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CNN Sunday Morning

Interview With Paul Tough

Aired December 09, 2001 - 08:51   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: The end of the year is almost here and for many magazines, that means picking an important event or a person that define the year to go on the front covers. However, one magazine is bucking the trend. Paul Tough from the "New York Times" magazine joins us now. He's in the Big Apple to talk about the year in ideas.

Paul, thanks for being with us this morning.

PAUL TOUGH, "NEW YORK TIMES" MAGAZINE: Thank you.

SAVIDGE: You got a lot of stuff in there, everything from sort of the weird to the very deep. But I think we'll start with the odd, and I miss this one, the newly designed golf ball.

TOUGH: Yes. One of the reasons that you've missed it is that it's not actually on the market yet. But there's always been this problem with golf balls that you know the surface of a golf ball is dimpled. But you can only fit so many dimples on the surface.

SAVIDGE: Yes.

TOUGH: What an engineer for Callaway Golf figured out this year is that, if you put little ridges on the top of it, it flies a lot faster. There's a lot less drag and it's revolutionizing golf.

SAVIDGE: All right, now onto the deep: the consciously constructed sexual paradox, AKA Brittany Spears.

TOUGH: Yes, a very deep one. This is our somewhat tongue-in- cheek label for the idea that Brittany Spears embodies. Obviously performers have used sex to sell their acts in the past. What Brittany Spears does is combines an onstage persona that is a lot of bumping and grinding and writhing with an offstage persona which is virginal and pure. And what our writer says is that she has created herself as the perfect product as a result.

SAVIDGE: So why come up with a list of ideas like this, and how did you narrow it down? Do you vote? Do you ask people on the street? What was the formula?

TOUGH: It was a pretty complicated process. What we thought is that there's a way in which events and people are, of course, very important in culture. But there's something interesting about watching the way ideas move. There's something more lasting, more fascinating about the way that an idea can move from one part of the culture to another.

So what we did it went to experts in all sorts of fields from law to politics to fashion and asked them, what was the most important idea in their field right now. And we ended up with 80 that seemed to have made a big difference this year.

SAVIDGE: Yes, cheating is part of the game. This one we know, obviously, from Little League turmoil.

TOUGH: Yes, and Danny Almonte, the pitcher who was supposed to be 12 but turned out to be 14 was the person that brought a lot of attention to cheating this year. But what our author argues is that in fact, that obscured a bigger idea which is that, in Little League sports and young people sports, cheating is more and more becoming accepted as part of the game.

SAVIDGE: Another one never far from us here at CNN, in fact all I got to do is look down, the crawl that you see scrolling there. What makes that a new idea? It's been around a long time.

TOUGH: Well, it has been around a long time, but it used to be something that you and other cable networks would just use from time to time when there was a big breaking news story. Now, since September 11, it's run along the bottom of your screen and the other network screens constantly, so that television has become a print media. When people are listening to us talk, they're reading at the same time.

SAVIDGE: The dropper popper. We headlined this one. We have to tell folks about it. What exactly is it and can you demonstrate?

TOUGH: Well I don't think I can demonstrate it, but I can tell you what it is. It's a toy that's, we think going to be a big deal this Christmas season, and it's partly perfect for these times because it's so simple.

It's a $4.00 toy, unlike big Christmas toys from other years. It doesn't involve a lot of microchips or accessories. You turn it inside out like this, drop it and when it hits a flat surface it pops up higher than the where it started. So it's a very simple idea. It's just a rubber ball cut in half, but it's really something the first time you see it happen, it's really amazing.

SAVIDGE: It's one of those; I wish I had thought of that.

TOUGH: Right.

SAVIDGE: Why are there some items on this list and others not? Say the genome project that seemed to be revolutionary and no mention?

TOUGH: Well what we tried to do was isolate very specific ideas rather than a big project like the genome project. One thing that we do have on our list is pharmacogenomics, which is sort of the next stage after the genome project. It's what a lot of pharmaceutical companies are doing, taking prescription drugs that are targeted specifically at one genetic type and that seems to be the next stage in the genome project.

SAVIDGE: One e-mail that can change the world. Explain that.

TOUGH: Well that is an e-mail that was sent out by an Afghan- American named Tamim Unsury, I think one day after the September 11 attacks, and he was explaining what Afghanistan is like and arguing that American's real enemy wasn't the Afghan people.

And this is an e-mail that he sent to 20 friends and it got forwarded around to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Some people got it dozens of times, and it got his idea out there and turned him into a minor news celebrity for a few days.

SAVIDGE: Is this something we're going to see regular now? Is this a regular for this magazine?

TOUGH: I think we will. I think we'll keep doing it.

SAVIDGE: All right, we'll look forward to it. Paul Tough joining us from the "New York Times" magazine this morning with the list of ideas from 2001. Thanks very much.

TOUGH: Thank you.

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