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The Power of Habit

One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American businessman named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation: a minty, frothy toothpaste named “Pepsodent” that, he promised, was going to be huge.

Hopkins, at the time, was one of the nation's most famous advertising executives. He was the ad man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles “with live steam” (while neglecting to mention that every other company used the same method). He had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians.

But Hopkins' greatest contribution would be helping to create a national toothbrushing habit. Before Pepsodent, almost no Americans brushed their teeth. A decade after Hopkins' advertising campaigns, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a daily ritual for more than half the population. Everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable eventually bragged about a "Pepsodent smile."

I discovered the story of Claude Hopkins a few years ago while reporting my book, The Power of Habit, which explores the science of habit formation. Today, Hopkins is almost totally forgotten. He shouldn't be. Hopkins was among the first to elucidate principles that even now influence how video games are designed, public health campaigns are managed and that explain why some people effortlessly exercise every morning, while others can't pass a box of doughnuts without automatically grabbing a jelly-filled cruller.

So, how did Hopkins start America brushing?

By taking advantage of a quirk in the neurology of habits. It wouldn't be until almost a century later that medical schools and psychology labs would fully understand why habits exist and how they function. Today, we can create and change habits almost like flipping a switch.

But there are historical outliers who seemed to intuitc or accidentally stumble into - these insights before anyone else. Hopkins created a toothbrushing habit by identifying a simple and obvious cue, delivering a clear reward and —most important —by creating a neurological craving.

And craving, it turns out, is what powers a habit.

All habits—no matter how large or small—have three components, according to neurological studies. There's a cue—a trigger for a particular behavior; a routine, which is the behavior itself; and a reward, which is how your brain decides whether to remember a habit for the future. When Hopkins identified tooth film, he found a cue that had existed for eons. Moreover, the reward that Hopkins was promising was hard to resist. Who doesn’t want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent?

Three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. There were so many orders that the company couldn’t keep up. In three years, the product went international. Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the top sellers around the globe.

“I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” Hopkins wrote a few years after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was that he had grounded his advertising campaign in two basic rules:

First, find a simple and obvious cue.

Second, clearly define the rewards.

Even today, Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks. They're cited in boardrooms, advertising offices, and business school classrooms.

But that's not the full explanation of why Pepsodent was such a success. There's another rule that even Hopkins, at the time, didn't understand.

by Charles Duhigg, Slate |  Read more:

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As Long As They Both Shall Live

Two days from now and 10,000 feet above the Southern California desert, Rex Pemberton will don a wingsuit, leap from a plane, and race toward the earth trailing orange smoke from canisters strapped to his ankles while Melissa Pemberton, one of the world’s best aerobatics pilots, paints a white smoky corkscrew around her husband—two minutes of barnstorming showmanship for thousands of gaping spectators spread out below them.

But first, a moment of marital tension. A screw has worked itself loose, a tiny screw, stainless steel, five millimeters long, one of four securing a sheet of aircraft aluminum across the front left side of the engine. Rex notices the hole, a flaw in his wife’s exquisite plane, as they push it out of the hangar at Pine Mountain Lake Airport, a few hundred yards from their home in the hills outside Yosemite National Park. He taps his finger against the loose corner, and he worries. Engine vibrations have started a hairline crack in the metal. Melissa says she’ll have her mechanics replace the screw at an airport that’s a 15-minute flight away. But he retrieves a screwdriver and tiny screw from the hangar while she watches him, slightly exasperated.

In their garage, Rex often works on his powered paraglider, with its 30-horsepower engine that propels him over these valleys, forests, and mountain lakes at 40 miles per hour. But the $350,000 plane, a sparkling metallic blue Zivko Edge 540, with black flames edged in pink, has much smaller tolerances. “Rex, this isn’t your paraglider,” she says, her soft voice calm but her words coming faster now, betraying her annoyance. “I need you to listen to me when we’re talking about my plane.”

But he’s not really listening. He knows that if the piece breaks on her brief flight, there’s a chance she won’t be able to adjust the prop and may not be able to land. And he knows the odds. In his five years with Melissa, she has lost four close friends and six acquaintances. This season has been a particularly bad one on the air-show circuit. Five performers have died from crashes already, some of them in front of huge crowds, the worst when a modified P-51 Mustang slammed into the audience at the Reno Air Races in September, killing the pilot and eight spectators and injuring 69. Aerobatics are unforgiving. The forces exerted on Melissa’s plane can bend even the thick bolts that hold the engine in place, and a moment of disorientation, a major gust of wind, or a slight overcorrection at the controls can be fatal.

