Untitled (Ocean Wave) 2009

Eunice Kennedy Shriver watched as participants in the Special Olympics paraded at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1973.

By CARLA BARANAUCKAS
NY Times Published: August 11, 2009

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a member of one of the most prominent families in American politics and a trailblazer in the effort to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, died early Tuesday morning at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 88. Her death, at 2 a.m., was confirmed by her family in a statement. A family friend said that Mrs. Shriver had been in declining health for months, having suffered a series of strokes.

A sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy and the mother-in-law of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, Mrs. Shriver never held elective office. Yet she was no stranger to Capitol Hill, and some view her work on behalf of the mentally retarded, including the founding of the Special Olympics, as the most lasting of the Kennedy family’s contributions.

“When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” U.S. News and World Report said in its cover story of Nov. 15, 1993.

Edward Kennedy said in an interview in October 2007: “You talk about an agent of change — she is it. If the test is what you’re doing that’s been helpful for humanity, you’d be hard pressed to find another member of the family who’s done more.”

As an example, Mr. Kennedy cited the opening ceremony of the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai, where a crowd of 80,000 cheered as President Hu Jintao welcomed more than 7,000 athletes to China, a country with a history of severe discrimination against anyone born with disabilities.

Mrs. Shriver’s official efforts on behalf of people with mental retardation began after she became the executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in 1957. The foundation was established in 1946 as a memorial to her oldest brother, who was killed in World War II. Under Mrs. Shriver’s direction, it focused on the prevention of mental retardation and improving the ways in which society deals with people with intellectual disabilities.

“In the 1950s, the mentally retarded were among the most scorned, isolated and neglected groups in American society,” Edward Shorter wrote in his book “The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation.” “Mental retardation was viewed as a hopeless, shameful disease, and those afflicted with it were shunted from sight as soon as possible.”

The foundation was instrumental in the formation of President Kennedy’s Panel on Mental Retardation in 1961, development of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (which is now named for Mrs. Shriver) in 1962, the establishment of a network of mental retardation research centers at major medical schools across the United States in 1967 and the creation of major centers for the study of medical ethics at Harvard and Georgetown in 1971.

In 1968, the foundation helped plan and provided financing for the First International Special Olympics Summer Games, held at Soldier Field in Chicago that summer.

“I was just a young physical education teacher in the Chicago Park District back in the summer of 1968, a time of horrific tragedy for the Kennedy family, when Eunice Kennedy Shriver wrapped her arms around the very first Chicago Special Olympic games held at Soldier Field,” Justice Anne M. Burke of the Illinois Supreme Court said in an e-mail message. “I will never forget at the start of the games when she asked me to go to Sears and buy her a $10 bathing suit so she could jump in the pool with the Special Olympics swimmers.”

Just weeks after her brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed, Mrs. Shriver said in her address at the opening ceremony, “The Chicago Special Olympics prove a very fundamental fact, the fact that exceptional children — children with mental retardation — can be exceptional athletes, the fact that through sports they can realize their potential for growth.”

This was an extraordinary idea at the time. The prevailing thought had been that mentally retarded children should be excluded from physical activity for fear that they might injure themselves. As a result, many were overweight or obese.

The first Special Olympics brought together 1,000 athletes from 26 states and Canada for competition. In December 1968, Special Olympics Inc. was established as a nonprofit charitable organization. Since then the program has grown to almost three million athletes in more than 180 countries.

The Kennedy family learned firsthand about mental retardation through Rosemary Kennedy, the third of nine children and the oldest daughter, who was born mildly retarded in 1918, about a year after John F. Kennedy. Rosemary spent her childhood in the Kennedy household, unlike many mentally retarded children who grew up in institutions, sometimes as their families told friends that they had died.

Rosemary and Eunice developed a close bond, participating in sports including swimming and sailing and traveling together in Europe. “I had enormous affection for Rosie,” Mrs. Shriver said in an interview with NPR in April 2007.

She added: “If I never met Rosemary, never knew anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace. So where would you find out? Unless you had one in your own family.”

As Rosemary grew older, she had bouts of irritability and mood swings. In 1941, when she was 23, her father arranged for her to have a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to calm her. But the procedure, which was relatively new, only further incapacitated her, and she was sent to an institution in Wisconsin, where she died in 2005.

Rosemary’s disabilities were a closely held family secret until 1962, when Mrs. Shriver — with the approval of President Kennedy — wrote an article about her sister for The Saturday Evening Post. Referring to Rosemary’s move to an institution, Mrs. Shriver wrote, “It fills me with sadness to think this change might not have been necessary if we knew then what we know today.”

Earlier the same year, Mrs. Shriver began what became the forerunner of the Special Olympics when she opened a summer camp for mentally retarded children at her home in Maryland, called Timberlawn. The idea was born when a mother telephoned her and complained that she could not find a summer camp for her retarded child.

She recalled the telephone conversation this way in an interview with NPR: “I said: ‘You don’t have to talk about it anymore. You come here a month from today. I’ll start my own camp. No charge to go into the camp, but you have to get your kid here, and you have to come and pick your kid up.’ ” With that, the conversation ended.

For years, Camp Shriver provided physical activity for mentally retarded children, and Mrs. Shriver took a hands-on role, even jumping into the pool to give swimming lessons.

Senator Kennedy said that many of the activities at the camp were based on games the family had played with Rosemary on camping trips to western Massachusetts when they were growing up.

Her family said in a statement Tuesday morning, “She set out to change the world and to change us, and she did that and more.” Mrs. Shriver, her family said, “taught us by example and with passion what it means to live a faith-driven life of love and service to others.”

Eunice Mary Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on July 10, 1921, the fifth of nine children and the third daughter of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Her maternal grandfather was John Francis Fitzgerald, the Massachusetts politician known as Honey Fitz who served as mayor of Boston and a member of the House of Representatives. She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart Schools in the United States and England and Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Stanford in 1943.

After graduation, she worked in the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State, then was executive secretary for a juvenile delinquency project in the Department of Justice. In 1950, she became a social worker at the Penitentiary for Women in Alderson, W.Va. The next year she moved to Chicago to work with a shelter for women and the Chicago Juvenile Court.

In 1953, she married Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School and a former Navy officer, who worked for her father’s firm in Chicago, the Merchandise Mart. Mr. Shriver became the first director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration and the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1972. He survives her, along with their five children: Robert Sargent Shriver III; Maria Owings Shriver, who is married to Mr. Schwarzenegger; Timothy Perry Shriver; Mark Kennedy Shriver; and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver.

She is also survived by 19 grandchildren as well as her brother Edward and her sister Jean Kennedy Smith, former ambassador to Ireland.

Among the awards Mrs. Shriver received for her work on behalf of people with intellectual disabilities are the Legion of Honor, the Prix de la Couronne Française, the Albert Lasker Public Service Award, the National Recreation and Park Association National Voluntary Service Award and the Order of the Smile of Polish Children. She was also made a dame of the Papal Order of St. Gregory. On Nov. 16, 2007, she was honored with a personal tribute at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, with many Kennedy family members present.

In 1984 President Ronald Reagan awarded Mrs. Shriver the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In an interview with CBS News in 2004, Mrs. Shriver’s son Robert said: “My mom never ran for office, and she changed the world. Period. End of story.”

Dir. Christopher Munch
The Hours and Times
1991

Black and white. 60 minutes. Tuesday August 11

Elective Affinities – a film series devised by Larry Johnson and William E. Jones, features works that might have shown at the Cinema Theater on Western Avenue before getting busted by the cops. Artistic ambition, opportunism, and (of course) sexual desire intermingle, with “art films” and “nudies” colliding rather than harmonizing.

Chat Room
A seduction does not go quite as planned; rants and raves fill empty hours; words fail.

The first screening of the series presents two featurettes and a very rare short video: Christopher Munch’s film The Hours and Times, Michel Auder’s video A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, and Larry Johnson’s Untitled (Paul Rand’s Women, 1948).

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.

Parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00p.m.

Hammer Museum Programs

Liz Steyer after breakfast with three of her four children, ages 5 to 16. Laptops and cellphones are banned during meals.

By BRAD STONE
NY Times Published: August 9, 2009

Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.

“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”

Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

“It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”

The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.

“We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.

In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.

Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.

“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”

The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.

Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.

Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.

In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J., bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside.

Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it.”

Some families have tried to set limits on Internet use in the mornings. James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment, wakes every morning at 6 and spends the next hour on his BlackBerry, managing e-mail from contacts in different parts of the world.

But when he meets his wife, Liz, and their four children, ages 5 to 16, at the breakfast table, no laptops or phones are allowed.

Mr. Steyer says he and his sons feel the temptation of technology early. Kirk, 14, often runs through much of his daily one-hour allotment of video-game time in the morning.

Even Jesse, 5, has started asking each morning if he can play games on his father’s iPhone. And Mr. Steyer said he constantly feels the tug of waiting messages on his BlackBerry, even during morning hours that are reserved for family time.

“You have to resist the impulse. You have to switch from work mode to parenting mode,” Mr. Steyer said. “But meeting my own standard is tough.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 9, 2009

So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.

Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible, indeed worse than almost anyone thought possible not long ago. The nation has lost 6.7 million jobs since the recession began. Once you take into account the need to find employment for a growing working-age population, we’re probably around nine million jobs short of where we should be.

And the job market still hasn’t turned around — that slight dip in the measured unemployment rate last month was probably a statistical fluke. We haven’t yet reached the point at which things are actually improving; for now, all we have to celebrate are indications that things are getting worse more slowly.

For all that, however, the latest flurry of economic reports suggests that the economy has backed up several paces from the edge of the abyss.

A few months ago the possibility of falling into the abyss seemed all too real. The financial panic of late 2008 was as severe, in some ways, as the banking panic of the early 1930s, and for a while key economic indicators — world trade, world industrial production, even stock prices — were falling as fast as or faster than they did in 1929-30.

But in the 1930s the trend lines just kept heading down. This time, the plunge appears to be ending after just one terrible year.

So what saved us from a full replay of the Great Depression? The answer, almost surely, lies in the very different role played by government.

Probably the most important aspect of the government’s role in this crisis isn’t what it has done, but what it hasn’t done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn’t slashed spending as its income has fallen. (State and local governments are a different story.) Tax receipts are way down, but Social Security checks are still going out; Medicare is still covering hospital bills; federal employees, from judges to park rangers to soldiers, are still being paid.

All of this has helped support the economy in its time of need, in a way that didn’t happen back in 1930, when federal spending was a much smaller percentage of G.D.P. And yes, this means that budget deficits — which are a bad thing in normal times — are actually a good thing right now.

In addition to having this “automatic” stabilizing effect, the government has stepped in to rescue the financial sector. You can argue (and I would) that the bailouts of financial firms could and should have been handled better, that taxpayers have paid too much and received too little. Yet it’s possible to be dissatisfied, even angry, about the way the financial bailouts have worked while acknowledging that without these bailouts things would have been much worse.

The point is that this time, unlike in the 1930s, the government didn’t take a hands-off attitude while much of the banking system collapsed. And that’s another reason we’re not living through Great Depression II.

Last and probably least, but by no means trivial, have been the deliberate efforts of the government to pump up the economy. From the beginning, I argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, was too small. Nonetheless, reasonable estimates suggest that around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that plan — a number that will grow over time — and that the stimulus has played a significant role in pulling the economy out of its free fall.

