Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 945

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":

“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.

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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.”

* * *

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. 

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“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.”

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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.

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“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.

***

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.

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Chris Cornell: “I think half of all my records are about my wife”

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“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.”

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Under the cover of humanitarian aid: The U.S. military is all over Africa

In the shadows of what was once called the “dark continent," a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and -- north to south, east to west -- you’ll find the fruits of that effort: a network of bases, compounds, and other sites whose sum total exceeds the number of nations on the continent. For a military that has stumbled from Iraq to Afghanistan and suffered setbacks from Libya to Syria, it’s a rare can-do triumph. In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the U.S. military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war. So how many U.S. military bases are there in Africa?  It’s a simple question with a simple answer.  For years, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent.  It wasn’t true, of course, because there were camps, compounds, installations, and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on semantics. Take a look at the Pentagon’s official list of bases, however, and the number grows.  The 2015 report on the Department of Defense’s global property portfolio lists Camp Lemonnier and three other deep-rooted sites on or near the continent: U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3, a medical research facility in Cairo, Egypt, that was established in 1946; Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, a spacecraft tracking station and airfield located 1,000 miles off the coast of West Africa that has been used by the U.S. since 1957; and warehouses at the airport and seaport in Mombasa, Kenya, that were built in the 1980s. That’s only the beginning, not the end of the matter.  For years, various reporters have shed light on hush-hush outposts -- most of them built, upgraded, or expanded since 9/11 -- dotting the continent, including so-called cooperative security locations (CSLs).  Earlier this year, AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez disclosed that there were actually 11 such sites.  Again, devoted AFRICOM-watchers knew that this, too, was just the start of a larger story, but when I asked Africa Command for a list of bases, camps and other sites, as I periodically have done, I was treated like a sap. “In all, AFRICOM has access to 11 CSLs across Africa. Of course, we have one major military facility on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,” Anthony Falvo, AFRICOM’s Public Affairs chief, told me.  Falvo was peddling numbers that both he and I know perfectly well are, at best, misleading.  “It’s one of the most troubling aspects of our military policy in Africa, and overseas generally, that the military can’t be, and seems totally resistant to being, honest and transparent about what it’s doing,” says David Vine, author of Base Nation : How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. Research by TomDispatch indicates that in recent years the U.S. military has, in fact, developed a remarkably extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in Africa.  Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered.  These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries -- more than 60% of the nations on the continent -- many of them corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records.  The U.S. also operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché Offices in approximately 38 [African] nations,” according to Falvo, and has struck close to 30 agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers. There is no reason to believe that even this represents a complete accounting of America’s growing archipelago of African outposts.  Although it’s possible that a few sites are being counted twice due to AFRICOM’s failure to provide basic information or clarification, the list TomDispatch has developed indicates that the U.S. military has created a network of bases that goes far beyond what AFRICOM has disclosed to the American public, let alone to Africans.  AFRICOM’s Base Bonanza When AFRICOM became an independent command in 2008, Camp Lemonnier was reportedly still one of the few American outposts on the continent.  In the years since, the U.S. has embarked on nothing short of a building boom -- even if the command is loath to refer to it in those terms.  As a result, it’s now able to carry out increasing numbers of overt and covert missions, from training exercises to drone assassinations. “AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces,” says Richard Reeve, the director of the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a London-based think tank.  “Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft.  There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases... so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.” Indeed, U.S. staging areas, cooperative security locations, forward operating locations (FOLs), and other outposts -- many of them involved in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities and Special Operations missions -- have been built (or built up) in Burkina Faso,Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon,Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.  A 2011 report by Lauren Ploch, an analyst in African affairs with the Congressional Research Service, also mentioned U.S. military access to locations in Algeria, Botswana, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Zambia.  