'Argo' producer scours for the next stranger-than-fiction story

Hunched over a desk in his spartan Westwood apartment, David Klawans squints at his computer monitor and knits his brow in concentration. "I'm perusing," he says.

His eyes dart between headlines almost indecipherable on a Web page displaying about 800 stamp-sized images of newspapers from 90 different countries.

"Two kids running? What's that?" he exclaims before clicking on a photo. "Oh, it's refugees. Whatever. Moving on."

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Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.

His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and two Golden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.

"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."

Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."

Indefatigable in his quest to root out oddball, overlooked true-life stories, Klawans spins material most others ignore into cinematic gold.

OSCAR WATCH: "ARGO"

"Argo" took nearly 14 years to reach the big screen after Klawans read about CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez's rescue of six American diplomats hiding in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez (portrayed in the movie by "Argo's" director, Ben Affleck) posed the group as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, created a fictitious production company and planted articles about the bogus project in Hollywood trade papers.

Throughout the '90s Klawans was scraping by as a production assistant for an L.A.-based Japanese TV commercial firm. He didn't own a car, so he bicycled to UCLA's magazine archive to check the story. In microfiche files, he came across the CIA's planted articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety from January 1980. "My jaw dropped," he says.

Problem was, Mendez already had representation at Creative Artists Agency and was preparing to publish a memoir, "The Master of Disguise." Even so, Klawans persuaded Mendez to let him attempt to set up a movie project. He eventually bought the rights to Mendez's life story as well.

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"I'm cycling to pitch meetings wearing a backpack with a change of clothes. It's summertime and I'm sweating. And I'm getting to know studio security. They call me 'bike boy,'" remembers Klawans, who would switch from bike to business attire outside the studio gates. "I would basically throw my backpack behind a bush — I was embarrassed to look like a messenger guy."

The New York University film school graduate was born in Chicago. His family moved to Belgium when he was 2 and he grew up in Europe and the U.S. consuming a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy films including "Star Wars."

He came close to setting up the "Argo" project as a cable TV movie. But when that deal fell through, Klawans says, "it hit me that Tony had planted stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter as a cover. For the CIA, it's all about illusions and perception. I thought, 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to plant an "Argo" story in a magazine.'"

The producer had met former L.A. Weekly staff writer and "This American Life" contributor Joshuah Bearman through friends who thought the two shared an appreciation for offbeat material. Bearman also had experience turning a magazine story into a movie; an article he reported for Harper's became the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," about two die-hard video game players vying for the world's highest score in the vintage arcade game "Donkey Kong."

Klawans handed over his research and contacts to Bearman and proposed that the journalist write "Argo" as a magazine article that would entice movie backers.

Bearman landed an assignment from Wired magazine, then interviewed everyone he could: Mendez, officials in the State Department with knowledge of the exfiltration and Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who housed some of the fugitive American diplomats, as well as the six embassy "houseguests."

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The Power of Paying: What Consumer Hotshots Can Learn From Corporate Drudges

Sometimes these days interoperability seems like a lost cause in the technology world. Twitter has been making life hard for startups that make Twitter clients; Facebook has been making life equally hard for Twitter; and Google is preventing anyone else from adding content to its own social network, Google+.

But even as the aforementioned advertising-driven companies have made life hard for developers, enterprise companies have proven that software interfaces for web interoperability can be reliable and robust – powerful enough, even, to build a company on.

Leading the charge has been Amazon, whose web services and software interfaces, or APIs, have emerged as key startup building blocks. Amazon’s S3 storage service and EC2 virtual server service have been like the polar opposite of the Twitter API: Steady where Twitter has been unpredictable, scalable where Twitter has imposed tight limits, and open ended where Twitter has been closed.

But the biggest and most obvious difference between the constrictive Twitter API and the empowering Amazon API is this: The former is free, while the latter costs money. In other words, paying Amazon up front can actually reduce costs long term compared to a free API like Twitter’s, since there’s less volatility and risk in the API itself. (A fair number of startups who bet big on the Twitter API are now cursing the decision, as Wired has documented previously.)

