Opens January 21 through March 12, 2011

CFA Berlin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 13, 2011

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

What are the differences I’m talking about?

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.

But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.

In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.

Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.

What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.

Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: January 13, 2011

President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.

Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility. Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. Every column, every speech, every piece of legislation and every executive decision has its own humiliating shortcomings. There are always arguments you should have made better, implications you should have anticipated, other points of view you should have taken on board.

Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.

But every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward.

Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in succession they make the social organism better.

As a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process. We all get to live lives better than we deserve because our individual shortcomings are transmuted into communal improvement. We find meaning — and can only find meaning — in the role we play in that larger social enterprise.

So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.

The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.

But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.

So, of course, you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. Of course you get people who prefer monologue to dialogue. Of course you get people who detest politics because it frustrates their ability to get 100 percent of what they want. Of course you get people who gravitate toward the like-minded and loathe their political opponents. They feel no need for balance and correction.

Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away.

President Obama’s speech in Tucson was a good step, but there will have to be a bipartisan project like comprehensive tax reform to get people conversing again. Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty.

In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. … Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Plate 21 (triangle, iron)
2010
patinated bronze
36.8×30.5×2.5 cm
14 1/2×12 x 1 ins
unique

January 14 through February 19, 2011

Modern Art

By Jori Finkel
The Los Angeles Times
January 4, 2011

Paul Soldner, a ceramicist and longtime Scripps College teacher who introduced a pottery technique called American raku, died Monday at his home in Claremont after a period of declining health. He was 89.

“He was one of the greats in California ceramics — part of the West Coast scene that came on in the ’60s with Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Ken Price,” said Doug Casebeer, an artistic director at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colo., which Soldner helped to found. “It was a generation influenced by jazz — the idea of spontaneity and responding to your materials.”

Born in 1921 in Summerfield, Ill., Soldner moved several times in the Midwest for his father’s work as a Mennonite minister. The family landed in the small town of Bluffton, Ohio, where he attended Bluffton College. He didn’t by all accounts have a strong interest in art until he enlisted in the Army medical corps during World War II.

As he later told his family, his desire to become an artist was ignited by the war, or, more specifically, by seeing beauty emerge from terror in the form of charcoal drawings made by Holocaust victims on the barracks walls of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

“He was really struck by the fact that people in such dire circumstances tried to make beauty out of their lives,” said his daughter, Stephanie Soldner Sullivan. As for his Mennonite upbringing, she said that her father and her mother, Ginny, left the church and at one point explored Buddhism, but her father’s work ethic and his “idea that you made the most of whatever you had” persisted.

This resourcefulness came in handy in 1954, when Soldner moved to Los Angeles to became Voulkos’ first graduate student in the new ceramics program at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design). Because the department was so new and the ceramics studio nearly empty, the two had to build their own potter’s wheels from scratch. As Times art critic Christopher Knight once wrote, “Soldner’s welded X-frame kick-wheel became the California classroom standard, while Voulkos’ ceramics changed the direction of the art.” (Today, Soldner wheels and Soldner tubs, used for mixing clay, are still sold at supply stores.)

After his experience with Voulkos, Soldner began teaching at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School, where he was a visiting professor until 1966, returning as a full professor from 1970 to 1991. Early on, one of his undergraduate students was David Armstrong, who went on to become a close friend, an in-depth collector of his work (he owns more than 100 works by the artist) and the founder of the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona.

“I was going to be a veterinarian, but Paul changed my life. My whole vocation, avocation, centers on ceramics,” Armstrong, who inaugurated his museum in 2004 with a sweeping Soldner retrospective, said Monday. “He was a phenomenal teacher and an inspiration to countless ceramists.”

Armstrong was with Soldner in 1960 when he developed the technique known as American raku. Long used for tea ceremony ware in Japan, raku traditionally involves firing a pot in a kiln at lower-than-usual temperatures, only to remove it and plunge it in water (or green tea, as the origin story goes) while still red-hot. American raku involves “smoking” the piece instead, by plunging it into combustible materials like sawdust or newspapers instead of water.

According to Armstrong, Soldner discovered this technique while preparing for a demonstration at a local crafts fair. “Paul was a showman and wanted to make the event entertaining. But if you’ve ever been to a ceramics studio, you know it takes a long time to fire a piece on a kiln,” Armstrong said.

So Soldner tried his hand at raku: making an ad-hoc kiln out of a 50-gallon oil drum lined with concrete, formulating the right clay and glazes for it, and choosing a fish pond nearby for plunging the ceramics into cold water. But one bowl didn’t make it to the water. Rushing from the kiln to the pond with tongs in hand, Soldner accidentally dropped the bowl in a bed of pepper-tree leaves, where it started a small fire. The result was visually arresting, with the pot picking up the imprint of the leaves and acquiring a smoky or iridescent sheen.

Soldner, who embraced the beauty of the accidental and unpredictable, saw it as a fundamentally Japanese aesthetic. “In the West, there is this emphasis on perfection. Something that cracks is considered a mistake,” he told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in 1997, adding that the same “flaw” in the East might be called a “crackle.” “It’s no different than the approach to taming the outdoors. In the West, when you make a garden, you throw the rocks out. In the East, you bring the rocks back in.”

Bringing the rocks back in was not just a metaphor for Soldner, who was attracted to the rugged geology of the western United States. In the 1960s, he helped the developers of Anderson Ranch in Colorado choose its current location and refine its vision as an artists colony and community center. And from 1956 until his wife’s death in 1995, the couple worked on building a summer home in Aspen — by hand. They used rocks and other materials native to the area.

“He worked with rocks and he went to the dump, salvaging and scrounging and recycling materials. He used solar heating before it was on the map,” Casebeer said. “He was an artist, and he was an inventor.”

Besides his daughter, Soldner is survived by two grandchildren and a sister.

Hugh Hamilton for The New York Times

A composite photograph showing Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The parking lot is where Eli Broad’s proposed museum is to be built. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is at far right.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: January 11, 2011

Experience tells us that it would be unwise to build up expectations for Eli Broad’s proposed new museum, whose design was unveiled at a ceremony in downtown Los Angeles last week.

Despite the tens of millions he has poured into the city’s art institutions, Mr. Broad’s reputation as a cultural patron is, to put it politely, subpar. Among architects he is known as someone with a gift for getting the worst buildings from the most highly regarded talents — a reputation that was pretty much cemented with the opening of the $50 million Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a bland, uninspired travertine box by Renzo Piano that ranks somewhere near the bottom of that architect’s achievements.

Just as bad is his failure, in the view of many (myself included), to grasp the peculiar beauty of Los Angeles, its oddly hypnotic blend of flimsy houses and muscular freeways, raw nature and metropolitan grit. His urban ideal, to the degree that he has one, seems to be based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or on central Paris — models that, however attractive, have little to do with Los Angeles’s sprawl.

Some of us saw the new museum building, which will be called the Broad Art Foundation and will occupy a site on Grand Avenue in the city’s downtown, as this 77-year-old philanthropist’s best — and perhaps last — chance at redemption. And there is something alluring about the design, by Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Its honeycomblike exterior is a smart counterpoint to the swirling forms of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall next door. And the sequence of spaces that leads you through the building makes subtle but important nods to the city around it — not only to other, nearby cultural institutions, but also to the Latino community a few blocks to the southeast, which many of those institutions historically ignored.

But too many critical aspects of the design miss the mark. The galleries, in particular, are deeply flawed; other important elements were either scrapped during the design process or never fully thought through, so that the overall impression is of a project that falls, with an unpleasant thud, well short of its potential. As in so many of Mr. Broad’s architectural adventures, early promise gets lost in a muddle of bad or careless decisions — and the city loses.

The museum is likely to be the final component of a kind of cultural acropolis conceived for this hilltop stretch of Grand Avenue more than 50 years ago by Dorothy Chandler, the powerful wife of the Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler. That vision involved bulldozing hundreds of Victorian houses to make room for a chain of cultural monuments and corporate fortresses, and by the late 1980s the area was an emblem of the city’s social polarization, an enclave of faceless towers and windswept plazas barricaded against the vibrant Latino shopping corridor just down the hill.

Since then an army of civic leaders, urban planners and architects have struggled for ways to draw wary Angelenos to the avenue and reverse its elitist image, with varying degrees of success. The delirious stainless-steel exterior of Mr. Gehry’s Disney Hall, opened in 2003, added some desperately needed vitality to the street, but the chiseled concrete of Rafael Moneo’s 2002 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels created a sacred precinct walled off from the avenue.

Other projects have dragged on for years, like a new park that would extend from Grand Avenue several blocks down to the foot of City Hall, and a vast Gehry-designed retail-and-residential tower complex, which both have the potential to begin breaking down the physical and psychological barriers between the culture mavens who visit the top of the hill and the residents of the neighborhoods at its foot.

On its surface, at least, the Diller Scofidio design seems a thoughtful addition to that story. Its subdued square form is not only a nice contrast to the exuberance of Mr. Gehry’s hall; it is also in keeping with the mood of the avenue, which over the years has developed its own kind of eerie stillness, especially at night, when it is mostly barren. A porous steel skin wraps around the building, pried up from the ground at two corners to create the main lobby entrances on Grand Avenue. The relatively straightforward interior layout — a 35,000-square-foot, column-free gallery space on top of a floor of art storage, a ground-floor lobby and three levels of underground parking — allows for an elaborate architectural narrative. Visitors arriving from the direction of Disney Hall will cross the lobby and ride a 97-foot-long enclosed escalator that cuts diagonally through the storage floor on its way up to the top-floor galleries.

Once they are through looking at art, they will funnel down a broad staircase with big windows that overlook the racks of paintings and storage containers — a kind of back-room view of the curator’s process — before they are deposited back in the lobby.

It’s a seductive sequence — and one as controlling, in its way, as Wright’s Guggenheim spiral. By orienting the main escalator from the Second Street entrance, the architects are not only striving to link the museum to the string of cultural institutions that extends from Disney Hall to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum; they are also seeking to connect with the mainly Latino shopping strip along Broadway, which lies two blocks down Second Street to the east. At the other end, the staircase points departing visitors toward the entry of the Museum of Contemporary Art, an institution of which Mr. Broad was the founding chairman.

