Ad Reinhardt (American, 1913-1967)
1963. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60″ (152.4 x 152.4 cm

Through April 25, 2011

MOMA

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 30, 2010

Hypocrisy never goes out of style, but, even so, 2010 was something special. For it was the year of budget doubletalk — the year of arsonists posing as firemen, of people railing against deficits while doing everything they could to make those deficits bigger.

And I don’t just mean politicians. Did you notice the U-turn many political commentators and other Serious People made when the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal was announced? One day deficits were the great evil and we needed fiscal austerity now now now, never mind the state of the economy. The next day $800 billion in debt-financed tax cuts, with the prospect of more to come, was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a triumph of bipartisanship.

Still, it was the politicians — and, yes, that mainly meant Republicans — who took the lead on the hypocrisy front.

In the first half of 2010, impassioned speeches denouncing federal red ink were the G.O.P. norm. And concerns about the deficit were the stated reason for Republican opposition to extension of unemployment benefits, or for that matter any proposal to help Americans cope with economic hardship.

But the tone changed during the summer, as B-day — the day when the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy were scheduled to expire — began to approach. My nomination for headline of the year comes from the newspaper Roll Call, on July 18: “McConnell Blasts Deficit Spending, Urges Extension of Tax Cuts.”

How did Republican leaders reconcile their purported deep concern about budget deficits with their advocacy of large tax cuts? Was it that old voodoo economics — the belief, refuted by study after study, that tax cuts pay for themselves — making a comeback? No, it was something new and worse.

To be sure, there were renewed claims that tax cuts lead to higher revenue. But 2010 marked the emergence of a new, even more profound level of magical thinking: the belief that deficits created by tax cuts just don’t matter. For example, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona — who had denounced President Obama for running deficits — declared that “you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”

It’s an easy position to ridicule. After all, if you never have to offset the cost of tax cuts, why not just eliminate taxes altogether? But the joke’s on us because while this kind of magical thinking may not yet be the law of the land, it’s about to become part of the rules governing legislation in the House of Representatives.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the incoming House majority plans to make changes in the “pay-as-you-go” rules — rules that are supposed to enforce responsible budgeting — that effectively implement Mr. Kyl’s principle. Spending increases will have to be offset, but revenue losses from tax cuts won’t. Oh, and revenue increases, even if they come from the elimination of tax loopholes, won’t count either: any spending increase must be offset by spending cuts elsewhere; it can’t be paid for with additional taxes.

So if taxes don’t matter, does the incoming majority have a realistic plan to cut spending? Of course not. Republicans say that they want to cut $100 billion in spending, which is itself small change in a $3.6 trillion federal budget. But they also say that defense, Medicare and Social Security — all the big-ticket items — are off the table. So they’re talking about a 20 percent cut in what’s left, which includes things like running the judicial system and operating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; they have offered no specifics about where the cuts will fall.

How will this all end? I have seen the future, and it’s on Long Island, where I grew up.

Nassau County — the part of Long Island that directly abuts New York City — is one of the wealthiest counties in America and has an unemployment rate well below the national average. So it should be weathering the economic storm better than most places.

But a year ago, in one of the first major Tea Party victories, the county elected a new executive who railed against budget deficits and promised both to cut taxes and to balance the budget. The tax cuts happened; the promised spending cuts didn’t. And now the county is in fiscal crisis.

Now the federal government has a lot more flexibility than a county government: it needn’t, and shouldn’t, balance its budget each year. The deficits of the past two years have actually been a good thing, helping to support the economy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

But Nassau County shows how easily responsible government can collapse in this country, now that one of our major parties believes in budget magic. All it takes is disgruntled voters who don’t know what’s at stake — and we have plenty of those. Banana republic, here we come.

Gary Chen walked into Stein on Vine looking for a job in 1980 and found a lifetime gig. The pay was lousy when he worked for late owner Maury Stein, he said, but the jazz legends who frequented the store fascinated him. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

By Steve Lopez
The Los Angeles Times
December 29, 2010

Gary Chen was writing the final pages of his book when I walked into Stein on Vine. When I asked what the book was about, Chen said it was the story of a kid from Taiwan who walked in the door of a legendary Hollywood music shop 30 years ago and never left.

An autobiography, in other words.

In Taiwan, Chen was a natural the minute he picked up a guitar. He played by ear, had a band in his teens and lots of money in his early 20s. But none of that brought happiness, so he enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and studied composition for three years before heading for home in 1980.

“I laid over in L.A., and some friends said, ‘Are you in a hurry to get back to Taiwan? If not, why don’t you hang with us?’ So I did.”

Los Angeles felt right, and Chen considered staying. But he knew too many great starving musicians in California to bank on a career in music here. So he started looking for a music store where he could work. When he opened the Yellow Pages, the first listing he saw was for Stein on Vine.

“Hey, I was wondering if you needed any help,” Chen said in a phone call to owner Maury Stein.

“Why don’t you come on over and let me take a look at you?” Stein said.

When he got there, a clerk told Chen that Stein was in a back room and would be out momentarily. While waiting, Chen noticed photos of “lots of naked women” plastered on the walls and wondered what kind of shop he had stumbled upon. It turned out that Stein was a big-band sax player who had gotten a gig at a nudist colony in San Bernardino County.

“The deal was that the band had to be nude too,” Chen said.

Chen couldn’t believe it when Stein finally emerged in the company of several jazz giants. There was trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bass men Ray Brown and John Heard, and pianist Lou Levy, who had played with Sinatra.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” recalled Chen. “Maury says, ‘Come back tomorrow at 10. He didn’t say anything else. Nothing about money. Nothing. So I came back the next day and I’ve been here ever since.”

The pay was lousy, but the parade of legends was a nice perk. Stein, whose brother Jule wrote some of the biggest pop hits of the 20th century along with Sammy Cahn, was a father figure to countless musicians. And he got visits from Nelson Riddle, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Mandel, Wayne Shorter, Ray Charles, Horace Silver and Shelly Manne.

The shop sold, repaired and rented instruments and supplies, but it was more of a clubhouse than a store, with a back-room studio that hosted some of the greatest live music never recorded.

Chen’s layover of a few days stretched into a few months and then a few years. When Stein put Chen in charge of the books, Chen found the store was a money loser. Stein ran a loose shop, and he partied day and night.

Chen always counted on getting back to his own music career, but he grew to love Stein and the cool, crazy vibe in the store. He was tinkering with an upright bass one day when Ray Brown came up and showed him a few moves. Chen became obsessed with the bass and practiced for hours in his down time, unless he was out with Stein and other musicians who had become his friends.

“He was the father I never had, and I was the son he always wanted,” Chen said.

On Jan. 10, 1987, Chen was dining with Stein and Stein’s girlfriend. Stein’s hard living was catching up with him, and the girlfriend suggested that Stein ought to get something down on paper about who would run the store when he was gone.

Chen could see where that was headed.

“It’s not for me,” said Chen, who wanted to get on with his music career.

Later that night, Stein dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

“Maury,” thought Chen, “you got me. You got me good.”

Chen knew he had to keep Stein on Vine alive. He couldn’t let down the musicians who counted on the connections they made at the shop, where friendships flourished, job connections were made and new music was tested in the back room. It’s the kind of place where a broke musician will come by, borrow a bass for a $100 gig and bring it back the next day with $35 for Chen.

After Stein died, Chen and Wayne Shorter spent a day hanging out at Stan Getz’s Malibu pad, and when it was over, Chen had an epiphany on PCH.

“I was always angry about never having gotten a chance to play because I was always working, but I had a realization. I’d just been hanging with two of the greatest musicians who ever lived. They love me because of who I am and what I do, and this is my gig. The store is my gig in this lifetime.”

