Technology & Elections

Posted on by
vote, voting, election

A set of articles in the current issue of Wired discuss the part technology can play in improving our elections. Skeptical, all things considered? You should be. Still, here’s what to watch for.

Candidates and Facebook

James Barnes, a Facebook employee embedded with the Trump campaign in 2016 (think about that a moment), has had second thoughts and is now working to promote Joe Biden at the political nonprofit Acronym. It produces digital media campaigns for progressive candidates and causes. By the end of summer, though, very few voters were undecided, so their campaigns weren’t making converts. One can only hope that the Trump campaign’s October efforts to outspend Biden on Facebook ads in several battleground states, according to this CNBC story, will fall flat too.
Read: PW Singer’s Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media.

The Voting Process

To be a state election official is to be plagued with nightmares. “We all knew we were headed into what would be a contentious election year,” said Arizona’s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, in a model of understatement in this Wired article by Lily Hay Newman. Plus, they know they have a derailing technical problem or two: In Georgia’s disastrous primary, for example, all 159 counties were using new machines for the first time. Plus, the pandemic. Officials have had to scramble to find polling places. Traditional venues—schools, community centers, churches—balked. Experienced poll workers? A vanishing species.

Texas election officials and a team of university-based computer scientists, Wired reports, have devised a way to use advanced encryption technology—homomorphic cryptography—to improve our notoriously vulnerable voting machines. (Just using the term, I’ve already approached the limit of my understanding of how it works.) The machine assigns a lengthy ciphertext to each vote and prints out a short identifier, akin to a bit.ly link. Voters can use these to verify their votes are “in there.” Part of the beauty is that votes do not need to be decrypted to be counted, so privacy is maintained.
Read: James McCrone;s Faithless Elector, about a member of the electoral college who doesn’t stick to the script or McCrone’s brand new book, Emergency Powers, about how far someone will go to hang on to the presidency. Hmmmmm.

Secure Vote Counting

In this election, several states will use “risk-limiting audits” to validate results. These methods link the scale of the audit to the victory margin. If a candidate wins big, even a small sample of randomly selected ballots can confirm the results. In closer contests, a larger sample is needed. Bottom line: Unfortunately, processes, equipment, and practices vary widely, state to state, and nationally, the lack of investment in improving them contributes to a loss of faith in our elections that eventually damages every one of us.

Foreign Intrigue

Posted on by

If domestic intrigues are giving you fits, you might try some stories set in other countries. What you’ll find, of course, is that there’s no end to the shenanigans people get up to. But you knew that, right? Here are three award-winners from France, Germany, and Japan. In general, crime novels by non-American, non-British authors have a different style. They often have subplots that leave you to draw your own conclusions. Personally, I like that extra dose of mystery. These three happen to have wonderful cover art too!

Summer of Reckoning

Summer of Reckoning, Marion Brunet

Some teenage summers are just too awkward and painful to revisit. Marion Brunet’s novel expertly describes a summer exactly like that. When I say it’s set in the south of France, you’re thinking Provence. Lavender and cabernet. The bleak, poverty-stricken village where sixteen-year-old Céline and her fifteen-year-old sister, Johanna, live with their brutish father, Manuel, is not that. Céline is pregnant, and Manuel insists she reveal who the father is. From his drunken determination, much tragedy ensues. Winner of the French Mystery Prize (the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière), it was translated by Katherine Gregor. Read my full review here.

Mexico Street

Simone Buchholz, Mexico Street

Simone Buchholz’s street-smart Hamburg public prosecutor Chastity Riley works closely—in some cases intimately—with the local police. Her cast of well characterized lovers, former lovers, and police colleagues is investigating the latest in a rash of car fires. This one is different, there’s a dying man inside, a member of a notorious Bremen gangster family.

That connection leads Riley and her crew to some dark and lawless places, to a world and family life that operate under their own unforgiving rules. Winner of the German Crime Fiction Prize in 2019, translated by Rachel Ward. Read my full review here.

