Preschool Application Essay

Renee Mease
Director of Admissions
All Souls School
1157 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Dear Ms. Mease,

As All Souls School is one of Manhattan’s premier preschools and you are certain to be terribly busy, it seemed to me a good idea to write you a letter briefly summarizing my application for admission to the Class of 2013.

First, let me say that I can appreciate the difficulty of your position.  Picking from a group of applicants so qualified as the one with which you are faced is no easy feat.  At Gymboree just yesterday, I saw two of my classmates build a tower of blocks a full six blocks high.  It stood proudly for almost 30 seconds, falling only when the two young engineers decided to destroy it so as to gnaw on the blocks.

As for myself, I humbly present a dispassionate list of my diversions.  To begin with what may be your most pressing concern, I have been training over the past several months to use a toilet.  I currently spend about ten hours a day diaperless, and I gain at my current pace roughly two hours a month, with only a handful of public accidents to my name.

Furthermore, I am learning to speak, and at the moment my vocabulary stands at roughly 150 words.  I am often able to express my feelings in speech, this week having said three times to my father, “Me hungee”, whereupon he fed me — I am discovering that I can use vocalizations to elicit reactions from other people.  Turning the pages of the picture books from which my parents read to me has also become a treasured pastime.

The development of my physical faculties is, if I may say so, ahead of schedule.  On more than one occasion, I have caught a ball that was thrown to me softly, and I can throw a ball myself several feet.  Chairs are by now easy for me to use, although to be frank, tall steps and some doorknobs still give me trouble.  Also, my parents discovered with apparent dismay that I’ve developed the ability to help myself to the contents of the pantry.  (They stumbled on that discovery last week, when my mother entered our kitchen to find me dancing naked on a pile of powdered sugar.)

You are also wondering, I’m sure, about the development of my social skills.  They are above average.  I am rarely combative while on play dates, and without being submissive, I am able to deal with ungenerous peers with a simple “No!  Mine!  Miiiine!”  My mother and I are quite close, though, and some have remarked that I am a bit “clingy”.  I can assure you that this would not be a problem for me at All Souls; if my mother is allowed to come into the classroom with me on my first day, she will be able to leave not long afterwards, when I am distracted from my crying by a crayon or a picture of a dog.

Finally, my father, a leading economist at the World Bank, sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and my dear mother is a philanthropist who busies herself with the sisyphean task of spending her vast inherited wealth.

I look anxiously forward to meeting you at the play date you have been kind enough to organize for All Souls applicants.  If I may elucidate anything about my application for you, please do not hesitate to call me at home and speak to my parents.  I would have liked very much to speak with you personally, but I will be unable to communicate with more than simple, two-word phrases until I am at least a year older.

Sincerely,
Lillybell Colvin

You Want I Should Cook a Brisket?

Beef in the freezer has potential energy, like a rock in the air.  It’s in an unsustainable state.  Just as nature’s restoring forces pull the rock to the ground, they pull a cut of beef out of the freezer, onto a heat source, and into your stomach.

I’ve just spent a month with ten pounds of beef in the freezer, and I don’t have the strength to keep that rock in the air any longer.  My strength began to wane two weeks ago, first when a roast found its way into a friend’s oven, and then again when a flat iron steak fell from the freezer into a skillet.  But those were pebbles, really.  The boulder was the two-pound brisket teetering at the back of the freezer, and this weekend it crashed to Earth.

Famous mainly for being the only cultural overlap between Jews and cowboys, brisket isn’t a five-minutes-on-each-side cut of meat.  For dishes like corned beef and pastrami, it’s cured in brine.  At barbecue competitions, it spends eight or ten hours in a smoker.  And whatever you do with it has to include some similar way of breaking down the connective tissues, or the result will be like a giant piece of dry gum.  Generally, what’s in order is low heat for a long time.

Since for 23 years in a row Santa has failed to install a smoker in my kitchen, the oven is where my brisket would be spending most of its time between the freezer and my stomach.  I’m not quite at the level of culinary skill where I’d wing a brisket, so I poked around for a recipe to start from and eventually settled on a great one from The Perfect Pantry.

First, a few notes about the ingredients.  I left out the bay leaves and celery seeds that the recipe calls for because I didn’t have them, and I added some vermouth because the Sun is going to swallow up the Earth in a few billion years.  You’ll notice there’s also a tomato in the picture below.  I felt a little ashamed that instead of coming off of sun-beaten stones in an old Sicilian woman’s backyard, my store-brand tomato paste had come off of a shelf at Safeway.  So the tomato is from my Full Belly Farm CSA box, and it’s in the picture because I crushed it up and used it to bring the tomato paste back to life.

