••• JONATHAN LETHEM CRITICS OFTEN USE the word prolifi.docx

•••
JONATHAN LETHEM
CRITICS OFTEN USE the word prolific to describe Jonathan
Lethem. He has published
nine novels, five collections of stories, two essay volumes, a
novella, and a comic
book. But a better word for him might be protean. In the
religion of the ancient
Greeks, Proteus was a god of the sea who presided over
unexpected change, a
power that gave him the ability to alter .his shape whenever
humans tried to
compel him to foretell events. Like the mythical Proteus,
Lethem is a shape-shifter
whose work threads across boundaries of all kinds-the
boundaries between detective
:fiction, for example, and the "serious" literature of ideas. What
Lethem has written
about New York might be said to encapsulate his view of both
life and art:
To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds
squirreled
inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh
water and
steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and
whatever else
which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-
demolishing
workmen periodically wrench open. . . . We only pretend to live

on
something as orderly as a grid.
For Lethem, the writer's task is to look beneath the reassuring
surface. He
believes the truth is seldom found by stopping with the obvious
or respecting
conventions. Indeed, he sees the act of writing as fundamentally
promiscuous.
Perhaps it is not at all surprising that Lethem would have some
unexpected
ideas about what it means to be creative. Normally we think of
creativity as the
ability to say or do something completely original, but the
isolation implied by this
belief strikes Lethem as unappealing. Instead, he celebrates
what he calls the
"ecstasy of influence." If we wish, we can treat words, ideas,
and images as some-
body's private property, but we can also view them as available
for everyone to
use. Nothing, he suggests, is totally original: everything is
bound up with every-
thing else, if not on the surface, then underneath, like the "lines
of television cable
and fresh water" hidden by the "grid." Once we give up the idea
of the private
ownership of culture, writing and thinking take on a new life, as
acts of generosity
that place us in debt to everyone who .has made our creativity
possible.
Excerpt from THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE:
NONFICTIONS, ETC. by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2011
by

Jonathan Lethem. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint
of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division
ofRandom House LLC and Random House Group LTD. All
rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, out-
side of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must
apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.
Quotation comes from Michlko Kakutani, "One by One,
Narratives Reflecting Life's Mosaic," New York Times,
January 8, 2008.
231
232 JONATHAN LETHEM
Lethem's argument is powerful, and many writers, artists, and
scientists have
experienced the ecstasy he describes. But where does that leave
the writing done
in the university itself? Most universities impose harsh
penalties on plagiarists, the
people who use the words of others without attribution-that is,
without an
acknowledgment of someone's prior ownership. Indeed, your
own college or
university might expel students found guilty of cheating. Where
does cheating
start and creativity stop?
•••
The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man

dies,
one chapter is not tom out of the book, but translated into a
better
language; and every chapter must be so translated ....
-JOHN DONNE
Love and Theft
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on
the story of an
amour Jou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a
room as a lodger.
The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is
a preteen,
whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he
becomes intimate
with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator-marked by her
forever-remains
alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story:
Lolita.
The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg,
published his
tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's
novel. Lichberg
later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his
youthful works
faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until
1937, adopt
Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for
Nabokov as a hidden,
unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not
without examples of
this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is
that Nabokov,

knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that
art of quotation
that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called "higher
cribbing." Literature
has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are
continually recast. Little
of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its
predecessor; the
former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did
Nabokov consciously
borrow and quote?
"When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate
dishonesty." The
line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup,
written by Stirling
THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 233
Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to
Eli Wallach's blaz-
ing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long,
sturdy auteurist career.
Yet what were those words worth-to Siegel, or Silliphant, or
their audience--
in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan
heard it (presum-
ably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it
up a little, and
inserted it into "Absolutely Sweet Marie"? What are they worth
now, to the
culture at large?
Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music.
The songwriter
has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood

films but from
Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's
Confessions ef a Yakuza.
He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for
his 2001 album
Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general
resonance of the title, in
which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness oflove, as
they do so often in
Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie
Fiedler's Love and
Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the
literary motif of the
interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and
Jim or Ishmael
and Queequeg-a series of nested references to Dylan's own
appropriating,
minstrel-boy sel£ Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it
famously urges us not to
look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that
might otherwise have
little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of
the Confeder-
ate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest
record, Modem
Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.
The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when
one day I
went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know
the lines, I
confess, not from a college course but from the movie version
of 84, Charing
Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I
checked out 84, Char-
ing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the

Donne passage, but it
wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted
from the book,
but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was
the passage,
read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution.
Unfortunately,
the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the
Web, I found
myself searching for the line "all mankind is of one volume"
instead of"all man-
kind is of one author, and is one volume."
My Internet search was initially no more successful than my
library search. I
had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a
matter of a few
keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I
found that most
of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch
effort I searched the
seemingly more obscure phrase "every chapter must be so
translated." The pas-
sage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a
scholarly library
collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had
posted it on his
homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in
Devotions upon Emer-
gent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing
Donne ever wrote,
containing as it does the line "never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it
tolls for thee." My search had led me from a movie to a book to
a play to a
website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as

famous as they
are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.
234 JONATHAN LETHEM
Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long
time. When
I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing.
Immediately, and to
my very great excitement, I discovered one William S.
Burroughs, author of some-
thing called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating
brilliance. Burroughs
was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer.
Nothing, in all my
experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect
on my sense of
the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to
understand this impact, I
discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other
writers' texts into
his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called
plagiarism. Some of
these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction
of the Forties
and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By
then I knew
that this "cut-up method," as Burroughs called it, was central to
whatever he
thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to
be akin to
magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck
stood up, so
palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the

universe with scis-
sors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no
plagiarist at all.
Contamination Anxiety
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for
the folklorist
Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was
entitled "Coun-
try Blues," Waters described how he came to write it. "I made it
on about the
eighth of October '38," Waters said. "I was fixin' a puncture on
a car. I had been
mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my
mind and it come
to me just like that and I started singing." Then Lomax, who
knew of the
Robert Johnson recording called "Walkin' Blues," asked Waters
if there were
any other songs that used the same tune. "There's been some
blues played like
that," Waters replied. "This song comes from the cotton field
and a boy once
put a record out-Robert Johnson. He put it out as named
'Walkin' Blues.' I
heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from
Son House."
In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own
active authorship: he
"made it" on a specific date. Then the "passive" explanation: "it
come to me just
like that." After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters,
without shame,
misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by
Johnson, but that his

mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that
complex genealogy,
Waters declares that "this song comes from the cotton field."
Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind
of"open source"
culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger
musical frameworks
are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the
possibilities; musicians
have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than
simply approxi-
mate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby
and Lee
"Scratch" Perry deconstructed recorded music, using
astonishingly primitive
pre-digital hardware, creating what they called "versions." The
recombinant
nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in
New York and
London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and
fundamentally social process
generates countless hours of music.
Visual, sound, and text collage-which for many centuries were
relatively
fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)-became
explosively cen-
tral to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism,
cubism, Dada,
rnusique concrete, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism.
In fact, collage,
the common denominator in that list, might be called the art
form of the twen-

tieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the
moment, chronol-
ogies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate-Igor
Stravinsky's
music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and
Henry Darger's, the
novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author
who pillaged
Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as
well as cherished
texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery
of their "plagia-
rized" elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther
King Jr.'s
sermons-it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry,
quotation, allusion,
and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non
of the creative act,
cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural
production.
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered
into the tele-
vision canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated
characters Itchy
and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the
very nature of
cartoons. "Animation is built on plagiarism!" declares the
show's hot-tempered
cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. "You take
away our right
to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?" If nostalgic
cartoonists had
never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren &
Stimpy Show;
without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials,

there would
be no South Park; and without The Flintstones-more or less The
Honeymooners
in cartoon loincloths-The Simpsons would cease to exist. If
those don't strike
you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of
"plagiarisms" that
links Ovid's "Pyramus and Thisbe" with Shakespeare's Romeo
and Juliet and
Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's
description of Cleopatra,
copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and
also later nicked
by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of
plagiarism, then we
want more plagiarism.
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own
nascent gifts are
awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists
are converted to
art by art itsel£ Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and
purifying oneself
of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of
filiations, communities,
and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory
of an act never
experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not
consist in creating
out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no
matter how
deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer
look at The
Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot's poem

is a vertiginous
melange of quotation, allusion, and "original" writing. When
Eliot alludes to
Edmund Spenser's "Prothalarnion" with the line "Sweet Thames,
run softly, till
I end my song," what of readers to whom the poem, never one
of Spenser's
most popular, is unfumiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known
largely because
of Eliot's use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line
to Eliot, or later
236 JONATHAN LETHEM
discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot
evidenced no
small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully
added to The Waste
Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination
anxiety. Taken
from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except
modernism without the
anxiety?
Surrounded by Signs
The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a
certain but unspecifi-
able intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility.
They meant to
reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once
again into close con-
tact with the matter that made up their world. Andre Breton's
maxim ''Beautiful