Rex can’t change any of that, but here at least he has the illusion of control. “Just let me see,” he insists, and spins the screw into the engine. “See? It’s the same screw. The exact same screw.”

Melissa relents and climbs into her plane. The prop turns, stutters, and catches, and the engine settles into a deep, throaty rumble. She revs the throttle and roars down the runway, and Rex watches his wife climb into the morning sky.

Every marriage has its unspoken rules, an understanding of needs and desires, and the Pembertons’ is no different, though the stakes are slightly higher.

“I would never tell her to stop because of any fear that she’ll have an accident,” says Rex, 28. “We need to keep each other in check and make sure we’re doing these risky things in the safest way possible but not tell the other to stop, because those are our core values.”

Melissa, 27, agrees. Her husband has made more than 1,300 skydives and 300 BASE jumps. At age 21, he became the youngest Australian to climb Everest, and he recently set his sights on Pakistan’s K2, an objective that had Melissa concerned, though for reasons that had little to do with the technical route to the summit. “It’s one thing to worry about a mountain, but I don’t want him to get kidnapped or blown up,” she says. Still, these are concerns, not ultimatums. “I would never tell him outright, ‘No,’ ” she says. “If he wants to do something, that’s up to him.” Because that’s where they found each other—riding the edge of excess—and why they fell in love in the first place.

by Brian Mockenhaupt, Outside |  Read more:
Photographer: Cody Pickens

The Voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle

[ed. Also Boris and Natasha, Sherman and Mr. Peabody, Dudley Do-Right and Nell. The best children's cartoon series ever.]

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The Decline and Fall of Parental Authority

American parents today face a perfect storm of cultural and social circumstances that undermine the very foundations of parental authority. In response, mothers and fathers are beginning to see therapists as irrelevant and to challenge the entire social, educational, and economic context of childrearing. On a day long before the Occupy Wall Street Movement began, I met with a large group of 21st-century child professionals who were on a tear about the multiple inadequacies of today’s mothers and fathers. Sparks of indignation about parents’ inability or refusal to take charge of their kids—to create any kind of appropriate hierarchy in the family—lit up the auditorium. “They’re scared of their own children!” one proclaimed to nods of agreement all around. “If I ever said just one thing to my parents the way they allow their kids to talk to them every single day, I know exactly what would have happened to me!” said another. “They’ve abdicated, handing their children over to us to raise!” yelled a third. The general consensus was that today’s parents had become a “doormat generation” to their own kids, and that they were resisting all efforts by well-meaning professionals to help them grow parental backbones. It was enough to make one’s head spin.

Well, until later. That evening, I met with hundreds of parents from the same community. In a weirdly antiphonal response to what I’d heard earlier in the day, they rocked the school auditorium with their complaints of how hard—no,impossible—it was to be a parent today. School was a bureaucratic, relentlessly demanding, social and academic rat race that wasn’t even preparing their kids for the future. A vast and frightening Internet culture was hijacking their kids, and they were helpless to do much about it. These parents said they were trying so hard to make ends meet that they had little time left over just to be with their kids, much less maintain consistent authority over their lives.

Besides the more familiar complaints, these parents railed against accusations that they weren’t trying to take charge of their own children and teens, even as they admitted just how hard that had become. It was as though the earlier meeting with school administrators and educators had been bugged. In fact, the parents made clear that they wanted to be more effective and engaged, but were blocked not only by social forces, but by the very childrearing system that was supposed to prepare their children for adulthood. More and more, the collective verdict was clear: the conveyor belt of 21st-century childrearing was seizing up, and the academic and therapeutic professionals working with children “just weren’t getting it.”

Not long ago, I might have heard parents talk as if their kids’ problems—drugs, school failure, or acting out—were matters for individual families to resolve, sometimes with the aid of a therapist. Now, I’m seeing mothers and fathers challenge the entire social, educational, professional, and economic context of childrearing—a system, they increasingly believe, that’s made effective parenting almost unachievable. (...)

“How can I get my child to not go to midweek concerts when almost everyone else in the school is going?” “It’s one thing to tell my kids not to drink and drive, but how can I stop them from texting while they’re driving?” “You tell us that we should limit screen time, but how can we when half of the homework in elementary school is online?” “When my preteen son calls me from anywhere on his phone, how can I be certain he’s really where he says he is?”

