health
Make your own way
Tim Gill

Movement is vital to our happiness and good health, so parents should let their offspring off the leash a little more. The daily walk to school is a good place to start.

Walking is how we make our way through life. Our instinct for movement and exploration kicks in from birth and can be seen throughout childhood. Just watch a toddler taking their first steps, trying to master the art of putting one foot in front of the other. Yet modern life stifles children’s adventurous impulses at every turn, with studies showing a collapse in their right to roam. It’s not hard to connect this with concerns about children’s health and wellbeing. And, as yesterday’s screen-reared children become today’s anxious parents, there’s a real prospect of a spiral of decline.

So what could break that cycle? My answer is that most quotidian of childhood experiences: the walk to school. I am talking here about walking alone – or rather, without parents or other adults. When adults are in the frame, their presence undermines children’s independence; it is a rare parent who can resist the impulse to step in at the first sign of any problem, denying children the chance to figure things out for themselves. Let’s start with the obvious. Walking burns calories and keeps muscles and joints in good working order, counteracting the damaging consequences of too much sitting and helping to embed travel habits that can last a lifetime. With as much as 12 per cent of healthcare funding in many countries being spent on treating the harmful effects of type 2 diabetes – a lifestyle disease largely caused by inactivity and poor diet – even modest reductions in rates will ease pressure on those budgets.

Turning from physical to mental health, the solo trip to school is many children’s first taste of responsibility and independence. Walking gives children their own agency and increases self-confidence. They feel more connected to nature and to the towns and cities in which they live, strengthening the glue that builds supportive and resilient communities. Researchers have studied children’s mental images of their local area by asking them to make sketch maps from memory. Strikingly, the drawings made by those who are driven to school are little more than a list of objects (dog, tree, house, park, road). By contrast, the walkers drew detailed maps of their neighbourhoods, fleshing out the locations and relationships of significant places and people.

But it’s not all about children. Parents who are unburdened by the daily school run get the rare gift of time. This can easily add up to several extra hours every week: even more for parents who, building on their children’s independent mobility, cut back on the parental taxi service that dominates so many family schedules. In much of the developed world walking to school is, statistically, relatively safe for children in their middle years and older. Six- and seven-year-olds regularly walk to school unaccompanied in some countries, including the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Nordic nations (which often feature at the top of global league tables of children’s wellbeing). So why are parents nervous? Every parent wants their child to grow up to be confident, responsible and independent. Most understand that this means gradually letting go. But this can get drowned out in a fast-moving, instant-fix, information-overload culture whose content is fuelled by fear. That said, traffic danger in some areas needs tackling before parents can be expected to let their kids out the door.

Anyone interested in children’s lives will have found it hard to avoid the US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his bestselling book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. While Haidt’s grim account of the symptoms of a social media-saturated youth has grabbed the headlines, his prescription for childhood independence deserves just as much attention. The good news is that walking to school is on the up. Cities around the world, rightly framing it as a systemic problem, are taking action. Some schemes are little short of revolutionary. In Paris, Barcelona and Tirana, streets outside schools have been given low-cost makeovers that cut traffic and invert the historical pecking order that has placed car drivers at the top and children at the bottom. The result? Dramatic shifts in children’s travel patterns, reductions in motor traffic (and noise and air pollution levels) – and even a revival of old-fashioned street play.

Walking to school – to shops, friends’ houses or the park – is a healthy habit, a rite of passage, a freedom pass (for children and parents) and a path to stronger communities, quieter cities and a greener planet. Who doesn’t want that?

design
The folly of human-centred design
Stella Roos

Anyone creating good products should start with the people who will use them. So why is there an entire industry predicated on the notion that everything now needs an app?

Whenever I come across the term “human-centred design”, I think of an anecdote that an architect friend likes to tell. It happened years ago but he is still incensed about it. He was invited by a well-known “global design and innovation company” to a workshop in Berlin discussing how cinemagoing could be “disrupted” (that buzzword is a good cue to turn on your heels and run). The company had gathered a talented panel of experts, including a computer scientist, and the director of a film festival.

For three days, the group explored how the experience of going to the movies could be improved for people. But at the end, they discovered that the exercise had been rigged all along. The workshop leader, flown in straight from Silicon Valley, concluded out of the blue that what cinemas really needed was – surprise, surprise – a new app.

The story highlights the common gap between the stated intentions and actual outcomes of design approaches that call themselves “human-centred”. Often used in the same sentence as that other modish phrase, “design thinking”, the term is tossed around by corporations and consulting firms to describe a principle of putting people at the centre of innovation. They often endlessly quiz potential users and customers about their motivations, pain points and hopes for particular products or services. While in Berlin, the consultants might have also visited cinemas for “observations from the field” or organised “jam sessions” with a consumer panel.

The methods, laid out in flow charts that are studied by management-science undergraduates, seem quite innocent but produce outcomes that can be cluttered and confusing (the adage that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” rings particularly true here). The result is that these so-called human-centred design thinkers often end up filling the world with unnavigable steering boards, maddening touch-screen light switches and apps, apps, apps. How could such an inoffensive idea lead to so much digital faff?

The popular use of the term “human-centred design” can be credited to Stanford University’s design programme. The school was founded in 1958 by John E Arnold, a professor in mechanical engineering and business administration who (slightly ironically) is best known for tasking students with designing household items for an alien civilisation. At the time, homes and workplaces were inundated with novel technologies that mostly made life more difficult, à la Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle. The aim of the new programme was to teach the country’s top engineers to think more about the people using their inventions. This notion of considering people’s wants and desires was thought to be groundbreaking and today it has swelled into a sizeable body of academic literature on “human-centric design” and even has an official definition in the iso Standards (an internationally recognised process guideline).

But, in reality, it isn’t that novel: Stanford’s design school is founded and attended mainly by engineers, so they could be forgiven for having only coined a word for a concept as old as architecture itself. As historians Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina lay out in their book Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, even Vitruvius, the father of architectural theory, dedicated the beginning of his magnum opus to how human wellbeing can be improved with buildings – “healthfulness being their chief object”. From William Morris to Hans Hollein, so many designers have thought deeply about the topic that the adjective “human-centred” sounds like a truism.