as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella
on an operating
table" is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects
in an unexpected
context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.
This "crisis" the surrealists identified was being simultaneously
diagnosed by
others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was
found in a cer-
tain technological orientation he called "enframing." This
tendency encourages
us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can
serve us or be
used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate
ourselves vis-a-vis
these "objects," so that we may see them as "things" pulled into
relief against the
ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had
the great potential
to reveal the "thingness" of objects.
The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could
carry out this
reanimating process automatically; the process of framing
objects in a lens was
often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the
effect, Walter
Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic
apparatus and Freud's
psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories "isolated and
made analyzable
things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the
broad stream of per-
ception," the photographic apparatus focuses on "hidden details
of familiar

objects," revealing "entirely new structural formations of the
subject."
It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography
a series of
judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that
art: courts were
asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional,
required permission
before he could capture and print an image. Was the
photographer stealing
from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating
something of
private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in
favor of the pirates.
Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's
Steamboat Bill,
Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the
photographer should
be free to capture an image without compensating the source.
The world that
meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be,
with minor excep-
tions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.
Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we
sometimes get
called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-
TV, the mimetic
deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic
and at worst a
dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by
dating it out of the

Platonic Always, where_ it ought to reside. In a graduate
workshop I briefly
passed through, a certam gray eminence tried to convince us
that a literary
story should always eschew "any feature which serves to date
it" because "serious
:fiction must be Timeless." When we protested that, in his own
well-known
work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars,
and spoke not
Anglo-Saxon but postwar English-and further, that fiction he'd
himself ratified
as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately
topical, commercial,
and timebound references-he impatiently amended his
proscription to those
explicit references. that would date a story in the "frivolous
Now." When
pressed, he said of course he meant the "trendy mass-popular-
media" reference.
Here, trans-generational discourse broke down.
I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo,
moon landings,
zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A *S*H, and The Mary
Tyler Moore
Show. I was born with words in my mouth-"Band-Aid," "Q-tip,"
"Xerox"-object-names as :fixed and eternal in my logosphere as
"taxicab" and
"toothbrush." The world is a home littered with pop-culture
products and their
emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for
originals yet
mysterious to me-I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo
before Bogart,
and "remember" the movie Summer ef '42 from a Mad magazine

satire, though
I've still never seen the :film itsel£ I'm not alone in having been
born backward
into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the
commercial and cul-
tural environment with which we've both supplemented and
blotted out our
natural world. I can no more claim it as "mine" than the
sidewalks and forests
of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance
as either artist or
citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.
Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in
their
lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the
summer night
one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a
sweet.
and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a
girl in
Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember
is the
time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was
falling to
the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found
Orson
Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while
listening to reggae
and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall-
i.e., when damn
near everything presents itself as familiar-it's not a surprise that

some of today's
most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar
strange. In so doing,
in reirnagining what human life might truly be like over there
across the chasms
of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and
appearance, artists are
paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three
whole dimensions
to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams
of flat sights. '
Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be
attached to the
artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we
swim, the
alternative-to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of
irrelevance-is far
worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore
none of them.
238 JONATHAN LETHEM
Usemonopoly
The idea that culture can be property-intellectual property-is
used to justify
everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay
royalties for singing
songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the
estate of Margaret
Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind
Done Gone. C~rpora-
tions like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human

genes, while the
Recording Industry Association of America has sued music
downloaders for co~y-
right infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for
thousands of dollars with
defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop
owners who play
background music in their stores; students and scholars _are
shame~ fro~ placing
texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same tune,
copynght 1s revered
by most established writers and artists as a birthright ~nd
bulwark, the_ s~urce of
nurture for their iniini.tely fragile practices in a rapaaous world.
Plagiansm and
piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught
to drea~, as they
roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and
remuneration.
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as
by ideas that
are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon w~t
needs no_ defens:.
In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction
of copynght. I~ is
taken as a law both in the sense of a universally recognizable
moral absolute, like
the law ag~t murder, and as naturally inherent in our ':orld, ~e
the l_a':' of
gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is_~ ongom~
soaal _negotiation,
tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect m its every
mca~tion.
Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary

evil: he favo~ed
providing just enough incentive to create, not~g more, :md
thereafter _allowing
ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception o~
cop~ght was
enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the
authonty to promote
the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securin~ for ~ted
Times _to Au~o~
and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Wntmgs
and D1scovenes.
This was a balancing act between creators and society as a
w~~le; ~econd comers
might do a much better job than the originator ~th the ongmal
1~ea.
But Jefferson's vision has not fared well, has m fact been
steadily eroded by
those who view the culture as a market in which everything of
value should be
owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modem
American c~py-
right law is its almost limitless bloating-its expansio~ in both.
scope ~d du:ation.
With no registration requirement, every creative act m a
tangible medi1:11111s now
subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your
child's ~er
painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to
grant copynght
gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which ~ould b~
renewed for another
fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is tlie life of
the author plus
seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to sa~ tliat ~ch
time Iv.lickey Mouse

is about to fall into tlie public domain, the mouse s copynght
t:rrn 1s ex_tended.
Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology 1s
exposmg those
restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on
reproduction as the
compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn't because there was
anything ~nda-
mentally invasive of an autlior's rights in the making of a copy.
Rather it was
because copies were once easy to find and count, so tliey made
a useful bench-
mark for deciding when an owner's rights had been invaded. In
the contempo-
rary world, though, the act of "copying" is in no meaningful
sense equivalent to
an infringement-we make a copy every time we accept an
emailed text, or
send or forward one--and is impossible anymore to regulate or
even describe.
At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded
by a dire
trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion
Picture Association
of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a
Hollywood film is
compared to the theft of a car or a handbag-and, as tlie bullying
supertitles
remind us, "You wouldn't steal a handbag!" This conflation
forms an incitement
to quit tliinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or

downloading music
is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own
arguments would
be as ethically bankrupt as the MP AA's. The truth lies
somewhere in the vast
gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a
handbag, once
stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the
appropriation of an article of
"intellectual property" leaves tlie original untouched. As
Jefferson wrote, "He
who receives an idea from me, receives iristruction himself
without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
darkening me."
Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating
but from distrib-
uting, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll
publishers fear the
record comparries, who fear tlie cassette-tape manufacturers,
who fear the online
vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most
quickly from the intan-
gible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has
been the same in
every industry and witli every technological irmovation. Jack
Valenti, speaking for
the MPAA: "I say to you tliat the VCR is to tlie American film
producer and tlie
American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home
alone."
Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language.
The word
"copyright" may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded

purposes as "family
values," "globalization," and, sure, "intellectual property."
Copyright is a "right"
in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on
the use of creative
results. So let's try calling it that-not a right but a monopoly on
use, a
"usemonopoly"-and then consider how the rapacious …
Grading Rubric for MUS 81A Written Work
Criteria Excellent
Above
Average
Average
Below
Average
Failing
Format:
10 points
possible
10 points 8 points 5 points 2 points 0 points
Name on paper
Required length
Name in file name
Sent as required
Follows specified format
with intro, body &

conclusion
Neat appearance
Proper citations and
Documentation
(Works Cited or
Bibliography)
Missed one of
the formatting
requirements
Missed two of
the formatting
requirements
Missed three or
four of the
formatting
requirements
Did not follow
format
directions.
No name on
paper
No name in file
Content:
80 points
possible
The focus is on

specific topics or
items presented in
the class or
assignment(s).
The introduction is a
short overview that
hits the high points of
what you intend to
say.
The body is a focused,
clear, well organized
discussion with
supporting examples.
Your conclusion
summarizes the
points you made.
The essay lacks
focus,
specificity, or
clarity.
The essay could
use some
improvement in
organization or
depth of
discussion.

