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Ken's first test subject was Alan Melvin, a world-class Masters triathlete in his sixties. First, Ken set a baseline by having Melvin run four hundred meters full out. Then he clipped a small electric metronome to his T-shirt.

"What's this for?"

"Set it for one hundred eighty beats a minute, then run to the beat."

"Why?"

"Kenyans have superquick foot turnover," Ken said. "Quick, light leg contractions are more economical than big, forceful ones."

"I don't get it," Alan said. "Don't I want a longer stride, not a shorter one?"

"Let me ask you this," Ken replied. "You ever see one of those barefoot guys in a 10K race?"

"Yeah. It's like they're running on hot coals."

"You ever beat one of those barefoot guys?"

Alan reflected. "Good point."

After practicing for five months, Alan came back for another round of testing. He ran four one-mile repeats, and every lap of the track was faster than his previous four hundred-meter best. "This was someone who'd been running for forty years and was already Top Ten in his age group," Ken pointed out. "This wasn't the improvement of a beginner. In fact, as a sixty-two-year-old athlete, he should have been declining."

Ken was working on himself, as well. He'd been such a weak runner that in his best triathlon to date, he'd come off the bike with a ten-minute lead and still lost. Within a year of creating his new technique in 1997, Ken became unbeatable, winning the world disabled championship the next two years in a row. Once word got out that Ken had figured out a way to run that was not only fast but gentle on

Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)

If evolution has indeed left us hardwired to be social and derive satisfaction from altruism, then it's obviously not just the affluent who have these needs. Indeed, some interesting initiatives give the poor the rewards that come with helping others, and one of the most intriguing is the Restore Leadership Academy in Uganda. Its impoverished students raise money to help American kids.

The academy was founded by Bob Goff, an American lawyer who is a passionate believer in self-help and self-efficacy, and who exudes those same qualities. When his law school application was rejected, he camped outside the dean's office for a week until the dean surrendered and accepted him. Many years later, as a veteran traveler to Uganda, Goff started Restore in 2007 with just four students. It now has a middle school and a high school, with forty teachers and 350 coed students, including former child soldiers and orphans. They all grew up knowing only poverty and conflict. Official test scores from Restore Leadership Academy have ranked it as the second-best school in northern Uganda in academics and the best in athletics. Pupils pay partial tuition and donors cover the rest, including tuition, food, school supplies, medicine, and a sports program. Funders can support a student at the academy for $30 a month.

For fear of breeding dependency, Goff ensures that the students don't perceive themselves as charity cases. They plant, grow, and sell their own crops to pay for their education, and they engage in public service projects such as repairing wells. Then the academy proposed something that raised eyebrows: raising money to donate to needy kids in America. "We wanted to give the kids a sense of empowerment," explains Deborah Eriksson, the executive director of Restore International, which oversees the academy. "We wanted to switch the idea from they are just beneficiaries of help to 'I am strong enough, I can give.' "

The academy chose as its target charity The Mentoring Project, which is based in Portland, Oregon, and supports at-risk boys who don't have dads. Such an organization resonated with the Ugandan children, for many in their community had lost fathers and they intuitively understood the need for mentors. Helping kids in a rich country was novel for the Ugandan students. "They see Westerners come over on trips and they seem insanely wealthy," Eriksson noted. "Kids probably think: 'They could help me so much, they have so much money.' We like the idea of switching that thinking because we don't want them to just think that 'people from the States are here to help me, pity me, and they have it all figured it out.' We want them to think in terms of friendship, and all around the world there are folks who need help."

John Sowers, president of The Mentoring Project, was stunned when he received an email explaining that a group of impoverished Ugandan children recovering from war planned a donation. "How can these kids give to us?" he wondered. "I was thinking, 'Wait a second. I've been giving money to Africa, and I can't take money from Africa.' "

He recalls telling Goff, Bob, I don't know if we can take money from you guys. Empowering these kids to give, Goff replied, is the best thing we can do for them.

Samuel Oboma, a Restore academy graduate now at university and aiming to become a lawyer, says that the students were eager to help their American counterparts. His own father was killed in the war in northern Uganda a week before he was born, and his mother was jobless, so he never had much to share - and that made the chance to help needy American kids even more special. "It's something wonderful," Samuel said. "It's not only people within Africa or a specific part of the world who need help... It's good to give a hand to whoever needs it. In any part of the world you're responsible, irrespective of race or color."

In Oregon, Sowers gradually came around to the idea of accepting money from Ugandan students: "I want to see the kids as victims, and they have been victimized, but Bob is all about empowering them. So Bob's idea was for them to give to us. And what an amazing idea for them to give to this country - and you're impacting America and Uganda and everyone else. That blew me away." So far, the Ugandan youngsters have raised $830, which goes to training, supporting, and recruiting mentors for the American youngsters. Every month, the Ugandan students raise another $25 or so.


Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "A Path Appears" (2014)

What might make Lucky Strike stand out? In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins. "It's toasted" was the slogan, the "secret" step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine's playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic - specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes, With a new claim that toasting "removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation," including "harmful corrosive acids," the Lucky Strike slogan became: "Your throat protection - against irritation - against cough." There was even a secret process involved: "the 'TOASTING' process includes the use of the Ultra Violet Ray ... heat purifies and so 'TOASTING' - that extra, secret process - removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing." To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a "precious voice" campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers. What could be more persuasive than the Metropolitan Opera's lead soprano attesting that she smoked Luckies to protect her livelihood?

The testimonials were, of course, paid for, but it is still startling that Lasker was able to coax the singers into the effort. Even by the late 1920s, there were inklings that cigarettes might be bad for you. So, to preempt the truth, Lasker deployed another old patent medicine trick: he tried to co-opt medical authority. The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands. Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: "20,679 physicians say 'LUCKIES are less irritating' ... Your throat protection."