In his book Architect, Verb, Reinier de Graaf, partner at oma, gives human-centred design the drily sarcastic definition of an “atypical approach to design where products adjust to people instead of the other way around”. Only to someone who believes that people adjusting to products is the norm would the methods of human-centred design – observing people’s needs, asking for feedback – seem innovative. For most professional designers, they have always been a given.

Still, designers and architects do not typically assemble the consumer panels and questionnaires that are associated with the Stanford-inspired human-centred design approach. Why? The classic example of the futility of market research comes again from Silicon Valley and that oft-quoted quip of Steve Jobs – “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – and, indeed, nobody had thought that it was possible to carry 1,000 songs in your pocket before the iPod came along. By taking the approach of assembling a group and democratically noting down everyone’s views and requests, there is a risk of ending up with a device with so many buttons that nobody can figure out how to use it.

When I think of design that really puts humans first, the best examples lie far from Palo Alto. There are the Amsterdam playgrounds of Aldo Van Eyck, which were inspired by the way that children were playing with the rubble left over from the Second World War. Or Brazil’s Orelhão telephone booths, which are shaped like an eggshell on a pole instead of a cabin. Designed by Chu Ming Silveira, they save sidewalk space, don’t attract litter and improve acoustics, with the bonus of making anyone using them look dashing. Both designs were adopted by the masses after literally and figuratively putting people at the centre – no surveys or brainstorming sessions required.

My architect friend’s anecdote also has a happy ending. At the workshop, the imposition of an app was disruptive, indeed: the group decided to stage a small insurgency and kicked their leader out of the room. Then they spent the rest of the day drawing up and prototyping objects such as furniture, ticket booths and a headset. Like decent design always has been, it was just people making things for people, buzzwords be damned.

psychology
Short-cut society
Leif Weatherby

We consider ourselves rational but reliance on mental short cuts leaves us open to economic exploitation. Can technology help? Yes, but it could hinder us too.

In the US, the holiday known as Black Friday, an orgy of consumerism, follows Thanksgiving, which is probably the least commercial holiday of the year. As sure as night follows day, family togetherness gives way to a kind of market purge. The typical Black Friday purchase is the flat-screen TV, and one can hardly avoid ads that look like this: “4K ultra hdtv deals! $1,299.99 – now $649.99!” 

This marketing technique exploits a psychological theory called “anchoring”, effectively appealing to what some scientists think is a weakness of the human brain in which we are unable to make rational assessments of value when we anchor our judgements around a given number. In the game of prices, which can be thought of as a kind of intellectual duel between companies and consumers, this almost seems like a form of cheating. After all, when I see that struck-through high number, I don’t know offhand if that really was the price of the television yesterday. But the deal will only stay good for a few days so I have a limited time to decide. Instead, I have to rely on what is called a “heuristic” to make a decision, balancing my sense of the importance of the purchase – how much I need that TV – against the sense I have of the value of the commodity. So, I find myself deciding on the basis of what information is given to me in the ad: the anchor of the original price.

The idea of the anchor as a cognitive bias comes from a body of research called behavioural science. This research has been widely adopted by behavioural economics, which applies insights from psychology to markets, finance and business, especially management. This area of research was created by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1980s (Kahneman died in March at the age of 90, having transformed the social sciences). He and Tversky discovered that humans were systematically unable to quickly make optimal decisions using evidence, even if they had advanced training in the statistical theories that define what “optimal” means. They found that instead of doing the difficult maths required, their experimental subjects replaced problems with simpler questions that Kahneman named a heuristic: a cognitive short cut that they theorised was necessary because the brain was unable to process information quickly and cleanly enough. In other words, rather than weighing the evidence, we jump to conclusions, pairing things that are superficially alike and relying on the evidence we have access to most immediately: adjusting around an anchor. 

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely – now under investigation for potential fraud – points to a use of anchoring by The Economist, which once listed subscriptions at the following prices: digital only, $59; print only, $125; and print plus digital, $125. The middle option, print only, is a decoy price there to underline the alleged value of the bundle, which is more than twice as expensive as the digital-only option. Ariely points out that with two prices, you have to make your own comparison, whereas the comparison of the two is supplied to you by the middle option, which anchors you to a number. 

What is happening here is a version of Kahneman and Tversky’s original experiment, in which they gave two versions of the same maths problem to two different groups: 8 3 7 3 6 3 5 3 4 3 3 3 2 3 1 and 1 3 2 3 3 3 4 3 5 3 6 3 7 3 8. The groups gave back median guesses of 2,250 and 512, respectively. The real answer is 40,320. Without enough time to do the taxing amount of mental arithmetic, the groups leaned on the lead number, which anchored them. If people do this consistently in experiments, how does it influence their decisions in real-life scenarios? The barrage of digital advertisements, app reminders and “nudges” – to use behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s term – that we face every day is effectively a form of competition to set baselines for us. 

It is hard to overstate the influence of this heuristics and biases theory, not just on the subsequent development of science – Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper has amassed nearly 50,000 citations on Google Scholar – but on our digitally mediated lives today. It’s not just Black Friday; we are inundated with marketers and managers trying to exploit our biases, to get us to heuristically jump to their desired conclusions. There is nothing new about advertisers appealing to our deepest desires or even attempting to “manufacture” them. But anchoring is both widespread in use and scientifically murky. I have written in the past that behavioural economics is shaky as science but it also poses some interesting philosophical questions about how we go about our daily digital lives. One of those questions is how we decide about value and what counts as a good decision. 

AI might be transforming this game, since it allows nearly infinite experimental testing in real time. For example, the headline that you see over a digital article is tested using algorithms that “learn” which version of the wording is more clickable. In cases such as this, algorithms search for baselines that work – effective anchors – without the need for actual advertisers or writers to craft them. The psychological theory, combined with the advance of digital technologies, might soon lead to the automation of a lot of marketing. As the science-fiction author Ted Chiang recently put it, “Will AI become the new McKinsey?” A core method of the consulting firm is large “strategic” layoffs.

