Lily Salter's Blog, page 946
November 22, 2015
The Kochs, loathsome to the end: The real reason they’re interested in criminal justice reform
As the GOP-controlled Congress drafts a major criminal justice reform package to unshackle millions of poor and people of color from a predatory legal system, House Republicans are ensuring that corporate America also will get what it wants: tougher legal hurdles for prosecutors to go after white-collar crimes. An early draft of one bill in the House Judiciary Committee’s package of reforms would raise the legal threshold needed to prove a person committed a white-collar offense. In most instances today, a person cannot claim he didn’t know what he was doing was illegal. But the House’s proposal would require government to “prove that the defendant knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful.” “The House language violates the basic precept that ‘ignorance of the law is no defense,’” Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, told the Huffington Post. “There is absolutely no reason for the otherwise laudable criminal justice reform bill to contain any measure to weaken already feeble standards for corporate criminal prosecution.” Actually, in the ways Washington works, there is every reason to expect that the GOP would include pro-corporate fine print in the reform package. This is legislation both parties want passed before the 2016 elections. Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks funded by corporate titans such as the anti-regulation Koch brothers have been doing what they’re paid to do—issuing papers urging Congress to toughen the requirements to get a white-collar conviction. They argue, much like the civil rights community, that prosecutors have too much power and too readily abuse it. However, a key distinction between the racial justice agenda and the corporate agenda is that civil rights activists are primarily focused on police and prosecutorial abuses of the criminal justice codes, whereas the corporate community is primarily focused on government regulations of industry. They are shrewdly saying that people who make mistakes should be punished, but by fines or other penalities—not criminal convictions that last a lifetime. “Some people or entities intentionally pollute our air and water or intentionally engage in other conduct knowing it will cause harm, in which case criminal prosecution may be entirely appropriate,” John Malcolm, Heritage Foundation’s judicial and legal studies director, wrote this fall. “However, if somebody or some entity unwittingly does something that results in harm, say, to the environment or to another person, there is no reason why it cannot be dealt with (even harshly) through the administrative or civil justice systems. This would help to remedy the problem and compensate victims without saddling morally blameless individuals and entities for life with a criminal conviction.” Malcolm’s paper and argument reviews a range of varying standards of proof that would be required for a conviction. They range from the toughest on perpetrators to the loosest, starting with a person could be accused of “negligently” commiting a crime. The spectrum continues with “recklessly,” “knowingly,” “intentionally,” and finally, “willfully." Making it harder for prosecutors to obtain convictions by changing the standard of proof required for governmental action is a strategy seen in many right-wing political fights. That tactic was exactly how the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act—they changed and raised the standard of proof that would justify federal intervention in new state laws curbing voting rights. Thus, it’s notable the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee’s legislative draftsmen chose the standard that seems to be in the middle of the sprectrum presented by Malcolm, as that seems reasonable, However, in practice, it lets many would-be corporate lawbreakers to escape prosecution. “Will some senior corporate management 'fat cats' benefit because strictermens rea [Latin for guilty mind] requirements make it more difficult to prosecute them successfully? Possibly,” Malcom writes, answering the question he raises, before quoting another Heritage Foundation legal paper. “Corporate directors, chief executive officers (CEOs), presidents, and other high-level officers are not involved in the day-to-day operation of plants, warehouses, shipping facilities, and the like. Lower level officers and employees, as well as small business owners, bear that burden.” It remains to be seen if this new standard of proof will remain in the legislation as it makes its way through the House and Senate, but the chances are good that it will. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, told the Huffington Post that this proposal, should it become law, would seriously undermine white-collar prosecutions. It “would create confusion and needless litigation, and significantly weaken, often unintentionally, countless federal statutes,” including “those that play an important role in protecting the public welfare... protecting consumers from unsafe food and medicine,” Carr said. That is exactly the goal of the Heritage Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. “Nearly 5,000 federal criminal statutes are scattered throughout the U.S. Code, and an estimated 300,000 or more criminal regulatory offenses are buried in the Code of Federal Regulations,” Heritage wrote. “Not even Congress or the Department of Justice knows precisely how many criminal laws and regulations currently exist. Because many of them lack adequate (or even any) mens rea standards, innocent mistakes or accidents can become crimes.” 
The message that America desperately needs to acknowledge: Arab Lives Matter
On November 12, the day before the attack on Paris, ISIS committed a horrific terrorist attack on innocent citizens of Beirut. Like the Paris attack, it was coordinated and commanded by ISIS. Like the Paris attack, it was executed by a cell of terrorist suicide bombers. Like in Paris, a manhunt ensued to find a network of planners and associates behind the bombers, and the Lebanese authorities have arrested nine people for suspected involvement in the attack. The two tragedies, one in Paris and the other in the largely French-speaking city once known as the "Paris of the Middle East," were remarkably similar. The most significant difference between the two attacks was the relative severity; the Beirut attack was far worse than the attack on Paris. Were the same proportion of the French population killed as in the Lebanon attack, Paris would have suffered 635 deaths. In fact, the attack exceeded the deadliness of 9/11 in terms of the proportion of citizens killed. The same magnitude of attack would have claimed almost 3,100 New Yorkers’ lives.
But according to news coverage in the West, those Lebanese lives effectively don’t matter. FAIR's Jim Naureckas points out the striking disparity in coverage in the New York Times, which was generally reflective of the wider news media's response. But it's not fair to only blame the press; the public appetite for Paris news seemed insatiable. Even those of us who consider ourselves enlightened and proudly attentive to uninterrogated biases--in which camp I like to include myself--couldn't help but be swept up in it, unwittingly revealing what really matters to us, whose lives we value. We say “Black Lives Matter” because black deaths at the hands of police don’t register in the national conscience to any degree commensurate to their tragic significance. The protest movement’s slogan is a dire appeal for black life to be valued as fully as white life is. In a country at whose founding black inhabitants were considered three-fifths of a person, if not simply animals, black citizens in 2015 still fight to be considered fully human.
But another dark dimension of the Black Lives Matter moment is the assumption that the dead deserve their fate. That’s made explicit in failures to indict or convict in the legal system and more implicit in the court of public opinion with the now-predictable conservative reaction of presenting posthumous evidence of the slain citizen’s moral failings or latent danger. That’s why a boyish photo of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown is countered with a “scary”- and more “black”-looking visage from conservatives; the battle is to determine the character of the victim as much as the circumstances at the time of the killing. Wearing a hoodie or sagging pants--that is, the mere superficial participation in a culture--might become entered as evidence in the national popular litigation. Notions of generalized guilt can influence opinion as much as the matter of precise and particular guilt or innocence of the victim at the moment of his death. A preponderance of cultural guilt applied posthumously to the victim can make his innocence at the moment of his execution immaterial. Thankfully, Black Lives Matter has emerged to combat this vestige of the country’s original sin.
Similarly, a call of “Arab Lives Matter” should accompany the disregard for an attack like the one in Beirut. To casually ignore an attack 500 percent more deadly, per capita, than the Paris slaughter, committed by the very same organization, is racist, to be sure; but it’s also to imply that Lebanese victims deserve the violence in a way that the French don’t. Like an American black boy killed by police, the character of the Beirut neighborhood immediately became a battleground. The initial New York Times headline needlessly described the slaughter of innocents as occurring in a “Hezbollah Stronghold,” while those more concerned with maintaining the full humanity of the victims objected, eventually pushing the Times to alter its description. The Paper of Record reflexively assigned a certain guilt to the victims.
Meanwhile, after the Paris attack, the French were not similarly described as “Libya Invaders,” despite their primary role in the 2011 invasion, or as long and brutal colonizers of Muslim countries, or as the country that controlled Syria after the First World War. Because that would have been wrong; no Parisian victim deserved to die for her country’s thorough involvement in Muslim lands.
So while many recoil at Republican presidential candidates and GOP governors who leap to an assumption of guilt on the part of Syrian refugees, our collective obsession with the Paris attack signals a readiness to understand a certain naturalness to the attack in Beirut. We see it as something alien and foreign to Paris but something endemic to Lebanon, despite the Paris attackers being mostly (if not all) French and the Lebanese attackers being almost exclusively Syrians. But that’s where many start tacitly scrambling distinctions with abandon, imagining the French terrorists to be foreign and the Lebanese attackers to be natural to that environment. Our especial compassion only makes sense if we believe the victims in Paris being less deserving of the violence. The narrative of Islam-as-violent is at work in the rhetoric of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Republican governors, but so too does it inform the way we’ve mourned Paris and forgotten Beirut.
Snark is good for you: Science reveals the surprising benefits of sarcasm
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” wrote that connoisseur of wit, Oscar Wilde. Whether sarcasm is a sign of intelligence or not, communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm expresses the poisonous sting of contempt, hurting others and harming relationships. As a form of communication, sarcasm takes on the debt of conflict. And yet, our research suggests, there may also be some unexpected benefits from sarcasm: greater creativity. The use of sarcasm, in fact, promotes creativity for those on both the giving and receiving end of sarcastic exchanges. Instead of avoiding sarcasm completely in the office, the research suggests sarcasm, used with care and in moderation, can be effectively used and trigger some creative sparks. Sarcasm involves constructing or exposing contradictions between intended meanings. The most common form of verbal irony, sarcasm is often used to humorously convey thinly veiled disapproval or scorn. “Pat, don’t work so hard!”, a boss might say upon catching his assistant surfing the Internet. Early research on sarcasm explored how people interpret statements and found that, as expected, sarcasm makes a statement sound more critical. In one laboratory study, participants read scenarios in which, for instance, (1) one person did something that could be viewed negatively, such as smoking, and (2) a second person commented on the behavior to the first person, either literally (“I see you don’t have a healthy concern for your lungs”) or sarcastically (“I see you have a healthy concern for your lungs”). Participants rated sarcasm to be more condemning than literal statements. In a similar study, participants were encouraged to empathize either with a person behaving in a way that could be construed as negative or with a second person commenting on the first person’s behavior. Both perspectives prompted participants to rate sarcastic comments by the second person as more impolite relative to literal comments. Other research has show that sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted, particularly when communicated electronically. In one study, 30 pairs of university students were given a list of statements to communicate, half of which were sarcastic and half of which were serious. Some students communicated their messages via e-mail and others via voice recordings. Participants who received the voice messages accurately gleaned the sarcasm (or lack thereof) 73 percent of the time, but those who received the statements via e-mail did so only 56 percent of the time, hardly better than chance. By comparison, the e-mailers had anticipated that 78 percent of participants would pick up on the sarcasm inherent in their sarcastic statements. That is, they badly overestimated their ability to communicate the tenor of their sarcastic statements via e-mail. What’s more, the recipients of the sarcastic e-mails were also decidedly overconfident. They guessed they would correctly interpret the tone of the e-mails they received about 90 percent of the time. They were considerably less overconfident about their ability to interpret voice messages. In recent research, my colleagues and I discovered an upside to this otherwise gloomy picture of sarcasm. In one study, we assigned some participants to engage in either simulated sarcastic, sincere, or neutral dialogues by choosing from pre-written responses on a sheet of paper. Others were recipients of these different types of messages from others. Immediately after participants engaged in these “conversations,” we presented them with tasks testing their creativity. Not surprisingly, the participants exposed to sarcasm reported more interpersonal conflict than those in other groups. More interestingly, those who engaged in a sarcastic conversation fared better on creativity tasks. The processes involved in initiating and delivering a sarcastic comment improved the creativity and cognitive functioning of both the commenter and the recipient. This creativity effect only emerged when recipients picked up on the sarcasm behind the expresser’s message rather than taking mean comments at face value. Why might sarcasm enhance creativity? Because the brain must think creatively to understand or convey a sarcastic comment, sarcasm may lead to clearer and more creative thinking. To either create or understand sarcasm, tone must overcome the contradiction between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates, and is facilitated by, abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking. Consider the following example, which comes from a conversation one of my co-authors on the research (Adam Galinsky, of Columbia) had a few weeks before getting married. His fiancée woke him up as he was soundly asleep at night to tell him about some new ideas she has for their upcoming wedding next month –many of which were quite expensive. Adam responded with some ideas of his own: “Why don’t we get Paul McCartney to sing, Barack Obama to give a benediction and Amy Schumer to entertain people.” His comment required his fiancée to recognize that there is a distinction between the surface level meaning of the sentence (actually signing up these people to perform) and the meaning that was intended. This is not the first set of studies showing that creativity can be boosted by things that would commonly be considered creativity killers. In one series of studies, for example, researchers found that moderate noise can be an untapped source of creativity, providing a welcome distraction that helps the brain make disparate associations. In addition, alcohol is believed to aid creativity, up to a point, by reducing focus and relaxing the mind. Sarcasm can be interpreted negatively, and thus cause relationship costs. So, how do we harness its creative benefits without creating the type of conflict that can damage a relationship? It comes down to trust. Our studies show that, given the same content and tone, sarcasm expressed toward or received from someone we trust is less conflict provoking than sarcasm expressed toward or received from someone we distrust. Of course, if we were to vary the tone and content, it would make a difference too – given an extremely harsh tone and critical content, even trust might not be enough. Given the risks and benefits of sarcasm, your best bet is to keep salty remarks limited to conversations with those you know well, lest you offend others—even as you potentially help them think more creatively. 
America has never recovered from Ronald Reagan. That’s why Bernie Sanders is so important.
On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave his long planned speech on Democratic Socialism, invoking great American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminding everyone that some of the most popular social programs we have today — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all once labeled socialist and aggressively opposed by monied interests, who FDR called “economic royalists.” Not only were social programs opposed and called socialism; so were any kind of laws or regulations that intervened with the “free market” for the betterment of society. “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as 'socialist,'” explained Sanders. Of course, capitalists never come out and say that they want the government to get out of their way so that they can take advantage of workers or employ children or contaminate the water supply. They fear-monger about the threat of socialism and claim that as long as the government intervenes with their business, we can never have true freedom. A young propagandist named Ronald Reagan issued such a warning in the early sixties, in opposition to what is seen as the predecessor to Medicare. "Federal programs," Reagan warned, "will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until one day… we will wake to find that we have socialism.” Sounds familiar. Today, we have “economic royalists” like the Koch brothers who, with their billions, fund the myths that have long sat in opposition to the social programs and market regulations that helped create the middle class. “A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value,” said Charles Koch in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year, “In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.” Koch puts forth the idea that an unregulated free market (or what he calls a “truly free society”) would solve most of society’s problems, and that any business — such as Koch Industries — that disrespects its customers will fail. There are many reasons why this is wrong. First of all, what is disrespecting a customer? Wrecking the environment? Violating safety regulations that end up killing innocent Americans? In that case, Koch Industries would have surely failed in a “truly free society” by now. Except it wouldn’t. When a corporation is as big and diversified as Koch Industries, most customers don’t even know when they’re buying a product from them (you may very well be using a Koch product in your own household), and “ethical consumerism” is, unfortunately, more myth than reality (consumers tend to look for the best deals before looking for products that comply with their moral code). The truth, of course, is that an unfettered free market has disastrous affects on society, and that the freedom the Koch brothers and people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) promote is a kind of barbaric freedom. This was witnessed back 2011, when Rand’s father, Ron Paul, was questioned at a GOP primary debate whether a healthy uninsured 30-year-old man who fell into a coma after something “terrible happened” should be treated or simply left to die. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” which was followed by some fans shouting “Yes!” to the question of whether he should simply be left to die (which led Paul to backtrack, realizing the barbarity of his answer). The libertarian thinker, F. A. Hayek, who inspired the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, said this much in his book on freedom, “Constitution of Liberty": 
On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave his long planned speech on Democratic Socialism, invoking great American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminding everyone that some of the most popular social programs we have today — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all once labeled socialist and aggressively opposed by monied interests, who FDR called “economic royalists.” Not only were social programs opposed and called socialism; so were any kind of laws or regulations that intervened with the “free market” for the betterment of society. “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as 'socialist,'” explained Sanders. Of course, capitalists never come out and say that they want the government to get out of their way so that they can take advantage of workers or employ children or contaminate the water supply. They fear-monger about the threat of socialism and claim that as long as the government intervenes with their business, we can never have true freedom. A young propagandist named Ronald Reagan issued such a warning in the early sixties, in opposition to what is seen as the predecessor to Medicare. "Federal programs," Reagan warned, "will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until one day… we will wake to find that we have socialism.” Sounds familiar. Today, we have “economic royalists” like the Koch brothers who, with their billions, fund the myths that have long sat in opposition to the social programs and market regulations that helped create the middle class. “A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value,” said Charles Koch in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year, “In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.” Koch puts forth the idea that an unregulated free market (or what he calls a “truly free society”) would solve most of society’s problems, and that any business — such as Koch Industries — that disrespects its customers will fail. There are many reasons why this is wrong. First of all, what is disrespecting a customer? Wrecking the environment? Violating safety regulations that end up killing innocent Americans? In that case, Koch Industries would have surely failed in a “truly free society” by now. Except it wouldn’t. When a corporation is as big and diversified as Koch Industries, most customers don’t even know when they’re buying a product from them (you may very well be using a Koch product in your own household), and “ethical consumerism” is, unfortunately, more myth than reality (consumers tend to look for the best deals before looking for products that comply with their moral code). The truth, of course, is that an unfettered free market has disastrous affects on society, and that the freedom the Koch brothers and people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) promote is a kind of barbaric freedom. This was witnessed back 2011, when Rand’s father, Ron Paul, was questioned at a GOP primary debate whether a healthy uninsured 30-year-old man who fell into a coma after something “terrible happened” should be treated or simply left to die. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” which was followed by some fans shouting “Yes!” to the question of whether he should simply be left to die (which led Paul to backtrack, realizing the barbarity of his answer). The libertarian thinker, F. A. Hayek, who inspired the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, said this much in his book on freedom, “Constitution of Liberty":
“Liberty does not mean all good things or the absence of all evils. It is true that to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks. In the sense in which we use the term, the penniless vagabond who lives precariously by constant improvisation is indeed freer than the conscripted soldier with all his security and relative comfort.”
