The following information is used only for educational purposes.
http://youtu.be/HGiHU-agsGY
David Damberger discusses "Learning From Failure" at TEDxYYC 2011.
David is the founder of Engineers Without Borders Calgary (EWB). After building the organization in Calgary and working with them in India, David spent four years building EWB's overseas programs as the Director of Southern African Programs. In this role, David consulted for dozens of African based companies, non-profits and governments in the fields of agriculture; food processing; water and sanitation; and mobile applications for development.
David currently works as a corporate strategy consultant and is a co-founder of Ethical Ocean, an e-commerce marketplace for the worlds top fair-trade, eco-friendly and sweatshop free products.
David holds a degree in engineering and a minor in entrepreneurship from the University of Calgary. He is also a Social Entrepreneuship MBA candidate at the University of Oxford. Recently, David was recognized as the youngest member of the Top 40 Alumni in the History of the University of Calgary.
David will be drawing on his work experience in Africa to speak about the transformative power of publicly admitting failure in the development aid sector which currently lacks accountability, creativity and transparency.
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.*
(*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
MCKinsey Quarterly-June 2011-The Perils of Bad Strategy
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_perils_of_bad_strategy_2826
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_perils_of_bad_strategy_2826
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Blogging for ELT
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
Published on TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk)
Home > Think > Articles > Blogging for ELT
________________________________________
Blogging for ELT
6 Mar 2005
This article takes a look at blogging, which is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool. It gives an overview of blogging websites, suggests why you might want to use them, and gives some practical advice on setting up blogs for use with your own classes.
• What is a blog?
• Types of blogs used in language teaching
• Why blog?
• Where to start
• Tips for managing learner blog settings
• Keeping students interested
• Some ideas for activities
• Pitfalls to watch out for
• Advanced feature
What is a blog?
A blog (short for weblog) is a frequently updated website that often resembles an online journal. It's so easy to create and update a blog - it requires only basic access to the Internet, and a minimum of technical know-how. Because of this, it is one of the easiest ways to publish student writing on the WWW. It's almost as easy as sending an email.
Nowadays, blogs can also display photos and some people are using them with audio and even video, but this article will concentrate on the basics, showing how a simple text-based blog can be used to great effect with your English language learners.
Types of blogs used in language teaching
Aaron Campbell (2003) has outlined three types of blogs for use with language classes:
• The Tutor Blog is run by the teacher of a class. The content of this type of blog can be limited to syllabus, course information, homework, assignments, etc. Or the teacher may choose to write about his or her life, sharing reflections about the local culture, target culture and language to stimulate online and in-class discussion. In this type of blog, students are normally restricted to being able to write comments to the teacher's posts. A great example of this is Aaron Campbell's own 'The New Tanuki' http://thenewtanuki.blogspot.com/
• The Class Blog is a shared space, with teacher and students being able to write to the main area. It is best used as a collaborative discussion space, an extra-curricular extension of the classroom. Students can be encouraged to reflect in more depth, in writing, on themes touched upon in class. Students are given a greater sense of freedom and involvement than with the tutor blog. A very good example of what has been done with this type of blog is Barbara Dieu's 'Bee Online' http://beeonline.blogspot.com/) and 'Bee Online 2' http://beeonline2.blogspot.com/
• The Learner Blog is the third type of blog and it requires more time and effort from the teacher to both set up and moderate, but is probably the most rewarding. It involves giving each student an individual blog. The benefit of this is that this becomes the student's own personal online space. Students can be encouraged to write frequently about what interests them, and can post comments on other students' blogs. For examples, see the links to learner blogs from the class blog and tutor blog examples above.
Of course, teachers who decide to use blogs often use a combination of Tutor or Class blog and Learner blogs, with hyperlinks connecting them.
Why blog?
So, why should you blog with your students? There are many reasons why you may choose to use weblogs with students. One of the best reasons is to provide a real audience for student writing. Usually, the teacher is the only person who reads student writing, and the focus of this reading is usually on form, not content. With weblogs, students can find themselves writing for a real audience that, apart from the teacher, may include their peers, students from other classes, or even other countries, their parents, and potentially anyone with access to the Internet.
Here are some other reasons for using blogs:
• To provide extra reading practice for students.
This reading can be produced by the teacher, other students in the same class, or, in the case of comments posted to a blog, by people from all over the world.
• As online student learner journals that can be read by their peers.
The value of using learner journals has been well documented. Usually they are private channels between teacher and student. Using a blog as a learner journal can increase the audience.
• To guide students to online resources appropriate for their level.
The Internet has a bewildering array of resources that are potentially useful for your students. The problem is finding and directing your learners to them. For this reason, you can use your tutor blog as a portal for your learners.
• To increase the sense of community in a class.
A class blog can help foster a feeling of community between the members of a class, especially if learners are sharing information about themselves and their interests, and are responding to what other students are writing.
• To encourage shy students to participate.
There is evidence to suggest that students who are quiet in class can find their voice when given the opportunity to express themselves in a blog.
• To stimulate out-of-class discussion.
A blog can be an ideal space for pre-class or post-class discussion. And what students write about in the blog can also be used to promote discussion in class.
• To encourage a process-writing approach.
Because students are writing for publication, they are usually more concerned about getting things right, and usually understand the value of rewriting more than if the only audience for their written work is the teacher.
• As an online portfolio of student written work.