Not a bad gig, either. I can’t wait for the book.

Odd/Even
1989
Pencil, gouache, watercolor and ink on paper
23 1/4 x 21 inches
(59.1 x 53.3 cm)

Opens January 21

Santa Monica Museum of Art

Jon Stewart, left, spoke with 9/11 first responders about their health problems on “The Daily Show” on Dec. 16.

By BILL CARTER and BRIAN STELTER
NY Times Published: December 26, 2010

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

Certainly many supporters, including New York’s two senators, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, played critical roles in turning around what looked like a hopeless situation after a filibuster by Republican senators on Dec. 10 seemed to derail the bill.

But some of those who stand to benefit from the bill have no doubt about what — and who — turned the momentum around.

“I don’t even know if there was a deal, to be honest with you, before his show,” said Kenny Specht, the founder of the New York City Firefighter Brotherhood Foundation, who was interviewed by Mr. Stewart on Dec. 16.

That show was devoted to the bill and the comedian’s effort to right what he called “an outrageous abdication of our responsibility to those who were most heroic on 9/11.”

Mr. Specht said in an interview, “I’ll forever be indebted to Jon because of what he did.”

Mr. Bloomberg, a frequent guest on “The Daily Show,” also recognized Mr. Stewart’s role.

“Success always has a thousand fathers,” the mayor said in an e-mail. “But Jon shining such a big, bright spotlight on Washington’s potentially tragic failure to put aside differences and get this done for America was, without a doubt, one of the biggest factors that led to the final agreement.”

Though he might prefer a description like “advocacy satire,” what Mr. Stewart engaged in that night — and on earlier occasions when he campaigned openly for passage of the bill — usually goes by the name “advocacy journalism.”

There have been other instances when an advocate on a television show turned around public policy almost immediately by concerted focus on an issue — but not recently, and in much different circumstances.

“The two that come instantly to mind are Murrow and Cronkite,” said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television at Syracuse University.

Edward R. Murrow turned public opinion against the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Mr. Thompson noted that Mr. Murrow had an even more direct effect when he reported on the case of Milo Radulovich, an Air Force lieutenant who was stripped of his commission after he was charged with associating with communists. Mr. Murrow’s broadcast resulted in Mr. Radulovich’s reinstatement.

Walter Cronkite’s editorial about the stalemate in the war in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive in 1968 convinced President Lyndon B. Johnson that he had lost public support and influenced his decision a month later to decline to run for re-election.

Though the scale of the impact of Mr. Stewart’s telecast on public policy may not measure up to the roles that Mr. Murrow and Mr. Cronkite played, Mr. Thompson said, the comparison is legitimate because the law almost surely would not have moved forward without him. “He so pithily articulated the argument that once it was made, it was really hard to do anything else,” Mr. Thompson said.

The Dec. 16 show focused on two targets. One was the Republicans who were blocking the bill; Mr. Stewart, in a clear effort to shame them for hypocrisy, accused them of belonging to “the party that turned 9/11 into a catchphrase.” The other was the broadcast networks (one of them being CBS, the former home of Mr. Murrow and Mr. Cronkite), which, he charged, had not reported on the bill for more than two months.

“Though, to be fair,” Mr. Stewart said, “it’s not every day that Beatles songs come to iTunes.” (Each of the network newscasts had covered the story of the deal between the Beatles and Apple for their music catalog.) Each network subsequently covered the progress of the bill, sometimes citing Mr. Stewart by name. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, credited Mr. Stewart with raising awareness of the Republican blockade.

Eric Ortner, a former ABC News senior producer who worked as a medic at the World Trade Center site on 9/11, expressed dismay that Mr. Stewart had been virtually alone in expressing outrage early on.

“In just nine months’ time, my skilled colleagues will be jockeying to outdo one another on 10th anniversary coverage” of the attacks, Mr. Ortner wrote in an e-mail. “It’s when the press was needed most, when sunlight truly could disinfect,” he said, that the news networks were not there.

Brian Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News” and another frequent Stewart guest, did not comment on his network’s news judgment in how it covered the bill, but he did offer a comment about Mr. Stewart’s role.

“Jon gets to decide the rules governing his own activism and the causes he supports,” Mr. Williams said, “and how often he does it — and his audience gets to decide if they like the serious Jon as much as they do the satirical Jon.”

Mr. Stewart is usually extremely careful about taking serious positions for which he might be accused of trying to exert influence. He went to great lengths to avoid commenting about the intentions of his Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington in October, and the rally itself emphasized such less-than-impassioned virtues as open-minded debate and moderation.

In this case, Mr. Stewart, who is on vacation, declined to comment at all on the passage of the bill. He also ordered his staff not to comment or even offer any details on how the show was put together.

But Mr. Specht, the show guest, described how personally involved Mr. Stewart was in constructing the segment.

After the news of the Republican filibuster broke, “The Daily Show” contacted John Feal, an advocate for 9/11 victims, who then referred the show producers to Mr. Specht and the other guests.

Mr. Stewart met with the show’s panel of first responders in advance and briefed them on how the conversation would go. He even decided which seat each of the four men should sit in for the broadcast.

For Mr. Stewart, the topic of the 9/11 attacks has long been intensely personal. He lives in the TriBeCa area and has noted that in the past, he was able to see the World Trade Center from his apartment. Like other late-night comedians, he returned to the air shaken by the events and found performing comedy difficult for some time.

But comedy on television, more than journalism on television, may be the most effective outlet for stirring debate and effecting change in public policy, Mr. Thompson of Syracuse said. “Comedy has the potential to have an important role in framing the way we think about civic life,” he said.

And Mr. Stewart has thrust himself into the middle of that potential, he said.

“I have to think about how many kids are watching Jon Stewart right now and dreaming of growing up and doing what Jon Stewart does,” Mr. Thompson said. “Just like kids two generations ago watched Murrow or Cronkite and dreamed of doing that. Some of these ambitious appetites and callings that have brought people into journalism in the past may now manifest themselves in these other arenas, like comedy.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 26, 2010

Oil is back above $90 a barrel. Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past six months.

So what’s the meaning of this surge?

Is it speculation run amok? Is it the result of excessive money creation, a harbinger of runaway inflation just around the corner? No and no.

What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story.

Some background: The last time the prices of oil and other commodities were this high, two and a half years ago, many commentators dismissed the price spike as an aberration driven by speculators. And they claimed vindication when commodity prices plunged in the second half of 2008.

But that price collapse coincided with a severe global recession, which led to a sharp fall in demand for raw materials. The big test would come when the world economy recovered. Would raw materials once again become expensive?

Well, it still feels like a recession in America. But thanks to growth in developing nations, world industrial production recently passed its previous peak — and, sure enough, commodity prices are surging again.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that speculation played no role in 2007-2008. Nor should we reject the notion that speculation is playing some role in current prices; for example, who is that mystery investor who has bought up much of the world’s copper supply? But the fact that world economic recovery has also brought a recovery in commodity prices strongly suggests that recent price fluctuations mainly reflect fundamental factors.

What about commodity prices as a harbinger of inflation? Many commentators on the right have been predicting for years that the Federal Reserve, by printing lots of money — it’s not actually doing that, but that’s the accusation — is setting us up for severe inflation. Stagflation is coming, declared Representative Paul Ryan in February 2009; Glenn Beck has been warning about imminent hyperinflation since 2008.

Yet inflation has remained low. What’s an inflation worrier to do?

One response has been a proliferation of conspiracy theories, of claims that the government is suppressing the truth about rising prices. But lately many on the right have seized on rising commodity prices as proof that they were right all along, as a sign of high overall inflation just around the corner.

