This week Claire Cain Miller of the NY Times reported on an interesting migration trend. The young, college-educated, professional-and-entrepreneurial class we expect to see concentrating in Brooklyn, the SF Bay Area, DC, Seattle, and three or four other usual-suspect big cities is also now showing up in medium-sized and small places. The story was based on a new study, "Young and Restless," from City Observatory.

This is exactly in parallel with what we've been seeing and reporting on, in locales as non-usual-suspect as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Greenville, South Carolina, or Holland, Michigan, or Redlands, California. Now Deb Fallows has a report on this same phenomenon in the capital city of her home state: Columbus, Ohio.

Among the many things I hadn't known about Columbus before we went there is that it's considered the #3 city in the U.S. fashion-design universe. We've got New York, LA, and then — Columbus, home of influential retailers including The Limited, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch, and others, plus CCAD, the influential Columbus College of Art and Design.

Deb describes some of the "creative class" people who are moving to Columbus, or moving back to Columbus after growing up there and living elsewhere, to be part of the fashion movement. She also describes the touching fate of the state's symbolic Buckeye tree, planted on an official Tree Walk on the grounds of what had been the Ohio Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. I will leave the rest of the story to her and hope you find it as interesting to read as we did to learn about.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/hip-in-the-heartland/381923/

Usually I am a fan of all things American. But ...

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/history-greatest-monster/381938/

The South China Morning Post has a fascinating story about the flight of a Chinese-owned airliner that eventually got its 200 passengers safely to the ground, but not before some misadventures.

The screenshot above, used with permission from FlightAware, shows the route the plane had to take before Chinese controllers allowed it to land. Here's a larger view of the trip, the track of which picks up a little while after its departure.

Highlights were:

• The plane, an Airbus flown by China Eastern, started out in Asahikawa on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido;

• It was headed for Beijing's Capital Airport, shown as ZBAA/PEK on the screen above. But it couldn't land there because the visibility was too low. Planes abort landings because of low ceilings or limited visibility all the time; knowing how and when to execute a "missed approach" safely is part of normal IFR (instrument-flight rules) skills. There are circumstances where some airliners can land with no visibility, but let's ignore them for now. Usually the problem is fog, clouds, and so on. In this case, it was because the pilots couldn't see through Beijing's polluted air. According to the SCMP, some 60 flights were diverted from Beijing that day because the air was opaque.

• If a plane, especially an airliner, can't land at one airport, it just goes somewhere else. This too happens all the time, as weary frequent flyers know. But the controllers at the nearby Jinan and Qingdao airports in Shandong province said, "Unt-uh." You are not cleared to land. This is very much not the way the aviation world usually works. Remember, too, that this wasn't some threatening alien craft but an international flight by one of China's mainstay airlines.

• Unable to land in Beijing, and not approved to land anywhere else, the plane just circled around in holding patterns, as you see above.

• Eventually and inevitably, it ran low on gas.

• At this point the pilots reported to the controllers that they were in emergency circumstances and needed to land now. The controllers in Qingdao finally said, OK, now that it's an emergency, you can land. According to the SCMP account, the plane had so little fuel left over when it touched down that the final approach to Qingdao was all-or-nothing. There wouldn't have been enough fuel for another "go around."

Here is how the flight looks on a normal day:

This story has everything: Signs of China's growth, prosperity, and strength—planes full of tourists to Hokkaido, shiny new airline fleets. On the other hand, the inescapable consequences of pollution. And, perhaps most important, the distance still to go in developing the complex, resilient, trust-rather-than-command-based networks that are necessary to operate the highest-value modern organizations in the right way.

Universities can't (in my view) operate well in a climate of press censorship; high-tech startups are hindered when there is doubt about contract rights and rule of law; and things like an aviation network don't work well when people are afraid, or unwilling, to adapt and take local initiative rather than waiting for commands. Yes, I do realize how adaptable and de-centralized most of China usually is. But the reason that high-end modern industries like aerospace, bio-tech, and info-tech are such important bellwethers for China's development is that their success depends on a combination of clearly understood standards and delegated authority and decision-making. These modern systems can't work if everyone is waiting for explicit instructions from headquarters or mainly worry that they'll be punished for exercising on-scene judgment.

There is a larger point to make here, about why these top-end, "soft infrastructure" developments will be harder for China (though still perhaps possible) than the hard-production miracles of the past generation. In fact there's a whole book on the topic! I will be interested to hear from my friends in the Chinese aviation world and who will be blamed for what after this event.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/what-a-wandering-airliner-says/382078/

Four years ago, when Republicans were sweeping the boards in many midterm contests, the Tea Party faction had one of its biggest and strangest victories in Maine. Biggest, in that the Tea Party Republican candidate who became Maine's governor, Paul LePage, is arguably the most right-wing governor in the country, serving in what is far from the most right-wing state. Strangest, in that he eked out a victory not over the Democratic candidate, who faded badly in the last weeks of the campaign, but over the Independent Eliot Cutler.

That race four years ago was full of what-ifs. What if the Democrats, when it became clear that their candidate (Libby Mitchell) was sinking to a distant third, had explicitly or implicitly thrown in the towel or backed Cutler — similar to what is happening now in the Senate race in Kansas? What if fewer people had voted early, before it became clear that the real race was between Cutler and LePage? What if the Maine moderate/centrists who have sent the likes of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Angus King to Washington had a clearer picture of how hard-line LePage was going to be in office? What if the dynamics had shifted a few days earlier, so that Cutler had caught up in time? In the end LePage beat Cutler by 10,000 votes, with Mitchell another 100,000 behind.

As I wrote back in 2010, Eliot Cutler and his wife Melanie are close friends of ours; their daughter Abby, who is now a doctor, once worked for the Atlantic. That meant I wasn't a dispassionate observer, but also that I knew Eliot well enough to be enthusiastic about what he could have done as governor.

This year two things are similar: LePage has been running as a Republican, and Cutler as an Independent. The big difference is that the Democrats have unified earlier, and more powerfully, behind a stronger candidate than last time. This is Rep. Mike Michaud, from Maine's northern — and poor, and rural — Second Congressional District.

Two months ago, I noted that Angus King, who won statewide races for governor and U.S. Senate as an independent, had endorsed Eliot Cutler. Since then, the race has fallen into a pattern with Michaud and LePage closely matched at just under 40% support, with Cutler below 20%, even after strong performances in a recent string of debates.

Yesterday two significant press conferences occurred. First, Eliot Cutler said that if people supported him but thought he could not win, they had his blessing to vote strategically—that is, to act as if it were a run-off between the other two candidates, even though he was staying in the race.

Then, his crucial supporter Angus King said that, in effect, he would be voting strategically, and switched his endorsement to Mike Michaud. As King put it (via a Politico story):

“Eliot Cutler is a fine man who would make a good governor of our state,” King said in a statement. “But, like Eliot, I too am a realist. After many months considering the issues and getting to know the candidates, it is clear that the voters of Maine are not prepared to elect Eliot in 2014. … The good news is that we still have a chance to elect a governor who will represent the majority of Maine people: my friend and colleague, Mike Michaud.”

These moves obviously change the nature of the race, and they avoid another potential what-if: What if a clear majority of Maine's voters wanted not to have Paul LePage for another four years, but got just that because of a split in the liberal-centrist vote?

This also heightens the importance of what Eliot Cutler said yesterday, after he that his supporters should feel free to pay attention to the polls when voting:

For those voters who have been seized with anxiety and who don’t want fear to become an indelible hallmark of politics in Maine I have a single request: Regardless of whether you vote for me or someone else, please join me in supporting the proposed citizens’ initiative on ranked choice voting and sign a petition at the polls on November 4 to bring ranked choice voting to a vote of the people in a referendum.

The machinery of democracy is already flawed in enough ways, inadvertent and intentional, and the match between party alignment and popular wishes is already sufficiently askew, that we need to seize any opportunity to fix easily correctible errors. So if I were in Maine, in addition to considering "strategic" questions, I would sign that petition. People of Maine, over to you.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/political-news-from-Maine-latest-shifts/382151/

About ten days ago Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself giving a speech and handling a Q&A with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing — and doing it in Chinese. You've probably seen it already, but here it is again just in case.

A few hours later, Isaac Stone Fish of FP posted an item with his answer to the question that most Westerners who've been in China had been asked by their friends. Namely, How did Zuckerberg sound? And his answer was harsh. It began:

I've gotten several emails asking about how Zuckerberg's Mandarin is. In a word, terrible.

The piece was titled "Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin Like a Seven-Year-Old," and it went on to explain why Stone Fish thought so.

Not everyone agreed.

For instance, Mark Rowswell, a Canadian stand-up comic, language teacher, and media personality who under his Chinese name Dashan ("big mountain") is famous throughout China for his native-sounding skills in Mandarin, offered a message of support:

This is like a Tweet from Peyton Manning about some youth-league player saying, "the kid can throw." Before I had seen that reaction to Stone Fish's item or anything else, I did a Tweet of my own that, like many expressions in that medium, was not as fully thought-out as it could have been:  

The not fully thought-out part was that the "Like a Seven-Year-Old" headline mis-stated the point Stone Fish wanted to make. The main problem with Zuckerberg's Chinese (and later on I'll explain why I dare even say this) is how it sounded — namely, as if he had never heard of the all-important Chinese concept of tones. English speakers know how tones can affect meaning. "You're going where?" with a rising-question tone at the end is a request for information. "You're going where?" with a high-astonished-angry tone at the end is something else.

But tones in English mainly affect the shape and meaning of an entire sentence. In Chinese they signal the meaning of every single word. It's hard for English-speakers to grasp how confusing it must be for Chinese speakers to hear their language rendered without attention to tones, which is essentially what Zuckerberg did, because it's like explaining differences in hue to a color-blind person. But in her classic work on the subject, Dreaming in Chinese, a linguist whom I happen to know gives the example of he and she. In English, there is quite a huge difference between those terms. No native English speaker ever mixes them up. But even native Chinese speakers who are very good in English frequently get them confused, or have to stop to think carefully which one they want. (The book explains why.) We think: How can he versus she possibly be confusing? Chinese speakers think: How can you possibly not remember which tones wǒ men ("we," written 我们) has?

A seven-year-old native speaker of Chinese would get all the tones right. That's what native speakers do, and that is what was wrong with the "like a seven-year-old" headline. The real point was closer to, "He speaks it like some cab driver from [name your bad-accent country] you can barely understand."

All this is to introduce a guest post by an American who has made learning Chinese a larger part of his life effort than Zuckerberg, as CEO of a gigantic and fast-growing company, could do. His name is Kevin Slaten, and I turn the floor over to him. (Isaac Stone Fish knows that I'll be posting this, and I'll link to or quote any reply he might make. I've edited Slaten's note only to reflect the fact that Isaac's last name is two words, Stone Fish.)

FP Editor Insults Zuckerberg Like a Seven-Year-Old

By Kevin Slaten

Last Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with faculty and students at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management to discuss Facebook and technology. To everyone's surprise, not only did Zuckerberg open with “dajia hao!” (“hi, everyone!”), but he proceeded to use Chinese to conduct most of the 30-minute conversation.