But as attractive as some of the ideas behind the overall narrative are, they tend to fall apart once you begin to examine them one step at a time. The porous skin, which covers the roof as well as the four sides of the building, is intended to fill the top-floor galleries with sunlight. But the main windows there face southeast toward Grand Avenue — and the harsh morning light that is anathema to viewing art. (The northern walls, which would let in the kind of indirect sunlight artists and curators love, are largely blocked by mechanical systems and a freight elevator.)

What’s more, the perforations in the skin will make the sunlight mottled and uneven. And forget hanging art on most of the exterior walls. My guess is that after the first show, the entire wall will simply be boarded over, and you’ll never see it again.

Then there is the descent on foot. Opening the back of the house to public view has become a fashionable idea since the 2003 opening of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Schaulager museum in Basel, Switzerland, where visitors can schedule private viewings of storage rooms organized by individual artists. But in the Diller Scofidio design you will have no direct connection to the art itself, and it’s doubtful that snapshot views of artworks arranged on racks will be compelling enough to merit the length of the walk (or, alternatively, that repeat visitors will want to wait in line for the single, overcrowded elevator).

Finally — and as critical to the design’s overall success — there is the relationship between man and car. In their original proposal, Diller Scofidio included a parking entry at ground level along Second Street, which would have cut underneath the lobby and spiraled down to the underground parking. This entry added a crucial dimension to the narrative: the interweaving of pedestrian and automotive life that is central to the experience of Los Angeles generally, and of Grand Avenue in particular, with its views onto nearby freeways. But the entrance was removed during the design process, and what was once a more complex reading of urban mobility has been reduced to something more banal.

This isn’t just bad news for Mr. Broad.

Grand Avenue has never really worked as an idea — not only because it was elitist but also because the idea of a singular, dominant cultural hub runs so counter to the city’s nature.

Still, in many ways the avenue’s fortunes have also come to embody Los Angeles’s continuing struggle to define its civic identity in an era when its cultural status continues to rise. A successful Broad museum would go a long way toward cementing that status, which makes the possibility of its failure that much more of a blow.

Seizure, 2008.

Through February 6, 2011

Aspen Art Museum

via

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published January 9, 2011

If it turns out that a poisonous variant of free speech is partially to blame for the shootings in Tucson, we will most certainly be struck by the fact that Gabrielle Giffords was seen last week in Congress, reading part of the Constitution that allows an American citizen to say just about anything.

But as Rep. Giffords herself also pointed out, in March when she was a target because of her vote on health care reform, free speech does have a cost.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” said Giffords. “Crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences.”

Giffords had already felt a blunt edge of opponents’ rage — a window in her Tucson office was shattered after she voted to expand health care for other Americans.

The court filings late Sunday offered few clues on why a deranged man would open fire on a public servant meeting the public, killing six, gravely wounding Ms. Giffords. Was it because she was a Jew? A woman? A Democrat? A member of Congress? An advocate of health care? A face of government in a state where anti-government sentiment is the early bird special? All we know is that the 22-year-old man charged with the shootings, Jared Lee Loughner, wrote notes about a planned “assassination.”

So, from there, deductions must begin. One discussion goes to the first two amendments of the Constitution — a clause that guarantees even crazy people the right to say horrible things, and another one that seems to give those same crazy people the right to own a lethal weapon.

Neither amendment, of course, killed a 9-year-old girl or put a bullet through the head of that bright soul, Gabrielle Giffords. But both amendments, when abused, can have lethal consequences, as the congresswoman herself said so hauntingly in March. The sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, who is already under Tea Party attack for speaking his mind, had it mostly right when he said Arizona had become “the Tombstone of the United States.”

Tombstone, the town, is in Giffords’s southern Arizona district, an Old West burg where shootouts are staged, bodies fall into the street, and then everybody applauds and laughs it off. Tombstone politics is the place we’ve been living in for some time now, and our guns are loaded.

In my home state Washington, federal officials recently put away a 64-year-old man who threatened, in the most vile language, to kill Senator Patty Murray because she voted for health care reform. Imagine: kill her because she wanted to give fellow Americans a chance to get well. Why would a public policy change prompt a murder threat?

Prosecutors here in Washington State told me that the man convicted of making the threats was using language that, in some cases, came word-for-word from Glenn Beck, the Fox demagogue. Every afternoon Charles A. Wilson would sit in his living room and stuff his head with Beck, a man who spouts scary nonsense to millions. Of course, Beck didn’t make the threats or urge his followers to do so.

But it was Beck who said “the war is just beginning,” after the health care bill was passed. And it was Beck who re-introduced the paranoid and racist rants of a 1950s-era John Birch Society supporter, W. Cleon Skousen, who said a one-world government cabal was plotting a takeover.

It’s also worth one more mention of Sharron Angle, the Republican who was nearly elected Senator from Nevada. She agreed with a talk-radio host who suggested that “domestic enemies” — a code for treasonous agents, deserving of death — were working within the walls of Congress. And it was Angle who speculated on whether people frustrated with politicians would turn to “Second Amendment remedies,” which is not even code for assassination. It can only mean one thing.

The federal judge who was murdered on Saturday morning, John M. Roll, received numerous death threats to him and his family after an Arizona talk-radio station went after him because he dared to let a civil rights lawsuit against the state’s harsh immigration law proceed. He needed marshal protection from these rabid radio-inspired opponents of a free and functioning judiciary.

The good news is that already, in just a few days time, this kind of talk from Beck, Palin and Angle is now being seen for what it really is — something not to be touched by fair citizens or ambitious politicians. And the long-overdue revulsion is because such poisons — death threats in place of reasoned argument, fetishizing of guns, glib talk of “taking someone out” — were used so carelessly, as if they didn’t matter.

Well, they do matter. Even if the gunman’s motives are never truly known, the splattering of so much innocent blood on a Saturday morning gives a nation as fractious as ours a chance to think about what happens when words are used as weapons, and weapons are used in place of words.

Friending, trending, even evidencing and statementing… plenty of nouns are turning into verbs.

By: Anthony Gardner
Intelligent Life Magazine, Winter 2010

Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.

The English language is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old ones fall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon.

It is found in all areas of life, though some are more productive than others. Financiers are never lacking in ingenuity: Investec recently forecast that “Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow Marks & Spencer to anniversary tougher comparisons”—whatever that may mean. Politics has come up with “to handbag” (a tribute to Lady Thatcher) and “to doughnut”—that is, to sit in a ring around a colleague making a parliamentary announcement, so that it is not clear to television viewers that the chamber is practically deserted.

New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist: we “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.

Sport is another ready source. “Rollerblade”, “skateboard”, “snowboard” and “zorb” have all graduated from names of equipment to actual activities. Football referees used to book players, or send them off: now they “card” them. Racing drivers “pit”, golfers “par” and coastal divers “tombstone”.

Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Language Instinct” (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

There is a difference today, says Robert Groves, one of the editors of the new “Collins Dictionary of the English Language”. “Potential changes in our language are picked up and repeated faster than they would have been in the past, when print was the only mass communication medium, and fewer people were literate.” So coinages can be trialled around the world—and greenlighted—as soon as they are visioned.

What makes these leaps so easy is that English, unlike other Indo-European languages, uses few inflections. The infinitive does not take a separate ending, so while in French the noun “action” has to become the verb “actionner”, English can use the same form for both. In German (apart from “essen” meaning “food” or “eat”), such words are virtually unknown; the same is true of Chinese—though the noun meaning “thunder” can be used as the verb “to shock”. In Arabic such formations are not found at all.

What’s the driving force behind it? “Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to say something over and over again, is a common motivator,” says Groves. So fund-raisers say “to gift-aid” rather than repeat “donate using gift aid” all day long, and CIA agents looking for suspects to kidnap find “to rendition” handier than “to subject to extraordinary rendition”.

Sometimes the results are ridiculous—notably when verbs are minted from nouns which were formed from verbs in the first place. To say “Let’s conference” instead of “Let’s confer”, “I’ll signature it” instead of “I’ll sign it”, or “they statemented” instead of “they stated”, makes the speaker seem either ignorant or pretentious. (The late General Alexander Haig, whose military jargon was so singular it became known as “Haigspeak”, even wanted “to caveat” a proposal, and was duly ridiculed.) Using an elaborate verb when there is a far simpler alternative—such as “dialogue” for “talk”—has the same effect.

On the other hand, verbing can be entertaining—especially when applied, with a touch of mischief, to a proper noun. A classic example is “Gerrymander”, dating back to 1812, when—under Governor Gerry of Massachusetts—political boundaries were redrawn so tortuously that one district acquired the shape of a salamander. In 2004 a smear campaign against John Kerry, the Democrats’ nominee for president, gave us the verb “to swiftboat”, derived from the type of naval vessel Kerry had commanded in Vietnam. Nor should we forget “to Bobbitt”, the verb coined when an irate Lorena Bobbitt took a knife to quite a specific part of her husband’s physique.

Some lovers of the language deplore the whole business of verbing (Benjamin Franklin called it “awkward and abominable” in a letter to Noah Webster, the lexicographer, in 1789); others see it as proof of a vibrant linguistic culture. Certain words seem to bring people out in a rash—among them “actioning”, “tasking”, “impacting”, “efforting”, “accessing”, “progressing” and “transitioning”. Often, though, the dictionary yields surprising precedents: “impact” was used as a verb in the 17th century, and “task” in the 16th. Other verbs have managed to escape linguistic ghettoes (“to access” was recognised by the “Oxford English Dictionary” over 20 years ago, but only as a computing term), or acquire new meanings: “to reference”, originally meaning “to supply with references”, has now become a near-twin of “to refer to”.

Coinages that seem to bend over backwards invite derision. You may not be rushing “to boilerplate” (automatically include) material in a document, or “to demagogue” a political subject (discuss it in a rabble-rousing manner). Locative verbs are particularly clumsy: “I’d like to showcase/front-stage/hothouse/workshop this.” A few simply appear crass—none more so than “to incest”, meaning “to force into an incestuous relationship”.

