What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

1.

On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas. He was wearing a navy blue suit and a tie. He was fifty-two years old, but looked older. Huddled around him were eight lawyers from his defense team. Outside, television-satellite trucks were parked up and down the block.

“We are here this afternoon,” Judge Simeon Lake began, “for sentencing in United States of America versus Jeffrey K. Skilling, Criminal Case Number H-04- 25.” He addressed the defendant directly: “Mr. Skilling, you may now make a statement and present any information in mitigation.”

Skilling stood up. Enron, the company he had built into an energy-trading leviathan, had collapsed into bankruptcy almost exactly five years before. In May, he had been convicted by a jury of fraud. Under a settlement agreement, almost everything he owned had been turned over to a fund to compensate former shareholders.

He spoke haltingly, stopping in midsentence. “In terms of remorse, Your Honor, I can’t imagine more remorse,” he said. He had “friends who have died, good men.” He was innocent – “innocent of every one of these charges.” He spoke for two or three minutes and sat down.

Judge Lake called on Anne Beliveaux, who worked as the senior administrative assistant in Enron’s tax department for eighteen years. She was one of nine people who had asked to address the sentencing hearing.

“How would you like to be facing living off of sixteen hundred dollars a month, and that is what I’m facing,” she said to Skilling. Her retirement savings had been wiped out by the Enron bankruptcy. “And, Mr. Skilling, that only is because of greed, nothing but greed. And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

The next witness said that Skilling had destroyed a good company, the third witness that Enron had been undone by the misconduct of its management; another lashed out at Skilling directly. “Mr. Skilling has proven to be a liar, a thief, and a drunk,” a woman named Dawn Powers Martin, a twenty-two-year veteran of Enron, told the court. “Mr. Skilling has cheated me and my daughter of our retirement dreams. Now it’s his time to be robbed of his freedom to walk the earth as a free man.” She turned to Skilling and said, “While you dine on Chateaubriand and champagne, my daughter and I clip grocery coupons and eat leftovers.” And on and on it went.

The judge asked Skilling to rise.

“The evidence established that the defendant repeatedly lied to investors, including Enron’s own employees, about various aspects of Enron’s business,” the judge said. He had no choice but to be harsh: Skilling would serve 292 months in prison – twenty-four years. The man who headed a firm that Fortune ranked among the “most admired” in the world had received one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal. He would leave prison an old man, if he left prison at all.

“I only have one request, Your Honor,” Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling’s lawyer, said. “If he received ten fewer months, which shouldn’t make a difference in terms of the goals of sentencing, if you do the math and you subtract fifteen percent for good time, he then qualifies under Bureau of Prisons policies to be able to serve his time at a lower facility. Just a ten-month reduction in sentence…”

It was a plea for leniency. Skilling wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. He was a pillar of the Houston community, and a small adjustment in his sentence would keep him from spending the rest of his life among hardened criminals.

“No,” Judge Lake said.

2.

The national security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source, bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The CIA had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11 to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11 a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

If you sat through the trial of Jeffrey Skilling, you’d think that the Enron scandal was a puzzle. The company, the prosecution said, conducted shady side deals that no one quite understood. Senior executives withheld critical information from investors. Skilling, the architect of the firm’s strategy, was a liar, a thief, and a drunk. We were not told enough – the classic puzzle premise – was the central assumption of the Enron prosecution.

“This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen,” the lead prosecutor for the Department of Justice said in his closing arguments to the jury:

But the prosecutor was wrong. Enron wasn’t really a puzzle. It was a mystery.

3.

In late July of 2000, Jonathan Weil, a reporter at the Dallas bureau of the Wall Street Journal, got a call from someone he knew in the investment-management business. Weil wrote the stock column called “Heard in Texas” for the paper’s regional edition, and he had been closely following the big energy firms based in Houston – Dynegy, El Paso, and Enron. His caller had a suggestion. “He said, ‘You really ought to check out Enron and Dynegy and see where their earnings come from,’” Weil recalled. “So I did.”

Weil was interested in Enron’s use of what is called mark-to-market accounting, which is a technique used by companies that engage in complicated financial trading. Suppose, for instance, that you are an energy company and you enter into a $100 million contract with the state of California to deliver a billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2016. How much is that contract worth? You aren’t going to get paid for another ten years, and you aren’t going to know until then whether you’ll show a profit on the deal or a loss. Nonetheless, that $100 million promise clearly matters to your bottom line. If electricity steadily drops in price over the next several years, the contract is going to become a hugely valuable asset. But if electricity starts to get more expensive as 2016 approaches, you could be out tens of millions of dollars. With mark-to-market accounting, you estimate how much revenue the deal is going to bring in and put that number in your books at the moment you sign the contract. If, down the line, the estimate changes, you adjust the balance sheet accordingly.

When a company using mark-to-market accounting says it has made a profit of $10 million on revenues of $100 million, then, it could mean one of two things. The company may actually have $100 million in its bank accounts, of which $10 million will remain after it has paid its bills. Or it may be guessing that it will make $10 million on a deal where money may not actually change hands for years. Weil’s source wanted him to see how much of the money Enron said it was making was “real.”

Weil got copies of the firm’s annual reports and quarterly filings and began comparing the income statements and the cash-flow statements. “It took me a while to figure out everything I needed to,” Weil said. “It probably took a good month or so. There was a lot of noise in the financial statements, and to zero in on this particular issue you needed to cut through a lot of that.” Weil spoke to Thomas Linsmeier, then an accounting professor at Michigan State, and they talked about how some finance companies in the 1990s had used mark-to-market accounting on subprime loans – that is, loans made to higher-credit-risk consumers – and when the economy declined and consumers defaulted or paid off their loans more quickly than expected, the lenders suddenly realized that their estimates of how much money they were going to make were far too generous. Weil spoke to someone at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, to an analyst at the Moody’s investment-rating agency, and to a dozen or so others. Then he went back to Enron’s financial statements. His conclusions were sobering. In the second quarter of 2000, $747 million of the money Enron said it had made was unrealized – that is, it was money that executives thought they were going to make at some point in the future. If you took that imaginary money away, Enron had shown a significant loss in the second quarter. This was one of the most admired companies in the United States, a firm that was then valued by the stock market as the seventh-largest corporation in the country, and there was practically no cash coming into its coffers.

Weil’s story ran in the Journal on September 20, 2000. A few days later, it was read by a Wall Street financier named James Chanos. Chanos is a short-seller – an investor who tries to make money by betting that a company’s stock will fall. “It pricked up my ears,” Chanos said. “I read the 10-K and the 10-Q that first weekend,” he went on, referring to the financial statements that public companies are required to file with federal regulators. “I went through it pretty quickly. I flagged right away the stuff that was questionable. I circled it. That was the first run-through. Then I flagged the pages and read the stuff I didn’t understand, and reread it two or three times. I remember I spent a couple hours on it.” Enron’s profit margins and its return on equity were plunging, Chanos saw. Cash flow – the lifeblood of any business – had slowed to a trickle, and the company’s rate of return was less than its cost of capital: it was as if you had borrowed money from the bank at 9 percent interest and invested it in a savings bond that paid you 7 percent interest. “They were basically liquidating themselves,” Chanos said.

In November of that year, Chanos began shorting Enron stock. Over the next few months, he spread the word that he thought the company was in trouble. He tipped off a reporter for Fortune, Bethany McLean. She read the same reports that Chanos and Weil had, and came to the same conclusion. Her story, under the headline “IS ENRON OVERPRICED?,” ran in March of 2001. More and more journalists and analysts began taking a closer look at Enron, and the stock began to fall. In August, Skilling resigned. Enron’s credit rating was downgraded. Banks became reluctant to lend Enron the money it needed to make its trades. By December, the company had filed for bankruptcy.

Enron’s downfall has been documented so extensively that it is easy to overlook how peculiar it was. Compare Enron, for instance, with Watergate, the prototypical scandal of the 1970s. To expose the White House cover-up, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used a source – Deep Throat – who had access to many secrets, and whose identity had to be concealed. He warned Woodward and Bernstein that their phones might be tapped. When Woodward wanted to meet with Deep Throat, he would move a flowerpot with a red flag in it to the back of his apartment balcony. That evening, he would leave by the back stairs, take multiple taxis to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and meet his source in an underground parking garage at 2 a.m. Here, from All the President’s Men, is Woodward’s climactic encounter with Deep Throat:

Watergate was a classic puzzle: Woodward and Bernstein were searching for a buried secret, and Deep Throat was their guide.

Did Jonathan Weil have a Deep Throat? Not really. He had a friend in the investment-management business with some suspicions about energy-trading companies like Enron, but the friend wasn’t an insider. Nor did Weil’s source direct him to files detailing the clandestine activities of the company. He just told Weil to read a series of public documents that had been prepared and distributed by Enron itself. Woodward met with his secret source in an underground parking garage in the hours before dawn. Weil called up an accounting expert at Michigan State.

When Weil had finished his reporting, he called Enron for comment. “They had their chief accounting officer and six or seven people fly up to Dallas,” Weil says. They met in a conference room at the Journal’s offices. The Enron officials acknowledged that the money they said they earned was virtually all money that they hoped to earn. Weil and the Enron officials then had a long conversation about how certain Enron was about its estimates of future earnings. “They were telling me how brilliant the people who put together their mathematical models were,” Weil says. “These were MIT PhDs. I said, ‘Were your mathematical models last year telling you that the California electricity markets would be going berserk this year? No? Why not?’ They said, ‘Well, this is one of those crazy events.’ It was late September 2000 so I said, ‘Who do you think is going to win? Bush or Gore?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said, ‘Don’t you think it will make a difference to the market whether you have an environmentalist Democrat in the White House or a Texas oilman?’” It was all very civil. “There was no dispute about the numbers,” Weil went on. “There was only a difference in how you should interpret them.”

Of all the moments in the Enron unraveling, this meeting is surely the strangest. The prosecutor in the Enron case told the jury to send Jeffrey Skilling to prison because Enron had hidden the truth: You’re “entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is,” the prosecutor had said. But what truth was Enron hiding here? Everything Weil learned for his Enron exposé came from Enron, and when he wanted to confirm his numbers, the company’s executives got on a plane and sat down with him in a conference room in Dallas.

Nixon never went to see Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. He hid in the White House.

4.

The second, and perhaps more consequential, problem with Enron’s accounting was its heavy reliance on what are called special-purpose entities, or SPEs.

An SPE works something like this. Your company isn’t doing well; sales are down and you are heavily in debt. If you go to a bank to borrow $100 million, it will probably charge you an extremely high interest rate, if it agrees to lend to you at all. But you’ve got a bundle of oil leases that over the next four or five years are almost certain to bring in $100 million. So you hand them over to a partnership – the SPE – that you have set up with some outside investors. The bank then lends $100 million to the partnership, and the partnership gives the money to you. That bit of financial maneuvering makes a big difference. This kind of transaction did not (at the time) have to be reported in the company’s balance sheet. So a company could raise capital without increasing its indebtedness. And because the bank is almost certain the leases will generate enough money to pay off the loan, it’s willing to lend its money at a much lower interest rate. SPEs have become commonplace in corporate America.

Enron introduced all kinds of twists into the SPE game. It didn’t always put blue-chip assets into the partnerships – like oil leases that would reliably generate income. It sometimes sold off less-than-sterling assets. Nor did it always sell those assets to outsiders, who presumably would raise questions about the value of what they were buying. Enron had its own executives manage these partnerships. And the company would make the deals work – that is, get the partnerships and the banks to play along – by guaranteeing that, if whatever they had to sell declined in value, Enron would make up the difference with its own stock. In other words, Enron didn’t sell parts of itself to an outside entity; it effectively sold parts of itself to itself – a strategy that was not only legally questionable but extraordinarily risky. It was Enron’s tangle of financial obligations to the SPEs that ended up triggering the collapse.

When the prosecution in the Skilling case argued that the company had misled its investors, they were referring, in part, to these SPEs. Enron’s management, the argument went, had an obligation to reveal the extent to which it had staked its financial livelihood on these shadowy side deals. As the Powers Committee, a panel charged with investigating Enron’s demise, noted, the company “failed to achieve a fundamental objective: they did not communicate the essence of the transactions in a sufficiently clear fashion to enable a reader of [Enron’s] financial statements to understand what was going on.” In short, we weren’t told enough.

Here again, though, the lessons of the Enron case aren’t nearly so straightforward. The public became aware of the nature of these SPEs through the reporting of several of Weil’s colleagues at the Wall Street Journal – principally John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith – starting in the late summer of 2001. And how was Emshwiller tipped off to Enron’s problems? The same way Jonathan Weil and Jim Chanos were: he read what Enron had reported in its own public filings. Here is the description of Emshwiller’s epiphany, as described in Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, the definitive history of the Enron debacle. (Note the verb scrounged, which Eichenwald uses to describe how Emshwiller found the relevant Enron documents. What he means by that is downloaded.)

It was section eight, called “Related Party Transactions,” that got John Emshwiller’s juices flowing.

After being assigned to follow the Skilling resignation, Emshwiller had put in a request for an interview, then scrounged up a copy of Enron’s most recent SEC filing in search of any nuggets.

What he found startled him. Words about some partnerships run by an unidentified “senior officer.” Arcane stuff, maybe, but the numbers were huge. Enron reported more than $240 million in revenues in the first six months of the year from its dealings with them.

Enron’s SPEs were, by any measure, evidence of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence. But you can’t blame Enron for covering up the existence of its side deals. It didn’t; it disclosed them. The argument against the company, then, is more accurately that it didn’t tell its investors enough about its SPEs. But what is enough? Enron had some three thousand SPEs, and the paperwork for each one probably ran in excess of a thousand pages. It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public. What about an edited version of each deal? Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law School, recently examined a random sample of twenty SPE disclosure statements from various corporations – that is, summaries of the deals put together for interested parties – and found that on average they ran to forty single-spaced pages. So a summary of Enron’s SPEs would have come to a hundred and twenty thousand single-spaced pages. What about a summary of all those summaries? That’s what the bankruptcy examiner in the Enron case put together, and it took up a thousand pages. Well, then, what about a summary of the summary of the summaries? That’s what the Powers Committee put together. The committee looked only at the “substance of the most significant transactions,” and its accounting still ran to two hundred numbingly complicated pages and, as Schwarcz points out, that was “with the benefit of hindsight and with the assistance of some of the finest legal talent in the nation.”

A puzzle grows simpler with the addition of each new piece of information: if I tell you that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Peshawar, I make the problem of finding him an order of magnitude easier, and if I add that he’s hiding in a neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city, the problem becomes simpler still. But here the rules seem different. According to the Powers report, many on Enron’s board of directors failed to understand “the economic rationale, the consequences, and the risks” of their company’s SPE deals – and the directors sat in meetings where those deals were discussed in detail. In Conspiracy of Fools, Eichenwald convincingly argues that Andrew Fastow, Enron’s chief financial officer, didn’t understand the full economic implications of the deals, either, and he was the one who put them together.

“These were very, very sophisticated, complex transactions,” says Anthony Catanach, who teaches accounting at the Villanova University School of Business and has written extensively on the Enron case. Referring to Enron’s accounting firm, he said, “I’m not even sure any of Arthur Andersen’s field staff at Enron would have been able to understand them, even if it was all in front of them. This is senior-management-type stuff. I spent two months looking at the Powers report, just diagramming it. These deals were really convoluted.”

Enron’s SPEs, it should be noted, would have been this hard to understand even if they were standard issue. SPEs are by nature difficult. A company creates an SPE because it wants to reassure banks about the risks of making a loan. To provide that reassurance, the company gives its lenders and partners very detailed information about a specific portion of its business. And the more certainty a company creates for the lender – the more guarantees and safeguards and explanations it writes into the deal – the less comprehensible the transaction becomes to outsiders. Schwarcz writes that Enron’s disclosure was “necessarily imperfect.” You can try to make financial transactions understandable by simplifying them, in which case you run the risk of smoothing over some of their potential risks, or you can try to disclose every potential pitfall, in which case you’ll make the disclosure so unwieldy that no one will be able to understand it. To Schwarcz, all Enron proves is that in an age of increasing financial complexity, the “disclosure paradigm” – the idea that the more a company tells us about its business, the better off we are – has become an anachronism.

5.

During the summer of 1943, Nazi propaganda broadcasts boasted that the German military had developed a devastating “super weapon.” Immediately, the Allied intelligence services went to work. Spies confirmed that the Germans had built a secret weapons factory. Aerial photographs taken over northern France showed a strange new concrete installation pointed in the direction of England. The Allies were worried. Bombing missions were sent to try to disrupt the mysterious operation, and plans were drawn up to deal with the prospect of devastating new attacks on English cities. Nobody was sure, though, whether the weapon was real. There seemed to be weapons factories there, but it wasn’t evident what was happening inside them. And there was a launching pad in northern France, but it might have been just a decoy, designed to distract the Allies from bombing real targets. The German secret weapon was a puzzle, and the Allies didn’t have enough information to solve it. There was another way to think about the problem, though, which ultimately proved far more useful: treat the German secret weapon as a mystery.

The mystery solvers of the Second World War were small groups of analysts whose job was to listen to the overseas and domestic propaganda broadcasts of Japan and Germany. The British outfit had been around since shortly before the First World War and was run by the BBC. The American operation was known as the Screwball Division, the historian Stephen Mercado writes, and in the early 1940s had been housed in a nondescript office building on K Street, in Washington. The analysts listened to the same speeches that anyone with a shortwave radio could listen to. They simply sat at their desks with headphones on, working their way through hours and hours of Nazi broadcasts. Then they tried to figure out how what the Nazis said publicly – about, for instance, the possibility of a renewed offensive against Russia – revealed what they felt about, say, invading Russia. One journalist at the time described the propaganda analysts as “the greatest collection of individualists, international rolling stones, and slightly batty geniuses ever gathered together in one organization.” And they had very definite thoughts about the Nazis’ secret weapon.

