By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 5, 2010

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.

I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here’s hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future.

Choe Sang-Hun/The New York Times

Cha Sa-soon, with her new car.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
NY Times Published: September 3, 2010

SINCHON, South Korea

A PERSON could know South Korea for a long time without knowing Wanju, an obscure county 112 miles south of Seoul. And, at least until recently, a person could know a lot about Wanju without ever hearing of Cha Sa-soon, a 69-year-old woman who lives alone in the mountain-ringed village of Sinchon.

Now, however, Ms. Cha is an unlikely national celebrity.

This diminutive woman, now known nationwide as “Grandma Cha Sa-soon,” has achieved a record that causes people here to first shake their heads with astonishment and then smile: She failed her driver’s test hundreds of times but never gave up. Finally, she got her license — on her 960th try.

For three years starting in April 2005, she took the test once a day five days a week. After that, her pace slowed, to about twice a week. But she never quit.

Hers is a fame based not only on sheer doggedness, a quality held in high esteem by Koreans, but also on the universal human sympathy for a monumental — and in her case, cheerful — loser.

“When she finally got her license, we all went out in cheers and hugged her, giving her flowers,” said Park Su-yeon, an instructor at Jeonbuk Driving School, which Ms. Cha once attended. “It felt like a huge burden falling off our back. We didn’t have the guts to tell her to quit because she kept showing up.”

Of course, Ms. Park and another driving teacher noted, perhaps Ms. Cha should content herself with simply getting the license and not endangering others on the road by actually driving. But they were not too worried about the risk, they said, because it was the written test, not the driving skill and road tests, that she failed so many times.

WHEN word began spreading last year of the woman who was still taking the test after failing it more than 700 times, reporters traced her to Sinchon, where the bus, the only means of public transportation, comes by once every two hours on a street so narrow it has to pull over to let other vehicles pass.

They followed her to the test site in the city of Jeonju, an hour away. There, they also videotaped her in the market, where she sells her home-grown vegetables at an open-air stall.

Once she finally got her license, in May, Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group, South Korea’s leading carmaker, started an online campaign asking people to post messages of congratulations. Thousands poured in. In early August, Hyundai presented Ms. Cha with a $16,800 car.

Ms. Cha, whose name, coincidentally enough, is Korean for “vehicle,” now also appears on a prime-time television commercial for Hyundai.

It is a big change from her non-celebrity life, spent simply in a one-room hut with a slate roof, where the only sounds on a recent summer day were from a rain-swollen brook, occasional military jets flying overhead and cicadas rioting in the nearby persimmon trees. A lone old man dozed, occasionally swatting at flies, in a small shop next to the bus stop.

Born to a peasant family with seven children but no land, Ms. Cha spent her childhood working in the fields and studying at an informal night school. It was not until she turned 15 that she joined a formal school as a fourth grader. But her schooling ended there a few years later.

“Father had no land, and middle school was just a dream for me,” she said.

Ms. Cha said she had always envied people who could drive, but it was not until she was in her 60s that she got around to trying for a license.

“Here, if you miss the bus, you have to wait another two hours. Talk about frustration!” said Ms. Cha, who had to transfer to a second bus to get to her driving test site and to yet another to reach her market stall.

“But I was too busy raising my four children,” she continued. “Eventually they all grew up and went away and my husband died several years ago, and I had more time for myself. I wanted to get a driver’s license so I could take my grandchildren to the zoo.”

Ms. Cha tackled the first obstacle, which for years proved insurmountable: the 50-minute written test consisting of 40 multiple-choice questions on road regulations and car maintenance.

Early in the morning (she wakes up 4 a.m.) and before going to bed, she put on her reading glasses and pored over her well-worn test-preparation books. She first tried, unsuccessfully, an audio test for illiterate people where questions were read to test-takers. Later, she switched to the normal test.

“She could read and write words phonetically but she could not understand most of the terminology, such as ‘regulations’ and ‘emergency light,’ ” said Ms. Park, the teacher.

Choi Young-chul, an official at the regional driving license agency, said: “What she was essentially doing while studying alone was memorizing as many questions — with their answers — as possible without always knowing what they were all about. It’s not easy to pass the test that way.”

PRACTICE made perfect, but slowly. She failed the written test 949 times, but her scores steadily crept up. When she came to them early last year, teachers at Jeonbuk Driving School pitched in, giving her extra lessons, painstakingly explaining the terminology.

“It drove you crazy to teach her, but we could not get mad at her,” said Lee Chang-su, another teacher. “She was always cheerful. She still had the little girl in her.”

It was only last November, on her 950th try, that she achieved a passing grade of 60 out of 100. She then passed two driving skill and road tests, but only after failing each four times. For each of her 960 tests, she had to pay $5 in application fees.

“I didn’t mind,” said Ms. Cha. “To me, commuting every day to take the test was like going to school. I always missed school.”

Her son, Park Seong-ju, 36, who lives in Jeonju and makes signboards and placards, said: “Mother has lived a hard life, selling vegetables door to door and working other people’s farms. Maybe that made her stubborn. If she puts her mind to something, no one can argue her out of it.”

About a decade ago, before embarking on her quest for a driver’s license, Ms. Cha spent three years studying for a hairdresser’s license. For six months, she caught a 6 a.m. bus every weekday, switched to a train and then to another bus to attend a government-financed training program for hairdressers. But no beauty salon would hire her. She was considered too old.

No matter, she said. “It was like getting a school diploma.”