The Aosawa Murders

Aosawa Murders, Riku Onda

In the 1970s, an Aosawa family birthday party ends with 17 people poisoned to death. The only survivor is teenage daughter, Hisako, who is blind. The evocative, layered story by Riku Onda is created retrospectively from interviews with the principals, starting with Hisako’s memories, the ruminations of the police detective who is convinced Hisako somehow must have been involved, and the author of a best-selling book about the murders.

Was this the perfect crime? As the book blurb says, “Part Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Part Capote’s In Cold Blood.” Winner of the Mystery Writers of Japan Best Novel Award, and translated by Alison Watts.

Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: Who Are These Women?

Posted on by
sangria-colored room, andallshallbewell Tumblr page

Archer Landis, the Manhattan architect at the center of my forthcoming novel, has been married and faithful to his wife Marjorie for thirty-odd years. But Julia Fernández, a new associate in his firm, has unexpectedly stolen his heart. For me as a writer, describing these two women and their worlds didn’t happen all at once. At first, my thoughts were akin to a sketch I kept going back to—adding, subtracting, refining, and shaping details—so that their ultimate descriptions show them to be distinct three-dimensional characters. Writing my first or second draft, I did not understand them well enough to do that.

Where They Live

In the novel’s first chapter, you see Julia’s Chelsea apartment as Archer, with his strong design sensibility, sees it. He’s aware of all the references to her Spanish origins—the sangria-colored walls, the heavy dark curtains, the chaise longues upholstered in deep carmine velvet. “It would require all his French curves and a full palette of rose and violet pigments to reproduce the effect.”

Archer and Marjorie’s penthouse in an Upper East Side high-rise is light-filled, with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the East River. The apartment is all straight lines, its walls are pale gray, the furniture has white leather upholstery, and a painting by Joan Miró provides only “a confetti of color.” A totally different woman lives there.

What They Wear

Archer thinks of Julia as the bright bird in his office. She wears simple silk dresses in shades like watermelon pink, lime, and saffron. She has licorice-colored hair. You get the picture. In Landis’s eyes, she’s delicious.

Marjorie dresses in long knitted skirts, tunics and drapy attached scarves in the palest rose, taupe, beige, and off-white. Colors so faint that, over successive scenes, Archer cannot always identify what they are.

How He Feels about Them

My intent is that these details say much more about the differences between Julia and Marjorie than their taste in interior decorating and clothing. Much later in the book, Landis muses on his love for them both, calling Julia his dazzling sun, and Marjorie his moon, the one who could regulate the tides within him and light the darkness. This analogy (I hope) recalls to the reader the earlier evocative descriptions constructed from specific details.

Avoiding Cliché Traps

Superficial inventories (height, hair, eyes, clothing, voice) when a character is first introduced tend to be flat and uninteresting. They read like the author is ticking the boxes. They’re akin to the first impression of someone, and nothing like the rich descriptions and telling details that reflect the real person.

Trying for an intriguing first draft detail, maybe, have you noticed how often authors give a female character green eyes? I am one of the two percent of people worldwide who actually have green eyes, so I notice this. A green-eyed woman has become a bit of a cliché. (One of my characters has them too!) In any case, eye color is not a significant detail. Rarely does a plot depend on the color of a character’s eyes (or hair). Height, maybe.

Some interesting research bears out the prevalence of male and female stereotypes in physical description that, thanks to overuse, no longer connect with readers.

Other posts in this series: Why an Architect?

Photo: andallshallbewell Tumblr page

Listen Up!

Posted on by
earphones

Two more excellent books in audio. One by a new author, the other by one of my favorites. Clicking the title takes you to my Amazon affiliate link.

Miracle Creek

Angie Kim’s debut novel received so many “book of the year” accolades, I acquired it on that basis alone. When I grasped the story-line, I was prepared to be uninterested. Boy, was I wrong! It pulls you deeper and deeper in as the plot twists and turns. Young Yoo and her teenage daughter Mary immigrated to America from South Korea with nothing. Young worked long and hard while her husband stayed in Korea to earn money.

Miracle Creek, Angie Kim

After several years, he does come to the States, distant relatives in the South Korean community provide underwriting so he can buy a Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment (HBOT) chamber and set up a treatment center in Virginia. A sealed HBOT device delivers 100 percent pure oxygen to the people inside and is touted as helpful for a wide variety of  conditions. However, the FDA considers its benefits unproven.

