Børge Mogensen’s house in Gentofte, North Copenhagen. The house was designed and built by Mogensen 1958, and he lived there with his wife, Alice, until his death in 1972.
Mogensen’s iconic model 2213 sofa sits in the living room. It was specifically designed for this space in 1962, and, like much of his furniture, has been in continual production since. Across from the sofa are two of Mogensen’s 1959 Spanish chairs.

Two dining areas, both featuring Børge Mogensen-designed, Shaker-inspired dining tables and simple rattan-seat chairs. The pendant lamps over both tables are by fellow Danish designer Poul Henningsen.

More Poul Henningsen lighting, and one of Mogensen’s model 3237 chairs, again influenced by both Shaker and Spanish furniture construction. (Check out the nail pattern on the ceiling, too!)

All of these photos were taken by Andrew Wood for Magnus Englund’s (co-founder of Skandium) excellent book, Scandinavian Living. (Out of Print)

via

You
2010
Powder-coated stainless steel, lenses
70 inches high

January 28 – March 5, 2011

303 Gallery

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY TimesPublished: January 27, 2011

President Obama’s State of the Union address was a ho-hum affair. But the official Republican response, from Representative Paul Ryan, was really interesting. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Mr. Ryan made highly dubious assertions about employment, health care and more. But what caught my eye, when I read the transcript, was what he said about other countries: “Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.”

It’s a good story: Europeans dithered on deficits, and that led to crisis. Unfortunately, while that’s more or less true for Greece, it isn’t at all what happened either in Ireland or in Britain, whose experience actually refutes the current Republican narrative.

But then, American conservatives have long had their own private Europe of the imagination — a place of economic stagnation and terrible health care, a collapsing society groaning under the weight of Big Government. The fact that Europe isn’t actually like that — did you know that adults in their prime working years are more likely to be employed in Europe than they are in the United States? — hasn’t deterred them. So we shouldn’t be surprised by similar tall tales about European debt problems.

Let’s talk about what really happened in Ireland and Britain.

On the eve of the financial crisis, conservatives had nothing but praise for Ireland, a low-tax, low-spending country by European standards. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranked it above every other Western nation. In 2006, George Osborne, now Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, declared Ireland “a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policy making.” And the truth was that in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.

So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.

The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?

What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.

And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.

So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.

Which brings me back to Paul Ryan and his response to President Obama. Again, American conservatives have long used the myth of a failing Europe to argue against progressive policies in America. More recently, they have tried to appropriate Europe’s debt problems on behalf of their own agenda, never mind the fact that events in Europe actually point the other way.

But Mr. Ryan is widely portrayed as an intellectual leader within the G.O.P., with special expertise on matters of debt and deficits. So the revelation that he literally doesn’t know the first thing about the debt crises currently in progress is, as I said, interesting — and not in a good way.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Thanks to Drew Fuller

Edge Marks
2010
oil on canvas
45 x 32 inches

Through February 20, 2011

Lisa Cooley

Evan Sung for The New York Times

By MARK BITTMAN
NY Times Published: January 25, 2011

TODAY marks the exit of The Minimalist from the pages of the Dining section, as a weekly column at least. There may be return appearances, but the unbroken string of more than 13 years and nearly 700 columns ends here. (I’m not leaving the Times family; more about that in a minute.)

Sooner or later, a weekly column starts to turn into a body of work. This one charts the history not only of my personal development in the kitchen, but of recent cooking trends. So indulge me while I toast The Minimalist with a Champagne cocktail — developed with help from the bartender Jim Meehan, it is appropriately celebratory and bittersweet — and a few reflections.

The Minimalist first appeared on Sept. 17, 1997. It was the brainchild of Rick Flaste, who created the Dining In/Dining Out section (now the Dining section); Trish Hall, my on-and-off editor; and me. It was conceived as a successor to Pierre Franey’s classic 60-Minute Gourmet column, but with a less French, more modern, less chef-y sensibility. In addition, Rick wanted the recipes to be “smart,” and although I couldn’t quite figure out what that meant, I tried to please him.

As every columnist will tell you, it takes time for a column to find its true identity, and The Minimalist was no different. A year later, the column was at least adolescent, and I described its typical recipes as I do today: nearly all of them use minimal technique, minimal time or minimal ingredients; many recipes meet two of those standards, and quite a few all three.

I could say it more succinctly: The column’s goal, my job, has been to help make home cooking more accessible.

The first topic was Rick’s idea, and such a good one that I was intimidated: red pepper purée. You roast red peppers (I’ll take credit for devising an easy technique for that, one I still recommend), peel them, and purée them with salt and olive oil, or with other flavors. You use this as a condiment.