(The full photo set for this meal is on my Flickr account.)

All the ingredients but the beer went into a bowl, and that bowl went into the fridge.  It’s probably worth marinating the beef for at least a couple hours, but I got impatient and only gave it about 40 minutes.  The photo of this is unappetizing, but I’ll include it here in case you want to duplicate my preparation to a senseless level of detail.

To be specific, that bowl contains the following:

• 2 pounds of brisket
• 3/4 of an onion, chopped (set aside the remaining 1/4)
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 6 ounces of tomato paste
• 1 crushed tomato
• 1 cup of soy sauce
• 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce
• 1.5 ounces of sweet vermouth
• some dried cilantro
• some oregano
• some ground ginger
• some black pepper
• a pornographic quantity of brown sugar

I’d trimmed the brisket of most of its fat before marinating it.  That was more work than it sounds like.  A lot of hacking and sawing, partly because my knives are dull and partly because I probably thawed the meat a bit too much.  Raw meat is very soft at room temperature, which meant that I had to use a lot of forks and knives and dig in hard with my hands too.  For about two days afterward, all my utensils smelled like meat.  (Incidentally, All My Utensils Smelled Like Meat is the name of my upcoming death metal album.)

By the way, while in the kitchen always remember to give your young chef positive reinforcement.  For instance, every time I completed a step of this recipe, I rewarded myself with a heaping tablespoon of brown sugar.

Now to the application of heat.  Oddly, the first step of low and slow cooking is high and fast cooking.  Meat that spends a few hours in the oven at 250 degrees will come out tender, but it won’t have that flavorful browning you like to see around the outside.  To conjure up those lovely dark molecules, you sear the meat before putting it in the oven to start its long march to delectability.  With a little marinade still stuck to it, a piece of brisket that you’ve just thrown in a very hot pan will look something like this:

Make sure all six sides get some face time with the bottom of the pan, and you’ll end up with what you see in the picture below.  Keep in mind, everywhere but its surface, the meat is still practically raw.

The pan, however, will not be in great shape:

The word for that is fond.  The stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan when you’re done cooking.  Before you reach under the sink for a pad of steel wool, though, ask yourself: why would the French have bothered naming this stuff?  The browned, concentrated remnants of some seared meat and its marinade.  What use can we invent for something like that?  Say, hypothetically, we’re about to put a brisket in the oven for four hours but are hungry now, want a mini-meal in the next few minutes, and don’t feel like dirtying another pan in the preparation of this mini-meal.  And say that we’re using the royal we for no reason.  We’d probably do this:

(Recipe within a recipe: fried eggs.  I like mine with a very runny yolk and a very crispy white, so here’s how you can achieve that.  Get a pan very hot and coat it with oil or butter.  As soon as you break the egg into the pan, get to work putting as much of the white as possible in contact with metal.  There will be a clear layer of uncooked white on top of the layer touching the pan; use a spatula to sweep that clear layer into direct contact with the pan.  Cook on high heat until the white is as crispy as you like it.  Done properly, this strategy results in some intense spattering as the egg cooks, so stand back.)

Back to the brisket.  I poured the marinade from the bowl over the meat, topped everything with the 1/4 of a chopped onion that I set aside earlier, covered it with aluminum foil, and put it in a 300 degree oven for three hours.  The recipe says to cook the meat at 350 degrees for four hours, but I changed it for a couple reasons.  First, my brisket was grass-fed beef (from Open Space Meats, which I’ve always had good experiences with), which cooks more quickly than grain-fed beef.  Second, 350 degrees just seemed high.

At the three hour mark, uncover the meat and cook it for another hour.  Too little uncovered cooking time and the sauce will be too thin, too much and the sauce will be too thick.  I waited the recommended hour and removed my brisket from the oven.

An hour was too much time.  The sauce on top of the meat came out perfectly, but the rest of the sauce boiled away so much liquid that it charred.  Nevertheless, I set the meat aside, scraped the overly reduced marinade into a pot, and began the last step of the recipe, making the sauce.  The sauce has two ingredients: what you get off the dish the meat cooked in, and beer.  You put the two ingredients in a pot and boil away the liquid until the sauce is as thick as you like.

Tasting as the sauce reduced, I found the char taste very persistent, and not pleasant.  It wasn’t interacting well with the beer flavor, either.  I eventually started throwing things into the pot pretty much at random.  Salt, brown sugar, Southern Comfort, cinnamon, and I don’t know what else.  The end result was a bit tar-like, but tasted passable in very small doses.  (I learned about the “very small doses” qualifier after initially smothering the brisket with the sauce.)

