Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I just wrote a review of a strange and compelling book that I want to tell you about. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, is by Rebecca Solnit, an author and essayist.

The book chronicles five disasters—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. But instead of rehashing the old stories of suffering and redemption, Solnit focuses on the ways many people seemed to thrive in some ways in the midst of all that loss. It is a rarely discussed truth about disasters—they provide a sort of clarity and community that is lacking in normal times. And Solnit makes the point that if we are too become a more resilient society, we need to understand the “joy” of disasters as much as we understand the pain.

I found the book to be thoughtful and smart—right up to the point when Solnit lectures us on the media and the rest of the “elites” who perpetuate disaster myths. I am not one to defend the media coverage of disasters, as is evidenced throughout this blog, but I found her condemnations to be more preachy than productive. We have to understand why reporters mischaracterize disasters if we hope to do better; righteous indignation is satisfying, but it doesn’t get us anywhere at this point.

That said, the book is a provocative exploration of the dark chasm between disasters as we expect them to be and as they are. The review came out today in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and you can download the full review at no charge here here.

I’ve been doing some TV interviews about this week’s TIME cover story on paying kids to learn in school. People keep asking me: “What will happen as a result of these findings?” If we know that paying kids to perform in school can work if it’s done right (and studied carefully), are more schools going to do it?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a no brainer—especially since this kind of program costs literally 1/10th of what other reforms with similar results cost. But the truth is, I really don’t know what will happen. We know that DC is continuing its program, as is Dallas, which is fantastic. And New York and Chicago continue to experiment with various kinds of incentives. But we don’t know if this research will translate into policy everywhere. And why don’t we know?

Because not everyone has the courage of Joel Klein, New York City’s Schools Chancellor. Klein let Harvard economist Roland Fryer into his school system three years ago to test what would happen if you paid kids to get good test scores. This is a big deal. It was controversial and no one knew if it would work. Using private funds, Fryer paid more than 8,000 kids some $1.5 million in New York, with Klein’s support.

As it turns out, the New York City model did not work—at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. The kids enjoyed the money, and they weren’t harmed in any way. But their standardized test scores and grades did not go up compared to kids who did not get paid.

But, and this is key: some of the other models (particularly in Dallas) did work. So Klein and the NYC schools took a risk so that the rest of the country could learn. The question is, will they? “You want to look at these things and expand those that are successful and certainly try to figure out why certain things didn’t work,” Klein told me. “What you don’t want to do is to resist all innovation on the theory that some of it might not work.”

In education, big policy decisions almost never get made according to evidence. Then again, there almost never is evidence. Now we have some. I look forward to seeing what happens.

I have a story in today’s TIME Magazine about what happens when you pay kids to work hard in school. I got interested in this because, most of the time, schools operate in the dark—through trial and error, hunches and theories, year after year. The practices and assumptions have never been tested in a rigorous way. So I was intrigued to learn about this latest project of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is dedicated to the radical notion of doing education research using the scientific method.

Fryer thought it would be interesting to see if paying kids cash money could help them perform better in school. So he and his team launched a massive, randomized experiment in Chicago, Dallas, DC and NYC to test the idea. They paid out $6.3 million in largely private money to 18,000 kids. They also tracked control groups whom they did not pay. The program generated a massive amount of buzz, but until now, no one knew if it was working.

Fryer agreed to share his results with me for the story. (His full academic paper, released just after the story came out, is here. Warning: PDF.) Almost as fascinating as the findings is his story of launching the experiment itself. You’d think he was trying to pay kids to lie, cheat and steal—not to learn. A wild tale.

But the best part was hanging out in the classrooms, talking to the kids about the experiment from the inside. They totally get it. They know that many of their teachers don’t approve of them being paid for coming to class; they know that their parents are skeptical; they know it won’t help some kids. And they totally dig it. They. Love. It. They want to earn more. The real problem is, as the story explains, they don’t always know how.

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An op-ed in today’s New York Times offers a nice reminder that girls are not in fact becoming more violent. They are becoming less so, despite the occasional horror story.

“We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and violent injuries by and toward girls have been plunging for at least a decade.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, based on reports from more than 10,000 police agencies, is the most reliable source on arrests by sex and age. From 1995 to 2008, according to the F.B.I., girls’ arrest rates for violent offenses fell by 32 percent, including declines of 27 percent for aggravated assault, 43 percent for robbery and 63 percent for murder. Rates of murder by girls are at their lowest levels in at least 40 years.”

The recent spate of suicides at Cornell University reminds me of how little we understand suicide—despite how common it is.

As a student at Cornell, back in the day, I remember it as a fabulous place to be if you were feeling good—and a terrible place to be when you were sad. The winters last most of the year. The school is isolated from the rest of civilization. And worst of all, it seemed like you were always walking uphill. I don’t know how that is possible, but it definitely felt that way.

Then there were the gorges. Glorious cuts into the earth, dramatic and, to me anyway, proof of life—not death. When I got stressed out, I used to put on my Walkman (oh yes!) and go running down the slick stone boulders lining the gorge, jumping from one to the next, racing the booming rush of water.

It’s worth noting that Cornell’s suicide rate has not historically been higher than other university rates. But it is also true that way more people kill themselves (everywhere) than most of us realize. For a very thoughtful read on the mystery of suicide—and whether gorges, bridges and other dramatic scenery can in fact tempt people to kill themselves—it’s worth looking back at this 2008 New York Times Magazine story.

“[I]f the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance. But is it?”

In the piece, writer Scott Anderson describes a fascinating study conducted in San Francisco. Researcher Richard Seiden got a police list of the 515 people who had been thwarted while trying to kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of three decades. Then he investigated what had happened to these poor souls:

“His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.”