The German leadership, first of all, was boasting about the secret weapon in domestic broadcasts. That was important. Propaganda was supposed to boost morale. If the Nazi leadership said things that turned out to be misleading, its credibility would fall. When German U-boats started running into increasingly effective Allied resistance in the spring of 1943, for example, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, tacitly acknowledged the bad news, switching his emphasis from trumpeting recent victories to predicting long-term success, and blaming the weather for hampering U-boat operations. Up to that point, Goebbels had never lied to his own people about that sort of news. So if he said that Germany had a devastating secret weapon it meant, in all likelihood, that Germany had a devastating secret weapon.

Starting from that premise, the analysts then mined the Nazis’ public pronouncements for more insights. It was, they concluded, “beyond reasonable doubt” that as of November 1943 the weapon existed, that it was of an entirely new type, that it could not be easily countered, that it would produce striking results, and that it would shock the civilian population upon whom it would be used. It was, furthermore, “highly probable” that the Germans were past the experimental stage as of May of 1943, and that something had happened in August of that year that significantly delayed deployment. The analysts based this inference, in part, on the fact that, in August, the Nazis abruptly stopped mentioning their secret weapon for ten days, and that when they started again, their threats took on a new, less certain, tone. Finally, it could be tentatively estimated that the weapon would be ready between the middle of January and the middle of April, with a month’s margin of error on either side. That inference, in part, came from Nazi propaganda in late 1943, which suddenly became more serious and specific in tone, and it seemed unlikely that Goebbels would raise hopes in this way if he couldn’t deliver within a few months. The secret weapon was the Nazis’ fabled V-1 rocket, and virtually every one of the propaganda analysts’ predictions turned out to be true.

The political scientist Alexander George described the sequence of V-1 rocket inferences in his 1959 book Propaganda Analysis, and the striking thing about his account is how contemporary it seems. The spies were fighting a nineteenth-century war. The analysts belonged to our age, and the lesson of their triumph is that the complex, uncertain issues that the modern world throws at us require the mystery paradigm.

Diagnosing prostate cancer used to be a puzzle, for example: the doctor would do a rectal exam and feel for a lumpy tumor on the surface of the patient’s prostate. These days, though, we don’t wait for patients to develop the symptoms of prostate cancer. Doctors now regularly test middle-aged men for elevated levels of PSA, a substance associated with prostate changes, and, if the results look problematic, they use ultrasound imaging to take a picture of the prostate. Then they perform a biopsy, removing tiny slices of the gland and examining the extracted tissue under a microscope. Much of that flood of information, however, is inconclusive: elevated levels of PSA don’t always mean that you have cancer, and normal levels of PSA don’t always mean that you don’t – and, in any case, there’s debate about what constitutes a normal PSA level. Nor is the biopsy definitive: because what a pathologist is looking for is early evidence of cancer – and in many cases merely something that might one day turn into cancer – two equally skilled pathologists can easily look at the same sample and disagree about whether there is any cancer present. Even if they do agree, they may disagree about the benefits of treatment, given that most prostate cancers grow so slowly that they never cause problems. The urologist is now charged with the task of making sense of a maze of unreliable and conflicting claims. He is no longer confirming the presence of a malignancy. He’s predicting it, and the certainties of his predecessors have been replaced with outcomes that can only be said to be “highly probable” or “tentatively estimated.” What medical progress has meant for prostate cancer – and, as the physician H. Gilbert Welch argues in his book Should I Be Tested for Cancer?, for virtually every other cancer as well – is the transformation of diagnosis from a puzzle to a mystery.

That same transformation is happening in the intelligence world as well. During the Cold War, the broad context of our relationship with the Soviet bloc was stable and predictable. What we didn’t know was details. As Gregory Treverton, who was a former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, writes in his book Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information:

With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, Treverton and others have argued that the situation facing the intelligence community has turned upside down. Now most of the world is open, not closed. Intelligence officers aren’t dependent on scraps from spies. They are inundated with information. Solving puzzles remains critical: we still want to know precisely where Osama bin Laden is hiding and where North Korea’s nuclear-weapons facilities are situated. But mysteries increasingly take center stage. The stable and predictable divisions of East and West have been shattered. Now the task of the intelligence analyst is to help policymakers navigate the disorder. Several years ago, Admiral Bobby R. Inman was asked by a congressional commission what changes he thought would strengthen America’s intelligence system. Inman used to head the National Security Agency, the nation’s premier puzzle-solving authority, and was once the deputy director of the CIA. He was the embodiment of the Cold War intelligence structure. His answer: revive the State Department, the one part of the US foreign-policy establishment that isn’t considered to be in the intelligence business at all. In a post-Cold War world of “openly available information,” Inman said, “what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they’re observing.” Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses.

6.

Enron revealed that the financial community needs to make the same transition. “In order for an economy to have an adequate system of financial reporting, it is not enough that companies make disclosures of financial information,” the Yale law professor Jonathan Macey wrote in a landmark law review article that encouraged many to rethink the Enron case. “In addition, it is vital that there be a set of financial intermediaries, who are at least as competent and sophisticated at receiving, processing, and interpreting financial information… as the companies are at delivering it.” Puzzles are “transmitter-dependent”; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are “receiver-dependent”; they turn on the skills of the listener, and Macey argues that, as Enron’s business practices grew more complicated, it was Wall Street’s responsibility to keep pace.

Victor Fleischer, who teaches at the University of Colorado Law School, points out that one of the critical clues about Enron’s condition lay in the fact that it paid no income tax in four of its last five years. Enron’s use of mark-to-market accounting and SPEs was an accounting game that made the company look as though it were earning far more money than it was. But the IRS doesn’t accept mark-to-market accounting; you pay tax on income when you actually receive that income. And, from the IRS’s perspective, all of Enron’s fantastically complex maneuvering around its SPEs was, as Fleischer puts it, “a non-event”: until the partnership actually sells the asset – and makes either a profit or a loss – an SPE is just an accounting fiction. Enron wasn’t paying any taxes because, in the eyes of the IRS, Enron wasn’t making any money.

If you looked at Enron from the perspective of the tax code, that is, you would have seen a very different picture of the company than if you had looked through the more traditional lens of the accounting profession. But in order to do that you would have to be trained in the tax code and be familiar with its particular conventions and intricacies, and know what questions to ask. “The fact of the gap between [Enron’s] accounting income and taxable income was easily observed,” Fleischer notes, but not the source of the gap. “The tax code requires special training.”

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have any special training. They were in their twenties at the time of Watergate. In All the President’s Men, they even joke about their inexperience: Woodward’s expertise was mainly in office politics; Bernstein was a college dropout. But it hardly mattered, because cover-ups, whistle-blowers, secret tapes, and exposés – the principal elements of the puzzle – all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight. Woodward and Bernstein would never have broken the Enron story.

“There have been scandals in corporate history where people are really making stuff up, but this wasn’t a criminal enterprise of that kind,” Macey says. “Enron was vanishingly close, in my view, to having complied with the accounting rules. They were going over the edge, just a little bit. And this kind of financial fraud – where people are simply stretching the truth – falls into the area that analysts and short-sellers are supposed to ferret out. The truth wasn’t hidden. But you’d have to look at their financial statements, and you would have to say to yourself, ‘What’s that about?’ It’s almost as if they were saying, ‘We’re doing some really sleazy stuff in footnote 42, and if you want to know more about it, ask us.’ And that’s the thing. Nobody did.”

Alexander George, in his history of propaganda analysis, looked at hundreds of the inferences drawn by the American analysts about the Nazis, and concluded that an astonishing 81 percent of them were accurate. George’s account, however, spends almost as much time on the propaganda analysts’ failures as on their successes. It was the British, for example, who did the best work on the V-1 rocket problem. They systematically tracked the “occurrence and volume” of Nazi reprisal threats, which is how they were able to pinpoint things like the setback suffered by the V-1 program in August of 1943 (it turned out that Allied bombs had caused serious damage) and the date of the Nazi V-1 rocket launch. K Street’s analysis was lackluster in comparison. George writes that the Americans “did not develop analytical techniques and hypotheses of sufficient refinement,” relying instead on “impressionistic” analysis. George was himself one of the slightly batty geniuses of K Street, and, of course, he could easily have excused his former colleagues. They never left their desks, after all. All they had to deal with was propaganda, and their big source was Goebbels, who was a liar, a thief, and a drunk. But that is puzzle thinking. In the case of puzzles, we put the offending target, the CEO, in jail for twenty-four years and assume that our work is done. Mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. Because if you can’t find the truth in a mystery – even a mystery shrouded in propaganda – it’s not just the fault of the propagandist. It’s your fault as well.

In the spring of 1998, Macey notes, a group of six students at Cornell University’s business school decided to do their term project on Enron. “It was for an advanced financial-statement-analysis class taught by a guy at Cornell called Charles Lee, who is pretty famous in financial circles,” one member of the group, Jay Krueger, recalls. In the first part of the semester, Lee had led his students through a series of intensive case studies, teaching them techniques and sophisticated tools to make sense of the vast amounts of information that companies disclose in their annual reports and SEC filings. Then the students picked a company and went off on their own. “One of the second-years had a summer-internship interview with Enron, and he was very interested in the energy sector,” Krueger went on. “So he said, ‘Let’s do them.’ It was about a six-week project, half a semester. Lots of group meetings. It was a ratio analysis, which is pretty standard business-school fare. You know, take fifty different financial ratios, then lay that on top of every piece of information you could find out about the company, the businesses, how their performance compared to other competitors.”

The people in the group reviewed Enron’s accounting practices as best they could. They analyzed each of Enron’s businesses, in succession. They used statistical tools, designed to find telltale patterns in the company’s financial performance – the Beneish model, the Lev and Thiagarajan indicators, the Edwards-Bell-Ohlsen analysis – and made their way through pages and pages of footnotes. “We really had a lot of questions about what was going on with their business model,” Krueger said. The students’ conclusions were straightforward. Enron was pursuing a far riskier strategy than its competitors. There were clear signs that “Enron may be manipulating its earnings.” The stock was then at $48 – at its peak, two years later, it was almost double that – but the students found it overvalued. The report was posted on the website of the Cornell University business school, where it has been, ever since, for anyone who cares to read twenty-three pages of analysis. The students’ recommendation was on the first page, in boldfaced type: “Sell.”[3]

January 8, 2007

1.

Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-Marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down – which he did nearly every day – it could take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him Smokey. He was missing most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray.

His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called “horse piss.” On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a 250-milliliter bottle of cheap vodka for $1.50. If he was flush, he could go for the 750-milliliter bottle, and if he was broke, he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.

“If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day,” Patrick O’Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. “And he’s gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who’ve been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we’d say, ‘ Murray, you know you love us,’ and he’d say, ‘I know’ – and go back to swearing at us.”

“I’ve been a police officer for fifteen years,” O’Bryan’s partner, Steve Johns, said. “I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally.”

Johns and O’Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. “Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that,” O’Bryan said. “I don’t know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, ‘Congratulations,’ and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so.”

Often, he was too intoxicated for the drunk tank at the jail, and he’d get sent to the emergency room at either Saint Mary’s or Washoe Medical Center. Marla Johns, who was a social worker in the emergency room at Saint Mary’s, saw him several times a week. “The ambulance would bring him in. We would sober him up, so he would be sober enough to go to jail. And we would call the police to pick him up. In fact, that’s how I met my husband.” Marla Johns is married to Steve Johns.

“He was like the one constant in an environment that was ever changing,” she went on. “In he would come. He would grin that half-toothless grin. He called me ‘my angel.’ I would walk in the room, and he would smile and say, ‘Oh, my angel, I’m so happy to see you.’ We would joke back and forth, and I would beg him to quit drinking and he would laugh it off. And when time went by and he didn’t come in, I would get worried and call the coroner’s office. When he was sober, we would find out, oh, he’s working someplace, and my husband and I would go and have dinner where he was working. When my husband and I were dating, and we were going to get married, he said, ‘Can I come to the wedding?’ And I almost felt like he should. My joke was ‘If you are sober you can come, because I can’t afford your bar bill.’ When we started a family, he would lay a hand on my pregnant belly and bless the child. He really was this kind of light.”

In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren’t an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. “One morning, I’m listening to one of the talk shows, and they’re just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is,” O’Bryan said. “And I thought, Wow, I’ve never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies.” O’Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald’s fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren’t the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a “One down” call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.

O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. “We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often,” O’Bryan said. “We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars – and that’s at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand.”

The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you toted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets – as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses – Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

“It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan said.

2.

In the wake of the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that the LAPD’s troubles had a “normal” distribution – that if you graphed them, the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.

But when the LAPD was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the LAPD. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them – and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The NYPD receives about three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the LAPD, it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a power law distribution – where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.

The Christopher Commission’s report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight “use of force reports” (that is, documented internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting. Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five. Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like “striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed,” beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.

The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops, the LAPD would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren’t working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department’s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you’d propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle – like better training or better hiring – when the middle didn’t need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn’t be nearly strong enough.

In the 1980s, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semipermanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, in the early 1990s, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back and was surprised to discover that he couldn’t find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. “It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives,” he said.

Culhane then put together a database – the first of its kind – to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty percent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

The next 10 percent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last 10 percent – the group at the farthest edge of the curve – that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem – the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges – it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early 1990s, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade – which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least $62 million was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. “It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds,” Culhane said. “We’re talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot.” Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, recently tracked the medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless people. In the course of five years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing homes, and the group still accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits – at a minimum cost of $1,000 a visit. The University of California, San Diego, Medical Center followed fifteen chronically homeless inebriates and found that over eighteen months, those fifteen people were treated at the hospital’s emergency room 417 times, and ran up bills that averaged $100,000 each. One person – San Diego’s counterpart to Murray Barr – came to the emergency room eighty-seven times.

“If it’s a medical admission, it’s likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia,” James Dunford, the city of San Diego’s emergency medical director and the author of the observational study, said. “They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they’re out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it’s the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they are going through alcohol withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we’re doing is making them capable of walking down the block.”

The homelessness problem is like the LAPD’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. He is on the road constantly, crisscrossing the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it’s a problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reevaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.

“I was in St. Louis recently,” Mangano said, back in June, when he dropped by New York on his way to Boise, Idaho. “I spoke with people doing services there. They had a very difficult group of people they couldn’t reach no matter what they offered. So I said, ‘Take some of your money and rent some apartments and go out to those people, and literally go out there with the key and say to them, “This is the key to an apartment. If you come with me right now I am going to give it to you, and you are going to have that apartment.” ’ And so they did. And one by one those people were coming in. Our intent is to take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homeless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness.”

Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. “I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

3.

The old YMCA in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east of the central business district. The main building is a handsome six-story stone structure that was erected in 1906, and next door is an annex that was added in the 1950s. On the ground floor are a gym and exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred apartments – brightly painted one bedrooms, efficiencies, and SRO-style rooms with microwaves and refrigerators and central air-conditioning – and for the past several years those apartments have been owned and managed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem. The winters are relatively mild, and the summers aren’t nearly as hot as those of neighboring New Mexico or Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city’s estimates, it has roughly a thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend their time downtown, along the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic Center Park. Many of the merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring away customers. A few blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center handles twenty-eight thousand admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on the streets, either from liquor or – as is increasingly the case – from mouthwash. “Dr. -, Dr. Tich, they call it – is the brand of mouthwash they use,” says Roxane White, the manager of the city’s social services. “You can imagine what that does to your gut.”

Eighteen months ago the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture of federal and local funds, the CCH inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled 106 people. It is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system the most. CCH went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness. “We have one individual in her early sixties, but looking at her you’d think she’s eighty,” Rachel Post, the director of substance treatment at the CCH, said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to protect their identity.) “She’s a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is, she gets up and tries to find whatever she’s going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There’s another person who came in during the first week. He was on methadone maintenance. He’d had psychiatric treatment. He was incarcerated for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that, and, if that’s not enough, he had a hole in his heart.”

The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: Would you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at the YMCA or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball courts used to be, the coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five days a week, between eight-thirty and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review the status of everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are several large whiteboards, with lists of doctor’s appointments and court dates and medication schedules. “We need a staffing ratio of one to ten to make it work,” Post said. “You go out there and you find people and assess how they’re doing in their residence. Sometimes we’re in contact with someone every day. Ideally, we want to be in contact every couple of days. We’ve got about fifteen people we’re really worried about now.”

The cost of services comes to about $10,000 per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over $4,500 a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most $15,000, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. The idea is that once the people in the program get stabilized, they will find jobs, and start to pick up more and more of their own rent, which would bring someone’s annual cost to the program closer to $6,000 dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have already been added, and the city’s homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years.

The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that the very sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. Some of them plainly won’t be able to get there: these are, after all, hard cases. “We’ve got one man, he’s in his twenties,” Post said. “Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver. One time he blew a blood alcohol of.49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place we had, he brought over all his friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window. Then we gave him another apartment, and he did the same thing.”

Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could relapse at some point and perhaps trash another apartment, and they’d have to figure out what to do with him next. Post had just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who run a similar program, and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply encourages them to behave irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the alternative? If this young man was put back on the streets, he would cost the system even more money. The current philosophy of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But someone who blows.49 on a Breathalyzer and has cirrhosis of the liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn’t respond to incentives and sanctions in the usual way. “The most complicated people to work with are those who have been homeless for so long that going back to the streets just isn’t scary to them,” Post said. “The summer comes along and they say, ‘I don’t need to follow your rules.’” Power-law homeless policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the YMCA.

That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand – and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment, we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency.

We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don’t give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn’t help every chronically homeless person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the supportive-housing program; it will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may never get one. There isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit – to observe the principle of universality – isn’t as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don’t solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

4.

A few miles northwest of the old YMCA in downtown Denver, on the Speer Boulevard off-ramp from I-25, there is a big electronic sign by the side of the road, connected to a device that remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a car with properly functioning pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes “Good.” When a car passes that is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes “Poor.” If you stand at the Speer Boulevard exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you’ll find that virtually every car scores “Good.” An Audi A4 – “Good.” A Buick Century – “Good.” A Toyota Corolla – “Good.” A Ford Taurus – “Good.” A Saab 9-5 – “Good,” and on and on, until after twenty minutes or so, some beat-up old Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes “Poor.” The picture of the smog problem you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the picture of the homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staff meetings at the YMCA are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law distribution, and the air-pollution example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems centered on a few hard cases.

Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that’s just.06 percent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason – age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner – a small number of cars have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of 10 percent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, 5 percent of the vehicles on the road produce 55 percent of the automobile pollution.

“Let’s say a car is fifteen years old,” Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. “Obviously, the older a car is, the more likely it is to become broken. It’s the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions – the computer’s not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst died. It’s not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It’s not just old cars. It’s new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year.”

In Stedman’s view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year – take time from work, wait in line, pay $15 or $25 – for a test that more than 90 percent of them don’t need. “Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer,” Stedman says. “Not everybody takes an AIDS test.” On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts – with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars – have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site “hot” – having just come off hard driving on the freeway – which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn’t, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city’s regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality.

He proposes mobile testing instead. In the early 1980s, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman’s devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same $25 million that Denver’s motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between 35 and 40 percent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.

Why don’t we all adopt the Stedman method? There’s no moral impediment here. We’re used to the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn’t be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and – presto – the air gets better. But Stedman doesn’t much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn’t so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It’s a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?

That’s what made the findings of the Christopher Commission so unsatisfying. We put together blue-ribbon panels when we’re faced with problems that seem too large for the normal mechanisms of bureaucratic repair. We want sweeping reforms. But what was the commission’s most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a known history of doing things like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a performance review from his superior stating that he “usually conducts himself in a manner that inspires respect for the law and instills public confidence.” This is what you say about an officer when you haven’t actually read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission’s report was that the LAPD might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to read the files of their officers. The LAPD’s problem was a matter not of policy but of compliance. The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that’s not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know better. It’s that we didn’t want to know better. It was easier the old way.

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort. In Denver, John Hickenlooper, the city’s enormously popular mayor, has worked on the homelessness issue tirelessly during the past couple of years. He spent more time on the subject in his annual State of the City address this past summer than on any other topic. He gave the speech, with deliberate symbolism, in the city’s downtown Civic Center Park, where homeless people gather every day with their shopping carts and garbage bags. He has gone on local talk radio on many occasions to discuss what the city is doing about the issue. He has commissioned studies to show what a drain on the city’s resources the homeless population has become. But, he says, “there are still people who stop me going into the supermarket and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re going to help those homeless people, those bums.’”

5.

Early one morning, a few years ago, Marla Johns got a call from her husband, Steve. He was at work. “He called and woke me up,” Johns remembers. “He was choked up and crying on the phone. And I thought that something had happened with another police officer. I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, what happened?’ He said, ‘ Murray died last night.’” He died of intestinal bleeding. At the police department that morning, some of the officers gave Murray a moment of silence.

“There are not many days that go by that I don’t have a thought of him,” she went on. “Christmas comes – and I used to buy him a Christmas present. Make sure he had warm gloves and a blanket and a coat. There was this mutual respect. There was a time when another intoxicated patient jumped off the gurney and was coming at me, and Murray jumped off his gurney and shook his fist and said, ‘Don’t you touch my angel.’ You know, when he was monitored by the system, he did fabulously. He would be on house arrest and he would get a job and he would save money and go to work every day, and he wouldn’t drink. He would do all the things he was supposed to do. There are some people who can be very successful members of society if someone monitors them. Murray needed someone to be in charge of him.”

But, of course, Reno didn’t have a place where Murray could be given the structure he needed. Someone must have decided that it cost too much.

“I told my husband that I would claim his body if no one else did,” she said. “I would not have him in an unmarked grave.”

February 13, 2006

1.

At the beginning of the first Gulf war, the United States Air Force dispatched two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets to find and destroy the Scud missiles that Iraq was firing at Israel. The rockets were being launched, mostly at night, from the backs of modified flatbed tractor-trailers, moving stealthily around a four-hundred-square-mile “Scud box” in the western desert. The plan was for the fighter jets to patrol the box from sunset to sunrise. When a Scud was launched, it would light up the night sky. An F-15E pilot would fly toward the launch point, follow the roads that crisscrossed the desert, and then locate the target using a state-of-the-art, $4.6 million device called a LANTIM navigation and targeting pod, capable of taking a high-resolution infrared photograph of a four-and-a-half-mile swath below the plane. How hard could it be to pick up a hulking tractor-trailer in the middle of an empty desert?

Almost immediately, reports of Scud kills began to come back from the field. The Desert Storm commanders were elated. “I remember going out to Nellis Air Force Base after the war,” Barry Watts, a former Air Force colonel, says. “They did a big static display, and they had all the Air Force jets that flew in Desert Storm, and they had little placards in front of them, with a box score, explaining what this plane did and that plane did in the war. And, when you added up how many Scud launchers they claimed each got, the total was about a hundred.” Air Force officials were not guessing at the number of Scud launchers hit; as far as they were concerned, they knew. They had a $4 million camera that took a nearly perfect picture, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth. “That photography not only does not, but cannot, lie is a matter of belief, an article of faith,” Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have written. “We tend to trust the camera more than our own eyes.” Thus was victory declared in the Scud hunt – until hostilities ended and the Air Force appointed a team to determine the effectiveness of the air campaigns in Desert Storm. The actual number of definite Scud kills, the team said, was zero.

The problem was that the pilots were operating at night, when depth perception is impaired. LANTIM could see in the dark, but the camera worked only when it was pointed in the right place, and the right place wasn’t obvious. Meanwhile, the pilot had only about five minutes to find his quarry, because after launch the Iraqis would immediately hide in one of the many culverts underneath the highway between Baghdad and Jordan, and the screen the pilot was using to scan all that desert measured just six inches by six inches. “It was like driving down an interstate looking through a soda straw,” Major General Mike DeCuir, who flew numerous Scud-hunt missions throughout the war, recalled. Nor was it clear what a Scud launcher looked like on that screen. “We had an intelligence photo of one on the ground. But you had to imagine what it would look like on a black-and-white screen from twenty thousand feet up and five or more miles away,” DeCuir went on. “With the resolution we had at the time, you could tell something was a big truck and that it had wheels, but at that altitude it was hard to tell much more than that.” The postwar analysis indicated that a number of the targets the pilots had hit were actually decoys, constructed by the Iraqis from old trucks and spare missile parts. Others were tanker trucks transporting oil on the highway to Jordan. A tanker truck, after all, is a tractor-trailer hauling a long, shiny cylindrical object, and, from twenty thousand feet up at four hundred miles an hour on a six-by-six-inch screen, a long, shiny cylindrical object can look a lot like a missile. “It’s a problem we’ve always had,” Watts, who served on the team that did the Gulf war analysis, said. “It’s night out. You think you’ve got something on the sensor. You roll out your weapons. Bombs go off. It’s really hard to tell what you did.”

You can build a high-tech camera capable of taking pictures in the middle of the night, in other words, but the system works only if the camera is pointed in the right place, and even then the pictures are not self-explanatory. They need to be interpreted, and the human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle than the technical task of picture taking. This was the lesson of the Scud hunt: pictures promise to clarify but often confuse. The Zapruder film intensified rather than dispelled the controversy surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The videotape of the beating of Rodney King led to widespread uproar about police brutality; it also served as the basis for a jury’s decision to acquit the officers charged with the assault. Perhaps nowhere have these issues been so apparent, however, as in the arena of mammography. Radiologists developed state-of-the-art X-ray cameras and used them to scan women’s breasts for tumors, reasoning that, if you can take a nearly perfect picture, you can find and destroy tumors before they go on to do serious damage. Yet there remains a great deal of confusion about the benefits of mammography. Is it possible that we place too much faith in pictures?

2.

The head of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City, is a physician named David Dershaw, a youthful man in his fifties, who bears a striking resemblance to the actor Kevin Spacey. One morning not long ago, he sat down in his office at the back of the Sloan-Kettering Building and tried to explain how to read a mammogram.

Dershaw began by putting an X-ray on a light box behind his desk. “Cancer shows up as one of two patterns,” he said. “You look for lumps and bumps, and you look for calcium. And, if you find it, you have to make a determination: is it acceptable, or is it a pattern that might be due to cancer?” He pointed at the X-ray. “This woman has cancer. She has these tiny little calcifications. Can you see them? Can you see how small they are?” He took out a magnifying glass and placed it over a series of white flecks; as a cancer grows, it produces calcium deposits. “That’s the stuff we are looking for,” he said.

Then Dershaw added a series of slides to the light box and began to explain all the varieties that those white flecks came in. Some calcium deposits are oval and lucent. “They’re called eggshell calcifications,” Dershaw said. “And they’re basically benign.” Another kind of calcium runs like a railway track on either side of the breast’s many blood vessels – that’s benign, too. “Then there’s calcium that’s thick and heavy and looks like popcorn,” Dershaw went on. “That’s just dead tissue. That’s benign. There’s another calcification that’s little sacs of calcium floating in liquid. It’s called ‘milk of calcium.’ That’s another kind of calcium that’s always benign.” He put a new set of slides against the light. “Then we have calcium that looks like this – irregular. All of these are of different density and different sizes and different configurations. Those are usually benign, but sometimes they are due to cancer. Remember you saw those railway tracks? This is calcium laid down inside a tube as well, but you can see that the outside of the tube is irregular. That’s cancer.” Dershaw’s explanations were beginning to be confusing. “There are certain calcifications in benign tissues that are always benign,” he said. “There are certain kinds that are always associated with cancer. But those are the ends of the spectrum, and the vast amount of calcium is somewhere in the middle. And making that differentiation, between whether the calcium is acceptable or not, is not clear-cut.”

The same is true of lumps. Some lumps are simply benign clumps of cells. You can tell they are benign because the walls of the mass look round and smooth; in a cancer, cells proliferate so wildly that the walls of the tumor tend to be ragged and to intrude into the surrounding tissue. But sometimes benign lumps resemble tumors, and sometimes tumors look a lot like benign lumps. And sometimes you have lots of masses that, taken individually, would be suspicious but are so pervasive that the reasonable conclusion is that this is just how the woman’s breast looks. “If you have a CAT scan of the chest, the heart always looks like the heart, the aorta always looks like the aorta,” Dershaw said. “So when there’s a lump in the middle of that, it’s clearly abnormal. Looking at a mammogram is conceptually different from looking at images elsewhere in the body. Everything else has anatomy – anatomy that essentially looks the same from one person to the next. But we don’t have that kind of standardized information on the breast. The most difficult decision I think anybody needs to make when we’re confronted with a patient is: Is this person normal? And we have to decide that without a pattern that is reasonably stable from individual to individual, and sometimes even without a pattern that is the same from the left side to the right.”

Dershaw was saying that mammography doesn’t fit our normal expectations of pictures. In the days before the invention of photography, for instance, a horse in motion was represented in drawings and paintings according to the convention of ventre à terre, or “belly to the ground.” Horses were drawn with their front legs extended beyond their heads, and their hind legs stretched straight back, because that was the way, in the blur of movement, a horse seemed to gallop. Then, in the 1870s, came Eadweard Muybridge, with his famous sequential photographs of a galloping horse, and that was the end of ventre à terre. Now we knew how a horse galloped. The photograph promised that we would now be able to capture reality itself.

The situation with mammography is different. The way in which we ordinarily speak about calcium and lumps is clear and unambiguous. But the picture demonstrates how blurry those seemingly distinct categories actually are. Joann Elmore, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center, once asked ten board-certified radiologists to look at 150 mammograms – of which 27 had come from women who developed breast cancer, and 123 from women who were known to be healthy. One radiologist caught 85 percent of the cancers the first time around. Another caught only 37 percent. One looked at the same X-rays and saw suspicious masses in 78 percent of the cases. Another doctor saw “focal asymmetric density” in half of the cancer cases; yet another saw no “focal asymmetric density” at all. There was one particularly perplexing mammogram that three radiologists thought was normal, two thought was abnormal but probably benign, four couldn’t make up their minds about, and one was convinced was cancer. (The patient was fine.) Some of these differences are a matter of skill, and there is good evidence that with more rigorous training and experience radiologists can become better at reading breast X-rays. But so much of what can be seen on an X-ray falls into a gray area that interpreting a mammogram is also, in part, a matter of temperament. Some radiologists see something ambiguous and are comfortable calling it normal. Others see something ambiguous and get suspicious.

Does that mean radiologists ought to be as suspicious as possible? You might think so, but caution simply creates another kind of problem. The radiologist in the Elmore study who caught the most cancers also recommended immediate workups – a biopsy, an ultrasound, or additional X-rays – on 64 percent of the women who didn’t have cancer. In the real world, a radiologist who needlessly subjected such an extraordinary percentage of healthy patients to the time, expense, anxiety, and discomfort of biopsies and further testing would find himself seriously out of step with his profession. Mammography is not a form of medical treatment, where doctors are justified in going to heroic lengths on behalf of their patients. Mammography is a form of medical screening: it is supposed to exclude the healthy, so that more time and attention can be given to the sick. If screening doesn’t screen, it ceases to be useful.

Gilbert Welch, a medical-outcomes expert at Dartmouth Medical School, has pointed out that, given current breast-cancer mortality rates, nine out of every thousand sixty-year-old women will die of breast cancer in the next ten years. If every one of those women had a mammogram every year, that number would fall to six. The radiologist seeing those thousand women, in other words, would read ten thousand X-rays over a decade in order to save three lives – and that’s using the most generous possible estimate of mammography’s effectiveness. The reason a radiologist is required to assume that the overwhelming number of ambiguous things are normal, in other words, is that the overwhelming number of ambiguous things really are normal. Radiologists are, in this sense, a lot like baggage screeners at airports. The chances are that the dark mass in the middle of the suitcase isn’t a bomb, because you’ve seen a thousand dark masses like it in suitcases before, and none of those were bombs – and if you flagged every suitcase with something ambiguous in it, no one would ever make his flight. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that it isn’t a bomb. All you have to go on is what it looks like on the X-ray screen – and the screen seldom gives you quite enough information.

3.

Dershaw picked up a new X-ray and put it on the light box. It belonged to a forty-eight-year-old woman. Mammograms indicate density in the breast: the denser the tissue is, the more the X-rays are absorbed, creating the variations in black and white that make up the picture. Fat hardly absorbs the beam at all, so it shows up as black. Breast tissue, particularly the thick breast tissue of younger women, shows up on an X-ray as shades of light gray or white. This woman’s breasts consisted of fat at the back of the breast and more dense, glandular tissue toward the front, so the X-ray was entirely black, with what looked like a large, white, dense cloud behind the nipple. Clearly visible, in the black, fatty portion of the left breast, was a white spot. “Now, that looks like a cancer, that little smudgy, irregular, infiltrative thing,” Dershaw said. “It’s about five millimeters across.” He looked at the X-ray for a moment. This was mammography at its best: a clear picture of a problem that needed to be fixed. Then he took a pen and pointed to the thick cloud just to the right of the tumor. The cloud and the tumor were exactly the same color. “That cancer only shows up because it’s in the fatty part of the breast,” he said. “If you take that cancer and put it in the dense part of the breast, you’d never see it, because the whiteness of the mass is the same as the whiteness of normal tissue. If the tumor was over there, it could be four times as big and we still wouldn’t see it.”

What’s more, mammography is especially likely to miss the tumors that do the most harm. A team led by the research pathologist Peggy Porter analyzed 429 breast cancers that had been diagnosed over five years at the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. Of those, 279 were picked up by mammography, and the bulk of them were detected very early, at what is called Stage One. (Cancer is classified into four stages, according to how far the tumor has spread from its original position.) Most of the tumors were small, less than two centimeters. Pathologists grade a tumor’s aggression according to such measures as the “mitotic count” – the rate at which the cells are dividing – and the screen-detected tumors were graded “low” in almost 70 percent of the cases. These were the kinds of cancers that could probably be treated successfully. “Most tumors develop very, very slowly, and those tend to lay down calcium deposits – and what mammograms are doing is picking up those calcifications,” Leslie Laufman, a hematologist-oncologist in Ohio, who served on a recent National Institutes of Health breast-cancer advisory panel, said. “Almost by definition, mammograms are picking up slow-growing tumors.”

A hundred and fifty cancers in Porter’s study, however, were missed by mammography. Some of these were tumors the mammogram couldn’t see – that were, for instance, hiding in the dense part of the breast. The majority, though, simply didn’t exist at the time of the mammogram. These cancers were found in women who had had regular mammograms, and who were legitimately told that they showed no sign of cancer on their last visit. In the interval between X-rays, however, either they or their doctor had manually discovered a lump in their breast, and these “interval” cancers were twice as likely to be in Stage Three and three times as likely to have high mitotic counts; 28 percent had spread to the lymph nodes, as opposed to 18 percent of the screen-detected cancers. These tumors were so aggressive that they had gone from undetectable to detectable in the interval between two mammograms.

The problem of interval tumors explains why the overwhelming majority of breast-cancer experts insist that women in the critical fifty-to-sixty-nine age group get regular mammograms. In Porter’s study, the women were X-rayed at intervals as great as every three years, and that created a window large enough for interval cancers to emerge. Interval cancers also explain why many breast-cancer experts believe that mammograms must be supplemented by regular and thorough clinical breast exams. (Thorough is defined as palpation of the area from the collarbone to the bottom of the rib cage, one dime-size area at a time, at three levels of pressure – just below the skin, the midbreast, and up against the chest wall – by a specially trained practitioner for a period not less than five minutes per breast.) In a major study of mammography’s effectiveness – one of a pair of Canadian trials conducted in the 1980s – women who were given regular, thorough breast exams but no mammograms were compared with those who had thorough breast exams and regular mammograms, and no difference was found in the death rates from breast cancer between the two groups. The Canadian studies are controversial, and some breast-cancer experts are convinced that they may have understated the benefits of mammography. But there is no denying the basic lessons of the Canadian trials: that a skilled pair of fingertips can find out an extraordinary amount about the health of a breast, and that we should not automatically value what we see in a picture over what we learn from our other senses.

