My organization, American Renaissance, has been studying race and crime ever since 1990. We published our first report called “The Color of Crime” in 1999, and updated it in 2005 and 2016.
I am therefore very happy to find that an amateur researcher, working in his spare time, has looked even deeper than we ever did into the racial aspects of the most serious crime of all: murder. This person, whose name I don’t even know, tweets under the name of datahazard.
He also has a Substack that, as you can see, is about “advocacy and analyses on underreported & unpopular topics.”
On the chilly morning of March 27, 1968, the low gray sky of the Kirzhach area of Russia’s Vladimir Region was pierced by the roar of an engine. A two-seat jet fighter plummeted through the rainy clouds, cutting off the tops of trees and disintegrating in flight before hitting the ground at great speed. An explosion followed. A piece of a flight jacket was left hanging on a birch tree. In the pocket was an unused breakfast ticket: With the name “Gagarin Yu. A.”
Arguably, the most famous person on the planet had died – an internationally recognized hero, the idol of Soviet youth, the first person in space. The results of an interdepartmental investigation of the crash were collected in 29 volumes, and its final verdict was classified by the authorities. How did Yuri Gagarin die?
Maiden flight
In his biography, the legendary cosmonaut has been portrayed as the boy next door – the third child of a carpenter and a dairymaid from a small central Russian town. During the Second World War, he and his family lived under Nazi occupation. His parents did not collaborate with Adolf Hitler’s men, nor did they engage in partisan activities – they merely survived.
After the war, Yuri moved to Moscow – after finishing sixth grade – and entered a vocational school. He began learning the mold maker’s trade and joined the Komsomol youth organization. Having mastered a basic profession, Gagarin entered the industrial college of Saratov, where he became known for his athletic abilities and character.
Soon, the future pilot took an interest in aviation, an area which enjoyed great popularity in the USSR, as the Kremlin leader Joseph Stalin placed great emphasis on its development. Gagarin joined the aeroclub of the DOSAAF Soviet defense and sports organization. This undertaking presented no problem for the excellent student and Komsomol member, who made his first independent flight at the age of 21 on a Yak-18 training aircraft. In total, Yuri completed 196 flights in the aero club and flew 42 hours and 23 minutes.
That same year, Gagarin was drafted into the army, where he was assigned to an aviation school and even appointed assistant platoon commander. He was an excellent student in almost all piloting disciplines – only landing was a problem. This was typical for short pilots – due to his stature, the viewing angle was impaired. As a result, Gagarin tended to slam the plane on the runway. To solve this issue, he put a thick cushion on his seat so he could see the front of the aircraft better. He graduated with an ‘excellent’ mark in the fall of 1957 and was sent to serve in the Northern Fleet, where he flew a MiG-15 fighter.
As an excellent student of combat with sound physical and political training, he was soon chosen for the first cosmonaut squad of 20 people, created in April 1960.
Psychologists noted his lively, proactive character:
“He loves events with lots of action, where heroism, the will to win, and the spirit of competition prevails. In sports, he takes the role of initiator – the leader and captain of the team. As a rule, his will to win, endurance, determination, and understanding of his team play a role here. His favorite word is ‘work’. He makes sensible suggestions at meetings. He is always self-assured and confident in his abilities.”
But this didn’t matter much to the Soviet space program, which was in a race with the US, and needed to speed up its development. The R-7 launch vehicle created by designer Sergey Korolev had some well-known flaws.
From the point of view of the designers, the main requirements were that they were fighter aviators accustomed to high G-forces who were no more than 170cm tall, weighed no more than 70 kilograms (to fit into the Vostok capsule), were aged 25-30, physically fit, disciplined, and psychologically stable. There was not much confidence in the last point, so the designers came up with a kind of ‘fuse’. It was thought that the first person in space might panic and try to manually take control of the spacecraft. In anticipation of this, he was given an envelope with a complex mathematical problem – only by coming to his senses and solving it could the cosmonaut take the reins.
In general, the design specialists took a utilitarian approach to selecting cosmonauts. The final decision on would fly to space was made by the head of the Soviet state, Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin. Perhaps it was Gagarin’s ordinariness, his lack of awards and serious track record, that played a decisive role. If Lenin posited that “any cook can run the country,” then Khrushchev held that ‘any mold caster can fly into space.’
Golden boy
It was Khrushchev who made Gagarin a superstar. However, before becoming the most famous person in the world, Yuri had to practically disappear. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, the USSR could not afford even a chance of public failure, so the launch of the rocket on April 12, 1961 was carried out in the strictest secrecy. Yuri’s wife and daughters did not even know about the flight. The farewell letter written to them before the launch would be published many years later, after Gagarin’s actual death.
However, as soon as it became clear that the flight was successful and the cosmonaut had returned alive and well, an almost endless series of celebrations and receptions began. At the landing site, Gagarin was awarded the somewhat ironic ‘For the Development of Virgin Lands’ medal. At the airfield in the city of Engels, he was handed a congratulatory telegram from the Soviet government, and the Air Force command and journalists arrived there a couple of days later.
The voice of TASS, Yuri Levitan, announced to the whole world that the first manned space flight had been piloted by Soviet citizen Gagarin. The cosmonaut personally reported on the successful flight to the highest government officials via a secure line. After that, the he was transported to a government dacha in Kuibyshev on the Volga, and a couple of hours later, designers and program managers headed by Korolev arrived and sat down to celebrate at nine in the evening. This was only the first party for the Soviet officer, who had been a complete unknown in the morning, writing a farewell letter to his wife. It was far from the last.
A day later, the cosmonaut was met in Moscow. Khrushchev personally secured Gagarin’s promotion from senior lieutenant to major from the reluctant defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky. On approach to Moscow, his plane was met by a solemn escort of seven MiG-17 fighters. The flying motorcade passed over the center of the capital and Red Square, and landed at Vnukovo. A red carpet was stretched from the ramp to the podium, along which cheering people, journalists, and cameramen stood. Gagarin walked down the path to Khrushchev with his shoelace untied.
To the cheers of the welcoming crowds, Khrushchev and Gagarin rode in an open limousine to Red Square, where Gagarin was awarded the titles ‘Hero of the USSR’ and ‘Cosmonaut of the USSR’ at a solemn ceremony in the presence of the country’s highest officials. The rally lasted three hours, and another private gathering in the inner halls of the Kremlin went on for another three. A press conference for the foreign press was scheduled for the next day.
Gagarin was given practically no time to recover. He became Khrushchev’s main PR tool in the international arena. Even during the five-day post-flight medical examination, two Pravda newspaper correspondents were assigned to the cosmonaut to write an autobiography, ‘The Road to Space’. On April 28, just two weeks after his legendary flight, he went to Czechoslovakia, from which his world tour began. In May, he was in Bulgaria; in June, Finland; and in July, the UK.
It is noteworthy that Gagarin, a foundry worker by profession, was invited to Britain by the general secretary of the foundry workers’ union. There, he had lunch with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, laid a wreath at Karl Marx’s grave, and had breakfast with the Queen. She even agreed to a joint photo in violation of protocol. Gagarin was no longer an earthly man – he was capable of anything.