Bernie Sanders, FDR, MLK, and many other past and present Americans have a very different view of freedom, and believe that the freedom to starve or to be left untreated after being seriously injured is no freedom at all. As FDR said while listing his Second Bill of Rights, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” This is one of the fundamental values of socialism.
For Karl Marx, socialism was the final step towards human liberation after capitalism, which had liberated human beings from feudalism (by eliminating birth ranks, i.e. nobility, while also creating a free yet slavish wage system). In a socialist society, where productive powers have advanced to such a degree (thanks to capitalism) that they have freed human beings from the endless productive toil that has existed throughout history, it is, as he famously put it, “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” For Sanders and other Democratic Socialists (or Social Democrats), socialism is not so much about having the individual freedom to do what you wish without ever taking on a role (a major flaw in Marx’s thought was his dismissal of identity and the fulfillment human beings find in roles, e.g. someone who writes or paints would like be known as a writer or a painter), but having the freedom to fully utilize your innate talents and pursue work that you love, without having to worry about medical care or being tens of thousands dollars in debt for a necessary education. It is the right for every single person who works hard, regardless of how skilled or unskilled the labor is, to have a livable wage. And of course, it is democracy, or as Sanders put it:“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.”The two political parties, who for decades have been neoliberal parties serving the interests of the capitalist class first and foremost, seem to be moving further apart. Since the ISIS attacks on Paris, some Republicans have started to sound increasingly like their fascist forbearers, while also talking about the importance of freedom. But the only candidate who offers the real freedom that so many great Americans have advocated in the past, it seems, is Bernie Sanders.
On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave his long planned speech on Democratic Socialism, invoking great American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminding everyone that some of the most popular social programs we have today — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all once labeled socialist and aggressively opposed by monied interests, who FDR called “economic royalists.” Not only were social programs opposed and called socialism; so were any kind of laws or regulations that intervened with the “free market” for the betterment of society. “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as 'socialist,'” explained Sanders. Of course, capitalists never come out and say that they want the government to get out of their way so that they can take advantage of workers or employ children or contaminate the water supply. They fear-monger about the threat of socialism and claim that as long as the government intervenes with their business, we can never have true freedom. A young propagandist named Ronald Reagan issued such a warning in the early sixties, in opposition to what is seen as the predecessor to Medicare. "Federal programs," Reagan warned, "will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until one day… we will wake to find that we have socialism.” Sounds familiar. Today, we have “economic royalists” like the Koch brothers who, with their billions, fund the myths that have long sat in opposition to the social programs and market regulations that helped create the middle class. “A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value,” said Charles Koch in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year, “In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.” Koch puts forth the idea that an unregulated free market (or what he calls a “truly free society”) would solve most of society’s problems, and that any business — such as Koch Industries — that disrespects its customers will fail. There are many reasons why this is wrong. First of all, what is disrespecting a customer? Wrecking the environment? Violating safety regulations that end up killing innocent Americans? In that case, Koch Industries would have surely failed in a “truly free society” by now. Except it wouldn’t. When a corporation is as big and diversified as Koch Industries, most customers don’t even know when they’re buying a product from them (you may very well be using a Koch product in your own household), and “ethical consumerism” is, unfortunately, more myth than reality (consumers tend to look for the best deals before looking for products that comply with their moral code). The truth, of course, is that an unfettered free market has disastrous affects on society, and that the freedom the Koch brothers and people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) promote is a kind of barbaric freedom. This was witnessed back 2011, when Rand’s father, Ron Paul, was questioned at a GOP primary debate whether a healthy uninsured 30-year-old man who fell into a coma after something “terrible happened” should be treated or simply left to die. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” which was followed by some fans shouting “Yes!” to the question of whether he should simply be left to die (which led Paul to backtrack, realizing the barbarity of his answer). The libertarian thinker, F. A. Hayek, who inspired the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, said this much in his book on freedom, “Constitution of Liberty": “Liberty does not mean all good things or the absence of all evils. It is true that to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks. In the sense in which we use the term, the penniless vagabond who lives precariously by constant improvisation is indeed freer than the conscripted soldier with all his security and relative comfort.”
Bernie Sanders, FDR, MLK, and many other past and present Americans have a very different view of freedom, and believe that the freedom to starve or to be left untreated after being seriously injured is no freedom at all. As FDR said while listing his Second Bill of Rights, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” This is one of the fundamental values of socialism.
For Karl Marx, socialism was the final step towards human liberation after capitalism, which had liberated human beings from feudalism (by eliminating birth ranks, i.e. nobility, while also creating a free yet slavish wage system). In a socialist society, where productive powers have advanced to such a degree (thanks to capitalism) that they have freed human beings from the endless productive toil that has existed throughout history, it is, as he famously put it, “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” For Sanders and other Democratic Socialists (or Social Democrats), socialism is not so much about having the individual freedom to do what you wish without ever taking on a role (a major flaw in Marx’s thought was his dismissal of identity and the fulfillment human beings find in roles, e.g. someone who writes or paints would like be known as a writer or a painter), but having the freedom to fully utilize your innate talents and pursue work that you love, without having to worry about medical care or being tens of thousands dollars in debt for a necessary education. It is the right for every single person who works hard, regardless of how skilled or unskilled the labor is, to have a livable wage. And of course, it is democracy, or as Sanders put it:“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.”The two political parties, who for decades have been neoliberal parties serving the interests of the capitalist class first and foremost, seem to be moving further apart. Since the ISIS attacks on Paris, some Republicans have started to sound increasingly like their fascist forbearers, while also talking about the importance of freedom. But the only candidate who offers the real freedom that so many great Americans have advocated in the past, it seems, is Bernie Sanders.
Sniffing out ovarian cancer: Working dogs help in the war on cancer — with their amazing noses
McBaine is a black-and-white English springer spaniel with a constantly wagging tail and a passion for sniffing out ovarian tumors. During a typical day at the University of Pennsylvania’s Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia, McBaine is brought into a back room that’s mostly bare except for a large metal wheel in the center of the floor. Attached to the wheel are twelve small cups, one of which contains a blood sample from a patient fighting ovarian cancer. McBaine runs around the wheel, smelling each cup one by one, the black tuft on the end of his tail waving happily throughout. Then he stops, places his paw gently on one of the cups, and sits down. “Good boy!” his trainer yells, as she tosses the dog’s favorite rope toy across the floor. Play is McBaine’s reward for finding the cancer sample among the cups that contain healthy blood samples or nothing at all. It was an unusually warm spring day in Philadelphia when I returned to my alma mater to learn about a completely different way dogs are helping in the war on cancer — with their noses. McBaine was one of four dogs enrolled in an innovative study with a lofty goal. After training the dogs to identify ovarian cancer by its smell, the researchers running the project planned to find out exactly what it is the dogs are detecting in the cancer and then invent a diagnostic device that could mimic the dog’s nose. That device would give physicians the power to find ovarian cancer long before its victims have any inkling that they are sick. “We wouldn’t put dogs in every hospital or every laboratory,” said Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian, dog trainer, and executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center. “Our whole goal is for the end product to be a chemical sensor — a machine with the sensitivity and specificity of the dog.” The Penn Vet Working Dog Center is not on the university’s main campus, but two miles away in a nondescript office complex a stone’s throw from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I walked through the main entrance into a giant room with blue foam tiles on the floor and the elements of an obstacle course scattered about — a three-step ladder, a ramp, and several old tires. A dry-erase board on the wall listed all the dogs who were being trained at the center and their progress mastering a variety of skills, from search and rescue, to agility, to impulse control. As Otto took me on a tour, the sound of the hand-held clickers the dog trainers were using echoed through the halls. The Penn Vet Working Dog Center, she explained, was founded in 2007, but it didn’t have its own headquarters until it opened in this building five years later. The center was born from Otto’s passion for training search and rescue dogs, which she did in her spare time while working as an emergency veterinarian at Penn. Otto volunteered to provide medical care for the canine search-and-rescue teams that were deployed after Hurricane Floyd hit Florida in 1999, and again in the wake of the September 11th attacks. After Otto returned from Ground Zero, she got word that the American Kennel Club was looking to fund a study of the 9/11 dogs. She immediately applied, and was chosen to manage the study. “We’ve been following the dogs — their health, their behavior. We get x-rays and bloodwork every year, and when the dogs die, we examine the causes of death,” Otto said. “As I looked at the whole intersection of dogs and work, I realized there’s a lot we don’t know.” A decade after 9/11, the Working Dog Center opened its doors with the mission of taking what was learned from the Ground Zero study and others like it to improve the breeding and training of working dogs. The center’s trainers started by teaching dogs to detect explosives and narcotics. Later they branched out into the medical realm, pairing dogs who could detect dangerous drops in blood sugar levels with diabetic patients. The cancer-detection project was the center’s newest pursuit. The dogs at Penn’s center were named in honor of the dogs and trainers who were deployed to the 9/11 sites, or the victims who died in the act of terrorism. (McBaine’s namesake was a search-and-rescue dog who served as part of the control group for the 9/11 canine study.) McBaine and his fellow trainees lived with foster families, who brought them to the center Monday through Friday to be trained. Otto was a businesslike clinician who, I quickly realized, turned to mush in the presence of her trained dogs. She took me to the back of the center to meet Ffoster, (spelled with a double F), a calm three-year-old yellow Lab who was the newest addition to the cancer-detection program. She was named after 9/11 victim Sandra N. Foster. “Here’s Ffoster, here’s the good girl,” Otto said, speaking to the dog in a gentle tone as she let her out of the crate where she had been napping. “Do you want to come out and say hi?” Earlier that day, Ffoster took her turn at the cancer wheel. Ffoster was more deliberate and considerably less bouncy than McBaine, walking slowly around the wheel, checking each cup carefully before coming to a stop. She was right. She got a treat as a reward. “You did good today,” Otto cooed. “You’re learning good stuff.” The notion that dogs might be able to detect cancer first emerged in 1989, when the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a five-paragraph letter titled “Sniffer dogs in the melanoma clinic?” In the letter, two physicians at King’s College Hospital in London described the case of a forty-four-year-old woman, who came into their clinic with a lesion on her left thigh. She told them she made the appointment because her dog, a Doberman–border collie mix, was constantly sniffing a mole on her leg. The dog, the physicians wrote, “showed no interest in the other moles on the patient’s body but frequently spent several minutes a day sniffing intently at the lesion, even through the patient’s trousers.” One day the woman donned shorts, at which point her dog tried to bite the mole off completely. That’s when she decided she should get it examined. The object of the dog’s obsession turned out to be a malignant melanoma. “Perhaps malignant tumours such as melanoma, with their aberrant protein synthesis, emit unique odours which, though undetectable to man, are easily detected by dogs,” the physicians wrote. They reported that the dog had saved the patient’s life, because when she came into the clinic the tumor was so small they could easily treat it. She was cured. Those five paragraphs were enough to mobilize dog-loving scientists all over the world to design studies testing whether dogs can smell cancer. Over the next several years, dozens of papers were published in medical journals, most of them reporting astounding success rates — often with 90 percent accuracy or better — among dogs trained to sniff cancer. Otto read those papers avidly and watched with fascination as other dog-training organizations began teaching dogs to sniff cancer. She wanted to do the same, she just didn’t have the funding or the know-how she needed to get started. Then one day shortly after the new center opened, Otto’s phone rang. It was a cold call from another Penn faculty member, ophthalmologist Jody R. Piltz-Seymour, a dog lover who had also been captivated by all the reports about dogs who could sniff cancer. Piltz-Seymour had lost her father and aunt to pancreatic cancer. A second aunt and her mother-in-law both died of ovarian cancer. Piltz-Seymour was particularly interested in research done by a Swedish scientist named György Horvath. In a 2008 paper, Horvath described how he trained a four-year-old black giant schnauzer to recognize tissue samples from late-stage ovarian cancer patients by their scent. Then Horvath ran the dog through two series of tests to see if she could tell the difference between ovarian cancer and healthy tissue, even when the cancer samples were taken from women in the early stages of the disease. In both testing situations, the dog correctly identified all the cancerous samples, and when presented with 80 pieces of healthy tissue, only twice did she falsely identify them as cancerous. Horvath’s results made Piltz-Seymour realize dogs could be the key to early detection, but she knew she would need help translating the findings into a useful clinical tool. Then the Working Dog Center opened, and she figured she had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. “I thought we had this phenomenal new resource right in the backyard,” Piltz-Seymour said. As she reminisced about her cold call to Otto, she began to laugh. “You have to picture this — here’s an ophthalmologist calling about dogs and cancer.” Little did she know that Otto was already keen on the idea and was looking for an ally to help get a study started. “Jody had done a lot of research and wanted to see if she could help move it forward,” Otto said. “She spearheaded this — it was personal.” Piltz wanted to start with ovarian cancer, not just because of her family history, but also because she believed it was where the dogs could make the most impact. “Everybody in my family succumbed to their cancers because none of their cancers were caught early,” Piltz-Seymour told me. “The vast majority of the time, ovarian cancer is caught late. But when caught early, the success rate with treatment is brilliant. That makes it the perfect cancer to study.” Indeed, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer patients who are diagnosed and treated before their cancer spreads is 92 percent. Yet only 15 percent of ovarian cancers are found that early. These tumors rarely produce symptoms in their early stages, and when they do, their victims commonly mistake what they’re feeling for something far more benign, like constipation. As I listened to Piltz-Seymour talk about this conundrum, I thought about Beth, who didn’t know she was gravely ill until her cancer had spread beyond her stomach. “Gastric cancer is similar to ovarian cancer in that it doesn’t produce symptoms until it’s too late,” I told Piltz-Seymour. The five-year survival rate for gastric cancer patients who are diagnosed at the earliest stages is as high as 71 percent. That’s because surgery and chemo can be quite effective when the cancer hasn’t spread. The problem is, the only good way to find stomach tumors is with an endoscopy, an invasive and sometimes risky procedure that involves sticking a tiny camera down the patient’s throat while he or she is sedated. In most countries, healthy people aren’t given an endoscopy unless they have a strong family history of gastric cancer. Because we had no history of the disease in our family, the doctors who saw Beth for her checkups and minor complaints never would have imagined they should look in her stomach for signs of trouble. So they didn’t. In Japan, where the prevalence of gastric cancer is high, mass screening is routine, and now half of all cases of the disease are found in the early stages. Hence the five-year survival rate following surgery for Japanese patients is a staggering 96 to 99 percent. Whenever I see dogs like McBaine sticking their noses into human tissue samples and instantly identifying the cancerous ones or I read about them in the press, I have a fantasy: I imagine everyone in the world going to the doctor for a routine physical each year and breathing into a tube, or leaving a blood or urine sample, and learning on the spot if there’s any sign of cancer in their stomachs, lungs, ovaries, or anywhere else in the body where tumors can easily hide. If dogs can detect cancer, then it seems only logical that scientists can unlock the mysteries of the canine sense of smell and replicate it with a diagnostic device — an electronic nose that could be put to work in every medical clinic in the world, but that wouldn’t need to be fed and walked twice a day. Piltz-Seymour told me she had exactly the same fantasy. “I kept seeing these very interesting articles about dogs detecting cancer, but no one seemed to follow through to develop anything that could be used in clinical practice,” she said. When she set out to develop an early-detection system for ovarian cancer, Piltz-Seymour knew she needed to put together a team that included more than just dog trainers. She began calling and e-mailing oncologists and doctors, most of whom ignored her. Then she got a return call from a gynecologist at Penn named Janos L. Tanyi. He offered to join the team and referred Piltz-Seymour to two other Penn faculty members he believed would be interested: molecular scientist George Preti and physics professor A.T. Charlie Johnson. Preti and Johnson had already done some research to try to identify the odors associated with ovarian cancer. They both jumped at the opportunity to add dogs to their team. “Our initial hypothesis that ovarian cancer would emanate a unique odor signature was based on the work done in Europe with dogs,” said Preti, who in addition to his appointment at Penn was a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia research house devoted entirely to unlocking the mysteries of smell and taste. “I knew dogs would be a very good biological detector.” 
