For Jenn Kahn’s Pitch Perfect workshop, please read these pitches in advance and mark the
three stories you would be most likely to assign if you were an editor (without worrying about
genre).
AN/Wired
First there was Superman, then there was Batman. Now there’s Memory Woman:
Jill Price, world’s leading mnemonist, as seen earlier this year on 20/20
and Good Morning America. Price, according to the hype, can remember
essentially everything that’s ever happened to her. Newsweek, NPR, and The
USA Today all gushed about her and new book “The Woman Who Can’t Forget:” A
respected memory researcher at UC Irvine endorsed her as the real thing, the
first diagnosed case of what he dubbed “hyperthymestic syndrome.”
If Ms. Price were really everything the media says she is, it would be big
news, indeed. Geneticists could sample her DNA, neuroscientists could
finally figure out how human memory really works, and Google might finally
face some serious competition. But alas: Jill memory isn’t close to
photographic---and hints of Ms. Price’s limits abound, some hidden in plain
sight, others buried in the scientific literature.
Photographic memory, in fact, is nothing more than an urban legend. In the
language of computer science, human memory is content-addressable, not
location-addressable: we can store all kinds of information, but the
precision that allows computers to store bitmapped pictures and
arbitrarily-large databases is entirely lacking. Machines really do have
photographic memory. But we retrieve information based on context- or
state-dependent reminders, rather than specific RAM-chip like pointers to
particular physical locations. As a result, human memory retrieval is often
wildly imprecise. Our recollections are subject to things like distortion,
interference, and even outright confabulation. Photographic memory wouldn’t
just require a souping up of circuits that are already there, it would
require a complete rewiring of the human brain.
There are of course differences between people’s minds. But memory, like
just about everything else, is distributed along the normal curve, and Ms.
Price is square in the same curve as the rest of us. You can actually see
this for yourself if you carefully read the scientific literature on Ms.
Price. Although she can remember vast quantities of autobiographical
information, under laboratory conditions with novel verbal material, she’s
only about 2 standard deviations above the mean. This is a fine showing,
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which puts her in the top 5% of the population –- but not 6 or 7 standard
deviations. At memory for faces, she’s actually worse than average.
What’s really going on? Price doesn’t have a superhuman memory, she has
somewhat above average case of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- and a
superhuman interest in herself. She has kept a diary every day since she
was little, and by now has over 50,000 pages, detailing what she ate, what
television shows she watched, and what was in the news. To the extent that
Jill can remember so much about herself, it’s not so much that her memory is
extraordinary but that her interest in herself is truly exceptional. I can
still tell you the names and numbers of most of the players of the 1983
Baltimore Orioles, not because I have an exceptional memory, but because for
one glorious, World Series-winning summer, I focused on little else. If
Price can impress Diane Sawyer by describing breakfast on April 3, 1987, it
is mostly because she spends so much of her time thinking about little else.
In the spirit of ferreting out the truth and perhaps ending Ms. Price’s free
ride, I’ve been in touch with Price’s publicist at Simon and Schuster, and
am in the process of arranging in-person interviews with her and the
scientists who have written about her. I also plan to interview Brad
Williams, another man who claims to have hyperthymestic syndrome and has
been making the talk-show rounds. A disc jockey in Wisconsin, he’ll be the
subject of a documentary hitting theatres this winter.
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NN/Wired
Hi Nick,
I have a story that is well-suited for Wired readers. I'd like to profile the work of Arthur Ganson,
a sculptor who makes machines that he calls kinetic sculptures or objects of "gestural
engineering." His work is in an ongoing exhibit at the MIT Museum and he will be speaking in
September at a seminar sponsored by the Long Now Foundation at the Cowell Theater in San
Francisco.
His machines do the fantastical stuff of daydreams -- like making a chair explode and then
putting it back together for a fleeting moment before it explodes again. Or like unraveling a piece
of red thread slowly so that it resembles the "accumulation of time." One machine appears to
revel in the simple task of bathing itself with gasoline. People who see them often laugh out
loud.
In one sense, the sculptural machines confront people with the difference between a motion and a
gesture. The machines animate objects like artichoke petals or wishbones or chairs so that their
actions mimic human gestures, which suggest more emotion and meaning than a simple
movement of a lever or a pulley.
