Sometimes it’s intentional—hacktivists exposing racist jokes in emails exchanged by Arizona police officers—and sometimes it’s accidental, a misplaced iPhone or a misdirected email. But as the amount of data we collectively produce has exponentially increased, so have the number of breaches. Since 2005, more than 534 million digital records have been stolen, lost, or compromised, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. And those are just the incidents that have been reported. In reality, the number of breaches is probably much, much larger. We don’t even know how much data we’ve lost.

I recently watched Gyllenhaal in the transdimensional, train-based thriller Source Code. The movie left me in a state of befuddlement. I wasn’t confused about how a Marine could be forcibly transposed into a dead man’s body to defuse a bomb that had already exploded—any fool could figure that out, especially with Vera Farmiga calmly explaining it 100 times. No, I was confused about how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is.

There were moments in Source Code when Gyllenhaal seemed to tower over everyone on the train he was trapped on for eight minutes at a time. In other scenes, he looked positively diminutive—a doe-eyed homunculus lost amid explosions and time warps and Michelle Monaghan’s caresses.

I’m not the sort of person who thinks much about the height of celebrities. (I’ve always assumed most famous people are about seven feet tall.) The fact that I caught myself wondering about Gyllenhaal’s height suggested there was something uncanny about it, in the way an unsettlingly warm afternoon can bend one’s conversation toward the topic of global warming.

As soon as I got home, I typed “How tall is Jake Gyllenhaal” into my web browser’s search box. The internet deposited me at CelebHeights.com, “an Entertainment site estimating the heights of famous people, including fan photos and celebrity quotations about their own height.” Bingo. Surely CelebHeights would provide the concise, definitive answer to my question!

Friends, the CelebHeights entry on Jake Gyllenhaal runs to 11 printed pages. It spans 21 months. It is the Infinite Jest of Jake Gyllenhaal–height-related discourse: a maelstrom of heated debate, contested recollections, and esoteric theories of mind-numbing potency.

The entry begins with a quote from Jake Gyllenhaal's website: “I’m happily 6 feet tall.” What would seem a benign proclamation is actually the fuse to a powder keg. Before I knew it, a message-board user had whisked me away to an exclusive party for the express purpose of witnessing Gyllenhaal’s towering ... mendacity:

“Met Jake at the Weinstein Oscar Party. We were both wearing dress shoes, and standing 4 inches away from him, I was looking him in the eye. I had no need to even slightly angle my eyes upward. I’m 5’8”, and Jake was an inch taller than me, period. He has a pretty tall cranium, which gave him the extra inch over me.” —Anonymous

This should have been my signal to close my computer and await the release of Jake Gyllenhaal’s medical records. Anonymous was accusing Gyllenhaal of adding three full inches to his height! I already suspected my quest for the facts would be a thorny one, but I couldn’t help myself; I read on:

“Wasn’t he considered for the role of the Joker a few years back (which eventually did not work out). The Joker is 6'3".” —don23

This is one of the craziest things I’ve read on the internet, and I’ve read my share of crazy things on the internet. Reverse engineering an actor’s height via the height of a fictional character he was slated to portray is less than foolproof, right? (Can we safely assume the actor who donned a rubber suit to play Godzilla was not as tall as the actual Godzilla?)

I still hadn’t found an authority I could trust.

“wow... I thought you’re 6'5 above jake... but that’s okay.. as long as you’re good in acting. i love your movie. prince of persia.” —jude villz

It’s not unusual for our opinion of a public figure to affect our perception of that person’s physical characteristics. (In my mind, George W. Bush’s eyes are so squinty and close together they’re basically a pair of Grape-Nuts in an empty bowl.) But jude villz had gone overboard: 6'5" or above for Jake Gyllenhaal? That would make him taller than Liam Neeson and Jeff Goldblum! (Not if they were stacked on top of each other, but still.) It’s important to ground one’s theories in testable data. You may love Rush Limbaugh’s voice because it sounds like a perpetually rising loaf of bread, but that’s no reason to swallow his conspiracy theories about climate-change hoaxes.

I had just started researching, and already I was dealing with a spread of at least eight inches. I tried to comfort myself: Don’t worry, there is a fact of the matter as to how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is. You’ll figure out that fact.

One page ... two pages ... three pages ... four pages ...

Why is there so much online debate about celebrity heights? My friend suspected most of the people debating Jake Gyllenhaal’s height were fellow actors, because actors are self-conscious about their stature. (Apparently, many film and television actors are on the short side; it has to do with fitting them in a camera lens, or the golden rectangle, or something.) What if most
of the people arguing about Gyllenhaal’s height had a professional interest in the subject? They were sizing up the competition. Their very livelihoods—perhaps their very lives—depended on it.

When it comes to data, context is key. A datum that seems insignificant to you might be the most important information in my life. This is why reading message-board arguments about topics you know nothing about is so heart expanding—there is no person for whom some fact of the matter is not vitally important.

The frustrating thing is when there’s a piece of data you think should be vitally important to everyone, and not enough people seem to care. For instance:

“The climate crisis ... is getting a lot worse—much more quickly than predicted. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more—if more should be required—the future of human civilization is at stake.” —Al Gore

Maybe people don’t recognize the data as a settled fact of the matter—they see it as a conspiracy, or a fiction, or, most frustrating, they “need to see more evidence first.” (The Jake Gyllenhaal–height equivalent would be something like, “I won’t be convinced by the data on his height until we cryogenically freeze him beside fifty yardsticks in an oxygenless laboratory for 10,000 years.”)

The CelebHeights.com discussion of Jake Gyllenhaal goes quiet for weeks at a time. Then someone posts an account of a recent sighting, or a photo of Gyllenhaal standing beside a celebrity of quantifiable tallness (like Xzibit), and then someone else counters that Gyllenhaal’s height is hard to calculate because “his body is like a peruvian guy (large oblong head, short neck),” adding “I should see him shaven” (?!?), and the whole thing flares up again. Any new piece of data, in the hands of the right maniac, can help a fact of the matter remain perpetually contested. This debate has been going strong for almost two years; is it any wonder that issues of slightly graver import—climate change, the theory of evolution, President Obama’s citizenship—are usually 5,000 percent overdebated?

“The ... half dozen or so posts, which seem to have a heavy emphasis on homosexual behavior etc. ... have no redeeming value and will probably not be posted.” —Climate Change Message Board Moderator

Five pages ... six pages ... seven pages ...

At some point I realized that what had begun as idle curiosity (“I wonder how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is?”) and developed into a quest (“I’ve gotta know how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is!”) was now a high-stakes emotional journey (“Dear God, when will I uncover the truth about Jake Gyllenhaal’s height?”). I longed for closure.

A mysterious user named Bradi finally dropped the hammer:

“I see a 5'11" maxed morning height guy in those pictures” —Bradi

I was struck by Bradi’s tone of authority. His (her?) refusal to issue a straightforward proclamation, referring instead to his own perception (“I see”) only made him seem more objective. Bradi sounded like a true authority on celebrity heights who was demeaning his expertise by even participating in the debate. Even the term “maxed morning height” (new to me) felt solid; it makes sense that Jake Gyllenhaal is tallest before getting beaten down by an unforgiving world all day.

Whereas I imagined the guy who met Jake Gyllenhaal at the Weinstein party was compromised by self-inflicted cataracts of cologne, and the guy who wrote about the Joker was a bong-lunged sociopath, Bradi struck me as unimpeachable: He lived in a clean house and went duck hunting with a dog named Thucydides. I just knew it. The debate was settled for me: Jake Gyllenhaal has a maxed morning height of 5'11".

Surely climate scientists could benefit from studying Bradi’s balance of understatement and screw-you confidence: I see an atmosphere that is changing radically due to carbon emissions in those graphs. If you disagree, you’re an idiot. The problem, of course, is convincing those people who either don’t trust any data about climate change because of Al Gore being a fat blowhard or don’t believe said data are relevant to them. Maybe it would help if Jake Gyllenhaal made a public- service announcement about climate change after sleeping for a month straight, so he’s at a maxed morning height of 11'3".

In developing a new search results page, Divine created a blue toolbar button. The team agreed that this particular hue was the best, until a project manager noted that a greener shade of blue in a nearby ad had performed much better—meaning that users were more likely to click it. The team was ordered to test 41 different blues to see which one users would choose, instead of relying strictly on Divine’s expertise.

The story was picked up by The New York Times and quickly rippled through the design world as creatives accused Google of “smothering” and “undermining” designers. One of Google’s designers, Douglas Bowman, cited the incident as a reason for quitting the company. Bloggers vilified Marissa Mayer, the “keeper” of Google’s homepage, who had mandated the testing as part of her ongoing reliance on charts and graphs. They felt she had gone over to the side of the numbers.

In the age of instant feedback—with its usability studies (which sound boring) and eye-tracking surveys (which sound painful)— our well-crafted prose and art are swiftly reduced to revenue, translated to a string of dollar signs. All too often it feels like the choices made by writers and designers aren’t as much creative as they are knee-jerk, robotic operations to capture more clicks. With one eye always trained on the traffic numbers, do we ignore our own creative intuition?

I remember the first time I was confronted with this new reality. I had written a blog post with the most perfect, pun-filled headline. But when I saw it, edited and published, I did not recognize it as my own. My headline had been swapped with a gimmick that anyone who writes for the web (and anyone who reads it) will instantly recognize: The dreaded formula of “The Top 5 Things That Will Prove Something Important.” My post had been turned into a list. My editor—a hardened blogging authority at the age of 26—shrugged. It had been proven somewhere (where?) that people love lists.

At first I was skeptical, borderline insulted. But when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.

Here Are The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This:

1.    It has changed the way I write. If a bulleted listicle is proven to perform better than a well-crafted essay, I’m going to write the listicle.

2.   My headlines are noticeably less interesting than they used to be. But, as an editor once told me, clever headlines are dead, unless you’re The New York Post.

3.   After I publish a story, I spend an hour feeding it to social networks and aggregators when I should be writing the next piece. That doesn’t even count the hours spent composing the perfect social media haikus that serve as the lead-ins to my links. It’s reducing my per-word rate to pennies.

4.    I stay up at night worrying about how many people will tweet my as-yet-unpublished story. Add to that the endless perusing of other people’s Twitter streams to see what they’re reading and writing about and where my work can fit into the conversation.

5.    I wonder if I’m still a writer, or if I’m a content creator.

One of the reasons I wanted to become a writer is that I was fascinated by a journalist’s ability to shape public opinion. Yet, the more information I have about who actually reads my words, the further removed I feel from the field of journalism. Sometimes my writerly self takes a back seat to my other personality, the one that’s obsessed with getting strangers to like me for something I wrote. As a slave to data, my success as a writer now hinges on how often I get Stumbled Upon, Voted Up, Promoted, Ffffound, Dugg, RTed, and Liked.

One might argue that I’m more machine than journalist. I actually enjoy the rush of attracting traffic. But does it make me any less of a creative person?

I posed this question to Divine, the poster child for creatives wronged by data, who says this is the compromise we have to make. “For traditionally trained designers, a lot of your training is about process and intuition and figuring out how they have a relationship together,” he says. “Now we have data and live traffic experiments and lots of other signals in that realm that serve to influence whether or not an idea is good. I want as much information as possible.”

Ostensibly, having this data at our fingertips would mean that we’re producing better ideas. The more you know about what your audience wants, the better you can create stories and infographics and art for them. If writing a certain headline or choosing a certain color for a button means that the most people will get access, shouldn’t you do it? It’s an interesting question.

And it leads to another: What time does the Super Bowl start?

This is what potentially millions of people were asking on Saturday, February 5—or at least what they were Googling. An uncredited editor at The Huffington Post seized the opportunity, filing a story at 8:49 p.m. with that question as the headline.

“Are you wondering ‘what time does the Superbowl [sic] start?’” the story began. “It’s a common search query, as is ‘what time is the super bowl 2011,’ ‘superbowl time’ and ‘superbowl kickoff time 2011.’” In the third paragraph, the story finally got to the answer (Sunday, February 6, 6:30 p.m.).

The article has since been “edited for greater clarity,” with the first two grammatically offensive paragraphs stripped out. But the truth remains: In its bald-faced grab for traffic, HuffPo even chose to include a typo—the headline still says “Superbowl,” not the correct “Super Bowl”—because most people were searching for the misspelled version. Data in action.

Take it as the exception, but in fact this is not too different from how many sites with a veneer of journalistic integrity are generating stories right now. The sorts of stories you’ve no doubt clicked on. Instead of stumbling across a story idea while walking down the street, or meeting a stranger, or pondering an issue in the shower, a writer—maybe even me—skims Twitter’s trending topics or the most-searched phrases on Google Trends and then writes a piece. In most cases, a piece of crap.

