Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Although I’ve worked for Amanda, and with The Unthinkable for over two years, I was completely unprepared for the unthinkable when it hit Washington, DC, last week.

My commute, door-to-door is 8.8 miles. In normal circumstances the drive might take 30 minutes. At the absolute worst: 45 minutes. Last Wednesday, it took me 6 hours.

I grew up just north of Boston and am no stranger to winter weather and snow driving. Yet no one could have convinced me that a mere 4 or 5 inches of snow and sleet would have caused the kind of chaos I witnessed Wednesday.

The official explanation looks like this: A snowstorm hitting exactly at 4 p.m., coupled with icy roads, inexperienced snow drivers and the already awful DC traffic combined to create what The Washington Post called “one of the most harrowing events [local emergency managers] can recall since since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon.”

But the big picture is more ominous. Wednesday’s commute proved that the DC region (along with Los Angeles and many other congested cities) cannot be evacuated in a reasonable amount of time.

Local officials need to do a better job of managing evacuations and working together across turf lines. They must also begin educating the public about the need to shelter in place rather than leaving. They should do this now—while the trauma is fresh in people’s minds.

Regular people, meanwhile, need to be more self-sufficient. As it was, many drivers ran out of gas or were stuck in their cars overnight, arriving home from work just when they would normally be leaving the next morning. To give you an idea, check out this horrifying map of Wednesday’s DC traffic conditions.

Otherwise, expect to share the sense of helplessness and rage I felt the other day. Here’s a quick synopsis of my mental deterioration during my 6-hour ordeal: Drive slowly and you’ll be fine—> Why are we at a dead stop?—> Why can’t anyone drive in the snow?—> Why is that fancy car getting stuck, and why, for the love of snow, is that driver gunning it?—> Why are people abandoning their cars in the MIDDLE of the road?—> I’m starving.—> I have no food.—> I will be stuck in my car overnight.—> I have to use the bathroom.—-> I am so thirsty.—> I HATE THIS, AND I HATE EVERYONE.

And on and on. My anger soon became depression and then acceptance (see one driver’s stages of traffic grief here).

Towards the end of my journey, when I had crossed from DC into VA , my panic subsided just a bit. When I finally reached my icy driveway, the relief was overwhelming. And then I swore I’d never get in my car again.

Of course that’s not an option. I have to get in my car again, even if the forecast calls for a wintry mix this week. We all have lives to lead, jobs to work, kids to drive, dry cleaning to pick-up. Even as I write this, my heart is starting to race with the thought of another six hours in the car. It can happen again, and at some point, snow won’t be the cause.

Fortunately there are a few things we can do right now (a CDC checklist is here). Stock your car with bottles of water, non-perishable snacks, blankets, and flashlights with working batteries. A cell phone car charger is always a good investment (in my case, the dwindling battery symbol became a powerful metaphor for my resilience). Keep your gas tank at a healthy level all the time—and always fill it up before snow arrives.

If anything, the above precautions will help ease your panic when faced with an unprecedented traffic event. (I’m talking to you, guy who got out of his car to curse and make lewd gestures at a stuck car.)

As for the officials (I’m talking to you, Ed McDonough, spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, who told The Washington Post: “We have to put our minds together and see if we might able to come up with some reasonable ways to deal with this ... But quite frankly, what can we do but pray the snow doesn’t hit at rush hour?”): Wednesday’s commute can’t be blamed solely on the timing of the snow. The DC traffic situation is beyond capacity on normal, perfectly sunny days. Just one accident is enough to cripple every major route out of the District (some of which are, ironically, evacuation routes).

Prayer is not a plan. 

Teach for America (whose research I wrote about here last year) is having a big geek-out festival in DC from Feb. 11-13. Along with James Carville, Whitney Tilson and Kira Orange Jones, I’ll be doing a panel on the media’s role in the country’s noisy education debate.

I remember when Wendy Kopp came to my high school to recruit for a wacky start-up called Teach for America. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago…

Teach for America is now bigger than the Peace Corps, which is nice. But more important than its active teachers are its alumni—who are influencing education reform in ways that are hard to overstate. (Some people actually think there is a giant conspiracy of ed reformers, almost all of whom can be traced back to Wendy Kopp. Those people are not entirely wrong.)

Hope to see some of you in DC next month.

Nuclear bomb survival doesn’t tend to come up in conversation often these days. But when it does, I immediately think of my parents and the infamous drills of the ‘50s, which seem so quaint now. These days, nuclear bombs conjure up images of automatic, mass death and suffering, or, in the words of my dad when we discussed it today, “We’re all fried anyway.”

