Good Magazine:

Fin

2008-09-02T16:29:00-04:00

A mile or two off the coast of Cape Cod, just east of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Ted Ligenza shoves a hand across the ignition switch of the Reina Marie, and his 31-foot boat sputters into silence and drifts to a stop. It is not yet dawn on a cold day in January. A five-foot swell lifts and lowers the boat in the semi-darkness while Ligenza stands at the wheel staring intently at his sonar. When he spots a flicker of color on the screen, he crams the rest of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into his mouth and ducks into the hold. The Reina Marie, pilotless, begins to drift westward, pushed by the waves and the wind.

Ligenza, 54, is a square-built man, broad everywhere aroundan impression only heightened by several layers of thick flannel underneath the billowing orange overalls he wears on his boat. He moves nimbly, pulling tackle out of boxes, returning to the helm every few moments to check the sonar. On his third or fourth pass by the wheel, a dark look flashes across his face. The flicker on the screen is gone. This isnt good, he says. There should be fish here.

On the radio navigation system, a pair of numbers is blinkingtwo coordinates that mark a spot on the ocean where cod, drawn by geography or temperature or instinct, have been known to converge. Ligenza, a commercial fisherman for 35 years, lives by such numbers. They create a kind of map of the sea, a catalogue of possible fishing sites. Beside the wheel of the Reina Marie, a tattered notebook lists pages upon pages of coordinates, collected over decades on the water. Others are scribbled in haste on the walls and ceiling of the wheelhouse. Ligenza consults his book for a second time and confirms the numbers. Then he worries aloud about the cost of fuel for the hour-and-a-half trip, and considers the unhappy possibility that he will only break even on the day, or take a loss.

Finally, a splash of color returns on the sonar, and Ligenza quickly drops a line into the sea. Four hooks rush overboard, tethered to a steel jig, and the line hisses as it uncoils from the deck. When the jig reaches the sea floor he tugs back on the line until he feels the weight of fish on the other end. Then he plants his feet and begins to haul, hand over hand. When it emerges, the line offers up three cod, each the length of Ligenzas forearm. They hang limply from their hooks and Ligenza shakes his head. None are close to legal size. Prying them loose, he returns them one by one to the water.

“Our oceans carry less than a tenth the number of fish they once held, yet few of us have any sense that something is wrong.”

Ligenza curses beneath his breath and drops the tackle by his feet. Then he turns and starts the engine, thumbing through his notebook for a new set of numbers.

You know when I realized how bad it was? he will say later, at dusk. I looked at my numbers. All these places, and theres none of them that have fish anymore. Twenty years ago, if you had come to this spot off Wellfleet or, for that matter, any other along the Atlantic coast of North America, you would have found an ocean still brimming with life. The waters had been fished for hundreds of years, but they still harbored an impressive number of species. And none were more abundant than cod. They seemed innumerable and inexhaustible, and when they disappeared, as if overnightdecimated at last by years of overfishingit came as a profound shock.

The first to suffer were the fishermen of Newfoundland, who saw their industry collapse in the early 1990s. Later it was the fishing communities further south, along the Gulf of Maine. Fishermen of the southern Cape, like Ligenza, could still find enough cod even five or six years ago to make a decent living, but that, too, has changed. Today, cod populations in the Georges Bank, off Cape Cod, hover near the brink, at levels 10 percent of what scientists consider healthy. Large areas of the Bank are losed entirely to groundfishing.

By now, the collapse is a well-known story in New England, chronicled in books like Mark Kurlanskys Cod and in newspaper accounts of riotous fishery meetings and bank foreclosures in port towns. But it is only part of the story. Less appreciated is what else is missing from the New England coast. The number of overfished or threatened species makes for a sobering list: Atlantic halibut, yellowtail flounder, haddock, wolffish, river herring, Atlantic salmon. Shark populations in the North Atlantic have dropped by half since 1986, in the same time that bluefin tuna, which once swept past the Cape in schools a hundred thick, have been brought near commercial collapse. The astonishing fecundity of the New England coast has been reduced to a memoryone that haunts a generation of fishermen. In Harwich, on the Cape, a fisherman points me to a map of the coastal channels he once fished and covers it with a big, callused hand. You cant find anything there anymore, he says.

