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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)

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

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)

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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.

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

Ben Workman of Utah is never going to lose his keys again. He implanted a chip inside his hand that allows him to unlock his Tesla with just a wave. This procedure is still pretty rare. A piercing studio refused to help Workman do the implant - so did a doctor and a veterinarian. Eventually, he enlisted a family member. Someday he hopes to add a credit card chip. And just for fun, he's already implanted a magnet in his left hand for magic tricks.

Particularly troubling was Trump's dawdling on ambassadorships after he created a problem by firing every current ambassador the moment he took his oath. While he had the power to do so, traditionally incoming presidents leave sitting ambassadors, especially career diplomats, in place until the Senate confirms their replacements. That ensures a steady flow of information and assures foreign leaders about continuity between administrations.

After more than seven months in office Trump had nominated only 36 of 188 ambassadors.

This meant that in foreign capitals when multibillion-dollar investment decisions were being discussed, political intrigues were unfolding, and informal changes in policy were under way, the United States often had no one with authority at the dinner tables, cocktail parties, or official government proceedings where they could pick up intelligence. Just knowing who sat where, or who was absent, at functions often provides valuable insights into foreign affairs. Not having ambassador-rank representatives on the scene posed serious economic and national security risks to the United States and was not consistent with Trump's claims that he would always put America first.

The failure to promptly fill these positions, and many others, raised more than the issue of Trump's lackadaisical approach to governing and ignoring basic duties while he spent hours watching television to learn what was being said about him.

His neglect also brought into question whether he was Violating his oath to "faithfully execute" the duties of his office as Article II, Section 2 of the American Constitution clearly states.

The Constitution does not employ the discretionary verb MAY or the merely authorizing word CAN, but a verb that imposes a duty to act. And it uses that mandating verb twice: "he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law."

Another big reason for the slowness in filling important posts is Trump's mercurial nature and how it creates unnecessary problems. Instead of thoughtful, even calculated, official actions, Trump's volatile emotions often drive his decisions. So does whatever he heard from the last person he spoke to. So one of the first things General John Kelly did as White House chief of staff was to control who sees the president and what papers they put in front of him.

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

There is an awards ceremony to celebrate people who had done extraordinary things in government. Every year the Sammies - as Max called them, in honor of his original patron - attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year the list of achievements was mmd-blowing. A guy in the Energy Department (Frazer Lockhart) organized the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in sixty years early and $30 billion under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously Incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories m the United States government. They just never got told.

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

Among fly fisherman in the Pacific Northwest, Liam Wood was a wunderkind. He started casting at age nine and was soon tying his own flies. Still in school, he got a part-time job at a sporting-goods store that outfitted fly fishermen. Five days after graduating from Sehome High School in 1999, Wood grabbed his waders and headed for Whatcom Falls Creek, hoping to hook rainbow trout. It was a perfect day for doing what he loved best. Until, that is, he took a deep breath of cool June air. Liam Wood, eighteen, collapsed and drowned.

Just upstream, Stephen Tsiorvas and Wade King were doing what many ten-year-old boys do, playing with fire. They had a blue butane cigarette lighter. It was spent, but when they flicked the flint, a tiny spark ignited 237,000 gallons of gasoline, killing every living thing for a mile and a half along the banks of Whatcom Falls Creek.

"It looked like a napalm drop," one resident said.

The explosion came minutes before the gasoline, gushing from a ruptured pipeline managed by Royal Dutch Shell, would have flowed under Interstate 5. A few minutes later it would have reached downtown Bellingham, where a high-rise apartment tower for the elderly and disabled stands just seventy-five feet from the water's edge. Because their normal boyish play saved hundreds of lives by igniting the gasoline before it reached downtown, Mayor Mark Asmundson called Stephen and Wade, badly burned and in agony, "unwitting heroes."

Outside the state of Washington, the blast was reported as a freak accident, worthy of a single sentence on the ABC World News, which reported a dead teenager and two boys with burns. Stephen and Wade died soon after the broadcast ended. Within days the boys were largely forgotten by the media, which focused on a sudden spike in gasoline prices, a consequence of the ruptured pipeline that was no longer delivering fuel along the I-5 corridor in Washington and Oregon.

A little more than a year later, the New Mexico desert erupted just before dawn. The blast awakened people twenty miles away. When Carlsbad firefighters reached the scene south of town, they found what appeared to be a gigantic blowtorch, as natural gas under high pressure shot from a thirty-inch-wide pipeline. During the fifty-five minutes it took for EI Paso Natural Gas to shut off the flow of natural gas, the roar from the flames was so loud that firefighters could barely hear orders shouted directly into their ears. But the silence that followed was punctuated by the sound of wailing.

