Good and Bad Cryptic News

So, I got the inevitable bad news last week: My cryptic was rejected by the Times. Their criticisms were very fair, and I appreciated their (briefly stated) insights. It was still sad. They published a cryptic on Sunday, though, and it was a very neat one: Show about meat (6) = REVEAL; Musical instrument tossed into breach (9) = VIOLATION; Starts to cry after performing extremely risky stunt (5) = CAPER. Tidy clues like that. I was very happy that I still loved doing the cryptic, even after mine was rejected. I've had negative experiences with things I love after which I can't really look at the thing for a while. It's always bugged me, and I like to think I'm getting over that.

In other good news, I got into another vibrant center of UU studies, and they're giving me mad incentives. Incentives are tempting, so I will be considering this particular UU institute more closely. Yay, them.

And I've discovered a new pet peeve: Jargon. (OK, it's actually an old pet peeve that's resurfaced.) I understand things need names, and shorthand can be very convenient...so, yes, there is a time and place for jargon. But I feel like people and ideas are often unfairly excluded by jargon. People will, say, have an idea about what it means to act ethically, and someone will respond, "Oh, that's utilitarianism." And that way whatever subtle differences existed between the person's original idea and utilitarianism proper get eliminated. It's kind of like how victims of a crime will describe the perpetrator to a sketch artist, and from then on in, their image of the perp is the one drawn, not the one they saw. Everyone's ideas kind of get sifted into preexisting categories. Maybe this is fair...maybe the currently existing categories are the optimal versions of these theories...the ones that have withstood the test of time. But I have a hard time believing they're truly an orthogonal basis of philosophy. I think it might be better to let people's ideas flourish for a while without categorizing them. Maybe it could actually lead somewhere.

As for excluding people...well, I just see so many blog comments telling people the name of the fallacy they're committing, or the theory they're ignoring, or the concept they've overlooked. And by handing them the jargon (affirming the consequent! logical positivism! the patriarchy!) they're putting them out of the conversation. Usually these concepts are simple enough that they could take the time to explain and thus continue to engage the person. But they don't. They just tell them to "look it up." In this way jargon prevents learning, and it pisses me off.

So, here's my quick thought for the day: Jargon is a necessary and convenient evil for people who spend large amounts of time dealing with a topic, but in general, the use of jargon shows a lack of understanding and does not in any way indicate that the speaker belongs to the group that should be using it. If you can explain an idea simply, always do it. Ultimately the name of the idea isn't as important as the idea itself.

And now I am tired. Good night.

Unrequited Love (the blog post!)

But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
—Abraham Cowley

All right, I admit it: I took that from the Wikipedia entry, /Unrequited_love. So sue me.

Unrequited love is, like, one of the big emotions, right? Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo! Et cetera! They all took on unrequited love, holding it up as one of the most all-consuming, powerful feelings a person can have. Woe unto the man or woman struck with this affliction, for it can inspire you to great achievement, but all the while it tears out your heart. This is the reaction we have to unrequited love.

...OR IS IT?

What was the last reaction you had to someone who loved in vain? Was it, "Oh God, I'm so, so sorry for your suffering."? Was it, "Take this burning passion and sublimate it! Let it drive you."? Or was it, "Yeah, that sucks. But at least you know: He's married/gay/straight/not into you. Now get over him."? I'm betting on that one.

To everyone's credit, that is the healthiest response, getting over him. But I wonder why we believe this to be so overwhelmingly possible today, to the point where it's considered a sign of immaturity not to get over your crush? When did we delegitimize unrequited love? I don't think the feeling has gotten any less potent in the last 500 years (although I'd imagine the selective pressure for genes that help you get over crushes would be strong).

Kudos, then, to Barry McCrea. When I read this essay he wrote for Sex Week at Yale, I found it enormously refreshing. I haven't looked at it since it was published a year or two ago, but it's stuck with me throughout. (Looking at it again, now, I realize exactly how much it's stuck with me...and I again doubt Ms. Viswanathan's guilt. Anyway.) He acknowledges how bad it can be—see the friend who lost her job—without dismissing or demeaning it. I especially like his point that unrequited love takes you outside yourself...even though I'm not sure I agree with it. Yes, there is an external object, but your internal interpretation of this person is really the fixation, no?

In any case, I'd like to put in my vote for "unrequited love is serious shit." Sure, call it a silly crush. Dismiss it. Laugh about it. That's all necessary to save face. But if it persists and grows, know you're far from the first to have felt this way. Is it unhealthy? Hells, yeah. But your fellow invalids have a long history of producing great poetry and art. You're in good company, you pathetic puppy dog.

Ought we give Iowa a try? Really?

7:59 PM (EST): The corn people are preparing to caucus (yes, that was the secret code), so I suppose I should register my predictions now. I predict Hillary will win handily. Not overwhelmingly, but handily. I base this on one fact alone: John Kerry won Iowa handily last time. To the best of my recollection (and my recollection may suck), Kerry was as much of an initial front-runner, as centrist, in as close a race in the polls, and substantially duller...in terms of charisma, not intelligence. So I'm going to bet that Iowans are perhaps only slightly hungrier for change—whatever that means—and Hills will win by about a 3 point margin. Could definitely be wrong...we'll know in a matter of hours.

9:48 PM (EST): It appears that Obama has won by that handy margin I predicted for Clinton. That does make me happy, even if he's not my first choice candidate, because it means the youth turned out. I like when the youth turn out because, well, young people are progressive. Young people aren't scared of Teh Gays, we want to help the poor, and we're violently pacifistic. If Obama's candidacy gets more young people involved in politics, that's great. ...but I'd still like to see Hillary win.

MMVIII

At long last, it is 2008. A year of elections. A year of Olympics. A year of the prime factors 2 x 2 x 2 x 251.

Vacation, which I was glad to have, was excellent. I read a truly great novel, watched the first season of a hideously addictive TV series, and caught up with lots of old friends (no link provided). I attended one very good play, two very good movies, and three of the best coffee shops in the world. Not that I'm biased, or anything. So that was vacation. Low-key and friend-filled. Just as I like it.

Other than that, UU stuff is going delightfully. I wouldn't want to gasconade on the blog, lest UU committees read this and have their perception of me go catawampus. (V and I worked on an exceptionally difficult Saturday crossword over break.) But I've heard good news from two excellent places: the "New York City of UU" and a place that would have me study UU in New York City. Woot woot.

