Marty's Blog

April 11, 2015

David Brooks

When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

 I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life. Here, quickly, are some of them

THE HUMILITY SHIFT We live in the culture of the Big Me. The meritocracy wants you to promote yourself. Social media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel of your life. Your parents and teachers were always telling you how wonderful you were.

But all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin, whether it is selfishness, the desperate need for approval, cowardice, hardheartedness or whatever. They have traced how that core sin leads to the behavior that makes them feel ashamed. They have achieved a profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.

SELF-DEFEAT External success is achieved through competition with others. But character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, realized early on that his core sin was his temper. He developed a moderate, cheerful exterior because he knew he needed to project optimism and confidence to lead. He did silly things to tame his anger. He took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on slips of paper and tore them up and threw them in the garbage. Over a lifetime of self-confrontation, he developed a mature temperament. He made himself strong in his weakest places.

THE DEPENDENCY LEAP Many people give away the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” as a graduation gift. This book suggests that life is an autonomous journey. We master certain skills and experience adventures and certain challenges on our way to individual success. This individualist worldview suggests that character is this little iron figure of willpower inside. But people on the road to character understand that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside.

People on this road see life as a process of commitment making. Character is defined by how deeply rooted you are. Have you developed deep connections that hold you up in times of challenge and push you toward the good? In the realm of the intellect, a person of character has achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things. In the realm of emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be completed in a single lifetime.

ENERGIZING LOVE Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”

She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

THE CALL WITHIN THE CALL We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in their craft.

Frances Perkins was a young woman who was an activist for progressive causes at the start of the 20th century. She was polite and a bit genteel. But one day she stumbled across the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and watched dozens of garment workers hurl themselves to their deaths rather than be burned alive. That experience shamed her moral sense and purified her ambition. It was her call within a call.

After that, she turned herself into an instrument for the cause of workers’ rights. She was willing to work with anybody, compromise with anybody, push through hesitation. She even changed her appearance so she could become a more effective instrument for the movement. She became the first woman in a United States cabinet, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and emerged as one of the great civic figures of the 20th century.

The novelist George Eliot (her real name was Mary Ann Evans) was a mess as a young woman, emotionally needy, falling for every man she met and being rejected. Finally, in her mid-30s she met a guy named George Lewes. Lewes was estranged from his wife, but legally he was married. If Eliot went with Lewes she would be labeled an adulterer by society. She’d lose her friends, be cut off by her family. It took her a week to decide, but she went with Lewes. “Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done,” she wrote.

She chose well. Her character stabilized. Her capacity for empathetic understanding expanded. She lived in a state of steady, devoted love with Lewes, the kind of second love that comes after a person is older, scarred a bit and enmeshed in responsibilities. He served her and helped her become one of the greatest novelists of any age. Together they turned neediness into constancy.

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?

Their lives often follow a pattern of defeat, recognition, redemption. They have moments of pain and suffering. But they turn those moments into occasions of radical self-understanding — by keeping a journal or making art. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.

This is a philosophy for stumblers. The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off balance. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. Recognizing her limitations, the stumbler at least has a serious foe to overcome and transcend. The stumbler has an outstretched arm, ready to receive and offer assistance. Her friends are there for deep conversation, comfort and advice.

External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.

Those are the people we want to be.

APRIL 9, 2015

Nicholas Kristof

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our

nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids

worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global

index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what

matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.

We may thump our chests and boast that we’re No. 1, and in some ways we are. But,

in important ways, we lag.

The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving

children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we

know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We

have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates

than 80.

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our

education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Ouch. “We’re No. 87!” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Michael E. Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who helped devise the

Social Progress Index, says that it’s important to have conventional economic

measures such as G.D.P. growth. But social progress is also a critical measure, he

notes, of how a country is serving its people.

“We’re not now No. 1 in a lot of stuff that traditionally we have been,” said

Professor Porter, an expert on international competitiveness. “What we’re learning is

that the fact that we’re not No. 1 on this stuff also means that we’re facing long-term

economic stresses.”

“We’re starting to understand that we can’t put economic development and

social progress in two separate buckets,” Porter added. “There’s a dialectic here.”

The top countries in the 2015 Social Progress Index are Norway, Sweden,

Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand and Canada. Of the 133 countries rated, Central

African Republic is last, just after Chad and Afghanistan.

Sri Lanka does better than India. Bangladesh outperforms Pakistan. Both the

Philippines and South Africa do better than Russia. Mongolia comes in ahead of

China. And Canada wallops the United States.

One way of looking at the index is to learn from countries that outperform by

having social indicators better than their income levels. By that standard, the biggest

stars are Costa Rica and Uruguay, with New Zealand and Rwanda also

outperforming.

“This takes time,” said Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress

Imperative, which produces the index. “Costa Rica is an overperformer because of its

history.”

Green notes that Costa Rica offered free, universal primary education in the

19th century. In the 20th century, it disbanded its military forces and invested some

of the savings in education. One payoff: Some surveys have found Costa Ricans

among the happiest people in the world.

Then there are the underperformers that do worse than would be expected from

their income level. Saudi Arabia leads that list.

The Social Progress Index, now in its second year, might seem a clarion call for

greater equality, but that’s not quite right. Professor Porter and his number crunchers

found only a mild correlation between economic equality (measured by

Gini coefficient) and social progress. What mattered much more was poverty.