Two elements of that column became continual. The purée is essentially a paste — a pesto — and when it came to taking an ingredient and puréeing it, I became a fanatic. I did this with herbs, with vegetables (the leek was the most recent), with beans, with peas, with arugula and other greens, with almost everything I could lay my hands on. Last year, I finally recognized that the food processor was a major component of my cooking style, and celebrated that in a column. More important was that I’d established the variability of the recipe, something I’d done before that, and have done ever since. One goal has always been to demonstrate that few recipes are dogma; they can all be tweaked. And learning to tweak is part of becoming a cook. (One of the most gratifying comments I get from people who use my recipes is that they’re easy to change.)

Within a couple of weeks, I had tackled chicken under a brick, a then-little-known dish I’d learned in Tuscany, and one that seemed to solve the problem of producing, without too much fuss, a nearly whole chicken that’s both crisp and juicy. Thus began what became a powerful thread in both the column and my personal cooking. (I do have a cooking life outside of The Minimalist, but the two have been melded — or even welded — for all these years.) This involved exploring traditional recipes, and gently — I hoped — Americanizing them, without — I hoped — robbing them of their souls. Thus there were a fast cassoulet, a simple bouillabaisse, quick paella and, eventually, the 45-minute turkey.

One could argue that I robbed all of them of their souls, but cooking is compromise, after all. We almost never have the time, the ideal ingredients or equipment, or all of the skills we’d like.

In 1998, I began a decade of intense travel. I cooked with chefs, with grandmothers (a privilege, almost always), with granddaughters, with whole families, with celebrities, with friends and with colleagues. And I discovered that you never cook with someone else without learning something. In every case, there’s a two-way transfer of knowledge. If they know less than you do, you grow from teaching. If more, of course, you grow from learning.

Some of my favorite dishes came out of travel: pasta alla Gricia, among the most basic and simplest building blocks of pasta cooking; braised squid with artichokes (a visit to Liguria began that craze for me, along with a passion for farinata, also called socca); black cod with miso; jook; and eggplant curry, just to name a few.

There were also dishes I learned in New York, of course: spaghetti with fried eggs (thank you, Arthur Schwartz); Sichuan chicken with chilies; stir-fried chicken with ketchup (thank you, Suvir Saran). There were another 500 or so I learned from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, with whom I wrote a couple of cookbooks, but that’s a different tale.

Usually, I was either taught to make something or I modeled it myself, as best I could. I refused to buy into the notion that there was a “correct” way to prepare a given dish; rather, I tried to understand its spirit and duplicate that, no matter where I was cooking. For months I lived with a hot plate and a combination convection-microwave oven. When I needed to roast something I borrowed a friend’s kitchen. For years after that I cooked in others’ kitchens more than my own; the column never missed a beat. Thus I have no patience for “I’d love to cook but I have a lousy kitchen.”

To me the question was not, “Would I cook this as a native would?” but rather, “How would a native cook this if he had my ingredients, my kitchen, my background?” It’s obviously a different dish. But as Jacques Pépin once said to me, you never cook a recipe the same way twice, even if you try. I never maintained that my way of cooking was the “best” way to cook, only that it’s a practical way to cook. (I’m lazy, I’m rushed, and I’m not all that skillful, and many people share those qualities.)

There has been some invention as well. Before Rick dreamed up The Minimalist, I pitched a column called The Spontaneous Cook, to reflect the way I and many others actually operate in the kitchen: shop avidly, keep a full refrigerator and pantry, pull things out and get to work. Thus I “created,” usually by accident, some of my favorite dishes: crisp-braised duck legs with aromatic vegetables, braised turkey (the demands of the annual Thanksgiving column engendered much creativity, and this was an especially successful one), and the more-vegetable-than-egg frittata.

One recurring theme was restating the absolutely obvious: cooking truths that had somehow disappeared. Another, related, theme was a kind of counterintuitive — or perhaps anti-trendy — populism, a celebration of ordinary ingredients that were largely ignored by food snobs. Examples of the first were a piece reminding people that they already had a broiler, that it was arguably more useful than the much-worshiped grill and that it therefore should be employed more often; and a column outlining how, with thought, one could double the utility of the freezer. Examples of the second theme included ketchup (I mean, why not?) and frozen vegetables, which I argued were preferable to so-called fresh ones flown in from Peru.

Then there was Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, the most popular recipe I never invented. Wish I had, but Jim paid plenty of dues before arriving at it.

Now I look at the extensive list and see a number of amusing minor phases. Salmon, for example, was a regular visitor to the column in the early years, when it was becoming common and cheap thanks to aquaculture. Maybe it tasted better in those days, and it was certainly less discredited. In later years, it became all but invisible in the column.

The biggest change, as anyone who’s followed The Minimalist closely knows, was a gradual shift of focus from meat, poultry and fish at the center of the plate to, well, something other than that. (Beefsteak, for example, appeared an average of one-and-a-half times a year for the first 9 to 10 years; since 2008, it’s been featured only once.)

