father having a personal conversation with his mother, or with his grandmother, whom everyone called the Dragonlady, seems impossible—with his Aunt Bess or his uncle, President Harry Truman, outrageous.

In my youth, my father and I continued this tradition, juxtaposing all that quiet with some good old yelling. My father is not small—6' 2'', and a barrel of a guy—and when I was a child he seemed to me a giant out of fairy tales: domineering, mercurial, and remote. I can still remember the terror I felt one night as I searched desperately, in vain, for the car keys as he screamed at me to find them. I, in turn, would try to injure him by attacking his cooking. He’s still heartbroken today from the time when, at ten, I said, “Your food smells better, but mommy’s tastes better.” Even into my adolescence we had little in common. When I got a scholarship to play football in college, my father, the opera fan, wrote in the local paper, “I thought I was going to have a choir boy, but I got a quarterback.”

It wasn’t until twenty-two, in a subterranean Italian restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a road trip from Austin to Ogden, that I truly determined to get to know my father.

It was the revelation that did it—my mother breaking the secret that my father was gay. Over what I think was chicken in Elmer’s glue, she just let it slip. They’d been divorced for twenty-one seemingly celibate years. “He hasn’t told you?” she asked. “He told me he’d told you.”

I affected indignation, shock even. But the moment had the resonance of literature—naming something I didn’t know I knew. Later I would go around telling people that it wasn’t a conclusion a son could come to about his father, no matter the evidence. But the evidence, in retrospect, looked substantial: an encyclopedic knowledge of opera—gay; fabulous taste in furniture—also gay; phenomenal talent in the kitchen and a love for luxury and glamour—gay! How could I not know? Though he was less flamboyant in his mannerisms then, it must have seemed painfully clear to onlookers. In fact, it was my recounting of a trip to Fauchon in Paris, to pick up his favored Melange des Isles tricolor peppercorns, that elicited my mother’s revelation.  (...)

The truth was that even as I wanted to harbor a Shakespearean grudge against my father, I was warmed by his accidental revelation. I thought about how he had grown up very alone, in a conservative family during the conservative fifties. How he had no one he could speak frankly to until he met my mother working on the original production of Hair. The day after my dinner at Pastis, I decided to drop by my father’s apartment. I found him on the couch watching Molto Mario. I sat down and joined him. He fixed us drinks, negronis. “Like sitting at Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona,” he said.

We came to love this great ginger Falstaff, the medium through whom we were reconnecting, as a member of our extended family. He cooked with the same giddiness as my father—dropping in references to Proust, telling stories about visiting markets in Abruzzo or wineries in the Castelli, and stirring our romance for food along with his braising liquid. “Marsala means port of Allah,” he would say, and my father would light up like a four year old. “Isn’t that wonderful?” he’d say, and sip his gin. When the travel edition, Mario Eats Italy, entered the mix, my Dad and I were, as he would say, in hog heaven. Every day Batali cooked in his cliffside villa outside Positano before trooping around the Amalfi coast for lemons the size of grapefruit, glistening crustaceans, and bright, metallic, deep-sea swimmers to cook on the beach.

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The Treatment

Why is it so difficult to develop drugs for cancer?

by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker

In the world of cancer research, there is something called a Kaplan-Meier curve, which tracks the health of patients in the trial of an experimental drug. In its simplest version, it consists of two lines. The first follows the patients in the "control arm," the second the patients in the "treatment arm." In most cases, those two lines are virtually identical. That is the sad fact of cancer research: nine times out of ten, there is no difference in survival between those who were given the new drug and those who were not. But every now and again—after millions of dollars have been spent, and tens of thousands of pages of data collected, and patients followed, and toxicological issues examined, and safety issues resolved, and manufacturing processes fine-tuned—the patients in the treatment arm will live longer than the patients in the control arm, and the two lines on the Kaplan-Meier will start to diverge.

Seven years ago, for example, a team from Genentech presented the results of a colorectal-cancer drug trial at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology—a conference attended by virtually every major cancer researcher in the world. The lead Genentech researcher took the audience through one slide after another—click, click, click—laying out the design and scope of the study, until he came to the crucial moment: the Kaplan-Meier. At that point, what he said became irrelevant. The members of the audience saw daylight between the two lines, for a patient population in which that almost never happened, and they leaped to their feet and gave him an ovation. Every drug researcher in the world dreams of standing in front of thousands of people at ASCO and clicking on a Kaplan-Meier like that. "It is why we are in this business," Safi Bahcall says. Once he thought that this dream would come true for him. It was in the late summer of 2006, and is among the greatest moments of his life.