Enough about the unfortunately charred sauce, though.  The meat itself was simply phenomenal.  The flavors were terrific, and it was tender to the point of falling apart — as tender as the most tender slow-cooked ribs I’ve had, with no mushiness.  Flavorwise, tomatoes and soy sauce are rapidly establishing themselves in my head as requirements for slow-cooked beef.  They worked wonderfully here.

(Mmm.  Every time I see that picture I think of my Uncle Charlie, who’s serving three years in the Louisiana State Pen for carnal knowledge of a chuck roast.)

This brisket is a five-hour dish, but less than an hour of that is spent actually doing things — none of them challenging.  I’ve cooked five-hour dishes where most of that time is spent doing things (hello, French Laundry Cookbook), and those are a powerful lesson in diminishing marginal returns.  On this one, nothing fancy was in order.  It was mostly just waiting around.  Remember, brisket has potential energy.  Like with a rock in the air, all you really have to do is get out of the way.

Field Trip to the Supreme Court

The morning of the Supreme Court field trip, I was downstairs and ready to go to school before my alarm even went off.  While I waited for my mom to come down, I recited the stuff I was going to use to impress the tour guide.  Boom, Article III!  Pow, Marbury v. Madison!  Zing, Roberts, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, Sotomayor!  That last one is tough to get out in one breath.  “Wow, and you’re only in fifth grade!  You must be at the top of your class”, the tour guide would say, just before she leaned in close and whispered, “We have something special for kids like you; do you want to see Earl Warren’s gavel?”

Mom dropped me off at school just before 8:00, and a few minutes later Mr. Whittaker was standing at the front of the bus giving us the obligatory preflight speech.  “Stay in your seats guys, and don’t get too loud.  We’ll be there in 90 minutes.”  Less the instructions of the group leader than the pleas of a man locked in a steel box with 25 fifth-graders.  He was a good teacher, though, and he’d always been nice about encouraging my interests.  Sometimes after class, I’d steal a few minutes to ask him about the Court or a contentious case in the news.

At some schools habits like that would have turned recess into the Shawshank washroom for me, but my classmates didn’t mind.  They fantasized about playing pro football, I fantasized about clerking for Alex Kozinski, and we didn’t bother each other about it.  One advantage of going to a Quaker school, maybe.

The kid sitting next to me on the bus piped up halfway into the trip.  “What do we do on this tour?”  Good question, Farkus.  This was my third time out, so there weren’t any mysteries.  You meet the guide and the tour proceeds as follows: short speech on the Court’s history, 20-minute movie about the Court, one-hour tour of the building, three minutes to watch oral argument, gift shop.

Satisfied, Farkus put his headphones back in.  I focused for a second to make sure that he hadn’t noticed my lie.  In fairness, the tour I described was the one he and the rest of my class would be taking.  But my tour was going to include … let’s call it a self-guided segment.  Last time I’d done the official tour, the group had walked past a small second-floor gallery of historical artifacts.  An original copy of the dissent from Dred Scott, justices’ robes, etc.  I’d asked the tour guide if we could go in.  “I’m sorry, the Artifacts Room is reserved for government employees, visiting dignitaries, and friends of the Court.”

So, buddy, I guess in the opinion of the Court, a ten-year-old doesn’t cut the mustard, huh?  This time I was going to appoint myself dignitary for a day.

One hundred minutes after setting off from Baltimore, we pulled up to the front entrance of the Supreme Court building and got off the bus.  Then we walked around to the back of the building, because the front entrance isn’t open to the public.  Our tour guide met us just inside and took us to the auditorium where she’d do her song and dance and show us the movie.

She asked Farkus to move a couple chairs at the front of the room and help her set up.  “What is this, the Lochner era Court?”, I quipped, just loud enough for her to hear.  It had the desired effect; she gave me a warm, surprised laugh and then began her presentation for the class.  It was very high-level and not that interesting, and she kept it short — all of which was fine by me, since when the lights dimmed for the movie, I’d already cleared my head and was poised to make my move.

The music swelled and James Earl Jones — how the hell did they get him for this rinky dink film? — boomed, “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court…”.  I was in the back, closest to the door, and waited to make sure everyone was sufficiently enraptured before I crept to the exit.  Quickly and quietly, I got up, opened the door, slipped into the hallway, and sprinted to the nearest nook on that same side of the hall.  Hiding there, pressed between the wall and the side of a water fountain, I heard the door I’d opened a few seconds before gently click shut, and I listened to see if anyone followed me out.  Ten seconds, 15, 30 … nothing.  Nice.  I had 18 minutes to carry out the rest of the plan and get back to my seat before the end of the movie.

