Marc Abrams walks past a mural bearing his likeness on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake on May 6. Abrams would walk 20 to 30 miles a day, often reading the newspaper. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times / May 6, 2010)

Audio slide show: Hit the ground walking

By Kate Linthicum
Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2010

Marc Abrams, a physician whose epic (and shirtless) daily walks through Silver Lake inspired documentaries, murals and magazine profiles, died Wednesday. He was 58.

His wife, Cindy, found him dead in their backyard hot tub. Police initially determined that it was a suicide, although the official cause of death is pending.

Abrams traversed 20 to 30 miles of pavement each day and wore out four pairs of shoes each year. He walked swiftly — often hunched over a newspaper — slowing only to shout hellos to friends or give medical advice to those who asked for it.

On warm days, he wore brightly colored running shorts and nothing else. His bronzed chest and well-muscled shoulders occasionally drew honks from passing cars.

“He had the greatest tan of anyone in town,” said City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who lives a few blocks from the quiet hillside home Abrams shared with his wife. Whenever LaBonge spotted Abrams striding down the sidewalk he would stop to shout, “What up, Doc?”

Abrams had many nicknames: the Walking Man, Dr. Walk and Read, Doc Walker. He was baffled by the attention, his wife said.

“He didn’t see himself as interesting,” she said. “He didn’t understand why people were so interested in his habits.”

Perhaps it was the extraordinary nature of those habits.

Aside from the walking, Abrams swam two miles every day in the lap pool behind his house, his wife said. He also performed a punishing number of push-ups, although friends say reports that he did 4,000 each day may have been exaggerated.

Although he was a lifelong exercise nut — growing up he ran track and played tennis and football — he was not equally committed to nutrition.

His freezer was packed with muffins and coffee cake, and he liked to joke that his six basic food groups were chocolate, milkshakes, coffee, pizza, cookies and cake. (His wife said he supplemented the sweets with protein shakes and a multivitamin each morning).

Abrams was born Aug. 19, 1951, and grew up in a small apartment in South Philadelphia, where his father worked at a textile factory. He studied history and music at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and attended medical school at Stanford University.

In 1980, Abrams moved to Silver Lake with his first wife, Patricia Hishiki Abrams. She died of cancer in 1991.

The next year, a patient at Abrams’ medical office in North Hollywood introduced him to Cindy, a teacher who was visiting from out of town.

Cindy was impressed by the doctor’s intellect. Abrams was a history buff and a classical music lover who, Cindy said, knew “every note of every Gustav Mahler symphony.”

“We met and fell and love and got married,” Cindy said. “Then I found out who I married.”

She said that before moving to Silver Lake, she hadn’t known that he was such a neighborhood fixture — or that he was so set in his ways.

“He lived according to his own rules,” she said. “He used to say that people become more like themselves when they get old.”

Abrams closed his medical practice last year, giving him “more time to read, more time to walk,” she said.

His wife and a brother are Abrams’ only survivors.

Around Silver Lake on Thursday, neighbors built makeshift memorials.

On the dirt path near the Silver Lake Reservoir that Abrams circled every day, someone had placed a bouquet of lilacs and a poster-sized notice of his death. Outside Local restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, the site of a massive mural dedicated to Abrams, someone left flowers and a pair of old running shoes.

A memorial walk in his honor is planned for Sunday at noon. It begins at the intersection of Moreno Drive and West Silver Lake Drive.

Craig Stecyk’s photograph of George Greenough, the surfer and surfboard designer, around 1965.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: July 22, 2010

The exuberant three-gallery exhibition “Swell” is one of the Big Kahunas of the season’s group shows. Its requisite summertime theme is surfing, which runs wider and deeper than most, encompassing an array of visual material and several familiar characters, namely the American male as renegade and good buddy.

At Nyehaus gallery in Chelsea, various black-and-white photographs convey the solitude, skill and risk of surfing.
The show, which sprawls throughout the Chelsea spaces of Nyehaus, the Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Metro Pictures, spans more than half a century, from the 1950s to the present. In addition to scores of artworks it contains about two dozen surf boards, along with photographs, posters and other artifacts. Of the nearly 80 individuals whose efforts are represented here, fewer than 10 are women. This statistic reflects a significant lack of imagination, considering that a lot of the work here is merely vaguely oceanic. Nonetheless the show, which has been organized by Tim Nye of Nyehaus and Jacqueline Miro, an architect, urbanist and surfer, in concert with the staffs at Petzel and Metro Pictures, is ecumenical in other ways.

