Amanda Ripley's Blog
April 14, 2021
High Conflict: How to break the spell?
This is a true story about two grown women who stopped talking to each other. For 30 years. Over a piece of cheese.
A century ago, two sisters named Anna and Maria immigrated to America from Italy, raising their families side by side in central New Jersey.
Then one day in the 1970s, Anna went back to Italy to visit. While she was there, someone gave her a hunk of good Italian provolone, the authentic kind that originated in Naples, to bring back for Maria.
Anna came home as planned. But the cheese never made it to Maria.
What happened to the cheese? Nobody knows, to this day. Probably, it got eaten. Whatever the case, this disappearing cheese sparked a feud, the kind that seems to have a life of its own. There was a huge blow-up argument. And then silence. The sisters didn’t speak again for decades.
Conflict can be a force for good, pushing us to challenge each other and defend ourselves and do better. But sometimes, it escalates into something else, something called high conflict.
High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. High conflict acts like a spell, bewitching us without our realizing what is happening. The brain behaves differently. People feel increasingly certain of their own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. Both sides feel the same emotions, though they never discuss it with each other.
“Where one was not going to forgive, the other was not going to forget,” Maria’s granddaughter Samantha told me. Each woman complained about how stubborn the other one was. On and on and on. “They were saying the same things about each other,” Samantha says. At her First Holy Communion, the sisters kept a wide berth from each other. Same thing at Easter. The family adapted, maneuvering around the sinkhole in their midst, trying not to fall in.
Right now, the United States is stuck in high conflict of the political variety, as every news cycle keeps reminding us. Many of us are just trying to avoid the sinkhole, hoping it will fill in one day.
For others, when we encounter the other side, in person or on a cable news channel, we feel a tightening in our chest, a dread mixed with rage, as we listen to whatever insane, misguided, dangerous thing they say. The more we try to escape the conflict, the more tightly we get caught in its grip, like a Chinese finger trap.
For the past four years, I’ve been following people and communities that were stuck in some kind of high conflict — and made it out. I’ve been learning from their remarkable stories, collecting patterns and wisdom, both practical and profound. There’s a lot to say about this, and so many questions I want to ask you all. But one way I can be useful right now, I think, is to make you a promise:
There is a way to make high conflict healthy, even the most dispiriting conflicts, like hyper-polarization — or sibling feuds. There are specific strategies that work to revive curiosity, humility, and surprise, without surrendering your own beliefs.
I’ve seen it happen right in front of me, again and again. People who have made this shift have certain things in common: they all found ways to rehumanize and recategorize their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
About 30 years after the provolone went missing, Anna’s husband died. Maria called her sister Anna on the phone. They talked for a long time. Not so much about cheese, but about their lives, their grandchildren, their family back home in Italy.
This was not a surrender, to be clear. The sisters still argued. They still got on each other’s nerves. Maria never forgot the missing cheese. The two of them continued to complain about each other to their grandchildren, just as they always had. But the conflict had shifted from high to healthy, and it stayed that way, until they died.
My new book High Conflict is out now. Whatever else happens in this unsettled year, I am confident that we can, together, get less stuck. We can discover, share and create different sources of news and inspiration, fresh rituals, unexpected delights, constructive discomforts, and new ways to make ourselves useful. I hope to see you on this journey.
In remembrance of cheese, lost and found,
Amanda
A century ago, two sisters named Anna and Maria immigrated to America from Italy, raising their families side by side in central New Jersey.
Then one day in the 1970s, Anna went back to Italy to visit. While she was there, someone gave her a hunk of good Italian provolone, the authentic kind that originated in Naples, to bring back for Maria.
Anna came home as planned. But the cheese never made it to Maria.
What happened to the cheese? Nobody knows, to this day. Probably, it got eaten. Whatever the case, this disappearing cheese sparked a feud, the kind that seems to have a life of its own. There was a huge blow-up argument. And then silence. The sisters didn’t speak again for decades.
Conflict can be a force for good, pushing us to challenge each other and defend ourselves and do better. But sometimes, it escalates into something else, something called high conflict.
High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. High conflict acts like a spell, bewitching us without our realizing what is happening. The brain behaves differently. People feel increasingly certain of their own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. Both sides feel the same emotions, though they never discuss it with each other.
“Where one was not going to forgive, the other was not going to forget,” Maria’s granddaughter Samantha told me. Each woman complained about how stubborn the other one was. On and on and on. “They were saying the same things about each other,” Samantha says. At her First Holy Communion, the sisters kept a wide berth from each other. Same thing at Easter. The family adapted, maneuvering around the sinkhole in their midst, trying not to fall in.
Right now, the United States is stuck in high conflict of the political variety, as every news cycle keeps reminding us. Many of us are just trying to avoid the sinkhole, hoping it will fill in one day.
For others, when we encounter the other side, in person or on a cable news channel, we feel a tightening in our chest, a dread mixed with rage, as we listen to whatever insane, misguided, dangerous thing they say. The more we try to escape the conflict, the more tightly we get caught in its grip, like a Chinese finger trap.