He returned to Moscow on July 15, but was already off to Poland on the 20th. After celebrating the 17th anniversary of the liberation of the country from the Nazi invaders and participating in an all-Polish youth rally in Zielona Gora, he returned to Moscow on the evening of the 22nd. At midnight the next day, he was already on his way across the Atlantic, visiting Iceland, Canada, and of course, Cuba, where there was a big celebration and a reception with Fidel Castro. Then, he went on to Curacao, Brazil, and returned by the same route. In August, he was feted in Hungary; in November, in India and Sri Lanka; and in December, in Afghanistan.
This went on for quite a long time: Egypt, Libya, Ghana, Liberia, Greece, Cyprus, Austria, Japan; again Finland, Denmark, and France; again Cuba, Mexico, and East Germany; and in October 1963, he visited the US at the invitation of the UN secretary general. Then Sweden, Norway, and again, France.
Obviously, there were solemn meetings, receptions, rallies, speeches, and breakfasts with monarchs everywhere. In Norway, the cosmonaut went to the sea to fish and visited the Grieg Museum at the request of Norwegian sailors. Gagarin lived according to this crazy regime for almost three years. It was said that he began to drink a bit, his former work routine completely forgotten.
Too Fast, Too Reckless
Finally, Gagarin’s name gradually began to disappear from the front pages of the world media. And for Khrushchev, Gagarin’s biggest international promoter, an uneasy situation began, which ended with his resignation.
The 30-year-old colonel, who was at the peak of his fame, had to integrate back into normal life. In between trips, he attended classes at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. But his main task was to prepare for the next space flight and return to permanent service in fighter aviation.
It was determined that, over the years of his tours, he had lost the qualifications to be a fighter pilot and needed to be retrained. As part of this process, a routine flight took place on March 27, 1968. Yuri was familiar with the plane – a training modification of a MiG-1 with a paired cockpit for an instructor and additional fuel tanks. The instructor was Vladimir Seregin, an experienced test pilot of the 1st class who had received the Hero’s Star for assault sorties during the Great Patriotic War. It was assumed that, in the event of an emergency, control of the aircraft would pass to him. One peculiarity about the training MiG-15 was that the instructor himself had to eject before the pilot could.
The weather was unpleasant, but it was acceptable for a simple flight task – low clouds with a couple of kilometers of clearance above, and then thick clouds again. Gagarin and Seregin’s plane took off at the Chkalovsky airfield at 10:18 in the morning. The task should have taken about 20 minutes, but at 10:30, Gagarin reported its successful completion and requested permission to turn around and return to base. The plane was not heard from again.
The search for the wreckage took quite a long time. The crash site was finally found at 2:50pm about 65 kilometers from the airfield, 18 kilometers from the city of Kirzhach in Vladimir Region. The State Commission started working the next day.
The shocking death of the first man in space, the large-scale investigation, and the secrecy of its results sparked numerous rumors about the causes of the disaster. Some believed that the all-powerful KGB had decided to remove the popular figure. Others speculated about a UFO encounter. Another story was that Gagarin and Seregin had died a few days earlier during the completion of the L-1 lunar flyby program. And, of course, there was the inevitable conjecture that the pilot and the instructor had taken a glass of vodka before departure.
More reasonable theories envision the dangerous approach of another aircraft performing training tasks in the same area, which caused the plane to fall into a tailspin in its wake. The idea that the cabin had depressurized due to a collision with a weather balloon was also put forth.
The most logical theory still seems to be that the crash was due to a piloting error and bad weather data. Having had many calm, routine flights, Gagarin completed the task in a band of acceptable cloud cover twice as fast as he should have, reported to the ground that he was returning, and dove down through a solid cloud bank. According to his and Seregin’s calculations, they should have emerged from the clouds and seen the horizon at an altitude of about 900 meters, but the clouds had fallen lower. When the pilots finally saw the ground, there was no time to pull out of the dive at such speed with so much momentum, although both officers fought until the last moment to level the plane.
The self-confidence of an impatient ace, who had grown accustomed to celebrations, balls, and his own exceptionalness, compounded by rapidly changing weather conditions, most likely caused the tragic accident. The banality of this version also explains its secrecy. The Soviets could not put the first man in space and then have been seen to so stupidly fail to protect him. It was better to let rumors circulate among the people than allow the whole world to find out about the simple mistakes made in the preparation and execution of routine training flights. Gagarin and Seregin were cremated the day after their deaths. Their ashes were placed in the necropolis of the Kremlin Wall.
The origin story of comic books isn’t flashy. No radioactive spider bite, atomic explosion, or shadowy experiment granted the medium the sort of ability that would have allowed it to arrive on early-20th-century drugstore racks as glossy, fully formed vehicles for sophisticated entertainment. Rather, it took a steady progression over the course of more than 75 years for the form to fully understand, and then harness, its powers. When the first comics arrived on newsstands in the early 1930s, they were a cynical attempt to put old wine in new bottles by reprinting popular newspaper comic strips. Cheaply printed and barely edited, those pamphlets were not what a critic at the time would have called high art.
Yet today, the medium is flourishing in ways its ancestors could never have imagined. From floppy single issues of superhero sagas to hefty graphic novels, harrowing comic-book memoirs to YA fare about queer adventurers, readers can tap into a dizzying array of what the great cartoonist Will Eisner famously termed “sequential art.” And, as evidenced by the sheer number of adaptations in film, television, and even on the Broadway stage, the rest of the entertainment industry has grown wise to what fans have long known: There’s a special alchemy that comes when you tell a story with pictures.
Printed images — and the comic book medium’s unique presentation of them — are at the heart of this feature. We have set out to trace the evolution of American comics by looking at 100 pages that altered the course of the field’s history. We chose to focus on individual pages rather than complete works, single panels, or specific narrative moments because the page is the fundamental unit of a comic book. It is where multiple images can allow your eye to play around in time and space simultaneously, or where a single, full-page image can instantly sear itself into your brain. If there are words, they become elements of the image itself, thanks to the carefully chosen economy of the writer and the thoughtful graphic design of the letterer. In the best pages, one is torn between staring endlessly at what’s in front of you or excitedly turning to the next one to see where the story is going. When comics have moved in new directions, the pivot points come in a page.
To assemble our list of 100, we assembled a brain trust of comics professionals, critics, historians, and journalists. Our criteria were as follows: A page had to have either changed the way creators approach making comics, or it had to expertly distill a change that had just begun. In some cases, there were multiple pages that could be used to represent a particular innovation; we’ve noted those instances. We didn’t necessarily pick the 100 best pages — there are many amazing specimens we didn’t include because they didn’t have a significant influence on the craft of comics. These are also not the only 100 pages that have shaped comic books, but each, in its own way, has had a profound impact on the form as we know it. And, this being comics, we had to get a little nitpicky: We’re only dealing with comics first published by North American publishing houses, and we’re not including newspaper comic strips, webcomics, or reprints thereof.
In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to banspeakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?
Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions isacurefor depression.
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.
After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.
Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT. Subscribe
The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction
In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)
I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.
Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.
Figure 1. Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.
In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression.
Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).
Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).
The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,
Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.
The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:
Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.
After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”
Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”
Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:
It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control:
Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”
Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”
And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem?
Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”
Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014:
I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.
I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.
There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys)
. Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls.
But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty.
But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based.
Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.”
From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.
When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s.
Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.
It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.)
We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.)
Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external.
We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:
Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).
Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree).
In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z. Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.
But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?
Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs
I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.
Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagel (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:
There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity.
Nagel described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.
I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis.
In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.
I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previousposts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible:
1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students
As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversitytraining to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are somefindings that theybackfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.
