Thanks to the Millennium Art Academy High School in the Bronx for inviting me to speak at the Career Day event on Wednesday. My co=presenter Kathleen Cushman spoke about being a writer. Thanks very much to my old friends and new friends of friends who donated magazines to be distributed to the students attending the session: Bob Love of The Week; Belinda Luscombe of Time; Jess Cagle of Entertainment Weekly; Matt DeMazza and Ken Derry of Yankees Magazine; Ryan D’Agostino and Lauren Drucker of Hearst magazines; and Frank Rich and Lauren Starke of New York magazine.

The most discouraging story of the work is a report in The Economist of the progress scientists have made in using machines to read minds. According to a report in the Public Library of Science, scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that by taping electrodes to the scalp, a volunteer can pilot a virtual helicopter through a virtual three-dimensional sky, merely by thinking. Additionally, an article in Current Biology details how researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich have made progress in using machines to read dreams. Finally, as reported in Current Biology, scientists at Berkeley detail how they have been able to actually read what is going through a person’s head.

No kidding: the had volunteers sit in fMRI machines while watching film trailers, and recorded images off the visual cortex, and then looked for correlations between those images and the trailers. They then fed 5000 hours of clips from YouTube into the computer, and asked it to predict what the matching fMRI pattern would look like. “Having done that, they each endured a further two hours in the machine, watching a new set of trailers. The computer looked at the reactions of their visual cortices and picked, for each clip, the 100 bits of YouTube footage whose corresponding hypothetical fMRI pattern best matched the real one. It then melded these clips together to produce an estimate of what the real clip looked like. As the pictures above show, the result was often a recognisable simulacrum of the original. It also moved (watch at gallantlab.org) in the same way as the clip it was based on.” (I dunno, call me a skeptic, but the image of Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau is not really a recognizable simulacrum of the other other, at least not as much as would, say, a picture of a baggy faced Leonoid Brezhnev, minus his hedgerow of eyebrows, wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt.)

Finally, researchers at Princeton University, have been sort of able to tell what people have been thinking about. Using brain scans taken during an experiment in 2008 in which subjects were asked to imagine objects that they had just seen in pictures, the scientists applied pattern-detection algorithms to try and re-identify the objects. “Dr Pereira divided the data in two. He used half to generate his hypothesis and half to test it. Though his could not distinguish exactly which objects the volunteers had seen, they managed a task that was only slightly less demanding. They could work out what type of object something was. In other words, they could not distinguish a carrot from a stick of celery, but could say that it was a vegetable.”

Impressed? Yeah, I guess, although I’m none too excited. I know that this is research will break through all kinds of barriers, and that before long we will further liberate the intellect of geniuses like Steven Hawking and read into the minds of coma victims and probably talk to our dogs. ( I mean really talk, like the way we seldom do with people.) But I for one don’t much want everyone to be able to read my mind. As Bob Dylan said, “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Or in my case, just scoff. But think about all the nasty, inappropriate, seditious, selfish, ugly thoughts that pass through your head in a day, the 5000 times a year men not always appropriately think about sex, the number of times we nod our heads when our bosses take an uninformed interest in our projects or bite our tongues when our spouses talk about–oh, take your pick. Sometimes I feel that the only reliable amusement left to me are my own thoughts. I would not want to lose that.

Plus there’s the public angle. More and more, we are being scanned by CCTV cameras, erected to prevent terrorism, successful mostly in catching indiscreet teens and furtive petty criminals. But the scanners are becoming more sophisticated: they can overhear speech, perform facial recognition, and spot postures and gaits consistent with someone hiding something beneath their clothing. How long before a scanner can be mounted on a street corner or in Grand Central Station, put there putatively to find terrorists thinking about bombing, and instead having to wade through millions of musings involving lust, envy, self-pity.

Halt the research now.

I absolutely love this photo of Hilary Clinton, taken by Diana Walker for Time magazine. Clinton was on a C-17, on her way to meet with rebel leaders in Tripoli. Despite her stated refusals, I think it’s likely she will be Barack Obama‘s running mate in the 2012 election. She not only will help him win the election; she is the steely backbone he has seemed to lack in his confrontations with the Republicans in Congress.

The morning after Steve Jobs died, I watched a usual Morning Joe panel step far outside its sweet spot and try to eulogize Jobs’ impact. Joe Nocera was pretty effective, mostly because he had paid close attention to Jobs and Apple, and Willie Geist was at least in touch with the culture. But Joe, Mika, Pat Buchanan, Ed Rendell and Mike Barnicle were grabbing onto thoughts like shipwreck victims seeking driftwood. In no particular order, Jobs was a great inventor, a great businessman, a great designer, an innovator, demanding, our Edison, our Ford, and ultimately, a great American. Not of these answers were particularly insightful, none were wrong, none added to our sum of knowledge about the man.

I wish these people had stuck to their area of expertise. Will Jobs end up changing politics? Ford did: the rise of a middle class, the creation of the car-enabled suburb. Edison did: we now have a politics shaped and controlled by mass electronic media. Surely Jobs has already had an impact, with instant information in the palm of your hand. But there are other changes. What will it mean when there is no privacy, for example, no privacy, when you can find anyone anywhere by tracking their phones? What will it mean for political compromise, when everyone has become accustomed to being able to review an infinite number of choices, and to be able to have their selection, any time, any where? (My kids’ idea of deferred gratification is watching something on DVR.) What will it mean for political discourse when people will not be able to sit at a table and have a conversation without simultaneously talking with friends on the phone and on line?

I also wish one of the politicos at the Morning Joe table had brought up the topic that usual dominates their conversation: taxes. Because here’s a question I have: do you think Steve Jobs ever factored in the marginal tax rate when he was i-plotting his business decisions? Because I don’t; I think he was motivated by the love of what he was doing. I mean, if you listen to Perry and Palin and Cantor and all the usual Republican mouthpieces, you hear them say that if you raise the marginal tax rates, it will kill people’s incentive to start businesses and invest in new products and so on. Because I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Steve Jobs–great inventor, great businessman, great innovator, great American–just wanted to do stuff he thought was cool. Do you think for an instant he ever said, “You know, this i-Pad is just sensational, and the i-phone is just going to rock the universe. Thank God the marginal tax rate isn’t three points hire, because otherwise, I just couldn’t be bothered.” I’m sure that as tax rates rise, the cost does diminish the incentive to work and to invest, but for the most part, people choose their work because they are excited about the activity and the challenge and the self-satisfaction.

JMal CBC from Kenneth B Smith on Vimeo.

For eight or nine months after 9/11, I felt pretty depressed about the mass murder of people who were exactly like me and who on another day could easily have been me, and about the brutal attack on the city where I had made my home. Sometime in the spring, however, I read an article about a deputy fire chief named Orio Palmer, a marathoner who on 9/11 ran up eighty-some flights of stairs to reach a sky lobby that had been the point of impact, and who took charge of the scene and began directing rescue operations until, quite terribly, the building collapsed.

I cannot say why, but my mood was lifted when I learned about Orio Palmer. His magnificent courage, his steadiness, his calm determination to do what he had trained his whole life to do, just uplifted my entire spirit, and the terrible gloom I had felt for months fell away.

Later I began to collect stories of other acts of courage that day. Like that of Welles Crowther, a 25 year old kid who went to the floor of impact and rescued survivors. Only a handful of people who had been on that floor survived, but all of the ones who survived where helped by Welles Crowther, who himself did not survive. And Rick Rescorla, the old soldier who was head of security of Morgan Stanley, and who got nearly every one of the 500 people in his company out safely, singing as he went the ancient battle song Men of Harlech (amended to reflect his birthplace in Cornwall). He did not survive. Ed Beyea, a quadriplegic who was being carried down the fire stairs in his wheelchair because the elevators were out, and who took himself off the line because he was causing a back up. He did not survive, and neither did his friend Abe Zelmanowitz, who stayed with Ed with rather than leave him to face his fate alone. Dave Karnes, the retired marine from Wilton, Connecticut, who walked out of his office, went home and put on his old uniform, drove down to Ground Zero, and started climbing the wreckage, and who, on that night of 9/11, located two Port Authority officers buried in the rubble, two of the last people to be pulled out of the rubble alive. Bill Feehan, a fire chief who led his men from the front, and like Davey Crockett fighting to his last breath at the Alamo, was pulling rubble off of people with his bare hands when the second collapse overwhelmed him. Jan Demczur, a Polish immigrant window washer who was trapped in an elevator with some other passengers, and who used the handle of his squeegee to scrape through the drywall of the elevator shaft, creating a hole through which he and the others escaped. Bryan Clark and Stanley Prainmath, two men who found themselves alone in an stairwell, and who helped each other escape. What amazed me at the time, what amazes me to this day, is that so few people know these stories.

We cannot help but get swallowed up in the terrible tragedy of the 3000 people who died that morning, but maybe 10,000 people or more survived, thanks to courage and resolve of people like those whose names I’ve mentioned, and many, many more. We think of the event as a tragedy, and it manifestly was, but it was also our Dunkirk. Our inability to allow that view, our inability to recognize the acts of heroism, left us feeling weaker and more fearful, and frankly more vulnerable to the manipulations of our government. But we should not forget: Under the most terrible of conditions, courage emerged. Grace emerged. Determination emerged. Orio Palmer and Rick Rescorla and Welles Crowther rose up and wrestled the lives of thousands from the grasp of our enemies.

(For a time I tried to tell these stories in a screenplay and then later in a graphic history. An artist named Paul Maybury did these sample illustrations. At top, Rick Rescorla, wearing a black suit, leads his people to safety. Below, a triptych showing an isolated Stanley Prainmath escaping to safety with the help of a stranger on the other side of a pile of rubble, Bryan Clark. Thanks once again to Paul for his work and enthusiasm for this project.)

Ryan Adams shot the video for this gem of a song on September 7, 2001. The World Trade Center looms in all its dopey, stolid earnestness throughout the film, oblivious to its imminent destruction. It always chokes me to see this.

Disunion, The New York Times’ series on the Civil War which I helped create and worked on, was honored by the New Media Institute with one of its 2011 New Media Awards. This marks the second award for Disunion, which was honored earlier this year by the American Historical Association for Best History Writing on the web. Disunion was chosen in the field of history, and was selected for how well the site used technology to serve and communicate with its audience. Congratulations to my colleagues who helped create such an interesting site.

I had the great pleasure of talking about And the War Came with Jim Fuller and his friend Bill Walker on WOUB radio in Athens, Ohio. Jim and Bill are very knowledgeable about the Civil War, and it was very rewarding to talk with people who are so well informed and so thoughtful about the issues that surrounded the conflict. I am very grateful that I was invited onto the program. Anyone who wishes to hear the broadcast can listen to it here. Thanks, guys!