The examples
are adequate
but do not
strongly
support the
points you are
making.
Perhaps more
examples or
more specific
examples
would help.
The intro and
conclusion
follow the
guidelines.
The essay lacks
focus,
specificity, or
clarity.
The discussion
is not well
organized.
The examples
may not
support the
points you are
making.
The intro
and/or the
conclusion are

weak.
The essay lacks
focus,
specificity, or
clarity.
There is little
discussion of
specific topics.
The paper is
not well
organized.
There are few,
if any, examples
of how the
topics relate to
you personally.
The intro &
conclusion are
very weak.
The document
does not focus
on specific
topics or items
presented in
the class.
The
introduction is

absent.
The discussion,
if any, does not
relate to the
assignment.
The conclusion
(summary of
your points) is
absent.
Grading Rubric for MUS 81A Written Work
Grammar,
Spelling
and
Punctuation:
10 points
possible
No errors:
§ complete
sentences, no
fragments

§ no run-on
sentences
§ subject and verb
agreement
§ present/past tense
consistent
§ no spelling errors
§ appropriate use of
all punctuation,
especially
apostrophes
§ proper paragraphs
Few (2-3)
grammar, spelling
& punctuation
errors:
§ complete
and easily
understood
sentences

§ few
punctuation
errors
§ easy to read
Several (4-8)
grammatical,
spelling or
punctuation
errors:
§ misspellings
or typos
§ occasional,
(often
repeating)
grammatical
errors
§ not easy to
read

§ occasional
punctuation
errors
Many errors
(8-10)
§ grammatical
errors
§ spelling
errors and
typos
§ errors in
punctuation
§ incomplete
or run-on
sentences
§ improper
use of tense
Filled with errors:

§ incomplete
sentences,
difficult to
follow, riddled
with
grammatical
errors
§ filled with
spelling errors
and typos
§ obviously not
proofread nor
spellchecked
§ misuse of
punctuation –
especially
capitalization
and
apostrophes.
Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at
Harvard University

Nappy Happy
Author(s): Ice Cube and Angela Y. Davis
Source: Transition, No. 58 (1992), pp. 174-192
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the
Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research at Harvard University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2934976
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T R A N S I T I ON Conversation
NAPPY HAPPY
A Conversation with Ice Cube and Angela Y. Davis.
You may love him or loathe him, but
you have to take him seriously. O'Shea
Jackson-better known by his nom de mi-
crophone, Ice Cube-may be the most
successful "hardcore" rap artist in the re-
cording industry. And his influence as a
trendsetter in black youth culture is un-
rivaled. According to some academic
analysts, Ice Cube qualifies as an "or-
ganic intellectual" (in Antonio Gramsci's
famous phrase): someone organically
connected to the community he would
uplift.
He is, at the same time, an American
success story. It was as a member of the
Compton-based rap group NWA that he
first came to prominence in 1988 at the

age of 18. Less than two years later, he
left the group over a dispute about
money, and went solo. Amerikkka's Most
Wanted, his gritty debut album, went
platinum-and the rest is recording his-
tory.
Ice Cube is also a multimedia phe-
nomenon. Artless, powerful perfor-
mances in films by John Singleton and
Walter Hill have established him as a
commanding screen presence. That,
combined with his streetwise credibility,
has been a boon for St. Ides malt liquor,
which has paid generously for his ongo-
ing "celebrity endorsement." Naturally,
it's a relationship that has aroused some
skepticism. While Public Enemy's
Chuck D, for example, has inveighed
against an industry that exacts a tragic
toll in America's inner cities, even suing
a malt liquor company that used one of
his cuts to promote its product, Ice Cube

defends his role in touting booze in the
'hood-even though, having joined the
Nation of Islam, he says he's now a tee-
totaller. "I do what I want to do," he says
of his malt liquor ads.
Some of his other celebrity endorse-
ments have raised eyebrows as well. For
example, at the end of a press conference
last year, Ice Cube held up a copy of a
book entitled The Secret Relationship Be-
tween Blacks and Jews, which purports to
reveal the "massive" and "inordinate"
role of the Jews in a genocidal campaign
against blacks. "Try to find this book,"
he exhorted, "everybody."
But then Ice Cube is no stranger to
controversy, and his second album Death
Certificate has certainly not been without
its critics. The album, which has sold

174 TRANSITION ISSUE 58
2017 18:36:33 UTC
over a million copies, delivers a strong
message of uplift and affirmation . . .
unless you happen to be female, Asian,
Jewish, gay, white, black, whatever.
So, for instance, in the song "No Va-
seline," Ice Cube calls for the death of
Jerry Heller, his former manager, and
imagines torching NWA rapper Eazy-E
for having "let a Jew break up your
crew." In "Horny Lil' Devil," Cube
speaks of castrating white men who go
out with black women. ("True Niggers
ain't gay," he advises in the course of this
cut.) In "Black Korea," he warns Korean
grocers to "pay respect to the black fist,
or we'll burn your store down to a
crisp." You get the picture. Not exactly

"It's a Small World After All."
Still, Ice Cube's champions-and
stalwart defenders-are legion. "I have
seen the future of American culture and
he's wearing a Raiders hat," proclaimed
the music criticJames Bernard. "Cube's
album isn't about racial hatred," opined
Dane L. Webb, then executive editor of
Larry Flynt's Rappages. "It's about have-
nots pointing fingers at those who have.
And the reality for most Black people is
that the few that have in our communities
are mostly Asian or Jewish. And when a
Black man tells the truth about their
oppressive brand of democracy in our
community, they 'Shut 'Em Down.'"
"When Ice Cube says that NWA is con-
trolled by a Jew," Chuck D protested,
"how is that anti-Semitism, when Heller
is a Jew?" The journalist Scott Poulson-
Bryant pointedly observed that most of
Cube's critics are unconcerned when he
advocates hatred and violence toward

NAPPY HAPPY 175
Angela Y. Davis
and Ice Cube
(O'Shea Jackson)
Courtesy Set To Run
2017 18:36:33 UTC
other blacks. "All the cries of Ice Cube's
racism, then, seem dreadfully racist
themselves," he argued. "Dismissing the
context of Death Certificate's name-
calling and venom, critics assume a
police-like stance and fire away from be-
hind the smoke screen."
Not all black intellectuals have been as
charitable. Thus Manning Marable, the
radical scholar and commentator, ques-
tions the rap artist's "political maturity
and insight" and insists that "people

of color must transcend the terrible ten-
dency to blame each other, to empha-
size their differences, to trash one
another. ... A truly multicultural de-
mocracy which empowers people of
color will never be won if we tolerate
bigotry with our own ranks, and turn
our energies to undermine each other."
And what of the legendary Angela Y.
Davis? In some ways, hers, too, was an
American success story, but with a twist.
Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis
went on to graduate magna cum laude
from Brandeis University and work on
her doctorate under Herbert Marcuse at
the University of California, San Diego,
and teach philosophy at the University of
California, Los Angeles. In a few short
years, however, her political commit-
ments made her a casualty of the gov-
ernment's war against black radicalism:

the philosopher was turned into a fugi-
tive from justice. In 1970, by the age of
twenty-six, she had made the FBI's Ten
Most Wanted List (which described her
as "armed and dangerous") and appeared
on the cover of Newsweek-in chains.
Now a professor in the History of
Consciousness program at the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Cruz, Davis has
made her mark as a social theorist, elab-
orating her views on the need for a trans-
racial politics of alliance and transfor-
mation in two widely cited collections
of essays, Women, Race, & Class and
Women, Culture, & Politics. Cautioning
against the narrow-gauged black nation-
alism of the street, Davis is wont to decry
anti-Semitism and homophobia in the
same breath as racism. "We do not draw
the color line," she writes in her latest
book. "The only line we draw is one
based on our political principles."

So the encounter between them-a
two hour conversation held at Street
Knowledge, Cube's company offices-
was an encounter between two different
perspectives, two different activist tradi-
tions, and, of course, two different gen-
erations. While Davis's background has
disposed her to seek common ground
with others, these differences may have
been both constraining and productive.
Davis notes with misgivings that Death
Certificate was not released until after the
conversation was recorded, so that she
did not have the opportunity to listen to
more than a few songs. She writes:
"Considering the extremely problematic
content of 'Black Korea,' I regret that I
was then unaware of its inclusion on the
album. My current political work in-
volves the negotiation of cross-cultural
alliances-especially among people of

color-in developing opposition to hate
violence. Had I been aware of this song,
it would have certainly provided a the-
matic focus for a number of questions
that unfortunately remain unexplored in
this conversation."
Angela Y. Davis: I want to begin by
acknowledging our very different posi-
tions. We represent different generations
2017 18:36:33 UTC
and genders: you are a young man and I
am a mature woman. But I also want to
acknowledge our affinities. We are both
African Americans, who share a cultural
tradition as well as a passionate concern
for our people. So, in exploring our dif-
ferences in the course of this conversa-
tion, I hope we will discover common
ground. Now, I am of the same gener-

ation as your mother. Hip-hop culture is
a product of the younger generation of
sisters and brothers in our community. I
am curious about your attitude toward
the older generation. How do you and
your peers see us?
Ice Cube: When I look at older people,
I don't think they feel that they can learn
from the younger generation. I try and
tell my mother things that she just
doesn't want to hear sometimes. She is so
used to being a certain way: she's from
the South and grew up at a time when the
South was a very dangerous place. I was
born in Los Angeles in 1969. When I
started school, it was totally different
from when she went to school. What she
learned was totally different from what I
learned.
AYD: I find that many of the friends I
have in my own age group are not very

