Why are Americans so ignorant of what’s going on in the world outside our borders, even when our own government is playing a key role in those events? That’s a question that dogged Anne Kelleher, a professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state, while she was lecturing in Ankara, Turkey, last year on a Fulbright scholarship. “I tried to explain to the teachers and students there why, during the U.S. presidential election, foreign policy wasn’t front and center. For them, it’s unfathomable that the most militarily powerful, the most politically influential country, with the most impact on the global economy, plus a culture that’s transformed the world via its media — how a country with that kind of far-flung influence can choose its leader with no attention to the issues that it faces worldwide.” Kelleher cited a January 2000 Gallup poll in which Americans asked to rank the importance of issues in the presidential campaign relegated the U.S. role in world affairs to 20th place.

Ignorance of history, as well as of current events, can have dire consequences. President George W. Bush’s use of the word “crusade” in describing his planned war on terrorism was a stunning misstep at a time when the U.S. badly needs to reassure the Muslim world that we aren’t on the verge of a new holy war. If that’s not disturbing enough, only a year ago the president’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was talking nonsense to the New York Times and USA Today about Iran trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism to the Taliban and “doing all kinds of things with Pakistan”; Iran, a Shiite Muslim nation, is a foe of the Sunni Muslim governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Sunday, the Times reported that the “outline” of the U.S.’s war plan “often emerges from the private conversations” between Bush and Rice.

Eric Ransdell, a foreign correspondent for nine years in Africa and Asia and currently a documentary filmmaker living in Shanghai, China, blames the American education system for producing know-nothing citizens, people who in turn are unlikely to protest the decline in news coverage of foreign affairs. Recent surveys by such institutions as Harvard and the University of Maryland show that reporting on world events has dramatically shrunk in both the print and broadcast news media.

“For decades we’ve been reading about how American schoolchildren can’t find Mexico or Canada on a map, and yet nothing seems to change,” says Ransdell. “These people who don’t know the difference between Switzerland and Swaziland then become the main consumers of news. And in poll after poll they tell us that they want less foreign news and more of what I call ‘selfish journalism’ — which stocks to buy, sex and beauty tips, 10 steps to a healthier colon and so on. It becomes this horrible feedback loop where people are sent out of our schools in a state of complete ignorance of the rest of the world and then, maybe because they’re embarrassed, clamor for even less information on something they know almost nothing about.”

Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley, says that while “Americans are ever more involved in the world and ever less knowledgeable about it,” it’s the bosses at U.S. media companies who deserve the blame. “The broadcast media has decided to cut back on foreign news coverage in its infinitely craven efforts to pander to the largest and the lowest common denominator. This last week we’ve seen what the broadcast media is capable of when they’re let out of the constraints of ratings and the bottom line mentality. I’m hearing journalists saying ‘Wow, this past two weeks we felt dignified again. We’re able to do what we want to do and know how to do. We had the time and the resources and the suits were off our backs.’”

But even Schell can’t claim that any more than an “elite” of American news consumers craves reporting on world events. “Other people would prefer just to read the ball scores,” he concedes. Ransdell recalls, “When I was at U.S. News & World Report I heard about these focus groups we did with our readers where almost every time foreign news came in dead last in terms of what our audience wanted us to deliver. Mike Ruby and the other editors I was working for at the time all wanted more foreign coverage, more overseas bureaus and a bigger foreign news hole, but what could they do? The fact that as much foreign news finds its way into print and onto television as it does today is, frankly, a miracle given the yodeling ignorance of the American public.”

Editors of Web sites, who can track the actual number of readers who click on each story, confirm that foreign stories simply don’t draw readers. “Until the current crisis, our foreign news stories have generally attracted disappointing numbers of readers,” says Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya.

