Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal.

Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. (Some of his progeny, elected in the early 1990s, moved to the Senate and polarized its culture in the same way.)

Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.

The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraskacalled his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections.

In the House, some of the remaining centrist and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats have been targeted for extinction by redistricting, while even ardent tea party Republicans, such as freshman Rep. Alan Nunnelee (Miss.), have faced primary challenges from the right for being too accommodationist. And Mitt Romney’s rhetoric and positions offer no indication that he would govern differently if his party captures the White House and both chambers of Congress.

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

Look ahead to the likely consequences of voters’ choices in the November elections. How would the candidates govern? What could they accomplish? What differences can people expect from a unified Republican or Democratic government, or one divided between the parties?

In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.

tmann@brookings.edu

nornstein@aei.org

Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” which will be available Tuesday.

Read more from Outlook, including:

Turned off from politics? That’s exactly what the politicians want.

The top five cliches that liberals use to avoid real arguments

5 myths about conservative voters

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Disruptions: Innovation Isn’t Easy, Especially Midstream

Nick Bilton/The New York TimesThe Polaroid Land camera in the Instagram offices.

In Instagram’s early offices in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, basking in the blue glow of half a dozen computer screens, sat an old Polaroid camera. It was a Rainbow SX-70 OneStep Land Camera.

Most of Instagram’s 30 million users wouldn’t recognize this instant film camera — even though Edwin Land’s creation was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1972 — but they would recognize the echoes of the camera’s design in Instagram’s logo.

In fact, Instagram’s personality and style were developed in some way from old film camera companies. The application’s filters that convert pictures to look like snapshots from yesteryear were inspired by classic Brownies and Instamatics and disposable point-and-shoots.

So why was a small start-up with only 13 employees able to build Instagram while a company like Eastman Kodak, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection, was not? It’s easy to imagine how things could be different at Kodak had it dreamed up the idea.

Leica, Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Olympus — all of which are still in business, though for how long is yet to be determined — didn’t build Instagram, either. (Polaroid disappeared long ago, though its brand name persists in different forms.)

Michael Hawley, who is on Kodak’s board of directors, said the answer could be summed up in one word: culture.

“It’s a little like asking why Hasbro didn’t do Farmville, or why McDonald’s didn’t start Whole Foods,” said Mr. Hawley, formerly of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Cultural patterns are pretty hard to escape once you get sucked into them. For instance, Apple and Google are diametrical opposites in so many ways, have all the skills, but neither of them did Instagram, either.”

Neither could Facebook. If it could, it wouldn’t have paid $1 billion to acquire the small team of engineers and access to the program’s 30 million users.

The challenge of creating something small and disruptive inside a large company is one that many face today.

But Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, explored this problem in his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and found that “it was as if the leading firms were held captive by their customers, enabling attacking entrant firms to topple the incumbent industry leaders each time a disruptive technology emerged.”

In a 2008 talk at the Yale School of Management, Gary T. DiCamillo, a former chief executive at Polaroid, said one reason that the company went out of business was that the revenues it was reaping from film sales acted like a blockade to any experimentation with new business models.

“We knew we needed to change the fan belt, but we couldn’t stop the engine,” he said. “And the reason we couldn’t stop the engine was that instant film was the core of the financial model of this company. It drove all the economics.” The same was true of Kodak and its reliance on its own cash cow: silver halide film.

It is a cyclical problem all successful companies eventually face as the technology around them changes, and they can not.

Even if Polaroid or Kodak could have developed Instagram, it’s likely that the project would have been killed anyway. What would be the reaction of almost any executive presented with a business plan to save the company with an iPhone app that had no prospect for revenue?

Companies that try to change the fan belt while the engine is still moving usually end up losing a few fingers. Many people thought Netflix was going to defy the innovator’s dilemma as it weaned its customers from physical DVDs to digital downloads last year. It fumbled, and the company’s market value was sliced to just over $4 billion, from $16 billion, during the three months it tried to make this transition.

The most perplexing part of Polaroid’s fall and Instagram’s rise can be seen with both the founding thesis of both companies. In the early days of Polaroid, Mr. Land said photography should “go beyond amusement and record-making to become a continuous partner of most human beings.” His goal was to build a business that would allow anyone to feel an emotional connection to photography. This was exactly what Instagram figured out, too. And it’s what Facebook was unable to solve on its own.