A number of observers noted that while his Mandarin was not textbook, Zuckerberg deserves admiration for the hard work he put in to get to that point, and even then, he was relatively relaxed and seemed to enjoy the occasion to converse in his new language.

But the Asia Editor at Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish, took an entirely different—and solidly inane—perspective: “Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin Like a Seven-Year Old.”

Stone Fish writes, “It's hard to describe in English what Zuckerberg's Mandarin sounded like, but I'd put it roughly at the level of someone who studied for two years in college, which means he can communicate like an articulate 7-year-old with a mouth full of marbles.”

This article is the literary—if I can even use such a respectable word—equivalent to a person heckling somebody with a lisp who has the courage to get up in front of a lot of people and make a respectable speech despite knowing fully well his own linguistic challenges. To use a public platform to make fun of this person is at best irrelevant and at worst mean-headed.

Someone could respond to me: this is Mark Zuckerberg, among the most rich and powerful people in the world. Okay, fine. Zuckerberg probably can't hear haters like Fish through his oceans of cash.

But this is not really about Zuckerberg; Stone Fish's negativity is directed at many more people than one.

There were more than 8,000 shares of Stone Fish's article, meaning tens or hundreds of thousands of people have read it. Among these are intermediate-level learners of the Chinese language who, like Zuckerberg, have not yet mastered the challenging tonality aspect associated with Mandarin Chinese.

What is Stone Fish, a “China expert”, telling these students of Chinese when he is tearing down a notable person for speaking non-standard Mandarin? He's telling them, “you'll be laughed at”, thereby alienating the people most likely to study and work in and around China in the future. This is not the sort of role modeling and leadership that we should expect from Foreign Policy's Asia Editor.

What's more, as a second-language learner of Chinese himself, for Stone Fish to look down on others for their “imperfect” Chinese is both arrogant and risky. There are highly respected China experts—dare I say much more experienced and influential in the field than Isaac Stone Fish—who have used their nonstandard Mandarin to deliver well-received public speeches. Hell, even  the Mandarin used in speeches by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping (neither of whom were native Mandarin speakers) was notoriously nonstandard.

Those of us who did not grow up speaking Chinese, Mr. Stone Fish, should be especially careful not to throw stones in our glass houses. You might rethink your language confidence if Da Shan—the Chinese name of Mandarin expert Mark Roswell—published an article leading with “Isaac Stone Fish Speaks Chinese Like a Seven-Year-Old”. And before you become defensive, Stone Fish, remember that a seven-year-old Chinese kid could probably speak Mandarin more fluently than the majority of us foreign learners.

What's puzzling about Stone Fish's aimless post is that it comes from Foreign Policy, particularly as it was written by that magazine's lead China-focused editor. In my days as a Junior Fellow in the China Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I remember when Foreign Policy, owned at the time by the Carnegie Endowment and housed in the floor above my office, was often mentioned among my colleagues and peers for providing valuable insight into global trends.

Foreign Policy says of itself: “Foreign Policy and ForeignPolicy.com provide the best available analysis of pressing global challenges by the world’s leading experts.” So, where exactly does a childish analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's Chinese fit into this?

Based on Foreign Policy's own standards, Stone Fish's article should have looked much different.

It should have discussed how few non-Chinese CEO's have been brave enough to make such a determined effort to speak to Chinese in their own language. It should have looked into Zuckerberg's motivations for joining the board of Tsinghua's business school, such as an attempt to nurture a back channel through which he could pursue future ventures in China, especially as Facebook has been blocked by government censors there.

The article should have looked at how Zuckerberg's performance reflects a number of larger trends. Study of Chinese language and culture is on the rise among younger generations, including Millennials like Zuckerberg (and Stone Fish, and myself). China itself is also on the rise, fixing to become the largest economy in the world and host a massive consumer market; major companies are going to increasingly find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. A boss who is willing to put himself out there to communicate in Mandarin is a marketing strategy.  

Of course, a full analysis would have taken a lot more time and effort for Isaac Stone Fish than just throwing barbs at Zuckerberg for doing his best to communicate in Chinese.

Speaking of Chinese fluency, Mr. Stone Fish, we didn't catch that link to your own 30-minute Chinese-language speech in front of millions of people around the world. Do us the pleasure of linking it in the comments below. [JF note: Or, since we don't have comments here, it can be part of a follow-up post.]

Kevin Slaten is the program coordinator at China Labor Watch. He holds a Master's degree in Advanced Chinese Language and Culture from The Ohio State University. His opinions are his own. Follow Kevin on Twitter or his blog.

Just two more language points of my own:

1) This whole episode illustrates why Chinese is considered a "harder" language for English-speakers than, say, French or even German. Learning any language involves both memory work (vocabulary, gender, conjugations, etc) and imaginative leaps in phrasing and structure, so that you don't seem just to be creating a sentence in English and then plugging in the foreign words. Beyond those "normal" challenges, Chinese requires wrestling with two elements that just aren't part of the native English-speaker's repertoire: tones in spoken Chinese, and characters in the written language.

If Chinese is your native language, you hear those tones as soon as you hear anything, and you deal with characters starting in school. Foreigners often find one or the other, tones or characters, the real obstacle, although in theory they need to learn both. My wife Deb has an excellent ear for language, and is always being told that she sounds good in whatever language she is speaking. Thus tones — a semi-musical concept — came quickly for her. I have a bad ear and have never been told that I "sound good." But I like the character-based writing system; I find that remembering characters comes relatively easily; and so in China I felt more or less visually literate, although I would struggle to be understood. This is why, as Deb explains in her book, we felt well-prepared as a language team in China — I could read, she could talk — but could be in trouble just on our own.

2) Slaten's note brings up the crucial point of "face" — or pride, vanity, dignity, whatever term you'd want — in learning foreign languages.

Learning any language is a long process of making mistakes and learning from them, even with your first language. It's not embarrassing for little children, because they don't know they should be embarrassed, and because we all realize that they are kids. ("He said 'I goed to school,' isn't that cute!") But by the time you're an adult, you have more to lose by sounding stupid or clumsy in another language. At the very best, you'll have a more limited range of tools with which to shape and shade your meaning. At worst, you'll make people laugh at you.

As English has become the international language, something that was different even a generation ago, the embarrassment penalty for non-native speakers has become lower in English than in any other language. Partly that's because so many people start studying it relatively young. (If you're an ambitious parent in Brazil, Russia, Germany, and China too, you want your children to get good early English training.) Partly it's because there are so many "native" variants of English around the world: the English-English variety; the standard-American English that via TV, movies, and commerce is becoming a standard world wide; Aussie; Indian; South African; Scottish; Caribbean; West African; Canadian; Singaporean; you name it. And partly it's because we're so accustomed to hearing those native-speaker variants and also so many non-native speakers getting their meaning across in their own approximations of English. Go to any international business conference. Get in any big-city cab in the United States.

Acceptance of a range of accents and approaches is more normal in China than in, say, Japan. There are many variants of Chinese inside the country, and there's a charming assumption that foreigners should try to deal with the language (unlike the frequent Japanese assumption that their language is too uniquely Japanese for foreigners to try, plus the counterpart in France). Still: because Chinese is so "hard," and because for adults the consequences of sounding silly or dumb in Chinese are so discouraging, many people don't try.

I never tried in China in any public circumstance remotely like Zuckerberg's, because the only language I'd learned early enough to sound even passable, French, wasn't relevant. With all the other languages I've coped with since then, I've mainly tried to develop: passive understanding, so I could have some sense of what has happening around me; reading understanding, since as with characters that's easier for me; and basic-functional competence, so I could say "I'd like to go here, not there" or "I left my bag on the Number Ten metro, can you help me find it?" or "I would like two tickets to Yinchuan." And since my professional identity and personal sense-of-self are wrapped up with using even one language precisely, I avoid putting myself in public circumstances where I would come across as saying, "Me like China but no like pollution and censorship. They bad."

All of which is why I think Isaac Stone Fish was "fair" in saying that Mark Zuckerberg's Chinese didn't sound very good — but that Dashan, Kevin Slaten, and others are right to say that the effort should be praised and not ridiculed. Fear of ridicule is precisely what keeps me and countless others from ever daring what Zuckerberg did, and the existing stock of it is so great that it's a shame to add any more.

Mark Zuckerberg is in a position not to care if anyone laughs at him, but even he must notice. So good for him for taking this risk, and thanks to both Isaac Stone Fish and Kevin Slaten for prompting a discussion of larger matters of language.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/mark-zuckerberg-speaking-chinese-brave-foolish-or-both/382254/

Two weeks ago Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself doing a speech and Q-and-A session in China, in Chinese. Soon thereafter, Isaac Stone Fish of Foreign Policy, whose friends had asked him how Zuckerberg's Chinese was, responded "terrible." He did an item called "Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Chinese Like a Seven-Year-Old." Yesterday I posted a critical-review-of-that-critical-review, by Kevin Slaten, plus some other thoughts about language learning.

Since then I've received an avalanche of interesting letters, and I plan to share an assortment of them tomorrow. For now, Isaac Stone Fish deserves a clear shot to reply to Kevin Slaten's criticisms. I turn the floor over to him:

Thanks Mr. Fallows for your thoughtful post, and for giving me the chance to respond, and Mr. Slaten, thanks for your contribution.

After Zuckerberg spoke Mandarin, several news outlets claimed his Mandarin was fluent. That is incorrect. There’s a difference between speaking unstandard Mandarin -- which, as Mr. Slaten correctly pointed out, is what that Mao and Deng spoke -- and speaking broken Mandarin with mangled tones, which is the way Zuckerberg spoke.

The problem with Zuckerberg’s Mandarin was not just his pronunciation; he also made many grammatical errors. You’re right that a seven-year-old native speaker -- even if his mouth was full of marbles -- would not make the tonal or grammatical errors that Zuckerberg made. It was the best analogy I could think of to describe the quality of his Mandarin: any other suggestions for analogies would be much appreciated.

Learning Chinese was great fun, and very helpful to me in my career; I strongly recommend it to people who want to work in China. But it’s very time-consuming. Even if it would be encouraging, I am not going to pretend that a beginner can study Chinese part-time for a few years and suddenly learn to speak excellent Mandarin.

In the end of his piece, Mr. Slaten writes, “Speaking of Chinese fluency, Mr. Stone Fish, we didn't catch that link to your own 30-minute Chinese-language speech in front of millions of people around the world.”

I must admit defeat. Yes, I could give a 30-minute Chinese-language speech much better than Zuckerberg’s, especially if I prepared for the topic, as Zuckerberg seemed to have done. But I will never be able to satisfy Mr. Slaten’s request to do so in front of millions of people. Why? Because only an exceedingly small number of people actually care about the level of my Mandarin. Take my former Chinese teachers and my parents out of that equation, and that number drops dangerously close to zero.

