The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

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  Lois is a type—a particularly rare and extraordinary type, but a type nonetheless. She’s the type of person who seems to know everybody, and this type can be found in every walk of life. Someone I met at a wedding (actually, the wedding of the daughter of Lois’s neighbors, the Newbergers) told me that if I ever went to Massapequa I should look up a woman named Marsha, because Marsha was the type of person who knew everybody. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the word is that a tailor named Charlie Davidson knows everybody. In Houston, I’m told, there is an attorney named Harry Reasoner who knows everybody. There are probably Lois Weisbergs in Akron and Tucson and Paris and in some little town in the Yukon Territory, up by the Arctic Circle. We’ve all met someone like Lois Weisberg. Yet, although we all know a Lois Weisberg type, we don’t know much about the Lois Weisberg type. Why is it, for example, that these few, select people seem to know everyone and the rest of us don’t? And how important are the people who know everyone? This second question is critical, because once you begin even a cursory examination of the life of someone like Lois Weisberg you start to suspect that he or she may be far more important than we would ever have imagined—that the people who know everyone, in some oblique way, may actually run the world. I don’t mean that they are the sort who head up the Fed or General Motors or Microsoft, but that, in a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way, they make the world work. They spread ideas and information. They connect varied and isolated parts of society. Helen Doria says someone high up in the Chicago government told her that Lois is “the epicenter of the city administration,” which is the right way to put it. Lois is far from being the most important or the most powerful person in Chicago. But if you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government and influence and interest groups in the city of Chicago you’ll end up coming back to Lois again and again. Lois is a connector.

  Lois, it must be said, did not set out to know everyone. “She doesn’t network for the sake of networking,” says Gary Johnson, who was Lois’s boss years ago, when she was executive director of the Chicago Council of Lawyers. “I just think she has the confidence that all the people in the world, whether she’s met them or not, are in her Rolodex already, and that all she has to do is figure out how to reach them and she’ll be able to connect with them.”

  Nor is Lois charismatic—at least, not in the way that we think of extroverts and public figures as being charismatic. She doesn’t fill a room; eyes don’t swivel toward her as she makes her entrance. Lois has frizzy blond hair, and when she’s thinking—between her coffee and her cigarette—she kneads the hair on the top of her head, so that by the end of a particularly difficult meeting it will be standing almost straight up. “She’s not like the image of the Washington society doyenne,” Gary Johnson says. “You know, one of those people who identify you, take you to lunch, give you the treatment. Her social life is very different. When I bump into her and she says, ‘Oh, we should catch up,’ what she means is that someday I should go with her to her office, and we’d go down to the snack bar and buy a muffin and then sit in her office while she answered the phone. For a real treat, when I worked with her at the Council of Lawyers she would take me to the dining room in the Wieboldt’s department store.” Johnson is an old-school Chicago intellectual who works at a fancy law firm and has a corner office with one of those Midwestern views in which, if you look hard enough, you can almost see Nebraska, and the memory of those lunches at Wieboldt’s seems to fill him with delight. “Now, you’ve got to understand that the Wieboldt’s department store—which doesn’t exist anymore—was a notch below Field’s, where the suburban society ladies have their lunch, and it’s also a notch below Carson’s,” he says. “There was a kind of room there where people who bring their own string bags to go shopping would have a quick lunch. This was her idea of a lunch out. We’re not talking Pamela Harriman here.”

  In the mideighties, Lois quit a job she’d had for four years, as director of special events in the administration of Harold Washington, and somehow hooked up with a group of itinerant peddlers who ran the city’s flea markets. “There was this lady who sold jewelry,” Lois said. “She was a person out of Dickens. She was bedraggled. She had a houseful of cats. But she knew how to buy jewelry, and I wanted her to teach me. I met her whole circle of friends, all these old gay men who had antique stores. Once a week, we would go to the Salvation Army.” Lois was arguably the most important civic activist in the city. Her husband was a judge. She lived in a huge house in one of Chicago’s nicest neighborhoods. Yet somehow she managed to be plausible as a flea-market peddler to a bunch of flea-market peddlers, the same way she managed to be plausible as a music lover to a musician like Tony Bennett. It doesn’t matter who she’s with or what she’s doing; she always manages to be in the thick of things. “There was a woman I knew—Sandra—who had a kid in school with my son Joseph,” Lois told me. Lois has a habit of telling stories that appear to be tangential and digressive but, on reflection, turn out to be parables of a sort. “She helped all these Asians living uptown. One day, she came over here and said there was this young Chinese man who wanted to meet an American family and learn to speak English better and was willing to cook for his room and board. Well, I’m always eager to have a cook, and especially a Chinese cook, because my family loves Chinese food. They could eat it seven days a week. So Sandra brought this man over here. His name was Shi Young. He was a graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago.” Shi Young lived with Lois and her family for two years, and during that time Chicago was in the midst of political turmoil. Harold Washington, who would later become the first black mayor of the city, was attempting to unseat the remains of the Daley political machine, and Lois’s house, naturally, was the site of late-night, top-secret strategy sessions for the pro-Washington reformers of Chicago’s North Side. “We’d have all these important people here, and Shi Young would come down and listen,” Lois recalls. “I didn’t think anything of it.” But Shi Young, as it turns out, was going back up to his room and writing up what he heard for the China Youth Daily, a newspaper with a circulation in the tens of millions. Somehow, in the improbable way that the world works, a portal was opened up, connecting Chicago’s North Side reform politics and the readers of the China Youth Daily, and that link was Lois’s living room. You could argue that this was just a fluke—just as it was a fluke that Isaac Asimov was in town and that Lois happened to be driving by when Cindy Mitchell came running out of her apartment. But sooner or later all those flukes begin to form a pattern.