All in all, then, the government has played a crucial stabilizing role in this economic crisis. Ronald Reagan was wrong: sometimes the private sector is the problem, and government is the solution.

And aren’t you glad that right now the government is being run by people who don’t hate government?

We don’t know what the economic policies of a McCain-Palin administration would have been. We do know, however, what Republicans in opposition have been saying — and it boils down to demanding that the government stop standing in the way of a possible depression.

I’m not just talking about opposition to the stimulus. Leading Republicans want to do away with automatic stabilizers, too. Back in March, John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that since families were suffering, “it’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it.” Fortunately, his advice was ignored.

I’m still very worried about the economy. There’s still, I fear, a substantial chance that unemployment will remain high for a very long time. But we appear to have averted the worst: utter catastrophe no longer seems likely.

And Big Government, run by people who understand its virtues, is the reason why.

By BARBARA EHRENREICH
NY Times Published: August 8, 2009

IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.

For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization — one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.

Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you’re in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”

By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.

Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you’re littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking “overly anxious” in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police “can force you to stop just to investigate why you don’t want to talk to them.” And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children’s Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.

Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing.

Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.”

But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.”

thanks to robert von sternberg

By DAN BARBER
NY Times Published: August 8, 2009

Tarrytown, N.Y.

IF the hardship of growing vegetables and fruits in the Northeast has made anything clear, it’s that the list of what can go wrong in the field is a very long one.

We wait all year for warmer weather and longer days. Once we get them, it seems new problems for farmers rise to the surface every week: overnight temperatures plunging close to freezing, early disease, aphid attacks. Another day, another problem.

The latest trouble is the explosion of late blight, a plant disease that attacks potatoes and tomatoes. Late blight appears innocent enough at first — a few brown spots here, some lesions there — but it spreads fast. Although the fungus isn’t harmful to humans, it has devastating effects on tomatoes and potatoes grown outdoors. Plants that appear relatively healthy one day, with abundant fruit and vibrant stems, can turn toxic within a few days. (See the Irish potato famine, caused by a strain of the fungus.)

Most farmers in the Northeast, accustomed to variable conditions, have come to expect it in some form or another. Like a sunburn or a mosquito bite, you’ll probably be hit by late blight sooner or later, and while there are steps farmers can take to minimize its damage and even avoid it completely, the disease is almost always present, if not active.

But this year is turning out to be different — quite different, according to farmers and plant scientists. For one thing, the disease appeared much earlier than usual. Late blight usually comes, well, late in the growing season, as fungal spores spread from plant to plant. So its early arrival caught just about everyone off guard.

And then there’s the perniciousness of the 2009 blight. The pace of the disease (it covered the Northeast in just a few days) and its strength (topical copper sprays, a convenient organic preventive, have been much less effective than in past years) have shocked even hardened Hudson Valley farmers.

Jack Algiere, head vegetable farmer at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (where I have a restaurant that purchases from the farm), lost more than half his field tomatoes in three days. Other organic farmers were forced to make a brutal choice: spray their tomato plants with fungicides, and lose organic certification, or watch the crop disappear. Even for farmers who routinely spray, or who reluctantly spray precautionary amounts, this year’s blight lowered yields. (Fungicides work only to suppress the disease, not cure it.) As one plant pathologist told me, “Farmers are out there praying and spraying.”

Of course, farmers aren’t the only ones affected. If you love eating flavorful organic field tomatoes, good luck — they’ll be as rare this summer as a week without rain. And those that survive will cost you; we’re already seeing price increases of 20 percent over last year.

So what’s going on here? Plant physiologists use the term “disease triangle” to describe the conditions necessary for a disease outbreak. You need the pathogen to be present (that’s the late blight), you need a host (in this case tomatoes and potatoes) and you need a favorable environment for the disease — for late blight that’s lots of rain, moderate temperatures and high humidity.

Does that last bit sound familiar? It has been the weather report for the Northeast this summer, especially in June. Where we saw precipitation fit for Noah’s Ark, late blight found something akin to a four-star hotel. Those soggy fields and backyard vegetable plots? Inviting, and all too easy to check into.

But weather alone doesn’t explain the early severity of the disease this year. We’ve had wet, cool summers in the past, but it’s never been this bad. Instead we have to look at two other factors: the origin of the tomato plants many of us cultivate, and the renewed interest in gardening.

According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens. Perhaps this is why the Northeast was hit so viciously: instead of being spread through large farms, the blight sneaked through lots of little gardens, enabling it to escape the attention of the people who track plant diseases.

It’s important to note, too, that this year there have been many more hosts than in the past as more and more Americans have taken to gardening. Credit the recession or Michelle Obama or both, but there’s been an increased awareness of the benefits of growing your own food. According to the National Gardening Association, 43 million households planned a backyard garden or put a stake in a share of a community garden in 2009, up from 36 million in 2008. That’s quite a few home gardeners who — given the popularity of the humble tomato — probably planted a starter or two this summer.

Here’s the unhappy twist: the explosion of home gardeners — the very people most conscious of buying local food and opting out of the conventional food chain — has paradoxically set the stage for the worst local tomato harvest in memory.

So what do we do?

For starters, if you’re planning a garden (and not growing from seed — the preferable, if less convenient, choice), then buy starter plants from a local grower or nursery. A tomato plant that travels 2,000 miles is no different from a tomato that has traveled 2,000 miles to your plate. It’s an effective way to help local growers, who rely on sales of these plants before the harvest arrives. It’s also a way to protect agriculture. If late blight occurs in a small nursery it’s relatively easy to recognize, as straightforward as being able to see the plant, recognize its symptoms and isolate it before it has a chance to spread.

This is less of an option on a farm that’s spread out over dozens of acres, nor is it likely once the plant gets to a large retailer. A plant pathologist from Cornell told me she visited one such store and noticed the tomato plants were infected with blight. She immediately reported it to the manager, who said he couldn’t remove the plants without approval from his superiors (which would take time). The pathologist returned a week later to find that the plants were still there.

In fact, this late blight outbreak appears to be a classic example of what Charles Perrow, a sociologist, calls a “tightly coupled” accident. With tight coupling — lots of tomatoes grown in one place, say, or distributed by one large retailer — failures in one part of the system can quickly multiply. The damage cannot be as readily controlled. The recent spike in food-borne illnesses is another example of the problems associated with an overly consolidated food chain. E. coli’s been around for a long time; what’s new is how quickly and widely it spreads when there are only a few big meat producers.

There’s another lesson here for the home gardener. When you start a garden, no matter how small, you become part of an agricultural network that binds you to other farmers and gardeners. Airborne late blight spores are a perfect illustration of agriculture’s web-like connections. The tomato plant on the windowsill, the backyard garden and the industrial tomato farm are, to be a bit reductive about it, one very large farm. As we begin to grow more of our own food, we need to reacquaint ourselves with plant pathology and understand that what we grow, and how we grow it, affects everyone else. (Potato farmers in the Andes, for example, plant disease-prone varieties at high altitudes where the cold keeps pathogens in check — to protect themselves and their neighbors. They don’t get as big a harvest, but they decrease the risk of an epidemic.)

Government can help. For all the new growers out there, what’s missing is not the inspiration, it’s the expertise, the agricultural wisdom and technical knowledge passed on from generation to generation. Congress recognized the need for this kind of support almost 100 years ago when it passed the Smith-Lever Act, creating a network of cooperative extension services in partnership with land-grant universities. Agricultural extension agents were sent to farms to share the latest technological advances, introducing new varieties of vegetables and, yes, checking the fields for disease.

The cooperative extension service is still active, but budget cuts have left it ill equipped to deal with a new generation of farmers. The emphasis now is on reaching farmers through mass e-mail messages and Web-based dialogues, with less hands-on observation. That’s like getting a doctor’s check-up over the phone. More agents in the field during those critical weeks in June might well have resulted in swifter, more effective protection of the plants: early detection of any disease requires a number of trained eyes.

The food community has a role to play, too — by taking another look at plant-breeding programs, another major fixture of our nation’s land-grant universities, and their efforts to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables. To many advocates of sustainability, science, when it’s applied to agriculture, is considered suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic. It’s a nostalgia I’m guilty of promoting as a chef when I celebrate only heirloom tomatoes on my menus. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new.

That includes the development of plants with natural resistance to blight and other diseases — plants like the Mountain Magic tomato, an experimental variety from Cornell that the Stone Barns Center is testing in a field trial. So far there’s been no evidence of disease in these plants, while more than 70 percent of the heirloom varieties of tomatoes have succumbed to the pathogen.

Mountain Magic is an example of regionalized breeding. For years, this kind of breeding has fallen by the wayside — the result of a food movement wary of science and an industrialized food chain that eschews differentiation in favor of uniformity. (Why develop and sell 20 different tomato varieties for 20 different microclimates when you can simply sell one?)

Breeders in regions vulnerable to late blight should be encouraged to select for characteristics that are resistant to it, in the same way that they select for, say, lower water demands in the Southwest. While they’re at it, breeders could be selecting for flavor and not for uniformity, shipping size and shelf life. The result will mean not just tastier tomatoes; it will translate into a food system with greater variety and better regional adaptation.

Healthy, natural systems abhor uniformity — just as a healthy society does. We need, then, to look to a system of food and agriculture that values and mimics natural diversity. The five-acre monoculture of tomato plants next door might be local, but it’s really no different from the 200-acre one across the country: both have sacrificed the ecological insurance that comes with biodiversity.

What does the resilient farm of the future look like? I saw it the other day. The farmer was growing 30 or so different crops, with several varieties of the same vegetable. Some were heirloom varieties, many weren’t. He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either.

Sometimes giving in to nature can be the biggest victory of all.

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: August 8, 2009

Sometimes the people we write about drive us crazy.

During the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, I used to wake up in the middle of the night, trying to separate truth from lies.

The same thing happened during the imbroglio between Sgt. James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the days before the beer summit — (“Beer makes me bloat,” Gates told me) — I woke up in the middle of the night, puzzling over how the policeman and the professor could have such irreconcilable stories.

The Cambridge officer wrote in his report that Gates had yelled at him, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” The Harvard professor denied it.

Crowley seems like a good guy, not the type to falsify a police report. And Gates, a man well-satisfied with the salons of Harvard, PBS and Martha’s Vineyard, does not seem like the type to resort to trash-talking from the ’hood.

So how to reconcile it? At 4 a.m., it suddenly hit me. Gates had just gotten back from researching Yo-Yo Ma’s genealogy in China. Maybe he had said something like, “I was outside the country exploring Yo-Yo Ma’s roots,” or even “Yo-Yo Ma’s mama’s roots,” and the policeman misheard him.

Later that morning, I ran it past Gates.

“That’s funny,” he replied. “But no, no. I didn’t mention China to Sgt. Crowley. However, Yo-Yo Ma is a friend, and we do call him ‘Yo Mama’ around Cambridge.”

We never do get to the bottom of some stories.

Of course, more often, it works the other way around. We drive the people we write about crazy.

I was reminded of this reading the new chronicle of the vertiginous 2008 campaign written by The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson.

Once more, we are mesmerized, even horrified, as Bill Clinton does his dinner-theater version of “King Lear,” howling at the South Carolina sky as he realizes he no longer has enough juice with African-American voters to derail Barack Obama and make his wife president.