There is much to be gained from students keeping a portfolio of their work. One example is the ease at which learners can return to previous written work and evaluate the progress they have made during a course.
• To help build a closer relationship between students in large classes.
Sometimes students in large classes can spend all year studying with the same people without getting to know them well. A blog is another tool that can help bring students together.
Where to start
There are lots of sites where you can set up a blog for free, but perhaps the best known and one of the most reliable and simple blogging tools to use with students is Blogger (http://blogger.com). It takes only fifteen minutes from setting up an account to publishing the first post using this valuable tool.
The teacher sets up the tutor blog or a class blog. With a Class blog, students will need to be invited to participate by e-mail. Learner blog accounts can either be set up beforehand by the teacher, or done at the same time with a whole class in a computer room. The former gives the teacher more control of student accounts, but some advantages of the latter is that learners are given more choice (of username, design of the blog, etc) and a greater sense of 'ownership' of their new virtual writing space.
Tips for managing learner blog settings
• Use the 'Settings' in Blogger to add yourself (under Members) as Administrator of the learner blog. This is invaluable if students later forget usernames or passwords, and can also help if inappropriate posts are published
• Make sure you change the setting and turn the 'Comments' feature on. This will allow the others to respond to things the students write on their learner blogs.
• Also in 'Settings', you will find an option to receive an email whenever a student publishes their blog. This will save you time regularly checking learner blogs to see if any of your students have posted. Another way of being informed of this is to use the 'Site Feed' function (discussed further below).
Keeping students interested
Many teachers who start to use blogs find the novelty factor is enough to create student interest in starting to use them. However, blogs work best when learners get into the habit of using them. If learners are not encouraged to post to their blogs frequently, then they can quickly be abandoned. A failed experiment. Here, the teacher in the role of facilitator is vital for maintaining student interest. Here are some ideas to how this can be done:
• Respond to student posts quickly, writing a short comment related to the content. Ask questions about what the learner writes to create stimulus for writing.
• Students should be actively encouraged to read and respond (through the commenting feature of the blog) to their classmates.
• Writing to the blog could be required, and it may form part of the class assessment. Students should be encouraged to post their writing homework on the blog instead of only giving it to the teacher.
Some ideas for activities
• Mystery guest. Invite another teacher or someone from another school or country as a mystery guest to your blog. Ask the students to engage him or her in dialogue and guess their identity.
• Project work. A blog is an ideal space for developing a project, especially if the project is a shared one between several classes or even classes in different countries.
• International link-ups. Contact another educational establishment to see if they are interested in a joint blogging project. Students can write about their lives, culture, interests, etc, and be encouraged to read about the other class and respond by writing comments.
• Photoblog. If you plan on using photographs in your blog, there are lots of tools available to help you. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) makes publishing photographs to blogs easy. If you want to make photographs central to the blog, however, it is better to use a blogging tool such as Buzznet (http://www.buzznet.com), which is a photo publishing tool and blog rolled into one.
Pitfalls to watch out for
• Unwanted comments. To avoid unwanted comments, you can always restrict comments to people in the class or to registered bloggers.
• Correction. It is difficult to use a blog for correcting students. Student written work can always be corrected before posting to the blog, or you can do class correction sessions using work published in the blogs.
• Privacy. By their very nature, most blogs are public. Anyone with access to the Web can find and read a blog, and write comments (if this feature has been turned on). If privacy is an issue, then you will be better off using a blogging tool that allows different levels of access rights. Live Journal http://www.livejournal.com is a good choice, and is particularly popular with teenagers . Live Journal allows the setting up of a closed community, which could be restricted to the members of a class or to a wider circle including other classes, parents, etc.
Advanced feature
The easiest way to keep track of a lot of learner blogs is to use the 'Site Feed' feature. You will need to use another piece of software called a newsreader or aggregator to read site feeds. Using a newsreader means your e-mail in-box won't become cluttered with posted messages from students publishing their weblogs. One of the most popular, free web-based newsreaders is Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com.
The BBC and British Council are not responsible for the content of external web sites.
Further reading
Blog-efl. My own blog with information and comments for teachers of EFL/ESL interested in using blogs http://blog-efl.blogspot.com
'Weblogs for use with ESL classes' Campbell AP (2003) http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-Weblogs.html
If you have any suggestions or tips for using blogs in the class you would like to share on this site, contact us.
Published on TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk)
Home > Think > Articles > Blogging for ELT
________________________________________
Blogging for ELT
6 Mar 2005
This article takes a look at blogging, which is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool. It gives an overview of blogging websites, suggests why you might want to use them, and gives some practical advice on setting up blogs for use with your own classes.
• What is a blog?
• Types of blogs used in language teaching
• Why blog?
• Where to start
• Tips for managing learner blog settings
• Keeping students interested
• Some ideas for activities
• Pitfalls to watch out for
• Advanced feature
What is a blog?
A blog (short for weblog) is a frequently updated website that often resembles an online journal. It's so easy to create and update a blog - it requires only basic access to the Internet, and a minimum of technical know-how. Because of this, it is one of the easiest ways to publish student writing on the WWW. It's almost as easy as sending an email.
Nowadays, blogs can also display photos and some people are using them with audio and even video, but this article will concentrate on the basics, showing how a simple text-based blog can be used to great effect with your English language learners.