receptive to the culture of the younger
generation. Some of them who have
looked at my CDs have been surprised to
see my collection of rap music. Invari-
ably, they ask, "Do you really listen to
that?" I remind them that our mothers
and fathers probably felt the same way
about the music we listened to when we
were younger. If we are not willing to
attempt to learn about youth culture,
communication between generations
will be as difficult as it has always been.
We need to listen to what you are
saying-as hard as it may be to hear it.
And believe me, sometimes what I hear
in your music thoroughly assaults my
ears. It makes me feel as if much of the
work we have done over the last decades
to change our self-representations as Af-
rican Americans means little or nothing
to so many people in your generation. At

the same time, it is exhilarating to hear
your appeal to young people to stand up
and to be proud of who they are, who we
are. But where do you think we are right
now, in the 1990s? Do you think that
each generation starts where the preced-
ing one left off?
The war against gangs is
a war against our kids
IC: Of course. We're at a point when we
can hear people like the L.A. police chief
on TV saying we've got to have a war on
gangs. I see a lot of black parents clap-
ping and saying: Oh yes, we have to have
a war on gangs. But when young men
with baseball caps and T-shirts are con-
sidered gangs, what these parents are do-
ing is clapping for a war against their
children. When people talk about a war

on gangs, they ain't going to North of
Pico or Beverly Hills. They are going to
come to South Central L. A. They are go-
ing to go to Watts, to Long Beach, to
Compton. They are going to East Oak-
land, to Brooklyn. That war against
gangs is a war against our kids. So the
media, the news, have more influence on
our parents than we in the community.
The parents might stay in the house all
day. They go back and forth to work.
NAPPY HAPPY 177
2017 18:36:33 UTC
They barely know anybody. The gang
members know everybody up and down
the street.
AYD: During the late sixties, when I
lived in Los Angeles, my parents were
utterly opposed to my decision to be-

come active in the Black Panther Party
and in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Co-
ordinating Committee]. They were an-
gry at me for associating myself with
what was called "black militancy" even
though they situated themselves in a pro-
gressive tradition. In the thirties, my
mother was active in the campaign on
behalf of the Scottsboro Nine-you
know about the nine brothers who were
falsely charged with raping three white
women in Scottsboro, Alabama. They
spent almost all of their lives in prison.
My mother was involved in that cam-
paign, confronting racism in a way that
makes me feel scared today. But when
she saw me doing something similar to
what she had done in her youth, she be-
came frightened. Now she understands
that what I did was important. But at the

time she couldn't see it. I wish that when
I was in my twenties, I had taken the ini-
tiative to try and communicate with my
mother, so that I could have discovered
that bridging the great divide between us
was a similar passion toward political ac-
tivism. I wish I had tried to understand
that she had shaped my own desire to
actively intervene in the politics of rac-
ism. It took me many years to realize that
in many ways I was just following in her
footsteps. Which brings me to some ob-
servations about black youth today and
the respect that is conveyed in the pop-
ular musical culture for those who came
before-for Malcolm, for example.
What about the parents of the young
people who listen to your music? How
do you relate to them?
IC: Well, the parents have to have open
minds. The parents have to build a bond,

a relationship with their kids, so Ice Cube
doesn't have control of their kid. They
do. Ice Cube is not raising their kid.
They are.
AYD: But you are trying to educate
them.
IC: Of course. Because the school sys-
tem won't do it. Rap music is our net-
work. It's the only way we can talk to
each other, almost uncensored.
AYD: So what are you talking to each
other about?
IC: Everybody has a different way. My
first approach was holding up the mir-
ror. Once you hold up a mirror, you see
yourself for who you are, and you see the
things going on in the black community.
Hopefully, it scares them so much that
they are going to want to make a change,
or it's going to provoke some thought in
that direction.

AYD: Am I correct in thinking that
when you tell them, through your mu-
sic, what is happening in the commu-
nity, you play various roles, you become
different characters? The reason I ask this
question is because many people assume
that when you are rapping, your words
reflect your own beliefs and values. For
example, when you talk about "bitches"
and "hoes," the assumption is that you
believe women are bitches and hoes. Are
you saying that this is the accepted lan-
guage in some circles in the community?
2017 18:36:33 UTC
That this is the vocabulary that young
people use and you want them to observe
themselves in such a way that may also

cause them to think about changing their
attitudes?
IC: Of course. People who say Ice Cube
thinks all women are bitches and hoes are
not listening to the lyrics. They ain't lis-
tening to the situations. They really are
not. I don't think they really get past the
profanity. Parents say, "Uh-oh, I can't
hear this," but we learned it from our
parents, from the TV. This isn't some-
thing new that just popped up.
AYD: What do you think about all the
efforts over the years to transform the
language we use to refer to ourselves as
black people and specifically as black
women? I remember when we began to
eliminate the word "Negro" from our
vocabulary. It felt like a personal victory
for me when that word became obsolete.
As a child I used to cringe every time
someone referred to me as a "Negro,"
whether it was a white person or another

"Negro." I didn't know then why it
made me feel so uncomfortable, but later
I realized that "Negro" was virtually
synonymous with the word "slave." I
had been reacting to the fact that every-
where I turned I was being called a slave.
White people called me a slave, black
people called me a slave, and I called my-
self a slave. Although the word "Negro"
is Spanish for the color black, its usage in
English has always implied racial inferi-
ority.
When we began to rehabilitate the
word "black" during the mid-sixties,
coining the slogan "Black is beautiful,"
calling ourselves black in a positive and
self-affirming way, we also began to crit-
icize the way we had grown accustomed
to using the word "nigger." "Negro"
was just a proper way of saying "nig-
ger." An important moment in the pop-
ular culture of the seventies was when

Richard Prior announced that he was
eliminating "nigger" from his vocabu-
lary.
How do you think progressive Afri-
can Americans of my generation feel
when we hear all over again-especially
in hip hop culture- "nigger, nigger, nig-
ger"? How do you think black feminists
like myself and younger women as well
respond to the word "bitch"?
IC: The language of the streets is the only
language I can use to communicate with
the streets. You have to build people up.
You have to get under them and then lift.
You know all of this pulling from on top
ain't working. So we have to take the
language of the streets, tell the kids about
the situation, tell them what's really go-
ing on. Because some kids are blind to
what they are doing, to their own ac-

tions. Take a football player-a quarter-
back. He's on the field, right in the ac-
We have a lot of people
out there just looking to get
paid. I'm looking to earn,
but I'm not looking to
get paid
tion. But he still can't see what's going
on. He's got to call up to somebody that
has a larger perspective. It's the same
thing I'm doing. It's all an evolution pro-
cess. It's going to take time. Nothing's
going to be done overnight. But once we
start waking them up, opening their
eyes, then we can start putting some-
NAPPY HAPPY 179
2017 18:36:33 UTC
thing in there. If you start putting some-

thing in there while their eyes are closed,
that ain't doing no good.
AYD: Your first solo album, Ameri-
kkka's Most Wanted, went gold in ten days
without any assistance from the radio
and the normal network, and went plat-
inum in three months. Why do you think
young sisters and brothers are so drawn
to your voice, your rap, your message?
IC: The truth. We get a lot of brothers
who talk to a lot of people. But they ain't
saying nothing. Here's a brother who's
saying something- who won't sell him-
self out. Knowing that he won't sell him-
self out, you know he won't sell you out.
We have a brother who ain't looking to
get paid. I'm looking to earn, but I'm not
looking to get paid. You have a lot of

people out there just looking to get paid.
We've got a lot of people in the position
of doing music, and all they want to talk
about is "baby don't go, I love you,"
"please come back to me," and "don't
worry, be happy."
AYD: What's the difference between
what you tried to do on Amerikkka's Most
Wanted and on Death Certificate?
IC: Well in Amerikkka's Most Wanted, I
was still blind to the facts. I knew a few
things, but I didn't know what I know
now. I've grown as a person. When I
grow as a person, I grow as an artist. I
think that this new album, Death Certif-
icate, is just a step forward.
AYD: Perhaps you can say how this al-
bum is evidence of your own growth and
development in comparison to Ameri-
kkka's Most Wanted.

