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This American Life recently ran an episode called “The Giant Pool of Money,” which explained the subprime mortgage crisis, and since then it has become the most-downloaded episode of all time. By a margin of 50,000 downloads and counting…

Jay Rosen at Pressthink calls it “the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard.” And, in the course of praising the piece, he says something absolutely brilliant: “Explanation leads to information, not the other way around.” (Forgive the extended pullquote.)

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information, as with prices, weather reports and ball scores. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior reports.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and make note it. (“”Subprime lenders in trouble: check.”) Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye on the story. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is truly up) I might then turn to an “analysis” piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps a roundtable with experts on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That’s the way it works… right?

Wrong! For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I’ve picked up a blinking red light from the news system’s repeated placement of “subprime” items in front of me.

On top of that, if I decide to buckle down and really pay attention to “subprime lenders in crisis” news—including the analysis pieces and the economics columnist—I am likely to feel even more frustrated because the missing narrative prevents these good-faith efforts from making much of a difference. The columnist who says he is going to explain it to me typically assumes too much knowledge (“mortgage-backed securities?”) or has too little space, or is bored with the elementary task of explanation and prefers that more sophisticated work appear under his byline. Or maybe, as with this story, the very people paid to understand the story barely know how to explain it.

I think this is a profound insight, and it certainly echoes my own experience as a news consumer. I often have the sensation, when reading stories about unfamiliar topics, that I don’t have anywhere to “hang” the information. There’s no file in the filing cabinet that fits the new info. I’m too ignorant even to *categorize* the data and stash it somewhere meaningful. (South Ossetia is Exhibit A.) And in that situation, reading the news becomes a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise. You may retain the occasional proper noun, and you might learn the correct use-in-a-sentence of a phrase like “subprime mortgage,” but you’re not building a cognitive “tree,” with roots and branches. There’s nowhere to hang the new info.

And I think that’s Rosen’s point. An explanation provides the filing cabinet for the information. But, even as I type that, I realize that “filing cabinet” isn’t the right metaphor — it’s not just that you feel capable of storing the information in a way that you’ll be able to access later, it’s that once the basic filing cabinet is set up, each new piece of information makes you smarter. (Versus without the filing cabinet, that isn’t the case.) So unless you guys have cooler filing cabinets than me, that’s where the metaphor fails. Metaphor assistance, anyone?

(h/t Hashim)

1. From a letter sent to me by AmEx: “Dear Cardmember, We are pleased to notify Cardmembers that the $1,000,000.00 Prize in the Super Million Dollar XV Sweepstakes presented by American Express Publishing is still available and could be yours to win. The Prize Entry Number that decides the person who will win the $1,000,000.00 Prize has already been preselected. That person could be you, DAN HEATH.”

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. The vaguely ESL wording? (Super Million Dollar!) The Roman-numeraled sweepstakes? (Were there really 14 prior events? And were they also Super?) The repetition (“already…preselected”)? The helpful reminder of who, in fact, I am? (“you, DAN HEATH”) Oh, and there’s this: Is the credit card company that prides itself on its “elite” reputation really sending me *sweepstakes* mailers? (AmEx, did you run out of hair tonic and Charles Atlas literature?)

Let’s just leave it at this: You know how to make your cardholders feel classy, AmEx! Super Million Dollar Classy!

2. In the midst of praying for my sweepstakes victory, I get an email from AmEx warning me about a suspicious charge. (A $99 florist fee. Because, if there’s one surefire sign of identity theft, it’s a bouquet.) As we all know by now, “suspicious charges” mean that our credit cards will be shut off for our own protection. So I called AmEx from the road, knowing that I’d need the card for travel expenses. Gave them the usual: card number, security code, SSN. Asked them to clear my account so I could use the card. OK, more security questions: Birthdate, mother’s maiden name, address, phone #. Not bragging, but I did pretty well on the quiz.

Then the fun beings: “But you’re not calling from your home phone.” Nope, this is my cell. “Is there someone at your home number?” Nope, I’m on the road. “Will you be there later?” Days after I need my card, yes. “Is there anybody who could answer your home phone?” Um, I’m the person who you need to be talking to, and here I am! “Well, do you have a voice mail that has your name on it?” Er, no, not on my home phone. “Well, we can’t reactivate your account without confirming that.” [Much verbal abuse and erosion of karma.]