At the core of “Swell” is an excellent show that helpfully sets postwar Los Angeles art against a broader canvas of surfing, beachcombing and car and drug culture. But the key was surfing, with which art at that time shared both a rebel spirit and certain technologies borrowed from the airplane industry.

It adds both the Beat Generation assemblage of the 1950s and works by lesser-known artists to the more canonical history of the seductive high-gloss Finish Fetish sculptures and reliefs and the environmental “Light and Space” installation pieces that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. These last two movements were shown off this year in splendid isolation in “Primary Atmospheres,” a pristine show at Nyehaus and the David Zwirner Gallery; 7 of the 10 artists in that show are represented here, sometimes by the same work.

But “Swell” has more grit, broader margins, more mess. And it evokes more fully the lost innocence of the time before the art world got big and before surfing — the beautiful sport, if not game — became wildly popular and then turned professional. Unfortunately the show often loses its focus as approaches the present, adding recent works by some of the older artists and several more by younger ones — including a few from New York and Europe — that are only tangentially pertinent.

Each gallery’s presentation is different in terms of arrangement, clarity and ratio of older to newer work. A good place to start is Metro Pictures, where the past holds sway, and the historical progression is laid out in distinct segments. In the first space various forms of assemblage dominate, most forthrightly in George Herms’s 1973 “Scientific American,” a large grid of old shelves filled with all manner of detritus, including copies of the magazine for which it is named. It suggests a suite of boxes by a beachcombing Joseph Cornell.

On the opposite wall Ashley Bickerton (a serious surfer who forsook New York — and the Neo-Geo style for which he was known — for Bali in 1993) combines assemblage with his own version of finish fetish. The result is “Jack Blaylock” (2001), a hyper-real portrait of what appears to be an aging, drug-ravaged surfer rendered on a giant piece of gorgeously finished wood that is festooned with bits of driftwood and surf-tossed footwear. The Los Angeles painter Ed Moses offers a palm-treed and beaded folding screen from this year, while works from the 1960s show Tony Berlant using painted tin to more or less obliterate the lines separating collage, assemblage and quilting. Recent works by Fred Tomaselli, a Brooklyn artist who kayaks the waters of the New York region, build images from cut-up magazines, marijuana leaves and pills. Works from the ’60s by Wallace Berman and from the last decade by Robert Dean Stockwell and David Lloyd, another surfer-artist, contribute to the recycling effect, while Ed Ruscha chills everything out with a 1984 field of saffron vapors on which the words “Polynesian Sickness” float.

The overlap of art and surfing is most evident in the style and craft that permeates the second gallery at Metro, where one wall is lined with gleaming surfboards made over the last 50 years. The more austere are the work of well-known surfers who also excelled at the aerodynamic art of board shaping like Herbie Fletcher, Joel Tudor, Matt Kivlin and Donald Takayama.

The gaudier boards have been decorated by artists like Peter Alexander, Raymond Pettibon and Charles Arnoldi, although Jim Ganzer contributes a relatively sinister gray board that resembles a hammerhead shark. A 2004 board decorated by the street artist Barry McGee’s reminds us that surfing spawned a landlocked cousin, skateboarding.

Several Finish Fetish paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s attest to the absorption of surf-board materials and techniques — cast fiberglass, resins, high-gloss finishes, and luminous monochromes — by art. Note the fabulous confluence of streamlined forms in various shades of red and egg-yolk yellow by DeWain Valentine, Billy Al Bengston, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman. Especially striking is a yellow surfboard from 2006, shaped by the surfer Mike Hynson with a cherry red fin in translucent resin provided by Mr. Tudor.

Things turn atmospheric in the third space at Metro, where various examples of ’60s-era Light and Space art include the glass boxes of Larry Bell, a wedge of cast polyester by Mr. Alexander, an odd canvas-on-canvas collage by Joe Goode and cast-resin reliefs and sculptures in shades of blue by Helen Pashgian, whose work was largely unknown until recently. She contributes a smoky blue sphere inset with clear polyester resin that conjures up the tube, or interior volume, of a giant wave. Recent photographs by Roe Ethridge and Catherine Opie capture real surfaces in action and on the beach.

In the upstairs space contemporary works by Mary Heilmann, Jay Batlle, Ned Evans, Blake Rayne and Thaddeus Strode harmonize one way or another with earlier pieces by Mr. McCracken, Mr. Goode and Sister Mary Corita.