Tim Wu "Attention Merchants" (2016)

Back in 2013 there had been an incident in California that got everyone's attention. Late one night, just southeast of San Jose, at Pacific Gas and Electric's Metcalf substation, a well-informed sniper, using a .30-caliber rifle, had taken out seventeen transformers. Someone had also cut the cables that enabled communication to and from the substation. "They knew exactly what lines to cut," said Tarak Shah, who studied the incident for the DOE. "They knew exactly where to shoot. They knew exactly which manhole covers were relevant - where the communication lines were. These were feeder stations to Apple and Google." There had been enough backup power in the area that no one noticed the outage, and the incident came and went quickly from the news. But, Shah said, "for us it was a wake-up call." In 2016 the DOE counted half a million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the U.S. electrical grid. "It's one thing to put your head in the sand for climate change - it's like MANANA," says Ali Zaidi, who served in the White House as Obama's senior adviser on energy policy "This is here and now. We actually don't have a transformer reserve. They're like these million-dollar things. Seventeen transformers getting shot up in California is not like, 'Oh, we'll just fix the problem.' Our electric-grid assets are growing vulnerable."

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

That Trump was not fully investigated by the enforcement division was obvious to anyone who read its 1982 licensing report. But it was almost a decade later that investigative reporter Wayne Barrett's biography of Trump revealed that the developer also had been the target of a 1979 federal bribery investigation. No charges resulted from the probe, which had been inspired by one of Barrett's disclosures in the Village Voice newspaper But Trump had not listed the probe in his license application, and the Casino Control Act mandates license denial for anyone who omits a relevant fact. The key court case upholding the disclosure provision involves a woman denied a license as a blackjack dealer - a much lower level of license than casino owner - because she did not report that she had been forced to resign from a retail clerk job for selling friends a few items below their ticketed prices, a matter handled in court as misdemeanor shoplifting.

The licensing report did reveal that Trump had failed to list on his application an investigation of alleged racial discrimination against tenants. Still, the enforcement division recommended Trump for approval because he disclosed this matter just before he was to be questioned under oath about the omission.

The licensing report's most interesting portions examined Trump's finances, disclosing a pattern that would continue into the future: modest executive salary ($100,000), minimal savings ($6,000), fat fees from his deals ($1 million commission on the Grand Hyatt), and enormous debts ($35 million unsecured credit line at Chase Manhattan Bank).

The report also gave a glimpse into his efforts to avoid income taxes by owning his properties through partnerships. At first Trump cut his siblings Maryanne and Robert in on some deals, but in his casinos and many other of his celebrated deals Trump was almost always both the sole general partner and the sole limited partner, a strategy designed to reduce income taxes. It worked fabulously to lighten the burden of supporting the United States government. By 1978 Trump had yet to build Trump Tower or any of his casinos, which together created opportunities for multimillion-dollar deductions each year, by vastly enlarging his opportunities to report a negative income to the government while at the same time living the vaunted Trump lifestyle on cash flow.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

A family of four in Florida was on their way to the hospital with a medical emergency when they ran out of gas. Fortunately, paramedics got there and took the sick family member to the hospital. But the rest of the family was still stranded. So three firefighters who'd showed up to assist pushed the family's car a quarter mile uphill to a gas station and paid to refill the tank and fix the flat tire. Now, that is full service.

Barefoot Ted was right, of course.

Lost in all the fireworks between Ted and Caballo was an important point: running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot. Barefoot Ted, in his own weird way, was becoming the Neil Armstrong of twenty-first-century distance running, an ace test pilot whose small steps could have tremendous benefit for the rest of mankind. If that seems like excessive stature to load on Barefoot Ted's shoulders, consider these words by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University:

"A lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, give us knee problems. Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries."

And the cost of those injuries? Fatal disease in epidemic proportions. "Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history," Dr. Lieberman said. "If there's any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it's to run."

Magic bullet? The last time a scientist with Dr. Lieberman's credentials used that term, he'd just created penicillin. Dr. Lieberman knew it, and meant it. If running shoes never existed, he was saying, more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.

That's a staggering amount of guilt to lay at Nike's feet. But the most remarkable part? Nike already knew it.

In April 2001, two Nike reps were watching the Stanford University track team practice. Part of a Nike rep's job is getting feedback from its sponsored runners about which shoes they prefer, but that was proving difficult at the moment because the Stanford runners all seemed to prefer nothing.

"Vin, what's up with the barefooting?" they called to Stanford head coach Vin Lananna. "Didn't we send you enough shoes?"

Coach Lananna walked over to explain. "I can't prove this," he explained, "but I believe when my runners train barefoot, they run faster and suffer fewer injuries."

Faster and fewer injuries? Coming from anyone else, the Nike guys would have politely uh-huhed and ignored it, but this was one coach whose ideas they took seriously. Like Joe Vigil, Lananna was rarely mentioned without the word "visionary" or "innovator" popping up. In just ten years at Stanford, Lananna's track and cross-country teams had won five NCAA team championships and twenty-two individual titles, and Lananna himself had been named NCAA Cross Country Coach of the Year. Lananna had already sent three runners to the Olympics and was busy grooming more with his Nike-sponsored "Farm Team," a post-college club for the best of the very best. Needless to say, the Nike reps were a little chagrined to hear that Lananna felt the best shoes Nike had to offer were worse than no shoes at all.

"We've shielded our feet from their natural position by providing more and more support," Lananna insisted. That's why he made sure his runners always did part of their workouts in bare feet on the track's infield. "I know as a shoe company, it's not the greatest thing to have a sponsored team not use your product, but people went thousands of years without shoes. I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you overcompensate. You fix things that don't need fixing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems."

"Risk" isn't quite the right term; it's more like "dead certainty."

Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of all runners suffer an injury. That's nearly every runner, every single year. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or ripped as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone.

Maybe you'll beat the odds if you stretch like a swami? Nope. In a 1993 study of Dutch athletes published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, one group of runners was taught how to warm up and stretch while a second group received no "injury prevention" coaching. Their injury rates? Identical. Stretching came out even worse in a follow-up study performed the following year at the University of Hawaii; it found that runners who stretched were 33 percent more likely to get hurt.

Lucky for us, though, we live in a golden age of technology.

Running-shoe companies have had a quarter century to perfect their designs, so logically, the injury rate must be in free fall by now. After all, Adidas has come up with a $250 shoe with a microprocessor in the sole that instantly adjusts cushioning for every stride. Asics spent three million dollars and eight years - three more than it took the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb - to invent the awe-inspiring Kinsei, a shoe that boasts "multi-angled forefoot gel pods," a "midfoot thrust enhancer," and an "infinitely adaptable heel component that isolates and absorbs impact to reduce pronation and aid in forward propulsion." That's big bucks for sneaks you'll have to toss in the garbage in ninety days, but at least you'll never limp again.

Right? Sorry.

"Since the first real studies were done in the late '70's, Achilles complaints have actually INCREASED by about 10 percent, while plantar fasciitis has remained the same," says Dr. Stephen Pribut, a running-injury specialist and past president of the American Academy of Podiatric Sports Medicine. "The technological advancements over the past thirty years have been amazing," adds Dr. Irene Davis, the director of the Running Injury Clinic at the University of Delaware.

"We've seen tremendous innovations in motion control and cushioning. And yet the remedies don't seem to defeat the ailments."

In fact, there's no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies - not one - that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.

It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden in plain sight for thirty-five years. Dr. Richards was so stunned that a twenty-billion-dollar industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he even issued a challenge:

Is any running shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries?

Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance?

If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer reviewed data to back it up?

Dr. Richards waited, and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.

So if running shoes don't make you go faster and don't stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for? What are the benefits of all those microchips, "thrust enhancers," air cushions, torsion devices, and roll bars? Well, if you have a pair of Kinseis in your closet, brace yourself for some bad news. And like all bad news, it comes in threes:

PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst

RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at



Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)

Take a pair of sparkling eyes
(W S Gilbert, "The Goldoliers")

I suppose this one really started when my son got one of his sore throats because who should rush into me but Glinka.

Now Glinka is the au pair girl. She's a middle-aged lady who comes from Lapland and prior to arriving in England she'd never before left her little wooden hut. So all of our ways is rather strange to her.

But any way, in she rushed and she shouted out, "The son, the male child. He's choking himself. Choking."

Now I must explain that Glinka had only been with us two months and instead of going to evening classes, she'd decided to learn the language watching Coronation Street.

So, she said "Come quick, come quick, the first born. Up and he's snuffing it."

Of course I rushed up to the bathroom immediately as any father would, and what do I see? There was my son and he's holding a glass of salt water and having a gargle.

He said, "Hello Dad." (gurgles)

Well Glinka nearly fainted.

I said, "Don't be silly, Glinka. He's only gargling."

Well, after nearly half an hour of patient explanation I elicited a most astonishing anthropological fact. The people of northern Lapland do not gargle.

She asked "Can anyone do it?"

I said, "Yes."

"You don't have to belong to an industrialized society?"

"Go ahead and try it."

I gave her a glass of salt water and you should have seen her face. Exhilarated wasn't the word. Can you imagine, at the age of forty-five that your body can produce a wholly new noise.

And I must tell you, from that moment on, there was no stopping her. Every spare moment, there she was up in the bathroom "gurrrr" and shrieking with delight

There was no more going to discos on her day off. No more wine and blubber parties at the Anglo-Lapland Club. Every evening was spent in her room with a giant jerry can of water and this great two pound block of salt

It was harmless. And she obviously enjoyed it. It could have gone on indefinitely except for one thing. Suddenly England found itself plunged into yet another one of its consumer crises, a salt shortage. And when that took hold, it really became a bit much eating flavorless French frie just so the au pair emitting throbbing trills on her uvula.

So I said to her "I'm terribly sorry, Glinka, but I'm afraid your gargling is getting rather like using petrol for unessential journeys. So I'm sorry. No more salt. You'll have to find something else to goose up the warm water with."

And then I suddenly had an inspiration. In the kitchen we've got a spice rack. We never really use much. We just keep it because the names on the jars are so nice. Like cinnamon, which always reminds me of the chap that wrote the Inspector Maigret stories.

I said to her, "Look. Why don't you use of these spices to flavor the water with? Here. Nutmeg. How about that?"

And she said, "That'll be right gravely."

And she took it to the bathroom and sure enough in a few minutes drifting down came the sound of an outboard motor noise.

However, about a month later we began to notice something. A definite change had come over Glinka. Gone sort of wild and kind of leering.

I thought perhaps she might be going through the change of climate, you see, so I said to her, "Perhaps you ought to go see the doctor."

Well, her manner being what it was, rather sullen It took a bit of arguing, but finally she agreed to it. When she came back that's when we learned another astonishing fact.

Did you know that nutmeg is a mild intoxicant? It was really so. And by gargling in such quantities over the preceding month Glinka had passed the whole four weeks absolutely smashed out of her mind. If you think that's incredible. If you don't believe it, I can show you the very note the doctor wrote telling me not to allow Glinka to continue this activity of hers.

It says, "Take au pair off gargling spice."

