by Lewis, Dan
Until Susman realized that it had also gone somewhere else—it went home with her. She was, at the time, the mother of young children and wanted to be able to work from home. This was before the era of ubiquitous broadband, so she couldn’t simply connect to the servers at the office. She had to make a copy of the files she needed, which in this case contained about 70 percent of what was lost. The team was able to recover almost all their work.
Ultimately, most of this wouldn’t matter. After the incident, Pixar changed the script, and while many of the character and set models Susman and her team created were kept for the newer version of the movie, all the animations and most of the lighting went down the memory hole. The story of the near-disaster, though, did live on—a version of it is included as a bonus feature on the Blu-Ray version of Toy Story 2.
BONUS FACT
In Toy Story, Andy, the child who owns the toys, appears, as does his mother. But his father never does. Why? As one Pixar camera artist explained, “Human characters were just hideously expensive and difficult to do in those days and, as Lee mentioned, Andy’s dad wasn’t necessary for the story.”
DOUBLE BONUS!
Toy Story and Toy Story 2 may have saved an iconic toy from disappearing off shelves. Before the original movie in 1995, Ohio Art, the company that makes the Etch A Sketch, was in severe financial straits. After the Etch A Sketch made a twelve-second appearance in Toy Story, demand for the toy spiked. Sales fell off after a few more years, but in 1999, they spiked again. That second boost probably came from the toy’s repeat performance—this time for forty-five seconds—in Toy Story 2.
RECOVERING NIXON
THE ONGOING EFFORTS TO UNERASE EIGHTEEN AND A HALF MINUTES OF HISTORY
As president, Richard Nixon wanted everything recorded for posterity—even the stuff he’d rather not anyone ever find out about. It ultimately led to his political downfall; as the Watergate scandal made headlines in 1973, the existence of his extensive recording system became public knowledge. Thousands of hours of conversations had been memorialized on tape, and there wasn’t much anyone in the administration could do to prevent the public from finding out what secrets they held. But one tape is best known for what’s missing—there’s an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the recording. Instead of words, there are clicks, buzzes, and static.
And it’s treated like a national treasure.
Tape 342—that’s what the archivist community calls it—contains this eighteen-plus minutes of erased information. However, because of its potential historical significance, we haven’t given up hope yet of recovering whatever was said. The recording was originally made on July 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Instead of conversation—most likely between Nixon and his then chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman—there’s what appears to be static. No one knows what conversations were on those tapes—Nixon, if he knew and could remember, took that information to his grave—and the explanations for the erasures by the Nixon administration have fallen flat. In general, few scholars today assume that the erased portion of the tape contains explicit evidence of anything nefarious, but our natural human curiosity makes this mystery too juicy to ignore.
So we’re not.
After Nixon left the White House, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) took possession of the tapes, including Tape 342. Today, it’s stored in conditions that Wired magazine noted are typically reserved for documents and recordings that actually have comprehensible words contained within them:
Stroll into the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and ask to check out Tape 342, and the archivists will look at you as if you’ve asked to wipe your feet on the Declaration of Independence. Tape 342 is treated like a priceless heirloom, locked in a vault kept at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent relative humidity. The tape has been played just half a dozen times in the last three decades, and only then to make copies.
The reason? There’s an ongoing hope that the information once recorded there will somehow be recovered. In August 2001, NARA began that rescue process in earnest, believing that advances in technology may be able to translate those buzzing noises into intelligible speech. The NARA experts began to make test tapes available to anyone with a theory as to how to translate the buzzes and noises into Nixon’s words.
NARA didn’t offer to pay anyone, but plenty of researchers took the bait—being the one to solve this mystery would be a reward in its own right (and probably lead to all sorts of new business opportunities). But about two years later, NARA again admitted defeat. Archivist John Carlin told the AP that he was “fully satisfied that we have explored all of the avenues to attempt to recover the sound on this tape” without success. But NARA wasn’t giving up. He assured the press that NARA “will continue to preserve the tape in the hopes that later generations can try again to recover this vital piece of our history.”
BONUS FACT
In 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy faced off in the first-ever televised presidential debate. The debate appeared to go poorly for Nixon, who, unlike JFK, refused to wear makeup, an error amplified by the fact that he was suffering from flu-like symptoms and appeared very pale and lethargic. How much did this matter? According to History.com, a clear majority of those who watched the debate on TV thought JFK came out ahead. On the other hand, of those who listened on the radio, most thought that the result was a draw or that Nixon bested Kennedy.
CANCELING HISTORY
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYTHING YOU LEARN IN SCHOOL IS A LIE?
As May and June approach, children around the world are doing the same thing: studying or taking end-of-year exams. Here and there, some students are celebrating, because for some reason their exams were canceled. Maybe the photocopier broke? Or the teacher was sick that day? Maybe the power was out at school?
Or maybe everything they learned was a lie.