Thanks to Isaac Stone Fish for his good-humored response, to Kevin Slaten for his stimulus for this discussion, and to everyone else who has written. Tomorrow it will be your turn.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/isaac-stone-fish-with-more-on-mark-zuckerbergs-chinese-language-show/382267/

Two days I described the disagreement on whether it was brave or crazy for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, to do a public session in Chinese, and the larger issues of language-learning the controversy brought up. Yesterday Isaac Stone Fish, author of an item for Foreign Policy saying that Zuckerberg hadn't done very well, explained why he had made that case and answered criticism from another student-of-China named Kevin Slaten.

A slew of mail from people who have worked the frontiers of language has arrived, and to wrap up this mini-series you'll find an assortment below. [Update: I've just received a very interesting note on the business, as opposed to linguistic, ramifications of Zuckerberg's talk, which if I can work out some details I'll put up as a post-finale bonus later today.]

1) "The audience really couldn't tell what he was saying." Thomas Rippel, an Austrian who is fluent in English and who has lived and worked in China, writes to defend Isaac Stone Fish:

While the title of Isaac Stone Fish's article is ill chosen, I agree with most of it. Zuckerberg's Chinese sounded awful.

It was not just the tones he just completely ignored. He pronounced the "i" in shi as "e". That kind of elementary pronunciation mistake (shi is the most common word in the Chinese language [JF: and is pronounced more like shhh]) makes it clear that he spent 95+% of his time learning from books and not speaking and listening.

The fact that his wife is Chinese is critical here [JF note — see below on the tricky question of whether Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's wife, "is Chinese."] It makes you wonder why he put all this effort into learning such a difficult language at all if he ignored to put any effort into speaking it in a way that anyone can understand.

I could tell that for the most part the audience could not understand what he said.

I wouldn't say its embarrassing (and neither did Stone Fish). I applaud Zuckerberg for trying and even did so by sharing his interview wish friends on Facebook without any cynical remarks. But Stone Fish was asked by non-Chinese speakers how good his Chinese was. And his answer was honest and accurate.

Kevin Slaten's article on the other hand is just a contradiction in itself. He is the one who calls Stone Fish a bully, a personal attack. Its easy to call someone a bully, or a racist or bigot for that matter, and just end any meaningful discussion without going into the issue being discussed. It is but a benign example of how people like Slaten continually enforce a kind of self censorship in the press that stifles honest discussion.

2) "I couldn't understand him, but in a way that's to his credit." This note is from an "ABC," a term much more familiar in China and in Chinese-language conversation than in the U.S.

ABC stands for "American-Born Chinese," that is, a native-born U.S. citizen of Chinese ancestry, like former Cabinet secretaries Gary Locke or Steven Chu, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, athletes Michelle Kwan or Michael Chang, designer Maya Lin, etc. Or, as is relevant to point out, Priscilla Chan, who was born in Massachusetts but learned Chinese as a child from her family.

ABC is different from meiji huaren, 美籍华人, which is "Chinese-American" and would include people who were born in China (or elsewhere) but have emigrated. It is very different from Zhongguo ren, 中国人, which means a Chinese citizen and is unfortunately the way Zuckerberg referred to his wife in the talk.

Back to our ABC reader:

Just wanted to throw in my two cents as an ABC with a qualified conversational fluency in Mandarin.

From the little that I listened to, I had trouble understanding Zuckerberg for two reasons: first, his general lack of tone (which you explain at length), and second, his vocabulary exceeds my own.

For this latter reason I'm obviously in my own glass house, but I think that's possibly something that his naysayers are glossing over -- the feat of memory required to have as expansive a vocab as Zuckerberg displays -- and for this fact alone he would earn kudos. To do so in a public setting? Even more so.

I am currently in my third extended visit to China and trying to learn the language. First of all, as you already know, the Chinese are very kind and accepting of those attempting the language.

On my first, trip my plan was to "bus surf" across China from Beijing to Kunming only knowing how to say "hello" and "thank you". It worked for me in Europe, Mexico and down to Guatemala, thru the Philippines but not so well in China. I can, anywhere on earth buy food and get into a hotel but buying a bus/train ticket in China IS difficult. I did it with the kindness of many Chinese strangers who may have spoken as few as 20 words of English because of their own fears of being thought of as stupid.

I then began to listen to people speak. I studied my phrase book and ask questions. Always listening to the tones and the tempo. I figure if I can know 100 words and ten popular phrases (or questions) I can survive here.

I have traveled in 18 other countries and have been in countries that have a tonal language, like Vietnam but theirs has much higher highs than in China. The tones here sound muted but I am figuring them out.

It does take guts to learn a new language and more guts to use it outside of the classroom. I congratulate Mark and now consider him my hero.

By the way, Mark may have money but I have something he doesn't. I am retired and have the luxury of spending 90 day visits in China just sitting in parks, volunteering to teach and riding the city bus all day for one yuan to listen and learn.

7) A secret oath among people who study Chinese.

I have been studying Chinese for 10+ years and am now full time student (of mandarin) at [a major university in China] so have been keenly following the news on Mark....

The point of view that I have come to is that there seems to be a secret oath among those of us who try to study Chinese. We all know that we aren’t fluent, but we present united front to those who don’t know better. My wife is Chinese, and it is very rare for American (who professes to be fluent) to actually talk to her in Mandarin. Its’ like a mutual non-aggression pact, and Stone Fish seems guilty of breaking this.

8) "Using Mandarin in China shows even more respect than it otherwise would." And to wrap things up, another Austrian on the geopolitics of language.

I do appreciate the focus you put on how such negative discussions just promote the view that foreign languages are just too hard to learn (to tremendously simplify it).

Now, I’d still like to jump in and say that something must be wrong with the teaching if “intermediate-level learners of the Chinese language … have not yet mastered the challenging tonality aspect associated with Mandarin Chinese” complain that non-standard English is much less accepted than you seem to think (I started making Youtube videos some time ago, and then stopped and haven’t done nearly as much as I wanted simply because the first comments I ever got were not about the actual content but about the way I sounded and appeared, to the viewer/troll, to be behaving) – but all such thoughts and comments would just promote this superficial view that has been so dominant. [JF note: I didn't say there was no embarrassment penalty for non-native speakers bungling their way through English. I said that the penalty was lower there than for any other language, which I believe is absolutely true.]

As you and Kevin Slaten have begun to point out, there would be deeper issues hiding behind the over-discussed way Zuckerberg sounded.

It isn’t even just the aspect of marketing / PR that a CEO learning and using Mandarin in China provides, there are even deeper issues of how languages and their use are interpreted, on an international relations / hierarchical level, for example.

“English as dominant” is a phrase that would actually show that, if only we thought about it a little more, for the wide use of the language is considered to be a reflection of the standing of the English-speaking countries in the international arena. Thus, using Mandarin in China shows even more respect than it otherwise would - or perhaps, it could be seen as showing a bit of a willingness to submit to another country’s/culture’s higher role (which one could argue to always be an issue with a civilization such as China’s, which has been having a tendency of seeing itself as the pinnacle of civilization, after all).

Power relations come into play… and the opposite also applies, so that English native speakers who speak a foreign language may be seen by their kin as betraying the dominance of their language and making themselves smaller than they are. One would hope not, but such feelings of cultural superiority might play a role in making some criticism all the stronger. (“Why make an ass of yourself – and thus us – when you speak the dominant world language?” may be the subconscious thought.)

Then again, Chinese attitudes towards foreign Mandarin speakers vary, depending on person and situation. Zuckerberg as something of an idol likely got even more of an applause than the average foreigner who’s lauded about his/her “great Chinese” after speaking half a sentence, and it seems to have thrown some of the reporting (which at least felt as if it was saying that he must have done great given how much applause, and oohs and ahhs, he got, whereas other people in other situations might just be told that they are not actually making any sense because they aren’t really saying anything right).

Yet again, getting too good at it can be a challenge to self-understanding of the native speakers. There’s that tendency to see Chinese, both the language and the culture / social psychology, as almost a genetic issue, where any ethnic Chinese is supposed to speak Chinese and understand Chinese behavior by virtue of their “being” (looking) Chinese. And with that comes the anxiety expressed in “天不怕地不怕，只怕老外说中国话”… which apparently came from Kevin Rudd, though. [JF note: This is a joke that former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose command of Mandarin no one disputes, told in a speech. Loosely: "I'm not afraid of much, but a foreigner speaking China, now that's scary!"]...

So, how good was Zuckerberg’s Chinese? Don’t know; don’t care; I’d rather sit down and study more myself. How much it could tell us that there are so many discussions about that superficial issue, though – now that is something I find myself very interested in.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/more-on-zuckerberg-and-chinese/382261/

I promise, this is it. But I think I can also promise that this is worth it. Earlier today, I posted a summary of the back-and-forth about Mark Zuckerberg's decision to do a 30-minute session in Chinese, and what that meant for the psychology of language learning.

Now Paul Duke, an American proficient in Chinese who explains his bona fides below, weighs in with the last word. (Unless I hear from Zuckerberg himself...)

Let me give you the short version of my view, then I'll explain:

Zuckerberg's interview in Chinese was a brilliant move from a business perspective. To go to China -- where Facebook is blocked! -- and make the gigantic gesture of respect of speaking Chinese (whatever the quality) for half an hour, scored more positive publicity for Facebook than any other imaginable strategy. My hat is off to Zuckerberg as a brilliant businessman.

Now the details:

I've been studying Chinese for more than 20 years, and have worked over the past 17 years on and off in and around the Chinese movie industry, as a producer, subtitler, liaison generale, and most entertainingly (for me) as translator for Donald Sutherland and Paul Mazursky during production of the Chinese film Big Shot's Funeral, directed by China's most successful comedy director, Feng Xiaogang (who speaks no English other than a handful of swear words), and funded by Columbia Pictures, back in 2001.

Whenever you mention your old apartment in Beijing, the air quality in Beijing, etc., I know exactly whereof you speak. From 2011 to 2013 I lived just a little ways from where you used to live, in the apartment complex called "Richmond Park".

Here's what I think about Zuckerberg and his Chinese which has been missed in every commentary I've seen:

-- Mark Zuckerberg is by all accounts an extremely shrewd businessman. The movie The Social Network portrayed this in a very entertaining and, I gather from reading about the real Mark Zuckerberg, genuinely insightful way.

-- China and its closed market for social media (ie, no Twitter, and no Facebook, as you well know) is possibly the biggest business threat to the current global domination of Facebook. Putting it simply, if someone in China creates a social media network on the web that matches the power of Wechat on smartphones, then Facebook may never be able to truly dominate social media in China the way it does in the US. In fact, a popular (in China) Chinese competitor to Facebook is at the moment the only truly imaginable serious business competition for Facebook. (Of course, one has to admit the caveat that everything can change fast on the web, etc etc, as newspapers and magazines know well!)

-- Zuckerberg, being an extremely shrewd and ambitious businessman, is looking to use every tool he possibly can to break into the Chinese market and make sure Facebook is not bested by a Chinese competitor, in China or worldwide.