One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit” can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.
2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18
What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights, and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:
Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.
We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It’s time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.
It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post.
In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.Subscribe
The four items are: Life often seems meaningless. The future often seems hopeless. I enjoy life as much as anyone. (reverse coded). It feels good to be alive. (reverse coded). Response options: 1 (Disagree) to 5 (Agree)
Thanks to David Stein for flagging that the percent rates for “Whenever I Get Ahead, Something or Someone Stops Me” were inconsistent between figures 3 and 4. In Jean’s graph (Figure 3), she included the percentage of respondents who don’t disagree with the statement(i.e., those who answered “neutral,” “mostly agree” or “agree,”) while Zach (Figure 4) only included respondents who answered, “agree.”
The Monitoring the Future study is administered each year, but in all of Zach’s graphs, he merged pairs of years, to increase the sample size and stability of trends as we divided up participants by gender and politics.
The four items are all from the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale. Gimbrone et al. took four of the 6 negative (self-critical) items, in their search for items to measure internalizing symptoms. They report that this four-item self-derogation scale has a reliability of alpha = .87.
The world is currently grappling with a mental health crisis, with millions of people reporting depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. According to recent estimates, nearly half of all Australians will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lifetime.
Mental health disorders come at great cost to both the individual and society, with depression and anxiety being among the leading causes of health-related disease burden. The COVID pandemic is exacerbating the situation, with a significant rise in rates of psychological distress affecting one third of people.
While traditional treatments such as therapy and medication can be effective, our new research highlights the importance of exercise in managing these conditions.
Our recent study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reviewed more than 1,000 research trials examining the effects of physical activity on depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. It showed exercise is an effective way to treat mental health issues – and can be even more effective than medication or counselling.
Harder, faster, stronger
We reviewed 97 review papers, which involved 1,039 trials and 128,119 participants. We found doing 150 minutes each week of various types of physical activity (such as brisk walking, lifting weights and yoga) significantly reduces depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, compared to usual care (such as medications).
The largest improvements (as self-reported by the participants) were seen in people with depression, HIV, kidney disease, in pregnant and postpartum women, and in healthy individuals, though clear benefits were seen for all populations.
We found the higher the intensity of exercise, the more beneficial it is. For example, walking at a brisk pace, instead of walking at usual pace. And exercising for six to 12 weeks has the greatest benefits, rather than shorter periods. Longer-term exercise is important for maintaining mental health improvements.
How much more effective?
When comparing the size of the benefits of exercise to other common treatments for mental health conditions from previous systematic reviews, our findings suggest exercise is around 1.5 times more effective than either medication or cognitive behaviour therapy.
Furthermore, exercise has additional benefits compared to medications, such as reduced cost, fewer side effects and offering bonus gains for physical health, such as healthier body weight, improved cardiovascular and bone health, and cognitive benefits.
Why it works
Exercise is believed to impact mental health through multiple pathways, and with short and long-term effects. Immediately after exercise, endorphins and dopamine are released in the brain.
In the short term, this helps boost mood and buffer stress. Long term, the release of neurotransmitters in response to exercise promotes changes in the brain that help with mood and cognition, decrease inflammation, and boost immune function, which all influence our brain function and mental health.
Regular exercise can lead to improved sleep, which plays a critical role in depression and anxiety. It also has psychological benefits, such as increased self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment, all of which are beneficial for people struggling with depression.
Not such an ‘alternative’ treatment
The findings underscore the crucial role of exercise for managing depression, anxiety and psychological distress.
Some clinical guidelines already acknowledge the role of exercise – for example, the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Guidelines, suggest medication, psychotherapy and lifestyle changes such as exercise.
However, other leading bodies, such as the American Psychological Association Clinical Practice Guidelines, emphasise medication and psychotherapy alone, and list exercise as an “alternative” treatment – in the same category as treatments such as acupuncture. While the label “alternative” can mean many things when it comes to treatment, it tends to suggest it sits outside conventional medicine, or does not have a clear evidence base. Neither of these things are true in the case of exercise for mental health.
Even in Australia, medication and psychotherapy tend to be more commonly prescribed than exercise. This may be because exercise is hard to prescribe and monitor in clinical settings. And patients may be resistant because they feel low in energy or motivation.
But don’t ‘go it alone’
It is important to note that while exercise can be an effective tool for managing mental health conditions, people with a mental health condition should work with a health professional to develop a comprehensive treatment plan – rather than going it alone with a new exercise regime.
A treatment plan may include a combination of lifestyle approaches, such as exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, and socialising, alongside treatments such as psychotherapy and medication.
But exercise shouldn’t be viewed as a “nice to have” option. It is a powerful and accessible tool for managing mental health conditions – and the best part is, it’s free and comes with plenty of additional health benefits.
Nothing is more American than Abstract Expressionism: its style embodies freedom and personal expression. What better way than this for the CIA to combat the rigid style of Socialist Realism?
Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin by Aleksandr Gerasimov, 1938; with Young Nelson Rockefeller admiring a painting to be hung in the new building of MoMA, 1939
Although differing art perspectives were simply one ideological aspect of the Cold War, they were very important in influencing Western Europe’s intelligentsia and inspiring cultural rebellions behind the Iron Curtain. However, the spread of Abstract Expressionism and its incredibly fast rise to prominence on the global art scene could not have happened naturally. The CIA played a key role in spreading both the style and its ideology worldwide to combat the opposing style of Socialist Realism and, by extension, communist culture at large.
Socialist Realism: The Antithesis To Abstract Expressionism
Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin by Aleksandr Gerasimov, 1938, in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
When comparing the two styles, it is quite evident that they could not be more different from one another. While Abstract Expressionism promotes the concept of creating art solely for the sake of art, Socialist Realism focuses on creating easy-to-understand messages for the masses.
Socialist Realism is just what it sounds like: the artist must draw and paint figures from life in a highly accurate way. An excellent example of this is Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938) by Aleksandr Gerasimov. Ironically, as can be seen in Gerasimov’s painting, Soviet leaders tend to be depicted as almost God-like, which is unexpected for a collectivist society to encourage the veneration of an individual.
Unlike most art movements, Socialist Realism was imposed from above rather than informally spreading through society. The Soviet Union led a fierce campaign in favor of the Socialist Realism movement because it embodied the utilitarian and working-class ideals of communism.
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The shift to total control of all aspects of culture came with the rise of Joseph Stalin in 1924. Beforehand, avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Constructivism, and Suprematism were tolerated and even encouraged by the Soviet government. This freedom simply reflected the lack of attention the government gave to cultural matters at the onset of the USSR.
Stalin believed that art must serve a functional purpose. For him, this meant positive images of the daily life of the proletariat in communist Russia. In 1934, Socialist Realism officially became the state-sanctioned and only acceptable art form in the USSR. However, the movement was largely confined to communist countries where the government regulated art and did not catch on further abroad.
Before the 1950s, the United States was considered to be a provincial backwater of the art world. However, due to the devastation caused by World War II, many artists fled to the US. It was these émigrés’ progressive creativity, along with American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who then developed Abstract Expressionism. What makes the movement so distinct is that its rise to international prominence coincides with the US becoming the most powerful country in the post-war era.