For the past four years, I’ve been following people and communities that were stuck in some kind of high conflict — and made it out. I’ve been learning from their remarkable stories, collecting patterns and wisdom, both practical and profound. There’s a lot to say about this, and so many questions I want to ask you all. But one way I can be useful right now, I think, is to make you a promise:
There is a way to make high conflict healthy, even the most dispiriting conflicts, like hyper-polarization — or sibling feuds. There are specific strategies that work to revive curiosity, humility, and surprise, without surrendering your own beliefs.
I’ve seen it happen right in front of me, again and again. People who have made this shift have certain things in common: they all found ways to rehumanize and recategorize their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
About 30 years after the provolone went missing, Anna’s husband died. Maria called her sister Anna on the phone. They talked for a long time. Not so much about cheese, but about their lives, their grandchildren, their family back home in Italy.
This was not a surrender, to be clear. The sisters still argued. They still got on each other’s nerves. Maria never forgot the missing cheese. The two of them continued to complain about each other to their grandchildren, just as they always had. But the conflict had shifted from high to healthy, and it stayed that way, until they died.
My new book High Conflict is out now. Whatever else happens in this unsettled year, I am confident that we can, together, get less stuck. We can discover, share and create different sources of news and inspiration, fresh rituals, unexpected delights, constructive discomforts, and new ways to make ourselves useful. I hope to see you on this journey.
In remembrance of cheese, lost and found,
Amanda
February 4, 2019
(Un)Covering Trump
In the 818 days since the 2016 election, the Washington Post has used the word “unprecedented” in reference to President Donald Trump, or his associates, about 657 times — or almost every day. On just one day in January, for example, readers learned of Trump’s “unprecedented steps” to slow immigration, his “unprecedented decision” to hold onto his business in the White House, and his “unprecedented assault” on the census.
There is a breathlessness to the coverage that, oddly, does not diminish with time. The word “remarkable” appears almost as often in the Post, averaging every other day since 2016. We read about the “remarkable rift” between the President and his former National Security Adviser (Dec. 1, 2017), Trump’s “remarkable ignorance of U.S. history” (July 19, 2018), and his “remarkable tweetstorm” against his former lawyer (Dec. 4, 2018).
If something happens that often, it can’t be all that remarkable. Why do journalists keep using these words? Simple. Because any time news breaks, we call political scientists, pollsters, former White House staffers, and opponents for analysis, little of which is remotely illuminating. The problem is, we try to cover Trump as a political matter. And by doing so, we’re potentially missing a big part of the story.
Imagine if Trump had a seizure during a press conference. Would reporters ring up the folks at Brookings and the Cato Institute for comment? Would we analyze new polling data to help us understand if there is a clever political strategy behind his behavior?
No. We’d call physicians, who would tell us that they can’t formally diagnose the president without seeing him, but they can say that a seizure is generally caused by an uncontrolled electrical disturbance in the brain. They could then explain that a seizure might be caused by epilepsy — and what might happen if epilepsy goes untreated. This context would not be inappropriate or biased; it would demystify the president’s behavior and help us prepare for what comes next, with significantly less drama and noise.
To continue reading, click here.
There is a breathlessness to the coverage that, oddly, does not diminish with time. The word “remarkable” appears almost as often in the Post, averaging every other day since 2016. We read about the “remarkable rift” between the President and his former National Security Adviser (Dec. 1, 2017), Trump’s “remarkable ignorance of U.S. history” (July 19, 2018), and his “remarkable tweetstorm” against his former lawyer (Dec. 4, 2018).
If something happens that often, it can’t be all that remarkable. Why do journalists keep using these words? Simple. Because any time news breaks, we call political scientists, pollsters, former White House staffers, and opponents for analysis, little of which is remotely illuminating. The problem is, we try to cover Trump as a political matter. And by doing so, we’re potentially missing a big part of the story.
Imagine if Trump had a seizure during a press conference. Would reporters ring up the folks at Brookings and the Cato Institute for comment? Would we analyze new polling data to help us understand if there is a clever political strategy behind his behavior?
No. We’d call physicians, who would tell us that they can’t formally diagnose the president without seeing him, but they can say that a seizure is generally caused by an uncontrolled electrical disturbance in the brain. They could then explain that a seizure might be caused by epilepsy — and what might happen if epilepsy goes untreated. This context would not be inappropriate or biased; it would demystify the president’s behavior and help us prepare for what comes next, with significantly less drama and noise.
To continue reading, click here.
October 16, 2018
The Smartest Kids in the World: The Movie
When I traveled around the world for my last book, following American kids in higher performing education systems, I brought a camera. I took a bunch of extremely amateurish video, mostly of students' feet--to protect the privacy of random kids in classrooms and hallways.
