By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: June 13, 2011

We found them in a corner of our garage: a half-dozen baby opossums, peeping like birds, squirming over one another and scratching the wall. They were cute and ghastly in an “Addams Family” sort of way, their long snouts tapered like wine stoppers, their black eyes bulging up from their pale fur like peppercorns from a bed of rice, and their tiny teeth as sharp and plentiful as a piranha’s.

Alerted by the cries, the mother opossum quickly nosed in from the side. As she struggled to calm her babies, to mop up the bright chaos we’d inadvertently thrown her way, we quietly retreated and closed the garage door.

A few weeks later, we were saddened to see, in the middle of our driveway, the corpse of the mother opossum. There were no signs of injury or disease. As it turned out, the opossum had simply followed her species’ ruthless recipe for success in an overwhelmingly placental world: grow up fast, give birth to one or two large broods, and then, at a time of life when most comparably sized mammals have just reached their prime, stop playing possum — and die of old age.

The Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana, is one of the more familiar and widespread mammals in the United States, found coast to coast, up into Canada and down into Costa Rica, in fields and sheds, city parks and the alleys of Brooklyn, and all too often as roadkill on the sides of highways. The opossum is generally lumped together in the public mind with raccoons, squirrels, skunks and other workaday wildlife of more or less housecat dimensions, but scientists emphasize that Didelphis is a fundamentally different breed of animal, as singular in its evolutionary history as it is solitary in its habits.

For one thing, it’s our own private Australia, the United States’ sole living example of a marsupial mammal — a mammal that gestates its young in a pouch, or marsupium, rather than in a uterus, as we placental mammals do. For another, new evidence suggests that the opossum is more deeply marsupial than such poster pouch-bearers as koalas, wallabies and kangaroos.

Analyzing fossils recently unearthed in Wyoming and elsewhere, scientists have proposed that the earliest marsupials, which date to the age of the dinosaurs, may well have resembled opossums, and that other marsupial species are all derived from the basic opossum format. If nothing else, scientists said, the new fossils show that opossums have changed remarkably little since their forebears nested in a T. rex garage.

“Every time I see an opossum I get moved,” said Inés Horovitz, of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They’ve managed to survive all this time looking the same as their ancestors did 60 million years ago or more.” Dr. Horovitz is an author on a report about the fossil findings that appeared in the journal PloS One.

By tracing the evolution of marsupials, researchers also hope to glean new insights into the history of placental mammals and to understand how they have come to dominate the planet, accounting for about 90 percent of all warmblooded, hairy-hided, lactating animals alive today.

Still other scientists are intrigued by the opossum’s casually relentless adaptability, the way a basically tropical mammal has managed to steadily expand its range into wintry New England, the Midwest and beyond. “Sixty or seventy years ago, there weren’t any around here,” said Todd K. Fuller of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. But in a recent four-year study of opossum demographics around Amherst, Dr. Fuller’s graduate student, Leann Kanda, found an impressive marsupial density, 25 to 50 adults per square mile.

One key to the opossum’s success is that it’s low-key — a nocturnal forager that shies away from other animals, is nonterritorial and avoids fights. If cornered, an opossum may resort to its legendary talent for playing possum, an autonomic response, like fainting, in which the animal falls to its side with its mouth adrool, excretes droppings and a foul odor, and remains in a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours, until finally it revives beginning with a twitch of the ears.

Opossums are also willing to move over surprisingly long distances. James C. Beasley and William Beatty of Purdue University in Indiana have ear-tagged or radio-collared about 100 opossums, and compared their activity and migration patterns with those of their fellow nocturnalists, raccoons.

“Raccoons maintain very small home ranges,” Dr. Beasley said, and they like to stay put. By contrast, some opossums the researchers captured would turn up two weeks later at a spot 15 miles away.

And while migrating mammals are often males in search of a mate, many of the far-ranging gypsy opossums proved to be females with young in their pouches. “They could be looking for more suitable dens,” Dr. Beasley said.

Or a better snack selection. Opossums are opportunistic omnivores, equipped with 50 teeth — a record among North American mammals. They’ll eat fruits, insects, nuts, pet food, small rodents, Big Macs. “They’re vacuum eaters,” said Alfred Gardner, an opossum expert at the Smithsonian Institution. “They’ll take in anything with nutritional value.”

If a leaf has an egg mass on it, or a paper is streaked with grease, leaf and paper get scarfed down. Because they are not as dexterous as raccoons at digging and foraging, opossums are not considered the sort of “subsidized predators” that clean out the nests of endangered songbirds and turtles. They can, however, catch and eat snakes, and they are among the few animals to be resistant to the venom of rattlesnakes and other pit vipers. No matter what they eat, opossums are poor at storing body fat, and as the Fuller team discovered, they survive harsh winters only by taking advantage of the happenstance scraps and warm shelter that humans supply.

The most outstanding feature of a marsupial is its approach to childbearing. Embryonic opossums spend about 12 days in the mother’s ill-equipped uterus before emerging as so-called joeys, which are roughly the size of rice grains. Those joeys must then crawl their way into the mother’s pouch and latch onto a nipple, where they remain attached and nursing for the next couple of months.

After leaving the pouch they remain with the mother for another few weeks, and then they’re on their own. Most marsupials have large litters, which helps offset the brevity of their lives. Whereas raccoons can survive well into their teens, even in coddled captivity opossums are dead by age 4.

In the past, researchers thought marsupials were the primitive predecessors to placental mammals, but they have since learned that both mammalian groups arose about the same time, 125 million years or so ago, and then evolved along independent tracks.

The placental plan appears to have the upper hand, however. “Wherever there has been contact, placentals have replaced the marsupials,” Dr. Gardner said. Only in Australia and surrounding islands and parts of South America, where marsupials have been relatively isolated for long periods, have they managed to thrive.

Perhaps the placentals’ advantage lies with their relatively larger brains, Dr. Gardner said. Dr. Horovitz suggested that because embryonic marsupials need well-developed forelimbs to crawl their way to a lactational lifeline, they lose the potential for the diversity of limb and body shape seen in placentals.

Yet we have our opossum, a living piece of the Cretaceous. If you’re lucky enough to see one, say hello — and goodbye.

Zuma, 1977

Through June 18, 2011

Wallspace

Installation View
2011
Patinated Bronze

June 15 through June 19, 2011
Modern Art at Art 42 Basel

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: June 11, 2011

The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.

Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.

Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.

Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system — I say this as an Oregon farmboy who once raised sheep, cattle and hogs — is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.

The Food and Drug Administration reported recently that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock, not humans. And 90 percent of the livestock antibiotics are administered in their food or water, typically to healthy animals to keep them from getting sick when they are confined in squalid and crowded conditions.

The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.

This cavalier use of low-level antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The upshot is that ailments can become pretty much untreatable.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, a professional organization of doctors, cites the case of Josh Nahum, a 27-year-old skydiving instructor in Colorado. He developed a fever from bacteria that would not respond to medication. The infection spread and caused tremendous pressure in his skull.

Some of his brain was pushed into his spinal column, paralyzing him. He became a quadriplegic depending on a ventilator to breathe. Then, a couple of weeks later, he died.

There’s no reason to link Nahum’s case specifically to agricultural overuse, for antibiotic resistance has multiple causes that are difficult to unravel. Doctors overprescribe them. Patients misuse them. But looking at numbers, by far the biggest element of overuse is agriculture.

We would never think of trying to keep our children healthy by adding antibiotics to school water fountains, because we know this would breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It’s unconscionable that Big Ag does something similar for livestock.

Louise Slaughter, the only microbiologist in the United States House of Representatives, has been fighting a lonely battle to curb this practice — but industrial agricultural interests have always blocked her legislation.

“These statistics tell the tale of an industry that is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” Slaughter said. “As they feed antibiotics to animals to keep them healthy, they are making our families sicker by spreading these deadly strains of bacteria.”

Vegetarians may think that they’re immune, but they’re not. E. coli originates in animals but can spill into water used to irrigate vegetables, contaminating them. The European E. coli outbreak apparently arose from bean sprouts grown on an organic farm in Germany.

One of the most common antibiotic-resistant pathogens is MRSA, which now kills more Americans annually than AIDS and adds hugely to America’s medical costs. MRSA has many variants, and one of the more benign forms now is widespread in hog barns and among people who deal with hogs. An article this year in a journal called Applied and Environmental Microbiology reported that MRSA was found in 70 percent of hogs on one farm.