Rushing down to the Pecos River, firefighters found six horribly burned members of an extended family of twelve. Those not killed in the blast sought refuge in the waters after flames engulfed their campsite. One begged to be shot.

This second pipeline disaster also made a brief appearance in the national news, covered as the sad story of an unlucky family that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within days, all twelve campers would be dead; along with the causes of the rupture, their story was lost in the rush to talk about how electricity prices in California soared because there was no fuel for the modified jet engines that generate electricity to meet peak demand on hot August afternoons. The pipeline repairs took nearly a year.

***

A decade later, on September 9, 2010, another thirty-inch natural-gas pipeline exploded, this time on the San Francisco Peninsula. This pipe operated at 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. A wall of flames hundreds of feet high shot skyward as evening fell on suburban San Bruno. To reach manual shutoff valves, Pacific Gas & Electric crews had to negotiate rush-hour traffic. One valve was more than thirty miles from the blast, and it took the crew an hour and a half to get there. The explosion - which left a crater forty feet deep - killed eight people, injured sixty more, and severely damaged or destroyed 120 homes.

Among the dead were Jacqueline Greig and her thirteen-year-old daughter Janessa. Ironically, Greig had worked for the Division of Ratepayer Advocates at the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco as a natural-gas analyst for more than two decades. Her last assignment: investigating whether PG&E was spending enough money maintaining and inspecting its high-pressure transmission pipelines to make sure they would not explode.

These are just three incidents out of many, but the explosions in Bellingham, Carlsbad and San Bruno should serve as warning signs about an increasingly dangerous future, one in which an immensely profitable industry too often works quietly to thwart safety regulations.

IS ANYBODY WATCHING?

If you live in an urban or suburban area, you probably spend part of your day above or near a pipeline that moves massive amounts of pressurized natural gas, scalding hot diesel, jet fuel or gasoline. Due to the potential impact of a rupture, these areas are officially known as "high consequence areas," a euphemism for what might more accurately be called death zones.

Compared to automobile or even plane crashes, very few people have died from pipeline ruptures in the past two decades. A pipeline blast kills someone about every three weeks on average, while someone is burned every few days. Most of these are the result of preventable accidents, often due to a mistake by a pipeline worker or a backhoe operator hitting a pipeline. Though the numbers are small, as the pipeline industry emphasizes, this reflects luck more than serious safety planning. Open spaces where pipelines were laid decades ago are now being developed, but aging pipelines in the vicinity remain in use. The political push for less government means fewer inspections, increasing the risk of a deadly blast that one day might wipe out a block of homes, offices, stores or even a hospital or an elementary school.

High-pressure natural-gas lines run in to every big city in America. In Manhattan alone, high-pressure gas lines enter Battery Park at the southern tip of the island, at the mouths of the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, near the George Washington Bridge, on the Lower East Side, and near the vast apartment complex on the East Side known as Tudor City. That is a partial list.

Vincent Dunn, deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department from 1973 to 1999, says what no one wants to hear: when it comes to high-pressure pipelines, profits trump safety. "Industry and big business run the city," Dunn told me. "So if a fire department was asked how to control high-pressure gas lines, we would say don't run it through the big population centers, but we would just be overruled. We have to clean up and wipe up whatever the results are when things go wrong."

A gas industry study, adopted by the federal Department of Transportation, defined "high consequence areas" and estimated the damages from an explosion in an open area, like the desert death zone in New Mexico. The study considered a thirty-inch pipeline operating at 1,500 pounds of pressure per square inch of the pipeline wall and concluded that the likely death zone in the event of an explosion would extend 660 feet in every direction. Experience shows that the estimate is woefully inadequate. The EI Paso Natural Gas pipeline that killed the Heady, Smith and Sumler families in August 2000 operated at just 675 pounds of pressure, so the consequences should have been felt in a much smaller area than 660 feet from the blast. The family members were 675 feet from the rupture.

In a city, buildings could help contain the blast zone, but that presents another problem: streets are flush with secondary fuel sources. Gasoline, diesel and compressed natural gas fill the tanks of cars, trucks and buses. Fuel oil tanks lie under buildings. Sidewalks feature canopies made of canvas and people wear clothes that would add more fuel.

Chief Dunn praised Consolidated Edison for its annual training of FDNY crews, but still warned that the rupture of a large natural-gas line in a densely developed city would likely cost many lives and many billions of dollars in damage. "The gas would burn until the gas company could shut it off from two directions," Chief Dunn said. "The heat would radiate up five or six floors and go through the windows, which don't stop the heat." Fires would start inside offices and apartments.

