Omnivoracious

The Language of Science Is Language: Lee Smolin and "Time Reborn"

All things originate from one another,
and vanish into one another
according to necessity...
in conformity with the order of time.
   -- Anaximander, On Nature

My second favorite book is called The Life of the Cosmos. Originally published in 1997, it details physicist Lee Smolin's ideas about cosmological natural selection, a mind-expanding intellectual panorama depicting the universe itself as a manifestation of deep laws that trigger self-organization at literally all scales. Beyond physics' usual fundamental forces and constants, Smolin's natural laws suggest that even the cosmos itself emerges from -- and resembles, though not exactly-- its predecessors.

Inspiring for reasons that are as poetic as they are scientific, Smolin's thinking bridges physics, biology, and even philosophy. With his latest book, Time Reborn (hardcover | Kindle edition), Smolin suggests a radical reconception of the nature of time. With his trademark sincere and curious reverence for nature, Smolin kindly entertained a few questions for Omnivoracious readers.

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How do you think about conveying your ideas to readers not instinctively drawn to science?
Everyone is interested in the question of what time is because how you think about time affects everything we think about our own lives. Are our futures determined already? Are our experiences of willing, choosing, imagining, and inventing all illusions because the future is already written? Or are they true and real and in fact deep hints as to the nature of reality? Is it already fixed what kind of life my child will have or how bad global warming will be, or does what we choose to do really matter? These are the questions my book addresses, and I offer a hopeful answer explained in a way that all can understand.

A Life on the Edge: An Interview with Jim Whittaker

Nobody has a better business card than Jim Whittaker.

The business side is low-key: A simple, stylized mountain logo, his name, and the words “Adventurer, Author, Speaker.” But turn it over and you'll find a picture of Whittaker--or "Big Jim," as he was known then and ever since--standing astride the summit of the tallest mountain on the planet, ice axe raised over his head in what must have been a heady mix of triumph, joy, and disbelief (relief would have to wait until after the descent). He was--is--the first American to accomplish the feat, and either the 10th or 11th overall, depending on how you're counting. Nawang Gombu, who took that picture, was Whittaker's climbing partner that day--May 1, 1963, 50 years ago tomorrow--and as Big Jim tells it, they chose to summit as a team, together.

Whittaker's and Gombu's achievement wasn't the only highlight of the expedition. Three weeks later, on another spine of Everest’s three-sided pyramid, Thomas Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld drove a new route up the perilous West Ridge, over the summit, and down Whittaker's South Col route, pausing overnight to bivouac at 28 thousand feet. It was the first traverse of an eight-thousand meter peak, but they had no choice—their route up provided no way back down. As an incredible feat of daring and perserverance, mountaineers consider it to be one of the greatest accomplishments in Everest (and climbing) history. Even a half-century later, it has been rarely repeated.

May 1, 1963, was a life-changing moment for Whittaker: He suddenly found himself befriended by the Kennedys--vacationing with the family and hosting them in his own home--and later ran RFK’s campaign in Washington State; he became CEO of REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated--he was previously its first full-time employee); he led two expeditions to K2, the second of which put the first Americans atop the world’s second-highest peak; and he returned to Everest in 1990 to lead a team comprised of Cold War antagonists to the top. And those are just the highlights.

But the unassuming kid from West Seattle stayed the same. He simply feels amazed at his own fortune: lucky.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary, Mountaineers Books has published extraordinary new editions of Whittaker’s autobiography, A Life on the Edge, and Hornbein’s account of his and Unsoeld’s epic climb, Everest: The West Ridge.  Both are oversized hardcovers, filled with incredible images (many by Whittaker’s wife, Dianne Roberts, who photographed their K2 expeditions and has an amazing business card of her own), with new forewords by climber/authors Ed Viesturs and Jon Krakauer. These are essential books for mountaineers, armchair or otherwise.

