Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Alone. A black guy. He’s got a gun; otherwise he wouldn’t be there. And he’s little, to boot. Where’s he getting the balls to stand out there in the middle of the night? He’s got a gun. That’s the story you tell yourself.” They back the car up. Carroll said later he was “amazed” that Diallo was still standing there. Don’t bad guys run at the sight of a car full of police officers? Carroll and McMellon get out of the car. McMellon calls out, “Police. Can we have a word?” Diallo pauses. He is terrified, of course, and his terror is written all over his face. Two towering white men, utterly out of place in that neighborhood and at that time of night, have confronted him. But the mind-reading moment is lost because Diallo turns and runs backs into the building. Now it’s a pursuit, and Carroll and McMellon are not experienced officers like the officer who watched the pearl-handled revolver rise toward him. They are raw. They are new to the Bronx and new to the Street Crime Unit and new to the unimaginable stresses of chasing what they think is an armed man down a darkened hallway. Their heart rates soar. Their attention narrows. Wheeler Avenue is an old part of the Bronx. The sidewalk is flush with the curb, and Diallo’s apartment building is flush with the sidewalk, separated by just a four-step stoop. There is no white space here. When they step out of the squad car and stand on the street, McMellon and Carroll are no more than ten or fifteen feet from Diallo. Now Diallo runs. It’s a chase! Carroll and McMellon were just a little aroused before. What is their heart rate now? 175? 200? Diallo is now inside the vestibule, up against the inner door of his building. He twists his body sideways and digs at something in his pocket. Carroll and McMellon have neither cover nor concealment: there is no car door pillar to shield them, to allow them to slow the moment down. They are in the line of fire, and what Carroll sees is Diallo’s hand and the tip of something black. As it happens, it is a wallet. But Diallo is black, and it’s late, and it’s the South Bronx, and time is being measured now in milliseconds, and under those circumstances we know that wallets invariably look like guns. Diallo’s face might tell him something different, but Carroll isn’t looking at Diallo’s face—and even if he were, it isn’t clear that he would understand what he saw there. He’s not mind-reading now. He’s effectively autistic. He’s locked in on whatever it is coming out of Diallo’s pocket, just as Peter was locked in on the light switch in George and Martha’s kissing scene. Carroll yells out, “He’s got a gun!” And he starts firing. McMellon falls backward and starts firing—and a man falling backward in combination with the report of a gun seems like it can mean only one thing. He’s been shot. So Carroll keeps firing, and McMellon sees Carroll firing, so he keeps firing, and Boss and Murphy see Carroll and McMellon firing, so they jump out of the car and start firing, too. The papers the next day will make much of the fact that forty-one bullets were fired, but the truth is that four people with semiautomatic pistols can fire forty-one bullets in about two and a half seconds. The entire incident, in fact, from start to finish, was probably over in less time than it has taken you to read this paragraph. But packed inside those few seconds were enough steps and decisions to fill a lifetime. Carroll and McMellon call out to Diallo. One thousand and one. He turns back into the house. One thousand and two. They run after him, across the sidewalk and up the steps. One thousand and three. Diallo is in the hallway, tugging at something in his pocket. One thousand and four. Carroll yells out, “He’s got a gun!” The shooting starts. One thousand and five. One thousand and six. Bang! Bang! Bang! One thousand and seven. Silence. Boss runs up to Diallo, looks down at the floor, and yells out, “Where’s the fucking gun?” and then runs up the street toward Westchester Avenue, because he has lost track in the shouting and the shooting of where he is. Carroll sits down on the steps next to Diallo’s bullet-ridden body and starts to cry.

Conclusion. Listening with Your Eyes: The Lessons of Blink

At the beginning of her career as a professional musician, Abbie Conant was in Italy, playing trombone for the Royal Opera of Turin. This was in 1980. That summer, she applied for eleven openings for various orchestra jobs throughout Europe. She got one response: The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. “Dear Herr Abbie Conant,” the letter began. In retrospect, that mistake should have tripped every alarm bell in Conant’s mind.