-- His appearance at Qinghua and his ability to speak half-decent Chinese after just a few years of study struck a publicity home-run for Facebook IN CHINA which cannot be overstated. Facebook is blocked in China, but Chinese media and social media was aflame with the story of the multi-billionaire founder of Facebook who speaks Chinese!

-- As you yourself well know, even in today's exceedingly practical and expedience-minded Chinese society, face, politeness and respect still matter quite a bit. For Facebook to be blocked by the Chinese government, and for Zuckerberg to nevertheless put hundreds and hundreds of hours into studying Chinese is an amazing act of respect. How many Chinese people do you think were saying to themselves and their friends, "Wow, we block this guy's website and cost him billions in advertising and he goes out and learns our impossible language!"?

-- I've already gone on too long, but I'm just going to wrap this up by saying: Zuckerberg has, with one half-hour interview, put the Chinese government on the defensive -- at least from a "face" and "politeness" point of view. At this point, he has shown tremendous respect toward the Chinese, and many millions of Chinese are saying "this guy isn't so bad, maybe Facebook isn't so bad, our government should really loosen up."

The next step -- for Zuckerberg's Chinese proficiency and for his PR campaign -- would be to announce he's going to spend a year in Taiwan in one of those immersion programs at a university there. He could say: "I'm convinced from all the feedback I've gotten that I need to be full-time in a Chinese-only environment, and much as I love China, I can't run Facebook from there because I can't get to the website! But China is only a 90 minute flight away and I'll be visiting regularly."

Well, maybe the PR part would backfire, but all of us who have struggled with Chinese know this is the only way to make the leap from not-bad textbook-and-tutor Chinese to really feeling comfortable in the language, and more importantly, using the vocabulary and sentence structures which native speakers use.

We can only imagine...

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/the-under-appreciated-genius-of-mark-zuckerberg-in-china/382324/

Get out and vote! I will be doing so in D.C. later today, though not, alas, for a full-fledged senator or representative, nor an anti-leafblower ordinance, but there's always next time. I'll vote once my wife Deb and I get back to D.C. from West Virginia, latest stop on our American Futures journeys.

What you see above is part of the mailings flooding into homes in West Virginia's Second Congressional District. It's now represented by Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, who is expected to win today to succeed Jay Rockefeller in the U.S. Senate. Alex Mooney is the Republican candidate to succeed Capito in Congress. Barack Obama Nancy Pelosi the anti-gun Michael Bloomberg Nick Casey Jr. is the Democrat.

Here's what a local Republican received yesterday. It gives a flavor of how local races are being "nationalized."

We're not here on a political-reporting swing—it is amazing how much more interesting it is to see the country doing something other than watching campaign rallies—but it's election day, after all.

The other big item on the local ballot is a levy to support improvements in the Charleston public library. On Halloween, Larry and Sandra Groce, about whom you'll be seeing more in this site, decorated their entire house on the theme of: You know what would be scary? No library! There's a nice story about them and their house in The Charleston Gazette; here is the way the house looked in the stark autumn light yesterday, which gives a rough idea:

Vote!

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/vote-early-and-often/382333/

This post is to introduce a new email newsletter that I hope you’ll be interested in. It’s about the “American Futures” reporting project that my wife Deb and I have been undertaking through the past year and are ready to take in what we think will be exciting new directions.

When we began this project for The Atlantic in the summer of 2013, with our colleagues at Marketplace radio and the digital-mapping company Esri, our idea was to visit some of the smaller towns and cities the media tend to overlook, to see  how people were adjusting to the economic, environmental, and technological opportunities and challenges of this era.

Reinvention and resilience across the nation
Read more

This was a variant on the classic road-trip approach to reporting the diverse realities of America, the variant being that we were making the journey in a little Cirrus SR-22 propeller plane. Since only a few small towns are on an Interstate, but nearly all of them have local airports—a total of 5,000 across the country—this has allowed us to range among places as far-flung as Eastport, Maine and Redlands, California, or Duluth, Minnesota and Columbus, Mississippi. In the months ahead we’re planning to travel through the Central Valley of California; to the American Prairie Reserve in Montana; to coal country in Tennessee and Kentucky, and rural Alabama; and many places more.

By now we’ve done two articles in the print edition of The Atlantic; with our reporting colleague John Tierney we’ve done well over 200 on-line features; we’ve joined Kai Ryssdal and his Marketplace team for reports from South Dakota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Maine, and other corners of the country; we’ve done video and audio features for The Atlantic’s site; and we’ve made speeches and presentations across the country.

We’ve learned about tidal-energy projects, about the rise of craft brewing, about how old cities are attracting young residents to their downtowns, about the surprising role that libraries are playing in the digital age, and a dozen themes more.

Deb has a background in linguistics and has reported on regional language patterns, as well as stories of innovative schools, refugee resettlements, arts programs, and the fun of flying. John is a former college political-science professor and has written about innovations at community colleges and research universities — and also the craft-distillery movement, neighborhood-redevelopment efforts, and the public architecture of the Great Plains. We’ve ended each day of reporting very tired, but even more excited and surprised by what we’ve learned.

We’ve found this project every bit as engaging as we expected, but we’ve also discovered something we hadn’t foreseen. There is a pattern that connects the individual stories we’ve reported, and that sharply differs from the tone of most coverage we read or hear. At the national level, American politics is bitterly polarized, and the mood of the country can seem fearful and downcast. But city by city we’ve seen examples of collaboration, practical-minded compromise, long-term investment in a region’s future, and a coast-to-coast resurgence in manufacturing and other startup activity.

Deb Fallows, John Tierney, and I are producing reports for this project on The Atlantic’s site almost every day. You can find a master collection of them here: http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/american-futures/  But with the daily surge of material appearing so often on TheAtlantic.com, we wanted to make it easier for readers who are interested to follow the reports we’re putting up. That’s why we’ve decided to start this newsletter.

Every few days or once a week, I’ll send you an email that contains links to the latest items by Deb, John, or me from our American Futures reporting.  A typical email newsletter will be brief, with very little text, merely calling your attention to the five or six most recent new pieces, with links you can click to read more.

I hope you’ll find this interesting and will want to continue to receive the emails. If not, there’ll be an easy-to-use “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email. Click it, and we’ll bother you no more. Sign up by putting your email address in the box below and clicking "subscribe."

Here is a small sampling of pieces we've done in the past year that will give you a taste of the variety of topics and places we’re exploring.

Online posts.

By Jim Fallows:

• The surprising team that is remaking one of the poorest parts of the nation’s poorest state: “Joe Max Higgins and Theories of History.”
• A high school in southern Georgia preparing a wide variety of students for jobs of the future. “What ‘Career Technical’ Education Looks Like.”
• The biggest infrastructure project in America, and why it matters. “California High-Speed Rail.”
• Why the news media present Americans as the objects of big unstoppable trends, but many Americans consider themselves in the active, not the passive, mode. “National Problems, Local Solutions.”
• Why an internationally successful tech company prefers to stay in an out-of-the-way small California city. “Why Do Tech Companies End Up Where They Are?”

By Deb Fallows:

• How a school in South Carolina is preparing elementary-school children from a wide range of backgrounds for tech jobs. “America’s Tiniest Engineers.”
• How our language defines and reveals us. “What We Mean When We Say Hello.”
• How the humble library is finding a crucial new place in the Internet era. “Not Your Mother’s Library.”
• How cities from the Great Plains to northern New England are the new American melting pot. “The Story of ‘Brings Luck.’”

By John Tierney:

• How a “career” academy enhances the economic and cultural life of a state. “An Educational Surprise from Down East.”
• How an extremely small town is using arts and culture to lead its revival. “Building a Museum: Report from Down East.”
• Why community colleges matter. “When a Community College Transforms a City.”

Video:

• The Geography of Small Talk: How Do You Say Hello?
• Jim and Deb Fallows, interviewed by James Bennet at Washington’s historic Sixth and I Synagogue, as played on C-SPAN.

Articles:

• “An Intimate View of America, From Above” by Deb Fallows, in The New York Times.
• “Why Cities Work Even When Washington Doesn’t,” by Jim Fallows, in The Atlantic.
• “The Little Town That Might,” by Jim Fallows, in The Atlantic.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/how-to-sign-up-for-our-american-futures-newsletter/382438/

I've been offline for many hours and am just now seeing the announcements from Beijing. The United States and China have apparently agreed to do what anyone who has thought seriously about climate has been hoping for, for years. As the No. 1 (now China) and No. 2 carbon emitters in the world, and as the No. 1 (still the U.S.) and No. 2 economies, they've agreed to new carbon-reduction targets that are more ambitious than most people would have expected.

We'll wait to see the details—including how an American president can make good on commitments for 2025, when that is two and possibly three presidencies into the future, and when in the here-and-now he faces congressional majorities that seem dead-set against recognizing this issue. It's quaint to think back on an America that could set ambitious long-term goals—creating Land-Grant universities, developing the Interstate Highway System, going to the moon—even though the president who proposed them realized that they could not be completed on his watch. But let's not waste time on nostalgia.

Before we have all the details, here is the simple guide to why this could be very important.

1) To have spent any time in China is to recognize that environmental damage of all kinds is the greatest threat to its sustainability—even more than the political corruption and repression to which its pollution problems are related. (I'll say more about this connection some other time, but you could think of last week's reports that visiting groups of senior Chinese officials bought so much illegal ivory in Tanzania during a state visit that they drove the black market price to new highs. [I've changed the description of these allegations slightly from the first-posted version.])

You can go on for quite a while with a political system like China's, as it keeps demonstrating now in its 65th year. But when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won't last. The Chinese Communist Party itself has recognized this, in shifting in the past three years from pollution denialism to a "we're on your side to clean things up!" official stance.

Analytically these pollution emergencies are distinct from carbon-emission issues. But in practical terms pro-environmental steps by China are likely to help with both.

2) To have looked at either the numbers or the politics of global climate issues is to recognize that unless China and the U.S. cooperate, there is no hope for anyone else. Numbers: These are far and away the two biggest sources of carbon emissions, and China is the fastest-growing. As John Kerry points out in an op-ed in tomorrow's NYT, reductions either of them made on its own could just be wiped out unless the other cooperates. Politics: As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks five years ago showed, the rest of the world is likely to say, "To hell with it" if the two countries at the heart of this problem can't be bothered to do anything.

We see our own domestic version of this response when people say, "Why go through the hassle of a carbon tax, when the Chinese are just going to smoke us to death anyway?" This new agreement does not mean that next year's global climate negotiations in Paris will succeed. But it means they are no longer guaranteed to fail.

3) China is a big, diverse, churning, and contradictory place, as anyone who's been there can detail for hours. But for the past year-plus, the news out of China has been consistent, and bad.

Many people thought, hoped, or dreamt that Xi Jinping would be some kind of reformer. Two years into his watch, his has been a time of cracking down rather than loosening up. Political enemies and advocates of civil society are in jail or in trouble. Reporters from the rest of the world have problems even getting into China, and reporters from China itself face even worse repression than before. The gratuitous recent showdown with Hong Kong exemplifies the new "No More Mr. Nice Guy" approach.

