A Thousand Times No

It’s February 29th, a day that turns up only once every four years. Today I was trying to think of things that I might like to do once every four years — no more, no less — for the rest of my life.

Travel to a new continent? There’s only six left, other than the one I’m standing on at the moment, and I’d like to think I have more than 24 years left in me yet.

Jump out of a plane? Not something I see myself doing thirty years down the line, unlike some people.

Go on a cruise? Maybe. I might know better after I try it out first. (Ditto on the parachuting.)

Then it came to me, the thing I’ve already been doing on exactly that schedule. Not too seldom, not too often, and something I can manage even when I’m a little old lady battling osteoporosis and yelling at kids to stay off my lawn.

If you haven’t already guessed what it is, you have until November to figure it out.

Yesterday morning I needed to have some blood drawn as part of my annual physical checkup. The lab used by my doctor’s office has a large waiting room, but the space where they perform the actual blood draws is tiny, filled with a series of special chairs with gated lap tables for the patients’ arms. Ringed against the wall of the lab, the chairs face each other, which must provide a challenge when traffic is high for any patient who feels faint at the very sight of blood.

Several people drifted past the lab door while I waited outside nearby. One couple walked in together, then wandered out, are were about to walk in again when the woman waiting next to me cheerfully told them, “You need to pull a tab out of the number machine. It’s just like going to the deli.”

She and I were called into the lab at the same time by a tiny Asian woman who was going to draw blood from each of us in turn. Though there were three other phlebotomists in the room, the were all gathered around a window examining something of great interest together. I suddenly remembered the various times I had been to this lab before. There was the time one flub-otomist went into both my arms search of a vein — later resulting in ugly bruises on both sides — but kept missing until an excruciating third attempt. She had started talking about inserting a needle into my hand until I vigorously protested, “You can put a tourniquet on my arm for an hour before will I let you stick a needle anywhere near my hand.”

Yesterday’s phlebotomist, I recalled, was from the Philippines, with a sure and deft touch. As she began swabbing my arm, I started taking deep breaths to force myself to relax. Seeing my body go tense, the patient in the chair next to me began chatting with me to reassure me. “I’m trying to have a baby, so I’m here all the time,” she confided with a smile. “You’ve got the best person here working on you.”

“I know,” I replied, returning her smile and giving her the thumbs-up sign. She responded with a thumbs-up, and out of earshot from the window she added, “There’s tremendous variation among the people who work here. Tremendous. Variation.” Recalling my previous experiences, I nodded strongly. By then, I could no longer feel the needle resting in my arm. Within a few more moments, everything was done, and I was on my way.

As I waved goodbye to the other patient while “our” phlebotomist began preparing to draw blood from her, I silently hoped that the luck of the draw would someday bring her the baby she wished.

The New Republic is running a fascinating piece entitled “The Audacity of Data,” in which senior editor Noam Scheiber examines the empirically-based, data-driven approaches of several of Obama’s leading policy advisors. If you liked Freakonomics or The Paradox of Choice, you’ll enjoy this article and its profiles of various “Obamanauts,” including University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee.

I was a bit surprised that the piece opens with the spotlight on Chicago behavioral economist Richard Thaler, but somehow manages to entirely forgo using the phrase “libertarian paternalism,” even as it explicitly describes policies of that ilk. Of course, it would only serve to muddy a piece about the post-ideological nature of Obama advisors to have either of the loaded terms “libertarian” or “paternalism” appear in print. It also seems that Thaler and Chicago legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who coined the term in a paper they co-authored in 2004, have omitted it from the title of their upcoming book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (note the cute elephants on the cover).

The Scheiber piece made me realize what resonates with me about Obama’s approach to policymaking: it incorporates de facto usability testing! One of the truisms of the usability biz is that all products eventually undergo usability evaluations — the question is whether it happens before or after you release the product. Usability testing can help resolve what we jokingly refer to as “wars of religion” over design dilemmas, when competing solutions are reflections of differences in aesthetic preference and personal belief. In the end, the user will interact with the product in ways that designers and developers alike often fail to anticipate, all our glorious theories be damned. Looking at the data from usability testing helps keep the things we build in line with how they will actually be used by people in the real world.