Dennis Norden 530b

One Father's Day, our teenage kids banded together and got Nick the perfect gift for any dad - a rat. It was an African giant pouched rat, to be precise, and it has a wondrous sense of smell that allows it to do heroic work detecting landmines. Our kids sponsored one rat's training in Nick's name. The breed is thirty inches long including the tail, with poor eyesight but a superb sense of smell. A Belgian aid group called Apopo figured out how to train these animals to do this lifesaving work. The rats are too light to set off the mines, and they are easily trainable. With a life span of eight years, the rats have plenty of time to earn back the training costs. In a single day, one of these rats - dubbed HeroRats - can clear 400 square meters of land otherwise unusable because of landmines. The HeroRats are deployed to clear mines in Mozambique and Angola, and in twenty minutes they can help clear as much land as a human could in two days.

Our children's donation made a difference to some very needy people, so we were thrilled that Nick received so meaningful a gift.'

If you want to sponsor a HeroRat in someone's honor, visit www.apopo.org. The cost is $84 a year, or €60, and you get an "adoption certificate."

Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "A Path Appears" (2014)

William S. Paley, president and chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was of a type lost to our times, when vice has ceased to pay virtue its natural tribute, hypocrisy. He was simultaneously well mannered and insatiably hedonistic, cultivating the finest things and the fanciest of friends while maintaining a quiet, understated demeanor. "His strivings were nearly invisible," wrote an associate) "his actions always veiled in gentility." His several marriages, each to a beautiful socialite, never interfered with his sexual conquests. Paley was, in short, a playboy of the old school. And due to timing, coincidence, and some level of innate talent, he would become a primary, and perhaps the prime, merchant of the twentieth century's definitive attention industry, broadcasting.

Paley's entry into it was close to a chance occurrence. Born rich, he had, by age twenty-seven, graduated from college and taken a secure place in the family business, which sold La Palina cigars. His c1assmates had seen him as destined to do little more than live off his parents' money and chase women and the other pleasures of the bon vivant. But something happened while he was serving as the advertising manager for the famly cigar company: he, like so many others, became entranced by radio. The family had decided to advertise on the new medium, whereupon Paley devised the idea of "La Palina girl," a glamorous and sultry singer who was depicted as the only female guest at an all-male gathering of smokers, whom she would amuse with her wisecracks and song. While producing the show, Paley fell in love with La Palina girl - the miraculous sensation of coming up with a hit. While no Amos 'n' Andy, his show did drive sales of the family cigars from 400,000 to one million a day - making it "one of radio's earliest spectacular achievements."

So smitten was he that Paley started cajoling his father for a toy, almost as another rich kid might ask for a sports car, and soon, crossing the Atlantic, Samuel Paley would be telling a fellow passenger, "I just bought the Columbia Broadcasting System for my son." As an investment, it seemed foolish at best. The network had long been available to NBC and its boss, David Sarnoff, but it was so tiny (sixteen part-time, low-wattage stations) and NBC so powerful that Sarnoff had written it off as worth neither buying nor destroying. Columbia was an outsider with a limited following, and concerning its first programming, a reviewer in Radio Broadcast was brutal. "Probably not a dozen people in the country, beside ourselves, heard it. No one not paid to do so, as we are, could have survived it." Thus, still in his late twenties, Paley became an unlikely captain of what looked like a sinking ship. With his "cocktail slouch" he seemed, according to a contemporary, "just a rich man's son, another angel with ten fingers to burn."

***

But Paley was easy to underestimate, as he soon showed. In the late 1920S, the business worked this way: network shows were produced either by the networks themselves - so-called public interest, or "sustaining" shows - or by other businesses that "sponsored" a show, the way Pepsodent sponsored Amos' n' Andy. The broadcast schedule at most affiliated stations was therefore a combination of these sustaining programs, for which they paid the network a licensing fee, and the sponsored shows, plus whatever fare the local station itself might put on. NBC and CBS lost money producing the sustaining shows, but the idea was to make up the difference with the substantial advertising proceeds from the sponsored shows, of which a small portion went to the affiliates.

In 1928, Paley made a bold offer to the nation's many independent radio stations. The CBS network would provide any of them ALL of its sustaining content FOR FREE - on the sole condition that they agree to carry the sponsored content as well, for which they would, moreover, receive a handsome check. In short, Paley was offering a full slate of programming, and paying stations to take it - an apparent win-win deal, considering they were often desperate to fill their hours anyhow.

In just three months, Paley shocked the broadcast world by signing twenty-five new affiliates. CBS, once a kind of joke, became larger than either of NBC's Red or Blue networks' in just one fiscal quarter. Paley understood that, under the guise of a giveaway, he was in fact buying audiences on the cheap (a trick similar to that of the American penny press of the 1830s). With his requirement of carrying the full CBS schedule, he had also begun a trend toward homogenizing and nationalizing the content of radio. That would eventually become a cause for complaint, but at the time it was an insuperable competitive advantage: NBC, in contrast, was stingily charging its affiliates to license its sustaining programs, while also driving a hard bargain, on a show-by-show basis, over their share of proceeds from running the sponsored shows - to say nothing of setting very exacting technical requirements to become an NBC station. With CBS and Paley everything was free and easy, good times for all, and so stations were happy to join up.

Paley never understood the technical side of radio well, but he understood from the beginning the very particular and unusual business of being an attention merchant. By that time, there were large new industries, like film, in the relatively straightforward business of selling content. Broadcasting, however, was still in a nebulous state, somewhere between a public service and a business. Officially, radio stations were trustees of the public airwaves and were required, by federal law, to conduct their broadcasting "in the public interest" Accordingly, some stations were noncommercial, and the commercial stations were required to broadcast some programs that were public minded. Nonetheless Paley understood that radio was quickly becoming a business, chat amassing a giant audience was key, and that broadcasting would become enormously profitable by growing the network and by offering skillful programming. Yet before any of this would work, he would first need to sell advertisers on the possibilities of broadcasting itself.