Among Pak’s clients is a group of mothers of children with autism who are convinced HBOT can help. One day, despite all the center’s safety precautions, a tragic fire erupts in the barn where the chamber is housed, killing parent and one child. It’s soon evident the fire was deliberate, and the mother of the dead child is arrested and put on trial. You’ll find everything is far more complicated than it seems. Expertly read by Jennifer Lim.

The Dutch House

The Dutch House, Ann Patchett

Probably I don’t need to say more than that this intriguing family story was written by Ann Patchett and narrated by Tom Hanks. Maeve and Danny Conroy grew up in the 1960s in a 1922 mansion built by the Van Hoebeek family. Located in the Philadelphia suburbs, the house is filled with extravagant touches, including a gilded ceiling in the dining room.

The children’s mother has abandoned them to go to India, it is said, and they are left mainly in the care of loyal servants. When their father remarries, they have little use for his new wife. She returns their disaffection and exiles them as soon as she can.

The adult Maeve and Danny sit in Maeve’s car outside the Dutch house and try to make sense of how they grew up, what they have lost, and what they have become. The house is a character in the story, the embodiment of lost treasure. Although there is plenty of opportunity for excessive sentimentality in this modern fairy tale, Patchett does not fall prey to it and her characters move briskly through life.

The Woman Is a Spy

Posted on by

Three women who’ve made outstanding careers for themselves in the intelligence community were featured in a Cipher Brief webinar last Friday, moderated by the organization’s founder, Suzanne Kelly, former CNN Intelligence Correspondent. As a writer interested in that world, I was eager to hear the women’s perspectives.

The women were:

Over the course of these women’s careers, the attitude toward women working in intelligence has evolved, just as it has throughout American society. When they started out in the early 80s or so, the intelligence community was an old boys’ club, and most women were relegated to support staff and administrative positions. The diversity of job opportunities for women is much greater now—after all, CIA Director Gina Haspell is a woman—but vestiges of old attitudes remain.

Thus, the era in which a story is set makes a great deal of difference as to how female characters would be treated. Perhaps engineering backgrounds gave two of these women added insight or practice in breaching institutional gender barriers.

The panelists had all worked in a variety of settings—for both government and the private sector. They change jobs and vacuum up new knowledge and skills. So, if your character needs a particular expertise, it certainly would be realistic to create a previous position where she could have gained it, inside government or not. Or, even in her own security services company.

Savvy women in the intelligence community work hard to develop a network of women in their and other intelligence agencies for all the familiar advice-seeking, moral-support reasons we know. From the perspective of these women, a more diverse workforce—in terms of gender, cultural background, type of education, analytic style, and where people have lived —produces better intelligence outcomes, as intelligence community employers have come to appreciate.

Suggested reading:
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
Bloodmoney by David Ignatius
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynn Olson

War Stories: Oddly Timely?

Posted on by

Can focusing on another low point in Western civilization sidetrack you from obsessing over the current news cycle? Does seeing how another generation coped with agonizing stress help? These engrossing World War II stories are like biting your lip as a distraction from a different pain. Click on the novel title for my Amazon affiliate link.

The Interpreter

AJ Sidransky’s political thriller has a fresh and appealing story line. The war in Europe is winding down when US Army Intelligence recruits Vienna-born GI Kurt Berlin to help in its interrogations of captured Germans—Nazis, Wehrmacht officers, and members of the SS and Gestapo.

When he reluctantly agrees, he finds himself face-to-face with the Nazi who had a terrible impact on his own family. He’s in the excruciating position of keeping his own emotions in check, but can he sustain it? Read my full review here.

Night of Shooting Stars, Ben Pastor

The Night of Shooting Stars

Latest in author Ben Pastor’s award-winning World War II-era political thrillers about colonel Baron Martin von Bora, late of German military intelligence. Because his former unit was believed to harbor anti-Nazi army officers, Bora must keep looking over his shoulder when he’s asked to investigate a strange murder. Is it a trap? What he keeps uncovering are dangerous hints about a plot threatening Adolf Hitler himself. Read my full review here.

