Category Archives: real life

Two Days of Theater Bliss!

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library, Morgan Library

Morgan Library (photo: Jim Forest, Creative Commons license)

Spent two days in Manhattan this week and highly recommend these highlights. First up was a walk from the train to the Morgan Library (225 Madison Avenue), a treasure-trove of art and the written word, in which lots is always going on. This visit was to see the special exhibit “Lincoln Speaks: Words that Transformed a Nation,” which includes many original documents Lincoln wrote, with helpful context. Take the docent tour.

This exhibit is on view only through June 7, but afterward the library will be putting on “Alice: 150 years of Wonderland” (June 26-October 11). For the first time in 30 years, the British Library will send the original Alice in Wonderland manuscript to New York, and its display will be augmented by original drawings, letters, and other material. Another good reason to visit the Morgan—a terrific café! Order the duck confit salad. I had a Gilded Age Manhattan, which had flakes of gold floating on its surface—irresistible in that fabulous mansion—and needed an afternoon nap.

Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II

In the evening, thrilled beyond words, we saw Helen Mirren in The Audience, where she reprises her role as Queen Elizabeth II. Each week, the monarch has a half-hour private audience with the current Prime Minister, to learn what the government has been up to for the past week and what’s ahead. Mirren’s portrayal of the Queen over the years—from the time of her accession at age 25 to age 89 today—is completely believable. The Queen always backs the government, but that has not always been easy or comfortable. And the government hasn’t always served her well, in terms of candor or protecting her principal leadership interest, the health of the Commonwealth.

If you know or remember anything at all about the dozen political leaders who have served her—from Winston Churchill up through a prickly Margaret Thatcher to today’s David Cameron—you will enjoy these different portrayals. Sets and costumes were perfect. We may think of the Queen is being a bit bland of affect and possibly not as full of terrific one-liners that playwright Peter Morgan gives her (in the first scene, PM John Major confesses, “I only ever wanted to be ordinary,” and the Queen sympathizes: “And in which way do you consider you’ve failed in that ambition?”). But Mirren brings her to well-rounded life, and Morgan even gives her a rationalization for this persona, writing that a monarch’s very ordinariness is what makes for success. Mirren’s line is something like “if we were tremendously creative or brilliant, we’d be tempted to meddle, and that would cause no end of trouble.”

St. Patrick's, cathedral, New York, stained glass

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Wednesday morning, out for a stroll, we found St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the throes of a monumental restoration effort. The exterior where the work has been completed must appear as it did when it was first constructed, with all the grime cleared away from stones and stained glass, and, more important, but invisibly, many structural repairs made. Absolutely beautiful.

Inside, the work continues as well, and the altar is obscured by a mare’s nest of scaffolding. A bit cacophanous, but the completed parts are truly spectacular.

Lunch at my favorite NYC spot, where I’ve eaten so many times, Osteria al Doge at 142 W. 44th Street, a half-block from Times Square. Lovely food and service.

Wolf Hall , playAs if we hadn’t had enough excitement already, off to the Winter Garden Theatre for Part Two of Wolf Hall (Part One reviewed here). I suppose it isn’t too great a spoiler to say that Anne and Cardinal Wolsey’s antagonists get their comeuppance. Though Mark Ryland’s portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in the tv version seems perfect, Ben Miles is mighty fine in the play, too (a comparison). I enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s books, on which these dramatizations are based, and like both versions. Again, I was struck by the efficiency of the stage play, with its stark set and minimal props, which has a powerful focusing effect.

See The Audience and both parts of Wolf Hall, if you have the chance! But soon. Limited engagements.

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Crime Scene 101

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Television and the movies notoriously overstate the tools (especially the electronic ones) at a criminal investigator’s command, to the extent juries have developed increased expectations about the availability of forensic evidence. (Here’s a fascinating study of the “CSI Effect,” suggesting prosecutors and judges need to up their game.) At the same time, many writers of crime thrillers strive to accurately portray crime scene investigations and to make their fictional detectives follow more careful procedures than often occurs in real life.

crime scene investigation

(photo: U.S. Army, Europe, creative commons license)

Forensic investigator Geoff Symon recently talked to crime authors about evidence. He began by dividing it into two categories:

  • direct evidence, which means eye-witness accounts, with all their well-documented weaknesses and
  • circumstantial evidence, which is everything else.