You do have to wonder what these people were thinking two years ago, when raw material prices were plunging. If the commodity-price rise of the past six months heralds runaway inflation, why didn’t the 50 percent decline in the second half of 2008 herald runaway deflation?

Inconsistency aside, however, the big problem with those blaming the Fed for rising commodity prices is that they’re suffering from delusions of U.S. economic grandeur. For commodity prices are set globally, and what America does just isn’t that important a factor.

In particular, today, as in 2007-2008, the primary driving force behind rising commodity prices isn’t demand from the United States. It’s demand from China and other emerging economies. As more and more people in formerly poor nations are entering the global middle class, they’re beginning to drive cars and eat meat, placing growing pressure on world oil and food supplies.

And those supplies aren’t keeping pace. Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived. True, alternative sources, like oil from Canada’s tar sands, have continued to grow. But these alternative sources come at relatively high cost, both monetary and environmental.

Also, over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices. And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common.

So what are the implications of the recent rise in commodity prices? It is, as I said, a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding. This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse. It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources.

But that’s for the future. Right now, rising commodity prices are basically the result of global recovery. They have no bearing, one way or another, on U.S. monetary policy. For this is a global story; at a fundamental level, it’s not about us.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

STORY TIME José Rosado, 42, visiting with his sons at Rikers Island, top. Below, Mr. Rosado picking books and recording himself reading for the boys.

By FERNANDA SANTOS
NY Times Published: December 24, 2010

THERE once was a man who read an unabridged dictionary from cover to cover to keep from losing his mind. Solitary confinement can do that to you, make you read what you would never look at on the outside, and then read more and more of it, to preserve your sense of humanity, maybe, but certainly to maintain whatever flimsy connection you hold to the world beyond your prison cell.

The other choice was to go crazy, or at least that was how it felt to José Rosado, or José Rosaldo, or José Reyes; his identity varies based on his crime and conviction. Mr. Rosado, 42, is a scraggy recovering addict with a 10th-grade education halfway through an eight-month stint on Rikers Island.

Mr. Rosado, known around the jailhouse as “professor,” has a wife, three sons and 52 books waiting for him in a public-housing project in East New York, Brooklyn. The books have been his anchor, he said, grounding him not to reality, but to distant times, faraway places and magical corners of his imagination, where heroin does not command him to do the bad things he has done.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Rosado has often spent 23 hours a day alone in a cell in the criminal justice system’s equivalent of “time out.” That was where he read — about Freemasonry and kabbalah, about ancient history, anthropology and archaeology. He has read the Bible and the Koran — “the whole 114 suras,” or chapters, he said, “from Al-Fatiha to Al-Nas,” the first and the last.

“Knowledge will get you to a lot of places,” Mr. Rosado said.

It did not keep Mr. Rosado out of Bare Hill, Clinton, Southport and Attica — prisons across New York State, far from his home in Brooklyn. He has been in and out since 1989, for burglary and drugs and, most recently, third-degree assault, often extending his stints with bad behavior: his prison disciplinary record runs for six pages.

These days, Mr. Rosado is reading “Fox in Socks” and “Hop on Pop” and “Clifford y la Hora del Baño.” Juan Camacho, 35, a drug dealer and father of two, is partial to “The Cat in the Hat” (though he says he did not like the movie as much because “it doesn’t have the same rhyming, the classic of it”). And Qaaid Reddick, 27, who has never met his third daughter because she was born while he was behind bars on a weapons charge, is paging through “Merry Christmas, Curious George.”

They are three of the eight men at the Eric M. Taylor Center — one of nine jails on Rikers Island — who completed a five-week literacy course this fall called “Daddy and Me,” in which they recorded themselves reading children’s books for the sons and daughters they had left behind. It was the first time such a program had been tried at Rikers, though there have been many similar efforts, most focusing on female inmates in prisons across the country, since at least 1996.

“People are multidimensional,” said Dora B. Schriro, the city’s Correction Department commissioner. “Part of being a man is being a dad, and part of being a good man is being a good dad, in the most fundamental sense of the word.”

Financed with about $3,800 from a family literacy grant from the state, the program at the Taylor Center was run by Nick Higgins, supervising librarian at the New York Public Library’s correctional services program. On the first day, Mr. Higgins told the inmates, “Our objective is to hopefully change the attitude that some of you might have about reading to children, that reading is Mom’s job.”

Over five weeks, Mr. Rosado learned to calibrate his raspy voice to a higher pitch. Mr. Camacho learned to contort his facial muscles into humorous expressions. Mr. Reddick, on the back end of his sixth stay at Rikers since 2005, rediscovered “The Little Engine That Could,” a book he remembered reading in elementary school.

THE inmates — in olive-green jumpsuits that seemed too big for their frames, with the names of their mothers, girlfriends and children tattooed on their skin — had a long table of children’s books from which to choose: “Goodnight Moon,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “El Zorrito.”

“I like monkeys,” Mr. Reddick said as he got acquainted with Curious George. “They’re the closest thing to a human being.”

As a child, Mr. Reddick lived on East 92nd Street in Manhattan, near a Presbyterian church that had a strawberry shortcake festival he never missed. He said he was arrested for the first time at age 14 for punching a boy who had disrespected him. Since then, he has been in and out of prison, mostly for assault; on May 29, he was arrested on Staten Island with a gun in his backpack. When asked where he grew up, Mr. Reddick said, “Right here,” meaning Rikers. He has three daughters: Mary Jane is 4, Ma’Naiya is 3, and Mya was born on Oct. 18. He was looking forward to the celebration at the end of the reading program, when children would visit their fathers and get the CDs the men had recorded on a Marantz PMD660, because it would be the first time he would see the baby.

At the first session, Mr. Reddick tried reading in front of the group, but was barely audible. “See the man in the yellow hat at the — ” He stopped midsentence and stuck out his tongue. “I misspoke,” he said sheepishly. At the third session, he read the book until the end, but with no inflection in his voice, as if he had been forced into it. By the next week, when it was time to record, he had abandoned the little monkey for the little engine he recalled from his childhood: I think I can, I think I can.

That was for Mary Jane. For Ma’Naiya, he chose “Papa, Do You Love Me?”, a modern story inspired by the Masai tribe in Kenya. Mr. Reddick had never heard of the book, but he liked the title. He did not select a story for Mya.

“Mya is too little for books,” Mr. Reddick said.

On the program’s fifth and final session, last month, Mr. Reddick and the others were escorted to the jail’s visiting room. Each of them commanded a set of colorful chairs arranged in a circle to welcome their families. Mr. Reddick sat among the red and green chairs, waiting. He watched as the other inmates hugged their babies and their babies’ mothers. He listened to them read their stories.

A girl laughed heartily as her father tickled her belly. A woman asked one of the correction officers if her daughter could have another cup of juice. The officer told her she did not have to ask; the juice and doughnuts had been laid out for the families.

Mr. Reddick sat alone for some time, staring at the CDs and books on the table before him, then staring into nothing. Eventually, he joined two other inmates whose families had not come either. They chatted, their backs turned to the men whose families were there.

He knew Mary Jane and Ma’Naiya would not be coming; they live on Staten Island with his sister, who, he said, thinks they should not see their father in jail. But he had expected Baby Mya. Later, he learned that her mother had woken up too late to catch the bus.

“No promises made, no promises broken,” Mr. Reddick shrugged.

MR. CAMACHO said he had a lot of children’s books in the apartment in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, where his wife, Jasmine Bosch, lives with their two boys, José, 8, and Steven, 4; two dogs; and a cat named Tiger. But none were visible on a visit to the first-floor one-bedroom apartment one rainy afternoon. Ms. Bosch, who is 27 and unemployed, said that there were some, in a bin somewhere in the boys’ closet, but that she had no time to read them.