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  In the late 1960s, a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in an effort to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem, though it could also be called the Lois Weisberg problem. It is this: How are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web? Milgram’s idea was to test this question with a chain letter. For one experiment, he got the names of a hundred and sixty people, at random, who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and he mailed each of them a packet. In the packet was the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his name on a roster in the packet and send it on to a friend or acquaintance who he thought would get it closer to the stockbroker. The idea was that when the letters finally arrived at the stockbroker’s house Milgram could look at the roster of names and establish how closely connected someone chosen at random from one part of the country was to another person chosen at random in another part. Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. It is from this experiment that we got the concept of six degrees of separation.

  That phrase is now so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of how surprising Milgram’s finding was. Most of us don’t have particularly divers
e groups of friends. In one well-known study, two psychologists asked people living in the Dyckman public-housing project, in uptown Manhattan, about their closest friend in the project; almost 90 percent of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, both age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity. Another study, involving students at the University of Utah, found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else he’ll say that it is because they share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the pairs of students on their attitudes you’ll find out that this is an illusion, and that what friends really tend to have in common are activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends; we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do: people in Omaha are not, as a rule, friends with people who live in Sharon, Massachusetts. So how did the packets get halfway across the country in just five steps? “When I asked an intelligent friend of mine how many steps he thought it would take, he estimated that it would require a hundred intermediate persons or more to move from Nebraska to Sharon,” Milgram wrote. “Many people make somewhat similar estimates, and are surprised to learn that only five intermediaries will—on the average—suffice. Somehow it does not accord with intuition.”

  The explanation is that in the six degrees of separation not all degrees are equal. When Milgram analyzed his experiments, for example, he found that many of the chains reaching to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern. Twenty-four packets reached the stockbroker at his home, in Sharon, and sixteen of those were given to him by the same person, a clothing merchant whom Milgram calls Mr. Jacobs. The rest of the packets were sent to the stockbroker at his office, and of those the majority came through just two men, whom Milgram calls Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones. In all, half of the responses that got to the stockbroker were delivered to him by these three people. Think of it. Dozens of people, chosen at random from a large Midwestern city, sent out packets independently. Some went through college acquaintances. Some sent their packets to relatives. Some sent them to old workmates. Yet in the end, when all those idiosyncratic chains were completed, half of the packets passed through the hands of Jacobs, Jones, and Brown. Six degrees of separation doesn’t simply mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those few.

  There’s an easy way to explore this idea. Suppose that you made a list of forty people whom you would call your circle of friends (not including family members or coworkers), and you worked backward from each person until you could identify who was ultimately responsible for setting in motion the series of connections which led to that friendship. I met my oldest friend, Bruce, for example, in first grade, so I’m the responsible party. That’s easy. I met my college friend Nigel because he lived down the hall in the dormitory from Tom, whom I had met because in my freshman year he invited me to play touch football. Tom, then, is responsible for Nigel. Once you’ve made all the connections, you will find the same names coming up again and again. I met my friend Amy when she and her friend Katie came to a restaurant where I was having dinner. I know Katie because she is best friends with my friend Larissa, whom I know because I was told to look her up by a mutual friend, Mike A., whom I know because he went to school with another friend of mine, Mike H., who used to work at a political weekly with my friend Jacob. No Jacob, no Amy. Similarly, I met my friend Sarah S. at a birthday party a year ago because she was there with a writer named David, who was there at the invitation of his agent, Tina, whom I met through my friend Leslie, whom I know because her sister Nina is best friends with my friend Ann, whom I met through my old roommate Maura, who was my roommate because she had worked with a writer named Sarah L., who was a college friend of my friend Jacob. No Jacob, no Sarah S. In fact, when I go down my list of forty friends, thirty of them, in one way or another, lead back to Jacob. My social circle is really not a circle but an inverted pyramid. And the capstone of the pyramid is a single person, Jacob, who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of my relationships. Jacob’s full name, incidentally, is Jacob Weisberg. He is Lois Weisberg’s son.