Her tenacity has struck a chord with South Koreans, who are often exhorted to recall the hardship years after the 1950-53 Korean War and celebrate perseverance as a national trait.

The country’s most popular boxing champion was Hong Su-hwan, who was floored four times before knocking out Hector Carrasquilla to win the World Boxing Association’s super bantamweight championship in 1977. His feat gave rise to a popular phrase about resolve: “Sajeonogi,” or “Knocked down four times, rising up five.”

Ms. Cha seems to have given new meaning to this favorite Korean saying.

On her wall where she hung black-and-white photographs of her and her late husband as a young couple and a watch that had stopped ticking, she also had posted a handwritten — and misspelled — sign that read, “Never give up!”

Valentin Bontjes van Beek

The Hungarian pavilion.

RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
NY Times Published: September 3, 2010

VENICE — Kazuyo Sejima won the Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale for her design for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and she is back this year to curate the 2010 Biennale, the first Japanese and first female curator of the event, now in its 12th edition.

Her choice of nearly 50 architects, engineers and artists, whose presentations fill the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Biennale Gardens and the Corderie, or Rope Walk, at the Arsenale, is above all marked by its diversity, unified under the usefully unspecific overarching title of “People meet in architecture.” This core show is accompanied by exhibitions at 53 national pavilions on the two principal sites and at scores of other locations around the city.

Some of the architects and engineers Ms. Sejima has invited to participate have created installations that would not look out of place at a visual arts biennial. At the Corderie, for example, the Spanish Antón García-Abril & Ensamble studio have made an imposing full-scale mock-up of the primary structural elements of their inside-out “Hemeroscopium House” in Madrid, which consists of gigantic gray concrete beams in the shape of outsized steel girders; from Germany, Transsolar KlimaEngineering and Tetsuo Kondo Architects have collaborated in “Cloudscapes” to build a looped walkway rising through a dense blanket of artificially generated mist; and the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in his pitch-dark “Your split second house” has produced another perception-bending experience of cracking spirals of light.

Ms. Sejima’s ideas of what is relevant to architecture today are probably more eclectic than those of any previous curator of the event. A tiny space in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni accommodates a floor-to-ceiling selection of drawings from the notebooks of the visionary and influential English architect Cedric Price (1934-2003), creator of the famous kinetic aviary for the London Zoo, with a delightful video of him talking about them. In a large hall in the Artilerie at the Arsenale, meanwhile, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff consists of forty speakers playing the individual sung parts of the 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in alium,” or “40-part motet,” one of the most elaborately “architectural” pieces of music ever written.

The enduring importance of drawing as the launching pad of the creative architectural process is vigorously advocated by the Hungarian pavilion, its internal spaces festooned with curtains of pencils, combined with videos exploring this form of human expression that stretches back to our distant ancestors.

Ms. Sejima has taken the opportunity to showcase some of her own recent projects. At the Palazzo delle Esposizioni is a joint project, currently under construction, with her partner Ryue Nishizawa to create a new form of museum integrated with the landscape and village houses on the small Japanese island of Inujima on the Seto Inland Sea. This will consist of a series of scattered exhibition spaces with a larger, semi-subterranean exhibition hall at the island’s summit, blending with the local topography but affording views of the surrounding sea and countryside.

The landscaped qualities of her style, with its contours and undulating interiors reflecting the natural environment, are captured on a 12-minute film by Wim Wenders that shows her recently completed Rolex Learning Center at the École polytechnique fédérale in its hilltop position in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is screened in the Corderie.

Mr. Wenders’s film is shot in 3-D, a form ideally suited to conveying architectural volumes that is also effectively employed in several other presentations, including those of the Danish and Australian pavilions. The former looks at Copenhagen, a city where hundreds of microarchitectural projects have been realized in recent decades but which has not had a grand plan since the late 1940s. This kind of macroplanning for the future is now under way and the various displays illustrate the sometimes radical transformations the city and its surroundings can expect to undergo.

A film at the Australian pavilion, watchable with the aid of 3-D glasses suspended from the ceiling, alternates between panoramic night views of the country’s coastal cities (where 93 per cent of the populations lives) and the vertiginous open-cast mines in the near-uninhabited interior, from which billions of tons of raw materials are being excavated to build cities elsewhere, and which cover areas as large and as deep as inverted high-rise city centers.

National pavilion responses to the curator’s theme of “People meet in architecture” are extremely varied. The Kingdom of Bahrain is at the Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time this year, and was awarded the Golden Lion for best participating country (the awards ceremony was on Aug. 28). Their “Reclaim” show at the Arsenale features three “kabayen” (or cabins, derived from the English word), ad hoc recreational huts built on stilts of drift wood and other odds and ends, and furnished with carpets and cushions.

Once an island of fishers and pearl divers, Bahrain is now highly urbanized and land reclaimed for building has pushed the coastlines further out to sea. But determined to maintain their littoral lifestyle, a number of fishermen and others have taken to building these structures along the shore, and they have become important places to meet, chat and socialize. As the newly reclaimed land is eventually developed, the cabin dwellers have to move on. One of the cabins on show had already been shifted to a new seaside location five times.

The Nordic Countries pavilion offers a broad survey of social gathering places, from squares and saunas to observation platforms and a moveable church. The Finnish pavilion presents some striking recent designs for schools, the places where many of us first encounter a wider world.

The design of domestic living spaces is the theme of many shows across the whole Biennale.