The Winds of War
War and Remembrance

The audiobook of Herman Wouk’s 1971 saga, The Winds of War, is long (45 hours, 46 minutes) and engaging—perfect for my daily 40-minute walk. There are an awful lot of characters in this story of events leading up to World War II—American, English, German, Polish—many of them real-life politicians and military leaders. At the core of the story is a single family, fictional US Navy officer Victor “Pug” Henry, his wife, his three adult children, and their significant others. Pug is desperate to command a battleship, but naval intelligence duties in the capitals of Europe keep delaying that assignment. You get a well-rounded picture of the multinational political forces and military maneuvering in the late 1930s, packaged in a rich skein of interesting plot lines. The book ends shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk

In its sequel, War and Remembrance (56 hours), Pug is still in the Navy, son Warren is a Navy flyer stationed on an aircraft carrier in Pearl Harbor, and son Byron is a submariner. Byron’s situation is complicated by his marriage to Natalie Jastrow, a Jew stuck in fascist Italy. With these three men in different branches of the Navy, Wouk thrillingly (for me) recreates many of the important battles and strategies of the war in the Pacific.

You may recall ABC’s 1980s miniseries of these books with Robert Mitchum as Pug Henry (Interestingly, all three children were played by different actors in the two productions.) Reportedly, a new adaptation, to be co-written by Seth MacFarlane is in the works.

The Winds of War was a best-seller, but the critics didn’t love either book. Too much emphasis on historical accuracy over character development, they thought. Exactly what made me enjoy it! It’s like an education about the war in an easy-to-digest package, with Wouk’s main point, the key word “remembrance.”

The audiobooks are narrated brilliantly by Kevin Pariseau, who kept me company all summer.

Where Writers’ Ideas Come from: Why an Architect?

Posted on by
woman writing

The architect who is the protagonist of my novel-in-progress, Archer Landis, has lived in my head so long, I had to scour my brain to remember why he designs buildings rather than runs railroads, manages a department store empire, or fixes teeth.

My parents were Frank Lloyd Wright devotees, read his books (I still have them), and in the 1950s, when they wanted to build a house, they wrote to the great man. The size of their budget undoubtedly stopped that conversation before it got started, but he wrote them a nice letter. So my dad designed our house himself along Wrightean principles. Small by today’s standards. Small then.

In college I lurked around the studios in the architecture school, using an empty drawing board for my own graphics work, fascinated by the students’ model buildings and the smell of sharpened pencils, rubber cement, clay. A scene in the novel has Landis ruminating on that kind of by-hand work versus today’s 3-D printing.

At a more symbolic level, Landis is confronted with people who are his opposites. He wants to build; they want to destroy. Their destructiveness affects him directly, both personally and professionally, and threatens his family, his business, his life.

As this book developed, the things he notices, his relationships, nearly everything he does goes back to the touchstone of his calling. Straightedges and French curves and stone samples. He could no more be a railroad exec, a retailer, or a dentist than he could be an emissary from Alpha Centauri.

Photo of woman writing: Nick Kenrick, creative commons license

Thrills and Chills, Delivered Right to Your Ears

Posted on by

These are “OK-I’ll-take just-another-walk-around-the-block” audiobook listens. Award-nominated stories, great narrations! Click on the titles for my Amazon affiliate links. Enthralled by every one of these!

The End of October

Lawrence Wright, End of October

Lawrence Wright must have really polished up his crystal ball before writing this medical/political thriller about a brutal pandemic. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, he has a knack for describing scientific complexities and capturing both the big political picture and the significant details. The hero of the book is Henry Parsons, an American physician from the Centers for Disease Control trying to control the uncontrollable as world leaders behave in all-too-familiar, self-serving, short-sighted ways. Near the end, the book strays into conventional thriller territory, but the rest is terrific.

Mark Bramhall read the audio version, and I could hear Dr. Anthony Fauci every time he delivered Parsons’s words. Read my full review here.