AFRICOM failed to respond to scores of requests by this reporter for further information about its outposts and related matters, but an analysis of open source information, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and other records show a persistent, enduring, and growing U.S. presence on the continent. “A cooperative security location is just a small location where we can come in... It would be what you would call a very austere location with a couple of warehouses that has things like: tents, water, and things like that,” explained AFRICOM’s Rodriguez.  As he implies, the military doesn’t consider CSLs to be “bases,” but whatever they might be called, they are more than merely a few tents and cases of bottled water. Designed to accommodate about 200 personnel, with runways suitable for C-130 transport aircraft, the sites are primed for conversion from temporary, bare-bones facilities into something more enduring.  At least three of them in Senegal, Ghana, and Gabon are apparently designed to facilitate faster deployment for a rapid reaction unit with a mouthful of a moniker: Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response-Africa (SPMAGTF-CR-AF).  Its forces are based in Morón, Spain, and Sigonella, Italy, but are focused on Africa.  They rely heavily on MV-22 Ospreys, tilt-rotor aircraft that can take-off, land, and hover like helicopters, but fly with the speed and fuel efficiency of a turboprop plane. This combination of manpower, access, and technology has come to be known in the military by the moniker “New Normal.”  Birthed in the wake of the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the New Normal effectively allows the U.S. military quick access 400 miles inland from any CSL or, as Richard Reeve notes, gives it “a reach that extends to just about every country in West and Central Africa.” The concept was field-tested as South Sudan plunged into civil war and 160 Marines and sailors from Morón were forward deployed to Djibouti in late 2013.  Within hours, a contingent from that force was sent to Uganda and, in early 2014, in conjunction with another rapid reaction unit, dispatched to South Sudan to evacuate 20 people from the American embassy in Juba.  Earlier this year, SPMAGTF-CR-AF ran trials at its African staging areas including the CSL in Libreville, Gabon, deploying nearly 200 Marines and sailors along with four Ospreys, two C-130s, and more than 150,000 pounds of materiel. A similar test run was carried out at the Senegal CSL located at Dakar-Ouakam Air Base, which can also host 200 Marines and the support personnel necessary to sustain and transport them.  “What the CSL offers is the ability to forward-stage our forces to respond to any type of crisis,” Lorenzo Armijo, an operations officer with SPMAGTF-CR-AF, told a military reporter. “That crisis can range in the scope of military operations from embassy reinforcement to providing humanitarian assistance.” Another CSL, mentioned in a July 2012 briefing by U.S. Army Africa, is located in Entebbe, Uganda.  From there, according to a Washington Postinvestigation, U.S. contractors have flown surveillance missions using innocuous-looking turboprop airplanes.  “The AFRICOM strategy is to have a very light touch, a light footprint, but nevertheless facilitate special forces operations or ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] detachments over a very wide area,” Reeve says.  “To do that they don’t need very much basing infrastructure, they need an agreement to use a location, basic facilities on the ground, a stockpile of fuel, but they also can rely on private contractors to maintain a number of facilities so there aren’t U.S. troops on the ground.” The Outpost Archipelago AFRICOM ignored my requests for further information on CSLs and for the designations of other outposts on the continent, but according to a 2014 article in Army Sustainment on “Overcoming Logistics Challenges in East Africa,” there are also “at least nine forward operating locations, or FOLs.”  A 2007 Defense Department news release referred to an FOL in Charichcho, Ethiopia.  The U.S. military also utilizes “Forward Operating Location Kasenyi” in Kampala, Uganda.  A 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office mentioned forward operating locations in Isiolo and Manda Bay, both in Kenya. Camp Simba in Manda Bay has, in fact, seen significant expansion in recent years.  In 2013, Navy Seabees, for example, worked 24-hour shifts to extend its runway to enable larger aircraft like C-130s to land there, while other projects were initiated to accommodate greater numbers of troops in the future, including increased fuel and potable water storage, and more latrines.  The base serves as a home away from home for Navy personnel and Army Green Berets among other U.S. troops and, as recently revealed at theIntercept, plays an integral role in the secret drone assassination program aimed at militants in neighboring Somalia as well as in Yemen. Drones have played an increasingly large role in this post-9/11 build-up in Africa.  MQ-1 Predators have, for instance, been based in Chad’s capital,N’Djamena, while their newer, larger, more far-ranging cousins, MQ-9 Reapers, have been flown out of Seychelles International Airport.  As of June 2012, according to the Intercept, two contractor-operated drones, one Predator and one Reaper, were based in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, while a detachment with one Scan Eagle (a low-cost drone used by the Navy) and a remotely piloted helicopter known as an MQ-8 Fire Scout operated off the coast of East Africa.  The U.S. also recently began setting up a base in Cameroon for unarmed Predators to be used in the battle against Boko Haram militants. In February 2013, the U.S. also began flying Predator drones out of Niger’s capital, Niamey.  A year later, Captain Rick Cook, then chief of U.S. Africa Command’s Engineer Division, mentioned the potential for a new “base-like facility” that would be “semi-permanent” and “capable of air operations” in that country.  That September, the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlockexposed plans to base drones at a second location there, Agadez.  Within days, the U.S. Embassy in Niamey announced that AFRICOM was, indeed, “assessing the possibility of establishing a temporary, expeditionary contingency support location in Agadez, Niger.” Earlier this year, Captain Rodney Worden of AFRICOM’s Logistics and Support Division mentioned “a partnering and capacity-building project... for the Niger Air Force and Armed Forces in concert with USAFRICOM and [U.S.] Air Forces Africa to construct a runway and associated work/life support area for airfield operations.”  And when the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 was introduced in April, embedded in it was a $50 million