This national indifference has its foundation in a lack of the most elementary facts. When Osama bin Laden emerged as the prime suspect behind the attacks, demand for maps of Afghanistan and Central Asia reportedly skyrocketed. Kenneth Davis, a writer who has found a niche for himself by filling in the gaps in readers’ knowledge with his “Don’t Know Much About …” book series (including “Don’t Know Much About Geography”), says such rushes are nothing new. “We don’t usually know where these places are when the troops hit the beaches. It was no different in 1945, when people were scrambling to learn about Normandy.”

The roots of Americans’ global cluelessness are tangled. Davis traces a recent worsening of the problem “over the last 30 or 40 years” back to our educational system. “Geography is no longer taught in a lot of schools. It got morphed into something called ‘social studies,’ along with history and political science. As less actual geography was taught, we then had a lot of teachers who don’t know geography.” Although Davis feels geography is currently enjoying a revival at the elementary school level, most adult Americans were educated during the decline. “A vast number of Americans are utterly lost when it comes to knowing where we are in the world,” he explains.

Davis also blames the traditional “dry, boring” method of teaching geography — the old “principal products of Peru” approach — for the disinterest many people feel in the topic. Combining geography with history and other subjects into a dumbed-down category called “social studies” may have been a well-meaning attempt to make it more interesting, but the truth is that many Americans are also sorely lacking in rudimentary historical literacy. Kelleher, who at her “midsize, midlevel, comprehensive university” sees a great many average American college freshmen, says, “You find that a large cross section of students, even when you mention major events of world history — and I’m just talking about European history, things like the Renaissance — will give you blank stares.”

Some outsiders see American’s lack of interest in world affairs as springing from our national character as well as our educational shortcomings. Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat who is a foreign affairs scholar at the Cato Institute and writes a syndicated column about foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times, observes that some of this disregard results from the country’s “geographical isolation between the two oceans and with friendly neighbors. In Britain, you’re up against foreign affairs all the time. In America, you can go about your business without relating to the rest of the world, at least on the level of detail. You have to have some reason to know about foreign affairs and most Americans don’t need to.” Not, at least, until Sept. 11, when a nightmare version of “foreign affairs” showed up at America’s doorstep.

It’s also true, says Davis, that a certain isolationist tendency “goes back to the beginning of American political history. Washington and Jefferson talked about the dangers of foreign entanglements.” Clarke sees that vein of thought as a key part of America’s identity: “The first waves of people coming to the U.S. and many of the subsequent ones were people fleeing conflicts. And so when they came to the U.S., they said, ‘We don’t want to hear about that stuff anymore. We don’t want to be involved with choosing between, for example, Catholic and Protestant. We left that behind.’ People don’t want to carry with them the woes of Cambodia or wherever. The U.S. is an oasis, a cultural escape from quarrels that, when you get to the U.S., seem a bit petty. When the former Yugoslavia broke up, we said to them ‘Come on, grow up. Your differences are not that significant.’ Americans think they are beyond that sort of thing.”

But not, as we have bitterly learned, beyond the reach of those conflicts. In fact, the U.S. has long been deeply involved in the political affairs of the regions that the Sept. 11 hijackers hail from. Past U.S. actions have contributed to conditions that have allowed terrorism to flourish. In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. withdrew from the region entirely once Soviet troops left in 1989, ignoring pleas from Afghans for help in getting their war-devastated country back on its feet. In the resulting anarchy, the Taliban took over, and Afghans continue to resent the U.S. for letting them bear the brunt of Western efforts to contain communism.

“I remember when that happened,” says Clarke. “We had people in the British diplomatic corps going to the Americans every day saying you can’t just walk away. They got absolutely no response.”

One of the ugly ironies of Osama bin Laden’s declared war on American citizens is that he is, in a way, calling us on one of our points of pride. Although many Americans aren’t fully aware of their nation’s policies, and the impact of those policies in the Middle East and Asia, if ours truly is a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” then aren’t we responsible for its actions?