Of course, wealthy countries with high poverty tend to be unequal as well. But

inequality at the top seems to matter less for well-being than inequality at the

bottom. Perhaps we should worry less about reining in the top 1 percent and more

about helping the bottom 20 percent?

On the other hand, one way to finance empowerment programs is to raise taxes

on tycoons. And when there is tremendous inequality, the wealthy create private

alternatives to public goods — private schools, private security forces, gated

communities — that lead to disinvestment in public goods vital to the needy.

In any case, the 2015 Social Progress Index should be serve notice to Americans

— and to people around the globe. We obsess on the wrong measures, so we often

have the wrong priorities.

As an American, what saddens me is also that our political system seems unable

to rise to the challenges.

As Porter notes, Americans generally understand that we face economic

impediments such as declining infrastructure, yet we’re frozen. We appreciate that

our education system is a mess, yet we’re passive.

We can send people to space and turn watches into computers, but we seem

incapable of consensus on the issues that matter most to our children — so our

political system remains in gridlock, even as other countries pass us by.

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How money is ruining America’s courts.
By SUE BELL COBB

March/April 2015

I felt trapped. I had made it to the top of my profession. I was the chief justice of Alabama, the first woman to head the state Supreme Court. It was, for a lawyer like myself, the pinnacle of achievement. And I’d earned it the hard way. To get to the justice’s chambers, I had won the nation’s most expensive judicial race that year. But at what cost?
I had needed $2.6 million to win—and that money had to come from somewhere. My opponent had raised even more, nearly $5 million in all. It’s terribly awkward and uncomfortable for a judge to have to ask for campaign money. But how are you going to win without it? My biggest concern is how shameful all of this looks to the public.

Two days after my election in 2006, I was with my daughter, Caitlin, on a school field trip when my cellphone rang. A reporter from a national legal publication was calling. Would she ask, I thought, about my election as Alabama’s first female chief justice? Or my plans for reform after holding court in some 40 of Alabama’s 67 counties over 25 years?

“Judge Cobb,” she asked, “how does it feel to be the victor of the most expensive judicial race in the United States this year? And how can you assure the people of Alabama that the contributions you sought are not going to impact how you rule? And how can you convince the people of Alabama not to believe that their courts are for sale?”

I was mortified. And while I was proud of the work I did for the next 4 1/2 years, I never quite got over the feeling of being trapped inside a system whose very structure left me feeling disgusted. I assure you: I’ve never made a decision in a case in which I sided with a party because of a campaign donation. But those of us seeking judicial office sometimes find ourselves doing things that feel awfully unsavory.

No one is immune from these pressures. Not even me.

The reporter’s questions were valid in 2006. And they still are. How do we convince Americans that justice isn’t for sale—when in 39 states, it is?

***

The phone calls always started with chitchat: How’s the family? How’s your law practice going? It was fun catching up with old friends and acquaintances until the point when I had to steer them toward the real reason I was calling.

“I’d very much appreciate your support for my campaign,” I’d say, religiously avoiding the “ask” and handing the phone to my finance director when it came time to talk real money.

The money was important. In Alabama, you don’t get to mete out justice without spending millions of dollars. I had my money; my opponent had his. The race for dollars reached new heights when a poll showed that I had a real chance of winning despite being a Democrat and the underdog, leading my opponent and his supporters to significantly increase their fundraising. And I had to answer in the best way I could—by trying to raise more money—or risk falling woefully behind. The amounts are utterly obscene.

In Alabama, would-be judges are allowed to ask for money directly. We can make calls not just to the usual friends and family but to lawyers who have appeared before us, lawyers who are likely to appear before us, officials with companies who may very well have interests before the court. And I did.

Where do you draw the line? If you ask for money from lawyers who appear in your court, it’s untenable for you. It’s also untenable for them. I may not have directly asked for money or collected the check, but in my heated campaign to become chief justice, I did reach out to everyone and anyone I could.
The simple fact is: I had to. Judicial elections have become just as overwhelmed by money as all the other contests in American politics, even if we tend to forget that in Alabama and 38 other states, judges have to stand for election. And if you’re running for office, it means you have to raise money. Lots of money. And that meant phone calls. Lots of phone calls.

The money, as it flowed in to me—check after check for as little as $5 from an individual donor to more than $200,000 from the Alabama Democratic Party to $638,000 from a well-known PAC that accepted money from a variety of businesses and law firms—went to the same place that it goes in other political races: to feed the TV ads and the consultants who make them.

Yes, to run for judge means pitching yourself to the public just as if you were running for dogcatcher. Many ads for judicial candidates I’ve seen are downright terrifying, with would-be judges bashing opponents as if they were evil incarnate. These candidates were portrayed as judges who, if given the chance, would release child molesters and murderers and order them to move in next door. Nothing could be further from the truth. But dignity and fairness are too often the first casualties in these kinds of endeavors. How else to explain a campaign ad from the late 1990s in which one candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court, who was revered by many in the bench and bar, nevertheless gave in to pressure from his campaign consultants and ran an ad comparing his opponent to a skunk? The ad opens with the image of the animal and is replaced by a photograph of the opponent as the narrator explains, “Some things you can smell a mile away. … You can smell how bad this man’s ideas are no matter where you live in Alabama.”