The GOP-ISIS nightmare coalition: Islamic extremists and the anti-immigrant right have the same goal — the death of democracy

Amid all the terror and panic and xenophobic hysteria of the Paris aftermath — which seems to have set the dial on the political Way-Back Machine to about 2002, at least for now — Republicans actually have a point. Maybe it’s half a point, because when Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Marine Le Pen) raise the contested question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, they don’t really understand the basic terms of the question, let alone where it leads. I will jump ahead here and suggest that you don’t get to ask that leading question about Islam and democracy, which has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, without asking a number of corollary questions. What do we mean by Islam, and what do we mean by democracy? Is “democracy,” as we currently understand it and experience it, actually compatible with the idea of democracy as it was handed down from antiquity and reconceived by the Enlightenment? But it does no good for people on the left who claim to stand for democracy, and for its associated values of human rights and civil liberties, to pretend that the questions about Islam and democracy do not exist or do not matter, or that they have been settled. The killings in the 11th arrondissement, and the reaction throughout the West, should be enough to tell us that isn’t so. It gives me absolutely no pleasure to insist that on this question, as on others, the Islamist militants of ISIS and the anti-Islamic Western right have reached the same conclusion. To put it more bluntly, every major Republican presidential candidate (excepting one or two of Jeb Bush’s multiple personalities) largely subscribes to the political and philosophical worldview of ISIS, except when it comes to final eschatological questions about who ends up in Paradise. Indeed, in both cases the idea that Islam and democracy are incompatible is more like an essential premise than a conclusion, and the kinship goes much deeper than that. Both sides begin with the same diagnosis, which is that Western civilization faces a fundamental, existential crisis, and arrive at closely allied prescriptions aimed at producing closely related outcomes. In one case, Western democracy is seen as a corrupt and decadent sham that will simply be destroyed (and perhaps, in some fantasy future, subjugated to Islamic rule). In the other, Western democracy is corrupt and decadent and so on, and it must be destroyed in order to save it. This meeting of minds and convergence of interests is not good news for the future of Islam or the future of Western democracy or the future of the human species. Personally, I’m not interested in the left-liberal tendency to use this for partisan political purposes: There are more important things at stake here than winning the next election, and in any event this issue feels like a lose-lose for everyone. It’s definitely not good news for those who want to resist both militant Islam and right-wing bigotry, as witness the political gymnastics performed in recent days by French President François Hollande and Hillary Clinton and even Bernie Sanders. Clinton’s post-Parisian lurch to the right is obviously a strategic maneuver designed to fend off charges that she’s a terrorist-coddling crypto-Muslim in the mold of Barack Hussein Obama. It should also serve to remind both Clinton’s fans and detractors who she really is: a classic “Cold War liberal,” progressive on domestic social issues (at least within the frame of neoliberal economic and fiscal policy) but supremely hawkish when it comes to foreign policy and national security. Whether that combination reflects genuine principle or sheer political calculation I couldn’t say, and with Hillary Clinton I’m not sure there’s a difference. In her best possible incarnation, she might be President Hubert Humphrey, albeit imprisoned by a political climate HHH could never have imagined. This point about the ideological marriage of ISIS and the Republicans has been made in various ways by various commentators since the Paris attacks — I made it myself in the immediate aftermath, even if I “buried the lede” — but I don’t think it can be restated often enough. Strategists of the Islamic State want Western regimes to persecute and marginalize Muslim citizens, crack down on immigration and squander their financial and political capital on a military response that is unlikely to produce a clear-cut victory and highly likely to harden anti-Western attitudes in the Islamic world. A similar approach worked brilliantly for Osama bin Laden in 2001 — better than he expected, I would guess — and ISIS possesses a far more sophisticated understanding of Western politics and culture than Osama and the old-school al-Qaida leadership ever did. ISIS has repeatedly made clear, in its own English-language publications, that it seeks to divide the world between the infidel Crusader West and the purifying force of radical Islam, and to destroy any “gray zone” of accommodation or détente that lies between those stereotypical extremes. As scholar Bernard Lewis explained in an extended discourse on this subject back in 1993 (long before he suckered himself into becoming a war cheerleader), the most important target of Islamic fundamentalism was not the West itself but “pseudo-Muslim apostates” who had abandoned the true faith and become corrupted by secular foreign ideologies like liberalism or socialism or nationalism. This also could not possibly be clearer in the case of ISIS, which has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and whose ideological outreach is all about providing unemployed and disaffected Muslim youth in Europe and North America (many from secular families) a renewed sense of identity and community. Some Republicans and European right-wingers are intelligent enough to understand all this, one must assume. It’s not some breathtaking new analysis to assert that the conflict between the West and violent Islamic extremism — and the conflict within the Muslim world itself — has more to do with ideology and economic conditions than with bombing sorties and “boots on the ground.” Either the leaders of the xenophobic right do not agree that they are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do or they don’t care, and both possibilities are equally puzzling. My conclusion is that some don’t know and others don’t care, and that none of them can help themselves. They are driven forward by larger forces they cannot resist or control — by the populist upsurge of fear and animosity that is driving the No Syrian Grandmas movement, and by their not-so-secret conviction that the Islamist militants are right about the decrepit condition of Western civilization and democracy. For at least the last 20 years and arguably closer to the last 50, the Republican Party has bet its future on appealing to a constantly shrinking electoral quadrant of exurban whites, largely in the South and Southwest. Throughout that period, the basis of that appeal has been the idea that America and Americanism (as core Republican voters understood those things) were in critical danger and under constant attack from within, from feminism and multiculturalism and the P.C. thought police, from Adam-and-Steve wedding cakes and the “war on Christmas” and white people who drove Volvos and wore funny glasses and drank chai lattes. Drive through any rural region of the United States — in my case, the impoverished hinterlands of central New York State, barely three hours from Manhattan — and you’ll encounter those “Take Back Our Country” lawn signs. No one on any side of the question needs to ask from whom. It’s glaringly obvious, or at least it should be, that those are exactly the same tendencies that the leaders of ISIS and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban perceive and despise in the West. Much of that derives from Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic extremism, who published his influential critique “The America That I Have Seen” after spending two years in various parts of the U.S. in the late 1940s. Qutb excoriated America for its “deviant chaos” and its focus on “animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins.” He probably never imagined the prospect of same-sex weddings, gender-neutral bathrooms or Kardashian-centric reality TV, but would have perceived such outrageous developments as logical results