Types of blogs used in language teaching
Aaron Campbell (2003) has outlined three types of blogs for use with language classes:
• The Tutor Blog is run by the teacher of a class. The content of this type of blog can be limited to syllabus, course information, homework, assignments, etc. Or the teacher may choose to write about his or her life, sharing reflections about the local culture, target culture and language to stimulate online and in-class discussion. In this type of blog, students are normally restricted to being able to write comments to the teacher's posts. A great example of this is Aaron Campbell's own 'The New Tanuki' http://thenewtanuki.blogspot.com/
• The Class Blog is a shared space, with teacher and students being able to write to the main area. It is best used as a collaborative discussion space, an extra-curricular extension of the classroom. Students can be encouraged to reflect in more depth, in writing, on themes touched upon in class. Students are given a greater sense of freedom and involvement than with the tutor blog. A very good example of what has been done with this type of blog is Barbara Dieu's 'Bee Online' http://beeonline.blogspot.com/) and 'Bee Online 2' http://beeonline2.blogspot.com/
• The Learner Blog is the third type of blog and it requires more time and effort from the teacher to both set up and moderate, but is probably the most rewarding. It involves giving each student an individual blog. The benefit of this is that this becomes the student's own personal online space. Students can be encouraged to write frequently about what interests them, and can post comments on other students' blogs. For examples, see the links to learner blogs from the class blog and tutor blog examples above.
Of course, teachers who decide to use blogs often use a combination of Tutor or Class blog and Learner blogs, with hyperlinks connecting them.
Why blog?
So, why should you blog with your students? There are many reasons why you may choose to use weblogs with students. One of the best reasons is to provide a real audience for student writing. Usually, the teacher is the only person who reads student writing, and the focus of this reading is usually on form, not content. With weblogs, students can find themselves writing for a real audience that, apart from the teacher, may include their peers, students from other classes, or even other countries, their parents, and potentially anyone with access to the Internet.
Here are some other reasons for using blogs:
• To provide extra reading practice for students.
This reading can be produced by the teacher, other students in the same class, or, in the case of comments posted to a blog, by people from all over the world.
• As online student learner journals that can be read by their peers.
The value of using learner journals has been well documented. Usually they are private channels between teacher and student. Using a blog as a learner journal can increase the audience.
• To guide students to online resources appropriate for their level.
The Internet has a bewildering array of resources that are potentially useful for your students. The problem is finding and directing your learners to them. For this reason, you can use your tutor blog as a portal for your learners.
• To increase the sense of community in a class.
A class blog can help foster a feeling of community between the members of a class, especially if learners are sharing information about themselves and their interests, and are responding to what other students are writing.
• To encourage shy students to participate.
There is evidence to suggest that students who are quiet in class can find their voice when given the opportunity to express themselves in a blog.
• To stimulate out-of-class discussion.
A blog can be an ideal space for pre-class or post-class discussion. And what students write about in the blog can also be used to promote discussion in class.
• To encourage a process-writing approach.
Because students are writing for publication, they are usually more concerned about getting things right, and usually understand the value of rewriting more than if the only audience for their written work is the teacher.
• As an online portfolio of student written work.
There is much to be gained from students keeping a portfolio of their work. One example is the ease at which learners can return to previous written work and evaluate the progress they have made during a course.
• To help build a closer relationship between students in large classes.
Sometimes students in large classes can spend all year studying with the same people without getting to know them well. A blog is another tool that can help bring students together.
Where to start
There are lots of sites where you can set up a blog for free, but perhaps the best known and one of the most reliable and simple blogging tools to use with students is Blogger (http://blogger.com). It takes only fifteen minutes from setting up an account to publishing the first post using this valuable tool.
The teacher sets up the tutor blog or a class blog. With a Class blog, students will need to be invited to participate by e-mail. Learner blog accounts can either be set up beforehand by the teacher, or done at the same time with a whole class in a computer room. The former gives the teacher more control of student accounts, but some advantages of the latter is that learners are given more choice (of username, design of the blog, etc) and a greater sense of 'ownership' of their new virtual writing space.
Tips for managing learner blog settings
• Use the 'Settings' in Blogger to add yourself (under Members) as Administrator of the learner blog. This is invaluable if students later forget usernames or passwords, and can also help if inappropriate posts are published
• Make sure you change the setting and turn the 'Comments' feature on. This will allow the others to respond to things the students write on their learner blogs.
• Also in 'Settings', you will find an option to receive an email whenever a student publishes their blog. This will save you time regularly checking learner blogs to see if any of your students have posted. Another way of being informed of this is to use the 'Site Feed' function (discussed further below).
Keeping students interested
Many teachers who start to use blogs find the novelty factor is enough to create student interest in starting to use them. However, blogs work best when learners get into the habit of using them. If learners are not encouraged to post to their blogs frequently, then they can quickly be abandoned. A failed experiment. Here, the teacher in the role of facilitator is vital for maintaining student interest. Here are some ideas to how this can be done:
• Respond to student posts quickly, writing a short comment related to the content. Ask questions about what the learner writes to create stimulus for writing.
• Students should be actively encouraged to read and respond (through the commenting feature of the blog) to their classmates.
• Writing to the blog could be required, and it may form part of the class assessment. Students should be encouraged to post their writing homework on the blog instead of only giving it to the teacher.
Some ideas for activities
• Mystery guest. Invite another teacher or someone from another school or country as a mystery guest to your blog. Ask the students to engage him or her in dialogue and guess their identity.
• Project work. A blog is an ideal space for developing a project, especially if the project is a shared one between several classes or even classes in different countries.