Not every coinage passes into general use, and with luck “to incest” will quietly fade away. But as for trying to end verbing altogether, forget it. You’d simply be Canuting.

via

January 8 – February 5, 2011

Marc Foxx

Kelly Breslin, Fragment #3 (for Agnes Denes) Ceramic and Bronze 2010

January 8 through February 5, 2011

Opening Reception 6-8pm, January 8

ACME

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 6, 2011

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.

How bad is the Texas deficit? Comparing budget crises among states is tricky, for technical reasons. Still, data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest that the Texas budget gap is worse than New York’s, about as bad as California’s, but not quite up to New Jersey levels.

The point, however, is that just the other day Texas was being touted as a role model (and still is by commentators who haven’t been keeping up with the news). It was the state the recession supposedly passed by, thanks to its low taxes and business-friendly policies. Its governor boasted that its budget was in good shape thanks to his “tough conservative decisions.”

Oh, and at a time when there’s a full-court press on to demonize public-sector unions as the source of all our woes, Texas is nearly demon-free: less than 20 percent of public-sector workers there are covered by union contracts, compared with almost 75 percent in New York.

So what happened to the “Texas miracle” many people were talking about even a few months ago?

Part of the answer is that reports of a recession-proof state were greatly exaggerated. It’s true that Texas job losses haven’t been as severe as those in the nation as a whole since the recession began in 2007. But Texas has a rapidly growing population — largely, suggests Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that; but given that rising population, Texas needs to create jobs more rapidly than the rest of the country just to keep up with a growing work force.

And when you look at unemployment, Texas doesn’t seem particularly special: its unemployment rate is below the national average, thanks in part to high oil prices, but it’s about the same as the unemployment rate in New York or Massachusetts.

What about the budget? The truth is that the Texas state government has relied for years on smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of sound finances in the face of a serious “structural” budget deficit — that is, a deficit that persists even when the economy is doing well. When the recession struck, hitting revenue in Texas just as it did everywhere else, that illusion was bound to collapse.

The only thing that let Gov. Rick Perry get away, temporarily, with claims of a surplus was the fact that Texas enacts budgets only once every two years, and the last budget was put in place before the depth of the economic downturn was clear. Now the next budget must be passed — and Texas may have a $25 billion hole to fill. Now what?

Given the complete dominance of conservative ideology in Texas politics, tax increases are out of the question. So it has to be spending cuts.

Yet Mr. Perry wasn’t lying about those “tough conservative decisions”: Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It’s hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.

I don’t know how the mess in Texas will end up being resolved. But the signs don’t look good, either for the state or for the nation.

Right now, triumphant conservatives in Washington are declaring that they can cut taxes and still balance the budget by slashing spending. Yet they haven’t been able to do that even in Texas, which is willing both to impose great pain (by its stinginess on health care) and to shortchange the future (by neglecting education). How are they supposed to pull it off nationally, especially when the incoming Republicans have declared Medicare, Social Security and defense off limits?

People used to say that the future happens first in California, but these days what happens in Texas is probably a better omen. And what we’re seeing right now is a future that doesn’t work.

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By HILARY STOUT
NY Times Published: January 5, 2011

SARAH WILSON was speaking proudly the other day when she declared: “My house is a little messy.”

Ms. Wilson lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., a small town in the Poconos. Many days, her home is strewn with dress-up clothes, art supplies and other artifacts from playtime with her two small children, Benjamin, 6, and Laura, 3. “I let them get it messy because that’s what it’s here for,” she said.

Ms. Wilson has embraced a growing movement to restore the sometimes-untidy business of play to the lives of children. Her interest was piqued when she toured her local elementary school last year, a few months before Benjamin was to enroll in kindergarten. She still remembered her own kindergarten classroom from 1985: it had a sandbox, blocks and toys. But this one had a wall of computers and little desks.

“There’s no imaginative play anymore, no pretend,” Ms. Wilson said with a sigh.

For several years, studies and statistics have been mounting that suggest the culture of play in the United States is vanishing. Children spend far too much time in front of a screen, educators and parents lament — 7 hours 38 minutes a day on average, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year. And only one in five children live within walking distance (a half-mile) of a park or playground, according to a 2010 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control, making them even less inclined to frolic outdoors.

Behind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades. Add to that parental safety concerns that hinder even true believers like Ms. Wilson.

“People are scared to let their kids outside, even where I live,” she said. “If I want my kids to go outside, I have to be with them.”

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, concluded, “Play is just a natural thing that animals do and humans do, but somehow we’ve driven it out of kids.”

Too little playtime may seem to rank far down on the list of society’s worries, but the scientists, psychologists, educators and others who are part of the play movement say that most of the social and intellectual skills one needs to succeed in life and work are first developed through childhood play. Children learn to control their impulses through games like Simon Says, play advocates believe, and they learn to solve problems, negotiate, think creatively and work as a team when they dig together in a sandbox or build a fort with sofa cushions. (The experts define play as a game or activity initiated and directed by children. So video games don’t count, they say, except perhaps ones that involve creating something, and neither, really, do the many educational toys that do things like sing the A B C’s with the push of a button.)

Much of the movement has focused on the educational value of play, and efforts to restore recess and unstructured playtime to early childhood and elementary school curriculums. But advocates are now starting to reach out to parents, recognizing that for the movement to succeed, parental attitudes must evolve as well — starting with a willingness to tolerate a little more unpredictability in children’s schedules and a little less structure at home. Building that fort, for example, probably involves disassembling the sofa and emptying the linen closet. (A sheet makes an excellent roof.)

“I think more than anything, adults are a little fearful of children’s play,” said Joan Almon, executive director of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit pro-play group. “Some people have a greater tolerance for chaos and have developed a hand for gently bringing it back into order. Others get really nervous about it.” Megan Rosker, a mother of three (ages 6, 3 and 2) in Redington Shores, Fla., has learned to embrace the disorder. She set aside the large sunroom in her home for the children and filled it with blocks, games, crayons, magazines to cut up and draw in, as well as toys and dress-up clothes. “I think a big part of free play is having space to do it in, a space that isn’t ruled over by adults,” she said.

“The other key is not to instruct kids how to play with something,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many board-game pieces have been turned into something else. But I let them do it because I figure their imagination is more valuable than the price of a board game.”

But, Ms. Rosker added, “I won’t claim any of this has been easy for me or my husband,” noting that her husband used to be “a total neat freak.” She said they have learned to live with disarray and to take other difficult steps, like strict limits on screen time.

Ms. Rosker has also campaigned, although unsuccessfully, to bring recess to her son’s elementary school. But school officials were too worried about potential injuries, unruliness and valuable time lost from academic pursuits to sign on to her idea and, she was surprised to find, many parents were similarly reluctant. “They said: ‘I’m not going to sign that. I’m sure there is a good reason why this is good for our kids — our school has good test scores.’ “

To try to reach more parents, a coalition called Play for Tomorrow this fall staged what amounted to a giant play date in Central Park. The event, known as the Ultimate Block Party, featured games like I Spy, mounds of Play-Doh, sidewalk chalk, building blocks, puzzles and more. The National Science Foundation was closely involved, advising organizers — and emphasizing to parents — the science and the educational value behind each of the carefully chosen activities. Organizers were hoping to attract 10,000 people to the event. They got more than 50,000.

“We were overwhelmed,” said Roberta Golinkoff, a developmental psychologist at the University of Delaware and a founder of the event along with Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. They are now working with other cities — Toronto, Atlanta, Baltimore and Houston, among them — to stage similar events, along with making the Central Park gathering an annual one.

The goal, in some ways, is to return to the old days.

“When I was growing up, there was a culture of childhood that children maintained,” said Jim Hunn, vice president for mass action at KaBOOM, a nonprofit group that is a leading voice in reducing what it terms the “play deficit.” He noted that he learned games like Capture the Flag from other children. To revive that culture, he said: “Parents have to reassert themselves in this process and teach them how to play. It’s critical that parents take some ownership and get out and play with their children.”

But promoting play can be surprisingly challenging to parents. Emily Paster, a mother of two in River Forest, Ill., a Chicago suburb, tries to discourage screen time and encourage her children to play imaginatively. That usually works fine for her 7-year-old daughter, who is happy to play in her room with her dolls for hours. But her 4-year-old son is a different story, especially in the cold weather when he’s cooped up.

“If he wants to play, he always wants me to play with him,” Ms. Paster said. “This child has a million toys. Every kind of train you can imagine. But he really wants a partner. If I’m meant to get anything accomplished — dinner, laundry, a phone call — then it’s really difficult.”

Encouraging brother and sister to play together only goes so far. “It seems like there’s a ticking time bomb,” Ms. Paster said. “Someone’s going to decide they’re done before the other one’s ready.” Sometimes, a video screen is the unwelcome but necessary alternative.

“If I want to get anything done it’s like, ‘Here’s the Leapster,’ “ she admitted, referring to a Leapster Explorer, a video-like device for preschoolers.

But once they’re used to it, Mr. Hunn said, children will direct their play themselves — a situation Ms. Almon recalls from her own childhood. “Our neighborhood gang organized a lot of softball games,” she said. “There was no adult around. We adjusted the rules as we needed them. Once the adults are involved it becomes: Here are the rules, and we have to follow these rules. It still can be a good activity but stops being play.”

In the vast world of organized children’s sports, a few parent-coaches are getting that hands-off message. Ms. Almon knows of a soccer coach who started allowing children to organize their own scrimmages during practice while he stood silently on the sidelines, and a hockey coach in Chicago who ends practices by shooing all the adults off the ice and letting the kids skate as they please.

There are more formal efforts, in addition to the Ultimate Block Party initiatives. The US Play Coalition, a group of doctors, educators and parks and recreation officials, plans a conference next month at Clemson University on the value of outdoor play. KaBOOM has built 1,900 playgrounds across the country, most in low-income neighborhoods, and in September helped organize “Play Days” in 1,600 communities. It also has added do-it-yourself tools on its Web site to help parents organize and create neighborhood play spaces themselves. Another Web site scheduled to start this spring, LearningResourceNetwork.net, aims to create a broad educational source for parents and teachers.