But what happens when AI provides the strategy? The hard, human work of exploiting our cognitive biases gets automated, creating a weird situation in which a psychology that was allegedly devoted to questions of human rationality is executed without any human decision-making to exploit the least rational aspects of our minds. Economists usually think of prices as expressing preferences – when I buy a cup of coffee, for example, I am asserting my preference for that particular product, as opposed to any other, at that particular price, which I am willing to pay. Decisions of this sort may be more or less “rational” (I should not pay $8 for a single cup of coffee, something that is becoming harder and harder to avoid in New York, where I live) but they are mine. When AI exploits anchoring, it looks less like I am making a rational choice from among options and more like an industrial amount of data-mining is being plugged directly into my unconscious. This outcome was predictable, if not rational. 

German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has spent his career arguing against heuristics and biases as a framework. He thinks humans adapt well to their cognitive circumstances and can remain rational even in the face of algorithms designed to win the game. He even points out that terms such as anchoring hide more than they reveal – he calls terms of this kind “surrogates for theories” – creating an obstacle to science that too easily becomes a way of exploiting human minds without illuminating us in the least. Indeed, many a marketer may ask: supposing this anchoring thing is scientifically valid, how does one know which anchor will work? As the number of heuristics and biases has proliferated – lists often include dozens, and hundreds have been proposed – the absence of a theory becomes a pragmatic problem. If I am in a restaurant and the prices seem high, do I anchor to them or do I walk out? 

Questions such as this multiply as soon as one thinks about anchoring philosophically: are we collectively anchored to 2 per cent inflation? Am I anchored to my parents’ sense of what an apr on a mortgage should be? If we think of all quantitative expectations as a set of anchors that do not properly evaluate evidence, the paltriness of the original theory becomes clear. After all, what would it mean for me to be unable to anchor around a baseline? If I could not do that, I would spend most of my brainpower calculating values anew at each moment. Every price would be abstract, every decision prohibitively costly in time and energy. 

If AI and other algorithms take over that function, it unburdens us – but at a different cost. When prices do not communicate human values but are just the results of data processing with the goal of bringing in revenue, then it is not individual humans who are irrational but all of society. What seemed like a virtuous science aiming to illuminate us about our behaviours has become a monstrous obstacle to a good society. Let’s call it the short-cut society, held up by Big Data and bad philosophy pretending to be science. We have to decide if we want our society to be run on the ceaseless consumption of eternally discounted products. If not, we’ll need to impose some actual rationality on the digital economy that feeds off our acquisitive tendencies. Or, in other words, we’ll need to know if $1,299.99 was ever the real price.

q&a: defence
Lessons from the deep
Josh Fehnert talks to Taylor Sheppard

Life below the waves can be stressful but a select few thrive in a submarine’s closed-off environment. Former US Navy officer Taylor Sheppard tells us what the experience taught her.

A graduate of a small Maui high school and then the University of Notre Dame, Taylor Sheppard commissioned into the US Navy in 2012 – during the second year women began to serve on submarines. She has since completed eight overseas deployments on two different submarines, most recently as the engineer officer on the USS Florida. “My parents were career naval officers and I always admired the Submarine Force,” she tells monocle. She is now a navy reservist assigned to the Office of Naval Research, supporting r&d projects and technology development opportunities with a civilian career doing asset reliability and maintenance operations for McKinsey & Company. 

“I have always thought of submarine life as an interesting comedy of manners underwater,” says Sheppard, who is based in Florida when she’s on dry land. “People immediately think of torpedoes and war or national defence but it’s not always like that. We live for months underwater, existing in our own compact community. The arguments onboard are about the fact that the cooks overboiled the spaghetti, not that we could be headed off to war. I try to remind myself that we’re just existing, learning and living with each other. It’s not as one-dimensional as always being on guard for some sort of international conflict.”

Here we hear about naval superstition and why submariners’ shoe choice really matters, and glean some lessons on leadership, sharing and self-preservation from life lived under the swell.

First, tell us something we might not know or expect about life in the briny deep.
Shoe style and quality matter – even underwater. Once we’re at sea, we change out of our combat boots primarily because it’s easier to respond to potential emergencies, such as fires, if we have to run across the boat. But the comfort and flair of a person’s shoe choice makes for endless conversation and individualism among a sea of blue uniforms. One of my junior officers wore platform sneakers so she would be tall enough to see out of the periscope. The auxiliary machinist mates wore red ones on drill days for good luck. The nuclear mechanics had to rotate pairs at least weekly (recommended more frequently) because their shoes – and all other items of clothing – would lose all structural support after constant exposure to the lube-oil bays in the engine room.

So, there’s space for some self-expression onboard. Does this extend to how you keep your quarters?
Comfort matters. My roommate and I covered the walls surrounding her bed with peel-and-stick wallpaper. The existing enclosure, fabricated from recycled material, was neon green and glowed in the dark. We found a blue toile print during a port call in Greece and transformed our room into an Eden; it was discernible [as on a submarine] only by the metal trimming in each corner.

Your training ended around the time that the US Navy started allowing female recruits. Were you daunted, being among the first women onboard? What did you feel as that hatch first clicked shut behind you?
I was the third female to show up on the first submarine to which I was assigned and feel very fortunate about the group that I went through training with. My first and lasting impression was the talented crew: they were so resourceful. You go underwater and you have each other and that’s about it. So, if you buy into that particular deployment with that crew, everything else becomes easier. There were challenges at times but success started and ended with the crew.

The military is seen as inherently conservative because of its history of defence but when it comes to changes, it can act quickly. I don’t think the navy gets credit for that. When a law or policy changes, it’s “operationalised” and the new norm is established. Coming in as a woman on a submarine, there was no question about us belonging or whether the new concept would succeed because it couldn’t fail. It was up to the crew to ensure that the growing pains were solved quickly.

So, changes quickly become part of your mission and decisions can be made unilaterally. But are there moments when people are at odds with their commanding officer or grumble about the mission at hand? Is it about being yourself or putting yourself aside?
We live with each other for months at a time in an enclosed space. The stress can build up. It’s important to remain calm, much like flight attendants in rough turbulence. It’s also important to remember what makes this profession fun: seeing dolphins ride the waves across the bow, seeing the world through a periscope, letting the captain talk over the bridge-to-bridge communication system in a foreign language that he’s been practicing. 

