Wall Relief No. 1, 2010
ceramic
19 x 59 in.

Through December 31

franklloyd

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: December 14, 2010

Former President José María Figueres of Costa Rica has a saying I like: “There is no Planet B” — so we’d better make Plan A work to preserve a stable environment. I feel the same way about America these days. There is no America B, so we’d better make this one work a lot better than we’ve been doing, and not only for our sake. When Britain went into decline as the globe’s stabilizing power, America was right there, ready to pick up the role. Even with all our imperfections and mistakes, the world has been a better place for it. If America goes weak, though, and cannot project power the way it has, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world. You will not like who picks up the pieces. Just glance at a few recent headlines.

The world system is currently being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers, among others. What globalization, technological integration and the general flattening of the world have done is to superempower individuals to such a degree that they can actually challenge any hierarchy — from a global bank to a nation state — as individuals.

China has put on a sound and light show these past few weeks that underscored just how much its rising economic clout can be used to warp the U.S.-led international order when it so chooses. I am talking specifically about the lengths to which China went to not only reject the Nobel Peace Prize given to one of its citizens — Liu Xiaobo, a democracy advocate who is serving an 11-year sentence in China for “subversion of state power” — but to intimidate China’s trading partners from even sending representatives to attend the Nobel award ceremony at Oslo’s City Hall.

Mr. Liu was represented at Friday’s Nobel ceremony by an empty chair because China would not release him from prison — only the fifth time in the 109-year history of the prize that the winner was not in attendance. Under pressure from Beijing, the following countries joined China’s boycott of the ceremony: Serbia, Morocco, Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ukraine, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the Philippines. What a pathetic bunch.

“The empty chair in Oslo’s Town Hall last Friday was not only that of Liu, but of China itself,” observed Rowan Callick, a columnist for The Australian. “The world is still waiting for China to play its proper, full role in international affairs. The perversity of such a successful, civilized nation playing a dominant role as a backer — if sometimes merely by default — of cruel, failed or failing states is intensely frustrating.”

It gets worse. The Financial Times reported that “outside Mr. Liu’s apartment in Beijing, where his wife Liu Xia has been held under house arrest since the award was announced, large blue screens were erected, preventing television cameras from having a view of the building.”

Honestly, I thought China’s leaders had more self-confidence than that. Clearly, they are feeling very insecure. Think if China had said instead: “We disagree with this award and we will not be attending. But anytime one of our citizens is honored with a Nobel, it is an honor for all of China — and so we will pass this on to his family.” It would have been a one-day story, and China’s leaders would have looked so strong.

As for the superempowered individuals — some are constructive, some are destructive. I read many WikiLeaks and learned some useful things. But their release also raises some troubling questions. I don’t want to live in a country where they throw whistle-blowers in jail. That’s China. But I also don’t want to live in a country where any individual feels entitled to just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank in a way that undermines the ability to have private, confidential communications that are vital to the functioning of any society. That’s anarchy.

But here’s the fact: A China that can choke off conversations far beyond its borders, and superempowered individuals who can expose conversations far beyond their borders — or create posses of “cyber-hacktivists” who can melt down the computers of people they don’t like — are now a reality. They are rising powers. A stable world requires that we learn how to get the best from both and limit the worst; it will require smart legal and technological responses.

For that job, there is no alternative to a strong America. Critics said of the British Labour Party of the 1960s that the Britain they were trying to build was half-Sweden and half-heaven. The alternative today to a world ordered by American power is not some cuddly multipolar system — half-Sweden and half-heaven. It is half-China and half-superempowered individuals.

Managing that will never be easy. But it will be a lot easier with a healthy America, committed to its core values, powerful enough to project them and successful enough that others want to follow our lead — voluntarily.

Through December 18

1301 PE

L.A.’s leaders need to step in to help find a solution to preserving the Hollywood Farmers Market.

The Los Angeles Times
December 13, 2010
Editorial

It is almost inconceivable that the existence of the Hollywood Farmers Market, a cherished community institution that for 19 years of Sundays has brought together local farmers, vendors and 10,000 customers, is in jeopardy over access to parking. But that is the case.

Once a week, the sprawling market takes over a stretch of Ivar Avenue and, in the process, blocks off two parking lots that belong to the nearby Los Angeles Film School. The school and the market have been tussling for three years, but a year-old city ordinance requiring 51% of neighboring businesses to approve street closures has given the school more muscle. It will not sign off on a permit renewal for the market, which now has until Jan. 9 to come up with a solution.

We acknowledge the film school’s justifiable concern over parking, but there can be no vacillating about the outcome that matters to Los Angeles: The Hollywood Farmers Market must be saved.

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The city bears some responsibility for this fiasco. In years past, City Council members regularly waived street-closing procedures and issued permits at will, but now it’s clear that the new system is troublesome as well. If the market’s permit is not renewed, about 50 farmers could lose spaces, forfeiting about $3 million annually that supports 120 employees, according to Pompea Smith, head of the organization that runs the market. SEE-LA, a nonprofit that gets a percentage of vendors’ sales, would lose about $170,000. Without that money, its ability to sustain the other, smaller farmers markets it runs — in Watts, Echo Park, Atwater Village, Leimert Park, the Central Avenue market and the Hollywood-Sears market — could be in danger, along with its Good Cooking/Buena Cocina classes and its “Bring a Farmer to School” program.

The glimmer of hope is that both sides say they are still seeking an amicable solution. Options include moving part of the market and relocating some farmers, or for the school to find alternative Sunday parking for students. If the city issues a permit anyway, it risks a lawsuit by the film school.

We don’t have the solution, but we believe a compromise is reachable. The city should provide vigorous, determined leadership and save the Hollywood Farmers Market.

* Please Contact Eric Garcetti at councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org to let him know how you feel

via

“Vogue Paris, November, 1978”

Institute of French Culture New York

S C 5, 1954, Painted cloth collage on soft board, 42 1/2 x 59 1/2 in (107.9 x 151.1 cm)

Through December 18

Santa Monica Museum of Art

By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times Published: December 9, 2010

Here is a description of some of the most innovative and important American theater of the last quarter of the 20th century. A man sits at a table and starts talking. If he has props, they are minimal — a spiral notebook, a record player, a box of pictures — and his costume is correspondingly modest, consisting usually of a flannel shirt, blue jeans or chinos, and sneakers. He speaks mostly about himself, digressing from anecdotes about his childhood and professional life into more serious confessional territory, though always with reserve and good humor.