Since it may be impossible to change the fan belt, buying a new engine, even for $1 billion, starts sounding pretty smart.

Coping with the data deluge

DESPITE OUR naturally humble predilections, few finance directors could deny that the role and influence we hold in our respective businesses has grown significantly over the last few, volatile years. Where we were primarily focussed on the financial management of our organisations, our role on the board is increasingly strategic, tasked with evaluating shifts in business strategy, modelling new product successes (and possible failures) and assessing new market opportunities - all directed at delivering growth and stability in a volatile market.

In theory, thanks to the increasing power of business technology today, we have more information than ever before to help us make better business decisions. This information is steeped in detailed financial models and real data from around our business, our customer base, and our market environment. Unfortunately, the deluge of data relating to our business - whether that's an insight in an email, a critical piece of customer information in a structured database or an obscure trend hidden in the sales data, or even a broader insight from customer conversations on social media - has the potential to keep us from seeing the wood for the trees.

It used to be simpler: data, as we knew it, was structured, and existed in defined places within the corporate empire. However, a combination of cheaper technology, the internet, the rise of social media and the consumerisation of IT has turned this upside down.

Data is now growing exponentially - structured and unstructured, alphanumerical, visual and aural - and, crucially, it exists both inside and outside the corporate firewall. The variety and increasing size of these data-sets has made them difficult to work with using traditional database management tools, with new units of sizing such as terabyte, exabyte and zettabyte now necessary to classify them. The difficulty for CFOs is that not only do they need to pay to capture, store, search, share, and analyse this data within the corporate firewall, but they need to enable the business to find increasingly innovative ways to mine it and transform it into valuable, actionable information.

Enter ‘big data analytics': a new set of technologies that promise to draw together structured and unstructured data, derive actionable insight from it, and inform business strategy in real-time. Say you're an online retailer and you want to increase the basket value from each customer. In assessing the potential value of stocking a new category of product, you might want to take a variety of insights into account, including conversation topics between your existing customers on social media networks, real-time weather forecasts, and - fundamentally - trend-data relating to customer shopping patterns. All of this data needs to be captured, brought together and modelled; sometimes from data sources you own, sometimes from external ones. This is what big data analytics platforms do - and companies like Amazon are already making full use of them.

A critical benefit of this type of insight is a more sophisticated, agile business which is able to capitalise on new trends or opportunities in hours or days, instead of months or years. O'Reilly Media, for example, uses big data analytics to spot consumer trends and insight points, analysing mountains of data to identify the hot topics for their next set of ‘how-to' books and guides. What better insights could you ask for than those of your own customers and prospects? Today, if you know how and where to look, these insights are freely available.

Another example of the potential of big data for the CFO lies in in the development of new revenue streams and business models which become possible if you can successfully monetise your own data assets. A particularly prominent example here is the New York Stock Exchange: the Exchange set up a company called NYSE Technologies to let customers have access, in real time, to every piece of historical data, transaction and ‘tick' ever to cross its systems. NYSE Technologies is now marketing this data as a service to other companies, who can model their market engagement using this real-time feed. The team at NYSE Tech have capitalised on their dataset to create a new revenue stream for the business, with all the benefits that brings.

Early-bird CFOs who catch this worm and successfully unlock the full value of their corporate information will help to put their organisations in a prime position to reap significant rewards. However, there may be a need for a new skillset in the CFO's organisation: in the same way that companies 30 years ago persuaded their CFOs to commit investment to the recruitment of computer scientists, today we must be looking to bring in a new breed of ‘data scientist' to support us in a more sophisticated, real-time analysis of our business data.

This, in turn, will drive business strategy and decision-making, and will ultimately create new revenue streams. The full potential of this is yet to be seen, but the first exploratory steps are being taken today.
Once the value of information as a business asset unto itself is recognised, converting raw data into valuable sources of revenue becomes possible. Digging deeper into your organisation enables you to consider and support your business in completely new ways. The increased business insight delivered by big data analytics tools will empower you to ask the questions you never even knew to ask - and lead you to some important answers around your competitive advantage, potential for innovation, and ability to exploit new market opportunities.