I worked for years with former state Representative Jeffrey McLaughlin to eliminate partisan races for judicial office that often make these campaigns overtly and inappropriately political and tend to drive up the amount of money spent by outside groups. And each time—whether the legislature was controlled by Democrats or Republicans—we couldn’t make headway. McLaughlin even recounts how one Republican legislator threatened lawmakers of his own party that if they voted to eliminate partisan judicial races, he would ensure they would face primary opponents in their next campaigns.
Here’s the thing: Donors want clarity, certainty even, that the judicial candidates they support view the world as they do and will rule accordingly. To them, the idea of impartial and fair judges is an abstraction. They want to know that the investments they make by donating money to a candidate will yield favorable results. For businesses, this means judges who are skeptical of, or hostile to, malpractice suits and product liability claims. For unions, it translates to backing those who see business, especially Big Business, as the enemy.

Opposing sides frequently give lip service to seeking justice, but that’s not what they mean. They’re not thinking about the fact that our rulings bind not just those who appear before us but every resident of the state, whether it’s a matter involving an allegedly faulty product or an unpaid worker’s comp claim or a property owner’s fight against a government entity trying to seize his building. No, what these special interests want is simply to win. This helps to explain why judicial elections have become awash in money, with some $275 million spent on such campaigns since 2000, as each side tries to stack the bench with judges it trusts are on their team.

But public trust is eroded when judicial candidates are forced to court big donors and spenders. And outright corruption can occur too, as we saw in Arkansas recently when a former state circuit judge pleaded guilty to having reduced a jury’s negligence award against a health care business in exchange for a campaign bribe. It was no coincidence, it turns out, that the owner of the business had funneled thousands of dollars to the judge’s campaign fund just as the judge had an epiphany: He slashed to $1 million the jury’s $5.2 million award because the original amount “shocked the conscience.” That’s not the only thing shocking about this case.

***

When a judge asks a lawyer who appears in his or her court for a campaign check, it’s about as close as you can get to legalized extortion. Lawyers who appear in your court, whose cases are in your hands, are the ones most interested in giving. It’s human nature: Who would want to risk offending the judge presiding over your case by refusing to donate to her campaign? They almost never say no—even when they can’t afford it.

Here’s how I know: Although Alabama allows me to press potential donors for specific amounts of money, I had my own personal ban on directly asking for checks during my race for chief justice. When I phoned an attorney and secured a pledge of support, my finance director would take over to ask for a promise of a specific dollar figure and when it could be expected. I made the initial contact because it was more likely that the would-be donors would take my call—someone they often knew personally or had heard of through the media or court appearances; it would have been much easier not to pick up or return the calls of a stranger.
More times than I can remember, a prospective donor would say, “Judge, I want to help. How much do you need?” Yet when talking to my finance director, the tune would change. The lawyer was more frank about his inability to pay. When this happened, it was painfully clear to me that the prospective donor felt compelled to give, even if he or she couldn’t fulfill the pledge. I accepted hundreds of contributions from lawyers and lobbyists for a total of close to $2 million in my 2006 race. I’m sorry to say that some of them surely gave because they felt they had no choice.

Imagine how much worse it gets when a judge or candidate has no qualms about applying pressure. Take for instance, these examples from Texas—a state where judges may solicit money directly. All are drawn from a friend-of-the-court brief I joined at the U.S. Supreme Court, which is weighing a Florida ban on direct judicial solicitation for money:

? One judge emailed a small group of partners at a prominent firm to point out contributions made by other firms. “[A]ll the Top 10 firms are committed to maxing out as a firm: $30,000 total,” the judge wrote, requesting that their firm “do the same.” “At most of the firms, they are designating a senior partner … to bundle dozens of relatively small-$ contributions … until they reach the target,” the judge explained, promising, “Bottomless thanks!”

? Another judge, soon after winning election, sent a personal email to a local lawyer that stated in part: “I trust that you will see your way clear to contribute to my campaign account in an amount reflective of the $2,000 contribution you made towards my defeat … and the fact that by their very nature post-election contributions are tardy and in very few realms does tardiness not incur an up-charge.”

? A third sent personally addressed letters to selected local attorneys, explaining that “Liberal … special interest groups … have targeted [my] court … for a Democrat take-over. Tort reforms … are at risk if we lose this court. … I have already reached the maximum allowable PAC contributions, and now can only accept personal or law firm contributions. I need your help. Please let me hear from you today.”

These overtures are shameful. They’re embarrassing. And they’re perfectly legal.

It is also not unlawful for big special interests on both sides of the political aisle to play by existing rules to buy the best judges they can for their respective sides. Here’s how U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue once put it: “We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.” Unions and trial lawyers—generally perceived to be aligned with Democrats—aren’t any less shy about their plans to target the bench as a way to achieve political ends: “We figured out a long time ago that it’s easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators,” as an Ohio AFL-CIO official put it.

***

In my experience on the bench, I saw plenty of cases in which I was certain that campaign money played no role in the outcome.