• International link-ups. Contact another educational establishment to see if they are interested in a joint blogging project. Students can write about their lives, culture, interests, etc, and be encouraged to read about the other class and respond by writing comments.
• Photoblog. If you plan on using photographs in your blog, there are lots of tools available to help you. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) makes publishing photographs to blogs easy. If you want to make photographs central to the blog, however, it is better to use a blogging tool such as Buzznet (http://www.buzznet.com), which is a photo publishing tool and blog rolled into one.
Pitfalls to watch out for
• Unwanted comments. To avoid unwanted comments, you can always restrict comments to people in the class or to registered bloggers.
• Correction. It is difficult to use a blog for correcting students. Student written work can always be corrected before posting to the blog, or you can do class correction sessions using work published in the blogs.
• Privacy. By their very nature, most blogs are public. Anyone with access to the Web can find and read a blog, and write comments (if this feature has been turned on). If privacy is an issue, then you will be better off using a blogging tool that allows different levels of access rights. Live Journal http://www.livejournal.com is a good choice, and is particularly popular with teenagers . Live Journal allows the setting up of a closed community, which could be restricted to the members of a class or to a wider circle including other classes, parents, etc.
Advanced feature
The easiest way to keep track of a lot of learner blogs is to use the 'Site Feed' feature. You will need to use another piece of software called a newsreader or aggregator to read site feeds. Using a newsreader means your e-mail in-box won't become cluttered with posted messages from students publishing their weblogs. One of the most popular, free web-based newsreaders is Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com.
The BBC and British Council are not responsible for the content of external web sites.
Further reading
Blog-efl. My own blog with information and comments for teachers of EFL/ESL interested in using blogs http://blog-efl.blogspot.com
'Weblogs for use with ESL classes' Campbell AP (2003) http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-Weblogs.html
If you have any suggestions or tips for using blogs in the class you would like to share on this site, contact us.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
TEDTalks- Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
TEDTalks- Jay Walker on the world´s English mania
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
TEDTalks- Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
TEDTalks-2008 Keith Barry does Brain Magic
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
TEDTalks-Christopher deCharms looks inside the brain
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
TEDTalks-Marc Pachter-The Art of the Interview
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
Transcript of the talk-2008
The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did.
I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview.
And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why.
Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me.
And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it -- and the the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited.
So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough.
But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait.
Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really now that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fullbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we an hour conversion about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?"
And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that."
And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own." I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out.
So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s.
In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force -- I guess that's the way I think about it -- filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up -- by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him.
But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman, I didn't know who she was, and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?"
And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did."
And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it." And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk.
So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them.
The worst interview I ever did: WIlliam L. Shirer. The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter." Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you.
But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't -- and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews -- tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place.
I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people.
There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called "The Women." She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview, I did the living self-portrait with her, there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence.
And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation.
We were on the stage and then -- by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there -- any of you in the moderate-to-full-entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing.
And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question -- I didn't know how I was going to get out of it -- I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and blah blah blah," she said, "oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress." But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage."
And then she turned to me and said, "And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?" just withering in her contempt.
And I said, "I'm learning."
(Laughter)
And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like.
I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died -- she had toward the end a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party.
And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly.
Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?"
And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "What was your childhood like?"
And I said -- these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate -- and I said, "My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny."
(Laughter)
And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed?
Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints.
One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?"
And he said, "Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters." So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years.
And I asked him one question. I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?"
And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "Well ..." -- I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so." He said, "You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit."
And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that." He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation."
And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest." And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow.
But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but, I promise you, it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma," transforming the American theater. An amazing woman.
At the time that I proposed to her that -- by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary -- but proposed to her that she come on. She said, "Come to my apartment." She lived New York. "Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed."
And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but -- I speak of the life force -- her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion.
And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to." And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series.
She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?"
And the audience just -- you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned -- here she was, in this broken body -- and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "And then puberty hit."
And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life.
It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family.
Thank you very much.
Transcript of the talk-2008
The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did.
I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview.
And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why.
Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me.
And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it -- and the the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited.
So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough.
But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait.
Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really now that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fullbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we an hour conversion about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?"
And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that."
And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own." I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out.
So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s.
In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force -- I guess that's the way I think about it -- filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up -- by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him.
But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman, I didn't know who she was, and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?"
And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did."
And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it." And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk.
So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them.
The worst interview I ever did: WIlliam L. Shirer. The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter." Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you.
But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't -- and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews -- tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place.
I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people.
There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called "The Women." She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview, I did the living self-portrait with her, there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence.
And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation.
We were on the stage and then -- by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there -- any of you in the moderate-to-full-entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing.
And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question -- I didn't know how I was going to get out of it -- I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and blah blah blah," she said, "oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress." But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage."
And then she turned to me and said, "And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?" just withering in her contempt.
And I said, "I'm learning."
(Laughter)
And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like.
I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died -- she had toward the end a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party.
And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly.
Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?"
And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "What was your childhood like?"
And I said -- these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate -- and I said, "My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny."
(Laughter)
And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed?
Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints.
One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?"
And he said, "Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters." So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years.
And I asked him one question. I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?"
And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "Well ..." -- I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so." He said, "You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit."
And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that." He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation."
And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest." And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow.
But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but, I promise you, it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma," transforming the American theater. An amazing woman.
At the time that I proposed to her that -- by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary -- but proposed to her that she come on. She said, "Come to my apartment." She lived New York. "Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed."