Before you know it, 90 minutes have gone by, during which you have been moved, tickled, held in suspense and, at last, in ways that are difficult to analyze in retrospect, freshly awakened to some of the mysteries and serendipities of human existence.

When Spalding Gray, the man at that table, began performing his autobiographical monologues in the late 1970s and early ’80s — first as a member of the Wooster Group, then on his own — they felt radical and revelatory, like bulletins from newly discovered artistic territory. By 2004, when Mr. Gray committed suicide by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, his work was a familiar and widely appreciated feature of the cultural landscape. He made occasional appearances in movies, television series and conventional plays, but his great role, his great project, was himself.

His progress from the fringe to the mainstream was sped by a series of films made by skilled and sympathetic directors: Jonathan Demme’s “Swimming to Cambodia”; Nick Broomfield’s “Monster in a Box”; and “Gray’s Anatomy,” by Steven Soderbergh. Now Mr. Soderbergh has assembled a biographical tribute that is also a sampler of Mr. Gray’s performances, formal and otherwise.

The film, “And Everything Is Going Fine” (the highly ironic title comes from a monologue excerpted in the film), is, among other things, a tour de force of smart and sensitive editing. Drawing on recordings of stage appearances, television interviews with MTV and Charlie Rose, and other videotaped conversations, this documentary is as digressive and, miraculously, as coherent as the monologues that are its principal inspiration.

At one point Mr. Gray explains how, through improvisation, transcription and revision, his pieces arrived at their final shape and duration. In addition to shedding light on this process — which transformed raw experience into what its subject and author sometimes called “narcissistic journalism” — “And Everything Is Going Fine” replicates it, almost as if it were a single, unbroken recitation stretched out over a quarter-century.

Its chronology is both straightforward and hauntingly complex — a fugue of past and present. The narrative proceeds, more or less in order, from Mr. Gray’s childhood (in Barrington, R.I.), through his college years and his early acting career, then onward through sex, love, fame, family and middle age. But the narrator himself ages and grows younger according to a different rhythm, depending on when each act of reminiscence was performed and recorded. His hair is browner or grayer, longer or shorter, and the shades of flannel change along with the timbre of his voice and the arch of his eyebrows.

The story he has to tell is, on one level, a rambling, anecdotal account of a more or less ordinary life, its tragedies, absurdities and frustrations offered with sincerity and charm. In an era of rampant memoirism and multimedia T.M.I., Mr. Gray might seem like a pioneer or just another old guy rattling on about himself, but Mr. Soderbergh uses his own artistic resources to remind us of Mr. Gray’s uniqueness as an artist. A natural actor (praised early on for his uncanny sense of timing), he was also an extraordinary writer, perhaps the last in a long line of introspective, eccentric, mildly melancholic New Englanders going back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Though his accent, with its inaudible R’s and mouth-filling vowels, might strike some ears with an upper-crusty sound, Mr. Gray’s background was modest and his sensibility democratic. His interest in his own condition, which could verge on the morbid, was also an expression of his interest in everybody else, and his investigations of personal life usually seemed less like over-sharing than like generosity, or even friendship. To see him, onstage or on screen, was to know him.

This sense of intimacy makes “And Everything Is Going Fine” both vibrant — what amazing company this man was! — and terribly sad. There is no introduction or postscript that mentions Mr. Gray’s death, but its shadows gather early, when he talks about his mother’s nervous breakdowns and her eventual suicide. As he grows older, death returns as a theme, and as his monologues adopt some of the idioms of therapy culture, the specters of depression and its sister maladies creep into the frame.

What caused this gentle man, with two young sons (one of whom, Forrest, composed music for this film) and a place of honor in the imaginative life of New York and the rest of America, to end his life? There is no simple answer, of course, but someone might have turned an exploration of the question into a funny, illuminating and poignant piece of theater. Or, failing that, a movie, which is what Mr. Soderbergh has done.

And Everything Is Going Fine

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Deborah Augustine

Mike Barrett keeps his bees in a hive that sits on the rooftop of his two-story row house in Astoria.

By KRISTINA SHEVORY
NY TIMES Published: December 8, 2010

MIKE BARRETT does not have much of a yard at his two-story row house in Astoria, Queens. But that fact has not kept him from his new hobby of beekeeping — he put the hive on his roof. When it was harvest time this fall, he just tied ropes around each of the two honey-filled boxes in the hive, and lowered them to the ground.

Eventually, Mr. Barrett loaded the boxes into his car, took off his white beekeeper suit and set off for a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. There, along with other members of the New York City beekeeping club, he extracted his honey, eventually lugging home 40 pounds of the stuff.

He was happy with his successful harvest, but he also reaped something he did not expect. “I was surprised how much I really care about the bees,” said Mr. Barrett, 49, a systems administrator for New York University, in reflecting on his inaugural season as a beekeeper. “You start to think about the ways to make their lives better.”

Until last spring, Mr. Barrett would have been breaking the law and risking a $2,000 fine for engaging in his sticky new hobby. But in March, New York City made beekeeping legal, and in so doing it joined a long list of other municipalities, from Denver to Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Salt Lake City, that have also lifted beekeeping bans in the last two years. Many towns, like Hillsboro, Ore., have done the same, and still other places, like Oak Park, Ill., and Santa Monica, Calif., are reconsidering their prohibitions.

Nationwide, hives are being tucked into small backyards and set alongside driveways; even the White House has installed some. Beekeeping classes are filling up quickly, and new beekeeping clubs are forming at the same time that established ones are reporting large jumps in membership.

At Mr. Barrett’s club, for instance, membership has more than doubled, to about 900, in the last year. In Los Angeles, the Backwards Beekeepers club has 400 members — up from six members two years ago. And in Denver, a club that was formed last year already boasts a roster of 200.

“Everyone who teaches a beekeeping course is finding themselves popular all of a sudden,” said James Fischer, 53, an instructor at New York City Beekeeping.

One force behind this rise of beekeeping is the growing desire for homegrown and organic food. Another, more complex one is the urge to stem the worrisome decline in the nation’s bee population.

The number of bees has been falling since the end of World War II, when farmers stopped rotating crops with clover, a good pollen source for bees, and started using fertilizers. Pesticides and herbicides became common as well. In cities, native plants were ripped out in favor of exotic ones that were not good for bees.

Then, four years ago, honey bee colonies mysteriously started to die around the country. This drop-off, called colony collapse disorder, added to the mounting health problems, like mites and diseases, that bees are facing. About 30 percent of the country’s managed colonies have died; around a third of the deaths are related to colony collapse disorder, according to the Agriculture Department.

“We don’t know the primary cause, but we know the combination of poor nutrition, heavy pesticide use and bee diseases have put bees into a tailspin,” said Marla Spivak, an entomology professor at the University of Minnesota and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work on honey-bee health.

Whatever the cause of colony collapse disorder, “People want to feel that they are doing something to help,” said Dave Mendes, president of the American Beekeeping Federation in Atlanta. “Having a few beehives in your backyard can make you feel better.”

But beekeeping is forbidden in many places. Some of the bans arose after World War II. Cities, seeking to eradicate any traces of agriculture within their limits in order to show they were full-fledged municipalities, forbade the raising of livestock, chicken and other creatures used in food production. Another wave of prohibitions came 20 years ago with the arrival of “killer bees” from Mexico. “People thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die, my kids are going to die and my dogs are going to die,’ ” said Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine in Medina, Ohio. “At the time, people didn’t know what killer bees would do because they kept moving.” (Fortunately, the bees turned out not to be the threat that people feared.)

Nurturing flowers, fruits and vegetables is another factor in the rise in beekeeping, and it ranks high for Marygael Meister, who runs the Denver Beekeepers Association. In 2008, when Ms. Meister took a beekeeping class and set up two hives in her backyard in Denver, her goal was to help her more than 300 rosebushes thrive.

Ms. Meister said she had initially called the city information line and had been told it was legal to keep bees. The information was incorrect, and she received a cease-and-desist order when a neighbor complained about her hives. But instead of giving up, Ms. Meister decided to fight, showing the zeal of the nation’s new crop of beekeepers.

“I was livid,” Ms. Meister said. “I really enjoyed my bees and it was not like I was keeping a mountain lion in my backyard. It was absurd to me that the city was perpetuating the idea that Denver is so green and we’re not.”

Ms. Meister spent the next five months urging city officials to legalize beekeeping. In November 2008, the Denver City Council did so, and shortly thereafter Ms. Meister started the city’s first beekeeping club.

But legalization does not give beekeepers free rein. Cities often impose conditions on beekeepers — an annual fee, a permit, a minimum required distance between hives and nearby structures.

The City of Minneapolis, which legalized beekeeping last year, has set particularly stringent restrictions. Besides paying a $100 annual fee per hive, beekeepers there must obtain signed permission from all the neighbors within a 100-foot radius of the hives, and for neighbors within a 300-foot radius, they need 80 percent of the signatures.

For Jacquelynn Goessling, having her neighbors sign off on her hives was hardly a problem. People in her Minneapolis neighborhood of Kingfield, which she calls a “hotbed of liberal politics,” were so supportive that some wanted to host one of her hives in their own yards, or to help by planting their gardens with the kinds of flowers bees like. “Power to the bees” became a rallying cry for many of her friends. A year later, she has 12 hives citywide.

Ms. Goessling has also forged new relationships with neighbors — including the grumpy ones. Since she became the neighborhood’s “bee lady,” people want to buy her honey, either with cash or in trade for things like raspberry jam. Grateful neighbors also tell her they are getting more apples on their trees and, for the first time, seeing fruit on their arctic kiwi plants.

Eventually, Ms. Goessling would like to become a full-time beekeeper. She will be working with a local business center this winter to draft a business plan.

“If I could make $50,000 from bees, I’d quit my job so I could spend more time with my kids and have the summers off,” said Ms. Goessling, 48, a database administrator.

As Ms. Goessling dreams of a new career, other bee lovers, like Daniel Salisbury of Santa Monica, are fighting for the same opportunity.

Santa Monica models itself as an environmentally conscious city, but it has long banned beekeeping. So when city inspectors found three hives in Daniel Salisbury’s backyard two years ago, they insisted he move them. He took the hives north to his mother’s house in San Luis Obispo County, where beekeeping is legal, but he also began a drive to legalize hives in Santa Monica.

He has become so well known that people at his city-owned trailer park call to alert him when exterminators, retained by the Santa Monica housing agency, are headed toward bee swarms.

“I would chase down the swarms and literally run with my clippers to get the branch before Orkin showed up,” said Mr. Salisbury, 47, an antiques dealer, referring to a large pest-control company.

Over the last two years, Mr. Salisbury has attended Santa Monica City Council meetings, recruited a Los Angeles beekeeping club to help, and launched an e-mail legalization campaign joined by hundreds worldwide. On Tuesday, the Santa Monica City Council is scheduled to reconsider the beekeeping ban, and supporters of legalization are optimistic.

Max Wong, a Los Angeles beekeeper who has been helping Mr. Salisbury with his drive, hopes to wield some of the same political techniques in a legalization push in her city. Beekeeping rules there are a patchwork, with the hobby legal on one side of a street and illegal on the other.

“We’re in trouble and the bees are in trouble,” said Ms. Wong, 42, a member of the Backwards Beekeepers club. “We need to do something.”

Ms. Wong, a film producer who started keeping bees a year ago, wants to legalize bees not just to help hobbyists like herself, but to help feed and employ others. She sees bees as the best way to increase vegetable pollination in local community gardens and thinks that some people, like a few members of her club, could even become professional beekeepers.

Like Mr. Barrett from Queens and other new beekeepers, Ms. Wong is developing a close relationship with her bees, and she wants to ensure that others can enjoy the hobby as much as she does.

“It’s like having 35,000 pets,” she said. “I’m hyperactive, so anything that shuts down my brain is a good thing. When I’m working at a hive, I’m quiet and meditative.”

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: December 6, 2010

Every day, hundreds of thousands of scholars study human behavior. Every day, a few of their studies are bundled and distributed via e-mail by Kevin Lewis, who covers the social sciences for The Boston Globe and National Affairs. And every day, I file away these studies because I find them bizarrely interesting.

In this column, I’m going to try to summarize as many of these studies as space allows. No single study is dispositive, but I hope these summaries can spark some conversations:

Female mammals tend to avoid close male relatives during moments of peak fertility in order to avoid inbreeding. For the journal Psychological Science, Debra Lieberman, Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton tracked young women’s cellphone calls. They found that these women had fewer and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility days, but not with female relatives.

Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker published a study in Psychological Science in which they presented some research subjects with evidence that undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were forced to confront the counterevidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.

Physical contact improves team performance. For the journal Emotion, Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang and Dacher Keltner measured how frequently members of N.B.A. teams touched each other. Teams that touched each other frequently early in the 2008-2009 season did better than teams that touched less frequently, even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations and early season performance.

According to John Gaski and Jeff Sagarin in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, there is a surprisingly strong relationship between daylight saving time and lower SAT scores. No explanation was offered.

For an article in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Mark Duggan, Randi Hjalmarsson and Brian Jacob investigated whether gun shows increase crime rates. They identified 3,400 gun shows in Texas and California and looked at crime rates for the areas around the shows for the following month. They found no relationship between gun shows and crime in either state.

Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees’ initiatives.

Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance.

People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.

Would you rather date someone who dumped his or her last partner or someone who was the dumpee? For an article in Evolutionary Psychology, Christine Stanik, Robert Kurzban and Phoebe Ellsworth found that men will give a woman a lower rating when they learn that she dumped her last boyfriend, perhaps fearing they will be next. But women rated men more highly when they learned that they had done the dumping, perhaps seeing it as a sign of desirability.

These studies remind us that we are strange, complicated creatures — deeply influenced by primordial biases and our current relationships. But you don’t have to settle for my summaries of these kinds of studies. Go to the National Affairs Web site, where there are links to Kevin Lewis’s daily batch of studies. A day without social science is like a day without sunshine.

Swiss Dots Ltd.

The typeface Helvetica is ubiquitous.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: December 5, 2010

LONDON — Cyrus Highsmith set himself a challenge: to avoid the typeface Helvetica for a day. He banned himself from buying anything branded in that font and from traveling on any form of transport with Helvetica signage. As he’s a New Yorker, that included the local subway system. If he happened to come across anything in the typeface, he would look away.

Easy-peasy, you might think, but you’d be wrong. Helvetica cropped up much more often than Mr. Highsmith had expected.

He had known to avoid the Internet, and had taken the precautionary measure of erasing Helvetica from the font menu on his computer. But he hadn’t reckoned on spotting it on the washing instruction labels of his clothes, his television remote control, a bus timetable or the stock market tables in The New York Times.

Another problem was finding a Helvetica-free way of paying for whatever he needed to buy during the day, as the forbidden typeface not only appeared on his credit cards but on the newest U.S. dollar bills.

Why, you might wonder, would anyone take on such a weird challenge?

Mr. Highsmith is a type designer. He embarked upon his Helvetica boycott in the hope of addressing the philosophical question: “Do you need type to live?” But the author Simon Garfield, who included the story in his “Just My Type: A Book About Fonts,” suggests that a more pertinent question would have been: “Do you need Helvetica to conduct contemporary urban activity?” Judging by Mr. Highsmith’s experience, the answer is yes, unless you’re willing to go to a great deal of trouble to avoid it, especially if you live in New York.

The Helvetica boycott is just one of the engaging tales of typographic obsession in “Just My Type.” Many of them involve designers who, like Mr. Highsmith, have devoted their working lives to creating fonts. Others explain how powerfully their work affects the rest of us, the 99.99 percent of the population whom they describe, part-derisively, part-pityingly, as “civilians.”

Like many of his fellow “civilians,” Mr. Garfield discovered typography after becoming curious about the contents of his computer font menu, developing a particular fondness for Mrs Eaves and HT Gelateria. He has published more than a dozen nonfiction books, mostly on science and social history. “Just My Type” is his first foray into typography, making him a very brave man, because the world of type is an intensely geeky one with its own language, rules and rituals, including the popular pastime of denouncing hapless “civilians” for making typographic gaffes.

Take Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men.” He is regularly roasted by type bloggers who can’t understand how a television series that is lauded for historical accuracy when it comes to props, costumes, sets, slang and just about everything else, could be so sloppy in choosing fonts. Likewise, among the “Just My Type” cast of characters is Mark Simonson, an American graphic designer who scores movies for typographic (in)accuracy on his Web site. Both “LA Confidential” and “The Hudsucker Proxy” have been cited for committing the “Mad Men” crime of featuring fonts designed long after the periods in which they were set.

Mr. Garfield makes some factual gaffes of his own. It’s neither correct, nor fair, for instance, to describe the gloriously eclectic graphic designer Alan Fletcher as a “book designer.” “Just My Type” also suffers from his apparent inability to decide whether to write a history of typography or an anecdotal account of its impact on daily life. The result is occasionally confusing, not least because neither the history nor anecdotes are in chronological or any other discernible order. But its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, so much so that it feels mean to moan about as impassioned, warm-hearted and open-minded a book as this.

The historic passages begin with Johannes Gutenberg, the German printer who made books affordable for millions of people by casting the first reusable letters in the 1440s. Gutenberg died poor, having forfeited his printing machinery in a legal battle, leaving the British printer William Caxton to commercialize his innovations in the late 1400s. In this, he was helped by his protégé, the propitiously named Wynkyn de Worde, whose fonts were imitated throughout Europe.

Mr. Garfield then introduces the designers of beautiful fonts that are still used today, such as Claude Garamond in 16th-century France, William Caslon and John Baskerville in 18th-century Britain, and 20th-century Modernists like Paul Renner in Germany and Adrian Frutiger in Switzerland. Having described the painstaking process of casting the letters, numbers and symbols of traditional typefaces in metal, he explores the shift from printed to digital fonts, which are made on computers, and the efforts of Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann and other digital pioneers to create a new genre of typefaces to be read on screen, rather than in print.

Along the way, “Just My Type” reflects on everything from the uproar over Ikea’s decision to ditch Mr. Frutiger’s Modernist classic Futura for its logo in favor of Mr. Carter’s digital font Verdana; to Gotham’s role as a secret vote-winning weapon in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign; to how Cooper Black can convey one meaning on the cover of the Beach Boys’ 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” and another on the title sequence of the turn-of-the-1970s British television series “Dad’s Army,” and a third in the corporate identity of the budget airline Easy Jet.

The book also dwells on the importance of the distinction between legibility and readability when it comes to choosing typefaces; the psychology of favorite fonts; and why type nuts love the ampersand symbol, loathe Comic Sans and are suspicious of Arial — but how, despite their doubts, Arial Black has become one of the most popular fonts, along with Frutiger, for European soccer shirts. Answer: Because it’s both legible even from the opposite end of the stadium.

Protecting her famous clientele, she tossed a garbage can cover at the celebrity photographer Ron Galella outside the restaurant in 1978. Once, when a newcomer asked directions to the men’s room, Ms. Kaufman replied, “Take a right at Michael Caine.”

By ENID NEMY
NY Times Published: December 3, 2010

Elaine Kaufman, who became something of a symbol of New York as the salty den mother of Elaine’s, one of the city’s best-known restaurants and a second home for almost half a century to writers, actors, athletes and other celebrities, died Friday in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by complications of emphysema, said Diane Becker, the restaurant’s manager.

To the patrons she knew at her Upper East Side establishment, Ms. Kaufman was the quirky, opinionated, tender-hearted and imposingly heavyset proprietor who came in almost every night to check on things and schmooze, moving from table to table and occasionally perching herself on a stool at the end of her 25-foot mahogany bar.

With those she did not know, her demeanor varied; some accused her of being rude, though she indignantly denied that she ever was. As she put it, she had little time to explain to dissatisfied customers why they were being directed to tables in the back, known as Siberia, or led to the bar or even turned away, when they could clearly see empty tables along “the line.”

The line was the row of tables along the right wall of the main room, extending from the front to the back and visible from the entrance. Those tables were almost always saved for the most valued regulars, with or without reservations. One regular was Woody Allen, who filmed a scene for “Manhattan” at Elaine’s.

Elaine’s, in fact, was a scene, a noisy restaurant and bar celebrated as a celebrity hangout that all but shouted “New York” to the rest of the country, if not the world. For Billy Joel, in his 1979 hit “Big Shot,” the very name connoted the uptown in-crowd. (“They were all impressed with your Halston dress/And the people that you knew at Elaine’s.”) And in the new movie “Morning Glory,” with Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams, the indomitable Ms. Kaufman herself makes a cameo appearance.

Of course, it was an unspoken rule among the customers never to appear overly impressed or distracted by the famous. This was New York, after all. But there were exceptions, Ms. Kaufman recalled. Mick Jagger was one. (“The room grew still,” she said.) Luciano Pavarotti was another. (“Everyone stood up and applauded.”) And Willie Nelson proved irresistible. (“He kissed all the women at the bar.”)

Once, when a newcomer asked directions to the men’s room, Ms. Kaufman replied, “Take a right at Michael Caine.”

Ms. Kaufman opened her restaurant in 1963, along an unfashionable block on Second Avenue just north of 88th Street. Soon a loyal clientele began to form, as if by chain reaction.

Almost from the beginning there were writers, many of whom were granted credit privileges when cash was low or nonexistent. And the writers — Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Peter Maas, Dan Jenkins, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, Frank Conroy and others — drew editors: Clay Felker, Willie Morris and James Brady, to name a few.

Then came the theater, film and television personalities, eager to meet literary lights. And they, having added to the growing cultural cachet of Elaine’s, soon attracted the famous from other arenas — sports figures, politicians and gossip-column society — all wanting to be part of the scene.

Elaine’s flourished, despite its less-than-stellar reputation for food. For 14 years, it was the site of the New York Oscar-night parties hosted by Entertainment Weekly. “I live a party life,” Ms. Kaufman said in an interview in 1983 in The New York Times. “Elsa Maxwell used to have to send out invitations. I just open the door.”

Elaine Edna Kaufman was born in Manhattan on Feb. 10, 1929, one of four children of Joseph and Pauline Kaufman. Brought up in Queens and the Bronx, she graduated from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx and worked at the stamp department at Gimbels, a wholesale fabric house and the long-gone Astor Pharmacy, where she was night cosmetician. She also sold cigars and checked hats at the Progressive Era Political Club in Greenwich Village before being introduced to the restaurant business by Alfredo Viazzi.

Mr. Viazzi, a former seaman and struggling writer, owned Portofino, a Greenwich Village restaurant popular with publishing and downtown theater people, and in 1959 he and Ms. Kaufman, having begun a romantic relationship, joined forces in running it.

When she broke up with Mr. Viazzi four years later, she “took my pots and pans” and decided to open her own restaurant. “I couldn’t afford to open in the Village,” she said, “so I found an Austrian-Hungarian restaurant in an area of the Upper East Side which was Siberia then.” She bought it with a partner for “$10,000 or $12,000,” she said. (Within eight years she was the sole owner.)

Many of her old patrons followed her uptown, and neighborhood celebrities like the painters Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, who were married at the time, began dropping in. She was also discovered by the columnists Dorothy Kilgallen and Leonard Lyons.

During the first year, Ms. Kaufman waited on tables herself; one summer Elaine Stritch, unwilling to do summer stock, tended bar.

The restaurant’s indifferent décor — the comedian Alan King once said the place was “decorated like a stolen car” — changed little through the years. The rummage from junk shops and $5 light fixtures remained, but one feature continued to grow: the framed covers of books by authors who ate and drank there. Several hundred of the covers festooned the walls between the main dining area and the adjoining Paul Desmond room — named after the jazz saxophonist, another regular — which was used for overflow crowds, private parties and sometimes B-, C- and D-list people.

In the later 1960s Ms. Kaufman bought the low-rise building that houses the restaurant as well as the building next to it. The rental apartments above helped finance the restaurant over the years.

Ms. Kaufman treated many of her regular patrons as both friends and extended family, though she had her limits. She had several run-ins with well-known personalities. After an argument with her, Norman Mailer vowed never to return and wrote her an unflattering letter. She scribbled “Boring” across the top and sent it back to him. A day or two later, he was back.

In 1998, Ms. Kaufman was arrested on assault charges after slapping a customer. The case involved a man and a woman who said she had called them “white trash” after they ordered one drink between them. Ms. Kaufman denied using the expression and said she had slapped the man only after “he got in my face.” The charges were later dropped, as were civil lawsuits that both Ms. Kaufman and the customer filed.

Ms. Kaufman was married in 1980 to Henry Ball, who was also in the restaurant business. They were divorced in 1984, and he died in later years. Ms. Kaufman, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by three nephews, a niece and several cousins. The restaurant will remain open and maintain the same hours and staff, Ms. Becker said.

Though patronage at Elaine’s fell off in the late 1980s, it returned within several years, and the restaurant, which often stays open until the wee hours, once again became a favorite of celebrities. It was a prime destination on summer Sunday evenings, when weekenders returning to the city stopped in for dinner. But on almost any night, the regulars treated it as their club, talking to friends and to Elaine and playing darts, card games and backgammon. The games ended some years ago, but the ambience remained.

In 2003, Ms. Kaufman was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

“I’ve lived just about the most perfect life,” Ms. Kaufman said in 1998. “I’ve had the best time. If I wanted to do something, I did it. Designers designed my clothes and did my apartment. I had house seats for the theater. I was invited to screenings and

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 2, 2010

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth.

Meanwhile, there’s a real deficit issue on the table: whether tax cuts for the wealthy will, as Republicans demand, be extended. Just as a reminder, over the next 75 years the cost of making those tax cuts permanent would be roughly equal to the entire expected financial shortfall of Social Security. Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table — legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that’s vital to national security — would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot — as they did on Thursday when they forced a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts, putting Republicans in the awkward position of voting against the middle class to safeguard tax cuts for the rich.

It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.

Robin Hauser Reynolds

Holland Reynolds’s teammates joined her in the ambulance after her effort won the state championship. Reynolds recovered within a few hours.

By KATIE HAFNER
NY Times Published: December 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — A top runner who hits the wall. A coach with a cruel illness. A state championship at stake.
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Holland Reynolds’s teammates joined her in the ambulance after her effort won the state championship. Reynolds recovered within a few hours.

Such was the situation last Saturday when Holland Reynolds, a star runner from a small private high school in San Francisco, collapsed at the state cross-country meet and crawled across the finish line to clinch the championship for her team.

Reynolds, 16, a junior, has been a distance runner since she was in third grade. She arrived at San Francisco University High School as a fast freshman in 2008, ended her first season as the team’s top runner and has been the lead runner for the cross-country team ever since.

Her coach, Jim Tracy, 60, arrived at University High School in 1994 and built both the girls’ and boys’ teams into perennial state champions.

Reynolds said Tracy was the best coach she had ever had. “He always tells the truth,” she said. “If you ask him, ‘Well, how do you think I did today?’ he’ll tell you, ‘You had a bad race,’ ” she said. “It’s because of his honesty that when you receive a compliment from him, you know you’ve done really well, and it makes all the runners want to strive to please him.”

Until three years ago, Tracy, an accomplished runner, could keep pace with his fastest runners. Symptoms of his illness began nearly five years ago, he said, when a muscle in his thumb stopped functioning. And last June, he was found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

But it is only in the past year that the disease has begun to debilitate him. A.L.S. patients, most of whom eventually lose the use of all but their eye muscles, typically live three and a half to four years after the onset of symptoms, but the range can vary widely.

At the beginning of this season, Jim Ketcham, the school’s athletic director, assembled the team and told the runners that Tracy was very sick. The news devastated the team. “Everybody was crying,” Reynolds said.

Since the start of the season, Tracy’s condition has grown visibly worse. “He’s been falling down sometimes at practice,” Reynolds said. “And he brings a chair to our workouts.”

Last weekend’s state meet in Fresno took place on a rainy, unseasonably cold morning. Reynolds, who was fighting a slight cold, was unaccustomed to such low temperatures, and said she might have misjudged how much she needed to drink.

Just before the 3.1-mile race, the team did its regular cheer, then Reynolds, who is the team captain, led a special cheer for Tracy. “I think that made the team really want to win it for Jim,” Reynolds said.

At the 2.5-mile mark, Reynolds was in third place, pushing for second, among the 169 runners. “I was going to make my move,” she said, “but for some reason my legs just gave out. I was confused, and I started to slow down.”

Tracy was at the team’s tent near the finish line, and he said he knew something was wrong when another University High runner finished before Reynolds. “I thought, ‘This isn’t right,’ ” he said. “ ‘Holland should be here already.’ ”

Tracy, who wears braces on his legs and his back and walks with difficulty, made his way to the course and found Reynolds, half a mile out, barely running and weaving across the course.

“She usually runs with a slightly bent upper torso,” Tracy said. “But this had twisted her over even more. It looked like she was barely able to keep herself stabilized. It was a grisly sight.”

Tracy said Reynolds looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

“But her vision was locked on her goal,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was like a mask of determination. I’ve seen that so many times when she’s in front, but this time she was getting buried. People were flying past her.”

Within two or three yards of the finish line, Reynolds collapsed, and a race official was at her side within seconds. He told her he could not touch her or help her, but to avoid disqualification, she would have to get over the finish line.

“I said, ‘Are you O.K., and do you want to finish?’ ” said Brian Weaver, the official. “She said ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘O.K., all you have to do is get your foot across the line, and you don’t have to get up, it’s O.K. if you crawl.’ ”

Reynolds started crawling.

“I was encouraging her,” Weaver said. “I said, ‘You can do this.’ She was nodding her head and crawling, and I was saying, ‘Nice and easy, don’t force it.’ ”

Tracy said, “It took over 20 seconds for her to crawl two yards.”

Reynolds said she did not remember collapsing but did remember crawling: “All I knew was that I had to cross the line.”

She finished in 37th place, with a time of 20 minutes 15 seconds, giving University the title it would not have won without her struggle over the line.

The instant Reynolds crossed the line, she was scooped up by Weaver, an assistant coach from the school and a trainer, who took her to an ambulance, where she was given intravenous fluids.

Weaver said that if Reynolds had appeared to be in immediate danger, he would not have let her continue. “I would have picked her up and carried her straight to the ambulance,” he said. “But she was able to make eye contact with me. Her body was tired, but she was mentally all there.”

Reynolds was still in the ambulance, unable to keep her eyes open, when she heard her mother tell her father they had won the championship. An hour later, her teammates were in the ambulance with her, and they gave Reynolds her medal. Within a few hours, she had recovered enough to go home. On Wednesday, she went for a 15-minute run.

Last Saturday’s race was the team’s eighth state championship, making it the most successful team in California cross-country history.

Scott Menchin

By CHARLES ZANOR
NY Times Published: November 29, 2010

Narcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species.

Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored.

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.

Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles.

Most nonprofessionals have a pretty good sense of what narcissism means, but the formal definition is more precise than the dictionary meaning of the term.

Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D.

The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship.

Of course, it would be premature to call the major-league hopeful a narcissist at such an early age, but imagine that same kind of unstoppable, unrealistic attitude 10 or 20 years later.

The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”

Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others.

Most of us would agree that this is an easily recognizable profile, and it is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided to throw N.P.D. off the bus. Many experts in the field are not happy about it.

Actually, they aren’t happy about the elimination of the other four disorders either, and they’re not shy about saying so.

One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual.

Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how “unenlightened” the personality disorders committee is.

“They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing.” He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment.

“It’s draconian,” he said of the decision, “and the first of its kind, I think, that half of a group of disorders are eliminated by committee.”

He also blamed a so-called dimensional approach, which is a method of diagnosing personality disorders that is new to the DSM. It consists of making an overall, general diagnosis of personality disorder for a given patient, and then selecting particular traits from a long list in order to best describe that specific patient.

This is in contrast to the prototype approach that has been used for the past 30 years: the narcissistic syndrome is defined by a cluster of related traits, and the clinician matches patients to that profile.

The dimensional approach has the appeal of ordering à la carte — you get what you want, no more and no less. But it is precisely because of this narrow focus that it has never gained much traction with clinicians.

It is one thing to call someone a neat and careful dresser. It is another to call that person a dandy, or a clotheshorse, or a boulevardier. Each of these terms has slightly different meanings and conjures up a type.

And clinicians like types. The idea of replacing the prototypic diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with a dimensional diagnosis like “personality disorder with narcissistic and manipulative traits” just doesn’t cut it.

Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of Colorado Medical School, said: “Clinicians are accustomed to thinking in terms of syndromes, not deconstructed trait ratings. Researchers think in terms of variables, and there’s just a huge schism.” He said the committee was stacked “with a lot of academic researchers who really don’t do a lot of clinical work. We’re seeing yet another manifestation of what’s called in psychology the science-practice schism.”

Schism is probably not an overstatement. For 30 years the DSM has been the undisputed standard that clinicians consult when diagnosing mental disorders. When a new diagnosis is introduced, or an established diagnosis is substantially modified or deleted, it is not a small deal. As Dr. Gunderson said, it will affect the way professionals think about and treat patients.

Given the stakes, the blow-back from experts in personality disorders should come as no surprise.

Dr. Gunderson has written a letter co-signed by other clinical and research leaders to the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association and the task force that governs DSM-5. And Dr. Shedler and seven colleagues published an editorial in the September issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. In the relatively small world of mental health diagnostics, this is most certainly a battle worth watching.

Right now, this much seems clear: It is way too early for the narcissists to give up their seat on the bus.

A News Corporation family feud: a scene in “The Fool Monty” episode of “The Simpsons.”

By DAVE ITZKOFF
NY Times Published: November 30, 2010

“The Simpsons” has certainly never been shy about biting the corporate hand that feeds it — witness the recent opening-credit sequence of that Fox animated comedy, created by the underground artist Banksy, that imagined 20th Century Fox as a nightmarish third-world sweatshop.
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Lately “The Simpsons” has been taking potshots at its corporate siblings at Fox News. An episode shown last week, called “The Fool Monty,” opened on a helicopter supposedly belonging to that cable news channel and bearing the slogan “Fox News: Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.”

In a “Simpsons” episode that ran on Sunday night, called “How Munched Is That Birdie in the Window,” the helicopter reappeared — this time in the show’s opening credits, and with a new slogan: “Fox News: Unsuitable for Viewers Under 75.”

Yet, as Mediabistro’s WebNewser site reported, when that episode was posted on Web sites like Fox.com and Hulu.com, the Fox News joke had disappeared, replaced with a gag depicting Homer Simpson as King Kong.

So what happened to that joke? The answer, according to the veteran “Simpsons” executive producer and show runner Al Jean, will probably disappoint conspiracy theorists but it does shed light on the show’s mostly good-natured feud with Fox News.

Mr. Jean said the “Simpsons” producers — in particular, the creator of the series, Matt Groening — were pleased with how the first Fox News joke seemed to ruffle the feathers of Bill O’Reilly, the host of the Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor.” (On his show last week, Mr. O’Reilly played the “Simpsons” satire of Fox News and, with a smile, said: “Pinheads? I believe so.”)

The “Simpsons” producers could not let that remark stand, so they rushed their second Fox News joke into Sunday’s episode — so late in the production process that the gag could be inserted only into the version shown in North America but not into versions shown in foreign markets or on the Internet.

“There’s a lot of masters that go out,” Mr. Jean said in a telephone interview, “so to save money, we just put it in the one master that’s for the U.S. and Canada. More money that will then go to Fox News and undoubtedly to Bill O’Reilly.”

Mr. Jean emphasized that neither he nor his “Simpsons” colleagues had ever been told by their corporate Fox parents to stop making fun of Fox News.

“Both ends of it benefit the ultimate News Corp. agenda,” Mr. Jean said. “We’re happy to have a little feud with Bill O’Reilly. That’s a very entertaining thing for us.”

Mr. Jean said that, in addition to garnering “The Simpsons” a little extra publicity, the back-and-forth with Fox News was teaching the animated show how to take better advantage of the Web and how to integrate topical jokes into a show that can take a year or more to produce a single episode.

“We’ve really entered this new era,” Mr. Jean said, “where even a show like us, that’s produced so far in advance, turns into a sort of daily show, where you do something, you can throw something in that gets immediately around the Internet. It gets a response. It’s mostly just us trying to do our humor in the new way that humor is done.”

Mr. Jean said next week’s episode would feature the trouble-making pop star Katy Perry but would probably not have another Fox News joke.

“There won’t be a helicopter,” he said. “But that’s in response to nothing. It’s just because of how long the episode turned out. It’s so you can see more of Katy Perry’s cleavage.”

Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press

Pierre Le Guennec

By SCOTT SAYARE
NY Times Published: November 29, 2010

PARIS — Pablo Picasso gave them as a gift.

So said Danielle Le Guennec, 68, explaining how she and her husband came to possess a box full of 271 previously unknown sketches, paintings and collages by one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.

“It was very straightforward,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday, after the French newspaper Libération reported the find. Her husband, Pierre Le Guennec, 71, had worked as an electrician in three of Picasso’s homes on the French Riviera in the early 1970s. “My husband was getting ready to leave” one day, she recounted, and without much ado or any explanation, Picasso gave him “a box.”

Picasso, she added, “never explained anything.”

In September the couple boarded a Paris-bound train with a suitcase full of works, including several watercolors, dozens of lithographs, more than 200 sketches and 9 Cubist collages, in the hopes of having it authenticated by Claude Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s son and the administrator of the Picasso estate.

Suspecting that the works were stolen, Mr. Ruiz-Picasso contacted a lawyer, who filed a lawsuit on Sept. 23 claiming that the works were “stolen goods”; investigators seized the art from the Guennecs’ home in the South of France two weeks later. The inquiry is continuing, and it is unclear what will become of the artworks.

The cache, which appears to date from the first three decades of the 20th century, has been valued at about $80 million, according to Jean-Jacques Neuer, the lawyer representing Mr. Ruiz-Picasso; four other heirs; and Picasso’s stepdaughter, Catherine Hutin-Blay.

“We’ve never seen anything like this with regard to Picasso,” Mr. Neuer said in a telephone interview. “It’s completely stupefying.” He added: “There is no debate over the authenticity of the works. There is no possible doubt.”

Picasso was known as an inveterate collector of the artifacts and detritus of day-to-day life, and held particularly tightly to his artworks; his heirs say they doubt he could ever bear to part with such a sizable collection.

“He kept everything: letters, Métro tickets, tickets for the theater or bullfights,” Mr. Ruiz-Picasso told Libération. He said many of the 271 pieces were undated.

“He always dated, signed and dedicated his gifts,” Mr. Ruiz-Picasso said. “I leave it to the justice system to shed light on the matter. We ourselves are certainly not acting for our own profit. We’re not in need.”

Beyond the question of how the Guennecs obtained the works, it remains unclear how it was possible for the art to have gone unrecorded in the first place.

Unknown works by Picasso have surfaced here and there in the past, said Christine Pinault, an official at the Picasso Administration, the organization that manages the Picasso estate. The artist produced nearly 40,000 works in his lifetime, and offered many to friends and admirers. But never has such a concentration come to light.

“There are only questions in this whole story, for the moment,” Ms. Pinault said. “Everyone is wondering how such a thing could happen.” She viewed the collection in September.

Ms. Le Guennec said the box of Picassos had sat in the garage of her home for 30 years. But Mr. Le Guennec recently underwent major surgery, and they began to worry about their children’s inheritance, she said. And the box came out so she could authenticate its contents.

“We don’t have anything left now,” she said, but added, “We have our lawyer.”

Librado Romero/The New York Times

A tablet bearing a rough sketch of a square and its diagonals.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
NY Times Published: November 26, 2010

If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?

Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?

And how would you have figured out the width of that canal (which, the tablet tells us, is one-and-a-half ninda)?

Spend some time at this modest yet thoroughly intriguing exhibition, “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” and you begin to realize that the answers can be far more cryptic than these tablets were before great scholars like Otto E. Neugebauer began to decipher them during the first half of the 20th century.

The institute, part of New York University, has gathered together a remarkable selection of Old Babylonian tablets from the collections of three universities — Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania — that cover a wide mathematical range. Made between 1900 and 1700 B.C., they include student exercises, word problems and calculation tables, as well as more abstract demonstrations. Under the curatorship of Alexander Jones, a professor at N.Y.U., and Christine Proust, a historian of mathematics, the tablets are used to give a quick survey of Babylonian mathematical enterprise, while also paying tribute to Neugebauer, the Austrian-born scholar who spent the last half of his career teaching at Brown University and almost single-handedly created a new discipline of study through his analysis of these neglected sources.

Only about 950 mathematically oriented tablets survived two millenniums of Babylonian history, and since their discovery, debate has raged over what they show us about that lost world. Every major history of Western mathematics written during the last 70 years has at least started to take Babylonians into account. Generally, their systems have been seen as precursors to the theoretical flowering of Greek mathematics, out of which our own mathematical approaches have grown.

But Neugebauer, and then his many students and rivals, also showed how sophisticated Babylonian mathematics was and how many similarities existed to later Western systems — if, that is, you counted using 60 fingers (as we often seem to, thanks to the Babylonians, when dealing with seconds and minutes and, in part, even when measuring angles).

Examining the surviving tablets, including one multiplication table on display here, scholars decoded the bird’s feet of Babylonian numerals, showing that the Babylonians, like us, used the same symbol to represent different numerical values. (The same digit for us has a different value if it is in the 1’s column, the 10’s column, or the 100’s column; the Babylonians could use the same sign, depending on context, to represent a 1 or a 60 or a 3,600.)

The most famous tablets here — one showing a square with two diagonals, and another, known as Plimpton 322, containing a table of numerical symbols — suggest that the Babylonians knew at least some of the consequences of the theorem that now bears the name of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who lived some 1,500 years after these works were chiseled.

But did the Babylonians conceive of it as a “theorem” — a timeless truth subject to proof based on accepted principles? Or was it thought of as a property of areas of land that were mapped out by surveyors? Or, as one scholar recently wrote, was Plimpton 322 “a teacher’s catalog of parameters” for calculation? Or something else completely?

Aside from the fact that the analysis of these tablets is relatively recent, one of the problems is that much of their context is hypothetical, because of the almost haphazard way in which early modern explorers pulled these artifacts out of the layered rubble of ancient mounds of detritus. In a fascinating 2008 book, “Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History” (Princeton), Eleanor Robson even suggests that many tablets like these of the second millennium B.C. “were essentially ephemera, created to aid and demonstrate recall, destined almost immediately for the recycling bin.”

But as Ms. Robson also points out, these tablets’ word problems about digging and construction, their use in teaching record keeping and calculation, and their implicit affirmation of the importance of scribes and teachers, also reveal a highly organized, bureaucratic society, an “ordered urban state, with god, king and scribe at its center.”

At the exhibition itself, it would have helped if some of the translations and interpretations of the tablets provided in an accompanying brochure had been made available directly on the labels themselves, so you could both look at the artifact and see how to interpret it.

It might have helped, too, if the show suggested the kinds of debates that have arisen about the status of Babylonian mathematics, which, in many ways, parallel larger debates about Western and non-Western cultures. In this case those debates become all the more charged because of the geographical region involved.

While once, for example, Babylonian mathematics was clearly seen as a precursor to the Greeks and to Western systems, there is an impulse now to see it as a historical victim of Western cultural perspectives. That is partly how Ms. Robson portrays it, even (unconvincingly) evoking Edward Said’s book “Orientalism”; a hint of that sentiment may even be one of the subtle draws of this exhibition.

But for an outsider surveying these objects and the history, the response is at once awe at the ancient minds that created such powerful systems for understanding and ordering experience, and still more amazement at the mathematical world that later developed and went so much further: explicitly turning individual examples into theorems, earthly practices into abstract principles and outlining new methods for understanding that are still being applied.

This is the trench solution as it appears on the Babylonian tablet. The translation, by Alexander Jones, a curator of the “Before Pythagoras” exhibition, is in the show’s brochure:

“Solution: Multiply the length and the depth, and you get 30. Take the reciprocal of the workload, multiply by 30 and you will get 3. Multiply the wages by 3, and you will get 6. Take the reciprocal of 6, and multiply it by 9, the total cost in silver, and you will get its width. One and a half ninda is the width. Such is the procedure.”

(A reciprocal in Babylonian arithmetic is in relation to 60, so the reciprocal of 10 is 6.)

“Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics” is on view through Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84th Street, Manhattan; nyu.edu/isaw.

Asteriskos
1968
Cast bronze, black patina
16 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches; 42 x 42 x 42 cm

Through December 23

Mathew Marks

“Tsugaru”, 2010

Through December 18

Taka Ishii Japan