When you look at pictures of these men, they are almost always smiling (especially Unsoeld), even as some of them are ported down mountains without so many of the toes they started up with. Certainly there are grittier images available, and maybe those are just the pictures they selected for the books, but I'd like to think not. When asked why he was so determined to climb Everest, British climber George Mallory famously said, "Because it's there." Whittaker, Tom Hornbein, and the rest of the 1963 expedition didn't climb the mountain because it was there; they climbed it because they were here, present on what Big Jim calls “this magical planet.” They were living with purpose, and they knew it. Jim and Dianne still are.

Though he’s been busy with media and events to mark the date, Jim and Dianne made time to stop by the Brave Horse Tavern in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood for a chat about Everest, the Kennedys, and more. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

(Click here to learn more about Everest, K2, and other classics of mountaineering—many of which are published by Mountaineers books--and visit Jim Whittaker’s web site for more information, including additional photographs from his personal collection. )

Jon Foro: You were specifically picked for the Everest team due to your Mt. Rainier experience. Did that prepare you the way you thought it might?

Jim Whittaker: I guided on Rainier through college, for three summers, and I climbed a lot, and I was on the ski patrol. So I'd done a lot of different things in the outdoors. (On McKinley, we had an accident--one of our team got a broken ankle and it took us a while to get down.  I meant to ask Norman [Dyhrenfurth, the expedition leader] whether that was what really drew his attention, because it was on nation-wide news that we were stranded on the summit of Mt. McKinley.)

Yeah, it did, it did. The thing is, the Northwest has got the glaciers. The East Coast, The middle states, even the Rockies don't have the glaciers. But here, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, they've got snow and ice--everything that Mount Everest has except that extra fourteen thousand feet. We have the crevasses, the seracs, we've got the weather--incredibly bad weather could hit.... So it was a great training ground. So I went over fairly confident--maybe overconfident--that we could knock off the mountain.

"The Orphan Master's Son" and More Pulitzer Prize Winners

After 2012's odd omission of a Fiction winner, this year's Pulitzer Prizes delivered on all fronts: Nonfiction to Gilbert King for Devil in the Grove, History to Fredrik Logevall for Embers of War, Biography to Tom Reiss for The Black Count, Poetry to Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap, Drama to Ayad Akhtar for Disgraced--and Fiction honors to Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master's Son, described by the judges as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."

In a piece here on why we'd picked Johnson's novel as our spotlight for the Best Book of the Month (over, I might add, John Green's phenomenal Fault in Our Stars) when it was released in January of last year, I shared how our team's obsession with this book in December 2011 took a strange turn when we heard that Kim Jon-il had died. The outpouring of news about and propaganda from North Korea felt like an alarming intrusion into reality of the fictional world we'd been compulsively descending into each night, a searing reminder "that the surreal, brutal universe Johnson evokes continues to unfold just across the Pacific."

As North Korea's new leader incites increasingly nervous debates about his true threat level, Johnson's novel feels all the more relevant and haunting. I keep finding myself drawn to Internet accounts from escapees and satellite images of the camps where a (roughly) estimated 3.5 million have so far been killed. No other modern nation is a more brutally constructed Orwellian fiction than the DPRK, and it's easy to see how Johnson became obsessed with questions about how it must be to live within this gulag of the mind. He wrote about this experience for Amazon Books:

I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.

If you want to understand North Koreans--and how they have been conditioned to think about Americans--start with The Orphan Master's Son.

See new and past Pultizer Prize winners at Amazon Books.

Stage and Page: The Relationship Between TED Talks and Authors

TED Talks -- a series of recorded lectures in which industry leaders in technology, entertainment, and design are invited to present forward-thinking ideas -- are a relatively new phenomenon for the nonprofit organization TED. To put this into perspective, the first TED conference, held in 1984, included Sony and Lucasfilm; they presented the CD and 3D graphics respectively. Two decades later, TED started posting the talks online, and now they seem to be everywhere.

Often a presenter's biography will mention a book he or she has authored, and sometimes the speaker is even an author by trade. In fact, currently among the top 20 TED Talks (determined by views) are Bonk and Gulp author Mary Roach (No. 19) and Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert (No. 13).