Another scholarly journal reported that MRSA was found in 45 percent of employees working at hog farms. And the Centers for Disease Control reported this April that this strain of bacteria has now been found in a worker at a day care center in Iowa.

Other countries are moving to ban the feeding of antibiotics to livestock. But in the United States, the agribusiness lobby still has a hold on Congress.

The European outbreak should shake people up. “It points to the whole broken system,” notes Robert Martin of the Pew Environment Group.

We need more comprehensive inspections in the food system, more testing for additional strains of E. coli, and more public education (always wash your hands after touching raw meat, and don’t use the same cutting board for meat and vegetables). A great place to start reforms would be by banning the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.

At the Venice Biennalle

via

Andreas Praefcke

To trace the great arcs of civilization, historians tap the humble list

By Gal Beckerman
Boston Globe Published: June 5, 2011

On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.

Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.

At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.

What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.

A household list might seem a fairly modest starting point upon which to build a whole theory of economic development. But in fact these types of lists are becoming increasingly important to historians — documents produced not as a message to posterity, like a memoir or diplomatic record, but as a simple snapshot of everyday life. Taken as a group, lists offer a rare window into the building blocks of society, economy, and culture — one that is becoming only more valuable as historians gain the processing power to make sense of them.

“Something as innocuous as a list turns out to be incredibly fruitful if you bring both a sense of historical questions and context,” said Kris Inwood, a Canadian historian who has been examining the many lists contained in the medical records of soldiers who served the British Empire. “You also need, of course, a methodology to know what to do when you get all these lists. But if you bring all these tools to it, you will find real meaning in them.”

We all make lists all the time, of course: The simple act of itemizing things on a piece of paper is nearly universal, if only because we all sometimes need help remembering what to get done around the house. Even if we don’t realize it, these personal lists are also discrete sets of information — traces of data, however ephemeral, about our lives.

For historians, this is exactly why they matter. Throughout history, officials have kept track of property in order to levy taxes. Similar inventories have been carried out locally, as in Germany, to keep track of inheritance. There are also lists, both private and official, of debts owed. And the official censuses of countries or parish registries or military “muster rolls” often contain information beyond just names and ages.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, before powerful computers arrived to help with the task of storing and organizing large databases of information, historians, particularly of economic development, have sought to combine their qualitative approach with a quantitative one. New academic centers and groups emerged with this new focus — in Britain, the Centre for Quantitative Economic History; in France, the Annales School; and in the United States, a group called the New Economic Historians, or Cliomatricians. Computers have now allowed historians to use lists even more systematically in order to get at broad trends over time.

All of these lists become the raw material for researchers to test out big historical theories, such as, in Ogilvie’s case, the idea of an “Industrious Revolution.” She wanted to see if the increased consumerism that began in the rich northern European countries like England and the Netherlands in the 17th century, and helped fuel the coming industrial explosion, was an anomaly. Could the same patterns be observed in countries like Germany that lagged economically about a hundred years behind? The lists, with their micro-data, allowed her to confirm that this stage of development was more universal.

“We’ve gotten up to the 1730s and we are just starting to see our first coffee cups now,” said Ogilvie. “In England and the Netherlands, these exotic drinks, tea and coffee, appear in inventories after about 1650, along with things like calico garments, early cotton, little silk garments. So for 80 years when you should have been seeing these things were it an English or a Dutch or Flemish home, we are not seeing them in our German homes. But now we are. That’s consistent with the hypothesis that this kind of consumer and industrious revolution happened in Germany, but it happened a lot later.”

Tracy Dennison, at the California Institute of Technology, is another academic using lists to help understand the evolution of a particular social universe, in her case the institution of serfdom in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dennison is looking specifically at the 3,000 serfs who lived on a rich estate 200 miles north of Moscow, owed by the wealthy Sheremetyev family. She looked at all the documents produced by the estate from 1750 to 1860, including lists of all serf property that were created in order to assess them for taxes. Even just a cursory glance, Dennison said, upends our sense of serf society as uniformly impoverished. The categorized list of their dwellings range, she said, “from two-story houses with tile roofs to small wooden huts with thatched roofs.”

One of the lists Dennison looked at came about when the owners of the estate became suspicious of the amount of clothing their serfs owned. A decree was issued, which accused the serfs of having, as Dennison put it, “several changes of the nicest clothing while at the same time being in arrears on their taxes.” An inventory of all the serfs’ clothing was established and new rules enacted that put strict limits on the number of headscarves, coats, etc. that any family could have if they had not paid their taxes in full.

“These lists help us answer so many questions,” Dennison said. “What kind of stratification was there in this society? What sort of economic possibilities and consumption possibilities even within the constraints of a serf system? Was there was market penetration in the countryside?”

Sometimes lists prepared for one reason also contain secondary information that provides a great unintended store of material. Such is the case in the ambitious survey being carried out by Leigh Shaw-Taylor at Cambridge. He is trying to get a clearer picture of the occupational structure of England in the centuries that preceded the Industrial Revolution — like Ogilvie, to get a better idea of what triggered it.

But before a certain point in history, it’s not easy to find out what people actually did for a living. The British census only started systematically recording occupations in 1851, so Shaw-Taylor began scouring all kinds of other lists. There are the baptism records contained in England and Wales’s 11,400 surviving parish registers, which from 1813 were legally required to include the father’s occupation. One source for 1520 is a “muster roll,” a list of men fit for military service. Alongside descriptions of whether they own a horse or bow and arrow, the muster roll lists their jobs. And Shaw-Taylor is making use of an earlier set of lists, made in 1379 when the unpopular Poll Tax was instituted to pay for military campaigns overseas. On the county-by-county catalogs of people who owed this tax, occupation is often listed.

Shaw-Taylor is now eight years into this research and he envisions another decade of work to get the complete broad sweep, but already his findings — gleaned from these lists — have altered historians’ sense of the chronology of important economic shifts.

“It turns out that less than half of the population was working as farmers in 1700, much earlier than people previously thought,” Shaw-Taylor said. “This means that major structural change preceded the period when modern economic growth really got going. The conventional knowledge was that this change in people’s occupations came only as economic growth took off. Actually it’s quite clear that it began happening more than a hundred years before.”

The study of history has always been a battlefield between the “great man” approach that puts the likes of Napoleon and Stalin at the helm, and the notion that history is pushed along by more pervasive social and cultural forces, perceptible even in the smallest of gestures and habits.

For people concerned with those broader movements, lists offer important ammunition. In all that accumulated information contained in inventories and tax lists and muster rolls are the raw material of everyday life. And not only do the lists provide a historical trace of people whose lives might have otherwise gone unrecorded, they also furnish evidence of those tectonic changes by documenting tiny shifts — say the first purchased coffee cup in a Black Forest village.

Inwood, the Canadian scholar looking at British medical records, said the significance of the lists he is working with is that it is the first time in history that large numbers of people from all over the world — both native-born British and the aboriginal populations like Maoris and South African bushmen — were undergoing the same type of medical scrutiny. The result is long lists of height and weight, for example, that can be compared and give a much clearer sense of divergent living conditions in the 19th century. It is a portrait of an empire that could only be captured in the form of a list.

“It gives a balanced view of society,” Inwood said. “You do see in these lists the rich person, you will see the politician who books are written about. But you also see the people who don’t show up any other way.”

Gal Beckerman is a journalist and author. His first book, ”When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” was published in September and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

via

John Hancock, 2011 (detail)
vinyl, aluminum, stainless steel
138 x 174 x 28 inches
(350.5 x 442 x 71.1 cm)

June 15 – 19, 2011 at Ar Basel Booth S20

David Kordansky

Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton a 50 year advocate of barefoot running

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
NY Times Published: June 8, 2011

At a recent symposium of the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting in Denver, cutely titled “Barefoot Running: So Easy, a Caveman Did It!,” a standing-room-only crowd waited expectantly as a slide flashed up posing this question: Does barefoot running increase or decrease skeletal injury risk?

“The answer,” said Dr. Stuart J. Warden, an associate professor of physical therapy at Indiana University, “is that it probably does both.”