But I also saw cases in which I was concerned that fellow justices consistently ruled a certain way because business community backing alone had brought them to the court. For example: A justice I will not name, in considering 46 appeals of jury verdicts for plaintiffs, voted to reverse the verdict in full or in part 38 times. For those who don’t follow appellate courts closely, it’s worth pointing out that this is an astonishing record.

Another example: In 2005, shortly before I joined the Alabama Supreme Court, the justices heard appeals in 18 cases in which businesses had been hit with jury verdicts. The court—dominated by Republicans backed by business interests—threw out 17 of these verdicts. I don’t think that the justices who voted to overturn these cases were corrupt. My take is that they were genuinely ruling according to their beliefs. But what this proves is how proficient special interests have become at identifying and then supporting candidates who are reliable votes for their cause.

What could possibly be wrong with that? Quite a bit, actually.
Judges are meant to be impartial. They’re supposed to apply the settled law against the facts and evidence of the case before their court. Yet being consistently and easily predictable suggests that the judge isn’t applying the law so much as reflecting his or her personal views. The courts—and therefore justice—are also skewed when one side has far more money to support its candidates. Alabama is about as red a state as there is, and Republican candidates rarely have to worry about money; they’re often recruited and funded by business interests, many times through the Business Council of Alabama. There are groups in the state that support Democratic candidates and causes, but the coffers are far more modest.

I ran as a Democrat, and if you believe the conventional wisdom, I should have been inundated with contributions from personal injury and plaintiffs’ lawyers. I received my fair share, but I also heard time and again from lawyers who said they couldn’t afford to give because the state’s appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, had thrown out or gutted the verdicts they had won at trial. And they were seeing companies far less interested in settling cases because they were confident the Republican-dominated courts would come to the rescue. Could these lawyers have been exaggerating to get out of giving? Sure, but based on my observations, I thought they were being truthful.

Would I feel differently about judicial campaigns in my state if my fellow Democrats had the upper hand? Not at all. My point is not to see more Democrats elected, but to see the best qualified, politically unhampered individuals ascend to the bench and fairly dispense justice. I have supported Republicans running for judicial office when I thought they were smart and well-qualified and intellectually honest. This didn’t always sit well with fellow Democrats.

The money and politics that engulf judicial campaigns have other deleterious effects. The American Constitution Society worked with Joanna Shepherd, an Emory University law professor, on a recent study that suggested that attack ads accusing judicial candidates of being soft on crime can affect an elected judge’s votes. “The more TV ads aired during state Supreme Court judicial elections in a state, the less likely justices are to vote in favor of criminal defendants,” the study concluded.

Here’s a very different example of how applying the law without fear or favor can hurt a judge—in this case, me. During my campaign for chief justice, a supporter of mine gave a substantial amount of money to a state PAC, with instructions that the money should go to my campaign. He didn’t give directly for two reasons: He could give an unlimited sum and not be identified publicly, and several of his clients backed my Republican opponent. But the money did not show up because the man who ran the PAC had an issue with me: As an appellate judge, I had authored an opinion—joined by my four Republican colleagues—that overturned the conviction of a defendant charged with assaulting and robbing a member of the PAC director’s family. Is it any wonder that some judges would think twice before issuing such an opinion for fear that it could be used against them? (The donation finally arrived, but only after much effort, and after it was refunded to the donor, who made the contribution through another PAC.)

***

When I ran for chief justice, my campaign aired a TV ad featuring me playing piano and a children’s choir singing “This Little Light of Mine.” It was intended to counter my opponent’s claims that I was out of touch with the values of Alabama voters.

During my statewide travels, a senior voter approached me, saying that he had “just one question.” It wasn’t about the death penalty, prayer in schools or abortion. He wanted to know, “Do you really play the piano at church?” as the ad showed. I told him I did—that I had played for my church’s children’s choir for years. His response: “That was all I wanted to know.” He simply wanted to be sure that I was the person my ads had portrayed me to be.

But I have to admit that there was one segment in another ad that I am not particularly proud of. In the ad, titled “Only,” I’m heard saying that “I’m the only candidate for chief justice who spent a lifetime keeping troubled kids out of jail, who has sent hundreds of criminals back to death row … who’s locked up murderers and child abusers. And I’m the only wife and mother.”

Here’s the sentence in that ad that bothers me: I’m “the only candidate not supported by insurance corporations or oil money.” I’m shown flipping a cue card that has “Insurance Corp.” written on one side and “Oil $” written on the other. I argued against including this scene. Wouldn’t it suggest that I would be hostile to the interests of these two industries should they ever appear before me? That I wouldn’t or couldn’t give them a fair shake? But I was talked into it by my advisers, who said it would illustrate my independence from big money and help shine a light on the fact that my opponent had been strongly supported by big businesses. It didn’t feel right to me, but I went along, thinking they understood the political marketplace better than I did. I regret it to this day.

There isn’t a perfect system for selecting judges, but there certainly is a better one. Let’s start with nonpartisan elections, the public financing of judicial campaigns—which was successful in North Carolina until the legislature killed it in 2013—and merit-based selection of judges, a system that can include nonpartisan screening commissions, gubernatorial appointment and retention elections.

Judges are not, and should never be, like ordinary politicians. We cannot and should not promise anything for those who elect us, but to be fair.