These are just a few of the questions I increasingly hear from parents and groups across the country. On top of losing faith in a secure future, mothers and fathers deal with everyday dilemmas that make a joke of traditional rules and childrearing practices. Unfortunately, many therapists still seem to believe that reliable solutions to the problems families face can be readily found in our psychodynamic, family, or standard evidence-based protocols. The rampant “medicalization of childhood”—our attempt to assist kids in getting the help they need to grow up in today’s tumultuous world by assigning more and more DSMdiagnoses—doesn’t instill parental confidence either. “How many of you are familiar with the following diagnoses?” I ask parents. As recently as five years ago, most had only a vague sense of the acronyms used every day in our work. Now ADD (attention deficit disorder), AD/HD (attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder), PDD (pervasive developmental disorder), ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), spectrum disorders, Asperger’s, bipolar I & II roll off parents’ lips so easily you’d think you were at grand rounds in a teaching hospital.

By the time kids are 18, at least half of them have already received a psychological diagnosis. While many mothers and fathers have become psychological sleuths, searching their child’s behavior for any sign of disorder, others continue to believe that the only thing wrong with kids is a lack of discipline. All the while, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between psychological aberrations and the peculiar 21st-century context in which kids are growing up.

by Ron Tafel, Alternet |  Read more:
Photo: Shutterstock/Anna Jurkovska via:

The Next Future

But to return, if I may use the expression, to the future...

—J. B. S. Haldane, 1924

During a summer in the late 1960s I discovered an easy and certain method of predicting the future. Not my own future, the next turn of the card, or market conditions next month or next year, but the future of the world lying far ahead. It was quite simple. All that was needed was to take the reigning assumptions about what the future was likely to hold, and reverse them. Not modify, negate, or question, but reverse. It was self-evident that this was the right method, because so many of the guesses that the past had made about its then future—that is, my own present—had turned out to be not only wrong but the opposite of what came to be instead, the more so the further ahead they had been projected.

You could, of course, riffle through the old predictions and now and then find some tool or technique, some usage or notion, some general idea of how things would get gradually better or suddenly worse, that seemed eerily to foreshadow the actual; but that was really a game, where you took some aspect of the present and tried to match it with what the past had once thought up. Captain Nemo’s submarine is driven by a heatless inexhaustible power source—Jules Verne predicted the nuclear sub! What was almost never predicted correctly was what the present world would be like: like to be in and to experience. There is a wonderful moment in Edward Bellamy’s influential futurist utopian tract Looking Backward (1888) where a character, having fallen asleep in the 1880s and awakened in the year 2000, rushes out of the house to see the new world—after fortunately finding among the hats on the hatrack by the door a hat that fits him. In the future we, at least we proper folk, will still not go “bareheaded” or “hatless” into the street, for fear of being thought mad or distracted.

So it seemed clear to me that if you simply reversed what the past had imagined, you got something close to the real existing present. The same principle would therefore work for the future, and I went about applying it to the limning of the world that would exist in, say, five hundred years’ time. (I had nothing to do that summer; I had lost my job and was squatting in an unoccupied building as a sort of watchman. It was the time and the moment to think up things never before thought up.)

What predictions could I reverse? One general assumption at the time I set to work was that overpopulation would soon create a future of scarcity and desperate struggles for resources everywhere, including the rich First World, all earth filling with humans as with lemmings. So reverse that: perhaps as an unintended result of attempts to limit growth, numbers will cease to rise and start downward, and in the far future populations will be not large but small, maybe vanishingly small. Pollution, smog, river fires, acid rain spoiling the natural environment and making the built environment uninhabitable? No; smokestack industry, even all industry, will in time cease to grow, tumorlike and poisonous, and instead shrink away. The near-certain chance that eventually, by accident or on purpose, thermonuclear weapons would destroy even the possibility of civilization? No, no nuclear war—somehow it will be obviated. But if vastation by the bomb were escaped, it looked certain that the peoples and nations would be knit ever more closely together by interlocking technologies, skiving off human differences and reducing us to robot cogs in a single ever-growing world machine; or, conversely, that technology would vastly increase wealth and scope for the fortunate in a groomed and gratifying One World with an opening to the stars. No, neither of those: no technology in the future, no space travel, even our current technology forgotten or voluntarily given up, becoming a wonderful dream of long ago, as we dream of knights in armor. So then, brutish neoprimitives squatting in the remains of a self-destroyed technoworld? No, no, that’s what you’d guess, and it will therefore be different from that. Self-conscious minicivilizations, I thought, highly cultivated yet without reading or writing, unknown to one another, with concerns we can’t imagine, walking humbly on a wounded but living earth.