Bill could not bear to see the press transfer the crown to Obama as the best politician of our age. He thought he’d retain the title at least for his lifetime.

It drove him temporarily mad. It was Bill who changed the strategy for the primary in South Carolina, where the Clintons had originally planned to campaign minimally and lose, but not so badly that it would scuttle Hillary’s campaign.

“Bill Clinton decided, by God, we were going to do better with African-Americans,” a senior Clinton adviser told the authors.

Ego can be dangerous. Bill “believed that Obama had gotten a free ride from the media, and he wanted to force a conversation about that,” Balz and Johnson wrote in their book, “The Battle for America 2008.” They added, “His once certain political touch and instincts eluded him.”

It’s also interesting to read the chapter on “Palinmania” and remember how serene Sarah Palin was before she became unhinged by fame and her fixation with her reviews, especially from conspiratorial and gossipy bloggers.

The same McCain advisers who later turned against Palin were impressed with her at first, when she earned adjectives like unruffled, self-confident, tough-minded and self-assured.

From Bill Ayers to Reverend Wright, “Sarahcuda” was ready to bite, telling rallies, “The heels are on, the gloves are off.”

But by the end, after Tina Fey, Katie Couric and the shopping spree, Palin had lost confidence. She became erratic.

“During a campaign trip in October to New Hampshire, she balked at sharing the stage with former congressman Jeb Bradley because they differed on abortion and drilling in the Arctic wilderness,” the authors wrote. “That same day, she was reluctant to join Bradley and Senator John Sununu for conversation aboard her campaign bus and had to be coaxed out of the back of the bus to talk to them, according to a McCain adviser.”

Palin is still obsessed with the blogosphere, which recently lit up with a rumor started by a fellow mavericky Alaskan, who also no longer has his job — that she and Todd were Splitsville. She sarcastically told Mike Allen of Politico that she loved finding out “what’s goin’ on in my life from the news.”

She deserted her post as governor to write her book about the “pioneering spirit,” as she told Allen. The contradiction seems lost on her.

And, as Talking Points Memo reported on Friday, she put up a demented, fact-free Facebook rant trashing the president’s health care plan: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Do we sometimes drive ’em downright crazy? You betcha!

LAST STAND? A newspaper kiosk on Broad Street.

By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE
NY Times Published: August 6, 2009

On a recent trip into Philadelphia, after I exited the Interstate and coasted to a stop at the first traffic light, a man walked up to my car. He wore a black apron with a change pouch and held aloft a copy of The Philadelphia Daily News, the city’s tart, irreverent tabloid. It gave me a warm feeling. Of course it did! I’m a newspaper guy. I worked as a reporter for The Daily News in the 1980s, and later for what we called “big sister,” the sober, broadsheet Philadelphia Inquirer. Even in better times, I would have been happy to see the product being hawked, but these days any small sign of life in the newspaper industry, even just the sight of someone reading a paper, feels positively uplifting. I handed over 75 cents for my Daily News, then drove on toward the center of the city — and U.S. Bankruptcy Court, where a hearing was soon to begin, part of an ongoing process that will determine the fate of the city’s newspapers.

Philadelphia is, of course, the city of Ben Franklin, a printer by trade who published The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper, as well as Poor Richard’s Almanac. It is where the Founding Fathers drafted the nation’s most important documents — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Word of the Declaration went out to the people on July 6, 1776, when it was published in the pages of The Pennsylvania Evening Post. By the early 20th century, the raucous, elbows-out era of American newspapering, there were 10 daily papers in the city. Now down to a besieged two, Philadelphia is a particularly good place to observe what appears to be big-city journalism’s last stand, when many of America’s metropolitan newspapers must quickly figure out how to become profitable again or face likely extinction.

The stakes extend in many directions. Newspapers remain the primary source of news-gathering in America. And unlike so many Internet “sites,” they are firmly grounded in a geographical place. To read a newspaper is to know what town you’re in. As a young reporter, I covered the trial of a well-known Philadelphia mobster, Harry (the Hunchback) Riccobene, who had been tried, convicted and incarcerated numerous times previously. I approached him during a break on the trial’s first day and asked if he was nervous. He wasn’t. “What’s the expression?” he said to me. “My record speaks for itself.” I was pretty proud when that made it into print. I felt as if I’d shared a joke with a whole city, one that I knew appreciated that kind of wiseguy humor.

No one would say that the history of journalism in America is one of unremitting excellence. Plenty of smaller communities, and some big cities, have never been blessed with anything better than lackluster newspapers. Certainly The Inquirer and The Daily News, when owned by Walter Annenberg, Philadelphia’s postwar press baron, were undistinguished, in no small part because they were subject to Annenberg’s political and personal pique. (He was said to have a blacklist of names that could not appear in print, an eclectic group that included Ralph Nader, Imogene Coca and Zsa Zsa Gabor, as well as the city’s N.B.A. franchise, when it went uncovered for a season because Annenberg had a beef with its owner.)

Annenberg’s sale of The Inquirer and The Daily News in 1969 to the Knight newspaper chain (which later became Knight Ridder) had the effect of elevating the journalism. The Inquirer established a formidable reputation by winning 17 Pulitzer Prizes between 1975 and 1990, a total second only to that of The New York Times in that period. It is certainly less ambitious now than in its peak years, when it sent reporters to cover every big national story and maintained a half-dozen foreign bureaus, but it remains a force in its region and capable of the kind of “watchdog” journalism essential in cities like Philadelphia, which seem to breed corrupt politicians. The Daily News, with a reduced staff that covers fewer stories, remains aggressive, and its distinctive voice is taken seriously in the city’s corridors of power.

But the journalistic worthiness of the two newspapers has not protected them. And what was seen as a possible salvation in 2006, the purchase of the newspapers by Philadelphians with deep roots in the city (the first local investors since Annenberg), has, to this point, produced only a ghastly hemorrhage of money. The new owners put up $150 million of their own. Before filing for bankruptcy, they stopped payment on $400 million in debt. They have not, however, given up, and are locked in a standoff with lenders that Brian Tierney, the leader of the ownership group, has framed as a battle to preserve quality journalism in Philadelphia.

Tierney is the central figure in Philadelphia’s newspaper drama today — an imperfect, improbable savior who in his previous role as the city’s most prominent public-relations executive was hyperaggressive, and often bullying, in his interactions with reporters. No one would compare him with Franklin, except perhaps in his self-confidence. But he has taken to newspapering with a convert’s devotion. In one of our conversations, he had to stop talking for a moment as tears came rolling down his cheeks. He was telling me about a speech he gave to an adult-education group, a routine appearance until the moderator asked everyone to join hands and pray for The Inquirer and The Daily News. “It was unbelievable they would say a prayer for us,” Tierney said as he reached under his glasses to dry his eyes. “But they care. You know, it’s not like we’re some radio station thinking about switching from Top 40 to a salsa format. This is the people’s work, a public trust.”

Bankruptcy proceedings in which the parties do not amicably come together on terms for restructuring debt are fluid and unpredictable. The Philadelphia newspaper case has been particularly rancorous. A possibility exists, probably remote at this point, that the papers could just fold, making Philadelphia the winner of a dubious sweepstakes: first major American city to be left without a daily newspaper. Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation, which finances journalistic innovation, told me, “It’s going to happen somewhere.”

What you notice first about Tierney is his stocky, strong-looking build and the restless physical energy he gives off, as if he’s always an instant away from rushing the line and tackling a quarterback. Now 52, he grew up in Philadelphia’s blue-collar suburbs but was educated at its elite schools, Episcopal Academy on the Main Line followed by the University of Pennsylvania. His father drove a cab before starting a window-glass company; his mother worked as a hatcheck attendant. Short on money to run the newspapers, Tierney sometimes seems as if he’s trying to post Philly street cred as collateral. In a city where some old-timers still identify their neighborhoods by the Catholic parishes they live in, he makes a point of saying that after work on most nights he drives back to the suburbs on a route that takes him past “Roman and Hallahan” — Roman Catholic and John W. Hallahan, the high schools his father and mother attended.

He has taken his public relations mind-set to newspapering. He says he thinks the industry shares too much bad news about itself — “The audience for TV news is tanking, but do you ever hear them talk about that?” — and he was an early advocate for the idea that newspapers ought to begin charging for online content, a notion that has recently gained momentum. He can be a loose cannon. Testifying before Congress in April, he attempted a strained metaphor that involved a “dance club” charging high prices for beer but not paying its dancers, or what might be termed the content providers. “Was that example in reference to a gentlemen’s club?” Representative John Conyers asked. “That’s the kind of club I meant, sir,” he responded.

In bankruptcy court that morning, during an interminable recess, the door in the back of the courtroom kept swinging open as Tierney blew in and out, moving between his lawyers, a group of Teamsters-affiliated newspaper truck drivers who came to support him and the print and radio reporters there to cover the hearing. At one point, he shared a confidence with reporters — “This is off the record, guys,” he said — then returned 20 minutes later and repeated the same thing, just about word for word, on the record.

Like many East Coast and Rust Belt cities, Philadelphia has long had what is sometimes referred to as a challenging union environment. At the newspapers, the Teamsters, whom I remember as physically imposing, tended to call the shots for all the unions, but the passage of time and the onset of job insecurity has mellowed them. On the sidewalk outside the courtroom, a half-dozen drivers, graying and grandfatherly, held signs that said, “Teamsters for Tierney.”

Inside, Jim Phelan, a Daily News driver for 50 years, chatted with Bob Warner, who has had a long career as an investigative reporter at The Daily News. “You remember that Dexter column?” Phelan asked Warner, recalling a long-ago column by Pete Dexter, now a novelist, involving some high jinks with a lynx in a suitcase. Warner brought up an article by Bill Conlin about a hilariously profane tirade by the baseball manager Dallas Green. The two of them kept one-upping each other with their favorite stories. It felt like a wake, except that the loved one was still on life support.

Tierney’s ownership group, Philadelphia Media Holdings, purchased the Philadelphia newspapers, along with their joint Web site, Philly.com, for $515 million. The papers had basically been orphaned by the McClatchy chain, which, after buying Knight Ridder, announced plans to immediately unload the chain’s least profitable papers, including the two in Philadelphia. Tierney told me that under his ownership, The Inquirer and The Daily News have been operating at a profit if you exclude the debt obligations. That sounds almost comical, like a homeowner saying his household finances are in terrific shape except for the mortgage he can’t pay, but it holds out the promise that print journalism without excessive debt, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, may be a sustainable, if not an overly lucrative, business.

Tierney and his partners want to invest additional money and emerge from bankruptcy in financial control of the newspapers — in essence, they hope to buy them again, but this time for about $36 million in addition to the newspaper building and other considerations. Meanwhile, the papers’ fortunes diminish with each passing month. The Daily News’s circulation has fallen below 100,000, down from a peak in the early 1980s of nearly 300,000, and reporters in its cavernous newsroom work amid rows of empty desks. The Inquirer still employs more than 300 journalists, a substantial number in this era but about half of what it once had. In the six months ending in April, its daily circulation fell to 288,000 — from 545,000 in 1983 and 352,000 as recently as 2007. Advertising revenue in the last year has dropped precipitously.