At Petzel things tilt toward contemporary with appropriately watery or druggy paintings and drawings from the last decade by Bill Komoski, Jeff Lewis, Cameron Martin, Wolfgang Bloch and Robert Longo, and a 2009-10 chunk of black (oil-tinted?) ocean in cast polyester resin by Alex Weinstein. A late-’80s video by Gary Hill provides intermittent surf sounds.

Blasts from the past include an edge-to-edge drawing of waves from 1970 by Vija Celmins; a marvelous “painting” of grafted sticks from 1974 by Mr. Arnoldi that is the ultimate in driftwood elegance; surfing cartoons from the late ’60s by Robert Williams, Jim Evans and R. Crumb. A 2001 greenish flourish in painted ceramic by Ken Price, one of the more accomplished artist-surfers, evokes both a hand and a wave represents the Finish Fetish generation, as do a cluster of surfboards by Mr. Fletcher from around 1970. The three largest replicate the shapes boards used by Hawaiian kings: surfing was originally a royal sport. But the boards’ red, black and gold militaristic designs reflects the fact that G.I.’s stationed in the Pacific during World War II were among the first Americans to surf.

Mr. Bickerton is represented by a transitional non-Neo-Geo sculpture from 1993: a tall sinuous pedestal of Bali coral with a miniature tent on top. A series of color photographs by Rob Reynolds in the last two years pays tribute to the customized cars of Los Angeles in a dead-pan manner of Mr. Ruscha’s 1960s images of things L.A.

At Nyehaus, where the show is ensconced in the gallery’s somewhat decrepit town house, funkiness reigns, as does a certain documentary aesthetic. Black-and-white photographs by Bud Browne and Craig Stecyk fully convey the solitude, skill and risk of surfing. One by Mr. Stecyk, from around 1968, shows Miki Dora nonchalantly upright on a speeding board. Mr. Ganzer contributes some equally relaxed photographs of artists like Mr. Bell, Mr. Price and Laddie John Dill, who is represented at Nyehaus by a recent example of the sand and neon installation pieces he has made since the late 1960s. This work shares a darkened gallery with iridescent paintings on velvet from 1975 and 1984 by Mr. Alexander and a decidedly non-fetish-finish wall piece in banged-up aluminum by Mr. Bengston, from 1970-71.

Elsewhere five drawings by Mr. Pettibon iterate the obsession with waves signaled by his wave-covered surfboard at Metro Pictures. Peter Dayton turns the stripes typical of surfboards into a large painting on paper (2008), where they make for a slightly eccentric form of Pop-abstraction. And John Van Hamersveld’s 2003 silkscreen of his well-known poster for Bruce Brown’s 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer” recalls the moment when the sport truly went global.

This exhibition demonstrates the rich and complicated entwining of art and surfing — two physically demanding disciplines with both fetishistic and mystical aspects. In general it affirms that art is always a reflection of the environment that produces it. In particular, it demonstrates once again that where postwar art is concerned, the East Coast still has much to learn about the West.

“Swell” is at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, (212) 206-7100, through July 30; and at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, (212) 680-9467, and Nyehaus, 358 West 20th Street, (212) 366-4493, through Aug. 6; all in Chelsea.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: July 21, 2010

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The yang of America’s labor force is this: over a 40-year career, a man earns $431,000 more than a woman on average, according to the Center for American Progress.

The yin of America’s labor force is this: in this decade, for the first time in American history, men no longer inevitably dominate the labor force. Women were actually the majority of payroll employees for the five months that ended in March, according to one measure from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s mostly because about three-quarters of Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Recession were men.

Now men again fill a slight majority of payroll jobs because they are more likely to work in summer jobs such as construction. America may now teeter back and forth, with men predominant in the summers and women in the winters.

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

It’s also true that while men still dominate the American power elite, they also dominate the bottom rungs of the ladder. By some counts, America’s prisoners are 90 percent male, and most estimates are that homeless people are disproportionately male.

If school performance predicts career success, then women may do even better a few decades from now, for girls clearly excel in school as never before. The National Honor Society, for top high school students, says that 64 percent of its members are girls. The Center on Education Policy cites data showing that boys lag girls in reading in every American state.

Yet count me a skeptic. My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.”

One reason is that women’s gains still have a catch-up quality to them. Catch-up is easier than forging ahead.

Moreover, the differences in educational performance are real but modest. In math, boys and girls are about equal. In verbal skills, 79 percent of elementary schoolgirls can read at a level deemed proficient, compared with 72 percent of boys, according to the Center on Education Policy.

