Once I understood that, I started to feel the same urgency Rhee and a lot of teachers and principals feel. I remember walking through an elementary school in DC with her, smiling down at the kids in their crisp school uniforms, and feeling the weight of every minute that ticked by without any learning happening. Until I spent time talking to kids--in their classrooms, in their homes, in front of their schools--I never appreciated just how much of our children’s time we waste. Nobody understands the problems of a school system as well as the students who are in it.

Rhee herself could be a little frightening, depending on her mood. She has a level of confidence--some might say arrogance--that is surprising. Most women--even women in power--want on some level to be liked. Not Rhee. I kind of admire that about her, even as I wonder whether it will ultimately be her undoing. As I told a friend of mine after finishing up a day with Rhee: I wouldn’t want to work for Michelle Rhee. But I’d like her to be my kid’s superintendent.

Anyway, after this speech for the Overseas Security Advisory Council, a man came up to me and told me about Jeff Cooper’s Colors. I neglected to ask if I could use his name here, so I thank him anonymously. But I’d like to share what he told me.

Lt. Col. Cooper was a writer, a historian and a master gunslinger. His Color Code was essentially a theory about how your mental state of readiness affects your ability to respond to a threat. I wish I’d known about his Color Code before I finished The Unthinkable, because we were both saying the same thing in different ways.

One of the things I found again and again, in all kinds of disasters from plane crashes to car wrecks, is that people are extremely likely to freeze up and do nothing. Cooper’s theory is that your mental state just before the crisis determines whether you will shut down or respond more appropriately.

The four colors are White, Yellow, Orange and Red. If something goes horribly wrong when you are in the White state, you will fail, Cooper wrote. White is a state of relaxation and complacency. Yellow is the ideal--a state of relaxed awareness, when you are not conscious of any particular threat but you are conscious of the horizon, of what is happening around you and of the possibility that anything could happen at any time. Orange is when you are acutely aware that something is wrong, and Red is when you are in the thick of it.

I love this idea. I would, with apologies to Cooper, who died two years ago, like to extend this idea beyond gunfighting to all kinds of trauma and conflict. We should all aspire to be in the Yellow Zone: a place of equanimity and readiness, where we are aware but not anxious; engaged but not frightened; informed of the range of possible threats and our own ability to prevent, respond and recover from loss and change, but not consumed by hypotheticals. Imagine that.

Honestly, it is just a ridiculous thrill to be on any list with the 8 other nonfiction books Hudson selected. Check it: The Animal Dialogues by Craig Childs, Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd, Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, The Way of the World by Ron Suskind, and The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. See what I’m saying?

Also a shout out to my colleague and friend at Time, Jeff Kluger, whose smart, fabulous book, Simplexity, was chosen in the business category. You should now be able to find both our books at Hudson’s 400 newsstands in airports and train stations around the country. 

Saturday’s Russian sub disaster, which killed 20 people, is mystifying. Russian officials said that the Nerpa’s automatic fire-suppression system accidentally went off, releasing Freon gas and suffocating the victims. But submarine crews are normally trained to put on oxygen masks whenever this happens (and it is not all that uncommon). So what happened?

This Newsweek interview with Mikhail Barabanov, editor-in-chief of Moscow Defense Brief, speculates that this was a case of too many people onboard with too little training. Once again, the human factor matters most of all:

Besides the crew, there was a crowd of civilians aboard—127 of the people on board at the time were civilian port workers and engineers. That means the boat was overcrowded. And the civilian guests on the boat did not know what to do in an emergency situation

Thanks to Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, master sleuth, for alerting me to this report.

Generally speaking, Americans don’t tend to take to the streets in joy. Except for Tuesday night. What a night…

Check out the scene… in Brooklyn

In Washington, DC, on U Street, birthplace of Duke Ellington, destroyed in the 1968 riots and brought back to life just the past few years:

On Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House:

In Boulder, CO:

But to answer your question, this year, exit pollsters dealt with early voting by doing telephone surveys of early voters in 18 states before the election. The phone survey had its own problems (it only included landline phones, for example), but it was in other ways easier to control than physically surveying people at polling places. The data was then merged with the data from the exit polls.