Barefoot running remains as popular and contentious a topic among exercise scientists as it is among athletes, even though it is practiced by only a tiny subset of American runners. These early-adopter runners, however, tend to be disproportionately enthusiastic and evangelical. Many cite the best seller “Born to Run,” by Christopher McDougall, which touts barefoot running, and claim that barefoot running cured them of various running-related injuries and will do so for their fellow athletes. “There are people who are convinced that barefoot runners never get injured,” said Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard who runs barefoot himself and spoke on the topic during last week’s symposium.

But in the past year, anecdotal evidence has mounted that some runners, after kicking off their shoes, have wound up hobbled by newly acquired injuries. These maladies, instead of being prevented by barefoot running, seem to have been induced by it.

So what really happens to a modern runner when he or she trains without shoes or in the lightweight, amusingly named “barefoot running shoes” that are designed to mimic the experience of running with naked feet? That question, although pressing, cannot, as the newest science makes clear, easily be answered.

Most of us, after all, grew up wearing shoes. Shoes alter how we move. An interesting review article published this year in The Journal of Foot and Ankle Research found that if you put young children in shoes, their steps become longer than when they are barefoot, and they land with more force on their heels.

Similarly, when Dr. Lieberman traveled recently to Kenya for a study published last year in Nature, he found that Kenyan schoolchildren who lived in the city and habitually wore shoes ran differently from those who lived in the country and were almost always barefoot. Asked to run over a force platform that measured how their feet struck the ground, a majority of the urban youngsters landed on their heels and generated significant ground reaction forces or, in layman’s terms, pounding. The barefoot runners typically landed closer to the front of their feet and lightly, without generating as much apparent force.

Based on such findings, it would seem as if running barefoot should certainly be better for the body, because less pounding should mean less wear and tear. But there are problems with that theory. The first is that the body stubbornly clings to what it knows. Just taking off your shoes does not mean you’ll immediately attain proper barefoot running form, Dr. Lieberman told me. Many newbie barefoot runners continue to stride as if they were in shoes, landing heavily on their heels.

The result can be an uptick in the forces moving through the leg, Dr. Warren pointed out, since you’re creating as much force with each stride as before, but no longer have the cushioning of the shoe to help dissipate it. Most barefoot runners eventually adjust their stride, he and the other presenters agreed, landing closer to the front of their feet — since landing hard on a bare heel hurts — but in the interim, he said, “barefoot running might increase injury risk.”

Even when a barefoot runner has developed what would seem to be ideal form, the force generated may be unfamiliar to the body and potentially injurious, as another study presented at last week’s conference suggests. For the study, conducted at the Biomechanics Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, runners strode across a force plate, deliberately landing either on the forefoot or on the heel. When heel striking, the volunteers generated the expected thudding ground reaction forces; when they landed near the front of the foot, the force was still there, though it generally had a lower frequency, or hertz.

Earlier research has shown that high-frequency forces tend to move up the body through a person’s bones. Lower-frequency forces typically move through muscles and soft tissue. So shifting to a forefoot running style, as people do when running barefoot, may lessen your risk for a stress fracture, and up your chances of developing a muscle strain or tendinitis.

So where does all of this new science leave the runner who’s been considering whether to ditch the shoes? The “evidence is not concrete for or against barefoot or shod running,” said Allison H. Gruber, a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts and lead author of the hertz study. “If one is not experiencing any injuries, it is probably best to not change what you’re doing.”

On the other hand, if you do have a history of running-related injuries or simply want to see what it feels like to run as most humans have over the millenniums, then “start slowly,” said Dr. Lieberman. Remove your shoes for the last mile of your usual run and ease into barefoot running over a period of weeks, he suggests, and take care to scan the pavement or wear barefoot running shoes or inexpensive moccasins to prevent lacerations.

And pay attention to form. “Don’t overstride,” he said. Your stride should be shorter when you are running barefoot than when you are in shoes. “Don’t lean forward. Land lightly.”

On this point, he and all of the scientists agree. Humans may have been built to run barefoot, “but we did not evolve to run barefoot with bad form.”

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Los Angeles Police cars in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium in the aftermath of the brutal beating of a San Francisco Giants fan during the season opening game at the stadium in March.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: June 8, 2011

LOS ANGELES — Baseball in Los Angeles: Dodger Dogs and views of the San Gabriel Mountains from the stands. Perfect California days for the Boys in Blue. A storied franchise playing in one of America’s vintage stadiums.

But these days, the boys in blue refer to a different uniformed team. Dodger Stadium is teeming with Los Angeles Police Department officers — on foot, on scooters, in patrol cars and in helicopters, on the lookout for fights and ugly rowdiness during and after games, in a stadium awash in empty seats.

As a result, the Dodgers, rich in history and victories and a source of civic pride since Walter O’Malley brought them here from New York in 1958, have become a source of embarrassment for the city this spring, as a parade of indignities tests the loyalty of their anguished fans.

The police presence — “Oh my God, it’s like an armed camp in there,” said David Hamlin, a communications consultant who attended a Chicago Cubs game last month — comes in response to an opening-day attack on a San Francisco Giants fan who is still in a coma.

The episode was unsettling for its brutality, but it was not entirely a shock, considering that the stadium has become a source of growing complaints about drunken and menacing crowds in the stands and in the streets.

The team has other problems, too. The long divorce drama involving the team’s owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt, has threatened the team’s financial viability and led Bud Selig, the Major League Baseball commissioner, to step in and take over to prevent the team from collapsing.

The owners, who are already derided here for spending money on luxury homes rather than on new players or security, were in danger of not meeting their payroll; indeed, it was considered something of a milestone when Mr. McCourt was able to meet his payroll at the end of May.

A team that used to be associated with championships was in third place in the National League West on Wednesday, ahead of the San Diego Padres and the Colorado Rockies. Attendance has slipped so much that The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article last week showing a picture of empty bleachers, with the headline “Dodgers’ fans are going, going …”

Can you blame Dodger fans for thinking that it’s time to send the bums back to Brooklyn?

“We go to games two or three times a year because of my affection for baseball,” Mr. Hamlin said. “I’d be very surprised if I go back this year. Very surprised. There are police officers on the field. There are police officers in the stands. The parking lot after the game made it look like watching the Mideast on television.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sighed when asked about the team he grew up with, attending the first games at Dodger Stadium and seeing players like Sandy Koufax pitch. “I think the entire city wants to get out of this purgatory,” he said. “I think everyone is frustrated.”

Attendance this year is down sharply; through 31 home games to date, it has averaged 35,787, compared with 43,489 last season, according to ESPN.com. And those numbers may be somewhat overstated, given that many season-ticket holders appear to be leaving their tickets in the drawer and staying home.

Asked about all the empty seats, Josh Rawitch, a spokesman for the Dodgers, said, “We believe it is a number of factors.” He declined to elaborate.

Many of them, though, are self-evident. The financial turmoil surrounding the McCourts means that the team is essentially bereft of the big-name stars who attract fans even to teams with losing records, which the Washington Nationals were able to do with the pitcher Stephen Strasburg (at least until he went on the disabled list last month). And it is tough being a losing team in any city.

More than anything, though, the opening day attack and the police presence in the stadium since then has made baseball here seem like anything but a family pastime. Dodger fans say the days when the biggest hassle of going to a ballgame was plotting ways to avoid the traffic, no small challenge for a downtown stadium, now seems almost quaint.

Fans are beginning to draw unwelcome comparisons to the rough and threatening crowds that used to attend Raider football games before the team decamped to Oakland, Calif., in 1994, many of whom would sport gang colors and tattoos.

“When I got here, Dodger fans were unbelievably different than the fans I knew from New York,” said Woody Studenmund, a season-ticket holder and an economics professor at Occidental College who was born in Cooperstown, N.Y. — home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame — and moved here 30 years ago.

“They were polite, upbeat and seemed to make an effort to cheer even when good plays didn’t work,” Professor Studenmund said. “Until this sea of blue arrived, it was not surprising to see fights in the left field bleachers or other parts of the stadium. The whole crowd has become tougher.”

There seems little reason for hope on this season’s horizon. The McCourts will probably be dislodged as owners, though no one knows when that might happen. No one knows, either, how long it will take the team to repair its bond with the city.

“I think the damage is so severe that it will take many years to get past this,” said David Carter, the executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California. “They didn’t create the damage and ill will overnight. You have to go back and look at how amazing the Dodger brand once was. It will bounce back.”

