Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I gave a speech at the State Department yesterday, and as always happens at these things, I came away much the wiser. In fact, I am starting to think that the main reason to do these speeches is the selfish one: because at the end, I just stand there sipping from a bottle of water and people walk up to tell me wondrous, strange, fascinating stories.

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.

Once again, California is proving itself way ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to disaster resilience. Check out my Time.com story on the Great Shakeout here.

Exciting news! The Unthinkable has been chosen by Hudson Booksellers as one of the best books published in 2008.

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.

I spent some time yesterday watching images of the country’s response to Obama’s victory. I thought I’d share some of the best videos here.

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:

Thanks for the comment, Valerie. I should have mentioned this in the story. You’re right, early voting has really revolutionized everything, and I think the day is coming when we will all vote early.

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 was planning to refuse to read any exit-poll data tonight, since they are always wrong. Then I got assigned to write about them.

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

OK, I spent the past week looking behind the voting booth curtain, and it was scary. I had no idea just how much we rely on chance, faith and volunteers to get an election done in this country. Incredible. I have new respect for poll workers. I have new doubts about the result in a close race. I haven’t seen anything this homespun since I went to Amish country. And it’s significantly less charming when your vote is in the balance.

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.