Until we act, the phone calls will continue. How’s your family? How’s the law practice going? And by the way…
Sue Bell Cobb was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court from 2007 to 2011 and served as a judge for a total of 30 years.

Truthdig – ‘Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like’

FEB. 11, 2015
Mark Bittman
The world of food and agriculture symbolizes most of what’s gone wrong in the United States. But because food is plentiful for most people, and the damage that conventional agriculture does isn’t readily evident to everyone, it’s important that we look deeper, beyond food, to the structure that underlies most decisions: the political economy.
Progressives are not thinking broadly or creatively enough. By failing to pressure Democrats to take strong stands on everything from environmental protection to gun control to income inequality, progressives allow the party to use populist rhetoric while making America safer for business than it is for Americans. No one seriously believes that Hillary Clinton will ever put the interests of  Main Street before those of her donors from Wall Street, do they? At least not unless she’s pushed, and hard.
It’s clear to most everyone, regardless of politics, that the big issues — labor, race, food,
immigration, education and so on — must be “fixed,” and that fixing any one of these will help with the others. But this kind of change must begin with an agreement about principles, specifically principles of human rights and well-being rather than principles of making a favorable business climate.
Shouldn’t adequate shelter, clothing, food and health care be universal? Isn’t everyone owed a society that works toward guaranteeing the well-being of its citizens? Shouldn’t we prioritize avoiding self-destruction?
Plenty of Democrats, even those who think of themselves as progressive, would not answer yes to those questions. Some would answer, “Don’t be naïve, that’s impossible,” and others would say, “All we need to provide is equal opportunity for all and let the market sort it out.” (To which I’d reply, “Talk about naïve!”) I’m fine
with disagreement, but I’m not fine with standard public questions like “How do we
create a better climate for business so it can provide more jobs?” Consider what this
implies about the purpose of people, to say nothing about the meaning of life. The
business of America should not be business, but well-being.
Think about it this way: There are two kinds of operating systems, hard and soft.
A clock is a hard system. We know what it’s for, we know when it isn’t working, and
we know that 10 clock experts would agree on how to fix it — and could do so.
Soft systems, like agriculture and economics, are more complex. We don’t all
agree on goals, and we don’t agree on whether things are working or in need of
repair. For example, is contemporary American agriculture a system for nourishing
people and providing a livelihood for farmers? Or is it one for denuding the nation’s
topsoil while poisoning land, water, workers and consumers and enriching
corporations? Our collective actions would indicate that our principles favor the
latter; that has to change.
Defining goals that matter to people is critical, because the most powerful way
to change a complex, soft system is to change its purpose. For example, if we had a
national agreement that food is not just a commodity, a way to make money, but
instead a way to nourish people and the planet and a means to safeguard our future,
we could begin to reconfigure the system for that purpose. More generally, if we
agreed that human well-being was a priority, creating more jobs would not ring so
hollow.
Sadly, even if we did agree, complex systems are not subject to clever fixes.
Rather, changes often have unexpected results (that shouldn’t happen with a clock),
so change necessarily remains incremental. But without an agreement on goals,
without statements of purpose, we are going to continue to see changes that are not
in the interest of the majority. Increasingly, it’s corporations and not governments
that are determining how the world works. As unrepresentative as government
might seem right now, there is at least a chance of improving it, whereas
corporations will always act in their own interests.
It’s been adequately demonstrated that more than minor tweaks are needed to
improve life for most people. Let’s try to make sense of where the world is now
instead of relying on outdated doctrines like “capitalism” and “socialism” created by
people who had no idea what the 21st century would look like. Let’s ambitiously and publicly philosophize — as the conservatives do — and think about what shape a
sensible political economy might take.
The big ideas and strategies for how we should manage society and thrive with
the planet are not a set of rules handed down from on high. To develop them for now
and the future is a major challenge, and we — progressives and our allies — have to
work harder at it. No one is going to figure it out for us.

FEB. 7, 2015
Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON — THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while.
NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly
inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor
felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself
up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division.
But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there
was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News
reporter put it.
It seemed pathological because Williams already had the premier job, so why
engage in résumé inflation? And you don’t get those jobs because of your derring-do.
When Williams was declared the hair apparent to Tom Brokaw in 1995, hailed
by Jay Leno as “NBC’s stud muffin,” I did a column wondering why TV news
programs only hired pretty white male clones. I asked Williams if he was an anchor
android.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said gamely, in his anchor-desk baritone. “I can deny
the existence of a factory in the American Midwest that puts out people like me.”
Williams told friends last week that he felt anguished, coming under fire for his
false story of coming under fire.
Although the NBC anchor had repeated the Iraq war tall tale, ever more
baroquely, for more than a decade, when he cited it on his Jan. 30 broadcast during
a segment about going to a Rangers game with a retired, decorated soldier who had
been on the ground that day when he landed, Williams got smacked down on
Facebook.