Over the 1920s and 1930s, CBS produced a series of pamphlets emphasizing the power of broadcasting to reach into the minds of its listeners. One entitled You Do What You're Told argued that since people tended to obey human voices, radio advertising would be more compelling than existing print forms. Radio, according to the pamphlet, "presents the living voice of authority," giving it the "supple power to move people and mold them, to enlist them and command them.

"Here you have the advertiser's ideal - the family group in its moments of relaxation awaiting your message," said CBS. "Nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man." It is, as we shall see, one thing to sell access to the minds, quite another to predict reliably the audience's frame of mind; and by dictating the moment of infiltration, radio claimed to do just that. At the time and place of CBS's choosing, the audience would be "at leisure and their minds receptive."

Though dominant in ratings, NBC still clearly suffered from the same weakness in programming that had limited it in radio, mainly because of Sarnoff's indifference to content. When Paley and his team of programmers launched their attack, the strategy would be one that had worked before, that of promoting CBS as the higher-quality alternative - the Tiffany Network - purveyor of the best of the best.

NBC's lackadaisical approach was epitomized by the Camel News Caravan, its television news show. The fifteen-minute Caravan was hosted by a former actor, John Cameron Swayze, and consisted mainly of his reading out headlines and playing newsreels designed for movie theaters, until delivering his signature sign-off, "That's the story folks," almost the same one used by Porky Pig. The show was not only superficial but also subject to onerous censorship and direction by Camel's owner, the R. J. Reynolds Company. The sponsors preferred upbeat news, and mandated coverage of football (for men) and fashion (for women). They also set out a surprisingly detailed speech code that barred any display of competing brands, pipes, cigars, not to mention "no-smoking signs" as well as actual, living camels. When, in 1952, Reader's Digest published a report linking, for the first time, cigarettes and cancer, the ensuing media sensation somehow never reached the Camel News Caravan. As one writer put it, "What Camel wanted, Camel got ... because they paid so much."

Anyone could do better than that, and CBS soon established itself as the leader with CBS Television News (later renamed the CBS Evening News). In 1951, CBS radio's star, Edward Murrow, appeared on television, perhaps surprising viewers, who had only ever heard his voice. His first show, See It Now, was produced by another legend, Fred Friendly.


Tim Wu "Attention Merchants" (2016)

Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Donald Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was one thirty-five in the morning, but that wasn't the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. "You got what you wanted, Mike," she said, "now leave me alone." She wouldn't so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the tube without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn't even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It wasn't hard to see why Trump hadn't seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government:

Why study for a test you'll never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might at your very best be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the United States. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.

Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said, "We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!" Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy - the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain - but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. "Trump was like I LOVE THE BANGLES! YOU KNOW THAT SONG 'WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN'?" recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He'd asked Jared Kushner what that was about, and Jared had simply said, DONALD RAN A VERY UNCONVENTIONAL CAMPAIGN, AND HE'S NOT GOING TO FOLLOW ANY OF THE PROTOCOLS. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Mike Pence. Now, incredibly, Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence's first, ominous question. Why Isn't Puzder on the list for Labor? Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for Hardee's and Carl's Jr., wanted to be the secretary of labor. Christie explained that Puzder's ex-wife had accused him of abuse, and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labor, he wouldn't survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed but stepped down from his job at the fast-food company.)

After meeting with Pence, Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children and Jared and the other members of Trump's inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn was a job seeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of. Now he wanted to be named Trump's national security adviser, which was maybe the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national security team inside the Trump transition - staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials - had thought that an especially bad idea. Flynn's name wasn't on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he'd like to have.

Before Christie could intercede, Steve Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office Impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie, It's really quick, said Bannon. You're out. Why? asked Christie, stunned.

We're making a change.

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

Filling the four thousand positions a new president is authorized to fill is a daunting task even for the best prepared candidates. Donald Trump said he did not expect to win and thus it was no surprise that he did not have an operation under way to identify the best talent along with places for those loyalists who had helped him become president.

But even a year after the election, the Trump administration has left many jobs vacant. Trump has the slowest rate of appointments of any modern president. And as time passes he is not catching up with those who came before him, but falling further behind.

By the time Congress took its regular August recess, Trump had not even nominated people for 368 of 591 key positions requiring Senate confirmation. Paul C. Light, a New York University professor who studies the federal workforce, said that "Trump is running at a subglacial speed." He had just 124 nominees confirmed, less than half the number for Presidents Bill Clinton (252), George W. Bush (294), and Barack Obama (310). The Partnership for Public Service, which tracks presidential appointments, noted that there was not a single case in which the White House had announced an appointment but not yet formally filed the nomination, so the appointments pipeline was empty, too.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

news of the laws of cooking. You may, if you wish, fry an egg on a hot sidewalk. You may not apparently cook a chicken in a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park. Acting on a tip, a park ranger found several men dipping a burlap sack with two whole chickens in the spring. It's illegal and dangerous to get too close to Yellowstone's hot springs and geysers. If you're going to risk your life that way, better to do it with a turkey fryer in your garage

PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst

Runners wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern. Dr. Marti's research team analyzed 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand-Prix, a 9.6-mile road race. All the runners filled out an extensive questionnaire that detailed their training habits and footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 percent had been hurt during that time.

But what surprised Dr. Marti, as he pointed out in The American Journal of Sports Medicine in 1989, was the fact that the most common variable among the casualties wasn't training surface, running speed, weekly mileage, or "competitive training motivation." It wasn't even body weight, or a history of previous injury: it was the price of the shoe. Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40. Follow-up studies found similar results, like the 1991 report in Medicine & Science m Sports & Exercise that found that "Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, 'pronation correction') are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40)."

What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain. Sharp-eyed as ever, Coach Yin Lananna had already spotted the same phenomenon himself back in the early '80S. "I once ordered high-end shoes for the team, and within two weeks, we had more plantar fasciitis and Achilles problems than I'd ever seen. So I sent them back and told them, 'Send me my cheap shoes,' " Lananna says. "Ever since then, I've always ordered the low-end shoes. It's not because I'm cheap. It's because I'm in the business of making athletes run fast and stay healthy."

Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
(song by Irving Berlin)

As far as Christmas is concerned, I happen to be in that peculiarly awkward position which you may sometime have found yourself in. I found out what I'm being given for Christmas and I don't want it.

Now I mention this because I believe it defines a situation which other years is happening to more and more people more and more frequently.

I know that the British Christmas isn't what it used to be, what with deep frozen turkeys and dirty Christmas cards and department stores that advertise, and carol singers getting mugged for their pitch pipes, and Christmas trees being so expensive that the only one you can afford you have to bend down to put the star on it.

But that is not where the real Christmas rot, as it were, has set in.

If anyone wants to know when Christmas stopped being Christmas, I'll tell you. It was when we stopped giving presents, and started giving gifts, which come from gift shops. A small porcelain of a shepherdess with a barometer in her navel, magnetized backgammon boards, Moroccan drink trays that have nothing you can lift them up by, a swiss brandy glass that hits the top of your nose when you tilt it to drink, objects called pendants for hanging around your neck, huge irregularly shaped blobs of metal that are so heavy that every time you walk fast in bumps chips off your sternum

These are gifts, as distinct from presents. The new giving objects, not designed for use or ornament or enjoyment, just sort of currency for Christmas transactions.

Now of all of them, the one that makes my heart sink is what I'm being given: a Scandinavian candle-making kit.
Now I can just see the sequence of events when I open it.

I'll say, "Oh it's a candle-making kit."

"Sure you haven't got one."

"No, no, I don't think so."

"Well, go on try it. Let's see you go on and try it."

You know that particular muscular ache at the side of your face that only comes from maintaining a grateful smile. You know that. That'll be me all Christmas day. Moreover, what is more, with the particularly virulent form of kack-handedness that I happen to be afflicted with, I can just see what that candle-making kit will lead to. All that wax and molding and hot tallow.

If anybody wants to know about half past six on Christmas night, I can tell them now: I'm cleaning off a white grease mess.

Dennis Norden169a

In thinking of the future of Japan, one parable is the little island of Akashima in the Goto archipelago near Nagasaki. Yoshie Kakou, a friendly seventy-year-old fisherman, stood on a bluff on Akashima, smiling shyly and speaking lovingly of the throngs of friends and family members who surrounded him. The only catch is that Kakou was standing in the cemetery, and the throngs were all buried there. Akashima's hospital, school, stores, and most of its homes are abandoned, and aside from Kakou only four people still live on the 128-acre island. Akashima, its seaside cliffs jutting out of a blue-black ocean that is hospitable mostly to the passing whales, has lost people (it had three hundred inhabitants at its peak a few decades ago) partly because women had fewer babies but mostly because people moved to the cities. More important, Akashima offers a glimpse of Japan's difficulties in generating the kind of boom in productivity that might help make up for a shrinking workforce. Akashima, a minnow in the Sea of Japan, is taking up a whale's share of the national resources. As Kokou spoke of the island, several barges were chugging into Akashima's port to begin a $2.5-million project to expand it and build a new pier.

It may seem odd to be spending so much money on a project that serves only five full-time residents, but that is just the beginning. The government also provides a $490,000 annual subsidy to the twice-daily ferry to Akashima and a neighboring island, Oshima, which has seventy residents. At a huge cost, the government has also laid down not just one but two undersea cables to Akashima to carry electricity to the five residents, demonstrating its absolute disregard for expense and efficiency "That is to ensure a stable supply of electricity," explained Choji Tanikawa, an official in the regional office on the main island of Fukue. Then there are the other subsidies: the underwater telephone cable, the postal delivery, the weekly clinic by a government doctor. The school on the island of Oshima next door has what must be one of the best student-teacher ratios in the world: There are three students and nine teachers.

Because it lays down undersea cables to places like Akashima, Japan charges unified telephone rates across the country so high that they have stifled Japan's growth of the Internet. Likewise, servicing such remote places results in high electrical charges, postal rates, and taxes that have made it increasingly difficult for Japanese businesses to compete. It is, for example, more expensive to mail a letter within Tokyo than to mail it from America to Tokyo. Japanese companies began to do their mass mailings from America to save on postage, so the Japanese government banned the mailing of domestic advertising from abroad. Japan, in short, has fostered a gentle brand of capitalism, so that mercy does indeed seem to "droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven," as Shakespeare wrote. But Shakespeare never pondered the plight of a country with such a flood of mercy that it cannot restructure its economy. The effort to run a country as if it were a Disney movie is deeply admirable but hopelessly naive, and so Japan today abounds with charm but not much efficiency In a system too squeamish to let industries or islands die, taxes increasingly go to rescue the feeblest competitors, and to keep islands like Akashima alive. There has not even been any discussion of cutting back the ferry service to once daily, and islanders seem stunned when they are asked whether the government should continue to provide expensive services to a tiny, aging population. "They've never talked about cutting off' services," said Mankichi Kokou, seventy-three, another Akashima resident. "Even if this becomes a ghost town, the services will continue. They have to." So Akashima endures, and Japan withers.


Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "China Wakes" (1994)

Martin Scorsese: And so it was very real. In Mean Streets, the shooting in the car at the end was based on something I experienced. I was at NYU when it happened. I got out of a car with a friend of mine only a half hour before a shooting like that occurred. On the weekends I'd hang out with my friends - at after-hours clubs, the backs of tenements, that sort of stuff. This kid had a car, and he was going around for a ride. He was a part-time cop, had a gun. And so we went with him in the car a few times.