My growing conviction that the meat-heavy American diet and our increasing dependence on prepared and processed foods is detrimental not only to our personal health but to that of the planet has had an impact on my life and on that of the column. You can see this in dishes like stir-fried lettuce with shrimp, chickpea tagine with chicken, a number of bean dishes and the dozens of other meatless or less-meat recipes that have become dominant in the last five years.

In part, what I see as the continuing attack on good, sound eating and traditional farming in the United States is a political issue. I’ll be writing regularly about this in the opinion pages of The Times, and in a blog that begins next week. That’s one place to look for me from now on. The other is in The Times Magazine, where I’ll be writing a recipe column most Sundays beginning in March.

Part of my reasoning in going to the opinion section is to advocate, essentially, for eaters’ rights. But the response of good cooks, and those of us who write about cooking, must be to continue to look for ways to bring real food to all of our tables.

Which, in a way, is pretty funny, because it’s where The Minimalist began.

Video Gallery: The Minimalist’s Greatest Hits

The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites

A male Acmon blue butterfly (Icaricia acmon). Vladimir Nabokov described the Icaricia genus in 1944. Photograph by Roger Vila

By CARL ZIMMER
NY Times Published: January 25, 2011

Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.

He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted over a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.

At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile.

Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.

Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge spanning the Pacific. “I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world,” he wrote.

When “Lolita” made Nabokov a star in 1958, journalists were delighted to discover his hidden life as a butterfly expert. A famous photograph of Nabokov that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post when he was 66 is from a butterfly’s perspective. The looming Russian author swings a net with rapt concentration. But despite the fact that he was the best-known butterfly expert of his day and a Harvard museum curator, other lepidopterists considered Nabokov a dutiful but undistinguished researcher. He could describe details well, they granted, but did not produce scientifically important ideas.

Only in the 1990s did a team of scientists systematically review his work and recognize the strength of his classifications. Dr. Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’ ”

To do so, she would need to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of blues, and estimate when the branches split. It would have been impossible for Nabokov to do such a study on the anatomy of butterflies alone. Dr. Pierce would need their DNA, which could provide more detail about their evolutionary history.

Working with American and European lepidopterists, Dr. Pierce organized four separate expeditions into the Andes in search of blues. Back at her lab at Harvard, she and her colleagues sequenced the genes of the butterflies and used a computer to calculate the most likely relationships between them. They also compared the number of mutations each species had acquired to determine how long ago they had diverged from one another.

There were several plausible hypotheses for how the butterflies might have evolved. They might have evolved in the Amazon, with the rising Andes fragmenting their populations. If that were true, the species would be closely related to one another.

But that is not what Dr. Pierce found. Instead, she and her colleagues found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated.

“By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.

Nabokov’s taxonomic horseshoes turn out to belong in Nome after all.

“What a great paper,” said James Mallet, an expert on butterfly evolution at University College London. “It’s a fitting tribute to the great man to see that the most modern methods that technology can deliver now largely support his systematic arrangement.”

Dr. Pierce says she believes Nabokov would have been greatly pleased to be so vindicated, and points to one of his most famous poems, “On Discovering a Butterfly.” The 1943 poem begins:

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer — and I want no other fame.

“He felt that his scientific work was standing for all time, and that he was just a player in a much bigger enterprise,” said Dr. Pierce. “He was not known as a scientist, but this certainly indicates to me that he knew what it’s all about.”

LA Times

1

Opens February 12, 2011

Richard Telles

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 23, 2011

Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”

This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.

But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America.

About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness?

It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly.

Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals.

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.

Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.

By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing — indeed, GE Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout.

So what does the administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?

The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation.

My guess is that we’re mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I’ll be pleased.

But even if he proposes good policies, the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad metaphors is a sad commentary on the state of our discourse.

The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason, however, the teachable moment came and went with nothing learned.

Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life, and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on top — and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster again.

By: Lyra Kilston
Artforum
January 2011

Perhaps a glut of cold Conceptual “strategies” in art, and virtuality in the digital world, has left us hungry for matter—for texture, grit, and mud. Whatever the root, ceramics has looked especially appealing lately, with its lean toward tactility and accidents. “Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art,” organized by artists Roger Herman and Monique Van Genderen, is titled in jest, since no such museum exists. But this exhibit, which features 150 works by twenty-four Los Angeles–based artists, offers such a marvelously varied range of approaches to clay—as painting, vessel, totem, tile, or frieze—that it warrants the lofty title.