Often, the elaborate gears and motors Ganson uses to execute the precise motions serve no other
purpose than to entertain or to evoke a response in the person watching them. In this sense, the
work seems to propose a new role for machines in our society -- not only as objects that do
practical tasks, but as objects that serve an emotional purpose. Robotics researchers are exploring
the potential for machines to feel emotions, while Ganson seems to be exploring the potential for
machines to incite human emotion.
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JV: Marketing for Your Nose/NYTM
Last week, Mark Peltier took a tour of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. He scrutinized the hotel’s
looks—marble floors, mirrored walls, red velvet—and analyzed its sounds. Most importantly, he
pondered what the place smelled like, or rather, what it should smell like. The Trump persona
and brand are unique, so shouldn’t there be a distinct Trump aroma, too? The Donald, it seems,
is thinking the same thing. He has hired Peltier, the cofounder of a company called AromaSys, to
create a “signature smell” for his hotels and to disperse it directly through the air conditioning.
The scent needs to be glitzy, appealing, intoxicating. It needs to be as memorable as Trump
himself.
Nike has the swoosh, McDonalds the Golden Arches. The idea that companies should have
signature smells, too, is the essence of scent marketing and is part of a recent trend in advertising
known as full-sensory branding. The typical American watches 294 television commercials per
day and is bombarded by billboards, print and radio advertisements, pop-ups, and spam. Our ears
and eyes are overtaxed. The nose, meanwhile, is seen as an underutilized conduit for corporate
communications. Scientific studies indicate that smell triggers memories and emotions more
powerfully than any other sense; a limited but growing body of research suggests that certain
aromas can cause customers to linger longer, spend more, and return sooner. To full-sensory
branding advocates, the nose is marketing’s final frontier.
Dozens of companies launched scent marketing campaigns this year. The Westin Hotels began
piping a white tea fragrance into lobbies; Omni Hotels announced its own “Sensory Advisory
Board” and began deploying the scents of lemongrass, green tea, and sugar cookie. The Samsung
Experience store in Time Warner Center is now scented with a fragrance the company calls
Intimate Blue, while on Madison Avenue, Sony Style smells of mandarin, vanilla, and other
ingredients that the company believes will make female customers feel more at home. Airlines,
automakers, appliance dealers, department stores, homebuilders, high-end boutiques, and grocery
stores have all jumped on the scent marketing bandwagon. The goal typically is to create a novel
aroma that somehow conveys a company’s overall image and particular attributes of a product.
The endeavor is much more complicated than simply ordering truckloads of potpourri. RollsRoyce, for example, sampled the air inside a 1965 Silver Cloud, identified 800 distinct chemical
components, and synthesized them in a spray that is spritzed inside of every new model. Foot
Locker built a European advertising campaign around print and point-of-purchase ads that
wafted the scent of new sneakers. A bank in Washington has even experimented with ATMs that
dispense scented twenties so that the “smell of money” is uniquely the bank’s own.
To report this proposed feature story, I might enlist a full-sensory branding consultant—possibly
Harald Vogt at the recently created Scent Marketing Institute—to take me on an olfactory tour of
the city, with stops at Cadillac, Bloomingdales, Sony Style, Thomas Pink, etc. To witness the
science and art of scent creation, I’d visit International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), a
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multinational giant that in March announced the creation of a new “BrandEmotions” division to
focus on smell marketing. IFF created Intimate Blue for Samsung and has developed technology
that can aroma-infuse clothing, carpets, furnishings, packaging, and plastic. The company is
hoping to make the world much more fragrant and to profit from doing so. Whether by phone or
in person, I’d also want to do some reporting from smell’s scientific camp, whose members
include everyone from Richard Axel and Linda Buck, winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, to the universally known if not universally respected Alan Hirsch,
founder of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation. In the mid-1990s, a Hirsch
study found that dispersing a floral odor around slot machines caused revenues to soar; his work
is the reason that almost every Vegas casino now deploys scents.
The central players in the industry are companies like AromaSys and a similar one called
ScentAir. They are typically involved in every step of the process: the first meeting with a client
like Trump, the development of a signature scent, and the installation of sophisticated machines
to disperse the aroma. To unify the story and provide a narrative, arc we might pick a case
study—Peltier’s work for Trump, for instance—and follow it from the birth of the idea to the
distribution of the brand scent. The article would convey the fun, fascinating side of scent
marketing but not shy away from the fact that olfactory advertising is a little creepy, too.