Abstract Expressionist art can be defined by a few broad characteristics: all forms are abstract, they cannot be found in the visible world, and the works represent a free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression. However, it is also considered to be “high” art because some degree of background knowledge is necessary to fully appreciate the work. This renders it less accessible to the masses, unlike that of Socialist Realism.
The main difference between the movements is, while Socialist Realist works are steeped with political propaganda, Abstract Expressionist pieces are completely devoid of any political message. The forms depicted do not represent anything but the strokes of paint on canvas or the twisting of metal into a shape. The viewer separates the life of the artist from his or her work and can let the piece stand alone, independent from its creator. The value of abstract art is intrinsic unto itself, and its purpose is solely aesthetic. It does not aim to teach lessons or promote an ideology. Abstract Expressionist artists reduce their forms down to the most basic building blocks of their medium: paint and the canvas.
Oddly enough, the CIA even had to circumvent the US government to promote the spread of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Many conservative politicians condemned the movement as being too avant-garde, un-American, and, ironically, even communist. In 1947, the State Department withdrew a touring exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art” because they thought the styles exhibited reflected badly on American society. In addition to canceling, Congress also issued a directive ordering that no American artist with a communist background could be exhibited at the government’s expense.
The politicians condemning the movement were not entirely crazy. Although Abstract Expressionism embodies the fundamental values of American freedom of expression, a majority of the movement’s artists actually had ties to communism. Many of the artists began their careers working for the Federal Arts Project during the Great Depression; in other words, working to produce subsidized art for the government. More specifically, in the 1930s, Jackson Pollock worked in the studio of muralist and staunch communist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Additionally, the expressionist artists Adolph Gottlieb and William Baziotes were known communist activists.
However, the innate quality of Abstract Expressionist art involves a complete lack of representation of political values. The CIA must have realized that the movement, removed from the personal lives of its artists, was the perfect antidote to Socialist Realism. They then pushed forward in making it the artistic face of American ideologies.
Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization covertly run by the CIA under the Long-Leash program, they were able to secretly fund over 20 anti-communist magazines, hold art exhibitions, organize international conferences, and run a news service. The goal was to ensure that European intelligentsia came to associate American culture with modernity and cosmopolitanism. However, this organization was not the only avenue used to participate in the cultural cold war.
In order to advance its objectives, the CIA also turned to the private sector. The majority of American museums are privately owned, which made it easier for the CIA to work around the government. Honing in on the Museum of Modern Art, the CIA established connections with many of its board members. The most telling link between the museum and the CIA was its president.
At the time, the president of MoMA was Nelson Rockefeller. He was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a think-tank sub-contracted by the government to study foreign affairs. Through this think tank, the CIA gave MoMA a five-year grant of $125,000 to fund the museum’s International Program, which was responsible for loaning its collections to European institutions. By 1956, MoMA had organized 33 international exhibitions devoted to Abstract Expressionism, all funded by the grant. At one point, MoMA loaned out so many pieces that people complained of an empty museum.
Long-Term Effects Of Abstract Expressionism During The Cold War
The Cold War was very ideologically charged: it was a battle between opposing political systems. It is therefore only natural that the spread of culture played such an important role. The CIA employed the most effective sort of propaganda, the sort which influences the minds of people without them realizing it. Eventually, their covert methods made Abstract Expressionism so popular that it became quite difficult for an artist to find success working in any other style.
The CIA’s tactics soon paid off. By popularizing the movement in the United States and Western Europe, Abstract Expressionism slowly made its way behind the Iron Curtain. Artists from Eastern Europe would visit exhibitions in other countries and then return home enlightened by what they saw. In 1956, the Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor saw one of the many CIA-funded exhibitions sent to Paris. He was deeply impacted by the show and returned to Kraków determined to move the artistic climate towards abstraction. This was seen as an act of rebellion, as Kantor moved decidedly away from the state-mandated style of Socialist Realism. Five years later, he and 14 other Polish artists were given an exhibition at MoMA entitled “Fifteen Polish Painters.”
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, there is no denying that the influence of Abstract Expressionism had a profound impact on the cultural outcomes. Not only was abstract art widely received in the West, but Eastern European countries also recognized the movement as the perfect antidote to state-sanctioned socialist art. Artists behind the Iron Curtain began to embrace the movement as a revolutionary expression of freedom. Thus, the once apolitical style of Abstract Expressionism became an act of rebellion.
Throughout the Russian Revolution, painters documented the radical events happening around them. They also created jarring propaganda that told more about reality than official records.
What is a revolution? The simplest answer would be a forceful change of a political regime. Every revolution in history represents a violent political shift. Even if a revolution ultimately fails, it is sure to leave a legacy that shakes the world long after all cannon fire is silenced, and all rebels are gone. As a significant event that alters the lives of millions, a revolution cannot help but become a part of art. The Russian Revolution is no exception.
te. It sparked a series of events that reshaped the world and had long-lasting implications that rippled across continents. Constructivism and avant-garde art flourished only to be replaced by Socialist Realism, which would eventually become a language of art as much as an ideological weapon. However, the Russian Revolution remains what it is – a polarizing event that instigated many different art forms.
By Ana-Teodora KurkinaMA & PhD in HistoryAna is a social historian who holds a PhD in history from LMU Munich and UR Regensburg. She earned her second MA from Central European University, Budapest and her first MA from MSU, Moscow. When she is not writing about art and propaganda, she plays strategic boardgames. Her professional interests revolve around Eastern Europe.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1974 spy novel by British author John le Carré. It follows the endeavours of taciturn, aging spymasterGeorge Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. The novel has received critical acclaim for its complex social commentary—and, at the time, relevance, following the defection of Kim Philby. The novel has been adapted into both a television series and a film, and remains a staple of the spy fiction genre.[2][3]
When Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was published in 1974, revelations exposing the presence of Soviet double agents in Britain were still fresh in public memory. Guy Burgess, Donald Duart Maclean, and Kim Philby, later known as members of the Cambridge Five, had been exposed as KGB spies. The five had risen to very senior positions in branches of the British government. The book, based on the premise of uncovering a Soviet double agent in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), offers a novelisation of this period.[5] It is also set against a theme of decline in British influence on the world stage after the Second World War, with the USSR and the USA emerging as the dominant superpowers during the Cold War.[5]
David Cornwell, who wrote under the pseudonym John le Carré, worked as an intelligence officer for MI5 and MI6 (SIS) in the 1950s and early 1960s.[6] Senior SIS officer Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR in 1963, and the consequent compromising of British agents, was a factor in the 1964 termination of Cornwell’s intelligence career.[7][8] In the novel, the character of Bill Haydon, with his easy charm and strong social connections, bears a close resemblance to Philby.[6]
The title alludes to the nursery rhyme and counting game Tinker Tailor.
Series
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977 and Smiley’s People in 1979. The three novels together make up the “Karla Trilogy”, named after Smiley’s long-time opponent Karla, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence. These were later published as an omnibus edition titled The Quest for Karla in 1982.