Later, when talking to audiences about the book, I would show these short, fairly crappy video clips to illustrate a point. And something amazing happened: it was like I'd cast a spell over the audience. Literally, their faces would light up as they watched Kim from Oklahoma walk to school in Finland or Eric from Minnesota catch the subway in Korea.
The lesson: there is nothing like the emotional power of video. Nothing written down has quite that impact.
Which is why I am so excited to share this news. The Smartest Kids in the World is now a documentary film. Inspired by the book, the award-winning filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos followed four new American teenagers to four countries for one school year. The film literally transports us, alongside the students. We get to see these remarkable American kids boarding their planes in Wyoming and Florida, revealing their hopes and fears to other kids in their borrowed countries. We discover what they miss about America—and what they don’t. It is a dazzling, mind-opening ride, and you emerge with a new imagination for what is possible.
At a time when many countries are closing inward, hunkering down in response to change and fear, this is a film about young Americans doing the opposite. They are charging out into the world, convinced that there must be ways to adapt to a changing world and to learn from one another, rather than turning on each other.
World premiere is Nov. 11, 2018, in NYC. Hope to see some of you there. More details here.
Later, when talking to audiences about the book, I would show these short, fairly crappy video clips to illustrate a point. And something amazing happened: it was like I'd cast a spell over the audience. Literally, their faces would light up as they watched Kim from Oklahoma walk to school in Finland or Eric from Minnesota catch the subway in Korea.
The lesson: there is nothing like the emotional power of video. Nothing written down has quite that impact.
Which is why I am so excited to share this news. The Smartest Kids in the World is now a documentary film. Inspired by the book, the award-winning filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos followed four new American teenagers to four countries for one school year. The film literally transports us, alongside the students. We get to see these remarkable American kids boarding their planes in Wyoming and Florida, revealing their hopes and fears to other kids in their borrowed countries. We discover what they miss about America—and what they don’t. It is a dazzling, mind-opening ride, and you emerge with a new imagination for what is possible.
At a time when many countries are closing inward, hunkering down in response to change and fear, this is a film about young Americans doing the opposite. They are charging out into the world, convinced that there must be ways to adapt to a changing world and to learn from one another, rather than turning on each other.
World premiere is Nov. 11, 2018, in NYC. Hope to see some of you there. More details here.
June 27, 2018
Complicating the Narratives
Last summer, 60 Minutes brought 14 people — half Republicans, half Democrats — to a converted power plant in downtown Grand Rapids, MI. The goal was to encourage Americans to talk — and listen — to those with whom they disagree. Oprah Winfrey led the conversation, her debut as a 60 Minutes Special Correspondent — and her return to CBS News, where she’d started her career as a Baltimore news anchor four decades earlier.
It was an extraordinary opportunity. For three hours, nine cameras captured the group’s conversation about Twitter, President Trump, health care and the prospect of a new civil war. The crew even built a special table, just for the occasion. The edited 16-minute segment would represent the first of a series of planned 60 Minutes shows focused on a divided America. It was a chance for a respected news outlet to go beyond the clichés and name-calling and excavate richer, deeper truths, at a time of profound division in America.
In the end, that was not what happened. The episode drew nearly 15 million viewers, making it the third-most-watched TV show of the week, according to Nielsen ratings. But the on-air conversation was strangely dull and superficial.
First, a heavyset man named Tom said he loved Trump more every day; next, a blonde woman named Jennifer said Trump made her feel sick to her stomach. Later, Winfrey went around the table asking each person for one word to describe the typical Trump voter, then repeating their answers. “Frustrated,” said Tom. “Frustrated,” said Winfrey.
What went wrong? How could one of the most successful, relatable interviewers in American history create such uninspired television?
Deep in their bones, talk-show hosts (like journalists generally) understand certain things about human psychology: we know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger. We can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations.
As politicians have become more polarized, we have increasingly allowed ourselves to be used by demagogues on both sides of the aisle, amplifying their insults instead of exposing their motivations. Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation. Long before the 2016 election, the mainstream news media lost the trust of the public, creating an opening for misinformation and propaganda. If the purpose of journalism is to “see the public into fuller existence,” as Jay Rosen once wrote, it’s hard to conclude that we are succeeding.
“Conflict is important. It’s what moves a democracy forward,” says journalist Jeremy Hay, co-founder of Spaceship Media, which helps media outlets engage divided communities. “But as long as journalism is content to let conflict sit like that, journalism is abdicating the power it has to help people find a way through that conflict.”
But what else can we do with conflict, besides letting it sit? We’re not advocates, and we shouldn’t be in the business of making people feel better. Our mission is not a diplomatic one. So what options does that leave?
To find out, I spent the past three months interviewing people who know conflict intimately and have developed creative ways of navigating it. I met psychologists, mediators, lawyers, rabbis and other people who know how to disrupt toxic narratives and get people to reveal deeper truths. They do it every day — with livid spouses, feuding business partners, spiteful neighbors. They have learned how to get people to open up to new ideas, rather than closing down in judgment and indignation.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all kinds of places, and I did not know these lessons. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives now people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.