of America’s fundamental depravity. Some of Qutb’s complaints about materialism, consumerism and economic inequality, in fairness, are more redolent of left-wing moralizing, and those elements too can be found in contemporary Islamist rhetoric. But he was especially obsessed with the widespread secularism of American life, with the growing cultural influence of black people (whom he described as “bestial” and “noisy”) and with the sexual and intellectual freedom of women. Remember, this was 1949! He sounds like a horndog Baptist preacher out of some overcooked satirical novel when he inveighs against the “seductive capacity” of the American female, found in her “expressive eyes, and thirsty lips … in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs.” Whatever research Qutb may have undertaken on that subject during his time in Colorado and California was for the benefit of Islam, to be sure. My point is not merely that puritanism of all stripes has common roots and common goals, and always calls for a return to some bygone era of virtue that almost certainly never existed. That’s a point worth making, but here’s the real secret sauce that binds the insane doctrines of ISIS to the Republican Party madhouse of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: They both perceive all this decadence and moral relativism and loss of faith as the consequence of 200-odd years of democratic malpractice. One side has the decency to say openly that the legacy of 1776 and 1789 was complete bullshit from the get-go, nothing more than a high-minded pretext for imperial conquest and endless self-indulgence. The other side — and I think you know the one I mean — must pretend that democracy is or was a good idea, at least until it was distorted by Communist mind control or the Black Panthers or the 14th Amendment, while doing everything possible to undermine it. I don’t suspect I need to lay out here all the ways that the American right, faced with an evident demographic disadvantage, has sought to disenfranchise its opponents, poison the political and legislative process and transfer power to the super-rich. As I and others have repeatedly observed, the great victory of the Koch brothers and the Republican brain trust in the 2014 midterm election lay not just in the GOP’s huge congressional majority but in the shocking 36.6 percent turnout, the lowest in any national election since World War II. The American right cannot return to a system where only property-owning white men are allowed to vote, at least not without visibly ripping up the Constitution. But it has gone a long way toward creating an environment that discourages and disheartens everyone else, and where the Angry White Male vote is coddled and inflamed and privileged in numerous ways. As strange as this may sound, I do not doubt the faith that lies behind the right-wing distaste for democracy, or at least no more than I doubt the conflicted zealotry that lies behind militant Islam. Both sides correctly observe that the various strains of post-Jeffersonian democracy in the Western world have been plagued with problems from the beginning, and now face a dire crisis. Both the Western right and fundamentalist Islam yearn to pull their societies back toward a purer distillation of faith and a collective sense of purpose, and what could serve that purpose better than an apocalyptic "clash of civilizations"? They see the salvation of their respective societies in the rejection of the flabby ideal of democracy, explicitly or otherwise, and its replacement with a more virile, more godly and more effective system. Is Islam compatible with democracy? Scholars have batted that one around for decades without arriving at a clear yes-or-no answer. Roughly 40 percent of the world's Muslims live in nominal democracies now, for whatever that's worth, and the popular appetite for democracy demonstrated by the Arab Spring was unmistakable, if also unfulfillable. But it strikes me as the wrong question. We might as well ask whether capitalism is compatible with democracy, or whether human nature is. As Justice Louis Brandeis may have said (like so many famous quotations, this one is tough to pin down), we can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. By that standard we have never had democracy, and quite likely never will.Amid all the terror and panic and xenophobic hysteria of the Paris aftermath — which seems to have set the dial on the political Way-Back Machine to about 2002, at least for now — Republicans actually have a point. Maybe it’s half a point, because when Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Marine Le Pen) raise the contested question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, they don’t really understand the basic terms of the question, let alone where it leads. I will jump ahead here and suggest that you don’t get to ask that leading question about Islam and democracy, which has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, without asking a number of corollary questions. What do we mean by Islam, and what do we mean by democracy? Is “democracy,” as we currently understand it and experience it, actually compatible with the idea of democracy as it was handed down from antiquity and reconceived by the Enlightenment? But it does no good for people on the left who claim to stand for democracy, and for its associated values of human rights and civil liberties, to pretend that the questions about Islam and democracy do not exist or do not matter, or that they have been settled. The killings in the 11th arrondissement, and the reaction throughout the West, should be enough to tell us that isn’t so. It gives me absolutely no pleasure to insist that on this question, as on others, the Islamist militants of ISIS and the anti-Islamic Western right have reached the same conclusion. To put it more bluntly, every major Republican presidential candidate (excepting one or two of Jeb Bush’s multiple personalities) largely subscribes to the political and philosophical worldview of ISIS, except when it comes to final eschatological questions about who ends up in Paradise. Indeed, in both cases the idea that Islam and democracy are incompatible is more like an essential premise than a conclusion, and the kinship goes much deeper than that. Both sides begin with the same diagnosis, which is that Western civilization faces a fundamental, existential crisis, and arrive at closely allied prescriptions aimed at producing closely related outcomes. In one case, Western democracy is seen as a corrupt and decadent sham that will simply be destroyed (and perhaps, in some fantasy future, subjugated to Islamic rule). In the other, Western democracy is corrupt and decadent and so on, and it must be destroyed in order to save it. This meeting of minds and convergence of interests is not good news for the future of Islam or the future of Western democracy or the future of the human species. Personally, I’m not interested in the left-liberal tendency to use this for partisan political purposes: There are more important things at stake here than winning the next election, and in any event this issue feels like a lose-lose for everyone. It’s definitely not good news for those who want to resist both militant Islam and right-wing bigotry, as witness the political gymnastics performed in recent days by French President François Hollande and Hillary Clinton and even Bernie Sanders. Clinton’s post-Parisian lurch to the right is obviously a strategic maneuver designed to fend off charges that she’s a terrorist-coddling crypto-Muslim in the mold of Barack Hussein Obama. It should also serve to remind both Clinton’s fans and detractors who she really is: a classic “Cold War liberal,” progressive on domestic social issues (at least within the frame of neoliberal economic and fiscal policy) but supremely hawkish when it comes to foreign policy and national security. Whether that combination reflects genuine principle or sheer political calculation I couldn’t say, and with Hillary Clinton I’m not sure there’s a difference. In her best possible incarnation, she might be President Hubert Humphrey, albeit imprisoned by a political climate HHH could never have imagined. This point about the ideological marriage of ISIS and the Republicans has been made in various ways by various commentators since the Paris attacks — I made it myself in the immediate aftermath, even if I “buried the lede” — but I don’t think it can be restated often enough. Strategists of the Islamic