“Our first big push will be on play,” said Susan Magsamen, the executive director of the group.

An important part of the movement is teaching children themselves how to play. The average 3-year-old can pick up an iPhone and expertly scroll through the menu of apps, but how many 7-year-olds can organize a kickball game with the neighborhood kids?

Toward that end, at the Central Park event, parents were given a 75-page “Playbook” outlining research on play and offering children ideas for playful pursuits — things that generations past did without prompting and that may evoke in today’s parents feelings of recognition and nostalgia.

“Climb on the couch with your friends and pretend you are sailing on a ship to a distant land,” reads one idea. Another, from the section on construction play: “Lay a toy on the floor and figure out how to build a bridge going over the toy with blocks.”

“Make paper doll cutouts from old newspapers and magazines,” a third suggests, “and let your imagination fly!”

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times Published: January 4, 2011

Gerry Rafferty, a Scottish singer and songwriter who combined a gift for melody, a distinctive voice and a fatalistic worldview to produce 1970s hits like “Stuck in the Middle With You” and “Baker Street,” died Tuesday in Dorset, England. He was 63.

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His death was confirmed by Michael Gray, his former manager, in an obituary he wrote for the London newspaper The Guardian, and later by his agent, Paul Charles, in a report by The Associated Press. Various news reports said Mr. Rafferty had been hospitalized for severe liver and kidney problems.

Mr. Rafferty’s 1978 album, “City to City,” reached No. 1 in the United States. One track, “Baker Street,” made the Top 10 in both Britain and the United States. So did “Stuck in the Middle With You,” a song Mr. Rafferty and Joe Egan recorded with their group Stealers Wheel in 1972. That song reached a new generation of listeners when Quentin Tarantino used it in the notorious ear-slicing scene in his 1992 movie “Reservoir Dogs.”

In all, Mr. Rafferty sold more than 10 million albums over three decades.

But Mr. Gray, writing in The Guardian, said Mr. Rafferty’s success was a shadow of what it might have been. At the peak of his popularity, Mr. Rafferty declined to tour the United States and turned down chances to play with Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. In his later years his output declined, then stopped altogether as he “spiraled into alcoholism,” Mr. Gray said. Mr. Rafferty himself said in a rare interview in 2009 with The Sunday Express that he suffered from depression.

But at his peak Mr. Rafferty drew rave reviews for his synthesis of country, folk and rock music. Reviewing “City to City” in Rolling Stone, Ken Emerson said Mr. Rafferty “writes with the sweet melodiousness of Paul McCartney and sings with John Lennon’s weary huskiness.”

Mr. Emerson discerned “a prayerful quality” in Mr. Rafferty’s voice, reminiscent of “the dim dawn after a dark night of the soul.”

Almost from his birth in Paisley, Scotland, on April 16, 1947, Gerald Rafferty knew plenty about life’s dark side. He and his mother would hide from his father to avoid being beaten when he stumbled home drunk, Mr. Gray wrote. But music pervaded the family’s life, as young Gerry assimilated Roman Catholic hymns, traditional folk music, 1950s pop and even the Irish rebel tunes his deaf father bellowed.

Mr. Rafferty dropped out of school at 15 and went to work in a butcher shop. On weekends he and a friend, Mr. Egan, played in a local group, the Mavericks. After bouncing about a bit, Mr. Rafferty and Mr. Egan reunited in Stealers Wheel, whose debut album included “Stuck in the Middle.”

“Stuck in the Middle,” written as a parody of many of Bob Dylan’s songs, ridiculed a music industry cocktail party, complaining, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

By 1975, Stealers Wheel had broken up after recording three albums, and Mr. Rafferty spent the next three years in legal disputes over contracts. Finally, in 1978, he was free to record again and signed with United Artists. “City to City,” a solo effort, was his first album for the label. Its centerpiece song, “Baker Street,” featured a saxophone solo by Raphael Ravenscroft that became so popular it was said to spark a global increase in saxophone sales.

Mr. Rafferty went on to record several more albums, including “Night Owl,” which made it to the Top Five in England and the Top 20 in the United States in 1979. Other albums followed, some of which garnered good reviews but none of which approached Mr. Rafferty’s earlier success.

He contributed a vocal to the soundtrack of the 1983 film “Local Hero,” and produced the Proclaimers’ 1987 hit “Letter From America.”

Mr. Rafferty’s marriage to Carla Ventilla ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughter, Martha, a brother and a granddaughter.

In the 2009 interview, Mr. Rafferty called the music industry “something I loathe and detest.” Nevertheless, he earned nearly $125,000 a year in royalties for “Baker Street” alone.

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Photo Illustration by Penelope Umbrico for The New York Times

‘‘Sunset Portraits, From 8,462,359 Sunset Pictures on Flickr, 12/21/10’’

By ROB WALKER
NY Times Published: January 5, 2011

Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others and artifacts of your life like photographs, journals, letters. Even if you haven’t made such arrangements, all of this will get sorted one way or another, maybe in line with what you would have wanted, and maybe not.

But many of us, in these worst of circumstances, would also leave behind things that exist outside of those familiar categories. Suppose you blogged or tweeted about this article, or dashed off a Facebook status update, or uploaded a few snapshots from your iPhone to Flickr, and then logged off this mortal coil. It’s now taken for granted that the things we do online are reflections of who we are or announcements of who we wish to be. So what happens to this version of you that you’ve built with bits? Who will have access to which parts of it, and for how long?

Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that’s partly because what we do online still feels somehow novel and ephemeral, although it really shouldn’t anymore. Or maybe it’s because pondering mortality is simply a downer. (Only about a third of Americans even have a will.) By and large, the major companies that enable our Web-articulated selves have vague policies about the fate of our digital afterlives, or no policies at all. Estate law has only begun to consider the topic. Leading thinkers on technology and culture are understandably far more focused on exciting potential futures, not on the most grim of inevitabilities.

Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares — I’ll be dead!). But increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.

At some point, these hoards will intersect with the banal inevitability of human mortality. One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000. Academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about it (what are the legal implications?) and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management (is there a profit opportunity here?). Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site called TheDigitalBeyond.com, have just published a tips-and-planning book, “Your Digital Afterlife,” with advice about such matters as appointing a “digital executor.”

Adele McAlear, a social-media and marketing consultant, became interested in this subject a few years ago, when one of her regular Twitter contacts died. A Web enthusiast who has created “Lord knows how many profiles” for herself in the course of road-testing various new services, she is an “advocate of creating content and putting it online.” And yet, she continues, it “hadn’t dawned on me, what happens to all of this stuff that you put out there, this digital litter that sort of accumulates.” That may be particularly true for people like McAlear, who have thoroughly integrated their Web expressions into their identity. (Indeed, she explores her new interest on a blog, DeathandDigitalLegacy.com.) But you don’t have to be a social-media consultant to live that way. More and more people do, as a matter of course. Millions of us are “sharing” our thoughts and tastes; our opinions and observations about WikiLeaks and “Glee” and the Tea Party and some weird dude on the subway this morning; and photographs of newborns and weddings and parties and — why not? — that weird dude on the subway. Maybe the momentous and the momentarily amusing add up to a pleasing means of real-time connection, but what do they add up to when we’re gone? The legacy of a life you hope your survivors will remember? Or a jumble of “digital litter” for them to sort through?

ON OCT. 18, 2009, Mac Tonnies updated his blog, sent out some public tweets and private messages via Twitter, went to bed and died of cardiac arrhythmia. While he had experienced some symptoms that indicated potential heart problems, his sudden death came as a shock even to those who knew him well. He was 34.

Tonnies lived in Kansas City, Mo. He was single and childless, owned two cats and paid his bills through workaday jobs, behind the counter at Starbucks or doing phone work for a small marketing agency. He was also a writer (he had just finished a draft of his third book) with an adventurous intellect. His audience was small, but devoted. Tonnies, who started his blog, Posthuman Blues, in 2003, was an extremely active user of online media and forged many friendships with people he never met in the physical world. Many of his interests were distinctly future-oriented, including speculative or fringe topics that sound to most people like science fiction. Often this was the common ground of those online relationships: a freewheeling consideration of the very nature of humanity.

Rita J. King, an expert on online identity and persona who is an “innovator in residence” for I.B.M., was introduced to Tonnies via e-mail in 2004, and they kept in frequent touch. “He is the one I had all my conversations with, early on, about technology and consciousness,” she says. Possibly a typical venti latte buyer in Kansas City would have found that puzzling and dismissed some of Tonnies’s other interests (U.F.O.’s, life on Mars, the paranormal) as flat-out weird. But online, he wasn’t some guy with a lot of strange ideas. He was himself. And he attracted an eclectic group of similarly minded friends.

The last entry on Posthuman Blues was titled “Tritptych #15,” a set of three images with no text. The first comment to this post came from an anonymous reader, wondering why Tonnies had not updated the blog or tweeted for two days. Some similar comments followed, and then this: “Mac Tonnies passed away earlier in the week. Our condolences are with his family and friends in this time of grief.” The author of that comment was also anonymous. After a rapid back-and-forth about whether this startling news was true and some details of the circumstances, that post’s comment section transformed into a remarkable mix of tributes, grieving and commiseration. You can still read all this today, in a thread that runs to more than 250 comments.

“It was a very strange feeling,” Dana Tonnies, Mac’s mother, told me, describing how she and her husband became aware of the swirl of activity attaching to her son’s online self. “I had no control over what was being said about him, almost immediately.” Dana and Bob Tonnies were close to their only son — in fact they had coffee with him, in a regular Sunday ritual, the morning before he died — but they had little contact with his digital self. Sometimes he would show them his online writing, but he had to do so by literally putting his laptop in front of them. The Tonnies did not read blogs. In fact they did not own a computer.