For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a rational world. When people made mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was assumed, generally prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all manner of biases and illusions.
“We are influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it,” as Kahneman put it. The good news was that these irrational behaviors are also highly predictable. So economists have gradually adjusted their models to account for these systematic human quirks.
Journalism has yet to undergo this awakening. We like to think of ourselves as objective seekers of truth. Which is why most of us have simply doubled down in recent years, continuing to do more of the same kind of journalism, despite mounting evidence that we are not having the impact we once had. We continue to collect facts and capture quotes as if we are operating in a linear world.
But it’s becoming clear that we cannot FOIA our way out of this problem. If we want to learn the truth, we have to find new ways to listen. If we want our best work to have consequences, we have to be heard. “Anyone who values truth,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, “should stop worshipping reason.”
We need to find ways to help our audiences leave their foxholes and consider new ideas. So we have a responsibility to use all the tools we can find — including the lessons of psychology.
“It’s time to stop making excuses,” as Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler wrote in his book Misbehaving. He was speaking to economists but he could have been addressing journalists. “We need an enriched approach…that acknowledges the existence and relevance of Humans.”
[Read the rest here.]
It was an extraordinary opportunity. For three hours, nine cameras captured the group’s conversation about Twitter, President Trump, health care and the prospect of a new civil war. The crew even built a special table, just for the occasion. The edited 16-minute segment would represent the first of a series of planned 60 Minutes shows focused on a divided America. It was a chance for a respected news outlet to go beyond the clichés and name-calling and excavate richer, deeper truths, at a time of profound division in America.
In the end, that was not what happened. The episode drew nearly 15 million viewers, making it the third-most-watched TV show of the week, according to Nielsen ratings. But the on-air conversation was strangely dull and superficial.
First, a heavyset man named Tom said he loved Trump more every day; next, a blonde woman named Jennifer said Trump made her feel sick to her stomach. Later, Winfrey went around the table asking each person for one word to describe the typical Trump voter, then repeating their answers. “Frustrated,” said Tom. “Frustrated,” said Winfrey.
What went wrong? How could one of the most successful, relatable interviewers in American history create such uninspired television?
Deep in their bones, talk-show hosts (like journalists generally) understand certain things about human psychology: we know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger. We can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations.
As politicians have become more polarized, we have increasingly allowed ourselves to be used by demagogues on both sides of the aisle, amplifying their insults instead of exposing their motivations. Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation. Long before the 2016 election, the mainstream news media lost the trust of the public, creating an opening for misinformation and propaganda. If the purpose of journalism is to “see the public into fuller existence,” as Jay Rosen once wrote, it’s hard to conclude that we are succeeding.
“Conflict is important. It’s what moves a democracy forward,” says journalist Jeremy Hay, co-founder of Spaceship Media, which helps media outlets engage divided communities. “But as long as journalism is content to let conflict sit like that, journalism is abdicating the power it has to help people find a way through that conflict.”
But what else can we do with conflict, besides letting it sit? We’re not advocates, and we shouldn’t be in the business of making people feel better. Our mission is not a diplomatic one. So what options does that leave?
To find out, I spent the past three months interviewing people who know conflict intimately and have developed creative ways of navigating it. I met psychologists, mediators, lawyers, rabbis and other people who know how to disrupt toxic narratives and get people to reveal deeper truths. They do it every day — with livid spouses, feuding business partners, spiteful neighbors. They have learned how to get people to open up to new ideas, rather than closing down in judgment and indignation.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all kinds of places, and I did not know these lessons. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives now people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.
For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a rational world. When people made mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was assumed, generally prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all manner of biases and illusions.
“We are influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it,” as Kahneman put it. The good news was that these irrational behaviors are also highly predictable. So economists have gradually adjusted their models to account for these systematic human quirks.
Journalism has yet to undergo this awakening. We like to think of ourselves as objective seekers of truth. Which is why most of us have simply doubled down in recent years, continuing to do more of the same kind of journalism, despite mounting evidence that we are not having the impact we once had. We continue to collect facts and capture quotes as if we are operating in a linear world.
But it’s becoming clear that we cannot FOIA our way out of this problem. If we want to learn the truth, we have to find new ways to listen. If we want our best work to have consequences, we have to be heard. “Anyone who values truth,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, “should stop worshipping reason.”
We need to find ways to help our audiences leave their foxholes and consider new ideas. So we have a responsibility to use all the tools we can find — including the lessons of psychology.
“It’s time to stop making excuses,” as Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler wrote in his book Misbehaving. He was speaking to economists but he could have been addressing journalists. “We need an enriched approach…that acknowledges the existence and relevance of Humans.”
[Read the rest here.]
June 12, 2017
Politics Interrupted
The United States has flatlined when it comes to electing women: At the local, state and federal level, women hold fewer than 1 in every 4 elected offices, and the ratio hasn’t budged much lately. The U.S. ranks 101st, below China, Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to gender equity in our national legislature—down from 52nd two decades ago.