Ms. Bosch said that she woke up at 6:30 a.m. and that by 7, she and the boys would already be fighting. She fights to rouse José, to get him ready and out the door to get to school on time. She fights to keep Steven under control as she rushes to get breakfast.

Sometimes, cockroaches emerge from under the kitchen cabinets and crawl onto the table. Ms. Bosch said that she had gotten used to the roaches, but that she did not like the mice. That’s why she got Tiger. Tiger likes to eat cockroaches, too.

The apartment smells like stale cigarettes. Ms. Bosch smokes Newports, which she buys by the carton in New Jersey. She said she tried not to smoke in front of the boys, and also not to cry.

“I do my best,” she said.

While José and Steven are in school, Ms. Bosch said, she washes and folds, cooks and cleans, feeds Tiger and walks the dogs, one of whom is an old mutt who is half-blind and tends to crash into everything.

Ms. Bosch is dyslexic. She cannot read to the boys unless it is an easy book. José is dyslexic, too, “or something like that,” she said. “He needs help when he brings homework home.”

It was Mr. Camacho who taught the boys to write their names. Steven traced his four times that rainy afternoon. “Homework,” he said, waving the sheet of paper over his head.

During the Daddy and Me sessions, Mr. Camacho stumbled over the silly singsong of “The Cat in the Hat,” at one point saying, “I can already imagine José giggling.” Then, he said he hoped the boys would not be afraid of making mistakes, but would learn from them and not repeat them.

At the final session, he told José, who is 4-foot-11 and weighs 120 pounds, to eat more fruit. Then, before his family walked away, he grabbed the boy by the arm and said, “When you hear my voice, remember that daddy is there with you.”

Mr. Camacho has been at Rikers since June. The police had found 56 bags of crack cocaine in the pocket of a jacket in a hallway closet in his home, along with a marijuana pipe and five .38 Special bullets. Ms. Bosch kept track of the days until his scheduled Dec. 15 release on a calendar taped to the wall.

“My baby is coming home soon,” she said in early November.

But it did not turn out that way.

Instead, on Nov. 17, Mr. Camacho was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, to face federal drug conspiracy charges that carry a minimum sentence of 10 years.

A federal indictment said Mr. Camacho — or “Papito Camacho,” as he is known on the streets — had sold a dozen bags of crack to an undercover police officer near his home on Manida Street, part of an enterprise that involved 12 others.

IN the recording room, Mr. Rosado pronounced Seuss as “Zeus” and read the words of “Fox in Socks” as if he were singing a rap song. “This-is-what-they-CALL-a-TWEET-le-BEE-tle-NOO-dle-POO-dle-BOT-tled-PAD-dled-MUD-dled-DUD-dled-FUD-dled-WUD-dled-FOX-IN-SOCKS-sir!”

He turned the page.

“There goes that little girl you like,” he said into the microphone, his eyes on one of the book’s characters, Sue, with her wavy hair and lips locked in a perpetual frown.

He was speaking to a child who was not there: Karabalí, 7, his eldest, who was named for a character in a Puerto Rican legend Mr. Rosado once read in prison, a runaway slave who eluded his captors even after his death. His second son, Cofresí, 6, is named after a 19th-century Puerto Rican pirate who robbed ships carrying gold from the island. The third is José, who is 5 and named for his father, a Puerto Rican who has a long rap sheet filled with heroin and burglary convictions.

Mr. Rosado bought his first book out of a prison catalog, in 1994, after he was ordered to spend 365 days in isolation for slashing another inmate. It was Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and it cost $99, he said.

Later, he read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” which dissected military operations written more than 2,000 years ago. He read Robert Temple’s “Sirius Mystery,” which explored extraterrestrial beginnings of the human civilization. He read National Geographic’s “Lost Kingdoms of the Maya” and Henry Brun’s “Global Studies: Civilizations of the Past and Present,” which is more commonly assigned to teenagers in high school.

“People treat you better when you have an education,” Mr. Rosado said. “I always tell my kids, ‘Read, read, read.’ ”

He met his wife, Olguita, after he came out of state prison in 2002 and moved to Orlando, Fla., where he found work building cabinets for a cousin’s small construction business. The housing market was booming, and for four years, he said, he made money and walked the line.

But when the housing market crumbled and work dried up, Mr. Rosado started getting high again. He tried to escape to Brooklyn, where he toiled as a tile maker for two years, but the company folded as the economy sputtered. On Aug. 17 , he was caught robbing a deli near his home. “We have cellphone, cable, house phone,” Mr. Rosado said, ticking off bills by way of explanation. “We have children, and we want them to eat nice, to dress up nice. I just got caught up. Did what I had to do.”

He got to Rikers a few days later and is scheduled for release on April 11.

“Block everything out, take a deep breath and pretend you’re reading to them,” Mr. Rosado mumbled to himself as he headed to the Daddy and Me recording room one Thursday morning.

Sometimes, he closed his eyes and broke from the text to address his sons. He apologized to Karabalí for stumbling on Dr. Seuss’s tongue-twisting rhymes. He reminded Cofresí about Timbuktu, “home of the ancient African civilizations,” after coming across the name in “Hop on Pop.”

“The book is bilingual,” he explained to little José about Clifford.

“You know English and Spanish, Papi, so when I talk to you in Spanish, you answer in Spanish, and when I talk to you in English, you answer in English.”

“Papi,” he added, “I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

Soon was a week later, in that visiting room with the brightly colored chairs. Cofresí told his father about the day someone fired a gun right outside their apartment door just a minute after he and his mother had stepped inside. Sitting on his mother’s lap, José read the English and Spanish words in the Clifford book.

On one side of the room was a bookcase full of children’s stories. Karabalí had raced to it almost as soon as he had arrived, grabbed one of the books and demanded, in a way that only a child can: “Daddy, read for me.”

Richard Aldrich, If I Paint Crowned I’ve Had It, Got Me, 2008. Oil and wax on wood, on cut linen, 84 x 58 inches.

January 21 – May 1, 2011

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Egon Schiele
Girl with Purple Stockings
1913

Through January 16

The Hammer

Ed Ou/The New York Times

Thanks to this solar panel, Sara Ruto no longer takes a three-hour taxi ride to a town with electricity to recharge her cellphone.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NY Times Published: December 24, 2010

KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.

Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.

Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.

That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.

“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.

As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.

Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.

In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.

“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”

The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.

There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.

But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.

With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.

In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.

In addition to these small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and “mini” hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village.

Yet while these off-grid systems have proved their worth, the lack of an effective distribution network or a reliable way of financing the start-up costs has prevented them from becoming more widespread.

“The big problem for us now is there is no business model yet,” said John Maina, executive coordinator of Sustainable Community Development Services, or Scode, a nongovernmental organization based in Nakuru, Kenya, that is devoted to bringing power to rural areas.

Just a few years ago, Mr. Maina said, “solar lights” were merely basic lanterns, dim and unreliable.

“Finally, these products exist, people are asking for them and are willing to pay,” he said. “But we can’t get supply.” He said small African organizations like his do not have the purchasing power or connections to place bulk orders themselves from distant manufacturers, forcing them to scramble for items each time a shipment happens to come into the country.

Part of the problem is that the new systems buck the traditional mold, in which power is generated by a very small number of huge government-owned companies that gradually extend the grid into rural areas. Investors are reluctant to pour money into products that serve a dispersed market of poor rural consumers because they see the risk as too high.