While the volumes of information we possess continues to explode, each piece holds unique value which is waiting to be mined and interpreted. By equipping your organisations to deploy powerful new analytical tools and harnessing big data effectively, you will help your business to exploit new intelligence, spot emerging business trends, and accelerate go-to-market initiatives that may otherwise have been impossible to conceive.

Steve O'Neill, CFO EMEA North, EMC Corporation

When in Rome . . .

By JOSEPH RAGO

The Kobal Collection/Universal

TOGA PARTY! John 'Bluto' Blutarsky (John Belushi), trying to lift the pall after an academic cheating scheme goes wrong.

The brothers of Delta Tau Chi were already behind the times in 1962, the year in which the 1978 movie "Animal House" is set, and certainly their arrested development has not kept pace with the half-century's progress since. So how come their misbehavior is as alluring, and hilarious, as ever? At this distance, aren't we supposed to know better?

In "Fat, Drunk, and Stupid," a memoir of the movie's creation, Matty Simmons simply takes the appeal for granted. If I had produced one of the greatest comedies of all time, I'd probably leave it at that, too. "Animal House" is imperishable because it is hysterical.

Still, the question stands. The GPAs of Bluto Blutarsky, Otter Stratton, Kent "Flounder" Dorfman et al. hover somewhere around a Gentleman's F. The boys contribute nothing worthwhile to what today would be called "the Faber College community," except free beer and unofficial electives in partying.

This is a film, after all, that shows the gang drunk-driving to the nearby Emily Dickinson College, where Otter poses as the "engaged to be engaged" fiancé of the late Fawn Leibowitz. Having learned that she recently died in a kiln explosion, he tells her bereaved roommate: "She was going to make a pot for me." Otter parlays the con into a group date at a seedy roadhouse, which ends when the Delta guys are intimidated by the black clientele and desert the girls. "What baffles me is why Fawn would go out with boys like that," one of the Dickinson girls says as they make their way back to their dorm on foot. "They reminded me of criminals."

In the 1970s American humor found a new comic register—ironic, pitiless, irreverent toward anything resembling a status quo—and "Animal House" had perfect pitch. So did National Lampoon, the magazine that Mr. Simmons bankrolled in 1969. (Technically, the movie's full name is "National Lampoon's Animal House.") He had made a fortune, starting in the 1950s, as one of the entrepreneurs behind the first credit card, the Diners Club, and for some reason he gave part of the money to Doug Kenney and a couple other genius Harvard reprobates. They had what was then a fresh idea, namely to publish a humor magazine of the sort that would give Diners Club customers heartburn.

The Lampoon became a bible for the under-30 crowd, especially college students, and Hollywood beckoned. Kenney started working on a script with the writer Harold Ramis; their treatment, with the working title "Laser Orgy Girls," depicted the high-school exploits of a young Charles Manson. Mr. Simmons, playing the voice of reason, insisted that the writers tone down the material. He also moved the plot to academia, loosely defined, and brought in a third writer, Chris Miller, whose short stories about his Dartmouth College capers were among the Lampoon's most popular.

Today at Dartmouth—public service announcement: my alma mater—the faculty and school administrators hold "Animal House" in somewhat less esteem than Yale must feel for George W. Bush. Yet in my informal surveys, alumni of the era depicted by the movie regard it less a satire than cinéma vérité. (The resemblance to modern student life is also uncanny.) There's a reason for that, as Mr. Simmons details. "Double secret probation" was a real thing. The true-to-life stories he expurgated from the screenplay but describes in "Fat, Drunk, and Stupid," however, are—to use a line employed by the Faber administration—so profound and disgusting that decorum prohibits listing them here.

Such restraint is, paradoxically, part of the reason the movie succeeds. "Animal House" is often called tasteless, and it is, but it is tastelessness elevated to art—a comedy of bad manners. Unlike its gross-out derivatives, from "Porky's" to "American Pie," the movie is the work of smart, literate people. Watch it again if you don't believe me.

The same impulse—to run it back, to do it again—also helps to explain why "Animal House" is canonical. At heart, it is a backward-looking and rather sentimental appeal to a passage in life when the only things that matter are fun and friends and youthful extravagance, before settling down to career, family and other adult responsibilities. "We invented nostalgia," Doug Kenney once claimed—and it was true, at least for a happy few.