It’s important to be yourself and stay true to your professional self but also to recognise the mission and the naval hierarchy: a good approach is “ship, shipmate, self”. It’s why we break up the command structure into watch teams, divisions and departments, which provides a communal aspect and also helps us achieve our mission. That’s not to say that I don’t stick to my values. I’ll give you an example, as it’s hard sometimes to give philosophical answers about leadership because situations change so frequently. If you’re on a submarine during a holiday, there’s a potential strategy: keep the crew busy, which helps to distract them from the fact that they’re not at home and they’re away from their loved ones. Or you could give the crew the day off to enjoy it. The strategies change depending on what your deployment is and where you are in its cycle, so it’s hard to have a firm rule.

Tell us about communication onboard – what can the world learn from it? Is it about being precise in a way that makes it impossible to be misunderstood?
When an emergency happens, there’s a sensory overload as alarms sound and orders are given over the noise. It could be overwhelming if you aren’t prepared properly. The crew members are conditioned to respond to these situations. They are professionals at reacting quickly to maintain safe conditions. Orders need to be clear and the navy has spent centuries perfecting the protocol. We train for concise communication so that orders won’t be misunderstood. There is a formality that we follow. 

An example: if you pick up the phone or answer a call, you state your location and the billet that you occupy. So, I’d pick up the phone and say, “Engine room, engineer.” I have already communicated a lot of essential information in just a few words. There is also a procedure when speaking. Orders are standardised and we respect the traditions and formalities of the navy. You don’t waste unnecessary moments communicating because there’s often no time to explain yourself. 

“Better communication” is often mentioned in leadership training but I think it’s really just relationship building, especially when you have a hierarchical chain of command and peers who you work with very closely for a long period of time. I got to work with many crews on many deployments and my perspective changed over the course of my time on the boat, from when I showed up as a 22-year-old to 11 years later. I was lucky to gain a better understanding of who people are and how to relate to and interact with them. It’s about knowing how to navigate challenging situations but also appreciate the great moments when they arrive. We can have so much fun with each other if we embrace those moments. That’s probably the best lesson that I have taken away. And now that I’m working in a civilian role on the business side, I couldn’t credit that experience more.

Can communication ever be too efficient? Do people make decisions too quickly, if so? Sometimes miscommunication can come from sloppy interactions but reacting too swiftly might be just as bad. Have you ever experienced that and in what kind of scenarios?
I can give you two talking points on this. The first concerns the larger theme of perspective. Being on a submarine gives you great perspective about what you’re trying to say. There’s not much room for drama. An example that comes to mind is that I once had a junior officer run up to me, saying something about a “major discrepancy” and that I needed to come and see what the problem was. In my head, I was thinking, “major discrepancy” – something’s really wrong. I got to the area of concern and saw that an overhead light bulb had burned out. We went to the storeroom and replaced it. I had a conversation with my junior officer afterwards, in which I said that a “major discrepancy” is something like losing electrical power – a problem that you should treat very seriously. But a room that’s dark because a light is out? You just fix it. Our captains always say, “Don’t be dramatic. Just state the facts, then we can go and address them.”

Second, in training, we reiterate that you do often have quite a bit of time to make decisions. In new scenarios where we are training operator responses during drills, the fastest time that you would actually have to react and make a decision is between seven and 10 seconds. While that might not seem like a lot of time, whenever we seem to be jumping to or pre-empting decisions, because of the downstream effects, we can stop and step back. As part of training, we’ll sit there in silence and count to 10. If you do so, it’s quite a bit of time. It’s enough to look at all of your indications, make sure that you are making your best judgement, get the watch team aligned and then go take the action.

What should you carry in an emergency: a toothbrush, a penknife, a watch…?
Always carry a flashlight. There are four reasons for this. First, there’s nothing so dark as a submarine that suddenly loses electrical power. Second, at night we “rig for red”, which means all overhead lights go off and only red flashlights are used (to avoid straining the eyes). This works well unless you’re trying to read instructions from the engineer, who signs in red pen. Third, your only hope of minimising your bilge-cleaning time is to let your buddy shine his light over your shoulder and find the dirt before the chiefs do. Four, there’s an instant morale boost when a group of sailors lines up the “strobe” function in sync and suddenly the crew’s lounge turns into a disco. 

I’d add a cleaning rag. You never know when you have to wipe down oil so you don’t slip on a ladder – and you can’t see the oil unless you have a flashlight. 

OK. Deep breath. Are there certain things that people don’t talk about when they’re on a submarine? Do people steer clear of politics? Are there some things that are deemed to be too divisive? 
Anything goes. That’s partly because you spend eight hours of your time just on watch with your team and that’s a long time to be around the same people every day. When you’re off watch, you’re doing training with them or doing jobs or taking care of other responsibilities with them. If you’re on the mid-watch, there’s a lot of time to discuss things and have deep conversations and it has never felt uncomfortable for me. You build such strong and deep connections because you’re all on the same journey together. It’s a strange thing to go underwater with people for a long period of time while the world continues without you. Even now, if you walk into a room and you find out that someone else is a submariner, there’s an inherent understanding that exists because of what you’ve gone through. So, yes, I think that we’re very comfortable with discussing any sort of topic.

A few years ago, I interviewed a psychologist who said that one of the mistakes that he thought we make as a society is telling anyone that they can be anything, which creates a series of unrealistic expectations. But in the same vein, are some people just not cut out to be on a submarine? Or do you believe that you could, with the right amount of training and incentives, train anyone?
I have two answers to your question. I think that humans in general are capable of amazing things. We’re extremely adaptable. And that shows every time that you get under way because you adapt to whatever situation you’re in. And it’s just as easy – well, I wouldn’t say it’s easy necessarily – to come back and be transplanted into the real world. Most people can assimilate to any environment and situation. I do believe that we’re capable of more than we give often ourselves credit for. 

The Submarine Force is exceptional at empowering its members. At some point, it seems like society stops telling people that they’re capable of doing things that they want to do. I have never seen that on a submarine. The crew continues to encourage each other and strive for excellence. There’s no point in being pessimistic or restricting anyone. I am in awe of the 21-year-olds who come from all over the country to do something that they set out to do, whether it’s to see the world or learn a trade.

To take another tack, the sea is home to lots of superstitions. State-of-the-art cruise ships in the Caribbean sometimes have garlic on the bridge to ward off spirits. Are there any kinds of superstitions aboard a submarine?
There are so many. I could talk about this all day. I’ll give a couple of examples that are sort of tried and true, then maybe some more nuanced ones, from just my experience. One that has existed among sailors for centuries is the idea of tattooing a rooster and a pig on your foot: one on each. I served with a captain who had some sort of Tiki idol from one of his voyages: if it fell, he expected something bad to happen.