And then on Elizabeth Street one night at about two in the morning, we realized he was acting with bravado, in a way that we pulled back from. So we told him we were going to go home. So, all right, he drops us off. On Elizabeth Street you had cars parked on both sides. And he's driving down the block. And there's a red light, and there's a car in front of him. And the red light changes to green, and the car doesn't move. A guy comes over and starts talking with the driver in the first car. Our friend blows his horn. The car in front of him doesn't move. The guys are talking. He blows his horn again. The guys continue talking. He gets out, walks up to them, he takes his gun out or his badge. He says, "I'm a cop. Move this car." The guy says, "All right." He moves the car.

The next morning, we heard our guy was driving on Astor Place. He looked over at a car next to him and the people in that car started firing shots into his car. There was another kid in the car who got shot in the eye. And it was because he talked to the wrong people the wrong way.

And that became something that was very important to me and my friend, who had left the car an hour or two earlier. Because we could have been killed. Mean Streets had to be made because I was in the car that night. I went backwards from that. How the hell did he get into a situation like that? We didn't even know the guys. And I said to myself, That's the story to tell.

It made you stop and think - the kind of world we're in, the society we're in. So, anyway, that was a major moment m my life, and that's what Mean Streets comes out of. And it has to explode like that. I've seen it happen, a lot of times. It's just the way things work. So that's why the chaos is there. I was almost a victim of it. Another friend of mine was killed, taken out because he was a wild cannon. But by that point, I was moving to California, you know.

I learn more from talking to cabdrivers than I do talking to other people. The woman - a society campaign worker - is attracted to Travis because he's so out of her league, as it were. Her Junior League, I guess. Which makes this notion of taking her to a porn movie-

MS: Oh! I know. Well, you have to remember, a lot of people don't remember now, but at that time, they were trying to make porn acceptable, with Deep Throat and Sometimes Sweet Susan, and pictures like that.

Richard Schickele: I went to a few of those.

MS: It was okay to go with a girl, But Brian De Palma and I went to see Deep Throat, and he said, Look at the people around us, It doesn't feel right. There were couples. I said, You're right. We should be with all these old guys in raincoats. It was a wonderful kind of hypocritical thing that was happening - it opened up the society.

I'm telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places. That was like biblical in my mind - hell and damnation and Jeremiah, and someday a real rain was going to come.

RS: But that character, you know he's drawn to that. He goes to porn movies all the time. On the other hand, I guess there's a little bit of you in there.

MS: I know. It's upsetting. And It was an upsetting film to make. But we really felt strongly about it. De Niro and I never discussed it this way, by the way. It was nonverbal. It was just understood. I can't speak for him, but I know he understood certain things about the rejection, about not being part of a group.

RS: The famous scene, the mirror, where De Niro rehearses drawing-

MS: It was an improv.

RS: How much so?

MS: It's all improv. In the script, he sort of preens in front of the mirror, to get that maniacal expression on his face, to have the gun sliding in and out of his sleeve, which if you actually did it wouldn't work that well. But in the film it worked well.




Richard Schickel "Conversations with Scorsese" (2012)

"I certify that the statements I have made on this form and all attached statements are true, complete, and correct to the best of my knowledge."

Trump wanted to submit his financial disclosure without his signature. Sheri Dillon, his lead lawyer at the Morgan Lewis law firm, wrote to the Office of Government Ethics saying that since Trump was filing voluntarily a year before the next report was due, she saw no reason why a signature was required. Marilyn Glynn, a retired veteran of the Office of Government Ethics, was astonished that Trump and his lawyer would even think they could file an unsigned ethics form. "It would be as unusual as not signing your taxes," Glynn said.

The form showed that Trump was worth nowhere near what he claimed in the campaign when within days he said $8 billion, $7 billion, $10 billion, more than $10 billion, and once $11 billion. The form showed $1.4 billion.

When the report, properly signed, was filed, it showed that profits at Mar-a-Lago had shot up by 23 percent from $30 million to $37 million. That occurred after President-elect Trump doubled the fee for joining the club to $200,000 and after the Secret Service, cabinet members, and other federal employees paid for rooms, meals, golf carts, and drinks, and the taxpayers picked up the tab for guests like the president of China and his retinue.

The disclosure form set very high values on many Trump properties. For example, he valued the golf course he plays while staying at Mar-a-Lago at more than $50 million. The Palm Beach County property assessor valued that Jupiter, Florida, property at $18.4 million in 2016. Concerned about how much tax he would have to pay, Trump said that figure was too high and appealed. He said its value was no more than $5 million. Trump had first sued over the value of the property in 2014, saying the $25 million valuation by the county assessor vastly overstated the golf course's worth. Trump's property tax appeal papers say he paid $5 million for the golf course when he acquired it in financial trouble in 2012.

So, which is it - more than $50 million or less than $5 million? What's a mere 90 percent difference?

Trump sued the county again in 2017, when he was president, claiming the property was worth far less than what he put down on his Office of Government Ethics disclosure form. This time he didn't put a value on the property, reporter Jeff Ostrowski of The Palm Beach Post noted when he broke the story.

If the Jupiter course is worth $50 million, his property tax bill would be a tad more than $1 million. The assessor's valuation set the property tax at $383,171. Trump said he should pay no more than $104,000.

Trump valued his Westchester golf course, a short drive north of Manhattan, at more than $50 million on his presidential ethics form. But Trump also protested his property taxes, saying the local tax officials in Briarcliff Manor had grossly overvalued the property. Trump said it was worth only $1.35 million. That's roughly the value of two homes in the surrounding neighborhood. The golf course covers 140 acres, includes a 100-foot waterfall and a clubhouse that Trump claims has 1.7 acres of floor space.

There is no way to justify the claim that the golf course is worth less than $1.4 million. Yet that claim stood until David McKay Wilson reported it in the Journal News, the Westchester County Gannett newspaper, and Brian Ross of ABC and I gave it national attention. Trump then revised his tax protest, saying he was willing to agree to a value of $9 million, still at least an 82 percent discount from his ethics filings.

