El Al and airport security

"Why can't TSA be more like El Al?" you sometimes hear when people grouse about American airport security. "El Al hasn't had a terrorist incident on one of its planes for many decades."

True. El Al's security measures indeed are highly effective. Instead of examining shoes and toothpaste tubes, El Al agents -- all trained psychologists -- quietly interview each passenger at length, watching for telltale signs that all might not be well.

Years ago, when I flew El Al from JFK to Tel Aviv on a travel writers' junket, a pretty young Israeli sat me down in a cubicle and politely asked me about my business in Israel, where I was staying, with whom I was traveling, and so on. She kept her eyes on mine during the entire interview -- "interrogation" is too harsh a word for the deceptively soft questions she asked -- and presumably watched my body language for unconscious but revealing twitches of guilt and evasiveness.

It was clear that she knew exactly who I was and why I was traveling to Israel -- I was a guest of both El Al and the Israeli tourism authority and presumably had passed a background check -- but she pressed on anyway, until she was satisfied that I posed no danger.

Afterward, she thanked me for my patience and waved me and my luggage through the metal detector and X-ray machine and into the passenger lounge. I looked about. Three or four men and women in unobtrusive civilian clothes strolled quietly among the passengers, apparently observing their behavior. It was hard to miss them; they had the watchful look of cops.

Wouldn't it be nice if American air security could do the same?

But TSA agents could never follow this scheme. They barely have a high school education, let alone a degree in psychology. They obey a rigid operations manual; they do not make considered decisions.

We also have to remember that El Al is a minor national airline and is government-supported. It can afford the relatively small number of highly trained security personnel it needs.

And so for us, El Al's policy is way too labor-intensive as well as too brain-demanding.

Readability

In today's New York Times, the estimable David Pogue (I never miss a column of his) offers his "Pogie Awards" for the year's best tech ideas.

Some of these notions are better in the conception than in the execution, but not Pogue's favorite, Readability, a tiny (and free) button for your browser's toolbar that strips out everything from a Web page except the text and accompanying photos. With a single click of that button you're suddenly presented with a narrow (but adjustable) column of text as clean and clear as one in a well-designed, well-printed photo book. No muss, no fuss.

Reading newspapers and magazine content on the Internet can be maddening. Often we're presented with a visual dog's breakfast, cluttered with graphics that howl and bark for our attention. Click on a news story, and you'll get a new page with a bunch of new ads. This can be very annoying, especially since ad blockers no longer work as well as they used to. (There's a war on, you know -- a war between pro-ad and anti-ad programmers.)

The problem of readability seems to be a fairly new one. After all, those of us who grew up with printed newspapers, especially mainsheet-sized dailies, quickly got used to the ads surrounding the stories we read. We trained ourselves to skip over the huckstering, or perhaps just glance at and quickly dismiss it.

Yes, some readers did complain about ad-heavy newspapers and magazines -- but back in those days, most of us understood that the ads paid for producing the papers we bought for a mere quarter. Besides, we almost instinctively knew how to read around them, unless we were actively interested in their content.

The Readability button does make a difference for Web news and blog readers. As Pogue points out, it does not handle all Web pages properly, but it presents most of them swiftly and smartly. Reading long-form articles suddenly becomes almost soothing.

You can get Readability here. Just follow the simple instructions and mouse the button to your browser's toolbar, where it will stay.

Heads up, buddy!

One of my New Year's resolutions is to get Hang Fire finished, now that the old ticker is tocking properly, and another is to fan the flames of shameless self-promotion.

You know that "midlist" (meaning slow-selling) authors get few publicity dollars from their publishers. This means that we poor scribblers have to get out there with sandwich boards and bullhorns if our books are to survive in the marketplace. We can't allow our tiny lights to gutter under a bushel.

I've made a start with the home page of henrykisor.com.

Immodest and in-your-face, isn't it? But that's what it takes these days.

Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds

Govert Teunisz Flinck, Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds. Oil on wood, 1639. Musee de Louvre, Paris. (Click on image for large version.)

The Adoration of the Magi

Pieter Aertsen, The Adoration of the Magi. Oil on panel, c. 1560. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Click on image for large version.)

Increasing Your Word Power

Great new words I discovered while looking up other stuff on the Internet:

Seppo (n.) An American, in Australian argot. Backformation from imported Cockney rhyming slang (seppo=septic tank=Yank).

Angel turds (n.) Those annoying Styrofoam peanuts that fall out of packing boxes around Christmas when the air is dry and staticky and stick to your sleeves and the rug.

When the title becomes the design

Richard Hendel's design for the cover of the newest edition of What's That Pig Outdoors?















Yesterday the new and updated edition of my first book, What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness, took another stride down the road to its August 1 publication date at the University of Illinois Press. Just last week the text editing was finished.

Cope Cumpston, the press's art director, sent me a copy of the art for the cover for the new edition.

The design is spare and elegant, with the unusual title set in an equally unusual font (Geogrotesque Stencil) that almost fades out of a light gray block background. The subtitle -- which reveals the subject of the book -- is set in eye-catching red underneath.

I like it. I think it's perfect for the new edition's most important target audience, academics and students, yet has commercial bookstore appeal as well.

Commercial books -- that is, those sold in bookstores (and online) for the mass market -- need bold and brassy covers to compete with all the others that jostle for space on the tables. They especially must catch the eyes of casual browsers, those who aren't sure what they're looking for, and push them into impulse purchases.

Many commercial bookstores don't carry university-press titles, except for the rare crossover title that attracts both scholarly and ordinary readers. The audience for university press books is different. Much of it consists of solitary professors perusing catalogs and complimentary copies of books in their bailiwicks, searching for fresh viewpoints to expose to their students as well as new data for their own research.

Here the task of the cover is not so much to grab the eye as it is to engage the mind. Subtlety counts. Still, the covers need to be strong enough to attract students browsing in university bookstores, searching out supplementary reading for their courses.

This new edition of Pig is the third. It was first published in 1990 as a hardcover (above, right) by the Hill & Wang imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, then as a Penguin paperback (below, left) in 1991.

The cover designers for the first two editions had a difficult problem: How to illustrate the idea of deafness. Unlike other disabilities (or different abilities, as some folks would argue), deafness is not visible. You can't spot it just by looking at a deaf person. Only when the subject speaks, either in voice or in sign language, can you discern it.

The designers made several stabs at illustrating that difficult visual concept before they settled on the solution: Make the odd title of the book the major illustration. The result in both earlier editions was fine, in my opinion, but I think freelancer Richard Hendel's design for the U. of I. Press edition is the best of the three.

Hendel is a veteran in the business -- he is the award-winning author of On Book Design. He told Cumpston that what he was trying to do is illustrate "the idea of barely heard by making the title not quite seen."

The challenge for a designer, Hendel writes in his book, "isn't to create something different or pretty or clever but to discover how best to serve the author's words."

I think he's done that with his Pig cover. I'm pleased.

The next step in the production of the new book will be to design its interior, then place the text on pages and proof them. I'll see those pages in February.