And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but -- I speak of the life force -- her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion.
And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to." And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series.
She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?"
And the audience just -- you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned -- here she was, in this broken body -- and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "And then puberty hit."
And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life.
It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family.
Thank you very much.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
TEDTalks-2005 Steven Pinker on Language & Thought
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TEDTalks-Erin McKean redefines the dictionary
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Saturday, June 11, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
TED-May2011-Jessi Arrington on Wearing Nothing New
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Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Job Application-Useful phrases
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Saturday, June 4, 2011
Cirque du Soleil & Guy Laliberté-The New York Times-2011
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June 3, 2011
Defiant Showman Demands His ‘Wow’
By JASON ZINOMAN
MONTREAL
WITH a wolfish grin, mangled pinky and a bald head shaped like a bullet, Guy Laliberté, a co-founder and the owner of Cirque du Soleil, looks like a man with a plan for world domination. Appearances, in this case, do not deceive.
“There are three capitals of entertainment in the world: Las Vegas, New York and London,” announces Mr. Laliberté, the only person smoking in the vast campus here where two-fifths of his 5,000 employees work. “So far the only one I truly conquered is Vegas. New York and London are still on my checklist.”
Mr. Laliberté, whose left hand was injured while cooking, is being modest, since he is hardly a newcomer to New York, where he’s put on 19 shows, or London, where he’s done 18, since Cirque’s founding in the early 1980s. He didn’t make the leap from accordion-playing street performer to one of the world’s most influential and powerful entertainment impresarios by setting his sights low.
Between now and the end of the year Cirque will open three humongous new productions. “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which has already taken in a $50 million advance, begins touring in October in Montreal. “Iris,” an action-packed fantasy that imagines an alternative history of the movies, is to be Cirque’s first permanent show in Los Angeles.
The highest-stakes gamble, however, may be “Zarkana,” which opens a four-month run at Radio City Music Hall this week. While it will go on to Madrid and Moscow — where it will play the Kremlin — it’s no accident that “Zarkana” starts in New York, the site of what Mr. Laliberté admits is the company’s first real flop. That was “Banana Shpeel,” which opened and closed in an abortive run last year. It began as an attempt to merge the circus and musical theater, telling the story of a devilish producer who promises a clown fame and fortune. By the time the show reached New York, the company had lost confidence in the concept, fired the composer, cut songs and retreated to more traditional Cirque acrobatics, albeit on a smaller scale.
Mr. Laliberté, who owns an island, a boat and seven homes, was hard to reach during some of the troubles; he was orbiting Earth, after paying $35 million to be the seventh space tourist, giving him one of the greatest excuses in the history of show business failure. “I kept hearing there are too many songs, too much like a Broadway show,” said the “Shpeel” director, David Shiner. “Guy wanted to do something different. But he was in space.”
Mr. Laliberté concedes the point and takes responsibility for the rare failure, but it also drove him back to New York, where he hopes “Zarkana” will be a summer staple at Radio City. “We’re returning like men,” he says, to “face the critics who killed us face to face.”
The message is defiant, but it’s delivered in an oddly calm, almost dispassionate voice. Mr. Laliberté has a reputation for fierceness, but despite some forceful arm waving he maintains a poised, business-like demeanor. Philippe Decouflé, the director of “Iris,” describes him as a “very nice bulldozer.”
In aiming “Zarkana” for a run in Manhattan, Cirque du Soleil is inching closer to the heart of the traditional theater world. By numbers alone it’s already a mighty rival; Cirque’s 22 current productions, including its standing Las Vegas shows and the touring big-top productions, annually sell about as many tickets as all Broadway shows combined.
The permanent shows typically cost between $40 million and $50 million, but the business model varies far more for the big-top productions that are pumped out every two years with assembly-line precision. They begin in Canada, move to the United States and then travel the world. (Cirque has touched every continent except Antarctica.) Total revenue, including tickets and merchandise, is expected to pass $1 billion for the first time next year.
Cirque has redefined one of the world’s oldest art forms. Out with the animals and the ringmaster in a red coat; in with New Agey world music, big-budget spectacle, world-class athletes and poetic clowns in swirls of caked-on makeup. The company’s influence ranges widely, from the special effects in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which employs former Cirque employees, to the Metropolitan Opera, where the director Robert Lepage used technology he developed while with Cirque. It even extends to the language: eyes rolled when Cirque du Soleil sued a rival American company, Cirque Dreams, for using a common word in its name. (Cirque du Soleil lost the lawsuit.) But is there any mystery why so many Anglophone companies choose to use the word Cirque?
Mr. Laliberté’s greatest triumph, however, has been in Las Vegas. Like Disney did with Times Square, Cirque helped remake the strip into a family-friendly destination. Seven permanent shows have opened there in 17 years, and despite bad reviews, economic downturns and other setbacks of live performance not one has closed.
Dominic Champagne, who has directed two of these shows, “Love” and “Zumanity,” said you could put almost anything “in a jar, put it onstage, call it Cirque du Soleil and it would be a hit.”
As Cirque has transformed from an arty alternative to traditional big-top circus into what it is today, some suggest it has become emotionally cold and risk-averse. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story — and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor currently in “War Horse” who was fired from “Banana Shpeel” last year. “They have no idea about Aristotelean plotting or character. It’s not in their heart. They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”
The problem is that audiences have come to expect a certain scale from Cirque, and when they don’t get it, as in the case of “Shpeel,” they may be disappointed. It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberté too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says, leaning forward with a grave look. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more. The answer is we can explore new stuff, but we need to give the public a bone to chew on.”