The history of education is filled with such earnest, progressive hopes for stan- dardized testing; Napoleon built the French bureaucracy in much the same way, and the SAT, for all its flaws, played an important role in opening up the Ivy League to Jews, Catholics, and public-school students.

The University of California and other elite colleges now acknowledge that the SAT is an incomplete measure of what students know and discriminatory against low-income students of color. But standardized testing is booming in primary and secondary schools. For the past decade, No Child Left Behind has required states to assess children in math and reading every year from third through eighth grades. The Obama administration has made test-based “accountability” a cornerstone of his school reform agenda, even asking states to develop standardized tests for preschoolers.

Today standardized tests are big business, but the testing world was once dominated by nonprofits. The first effective multiple-choice test-scoring machine was developed in the early 1960s by a University of Iowa education professor named Everett Franklin Lindquist, who believed the only legitimate use of a test score was in helping a classroom teacher diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses and modify lesson plans accordingly. In 1968, the University of Iowa sold Lindquist’s technology to Westinghouse, which in turn sold it to the textbook and testing giant Pearson. The Scantron Corporation was founded as a competitor in 1972; instead of selling grading machines, Scantron gave them away free to schools and then charged for the special answer-sheets.

Today both Scantron and Pearson are owned by M & F Holding Company, the conglomerate of buyout king Ronald Perelman. And the nonprofit Educational Testing Service—the home of the AP, SAT, GRE, and TOEFL—now has a for-profit arm; one of its projects is a computer program that claims to provide “reliable evaluations” of student essays in 20 seconds.

As standardized testing plays an increasingly central role in education, school districts from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., have been rocked by cheating scandals. Adults at dozens of schools in both cities are suspected of changing students’ answers on multiple-choice tests. But these scandals have done little to derail the testing juggernaut. Nor have policy makers heeded the sage advice of psychometricians like Harvard’s Daniel Koretz, who concluded after decades of research that “we usually cannot distinguish between real and bogus gains” on standardized exams.

In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system is spending $2 million this year to develop 52 new standardized tests, including some for kindergarteners. The Charlotte Observer convened a forum of high school students to weigh in on the new testing. “School and classes shouldn’t be based on just giving tests,” said 15-year old Dajha Medley, “although that’s what it has become now.”

Numb3rs is about a crack FBI agent named Don Eppes and his young, math superstar/professor brother, Charlie. It’s a crime drama, but it’s not one of those blunt-hammer crime dramas where they rely on played-out police techniques like interrogation, blood samples, and wiretapping. No, these guys use math. Why math? Because math explains everything, even the allure of a show about math.

Charlie is a math genius. You know this because he can do the one thing that only math geniuses can do: scribble equations on a transparent board at a manic pace (some math geniuses prefer to use a window pane; both answers are acceptable). Charlie spends approximately two minutes of each episode positioned at such a board, writing out equations with a marker as his FBI colleagues crowd around. He then turns to them and gives an ad hoc lecture that ultimately leads to the capture or killing of the bad guy. The other agents listen carefully, taking in esoteric mathematical principles like number theory and multivariable analysis and earnestly adding their own real-life and episode-relevant examples. This is the kind of class participation and energy that teachers only dream about.

The best way to catch bad guys is to examine the patterns they leave. We learn this right off the bat in Episode 1. By carefully noting where water droplets fall from a sprinkler, we can calculate the exact placement of the sprinkler itself. And if instead of water droplets we’re talking about victims, well, that’s how they nail the Los Angeles rapist. In Episode 3 we’re dealing with a potential pandemic—a deliberately unleashed, even-more-deadly version of the famously deadly 1918 Spanish flu. That pattern is right in front of our eyes. To a non-math-oriented FBI agent it looks just like a tree. But guess what? “Branching is a common pattern in nature, from crystals to giant redwoods,” Charlie teaches us.

Case closed. To find patterns, we must first make careful observations.

Here’s one. I notice that in Episode 7 they start drinking out of thermal mugs and use them in 100 percent of the episodes thereafter except for a mysterious disappearance in Episode 12. I don’t know what this means.

Charlie’s father—who Charlie still lives with at age 29—asks probing questions about whether Charlie has a girlfriend in episodes 2, 3, and 6. It’s difficult to tell whether the father is wondering if his son is gay or trying to suss out whether the young professor will move out at some point, for god’s sake; the sample size is too small.

Vertically mounted maps that are then circled using either red or white markers for geolocation occur in 100 percent of the shows. Also critical to the show are data and time. Data as in, “If I could just get my hands on some geospacial radar imagery data, you know I’d be able to narrow the list of targets.” And time as in, “You’ve just asked me to solve one of the world’s biggest mysteries in a few hours.”

Surprisingly, the phrase, “It’s a long shot, but ...” only turns up in Episode 3. And the word “supercomputer” is only used in Episode 5 (although it’s used three times). Around Episode 6 I find myself talking back to the show. I say things like, “Do a regression analysis, Charlie!” and, “Have you considered wave theory?” even though I don’t have the faintest idea what either of these things are. Episodes 7 and 8 I watch at an angle, lying on the sofa, while the other 11 episodes I watch in a sitting position, slightly bent forward. Twice
I take a break to make meals that would be considered more like dinner than a midnight snack. Four times I pause the show and wander outside to check out the night sky. Once (halfway through Episode 12) I call my own professor brother. He doesn’t pick up.

Charlie manages to show up at the scene of the crime in episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 13. Each time this really affects him. His job is no longer the challenge of understanding abstract causality in our universe, it’s life and death, mainly death. These crisis-of-faith moments seem to coincide with brushes against the remnants of actual, real-life violence. Maybe he sees a victim wrapped in that black bag, or a marker where the bullet casings landed, or he notices a victim’s family member. Either way, these moments are united by a certain deepness to his stare.

The one glaring exception to his crime scene visits is Episode 11. In this episode, Charlie bumps into a young mathematics research assistant whose mentor has been brutally murdered. The murder has caused the kid to re-evaluate what he’s interested in doing with his life. He tells Charlie that he’s headed back to school to study econometrics because he’s interested in using math for good. “People assume that the economy is this adversarial relationship where one person’s gain by definition has to be another person’s loss. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There can be gains for everybody.”

Good kid, right? Wrong. He’s the killer. Stabbed his mentor to death just before the man was able to complete the formula. What formula? Allow Charlie to explain, “Once he was through, theoretically he’d be able to predict human performance based on geographic and environmental factors down to a city block.”

One of the FBI agents breaks that down for us. “So basically, you are where you live.”

Wow. That’s some rough stuff: math being used to predict and possibly determine who will and won’t succeed. At the end of the show Charlie confronts the kid about the killing just before they duck his head into the squad car. Turns out the kid grew up in West Oakland and computers were his only savior. “It’s not too difficult to figure out what Dr. Hoke’s formula would say about putting a computer lab in my high school,” the kid tells Charlie, comparing this kind of detailed statistical analysis and resource allocation to the Nazis’ use of eugenics. “I did what I had to do to stop that before it started.”

“That makes you a murderer,” Charlie retorts.

But it’s not that simple. The kid points out that Charlie consults for the National Security Agency, and does he think for one second that all his NSA work is being used for good?

Silence. Cue the deep stare.

At a recent dinner someone explained to me his theory behind the popularity of CSI. It’s because the show explains everything three times, he said. One character makes the big statement, another character rephrases it, and a third character rephrases it again. If you don’t understand that first pass, by the time they’re done with the third explanation everything is crystal clear.

Hearing this, another friend, a federal prosecutor, complained that it was CSI that had poisoned the jury pool. Everyone’s an expert in forensics now, so when they go to deliberate they say things like, “Did they implement fluorescent scanners to look for fingerprints on the file?” or, “How come they forgot to use a nano-DNA swab?”

Numb3rs didn’t just last for a season. It ran six, totaling 119 episodes, each with millions of viewers. I hope that these fans feel an equal sense of expertise in math as the CSI fans feel in forensics— by which I mean, like me, they don’t really get it but at least they think they do. Most of the things Charlie uncovers on the series, even the dumbed-down illustrations and examples, go over my head. I’ve always held the geeks in high esteem and longed for their quantified understanding of the natural beauty in the universe. While it’s possible for a mathematician to look at a piece of art and see something gorgeous, the probability of an artist looking at a mathematician’s work and seeing the same is smaller. The fact that Numb3rs even bothers is impressive to me. Much like Charlie, Numb3rs does the math thing with an undeniable level of conviction. Even if we don’t understand, we believe.

While it hasn’t taught me more about math, Numb3rs has taught me how to think like a fake mathematician. Now when I’m pondering whether to park illegally for five minutes I’ll think about the number of traffic cops, the number of streets in the city, the number of trees on those streets, and the period of time we’re talking about, trying to create some kind of probability about whether I’ll get a ticket or not.

So far it’s worked 100 percent of the time.

Gage is the leading Republican strategist in a field called predictive analytics, or microtargeting. He worked with George W. Bush’s winning campaign in 2004 and is now working with Mitt Romney, whom he hopes to fashion into the first presidential “data-driven candidate.” Gage praises the Democrats’ success in using microtargeting to build the Obama coalition in 2008. Ken Strasma, Obama’s national targeting director for that campaign and the founder of the consulting company Strategic Telemetry, says 2008 was the tipping point when microtargeting became a must-have tool for any political contender. Now, a data strategy is as necessary as a television strategy, and each campaign is “an information arms race,” explains Alex Lundry, who works for Gage’s company, TargetPoint.

Every time you “like” a friend’s Facebook status, sign up for a Nordstrom credit card, rate a Netflix movie, order a magazine subscription, or merely click on a website, you’re leaving behind a trail of data exhaust that up until recently has been like so many discarded Styrofoam cups lying along the information superhighway. The rise of microtargeting is a function of new logarithms—and computers fast enough to process them—that are able to capture all this trash and turn it into gold. Over the years, the data-mining industry has become adept at recycling information about the websites we visit and the products we buy. Rumor has it that some high-end companies, including Omaha Steaks, can now make more money by selling their customer pedigrees to data-mining firms than they can from selling their product.

Both parties use this data to craft hyperspecific messages to peel away voters from their opponents. With access to a database containing information on roughly 200 million individuals—not just email addresses, real people with names—Gage tries to predict which candidate they will vote for and what kind of message will help make up their minds.

“Let’s say I want to run for a Senate seat in Michigan,” he explains. “So I say, ‘How many customers are out there?’” Out of 7.5 million registered voters in the state, he decides that 4.2 million might cast a ballot. “So I need to figure out how to get on Election Day, say, 2.1 million voters to go and buy my product, to pull my lever. So you probably say who are these people? How do I get to them? That’s where we come in.” He’ll take a random sample of 200,000 voters from across the state and overlay census tract and consumer information for each person. Then they’ll conduct a microsurvey of about 10,000 people from the list to understand each voter’s attitudes. “Is he a Democrat or Republican? A protectionist or a free trader? How do they feel about guns? How do they feel about abortion? How do they feel about the role of government?”

By overlaying information, profiles emerge. Simply knowing someone’s age and gender doesn’t predict much. For any 59-year-old male there’s roughly a 54 percent chance he’s Republican (Gage didn’t want to reveal the exact stats, so he gave me “numbers rooted in truth”). But knowing that he’s a white businessman who lives in Louisiana, drives an SUV, and owns a Bible means there’s something like a 94 percent chance he’s Republican. In contrast, take a 59-year-old black businessman who lives in California, drives an SUV, and likes modern art. A man who fits this profile only has a 12 percent chance of being Republican.

The first profile is someone who might be good to reach out to for fundraising early on or with a reminder to vote just before Election Day. But he’s likely already in the Republican camp. Microtargeting can be used to rally members of a candidate’s base to ensure they turn up at the polls. But it’s also used to zero in on the issues that can persuade an individual swing voter. In 2004, Gage helped identify the middle-class, middle-age Hispanic women concerned about education—and therefore receptive to a message about Bush’s role in No Child Left Behind—whose votes helped Bush win New Mexico, and the Ohio “security moms” who were particularly worried about terrorism.

Gage has found that “anger points,” issues that provoke the most ire, are the most effective way to boost turnout. So his surveys are designed to find which issues—taxes, abortion, guns—fit each profile in order to get the most persuasive message to the right voter. He claims he can deliver a 3 percent to 4 percent bump for his clients. The margins may seem small, but the impact isn’t; presidential races boil down to close battles in a dozen or so states. Every vote counts.