This vision was enthralling to me, convincing because so unforeseen: its roots in the present firm and deep yet so occult that they will only be able to be perceived after centuries. Above all it seemed to me to be a future that had no lesson for the present, gave no warning or hope, made no particular sense of history or the passage of time. Its unknowable origins lifted from the present the burden of needing to do the right thing now in order not to be punished in the time to come. There was no right thing that could be done; we would just have to do our best. The future would be strange, but all right.

Though I had not conceived it so, this pleasant obsession eventually generated a book, a novel, a science fiction, in which all the eons-to-come details impossible to know were given form, though of course not the form they would or will really have. And when read now, forty years from when I first began to write it, what is immediately evident about my future is that it could have been thought up at no time except the time in which I did think it up, and has gone away as that time has gone. No matter its contents, no matter how it is imagined, any future lies not ahead in the stream of time but at an angle to it, a right angle probably. When we have moved on down the stream, that future stays anchored to where it was produced, spinning out infinitely and perpendicularly from there. The process I engaged in is still viable, maybe, or as viable as it was then, but it must forever be redone. The future, as always, is now.

by John Crowley, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Knee Replacement May Be a Lifesaver for Some

By the time 64-year-old Laura Milson decided to undergo total knee replacement after 12 years of suffering from arthritis, even a short walk to the office printer was a struggle.

After her surgery last August at the Rothman Institute at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Ms. Milson spent a week in rehabilitation and says she hasn’t stopped walking since. “My son says to me, ‘You have to slow down,’ and I say, ‘No, I have to catch up!,’ ” she said. “It’s a whole different life.”

For Ms. Milson, who lives in Shrewsbury, Pa., replacing the joint in her right knee came with a surprising bonus: a 20-pound weight loss in two months. “I joked with my doctor, ‘I think you put a diet chip in my knee,’ ” she said. “The weight just sort of came off.”

Now she has joined Weight Watchers to drop a few extra pounds and is training for a three-day breast cancer walk in October.

For years surgeons have boasted of the pain relief and improved quality of life that often follow knee replacement. But now new research suggests that for some patients, knee replacement surgery can actually save their lives.

In a sweeping study of Medicare records, researchers from Philadelphia and Menlo Park, Calif., examined the effects of joint replacement among nearly 135,000 patients with new diagnoses of osteoarthritis of the knee from 1997 to 2009. About 54,000 opted for knee replacement; 81,000 did not.

Three years after diagnosis, the knee replacement patients had an 11 percent lower risk of heart failure. And after seven years, their risk of dying for any reason was 50 percent lower.

by Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Stuart Bradford

Masaaki Yasuda
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People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so out of control that you have to transform your life…

Elizabeth Gilbert

Photo: Balthus and Setsuko, 2000 -by Duane Michals

The Patient of the Future

Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald's. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. "In Illinois they said, 'We know what's going to happen when you go out to California. You're going to start eating organic food and get a blonde trainer and get a hot tub,' " recalls Smarr, who laughed off the predictions. "Of course, I did all three."

Smarr, who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in La Jolla, dropped from 205 to 184 pounds and is now a fit 63-year-old. But his transformation transcends his regular exercise program and carefully managed diet: he has become a poster man for the medical strategy of the future. Over the past decade, he has gathered as much data as he can about his body and then used that information to improve his health. And he has accomplished something that few people at the forefront of the "quantified self" movement have had the opportunity to do: he helped diagnose the emergence of a chronic disease in his body.

Like many "self-quanters," Smarr wears a Fitbit to count his every step, a Zeo to track his sleep patterns, and a Polar WearLink that lets him regulate his maximum heart rate during exercise. He paid 23andMe to analyze his DNA for disease susceptibility. He regularly uses a service provided by Your Future Health to have blood and stool samples analyzed for biochemicals that most interest him. But a critical skill separates Smarr from the growing pack of digitized patients who show up at the doctor's office with megabytes of their own biofluctuations: he has an extraordinary ability to fish signal from noise in complex data sets.