For one of the most influential producers in show business Mr. Laliberté keeps a surprisingly low profile in the news media and, pointedly, within Cirque. Analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him. In the wake of the demise of “Banana Shpeel” Cirque opened its doors to a reporter for a rare chance to talk to him and watch as he sat in on what the company calls a “checkpoint” — basically a progress report for the boss — for the Michael Jackson show.
The formula begins with the conviction that you need something novel in every show. “Zumanity” added an erotic edge; “O” turned the stage into a vast pool. After the concept is established, the team develops what it calls the acrobatic skeleton of generally 10 acts; 6 are imported (acrobat troupes hired from China and the like), and 4 are developed internally. As Cirque has brought in directors from theater, opera and film, the script has become more important. Pairing it with the acts is as tricky a part of creation of a Cirque show as the relationship between songs and the book of the musical. Sequence is critical.
“We need to consider two things: rhythm and height,” Mr. Laliberté says. “Is it a floor, mid-range or aerial act? You can’t put three jugglers in a row or three aerialists in a row. Circus has much more highs and lows than in a play. You need your ‘wow,’ your tender moment and humor. We have our conventions.”
Wall-to-wall music, costumes and lighting work hard to create otherworldly designs that are an overwhelming mess of contradictions: nostalgic and futuristic, whimsical and melodramatic, sexy and asexual. There is just a hint of a plot. You can tease out themes. (“Saltimbanco”: immigration. “Ovo”: biodiversity.) But why bother? What it adds up to is something defiantly vague and open to interpretation. “You need to make an artistic product to be able to permit the audience to open their door,” Mr. Laliberté says. “If they want an esoteric door, there is that.”
But in working with the musical catalog of the King of Pop, more than acrobatics is on the line. So after the director Jamie King — who has staged concert tours by Madonna and Britney Spears — presented to Mr. Laliberté a slick video featuring choreography, designs in progress and deafeningly loud versions of “Thriller,” “Beat It” and other hits, the checkpoint grew silent. Dozens of artists and designers watched. With cigarette smoke swirling above his head, Mr. Laliberté’s deadpan expression never shifted. Nor did his posture. After the presentation he finally interrupted the tense stillness and revealed his hand — well, in part. “Michael is not prominent enough,” he said. “I need to hear him. Make his voice stronger.”
The truth is, circus is Mr. Laliberté’s third passion. His second is travel. His first is business. Within the Cirque empire he has been the major fund-raiser since the beginning; in 1983 he landed a $1.3 million grant from the Canadian government to present a show as part of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. At the time his company was a modest nonprofit that divvied up beers at the end of rehearsal in a rented gym. But his original presentation included a five-year plan with multiple shows. He was 24.
Cirque had its breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1987. “Cirque Réinventé,” staged by Guy Caron, was new for American audiences familiar with Ringling Brothers. It was dramatic, emotional, occasionally slow and highly theatrical. Disney made an offer to buy the company. So did Columbia Pictures. Mr. Laliberté turned them both down, insisting on creative control.
Mr. Caron left the company following a dispute over money, and eventually returned, but Cirque’s history is riddled with power struggles that end with one survivor. “I survived three putsches,” Mr. Laliberté says with his usual swagger.
Cirque’s golden age began, many say, when Franco Dragone, a coal miner’s son who worked in commedia dell’arte, started directing in the late 1980s with “Nouvelle Experience.” Over a decade he staged eight shows (including the Las Vegas hits “Mystère” and “O”), and his freewheeling style was rooted in the belief that performers work best when they aren’t thinking. He would ask the acrobats to race around the stage until they were out of breath to prepare for rehearsal.
Steve Wynn, who first presented Cirque in Las Vegas, hired away Mr. Dragone and much of his design team in 1999 to make their own show. Mr. Laliberté was furious. “I called up Steve Wynn and told him: ‘You think you’re buying the creative force of Cirque du Soleil. Be careful,’ ” Mr. Laliberté says. “Will I do business with Steve again? Probably not.”
Behind the scenes there was panic. “There was a concern because we had a successful model and a question of could we do it without him,” said Boris Verkhovsky, Cirque’s director of performance. “Guy said we can now be a great host for innovators and geniuses.”
Instead of finding a new artistic guru, Mr. Laliberté recruited directors from theater and film, injecting fresh ideas into the shows. By bringing in theater directors like Mr. Lepage, who had no experience with circus, and giving them bigger budgets than they had ever worked with, Cirque was taking a risk. For one thing, the chemistry of every show is different.
“At the start it was a team,” Mr. Caron said. “We all knew each other and were friends. So I could tell someone, ‘This is terrible’ and they could say, ‘Go to hell,’ and we’d be fine the next day. Now it’s so big that the decisions take a long time to go from top to bottom.”
As the organization has grown, Mr. Laliberté has delegated more. But he knows he needs to stay on the planet for the start of “Zarkana.” “The machine here is not one I always like, but there’s a limit to what I can do,” he says, flashing a lopsided smile and striking what might be the only note of insecurity in several hours of conversation. “Look,” he says, shifting into confidently matter-of fact mode. “I am in the business of live or die by the public.”