Speaking of cities that count, Natalia has flown off to Londres! I'm pretty excited to go visit her there in a couple of months.

There was plenty more I wanted to say, I think, but it will have to wait for my post-caucus update. For now I leave you with this blog post, which sucked up too much of my late afternoon, and the following quote on the "Greatest Generation:"

“What makes them so great? Because they were poor and hated Nazis? Who doesn’t fucking hate Nazis?”

Who says Broadway is dead?

Pre-Bed Thought 2

The New York Times has this great article on experimental philosophy this week. It's good to hear this is going on: I always thought that ethics, especially, could benefit from some good experiment. If you think ethics is more descriptive than proscriptive, as they say, it makes sense to test your ideas when you can. And it might even make sense just to throw people into a bunch of situations and see what comes out.

But here's my take on the actual study cited. And I quote.

Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment?

O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally?

I don’t know where you ended up, but in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment.

Then there's another similar study:

Edouard Machery, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh by way of the Sorbonne, told subjects about a man named Joe who visits the local smoothie shop and asks for the largest drink available. Joe is informed that the megasmoothies come in a special commemorative cup. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the cup. He just wants the megasmoothie. Did he get the commemorative cup intentionally? Most people said no. What if, instead, he’s informed that the megasmoothie has gone up in price and that he’ll have to pay an extra dollar for it? Joe doesn’t care about the extra dollar; he just wants the megasmoothie. Did he pay the extra dollar intentionally? Most people said yes. Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit. In the case of the blameworthy company chairman, then, more pollution was taken to be a harm incurred to gain more profit.

I think, and perhaps I think this too frequently, that this is a language issue more than a substance issue. I think we actually use the word "intend" differently in positive and negative situations. When we talk about intending good things to happen, we are asking whether we purposefully brought something about. This is our usual definition of "intend." But I think when we ask "Did he intentionally harm the environment?" or "Did he intentionally pay the extra dollar?" we're asking whether or not he was hoodwinked and/or ignorant, whether he did something with or without knowing the all the negatives.

I think this distinction might also come in not just in the situations but also in the difference between the phrasing "Did he intend to...?" and "Did he intentionally...?" I think "intentionally" points to knowledge of the consequences of your actions more than it points to purpose. Whereas "intend" points to purpose. You shoot an intruder in the chest. Did you intend to kill him? Maybe not. Did you intentionally kill him? For some reason, it feels slightly more ambiguous, slightly more likely.

So yeah, first reaction: In the positive situations, as presented here, we need them to be purposeful actions to define them as "intended," and in the negatives the person need only have full awareness of the consequences and be in control of their actions to qualify as "intentional."

Pre-Bed Thought

I read something today that raised the question, "Why did we evolve consciousness?" It is, of course, a fun question: Couldn't we do exactly the same stuff if we weren't there witnessing it? I haven't given the question appropriate consideration, but here are my first thoughts:

We could have evolved consciousness because it's the most efficient way to make us unpredictable. Unpredictability has clear benefits for survival...it's harder for animals to hunt you or for other people to trick you if they don't know you'll react the same way to nearly identical stimuli. And although I'm more or less a determinist, certainly the factors that sway decisions can be extremely subtle and nigh impossible to control for. It's really hard to create a random number generator, so perhaps consciousness is the closest we can get with reasonable efficiency. Also (and similarly), consciousness may us to adapt to new situations. We can extrapolate not only rules but probabilities from our past experiences and apply them to the present. Maybe consciousness is a good tool in extrapolation and probability gaging.

Then again, maybe not. I'm just throwing the possibility out there...

Falling in Love with Love

A recent conversation prompted me to wonder: When did we start to hate love? I mean, we all want love for ourselves, but at what point did an affectionate, happy couple stop evoking "aw"s and start evoking "ugh"s? And when did the announcement of an engagement stop being cause for joy and start being cause for whispers about how long it will last. I mean, I suppose it started when we saw which people were getting engaged right out of college and noticed that a fair percentage of them were passionate but fickle people who shouldn't be putting a down payment on an apartment, much less getting hitched. Not all of them...but a fair percentage. I remember, when I was young, I used to watch romantic comedies where the woman eventually had to choose between love and career. And I always thought, "Just go for love; that's what will make you happy!" And in the end, she always did. Now I'd think, "If you have a great career opportunity, for god's sake, take it!" If the guy's good for you, he'll urge you to make the same choice.

Maybe young people have always been cynical about love. Really, it's usually little kids and old people who smile at happy couples. Maybe they have a better perspective on life and know what's really important. Or maybe it's just that most little kids I see have married parents and most old people I see found a life partner. So not only do they not have anything to be jealous of, they may have forgotten how frequently love spectacularly flops. Or not-so-spectacularly flops.

Something about Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach rings pretty true. Twenty-somethings, to say nothing of teenagers, can be insecure and fucked up. Sure, there are some great couples out there. I'm proud to say I know a few. I'm less thrilled to say they're disproportionately religious Christians. Doesn't bode well for me and most of my friends.

But enough with the moping: All but one of the UU apps are in, and that's exciting. I had lunch with Brad and his UU school buddy Nick today. Nick was talking about a case going on somewhere he works (worked? I don't remember). Even though it was in an area of UU I'm not too into, it was pretty spectacular. The evolution of the UU has left some crazy-ass loopholes, and people in the know are far better at exploiting them than your average feller. So average fellers get screwed. With so much emphasis on companies and people who are tacitly evil, it's sometimes easy to forget how many companies and people are explicitly evil. During those times, I like to think of my old landlord. Ah, me.

Back to work post-vacation tomorrow. It was nice to spend time at Slave again.

I Like Mic

Status Que?

When Greg leaves comments on my last post cryptically hinting that I should perhaps update my blog, I figure it's time. The bad part about going two months without updating is that I have two months worth of updating. So you're getting a cumulative update rather than an event-by-event update.

So, the months. I finally finished my cryptic crossword and sent it in to he who wears short Shortz last week. It's not without its flaws, but I think there are some fun and creative clues in there. I'm battling serious odds—he may not even take unassigned cryptics—but until I hear back, I can live safely in that quantum superposition of "accepted" and "not accepted." And if the function collapses to "not accepted," you, my dear reader, can look forward to trying the puzzle...on this very blog! Unless I decide to submit it elsewhere. Gee, I hope I get some personal comments from the man himself. That would be an honor, indeed.