Amazon is hardly the only example of how it pays to bet on software interfaces with a solid revenue stream behind them. Salesforce.com, for example does brisk business with its paid platform cloud Heroku and with its App Exchange, which sells software that runs on its paid core customer relationship management offering. Even Apple’s iOS app store, while essentially free for developers, illustrates how much money can be made writing for a platform that serves paying customers.

“In the consumer world, API’s are usually driven by companies who also have their own direct-to-consumer offering, and thus there is inherent potential conflict in them leveraging their data and user base versus enabling others,” says Matt Murphy, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has overseen the venture capital firm’s mobile-focused iFund.

Outside of the consumer world, the case for providing a robust API is more clear-cut. Murphy cited as on example of this Twilio, which offers a paid API to connect applications to phone services like text messages, recorded information lines, and conference calls.

Companies like Twilio that make lots of revenue offering software interfaces have an incentive to maintain and improve those interfaces and to keep those interfaces open and running smoothly. That means building on such interfaces is safer, as a rule.

“You need to be mindful of the competitive dynamics,” says Paul Buchheit, a former Google engineer whose startup FriendFeed built on APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others. “The simplest question to ask is if the platform is the product, or if it exists mainly to support another product. The Amazon Web Services platform is the product, and so it’s unlikely that Amazon would do anything to harm the platform. However, in the case of Twitter, the platform is just a feature, and so they will do whatever they believe is best for the core Twitter product, even if that means killing the platform.”

“iOS is kind of in the in-between space of platform as product and platform as feature, and the obviously exercise much more control than Amazon does. I’d be very wary of building an iOS app that somehow competes with Apple, for example.”

Of course, paying customers don’t guarantee a software interface is reliable, just nor does a lack thereof mean a software interface is flaky. Google’s App Engine, for example, offers a paid API that has been criticized as unreliable and constrictive.

GitHub, meanwhile, has built an innovative business around the native API of the free, open-source software revision tracker git.

As a general guideline, however, you can safely assume that if you’re not paying money for an API now, there’s a good chance you’ll be paying, somehow, for your usage later.

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“Zero Dark Thirty” hits the U.K.: did critics zero in on torture scenes?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Zero Dark Thirty” landed this week in the United Kingdom, where the Kathryn Bigelow drama continued to stir debate over its depiction of the use of torture in the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

As they have in the U.S., some critics accused the filmmakers of implying that enhanced interrogation techniques could be a useful form of intelligence gathering, while others believed that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were more ambiguous in their portrayal of torture’s efficacy.

Most reviewers were floored by the propulsive storyline, the performance of star Jessica Chastain and the gripping dramatization of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

In the Evening Standard, David Sexton argues that the film is ambivalent about waterboarding and other brutal methods, noting that a key piece of information is only discovered after interrogators ply a detainee with food and kindness.

“This has proved offensive to those who, to avoid having to accept there may be negative consequences from taking the moral high ground, prefer to believe that torture must always be ineffective as well as wrong,” Sexton writes. “Some of these critics – most notably nitwit Naomi Wolf, who has tastefully compared Bigelow to Leni Riefensthal and dubbed her ‘torture’s handmaiden’ – have claimed the film’s disturbing representation of torture amounts to a blithe commendation of the practice, not really a possible interpretation for those who have actually seen the movie.”

In a four-star review, Sexton went on to hail “Zero Dark Thirty” as “terrifically good” and said the depiction of the raid was a “masterclass in action filmmaking.”

In The Independent, Anthony Quinn praised the film for avoiding simplistic conclusions about America’s controversial interrogation methods.

“The waterboarding, the beatings, the dog collars, all the stuff you’ve heard about is here, and perhaps some you haven’t – the spectacle of a man being forced inside a small wooden box is as harrowing as any,” Quinn writes. “Is this an abhorrent crime? Would the information be impossible to gain by other means? The film isn’t saying either way; it is asking us to make up our own minds.”