Ted Ligenza steers the Reina Marie off the coast of Cape Cod.

What has transpired off the shores of Cape Cod is not unique. The same has occurred on coasts throughout the world. In 1988, at the peak of the output of the worlds fisheries, boats around the globe landed something on the order of 80 million tons of fish. Since then, depending upon which numbers you believe, the worlds annual catch has either plateaued or fallen by as much as 500,000 tons a year.

The rise of industrial fishing in the latter half of the 20th century, coupled with a growing world population, has overmatched the oceans supply. And while the history of New England fishing might seem a stark exampleand it isAmerican fisheries are actually among the most enlightened in the world (though that is not saying much), with stringent management plans and some notable fish recoveries. In Europe, by contrast, nearly half of fish stocks are considered seriously depleted, and the North Sea has become a relatively barren body of water (to fill their nets, the distant water fleets of Europe now sail the west coast of Africa). And while fish stocks dwindle worldwide, an estimated 90 percent of large predatory fishtuna, swordfish, cod, halibuthave disappeared since the mid-20th century. One study, published almost two years ago in Science, predicted a worldwide collapse of commercial fish stocks in just 40 years, if the present pace of fishing continues.

The demise of commercial fishing is beyond the limits of even our darkest environmental imaginations. And yet the evidence of the oceans diminishment is everywhere. Leaving aside the legitimate concerns of conservationists, the possibility of a broad fish collapse is harrowing for other reasons. At a time when we are mired in a global food crisis, nearly 1.5 billion people depend upon the sea as a source of food or income. The destabilizing effect of such a collapse would be tremendous, bringing communities and countries into conflict over a resource we once considered boundless. It is fair to say that the endgame has begun.

“Ive always tried to fish in what I thought was an ethical manner. But Ive paid dearly for it. If Id have gotten in big, with a bigger boat, Id have something to give my children now."”

Not long ago, I traveled to the north shore of Long Island to visit with Carl Safina, a leading ocean conservationist, who 10 years ago wrote Song for the Blue Ocean, an elegiac account of the consequences of overfishing. For nearly three decades, Safina has concerned himself with the sea, first working on behalf of the National Audubon Society and later co-founding the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation organization.

We met on a bright wintry afternoon. A storm had just passed, the sky was clear, and we walked along a beach near his home. Safina, who is 53, wore a baseball cap lowered against the wind. When I was a child, he said, we couldnt conceive of there being a problem with the ocean. When I first came here to the Sound, it seemed a pristine place. It was only later that I started to realize that it was being overfished, and that it had been overfished even before I arrived. I spoke with people who were only in their mid-50s who could recall schools of fish that are completely unimaginable now. And then I myself started to see that those fish were dropping, year after year. Later, he continued, when I was old enough to go offshore the ocean still seemed thriving.

Renowned fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly has a term for this habit of mind that allows us to adapt to the impoverishment of our landscapes. He calls it shifting baseline syndrome. Over time, we lose track of the natural state of the world. So when we hear fishermen today describe years when fish crowded the harbors, their stories have no place within our own experiencesthe excesses of one generation are repeated by the next until we find ourselves at a moment such as this, when our oceans carry less than a tenth the number of fish they once held, yet few of us have any sense that something is wrong.

When I asked Safina why that is, he nodded at the water. The reason is right there, he said. You cant see beneath the surface. You can see a clear-cut in the forest, but you cant see an ocean without fish. You cant see the tuna that are no longer here, or the swordfish, or the dolphins that were once right off this shore.

Many of Ligenza's most trusted fishing spots are now empty.