On May 31, 1988, that’s what happened in the Soviet Union.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he ushered in a series of political reforms known as glasnost, or “openness,” aiming to increase transparency concerning all the things in which the government was involved. Part of the process meant allowing for the critical re-examination of what the government had done in the past, and it quickly became clear that Gorbachev’s predecessors had whitewashed most of this story. The stories and lessons included in a typical Soviet history education were incomplete at best and outright propaganda at worst. The New York Times quoted one student who said that her textbook had only one paragraph on Joseph Stalin, and not a very good one at that: “It said simply that he was a leader who had some problems.”
So the nation needed to rewrite its history books.
But that decision was made late in the 1987–1988 school year and was not something the USSR could remedy overnight. The misunderstanding of history was pervasive across all sectors of life and had gone on for decades. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “even historians, social scientists and Communist Party theoreticians are uncertain what was correct, what was fantasy and what was a cover-up of crimes in the material taught Soviet students.” The USSR’s State Committee on Education hoped to have new textbooks ready in time for the following school year, but that seemed optimistic.
In any event, that wouldn’t help with the more immediate problem. On the last day of May, roughly 53 million schoolchildren ages six to sixteen were scheduled for their end-of-year examinations. The government had just admitted that the history section of these exams was testing the students’ knowledge of exaggerations, myths, and in some cases, outright lies. Gorbachev’s government wanted to reverse this trend, so the officials took dramatic action. The government ordered that the exams be canceled—a move that the government-run newspaper Izvestia praised as a sign that glasnost was real: “Perhaps this, as nothing else, testifies to the triumph of new thinking, to the readiness to discard the traditional approaches. Only yesterday, one could not even suppose that such a
decision was possible, let alone would be implemented.”
But not all kids had reason to celebrate. Like many dramatic Communist orders, this one was controversial, hard to enforce, and therefore, easily ignored. As a result, many schools still administered exams in defiance of the edict—ironically, by testing their students on the now-admitted pseudo-history they had been taught over the past year.
BONUS FACT
In December 2012, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University went to administer his final exam, only to find out that no one showed up. While he was probably surprised, he immediately understood why. He had previously announced (as he had since 2005) that he curved his exams so that the highest score was redefined to be a perfect grade. If everyone got a zero, then everyone’s zero would be considered a 100 instead. His class rose to the occasion. They all boycotted the final and, in doing so, aced the test.
THE KALAMAZOO PROMISE
WHERE EVERYONE GOES TO COLLEGE FOR FREE
The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is the sixteenth most populous in the state, with just under 75,000 people according to the 2010 census. Like many Michigan municipalities, Kalamazoo’s population has been shrinking over the past few decades; in 1990, it was home to more than 80,000 people. (Detroit, the largest city in the state, was at 1.027 million people in the 1990 census; per the 2010 census, Detroit’s population is now just under 720,000.) In 2000, 24.3 percent of Kalamazoo’s population was below the poverty line, including 26 percent—more than one out of four—of those age eighteen and under.
To help fix this, at the November 10, 2005, Kalamazoo Board of Education meeting, board members announced something dramatic: free or drastically reduced college tuition to many of the city’s schoolchildren.
The program is called the “Kalamazoo Promise.” Any student who attends the Kalamazoo public school system for at least four years and graduates receives a scholarship—including mandatory fees (but not room and board)—to any of Michigan’s state colleges (and a dozen or so private colleges as well). The scholarship starts at 65 percent of one’s costs and goes up 5 percent for each additional grade the child spends in the Kalamazoo school system. A child who goes to Kalamazoo’s school system from kindergarten through twelfth grade, therefore, is eligible for 100 percent of his or her college tuition via the Promise. The Promise is backed by a group of anonymous donors, believed primarily to be comprised of members of the Stryker (of the Stryker Corporation) and Upjohn (of the Upjohn Company) families. There are rumors that former New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter (who grew up in Kalamazoo) is also involved.
The goals of the Promise are not just to encourage children to attend college (and to make that possible), but also to encourage families and businesses to relocate to Kalamazoo and keep a failing city moving forward. (In fact, the New York Times asserted that the Promise is “primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy.”) As of October 2010, almost five years after the Promise was announced, enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools was up 3 percent from the prior year, bucking the statewide trend. There are anecdotal reports of the school system improving and the real estate market rebounding; in the latter case, homeowners are regularly advertising their places as “Promise eligible,” “Promise qualified,” or the like, signifying that their home is in the geographic area covered by the Promise.
As of 2010, the Promise had paid out $18 million in tuition to roughly 2,000 high school graduates and shows no signs of stopping. The effect on students has been mixed, but shows—pardon the pun—promise. Kalamazoo is seeing measurable and positive results at the high school level, with jumps in college readiness rates that are markedly larger than statewide averages—and a reversal from the losses other urban centers in Michigan are experiencing. However, roughly half of those students who received scholarships (through 2011) dropped out of college before completing their program. The Promise’s leadership is looking toward ways of better preparing eligible students for college.