Studies show that women tend to win elections at the same rate as men—but they are far less likely to run at all. A POLITICO investigation into the causes of gender inequality in electoral politics found that the traditional explanations—fundraising imbalances, sexism in the media and the voting booth, unyielding party bureaucracies and more—have faded in importance. Today, the greatest obstacle may be less conspicuous: America has a shortage of female politicians because, to put it simply, women don’t want the job.
But since the presidential election, American women have been behaving unusually. First, in January, approximately 4.2 million people attended more than 600 women’s marches nationwide—making it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history, according to estimates collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut. In the months afterward, the number of women who filed to run for the Virginia Legislature went up 75 percent over the last comparable cycle in 2013, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In New Jersey, the only other state with legislative elections this year, the number of female candidates is up 25 percent....
Click here to read the rest of the story. And check out the fantastic video about women who are running by the talented Reena Flores at POLITICO.
Studies show that women tend to win elections at the same rate as men—but they are far less likely to run at all. A POLITICO investigation into the causes of gender inequality in electoral politics found that the traditional explanations—fundraising imbalances, sexism in the media and the voting booth, unyielding party bureaucracies and more—have faded in importance. Today, the greatest obstacle may be less conspicuous: America has a shortage of female politicians because, to put it simply, women don’t want the job.
But since the presidential election, American women have been behaving unusually. First, in January, approximately 4.2 million people attended more than 600 women’s marches nationwide—making it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history, according to estimates collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut. In the months afterward, the number of women who filed to run for the Virginia Legislature went up 75 percent over the last comparable cycle in 2013, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In New Jersey, the only other state with legislative elections this year, the number of female candidates is up 25 percent....
Click here to read the rest of the story. And check out the fantastic video about women who are running by the talented Reena Flores at POLITICO.
March 15, 2017
The Long Half-Life of Half-Baked Laws
In the 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of states passed laws to crack down on civil rights and anti-war protesters. And to be fair, lawmakers had reason to be alarmed: while most protests were peaceful, others were bloody and cruel. Police and soldiers had shot students to death and protesters had killed innocent bystanders with bombs. The headlines make today's protests look like cricket matches.
In South Carolina back then, a rural lawmaker proposed a bill to make it a crime to “disturb in any way or in any place the students or teachers of any school” or “to act in an obnoxious manner.” Representative F. Hall Yarborough acted after a series of nonviolent marches by black college students protesting segregation in his district. “I’m interested in keeping outside agitators off campus,” Yarborough told the Associated Press.
But what happened after the heat of the day had faded--after the Vietnam War had ended and Yarborough had retired? The laws were re-purposed for a new era.
Today, South Carolina's law against disturbing school is used to charge some 1,200 kids a year with disturbing school, punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $1,000 fine. These kids are not activists or "outside agitators," but students--accused of shoving, yelling, or cursing. The law is vague enough that it can be invoked for almost any form of misbehavior, even chewing gum, as one South Carolina Sheriff told me. The charge has been filed against kids as young as 7, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And black students are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school.
At least 22 other states also have their own laws against disturbing school, remnants, in most cases, of this long-ago legislative crack down. Today, these laws are used to send at least 10,000 kids into the criminal justice system each year, as I detailed in an Atlantic story last year. The consequences, in kids' alienation, parental despair, lost school days and court costs, are profound--and could not have been imagined by the lawmakers who introduced these bills. (Just being arrested, as criminologist Gary Sweeten has found, doubles a student's chance of dropping out of high school, even if the charge is dropped.)
This year, a South Carolina state senator named Mia McLeod has proposed reforming this old law so that it will no longer apply to students at their own school. Similar attempts have been made over the past 50 years, to no avail. McLeod's current bill, which would simply restore the law to its original purpose, targeting "outside agitators," has already run into opposition from certain prosecutors and police officers.
Meanwhile, at the very same time, lawmakers nationwide are introducing a new wave of bills for a new era of civil unrest, making eerily similar claims about the need to keep "outside agitators" out of their towns: “You now have a situation where you have full-time, quasi-professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” Republican state senator John Kavanagh of Arizona said in support of bill to bring racketeering charges against certain protesters.
This kind of fear-mongering has a long tradition in America, with well-documented and shameful results. In 1970, President Richard Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest noted that more than 30 states had passed nearly 80 laws to counter protesters--laws that ranged from "the unnecessary and ill-directed to the purely vindictive.” The report called for lawmakers to bravely choose reconciliation over repression--in words that are as true today as they were 47 years ago: "Tolerance and understanding on all sides must re-emerge from the fundamental decency of Americans, from our shared aspirations as Americans, from our traditional tolerance of diversity, and from our common humanity."
In South Carolina back then, a rural lawmaker proposed a bill to make it a crime to “disturb in any way or in any place the students or teachers of any school” or “to act in an obnoxious manner.” Representative F. Hall Yarborough acted after a series of nonviolent marches by black college students protesting segregation in his district. “I’m interested in keeping outside agitators off campus,” Yarborough told the Associated Press.