Before their industry went into free fall, most Philadelphia journalists would have been apoplectic at the thought of working for Tierney. He was enmeshed in local politics, contributing money to Republican candidates and running campaigns. In the late 1990s, he successfully fought to keep an investigative article involving his best-known client, the local Catholic archdiocese, out of The Inquirer. The reporter on the story ended up filing a defamation suit against his own newspaper and settling out of court. It was a fiasco for the newspaper, and Tierney was in the middle of it. At Philadelphia Media Holdings, Tierney accepted a pay raise and a $350,000 bonus right before the bankruptcy filing — and after employees agreed to give up their own paltry union raises.

It is a sign of the times that most of those at the newspapers seem to accept and even embrace Tierney, preferring him to Knight Ridder in its last years of ownership; to the bankers they still might work for; and certainly to the prospect of the whole enterprise going belly up. It doesn’t hurt that journalists are wired to enjoy a good show and that Tierney provides one. A couple of months ago, he staged a big barbecue in the papers’ back lot and put out an advertising-packed special section to celebrate The Inquirer’s 180th anniversary — a less-obvious milestone than, say, a 175th or 200th anniversary. “He’s like our P. T. Barnum,” Craig McCoy, one of The Inquirer’s most respected reporters, told me.

Tierney gave a tour to Annenberg’s widow, Leonore, not long after taking over the newspapers. They sat in her husband’s old office, now Tierney’s, on North Broad Street, looking out over the city skyline. “Walter had nicer furniture,” she told him. He also had a more favorable business climate, operating long before Internet powerhouses like Craigslist began to gobble up revenue from classified ads.

It was an article of faith among this generation of newspaper publishers that once they finally “got” the Web and built dynamic, advertising-friendly Web sites, they would prosper. But display advertising never migrated in hoped-for numbers to newspaper Web sites. Then the recession hit, and what had already been disappointing growth in online revenue stopped. For the 12-month period ending in June, the Philadelphia newspapers attracted $12.9 million in online revenue, down from $17.3 million in the same period a year previously.

There is every reason to believe that the big, grab-bag metro daily that mixes its news in with comics, advice columns, obituaries and recipes, and undertakes an expensive manufacturing and delivery operation each day to put the product on the street, will pass into history. Among the problems faced by Tierney and other publishers is that many of the big thinkers on the periphery of their industry — academics, Web entrepreneurs, former journalists with the wisdom of hindsight — have already moved on. They’re done with paper, ink, trucks, fuel, the whole era.

This drumbeat, a relentless declaration that print is doomed, may be a problem in and of itself, making it easy to cast anyone who wants to save print as a Luddite. In a widely read essay earlier this year, Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. and an Internet consultant, suggested embracing the current moment of flux. “That is what real revolutions are like,” he wrote. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. . . . When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place.”

But parts of the system are actually not broken at all. Journalists still know how to gather news. And the Internet is a step forward in disseminating it. What’s broken is the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created. Most of it is available to readers online, free, including on newspapers’ own Web sites, where it is not sufficiently supported by advertising.

Newspaper Web sites do draw traffic (“eyeballs”). In April, when the beloved voice of the Philadelphia Phillies, Harry Kalas, collapsed in the broadcast booth and died just before an afternoon game, Philly.com quickly put up a comprehensive package, including a photo gallery, articles from the archives and a space for readers to write in their memories. The site got 3.8 million page views that day, nearly double its average. “The Web is a big part of us being the dominant news source in the region,” Tierney told me. “We want it to be what people turn to for breaking news, or to celebrate a big event or to share their sorrow. And that’s already happening.”

He is under no illusion, though, that the Web site will come close any time soon to supporting the news-gathering of the 400 journalists he employs. For that, he has the print editions. (The joint Web site for The Inquirer and The Daily News accounts for just 6.5 percent of the company’s advertising revenue, a little below the industry average. On it own, it would support a fraction of the current staff, maybe just a few dozen journalists.) Tierney has ordered a stop to the practice of putting exclusive Inquirer and Daily News articles up on Philly.com the night before their publication in print. This extends even to reviews. “Are we going to get beat on a restaurant review?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

As soon as possible, he wants to begin charging for online content. As he told me this, he banged a bagel on a conference table, which sounded like a rock as it hit. “You hear that?” This bagel stinks, he said. “It’s got the same consistency inside and out, but if you went down to our cafeteria, it costs like $1.25. That’s what people pay for stuff like this, so you mean to tell me I can’t get them to pay that for online access to all the incredible stuff in The Inquirer and Daily News online? People who say that all this content wants to be free aren’t paying talented people to create it.”

In an industry currently marinating in self-doubt, Tierney has the appeal of clarity. He may not ultimately be right, but he’s emphatic. Nothing, in his mind, is in place to match the still-powerful newspaper engines. Certainly not television and radio, whose news operations in Philadelphia, as in most cities, largely piggyback on the newspapers. And not blogs or the nascent foundation-supported journalism springing up in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

“We do the brawny work,” Tierney said, sounding like the C.E.O. of some smokestack industry. “The Web efforts, they add something. I congratulate them. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But if somebody thinks in any short term, or even medium term, that the answers are those things, they’re kidding themselves. I know I sound like a heretic in that I won’t come out and say, ‘They’re the future.’ But they’re not. The brawny work is what we’re doing, and the brawny vehicle to carry it is the printed product.”

I met with Alberto Ibargüen, the Knight Foundation president, at the Newseum in Washington, where he serves as chairman — and where every day, at street level, a sampling of front pages from around the nation is displayed. I looked at them on my way in, and even some of the names sounded like relics from another era: The Elkhart Truth; The Santa Fe New Mexican; The Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

Knight has endowed journalism professorships at universities around the nation, and the health of newspapers has long been a focus of its philanthropy. But as Ibargüen explained it, that has changed — the foundation now seeks to preserve news and information, as distinct from saving newspapers. Knight has been a primary source of financing for MinnPost.com, in Minneapolis, and the Voice of San Diego, the two most advanced Web-only local news operations. It recently gave a grant to Spot.us, a nonprofit start-up that invites citizens to decide what investigative stories are worthy of its financial support — a concept that seems almost designed to send a shiver up the spine of traditional journalists. “Why should an editor have all the fun on deciding what writers are going to do?” Ibargüen said. “This invites journalists to pitch their stories on a Web site and have citizens decide what’s valuable to them. . . . They might say, ‘Here’s $3,000 to do an investigation of the school superintendent.’ ”

Ibargüen and others involved in the invention of new-age journalism speak a language I’ve never heard in newsrooms. When I met with Jan Schaffer, director of the Knight-financed J-Lab at American University (and formerly the business editor at The Inquirer), she referred repeatedly to “the media ecosystem.” She said that “news is a process, not a product” and talked of “big-J journalists,” those at newspapers and other traditional outlets, and “little-j journalists,” citizens who create their own journalism. She said that one of her favorite new outlets is a Web site covering suburban Chappaqua, adding that it was “run by three stay-at-home moms.”

Many working journalists in the country regularly check a Web site known to most as “Romenesko” (after its creator, Jim Romenesko), which aggregates industry news and these days consists mainly of layoffs and other dire news. It can be excruciating to read. Just this year, The Rocky Mountain News perished. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a Web-only publication with a tiny staff. Detroit’s daily newspapers are now delivered just three days a week. The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company, and The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, each went through near-death experiences as their owners won labor concessions after threatening to shutter the papers.

Smaller newspapers, those with circulations under 50,000, are considered the healthiest part of the industry. “They’re not making 30 percent profit margins like they once did, but most of them are doing fine,” John Morton, a newspaper analyst who has followed the industry for decades, told me. Most analysts predict that the papers with a national profile and brand — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — will find a way to survive and stay in print. (It must be noted that few can say exactly how this will happen.)

The most endangered segment is the one occupied by The Inquirer and other big metro papers that once dominated their regions, in some cases had national and even international reach but now struggle to fully staff bureaus in their state capitals. Among those currently in bankruptcy are the papers that are a part of the vast Tribune Company, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. What the bankrupt and most at-risk papers have in common is that they recently changed hands and the new owners took on debt — immense debt, in the case of the Tribune Company, which listed obligations of $13 billion when it filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

The newspapers that emerge from bankruptcy should have a better chance at survival, but they’ll be different. “Bear in mind that there will be an economic recovery at some point,” Morton said. “But I suspect the big metros have lost a substantial amount of their advertising forever. When they return to profitability, it will be at a lower level, and the papers will be diminished in size and journalism.”

Much of what will be sorted out in the coming years is the extent to which news will continue to be produced by professional journalists. In May, I attended a meeting of the Knight-sponsored “Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy,” an impressive group led by the former United States solicitor general Ted Olson and Marissa Mayer, an executive at Google. Much of the conversation was abstract and airy, but even within that, a kind of clash in worldviews was apparent. One commission member, Danah Boyd, a blogger and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, expressed her admiration for “journalism by the public, for the public.” She advocated for the need to have universal high-speed access for young people who blur the lines of art, research and news and “like to mash it up and mix it up” — and spoke with passion about how on her way to the airport in Boston she learned more from her Twitter feeds about a traffic backup than from the local all-news radio.

John Carroll, a fellow panelist and a lion of the traditional news business — he edited The Baltimore Sun and The Los Angeles Times — seemed to shift impatiently through much of the all-day meeting. When he spoke, he apologized for not seeming to be sufficiently forward-looking. He said the country needed “a national base line of originally reported news . . . the kind of news produced by professional reporters.” Just to be clear, he added, “By reporters, I mean people who go out and dig stuff up.”

In January, the Knight Foundation awarded a $200,000 grant to The Philadelphia Public School Notebook. Its editor, Paul Socolar, may be something like the journalist of the future. He is earnest, dedicated to a cause, foundation-financed and, to this point, read by a narrow audience. I accompanied him to a press briefing for the rollout of the Philadelphia school district’s $3.2 billion budget. He quickly imbibed a thick handout filled with charts and long columns of numbers and jotted down questions, which seemed a bit sharper and harder to answer than those asked by the reporters from the city’s two dailies.

The Notebook actually started publishing in 1994, and Socolar, who had two children in the public schools, became its editor five years later. During his tenure, Socolar told me, The Public School Notebook refined its mission: its editors and contributors still consider themselves advocates for change, he said, “but it became equally clear to us that we have to do reporting, have journalistic standards and publish real news stories.”

It has largely achieved that. The Notebook, a five-times-a-year print publication, breaks stories and is notably well written. The grant was to improve its Web site and, as Socolar put it, start a “two-way conversation” with readers. But a broad audience and impact, two goals of traditional journalism, have been hard to attain. Socolar acknowledged that The Notebook’s core readers are insiders — principals, teachers, district administrators and highly engaged parents. “There is a jolt you can get out of an Inquirer story that I know we don’t,” Socolar said.

The new money helped energize The Notebook’s Web site, but it will take time before it generates more traffic and hosts a dynamic dialogue. “It’s still pretty modest,” Socolar said. “About 400 visitors a day — 500 or 600 on really good days. And some of those folks are stumbling upon it because they’re looking for the movie ‘The Notebook.’ ”

In Philadelphia, the Knight Foundation has also supported the Web site Plan Philly, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania that reports on planning and zoning at a level of detail never approached by the city’s newspapers, as well as the city’s version of EveryBlock.org, a “hyperlocal” that provides microscopic, data-driven information on segments of the city — home sales, crime, health-code violations at restaurants and so forth. A proliferation of blogs and Web sites cover the arts, sports and food scenes in Philadelphia. A Web site called the Media Mobilizing Project, also underwritten by the Knight Foundation, seeks out the stories of immigrants and other minorities, which newspapers, even at their best, rarely did a good job of telling.