McBaine is a black-and-white English springer spaniel with a constantly wagging tail and a passion for sniffing out ovarian tumors. During a typical day at the University of Pennsylvania’s Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia, McBaine is brought into a back room that’s mostly bare except for a large metal wheel in the center of the floor. Attached to the wheel are twelve small cups, one of which contains a blood sample from a patient fighting ovarian cancer. McBaine runs around the wheel, smelling each cup one by one, the black tuft on the end of his tail waving happily throughout. Then he stops, places his paw gently on one of the cups, and sits down. “Good boy!” his trainer yells, as she tosses the dog’s favorite rope toy across the floor. Play is McBaine’s reward for finding the cancer sample among the cups that contain healthy blood samples or nothing at all. It was an unusually warm spring day in Philadelphia when I returned to my alma mater to learn about a completely different way dogs are helping in the war on cancer — with their noses. McBaine was one of four dogs enrolled in an innovative study with a lofty goal. After training the dogs to identify ovarian cancer by its smell, the researchers running the project planned to find out exactly what it is the dogs are detecting in the cancer and then invent a diagnostic device that could mimic the dog’s nose. That device would give physicians the power to find ovarian cancer long before its victims have any inkling that they are sick. “We wouldn’t put dogs in every hospital or every laboratory,” said Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian, dog trainer, and executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center. “Our whole goal is for the end product to be a chemical sensor — a machine with the sensitivity and specificity of the dog.” The Penn Vet Working Dog Center is not on the university’s main campus, but two miles away in a nondescript office complex a stone’s throw from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I walked through the main entrance into a giant room with blue foam tiles on the floor and the elements of an obstacle course scattered about — a three-step ladder, a ramp, and several old tires. A dry-erase board on the wall listed all the dogs who were being trained at the center and their progress mastering a variety of skills, from search and rescue, to agility, to impulse control. As Otto took me on a tour, the sound of the hand-held clickers the dog trainers were using echoed through the halls. The Penn Vet Working Dog Center, she explained, was founded in 2007, but it didn’t have its own headquarters until it opened in this building five years later. The center was born from Otto’s passion for training search and rescue dogs, which she did in her spare time while working as an emergency veterinarian at Penn. Otto volunteered to provide medical care for the canine search-and-rescue teams that were deployed after Hurricane Floyd hit Florida in 1999, and again in the wake of the September 11th attacks. After Otto returned from Ground Zero, she got word that the American Kennel Club was looking to fund a study of the 9/11 dogs. She immediately applied, and was chosen to manage the study. “We’ve been following the dogs — their health, their behavior. We get x-rays and bloodwork every year, and when the dogs die, we examine the causes of death,” Otto said. “As I looked at the whole intersection of dogs and work, I realized there’s a lot we don’t know.” A decade after 9/11, the Working Dog Center opened its doors with the mission of taking what was learned from the Ground Zero study and others like it to improve the breeding and training of working dogs. The center’s trainers started by teaching dogs to detect explosives and narcotics. Later they branched out into the medical realm, pairing dogs who could detect dangerous drops in blood sugar levels with diabetic patients. The cancer-detection project was the center’s newest pursuit. The dogs at Penn’s center were named in honor of the dogs and trainers who were deployed to the 9/11 sites, or the victims who died in the act of terrorism. (McBaine’s namesake was a search-and-rescue dog who served as part of the control group for the 9/11 canine study.) McBaine and his fellow trainees lived with foster families, who brought them to the center Monday through Friday to be trained. Otto was a businesslike clinician who, I quickly realized, turned to mush in the presence of her trained dogs. She took me to the back of the center to meet Ffoster, (spelled with a double F), a calm three-year-old yellow Lab who was the newest addition to the cancer-detection program. She was named after 9/11 victim Sandra N. Foster. “Here’s Ffoster, here’s the good girl,” Otto said, speaking to the dog in a gentle tone as she let her out of the crate where she had been napping. “Do you want to come out and say hi?” Earlier that day, Ffoster took her turn at the cancer wheel. Ffoster was more deliberate and considerably less bouncy than McBaine, walking slowly around the wheel, checking each cup carefully before coming to a stop. She was right. She got a treat as a reward. “You did good today,” Otto cooed. “You’re learning good stuff.” The notion that dogs might be able to detect cancer first emerged in 1989, when the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a five-paragraph letter titled “Sniffer dogs in the melanoma clinic?” In the letter, two physicians at King’s College Hospital in London described the case of a forty-four-year-old woman, who came into their clinic with a lesion on her left thigh. She told them she made the appointment because her dog, a Doberman–border collie mix, was constantly sniffing a mole on her leg. The dog, the physicians wrote, “showed no interest in the other moles on the patient’s body but frequently spent several minutes a day sniffing intently at the lesion, even through the patient’s trousers.” One day the woman donned shorts, at which point her dog tried to bite the mole off completely. That’s when she decided she should get it examined. The object of the dog’s obsession turned out to be a malignant melanoma. “Perhaps malignant tumours such as melanoma, with their aberrant protein synthesis, emit unique odours which, though undetectable to man, are easily detected by dogs,” the physicians wrote. They reported that the dog had saved the patient’s life, because when she came into the clinic the tumor was so small they could easily treat it. She was cured. Those five paragraphs were enough to mobilize dog-loving scientists all over the world to design studies testing whether dogs can smell cancer. Over the next several years, dozens of papers were published in medical journals, most of them reporting astounding success rates — often with 90 percent accuracy or better — among dogs trained to sniff cancer. Otto read those papers avidly and watched with fascination as other dog-training organizations began teaching dogs to sniff cancer. She wanted to do the same, she just didn’t have the funding or the know-how she needed to get started. Then one day shortly after the new center opened, Otto’s phone rang. It was a cold call from another Penn faculty member, ophthalmologist Jody R. Piltz-Seymour, a dog lover who had also been captivated by all the reports about dogs who could sniff cancer. Piltz-Seymour had lost her father and aunt to pancreatic cancer. A second aunt and her mother-in-law both died of ovarian cancer. Piltz-Seymour was particularly interested in research done by a Swedish scientist named György Horvath. In a 2008 paper, Horvath described how he trained a four-year-old black giant schnauzer to recognize tissue samples from late-stage ovarian cancer patients by their scent. Then Horvath ran the dog through two series of tests to see if she could tell the difference between ovarian cancer and healthy tissue, even when the cancer samples were taken from women in the early stages of the disease. In both testing situations, the dog correctly identified all the cancerous samples, and when presented with 80 pieces of healthy tissue, only twice did she falsely identify them as cancerous. Horvath’s results made Piltz-Seymour realize dogs could be the key to early detection, but she knew she would need help translating the findings into a useful clinical tool. Then the Working Dog Center opened, and she figured she had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. “I thought we had this phenomenal new resource right in the backyard,” Piltz-Seymour said. As she reminisced about her cold call to Otto, she began to laugh. “You have to picture this — here’s an ophthalmologist calling about dogs and cancer.” Little did she know that Otto was already keen on the idea and was looking for an ally to help get a study started. “Jody had done a lot of research and wanted to see if she could help move it forward,” Otto said. “She spearheaded this — it was personal.” Piltz wanted to start with ovarian cancer, not just because of her family history, but also because she believed it was where the dogs could make the most impact. “Everybody in my family succumbed to their cancers because none of their cancers were caught early,” Piltz-Seymour told me. “The vast majority of the time, ovarian cancer is caught late. But when caught early, the success rate with treatment is brilliant. That makes it the perfect cancer to study.” Indeed, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer patients who are diagnosed and treated before their cancer spreads is 92 percent. Yet only 15 percent of ovarian cancers are found that early. These tumors rarely produce symptoms in their early stages, and when they do, their victims commonly mistake what they’re feeling for something far more benign, like constipation. As I listened to Piltz-Seymour talk about this conundrum, I thought about Beth, who didn’t know she was gravely ill until her cancer had spread beyond her stomach. “Gastric cancer is similar to ovarian cancer in that it doesn’t produce symptoms until it’s too late,” I told Piltz-Seymour. The five-year survival rate for gastric cancer patients who are diagnosed at the earliest stages is as high as 71 percent. That’s because surgery and chemo can be quite effective when the cancer hasn’t spread. The problem is, the only good way to find stomach tumors is with an endoscopy, an invasive and sometimes risky procedure that involves sticking a tiny camera down the patient’s throat while he or she is sedated. In most countries, healthy people aren’t given an endoscopy unless they have a strong family history of gastric cancer. Because we had no history of the disease in our family, the doctors who saw Beth for her checkups and minor complaints never would have imagined they should look in her stomach for signs of trouble. So they didn’t. In Japan, where the prevalence of gastric cancer is high, mass screening is routine, and now half of all cases of the disease are found in the early stages. Hence the five-year survival rate following surgery for Japanese patients is a staggering 96 to 99 percent. Whenever I see dogs like McBaine sticking their noses into human tissue samples and instantly identifying the cancerous ones or I read about them in the press, I have a fantasy: I imagine everyone in the world going to the doctor for a routine physical each year and breathing into a tube, or leaving a blood or urine sample, and learning on the spot if there’s any sign of cancer in their stomachs, lungs, ovaries, or anywhere else in the body where tumors can easily hide. If dogs can detect cancer, then it seems only logical that scientists can unlock the mysteries of the canine sense of smell and replicate it with a diagnostic device — an electronic nose that could be put to work in every medical clinic in the world, but that wouldn’t need to be fed and walked twice a day. Piltz-Seymour told me she had exactly the same fantasy. “I kept seeing these very interesting articles about dogs detecting cancer, but no one seemed to follow through to develop anything that could be used in clinical practice,” she said. When she set out to develop an early-detection system for ovarian cancer, Piltz-Seymour knew she needed to put together a team that included more than just dog trainers. She began calling and e-mailing oncologists and doctors, most of whom ignored her. Then she got a return call from a gynecologist at Penn named Janos L. Tanyi. He offered to join the team and referred Piltz-Seymour to two other Penn faculty members he believed would be interested: molecular scientist George Preti and physics professor A.T. Charlie Johnson. Preti and Johnson had already done some research to try to identify the odors associated with ovarian cancer. They both jumped at the opportunity to add dogs to their team. “Our initial hypothesis that ovarian cancer would emanate a unique odor signature was based on the work done in Europe with dogs,” said Preti, who in addition to his appointment at Penn was a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia research house devoted entirely to unlocking the mysteries of smell and taste. “I knew dogs would be a very good biological detector.”
* * *
The dog’s nose is among the most powerful sensory organs the world has ever known. Dogs have 200 million olfactory receptors (ors), which are proteins on the surface of the neurons inside their noses that help their brains to perceive and process odors. Humans, by contrast, have just five million ors. The mucous membranes inside dogs’ nostrils are extraordinarily dense, and their noses exquisitely structured for the efficient processing of smells. That allows them to detect odors that are present in quantities as low as parts per trillion — an amount so minuscule it’s almost impossible to imagine. On top of that, many experts believe the proportion of the dog’s brain that’s dedicated to analyzing scents is 40 times larger than that of humans. Suffice it to say, it’s enough for scientists to estimate that the dog’s ability to recognize minute traces of particular odors is one million times better than that of people. But what exactly are the dogs sniffing in cancer that they find so alarming? Shortly after The Lancet publication, a popular theory emerged suggesting that tumors must be emitting volatile organic compounds (vocs), which are carbon-based chemicals that naturally occur in the body. Since the late 1980s, scientists have identified a variety of vocs that are overly abundant in cancerous tissues, including some types of benzene. Because vocs have a low boiling point, they easily evaporate and travel to places far from the original tumor, including through urine, blood, and exhaled breath. As the scientific world became aware of the dog’s ability to sniff cancer, some researchers set out to prove that tumors have unique voc signatures, or specific odor profiles that distinguish them from healthy tissue and that can be easily detected and analyzed — if not by dogs than by some sort of non-invasive test. Among those researchers were scientists at the Cleveland Clinic, who in the early 2000s collected breath samples from lung cancer patients, healthy volunteers, and patients with other lung diseases. They analyzed the exact chemical makeup of the cancerous breath and used it to develop a device containing thirty-two tiny sensors. There are two criteria used to judge the value of a diagnostic test in oncology: sensitivity and specificity. A sensitive test can pick up the presence of cancer. A specific test can do so with a high rate of accuracy — meaning it rarely detects the disease in people who don’t have it. Back when the Cleveland Clinic was doing its study, pet scanning in lung cancer was 97 percent specific and 78 percent sensitive. The Cleveland Clinic’s electronic nose stacked up pretty well, scoring 92 percent specificity and 71 percent sensitivity. That means the electronic nose missed the abnormality about a third of the time, but when it found something fishy, it was nearly flawless at figuring out when it was cancer and when it was not. The dogs also performed well. In a 2012 trial of breath samples from 220 people, sniffer dogs scored 90 percent on sensitivity and 72 percent on specificity for lung cancer, even when the scientists tried to confuse them with samples from patients with the non-cancerous lung condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (copd). Other dog studies that had trained dogs with urine, blood, or tissue samples achieved comparable or better results in detecting melanoma, as well as ovarian, breast, bladder, and colorectal cancer. As it became more and more clear that dogs could smell cancer, some researchers wondered if it really made sense to spend time and money creating electronic noses. Some thought a smarter strategy would be to employ the dogs themselves in medical clinics as a sort of living warning system — an advance guard to alert doctors and patients that further testing would be a good idea. One such researcher was Robert Gordon, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California. Gordon envisioned equipping volunteer church groups, for example, with urine-collection kits and a few dogs who were trained to sniff them. “If anybody came up positive then they could be sent to a center where they could get more sophisticated testing,” he said. “I thought in areas that were not developed, in the backwoods, you could use a dog.” Gordon, who is hearing impaired, was inspired by his own dog, a Chihuahua-beagle mix named Ginger, whom he had trained to be a certified hearing-assistance dog. “She’s a fabulous animal,” Gordon said. “She goes everywhere with me — restaurants, movies — helping me as a hearing dog. I put a towel down so her hair doesn’t get on anything. She snores through the loud movies.” In 2004, Gordon set out to train Ginger and nine other dogs to discriminate between patients who had prostate cancer, those who had breast cancer, and those who were healthy, based on urine samples. The dogs made a lively crew that included a miniature goldendoodle, an Italian greyhound, and a Pembroke Welsh corgi. But few of them showed much talent for sniffing cancer — only two performed better than chance, or luck, at specificity in detecting each of the two tumor types. None were better than chance at sensitivity, not even Ginger. After thinking about it, Gordon concluded that the imperfections were not in the dogs themselves but rather in the way he had designed the study. He could only gather a few urine samples, which he froze, thawed, and re-used several times during the training process. He wondered if all that freezing and thawing might have destroyed the scents he was training the dogs to recognize. He had also discovered that the dogs would get fatigued after less than two hours of work. It all made Gordon realize that developing an electronic nose might indeed be far wiser than using dogs at medical clinics or in the backwoods. “It’s impractical to spend the money on dogs,” Gordon said. “That money would be best served finding what the chemicals are that the cancer puts off — the chemical signature that makes them so destructive.” Other researchers had already discovered that finding the vocs was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to train a machine to recognize cancer vocs amid the thousands of other scents emitted by the human body. In dogs, that process is known as imprinting, and it involves teaching the animals to recognize the scent of cancer simply by exposing them to it. Much like a bloodhound who’s directed to find a missing child might be presented with a t-shirt infused with that child’s scent, a cancer-detection dog is asked to sniff cancerous tissue, or samples of urine, blood or breath from sick patients, and then taught to find that scent while ignoring everything else. As the research papers proving the dog’s ability to sniff cancer continued to pile up, a handful of scientists took on the challenge of developing an electronic nose that could be imprinted with the scent of cancer as effectively as a dog’s could. Among the most passionate scientists in that pursuit was someone in my sister’s backyard: Hossam Haick, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. In 2007, Haick began developing a device he dubbed Na-Nose, short for nanotechnology nose. He used tiny gold particles to create an array of electronic sensors, which were connected to a tube. The result was a device that operated much like a breathalyzer, but was far more sensitive because it could analyze up to one thousand different gases in exhaled breath. Haick set out to prove that the Na-Nose could detect much more than the mere presence of cancer — that it could also distinguish one form of the disease from another. Haick’s main challenge, he told me, was figuring out how to deal with all the confounding molecules, as he called them, that appear in breath, like mouthwash ingredients, or residual odors from the garlic pizza a patient ate two days before taking the breath test (and failed to eliminate with the mouthwash). Haick, a chemical engineer, used artificial intelligence to train the Na-Nose to recognize cancer vocs and ignore everything else. Over the next few years, Haick and his colleagues tested their device in clinics around the world, recruiting four thousand patients with a variety of different cancers to try it. The results were often remarkable. For instance, in 2012, Haick teamed up with scientists in China and Latvia to test his technology in 130 patients with stomach disorders. Thirty-seven of the patients had gastric cancer, while the rest had ulcers or a benign condition. They found that the Na-Nose technology could distinguish between the cancerous and non-cancerous diseases with 83 percent sensitivity and 96 percent specificity. Even better, it could pick out the patients who had early-stage gastric cancer from those who were in the late stages of the disease with 89 percent sensitivity and 94 percent specificity. The Na-Nose’s accuracy was consistent regardless of the patients’ tobacco and alcohol consumption — habits that had the potential to produce confounding odors. I told Haick about my sister and asked if he thought his device might someday be used to screen healthy people, allowing stomach tumors to be detected even when they’re completely silent. “Absolutely,” he replied. “That is our intention. We want to catch the cancer at the early stages before anybody has symptoms. Then we can increase the survival rate by using currently available treatments. It’s true with other cancers, too.” In a later study, presented at a medical meeting on stomach disorders in the summer of 2014, the Na-Nose performed even better, distinguishing gastric cancer from ulcers and pre-cancerous lesions with 98 percent specificity. Haick’s technology proved equally adept at discerning lung cancer, often performing better than sniffer dogs or the Cleveland Clinic’s early rendition of an electronic nose. In a study published in 2012, for example, the Na-Nose could determine whether the nodules found in patients with lung disorders were benign or cancerous with 86 percent sensitivity and 96 percent specificity. “If you detect the lung cancer at the early stages you can increase the survival rate from 10 percent to more than 70 percent,” Haick said. “But only by early detection.” Excerpted from "Heal: The Vital Role of Dogs in the Search for Cancer Cures" by Arlene Weintraub. Copyright © 2015 by Arlene Weintraub. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd.McBaine is a black-and-white English springer spaniel with a constantly wagging tail and a passion for sniffing out ovarian tumors. During a typical day at the University of Pennsylvania’s Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia, McBaine is brought into a back room that’s mostly bare except for a large metal wheel in the center of the floor. Attached to the wheel are twelve small cups, one of which contains a blood sample from a patient fighting ovarian cancer. McBaine runs around the wheel, smelling each cup one by one, the black tuft on the end of his tail waving happily throughout. Then he stops, places his paw gently on one of the cups, and sits down. “Good boy!” his trainer yells, as she tosses the dog’s favorite rope toy across the floor. Play is McBaine’s reward for finding the cancer sample among the cups that contain healthy blood samples or nothing at all. It was an unusually warm spring day in Philadelphia when I returned to my alma mater to learn about a completely different way dogs are helping in the war on cancer — with their noses. McBaine was one of four dogs enrolled in an innovative study with a lofty goal. After training the dogs to identify ovarian cancer by its smell, the researchers running the project planned to find out exactly what it is the dogs are detecting in the cancer and then invent a diagnostic device that could mimic the dog’s nose. That device would give physicians the power to find ovarian cancer long before its victims have any inkling that they are sick. “We wouldn’t put dogs in every hospital or every laboratory,” said Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian, dog trainer, and executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center. “Our whole goal is for the end product to be a chemical sensor — a machine with the sensitivity and specificity of the dog.” The Penn Vet Working Dog Center is not on the university’s main campus, but two miles away in a nondescript office complex a stone’s throw from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I walked through the main entrance into a giant room with blue foam tiles on the floor and the elements of an obstacle course scattered about — a three-step ladder, a ramp, and several old tires. A dry-erase board on the wall listed all the dogs who were being trained at the center and their progress mastering a variety of skills, from search and rescue, to agility, to impulse control. As Otto took me on a tour, the sound of the hand-held clickers the dog trainers were using echoed through the halls. The Penn Vet Working Dog Center, she explained, was founded in 2007, but it didn’t have its own headquarters until it opened in this building five years later. The center was born from Otto’s passion for training search and rescue dogs, which she did in her spare time while working as an emergency veterinarian at Penn. Otto volunteered to provide medical care for the canine search-and-rescue teams that were deployed after Hurricane Floyd hit Florida in 1999, and again in the wake of the September 11th attacks. After Otto returned from Ground Zero, she got word that the American Kennel Club was looking to fund a study of the 9/11 dogs. She immediately applied, and was chosen to manage the study. “We’ve been following the dogs — their health, their behavior. We get x-rays and bloodwork every year, and when the dogs die, we examine the causes of death,” Otto said. “As I looked at the whole intersection of dogs and work, I realized there’s a lot we don’t know.” A decade after 9/11, the Working Dog Center opened its doors with the mission of taking what was learned from the Ground Zero study and others like it to improve the breeding and training of working dogs. The center’s trainers started by teaching dogs to detect explosives and narcotics. Later they branched out into the medical realm, pairing dogs who could detect dangerous drops in blood sugar levels with diabetic patients. The cancer-detection project was the center’s newest pursuit. The dogs at Penn’s center were named in honor of the dogs and trainers who were deployed to the 9/11 sites, or the victims who died in the act of terrorism. (McBaine’s namesake was a search-and-rescue dog who served as part of the control group for the 9/11 canine study.) McBaine and his fellow trainees lived with foster families, who brought them to the center Monday through Friday to be trained. Otto was a businesslike clinician who, I quickly realized, turned to mush in the presence of her trained dogs. She took me to the back of the center to meet Ffoster, (spelled with a double F), a calm three-year-old yellow Lab who was the newest addition to the cancer-detection program. She was named after 9/11 victim Sandra N. Foster. “Here’s Ffoster, here’s the good girl,” Otto said, speaking to the dog in a gentle tone as she let her out of the crate where she had been napping. “Do you want to come out and say hi?” Earlier that day, Ffoster took her turn at the cancer wheel. Ffoster was more deliberate and considerably less bouncy than McBaine, walking slowly around the wheel, checking each cup carefully before coming to a stop. She was right. She got a treat as a reward. “You did good today,” Otto cooed. “You’re learning good stuff.” The notion that dogs might be able to detect cancer first emerged in 1989, when the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a five-paragraph letter titled “Sniffer dogs in the melanoma clinic?” In the letter, two physicians at King’s College Hospital in London described the case of a forty-four-year-old woman, who came into their clinic with a lesion on her left thigh. She told them she made the appointment because her dog, a Doberman–border collie mix, was constantly sniffing a mole on her leg. The dog, the physicians wrote, “showed no interest in the other moles on the patient’s body but frequently spent several minutes a day sniffing intently at the lesion, even through the patient’s trousers.” One day the woman donned shorts, at which point her dog tried to bite the mole off completely. That’s when she decided she should get it examined. The object of the dog’s obsession turned out to be a malignant melanoma. “Perhaps malignant tumours such as melanoma, with their aberrant protein synthesis, emit unique odours which, though undetectable to man, are easily detected by dogs,” the physicians wrote. They reported that the dog had saved the patient’s life, because when she came into the clinic the tumor was so small they could easily treat it. She was cured. Those five paragraphs were enough to mobilize dog-loving scientists all over the world to design studies testing whether dogs can smell cancer. Over the next several years, dozens of papers were published in medical journals, most of them reporting astounding success rates — often with 90 percent accuracy or better — among dogs trained to sniff cancer. Otto read those papers avidly and watched with fascination as other dog-training organizations began teaching dogs to sniff cancer. She wanted to do the same, she just didn’t have the funding or the know-how she needed to get started. Then one day shortly after the new center opened, Otto’s phone rang. It was a cold call from another Penn faculty member, ophthalmologist Jody R. Piltz-Seymour, a dog lover who had also been captivated by all the reports about dogs who could sniff cancer. Piltz-Seymour had lost her father and aunt to pancreatic cancer. A second aunt and her mother-in-law both died of ovarian cancer. Piltz-Seymour was particularly interested in research done by a Swedish scientist named György Horvath. In a 2008 paper, Horvath described how he trained a four-year-old black giant schnauzer to recognize tissue samples from late-stage ovarian cancer patients by their scent. Then Horvath ran the dog through two series of tests to see if she could tell the difference between ovarian cancer and healthy tissue, even when the cancer samples were taken from women in the early stages of the disease. In both testing situations, the dog correctly identified all the cancerous samples, and when presented with 80 pieces of healthy tissue, only twice did she falsely identify them as cancerous. Horvath’s results made Piltz-Seymour realize dogs could be the key to early detection, but she knew she would need help translating the findings into a useful clinical tool. Then the Working Dog Center opened, and she figured she had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. “I thought we had this phenomenal new resource right in the backyard,” Piltz-Seymour said. As she reminisced about her cold call to Otto, she began to laugh. “You have to picture this — here’s an ophthalmologist calling about dogs and cancer.” Little did she know that Otto was already keen on the idea and was looking for an ally to help get a study started. “Jody had done a lot of research and wanted to see if she could help move it forward,” Otto said. “She spearheaded this — it was personal.” Piltz wanted to start with ovarian cancer, not just because of her family history, but also because she believed it was where the dogs could make the most impact. “Everybody in my family succumbed to their cancers because none of their cancers were caught early,” Piltz-Seymour told me. “The vast majority of the time, ovarian cancer is caught late. But when caught early, the success rate with treatment is brilliant. That makes it the perfect cancer to study.” Indeed, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer patients who are diagnosed and treated before their cancer spreads is 92 percent. Yet only 15 percent of ovarian cancers are found that early. These tumors rarely produce symptoms in their early stages, and when they do, their victims commonly mistake what they’re feeling for something far more benign, like constipation. As I listened to Piltz-Seymour talk about this conundrum, I thought about Beth, who didn’t know she was gravely ill until her cancer had spread beyond her stomach. “Gastric cancer is similar to ovarian cancer in that it doesn’t produce symptoms until it’s too late,” I told Piltz-Seymour. The five-year survival rate for gastric cancer patients who are diagnosed at the earliest stages is as high as 71 percent. That’s because surgery and chemo can be quite effective when the cancer hasn’t spread. The problem is, the only good way to find stomach tumors is with an endoscopy, an invasive and sometimes risky procedure that involves sticking a tiny camera down the patient’s throat while he or she is sedated. In most countries, healthy people aren’t given an endoscopy unless they have a strong family history of gastric cancer. Because we had no history of the disease in our family, the doctors who saw Beth for her checkups and minor complaints never would have imagined they should look in her stomach for signs of trouble. So they didn’t. In Japan, where the prevalence of gastric cancer is high, mass screening is routine, and now half of all cases of the disease are found in the early stages. Hence the five-year survival rate following surgery for Japanese patients is a staggering 96 to 99 percent. Whenever I see dogs like McBaine sticking their noses into human tissue samples and instantly identifying the cancerous ones or I read about them in the press, I have a fantasy: I imagine everyone in the world going to the doctor for a routine physical each year and breathing into a tube, or leaving a blood or urine sample, and learning on the spot if there’s any sign of cancer in their stomachs, lungs, ovaries, or anywhere else in the body where tumors can easily hide. If dogs can detect cancer, then it seems only logical that scientists can unlock the mysteries of the canine sense of smell and replicate it with a diagnostic device — an electronic nose that could be put to work in every medical clinic in the world, but that wouldn’t need to be fed and walked twice a day. Piltz-Seymour told me she had exactly the same fantasy. “I kept seeing these very interesting articles about dogs detecting cancer, but no one seemed to follow through to develop anything that could be used in clinical practice,” she said. When she set out to develop an early-detection system for ovarian cancer, Piltz-Seymour knew she needed to put together a team that included more than just dog trainers. She began calling and e-mailing oncologists and doctors, most of whom ignored her. Then she got a return call from a gynecologist at Penn named Janos L. Tanyi. He offered to join the team and referred Piltz-Seymour to two other Penn faculty members he believed would be interested: molecular scientist George Preti and physics professor A.T. Charlie Johnson. Preti and Johnson had already done some research to try to identify the odors associated with ovarian cancer. They both jumped at the opportunity to add dogs to their team. “Our initial hypothesis that ovarian cancer would emanate a unique odor signature was based on the work done in Europe with dogs,” said Preti, who in addition to his appointment at Penn was a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia research house devoted entirely to unlocking the mysteries of smell and taste. “I knew dogs would be a very good biological detector.” * * *
The dog’s nose is among the most powerful sensory organs the world has ever known. Dogs have 200 million olfactory receptors (ors), which are proteins on the surface of the neurons inside their noses that help their brains to perceive and process odors. Humans, by contrast, have just five million ors. The mucous membranes inside dogs’ nostrils are extraordinarily dense, and their noses exquisitely structured for the efficient processing of smells. That allows them to detect odors that are present in quantities as low as parts per trillion — an amount so minuscule it’s almost impossible to imagine. On top of that, many experts believe the proportion of the dog’s brain that’s dedicated to analyzing scents is 40 times larger than that of humans. Suffice it to say, it’s enough for scientists to estimate that the dog’s ability to recognize minute traces of particular odors is one million times better than that of people. But what exactly are the dogs sniffing in cancer that they find so alarming? Shortly after The Lancet publication, a popular theory emerged suggesting that tumors must be emitting volatile organic compounds (vocs), which are carbon-based chemicals that naturally occur in the body. Since the late 1980s, scientists have identified a variety of vocs that are overly abundant in cancerous tissues, including some types of benzene. Because vocs have a low boiling point, they easily evaporate and travel to places far from the original tumor, including through urine, blood, and exhaled breath. As the scientific world became aware of the dog’s ability to sniff cancer, some researchers set out to prove that tumors have unique voc signatures, or specific odor profiles that distinguish them from healthy tissue and that can be easily detected and analyzed — if not by dogs than by some sort of non-invasive test. Among those researchers were scientists at the Cleveland Clinic, who in the early 2000s collected breath samples from lung cancer patients, healthy volunteers, and patients with other lung diseases. They analyzed the exact chemical makeup of the cancerous breath and used it to develop a device containing thirty-two tiny sensors. There are two criteria used to judge the value of a diagnostic test in oncology: sensitivity and specificity. A sensitive test can pick up the presence of cancer. A specific test can do so with a high rate of accuracy — meaning it rarely detects the disease in people who don’t have it. Back when the Cleveland Clinic was doing its study, pet scanning in lung cancer was 97 percent specific and 78 percent sensitive. The Cleveland Clinic’s electronic nose stacked up pretty well, scoring 92 percent specificity and 71 percent sensitivity. That means the electronic nose missed the abnormality about a third of the time, but when it found something fishy, it was nearly flawless at figuring out when it was cancer and when it was not. The dogs also performed well. In a 2012 trial of breath samples from 220 people, sniffer dogs scored 90 percent on sensitivity and 72 percent on specificity for lung cancer, even when the scientists tried to confuse them with samples from patients with the non-cancerous lung condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (copd). Other dog studies that had trained dogs with urine, blood, or tissue samples achieved comparable or better results in detecting melanoma, as well as ovarian, breast, bladder, and colorectal cancer. As it became more and more clear that dogs could smell cancer, some researchers wondered if it really made sense to spend time and money creating electronic noses. Some thought a smarter strategy would be to employ the dogs themselves in medical clinics as a sort of living warning system — an advance guard to alert doctors and patients that further testing would be a good idea. One such researcher was Robert Gordon, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California. Gordon envisioned equipping volunteer church groups, for example, with urine-collection kits and a few dogs who were trained to sniff them. “If anybody came up positive then they could be sent to a center where they could get more sophisticated testing,” he said. “I thought in areas that were not developed, in the backwoods, you could use a dog.” Gordon, who is hearing impaired, was inspired by his own dog, a Chihuahua-beagle mix named Ginger, whom he had trained to be a certified hearing-assistance dog. “She’s a fabulous animal,” Gordon said. “She goes everywhere with me — restaurants, movies — helping me as a hearing dog. I put a towel down so her hair doesn’t get on anything. She snores through the loud movies.” In 2004, Gordon set out to train Ginger and nine other dogs to discriminate between patients who had prostate cancer, those who had breast cancer, and those who were healthy, based on urine samples. The dogs made a lively crew that included a miniature goldendoodle, an Italian greyhound, and a Pembroke Welsh corgi. But few of them showed much talent for sniffing cancer — only two performed better than chance, or luck, at specificity in detecting each of the two tumor types. None were better than chance at sensitivity, not even Ginger. After thinking about it, Gordon concluded that the imperfections were not in the dogs themselves but rather in the way he had designed the study. He could only gather a few urine samples, which he froze, thawed, and re-used several times during the training process. He wondered if all that freezing and thawing might have destroyed the scents he was training the dogs to recognize. He had also discovered that the dogs would get fatigued after less than two hours of work. It all made Gordon realize that developing an electronic nose might indeed be far wiser than using dogs at medical clinics or in the backwoods. “It’s impractical to spend the money on dogs,” Gordon said. “That money would be best served finding what the chemicals are that the cancer puts off — the chemical signature that makes them so destructive.” Other researchers had already discovered that finding the vocs was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to train a machine to recognize cancer vocs amid the thousands of other scents emitted by the human body. In dogs, that process is known as imprinting, and it involves teaching the animals to recognize the scent of cancer simply by exposing them to it. Much like a bloodhound who’s directed to find a missing child might be presented with a t-shirt infused with that child’s scent, a cancer-detection dog is asked to sniff cancerous tissue, or samples of urine, blood or breath from sick patients, and then taught to find that scent while ignoring everything else. As the research papers proving the dog’s ability to sniff cancer continued to pile up, a handful of scientists took on the challenge of developing an electronic nose that could be imprinted with the scent of cancer as effectively as a dog’s could. Among the most passionate scientists in that pursuit was someone in my sister’s backyard: Hossam Haick, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. In 2007, Haick began developing a device he dubbed Na-Nose, short for nanotechnology nose. He used tiny gold particles to create an array of electronic sensors, which were connected to a tube. The result was a device that operated much like a breathalyzer, but was far more sensitive because it could analyze up to one thousand different gases in exhaled breath. Haick set out to prove that the Na-Nose could detect much more than the mere presence of cancer — that it could also distinguish one form of the disease from another. Haick’s main challenge, he told me, was figuring out how to deal with all the confounding molecules, as he called them, that appear in breath, like mouthwash ingredients, or residual odors from the garlic pizza a patient ate two days before taking the breath test (and failed to eliminate with the mouthwash). Haick, a chemical engineer, used artificial intelligence to train the Na-Nose to recognize cancer vocs and ignore everything else. Over the next few years, Haick and his colleagues tested their device in clinics around the world, recruiting four thousand patients with a variety of different cancers to try it. The results were often remarkable. For instance, in 2012, Haick teamed up with scientists in China and Latvia to test his technology in 130 patients with stomach disorders. Thirty-seven of the patients had gastric cancer, while the rest had ulcers or a benign condition. They found that the Na-Nose technology could distinguish between the cancerous and non-cancerous diseases with 83 percent sensitivity and 96 percent specificity. Even better, it could pick out the patients who had early-stage gastric cancer from those who were in the late stages of the disease with 89 percent sensitivity and 94 percent specificity. The Na-Nose’s accuracy was consistent regardless of the patients’ tobacco and alcohol consumption — habits that had the potential to produce confounding odors. I told Haick about my sister and asked if he thought his device might someday be used to screen healthy people, allowing stomach tumors to be detected even when they’re completely silent. “Absolutely,” he replied. “That is our intention. We want to catch the cancer at the early stages before anybody has symptoms. Then we can increase the survival rate by using currently available treatments. It’s true with other cancers, too.” In a later study, presented at a medical meeting on stomach disorders in the summer of 2014, the Na-Nose performed even better, distinguishing gastric cancer from ulcers and pre-cancerous lesions with 98 percent specificity. Haick’s technology proved equally adept at discerning lung cancer, often performing better than sniffer dogs or the Cleveland Clinic’s early rendition of an electronic nose. In a study published in 2012, for example, the Na-Nose could determine whether the nodules found in patients with lung disorders were benign or cancerous with 86 percent sensitivity and 96 percent specificity. “If you detect the lung cancer at the early stages you can increase the survival rate from 10 percent to more than 70 percent,” Haick said. “But only by early detection.” Excerpted from "Heal: The Vital Role of Dogs in the Search for Cancer Cures" by Arlene Weintraub. Copyright © 2015 by Arlene Weintraub. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd.