Such myopia is not unique to our age. As Callum Roberts shows in his book, The Unnatural History of the Sea, even at the turn of the 20th century, great stretches of ocean were already depleted by centuries of fishing. In many places, he writes, the oceans were transformed long before scientists first began writing papers on marine ecology, or people of todays generations first dipped their toes in the sea. The seas that we have blithely assumed to be natural and unsullied had in reality already been profoundly altered.

If it is true that the seas have been overfished for generations, it is also the case that 50 years of industrial-scale fishing have quickened the speed of the damage. Advancements in fishing technology have taken much of the guesswork out of the game. The adoption of sonar, for instance, has allowed fishing vessels to catch entire schools at a time; bigger, more powerful factory ships can now access even the most remote places; and improvements in catching techniquesparticularly bottom trawling, where a net is dragged across the sea floorhave had severe effects.

The trawl, which dates to the 14th century, came into widespread use in the North Sea around Great Britain in the 1800s. Almost from its inception, concerns arose over its use. When a trawl is towed, it snares whatever cant outswim it, much of which is killed in the process. They have a high bycatchthey trap a large quantity of untargeted species, the majority of which are thrown back, dead or dying, into the sea.

“At a time when we are mired in a global food crisis, nearly 1.5 billion people depend upon the sea as a source of food or income. A collapse of the fish supply could bring countries into conflict over a resource we once considered boundless.”

Of course, the business has always been a bloody one; few methods of fishing are harmless. When bluefin grew scarce in the North Atlantic in the mid-1980s, tuna boats resorted to spotter planes to hunt for surviving fish. Longline boats, which can haul miles of line and thousands of baited hooks, frequently snare sea turtles and sea birds. Gillnets, so named because they trap the gills of fish as they attempt to wriggle upward through mesh openings, have serious bycatch problems. And while it would be easy to blame fishermen for these practices, in many ways their hands are tied. Competing for a common, diminishing resource, they can turn their backs on technology only at their own peril.

When I asked Ted Ligenza if he resented trawlers or gillnetters, he demurred. He shares a port with men whose livelihoods depend on these techniques, and many of them are his friends. When pressed, the most he would say was that he wished more people had fished as he had, with a hook and a line. If that had been the case, he told me, there might still be fish. I wasnt willing to do a lot of things that other people have done, Ligenza said. I wasnt willing because it wasnt fair to the fish, and it wasnt fair to my sons and the next generation. So Ive always tried to fish in what I thought was an ethical manner. But Ive paid dearly for it. If Id have gotten in big, with a bigger boat, Id have something to give my children now. But I never wanted to fish that way. I just didnt have the stomach for it.

Many experts think that governments have been too kind to the fishing industry. The European Union, China, Japan, and the United States spend as much as $20 billion a year to subsidize a $90 billion industry. The number of industrial-sized fishing boats in the world, which the U.N. estimates at 1.3 million, will have to be reduced by more than a third to reach sustainable levels of fishing (and some conservation organizations put the number at closer to half).

To reverse the trend, fish agencieslong beholden to industry interestswill have to set enforceable catch quotas established by independent scientists. Where quotas are in place, they often account only for landingsthe fish brought to port. But fisheries also need to be managed for bycatch, which, if tallied, might increase global catch numbers by 20 percent or more (accurate numbers are difficult to come by, but in the notorious shrimp industry an estimated three pounds of bycatch accompany each pound of netted shrimp). In fragile areas, high-impact methods of fishing like bottom trawling will need to be outlawed entirely. And while these measures will tax already beleaguered fishing communities, the success stories of sustainable fisheriesin Alaska, New Zealand, Icelandserve as proof that a balance can be struck.