If more Americans do decide, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, to get up to speed on geopolitics, they’re in for a rude awakening. Vivienne Walt, a South Africa-born U.S. citizen currently living in Paris and covering international news for a variety of American newspapers, sees Americans’ understanding of their role in world affairs as hobbled by political naiveté. “Americans have an extremely positive view of their country and political system,” she observes. Unfortunately, though, most Americans aren’t paying close enough attention to object when U.S. policy goes against that view. There’s a big gap between what many starry-eyed Americans perceive to be their nation’s noble role in world affairs and the routine self-interest that guides most governments’ foreign policy — including our own.

“One of the great grievances about America is that they’re supporting the Saudi [regime],” says Walt. “The Saudis themselves feel that America is supposed to stand for democracy, yet here they are propping up the totally repressive government they live under as long as it supports their economic interests. Here’s this huge power built on notions of freedom and democracy, yet they are living in an awful country with a terrible government and there’s no American support for change there.” (Most of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks appear to have been Saudis.)

Walt thinks Americans get a bad rap for having the kind of provincial outlook common in other Western nations (“if you go to some little town in Burgundy or in the heartland of France or the middle of England, people are exceptionally parochial”), but she nevertheless feels that “America sets itself up for its own fall. It proclaims freedom and democracy as central to what it stands for, so when they’re propping up someone horrible it’s very glaring. The French support the worst people in the world, but no one makes a fuss about it.”

Most observers agree that once the American public can be convinced to pay attention to problems in other countries, their concern is genuine. “When they do get exposed to the issues,” says Walt, “Americans seem to care very much. They get intrigued and want to help. In France, people are so blasé and cynical.” But even that practical impulse has its drawbacks. “Americans like straight answers to problems,” says Kelleher. “They’re the activist problem-solvers of the world. If there’s a problem out there, Americans think it should be fixed. And Americans like a situation that can be fixed in the foreseeable future. Look at terrorism: Does it lend itself to that kind of fix? No.” The complicated, delicate, sometimes centuries-old political conflicts of the Middle East seem custom-designed to exasperate an impatient people with little interest in the past.

In the past, the American public’s response to the maddening complexities of geopolitics has been to turn away, leaving the nation’s diplomatic elites to craft and execute U.S. foreign policy in a nearly scrutiny-free zone. That attitude now seems woefully outdated. With their own safety on the line, will American citizens finally give geopolitics the attention it deserves? Clarke hopes so. “If you look back to the most ill-informed action in U.S. foreign policy over the past 50 years,” he says, “I’d have to say it was the [Gulf of] Tonkin Resolution, and it was the elite who did that. All the guys you thought would take a more measured approach didn’t. So you can’t lay all the blame on ignorant Joe Six Pack.”

Kelleher sees the response to the current crisis as “going in two different directions. Some moderate, well-meaning people want to get their minds around the issues in the region. The second reaction will be a strong ‘Let’s bomb the Middle East. This is Christian vs. Muslim. Why bother to understand the people and why bother working with all the nations in the region to build a political position and strategize with them?’” She calls this second reaction “almost a glory in ignorance. It’s a pride in not understanding complexity in political issues,” arising in part from a long-standing anti-intellectual strain in American society.

Now, with the 21st century off to a shaky start, that prejudice may be one more dangerous luxury we can no longer afford. “When you start asking questions,” says Kelleher, “like Who are we going to bomb? Are we going to land ground troops? What are the ramifications of these actions? Who do we alienate? And the answer is the very people we need in order to effect an anti-terrorist policy: Arabs — to have to think through that is irritating because you need to know something, and people do not like to be confronted with their own ignorance.”

Surely only ignoramuses and resentful students slogging through their required reading feel this way, right? Not according to a new study led by the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, Professor Daniel Rockmore. In “Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,” an article published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries. And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.