As the tension of the Cold War is peaking in 1973, George Smiley, former senior official in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (known as “the Circus” because its London office is at Cambridge Circus), is living unhappily in forced retirement, following the failure of an operation codenamed Testify in Czechoslovakia which ended in the capture and torture of agent Jim Prideaux. Control, chief of the Circus, had suspected that one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus was a Soviet mole, and had assigned them code names for Prideaux to relay back to the Circus, derived from the English children’s rhyme “Tinker, Tailor“:
Guillam unexpectedly approaches Smiley and takes him to the house of Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon, the Civil Servant who oversees the Circus. There they meet Ricki Tarr, an agent recently declared persona non grata due to suspicion of having defected. Tarr defends himself by explaining that he was informed of a Soviet mole, codenamed Gerald, at the Circus’ highest level whilst in Hong Kong by Irina, the wife of a trade delegate. Irina claimed that the mole Gerald reports to a Soviet official stationed at the embassy in London called Polyakov. Shortly after Tarr relayed this to the Circus Irina was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union, leading Tarr to suspect that the mole was real, and now knew his identity. Tarr went into hiding, resurfacing to contact Guillam.
Lacon reasons that neither Smiley nor Guillam can be the mole, due to their respective dismissal and demotion, and so requests that Smiley investigate the presence of the mole in total secrecy to avoid another PR scandal for both the Government and the Circus. Smiley cautiously agrees, and forms a team consisting of himself, Guillam, Tarr, and retired Scotland Yard Inspector Mendel. Smiley is also given access to Circus documents, and begins by examining Alleline’s restructuring, discovering the ousting of Jerry Westerby and Connie Sachs, as well as slush fund payments to Jim Prideaux.
Smiley begins the hunt
Smiley visits Sachs, discovering that she confronted Alleline about her discovery that Polyakov was actually a Soviet Colonel called Gregor Viktorov, but he ordered her to drop the subject. She also mentions rumours of a secret Soviet facility for training moles, and makes allusions to Prideaux and Bill Haydon’s relationship being more than just platonic friendship.
Smiley examines Operation Witchcraft, an operation in which Soviet intelligence was obtained through a key source known as “Merlin”, which was treated with suspicion by both Smiley and Control. Alleline obtained ministerial support to circumvent Control’s authority, and his post-Testify promotion supporters Haydon, Esterhase, and Bland have sponsored it. Smiley also learns that this “Magic Circle” has obtained a safe house somewhere in London where they obtain information from a Merlin emissary posted in London under a diplomatic cover, whom Smiley concludes is Polyakov himself.
Smiley suspects that the Circus does not realise the flow of information is going the other way, with the mole Gerald passing important British secrets (“gold dust”) in return for low-grade Soviet material (“chicken feed”), which would make “Witchcraft” simply a cover for the mole.
Karla
Smiley also discovers that the log from the night Tarr reported in from Hong Kong has been removed, and Guillam starts to suffer from paranoia as a result of their operation. Smiley tells Guillam that he suspects a Soviet intelligence officer named Karla is linked in some way to the operation, and reveals what he knows about him. Karla is believed to have followed his father into espionage, getting his start during the Spanish Civil War posing as a White Russianémigré in the forces of General Francisco Franco, recruiting foreign, mainly German, operatives. After this, the Circus lost track of Karla, but he resurfaced during Operation Barbarossa, directing partisan operations behind German lines. Smiley explains his belief that somewhere in the gap between these two conflicts, Karla travelled to England and recruited Gerald.
Smiley points out that Karla is fiercely loyal to both the Soviet Union and communism, highlighting Karla’s current rank despite his internment in a gulag by the Stalinist regime, and reveals that Karla turned down an offer from Smiley in India to defect, even though his return to the USSR in 1955 was to face a likely execution. During his attempt to obtain Karla’s defection, Smiley plied him to defect with cigarettes and promises that they could get Karla’s family out to the West safely. Smiley suspects that this only revealed his own weakness, his love for his unfaithful wife, Ann. Smiley offered Karla his lighter, a present from Ann, to light a cigarette, but Karla rose and left with it.
Merlin and Testify
Smiley suspects a link between Merlin and the botched Operation Testify. Sam Collins, who was duty officer that night, tells Smiley that Control ordered him to relay the report of the Czech operation only to him, but that when he did so, Control froze up, and that Bill Haydon’s sudden arrival was the only reason the hierarchy didn’t fall apart that night. Smiley then visits Max, a Czech operative who served as a legman for Jim on the operation, who tells Smiley that Prideaux gave him instructions to leave Czechoslovakia any way he could if Jim didn’t surface at the rendezvous at the appointed time. Next, Smiley pays a visit to Jerry Westerby, who tells Smiley of his trip to Prague where he picked up a story about Jim by a young army conscript, who insisted that the Russians were in the woods waiting a full day before the ambush.
Finally, Smiley tracks down Prideaux. Prideaux tells him Control believed there was a mole in the Circus, and had whittled it down to five men, Alleline (Tinker), Haydon (Tailor), Bland (Soldier), Esterhase (Poorman), and Smiley himself (Beggarman), and that his orders were to obtain the identity from a defector in Czech intelligence who knew. He tells Smiley he almost didn’t make the rendezvous with Max because he noticed he was being tailed, and that when he arrived to meet the defector, he was ambushed, taking two bullets to his right shoulder. During his captivity, both Polyakov and Karla interrogated him, focussing solely on the extent and status of Control’s investigation. Prideaux suggests that the Czech defector was a plant, contrived by Karla to engineer Control’s downfall through Testify’s failure, all conceived to protect the mole.
Catching the mole
Smiley confronts Toby Esterhase, stating that he is aware that Esterhase has been posing as a Russian mole, with Polyakov as his handler, in order to provide cover for Merlin’s emissary Polyakov. Smiley compels Esterhase into revealing the location of the safe house, through making him realise that not only is there a real Soviet mole embedded in the SIS, but also that Polyakov has not been “turned” to work in British interest pretending to run the “mole” Esterhase, and in fact remains Karla’s agent. Tarr is sent to Paris, where he passes a coded message to Alleline about “information crucial to the well-being of the Service”. This triggers an emergency meeting between Gerald and Polyakov at the safe house, where Smiley and Guillam are lying in wait.
Haydon is revealed to be the mole, and his interrogation reveals that he had been recruited several decades ago by Karla and became a full-fledged Soviet spy partly for political reasons, partly in frustration at Britain’s rapidly declining influence on the world stage, particularly on account of the failings at Suez. He is expected to be exchanged with the Soviet Union for several of the agents he betrayed, but is killed shortly before he is due to leave England. Although the identity of his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux, due to the method of execution echoing the way he euthanises an injured owl earlier in the book. Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus to deal with the fallout, and is still head at the start of the second book of The Karla Trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy.
Characters
George Smiley: Educated at Oxford, he was a senior officer in the Circus, before being eased out upon Operation Testify’s failure. He is called upon to investigate the presence of a Soviet mole in the Circus.
Sir Percy Alleline: Chief of the Circus following Control’s ousting. Alleline spent his early career in South America, northern Africa and India. He is seen to be vain and overambitious, and is despised by Control. Alleline is knighted in the course of the book in recognition of the quality of the intelligence provided by the source codenamed Merlin. A Lowland Scot, son of a Presbyterian minister, Alleline came to the Circus from a City company.[9]
Roy Bland: Second in command of London Station to Bill Haydon. Recruited by Smiley at Oxford, he was the top specialist in Soviet satellite states and spent several years under cover as a left-wing academic in the Balkans before being instated in the Circus.
Control: Former head of the Circus and now dead. Before the war he was a Cambridgedon.
Toby Esterhase: He is the head of the lamplighters, the section of the Circus responsible for surveillance and wiretapping. Hungarian by birth, Esterhase is an anglophile with pretensions of being a British gentleman. He was recruited by Smiley as “a starving student in Vienna“.