Safina certainly thinks so. When the wind picked up, we retreated to his car. Sand rattled against the windows and in the distance a lone windsurfer cut a white line across the water. I asked if anything had given him cause for hope in the decade since the publication of his book, and he smoothed his beard and looked out to the other side of the bay, where four smokestacks issued cheerful clouds of steam. Theres plenty to make you pessimistic, he said. Im not a betting man. Its for people on the sidelines to guess who will win or lose. If youre working on this, you just try to find out what you can do. A lot of surprising things can happen. And you can change things. Ive seen it. Weve seen progressno-where near enough and by no means widespread enough but progress all the same. When people do the right things, fish come back. Species populations rebound. Its really that simple. So, yes, I do have hope. I do.

We have imperiled what is perhaps the last wilderness on earth, for the simplest reason: We believed it was so vast it couldnt be harmed. The signs of our folly are now too numerous to ignore. Massive, swirling gyres of plastic have formed in the North Pacific, as have toxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and dozens more places. Coastal pollution and construction is destroying critical wetland habitats worldwide. And the ocean itself is warming, a development that will have consequences we can hardly imagine. Amid these challenges, overfishing represents the most immediate threat and possibly the easiest problem to remedy.

Less than 1 percent of the ocean has any form of protection, while more than 10 percent of our land has been excluded from development. Yet in places where fishing has been halted, recovery can be measured over a relatively short period of time. The oceans floor begins to return to a natural state, fish populations start to rebound, and fishermen experience a surge in catch as fish migrate beyond protected waters.

Some experts suggest that as much as 20 percent of the ocean will need safeguarding from fishing in the coming years, a number so high as to appear politically impossible. Yet in 2006, the Bush administration designated for protection 140,000 square miles of ocean near the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and succeeded in creating the largest marine reserve on earth. The argument for such preservation has as much to do with our responsibility to future generations as it does with our present appetite for fish.

“ When people do the right things, fish come back. Species populations rebound. Its really that simple. So, yes, I do have hope.”

Because of our role as consumers, were no less culpable than fishermen for the state of the oceans. Global seafood consumption has doubled since 1973 and, just as its health benefits are becoming known, it seems clear that we will have to eat less fish, and that the fish we do eat will have to be smaller and lower on the food chain, where the effects of fishing are less pernicious. A cod caught by a bottom trawler carries with it a different set of environmental implications than a cod caught by a hook and lineand we ought to recognize and pay for the difference. And we would do well to contemplate, too, why it is that we become indignant at the thought of a world without wolves or elephants, yet stand idly by as bluefin tuna, for instance, are hunted into obsolescence. This animal, as grand as any we know, can live for 30 years, weigh as much as 1,200 pounds, and cross thousands of miles of ocean in a single year.

If we manage to avert ourselves from our present path, then it will be not just the fish that survive, but also the fishing towns along our coasts. The culture of fishing is as old as civilization, with its own language and wisdom. It instructs us that there is another way of living, a life based upon the seasons and the tides and the movements of other beings. If we lose the fish, we lose the fishermenand then, at last, we will have lost something of ourselves.

At sunset, Ted Ligenza points the Reina Marie southwest toward home. The temperature has fallen by 10 degrees in an hour, and gusts of cold salt air sweep past the crumpled newspapers that line the cracks in the wheelhouse. Despite the chill, Ligenza has reason to be in a good mood250 pounds of cod, a decent catch, sit in boxes on the deck. But he is quiet, carried away by his thoughts.

He begins to tell stories of the old days, recalling years when 15 or 20 hook fishermen surrounded him at any given spot, many of them his friends. Hauling cod from the water, his radio crackled with laughter. He felt safe then, out on the water with men he knew and trusted. But his is a solitary life now. Most of the hook-and-line men have sold their boats and retired, or found other work onshore. Today, in the 12 hours weve been out on the water, only a single boat has passed us.

When I came here as a young man, I had a future, Ligenza says, his voice barely rising above the groan of the engine. And I loved this life. I loved this way of fishing. I felt good about it. I was happy every morning, heading out. Now every day Im just praying to hell Ill catch enough to make some money. Im doing this just by the skin of my teeth.