American Spy

In Lauren Wilkinson’s highly regarded debut novel, it’s 1986 and Marie Mitchell is an FBI intelligence officer. As a young Black woman, she feels passed over, and her boss is hostile. She’s approached by CIA operatives running a campaign to discredit Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, pro-Communist president of Burkina Faso, and Marie agrees to help. What Marie  doesn’t expect is to fall under Sankara’s magnetic spell. Long after leaving Africa, the long tail of retribution is still chasing her, with deadly intent. Marie’s strong relationships with her family give the book tremendous resonance. Narrated by Bahni Turpin, beautifully

Stranger Diaries, Elly Griffiths

The Stranger Diaries Elly Griffiths’ award-nominated story describes Clare Cassidy, a high school English teacher with an affinity for the long-dead gothic horror writer R.M. Holland and his most famous work, “The Stranger,” a short story about a macabre murderer. When colleagues at the school where she teaches—where Holland himself lived and worked—start being murdered, there are mysterious links to Holland and every reason to think Clare may be next. Narrated by Esther Wane, Sarah Feathers, Anjana Vasan and Andrew Wincott, who reads “The Stranger,” bit by bit.

Good Covid Ideas from Bill Gates

Posted on by

Bill Gates has probably spent more time thinking about public health—not just in the developing world—than almost anyone who isn’t a medical epidemiologist. In a 2015 TED talk, he warned about the likelihood of a pandemic and his bottom-line was, “We’re not ready.”

Being right isn’t always gratifying. Yet, in the current issue of WIRED, Gates doesn’t cast blame on the skeptics. “We can do the postmortem at some point. We still have a pandemic going on, and we should focus on that.”

His message is for public officials and private industry alike. A particularly urgent need is for a rapid self-test for Covid 19. Most tests today, which require people to wait days for results, are essentially useless, Gates says, and a big barrier to quicker test results is the insurance reimbursement system. Tardy tests are reimbursed at the same rate as timely ones. Why not build in a financial incentive for speedy response and a penalty—including no reimbursement at all—for delayed results?

Another shortfall is that the US should help the vaccine companies build extra factories for the billions of doses that will be needed around the world if the pandemic is to be effectively stopped. Although this would be expensive, he says it’s a fraction of the money that will be lost in a tanking worldwide economy. “In terms of saving lives and getting us back to normal,” that expenditure is a smart and essential investment. Interesting.

Autumn Thrills

Posted on by

Three exciting reads from 2020. The only thing they have in common is how good they are! Click on the title for my Amazon affiliate link.

The Wicked Sister

In this all-new story and cast of characters, Karen Dionne reprises elements of her first quite fabulous book, The Marsh King’s Daughter. Again, the setting is the sparsely populated, heavily wooded Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and, again, the natural world plays an important role, underlining themes and supporting the action.

The main character, 26-year-old Rachel, even talks to animals. Dionne’s light touch makes these interactions more revealing of Rachel than weird. Rachel is fragile. She’s just spent 15 years in a mental institution believing she murdered her parents. With chapters narrated by both her mother (“then”) and Rachel (“now”), you learn what really happened and pray for Rachel’s escape. My full review here.

How to Be Nowhere

Fasten your seatbelt for a breakneck, bumpy ride. Tim MacGabhann’s new thriller takes place in the murky regions of Central America

Investigative reporter Andrew and his friend Maya have connected with some pretty dangerous characters over the years, and that past comes roaring back.

The bad guys want the reporters’ help finding their leader’s daughter, a much more difficult and dangerous task than you might imagine. Plenty of dark humor. If Hollywood ever makes a movie of this story, they’ll need a hefty budget line-item for expendable vehicles.

My full review here.

Seven Lies

Elizabeth Kay’s new domestic thriller is an immersive journey into a twenty-year friendship. Jane and Marnie have been inseparable since age eleven, though narrator Jane doesn’t hesitate to explain the many ways they differ.

They work in London post-college, and Marnie meets successful, wealthy, charming Charles. Jane loathes him. When Marnie asks Jane, “You think we’re right for each other, don’t you?” Jane swallows hard and tells lie number one: “Yes, I do.”

Kay strings you along, inviting your complicity, as the box Jane has constructed for herself becomes smaller and smaller and her lies increasingly consequential. My full review here.