A nationalistic, spoiling-for-a-fight tone has spilled over into China's "diplomatic" dealings too. So to have this leader of China making an important deal with an American president at this stage of his political fortune is the first news that even seems positive in a long while.

We'll wait to see the details. But at face value, this is better news—about China, about China and America, and about the globe—than we've gotten for a while.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/is-the-us-china-climate-announcement-as-big-a-deal-as-it-seems/382658/

I like and respect former Senator, soon-to-be-former Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, and I am sorry that he is leaving this position. For day-job reasons, namely closing a long magazine story that involves the Pentagon, I have been absent from this site for a while and will be for another day. But let me quickly put up what I consider a useful reference: it's a conversation I had with Hagel just four weeks ago, at the Washington Ideas Forum here in D.C:

In particular I direct your attention to:

• The section beginning at 15:30 in the video above, when I ask Hagel how his experience as an enlisted combat veteran of Vietnam affects his decisions and outlook in the Pentagon. Note especially what he says starting at around 16:50 on how lessons of Vietnam made him want to know, or at least to ask, how a military commitment would end before deciding to begin it. "It's made me cautious."*
• Around 2:10, I ask a several-part question, the last part of which is: Will today's "long wars" ever come to an end? Hagel covers other parts of the question, but not that one, in his initial response. So at 6:45 I re-ask it and say, At what point, if ever, will our Middle Eastern wars be declared over? You'll hear his reply.
• Right at the start, I ask him about Defense Department measures to cope with Ebola. This was news that he had announced a few minutes before our talk.
• Starting at 8:50, I ask about the Pentagon's view of whether climate change is a national-security concern (answer: it is) and what he thinks should be done about it.

More later. In the meantime, my Atlantic colleague Steve Clemons explains the view from inside Hagel's camp here, and Fred Kaplan explains in Slate some of the sources of Hagel's distance from the White House and other power centers.

*  For the record, early in this answer Hagel makes a verbal slip that I decided not to correct. He says that 1968 was the bloodiest year for America in Vietnam, which is true, and that 56,000+ Americans were killed in Vietnam, which is also true. But he says that they all died that year, which of course (and as of course he knows) is not true. The actual American death toll in 1968 was over 16,000, which is shocking on its own (more than 300 per week) but is not 56,000. I judged in real time that Hagel's meaning was sufficiently clear that it was unnecessary, and would have seemed pedantic, for me to interrupt and say "You're talking about the casualties for the whole war, not that one year."

Also for the record, if you'd like a reminder of the odious attempt to block Hagel's confirmation based on smear allegations that he was anti-Semitic, a claim denounced by leading figures in Nebraska's Jewish community and by Israelis with whom Hagel had worked, and also based on the preposterous suggestion that he might be on the North Korean payroll (I'm not making that up), see this and this on the anti-Semitism campaign, and this on North Korea. Spoiler: the person challenging Hagel to prove that he wasn't a North Korean agent was none other than Ted Cruz.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/talking-with-chuck-hagel/383128/

I spent much of this afternoon flying a small airplane, with my wife Deb. The idea (after closing an article) was to get off the East Coast, toward our destinations in the west, before the latest winter storm immured people in the east for Thanksgiving.

Our landing at Huntington airport on the West Virginia - Kentucky - Ohio border was right at dusk, so I was grateful for the big, wide runway and the absence of any problematic wind. On the other hand, I can see pretty well ... which is why I noted this video about what it is like to land the same kind of airplane I've been flying, if you can't see at all. Watch and admire. People are capable of a lot. Early happy Thanksgiving.

Blind Pilot Lands Plane from Creative Speakers Service on Vimeo.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/how-to-land-an-airplane-if-youre-blind/383217/

Through the 1930s, a woman named Caroline Henderson wrote a popular series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly called "Letters from the Dust Bowl." She had grown up in Iowa, gone to college at Mount Holyoke, moved to the far western part of the Oklahoma panhandle to begin life as a farmer, and married a man she first met when he worked digging a well on her farm.

For a while in the early 20th century, the Henderson family enjoyed good years. Here were Caroline and Will Henderson in their heyday on their 640-acre farm, standing in front of the house that Will Henderson built. It's the same house you see in the opening picture for this post.

Then things turned very bad for the country, and the high plains farming region, and the Henderson family and their neighbors, during the combined economic and ecological disaster of the Depression and Dust Bowl years. That is what Caroline Henderson wrote about for the magazine, in installments that looked like this when they were first published (in a photo from our bound volumes, courtesy of my colleagues Jennifer Barnett and Nora Biette-Timmons):

Here is the sort of thing she wrote:

We have had several bad days of wind and dust. On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. Nothing that you see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms.

Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all plans for improvement or normal farm work, and the difficulty of making other plans, even in a tentative way. To give just one specific example: the paint has been literally scoured from our buildings by the storms of this and previous years; we should by all means try to 'save the surface'; but who knows when we might safely undertake such a project?...

The prospects for a wheat crop in 1936 still remain extremely doubtful...

You can read some of her installments from the archives here.

Why am I mentioning this? Through this week my wife Deb and I are making our way across the country in our little airplane, getting away from the East Coast just before the big storm on Tuesday night and heading for an period of Western-states reporting for our American Futures series in the weeks to come. Once we get to California we'll have more to say about some surprising experiences en route in West Virginia and Kentucky.

But I couldn't let this day end without mentioning the surprisingly emotional effect of seeing the very site from which a correspondent for our own magazine wrote about her and her region's hardships 80 years ago.

We decided to make the Thanksgiving Day stop in the western panhandle town of Guymon, Oklahoma, a commercial center about 30 miles from the Hendersons' farm. This is how Guymon looked on the way in today, with a very strong, steady down-the-runway wind that gave a slow-mo feeling on approach, as if landing a helicopter. ("I guess it's always this windy?" I said to the airport manager after we landed. "What wind?" he replied—but we both knew he was putting me on.)

Then we followed the instructions that Deb had gotten from the Henderson's grandson, a professor who still owns the farm and has asked that it not be developed or commercially farmed. We drove west for 20-plus miles, toward the small settlement of Eva. Then up another 2-lane paved road, and then looking for the intersection of two unpaved roads, known as "Road N" and "Road 9." The GPS lat/long coordinates were a big help.

We found their farm, and the remnants of the buildings whose construction and care Caroline Henderson had described so painstakingly in her dispatches and an eventual book, Letters from the Dust Bowl. With one or two details removed from the frame — modern wires here, a large commercial sow-raising operation in the distant background there — we felt we could have been looking at a scene from the 1930s, minus only the dust.

This part of the country is now connected to the nation and the world in a way hard to imagine when the Hendersons were fighting dust and drought and despair. Yet even now, this area has the distinct sense of being very, very far away from anything, and very much on its own. Here is the view to the south:

And more to the east:

And to the north. In her letters Caroline Henderson describes the barn that Will built. It is now collapsing into itself, the roof timbers falling into its interior.

Everything seemed shaped by the wind, even without its former burden of dust.

In later installments Deb will have more to say about Caroline Henderson's writings, her life, and her example. At the end of Thanksgiving Day I merely wanted to note the very powerful effect of seeing the very house in which she wrote her chronicles of a terrible stage in the country's history, the very land that she and her husband and their daughter fought to preserve. (Let alone the improbability of letters she wrote at her desk, which we saw inside the house, making their way to editors in Boston, who made them known across the country.) Most of us fancy ourselves "brave" and "independent" in various ways. But to have even this rough idea of where and how these families lived, through all those years, gives a different meaning to courage and independence. Today I am thankful for what Caroline Henderson and others like her did; and that my wife and I had a chance for this further understanding of the world they lived in; and that our magazine played its part in their saga long ago.

Now, back on the road early tomorrow.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/thanksgiving-in-the-dust-bowl/383251/

It's been four weeks since the U.S. election day. Through most of that time I've been offline and underwater (or in the air), finishing one big project and beginning another. Starting this week, my wife Deb and I will be in the West for an extended period of American Futures reporting that fortunately coincides with the extended period known as "winter" in the East. To kick that off, a word about the connection between what we're seeing town-by-town and the larger politics of the country as a whole.

Election Day brought a lot of results I was sorry about, from Maine to Florida to Colorado to Alaska, but also a few glimmers on the bright side:

• Next year's class of freshman representatives will include two mid-30s Democrats who scored upset wins. One is Pete Aguilar, the mayor of my ancestral home town of Redlands, California, whom we met and interviewed as part of our reporting in Redlands last year. Republicans have held this district for most of my lifetime, but Aguilar made it through on a big Republican night by a 51-49 margin. The other is Seth Moulton, who upset long-time incumbent Representative John Tierney (not our John Tierney) in the Democratic primary and then beat his Republican opponent easily in the general. You'll hear more from Moulton, among others, in my magazine story next month.

• Voters in Kanawha County, West Virginia, which includes the capital city of Charleston, approved by a 2-to-1 margin a tax increase, or levy, to support the local public library. This was only a year after a similar measure had gone down to a bad defeat. We were in Charleston on election day, and Deb Fallows explained why the library-funding fight mattered, for civic-culture reasons extending beyond the library itself. Editor Brad McIlhinny of the Charleston Daily Mail also wrote about some of the civic-culture questions we discussed with him and opinions editor Kelly Merritt.
• Jerry Brown won in a walk for a fourth term as governor of California, which for reasons I explained early last year I view as a plus for the state and for the country as a whole. The benefit to the country, I argued in that earlier article, is what Brown's longevity shows about the often-scorned craft of practical politics. Brown's survival is also an obvious plus for his signature high-speed rail project in California, which I've examined in 14 pre-election installments and about which there's one final episode to come.
• My current "taxation without representation" home borough of D.C. passed a marijuana-legalization initiative by a mind-blowing huge margin. I voted yes (when we got back from Charleston before the polls closed), not because I wanted to relive the high times of the 1960s but because the police and penal activity devoted to this front of the War on Drugs is such a brutalizing dead loss. Now our seigneurs in the Congress, elected from somewhere else and representing exactly no one in D.C., will decide whether to allow the locally passed initiative to take effect.

On to the larger political theme: Through the past year Deb Fallows, (our) John Tierney, and I have tried to demonstrate that even as national-level politics comes closer to the devastating pointlessness of trench warfare in 1917, political life at the local and regional level can be impressively sane, practical-minded, and productive. This article from a few months ago is one example: We've had lots more, like this and this.

A few weeks ago a reader named John Kilian wrote in from North Carolina to say that I had correctly observed these promising signs from non-national-level politics, but that I was drawing the wrong conclusion from them. As he put it:

What you are discovering on your road trip is the genius of conservatism. A smart conservative could use your title, “national problems, local solutions” as a title for a fine book or lecture. Laboratories of democracy, etc. People know what is best for their own community, and they know best how to deal with local issues.

You can read his full argument here. Since then lots of readers wrote in to make the opposite case. Here is a sampling.