And then he tells me of a day 20 years ago, fishing with a friend at a spot offshore along the Great South Channel. The cod were thick on the sea floor then. Surrounding Ligenza on all sides were other boats: hookers, trawlers, gillnetters. Their decks were slick with fish, and flocks of gulls fought overhead for the spoils. Glancing around, his friend took it all in: the men and the fish and the many boats. Ted, he said, this cant go on forever.

At the time, Ligenza says, I was pissed at him for saying it. But he wasnt wrong. He wasnt wrong.

Prescription for Upheaval

2008-08-27T21:13:00-04:00

The apogee of protest rock might well have come on May 15, 1970. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young recorded Ohio in a Los Angeles record studioa song that Neil Young had penned in feverish reaction to the Kent State killings 11 days earlier. In searing terms, the song called a generation to account for the actions of its government: Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. / Were finally on our own. / This summer I hear the drumming, / Four dead in Ohio.

In these new tumultuous times, we have plenty to get worked up about (the Florida recount, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, to name a few), but you would be hard-pressed to find such overt social commentary addressed by todays of-the-moment rock bands, at least in any memorable way. Even Rolling Stone admitted not long ago that some of the new political rock is couched in ambiguitybut isnt a lack of ambiguity required for a clear message of protest?

Maybe weve just been looking for protest in all the wrong places. Maybe the interesting music revolt isnt happening on the FM dial anymore. Case in point: Ted Leo, lead singer and guitarist of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and a fixture of the alternative rock scene. His sound is a tightly woven texture of punk and pop, with hard-charging songs of an unambiguously political sort. I see my songs as vignettes or snapshots about the human condition at a moment of reflection, or crisis, or triumph, says Leo, 37.

“Youve got people creating amazing art infused with their passion and politics all the time.”

As a New Jersey native, his songs can certainly echo the workingman blues of Bruce Springsteen, but they take just as much from Joe Strummer of the Clash and the whole punk ethos. In the late 1980s, Leo fronted the hardcore band Citizens Arrest (before stints with Animal Crackers and Chisel), and while hes no longer screaming into mics and hanging from rafters, the antiestablishment rebellion of hardcore punk still rings clearly throughout his newer, more popular work. In songs like Heart Problems, Bomb. Repeat. Bomb, and The One Who Got Us Out, he laments the Iraq war, the abuse of detainees, the erosion of our civil liberties, our failing economy, and our broken health-care system.

In this age of Clear Channel, and the soft banalities of corporate-curated rock radio, it would seem quite a large leap for Leos songsangry and unapologeticto seize a national audience in the way that Ohio or Creedence Clearwater Revivals Fortunate Son captured college campuses decades ago. But Leo himself seems unperturbed by this fact. I dont want to be a rock star, I dont ever want to be playing arenas. My audience is not massive: its a tight and loyal crowd. He also resists the inevitable comparisons to his protest-rock forebears. His music is its own thing, he says. To suggest that [the 1960s] were some sort of heyday of musical radicalism, he says, completely glosses over the fact that when the world got self-satisfied in the 1970s, punk picked up the torch, and [the old radicals] were on the other side of the picket line. Youve got people creating amazing art infused with their passion and politics all the time.

So far, Leos most overt call to action has been Shake the Sheets, an album he released just before the 2004 presidential election. He and his band took their fist-pumping pop songs to get-out-the-vote events, shows supporting John Kerry, and organized protests. Despite the outcome of that election, Shake the Sheets struck a chord with a larger audience and marked a sharper, more direct approach in Leos songwriting. This time around, hes at it again, having just performed at the Campus Progress national conference in Washington, D.C., and touring with the band Against Me! this fall. He has also been working on a new crop of songs, which he plans to release in time for the November elections.

Leos 2004 album Shake the Sheets featured the hit Me and Mia as well as The One Who Got Us Out, which features overtly political lyrics like Take it to the floor of Congress / Look into the Core of Rotten / Turn into the one who got us out.