Symon emphasized that circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and when a tv lawyer pooh-poohs a case, saying “it’s only circumstantial,” that’s not necessarily a weakness. In truth, unless there is a reliable eye-witness, all cases are circumstantial. Fingerprints, hairs, fibers, and blood and DNA other than the victim’s are all circumstantial evidence, and the accumulation of evidence of this type, when put together in a convincing narrative, can become absolutely compelling. Circumstantial evidence can relate to a particular category of people (say, all those with blood type AB negative or having a carpet with a particular kind of fiber), or to a particular individual (fingerprints or DNA).

Says Adam Plantinga in 400 Things Cops Know says “People watch crime shows on TV so they think the police can get readable prints off just about anything—human skin, stucco walls, quesadillas,” but “only a few surfaces are conducive to the retrieval of fingerprints.” Slick surfaces, like noncoated glass, glossy paper, and aluminum are best, he says.

Two additional considerations are avoiding contamination of the crime scene and maintaining the chain of evidence. No longer do hordes of people enter the room where a body lays, tromp around in their own shoes, and depart. (In the notorious 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, “Police officers, relatives, press, and neighbors [were allowed to] troop through the house.” Subsequently, this case was a basis for the movie and tv series, The Fugitive.)

Today’s investigators recognize that “whenever you leave a room you take something with you and you leave something behind,” Symon said. Thus, the importance of hair coverings, gloves, booties, and hazmat-looking suits. Cross-contamination of the crime scene was vital to the defense of O.J. Simpson. First investigators on the scene, therefore, have a particular responsibility to document it accurately with photos, video, sketches, and notes, knowing it may be contaminated subsequently.

Similarly, the chain of custody for evidence is an essential part of “preserving” the crime scene evidence. Unless a piece of evidence has been carefully tagged, and each subsequent person who handled and tested it has signed for it, criminal prosecutors cannot claim that a trace of DNA , a hair, or other physical evidence is the same bit gathered at the crime scene and not somehow introduced subsequently.

Symon and other forensic investigators help authors by describing “reality.” The challenge for the author is to subvert reality in a believable way so their story’s plot can unfold. While in real life, procedural mess-ups may mean perpetrators are never be brought to justice, this often suits the author’s fictional purposes very well.

27 Maps about English & America

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language tree

Ellis Island Language Tree (photo: Colin Howley, creative commons license)

The English language is rich and diverse—and so difficult to learn, especially the spelling—for reasons made amply clear by the first map in this fascinating series. The English language has grown root and branch from a wide diversity of linguistic traditions.

Moreover, English is full of idioms derived from all these different cultures. (A friend who is a native German-speaker wanted a book to read to improve his language skills, and I suggested The Big Sky, a 1947 novel about the American frontier by Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. B. Guthrie, Jr. It’s told in the plain language of the era and characters, and I thought it also might shed light on the formation of the American outlook, pre-1970 or so. Big mistake. Although the vocabulary was easy, the book was so shot full of idioms, phrases an American reader would understand at once, it was impossible for an outsider to parse.)

Back to the maps. Others of particular interest include #7, the accompanying text of which points out that the pronunciation of American English today is closer to 18th-century British English than what current British speakers use. The changes that occurred in British English in the 19th century led to the dropping of the “r” after vowels, which elegant Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 1940s would emulate (“Chahles, wheah did you pahk the cah?”) and other pseudo-elegances, leading inevitably to Singin’ in the Rain’s “I cahn’t, cahn’t, cahn’t.”

#13 is a map of Europe showing where English-speakers can most likely have a conversation in their native language. More than 95% of Britons can carry on such a conversation, as can 39% percent of people in France. Whether they will do so is a separate question, though the French I’ve encountered have shown great patience with my fumbling attempts at their language.

Don’t miss #22, which is a reprise of a video that made the rounds some months ago, a woman demonstrating 17 different British accents. First up is the “received pronunciation” that straddles differences across regions, akin to what we think of in the United States as newscaster-speak, or, more technically, as shown in map #24, “General Northern.”

“General Northern” has replaced a “truly astonishing” number and variety of language families present on the North American continent when European explorers arrived. Few of these American Indian languages survive today. This story also is graphically told on these two maps, accompanying Orin Hargraves’s Visual Thesaurus story on “The Continent of Lost Languages.”