State want Western regimes to persecute and marginalize Muslim citizens, crack down on immigration and squander their financial and political capital on a military response that is unlikely to produce a clear-cut victory and highly likely to harden anti-Western attitudes in the Islamic world. A similar approach worked brilliantly for Osama bin Laden in 2001 — better than he expected, I would guess — and ISIS possesses a far more sophisticated understanding of Western politics and culture than Osama and the old-school al-Qaida leadership ever did. ISIS has repeatedly made clear, in its own English-language publications, that it seeks to divide the world between the infidel Crusader West and the purifying force of radical Islam, and to destroy any “gray zone” of accommodation or détente that lies between those stereotypical extremes. As scholar Bernard Lewis explained in an extended discourse on this subject back in 1993 (long before he suckered himself into becoming a war cheerleader), the most important target of Islamic fundamentalism was not the West itself but “pseudo-Muslim apostates” who had abandoned the true faith and become corrupted by secular foreign ideologies like liberalism or socialism or nationalism. This also could not possibly be clearer in the case of ISIS, which has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and whose ideological outreach is all about providing unemployed and disaffected Muslim youth in Europe and North America (many from secular families) a renewed sense of identity and community. Some Republicans and European right-wingers are intelligent enough to understand all this, one must assume. It’s not some breathtaking new analysis to assert that the conflict between the West and violent Islamic extremism — and the conflict within the Muslim world itself — has more to do with ideology and economic conditions than with bombing sorties and “boots on the ground.” Either the leaders of the xenophobic right do not agree that they are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do or they don’t care, and both possibilities are equally puzzling. My conclusion is that some don’t know and others don’t care, and that none of them can help themselves. They are driven forward by larger forces they cannot resist or control — by the populist upsurge of fear and animosity that is driving the No Syrian Grandmas movement, and by their not-so-secret conviction that the Islamist militants are right about the decrepit condition of Western civilization and democracy. For at least the last 20 years and arguably closer to the last 50, the Republican Party has bet its future on appealing to a constantly shrinking electoral quadrant of exurban whites, largely in the South and Southwest. Throughout that period, the basis of that appeal has been the idea that America and Americanism (as core Republican voters understood those things) were in critical danger and under constant attack from within, from feminism and multiculturalism and the P.C. thought police, from Adam-and-Steve wedding cakes and the “war on Christmas” and white people who drove Volvos and wore funny glasses and drank chai lattes. Drive through any rural region of the United States — in my case, the impoverished hinterlands of central New York State, barely three hours from Manhattan — and you’ll encounter those “Take Back Our Country” lawn signs. No one on any side of the question needs to ask from whom. It’s glaringly obvious, or at least it should be, that those are exactly the same tendencies that the leaders of ISIS and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban perceive and despise in the West. Much of that derives from Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic extremism, who published his influential critique “The America That I Have Seen” after spending two years in various parts of the U.S. in the late 1940s. Qutb excoriated America for its “deviant chaos” and its focus on “animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins.” He probably never imagined the prospect of same-sex weddings, gender-neutral bathrooms or Kardashian-centric reality TV, but would have perceived such outrageous developments as logical results of America’s fundamental depravity. Some of Qutb’s complaints about materialism, consumerism and economic inequality, in fairness, are more redolent of left-wing moralizing, and those elements too can be found in contemporary Islamist rhetoric. But he was especially obsessed with the widespread secularism of American life, with the growing cultural influence of black people (whom he described as “bestial” and “noisy”) and with the sexual and intellectual freedom of women. Remember, this was 1949! He sounds like a horndog Baptist preacher out of some overcooked satirical novel when he inveighs against the “seductive capacity” of the American female, found in her “expressive eyes, and thirsty lips … in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs.” Whatever research Qutb may have undertaken on that subject during his time in Colorado and California was for the benefit of Islam, to be sure. My point is not merely that puritanism of all stripes has common roots and common goals, and always calls for a return to some bygone era of virtue that almost certainly never existed. That’s a point worth making, but here’s the real secret sauce that binds the insane doctrines of ISIS to the Republican Party madhouse of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: They both perceive all this decadence and moral relativism and loss of faith as the consequence of 200-odd years of democratic malpractice. One side has the decency to say openly that the legacy of 1776 and 1789 was complete bullshit from the get-go, nothing more than a high-minded pretext for imperial conquest and endless self-indulgence. The other side — and I think you know the one I mean — must pretend that democracy is or was a good idea, at least until it was distorted by Communist mind control or the Black Panthers or the 14th Amendment, while doing everything possible to undermine it. I don’t suspect I need to lay out here all the ways that the American right, faced with an evident demographic disadvantage, has sought to disenfranchise its opponents, poison the political and legislative process and transfer power to the super-rich. As I and others have repeatedly observed, the great victory of the Koch brothers and the Republican brain trust in the 2014 midterm election lay not just in the GOP’s huge congressional majority but in the shocking 36.6 percent turnout, the lowest in any national election since World War II. The American right cannot return to a system where only property-owning white men are allowed to vote, at least not without visibly ripping up the Constitution. But it has gone a long way toward creating an environment that discourages and disheartens everyone else, and where the Angry White Male vote is coddled and inflamed and privileged in numerous ways. As strange as this may sound, I do not doubt the faith that lies behind the right-wing distaste for democracy, or at least no more than I doubt the conflicted zealotry that lies behind militant Islam. Both sides correctly observe that the various strains of post-Jeffersonian democracy in the Western world have been plagued with problems from the beginning, and now face a dire crisis. Both the Western right and fundamentalist Islam yearn to pull their societies back toward a purer distillation of faith and a collective sense of purpose, and what could serve that purpose better than an apocalyptic "clash of civilizations"? They see the salvation of their respective societies in the rejection of the flabby ideal of democracy, explicitly or otherwise, and its replacement with a more virile, more godly and more effective system. Is Islam compatible with democracy? Scholars have batted that one around for decades without arriving at a clear yes-or-no answer. Roughly 40 percent of the world's Muslims live in nominal democracies now, for whatever that's worth, and the popular appetite for democracy demonstrated by the Arab Spring was unmistakable, if also unfulfillable. But it strikes me as the wrong question. We might as well ask whether capitalism is compatible with democracy, or whether human nature is. As Justice Louis Brandeis may have said (like so many famous quotations, this one is tough to pin down), we can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. By that standard we have never had democracy, and quite likely never will.