If it strikes you as peculiar to see numbers guys (the article’s authors are all men) weighing in on literary style, then you haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in humanities research. Crunching data — especially the vast number of texts that have been converted to a digital format by such programs as GoogleBooks — is all the rage in liberal-arts academia these days. Among other interesting recent projects, researchers have graphed the emergence and usage of particular words or phrases by date, looking for insight into how certain ideas developed historically.

The Dartmouth research belongs to the relatively established field of stylometry, the study of linguistic patterns in texts. Digitally-aided stylometry is most familiar as a means of establishing the authorship of contested works: Plays or poems allegedly written by Shakespeare, say, or Christopher Marlowe. This involves comparing a small number of works to each other and looking for internal consistencies and differences. Most authors use detectably distinctive language patterns, even after you eliminate such obvious giveaways as content. In fact, stylometrists often assert that tracking “content-free” words — such as conjunctions, like “and,” and prepositions, like “above” — is the most reliable way to reach what the Dartmouth researchers call a “useful stylistic fingerprint” for any given author.

It’s more unusual, however, to crunch a large body of texts written over a long period of time by many different people. The Dartmouth study analyzed multiple works by 537 authors who wrote English language texts published since 1550. Comparing them to each other, they found, not surprisingly, that authors from a given historical period have more in common with each other stylistically than they do with authors from the past (or future). They also found that the more recent a work is, the more “localized” its stylistic brethren are in time. An author from, say 1850, will have more in common with an author from 1800 than an author from 1950 will have with an author from 1900.

All of this makes sense; language changes over time, and during the 20th century, with the advent of broadcast media and other mass-communications technologies, it changed faster than ever. Today, thanks to the Internet, slang, jokes and new figures of speech seem to disseminate instantaneously. Suddenly, everyone’s talking about frenemies and saying, “Do not want!”

Where the Dartmouth article makes a big leap, however, is in claiming that contemporary authors are less “influenced” by authors of the past than they are by those of their own time. Furthermore, they propose a reason: The explosion in the number of published books in the past century or so. Titles by contemporary authors are in the (vast) majority. By this logic, with “even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors,” writers, like everyone else, are less likely to read the classics.

There are so many wobbly assumptions built into these interpretations that they could be used as an illustration of the dangers of empirical hubris: Having a lot of numbers and equations is not the same as knowing what they mean, especially in such a complex and meaning-rich field as literature. The Dartmouth researchers seem somewhat aware of this problem — they suggest that the dramatic decrease in the influence of the past on 20th century literature might be due to the Modernist movement, which advocated just such a break with tradition. (Note: The texts used in the study were taken from the public domain, and so included nothing published after 1952, a time when Modernism still ruled the literary roost. For all we know, postmodernism might cause the math department’s processors to melt down.)

First, there is the assumption that a lack of stylistic similarity is the same thing as a lack of influence. This is manifestly untrue. A stylometric analysis of, say, the prose of John Irving, for example, would probably not show much resemblance to that of Charles Dickens; one author is a contemporary American and the other a Victorian Briton. But Irving worships Dickens and cites him as his master and model in every interview he gives. He writes in the voice of a modern American, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t profoundly influenced by Dickens’s novels. On the pop fiction front, Helen Fielding doesn’t write a bit like Jane Austen in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” so does that mean the founding text of chicklit simply couldn’t have been influenced by “Pride and Prejudice”? Please: Fielding’s novel is a retelling of the Regency classic in a modern setting.

Also built into that first assumption is the peculiar notion that the only influence on a writer’s style is the work of other authors. Most writers aspire to represent the speech of their own time. They listen to people talking at home, in the street and in the media. If the authors of a particular historical moment tend to sound similar, it is most likely due to this common influence rather than their influence on each other. It would be absurd for, say, Jonathan Franzen to write about 21st century Americans in the prose style of Anthony Trollope, but that doesn’t mean that Trollope’s approach to “the way we live now” (to borrow the much-quoted title of his best-known book) hasn’t infused Franzen’s ambition to write sweeping, often satirical “social” novels set in the present day. In fact, it’s precisely his desire to emulate Trollope that makes it impossible for Franzen to write prose like Trollope’s; the way we live now can’t be described in the language they used then.