I feel that submarines have their own personality and identity. My submarine was the third oldest in the fleet, commissioned in the 1970s, and the sailors always treated the boat as its own entity. If we fought the boat, the boat would fight back. We would get to a point where, if one thing was breaking and then another thing broke, and we were spending all night trying to fix something, we would decide to stop and let the submarine be – go to sleep, rest and play nice the next day. So, there’s sort of a superstition around the submarines themselves being their own beings. They have lived a thousand lives on their own. Treat the boat nicely and the boat will treat you nicely.

One thing that is true for mariners but especially true for submariners is the “crossing the line” ceremonies that are held when you cross the equator. You always pay your respects to King Neptune and Davy Jones. Whenever we cross the equator, the crew holds a ceremony that evening for a safe voyage across the sea with a crossing-the-line certificate. There’s a whole circus of ordeals going on aboard the submarine but it is rooted in superstition that any time we cross the equator, we pay homage to the mariners who have gone before us and request safe passage.

I like the idea of having respect for vessels and their integrity and needs. Are submarines male or female? Does that vary?
They’re all female.

Roger that. Are there any other characteristics that they have? They sound a bit cantankerous – or is that just because you’re the engineer?
I remember a time when we were in the Atlantic and we had come up to transmit a message. The swells are big when you’re mid-ocean. We were at a slower speed at periscope depth and were rocking so much we needed to come up further and send a message off. We’re sitting there at periscope depth and we’re rocking so much. The fairwater planes are taking direct hits from the waves. And when that happens, they right themselves, which cycles the hydraulic pump. As the engineer, I’m sitting there listening to the clinking and in my head; I’m just thinking about all the maintenance that we’re going to have to do to fix it. 

Submarines do have characteristics but each operator also has their unique way of handling it. You could always tell which diving officer, who controls the trim of the ship, was on watch based on how much pitch and list you felt walking forward to aft.

What do you think you have learned about the things that you really need in terms of possessions? Or things you don’t need?
As deployments go on, trades for goods get more interesting. Three packs of Nespresso pods for one candy bar is not unheard of. Money has no meaning. The circular economy thrives and the barter system rules. One of the lessons that I have learned is the importance of communal possessions. We go under way with only so much shared resources: I’m thinking duct tape or tools. The machinery divisions maintain their own set that are related to them; mechanics will have any drill bit that you could want. Electricians have wires and clamps. What it taught me was that not everybody needs to have their own thing because we have the ability to share. Also, that barter system is extremely viable. You get to a point where sometimes shared resources dwindle but that brings us together in a way that doesn’t happen when you’re in a more usual society with easily replenishable resources. 

Also on limited resources, how important is it to spend time wisely on a boat – to devote time to learning, fitness or reading something worthwhile?
I would run on our treadmill and stare at the same pipe every day, year after year. Just running on this treadmill – looking at the same hydraulic pipe every time. But whenever I was able to listen to podcasts that I downloaded beforehand, I still felt part of the world and could understand what was happening in the different regions in geopolitics or architecture, design or urbanism. And that always made me feel that, even though we were underwater, we were going to come up somewhere looking at a society from the periscope. You need to make an effort. It’s easy to fall into the mundaneness of it all but my takeaway was that most people really wanted to make an effort.

I was always encouraged by the sailors – take the quartermasters, for example – on a long mid-watch for eight hours while the rest of the crew is asleep. They’re just navigating the ship through its charted waters and it could be very mundane. But then maybe a skilled quartermaster might pull out an old book by someone like Nathaniel Bowditch [a 19th-century navigator] and they would read about celestial navigation. And then they would spend their time determining what stars were on our horizon and would try to understand whether their gps systems were working well, or how they could better fix their charts like the navigators of old.

Humans are inherently curious and enthusiastic creatures. Even when you take away the world from them by having them deployed on a sub, they will still want to know more about it.

Tell us about your relationship with technology. How do you stay up to date on a submarine and how much time do you spend on a device such as a smartphone or a computer? What effect does that have on your life?
I’m probably far behind everybody else when it comes to the technological world. That could just be me, I’m not sure. We don’t have cellular phones or access to the internet underwater so when we come back it feels very overwhelming to reconnect. When you come home from deployment, you get messages and phone calls, and have to try to catch up with the world. Usually, a lot has changed since you left. It’s a lot to take in but you also sort of forget that the connection exists. Whenever I come home from deployment, it’s a couple of days before I can remember that I can text somebody or call them – you’re just not used to that being at your fingertips.

And maybe sometimes it’s comforting to know that the world keeps turning, whether you’re paying attention to the details or not?
That’s true. I was underwater when the coronavirus pandemic happened and that was a really strange thing to try to figure out. There was a period of time in June and July of 2022 when we were under way doing local operations and training exercises and we had been so busy that we hadn’t had time to download any news. We download radio messages and decrypt them so that we can stay up to date on what’s going on in the world. If we’re busy, we don’t typically stay in connection long enough to send or receive emails. 

I remember I had got a news download and the first two stories were that Boris Johnson was resigning as the UK’s prime minister and that Shinzo Abe had been assassinated. We were confused; we were wondering whether it was an exercise. Those types of messages have high stakes and consequences. It was one of those moments when we weren’t sure whether what we were reading was real or a training message. 

In 2016 I had been under way for the entire spring and summer. I didn’t come back until the end of October. At that point, the entire US presidential campaign had happened; Donald Trump had run and was about to be elected. So, the world continues without you. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the doom and gloom of the day but, at the same time, we could still move forward and progress what it is that we’re trying to do.

What if there’s an emergency?
That would depend on what our mission was. If we’re communication-silent or deep underwater and not transmitting, it could be a few weeks before we hear from our families. Our operational shore commands can always get in contact with us. So, if something happens – for example, with a sailor’s family – we can work with our chain of command shoreside to send the sailor home. There are options. 