IC: I think I have more knowledge of
self. I am a little wiser than I was. In
Amerikkka's Most Wanted, even though it
was a good album-it was one of the best
albums of the year-I was going through
a lot of pressure personally. With this
new album, Death Certificate, I can look
at everything, without any personal
problems getting in the way. It's all
about the music.
AYD: I am interested in what you've
said about the difference between side A
and side B.
IC: Death Certificate is side A. Most peo-
ple liken it to "gangster rap." "Reality
rap" is what it is. Side A starts off with
a funeral, because black people are men-
tally dead. It's all about getting that
across in the music. A lot of people like
the first side. It's got all that you would
expect. At the end of the first side, the

death side, I explain that people like the
first side because we're mentally dead.
That's what we want to hear now. We
don't love ourselves, so that's the type of
music we want to hear. The B side-
which is the life side-starts off with a
birth and is about a consciousness of
where we need to be, how we need to
look at other people, how we need to
look at ourselves and reevaluate our-
selves.
AYD: Let's talk about "party politics."
When kids are partying to your music,
they are also being influenced by it, even
though they may not be consciously fo-
cusing on what they need to change in
their lives.
IC: I wouldn't say my music is party mu-
sic. Some of the music is "danceable."

2017 18:36:33 UTC
But a lot of it is something that you put
on in your Walkman and listen to.
AYD: But what kind of mood does it
put you in? Isn't it the rhythm, the beat
that captures you, that makes you feel
good?
IC: You should feel good when you
learn it.
AYD: I have talked to many of my
young friends who listen to you and say,
"This brother can rap!" They are really
impressed by your music, but they
sometimes feel embarrassed that they
unthinkingly follow the lyrics and some-
times find themselves saying things that
challenge their political sensibilities. Like
using the word "bitch," for example.
Which means that it is the music that is
foregrounded and the lyrics become sec-

ondary. This makes me wonder whether
the message you are conveying some-
times escapes the people that you are try-
ing to reach.
IC: Well, of course it's not going to reach
everybody in the same way. Maybe the
people that are getting it can tell the
brother or the sister that ain't getting it.
I think what my man's trying to say here
is called breakdown. You know what I'm
saying? Once you have knowledge, it is
just in your nature to give it up.
AYD: I took your video-"Dead
Homies"-to the San Francisco County
Jail and screened it for the sisters there
who recently had been involved in a se-
ries of fights among themselves in the
dorm. They had been fighting over who
gets to use the telephone, the micro-
wave, and things like that. The guards

had constantly intervened-they come in
at the slightest pretext, even when some-
body raises their voice. Your video, your
song about young people killing each
other, provided a basis for a wonderful,
enlightening conversation among the
women in the jail. They began to look at
themselves and the antagonisms among
them in a way that provoked them to
think about changing their attitudes.
IC: Let me tell you something. What we
have is kids looking at television, hearing
the so-called leaders in this capitalist
system saying: It's not all right to be
poor-if you're poor you're nothing-
get more. And they say to the women:
You got to have your hair this way, your
eyes got to be this way. You got to have
this kind of purse or that kind of shoes.
There are the brothers who want the
women. And the women have the atti-

tude of "that's what we want." I call
it the "white hype." What you have
is black people wanting to be like
white people, not realizing that white
people want to be like black people. So
the best thing to do is to eliminate that
type of thinking. You need black men
who are not looking up to the white
man, who are not trying to be like the
white man.
AYD: What about the women? You
keep talking about black men. I'd like to
hear you say: black men and black
women.
IC: Black people.
AYD: I think that you often exclude
your sisters from your thought process.
We're never going to get anywhere if
we're not together.
NAPPY HAPPY 181
2017 18:36:33 UTC

IC: Of course. But the black man is
down.
AYD: The black woman's down too.
IC: But the black woman can't look up
to the black man until we get up.
AYD: Well why should the black
woman look up to the black man? Why
can't we look at each other as equals?
IC: If we look at each other on an equal
level, what you're going to have is a di-
vide.
AYD: As I told you, I teach at the San
Francisco County Jail. Many of the
women there have been arrested in con-
nection with drugs. But they are invis-
ible to most people. People talk about the
drug problem without mentioning the
fact that the majority of crack users in our
community are women. So when we
talk about progress in the community,
we have to talk about the sisters as well

as the brothers.
IC: The sisters have held up the com-
munity.
AYD: When you refer to "the black
man," I would like to hear something ex-
plicit about black women. That will con-
vince me that you are thinking about
your sisters as well as your brothers.
IC: I think about everybody.
AYD: We should be able to speak for
each other. The young sister has to be
capable of talking about what's happen-
ing to black men-the fact that they are
dying, they're in prison; they are as en-
dangered as the young female half of our
community. As a woman I feel a deep
responsibility to stand with my brothers
and to do whatever I can to halt that vi-
cious cycle. But I also want the brothers
to become conscious of what's happen-
ing to the sisters and to stand with them
and to speak out for them.

IC: We can't speak up for the sisters until
we can speak up for ourselves.
AYD: Suppose I say you can't speak up
for yourselves until you can also speak up
for the sisters. As a black woman I don't
think I can speak up for myself as a
woman unless I can speak up for my
brothers as well. If we are talking about
an entire community rising out of pov-
erty and racism, men will have to learn
how to challenge sexism and to fight on
behalf of women.
IC: Of course.
AYD: In this context, let's go back to
your first album. I know that most
women-particularly those who identify
with feminism or with women's move-
ments-ask you about "You Can't Faze
Me." Having been involved myself with
the struggle for women's reproductive
rights, my first response to this song was
one of deep hurt. It trivializes something

that is extremely serious. It grabs people
in a really deep place. How many black
women died on the desks of back alley
abortionists when abortion was illegal
before 1973? Isn't it true that the same
ultraright forces who attack the rights
of people of color today are also calling
for the criminalization of abortion?
2017 18:36:33 UTC
Women should have the right to exercise
some control over what happens to our
bodies.
AYD: What do you think about the
"don't do drugs" message you hear over
and over again in rap music? Do you
think that it's having any effect on …

, ...
FRANKLIN FOER
FRANKLIN FOER (RHYMES WITH "LORE") is a writer long
associated with the liberal
magazine the New Republic, which was founded in 1914 by
leaders of the Pro-
gressive movement. Impatient with the mainstream media,
which these leaders
saw as controlled by moneyed interests, they were hoping to
create an indepen-
dent journal of ideas. Since then, the New Republic has seen its
ups and downs,
but the near-collapse of the magazine during Foer's second stint
as editor exposes
the stubborn persistence of the problem it was founded to
address: the survival of
independent media in a highly unequal society like ours. In
1914, the elite owed
their towering wealth to railroads, coal mines and oil wells;
today they control
the Internet and the "attention economy."
Foer was a casualty and not the cause of the magazine's decline.
After a term
as editor, he left to pursue other projects when he was lured
back to the editor's
post by Chris Hughes, then a boyish 28-year-old lucky enough
to have shared a
room with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg when the two
were students at
Harvard. As part of the original Facebook team, Hughes later
sold his interest in
the platform for an amount purportedly in excess of700 million
dollars. And that
enormous wealth encouraged him to think that he could reshape

the nation's
cultural life in the ways he thought best. One of his first moves
was to buy the
New Republic, a respected but financially strapped print
magazine.
At first, the New Republic's journalists welcomed Hughes as a
white knight
who had arrived in the nick of time to save them from the
problems created by
the shift away from print to the Internet. They interpreted the
return of Foer as a
sign of Hughes' commitment to serious, hard-hitting analysis.
But gradually the
writers at the magazine realized that their owner had something
else in mind, as
Sarah Ellison reports in Vanity Fair, another mass-market
periodical:
Over time, one of the big :flash points that developed between
Hughes
and his New Republic writers was their productivity. What that
some-
times meant-despite Hughes's stated contempt for "superficial
metrics
of online virality"-was productivity measured in Web traffic ....
The
site's traffic did indeed double, but never got beyond that. "It
was not
just about traffic," another former staffer told me. "It was.
really about
[Hughes] kind of feeling, 'These writers are taking my money,
and
they're coasting. They're sitting around in their office,
intellectually
masturbating, while I'm paying them."'