The audition was held in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, since the orchestra’s cultural center was still under construction. There were thirty-three candidates, and each played behind a screen, making them invisible to the selection committee. Screened auditions were rare in Europe at that time. But one of the applicants was the son of someone in one of the Munich orchestras, so, for the sake of fairness, the Philharmonic decided to make the first round of auditions blind. Conant was number sixteen. She played Ferdinand David’s Konzertino for Trombone, which is the warhorse audition piece in Germany, and missed one note (she cracked a G). She said to herself, “That’s it,” and went backstage and started packing up her belongings to go home. But the committee thought otherwise. They were floored. Auditions are classic thin-slicing moments. Trained classical musicians say that they can tell whether a player is good or not almost instantly—sometimes in just the first few bars, sometimes even with just the first note—and with Conant they knew. After she left the audition room, the Philharmonic’s music director, Sergiu Celibidache, cried out, “That’s who we want!” The remaining seventeen players, waiting their turn to audition, were sent home. Somebody went backstage to find Conant. She came back into the audition room, and when she stepped out from behind the screen, she heard the Bavarian equivalent of whoa. “Was ist’n des? Sacra di! Meine Goetter! Um Gottes willen!” They were expecting Herr Conant. This was Frau Conant.

It was an awkward situation, to say the least. Celibidache was a conductor from the old school, an imperious and strong-willed man with very definite ideas about how music ought to be played—and about who ought to play music. What’s more, this was Germany, the land where classical music was born. Once, just after the Second World War, the Vienna Philharmonic experimented with an audition screen and ended up with what the orchestra’s former chairman, Otto Strasser, described in his memoir as a “grotesque situation”: “An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury.” To Strasser, someone who was Japanese simply could not play with any soul or fidelity music that was composed by a European. To Celibidache, likewise, a woman could not play the trombone. The Munich Philharmonic had one or two women on the violin and the oboe. But those were “feminine” instruments. The trombone is masculine. It is the instrument that men played in military marching bands. Composers of operas used it to symbolize the underworld. In the Fifth and Ninth symphonies, Beethoven used the trombone as a noisemaker. “Even now if you talk to your typical professional trombonist,” Conant says, “they will ask, ‘What kind of equipment do you play?’ Can you imagine a violinist saying, ‘I play a Black and Decker’?”

There were two more rounds of auditions. Conant passed both with flying colors. But once Celibidache and the rest of the committee saw her in the flesh, all those long-held prejudices began to compete with the winning first impression they had of her performance. She joined the orchestra, and Celibidache stewed. A year passed. In May of 1981, Conant was called to a meeting. She was to be demoted to second trombone, she was told. No reason was given. Conant went on probation for a year, to prove herself again. It made no difference. “You know the problem,” Celibidache told her. “We need a man for the solo trombone.”

Conant had no choice but to take the case to court. In its brief, the orchestra argued, “The plaintiff does not possess the necessary physical strength to be a leader of the trombone section.” Conant was sent to the Gautinger Lung Clinic for extensive testing. She blew through special machines, had a blood sample taken to measure her capacity for absorbing oxygen, and underwent a chest exam. She scored well above average. The nurse even asked if she was an athlete. The case dragged on. The orchestra claimed that Conant’s “shortness of breath was overhearable” in her performance of the famous trombone solo in Mozart’s Requiem, even though the guest conductor of those performances had singled out Conant for praise. A special audition in front of a trombone expert was set up. Conant played seven of the most difficult passages in the trombone repertoire. The expert was effusive. The orchestra claimed that she was unreliable and unprofessional. It was a lie. After eight years, she was reinstated as first trombone.

But then another round of battles began—that would last another five years—because the orchestra refused to pay her on par with her male colleagues. She won, again. She prevailed on every charge, and she prevailed because she could mount an argument that the Munich Philharmonic could not rebut. Sergiu Celibidache, the man complaining about her ability, had listened to her play Ferdinand David’s Konzertino for Trombone under conditions of perfect objectivity, and in that unbiased moment, he had said, “That’s who we want!” and sent the remaining trombonists packing. Abbie Conant was saved by the screen.

1. A Revolution in Classical Music