Corporations are now tapping the power of our most primal sense, the one that manipulates
mood and memory with the least amount of higher cognitive interference. Also, we’re already at
the brink of sensory overload when it comes to advertisements. Will full-sensory brands push us
over the edge?
IM/Wired
Several times a year, Kevin Murray and his crew of surveillance investigators appear at the work
sites of his clients, carrying about $400,000 worth of equipment in suitcases. These are
prosperous times for the bugging prevention industry, and Murray Associates keeps adding
expensive gear to its arsenal.
There's the Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer, which scrutinizes radio frequencies from 10 kHz to
40 GHz in search of bugs sending signals; the Digital Telecommunications Surveillance
Analyzer that inspects digital telephone systems; an ultraviolet digital TV camera that spots
spycams and their power sources behind walls and ceilings; and the Wireless LAN Security
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Audit System, which uncovers security gaps in corporate networks. For a fee of $20,000,
Murray and his crew sweep a large office suite or work area.
During thirty years and nearly 4,000 eavesdropping audits, they've found bugs in Canadian
parliamentary offices, surveillance devices in the middle of an avocado farm, spy equipment that
employees planted in their own CEO's office, and a group of foreign spies at work inside a
client's headquarters. (There have been three such "live catches" during Murray's career.) They
once swept a corporate airplane immediately after the death of the company chairman -- with the
dead man's body still aboard, stiffening in one of the seats. Most eavesdropping is motivated by
quests for money and power, the same incentives behind the defense against it.
I propose a feature article for Wired about Murray's work, the ever-increasing demand for his
expertise, and the combination of technology, experience, and craft that goes into successful
surveillance detection. American businesses are catching on to (and catching up with) the
widespread electronic eavesdropping prevalent for years overseas, but that's not the only reason
for the call for Murray's services. Corporate lawyers fear that inattention to information security
can lead shareholders to cry negligence, and the cheapness and wireless capabilities of today's
eavesdropping technology make spying so simple.
Murray, a silver-haired and unpretentious man who keeps an inflated Spy vs. Spy toy in his
office in Oldwick, New Jersey, will let me accompany him as he goes through a client's facilities.
(A client in Princeton has agreed to my presence.) I can use that sweep as the framework for a
story that covers Murray's most memorable finds, the art and technology of detection, and the
vulnerability of businesses to spying from competitors, employees, and "extortionographers," or
blackmailers, who peddle incriminating and illegally acquired information for money.
Nobody knows how often electronic spying is attempted in business settings -- the successes
escape notice -- but cases frequently surface in the news. Just this week, an employee of
electronics manufacturer AMX Corporation pleaded guilty to eavesdropping on emails from
competitor Crestron Electronics, a crime that Crestron says cost it $10 million in lost business,
and a man was arrested in southern France for allegedly planting hidden cameras to steal
information from the Alinghi sailing team that holds the America's Cup. Electronic spying is
unquestionably on the rise.
6
JC/Sports Illustrated
B.J.,
I'm interested in writing a Bonus piece on Jeremy Tyler, the San Diego native who is skipping
his senior year of high school to play professionally in Israel. I've been in touch with Tyler and
with representatives of his team, Maccabi Haifa, and they've agreed to let me spend several days
with him in December. I'll be going to Israel through a travel grant from my school — it will
cover all costs of reporting. Below is a more formal pitch.
----Rated among the top prospects in his high school class, Jeremy Tyler was projected by scouts to
be a top-five pick when he entered the NBA draft in 2011. A 6-foot-11 man-child, Tyler
developed a reputation for both his polished skill set and his raw strength. This summer,
however, Tyler became famous for a different reason: his decision to forgo his senior year of
high school to accept a $140,000 contract with Maccabi Haifa of the Israeli Premier League.
With the NBA restricting players from being eligible for the draft until a year after their high
school class graduates, Tyler decided that his best path to the league went through Israel and the
Euroleague, not high school and college.