Microtargeting helps both parties identify the issues they can use to peel away voters. Ken Strasma likes the SUV as an example, too. At first, the average SUV driver wouldn’t seem to care about gas prices or the environment. But find out she has four children and a two-hour commute and that changes: The kids explain the SUV; the commute tells you she’s susceptible to a political message about gas prices and that a radio ad might be better than direct mail or an internet approach.

The devil is in the aggregation of the details. “There started to emerge a few years ago,” says Strasma, “a subset among Christian evangelical voters who viewed environmentalism as an important issue. They saw it as a biblical imperative.” So, rather than banging their heads against the wall about trying to fight the abortion fight, Strasma says the Democrats could target those voters with the message about a pro-environment stance.

The problem with microtargeting, says Robert Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia University who specializes in the increasing polarization of American political life, is that it’s an intensification of politics as usual. He says microtargeting strategies, along with innovations such as cognitive scientists monitoring a person’s brain waves to find the most effective talking points, increase the influence of messaging. “That is,” he says, “they’re basically trying to create and mobilize more of an ideological base in both parties.” The effect could increase the bitter partisanship that already exists, making compromise—on how to tackle the federal deficit, for example—difficult. Shapiro argues that partisanship has changed the way people process facts, and points to the growing number of people who believe that weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq.

Ken Strasma admits that microtargeting does probably amplify the ideologically extreme cases in both parties. “On the other hand,” he says, “the issues and messages can also mean someone who is frustrated by partisan gridlock, frustrated by extremism, and who wants someone who’s going to campaign and govern in a new way. And that was definitely one of the successful messages in the Obama campaign.” In other words, “angry” and “partisan” are not synonymous. “Change” was a successfully targeted message.

Gage disagrees that microtargeting has altered the nature of politics. “It’s basic electoral politics as it always has been but with new technology,” he says. “You find ’em, you vote ’em, and you count ’em. Abraham Lincoln did that. Everyone does that.”

That’s true to an extent, according to Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist working on a book about how presidents since Kennedy have used polling to shape messages that would appeal to critical subgroups of voters, shifting the debate from policy to personality—a cruder form of microtargeting. “The effort to selectively mobilize supporters is as old as politics.” The founding fathers did it in the debate over ratifying the Constitution. Political candidates did it in ancient Athens. But the “potency and the consequence of targeting” has since changed for two reasons. First, more sophisticated technology makes it much more precise. The advent of computer-based analysis in the 1960s was a breakthrough that allowed politicians to break down regions by precinct. In the 1990s, neighborhoods could be analyzed block by block and by individual. “Now you’re able to kind of tailor a message to a person, knowing what that person’s interests and predispositions are. That’s kind of a revolutionary step,” he says.

“The second part,” Jacobs continues, “is a political system in which the incentives profoundly changed over the last four decades.” Until the 1970s, the two major parties were dominated by strong leaders, and the focus was on winning elections, which meant building the largest possible coalition. But reforms to limit the power of party bosses over the nomination process shifted influence to those who showed up at caucuses and primaries—often single-issue activists and the more ideologically extreme members of each party.

“It was a good intention, which was to democratize American politics and move away from smoke-filled rooms and all that. But the actual effect was that the nomination process became controlled by these very small, very ideological groups in both parties.” Rather than voters shaping the candidates’ platforms, the incentives push campaigns to seek out peripheral issues, building a narrow coalition of voters without compro- mising the predetermined policy agenda of its backers.

In theory, anything that gets more people to the polls should be good for a democracy. But microtargeting could also be used to suppress turnout; Republicans sending messages about Democratic support for gay marriage or gun control to anti-gay-rights or gun-owning Democrats, for example, could diminish their interest in voting. And because microtargeting selects for the most persuadable voter, which often means the least-attentive voter, Jacobs believes it can be used to distract and mislead. “Microtargeting is not simply about turning out voters anymore,” he says. “But actually manipulating and confusing voters to the extent of propagating misinformation.” As an example he cites the persistent belief that Saddam Hussein helped plan the 9/11 attacks. “About 31 percent of Americans, almost entirely Republican, believe that,” he says. That was part of a deliberate messaging strategy.

In 2012, both parties will be looking to persuade voters who went with Obama in 2008 but are now disaffected. And both parties will likely use microtargeted messages to frighten them, Jacobs says.

Strasma is more optimistic. Microtargeting can help a candidate craft his message and speak to each voter on the issues he or she most cares about, he says.

But it is important, Strasma cautions, for voters to know that microtargeting is being used. He compares the situation to retailers using store discount cards to track customers’ shopping habits so they can send them special offers to maximize profits. “Being an informed consumer depends on having some understanding of that. The same is true for politics. You get a piece of mail and think, ‘Wow, this candidate is focusing on my top-three issues and really seems to care about the same things I care about.’ You should realize that it’s quite possible that your neighbor across the street got an entirely different piece of mail.”

The Framingham Heart Study was unprecedented in scale and size. Researchers examined 5,209 adults, measuring each by 80 variables including cholesterol, weight, blood pressure, and lung capacity. The plan: Re-examine those same patients every two years, write down everything on paper, and file it away. The idea: Look for patterns in the data over time. As Levy and Brink put it, “Science is a collaboration, not an isolated effort. It is like a relay race toward answers.”

Ultimately, our understanding of the cardiovascular risks associated with smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise all stem from the Framingham data, which have since been digitized. The numbers have been the foundation for more than 1,200 published studies. Currently, geneticists are evaluating and expanding on the data to see how heart disease might be wired into our DNA. In the next year, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute expects its Framingham-specific database to balloon from 1.3 terabytes to 100. And back in Framingham, the granddaughters and grandsons of the original volunteers are getting pricked, poked, prodded, and X-rayed every two years in what is now called the Offspring Study.

We’re on the cusp of what might eventually blossom into a dozen Framinghams, provided we as patients let ourselves be counted. There’s been much hand-wringing about the need for more doctors to adopt electronic medical records, and a major benefit of going digital is that it can bolster research. One of the first HMOs to adopt e-records, Kaiser Permanente is quickly evolving from health care provider to health insight provider. In 2009, the National Institutes of Health awarded Kaiser 22 grants totaling $54 million for research using its database of 9 million patients. Today, Kaiser’s Division of Research oversees more than 250 ongoing studies on everything from diabetes and autism to epilepsy and back pain. Simply by seeing a doctor in the network, each of Kaiser’s 9 million patients could be contributing.

Kaiser isn’t alone. An even bigger data set is managed by Practice Fusion, a company that in 2007 began providing doctors with electronic-record and practice-management software free of charge. Four years later, the company’s cloud-based database consists of 12 million patients being treated by more than 75,000 doctors. The data are backed up with three biometric security checks; the software is as secure as networks maintained by credit card companies.

But how can the San Francisco-based start-up afford to give away what its competitors value at $50,000? Selling anonymized medical charts to research institutions could bring in two and a half times the revenue of traditional software sales. Thus far, Practice Fusion relies on funding, but the potential value of this type of data hasn’t escaped the company. “Once it’s de-identified, it becomes all of our data,” says Matthew Douglass, vice president of engineering at Practice Fusion. “In 20 years, with all the aggregating and data mining that’s taking place now, this information will be used to cure something. It’s only a matter of time.”

For now, we can begin answering a multitude of questions. Practice Fusion has contributed data to two forthcoming medical studies at Harvard, research that otherwise might have been cost-prohibitive. The company’s internal research team published a Prescription Index, which breaks down the most common medications prescribed by specialty. Last year, the company also uploaded 15,000 anonymized records to Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace, a one-stop shop for buying, selling, trading, and sharing large sets of data. In that case, Practice Fusion’s data were made available for free as part of a public “hackathon” sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, which has recently been working to aggregate and make public huge swaths of health data on the websites data.gov/health and healthindicators.gov. (These aren’t personal records like Framingham, but more like smoking rates or hospital quality ratings.) By mashing up, say, obesity rates with thenumber of fast-food restaurants per square mile, programmers can see correlations that could affect public policy.

Investigating potential epidemics in real time is another benefit to digitized data. Doctors taking part in ecosystems like the ones used by Kaiser and Practice Fusion can share charts and general observations to understand if, say, a new medication could be causing a wave of unanticipated side effects.

If the term “syndromic surveillance” sounds like a panoptic nightmare, it shouldn’t. How often have you heard someone on Twitter or Facebook mention they have the flu?

Epidemiologists already routinely comb social media to track disease. In a study on influenza published in April, researchers determined that monitoring Twitter can “estimate disease activity” in real time up to two weeks quicker than the Centers for Disease Control’s system. Of course, the use of social media is limited. Most people would never tweet about having an STD, for instance. But the larger point is obvious: Networked, digital databases are incredibly efficient. Imagine how many more people would report having the flu if it were just a matter of sending a private alert to their doctor. Now think bigger.

When the Framingham researchers got going in 1948, they didn’t know what the data might lead to, so they locked away all that paperwork in filing cabinets just to be safe. Today, health care providers typically discard 90 percent of the data they generate, according to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. What if some of what we’re tossing—or still storing in filing cabinets— could eventually prove valuable? Ninety percent of doctors in the United States are still on paper.

It’s easy for us to say, “That’s their problem.”

But consider Framingham. All that research, all those insights exist because average folks were not only willing to sign up, but went door to door to make sure their neighbors did, too. Today we have it so much easier. Saving our medical data is often as simple as checking a box. As long as the info is being logged, it could eventually become available for research. Maybe it never will, but at least there’s a chance.

After three years of working on the show, I quit, but Misha kept it running. A few years later, though, I realized I missed working with him, so I decided I would write a novel called The Moral Development of Misha. I got about 60 pages into the story of a man who wandered the city, who was nervous about his career and his life, yet was a force of reason in any situation. The writing stalled, however, when I couldn’t figure out how to develop him morally.

Worse than that, I never found the project as interesting as talking to my friend. I have always liked the way Misha speaks and thinks, but writing down the sorts of things he might say and think was never as pleasurable as encountering the things he actually did say and think. If I wanted to capture Misha, in all his specificity, why was I creating a fictional Misha? If I wanted to engage with Misha, why not leave my room and walk down the street?

One day, I told him I thought the world should have a book about everything he knows. He agreed to collaborate on this project with me, but only if I promised not to quit in the middle as I always do with everything. We came up with a list of things he thinks about, and those topics became the chapters of a book called The Chairs Are Where People Go.

Chapter topics included:

People’s Protective Bubbles Are Okay
Is Monogamy a Trick?
Sitting on the Same Side of the Table (in a negotiation)
Keeping Away People Who Would Be Disappointed
Why Robert McKee Is Wrong about Casablanca
Conferences Should Be an Exhilarating Experience
Making the City More Fun for You and Your Privileged Friends Isn’t a Super-Noble Political Goal
Everyone’s Favorite Thing and Unfavorite Thing Are Different
Wearing a Suit All the Time Is a Good Way to Quit Smoking

Over the next several months, we met a few times a week at my apartment, usually at around 10 in the morn- ing. We drank coffee and worked our way down the list. Misha sat across from me at my desk. As he talked, I typed.

Misha speaks in fully formed paragraphs, I was surprised to discover. On some occasions he would say something, then say to me, “Don’t put that in,” and then I would say, “But that’s the best part,” and I would do it anyway.

It was on one such occasion when I discovered that Misha believes you can put a price on a human life. Here is the conversation we had about it:

Sheila: I always get really pissed off when someone sees me running for the elevator and then they don’t hold it. I always hold it because I’m a nice guy.

Misha: I definitely don’t think you should hold elevator doors for people, and I don’t think you’re actually being nice. I think you’re trying to be nice, but here’s the thing: You’re in a building with, say, four elevators, and you’ve got this one person running for the one you’re in. If you hold the door for them, you’re saving them maybe the 30 seconds it will take to wait for the next elevator, and that’s the part that’s nice. But what’s not nice is this: You’re delaying the elevator by maybe five seconds. For those five seconds, that elevator isn’t moving at all, so it’s just wasted elevator time. That affects other people. There might be other people on the same elevator with you, and it’s not up to you to decide on their behalf to delay them. Similarly, there are people waiting on other floors for that elevator, and you’re slowing them down, too. So the math is this ... you’re adding a 30-second convenience for one person, but you’re creating a five-second inconvenience for: yourself, everyone in the elevator with you, and all the people waiting on the other floors. If the total number of people in that case is more than six—which I think it usually is—then the total amount of time you’re wasting is more than the amount of time you’re saving for that one person.

It’s different from just holding a door for someone, because that’s just an act of selflessness; you’re only inconveniencing yourself a little bit to create extra convenience for another person. So as a nice guy, you can still do that.