"Mark Zuckerberg's War on Free Will" from A WORLD
WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF
BIG TECH by Franklin Foer, copyright© 2017 by Franklin
Foer. Used by permission of Pengwn Books, Ltd.
102
FRANKLIN FOER 103
In the editorial offices of the New Republic, the older culture of
ideas collided with
the new culture of information. If ideas are measured by their
quality, iriformation
can be quantified in metrics like "visits," "page views," and
"downloads." Deter-
mined to increase the :flow of traffic to the New Republic's
online site, Hughes
eventually fired Foer, whose exit inspired two thitds the staff to
resign in protest.
Just prior to Hughes' purchase of the magazine, sales had more
than doubled,
but on his watch, newsstand sales declined by 57% in 2013 and
by another 20%
in 2014. Today, the magazine limps along, a shadow of its
former sel£ Hughes
abandoned it in 20i6, after deciding to devote his energies to
venture capital.
Franklin Foer continues to write for some of the best magazines
in the coun-
try, most recently the Atlantic. His latest book, World Without
Mind: The Existential
Threat ef Big Tech (2017) tries to come to terms with dangers
presented by the

cultural clash that all but destroyed his magazine, and, quite
possibly, many others
in the years to come.
REFERENCES
Sarah Ellison, "The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris
Hughes and Sean Eldridge."
Vanity Fair July 2014. https:/
/www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/chris-hughes-
sean-eldridge-new-republic-congress-run
Katerina Eva Matsa and Michael Barthal, "The New Republic
and the State of Niche
News Magazines." Pew Research Center. FACTANK: News in
the Numbers.
10 December 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank:/2014/12/10/the-new-
republic-and-the.,.state-of-niche-news-magazines/
• ••
Mark Zuckerberg's War
on Free Will
Silicon valley graduated from the counterculture, but not really.
All the values it
professes are the values of the sixties. The big tech companies
present themselves
as platforms- for personal liberation, just as Stewart Brand
preached. Everyone
has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their
intellectual and
democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where
television had been
a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is

participatory and
empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for
themselves, and form their
own opinions.
We can't entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the
world, even
in the United States, where Facebook emboldens citizens and
enables them to
organize themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn't
accept Facebook's
self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully
managed top-down
system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the
patterns of conversation,
104 FRANKLIN FOER
but that's a surface trail. In reality, Face book is a tangle of
rules and procedures
for sorting .information, rules devised by the corporation for the
ultimate benefit
of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always
auditing them,
using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. Wbile it
creates the impres-
sion that it offers choice, Facebook patemalistically nudges
users in the direction
it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction
that thoroughly
addicts them. It's a phoniness most obvious in the compressed,
historic career of
Facebook's mastermind.

Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or
maybe just a little bit
naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original
hackers. Let's be precise
about the term. His idols weren't malevolent data thieves or
cyber-terrorists. In the
parlance of hacker culture, such ill-willed outlaws are known as
crackers. Zuck-
erberg never put crackers on a pedestal Still, his hacker heroes
were disrespectful
of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely
resourceful nerd cowboys,
unbound by conventional thinking. In MIT's labs, during the
sixties and seven-
ties, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff
of early computing,
such marvels as the .first video games and word processors.
With their free time,
they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further
attention to their own
cleverness-installing a living, breathing cow on the roof of a
Cambridge dorm;
launching a weather balloon, which miraculously emerged from
beneath the turf,
emblazoned with "MIT," in the middle of a Harvard-Yale
football game.
The hackers' archenemies were the bureaucrats who ran
universities, corpo-
rations, and governments. Bureaucrats talked about making the
world more effi-
cient, just like the hackers. But they were really small-minded
paper-pushers who
fiercely guarded the .information they held, even when that
.information yearned
to be shared. When hackers clearly engineered better ways of

doing things--a box
that enabled free long-distance calls, an instruction that might
improve an operat-
ing system-the bureaucrats stood in their way, wagging an
unbending finger. The
hackers took aesthetic and comic pleasure if!- outwitting the
men in suits.
When Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2002, the
heyday of the
hackers had long passed. They were older guys now, the stuff of
good tales, some
stuck in twilight struggles against The Man. But Zuckerberg
wanted to hack, too,
and with that old-time indifference to norms. In high school-
using the nom
de hack Zuck Fader-he picked the lock that prevented outsiders
from fiddling
with AOL's code and added his own improvements to its instant
messaging
program. As a college sophomore he hatched a site called
Facemash-with the
high-minded purpose of determining the hottest kid on campus.
Zuckerberg
asked users to compare images of two students and then
determine the better
looking of the two. The winner of each pairing advanced to the
next round of his
hormonal tournament. To cobble this site together, Zuckerberg
needed photos.
He purloined those from the servers of the various Harvard
houses that stockpiled
them. "One thing is certain;' he wrote on a blog as he put the
finishing touches
on his creation, "and it's that I'm a jerk for making this site. Oh
well."

His brief experimentation with rebellion ended with his
apologizing to a
Harvard disciplinary panel, as well as campus women's groups,
and mulling strategies
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 105
to redeem his soiled reputation. In the years since, he's shown
that defiance really
wasn't his natural inclination. His distrust of authority was such
that he sought out
Don Graham, then the venerable chairman of the Washington
Post company, as
bis mentor. After he started Facebook, he shadowed various
giants of corporate
America so that he could study their managerial styles up close.
Though he hasn't
fu]ly shed his awkward ways, he has sufficiently overcome his
introversion to appear
at fancy dinner parties, Charlie Rose interviews, and vanity Fair
cover shoots.
Still, the juvenile fascination with hackers never did die, or
rather he carried
it forward into his.new, more mature incarnation. When he
finally had a corpo-
rate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One
Hacker Way. He
designed a plaza with h-a-c-k inlaid into the concrete. In the
center of his office
park, he created an open meeting space called Hacker Square.
This is, of course,
the venue where his employees join for all-night Hackathons.As
he told a group
of would-be entrepreneurs, "We've got this whole ethos that we

want to build a
hacker culture."
Plenty of companies have similarly appropriated hacker culture-
-hackers are
the ur-disrupters-but none have gone as far as Facebook. Of
course, that's not
without risks. "Hacking" is a loaded term, and a potentially
alienating one, at
least to shareholders who crave sensible rule-abiding
leadership. But by the time
Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he'd stripped
the name of most
of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial
philosophy that contains
barely a hint of rebelliousness. It might even be the opposite of
rebelliousness.
Hackers, he told one interviewer, were 'Just this group of
computer scientists who
were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible.
That's what I try to
encourage our engineers to do here:' To hack is to be a good
worker, a responsible
Facebook citizen--a microcosm of the way in which the
company has taken the
language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service
of conformism.
Zuckerberg claimed to have distilled that hacker spirit into a
motivational
motto: "Move Fast and Break Things." Indeed, Facebook has
excelled at that.
The truth is, Facebook moved faster than Zuckerberg could ever
have imagined.
He hadn't really intended his creation. His company was, as we
all know, a dorm

room lark, a thing he ginned up in a Red Bull-induced fit of
sleeplessness.As his
creation grew, it needed to justify its new scale to its investors,
to its users, to the
world. It needed to grow up fast.According to Dustin
Moskovitz, who cofounded
the company with Zuckerberg at Harvard, "It was always very
important for our
brand to get away from the image of frivolity it had, especially
in Silicon Valley!'
Over the span of its short life, the company has caromed from
self-description
to self-description. It has called itself a tool, a utility, and a
platform. It has talked
about openness and connectedness. And in all these attempts at
defining itself, it
has managed to clarify its intentions.
Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency
of govern-
ments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the
transparency of
individuals-or what it has called, at various moments, "radical
transparency" or
"ultimate transparency." The theory holds that the sunshine of
sharing our intimate
details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we
don't intend for our
secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will
improve society.With the
106 FRANKLIN FOER
looming threat that our embarrassing information will be

broadcast, we'll behave
better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and
damning revela-
tions will prod us to become more tolerant of one another's sins.
Besides, there's
virtue in living our lives truthfully. "The days of you having a
different image for
your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you
know are probably
coming to an end pretty quickly," Zuckerberg has said. "Having
two identities for
yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."
The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on
what's best
for you, and it's trying to transport you there. "'To get people to
this point where
there's more openness-that's a big challenge. But I think we'll
do it," Zucker-
berg has said. He has reason to believe that he will achieve that
goal. With its size,
Facebook has amassed outsized powers.These powers are so
great that Zuckerberg
doesn't bother denying that fact. "In~ lot of ways Facebook is
more like a govern-
ment than a traditional company. We have this large community
of people, and
more than other technology companies we're really setting
policies!'
Without knowing it, Zuckerberg is the heir to a long political
tradition. Over
the last two hundred years, the West has been unable to shake
an abiding fantasy;
a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians
and replace them

with engineers-rule by slide rule. The French were the first to
entertain this
notion in the bloody, world-churning aftermath of their
revolution. A coterie of
the country's most influential philosophers (notably, Henri de
Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte) were genuinely torn about the course of the
country. They hated
all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power-the feudal lords,
the priests, and the
warriors-but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the
difference, they
proposed a form of technocracy-engineers and assorted
technicians would rule
with beneficent disinterestedness.Engineers would strip the old
order ofits power,
while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose
rationality and order.
This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially
Americans. The
great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing
engineers in
power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision
briefly became a
reality. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites were
aghast at all the
irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict-the xenophobia,
the racism, the
urge to lynch and riot. What's more, the realities of economic
life had grown
so complicated, how could politicians possibly manage them?
Americans of all
persuasions began yearning for the salvific ascendance of the
most famous engineer
of his time: Herbert Hoover. During the war, Hoover had