On top of his pioneering computer science work—he advocated for the adoption of ARPAnet, an early version of the Internet, and students at his University of Illinois center developed Mosaic, the first widely used browser—Smarr spent 25 years as an astrophysicist focused on relativity theory. That gave him the expertise to chart several of his biomarkers over time and then overlay the longitudinal graphs to monitor everything from the immune status of his gut and blood to the function of his heart and the thickness of his arteries. His meticulously collected and organized data helped doctors discover that he has Crohn's, an inflammatory bowel disease.

I have ulcerative colitis, a cousin of Crohn's, and I am intrigued by what Smarr calls his "detective story." His investigation of his body has evolved into a novel collaboration with a leading gastroenterologist to better understand and treat his disease, and maybe even to help others like me. But I am also a disease-weary skeptic. After 22 years of seeing specialists, enduring a battery of tests, unscrambling the complex medical literature, and trying a hodgepodge of interventions, I have had no luck staving off flares and only modest success controlling them with blunt-force drugs. Like others who have chronic illnesses, I am acutely sensitive to false hope. I have been repeatedly baffled by the course my disease takes and thoroughly confused by tests meant to clarify my condition.

by Jon Cohen, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:
Photo:: Michael Kelley

So Appy Together

Siri, the iPhone's sassy personal assistant, was just the beginning. Right now, behavioral scientists are racing to develop a new generation of apps and programs that can mimic compassion, concern, and sympathy—technology they hope we will form relationships with, even fall in love with. Janelle Nanos goes inside this brave new world to find out how our ever-smarter iPhones and Droids are changing what it means to be human.

Monday morning begins with the chime of bells. Blinking awake, I turn toward the noise, pawing at my bedside table in search of my phone. With a quick tap the bells are silenced, as if someone has abruptly cut the ropes in the belfry. I remove the sleep sensor from my forehead and adjust my glasses, scanning through the data from last night to check my REM. “What’s on the agenda for today?” I ask. “Four meetings ahead of you, two assignments due soon,” my phone says, then pings me with my Daily Challenge text message. Today I’m told to try to take 5,000 steps. Totally doable, I think, then reach for my body-monitoring armband and slide it up onto my biceps. My phone connects to it via Bluetooth, and begins registering my movement as I head to the kitchen. I open the fridge, grab the milk, then pour a bowl of cereal, pulling up my phone’s diet tracker to scan the bar codes on each container for an accurate calorie count.

“We’d better finish the milk — it spoils tomorrow,” my husband says, and I realize it’s the first time we’ve spoken this morning. I grimace apologetically, and flip my phone face-down on the table.

I love my smartphone. It’s become a second brain in my pocket that’s changed how I process information. It’s with me every waking moment — and the sleeping moments, too — tracking my daily habits. And through my constant e-mail and Facebook activity, and the personal documentation of my life via Twitter and Instagram photos, it’s become the lens through which I see the world. All day long, I find myself instinctively reaching for my phone, using it as a tool to validate my existence.

But lately, my smartphone and I have taken our relationship to the next level. I provide it with ever-more-intimate details about my life. Last year, for example, I set a few goals for myself. I wanted to lose some weight, save money, and run a half marathon. With only a few app downloads, my phone became a trainer, life coach, and confidant. It now knows what I eat, how I sleep, how much I spend, how much I weigh, and how many calories I burn (or don’t) at the gym each day. It’s gotten to the point where my phone now somehow knows more about me than anyone else in the world, including my own darling husband. My gadget has become a tiny black mirror, reflecting back how I see myself. Which means things are getting more complicated between us.

Lately, I’ve found myself trying to outsmart my smartphone, fudging my calorie intake when I’ve gone overboard on dessert, or hiding a credit card from my personal-finance app so it doesn’t know about my occasional spending sprees. And then I catch myself: It’s a damn phone. This is insane!

What’s going on here? How is it that I’ve come to feel accountable to a device — my device — one that works for me, not the other way around? I know I can’t be the only one asking these questions, as 30 percent of Americans now own smartphones (and one-third of them have downloaded apps to help them monitor their lives). Right now, something called “behavioral scientists” are hard at work dreaming up technologies to make our phones more and more human in the way they interact with us — and to encourage us to build relationships with them. It turns out that Siri, the iPhone’s wildly popular new personal assistant, is just the beginning. Where are we headed? I wanted to know before things got any weirder between my phone and me.