November 21, 2015
“Liquid Sky”: This glam early-’80s sci-fi masterpiece that predicted the AIDS crisis could disappear forever
A glowing spaceship appears over the New York City skyline as dissonant New Wave music fills the multiple ears with their dangling rings. Junkies, models, poseurs and performance artists feed off each other in a battle to be the most fierce, all the while unaware that tiny aliens are harnessing their ecstasy. Most visitors to New York go to Serendipity for a frozen hot chocolate — these buggers are literally fueling their space ship with the power of the human orgasm, which turns the screen electric blue and red and green and purple. "Liquid Sky" is set in New York City in the few years between disco and AIDS when young denizens indulged in exhibitionistic sex and hard drugs and took their fashion cues from the gleefully androgynous English New Romantic movement (big hair, frills, ruffles, theatrical make up). They danced like rusty robots in neon lit nightclubs. Within this odd demimonde Margaret (Anne Carlisle) lives and works as a successful model. She has the perfect life, with one exception: she kills everyone she has sex with, whether that sex is loving, non-consensual or even with her male doppelganger “Jimmy” (also played by Anne Carlisle, then a face at the Mudd Club, a key hangout of the period). Margaret is high maintenance (“You know this bitch takes two hours to go get ready to go anywhere,” says girlfriend Adrian, who nearly steals the film with her performance of “Me and My Rhythm Box”). Shot in Ed Koch’s crumbling New York on a tiny budget, "Liquid Sky"’s now highly-influential look, which has informed the costumes of everyone from Karen O to Lady Gaga and Sia, came largely from Carlisle’s closet or thrift shop shopping bags. Carlisle, director Slava Tsukerman and co-producer Nina Kerova created a new kind of glamor queen who, Bowie-like, quite easily stokes the desire of the men and women — before leaving a crystal spike in the back of their brain. “I kill people that fuck me,” the character confesses. Is it worth it? Almost. Is it almost ghoulishly predictive? Absolutely. This was 1982. “They already had AIDS, but it wasn’t that publicized,” says Tsukerman, who swears the film was conceived as science fiction. Tsukerman, who traveled from Moscow to Hollywood and then found himself in Carlisle's fast-fashion world, where it seemed that everyone was a dancer, painter, band member, filmmaker or actor, adds, “The information about AIDS came after Liquid Sky.” Carlisle was equally aghast when her real life friends began dying of this new sexually transmitted disease. “It was so amazing, because the film is really about dying from sex and then everyone started dropping. It was really, really eerie. That happens sometimes in creative life. You do something and it’s an accident that it actually comes true. It’s mystical.” The two were already well established in the world of downtown film before "Liquid Sky" was co-conceived. Tsukerman had a film called “Sweeet Sixteen” which was nearly financed. “It was about a girl who was killed in a car accident in 1935 and her father, a crazy scientist, saves her head and makes a mechanical body,” he says. Andy Warhol was supposedly committed make an appearance. Carlisle had a film called "The Fish" which she was showing around the clubs. When the pair met, it was clear that Tsukerman found his muse — but he had reservations, once "Liquid Sky" began pre-production, that Carlisle, primarily a painter, model and self described “nihilist” who attended the School of Visual Arts, could handle the role of both Margaret and Jimmy, even though, as she recalls, "I had a boy’s haircut and a mini skirt. No one else was doing that.” Carlisle convinced him one day. “We were scouting locations and I dressed as a man and I picked up a girl in front of him and that was my audition,” she says. “She thought I was a boy. I admitted I was a girl and she said she was still into it.” "Liquid Sky" has a pre-apocalyptic feel of the Cold War sci-fi with the slickness of much more expensive films like its contemporary "Blade Runner," but the budget (about a half-million) nearly sparked a mutiny. “The crew was paid very little and they did revolt at one point over the food,” Carlisle says. “They were worked day and night. We worked terrible hours. That the film got made at all was a miracle. It was really — at one point, I was arguing with them, we're making art here and you're worried about food. And he said you’re making art here. We want pizza!” Unlike Ridley Scott’s film, "Liquid Sky" was shot through with a kind of self-deprecating, New York Jewish humor. A rumpled, hapless professor (the lanky Otto von Wehnherr) is on the trail of the alien spacecraft and bumbles his way through the jaded world, where few believe or even care that there might be visitors feeding on the heat of human sexual climax. They're fixated on their next score, or on Chinese take out. The film, released in the summer of ’82 at media-heavy film festivals, beginning in Montreal, quickly became a minor sensation. This was the height of the second British cultural invasion (Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran) which was of a piece with Carlilse’s androgyny and gear. It played at the Waverly Theater in New York City for about four years and Carlisle became a star, posing in and out of male drag for (warning: link NSFW) one of Playboy's strangest photo shoots. Carlisle briefly moved to Hollywood and got an agent, but was confused that the only parts offered to her were supporting roles in films like "Crocodile Dundee." She returned to New York somewhat broken. “I went into psychoanalysis.” By then, Rock Hudson had announced he had AIDS and the disease was soon a household world. Carlisle didn’t feel responsible for her and Tsukerman’s vision, but it haunted her nonetheless. “I went to school to become an art therapist to help people who were dying,” she said. “I actually was so moved by it I changed my life. I said, I have to do something other than pursue acting.” However, neither Carlisle nor Tsukerman let go of Margaret. Carlisle wrote a novel based on her character and Tsukerman began piecing together material designed to document the making of the film, whose status as both a prescient New York story and a fashion touchstone has grown over the years (a Liquid Sky boutique on Manhattan’s Lafayette Street operated for a while). The soundtrack by the un-trained Tsukerman — loud, atonal but funky — inspired the more abrasive elements of the Electroclash movement of the late '90s. Innovative and influential as it is, one would assume that Liquid Sky is in the queue to become part of the permanent collection of the Criterion Editions or even MOMA, but in reality the original 35 mm film stock is decaying. “We need money,” Carlisle says. Tsukerman is racing time to raise the funds to restore the film, planning both a crowdfunding endeavor and completion on the documentary. Meanwhile there’s a sequel in the works — its working title is "Vagina Warriors." “We’re writing the script,” says Tsukerman. “We’ve stayed friends.” Carlisle is guarded about the story, but will say, “Margaret comes back and she changes other women.” Meanwhile, in an age where society is exploring the nature of gender more rapidly than ever in history, a film like "Liquid Sky" certainly deserves a second life. “I hear it a lot,” says Carlisle. “People say that it changed their life. Especially people who were marginalized. They felt like they were not understood by anyone and then they saw this film and said. ‘Oh, no, there’s more like me out there.”A glowing spaceship appears over the New York City skyline as dissonant New Wave music fills the multiple ears with their dangling rings. Junkies, models, poseurs and performance artists feed off each other in a battle to be the most fierce, all the while unaware that tiny aliens are harnessing their ecstasy. Most visitors to New York go to Serendipity for a frozen hot chocolate — these buggers are literally fueling their space ship with the power of the human orgasm, which turns the screen electric blue and red and green and purple. "Liquid Sky" is set in New York City in the few years between disco and AIDS when young denizens indulged in exhibitionistic sex and hard drugs and took their fashion cues from the gleefully androgynous English New Romantic movement (big hair, frills, ruffles, theatrical make up). They danced like rusty robots in neon lit nightclubs. Within this odd demimonde Margaret (Anne Carlisle) lives and works as a successful model. She has the perfect life, with one exception: she kills everyone she has sex with, whether that sex is loving, non-consensual or even with her male doppelganger “Jimmy” (also played by Anne Carlisle, then a face at the Mudd Club, a key hangout of the period). Margaret is high maintenance (“You know this bitch takes two hours to go get ready to go anywhere,” says girlfriend Adrian, who nearly steals the film with her performance of “Me and My Rhythm Box”). Shot in Ed Koch’s crumbling New York on a tiny budget, "Liquid Sky"’s now highly-influential look, which has informed the costumes of everyone from Karen O to Lady Gaga and Sia, came largely from Carlisle’s closet or thrift shop shopping bags. Carlisle, director Slava Tsukerman and co-producer Nina Kerova created a new kind of glamor queen who, Bowie-like, quite easily stokes the desire of the men and women — before leaving a crystal spike in the back of their brain. “I kill people that fuck me,” the character confesses. Is it worth it? Almost. Is it almost ghoulishly predictive? Absolutely. This was 1982. “They already had AIDS, but it wasn’t that publicized,” says Tsukerman, who swears the film was conceived as science fiction. Tsukerman, who traveled from Moscow to Hollywood and then found himself in Carlisle's fast-fashion world, where it seemed that everyone was a dancer, painter, band member, filmmaker or actor, adds, “The information about AIDS came after Liquid Sky.” Carlisle was equally aghast when her real life friends began dying of this new sexually transmitted disease. “It was so amazing, because the film is really about dying from sex and then everyone started dropping. It was really, really eerie. That happens sometimes in creative life. You do something and it’s an accident that it actually comes true. It’s mystical.” The two were already well established in the world of downtown film before "Liquid Sky" was co-conceived. Tsukerman had a film called “Sweeet Sixteen” which was nearly financed. “It was about a girl who was killed in a car accident in 1935 and her father, a crazy scientist, saves her head and makes a mechanical body,” he says. Andy Warhol was supposedly committed make an appearance. Carlisle had a film called "The Fish" which she was showing around the clubs. When the pair met, it was clear that Tsukerman found his muse — but he had reservations, once "Liquid Sky" began pre-production, that Carlisle, primarily a painter, model and self described “nihilist” who attended the School of Visual Arts, could handle the role of both Margaret and Jimmy, even though, as she recalls, "I had a boy’s haircut and a mini skirt. No one else was doing that.” Carlisle convinced him one day. “We were scouting locations and I dressed as a man and I picked up a girl in front of him and that was my audition,” she says. “She thought I was a boy. I admitted I was a girl and she said she was still into it.” "Liquid Sky" has a pre-apocalyptic feel of the Cold War sci-fi with the slickness of much more expensive films like its contemporary "Blade Runner," but the budget (about a half-million) nearly sparked a mutiny. “The crew was paid very little and they did revolt at one point over the food,” Carlisle says. “They were worked day and night. We worked terrible hours. That the film got made at all was a miracle. It was really — at one point, I was arguing with them, we're making art here and you're worried about food. And he said you’re making art here. We want pizza!” Unlike Ridley Scott’s film, "Liquid Sky" was shot through with a kind of self-deprecating, New York Jewish humor. A rumpled, hapless professor (the lanky Otto von Wehnherr) is on the trail of the alien spacecraft and bumbles his way through the jaded world, where few believe or even care that there might be visitors feeding on the heat of human sexual climax. They're fixated on their next score, or on Chinese take out. The film, released in the summer of ’82 at media-heavy film festivals, beginning in Montreal, quickly became a minor sensation. This was the height of the second British cultural invasion (Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran) which was of a piece with Carlilse’s androgyny and gear. It played at the Waverly Theater in New York City for about four years and Carlisle became a star, posing in and out of male drag for (warning: link NSFW) one of Playboy's strangest photo shoots. Carlisle briefly moved to Hollywood and got an agent, but was confused that the only parts offered to her were supporting roles in films like "Crocodile Dundee." She returned to New York somewhat broken. “I went into psychoanalysis.” By then, Rock Hudson had announced he had AIDS and the disease was soon a household world. Carlisle didn’t feel responsible for her and Tsukerman’s vision, but it haunted her nonetheless. “I went to school to become an art therapist to help people who were dying,” she said. “I actually was so moved by it I changed my life. I said, I have to do something other than pursue acting.” However, neither Carlisle nor Tsukerman let go of Margaret. Carlisle wrote a novel based on her character and Tsukerman began piecing together material designed to document the making of the film, whose status as both a prescient New York story and a fashion touchstone has grown over the years (a Liquid Sky boutique on Manhattan’s Lafayette Street operated for a while). The soundtrack by the un-trained Tsukerman — loud, atonal but funky — inspired the more abrasive elements of the Electroclash movement of the late '90s. Innovative and influential as it is, one would assume that Liquid Sky is in the queue to become part of the permanent collection of the Criterion Editions or even MOMA, but in reality the original 35 mm film stock is decaying. “We need money,” Carlisle says. Tsukerman is racing time to raise the funds to restore the film, planning both a crowdfunding endeavor and completion on the documentary. Meanwhile there’s a sequel in the works — its working title is "Vagina Warriors." “We’re writing the script,” says Tsukerman. “We’ve stayed friends.” Carlisle is guarded about the story, but will say, “Margaret comes back and she changes other women.” Meanwhile, in an age where society is exploring the nature of gender more rapidly than ever in history, a film like "Liquid Sky" certainly deserves a second life. “I hear it a lot,” says Carlisle. “People say that it changed their life. Especially people who were marginalized. They felt like they were not understood by anyone and then they saw this film and said. ‘Oh, no, there’s more like me out there.”