I’d planned my trip up to the Artifacts Room on the second floor as a reenactment of Mission: Impossible, but apparently, ten-year-olds are free to walk around the Supreme Court building unaccompanied.  People assume you’re a justice’s grandkid and leave you alone, as long as you don’t look lost — avoid eye contact, without looking like you mean to.

As I walked down the second-floor hall on the way to the Artifacts Room, I passed the suite containing the justices’ chambers.  The door to the suite was open, and from where I stood, I could see the corner of the receptionist’s desk.  Nothing else, though, and no one came or went in the time I stood there.  I waited a minute and moved on disappointedly — it wasn’t a good place to be caught loitering, and in any case, I was down to 15 minutes of movie.

The Artifacts Room was 50 yards away, and while I covered that distance, I looked up and down the hall to make sure no one else was headed to the room.  No one was, and when I got to the room itself, I was relieved to find it also empty.  Passing people in the hallway was one thing; explaining why, at 10:30 on a school day, I was perusing an exhibit alongside a group of ambassadors’ wives would have been something else entirely.

The room was small, maybe 20’ x 20’, and it was organized around the reproduction of the Constitution which sat — under bulletproof glass, for some reason — in the middle of the room.  I walked the room’s perimeter, stopping at each one of the artifacts lining the walls.

After a few minutes, I came to William Howard Taft’s robe.  It merited exhibition, presumably, because to cover the Chief Justice, it had been made from an army surplus tent.  I leaned forward to read the information card, and as my head neared the display case, I froze.  My eyes locked on an awful reflection in the glass — there was someone standing behind me.

I turned around to see Chief Justice John Roberts staring blankly at Taft’s robe.  “Christ, what a porker”, he muttered.  “The couch in my chambers still has a dent in it the shape of that guy’s ass.”

All I could manage was to breathe, “You’re Chief Justice Roberts.”

“Yeah, look, are you another one of Breyer’s grandkids?  I don’t have anymore Butterfingers, alright?  I’m all out.”

“No, sir, I’m just, well, uh —”

“Okay, then you know what, I don’t really care.  Just stay off the furniture and everything’s copacetic.”  He gestured to the artifact a few feet to his left and read its information card aloud.  “Have you seen this quill?  ‘With this quill, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the majority opinion in Marbury v. Madison, thereby establishing the concept of judicial review.’  The first time I came in here with one of my clerks, we scratched that out and wrote, ‘With this quill, a nameless lackey took dictation for Chief Justice John Marshall.’”

We were soon walking around the room, stopping at some of the artifacts so the Chief Justice could suggest a replacement for the text on the information cards.

“Harry Blackmun’s reading glasses: ‘After 1973, Justice Blackmun took these off anytime he saw the word Roe.’”

“An original copy of the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson: ‘Let’s not talk about this one, okay?’”

“The Bible with which William Rehnquist was sworn in as Chief Justice: ‘We tried to get his sideburns instead, but they were tragically shaved off in 1979.’”

“The Harvard Law School transcript of Louis Brandeis, who graduated in 1877 with the highest grades in the school’s history: ‘In 1877, HLS was a storage room off the Harvard president’s library.  When Brandeis makes law review and magna in the class of 1979, then we can talk.’”

Satisfied that he’d made the points he wanted to make, the Chief Justice said, “Listen, I’ve got to get back to my chambers for a meeting with some people.  My secretary is out sick, so why don’t you make three cups of coffee and bring them in to us.”

He turned and walked out of the room without waiting for an answer.  I had imagined the Chief Justice as the wise, accessible Jesus at a new age Christian ministry.  The Jesus who solemnly delivers the inerrant word of God but sticks around for a Q&A afterwards.  John Roberts was more like an angry Don Rickles playing a judge.  More pertinently, though, he was already halfway down the hall.

I caught up with him at the doorway of the suite of justices’ chambers, just in time to hear him announce to the kid he assumed was behind him, “The coffee machine is down that hall, on the right.  Let’s do one cup with five sugars and equal parts milk and coffee, and the other two cups black.”

I’d have asked which door led to his chambers, but by the time he finished speaking, I was watching him go through the door in question.

With that, lost in thought, I walked down the hall to the coffee machine and while turning into the kitchenette ran straight into the side of Antonin Scalia.  He yelled, “God damn it, Breyer, again with the grandkids?”

Justice Scalia looked like a 240-pound baby.  That was due partly to an outfit — undershirt, light dress pants, no shoes — which built on the solid foundation laid by the man’s round, fat face.  If he didn’t look like a 240-pound baby, he looked like a taller Danny DeVito.  I stared at him, stunned, and five seconds later Stephen Breyer poked his head into the room.  “Nino, I already told you, my daughter is sorry ab—”  He looked at me.  “Who are you?”