Estonia, with a population of under 1,400,000, offers a very positive environment to its many young architects, with 90 per cent of homes built to unique designs. In Japan, the rate of replacing houses is phenomenally high — every 26 years, compared with 150 years in Britain — offering ample opportunities for local architects to experiment and tailor their forms, typically within restricted plots, to the lifestyles of particular clients.

The Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow’s display, part of Ms. Sejima’s exhibition, includes designs catering to an aspiring Tea Master, a journalist couple, a banker, an architect, and a woman who wishes to retire with plenty of space for her pet pony.

The architect Martin Rajnis’s “Natural Architecture” fills and even erupts out of the Czech pavilion into the Biennale Gardens. To create his wood structures he seeks “inspiration in the deeper laws of nature, which is an unbelievable treasure-house of ingenious structures, forms, colors, systems and chance.”

“The Ark. Old Seeds for New Cultures” at the Greek pavilion also proposes a “back to nature” solution in the form of a symbolic but habitable wooden ark, stuffed with native seeds, plants and dried fruits, emitting a complex melange of contrasting aromas, with a functioning galley kitchen and sleeping area, a kind of refuge/meeting place/incubator for rethinking the relationship between city and country and the future of architecture in general.

12th Venice Architecture Biennale. Biennale Gardens, Arsenale and other venues. Through Nov. 21.

Dish attributed to Solomon Loy, Alamance County, North Carolina, 1825-1840.

A WORLD OF CERAMICS

By EVE M. KAHN
NY Times Published: September 2, 2010

In North Carolina, 18th-century immigrant potters developed signature styles. Quakers from England preferred sunburst motifs on red backgrounds, while German Lutherans and Calvinists specialized in polka dots and stripes on black vessels. Moravians from Bohemia molded green flasks in turtle and owl forms and painted pomegranates and lilies to symbolize Jesus’ wounds and rebirth.

The products were all made near Greensboro. When they are shown together, “it’s going to be such a flood of pattern and color,” said Robert Hunter, a curator of “Art in Clay: Masterworks of North Carolina Earthenware,” now at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition ranks as “the largest and certainly the most revisionist” display of the material ever organized, Mr. Hunter said. Luke Beckerdite, a curator of the show, explained, “For so long, everyone thought all of this was Moravian.”

About half of the 120 pieces are loans from Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C., near the sites of Moravian workshops. Archaeological digs there and at other settlers’ kilns have not yet been completed, Mr. Beckerdite said. Shards keep turning up that suggest how communities experimented with forms. The excavations, he said, “will be key to establishing the final word.”

Milwaukee Art Museum

Thanks to Kelly Breslin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 2, 2010

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.

But let’s put politics aside and talk about what we’ve actually learned about economic policy over the past 20 months.

When Mr. Obama first proposed $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, there were two groups of critics. Both argued that unemployment would stay high — but for very different reasons.

One group — the group that got almost all the attention — declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. If you were, say, reading The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in early 2009, you would have been repeatedly informed that the Obama plan would lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation.

The other group, which included yours truly, warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecasts then available. As I pointed out in February 2009, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a $2.9 trillion hole in the economy over the next two years; an $800 billion program, partly consisting of tax cuts that would have happened anyway, just wasn’t up to the task of filling that hole.

Critics in the second camp were particularly worried about what would happen this year, since the stimulus would have its maximum effect on growth in late 2009 then gradually fade out. Last year, many of us were already warning that the economy might stall in the second half of 2010.

So what actually happened? The administration’s optimistic forecast was wrong, but which group of pessimists was right about the reasons for that error?

Start with interest rates. Those who said the stimulus was too big predicted sharply rising rates. When rates rose in early 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “The Bond Vigilantes: The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return.” The editorial declared that it was all about fear of deficits, and concluded, “When in doubt, bet on the markets.”

But those who said the stimulus was too small argued that temporary deficits weren’t a problem as long as the economy remained depressed; we were awash in savings with nowhere to go. Interest rates, we said, would fluctuate with optimism or pessimism about future growth, not with government borrowing.

When in doubt, bet on the markets. The 10-year bond rate was over 3.7 percent when The Journal published that editorial; it’s under 2.7 percent now.

What about inflation? Amid the inflation hysteria of early 2009, the inadequate-stimulus critics pointed out that inflation always falls during sustained periods of high unemployment, and that this time should be no different. Sure enough, key measures of inflation have fallen from more than 2 percent before the economic crisis to 1 percent or less now, and Japanese-style deflation is looking like a real possibility.

Meanwhile, the timing of recent economic growth strongly supports the notion that stimulus does, indeed, boost the economy: growth accelerated last year, as the stimulus reached its predicted peak impact, but has fallen off — just as some of us feared — as the stimulus has faded.

Oh, and don’t tell me that Germany proves that austerity, not stimulus, is the way to go. Germany actually did quite a lot of stimulus — the austerity is all in the future. Also, it never had a housing bubble that burst. And with all that, German G.D.P. is still further below its precrisis peak than American G.D.P. True, Germany has done better in terms of employment — but that’s because strong unions and government policy have prevented American-style mass layoffs.

The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round.

I know that getting that round is unlikely: Republicans and conservative Democrats won’t stand for it. And if, as expected, the G.O.P. wins big in November, this will be widely regarded as a vindication of the anti-stimulus position. Mr. Obama, we’ll be told, moved too far to the left, and his Keynesian economic doctrine was proved wrong.

But politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. The economic theory behind the Obama stimulus has passed the test of recent events with flying colors; unfortunately, Mr. Obama, for whatever reason — yes, I’m aware that there were political constraints — initially offered a plan that was much too cautious given the scale of the economy’s problems.

So, as I said, here’s hoping that Mr. Obama goes big next week. If he does, he’ll have the facts on his side.

Now Open
1549 Echo Park Avenue

cookbook

Kanagawa Institute of Technology

via

Aug 16, 2010
Archinect

This house in the Osaka Prefecture Sakai City of Japan was built as a single family residence for three. It is located in a quiet residential neighborhood near the old Hamadera Suwanomori tram station. The client purchased the plot in this part of town because his childhood memories are deeply rooted within this neighborhood.

In the North, the house faces a narrow 4 meter-wide road, and in the West and East, it is framed by neighboring houses. In the South, house connects to the lush green area of the Suwanomori shinto shrine. It was a main request, that the green in the South was to be felt in the plans.

The interior is sprinkled with natural light through many small windows and ceiling lights which achive a bright space and avoid installing big east/west windows. The space is dominated by the split-level circulation and the material choices.

Both east and west walls have been fully utilized as bookshelfs to act as book storage and also display the growth of the family’s child. The design mentality that seeks to avoid clutter and uselessness has the bookshelf walls also act as additional layers of insulation against the outside heat.

The spatial configuration is designed in a way that lets the inhabitants feel as close to nature as possible: natural light and the rich green from the South coming in, and natural ventilation that can be controlled through additional openings and shutters in the North, South, East and West, depending on the respective season.

To obtain this, an opening with shutters on the first floor facing the South toggles ventilation, according to the current climate situation, and maintains privacy from the outside. An additional dividing wall can be created with half room-high folding doors.

Special energy was devoted to creating a union between the single shades of plywood used on the floor, the wall, ceilings, and fittings. A careful selection was applied to the arrangement of colors, paints, and wood stains to give the space a light attitude. The client’s personal mark can be felt here and there.

The idea was to create a timeless and environmentally friendly residence that adjusts naturally to the family’s changing needs as time passes.

Archinect

Untitled (Scars), 2008, concrete, dye, ink, hair, acrylic paint, linen, wood, staples, 17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm)

Discipline Joy Lake, 2008, concrete, dye, ink, hair, acrylic paint, linen, wood, staples, 17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm)

Saw these a while ago and can’t stop thinking about them

David Kordansky

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Orange County, Calif., has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years, but the percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent in June, the lowest level in 70 years. But it has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, a land of gated communities and great wealth that produced a steady stream of colorful conservative figures. A view of Newport Ridge, a high-end housing development in southern Orange County.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: August 29, 2010

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Orange County has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years: birthplace of President Richard M. Nixon and home to John Wayne, a bastion for the John Birch Society, a land of orange groves and affluence, the region of California where Republican presidential candidates could always count on a friendly audience.

But this iconic county of 3.1 million people passed something of a milestone in June. The percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent, the lowest level in 70 years.

It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful — its detractors might suggest zany — reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state.

At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county’s residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land.

The demographic changes that have swept the county reflect what is happening across the state and much of the nation. It has happened slowly but surely over the course of a generation, becoming increasingly apparent not only in a drive through the 34 cities that fill this sprawling 789-square-mile county south of Los Angeles, but also, most recently, in the results of a presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama drew 48 percent of the vote here against Senator John McCain of Arizona. (By comparison, in 1980, Jimmy Carter received just 23 percent against Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero whose election as California governor in 1966 and 1970 was boosted in no small part by the affection for him here.)

“I was a city planner in San Diego in 1960 when Orange County was just orange groves and typecast as a conservative stronghold,” said Marshall Kaplan, the executive director of the Merage Foundations, which runs educational and other programs for recent immigrants here. “It isn’t anymore. I live in Irvine. My wife is Asian. In Irvine, I sometimes feel like I’m her affirmative action program.”

Manuel Gomez, the vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, Irvine, said the county where he was born 63 years ago is almost unrecognizable to him today. “With diversity comes more cultural voices and political voices,” he said. “And certainly better food.”

Orange County is not unique in being a reliable Republican region in California. But this county has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, the anti-Los Angeles, a land of gated communities and great wealth that managed to produce a steady stream of colorful conservative figures, including the televangelist Robert H. Schuller and former Representative Robert K. Dornan — B-1 Bob, as he was known, for his advocacy of military projects. (In a sign of what was to come, Mr. Dornan lost the House seat in 1996 to a Democratic Latina, Loretta Sanchez).

With such world-famous attractions as Disneyland and Mr. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and enclaves like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, Orange County is as much a symbol in California as it is nationally.

Indeed, to some measure, the extent of the county’s transformation may seem magnified simply because of the way people thought of it in the past. “The new Orange County is not a repudiation of the old,” said Kevin Starr, a California historian. “For all the attention paid the right-wingers there, they never really took up the whole place. They were just more mediagenic than everyone else.”

Still, by any measure, this is no longer Nixon’s Orange County.

Here in Santa Ana, a sign on a downtown furniture store the other day advertised a sale in Spanish only; nearly 95 percent of the enrollment in the public schools is Latino. The mayor of Irvine, Sukhee Kang, was born in Korea, making him the first Korean-American to run a major American city. “We have 35 languages spoken in our city,” Mr. Kang said.