Our apartment has settled, and it is good. Chayes has beautified her room—it's great to be spending some quality time with her—Betsey has moved into Megan's old room and is fitting in beautifully, and Greg's the same sunny delight as ever. Greg and I saw a super-exclusive run-through of Cry Baby last weekend (yay, thanks, Mark!) This particular performance was not "up for review," so I will only review it with the most inscrutable puzzle I can think of: _T W_S _W_S_M_. G_ S__ _T WH_N _T'S _N T_WN.

Work's been crazy as ever. There's been lots of talk about the, er, inappropriate comments made by a certain, unnamed James Watson. If you haven't already read the massive press coverage, you can get the latest at the links I put in the first half of the sentence. The whole to-do prompted me not only to fashion a harness for my jaw to wear whenever reading Watson's comments on black people, women, fat people, gay people or, oh yeah, Rosalind Franklin, but also to do some reading on race and IQ.

It's apparently well-established [most of the following assertions come from that linked report] that the average IQ of black people in America is 15 points lower than the average IQ of white people in America. There are two major questions that come out of this: What are the reasons for this difference? and What the heck does IQ mean anyway? Neither one of these has yet been answered especially thoroughly. While IQ is highly heritable, this doesn't mean that the IQ variations between races is largely genetic. There are plenty of other factors, many unknown, that go into intelligence, and it seems likely that these largely account for differences that we see. Yes, racists, it's conceivable they don't. Someone, sometime will do solid research and we'll have a better idea. The other question, about what IQ actually measures, is just as hazy. It's definitely a solid predictor of academic achievement. In this sense, the test isn't biased toward white people...it's an equal predictor for black people and white people. As the APA report points out, the test is biased against black people in the plain sense that they, on average, do worse. You might say, well, that's not really bias if it still predicts the same stuff, but hey, IQ tests are designed so both sexes necessarily have the same average. It's explicitly not biased toward men or women; I don't know if it's an equal predictor for both sexes, though. This paragraph's getting long, so let me sum up my point: IQ tests are a good but imperfect predictor of academic achievement. There's no great reason to think they measure some ineffable quality of "intelligence." That concept isn't well-defined, anyway. There would probably be some correlation between IQ score and anything measuring some kind of intelligence—probably a fairly strong correlation—but who knows how strong or how consistent between tests? I don't. What I'm saying is we don't know all that much about this topic. And I think people without an agenda should research it, mostly because I'm a curious person and it's an interesting topic. So there.

Oh, and the UU apps are coming along swimmingly. Hopefully those will be out the door in the next couple of weeks. I'm actually feeling very good about this decision. I'm reading One U, a book about UU school, and it's scaring me, but it's also getting me very psyched for the kind of thinking I'd be doing.

All right, friends. I have an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to watch. Emily points out the show's egregiously absent commas. Normally, I would be unforgiving, but somehow Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause have won me over.

Midnight Madness X

What more could I want from life than 18 hours of sleepless, delirious puzzle solving? Well, 18 hours of well-rested, clear-headed puzzle-solving would be nice. But that's not what I got from Midnight Madness X, an alternately frustrating and exhilarating puzzle hunt that started Saturday at 8 pm and ended Sunday, just before 2 pm. Greg had participated the past two years (he's also done a few Microsoft hunts) and brought me onto Team Plaid, otherwise comprised of people who work with him at the hedge fund. I will now tell you the exhaustive and exhausting tale of Team Plaid's glorious victory (over teams who finished in eighth place or later), complete with pictures, provided by flickr users who actually took them.

After a sushi dinner with Jess and her friend Jack, Greg and I headed over to the (misleadingly) convenient starting point, Riverside Park, just west of 103rd St. I gradually met Greg's coworkers (and the one other female who came along) and we got a map of the Columbia campus (our area!) and our first two clues. One was a clear box that revealed a poem (I didn't work on this one), and the other was this (courtesy Brian of Team Red):



One guy quickly realized the abbreviations referred to places on the Columbia campus, and Greg quickly realized it was a tangram (you have to cut it up and rearrange the pieces). It took him about 10 minutes to convince everyone of this, and they never actually believed my solution of the tangram (it wasn't perfect), but we were both right. When we got to the (very general) location, there was a hangman puzzle on a whiteboard. It very clearly was going to spell out "TIME MACHINE" when it was solved, and there were some econ equations scribbled next to it. We spent a few hours trying to solve this puzzle. One problem: IT WASN'T THE REAL PUZZLE. I kept on saying to Greg, "wouldn't it be funny if this weren't the real puzzle," and he did not approve of my sense of humor. Without finding the real puzzle, we couldn't solve the other puzzle, because they relied on each other. Eventually we found out we were working on the wrong thing and found the other half of the puzzle. We solved it too late...by the time we got the next puzzle—a hilarious craigslist ad for a BBW (big-breasted woman, apparently) looking for a VGL (very good looking, that one I knew) man—we were off to Union Square, where we were all supposed to be at midnight.

We got there around 1 (we hadn't originally bought the Union Sq thing as not-a-trap) and waited for the rest of the game to start. Teams that had done better in the first half got a head start. We got two digital pictures: one of a street, one of a storefront. So part of our team went to the storefront (14th and C) and the other part went to the street (9th, just E of Bway). And we looked for the clues. And looked. And looked. And Game Control was MIA. So we looked some more. Shortly before FOUR FUCKING AM we managed to reach game control, who told us that there were no clues there and the direction of the photographs mattered. So with that we got that we had to head to the intersection of the two sightlines: 9th and C. While hunting for the clue there, I ran into a drunk coworker, which was fun. I also realized it was kind of strange that I was out at 4 am and neither drunk nor somebody else, which together would have made the situation make sense. Anyway...

That almost ended the excruciatingly frustrating portion of MMX. There was just one more. The packet at 9th and C sent us to the lower east side and contained three clues. The easiest of the evening (there was a dude in a Subaru), a tough but ultimately satisfying one (explanation TK), and this (thanks Strle):



Greg and I easily translated the wingdings by pattern. Greg then suggested that it was probably an intersection, so the middle word should be "AND." (Go, Greg.) I plugged that in and found that the Ds fell in the first word in such a way that ELDRIDGE fit perfectly. That put an R at the end of the 6-letter last word. I looked on the map they gave us. BROOME was the only 6-letter street crossing Eldridge. Alas! We had solved it incorrectly! Well, either that or their map just wasn't detailed enough to include Hester. UGH. Turns out the numbers indicate the letter in the name of the font (Times, Courier, Wingdings or Helvetica) to use there. Grr. In any case, had Hester been on that map, we would have gotten that one an hour earlier than we did.