The peak of Sinatra’s power: “Every Sinatra performance was acting. His greatest performance was as himself”
Few musicians were ever as popular, influential, complicated, or dangerous as Frank Sinatra. Between landmark albums like “Songs for Young Lovers” and “In the Wee Small Hours,” his movie acting (“From Here to Eternity,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “The Manchurian Candidate”), his marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, his running with the Rat Pack and brushes with the mob, he led a full, at times overstuffed life. Biographer James Kaplan now follows his acclaimed “Frank: The Voice” with “Sinatra: The Chairman,” a thick, almost 1,000-page volume that aims for the level of depth and context Peter Guralnick achieved with his Elvis Presley biographies. Kaplan’s book both gets up close -- using detail the way a novelist does -- and weaves Sinatra in with the era he lived through. “The Chairman” emphasizes the period from 1954 to his 1971 retirement; it closes by moving quickly through Sinatra's return to performing. We spoke to Kaplan about Sinatra’s temperament, his acting, and the influence of jazz on his singing. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Can you characterize the period of Sinatra’s career and life? It’s really the mature and great and established Sinatra, isn’t that fair to say? Yes, it is. My first volume covers Sinatra from birth until the night he wins the Oscar for "From Here to Eternity" in ’54. And so, it includes his rise as a romantic young singer, his explosion as a superstar in World War II, and then his collapse, in career and personal collapse post-World War II. The end of that book is the beginning of a comeback, and Volume II picks up that story 11 days after the Oscar, where Sinatra was writing a thank-you note to a friend for congratulating him on the Oscar. And, the first book is the story of the rise of a young, romantic troubadour and the second book is really a book about power. It’s a darker, tougher book. And it’s a book that even with World War II and the big band era fitting into Volume I, Volume II covers a lot more of American history and a lot more of popular culture than Volume I does. There’s more to put in it. But yes, your assessment is exactly right. Even as Sinatra acquires enormous temporal power in the mid ’50s and on into the ’60s, he’s also putting together a string of the most astonishing albums of popular music—creative to date, and in many ways, still to this day. How many years did you spend on this one? I’m wondering if the huge amount of research and interviewing change your view of him, either as a man or a musician? Each of the books took me five years. Roughly speaking, with each of them, about three years of research and two years of writing. Research, including reading everything — books, newspaper articles, gossip columns, everything, and then, hundreds of interviews. It’s an enormous undertaking and of course, my feelings about Sinatra evolved as the project went on. When I began it, I was kind of, looking back, miserably ignorant of Sinatra. That is to say, I knew who he was, I knew how great he was, I knew he had created this music. But as to the specifics of this career and the complexities and subtleties of his life, I knew little if not nothing. I knew a lot of the clichés that had become widespread about Sinatra. But it was my job to get behind those clichés, and to give the reality dimension and to shoot down any falsehoods that had been spread. One thing I’ll say is, the cliché about biographers is -- it’s an unfortunate one -- after a long time of working on the book they’re working from a contempt for their subject. And it never happened to me. He was a genius and he was a genius in several ways, and one genius that he possessed besides his musical genius was a genius for making himself dislikable. So there were many times when I disliked him. He could be awful, he could be quite awful; as Pete Hamill said, “His shortcoming were regrettable.” He’s putting it very kindly. His shortcomings were large on the world. But I never felt contempt for him; contempt is one thing but dislike is another. I never -- and this is more important still -- never got bored with him. And I’m still not. And what’s more is I get goose bumps when I hear the guy sing. It’s an astonishing voice, and it’s beyond astonishment really, it’s inexplicable. There’s all kinds of things that I can say what it is, and there’s all kinds of things that I can’t say. The explosive moment of my pre-adolescence was seeing the Beatles on February 9 on the Ed Sullivan show. And I loved rock ‘n’ roll, I continue to love rock ‘n’ roll, I listen to all kinds of music. I love classical, I love jazz and another evolution for me, studying Sinatra, was realizing that studying Sinatra and his music was not looking at a nostalgia act. It was not looking at something old-fashioned, or big band-er or your father’s cardigan sweater. It was looking at the greatest, arguably the greatest, interpretive musician of all time. And that includes everybody. Let’s talk about Sinatra’s temperament for a minute. During that period, he was enormously popular, enormously powerful, feared in some cases. He was also despairing some of the time too. He tried to kill himself in the early ’50s over Ava Gardner; he could’ve died. Did he remain haunted, frustrated and insecure, even through his most successful period? Yes. I think he was a tormented man. Listen, this was a guy who said that when he was a kid he heard the music of the spheres. This is a little Italian kid walking around Hoboken, New Jersey, in danger of getting beaten if he walked into the wrong Irish-American neighborhood or African-American neighborhood. It was important, when he was growing up, to be tough. It was important for him during his whole life to be tough, but this was a guy who was an out-and-out a musical genius, who heard too much, who felt too much. He was beyond high-strung. He was exorbitantly oversensitive, and that was a quality he felt he had to shield from the outside world. He had to put on this shield of swagger, bluster and masculinity. He was a little man. He was an Italian-American who grew up at a time when Italian-Americans were just a half step above African-Americans. Italian-Americans were not legally considered white until sometime in the 1940s. It was crazy. That explains a lot about his attraction to the mafia. These were guys who seemed powerful to him, strong, and honorable, and unfortunately he had a crush on them. He idolized them like a small boy idolized cowboys or soldiers. But, he was a little guy. He was 5' 7". Until the mid-’60s, he was very skinny, had slight delicate wrists, artistic hands and small feet. He was over-sensitive, strung way high and a genius to boot. He was really a tormented guy in lots of ways. He had horrible parenting. He had a father who was distant and a mother who he never knew whether she was going to hug him or hit him. And she did hit him. His mother and father ran a bar in Hoboken. They had a billy club behind the bar, and she slung him with it when he got out of line. And one time on the Jersey shore, she pushed his head underwater, under the surf, apparently just for the hell of it. She was extremely unpredictable. His parents were frequently absent. He was very similar to his mother. She was pathologically impatient, had a volcanic temper, just like him. And so the whole combination made him a bundle of woe in many ways. He hated the night. He was scared of the dark. He was afraid to go to sleep. He needed company at all times until he finally turned in at about 7 or 8 a.m. He had many demons. I am not excusing his bad behavior, which he stoked with alcohol, and which grew worse with power and entitlement. But he was guy who was never really happy, except for the times when he was singing well. And his standards were so superlative that he knew when he was singing well, and when he was singing poorly. And most of the rest of the time, seven-eighths or nine-tenths of his life, he was just from one thing onto the other. He was terminally impatient, and deeply dissatisfied always. The ’50s was a great period for him. How did the change the ’60s brought, musically and otherwise, hit Sinatra? It hit him hard. It destroyed the music business as he knew it. He hated rock 'n’ roll. He hated Elvis, when he came in in the mid-’50s. He detested rock 'n’ roll, and suddenly, here’s the apotheosis of rock 'n’ roll, and the music business is completely turned on its head. Everything, the American songbook, was not fallen by the wayside, but was becoming old hat in the blink of an eye. He had started this new record company, Reprise, in the 1960s, and it was a flop right out of the gate. He couldn’t sell records. He signed up all his old pals, Dean Martin and Pearl Bailey, and people like that, for his new record label, but he couldn’t sell records until the guy he had hired to be in charge of his record company, a guy named Mo Ostin, started signing rock 'n’ roll acts. Reprise was about to go down the tubes, until 1963, when Jack Warner, head of Warner brothers, decided he had to have Sinatra as a movie star. Well, Sinatra had a brilliant lawyer named Mickey Rudin, who met with Jack Warner, and said, “You could have Sinatra as a movie star, but you got to take the record label too.” And Jack Warner said, “Anything. Anything!” And he put several million dollars in Frank’s pocket. The labels merged: Warner and Reprise. Mo Ostin, as head of Reprise, began signing rock n’ roll. He signed The Kinks. Suddenly, they were making money, hand over fist, but only because he was signing rock acts. Frank loved to make money, but he hated rock 'n’ roll. So yes, he was somewhat conflicted. How important was Sinatra’s acting to him, and how substantial does it seem? It wasn’t just a side project to his music career, was it? Yes, it was more than that. First thing to understand was that when Sinatra was performing in a club, or in a recording studio – those recording sessions were performances, there was always an audience. He always brought in a gallery full of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on to every recording session. Every Sinatra performance was acting. His greatest performance was as himself. The one time I saw him was in 1981 in Carnegie Hall, and I went with my tongue in my cheek. Growing up and seeing Phil Hartman and Joe Piscopo make fun of Sinatra, I was expecting something clownish, and I went and this guy was the greatest performer I had ever seen. I had seen a lot of rock 'n’ roll in my time. I saw The Stones. And he was just incredible. He was an actor. The first person he ever idolized was Bing Crosby, and Bing Crosby became a superstar in the 1930s not only by selling records, but also by acting in movies. He knew that his best take was his first one. He was a very untrained and instinctive actor. He was almost always, on a movie set, a total pain in the ass, and it all depended on his relationship with the director and his feeling about the property that he was acting in. Almost always, after MGM canned him in the early ’50s and he went out on his own, he was Frank Sinatra the superstar who was basically in charge of the production. And once he took over, once he was bossing the director around, all bets were off. And so he made a lot of crappy movies. But there were exceptions. There were people he couldn’t boss around, he didn’t want to boss around. The first big exception after MGM was Fred Zinnemann making from “From Here to Eternity.” Right. Sinatra was on his uppers, his career had gone down the tubes. He was desperate to come back, and not only that, but Fred Zinnemann was a brilliant director, a courtly and gentle and intelligent European whom Sinatra had great respect for. And Sinatra busted his ass to do that job in “From Here to Eternity” and deserved every bit of the Oscar he won. He did a wonderful job. The other two exceptions I would say -- with an asterisk for Vincente Minnelli in “Some Came Running” in 1958 -- would be Otto Preminger’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” in 1955, where Sinatra played a heroin addict, and always felt that he deserved another Oscar for that. I differ — I tend to think that that movie is stagey and dated and that Sinatra was chewing the scenery, but he did do a good job in that movie and he respected Preminger and worked hard. And I feel Sinatra’s greatest movie of all was “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great movie, and John Frankenheimer was a brilliant director, brilliant young guy, much younger than Sinatra. And Sinatra didn’t have to behave for John Frankenheimer, John Frankenheimer was not only brilliant -- he was as tough guy. He was a jock from Queens, and he was not going to take any shit from this little Sinatra. But not only that, he wasn’t just a tough guy, he was a great director, brilliant guy, and it was just a brilliant project from the get-go between Frankenheimer and his writer George Axelrod. It’s a staggeringly great movie. Other than that, the movies he made tend to be either regrettable or entertainments. You can watch “Pal Joey,” and “Pal Joey” is a fun musical. You can watch “Guys and Dolls” and for all the negative people said about it, and how Sinatra and Brando should have reversed roles -- I like the movie. It’s fun to watch. “Ocean’s 11” is a terrible movie but it’s fun to watch. It’s seminal and it is definitively politically incorrect, and it’s the Rat Pack and it’s naughty fun, and Sinatra was bossing the hell out of that poor director Lewis Milestone. It’s a bad movie but it’s a fun movie. And the Tony Rome movies – [like] “Lady in Cement” where he’s playing a private detective. Those two were really the roles that were closest to Sinatra as Sinatra. Those were fun movies to watch. Not great movies by any means, but fun. Right, right. Well, the real genius of Sinatra I think is in the phrasing. I wonder how much of that came from his love of jazz musicians… Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzgerald -- how much of phrasing is indebted jazz singers and horn players? All of it. All of it! Billie Holliday was almost the same age as Sinatra. She was born, I think, eight months before Sinatra in 1915, and yet she became a success very, very young with Teddy Wilson, with Count Basie, and with Benny Goodman. So when Sinatra was a punk kid, a teenager, he used to go to 52nd Street in New York between Fifth and Sixth. Now it’s just office buildings. But back then it was this long row of brownstones, both sides of the street, and it was full of jazz clubs. You could walk from door to door and hear these geniuses. You could hear Lester Young. You could hear Teddy Wilson. You could hear Billie Holiday -- and he did. And this was not only the basis for his phrasing and for his love of jazz, it was also the basis for his admittedly flawed, conflicted sense of tolerance his entire life. He was a guy who thought it was obscene and absurd that black people were discriminated against, and yet this was also a guy who could make horrible “Amos and Andy” jokes on-stage at the Sands, who could say things about eating watermelon. He thought he was entitled to. But when you watch “A Man and His Music, Part III,” the great TV special he made in 1967 with Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim, you watch Sinatra with Ella and he was not only vastly respectful of her and not only learned a ton from her, he was in awe of her. He was even kind of intimidated by her. So the answer to your question is, All of it. He loved jazz. He loved jazz musicians. He loved listening to them and he learned that great secret of just staying a little bit behind the beat, keeping the listener hanging and wanting a little bit. It was a great secret, and he learned it from the great horn players. But first from Billie.Few musicians were ever as popular, influential, complicated, or dangerous as Frank Sinatra. Between landmark albums like “Songs for Young Lovers” and “In the Wee Small Hours,” his movie acting (“From Here to Eternity,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “The Manchurian Candidate”), his marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, his running with the Rat Pack and brushes with the mob, he led a full, at times overstuffed life. Biographer James Kaplan now follows his acclaimed “Frank: The Voice” with “Sinatra: The Chairman,” a thick, almost 1,000-page volume that aims for the level of depth and context Peter Guralnick achieved with his Elvis Presley biographies. Kaplan’s book both gets up close -- using detail the way a novelist does -- and weaves Sinatra in with the era he lived through. “The Chairman” emphasizes the period from 1954 to his 1971 retirement; it closes by moving quickly through Sinatra's return to performing. We spoke to Kaplan about Sinatra’s temperament, his acting, and the influence of jazz on his singing. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Can you characterize the period of Sinatra’s career and life? It’s really the mature and great and established Sinatra, isn’t that fair to say? Yes, it is. My first volume covers Sinatra from birth until the night he wins the Oscar for "From Here to Eternity" in ’54. And so, it includes his rise as a romantic young singer, his explosion as a superstar in World War II, and then his collapse, in career and personal collapse post-World War II. The end of that book is the beginning of a comeback, and Volume II picks up that story 11 days after the Oscar, where Sinatra was writing a thank-you note to a friend for congratulating him on the Oscar. And, the first book is the story of the rise of a young, romantic troubadour and the second book is really a book about power. It’s a darker, tougher book. And it’s a book that even with World War II and the big band era fitting into Volume I, Volume II covers a lot more of American history and a lot more of popular culture than Volume I does. There’s more to put in it. But yes, your assessment is exactly right. Even as Sinatra acquires enormous temporal power in the mid ’50s and on into the ’60s, he’s also putting together a string of the most astonishing albums of popular music—creative to date, and in many ways, still to this day. How many years did you spend on this one? I’m wondering if the huge amount of research and interviewing change your view of him, either as a man or a musician? Each of the books took me five years. Roughly speaking, with each of them, about three years of research and two years of writing. Research, including reading everything — books, newspaper articles, gossip columns, everything, and then, hundreds of interviews. It’s an enormous undertaking and of course, my feelings about Sinatra evolved as the project went on. When I began it, I was kind of, looking back, miserably ignorant of Sinatra. That is to say, I knew who he was, I knew how great he was, I knew he had created this music. But as to the specifics of this career and the complexities and subtleties of his life, I knew little if not nothing. I knew a lot of the clichés that had become widespread about Sinatra. But it was my job to get behind those clichés, and to give the reality dimension and to shoot down any falsehoods that had been spread. One thing I’ll say is, the cliché about biographers is -- it’s an unfortunate one -- after a long time of working on the book they’re working from a contempt for their subject. And it never happened to me. He was a genius and he was a genius in several ways, and one genius that he possessed besides his musical genius was a genius for making himself dislikable. So there were many times when I disliked him. He could be awful, he could be quite awful; as Pete Hamill said, “His shortcoming were regrettable.” He’s putting it very kindly. His shortcomings were large on the world. But I never felt contempt for him; contempt is one thing but dislike is another. I never -- and this is more important still -- never got bored with him. And I’m still not. And what’s more is I get goose bumps when I hear the guy sing. It’s an astonishing voice, and it’s beyond astonishment really, it’s inexplicable. There’s all kinds of things that I can say what it is, and there’s all kinds of things that I can’t say. The explosive moment of my pre-adolescence was seeing the Beatles on February 9 on the Ed Sullivan show. And I loved rock ‘n’ roll, I continue to love rock ‘n’ roll, I listen to all kinds of music. I love classical, I love jazz and another evolution for me, studying Sinatra, was realizing that studying Sinatra and his music was not looking at a nostalgia act. It was not looking at something old-fashioned, or big band-er or your father’s cardigan sweater. It was looking at the greatest, arguably the greatest, interpretive musician of all time. And that includes everybody. Let’s talk about Sinatra’s temperament for a minute. During that period, he was enormously popular, enormously powerful, feared in