Adrian Saxe’s lustrous half-spheres on the wall are reminiscent of Robert Irwin’s hovering discs, but a corroded and metallic version, although still as otherworldly (they were made in 1968; the rest of the show is primarily from 2009–11). Two other wall-mounted series stood out: the duo Two Serious Ladies’ “Caveman Photographs,” 2010, offers three slabs of flattened clay into which keys, USB cables, a credit card, and headphones have been pressed to leave markings. The clay tablets are glazed in a mild palette and hang by electrical cords. On the earthier end, Kelly Breslin’s “Fragment (for Agnes Denes),” 2010, features brown mounted hunks, heavily textured by jabs and holes, and strewn with small puddles of glaze. Resembling pieces of rock cracked off of a tide pool, they seem close siblings to Denes’s mystical earth works.

Other highlights are Julia Haft-Candell’s Pink, 2010, a delightful mess of grids and cubes embellished with thread, teetering glossily on a rusty metal chair. More recognizable (and startlingly so) are Matthias Merkel-Hess’s life-size casts of trashcans, plastic buckets, milk crates, and Kitchenaid mixers. Expertly glazed in acidic washes or smooth mattes, or rough and peeling in burnished scraps, the humble trashcan never looked so lovely.

January 8–February 5 at ACME

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
NY Times Published: January 21, 2011

The “princess phase.” So inevitable is this period in the maturation of girls today that it should qualify as an official developmental stage, worthy of an entry in Leach or Brazelton: first crawling, then walking, then the urgent desire to wear something pink and spark­ly. Whether we smile indulgently or roll our eyes at the drifts of tulle and chiffon that begin accumulating in our daughters’ rooms around age 4, participation in these royal rituals has come to seem necessary, even natural.

Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.” As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself “surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as ‘Princess.’ ” Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.

Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. “Is all this pink really necessary?” Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.

“Only if you want to make money,” he replies.

The toy fair is one of many field trips undertaken by Orenstein in her effort to stem the frothy pink tide of princess products threatening to engulf her young daughter. The author of “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,” among other books, Orenstein is flummoxed by the intensity of the marketing blitz aimed at girls barely old enough to read the label on their Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. “I had read stacks of books devoted to girls’ adolescence,” she writes, “but where was I to turn to under­stand the new culture of little girls, from toddler to ‘tween,’ to help decipher the potential impact — if any — of the images and ideas they were absorbing about who they should be, what they should buy, what made them girls?”

She turns, like many a journalist before her, to the child pageant circuit, the world of sequined “cupcake dresses” and custom-made “flippers” (dental prosthetics that disguise a gap-toothed smile) that has proved irresistible to reporters since the killing of the 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. To her credit, Orenstein recognizes this as well-trodden ground. “It would be easy pickin’s for me to attack parents who tart up their daughters in hopes of winning a few hundred bucks and a gilded plastic trophy; who train them to shake their tail feathers on command, to blow kisses at the judges and coyly twirl their index fingers into their dimpled cheeks,” she writes. “But really, what would be the point? That story has been told, to great success and profit.”

Such meta-observations, which appear throughout the book, are part of Orenstein’s method: she argues with herself, questions her own assumptions, ventures an assertion and then has second thoughts — all in full view of the reader. At times, her assiduously cultivated ambivalence seems to paralyze her; she gets stuck between competing concerns, unable to say anything definitive about what she believes. By and large, however, Orenstein’s reflexive self-interrogation is a good match for her material. It allows her to coax fresh insights from the exhaustively analyzed subject of gender and its discontents.

In the case of child beauty pageants, Orenstein offers a shrewd critique of why media exposés of the phenomenon are so perennially popular. They “give viewers license, under the pretext of disapproval, to be titillated by the spectacle, to indulge in guilty-pleasure voyeurism,” she observes. “They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualization of little girls — way over the line — where, exactly, is that line, and who draws it and how?” Orenstein allows us to watch her struggle with these questions, and when she arrives at a few answers, they feel well earned.

Orenstein finds one such enlightening explanation in developmental psychology research showing that until as late as age 7, children are convinced that external signs — clothing, hairstyle, favorite color, choice of toys — determine one’s sex. “It makes sense, then, that to ensure you will stay the sex you were born you’d adhere rigidly to the rules as you see them and hope for the best,” she writes. “That’s why 4-year-olds, who are in what is called ‘the inflexible stage,’ become the self-­appointed chiefs of the gender police. Suddenly the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses became more clear to me: developmentally speaking, they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls, when they will latch on to the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity.” For a preschool girl, a Cinderella dress is nothing less than an existential insurance policy, a crinolined bulwark to fortify a still-shaky sense of identity.