Finally, the authors of the Dartmouth study seem to believe that readers choose their books by making a random selection from the pool of potential candidates. If there are more books by contemporary writers, then probability dictates that a reader is more likely to pull a recent title from this grab bag. True, the abundance of choices can be overwhelming, but it can just as easily lead someone to devote their precious reading hours to the tried and true. There is no reason to conclude that because contemporary writers differ stylistically from the authors of the past, they therefore must never have read those authors. I realize that my evidence here is anecdotal, but I’m willing to bet that I know a lot more novelists than the Dartmouth math department does, and as a rule they read far more of the classics than the average civilian. They want to know what people are writing and reading now, of course, but every author also wants to know what kind of books stand the test of time — because most authors want to write one.

As I mentioned earlier, language changes, and authors who aspire to lasting renown are sometimes vexed by these changes. In 1712, Jonathan Swift published a letter to the Earl of Oxford (then Lord Treasurer) urging the establishment of the English equivalent of the Académie Français: a body authorized to dictate the correct form and usage of the language. If “Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys” could be prevented from constantly introducing “affected Phrases, and new, conceited Words,” Swift argued, then there might be found a way to “fix” English forever. If not, “How then shall any Man who hath a Genius for History, equal to the best of the Antients, be able to undertake such a Work with Spirit and Chearfulness, when he considers, that he will be read with Pleasure but a very few Years, and in an Age or two shall hardly be understood without an Interpreter?”

English has no academy, and Swift was both right and wrong. We still read him today, and we have even concocted the “new, conceited” word “Swiftian” to describe the ferocious mode of satire we identify with him (though we now give “conceited” a different definition). But then there are those one-star Amazon reviews for “Gulliver’s Travels”: “I had to give up on this book about 2/3 of the way through,” one reader complains. “I was just getting too tired of looking up ‘Old English’ words as I read.” No doubt this protest would have confirmed Swift’s generally low opinion of the human race. Prose styles come and go, but idiots will always be with us.

Further reading

“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature” by James M. Huges, Nicholas J. Fotia, David C. Krakauer and Daniel N. Rockmore in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract)

“A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” by Jonathan Swift

The average resident of the developed world uses the Internet constantly, contemplating its impact on contemporary life and exploring its numberless delights, temptations and annoyances on a daily basis. Yet, for most of us, any notion of how all this information arrives in our homes and workplaces is weirdly immaterial. Stevens was ridiculed for his hopelessly old-fashioned reference to the physical world and the movement of palpable objects, while smart kids and late-night comics grasped that the Internet has zipped beyond all that to become the disembodied essence of human communication.

Only it’s not, and “Tubes” is about the actual, physical things — many of them tubes — that make up the pathways of the Internet. For all their significance to contemporary life, governance, commerce and industry, these conduits aren’t an alluring topic. Like a lot of important things, they are superficially dull and trivial: bundles of cables; deserted stations ringed in cyclone fencing beside lonely highways; featureless, windowless buildings in old warehouse districts and, above all, rooms filled with metal boxes, blinking lights and cool, dry processed air. This is not the stuff that dreams are made of — and at the same time it is, because dreams of every sort thrive online.

Fortunately, Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder represented by these unprepossessing objects. In the Cornish seaside town of Porthcurno, he’s shown a black cable emerging from the floor, “spooled into steel trays the size of merry-go-rounds, like something stolen from Richard Serra’s storehouse,” and pictures the thousands of miles it extends, through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way back to Long Island, where, in the form of light shining down strands of glass, it will carry home the email he writes to his wife from his hotel room that night. (Another cable, running from Portugal to Africa is a “nine-thousand-mile path of light… that would transform a continent.”) Swathes of cables lifted from beneath the streets of Manhattan by workmen are likened to “giant squid under the streetlights.”