“But it won’t bounce back overnight,” he added. “I think fans are interested in just getting past this era and to the point where you can go to a Dodger game and just think about and talk about baseball.”

Opens June 9 through July 9, 2011

Johann Koenig

Anders Garm and Jan Bielecki

The Caribbean box jellyfish, Tripedalia cystophora, has two complex eyes with a lens, cornea and retina, as well as one or more simple eyes that can distinguish light and dark.

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: June 6, 2011

BALTIMORE — Until I met Doug Allen, the wiry, ponytailed senior aquarist who guided me through the extremely popular jellyfish exhibit at the National Aquarium, my personal experience with jellyfish consisted mainly of using them as yet another excuse not to go swimming: “Hey, I could get stung by a jellyfish!” Isn’t that what happened to 1,800 people off the coast of Florida last week? So when Mr. Allen suddenly stopped, clambered a ladder to the top of one of the tanks and called down, “You want to try holding a moon jelly?” my first impulse was to knock a few schoolchildren out of the way as I bolted for the door. My second impulse …

Too late. A three-inch-wide moon jellyfish had been plopped in my hands, and my fear quickly dissolved into fascination. The jellyfish shimmered and glowed. With its tendrils retracted, it looked like a round bar of glycerin soap, or maybe a translucent diaphragm, and it felt equal parts firm, jiggly and slimy, like a slice of liver coated in raw egg. And for all the vigor of my fondlings, I detected no sting.

“The poison of a common moon jellyfish is very weak,” said Anders Garm, who studies jellyfish at the University of Copenhagen. “You’d have to kiss the jellyfish to feel it.” There was no risk of that, but when we parted, the jellyfish left behind a kiss of its own on the palm of my hand: a sticky film that was surprisingly hard to remove. Thanks, my little honey moon.

Among nature’s grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry?

Yet if any taxonomic dynasty is entitled to the originalist mantle, to the designation of genuine emblematic earthling animal, and also to brand the rest of us the alien arrivistes, it is the jellyfish. A diverse group of thousands of species of gooey, saclike invertebrates found throughout the world, the jellyfish are preposterously ancient, dating back 600 million to 700 million years or longer. That’s roughly twice as old as the earliest bony fish and insects, three times the age of the first dinosaurs.

“Jellyfish are the most ancient multiorgan animal on earth,” said David J. Albert, a jellyfish expert at the Roscoe Bay Marine Biological Laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.

For all their noble antiquity, jellyfish have long been ignored or misunderstood by mainstream science, dismissed as so much mindless protoplasm with a mouth. Now, in a series of new studies, researchers have found that there is far more complexity and nuance to a jellyfish than meets the eye — or eyes. In the May 10 issue of the journal Current Biology, Dr. Garm and his colleagues describe the astonishing visual system of the box jellyfish, in which an interactive matrix of 24 eyes of four distinct types — two of them very similar to our own eyes — allow the jellies to navigate like seasoned sailors through the mangrove swamps they inhabit.

In The Journal of Experimental Biology, Richard A. Satterlie, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, recently disputed the conventional wisdom that jellyfish lack any semblance of the central nervous system that we higher vertebrates are so proud of. The distribution of a jellyfish’s nerve cells may be comparatively more diffuse than in an animal with an obvious brain and spinal cord, said Dr. Satterlie, but the layout is hardly helter-skelter. Recent detailed investigations of jellyfish neural architecture and activity reveal evidence of “neuronal condensation,” places where the neurons coalesce to form distinctive structures that act as integrating centers — taking in sensory information and translating it into the appropriate response.

“The bottom line is, jellyfish do a lot more than people think,” said Dr. Satterlie, “and when college textbooks claim they have no centralized nervous system, that’s flat-out wrong.”

Dr. Albert goes further, insisting it is fair to declare that a jellyfish has a brain. He spent years studying the resident population of moon jellyfish in Roscoe Bay, starting with the simple question, how can there even be a resident population? The tides flow in and out of the bay each day. The jellies were supposed to be like plankton, at the mercy of the tides. So why aren’t they simply flushed by the tides into the open sea, without so much as a goodnight moon?

Dr. Albert discovered that the jellies aren’t passive floaters at all. When the tide starts flowing out, they ride the wave until they hit a gravel bar, and then dive down to reach still waters. They remain in the calm oasis until the tide starts flowing back in, at which point they come up and get swept back into the bay. He also learned that the jellies have salinity meters and in summer avoid the fresh water dumped into the bay from mountain snowmelt, again by diving until they find salt enough to suit their taste. They like to aggregate into schools and through molecular signatures on the outside of their bells can distinguish between a friendly fellow jelly and any predatory species of jellyfish that might eat them.

“If a moon jelly gets touched by a predatory jellyfish, it turns and swims up,” Dr. Albert said. When it bumps into other benign species of jellyfish, though, as it often does, “nothing happens.”

The jellyfish activity log grew too lengthy to ignore. “If you look at all these behaviors, you have to ask, what would it take to organize and execute them?” he said in a telephone interview. “These are not simple reflexes; they’re organized behaviors.”

Dr. Albert concluded that the jellyfish must have some kind of brain. “That’s what a brain does,” he said. “It controls behaviors.”

Writing earlier this year in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Dr. Albert summarized his behavioral observations under the title “What’s on the Mind of a Jellyfish?” to which he answered, “a lot.” Brains and beauty, and campiness, too. Among the jellyfish on display in Baltimore were ones that looked like beating hearts, others like spotted toadstools, still others like parasols with a few too many ruffled streamers, and this one over here would make a swell hat for a royal wedding.

“They’re living lava lamps,” said Jack Cover, general curator of the aquarium. And they’re so mesmerizing to visitors that, Mr. Allen said, “the jellies are right up there in popularity next to the dolphins.” Which is a good thing, considering that the infrastructure needed to keep the tender-fleshed sylphs hale and whole can cost millions. “Keeping jellyfish is a fine art,” said Vicky Poole, the exhibit manager. “It’s a little like maintaining phlegm.”

Jellies have no trouble maintaining themselves in the wild, however. They are found in open oceans, along coasts and in lagoons, and a few can handle fresh water. With their modest oxygen requirements, jellies can grow in post-algal “dead zones” and other polluted waters where most marine life can’t — not surprising for a group that has weathered five past mass extinctions.

Adult jellies range in size from the Australian Irukandji, which is about the size of a fingernail, to the lion’s mane jelly, with a bell 8 to 10 feet wide and tentacles trailing 100 or more feet behind it.

A hallmark of jellies is their radial symmetry, a concentric body plan that is more commonly associated with flowers than with animals but that allows the jellies to swim or drift through the water in straight lines.

All jellies are carnivorous, feeding on plankton, crustaceans, fish eggs, small fish and other jellyfish, ingesting and voiding through the same convenient hole in the middle of the bell. Jellies do not actively hunt but instead use their tentacles as drift nets. Should a fish brush against the often invisible extensions, the pressure prompts the tentacles’ stinging cells to release tiny harpoons packed with neurotoxins. In the most venomous jellyfish, the toxins are designed to work quickly and unequivocally, to forfend any damage to the predator’s delicate tissue.

“If a jellyfish were to swallow a prawn that wasn’t completely dead,” said Dr. Garm, “the prawn would puncture its stomach.” Some of these take-no-chances poisons turn out to be powerful enough to kill very large animals the jellyfish have no intention of eating, including humans. Most notorious is an Australian box jellyfish called the sea wasp, whose sting can kill a grown man in a matter of seconds or minutes. Because the harpoons are so shallow, however, Australians have learned that they can protect themselves while swimming in sea wasp waters simply by covering their exposed skin with pantyhose.

Jellyfish in the box clade apparently take many things to extremes. In their new report on box jellyfish, Dr. Garm and his colleagues sought to understand why the creatures have evolved such a complex battery of eyes. Some of the eye types are simple light-and-shadow meters similar to those of other jellies. The team concentrated on an elaborate eye type unique to box jellies. Not only are the eyes equipped with a cornea, lens and retina, as human eyes are, but they are also suspended on stalks with heavy crystals on one end, a gyroscopelike arrangement that ensures the eyes are focused unerringly skyward.

“The crystal works as a weight,” Dr. Garm said. “No matter how the jellyfish reorients itself, the stalk bends and the eyes face up.”