Like I said, I lie to my phone. On the days when I’m exceeding my calorie goal in my weight-loss app, I’ll sometimes tweak the numbers. Or I’ll just avoid using the app at all that day.

But I don’t enjoy the feeling that I’m cheating on my phone. So I reach out to Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor and author of the recent book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Turkle, a sociologist and clinical psychologist, has spent the past two decades exploring the relationship between humans and robots. She’s currently researching Siri and the way its users have, in only a few months’ time, come to think of it as a nonjudgmental best friend. Siri is a “cultural preparation for a kind of intimacy with our machines that will take us to a new level,” Turkle explains. As humans, she says, we’re programmed to anthropomorphize objects. But until now, these objects haven’t been programmed to love us back.

“We’re at a moment of temptation,” she says. “We’re entering into a whole new level of relationship with inanimate objects. And they’re not just inanimate objects that we can project on. We have objects that have little minds of their own.”

Janelle Nanos, Boston Magazine |  Read more:
Illustrations by Viktor Koen

Alabama Shakes

The Girl on the Bridge

The last thing Kay said on the phone a little before midnight was unsettling enough—“Bryan, I love you. I got to go. It was nice to know you”—but now she wouldn’t answer her cell. She wasn’t in her Queen Anne apartment. She wasn’t in the park they’d strolled through hand in hand days earlier. He didn’t know where she was, he just knew he had to find her.

Finally around 1:30am, Sunday, January 16, 2011, after pounding on his girlfriend’s door, after multiple calls went straight to voice mail, Bryan Wilson, a 29-year-old sustainable-business consultant, dialed 911.

A Seattle police cruiser met him at the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Roy minutes later. “Do you have any reason to believe she might hurt herself or others?” asked officer Kurt Alstrin. “Yes,” Bryan said. “She’s severely depressed.”

Soon every police radio in Seattle crackled with the name. Kaylan Rose Campbell, 25 years old. Green eyes. Red or auburn hair. Five feet eight inches tall.

What the radio message couldn’t convey was that few people who knew Kay had ever met anyone more intelligent. Or more beautiful. That she dabbled in six languages and had traveled halfway around the globe by the time she was 20. That she could hear any tune once and play it back on a keyboard. That she laughed so loud you could feel it in your spine.

Nothing in that call to all police units could explain how Kaylan Campbell had been struggling for the past few months, how she had told those closest to her that she hated herself, that she was convinced she was a bad person, that she felt trapped.

“Any idea where she might be?” Officer Alstrin asked.

Bryan recalled the background noise he’d heard during their last phone conversation. Wind. Traffic. He thought of their conversations during the 
past week.

“Where do you think she is?” the officer pressed.

“I think she’s at the bridge,” Bryan said. “The Aurora Bridge.”

He knew the words were loaded, that they sounded preposterous. Someone’s distressed and I automatically assume she’s going to jump off the Aurora Bridge?

But the cliche exists for a reason. The bridge, site of more than 230 suicides, is second in the U.S. only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate in number of jumpers. So dire had the suicide problem become—especially for the vocal minority who lived and worked below the bridge—that the Washington State Department of Transportation was nearly finished constructing a $5 million suicide fence. The project had been stalled, first by historic preservationists who wanted to keep the nearly 80-year-old bridge looking exactly as it did when it was erected in 1932, and later by engineering setbacks and unforeseen noise complaints.

If Kaylan Campbell was on the span connecting Queen Anne to Fremont, staring into the darkness 15 stories down—at either the Ship Canal or its banks—she had joined hundreds of others who had come to the bridge for the same reason since before it was even completed.

by James Ross Gardner |  Read more:
Photo: David Bowden

Those Fabulous Confabs

In January, in Davos, Switzerland, global leaders—prime ministers, central bankers, Mick Jagger—gathered for the annual World Economic Forum, the planet’s most high-powered schmoozefest. Simultaneously, in Lake Tahoe, 650 twentysomethings and their fellow travelers were hanging out with Questlove and the president of Georgia at Summit Series, an event focused on networking and social entrepreneurship. And this week, in Long Beach, a more tech-savvy crowd will convene for TED 2012. The high season of the ideas conference is upon us.