organized a system that
managed to feed starving Europe, despite the seeming
impossibility of that assign-
ment. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt-who would, of course,
ultimately vanquish
him from politics-organized a movement to draft Hoover for the
presidency.
The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy
fantasies about
the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream,
however, has come to
fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies.
We're not ruled by
engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in
American life,
the highest, most influential tier of our elite. Marc Andreessen
coined a famous
MARK ZUCKERBERG'$ WAR ON FREE WILL 107
aphorism that holds, "Software is eating the world." There's a
bit of obfuscation in
that formula-it's really the authors of software who are eating
the world.
There's another way to describe this historical progression.
Automation has
'come in waves. During the Industrial Revolution, machinery
replaced manual
workers. At first machines required human operators. Over
time, machines came
to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries,
engineers auto-
mated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated
thought. They

have perfected technologies that take over intellectual
processes, that render the
brain redundant. O:r; as Marissa Mayer once argued, "You have
to make words less
human and more a piece of the machine." Indeed, we have
begun to outsource our
intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should
learn, the topics we
should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These
companies can justify their
incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-
Simon and Comte
articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are
imposing order on
human life.
Nobody better articulates the modern faith in engineering's
power to trans-
form society than Zuckerberg. He told a group of software
developers, "You know,
I'm an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering
mindset is this hope and
this belief that you can take any system that's out there and
make it much, much
better than it is today. Anything, whether it's hardware, or
software, a company, a
developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much,
much better." The
world will improve, if only Zuckerberg's reason can prevail--
and it will.
1HE PRECISE SOURCE OF FACEBOOK's power is algorithms.
That's a concept repeated
dutifully in nearly every story about the tech giants, yet it
remains fuzzy at best to
users of those sites. From the moment of the algorithm's
invention, it was possible

to see its power, its revolutionary potential. The algorithm was
developed in order
to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the
hands of humans, to
settle contentious debates. To understand the essence of the
algorithm-and its
utopian pretension-it's necessary to travel back to its birthplace,
the brain of one
of history's unimpeachable geniuses, Gottfried Leibniz.
Fifty years younger than Descartes, Leibniz grew up in the same
world of
religious conflict. His native Germany; Martin Luther's
homeland, had become
one of history's most horrific abattoirs, the contested territory at
the center of
the Thirty Years War. Although the battlefield made its own
contribution to the
corpse count, the aftermath of war was terrible, too. Dysentery,
typhus, and plague
conquered the German principalities. Famine and demographic
collapse followed
battle, some four million deaths in total.The worst-clobbered of
the German states
lost more than half of their population.
Leibniz was born as Europe negotiated the Peace ofWestphalia
ending the
slaughter, so it was inevitable that he trained his prodigious
intellectual energies
on reconciling Protestants and Catholics, crafting schemes to
unify humanity.
Prodigious is perhaps an inadequate term to describe Leibniz's
mental reserves.
He produced schemes at, more or less, the rate he contracted his
diaphragm.

His archives, which still haven't been fully published, contain
some two hundred
thousand pages of his writing, filled with spectacular creations.
Leibniz invented
108 FRANKLIN FOER
calculus-to be sure,he hadn't realized that Newton discovered
the subject earlier,
but it's his notation that we still use. He produced lasting
treatises on metaphysics and
theology; he drew up designs for watches and ,vindmills, he
advocated universal
health care and the development of submarines.As a diplomat in
Paris, he pressed
Louis XIV to invade Egypt, a bank-shot ploy to divert
Germany's mighty neighbor
into an overseas adventure that might lessen the prospect of
marching its armies
east. Denis Diderot, no slouch, moaned, "When one compares ...
one's own small
talents with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away
one's books and go
die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner."
Of all Leibniz's schemes, the dearest was a new lexicon he
called the universal
characteristic-and it, too, sprang from his desire for peace.
Throughout history;
fanciful thinkers have created languages from scratch in the
hope that their con-
coctions would smooth communication between the peoples of
the world, fos-
tering the preconditions for global oneness. Leibniz created his

language for that
reason, too, but he also had higher hopes: He argued that a new
set of symbols and
expressions would lead science and philosophy to new truths, to
a new age of rea-
son, to a deeper appreciation of the universe's elegance and
harmony, to the divine.
What he imagined was an alphabet of human thought. It was an
idea that
he first pondered as a young student, the basis for his doctoral
dissertation at
Altdorf. Over the years, he fleshed out a detailed plan for
realizing his fantasy.
A group of scholars would create an encyclopedia containing
the fundamental,
incontestably true concepts of the world, of physics,
philosophy, geometry, ev-
erything really. He called these core concepts "primitives," and
they would in-
clude things like the earth, the color red, and God. Each of the
primitives would
be assigned a numerical value, which allowed them to be
combined to create
new concepts or to express complex extant ones. And those
numerical values
would form the basis for a new calculus of thought, what he
called the calculus
ratiocinator.
Leibniz illustrated his scheme with an example. What is a
human? A rational
animal, of course. That's an insight that we can write like this:
rational x animal = man

But Leibniz translated this expression into an even more
mathematical sentence.
"Animal," he suggested, might be represented with the number
two; "rational"
with the number three. Therefore:
2 x3 6
Thought had been turned into math-and this allowed for a new,
foolproof
method for adjudicating questions of truth. Leibniz asked, for
instance, are all men
monkeys? Well, he knew the number assigned to monkeys, ten.
If ten can't be
divided by six, and six can't be divided by ten, then we
know:There's no element
of monkey in man-and no element of man in monkey.
That was the point of his language: Knowledge, all knowledge,
could ulti-
mately be derived from computation. It would be an effortless
process, cogitatio
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 109
caeca or blind thought. Humans were no longer even needed to
conceive new
ideas. A machine could do that, by combining and dividing
concepts. In fact,
Leibniz· built a prototype of such a machine, a gorgeous,
intricate compilation
of polished brass and steel, gears and dials. He called it the
Stepped Reckoner.
Leibniz spent a personal fortune building it. With a turn of the
crank in one
direction the Stepped Reckoner could multiply, in the other

direction divide.
Leibniz had designed a user interface so meticulous that Steve
Jobs would have
bowed down before it. Sadly, whenever he tested the machine
for an audience, as
he did before the Royal Society in London in 1673, it failed.The
resilient Leibniz
forgave himself these humiliating demonstrations. The
importance of the universal
characteristic demanded that he press forward. "Once this has
been done, if ever
further controversies should arise, there should be no more
reason for disputes
between two philosophers than between two calculators:'
Intellectual and moral
argument could be settled with the disagreeing parties
declaring, "Let's calculate!"
There would be no need for wars, let alone theological
controversy, because truth
would be placed on the terra fuma of math.
Leibniz was a prophet of the digital age, though his pregnant
ideas sat in the
waiting room for centuries. He proposed a numeric system that
used only zeros
and ones, the very system of binary on which computing rests.
He explained
how automation or white-collar jobs would enhance
productivity. But his critical
insight was mechanical thinking, the automation of reason, the
very thing that
makes the Internet so miraculous, and the power of the tech
companies so
potentially menacing.
Those procedures that enable mechanical thinking came to have

a name. They
were dubbed algorithms. The essence of the algorithm is
entirely uncomplicated.
The textbooks compare them to re<:mes--a series of precise
steps that can be
followed mindlessly.This is different from equations, which
have one correct result.
Algorithms merely capture the process for solving a problem
and say nothing
about where those steps ultimately lead.
These recipes are the crucial building blocks of software.
Programmers can't
simply order a computer to, say, search the Internet. They must
give the computer
a set of specific instructions for accomplishing that task. These
instructions must
take the messy human activity oflooking for information and
transpose that into
an orderly process that can be expressed in code. First do this ...
then do that ....
The process. of translation, from concept to procedure to code,
is inherently reduc-
tive. Complex processes must be subdivided into a series of
binary choices. There's
no equation to suggest a dress to wear, but an algorithm could
easily be written
for that-it will work its way through a series of either/ or
questions (morning or
night, winter or summer, sun or rain), with each choice pushing
to the next.-
Mechanical thinking was exactly what Alan Turing first
imagined as he col-
lapsed on his run through the meadows of Cambridge in 1935
and daydreamed