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The last JFK assassination myth: Debunking the eerie prediction that won’t go away

Professional psychic Jeane Dixon rose to fame based on her reputation for predicting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 52 years ago today. Dixon’s prediction — repeated in numerous news accounts and in her 1997 obituaries in national media — made her the best-known psychic in America. Did the prophetess really foresee the murder of a president? Well, kinda yes and kinda no. Dixon’s ominous foresight first appeared in a profile of the Washington socialite and seeress in Parade magazine on May 13, 1956, under the headline “Incredible Crystal Gazer.” Her prophesy appeared in the penultimate paragraph: “As for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office ‘though not necessarily in his first term.’” Okay, not too shabby. But the myth of Dixon’s prediction got inflated over time. When she died, CNN eulogized that Dixon had predicted that the fallen president would be “a tall young man with blue eyes and brown hair,” a reasonable enough resemblance to Kennedy (though his eyes were greenish-gray). But those physical details did not actually appear in her 1956 prediction. They came in Dixon’s, ahem, enhanced description of her forecast in her post-Kennedy authorized biography "A Gift of Prophecy" in 1965. Biographer Ruth Montgomery later complained that the publisher pressured her into cutting references to the psychic’s errors, such as Dixon’s election-eve reversal that Nixon would prevail over Kennedy. Dixon hedged on this, however, by warning that the Democrats could “steal the election” through ballot tampering, a hypothesis shared by some post-election observers. Back to the original prediction: Prophesizing a Democratic victory in 1960 was obviously a 50-50 gambit (since Orval Faubus of the States’ Rights Party wasn’t an odds-on favorite). Dixon’s foresight that unions would prove decisive in the post-war election was also a reasonable likelihood. And what about her statement that the executive would be “assassinated or die in office”? Eerie. But Dixon is on record making lots and lots (and lots) of predictions, most of which never came true. And, not infrequently, they were rather disturbing ones involving race riots, Communist conspiracies, terrorist attacks and military threats. Dixon’s political leanings made her popular with conservative politicians, such as Sen. Strom Thurmond (she became godmother to the South Carolina Republican’s son) and, in the 1960s, with California’s New Age-friendly governor, Ronald Reagan. As an actor and politician, Reagan freely professed an interest in astrology, another of Dixon’s specialties. In Reagan’s 1965 memoir, "Where’s the Rest of Me?," he also named Santa Monica astrologer Carroll Righter as a good friend. (Four years later the nattily dressed bachelor became the first – and only – astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine.) The Reagans were clearly comfortable around New Agers. But when Nancy was discovered consulting an astrologer during her husband’s second presidential term, it was not Dixon but San Francisco stargazer Joan Quigley from whom the first lady had been seeking guidance. Dixon had fallen from favor with the Reagans when she failed to predict, or encourage, Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House. During the summer of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, the candidate told a journalist: “I remember that Jeane Dixon … was always gung ho for me to be president — but in the foretelling part of her mind, she said back in ’68, ‘I don’t see you as president. I see you here at an official desk in California.'” Four months later Reagan was the president-elect. So, did Dixon predict Kennedy’s assassination? The final verdict is no. Dixon may have possessed some kind of sensitive or intuitive gift, but her fame rested on a process by which she scored an accurate hit or two out of thousands of public forecasts. Such was tragically the case with the Kennedy assassination. And, as in her 1965 biography, Dixon sometimes elaborated upon her prognostications after the fact. Although Dixon never became the seer to the White House, she did gain one documented entrance to the Oval Office. Dixon was friendly with Richard Nixon’s trusted secretary and gatekeeper, Rose Mary Woods. On at least one occasion, Woods told Nixon about terrorist threats prophesied by Dixon, which the president raised with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and other officials, according to White House tapes. In May of 1971, Woods persuaded the president to personally meet with Dixon. Nixon’s Oval Office session with “the soothsayer,” as he called Dixon, also got preserved on White House recordings. The prophetess told the president: “The Lord intended Nixon to be great …We’ll all get together and we’ll band united under the head of, actually, the father of our country — and that’s our president. And it happens to be Nixon.” Nixon was unmoved. He responded: “Yeah, well, I tell ya, y-you could sell almost anything.”Professional psychic Jeane Dixon rose to fame based on her reputation for predicting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 52 years ago today. Dixon’s prediction — repeated in numerous news accounts and in her 1997 obituaries in national media — made her the best-known psychic in America. Did the prophetess really foresee the murder of a president? Well, kinda yes and kinda no. Dixon’s ominous foresight first appeared in a profile of the Washington socialite and seeress in Parade magazine on May 13, 1956, under the headline “Incredible Crystal Gazer.” Her prophesy appeared in the penultimate paragraph: “As for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office ‘though not necessarily in his first term.’” Okay, not too shabby. But the myth of Dixon’s prediction got inflated over time. When she died, CNN eulogized that Dixon had predicted that the fallen president would be “a tall young man with blue eyes and brown hair,” a reasonable enough resemblance to Kennedy (though his eyes were greenish-gray). But those physical details did not actually appear in her 1956 prediction. They came in Dixon’s, ahem, enhanced description of her forecast in her post-Kennedy authorized biography "A Gift of Prophecy" in 1965. Biographer Ruth Montgomery later complained that the publisher pressured her into cutting references to the psychic’s errors, such as Dixon’s election-eve reversal that Nixon would prevail over Kennedy. Dixon hedged on this, however, by warning that the Democrats could “steal the election” through ballot tampering, a hypothesis shared by some