But that’s a dated perception, it turns out. First of all, a terrorist’s nuclear bomb is likely to be much smaller—and more survivable—than a Soviet bomb. And according to the New York Times this week, new science show that we are much more likely to survive any kind of nuclear attack if we immediately take cover from the radiation:

“Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.”

For those working to improve preparedness, it’s less about the facts themselves than how to disseminate the information to a public generally fatalistic about the phrase “nuclear attack.” FEMA head Craig Fugate said as much in an interview with the Times:

“We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about[...]”

Though getting past that “mental block” is probably easier said than done (just check out this year’s failed attempt at the nation’s first live exercise simulating a nuclear bomb detonation), the New York Times and FEMA should be celebrated for even broaching such a subject with the American people.  Yes, the thought of a nuclear attack is scary and full of the unknown, but it’s time to start acting like grown-ups. The threat of nuclear attack, albeit small, is real.  We know you can survive. Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew how?

Unfortunately if you’re looking for clear, straightforward survival steps right now, there’s not much out there. The Citizen Corps site has a “Planning for a Nuclear Detonation” fact sheet of sorts, but it’s dense and lacks practical steps. It does seem clear that staying inside—even for a few hours and preferably in a basement—is a much better idea than trying to evacuate. Hopefully Fugate will work on getting us better guidance than that. For now, there’s this: an ‘06 tongue-in-cheek Slate piece about surviving a nuclear bomb (“Here’s the worst part: You will survive.”)

The New York Times has a troubling story on the front page about an experiment on homeless people. But what’s troubling is not the experiment, from what I can tell; it’s the newspaper’s fear-based spin on the story.

So here’s the situation: New York City is conducting a test to see if an expensive program to prevent homelessness actually…prevents homelessness. This is radical and admirable—because it almost never happens. We waste billions of dollars in education, welfare and other spending in this country because we don’t test programs in a careful, rigorous way to see if they work.

I’ve written about another such experiment in Time (one designed to test whether paying students led to more learning in schools), and what I learned is that these studies reveal how very differently humans behave from what we often expect.

Randomized studies are integral to any ethical social program. Because the only way to really know if an intervention is working, as medical researchers have understood for quite some time, is to randomly assign a group of people who will get the intervention—and a group of people who will not.

But you have to do it carefully! You don’t want to do harm to the people who don’t get the service. But this is not new ground. We know how to do this. We do it every day in other fields. And in fact, in this case, it seems the experiment was designed according to standard, humane practices. The study will monitor 400 households that sought help from the city this summer because they were behind on rent and in danger of being evicted. Two hundred families received the services of a program called Homebase, which offers job training, counseling services and, in some cases, emergency money to help people stay put. The other 200 families were given the names of other agencies that also help people in need.

The research firm, Abt Associates, approved the study as ethical because Homebase’s services were not already available to everyone to begin with, due to limited funds—and because the control group still had access to other, alternative services.

But the important question is, which is more unethical? Denying one specific service to some families to see if a program works? Or continuing to spend—and more importantly cut—money without any meaningful test of whether it works? The city, as the article notes much, much later, had to cut $20 million from its Homeless Services budget last month. And federal stimulus money (which went towards the $23 million bill for Homebase) will end in July of 2012. So cuts must happen. Shouldn’t they happen ethically?

Between recessions, war and regular life, it’s been a vivid 12 months. We probably all know someone who has lived through some kind of ordeal or another. So if you’re looking for a Christmas gift for someone who is in search of peace this year, I want to recommend a new book called, Your Life on Purpose.

This book was written by three authors, each of whom had recently experienced some kind of personal crisis—and all of whom happen to know an exceptional amount about anxiety and the mind. One of the authors is John Forsyth, a psychologist and professor whom I have interviewed several times over the years. First, for The Unthinkable, he helped me understand the freezing response to a life-or-death situation, which he has studied in rape victims. For Time Magazine, he helped me understand how the brain responds to financial uncertainty. His new book broadens some of that wisdom down into a kind of pocket manual for living.

In general, I am not a big fan of self-help books, but this book is different. I don’t think anyone has ever made as much sense out of the conflicts embedded in the human condition in as few words. The main idea is that pain and fear are necessary experiences if we are to build lives we care about. It is a surprisingly freeing notion, and I find myself thinking of it often. Then the book tackles the next natural question: what do we care most about? It helps us answer this question for ourselves—and turn intentions into action, step by careful step.

I just bought 4 off of Amazon. My congratulations to John and his co-authors, Matthew McKay and Georg Eifert.