“There are many small islands of success, but they need to go to scale,” said Minoru Takada, chief of the United Nations Development Program’s sustainable energy program. “Off-grid is the answer for the poor. But people who control funding need to see this as a viable option.”

Even United Nations programs and United States government funds that promote climate-friendly energy in developing countries hew to large projects like giant wind farms or industrial-scale solar plants that feed into the grid. A $300 million solar project is much easier to finance and monitor than 10 million home-scale solar systems in mud huts spread across a continent.

As a result, money does not flow to the poorest areas. Of the $162 billion invested in renewable energy last year, according to the United Nations, experts estimate that $44 billion was spent in China, India and Brazil collectively, and $7.5 billion in the many poorer countries.

Only 6 to 7 percent of solar panels are manufactured to produce electricity that does not feed into the grid; that includes systems like Ms. Ruto’s and solar panels that light American parking lots and football stadiums.

Still, some new models are emerging. Husk Power Systems, a young company supported by a mix of private investment and nonprofit funds, has built 60 village power plants in rural India that make electricity from rice husks for 250 hamlets since 2007.

In Nepal and Indonesia, the United Nations Development Program has helped finance the construction of very small hydroelectric plants that have brought electricity to remote mountain communities. Morocco provides subsidized solar home systems at a cost of $100 each to remote rural areas where expanding the national grid is not cost-effective.

What has most surprised some experts in the field is the recent emergence of a true market in Africa for home-scale renewable energy and for appliances that consume less energy. As the cost of reliable equipment decreases, families have proved ever more willing to buy it by selling a goat or borrowing money from a relative overseas, for example.

The explosion of cellphone use in rural Africa has been an enormous motivating factor. Because rural regions of many African countries lack banks, the cellphone has been embraced as a tool for commercial transactions as well as personal communications, adding an incentive to electrify for the sake of recharging.

M-Pesa, Kenya’s largest mobile phone money transfer service, handles an annual cash flow equivalent to more than 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, most in tiny transactions that rarely exceed $20.

The cheap renewable energy systems also allow the rural poor to save money on candles, charcoal, batteries, wood and kerosene. “So there is an ability to pay and a willingness to pay,” said Mr. Younger of the International Finance Corporation.

In another Kenyan village, Lochorai, Alice Wangui, 45, and Agnes Mwaforo, 35, formerly subsistence farmers, now operate a booming business selling and installing energy-efficient wood-burning cooking stoves made of clay and metal for a cost of $5. Wearing matching bright orange tops and skirts, they walk down rutted dirt paths with cellphones ever at their ears, edging past goats and dogs to visit customers and to calm those on the waiting list.

Hunched over her new stove as she stirred a stew of potatoes and beans, Naomi Muriuki, 58, volunteered that the appliance had more than halved her use of firewood. Wood has become harder to find and expensive to buy as the government tries to limit deforestation, she added.

In Tumsifu, a slightly more prosperous village of dairy farmers, Virginia Wairimu, 35, is benefiting from an underground tank in which the manure from her three cows is converted to biogas, which is then pumped through a rubber tube to a gas burner.

“I can just get up and make breakfast,” Ms. Wairimu said. The system was financed with a $400 loan from a demonstration project that has since expired.

In Kiptusuri, the Firefly LED system purchased by Ms. Ruto is this year’s must-have item. The smallest one, which costs $12, consists of a solar panel that can be placed in a window or on a roof and is connected to a desk lamp and a phone charger. Slightly larger units can run radios and black-and-white television sets.

Of course, such systems cannot compare with a grid connection in the industrialized world. A week of rain can mean no lights. And items like refrigerators need more, and more consistent, power than a panel provides.

Still, in Kenya, even grid-based electricity is intermittent and expensive: families must pay more than $350 just to have their homes hooked up.

“With this system, you get a real light for what you spend on kerosene in a few months,” said Mr. Maina, of Sustainable Community Development Services. “When you can light your home and charge your phone, that is very valuable.”

Untitled (Study for Stories of Artists & Writers), 1997–98. Graphite and screenprint on paper, 13 × 10 in. (33 × 25.4 cm)

Through February 20, 2011

LACMA

Thanks to Steven Baker

Opening reception January 13, 2011 6-8PM

bortolami

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 23, 2010

Hey, has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book, where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund. “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week. What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven’t changed since Victorian times. Still, some things are different. In particular, the production of humbug — which was still a somewhat amateurish craft when Dickens wrote — has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.

Let me walk you through a case in point, one that I’ve been following lately.

If you listen to the recent speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls, you’ll find several of them talking at length about the harm done by unionized government workers, who have, they say, multiplied under the Obama administration. A recent example was an op-ed article by the outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who declared that “thanks to President Obama,” government is the only booming sector in our economy: “Since January 2008” — silly me, I thought Mr. Obama wasn’t inaugurated until 2009 — “the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs, while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.”

Horrors! Except that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment has fallen, not risen, since January 2008. And since January 2009, when Mr. Obama actually did take office, government employment has fallen by more than 300,000 as hard-pressed state and local governments have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters and other workers.

So how did the notion of a surge in government payrolls under Mr. Obama take hold?

It turns out that last spring there was, in fact, a bulge in government employment. And both politicians and researchers at humbug factories — I mean, conservative think tanks — quickly seized on this bulge as evidence of an exploding public sector. Over the summer, articles and speeches began to appear highlighting the rise in government employment and issuing dire warnings about what it portended for America’s future.

But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

Is it really possible that the authors of those articles and speeches about soaring public employment didn’t know what was going on? Well, I guess we should never assume malice when ignorance remains a possibility.

There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims. And this isn’t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.

Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)

And it’s a very effective process. When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

So in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them: America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace. But Scrooge was right about the prevalence of humbug. And we’d be much better off as a nation if more people had the courage to say “Bah!”

January 7 through February 12, 2011

David Zwirner

By Christopher Reynolds and Rene Lynch
Los Angeles Times
December 23, 2010

Los Angeles Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila ducked into Red Medicine, a new Beverly Hills restaurant, for some modern Vietnamese food the other night, but got nothing to eat. Instead, she was outed and ousted, her party turned away, her picture snapped and critic’s anonymity shredded by the restaurateur himself.

“I always knew at some point a blogger or somebody would take a secret photo. But I never expected that a restaurateur would stick a camera in my face,” Virbila said Wednesday.

Virbila was rebuffed, Red Medicine managing partner Noah Ellis said, because “Irene is not the person any of us wanted reviewing our restaurant. … This was not a rash decision.”

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By Wednesday afternoon, the photo of Virbila was posted on several blogs and websites, including the much-viewed Gawker.com and Eater.com. Virbila’s anonymity, which she’d guarded through 16 years as this newspaper’s restaurant critic, was a memory. And among foodies, the debate over anonymity — is it still possible or even advisable for a restaurant critic? — was on.

If restaurant staffers know you’re a critic with wide readership, Virbila said, they change their behavior and sometimes even serve different food. Essentially, “it’s not an accurate representation of the restaurant.”

Stefan Richter, owner-chef of Stefan’s at L.A. Farm in Santa Monica, said he was shocked at the confrontation but also suggested that Virbila is not truly anonymous. “I think people know who the critics are these days,” he said, “everybody knows.”

Chef Michael Mina, who employed Ellis at several restaurants, disagreed with Ellis. “Is he out of his mind? I think that’s crazy.”

Mina said he has been reviewed repeatedly by Virbila over the years — “Probably the toughest person on me has been Irene.” But he said restaurateurs generally have far more to gain than lose from a restaurant review.

The drama began Tuesday at 8 p.m. It was the restaurant’s ninth night of serving dinner, Ellis said, and the kitchen was running behind.