It’s a path similar to that taken by prodigious tennis players, gymnasts, and musicians, but in
basketball, the decision sparks controversy. The NBA instituted its age restriction in 2006 as a
way of limiting the number of players who enter the draft as recipients of bad advice, often
quickly flaming out of the league, if they make it at all, with no college education. The NCAA
benefits by admitting superstar-caliber talents into college basketball for one season apiece. The
NBA benefits by restricting the number of immature teenagers in the league, and by importing
rookies who have already developed name recognition as college stars. And as the thinking goes,
the athletes benefit by gaining life experience, education, and more on-court seasoning. But
Tyler’s advisers see things differently. They perceive a system in which the most elite teenage
players don’t benefit at all, risking career-threatening injury while universities profit from their
play.
Tyler isn’t the first player to buck this system. Last year, top prospect Brandon Jennings played
one season for an Italian club before being selected by the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of
June’s draft. But Jennings, a graduate of basketball factory Oak Hill Academy, had few options
after his SAT score was red-flagged, jeopardizing his admittance to the University of Arizona,
where he had committed to play. Tyler has no such limitations. A good student from a twoparent household in a nice San Diego neighborhood, Tyler had committed to the University of
Louisville, where would have played upon graduation from San Diego high. Instead, he will
enter a foreign system that allows players to turn pro in their mid-teens, focusing exclusively on
7
basketball, and debate continues as to whether his chosen path is good for him — or for the
future of the sport he plays.
I’ve spoken with Tyler and with media representatives from Maccabi Haifa, and they’ve agreed
to let me spend a week hanging out with Tyler in Israel. My travel will be completely covered by
a grant from the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I am a
student. I’ll also be talking with Reebok’s Sonny Vaccaro, who has advised many players
who’ve made the prep-to-pro jump (including Tyler) and others with a stake in the future of the
age limit debate. Tyler himself is unassuming about his role in systemic change. (Asked how the
transition has been, he says, “It’s a lot like home. Haifa is like San Diego, and Tel Aviv is like
L.A.”). So far he's played well, averaging about 11 points and 5 rebounds in the preseason. And
whether it’s his intention or not, Tyler threatens to disrupt the current system, forcing the NBA to
re-evaluate its limit on age.
8
JK/Outside
Fearless: What really happens when an elite skier loses his edge?
Two years ago, Olympic men’s downhill champion Antoine Deneriaz was at the top of his game.
His aggressive descents over a treacherous course at Turin had shut down the competition, which
included Hermann Maier and Daron Rahlves. It seemed like the start of an extraordinary World
Cup career.
In fact, it was almost the end. Not long after the Olympics, Deneriaz lost control during a race in
Sweden and crashed violently, sustaining a concussion and a badly bruised thigh. As race wipeouts go, the fall was serious but not extraordinary; the previous year, Deneriaz had fared worse,
severing most of the ligaments in his left knee on a jump – and still recovered to win gold at
Turin. Gilles Brenier, the French team coach, confidently predicted a strong coming season.
Instead, the team’s star downhiller faltered. Although Deneriaz’s injuries healed quickly, he
remained anxious, unable to shake vivid memories of the crash. The low point came in
December, shortly after World Cup champion Aksel Svindal crashed badly on a training run in
Vail. Racing the same course a few days later, Deneriaz performed poorly, ultimately placing
82nd. He announced his retirement hours later. “Something was broken that day in Sweden,”
Gilles Brenier observed sadly. “Something from which Antoine could not recover.”
What’s remarkable about the case of Antoine Deneriaz is not just that he lost his nerve, but how
unexpectedly it happened. Downhill racers can seem almost eerie in their resiliency. Hermann
Maier famously came back to win two gold medals in Nagano just days after a 70-mph wreck
that seemed destined to end his career. After a horrifying collision shattered her femur, Picabo
Street watched videos of her own crash obsessively, and then claimed to forget about it. Like
Maier and Street, Deneriaz was a top competitor for years, untroubled by collisions and
seemingly fearless. So what happened to him this time?
There’s a complicated story in the answer to this question. For every athlete that returns to
winning form after a crash, there are dozens who never quite shake their demons. The experience
is so common that Jesse Hunt, the USOC’s Alpine director, has a term for it -- “The Fear” -- and
it afflicts elite gymnasts, cyclists, and NASCAR drivers as readily as skiers. What makes
Deneriaz unusual is the degree to which he has been open about his psychological battle. Most
racers who lose their nerve -- and the downhill circuit is full of them -- simply vanish.