“I’m getting coffee for Chief Justice Roberts.”

“What are you doing here, kid?”

“Um, I’m a kid, I’m on a field trip with my, uh, class, from Baltimore.  I met, er, Chief Justice Roberts in the Artifacts Room.  Um, Mr. Justice.”

“Did he go on about Taft’s fat ass?”

“Yes, sir.  He talked about a bunch of the artifacts in the room, then he told me to make some coffee for his meeting.”

Justice Scalia had apparently become bored, because he decided to begin his own line of questioning.  “What have you learned in school about the Supreme Court?”

To my left, I saw Justice Breyer straighten up.  “We learned that it’s the court of last resort for the whole country, and that you have original jurisdiction on a few issues.”

“How do we make our judgments?”  Justice Breyer inhaled sharply and slowly began rocking back and forth.

“You hear oral arguments from the parties to the case, and you read briefs.  Then you use your interpretation of the law and the Constitution to make a decision.”

Scalia’s gaze narrowed and an unfriendly smile crept across his face.  He leaned forward and asked, “And what did you learn about the Constitution?”

Breyer’s face was red, he’d stopped breathing, and he seemed unaware that he was audibly grinding his teeth.  I answered Scalia, “Well, the Constitution is, um, our teacher said that, uh, the Constitution is the law that all the other laws have to follow.”  He relaxed slightly and I continued, “A judge’s job is to interpret the Constitution, because it’s a living docu—”

Before I could finish the word, Justice Scalia had lifted me into the air by my collar, and his face was suddenly six inches from mine.  At that distance, he spoke quietly, “Let me tell you something about the Constitution, kid.  It’s dead.  D-E-A-D.  The framers froze it like Walt Disney’s head, and if you want to thaw it out, you’d better look up the clause on amendments.  Is that straight?”

“As an arrow, Mr. Justice.”

He dropped me to the floor and left the room.  Justice Breyer saw my eyes welling up and said, “Don’t take it too hard, kid.  The first time he did that to me, I threw up on myself.”

“It’s just that I’ve read so much about him, and now he’s yelling at me.”

“It’s alright, he doesn’t mean it.  Look, some of us are going for a quick game of three-on-three in a little bit.  Why don’t you come by and we’ll sign some autographs for you.”

“Thank you”, I sniffled.  “I just have to make coffee for Chief Justice Roberts’ meeting first.”

I was soon carrying a tray of coffees down an empty hallway to the meeting.  There were maybe a dozen doors off this hall.  I patted myself on the back for having been careful to note which door the Chief Justice slipped into when we first entered the suite.  Fifth one on the left.  I counted them off in my head as I walked.  One, two, three, four, and there we go.  I gave a soft knock and opened the door.

“Chief Justice Roberts, I hav—”

John Roberts wasn’t in his chambers.  It wasn’t even his chambers.  It was a walk-in janitor’s closet, and Justice Alito and Justice Kennedy were in it watching a YouTube video of a guy taking a line drive to the crotch.

“Oh, um, sorry, I was looking for the Chief Justice.”

Justice Alito sat silent, looking like the guy on a busted robbery crew who’d had a bad feeling about the job from the start — and Justice Kennedy answered like the guy who’d recruited him.  “It’s two more doors down.  And look, son, we’re supposed to be reading amicus briefs, so …”

“Got it, no problem.”

I closed the door and continued to John Roberts’ chambers, the muffled laughter of Alito and Kennedy fading as I got away from the closet.  I knocked on the second door on the left past the closet and the Chief Justice called out, “Come in.”

“Here are your coffees, sir.”

“It’s about time, kid.  The sugared one is for Justice Thomas.  The other two are for me and Fuckface.”  Justice Clarence Thomas and a pimply twentysomething clerk were sitting in the chairs in front of John Roberts’ desk.

“Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice”, said the clerk.  It was clear he’d been crying just before I walked in.

I handed out the coffees, first to the Chief Justice and then to the others.  “Here you are, Justice Thomas.”  Thomas sat without moving, staring at the wall over the Chief Justice’s left shoulder.  As I served the clerk, the meeting continued.

“Clarence, what’s the ETA on that dissent in Santangelo?”

Thomas didn’t say anything.

“How much are you going to focus on the Disestablishment Clause there?”

Thomas didn’t even blink.

“A lot, then?”

Still nothing.

“Yeah, I was considering writing my own dissent on that.”

Thomas stood up and left the room.

“Alright, glad we got that sorted out”, said Roberts.  “If you wrote everything down, Fuckface, it looks like we’re done here.”