In the months after their son’s death, Dana and Bob went about the difficult business of organizing his papers (letters, e-mail printouts, story drafts) and deciding which of his belongings to keep (like his thousand or so books) or to give to his friends (his leather jacket, his three watches). This painful process took awhile, and they were not really focused on his blog or Flickr account and the like. They also inherited their son’s computer and have since learned how to navigate it and the Internet. But by then, their son’s online circle had already taken action.

I spoke to a half dozen people Mac Tonnies met online and in some cases never encountered in the physical world. Each expressed a genuine sense of loss; a few sounded grief-stricken even more than a year later. Mark Plattner, who lives in St. Louis and met Tonnies a dozen years ago through the comments section of another blog, decided that Posthuman Blues needed to survive. He used software called Sitesucker to put a backup of the entire thing — pictures, videos, links included — on a hard drive. In all, Plattner has about 10 gigabytes of material, offering a sense of Tonnies’s “personality and who he was,” Plattner says. “That’s what we want to remember.” He intends to store this material through his own hosting account, just as soon as he finds time to organize it all.

Plattner was one of several online friends who got involved in memorializing Tonnies and his work. Dia Sobin, an artist who lives in Connecticut, met Tonnies online around 2006; they communicated often by e-mail and phone, but never met in person. She created art for Tonnies’s site and for the cover of what turned out to be his final book. Less than two weeks after he died, she started a blog called Post-Mac Blues. For more than a year, she filled it with posts highlighting passages of his writing, reminiscences, links to interviews he gave to podcasters and bloggers, even his Blip.fm profile (which dutifully records that he listened to a song from “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” by David Byrne and Brian Eno, at 4:16 p.m. on the last day he lived). Her site is “a map to Mac Tonnies,” Sobin says. “And a memorial.”

“I only ever knew him over Twitter,” Sarah Cashmore , a graduate student in Toronto, told me. She shared his enthusiasm for design and technology and learned of his death from Twitter contacts. “I was actually devastated,” she says. A few months later, she teamed up with several other members of Tonnies’s Twitter circle to start a second Tonnies-focused blog, Mac-Bots.

This outpouring of digital grief, memorial-making, documentation and self-expression is unusual, maybe unique, for now, because of the kind of person Tonnies was and the kinds of friends he made online. But maybe, his friend Rita King suggests, his story is also a kind of early signal of one way that digital afterlives might play out. And she doesn’t just mean this in an abstract, scholarly way. “I find solace,” she told me, “in going to Mac’s Twitter feed.”

Finding solace in a Twitter feed may sound odd, but the idea that Tonnies’s friends would revisit and preserve such digital artifacts isn’t so different from keeping postcards or other physical ephemera of a deceased friend or loved one. In both instances, the value doesn’t come from the material itself but rather from those who extract meaning from, and give meaning to, all we leave behind: our survivors.

The most remarkable set of connections to emerge from Tonnies’s digital afterlife isn’t among his online friends — it is between those friends and his parents, the previously computer-shunning Dana and Bob Tonnies. Dana, who told me that her husband now teases her about how much time she spends sending and answering e-mail (a good bit of it coming from her son’s online social circle), is presently going through Posthuman Blues, in order, from the beginning. “I still have a year to go,” she says. Reading it has been “amazing,” she continues — funny posts, personal posts, poetic posts, angry posts about the state of the world. I ask her if what she is reading seems like a different, or specifically narrow, version of her son. “Oh, no, it’s him,” she says. “I can hear him when I read it.”

Mac Tonnies’s digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn’t worked out perfectly. His “Pro” account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has lapsed, the vast majority can no longer be viewed. Some were likely gathered in Plattner’s backup of Tonnies’s blog; others may exist somewhere on his laptop, though Dana Tonnies still isn’t sure where to look for them. All could be restored if Tonnies’s “Pro” account were renewed. But there’s no way to do that — or to delete the account, for that matter: no one has the password Tonnies used with Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo. He used Blogspot for Posthuman Blues; that’s a free Google product, and there are no fees to keep it updated or any immediate danger of it disappearing. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee of how long it will remain. Updating, altering or maintaining it would require Tonnies’s password, which he didn’t leave behind. Obtaining that password from Google would require providing the company with proof of death. As lovely and moving as the tributes and communal mourning that appeared in the comments to his final post are, it’s jarring to see the thread gradually infiltrated by spam-bots — pidgin-English comments followed by long lists for links for “cheap Ugg boots” and such. It’s like finding a flier for a dry cleaner stuck among flowers on a grave, except that it’s much harder to remove.

It’s unlikely the material Tonnies left online would have fared as well had it not been for his savvy and generous circle of Web friends. For most survivors, coping with the physical possessions and conventional assets of the departed can be overwhelming enough, but at least there are parameters and precedents. Even if a houseful of objects is liquidated through an estate sale or simply junked, mechanisms exist to ensure some sort of definitive outcome, even in the absence of a will. And there’s no way of ignoring or forgetting it: eventually the stuff will have to be dealt with.

Bit-based personal effects are different. Survivors may not be aware of the deceased’s full digital hoard, or they may not have the passwords to access the caches they do know about. They may be uncertain to the point of inaction about how to approach the problem at all. Any given e-mail account, for instance, can include communication as trivial as an “I’m running late” phone call or as thoughtful as a written letter — all jumbled together, by the hundreds or thousands. Similarly, let’s just say not all of us are discriminating curators in uploading pictures to Facebook, for instance, flinging more images from one weekend onto the Web than an earlier generation would have saved from a weeks-long vacation. When you inherit a physical scrapbook or even a diary, some choices have already been made — either by culling or by constraints of space — but accessing and then assessing the digital effects of a dead loved one entail a thicket of choices and challenges that many would simply rather avoid.

This has inspired a variety of entrepreneurs to place bets that, eventually, people will want control over the afterlife of their digital selves. Several promise to manage the details of your digital death — storing your passwords and your wishes for who gets access to what and integrating your content-related instructions into a kind of adjunct to a traditional will. Legacy Locker claims “around 10,000” people have signed up for its digital-estate-management service. Its rivals include DataInherit, a service of DSwiss, “the Swiss bank for information assets” (you can even update your digital-legacy data via its iPhone app), and Entrustet, of Madison, Wis. Last May these three firms sponsored Digital Death Day, an event tacked on to an annual online-identity conference near San Francisco.

The founders of Entrustet are surprisingly young. Jesse Davis , who is 23, was still a student at the University of Wisconsin when he wrote the original business plan in 2008. He came up with the idea after reading what has become one of the best-known stories on the complexities of digital assets and one of the few that has found its way into the courts. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, did not leave behind the password to his Yahoo e-mail account, and when the company refused to give his parents access to it, they sued. Eventually, under orders from a probate judge, Yahoo gave them a CD it said contained Ellsworth’s e-mail. Ellsworth’s story convinced Davis and his business partner, Nathan Lustig, 25, that there was a market for “digital estate planning” services. In the case of Entrustet, this means an automated system for storing passwords and instructions for all your digital assets.

Such businesses rest on a simple idea: Web, mobile and social-media use keeps exploding; everyone still dies. Meanwhile, much of the archiving of basic family life is becoming digital. It has become routine to have an online “presence” even as an infant, by way of a picture posted on a parent’s social-networking profile. Lustig pointed me to a recent corporate study that identified “chief memory officer” as a kind of unofficial role taken on by someone (often mom) in many families — the person who is paying attention to the idea that there may be no physical scrapbook or set of journals to hand down to future generations and that bits-and-bytes memory objects need to be preserved somehow. Trendwatching.com has predicted a “burgeoning market” for products and services that protect the digital content that is “the nucleus of one’s personal brand.”

I spoke to a couple of Entrustet users, who said they particularly wanted to protect photos stored online, along with hosting and domain-­registration information for personal and business sites. Entrustet also offers an “account incinerator,” to obliterate content its users would prefer not to have linger on after them, and one person I spoke to mentioned having tagged a personal Twitter account for deletion — “it’s just inside jokes, personal ranting and raving” — along with a Gmail account. “I don’t need people judging the personal e-mails that I sent to my friends,” he explained.

Given the degree to which the most popular online platforms involve promoting a quasi-public persona — the “you” who declares fandom of Bob Dylan and Flannery O’Connor, but not the “you” who binges on “Jersey Shore” reruns and TMZ.com — this instinct seems logical. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too? It’s not wholly unusual to do this with physical artifacts: letters to be opened only after death, or even to be destroyed. If you don’t want your heirs figuring out that you had a secret Tumblog clogged with pictures of Natalie Portman, maybe you should just arrange for it to be “incinerated.” If nothing else, those Entrustet users figure they are leaving behind some guidelines about which bits of their online lives matter, and which don’t.

Most people do not leave such directives, making the fate of their digital lives uncertain. One of the better-known instances of a disappeared digital legacy involves Leslie Harpold, a Web pioneer who died unexpectedly in 2006, at age 40. Her writing and other online projects connected her with friends and admirers who were helping create the Internet’s self-expression tool kit back in the mid-1990s. In early 2010, after her sites Harpold.com and Smug.com quietly disappeared, some of those friends lobbied Harpold’s family to let them preserve her work. “Her work is her legacy,” one admirer, Rogers Cadenhead, wrote to Harpold’s niece, Melissa Krauskopf, an attorney who served as the personal representative of Harpold’s estate. “I have corresponded with several of Leslie’s friends about her sites all disappearing from the Web. For what it is worth, all of us believe that she would not have wanted that to happen.”

This offer was declined. Harpold’s niece replied that Harpold’s legacy isn’t in her online work but rather “is with every person who knew her and loved her.” I spoke to Krauskopf briefly, and while she was cordial, she had little to add. Had her aunt left directives about her online work, they would of course have been honored, she said. But in their absence, the domains were part of the estate that went to Harpold’s mother, and while Krauskopf appreciates the perspective of her aunt’s Web friends, it was a family decision that doesn’t require public explanation. “People need to appreciate that she was a real person,” Krauskopf says, and the family prefers to “remember her as she was.”