Quinn also argued that the film is more effective because it was directed by a woman and that because of her gender, Bigelow has a less “gung-ho” relationship to violence than a Ridley Scott or Michael Mann might bring to the same material (he may not have seen “Point Break”)

Robbie Collins maintains in his review of the film in the Telegraph that Bigelow and Boal leave it to audiences to decide whether torture is right or wrong.

“These scenes are every bit as hellish to watch as they should be, and Bigelow’s genius is to make them feel at once gratuitous and necessary,” Collins writes.

He also praised the film for eschewing jingoism and for having the courage to end on a deflated note.

“Where, then, does Zero Dark Thirty leave us?” Collins asks.

“In the same place it leaves Maya: with our thirst for justice quenched, but our sense of rightness shaken. “Where do you want to go?” a pilot asks her, and she starts shedding tear after tear. This, finally, is what victory looks like, and its likeness to defeat is terrifying.”

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was more unsettled by the film’s relationship with torture and seemed to wish it had taken a firmer position.

“There is nothing in Zero Dark Thirty comparable to Gavin Hood’s soul-searching 2007 movie, Rendition, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s CIA agent denounces waterboarding information as valueless; he quotes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and says torture victims ‘speak upon the rack,/ Where men enforced do speak anything,’” Bradshaw writes. “I can well believe that, but for me the most sinister depiction of torture is non-depiction. Many Hollywood movies about the war on terror have managed to ignore the subject, implying non-existence. Despite its fence-sitting, I prefer Bigelow’s account.”

Bradshaw was also less enamored of the film on an artistic level, writing that “It is well made, with a relentless, dour drumbeat of tension and a great final sequence, but nowhere near as good as the first season of Homeland.”

Empire Magazine’s Kim Newman mostly skirted the political debate surrounding “Zero Dark Thirty,” but was ecstatic about Bigelow’s directing, the film’s pacing and star turns.

“Like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s a relatively new kind of American patriotic war movie, counterprogramming jaded paranoid fantasies like the Bourne movies or the liberal horror stories (Redacted, Rendition, In The Valley Of Elah, Green Zone etc.) thrown up by the War On Terror,” Newman writes. “It’s measured, seething with suppressed emotion, unafraid of slow stretches and false trails, snapping shut like a mantrap when blood is shed. If it grips in a more intellectual, journalistic manner than its Oscar-winning predecessor, it’s because Chastain’s character is necessarily absent during the climax – though she has a terrific post-traumatic outburst when the case is closed.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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U.S. Durable Goods Orders Exceed Estimates

WASHINGTON — Orders for durable goods jumped 4.6 percent in December, while a gauge of future business spending also rose, a sign that corporate worries over tighter fiscal policy at the end of 2012 may not have held back investment plans as much as feared.

The Commerce Department said on Monday that overall durable goods orders jumped 4.6 percent, more than expected.

In addition, nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, a closely watched proxy for investment plans, edged higher 0.2 percent. The government also revised higher its estimate for November.

Analyst estimates for goods orders averaged around 2 percent.

Separately, the National Association of Realtors said contracts to buy previously owned homes in the United States unexpectedly fell in December after three months of gains.

The trade group said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed last month, dropped 4.3 percent to 101.7.

The drop in contracts, which the Realtors group blamed on the tightening stock of homes, suggested resales could fall again in January after slipping in December.

“The supply limitation appears to be the main factor holding back contract signings in the past month,” said Lawrence Yun, the group’s chief exonomist. “Supplies of homes costing less than $100,000 are tight in much of the country, so first-time buyers have fewer options.”

The NAR expects sales of previously owned homes to increase 9 percent this year after a similar gain in 2012.

Home resale contracts were down in three of the country’s four regions last month. They increased in the Midwest.