One of Tierney’s first moves was to hire Bill Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer winner when he was an Inquirer reporter, as the paper’s top editor. Marimow, who is 62, had moved on to Baltimore, where he edited The Sun, then to Washington to serve as managing editor for news at National Public Radio. His return to Philadelphia amounted to a doubling down on labor-intensive, expensive-to-produce, hard-news journalism. It’s not at all clear there’s a business plan in that, but if The Inquirer goes down, it will do so with guns blazing.

In March, Vince Fumo, a longtime state senator from South Philly and power broker in the state capital, was convicted in federal court in a massive public corruption scheme. The main charge involved millions of dollars given to a nonprofit he controlled from donors who sought to remain hidden, including PECO Energy, a state-regulated electric utility that secretly contributed a whopping $17 million. It was Inquirer reporters who first uncovered the conspiracy and identified the sources of the money, and the federal prosecutor, in his closing argument to the jury, took the unusual step of crediting them. “It only stopped for one reason,” Robert Zauzmer, an assistant U.S. attorney, said. “It stopped for the same reason that everything else stops in this case. The publicity starts in The Philadelphia Inquirer . . . and that was the end of the scheme.”

The crisis in newspapers is sometimes framed as something that matters mainly to journalists, but it is of course more than that. My conversations in Philadelphia showed a concern far beyond the newsrooms. I asked Zauzmer if he had in mind the papers’ imperiled status when he addressed the jury. “I did, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do it,” he said, adding that he would not have done so if there was not also a strategic reason for crediting The Inquirer. The publicity caused Fumo to try to cover his tracks, he said, and those actions figured into some of the criminal charges. (“The Inquirer will go absolutely BALLISTIC if they ever really find out,” Fumo, urging associates to withhold information, wrote in one e-mail message that came out at trial.)

Marimow called my attention to some recent investigative triumphs — a story on a C.E.O. who stole a half-million dollars from his charter school, was charged criminally and had just pleaded guilty; another on a large number of city employees who failed to pay their property taxes. As we talked, he showed me letters and printed-out e-mail from readers responding to emotionally resonant stories. He called them “the irrefutable evidence of the beauty, the importance and the significance of the newspaper.”

One letter was in response to an article about a longtime supermarket employee who was fired after he forgot his reading glasses one day and took a pair from a shelf to do inventory. “I want to thank you for your article on Bob Martucci,” a reader wrote. “Thank God for the press.” Another letter came after an article on the funeral of a slain police officer who was buried with a sonogram of his unborn child. “I sat in a park in midmorning with a Wawa coffee and the paper,” it said. “Within minutes I had tears slowly running down my cheeks.”

With The Inquirer and The Daily News teetering, many in the city have hoped that the Pew Charitable Trusts would emerge as a white knight. Founded with money from the Sun Oil fortune, Pew is Philadelphia-based and prominent, nationally, in studying, supporting and in various ways participating in the media. Pew’s managing director for information initiatives, Donald Kimelman, spent two decades at The Inquirer, including four years as its Moscow correspondent. He told me that the Pew did, indeed, look seriously at giving financial backing to a Web-only news operation in Philadelphia but decided against it for a reason that should catch the attention of anyone hoping that foundations are the future of muscular news-gathering: It did not want to give birth to a long-term money drain.

The foundation commissioned a study three years ago, when the Philadelphia papers were passing out of Knight Ridder’s control and some prospective buyers seemed likely to make drastic cuts. “Everyone was thinking of the worst-case scenario,” Kimelman said, “and we had to ask ourselves, ‘Is there a role for us to play?’ ”

The news site was to be seeded with nonprofit funds but with a goal that it could eventually subsist on advertising revenue. Kimelman concluded that the projections were too optimistic to support even the 30 or so journalists envisioned — and that was before the market for online advertising tanked. “We didn’t want to be in it for two or three years,” he said, “and then instead of the for-profit publisher laying people off, we’d be the nonprofit doing layoffs.”

The other reason the plan died was that Brian Tierney and his local partners — the largest is Bruce Toll, a founder of the home builder Toll Brothers — won the bidding for the newspapers. “There was some thought that we should be the heroes,” Kimelman said. “But we were not going to compete with local ownership. When the Tierney group came in, they became the local heroes.”

Tierney and his partners are still operating The Inquirer and The Daily News, but who ultimately owns them is to be determined in bankruptcy court. Some of the banks that initially lent money for the acquisition in 2006 have taken their losses and departed, selling the loans at deep discounts. The owner of the largest share of debt in the newspapers is Angelo, Gordon & Company, a New York firm specializing in “distressed debt.”

That firm is also a player in the Tribune Company bankruptcy; in the management of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is expected to emerge soon from bankruptcy; and in American Media Company, which publishes The National Enquirer and The Star. A banker at the firm, Bradley Pattelli, is involved in all those properties, making him a highly influential if little-known figure in American newspapers. (I talked to Pattelli twice on the telephone, but he would not speak on the record. At his request I e-mailed him questions, but he did not respond to them.)

The reorganization plan Tierney files in bankruptcy court will offer lenders about $36 million — raised from the initial group as well as some new investors — along with the Inquirer Building, just north of Center City, and its surrounding real estate. The newspapers would either become tenants or move to another location. The lenders will follow with a proposal of their own. They are likely to place a higher financial value on the newspapers, although no one disputes that they are worth far less than the money owed.

Angelo, Gordon, however, appears to want to play a significant role in owning and operating the papers. Tierney contends that the company would quickly close The Daily News and, over time, cut costs in such a way as to decimate The Inquirer. It’s impossible to know. (And, depending on which way the economy turns, Tierney himself, who has already presided over substantial layoffs, could find that he has to make further cuts.)

What is clear is that beyond the hardheaded, dollars-and-sense negotiations, Tierney is making an appeal based partly on emotion. He’s the Philly guy protecting a local resource — and the future of print journalism in a city with a history of, and a continuing need for, great newspapering. Like Marimow, he kept directing me to examples of recent articles, which he had spread out on the table. One was an investigative series on an arcane city agency discovered to be granting huge tax cuts to insiders.

“This isn’t cheap to do,” he said, holding up a newspaper with the big front-page headline, “It’s Who You Know.” “Think about the cost of it — the writing, the editing, even the newsprint. But I’m proud of it. It’s what we’ve got to keep doing. People feel that here. I think even our drivers feel like, We’re not bringing in doughnuts. We’re bringing in The Inquirer and Daily News.”

Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Warrior Girls,” about the injury epidemic in girls’ sports.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 8, 2009
An article on Page 36 this weekend about the plight of daily newspapers in Philadelphia misspells the name of a company that once owned The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. It is McClatchy, not McClatchey.

Some of the author’s round-trip cookware, courtesy of mom.

By Anna Winger
T Magazine

My mother phased out of popular culture in 1975. O.K., maybe 1977. She is the most unlikely of iconoclasts, but when it comes to the recent fashion for recycling, it turns out she was way ahead of the curve.
She never throws anything out, and she rarely buys anything new. But she doesn’t hoard things; she insists on passing them along to her children.
My brother, Alex, and I call her the International Rug Smuggler because once she persuaded a neighbor who was coming to Berlin,
because once she persuaded a neighbor who was coming to Berlin, where I live, to haul a big old Oriental rug from her Massachusetts basement across the Atlantic. It ended up on the floor in my husband’s study. The next time my dad came to stay with us, he was shocked to see this rug, a wedding present fromhis first marriage, which ended in 1963.
You could call my mother the original green consumer, except that the carbon imprint of her efforts to foist off the things she doesn’t want on us would probably offset any benefit to the environment.
But isn’t this everyone’s dilemma? As I scramble to adjust my own compulsive shopping habits to reflect an eco- (and economically) friendly attitude, contradictions keep leading me back to the same worrisome possibility: maybe the only way to shop green is not to shop at all. In light of global warming, peak oil and toxic Chinese exports, my mother’s restraint suddenly seems stylish, if not inspiring.
She has two nice houses, a winter one and a summer one, that have both looked exactly the same for as long as I can remember. She has been married to my father for 41 years. She grew up in a house in England surrounded by stuff that had been in the family for literally hundreds of years. When she arrived in the United States with my dad in the 1960s, she was shocked by the way her new American friends spent money on furniture. Where she came from, people just picked
through their ancestors’ attics when they needed a chair.
So maybe it’s an English thing, or an English thing of a certain class and generation. Either way, she is bewildered to have produced two American children so easily seduced by consumer culture.
When I was a teenager in the ’80s, my best friend’s mother was constantly redecorating their house. I longed for the trompe l’oeil marble floors, leopard-print chairs and mirrored vanities I saw over there and told my mother. She scoffed. Our house remained filled with heirloom furniture, African art, lots of carpets and lots and lots of books. I begged for a canopied bed and wallpaper. Never happened.
When I moved to Berlin, my mother showed up for her first visit with a suitcase full of her old pots, pans and cutlery. (She insists some of it was new.) When I pointed out that they do have stores in Berlin and, in fact, everything she had brought me came originally from Germany or nearby Denmark, she just shrugged.
‘‘Why buy anything if you don’t have to?’’ she said.
The only notable exception to her no-shopping rule is travel to exotic places.
‘‘God forbid you set foot in Ikea with a credit card,’’ she would tell me. ‘‘But if you find yourself in Nepal — or better, Tibet — buy up every prayer rug you see and run for the plane.’’
Maybe this sounds like another green contradiction, but then again, artisans usually work with local materials, and she mostly likes antiques. In other words, when she does shop, she deliberately buys good quality things that are unique, things that she would never want to throw away. She simply does not believe in the disposable.
Recently she was staying with Alex in Los Angeles when his cat died. She disinfected the litter box and stuck it in a closet.
‘‘Why is there a litter box in my closet?’’ he asked her when he found it.
‘‘You might get another cat,’’ she replied.
‘‘When?’’
‘‘Someday.’’
‘‘And until then?’’
‘‘Maybe one of your friends will get a cat.’’
So he threw it out. But not without feeling guilty.
‘‘The problem,’’ he said to me, ‘‘is that she has a point. When the oil supply runs out and the rest of us are scrambling, you know who’s going to be just fine?’’ The admiration in his voice was palpable: ‘‘Mummy.’’
Sure. She would have been just fine in East Germany before the wall came down, too, when useful things were passed necessarily from friend to friend. Call it the karma of stuff. It’s as if she believes that every object, no matter now lowly, has a spirit that deserves to be passed on.
‘‘I’m not esoteric,’’ she protests when I tell her that. ‘‘I’m just frugal. You kids could learn something from me.’’
Couldn’t we all.

via

Thanks to Kathy Rifkin

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By ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
NY Times Published: August 6, 2009

Edinburgh

THIS is very serious. Britain, as most readers of this newspaper know, has long been populated by three warlike tribes, the Scots, the English and the Welsh. Much of British history consists of disputes between these tribes, particularly between the Scots and the English. Since the middle of the 18th century, after Bonnie Prince Charlie made a vain attempt to reclaim the kingdom for the Scottish Stuart dynasty, an uneasy peace has prevailed, based, in part, on the understanding that Scottish pride and Scottish feathers will not be unduly ruffled. But then, every so often, somebody threatens this delicate understanding with an outrageous suggestion. This usually happens in August, when newspapers have nothing better to talk about. And it has happened again this August.