Peter Guillam: He is the head of the scalphunters, the section of the Circus used in operations that require physical action and/or violence, and is based in Brixton. Son of a French businessman and an Englishwoman, he is a longtime associate of Smiley.
Bill Haydon: Commander of London Station, he has worked with the Circus since the war. A polymath, he was recruited at Oxford where he was a close companion of Prideaux. One of Ann Smiley’s cousins, he has an affair with her, and this knowledge subsequently becomes widely known. One of the four who ran the double agent codenamed Merlin.
Oliver Lacon: A Permanent Secretary in Great Britain’s Cabinet Office. Civilian overseer of the Circus. A former Cambridge rowing blue; his father “a dignitary of the Scottish church” and his mother “something noble”.[10]
Mendel: Retired former Inspector in the Special Branch, he assists Smiley during his investigation. Frequently a go-between for Smiley and other members helping him investigate.
Jim Prideaux: His Circus codename was Jim Ellis. Raised abroad partially, he is first identified as a prospective recruit by fellow student Bill Haydon at Oxford. He was shot in Czechoslovakia during the collapse of Operation Testify. Former head of the scalphunters. Now teaches at a boys’ prep school.
Connie Sachs: Former Russia analyst for the Circus, she is forced to retire, and now runs a rooming house in Oxford. Alcoholic, but with an excellent memory. She is said to have been modelled upon Milicent Bagot.
Miles Sercombe: The Government Minister to whom Lacon and the Circus are responsible. A distant cousin of Smiley’s wife, he plays a peripheral role in Smiley’s investigation. Not highly regarded.
Ricki Tarr: A field agent who supplies information that indicates there is a Soviet mole in the Circus. He was trained by Smiley. Works for Guillam as one of the scalphunters.
Jargon
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy employs spy jargon that is presented as the authentic insider-speak of British Intelligence. Le Carré noted that, with the exception of a few terms like mole and legend, this jargon was his own invention.[11] In some cases, terms used in the novel have subsequently entered espionage parlance.[6] For example, the terms mole,[12] implying a long-term spy, and honey trap,[13] implying a ploy in which an attractive person lures another into revealing information, were first introduced in this novel, and have only subsequently entered general usage.
The television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy also uses the term “burrower” for a researcher recruited from a university, a term taken from the novel’s immediate sequel The Honourable Schoolboy.
Moscow Centre
Moscow Centre is a nickname used by John le Carré for the Moscow central headquarters of the KGB, especially those departments concerned with foreign espionage and counterintelligence.[15] It arises from use by Soviet officers themselves, and Le Carré likely just used the nickname to gain greater credibility for his books.
The part of Moscow Centre most often referred to in Le Carré’s novels is the fictional Thirteenth Directorate headed by Karla, the code name for a case officer who has risen and fallen from political favour several times and was at one point “blown” by the British in the 1950s. Karla and George Smiley meet while Karla is in prison in Delhi, with Smiley trying to persuade Karla to defect during an interrogation in which Karla gives nothing away. Karla refuses these advances and eventually returns to favour in the USSR, masterminding the Witchcraft/Source Merlin operations supporting the mole Gerald in the Circus. Karla possesses a cigarette lighter given to Smiley by his wife, which he took during Smiley’s interrogation of him.
Critical response
In a review for The New York Times written upon the novel’s release in 1974, critic Richard Locke called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy “fluently written”, noting that “it is full of vivid character sketches of secret agents and bureaucrats from all levels of British society, and the dialogue catches their voices well.” He praised the novel’s realism, calling the detailing of “the day to day activities of the intelligence service at home and abroad” convincing. He noted that the “scale and complexity of this novel are much greater than in any of Le Carré’s previous books”, while the “characterisation too has become much richer”.[2]
An article published in in-house Central Intelligence Agency journal Studies in Intelligence, presumably written by agents under pseudonyms,[16] called it “one of the most enduring renderings of the profession”.[3] It does question the “organisational compression” involved in the form of a large organisation, which the SIS would be, being reduced to a handful of senior operatives playing operational roles, but admits that this “works very well at moving the story along in print”. However, the idea that a major counter-intelligence operation could be run without the knowledge of counter-intelligence professionals, an allusion to Smiley’s investigation progressing in an undetected manner, is deemed an “intellectual stretch”.[3]
John Powers of NPR has called it the greatest spy story ever told, noting that it “offers the seductive fantasy of entering a secret world, one imagined with alluring richness”.[17] Le Carré himself believed the novel to be among his best works.[7]
In Le Carré’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph it read: “He transformed espionage fiction in the masterworks The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”[18]
Allusions and references
In the book, Sarratt is a Circus facility, containing a training school for British spies and a holding centre for persons undergoing debriefing or interrogation or in quarantine. This is a reference to an actual village near Watford in which Le Carré worked as a teenager in a department store.[6] Other Circus locations mentioned are a converted laundry in Acton from which the Lamplighters section operates, and a disused school in Brixton, home of the Scalphunters section.
A TV adaptation of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was made by the BBC in 1979. It was a seven-part serial and was released in September of that year. The series was directed by John Irvin, produced by Jonathan Powell, and starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley, with Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon. Ricki Tarr was played by Hywel Bennett. In the US, syndicated broadcasts and DVD releases compressed the seven-part UK episodes into six,[19] by shortening scenes and altering the narrative sequence.
Radio
In 1988, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatisation, by Rene Basilico, of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in seven weekly half-hour episodes, produced by John Fawcett-Wilson. It is available as a BBC audiobook in CD and audio cassette formats. Notably, Bernard Hepton portrays George Smiley. Nine years earlier, he had portrayed Toby Esterhase in the television adaptation.
In 2009, BBC Radio 4 also broadcast new dramatisations, by Shaun McKenna, of the eight George Smiley novels by John le Carré, featuring Simon Russell Beale as Smiley. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was broadcast as three one-hour episodes, from Sunday 29 November to Sunday 13 December 2009 in BBC Radio 4’s Classic Serial slot. The producer was Steven Canny.[20] The series was repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra in June and July 2016, and has since been released as a boxed set by the BBC.
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson made a film adaptation in 2011, based on a screenplay by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan. The film was released in the UK and Ireland on 16 September 2011, and in the United States on 9 December 2011. It included a cameo appearance by Le Carré in the Christmas party scene as the older man in the grey suit who stands suddenly to sing the Soviet anthem. The film received numerous Academy Award nominations, including a nomination for Best Actor for Gary Oldman for his role as George Smiley. The film also starred Colin Firth as Bill Haydon, Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam, Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr, and Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux.[21]
^ Jump up to:abc Bradford, Michael; Burridge, James (September 2012). “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: the Movie”. Studies in Intelligence. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency. 56 (3). Archived from the original on 20 January 2013. Retrieved 14 May 2018.