June 3, 2011
Defiant Showman Demands His ‘Wow’
By JASON ZINOMAN
MONTREAL
WITH a wolfish grin, mangled pinky and a bald head shaped like a bullet, Guy Laliberté, a co-founder and the owner of Cirque du Soleil, looks like a man with a plan for world domination. Appearances, in this case, do not deceive.
“There are three capitals of entertainment in the world: Las Vegas, New York and London,” announces Mr. Laliberté, the only person smoking in the vast campus here where two-fifths of his 5,000 employees work. “So far the only one I truly conquered is Vegas. New York and London are still on my checklist.”
Mr. Laliberté, whose left hand was injured while cooking, is being modest, since he is hardly a newcomer to New York, where he’s put on 19 shows, or London, where he’s done 18, since Cirque’s founding in the early 1980s. He didn’t make the leap from accordion-playing street performer to one of the world’s most influential and powerful entertainment impresarios by setting his sights low.
Between now and the end of the year Cirque will open three humongous new productions. “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which has already taken in a $50 million advance, begins touring in October in Montreal. “Iris,” an action-packed fantasy that imagines an alternative history of the movies, is to be Cirque’s first permanent show in Los Angeles.
The highest-stakes gamble, however, may be “Zarkana,” which opens a four-month run at Radio City Music Hall this week. While it will go on to Madrid and Moscow — where it will play the Kremlin — it’s no accident that “Zarkana” starts in New York, the site of what Mr. Laliberté admits is the company’s first real flop. That was “Banana Shpeel,” which opened and closed in an abortive run last year. It began as an attempt to merge the circus and musical theater, telling the story of a devilish producer who promises a clown fame and fortune. By the time the show reached New York, the company had lost confidence in the concept, fired the composer, cut songs and retreated to more traditional Cirque acrobatics, albeit on a smaller scale.
Mr. Laliberté, who owns an island, a boat and seven homes, was hard to reach during some of the troubles; he was orbiting Earth, after paying $35 million to be the seventh space tourist, giving him one of the greatest excuses in the history of show business failure. “I kept hearing there are too many songs, too much like a Broadway show,” said the “Shpeel” director, David Shiner. “Guy wanted to do something different. But he was in space.”
Mr. Laliberté concedes the point and takes responsibility for the rare failure, but it also drove him back to New York, where he hopes “Zarkana” will be a summer staple at Radio City. “We’re returning like men,” he says, to “face the critics who killed us face to face.”
The message is defiant, but it’s delivered in an oddly calm, almost dispassionate voice. Mr. Laliberté has a reputation for fierceness, but despite some forceful arm waving he maintains a poised, business-like demeanor. Philippe Decouflé, the director of “Iris,” describes him as a “very nice bulldozer.”
In aiming “Zarkana” for a run in Manhattan, Cirque du Soleil is inching closer to the heart of the traditional theater world. By numbers alone it’s already a mighty rival; Cirque’s 22 current productions, including its standing Las Vegas shows and the touring big-top productions, annually sell about as many tickets as all Broadway shows combined.
The permanent shows typically cost between $40 million and $50 million, but the business model varies far more for the big-top productions that are pumped out every two years with assembly-line precision. They begin in Canada, move to the United States and then travel the world. (Cirque has touched every continent except Antarctica.) Total revenue, including tickets and merchandise, is expected to pass $1 billion for the first time next year.
Cirque has redefined one of the world’s oldest art forms. Out with the animals and the ringmaster in a red coat; in with New Agey world music, big-budget spectacle, world-class athletes and poetic clowns in swirls of caked-on makeup. The company’s influence ranges widely, from the special effects in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which employs former Cirque employees, to the Metropolitan Opera, where the director Robert Lepage used technology he developed while with Cirque. It even extends to the language: eyes rolled when Cirque du Soleil sued a rival American company, Cirque Dreams, for using a common word in its name. (Cirque du Soleil lost the lawsuit.) But is there any mystery why so many Anglophone companies choose to use the word Cirque?
Mr. Laliberté’s greatest triumph, however, has been in Las Vegas. Like Disney did with Times Square, Cirque helped remake the strip into a family-friendly destination. Seven permanent shows have opened there in 17 years, and despite bad reviews, economic downturns and other setbacks of live performance not one has closed.
Dominic Champagne, who has directed two of these shows, “Love” and “Zumanity,” said you could put almost anything “in a jar, put it onstage, call it Cirque du Soleil and it would be a hit.”
As Cirque has transformed from an arty alternative to traditional big-top circus into what it is today, some suggest it has become emotionally cold and risk-averse. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story — and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor currently in “War Horse” who was fired from “Banana Shpeel” last year. “They have no idea about Aristotelean plotting or character. It’s not in their heart. They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”
The problem is that audiences have come to expect a certain scale from Cirque, and when they don’t get it, as in the case of “Shpeel,” they may be disappointed. It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberté too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says, leaning forward with a grave look. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more. The answer is we can explore new stuff, but we need to give the public a bone to chew on.”
For one of the most influential producers in show business Mr. Laliberté keeps a surprisingly low profile in the news media and, pointedly, within Cirque. Analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him. In the wake of the demise of “Banana Shpeel” Cirque opened its doors to a reporter for a rare chance to talk to him and watch as he sat in on what the company calls a “checkpoint” — basically a progress report for the boss — for the Michael Jackson show.