Some other author TED vets you may recognize include Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, McSweeney's founder and editor Dave Eggers, food and agriculture expert Michael Pollan, The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan, and The Fault in Our Stars author John Green.

But there was a moment, a week or so ago, when something truly new happened: our two bestselling books were Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. Each was the debut book by a TEDTalker-turned-author who used her presentation as the basis of her book. Is it a new trend? Is there such a thing as a "TED effect" now?

It's too soon to tell, but we're keeping our eyes open. Meanwhile, TED has teamed up with Kindle Singles to publish shorter nonfiction (around 20,000 words) pieces by many TED Talks participants. You can find them here.

Which of your favorite authors would you want to see give a TED Talk? Which TED Talks presentations would you like to read more about in a book? Comment below.

Some Things You Might Not Know About Sheryl Sandberg...But Lucky Us, We Got the Chance to Ask

By any measure, Sheryl Sandberg is a big success. Smart, rich, powerful, the 43-year-old COO of Facebook, wife, mother-of-two "has it all," as they used to say. But Sandberg doesn't take her successes for granted -- hell, no! She worked hard for them -- and she's intent on helping other women learn to lead.

Her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is out March 12, and has already garnered lots of passionate opinions. We chose her book as one of the Best of the Month and chatted with her a week or so before it went on sale.

Some things we learned:

Sandberg considers Lean In (the book) and Lean In (the foundation the book launches), to be unisex and ageless. Men and women need to work together to change the culture, she says. "I think this is everyone's issue," she says. She then tells me that even her 70-something mother was inspired by it -- and is now planning to have a Bat Mitzvah, an opportunity not available to her when she was 13.

She doesn't seem particularly surprised by the flack she's gotten in some corners of the press for "blaming" women instead of corporations and government. "I always knew this topic would incite strong debate. It's about us, about our passions."

Some critics also suggest Sandberg's opinions are mere clones of last century's feminism -- which, ironically, Sandberg admits to having undervalued at the time. "Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts."

Even this very privileged, super successful woman -- she has two Harvard degrees and has worked in the White House -- has self doubt. When I ask her how she got over the typical fears she elucidates in the book, she says, "The simple answer is I'm not sure I have. Like many women, I have a complicated relationship with leadership, with the word 'power.'"

Also, to those who think Sandberg must be "tough," she explains that she has, on occasion cried in the office and that she has come to understand that the occasional personal sharing can be conducive to a good working relationship. Example: Sandberg first turned down a job with her former professor, Larry Summers, for the most personal of reasons -- she wanted to get away from DC, where her ex-husband was living -- and declares that particular choice to have been the "best thing to do."

Real cultural change doesn't happen overnight -- "Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized," she writes -- but Sandberg evokes the night Obama was first elected President as an indicator of what can happen in just one generation. "I was standing behind my couch with my arms around my sister, crying [and watching the returns] and we said, 'You know what's the best thing about this?'" Answer: Her kids -- then one and three years old -- would grow up never knowing a time when it was unusual or special to have an African American president. So maybe the generation being born now will grow up free of gender stereotypes.

Two of the strongest chapters in the book -- the ones that resonated in our offices, which employ many brilliant women in the early stages of their careers -- are 1) Don't Leave Before You Leave (i.e. Don't be like the woman Sandberg cites who discusses her child-rearing plans with an employer when she was not only not pregnant... "but she didn't even have a boyfriend.") And 2) Are You My Mentor? (which takes its name from the popular children's book about ducklings: Are You My Mother?). Women need mentors, sure, but those mentors have to be earned, the relationship has to grow organically, and -- guess what? -- a woman is even allowed to have a male mentor.

She doesn't seem to care how she will be remembered. When I ask her what search terms on Google (her former employer) would bring up her name, she pauses. "I don't know," she says. I suggest "feminist leader," or "visionary," or "troublemaker" and she doesn't bite. "You know, it really doesn't matter," she says. "This is not about me. What matters is that we're having the conversation."