Orenstein is especially sharp-eyed on the subject of what comes after the princess phase, for in the micro-segmented world of marketing to children, there is of course a whole new array of products aimed at girls who begin to tire of their magic wands. These include lines of dolls with names like Moxie Girlz and Bratz: “With their sultry expressions, thickly shadowed eyes and collagen-puffed moues, Bratz were tailor-made for the girl itching to distance herself from all things rose petal pink, Princess-y, or Barbie-ish,” Orenstein notes. “Their hottie-pink ‘passion for fashion’ conveyed ‘attitude’ and ‘sassiness,’ which, anyone will tell you, is little-girl marketing-speak for ‘sexy.’ ”

As Orenstein forges on, braving Toys “R” Us, the American Girl doll store and a Miley Cyrus concert, the reader may occasionally wonder: Is she reading too much into this? After all, it’s just pretend; it’s just play. “To a point I agree,” Orenstein half-concedes, equivocal as ever. “Just because little girls wear the tulle does not mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of them shoot baskets in ball gowns or cast themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella.” By this point the reader knows what’s coming. “Yet even if girls stray from the prescribed script, doesn’t it exert its influence? Don’t our possessions reflect who we are; shape, even define, our experience?”

The author’s process of restless self-examination continues, all the way to the book’s open-ended conclusion. Orenstein has done parents the great favor of having this important debate with herself on paper and in public; she has fashioned an argument with its seams showing and its pockets turned inside out, and this makes her book far more interesting, and more useful. Because the thing about a phase is: kids grow out of it. (The marketers are counting on that.) But parents’ internal deliberations about what’s best for their children are here to stay.

Annie Murphy Paul is the author of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”

Opening January 30

Overduin and Kite

Study for “White Black”
1958
Gouache, ink on paper
4 1/2 x 5 5/8 inches; 11 x 14 cm

Open February 12, 2011

Mathew Marks

Paul Sietsema
Anticultural Positions
2009
16-millimeter film, silent, approximately 25 minutes

January 30 – April 24, 2011

Hammer

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
NY Times Published: January 18, 2011

R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who became the founding director of the Peace Corps, the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, a United States ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972, died on Tuesday in Bethesda, Md. He was 95.
His family announced his death in a statement.

Mr. Shriver was found to have Alzheimer’s disease in 2003 and on Sunday was admitted to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, where he died. He had been in hospice care in recent months after his estate in Potomac, Md., was sold last year.

White-haired and elegantly attired, he attended the inauguration of his son-in-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Republican governor of California in the fall of 2003. Mr. Schwarzenegger is married to Maria Shriver, a former NBC News correspondent.

But in recent years, as his condition deteriorated, Mr. Shriver was seldom seen in public. He emerged in one instance to attend the funeral of his wife of 56 years, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of John F. Kennedy; she died in 2009 in Hyannis, Mass., at the age of 88.

As a Kennedy brother-in-law, Mr. Shriver was bound inextricably to one of the nation’s most powerful political dynasties. It was an association with enormous advantages, thrusting him to prominence in a series of seemingly altruistic missions. But it came with handicaps, relegating him to the political background and to a subordinate role in the family history.

“Shriver’s relationship with the Kennedys was complex,” Scott Stossel wrote in “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver,” a 2004 biography. “They buoyed him up to heights and achievements he would never otherwise have attained — and they held him back, thwarting his political advancement.”

The book, as well as reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications, suggested that Mr. Shriver’s hopes to run for governor of Illinois in 1960 and vice president in 1964 and 1968 were abandoned to help promote, or at least not compete with, Kennedy aspirations. Mr. Shriver’s vice-presidential race in 1972, on a ticket with Senator George S. McGovern, and a brief primary run for president in 1976 were crushed by the voters.

Mr. Shriver was never elected to any national office. To political insiders, his calls for public service in the 1960s seemed quixotic at a time when America was caught up in a war in Vietnam, a cold war with the Soviet Union and civil rights struggles and urban riots at home. But when the fogs of war and chaos cleared years later, he was remembered by many as a last vestige of Kennedy-era idealism.

“Sarge came to embody the idea of public service,” President Obama said in a statement.

Mr. Shriver’s impact on American life was significant. On the stage of social change for decades, he brought President Kennedy’s proposal for the Peace Corps to fruition in 1961 and served as the organization’s director until 1966. He tapped into a spirit of volunteerism, and within a few years thousands of young Americans were teaching and working on public health and development projects in poorer countries around the world.

After the president’s assassination in 1963, Mr. Shriver’s decision to remain in the Johnson administration alienated many of the Kennedys, especially Robert, who remained as the United States attorney general for months but whose animus toward his brother’s successor was profound. Mr. Shriver’s responsibilities deepened, however. In 1964, Johnson persuaded him to take on the administration’s war on poverty, a campaign embodied in a vast new bureaucracy, the Office of Economic Opportunity.

From 1965 to 1968, Mr. Shriver, who disdained bureaucracies as wasteful and inefficient, was director of that agency, a post he held simultaneously with his Peace Corps job until 1966. The agency created antipoverty programs like Head Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor. (The Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled in 1973, but many of its programs survived in other agencies.)