Sheila: So I suppose I shouldn’t be angry when a bus driver pulls away just as I’m running up to the bus?

Misha: Exactly! You think, Oh, it’s just a five-second delay for them to save me a five-minute wait for the next bus, but that means a five-second delay for the 50 people on the bus and the other hundred people waiting for the bus down the line. If the bus waited for everyone who came running up to it, it would run much slower. Sometimes you see people hold subway doors for their friend who is hurrying down the stairway, and that seems crazy to me! There are, like, a thousand people on the train!

Sheila: OK, well what about an airplane?

Misha: Yeah, well, there was that story a few months back—there was this airline pilot who delayed a plane. He held it for 10 minutes on the tarmac for a man who wanted to catch the flight to go see his dying grandson. It got widely reported as a gesture of great humanity and kindness on the part of the pilot, but I gotta say [laughs robustly] for me it was just another fucking elevator door! Like, you don’t know who else is on that plane. For all you know, someone on that plane ended up missing something equally insanely important because their flight was held 10 minutes. Or maybe it wasn’t even one person with something wildly important, but a hundred people missing something pretty important.

Sheila: But flights are always 10 minutes late. What’s the big deal?

Misha: Sure, but when they are, we understand that as being unfortunate and costly. We don’t try to make them 10 minutes late on purpose.

Sheila: Hm.

Misha: I think it’s really hard for our brains to do this math; to create an equivalence between something very significant and important for one person, and something less important for a large number of people. But this is what we have to do when we create government policies, for example. When we design highways, there are engineers at the government who can take a pretty good guess at how many lives it would save to make the lanes a bit wider, but we choose not to make the lanes wider even if it might save two lives a year, because it would cost an extra few million dollars. People say you can’t put a price on human life, but in these situations we do place a price. An even cheaper way to save lives would be to reduce the speed limit. But reducing the speed limit is inconvenient for many people, and it turns out that when really faced with choosing between having our commutes to and from work seven minutes longer or a few more people dying, we choose the convenience of the faster commute.

Sheila: Because we’re brutal animals!

Misha: No, not ’cause we’re brutal animals! We create so many safety regulations that save lives, but are costly. But we like to do it in cases that are worth it. And that’s the thing: the value of a human life is great, but it’s not infinite; it’s finite.

“What am I?” I asked them that day. I was 6 years old.

“You’re you,” they said.

Turns out my question was rather prescient. Just as people like to know what you do for a living, what college you went to, what neighborhood you live in, your ethnicity is apparently everyone’s business. When people in bars casually ask me, “What are you?” my answer varies depending on my mood: “A human being,” “an Arizonan,” “Cord.” If they’re hitting on me and I give them the real answer, they’ll sometimes reply with, “It’s a great mix.”

But we don’t yet live in a world in which “I’m me” is an option on college applications, census forms, or medical records. When my father needed a kidney transplant in 2008, doctors wanted to know my race. When I wondered why that mattered, they speculated that because I wasn’t full black like my half brothers, I’d be less susceptible to hypertension in the future, and thus a better donor candidate. Whereas many Americans might check one box next to the question “What is your race?” on a job application or driver’s license form, I’ve sometimes checked three. Occasionally I’ve been told to “check only one,” at which point I’m forced to decide if I should choose black, the race I most resemble, or white, the race that makes up most of my bloodline. Sometimes I’ll write “tri-racial” in the line next to “Other.” Sometimes I leave the question blank.

As you can imagine, I’m not the only one with this problem. America’s mixed-race population jumped by 35 percent in a decade, according to the 2010 census, with more than 5 million of us now self-identifying as multiracial. For centuries people have sought new and better ways to define race. Some of these have been innocuous attempts at demography; others have been linked to efforts to “purify” society by marginalizing undesirables. The question at the heart of both pursuits is the same one I’ve asked myself for almost 30 years: What makes a white person white and what makes a black person black?

I decided to immerse myself in several historical understandings of race and ethnicity to figure out how I would have answered the question “What are you?” had I been born in another time and place. As it turns out, people have never had any idea what they’re talking about when it comes to defining black, white, and everything in between.

Location: United States
Time: Antebellum

In a time when a person’s race dictated whether or not you could own them, a general consensus about how to define race was frighteningly nonexistent. Even the so-called experts disagreed. Princeton University President Samuel Stanhope Smith believed black people were covered in a large freckle brought on by an abundance of bile. Louis Agassiz, a respected Harvard scientist, once said before the American Association for the Advancement of Science that “viewed zoologically, the several races of men were well marked and distinct.” One thing most scholars agreed upon is that, regardless of what made blacks different from whites, being black was worse. This perceived hierarchy led to rules of “hypodescent,” which dictated that if a person of a superior race (read: white) had a child with a person of an inferior race (read: black), that child was usually a member of the inferior race, with exceptions made arbitrarily based on skin tone, hair texture, etc. Of course, even hypodescent had stratification: Mulatto blacks had one black parent and were worse than quadroon blacks who had a black grandparent, and so on.

What that makes me: My father is African American mixed with American Indian blood, which in the 1800s was also considered subwhite. Frederick Douglass was thought to be of black, Indian, and white descent, yet we know he was still a victim of slavery. Chances are I’d be considered a mulatto and set into bondage.

Location: United States
Time: Early 1900s

Frightened by the prospect of freshly freed blacks tainting their communities, white Americans, who had occasionally accepted white-looking quadroons and octoroons (one black great-grandparent), now started enacting “one-drop rules,” which said that anyone with any African blood whatsoever was black. Under the nation’s antimiscegenation laws, the one-drop rule effectively prevented someone who’d had a black great- grandparent, or great-great-grandparent, from legally marrying a white person. Tennessee was the first state to officially enact a one-drop law, followed by places like Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina. Keep in mind that this wasn’t just backward, post-war Confederate thinking: In his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, Columbia-educated lawyer Madison Grant wrote, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

What that makes me: Black.

Location: South Africa
Time: Apartheid

South Africa’s Population Registration Act of 1950 divided the nation’s races into four groups: native (black), white, Asiatic, and colored. Colored was reserved for anyone of mixed race as well as some East and South Asians, all of whom were treated better than blacks but worse than whites. Because the law, like all racial laws, was as nebulous as race itself, oftentimes close family members were torn apart when the government declared them to be of different racial groups. To best understand how absurd the categorizations got, one need look no further than the pencil test, which “involved sliding a pencil into a person’s hair,” writes Wendy Watson in her brief history of South Africa, Brick by Brick. “If it remained there instead of slipping out, the person’s hair was deemed too curly to be that of a white person.” Later into apartheid, Japanese and Taiwanese investment in South Africa grew to such a degree that South African officials granted them “honorary white” status to spur business development. (South Africa’s insane racial muddling didn’t end with apartheid. In 2008 a court ruled that Chinese South Africans were officially “black,” thus granting them access to affirmative action programs meant to mitigate the effects of apartheid.)

What that makes me: Because my mother is German, I’d have been colored, not black (though I tried the pencil test and it stuck). Unlike my father, I could have voted, but only for colored politicians, whose segregated branch of parliament was designed to always be overruled by the white branch. I also could have moved about more freely than my dad, who would have been banned from any white area in which he wasn’t working. Neither of us could have lived with my mother.

Location: Haiti
Time: Present

After slaughtering French military colonizers in 1804, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines immediately instituted a policy that every single Haitian, regardless of color or mix, was black. The whimsical policy was meant to counteract the similarly whimsical racial categories the French had established to divide the black underclass. In the years since Dessalines’s rule, the Haitian government has maintained that all Haitians are black, but Haitian citizens have learned to divide themselves as black, red, yellow, mulatto, and white—the Haitian word for white, blan, translates to foreigner. But exactly what constitutes a white person, a black person, and a mulatto person is still up for debate. As the PBS program Race: The Power of an Illusion notes, “[I]n Haiti, you’re white if you have any amount of European ancestry.” Race in Haiti is also tied directly to class; as a Haitian proverb puts it, “The rich black is a mulatto; the poor mulatto is a black.”

What that makes me: Because I’m relatively wealthy, educated, and possessed of a white mom, in Haiti I’m a white guy.

Location: Brazil
Time: Present

Brazil’s diverse history—Portuguese colonists, African slaves, native Indians, and Asian immigrants—has resulted in a high rate of interracial relationships and a large population of mixed-race citizens. Naturally, it’s also resulted in a Byzantine taxonomy of racial categories. For research purposes, Brazil’s 1976 national household survey had an open-ended question asking people what color they were. Citizens responded 136 different ways, including “brownish,” “honeydew,” “reddish brown,” and “café latte.” In the 2008 national survey, the government legally acknowledged five different groups: branca (white), preta (black), amarela (yellow), indigena (Indian), and parda (brown). Brazilians tend to ignore traditional racial descent rules and self-identify based largely on looks. If people look white, they call themselves white, and if they look brown, they don’t call themselves parda, the government term, they say they’re morenos or “tanned.” “The physical traits of an ndividual, especially skin pigmentation, hair color, hair texture, and the shape of the lips and nose, are constantly used for racial categorization and thus play an extremely influential role in human social relationships,” says the 2002 report “Color and Genomic Ancestry in Brazilians,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because of this, even siblings can be of separate racial groups based on genetic luck of the draw.

What that makes me: With curly, but not kinky, hair, brown skin, and interracial parents, I’m probably a prime candidate for the category that 43 percent of Brazilians say they fall into: “brown.”

Though some people revel in their distinct lineage, I love that my blended heritage makes me somewhat indefinable. However, I’m not naive enough to believe that “brown” is an acceptable racial classification in all contexts. If we’re going to have race-based programs designed to right historical wrongs, we also need to continue codifying race. But how? The one-drop rule is prima facie ridiculous, especially considering that studies show nearly 60 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (the equivalent of one white great-grandparent). On the other hand, just look at Brazil’s relative disregard for quantification, which means fraternal twins with markedly different skin color could be categorized as two different races.

With broad acceptance of interracial relationships among younger generations and with America’s Latino population booming, it’s going to get increasingly difficult to attach a single racial label to any one bloodline. This is what happens when you let an outright lie (that race is a definable, quantifiable thing) stratify society for centuries.

Like most scientists and politicians before me, I don’t have a good answer. I am confident, however, that one day there will be no need for questions about race on official forms. Alas, I am also confident I won’t live to see that day.

The most helpful was a place called the Hoffman Process in Napa Valley, where I got to spend eight days beating couch cushions with a bat while pretending I was killing my parents (you had to be there). The least helpful was a place in Virginia that kicked me out halfway through.

At this point, my biggest problem is my unfinished book. It never seems to end because self-help never seems to end. I see it everywhere. On the lids of coconut water (“Happiness in a bottle”). In President Obama’s press conferences (Malia and Sasha don’t wait until the night before to do their homework; why should Congress?). On a rerun of My So-Called Life (Rayanne’s mom reads tarot cards). And the more self-help I’m surrounded with, the less it seems to work. It’s not that I’m dismissive, just tired. Achieving inner peace is boring. And a lot of the industry misses what I find most appealing: The reason people are drawn to these places and philosophies is because they’re feeling vulnerable and lost, and there’s something lovely about their willingness to admit it.

Here is a glimpse of what it’s like to be inside my head as I navigate the world, dodging motivational potholes at every turn.

It’s late and I’m procrastinating online, mostly on Twitter. Malia and Sasha would never do this. They would never type in the name of a person they no longer talk to and try to gauge whether he’s happy based on whom he’s following.

I notice a tweet from Judd Apatow: “I start shooting my next film tomorrow. Will sleep come?”

Jennifer Grey tweets back: “Good luck today! I listen to hypnosis when I have the gotta get to sleep insomnia that always comes with work. Carolyn Conger.”

I’ve never heard of Carolyn Conger. According to her website, she “conducts seminars in psychological growth, healing, dream work, intuition, creativity and spirituality” and has “lived with tribal societies through- out the world.”

I find an audio clip of her narrating a visualization exercise called the Sacred Pool and listen to it for a bit. It starts off with some pretty standard stuff, a king wander- ing around in a secret tunnel underneath his castle. He walks down and down, to deeper and deeper levels. Then Carolyn throws a curveball and tells us about a magician “who had given [the king] the tools and knowledge to transform his body any way he wished. From male to female and then back again. From tall to short, or vice versa. From light complexion to dark, into animal to mythic form, into fluid or sound or light. Anything. Nothing was too difficult. The king was excited because he knew it was true.”