This book is more than a electrical engineering travelogue, however; in the course of his research Blum interviewed representative examples of the people who make the Internet work and a smattering of those who helped build it in the first place. The computer science professor at UCLA who, in 1969, used a phone line to connect that university’s computer network with Stanford’s shows Blum the IMP (Interface Message Processor) used for the task: a file-cabinet-sized box — the first piece of the Internet! — now shoved into the corner of a shabby conference room. He attends a meeting of network operators, the people who, among other things, negotiate the direct, plug-in, network-to-network connections that are the building blocks of the net, and hears a Dutch woman imitating an old-school street hawker: “I have eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. For all of you with content, please send me an email.”

So ingeniously beguiling is Blum’s way of conveying all this that, before you know it, you have acquired a sense of the basic structure of Internet — from old-school exchanges to fiber-optic regeneration stations. The Internet turns out to be not quite what Blum (and a lot of other people, including myself) assumed. “I expected to find a loose arrangement of little pieces,” he writes, expressing an idea probably shared by many of his readers. “It was all supposed to be distributed, amorphous, nearly invisible.” True, information can travel via a variety of routes, but most of the time it makes its way along major thoroughfares. While the Internet doesn’t exactly have a center, it certainly has nodes and backbones where most of the connections are made and the data stored. Blum tried to lay eyes on as many of these as he could.

It wasn’t always easy. Having arranged to visit a brand-new Google data center in rural eastern Oregon, Blum never gets closer to the servers than the lunchroom, and his interviews are supervised so oppressively it’s like taking an official tour of North Korea. (Perhaps ironically, a Facebook center in the same region proved much more open.) For months, Cablevision, his own Internet service provider, dodged his requests for an overview of how data got from their network to his home in Brooklyn. While the more secretive of the organizations he contacted often attributed their caution to security concerns, Blum was skeptical. He compares a stopover at the friendly visitor center at nearby Bonneville Dam to the “Orwellian atmosphere” at Google; both are important, strategically sensitive resources, but only one is shut up tighter than Fort Knox. Blum questions whether it’s wise to hand over “so much of ourselves” to corporations that are not obliged to return the trust.

Part of the utopian romance of the Internet is that it has no weight, no friction, no footprint, no smell. The buzzword of the moment — “cloud” — promises ethereality, pure information, a dream with almost supernatural intimations. Yet as one of Blum’s data-center tour guides explains, “This is the cloud. All those buildings like this around planet create the cloud. The cloud is a building. It works like a factory.” It needs power, raw materials and staff. And its roots are in the earth.

The criticism brought to mind a lengthy discussion on Reddit last year, inspired by an anecdote from a bookstore clerk who sold copies of all four “Twilight” novels to a sheepish professor. The professor’s explanation: “Every time I reference low forms of literature, I always use ‘Twilight’ as the example. Today a student asked if I’ve actually read them, and I had to say no. They demanded that I do.”

What should literary academics study? To judge by the Reddit comments, many people believe that academia’s job is to ordain great literature and pass on its exalted benefits to students. As for bad literature, the more calumny that can be heaped on it and those who love it, the better! Much of the discussion devolved into knee-jerk “Twilight” bashing by users as unfamiliar with the books as that sheepish professor. (Many of them give the impression of cherishing equally bad taste, albeit for forms of pop culture that are much less girly.) Extravagant evocations of steaming piles of bodily waste abounded.

Nevertheless, a few readers agreed with the professor’s students: If you’re going to knock something, then set a good example by knowing what you’re talking about. You don’t want to give students the idea that it’s OK to opine on a book they haven’t read, for crying out loud. And, toward the end, a few informed participants even stepped in to speak out on behalf of the study of not-very-good books — provided those books are a cultural phenomenon, which “Twilight” most certainly is. “Something doesn’t have to be high-brow literature to be a worthwhile material for study,” wrote one. “That’s not to say it’s a ‘great book’, but for academic literature, whether or not something is ‘great’ is sort of beside the point.” “I think a lot of people assume English Ph.D.’s just go around saying ‘This book is good, this book is bad,’ all day,” wrote another. “That is an incredibly misguided understanding of the study of literature.”