about a fantastical new calculating machine. For the first
decades of computing, the
term "algorithm" wasn't much mentioned. But as computer
science departments
began sprouting across campuses in the sixties, the term
acquired a new cachet. Its
vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers,
especially in the academy,
110 FRANKLIN FOER
were anxious to show that they weren't mere technicians. They
began to describe
their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of
the greatest of all
mathematicians-the Persian polymath MUQ.ammad ibn Musa al-
Khwarizmi, or
as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the twelfth
century, translations of
al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the West; his
treatises pioneered
algebra and trigonometry.By describing the algorithm as the
fundamental element
of programming, the computer scientists were attaching
themselves to a grand
history. It was a savvy piece of name dropping: See, we're not
arriviste, we're
working with abstractions and theories,just like the
mathematicians!
There was sleight of hand in this self-portrayal. The algorithm
may be the
essence of computer science-but it's not precisely a scientific
concept. An algo-

rithm is a system, like plumbing or a military chain of
command. It takes know-
how, calculation, and creativity to make a system work
properly. But some systems,
like some armies, are much more reliable than others. A system
is a human artifact,
not a mathematical truism. The origins of the algorithm are
unmistakably human,
but human fallibility isn't a quality that we associate with it.
When algorithms
reject a loan application or set the price for an airline flight,
they seem imper-
sonal and unbending. The algorithm is supposed to be devoid of
bias, intuition,
emotion, or forgiveness. They call it a search engine, after all-a
nod to pistons,
gears, and twentieth-century industry, with the machinery wiped
clean of human
fingerprints.
Silicon Valley's algorithmic enthusiasts were immodest about
describing the
revolutionary potential of their objects of affection. Algorithms
were always
interesting and valuable, but advances in computing made them
infinitely more
powerful. The big change was the cost of computing. It
collapsed, and just as
the machines themselves sped up and were tied into a, global
network. Comput-
ers could stockpile massive piles of unsorted data-and
algorithms could attack
this data to find patterns and connections that would escape
human analysts. In
the hands of Google and Facebook, these algorithms grew ever
more powerful.

As they went about their searches, they accumulated more and
more data. Their
machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using
these learnings to more
precisely deliver the desired results.
For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge
was a slog
of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the
world …
•••
MARTHA STOUT
WHAT Is SANITY? Are "normal" people always sane, or could
it be said that we
experience sanity only at certain times? After witnessing a
jarring event, have you
ever found yourself in a condition that is not exactly sane: a
state of frantic agita-
tion or numbness and distraction? These are just some of the
questions explored
by Martha Stout in her first book, The Myth ef Sanity: Divided
Consciousness and
the Promise ef Awareness (2002), from which this selection
comes. Stout draws on
her nearly 30 years of practice as a clinical psychologist to
show that the tendency
to dissociate--to withdraw from reality-begins as a life-
preserving resource that
defends against severe trauma in childhood, but later can
develop into a way of
life defined by emotional detachment and prolonged

disengagement with the
world. In the most extreme cases, a dissociative disorder can
cause individuals to
black out for extended periods or to develop multiple
personalities in order to
cope with life's challenges. By defirring a continuum that
extends from the
everyday experience of spacing out or getting lost in thought to
conditions like
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stout urges her readers to
recognize the com-
plexity of consciousness itsel£ If all of us dissociate to some
degree, then a term
like "sanity" is simply too crude to capture the real nature of
mental health,
which requires a proper balance between dissociation and
engagement. The
patients Stout focuses on in her study have lost this precious
balance, but with
her help, they come to see the meaning of their lives as
something they can
recover. In jargon-free prose, Stout tells stories of her patients'
struggles for
sanity, revealing in each case how buried or missing ,memories
disrupt their
awareness of the present.
For more than 25 years Stout served on the clinical faculty of
the Harvard
Medical School through the McLean Hospital in Belmont,
Massachusetts, and
the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In addition, she
has taught on
the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and
the psychology
faculty of Wellesley College. Since completing The Myth ef

Sanity, she has
published two other best selling books The Sociopath Next Door
(2005) and The
Paranoia Switch (2007).
"When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday," from THE
MYTH OF SANITY by Martha Stout, copyright
© 2001 by Martha Stout. Used by permission of Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
Biographical information comes from <http:/
/harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=1880> and
<http:/ /www.marthastout.com/ />.
413
414 MARTHA STOUT
•••
When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning,
It Was Friday
"The horror of that moment," the King went on "I shall
forget!" , never, never
"You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a
memorandum of it."
-LEWIS CARROLL
Imagine th~t you are in your house--no-you are locked in your
house cannot

get out. It 1s the dead of winter. The drifted snow is hi"ghe th '.
d
bl kin h • r an your wm ows
oc g t e light of both moon and sun. Around the house the · d '
night and day. ' wm moans,
N . . tha
.c tl ow unagme t even though you have plenty of electric lights,
and per-
iec y good central heating, you are almost always in the dark d ·
ld
b hin • an quite co
e~ause s?met g 15 wr~ng with the old-fashioned fuse box in the
basement'.
Inside this cobwebbed, mnocuous-looking box the fu k b ·
d
. , ses eep urnmg out
an on account of this small malfunction all the power m· th h dl'
fail ' e ouse repeate y
s. : ou have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little
bag of new
ones 15 ~mpty; ~ere are no more. You sigh in frustration, and
regard your frozen
brea~ m . the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be
so
tomblike mstead. cozy, is
In all probabili_ty, there is something quirky in the antiquated
fuse box; it has
developed some_ kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really
reactin to an

dangerous electncal overload at all Should you get some pe · g f
y
P
o k t d h · nmes out o your
c e , an use t em to replace the burned-out fuses? That would
solve the
po:wer-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins
in there. Using
coms woul~ scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box but
the need for a
safeguard nght now is questionable, and the box is keep~g you
cold and ·
the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason.
m
On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is
overloaded
somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If
you do not
find the fire soon eno_ugh, if you cannot manage to put the fire
out, the whole
h?use could go up, w1tli you trapped inside. you know that
deatli by burning is
hideous. You know also that your mind is playm· g tricks but
thinkin. b fir
alrn · · h , g a out e,
you ost unagme t ere is smoke in your nostrils right now.
So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark livm· d
.c d b fr g room, e1eate
num om the ~old, though you have buried yourself under every
blariket i~
th_e house~ No ligh~ to read by, no music, just the wail and

rattle of the icy
wmd outside? Or, m an attempt to feel more hum d ak thin an, o
you m e gs
WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY
415
wann and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and
howling pain? If
you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent
smoke every
moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of
these waking
moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep?
Do you sabotage the fuse box?
I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do,
trapped in a situ-
ation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do
know that any-
one wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face
just this kind of
dilemma, made yet. more harrowing because her circumstance is
not anything
so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a
solitary, unlockable
confinement inside the limits of her own mind. The person who
suffers from a
severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a
barely sublethal mis-
ery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may
well bring her a
better life, but that feels like stupidly issuing an open invitation
to the unspeak-
able horror that waits to consume her alive. And in the manner

of die true hero,
she must choose to take the risk.
For trauma changes the brain itself. Like the outdated fuse box,
the psycho-
logically traumatized brain houses inscrutable eccentricities
tliat cause it to
overreact-or more precisely, misreact-to the current realities of
life. These
neurological misreactions become established because trauma
has a profound
effect upon· the secretion of stress-responsive neurohormones
such as norepi-
nephrine, and thus an effect upon various areas of die brain
involved in memory,
particularly the amygdala and die hippocampus.
The amygdala receives sensory information from the five
senses, via the thal-
amus, attaches emotional significance to the input, and then
passes along this
emotional "evaluation" to the hippocarnpus. In accordance with
die amygdala's
"evaluation" of importance, the hippocampus is activated to a
greater or lesser
degree, and functions to organize the new input, and to integrate
it with already
existing information about similar sensory events. Under a
normal range of con-
ditions, this system works efficiently to consolidate memories
according to their
emotional priority. However, at the extreme upper end of
hormonal stimulation,
as in traumatic situations, a breakdown occurs. Overwhelming
emotional signifi-
cance registered by the amygdala actually leads to a decrease in

hippocampal activa-
tion, such that some of the traumatic input is not usefully
organized by the
hippocampus, or integrated witli oilier memories. The result is
that portions of
traumatic memory are stored not as parts of a unified whole, but
as isolated sen-
sory images and bodily sensations tliat are not localized in time
or even in situa-
tion, or integrated with other events.
To make matters still more complex, exposure to trauma may
temporarily
shut down Broca's area, die region of the left hemisphere of the
brain that trans-
lates experience into language, die means by which we most
often relate our
experience to others, and even to .ourselves.
A growing body of research indicates that in these ways the
brain lays down
traumatic memories differently from the way it records regular
memories. Reg-
ular memories are formed through adequate hippocampal and
cortical input, are
integrated as comprehensible wholes, and are subject to
meaning-modification
416 MARTHA STOUT
by future events, and through language. In contrast, traumatic
memories include
chaotic fragments that are sealed off from modulation by
subsequent experience.

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