“The finger has hundreds of sensors per square centimeter,” says Mark Goldstein, a sensory psychophysicist who cofounded MammaCare, a company devoted to training nurses and physicians in the art of the clinical exam. “There is nothing in science or technology that has even come close to the sensitivity of the human finger with respect to the range of stimuli it can pick up. It’s a brilliant instrument. But we simply don’t trust our tactile sense as much as our visual sense.”

4.

On the night of August 17, 1943, two hundred B-17 bombers from the United States Eighth Air Force set out from England for the German city of Schweinfurt. Two months later, 228 B-17s set out to strike Schweinfurt a second time. The raids were two of the heaviest nights of bombing in the war, and the Allied experience at Schweinfurt is an example of a more subtle – but in some cases more serious – problem with the picture paradigm.

The Schweinfurt raids grew out of the United States military’s commitment to bombing accuracy. As Stephen Budiansky writes in his wonderful recent book Air Power, the chief lesson of aerial bombardment in the First World War was that hitting a target from eight or ten thousand feet was a prohibitively difficult task. In the thick of battle, the bombardier had to adjust for the speed of the plane, the speed and direction of the prevailing winds, and the pitching and rolling of the plane, all while keeping the bombsight level with the ground. It was an impossible task, requiring complex trigonometric calculations. For a variety of reasons, including the technical challenges, the British simply abandoned the quest for precision: in both the First World War and the Second, the British military pursued a strategy of morale or area bombing, in which bombs were simply dropped, indiscriminately, on urban areas, with the intention of killing, dispossessing, and dispiriting the German civilian population.

But the American military believed that the problem of bombing accuracy was solvable, and a big part of the solution was something called the Norden bombsight. This breakthrough was the work of a solitary, cantankerous genius named Carl Norden, who operated out of a factory in New York City. Norden built a fifty-pound mechanical computer called the Mark XV, which used gears and wheels and gyroscopes to calculate airspeed, altitude, and crosswinds in order to determine the correct bomb-release point. The Mark XV, Norden’s business partner boasted, could put a bomb in a pickle barrel from twenty thousand feet. The United States spent $1.5 billion developing it, which, as Budiansky points out, was more than half the amount that was spent building the atomic bomb. “At air bases, the Nordens were kept under lock and key in secure vaults, escorted to their planes by armed guards, and shrouded in a canvas cover until after takeoff,” Budiansky recounts. The American military, convinced that its bombers could now hit whatever they could see, developed a strategic approach to bombing, identifying, and selectively destroying targets that were critical to the Nazi war effort. In early 1943, General Henry (Hap) Arnold – the head of the Army Air Forces – assembled a group of prominent civilians to analyze the German economy and recommend critical targets. The Advisory Committee on Bombardment, as it was called, determined that the United States should target Germany’s ball-bearing factories, since ball bearings were critical to the manufacture of airplanes. And the center of the German ball-bearing industry was Schweinfurt. Allied losses from the two raids were staggering. Thirty-six B-17s were shot down in the August attack, 62 bombers were shot down in the October raid, and between the two operations, a further 138 planes were badly damaged. Yet, with the war in the balance, this was considered worth the price. When the damage reports came in, Arnold exulted, “Now we have got Schweinfurt!” He was wrong.

The problem was not, as in the case of the Scud hunt, that the target could not be found, or that what was thought to be the target was actually something else. The B-17s, aided by their Norden Mark XVs, hit the ball-bearing factories hard. The problem was that the picture Air Force officers had of their target didn’t tell them what they really needed to know. The Germans, it emerged, had ample stockpiles of ball bearings. They also had no difficulty increasing their imports from Sweden and Switzerland, and, through a few simple design changes, they were able to greatly reduce their need for ball bearings in aircraft production. What’s more, although the factory buildings were badly damaged by the bombing, the machinery inside wasn’t. Ball-bearing equipment turned out to be surprisingly hardy. “As it was, not a tank, plane, or other piece of weaponry failed to be produced because of lack of ball bearings,” Albert Speer, the Nazi production chief, wrote after the war. Seeing a problem and understanding it, then, are two different things.

In recent years, with the rise of highly accurate long-distance weaponry, the Schweinfurt problem has become even more acute. If you can aim at and hit the kitchen at the back of a house, after all, you don’t have to bomb the whole building. So your bomb can be two hundred pounds rather than a thousand. That means, in turn, that you can fit five times as many bombs on a single plane and hit five times as many targets in a single sortie, which sounds good – except that now you need to get intelligence on five times as many targets. And that intelligence has to be five times more specific, because if the target is in the bedroom and not the kitchen, you’ve missed him.

This is the issue that the US command faced in the most recent Iraq war. Early in the campaign, the military mounted a series of air strikes against specific targets, where Saddam Hussein or other senior Baathist officials were thought to be hiding. There were fifty of these so-called decapitation attempts, each taking advantage of the fact that modern-day GPS-guided bombs can be delivered from a fighter to within thirteen meters of their intended target. The strikes were dazzling in their precision. In one case, a restaurant was leveled. In another, a bomb burrowed down into a basement. But, in the end, every single strike failed. “The issue isn’t accuracy,” Watts, who has written extensively on the limitations of high-tech weaponry, says. “The issue is the quality of targeting information. The amount of information we need has gone up an order of magnitude or two in the last decade.”

5.

Mammography has a Schweinfurt problem as well. Nowhere is that more evident than in the case of the breast lesion known as ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which shows up as a cluster of calcifications inside the ducts that carry milk to the nipple. It’s a tumor that hasn’t spread beyond those ducts, and it is so tiny that without mammography few women with DCIS would ever know they have it. In the past couple of decades, as more and more people have received regular breast X-rays and the resolution of mammography has increased, diagnoses of DCIS have soared. About fifty thousand new cases are now found every year in the United States, and virtually every DCIS lesion detected by mammography is promptly removed. But what has the targeting and destruction of DCIS meant for the battle against breast cancer? You’d expect that if we’ve been catching fifty thousand early-stage cancers every year, we should be seeing a corresponding decrease in the number of late-stage invasive cancers. It’s not clear whether we have. During the past twenty years, the incidence of invasive breast cancer has continued to rise by the same small, steady increment every year.

In 1987, pathologists in Denmark performed a series of autopsies on women in their forties who had not been known to have breast cancer when they died of other causes. The pathologists looked at an average of 275 samples of breast tissue in each case, and found some evidence of cancer – usually DCIS – in nearly 40 percent of the women. Since breast cancer accounts for less than 4 percent of female deaths, clearly the overwhelming majority of these women, had they lived longer, would never have died of breast cancer. “To me, that indicates that these kinds of genetic changes happen really frequently, and that they can happen without having an impact on women’s health,” Karla Kerlikowske, a breast-cancer expert at the University of California at San Francisco, says. “The body has this whole mechanism to repair things, and maybe that’s what happened with these tumors.” Gilbert Welch, the medical-outcomes expert, thinks that we fail to understand the hit-or-miss nature of cancerous growth, and assume it to be a process that, in the absence of intervention, will eventually kill us. “A pathologist from the International Agency for Research on Cancer once told me that the biggest mistake we ever made was attaching the word ‘carcinoma’ to DCIS,” Welch says. “The minute carcinoma got linked to it, it all of a sudden drove doctors to recommend therapy, because what was implied was that this was a lesion that would inexorably progress to invasive cancer. But we know that that’s not always the case.”

In some percentage of cases, however, DCIS does progress to something more serious. Some studies suggest that this happens very infrequently. Others suggest that it happens frequently enough to be of major concern. There is no definitive answer, and it’s all but impossible to tell, simply by looking at a mammogram, whether a given DCIS tumor is among those lesions that will grow out from the duct, or part of the majority that will never amount to anything. That’s why some doctors feel that we have no choice but to treat every DCIS as life-threatening, and in 30 percent of cases that means a mastectomy, and in another 35 percent it means a lumpectomy and radiation. Would taking a better picture solve the problem? Not really, because the problem is that we don’t know for sure what we’re seeing, and as pictures have become better we have put ourselves in a position where we see more and more things that we don’t know how to interpret. When it comes to DCIS, the mammogram delivers information without true understanding. “Almost half a million women have been diagnosed and treated for DCIS since the early nineteen-eighties – a diagnosis virtually unknown before then,” Welch writes in his new book, Should I Be Tested for Cancer?, a brilliant account of the statistical and medical uncertainties surrounding cancer screening. “This increase is the direct result of looking harder – in this case with ‘better’ mammography equipment. But I think you can see why it is a diagnosis that some women might reasonably prefer not to know about.”

6.

The disturbing thing about DCIS, of course, is that our approach to this tumor seems like a textbook example of how the battle against cancer is supposed to work. Use a powerful camera. Take a detailed picture. Spot the tumor as early as possible. Treat it immediately and aggressively. The campaign to promote regular mammograms has used this early-detection argument with great success because it makes intuitive sense. The danger posed by a tumor is represented visually. Large is bad; small is better – less likely to have metastasized. But here, too, tumors defy our visual intuitions.

According to Donald Berry, who is the chairman of the Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, a woman’s risk of death increases only by about 10 percent for every additional centimeter in tumor length. “Suppose there is a tumor size above which the tumor is lethal, and below which it’s not,” Berry says. “The problem is that the threshold varies. When we find a tumor, we don’t know whether it has metastasized already. And we don’t know whether it’s tumor size that drives the metastatic process or whether all you need is a few million cells to start sloughing off to other parts of the body. We do observe that it’s worse to have a bigger tumor. But not amazingly worse. The relationship is not as great as you’d think.”

In a recent genetic analysis of breast-cancer tumors, scientists selected women with breast cancer who had been followed for many years, and divided them into two groups – those whose cancer had gone into remission, and those whose cancer had spread to the rest of their body. Then the scientists went back to the earliest moment that each cancer became apparent and analyzed thousands of genes in order to determine whether it was possible to predict, at that moment, who was going to do well and who wasn’t. Early detection presumes that it isn’t possible to make that prediction: a tumor is removed before it becomes truly dangerous. But scientists discovered that even with tumors in the one-centimeter range – the range in which cancer is first picked up by a mammogram – the fate of the cancer seems already to have been set. “What we found is that there is biology that you can glean from the tumor, at the time you take it out, that is strongly predictive of whether or not it will go on to metastasize,” Stephen Friend, a member of the gene-expression team at Merck, says. “We like to think of a small tumor as an innocent. The reality is that in that innocent lump are a lot of behaviors that spell a potential poor or good prognosis.”

The good news here is that it might eventually be possible to screen breast cancers on a genetic level, using other kinds of tests – even blood tests – to look for the biological traces of those genes. This might also help with the chronic problem of overtreatment in breast cancer. If we can single out that small percentage of women whose tumors will metastasize, we can spare the rest the usual regimen of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Gene-signature research is one of a number of reasons that many scientists are optimistic about the fight against breast cancer. But it is an advance that has nothing to do with taking more pictures, or taking better pictures. It has to do with going beyond the picture.

Under the circumstances, it is not hard to understand why mammography draws so much controversy. The picture promises certainty, and it cannot deliver on that promise. Even after forty years of research, there remains widespread disagreement over how much benefit women in the critical fifty-to-sixty-nine age bracket receive from breast X-rays, and further disagreement about whether there is enough evidence to justify regular mammography in women under fifty and over seventy. Is there any way to resolve the disagreement? Donald Berry says that there probably isn’t – that a clinical trial that could definitively answer the question of mammography’s precise benefits would have to be so large (involving more than five hundred thousand women) and so expensive (costing billions of dollars) as to be impractical. The resulting confusion has turned radiologists who do mammograms into one of the chief targets of malpractice litigation. “The problem is that mammographers – radiology groups – do hundreds of thousands of these mammograms, giving women the illusion that these things work and they are good, and if a lump is found and in most cases if it is found early, they tell women they have the probability of a higher survival rate,” says E. Clay Parker, a Florida plaintiff’s attorney, who recently won a $5.1 million judgment against an Orlando radiologist. “But then, when it comes to defending themselves, they tell you that the reality is that it doesn’t make a difference when you find it. So you scratch your head and say, ‘Well, why do you do mammography, then?’”

The answer is that mammograms do not have to be infallible to save lives. A modest estimate of mammography’s benefit is that it reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer by about 10 percent – which works out, for the average woman in her fifties, to be about three extra days of life, or, to put it another way, a health benefit on a par with wearing a helmet on a ten-hour bicycle trip. That is not a trivial benefit. Multiplied across the millions of adult women in the United States, it amounts to thousands of lives saved every year, and, in combination with a medical regimen that includes radiation, surgery, and new and promising drugs, it has helped brighten the prognosis for women with breast cancer. Mammography isn’t as good as we’d like it to be. But we are still better off than we would be without it.

“There is increasingly an understanding among those of us who do this a lot that our efforts to sell mammography may have been overvigorous,” Dershaw said, “and that although we didn’t intend to, the perception may have been that mammography accomplishes even more than it does.” He was looking, as he spoke, at the mammogram of the woman whose tumor would have been invisible had it been a few centimeters to the right. Did looking at an X-ray like that make him nervous? Dershaw shook his head. “You have to respect the limitations of the technology,” he said. “My job with the mammogram isn’t to find what I can’t find with a mammogram. It’s to find what I can find with a mammogram. If I’m not going to accept that, then I shouldn’t be reading mammograms.”

7.

In February of 2002, just before the start of the Iraq war, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to declare that Iraq was in defiance of international law. He presented transcripts of telephone conversations between senior Iraqi military officials, purportedly discussing attempts to conceal weapons of mass destruction. He told of eyewitness accounts of mobile biological-weapons facilities. And, most persuasive, he presented a series of images – carefully annotated, high-resolution satellite photographs of what he said was the Taji Iraqi chemical-munitions facility.

“Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple,” Powell began. “The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate, to our imagery specialists.” The first photograph was dated November 10, 2002, just three months earlier, and years after the Iraqis were supposed to have rid themselves of all weapons of mass destruction. “Let me give you a closer look,” Powell said as he flipped to a closeup of the first photograph. It showed a rectangular building, with a vehicle parked next to it. “Look at the image on the left. On the left is a closeup of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says ‘Security’ points to a facility that is a signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker.” Then he moved to the vehicle next to the building. It was, he said, another signature item. “It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong… It is moving around those four and it moves as needed to move as people are working in the different bunkers.”

Powell’s analysis assumed, of course, that you could tell from the picture what kind of truck it was. But pictures of trucks, taken from above, are not always as clear as we would like; sometimes trucks hauling oil tanks look just like trucks hauling Scud launchers, and, while a picture is a good start, if you really want to know what you’re looking at, you probably need more than a picture. I looked at the photographs with Patrick Eddington, who for many years was an imagery analyst with the CIA. Eddington examined them closely. “They’re trying to say that those are decontamination vehicles,” he told me. He had a photo up on his laptop, and he peered closer to get a better look. “But the resolution is sufficient for me to say that I don’t think it is – and I don’t see any other decontamination vehicles down there that I would recognize.” The standard decontamination vehicle was a Soviet-made box-body van, Eddington said. This truck was too long. For a second opinion, Eddington recommended Ray McGovern, a twenty-seven-year CIA analyst, who had been one of George H. W. Bush’s personal intelligence briefers when he was vice president. “If you’re an expert, you can tell one hell of a lot from pictures like this,” McGovern said. He’d heard another interpretation. “I think,” he said, “that it’s a fire truck.”

December 13, 2004

1.

One day in the spring of 2004, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called Frozen, written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. “She said, ‘Somehow it reminded me of you. You really ought to see it,’” Lewis recalled. Lewis asked Betty what the play was about, and Betty said that one of the characters was a psychiatrist who studied serial killers. “And I told her, ‘I need to see that as much as I need to go to the moon.’”

Lewis has studied serial killers for the past twenty-five years. With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled Guilty by Reason of Insanity. She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see Frozen it struck her as a busman’s holiday.

But the calls kept coming. Frozen was winning raves on Broadway, and it had been nominated for a Tony. Whenever someone who knew Dorothy Lewis saw it, they would tell her that she really ought to see it, too. In June, she got a call from a woman at the theater where Frozen was playing. “She said she’d heard that I work in this field, and that I see murderers, and she was wondering if I would do a talk-back after the show,” Lewis said. “I had done that once before, and it was a delight, so I said sure. And I said, ‘Would you please send me the script, because I want to read the play.’”

The script came, and Lewis sat down to read it. Early in the play, something caught her eye, a phrase: “it was one of those days.” One of the murderers Lewis had written about in her book had used that same expression. But she thought it was just a coincidence. “Then, there’s a scene of a woman on an airplane, typing away to her friend. Her name is Agnetha Gottmundsdottir. I read that she’s writing to her colleague, a neurologist called David Nabkus. And with that I realized that more was going on, and I realized as well why all these people had been telling me to see the play.”

Lewis began underlining line after line. She had worked at New York University School of Medicine. The psychiatrist in Frozen worked at New York School of Medicine. Lewis and Pincus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Gottmundsdottir and Nabkus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Once, while Lewis was examining the serial killer Joseph Franklin, he sniffed her, in a grotesque, sexual way. Gottmundsdottir is sniffed by the play’s serial killer, Ralph. Once, while Lewis was examining Ted Bundy, she kissed him on the cheek. Gottmundsdottir, in some productions of Frozen, kisses Ralph. “The whole thing was right there,” Lewis went on. “I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realized that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen – I don’t believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence.”

