Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

For me, doing this TIME story on DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was a revelation. I knew our schools were troubled, but I hadn’t realized the compounded effects of all that mediocrity. I hadn’t known that a child who has three bad teachers for three years in a row really never recovers. I had not realized that the difference in test scores between white and minority kids goes away—totally vanishes—if they both have effective teachers for a few years.

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.

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.