In any case, we wound up working on "statements" (via Brian, again):



Our team figured out that it had something to do with states. Game Control eventually clued to us that an official state abbreviation is hidden in each line. We went through them, and I realized (Go, me) that the states were all kind of contiguous, and we should try tracing a line through the states in each stanza. When we did this, we came up with ESSEX + BROOME.

There we found a line of animals...each animal present twice. Here, Greg again solved the puzzle but with an execution that they didn't want (he took the difference in the animals' positions, not the number of animals between them, heaven forbid, and found that number letter in the animals' names), so the answer didn't work. Oh, the pain!

As we were working on that, around 6am, we ate breakfast, and about half of our team left. Greg was fading fast. We soon got my favorite puzzle of the day (Strle, again):



You're probably thinking what we were thinking: "What in God's name do we do with this?" Greg was apparently thinking, "Why am I sitting on concrete in a desolated area of Chinatown when I could be sleeping?" because he departed. I was left with three guys (a fourth would rejoin us). We perhaps too quickly got a hint on the clue: The spiral is the key to solving the strip. See if you have any inspiration...

We sat down at base camp and stared. And then I started folding the strip. I folded on every line indicated in the spiral. And when I was done with the segment between the outermost two black circles there was a "K" in my hands. Turns out the inside was the beginning, but we got it, and the bikers biked off to 103 Norfolk.

Much of the rest of the game was blurry for me, less because of exhaustion than because things got very fast very quickly, and the three guys on bikes got places much more quickly than myself and Jaime, the other pedestrian on the team. Other highlights included a fake crossword that gave us GPS coordinates, a video of a woman dancing in 22 dance segments that gave an intersection when we took the first letters of all the dances (Josh and I—mostly Joshmdash;managed to get enough of the dances that we could figure it out), and an awesome puzzle using the dongles that kept track of how many hints we had where the dongles responded to the angle they were placed at. Awesome.

At long last, when my legs were completely shot and I could feel the blisters forming, we got a direction to the amphitheater in East River Park. When Jaime and I arrived, our biking crew—Peter, Andrei and Josh—had come in 7th, seconds behind 5th and 6th, but an hour and a half behind the winners, who may have somehow gotten there without figuring out all of the clues. Everyone there felt good about finishing, and people from different teams were warmly congratulating each other (a girl I'd been scribbling down dance moves with clapped for me as I walked up the path).

Peter suggested going out for a drink, but it was 2 o'clock, and I was ready to treat myself to a cab and take a shower. Which I did. Thank God.

Sadly, this was the last Midnight Madness. Despite the early frustrations, I would love to do it again. It was a marathon, but the few times I figured things out were incredibly gratifying, and I got to know the LES pretty well, which was cool. And puzzle people rule. But I knew that already.

UPDATE: Kevin of Team Cerulean posted a picture of Team Plaid on flickr! You can see a little bit of me behind Greg:

Will Someone Please Think of the Children!

Maybe I haven't sufficiently honed my maternal instinct, but I can never get too worked up when people employ argumentum ad juvenis, namely, the rhetorical tactic where someone suggests that an action might just harm "the children" and therefore must be wrong. There are a couple of problems with this argument technique.

First, and less universally, the action the person's trying to stop is often...not actually bad for the children. Take this fine editorial by Institute of American Values VP Elizabeth Marquardt. Marquardt is trying to argue against giving kids three legal parents, and she does so by saying kids who grow up split between several households can be in no better shape than kids from more-or-less amicable divorces, who "must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home." FOR SHAME. I think the world might be a better place if the only values that were reinforced by all adult figures in a kid's life were those that are universally held. If one parent thinks eating meat is fine and another parent thinks it's cruel, or if one parent thinks responsible premarital sex is beneficial and another thinks it's unhealthy, it's great that kids have to recognize these ambiguities. It will also help them pick out the really important values (don't steal people's stuff) from the less critical ones (always look your best). Or maybe it won't. Whatever. Maybe on balance, kids from three-parent families have a slightly less happy childhood than kids from two-parent families. Which brings me to my second point.

Why the hell do we think it's so important that things are perfect for kids? Seriously. All kids ever grow up to be is adults, and we don't care nearly as much about them. It's not like kids are such freakin' saints; they can be downright cruel and self-absorbed and irritating. They're not any less pure-hearted than adults are. Most adults aren't truly cruel; they just want to get what's best for them and are often too self-centered to realize they're hurting people along the way. As any kid (and, you'd think, any former kid) knows, that's exactly what kids are like. Childhood isn't bliss. It's a shitshow of a social scene and you get totally scared by bizarre things. I don't think it's clear what factors make kids happier eventual adults, but you never hear people arguing about what will make kids better adults, just what's better for them while they're kids.

So why do we care so much about kids, without facing specifically that they're just going to turn into adults like all other adults? I think that the answer is—and steel yourself for the short-lived cheesiness—the kids represent hope. Awwwww. Ok, end cheesiness. I think kids represent false hope, the hope that these people will be totally unlike all the other people in the world and will somehow start a new world order where everything is just Jim Dandy. I'm kind of serious here. I have this feeling that adults are constantly looking for prodigies. They really want to find the one person who changes the world. You're a pretty special group of people, people who read the blog: When you were younger, did an adult ever relate to you as if you were really, really something special? And do you find it just a bit creepy? Like they expected oddly big things from you, things no adult could ever deliver on? I think everyone wants to find that Harry Potter, that kid that with ingenuity and goodness turns everything around.

Or maybe it's just an evolved emotional response. Wish we didn't have to base so much policy on it.

Spoiler Alert: I'm Just Wild About Harry

This post has spoilers. MANY spoilers. So if you're in the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or haven't read it but plan on doing so, leave! Leave now! The blog will still be here when you get back, I promise, and if it's not, that means there's something horrifically wrong with Google, and we all have bigger things to worry about.

So, um, everyone's predictions were right. Sure, some predictions contradicted each other, so they weren't ALL right, but if you took all the most common ones—Snape's on the right side and was in love with Lily, Harry's a horcrux, Neville's the one who becomes a teacher at Hogwarts—you'd more or less have all the answers.