Virbila, who had booked her reservation under another name, arrived promptly with her husband and two friends. They waited 20 minutes, then 30, then 40 — which didn’t much bother her, Virbila said.

“The menu looked really interesting,” she said. Besides, she was there “just to check it out. I wasn’t writing a review that night.”

While her party waited, Ellis and his partners were sneaking peeks, Ellis said. Management had talked about Virbila and her critical reviews of other eateries they’d been involved with. If she came, Ellis said, he and his partners had decided they would turn her away — and take her photograph.

So was this her? Ellis said he thought so and partner Adam Fleischman seemed even more sure. Once they had another confirmation from a customer, Ellis said, they decided to act.

He stepped up to about 6 feet from Virbila, pulled out his camera and grabbed a shot with flash.

Both Ellis and Virbila agree that in the ensuing conversation, Ellis told Virbila he knew who she was and that she asked him to delete the photo. Ellis declined and asked Virbila and her party to leave. They complied, but first Virbila had a question: Why had Ellis waited 40 minutes to turn her away?

“I was waiting for the right angle,” he said. The photo was posted on the restaurant’s website later that evening.

That whole scene, said San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer, sounds “very stupid. I think it’s very short-sighted. If it was a good restaurant, they wouldn’t be afraid.”

But at the same time, Bauer said, “the whole idea of anonymity is almost a moot point these days. … After you’ve done it for any length of time, a year or more, your image gets out, especially now with camera phones.” Virbila said she tries to keep a low profile, not appearing at food and wine events or establishing a Facebook page.

The men who run Red Medicine have worked in plenty of widely admired kitchens. Besides Ellis’ work for Mina, Red Medicine chef Jordan Kahn has worked for acclaimed chef Thomas Keller.

Ellis said he hopes his actions prevent Virbila from reviewing his restaurant and allows other restaurants to “make a decision as to whether or not they would like to serve her.”

Added Ellis: “We find that some of her reviews can be unnecessarily cruel and irrational, and that they have caused hard-working people in this industry to lose their jobs.”

If he had Tuesday night to live over again, Ellis said, he might not make Virbila wait so long. But he feels good about turning her away and posting the picture.

“We didn’t do this to prove a point and liberate the restaurants of the world. We did it because it was the right action for us,” said Ellis. “We’re just trying to be a great restaurant.”

Virbila has served as The Times’ restaurant critic since 1994, winning recognition from the James Beard Foundation in 1997 and the American Food Journalists Award in 2005. She typically visits a restaurant three times over two or three months before writing a review.

Tuesday night’s events, Virbila said, are “definitely going to make my job more difficult to do.”

Over a long history of cat-and-mouse games between high-end chefs and well-read critics, critics routinely have booked their reservations under other names, carried credit cards bearing pseudonyms and occasionally even worn disguises.

In more recent years, some have worried less about their anonymity. When LA Weekly restaurant critic Jonathan Gold won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for a body of work celebrating street food and ethnic eateries, newspapers and websites around the world ran a photo of him drinking deeply from a champagne flute the size of a football. Gold told The Times in a later interview that he had “noticed absolutely no difference in being recognized in restaurants. None. Zero.”

Said Los Angeles Times Food Editor Russ Parsons, “at this point, we’re not planning any changes in the way we do our restaurant reviews. Virbila is far from the first major critic to have her picture published and I’m sure she won’t be the last.”

Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Emilie Gossiaux, 21, in the hospital with her boyfriend, Alan Lundgard. She was hit by an 18-wheel truck while riding her bike in October.

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
NY Times Published: December 21, 2010

He reached for her hand. It had been five weeks since the accident. Emilie Gossiaux, 21, lay in a bed in the surgical intensive-care unit at Bellevue Hospital Center. She could not see. She could not hear. Beyond asking for water, she spoke very little. Her boyfriend, Alan Lundgard, 21, took her left palm in his.

Ms. Gossiaux with her mother, Susan. Ms. Gossiaux is undergoing physical therapy after suffering a traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest, a stroke and multiple fractures.

Ms. Gossiaux was riding her bicycle in Brooklyn on the morning of Oct. 8 when an 18-wheel truck making a right turn struck her. Once she arrived at Bellevue, her heart stopped for about one minute after she went into cardiac arrest. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, a stroke and multiple fractures in her head, pelvis and leg.

Ms. Gossiaux’s mother said that on the second day a nurse told her that her daughter was gone, and asked about organ donations.

Five weeks later, Ms. Gossiaux was still alive. But her future looked grim. Her parents were planning on taking her back home to the New Orleans area and placing her in a nursing home. At the time, a doctor told her family that she was not a candidate for rehabilitative treatment because there was no way to communicate with her.

Mr. Lundgard had spent every night at the hospital. Nobody had told him what the nurse said that second night. Nobody had the heart to.

Ms. Gossiaux and Mr. Lundgard met in 2006 in Colorado at a summer arts program for high school students. She was born in Metairie and raised in Terrytown, both suburbs of New Orleans. He was born in California but grew up in Midland, Mich. He loved her voice: one of his friends called it milk and honey. They met again in 2007 as freshman art students at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A couple since last February, they soon moved in together. The loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they lived and drew and painted was filled with light. The morning of the accident, she had been riding her bike to an art studio, where she had an internship.

When Ms. Gossiaux was a little girl, there were times her parents thought she was asleep in bed, but she was not. She was drawing her own comic strips, sometimes in the closet, sometimes with the shades open by the light of the moon. She has been hearing-impaired since she was a child, and had been wearing hearing aids since kindergarten. As she grew older, her hearing worsened.

In May, she had surgery to receive a cochlear implant, an electronic device known as a bionic ear, in her left ear. She took the fall semester off from Cooper to recuperate.

After the accident, Ms. Gossiaux had not allowed anyone to put in her cochlear implant or the hearing aid she wore in her other ear. Mr. Lundgard and her parents, Eric and Susan Gossiaux, feared that the accident had left her blind. Mr. Lundgard read on the Internet about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan; to communicate, Ms. Sullivan used her finger to spell words on Ms. Keller’s palm. He did not think it would work. But about 3 a.m. that November morning in her hospital room, leaning over her bed and holding her left hand, he decided to try.

With his index finger he spelled, one capital letter at a time, the words “I LOVE YOU.”

“Oh, you love me?” she told him. “That’s so sweet. Thank you.”

It was the first time she had responded in any significant way to the many attempts to communicate with her. In her disoriented state, she thought he was a kind stranger. “It wasn’t even a conversation,” Mr. Lundgard said. “It was just that one exchange which alerted me to the fact that she was not damaged to such an extent that it was beyond her ability to recover.”

Mr. Lundgard later had a longer conversation with Ms. Gossiaux, in which he finger-spelled questions and she responded. It took a long time to spell one sentence, but she understood what he wrote on her palm, telling him what year it was and where she was born.

Shortly after, she allowed her hearing aid to be put in her right ear. In an instant, she was back. “When she came to, it was like a party in the hospital,” said Mr. Lundgard, who is taking a year off from Cooper to help his girlfriend; he is a seasonal employee at The New York Times, working as an art assistant. “All the nurses came in; they were, like, dancing and screaming.”

Ms. Gossiaux never went to a nursing home. She was transferred to NYU Langone Medical Center’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine on East 17th Street, where she has been undergoing physical therapy.

Fate seems a meager word to describe the great mystery of their lives. On the morning of the accident, Mr. Lundgard put her helmet on her, strapping it on tight. A bus driver at the Louisiana school district where Susan Gossiaux works — a woman Ms. Gossiaux’s mother had never met — donated 106.5 sick days so that she could be by her daughter’s side. After the nurse told her that her daughter was gone, Susan Gossiaux was whispering in her ear when Ms. Gossiaux suddenly raised her arm.