A few miles away in Westminster — where Vietnamese immigrants began arriving about 30 years ago, earning the area the name Little Saigon — is a dazzling sea of Vietnamese characters on storefronts and billboards (including one for McDonald’s). “I’ve been here for 30 years,” said Kinh Tram, 59, as he sat in front of a two-story mall that was crowded with other Vietnamese immigrants. “When I first came here, most of these were open lots.”

There are pockets of deep poverty spread across a county long identified with suburban affluence and escape from urban Los Angeles. About 25 percent of residents here did not have health insurance at some point during 2009, according to a report released last week by the U.C.L.A. Center for Health Policy Research. Less than a mile from the entrance to Disneyland is a Latino enclave of low-income housing where trucks arrive every morning, with names like Yucatán Produce, to sell groceries and household goods to people who cannot afford a car to drive to the store.

Orange remains a Republican county, at least relatively: an influx of immigrants certainly does not equate to automatic Democratic gains, here or anywhere else across the country. Many Vietnamese immigrants are socially conservative and run for office as Republicans. Until the increased identification of the Republican Party with tough measures on immigration in recent years, Latino voters were also clearly in play for Republicans. Most elected officials in Orange County are Republicans.

But the political texture of this county, which is larger in population than Nevada or Iowa, is changing, and many officials say it is only a matter of time before many Republican officeholders get swept out with the tide.

While Republicans have been on a steady decline — in 1990, they made up 56 percent of the electorate — the percentage of independent voters, as in much of the state, soared to 20 percent this past June from 8.6 percent in 1990. President Obama’s strong showing here in 2008 continued a nearly 30-year pattern in which the vote for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily increased.

Mr. Tram, the Vietnamese immigrant in Westminster, said that he had voted for Mr. Obama and that he thought most of his Vietnamese friends had done the same. “The Republicans are for rich people,” he said.

A large reason for this transformation is immigration. But the changes also reflect how the regional economy has changed, with the shrinking of the aerospace industry, which supported the once dominant, mostly white middle-class community here. That has largely been taken over by service, tourism and high-tech jobs, the result being that this county is a contrast of the extremely wealthy and the lower middle class.

“It’s less of a middle-class suburb today,” said Michael M. Ruane, the director of the Orange County Community Indicators Project, which studies economic and demographic trends in the county. “You have areas of poverty and areas of great affluence and less of a middle.”

Even fans of the recent hit television series “The O.C.,” whose main characters were prosperous white residents of Newport Beach, got little hint of the diversity of the region. “The county is becoming more like California,” Mr. Ruane said. “The national image that it is an entirely conservative and entirely Republican county is wrong. Voter registration patterns and voting have shifted as a result of these demographic shifts.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 29, 2010

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.

So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.

And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.

But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

San Pedro bassist Mike Watt at his studio at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)

By John Payne
Special to the Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2010

Mike Watt banged up a knee while onstage thumping his bass with legendary proto- punk band the Stooges a few weeks back, so, at least for a while, there won’t be any kayaking or morning bicycle rides around his beloved San Pedro for the local art-punk champ. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop playing.

“I’m still doing the gigs,” he says with a crusty laugh, “I ain’t quit, but it’s like an ironing board, man. It’s totally stiff, and it’s just immobilized. But I got more gigs to do. I gotta stay in motion.”

That means he’ll soon be hopping back in the van to crisscross the country, like he’s done countless times since his days with the esteemed L.A. punk trio Minutemen, which formed 30 years ago. In that time, he’s gone through four vans: “This one is only a few years old, it’s got 248,000 miles … it’s a big country.”

One of the hardest-working men in showbiz, Watt is renowned for his slapping bass and wild enthusiasm in many bands both local and national. There’s his Material Girl tribute band the Madonnabes, and the original Punk Rock Karaoke with Eric Melvin of NOFX and Greg Hetson of Bad Religion. Watt’s been doing some shows recently with former Minutemen drummer George Hurley and recorded three albums with Hurley, Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza and various lead vocalists under the name Unknown Instructors. Also, there’s Hellride, Li’l Pit, Pair of Pliers, the Jom & Terry Show, Crimony, Dos, the Secondmen and Bootstrappers. He’s got his Missingmen band going too, as well as a weekly Web radio program, “The Watt From Pedro Show” (twfps.com), his Hootpage blog and loads of other things — including his third opera.

This summer, the bassist has been occupied with Iggy Pop’s revitalized Stooges, with whom Watt has been playing since Coachella in 2003. It’s a longer period than Watt’s stint with the formative band of his musical life, Minutemen, which “was five years and 11 months.” His time spent under Pop’s tutelage has been extremely valuable, he says.

“Iggy’s a great cat, as a music person, but he actually knows a lot about culture,” says Watt. “He’s very intelligent. I’ve learned so much about being a better bass player from that guy. There’s these guys that don’t operate machines, they have different perspectives of the sound; they’re more like conductors, almost like a bridge to the people. So they can help you, especially with bass, because it’s kind of mysterious how bass works. It’s not just a guitar. It’s a weird thing, kinda like grout between the tiles.

“Iggy’s songs are so much a part of our scene, they’re like the Source,” he says with a trace of awe. “I never believed I’d be in that situation.”

He’s being typically modest. Says former SST Records labelmate Henry Rollins, “Mike is the only living bass player I know who could be in the Stooges. To hit that pocket the way they do, they needed a bass player who understands what makes it work, and that’s Mike Watt.”

Watt likes being the grout, he’ll tell you over and over. It’s an idea he got from his late Minutemen bandmate D. Boon, who died in a van crash in 1985.