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Amanda Knox: The Final Chapter

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Italy, street

Perugia street scene (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto, creative commons license)

Working on a crime thriller set in Rome, I’ve had to try to come to grips with the eccentricities of the Italian judicial system. As a result, I’ve maintained a strong interest in the long saga of Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The pair was convicted, acquitted, convicted again, and now acquitted again for the final time in the 2007 murder of Knox’s British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy.

U.S. journalist Nina Burleigh went to Italy for the first trial, lived in Perugia in the lead-up to it, and intended to write a book about a young American abroad who went off the rails and became involved in a horrific crime. Instead, as she recounts in her excellent book,The Fatal Gift of Beauty, she was soon convinced by both the lack of evidence and the treatment of the accused that Knox and Sollecito are indeed innocent. Her book also explores some of the reasons behind the Italian media and public’s apparent eagerness that “Foxy Knoxy” be found guilty.

To this day, opinion about the case is strongly divided. Most prominently, Kercher’s family remains convinced of Knox’s guilt. Former FBI Agent Steve Moore provides a useful understanding of why people, especially families, tend to maintain their belief that an accused is guilty, regardless of subsequent evidence and courtroom decisions. (A heartbreaking documentary film about this phenomenon is West of Memphis, covering the case of convicted teens dubbed the “West Memphis Three.”)

The pubblico ministero (Mignini) plays a pivotal role in an Italian courtroom, somewhat like a prosecutor in a U.S. court, but with greater powers. For much of the period of legal wrangling in the Knox/Sollecito case, the prosecution was handled by a poster-man for Italian jurisprudence gone amok, Giuliano Mignini, whose erratic logic was amply documented in Douglas Preston’s true-crime book,The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who prowled “lovers’ lanes,” primarily in the 1970s and early 1980s. Preston has called the case against Knox one “based on lies, superstition, and crazy conspiracy theories.”

It certainly is a tale with many confusing elements—Amanda’s changing story, which was one of the chief marks against her, the investigators’ mistakes in securing evidence from the crime scene, the conflicting interpretations of the DNA evidence, and especially the clash of cultures when privileged foreign students indulge their freedoms far from home, oblivious to their conservative environment, an issue Moore discusses in this thoughtful blog post.

The story has fascinating characters, irredeemable tragedy at many levels, and the ability to evoke partisanship for or against out of proportion to the definite facts of the case. One can only hope that either when the court reveals its reasoning in finally acquitting Knox and Sollecito, which is to occur with 90 days of the reversal, or at some subsequent but not too distant time, the Kercher family can be persuaded that in the loss of their beloved daughter and sister, justice was achieved.

Good-bye to Snow!

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Possible snow showers tonight! Here’s a reprise of a post from last winter, my attempt to put the spirit of Old Man Winter to rest. “This is snow, OK? You satisfied? Now get outta here and tell Spring to come on in!”

08 Dec - 09 April 011

“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 2015 International Snow Sculpture Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms whose kids ask those tricky snow questions! Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow:

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

And, Boston, we’re sorry!

Shedding Light

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night sky, light pollution

(composite satellite photo: woodleywonderworks, creative commons license)

On vacation in Bryce Canyon—one of the few truly dark places left in the United States—a visiting astronomer said that in 25 years, if trends in light pollution don’t abate, no child in the United States will be able to see the Milky Way. Living for forty years in the New York-D.C. corridor, I have seen it only once, in far rural Virginia. In too many places now, the Milky Way and all except the brightest stars are “vanishing in a yellow haze,” says the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA).

Light pollution may sound at first like a problem that isn’t much of a problem, but it has consequences, disrupting the natural patterns of animals (many of which are nocturnal), migrating birds, and humans’ sleep patterns. Not only are sleep disorders a problem for many people, some research suggests these disrupted circadian rhythms raise the risk for chronic diseases: obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

Some years ago, the city of Tucson tackled the problem, when its expansion and night-glare threatened the operation of the night-observation telescope array at the nearby Kitt Peak National Observatory. In Tucson, night lighting must be shielded so that the light is directed down, not allowed to spread in all directions. IDA’s conservation program is attempting to designate dark sites that can preserve the starry night skies for future generations. (Proper lighting also conserves resources, given that 22% of U.S. energy use is for lighting.)