1) It's all about scale. From a reader in New York state:

My wife and I watched Ken Burns's The Roosevelts. It reminded me, as I'm sure it did many others, of how the scale and urgency of this country's challenges can overwhelm the capacity of local solutions. And that at such times ... Civil War, Reconstruction, the excesses of the Gilded Age when individuals' power exceeded local or even national public ability to act, war ..."local" takes on a different meaning.

What Mr. Kilian may not consider is that today's global connectedness can make any country itself "local" but that local impact can be quickly global. I point to the current ebola scare/hysteria/crisis as just one example of that. Or go back to 9/11 as another historic marker of such local/global interplay. As Chalmers Johnson famously noted, "blowback" from seemingly remote actions can be seen as local impacting global ....

Your series highlights how innovation in all fields can and does emerge from small scale actions inside bigger systems. The real question as I see it is how does such innovation infiltrate and change the larger system in a symbiotic vs. cancerous relationship.

One can look at how we're meeting (or not) our national energy demands as an example of how a mix of options (wind, solar, geothermal, bio-fuel, fossil) could be applied differently, reflecting local conditions. An energy mix that would work effectively in the Southwest would require a different mix in the Northeast.

However, there are forces of big systems ... in this example, the Big Energy corporate entities ... that work hard politically to maintain their position of economic power. So, Mr. Kilian's apparent focus on the deficiencies of "big gummint" overlooks or avoids the reality of other big powers that transcend and can determine outcomes in our social system.

2) "I had to laugh." From a reader in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota:

I had to laugh after reading the comments from Mr. Kilian …. He seems to have confused the notion of political alliances and parties with the notion of practicality.

Your tour of smaller cities throughout the nation has demonstrated that local governments and local interests create practical solutions for the issues they face. Neither national party has a really focused capacity to address these types of local issues, but local groups need and want to fix whatever ails them. This is simple, obvious, and practical—but frankly has nothing whatsoever to do with either a progressive or conservative sensibility.

Practicality is indeed a very “American” characteristic, and we find it wherever we travel in the USA. Mr. Kilian seems to feel his own party has a greater claim on practicality—without any really compelling justification.

I would argue that both major parties have found themselves increasingly distant from the issues and concerns of everyday citizens who are simply trying to make life meaningful, safe, and productive. In fact, the policies of both parties are now more closely associated with large donor groups (Wall Street, big oil, big insurance, military contractors, arms suppliers) than with any of the issues and concerns of most everyday working Americans.

This is arguably one of the main reasons why local governments find that they must solve their own problems. The most important discretionary parts of our national budget have been spent on completely failed wars serving nobody but the contractors and military suppliers.

If such spending ($3 to 5 trillion by most estimates—mostly off budget, while schools, bridges, roads, and other critical infrastructure is failing in very dangerous ways) is what Mr. Kilian means by fiscally and socially conservative policy, I would enjoy the chance to hear his rationale—but I am not holding my breath.

3) "It's the equivalent of shutting down all the hospitals, paying prayer groups to heal people, and then proclaiming victory when someone recovers from the flu." From a 30-something reader on the East Coast:

Mr. Kilian's points would be great had he raised them 30 years ago, but now they seem hopelessly out of touch. Sure, "National problems, local solutions" would be a title for a conservative text nowadays, but that text would be filled with rants about judicial activism, the national war against babies, and the urgent need to keep Mexicans from using Ebola as part of their alliance with ISIM.

The idea of states as laboratories is largely unused now, with the notable exception of marijuana legalization (and I can't imagine a Republican president from the current flock that would have held the DEA back as much as we've seen under our president).

Yes, local solutions are helping, but when he refers to the "vacuum caused by the lack of federal action," I had to laugh. That same lack of action is the very hallmark of modern conservatism. The GOP's entire strategy has not been "reasoned debate about localizing government;" rather it's been "obstruct, obstruct, and obstruct." His points are the equivalent of shutting down all the hospitals, paying prayer groups to heal people, and then proclaiming victory when someone recovers from the flu. Sure, local action is better than no action, and no action is what we often see at the federal level, but that hardly supports the idea of being a conservative nowadays.

Maybe he means simply being a reasonable, small-government conservative, but he may as well ask you to become a dragon-slaying knight as well. Or he may as well ask Obama to show Rooseveltian fortitude and threaten to pack the Supreme Court through sheer will. We deal in the politics we have, not the politics we wish to have (or the politics Aaron Sorkin puts on TV).

Certainly, local problems can benefit greatly from localized solutions. But one thing that goes unnoticed by Mr. Kilian, I believe, is that those local solutions are largely liberal ideas as well.  He says the HSR project is a local solution? Ask any conservatives in California if it's local, and I suspect they'll complain about the tyranny of Governor Brown and the need for county level solutions ... [JF note: This suspicion is correct.]

4) It's all about scale, in a different way. From a reader in the Pacific Northwest:

I am a big believer in localism. But I don’t think the argument for becoming a conservative as a result of observing the benefits of localism really works, unless and until localism actually deals successfully with the big national problems that affect the great bulk of the population (particularly the minority communities) that live in huge cities—and even bigger national problems such as air pollution, water pollution, climate change, immigration, etc.

To me, this is a missing piece of the overall picture. I don’t know the solutions. But not using the federal government to tackle these problems that really can’t be tackled completely or successfully locally—no matter what—is why the thrill of localism, which I share, doesn’t make me a political conservative.

5) "When the market works, we are happy." From a reader whose whereabouts I don't really know:

Your correspondent gets to his point thusly:

"And yet the Democratic Party, and most liberals, are wedded to the notion of top-down, big national projects that we vote for and pursue because we want to get it done."

Once again, this is a profoundly inaccurate description of liberal political and economic policies. What we want is to make the systems work. And when the market works, we are happy. When distortions or incentives serve to make market based solutions unworkable, we very happily champion government interventions. In some (actually, fairly rare) cases, those problems are national, and require federal-government intervention—Social Security, veterans health, Medicare, universal healthcare overage—but there is nothing in the liberal agenda that desires "top down, big national projects." Just making use of the community leadership at whatever level appropriate to produce outcomes that are fair, just, and beneficial to the community as a whole, not just the leadership or the merchant class.

But I suppose they'll never stop mischaracterizing these simple policy positions, because to do so would require them to admit that there are times when intervention in community affairs is the right answer ...

6) The federal government doesn't work, but that's no accident. Another reader:

While I believe that there are many areas that are well-suited for state and local initiatives, your correspondent seems to me to be missing the real reasons that state and local governments are currently more effective than the federal government, which are the structural differences between them.

The most obvious one is that most state governments have no equivalent to the filibuster, which has evolved to make the U.S. Senate incapable of action most of the time. [JF note: Jerry Brown very strongly made this same point to me, as noted here.] Also, the Supreme Court and the 14th Amendment have made it impossible for the states to have the kind of ridiculous imbalances between their Senate districts that result in the massive unrepresentativeness of the U.S. Senate, and at least partly as a result both houses of a state legislature are generally controlled by the same party, as currently only five legislatures of the fifty are split. Of the 45 with unified control, 38 have a governor of the same party. Compare that to the frequency of divided government at the federal level.

While it is true that in the past the federal government was able to function despite this, it is pretty clear that is no longer the case with partisan division at levels resembling those of the 1850s. It is useful to remember that the federal government was not functional then either, and many obviously desirable projects had to wait for the Southern legislators to absent themselves before they could be enacted ....

In my view, the only solution to federal dysfunction is to replace or substantially revise the Constitution. I don't expect that in the foreseeable future. [JF note: I agree with these first two sentences of the paragraph.] So if we want stuff done, I would suggest pushing for much more substantial and consistent federal revenue sharing, in the hope that state and local governments could accomplish more if they had the resources. I am not of the opinion that whatever regard Republicans have for the virtues of local government is likely to trump their dislike of taxes on the rich, but I imagine it is more likely than major constitutional change.

7) If cities are succeeding, the national government deserves part of the credit. From a reader in Washington, D.C.:

My first thought in response to [Kilian's note] was millions in block grants made to organizations like Main Streets that have done SOOO much to enhance the downtowns and promote business in small town America; Small Business Administration loans, HUD HOME loans for affordable housing, etc.  

Then in the course of my daily activities, I ran across this list of the government and other agencies helping to promote Dorchester County, Md. It speaks for itself.

I am a card-carrying Democrat and could never change, but I consider myself a conservative in essential ways—ways that are often not recognized. I want to conserve the environment, historic buildings, good jobs with middle-class wages, education at a reasonable price for the masses, sustainable businesses, etc.

8) The theory-reality gap bites the conservatives too. Another reader:

As a person long involved in government reform who worked on performance improvement in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, I take issue with the person who is using your series to justify the conservative approach.

The problem is that the theory is fine, but the reality has not worked. Conservatives have in recent times used their small-government notions to slash budgets, but they have not been able to fill the void with private-sector alternatives in ways that improve the lives of average people on a large scale. The result is the current record gap, for modern times, between rich and poor, and the deterioration of quality of life for mainstream Americans. Your examples are inspiring, but they are isolated examples. If they spread nationwide, we would have a different situation.

The best "liberal" approaches create a platform for the laboratories of democracy to function, allowing a great deal of experimentation, a variety of ways to reach common goals such as improved health, decent housing, thriving children and effective schools. But they do not allow the choice of opting out entirely, and that, unfortunately, is what too often happens if government is not a major player. The current push to repeal Obamacare, with only token mention of "replacing" it without specifying how, is a perfect example.

We all know local solutions are best. But the climate surrounding them must provide incentives to improve lives, waivers from regulations that raise barriers to progress, and a healthy dose of idealism so people can do the hard work of constructive change. Modern conservatism, as translated into politics, has not met this test.

9) The time for an Urbanist Tea Party has arrived. Finally, from reader Jarrett Walker, whose name I use since he's linking to one of his articles. He sent this from the U.S. West Coast but he has lived and worked extensively in Australia:

The tragedy is that an emerging urbanist left agrees totally with John Kilian, but in this polarized world they'll never be introduced.

Start here (my article covering last year's Atlantic/Aspen Citylab event): "Time for an Urbanist Tea Party?"

Thanks to all readers. Road reports are about to resume.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/on-the-politics-of-american-resilience/383360/

My friend Brian Glucroft, who over the years has done memorable photography and reportage about the vivid, diverse humanity of daily life in China, sends the picture above, taken a few days ago in Shanghai. He writes:

On Changping Road in Jing'an, Shanghai, I just heard saw / heard something I think you could appreciate. It reminds me that some of the criticism China hears from Westerners is motivated by a hope China can do better in areas where the West has failed.

Yet again, "oh well".

Then a little while later, he sent the two pictures below and this followup note:

Later in the day I saw two street cleaners less than a block away on the same road. A man swept the leaves off the sidewalk into piles on the road, and then a woman bagged them. No leaf blowers required. Their handmade brooms constructed from bamboo, branches, & leaves, still commonly used by street cleaners in Shanghai and elsewhere in China, worked just fine — plus quieter, cheaper, and environmentally friendlier. It's one way in which Shanghai and many other cities in China don't need to go green but already are.