“A lotta my stuff comes from playing with D. Boon. Boon was all for pushing the bass out, in a more egalitarian thing. It was more like political ideas in a band, the way he’d pull back on his guitar. And that’s where a lot of my style, whatever, comes from. But all bands are not like the Minutemen.”

“If you ever see Watt play or listen to his records,” says longtime Watt collaborator guitarist Nels Cline, “you notice that he always brings every ounce of his being to all that he does. The Minutemen were the beginning of my personal involvement in what could be called the punk scene in L.A., which was a scene — at least in the initial stages — that as a jazz-type dude I thought had little to do with me. But upon seeing the Minutemen, I realized that it had a lot to do with me, because of the vastness of their music, the originality of how they expressed themselves.”

The amiable, gregarious Watt is a beloved and valuable figure on the L.A. scene who can always be counted on to push his music forward. His recent recording project Floored by Four released its debut full length on Sean Lennon’s Chimera label. It was made in New York with a quartet also featuring guitarist Cline (best known these days for his work in Wilco), ex-Cibo Matto keyboardist Yuka Honda and drummer Dougie Bowne. The result is risk-taking, spontaneous and thought-provoking electric music — that’s also a lot of fun to listen to.

In crafting the album, Watt played or sang each player a very basic bass part to improvise around and sat back to be the glue as each worked his or her magic.

“Writing songs on bass is pretty weird,” he says, “but I kinda like it because it leaves a lot of room for other people. And I’m playing the bass and saying, well, what do you wanna do? If you’ve got all these years of improvisation and stuff — like us four, you can just jump on it.”

Floored by Four is one of many projects on Watt’s plate. He has the freedom to stay busy but likes even more the opportunity to keep growing, however far it may take him from his “punk” roots. He’s got another three albums recorded with Cline coming out; a project with a Canadian artist he’s never met (they exchanged files over the Internet); another album with his longstanding Missingmen crew; more work with Unknown Instructors. At his count, there’s a total of about “13 to 14″ items in the pipeline.

Watt’s most crucial current “proj,” as he calls them, is his third punk opera, to be titled “Hyphenated-Man.” The follow-up to 1997′s “Contemplating the Engine Room” and 2004′s “The Secondman’s Middle Stand,” it was recorded in Pere Ubu bassist Tony Maimone’s New York studio with Watt’s Missingmen crew (former Slovenly guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales), and it too is all about establishing a new freedom in the way music called rock might be shaped and what its sources of inspiration might be.

Inspired by the Minutemen’s oft-brief tunes, many of which clocked in at under a minute, as well as by painter Hieronymous Bosch, Watt is creating “Hyphenated-Man” out of 30 little songs that, combined, will reveal a broader whole. The idea is similar to, he says, the life he’s been living, or hopes for. He wrote it all on D. Boon’s Telecaster.

“This third opera is different from the other two,” he says. “The first one had a sad ending, the second one a happy ending. This one, there’s no ending. It’s all middle.” The theme is suggestive of its author, who, at 52, is a middle-aged man, still doing what he does and looking to glimpse an overview on what it all’s about.

“‘Hyphenated-Man’ is a voyage into the middle, without being all sappy about it. You played the game, but still you confront yourself: What is ‘Man’? In middle age you start asking yourself these questions, and it’s not like you’ve gotta figure it out. But you’re more open. There’s more questions than answers.”

Meanwhile, Watt keeps pushing forward with the same drive and determination that mark his best basslines.

“The recorded work is real important to me, because I’ve never had children, and they’re still gonna be here when I’m gone,” he says. “All my focus lately has been in trying to get all these things done, and out, and fighting for trippy places to put my bass, situations where I’m not just stuck in the ‘I Love Lucy’ rerun.”

Mike Watt’s got a legacy to uphold, of relevant, progressive and utterly smoking music.

“I’ve gotta keep going. D. Boon would want me to keep going. Keep the child’s eye wandering, I’ve been told. Be excited about things, just fire it up. Go for it. And don’t make it more complicated than that.”

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Published: August 28, 2010

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

By GUY DEUTSCHER
NY Times Published: August 26, 2010

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

By Vince Aletti
August 30, 2010
The New Yorker

If it did nothing more than provide a context for Brancusi’s luminous photographs of the sculptures in his studio, MOMA’s “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” would be a success. But there are many pleasures in the curator Roxana Marcoci’s stimulating survey of the long-standing love affair between the two mediums. What began in the nineteenth century as the simple documentation of monumental works evolved into more detailed and interpretive images, sometimes by sculptors themselves or by sympathetic collaborators: Steichen illuminated Rodin, Man Ray defined Duchamp. Soon, photographers were redefining sculpture, not just by exploring its real-world context but by ignoring and subverting the monument to focus instead on an eggbeater, a wig stand, a wad of chewing gum, or an arrangement of mirrors in the sand. With work by Ana Mendieta, Charles Ray, Erwin Wurm, and others, Marcoci also makes a persuasive case for the sculptural presence in performance art. Following no predictable path, her show offers surprises and provocations at every turn. ♦

MOMA

By MIGUEL HELFT
NY Times Published: August 26, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — Discerning Internet users know that glowing online reviews of things like books or restaurants cannot always be trusted. But federal regulators are serving notice that if you stand to gain financially from the review you are writing, you should be upfront about it.

The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday that a California marketing company had settled charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients’ games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.

The charges were the first to be brought under a new set of guidelines for Internet endorsements that the agency introduced last year. The guidelines have often been described as rules for bloggers, but they also cover anyone writing reviews on Web sites or promoting products through Facebook or Twitter.