Lewis never did the talk-back. She hired a lawyer. And she came down from New Haven to see Frozen. “In my book,” she said, “I talk about where I rush out of the house with my black carry-on, and I have two black pocketbooks, and the play opens with her” – Agnetha – “with one big black bag and a carry-on, rushing out to do a lecture.” Lewis had written about biting her sister on the stomach as a child. Onstage, Agnetha fantasized out loud about attacking a stewardess on an airplane and “biting out her throat.” After the play was over, the cast came onstage and took questions from the audience. “Somebody in the audience said, ‘Where did Bryony Lavery get the idea for the psychiatrist?’” Lewis recounted. “And one of the cast members, the male lead, said, ‘Oh, she said that she read it in an English medical magazine.’” Lewis is a tiny woman, with enormous, childlike eyes, and they were wide open now with the memory. “I wouldn’t have cared if she did a play about a shrink who’s interested in the frontal lobe and the limbic system. That’s out there to do. I see things week after week on television, on Law & Order or C.S.I., and I see that they are using material that Jonathan and I brought to light. And it’s wonderful. That would have been acceptable. But she did more than that. She took things about my own life, and that is the part that made me feel violated.”

At the request of her lawyer, Lewis sat down and made up a chart detailing what she felt were the questionable parts of Lavery’s play. The chart was fifteen pages long. The first part was devoted to thematic similarities between Frozen and Lewis’s book Guilty by Reason of Insanity. The other, more damning section listed twelve instances of almost verbatim similarities – totaling perhaps 675 words – between passages from Frozen and passages from a 1997 magazine profile of Lewis. The profile was called “Damaged.” It appeared in the February 24, 1997, issue of The New Yorker. It was written by me.

2.

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections. Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.

I’d worked on “Damaged” through the fall of 1996. I would visit Dorothy Lewis in her office at Bellevue Hospital and watch the videotapes of her interviews with serial killers. At one point, I met up with her in Missouri. Lewis was testifying at the trial of Joseph Franklin, who claims responsibility for shooting, among others, the civil-rights leader Vernon Jordan and the pornographer Larry Flynt. In the trial, a videotape was shown of an interview that Franklin once gave to a television station. He was asked whether he felt any remorse. I wrote:

That exchange, almost to the word, was reproduced in Frozen.

Lewis, the article continued, didn’t feel that Franklin was fully responsible for his actions. She viewed him as a victim of neurological dysfunction and childhood physical abuse. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness,” I wrote, “is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That line was in Frozen, too – not once but twice. I faxed Bryony Lavery a letter:

Almost as soon as I’d sent the letter, though, I began to have second thoughts. The truth was that, although I said I’d been robbed, I didn’t feel that way. Nor did I feel particularly angry. One of the first things I had said to a friend after hearing about the echoes of my article in Frozen was that this was the only way I was ever going to get to Broadway – and I was only half joking. On some level, I considered Lavery’s borrowing to be a compliment. A savvier writer would have changed all those references to Lewis, and rewritten the quotes from me, so that their origin was no longer recognizable. But how would I have been better off if Lavery had disguised the source of her inspiration?

Dorothy Lewis, for her part, was understandably upset. She was considering a lawsuit. And, to increase her odds of success, she asked me to assign her the copyright to my article. I agreed, but then I changed my mind. Lewis had told me that she “wanted her life back.” Yet in order to get her life back, it appeared, she first had to acquire it from me. That seemed a little strange.

Then I got a copy of the script for Frozen. I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn’t supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause. In late September, the story broke. The Times, the Observer in England, and the Associated Press all ran stories about Lavery’s alleged plagiarism, and the articles were picked up by newspapers around the world. Bryony Lavery had seen one of my articles, responded to what she read, and used it as she constructed a work of art. And now her reputation was in tatters. Something about that didn’t seem right.

3.

In 1992, the Beastie Boys released a song called “Pass the Mic,” which begins with a six-second sample taken from the 1976 composition “Choir” by the jazz flutist James Newton. The sample was an exercise in what is called multiphonics, where the flutist “overblows” into the instrument while simultaneously singing in a falsetto. In the case of “Choir,” Newton played a C on the flute, then sang C, D-flat, C – and the distortion of the overblown C combined with his vocalizing created a surprisingly complex and haunting sound. In “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys repeated the Newton sample more than forty times. The effect was riveting.

In the world of music, copyrighted works fall into two categories – the recorded performance and the composition underlying that performance. If you write a rap song, and you want to sample the chorus from Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” you have to first get permission from the record label to use the “Piano Man” recording, and then get permission from Billy Joel (or whoever owns his music) to use the underlying composition. In the case of “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys got the first kind of permission – the rights to use the recording of “Choir” – but not the second. Newton sued, and he lost – and the reason he lost serves as a useful introduction to how to think about intellectual property.

At issue in the case wasn’t the distinctiveness of Newton’s performance. The Beastie Boys, everyone agreed, had properly licensed Newton’s performance when they paid the copyright recording fee. And there was no question about whether they had copied the underlying music to the sample. At issue was simply whether the Beastie Boys were required to ask for that secondary permission: was the composition underneath those six seconds so distinctive and original that Newton could be said to own it? The court said that it wasn’t.

The chief expert witness for the Beastie Boys in the “Choir” case was Lawrence Ferrara, who is a professor of music at New York University, and when I asked him to explain the court’s ruling, he walked over to the piano in the corner of his office and played those three notes: C, D-flat, C. “That’s it!” he shouted. “There ain’t nothing else! That’s what was used. You know what this is? It’s no more than a mordent, a turn. It’s been done thousands upon thousands of times. No one can say they own that.”

Ferrara then played the most famous four-note sequence in classical music, the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth: G, G, G, E-flat. This was unmistakably Beethoven. But was it original? “That’s a harder case,” Ferrara said. “Actually, though, other composers wrote that. Beethoven himself wrote that in a piano sonata, and you can find figures like that in composers who predate Beethoven. It’s one thing if you’re talking about da-da-da dummm, da-da-da dummm – those notes, with those durations. But just the four pitches, G, G, G, E-flat? Nobody owns those.”

Ferrara once served as an expert witness for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was being sued by Ray Repp, a composer of Catholic folk music. Repp said that the opening few bars of Lloyd Webber’s 1984 “Phantom Song,” from The Phantom of the Opera, bore an overwhelming resemblance to his composition “Till You,” written six years earlier, in 1978. As Ferrara told the story, he sat down at the piano again and played the beginning of both songs, one after the other; sure enough, they sounded strikingly similar. “Here’s Lloyd Webber,” he said, calling out each note as he played it. “Here’s Repp. Same sequence. The only difference is that Andrew writes a perfect fourth and Repp writes a sixth.”

But Ferrara wasn’t quite finished. “I said, let me have everything Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote prior to 1978 – Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph, Evita.” He combed through every score, and in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat he found what he was looking for. “It’s the song ‘Benjamin Calypso.’” Ferrara started playing it. It was immediately familiar. “It’s the first phrase of ‘Phantom Song.’ It’s even using the same notes. But wait – it gets better. Here’s ‘Close Every Door,’ from a 1969 concert performance of Joseph.” Ferrara is a dapper, animated man, with a thin, well-manicured mustache, and thinking about the Lloyd Webber case was almost enough to make him jump up and down. He began to play again. It was the second phrase of “Phantom.” “The first half of ‘Phantom’ is in ‘Benjamin Calypso.’ The second half is in ‘Close Every Door.’ They are identical. On the button. In the case of the first theme, in fact, ‘Benjamin Calypso’ is closer to the first half of the theme at issue than the plaintiff’s song. Lloyd Webber writes something in 1984, and he borrows from himself.”

In the “Choir” case, the Beastie Boys’ copying didn’t amount to theft because it was too trivial. In the “Phantom” case, what Lloyd Webber was alleged to have copied didn’t amount to theft because the material in question wasn’t original to his accuser. Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn’t a straightforward application of the ethical principle “Thou shalt not steal.” At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction. Or suppose that you invented a cure for breast cancer in your basement lab. Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention. You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure – after a decent interval – because it is also in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property is, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited” – note that specification, limited – “Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

4.

So is it true that words belong to the person who wrote them, just as other kinds of property belong to their owners? Actually, no. As the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in his book Free Culture:

Lessig argues that, when it comes to drawing this line between private interests and public interests in intellectual property, the courts and Congress have, in recent years, swung much too far in the direction of private interests. He writes, for instance, about the fight by some developing countries to get access to inexpensive versions of Western drugs through what is called parallel importation – buying drugs from another developing country that has been licensed to produce patented medicines. The move would save countless lives. But it has been opposed by the United States not on the ground that it would cut into the profits of Western pharmaceutical companies (they don’t sell that many patented drugs in developing countries anyway) but on the ground that it violates the sanctity of intellectual property. “We as a culture have lost this sense of balance,” Lessig writes. “A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.”

Even what Lessig decries as intellectual-property extremism, however, acknowledges that intellectual property has its limits. The United States didn’t say that developing countries could never get access to cheap versions of American drugs. It said only that they would have to wait until the patents on those drugs expired. The arguments that Lessig has with the hard-core proponents of intellectual property are almost all arguments about where and when the line should be drawn between the right to copy and the right to protection from copying, not whether a line should be drawn.

But plagiarism is different, and that’s what’s so strange about it. The ethical rules that govern when it’s acceptable for one writer to copy another are even more extreme than the most extreme position of the intellectual-property crowd: when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable. Not long ago, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was accused of lifting material from the historian Henry Abraham for his 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court. What did the charge amount to? In an exposé that appeared in the conservative publication The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum produced a number of examples of close paraphrasing, but his smoking gun was this one borrowed sentence: “Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a ‘weak member’ of the Court to whom he could not assign cases.” That’s it. Nineteen words.

Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine ’70s pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain” – Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter – “was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” – here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different – it was urgent and brilliant and new.”

He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook – the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence – cribbing, tweaking, transforming – were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn’t been free to mine the blues for inspiration, we wouldn’t have got “Whole Lotta Love,” and if Kurt Cobain couldn’t listen to “More Than a Feeling” and pick out and transform the part he really liked, we wouldn’t have “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – and, in the evolution of rock, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a real step forward from “More Than a Feeling.” A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery’s borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.

5.

Bryony Lavery came to see me in early October of that year. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and we met at my apartment. She is in her fifties, with short, tousled blond hair and pale blue eyes, and was wearing jeans and a loose green shirt and clogs. There was something rugged and raw about her. In the Times the previous day, the theater critic Ben Brantley had not been kind to her new play, Last Easter. This was supposed to be her moment of triumph. Frozen had been nominated for a Tony. Last Easter had opened Off Broadway. And now? She sat down heavily at my kitchen table. “I’ve had the absolute gamut of emotions,” she said, playing nervously with her hands as she spoke, as if she needed a cigarette. “I think when one’s working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dollop of each. I was terribly confident that I could write well after Frozen, and then this opened a chasm of doubt.” She looked up at me. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said.

Lavery began to explain: “What happens when I write is that I find that I’m somehow zoning in on a number of things. I find that I’ve cut things out of newspapers because the story or something in them is interesting to me, and seems to me to have a place onstage. Then it starts coagulating. It’s like the soup starts thickening. And then a story, which is also a structure, starts emerging. I’d been reading thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs, about fiendishly clever serial killers. I’d also seen a documentary of the victims of the Yorkshire killers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who were called the Moors Murderers. They spirited away several children. It seemed to me that killing somehow wasn’t fiendishly clever. It was the opposite of clever. It was as banal and stupid and destructive as it could be. There are these interviews with the survivors, and what struck me was that they appeared to be frozen in time. And one of them said, ‘If that man was out now, I’m a forgiving man but I couldn’t forgive him. I’d kill him.’ That’s in Frozen. I was thinking about that. Then my mother went into hospital for a very simple operation, and the surgeon punctured her womb, and therefore her intestine, and she got peritonitis and died.”

When Lavery started talking about her mother, she stopped, and had to collect herself. “She was seventy-four, and what occurred to me is that I utterly forgave him. I thought it was an honest mistake. I’m very sorry it happened to my mother, but it’s an honest mistake.” Lavery’s feelings confused her, though, because she could think of people in her own life whom she had held grudges against for years, for the most trivial of reasons. “In a lot of ways, Frozen was an attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness,” she said.

Lavery settled, in the end, on a play with three characters. The first is a serial killer named Ralph who kidnaps and murders a young girl. The second is the murdered girl’s mother, Nancy. The third is a psychiatrist from New York, Agnetha, who goes to England to examine Ralph. In the course of the play, the three lives slowly intersect – and the characters gradually change and become “unfrozen” as they come to terms with the idea of forgiveness. For the character of Ralph, Lavery says that she drew on a book about a serial killer titled The Murder of Childhood, by Ray Wyre and Tim Tate. For the character of Nancy, she drew on an article written in the Guardian by a woman named Marian Partington, whose sister had been murdered by the serial killers Frederick and Rosemary West. And, for the character of Agnetha, Lavery drew on a reprint of my article that she had read in a British publication. “I wanted a scientist who would understand,” Lavery said – a scientist who could explain how it was possible to forgive a man who had killed your daughter, who could explain that a serial killing was not a crime of evil but a crime of illness. “I wanted it to be accurate,” she added.

So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was OK to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”

She was aware of how hopelessly inadequate that sounded, and when she went on to say that my article had been in a big folder of source material that she had used in the writing of the play, and that the folder had got lost during the play’s initial run, in Birmingham, she was aware of how inadequate that sounded, too.

But then Lavery began to talk about Marian Partington, her other important inspiration, and her story became more complicated. While she was writing Frozen, Lavery said, she wrote to Partington to inform her of how much she was relying on Partington’s experiences. And when Frozen opened in London, she and Partington met and talked. In reading through articles on Lavery in the British press, I found this, from the Guardian two years ago, long before the accusations of plagiarism surfaced:

Lavery wasn’t indifferent to other people’s intellectual property, then; she was just indifferent to my intellectual property. That’s because, in her eyes, what she took from me was different. It was, as she put it, “news.” She copied my description of Dorothy Lewis’s collaborator, Jonathan Pincus, conducting a neurological examination. She copied the description of the disruptive neurological effects of prolonged periods of high stress. She copied my transcription of the television interview with Franklin. She reproduced a quote that I had taken from a study of abused children, and she copied a quotation from Lewis on the nature of evil. She didn’t copy my musings, or conclusions, or structure. She lifted sentences like “It is the function of the cortex – and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead, known as the frontal lobes – to modify the impulses that surge up from within the brain, to provide judgment, to organize behavior and decision-making, to learn and adhere to rules of everyday life.” It is difficult to have pride of authorship in a sentence like that. My guess is that it’s a reworked version of something I read in a textbook. Lavery knew that failing to credit Partington would have been wrong. Borrowing the personal story of a woman whose sister was murdered by a serial killer matters because that story has real emotional value to its owner. As Lavery put it, it touches on someone’s shattered life. Are boilerplate descriptions of physiological functions in the same league?

It also matters how Lavery chose to use my words. Borrowing crosses the line when it is used for a derivative work. It’s one thing if you’re writing a history of the Kennedys, like Doris Kearns Goodwin, and borrow, without attribution, from another history of the Kennedys. But Lavery wasn’t writing another profile of Dorothy Lewis. She was writing a play about something entirely new – about what would happen if a mother met the man who killed her daughter. And she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life as a building block in making that confrontation plausible. Isn’t that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.

And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another – think how many serial- killer novels have been cloned from The Silence of the Lambs. Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’ words – even the most banal of phrases – it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

Dorothy Lewis says that one of the things that hurt her most about Frozen was that Agnetha turns out to have had an affair with her collaborator, David Nabkus. Lewis feared that people would think she had had an affair with her collaborator, Jonathan Pincus. “That’s slander,” Lewis told me. “I’m recognizable in that. Enough people have called me and said, ‘Dorothy, it’s about you,’ and if everything up to that point is true, then the affair becomes true in the mind. So that is another reason that I feel violated. If you are going to take the life of somebody, and make them absolutely identifiable, you don’t create an affair, and you certainly don’t have that as a climax of the play.”

It is easy to understand how shocking it must have been for Lewis to sit in the audience and see her “character” admit to that indiscretion. But the truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn from Lewis’s life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of circumstances and actions. In real life, Lewis kissed Ted Bundy on the cheek, and in some versions of Frozen, Agnetha kisses Ralph. But Lewis kissed Bundy only because he kissed her first, and there’s a big difference between responding to a kiss from a killer and initiating one. When we first see Agnetha, she’s rushing out of the house and thinking murderous thoughts on the airplane. Dorothy Lewis also charges out of her house and thinks murderous thoughts. But the dramatic function of that scene is to make us think, in that moment, that Agnetha is crazy. And the one inescapable fact about Lewis is that she is not crazy: she has helped get people to rethink their notions of criminality because of her unshakable command of herself and her work. Lewis is upset not just about how Lavery copied her life story, in other words, but about how Lavery changed her life story. She’s not merely upset about plagiarism. She’s upset about art – about the use of old words in the service of a new idea – and her feelings are perfectly understandable, because the alterations of art can be every bit as unsettling and hurtful as the thievery of plagiarism. It’s just that art is not a breach of ethics.

When I read the original reviews of Frozen, I noticed that time and again critics would use, without attribution, some version of the sentence “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That’s my phrase, of course. I wrote it. Lavery borrowed it from me, and now the critics were borrowing it from her. The plagiarist was being plagiarized. In this case, there is no “art” defense: nothing new was being done with that line. And this was not “news.” Yet do I really own “sins and symptoms”? There is a quote by Gandhi, it turns out, using the same two words, and I’m sure that if I were to plow through the body of English literature I would find the path littered with crimes of evil and crimes of illness. The central fact about the “Phantom” case is that Ray Repp, if he was borrowing from Andrew Lloyd Webber, certainly didn’t realize it, and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t realize that he was borrowing from himself. Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives – the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line – and let it go.

“It’s been absolutely bloody, really, because it attacks my own notion of my character,” Lavery said, sitting at my kitchen table. A bouquet of flowers she had brought were on the counter behind her. “It feels absolutely terrible. I’ve had to go through the pain for being careless. I’d like to repair what happened, and I don’t know how to do that. I just didn’t think I was doing the wrong thing… and then the article comes out in the New York Times and every continent in the world.” There was a long silence. She was heartbroken. But, more than that, she was confused, because she didn’t understand how 675 rather ordinary words could bring the walls tumbling down. “It’s been horrible and bloody.” She began to cry. “I’m still composting what happened. It will be for a purpose… whatever that purpose is.”