The insult to the Scots this year is that haggis, the Scottish national dish, is not really Scottish, but English. Now this may seem a matter of little consequence to Americans, but how would the United States react if apple pie and turkey with cranberry sauce were to be claimed as the products of, say, French cuisine? Or if somebody asserted that baseball was invented by the Romanians (which it was)? These things are a matter of national pride, and people should take great care when talking about them.

The basis of the current claim is that an English cookbook of the early 17th century contains a recipe for haggis. This, we are told, was well before any Scottish recipe book gives similar information. Well, now, this assertion is so patently flimsy that it hardly requires refutation. Of course there was no published Scottish recipe for haggis before then, for the simple reason that it would have been quite unnecessary for Scots to publish a recipe for something that everybody in Scotland knew how to make. Why state the obvious? It’s as simple as that.

But if further proof is required, then it is there in abundance. English cuisine has always been very open to foreign influences, and still is. If one looks at contemporary English cookbook writers, what do they write about? French food, Indian food, Chinese food — anything but English food. And it was ever thus. So it is no surprise that early 17th-century English food writers should have written about exotic Scottish dishes rather than English ones. This is what these people have always done.

The haggis, of course, has played an important role in the Scottish national psyche — not as food, but as an invention. Scots like to console themselves with the knowledge that even if today we are a small nation on the periphery of Europe, an adjunct to a defunct empire, and chronically unsuccessful at something we would love to be successful at (soccer), we nonetheless have a great past as inventors.

Scottish schoolchildren are indoctrinated with the history of Scottish inventions. Television, they are taught, was invented by John Logie Baird, a Scotsman, and not by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, an American. The Irish did not invent whisky, and Irish whiskey is not the real McCoy; McCoy himself, whoever he was, was clearly Scottish and definitely not Irish. And golf was not invented by the Dutch — as misguided Dutchmen have a habit of claiming — it was a product of the Scottish genius for hitting things with sticks and counting the hits.

So the haggis is clearly Scottish, as Robert Burns understood full well when he wrote his famous poem in its praise. If one’s national bard writes a poem to a dish consisting of chopped-up offal cooked in a sheep’s stomach together with oatmeal and spices and secured with a curious pin, then that dish must be authentically national.

Anyway, even if there were doubts about this — which of course no right-thinking person would entertain — why take an iconic dish away from a national cuisine that has so little else of distinction in it? Yes, we have salmon and porridge, and one or two other dishes, but Escoffier would surely have been very unfulfilled had he been born Scottish.

Blithely attributing our haggis to a people who already have lots and lots of dishes — most of them terribly stodgy — in their national cuisine seems, if nothing else, to be gratuitously cruel. It would be like eating a mockingbird, if I may be permitted a literary allusion.

Never heard of haggis? Never tasted it? Try it on your next visit to Scotland, or even England. It is best taken with mashed turnips, which, incidentally, were invented in Scotland, and with a shot of whisky. The whisky is to neutralize the taste of the haggis, and the turnips are there for health reasons. Highly recommended.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author, most recently, of “Tea Time for the Traditionally Built.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 6, 2009

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s “billion” — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.

But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

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By Mekado Murphy AND Melena Ryzik
NY Times August 6, 2009

Update | 6 p.m. John Hughes, the director and screenwriter who helped define a young generation with his ’80s films “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink,” has died.

The cause was a heart attack, according to a statement from the publicists Paul Bloch and Michelle Bega.

Mr. Hughes first began as a screenwriter, gaining notoriety for his screenplay for “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” which became a popular franchise.

But his true success came with his directorial debut, “Sixteen Candles,” which made a star out of its young lead, Molly Ringwald.

Mr. Hughes was responsible for a slew of films in the 1980s that defined what it meant to be an American teenager, from the music to the fashion to the social faux pas. His universe of nerds and jocks, socialites and misfits, rockers and rebels – not to mention overbearing principals, clueless teachers and absentee parents – also influenced a generation of movie-goers and -makers, versing them in a common language of pop culture idioms that persists decades on. “Mess with the bull, get the horns.”

He made a star of quirky girls – as embodied by Ms. Ringwald in “Pretty in Pink” and “16 Candles” (and Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club”) – and charmingly cocky, off-center boys, like Matthew Broderick’s character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” (“Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?”)

Though Mr. Hughes graduated to more adult fare with films like “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and had his biggest hits with explicitly family-oriented material like “Home Alone,” he remains associated with creating an ideal of American youth that allowed for idiosyncrasy and growth.

Cliques could reliably be broken down, the girl could get the guy, and parents would always go out of town so you could have a killer house party.

thanks to moses berkson

The house on Long Island designed by Mr. Gwathmey and his partner for Mr. Gwathmey’s parents, completed in 1966, was influential

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
NY Times Published: August 4, 2009

Charles Gwathmey, an architect who turned his love of Modernism and passion for geometrical complexity into a series of compelling houses and sometimes controversial public buildings, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was esophageal cancer, said Mr. Gwathmey’s stepson, Eric Steel.

Mr. Gwathmey was part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the “high Modernist” style developed in the early 20th century by Le Corbusier and others. Many of Mr. Gwathmey’s best buildings were houses. A series of wealthy clients — including Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Jerry Seinfeld and Jeffrey Katzenberg — chose him to create living spaces that were boldly geometric and luxuriously appointed, modern but certainly not spare.

Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, which Mr. Gwathmey founded with Robert Siegel in 1968, was a rare architecture firm to maintain a thriving residential practice (its first apartment, in 1969, was for the actress Faye Dunaway) while also creating large buildings for schools, museums and private real estate developers.

Many blended effortlessly into the urban fabric. They included the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan; the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens; an expansion of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard; and dozens more.

But a few of Gwathmey Siegel’s buildings — including a 1992 addition to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and the more recent Astor Place condominiums in the East Village — were denounced by critics as insufficiently deferential to their surroundings.

Among architects, Mr. Gwathmey was admired for his steadfastness during the 1980s, when some of his contemporaries turned to historicist, or post-Modernist styles.

“A lot of people jumped ship, but Charlie was loyal to Modernism,” said Peter Eisenman, the architect and theorist.

Cynthia Davidson, an author and editor, devoted an entire issue of her journal, ANY: Architecture New York, to Mr. Gwathmey in the late 1990s. She did so, she said, after realizing that “there’s a lot of interest in Charles’s work among the younger generation of architects.”

“He’s somebody they look at — that they have to look at,” Ms. Davidson added.

Mr. Gwathmey (pronounced GWAHTH-mee) himself was a dashing figure, given to Savile Row suits and shoes from the London boot maker John Lobb. He drove black sports cars from which he stripped details he considered extraneous and lived in refined style, in an apartment of his own design.

He became a sensation while still in his 20s, when, with his partner at the time, Richard Henderson, he designed a house for his parents, Robert and Rosalie Gwathmey, both artists, on the East End of Long Island. Completed in 1966, at a cost of $35,000, the Gwathmey house attracted throngs of visitors and was consistently named one of the most influential buildings of the modern era.

Mr. Gwathmey described the house — a 1,200-square-foot cedar-clad composition of cubes, triangles and cylinders — as “a solid block that has been carved back to its essence.”

“There is no additive, no vestigial, no applied anything that detracts from its primary presence,” he said.

Mr. Gwathmey thought of the house and its adjoining studio as sculptures. “They are not,” he declared, “organic or integrated with nature.”

In 2001 Mr. Gwathmey inherited the house from his mother and began a renovation that included covering the original concrete floor with marble. The upgrade was a sign of Mr. Gwathmey’s extraordinary success during the intervening years. Only a few miles away, he had designed a sprawling vacation compound for Mr. Spielberg.

Many of his clients returned to him for second or third houses. Mr. Spielberg said in a telephone interview, “Whenever I had a project on the East Coast, the first call I made was to Charlie.” He added that Mr. Gwathmey “liked to mix it up” — liked to take strong stands in defense of his design ideas — but “if there hadn’t been the sparks, the architecture wouldn’t have been as brilliant.”

Though lavish, Mr. Gwathmey’s residential designs were more about “This is who I am” than “This is what I’ve got,” Mr. Steel said. But they also reflected Mr. Gwathmey’s predilections for using angles and curves to create interlocking spaces, usually framed by materials like onyx, stainless steel and bird’s-eye maple.

Mr. Gwathmey formed his partnership with Mr. Siegel in 1968. (They had first met as students at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan.) One of their most daring projects was a renovation of Whig Hall at Princeton University, a neo-Classical building that had been damaged in a fire. Inserting Corbusian forms where part of the original facade was missing, they created a thrilling combination of traditional and avant-garde design.

Other prominent buildings included the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library on Madison Avenue. Among the firm’s most recent projects was a W Hotel in Hoboken, N.J. The new United States Mission to the United Nations, on First Avenue in Manhattan, is under construction.

In New York, Gwathmey Siegel was perhaps most famous for its addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. The addition, completed in 1992, consists of a rectangular 10-story tower behind Wright’s famous spiral.

The firm’s original proposal, for a much larger, cantilevered box, was denounced as obtrusive by critics and preservationists. In the end Mr. Gwathmey settled on a limestone slab that entirely defers to Mr. Wright’s powerful building. Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic for The New York Times and now a critic for The New Yorker, ultimately concluded that with the renovation masterminded by Gwathmey Siegel and the addition, the Guggenheim “is now a better museum and a better work of architecture.”

More recently, Mr. Gwathmey designed the Astor Place condominiums, a curvy glass building in the East Village. It was influenced by the sinuous towers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe but lacked the serenity associated with Mies’s best buildings. Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s current architecture critic, called the tower “squat and clumsy” and said it rested on “a banal glass box.”

Yale University selected Gwathmey Siegel to renovate and enlarge its Art & Architecture Building, a much maligned 1963 masterpiece by Paul Rudolph that had been badly altered over the decades. Mr. Gwathmey was widely praised for bringing Rudolph’s architecture back to life. But when it was completed, last summer, the same critics who loved the restoration dismissed the addition; Mr. Ouroussoff called it “sadly conventional.”

Still, Mr. Gwathmey took pride in having completed a building at Yale, his alma mater, that engaged in a conversation with Rudolph’s building, as well as with the 1953 Yale University Art Gallery by Louis I. Kahn across the street.

Mr. Eisenman said that Mr. Gwathmey deserved more credit than he got for making sure that his building didn’t overpower its neighbors. “Charles was able to sublimate his ego and produce really sophisticated solutions to plan problems, to circulation problems — but those aren’t the kinds of things that make headlines,” Mr. Eisenman said.

Charles Gwathmey was born on June 19, 1938, in Charlotte, N.C., and was reared both there and in New York City. He began college at the University of Pennsylvania and then moved to Yale, from which he graduated with a master’s degree in architecture in 1962. He then spent two years traveling through Europe, where he paid particular attention to the works of Le Corbusier. Fresh from that trip, he made a splash with his parents’ house, in Amagansett, N.Y., and soon became known as one of five young architects — Mr. Gwathmey was the youngest — who were reinterpreting Corbusian convention.