For more on early voting and polling, check out this helpful New York Times piece.

For more on polling in general (something all of us could stand to be more literate in, given the way the world works today), I strongly recommend Pollster.com. Mark Blumenthal is a particularly invaluable explainer.

I did my best not to look, really. Here is a story so bloated with caveats that it almost can’t stay afloat.

Check out my Time.com story on how your polling place works (or not) here.

Bottom line: Most people will not have to wait too long. But some people will have to wait an ungodly amount of time. All I can tell you is to try to get there between 10 am and 12 or 2 pm and 4 pm. Bring reading and equanimity. And if you run into problems, don’t leave without voting in some way, shape or form. Even if you use a provisional ballot (or even better, a back-up paper ballot), make sure you get it done. 

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of volunteers will appear at polling places at 5 a.m. (!) and manage what is expected to be a record turnout. They will look up your name, direct you to a voting booth, delicately explain that you can’t wear your Obama button or your McCain t-shirt in the polling place, resolve complex legal questions, puzzle over any technical meltdowns and try to keep the line moving.

For this, they get about $100. If all goes well (and in many places, it most certainly won’t), they go home around 9 pm.

One of the deadliest fires in American history happened on the night of May 28, 1977, at the Beverly Hills Supper Club outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. I wrote about this fire in my book because it was a case study in how groups behave in disasters. People struggled to stay with the people with whom they had arrived. The guests became largely passive and obedient, while the waiters and cooks did the vast majority of life saving. Darla McCollister, who had her wedding at the Club that night, was kind enough to share her story for the book.

Now we have some news on this fire, 31 years later. Glenn Corbett, a respected expert on fire safety and engineering, told me in New York City last month that he was looking into this fire at the request of one of the survivors--who believes there is reason so suspect arson. Glenn has since spent some time in Kentucky looking over the records and decided the case is worth revisiting. He and a group of survivors have called on the governor of Kentucky to create a new commission to investigate the causes of the ferioucious fire---which had been officially blamed on faulty wiring.

To learn more about this development, check out the local news coverage here. Darla, the survivor featured in The Unthinkable, is one of those interviewed:

At the end of each conversation, I asked these people--neuroscientists, anxiety experts, decision-science researchers--what they were doing differently than the rest of us during this strange period.

They aren’t checking how much they have lost, for one thing. They don’t trust their brains with that kind of drama. They are waiting 24 hours after a flurry of news before making any changes. “Fear is a drug,” neuroeconomist Gregory Berns told me. “Don’t make any financial decisions under the influence of fear.”

I actually feel a lot more chill about the whole situation having talked to them. Your brain is just doing its thing--worrying about things it can’t control. That doesn’t mean your brain is right.

For help with anxiety, check out the The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety--a promising new approach to a very old problem. Or get the workbook for free by participating in this study. Special thanks to John Forsyth, one of the co-authors of the workbook and a helpful source to me over the years, for letting me know about this very cool study. 

It got me thinking, and I figured it might be fun to make a short list of the less-obvious essentials--all things that people have said they wished they had taken or were most grateful they had remembered.

My own pillow
Play Station
Crossword puzzles
Kids’ immunization records
Battery-powered TVs
Cat litter (for use by humans)
Ear plugs
Ziploc bags!
The wine we were saving for special occasions

Special thanks to the New Orleans Times-Picayune for collecting some of the above must-haves.

Got any of your own to add?

I just got done talking to Greg Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University Medical Center. Fascinating guy, and he has a new book out called Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently. Worth a look. And by the way, when are we going to get some neuroeconomists working for the government--or for cable TV? These people understand how the brain makes decisions in times of anxiety. Turns out to be very different from what we might expect… More on that coming soon.