Tricking People into Doing the Right Thing

2008-08-27T18:48:00-04:00

Anyone who has studied psychology knows just how puzzling human behavior can be. Busy people are trying to cope in a complex world, and this means they simply cannot afford to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The bottom line is that people are, shall we say, nudge-able. With subtle hints, you can convince them to do things they otherwise might not be able to do for themselves. And we think private and public institutions ought to offer carefully planned nudgesdesigning choices that are less heavy-handed and more effective than mandates and bans.

Here are a few possibilities:

Quit smoking without a patch. Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking is a savings program offered by the Green Bank of Caraga in Mindanao, Philippines. A would-be nonsmoker opens an account with a minimum balance of one dollar. For six months, the client deposits the amount of money she would otherwise spend on cigarettes into the account. After six months, the client takes a urine test to confirm that she has not smoked recently. If she passes the test, she gets her money back. If she fails the test, the account is closed and the money is donated to a charity. MITs Poverty Action Lab found that opening up an account makes those who want to quit 53 percent more likely to achieve their goal. No other antismoking tactic, not even the nicotine patch, appears to be so successful.

Stop compulsive gambling. Over the past decade, several states, including Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, have enacted laws enabling gambling addicts to put themselves on a list that bans them from entering casinos or collecting gambling winnings. The underlying thought is that many people who have self-control problems are aware of their shortcomings and want to overcome them. Sometimes recreational gamblers can do this on their own or with their friends; sometimes private institutions can help them. But addicted gamblers might do best if they have a way to enlist the support of the state.

“Disulfiram causes alcohol drinkers to throw up and suffer a hangover as soon as they start to drink.”

Dollar a day. Teenage pregnancy is a serious problem, and girls who have one child, at, say, 18, often become pregnant again within a year or two. Several cities, including Greensboro, North Carolina, have experimented with a dollar-a-day program, by which teenage girls with a baby receive a dollar for each day that they are not pregnant. Thus far the results have been extremely promising. A dollar a day is a trivial amount to the city, even for a year or two, so the plans total cost is extremely low, but the small recurring payment is just enough to encourage some teenage mothers to take steps to avoid getting pregnant again. And because taxpayers end up paying a significant amount for many children born to teenagers, the costs appear to be far less than the benefits. Many people are touting dollar a day as a model program.

No Bite? No Drink. Those who want to stop biting their nails can buy bitter nail polishes such as Mavala Stop and Orly No Bite. A more extreme version of this concept is a drug called Disulfiram, which is given to some alcoholics. Disulfiram causes alcohol drinkers to throw up and suffer a hangover as soon as they start to drink. For some people suffering from chronic alcoholism, Disulfiram has had a strong and positive effect as part of a treatment program.

Stop men from peeing on the floor. Authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they cant help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldnt Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye

2008-08-13T20:32:00-04:00

Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salingers novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salingers novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

To this day, The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the most referred-to books on back-cover blurbs. Melissa Banks The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing is, as a coming of age story one of the best since Catcher in the Rye; Douglas Couplands Generation X is a modern-day Catcher in the Rye; David Sedariss Barrel Fever is a caustic mix of J. D. Salinger and John Waters. Indeed, there are many tales of adolescent angst out there, and they all, it seems, need a wink to Salinger to claim a place in this genre. But Salingers novel no longer deserves the top spot in contemporary coming-of-age literature, even if most would still agree that it firmly occupies the X spot in the X meets Y publishing pitch (Its Catcher in the Rye meets Blood Diamonds; Its Catcher in the Rye for gay teenagers).

High school teachers got on the Catcher bandwagon in the early 1960s, in an effort to update their hoary reading lists. When it was first assigned, Catchers purpose in the curriculum was to offer students a contemporary, cool alternative to, say, something lengthy and dense like David Copperfield. Salinger had a prescient sense of his heros eventual cultural role: Holden starts his story by telling us he is not going to rehearse all that David Copperfield kind of crap, because it bores him.

If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through all that Holden Caulfield crap. In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of ones interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do.