On technology – how much of what happens on a submarine is automated these days and how much comes from the time-honoured analogue traditions of old?
Traditional navigation isn’t dead. Though we have upgraded our systems and electronic charts, the quartermasters compete on who can shoot the best azimuth [calculated course] from the periscope and get the navigator’s permission to enter the ship’s fix. The officers look for bottom topography to compare against sonar returns and reckon the course. And every so often, we haul the sextant up to the bridge if we’re on the surface at nighttime. 

Analogue should not be discredited. Our submarine was the third oldest in the fleet and most of my challenges revolved around decisions that were made in the 1970s because a random drawing hadn’t been updated in three decades. Even with the upgrades to digital systems over the years, I’m convinced that we were safer because nobody born after 1985 would understand the systems that we operated on. 

And finally, what’s the best thing about being back on dry land?
Nothing beats the feeling of that first warm ray of sunshine or the fresh scent of rain after living in the same 60f [15c], fluorescently lit, steel-enclosed climate for months at a time. I remember sitting under an awning during a thunderstorm after a long deployment because it was so nice to experience weather again. Walking on a beach with endless stretches of sand feels like a luxury after having to squeeze around missile tubes to move across compartments.

Deep thoughts
Taylor Sheppard’s lessons from life on a submarine:

1. Keep calm
There’s never any point in getting spun up about something. The submarine is a closed system. We follow the laws of energy conservation. You can’t go anywhere and neither can your anger. Any release is trapped inside because the hatches are shut. It’s much better to submerge with a fixed amount of happiness instead of unproductive stress. 

2. Raisins are important
Fresh fruit and vegetables only last 10 to 14 days. After that, we shift to frozen stores. If you don’t want to eat syrup-soaked canned fruit for three months but still want to beat scurvy, dried fruit is essential. I can also tell you how versatile and long-lasting that cabbage is – who knew?

3. Trust your gut There’s the science of engineering but there’s also the art of navigation. Sometimes you’ll come to periscope depth and the sonar biologics [animal echolocation] are heavy because you’re near a school of fish or shrimp. You trust your team, know your indicators, follow your procedure and decide. 

4. Racks are sacred
And roommates are your best friends. They will guard your sleep by preventing the messenger from unnecessarily waking you up 15 minutes early but ensure you’re on time for watch. 

5. Say proper goodbyes
It’s a strange thing to be pulled away from your life for months at a time and then transplanted right back – especially as the world has continued without you in it. 

6. Seek heat
We keep the submarine very cold. Closing air vents is a bad idea as it stops circulation. Showers are limited because we make our own water. Most people wear caps. All drink hot beverages (including hot water). The smart ones go to the engine room and sit on top of the main engines at full speed for warmth. 

7. Pack light
It’s truly remarkable how little you need. We take two seabags with us and most of that is clothes. Coming home, I’m always amazed by how many possessions I forgot I had. 

8. Sunlight matters
Sunscreen is key, especially after you haven’t seen sunlight in a while. The most luxurious indulgence after a deployment is taking a shower without having to wear shoes or turn off the water after one minute. We are good at resource management. If we ventilate after a long time, fresh oxygen keeps people awake because they’re not used to it. 

9. Timing is everything
We have two treadmills on the submarine. You have to be smart about when you use them – if you start a run and the ship starts taking angles, you’ll spend the whole exercise holding on at various inclines or rocking off the side in heavy seas. 

10. Trust the crew
I have watched teams achieve incredible feats, from figuring out how to replace a breaker at sea to filling a compensating tank with no trim and drain system (people formed a human chain to pressurise a firehose and get water back into a tank). Another team endured a four-month extension that was supposed to be three weeks. The crew is amazing.

q&a: humour
When was the last time you laughed?
Nic Monisse talks to Vittorio Angelone

Can we take a joke any more? We ask a professional to find out what makes something funny and give ourselves permission to have a laugh.

After moving to London from Belfast to train as a classical musician, Vittorio Angelone made the less-than-obvious switch to stand-up. The Italian-Irish comedian has since performed all over Europe and enjoyed sell-out runs at festivals including the Edinburgh Fringe. He’s currently on tour with a new show that pushes boundaries – and buttons. “I sit in a funny place wherein old people call me a woke snowflake and on Tiktok young people call me right-wing,” he tells monocle. Angelone is at the coalface of comedy that pushes boundaries; it’s a challenging position to be in at the moment, as puritans are policing what we say and even the most mundane celebrity can find themselves publicly humiliated for a mistimed joke. Here, he explains his philosophy behind making comments on society through comedy. If you don’t get it, maybe that’s your problem. 

Have we got too precious about what we can and can’t laugh about?
Some think that this is the case but I don’t agree. It’s good that we’re a bit precious. Comedy doesn’t work unless there’s a sense of preciousness because all jokes are a simple formula: tension and release. For something to be funny, you need people to think, “Are we comfortable talking about this?” As with any other art form, there needs to be a little discomfort for the pay-off to be worth it. If nobody was ever tense or concerned about any topic, nothing would be funny.

But a bigger concern, more than individuals being precious or getting upset, is that people might be laughing at a joke for the wrong reason. An audience, for instance, might be laughing because they agree with the thing that you’re trying to poke fun at. When you’re making fun of bigoted ideas or racist ideas by highlighting them in a certain way, some people might laugh thinking, “Finally, somebody said it.” That means that you have to be strict with yourself and know that not all laughs are the ones that you’re going for.

Does a comedian have a responsibility to make sure that a joke is received in the right way?
This is one of the big frustrations that I have with some big-name Netflix comedians. These comics – and people do it beyond comedy too – say trigger words that make certain audience members think, “Yeah, they’re poking the wasps’ nest.” But they’re not actually saying anything transgressive. They’re just saying the words “immigrant”, “black” or “gay” but none of it means anything because they’re pandering to this false idea of transgression. It frustrates me when comedians say, “It’s just a joke,” or “I’m not making that joke,” when they use these words. You know what sort of laugh you’re getting.

Take Michael McIntyre. There’s a bit in one of his Netflix stand-up comedy specials where he talks about the Northern Irish accent, which I don’t find funny. I grew up in Belfast. He impersonates a Northern Irish person, putting on an accent and going cross-eyed, painting all Northern Irish people as stupid. Context matters. If someone like Anthony Jeselnik, a US comic who has branded himself as offensive, made that same joke, it would be funny. That’s because the whole point of Jeselnik’s jokes, the reason why people go to his shows, is that he says things that are awful, wrong, offensive and bad. In contrast, McIntyre’s shtick is his presentation of things in a way that suggests that what he’s joking about is something that we all agree on – and that’s why his Northern Irish joke landed so horribly with me. He wasn’t getting a laugh because he was saying something that’s funny for its offensiveness. Rather, he’s getting it because lots of people in the audience think that Northern Irish people are stupid and an accurate representation of them is to be cross-eyed and make noises.