A crew member from a Chinook flying ahead of Williams, who was involved in
the 2003 firefight, posted, “Sorry dude, I don’t remember you being on my aircraft. I
do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had
happened.” Stars and Stripes ran with it, and, by Saturday, Williams announced that
he was stepping down for several days.
Social media — the genre that helped make the TV evening news irrelevant by
showing us that we don’t need someone to tell us every night what happened that
day — was gutting the institution further.
Although Williams’s determination to wrap himself in others’ valor is
indefensible, it seems almost redundant to gnaw on his bones, given the fact that the
Internet has already taken down a much larger target: the long-ingrained automatic
impulse to turn on the TV when news happens.
Although there was much chatter about the “revered” anchor and the “moral
authority” of the networks, does anyone really feel that way anymore? Frothy
morning shows long ago became the more important anchoring real estate,
garnering more revenue and subsidizing the news division. One anchor exerted
moral authority once and that was Walter Cronkite, because he risked his career to
go on TV and tell the truth about the fact that we were losing the Vietnam War.
But TV news now is rife with cat, dog and baby videos, weather stories and
narcissism. And even that fare caused trouble for Williams when he reported on a
video of a pig saving a baby goat, admitting “we have no way of knowing if it’s real,”
and then later had to explain that it wasn’t. The nightly news anchors are not figures
of authority. They’re part of the entertainment, branding and cross-promotion
business.
Former ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer trended on Facebook for reportedly
scoring the first interview about Bruce Jenner’s gender odyssey.
When current ABC News anchor David Muir was still a correspondent, some
NBC News reporters had a drinking game about how many times he put himself in
the shot and how many times his shirt was unbuttoned.
As the late-night comic anchors got more pointed and edgy with the news, the
real anchors mimicked YouTube.
Williams did a piece on his daughter Allison’s casting in an NBC production of
“Peter Pan.” And Muir aired an Access Hollywood-style segment with Bradley
Cooper.

As the performers — Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Bill Maher
— were doing more serious stuff, the supposedly serious guys were doing more
performing. The anchors pack their Hermès ties and tight T-shirts and fly off to hot
spots for the performance aspect, because the exotic and dangerous backdrops
confer the romance of Hemingway covering the Spanish Civil War.
Oliver, who has made waves with pieces on financial chicanery in the Miss
America contest and the corporate players trying to undermine net neutrality, told
The Verge that he is hiring more researchers with backgrounds in investigative
journalism.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Fusion, Muir acted out the facial expressions
he uses during his broadcast: “the listening face,” the “really listening” face, and the
“really concerned” face. All that was missing was “Blue Steel.”
With no pushback from the brass at NBC, Williams has spent years fervently
“courting celebrity,” as The Hollywood Reporter put it, guest starring on “30 Rock,”
slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and regaling David Letterman with his
faux heroics: “Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I
was in, RPG and AK-47.”
As his profession shrinks and softens, Williams felt compelled to try to steal the
kind of glory that can only be earned the hard way.

JAN. 22, 2015
David Brooks
The online dating site OkCupid asks its clients to rate each other’s attractiveness on a
scale of 1 to 5. When men rated the women, the median score was about 3 and the
ratings followed a bell curve — a few really attractive women and an equal number of
women rated as unattractive.
But when women rated men, the results were quite different. The median score
was between 1 and 2. Only 1 in 6 of the guys was rated as having above average looks.
Either the guys who go to places like OkCupid, Tinder and other sites are
disproportionately homely, or women have unforgiving eyes.
Looks, unsurprisingly, dominate online dating. But I learned some details from
“Dataclysm,” the book by Christian Rudder, who is the co-founder and president of
OkCupid.
There’s a gigantic superstar effect. Women who are rated in the top 5 percent of
attractiveness get a vast majority of the approaches. The bottom 95 percent get much
less. For men, looks barely matter at all unless you are in the top 3 percent or so. The
hunks get barraged with approaches.
It’s better to have a polarizing profile than a bland one. People who generate
high levels of disapproval — because they look like goths or bikers or just weird —
often also generate higher levels of enthusiasm.
Racial bias is prevalent. When Asian men are looking at Asian women they rate
them as 18 percent more attractive than average. But when they are looking at black
women, they rate them as 27 percent less attractive. White and Latino men
downgrade black women by nearly the same percentage. White, Latino and Asian
women have similar preferences.

When people start texting or tweeting to each other, they don’t turn into a
bunch of Einsteins. Rudder looked into the most common words and phrases used
on Twitter. For men they include: good bro, ps4, my beard, in nba, hoopin and offseason.
For women they include: my nails done, mani pedi, retail therapy, and my
belly button.
People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t.
Research suggests they are broadly representative. It’s just that they’re in a specific
mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people. They have
access to very little information that can help them judge if they will fall in love with
this person. They pay ridiculous amounts of attention to things like looks, which
have little bearing on whether a relationship will work. OkCupid took down the
pictures one day. The people who interacted on this day exchanged contact info at
twice the rate as on a regular day.
The dating sites have taken the information available online and tried to use it
to match up specific individuals. They’ve failed. An exhaustive review of the
literature by Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern and others concluded, “No compelling
evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work.” That’s
because what creates a relationship can’t be expressed in data or photographs. Being
in love can’t be done by a person in a self-oriented mind-set, asking: Does this choice
serve me? Online dating is fascinating because it is more or less the opposite of its
object: love.
When online daters actually meet, an entirely different mind-set has to kick in.
If they’re going to be open to a real relationship, they have to stop asking where this
person rates in comparison to others and start asking, can we lower the boundaries
between self and self. They have to stop thinking in individual terms and start feeling
in rapport terms.
Basically, they have to take the enchantment leap. This is when something dry
and utilitarian erupts into something passionate, inescapable and devotional.
Sometimes a student becomes enraptured by the beauty of math, and becomes a
mathematician. Soldiers doing the drudgery of boot camp are gradually bonded into
a passionate unit, for which they will risk their lives. Anybody who has started a
mere job and found in it a vocation has taken the enchantment leap.
In love, of course, the shift starts with vulnerability, not calculation. The people
involved move from selfishness to service, from prudent thinking to poetic thinking, from a state of selection to a state of need, from relying on conscious thinking to
relying on their own brilliant emotions.
When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize
we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in
a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the
great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.
I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some
activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that
building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a
practical and fervent need.