In 1968, Johnson named Mr. Shriver ambassador to France. It was a time of strained relations. President Charles de Gaulle had recognized Communist China, withdrawn French forces from NATO’s integrated military command and denounced American involvement in Indochina. But Mr. Shriver established a working rapport with de Gaulle and was credited with helping to improve relations.

Mr. Shriver returned to the United States in 1970 to work for Democrats in the midterm elections and to reassess his own political prospects. His long-awaited break came two years later when Senator McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, picked him as his running mate. Mr. McGovern’s first choice, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, was dropped after revelations that he had received electroshock therapy for depression.

The McGovern-Shriver ticket lost in a landslide to the incumbent Republicans, Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. Four years later, Mr. Shriver ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, pledging a renewal of ethics after the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from the White House. But Mr. Shriver was knocked out in the primaries and ended his political career.

In later years, he was a rainmaker for an international law firm, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, retiring in 1986. He was also active in the Special Olympics, founded by his wife for mentally disabled athletes, and he continued his work with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, an advocacy organization he founded in Chicago in 1967 as the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded Mr. Shriver the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Ten years earlier, President Ronald Reagan conferred the same award on Eunice Shriver. They were the only husband and wife to win the nation’s highest civilian honor individually.

In 2008, PBS broadcast a documentary, “American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver.” A children’s book by Maria Shriver, “What’s Happening to Grandpa?,” was published in 2004, explaining the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. In May 2009, HBO presented a four-part documentary on Alzheimer’s. Ms. Shriver was the executive producer of one segment, “Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?”

Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., known as Sarge from childhood, was born in Westminster, Md., on Nov. 9, 1915, the son of his namesake, a banker, and Hilda Shriver. His forebears, called Schreiber, immigrated from Germany in 1721. One ancestor, David Shriver, was a signer of Maryland’s 1776 Constitution. The Shrivers, like the Kennedys, were Roman Catholics and socially prominent, but not especially affluent.

On scholarships, he attended Canterbury, a Catholic boarding prep school in New Milford, Conn. — John F. Kennedy was briefly a schoolmate — and Yale University, graduating with honors in 1938. He earned a Yale law degree in 1941 and joined the Navy shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming an officer on battleships and submarines in the Atlantic and the Pacific and winning a Purple Heart for wounds he sustained at Guadalcanal.

After the war, he joined Newsweek as an editor. He met Eunice Kennedy at a dinner party, and she introduced him to her father, Joseph P. Kennedy. In 1946, Joseph Kennedy hired him to help manage his recently acquired Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then the world’s largest commercial building. In Chicago, Mr. Shriver not only turned a profit for the mart but also plunged into Democratic politics.

After a seven-year courtship, Mr. Shriver and Ms. Kennedy were married by Cardinal Francis Spellman at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1953.

In addition to his daughter, Maria, Mr. Shriver’s survivors include four sons, Robert Sargent Shriver III of Santa Monica, Calif.; Timothy, of Chevy Chase, Md.; Mark, of Bethesda, Md.; and Anthony, of Miami; and 19 grandchildren.

Mr. Shriver’s relationships with the Kennedys were widely analyzed by the news media, not least because of his own political potential. He looked like a movie star, with a flashing smile, dark hair going gray and the kind of muscled, breezy athleticism that went with tennis courts and sailboats. Like the Kennedys, he was charming but not self-revealing, a quick study but not reflective. Associates said he could be imperious, but his knightly public image became indelible.

He took root in Chicago. In 1954, he was appointed to the city’s Board of Education, and a year later became its president. In 1955, he also became president of the Catholic Interracial Council, which fought discrimination in housing, education and other aspects of city life. By 1959, he had become so prominent in civic affairs that he was being touted as a Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois in 1960.

Mr. Shriver did nothing to discourage reports that he was considering a run. But with the rest of the Kennedy clan, he joined John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. As he and other family members acknowledged later, the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, had told him that a separate Shriver race that year would be a distraction. So he resigned from the Chicago school board and became a campaign coordinator in Wisconsin and West Virginia and a principal contact with minorities.

As the election approached, the campaign learned that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been sentenced in Georgia to four months of hard labor for what amounted to a minor traffic violation. Mr. Shriver suggested that Senator Kennedy call a distraught Coretta Scott King, who was terrified that her husband might be killed in prison. His reassuring call, and another by Robert F. Kennedy to a judge in Georgia that led to Dr. King’s release, helped produce a windfall of black support for Kennedy.

Senator Kennedy broached the idea for a volunteer corps in a speech at the University of Michigan and crystallized it as the Peace Corps in an appearance in San Francisco. Mr. Shriver, who as a young man had guided American students on work-and-learn programs in Europe, seemed a natural to initiate it.