Then again, the answers have never been the REAL draw of these books. The terrific characters and beautiful moments are as terrific and beautiful as ever here. I've always found the Weasley family to be the most emotionally stirring set of relationships in the book...the way Molly cares about her husband and children, the completely good-natured partnership of Fred and George, who are constantly joking but so emotionally close and mature. So when the Weasleys suffered in this book, I cried. I did. I also cried when Molly uttered what I believe to be the first swear word in the series: "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" Bloody brilliant.

When Harry dives into Snape's memories and realizes that he must sacrifice himself, those are also a great few pages. His last mile felt incredibly real...as I imagine facing death would be...as any bizarrely extreme situation is.

There were actually long stretches that were sort of slow. I mean, relative to the rest of Harry Potter, which is to say that I was reading a page a minute instead of a page every 50 seconds.

In any case, the ending was extremely satisfying, if somewhat predictable, and I'm happy. Stories about midnight madness TK.

Almost All Hallows Eve

With 100 pages left in Book 6, The Great Harry Potter Reread is about to come to a close, and The Great Deathly Hallows Read will soon begin. Who knows how we'll look back on this time? I certainly have no particular envy for the newspaper readers who received Great Expectations in installments, but then again, I hated Great Expectations.

As many have undoubtedly heard, some clever schmo uploaded gifs of the entire book on the web, and now spoilers are wildly circulating, as I try to dodge them like a seeker dodges bludgers (Quidditch reference, ho!). I've already happened upon one, which I hope was false—not that I'm so opposed to what was indicated in the spoiler, I just don't like plots spoiled. It was in an RSS feed for one of my favorite blogs, and it was in bold. So maybe there was some context in the non-bold text that made it clear the spoiler was made up, but I didn't stick around in case there were more spoilers.

Not cool, Slog poster. Not cool.

I'm not even reading comments on this very post until I finish Deathly Hallows, because I wouldn't be surprised if some eeeeevil child were technorating all HP posts and commenting with spoilers, just to stroke himself. Bad boy. Go to your room.

But really, I'm not too concerned with the things that will probably be in these spoilers. I'm less concerned with who dies than with the progress of the book itself, how the final battle is framed, what the final comment on human nature is. I'll need to actually read the book to figure all of these things out. And I'm so psyched.

Suddenly This Summer

You can almost convince yourself summer hasn't really started yet until the fourth of July. Then you know you're in the throes of the season and it's about to slip by, just as it does every year. I'd have thought this would stop after, you know, I stopped getting summer vacation. But it's still my favorite season. I'd much rather it be 85 than 45, and it's good to have all of the school-bound friends feeling a little more relaxed.

The summer has started off with Harry Pottering, which is unforseeably terrific. I've read the books already, and I know I enjoyed them, but being on a mission to read—spending a Sunday sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and then Riverside Park, reading a fantasy book, and feeling accomplished afterward—is so ideal.

I got my MacBook, which is treating me awfully well. I've only played with GarageBand enough to record myself singing Wimoweh. It's, well, horrible—at once overly pretty and harsh—but I'm thrilled. I'm harmonizing! With myself! And I can send the file to people! Woo!

And I'm happy with my UUST score. If I want to go to UU school, I'm in pretty good shape...just have to get recommendations from old professors and write the world's most brilliant 250 word statement. Maybe my alma mater will take me back...who knows? They're pretty picky, though.

Oh, I met an attractive guy this weekend. I know that doesn't sound like much (no, I didn't, like, get his number...or even have a one-on-one conversation with him) but so rarely am I at all attracted to someone I just met—nay, so rarely am I attracted to anyone at all—that it was sort of a proof of concept. The dude was gorgeous and authentically charismatic. And I kinda dug him. It's more a testament to my functionality than my maturity (it would be nice to go for someone attainable), but when that's in doubt, it's something.

So, on a completely different topic, I was thinking about consciousness a bit today. I do maintain a confidence in science and philosophy...I think we'll eventually have an idea of what consciousness is, but right now I think we don't quite know what questions to ask, and that's hindering progress in finding out what exactly consciousness is and how it arises from the brain. We've apparently nicely eliminated the possibility that consciousness is located at one place in the brain. You can take out any individual part of the brain and maintain consciousness...I mean, maybe parts will make you pass out, but they won't kill your identity. So I guess that only leaves the possibility that it's emergent from some collection of processes? Some network? Which kind of makes sense. But I think before we figure out how it emerges, we have to get a better subjective idea of what 'it' is.

Therefore, I've been trying to pinpoint my own consciousness. What do I feel I directly experience? It's easier to find stuff I don't directly experience. Inspiration is one of them. When I'm doing a cryptic and think of an answer, it often just 'comes to me.' You all know this. The answer to some problem just comes into your head. So that's something that does not happen in the conscious. So the answer appears in your head...how does it appear? Is it an image? A sound? It's kind of neither, usually, and so it's hard to say what it IS. Even when you have mental images or hear things, the sounds don't need to happen linearly; the image doesn't need to be detailed. In what way are we actually active? What specific actions can you take ownership of? I guess we experience things. Sound does actually register. But certainly the processing of that sound isn't part of the conscious mind, nor is the interpreting of it. I can't think of any specific process that I really feel I—as my conscious mind—do. Although I know I'm here.

OK, I'm too tired for further pontificating. 'Night, all.

The Great Harry Potter Reread

I've exchanged one acronym for another (UUST will hopefully retire on Friday when my score comes in), and I now embark on TGHPR: The Great Harry Potter Reread. I began last Wednesday with Greg's copy of The Sorcerer's Stone, but alas he informed me that he would be taking all of his Harry Potter books to India with him. He claims he wants to "read" them, but I'm certain he's doing it just to spite me. And to make his company pay more for his checked luggage. There are many advantages. So I went to that magical place where they let you take whatever books you have and bring them back once you've read them. I finished books one and two last weekend, have taking a brief break to do some fun reading for work, and tomorrow I should be able to make a dent in book three. After I finish four, I'll have to go back to book lending land to get five and six.

I may have already mentioned how good I feel about the Harry Potter craze. In a world where so many crazes are guilty pleasures (in that you perhaps should feel guilty when you mock people or consume environment-harming luxuries), a beautifully crafted fantasy series is such a delight. It's just nice to see people getting worked up about a story. And it seems that J.K. Rowling has handled it beautifully—having started out as a mother struggling to make ends meet and been vaulted to international celebrity author, she seems to have kept a cool head, stayed true to her original vision, and effortlessly walked so many lines between making her characters and points of tensions too simple and too complicated. Go go go Jo. In any case, I'm having so much fun with the reread, and I eagerly await book seven. (Snape is SO NOT REALLY EVIL. You'll see! I swear!)