Bahcall is the C.E.O. of Synta Pharmaceuticals, a small biotechnology company. It occupies a one-story brick nineteen-seventies building outside Boston, just off Route 128, where many of the region's high-tech companies have congregated, and that summer Synta had two compounds in development. One was a cancer drug called elesclomol. The other was an immune modulator called apilimod. Experimental drugs must pass through three phases of testing before they can be considered for government approval. Phase 1 is a small trial to determine at what dose the drug can be taken safely. Phase 2 is a larger trial to figure out if it has therapeutic potential, and Phase 3 is a definitive trial to see if it actually works, usually in comparison with standard treatments. Elesclomol had progressed to Phase 2 for soft-tissue sarcomas and for lung cancer, and had come up short in both cases. A Phase 2 trial for metastatic melanoma—a deadly form of skin cancer—was also under way. But that was a long shot: nothing ever worked well for melanoma. In the previous thirty-five years, there had been something like seventy large-scale Phase 2 trials for metastatic-melanoma drugs, and if you plotted all the results on a single Kaplan-Meier there wouldn't be much more than a razor's edge of difference between any two of the lines. 

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A Radical Rethinking of Thanksgiving Leftovers

by Mark Bittman, NY Times

Everyone (yes, literally) says that leftovers are “the best part of Thanksgiving,” but I’m not psyched for dry meat on bread with a ton of mayonnaise, or even that exotic alternative, cranberry sauce.

And yet. There you are with four pounds of turkey, a pile of meaty bones, cranberry sauce destined to hang around until February and your grandmother’s stuffing, which wasn’t easy to make. Oh, and mashed potatoes, an always-challenging leftover.

Fear not. Here are 20 (you read that right) handy-dandy minirecipes designed to stimulate both your overindulged appetite and your tryptophanned-out brain. Although they may need adjustments based on your original recipes — stuffing, for instance: cornbread or Pepperidge Farm? — the range is broad enough for you to find a few things that work.

TURKEY
Turkey-Noodle Soup With Ginger
Cook chopped onion, carrot, celery, garlic and ginger in neutral oil until soft, then add chicken or turkey stock and bring to a boil. Cook pasta in boiling salted water until almost done; drain and stir it into the soup, along with shredded turkey; heat through. Garnish: Parsley or cilantro.


STUFFING
Eggs Baked in Stuffing
Pack a layer of stuffing into the bottom of a well-greased baking dish or ramekins. (If you have time for a layer of caramelized onions, even better.) Make indentations and crack eggs into them and sprinkle with grated Parmesan or other cheese; bake at 375 until the eggs are just set, 10-15 minutes.


MASHED POTATOES
Mashed-Potato Pierogi
Cook chopped onion and garlic in butter until soft; stir into mashed potatoes. Fill wonton skins with a spoonful of the potato mixture (don’t overstuff); fold over and seal the edges with a little water. Working in batches, sauté in butter, or steam, or fry in an inch or two of hot oil until golden brown. Garnish: Sour cream and chopped dill.

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Photos: Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth.

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"We call these people riot police. They’re actually rioting police. I mean, they’re the ones who were inflicting the violence. And they’re doing, under the direction of the central government, exactly what the U.S. always criticizes other countries for. That is beating, rousting, [and] jailing anti-government demonstrators."

- Lew Rockwell

h/t RTAmerica
Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

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Federal Prosecutions

Financial Industry

Everyone Else

[ed. Questions?]

via: Catherine Rampell, Economix, NY Times

Charts: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Syracuse University

The Science Behind Airport Body Scanners

[ed.  Just noticed today, TSA is backing away from an independent study to evaluate the health effects of scanners, relying instead on draft conclusions from the Inspector General of Homeland Security.] 

by Erica Swallow, Mashable

The first full body scanner was developed by Dr. Steven W. Smith, inventor of the Secure 1000 whole body scanner in 1992. Smith sold the scanner and associated patents to Rapiscan Systems, who now manufactures and distributes the device. Rapiscan is just one of three companies that manufacture commercial X-ray devices used as security scanning applications — the other two companies are Tek84 and American Science and Engineering.