But what happened after the heat of the day had faded--after the Vietnam War had ended and Yarborough had retired? The laws were re-purposed for a new era.
Today, South Carolina's law against disturbing school is used to charge some 1,200 kids a year with disturbing school, punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $1,000 fine. These kids are not activists or "outside agitators," but students--accused of shoving, yelling, or cursing. The law is vague enough that it can be invoked for almost any form of misbehavior, even chewing gum, as one South Carolina Sheriff told me. The charge has been filed against kids as young as 7, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And black students are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school.
At least 22 other states also have their own laws against disturbing school, remnants, in most cases, of this long-ago legislative crack down. Today, these laws are used to send at least 10,000 kids into the criminal justice system each year, as I detailed in an Atlantic story last year. The consequences, in kids' alienation, parental despair, lost school days and court costs, are profound--and could not have been imagined by the lawmakers who introduced these bills. (Just being arrested, as criminologist Gary Sweeten has found, doubles a student's chance of dropping out of high school, even if the charge is dropped.)
This year, a South Carolina state senator named Mia McLeod has proposed reforming this old law so that it will no longer apply to students at their own school. Similar attempts have been made over the past 50 years, to no avail. McLeod's current bill, which would simply restore the law to its original purpose, targeting "outside agitators," has already run into opposition from certain prosecutors and police officers.
Meanwhile, at the very same time, lawmakers nationwide are introducing a new wave of bills for a new era of civil unrest, making eerily similar claims about the need to keep "outside agitators" out of their towns: “You now have a situation where you have full-time, quasi-professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” Republican state senator John Kavanagh of Arizona said in support of bill to bring racketeering charges against certain protesters.
This kind of fear-mongering has a long tradition in America, with well-documented and shameful results. In 1970, President Richard Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest noted that more than 30 states had passed nearly 80 laws to counter protesters--laws that ranged from "the unnecessary and ill-directed to the purely vindictive.” The report called for lawmakers to bravely choose reconciliation over repression--in words that are as true today as they were 47 years ago: "Tolerance and understanding on all sides must re-emerge from the fundamental decency of Americans, from our shared aspirations as Americans, from our traditional tolerance of diversity, and from our common humanity."
January 31, 2017
Inequality, Broken Marriages & Donald Trump
Say what you will about the election results, American voters correctly identified a real problem: the game is rigged in favor of the rich. Workers are not benefiting from progress at nearly the rate that shareholders and executives are benefiting. Capitalism is at war with democracy, and capitalism is winning.
It’s been a slow-motion realization, like a couple discovering that its marriage is broken. The Great Recession was the marital crisis, the vase-smashing domestic dispute that stripped everything bare, making the problem impossible to ignore: the banks and auto companies got bailed out, while the people lost their homes. Then, under the resulting economic strain, companies became ruthlessly efficient, finding ways to create the same profits with fewer employees—like a wife realizing she could get by without her husband’s paycheck after all. Once in place, such efficiencies tend to linger well past the crisis, just like the resentments.
But as any divorce lawyer will tell you, most marriages do not end at the worst of times. No, they end when things get slightly better: the economy improves, unemployment ticks down and there is just enough money in the savings account for a deposit on a rental apartment. And that’s what happened on November 8th.
Millions of voters walked out on the American marriage. They either didn’t vote at all or they voted for the guy who had given the finger to the establishment. Donald Trump had no need for special-interest money; he ignored consultants, focus groups, media elites and every rule of civil discourse and decency.
The problem is that voting for Trump is like having an affair; it may feel good for a while, but it won't fix the marriage.
Tomorrow: The United States used to be more egalitarian than Europe and proudly so. What caused America's rich to get even richer than just about anywhere else?
It’s been a slow-motion realization, like a couple discovering that its marriage is broken. The Great Recession was the marital crisis, the vase-smashing domestic dispute that stripped everything bare, making the problem impossible to ignore: the banks and auto companies got bailed out, while the people lost their homes. Then, under the resulting economic strain, companies became ruthlessly efficient, finding ways to create the same profits with fewer employees—like a wife realizing she could get by without her husband’s paycheck after all. Once in place, such efficiencies tend to linger well past the crisis, just like the resentments.
But as any divorce lawyer will tell you, most marriages do not end at the worst of times. No, they end when things get slightly better: the economy improves, unemployment ticks down and there is just enough money in the savings account for a deposit on a rental apartment. And that’s what happened on November 8th.
Millions of voters walked out on the American marriage. They either didn’t vote at all or they voted for the guy who had given the finger to the establishment. Donald Trump had no need for special-interest money; he ignored consultants, focus groups, media elites and every rule of civil discourse and decency.
The problem is that voting for Trump is like having an affair; it may feel good for a while, but it won't fix the marriage.
Tomorrow: The United States used to be more egalitarian than Europe and proudly so. What caused America's rich to get even richer than just about anywhere else?