The formula begins with the conviction that you need something novel in every show. “Zumanity” added an erotic edge; “O” turned the stage into a vast pool. After the concept is established, the team develops what it calls the acrobatic skeleton of generally 10 acts; 6 are imported (acrobat troupes hired from China and the like), and 4 are developed internally. As Cirque has brought in directors from theater, opera and film, the script has become more important. Pairing it with the acts is as tricky a part of creation of a Cirque show as the relationship between songs and the book of the musical. Sequence is critical.
“We need to consider two things: rhythm and height,” Mr. Laliberté says. “Is it a floor, mid-range or aerial act? You can’t put three jugglers in a row or three aerialists in a row. Circus has much more highs and lows than in a play. You need your ‘wow,’ your tender moment and humor. We have our conventions.”
Wall-to-wall music, costumes and lighting work hard to create otherworldly designs that are an overwhelming mess of contradictions: nostalgic and futuristic, whimsical and melodramatic, sexy and asexual. There is just a hint of a plot. You can tease out themes. (“Saltimbanco”: immigration. “Ovo”: biodiversity.) But why bother? What it adds up to is something defiantly vague and open to interpretation. “You need to make an artistic product to be able to permit the audience to open their door,” Mr. Laliberté says. “If they want an esoteric door, there is that.”
But in working with the musical catalog of the King of Pop, more than acrobatics is on the line. So after the director Jamie King — who has staged concert tours by Madonna and Britney Spears — presented to Mr. Laliberté a slick video featuring choreography, designs in progress and deafeningly loud versions of “Thriller,” “Beat It” and other hits, the checkpoint grew silent. Dozens of artists and designers watched. With cigarette smoke swirling above his head, Mr. Laliberté’s deadpan expression never shifted. Nor did his posture. After the presentation he finally interrupted the tense stillness and revealed his hand — well, in part. “Michael is not prominent enough,” he said. “I need to hear him. Make his voice stronger.”
The truth is, circus is Mr. Laliberté’s third passion. His second is travel. His first is business. Within the Cirque empire he has been the major fund-raiser since the beginning; in 1983 he landed a $1.3 million grant from the Canadian government to present a show as part of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. At the time his company was a modest nonprofit that divvied up beers at the end of rehearsal in a rented gym. But his original presentation included a five-year plan with multiple shows. He was 24.
Cirque had its breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1987. “Cirque Réinventé,” staged by Guy Caron, was new for American audiences familiar with Ringling Brothers. It was dramatic, emotional, occasionally slow and highly theatrical. Disney made an offer to buy the company. So did Columbia Pictures. Mr. Laliberté turned them both down, insisting on creative control.
Mr. Caron left the company following a dispute over money, and eventually returned, but Cirque’s history is riddled with power struggles that end with one survivor. “I survived three putsches,” Mr. Laliberté says with his usual swagger.
Cirque’s golden age began, many say, when Franco Dragone, a coal miner’s son who worked in commedia dell’arte, started directing in the late 1980s with “Nouvelle Experience.” Over a decade he staged eight shows (including the Las Vegas hits “Mystère” and “O”), and his freewheeling style was rooted in the belief that performers work best when they aren’t thinking. He would ask the acrobats to race around the stage until they were out of breath to prepare for rehearsal.
Steve Wynn, who first presented Cirque in Las Vegas, hired away Mr. Dragone and much of his design team in 1999 to make their own show. Mr. Laliberté was furious. “I called up Steve Wynn and told him: ‘You think you’re buying the creative force of Cirque du Soleil. Be careful,’ ” Mr. Laliberté says. “Will I do business with Steve again? Probably not.”
Behind the scenes there was panic. “There was a concern because we had a successful model and a question of could we do it without him,” said Boris Verkhovsky, Cirque’s director of performance. “Guy said we can now be a great host for innovators and geniuses.”
Instead of finding a new artistic guru, Mr. Laliberté recruited directors from theater and film, injecting fresh ideas into the shows. By bringing in theater directors like Mr. Lepage, who had no experience with circus, and giving them bigger budgets than they had ever worked with, Cirque was taking a risk. For one thing, the chemistry of every show is different.
“At the start it was a team,” Mr. Caron said. “We all knew each other and were friends. So I could tell someone, ‘This is terrible’ and they could say, ‘Go to hell,’ and we’d be fine the next day. Now it’s so big that the decisions take a long time to go from top to bottom.”
As the organization has grown, Mr. Laliberté has delegated more. But he knows he needs to stay on the planet for the start of “Zarkana.” “The machine here is not one I always like, but there’s a limit to what I can do,” he says, flashing a lopsided smile and striking what might be the only note of insecurity in several hours of conversation. “Look,” he says, shifting into confidently matter-of fact mode. “I am in the business of live or die by the public.”
The Bilingual Advantage-The New York Times-2011
The following information is used only for educational purposes.
May 30, 2011
The Bilingual Advantage
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.
Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?
A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.
As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.
Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?
A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.
But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.
Q. How does this work — do you understand it?
A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.
If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.
Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?
A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.
That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.
Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?
A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.
Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?
A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.
Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?
A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.
In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.
Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?
A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.
Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?
A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”
There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.
Q. Are you bilingual?
A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”
May 30, 2011
The Bilingual Advantage
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.
Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?
A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.
As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.
Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?
A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.
But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.
Q. How does this work — do you understand it?
A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.
If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.
Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?
A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.
That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.
Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?
A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.
Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?
A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.
Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?
A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.
In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.
Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?
A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.
Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?
A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”
There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.
Q. Are you bilingual?
A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”
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