At the very top, boys more than hold their own: 62 percent of kids who earn perfect 2,400 scores on the S.A.T. are boys.

Some education experts, like Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” argue that the success of girls has to do in part with how schools teach children. Tweaking curriculums by exposing kids to more books full of explosions might lead boys to do better in reading — and if boys continue to lag, there’ll be more of a push for boy-friendly initiatives.

I think we exaggerate the degree to which the sexes are mired in conflict. As Henry Kissinger once said, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” We men want our wives and daughters to encounter opportunity in the workplace, not sexual harassment; women want their husbands and sons to be in the executive suite, not jail. Nearly all of us root for fairness, not for our own sex.

The truth is that we men have typically benefited as women have gained greater equality. Those men who have lost their jobs in the recession are now more likely to have a wife who still has a job and can keep up the mortgage payments. And women have been particularly prominent in the social sector, devising new programs for the mostly male ranks of the jobless or homeless.

So forget about gender war and zero-sum games. Odds are that we men will find a way to hold our own, with the help of women. And we’ll benefit as smart and talented women belatedly have the opportunity to deploy their skills on behalf of all of humanity — including those of us with Y chromosomes.

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
NY Times Published: July 21, 2010

CAMANO ISLAND, Wash. — The “Barefoot Bandit” is not all Colton Harris-Moore has been called in his short splash of life.
Multimedia

Neighbors say his mother screamed things at him so vicious that they cringed when her words echoed through the giant evergreens that cover much of this island in Puget Sound. Classmates say he could be a bully — when he attended school.

Yet perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Mr. Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.

“We called him ‘Island Boy,’ ” recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Mr. Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.”

By the time he was captured on a stolen motorboat in the Bahamas last week, racing from the police with video-game gall, the 6-foot-5 Mr. Harris-Moore had become a sensation. After escaping from a juvenile halfway house here more than two years ago, he eluded the authorities across North America using his wits and his fleet (sometimes bare) feet. The police said he made makeshift homes in empty houses for days or weeks at a time and somehow taught himself to fly, mastering the art of crash-landing and walking away.

Even in the age of the search engine, Mr. Harris-Moore seemed untraceable and unknowable, part high-tech Huck Finn, part cunning criminal.

An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own. On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ tree house, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card, or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than a thousand miles — Colton Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.

That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.

“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”

Ms. Gomez added, “I think if he had proper direction, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

Mr. Harris-Moore had a volatile childhood and was often in conflict with his mother, Pam Kohler. His father appears to have been absent. According to public documents, child protection officials had been referred to the family at least a dozen times by the time Mr. Harris-Moore was 15.

A social worker’s report from the time he was first arrested, at 12, drew a succinct conclusion, at least from the boy’s point of view. “Colton wants Mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job and have food in the house,” the report said. “Mom refuses.”

When Mr. Harris-Moore was 4, someone reported Ms. Kohler after seeing “a woman grab a small child by the hair and beat his head severely,” according to a psychiatric summary 12 years later. By the time he was 10, an investigation involving “negligent treatment or maltreatment” had been initiated.

Ms. Kohler does not appear to have been prosecuted for a crime related to the complaints.

Ms. Kohler, 59, declined to be interviewed. A lawyer she has hired to handle news media inquiries and film and book proposals based on her son’s story said he had not seen allegations of abuse against Ms. Kohler in public records.

Several neighbors on Haven Place, the gravel road on the southern end of Camano Island where Mr. Harris-Moore grew up and his mother still lives, recalled often hearing mother and son screaming at each other into the night. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared Ms. Kohler.

A hand-painted sign at the end of her wooded driveway warns: “If you go past this sign you will be shot.”

Asked whether it was an empty threat, one neighbor said, “She shoots.”

The neighbor recalled a land surveyor telling how he had heard gunshots fired in his direction when he was surveying the property next door.

According to records and interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was disciplined frequently in school. One fifth-grade classmate, Mariah Campbell, recalled other students making fun of Mr. Harris-Moore’s dirty clothing and said he could be mean to classmates.

“Because he never did his homework,” Ms. Campbell said, “he never got to go to recess or anything.”

About age 12, Mr. Harris-Moore was determined to have several psychiatric conditions, including depression, attention deficit disorder and intermittent explosive disorder, according to a later psychiatric report. He was prescribed antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs.

He dropped out of school after ninth grade.

“He never wanted to go home,” said Christa Postma, who added that she became friends with Mr. Harris-Moore in middle school “because we both got in trouble all the time.”