I’d like to take a look at this war on terror from the inside. Besides talking with Deneriaz, Street,
and others, I have the option of visiting with Jonny Law, the freeskier who nearly died last year
after miscalculating the steepness of an escape ridge on an unstable slope in Alaska’s Chugach
9
mountains. Intent on returning to the sport, Law has begun working with a sports psychologist in
Canada who specializes in traumatic recovery.
US Alpine coach Phil McNichol has also given me permission to tag along to a race with Dane
Spencer, the 2002 Olympic slalom prodigy who narrowly escaped quadriplegia after breaking his
back in a horrendous wipeout in 2006. Spencer is back on the circuit this year, but the jury is still
out on whether he can become the fearless fast-course skier he once was. I’ve talked with
Spencer, and he’s a candid guy; hanging out with him in the “no fear” clubhouse that defines
World Cup racing would be a stark look at what he faces when he steps in the gate.
There’s plenty of interesting stuff to touch on here, including what experts say makes one crash
more mentally scarring than another (it’s not just the extent of the injury), the prospect that some
of us are naturally more vulnerable to “athletic PTSD,” and experimental drugs that supposedly
enhance the circuits that extinguish traumatic memories. In the end, though, this remains a story
about falling down and getting back up: something any athlete (and indeed, any one of us) can
relate to.
10
OT/Wired Magazine
The other day, I was flipping through a recent paper in the journal Science about the role that
animals play in moving seeds around the forests of Spain. The report involved some fancy
number-crunching of thousands of data points from Spain's forestry department. But what really
caught my eye was the affiliation of one of the authors: Microsoft Research.
It turns out that six full-time ecologists work inside a salmon-colored office building at
Microsoft's offices in Cambridge, UK. Not all of them are just plugging away on computers.
Some are actually getting their boots dirty setting up sensor networks on remote islands or
collecting data in the Mexican cloud forest. They call themselves computational ecologists, and
they believe that the methods and the tools they are developing will help scientists get a handle
on environmental problems ranging from the spread of invasive species to global warming.
Drew Purves, the confident, red-headed ecologist who published that paper in Science, has just
had his food web model incorporated into the Hadley Climate Model. Rich Williams, the head of
the group, spent ten years as a programmer before getting hooked on ecology. He's just
published a paper on the eating habits of trilobites living 500 million years ago. Another
Microsoft scientist is writing a program to simulate plant growth and another is building a
network to track the breeding habits of birds on Skomer Island in Wales using RFID tags and
GPS sensors.
While the philosophy of any corporate research lab is to foster innovation outside the product
development cycle, it still seems a bit strange that Microsoft would be entering the realm of field
ecology. Is it just the prestige factor or will they ever be able to monetize these tools? This
summer, I'd like to visit Cambridge, join the team on their ornithology trip to Skomer Island, and
find out how Microsoft is saving the environment.
11
JA/WIRED
Six weeks after the FBI’s announcement that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a 62-year-old bioweapons scientist
at Ft. Detrick, was responsible for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, the case has become mired in
national speculation – a bubble of claims and lingering doubts about the man whose spore-dusted
envelopes fatally poisoned five people, forced the closure of the US Senate, and ultimately led to
a seven-year, $50 million criminal investigation. The key figure in this confusion is the
enigmatic Dr. Ivins: a midwestern chemist and Roman Catholic who played the keyboard weekly
at his church for almost two decades, took pleasure in sophomoric practical jokes (his Ft. Detrick
office included a remote-controlled machine that made fart sounds), and raised two children in a
modest white house across the street from his workplace of 28 years, the U.S. Army Medical
Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Colleagues insist that Ivins was a gentle but fragile character whose mental breakdown
and suicide were driven by the FBI’s scrutiny. But as the government’s case has been made
public, a different portrait has emerged. At work, Ivins would gobble down powdered milk, and
bring foul-smelling homemade lunches layered in jars. Sometimes he abruptly dropped to the
floor to juggle balls while lying on his back. At night, he’d go home, log onto the Internet as
[email protected] or [email protected], and become a troll: writing letters to
the editor, and sending manic emails to friends or himself about the case. One of his favorite
targets was the page for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. He frequently edited KKG’s
Wikipedia page under the name Jimmy Flathead, and threatened posters who removed his
additions. “Delete this again and I will add more negative information to this site or reveal more
secrets,” he wrote. In July, Ivins wrote that his psychiatrist believed that he had symptoms that
"may not be those of depression or bipolar disorder” but that of “a paranoid personality
disorder."