Why stare fixedly toward the heavens? The researchers determined that the jellyfish look upward for navigational guidance. The animals live and feed among the underwater tree roots in murky mangrove swamps. Every night, they are swept away from the trees and sink to the muddy bottom of the open lagoon. Every morning they must return to the roots or risk starvation. They rise toward the surface and their upturned eyes scan the sky, until at last they spy the mangrove canopy, and they start swimming home.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 5, 2011

What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”

But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.

I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.

Start with the claim that the G.O.P. plan simply reforms Medicare rather than ending it. I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program — call it Vouchercare — that would offer nothing like the coverage that the elderly now receive. (Republicans get huffy when you call their plan a voucher scheme, but that’s exactly what it is.)

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.

So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

But what about the claim that none of this matters, because Medicare as we know it is unsustainable? Nonsense.

Yes, Medicare has to get serious about cost control; it has to start saying no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefits, it has to change the way it pays doctors and hospitals, and so on. And a number of reforms of that kind are, in fact, included in the Affordable Care Act. But with these changes it should be entirely possible to maintain a system that provides all older Americans with guaranteed essential health care.

Consider Canada, which has a national health insurance program, actually called Medicare, that is similar to the program we have for the elderly, but less open-ended and more cost-conscious. In 1970, Canada and the United States both spent about 7 percent of their G.D.P. on health care. Since then, as United States health spending has soared to 16 percent of G.D.P., Canadian spending has risen much more modestly, to only 10.5 percent of G.D.P. And while Canadian health care isn’t perfect, it’s not bad.

Canadian Medicare, then, looks sustainable; why can’t we do the same thing here? Well, you know the answer in the case of the Republicans: They don’t want to make Medicare sustainable, they want to destroy it under the guise of saving it.

So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.

Gertrude Stein, in a Man Ray portrait, was a shaper of Modernism.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: June 2, 2011

WE want our great artists and writers to be one thing or the other: saints or sinners, angels or devils. Either way, they should be heroes, with decisive achievements and expansive souls.

Gertrude Stein, one of America’s greatest writers, made every effort to fill the bill, first through her work, then through her life. Whether she comes down on the saint or sinner side, though, has long been a question. And it’s being raised again by two museum exhibitions in this city, across the Bay from where Stein grew up, in Oakland. Both suggest that, “Rose is a rose is a rose” aside, we still don’t know Stein very well.

In the eight years between 1903 and 1911, when she was in her late 20s and early 30s, she wrote her masterpiece, “The Making of Americans,” the first major modern experimental novel in English, predating by a decade the mature work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and offering an analog to Cubism.

The book is huge, almost a thousand printed pages. She wrote it out in longhand, making no revisions, usually working through the night, alone. And she wrote in a language no one had ever read before. It was in plain English, but rich with moral weight and haunted emotion, and conventional up to a point, then not. Eventually it lifts off from the syntax and logic we know, and all traces of narrative — names, places, events — drop away.

Forward direction ends; time stops, or rather freezes in an eternal present where nothing new happens because everything is happening all the time.

Stein was trying to create eternity — “the everlasting,” she called it — in prose. And given the demands the book makes on a reader’s attention, she, in a way, succeeded. “The Making of Americans” has a reputation for being unreadable, which it isn’t, though its difficulties have to be experienced to be believed, and its greatness has to be believed in for reading to continue.

Stein couldn’t find a publisher for the book until 1925, when she was over 50, by which time she had written many other things, become an art collector in Paris and found a life partner. “The Making of Americans” clinched her high reputation in elite literary circles. But hungry for fame, she now wanted more of it, and of a different, wider kind. So she shifted out of vanguard mode, turned on the charm and produced “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

Written under the name of her longtime lover, “Autobiography” is a book-length advertisement for Stein herself as she wanted the world to see her: not only as a genius-writer, but also as the primary shaper of early Modernism in Paris and as a pioneer of a gay sensibility.

The book took just weeks to turn out, and it’s a breeze to read. In Alice’s voice Stein name-drops, dishes, fabricates (“God, what a liar she is,” her older brother, Leo, fumed) and self-promotes with a gee-whiz American wit of a kind Andy Warhol would later perfect. In the end it’s all a performance, but one that works.

The book became a best seller in the United States, the land to which Stein, after 30 years in Europe, maintained a vehemently patriotic attachment. And she became what she had long desperately wanted to be: a cultural hero, a pop star.

For better and for worse the pop-star Stein — the one played by Kathy Bates in the new Woody Allen movie, “Midnight in Paris” — is the one people have an easy time loving: the funny, feisty, bohemian mover and shaker who looks like a butch Buddha and is good for a quotation or two.

But if we accept that Stein as our hero, what do lose? We lose Stein the great writer. And we lose the truth about the history of which she was a part.

The two remarkable Stein-related exhibitions, just a few blocks apart, try to restore some of that truth by approaching her from two angles: as an art patron in one case, and as a social personality in the other. Both shows seriously question Stein’s own solitary-genius account of herself in these roles.

Of the two “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is by far the more spectacular visually, but narrower in theme. Here we meet Stein the art entrepreneur in Paris as expected, except that she is by no means alone. A year before she arrived in 1903, Leo was already there and acquiring Cézanne and Renoirs, and he let her tag along. Soon they began to buy together — the show in part reconstructs their collection — with Leo often taking the lead in decisions. And there were other Steins on hand. An older brother, Michael, and his wife, Sarah, lived nearby and were also buying, in particular Matisse, with whom they became friends.

In short, the show demonstrates that Gertrude Stein was not, as she would ask the world to believe, the single-handed shaper of new art. Artists she patronized later on her own were pretty bad, bush-league Surrealists mostly. But in the early days she did something right: she put her cards on Picasso at the dangerous, critical moment when he was moving into Cubism.

He and she had formed a close friendship, one that produced, among other things, his famous portrait of her, in which she leans forward like some grave genderless deity receiving a confidence. (The painting is on loan from the Met, where the show will appear next year.) The path from this point to Cubism was relatively short, and one that Leo did not want to go down. An aspiring figurative painter of a conservative bent, he found Picasso’s increased fracturing of forms enraging.

Gertrude had precisely the opposite take: For her, Cubism was an exhilaration, a vindication, a learning tool. It was destructive, and subversive in a way she understood. It shattered conventions of realism and beauty, and, with its cutting up and rearranging of ordinary things to create multiple perspectives, it altered perceptions of time and space. These were effects she was trying to achieve in writing.

If her loyalty to Picasso at this juncture had ulterior motives — her appreciation of art usually did — it still established her as a significant force in Paris Modernism.

Her allegiance also contributed to a rancorous and permanent break with Leo, who moved out of 27 Rue de Fleurus, though there were other factors in the rift, which was permanent. Gertrude was having some enviable success with her writing, which Leo despised. And Alice Toklas had moved in as Gertrude’s lover.

The exhibition called “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, focuses on the relationship of the two women, and takes another step in dispelling the stand-alone-genius Stein myth by bringing Toklas fully into the picture.

The nuanced archival display begins with a wide range of photographs of the young Gertrude (she rarely spoke about her childhood); the undergraduate at what is now Radcliffe (where she studied psychology with William James); and the medical student at Johns Hopkins, where she specialized in nervous diseases of women, but left before getting her degree.

There is evidence that Stein had a history of depression. Being brainy, bulky and gay must have made her feel like a misfit pretty much everywhere she went. And writing, which she had begun to do, can be a lonely occupation, particularly if you’re inventing a mode that gives you little hope of readers. “I write for myself and strangers” is a repeated refrain in ”The Making of Americans,” which was composed in part before Stein and Toklas met.

The meeting was in 1907, when Toklas, a San Francisco native, was visiting Europe. The women began a partnership that became a celebrity marriage. It was also, in many ways, a collaboration.

Toklas was the one who cut Stein’s hair short, who fashioned the Stein “look,” a kind of theatrical creation. When Stein wrote using Toklas’s name, it was because their lives really were, in essential features, of a piece.

Stein and Toklas have, of course, been gay inspirations for generations. They were, within the era’s conventions, astonishingly forthright about their relationship. They were often photographed together at home, playing out gender roles, Stein in corduroys, Toklas in floral prints. Many of their friends were gay. “We are surrounded by homosexuals; they do all the good things in the arts,” Stein wrote to a friend.