some cases. He was also despairing some of the time too. He tried to kill himself in the early ’50s over Ava Gardner; he could’ve died. Did he remain haunted, frustrated and insecure, even through his most successful period? Yes. I think he was a tormented man. Listen, this was a guy who said that when he was a kid he heard the music of the spheres. This is a little Italian kid walking around Hoboken, New Jersey, in danger of getting beaten if he walked into the wrong Irish-American neighborhood or African-American neighborhood. It was important, when he was growing up, to be tough. It was important for him during his whole life to be tough, but this was a guy who was an out-and-out a musical genius, who heard too much, who felt too much. He was beyond high-strung. He was exorbitantly oversensitive, and that was a quality he felt he had to shield from the outside world. He had to put on this shield of swagger, bluster and masculinity. He was a little man. He was an Italian-American who grew up at a time when Italian-Americans were just a half step above African-Americans. Italian-Americans were not legally considered white until sometime in the 1940s. It was crazy. That explains a lot about his attraction to the mafia. These were guys who seemed powerful to him, strong, and honorable, and unfortunately he had a crush on them. He idolized them like a small boy idolized cowboys or soldiers. But, he was a little guy. He was 5' 7". Until the mid-’60s, he was very skinny, had slight delicate wrists, artistic hands and small feet. He was over-sensitive, strung way high and a genius to boot. He was really a tormented guy in lots of ways. He had horrible parenting. He had a father who was distant and a mother who he never knew whether she was going to hug him or hit him. And she did hit him. His mother and father ran a bar in Hoboken. They had a billy club behind the bar, and she slung him with it when he got out of line. And one time on the Jersey shore, she pushed his head underwater, under the surf, apparently just for the hell of it. She was extremely unpredictable. His parents were frequently absent. He was very similar to his mother. She was pathologically impatient, had a volcanic temper, just like him. And so the whole combination made him a bundle of woe in many ways. He hated the night. He was scared of the dark. He was afraid to go to sleep. He needed company at all times until he finally turned in at about 7 or 8 a.m. He had many demons. I am not excusing his bad behavior, which he stoked with alcohol, and which grew worse with power and entitlement. But he was guy who was never really happy, except for the times when he was singing well. And his standards were so superlative that he knew when he was singing well, and when he was singing poorly. And most of the rest of the time, seven-eighths or nine-tenths of his life, he was just from one thing onto the other. He was terminally impatient, and deeply dissatisfied always. The ’50s was a great period for him. How did the change the ’60s brought, musically and otherwise, hit Sinatra? It hit him hard. It destroyed the music business as he knew it. He hated rock 'n’ roll. He hated Elvis, when he came in in the mid-’50s. He detested rock 'n’ roll, and suddenly, here’s the apotheosis of rock 'n’ roll, and the music business is completely turned on its head. Everything, the American songbook, was not fallen by the wayside, but was becoming old hat in the blink of an eye. He had started this new record company, Reprise, in the 1960s, and it was a flop right out of the gate. He couldn’t sell records. He signed up all his old pals, Dean Martin and Pearl Bailey, and people like that, for his new record label, but he couldn’t sell records until the guy he had hired to be in charge of his record company, a guy named Mo Ostin, started signing rock 'n’ roll acts. Reprise was about to go down the tubes, until 1963, when Jack Warner, head of Warner brothers, decided he had to have Sinatra as a movie star. Well, Sinatra had a brilliant lawyer named Mickey Rudin, who met with Jack Warner, and said, “You could have Sinatra as a movie star, but you got to take the record label too.” And Jack Warner said, “Anything. Anything!” And he put several million dollars in Frank’s pocket. The labels merged: Warner and Reprise. Mo Ostin, as head of Reprise, began signing rock n’ roll. He signed The Kinks. Suddenly, they were making money, hand over fist, but only because he was signing rock acts. Frank loved to make money, but he hated rock 'n’ roll. So yes, he was somewhat conflicted. How important was Sinatra’s acting to him, and how substantial does it seem? It wasn’t just a side project to his music career, was it? Yes, it was more than that. First thing to understand was that when Sinatra was performing in a club, or in a recording studio – those recording sessions were performances, there was always an audience. He always brought in a gallery full of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on to every recording session. Every Sinatra performance was acting. His greatest performance was as himself. The one time I saw him was in 1981 in Carnegie Hall, and I went with my tongue in my cheek. Growing up and seeing Phil Hartman and Joe Piscopo make fun of Sinatra, I was expecting something clownish, and I went and this guy was the greatest performer I had ever seen. I had seen a lot of rock 'n’ roll in my time. I saw The Stones. And he was just incredible. He was an actor. The first person he ever idolized was Bing Crosby, and Bing Crosby became a superstar in the 1930s not only by selling records, but also by acting in movies. He knew that his best take was his first one. He was a very untrained and instinctive actor. He was almost always, on a movie set, a total pain in the ass, and it all depended on his relationship with the director and his feeling about the property that he was acting in. Almost always, after MGM canned him in the early ’50s and he went out on his own, he was Frank Sinatra the superstar who was basically in charge of the production. And once he took over, once he was bossing the director around, all bets were off. And so he made a lot of crappy movies. But there were exceptions. There were people he couldn’t boss around, he didn’t want to boss around. The first big exception after MGM was Fred Zinnemann making from “From Here to Eternity.” Right. Sinatra was on his uppers, his career had gone down the tubes. He was desperate to come back, and not only that, but Fred Zinnemann was a brilliant director, a courtly and gentle and intelligent European whom Sinatra had great respect for. And Sinatra busted his ass to do that job in “From Here to Eternity” and deserved every bit of the Oscar he won. He did a wonderful job. The other two exceptions I would say -- with an asterisk for Vincente Minnelli in “Some Came Running” in 1958 -- would be Otto Preminger’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” in 1955, where Sinatra played a heroin addict, and always felt that he deserved another Oscar for that. I differ — I tend to think that that movie is stagey and dated and that Sinatra was chewing the scenery, but he did do a good job in that movie and he respected Preminger and worked hard. And I feel Sinatra’s greatest movie of all was “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great movie, and John Frankenheimer was a brilliant director, brilliant young guy, much younger than Sinatra. And Sinatra didn’t have to behave for John Frankenheimer, John Frankenheimer was not only brilliant -- he was as tough guy. He was a jock from Queens, and he was not going to take any shit from this little Sinatra. But not only that, he wasn’t just a tough guy, he was a great director, brilliant guy, and it was just a brilliant project from the get-go between Frankenheimer and his writer George Axelrod. It’s a staggeringly great movie. Other than that, the movies he made tend to be either regrettable or entertainments. You can watch “Pal Joey,” and “Pal Joey” is a fun musical. You can watch “Guys and Dolls” and for all the negative people said about it, and how Sinatra and Brando should have reversed roles -- I like the movie. It’s fun to watch. “Ocean’s 11” is a terrible movie but it’s fun to watch. It’s seminal and it is definitively politically incorrect, and it’s the Rat Pack and it’s naughty fun, and Sinatra was bossing the hell out of that poor director Lewis Milestone. It’s a bad movie but it’s a fun movie. And the Tony Rome movies – [like] “Lady in Cement” where he’s playing a private detective. Those two were really the roles that were closest to Sinatra as Sinatra. Those were fun movies to watch. Not great movies by any means, but fun. Right, right. Well, the real genius of Sinatra I think is in the phrasing. I wonder how much of that came from his love of jazz musicians… Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzgerald -- how much of phrasing is indebted jazz singers and horn players? All of it. All of it! Billie Holliday was almost the same age as Sinatra. She was born, I think, eight months before Sinatra in 1915, and yet she became a success very, very young with Teddy Wilson, with Count Basie, and with Benny Goodman. So when Sinatra was a punk kid, a teenager, he used to go to 52nd Street in New York between Fifth and Sixth. Now it’s just office buildings. But back then it was this long row of brownstones, both sides of the street, and it was full of jazz clubs. You could walk from door to door and hear these geniuses. You could hear Lester Young. You could hear Teddy Wilson. You could hear Billie Holiday -- and he did. And this was not only the basis for his phrasing and for his love of jazz, it was also the basis for his admittedly flawed, conflicted sense of tolerance his entire life. He was a guy who thought it was obscene and absurd that black people were discriminated against, and yet this was also a guy who could make horrible “Amos and Andy” jokes on-stage at the Sands, who could say things about eating watermelon. He thought he was entitled to. But when you watch “A Man and His Music, Part III,” the great TV special he made in 1967 with Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim, you watch Sinatra with Ella and he was not only vastly respectful of her and not only learned a ton from her, he was in awe of her. He was even kind of intimidated by her. So the answer to your question is, All of it. He loved jazz. He loved jazz musicians. He loved listening to them and he learned that great secret of just staying a little bit behind the beat, keeping the listener hanging and wanting a little bit. It was a great secret, and he learned it from the great horn players. But first from Billie.Few musicians were ever as popular, influential, complicated, or dangerous as Frank Sinatra. Between landmark albums like “Songs for Young Lovers” and “In the Wee Small Hours,” his movie acting (“From Here to Eternity,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “The Manchurian Candidate”), his marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, his running with the Rat Pack and brushes with the mob, he led a full, at times overstuffed life. Biographer James Kaplan now follows his acclaimed “Frank: The Voice” with “Sinatra: The Chairman,” a thick, almost 1,000-page volume that aims for the level of depth and context Peter Guralnick achieved with his Elvis Presley biographies. Kaplan’s book both gets up close -- using detail the way a novelist does -- and weaves Sinatra in with the era he lived through. “The Chairman” emphasizes the period from 1954 to his 1971 retirement; it closes by moving quickly through Sinatra's return to performing. We spoke to Kaplan about Sinatra’s temperament, his acting, and the influence of jazz on his singing. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Can you characterize the period of Sinatra’s career and life? It’s really the mature and great and established Sinatra, isn’t that fair to say? Yes, it is. My first volume covers Sinatra from birth until the night he wins the Oscar for "From Here to Eternity" in ’54. And so, it includes his rise as a romantic young singer, his explosion as a superstar in World War II, and then his collapse, in career and personal collapse post-World War II. The end of that book is the beginning of a comeback, and Volume II picks up that story 11 days after the Oscar, where Sinatra was writing a thank-you note to a friend for congratulating him on the Oscar. And, the first book is the story of the rise of a young, romantic troubadour and the second book is really a book about power. It’s a darker, tougher book. And it’s a book that even with World War II and the big band era fitting into Volume I, Volume II covers a lot more of American history and a lot more of popular culture than Volume I does. There’s more to put in it. But yes, your assessment is exactly right. Even as Sinatra acquires enormous temporal power in the mid ’50s and on into the ’60s, he’s also putting together a string of the most astonishing albums of popular music—creative to date, and in many ways, still to this day. How many years did you spend on this one? I’m wondering if the huge amount of research and interviewing change your view of him, either as a man or a musician? Each of the books took me five years. Roughly speaking, with each of them, about three years of research and two years of writing. Research, including reading everything — books, newspaper articles, gossip columns, everything, and then, hundreds of interviews. It’s an enormous undertaking and of course, my feelings about Sinatra evolved as the project went on. When I began it, I was kind of, looking back, miserably ignorant of Sinatra. That is to say, I knew who he was, I knew how great he was, I knew he had created this music. But as to the specifics of this career and the complexities and subtleties of his life, I knew little if not nothing. I knew a lot of the clichés that had become widespread about Sinatra. But it was my job to get behind those clichés, and to give the reality dimension and to shoot down any falsehoods that had been spread. One thing I’ll say is, the cliché about biographers is -- it’s an unfortunate one -- after a long time of working on the book they’re working from a contempt for their subject. And it never happened to me. He was a genius and he was a genius in several ways, and one genius that he possessed besides his musical genius was a genius for making himself dislikable. So there were many times when I disliked him. He could be awful, he could be quite awful; as Pete Hamill said, “His shortcoming were regrettable.” He’s putting it very kindly. His shortcomings were large on the world. But I never felt contempt for him; contempt is one thing but dislike is another. I never -- and this is more important still -- never got bored with him. And I’m still not. And what’s more is I get goose bumps when I hear the guy sing. It’s an astonishing voice, and it’s beyond astonishment really, it’s inexplicable. There’s all kinds of things that I can say what it is, and there’s all kinds of things that I can’t say. The explosive moment of my pre-adolescence was seeing the Beatles on February 9 on the Ed Sullivan show. And I loved rock ‘n’ roll, I continue to love rock ‘n’ roll, I listen to all kinds of music. I love classical, I love jazz and another evolution for me, studying Sinatra, was realizing that studying Sinatra and his music was not looking at a nostalgia act. It was not looking at something old-fashioned, or big band-er or your father’s cardigan sweater. It was looking at the greatest, arguably the greatest, interpretive musician of all time. And that includes everybody. Let’s talk about Sinatra’s temperament for a minute. During that period, he was enormously popular, enormously powerful, feared in some cases. He was also despairing some of the time too. He tried to kill himself in the early ’50s over Ava Gardner; he could’ve died. Did he remain haunted, frustrated and insecure, even through his most successful period? Yes. I think he was a tormented man. Listen, this was a guy who said that when he was a kid he heard the music of the spheres. This is a little Italian kid walking around Hoboken, New Jersey, in danger of getting beaten if he walked into the wrong Irish-American neighborhood or African-American neighborhood. It was important, when he was growing up, to be tough. It was important for him during his whole life to be tough, but this was a guy who was an out-and-out a musical genius, who heard too much, who felt too much. He was beyond high-strung. He was exorbitantly oversensitive, and that was a quality he felt he had to shield from the outside world. He had to put on this shield of swagger, bluster and masculinity. He was a little man. He was an Italian-American who grew up at a time when Italian-Americans were just a half step above African-Americans. Italian-Americans were not legally considered white until sometime in the 1940s. It was crazy. That explains a lot about his attraction to the mafia. These were guys who seemed powerful to him, strong, and honorable, and unfortunately he had a crush on them. He idolized them like a small boy idolized cowboys or soldiers. But, he was a little guy. He was 5' 7". Until the mid-’60s, he was very skinny, had slight delicate wrists, artistic hands and small feet. He was over-sensitive, strung way high and a genius to boot. He was really a tormented guy in lots of ways. He had horrible parenting. He had a father who was distant and a mother who he never knew whether she was going to hug him or hit him. And she did hit him. His mother and father ran a bar in Hoboken. They had a billy club behind the bar, and she slung him with it when he got out of line. And one time on the Jersey shore, she pushed his head underwater, under the surf, apparently just for the hell of it. She was extremely unpredictable. His parents were frequently absent. He was very similar to his mother. She was pathologically impatient, had a volcanic temper, just like him. And so the whole combination made him a bundle of woe in many ways. He hated the night. He was scared of the dark. He was afraid to go to sleep. He needed company at all times until he finally turned in at about 7 or 8 a.m. He had many demons. I am not excusing his bad behavior, which he stoked with alcohol, and which grew worse with power and entitlement. But he was guy who was never really happy, except for the times when he was singing well. And his standards were so superlative that he knew when he was singing well, and when he was singing poorly. And most of the rest of the time, seven-eighths or nine-tenths of his life, he was just from one thing onto the other. He was terminally impatient, and deeply dissatisfied always. The ’50s was a great period for him. How did the change the ’60s brought, musically and otherwise, hit Sinatra? It hit him hard. It destroyed the music business as he knew it. He hated rock 'n’ roll. He hated Elvis, when he came in in the mid-’50s. He detested rock 'n’ roll, and suddenly, here’s the apotheosis of rock 'n’ roll, and the music business is completely turned on its head. Everything, the American songbook, was not fallen by the wayside, but was becoming old hat in the blink of an eye. He had started this new record company, Reprise, in the 1960s, and it was a flop right out of the gate. He couldn’t sell records. He signed up all his old pals, Dean Martin and Pearl Bailey, and people like that, for his new record label, but he couldn’t sell records until the guy he had hired to be in charge of his record company, a guy named Mo Ostin, started signing rock 'n’ roll acts. Reprise was about to go down the tubes, until 1963, when Jack Warner, head of Warner brothers, decided he had to have Sinatra as a movie star. Well, Sinatra had a brilliant lawyer named Mickey Rudin, who met with Jack Warner, and said, “You could have Sinatra as a movie star, but you got to take the record label too.” And Jack Warner said, “Anything. Anything!” And he put several million dollars in Frank’s pocket. The labels merged: Warner and Reprise. Mo Ostin, as head of Reprise, began signing rock n’ roll. He signed The Kinks. Suddenly, they were making money, hand over fist, but only because he was signing rock acts. Frank loved to make money, but he hated rock 'n’ roll. So yes, he was somewhat conflicted. How important was Sinatra’s acting to him, and how substantial does it seem? It wasn’t just a side project to his music career, was it? Yes, it was more than that. First thing to understand was that when Sinatra was performing in a club, or in a recording studio – those recording sessions were performances, there was always an audience. He always brought in a gallery full of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on to every recording session. Every Sinatra performance was acting. His greatest performance was as himself. The one time I saw him was in 1981 in Carnegie Hall, and I went with my tongue in my cheek. Growing up and seeing Phil