“Unlike gross-out derivatives like 'American Pie,' 'Animal House' is the work of smart, literate people.”

"Animal House" was quite literally an effort to re-create a world that was by then already gone. The clean-cut New Frontier of the early 1960s had been obliterated by the counterculture, and the kids had traded in their shetland sweaters for burlap ponchos. The movie was filmed in 1977 over 32 days on an active campus, the University of Oregon in Eugene. The decommissioned frat house that became the Delta headquarters was being used as a halfway home for ex-cons.

For Mr. Simmons and his humorist-elegists, the whole point was to achieve time-defying verisimilitude. A hairdresser imported from Beverly Hills turned out to know only how to cut disco styles and was replaced by an old-school barber in Eugene who "knew how to do sides."

The cast was mostly unknowns, except for "Saturday Night Live" star John Belushi, who played the immortal Bluto. The director was John Landis, who had attracted attention that year with "The Kentucky Fried Movie," an anarchic collection of comedy sketches written by future "Airplane!" and "Naked Gun" wizards David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. The "Animal House" actors were encouraged to relive their school days, and their devotion to method acting was total. On their first night in Eugene, some of them showed up at a U. of O. party, where a fist fight broke out involving the uninvited guests and some student athletes; a few in the "Animal House" contingent spent the balance of the evening in a hospital emergency room. Belushi tried unsuccessfully to rally the movie crew's Teamsters to retaliate.

Avoiding getting beaten up is generally a good policy, but Mr. Simmons makes it all sound like an awful lot of fun. In retrospect, plenty of things we've done that might seem, with the disadvantages of hindsight, like bad decisions were actually enriching. Consider the line that Mr. Simmons borrows for his title, the stodgy, malevolent Dean Wormer's counsel to one of the Deltas: "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." That's generally good advice too. But given that you're only an undergraduate once, one or two of the three is not the worst way to go through college.

"Animal House" endures, I think, because this spirit is so antithetical to Wormer's heirs, the moral regulators on the left and right who run America's institutions of higher education and want to choose for everyone what is supposed to be valuable or appropriate to their college experience. An unregulated group like a fraternity is a threat to their control—even as the reality, in my view, is that the people who don't take college so seriously go on to much better things than the ones holed up making grades. Anyhow, it's hard not to pity the underprivileged who obey and will never remember what might have been the greatest night of their lives.

Mr. Simmons doesn't seem to quite grasp that his achievement couldn't be repeated either. In the 1980s, he commissioned treatments for an "Animal House" sequel that would have fondly evoked the 1970s. The proposals included the obligatory Bluto Junior, psychedelic mushrooms and encounter groups. None of them was made. Like being a college student, "Animal House" could be made only once—a good thing on both counts.

Bell Epoque

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

Santa Monica, Calif.

Many adjectives accurately describe the American violinist Joshua Bell, but "ubiquitous" works best of all. He seems no sooner to leave a place than to return there with a new program. Since the beginning of 2011, for example, he has performed in the Los Angeles area five times, and he will appear here again later this month, with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and also in July, at the Hollywood Bowl. Such frequent visits are, of course, a measure of his longstanding popularity. Mr. Bell remains boyishly handsome at age 44, and his dynamic stage presence and unrestrained virtuosity are real draws for audiences that prefer their serious artistry spiked with matinee-idol panache.

Christopher Serra

"I probably do too much," Mr. Bell acknowledged over lunch last month, the Pacific Ocean serving as a picturesque backdrop. "I want to do everything. That's my problem. Life is short, and I hate the idea of turning down anything. You never know what interesting experience might happen. This is not a good way of thinking. I was going to have an almost three-week break this month, but then, sure enough, an offer to open the new hall in Las Vegas came up. And then China called. I couldn't refuse; I hadn't been to China in a year-and-a-half."

Mr. Bell clearly can't help himself. Indeed, he recently added conducting to his already packed schedule. On April 11, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, he begins a 15-city U.S. tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a chamber orchestra based in London whose music directorship he assumed last September. He will lead the ensemble from the violin in three different programs, on which he'll also serve as soloist in concertos by Beethoven and Bruch.

"It combines everything I love to do," Mr. Bell said of the endeavor, "but I don't have to deal with a middleman, the conductor. I control everything this way. Plus, I'm discovering the symphonic repertoire. I've always loved it, but now I get to put my mark on it."