By PICO IYER JAN. 3, 2015

MANY of my friends were shocked some years ago when I cut down on my junk-food
intake. Even my wise old physician was a little put out. He had more or less given me
the green light to the “golden arches” a few years before when, one afternoon,
following my annual checkup, he’d asked me what I consumed every day. “A Big
Mac, medium fries and Coke for lunch,” I answered, “and frozen pizza from the
convenience store for dinner.”
“Then,” he said, since my blood test numbers were more or less O.K., “I’d
recommend you keep on with the junk food.”
I did, gleefully, for a while. But at some point — maybe around the middle of my
fifth decade — my Happy Meals began to leave me feeling a little less than exuberant.
They sat inside my stomach, wobbling, even as I somehow felt more empty than
before I had devoured them. Finally, flush with pride, I put most burgers and fries
behind me.
When I went to my doctor the following year, I could not wait to tell him how I’d
mended my ways.
Sitting in his reception room, however, I needed something to munch on. I
reached for the nearest magazine and gobbled down details of Monica Lewinsky’s
secret life. I picked up a report on the news from Bosnia, then noticed that there was
a far spicier update on Winona Ryder’s sticky fingers. When the time for my
appointment came, I could hardly tear myself from all the savory nibbles. And when
I told my doctor about my new regime, he didn’t seem impressed.
A few years later, my wise old physician retired, and was replaced by a doctor
two years younger than myself. He was friendly and relaxed and had lots of numbers
at his fingertips. As “You should go to the gym,” he went on.
“But I hardly even visit KFC anymore!” I protested.
“I’m not suggesting triathlons. You’ve simply reached the age when you need to
get your heart going,” he continued. “Only three times a week, 30 minutes on a
treadmill.”
I wasn’t keen to do this, but he had my new (mysteriously higher) cholesterol
figures in his hands, engraved diplomas on his walls. Reluctantly, I signed on at a
local health club. Soon my time there became a highlight of my day. The huffing and
puffing left me at once calmer and invigorated. I felt even better than when
renouncing nachos with extra cheese.
I proudly reported this breakthrough to a quiet, slightly older friend. “You’ve
never thought of doing this with your mind?” he said, a bit ungraciously, I thought.
“Just sitting still for a few minutes every day, to give your imagination a chance to
take a walk?”
“I don’t have time!” I replied. “Especially now that I’m devoting 75 minutes to
the gym.”
I’m not the type to meditate; I’d sooner give up Taco Bell for life than take on
the rigorous disciplines of yoga or tai chi. But I recalled something a 17th-century
mathematician and philosopher had whispered to me, which echoed what my friend
now said. We run and run in search of contentment, Pascal wrote in his “Pensées,”
and so ensure we’ll never be settled or content. We mindlessly race away from the
one place where happiness is to be found.
I was, in short, what I’d call an externalist — a person who’ll exercise great care
over what he puts into his body and never think about what he puts into his mind.
Who will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from
the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends. Who will
fill his head with so much junk that he can’t remember that wolfing down Buffalo
wings is not the problem, but a symptom.
An externalist makes a point — even a habit — of cherishing means over ends,
effects over causes and everything that fills him up over everything that truly
sustains him. He interprets health in terms of his body weight, wealth in terms of his
bank account and success in terms of his business card. He’ll go to the health club,
and never think of the mental health club, like someone who imagines the only
arteries to be unclogged are the ones that course with blood.

This past Christmas, I was all set to take myself on an exotic vacation, and then
decided just to stay in my mother’s house in California — no long lines, no visas, no
three-hour online reservation attempts foiled when you forget your second
password. I’d come to believe that most destinations are less important than the
spirit you bring to them. And that spirit is better developed by sitting still than by
running all around.
As friends hurried off to the airport for Rio or Hawaii, I sat in my little room and
watched the sun burn on the water down below. Light flooded into the space every
afternoon and then, in the magic hour, the whole place began to glow. I nibbled at
breakfast bars and listened to public radio and did nothing at all, the way it isn’t
always easy to do if you’ve paid half your annual income to go to Mauritius.
Moments carried a depth, a weight, of both emotion and association, they’d seldom
have in Vegas. It’s not so much that we lack food, I remembered Simone Weil
suggesting, as that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry.
The external world is always going to be my home, of course, and a place where
I find each day’s savor and delight. And with Google Glass and Dreamliners and
every hour’s new wearable, it becomes ever more like a supermarket, restocked each
day with ever more astonishing options. Revisiting North Korea, four months ago, I
was reminded of just how lucky I am, when it comes to choice and opportunity.
The only problem with such visible bounty, though, is that it becomes ever
easier to feel, within yourself, like a gridlocked freeway at rush hour with no
overpasses or offramps in sight. You start railing against fascism, as W. H. Auden
suggested, and become a dictator at the family dinner table. You hold forth against
the destruction of the environment and never notice — or try to clear — the hazy
skies and deforested spaces within you.
I still surrender — gratefully — to the latest congressional sex scandal or
celebrity memoir whenever I’m killing time waiting for a plane, even though I know
that any book by D. H. Lawrence or Marcel Proust will leave me feeling more alive,
more myself, more in love with the world. And even as I keep my distance from
McDonald’s now, I have no hesitation in racing off toward organic, locally sourced,
“food with integrity” Chipotle outlets instead. A life of daily visits to the gym
demands some guilty pleasures.
But I know that one day my doctor is going to come into the room with a very
dark look on his face and news that no treadmill or repudiation of onion rings is going to make better. And then the only thing I’ll have to turn to will be all I’ve done
when going nowhere — and everything I might have stored in some less visible
account.
Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going
Nowhere.”