August 22, 2016
Solo Parenting Around the World
Kids do better with two parents than with one, generally speaking. That's true everywhere. Because kids are a lot of work everywhere.
But I often hear from Americans who seem to think we have an unusually large number of single parents. And they blame our tradition of single parenting for our problems. And it's true that about 4 in 10 US babies are born to unmarried women. But that alone is not what causes so many problems for kids.
In fact, the rate of babies born to single women in America is about average for the world (and for Europe specifically). In fact, a slightly higher percentage of kids are born to single women in Finland than in America. This is worth repeating: Finland, the place with some of the best and most equitable education results in the world, has a greater share of babies born to unmarried mothers than the US.
Estonia, which also crushes the US educationally, has an even higher rate of non-marital births than Finland. In fact, you look at a chart of non-marital births ranked by country, you'll see that education outcomes seem almost unrelated to marriage around the world.
In Greece, for example, almost every baby is born to a married woman. Happy days. But Greece has terrible education outcomes. Marriage, it turns out, does not make your family smarter. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, fewer than half of babies are born to married women, but the country has remarkable education results.
How to explain it? Well, it turns out that the toxic part of single parenting is the poverty that goes with it. And in some countries, single parenting is easier--even if you don't have a job.
For example, 1 out of every 3 French children living with a nonworking, single parent is poor. In the US, the rate is 9 out of 10. There is a reason for this, as Eduardo Porter at the New York Times explains:
"The French government devotes about 3 percent of its total economic activity to what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calls family benefits. That is four times the share spent in the United States. Government transfers have typically reduced the child poverty rate to under 10 percent, according to O.E.C.D. figures. In the United States, they shave it by only a few percentage points."
In other words, single parenting in America is much harder than single parenting in France--or Finland--and that's largely because the government devotes fewer resources to keeping its most vulnerable citizens out of poverty.
Now, before we go getting all Francophile, let me point out that low poverty does not make a country smarter, either. It is not enough. In fact, France's educational results are not much better than the US. A kid is way better off being born poor in Canada than in France (or the US) when it comes to her lifelong chances. Why? Because schools still need to be good, even if there's less poverty. These things interact.
But in a time of growing automation and globalization, income stability is increasingly important for kids' life chances. If parents cannot expect to keep a job for more than a year or two, and if the skills they need will keep changing every year, there will be more tumult in the lives of their children. Guaranteed. Governments can choose to soften that tumult in various ways, some of which work better than others, but those policies matter as much or more than the structure of the family.
When I tell people this, they often seem vaguely bummed. It's almost like they want to blame the family, the decline of civilization, the end of marriage, etc. When I tell them it's something much easier to fix, they look dissatisfied. It's a cultural bias that I encounter again and again. Until it changes, I don't see our child poverty rate changing much either.
But I often hear from Americans who seem to think we have an unusually large number of single parents. And they blame our tradition of single parenting for our problems. And it's true that about 4 in 10 US babies are born to unmarried women. But that alone is not what causes so many problems for kids.
In fact, the rate of babies born to single women in America is about average for the world (and for Europe specifically). In fact, a slightly higher percentage of kids are born to single women in Finland than in America. This is worth repeating: Finland, the place with some of the best and most equitable education results in the world, has a greater share of babies born to unmarried mothers than the US.
Estonia, which also crushes the US educationally, has an even higher rate of non-marital births than Finland. In fact, you look at a chart of non-marital births ranked by country, you'll see that education outcomes seem almost unrelated to marriage around the world.
In Greece, for example, almost every baby is born to a married woman. Happy days. But Greece has terrible education outcomes. Marriage, it turns out, does not make your family smarter. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, fewer than half of babies are born to married women, but the country has remarkable education results.
How to explain it? Well, it turns out that the toxic part of single parenting is the poverty that goes with it. And in some countries, single parenting is easier--even if you don't have a job.
For example, 1 out of every 3 French children living with a nonworking, single parent is poor. In the US, the rate is 9 out of 10. There is a reason for this, as Eduardo Porter at the New York Times explains:
"The French government devotes about 3 percent of its total economic activity to what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calls family benefits. That is four times the share spent in the United States. Government transfers have typically reduced the child poverty rate to under 10 percent, according to O.E.C.D. figures. In the United States, they shave it by only a few percentage points."
In other words, single parenting in America is much harder than single parenting in France--or Finland--and that's largely because the government devotes fewer resources to keeping its most vulnerable citizens out of poverty.
Now, before we go getting all Francophile, let me point out that low poverty does not make a country smarter, either. It is not enough. In fact, France's educational results are not much better than the US. A kid is way better off being born poor in Canada than in France (or the US) when it comes to her lifelong chances. Why? Because schools still need to be good, even if there's less poverty. These things interact.
But in a time of growing automation and globalization, income stability is increasingly important for kids' life chances. If parents cannot expect to keep a job for more than a year or two, and if the skills they need will keep changing every year, there will be more tumult in the lives of their children. Guaranteed. Governments can choose to soften that tumult in various ways, some of which work better than others, but those policies matter as much or more than the structure of the family.