Likewise, approaching policy with a keen eye towards measuring and quantifying how people really behave in everyday life is the ultimate in reality-based strategic planning. It is also an effective tool for resolving partisan deadlock. Nearly three decades after Reagan came to Washington, it would be a delicious twist of fate if a new wave of thinkers from the University of Chicago triggered yet another paradigm shift in how we choose to formulate our domestic policies.

(To hear more on the cognitive biases that underlie some of Thaler’s “anomalies,” check out my interview with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice.)

I am not a happy camper. Just as I was saving something I was writing here, some unknown person who is sharing a web server with me decided to clog the pipes with the mother of all load spikes. My attempt to save eventually timed out, and WordPress erased my entry.

In plain English, the dog ate my blog post.

I booked a car with PhillyCarShare this evening for a couple of hours in order to run a few errands. I drove a Prius hatchback, something I’ve done dozens of times before. Tonight was different. At one point, trying to make myself heard through the speakerphone setting on my cell phone, I turned down the car’s radio. When I finished the call, I simply continued to drive around in silence.

Priuses (Prii?) are very quiet cars to begin with, but when you mute the car’s audio system and roll through the narrow, moonlit streets of a town that was built on a horse-and-buggy scale, it’s practically meditative. The car was so noiseless that I rolled behind a takeout delivery person for the better part of a very long block as he slowly pedaled his bike, oblivious to my presence. At intersections, I could hear music seeping out of neighboring vehicles, even though all our windows were rolled up to keep the crisp night air at bay.

The hybrid comes on little cat feet…

I just learned that my neighborhood Wawa will be closing in less than a week. Wawa is a convenience store chain based in the mid-Atlantic that takes its name from the Lenni-Lenape term for the Canadian goose. All Wawas have deli counters and a selection of fresh foods, and the Wawa near my house was open around the clock. “The Wawa that sustains us will be no more,” sighed a woeful salesperson in a neighborhood shop when I stopped by yesterday afternoon. We were all crestfallen.

Wawa has been the clean, well-lighted constant in my neighborhood the entire time I’ve lived here. If I had a craving for a pint of ice cream, a sandwich, or face-to-face contact with another human being at three in the morning, my Wawa was always just a short walk away. If I stepped out for an evening dressed too lightly for the weather, or got caught in a downpour without an umbrella, my Wawa was the pit stop where I could warm up or dry out for a few minutes before dashing home. If I had to grab a quick bite before hurrying off to a music rehearsal or an evening gathering, the Wawa was always there for me. The cash machine nearest to my house is at the Wawa. I even got asked out on a date once after striking up a conversation while standing in line at my Wawa.

From a corporate standpoint, I’m sure it makes sense to close my neighborhood Wawa. There’s another Wawa several blocks away, and I could always walk there in a pinch. But it’s twice the distance from my home, at an intersection I rarely walk past, so it’s less a convenience store and more an emergency backup option.

I’m really going to miss you, friendly neighborhood Wawa. Thanks for the countless ways you made my day-to-day life run more smoothly all these years.

In his blog at Psychology Today, psychiatrist Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and several other books, muses on how the American electorate seems to hold Democrats and Republicans to different standards of emotional intelligence. A self-professed northeastern liberal, Kramer writes of the GOP:

That party has a different response to stiffness and insincerity in candidates—the presence of those traits seems to ‘energize the base.’ Better perhaps to say: while awkwardness is never an asset, at the presidential level it’s death for Democrats in a way that it’s not for Republicans.

Since Kramer’s books have been filled with astute, compassionate explorations of how we as a society choose to approach questions of mind and psyche, it’s tempting to take this observation as an invitation to plumb whatever lurks in the hidden hearts of Democrats. But I think the underpinnings of this phenomenon lie elsewhere — in fact, I don’t think the explanation lies with people who identify strongly as Democrats at all. To paraphrase political strategist James Carville, “It’s the swing voters, stupid.”

Dyed-in-the-wool Democrats will pull the lever for their party’s chosen candidate, come rain or come shine. But those party loyalists do not constitute a clear majority of the American electorate. For a Democratic presidential candidate to be voted into office, he or she must to sway enough of the undecided center to capture the White House.

Okay, take a step back and look at what every Democrat is standing on during the general election — the party platform. For generations now, the Democratic platform has been about helping the less fortunate and providing access and opportunity to people who very well may not look like you, live like you, or live anywhere near you. Energizing the swing vote means that you need to persuade people to act against their own short-term and immediate self-interests, to delay gratification in support of generational gains, and to work on behalf of the needs of others.