post-election observers. Back to the original prediction: Prophesizing a Democratic victory in 1960 was obviously a 50-50 gambit (since Orval Faubus of the States’ Rights Party wasn’t an odds-on favorite). Dixon’s foresight that unions would prove decisive in the post-war election was also a reasonable likelihood. And what about her statement that the executive would be “assassinated or die in office”? Eerie. But Dixon is on record making lots and lots (and lots) of predictions, most of which never came true. And, not infrequently, they were rather disturbing ones involving race riots, Communist conspiracies, terrorist attacks and military threats. Dixon’s political leanings made her popular with conservative politicians, such as Sen. Strom Thurmond (she became godmother to the South Carolina Republican’s son) and, in the 1960s, with California’s New Age-friendly governor, Ronald Reagan. As an actor and politician, Reagan freely professed an interest in astrology, another of Dixon’s specialties. In Reagan’s 1965 memoir, "Where’s the Rest of Me?," he also named Santa Monica astrologer Carroll Righter as a good friend. (Four years later the nattily dressed bachelor became the first – and only – astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine.) The Reagans were clearly comfortable around New Agers. But when Nancy was discovered consulting an astrologer during her husband’s second presidential term, it was not Dixon but San Francisco stargazer Joan Quigley from whom the first lady had been seeking guidance. Dixon had fallen from favor with the Reagans when she failed to predict, or encourage, Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House. During the summer of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, the candidate told a journalist: “I remember that Jeane Dixon … was always gung ho for me to be president — but in the foretelling part of her mind, she said back in ’68, ‘I don’t see you as president. I see you here at an official desk in California.'” Four months later Reagan was the president-elect. So, did Dixon predict Kennedy’s assassination? The final verdict is no. Dixon may have possessed some kind of sensitive or intuitive gift, but her fame rested on a process by which she scored an accurate hit or two out of thousands of public forecasts. Such was tragically the case with the Kennedy assassination. And, as in her 1965 biography, Dixon sometimes elaborated upon her prognostications after the fact. Although Dixon never became the seer to the White House, she did gain one documented entrance to the Oval Office. Dixon was friendly with Richard Nixon’s trusted secretary and gatekeeper, Rose Mary Woods. On at least one occasion, Woods told Nixon about terrorist threats prophesied by Dixon, which the president raised with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and other officials, according to White House tapes. In May of 1971, Woods persuaded the president to personally meet with Dixon. Nixon’s Oval Office session with “the soothsayer,” as he called Dixon, also got preserved on White House recordings. The prophetess told the president: “The Lord intended Nixon to be great …We’ll all get together and we’ll band united under the head of, actually, the father of our country — and that’s our president. And it happens to be Nixon.” Nixon was unmoved. He responded: “Yeah, well, I tell ya, y-you could sell almost anything.”Professional psychic Jeane Dixon rose to fame based on her reputation for predicting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 52 years ago today. Dixon’s prediction — repeated in numerous news accounts and in her 1997 obituaries in national media — made her the best-known psychic in America. Did the prophetess really foresee the murder of a president? Well, kinda yes and kinda no. Dixon’s ominous foresight first appeared in a profile of the Washington socialite and seeress in Parade magazine on May 13, 1956, under the headline “Incredible Crystal Gazer.” Her prophesy appeared in the penultimate paragraph: “As for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office ‘though not necessarily in his first term.’” Okay, not too shabby. But the myth of Dixon’s prediction got inflated over time. When she died, CNN eulogized that Dixon had predicted that the fallen president would be “a tall young man with blue eyes and brown hair,” a reasonable enough resemblance to Kennedy (though his eyes were greenish-gray). But those physical details did not actually appear in her 1956 prediction. They came in Dixon’s, ahem, enhanced description of her forecast in her post-Kennedy authorized biography "A Gift of Prophecy" in 1965. Biographer Ruth Montgomery later complained that the publisher pressured her into cutting references to the psychic’s errors, such as Dixon’s election-eve reversal that Nixon would prevail over Kennedy. Dixon hedged on this, however, by warning that the Democrats could “steal the election” through ballot tampering, a hypothesis shared by some post-election observers. Back to the original prediction: Prophesizing a Democratic victory in 1960 was obviously a 50-50 gambit (since Orval Faubus of the States’ Rights Party wasn’t an odds-on favorite). Dixon’s foresight that unions would prove decisive in the post-war election was also a reasonable likelihood. And what about her statement that the executive would be “assassinated or die in office”? Eerie. But Dixon is on record making lots and lots (and lots) of predictions, most of which never came true. And, not infrequently, they were rather disturbing ones involving race riots, Communist conspiracies, terrorist attacks and military threats. Dixon’s political leanings made her popular with conservative politicians, such as Sen. Strom Thurmond (she became godmother to the South Carolina Republican’s son) and, in the 1960s, with California’s New Age-friendly governor, Ronald Reagan. As an actor and politician, Reagan freely professed an interest in astrology, another of Dixon’s specialties. In Reagan’s 1965 memoir, "Where’s the Rest of Me?," he also named Santa Monica astrologer Carroll Righter as a good friend. (Four years later the nattily dressed bachelor became the first – and only – astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine.) The Reagans were clearly comfortable around New Agers. But when Nancy was discovered consulting an astrologer during her husband’s second presidential term, it was not Dixon but San Francisco stargazer Joan Quigley from whom the first lady had been seeking guidance. Dixon had fallen from favor with the Reagans when she failed to predict, or encourage, Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House. During the summer of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, the