For those concerned that he may be getting ahead of himself, Mr. Bell injects a dose of modesty. "I shouldn't call myself a conductor yet," he said, "but it's something I'm kind of migrating toward. It's always something I thought I would do at some point, and I think this is a really nice way to do it. As the years go by, I might occasionally drop the violin and see how it goes just leading the Academy."

Mr. Bell took no formal instruction in conducting, though he has led concertos from the fiddle for many years and served as an "artistic partner" with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 2004 to 2007. "My whole life I've been observing," he said. "And lately I've been asking opinions of friends who are conductors. Conducting is a strange thing to teach. There are very few great conducting teachers, and most great conductors don't teach. Look at Valery Gergiev—what he does is not teachable. A lot of it is on-the-job training, what works and what doesn't work. And I learn from bad conductors as well. I learn when an orchestra rolls its eyes."

The violinist maintains that the "diplomacy of conducting" should not be underestimated. "You have to be strong, because otherwise the musicians won't respect you," he said. "But you want them to like you, too. So you need the right amount of humor and insistence. And you can't treat them like an instrument, as some soloists who move toward conducting do. They think rehearsing an orchestra is like practicing. But you don't keep starting and stopping as you would at home. You've got to learn how to manage a rehearsal."

Soon even those unable to hear the Academy and Mr. Bell on tour can assess their collaboration. The orchestra and its new music director will be recording Beethoven's Fourth and Seventh Symphonies for Sony in May. "Those will be my first recordings as a conductor," Mr. Bell said with a hint of trepidation. "Of course there are a million versions of the Beethoven symphonies, but we're going to add ours to the mix. It's a different experience with us. It's more like chamber music. Even with the best big orchestras, there's room to hide. But here it's a smaller orchestra, and no one's conducting on a podium. I'm leading from the violin. No baton, though I may use my hand when I'm not playing."

As for the mechanical details of his efforts, Mr. Bell has a ready answer. "The unspoken secret is that an orchestra can play without a conductor to a certain extent," he said. "Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal—the vision, the structure, the architecture. That's not done in the moment, and that's what separates one interpretation from another."

Fans of the violinist should not fret that his forays into conducting will diminish his solo career. There is no danger of that, he insists. Instead, likening musicians to explorers, he suggests that conducting is merely an expansion of his existing interests. "You're visiting all these great wonders," Mr. Bell said, referring to musical milestones. "And this opens up a whole new set of them. There's also the challenge of it. What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don't, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth. For some, it's commissioning new pieces—and I want to do more of that, too—but this is a way I can challenge myself and do something new."

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

The Army as a Cornerstone

MY early years growing up in Allentown, Pa., gave no hint that I would have a 32-year career in the Army. I came from a middle-class family, played trumpet in the high school band, ran track and joined the football team. I had a newspaper route, and in the summer I washed dishes at a country club.

I became interested in going to the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., when I learned in junior high school that my father had been awarded a Silver Star as a combat medic in World War II. Dad was a high school social studies teacher who, like many veterans, never talked about his service.

At West Point, I thrived on the discipline and leadership training. I ran track, played intramural sports, was the top-ranked cadet in physical fitness over four years and graduated near the top of my class. Three weeks after earning my civil engineering degree in 1976, I married my high school sweetheart, Marla, and joined the Army Corps of Engineers.

After I went through Army Ranger training at Fort Benning, Ga., I was posted to Fort Ord in California. There is nothing more challenging, or rewarding, than that first experience as a platoon leader. I was hooked on the Army.

Our first daughter was born at Fort Ord, and in 1981 the Army sent the three of us to Boston so I could attend Harvard Business School. I then taught economics at West Point, where future Army leaders like David Petraeus and Martin Dempsey were also teaching.

In 1986, our second daughter was born, and our family moved to Washington. I was chosen for a White House fellowship and was the executive assistant to the director of the Office of Management and Budget. I met President Reagan and had a front-row view on how the country’s civilian leadership tackled deficit reduction and similar thorny issues we are still facing today.

In 1989, I deployed to Panama as a battalion operations officer during the mission that ousted Manuel Noriega. Three years later, it was back for a second tour in Washington. I like to joke that the Pentagon is a magnet since I spent 12 years of my career there.