^ Shapiro, Fred R. (30 October 2006). The Yale Book of Quotations (illustrated ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 448. ISBN978-0-300-10798-2. OCLC66527213. Retrieved 13 May 2018. According to the Oxford English Dictionary “it is generally thought that the world of espionage adopted [the term mole] from Le Carré, rather than vice versa.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British agent, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. It serves as a sequel to le Carré’s previous novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, which also featured the fictitious British intelligence organization, “The Circus”, and its agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold portrays Western espionage methods as morally inconsistent with Western democracy and values. The novel received critical acclaim at the time of its publication and became an international best-seller; it was selected as one of the All-Time 100 Novels by Time magazine.[1]
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold occurs during the heightened tensions that characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s Cold War, when a Warsaw Pact–NATO war sparked in Germany seemed likely. The story begins and concludes in Berlin, about a year after the completion of the Berlin Wall and around the time when double-agent Heinz Felfe was exposed and tried.[2]
Le Carré’s debut novel, Call for the Dead, introduced the characters George Smiley and Hans-Dieter Mundt. In that story, Smiley investigates the suicide of Samuel Fennan. He quickly establishes a link between the East German Secret Service and the deceased, and learns that Mundt, an assassin, killed the man after a misunderstanding between Fennan and their controller, Dieter Frey. Mundt escaped from England shortly after, getting back into East Germany before Smiley and Guillam could catch him. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold picks up two years later, where Mundt has had a somewhat meteoric rise to become the head of the Abteilung, because of his success with counter-intelligence operations against British networks, as well as a member of the Presidium of the Socialist Unity Party. Characters and events from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold are reinvestigated in A Legacy of Spies, le Carré’s 2017 novel centering on an aging Guillam.
Alec Leamas, a former SOE operative during World War II who fought in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Norway,[4] is recalled from his posting as Station Head of Berlin Station, West Berlin’s operational branch of the Circus, and returns to London in despair after watching the death of his final undercover operative, Karl Riemeck, a member of the praesidium in East Germany’sSocialist Unity Party, at the hands of Hans-Dieter Mundt. Mundt, formerly a lower level intelligence operative who is known to the Circus for his involvement in the murder of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan a few years earlier, has risen to become the head of the East German Abteilung on account of his brilliant counter-intelligence aptitude, a skill demonstrated with his liquidation of Leamas’ entire network. Finding himself with no operatives left, Leamas visits Circus chief Control and expresses a desire to get out of the intelligence community and “come in from the cold”. Control asks him to instead stay “in the cold” for one last mission: defect to East Germany and frame Mundt as a double agent for SIS. Mundt’s deputy, Jens Fiedler, Control explains, is beginning to believe that Mundt may be a turncoat, and could be a useful target for Leamas in this endeavour. In exchange for this, Leamas will keep anything he makes on the mission, in addition to a pension pot, and will be granted leave to retire from the service.
In order to convince the East Germans’ of Leamas’ potential defection, the Circus demotes Leamas to the finance department, where he starts to exhibit signs of alcoholism. He eventually is sacked abruptly on rumours he was stealing money from the Circus’ accounts to support the small pension he was granted by his superiors, and is forced to go on the dole. Eventually he takes a job in a small run-down library, whilst living in a low quality flat. Whilst there, he meets Liz Gold, the secretary of her local Communist Party of Great Britain branch, and the two gradually strike up a friendship, and eventually become lovers. After a period of illness reveals the extent of Liz’s feelings for him, Leamas confides in her that a day is coming where he will say goodbye and she must not look for him. A few days later, he says goodbye, and takes the “final plunge” into Control’s plan, getting arrested for assault and sentenced to three months in prison. Before fully involving himself in the scheme, he makes Control promise to leave Liz alone and out of the remit of the Circus.
Upon his release, Leamas is approached by an East German recruiter who claims to know him from his time in Berlin. He lets him stay at his home, and introduces him to a contact who takes him across to the Netherlands on a faked passport. Whilst there, an intelligence agent from the East interviews him deeply on his past in the Circus at a safe house in the Netherlands, before then taking him across into East Germany and gradually meeting more senior officials of the Abteilung, all the while dropping occasional hints about payments to a potential double agent. Whilst this occurs, Liz is suddenly visited by the retired Circus agent George Smiley, who tells her to come to him should she need anything, enquires about her relationship with Leamas, and pays off the outstanding rent on Leamas’ flat.
Now in East Germany, Leamas is finally introduced to Fiedler, where he is held under guard in a sparsely decorated home in the middle of nowhere. His days consist largely of extended discussion about his past Circus work, combined with walking in the local countryside and hills with Fiedler or a guard. The two men often end up in philosophical debate, particularly on the topic of Leamas’ more pragmatic view of life in comparison to Fiedler’s idealist ideological views about life in East Germany. These conversations reveal what Leamas observes as a fear about both the righteousness of Fiedler’s motivations, as well as the morality of what he does for his country. In contrast, Mundt is a brutal opportunist, also mercenary-like in manner, who left the Nazis after the war out of convenience and joined the Communists. Fiedler also notes his suspicions about Mundt as the men get closer, and Fiedler conveys his fears about Mundt’s anti-semitism affecting him, a Jewish man.
Towards the end of Leamas’ tenure in interrogation with Fiedler, the extent of the power struggle in the Abteilung is exposed when Mundt abruptly arrests Fiedler and Leamas. In the panic Leamas inadvertently kills an East German guard, and awakes in Mundt’s facility, where Mundt interrogates and tortures both men. It is then revealed, however, that Fiedler had also submitted an arrest warrant for Mundt, leading the East German régime to intervene and convene a court. Fiedler and Mundt are both released, and then summoned to present their cases to a tribunal convened in camera. During the trial, Leamas further elaborates on previous mentions of undercover payments to a foreign agent in bank accounts which match locations that Mundt had travelled to, whilst Fiedler presents other evidence implicating Mundt to be a British agent.
Whilst Leamas is away, Liz receives an invitation from the East Germans to participate in an exchange of party members with the British Communist Party. Surprisingly, she is summoned by Mundt’s attorney as a witness and forced to testify at the tribunal. She then admits Smiley paid the apartment lease, and that Smiley offered help should she need it. She also confesses that Leamas made her promise not to look for him, and that he said goodbye immediately before he assaulted the grocer. Leamas, realising his cover has been blown, offers to tell them about the mission in exchange for Liz’s freedom, but realises the true nature of the scheme during the course of the tribunal. Fiedler is then arrested at the tribunal’s end.
Immediately after the trial, Mundt subtly locates and then releases Leamas and Liz from jail, and gives them a car to get from their current location to the Berlin Wall. During the drive, Leamas explains the entire situation to a bemused Liz. Mundt is actually a British double agent, who reports to Smiley, who is actually undercover in the mission and pretending to be retired. Mundt was turned against the East Germans before he returned following the murder of Samuel Fennan a few years earlier, and the mission’s true target was Fiedler, who was closing on exposing Mundt as a double agent. On account of Leamas and Liz’s intimate relationship, however, Mundt (and Smiley) were provided with the means of discrediting Leamas’ ability to provide evidence to the tribunal, and as such discredit Fiedler. Liz, however, is shaken, and realises that to her horror, her actions have enabled the Circus to protect their asset Mundt at the expense of the thoughtful and idealistic Fiedler. When asked what will become of Fiedler, Leamas replies that he will most likely be shot.
Although disgusted, Liz overcomes this on account of her love for Leamas. The two drive to the Berlin wall, and make a break for West Germany by ascending over the wall and through a section of sabotaged barbed wire atop the wall. Leamas reaches the top, but as he reaches down to help Liz, she is shot and killed by one of Mundt’s operatives. She falls back down, and as Smiley calls to Leamas from the other side of the wall, he hesitates, before eventually descending the wall on the East German side to die.