The clip is scored by a man named Michael Stearns. His website has the kind of New Agey artwork that self-helpers love, a diamond containing stock photos of tree branches and the words “Rythm”[sic], “Polarity,” “Unity,” and “Measure” at each of the four points. I scroll down and see that his music has been used in the kind of laser-light shows that my friends and I used to go to in high school and which I have spent a significant portion of my adult life trying to pretend didn’t happen. This memory certainly doesn’t help me relax. I try and turn the laser-light show into something less embarrass- ing, like math club, but the memory’s unwieldy. It keeps morphing into something else, but that’s only because it’s a laser-light show and that’s what they do. The magician tells me he thinks laser-light shows are cool. He would.

This exercise doesn’t give me the slightest insight into my own psyche, but I do feel like I understand Jennifer Grey a lot better now. I visualize her lying in bed at night, visualizing that she is the king and that she can reverse the nose job that ruined her acting career. Nothing is too difficult.

I’m temporarily living in Los Angeles and staying in an apartment of a friend who’s in New York, working on a show for Oprah’s cable network, OWN, called Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes. I have all sorts of questions for him but don’t ask because I worry that once I start I won’t be able to stop.

Instead, I troll the O Magazine site. It’s overwhelming, and so I gravitate toward the simplest thing I can find, a quiz called “Could therapy help you?” Even when I try to trick it and answer “no” to the most depressing questions (“Do you feel as though you’re living life behind an invisible screen, unable to truly connect with anyone or anything? Yes or no?”), it still tells me, “You could benefit from seeing a good therapist.”

That’s all the guidance it gives. Just one sentence, sandwiched by ads for Princess Fergie’s new reality show (“Watch as Sarah journeys to the mystical deserts of Arizona with a shaman”) and links to articles suggesting other self-help strategies. All I have to do is de-sad my day, allow myself to be good enough, exercise, detox from my inbox, sign up for life-changing advice delivered to my inbox, make a new adult friend, break up with an old friend who’s dragging me down, change my patterns, find meaning in my actions, find balance between my left and right brains, create my own moral authority, have a kid show me a magic trick, go to the deepest place within, find metaphors in string-cheese wrappers, follow my life’s guidance, fill 20 to 30 note cards with my life’s guidance, and learn how to can jam.

* * *

I wander up to a store window to check out the dresses. (A lot of times, dresses that seem cute from across the street are actually cheap and stretchy up close.) There’s a family—a mom, a dad, and their grown son—sitting on a bench outside the restaurant next door.

The dad is upset because the son showed up late. The dad’s voice is raised and the mom is trying to get him to lower it. If she’s worried about people staring, she shouldn’t be. I’m listening as hard as I possibly can but my eyes are on the dresses (even though they are, in fact, the stretchy kind).

“You’re going to miss out on life,” I hear the dad tell the son. “You need to establish a value system.”

“Fuck your value system,” says the son.

I’m a subscriber to an assortment of self-help Meetup groups. My favorite is a group called The Spiritual Path, run by a man named Don DiBenedetto, who lives in Pearl River, New York, where he seems to be the leader of a community of life coaches and drum-circle aficionados. He sends emails about new events once a week or so, and he’ll often supplement these notices with an inspirational quote or a “Daily Om” or the occasional deeply unfunny, scanned-in newspaper comic.

Don was on a real Louise Hay kick this summer. Louise Hay was at the forefront of the Law of Attraction movement, which says that if you can switch your negative thoughts to positive ones you can make good things happen. Change the way you think and you can change your life. (The Secret, an offspring of the movement, equates the universe to television and says our thoughtsare like frequencies.) Don played Hay’s movie, You Can Heal Your Life, one night at a local high school. Three weeks later he invited everyone to the park for an outdoor showing. It must have gone over well, because he then assembled a study group to come watch it at a health spa. (“Bring a notebook!!!”)

I didn’t make it to these screenings, but You Can Heal Your Life is available online, so I decide to watch it on my own. I bring a notebook (!!!) from my bedroom into the living room so it will feel like I am watching it with Don and all his friends.

I have to steel myself to watch self-help movies. They never have actual plots, and there’s always a doctor who renounces traditional medical practices and someone, usually a man, who describes an encounter he had with a Native American that he twists into some lesson that backs up the central premise of the film. In You Can Heal Your Life, a visionary scientist—that’s what the words say underneath him in the movie, so I am forced to call him that, too—tells the story of a Native friend who asks him if he wants to go to a place where “the skin between the worlds is really thin.”

Overall, the movie is bearable, though, because of how unexpectedly delightful Louise Hay is. In the ’80s, she was known for her Hay Rides, huge gatherings of gay men diagnosed with AIDS, and the footage is touching. The men look so scared, and you can understand why her no-nonsense approach would be comforting. “We’re going to work on dissolving resentment. We’re going to work on forgiveness and loving ourselves. And we are not going to play ‘ain’t it awful.’ We’re not going to talk about how awful it is.”

There’s also a storyline involving a cranky girl whose negative inner thoughts play on a loop in voice-over. One day on the streets of what appears to be New York she passes by a woman thinking positive thoughts—she can tell by how smiley she is (and the positive woman’s voice-over confirms it).

The positive woman drops a card covered in the same kind of artwork that’s on Laser-Light Show Michael’s website, and it says “I am willing to change.” This is when I understand that the movie doesn’t take place in a Working Girl type of New York but an antidepressant-commercial type of New York. This is also when I decide to stop taking notes and pause the movie and go into the bathroom and slather moisturizer all over my face and type more enemies’ names into the internet and then sit back down and force myself to keep watching.

Anyway, after finding the card, the girl sets off on her spiritual journey, which begins with her thinking “I can” while walking through a magic doorway into an “internal landscape of change.” It looks a lot like a wheat field. She grumbles along in her head until she finds another card with a forgiveness theme that finally fixes her. The barren landscape transforms into a lush seaside, and when a hunky dude appears from out of nowhere to ask for directions, the girl visualizes the two of them holding hands and then it happens. Also she has manifested out of a form-fitting gray pencil skirt into an unflattering pair of shorts.

A couple days after I watch You Can Heal Your Life, my friend Anna throws a birthday dinner party. Anna is from Olympia, Washington. This means if she were given a crystal for her birthday, she would say, “Oh my god, I love it!” and this would be the truth. Still we manage to get along because she’s good at trash-talking. The last people at the party are me and our friend Lindsay, and when I tell Lindsay and Anna about the movie, Anna says something shocking: She identifies more with the positive woman than the negative one.

“But what does that even mean?” I ask. “You just feel good all the time? Instead of bad?”

“Are you trying to say,” asks Lindsay, “that when you sit down to do something, you just do it? Instead of not doing it, because you suck?” Anna nods. I want to press my ear against hers and catch any loose positive thoughts that might be falling out. I ask her if she would mind keeping a log of her positive thoughts for a day. She agrees to text them to me as they occur to her.

11:55 a.m.  A lot of songs in my brain. Right now Madonna I will always cherish you. Earlier, Wild Thang, the rap song.

11:58 a.m.  My mind wandered to thinking about what I might do if for some reason my job ended. And I was visualizing myself as a PR person or a producer. But in a way that seemed achievable and real. I was watching a little movie of myself in my mind really doing it.

12:20 p.m.  I just had a thought that the mute guy I see every week who works at whole foods and emphatically points things out for me when I ask him questions must have a crush on me. It’s a positive thought. Like I’m kind of getting something out of it. Maybe that’s more fucked up and disturbing than what you’re looking for.

I read these and automatically replace most of Anna’s positive thoughts with negative ones. The mute guy becomes the woman outside Starbucks who told me she liked my tights, which meant she must have thought she looked like me. This leads to a mental image of us sharing the tights, each getting a leg, as we limp around our Grey Gardens house together. I haven’t worn the tights since.

Then Anna texts me something practical that I can apply:

1:02 p.m.  I’m also constantly clicking my teeth back and forth like a drum beat which I think keeps me from having thoughts at all.

For the rest of the day, I practice, chomping down extra hard on pieces of ice and dry cereal. As long as I have a steady supply of crunchiness, I could go years without having another negative thought. I visualize the world ending in a horrible way, but with a positive twist. While everyone else is grabbing bottles of water, I go straight for the bags of croutons and potato chips.

For three years, my family and I lived directly within the flight path of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Located in the heart of the city, Sky Harbor is the ninth-busiest airport in the United States. On any given day, some 1,200 aircraft fly through the airspace above the Phoenix suburbs. We lived with the ever-present roar of 737s.

I photographed Seventy Flights in Ninety Minutes from the top of Hayden Butte in Tempe, Arizona. The publicly accessible volcanic butte is just beyond the airport and is straddled by Sky Harbor’s two busiest flight paths. For 90 minutes, I photographed every airplane that flew overhead, and then I digitally stitched together the many individual photographs. I hoped to re-create the experience of living in a flight path by compressing an hour and a half into one apparently single moment.

Another aspect of suburban life we grew increasingly familiar with is the necessity for freeway travel. Intertwined across the greater Phoenix area are five major freeway systems. Our home lay at the intersection of the 101 and 202 loops.

Entire 101 Freeway Loop, 91.2 Miles in 82 Minutes began as a stop-motion video animation. I steadied my camera on a tripod between the driver and passenger seats and, while driving the entire loop, used an interval timer to make one photograph for every minute of travel. Unhappy with the initial animation, I digitally compressed all 82 frames into one photograph. The result, not unlike an extended-time exposure, gives a glimpse of many different times and places in a single frame. Some areas with constant change become just a blur, while other static elements remain sharp and clear.

Soon after I began writing for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, a veteran writer took me aside. Correctly identifying one of my almost-daily crises of confidence, he explained that I shouldn’t get so hung up on my day-to-day performance because our job was a “volume-driven business.” At the time I found that imparted wisdom depressingly cynical—like being reminded by your platoon leader as you head into battle, “Don’t forget, we’re all sponges designed to soak up bullets. Now have fun out there!” However, a couple years into this, I’ve come to accept that writer’s words as incredibly practical wisdom. On a typical workday, late-night writers produce a ton of material, written almost at the speed of instinct—only some of it will make it through rehearsal, and a fraction of that might survive the hour during which it was broadcast and enjoy an unusually long lifespan well into the next day’s overloaded news cycle. And, while it’s certainly possible to create solid, enduring comedy under those conditions—miraculously, it happens quite often—there’s no doubt you’re at a statistical disadvantage.

For the handful of ways a comedy piece can succeed, there are countless combinations of factors that can sabotage it. Here are just a few:

Fallible Humans

Conan’s writers feature prominently in the show’s sketches. It’s fortunate our show is staffed with a number of writers who are also solid performers, and a couple writers who are outstanding performers. Also, it’s cheaper to cast us. But there’s a third and very compelling reason that only a few outside performers make their way into sketches, and are then cast over and over again, sometimes multiple times in a single show: Comedy is difficult, and highly subjective. What might have worked just fine on one comedy show can come across as broad, or grating, or borderline self-loathingly racist on another. I’ve seen so many promising ideas derailed by performances that were knowingly funny—the worst kind of funny.

Elderly actors are especially hard to cast for this reason. I suspect it’s because, more often than not, they’re summoning their experience with countless directors who have instructed them to act more “crotch- ety” or “enfeebled,” not trusting they would be able to sufficiently communicate their age with subtle indicators like sunken cheeks, liver spots, and milky retinas.

I once wrote a piece for the show in which we delivered the local fire department a housewarming present: a tree filled with cats. The cats were total professionals, but the elderly woman I cast turned in a performance that made Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma character seem comparatively understated, and the sketch was instantly banished to Planet Hamfist. I suppose I could have tried to correct her but I was taught to respect/be terrified of upsetting my elders.

(And don’t even get me started on elderly Asian actors. It should be required by law that an ACLU lawyer be present on the set whenever you’re shooting a comedy scene with an aged Korean woman.)

Tone Deafness

If there were a late-night comedy show completely run by comedy writers, without any interference from a host, producer, or network, that show would probably be called The Darkest and Most Impossibly Horrible Things You Can Imagine, Presented as Comedy. Every sketch would end with a gunshot or an infant’s stroller engulfed in flames, and the show would be canceled halfway through its opening titles. That’s because most comedy writers are so inured by humor that only the most shockingly toxic ideas can achieve the proper velocity to penetrate their indifference.