So are there topics that we can’t joke about?
I don’t think there’s anything that I’m allowed to talk about that other people aren’t. That’s not a very interesting way to make art. A broader cultural conversation, with more voices, is always a better one. I’ve seen comedians make jokes about Northern Irish people and be very funny. I’ve seen comedians make jokes about Northern Irish people and be very offensive. It depends on what angle you’re coming from – and this applies to making jokes more broadly, not just stand-up. You need to understand where your perspective comes from and how that comes across to people. Often, when I make jokes about contentious issues or about groups of people, I’m the butt of the joke and it’s my misunderstanding, my getting it wrong, that is the point of humour. My job is to joke about topics in a way that isn’t mean, nasty or bullying. Whether you’re a comedian or not, a good rule is to ask yourself: would you tell the joke if the people it was about were in the room? If that stops you from making the joke, you shouldn’t go ahead. 

What’s the best way to deal with a joke not landing?
It’s important to remember that you can’t determine whether a joke is funny based on one person. I have jokes about broad lgbtq issues and I have had hundreds, if not thousands, of queer audience members laugh hard at them. Still, I’ve had friends in the queer community say that they don’t like the jokes. That’s to be expected of any group of people. No social or cultural group is a monolith. Just because one queer person dislikes my joke, it doesn’t mean that they speak on behalf of the whole community, in the same way that if one person from that community does like it, you can’t assume that making the joke is OK – because they might both be idiots.

Why tell jokes that might push a crowd’s buttons?
People are at their funniest when an audience is taken to a place in their mind where they might be uncomfortable or nervous. It’s exciting when they think, “I’m not sure how I feel about this topic,” before having a big laugh about it. That’s what I’m trying to do. I try to take audiences to places where they might feel discomfort before making them feel good at the end, so that they can maybe think about those things with less trepidation in the future. It means that, hopefully, they’re more comfortable the next time they think about race or gender or sexuality or any number of things where they were once uncomfortable. Through comedy, I can show them that it doesn’t have to be scary and that you can get out the other side without getting it all wrong. But it’s a very hard thing to do and, as long as you’re not deliberately trying to upset someone, you need to have permission to get it wrong.

What role does an audience play when it comes to finding what’s funny?
The audience needs to have permission to get it wrong too. What I love about stand-up comedy is that it’s one of the only art forms where the audience takes the same risk as the performer. For example, if I say a joke that might be deemed controversial, maybe about something that most people wouldn’t admit to thinking or wouldn’t admit to experiencing or wouldn’t admit to being concerned about, then I am opening myself up to embarrassment. If nobody laughs, then I feel like an idiot and I’m ostracised in the room but if everybody laughs, then my making that joke has made the whole room go, “Oh, thank God, someone else feels like that. I was worried that it was just me.” However, if only one person in the audience laughs, which is the risk that every audience member is taking when they laugh, there are two embarrassed people in the room, me and that person. It’s risky because by laughing you’re saying, “Yes, I agree with what you said,” which means that the person laughing is taking the same risk as the person telling the joke – and that’s what makes telling a joke so exciting and why we need things to be precious about. Without this tension and release, none of it would be very fun.

ukraine war
Female conscription
Yaryna Chornohuz

Senior corporal Yaryna Chornohuz serves on the front line in Ukraine. Conscription, she says, would enable women to deploy valuable skills on the battlefield. 

I don’t want to be a victim. But over the years of war in my country, I have realised that this isn’t possible without knowing how to defend myself and my family. If I couldn’t fire a gun or fight off an attacker in close combat here, I would be defenceless. I’m writing this from Kyiv before returning to the Ukrainian front line. I have realised that if feminism has taught us anything, it’s that women should never become easy prey – a lesson that feels all too relevant when Russian shells are exploding around me and my team in our trenches in the country’s east. 

War returned to Ukraine in 2014. I became a mother the year before, just as Ukraine’s pro-European revolution was kicking into action. Pro-democracy protesters flooded the streets, calling for EU integration and an end to the country’s cosy ties with kleptocratic Russia, which was pulling us ever closer, back into its empire. Then, as it invaded, first annexing Crimea in the south before sending in its troops to occupy our eastern cities, towns and villages, I came to understand two things clearly. First, that our army desperately needed soldiers as open, state-sanctioned violence had made a comeback and was advancing towards our homes. Second, it wasn’t just men but also women who now had to learn how to protect themselves.

I have always respected the Israeli model of conscription. From a Ukrainian perspective, with all of the violence that our population has suffered in the past 100 years, it makes sense to have a level of basic military training for both men and women. We helped Europe to overcome the Nazis in the 20th century but Russia’s imperial evil was never defeated in the battles of the Second World War. And we are fighting its desire to annihilate our country now. Ukraine’s entire population has to be more than just willing to protect itself in the abstract: it also has to be trained to do so effectively in the real world. 

Women can play an important role in defence. I first joined the Ukrainian army in 2019 as a paramedic; within a year, I signed up as a regular contract soldier. Soon I became a combat medic and took on reconnaissance in the Ukraine Marine Corps battalion, mastering how to pilot drones. In this time, I have fought alongside both men and women. I can confidently say that those women on the front lines today are, in my opinion, on average more motivated and determined than the men. 

Of course, part of this is simply down to the fact that those I fought beside chose to enter the army – there is currently no conscription of women in Ukraine. Around the world, 21 countries include women in their conscription programmes, including three in Europe (Norway, Sweden and Denmark). But I have also witnessed how much better women can be at dealing with situations that men might shy away from. Take blood, for example – we see a lot of it on the battlefield, unfortunately. But perhaps because women encounter much more of it in our civilian lives, many are less scared to deal with it.

Women are also often more likely to be open about how they are feeling. We start conversations that men might otherwise avoid. This allows us to deal with stress more effectively. With rates of ptsd in Ukrainian society rising, it is paramount that we are all open about our experiences, both mental and physical. Some qualities that have been traditionally deigned feminine actually serve to complement many aspects of a soldier’s experience. 