You might think that stories like that would inspire at least the most cutting-edge true believers in the importance of online expression to stampede digital-afterlife-management companies. But Entrustet and its rivals acknowledge facing a variety of challenges, from an estate-planning community that isn’t particularly tech-forward to convincing potential customers that the start-up meant to deal with their digital afterlife will still be a going enterprise by the time they die. I tried out Entrustet myself. It seems to ease the unwieldy process of sorting out what to do with lots of online accounts with different passwords and so on, but I would add another challenge to the list: it’s depressing. I made my wife my “digital executor,” which meant that she received an e-mail about her responsibilities that she found jarring and a little chilling, even though I’d warned her. The idea of updating this thing every time I change a password or try out a new social Web tool that I may or may not keep using seemed even less enticing than cleaning out the attic.

Perhaps as a way around this problem, Entrustet is testing the waters on making deals with social-networking services. Its first partner in that approach is Broadjam, a service where musicians store and share their work. The idea is that Entrustet will function as a quietly integrated feature built into something you are happily using rather than being the go-to brand for everything you would rather not think about.

FOR NOW, THE DIGITAL identities of people whose Web contacts aren’t sophisticated techie types are simply languishing, or quietly fading away, with no hubbub, controlled not by friends or family but by the defaults of the services that enable their creation. And maybe that’s as it should be: what difference does it make what happens to the mundane accumulated detritus that makes up so much of what we do online? Once the people who cared about our status updates are gone, who cares if the updates persist?

One answer to that question is future historians. They surely won’t be poring over as many physical documents as today’s historians do, and surely the granular documentation of life in the 21st century, in digital form, is unprecedented. Fragile digital selves, then, represent a potential loss to the future.

This point of view has been most convincingly articulated by Dave Winer, the software developer whose Scripting News site is regarded as one of the first examples of what would come to be called blogs. He has been writing about the issue of online content preservation — he calls it “future-safing” — for several years. His views are a surprise to anybody who assumes that expression preserved in bits is somehow more durable than expression preserved in atoms; in fact he has drawn the opposite conclusion, repeatedly pointing out that digital technologies can be surprisingly unstable or can change rapidly in ways that leave a trail of obsolete material in their wake or both. He has written about his own efforts to preserve the original specs and code for some of his most significant technological creations on a suitably reliable server that future historians and others will be able to access. In thinking about how to do the same for his (and others’) online writing, he sounds pessimistic.

At one point he suggested a big company like Amazon or Google might be a suitable repository — maybe charging a flat fee to host content in perpetuity. But lately he has leaned more toward solutions involving institutions like universities or maybe the government. “What’s needed,” he wrote in early 2010, “is an endowment, a foundation with a long-term charter, that can take over the administration of a Web presence as a trust — before the author dies.”

In general, the companies that have created the most popular places and tools for online expression don’t exactly encourage users to stop and think about these subjects. Specific policies vary — details, buried in terms of service agreements, often involve a fair bit of effort, like providing a death certificate — and newer social-media services often have no particular policy at all. (Twitter established its guidelines only in August 2010.) The most prominent place this issue has come up, not surprisingly, is Facebook. For some time now, it has offered an option to request that a profile be switched to “memorial” mode when an individual dies. A post on the company blog explained that the issue first arose internally back in 2005, when one of its employees — there were only 40 at the time — died in a bike accident. (“When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” the post said.) Someone must put in a request for a profile to be memorialized, which deactivates certain features and resets various privacy controls, converting its function to a place where friends can leave remembrances. The process doesn’t give much direct control to any heir or executor or similar figure, and as some have complained, it can mean wiping out meaningful material and replacing it with “a thousand ‘sorry this happened’ ” messages, as one user put it.

To Winer, however, the issue goes beyond how a person is remembered by those he or she knew. And he’s right that Web sites come and go — often vanishing in months, depending on the whims and intentions and attention span of their creators. One estimate from the late 1990s suggested that almost half the sites created disappear within one year. The Library of Congress has a program that saves slices of the Web and announced last year that it would archive all tweets. But in general its mission is less a comprehensive record than a representative one, built around themes and events, like Sept. 11. Efforts like Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine are, while impressive, not intended to be complete. Richard Oram, associate director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, recently discussed on NPR the problems of tending archival material stored on old floppy discs. Similarly, saving census data that was once stored on Univac computers was a costly effort, and images recorded by early space missions and stored in now-obsolete formats have simply been lost.

“This is a huge gap in the Web we’re building today,” Winer has written. “Eventually it’s going to catch up with us when we lose a huge amount of stuff we thought we couldn’t lose.”

Cameron Hunt is one of the few people I encountered who is actively trying to preserve his digital identity. A 38-year-old Tampa resident who works in the military-contracting industry, Hunt attended Digital Death Day last year. Many of those who attended had some professional interest in the subject — academics, consultants, entrepreneurs. Hunt’s interest is more personal. He wants to leave a definitive, and stable, digital legacy behind — “a master repository of me,” as he puts it.

His motivations aren’t obvious: he is in good health; he’s divorced and has no children; and unlike Tonnies he is not engaged in traditional acts of creative expression, like writing books. Raised a Mormon, he never really connected to that church’s penchant for genealogy, which always struck him as a bunch of dry lists of names and dates. Then, a couple of years ago, his grandmother died, and he was given a copy of various family stories she had written. “Reading them as an adult, I was able to read between the lines,” he says, “to understand things in a rich way, and see how the stories and the experiences had influenced down through multiple generations.” Something else happened at the same time: the family realized that a big batch of slides in his grandmother’s possession had faded beyond recognition. Hunt was stunned. “Memories that were precious to me — not just living them, but after that going back and revisiting them — and now it’s gone,” he recalls. “I thought: I really need to do something.”

Hunt uses Twitter and Facebook; in fact, he has no privacy restrictions on his Facebook account, which lists his address and cellphone number. “I do that as part of my persona,” he told me when I suggested that it was a bad idea. “My friends know — if there’s an image that maybe I’ve cultivated, it’s ‘Cam’s crazy, he won’t be afraid to do it.’ Therefore opportunities come to me or people confide in me.”

In any case, while he’s also a user of Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare and various other online services, the core of his digital legacy is a collection of e-mail dating back to 1994. He has come to realize that achieving his goal is going to take serious effort. “I want to fund a bank account,” he says, “so that when I die, a curator can be paid to digitize anything that may not have been digitized, manage the collection, maybe do some research, help people find stuff if they’re looking for it.

“You know,” he adds with a chuckle, “all these ego-driven things of not being a famous man yet treating my digital afterlife as if I were famous.”

Admittedly, Hunt’s thinking sounds over the top. But part of the reason it seems so audacious is that there is so much to preserve, compared with, say, the physical material his grandmother left behind. A side effect of digital life is that the border between the real-time self-expressive object and the durable memory object has become porous.

Consider Gordon Bell, a famous computer engineer whose innovations date back to the 1960s. More recently he undertook a project under the auspices of Microsoft Research called MyLifeBits, which included not only the totality of his e-mail correspondence but also digital records of Web pages visited, scanned versions of paper notes, recordings of routine conversations and tens of thousands of snapshots taken every 30 seconds by a digital camera that dangles from his neck. Bell suggests that this in fact is ultimately what digital technology is for: “to capture one’s entire life.” As he once told ComputerWorld magazine, the point is not to share it all in real time but to give the individual a tool to “leave a personal legacy — a record of your life.”

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in his book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” notes Bell as an extreme example of a general cultural drift. It is only relatively recently, he argues, that our tools for recording what we see, experience and think have become so easy to use, inexpensive and effective that it is easier to let information accumulate in our “digital external memories” than it is to bother deleting it. “Forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy,” he writes. This is so even though a great deal of our digital expression is simple communication about the present, “intentionally ephemeral.” But because it’s more trouble to delete old blog posts, digital pictures and tweets than it is to make new ones, “society’s ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory.”

Mayer-Schönberger is only glancingly concerned with the notion of legacy; he is mostly making a point about privacy and personal information, not about what happens after life ends. So in the long run, his contention that the digital memory is “perfect” is doubtful. And as he notes, even in real time, digital memory can be flawed and misleading: it often merely seems perfect but can be incomplete or even altered.

Stacey Pitsillides, now finishing a graduate degree in design at Goldsmiths, University of London, has been researching digital afterlife issues for a few years now, drawn specifically to the question of what the piles of identity that we’re building up online will ultimately amount to. “We just see it as this infinity,” she says, but it isn’t. “There are certain costs, financial costs, physical and social costs, to keeping this amount of data. One of the social costs is that we kind of lose the ability to begin to choose and arrange what we want to say about ourselves, and instead get lost in this wash of information.

“If every object you’ve ever owned was a memory object,” she continues, “and we gave that to a family member and said, ‘You have to remember this person by all of these objects,’ then what position would we be in, and how would we ever remember everyone?”

It is possible that technology will answer this question with new ways for organizing, sifting and coping with masses of preserved personal data. Richard Banks, an interaction designer for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, has made some “technology heirloom” prototypes that collect, say, tweets or Flickr pictures in new physical devices that would automatically organize them (chronologically or thematically) for heirs or others. And a few nascent businesses have lately floated services that aspire to something closer to Cameron Hunt’s “master repository of me” or Gordon Bell’s vision of total memory forever. Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, “a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends.” This information is meant to be filtered through an “interactive avatar,” modeled on you, “that becomes more intelligent as you add more information.” The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company’s tag line is “Eternalize.” VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. “We want to give users the gift of immortality,” an Intellitar founder has said.

That, to put it mildly, is a hard claim to take seriously. For now, the less pie-in-the-sky issue is whether most people scattering digital objects across the Web have strong feelings about their persistence, or whether, as Mayer-Schönberger suggests, it simply isn’t worth the time to dispose of them. To Hunt, his own project is perfectly consistent with any effort to preserve analog mementos of life, just as his family (and many others) have for many years. “I’m just part of another generation,” he says. “I really don’t think it’s different in instinct or desire from what other people have done — except that so much of that information is quasi-public already.” He has a point there: even if we aren’t obsessing about the persistence of online expression and memory materials, we sure are cranking it out. What’s really surprising is how few Cameron Hunts there are, actively working out which of the digital self-traces they want to preserve, and how to go about it. All he is really trying to do is have some say in how he’s remembered.