Let me speak to your manager. [Long hold.] “The manager is busy right now, can she call you back?” Sigh.

28 hours later, I received that call back. And that’s the story of how AmEx lost a customer. But guys, please make sure you keep me in the loop for SuperDeluxe Million Dollar Sweepstakes XVI!

(I know these customer-service stories are a dime a dozen — anybody got an “elite” AmEx story to top me? I’ve got a free book for the biggest doozy!)

The evidence says that people who buy mutual funds retire a lot poorer than if they’d simply bought index funds. So why do mutual funds keep growing? In our latest Fast Company column, we explore why it’s so hard to get the truth to stick.

Brawndo. A fake sports drink brand in a satirical movie (Idiocracy) becomes real, and now it’s a real brand but it’s still satirical, and it seems to be satirizing a RabidMacho kind of sensibility, and people who drink it must be mocking that sensibility, right?, except that RabidMacho people will almost certainly love the brand too, so ultimately, no one is distinguishing themselves from anyone else, and what’s the point? Well, the point is the ads. They are hilarious, and that’s enough. Watch the ads here. Here’s a teaser:

 

[BRAWNDO] It’s like a monster truck you can pour into your face.

It’s got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? I don’t know but they’re extremely awesome. And Brawndo is full of them! They help plants grow, which is why you should drink Brawndo and not water, because water is from the toilet, and I’ve never seen plants grow out of a toilet.

It’s got caffeine: super extra caffeine. And 5 kinds of sugar, which makes it delicious, and much better than other energy drinks, which are NOT delicious.

Drinking it will make you wonder why you’ve never crushed a human skull with your bare hands. But you won’t have to, because you’ll already know that Brawndo tastes how that would feel, which is like having sex with a tractor-trailer in a parking lot.

Rob Walker wrote a great piece about Brawndo a few months back in the NYT.

Here’s Google CEO Schmidt, in response to a question about whether Google is “dumbing down” kids:

Kids use [Google] all the time because it’s a new way of learning. When I was growing up, in Virginia, they made me memorize the names of all the capitals of every county in the state. Completely useless information. So kids today are going from knowing everything to being able to search very quickly. The kids need to learn how to search because they’re going to have to search everywhere. They’re going to have search everywhere on devices that they carry with them.

Schmidt is right about the cult of memorization in schools. Most teachers do a great job of making lessons come alive, but when it comes time to measure what the students have learned, out come the standardized tests (thanks to state and federal requirements). And what’s easy to test in a multiple-choice format? Memorized information. So a student’s understanding of the Confederacy’s war strategy is funneled through questions like, “In what year did the battle of Gettysburg take place?”

There are (at least) two problems with that. First, if you’re the teacher, and you’re running low on class time, what are you going to teach — what’s on the test (i.e., factoids) or the “big-picture” stuff? Obviously you’ll teach to the test, because you’ve had it drilled into your head that the test scores are THE representation of your students’ learning in your class. If their test scores aren’t solid, you’re a bad teacher. So, yes, given a tradeoff, you and I both would teach the Gettysburg date.

Second, facts fade. Very very quickly. I propose a test to lots of school administrators who are in love with recall-type tests as an index of progress. Two weeks after your kids make solid scores, give them a surprise re-test. Same questions, same answers. And get ready to weep. All of us know and experience that our memories fade quickly — just see the forgetting curve literature — and yet we’ve designed assessments that seem to presume memories are permanent, like files stashed on a hard drive.

Google is the perfect real-world memory aid for students. It makes it easy to retrieve the factoids that will inevitably be lost from memory. It makes it so easy, in fact, that it’s foolish to obsess about teaching the factoids. If a student knows that there was a battle, during the Civil War, that represented a turning point, and she can articulate why, and she can discuss the factors that led up to the pivotal battle itself, isn’t that a picture of success? Would anyone think she’s less smart, or less aware of history, if she Googled the dates and the place names?