Announcing the Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2013

Last May, in his Best of the Month review for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, our own Neal Thompson said author Ben Fountain was "a writer worth every accolade about to come his way," and appears that that prediction has come true. In addition to being a finalist in the National Book Awards, last night Fountain took home the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards for Fiction.

Among the other big winners were Andrew Solomon, who won the Nonfiction category for Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Robert A. Caro in the Biography category for The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and D.A. Powell for his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.

Check out all the winners, as well as all the finalists.

Sara Says: Scientology, Again? How the Two Newest Books Stack Up

Every couple of years, like clockwork, the world seems to come around to an interest in books about Scientology -- the controversial religion started by a minor science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard in the '50s. For example: Blown for Good - Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (2010), My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist (2009), and Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (2011), just to name a few.

2013 is no exception: Lawrence Wright's Going Clear, out a month, is getting great reviews and is, at the time of this writing, No. 34 on our Bestsellers List with 25 days in the Top 100. This week, Jenna Miscavige Hill's Beyond Belief (a great title!) appears; I predict it too will sell well.

Why the everlasting fascination with Scientology, which may or may not have tens of thousands of members (the numbers, like most for this group, vary widely)? "I'm just not that interested in it," one noted journalist recently told me. "It's really very small." And yet, like the proverbial train wreck, a good book about the cult-or-religion (you decide) is hard to resist. Here's a partial list of the way the two newest entries in the category compare.

 

CELEBRITY FOCUS

Going Clear: While the subtitle of Wright's book makes reference to Hollywood's involvement with the Church, his main Hollywood contact seems to be Paul Haggis (screenwriter for such films as "Million Dollar Baby" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" and director of such short-lived TV series as "Family Law" and "The Black Donnellys"). He only nods at information about the more famous members, Tom Cruise and Travolta

Beyond Belief: Hill's is much more personal story. She was essentially born Scientologist; her uncle David Miscavige is the sect's leader and her parents were, for a time, high up in the organization. She focuses, therefore, more on regular people, though there are some interesting passages about how the Church treats celebrities: Lisa Marie Presley in particular.

OBJECTIVITY

Going Clear: While it is clear that Wright has a particular point of view about Scientology, he approaches the topic journalistically and lets other people (Haggis, predominantely) reveal information. He also adds a lot of history and biographical information about L. Ron Hubbard, which can make this book feel a bit padded.

Beyond Belief: Jenna Miscavige Hill is no journalist, and she knew the history of Scientology from the inside. Only after she left the main Church and went to Australia did she gain some perspective. "I had been under the impression that everyone loved L. Ron Hubbard," she writes, "and that Scientology was flourishing and expanding all over the world. However, it seemed like most people in Australia did not even know what it was, and those who did often were skeptical."

NEWS

Going Clear: Wright's book is exhaustively researched and gives a new reader a very good overview of the religion, although it never completely makes clear what the tenets of the Church are. (Or perhaps they're so muddled as to be unexplainable.)

Beyond Belief: Hill is very specific about Scientology practices. Apparently, all powerful people senior to her are addressed as "Mr," regardless of their gender. She also describes her punishments -– usually for "misunderstood words," a seemingly weird psychosemantic education all young Scientologists must endure; scrubbing bathrooms for days at a time was not unusual. She also reveals that "an out 2d is an unacceptable relationship, like the one that got her once-powerful mother declared an SP (Suppressed Person), the Scientology equivalent of excommunication.

FEAR FACTOR

Going Clear: Writing about scientology is risky business, as every writer (including this one) knows, and Wright is extra careful to show his methods –- one of the strongest scenes in the book is a how-I-got-the-story passage about meeting with the Church's spokespeople to check facts. One of the most chilling moments comes when Wright wonders aloud to Paul Haggis as to his future, now that he has spoken out. Haggis replies, in essence, that he wouldn't be surprised to be caught up a few years from now in some sort of scandal that doesn't appear to involve Scientology.