November 22, 2004

1.

In the fall of 1973, the Syrian army began to gather a large number of tanks, artillery batteries, and infantry along its border with Israel. Simultaneously, to the south, the Egyptian army canceled all leaves, called up thousands of reservists, and launched a massive military exercise, building roads and preparing anti-aircraft and artillery positions along the Suez Canal. On October 4, an Israeli aerial reconnaissance mission showed that the Egyptians had moved artillery into offensive positions. That evening, Aman, the Israeli military intelligence agency, learned that portions of the Soviet fleet near Port Said and Alexandria had set sail, and that the Soviet government had begun airlifting the families of Soviet advisers out of Cairo and Damascus. Then, at four o’clock in the morning on October 6, Israel’s director of military intelligence received an urgent telephone call from one of the country’s most trusted intelligence sources. Egypt and Syria, the source said, would attack later that day. Top Israeli officials immediately called a meeting. Was war imminent? The head of Aman, Major General Eli Zeira, looked over the evidence and said he didn’t think so. He was wrong. That afternoon, Syria attacked from the east, overwhelming the thin Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights, and Egypt attacked from the south, bombing Israeli positions and sending eight thousand infantry streaming across the Suez. Despite all the warnings of the previous weeks, Israeli officials were caught by surprise. Why couldn’t they connect the dots?

If you start on the afternoon of October 6 and work backward, the trail of clues pointing to an attack seems obvious; you’d have to conclude that something was badly wrong with the Israeli intelligence service. On the other hand, if you start several years before the Yom Kippur War and work forward, re-creating what people in Israeli intelligence knew in the same order that they knew it, a very different picture emerges. In the fall of 1973, Egypt and Syria certainly looked as if they were preparing to go to war. But, in the Middle East of the time, countries always looked as if they were going to war. In the fall of 1971, for instance, both Egypt’s president and its minister of war stated publicly that the hour of battle was approaching. The Egyptian army was mobilized. Tanks and bridging equipment were sent to the canal. Offensive positions were readied. And nothing happened. In December of 1972, the Egyptians mobilized again. The army furiously built fortifications along the canal. A reliable source told Israeli intelligence that an attack was imminent. Nothing happened. In the spring of 1973, the president of Egypt told Newsweek that everything in his country “is now being mobilized in earnest for the resumption of battle.” Egyptian forces were moved closer to the canal. Extensive fortifications were built along the Suez. Blood donors were rounded up. Civil-defense personnel were mobilized. Blackouts were imposed throughout Egypt. A trusted source told Israeli intelligence that an attack was imminent. It didn’t come. Between January and October of 1973, the Egyptian army mobilized nineteen times without going to war. The Israeli government couldn’t mobilize its army every time its neighbors threatened war. Israel is a small country with a citizen army. Mobilization was disruptive and expensive, and the Israeli government was acutely aware that if its army was mobilized and Egypt and Syria weren’t serious about war, the very act of mobilization might cause them to become serious about war.

Nor did the other signs seem remarkable. The fact that the Soviet families had been sent home could have signified nothing more than a falling-out between the Arab states and Moscow. Yes, a trusted source called at four in the morning, with definite word of a late-afternoon attack, but his last two attack warnings had been wrong. What’s more, the source said that the attack would come at sunset, and an attack so late in the day wouldn’t leave enough time for opening air strikes. Israeli intelligence didn’t see the pattern of Arab intentions, in other words, because, until Egypt and Syria actually attacked, on the afternoon of October 6, 1973, their intentions didn’t form a pattern. They formed a Rorschach blot. What is clear in hindsight is rarely clear before the fact. It’s an obvious point, but one that nonetheless bears repeating, particularly when we’re in the midst of assigning blame for the surprise attack of September 11.

2.

Of the many postmortems conducted after September 11, the one that has received the most attention is The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell. The authors begin their tale with El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian who was arrested in November of 1990 for shooting Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Nosair’s apartment in New Jersey was searched, and investigators found sixteen boxes of files, including training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School; copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; bomb-making manuals; and maps, annotated in Arabic, of landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and the World Trade Center. According to The Cell, Nosair was connected to gunrunners and to Islamic radicals in Brooklyn, who were in turn behind the World Trade Center bombing two and a half years later, which was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who then showed up in Manila in 1994, apparently plotting to kill the pope, crash a plane into the Pentagon or the CIA, and bomb as many as twelve transcontinental airliners simultaneously. And who was Yousef associating with in the Philippines? Mohammed Khalifa, Wali Khan Amin-Shah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whom had fought alongside, pledged a loyalty oath to, or worked for a shadowy Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.

Miller was a network-television correspondent throughout much of the past decade, and the best parts of The Cell recount his own experiences in covering the terrorist story. He is an extraordinary reporter. At the time of the first World Trade Center attack, in February of 1993, he clapped a flashing light on the dashboard of his car and followed the wave of emergency vehicles downtown. (At the bombing site, he was continuously trailed by a knot of reporters – I was one of them – who had concluded that the best way to learn what was going on was to try to overhear his conversations.) Miller became friends with the FBI agents who headed the New York counterterrorist office – Neil Herman and John O’Neill, in particular – and he became as obsessed with Al Qaeda as they were. He was in Yemen, with the FBI, after Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole. In 1998, at the Marriott in Islamabad, he and his cameraman met someone known to them only as Akhtar, who spirited them across the border into the hills of Afghanistan to interview Osama bin Laden. In The Cell, the period from 1990 through September 11 becomes a seamless, devastating narrative: the evolution of Al Qaeda. “How did this happen to us?” the book asks in its opening pages. The answer, the authors argue, can be found by following the “thread” connecting Kahane’s murder to September 11. In the events of the past decade, they declare, there is a clear “recurring pattern.”

The same argument is made by Senator Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in his investigative report on September 11, released this past December. The report is a lucid and powerful document, in which Shelby painstakingly points out all the missed or misinterpreted signals pointing to a major terrorist attack. The CIA knew that two suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had entered the country, but the CIA didn’t tell the FBI or the NSC. An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to headquarters that began with the sentence “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama Bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges.” But the FBI never acted on the information, and failed to connect it with reports that terrorists were interested in using airplanes as weapons. The FBI took into custody the suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, on account of his suspicious behavior at flight school, but was unable to integrate his case into a larger picture of terrorist behavior. “The most fundamental problem… is our Intelligence Community’s inability to ‘connect the dots’ available to it before September 11, 2001, about terrorists’ interest in attacking symbolic American targets,” the Shelby report states. The phrase “connect the dots” appears so often in the report that it becomes a kind of mantra. There was a pattern, as plain as day in retrospect, yet the vaunted American intelligence community simply could not see it.

None of these postmortems, however, answer the question raised by the Yom Kippur War: was this pattern obvious before the attack? This question – whether we revise our judgment of events after the fact – is something that psychologists have paid a great deal of attention to. For example, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff asked a group of people to estimate the probability of a series of possible outcomes of the trip. What were the chances that the trip would lead to permanent diplomatic relations between China and the United States? That Nixon would meet with the leader of China, Mao Tse-tung, at least once? That Nixon would call the trip a success? As it turned out, the trip was a diplomatic triumph, and Fischhoff then went back to the same people and asked them to recall what their estimates of the different outcomes of the visit had been. He found that the subjects now, overwhelmingly, “remembered” being more optimistic than they had actually been. If you originally thought that it was unlikely that Nixon would meet with Mao, afterward, when the press was full of accounts of Nixon’s meeting with Mao, you’d “remember” that you had thought the chances of a meeting were pretty good. Fischhoff calls this phenomenon “creeping determinism” – the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable – and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, “The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.”

To read the Shelby report, or the seamless narrative from Nosair to bin Laden in The Cell, is to be convinced that if the CIA and the FBI had simply been able to connect the dots, what happened on September 11 should not have been a surprise at all. Is this a fair criticism or is it just a case of creeping determinism?

3.

On August 7, 1998, two Al Qaeda terrorists detonated a cargo truck filled with explosives outside the US embassy in Nairobi, killing 213 people and injuring more than four thousand. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell see the Kenyan embassy bombing as a textbook example of intelligence failure. The CIA, they tell us, had identified an Al Qaeda cell in Kenya well before the attack, and its members were under surveillance. They had an eight-page letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative, speaking of the imminent arrival of “engineers” – the code word for bomb makers – in Nairobi. The US ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, had begged Washington for more security. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and legislator says that the Kenyan intelligence service warned US intelligence about the plot several months before August 7, and in November of 1997 a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, who worked for one of Osama bin Laden’s companies, walked into the US embassy in Nairobi and told American intelligence of a plot to blow up the building. What did our officials do? They forced the leader of the Kenyan cell – a US citizen – to return home, and then abruptly halted their surveillance of the group. They ignored the eight-page letter. They allegedly showed the Kenyan intelligence service’s warning to the Mossad, which dismissed it, and after questioning Ahmed, they decided that he wasn’t credible. After the bombing, The Cell tells us, a senior State Department official phoned Bushnell and asked, “How could this have happened?”

“For the first time since the blast,” Miller, Stone, and Mitchell write, “Bushnell’s horror turned to anger. There was too much history. ‘I wrote you a letter,’ she said.”

This is all very damning, but doesn’t it fall into the creeping-determinism trap? It is not at all clear that it passes the creeping-determinism test. It’s an edited version of the past. What we don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the time but led nowhere. The central challenge of intelligence gathering has always been the problem of “noise”: the fact that useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information. Shelby’s report mentions that the FBI’s counterterrorism division has sixty-eight thousand outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995. And, of those, probably no more than a few hundred are useful. Analysts, in short, must be selective, and the decisions made in Kenya, by that standard, do not seem unreasonable. Surveillance on the cell was shut down, but, then, its leader had left the country. Bushnell warned Washington – but, as The Cell admits, there were bomb warnings in Africa all the time. Officials at the Mossad thought the Kenyan intelligence was dubious, and the Mossad ought to know. Ahmed may have worked for bin Laden but he failed a polygraph test, and it was also learned that he had previously given similar – groundless – warnings to other embassies in Africa. When a man comes into your office, fails a lie-detector test, and is found to have shopped the same unsubstantiated story all over town, can you be blamed for turning him out?

Miller, Stone, and Mitchell make the same mistake when they quote from a transcript of a conversation that was recorded by Italian intelligence in August of 2001 between two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdel Kader Es Sayed and a man known as al Hilal. This, they say, is yet another piece of intelligence that “seemed to forecast the September 11 attacks.”

“I’ve been studying airplanes,” al Hilal tells Es Sayed. “If God wills, I hope to be able to bring you a window or a piece of a plane the next time I see you.”

“What, is there a jihad planned?” Es Sayed asks.

“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words: ‘Up above,’” al Hilal replies. Es Sayed thinks that al Hilal is referring to an operation in his native Yemen, but al Hilal corrects him: “But the surprise attack will come from the other country, one of those attacks you will never forget.”

A moment later al Hilal says about the plan, “It is something terrifying that goes from south to north, east to west. The person who devised this plan is a madman, but a genius. He will leave them frozen [in shock].”

This is a tantalizing exchange. It would now seem that it refers to September 11. But in what sense was it a “forecast”? It gave neither time nor place nor method nor target. It suggested only that there were terrorists out there who liked to talk about doing something dramatic with an airplane – which did not, it must be remembered, reliably distinguish them from any other terrorists of the past thirty years.

In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information that’s rich in detail tends to be short on intentions. In April of 1941, for instance, the Allies learned that Germany had moved a huge army up to the Russian front. The intelligence was beyond dispute: the troops could be seen and counted. But what did it mean? Churchill concluded that Hitler wanted to attack Russia. Stalin concluded that Hitler was serious about attacking, but only if the Soviet Union didn’t meet the terms of the German ultimatum. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, thought that Hitler was bluffing, in the hope of winning further Russian concessions. British intelligence thought – at least, in the beginning – that Hitler simply wanted to reinforce his eastern frontier against a possible Soviet attack. The only way for this piece of intelligence to have been definitive would have been if the Allies had had a second piece of intelligence – like the phone call between al Hilal and Es Sayed – that demonstrated Germany’s true purpose. Similarly, the only way the al Hilal phone call would have been definitive is if we’d also had intelligence as detailed as the Allied knowledge of German troop movements. But rarely do intelligence services have the luxury of both kinds of information. Nor are their analysts mind readers. It is only with hindsight that human beings acquire that skill.

The Cell tells us that, in the final months before September 11, Washington was frantic with worry:

The fact that these worries did not protect us is not evidence of the limitations of the intelligence community. It is evidence of the limitations of intelligence.

4.

In the early 1970s, a professor of psychology at Stanford University named David L. Rosenhan gathered together a painter, a graduate student, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists. He told them to check into different psychiatric hospitals under aliases, with the complaint that they had been hearing voices. They were instructed to say that the voices were unfamiliar, and that they heard words like empty, thud, and hollow. Apart from that initial story, the pseudo patients were instructed to answer every question truthfully, to behave as they normally would, and to tell the hospital staff – at every opportunity – that the voices were gone and that they had experienced no further symptoms. The eight subjects were hospitalized, on average, for nineteen days. One was kept for almost two months. Rosenhan wanted to find out if the hospital staffs would ever see through the ruse. They never did.

Rosenhan’s test is, in a way, a classic intelligence problem. Here was a signal (a sane person) buried in a mountain of conflicting and confusing noise (a mental hospital), and the intelligence analysts (the doctors) were asked to connect the dots – and they failed spectacularly. In the course of their hospital stay, the eight pseudo patients were given a total of twenty-one hundred pills. They underwent psychiatric interviews, and sober case summaries documenting their pathologies were written up. They were asked by Rosenhan to take notes documenting how they were treated, and this quickly became part of their supposed pathology. “Patient engaging in writing behavior,” one nurse ominously wrote in her notes. Having been labeled as ill upon admission, they could not shake the diagnosis. “Nervous?” a friendly nurse asked one of the subjects as he paced the halls one day. “No,” he corrected her, to no avail, “bored.”

The solution to this problem seems obvious enough. Doctors and nurses need to be made alert to the possibility that sane people sometimes get admitted to mental hospitals. So Rosenhan went to a research-and-teaching hospital and informed the staff that at some point in the next three months, he would once again send over one or more of his pseudo patients. This time, of the 193 patients admitted in the three-month period, 41 were identified by at least one staff member as being almost certainly sane. Once again, however, they were wrong. Rosenhan hadn’t sent anyone over. In attempting to solve one kind of intelligence problem (overdiagnosis), the hospital simply created another problem (underdiagnosis). This is the second, and perhaps more serious, consequence of creeping determinism: in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.

Pearl Harbor, for example, was widely considered to be an organizational failure. The United States had all the evidence it needed to predict the Japanese attack, but the signals were scattered throughout the various intelligence services. The army and the navy didn’t talk to each other. They spent all their time arguing and competing. This was, in part, why the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947 – to ensure that all intelligence would be collected and processed in one place. Twenty years after Pearl Harbor, the United States suffered another catastrophic intelligence failure, at the Bay of Pigs: the Kennedy administration grossly underestimated the Cubans’ capacity to fight and their support for Fidel Castro. This time, however, the diagnosis was completely different. As Irving L. Janis concluded in his famous study of “groupthink,” the root cause of the Bay of Pigs fiasco was that the operation was conceived by a small, highly cohesive group whose close ties inhibited the beneficial effects of argument and competition. Centralization was now the problem. One of the most influential organizational sociologists of the postwar era, Harold Wilensky, went out of his way to praise the “constructive rivalry” fostered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which, he says, is why the President had such formidable intelligence on how to attack the economic ills of the Great Depression. In his classic 1967 work Organizational Intelligence, Wilensky pointed out that Roosevelt would

The intelligence community that we had prior to September 11 was the direct result of this philosophy. The FBI and the CIA were supposed to be rivals, just as Ickes and Wallace were rivals. But now we’ve changed our minds. The FBI and the CIA, Senator Shelby tells us disapprovingly, argue and compete with one another. The September 11 story, his report concludes, “should be an object lesson in the perils of failing to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations.” Shelby wants recentralization and more focus on cooperation. He wants a “central national level knowledge-compiling entity standing above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies.” He thinks the intelligence service should be run by a small, highly cohesive group, and so he suggests that the FBI be removed from the counterterrorism business entirely. The FBI, according to Shelby, is governed by

In his 2003 State of the Union message, President George W. Bush did what Shelby wanted, and announced the formation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center – a special unit combining the antiterrorist activities of the FBI and the CIA. The cultural and organizational diversity of the intelligence business, once prized, is now despised.

The truth is, though, that it is just as easy, in the wake of September 11, to make the case for the old system. Isn’t it an advantage that the FBI doesn’t think like the CIA? It was the FBI, after all, that produced two of the most prescient pieces of analysis – the request by the Minneapolis office for a warrant to secretly search Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings, and the now famous Phoenix memo. In both cases, what was valuable about the FBI’s analysis was precisely the way in which it differed from the traditional “big picture,” probabilistic inference making of the analyst. The FBI agents in the field focused on a single case, dug deep, and came up with an “evidence-supported narrative of defendant wrongdoing” that spoke volumes about a possible Al Qaeda threat.

The same can be said for the alleged problem of rivalry. The Cell describes what happened after police in the Philippines searched the apartment that Ramzi Yousef shared with his coconspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad. Agents from the FBI’s counterterrorism unit immediately flew to Manila and “bumped up against the CIA.” As the old adage about the Bureau and the Agency has it, the FBI wanted to string Murad up, and the CIA wanted to string him along. The two groups eventually worked together, but only because they had to. It was a relationship “marred by rivalry and mistrust.” But what’s wrong with this kind of rivalry? As Miller, Stone, and Mitchell tell us, the real objection of Neil Herman – the FBI’s former domestic counterterrorism chief – to “working with the CIA had nothing to do with procedure. He just didn’t think the Agency was going to be of any help in finding Ramzi Yousef. ‘Back then, I don’t think the CIA could have found a person in a bathroom,’” Herman says. “ ‘Hell, I don’t think they could have found the bathroom.’” The assumption of the reformers is always that the rivalry between the FBI and the CIA is essentially marital, that it is the dysfunction of people who ought to work together but can’t. But it could equally be seen as a version of the marketplace rivalry that leads to companies working harder and making better products.