“I had the head doctor of surgical I.C.U. say, ‘Miracles happen,’ ” Susan Gossiaux, 59, said.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Lundgard sat at the edge of the bed next to Emilie Gossiaux at the hospital on 17th Street. “I feel like a newborn baby, just starting over,” she said softly.

The big rig had nearly killed her 71 days ago. Now she lay in bed, teasing Mr. Lundgard about the crush she had on him in sophomore year, laughing about a joke one of her therapists had told her. She spoke of wanting to graduate from Cooper, of wanting to sculpture again, of wanting to join the Peace Corps. She believes she will get her sight back.

“They told me that there was a very small chance, but if there’s a chance, then I’ll believe in it,” she said, “and I’ll have hope in it.”

Ms. Gossiaux reached for his arms. He leaned over the bed. “You want to get up?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I want a hug.”

By LARRY DAVID
NY Times Published: December 20, 2010

THERE is a God! It passed! The Bush tax cuts have been extended two years for the upper bracketeers, of which I am a proud member, thank you very much. I’m the last person in the world I’d want to be beside, but I am beside myself! This is a life changer, I tell you. A life changer!

To begin with, I was planning a trip to Cabo with my kids for Christmas vacation. We were going to fly coach, but now with the money I’m saving in taxes, I’m going to splurge and bump myself up to first class. First class! Somebody told me they serve warm nuts up there, and call you “mister.” I might not get off the plane!

I’m also going to call the hotel and get another room so I don’t have to sleep on a cot in the kids’ room. Don’t get me wrong — I love a good cot. The problem is they tend to take up a lot of room, and it’s getting a little tougher in my advancing years to fold it up and drag it to the closet. I mean, I’d do it if I had to, but guess what? I don’t! Not with this windfall coming my way. Now I get to have my own room with a king-sized bed. And who knows, maybe I’ll even get some fancy bottled water from the minibar. This is shaping up to be the best vacation I’ve had in years.

When I get home, thanks to the great compromise, the first thing I’m going to do is get a flat-screen TV. Finally I can throw out the 20-inch Zenith with the rabbit ears, the one I inherited from my parents when they died. The reception is terrible and I’m getting tired of going out to bars every time I want to watch a game. Last month, the antenna broke and I tried to improvise one with a metal hanger and wound up cutting myself. Every time I see that scab, I say to myself, “If, God willing, those Bush tax cuts are restored, I’m going to buy a new TV.” Well, guess what? They have been!

It’s also going to be a boon for my health. After years of coveting them, I’ll finally be able to afford blueberries. Did you know they have a lot of antioxidants, which prevent cancer? Cancer! This tax cut just might save my life. Who said Republicans don’t support health care? I’m going to have the blueberries with my cereal, and I’m not talking Special K. Those days are over. It’s nothing but real granola from now on. The kind you get in the plastic bins in health food stores. Did someone say “organic”?

The only problem is if, God forbid, the tax cuts are repealed in two years, how will I ever go back to Special K and bananas? Well, I did quit smoking, so I’m sure if push came to shove I could summon up the willpower to get off granola and blueberries. Of course, I suppose with the money I managed to save from the “Seinfeld” syndication, I probably could continue to eat granola with blueberries, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Life was good, and now it’s even better. Thank you, Republicans. And a special thank you to President Obama and the Democrats. I didn’t know you cared.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 19, 2010

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don’t work. But the response should be, what big-government policies?

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that’s not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

It’s also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why Obamanomics would fail was wrong. For two years we’ve been warned that government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high; in fact, rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently low by historical standards. For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner; instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — now at a half-century low.

The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America — and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official.

And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again.

But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.” Why?

Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.

People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy substance — most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases. But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong.

President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

By BEN RATLIFF
NY Times Published: December 17, 2010

Don Van Vliet, an artist of protean creativity who was known as Captain Beefheart during his days as an influential rock musician and who later led a reclusive life as a painter, died Friday. He was 69 and lived in Trinidad, Calif.

The cause was complications of multiple sclerosis, said Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner at the Michael Werner gallery in New York, where Mr. Van Vliet had shown his art, many of them abstract, colorful oils, since 1985. The gallery said he died in a hospital in Northern California.

Captain Beefheart’s music career stretched from 1966 to 1982, and from straight rhythm and blues by way of the early Rolling Stones to music that sounded like a strange uncle of post-punk. He is probably best known for “Trout Mask Replica,” a double album from 1969 with his Magic Band.

A bolt-from-the-blue collection of precise, careening, surrealist songs with clashing meters, brightly imagistic poetry and raw blues shouting, “Trout Mask Replica” had particular resonance with the punk and new wave generation to come a decade later, influencing bands like Devo, the Residents, Pere Ubu and the Fall.

Mr. Van Vliet’s life story is caked with half-believable tales, some of which he himself spread in Dadaist, elliptical interviews. He claimed he had never read a book and had never been to school, and answered questions with riddles. “We see the moon, don’t we?” he asked in a 1969 interview. “So it’s our eye. Animals see us, don’t they? So we’re their animals.”

The facts, or those most often stated, are that he was born on Jan. 15, 1941, in Glendale, Calif., as Don Vliet. (He added the “Van” in 1965.) His father, Glen, drove a bakery truck.

Don demonstrated artistic talent before the age of 10, especially in sculpture, and at 13 was offered a scholarship to study sculpture in Europe, but his parents forbade him. Concurrently, they moved to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where one of Don’s high school friends was Frank Zappa.

His adopted vocal style came partly from Howlin’ Wolf: a deep, rough-riding moan turned up into swooped falsettos at the end of lines, pinched and bellowing and sounding as if it caused pain.

“When it comes to capturing the feeling of archaic, Delta-style blues,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1982, “he is the only white performer who really gets it right.”

He enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College to study art in 1959 but dropped out after one semester. By the early 1960s he had started spending time in Cucamonga, Calif., in Zappa’s studio. The two men worked on what was perhaps the first rock opera (still unperformed and unpublished), “I Was a Teenage Maltshop,” and built sets and wrote some of the script for a film to be titled “Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People.”

The origins of Mr. Van Vliet’s stage name are unclear, but he told interviewers later in life that he used it because he had “a beef in my heart against this society.”

By 1965 a quintet called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (the “his” was later changed to “the”) was born. By the end of the year the band was playing at teenage fairs and car-club dances around Lancaster and signed by A&M Records to record two singles.

The guitarist Ry Cooder, then a young blues fanatic whose skill was much admired by Mr. Van Vliet, served as pro forma musical director for the next record, “Safe as Milk” (1967), which showed the band working on something different: a rhythmically jerky style, with stuttering melodies. The next album, “Strictly Personal” (1968), went even further in the direction of rhythmic originality.

But it was “Trout Mask Replica” that earned Mr. Van Vliet his biggest mark. And it was the making of that album that provided some of the most durable myths about Mr. Van Vliet as an imperious, uncompromising artist.

The musicians lived together in a house in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley; what money there was for food and rent was supplied by Mr. Van Vliet’s mother, Sue, and the parents of Bill Harkleroad, the band’s guitarist (whom Mr. Van Vliet renamed Zoot Horn Rollo). One persistent myth has it that Mr. Van Vliet, who had no formal ability at any instrument, sat at the piano, turned on tapes and spontaneously composed most of the record in a single marathon eight-and-a-half-hour session.

What really happened, according to later accounts, was that his drummer, John French (whose stage name was Drumbo), transcribed and arranged music as Mr. Van Vliet whistled, sang or played it on the piano, and the band learned the wobbly, intricately arranged songs through Mr. French’s transcriptions.