At least since the early seventies, when Davos was founded, there have been exclusive gatherings that mix fizzy ideas with major-league networking. The eighties gave rise to Renaissance Weekend, for a largely political crowd; Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley retreat, for media machers; and an early version of TED, for the titans of the converging worlds of (as the organizers had it) Technology, Entertainment, and Design. But recent years have seen a furious proliferation of these status events. There’s PopTech, FOO Camp, the Clinton Global Initiative, Solve for X (Google’s conference for “moonshot thinking”). And beyond the ­higher-profile events, a lengthening tail of gatherings you’ve never heard of like the Feast, Do Lectures, the 99% Conference, and Techonomy. All promise much the same thing: a velvet rope to keep out the attitudinally unwashed, serendipitous interaction, quirky content, and at least the illusion of egalitarian elbow-rubbing. They have their own vocabulary, too. These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about “disruptive” ideas that have been carefully “curated.”

The appeal is complex. For would-be world-savers enthralled by “the power of ideas,” these conferences are a stand-in for “a time when governments did shit, like put people on the moon,” per one curator. For even die-hard technologists, interacting via disembodied avatars gets old, and occasional 3-D mingling is refreshing. For a certain prosperous tier of the citizenry, the conferences serve as a higher-brow Learning Annex. But most simply, these events are about establishing and reinforcing new hierarchies. In a culture where social rank is ever more fluid, an entrepreneur who overnight goes from sleeping under his desk to IPO-ing into a billionaire needs a way to express his new status, stat. “We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” as Andrew Zolli, PopTech’s executive director, puts it.

Thus the rise of a cohort of speakers and attendees who migrate along the same elite social-intellectual trade routes. Throw in Sundance and SXSW and Burning Man, and you get what Michael Hirschorn has called “the clusterfuckoisie,” tweeting at each other as they shuttle between events. This is so exactly the sort of thing that David Brooks lives to break down into one of his fictive comic-sociological characters that, in his latest book, The Social Animal, he describes Davos parties as “rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.” But Brooks is himself a leading citizen of the realm, having spoken at TED and, regularly, the Aspen Ideas Festival. For public intellectuals with books and brands to promote, the new conferences are force multipliers, unpaid gigs that offer intangible yields. “Obviously it’s not the money,” Brooks says. “For me, it’s the chance to get out of my political-pundit circle and meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. There are psychic rewards.”

by Benjamin Wallace, New York |  Read more:
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Interview With an Element: Chlorine

Are you Bleach?

No. I am not Bleach, I am me. The success of Bleach would not have been possible without Sodium and Oxygen. We all have our roles to play. Oxygen does its own part. On my own I am just chlorine, but as sodium hypochlorite something more than that. My solo career was never as successful, looking back I needed time to see that — and I guess time to grow as an element.

Is it true that Bleach is behind “Eau de Labarraque”?

Yes. Eau de Labarraque was our first project together, and that goes way back to that summer in France in 1820. Many people accused us of selling out when we started over as Bleach, but it was just a natural step in our development at the time and a way to reach a greater audience.

What would you call your greatest success with Bleach?

Clearly that is our role in disinfection. Everyone knows about drinking water and swimming pools. We were even involved in deodorizing the body of Louis XVIII…  But I would say our role in preventing child bed fever is something that is often overlooked. Our project with Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s did not gain the recognition it should have. His idea of disinfecting your hands after dissection of a cadaver and assisting in the delivery room was so new at the time it was rejected by the medical profession for decades. Semmelweis died at the age of 47 of gangrene after a severe beating in a mental institution asylum in Vienna, and I wish he would get more recognition.

Why did your partnership with Oxygen end?

It did not end. The media love to spread rumors about rivalry, especially after oxygen started its new project OxiClean more than a decade ago, but we remain good friends. Oxygen may be more popular and is getting not as bad press as me, but I am not bitter. I am focused on my collaboration with Sodium and do not have much time to follow whatever gossip is making the rounds.

Do you see Sodium much nowadays?

Yes, we look back on a successful career together, but are not out of great ideas yet. Sodium completes me in a way that no other element does. Lately our reviews have not been great, but we are ready for a comeback. Sodium has been taking the blame for much that seemed wrong with Salt, but without it everything would be bland. Our contribution to food has been legendary, something acknowledged even by our harshest critics. At this point I would like to plug a new venture of mine. I got involved with Sugar, and discovered that my remix of their classic work is even sweeter than the original, and I even prevent any nutritional effect. Our joint offering sucralose is now available in stores.

by Simone Bauer, The Hairpin |  Read more:
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