candidate told a journalist: “I remember that Jeane Dixon … was always gung ho for me to be president — but in the foretelling part of her mind, she said back in ’68, ‘I don’t see you as president. I see you here at an official desk in California.'” Four months later Reagan was the president-elect. So, did Dixon predict Kennedy’s assassination? The final verdict is no. Dixon may have possessed some kind of sensitive or intuitive gift, but her fame rested on a process by which she scored an accurate hit or two out of thousands of public forecasts. Such was tragically the case with the Kennedy assassination. And, as in her 1965 biography, Dixon sometimes elaborated upon her prognostications after the fact. Although Dixon never became the seer to the White House, she did gain one documented entrance to the Oval Office. Dixon was friendly with Richard Nixon’s trusted secretary and gatekeeper, Rose Mary Woods. On at least one occasion, Woods told Nixon about terrorist threats prophesied by Dixon, which the president raised with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and other officials, according to White House tapes. In May of 1971, Woods persuaded the president to personally meet with Dixon. Nixon’s Oval Office session with “the soothsayer,” as he called Dixon, also got preserved on White House recordings. The prophetess told the president: “The Lord intended Nixon to be great …We’ll all get together and we’ll band united under the head of, actually, the father of our country — and that’s our president. And it happens to be Nixon.” Nixon was unmoved. He responded: “Yeah, well, I tell ya, y-you could sell almost anything.”Professional psychic Jeane Dixon rose to fame based on her reputation for predicting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 52 years ago today. Dixon’s prediction — repeated in numerous news accounts and in her 1997 obituaries in national media — made her the best-known psychic in America. Did the prophetess really foresee the murder of a president? Well, kinda yes and kinda no. Dixon’s ominous foresight first appeared in a profile of the Washington socialite and seeress in Parade magazine on May 13, 1956, under the headline “Incredible Crystal Gazer.” Her prophesy appeared in the penultimate paragraph: “As for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office ‘though not necessarily in his first term.’” Okay, not too shabby. But the myth of Dixon’s prediction got inflated over time. When she died, CNN eulogized that Dixon had predicted that the fallen president would be “a tall young man with blue eyes and brown hair,” a reasonable enough resemblance to Kennedy (though his eyes were greenish-gray). But those physical details did not actually appear in her 1956 prediction. They came in Dixon’s, ahem, enhanced description of her forecast in her post-Kennedy authorized biography "A Gift of Prophecy" in 1965. Biographer Ruth Montgomery later complained that the publisher pressured her into cutting references to the psychic’s errors, such as Dixon’s election-eve reversal that Nixon would prevail over Kennedy. Dixon hedged on this, however, by warning that the Democrats could “steal the election” through ballot tampering, a hypothesis shared by some post-election observers. Back to the original prediction: Prophesizing a Democratic victory in 1960 was obviously a 50-50 gambit (since Orval Faubus of the States’ Rights Party wasn’t an odds-on favorite). Dixon’s foresight that unions would prove decisive in the post-war election was also a reasonable likelihood. And what about her statement that the executive would be “assassinated or die in office”? Eerie. But Dixon is on record making lots and lots (and lots) of predictions, most of which never came true. And, not infrequently, they were rather disturbing ones involving race riots, Communist conspiracies, terrorist attacks and military threats. Dixon’s political leanings made her popular with conservative politicians, such as Sen. Strom Thurmond (she became godmother to the South Carolina Republican’s son) and, in the 1960s, with California’s New Age-friendly governor, Ronald Reagan. As an actor and politician, Reagan freely professed an interest in astrology, another of Dixon’s specialties. In Reagan’s 1965 memoir, "Where’s the Rest of Me?," he also named Santa Monica astrologer Carroll Righter as a good friend. (Four years later the nattily dressed bachelor became the first – and only – astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine.) The Reagans were clearly comfortable around New Agers. But when Nancy was discovered consulting an astrologer during her husband’s second presidential term, it was not Dixon but San Francisco stargazer Joan Quigley from whom the first lady had been seeking guidance. Dixon had fallen from favor with the Reagans when she failed to predict, or encourage, Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House. During the summer of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, the candidate told a journalist: “I remember that Jeane Dixon … was always gung ho for me to be president — but in the foretelling part of her mind, she said back in ’68, ‘I don’t see you as president. I see you here at an official desk in California.'” Four months later Reagan was the president-elect. So, did Dixon predict Kennedy’s assassination? The final verdict is no. Dixon may have possessed some kind of sensitive or intuitive gift, but her fame rested on a process by which she scored an accurate hit or two out of thousands of public forecasts. Such was tragically the case with the Kennedy assassination. And, as in her 1965 biography, Dixon sometimes elaborated upon her prognostications after the fact. Although Dixon never became the seer to the White House, she did gain one documented entrance to the Oval Office. Dixon was friendly with Richard Nixon’s trusted secretary and gatekeeper, Rose Mary Woods. On at least one occasion, Woods told Nixon about terrorist threats prophesied by Dixon, which the president raised with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and other officials, according to White House tapes. In May of 1971, Woods persuaded the president to personally meet with Dixon. Nixon’s Oval Office session with “the soothsayer,” as he called Dixon, also got preserved on White House recordings. The prophetess told the president: “The Lord intended Nixon to be great …We’ll all get together and we’ll band united under the head of, actually, the father of our country — and that’s our president. And it happens to be Nixon.” Nixon was unmoved. He responded: “Yeah, well, I tell ya, y-you could sell almost anything.”

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