Milky Way, night sky

The Milky Way (photo: Forest Wander, Creative Commons license)

Many businesses—car lots and gas stations are an example—are lit much too brightly at night, in the mistaken assumption that this makes them safer. We referred to the parking lot of a movie theater in Florida where we visited as the “brain surgery parking lot,” it was so brightly lit. Too much light creates glare that actually makes it harder to see. Having lights outfitted with correctly calibrated motion detectors indicate an intruder more easily than lights burning at full power all night. According to light pollution expert Paul Bogard, whose book is The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, “the best lighting is uniform, low-level lighting.” In other words, light when and where it is needed, not attempts to recreate High Noon.

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***400 Things Cops Know

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police, neighborhood

(photo: en.wikipedia)

By Adam Plantinga – If you write (or read or watch) crime stories, you’ll be fascinated by the detailed insights from a veteran Milwaukee and San Francisco patrolman (now police sergeant). The Wall Street Journal called the book “the new Bible for crime writers.” And, if you  wonder about how crimes are managed in the community, you’ll definitely gain some insights.

Plantinga, who is a Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Marquette University, divided his 400 lessons into 19 chapters on “Things Cops Know About . . .” shots fired, juveniles, booze and drugs, domestic violence, and so on. Each chapter is not only a dive into specifics, but as important, together—with candor and humor—they provide an unfiltered view into the thought processes of the cops called out to deal with some of society’s worst and most intractable problems, deaths in circumstances that most of us never have to contemplate, much less confront, and the possibility of violence at every traffic stop. The endemic cynicism he reports arises from constant exposure to people behaving badly, as well as the internal machinations of many police departments.

In the chapter on shots fired, I was surprised to learn how hard it is to find bullets after they’re fired (unless they’re in somebody), in part because “most handguns have ranges exceeding a mile.” Of course, before a bullet can go that far, it generally hits a tree or a house or something. And most criminals aren’t very good shots, Plantinga says. But, as a responding officer, you can’t count on that.

I saw a movie about a hit-and-run accident over the weekend, and thanks to reading this book, I tried to telepathically help the on-screen investigator: “Look for prints on the rearview mirror!” Thanks, Sergeant Plantinga.

**** 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

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New Orleans, Katrina

The New Orleans “bathtub ring” (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Chris Rose – This collection of newspaper columns from the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the days and months following Hurricane Katrina is, as the cover says, “a roller-coaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor”—whose shaky pilings are sunk into the physical, economic, and emotional debris of a devastated city.

Rose reports unflinchingly about the horrors and about the small personal triumphs the city’s residents experienced as they tried, not always successfully, to scrabble back to some kind of normalcy. Collectively, his writings probably better than anything else I’ve read answer the question people asked at the time, “Is New Orleans worth it?” His love of the city—its music, food, culture, and traditions, but mostly its people—soaks every page like floodwater.

The ongoing calamity didn’t stop when the wind and rain ceased, but went on and on in the form of poor government decision-making, ill-conceived emergency and reconstruction plans, rapacious utility companies and developers, loophole-seeking insurance schemes, lost possessions and people. To report on it, Rose got out and about, bicycling through the devastated areas, recording the citizenry’s stories. And some stories they were!

Rose’s close attention to these trials was not without its costs. A little more than two months after the disaster, he began one of his essays by quoting the people who said to him, “Everyone here is mentally ill now.” It took a while for him to recognize it—almost seven months—though his wife, his editor, his friends, and his readers tried to convince him much earlier, but he, too, was breaking under the strain. “I feel as if I have become the New Orleans poster boy for posttraumatic stress, chronicling my descent into madness for everyone to read,” he wrote in late March 2006. A few months later, he wrote about his yearlong battle with depression and what he was, finally, doing about it.

He’d been the city’s cheerleader, encouraging people to be strong and stand tall and celebrate what they still had, and his admission of needing serious help loosed a response from thousands. “It boggles the mind to think of how many among us are holding on by frayed threads, just barely, and trying to hide it as I was for so many months.” Even acknowledging that, he ended an essay about his depression with words of encouragement and purpose: “Find some way to shine a light. Together, maybe we’ll find our way out of this.”