It is. However, Mullan’s argument isn’t that the Harry Potter series is bad (he says his kids love the books), only that it isn’t serious enough to reward scholarly attention. “Harry Potter is for children,” he said, “not for grown-ups.” True, the Harry Potter books are technically “for” kids, but by now everybody knows that adults read them, too (including adults without children), and that some people who first read them as kids have since grown up and yet still regard them as important books. Can the Harry Potter novels, as novels, be detached from the momentous role they played culturally, socially and in the world of book publishing? Does it even make sense to try?

“Twilight,” which I suspect will have an even greater impact on America’s book culture because of the fan networks it has inspired, is doubly damned as unserious because it’s not only “for children” (that is, teenagers), but it’s also a romance, surely the most reflexively disdained of all literary genres. Throughout the early 19th century, all novels were seen in more or less this light: as fanciful stories read by silly women seeking escape from sterner truths, women all too prone to absorbing dangerously misguided notions of life and love. (For the record, I tend to agree with the later opinion, but that doesn’t mean I think “Wuthering Heights” beneath scholar interest.) As recently as the 1930s, it was controversial for any novel at all to be assigned to students at Oxford. Novels were regarded as recreational reading, not matter for significant study.

In the late 20th century, however, the field of cultural studies, a discipline springing out of poststructuralist theory, seized upon everything from Madonna to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” as fodder for academic work. Often, through some tortuously elaborate theoretical rationale, the fun stuff of pop entertainment could be cast as “subversive” or even revolutionary, tantamount to a form of political activism, which was something of an ivory-tower fetish at the time. That’s not to say that Madonna and Buffy didn’t have their subversive elements, but unlike actual political activity, those elements could be easily ignored by audience members who didn’t care to hear about them. Pop culture is funny that way.

Cultural studies has since fallen out of fashion a bit, and it doesn’t seem to have left much of an impression on the public, who at best dismissed it as fad. (Maybe they were right about that.) Still, there’s much to be said for smart people paying real attention to the stories that captivate huge numbers of people. First, there’s the simple question of why? Why was a boarding school series about wizards in training exactly what every kid wanted to read in the late 1990s? Why do so many girls and women like vampire romances?

Then there’s how. Was it just chance that elevated Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance above the rest of the genre, or was there something particularly effective in how she executed it? What role has the Internet played in fostering fandoms that not only persuade more people to read a book, but perhaps influence their opinion of it as well? If anything, an obviously “bad” book presents an even more fascinating puzzle to solve. Sometimes the answer is historical. The fictional techniques Dan Brown utilizes in “The Da Vinci Code” are so basic and formulaic they can be found in about a zillion other thrillers, but his bestseller’s tale of power, secrets, conspiracy and religion clearly spoke to a lot of discontented readers in the Bush years.

It’s also worth asking whether critics of the Harry Potter conference would object to a conference on “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” both books written explicitly for children. Somehow, the passage of a century or more makes them seem weightier, just as it has turned the ladies’ entertainments of Jane Austen’s time into the literature of today. Who’s to say the same won’t happen to J.K. Rowling’s creation, or even to Meyers? If so, there won’t be any lack of contemporary sources to explain how we saw them, the way we argued over the quality of their prose and the examples they set for young men and women. But as for how they’ll look to those readers, sitting down to study whichever “classics” will survive and be read 100 or more years in the future? That is anybody’s guess, and anybody should be entitled to take a shot at it.

Further reading

The Guardian newspaper on the U.K.’s first academic conference on Harry Potter

A Canadian bookseller sells “Twilight” novels to a sheepish professor

Reddit discusses whether college professors should read “Twilight.”

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.