The motorbike with the British design (seen many of those across China recently) and both people wearing face masks in the 2nd photo are bonuses.

These bottom two pictures resemble what I saw during our years in Shanghai, Beijing, and other big Chinese cities. But of course the country has "progressed" since then.

For an American take on this development, I direct you toward a measured assessment from Bill Radke in Seattle. And for more views of the variety of life in China, do visit Brian Glucroft's site. Its opening-spread picture gives an idea of its spirit:

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/china-catches-up/383361/

Fair warning: I am not going to try to strap any Larger Policy Significance onto this report. It was just one of the more interesting things we've seen on our travel, and we wanted to let others know about it.

Our story starts some 600 million years ago, when a body of water now known as the Iapetus Ocean lay beneath what is now the eastern coast of North America. That's about as much geology as you're getting from me. For more, you can start here, but I will tell you where the ocean's name comes from:

The modern Atlantic Ocean was named after the mythological Greek god Atlantis.... In Greek mythology, Iapetus was the father of Atlantis, so the older ocean is named after the older mythological figure. (The Iapetus Ocean disappeared as continental plates shifted around and recombined as Pangea. After Pangea broke up, a younger ocean - the Atlantic - formed between Africa and North America.)

Now we zoom ahead in time to about 250 years ago, in the late 1700s, when (according to local histories) a white settler named Mary Draper Ingles was captured by Indians in the Kanawha Valley of what is now West Virginia. While captive, she became proficient at making salt from the brine that bubbled up in a nearby salt lick. To connect the themes here, that brine was in fact from underground remnants of the Iapetus Ocean forcing their way upward.

By 200 years ago, around 1815, the Kanawha Valley was full of "salt furnaces," where people boiled down the bubbling-up brine to make salt, and then shipped that salt largely to the emerging meat-packing center of Cincinnati. The locals' main competition was from salt makers in Syracuse, New York. By 1850, the Charleston/Kanawha area was the salt-making center of the country.

And then ... well, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but the name "Great Salt Lake" might give one clue to where the trouble lay. For reasons we don't need to get into, the salt industry that had been so important to this part of the country through the mid-19th century was by the mid-20th century all but gone. The Dickinson's Kanawha Salt that had won a medal as world's best salt at the London World's Fair in the 1850s was by the 1950s shuttered and out of business.

A few years ago, the story changed. Lewis Payne and Nancy Bruns, a brother and sister who were seventh-generation descendants of the original salt-making family (which still has extensive land holdings in the area), decided to re-start the salt business as an artisanal operation. "The brine was still there!" Payne told us at the factory in the small town of Malden last month, where we'd been guided  by Bob Coffield of Charleston.

The family's forebears had felled trees and, when the trees were gone, used coal to stoke fires and boil off the brine. Payne and Bruns instead went all-solar, building big greenhouse-like evaporation rooms in which the brine could go through the various stages of its conversion into pure salt.

It sounds improbable, but here is some of the way it looks. First at right, Payne standing near one of the original drill sites, from the olden days of the salt works.  

Today's brine comes from a pump housed inside an ordinary-looking shed. Then it goes into the first of several evaporation chambers:

Through a series of rooms and tanks, through a process described on the company's site here, the liquid is brought to higher and higher degrees of concentration, until finally it can be scraped off and harvested, as the Paynes are doing here:

With tools like this:

And packed into sacks for further drip-drying:

And yielding finally tubs of pure, hand harvested salt, which is now shipped around the country to restaurants and gourmet shops.

Never confident in my culinary judgment, I sheepishly asked the Paynes: Salt is salt, right? Really, how different can it taste? They took turns informing me both about the science and the art behind their claims. Science: pristine brine, zillions of years old, free of contaminants, etc. Art: "People stop me on the street to say they've started using our salt, and friends ask them why the food suddenly tastes so much better."

Obviously they're biased sources. But they gave us a little taste of their product, which turned out to be hyper-salty, and very good. We bought numerous little gift packs: friends and relatives, look for salt under the tree! Is it expensive? Of course—but for a high-end product being able to command a premium price is much of the point. You can check out more information on their site, or read about them in the Charleston Gazette or the Charleston Daily Mail, or on Martha Stewart's site.

As advertised, there's no policy lesson here. And this is clearly no large-scale answer for a region that has lost much of its 20th-century mining and manufacturing base. But it deserves note as an innovative re-use of local resources. The test of an interesting day on the road is whether you go to sleep having seen things you'd had no way to anticipate when you got up. It met that test and more.

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This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/artisanal-salt-from-an-ancient-sea/383460/

Last night I described our fascinating and surreal trip to a successful "artisan salt" factory outside Charleston, West Virginia. The fascinating part is I hope obvious; the surreal part is that the people running the J. Q. Dickinson Salt Works are letting brine from a half-billion-year-old subterranean sea burble up to the surface, and then gently evaporating it down to its crystalline salt essence. They are doing this at a site where for millennia animals had gathered around salt licks formed where the brine came to the surface.

Bob Coffield, a lawyer and civic enthusiast in Charleston, took us to the salt works and spent more time and care taking pictures than we did during the visit. Here are a few more, for the sake of completeness.

In the photo at the top of the post, you see the austere, Japanese shoji-looking elegance of an evaporating room. I make the Japan allusion both on the merits and because one of the salt works' commercially important side products is nigari, the Japanese term for very bitter magnesium chloride flakes that among other uses serve as a coagulent in making tofu. The magnesium chloride can be separated from the normal sodium chloride (salt) as the brine evaporates.

Next, harvesting salt crystals from a nearly-fully-evaporated tray of brine. Paige and Lewis Payne, who showed us through the works that Lewis founded with his sister Nancy Bruns, invited us to dip a finger into the still-liquid part of this brew and taste it. If you can imagine the saltiness of a gallon of sea water concentrated into a little viscous drop, you've got the idea.

And here, courtesy of Coffield, is a short video of the same process taking place.

Some of the crystals were gem-looking cubes and other interesting 3D structures:

And some were more like snowflakes:

I am sure there is a scientific explanation for the differences in form, but I don't remember it now.

Another view of one of the big drying rooms, showing Paige Payne on the right and, on the left, Deb Fallows and Lewis Payne.

That's all for the salt reports, though not all for the Charleston area. Thanks to Coffield and the Paynes for showing us around.

* To read about and sign-up for our new American Futures email newsletter, see here. Or just go straight to the sign-up here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/another-look-at-salt-harvesting-in-west-virginia/383485/

Last week I mentioned in two posts (here and here) the revived "artisanal salt" industry that a brother and sister, Lewis Payne and Nancy Bruns, are creating on the site of the family's very successful 19th-century salt factory in the little town of Malden, West Virginia. Malden, just outside Charleston, was previously known as Kanawha Salines, after its dominant industry. Its greatest source of fame, apart from though related to the salt works, is as the boyhood home of Booker T. Washington. (More current source of fame: the football phenom Randy Moss grew up in an adjoining hamlet.)

Washington's family, who were slaves, had left a farm in Franklin County, Virginia, when they were freed by the arrival of Union troops in the spring of 1865. (I am drawing from an official narrative by Louis R. Harlan for the West Virginia Division of Culture and History.) They made their way to the Kanawha valley of the relatively new state of West Virginia, and there the 9-year-old Booker was soon put to work in the salt furnaces, where brine was boiled down to make commercial salt. From the state narrative:

Quite early one morning, Booker learned one of the reasons his stepfather had sent for him to come to Malden. He was routed from bed and he and his brother John went to work helping Wash Ferguson [his stepfather] pack the salt.

After the salt brine had been boiled to a damp solid state and dried in the "grainer" pan, it was necessary not only to shovel the crystallized salt into the barrel but to pound it until the barrel reached the required weight. The boys' work was to assist their stepfather in the heavy and unskilled labor of packing. Their workday often began as early as four o'clock in the morning and continued until dark, and the stepfather pocketed their pay.

Perhaps he was too poor to behave otherwise, and the exploitation of children by their parents was widespread in the nineteenth century in agriculture, textile mills, mining, and all low-wage industries. Nevertheless, the boys deeply resented Wash Ferguson for his greed and shortsightedness. They turned away from him, and he never became father to them in the sense of a model for their behavior or a person on whom to rely...

The first thing Booker learned to read was a number. Every salt packer was assigned a number to mark his barrels, and Wash Ferguson's was 18. At the close of every day the foreman would come around and mark that number on all of the barrels that Wash and his boys had packed, and the boy Booker not only learned to recognize that figure but to make it with his finger in the dust or with a stick in the dirt. He knew no other numbers, but this was the beginning of his burning desire to learn to read and write.

You can read much more at the official site, including the ups and downs of the salt industry in this part of the world in the years leading to the Civil War and thereafter, and of course from Washington's autobiography. In fact, here's part of what he says himself about the salt-works years:

My step-father seemed to be over careful that I should continue my work in the salt furnace until nine o'clock each day. This practice made me late at school, and often caused me to miss my lessons.

To overcome this I resorted to a practice of which I am not now very proud, and it is one of the few things I did as a child of which I am now ashamed. There was a large clock in the salt furnace that kept the time for hundreds of workmen connected with the salt furnace and coal mine. But, as I found myself continually late at school, and after missing some of my lessons, I yielded to the temptation to move forward the hands on the dial of the clock so as to give enough time to permit me to get to school in time. This went on for several days, until the manager found the time so unreliable that the clock was locked up in a case.

A reader in the Charleston area criticizes me for not including more of this slavery-and-afterwards background in my original two reports. He writes:

[Various complimentary comments about China coverage, where the reader has also lived and worked] but I just wanted to write about what I regard as a pretty serious omission to your recent article.

I'm a native of Charleston, West Virginia, and grew up in a neighborhood that was about ten minutes from the Dickinson property.  I wrote my masters thesis on the history of the Kanawha salt industry, and my thesis focused on the one aspect of that industry's history that is absent from your article: the role of slavery in the West Virginia salt industry.  

During its heyday the vast majority of salt mine workers were enslaved people of African descent, leased by salt companies who could not find free labor that was willing to endure the brutal conditions of this workplace.  The salt mines were incapable of operation without a legal, political, and economic structure that made massive human trafficking a regular feature of the antebellum Virginian economy and understanding the specifics of this wretched trade are central to understanding the early history of my hometown.

It is worth noting that I personally grew up knowing vaguely that our chemical industry had origins in the production of some sort of red-tinged salt, but it was not until I had been working as a historical educator on American slavery for 6 years that I discovered the role slavery played in the place I grew up.

I have nothing against the Dickinson's business, in fact, I am a big fan of any industry that might improve the poor image that the public has of West Virginia, but I think it is a bad idea to write an article about this topic and touch upon the history of this industry without a single mention of the role slavery played in building this industry.

It is not fair to the men who were forced to work in this industry to celebrate the salt without celebrating them as well.