DEC. 8, 2014
David Brooks
Like a lot of people in journalism, I began my career, briefly, as a police reporter. As
the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have unfolded, I’ve found myself thinking
back to those days. Nothing excuses specific acts of police brutality, especially in the
Garner case, but not enough attention is being paid to the emotional and psychological challenges of being a cop.

Early on, I learned that there is an amazing variety of police officers, even
compared to other professions. Most cops are conscientious, and some, especially
among detectives, are brilliant. They spend much of their time in the chaotic and depressing nether-reaches of society: busting up domestic violence disputes, dealing with drunks and drug addicts, coming upon fatal car crashes, managing conflicts large and small.
They ride an emotional and biochemical roller coaster. They experience moments of intense action and alertness, followed by emotional crashes marked by exhaustion, and isolation. They become hypervigilant. Surrounded by crime all day, some come to perceive that society is more threatening than it really is. To cope, they emotionally armor up. Many of the cops I was around developed a cynical, dehumanizing and hard-edged sense of humor that was an attempt to insulate themselves from the pain of seeing a dead child or the extinguished life of a young girl they arrived too late to save.
Many of us see cops as relatively invulnerable as they patrol the streets. The
cops themselves do not perceive their situation that way. As criminologist George
Kelling wrote in City Journal in 1993, “It is a common myth that police officers
approach conflicts with a feeling of power — after all, they are armed, they represent the state, they are specially trained and backed by an ‘army.’ In reality, an officer’s
gun is almost always a liability … because a suspect may grab it in a scuffle. Officers
are usually at a disadvantage because they have to intervene in unfamiliar terrain, on
someone else’s territory. They worry that bystanders might become involved, either
by helping somebody the officer has to confront or, after the fact, by second-guessing
an officer’s conduct.”
Even though most situations are not dangerous, danger is always an out-of-theblue
possibility, often in the back of the mind.
In many places, a self-supporting and insular police culture develops: In this
culture no one understands police work except fellow officers; the training in the
academy is useless; to do the job you’ve got to bend the rules and understand the law
of the jungle; the world is divided into two sorts of people — cops and a — holes.
This is a life of both boredom and stress. Life expectancy for cops is lower than
for the general population. Cops suffer disproportionately from peptic ulcers, back
disorders and heart disease. In one study, suicide rates were three times higher
among cops than among other municipal workers. Other studies have found that
somewhere between 7 percent and 19 percent of cops suffer from post-traumatic
stress disorder. The effect is especially harsh on those who have been involved in
shootings. Two-thirds of the officers who have been involved in shootings suffer
moderate or severe emotional problems. Seventy percent leave the police force
within seven years of the incident.
Most cops know they walk a dangerous line, between necessary and excessive
force. According to a 2000 National Institute of Justice study, more than 90 percent
of the police officers surveyed said that it is wrong to respond to verbal abuse with
force. Nonetheless, 15 percent of the cops surveyed were aware that officers in their
own department sometimes or often did so.
And through the years, departments have worked to humanize the profession.
Over all, police use of force is on the decline, along with the crime rate generally.
According to the Department of Justice, the number of incidents in which force was
used or threatened declined from 664,000 in 2002 to 574,000 in 2008. Community
policing has helped bind police forces closer to the citizenry.
A blind spot is race. Only 1 in 20 white officers believe that blacks and other
minorities receive unequal treatment from the police. But 57 percent of black officers But at the core of profession lies the central problem of political philosophy.
How does the state preserve order through coercion? When should you use
overwhelming force to master lawbreaking? When is it wiser to step back and use
patience and understanding to defuse a situation? How do you make this decision
instantaneously, when testosterone is flowing, when fear is in the air, when someone
is disrespecting you and you feel indignation rising in the gut?
Racist police brutality has to be punished. But respect has to be paid. Police
serve by walking that hazardous line where civilization meets disorder.

DEC. 4, 2014

David Brooks  NY Times

Why Elders Smile – NYTimes.com

A few months ago, Ezekiel Emanuel had an essay in The Atlantic saying that, all things considered, he’d prefer to die around age 75. He argued that he’d rather clock out with all his powers intact than endure a sad, feeble decline.