After the inauguration, Mr. Shriver, who scouted talent for the incoming administration — people who came to be known as “the best and the brightest” — was assigned to the task of designing the Peace Corps, which was established by executive order in March 1961.

As director, he laid the foundations for what arguably became the most lasting accomplishment of the Kennedy presidency. As the Peace Corps approaches its 50th anniversary this year, more than 200,000 Americans have served as corps volunteers in 139 countries.

Break mirrors, Mr. Shriver advised graduating students at Yale in 1994. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own.”

Lutèce, 1961 – 2004

By Zachary Woolfe
Capital
Jan. 4, 2011

“I think the whole Brooklyn thing must be greatly exaggerated,” said the eminent food writer Mimi Sheraton.

“I’m from Brooklyn,” she continued, “but it would take a lot to get me there for dinner. When Lundy’s was Lundy’s, I’d be there. When Gargiulo’s was Gargiulo’s, I went. I certainly went to Gage and Tollner. There were one-of-a-kind things there, but so far anywhere I’ve been to there has not been worth the trip from Manhattan. I haven’t been to Al di la, because you have to wait on line, and I’m not going to Brooklyn to wait on line. Not when there are 10 good Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village. The Times has certainly been very exaggerated in its Brooklyn coverage, because most of them live there. They begin to see it as being better than it is because it’s so close to them. I would go to Brooklyn if it were exceptional.”

Sheraton was sitting in the living room of her townhouse in the Village. On the coffee table was The Lutèce Cookbook, a record of one of the greatest, least Brooklyn restaurants in the city’s history, inscribed to her and her husband by the book’s author, and Lutèce’s chef, André Soltner.

Soon after it opened, in 1961 or 1962, Sheraton went to Lutèce for the first time, to see what all the fuss was about. The restaurant, on 50th Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues, was owned by the formidable André Surmain, and in the kitchen was Soltner, a young chef from France who spoke very little English. Soltner was cooking traditional French food—foie gras and frog’s legs and cream sauces—with accents of his native Alsace, but there was from the beginning something about the food’s freshness, about the integrity of the ingredients, that set it apart from Le Pavillon and its scions, the haute cuisine palaces that had dominated the city’s fine dining scene for decades.

On Nov. 4, 1977, Sheraton, who had been the restaurant critic of The New York Times for a little over a year, wrote a review of Lutèce, by then one of the most famous places in the city. She began the review with praise, the kind of blurb a chef might die for: she wrote that Lutèce was “one of the country’s most delightful and excellent restaurants.” But towards the end, things took a dark turn as she moved on to a grim listing of missteps during her recent visits. A lobster bisque had been disappointing; a baked crab entrée limp; roast duck with raspberry sauce “cloyingly, jamlike sweet.” At one dinner, the snails “lacked any flavor other than salt of which there was an overabundance.”

In a dramatic move towards an already-eminent institution, Sheraton removed one of the restaurant’s four stars, which had been awarded in 1972 by Raymond Sokolov. “Disappointments,” she wrote, “though relatively few, loom large precisely because they are exceptions.” Soltner, who by then had become the sole owner of Lutèce while continuing to cook, was, needless to say, displeased.

“André still hasn’t gotten over it,” Sheraton said with a laugh last week. She reinstated Lutèce’s fourth star a couple of years later, and eventually she and Soltner became friends. They are joining up on Friday for the latest installment in a series of post-concert “Musical Suppers” at the New York Philharmonic that Sheraton has hosted since last year, featuring chefs like Alain Ducasse, Lidia Bastianich, and Daniel Boulud. The intimate evenings, seating about 70, aren’t fund-raisers, though tickets are $225; Sheraton said that they’re intended to put a human face on the Philharmonic. (They have the added benefit of attracting well-to-do patrons, who may not be regular concertgoers, to the orchestra.)

Soltner, 78, is the first of the chefs in the series whose restaurant days are past (he sold Lutèce in 1994, and it closed, done in by bad menu choices and the post-9/11 economy, in 2004), and the title of the evening, “An Homage to the Legend of Lutèce,” emphasizes nostalgia. The dishes are all old favorites, starting with the Alsatian onion tart that, in that 1977 review, Sheraton said was “the best version of this we have ever had.” There will then be a jalousie of crab and spinach, encased in puff pastry; pumpkin soup, with croutons sautéed in butter; veal cheeks—“just impossible to find,” Soltner said excitedly over the phone recently, “just recently do they pull the cheeks out of the calf’s head”—braised in red wine and served with tender dumplings; and a bavaroise with pears and chocolate sauce.

THESE ARE THE KIND OF DISHES IT CAN BE HARD, IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE, to find today, and the meal is a reminder of Lutèce’s midcentury heyday—the restaurant pops up several times during season two of Mad Men—at a time when it can be hard to see its legacy.