From 1992 to 2002, I served as commander in three locations. I was commander of an engineer battalion at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, a regimental commander teaching leadership to West Point cadets, and brigade commander at Fort Hood in Texas.

We moved a lot and our daughters had to change schools often, but they learned to adapt to change — with much guidance from my wife. This didn’t sour them on military life, as both would join the Army — one would serve in Iraq and the other in Kuwait.

I became a brigadier general in 1999, first doing Army strategic planning, then commanding the Corps of Engineers Southwestern Division in Dallas, which oversees public infrastructure. By 2002, I was back for my fourth, and final, Pentagon tour. My job for the next six years was to equip the Army at war, and to help oversee allocation of the Army’s annual budget; I retired in 2008 as a lieutenant general.

In August of that year, I joined ITT Defense, then part of the ITT Corporation, as vice president of strategy, and was named president four months later. In October last year, the unit was spun off. I was named chief executive, charged with leading the company, now called ITT Exelis, through the current era of declining military spending.

Even in these leaner times, my life experiences, especially the coaching and mentoring I received, have been invaluable in setting company goals and developing leadership among our employees.

Selling You on Facebook

By JULIA ANGWIN and JEREMY SINGER-VINE

Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.

Now there are "apps"—stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To "buy" an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today's economy: personal data.

Some of the most widely used apps on Facebook—the games, quizzes and sharing services that define the social-networking site and give it such appeal—are gathering volumes of personal information.

A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person's religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends.

Interactive: How Grabby Are Your Facebook Apps?

Yahoo and Skype say that they seek the information to customize their services for users and that they are committed to protecting privacy. "Data that is shared with Yahoo is managed carefully," a Yahoo spokeswoman said.

The Journal also tested its own app, "WSJ Social," which seeks data about users' basic profile information and email and requests the ability to post an update when a user reads an article. A Journal spokeswoman says that the company asks only for information required to make the app work.

This appetite for personal data reflects a fundamental truth about Facebook and, by extension, the Internet economy as a whole: Facebook provides a free service that users pay for, in effect, by providing details about their lives, friendships, interests and activities. Facebook, in turn, uses that trove of information to attract advertisers, app makers and other business opportunities.

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'Data is what anyone wants access to,' says the maker of an app that collects information about users and their friends.

Up until a few years ago, such vast and easily accessible repositories of personal information were all but nonexistent. Their advent is driving a profound debate over the definition of privacy in an era when most people now carry information-transmitting devices with them all the time.

Capitalizing on personal data is a lucrative enterprise. Facebook is in the midst of planning for an initial public offering of its stock in May that could value the young company at more than $100 billion on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Facebook requires apps to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy.

Among the possible transgressions of Facebook policies that the Journal identified:

•The app that sought the widest array of personal information of the 100 examined, "MyPad for iPad," has a two-paragraph privacy policy that says it is "adding Privacy settings shortly." Privacy policies that describe how they collect, use and share data are required by Facebook. The app maker couldn't be reached for comment.

•Dozens of apps allow advertisers that haven't been approved by Facebook within their apps, which enables advertisers including Google to track users of the apps, according to data collected by PrivacyChoice, which offers privacy services. Google said app-makers control which technology they use to deliver online ads.

•Such apps as the popular quiz games "Between You and Me" and "Truths About You" sought dozens of personal details—including the sexual preferences of users and their friends—that don't appear to be used by the app in the questions it poses to users about their friends. The makers of the apps, whose quizzes ask questions like "Is your friend's butt cute?" couldn't be reached for comment. Facebook requires apps to collect only the information they need to operate.

On Thursday, after Journal inquiries, "Between You and Me" began asking users for much less personal data.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesman said: "We're focused on helping people make informed decisions about the apps they choose to use. App developers agree to our policies when they register. If we find an app has violated our policies—through our automated systems, internal policy teams, or user reports—we take action."

It is no surprise, of course, that Facebook can gain deep knowledge of people's lives. It is, after all, a social network where users voluntarily share their names, closest friendships, snapshots, sexual preferences ("interested in men," "interested in women"), schools attended and countless other details, including moment-to-moment thoughts in the form of "status updates."