This short week has been one of luxuries. Last night, I took Mum to JoJo for her birthday. Had the most fabulous foie gras brulee (yeah, I know it's cruel as hell, but it's quite literally the most delicious thing I've ever put in my mouth). And the decor and atmosphere were just lovely. It was, of course, lovely to spend time with Mom. And speaking of relatives, I had a delightful post-pride Italian dinner with Natalia the night before. Great to hang out with her, of course, and it sounds like her summer's shaping up to be very cool, or at least promising. And I got my MacBook today. Oh, beauty! I can't wait to start recording stuff and taking full advantage of garageband. It's a pretty darn impressive program.

Finally, Greg has alas departed for India. He'll be spending the next four weeks in fabulous and exciting Hyderabad, which has 6.1 million people, and which I'd never heard of before he announced he was going. I feel pathetic. After working in India, he's taking a couple weeks to backpack around Nepal, which should be awesome for him. I'm now one friend shorter for the summer (alas!) but I have Harry and a MacBook to keep me company. And, you know, my other friends. They exist.

In A Post-UUST World

Well, I'm finally done with that pain in the ass...um, unspecified standardized test. I think it went fine, although I doubt it was my greatest performance. Anyway, I'll find out in two and a half weeks. I came home exhausted and with a right side of my back that can hardly move (still! damned tiny desks in Davies!) only to find that my dearest roommate had hidden sixteen signs throughout my room, bathroom, and kitchen areas with "UUST" written on them (he used the real letters). I had apologized that I wouldn't be able to help clean up after our Tony party, and he apologized that he would be talking nonstop about the test after it was done. Sixteen signs counts as nonstop. Grr.

Speaking of our party, the weekend would have been pretty much ideal had I not been a bit of a nervous wreck. Friday night I went out with work people for drinks, then I picked up a copy of the new Ian McEwan and read the novel(la) in one sitting. I was crying by the end—yes, I'm weepy—and I may have gained some painful insight into myself. Which can be a good thing. Or it can just make me mopey. To make matters worse better [SIXTEEN SIGNS! --Ed.] Greg had his wallet stolen and we turned his room upside down looking for it. The next day, the perps charged a couple of metro cards...which is exactly what the crooks who stole Natalie's wallet and my laptop did. Weird mofos.

On Saturday, I went to Jess R's smaller birthday party on Governors Island. That island is totally underrated: totally beautiful, barely developed, and perfect for picnicking and frisbee throwing. We didn't have frisbees to throw, but it was still good times. Then I met up for coffee with Brad—we did some very solid hashing out of answers to general questions—and I had a delicious Mercer Kitchen dinner with V. The idea of the dinner was to stop me from studying, but I wound up doing a section at 11:45 pm after a few glasses of wine. It actually went decently. Who knew?

Sunday was major prep for the par-tay, as I made my World Famous Guacamole (aka Guac of Ages) and deviled eggs. Greg's dad was over, and he miraculously cleaned our entire apartment...well, not my room, which needs a hell of a once-over, but a lot of the apartment. I also managed to see Mike L, who was in from Dubai because his dad was having heart surgery. Apparently, half of the city is under a certain surveillance, where you cannot access sites that are not in accordance with the values of Arab society. Greeeat. So Mike's been having a hard time getting to certain networking sites from his apartment. In any case, 'twas good to see him, and I'm glad that he (amazingly) loves Dubai.

The party was ridiculously well-attended and tons of fun, even though Spring Awakening had a bit too much of a sweep. V and Sam got into a few low-key arguments about shows and how musicals should be written. The two of them have, er, different styles of arguing, so V valiantly muscled his way to victory. They really just have VASTLY different taste. So it goes. And Mark O brought his actual Tony, which added a delightful authenticity to the festivities. The Guac of Ages was a big hit (Chayes's boyfriend Steve apparently came exclusively for the guac), as were the eggs. I must admit, however, that Greg's open-faced smoked salmon and cilantro butter sandwiches were pretty darn good. After the party, V drove me home so my mom could drive me to the Have the following day.

And now I am relaxing after watching (yet again) the fabulous Spencer Quest/Jamie Donovan scene from Michael Lucas' La Dolce Vita. Porn is such high art these days. If you know anyone who's an expert in right-side-of-back massage, please let me know.

Riddle Me This

I was reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union yesterday (highly recommended), and there's a character in the book who's really into chess but hates puzzles. Reading that, it struck me that I've never heard of Shortz doing anything with chess. Heck, I love puzzles, and I despise chess. Is there really a divide between chess people and puzzle people? I guess Reiman likes both puzzles and chess...but I don't know. There is something kind of different between doing a solitary and non-competitive activity where you have to solve something concrete and battling someone else where the point is to work a strategy around them. I dislike competition and, frankly, strategy, and I love cleverness and puns and math, so I guess my preference makes sense. But maybe this is a solid way of splitting people up in two—like Cavaliers and Roundheads—or at least a way of splitting nerds in two. Are you a proud, vindictive, autism spectrum hyper-male with a love of battle, or are you a someone who finds the purest fun in clean cleverness and the satisfaction of rushing toward a victory that won't be tempered by someone else's loss? Do I sound biased in my descriptions?

The Next Exciting Ethical Dilemma!

Get psyched, kids: Eugenics is back, and it's looking much friendlier. All of those "eu" words that were are so positive in etymology seem creepy these days, don't they? Euphoria is a little psychotic and delirious, utopia quickly leads to communism and dystopia, and Eugene's a total dweeb. But eugenics has the worst connotation of them all. Mention the word and all anyone can think of is forced sterilization by the Nazis. Which was bad. Really bad. But the new eugenics is so morally ambiguous, and it may inspire some great ethical discussion.

Here's the deal: Slowly, we're learning more about the genetic and prenatal factors that can influence traits in a fetus. And we're learning how to test for them. So the obvious question arises: How much choice should parents have? What should they select for? Right now we can test for Down's Syndrome, and over 90% of the fetuses diagnosed are aborted. There's some controversy over this, but not a whole lot. It seems like a fairly large majority of Americans wouldn't blame a mother for terminating a pregnancy if she knew her kid was going to have a reasonably serious illness or disability. Still, this kind of thing doesn't do much good for living people who have that illness or disability and their families. As fewer people have these issues, demand for treatment decreases, and it's harder for people to find support from others they can relate to. The more people abort fetuses with Down's Syndrome, the more pressure there is to abort a kid with Down's Syndrome...the fewer people there are with the disease the greater the consequences of having it are. Also, people tend to be less sympathetic to illnesses they see as preventable. And, yeah, I guess screening and selective abortion is a method of prevention. And it's eugenics. Intervening to reduce suffering, boost intelligence, whatever.