They are meant to impose on the Internet the same kind of truth-in-advertising principles that have long existed offline.

Under the settlement, Reverb Communications and one of its executives, Tracie Snitker, agreed to remove all of the iTunes reviews that appeared to have been written by ordinary people but were actually written by employees of the company, which is based in Twain Harte, Calif.

The settlement also bars Reverb and Ms. Snitker from making similar endorsements of any product or service without disclosing any relevant connections. The settlement did not involve any monetary penalties.

“We hope that this case will show advertisers that they have to be transparent in their practices and help guide other ad agencies,” said Stacey Ferguson, a lawyer in the advertising practices division of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Ms. Snitker declined to be interviewed, but in a statement she said that in discussions with the trade commission, “it became apparent that we would never agree on the facts of the situation.”

“Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion,” she said. Ms. Snitker said that the settlement did not involve any admission of lawbreaking.

When the guidelines were announced, many bloggers and users of services like Twitter complained of government overreach, and worried that they would have to disclose even tenuous connections with companies or services they wrote about.

But Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the commission’s first enforcement action under the guidelines should be seen as good news by those who were concerned.

“This case sort of shows that what they have in mind is not the individual blogger or Twitterer, but rather a professional endorser,” Professor Zittrain said.

The action could be useful to public relations companies that want to resist requests from clients that they play dirty, he said.

“When a client says ‘Where are my good reviews? I am paying for them,’ you can say, ‘We can’t do it because it is illegal,’ ” Professor Zittrain said.

According to the commission’s complaint, Reverb employees, including Ms. Snitker, posted positive reviews about clients’ games from November 2008 to May 2009. The reviews were posted under account names that would give readers the impression that they had been placed by ordinary consumers, the complaint says.

The reviews typically gave the games four or five stars and included comments like “Amazing new game” and “One of the best apps just got better.”

The complaint does not identify the game developers whose work was reviewed. Reverb’s Web site lists more than 60 current and former clients, including Digital Leisure, Harmonix and MTV Games. The complaint said Reverb was paid a commission of a portion of sales by its game developer clients.

Given that fake reviews are widely understood to be common in the iTunes Store and on many Web sites, it was not clear why the trade commission had singled out Reverb. But the blog MobileCrunch reported last August that it had obtained a company document in which Reverb said it had hired “a small team of interns” whose tasks included “writing influential game reviews.”

Eric Goldman, former general counsel of Epinions.com, which reviews consumer products, said fake reviews were “a pervasive problem on the Internet.”

“It is a problem that every review site has to grapple with,” said Mr. Goldman, now a law professor at Santa Clara University and director its High Tech Law Center. “Many sites don’t have rigorous policing mechanisms, so it is very hard to verify the trustworthiness of reviews.”

While the case against Reverb is the first brought under the commission’s new guidelines, it is not the first of its kind. Last year, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced that the State of New York had reached a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery outfit, over faked reviews of its products on the Internet.

In a press release, the attorney general said the action was “a strike against the growing practice of ‘astroturfing,’ in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.”

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

A portrait of a samurai, an 1860 salt print, attributed to the studio of C. D. Fredricks & Company.

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
NY Times Published: August 26, 2010

It’s obvious from the start that “Samurai in New York” isn’t going to be about robed warriors taking the city, in spite of the sensational name. The show’s subtitle — “The First Japanese Delegation, 1860” — makes that pretty clear, and the introductory wall text spells it out: The visit in question, 150 years ago, was “all about trade,” a matter of setting up a business agreement.

And yet “Samurai” is one of those small, in-the-hallway exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York that delivers more than you’d expect. In this case it offers a lot to think about in terms of photography and its role in early publicity and celebrity culture as well as a fascinating look at how different societies responded to 19th-century stirrings of globalization.

The event commemorated is significant: a visit to the United States by more than 70 samurai, elite members of the Japanese military, who were the first known group to leave Japan in more than 200 years. The reasons for this isolation date back to the 17th century, when the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country in response to the efforts of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries to convert Japanese to Catholicism. After 1630 no foreigners could enter the country, and no Japanese could leave, on penalty of death.

The visit was possible after Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1854, after being dispatched by President Millard Fillmore on the errand, and reached a trade agreement with the Japanese. Six years later the samurai were sent to deliver a treaty of amity and commerce to President James Buchanan and ordered to avoid fraternizing with their American hosts. But good old aggressive American hospitality took over. There were parades and parties, and Walt Whitman even wrote a poem, which was printed on Page 2 of The New York Times. And the samurai were asked to pose for photographs.

“Ever since our arrival at the American capital,” Norimasa Muragaki, an ambassador, wrote in his diary on June 4, 1860, in Washington, “we have frequently been asked by photographers to allow our photographs to be taken, but we have hitherto refused, as it is not the custom in our country. Today, however, we had to submit, in deference to the President’s wishes.” He ended, “We therefore, for the first time, faced the photograph machine.”

After that initial session, the samurai — particularly lower-ranking members — spent plenty of time facing cameras. The show includes a silver print of a photograph by Mathew Brady of samurai with United States naval officers, taken in the Washington Navy Yard. A reproduction of an illustration from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, a weekly newspaper, shows Brady, later known for his grisly Civil War pictures, with a box camera, photographing the gifts brought by the Japanese. Here you can see how, in the 1860s, the proto-photojournalist with a camera the size of a television console was still working in the shadow of the sketch artist.