The clerk sniffled gently and nodded.  He walked out of the room with me, and as we got down the hall a bit, he whispered, “He means well.  It’s just that when he clerked for Rehnquist, this was how things were done, so he thinks it’s normal.  During one of the war on terror cases, he tried to waterboard me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.  At the last second, Scalia walked in on us and knocked the jug out of his hand.”  He paused.  “What’s your situation, by the way?  You’re not another one of Breyer’s grandkids, are you?”

“No, I’m, um, helping out for the day.”

“Ah, cool.  Are you interested in this stuff?”

“Yeah, I love it.”

He smiled.  “You want to see what it’s like to be a clerk?”

“Sure, that would be great.”

“Alright, I’m heading back to where the clerks hang out now.  You can come check it out.”

He led me through a labyrinthine series of corridors whose ceilings gradually got lower and whose walls slowly shrunk together.  We walked for what must have been miles.  After half an hour, the hall wasn’t wide enough to accommodate two people abreast.  I looked around and suddenly realized that the only lighting was a glow-in-the-dark strip along the baseboards.  The walls were exposed brick and oozed a heavy sludge.  There were scraps of paper shoved into the gaps between stones.  They said things like “All is lost.  Supplies running low.  One of us must die to save the others.  Please don’t forget me.”  I accidentally brushed against the wall and knocked a loose brick back into it.  The brick fell, and I heard silence for 15 seconds.  Then a distant splash.

Finally, the hallway came to a dead end.

“Are we lost?” I asked.

“Nope, we’re there.”

“Where’s the door?”

“Step back for a second.  And cover your face.”

The clerk bent over and heaved open a door in the floor.  As soon as he’d cracked it, what must have been a thousand bats exploded out of the doorway and thundered down the hall, back the way we’d come.

“Alright, come in”, the clerk said.

We climbed down a ladder into — what on Earth — the wood-paneled private reading room of the Supreme Court Library.  A few clerks sat in leather wingbacks reading casebooks, and the air was thick with pipe smoke.  A lot of tweed, some bow ties.  I looked behind me and the ladder was gone.  On the ceiling was a fresco depicting the great lawgivers of antiquity.

“This is where we spend most of our time”, said my guide.  “The job is mostly reading and writing, and we get pretty much all of that done in here.  Hey, you want to see how we write Scalia’s dissents?”

He took me into a pantry off the reading room and showed me over to the fridge.

“We got two magnetic poetry sets.  One for legal terms and one that’s just Italian cusses.  You want to give it a shot?  He needs a dissent for a Commerce Clause case by next Friday.”

“Sure!”

I took a few minutes to draft the best opinion I could and stepped back from the fridge to reveal my work.

The clerk looked impressed.  “’Cazzata to the ruling of the majority.  Claimant is advised to vaffanculo.  Originalism.’  Not bad at all, kid.  We might throw that in there.”

“Thank you, that would be so cool.”

“No problem.  I wish more of the clerks were around so you could see a little more, but a bunch of them are upstairs playing basketball.”

“Oh, I forgot!  Justice Breyer said I could go up and watch.”

“Well hurry up there and you should catch some of it.  Just go up to the top floor.  Use the elevator in the library.  None of the others go to the gym.”

“Thanks, I’m going to run.”

I rode the elevator to the top floor, and when the doors opened, I was facing the doors to the basketball court.  Just to their left, someone had placed a small sign: “The Highest Court in the Land”.  I went in.

Justice Breyer was standing on the bench with a towel around his neck, subbed out of the game.  It was, as he’d said, three-on-three.  On one team, three young clerks.  And on the other, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and the 89-year-old John Paul Stevens.  The score was 42–1, justices.  One of the spectators explained to me that the clerk team’s single point had been scored on the free throw they got after Justice Stevens punched their point guard in the gut.

My surprise at that faded as I saw the kind of basketball they were playing.  The clerks were dog-tired, shuffling their feet and losing the ball in the backcourt.  The justices were dribbling between their legs and bouncing the ball off the defenders’ heads — I even saw a near-dunk from Sotomayor.  At one point, a clerk on offense caught a lucky break when he crossed Stevens up.  He drove toward the basket and got off a clean jump shot, only to have the five-foot Ginsburg soar in from nowhere and slam the ball back down into his face.  She bellowed, “Cert. denied, bitch!”  The clerk jogged up the court, pressing his shirt to his bloody nose.

The game continued for another 15 minutes before an injury brought it to an early close.  After Sotomayor had scored her second three-pointer of the game, she’d heard one of the clerks mutter, “Not bad, for the new kid.”  She got in his face.

“You want to say that to my face, Air Bud?” she said.