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Death toll in Brazil nightclub fire hits 245

BRASILIA, Brazil—

A fire swept through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing at least 245 people and leaving at least 200 injured, police and firefighters said.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida told local news media that the 245 bodies were brought for identification to a gymnasium in the city of Santa Maria.

That toll would make it one of the deadliest nightclub fires more than a decade.

The cause of the fire is not yet known, officials said. Officials earlier put the death toll at 180.

Civil Police and regional government spokesman Marcelo Arigoni told Radio Gaucha earlier that the total number of victims is still unclear and there may be hundreds injured,

The newspaper Diario de Santa Maria reported that the fire started at around 2 a.m. at the Kiss nightclub in the city at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

Rodrigo Moura, whom the paper identified as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and partygoers were pushing and shoving to escape.

Ezekiel Corte Real, 23, was quoted by the paper as saying that he helped people to escape. “I just got out because I'm very strong,” he said.

“Sad Sunday”, tweeted Tarso Genro, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. He said all possible action was being taken and that he would be in the city later in the day.

Santa Maria is a major university city with a population of around a quarter of a million.

A welding accident reportedly set off a Dec. 25, 2000, fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.

At least 194 people died at an overcrowded working-class nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004.

A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, broke out on Dec. 5, 2009, when an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches, killing 152

A nightclub fire in the U.S. state of Rhode Island in 2003 killed 100 people after pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the 1980s rock band Great White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling.

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Lace 'Em Up: 4 Running Shoes Reviewed

Hitting the streets to get fit by spring? We review four new specialty sneakers for runners.

Adidas' Adizero Feather 2.0 runners are so light (barely 7 ounces) and so responsive, running in them feels more like bouncing on fluffy clouds than pounding on pavement. OK, I'm exaggerating, but I was really blown away by the light weight when I took them out on long-distance runs. So effective was the feather-weight design on a 5-mile outing, I could actually notice the reduced effort in my legs.

The shoe is topped with a barely-there breathable mesh that runs from the toes all the way back to the heel. Ventilation is therefore excellent, with a constant flow of cool air delivered directly to your piggies. And, unlike most shoes that make use of fancy, lightweight materials, they're actually quite sturdy.

These sneaks are compatible with Adidas' miCoach data reporting system and its companion apps. So if you already have a miCoach Speed_Cell sensor, just lift up the shoe's insert and pop it in (You can also attach the sensor to your laces). The sensor can be synced with your iPhone to track your speed, acceleration, distance, and pace during runs.

The only problem is that the miCoach system needs some work, including the inconsistent syncing and the iPhone app's interface. If you're used to the Nike+ app, you'll be struggling to work your way through using Adidas' lesser creation. That said, it's an add-on to the shoe and not a primary feature, so miCoach's shortcomings don't detract from the sneaker's quality.

WIRED Obscenely light at only 7 ounces. Flexible mesh upper keeps your tootsies cool and dry. Durable, despite the lightweight design. miCoach-compatible for tracking your runs. Great styling. Affordable at $115. Men's and women's versions.

TIRED If you're not into light shoes, these aren't for you. The miCoach system needs a lot of work -- it's adequate, but could be so much better.

Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Rating: 8 out of 10

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‘Argo’ wins Producers Guild Awards

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Argo” continues to shake up the Oscar race by taking the top honor at the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday.

Ben Affleck, coming off winning Golden Globe Awards for best motion picture drama and director for the real-life drama, received the award handed out at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’m still working as an actor,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Affleck also stars in “Argo” as the CIA operative who orchestrated a daring rescue of six American embassy employees during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. George Clooney and Grant Heslov share the producer award with Affleck as “Argo” beat out the Civil War saga “Lincoln,” which has a leading 12 Academy Awards nominations.

Other nominees in the PGA movie category were “Les Miserables,” ”Zero Dark Thirty,” ”Beasts of the Southern Wild,” ”Django Unchained,” ”Life of Pi,” ”Moonrise Kingdom,” ”Silver Linings Playbook,” and Skyfall.”