Here’s a memorable example among many: When Conan O’Brien was wrapping up his 16-year tenure as host of Late Night, it briefly fell upon the writing staff to come up with a fitting way to put a bow on that particular legacy. Something funny, memorable, and appropriate to the sentimental mood surrounding Conan’s departure from a post where he would surely be missed. What emerged from this assignment was something that looked like the discarded notes of a Hollywood pitch meeting from the director of The Human Centipede. Of the dozens of ideas, an overwhelming majority involved Conan being humiliated or killed in some manner—usually violent, often by his own hand. In various combinations, Conan was shot, hanged, beaten, and thrown into an unmarked grave in the desert; hit by a bus; hit by a taxi; or hit by a bus, then a taxi, while riding a young girl’s pink tricycle. In one scenario I proudly pitched, Late Night was merely a fantasy in Conan’s mind, which was severely addled after being kicked in the head by a quarter horse. According to my pitch, as the final show wrapped up, the real Late Night set would dissolve to a tiny Lego version Conan was playing with on the floor of an employees’ break room at a stud farm, where Conan had spent his last 16 years charged with the task of manually masturbating thoroughbred horses. (I think the final stage direction in my sketch was “In the distance, a horse whinnies in ecstasy.”)

Unsurprisingly, Conan chose none of our ideas and instead made an earnest, off-the-cuff closing statement to camera that was completely appropriate to the moment. I remember being genuinely angry and disappointed he didn’t go with my horse masturbator coda.

X-Factors

There are always unforeseeable and unassailable factors at play, conspiring to hobble a perfectly trenchant commentary on Kirstie Alley’s struggle with her weight. (Forklifts struggle with her weight, too! Am I right? I honestly don’t know if I’m right.) In my personal experience, these have included but were not limited to: poor camera coverage; garbled dialogue; unrealistic false beards; subpar puppetry; missed cues; missing graphics; proximity to the tragic death of a beloved celebrity; an obscure or arcane reference (Daniel J. Travanti, cryonics) or a reference entertaining only to other comedy writers (Bruce Vilanch, Robert Wuhl); an armadillo that refused to keep its fez on straight; and the inclusion of Tom Arnold.

Process of Elimination

I know I’m finding fault with a lot of external factors but, truthfully, the majority of my failures as a comedy writer have rested squarely on my own dumb, sloped shoulders. And sometimes distance is required to achieve proper perspective on those failures. During my brief employment at The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, and still in my infancy as a comedy writer, I produced a taped segment called “Hip to Trip.” The idea was this: Tripping and falling down had become a cool national trend once President Obama was captured on tape stumbling into a building. I believed this video represented a new benchmark in my career. I worked on it so hard and long there wasn’t even time to rehearse. Instead, it had to be previewed in Conan’s dressing room at the last minute, for a smattering of producers and Conan’s monologue writers. It did not make it into the show. Later, when I asked one of the monologue writers how Conan reacted, he said his disapproval was immediate and unflagging. He didn’t connect with the actor I’d cast in the lead, and found the premise to be a confusing reach.

I couldn’t believe it. I loved the piece. Loved it so much I would talk about it with anyone who would listen. And when we all left that job, quite suddenly, there were only a handful of sketches and videos I bothered to save on a DVD—that unaired piece being among them.

Recently, I was updating my personal website and uploading some of my favorite videos I’ve written and produced over the past couple years. There was no question in my mind: “Hip to Trip” was going to enjoy its rightful place in my portfolio. I found the DVD, ripped the file, and previewed it before uploading it—not for content, but for digital integrity. The “Hip to Trip” I remembered was edgy, silly, and maybe a little too “weird” for the flyover states. It was difficult to reconcile that “Hip to Trip” with the one I was watching now: a sloppy mess executed in a style more suitable for Disney sitcom than a grown-up comedy talk show.

In retrospect, I think what I’d originally enjoyed about the video—and why I might have mistaken it for something successful, when it clearly was not—was the amount of freedom I’d had to create it. I had (needlessly) cast an actor I admired, commissioned a (completely superfluous) song, and even (cost-prohibitively) filmed one of the scenes on Universal Studios’ “Jaws Lake,” holding up takes because the cheap animatronic shark was sometimes visible in the background of my shot. The video never made it to my portfolio, or anywhere else, and I think a valuable lesson was learned from producing it: I probably should have cast one of the writers.

I used to seriously entertain the idea of moving. This was back when I was less encumbered and traveled quite a bit. Every trip wound up as an audition for my New Hometown. Within a few days, I’d have decided which house would be mine, picked out which coffee shop I’d frequent, relished the thought of how much cheaper and easier it would be than living in New York City. The classic New York narrative is one of strivers drawn to the city by their ambition to be artists, Broadway sensations, contortionists, or what have you. I, on the other hand, live here essentially because my parents did, just as their parents did before them. Back then, it still seemed I might be able to break that chain. I came really close to moving a few times. But since having children and settling into a home in Brooklyn a block from where my father was born, I’ve pretty much given up the dream. Uprooting seems impossible, except when I visit the land of fantasy relocation.

Though my forays to this land are furtive and infrequent, I know I’m not the only visitor. Indeed, there is a whole genre of magazine feature that caters to moving-obsessed people like myself, providing lists that tell us which cities in America are offering everything in life we currently lack.

In addition to slideshows regularly published by outlets like CBS News, Newsweek, and Forbes, there are several data-driven websites devoted to place comparison. BestPlaces.net allows readers to rank the importance of such variables as crime, climate, cost of living, and schools. Their computers then take the survey results and “run through thousands of calculations and display a ranking of the cities which best meet your cri- teria,” according to the site. RelocateAmerica.com relies on real estate and labor market information to create its “Top 100 Places to Live” feature. FindYourSpot.com offers a quiz, and will create a tailored list of “perfect hometowns and undiscovered havens” based on your results. MyDreamLocale.com compiles a list of com- munities likely to appeal to you.

The bigger publications tend to have less personalized lists that read more like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Scroll through CNNMoney’s list of “Best Places to Live” and you’ll find Newton, Massachusetts, ranked third best place to reside, with its charming Victorian houses and expensive schools. Ellicott City, Maryland, apparently has a rocking “Bubbleman kids’ night,” according to the business site Kiplinger.com. Norfolk County, Massachusetts, where several presidents were born and the average SAT score is 1090, was ranked high on Forbes.com’s “Best Places to Raise a Family” list in 2008.

The lists are a fascinating way to waste time, in a click-and-ogle sort of way. And the list-makers often factor in as much data as possible. (Children’s Health magazine, for instance, used 29 “variables” to select its best places to raise children.) But the problem, or one of them, is that taste varies wildly. Another is that, because they attempt to incorporate an entire nation’s desires, these one-size-fits-all features tend to showcase a version of life as we’d like it to be, a version that glosses over the things that truly make a difference to most people: com- munity, services, and policies that ease their daily life. Idealizing places means being ignorant of their inevitable flaws. Graduation rates and crime stats, on which many of these lists are based, are important to consider. But allowing them to define a place is like falling in love with someone’s online profile. When I developed crushes on my vacation destinations, I didn’t have this kind of data.

Even the most sophisticated data set won’t yield a single best place for everyone to raise children in this country, of course. Try to picture a mythic spot where all life’s hassles melt away—where the playground is wondrously free of bullies, the schools provide uniformly positive educational experiences, the markets are all conveniently located and filled with delicious food you want to eat—and you begin to appreciate the futility of the effort. Or just Google the Bubbleman of Ellicott City, who, it turns out, is some guy who blows huge soap bubbles on the sidewalk. You realize that these lists attempt to service an impossibly broad swath of people, some of whom weigh the presence of big bubbles in their calculus of where to live.

Though the downsides of living there are rarely explored, the locales touted as havens by media behemoths are inevitably real places with real histories and real warts. Consider Tinley Park, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago that in 2009 BusinessWeek decreed top place to raise a family. Like most of the places on such lists, Tinley Park has a blandness that likely stems from being chosen on the basis of statistical analysis rather than human experience. Publications arrive at their “best places” largely by putting various facts and figures in a demographic blender. Test scores, crime stats, housing prices, and commute times go in. Wichita, Kansas; Lawton, Oklahoma; Abilene, Texas; and Tinley Park come out.

The distance between tabulation and reality might be summed up by the fact that Tinley Park, which has “top-rated schools, low crime, beautiful parks, relatively affordable houses, and easy access to jobs,” according to BusinessWeek, is also the place where a gunman mowed down six women in a Lane Bryant store a couple years back. A stark reminder that misfortune, unpleasantness, and indeed the full range of life’s harsh realities are ultimately inescapable.

Such is the case with Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo that BusinessWeek named the best place to raise children in New York state. While Tonawanda does have considerable virtues, including some affordable, quaint housing and proximity to Lake Erie, it also has notable spots of environmental contamination that pose serious risks to all the people who live there. Though no one at BusinessWeek seems to have spoken with them, most residents of Tonawanda are all too familiar with the health threats associated with local industry. In 2009 the New York Department of Environmental Conservation found that the air surrounding the Tonawanda Coke Corporation’s decades-old but still-functioning coke processing plant had 75 times the recommended limit of benzene, a known carcinogen. A local environmental group, the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, responded with a rally, which was well covered by the local press, to demand that the plant’s owner discuss health concerns with area residents. Mark Kamholz, the plant’s environmental control manager, was arrested on charges that he failed to notify the feds about the dangerous emissions. Then last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency cited the plant for “discharging industrial wastewater containing cyanide” into a sewer that empties into the Niagara River.

Tonawanda is also home (sweet home?) to a former Manhattan Project site, which generated nuclear waste that is now buried in local landfills. Though the dumping took place decades ago, the half-lives of the radioactive radium, thorium, and uranium start at 1,600 years.

The data aren’t the problem; it’s the lack of context. If BusinessWeek had consulted the New York State Department of Health, it would have found above-aver- age cancer rates in certain Tonawanda neighborhoods near the dump site. In October 2009, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided not to excavate one of the landfills—not because the site was found safe, but rather, according to Army Corps documents, because dredg- ing up and removing large amounts of deeply buried, weapons-grade, highly radioactive isotopes would be more dangerous to workers and the community than leaving it buried.

If BusinessWeek had spoken to the area’s residents, many of whom are well versed on the issue, the editors probably would not have chosen the site of a radioactive waste dump near a toxin-spewing chemical plant as one of the best places to raise a family. When I recently mentioned Tonawanda’s “best place” distinction to alongtime Buffalo resident, she joked that it might be the best place to live for families who don’t mind having children with three eyes.

To be fair, though, it’s not just Tonawanda that collapses under the weight of first-hand experience. On BusinessWeek’s site, most of the comments from resi- dents of the 50 supposedly best places (one in each state) express some level of incredulity at their hometown being deemed the best. “Warner Robins [Georgia]? You gotta be kidding! A one dimensional town if ever there was one. Unless your kids like baseball there is not much of anything to do here. And the schools? The standards are set artificially low to give the illusion the Houston County system is great. We can’t wait to move out of Warner Robins!” Or, this comment about Clarksville, Tennessee: “One of my kids teachers actually let her retake a test several times until she got the answers right. Some school system. There is nothing to do there for kids at all. You have to travel 45 minutes to Nashville for entertainment/activities. Rotten place to raise a family!”

Adding an eerie sense of dislocation to the outrage of many readers, BusinessWeek illustrated many of its stories about “best places” with pictures of entirely different cities, which were then Photoshopped so that images of random, happy-looking children appeared to be hovering on the skyline.

There are even bigger problems with using data to rank places to live. Emphasizing low crime, test scores, and “livability” often leads to the selection of places that are more expensive—and far less diverse—than the country overall. Thus, just as the outlandishly pricey Zurich, Switzerland, tops international “best cities” lists, elite, wealthy suburbs have increased chances of being touted as the best domestic hometowns. Tinley Park, for instance, is in the top 10 percent of places where residents are “middle class or better,” according to CityTownInfo.com, with the cost of living and average income there well above the national average. On the site’s one-to-10 scale of racial diversity, with 10 being most diverse, Tinley Park gets a three. Similarly, Des Moines, Iowa, Forbes’s choice for the best place to raise a family, is far whiter than the rest of the nation. And Burlington, Vermont, the city selected by Children’s Health as the best place to raise kids, is one of the whitest cities in the country, with more than 95 percent of the population identifying as white, according to census numbers.

The shortcomings of “best places” lists serve as a reminder that in pretty much every town in our country, the basics aren’t available in adequate supply. Were we to actually move to the cities featured on these sites, we might find low crime rates and good schools. But we might not be able to afford to live there. We might not feel like we fit in. And we might find plenty of other things lacking. That’s why we trawl the lists. Sometimes looking can make us feel better about our own home. Even if it’s a block from where we grew up.