“Trout Mask” offers solo vocal turns that sound like sea shanties; intricately ordered pieces with two guitars playing dissonant lines; and conversations with Zappa, the record’s producer. But its most recognizable feature is its staccato, perpetually disorienting melodic lines.

Band members’ accounts have described Mr. Van Vliet as tyrannical. (Both Mr. French and Mr. Harkleroad have written memoirs with dark details about this period.)

Mr. Van Vliet’s eccentricity and his skepticism about the music industry had much to do with why his music remained mostly a cult obsession. His band was offered a slot at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967, but Mr. Cooder had quit a week before, and Mr. Van Vliet was too spooked to perform. In the following years, when the band was at its creative peak, it played relatively few concerts.

The Magic Band’s first records after “Trout Mask Replica,” starting with “Lick My Decals Off, Baby,” had a more mature sound, but by “Clear Spot,” in 1973, the band had turned toward blues-rock. It later made a few ill-conceived concessions to commercialism, and in 1974 the band quit en masse after the critically panned “Unconditionally Guaranteed.”

After a long falling-out, Mr. Van Vliet reunited with his old friend Zappa to tour and make the album “Bongo Fury” in 1975, then assembled a new band to record “Bat Chain Puller,” which was never released because of contractual tie-ups. Parts of it were rerecorded in 1978 for an album released by Warner Brothers, “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller).”

When his business affairs cleared in the early 1980s, Mr. Van Vliet made two albums for Virgin, “Doc at the Radar Station” and “Ice Cream for Crow,” with a crew of musicians who had idolized him while growing up. The albums were enthusiastically received.

But “Ice Cream for Crow” was his last record; in 1982 he quit music to focus on his painting and moved to Trinidad, near the Oregon border, with his wife, Jan, who is his only survivor.

In the exhibition catalog to a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the museum director, John Lane, wrote of Mr. Van Vliet’s work, “His paintings — most frequently indeterminate landscapes populated by forms of abstracted animals — are intended to effect psychological, spiritual and magical force.”

Some of the images were a continuation of his songwriting concerns, especially those involving animals. A lot of his work dwells on the beauty of animals, on animals acting like humans and even on humans turning into animals. In “Wild Life,” he sang, “I’m gonna go up on the mountain and look for bears,” and in “Grow Fins,” an extraordinary blues from the album “The Spotlight Kid” (1972), he threatened a girlfriend that if she didn’t love him better he would turn into a sea creature.

Mr. Van Vliet had rarely been seen since the early 1990s and seldom at his gallery openings.

“I don’t like getting out when I could be painting,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.”

‘The more uneasy the country is, the more work we tend to have,’ says an organizer of an industry event in San Diego this month. Alan Bakor, left, and Stacy Roberts demonstrate response tactics to protect a client at a recent conference of bodyguards in San Diego. (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times /

By Shan Li
The Los Angeles Times
December 18, 2010

When bodyguards around the nation flocked to San Diego recently, the talk was all about paparazzi, terrorists and the latest tech gizmos, with seminars like “Surviving the Kill Zone — Human Factors Are the Key.”

Guards trained in martial arts showed the latest techniques for subduing nightclub troublemakers, joked about the challenges of guarding celebrities like Paris Hilton and compared notes on the latest technology borrowed from the military.

The 29th annual Executive Protection Institute Conference this month came at a time when demand for bodyguards has soared in lockstep with increasing global unrest spurred by wars and economic turmoil and rising public curiosity about the private lives of celebrities.

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“The more uneasy the country is, the more work we tend to have,” said Jerry Heying, one of the event’s organizers and executive director of the Executive Protection Institute, a training school for guards based in New York. He surveyed the platoon of bodyguards stuffed into a sea-green Holiday Inn conference room and said, “We are more relevant than ever.”

Despite a struggling economy and efforts by the federal government to cut its dependence on private security contractors, the domestic private security industry has grown in recent years.

Industry experts and security-company owners say much of the demand is a result of increased crime caused by economic uncertainty as well as companies cutting costs by farming out guard work to outside companies.

Robert Perry, a private security expert, dates the increase to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said that post- 9/11 was a “boom time for everyone in the bodyguard and security industry.”

Growth averaged about 15% from 2001 to 2006 and slowed down to about 5% in the years after, according to an annual report compiled by Perry’s firm, Robert Perry & Associates, which specializes in security-company mergers and acquisitions.

About 10,000 security-guard firms now operate nationwide and 1,000 firms within California, according to industry experts. But they caution that the fragmented, unregulated nature of the industry means that precise numbers are impossible to nail down.

Of the 103 professionals at the conference, many stressed the difference between armed bodyguards who protect the famous or wealthy and can earn more than $200,000 a year and unarmed security guards who patrol schools, malls and offices and earn far less.

It’s not just the looming threat of terrorism that has companies and individuals eager to hire professionals trained in protection. Technology has been both a boon and a headache to bodyguards and the clients they serve.

“It’s been a double-edged sword,” said Kent Moyer, chief executive of World Protection Group, a security company based in Beverly Hills that serves mostly celebrities and the extremely wealthy. Moyer, who was personal bodyguard for six years to Hugh Hefner and his family, said the dangers to his clientele have multiplied as fans have become more adept at finding personal information about celebrities.

“I tell my clients to never put their own names on a deed when buying a house, to always get mail in a post office box and never at home,” Moyer said. “But some of them won’t and won’t stop using Facebook or Twitter. Which means you are possibly telling someone crazy where you are or what you’re doing in real time.”

Guards also laughed about the challenges of working with high-profile celebrities. “I got a call from a movie studio to provide protection for Paris Hilton. I said no, no matter how much money it is, I’m not doing it,” said one. “Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, they’ll call you at 2 in the morning.”

On a lunch break from the conference, four fellow bodyguards sitting in a nearby restaurant nodded vigorously in agreement.

Heying, whose firm protected Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen during their brief stint at New York University, said, “Now with Google Earth, the paparazzi or a rabid fan can go on if they have an address and see exactly what someone’s house looks like. It can be a nightmare.”

But some technology leaps have made it easier for bodyguards and the private security firms that employ them to keep a handle on complex or large operations. Or simply make sure that clients are getting their money’s worth.

Previously classified military gadgets — like Blue Force Tracking, a global-positioning-system-enabled system used by the military to help locate friendly and hostile forces — have been adapted for use by private security firms, said Jonathan Havens, a former diplomatic security special agent for the State Department and now a security consultant with a small firm in Columbus, Ohio.

“Now companies are using some of this domestically,” he said.

Unlike Britain or China, the U.S. has no overarching regulatory agency tasked with licensing and monitoring bodyguards and security firms.

Each state determines its own standards and licensing requirements, which vary widely, said Jeff Flint, executive director of the California Assn. of Licensed Security Agencies, Guards and Associates as well as the National Assn. of Security Companies.

After Sept. 11, state governments realized that private security guards, not public law enforcement, protected an estimated 85% of the crucial infrastructure around the country, Flint said.

“Standards went up and ultimately hopefully public perception,” Flint said. California requirements for security guards are among the most rigorous, with minimum training of 40 hours and eight hours of continuing education a year to earn and maintain a license. The number of licensed security guards in the state has risen steadily over the last six years to 248,486 currently.

But minimum training was not what the people gathered at the conference had in mind. As the Friday drew to a close, men and a few women gathered in two adjoining hotel rooms, drinking beer and exchanging war stories of paparazzi and temperamental starlet clients.

And one other thing: The participants weren’t too wild about being called bodyguards. Said Heying: “We prefer to call ourselves protection specialists.”