The most interesting objects, however, are the small cartes-de-visite photographs, which in the cases of famous subjects like the samurai were treated as trading cards, and the stereographic images, printed on cards that would be inserted into viewing devices. The samurai’s poses are stiff and formal: not only an exigency of early photography — the need to hold still — but also evidence of Bushido, the strict code of behavior to which the military elite was bound.

In one photograph a young man wears traditional samurai dress but also Western leather shoes. Another shows a woman, identified only as a “New York Lady” flanked by members of the delegation. Painted studio backdrops create even odder juxtapositions, as the “exotic” samurai pose in front of palm trees or what appear to be scenes of India or Classical Greece or Rome. (A clue to which Americans might have been particularly interested in these images: The photograph of the samurai in leather shoes is owned the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.)

The jarring collision of cultures is also seen in a Japanese woodcut commissioned by one of the delegates upon his return home. In it a hot-air balloon with two American flags poking out of its basket rises up over a couple of gentlemen in Western top hats. The print also features a haiku in Japanese calligraphy, describing the event witnessed by its author during the Philadelphia leg of the trip.

“Samurai in New York” presents the visit as an extraordinary moment for both countries, but especially the one that had been closed to the world for so long. Americans could take credit for introducing the Japanese to photography. But the delegates might have picked up something else as well. A week before their departure in June 1860 an article appeared in The New York Times, describing the delegates’ activities. “Their baggage already increases to such huge proportions,” it said, “that even the capacious ‘Niagara’ bids fair to be well filled, and still they shop.”

Unfortunately no photographs of these shopaholic samurai are included in the show.

“Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, 1860” runs through Nov. 7 at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; mcny.org.

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times August 25, 2010

Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.

Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”

McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”

That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.
Rush LimbaughStephen Lovekin/Getty Images Rush Limbaugh

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:

“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”

Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”

You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.

Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.

It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.

“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”

Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.

Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.

Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”

The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.

Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: August 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

By BOB HERBERT
NY Published: August 23, 2010

I was surprised — but probably shouldn’t have been — that so many people had never heard of Bobby Thomson, who died at his home in Savannah, Ga., last week at the age of 86.

Thomson was among a small handful of public figures whose names have resonated most strongly with me through nearly my entire life. I was fresh out of kindergarten when he hit the most famous home run in history — the “shot heard round the world” that deeply traumatized the Brooklyn Dodgers and their fans and propelled the New York Giants into the 1951 World Series against the Yankees.

My dad, Chester Herbert (who was only in his 20s at the time), had an upholstery shop on Central Avenue in East Orange, N.J., and I was in the back of the shop with a cast of characters straight out of Damon Runyon. My mother’s name was Adelaide, and there were assorted craftsmen and hangers-on with names like Moe and Brownie and Earl Love and my beloved Uncle Breeze.

We were listening to the game on the radio. Nearly everyone was rooting for the Giants. But things looked beyond bleak when Thomson came to bat in the bottom of the ninth in the third and deciding game of a playoff series to determine who would win the National League pennant. There was one out and two runners were on base, and the archrival Dodgers were ahead, 4-2.

When Thomson hit the home run to suddenly and shockingly end both the game and the series, an astonishing celebration erupted in the back of the shop. My father hugged my mother, and they were jumping up and down. Then he picked me up and asked if I realized what had just happened. I didn’t, really — but according to family lore I started yelling, “We won! We won!”

My dad clipped all the newspaper accounts of Thomson’s feat and kept them for many years. I don’t know how many times we read them together when I was in first and second grade, and of course we had no idea that I would end up writing for three of the papers.

That magical moment of pure, unadulterated joy was the beginning of my love for the game of baseball. It seemed only appropriate that a player named Bobby, which is what everyone called me at the time, was the hero. Why not? I would hit imaginary homers in the park and race around the bases screaming, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

My parents explained the game to me, and I became obsessed with the players on that team, not just Thomson but guys like Sal Maglie, known as “The Barber,” and Monte Irvin and Whitey Lockman and a 20-year-old rookie who was on deck when Thomson hit the homer, Willie Mays.

There was an outfielder on that team named Hank Thompson. Bobby Thomson was white and Hank Thompson was black. I asked my father if they were brothers. He laughed and said: “No. You know how you can tell they’re not brothers?”

I said I didn’t. He said, “Hank Thompson spells his last name t-h-o-m-p-s-o-n. Bobby Thomson doesn’t have a ‘p’ in his last name. If they were brothers they would spell their names the same.”

It was years before I realized what a terrific thing that was to say to a kid.

I interviewed Willie Mays several years ago, and he told me a sweet story about him and Joe DiMaggio in that 1951 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Yankees, four games to two. “I never told this to anybody,” said Mays, “but Joe hit a home run in the Polo Grounds in that series, and I knew that was his last year, so I was happy for him even though I was playing against him. So what I did was, I started clapping. And you just didn’t do that in New York. But there I was standing in the outfield for the Giants clapping for Joe as he’s rounding the bases.”

As Mays and I shot the breeze about his early days with the Giants, he wistfully said, “Those were good times, man.”

They were great times for a kid growing up in New Jersey. The afternoons moved more slowly, and the summers seemed to last a little longer. You could hit a home run in your imagination every time you came up to the plate.

My Uncle Breeze is still around, still working. He fell in love with photography and takes photos at weddings and birthday parties in South Jersey. But nearly everyone else from the back of the shop is gone. I’d give anything — anything at all — to see them again just one more time.