And then we get beyond disease to other traits. It is cool to select for IQ? Hair color? Sexual orientation? The last one's a doozy. If a parent wants to select for a straight kid, it's like that a gay kid would face some problems growing up with that parent. Still, it just seems really creepy to say it's OK to select for your kid's sexual orientation. But whom is this parent harming? The gay community at large? By making the world population of gay people smaller and therefore making it harder to be gay or by not forcing herself to accept gay people and contribute to a better universal attitude toward sexual diversity? And as I saw a somewhat sketchy scientist discuss (thanks to CM for the paper), if people can abort for not wildly compelling reasons (could handle another kid, but don't really want one), why can't they abort for this reason?

I'm totally conflicted on these issues, which is kind of great. I love a good dilemma...and that kind of testing for sexual orientation is a little ways away anyway, so I don't have to worry that I'm screwing anyone over by being conflicted. My instinct is to say that it's a parent's right to select the child on whatever stupid criteria they want, so I don't think parents should be legally barred from this testing. On the moral question, I think it's morally wrong to prefer many traits strongly enough that you would choose to abort a fetus—go through an unpleasant procedure and risk having issues that aren't currently present with a future pregnancy—rather than have a child with that trait. I think someone who prefers hair color that strongly is just a little pathetic, and frankly, I think someone who prefers sexual orientation that strongly is, well, kind of a bad person. But I think given those attitudes, the decision to selectively abort is not itself immoral. I don't think it's the responsibility of any individual parent to help a minority by bearing a child who's part of that minority. I'm open to changing my mind, though. That's why I think it's a cool topic.

How to Sell Your Grand Treatise on Everything

I wanted to title this post "How to Be a Convincing Crazy," but I figured that might put off my target audience. Don't go, Grand Treatise writer! Hear me out: This post is just a list of hallmarks of good, convincing, sane writing. Whether or not you're a bit nuts, you can use my advice to make your Grand Treatise on Everything (GTE) more appealing to your intended reader. In my line of work, I've received more than a few GTEs (and I'm still young!), so I'm not a horrible example of your target audience. Here I will tell you what you can do to prevent me from immediately tossing your GTE.

Disclaimer: This is not a response to any individual person or document. Any one GTE could be stricken from my data set and the advice would still hold. Here we go...

1. Don't spill the beans!
GTEs from crazies are a dime a dozen. GTEs that are accurate and provide true insight into the nature of the universe are, well, really, really rare. So the second your reader realizes you are writing a GTE, you're in trouble. Your reader knows that the chances that you're a crazy who's BSing his way through the essay are pretty darn good, and he or she will likely stop reading (or at least stop taking you seriously) right there. So don't start sounding too grand too early. Keep words and phrases like "revolution," "meaning of life," "secret of the universe," and "theory of everything" out of your opening paragraph. In fact, leave them out of the whole piece. Don't capitalize "truth." Try to be modest and specific in your impact claims. Talk about how the ideas in your paper could have an impact on a specific field or help people achieve a certain end. Instead of saying that your theory "will revolutionize physics," say it "could provide insight into outstanding problems in high-energy particle physics." Instead of saying your ideas will "let people see the true meaning of life and achieve what some would call Nirvana," say they'll "let people explore a method of thought that could help lower everyday stress." And for the love of God, don't mention Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts. If you keep your language modest and specific, your reader might think you're on to something. Everyone is interested in the meaning of life and a theory of everything; if you let the reader make the connection between what you're saying and these grand topics by himself, you will stand a better chance.

2. Support your claims
How did you think of your GTE? Was it a flash of inspiration? Did God personally talk to you? Was it through a lifetime of painstaking thought? I don't care. I don't want to hear it. Nothing is going to convince your reader that your ideas and theories are accurate except solid evidence and strong arguments. Your reader doesn't trust you, and unsupported claims like "everything is energy" get you no points. This step is where you should spend most of your time and energy as you write and revise your GTE. If you have no support for your claims and just feel you achieved your knowledge through revelation, think of how you can support your assertions. Build up arguments that are rational and as rigorous as possible. Don't talk down to your reader; it doesn't make you sound authoritative, it just makes you sound crazy. Yes, you can appeal to your reader's intuition, but...

3. Avoid arguments that amount to "Duh!"
Prominent advocates of creationism often use "duh!" arguments, but hey, they seem crazy. Don't use them. You know you're using a "duh!" argument if you start using phrases like "of course," "obviously," "clearly," "common sense tells us." Most really, really bad theories appeal to common sense and intuition. It's a sign of lack of rigor. If you're trying to disprove quantum physics (I wouldn't recommend it), saying, "Obviously a particle can't be spin up and spin down at the same time!" is a dead giveaway that you don't know what you're talking about. Appeals to common sense and intuition are a sign that you simply don't understand something well enough to argue it. Which brings me to...

4. Do your research
If you are challenging an established idea, you should be very familiar with all of the arguments for that idea. If you're challenging quantum mechanics (again, not recommended), you should know about Bell's Inequality and why violation of it demonstrates entanglement. Is there something you don't understand? Is there something that seems obviously wrong to you? Spend a nice, long time trying to find an explanation in the literature. It will serve you well.

5. Keep your language simple/Use English
Keep your voice active and your words short. Long, florid sentences are just annoying, and they make your thinking appear muddled. Plus, strained sentences are a great opportunity for using overblown language. Avoid the overblown language. And don't define too many new words. Sure, if you want to create your own term for the "space-time-mind-connectedness continuum" or whatever you've come up with, go ahead. Knock yourself out. But when you start defining tons of subtopics that are key to your theory, you sound awfully caught up in yourself. (Unlike this post, which isn't at all self-involved, I know. But hush.)

6. Watch you're grammer
Do you think I'm a moron? I would too, had I read this section heading. Sure, anyone can sub in a "you're" where there should be a "your" or misspell a word. These aren't actual signs of low intelligence. But when you make these sorts of simple errors, you come across really poorly. Curl up with your good friends Strunk and White and get to know their rules. A couple of little errors won't spell doom (I'm not proofreading the post, I'm sure it's got its fair share of crap), but it's better to be safe than sorry. Oh, and in these modern days you can end sentences with prepositions, start them with conjunctions, and split infinitives til the cows come home. Enjoy.