There is no such thing as a perfect intelligence system, and every seeming improvement involves a trade-off. A couple of months ago, for example, a suspect in custody in Canada, who was wanted in New York on forgery charges, gave police the names and photographs of five Arab immigrants, who he said had crossed the border into the United States. The FBI put out an alert on December 29, posting the names and photographs on its website, in the “war on terrorism” section. Even President Bush joined in, saying, “We need to know why they have been smuggled into the country, what they’re doing in the country.” As it turned out, the suspect in Canada had made the story up. Afterward, an FBI official said that the agency circulated the photographs in order to “err on the side of caution.” Our intelligence services today are highly sensitive. But this kind of sensitivity is not without its costs. As the political scientist Richard K. Betts wrote in his essay “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” “Making warning systems more sensitive reduces the risk of surprise, but increases the number of false alarms, which in turn reduces sensitivity.” When we run out and buy duct tape to seal our windows against chemical attack, and nothing happens, and when the government’s warning light is orange for weeks on end, and nothing happens, we soon begin to doubt every warning that comes our way. Why was the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor so unresponsive to signs of an impending Japanese attack? Because, in the week before December 7, 1941, they had checked out seven reports of Japanese submarines in the area – and all seven were false. Rosenhan’s psychiatrists used to miss the sane; then they started to see sane people everywhere. That is a change, but it is not exactly progress.

5.

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli government appointed a special investigative commission, and one of the witnesses called was Major General Zeira, the head of Aman. Why, they asked, had he insisted that war was not imminent? His answer was simple:

The historians Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, in their book Military Misfortunes, argue that it was Zeira’s certainty that had proved fatal: “The culpable failure of Aman’s leaders in September and October 1973 lay not in their belief that Egypt would not attack but in their supreme confidence, which dazzled decision-makers… Rather than impress upon the prime minister, the chief of staff and the minister of defense the ambiguity of the situation, they insisted – until the last day – that there would be no war, period.”

But, of course, Zeira gave an unambiguous answer to the question of war because that is what politicians and the public demanded of him. No one wants ambiguity. Today, the FBI gives us color-coded warnings and speaks of increased chatter among terrorist operatives, and the information is infuriating to us because it is so vague. What does increased chatter mean? We want a prediction. We want to believe that the intentions of our enemies are a puzzle that intelligence services can piece together, so that a clear story emerges. But there rarely is a clear story – at least, not until afterward, when some enterprising journalist or investigative committee decides to write one.

March 10, 2003

1.

There was a moment in the third and deciding set of the 1993 Wimbledon final when Jana Novotna seemed invincible. She was leading 4-1 and serving at 40-30, meaning that she was one point from winning the game, and just five points from the most coveted championship in tennis. She had just hit a backhand to her opponent, Steffi Graf, that skimmed the net and landed so abruptly on the far side of the court that Graf could only watch, in flat-footed frustration. The stands at Center Court were packed. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were in their customary places in the royal box. Novotna was in white, poised and confident, her blond hair held back with a headband – and then something happened. She served the ball straight into the net. She stopped and steadied herself for the second serve – the toss, the arch of the back – but this time it was worse. Her swing seemed halfhearted, all arm and no legs and torso. Double fault. On the next point, she was slow to react to a high shot by Graf and badly missed on a forehand volley. At game point, she hit an overhead straight into the net. Instead of 5-1, it was now 4-2. Graf to serve: an easy victory, 4-3. Novotna to serve. She wasn’t tossing the ball high enough. Her head was down. Her movements had slowed markedly. She double-faulted once, twice, three times. Pulled wide by a Graf forehand, Novotna inexplicably hit a low, flat shot directly at Graf, instead of a high crosscourt forehand that would have given her time to get back into position: 4-4. Did she suddenly realize how terrifyingly close she was to victory? Did she remember that she had never won a major tournament before? Did she look across the net and see Steffi Graf – Steffi Graf! – the greatest player of her generation?

On the baseline, awaiting Graf’s serve, Novotna was now visibly agitated, rocking back and forth, jumping up and down. She talked to herself under her breath. Her eyes darted around the court. Graf took the game at love; Novotna, moving as if in slow motion, did not win a single point: 5-4 Graf. On the sidelines, Novotna wiped her racquet and her face with a towel, and then each finger individually. It was her turn to serve. She missed a routine volley wide, shook her head, talked to herself. She missed her first serve, made the second, then, in the resulting rally, mis-hit a backhand so badly that it sailed off her racquet as if launched into flight. Novotna was unrecognizable, not an elite tennis player but a beginner again. She was crumbling under pressure, but exactly why was as baffling to her as it was to all those looking on. Isn’t pressure supposed to bring out the best in us? We try harder. We concentrate harder. We get a boost of adrenaline. We care more about how well we perform. So what was happening to her?

At championship point, Novotna hit a low, cautious, and shallow lob to Graf. Graf answered with an unreturnable overhead smash, and, mercifully, it was over. Stunned, Novotna moved to the net. Graf kissed her twice. At the awards ceremony, the Duchess of Kent handed Novotna the runner-up’s trophy, a small silver plate, and whispered something in her ear, and what Novotna had done finally caught up with her. There she was, sweaty and exhausted, looming over the delicate white-haired Duchess in her pearl necklace. The Duchess reached up and pulled her head down onto her shoulder, and Novotna started to sob.

2.

Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have panicked or, to use the sports colloquialism, choked. But what do those words mean? Both are pejoratives. To choke or panic is considered to be as bad as to quit. But are all forms of failure equal? And what do the forms in which we fail say about who we are and how we think? We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.

Choking sounds like a vague and all-encompassing term, yet it describes a very specific kind of failure. For example, psychologists often use a primitive video game to test motor skills. They’ll sit you in front of a computer with a screen that shows four boxes in a row, and a keyboard that has four corresponding buttons in a row. One at a time, x’s start to appear in the boxes on the screen, and you are told that every time this happens you are to push the key corresponding to the box. According to Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, if you’re told ahead of time about the pattern in which those x’s will appear, your reaction time in hitting the right key will improve dramatically. You’ll play the game very carefully for a few rounds, until you’ve learned the sequence, and then you’ll get faster and faster. Willingham calls this explicit learning. But suppose you’re not told that the x’s appear in a regular sequence, and even after playing the game for a while, you’re not aware that there is a pattern. You’ll still get faster: you’ll learn the sequence unconsciously. Willingham calls that implicit learning – learning that takes place outside of awareness. These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain. Willingham says that when you are first taught something – say, how to hit a backhand or an overhead forehand – you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical manner. But as you get better, the implicit system takes over: you start to hit a backhand fluidly, without thinking. The basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in, you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the ability to hit a drop shot or place a serve at a hundred miles per hour. “This is something that is going to happen gradually,” Willingham says. “You hit several thousand forehands, after a while you may still be attending to it. But not very much. In the end, you don’t really notice what your hand is doing at all.”

Under conditions of stress, however, the explicit system sometimes takes over. That’s what it means to choke. When Jana Novotna faltered at Wimbledon, it was because she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch. She double-faulted on her serves and mis-hit her overheads, the shots that demand the greatest sensitivity in force and timing. She seemed like a different person – playing with the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner – because, in a sense, she was a beginner again: she was relying on a learning system that she hadn’t used to hit serves and overhead forehands and volleys since she was first taught tennis, as a child. The same thing has happened to Chuck Knoblauch, the New York Yankees’ second baseman, who inexplicably has had trouble throwing the ball to first base. Under the stress of playing in front of forty thousand fans at Yankee Stadium, Knoblauch finds himself reverting to explicit mode, throwing like a Little Leaguer again.

Panic is something else altogether. Consider the following account of a scuba-diving accident, recounted to me by Ephimia Morphew, a human-factors specialist at NASA: “It was an open-water certification dive, Monterey Bay, California, about ten years ago. I was nineteen. I’d been diving for two weeks. This was my first time in the open ocean without the instructor. Just my buddy and I. We had to go about forty feet down, to the bottom of the ocean, and do an exercise where we took our regulators out of our mouth, picked up a spare one that we had on our vest, and practiced breathing out of the spare. My buddy did hers. Then it was my turn. I removed my regulator. I lifted up my secondary regulator. I put it in my mouth, exhaled, to clear the lines, and then I inhaled, and, to my surprise, it was water. I inhaled water. Then the hose that connected that mouthpiece to my tank, my air source, came unlatched and air from the hose came exploding into my face.

“Right away, my hand reached out for my partner’s air supply, as if I was going to rip it out. It was without thought. It was a physiological response. My eyes are seeing my hand do something irresponsible. I’m fighting with myself. Don’t do it. Then I searched my mind for what I could do. And nothing came to mind. All I could remember was one thing: if you can’t take care of yourself, let your buddy take care of you. I let my hand fall back to my side, and I just stood there.”

This is a textbook example of panic. In that moment, Morphew stopped thinking. She forgot that she had another source of air, one that worked perfectly well and that, moments before, she had taken out of her mouth. She forgot that her partner had a working air supply as well, which could easily be shared, and she forgot that grabbing her partner’s regulator would imperil both of them. All she had was her most basic instinct: get air. Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on. But what did a novice like Morphew have? I searched my mind for what I could do. And nothing came to mind.

Panic also causes what psychologists call perceptual narrowing. In one study, from the early seventies, a group of subjects were asked to perform a visual-acuity task while undergoing what they thought was a sixty-foot dive in a pressure chamber. At the same time, they were asked to push a button whenever they saw a small light flash on and off in their peripheral vision. The subjects in the pressure chamber had much higher heart rates than the control group, indicating that they were under stress. That stress didn’t affect their accuracy at the visual-acuity task, but they were only half as good as the control group at picking up the peripheral light. “You tend to focus or obsess on one thing,” Morphew says. “There’s a famous airplane example, where the landing light went off, and the pilots had no way of knowing if the landing gear was down. The pilots were so focused on that light that no one noticed the autopilot had been disengaged, and they crashed the plane.” Morphew reached for her buddy’s air supply because it was the only air supply she could see.

Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

3.

Why does this distinction matter? In some instances, it doesn’t much. If you lose a close tennis match, it’s of little moment whether you choked or panicked; either way, you lost. But there are clearly cases when how failure happens is central to understanding why failure happens.

Take the plane crash in which John F. Kennedy, Jr., was killed. The details of the flight are well known. On a Friday evening in July of 1999, Kennedy took off with his wife and sister-in-law for Martha’s Vineyard. The night was hazy, and Kennedy flew along the Connecticut coastline, using the trail of lights below him as a guide. At Westerly, Rhode Island, he left the shoreline, heading straight out over Rhode Island Sound, and at that point, apparently disoriented by the darkness and haze, he began a series of curious maneuvers: He banked his plane to the right, farther out into the ocean, and then to the left. He climbed and descended. He sped up and slowed down. Just a few miles from his destination, Kennedy lost control of the plane, and it crashed into the ocean.

Kennedy’s mistake, in technical terms, was that he failed to keep his wings level. That was critical, because when a plane banks to one side it begins to turn and its wings lose some of their vertical lift. Left unchecked, this process accelerates. The angle of the bank increases, the turn gets sharper and sharper, and the plane starts to dive toward the ground in an ever-narrowing corkscrew. Pilots call this the graveyard spiral. And why didn’t Kennedy stop the dive? Because, in times of low visibility and high stress, keeping your wings level – indeed, even knowing whether you are in a graveyard spiral – turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Kennedy failed under pressure.

Had Kennedy been flying during the day or with a clear moon, he would have been fine. If you are the pilot, looking straight ahead from the cockpit, the angle of your wings will be obvious from the straight line of the horizon in front of you. But when it’s dark outside, the horizon disappears. There is no external measure of the plane’s bank. On the ground, we know whether we are level even when it’s dark, because of the motion-sensing mechanisms in the inner ear. In a spiral dive, though, the effect of the plane’s G-force on the inner ear means that the pilot feels perfectly level even if his plane is not. Similarly, when you are in a jetliner that is banking at thirty degrees after takeoff, the book on your neighbor’s lap does not slide into your lap, nor will a pen on the floor roll toward the “down” side of the plane. The physics of flying is such that an airplane in the midst of a turn always feels perfectly level to someone inside the cabin.

This is a difficult notion, and to understand it I went flying with William Langewiesche, the author of a superb book on flying, Inside the Sky. We met at San Jose Airport, in the jet center where the Silicon Valley billionaires keep their private planes. Langewiesche is a rugged man in his forties, deeply tanned, and handsome in the way that pilots (at least since the movie The Right Stuff) are supposed to be. We took off at dusk, heading out toward Monterey Bay, until we had left the lights of the coast behind and night had erased the horizon. Langewiesche let the plane bank gently to the left. He took his hands off the stick. The sky told me nothing now, so I concentrated on the instruments. The nose of the plane was dropping. The gyroscope told me that we were banking, first fifteen, then thirty, then forty-five degrees. “We’re in a spiral dive,” Langewiesche said calmly. Our airspeed was steadily accelerating, from 180 to 190 to 200 knots. The needle on the altimeter was moving down. The plane was dropping like a stone, at three thousand feet per minute. I could hear, faintly, a slight increase in the hum of the engine, and the wind noise as we picked up speed. But if Langewiesche and I had been talking, I would have caught none of that. Had the cabin been unpressurized, my ears might have popped, particularly as we went into the steep part of the dive. But beyond that? Nothing at all. In a spiral dive, the G-load – the force of inertia – is normal. As Langewiesche puts it, the plane likes to spiral-dive. The total time elapsed since we started diving was no more than six or seven seconds. Suddenly, Langewiesche straightened the wings and pulled back on the stick to get the nose of the plane up, breaking out of the dive. Only now did I feel the full force of the G-load, pushing me back in my seat. “You feel no G-load in a bank,” Langewiesche said. “There’s nothing more confusing for the uninitiated.”

I asked Langewiesche how much longer we could have fallen. “Within five seconds, we would have exceeded the limits of the airplane,” he replied, by which he meant that the force of trying to pull out of the dive would have broken the plane into pieces. I looked away from the instruments and asked Langewiesche to spiral-dive again, this time without telling me. I sat and waited. I was about to tell Langewiesche that he could start diving anytime, when, suddenly, I was thrown back in my chair. “We just lost a thousand feet,” he said.

This inability to sense, experientially, what your plane is doing is what makes night flying so stressful. And this was the stress that Kennedy must have felt when he turned out across the water at Westerly, leaving the guiding lights of the Connecticut coastline behind him. A pilot who flew into Nantucket that night told the National Transportation Safety Board that when he descended over Martha’s Vineyard, he looked down and there was “nothing to see. There was no horizon and no light… I thought the island might [have] suffered a power failure.” Kennedy was now blind, in every sense, and he must have known the danger he was in. He had very little experience in flying strictly by instruments. Most of the time when he had flown up to the Vineyard, the horizon or lights had still been visible. That strange, final sequence of maneuvers was Kennedy’s frantic search for a clearing in the haze. He was trying to pick up the lights of Martha’s Vineyard, to restore the lost horizon. Between the lines of the National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the crash, you can almost feel his desperation:

But was he choking or panicking? Here the distinction between those two states is critical. Had he choked, he would have reverted to the mode of explicit learning. His movements in the cockpit would have become markedly slower and less fluid. He would have gone back to the mechanical, self-conscious application of the lessons he had first received as a pilot – and that might have been a good thing. Kennedy needed to think, to concentrate on his instruments, to break away from the instinctive flying that served him when he had a visible horizon.

But instead, from all appearances, he panicked. At the moment when he needed to remember the lessons he had been taught about instrument flying, his mind – like Morphew’s when she was underwater – must have gone blank. Instead of reviewing the instruments, he seems to have been focused on one question: Where are the lights of Martha’s Vineyard? His gyroscope and his other instruments may well have become as invisible as the peripheral lights in the underwater-panic experiments. He had fallen back on his instincts – on the way the plane felt – and in the dark, of course, instinct can tell you nothing. The NTSB report says that the last time the Piper’s wings were level was seven seconds past 9:40, and the plane hit the water at about 9:41, so the critical period here was less than sixty seconds. At twenty-five seconds past the minute, the plane was tilted at an angle greater than forty-five degrees. Inside the cockpit it would have felt normal. At some point, Kennedy must have heard the rising wind outside, or the roar of the engine as it picked up speed. Again, relying on instinct, he might have pulled back on the stick, trying to raise the nose of the plane. But pulling back on the stick without first leveling the wings only makes the spiral tighter and the problem worse. It’s also possible that Kennedy did nothing at all, and that he was frozen at the controls, still frantically searching for the lights of the Vineyard, when his plane hit the water. Sometimes pilots don’t even try to make it out of a spiral dive. Langewiesche calls that “one G all the way down.”

4.

What happened to Kennedy that night illustrates a second major difference between panicking and choking. Panicking is conventional failure, of the sort we tacitly understand. Kennedy panicked because he didn’t know enough about instrument flying. If he’d had another year in the air, he might not have panicked, and that fits with what we believe – that performance ought to improve with experience, and that pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome. But choking makes little intuitive sense. Novotna’s problem wasn’t lack of diligence; she was as superbly conditioned and schooled as anyone on the tennis tour. And what did experience do for her? In 1995, in the third round of the French Open, Novotna choked even more spectacularly than she had against Graf, losing to Chanda Rubin after surrendering a 5-0 lead in the third set. There seems little doubt that part of the reason for her collapse against Rubin was her collapse against Graf – that the second failure built on the first, making it possible for her to be up 5-0 in the third set and yet entertain the thought I can still lose. If panicking is conventional failure, choking is paradoxical failure.

Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues have done a number of experiments in recent years looking at how certain groups perform under pressure, and their findings go to the heart of what is so strange about choking. Steele and Joshua Aronson found that when they gave a group of Stanford undergraduates a standardized test and told them that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. Steele and Aronson attribute this disparity to what they call “stereotype threat”: when black students are put into a situation where they are directly confronted with a stereotype about their group – in this case one having to do with intelligence – the resulting pressure causes their performance to suffer.

Steele and others have found stereotype threat at work in any situation where groups are depicted in negative ways. Give a group of qualified women a math test and tell them it will measure their quantitative ability and they’ll do much worse than equally skilled men will; present the same test simply as a research tool and they’ll do just as well as the men. Or consider a handful of experiments conducted by one of Steele’s former graduate students, Julio Garcia, a professor at Tufts University. Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you’d expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African-American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can’t do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: white men can’t jump.

It doesn’t come as news, of course, that black students aren’t as good at test-taking as white students, or that white students aren’t as good at jumping as black students. The problem is that we’ve always assumed that this kind of failure under pressure is panic. What is it we tell underperforming athletes and students? The same thing we tell novice pilots or scuba divers: to work harder, to buckle down, to take the tests of their ability more seriously. But Steele says that when you look at the way black or female students perform under stereotype threat, you don’t see the wild guessing of a panicked test taker. “What you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing,” he explains. “When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, ‘Look, I’m going to be careful here. I’m not going to mess things up.’ Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that’s not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not.” This is choking, not panicking. Garcia’s athletes and Steele’s students are like Novotna, not Kennedy. They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure – to work harder and take the test more seriously – would only make their problems worse.

That is a hard lesson to grasp, but harder still is the fact that choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs. Novotna herself could do nothing to prevent her collapse against Graf. The only thing that could have saved her is if – at that critical moment in the third set – the television cameras had been turned off, the Duke and Duchess had gone home, and the spectators had been told to wait outside. In sports, of course, you can’t do that. Choking is a central part of the drama of athletic competition, because the spectators have to be there – and the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion. But the same ruthless inflexibility need not govern the rest of our lives. We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.

5.

Through the first three rounds of the 1996 Masters golf tournament, Greg Norman held a seemingly insurmountable lead over his nearest rival, the Englishman Nick Faldo. He was the best player in the world. His nickname was the Shark. He didn’t saunter down the fairways; he stalked the course, blond and broad-shouldered, his caddy behind him, struggling to keep up. But then came the ninth hole on the tournament’s final day. Norman was paired with Faldo, and the two hit their first shots well. They were now facing the green. In front of the pin, there was a steep slope, so that any ball hit short would come rolling back down the hill into oblivion. Faldo shot first, and the ball landed safely long, well past the cup.

Norman was next. He stood over the ball. “The one thing you guard against here is short,” the announcer said, stating the obvious. Norman swung and then froze, his club in midair, following the ball in flight. It was short. Norman watched, stone-faced, as the ball rolled thirty yards back down the hill, and with that error something inside of him broke.

At the tenth hole, he hooked the ball to the left, hit his third shot well past the cup, and missed a makeable putt. At eleven, Norman had a three-and-a-half-foot putt for par – the kind he had been making all week. He shook out his hands and legs before grasping the club, trying to relax. He missed: his third straight bogey. At twelve, Norman hit the ball straight into the water. At thirteen, he hit it into a patch of pine needles. At sixteen, his movements were so mechanical and out of synch that, when he swung, his hips spun out ahead of his body and the ball sailed into another pond. At that, he took his club and made a frustrated scythelike motion through the grass, because what had been obvious for twenty minutes was now official: he had fumbled away the chance of a lifetime.

Faldo had begun the day six strokes behind Norman. By the time the two started their slow walk to the eighteenth hole, through the throng of spectators, Faldo had a four-stroke lead. But he took those final steps quietly, giving only the smallest of nods, keeping his head low. He understood what had happened on the greens and fairways that day. And he was bound by the particular etiquette of choking, the understanding that what he had earned was something less than a victory and what Norman had suffered was something less than a defeat.

When it was all over, Faldo wrapped his arms around Norman. “I don’t know what to say – I just want to give you a hug,” he whispered, and then he said the only thing you can say to a choker: “I feel horrible about what happened. I’m so sorry.” With that, the two men began to cry.

August 21 and 28, 2000

1.

In the technological age, there is a ritual to disaster. When planes crash or chemical plants explode, each piece of physical evidence – of twisted metal or fractured concrete – becomes a kind of fetish object, painstakingly located, mapped, tagged, and analyzed, with findings submitted to boards of inquiry that then probe and interview and soberly draw conclusions. It is a ritual of reassurance, based on the principle that what we learn from one accident can help us prevent another, and a measure of its effectiveness is that Americans did not shut down the nuclear industry after Three Mile Island and do not abandon the skies after each new plane crash. But the rituals of disaster have rarely been played out so dramatically as they were in the case of the Challenger space shuttle, which blew up over southern Florida on January 28, 1986.

Fifty-five minutes after the explosion, when the last of the debris had fallen into the ocean, recovery ships were on the scene. They remained there for the next three months, as part of what turned into the largest maritime salvage operation in history, combing a hundred and fifty thousand square nautical miles for floating debris, while the ocean floor surrounding the crash site was inspected by submarines. In mid-April of 1986, the salvage team found several chunks of charred metal that confirmed what had previously been only suspected: the explosion was caused by a faulty seal in one of the shuttle’s rocket boosters, which had allowed a stream of flame to escape and ignite an external fuel tank.

Armed with this confirmation, a special presidential investigative commission concluded the following June that the deficient seal reflected shoddy engineering and lax management at NASA and its prime contractor, Morton Thiokol. Properly chastised, NASA returned to the drawing board, to emerge thirty-two months later with a new shuttle – Discovery – redesigned according to the lessons learned from the disaster. During that first post-Challenger flight, as America watched breathlessly, the crew of the Discovery held a short commemorative service. “Dear friends,” the mission commander, Captain Frederick H. Hauck, said, addressing the seven dead Challenger astronauts, “your loss has meant that we could confidently begin anew.” The ritual was complete. NASA was back.

But what if the assumptions that underlie our disaster rituals aren’t true? What if these public postmortems don’t help us avoid future accidents? Over the past few years, a group of scholars has begun making the unsettling argument that the rituals that follow things like plane crashes or the Three Mile Island crisis are as much exercises in self-deception as they are genuine opportunities for reassurance. For these revisionists, high-technology accidents may not have clear causes at all. They may be inherent in the complexity of the technological systems we have created.

This revisionism has now been extended to the Challenger disaster, with the publication of The Challenger Launch Decision, by the sociologist Diane Vaughan, which is the first truly definitive analysis of the events leading up to January 28, 1986. The conventional view is that the Challenger accident was an anomaly, that it happened because people at NASA had not done their job. But the study’s conclusion is the opposite: it says that the accident happened because people at NASA had done exactly what they were supposed to do. “No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil,” Vaughan writes. “Rather, a series of seemingly harmless decisions were made that incrementally moved the space agency toward a catastrophic outcome.”

No doubt Vaughan’s analysis will be hotly disputed, but even if she is only partly right, the implications of this kind of argument are enormous. We have surrounded ourselves in the modern age with things like power plants and nuclear weapons systems and airports that handle hundreds of planes an hour, on the understanding that the risks they represent are, at the very least, manageable. But if the potential for catastrophe is actually found in the normal functioning of complex systems, this assumption is false. Risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable, and the rituals of disaster have no meaning. The first time around, the story of the Challenger was tragic. In its retelling, a decade later, it is merely banal.

2.

Perhaps the best way to understand the argument over the Challenger explosion is to start with an accident that preceded it – the near disaster at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear-power plant in March of 1979. The conclusion of the president’s commission that investigated the TMI accident was that it was the result of human error, particularly on the part of the plant’s operators. But the truth of what happened there, the revisionists maintain, is a good deal more complicated than that, and their arguments are worth examining in detail.

The trouble at TMI started with a blockage in what is called the plant’s polisher – a kind of giant water filter. Polisher problems were not unusual at TMI, or particularly serious. But in this case the blockage caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, inadvertently tripping two valves and shutting down the flow of cold water into the plant’s steam generator.

As it happens, TMI had a backup cooling system for precisely this situation. But on that particular day, for reasons that no one really knows, the valves for the backup system weren’t open. They had been closed, and an indicator in the control room showing they were closed was blocked by a repair tag hanging from a switch above it. That left the reactor dependent on another backup system, a special sort of relief valve. But, as luck would have it, the relief valve wasn’t working properly that day, either. It stuck open when it was supposed to close, and, to make matters even worse, a gauge in the control room which should have told the operators that the relief valve wasn’t working was itself not working. By the time TMI’s engineers realized what was happening, the reactor had come dangerously close to a meltdown.

Here, in other words, was a major accident caused by five discrete events. There is no way the engineers in the control room could have known about any of them. No glaring errors or spectacularly bad decisions were made that exacerbated those events. And all the malfunctions – the blocked polisher, the shut valves, the obscured indicator, the faulty relief valve, and the broken gauge – were in themselves so trivial that individually they would have created no more than a nuisance. What caused the accident was the way minor events unexpectedly interacted to create a major problem.

This kind of disaster is what the Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow has famously called a normal accident. By normal, Perrow does not mean that it is frequent; he means that it is the kind of accident one can expect in the normal functioning of a technologically complex operation. Modern systems, Perrow argues, are made up of thousands of parts, all of which interrelate in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Given that complexity, he says, it is almost inevitable that some combinations of minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic. In a classic 1984 treatise on accidents, Perrow takes examples of well-known plane crashes, oil spills, chemical-plant explosions, and nuclear-weapons mishaps and shows how many of them are best understood as normal. If you saw the movie Apollo 13, in fact, you have seen a perfect illustration of one of the most famous of all normal accidents: the Apollo flight went awry because of the interaction of failures of the spacecraft’s oxygen and hydrogen tanks, and an indicator light that diverted the astronauts’ attention from the real problem.

Had this been a “real” accident – if the mission had run into trouble because of one massive or venal error – the story would have made for a much inferior movie. In real accidents, people rant and rave and hunt down the culprit. They do, in short, what people in Hollywood thrillers always do. But what made Apollo 13 unusual was that the dominant emotion was not anger but bafflement – bafflement that so much could go wrong for so little apparent reason. There was no one to blame, no dark secret to unearth, no recourse but to re-create an entire system in place of one that had inexplicably failed. In the end, the normal accident was the more terrifying one.

3.

Was the Challenger explosion a normal accident? In a narrow sense, the answer is no. Unlike what happened at TMI, its explosion was caused by a single, catastrophic malfunction: the so-called O-rings that were supposed to prevent hot gases from leaking out of the rocket boosters didn’t do their job. But Vaughan argues that the O-ring problem was really just a symptom. The cause of the accident was the culture of NASA, she says, and that culture led to a series of decisions about the Challenger that very much followed the contours of a normal accident.

The heart of the question is how NASA chose to evaluate the problems it had been having with the rocket boosters’ O-rings. These are the thin rubber bands that run around the lips of each of the rocket’s four segments, and each O-ring was meant to work like the rubber seal on the top of a bottle of preserves, making the fit between each part of the rocket snug and airtight. But from as far back as 1981, on one shuttle flight after another, the O-rings had shown increasing problems. In a number of instances, the rubber seal had been dangerously eroded – a condition suggesting that hot gases had almost escaped. What’s more, O-rings were strongly suspected to be less effective in cold weather, when the rubber would harden and not give as tight a seal. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the shuttle launchpad was encased in ice, and the temperature at liftoff was just above freezing. Anticipating these low temperatures, engineers at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle’s rockets, recommended that the launch be delayed. Morton Thiokol brass and NASA, however, overruled the recommendation, and that decision led both the president’s commission and numerous critics since to accuse NASA of egregious – if not criminal – misjudgment.

Vaughan doesn’t dispute that the decision was fatally flawed. But, after reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts and internal NASA documents, she can’t find any evidence of people acting negligently, or nakedly sacrificing safety in the name of politics or expediency. The mistakes that NASA made, she says, were made in the normal course of operation. For example, in retrospect it may seem obvious that cold weather impaired O-ring performance. But it wasn’t obvious at the time. A previous shuttle flight that had suffered worse O-ring damage had been launched in 75-degree heat. And on a series of previous occasions when NASA had proposed – but eventually scrubbed for other reasons – shuttle launches in weather as cold as 41 degrees, Morton Thiokol had not said a word about the potential threat posed by the cold, so its pre-Challenger objection had seemed to NASA not reasonable but arbitrary. Vaughan confirms that there was a dispute between managers and engineers on the eve of the launch but points out that in the shuttle program, disputes of this sort were commonplace. And, while the president’s commission was astonished by NASA’s repeated use of the phrases acceptable risk and acceptable erosion in internal discussion of the rocket-booster joints, Vaughan shows that flying with acceptable risks was a standard part of NASA culture. The lists of acceptable risks on the space shuttle, in fact, filled six volumes. “Although [O-ring] erosion itself had not been predicted, its occurrence conformed to engineering expectations about large-scale technical systems,” she writes. “At NASA, problems were the norm. The word anomaly was part of everyday talk… The whole shuttle system operated on the assumption that deviation could be controlled but not eliminated.”

What NASA had created was a closed culture that, in her words, “normalized deviance” so that to the outside world, decisions that were obviously questionable were seen by NASA’s management as prudent and reasonable. It is her depiction of this internal world that makes her book so disquieting: when she lays out the sequence of decisions that led to the launch – each decision as trivial as the string of failures that led to the near disaster at TMI – it is difficult to find any precise point where things went wrong or where things might be improved next time. “It can truly be said that the Challenger launch decision was a rule-based decision,” she concludes. “But the cultural understandings, rules, procedures, and norms that always had worked in the past did not work this time. It was not amorally calculating managers violating rules that were responsible for the tragedy. It was conformity.”

4.

There is another way to look at this problem, and that is from the standpoint of how human beings handle risk. One of the assumptions behind the modern disaster ritual is that when a risk can be identified and eliminated, a system can be made safer. The new booster joints on the shuttle, for example, are so much better than the old ones that the overall chances of a Challenger-style accident’s ever happening again must be lower, right? This is such a straightforward idea that questioning it seems almost impossible. But that is just what another group of scholars has done, under what is called the theory of risk homeostasis. It should be said that within the academic community, there are huge debates over how widely the theory of risk homeostasis can and should be applied. But the basic idea, which has been laid out brilliantly by the Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde in his book Target Risk, is quite simple: under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organization safer in fact don’t. Why? Because human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.

Consider, for example, the results of a famous experiment conducted several years ago in Germany. Part of a fleet of taxicabs in Munich was equipped with antilock brake systems (ABS), a technological innovation that vastly improves braking, particularly on slippery surfaces. The rest of the fleet was left alone, and the two groups – which were otherwise perfectly matched – were placed under careful and secret observation for three years. You would expect the better brakes to make for safer driving. But that is exactly the opposite of what happened. Giving some drivers ABS made no difference at all in their accident rate; in fact, it turned them into markedly inferior drivers. They drove faster. They made sharper turns. They showed poorer lane discipline. They braked harder. They were more likely to tailgate. They didn’t merge as well, and they were involved in more near misses. In other words, the ABS systems were not used to reduce accidents; instead, the drivers used the additional element of safety to enable them to drive faster and more recklessly without increasing their risk of getting into an accident. As economists would say, they consumed the risk reduction, they didn’t save it.

Risk homeostasis doesn’t happen all the time. Often – as in the case of seat belts, say – compensatory behavior only partly offsets the risk reduction of a safety measure. But it happens often enough that it must be given serious consideration. Why are more pedestrians killed crossing the street at marked crosswalks than at unmarked crosswalks? Because they compensate for the “safe” environment of a marked crossing by being less vigilant about oncoming traffic. Why did the introduction of childproof lids on medicine bottles lead, according to one study, to a substantial increase in fatal child poisonings? Because adults became less careful in keeping pill bottles out of the reach of children.

Risk homeostasis also works in the opposite direction. In the late 1960s, Sweden changed over from driving on the left-hand side of the road to driving on the right, a switch that one would think would create an epidemic of accidents. But, in fact, the opposite was true. People compensated for their unfamiliarity with the new traffic patterns by driving more carefully. During the next twelve months, traffic fatalities dropped 17 percent before returning slowly to their previous levels. As Wilde only half-facetiously argues, countries truly interested in making their streets and highways safer should think about switching over from one side of the road to the other on a regular basis.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how risk homeostasis applies to NASA and the space shuttle. In one frequently quoted phrase, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who served on the Challenger commission, said that at NASA decision-making was “a kind of Russian roulette.” When the O-rings began to have problems and nothing happened, the agency began to believe that “the risk is no longer so high for the next flights,” Feynman said, and that “we can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time.” But fixing the O-rings doesn’t mean that this kind of risk-taking stops. There are six whole volumes of shuttle components that are deemed by NASA to be as risky as O-rings. It is entirely possible that better O-rings just give NASA the confidence to play Russian roulette with something else.

This is a depressing conclusion, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. The truth is that our stated commitment to safety, our faithful enactment of the rituals of disaster, has always masked a certain hypocrisy. We don’t really want the safest of all possible worlds. The national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit probably saved more lives than any other single government intervention of the past generation. But the fact that Congress lifted it last month with a minimum of argument proves that we would rather consume the recent safety advances of things like seat belts and air bags than save them. The same is true of the dramatic improvements that have been made in recent years in the design of aircraft and flight-navigation systems. Presumably, these innovations could be used to bring down the airline accident rate as low as possible. But that is not what consumers want. They want air travel to be cheaper, more reliable, or more convenient, and so those safety advances have been at least partly consumed by flying and landing planes in worse weather and heavier traffic conditions.

What accidents like the Challenger should teach us is that we have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life. At some point in the future – for the most mundane of reasons, and with the very best of intentions – a NASA spacecraft will again go down in flames. We should at least admit this to ourselves now. And if we cannot – if the possibility is too much to bear – then our only option is to start thinking about getting rid of things like space shuttles altogether.

January 22, 1996