The focus of the group’s work is “Jim,” a convicted offender in his 40s who’s near the end of his parole. Each member says a few words about how their week has been. Jim’s hasn’t gone so well—he’s felt lonely. He has a temp job and a 7 p.m. curfew, so after work every day, he goes home, eats dinner, and goes to bed. Even his brother doesn’t always want to talk to him. Warning flags go up for Clare Ann Ruth-Heffelbower, the program’s 63-year-old director, as Jim talks about how cut off he feels. “Do you think you’re going to do things that you know you shouldn’t do?” she asks.

He admits that he’s thought about drinking again. “Wasn’t that something that was a big part of your life before?” asks Heidi, a seminary student with a pierced tongue and multiple earrings. “You can’t blame what you did on your drinking problem, but as we’ve talked about, it’s something that you have to pay attention to.”

“I know,” he says.

“If you’re needing to meet people, find something to occupy your time, you could go to Alcoholics Anonymous,” suggests Ruth- Heffelbower. “You can make some new friends, maybe even meet a female friend that you like,” she says.

“Well, OK, that’s a good idea,” he says softly. “I’ll go.”

When they reconvene the following Monday, Jim admits he hasn’t made it to AA. This time Ruth-Heffelbower brought a meeting schedule, though, and Jim says he’ll go on Saturday. Another COSA volunteer suggests someone who could give him a ride.

This strategy runs counter to the prevailing approach to managing those convicted of sex crimes. In every state, once offenders are released from prison they are required to register their names, addresses, and photos. Putting such information in the public domain, the theory goes, will make them less likely to commit another sex crime because they know they’re being watched. But in practice, it hasn’t been that simple.

Registries began as a sound idea that grew from a terrible crime. On an October night in 1989, a masked gunman abducted Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old Minnesota boy. He was never found. Over the next five years, Jacob’s parents successfully pushed for legis- lation requiring sex-offender registries that would be accessible to the police, though not the public. President Clinton signed the Jacob Wetterling Act in September 1994. It gave police a critical tool that they could use to quickly check suspects early in a sex crime case.

On July 29, 1994, as the Wetterling Act was making its way through Congress, a 7-year-old in New Jersey named Megan Kanka was raped and strangled by a neighbor with a history of sex offenses. Kanka’s parents lobbied for Megan’s Law, which Clinton signed in May 1996, expanding the Wetterling Act to require states to open up their sex-offender registries to the public. “In some ways,” says Jacob Wetterling’s mother, Patty, “Megan’s Law hijacked our intentions.”

The impact of putting offenders’ identities into the hands of a fearful public was predictable. In a 2005 study, 47 percent of 121 sex offenders interviewed said they’d been harassed as a result of being on a registry, and 16 percent said that they’d been assaulted. Since 2005, at least five sex offenders have been murdered by people who used a registry to track them. A 2007 Human Rights Watch study found that private employers were reluctant to hire sex offenders, and a 2008 U.S. Department of Justice report concluded that cases of offenders being forced into homelessness were “widely reported.”

While registries have been very effective at marginalizing convicted offenders, a December 2008 study on the impact of Megan’s Law in New Jersey found that the law “has no effect on reducing the number of victims involved in sexual offenses.” Studies in other states came to similar conclusions. In 2009, analysts at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at seven studies on recidivism by registered offenders. Only two showed that being on a registry decreased the chances that an offender would commit another sex crime.

The public, however, remains convinced that registries work. In a national poll of 1,005 people early last year, 79 percent said they thought registration is an effective deterrent. And offender registries are making inroads in other areas of crime policy. Since 2005, at least 13 states have launched websites listing those convicted of a range of offenses, from manufacturing meth to drunk driving.

By these standards, COSA’s approach seems crazy. But the model is almost as old as sex-offender registries themselves. In the summer of 1994, a psychologist at the Correctional Service of Canada named Bill Palmer was desperate to prevent a high-risk child molester named Charlie Taylor from victimizing another child. While sex offenders’ risk of committing another crime varies considerably, reoffense rates for untreated offenders who target children can run as high as 40 percent. So Palmer connected Taylor with a local Mennonite minister, Harry Nigh, who agreed to have several members of his congregation help keep an eye on Taylor.

That group, which called itself “Charlie’s Angels,” was the first COSA, a model that has since been adopted in 16 sites in Canada and has spread to four U.S. states and Great Britain. The service matches each offender with four to six volunteers, who provide emotional support and lend a hand on practical details, from job applications to transportation. Volunteers are trained to monitor the offender’s behavior for signs of relapse. “We’re not there to hold the hand of a sex offender because he’s a poor sad guy who everybody despises,” says Andrew McWhinnie, national adviser to the Correctional Service on the COSA program. “Yes, we’re there for that, too, because he’s a human being and no one is disposable. But the reason is that we don’t want to see any more sexual victims.”

Taylor died in 2005 having never committed another sex crime. The first study of the program, published in 2005 by the Correctional Service of Canada, found that offenders who had been through COSA were 70 percent less likely than those who hadn’t to return to prison because of a sex offense. A second study conducted in 2007 and a third, published in the journal Sex Abuse in 2009, both found an 83 percent drop.

Attempts to replicate COSA in the United States are in early stages, but when the Fresno group was evaluated in September 2009, none of the 16 offenders who had been through the program had reoffended, according to Ruth-Heffelbower.

Jim’s experience shows that while support and accountability go together, keeping sex offenders on the right track isn’t easy. He never made it to AA. The week after the COSA meeting, his parole officer searched his hotel room and found pornography, a violation. So he went back to prison for two months.

But Ruth-Heffelbower wrote to him, and Jim replied that he wanted to continue meeting with COSA when he got out. Ruth- Heffelbower sees progress: “When people like him mess up, if they continue working with us when they come out, they’re much more serious and open.”

One of the original self-trackers, Nicholas Felton has been meticulously recording the details of his life since 2005—every meal eaten, hayride taken, page turned —and compiling it all in his Feltron Annual Reports. Along with fellow designer Ryan Case, Felton created Daytum, a website and iPhone app that helps people track their own activities and organize the resulting data in bar charts and pie graphs. The site enables just about anyone to be a casual “Feltron,” if there is such a thing.

In April, Facebook hired Felton and Case as product designers. With or without their help, social networking and personal statistics seem likely to converge in the future.

So we took a closer look at Felton’s Annual Reports. Part detective story, part graphic-design porn, the reports are as interesting for what they leave out as for what they highlight. After reading page after page of statistics about Felton’s daily life, it’s hard not to feel like you know him. We asked a couple of people who actually do (his mom and his girlfriend)—and Felton himself—whether the charts are getting it right.

Charts courtesy of Nicholas Felton

Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me. The way we spoke to each other about what I’d bring home for dinner or whether it was a PBR or a Grolsch kind of night. In nearly every conversation, there is something that releases the pressure from my chest by forcing a giant laugh.

Clark: did you eat?
Me: yes i had soup and chips but whatever someone else has smells delish
Clark: k just as long as you ate something
how do you spell Bodasifa?
from Point Break?
Me: let me look it up
Bodhisattva
Clark: ?
really?
sattva?
Me: yep
it’s a buddhism thing

I can break down Clark’s illness into one diagnosis (metastatic melanoma), one prognosis (between 4 and 14 months to live), three surgeries, three clinical trials, seven hospital stays, three doses of chemotherapy, and five weeks of hospice care. The first surgery, a deep lymph-node dissection of the left groin, and its subsequent days-long hospital stay, spanned the first week of April 2008. The second surgery, which removed the cancer’s recurrence from underneath the tender flesh of the first, was June 11. He was hospitalized from November 11–19 and again from December 1–6. On February 20, 2009, he had emergency surgery to remove a tumor the size of a baseball from his gut. He started chemotherapy on April 15.

Me: i am sorry i wigged out last night.
Clark: oh baby do not say sorry
Me: i really was just exhausted! that’s obvious.
Clark: I totally understand
i know you were so tired and I know that you want
to make sure I’m going to be okay and safe
and really makes me want to cry
Clark: i feel the same way about you
I want to always want to make sure you are safe
and warm and comfortable
Clark: and I didn’t mean to yell but you are so stubborn
Me: no i know
haha SO ARE YOU, for the record

Clark died two months later. He was 33. I was 25.

I spent a lot of time after his death looking at photographs of us camping, at a friend’s wedding, with my family at our first Thanksgiving. I listened to “The Ocean” by Sunny Day Real Estate, the song he heard when he imagined me walking down the aisle at our wedding. I cried when Archers of Loaf, the one band Clark insisted make an appearance on any playlist, announced its reunion tour. I watched YouTube videos of his band, Statehood, scanning for hints of what his voice sounded like, afraid I’d already forgotten.

The memories of my life as Clark’s caretaker buzz in the back of my brain at a low hum. Two years ago, I was on autopilot when I changed his diaper or scrubbed the smell of urine from the armchair he sat and slept in. I didn’t question how I found the strength to support his crumbling frame as we hobbled to the bathroom. Without even thinking about it, I’d roll my jeans halfway up my calves and get into the bathtub to pull him up. I shaved his face and gave him his painkillers at perfectly timed intervals. I dressed him.

Now my breath quickens when the answer to a clue in my crossword, “Body fluid buildup,” is “edema,” the condition in Clark’s left leg that caused it to swell and dwarf his right. My eyes sting as I read a newspaper article describing the latest study to come out of a cancer conference, which involves a drug trial that Clark was too sick to participate in. I slink off to the bathroom with my head down, ignoring my friends at the bar, when I catch a glimpse of his obituary, which hangs on the back of a door at the Black Cat, the bar where we met.

I go looking for evidence of our partnership that’s not tied to a memory of me sleeping on two chairs pushed together next to his hospital bedside. My Gmail is a priceless hoard of us making plans, telling inside jokes, calling each other “snoodle” and “bubbies.” I type his name into the search field and enter a world of the unscripted dialogue that filled our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union. In hundreds of chats automatically saved to my account, we express our love for each other readily and naturally in our own private speech. This is a history of our relationship that we didn’t intend to write, one that runs parallel to the one authored by his uncontainable illness.

Me: i love you :)
Clark: you do?
Me: yes more den anythin
Clark: I see
well, I’d say we have a problem because I
love you
your love might clash with my love, resulting into
a shitstorm of unicorns, babies, puppy dogs, and
couples ice skating
it could get ugly
Me: hahahahahahahhaha
and tandem bikes

I remember the pharmaceutical names of his medications—amitryptyline, Zoloft, methadone. It’s only thanks to my archive of our Gchat conversations—me from my work computer, he from our apartment’s couch or his hospital bed—that I remember that we called gabapentin his “Guptas.” They were brown, like the skin of Dr. Gupta, his kidney specialist. The Dilaudid pills he took for breakthrough pain were “hydros,” a nickname for the drug listed on the label, hydromorphone hydrochloride. He’d imitate a surfer when asking for them.

Clark: man, my left leg is useless
I really hope this chemo helps
I can barely use it anymore
Me: i know
it will work.
Clark: figure I’ll notice there first
Me: you never know
Clark: when are you leaving?
can I get a nap in?
Me: yes!
see you in like 45 minutes snoopy
Clark: cause i can’t seem to think of when I can get a nap in BEFORE practice cause when you get home I just want to hang with you
Me: yes, take a nap!
Clark: k i love you
Me: i will get gatorades and ensures. and be right home. love you.
Clark: LOVE YOU!

It was winter 2008 and Clark was taking part in a trial, his second, at the National Institutes of Health. It involved a drug called high-dose IL-2, which stimulates white blood cells to grow and divide in an attempt to overtake the cancer. The treatment has
a slim chance of success but it’s one of the only regimens approved specifically for melanoma by the FDA. Patients are typically bedridden with dizzying flulike symptoms and are uncharacteristically irritable or moody. Clark was no exception.

He had a high fever and soiled the bed again and again during his second IL-2 treatment. One time, after I held up his body so that the nurse could change the sheets, he shit as soon as I placed him down. During this stint at the hospital, the fourth dose of drug sent him mentally over the edge. He screamed at me and called me a bitch. I left the hospital in tears.

It was the only time during his illness that I elected not to sleep next to him. When I arrived at my friend Alyson’s, I had a text message from him that said, “You left me, so I’m leaving you.” Two hours later, he called me sobbing, apologizing. He barely remembered specifics the next day, but I still get a lump in my throat when I think about it. We had this conversation three days after we returned home:

Clark: you make me so happy
everyday is wonderful with you
Me: really?
Clark: no
Me: you promise?
Clark: not really
I’m just playing with your emotions
Me: :(
Clark: YES REALLY
stupid pants

In December 2008, Clark called my mother to apologize for the fact that I wasn’t going to be home to spend Christmas Day with them. I know it’s not uncommon for people my age to be away from their families during the holidays, but my mother, brother, sister, and I had never spent a Christmas apart. Clark and I opened presents at his mother’s house that year. My mom told him not to worry. “There’ll be plenty of other Christmases,” she said.