Once the electric power went off, either from the fire or a deliberate shutdown to prevent sparking, those in elevators would be trapped. People fleeing tall buildings would have to navigate emergency stairwells, a difficult-to-impossible task for the elderly and disabled. Even in buildings that did not catch fire, the smoke and heat from the streets could kill many.

Professor Glenn Corbett, a New Jersey fire captain who teaches fire safety management at John Jay College in Manhattan, told of a pipeline explosion in Edison, New Jersey, in 1994. More than six hundred manual turns of a valve were required to shut off the gas, a process that took six long hours. "There is no question you will ignite some surrounding buildings," Professor Corbett said about a natural gas-fueled fire burning for hours in an area of office or apartment towers. "The chance of this happening is very small, but if it does happen, the costs in life, in services being shut off for weeks or months, and in reconstruction would be enormous."

HOW SAFE IS SAFE ENOUGH?

No law required that any pipelines be inspected until 2002. Even now, with an assist from government officials whose job is to ensure safe operation of pipelines, the industry regularly obscures pipeline locations.

Most troubling of all, segments of pipeline are being given waivers from the very limited safety inspections required under the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002. The exact locations of these segments are treated as secret, although with enough determination and a surveyor's transit and chain, they can be identified. The industry also benefits from rules it promoted, rules that discourage repairing or replacing old, corroded pipelines. The corroded pipe that exploded near Carlsbad hadn't been tested for integrity since it was laid back in 1950, when Harry Truman was president.

Pipeline safety is the responsibility of the federal Department of Transportation and two agencies under its umbrella. "Safety is the number one priority," department spokesperson Maureen Knightly told me. She said the agency conducts eight hundred to nine hundred inspections a year and "reviews all available data to determine inspection frequency and focus."

A very different view comes from Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust. It is funded with $4 million of the penalties paid in the Bellingham disaster. Weimer considers the Transportation Department's safety-first claims almost laughable.

"The overarching problem with the current pipeline safety regulatory system is the undue influence that the pipeline industry has on every aspect of how those regulations are designed and enforced," Weimer said. "The industry deluges rule-making processes with their public relations people and lawyers, and most regulators have either come from the industry they now regulate or plan to go to work for that industry once they leave government service."

At pipeline safety conferences, Weimer said, he is often the only person present who is not an industry advocate or regulator. As far back as 1978, the investigating arm of Congress, now called the Government Accountability Office, issued scathing reports about incompetence, weak rules and ineffective enforcement by the Transportation Department's Office of Pipeline Safety. Pacific Gas & Electric was repeatedly found to have violated safety rules in its natural-gas pipeline system, yet was not fined once prior to the deadly San Bruno blast.

Even the American Petroleum Institute, which represents big oil companies, criticized the pipeline safety office over the poor quality of its accident records. Yet the industry as a whole has worked hard to make sure that not enough money is spent to properly inspect pipelines. Six months after the Bellingham disaster, the chairman of the agency that investigates pipeline disasters, the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Association of Oil Pipelines that its efforts to keep the pipeline safety office short of funds and unable to effectively regulate for safety would backfire. Safety board chairman Jim Hall said that "no American would want to use any transportation vehicle that would not be properly inspected for 48 years, nor should we have pipelines traveling through any of our communities in this condition." His words drew no applause. Hall said that to get the industry's attention, criminal charges and prison sentences might be necessary.

The pipeline industry lawyer whom the Obama administration made head of the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Cynthia Quarterman, said after the San Bruno blast that "we inherited a program that suffered from almost a decade of neglect." She is wrong about that. The neglect goes back long before the George W. Bush administration.

The entire federal and industry approach to pipeline safety stands in stark contrast to the way government and industry deal with airline safety issues, where the focus is on preventing crashes through the use of engineering, analysis and data collection. Rick Kessler, a pipeline engineer who worked on pipeline issues as a Capitol Hill staffer, now serves as a volunteer vice president of the Pipeline Safety Trust. How bad is the current system? Kessler told me that if the Federal Aviation Administration operated on the same rules as pipeline safety regulators, "I wouldn't get on a plane."

Inspecting pipelines for corrosion, faulty welds and damage from earth movements, both natural and by excavators, is one of the best ways to reduce the chance of rupture. Yet buried in the fine print are government rules that discourage shutting down pipelines to inspect, maintain or replace them before they fail, in effect shifting the risks of pipeline disasters from pipeline owners on to unwitting Americans.

Instead of replacing corroded pipelines, the owners just de-rate them.

"De-rating" means reducing the maximum pressure allowed from, say, 1,500 pounds per square inch to 1,200 pounds. As corrosion eats through more of a pipeline's steel wall, the pressure maximum may be reduced


David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)