OK, GTE writer. That's all my advice for this evening. I'll update the post when I've thought of more. Oh, one last thing: A lot of people are really into GTEs. You can recognize them by their copy of The Secret or the latest Deepak Chopra. I'm not one of these people, so I haven't read any truly popular GTE books. By reading a few of these and seeing what methods they use, you can probably derive more techniques for successfully framing your theories and ideas.

Good luck, GTE writer. If you have it all figured out, I look forward to learning about life, the universe, and everything. If not, I eagerly await your best efforts. Godspeed.

Fun, personal posting will resume soon. You'll hear all about my hot dates and wild tropical adventures...if and when they ever happen.

Adapted Screenplay

Just add stage directions, (barely) change the names, edit for length, and it practically reads like noir.

We are in a small interrogation room. CHUCK is leaning against the back wall and smoking, wearing the two piece remains of a three-piece suit. The smoke billows around his face, obscuring his features, but it is clear that he is in charge and he is at ease. Sitting at the table is JIM, a man with a face that could once stop traffic, but it looks like one car didn't quite stop in time. He has just come in from the rain and drops from his hair form a small puddle on the table and make the shoulders of his white, button-down shirt translucent. Exhaling, CHUCK speaks.

CHUCK

Can you remember the date and the day?

JIM

Yes, sir, very well. It was Wednesday, March the 10th, 2004.

CHUCK

And how do you remember that date so well?

JIM

This was a very memorable period in my life; probably the most difficult time in my entire professional life. And that night was probably the most difficult night of my professional life. So it's not something I'd forget.

CHUCK

Were you present when Al visited Johnny's bedside?

JIM

Yes.

CHUCK

And am I correct that the conduct of Al and Andy on that evening troubled you greatly?

JIM

Yes.

CHUCK

OK, let me go back and take it from the top. You rushed to the hospital that evening. Why?

JIM

[JIM takes a while to answer. He slicks back his wet hair and covers his face with his soaked palms, unable to look up at CHUCK.]

I've actually thought quite a bit over the last three years about how I would answer that question if it was ever asked, because I assumed that at some point I would have to testify about it.

I -- to understand what happened that night, I, kind of, got to back up about a week.

[JIM pulls in his chair and folds his hands on the table. He begins to tell CHUCK his story.]

In the early part of 2004, the Department of Justice was engaged -- the Office of Legal Counsel, under my supervision -- in a reevaluation both factually and legally of a particular classified program. And it was a program that was renewed on a regular basis, and required signature by the attorney general certifying to its legality.

And the -- and I remember the precise date. The program had to be renewed by March the 11th, which was a Thursday, of 2004. And we were engaged in a very intensive reevaluation of the matter.

And a week before that March 11th deadline, I had a private meeting with Johnny, the attorney general, for an hour, just the two of us, and I laid out for him what we had learned and what our analysis was in this particular matter.

And at the end of that hour-long private session, he and I agreed on a course of action. And within hours he was stricken and taken very, very ill...

CHUCK

You thought something was wrong with how it was being operated or administered or overseen.

JIM

We had -- yes. We had concerns as to our ability to certify its legality, which was our obligation for the program to be renewed.

[The camera follows JIM's story, showing Johnny at the hospital, showing JIM conducting official business.]

The attorney general was taken that very afternoon to George Washington Hospital, where he went into intensive care and remained there for over a week. And I became the acting attorney general.

And over the next week -- particularly the following week, on Tuesday -- we communicated to the relevant parties at the White House and elsewhere our decision that as acting attorney general I would not certify the program as to its legality and explained our reasoning in detail, which I will not go into here. Nor am I confirming it's any particular program.

That was Tuesday that we communicated that.

The next day was Wednesday, March the 10th, the night of the hospital incident. And I was headed home at about 8 o'clock that evening, my security detail was driving me. [We are transported into JIM's limo, driving down a major avenue, shockingly empty for the hour.] And I remember exactly where I was -- on Constitution Avenue -- and got a call from Johnny's chief of staff telling me that he had gotten a call from Johnny's wife from the hospital. She had banned all visitors and all phone calls. So I hadn't seen him or talked to him because he was very ill.

And Johnny's old lady reported that a call had come through, and that as a result of that call Andy and Al were on their way to the hospital to see Johnny.

CHUCK

Do you have any idea who that call was from?

JIM

[Pauses, tentative about what he wants to say] I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don't know that for sure. It came from the White House. And it came through and the call was taken in the hospital.

So I hung up the phone, immediately called my chief of staff, told him to get as many of my people as possible to the hospital immediately. I hung up, called Bob from the FBI and -- with whom I'd been discussing this particular matter and had been a great help to me over that week -- and told him what was happening. He said, "I'll meet you at the hospital right now."

Told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly to the hospital.

I got out of the car and ran up -- literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.

CHUCK

What was your concern? You were obviously in a huge hurry.

JIM

I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that.

And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Johnny's wife was standing by the hospital bed, Johnny was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn't clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.

CHUCK

At that point it was you, the old lady and the attorney general and maybe medical personnel in the room. No other Justice Department or government officials.

JIM

Just the three of us at that point.

I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn't clear that I had succeeded.

I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Bob by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Bob instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room.

I was shortly joined by the head of the Office of Legal Counsel assistant attorney general and a senior staffer of mine who had worked on this matter, an associate deputy attorney general.

So the three of us Justice Department people went in the room.

[We see the hospital room. On a simple bed is Johnny, a frail man with hollowed cheeks and small but sparkly eyes.]

I sat down in an armchair by the head of the attorney general's bed. The two other Justice Department people stood behind me. And Johnny's old lady stood by the bed holding her husband's arm. And we waited.

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Al, carrying an envelope, and Andy. [Al and Andy enter in trenchcoats and fedoras that cast their eyes in shadow.] They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Al began to discuss why they were there -- to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was -- which I will not do.

And Johnny then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me -- drawn from the hour-long meeting we'd had a week earlier -- and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent. And as he laid back down, he said, "But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general," and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room. And within just a few moments after that, Bob arrived. I told him quickly what had happened. He had a brief -- a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general and then we went outside in the hallway.

Dramatic, no? Here's the source material.