“Nah, hotshot.  I’m just saying, for a wise Latina woman, you’re doing alright”, he answered, and then shoved her.  She shoved him back, and it escalated into a full-blown fist fight.  Everyone else stood around impassively.  I looked over at Justice Breyer, wondering why no one was intervening.

“It’s okay.  One time and he’ll learn”, Breyer said.

A few minutes later, Sotomayor was ready to play again, and the clerk was on his way to the George Washington ER for treatment of a ruptured spleen.  The game was called off and the justices declared the winners.

Breyer called me over to where he and the other three justices were huddled afterwards.  “Alright, kid, let’s do those autographs now.  Got any paper?”

My heart sunk as I realized I didn’t.  “No, I’m so dumb, I forgot to get some from downstairs.”

“That’s okay, how about this.  Lift up your sleeve.”

I rolled my sleeve up to my shoulder, and Justice Breyer produced a marker from his pocket.  In turn, he, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor signed me.

“There you go, kid.  We’ve got to get back downstairs, so this is end of the line for you.  Why don’t you get back down to your class, they’re probably missing you.”

F-word.  My class.  Mr. Whittaker had probably called the police.  My mom was probably racing down to Washington, thinking she had to get there before a search boat pulled my body out of the Potomac.  I had to go now.

“Thank you so much!  This has been great.  Bye!” I yelled, and I took off down the hall.  Into the elevator, down to the library.  I sprinted past the clerks’ room, into the building’s main hall, down the grand staircase all the way to the ground floor, out the door, and boom — into Farkus, at the back of the line of my classmates shuffling onto the bus.

“Hey, watch it!” he yelled.

“Sorry, I tripped.”

“Yeah, well don’t.  And just so you know, this trip was way worse than you said it was going to be.  The most boring one eeevvvver.”

Mr. Whittaker was standing at the bus door, moving the line forward.  As it came to Farkus and then me, Mr. Whittaker fell in behind.  “Alright everyone, find a seat and let’s hit the road.”

He leaned in to me and said, “Sorry, I know you’ve been on this tour before.  I hope you still got something out of it this time.”

I smiled and nodded.

How Hard Was Felipe Massa Hit, Exactly?

(Note: a version of this article appeared on F1 Fanatic.)

Felipe Massa suffered a fractured skull and a concussion in an accident during qualifying for last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.  Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn ejected a coil spring from its rear suspension, and a few seconds later, Massa headbutted the spring at 160 mph.  The impact knocked him out and he crashed head-on into a tire wall.

(YouTube has a few videos of the incident, but I didn’t put one here because it will have been taken down by the time you read this.  Could someone sit Bernie Ecclestone down and teach him about those difference engines that young people use to view moving daguerreotypes?)

The 800-gram spring didn’t penetrate Massa’s helmet, but it managed to injure him badly anyway.  This all coming six days after Henry Surtees, a Formula Two driver, died when an opponent’s wheel broke off and hit his helmet, some are wondering whether cockpit covers might be necessary.  (Incidentally, Ayrton Senna, the last person to die in a Formula One car, also died when a wheel hit him in the head.)

In all the discussion of this, though, I haven’t seen any analyses attempting to quantify what happened to Massa.  He was hit hard enough to be knocked out, and that’s pretty much all we know.  So let’s figure it out.  How bad is it, exactly, if a spring hits you in the head at 160 mph?

The punch it packs is worse than getting shot.  Bullets are deadly because they tear up your insides, but in terms of kinetic energy, most don’t hold a candle to what hit Massa.

Below is a list of kinetic energies of common projectiles.  The bullet energies assume point-blank range (and are calculated using numbers from Alpine Armoring).  All the energies are calculated using the old kinetic energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity^2 formula you learned in school.

• 100 mph fastball from that kid in Rookie of the Year: 145 joules
• Barry Bonds’ swing (33 oz. bat at 70 mph): 458 joules
• 9mm handgun: 513 joules
• .44 Magnum: 1510 joules
• The spring that hit Massa (800 grams at 160 mph): 2046 joules
• AK-47 (7.62mm round): 2599 joules
• 12 gauge shotgun slug: 3580 joules
• The wheel that killed Surtees (~12 kg at 120 mph): 17,267 joules

Before we talk about those figures, it’s worth remembering that the Massa and Surtees accidents were real-world situations, and as such, the numbers above may be imprecise. Massa was moving at 160 mph, but if the spring was traveling in the same direction as his Ferrari, or if it ricocheted off of his car before striking him, the estimate of 2046 joules may be too high. If, for instance, we change the spring’s collision speed to 120 mph, its kinetic energy drops about 44% to a still-frightening 1151 joules. The same caveats apply to the figures on Henry Surtees’ accident.