If you’ve flown with a commercial airline in the past two years, you’ve probably encountered or heard news of full body scanners, which use either X-rays or millimeter radio waves to create a virtually nude image of a person’s body to identify any hidden objects, such as weapons or explosives, that the person may have concealed.

David J. Brenner, the Higgins Professor of Radiation Biophysics at Columbia University, explained quite simply in an interview with NPR late last year that “both [scanning technologies] work on the same basic principle of firing a beam of radiation at the individual and looking at what it’s reflected back, quite similar to radar or sonar, but in one case using millimeter waves, which are not so different from microwaves, in fact, and the other uses X-rays.”

Inventor Steven W. Smith explains backscatter X-ray scanning quite thoroughly in his 1993 patent for the technology behind the Secure 1000:

“A pencil beam of X-rays is scanned over the surface of the body of a person being examined. X-rays that are scattered or reflected from the subject’s body are detected by a detector. The signal produced by this scattered X-ray detector in then used to modulate an image display device to produce an image of the subject and any concealed objects carried by the subject.”

Each pixel in the processed image is determined by the intensity of the backscattered signal collected by the X-ray detector. Because heavy elements (like most metals) backscatter electrons more strongly than light elements (such as tissue, organic materials and plastics), they show up differently in the processed images. With current technologies, heavy elements show up darker, while light elements appear brighter — as a result, concealed weapons, which are often made of heavy elements, can be detected.

Millimeter wave scanning works in the same way, except it uses millimeter waves instead of X-rays. The basic difference between the two technologies is that millimeter wave radiation — unlike high frequency X-rays — is not genotoxic and cannot cause cancer.

Safety Concerns

So, what does the proliferation of these scanners mean for the safety of travelers undergoing full-body scanning?

Backscatter X-ray scanning has received the majority of attention when it comes to safety issues, because “as far as we know, there is no health hazard associated with the millimeter wave scanners,” Dr. Brenner told NPR. On the other hand, he notes, “We know that X-rays can damage DNA in cells, and we know that X-rays can ultimately produce cancer. So the concern is about the possibility of inducing X-ray-induced cancer in one of the individuals who’s scanned.”

No conclusive studies have been conducted that confirm that backscatter X-ray security scanners are safe for commercial use. Advocates for the use of the scanners believe that low-energy X-rays are of negligible risk to scanned travelers, but researchers protest that even very small doses of ionizing radiation is carcinogenic. The health effects of backscatter X-ray scanning remain under scrutiny, especially in scientific communities focused on cancer and imaging.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Marchcattle

Teaching Good Sex

by Laurie Abraham, NY Times

“First base, second base, third base, home run,” Al Vernacchio ticked off the classic baseball terms for sex acts. His goal was to prompt the students in Sexuality and Society — an elective for seniors at the private Friends’ Central School on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line — to examine the assumptions buried in the venerable metaphor. “Give me some more,” urged the fast-talking 47-year-old, who teaches 9th- and 12th-grade English as well as human sexuality. Arrayed before Vernacchio was a circle of small desks occupied by 22 teenagers, six male and the rest female — a blur of sweatshirts and Ugg boots and form-fitting leggings.

“Grand slam,” called out a boy (who’d later tell me with disarming matter-of-factness that “the one thing Mr. V. talked about that made me feel really good was that penis size doesn’t matter”).

“Now, ‘grand slam’ has a bunch of different meanings,” replied Vernacchio, who has a master’s degree in human sexuality. “Some people say it’s an orgy, some people say grand slam is a one-night stand. Other stuff?”

“Grass,” a girl, a cheerleader, offered.

“If there’s grass on the field, play ball, right, right,” Vernacchio agreed, “which is interesting in this rather hair-phobic society where a lot of people are shaving their pubic hair — ”

“You know there’s grass, and then it got mowed, a landing strip,” one boy deadpanned, instigating a round of laughter. While these kids will sit poker-faced as Vernacchio expounds on quite graphic matters, class discussions are a spirited call and response, punctuated with guffaws, jokey patter and whispered asides, which Vernacchio tolerates, to a point.

Vernacchio explained that sex as baseball implies that it’s a game; that one party is the aggressor (almost always the boy), while the other is defending herself; that there is a strict order of play, and you can’t stop until you finish. “If you’re playing baseball,” he elaborated, “you can’t just say, ‘I’m really happy at second base.’ ”

A boy who was the leader of the Young Conservatives Club asked, “But what if it’s just more pleasure getting to home base?” Although this student is a fan of Vernacchio’s, he likes to challenge him about his tendency to empathize with the female perspective.