My favorite digital-mortality business, DeathSwitch.com, gives the idea of speaking from beyond the grave a Web-era update. DeathSwitch was founded in 2006 by the neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman to coincide with a short story he wrote for Nature, titled “A Brief History of Death Switches.” The story imagines an automated service that allowed its users to send messages after they die. People use it to reveal secret bank accounts to heirs, confess to sins or settle scores from beyond the grave. Over time, uses for this fictional death switch become so elaborate that it is hard to tell that the sender of the message is deceased. That last part hasn’t happened yet, but otherwise the service offered by DeathSwitch.com, in real life, is basically the same as the fictional one: some final words from you, to whomever, after you’ve gone.

DeathSwitch.com has enough subscribers to cover costs, according to Eagleman. It keeps tabs on users by sending a periodic e-mail to make sure they are still alive. I suggested to Eagleman that I would find this regular reminder of my own mortality pretty unnerving, and he seemed perplexed. “If you allow the fact that you are going to pass away,” he replied, “and there are smart things you can do before you pass away to keep everybody in your family happy and well, then it’s as useful as a will, or a do-not-resuscitate.”

Eagleman is an interesting character. He is an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, and “Death Switch” is among the short stories collected in a slim, pleasing book he wrote in his spare time, “Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives.” As the title suggests, each story imagines some fictional variation on what might come after this life. It’s often quite funny and, as Eagleman points out, can be read as fundamentally hopeful in its willingness to wonder openly and imaginatively about life’s end.

His speculative afterlives end up offering provocative takes on what mortality and legacy really mean. One story posits that there are three deaths, the last coming when your name is spoken for the final time. In another, there is a hell in which you see yourself as others saw you; and in yet another, we sit in the afterlife looking back at life for evidence of our influence, as long as it lingers. “Death Switch,” the story, suggests that there is no afterlife as we think of it but that “a version of us” lives on in the endlessly sophisticated last notes we each send out, creating a strange network of “transactions with no one to read them.” The afterlife isn’t some other place or state of being. “Instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us.”

MAC TONNIES’S MANY eclectic intellectual pursuits included at least a passing interest in the notion of cyberimmortality. The idea of the self escaping bodily death by transforming into an age-proof, sickness-proof essence that can be uploaded into a computer or network dates back at least to Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella “True Names.” A year after that, William Gibson gave us the word “cyberspace” to describe a new place where humans might exist, potentially forever, outside the physical world. By the 1990s, as the Internet became a familiar presence in many people’s lives, some began to suggest that this was no mere science-fiction scenario; it was the future. Vinge was among those (along with, notably, Ray Kurzweil) to discuss the transformation of humans by technology, coming in a matter of decades, referred to as “the singularity.” The Carnegie Mellon robotics expert Hans Moravec, the artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, the computer scientist Rudy Rucker and others articulated visions of a future in which technology might truly free us from “the bloody mess of organic matter,” to use a phrase of Minsky’s. In her 1999 book, “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,” Margaret Wertheim contextualized such speculations as attempts to, in effect, “construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of heaven.”

Wertheim pointed out that cyberspace had become a new kind of place, where alternate (or at least carefully curated or burnished) identities could be forged, new forms of collectivity and connection explored, all outside the familiar boundaries of the physical world, like the body and geography. It’s not such a long journey to follow those assertions to the “view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body but by an information code,” as Wertheim wrote. “This is the belief that our essence lies not in our matter but in a pattern of data.” She called this idea the “cybersoul,” a “posited immortal self, this thing that can supposedly live on in the digital domain after our bodies die.”

And that, essentially, is what is implied by Gordon Bell’s assertion that his MyLifeBits project is a way to “leave a personal legacy — a record of your life.” Or to put it more prosaically, it’s the same thing Trendwatching.com meant by calling your digital traces on social networks the “nucleus of one’s personal brand.” It’s what the uncanny avatars of Lifenaut and Virtual Eternity hope one day to encapsulate. It’s at the heart of “singularity” theory.

Wertheim, it should be noted, saw the cybersoul notion as both flawed and troubling, and I would agree. Life’s essence reduced to captured data is an uninspiring, and unconvincing, resolution to the centuries-old question of where, in mind and in body, the self resides. At least other imagined versions of immortality (from the Christian heaven to the Hindu wheel of life) suggested a reconciliation, or at least a connection, with the manner in which a physical life is lived; the cybersoul’s theoretically eternal and perfect persistence ignores this concept. Most of all, though, fantasizing about living forever — in heaven or in a preserved pattern of data — strikes me as just another way of avoiding any honest confrontation with the fact of death.

Avoiding that confrontation isn’t merely a stumbling block for those digital-afterlife start-ups. I was struck by how many of the people I spoke to who professed a keen interest in the issue of preserving a digital legacy had in fact done absolutely nothing about it for themselves. “Hmm, that’s a good question,” one of the organizers of that Digital Death Day event, a Web-identity expert, replied when I asked her why she had not taken steps to plan for the future of her digital creations. “I’m probably afraid of resolving the issue,” another online-expression enthusiast offered (before joking that all he really wanted to do is “save my work better than my enemies save theirs”). Actually, I completely empathize. I’m not anxious to resolve the issue either, at least not by making any prolonged and thoughtful effort centered on the extended contemplation of my demise.

For me, at least, pondering the digital afterlife made me rethink digital life. We’re encouraged to record and express everything, all the time. In real time, we can record and distribute the most important moments of our existence, and some of the least. For the generations growing up in the Web era, this mode of being is more or less taken for granted. But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn’t. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.

If “digital litter” is all around us, then thinking about how to clean it up in real time — or producing less of it in the first place — might be more productive. Rita King, the online-identity expert who was a friend of Mac Tonnies’s, is clearly pleased to have access to his online effects and generally optimistic about new forms of remembering that digital technologies might enable. At the same time, though, she expressed some caution about the mindless expression of everything, the default veneration of “sharing” over “curating.” While she’s clearly an online-life enthusiast, she’s also careful about what she discloses in that new form of space. “If people thought about dying more often,” she observed, “they’d think about living differently.”

I found myself wondering, oddly enough, about what Mac Tonnies’s take might be. The last of his friends to whom I spoke was Paul Kimball, a filmmaker who lives in Nova Scotia. He met Tonnies online about a decade ago; they corresponded for six years before meeting in person, when Kimball came to Kansas City to interview Tonnies for a documentary. They ended up becoming close, even collaborating on a play (swapping drafts via e-mail) that was staged at the Boulder International Fringe Festival.

Among their shared interests, it turns out, was the relationship among technology, consciousness and mortality. Their play, based on a science-fiction story Tonnies had written in college, involves two women who turn out not to be, strictly speaking, creatures of organic matter: one is an artificial-intelligence program, the other a human consciousness uploaded into a form that could survive a centuries-long space journey. The very title of Tonnies’s Posthuman Blues blog, Kimball points out, hints at ambivalence about these subjects. But that was the place, he says, where his generally private friend “revealed himself,” post by post. The fact that the blog persists, in public, is what makes it distinct from, say, a journal Kimball owns that belonged to his grandfather and that has been read by perhaps 20 people.

The day before we spoke, Kimball continued, he had linked to an old Posthuman Blues post on his Facebook page, seeking reactions from his own online circle. “So I’m still having this conversation” with his friend Tonnies, he told me, “even though he’s been dead for more than a year.” Eventually, Kimball added, such situations may be routine. “We’re entering a world where we can all leave as much of a legacy as George Bush or Bill Clinton. Maybe that’s the ultimate democratization,” he said. “It gives all of us a chance at immortality.”

After talking to Kimball, I ended up watching a couple of interview clips of Tonnies on YouTube. In one, he discussed “transhumanism,” the techno-scientific quest to transcend the traditional limits of the human animal, death included, whether through merging with machines or fiddling with our genes. Skeptics or opponents of transhumanism are missing the point that it’s well underway, he argued: medicine is transhuman, in that it thwarts mortality. While I didn’t find this wholly convincing, I will concede that it was interesting to find myself in a position to listen to his arguments at all. It made me wish I could offer Tonnies my counterpoints — but of course I can’t. So I’ll give him the last word. “I like to think of death as a glorified terminal illness,” Mac Tonnies said, and will continue to say, for as long as this particular collection of bits remains available for someone to watch and listen to. “If we can escape the boundaries of death, maybe we’ll be O.K.”

Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column, is the author of “Buying In.”

Thanks to Ryan Andolina

Opens January 15 – March 5, 2011

Barbara Gladstone

Stephen B. Thornton

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
NY Times Published: January 3, 2011

Times Square had the ball drop, and Brasstown, N.C., had its descending possum. But no place had a New Year’s Eve as unusual, or freakishly disturbing, as Beebe, Ark.

Around 11 that night, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this small city about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and terrifying anyone who happened to be outside.

“One of them almost hit my best friend in the head,” said Christy Stephens, who was standing outside among the smoking crowd at a party. “We went inside after that.”

The cause is still being determined, but preliminary lab results from the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission revealed “acute physical trauma” in samples of the dead birds. There were no indications of disease, though tests were still being done for the presence of toxic chemicals.

Karen Rowe, the bird conservation program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said the prevailing theory was that the birds had been startled by New Year’s Eve fireworks and suddenly dispersed, flying low enough to run into chimneys, houses and trees. Pyrotechnics are used to scatter blackbirds for bird control, though only during the day, given the birds’ poor vision.

Beebe (pronounced BE-be) is a congregating spot for blackbirds, and one witness told Ms. Rowe that he saw the birds roosting earlier in the day and heard them again at night just after the fireworks started.

“It was the right mix of things happening in a perfect time sequence,” Ms. Rowe said.

At most recent count, up to 5,000 birds fell on the city. Sixty five samples were sent to labs, one of which is at the Livestock and Poultry Commission and the other in Madison, Wis.

Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the commission, said he was not aware of a case this large. “About nine years ago we had some ducks,” he said, “but that was only a couple of dozen.”