Hartman and Joe Piscopo make fun of Sinatra, I was expecting something clownish, and I went and this guy was the greatest performer I had ever seen. I had seen a lot of rock 'n’ roll in my time. I saw The Stones. And he was just incredible. He was an actor. The first person he ever idolized was Bing Crosby, and Bing Crosby became a superstar in the 1930s not only by selling records, but also by acting in movies. He knew that his best take was his first one. He was a very untrained and instinctive actor. He was almost always, on a movie set, a total pain in the ass, and it all depended on his relationship with the director and his feeling about the property that he was acting in. Almost always, after MGM canned him in the early ’50s and he went out on his own, he was Frank Sinatra the superstar who was basically in charge of the production. And once he took over, once he was bossing the director around, all bets were off. And so he made a lot of crappy movies. But there were exceptions. There were people he couldn’t boss around, he didn’t want to boss around. The first big exception after MGM was Fred Zinnemann making from “From Here to Eternity.” Right. Sinatra was on his uppers, his career had gone down the tubes. He was desperate to come back, and not only that, but Fred Zinnemann was a brilliant director, a courtly and gentle and intelligent European whom Sinatra had great respect for. And Sinatra busted his ass to do that job in “From Here to Eternity” and deserved every bit of the Oscar he won. He did a wonderful job. The other two exceptions I would say -- with an asterisk for Vincente Minnelli in “Some Came Running” in 1958 -- would be Otto Preminger’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” in 1955, where Sinatra played a heroin addict, and always felt that he deserved another Oscar for that. I differ — I tend to think that that movie is stagey and dated and that Sinatra was chewing the scenery, but he did do a good job in that movie and he respected Preminger and worked hard. And I feel Sinatra’s greatest movie of all was “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great movie, and John Frankenheimer was a brilliant director, brilliant young guy, much younger than Sinatra. And Sinatra didn’t have to behave for John Frankenheimer, John Frankenheimer was not only brilliant -- he was as tough guy. He was a jock from Queens, and he was not going to take any shit from this little Sinatra. But not only that, he wasn’t just a tough guy, he was a great director, brilliant guy, and it was just a brilliant project from the get-go between Frankenheimer and his writer George Axelrod. It’s a staggeringly great movie. Other than that, the movies he made tend to be either regrettable or entertainments. You can watch “Pal Joey,” and “Pal Joey” is a fun musical. You can watch “Guys and Dolls” and for all the negative people said about it, and how Sinatra and Brando should have reversed roles -- I like the movie. It’s fun to watch. “Ocean’s 11” is a terrible movie but it’s fun to watch. It’s seminal and it is definitively politically incorrect, and it’s the Rat Pack and it’s naughty fun, and Sinatra was bossing the hell out of that poor director Lewis Milestone. It’s a bad movie but it’s a fun movie. And the Tony Rome movies – [like] “Lady in Cement” where he’s playing a private detective. Those two were really the roles that were closest to Sinatra as Sinatra. Those were fun movies to watch. Not great movies by any means, but fun. Right, right. Well, the real genius of Sinatra I think is in the phrasing. I wonder how much of that came from his love of jazz musicians… Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzgerald -- how much of phrasing is indebted jazz singers and horn players? All of it. All of it! Billie Holliday was almost the same age as Sinatra. She was born, I think, eight months before Sinatra in 1915, and yet she became a success very, very young with Teddy Wilson, with Count Basie, and with Benny Goodman. So when Sinatra was a punk kid, a teenager, he used to go to 52nd Street in New York between Fifth and Sixth. Now it’s just office buildings. But back then it was this long row of brownstones, both sides of the street, and it was full of jazz clubs. You could walk from door to door and hear these geniuses. You could hear Lester Young. You could hear Teddy Wilson. You could hear Billie Holiday -- and he did. And this was not only the basis for his phrasing and for his love of jazz, it was also the basis for his admittedly flawed, conflicted sense of tolerance his entire life. He was a guy who thought it was obscene and absurd that black people were discriminated against, and yet this was also a guy who could make horrible “Amos and Andy” jokes on-stage at the Sands, who could say things about eating watermelon. He thought he was entitled to. But when you watch “A Man and His Music, Part III,” the great TV special he made in 1967 with Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim, you watch Sinatra with Ella and he was not only vastly respectful of her and not only learned a ton from her, he was in awe of her. He was even kind of intimidated by her. So the answer to your question is, All of it. He loved jazz. He loved jazz musicians. He loved listening to them and he learned that great secret of just staying a little bit behind the beat, keeping the listener hanging and wanting a little bit. It was a great secret, and he learned it from the great horn players. But first from Billie.
“Master of None” tackles the empathy gap: How nuanced minority stories can shrink the emotional gulf between white Americans and “others”
Amidst an ongoing conversation about diversity in media, questions about what, precisely, constitutes fair representation arose over the last week from an unexpected and tragic place. In the wake of terrorist attacks in France, many asked why the mass slaughter of civilians in Lebanon the day before or Nigeria the Tuesday after (or in the six non-European sites which faced deadlier terrorist attacks this year), wasn't given similar coverage. The implication was that media attention skewed in the direction of lost white lives. Some overly defensive members of the press refused to concede even the premise. The problem was not that journalists were not covering Middle Eastern and African deaths, many a journalist insisted, but that people weren't reading (and subsequently sharing) stories about them. These underappreciated news items were and would continue to be available for those who sought them out. The bias, however, is readily apparent once we expand the definition of “media” beyond foreign news bureaus. The point was that even the least engaged consumers knew about the attacks in Paris: late night hosts paid tribute to the city, Facebook offered convenient functionality which allowed users to watermark their profile pictures with French flags in solidarity, and, as I write, though Boko Haram has ouptaced ISIS as the world's deadliest terror group, Paris retains higher billing on the homepages of most major news sites. The complaints weren't about the news people found, but the news that found them. Most thoughtful grapplings with the subject conceded a media bias, but explained the discrepancy by pointing to the strong connection many Americans feel to Paris. It is true that the United States has deep historic and cultural ties to France, but not readily apparent that these ties ought to translate to a heightened emotional bond. That such deaths are a rare occurrence in Paris but more common in more turbulent regions, another common refrain, ought only to intensify our concern and sense of injustice. But admittedly limited coverage of terrorism in Africa and the Middle East tends to be met with indifference at best. The media serves as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a biased picture that then further warps our perspective.
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A more celebratory conversation was, meanwhile, taking place on other corners of the Internet. Calls for greater representation of minorities in scripted television have grown louder and more prominent this year. "Master of None," a new series from "Parks and Recreation" veterans Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, has been a welcome entrant to the dialogue since it premiered on Netflix earlier this month. The show itself openly plays with these issues, but its stars and creators have also been refreshingly candid and outspoken about the industry's deeply-ingrained racism and their very active and conscious efforts to counter it. In interview after interview, the "MoN" creative team has stressed the importance of not just more roles for minority actors, but different kinds of roles — ones that reject tokenism and singularity and instead embrace greater sophistication and variety. Scripted television is, perhaps, best-suited for these fleshed out portrayals because, in the same way that the segmented structure of cable news rejects complexity, the medium demands it. It is astonishingly difficult to retain audience interest in flat characters over a long time frame, and even minority characters who embody trite stereotypes tend to attract sympathy and offer something of an emotional inner life. It is, then, understandable that in his activism, "MoN" co-creator Ansari, who plays the show's protagonist Dev, has drawn from his own experiences. Writing in the New York Times, he describes the alienation he felt as a child, when the only on-screen Indians at his reach were cab drivers or convenience store workers. Here, he's echoing a point made in "MoN," when in an illustratively short montage a young Dev is blasted with cultural portrayals of Indians, featuring Apu from "The Simpsons" and the monkey brain-eating villain of "Indiana Jones." Ansari closes his Times piece with an appeal to the marketability of minority actors in leading roles. “You know what? No one really cares,” he writes. Speaking with Salon television critic Sonia Saraiya, fellow co-creator Alan Yang makes a similar point. Describing one of the show's most hard-hitting episodes, wherein Dev and his Asian-American friend learn about the struggles of their immigrant parents, Yang said, “It’s really not just a story about immigrants. It’s a story about being grateful to your parents, no matter what their background was. Regardless of where your parents are born, chances are they made some sacrifices for you and they took care of you and they worked really hard.” Both Ansari and Yang are right about the formative impact which on-screen diversity, or lack thereof, has on young minority viewers. And Yang is also right to note that certain aspects of "MoN," and shows furthering similar goals, speak to our commonalities. It is also fair to say that Ansari and Yang's discussions of these matters must serve strategic ends: If greater diversity can cultivate a passionate following amongst minorities, while others are indifferent to who plays these universal roles, Hollywood stands only to gain from diversifying its casts. (The two are also up against accepted industry wisdom, similar to that spouted by members of the press last week, that most viewers simply aren't vested in stories which don't relate directly to their own experience.) But it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the benefits of diversity extend beyond the minority community. Yang is correct that most parents sacrifice for their children, but the fear of picking up the phone lest people mock her accent, described by Dev's mother, is not universal. Nor, when "Fresh off the Boat" premiered last year, was protagonist Eddie Huang's shame and embarrassment when white classmates mocked his traditional Chinese food. First- and second-generation immigrants benefit from seeing these stories on screen, but it's also a teaching moment for all audience members. Viewers might think of these characters before imitating a foreign accent for laughs or mocking “ethnic” cuisine. They might understand others' sensitivity around this brand of humor, or even speak up when such jokes are told in their presence. Television's inherent progressiveness stems from its ability to draw us into unexpected narratives. When told compellingly, they serve as a recurring reminder that people who don't think, behave or — increasingly, importantly — look as we do still feel as deeply all the same. It broadens the scope of our empathy. In an increasingly global community where an empathy gap still demonstrably looms large, sophisticated minority portraits and an abandonment of the notion of white as default can help to close it. We might draw upon this empathy when we read and share the news, and editors, writers and commentators might do the same when they cover it. The process might become more equitable, the media's portrait of reality more broadly reflective of it, less distortive and more enlightening.
“It’s unacceptable to give religious privilege only to those who believe in the supernatural”: The Satanic Temple challenges the religious right
A small sect called the Satanic Temple has been giving the religious right fits by insisting that religious freedoms granted to Christians should apply to Satanists too. Is the group smart political theater or real religion? Both, says Temple co-founder and leader Doug Mesner, aka Lucien Greaves. Satanic Controversies In Orange County, Florida, members applied to give out Satanic Coloring Books alongside Christian propaganda being distributed in Florida elementary schools by a group called World Changers. For three years, the school board had ignored complaints about the World Changer materials, but after the Satanic Temple applied to distribute its own child-friendly materials, the practice ended. According to Greaves, “At first they tried to allay the fears of the public by saying they reserved the right to reject material if it wasn’t fit. They hoped our children’s activity book would violate community standards so it could be discarded without blatant discrimination. But our book has simple pro-social messages. When we gave that to them, they were utterly resigned. Their law was saying there was nothing they could object to. So they closed down the forum entirely.” When the state of Oklahoma decided to display a version of the Ten Commandments, carved in granite, on courthouse grounds, members of the Satanic Temple again treated this as an open forum for religion in the public square. They raised $28,000 in crowdfunding and hired a sculptor who created a 6-foot bronze monument depicting the Satanic avatar Baphomet blessing two children, with the Temple’s seven precepts below. The finished statue was unveiled in a dramatic ritual in Detroit last July. The list goes on: In Western Washington, Temple members seized an opening created by a Christian coach who was leading football prayers in his public capacity on public school grounds. Members of the Seattle temple asked that they, too, be allowed to lead after-game prayers on the field. The school district responded by suspending both the coach and the prayers but not in time to prevent footage of black-robed Satanists and jeering Christian students from hitting national media. In Missouri, the Temple has waded into the reproductive freedom fight by filing suit on behalf of a member, “Mary Doe,” who says she is entitled to religious exemption from odious abortion restrictions. The Temple’s “Seven Tenets” include two that provide the basis for the court case: One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone—and—Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. Lawyers for the Temple argue that forcing Doe to read scientifically bogus warnings against abortion (for example, that abortion causes cancer) and then contemplate the warnings for three days prior to the procedure violates her religious freedom. Once again, the Temple is crowdfunding the campaign and to date has raised about half of the anticipated $80,000 in legal costs. Using Privilege to Challenge Privilege? Is the Satanic Temple simply a political or secular advocacy group using religious privilege to challenge religious privilege? Co-founder Lucien Greaves says it’s more complicated than that.
We’re not trying to destroy religious privilege and exemption; we are coming at it in a way that we can find a legitimate plateau on which religious privilege can work in a pluralistic society. During our Oklahoma campaign to place our statue of Baphomet alongside the Ten Commandments, people kept asking what were we looking for? What was our preferred outcome? For the Ten Commandments to come down or ours to go up? But either one of those outcomes was OK with us. What we were fighting against was that one perspective enjoyed the power of state government. We were just fighting against the worst-case scenario—that the Christian point of view had a preferred place in a government institution. I’m not sure that people can make the appeal that because of deeply held beliefs they shouldn’t be held accountable to laws. But the courts need to be prepared to acknowledge that if they can, then a diametrically opposed claim can also be made on the basis of sincere belief.Religion without Gods Are the beliefs of the Satanic Temple really sincere, though? And given that members don’t ascribe to any form of supernaturalism, can they actually be called a religion? Greaves insists that the answer is yes on both counts.
Those who dislike us claim that we are not really a religion, but by what standard? These things beg for definition. In the Hobby Lobby case, there was no sincerity test at all, and no test that their exemption had some kind of spiritual basis. How could they relate the Bible to this idea that a corporation doesn’t have to pay for insurance for employees who then make their own choices about pregnancy? So, you have to wonder what kind of test they can possibly put to assess the religious or spiritual legitimacy of the Satanic Temple. In regard to our atheism, if you have a society that grants religious privilege and exemption and you’re willing to give privilege and exemption to certain groups, then it’s unacceptable to give that only to people who believe in the supernatural. We are openly atheist but we have cultural identity and symbolic constructs that are deeply meaningful to our members. There are other atheistic religions in human history, from Jainism to Buddhism to Confucianism. . . . The litmus test should be: Is this something put forward for an individual’s personal convenience or does it speak to some communities’ deeply held beliefs such that if the government impinges on that in some way it affects their sense of cultural identity?Greaves argues, in fact, that his litmus test is the only one that is constitutionally feasible in the U.S. or in any pluralistic nation that claims to treat religious perspectives equally. As evidence of sincerity, he points out that even when butting heads with Christian right opponents, Temple spokespersons seek to advance their own affirmative values, not merely to criticize other perspectives. Lilith Starr heads the Seattle chapter of the Satanic Temple, a group with about 50 members and weekly meetings. She describes her role in the Temple as an act of spiritual service. Starr studied Buddhism, which she sees as aligned with Satanism in that the highest value in both is compassion. Starr still meditates daily, but she likes the fact that Satanism encourages more active engagement in social justice: “Personally, the figure of Satan is a powerful symbol of standing up to unjust authority for yourself and for those around you. To me, he is a figure of compassion. Fighting against the rage and jealousy of an unjust god or against an unjust government authority. He is fighting for the people. He represents liberation.” Christian Right Inspires Satanist Activism Although both Greaves and Starr see their political engagement as an expression of their own religious values, they give the Christian right credit for activating them and for getting out the word about Satanism as a legitimate spiritual path. Without the Hobby Lobby case, Starr might have maintained a more solitary spiritual practice rather than stepping into the visible leadership position she holds today. Greaves says the Satanic Temple owes much of its growth to the Liberty Counsel, a Texas legal group working to insert Christianity into public life via “religious freedom” claims. “We came into this with no resources, no funding. We’ve gotten this far on the dime of the Liberty Counsel that have opened the doors so wide that they can’t prevent us from walking in now. . . . Ironically if they would keep their stuff out of the public sphere that would be to their advantage, because we don’t have the real estate they have. When they open up a public forum, they do so to our advantage—to the advantage of minority religions. Who would have heard of us if it weren’t for idiots at the Liberty Counsel? We should send those assholes a thank you.”