Along with honors from other Hollywood professional groups such as actors, directors and writers guilds, the producer prizes have become part of the preseason sorting out contenders for Academy Awards.

The big winner often goes on to claim the best-picture honor at the Oscars on Feb. 24.

Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” won the guild’s animation category, beating “Brave,” ”Frankenweenie,” ”ParaNorman” and “Rise of the Guardians.”

“Searching for Sugar Man” took the documentary prize, beating “A People Uncounted,” ”The Gatekeepers,” ”The Island President,” and “The Other Dream Team.”

Showtime’s “Homeland” won the producer’s award for television drama series, which beat out “Breaking Bad,” ”Downton Abbey,” ”Game of Thrones,” and “Mad Men.”

The ABC sitcom “Modern Family” took the prize for best comedy series for the third straight year, beating “30 Rock,” ”The Big Bang Theory,” ”Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and “Louie.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

J. Richard Hackman, an Expert in Team Dynamics, Dies at 72

J. Richard Hackman, a Harvard psychology professor whose fieldwork sometimes took him to the cockpit of an airliner to observe the crew in a nearly five-decade quest to determine the dynamics of teamwork and effective leadership, died on Jan. 8 in Boston. He was 72.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Judith Dozier Hackman, said.

Dr. Hackman, the author or co-author of 10 books on group dynamics, was the Edgar Pierce professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard.

In one of his best-known books, “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances” (2002), he replaced the popular image of the powerful “I can do it all” team leader with that of someone who, as he wrote, had the subtle skills “to get a team established on a good trajectory, and then to make small adjustments along the way to help members succeed.”

The conditions for a successful team effort — among them “a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context and expert team coaching” — “are easy to remember,” Dr. Hackman wrote.

“The challenge,” he continued, “comes in developing an understanding of those conditions that is deep and nuanced enough to be useful in guiding action, and in devising strategies for creating them even in demanding or team-unfriendly organizational circumstances.”

Besides tracking the interplay of pilots, co-pilots and navigators aboard civilian and military planes, Dr. Hackman observed corporate boards, sports teams, orchestra players, telephone-line repair crews, hospital workers and restaurant kitchen staff members.

And in recent years, for his 2011 book, “Collaborative Intelligence,” he was allowed to observe interactions within the American intelligence, defense, law-enforcement and crisis-management communities.

“Although my main aspiration has been to provide guidance that will be useful to team leaders and members,” he wrote, “there are no ‘one-minute’ prescriptions here — creating, leading and serving on teams is not that simple.”

Anita Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said, “The key thing about Dr. Hackman’s work is that it stands in contrast to some of the more popular models of leadership that focused very much on style or how leaders behave, versus what they do.”

Rather than viewing pay as a prime motivator for good performance, she continued, “he focused on features of people’s jobs that made them more intrinsically satisfied: the freedom to determine how they conduct their work, having a variety of tasks, having knowledge of the ultimate outcomes of their work, knowing how their work affects or is received by other people.”

He also liked to overturn some of the received wisdom about teamwork. In a 2011 article for The Harvard Business Review, Dr. Hackman listed “Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork.” Among them was this:

“Misperception No. 2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

“Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.”

John Richard Hackman was born in Joliet, Ill., on June 14, 1940, the only child of J. Edward and Helen Hackman. His father was an oil pipeline engineer, his mother a schoolteacher.

Dr. Hackman received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., in 1962, and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1966. He soon joined the psychology and administrative sciences department faculties at Yale, where he taught until 1986, when he moved to the psychology and business departments at Harvard.

Besides his wife, who is an associate dean at Yale, he is survived by two daughters, Julia Beth Proffitt and Laura Dianne Codeanne, and four grandchildren.

After Dr. Hackman died, The Harvard Crimson wrote that for years he had “devoted countless hours to improving one team in particular — the Harvard women’s basketball squad, for which he volunteered as an honorary coach.”

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