This kind of information is the coin of the realm in the personal-data economy. The $28 billion online advertising industry is fueled largely by data collected about users' Web behavior that allow advertisers to create customized ads.

The "app economy," which includes Facebook as well as smartphone apps, is estimated to have generated $20 billion in revenue in 2011 by selling downloads, advertising, "virtual goods" and other products, according to estimates from Rubinson Partners, a market researcher.

By virtue of its size and user base of 800-million-plus people, Facebook is at the heart of the personal data economy. Popular apps can quickly go "viral" there and gain millions of users—but can also flame out just as quickly. This explains why some apps seek to cash in by gathering as much data as possible and hoping to find ways to make money from it.

Brendan Wallace, co-founder of a Facebook app called "Identified" that provides career networking, said his company aims to build up a repository of data. He is unsure how he will use the information but said, "data is what anyone wants access to." "Identified," which isn't in the top 100 apps, obtains from each of its users birthday, city, education and work history, and also the same set of information from its users' friends.

The unconstrained collection of digital data is stirring feelings of distrust among some users. "Consumers are being pinned like insects to a pinboard, the way we're being studied," said Jill Levenson, a creative project manager at Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Atlanta. She recently deleted nearly 100 apps on Facebook and Twitter, she said, because she was uncomfortable with the way details about her life might be used.

Not only are apps obtaining data directly from people's Facebook accounts, some apps are also letting unapproved advertising companies track users, according to data collected from PrivacyChoice, a start-up that offers privacy services. This could be a violation of Facebook's advertising policies.

Facebook's policies restrict app makers from using any ad companies that haven't signed an agreement with Facebook—an agreement that prevents the advertiser from collecting personal information. However, the data from PrivacyChoice show that several dozen widely used apps are using unapproved companies, most notably Google, the biggest online ad company. That means app users can be tracked within their apps by Google and others. Google said advertisers using its DoubleClick ad services agree to terms that prohibit the collection of any personally identifiable information.

Apps are required to ask people's permission to access their Facebook data. But the way they ask plays on a fundamental human tendency—namely, that people who see frequent warnings come to disregard them. Science has a word for this: habituation. Habituation occurs when people become accustomed to simply pressing the "yes" button when faced with an alert or warning.

"If people see a warning a lot, but then nothing bad happens in the average case, it decreases the alarm level" and people won't pay attention even when they need to, said Adrienne Porter Felt, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied requests for personal data by apps on smartphones.

Studies also suggest that people have trouble understanding long lists of permissions, especially if the terms are technical. But there is a larger issue: Even if people understand the permissions they grant, they might not grasp the unexpected ways that their data may be used in the future.

A case in point came just this past week, in a scandal involving an iPhone app called "Girls Around Me." The app used publicly available information from Foursquare, a location-based social network, to enable men to locate nearbywomen on a map and view the personal data and photos from their Facebook profiles.

Foursquare is a service that allows users to "check in" from their smartphones at coffee shops, bars and other locations. It is designed as a service for people who want to alert their friends who might be in the neighborhood. "Girls Around Me" was making it easier, however, for strangers to potentially identify nearby women. The app triggered an uproar, and Foursquare revoked its access to users' locations. In an email to the Journal, the developer of "Girls Around Me" said that the app "gives the user nothing more than the Foursquare app can provide itself."

The flap suggests that the debate over making your data "public" or "private" on Facebook (or other online services) can miss the point. The real issue is how the data will be used.

Helen Nissenbaum, a New York University professor who studies privacy, said that "Girls Around Me" generated outrage because it violated social norms against stalking women. If social norms were fences, she said, "any ethical, law-abiding person won't step over the fence." In the absence of data-usage laws or norms, she said, some tech companies feel unconstrained about using information in new ways that can seem creepy.

Ms. Nissenbaum, author of the book "Privacy in Context," has called for the development of what she calls digital "fences" around data usage. She argues that rules for data use should be based on context. Information shared in a certain context—such as between a doctor and patient—should not then be shared in a way that would violate the context of the original situation.

"These rules that we think of as privacy rules are not only for the sake of the individual," Ms. Nissenbaum argues. "For instance, keeping voting confidential protects the integrity of democracy."

The White House included "respect for context" in its blueprint for a Privacy Bill of Rights that would set some guidelines for the use of personal data. The guidelines call for people to be given more information about what data are collected about them and to have some control over how it is used. Currently, the U.S. doesn't have a law providing comprehensive privacy protections.