The homosexuals she spoke of, though — and admired and collaborated with — were almost all male. Apart from Alice women had a scant presence in her life. In part the reasons were practical. Stein was always on the alert for people who could be helpful to her, particularly in advancing her career, and almost all those people in power to do so, in that era, were men.

This bias toward male authority was part of a deeply conservative streak in Stein’s character, one that manifested itself in many ways, some of them perilous. In her 2007 book “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice,” the writer Janet Malcolm documented the bizarre lives that Stein and Toklas, both Jews, lived in occupied France during World War II, when they maintained friendships with men who had close ties to the Vichy government or were anti-Semitic Nazi collaborators.

It’s possible that the women knew little or nothing about such links; certainly neither ever made a point, before or during the war, of acknowledging they were Jewish. But what is one to make of Stein’s alleged approval of Francisco Franco? Or her championing of the Vichy leader Marshall Pétain, whose speeches she agreed to translate? Or her oddly neutral reaction on learning about the Nazi death camps? Or for that matter, a lifelong show of American patriotism that feels over-insistent and knee-jerk, as if she were picking a fight.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum show addresses this briefly in wall text, but it’s an aspect of Stein’s character that demands further study. Her wartime denial may simply have been driven by fear, which drives even strong-minded people to otherwise unaccountable thinking. And Stein, for all her public bravado, was well acquainted with fear. References to it saturate “The Making of Americans.” And she addresses it in her very last work, her libretto for Virgil Thomson’s opera “The Mother of Us All,” about the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, where the heroine sings: “Men have kind hearts when they’re not afraid but they are afraid, afraid, afraid.”

So what, in the end, are we left with in Stein? Neither a saint nor a sinner, but many things in between. A culture-broker who did less than she claimed but still did a lot. A woman who made lesbian love an acceptable fixture of populist lore, but who chose men for company. A nationalistic American who gave fascism a pass.

Interestingly, Warhol presents certain similar challenges to philosophical orthodoxy. He was, after all, a portraitist at one time or another to political, social and economic fascists of every stripe. Like Stein, he also wore his queerness like a badge, though he didn’t necessarily assume that it came with responsibilities.

For many artists Warhol is a hero of a specific kind: a model of moral ambiguity, of values and attitudes that cannot be clearly defined, and so can’t be pinned down and dismissed as a product of one particular viewpoint in a particular time, and so consigned to the past.

Perhaps the same can be said of Stein. Ambiguity — moral, temporal — is certainly the very substance of “The Making of Americans,” her great lonesome novel. It is the work that Stein’s pop-star persona has distracted us from, that is as experimental now as when it was written; that hardly anyone reads; that offers both Stein and her readers a way to live; that I’ve been reading for years, and will continue reading, and will never finish.

Ettore Sottsass with “Shiva Vase”

By JENNIFER MEDINA
NY Times Published: June 4, 2011

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — When a group of activists proposed banning circumcision in San Francisco last fall, many people simply brushed them aside. Even in that liberal seaside city, it seemed implausible that thousands of people would support an effort to outlaw an ancient ritual that Jews and Muslims believe fulfills a commandment issued by God.

But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits. Now a similar effort is under way in Santa Monica to get such a measure on the ballot for November 2012.

If the anticircumcision activists (they prefer the term “intactivists”) have their way, cities across the country may be voting on whether to criminalize a practice that is common in many American hospitals. Activists say the measures would protect children from an unnecessary medical procedure, calling it “male genital mutilation.”

“This is the furthest we’ve gotten, and it is a huge step for us,” said Matthew Hess, an activist based in San Diego who wrote both bills.

Mr. Hess has created similar legislation for states across the country, but those measures never had much traction. Now he is fielding calls from people who want to organize similar movements in their cities.

“This is a conversation we are long overdue to have in this country,” he said. “The end goal for us is making cutting boys’ foreskin a federal crime.”

Jewish groups see the ballot measures as a very real threat, likening them to bans on circumcision that existed in Soviet-era Russia and Eastern Europe and in ancient Roman and Greek times. The circumcision of males is an inviolable requirement of Jewish law that dates back to Abraham’s circumcision of himself in the Book of Genesis.

They say the proposed ban is an assault on religious freedom that could have a widespread impact all over the country. Beyond the biblical, there are emotional connections: checking for circumcision was one of the ways Jewish children could be culled from their peers by Nazis and the czar’s armies.

“People are shocked that it has reached this level because there has never been this kind of a direct assault on a Jewish practice here,” said Marc Stern, associate general counsel for the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group. “This is something that American Jews have always taken for granted — that something that was so contested elsewhere but here, we’re safe and we’re secure.”

Mr. Hess also writes an online comic book, “Foreskin Man,” with villains like “Monster Mohel.” On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement saying the comic employed “grotesque anti-Semitic imagery.”

Jena Troutman, the mother of two young boys who is promoting the ballot measure in Santa Monica, said she did not think of herself as a crusader against religion. Instead, she views her work as a chance to educate would-be parents against a procedure that “can really do serious damage to the child.”

“I am just a mom trying to save the little babies,” Ms. Troutman said. “I’d rather be on the beach, but nobody is talking about this, so I have to.”

Ms. Troutman has run the Web site wholebabyrevolution.com for two years, and she is fond of rattling off sayings like “Your baby is perfect, no snipping required.” Well versed in the stories of circumcisions gone awry, she said the recent death of a New York City toddler who was circumcised at a hospital convinced her that she should push for the ballot measure.

Ms. Troutman, who has worked as a lactation educator and a doula, said she often approached women on the beach to warn them about the dangers of circumcising, but she has declined to answer questions about her own children.

Although precise numbers are not known, several studies have indicated that circumcision rates have been declining in the United States for the past several years and now range from 30 percent to 50 percent of all male infants.

Many medical groups take a neutral approach, saying that the practice is not harmful and that there is not enough scientific evidence to conclude that it is necessary, and leave the decision to parents and their doctor. Several studies have linked circumcision with a reduction in the spread of H.I.V. Roughly half of the 694 baby boys born in the Santa Monica-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital in 2010 were circumcised before they left the hospital, officials there said.

Dr. David Baron, a family physician, certified mohel — someone who performs ritual circumcision — and former chief of staff at Santa Monica-U.C.L.A., said that he would not press any parent to circumcise a son but that he viewed the effort to ban the procedure as “ridiculous and dishonest.”

“To say it is mutilation is wrong from the get-go,” Dr. Baron said. “It is a perfectly valid decision to say that it is not what you want for your child. Any doctor who says it is needed is not being honest, but to say that it needs to be banned is shocking.”

If the ballot measure passed, it would certainly face legal challenges. But several legal experts said it was far from certain that it would be struck down in a court. Ms. Troutman said she considered putting religious exemptions in the measure, but then decided, “Why should only some babies be protected?”

Rabbi Yehuda Lebovics, an Orthodox mohel based in Los Angeles who says he has performed some 20,000 circumcisions over several decades, said he often had to soothe nervous mothers.

“I am now doing the sons of the boys I did 30 years ago,” Rabbi Lebovics said. “So I turn to the new mother and ask, ‘Do you have any complaints in the way it turned out?’

Eric Goode and his team hope to mate two ploughshare tortoises, one of the rarest species in the world. Fewer than 300 remain in the wilds of Madagascar, and previous efforts to breed them in captivity have gone awry. (Stefano Paltera, For The Times / June 5, 2011)

By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times
June 5, 2011

Reporting from Ventura, Calif.—
When it comes to caring for the world’s rarest cold-blooded animals, few places match the pampering and security provided to hundreds of critically endangered turtles and tortoises at a secret compound in the foothills of Los Padres National Forest.

In paddocks and aquariums protected by surveillance cameras and electric wire, Okinawa leaf turtles feast on silkworms and mulberries in a temperature-controlled greenhouse. Nest-building Burmese black mountain tortoises relax in piles of freshly cut oak, sycamore and bamboo. Forest-dwelling impressed tortoises dine exclusively on organically grown oyster mushrooms. Philippine pond turtles spend the night in snug tunnels made of cork bark.

But Saturday’s VIPs were eight ploughshare tortoises flown in from Hong Kong in padded crates. Among them is a female of breeding age, which Eric Goode and his associates at the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy’s Behler Chelonian Center hope to mate with the only male ploughshare tortoise of breeding age in North America.

“That male, which is en route from a zoo in Texas, hasn’t seen a female ploughshare tortoise of breeding age in more than 25 years,” Goode said as he marveled at the new arrivals in a quarantined pen. “We’re hoping for the best. These creatures have seen nothing but bad luck, corruption and greed in captivity.”

Some would call that an understatement. With fewer than 300 left in the wilds of Madagascar, the ploughshare tortoise holds the dubious distinction of being the rarest tortoise on Earth. They are heavily targeted by global animal traffickers, and the high-domed creatures fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the Asian black market, conservationists say.

Until recently, attempts to breed the ploughshare tortoise outside of Madagascar failed miserably. In the early 1980s, a male died shortly after zoo workers in Honolulu used an electric device to procure semen from the animal. A female that it was supposed to have mated with had her ovaries removed during a botched operation.

“Given their plight and scarcity, it took more than a decade of hard work by us, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and Hong Kong authorities and conservationists to get these eight tortoises into our compound,” said Paul Gibbons, managing director of the Behler Chelonian Center. “But, then, a lot of the animals in our pens have similar stories to tell.”

Many of the species found on the compound are nearing extinction because of habitat loss, wildfires, hunting and black markets.

“International animal trafficking is a dark and dangerous subculture,” Goode said. “Certain dealers will go to great extents to get their hands on these animals. That is why, although we are certified by the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn., we are not open to the public.”

There is no sign outside the facility, nor is it listed in the phone book. “Theft is a reality,” Goode said. “The only visitors are turtle biologists from around the world.”

The conservancy was established in 2005 with 250 rare turtles transferred from a Bronx Zoo collection that had been housed at Saint Catherines Island off the coast of Georgia. Today, the conservancy mostly manages animals seized from illegal trafficking operations or bred in its rock-and-mortar outdoor pens.

The conservancy’s primary mission is to maintain “assurance colonies” of threatened and endangered tortoises and freshwater turtles, such as the four Galapagos tortoises that lumbered across a manicured lawn in a pen shaded by tropical plants and oaks Saturday.

It also lends some of its reptiles to zoos around the world and collaborates with conservationists to protect the rarest species from extinction. For example, the conservancy has been working with biologists in the United States and Mexico to revive bolson tortoise populations in the hot and thorny Chihuahuan Desert south of the Rio Grande Valley.

Once as plentiful as jackrabbits, only an estimated 5,000 bolson tortoises survive today. Cactus fruit is the bolson’s dish of choice, and it’s always on the menu at the conservancy.

“We specialize in creating environments that are peaceful and natural as possible for our turtles,” Goode said.

Iwan Baan

The three totems, respectively dedicated to summer, spring/autumn and winter, are set along a path that stretches away from the house in the style of a western.

Iwan Baan

The winter pavilion is apparently the most complex of the three structures: a concrete enclosure whose ceiling is pierced with a glazed skylight. Whoever sleeps in this pavilion can therefore look up and enjoy the constellations while immersed in the total night of the desert.

Iwan Baan

The spring/autumn pavilion.

By: Peter Zellner
Domus 947, May 2011

Thirty years ago Arata Isozaki designed a house and artist’s studio on a narrow alley lot less than 500 metres from the Pacific Ocean in Venice Beach, California. The slender structure was made for a friend of the architect’s named Jerry Sohn, an LA art collector. It was later sold to musician Eric Clapton. To this day Isozaki’s elegant house still manages to capture some of Southern California’s idiosyncratic qualities, in particular the relationship of cultural activities (art, architecture and music for instance) to the natural landscape.

The client and architect stayed friends, exchanging correspondence over two decades and visiting each other intermittently in Japan or California. Years passed and Sohn came to acquire a property in the desert about two and a half hours southeast of Los Angeles. Surrounded by the benthic beauty of an ancient but now dry sea floor, dramatic rock formations, cactuses, reddish soil, Joshua trees and sagebrush, the property sits 1,500 metres above sea level in the High Mojave Desert. It is about 15 kilometres from Joshua Tree National Park and 50 kilometres northeast of Palm Springs, which is typically 5 to 7 degrees Celsius hotter on any given day than the high desert. During the day the temperatures in the Mojave can soar to 38 degrees Celsius, but drop at night to 1 or 2 degrees Celsius.

Originally developed as a ranch in the 1920s and ’30s, the property includes a small cabin that was owned for a time by the LA artist Ed Ruscha who painted on its interior walls. The cabin and land are totally off the grid, meaning water is sourced from a well, sewage, electricity and phone services are sparse to non-existent, and solar- or gas-powered lighting and cooking are the standard not the exception. The nearest “urban setting” is a small village called Pioneertown that was built in 1946 by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers as part of a western movie set.

The primary sensation of being on the property is an impression of its remoteness, isolation, wildness and sublimity. Living on the site on a regular basis, as Sohn and his family do two or three times a month when not in LA, promotes a sort of deep hermeticism. Spending time wandering among the desert’s quite large rock formations, across washed-out creek beds and over the site’s mineralogical plains brings one quickly to an understanding of Southern Califonia’s fragility. Despite the site’s proximity to civilisation, one also gets a very immediate sense that our urban or cultural identities rest on the most tenuous of hypotheses supported by the most brittle of infrastructures.

On a trip to California in the 1990s, Isozaki visited the site with his friend Sohn and slept outdoors one night. His intuition, as he has noted elsewhere, was that the desert’s architecture has only the sky as its ceiling and the ground as its floor. On his next visit to the property, the client asked the architect to make an outdoor bedroom so that Sohn and his family could have a place where they could sleep under the stars and the moon, but away from snakes and other wildlife; a place to appreciate seasonal changes and stay cool on a hot summer’s night. The architect suggested the idea of nature itself as an interior, and instead proposed to his client that they make three outdoor bedrooms, not one. After some sketching and long-distance discussions, the architect and the client agreed to build three different bedrooms for four different seasons on three different areas of the property.

“Despite the site’s proximity to civilisation, one also gets a very immediate sense that our urban or cultural identities rest on the most tenuous of hypotheses supported by the most brittle of infrastructures.”
Artworks are dotted around Jerry Sohn’s property. For example, the small cabin once belonged to Ed Ruscha, who turned the interior walls into paintings. Below, the installation titled Circle of Japanese Fishing Floats by Richard Long.

The first “bedroom” one encounters walking away from the main cabin is the winter bedroom—a simple or seemingly simple cube. The winter bedroom is the most complete architectural exercise of the three, being a fully enclosed concrete and glass cube measuring nine by nine by nine feet with a six-foot-square glass panel inset on the top plane as part of the ceiling. Here the architect had intended to include a bed and storage unit designed by Man Ray, but the client decided to forego any interior furniture preferring to sleep directly on the structure’s concrete floor, which, incidentally, remains surprisingly warm on the coldest nights, radiating the sun’s heat trapped in the structure over the course of a day. On one interior wall the British artist Jeremy Dickinson has painted an image of a rusted toy found on the property, a small fire truck abandoned no doubt years ago by a child and preserved by the desert. Sleeping in the unit, detached from civilisation but somehow partially disconnected from immediately or directly experiencing nature, one feels something like a kinship with the architecture of the bedroom, as if body and structure were fused like a suit and nature could be partially filtered and partially cultured.
According to Isozaki, on the summer pavilion “the entire night sky becomes the ceiling”.

The next bedroom is the summer bedroom, a nine by nine foot concrete deck mounted on a low, stepped vertical concrete wall. Like the other bedrooms it is made out of three-inch board-formed concrete, its mass sculpturally defined by an exacting formation—its architectural lines embedded in form, an unadulterated translation of two into three dimensions. This bedroom, if it may even be called that, is a totem; almost a sculpture; almost a pure art act; both ancient and futuristic simultaneously. And yet beyond its sculptural qualities it is absolutely architectural, precise in its re-imagining how the body could inhabit the space between the heavens and the earth. It is just a platform, and at the same time it is everything architecture could or should aspire to achieve. That is to say, it arrives at a perfect marriage of formal intent and functional performance— nothing gained, nothing lost; both more architecture and less architecture than one needs at the same time.
The winter pavilion is apparently the most complex of the three structures: a concrete enclosure whose ceiling is pierced with a glazed skylight. Whoever sleeps in this pavilion can therefore look up and enjoy the constellations while immersed in the total night of the desert.