With that out of the way, let’s put the numbers into perspective.  Bullets focus their energy on a tiny area, which is why they would penetrate, say, a driver’s helmet.  So let’s look at the baseball examples, since the contact area in those cases is more similar to being hit with a coil spring.

Massa would have been 14 times better off getting beaned by Nolan Ryan.  He would have been four times better off letting Barry Bonds take a full-force swing at his head.  For that matter, in terms of sheer energy, he’d have been better off letting Barry Bonds hit him in the head at the same instant that someone shot him point-blank with Dirty Harry’s gun.

It’s simply incredible that a helmet can turn that into a survivable injury, but the massive energy of Henry Surtees’ accident is a reminder that there’s a limit to the amount of protection that one or two inches of padding can offer.  Being hit in the head with a wheel moving at race speeds is easily deadly, helmet or no helmet.

If the same thing causes another death in F1, the result may well be a rush to implement closed cockpits.  And if that day should come, let’s not pretend to have learned something we didn’t already know today.  Cockpit covers may or may not make sense, but if we are against them now, we shouldn’t be waiting for a death to change our minds.

Update

This article got a lot of good, insightful responses, so in an effort to live up to the quality commentary at F1 Fanatic and Hacker News, I decided to see if I couldn’t refine the estimates a bit.

The bottom line is that we need a way to calculate the spring’s speed.  Watching the video frame by frame, we see that the spring takes roughly 1 frame to cover the distance from the front of Massa’s car to his helmet.  Judging by pictures of his Ferrari, that distance is very close to half the length of the car.  Figures on the length of the F60 are difficult to come by, but for a number of recent F1 cars whose lengths I could find, the answer hovered around 180 inches.

So the spring traveled about 90 inches, or 7.5 feet, in 1 frame.  PAL video uses a frame rate of 25 frames per second, so 7.5 feet per frame translates to 187.5 feet per second.  That’s 127.8 mph.  Plug that into KE = 1/2*m*v^2 (after converting everything to kilograms and meters per second), and the spring’s kinetic energy comes out to 1306 joules.

Halt, Evildoer. I am a Baby.

The London Times ran an article the other day on a study of ways to increase the chances that a lost wallet will be returned.  The psychologists running the study abandoned wallets in high-traffic areas of Edinburgh.  Some of the wallets had a picture of a baby in them, some had other pictures (e.g. a puppy, a family), and some had no picture.

Eighty-eight percent of the baby picture wallets were returned, while only 15 percent of the wallets with no picture were returned.  The other pictures fell somewhere in the middle.

Behold, then, my new iPhone wallpaper:

Bring Out Your Dead

A blog post by Shamus Young popped up on Hacker News the other day asking people whether they’d have survived to their current age if they’d been born 1000 years ago.

For the random person, you’d make money betting on death.  Some Book I Found graphs probability-of-dying vs. age for citizens of ancient Rome, and by way of the math in Some Other Book I Found, it works out to better-than-even odds that a random newborn won’t live to see 20.  That’s for ancient Rome, of course, but I don’t imagine you’d be any better off in the Middle Ages (correct me if I’m wrong, historians).

So, what would kill you?  In your first few months of life, probably congenital disorders, nutritional or digestive issues, problems arising from premature birth, or infections.  Or damn near anything else, really.  If you make it to toddlerhood, accidents and infections account for most of the remaining 1-in-5 chance (according to the graphs linked above) that you’ll die before reaching adulthood.

Now to Young’s question.  I’ll answer it for the 15 descendants of my grandparents.

• Me: dead at 13 (cancer)
• Mom: probably dead at 24 (open fracture of tibia and fibula — suffered while skiing, which admittedly is not very medieval)
• Dad: alive
• Brother: probably dead at 8 (pneumonia)
• Sister: alive
• 3 blood uncles: 2 alive, 1 dead (at 14, of food poisoning)
• 2 blood aunts: 2 alive, 0 dead
• 5 cousins: 4 alive, 1 dead (at 17, of food poisoning)

Of 15 people, that’s a total of five dead, with the oldest dead at 24 and, as expected, four of the five deaths being attributable to infections or accidents.  An excellent survival rate of 66.6 percent.

Mini-epilogue

I thought for a while before publishing this about whether or not to change this alternate reality’s setting from the Middle Ages to ancient Rome, since the probability-of-death studies above use Roman data.

I stopped thinking about it when I realized that it wouldn’t matter.  Forget 1000 years ago; with the possible exception of my mom, all five of my family’s “dead” are alive today because of treatments developed within my grandparents’ lifetime.  Well done, Modern Medicine.