Although the basics of Ivins’ life have been covered -- the major papers and
newsweeklies have all done 1500-word biographies -- nobody has yet dug in to write a detailed
profile of the man behind the nation’s most sophisticated criminal attack, and his mystifyingly
unaddressed psychological collapse. I’d like to try. With the recent unsealing of evidence by the
Justice Department, a remarkable fund of Ivins’ private documents are now public: hundreds of
e-mails, chat room postings, and psychiatric reports. Many of the people who were in closest
contact with Ivins are also on record, including the counselor who oversaw Ivins’ treatment, and
several members of Ivins’ family. (Thomas Ivins, the scientist’s estranged older brother, testified
to a strange childhood with a mother who never let her youngest son stray far.) Ivins’ wife has
continued to defend her husband – supporting Congressional hearings to prove that Ivins was
innocent.
The details of Ivins’ life are far from insignificant. Responsible for inciting a terrorist
panic and nationwide manhunt, Ivins is infamous and yet his life remains, in many respects,
puzzlingly opaque. Even while losing his mind, Ivins continued to work diligently at
USAMRIID, conducting complicated research that enabled him to keep his security clearance.
He also played an apparently successful cat-and-mouse game with the FBI, leaking the name of
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“suspects” in his own department, and attempting to deflect suspicion with fake evidence. (At
one point he sent himself an email headlined, “Finally! I know Who mailed the anthrax!”)
At the very least, an investigation of Ivins’ life would result in an in-depth portrait that nobody
else has done. With luck, it could also reveal what hasn’t so far been understood: how a man in
delusion could reach the highest levels of bioweapons research, commit a highly visible crime,
and seemingly go undetected by either the coworkers or the federal agents in his company.
Barring the possibility that this was an elaborate strategy by the FBI to keep Ivins under
observation, it’s hard not to wonder what institutional dysfunction at USAMRIID – a deeply
paranoid, maximum-security laboratory – allowed Ivins to thrive unchecked.
JK/NYTM
Sheila,
The story I’m proposing is about the push by some psychologists to identify "fledgling
psychopaths": children as young as five who have psychopathic tendencies. This is based on
mounting evidence that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition – and one
that might respond to treatment. Ideally, the hope would be to intervene early, with therapies that
could prevent a pre-psychopathic kid from becoming a jailed adolescent, and a criminal adult.
The problem, of course, is the stigma of branding a young kid a psychopath. As one researcher
put it, "Autism you get sympathy for. But no one will be sympathetic to a cold-blooded 10-yearold."
Still, it’s possible that denying the condition may be worse. Mark Dadds, a psychologist at the
University of New South Wales who studies antisocial behavior in children, believes that unlike
adult psychopaths, who are famously untreatable, "pre-psychopathic" children might be able to
improve with therapies that target their neurological deficits – including the most damaging, the
absence of empathy.
Still, even the most ardent advocates admit that the prospect for improvement is slim. It's also the
fragile straw that separates diagnosis from determinism: a reason to treat psychopathic children
rather than jail them. “As the nuns used to say, ‘Get them young enough and they can change,’”
Dadds says. “You have to hope that’s true. Otherwise, what are we stuck with? These monsters.”
Story-wise, my plan is to explore this issue by focusing on one kid in particular. For the past two
years, I’ve been in touch with Dr. Daniel Waschbusch at Florida International University, who is
one of the few psychologists attempting to conduct intervention studies on pre-psychopathic
kids. Waschbusch’s current study includes a nine-year-old boy, James, who has tested high for
“callous-unemotional” traits: the extreme manipulativeness, cold anger, and lack of remorse that
are hallmarks of psychopathic teens. James is extremely bright but vicious, with what appear to
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be uncannily calculated moments of sweetness. As his mother, Jennifer, put it: “James will either
grow up to be a serial killer, or a Nobel Prize winner. He has the capacity to be either.”
I’ve spoken with Jennifer, and she’s willing to let me spend time with James, both during and
outside the study. Narratively, the heart of the piece would be James: beginning with his descent,
at age 3, into disturbingly alien behaviors, and from there to his mother’s elaborate attempts to
rescue him. Conceptually, the main thread in the piece would be the controversial prospect of
labeling a 9-year-old a psychopath, but the story would also explore the deep complexity of child
mental health diagnoses. At various times in his short life, James has been diagnosed with
Oppositional-Defiant Disorder, ADHD, OCD, sensory integration disorder, and something called
"first child syndrome" – evidence of just how widely kids’ behaviors can be made correspond to
adult psychiatric disorders. One risk of this inexactitude is overdiagnosis – normally petulant 5year-olds getting branded as oppositional – but for parents of truly disturbed children, the lack
of reliable diagnosis and treatment is nightmarish. (And can play out like the mental health
version of a rare immune disorder: desperate for a cure, you take your kid to a dozen doctors, but
they all have different theories – most of which turn out to be wrong, or at best only part of the
puzzle.)
Because Waschbusch’s study ends in mid-August, we’d want to move quickly on reporting this.
I could make a 3-day trip to Florida the week of July 25th or Aug 2, if Waschbusch and the
family agree. If that sounds good, let me know and I’ll get to work on making the arrangements.
14
BONUS:
ORIGINAL PITCH by JD – NOT ACCEPTED.
Deep Sea Cowboys:
The Adrenalized World of Maritime Salvage
Outside Magazine
2002
I first met salvage master Dan Schwall on a sinking ship. The boyish 39-year old New Yorker
was chewing Skoal on the deck of a massive 650-foot World War Two era barge that had broken
loose from its moorings at Pier 70 in San Francisco. The Port Authorities called Schwall, and,
like the calvary, he came swooping in from Miami on the first flight he could catch. By the time
a crane lifted me onto the deck, Schwall had lassoed the ship with the help of four tugboats,
dragged it back to the pier and tied it up again. The only problem was, it was sinking.
“You better put this on,” Schwall said, handing me a hard hat. “This ship’s going down.”
Schwall’s five-man team gathered round us. There was not a life jacket in sight. But for Schwall
and Titan Maritime Salvage - the company these guys work for - this was an easy job. Among
the 6 major international salvage companies, Titan is the only one whose sole business is
salvage. The other companies have diversified into tugboat operation and port management.
Titan doesn’t own any ships or care two bits about how ports are run – all they want to do is save
troubled ships.
Schwall’s second in command, salvage supervisor Roy Dodger, a one-time Army special forces
solider in Vietnam, derisively spit a wad of tobacco juice onto the barge’s rusted deck. He had
been a deep-sea salvage diver for 30 years, regularly diving to wrecks below 500 feet before he
failed his physical two years ago at age 56. Now he stayed topside, barking foul-mouthed orders
and grinning mischievously, seemingly unconcerned with the problem at hand.
“Hell, we’re winning the battle on bulkhead 4,” he said, adjusting the cell phone ear-bud he kept
in his ear from dawn till dusk – a reminder of his days in the Special Forces. The ship had 12
bulkheads. The first three were completely flooded. The battle line was drawn at 4. “This ain’t
nothing like the salvage we did in Algeria last year,” Roy continued. “All night long we’d be
under AK-47 fire. And when we were working the Marimar in Eretria, the Ethiopians bombed
the port.”
From where I was standing, I could see massive, torn metal holes in the barge’s side. Water was
flooding in. The deck was already tilted. Schwall took another plug of tobacco from his Skoal
tin. This is a man who has pumped 1,380 tons of flammable butadiene off a modified oil tanker in
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50-knot winds. The Spanish government has hired him to consult on the recent sinking of the
Prestige off the coast of Spain. If bulkheads one, two and three are flooded, so what?
Being calm in a crisis is part of the job description of a salvage master. Another part is being
able to pack your life into a bag in 15 minutes and leave the country for an undetermined period
of time. When Schwall is at home in Miami, his wife knows that the sound of his pager going off
in the middle of the night is the sound of maritime disaster somewhere in the world. It means
he’ll be gone within half an hour.
“Every day at Titan, somebody gets that page and races off,” Schwall says. “We have a guy on
our team whose specific job is to get our team to the site of the accident. He can find us any kind
of aircraft, anywhere in the world. Helicopters, jets, single-prop planes, jet boats, you name it:
he does whatever it takes to get us to the site as fast as is humanly possible.”