Beyond Belief: While she writes perhaps in more detail than even the most curious care to know about the punishments and threats made to her and her fellow renegade husband, Dallas Hill, the author seems strangely calm about her final decision to leave the Church. And how Byzantine that departure was; even while the Church threatened to punish the Hills by declaring them SPs (Suppressed Persons) and trying to extract payments for behavioral "violations," Hill spent weeks and months making her decision. Today, she's totally estranged from Scientology, unabashedly and seemingly fearlessly declaring the Church "a dangerous organization whose beliefs allow it to ... violate basic human rights."

Sam Sheridan Gives Survival Tips for Characters in Disaster Movies

How do you prepare for the end of the world? In his terrific new book The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse, Sam Sheridan seeks to answer that question by acquiring survival skills from experts all over the world, from Olympic weight lifters to car thieves.

Today, Sheridan looks at several famous scenes from disaster films and tells us what the characters could have done to up their chances of survival in the face of catastrophe.

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War of the Worlds

In Zombieland, the protagonist talks about “cardio” being a rule, but he’s not really talking about a long slow jog, he’s talking about sprinting. War of the Worlds has a great example of the need to be in shape to sprint. Here, Tom Cruise is sprinting for his life. So definitely, you need to be in shape to run sprints.

As the tripod rises up, the crowd is “milling,” standing around watching. Amanda Ripley writes wonderfully about this phenomenon in her book The Unthinkable. Who you “mill” with can have a huge effect on your survival.

As the tripod appears, it’s a good time to start thinking about cover. You could watch the tripod rise up from the corner of a building. Take a look around, and think If this goes bad, where do I go? Where am I sprinting to? But hey, I get it, you’re shocked. It’s an alien, this is a shocking event. I learned to do this when I was a firefighter working around helicopters. Helicopters are very dangerous and things can go wrong, so you would always want a plan—if the wind pushes the chopper this way, I’m diving behind those boulders.

Now the tripod starts shooting: OKAY time to go! Instead of just running straight down the street, Tom Cruise should definitely be looking to get off, get to the side, use cover. Cover doesn’t have to mean that it can block the lasers—it can just block the ability of the thing to see you. Eventually, Tom Cruise does just that. He finds cover, darting through a store. He hides behind a building and watches the tripod stroll past.

Be the Super Bowl Party MVP

Attention sports fans. As you know, Super Bowl Sunday is Feb. 3. Whether you're throwing a party or just attending one, you know there is only one competition that comes close to the one that will be on the screen. No, it's not who can eat the most hot wings in 2 minutes or who wins rock-scissors-paper for the inevitable half-time beer run. It's who has managed to cram the most otherwise meaningless information into their noggin. Of course!

You can never know too much obscure trivia in situations like these. And we've got you covered with a few handy books guaranteed to help you hold your own in stat-rattling conversations.

Self-described as "the ultimate reference to the ultimate game," The Ultimate Super Bowl Book: A Complete Reference to the Stats, Stars, and Stories Behind Football's Biggest Game -- and Why the Best Team Won leaves little room to misinterpret its content. Explore the games themselves with analysis and play-by-plays and learn about the star players and coaches for each Super Bowl.

 

 

Who currently holds what record? Who broke which record when? Study up on NFL records and stats with NFL Record & Fact Book 2012: The Official National Football League Record and Fact Book. Updated annually, it's considered essential reading for die-hard football fans.

 

 

 

You'll blow your fellow fans' minds when you're able to offer insights that cross-reference baseball, basketball and more. Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won is co-written by a behavioral economist and a Sports Illustrated writer. You'll have your (forgive the off-sport pun) bases covered with this one.

Get to Know the 2012 TIME Person of the Year

This morning, TIME revealed its Person of the Year for 2012, and the winner is... President Barack Obama. As the TIME staff explains on the website:

We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Barack Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America. In 2012, he found and forged a new majority, turned weakness into opportunity and sought, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union.

Congratulations to President Obama, who was contending with 8 other "short-list" candidates, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

If you're interested in learning more about President Obama, here are seven books to get you started: