Lane Wallace

Like many people (including my Atlantic colleague Jim Fallows), when I first heard about Northwest Airlines Flight 188 going radio silent for 75 minutes and overshooting its destination by 150 miles in October, I figured the pilots must have fallen asleep. As a pilot myself, I could think of no other conceivable reason for such a jaw-dropping lapse in pilot performance. And like Fallows, I, too, reacted with disbelief when the pilots said they had simply been too… More »

The first thought that crossed my mind, reading about the embarrassing leak of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia--a leak that revealed their efforts to suppress inconvenient or complicating data and discredit anyone who questioned their data or results--was that they must not have gotten the memo about discretion in email writing. The one about never putting anything in an email that you don't want to see on a Times Square billboard. … More »

A new fuel-cell technology promises to revolutionize access to cheap, clean energy.

How on earth did Oprah Winfrey--an unlikely media mogul if there ever was one--get so popular, powerful and rich, all at the same time? Ever since she announced at the end of last week that she was walking away from her legendarily popular syndicated talk show in 2011, the airwaves have been abuzz with discussion about what it means, what impact it will have ... and how she managed to get this successful in the first place. In yesterday's New York Times, columnist… More »

In a democracy, it is said, we get the government we deserve. The same can be said of bestselling guru prescriptives. Malcolm Gladwell's new book What the Dog Saw, a compilation of some of his favorite New Yorker pieces, has drawn both praise and criticism. Personally, I'm not a big Gladwell fan. Shoot me. I'm told he's an interesting person. And he knows how to tell a good anecdote. But, at the risk of oversimplifying my critique of his work ... he oversimplifies.… More »

The front page of Sunday's New York Times carried an eye-opening story about statements a number of Congressional Representatives--both Republican and Democratic--had entered into the Congressional Record before the House vote on the health care reform bill. The eye-opening bit was that it turned out the statements had been written not by the Representatives themselves, or even by a member of their staffs, but by a couple of lobbyists paid by the biotechnology firm… More »

The movie 2012 opens Friday, predicated on the notion that on December 21, 2012, as the most recent Mayan long-form calendar cycle (5,125.366 years) comes to an end, along with a unique planetary/solar alignment and a high level of solar activity, the world will cataclysmicly end one era and enter another. With earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and all sorts of devastating destruction in the process. The movie is not the only source of prophetic notions of doom, or… More »

There's been a certain poignancy to Veteran's Day, in recent times, as the very last keepers of exactly what November 11th means close their aging eyes and leave us. At last count this year, there were perhaps five veterans of WWI still living. Add those too young to fight, and there are still only a handful who remember the end of the war and all that era contained and meant. The living memory of World War II is not quite so close to extinction, but it, too, is… More »

There's been a lot of discussion, this week, about whether President Obama has fulfilled enough promises or expectations of change since his election a year ago. "I voted for him, and I really thought everything would be different," one disappointed voter from Iowa said in a televised interview. It would be easy to dismiss the expectations of such voters as unrealistic or naive, but we often expect more from big watershed events, and in more sweeping, immediate… More »

In the extensive coverage surrounding the 40th running of the New York City marathon this past weekend, more than one piece questioned whether marathon races had lost their elite edge. An op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday bemoaned the change in coverage from the pure, rarefied competition between the elite runners to human-interest stories about less professional athletes who competed. Cameron Stracher, who wrote the piece, argued that the long lag in U… More »

I have often felt a little envious of my professional musician friends. Not for the obvious reasons (getting to play in a band and get paid for it, or the accompanying status/sex-appeal), but because they had such a direct line to an audience's emotions. Writers can certainly influence a reader's emotions, but only by engaging the person's mind, first. The words have to be processed intellectually before they can be understood and felt emotionally. It's a quiet,… More »

On Friday, the latest biopic about Amelia Earhart -- this one a $20 million feature film starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere -- opens in theaters nationwide. As a woman pilot myself, I suppose I should be excited about having attention turned, once again, to one of our own. The fact that I'm not says nothing about my enthusiasm for women pilots or pioneers. It's just...enough about Amelia, already. Amelia Earhart was a remarkable woman for her time. I give her a… More »

Are print books really about to disappear, overtaken like horse-drawn carriages in the age of Detroit and the Ford Model T? Truth is, nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows what the future is going to hold, no matter how sure they sound in their predictions. Certainly, for all the fuss made about the Kindle, more than 95% of book buyers are still opting for the print version ... except, possibly, in the hot romance and erotic fiction categories. Earlier this year… More »

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." This sheepish and quintessential explanation of really bad ideas put forth into the world was uttered, I'm sure, by the backers of the Ford Edsel, New Coke, Clear Beer, OK Soda, and numerous other marketing fiascos. It was also undoubtedly mumbled by publisher Katharine Weymouth, or whoever in the Washington Post marketing department came up with the quickly-retracted idea, this past summer, of charging advertisers up to… More »

In the 1840s, a French economist named Frederic Bastiat wrote:In the economic sphere, an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen. There is only one difference between a good economist and a bad one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible… More »

At first glance, I thought that Alan Deutschman's new book, Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders, was an exercise in belaboring the obvious. Just as Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink can be reduced to "trust your gut," I thought Deutschman's premise that top CEOs and leaders need to "walk the walk, not just talk the talk," was too obvious to warrant repeating, let alone spend 176 pages discussing at length. But after reading both the book and the business… More »

Every strength has a flip side, as my mother always says. The same communication trait that makes it easy for me to write volumes of words also means that, at times, I talk an awful lot. Someone driven to excel may also drive everyone around them nuts with their singular focus. A tendency to take bold risks can lead to astounding success ... or reckless disaster. And according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, that interconnected… More »

In every field, there are artists who rise above the rest of us. I look up and marvel at the beauty of the stars. My Uncle Ned, who's a Harvard/University of Michigan-trained PhD astronomer, sees and marvels at astrophysical processes that go far beyond my surface appreciation of a pretty night sky. The same is true of art, music, cooking, botany, architecture, and almost every human endeavor. William Safire, who died Sunday at the age of 79, was an artist in the… More »

One hundred years ago this month, two intrepid explorers returned from the Arctic reaches and declared that they had reached the North Pole. Not together, but on competing expeditions to become the first person and team to the Pole. Robert E. Peary led one expedition, and Frederick A. Cook led the other. And each declared the other's claim to the Pole untrue. Today, of course, that kind of controversy could be settled far more easily. At the very least, we would… More »

Tucked into the news of the day, yesterday, was this small item about two MIT students who managed to get photos--surprisingly good photos-- of the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space for a whopping total of $148. The high-tech equipment involved in this research project included a small digital camera, a cell phone (with GPS), a styrofoam cooler, standard-issue athletic hand-warmers, a home-made parachute, and a mail-order weather balloon. To… More »