Characters
Alec Leamas: A British field agent in charge of East German espionage
Hans-Dieter Mundt: Leader of the East German Secret Service, the Abteilung
Jens Fiedler: East German spy, and Mundt’s deputy
Liz Gold: English librarian and member of the Communist Party
Karl Riemeck: East German bureaucrat turned British spy
Cultural impact
At its publication during the Cold War, the moral presentation of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold rendered it a revolutionary espionage novel by showing the intelligence services of both the Eastern and Western nations as engaging in the same expedient amorality in the name of national security. Le Carré also presented his western spy as a morally burnt-out case.
The espionage world of Alec Leamas portrays love as a three-dimensional emotion that can have disastrous consequences for those involved. Good does not always vanquish evil in Leamas’s world, a defeatist attitude that was criticised in The Times.[5][6]
In 1990, the Crime Writer’s Association ranked the novel third in their list The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. Five years later in a similar list by Mystery Writers of America the novel was ranked sixth.Time magazine, while including The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in its top 100 novels list,[1] stated that the novel was “a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth.”[7] The book also headed the Publishers Weekly‘s list of 15 top spy novels in 2006.[8]
Writing in The Telegraph, spy writer Jon Stock wrote: “The plot of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is assembled with more precision than a Swiss watch. The heartless way in which Alec Leamas is manipulated; Control’s ruthless playing of Mundt and Fiedler; and of course the dramatic ending on the Berlin Wall, immortalised in the film starring Richard Burton. My favourite le Carré, it gets better with each re-read.”[9]
Le Carré’s book won a 1963 Gold Dagger award from the Crime Writers’ Association for “Best Crime Novel”. Two years later the US edition was awarded the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “Best Mystery Novel”. It was the first work to win the award for “Best Novel” from both mystery writing organizations. Screenwriters Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, who adapted the book for the 1965 movie, received an Edgar the following year for “Best Motion Picture Screenplay” for an American movie.
In 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dagger Awards, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was awarded the “Dagger of Daggers,” a one-time award given to the Golden Dagger winner regarded as the stand-out among all fifty winners over the history of the Crime Writers’ Association.[citation needed]
^“The spy writer who held a grudge against Le Carré comes in from the cold”. The Guardian/The Observer Books. London. 12 September 2021. Retrieved 6 February 2022. “I have the impression that he [Le Carré] based his Spy largely on my book,” said Hermans, whose novel tells the story of a man who carries out dangerous missions with British agents during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
Le Carré describes how he came to write the book (in an article published in The Guardian newspaper (April 2013) on the novel’s 50th anniversary): “After a decade in the intelligence service, John le Carré’s political disgust and personal confusion ‘exploded’ in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.”
You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.
Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?
I’m a neuroscientist who studies how children acquire imagination. I’m especially interested in the neurological mechanisms of imagination. Once we identify what brain structures and connections are necessary to mentally construct new objects and scenes, scientists like me can look back over the course of evolution to see when these brain areas emerged – and potentially gave birth to the first kinds of imagination.
Not much food, though, grows underground. To eat, mammals had to travel above the ground – but the safest time to forage was at night, when dinosaurs were less of a threat. Evolving to be warm-blooded meant mammals could move at night. That solution came with a trade-off, though: Mammals had to eat a lot more food than dinosaurs per unit of weight in order to maintain their high metabolism and to support their constant inner body temperature around 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).
Our mammalian ancestors had to find 10 times more food during their short waking time, and they had to find it in the dark of night. How did they accomplish this task?
To optimize their foraging, mammals developed a new system to efficiently memorize places where they’d found food: linking the part of the brain that records sensory aspects of the landscape – how a place looks or smells – to the part of the brain that controls navigation. They encoded features of the landscape in the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain. They encoded navigation in the entorhinal cortex. And the whole system was interconnected by the brain structure called the hippocampus. Humans still use this memory system for remembering objects and past events, such as your car and where you parked it.
Groups of neurons in the neocortex encode these memories of objects and past events. Remembering a thing or an episode reactivates the same neurons that initially encoded it. All mammals likely can recall and re-experience previously encoded objects and events by reactivating these groups of neurons. This neocortex-hippocampus-based memory system that evolved 200 million years ago became the first key step toward imagination.
The next building block is the capability to construct a “memory” that hasn’t really happened.
Involuntary made-up ‘memories’
The simplest form of imagining new objects and scenes happens in dreams. These vivid, bizarre involuntary fantasies are associated in people with the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep.
Scientists hypothesize that species whose rest includes periods of REM sleep also experience dreams. Marsupial and placental mammals do have REM sleep, but the egg-laying mammal the echidna does not, suggesting that this stage of the sleep cycle evolved after these evolutionary lines diverged 140 million years ago. In fact, recording from specialized neurons in the brain called place cells demonstrated that animals can “dream” of going places they’ve never visited before.
In humans, solutions found during dreaming can help solve problems. There are numerous examples of scientific and engineering solutions spontaneously visualized during sleep.
The neuroscientist Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment that proved nerve impulses are transmitted chemically. He immediately went to his lab to perform the experiment – later receiving the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
Elias Howe, the inventor of the first sewing machine, claimed that the main innovation, placing the thread hole near the tip of the needle, came to him in a dream.
These discoveries were enabled by the same mechanism of involuntary imagination first acquired by mammals 140 million years ago.
Imagining on purpose
The difference between voluntary imagination and involuntary imagination is analogous to the difference between voluntary muscle control and muscle spasm. Voluntary muscle control allows people to deliberately combine muscle movements. Spasm occurs spontaneously and cannot be controlled.
Similarly, voluntary imagination allows people to deliberately combine thoughts. When asked to mentally combine two identical right triangles along their long edges, or hypotenuses, you envision a square. When asked to mentally cut a round pizza by two perpendicular lines, you visualize four identical slices.
This deliberate, responsive and reliable capacity to combine and recombine mental objects is called prefrontal synthesis. It relies on the ability of the prefrontal cortex located at the very front of the brain to control the rest of the neocortex.
Multiple types of archaeological artifacts unambiguously associated with prefrontal synthesis appear simultaneously around 65,000 years ago in multiple geographical locations. This abrupt change in imagination has been characterized by historian Yuval Harari as the “cognitive revolution.” Notably, it approximately coincides with the largest Homo sapiens‘ migration out of Africa.
Genetic analyses suggest that a few individuals acquired this prefrontal synthesis ability and then spread their genes far and wide by eliminating other contemporaneous males with the use of an imagination-enabeled strategy and newly developed weapons.
So it’s been a journey of many millions of years of evolution for our species to become equipped with imagination. Most nonhuman mammals have potential for imagining what doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened involuntarily during REM sleep; only humans can voluntarily conjure new objects and events in our minds using prefrontal synthesis.
The French Revolution is one of the most iconic events in history. It not only restructured the political order in Europe but also provided future generations with artistic inspiration.
The French Revolution brings a defined set of associations to one’s mind: the exemplary decadent aristocracy, the guillotine that became synonymous with the terrifying and efficient executions that engulfed France, and, finally, the rise of Napoleon. The insurgency then became a spooky tale perpetuated by the proponents of the old regime who clung to their power and privilege. With the blood of the revolution still fresh in the minds of many, they could always justify their reactionary views. In the end, the French Revolution meant the world in both politics and culture. Let’s take a look at 5 paintings that best capture the notion of the French Revolution in art.
xenagoguevicene 