New Orleans, Katrina

House destroyed, chandelier intact (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

This collection of essays is one of those compilations where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Yes, there’s repetition among them; yes, his messages are often the same. But the reader cannot help but think that if only the people’s situation were improving faster, he wouldn’t have had to hammer his message home so hard and so often. I pictured him in many ways like the John Goodman character in the first season of Treme—outraged and caring and providing his testimony. The difference is that the real Chris Rose stuck it out.

NSA Chief Speaks in Princeton

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Mike Rogers, NSA, military

Adm. Mike Rogers (photo: wikipedia)

Admiral Mike Rogers—Director, National Security Agency, and Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (the military’s centralized operational command for cyberspace operations)—spoke at Princeton University yesterday, part of an ongoing effort to establish greater understanding of the NSA mission and encourage private sector partnerships .

He kept his own remarks short, describing the missions of the two agencies he heads, in order to maximize time for audience questions. A key challenge he noted is assuring that efforts to manage the nation’s cyber-threats and foreign intelligence-gathering are appropriately balanced against “the inherent right to privacy” of the American people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s (the Watergate era), revelations of government spying on U.S. citizens led to two new mechanisms for privacy protection: FISA courts (authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the public has lost confidence in both those approaches at a time when threats have rapidly escalated.

“Would we even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the whistleblowers?” an audience member asked.

Rogers responded, “I don’t know any whistleblowers. I only know of thieves who stole government information.” He went on to say that he wished he had that information back, because the loss of it has imperiled troops overseas and many other individuals and activities, as well as entailed considerable costs. He tells his staff that, if they see any information or process of gathering it that they consider illegal, immoral, or unethical, they should raise it within the chain of command, and it isn’t up to each individual person to pick and choose which laws to obey.

In deciding how to respond to a cyber-attack, his command uses the same principle of proportionality that the military does in general. The exact means of retaliation is a policy decision, not his alone. In North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony last November, for example, he urged the President to “think more broadly,” beyond just cyber-methods, and the U.S. government response to date includes economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

A questioner asked what happens when information amassed on foreigners includes information about Americans (“incidental” information). Rogers wouldn’t speak to whether the FBI or CIA access such information but said the NSA treats it differently, as to whether and how long it is kept, than it does information on foreigners.

Another controversy raised was the NSA’s practice of bulk data storage. Rogers said that at least some bulk data storage is necessary because the agency does not know now what may be useful down the road. There are limits on how long information is retained, but these are currently “more of an art than a science,” he said. A January report by an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, at present, there are no screening methods that are a viable alternative to bulk data collection, although privacy protections can be strengthened.

How ISIS is Different

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desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

The issue of terrorism and the response of secular societies to it is the sharp edge of international relations and of much current interest. Recently, this website has included my summary of Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants,” as well as a review of the book The Terrorist’s Dilemma, by Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro about how covert organizations organize themselves.

Putting these two analysis side-by-side, ISIS appears to be both fundamentally and functionally different from the “traditional” terrorist organizations Shapiro describes in a number of key ways, including:

  • traditional terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, have political aims (getting Westerners out of the Arabian peninsula, etc.), whereas ISIS’s aims are religious
  • because of their political goals, traditional terrorist organizations have at least some interest in controlling ultra-violence, as it decreases their political capital, whereas ISIS is focused on establishing absolute, undiluted Sharia and the accompanying violence is part of the package
  • traditional terrorist organizations want to protect their leaders, whereas ISIS appears to court confrontation, or at least is not dissuaded from pursuing its tactics by fear of Western reprisal and
  • traditional terrorist organizations must operate “underground” in their host countries, so their activities—including communication with their agents in the field—always carry a security risk, whereas ISIS is operating in the open in its captured territories, and indeed must hold those territories in order to maintain the caliphate it has declared.

With respect to how an organization can behave when it has territory (a safe haven), ISIS does follow the pattern of traditional terrorist organizations by exploiting that benefit. In addition, traditional terrorist organizations suffer when there is a complete security vacuum and see the need to establish social institutions; not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s plans include a kind of social agenda (albeit along lines endorsed by Mohammed), though whether the organization can pull it off is another question.

These differences call for different approaches, not approaching ISIS like a spinoff al-Qa’ida or the Provisional IRA. This is new.