BONUS FACT
Derek Jeter almost didn’t play for the Yankees—he was almost drafted by another team, the Houston Astros. Jeter, fresh out of high school, was selected sixth overall in the 1992 Major League Baseball Draft by the Yankees. The Astros had the first pick but passed over him because they were concerned that he’d demand a higher-than-typical signing bonus. (Jeter had earned a baseball scholarship to the University of Michigan and could have used that as leverage.) Hal Newhouser, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Detroit Tigers from the 1940s, was working for a scout for the Astros at the time and is credited with discovering Jeter. Newhouser forcefully advocated for selecting Jeter, but the Astros failed to take Newhouser’s advice, selecting collegiate star Phil Nevin instead. Newhouser, enraged, quit.
INEMURI
REWARDED FOR SLEEPING AT YOUR DESK
It’s fifth period biology class, maybe an hour after lunch. The professor is droning on about the Krebs cycle or something—you have no idea. While you’re sitting upright with your eyes slightly open, you slowly drift off into a nap until your head falls forward, waking you suddenly. You look around, dazed, unsure of where you are or what just happened, but before anyone really notices (or lets on), you recover, barely, and are passably engaged with the class at hand.
This happens all too often—students, exhausted from class, homework, and the tensions of being teenagers, find themselves barely awake at their desks. So in 2006, a handful of high schools experimented with a straightforward approach—teachers encouraged students to take a brief after-lunch nap.
Not only that, but the high schools were actually behind the times. That’s because they were in Japan, where sleeping at work is not only accepted but, at times, a sign of one’s dedication and vigor. There’s even a word for it—inemuri, which literally translates as “sleeping while present.”
The theory is pretty straightforward: People who work hard get tired. On-the-job fatigue, therefore, is considered a sign of a productive employee. When you’re tired, sometimes your body overrules your mind, and you fall asleep, even at work. While that’s probably not acceptable in the United States and in other Western cultures, Japan is different—so different, that people will often take fake naps, just so their coworkers think that they’ve worked themselves to exhaustion. (One expert the BBC spoke with likened the practice to a UK worker sending an after-hours e-mail for the primary purpose of demonstrating that he or she is working well into the evening.)
Traditionally, only executives are permitted to practice inemuri, and when they do, they need to appear to be ready to wake at a moment’s notice—sleeping upright, as if paying attention but for the fact that their eyes are closed. However, in recent years, these cultural restrictions have waned. Many retailers now sell desk pillows, explicitly marketed toward those who wish to take a snooze during the workday, and nap salons have emerged across the nation, charging the equivalent of a few dollars for a thirty-minute rental of a daybed within the confines of the spa. Some places also sell coffee designed to kick in with a jolt of caffeine twenty or so minutes after drinking—an office worker imbibes, naps, and is woken up by the drink in time to get back to work.
Most telling is how institutions are adopting the trend. It’s not just schools such as the ones noted previously, nor are these small businesses. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that Toyota’s offices (not dealerships) in Tokyo turned off the lights around lunchtime, and workers took fifteen- to thirty-minute power naps—with the approval of top brass. A company spokesperson told the Post, “When we see people napping during lunchtime, we think, ‘They are getting ready to put 100 percent in during the afternoon.’ Nobody frowns upon it. And no one hesitates to take one during lunchtime either.”
BONUS FACT
At a young age, Bill Gates was recognized by his school’s administrators for his prowess with computers (and not for good reasons—he and three friends had manipulated the computer lab’s system to obtain extra computing time for themselves). The school asked G
ates, still a student, to create a class scheduling system for them, and he agreed. He took advantage of it, though; as he’d later claim in a speech he’d give at his alma mater, “By the time I was done, I found that I had no classes at all on Fridays. And even better, there was a disproportionate number of interesting girls in all my classes.”
WHAT ABOUT BOB?
HOW TO BE PRODUCTIVE AT WORK WITHOUT WORKING
In 2006, a report published by Inc.com concluded—ridiculously—that productivity losses cost U.S. employers more than half a trillion dollars—$544,000,000,000, to be a little more precise. The report found that in an eight-hour day, employees spent an average of 1.86 hours “on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks.” Of those surveyed, 52 percent “admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours [was] surfing the Internet for personal use.”
The data is garbage, of course; the idea that employees should be always-on and that anything less is going to result in productivity losses isn’t based in science or reality. But every once in a while, there’s an example of an employee who goes to the extreme, not doing much work and perhaps none at all. Take, for example, a former software developer identified only as Bob. According to a report by NPR, Bob’s schedule—determined by a retrospective look at his Internet browsing history—consisted of the following:
9:00 A.M.: Arrive and surf reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 A.M.: Take lunch.
1:00 P.M.: eBay time.