“Well, we’ve talked about how a huge percentage of women aren’t orgasming through vaginal intercourse,” Vernacchio responded, “so if that’s what you call a home run, there’s a lot of women saying” — his voice dropped to a dull monotone — ‘O.K., but this is not doing it for me.’ ”

In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

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Photo: Olivia Bee for The New York Times

Matinicus 1916, George Wesley Bellows

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Salman Khan: The New Andrew Carnegie?

by Annie Murphy Paul, Time

Meet Salman Khan, your child’s new teacher. If you haven’t heard of Khan, rest assured that your son or daughter is in good hands. He has four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. He got a perfect score on the math portion of his SAT. And he’s very experienced, having taught more than 85 million lessons to students all over the world.

Khan is the former hedge fund manager who set out to tutor his young cousin in math with a homemade video he posted online. From that modest beginning has grown the Khan Academy, a free online library of more than 2,700 videos offering instruction in everything from algebra to computer science to art history. Running the nonprofit academy is now Khan’s full-time job, and he plans to expand the enterprise further, adding more subject areas, more faculty members (until now, all the videos have been narrated by Khan himself) and translating the tutorials into the world’s most widely used languages.

Much attention has been paid to the use of Khan Academy videos in classrooms. Hundreds of schools across the U.S. have integrated his lessons into their curricula, often using them to “flip” the classroom: students watch the videos at home in the evening, then work on problem sets — what would once have been homework — in class, where there are teachers to help and peers to interact with. The approach is promising, and it may well change the way American students are taught.

The real revolution represented by Khan Academy, however, has gone mostly unremarked upon. The new availability of sophisticated knowledge, produced by a trusted source and presented in an accessible fashion, promises to usher in a new golden age of the autodidact: the self-taught man or woman. Not just the Khan Academy, but also the nation’s top colleges and universities are giving away learning online. Khan’s alma mater, MIT, has made more than 2,000 of its courses available gratis on the Internet. Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon are among the other elite institutions offering such free education. When Stanford announced last August that it would be opening to the online public a course on artificial intelligence, more than 70,000 people signed up within a matter of days. The course’s two professors say they were inspired to disseminate their lessons by the example of Salman Khan. Khan Academy’s own videos now go well beyond basic algebra to teach college-level calculus, biology and chemistry.

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Photos: Left; Steve Jurvetson: Right; Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Huang Yong Ping
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Helicopters and Boomerangs

[ed.  Manifestations of these phenomena are found in other parts of the world, too..In Japan, they use the charming euphemism parasite single.]

by Lawrence J. Cohen and Anthony T. Debenedet M.D., Time

As advocates of parent-child rough-and-tumble play, we have often bumped up against the bubble-wrapping tendencies of the helicopter parent. So when Merriam-Webster announced recently that helicopter parent is now a bona fide entry in their dictionary, we took notice. The concept — a parent who is overly involved in the life and safety of his or her child — surely predates the first known use of the phrase, in 1989. But official inclusion in the dictionary suggests that helicoptering is not just a fad that will go out of style. In fact, more and more parents seem to be in hover mode these days, but the trend is worth standing up to. Because the truth is that children benefit from precisely the opposite of helicoptering: rowdy, physical, interactive play — or roughhousing. Roughhousing between parent and child, not helicoptering, makes kids smart, emotionally intelligent, likable, ethical and physically fit.   (...)

For others, focusing too much on the future leads to a collapse, a giving up and dropping out of what seems like an impossible and exhausting ordeal. In the words of a “recovered” helicopter parent we know, “I finally got it when I realized all I wanted for my child was a manageable failure, a blip on the screen, a trip to the principal’s office — something to help him learn the art and beauty of imperfection and the fact that life goes on even when it isn’t exactly how we planned it to go.” These ideas bring to mind another term, boomerang child, which was also entered into the dictionary this year. A boomerang child is a young adult who returns home to live with his or her parents after college, usually due to financial reasons. Aside from the obvious economic factors, it’s possible that some of these boomerangers are the result of too much helicoptering, too much attention on the avoidance of falling or failing — and not enough attention on the excitement of risk or the wonders and dangers of the unknown.

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Photo: David Pollack / Corbis

Alécio Andrade París (Grand Palais), 1975
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