Selling the Democratic platform straight down the middle is selling self-sacrifice. Period.

If a Democratic candidate hasn’t got charm, charisma, and enough human warmth to make a camera lens melt, that’s going to go over like a lead balloon. It’s no coincidence that the most iconic Democrats (FDR, JFK) have not only been personable, but have also managed to combine being patrician and populist at the same time. The American electorate has a history of electing, then later pillorying, Democrats who don’t possess that patrician veneer — LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. But the patricians get boulevards and stadiums named in their honor, here and abroad.

Why? Knocking a home run out of the park with the Democratic agenda demands that the candidate embody a very American form of noblesse oblige: measuring our richness in life not by the accumulation of material possessions, but by how much we can give of ourselves to other people. A Democratic president cannot hope to successfully promote an agenda that requires altruistic sacrifices from the citizenry unless he or she appears to be free from, and well above, self-promotion and striving for personal gain.

When the most fortunate among us — those blessed with the greatest wealth, station, or talent at birth — choose to throw in their lot with everyone else at the expense of their own personal comfort, it seems petty, self-serving, and déclassé for the rest of us to do otherwise. The British royal family knew this by heart during the Blitz in WWII, and the Democrats would do well to remember it in this election year.

Charisma is not a dirty word: when you’re a Democrat, it’s a job requirement. Don’t leave home, or try to reframe public discourse, without it.

…is a ha’penny earned?

In an OpEd piece in today’s New York Times, Dalton Conley, the chair of NYU’s Sociology department, suggests that the federal government should provide incentives for Americans to increase their personal savings. Conley contends that providing 50 cents to match every dollar that low-income Americans deposited into a special investment fund, similar to the way many employers match funds for 401(k) plan deposits, would spur more savings while also providing capital to stimulate business growth.

Readers were all over the idea like a cheap suit on the comments board. They hated it, hated it, hated it. It never ceases to amaze me how the same people who have almost certainly acted in accordance with plenty of other financial incentives (tax breaks for IRAs, charitable donations, and mortgage interest) or disincentives (penalties for early withdrawals from retirement plans or certificates of deposit) seem to think that those with lesser incomes would behave any less rationally.  When it comes putting non-retirement investment assets into the hands of more Americans, I hardly think people who already have skin in that game are the ones to be lecturing everyone else about irrationality, exuberant or otherwise.

(To be continued:  I’ll put in the second of my two cents on this topic over the weekend, after I’ve gotten some much-needed sleep.)

I went to a sneak preview tonight for “Never Back Down,” a mixed martial-arts flick set in an affluent Orlando high school, awash in jump cuts and adrenaline. The movie is rated PG-13, despite delivering one brutal beat-down after another onscreen. Count on it being popular with the target teen audience, due in no small part to a bevy of attractive young stars, a juiced-up soundtrack, casually opulent backdrops, and a digital-age sensibility that zips through the hairpin turns of how young reputations are made or broken in an era of texting, MySpace, and YouTube.

After seeing a production like this, I can only remark: “How am I ancient? Let me count the ways.”

• I struggled for the first half of the film to get past male lead Sean Faris’s resemblance to a young Tom Cruise.
• I kept wondering what kind of health insurance plans the parents of these rough-and-tumble kids had, and where I could get that kind of coverage.
• I showed up solely for one name on the marquee — Djimon Hounsou.
• I’m older than the vintage black sports car that one teen character loves enough to kiss on the roof.

Part of the fun of seeing an action film in Philly comes when the audience starts talking back to the screen. A man sitting behind me registered his incredulity at the selective fight injuries, wryly noting, “That kid got kicked square in the mouth, but his face isn’t bleeding at all?” After Djimon Hounsou delivers a speech on the importance of proper respiration in combat, he sends a punching bag flying with a single roundhouse kick. A woman near me shouted, “Breathe!” to gales of appreciative laughter. While a guileless character was being lured into a setup, people warned him, “Don’t go with them! Don’t do it!”

I don’t care how good the audio in your home entertainment system might be — there is still no way it can match Philly Surround Sound.

Tonight there was a full lunar eclipse.  Watching the moon fade away is interesting, but it’s a slow process.  More striking is the color of the moon, a strange red-orange shade that makes it look like an wayward piece of celestial fruit.

(With a bite taken out, of course.)