Meantime, the app economy is on a tear. Facebook apps are generally free, but they are also big business—particularly games that sell "virtual goods." The software company Zynga, maker of popular apps including "FarmVille" and "CityVille," had revenue of $1.14 billion in 2011 (although it wasn't profitable). The company went public this past December, and its stock-market capitalization is currently more than $8 billion.

Facebook is considered to have one of the most advanced privacy models for its apps because it lists nearly every type of data sought—and provides users with the ability to reject apps' requests for some types of data. Smartphone apps often lack privacy policies and don't offer as much information and control over their use of personal data.

Today it can be difficult to remember how revolutionary apps seemed a few years ago, when Facebook unveiled them at its first-ever developers conference on May 24, 2007. At the time, MySpace had twice as many monthly users as Facebook, and it owed some of its success to the fact that MySpace users could trick out their Web pages with graphics, music and slide shows.

The companies that helped to customize MySpace profiles were the predecessors to apps—known at the time as "widget" makers. There were slide-show widgets and colorful-wallpaper widgets and the ultimate widget, YouTube, which let people put videos on their MySpace pages. But MySpace (which was owned by The Wall Street Journal's parent company, News Corp., between 2005 and 2011) had a rocky relationship with the widget makers. It didn't provide them with technical help and also didn't let the makers display ads within their widgets.

In 2007, Facebook's young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, welcomed widget makers by providing the kind of help that would ensure that their software could operate smoothly within Facebook. It also offered widget makers the opportunity to sell ads within Facebook and renamed widgets "applications," or "apps." Within two months, developers had built more than 2,000 Facebook apps. Venture capitalists began pouring money into app start-ups. In 2008, Apple opened its own app store to offer software for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It soon became clear that some apps had a cost to privacy. In July 2009, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated Facebook and discovered that it was sharing too much of users' personal data with app makers without informing users. "This is no trivial issue: There are close to a million developers out there, scattered across some 180 countries," said Elizabeth Denham, who was then Canada's assistant privacy commissioner.

At the time, Facebook informed app users only that they were required to let the third-party app developer "know who I am and access my information." It didn't specify what information was being shared.

The Canadian officials wanted Facebook to require consent for each category of data that an app sought. The officials also wanted Facebook to specifically require apps to obtain the consent of a user's friends before granting access to the friends' information. In addition, Canada called for Facebook to develop technology that would give developers access only to the user information required for an app to work properly.

Facebook agreed to make some changes, such as adding more disclosure, but didn't agree to seek permission from friends when their data were disclosed to an app. Ms. Denham wrote at the time that she relented on that point because she "was persuaded by Facebook's argument that many applications are designed to be social and interactive."

Facebook profiles are now set by default to let apps obtain all data from a user's friends except sexual preference, religion and political views. That means, for instance, even if a user has set his or her birthday, location and "online status" messages to be private to friends, their friends can approve an app that will also obtain that information.

In 2010, Facebook rolled out its new disclosure notices in apps. Users who attempted to acquire an app were met with a pop-up screen listing the types of information the app was seeking.

Amy Vernon, a freelance writer and digital consultant in Elizabeth, N.J., said that she used to use more apps on Facebook, but the permissions screens have made her more cautious. "Very often I get an invitation from a friend for a game and I'll click it and see the permissions, and decide, I'm not really that curious about this app," she said. "I almost always hit decline."

But even after the permissions screens appeared, most Facebook users still didn't understand what was happening with their data, according to a study last year by researchers at UC Berkeley. More than half the people surveyed couldn't tell which types of data a sample app could collect. And about 40% didn't understand that when an app was allowed to get personal data, it could actually transfer that data out of Facebook and store it elsewhere.

Still, some app developers say they are seeking less personal data than they could. Rick Marini, chief executive of the professional-networking app "BranchOut," said that more than 20 million people have signed up for the app. What users may not realize is that professional information about all of their friends is also now a part of the app's database. That lets "BranchOut" tout that it has more than 400 million profiles.

Mr. Marini said that his company seeks minimal data about users and their friends. "If we start asking for information like pictures and videos, we're going to hurt our business long term because users won't trust us," he said.

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com