There are also so many women in the Ukrainian army who inspire both me and my male colleagues to keep fighting as part of a more skilful, modern army. Take my friend, Olena Bilozerska, for example. A writer and journalist in her civilian life, Bilozerska trained to be a sniper in 2014. She wrote about her experience as a servicewoman in her memoir Diary of an Illegal Soldier, which was published in 2020. And on the battlefield, her skill has been lauded by people all over the world, including US soldiers – a video of her working just 200 metres from the occupiers was published on YouTube and ended up going viral. 

So, how might female conscription work? Perhaps some imagine that if women are included in the draft, society would face a crisis with no one left behind to look after children and the elderly. But there are always a certain number of people who would never be called up. Carers and single mothers would be taken off the list automatically in the same way that Ukrainian men with more than three children are today. We would need to be practical.

But leaving aside the issue of female conscription, I believe that we are leaving a large resource untapped. Many women who I have spoken to say that they support the idea of being called up and doing their bit. If they were to receive that letter in the post, they would gladly go. They are keen to help but they need the legitimacy of the state to justify their presence in units that might otherwise treat them with scepticism or as outliers.

Doing so would also bring a few lazy stereotypes into the crosshairs. We could show once and for all that women can be as strong and brave as men, if we only let them demonstrate their potential and legitimise their participation. It would be a golden opportunity to put patriarchal stereotypes to bed and impart a greater confidence in a truly equal society. 

The threat of war might seem far away for many Western readers living in comfortable, safe countries. But my country’s situation and our overnight transition from a hopeful European democracy to a nation under violent attack has proved the old Latin saying right: if you want peace, prepare for war. And don’t leave us women behind.

travel
What motels say about the American life
Birgit Schmid

Get around the US by car and sooner or later you’ll end up in a motel. In this modest accommodation with its run-down charm, you’ll encounter another America altogether.

Along America’s highways you come across a country no longer visible in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Everyday life here has little to do with the concerns of those in big cities, where people drink coffee with oat milk, a bouncer reminds you to behave appropriately when entering a club and men with beards introduce themselves with their pronouns at parties for fear of being addressed incorrectly. This other America is symbolised by the motel, which is a quintessential US institution. The word motel is a portmanteau of “motor” and “hotel”, which also describes its purpose. The long, one- or two-storey buildings offer car travellers a rather low-threshold entry to somewhere to stay overnight before moving on – a bed with a parking space in front of it.

In this sense, motels are the epitome of freedom and adventure. You can’t avoid them on a roadtrip. You might drive hundreds of miles on straight roads with the radio turned up loud but as night and tiredness set in you might be drawn in by the promise of bright signs reading “Melody Ranch Motel”, “Death Valley Inn” or “Motel 6”.

Only the lit-up words “No vacancy” indicate that you should drive on. They come from the time before the internet. The fact that there are no rooms available is not a big deal, as there will be other motels. People haven’t historically chosen a motel for its special location, much less its interior design: reservations are unnecessary. A motel is on the way. You take what comes or move on to the next one.

Places of mischief and the uncanny
Many motels still in business in the US have seen better days. It’s precisely this shabby and worn-out look that makes them so charmingly anachronistic today. In luxury hotels, everything seems untouched, sterile and clean, right down to the ribbon around the toilet lid. When you enter a motel room, however, you can almost smell the stories that have taken place within the four walls.

There might be a table and chair, two plastic coat hangers, a large bed with a thick mattress that can – for better or worse – also feel alive. There’s a fitted carpet. A small, fenced-in pool in front of the window, deserted in tem­peratures of 40c. A few streets away, you’re likely to find a gun shop. There is coughing all night through the thin walls. On one side, there is the mysterious sound of furniture being moved for some unknowable but nonetheless intriguing purpose.

The guests who visit from their mobile homes stuff the pockets of their xxl trousers with packaged biscuits at breakfast and sip filter coffee from paper cups in silence. The people at the reception of the often family-run motels are impossibly friendly in that inimitably American way. When you leave, someone named Bill or Susan always shakes your hand and wishes you a safe onward journey with apparent sincerity.

Motels are a reminder of the past perhaps because they remind us of so many American films and novels, whose atmosphere they have shaped, and which have in turn been shaped by them. Maybe that is why we romanticise them. They are part of pop culture, usually places of doom and the uncanny, like the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Janet Leigh takes her carefree shower. In the Coen brothers’ Fargo and in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the motel serves as a hideout for criminals and secret lovers. Ridley Scott lets friends Thelma and Louise stay at the Oklahoma City Motel, where the former is seduced and robbed by a handsome cowboy.

You wouldn’t be surprised, nor disappointed, to see the travelling woman in the red dress from Edward Hopper’s painting Western Motel behind a window. She sits on a sofa, her suitcases ready, her car waiting in front of the window in the bright sun. Motels attract lonely people who are trying to escape from themselves.

Miranda July’s daring love suite
According to The New York Times, there were more than 61,000 motels in the US in 1964. They became popular after the construction of the highway network in the 1950s and 1960s. Interstate highways have since crossed parts of the entire country from north to south and west to east. Today, there are said to be about 16,000 motels left. But now, in a way that few might have predicted, motels are having a moment, the newspaper claims. Younger people are discovering motel culture and its aesthetics. Not just on their travels: some are even buying run-down motels and renovating them. On Instagram, motel fans admire the refreshed design of the originally modest inns. This is also being shown in television series such as Motel Makeover and Motel Rescue.

US filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July celebrates the motel in the same way in her new novel On All Fours. The first-person narrator, an artist, invests $20,000 of prize money to renovate a cheap motel room in a Los Angeles suburb where she is stranded on her roadtrip. She transforms it into a suite with fragrant soaps, fluffy designer towels and velvet armchairs in order to experience a wild affair within it.

The bourgeois bohemians might move into the motel and paint over its cloudy walls. They might add a new layer to what came before them, while also perhaps preserving it. In the old motels, however, life goes on just as it ever did. You close the door to your room, return the key at first light and drive off early in the morning with the quiet feeling of having gotten away.

This article was first published in the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’. Translated by Monocle and edited for clarity and length.