When I tell people this, they often seem vaguely bummed. It's almost like they want to blame the family, the decline of civilization, the end of marriage, etc. When I tell them it's something much easier to fix, they look dissatisfied. It's a cultural bias that I encounter again and again. Until it changes, I don't see our child poverty rate changing much either.
February 3, 2016
The Commonwealth of Starbucks
Last month, Starbucks started giving full-time employees in China monthly housing allowances. The benefit, which will cover about half of the average worker’s housing costs, according to the company, is just Starbucks’s latest welfare policy roll-out. This year, the company will start giving U.K. employees interest-free loans to help pay the exorbitant up-front apartment-rental fees common in many cities there. Meanwhile, in the United States, Starbucks has started paying for employees to attend college, a program that began in 2014. About 5,000 have enrolled so far, and some 200 will have graduated by this summer.
I wrote about the company's college initiative on the cover of the Atlantic last year. Now we take a look at the connections between the US benefits and new policies worldwide.
What Starbucks does in China in particular is telling. China is now Starbucks's second largest market after the U.S. Soon, it will be the first. The company is opening more than one new store in China every day. Their success there, in a tea-drinking country with immense poverty, is remarkable.
Now the company is looking ahead to a China where workers are hard to find and harder to keep. There is no Starbucks without its baristas, so the company is finding ways to make their lives less miserable—just as it has in the U.S. and the UK.
The uncomfortable truth is that Starbucks currently depends upon the haves and the have-nots. The haves are their customers, and the have-nots are their workers. Like many companies and quite a few countries, Starbucks needs both groups to be satisfied—or at least apathetic—in order to thrive.
Are you a Starbucks employee? Or a customer? Chances are you have been one or both—or will be soon. Check out the rest of the story here, and let me know what you think on Twitter.
Photo: Alicea Thomas, a Starbucks supervisor, in Southern California.
I wrote about the company's college initiative on the cover of the Atlantic last year. Now we take a look at the connections between the US benefits and new policies worldwide.
What Starbucks does in China in particular is telling. China is now Starbucks's second largest market after the U.S. Soon, it will be the first. The company is opening more than one new store in China every day. Their success there, in a tea-drinking country with immense poverty, is remarkable.
Now the company is looking ahead to a China where workers are hard to find and harder to keep. There is no Starbucks without its baristas, so the company is finding ways to make their lives less miserable—just as it has in the U.S. and the UK.
The uncomfortable truth is that Starbucks currently depends upon the haves and the have-nots. The haves are their customers, and the have-nots are their workers. Like many companies and quite a few countries, Starbucks needs both groups to be satisfied—or at least apathetic—in order to thrive.
Are you a Starbucks employee? Or a customer? Chances are you have been one or both—or will be soon. Check out the rest of the story here, and let me know what you think on Twitter.
Photo: Alicea Thomas, a Starbucks supervisor, in Southern California.
February 1, 2016
Time to Stop “Appreciating” Teachers & Start Admiring Them
In Washington, DC, public-school teachers can make $100,000 after just four years on the job. Young teachers are buying apartments and sports cars. Finally.
But a curious thing has happened along the way. The public conversation has not kept up with the policy. Parents and pundits don't seem to realize that teachers are now true professionals—the kind who do complex, intellectual work for which they are duly compensated. With the best of intentions, people still talk down to teachers in subtle ways, underestimating their work and overestimating their sacrifices.
“When I tell people I’m a teacher, they say, ‘Oh, my gosh—that’s God’s work. Thank you.’ What they’re basically saying is ‘Thank you for doing that job so that I don’t have to.’ They’re missing that I am not actually sacrificing to do this. I’m working extremely hard because I believe in this intellectual journey—for my students and also for me. It is deeply engaging.” —Hope Harrod, DC's 2012 Teacher of the Year
It's time for the sad-sack narrative to evolve. As long as teachers are treated like charity cases, they will never get the power they deserve. Here's my rant at Washingtonian Magazine.
But a curious thing has happened along the way. The public conversation has not kept up with the policy. Parents and pundits don't seem to realize that teachers are now true professionals—the kind who do complex, intellectual work for which they are duly compensated. With the best of intentions, people still talk down to teachers in subtle ways, underestimating their work and overestimating their sacrifices.
“When I tell people I’m a teacher, they say, ‘Oh, my gosh—that’s God’s work. Thank you.’ What they’re basically saying is ‘Thank you for doing that job so that I don’t have to.’ They’re missing that I am not actually sacrificing to do this. I’m working extremely hard because I believe in this intellectual journey—for my students and also for me. It is deeply engaging.” —Hope Harrod, DC's 2012 Teacher of the Year
It's time for the sad-sack narrative to evolve. As long as teachers are treated like charity cases, they will never get the power they deserve. Here's my rant at Washingtonian Magazine.