The last bedroom one reaches, situated at the lowest point formed by the triangle between the three structures, is the fall and spring bedroom. This structure hovers, literally, between an architecture defined by enclosure and screening (the winter bedroom) and an architecture of openness and minimal form (the summer bedroom). The fall and spring bedroom, like its siblings, is also constructed of board-formed concrete. However, its architectural form is the most cultured, the most mannered. It is a floor folded into a vertical wall and then gently rolled into a barrel vault that rests on another wall, this one being perpendicular to the first wall. Between the two walls, three concrete prisms, two small cubic steps and a larger rectangular concrete box define a place to sleep or observe the vast desert valley beyond Sohn’s property. On the rear of the structure, the New York artist Lawrence Weiner has carefully applied a text painting to the longer exterior wall. It reads “OBSCURED HORIZON” in yellow upper-case stencil letters, outlined in red-orange and framed by an oblong red-yellow box. On either side of the box, the artist has added two identical cursive loops, like lower-case “e”s or two waves curling over and back onto themselves. As a visual summation or diagram of the structure, they could be no clearer: they perfectly capture how the architect has folded and then rolled the desert floor onto itself, over the sky and then back to the earth, while in the process partially concealing the earth’s own horizon.

Isozaki has said elsewhere that the Japanese tea house creates nature artificially, and therefore it is not nature itself. The opposite theory, he has suggested, is to consider nature as an artificial form. In the Mojave Desert, the architect’s subtle yet stable interventions in a primordial landscape propose not only that we bear witness to the delicacy of our relationship with our planet, but also to the resoluteness required of any structure that can survive the desert and indeed marry itself to such a landscape.
According to Arata Isozaki, in this project “the ceiling is the sky, the surrounding mountain range and rocks are the walls and partitions, and the majority of the floor is the desert. It only consists of expanding the notion of the house towards nature itself, the surrounding environment”.
Testo alternativo Immagine According to Arata Isozaki, in this project “the ceiling is the sky, the surrounding mountain range and rocks are the walls and partitions, and the majority of the floor is the desert. It only consists of expanding the notion of the house towards nature itself, the surrounding environment”.

In creating a state of being that is neither primitive nor overreaching in any false attempts to seek a new paradise, Isozaki has found a perfect balance between artifice or culture and nature. His idiosyncratic structures, designed for a friend and an exceptional client, propose the tightest of dances between the dissolution of culture into nature and the conscription of nature itself as part of our architectural cosmos. This seems very Californian. The collection of these three outdoor bedrooms is doubtlessly one of the most powerful acts of architecture I have ever encountered, a testament to Isozaki’s deep sense of self-control as an architect, as well as his daring ambition to imagine that architecture could claim the sky and the horizon as its domain.

9 June – 16 July 2011

Xavier Hufkins

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 2, 2011

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a blog post about the “mistake of 1937,” the premature fiscal and monetary pullback that aborted an ongoing economic recovery and prolonged the Great Depression. As Gauti Eggertsson, the post’s author (with whom I have done research) points out, economic conditions today — with output growing, some prices rising, but unemployment still very high — bear a strong resemblance to those in 1936-37. So are modern policy makers going to make the same mistake?

Mr. Eggertsson says no, that economists now know better. But I disagree. In fact, in important ways we have already repeated the mistake of 1937. Call it the mistake of 2010: a “pivot” away from jobs to other concerns, whose wrongheadedness has been highlighted by recent economic data.

To be sure, things could be worse — and there’s a strong chance that they will, indeed, get worse.

Back when the original 2009 Obama stimulus was enacted, some of us warned that it was both too small and too short-lived. In particular, the effects of the stimulus would start fading out in 2010 — and given the fact that financial crises are usually followed by prolonged slumps, it was unlikely that the economy would have a vigorous self-sustaining recovery under way by then.

By the beginning of 2010, it was already obvious that these concerns had been justified. Yet somehow an overwhelming consensus emerged among policy makers and pundits that nothing more should be done to create jobs, that, on the contrary, there should be a turn toward fiscal austerity.

This consensus was fed by scare stories about an imminent loss of market confidence in U.S. debt. Every uptick in interest rates was interpreted as a sign that the “bond vigilantes” were on the attack, and this interpretation was often reported as a fact, not as a dubious hypothesis.

For example, in March 2010, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Debt Fears Send Rates Up,” reporting that long-term U.S. interest rates had risen and asserting — without offering any evidence — that this rise, to about 3.9 percent, reflected concerns about the budget deficit. In reality, it probably reflected several months of decent jobs numbers, which temporarily raised optimism about recovery.

But never mind. Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.

So, here we are, in the middle of 2011. How are things going?

Well, the bond vigilantes continue to exist only in the deficit hawks’ imagination. Long-term interest rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about the economy; a recent spate of bad news has sent them down to about 3 percent, not far from historic lows.

And the news has, indeed, been bad. As the stimulus has faded out, so have hopes of strong economic recovery. Yes, there has been some job creation — but at a pace barely keeping up with population growth. The percentage of American adults with jobs, which plunged between 2007 and 2009, has barely budged since then. And the latest numbers suggest that even this modest, inadequate job growth is sputtering out.

So, as I said, we have already repeated a version of the mistake of 1937, withdrawing fiscal support much too early and perpetuating high unemployment.

Yet worse things may soon happen.

On the fiscal side, Republicans are demanding immediate spending cuts as the price of raising the debt limit and avoiding a U.S. default. If this blackmail succeeds, it will put a further drag on an already weak economy.

Meanwhile, a loud chorus is demanding that the Fed and its counterparts abroad raise interest rates to head off an alleged inflationary threat. As the New York Fed article points out, the rise in consumer price inflation over the past few months — which is already showing signs of tailing off — reflected temporary factors, and underlying inflation remains low. And smart economists like Mr. Eggerstsson understand this. But the European Central Bank is already raising rates, and the Fed is under pressure to do the same. Further attempts to help the economy expand seem out of the question.

So the mistake of 2010 may yet be followed by an even bigger mistake. Even if that doesn’t happen, however, the fact is that the policy response to the crisis was and remains vastly inadequate.

Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it; we did, and we are. What we’re experiencing may not be a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s little consolation for the millions of American families suffering from a slump that just goes on and on.

Comedy, 2011
Lightjet print, mouted on Sintra and face mounted with acrylic, 12×9 cm

Through June 19, 2011

The Approach

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: May 31, 2011

In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”

Many Frenchmen — not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi — may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner.

Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération — photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos,” or “Sick of machos.”

“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.

As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”

After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.

Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to reverse his spiraling fortunes by shaking off his old reputation as a jumpy and flashy Hot Rabbit and recasting himself as a sober and quiet family man. One newspaper noted that the enduring image from the G-8 summit meeting in Deauville was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in white smock, showing the other leaders’ wives her baby bump.

The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned on Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.

Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more. It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.

“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”

In Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Toranian, the editor of Elle, wrote about the puncturing of France’s “Latin culture of seduction”: “We laugh about our Italian neighbors, but the stone today is in our garden.” (She probably didn’t want to use a shoe-on-the-other-foot metaphor given the foot fetishist on the loose.)

On Tuesday, Libération presented interviews with a parade of women who poured out long-stifled grievances about their paternalistic culture: How they feel they must wear pants to work to fend off leering; how they’re tired of men tu-ing instead of vous-ing and making comments like “O.K., but just because you have pretty eyes”; how they’re fed up with married pols who come to Paris three days a week and sleep with their assistants; how, as Aurélie Filipetti, a socialist representative, complained, male pols and journalists squat on 80 percent of the political space.

Filipetti remembers hearing a male representative say during a ceremony, in front of three female representatives, “Hunting is like women. You always regret the shots you didn’t take.”

Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, talked about the de trop dirty jokes, recalling how once, when a female representative mentioned a rape, a male colleague called out: “With her face, it’s not going to happen to her.”

Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ ”

Roselyne Bachelot, a government minister, warned about lechers: “Something important has happened in these last few days. The lifting of a very real omertà, which had been reinforced by a legal arsenal that protected private life. I think that public men have understood that the respect of privacy now has some limits.”

Getting French men to change will still, she said, be pushing up “le rocher de Sisyphe.”