The group, known variously as the Five or the Whites (for the color of most of their buildings) or the New York School, consisted of Mr. Gwathmey, Michael Graves, Mr. Eisenman, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. The Five added visual flourishes (and in some cases theoretical underpinnings) to the unadorned white architecture of their idol, Corbusier, creating ever-more-elaborate buildings out of familiar Corbusian forms. They were known for using architecture not as a social or environmental tool, but as a way of achieving aesthetic perfection.

Over the years Mr. Gwathmey taught at a number of architecture schools, including those of Harvard, Yale and Princeton and, in Manhattan, of Columbia and Cooper Union.

Mr. Gwathmey’s first marriage, to Emily Gwathmey, ended in divorce; they had one daughter, Annie Gwathmey of Los Angeles, who survives him. He is also survived by his wife, the former Bette-Ann Damson, now Bette-Ann Gwathmey, who is the vice president for corporate philanthropy at Polo Ralph Lauren, and his stepson, Mr. Steel, of New York.

Mr. Steel said that “the same level of meticulousness that you see in his work, you’d see in every aspect of his life.” Even in the hospital during Mr. Gwathmey’s final illness, Mr. Steel said, “everything had to line up.”

thanks to moses berkson and nate lentz

Los Angeles Times
By Shelby Grad, August 6, 2009

The road along the Hollywood Reservoir has long been one of Los Angeles’ most popular walking and jogging trials.

That is, before 2005, the year L.A. experienced one of its wettest winters on record. All the rain caused landslides that forced officials to close down the roads. Ever since, users have wondered when they will be able to get back on the trail.
Today is the day. L.A. Councilman Tom LaBonge and neighborhood residents this morning will reopen the eastern perimeter road of the reservoir. The other side of the road remains closed.

As part of the project, the Department of Water and Power repaved the road, stabilized hillsides and improved drainage.

More work is required on the west side, which is not expected to reopen until 2011.

The reservoir was built in 1924 by William Mulholland and once provided Los Angeles with much of its water supply.

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version) sought to humanize Jim Crow, not challenge it.

Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism.

by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker August 10, 2009

In 1954, when James (Big Jim) Folsom was running for a second term as governor of Alabama, he drove to Clayton, in Barbour County, to meet a powerful local probate judge. This was in the heart of the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was in full effect. In Barbour County, the races did not mix, and white men were expected to uphold the privileges of their gender and color. But when his car pulled up to the curb, where the judge was waiting, Folsom spotted two black men on the sidewalk. He jumped out, shook their hands heartily, and only then turned to the stunned judge. “All men are just alike,” Folsom liked to say.

Big Jim Folsom was six feet eight inches tall, and had the looks of a movie star. He was a prodigious drinker, and a brilliant campaigner, who travelled around the state with a hillbilly string band called the Strawberry Pickers. The press referred to him (not always affectionately) as Kissin’ Jim, for his habit of grabbing the prettiest woman at hand. Folsom was far and away the dominant figure in postwar Alabama politics—and he was a prime example of that now rare species of progressive Southern populist.

Folsom would end his speeches by brandishing a corn-shuck mop and promising a spring cleaning of the state capitol. He was against the Big Mules, as the entrenched corporate interests were known. He worked to extend the vote to disenfranchised blacks. He wanted to equalize salaries between white and black schoolteachers. He routinely commuted the death sentences of blacks convicted in what he believed were less than fair trials. He made no attempt to segregate the crowd at his inaugural address. “Ya’ll come,” he would say to one and all, making a proud and lonely stand for racial justice.

Big Jim Folsom left office in 1959. The next year, a young Southern woman published a novel set in mid-century Alabama about one man’s proud and lonely stand for racial justice. The woman was Harper Lee and the novel was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and one way to make sense of Lee’s classic—and of a controversy that is swirling around the book on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary—is to start with Big Jim Folsom.

The Alabama of Folsom—and Lee—was marked by a profound localism. Political scientists call it the “friends and neighbors” effect. “Alabama voters rarely identified with candidates on the basis of issues,” George Sims writes in his biography of Folsom, “The Little Man’s Best Friend.” “Instead, they tended to give greatest support to the candidate whose home was nearest their own.” Alabama was made up of “island communities,” each dominated by a small clique of power brokers, known as a “courthouse ring.” There were no Republicans to speak of in the Alabama of that era, only Democrats. Politics was not ideological. It was personal. What it meant to be a racial moderate, in that context, was to push for an informal accommodation between black and white.

“Big Jim did not seek a fundamental shift of political power or a revolution in social mores,” Sims says. Folsom operated out of a sense of noblesse oblige: privileged whites, he believed, ought to “adopt a more humanitarian attitude” toward blacks. When the black Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., came to Montgomery, on a voter-registration drive, Folsom invited him to the Governor’s Mansion for a Scotch-and-soda. That was simply good manners. Whenever he was accused of being too friendly to black people, Folsom shrugged. His assumption was that Negroes were citizens, just like anyone else. “I just never did get all excited about our colored brothers,” he once said. “We have had them here for three hundred years and we will have them for another three hundred years.”

Folsom was not a civil-rights activist. Activists were interested in using the full, impersonal force of the law to compel equality. In fact, the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom’s career, because the racial backlash that it created drove moderates off the political stage. The historian Michael Klarman writes, “Virtually no southern politician could survive in this political environment without toeing the massive resistance line, and in most states politicians competed to occupy the most extreme position on the racial spectrum.” Folsom lost his job to the segregationist John Patterson, who then gave way to the radical George Wallace. In Birmingham, which was quietly liberalizing through the early nineteen-fifties, Bull Connor (who notoriously set police dogs on civil-rights marchers in the nineteen-sixties) had been in political exile. It was the Brown decision that brought him back. Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality. Activism proved incompatible with Folsomism.

On what side was Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch? Finch defended Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of what in nineteen-thirties Alabama was the gravest of sins, the rape of a white woman. In the years since, he has become a role model for the legal profession. But he’s much closer to Folsom’s side of the race question than he is to the civil-rights activists who were arriving in the South as Lee wrote her novel.

Think about the scene that serves as the book’s centerpiece. Finch is at the front of the courtroom with Robinson. The jury files in. In the balcony, the book’s narrator—Finch’s daughter, Jean Louise, or Scout, as she’s known—shuts her eyes. “Guilty,” the first of the jurors says. “Guilty,” the second says, and down the line: “guilty, guilty, guilty.” Finch gathers his papers into his briefcase. He says a quiet word to his client, gathers his coat off the back of his chair, and walks, head bowed, out of the courtroom.

“Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus’s lonely walk down the aisle,” Scout relates, in one of American literature’s most moving passages:

“Miss Jean Louise?”
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds.

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” Finch tells his daughter. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” He is never anything but gracious to his neighbor Mrs. Dubose, even though she considers him a “nigger-lover.” He forgives the townsfolk of Maycomb for the same reason. They are suffering from a “sickness,” he tells Scout—the inability to see a black man as a real person. All men, he believes, are just alike.

Here is where the criticism of Finch begins, because the hearts-and-minds approach is about accommodation, not reform. At one point, Scout asks him if it is O.K. to hate Hitler. Finch answers, firmly, that it is not O.K. to hate anyone. Really? Not even Hitler? When his children bring up the subject of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Maycomb, he shrugs: “Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn’t find anyone to scare. They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass. . . . Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” Someone in Finch’s historical position would surely have been aware of the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. Frank was convicted, on dubious evidence, of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan. The prosecutor in the case compared Frank to Judas Iscariot, and the crowd outside the courthouse shouted, “Hang the Jew!” Anti-Semitism of the most virulent kind was embedded in the social fabric of the Old South. But Finch does not want to deal with the existence of anti-Semitism. He wants to believe in the fantasy of Sam Levy, down the street, giving the Klan a good scolding.

In the middle of the novel, after Tom Robinson’s arrest, Finch spends the night in front of the Maycomb jail, concerned that a mob might come down and try to take matters into its own hands. Sure enough, one does, led by a poor white farmer, Walter Cunningham. The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.

Folsom was the same way. He knew the frailties of his fellow-Alabamians when it came to race. But he could not grasp that those frailties were more than personal—that racism had a structural dimension. After he was elected governor a second time, in 1955, Folsom organized the first inaugural ball for blacks in Alabama’s history. That’s a very nice gesture. Yet it doesn’t undermine segregation to give Negroes their own party. It makes it more palatable. Folsom’s focus on the personal was also the reason that he was blindsided by Brown. He simply didn’t have an answer to the Court’s blunt and principled conclusion that separate was not equal. For a long time, Folsom simply ducked questions about integration. When he could no longer duck, he wriggled. And the wriggling wasn’t attractive. Sims writes:

In the spring of 1955, he repeated portions of his campaign program that touched the issue of desegregation tangentially and claimed that he had already made his position “plain, simple, and clear.” He frequently repeated his pledge that he would not force black children to go to school with white children. It was an ambiguous promise that sounded like the words of a segregationist without specifically opposing segregation. Speaking to the Alabama Education Association in 1955, the governor recommended a school construction bond issue and implied that the money would help prolong segregation by improving the physical facilities of Negro schools.

One of Atticus Finch’s strongest critics has been the legal scholar Steven Lubet, and Lubet’s arguments are a good example of how badly the brand of Southern populism Finch represents has aged over the past fifty years. Lubet’s focus is the main event of “To Kill a Mockingbird”—Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson. In “Reconstructing Atticus Finch,” in the Michigan Law Review, Lubet points out that Finch does not have a strong case. The putative rape victim, Mayella Ewell, has bruises on her face, and the supporting testimony of her father, Robert E. Lee Ewell. Robinson concedes that he was inside the Ewell house, and that some kind of sexual activity took place. The only potentially exculpatory evidence Finch can come up with is that Mayella’s bruises are on the right side of her face while Robinson’s left arm, owing to a childhood injury, is useless. Finch presents this fact with great fanfare. But, as Lubet argues, it’s not exactly clear why a strong right-handed man can’t hit a much smaller woman on the right side of her face. Couldn’t she have turned her head? Couldn’t he have hit her with a backhanded motion? Given the situation, Finch designs his defense, Lubet says, “to exploit a virtual catalog of misconceptions and fallacies about rape, each one calculated to heighten mistrust of the female complainant.”

Here is the crucial moment of Robinson’s testimony. Under Finch’s patient prodding, he has described how he was walking by the Ewell property when Mayella asked him to come inside, to help her dismantle a piece of furniture. The house, usually crowded with Mayella’s numerous sisters and brothers, was empty. “I say where the chillun?” Robinson testifies, “an’ she says—she was laughin’, sort of—she says they all gone to town to get ice creams. She says, ‘Took me a slap year to save seb’m nickels, but I done it. They all gone to town.’ ” She then asked him to stand on a chair and get a box down from the chifforobe. She “hugged him” around the waist. Robinson goes on:

“She reached up an’ kissed me ’side of th’ face. She says she never kissed a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her papa do to her don’t count. She says, ‘Kiss me back nigger.’ I say Miss Mayella lemme outa here an’ tried to run but she got her back to the door an’ I’da had to push her. I didn’t wanta harm her, Mr. Finch, an’ I say lemme pass, but just when I say it Mr. Ewell yonder hollered through th’ window.”
“What did he say?”
. . . Tom Robinson shut his eyes tight. “He says you goddam whore, I’ll kill ya.”