The town contacted an environmental cleanup firm, which by Monday afternoon had picked up nearly all the birds, some of which were bagged and left at the end of driveways by residents.

“It just looked as if it had rained birds,” said Tracy Lightfoot, a member of the City Council, declining to speculate on the reason. “There’s lots of theories running around. I have no idea. I just don’t have a clue.”

State scientists believe one thing to be almost certain: that the bird deaths were not related to the roughly 85,000 fish that died a few days before near Ozark, in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember. They were spotted by anglers along the Arkansas River last week and reported to the Game and Fish Commission, which spent New Year’s Eve measuring and counting dead fish that had spread out for nearly 20 miles.

In that case, the victims were almost all drum, and almost all younger ones. That suggests the culprit was disease, said Mark Oliver, the chief of fisheries for the commission. He said fish kills were not uncommon, especially in winter when the fish are packed more closely, but he did not recall one of this size.

Meanwhile roughly 500 dead birds were found on Monday outside New Roads, La. Those birds were much more varied, with starlings and grackle in addition to blackbirds, and a few samples picked up by James LaCour, a wildlife veterinarian with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, did not show any signs of trauma, he said.

Thanks to Moses Berkson

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 2, 2011

If there’s one piece of economic wisdom I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.

Why do I need to point this out? Because I’ve noticed many people overreacting to recent good economic news. What particularly concerns me is the risk of self-denying optimism — that is, I worry that policy makers will look at a few favorable economic indicators, decide that they no longer need to promote recovery, and take steps that send us sliding right back to the bottom.

So, about that good news: various economic indicators, ranging from relatively good holiday sales to new claims for unemployment insurance (which have finally fallen below 400,000 a week), suggest that the great post-bubble retrenchment may finally be ending.

We’re not talking Morning in America here. Construction shows no sign of returning to bubble-era levels, nor are there any indications that debt-burdened families are going back to their old habits of spending all they earned. But all we needed for a modest economic rebound was for construction to stop falling and saving to stop rising — and that seems to be happening. Forecasters have been marking up their predictions; growth as high as 4 percent this year now looks possible.

Hooray! But then again, not so much. Jobs, not G.D.P. numbers, are what matter to American families. And when you start from an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, the arithmetic of job creation — the amount of growth you need to get back to a tolerable jobs picture — is daunting.

First of all, we have to grow around 2.5 percent a year just to keep up with rising productivity and population, and hence keep unemployment from rising. That’s why the past year and a half was technically a recovery but felt like a recession: G.D.P. was growing, but not fast enough to bring unemployment down.

Growth at a rate above 2.5 percent will bring unemployment down over time. But the gains aren’t one for one: for a variety of reasons, it has historically taken about two extra points of growth over the course of a year to shave one point off the unemployment rate.

Now do the math. Suppose that the U.S. economy were to grow at 4 percent a year, starting now and continuing for the next several years. Most people would regard this as excellent performance, even as an economic boom; it’s certainly higher than almost all the forecasts I’ve seen.

Yet the math says that even with that kind of growth the unemployment rate would be close to 9 percent at the end of this year, and still above 8 percent at the end of 2012. We wouldn’t get to anything resembling full employment until late in Sarah Palin’s first presidential term.

Seriously, what we’re looking at over the next few years, even with pretty good growth, are unemployment rates that not long ago would have been considered catastrophic — because they are. Behind those dry statistics lies a vast landscape of suffering and broken dreams. And the arithmetic says that the suffering will continue as far as the eye can see.

So what can be done to accelerate this all-too-slow process of healing? A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure. In the political system we have, however, Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte, delivering the Republican weekly address on New Year’s Day, declared that “Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending.”

Realistically, the best we can hope for from fiscal policy is that Washington doesn’t actively undermine the recovery. Beware, in particular, the Ides of March: by then, the federal government will probably have hit its debt limit and the G.O.P. will try to force President Obama into economically harmful spending cuts.

I’m also worried about monetary policy. Two months ago, the Federal Reserve announced a new plan to promote job growth by buying long-term bonds; at the time, many observers believed that the initial $600 billion purchase was only the beginning of the story. But now it looks like the end, partly because Republicans are trying to bully the Fed into pulling back, but also because a run of slightly better economic news provides an excuse to do nothing.

There’s even a significant chance that the Fed will raise interest rates later this year — or at least that’s what the futures market seems to think. Doing so in the face of high unemployment and minimal inflation would be crazy, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

So back to my original point: whatever the recent economic news, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole. We can only hope that enough policy makers understand that point.

Joao Silva for The New York Times

A bas-relief of the Babylon god Marduk adorns a wall.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS
NY Times Published: January 2, 2011

JIMIJMA, Iraq — The damage done to the ruins of ancient Babylon is visible from a small hilltop near the Tower of Babel, whose biblical importance is hard to envision from what is left of it today.

Across the horizon are guard towers, concertina wire and dirt-filled barriers among the palm trees; encroaching farms and concrete houses from this village and others; and the enormous palace that Saddam Hussein built in the 1980s atop the city where Nebuchadnezzar II ruled.

Something else is visible, too: earthen mounds concealing all that has yet to be discovered in a city that the prophet Jeremiah called “a gold cup in the Lord’s hands, a cup that made the whole earth drunk.”

On the hillside during one of his many visits to the ruins, Jeff Allen, a conservationist working with the World Monuments Fund, said: “All this is unexcavated. There is great potential at this site. You could excavate the street plan of the entire city.”

That is certainly years away given the realities of today’s Iraq. But for the first time since the American invasion in 2003, after years of neglect and violence, archaeologists and preservationists have once again begun working to protect and even restore parts of Babylon and other ancient ruins of Mesopotamia. And there are new sites being excavated for the first time, mostly in secret to avoid attracting the attention of looters, who remain a scourge here.

The World Monuments Fund, working with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, has drafted a conservation plan to combat any further deterioration of Babylon’s mud-brick ruins and reverse some of the effects of time and Mr. Hussein’s propagandistic and archaeologically specious re-creations.

In November, the State Department announced a new $2 million grant to begin work to preserve the site’s most impressive surviving ruins. They include the foundation of the Ishtar Gate, built in the sixth century B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar’s father, Nabopolassar, and adorned with brick reliefs of the Babylonian gods Marduk and Adad. (The famous blue-glazed gate that Nebuchadnezzar commissioned was excavated in the early 20th century and rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.)

The objective is to prepare the site and other ruins — from Ur in the south to Nimrud in the north — for what officials hope will someday be a flood of scientists, scholars and tourists that could contribute to Iraq’s economic revival almost as much as oil.

The Babylon project is Iraq’s biggest and most ambitious by far, a reflection of the ancient city’s fame and its resonance in Iraq’s modern political and cultural heritage.

“This is one of the great projects we have, and it is the first,” Qais Hussein Rashid, the director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, said in an interview in Baghdad. “We want to have it as a model for all the other sites.”

The task at hand is daunting, though, and the threats to the site abundant. In the case of some of the Hussein-era reconstructions, they are irreversible. The American invasion and the carnage that followed brought archaeological and preservation work to a halt across the country, leaving ruins to wither or, in the case of looting, much worse.

The American military turned Babylon into a base. It was later occupied by Polish troops and, though it was returned to the control of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in 2004, the detritus of a military presence still scars the site.

The World Monuments Fund has been carrying out what amounts to archaeological triage since it began its conservation plan in 2009. It has created computer scans to provide precise records of the damage to the ruins and identified the most pernicious threats, starting with erosion caused by salty groundwater. “What we’ve got to do is create a stable environment,” Mr. Allen said at the site in November. “Right now it’s on the fast road to falling apart.”

The wicking of groundwater into mud bricks, compounded by a modern concrete walkway and the excavations conducted by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey more than a century ago, have already eaten away some of the 2,500-year-old brick reliefs at the Ishtar Gate’s base.

“They took care of Ishtar Gate only from the inside, because you had visiting leaders and dignitaries who would come,” said Mahmoud Bendakir, an architect who is working with the fund, referring to the site’s caretakers during the Hussein era. “The outside is a disaster.”

The grant from the United States will pay for repairs to channel the water away from the gate’s foundation, which stands several yards beneath the surrounding area. Similar repairs are planned for two of Babylon’s temples, Ninmakh and Nabu-sha-Khare, the most complete sets of ruins, though they too suffer from erosion and harmful restorations with modern bricks.

“It’s difficult to say which is doing more,” Mr. Allen said, “but the two together are nearly toxic for the preservation of monuments.”

The American reconstruction team has refurbished a modern museum on the site, as well as a model of the Ishtar Gate that for decades served as a visitors’ entrance. Inside the museum is one of the site’s most valuable relics: a glazed brick relief of a lion, one of 120 that once lined the processional way into the city.

The museum, with three galleries, is scheduled to open this month, receiving its first visitors since 2003. And with new security installed, talks are under way to return ancient Babylonian artifacts from the National Museum in Baghdad.

The fate of Babylon is already being disputed by Iraqi leaders, with antiquities officials clashing with local authorities over when to open it to visitors and how to exploit the site for tourism that, for the most part, remains a goal more than a reality. Even now they are clashing over whether the admission fee should go to the antiquities board or the provincial government.

Another of the more dire threats to the site has been unchecked development inside the boundaries of the old city walls, enclosing nearly three square miles. The fund’s project has plotted the old walls on a map, causing trepidation among Iraqis who live along them now.

They fear the preservation of Babylon’s ruins will force them from their homes and farmlands, as when Mr. Hussein expelled residents of a local village to build his palace. “They took them from their lands,” said Minshed al-Mamuri, who runs a civic organization for widows and orphans here. “It’s psychological for them.”

Mr. Allen, who oversees the fund’s work, said the preservation of Babylon would require collaboration among competing constituencies that is extremely rare amid Iraq’s political instability.

“We’re looking at not just archaeology,” he said of the project. “We’re looking at the economic opportunities and viability for local people. They need to see something out of this site. That’s possible, and possible at the same time to preserve the integrity of the site.”