Soltner, now the dean of classic studies at the French Culinary Institute, is still an influential training chef. But in a food scene defined by casual dining, with iPods blasting even at “nice” restaurants; by the haute-frat-boy cooking of David Chang (“I really don’t take him seriously as a chef,” Sheraton said); by chefs who oversee restaurant empires while hosting TV shows, Soltner, who owned one restaurant, missed approximately five days of work during his 34 years there, and co-authored a single cookbook, is a vision from another time. (Not coincidentally, he’s the only “Musical Supper” chef who is actually going to the Restaurant Associates kitchen in Long Island City the day before the event to supervise the preparations.)

“Today, chefs are stars and there are people who are willing to finance them,” Soltner said. “My generation, 50 years ago, it was not so. We had one restaurant, and we had a tough time maybe to find the money to open it and renovate it. That was then. Today chefs who are good, who are recognized, they find investors very easily. It was not like that in my generation.”

Not that Soltner did badly for himself. He owned the restaurant’s building, and lived above it for decades, and got a very good deal when he sold it, according to Sheraton, because he got out when his reputation was still at its height.

“He did very well,” she said. “He didn’t wind up poor. It’s still possible to make good money owning a restaurant, but not as much as they want to make, not if you want to go corporate and have a huge empire. But if you have a very successful restaurant and you’re the sole owner, you can make a lot of money. Not as much, probably, as Sirio Maccioni or these guys are making, but you have to have in mind that these guys have a lot of backers to divide between. Soltner was the sole owner.”

But, while the model of the one-restaurant star chef is mostly dead, and while it is hardly easy to find crab jalousies on New York menus these days, Lutèce’s, and Soltner’s, legacy is perceptible, not least in the freshness-obsessed locavore scene. When Soltner started cooking in New York in 1961, even fancy restaurants used canned versions of hard-to-find ingredients like girolles, the French wild mushroom. Soltner, though, refused to use canned or frozen products, years before the lighter nouvelle cuisine put a renewed focus on freshness.

And though the restaurant was famously expensive, it was equally famously warm and friendly. Soltner eventually brought in his wife, Simone, to run the front-of-house, and the restaurant laid the groundwork for New York restaurants that retained their high quality without being snooty or overly formal.

Soltner seems generally at peace with the evolutionary changes in food culture. While some chefs of his generation have treated the science-obsessed school of molecular gastronomy with disdain, he compared the criticisms to those leveled against nouvelle cuisine in the ’70s; both schools, he said, have their good and bad qualities. Indeed, if he was thirty today, he ventured modestly, he, too, might have two or three restaurants.

Sheraton, who is working on a book-length food glossary and still writes regularly for magazines, was more critical of the current state of food writing. The Times, she said, focuses too much on trends.

“Pie is the new donut, or pie is the new cupcakes,” she said, “and the truck thing, I don’t know how long that’ll last. I don’t know where they eat it, that’s what I can’t figure out about a truck. Where the hell do you eat it?”

Reading her 1977 Lutèce review is kind of like reading Elizabethan English: it’s recognizable, but foreign. She describes the appearance of the restaurant’s dining rooms, and its food, and that’s pretty much that. For readers now, who have already gotten used to Sam Sifton’s style—oddly reliant on the second-person imperative, and obsessed with a restaurant’s sociocultural mood, its place within the city’s past and present—Sheraton’s reviews are nearly bare.

“It’s food writing for an audience less interested in food and more interested in the experience and the theater of it,” Sheraton said of Sifton’s work. “I don’t like it at all. I always told people what the place was like, but these long, long introductions about the scene—I usually skip the first column and a half and get to the food, because that’s what I think it’s about.”

La Grenouille, which opened in 1962 and which Sifton awarded three stars a year ago, is the last survivor of its generation of fine New York French restaurant. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of Sheraton’s favorite restaurants, and she was headed there for lunch on New Year’s Eve. Soltner, for his part, put the phone down for a minute to tend to the pork chops with red cabbage and chestnuts that he was making for dinner. He cooks at home most of the time, he said, and when he goes out, he goes to the city’s fanciest places: Jean-Georges, Daniel, Le Bernadin.

“When I go out,” he said, “I want to go out where they cook the right way, where they use the best ingredients, the most natural ingredients, and that’s it, you know? I don’t go out to second-class restaurants, because I eat better at home.”

Capital

Thanks To Ryan Andolina

Memory Ware #61, 2010
Foam, tinted resin, found jewelry, coffee pot, plastic toys
47 x 81 x 12 1/2 inches overall (119.4 x 205.7 x 31.8 cm)

Through February 19, 2011

Gagosian

F art house Photographed by Iwan Baan

Charlotte Rampling and Raquel Zimmermann at the Parisian Louvre.
C-print
127 x 177,8 cm / 50 x 70 in

Through January 29, 2011

johann koenig