The publication of Catcher helped launch a Salinger Industry, as George Steiner described the phenomenon in a 1959 article for The Nation. Released in the summer of 1951 by a 32-year-old writer with a modest reputation as a short-story writer, Catcher was a mid-summer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and by fall it was fourth on The New York Times Best-Seller list. A scant eight years later, the critic Granville Hicks thought twice about including Catcher on his New York University Contemporary American Literature syllabus, because 18-year-olds had already read it.

One reason for Catchers instant-classic status was that is wasto employ that overused neologismrelatable to those who had the power to write about it. In 1961, The New York Times Book Review credited the popularity of Catcher with the shock and thrill of recognition it gave readers: Many of my friends and this writer himself identified completely with Holden. Those few well-known critics who did not look like Holden tended to have a different perspective: Joan Didion, who thought Salingers work slight, mocked the relatability factor of Salingers novel in a 1961 essay, in which she describes a stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl who declared Salinger the single person in the world capable of understanding her. Like Didion, Steiner considered Catcher of minor literary merit. Its main appeal to students, he argued, is simply that the young like to read about the young, prefer short books, and ones without too many references to other books. Salinger, he says, flatters [their] very ignorance and moral shallowness. And it helped English professors get promoted, Steiner grumbled, since writing about Catcher requires less research and has less competition than writing yet another essay on Shakespeare. The Salinger Industry proved that there was something seriously wrong with contemporary American criticism.

American criticism may have been in trouble in the 1950s, but it is in even worse shape now. Today, there is far less overlap between what teachers, scholars, and the public read. Rare is a combination of scholar, public intellectual, and pedagogue who publishesas did Steiner, or Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilsonacross our increasingly specialized publications. And rarer still is the common reader (say, a high school teacher) who peruses scholarly journals, educational publications, and general-audience magazines alike.

Despite critics disapproval, Catcher is now canonical. It is a part of literary history. Holden is our contemporary American David Copperfield, our 20th-century Huck Finn. Hes part of our common conversation, our cultural literacy. You have to admire the guy.

Still, after half a century of new, equally relatable coming-of-age-stories, dont some of Holdens younger siblings deserve the end-of-the-year spot in sophomore English? Since a syllabus is a zero-sum game, adding means knocking something off the list (Scarlet Letter! yell my undergraduates). But not to worry: Given that a higher population of Americans now attend college than they did in the 1950s, most will be forced to read the old classics a few years later.

A revised syllabus:

Freaks and Geeks (1999)
NBCs series, produced by Judd Apatow, deftly portrayed the tenderness and anxiety of high school.

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
Andersons Speak tells the story of Melinda, a high school freshman and teenage outcast whose struggles with adolescence cause her to fall mute.

Drown, Junot Díaz (1996)
This book of short stories (by this years Pulitzer Prize winner) is told from the perspective of Dominican adolescents struggling with family, sexuality, and identity. The lyrical, inventive prose makes their stories all the more memorable.

Project X, Jim Shepard (2004)
Shepards bold novel tells the story of two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre. Shepard tackles one of the scariest aspects of 21st-century adolescence.

American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang (2007)
This graphic novel tells that age-old story of trying to accept who you are. Taking up Asian-American themes, Yang breaks new bildungsroman ground.

Old School, Tobias Wolff (2003)
Set in a prep school in the early 1960s, a scholarship boy with literary ambitions tries to find his voice. Wolff reworks Salingers terrain without sentimentality.

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
The first novel by the author of Middlesex plays with the horror genre, and tells us that not all is at it appears in suburbia. Unflinching and masterfully written, Suicides is not easy, but thats the point.

Anywhere But Here, Mona Simpson (1986)
A mother-daughter story about life on the road and a childs desire to be rooted. Simpson reminds us that sometimes a teenagers rebellion against a parent is warranted.

Good Magazine:

Fin

Prescription for Upheaval

Tricking People into Doing the Right Thing

Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldnt Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye

A revised syllabus:

Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldnt Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye