The New Yorker
by David Sedaris
OCTOBER 27, 2008

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”
Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
When doubting that anyone could not know whom they’re voting for, I inevitably think back to November, 1968. Hubert Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon, and when my mother couldn’t choose between them she had me do it for her. It was crazy. One minute I was eating potato chips in front of the TV, and the next I was at the fire station, waiting with people whose kids I went to school with. When it was our turn, we were led by a woman wearing a sash to one of a half-dozen booths, the curtain of which closed after we entered.
“Go ahead,” my mother said. “Flick a switch, any switch.”
I looked at the panel in front of me.
“Start on the judges or whatever and we’ll be here all day, so just pick a President and make it fast. We’ve wasted enough time already.”
“Which one do you think is best?” I asked.
“I don’t have an opinion,” she told me. “That’s why I’m letting you do it. Come on, now, vote.”
I put my finger on Hubert Humphrey and then on Richard Nixon, neither of whom meant anything to me. What I most liked about democracy, at least so far, was the booth—its quiet civility, its atmosphere of importance. “Hmm,” I said, wondering how long we could stay before someone came and kicked us out.
Ideally, my mother would have waited outside, but, as she said, there was no way an unescorted eleven-year-old would be allowed to vote, or even hang out, seeing as the lines were long and the polls were open for only one day. “Will you please hurry it up?” she hissed
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have something like this in our living room?” I asked. “Maybe we could use the same curtains we have on the windows.”
“All right, that’s it.” My mother reached for Humphrey but I beat her to it, and cast our vote for Richard Nixon, who had the same last name as a man at our church. I assumed that the two were related, and only discovered afterward that I was wrong. Richard Nixon had always been Nixon, while the man at my church had shortened his name from something funnier but considerably less poster-friendly—Nickapopapopolis, maybe.
“Oh, well,” I said.
We drove back home, and when asked by my father whom she had voted for, my mother said that it was none of his business.
“What do you mean, ‘none of my business’?” he said. “I told you to vote Republican.”
“Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t.”
“You’re not telling me you voted for Humphrey.” He said this as if she had marched through the streets with a pan on her head.
“No,” she said. “I’m not telling you that. I’m not telling you anything. It’s private—all right? My political opinions are none of your concern.”
“What political opinions?” he said. “I’m the one who took you down to register. You didn’t even know there was an election until I told you.”
“Well, thanks for telling me.”
She turned to open a can of mushroom soup. This would be poured over pork chops and noodles and served as our dinner, casserole style. Once we’d taken our seats at the table, my parents would stop fighting directly, and continue their argument through my sisters and me. Lisa might tell a story about her day at school and, if my father said it was interesting, my mother would laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he’d say.
“Nothing. It’s just that, well, I suppose everyone has a different standard. That’s all.”
When told by my father that I was holding my fork wrong, my mother would say that I was holding it right, or right in “certain circles.”
“We don’t know how people eat the world over,” she’d say, not to him but to the buffet or the picture window, as if the statement had nothing to do with any of us.
I wasn’t looking forward to that kind of evening, and so I told my father that I had voted. “She let me,” I said. “And I picked Nixon.”
“Well, at least someone in the family has some brains.” He patted me on the shoulder and as my mother turned away I understood that I had chosen the wrong person.
didn’t vote again until 1976, when I was nineteen and legally registered. Because I was at college out of state, I sent my ballot through the mail. The choice that year was between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Most of my friends were going for Carter, but, as an art major, I identified myself as a maverick. “That means an original,” I told my roommate. “Someone who lets the chips fall where they may.” Because I made my own rules and didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of them, I decided to write in the name of Jerry Brown, who, it was rumored, liked to smoke pot. This was an issue very close to my heart—too close, obviously, as it amounted to a complete waste. Still, though, it taught me a valuable lesson: calling yourself a maverick is a sure sign that you’re not one.
I wonder if, in the end, the undecideds aren’t the biggest pessimists of all. Here they could order the airline chicken, but, then again, hmm. “Isn’t that adding an extra step?” they ask themselves. “If it’s all going to be chewed up and swallowed, why not cut to the chase, and go with the platter of shit?”
Ah, though, that’s where the broken glass comes in. ♦

THE MAVERICK WEARS PRADA
Screenplay by
Maureen Dowd
Revised third draft
© Oct. 29, 2008

FADE IN:

INT. A HOTEL SUITE — in the middle of the day in the middle of Ohio.

NICOLLE WALLACE, a slender, preppie-looking blonde wearing a string of pearls is pacing and frantically thumbing her BlackBerry. She is a top McCain adviser under STEVE SCHMIDT who has been seconded to SARAH PALIN. On the TV, MSNBC’s DAVID SHUSTER is asking ANNE KORNBLUT about rumors that PALIN has gone AWOL after McCain advisers anonymously labeled her a rogue “diva” and a “whack job.”

NICOLLE

(hissing)

How’d she get away?

TRACEY SCHMITT, another blonde sorority type in pearls, also a Bush person who became a McCain person who was then sent over to manage PALIN as her press secretary, sits slumped in a chair, dejectedly checking her BlackBerry messages.

How the heck should I know? She told me she was going to the bathroom to change out of the Jimmy Choos into something more Target for the Joe the Plumber “They’re Not Smears, They’re Just Facts” Bus Tour. She never came back. I called Todd. He’s not picking up.

NICOLLE

Steve’s freaking out. You know how he is about message discipline, much less completely losing a candidate. He’s got enough on his plate scaring the nursing-home Jews in Florida and painting Obama as a Palestinian Marxist Madrassa Child. Maybe all of those dudes painting their chests for Sarah and screaming “2012!” have her looking past the old man. Steve says he will annihilate her if she sabotages this campaign to get started on the next one, or if she plants negative stories about me — I mean McCain — with the base. Are the clothes gone from the belly of the plane?

TRACEY

It’s not like we were ever gonna return them anyway.

NICOLLE

Think like a diva. Where would you go rogue?

TRACEY

Sean Hannity’s pocket. Could he pant over her more? Or maybe she’s hiding in Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s dressing room at “The View.”

NICOLLE

She’s probably at The Weekly Standard, plotting her shining city on the tundra with Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol. I can’t believe Barnes called me a coward because I tried to update that $30 Wasilla beehive that made her look like the girlfriend in an Elvis movie and upgrade her from pleather to leather. And besides, she’s not going to find real Americans at Saks and Neiman’s. She’s got to go to Barneys and Armani for that.

TRACEY

Between us, Nicolle, she doesn’t look $150,000 different. Maybe we should have spent that money on getting Henry Kissinger to put on his snowshoes and best leer and tutor her.

NICOLLE

Look, Tracey, maybe Sarah doesn’t know who Berlusconi is, but she does know who Valentino is. She saw those labels. She knew we were being sartorial socialists and spreading the wealth to Neiman’s and Saks. She liked being pampered like a movie star. We should have learned from W. If you can keep a war off budget, why can’t you keep a wardrobe off budget? I told the press if someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is lie there.

TRACEY

That’ll be the day.

NICOLLE

I’ll be glad when this blind date from hell is over and I can get away from the dysfunctional Palin clan and back to walking my dog, Lily, in Central Park with my pinko liberal friends. I knew Katie would be brutal, but thank God I arranged that interview because now I can go back to my gig as a political analyst at CBS.

TRACEY

I’m gonna miss Todd. He’s hot.

NICOLLE

I won’t miss him or his 20 calls a day playing stage dad. He’s probably the one who masterminded her breakout.

(Her BlackBerry rings to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.”)

Uh-oh, it’s Steve.

(She listens and then hangs up.)

TRACEY

(sardonically)

Does McCain know the maverick’s maverick has gone all mavericky on him?

NICOLLE

McCain is calling off the search.

TRACEY

(shocked)

Huh?

NICOLLE

He’s fed up with her getting bigger crowds and contradicting his message. He’s fed up with her interrupting him on TV interviews and taking them over. He’s fed up with her drilling him on drilling. He’s fed up with never being able to discuss anything with her, like the latest violence in the Congo. He’s weirded out by the way she keeps trying to explain the Rapture to him. His exact words to Steve were: “For my End of Days, I’d prefer to finish the race with Lieberman.” So forget Sarah. Let’s find Joe.

TRACEY

You betcha!

Final Wooden House, Sou Fujimoto Architects, 2008

I wanted to create an ultimate wooden architecture. I thought through this bungalow, which can be considered as a small and primitive house, it was possible to do a primitive and simultaneously new architecture. 350mm square profile cedar is piled endlessly. At the end of the process appears a prototypical place before architecture became architecture.

Wood is amazingly versatile. Due to its versatility, wood is used in a conventional wooden architecture by intentional differentiation in various places. Not only in structures, such as columns and beams, but it can also be used in everything else from foundation, exterior wall, interior wall, ceiling, flooring, insulation, furniture, stairs to window frames. I posit that if wood is indeed multifaceted, then conversely it should be possible to create architecture that fulfills all functions by one process, and by one way of using woods. It is an inversion of versatility. From that originates, new architecture that maintains an undifferentiated condition of the harmonized whole before function and role underwent mitosis.

350mm square profile cedar has an amazing impact. It transcends what we usually call “wood” and becomes “an existence” of an entirely different material. While the dimensions adequately display its materiality as wood, 350mm squared is simultaneously the dimensionality directly corresponding to human body. Thus, three-dimensional space is created out of 350mm increments. This stepped space was a long fascination of mine for couple of years as its defining characteristics are the generation of a sort of spatial relativity and a new sense of various distances unachievable by coplanar floors.

There are no categorization of floors, walls, and ceilings here. A locality that was thought as a floor transforms into chairs, ceilings, and walls from different perspectives. Floor levels are relative and people reinterpret the spatiality according to where they are. People are three-dimensionally distributed in space and will experience new sensations of depths. Spaces are not divided but is rather produced as a chance occurrence within fusing elements. Inhabitants discover various functions within those undulations. It is a place akin to nebulous landscape. This resonates with the undifferentiated condition of above-mentioned architectonic elements. Both as a constructional methodology and experiential space, this architecture is synthesized by the fusion of various undifferentiated elements. Here, conventional rules of architecture is nullified. There is neither a plan nor a stabilizing point. This is possible purely because the wood is that versatile. Perhaps it is only possible with wood to be simultaneously the insulation and the structure, the finish and also the furniture. By being composed of the wooden blocks instead of slabs, the method of creating the undifferentiated condition was made clear.

I think this bungalow ceases to be within the domain of wooden architecture. If architecture made from wood is to be considered wooden architecture, then this bungalow is the wood itself that transcends the architectural convention to directly become a place for humans. It is of primordial existence before architecture. That is to say, rather than new architecture, it seeks new conception, a new existence.

Education
University of Tokyo, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Architecture (Bachelor), 1990 - 1994

Awards
2008 Japanese Institute of Architecture Grand Prize (Children’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation), 2008
2007 KENNETH F. BROWN ARCHITECTURE DESIGN AWARD Honorable Mention (Children’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation), 2007
AR Awards 2006 “Grand Prize” (Children’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation), 2006
AR Awards 2006 “Highly Commended” (7/2 house), 2006
“Gold Prize” in House Competition by Tokyo Society of Architects and Building Engineers, 2006
"1st Prize" in Wooden House Competition in Kumamoto, 2005
AR Awards 2005 “Highly Commended” (Dormitory for Mentally Disabled in Date), 2005
AR Awards 2005 “Honourable Mention” (T house), 2005
JIA New Face Award 2004, 2004
"1st Prize" in International Design Competition for the Environment Art Forum for Annaka, 2003
Winning "SD Review 2003", 2003
"Honorable Mention" in Design Competition for the Ora Town Hall, 2002
Winning "SD Review 2002 SD Prize", 2002
Winning "SD Review 2001", 2001
Winning "SD Review 2000 Maki Prize", 2000
"2nd Prize in Design Competition for the Aomori Art Museum, 2000
Winning "SD Review 1997 SD Prize", 1997
Winning "SD Review 1995", 1995

Teaching Career
Kyoto University, Lecturer, 2007 - Present
Tokyo University, Lecturer, 2004
Showa Women's University, Lecturer, 2004 - Present
Tokyo University of Science, Lecturer, 2001 - Present

Talks and Lectures
RIBA London (2 2007); AR Emerging Architecture Talks: “Treatment Center for Mentally Disturbed Children” & “7/2 House”
London Metropolitan University (2 2007); Lecture: “Between Nature and Artifact, Formless Form & Local Relations”
MIT (11 2006); Architecture or Revolution series: “Formless Form”
Tokyo Opera City (11 2006); Toyo Ito, The New `Real` in Architecture series: “Sou Fujimoto, Toyo Ito and Kazuhiro Kojima in Conversation”
Romania Architecture Biennial (11 2006); Xtreme East, Contemporary architecture from Japan Conference: “Sou Fujimoto New Projects”
Takenaka Design Exhibition 2006 Osaka (8 2006); Invited Speaker
Kaoshun, Taiwan (5 2006); Symposium with Taiwanese architects

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

found on archinect

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: October 25, 2008

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

Coastal Access

Photographs by Moses Berkson

Opens November 1, 6-8PM
Through November 29
Constant Gallery
2673 S. La Cienega Blvd

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: October 26, 2008

McCain advisers have been scathing about the “sexism” of critics who dismiss Sarah Palin as Caribou Barbie.

How odd then, to learn that McCain advisers have been treating their own vice presidential candidate like Valentino Barbie, dressing her up in fancy clothes and endlessly playing with her hair.

In 1991, with Americans fretting about a shaky economy, Poppy Bush visited a J. C. Penney and bought $28 worth of tube socks and a toddler’s sweat suit in a desperate effort to seem in touch with the common folk. Palin might have followed that example and popped into Penney’s to buy some new American-made duds. She is so naturally good-looking, there is no need to gild the Last Frontier lily.

Instead, with the economy cratering and the McCain campaign running on an “average Joe” theme, dunderheaded aides, led by the former Bushies Nicolle Wallace and Tracey Schmitt, costumed their Eliza Doolittle for a ball when she should have been dressing for a bailout.

The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers:

The McCains own 13 cars, eight homes and access to a corporate jet, and Cindy had her Marie Antoinette moment at the convention. Vanity Fair calculated that her outfit cost $300,000, with three-carat diamond earrings worth $280,000, an Oscar de la Renta dress valued at $3,000, a Chanel white ceramic watch clocking in at $4,500 and a four-strand pearl necklace worth between $11,000 and $25,000. While presenting herself as an I’m-just-like-you hockey mom frugal enough to put the Alaska state plane up for sale on eBay, Palin made her big speech at the convention wearing a $2,500 cream silk Valentino jacket that the McCain staff had gotten her at Saks.

At that point, Palin should have been savvy enough to tell those doing her makeover that she was a Wal-Mart mom. The sartorial upgrade was bound to turn into a strategy downgrade, as Palin pressed her case as a homespun gal who was ever so much more American than the elite, foreignish Obama, while she was gussied up in Italian couture.

Politico broke the news that the Republican National Committee spent over $150,000 on a “Pretty Woman”-style shopping spree for Palin, including about $75,000 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and St. Louis.

Palin advisers did their best to spin the fashion explosion during the economic implosion, telling The Times that she needed new outfits to match the climate changes across 50 states.

Republicans once more charged the media with sexism for reporting on Palin’s Imelda Marcos closet. “No one would blink if this was a male candidate buying Brooks Brothers suits,” said William F. B. O’Reilly, a G.O.P. consultant.

It doesn’t wash to cry sexism now any more than it did at the beginning, when the campaign tried to use that dodge to divert attention from Palin’s lacunae in the sort of knowledge you need to run the world. The press has written plenty about the vanities and extravagances of male candidates. (See: Haircuts, John Edwards and Bill Clinton.) Sexism would be to treat Palin differently, or more delicately, than one of the guys.

The governor who spent all her time talking about how she had cleaned up excesses in Alaska, and would do the same in Washington, also went over the top on hair and makeup. As a former beauty pageant contestant and sports anchor on TV, Palin already seemed on top of her grooming before the McCain campaign made her traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi, the highest-paid individual on the campaign for the first two weeks of October. Ms. Strozzi, who earned an Emmy nomination for her war paint skills on the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance,” made $22,800 for the first half of this month.

Governor Palin, who used to get her hair done at the Beehive in Wasilla and shop at an Anchorage consignment shop called Out of the Closet, paid her traveling hairstylist — recommended by Cindy McCain — $10,000 for the first half of October.

In The New York Times Magazine today, Robert Draper reveals that the campaign also hired a former New York stage and screen actress, Priscilla Shanks, to be her voice coach for the convention. The expense was listed in finance reports as Operating Expenditures and Get-Out-The-Vote consulting. Apparently getting out the vote includes teaching a potential vice president the correct way to pronounce “nuclear.”

The conservative big shots who have not deserted Palin and still think she can be Reagan in a Valentino skirt are furious at those who have mishandled the governor and dimmed her star power. They mourn that she may have to wait now until 2016 to get rid of the phony stench of designer populism.

Makeovers are every woman’s dream. But this makeover has simply pushed back Palin’s dream of being president.

Walking and texting can save time, but studies show the brain has difficulty switching between more complicated tasks.

By ALINA TUGEND
NY Times Published: October 24, 2008

AS you are reading this article, are you listening to music or the radio? Yelling at your children? If you are looking at it online, are you e-mailing or instant-messaging at the same time? Checking stocks?

Since the 1990s, we’ve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend part or most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or juggling two or more things at the same time.

While multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists and others are finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient.

Although doing many things at the same time — reading an article while listening to music, switching to check e-mail messages and talking on the phone — can be a way of making tasks more fun and energizing, “you have to keep in mind that you sacrifice focus when you do this,” said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!” (Ballantine, 2006). “Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really not. It’s like playing tennis with three balls.”

Of course, it depends what you’re doing. For some people, listening to music while working actually makes them more creative because they are using different cognitive functions.

But despite what many of us think, you cannot simultaneously e-mail and talk on the phone. I think we’re all familiar with what Dr. Hallowell calls “e-mail voice,” when someone you’re talking to on the phone suddenly sounds, well, disengaged.

“You cannot divide your attention like that,” he said. “It’s a big illusion. You can shift back and forth.”

We all know that computers and their spawn, the smartphone and cellphone, have created a very different world from several decades ago, when a desk worker had a typewriter, a phone and an occasional colleague who dropped into the office.

Think even of the days before the cordless phone. Those old enough can remember when talking on the telephone, which was stationary, meant sitting down, putting your feet up and chatting — not doing laundry, cooking dinner, sweeping the floor and answering the door.

That is so far in the past. As we are required, or feel required, to do more and more things in a shorter period of time, researchers are trying to figure out how the brain changes attention from one subject to another.

Earl Miller, the Picower professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained it this way: human brains have a very large prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that contains the “executive control” process. This helps us switch and prioritize tasks.

In humans, he said, the prefrontal cortex is about one-third of the entire cortex, while in dogs and cats, it is 4 or 5 percent and in monkeys about 15 percent.

“With the growth of the prefrontal cortex, animals become more and more flexible in their behavior,” Professor Miller said.

We can do a couple of things at the same time if they are routine, but once they demand more cognitive process, the brain has “a severe bottleneck,” he said.

Professor Miller conducted studies where electrodes were attached to the head to monitor participants performing different tasks.

He found that “when there’s a bunch of visual stimulants out there in front of you, only one or two things tend to activate your neurons, indicating that we’re really only focusing on one or two items at a time.”

David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues looked at young adults as they performed tasks that involved solving math problems or classifying geometric objects.

Their 2001 study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that for all types of tasks, the participants lost time when they had to move back and forth from one undertaking to another, and that it took significantly longer to switch between the more complicated tasks.

Although the time it takes for our brains to switch tasks may be only a few seconds or less, it adds up. If we’re talking about doing two jobs that can require real concentration, like text-messaging and driving, it can be fatal.

The RAC Foundation, a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues, asked 17 drivers, age 17 to 24, to use a driving simulator to see how texting affected driving.

The reaction time was around 35 percent slower when writing a text message — slower than driving drunk or stoned.

All right, there are definitely times we should not try to multitask. But, we may think, it’s nice to say that we should focus on one thing at a time, but the real world doesn’t work that way. We are constantly interrupted.

A 2005 study, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.

Interestingly, a study published last April, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” found that “people actually worked faster in conditions where they were interrupted, but they produced less,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine and a co-author of both studies. And she also found that people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else.

“As observers, we’ll watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or e-mail,” she said. As I read that, I realized how often I was switching between writing this article and checking my e-mail.

Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people work in these patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have something to do with it.

Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure.

“I also argue that it’s bad for innovation,” she said. “Ten and a half minutes on one project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.”

Dr. Hallowell has termed this effort to multitask “attention deficit trait.” Unlike attention deficit disorder, which he has studied for years and has a neurological basis, attention deficit trait “springs entirely from the environment,” he wrote in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.”

“As our minds fill with noise — feckless synaptic events signifying nothing — the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,” he wrote. Desperately trying to keep up with a multitude of jobs, we “feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.”

But Dr. Hallowell says that despite our belief that we cannot control how much we’re overloaded, we can.

“We need to recreate boundaries,” he said. That means training yourself not to look at your BlackBerry every 20 seconds, or turning off your cellphone. It means trying to change your work culture so such devices are banned at meetings. Sleeping less to do more is a bad strategy, he says. We are efficient only when we sleep enough, eat right and exercise.

So the next time the phone rings and a good friend is on the line, try this trick: Sit on the couch. Focus on the conversation. Don’t jump up, no matter how much you feel the need to clean the kitchen. It seems weird, but stick with it. You, too, can learn the art of single-tasking.

By Paul Lieberman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
First of Seven Parts. October 25, 2008

Sgt. Willie Burns had a Tommy gun on the bench in front of him when his 18 handpicked candidates arrived at the 77th Street station on the edge of Watts. It was a cool evening in November 1946, and the men came in topcoats and hats. Burns wore his low, almost over his eyes, like the bad guys.

Years later, he told a grand jury: “My primary duties were to keep down these gangster killings and try to keep some of these rough guys under control.” But he hadn’t given his fellow LAPD cops any hint of why they’d been summoned that night. Now he laid it out.

If they joined the Gangster Squad, their targets would be the likes of Bugsy Siegel, the playboy refugee from New York’s Murder Inc., and Jack Dragna, the Sicilian banana importer who quietly lorded over the city’s rackets.

Then there was Mickey Cohen, the dapper former prizefighter who had come to town as Bugsy’s muscle but soon had his own cafe on North La Brea and a “paint store” nearby with three phones to take bets. That’s where he’d shot a produce broker whose family ran competing bookie joints. Mickey said the man came at him with a .45, the one found beside the body, and there were no witnesses to contradict his story. “It was me or him,” Mickey said. “I let him have it.”

There had been three more mob rub-outs around L.A. since then, including the shotgunning of two Chicago men outside a Hollywood apartment. That one generated a “Gangsters in Gambling War” headline that was a prime reason Police Chief C.B. Horrall wanted those 18 cops to see what a Thompson submachine gun looked like.

“You’ll be working with these,” Burns told them.

The deal was: If they signed on, they’d continue to belisted on the rosters of their old stations. They’d have no office, only two unmarked cars. They’d almost never make arrests. They’d simply gather “intelligence” and be available for other chores. In effect, they would not exist.

Burns gave them a week to ponder advice from an old lieutenant at the 77th, who said an assignment like that could get you in good with the chief. “Or you could end up down in San Pedro, walking a beat in a fog.”

After the week, only seven came back, making a squad of eight, counting Burns.

“We did a lot of things that we’d get indicted for today,” said Sgt. Jack O’Mara.

* * *

On the job a decade before J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI acknowledged the existence of the Mafia, they took an anything-goes approach to making life hell for Mickey Cohen and driving other such characters from the Southern California sunshine.

They used a look-alike Pac Bell truck to plant bugs, to hell with warrants. They did secret favors for Jack Webb, who glorified the LAPD with his “Dragnet” TV show. They stole evidence from mobsters and neutralized a pesky newspaper columnist. And Jack O’Mara personally set a trap for the showboating Mickey, to prove he was a killer.

There were close calls — grand jury investigations, lawsuits and a skeptical chief or two — but they endured through the 1950s. That’s when one of their cases changed the ground rules for policing in California and when one of their own — Jerry Wooters, the most reckless of them all — grew far too friendly with L.A.’s homegrown hoodlum, Jack “the Enforcer” Whalen.

But when “the Enforcer” made the mistake of confronting Mickey and his crew at a hangout in the Valley, a bullet between the eyes signaled that the Gangster Squad’s time was over, and so was a defining era in the city’s history.

Noir L.A. was a time and place where truth was not found in the sunlight, and justice not found in marble courthouses, and where not a single gangland killing was solved, not one, for half a century. Not on paper, anyway.

* * *

Their first assignment: the visitors shaking down Hollywood restaurants and nightclubs. “Hoodlum types from Rhode Island,” in O’Mara’s words, “what we called ‘dandruff.’ ”

The fear of evil outsiders had been a refrain in L.A. before any of these cops were born. You could go back to 1891, when this was a community of 70,000 with a police force of 75, and hear Chief John Glass warn of “Eastern crooks” seeking warm weather and easy pickings. After the turn of the century, the invaders were upgraded to “Eastern gangsters,” and in 1927 Det. Ed “Roughhouse” Brown became a local legend by escorting Al Capone to the train when the notorious mobster was discovered in a downtown hotel. “I thought you folks liked tourists,” Capone said before returning to Chicago.

Now a new group of “tourists” was demanding 25% of the take at landmarks such as the Mocambo and Brown Derby, and the club owners did not want to go to court, worried what might happen to their families. A state crime report would warn anew of an “Invasion of Undesirables.” “What are you gonna do?” O’Mara asked.

The view was great from the hills off Mulholland Drive. So why not escort these hoodlums up there and, as O’Mara put it, “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ‘em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland. And we leaned on ‘em a little, you know what I mean? Up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it’s dark at night.”

Amid that darkness, he would “put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, ‘You want to sneeze?’ ”

That was O’Mara’s signature, the gun in the ear and a few suggestive words: “Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?”

* * *

The squad members met on street corners or in parking lots. Their 1940 Fords had 200,000 miles on them and holes in the floorboard so they could pour fluid into the master cylinders. At times five men rode in one, and if several smoked cigars, their suits would stink so bad they’d hang them outdoors at night.

Their three Tommy guns came with 50-round drums and beautiful violin cases, but were a pain — they couldn’t leave them in the trunk and risk having them stolen. O’Mara slept with his under his bed.

When they did get an office, it was a cubbyhole in the decaying Central station, which had horse stalls from the 1880s.

It was tempting to see them as a wrecking crew, with several resembling another new team in town, the football Rams. Doug “Jumbo” Kennard stood 6-foot-4, Archie Case weighed 250 and Benny Williams was construction-strong — one of the cops who built the Police Academy in their spare time.

But a team needed a quarterback or two, men tough and clever, like Burns, who’d been a gunnery officer during the war. Or Jack O’Mara.

Born in 1917, he spent his toddler years in Portland, Ore., until ice storms inspired his father to pile the family into a Model T and drive south. Jack landed at Manual Arts High, where he wasn’t the speediest guy on the track team but never understood how anyone beat him. For fun, he boxed.

Not quite 135 pounds, he had to stuff himself with bananas and ice cream to make the weight for the LAPD, which needed men in the wake of its scandals of the 1930s, when a mayor and chief were caught selling promotions and a rogue squad planted a bomb under the car of a civic reformer. “It was a lousy, crooked department,” said Max Solomon, Bugsy Siegel’s attorney.

O’Mara became part of a generation that was supposed to change all that. At the academy, he foolishly kept racing the fastest man in the Class of 1940, Tom Bradley, the former UCLA track star and future mayor, though he had no chance of winning.

He worked patrol and traffic until Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. Coast Guard gave him an aptitude test and sent him to a cryptography unit in the Aleutian Islands, part of the effort to intercept Japanese communications and break their code. Who knew he had brains? When he returned, he was a pipe-smoking, 165-pound Spencer Tracy look-alike, and just the sort Burns wanted for his hush-hush unit.

Other cops suspected they were internal spies, headhunters, a rumor that started when a beat officer confided to the chief’s office that a bookmaking barber was inviting cops to “get on the take.” The squad caravaned to the barbershop, “ripped everything, kicked all the walls out,” O’Mara said, and shaved the guy’s head with his own razors.

Pleased, the brass gave them more muscle: 6-foot-5 Jerry Greeley and Lindo “Jaco” Giacopuzzi, a 230-pound former all-Valley football lineman who had built himself up carting milk cans at his family’s dairy. When that pair got a Tommy gun, they showed they understood the rules of this gig — that there were none in dealing with Mickey Cohen and his ilk. Asked to stake out the clothing store Mickey had opened, they decided to leave his crew guessing whether they were cops or out-of-town hoods.

They took the plates off their unmarked car and found others — from Illinois — in the trash at the DMV, then parked up the block from Mickey’s place. One of Mickey’s men went out to investigate and “every time he’d pass by us, we’d put our coat up and pull our hat down,” Giacopuzzi recalled. “So when we left, I was driving, and all the men in Mickey’s establishment there came out on the sidewalk . . . and I took the car and I swerved it . . . and Greeley leaned way out of the window with the Tommy gun. And you should have seen them hit the deck.”

It was a great prank to share with the squad, the fake drive-by, and maybe they wouldn’t have done it later, after someone — not faking — came by Mickey’s haberdashery on the Sunset Strip with a shotgun. That was no laughing matter, the dead body that marked the start of the Sunset Wars.

* * *

The squad made news for the first time on Nov. 15, 1947, with a report that Willie Burns and O’Mara had led a “flying detachment” that rousted six Midwesterners on Wilshire in a limo with New York plates. The six were booked on suspicion of robbery, though there was no evidence they had yet committed any crime in Los Angeles. Photographers were invited into the Wilshire station to snap them seated on a bench, several with bowed heads. Then four were escorted to the county border.

Of course, no one knew then what would become of the two men who were allowed to stay on promises of good behavior. Who could have guessed that James Fratianno, an ex-con “used-car salesman” from Cleveland, would become infamous as Jimmy the Weasel, the L.A. mob’s most prolific hit man? Who could have guessed that James Regace would rise to head that mob three decades later, under his real name, Dominic Brooklier?

What mattered at the time was that the squad had sent some suspicious characters packing and thus sent a signal to the civilian populace and to Mickey et al. That second audience did get the message — the bug in Mickey’s Brentwood home made that clear.

His right-hand man, Neddie Herbert, was overheard the day after the roust, saying: “I can’t meet you at the Mocambo, I’m afraid they’ll pick me up.” At 3:30 a.m., he updated Mickey: “Somebody else got picked up. Jesus Christ. I’m getting out of this. I want to live to be a grandfather.”

“They can’t make anybody leave town,” Mickey said. “It’s against the Constitution.”

The Gangster Squad could not take credit for that eavesdropping, or be blamed when it turned into a fiasco. The squad was still getting organized when vice detectives leaped at an opening provided by Mickey’s renovation of a ranch house on Moreno Drive. Five posed as construction workers, when the real ones took off, and hid a microphone between the wood bin and the fireplace.

The bug was set by the time Mickey and Lavonne Cohen moved in, and soon was picking up barking by Tuffy, their bulldog. The vice team’s mistake was hiring a private bugging expert, because he secretly ran a second line to his own listening post. For a year it gave him — along with the LAPD — a window into what Mickey was up to: talking about fixing charity boxing matches, telling someone back East that “we need a shotgun in the outfit,” grumbling about greedy cops who “grab it and tear your arm off” when you offer them “a gift.”

But the bug picked up nothing of note on June 20, 1947, when Bugsy Siegel was shot through the eye while reading the Los Angeles Times in his living room a few miles east. Mickey kept mum about Bugsy’s demise, which left him and Jack Dragna to fight for control of local gambling.

Mickey’s crew did complain about the leader of the Gangster Squad, Willie Burns, and how some cops were harassing customers at his haberdashery. “It’s ridiculous,” Mickey said. “Anybody who they see leave the store they take right downtown.” Not long after, Burns’ wife received flowers at home, a funeral arrangement.

* * *

Some hoodlums understand the wisdom of anonymity, but the 5-foot-5 Mickey was the opposite breed, like Capone, or later John Gotti. Mickey cultivated his image as a “dese, dem and dose” sort who worked his way up to monogrammed silk pajamas.

He could claim to be a local boy too, for while he was Brooklyn-born, as Meyer Harris Cohen, his mother moved west to Boyle Heights, where he got a paperboy’s education in the streets and began boxing with a Star of David on his trunks. He moved East to compete as a top featherweight and settled in Cleveland and Chicago, where he met the Capones and segued into “rooting,” his term for “sticking up joints.”

Now Mickey sped between nightspots in an entourage of Cadillacs and boasted that he wore suits just twice, then sold them at his store. He made no secret of his hand-washing mania, either, cleaning them constantly for fear that germs, not bullets, would get him.

But he was no joke — a commission appointed by Gov. Earl Warren estimated that “the Cohen gang” had 500 bookies under its wing, with Mickey demanding $40 a week for each telephone in return for his protection. And although the LAPD once was the place to secure that protection, by 1947 he found it easier to do business in some of the county’s other 46 law enforcement jurisdictions, especially Burbank, whose police chief soon was able to buy a 56-foot yacht, largely with cash.

Yet it wasn’t easy to get the goods on Mickey, for he’d say one instant that a gambling joint was worth “over half a million,” then lament that he still owed $45,000 on his house and, oh yeah, “I haven’t booked a horse in four years.”

Later, Mickey insisted he knew all along the cops had “a bug in my rug” and that’s why he dished them so much nonsense. But he seems to have learned of the bug by chance, when his gardener plunged a shovel through an underground wire. Mickey had his property swept and found the mike by the wood box.

Soon after, he obtained partial transcripts of his conversations, 126 pages of notes that the private bug man apparently had taken and now was selling along the Sunset Strip. The San Francisco Chronicle and the L.A. Times got them too, generating “Cohen’s Secrets” and “Cohen’s Big Deals” headlines . . . and questions about why the man still walked free if authorities had all that dirt on him.

That’s why the Gangster Squad had its own bug man.

* * *

From an Iowa farm family that came west in a covered wagon, Con Keeler had grown up tinkering with radios and could cobble together crude bugs using telephone and hearing aid parts. He also knew Navy intelligence officers who were developing eavesdropping systems that did not require long, telltale wires — a welcome innovation given that Mickey would be looking for wires.

In this system, the mike was connected to a transmitter that sent signals you could pick up blocks away. The downside was that you had to hide a six-pack of batteries with the transmitter and replace them every week. But the first challenge was planting the equipment.

That was especially daunting at Mickey’s house because someone — probably Dragna — had exploded dynamite under it. Mickey now had round-the-clock guards, swinging searchlights and an armored front door with a porthole window.

The answer? A diversion. As soon as Mickey and Lavonne went out one night, two squad members began digging noisily in a nearby lot. When Mickey’s guards went to have a look, Keeler climbed a fence and crept though an orange grove behind the house. He had burlap over his shoes to silence his footsteps and ammonia on his clothes to drive off dogs.

The bombing had left splintered openings under the house, and Keeler was able to slide one bug inside a closet where Mickey stacked dozens of pairs of shoes. Then he crept out through the orchard and past the home of an English physician who had worked for British intelligence in the war and was letting them use his garage as a listening post.

But they hadn’t counted on what their bugging would do to Mickey’s TV. At a time when only 10 million Americans had sets, he had the fanciest sold by W&J Sloane department store, with a “distinguished mahogany” cabinet and 45 tubes to guarantee clear reception. Now they overheard him ranting about the screwy lines on Channel 2.

Listening from the doctor’s garage, the squad knew what was up — their transmission was too close to the lowest frequency picked up by a TV. Mickey was likely to figure it out also.

“We could hear him call up and raise hell with W&J Sloane company. ‘Take this goddamn thing out of here or come out and have somebody fix it!’ ” O’Mara recalled. “Sure enough, they sent a technician out.”

O’Mara had an idea — intercept the repair truck. “Pulled him over, talked to him. He was scared, but he agreed. ‘I’d like you to take a man,’ I said.”

Mickey wanted service? He’d get two men fiddling with the back of his set. “While we’re in, we put in another bug. Right in his TV. And the batteries to run the damn bug.”

This one used a slightly different frequency that would not put annoying oscillations on Channel 2.

“Mickey said, ‘Fine, well, fine, thank you, guys’ and gave ‘em 25 bucks apiece for a tip, you know. Well, my guy takes Mickey aside and says, ‘Lookit, I’ll be back in here once a week and take care of it. You know, there’s a lot of bugs in televisions and stuff you have to work out.’ ”

Mickey had to think his lavish tips were why the repairman was so eager to get into his TV every week.

OK, so the bug couldn’t hear much when Mickey’s TV was on, and it was on all the time. But O’Mara sensed that their mission might be measured by small victories, and it was a small victory, for sure, to be able to say, a half-century later . . . and that’s how Mickey Cohen wound up paying for his own bugging.

Oct 18 2008 - Nov 15 2008 at Dan Hug

one of my all time favorite songs

At Regen Projects and Regen Projects II
October 23 – December 6, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 23rd, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. This will be the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery. Showing concurrently in both gallery spaces, Tillmans will present a selection of video works at Regen Projects and a new installation of photographs at Regen Projects II.

Tillmans’ photographs are wide ranging from formal abstracts that play with color, light and the process of photography to intimate, candid images. Seemingly casual, his installations are characteristic of his unique and personal aesthetic. Tillmans will show a selection of large-scale photographs at Regen Projects II. Abney Park and dark peonies are striking black and white photographs which originated from a photocopy; the appropriation and enlargement results in a total flattening of the image. The texture of the photocopy creates a medium onto itself, ultimately breaking down the image to tiny dots of pigment.

Additionally Tillmans will show works from his ongoing ‘Lighter’ series. In this body of work Tillmans plays with photographic processes to create abstract works of color and light. The works are often folded or creased giving the pieces a sculptural quality. Framed within a Plexiglas box, their sharp folds and wrinkles are accentuated, highlighting the works three-dimensional quality. Often vivid and vibrant in color the works play with the viewer’s perception of where flatness and form meet.

Each photograph Wolfgang Tillmans takes and prints is part of a collective, which provides
a framework for difference and dialogue. A gradually growing community of images is the dynamic repertoire from which various pictorial and symbolic alliances and juxtapositions form, disassemble, and reform in his installations and publications over time.

(Ault, Julie, “The Subject is Exhibition (2008) Installation as Possibility in the Practice of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008. p. 16)

At Regen Projects, Tillmans will show a selection of video works. These simple and poetic videos continue Tillmans’ exploration of the ephemeral. In Peas a pot of bright green peas boils then slowly cools, and in Wind of Change street musicians play the 1990 hit song of the same name in front of Berlin’s Europa Center, an iconic high-rise tower in West Berlin.

Wolfgang Tillmans lives and works in London and Berlin and was the winner of the Turner prize in 2000. Tillmans’ work has been the subject of numerous publications as well as museum exhibitions worldwide. A recent North American survey was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and traveled to the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. This year, Tillmans had a large-scale retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and this was accompanied by the extensive catalogue Lighter which documents many of Tillmans’ unique and site specific installations over the past two decades.

An opening reception will take place at the gallery on Thursday, October 23rd from 6 – 8 pm. For further information please contact Stacy Bengtson or Jennifer Loh at 310-276-5424.

By ANDREW POLLACK
NY Times Published: October 22, 2008
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — To satisfy the world’s growing demand for food, scientists are trying to pull off a genetic trick that nature itself has had trouble accomplishing in millions of years of evolution. They want to create varieties of corn, wheat and other crops that can thrive with little water.

As the world’s population expands and global warming alters weather patterns, water shortages are expected to hold back efforts to grow more food. People drink only a quart or two of water every day, but the food they eat in a typical day, including plants and meat, requires 2,000 to 3,000 quarts to produce.

For companies that manage to get “more crop per drop,” the payoff could be huge, and scientists at many of the biggest agricultural companies are busy tweaking plant genes in search of the winning formula.

Monsanto, the biggest crop biotechnology company, says its first drought-tolerant corn will reach farmers in only four years and will provide a 10 percent increase in yields in states like Nebraska and Kansas that tend to get less rainfall than eastern parts of the Corn Belt.

At a recent farm show here called Husker Harvest Days, a few thousand farmers were guided past a small plot on which Monsanto had grown its drought-tolerant corn next to a similar variety without the “drought gene.” A transparent tent had shielded the plants from any rain through the hot Nebraska summer.

The results were, to be sure, less than miraculous. Both the drought-tolerant and the comparison plants were turning brown and shriveling, and they were about three feet shorter than the lush green irrigated corn growing nearby. But the drought-tolerant plants, which also contained a second gene to protect their roots from a pest, were a little greener and a few inches taller than the comparison plants, and their cobs were missing fewer kernels.

Monsanto said the improvement was significant. And the Nebraska and Kansas farmers who toured Monsanto’s plot, many of them facing water-use restrictions and soaring pumping costs for irrigation, said any improvement would be welcome.

“We pump water like there’s no end, and that’s not going to last forever,” said Tom Schuele, a farmer in Cedar Rapids, Neb. Monsanto’s competitors, including DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred unit and Syngenta, say they also plan to introduce water-efficient corn in a few years. And companies are working on plants that can stand up to heat, cold, salty soils and other tough environments.

A small California company called Arcadia Biosciences is trying to develop crops that need only half as much nitrogen fertilizer as a conventional plant. Fertilizer is crucial to modern food production, but the large quantities used today damage the environment. And because fertilizer is made from natural gas, its costs have soared along with other energy costs.

Public sector scientists are also on the hunt. Researchers at the University of California and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are developing rice that can survive flooding, which causes major crop losses for poor farmers in the lowlands of India and other countries. While rice is typically grown in standing water, the plants will die if submerged for more than a few days.

Many of these advanced crops are being developed using genetic engineering. The technology, already used to make crops that can resist weeds and insects, has spurred worldwide controversy. But in an era in which people are marching in the streets of many countries to demand more food at lower prices, low-water crops might win over areas that now shun biotech crops, such as most of Africa.

“Drought tolerance to me is the most critical entry point,” said Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard who has advised African governments on biotechnology. “This is kind of reopening the window for genetic modification.”

Critics accuse the biotechnology industry and its backers of exploiting the recent global food crisis to push a technology that has been oversold and that could have unanticipated health and environmental effects.

Indeed, many past predictions of how biotechnology would create novel crops have not come to fruition. And some experts say Monsanto and its peers have not published enough information to prove they can make drought-tolerant crops.

“I want to see more, I guess, from the Monsanto work before I’d be convinced they’ve got it,” said John S. Boyer, an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware.

Safety questions must also be answered. Changing the water needs of a plant requires a more fundamental alteration of its metabolism than adding a gene to make the plant resistant to insects. “The potential for unintended side effects is greater, so the testing has to be greater,” said David A. Lightfoot, a professor of genetics and genomics at Southern Illinois University.

How much could be gained by use of these new crops is not yet clear. A report in 2007 by the International Water Management Institute, which is part of a network of agricultural research centers, concluded that genetic improvements would have only a “moderate” impact over the next 15 to 20 years in making crops more efficient in using water.

“Greater, easier and less contentious gains,” it said, could come from better managing water supplies, rather than trying to develop crops that can flourish with less water.

But many experts say the situation is grave enough that all approaches must be tried simultaneously.

Poor growing conditions can reduce crop yields by 70 percent or more below their potential. American farmers, for instance, average about 150 bushels of corn an acre. But David K. Hula of Charles City, Va., won a competition last year by achieving nearly 386 bushels an acre, a measure of what modern crop varieties can achieve under optimal conditions.

In many areas, lack of water is the biggest limiting factor, and supplies of water for irrigation could be reduced further in coming years in order to supply more water to growing cities and proliferating factories.

Global warming is also expected to lead to drier conditions and more frequent droughts in some parts of the world. Scientists at Stanford, for instance, have projected that corn yields in southern Africa could drop 25 percent by 2030 because of warmer, drier weather.

Breeding water-efficient crops would seem to be straightforward: Just grow crops under dry conditions and choose the ones that do best for the next round of breeding.

It does not quite work that way, however. After several generations, the crops are indeed more resistant to drought. But there is a downside in that they often turn out to have lower yields when there is plenty of rain.

So scientists are harnessing the same genetic techniques that have yielded insights into human health to decipher how plants control water use and adapt to stress. “We’ve probably made more progress in the last 15 years than we have in the last 5,000 years,” said Ray A. Bressan, a professor at Purdue.

In particular, he said, studies have overturned the conventional wisdom that water use is so complex that no single gene could have a big impact on it. “Single genes are having effects in the field that we never thought would be possible,” he said.

That has opened the door for genetic engineering, which allows scientists to add a gene from another species to a plant, or even an extra copy of one of the plant’s own genes.

Critics say that biotech seeds, which are patented and tend to be costly, , might not be suitable for poor farmers in developing countries. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a group working for improved farm productivity on that continent, has said that for now it would avoid genetic engineering because greater gains for small farmers can be made at lower cost using conventional breeding.

Indeed, there has been progress developing drought-tolerant crops using conventional breeding, despite the obstacles.

Syngenta, a big Swiss seed and agricultural chemical company, says it will introduce drought-tolerant corn developed by conventional breeding in 2011, followed by a genetically engineered version in 2014.

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, the institute that sparked the output improvements of the Green Revolution decades ago, has bred drought-tolerant corn that is already being grown in Africa. Marianne Bänziger, director of the global corn program for the center, said the yields are 20 to 50 percent higher than local varieties during droughts, with no loss of yield in wetter years.

Still, her institute, with financing from foundations, is working with Monsanto to develop genetically engineered corn that would be even more water-efficient.

Monsanto has said it would not charge royalties for using its technology in the African corn, to keep the seed affordable. It says that corn customized for Africa could be ready by 2017, only five years after it starts selling drought-tolerant corn to American farmers.

Various other approaches are being tried to make less thirsty crops.

Performance Plants, a Canadian company, adds a gene that causes the plant to start preserving its water more quickly as a drought begins. In one field test, the yield of its genetically engineered canola barely fell when irrigation was cut in half. The yield of a comparison crop fell 14 percent.

Monsanto is going in the opposite direction — trying to keep the plant producing seed when a drought starts, even when its natural response would be to slow down in order to preserve water.

“You don’t want a cactus,” said Jacqueline Heard, who directs Monsanto’s program for drought-tolerant crops. “You want something that keeps a plant very active.”

Monsanto will not say exactly what genes it is using, or in which species they originated. But one approach involves transcription factors, which are like master regulators, able to turn on dozens of other genes to orchestrate a plant’s response to lack of water.

But with so many downstream genes activated, there could be other effects on the plants besides less need for water. At a recent biotechnology conference, a university researcher showed a photograph of a cotton plant with an inserted gene for a transcription factor. The plant was missing most of its leaves.

No single approach is likely to suffice for all types of dry conditions. “Probably no one has found the magic gene yet,” said Jian-Kang Zhu, a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Riverside. “Probably there is no magic gene.”

thanks to jonathan at tagbanger

ARTIFACT An X-ray, a photograph and a schematic drawing of a clay “bundle” filled with about 300 pieces of metal and a stone axe. The object dates to 1700 and differs from religious caches previously found in Maryland.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
NY Times Published: October 20, 2008

Over the years of exploring the old houses and streets of Annapolis, Md., archaeologists have uncovered a trove of artifacts of early American slave culture. Among them are humble remains connected with religious practices, which bear the stamp of the slaves’ West African heritage.

Early in the 18th century, as they were being baptized, African-Americans clung to “spirit practices” in rituals of healing and the invocation of ancestral and supernatural powers. Sometimes called black magic, these occult rites would persist in America in modified form, later, as voodoo and hoodoo.

University of Maryland archaeologists have discovered in Annapolis what they say is one of the earliest examples of traditional African religious artifacts in North America. It is a clay “bundle,” roughly the size and shape of a football, filled with about 300 pieces of metal and a stone axe, whose blade sticks out of the clay, pointing skyward.

The bundle, found in April and dated to 1700, appears to be a direct transplant of African religion into what is now the United States, said Mark P. Leone, a professor of anthropology at Maryland who directed the excavations. The materials and construction, he said, differed from the hoodoo caches his teams had previously found in Annapolis.

“The bundle is African in design, not African-American,” Dr. Leone said in an announcement of the discovery. “The people who made this used local materials. But their knowledge of the charms and the spirit world probably came with them directly from Africa.”

In interviews last week, Dr. Leone and scholars of West African culture said they could not yet determine the bundle’s association with a specific religion or ethnic group.

Frederick Lamp, curator of African art at the Yale University Art Gallery, who was not involved in the discovery, said there was “no reason to doubt” the bundle’s direct link to the long tradition of West African religious practices. “But bundles filled with materials seen to have extraordinary spiritual power were used by many different cultures in Africa,” he said.

Dr. Lamp noted that X-rays of the bundle’s contents revealed an abundance of lead shot, iron nails and copper pins. “Some of the pins were bent, indicating this was a purposeful part of a ritual,” he said.

Metal worked in fire was widely seen as having special power, Dr. Lamp added, “and combining these materials in compacted clay was believed to increase the power of these objects.” The practice, he said, is well documented to this day among the Mande groups, principally in what are now Sierra Leone, Guinea and Mali, and the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin.

Nor should the Kongo people be ruled out as a source of these religious practices, scholars said. This culture, living in lands around the Congo River and in Angola and Cabinda, was a major source of African-American slaves. Kongo bundles contain stones, shells and other items that are supposed to hold the spirits of the dead for the use of the living in a custom that underlies hoodoo.

The bundle’s most striking component, the stone axe, was especially intriguing. Dr. Lamp said this brought to mind the Yoruba and the Fon people of Benin, who considered the axe blade a symbol of Shango, their god of thunder and lightning.

Matthew D. Cochran, a doctoral student in anthropology at University College London, who uncovered the bundle, said it would probably prove to be associated with Yoruba practices related to Shango.

In the lands of coastal West Africa then, and in its rural areas still, these rituals and materials were used by community practitioners, whose role was akin to that of American Indian medicine men. They were not attached to any world religion, or any institution. But people went to them at small sanctuaries in the woods in time of grief and distress. The practitioners, with one of these bundles at hand, rallied spiritual forces to deal with personal crises.

The Annapolis bundle, presumably made by a recent African immigrant, was excavated four feet below Fleet Street, which is near the Maryland Capitol and the waterfront. The object is 10 inches high, 6 inches wide and 4 inches thick. It remains intact, though an outer wrapping, probably of leather or cloth, has decayed, leaving an impression on the clay surface. The bundle is to go on display this week at the African American Museum in Annapolis.

Mr. Cochran said that as he dug at the bottom of the trench, the object first appeared to be a flat stone embedded in sediment. Then he saw small bits of lead shot scattered about. As the archaeologists freed the lumpy mass, a corner cracked open, exposing the pins and nails inside.

“I had seen hoodoo materials from Annapolis,” Mr. Cochran said, “and my sense immediately was that we had something African and important, but it was unclear what it was.”

In the next week, the bundle was examined and X-rayed by experts under the direction of Dr. Leone. The bundle’s age, from the turn of the 18th century, or no later than 1720, was estimated from well-dated pottery shards found in the excavations. But how the object survived the centuries is a mystery, though its placement on what was then the street surface suggests to Dr. Leone a surprising aspect of the practices of slaves at the time.

In previous explorations, material remains of African-related religion were almost always found buried in backyards or hidden under hearths and in basement corners. Early African-Americans seemed to practice their spirit rituals in secret.

A close examination, Dr. Leone said, showed that the bundle was probably originally placed in the gutter alongside the street, in the open for all to see. At the time the street was paved with logs and sawdust and only later covered with modern surfaces, burying the bundle.

Dr. Leone said the bundle’s visibility suggested “an unexpected level of public toleration” of African religion in colonial Annapolis. Most of the artifacts indicating that the practices were conducted in secrecy came from 50 years later. According to articles in a newspaper of the period, white people in Annapolis engaged openly in magic and witchcraft, of the English variety.

“So both European and African spirit practices may have been more acceptable then,” Dr. Leone concluded. “That changed after 1750 with the growing influence of the Enlightenment.”

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: October 21, 2008

Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”

But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.

His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his family back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a smiling young Iraqi boy.

His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go,” Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”

In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to try to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on ugly innuendo.

Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has gone to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to stand behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them in the TV shot.

The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in and out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race against Obama.

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.

“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”

Powell is dismissive of those, like Rush Limbaugh, who say he made his endorsement based on race. And he’s offended by those who suggest that his appearance Sunday was an expiation for Iraq, speaking up strongly now about what he thinks the world needs because he failed to do so then.

Even though he watched W. in 2000 make the argument that his lack of foreign policy experience would be offset by the fact that he was surrounded by pros — Powell himself was one of the regents brought in to guide the bumptious Texas dauphin — Powell makes that same argument now for Obama.

“Experience is helpful,” he says, “but it is judgment that matters.”

Though the 1971 San Fernando quake was a relatively moderate magnitude 6.6 and was centered in a sparsely populated, mountainous area outside of town, 65 people died and 2,000 were injured. Some of the most spectacular damage occurred at Olive View Hospital in Sylmar, California, pictured here, where 49 people died despite newly built, supposedly earthquake-resistant construction.

The second-largest earthquake ever recorded was a magnitude 9.2 in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1964. That quake caused the ground to shift vertically by as much as 50 feet in places. A 130-acre landslide demolished 75 homes. The resulting tsunami reached heights of 220 feet in places. In all, 128 people lost their lives, most killed by the tsunami, including 11 people in Crescent City, California.

The magnitude 9.4 Valdivia, Chile, earthquake in 1960 is the largest ever recorded. It killed around 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless in southern Chile. Even quality wooden homes, shown here, were destroyed. The resulting tsunami killed 138 people in Japan and 61 people in Hawaii, making it one of the deadliest quakes in U.S. history despite happening on another continent.

All 10 from Wired Magazine

MEAL PLAN A vampire bat feeding on a donkey in Trinidad.

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY TImes Published: October 20, 2008

With his soft voice and friar’s manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that.

He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation’s homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America’s leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony — very personal.

“You see this mesh here?” he said, pointing to a circlet of wiry material taped over the top of his little jam jar of horrors. The weave is dense enough to keep even newborns from escaping, he explained, but porous enough to allow the bedbugs’ stylets, their piercing mouthparts, to poke through. Mr. Sorkin pushed up his shirt sleeve and pressed the mesh end of the jar against the inside of his right arm. Roused to a frenzy by the twin cues of heat and carbon dioxide that “in evolution equal host,” said Mr. Sorkin, the insects scrambled toward the lid, thrust out their stylets and began to feed. For a good 10 minutes, Mr. Sorkin sat there with the proud placidity of a donor at a blood bank. He did not budge. He held the jar. He let the bedbugs bite.

“I can hardly feel it,” he said matter-of-factly, “and they do need to eat.”

Mr. Sorkin and his bedbugs are featured in the newly published “Dark Banquet,” a jaunty, instructive and charmingly graphic look at nature’s born phlebotomists — creatures from wildly different twigs of the phylogenetic tree that all happen to share a fondness for blood.

The book was written by Bill Schutt, a biologist and bloodsucking aficionado who holds joint positions at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University and the natural history museum, and that day he, too, was at the museum, to discuss the meal plan variously known as sanguivory and hematophagy, and who does it and when, why and how.

Among his rubied rabble are vampire bats tuned to extract blood from large slumbering mammals and bats that aim instead for the warm breast plates of birds; New World leeches that track their hosts through the water and Old World leeches that relentlessly stalk down blood bearers on land; the notorious vampire finches of the Galápagos that daintily peck open dribbling wounds on the hindquarters of blue-footed boobies; and the candiru, tiny, eel-like catfish that are reputed to have the power to swim up a person’s urethra and suck blood from the bladder and thus are often more feared than their fellow river dwellers, the piranhas.

Dr. Schutt, who is waggish and bearded and projects an air of high-voltage goth, also showed off museum specimens of his preferred bloodsuckers, the vampire bats, which in this case were well beyond any need for private Red Cross donations. Yet even post-mortem, the bats’ fur felt silky, their wings said da Vinci, and their faces and teeth showed the hallmarks of a wholehearted blood feeder.

As it turns out, the three species of bat that subsist entirely on blood — all of them native to Latin America — are much cuter than the average insect- or fruit-eating bat. Because vampire bats rely as much on heat and odor signals to find their food as they do on echolocation, they have a comparatively modest “nose leaf,” the knobby nasal organ that many bats use to direct their sonar signals and that helps account for the bat’s archetypal gargoyle appearance. A vampire bat’s incisors and canines are also much sharper and slimmer than standard bat dentition, the better to slip into the flesh of a large mammal or bird without being detected. Then there is the architecture of capillary action. A vampire bat does not suck the blood of its victims but instead lets physics do the sucking, its cleft lower lip, perfectly spaced lower incisors and doubly grooved tongue jointly forming a kind of tube through which a victim’s blood is pulled up as readily as water crawls up the stem of a plant.

The bat hastens the capillary action along, explained Dr. Schutt, “by moving its tongue back and forth like a piston.” That fast-flicking tongue also bathes the wound site in a salivary blend of anticoagulants to block blood’s natural tendency to clot on exposure. In fact, the anticoagulants in bat spit are so potent that a host animal often continues to bleed long after the vampire bat has feasted its fill and departed.

Dr. Schutt explained that hematophagy is a difficult, dangerous trade, in some ways harder than merely killing and eating your prey outright, which is why blood eaters from different taxonomic orders have evolved a similar set of utensils: the hatpin teeth, the natural clot busters and pain deadeners.

Blood feeders must also be stealthy and wily and good at escaping the swats and fury of their often much larger hosts. The common vampire bat, Desmodus, which feeds on large terrestrial mammals, creeps along the ground like a spider and, in addition to flying, can spring straight upward three feet into the air.

The white-winged vampire bat, Diaemus, approaches a potential host chicken so softly and lovingly that the bird is deceived and sweeps it up to its brood patch as though to warm its own chick. Aquatic leeches aim for hidden pockets and crevices: dip your head into leech-infested waters, and the segmented, toothy worms may slip up your nostrils and make a home of your nose.

Moreover, even though we rightly cherish our own blood as the indispensable elixir of our lives, it turns out that, as a foodstuff for others, it is surprisingly thin gruel. Blood is more than 95 percent water, with the rest consisting mostly of proteins, a sprinkling of sugars, minerals and other small molecules, but almost no fat. Tiny creatures can do fine on such light fare, which is why the great majority of exclusive blood eaters are arthropods — bedbugs, ticks, chiggers, female mosquitoes. For larger sanguivores, though, it is as much of a challenge to survive on blood as it is to acquire it. Lacking dietary fat, vampire bats cannot pack on adipose stores and must consume the equivalent of half their one-ounce body weight in blood every night or risk starving to death. And because the water in that blood meal would make the bats too heavy to fly, they must cast off all modesty and urinate freely as they feed.

Small wonder that wholehearted exclusive blood feeding is rare among vertebrates, and that two of the three species of vampire bats are found in such low numbers they are at risk of extinction. The only reason that so-called common vampire bats are common, said Dr. Schutt, is that they have learned to feed on cattle, pigs and other livestock. “They love it when we clear out the rain forest to make way for ranches,” he said.

The only other vertebrates known to subsist solely on blood are certain types of candiru, a poorly studied but floridly feared group of inchlong catfish found in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. A hematophagous candiru’s usual modus is to parasitize a larger catfish, infiltrating the host’s gill slits, grasping onto the flesh inside, rupturing blood vessels, pumping out the blood with its highly mobile jaws and then, after a minute or two, darting out again. Yet for at least a century, the fish have been reputed to target the human urethra as well, supposedly enticed by the scent of urine: fish, after all, urinate through their gills. Despite the antiquity and persistence of the legend, there is only one confirmed case, from 1997, of a candiru making its way into a human urethra, where it probably had no time for a blood meal before suffocating to death.

Professional blood feeding may not be for the faint of heart, but nature abounds in amateurs and opportunists. The vampire finches of the Galápagos live mostly on seeds, nectar and eggs, but they supplement their diet with occasional high iron snacks, by persistently pecking at the wings and tail region of one of the islands’ well-named blue-footed boobies. Once the finch draws blood, said Dr. Schutt, “you’ll see five finches waiting behind it like customers at a deli counter.”

Another example of a dabbling avian Dracula is the oxpecker, a member of the starling family famed for living aboard large mammals like rhinos, giraffes and buffalo and for plucking the ticks off its carrier’s hide. The oxpecker-mammalian relationship has long been celebrated as a noble case of symbiosis: the piggybacker gets food, the piggybacked gets groomed. More recently, researchers have determined that the oxpeckers do not merely pick off the parasites — they press their beaks in the wounds where the ticks were lodged and take nips of the host mammal’s blood. Who knows whether the poor beast would not rather sleep tight and let a few bugs bite, and instead lose that nasty oxpecker?

Oct 18th 2008
The Economist

LUCIO FONTANA, who was born on the very eve of the 20th century, was entranced by space. Born in Argentina and raised there and in his father’s native Italy, he saw how flight changed people’s perspective of the houses and communities they lived in, and how, later, space travel helped redefine man’s perception of the earth, sky and the universe. Through all these developments, Fontana realised, it was the nature of light that affected man’s imagination most of all.

Although Fontana started out as a figurative sculptor, he quickly concluded that only the abstract would offer him both the freedom and the discipline he needed to explore ideas about time, space, light and movement in art. “I make holes”, he wrote. “Infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint.” In 1935 Fontana took part in the first show of abstract sculpture ever held in Italy. But it would take another 20 years’ work before he began the famous “Slash” paintings, the series that are now his best known and most recognisable works.
Christie’s

In the mid-1960s, Ugo Mulas, a friend of Fontana’s, finally persuaded the artist to be photographed in his studio. Formally dressed in jacket and tie, Fontana, blade in hand, stands at the easel ready to make the first cut. On the canvas is a single shaft of light.

The pose is effective, but it remains that: just a pose. Fontana hated being watched while he worked. And he would allow no one into his studio, not even his wife Teresita, hence his reluctance to allow Mulas in with his camera. The photographs Mulas finally took of Fontana give the impression of showing the artist at work. Once he had been captured on film with the blade pointed at the canvas, though, Fontana sent the photographer out of the room. In the next image in the series the canvas has been slashed and the surface coloured with pigment. Several hours elapsed between the two photographs.

For Fontana the act of creation was intensely private, at once unknown and unknowable. The artist’s reticence about the source of his creativity is one reason why his “Slash” paintings, though superficially simple, retain such a strong element of mystery. No one knows quite how he made them, and they have proved impossible to replicate accurately—and to fake.

The early “Slash” years were full of experiments. Fontana made works on card. On canvas he tested different kinds of slashes; some opening outward rather than in, others painted with a bronze wash representing the Baroque. In the later versions, the slashed edges of the canvas face inward, towards the back of the canvas and away from the viewer. Each picture can have anything from one to 11 cuts, and the background is always a single uniform colour.

The heart of these pictures, though, is the black void, representing outer space, that is visible within each slash. The more you look at these works up close, the more surprising they appear. Yet it is only when you take one of these paintings off the wall and examine the back that you realise that the mysterious blackness is no accident; at the back of each slash Fontana pasted a piece of black mesh that would hold the sides of the cut canvas together and deepen the visible blackness within. Once he settled on this method, Fontana set to making his “Slash” as perfectly as possible.

Half a century on, architects and decorators of expensive houses have helped expand the market for Fontana’s “Slash” pictures, which, like Damien Hirst’s “Spin” paintings, look equally good in a contemporary or traditional setting.

The cognoscenti favour slashes with narrow openings rather than cuts that have expanded and grown floppy. The more cuts the better, though a rare, large crimson work with a single slash, which Fontana dedicated to his wife and which has always been known as the “Teresita”, fetched a record £6.7m ($11.6m) at Christie’s in February. Perpendicular cuts that are full of drama are preferable to oblique ones with less tension; red and white images, such as “Concetto Spaziale, Attesa” (pictured above), are the most popular. The other colours Fontana used in this series include blue, green and pink. Each one takes it in turns to be in vogue. This year the fashionable Fontana shade is yellow.

Sotheby’s sale of 20th-century Italian art will be held at its London headquarters on October 20th at 4pm. Christie’s Italian sale will take place the same day, at 7pm. “Lucio Fontana, Beyond Space” includes a whole floor of “Slash” works, as well as other pieces, and is at Imago art gallery, London, until December 20th.

Robert Von Sternberg, 2008 (untitled)

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 20, 2008

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place.

It was a winning formula. And the great thing was that the new packaging didn’t require any change in the product’s actual contents — in fact, the G.O.P. was able to keep winning elections even as its actual policies became more pro-plutocrat, and less favorable to working Americans, than ever.

John McCain’s strategy, in this final stretch, is based on the belief that the old formula still has life in it.

Thus we have Sarah Palin expressing her joy at visiting the “pro-America” parts of the country — yep, we’re all traitors here in central New Jersey. Meanwhile we’ve got Mr. McCain making Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber — who had confronted Barack Obama on the campaign trail, alleging that the Democratic candidate would raise his taxes — the centerpiece of his attack on Mr. Obama’s economic proposals.

And when it turned out that the right’s new icon had a few issues, like not being licensed and comparing Mr. Obama to Sammy Davis Jr., conservatives played victim: see how much those snooty elitists hate the common man?

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years. Now that the “Bush boom,” such as it was, is over, we can see that it achieved a dismal distinction: for the first time on record, an economic expansion failed to raise most Americans’ incomes above their previous peak.

Since then, of course, things have gone rapidly downhill, as millions of working Americans have lost their jobs and their homes. And all indicators suggest that things will get much worse in the months and years ahead.

So what does all this say about the candidates? Who’s really standing up for Ohio’s plumbers?

Mr. McCain claims that Mr. Obama’s policies would lead to economic disaster. But President Bush’s policies have already led to disaster — and whatever he may say, Mr. McCain proposes continuing Mr. Bush’s policies in all essential respects, and he shares Mr. Bush’s anti-government, anti-regulation philosophy.

What about the claim, based on Joe the Plumber’s complaint, that ordinary working Americans would face higher taxes under Mr. Obama? Well, Mr. Obama proposes raising rates on only the top two income tax brackets — and the second-highest bracket for a head of household starts at an income, after deductions, of $182,400 a year.

Maybe there are plumbers out there who earn that much, or who would end up suffering from Mr. Obama’s proposed modest increases in taxes on dividends and capital gains — America is a big country, and there’s probably a high-income plumber with a huge stock market portfolio out there somewhere. But the typical plumber would pay lower, not higher, taxes under an Obama administration, and would have a much better chance of getting health insurance.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Joe the plumber would almost certainly be better off, but Richie the hedge fund manager would take a serious hit.

But that’s the point. Whatever today’s G.O.P. is, it isn’t the party of working Americans.

September 17- November 11 at Galerie Meyer Kainer

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NY Times Published: October 17, 2008

It’s over.

I’ve studied the polls and the electoral map for months, and I no longer believe that John McCain can win. Unless Barack Obama slips up, Jeremiah Wright shows up or a serious national security emergency flares up, Obama will become the 44th president of the United States.*

The wayward wizards of Wall Street delivered the election to Obama by pushing the economy to the verge of collapse, forcing leery voters to choose between their pocketbooks and their prejudices. McCain delivered it to Obama with his reckless pick of Sarah Palin. That stunt made everything that followed feel like a stunt, tarnishing McCain’s reputation and damaging his credibility so that when he went negative it backfired. And, some radical rabble among McCain’s supporters delivered it to Obama by mistaking his political rallies for lynch mobs.

This perfect storm of poor judgments has set the stage for an Obama victory. It’s over. Fast forward to Nov. 5.

President-elect Obama (yes, get used to it) could wake up that morning as one of the most powerful presidents in recent American history. Not only is his party likely to maintain control of both houses of the Congress, it could dramatically strengthen its hand.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, the percentage of people who say that they approve of the way their own member of Congress is handling his or her job has never been lower and the percentage who say they disapprove has only been higher once before: on the verge of the Republican Revolution in 1994 when the Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate. But this time voters seem to be more disenchanted with Republicans than with Democrats. In November 1994, the Republican Party’s favorable rating was 54 percent and the Democrats’ was 44 percent. In the most recent poll, the Democrats’ favorable rating was 52 percent and the Republicans’ was 37 percent.

Some think that the Democrats could even pass the magic 60 mark in the Senate, providing them with a filibuster-proof majority. The last president to enjoy that advantage was Jimmy Carter.

Add to that the possibility of Obama appointing several justices to the Supreme Court (Carter didn’t appoint any), and the probability of his receiving an enthusiastic embrace from the international community, and we could see an administration unlike any we’ve seen for more than a generation.

Obama would make history by simply assuming office. But then, the question of governance: could this gifted, 47-year-old, first-term senator with a razor-thin political résumé harness his enormous power to push through an agenda that would meet our daunting challenges and secure our future?

History will be the judge, but on Nov. 5, it’s on.

*If I’m wrong, I’ll take my crow with a six pack of Liquid-Plumr.

James Welling (above image), Sara VanDerBeek, Shannon Ebner, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Demand group show at Gagosian

By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
NY Times Published: October 17, 2008

Back before the mortgage meltdown turned into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the country’s big economic problem was energy. The presidential campaign was on fire over what to “do” about the price of oil. Gas cost more than $4 a gallon, it was slowing down the economy, people were driving fewer miles and they were flying less. Believe it or not, this was an economic crisis that affected people who didn’t happen to be pinstriped bankers, hedge-fund managers or cabinet officials. You didn’t have to read the stock-market columns to know it was happening. Ordinary people started walking to town or skipping errands — taking the compact and not the S.U.V. Actually, I did that. And then, the price of oil plummeted, first because of slowing demand and recently amid panic selling during the credit crisis. And as it plunged more than 40 percent from its record high of $147 a barrel, the issue has faded.

Well, gas still costs $3.50 a gallon, and the price of a barrel of oil, last week close to $80, still is four times what it was all of six years ago. If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, consider that in the half-dozen years of the housing boom, residential home prices rose only 125 percent, whereas oil prices, even now, are 300 percent higher than they were six years ago. So the energy issue is still here. Remember the winter after Katrina, when home-heating-fuel prices caused an uproar? This winter they are likely to be much higher.

When the new president takes office, high energy costs will be — as they are already — a drag on the economy, one that is becoming conflated with the credit crisis. Last month, the U.S. auto industry sold fewer than one million cars — its slowest sales rate in 15 years. Tight credit and high gas prices each contributed to that. There is no way to completely unravel the two, but here is one fact: In the early part of this decade, when oil was cheap, Americans spent only 2 percent of their income on gasoline. Recently they have been spending about 4.5 percent — more than twice as much. And you can bet that the percentage is higher among families with lower incomes.

What we should do about all this varies greatly according to your view of why gas prices went up. Various people who know the oil industry have been worrying for several years that global supplies were running low. Emerging (and populous) nations like China and India have been consuming more, and in many countries and for reasons varying from geology to politics, production was peaking or actually declining. So the supply-demand equation was getting squeezed on both ends. Last winter — when the price was in the neighborhood of $100 per barrel — John Hess, the chairman of Hess Corporation, told a conference of energy specialists, “An oil crisis is coming — in the next 10 years.” Just in case the age of oil is truly ending, Hess, a medium-size oil company, is investing in fuel-cell technology, an alternative to gasoline. Richard Rainwater, the Texas investor who made billions buying oil stocks, shares the view that oil is scarce, and so does Warren Buffett, the investor whom Wall Street has been dialing for rescue capital. “It’s supply and demand,” Buffett told me. “The ability to produce 10 percent or 12 percent more than the world needed was there, and we got lulled into thinking — we just kept assuming — it would always be there. But there isn’t any tap to turn on now.” (Disclosure: I own stock in Buffett’s company.)

Buffett said this during the summer, before high oil prices (and before the full force of the credit hurricane) slowed the world’s thirst for oil. Under current conditions, the oil “tap” is not so dry, though presumably, economic activity will pick up someday and oil will become scarce again. Of course, this is if you believe that scarcity had anything to do with why the price rose in the first place.

There is also another, highly publicized view of the oil market. According to skeptics like George Soros and Michael Masters, a hedge-fund operator, the only thing wrong with the oil market is the market itself. Speculators, they say, drove the price away from its “fundamental” value; worse, a new breed of institutional investor has been buying oil futures, hoarding the supply. Masters compares these investors to the Hunt brothers, the Texas billionaires who cornered the silver market in the late ’70s — until silver crashed and the Hunts landed in bankruptcy. Essentially, he says, the oil price is, or was, seriously “wrong” — a distortion caused by traders that has little to do with the amount of oil being produced and consumed.

According to this view, oil traders are the culprits, as are the futures market and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates it. (The agency has also begun its own probe of the oil market.) Masters has fired off scores of e-mail messages to journalists and Wall Streeters, urging limits on speculators. (One message found its way to Senator Joe Lieberman.) Masters is not a disinterested party; his hedge fund has bet heavily on companies, like Delta Airlines, that have been punished by soaring oil prices. But his argument struck a populist chord. “Speculators are driving up the price of food and energy for everyone else,” he told me. Shad Rowe, a Dallas money manager, says the situation raises the bigger question of “whether people in a complex society ought to be allowed to make bets that affect other people and that have nothing to do with them.”

Of course, capitalism demands that people, or at least investors, make bets. That is how resources are allocated and money is invested where it is needed; high prices communicate scarcity. You could even say the oil market has performed a vital service to the country by telegraphing the need to conserve and to develop alternative supplies. The number of miles driven by Americans has declined, in recent months, by close to 5 percent. Consumers have abandoned S.U.V.’s, forcing Ford to speed up its plans to close truck factories and emphasize small cars. For similar reasons, General Motors and Chrysler are rushing to introduce electric cars. All of this is healthy, and none of it would have occurred in an environment of $20 oil. “Should speculators go to jail,” notes Robert Barbera, chief economist with the Wall Street firm ITG, “or should they get the Congressional Medal of Honor?”

In a sense, the question is whether we want to return to an era of plentiful oil and low prices — assuming it is possible — or to accept that political, geological and possibly environmental limitations will force us to diversify. The candidates, while talking tough about cutting our dependence on foreign oil, have supported some policies that seem inconsistent with that aim. Barack Obama has called for investment in alternative energy sources like wind and solar, and for ramping up production of cars that don’t rely on gasoline. John McCain has supported offshore drilling and nuclear power. Such policies are responsive to the idea that energy, oil in particular, is a scarce resource. And a higher oil price is the most persuasive lobby for all of them. But on the stump, each candidate has inveighed against high gasoline prices — as if prices were the problem, rather than a useful, albeit painful, signal that conventional supplies are running low. Obama supports a windfall tax on oil-company profits, a nonsolution that would discourage drilling and potentially worsen future shortages. (An Obama campaign flier asserts, “While you’re running on empty, Exxon made $4 billion in one month.”) McCain advocated a temporary repeal of the gas tax — a measure that would do the most to revive Americans’ love affair with big cars.

Congress took a positive step toward energy conservation last year, raising mileage requirements to 35 miles per gallon, but the new standard will not take effect until 2020 and will not, even then, make cars in the U.S. as efficient as those now on the road in Europe, where the average is about 45 miles per gallon. Wind and solar credits were also extended as part of the financial-bailout bill. Congress also held hearings (with Michael Masters as a prime witness) probing the supposed harm done by oil speculators. Blaming speculators is good politics. In 1958, the government shut down the market for onion futures after a price spike, and recently the Securities and Exchange Commission has seemed to blame speculators for the havoc in bank stocks.

The S.E.C. may not be all wrong, but oil trading and stock trading differ in an important respect. The stock market is a secondary market, in which investors merely exchange shares with one another. Except for the relatively rare occasions on which companies raise capital by selling new stock, changes in stock prices have little effect on nontraders, which means that mispricings (or bubbles) can persist for a long time. But commodity markets affect not just investors but also people who use the actual goods — all of us, that is.

Crude oil and other energy products are quoted on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a vast commodities pit with giant, wall-to-wall screens that is also a market for metals like copper and gold. Traders at the Merc buy and sell oil for future delivery, and the price on the Merc serves as the reference price for oil shipments around the world. In other words, when a refinery contracts to buy crude oil from, say, Saudi Arabia, it generally agrees to pay the price on the Merc less a certain differential. (The discount depends on the quality of the oil being shipped.) Approximately 500,000 crude-oil futures contracts, representing 500 million barrels, trade on the Merc each day. By comparison, the world uses only 86 million barrels of oil daily. Though in theory the price on the Merc reflects the underlying supply-and-demand trends, on any given day the futures market often wags the physical market, not the other way around.

Last June 5, for example, when the decrease in Americans’ gasoline consumption was already apparent, crude oil inexplicably shot up $5.49 a barrel — a record move. As analysts searched for an explanation, the following day oil soared like one of those fabled East Texas gushers — up $10.75. According to Raymond Carbone, a floor trader on the Merc, two news items — neither having anything to do with supply and demand — were behind it. Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, had made worrisome comments about inflation, which suggested that Trichet might raise interest rates, a step that could strengthen the euro and weaken the dollar. (When the dollar falls in currency markets, the price in dollars of international goods like vacations in France and barrels of crude oil generally goes up.) Also, an Israeli minister said it might be necessary to attack Iran. Israel did not attack — nor did the minister’s remark reflect any policy change — and the dollar was about to get stronger. Nonetheless, Carbone, who was betting on the rally to continue, figured the rumors were good for a ride and maintained his bets.

Looked at in isolation, trusting oil prices to Raymond Carbone and his peers on the Merc, and to their fellow speculators around the globe, does seem like madness. In two days, the price of a commodity that is a staple of everyday life rose 13 percent. According to a calculation by an energy economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve, that 48-hour market orgy weakened the future expected output of the U.S. economy by $90 billion, slicing more than half a percentage point off the gross domestic product.

But the link to the real economy means that commodity prices tend to correct relatively quickly. After all, when the price of a good is too high, people buy less of it. Also, a futures contract is not just a gambling chit (though many people use it that way). Futures are agreements to buy or sell actual oil (or corn or soybeans, etc.) at a future moment at a particular price. This makes them especially useful to hedgers, who use futures to offset risks in their business. Southwest Airlines correctly anticipated that oil would go up, and via futures bought its jet fuel in advance at prices lower than today’s.

Most of the trading on the Merc is probably done by speculators, not hedgers, and the vast majority settle in cash before their contracts expire. But the fact that traders have the right to settle in kind provides an important check. Say that traders went truly nuts and drove the price to $200 a barrel. Oil companies would take advantage and sell $200 oil by the boatload. Either the people who took delivery would be able to find customers for such expensive oil or — more likely — they would go broke, and the price would come crashing down.

The system sounds wacky, but those that preceded it were hardly better. Beginning in the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller tried to control oil’s price by monopolizing the distribution — until his company, Standard Oil, was dismantled in an antitrust case. In the 1930s, when oil sank to 10 cents a barrel, the state of Texas adopted a system that mimicked Rockefeller’s — or at least got the same result. For the next three decades, the Texas Railroad Commission controlled supplies by restricting well operators to a fixed number of production days per month. Then, in 1960, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which by then had supplanted Texas as the center of the oil world, founded the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries with the same principle in mind. (In fact, the founders hired a former Railroad Commission engineer to show them the ropes.) Since 1983, when the Merc introduced the crude-oil contract, investors and traders have largely assumed the cartel’s former function of setting prices.

The reason that the history of oil is basically one of attempted price fixing is that, as technology has improved, drilling costs have fallen, meaning that prices have been under near-continuous downward pressure. Like most commodities, oil should sell for whatever the cost of producing one additional unit is — in this case, one more barrel. Economists call this the “marginal” cost. If someone charges much more than that, a competitor can offer to sell it more cheaply.

It’s only when oil is scarce that things become interesting. If there isn’t enough to go around, then the marginal cost no longer matters because, at the margin, there is no more oil to produce. Under such conditions, oil will rise to the price at which people stop using it — either because they drive less or because they find another energy source. This is called the price of demand destruction. Think of that as the upper bound on the price. With the twin shocks of the ’70s — the Arab embargo and the Iranian revolution — oil did reach an upper bound, jumping tenfold to $40 a barrel in 1981. Demand quickly collapsed, and the price eventually sank all the way back to the marginal cost, $12.

Low prices were good news for consumers but a mixed blessing for society. Since it takes time for oil companies, as well as consumers, to react to price changes, markets tend to respond with a perilous lag. In the ’80s, oil companies were spending billions looking for oil, and Detroit was retooling its plants to make smaller cars, even as the price of oil was collapsing.

In the mid-1980s the oil industry suffered a terrible slump. Thousands of petroleum engineers were fired or left the business. Congress lost interest in energy conservation, and projects to develop shale oil and other alternatives were dropped. In Europe, high fuel taxes meant that people still had an incentive to conserve. In America, families became unwilling to ride in anything but trucks.

Even as oil prices rose in this decade, big oil companies — still responding to the price signal of an earlier period — plowed most of their cash flow into dividends and stock repurchases rather than risk it on exploration. State oil companies overseas, like Saudi Arabia’s, which control four-fifths of the world’s reserves, refused to make the investment to develop their fields to full potential for fear of flooding the market (another reaction to low prices). For similar reasons, there was a lull in building critically needed refineries.

By the time oil companies woke up to the consequences of low prices, it was in some sense too late. There was “a missing generation of engineers,” according to Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the author of “The Prize,” a history of the oil industry. There was also a lack of drilling rigs and men to work them. Drilling costs soared, and equipment was often unavailable. Also, countries where oil is abundant, like Russia and Venezuela, were increasingly chauvinistic and hostile to foreign operators. Civil unrest set back production in Nigeria.

By the middle of this decade, various big oil regions — Mexico, Nigeria, the North Sea, Colombia, Venezuela — were experiencing production declines. Matthew Simmons, an energy banker in Houston, made a startling forecast: the entire world’s oil production, he said, was peaking and was headed for irreversible decline.

Simmons was dismissed as an alarmist, and much of what he said was extreme. He spoke of a looming, postglobal economy in which transportation grinds to a halt, almost a literal return to the Dark Ages. This isn’t going to happen. At least not right away. The world has 1.3 trillion barrels of proven reserves, enough for 40 years at current rates of consumption. “Peak oil is about geology,” notes Marianne Kah, chief economist at ConocoPhillips. “I don’t think we are running out of oil. We are running out of access to oil.”

Kah is right: there is plenty of oil. But it cannot be withdrawn at will like money from an A.T.M.; wells yield only so much liquid per day. And since the flow from aging wells declines by about 5 percent a year, producers that stand pat will shrink. To stay even requires investment — and usually, the incentive of a high price. It also takes time. Thus, in the short run, whether the constraints on supplies are geologic or human may not matter.

What frightened markets last spring was the awareness that capacity was flattening at the same time that a strong global economy was pushing demand rapidly higher. And emerging nations would seem to have a lot of oil-demand growth ahead of them. While the U.S. consumes 25 barrels of oil per capita annually and Europe 10 barrels, each Chinese consumes 2 barrels a year. Given their numbers, even a small amount of growth in Chinese consumption will offset a great deal of conservation in the U.S. Rising demand is especially ominous in light of Buffett’s point: there is less spare capacity than in the previous decade. Before, if a war or hurricane were to interrupt supplies, Saudi Arabia could always open the tap farther. Soon there might not be enough. “Imagine if you and I were trading jelly beans,” Ken Hersh, who runs an energy fund, offered in a telling metaphor. “We both love jelly beans, we know our kids are going to like ’em, and our kids’ kids, and five years from now we have to make a trade and we look in the jar and there is only one jelly bean left.” As traders wondered what would happen if there was a natural or man-made disaster, they were pricing each barrel as if it were the very last jelly bean.

Institutions also have been counting jelly beans. After the stock-market disasters of the dot-com collapse in 2000 and Enron in 2001, big investors began to look for alternatives to stocks. Wall Street promoted commodities as the answer, and institutions like Harvard University and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System have taken a flier on commodity indexes that are heavily weighted in oil. Masters is incensed because such investors tend to hold for the long haul and thus, he claims, to remove supplies from the market. Then again, commodities could be just the latest fad. Literature from A.I.G., the recently rescued insurer, described commodities as “an asset class which has returns that have historically been comparable to stock returns but with lower volatility.” This is a gross distortion. (It is true only if you calculate the returns in a highly stylized manner.) The fact is that from 1975 to 2005, the average commodity did not keep up with inflation, much less with the stock market. Whether it is wise to invest pensions and endowments in rocks is, of course, their business, but it is hard to see why they should be less free than others to express an opinion — even if it does feed into prices. This, in fact, is what speculators are supposed to do: translate (however imperfectly) expectations about the future into today’s price.

You can argue that last July’s $147 peak was irrational, but Aubrey McClendon, the chief executive of the Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy, says it was merely the answer to a real-world economics quiz: at what price would the world consume less oil? Americans began to cut back on their driving at $50 oil, and at something like $120 oil they garaged their S.U.V.’s en masse. People in many emerging nations were slower to react, because their governments subsidize local gasoline prices. But as the price rose, such a subsidy became costly, and beginning in May, China, India, Indonesia and others cut their subsidies. The upper bound had been reached.

It’s actually the lower bound that should concern Washington now. When you ask economists what the minimum oil price is to sustain the development of alternatives to gasoline — new battery systems or sugar ethanol or even wood chips — you get a range of something like $75 a barrel to maybe $150.

Marginal costs for oil are less than those for alternative technologies, though they are rising. The marginal barrels today are found in remote and costly terrain, like the Canadian tar sands or off the coast of Brazil under 7,000 feet of seawater and more than 10,000 feet of ocean floor.

One intriguing alternative is natural gas. Its price also soared, from $2 per thousand cubic feet to $13. And while U.S. oil production has been falling for four decades, the gas industry is experiencing a revival. Most recently, gas companies have embarked on a frantic quest to lease land in a vast, wooded region of the Northeast known as the Marcellus Shale that may contain more natural gas than anywhere else in America. The drilling uses a new technology to inject water deep below the surface to split apart the shale, then underground drilling continues horizontally for hundreds of feet.

Farmers in the Marcellus who once leased land for $2 an acre are reaping fortunes. One 73-year-old dairy farmer leased 1,100 acres for $2.5 million. There could be many more like him out there. The United States has a lot of untapped shale, and there is no engineering reason that America could not substitute gas, which is cleaner and produces only half as much carbon as oil, for much of its driving. Eight million cars in the world already run on natural gas, though very few in the U.S. do. To Barbera, the economist, whose family owns some land in the Marcellus, it proves that technology will frustrate Thomas Malthus, the classical economist who forecast catastrophic, population-induced food shortages. The only risk in the Marcellus is that falling prices will sabotage the entire enterprise. Last summer, when gas was at a peak, Barbera told me that the gas companies rushing to sign up farmers reminded him of the way venture capitalists once threw money at Web sites. They shouldn’t be asking how high gas can go, he said; they should be asking at what price does the drilling stop.

Bingo. Gas has fallen to $7. If it falls much more, the Marcellus looks a lot less interesting. And if oil falls to $70, so do other alternatives.

It would be a tragedy if falling prices were to extinguish such alternatives and — given the time lag inherent in energy development — leave the country vulnerable to a yet another round of shocks. There is no disputing, as Ben Bernanke said, that recently falling oil prices are giving the economy a shot in the arm. But new energy projects also create jobs, and though oil prices impose a cost, Europe has lived with high prices (because of the imposition of taxes) and adjusted to them.

What can Washington do now? McClendon, the Chesapeake chief executive, whose company is active in the Marcellus, is angling for federal subsidies to help service stations convert to natural gas. This is what every energy pioneer wants: subsidies for what it does. But Congress is probably not the optimal institution for anointing technological winners. Its mandate to use corn for ethanol, while it has done wonders for Iowa farmers, has led to sharply higher corn prices and has not added much (if anything) to the country’s energy supply. And even if politicians act with the purest of motives, there are simply too many possibilities for the car of tomorrow (fuel cells, nickel-hydride or lithium-ion batteries, natural gas, biofuel from wood chips and oil itself) to know which will prove the most feasible.

The government could help finance basic research, but there is no reason to rule out any source — oil included. By restricting offshore drilling, the United States is shunning an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil (equal to 80 percent of our proven reserves). As McClendon says, it’s hard to fault Mexico or Saudi Arabia for not developing their fields to the max when the U.S. declares its own territory off-limits.

What the country doesn’t want is to remain dependent only on oil — to lose the urgency to develop alternatives. It happened once before. After the gas lines of the ’70s, Jimmy Carter declared that solving our energy problems was the moral equivalent of war. Then, in the 1980s, Americans forgot.

The way to avoid a repeat is to dust off an idea that Gerald Ford once proposed: a tax on oil. Ideally, it would kick in only if the price fell back to, say, $70 a barrel. The beauty of this tax is that, very likely, no one would have to pay it. The tax would merely serve as a floor — a new lower bound. Auto companies would never have to worry that cheap gas would tempt consumers away from efficient cars; investors could finance development of batteries and fuel cells, because cheap oil could never undercut them. Oil itself would be used more sparingly and last longer. The oil market did its part when it sent the price to almost $150. The government should make sure there is no going back.

Roger Lowenstein, an outside director of the Sequoia Fund, is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC subways, Bankrupted San Diego and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis.”

By DAN FROSCH
NY Times Published: October 16, 2008

RIVERTON, Wyo. — At 69, her eyes soft and creased with age, Alvena Oldman remembers how the teachers at St. Stephens boarding school on the Wind River Reservation would strike students with rulers if they dared to talk in their native Arapaho language.

“We were afraid to speak it,” she said. “We knew we would be punished.”

More than a half-century later, only about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation, fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.

“This is a race against the clock, and we’re in the 59th minute of the last hour,” said a National Indian Education Association board member, Ryan Wilson, whom the tribe hired as a consultant to help get the school off the ground. Like other tribes, the Northern Arapaho have suffered from the legacy of Indian boarding institutions, established by the federal government in the late 1800s to “Americanize” Native American children. It was at such schools that teachers instilled the “kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy, young boys had their traditional braids shorn, and students were forbidden to speak tribal languages.

The discipline of those days was drummed into an entire generation of Northern Arapaho, and most tribal members never passed down the language. Of all the remaining fluent speakers, none are younger than 55.

That is what tribal leaders hope to change. About 22 children from pre-kindergarten through first grade started classes at the school — a rectangular one-story structure with a fresh coat of white paint and the words Hinono’ Eitiino’ Oowu’ (translation: Arapaho Language Lodge) written across its siding.

Here, set against an endless stretch of windswept plains and tufts of cottonwoods, instructors are using a state-approved curriculum to teach students exclusively in Arapaho. All costs related to the school, which has an operating budget of $340,000 a year, are paid for by the tribe and private donors. Administrators plan to add a grade each year until it comprises pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade classes.

“This environment is a complete reversal of what occurs too often in schools, where a child is ridiculed or reprimanded for speaking one’s heritage language,” said Inée Y. Slaughter, executive director of the Indigenous Language Institute, a group in Santa Fe, N.M., that works with tribes on native languages.

“I want my son to talk nothing but Arapaho to me and my grandparents,” said Kayla Howling Buffalo, who enrolled her 4-year-old son, RyLee, in the school.

Ms. Howling Buffalo, 25, said she, too, had been inspired to take Arapaho classes because her grandmother no longer has anyone to speak with and fears she is losing her first language.

Such sentiments are not uncommon on the reservation and have become more pronounced in the five years since Helen Cedar Tree, at 96 the oldest living Northern Arapaho, made an impassioned plea to the tribe’s council of elders.

“She said: ‘Look at all of you guys talking English, and you know your own language. It’s like the white man has conquered us,’ ” said Gerald Redman Sr., the chairman of the council of elders. “It was a wake-up call.”

A group of Arapaho families had sent their children to a pre-kindergarten language program for years, but it was not enough. Heeding Ms. Cedar Tree’s words, the tribe began using Arapaho dictionaries, night classes, CDs made by the tribe, and anything they could find to help resuscitate the language. In the end, “we knew in our hearts that immersion was the only way we were going to turn this around,” said Mr. Wilson, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

He was referring not just to the potential for the Arapaho language’s extinction but to a host of other problems that have long plagued the vast reservation, which the tribe shares with the Eastern Shoshone.

“Language-immersion schools offer an environment that goes beyond teaching the language,” Ms. Slaughter said. “It provides a safe place where a child’s roots are nurtured, its culture honored, and its being valued.”

According to tribal statistics and the United States Attorney’s Office in Wyoming, 78 percent of household heads on the reservation are unemployed, the student dropout rate is 52 percent and crime has been rising.

Most recently, in June, three teenage girls were found dead in a low-income housing complex. The F.B.I. has not yet released autopsy results, but many tribal members think drugs or alcohol were involved. The deaths left the reservation reeling. Officials here hope that the school will herald a positive change, just as programs elsewhere have helped native youth become conversational in their tribal languages, enhancing cultural pride and participation in the process. A groundswell of language revitalization efforts has led to successful Indian immersion schools in Hawaii, Montana and New York.

Studies show that language fluency among young Indians is tied to overall academic achievement, and experts say such learning can have other positive effects.

“Language seems to be a healing force for Native American communities,” said Ellen Lutz, executive director of Cultural Survival, a group based in Cambridge, Mass., that is working with the Northern Arapaho. At a recent ceremony to celebrate the school’s opening, held in an old tribal meeting hall, three young girls sang shyly in Arapaho. Behind them, a row of elders sat quietly, their faces wizened and stoic, legs shuffling rhythmically as familiar words carried through the building.

“They are the ones who whispered it on the playground when nobody was looking,” Mr. Wilson said, referring to the elders. “If we lose that language, we lose who we are.