Titan regularly charters Lear jets and crams the luxurious interiors with salvage equipment,
leaving just enough room for Schwall and a few members of an advance salvage crew. And when
they land in foreign countries, they walk right through customs and immigration. “No one even
asks us our name,” says master diver Nigel Parr, a 6-year Titan veteran. “There’s so much
money riding on what we do, and time is so critical – we’re operating on an entirely different
level. Only combat is a more demanding line of work than salvage.”
About 3 hours ago, Schwall called to tell me that there was an emergency distress from a ship in
Southern Brazil. He and another Titan salvage master have been put on alert. He said that it
might be possible for me to follow the Titan team down for the salvage operation. The approval
would come within the next three days.
I have done both Lexis-Nexis and Web searches for coverage of the salvage business in
newspapers and magazines. I’m amazed with what little I’ve found. There has been coverage of
the salvage of the Kursk and the Japanese fishing trawler hit by a U.S. submarine but both of
those were already sunk. What I’m proposing is an article that documents a salvage master’s
attempt to keep a floundering ship afloat. It would document how these deep-sea cowboys work
and the Hollywood-esque A-Teams they assemble to get the job done.
Sincerely, JD
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REVISED PITCH by JD – ACCEPTED.
Deep Sea Cowboys
On July 23, 2006, the 55,000-ton Cougar Ace transport ship was hit by a rogue wave and suddenly rolled
80 degrees, hurling its 23 crew members against the ship’s metal walls. A mate’s leg snapped on impact
and his screaming blended with the groaning coming out of the cargo hold, which contained 4,812
Mazdas worth $75 million. The 634 foot long ship was now floating precariously on its side 230 miles
south of the Aleutian Islands, its massive propellers spinning uselessly in the air. Captain Nyi Nyi Tun
asked for a damage report and was told the ship was was taking on water. The crew prepared to abandon
ship.
Phil Reed was asleep in Florida when the phone rang a few hours later. A Lear jet was on standby
waiting to fly him to Alaska. Reed, a 47-year-old software geek, was a partner in a new company named
Titan Salvage that had departed from the traditional use of huge tugs and salvage cranes and built a
reputation for using software and brains to keep ships afloat. The company was fast and nimble—they
used private jets and portable pumps—and had impressed underwriters in London. It was time to prove
their mettle and save $75 million worth of Mazdas.
Reed’s approach was straightforward: Don’t fight the physics of water; use it to your advantage.
Over the last 10 years, he had jetted onto the decks of dozens of foundering ships clutching his beat-up
laptop and proceeded to build 3D models of the ship on the fly. Then he’d use the design software to
simulate how the ship would be affected by adding or subtracting ballast water in various compartments
throughout the vessel. He’d formulate a sort of water ballet—filling and pumping tanks in a specified
sequence—and hand the plan to one of Titan’s salvage masters, who’d put it into action. Time after time,
the ships flipped upright and floated freely again.
The rescues relied on a tight-knit group of extreme divers, mechanics, and grizzled salvage masters
who, together with Reed, had embarked on missions around the world at a moment’s notice. They were
often met at airports by plain-clothes government agents who jogged them through passport control
without stopping and spirited them onto fast boats or helicopters.
But with the Cougar Ace, Reed was faced with a dilemma. His wife and two kids had planned a
family vacation in Chicago—it had been on the calendar for nine months and his wife told him it was a
non-negotiable vacation. She won the argument and Reed scrambled Marty Johnson, a Seattle-based
naval architect who had studied Reed’s method.
The salvage crew arrived on a tug and clambered aboard the sideways ship, its massive props floating
free in the air and dwarfing the tug. Johnson climbed up the side to survey the deck, lost his footing and
fell 80 feet onto the ship’s metal railing. He died later that day in the floating surgery center of a Coast
Guard cutter. While the team mourned out at sea, Reed got on a plane in Chicago and headed west to
continue the battle.
The story I propose will document Titan’s effort to save the Cougar Ace —from the rogue wave, through
Marty’s death and to the final successful righting with no damage to the cargo. Interspersed, we will flash
back to other significant salvage operations that allowed the Titan team to develop their skills and
teamwork. The story will span the globe, from Alaska to Malaysia, and depict this unusual band of deep
sea cowboys.
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