“Come on, Mom,” he said.

She told me this after he was gone, and it haunts me. Did he always know he was going to die, or did he think there was a chance? Did he believe me when I told him stories of the people whose tumors had shrunk to nothing, seemingly by magic? It was easier for me to play cheerleader; I wasn’t the one shitting the bed and gritting my teeth through the pain.

Clark: babies, did they say the next treatment is rough? like IL-2?
Me: the one they want to do to you?
Clark: yes
Me: i don’t think anything compares to IL2.
but i think it is semi rough. i think it’s less puking, pooping, ill feeling and more weak, tired. however, IL2 has a really low success rate, the other treatment has a high one.
i was reading testimonies of people who have been cured by the treatment, this was a few months ago, and the one guy wrote that absolutely nothing compares to IL2.
honey?
Clark: i can’t stop crying
its hard to read the computer
i’m so happy
Me: yes baby
Clark: :-D
we are going to do it baby
Me: i’m so happy too
i know we are

Chemotherapy was our last-ditch effort to beat back the cancer. There was the tiniest chance that it would work. If all went according to plan, the chemo would shrink his tumors to manageable levels, and we’d return to the NIH to participate in a different clinical trial, the one with the best success rate.

Clark: I would go to my mothers
chill there
u can start having a life again
Me: baby, my life is being with you and fighting this cancer
that’s what it is
i do not resent you, and i never will|
i love you and we’re in this together

After three weeks of chemo, it was clear we were losing. Cancer had eaten away at his hip, attacked his spinal cord, and created a blockage in his large intestine that necessitated a colostomy bag. We then chose to stop trying to wipe out his disease and focus only on treating his pain. He lasted five more weeks.

Clark: dr. kitano called
Me: to say what?
Clark: email coming
um, the message said that she understands our concerns and thinks they are still able to provide us the original treatment and just wanted to talk to us more about it
Me: WHAT!
Clark: um, she still wants us to keep the appt. on Tuesday
Me: oh my god

I close my eyes and hear him tell me through exhaustion and tears how much he’s going to miss me after he dies. How beautiful I look sitting by the window of his hospice room.

Me: got her email
oh my god
they’re going to do it
Clark: whenever Kitano does something totally rad i play that “Are you ready for the sex girls” song from Revenge of the Nerds in my head
Me: HAHAHAHAHA
tell her that.
Clark: i should make her a mix tape

Now I live with my best friend, Cella. Some days I go to send her a message, searching for her name and the colored dot that accompanies it. I’ll try her even if she appears offline, because I need to tell her I’ll pick up coffee on the way home or ask if I can open the wine she left in the fridge.

And there it is: his name is right under hers. I move the cursor over it, and the thumbnail pops up with all of his information. His address, clarkstatehood@gmail. com. His icon, a photo of Patrick Swayze from Road House. A little gray dot, just like the one next to Cella’s name. As if he’s just not available to chat at the moment.

Clark is offline.

It’s a lot of information. More importantly, it’s a lot of information we actually understand.

For that, we owe thanks to Claude Shannon. As a graduate student at MIT in the decidedly predigital year of 1938, he moved computing one giant leap forward with information theory, a mathematical method for determining how much data can be sent across a line and still be understood on the other end. It’s the foundation of all those exabytes of internet traffic.

“He understood that information is fundamentally digital,” says Thomas Cover, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. All information, Shannon recognized, could be conveyed using binary digits, or as Shannon later called them, “bits.” With these bits of information—1 or 0, yes or no, true or false— anything can be represented and transmitted.

Before Shannon, muddled telephone calls and distorted radio signals perplexed engineers who used trial and error to improve transmissions. “What Shannon did was say you can always get an absolutely undistorted version, as long as you put in a finite number of bits,” says Cover. Shannon’s theory gave us a way to determine what that finite number is for each line of communication, whether it’s a telephone wire, a radio wave, or a smoke signal.

The same formula is what allows modern computers to know how many megabytes to send per minute over a cable modem or café Wi-Fi without making your Facebook photos fuzzy. It’s a formula that has transformed the world.

In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, science writer James Gleick puts it this way: “We speak of compressing data, aware that this is quite different from compressing a gas. We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.”

GOOD spoke with Gleick about Claude Shannon, the birth of information theory, and our data-saturated future.

GOOD: What’s the difference between data and information?

JAMES GLEICK: In colloquial use, we think of data as the dry, computer thing, and information as the thing we like. It’s not an accident that the Star Trek character is named Data, and he’s supposed to be emotionless. Shannon’s scientific definition of information was
the one that really resembles what we like to call data, but there’s another thing we worry about: knowledge. We’ve got a lot of information, and some of it is just noise. T.S. Eliot said this long before the Electronic Age. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

G: Do you think the science of information will become the theory of everything?

JG: I’m not crazy about that idea, that there’s ever going to be some set of equations that explain the whole universe—some ultimate unified theory. On the other hand, I do believe that our world is made of information, and that information is the thing we need to make sense of human history and of our modern predicament. I believe information is what matters. We used to think that what was important was energy or matter. The world was made of atoms. Now, even physicists are looking at informa- tion as the most fundamental quality.

G: What are the implications in trying to quantify everything? Are there things that don’t fit into data sets, like love or skill?

JG: You’ve thrown me for a bit with the word “love.” I think what we manage to communicate isn’t infinite, and therefore it’s quantifiable, it’s measurable, it’s not limitless. I’m not trying to say everything can be reduced to bits. Rather, measuring information has enriched our understanding. It’s enabled us to realize and appreciate the many different channels for transmitting information. The telephone was exciting 150 years ago because you could hear the voices of your loved ones, in real time, from a great distance. But it was just a narrow channel, and compared to the presence of your loved ones—where you have not just sound but sight, smell, and body language—the telephone was a drop in an ocean. The fact that we can talk about these things is because mathematicians and engineers have given us the language. It doesn’t mean they were trying to diminish the grand possibilities of human communication and knowledge.

G: George Orwell worried about information control, whereas Aldous Huxley thought it was more likely that we’d drown information in a sea of irrelevance. Which is riskier?

JG: Having access to thousands of times more information than we did a generation ago hasn’t instantly made us any smarter. It’s empowered us in very real ways. On a good day, it has given us something that feels like omniscience. When there’s an earthquake in Japan, the visual images come to us in real time. When I want to look up the answer to an obscure question that would have taken me a day in the library just a few years ago, the answer’s at my fingertips. I can pull a little device out of my pocket and find the answer, but that doesn’t necessarily make us any smarter. Look, a significant portion of the population believes stupid things. They doubt the place of birth of the president
of the United States. Some people are not persuaded that Osama bin Laden is dead. People can be willfully stupid, or they can be stupid for political purposes. Or they can just be confused because a mass of information doesn’t translate into clearer thinking. So we’re back to T.S. Eliot: “Where’s the knowledge we have lost in information?”

G: How does researching in the archives at the British Library compare to reading a PDF at home?

JG: Presumably the British Library has had to be very selective in what they’ve managed to gather and preserve over the centuries. On the other hand, we know that the Library of Congress claims that they’re going to archive all the world’s tweets. A sort of hierarchy is created right away. If you’ve got everything, then most of what you’ve got isn’t important. If you need to be very selective about what you preserve, then it’s likelier that what’s preserved is important. When I started to work on an earlier book, a biography of Isaac Newton, I went to the Morgan Library in New York, which has a tiny notebook, the first one young Isaac Newton ever kept. It’s maybe two by three inches and it’s made of vellum. He wrote on it, in ink, in a hand that is so small you really do need a magnifying glass to read it. I had seen facsimiles, but the facsimiles are blown up by about three times to make them read- able, which I didn’t realize until I saw the actual item. Just in terms of the words that Newton wrote, I didn’t need to go to that library. But there’s still value in the physical artifacts, and I believe the biographers of the future will still want to see some of these real items. There’s information that isn’t only in the words.

G: In the digital age, information is so abundant. Is there ever too much? We know that there’s sometimes too much information.

JG: We have initials for it: TMI. In the end, though, I’m optimistic. I think we’ll be able to cope. Now that we recognize that this superabundance is not the solution to all of our problems, we’re learning how to cope. Any given person in any given day can only read an almost infinitesimal fraction of the messages that are tweeted—much less the books that are printed—which is sad. And it’s sobering. But it’s not anything that needs to terrify us. It doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily missing what matters to us.

Introduction by Alex Goldmark. Interview by Peter Smith. Illustration by Matthew Moore.

Agents showed up at the Whitney Museum of American Art after the World Trade Center towers went down and asked to see one of Lombardi’s drawings. The agency was interested in Osama bin Laden and his associates, and one of Lombardi’s precise hand-drawn flow charts was useful for this. Perhaps the agents were hoping to see something—a connection, a warning sign, a new name—they had missed, hoping that Mark Lombardi hadn’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if they found what they were looking for in Lombardi’s art. He had an incredible way of seeing how the world fit together.

Lombardi committed suicide in 2000 at the age of 48. He spent his last six years making intricate drawings that from afar look like clouds, ellipses, sea creatures, or constellations. Step closer, however, and you realize the shapes are telling stories. In George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, c. 1979-90, 5th Version we see the moment Harken Energy buys the Bush-operated Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation and then trace the many profitable connections that follow until we arrive at the moment “Bush bails out with profit.”

In his drawings, you find the names of banks, senators, sheiks, popes, gangsters, presidents, and real estate holding companies, and see the connections and monetary exchanges between them all. As you might imagine, Swiss banks show up a lot.

The drawings have the precision of blueprints but the flow of nature. Sometimes Lombardi centers them on a timeline, with years running along a horizontal axis and names arcing off. Sometimes he organizes the drawings around more elliptical relationships, with one person becoming his or her own little center of gravity while the connections spiral out. These latter drawings take my breath away.

They were originally intended as aids for written pieces, but Lombardi quickly realized that they worked perfectly on their own. In his art shows, Lombardi presented his drawings along with a legend, which helped further the narrative. “Some type of influence or control,” it explained. Other lines represented “Sale or transfer of an asset,” or “Flow of money, loans or credits.”

All of the information he visualized in his drawings came from the public record. Lombardi read four or five newspapers a day. He’d write notes on three-by-five index cards; there were more than 12,000 at the time of his death. Once he started in on the drawings, he’d turn on the stereo full blast with white noise and lay out groupings of cards and piece together the interrelationships. He would work two to three days without sleeping.

When Lombardi first started working on the drawing series, he found himself paranoid about the information he was synthesizing. These were, after all, powerful relationships. And while everything was drawn from sources you or I could find, the simplicity and clarity of the drawings made the relationships feel so bare. It’s one thing to read about George W. Bush’s personal connections to people who supported Osama bin Laden; it’s a completely different thing to see their names connected with a flurry of short, arcing arrows. Here’s how Oliver North got money to the Iranians; here’s the information about money, arms, and nuclear weapons the United States gave to Saddam Hussein during the same period; here’s the support given to Osama bin Laden; here are the banks and shadow corporations set up to do this; here are the politicians, public figures, and businesspeople who profited.

I have to be careful when I examine his work because it changes the color of the world for me. Belief in coincidence fades. Here’s a note I wrote to myself quickly one night while reading about Lombardi:

“How’d the FBI know?” Originally it was just a reminder to look it up later. But after examining BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91, 4th Version, the drawing the FBI came to the Whitney to see after 9/11, I began to see the world as a sinister organization. This drawing dissects the bank that, beneath a sheen of legitimacy, funneled money to “a panoply of international gangsters, arms dealers, bagmen, corrupt foreign officials, drug smugglers, tax evaders, money launderers and agents of influence, not to mention elements of the intelligence services of the U.S., U.K., Pakistan, U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia,” in Lombardi’s words. It’s the organization of this information that makes Mark Lombardi’s work so seminal. He was operating long before internet searches made connections second nature to us, long before visualized data were commonplace on the front page of The New York Times.

Dr. Robert Hobbs, the curator of a 2003 retrospective of Lombardi’s work at the Drawing Center in New York City, told me that people traveled from out of state to see the pencil-drawn work. Part of the reason was that the drawings don’t reproduce that well; the graphite lines are not camera-friendly and the pieces are quite big. But the main reason, he said, was that they’d come to see a complete rendering of “the global community of power.” The world isn’t a bunch of molecules randomly bumping into each other; it’s organized. And even though it’s often organized in ways that are pretty unappealing, Lombardi's work gives this information structure, narrative, and ultimately grace.