Noted. This was a story about entrepreneurs in a depressed area of the country in 2014, but even in the "new" country of America everything has a past, and this part of the salt industry's origin-story does deserve mention.

Now, an entirely different view on the sociology of salt. This is from an American who has lived for years in China, talking about the role in that country's and culture's past, and its complicated present. I turn it over to him:

I ran into a former student this afternoon at a cafe near my home in Beijing and the topic of salt came up unexpectedly “in two aspects” (as my students might write). [JF note: standard Chinese academic/political jargon.]

First, she was telling me about the class she had just had from a Chinese professor, and how she likes his class because he often criticizes the government. Today’s lesson, she said, had been on IP theft and he had told them that the government protects Chinese companies who “innovate” by reaping western technology and then race to the China patent office to file first.

Second, I asked her why she was taking classes on the weekend, and she told me that she had received a job offer from China Salt two years ago and been hired and signed a contract with them, but they didn’t have an immediate position for her, so she had been waiting for a position to open, and was taking the weekend classes to maintain her English skills.

So our conversation naturally (or not) turned to salt (pun unintended). I had just read your “Artisanal Salt” post this morning, so salt was already on my mind. Plus, last week, I had come across an article from Tea Leaf Nation titled: "Thank You, but We Prefer the Salt Monopoly”.

That article triggered memories of one of my first WTF moments in China (and we foreigners all have them, as i’m sure you’ll agree).

It was in 2002 shortly after moving to Hangzhou, that I stumbled across a bizarre U.S. article about the “Salt Police" in China. ["Chinese Provinces Police Salt of the Earth," by Martin Fackler, then of the AP.] At the time I was, like “WTF, they have police force just for salt,and they roam the rural roads at night trying to stop locals from “smuggling” low grade salt into towns?”

The few mao [fractions of a cent] difference in prices mentioned in the article hardly seemed worth it at first glance, but as you know, scale is valuable in China. at the time I first read the article in 2002, I asked a good friend, “Is this for real?” She was from small town near Dandong, and assured me it was true-that the government was trying to assure that only iodized salt would be available to consumers...

So salt and its sale, consumption, demand, and control has a long, rich history in China-even meriting an administrative police force. Now, go back and read that latest Tea Leaf Nation article on the proposed “privatization” of the “salt monopoly”.

In the end, my ex-student sadly realized that, probably the reason China Salt hasn’t given her a position yet is because they are re-structuring for this upcoming privatization. On the other hand, I introduced her to your story and how Americans like to find new opportunities. I had a hell of a time explaining what the term “artisanal” means-I’ve been in China for 16+ years, so missed that particular addition to the American vernacular.

But, being Chinese, she immediately knew a market when she saw one. If this proposed “privatization of salt” goes through, your friends in Charleston ought to get ready to capitalize on that. Chinese consumers these days are willing to pay more for higher quality stuff, especially “foodstuffs”.

I agree entirely about the Chinese-market potential of high-end imported foodstuffs of all sorts. Our world is connected in strange and surprising ways, including via salt licks.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/the-past-is-never-past-west-virginia-salt-works-edition/383493/

Yesterday afternoon, after flying with my wife in a small propeller airplane up through the Central Valley of California (for today's Atlantic Navigate conference in San Francisco), we heard the terrible news that a small jet airplane had crashed into a house near the Gaithersburg airport in the northwest suburbs of DC, killing all three people on the plane and a mother and two children inside the house. This is a disaster on a smaller scale than an airline crash but in a way, more horrible, with the deaths of young family members as they went about their normal lives at home.

I am so sorry for everyone affected by this crash.

Only because I have some relevant local knowledge about this site—having flown in and out of Gaithersburg airport over the past 16 years and having based my small Cirrus airplane there for more than ten years—I am writing this post to add some basic facts.

1) Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg, known as KGAI in aviation terminology, is a "small" airport but not small enough that its runway size or geographic position is likely to be a factor in this crash. Its runway is 4,200 feet long and 75 feet wide. For perspective, most big commercial airports have runways with lengths of 8,000 feet and longer. But small jets and turboprops go in and out of Gaithersburg all the time. On an average day, it has well over 100 takeoffs and landing. It is an active place.

2) The neighborhood where the crash occurred is very close to the airport, by national standards. This shot, from Google Earth, shows the place where the crash occurred, on Drop Forge Lane. The red line, which I've added, is the final approach course for Runway 14 at Gaithersburg, which the airplane would have been following.

The area of the crash was less than a mile from the runway threshold, again close by national standards. On a normal approach airplanes would be somewhere between 500 and 1000 feet above the ground at that point in their descent.

3) None of the subdivisions or commercial areas that now surround KGAI were there when the airport was built in the late 1950s. They have expanded as this part of the close-enough-to-be-commutable, far-enough-to-be-affordable part of the DC suburbs has grown. Technically, developers built there and purchasers bought there knowing an airport was nearby, but of course no one expects to have their home destroyed and their family killed by a plane.

4) Airport operations show an awareness of this neighborhood's concerns and existence. The "preferred calm wind" runway is this same Runway 14, so that planes would whenever possible take off headed away from this neighborhood—as shown by the blue arrow in the graphic above. When winds favor takeoff in the opposite direction—on Runway 32—pilots are supposed to turn to the right as soon as possible precisely to avoid flying over the neighborhood in question. That is what the green arrow shows. (Every runway is known by two names, depending on the direction the plane is going. The names are based on their compass heading and always differ by 180 degrees. If a runway goes straight east-west, planes headed to the east will be flying heading 90 degrees and using Runway 9. When taking off or landing in the opposite direction, they will be flying on a 270-degree heading and using Runway 27.)

5) The weather at the time of the accident was not perfect but was benign enough not to seem an obvious cause of a crash. The winds were light. The ceiling was around 3,000 feet—which means that the jet would have been flying under instrument flight rules through most of the flight and would have followed an instrument approach to the airport. (Rather than just picking it out visually.) But once it descended below 3,000 feet it would have had the runway in sight.

6) The location of the crash is not a usual site for either mechanical failures or the most familiar type of loss-of-control crashes near an airport. As a plane slows and descends for a landing, the main mechanical problems would be if the landing gear did not come down or the flaps (which allow the plane to keep flying at a slower speed as it prepares to land) did not extend. But the pilot would have been aware of those problems and would have mentioned them in radio transmissions, which he did not.

The usual loss-of-control accidents near an airport occur when a plane makes too tight a turn when flying the rectangular "traffic pattern" in preparation for landing. The FAA image at right shows the "base to final" turn before landing. If a pilot mismanages that turn, the plane can stall (lose lift) and fall to the ground.

But in this case, the jet would have been following an instrument approach (probably RNAV 14) to Gaithersburg, which would have given him essentially a 10-mile long straight-in approach to the runway, with no need for this last minute turn. Also, Runway 14 has a "VASI," a set of red and white lights to give an incoming pilot a guide to the proper descent slope to follow. If you see all red lights, you're too low; all white, you're too high. Both red and white, you're on the right path.

7) To summarize #5 and #6: None of the usual weather-related, mechanical, or traffic-pattern problems that explain crashes seem to apply in this case.

Update 7A) The recording of radio traffic on the KGAI frequency contains several references to large number of birds around the runway. In my experience that's not rare, but it is conceivable that a bird-strike could have disoriented, distracted, or even disabled the pilot; or that maneuvering to avoid birds could have led to a loss of control; or that a bird going into an engine could have been the beginning of the plane's problems. The recording is here. [Update-update: see NTSB briefing below, which finds no evidence of bird strike or "bird ingestion."]

8) Gaithersburg is an "uncontrolled" airport, with no control tower. As the recent midair collision near Washington showed, control towers don't eliminate all traffic-conflict problems. But at Gaithersburg, pilots judge their position relative to one another through announcements on the CB-style common radio frequency. "Montgomery County traffic, Cirrus XXX is nine miles to the northwest, will make 45-degree entry to right-downwind for Runway 32." "Montgomery traffic, Cessna XXX is turning base to final for Runway 32." Etc.

9) Gaithersburg is very active as a training airport. On good-weather days (and yesterday was good enough to qualify) its environs usually contain a number of planes doing takeoffs and landings as part of their drill. Often they fly "closed traffic": taking off, flying the rectangular traffic pattern, landing, and doing it again. By definition, many of these are less-experienced pilots. A lot of them are non-native speakers of English, which means that it can take them longer to report their position and plans on the frequency, and sometimes to be less accurate about it.

10) The combination of points 8 & 9 can complicate the final stages of approach to landing at KGAI, in the following way: If you're coming in on an instrument approach, from ten miles out you're on a straight line for Runway 14. But the closer you get, the more you're alert for student (or other) pilots taking off, landing, or flying around in the pattern. I've kept count, and in recent months on about half the approaches I've made, I've had to make close-to-the-airport adjustments because of traffic in the pattern or whose location I wasn't 100 percent sure of. Sometimes this meant "going around," putting in power, climbing, and circling around for another landing attempt. Some times it means slowing down or making delaying maneuvers, usually "S-turns" to draw out the arrival process and sometimes full 360-degree turns. It's an expected rather than startling aspect of operations at this airport.

On the probabilities, I can imagine something similar happening as the light jet neared the airport: traffic the pilot hadn't expected meaning he had to adjust his plans, and then something going wrong from that point onward. There is nothing inherent in a delaying turn that would make it dangerous—S-turns involve a shallower bank than right-angle turns in the traffic pattern. But obviously something, as yet unknown, made the pilot lose control of the plane. Traffic in this area is all carefully monitored, as part of the special security rules in the DC area. So it should become apparent which aircraft were where, and when.

11) As a matter of public record, the pilot of the plane, who with his two passengers was killed, had been involved in a different loss-of-control landing accident in a different airplane four years ago at the same Gaithersburg airport.

Sincere sympathies to all on this terrible event.

News update 6:20pm EST The Aviation Safety Network has relayed this additional information, which bears on some of the possibilities mentioned above. I'll just post this now and do further explanations later:

The following preliminary findings -all subject to be validated- were reported in an NTSB press briefing on December 9:

- Flight time from Chapel Hill to Gaithersburg: 57 minutes
- En route altitude: FL230 [approx 23,000 feet]
- Captain (ATPL rated) seated in left hand seat [ATPL=Air Transport Pilot, an advanced-proficiency rating]
- Passenger seated in right hand seat
- Flight was cleared for RNAV GPS runway 14 approach
- 46 Seconds before CVR [cockpit voice recorder] recording ended: Radio Altimeter callout of 500 feet
- 20 Seconds before CVR recording ended: Audio stall callout, which continued to the end of the recording
- Flaps were extended and gear was down
- Lowest recorded airspeed by FDR [flight data recorder]: 88 knots
- Large excursions in pitch and roll attitude were recorded by the FDR
- 2 Seconds after lowest airspeed was recorded, the throttles were advanced
- No evidence of engine fire or failure or bird ingestion

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/the-tragic-airplane-crash-in-gaithersburg-maryland/383580/