Mayella plotted for a year, saving her pennies so she could clear the house of her siblings. Then she lay in wait for Robinson, in the fervent hope that he would come by that morning. “She knew full well the enormity of her offense,” Finch tells the jury, in his summation, “but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.” For a woman to be portrayed as a sexual aggressor in the Jim Crow South was a devastating charge. Lubet writes:

The “she wanted it” defense in this case was particularly harsh. Here is what it said about Mayella: She was so starved for sex that she spent an entire year scheming for a way to make it happen. She was desperate for a man, any man. She repeatedly grabbed at Tom and wouldn’t let him go, barring the door when he respectfully tried to disentangle himself. And in case Mayella had any dignity left after all that, it had to be insinuated that she had sex with her father.

It is useful, once again, to consider Finch’s conduct in the light of the historical South of his time. The scholar Lisa Lindquist Dorr has examined two hundred and eighty-eight cases of black-on-white rape that occurred in Virginia between 1900 and 1960. Seventeen of the accused were killed through “extra legal violence”—that is to say, lynched. Fifty were executed. Forty-eight were given the maximum sentence. Fifty-two were sentenced to prison terms of five years or less, on charges ranging from rape and murder to robbery, assault and battery, or “annoying a white woman.” Thirty-five either were acquitted or had their charges dismissed. A not inconsiderable number had their sentences commuted by the governor.

Justice was administered unequally in the South: Dorr points out that of the dozens of rapists in Virginia who were sentenced to death between 1908 and 1963 (Virginia being one of the few states where both rape and attempted rape were capital crimes) none were white. Nonetheless, those statistics suggest that race was not always the overriding consideration in rape trials. “White men did not always automatically leap to the defense of white women,” Dorr writes. “Some white men reluctantly sided with black men against white women whose class or sexual history they found suspect. Sometimes whites trusted the word of black men whose families they had known for generations over the sworn testimony of white women whose backgrounds were unknown or (even worse) known and despised. White women retained their status as innocent victim only as long as they followed the dictates of middle-class morality.”

One of Dorr’s examples is John Mays, Jr., a black juvenile sentenced in 1923 to an eighteen-year prison term for the attempted rape of a white girl. His employer, A. A. Sizer, petitioned the Virginia governor for clemency, arguing that Mays, who was religious and educated, “comes of our best negro stock.” His victim, meanwhile, “comes from our lowest breed of poor whites. . . . Her mother is utterly immoral and without principle; and this child has been accustomed from her very babyhood to behold scenes of the grossest immorality. None of our welfare work affects her, she is brazenly immoral.”

The reference to the mother was important. “Though Sizer did not directly impugn the victim herself, direct evidence was unnecessary during the heyday of eugenic family studies,” Dorr writes. “The victim, coming from the same inferior ‘stock,’ would likely share her mother’s moral character.” The argument worked: Mays was released from prison in 1930.

This is essentially the defense that Atticus Finch fashions for his client. Robinson is the churchgoer, the “good Negro.” Mayella, by contrast, comes from the town’s lowest breed of poor whites. “Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells,” Scout tells us. “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” They live in a shack behind the town dump, with windows that “were merely open spaces in the walls, which in the summertime were covered with greasy strips of cheesecloth to keep out the varmints that feasted on Maycomb’s refuse.” Bob Ewell is described as a “little bantam cock of a man” with a face as red as his neck, so unaccustomed to polite society that cleaning up for the trial leaves him with a “scalded look; as if an overnight soaking had deprived him of protective layers of dirt.” His daughter, the complainant, is a “thick-bodied girl accustomed to strenuous labor.” The Ewells are trash. When the defense insinuates that Mayella is the victim of incest at the hands of her father, it is not to make her a sympathetic figure. It is, in the eugenicist spirit of the times, to impugn her credibility—to do what A. A. Sizer did in the John Mays case: The victim, coming from the same inferior stock, would likely share her father’s moral character. “I won’t try to scare you for a while,” Finch says, when he begins his cross-examination of Mayella. Then he adds, with polite menace, “Not yet.”

We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

One of George Orwell’s finest essays takes Charles Dickens to task for his lack of “constructive suggestions.” Dickens was a powerful critic of Victorian England, a proud and lonely voice in the campaign for social reform. But, as Orwell points out, there was little substance to Dickens’s complaints. “He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places,” Orwell writes. “There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature.’ ” Dickens sought “a change of spirit rather than a change in structure.”

Orwell didn’t think that Dickens should have written different novels; he loved Dickens. But he understood that Dickens bore the ideological marks of his time and place. His class did not see the English social order as tyrannical, worthy of being overthrown. Dickens thought that large contradictions could be tamed through small moments of justice. He believed in the power of changing hearts, and that’s what you believe in, Orwell says, if you “do not wish to endanger the status quo.”

But in cases where the status quo involves systemic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart. “What in the world am I ever going to do with the Niggers?” Jim Folsom once muttered, when the backlash against Brown began to engulf his political career. The argument over race had risen to such a pitch that it could no longer be alleviated by gesture and symbolism—by separate but equal inaugural balls and hearty handshakes—and he was lost.

Finch’s moral test comes at the end of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Bob Ewell has been humiliated by the Robinson trial. In revenge, he attacks Scout and her brother on Halloween night. Boo Radley, the reclusive neighbor of the Finches, comes to the children’s defense, and in the scuffle Radley kills Ewell. Sheriff Tate brings the news to Finch, and persuades him to lie about what actually happened; the story will be that Ewell inadvertently stabbed himself in the scuffle. As the Sheriff explains:

Maybe you’ll say it’s my duty to tell the town all about it and not hush it up. Know what’d happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb includin’ my wife’d be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin’, Mr. Finch, taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that’s a sin. It’s a sin and I’m not about to have it on my head. If it was any other man it’d be different. But not this man, Mr. Finch.

The courthouse ring had spoken. Maycomb would go back to the way it had always been.

“Scout,” Finch says to his daughter, after he and Sheriff Tate have cut their little side deal. “Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?”

Understand what? That her father and the Sheriff have decided to obstruct justice in the name of saving their beloved neighbor the burden of angel-food cake? Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama. ♦

via

By LAURA A. MUNSON
NY Times Published: July 31, 2009

LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.

Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.

So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”

Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.

But I wasn’t buying it.

I said: “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?” he said.

“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you’re talking about.”

Then I repeated my line, “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?”

“How can we have a responsible distance?”

“I don’t want distance,” he said. “I want to move out.”

My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.

Instead, I went to my desk, Googled “responsible separation” and came up with a list. It included things like: Who’s allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who’s allowed keys to what?

I looked through the list and passed it on to him.

His response: “Keys? We don’t even have keys to our house.”

I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”

“I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need … ”

“Stop saying that!”

Well, he didn’t move out.

Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”

But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.

MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m a pushover. I’m weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I’m probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I’m not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.

I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say “Don’t take it personally” when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.

Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not — it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.

And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.

But I didn’t.

I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.

My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We’ve since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.

My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.

But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.

Laura A. Munson is a writer who lives in Whitefish, Mont.

thanks to jason asch

Micronation based around a nine story high illegally built tower, made of nailed together planks

Atlas Obscura
August 2, 2009

In the far southwest corner of Sweden, in a nature preserve a few kilometres northwest of the town of Arild, on a rocky beach reachable only via boat or strenuous 30-45 minute hike is the nation of Ladonia. You will know when you are in the nation Ladonia because it is marked by two monumental works of artistic creativity: Nimis and Arx.

Created by artist Lars Vilks, Nimis (Latin for “too much”) is a maze-like wooden artwork made of 70 tons of driftwood and nails and culminating in a nine story teetering wooden building/tower. Arx (Latin for “fortress”) is a stone and concrete sculpture resembling a melting sand castle. Nimis, the first of the two sculptures was begun in 1980 and went unnoticed by authorities for 2 years until 1982 when they declared it would have to be destroyed.

As a means of outmaneuvering the Swedish authorities, even while it was scheduled for destruction, Lars sold Nimis to artist Cristo. The legal document of the sale is a piece of driftwood, once a piece of the artwork itself, on display at the Swedish Museum of Sketches.

Another means of avoiding government interference (or perhaps tauntingly inviting it) was for Vilks to declare the area an independent nation. The nation of Ladonia, occupying essentially only the area around the sculptures, was declared in 1996 and has already had its share of national incidents. War was declared on Ladonia by satirical group the “Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets.” Ladonia also claims a “population” of over 15,000 though no one resides on the site as “all of its citizens are nomads.”

Unfortunately this was not entirely clear in the online application form and some 3000 Pakistanis, confused by the micronation’s web site, applied for immigrant status. They were granted it, anyone who applies is given citizenship, however as the Pakistanis began asking about Ladonia’s embassy and details of how to get there, it became clear that actually moving to Ladonia was not actually a possibility.

atlas obscura

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 2, 2009

Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.

But crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view.

And they’re still at it. Consider two recent news stories.

One involves the rise of high-speed trading: some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have been using superfast computers to get the jump on other investors, buying or selling stocks a tiny fraction of a second before anyone else can react. Profits from high-frequency trading are one reason Goldman is earning record profits and likely to pay record bonuses.

On a seemingly different front, Sunday’s Times reported on the case of Andrew J. Hall, who leads an arm of Citigroup that speculates on oil and other commodities. His operation has made a lot of money recently, and according to his contract Mr. Hall is owed $100 million.

What do these stories have in common?

The politically salient answer, for now at least, is that in both cases we’re looking at huge payouts by firms that were major recipients of federal aid. Citi has received around $45 billion from taxpayers; Goldman has repaid the $10 billion it received in direct aid, but it has benefited enormously both from federal guarantees and from bailouts of other financial institutions. What are taxpayers supposed to think when these welfare cases cut nine-figure paychecks?

But suppose we grant that both Goldman and Mr. Hall are very good at what they do, and might have earned huge profits even without all that aid. Even so, what they do is bad for America.

Just to be clear: financial speculation can serve a useful purpose. It’s good, for example, that futures markets provide an incentive to stockpile heating oil before the weather gets cold and stockpile gasoline ahead of the summer driving season.

But speculation based on information not available to the public at large is a very different matter. As the U.C.L.A. economist Jack Hirshleifer showed back in 1971, such speculation often combines “private profitability” with “social uselessness.”

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.

What about Mr. Hall? The Times report suggests that he makes money mainly by outsmarting other investors, rather than by directing resources to where they’re needed. Again, it’s hard to see the social value of what he does.

And there’s a good case that such activities are actually harmful. For example, high-frequency trading probably degrades the stock market’s function, because it’s a kind of tax on investors who lack access to those superfast computers — which means that the money Goldman spends on those computers has a negative effect on national wealth. As the great Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow put it in 1973, speculation based on private information imposes a “double social loss”: it uses up resources and undermines markets.

Now, you might be tempted to dismiss destructive speculation as a minor issue — and 30 years ago you would have been right. Since then, however, high finance — securities and commodity trading, as opposed to run-of-the-mill banking — has become a vastly more important part of our economy, increasing its share of G.D.P. by a factor of six. And soaring incomes in the financial industry have played a large role in sharply rising income inequality.

What should be done? Last week the House passed a bill setting rules for pay packages at a wide range of financial institutions. That would be a step in the right direction. But it really should be accompanied by much broader regulation of financial practices — and, I would argue, by higher tax rates on supersized incomes.

Unfortunately, the House measure is opposed by the Obama administration, which still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.

Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.