  This isn’t to say, though, that Jacob is just like Lois. Jacob may be the capstone of my pyramid, but Lois is the capstone of lots and lots of people’s pyramids, and that makes her social role different. In Milgram’s experiment, Mr. Jacobs the clothing merchant was the person to go through to get to the stockbroker. Lois is the kind of person you would use to get to the stockbrokers of Sharon and also the cabaret singers of Sharon and the barkeeps of Sharon and the guy who gave up a thriving career in orthodontics to open a small vegetarian falafel hut.

  4

  There is another way to look at this question, and that’s through the popular parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea behind the game is to try to link in fewer than six steps any actor or actress, through the movies they’ve been in, to the actor Kevin Bacon. For example, O. J. Simpson was in Naked Gun with Priscilla Presley, who was in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane with Gilbert Gottfried, who was in Beverly Hills Cop II with Paul Reiser, who was in Diner with Kevin Bacon. That’s four steps. Mary Pickford was in Screen Snapshots with Clark Gable, who was in Combat America with Tony Romano, who, thirty-five years later, was in Starting Over with Bacon. That’s three steps. What’s funny about the game is that Bacon, although he is a fairly young actor, has already been in so many movies with so many people that there is almost no one to whom he can’t be easily connected. Recently, a computer scientist at the University of Virginia by the name of Brett Tjaden actually sat down and figured out what the average degree of connectedness is for the quarter-million or so actors and actresses listed in the Internet Movie Database: he came up with 2.8312 steps. That sounds impressive, except that Tjaden then went back and performed an even more heroic calculation, figuring out what the average degree of connectedness was for everyone in the database. Bacon, it turns out, ranks only 668th. Martin Sheen, by contrast, can be connected, on average, to every other actor, in 2.63681 steps, which puts him almost 650 places higher than Bacon. Elliott Gould can be connected even more quickly, in 2.63601. Among the top fifteen are people like Robert Mitchum, Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, and Burgess Meredith.

  Why is Kevin Bacon so far behind these actors? Recently, in the journal Nature, the mathematicians Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz published a dazzling theoretical explanation of connectedness, but a simpler way to understand this question is to look at who Bacon is. Obviously, he is a lot younger than the people at the top of the list are and has made fewer movies. But that accounts for only some of the difference. A top-twenty person, like Burgess Meredith, made 114 movies in the course of his career. Gary Cooper, though, starred in about the same number of films and ranks only 878th, with a 2.85075 score. John Wayne made 183 movies in his fifty-year career and still ranks only 116th, at 2.7173. What sets someone like Meredith apart is his range. More than half of John Wayne’s movies were Westerns, and that means he made the same kind of movie with the same kind of actors over and over again. Burgess Meredith, by contrast, was in great movies, like the Oscar-winning Of Mice and Men (1939), and in dreadful movies, like Beware! The Blob (1972). He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Day of the Locust and also made TV commercials for Skippy peanut butter. He was in four Rocky movies, and also played Don Learo in Godard’s King Lear. He was in schlocky made-for-TV movies, in B movies that pretty much went straight to video, and in pictures considered modern classics. He was in forty-two dramas, twenty-two comedies, eight adventure films, seven action films, five sci-fi films, five horror flicks, five Westerns, five documentaries, four crime movies, four thrillers, three war movies, three films noir, two children�
�s films, two romances, two mysteries, one musical, and one animated film. Burgess Meredith was the kind of actor who was connected to everyone because he managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures that the acting profession has to offer. When we say, then, that Lois Weisberg is the kind of person who “knows everyone,” we mean it in precisely this way. It is not merely that she knows lots of people. It is that she belongs to lots of different worlds.

  In the 1950s, Lois started her drama troupe in Chicago. The daughter of a prominent attorney, she was then in her twenties, living in one of the suburbs north of the city with two small children. In 1956, she decided to stage a festival to mark the centenary of George Bernard Shaw’s birth. She hit up the reclusive billionaire John D. MacArthur for money. (“I go to the Pump Room for lunch. Booth one. There is a man, lurking around a pillar, with a cowboy hat and dirty, dusty boots. It’s him.”) She invited William Saroyan and Norman Thomas to speak on Shaw’s legacy; she put on Shaw plays in theaters around the city; and she got written up in Life. She then began putting out a newspaper devoted to Shaw, which mutated into an underground alternative weekly called the Paper. By then, Lois was living in a big house on Chicago’s near North Side, and on Friday nights people from the Paper gathered there for editorial meetings. William Friedkin, who went on to direct The French Connection and The Exorcist, was a regular, and so were the attorney Elmer Gertz (who won parole for Nathan Leopold) and some of the editors from Playboy, which was just up the street. People like Art Farmer and Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Lenny Bruce would stop by when they were in town. Bruce actually lived in Lois’s house for a while. “My mother was hysterical about it, especially one day when she rang the doorbell and he answered in a bath towel,” Lois told me. “We had a window on the porch, and he didn’t have a key, so the window was always left open for him. There were a lot of rooms in that house, and a lot of people stayed there and I didn’t know they were there.” Pause. Puff. “I never could stand his jokes. I didn’t really like his act. I couldn’t stand all the words he was using.”