In California, Trump has said that he invested $264 million in his Palos Verdes Peninsula golf course, a sum out of proportion to the $14 million a year Trump says it collects in revenue. The Los Angeles County assessor set the value of the Palos Verdes property at $21.8 million. Trump argued that $10 million was appropriate. The assessor finally cut the value to $10.7 million, but only after the number of rounds of golf played on the course fell so severely that Trump had to cut prices. So, it seems, contrary to his claims, not every business Trump owns is a money machine.

We know the Palos Verdes value claims at both ends are absurdities, more evidence of how Trump just makes stuff up.

On the high end, anyone who actually put $264 million into a golf course property worth just $10 million would win from Trump his favorite sobriquet - loser. On the other end, a handful of residential lots he carved out of the property were sold in 2017 with an average price of about $1.5 million. If a lot for a single house is worth $1.5 million or more, then clearly more than 250 acres of golf links, the driving range, the parking

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

In the 1970s, a man treated himself to a Rolex. The watch cost $346. He was in the military back then, not paid much, and that was a lot of money. But it nevertheless was a good investment. The watch seemed so precious he hardly ever wore it. And when he brought it to the TV show "Antiques Roadshow" and experts said it's worth up to $700,000 now, the moment that he was told, the man threw himself down on the ground.

PAINFUL TRUTH No.2: Feet Like a Good Beating

As far back as I988, Dr. Barry Bates, the head of the University of Oregon's Biomechanics/Sports Medicine Laboratory, gathered data that suggested that beat-up running shoes are safer than newer ones. In the Journal o] Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, Dr. Bates and his colleagues reported that as shoes wore down and their cushioning thinned, runners gained more foot control.

So how do foot control and a flapping old sole add up to injury-free legs? Because of one magic ingredient: fear. Contrary to what pillowy-sounding names like the Adidas MegaBounce would have you believe, all that cushioning does nothing to reduce impact. Logically, that should be obvious - the impact on your legs from running can be up to twelve times your body weight, so it's preposterous to believe a half inch of rubber is going to make a bit of difference against, in my case, 2,760 pounds of earthbound beef. You can cover an egg with an oven mitt before rapping it with a hammer, but that egg ain't coming out alive.

When E. C. Frederick, then the director of Nike Sports Research Lab, arrived at the 1986 meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics, he was packing a bombshell. "When subjects were tested with soft versus hard shoes," he said, "no difference in impact force was found." No difference! "And curiously," he added, "the second, propulsive peak in the vertical ground reaction force was actually HIGHER with soft shoes."

The puzzling conclusion: the more cushioned the shoe, the less protection it provides.

Researchers at the University of Oregon's Biomechanics/Sports Medicine Laboratory were verifying the same finding. As running shoes got worn down and their cushioning hardened, the Oregon researchers revealed in a 1988 study for the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, runners' feet stabilized and became less wobbly. It would take about ten years before scientists came up with an explanation for why the old shoes that sports companies were telling you to throwaway were better than the new ones they were urging you to buy. At McGill University in Montreal, Steven Robbins, M.D., and Edwird Waked, Ph.D., performed a series of tests on gymnasts. They found that the thicker the landing mat, the harder the gymnasts stuck their landings. Instinctively, the gymnasts were searching for stability. When they sensed a soft surface underfoot, they slapped down hard to ensure balance.

Runners do the same thing, Robbins and Waked found: Just the way your arms automatically fly up when you slip on ice, your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.

"We conclude that balance and vertical impact are closely related," the McGill docs wrote. "According to our findings, currently available sports shoes are too soft and thick, and should be redesigned if they are to protect humans performing sports."

Until reading this study, I'd been mystified by an experience I'd had at the Running Injury Clinic. I'd run back and forth over a force plate while alternating between bare feet, a super-thin shoe, and the well-cushioned Nike Pegasus. Whenever I changed shoes, the impact levels changed as well - but not the way I'd expected. My impact forces were lightest in bare feet, and heaviest in the Pegs. My running form also varied: when I changed footwear, I instinctively changed my footfall. "You're much more of a heel striker in the Pegasus," Dr. Irene Davis concluded.

David Smyntek decided to test the impact theory with a unique experiment of his own. As both a runner and a physical therapist specializing in acute rehabilitation, Smyntek was wary when the people telling him he had to buy new shoes were the same people who sold them. He'd been warned forever by Runner's World and his local running store that he had to replace his shoes every three hundred to five hundred miles, but how was it that Arthur Newton, one of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, saw no reason to replace his thin rubber sneakers until he'd put at least four thousand miles on them? Newton not only won the 55-mile Comrades race five times in the 1930s, but his legs were still springy enough to break the record for the 100 mile Bath-to-London run at age fifty-one.

So Smyntek decided to see if he could out-Newton Newton. "When my shoes wear down on one side," he wondered, "what if I just wear them on the wrong feet?" Thus began the Crazy Foot Experiment: when his shoes got thin on the outside edge, Dave swapped the right for the left and kept running. "You have to understand the man," says Ken Learman, one of Dave's fellow therapists. "Dave is not the average individual. He's curious, smart, the kind of guy you can't BS real easy. He'll say, 'Hey, if it's supposed to be this way, let's see if it really is.' "

For the next ten years, David ran five miles a day, every day. Once he realized he could run comfortably in wrong-footed shoes, he started questioning why he needed running shoes in the first place. If he wasn't using them the way they were designed, Dave reasoned, maybe that design wasn't such a big deal after all. From then on, he only bought cheap dime-store sneaks.

"Here he is, running more than most people, with the wrong shoe on the wrong foot and not having any problems," Ken Learman says. "That experiment taught us all something. Taught us that when it comes to running shoes, all that glitters isn't gold."

Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)