The crimes for which Mr. Harris-Moore has been convicted or is suspected of show an increasing focus on technology and transportation, involving the theft of laptops and mountain bikes, GPS devices and power boats. But it is hard to find anything in his past that suggests he would soon be capable of commandeering airplanes and flying them out of the country without any cockpit training, much less without getting caught.

He is suspected of taking at least five planes — including once during the Vancouver Olympics — and crash landing all of them. He walked away each time.

The skies above Puget Sound rumble with small planes going to and from its islands. Ms. Kohler has told reporters that her son could identify different models as they flew overhead. The Internet is filled with speculation that Mr. Harris-Moore taught himself to fly using simulation software on the laptops he is suspected of stealing. But there is little hard evidence of how he really learned.

“That will be the question that everybody will want to ask him when he talks, if he talks,” said Ed Wallace, a detective with the Island County sheriff’s office.

The “Barefoot Bandit” label is a relatively new nickname here, too, stemming from real footprints found at some crime scenes last year and drawings of footprints that the police believe Mr. Harris-Moore made at other scenes.

“He took the mantle and was wearing it proudly,” said Sheriff Bill Cumming of San Juan County.

Neighbors say they do have memories of Mr. Harris-Moore going barefoot at times when he was a boy. Back then, he complained to caseworkers that his mother did not press him to be more responsible. Caseworkers noted more than once that Ms. Kohler declined to follow up on the various counseling and treatment programs that were prescribed for her son.

Ms. Postma, the friend from eighth grade, who now works in quality control at a fish processor in Alaska, said that she had been in counseling, and “that really helped me.”

Several people in Mr. Harris-Moore’s neighborhood said he seemed to be on a search for parental substitutes as a boy — asking people to make him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or watching them do basic chores, then stealing their mailboxes or computers. Some noted that even as his efforts to avoid capture escalated into spectacle, cheered on by virtual friends on the Internet, he stayed in contact with his mother.

Mr. Harris-Moore arrived back in Washington on Wednesday and was due in court Thursday. He faces one federal charge of stealing an airplane and transporting it across state lines and potentially faces dozens more charges, including burglary, theft and credit card fraud.

At the end, his mother publicly encouraged him to escape to a country that does not extradite to the United States. Instead Mr. Harris-Moore ended up in the Bahamas.

“He wasn’t really trying to get away,” said Kyle Ater, who found bare footprints drawn in chalk on the floor of his natural food store on nearby Orcas Island on the morning after the police say Mr. Harris-Moore burglarized it, destroyed the alarm system, and ate an entire blueberry cheesecake from the cooler.

Snow Storm-Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. 1842

through September 19

museo del prado

By JOE SHARKEY
NY Times Published: July 19, 2010

YOU may think of this as the summer of the heat wave. I prefer to think of it as the summer of the body scanner.

As the Transportation Security Administration buys these machines and installs them at more and more airport checkpoints, a lot of travelers are having their initial encounters with them. And while I hear from large numbers of readers who hate the idea, it’s becoming increasingly clear that body scanners will soon be a standard part of the air travel experience.

Today, 142 body scanners are in use at 41 airports, and the security administration says it will have more than 450 installed by the end of the year.

The rationale for this is clear. Nonmetallic explosives pose a major security threat. As was demonstrated by the infamous, if inept, underwear bomber last Christmas Day, a person can pass through airport metal detectors with chemical explosives hidden in clothing. Body scanners see through clothing, detecting any mass on the body, metal or not.

While some critics claim that terrorists can defeat the technology by hiding explosive material in body cavities, the momentum for body scanners is strong. In late June, for example, legislation was introduced in the Senate to require the security administration to replace magnetometer metal detectors with body scanners at all airport checkpoints by 2013.

“Magnetometers are not enough in this post-9/11 world,” said Senator Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican who is the co-sponsor of the bill, along with Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat.

The strongest opposition, of course, comes from those who feel the machines are an invasion of personal privacy, but the security agency says people are more worried about the real threat posed by nonmetallic explosives. Early this year, the agency began highlighting a USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 5-6, in which 78 percent of respondents said they supported using body scanners.

The poll also found that women were twice as likely as men to say they would be “very uncomfortable” submitting to a body scan. Gallup put an optimistic face on that, saying that since 84 percent of respondents said that they believe body scanners would effectively detect explosives, “air travelers have a compelling reason to potentially counter any personal modesty issues they have related to body scans.”

Jacqueline Berlin, however, doesn’t think the reasoning is compelling at all. Like many women who replied to my recent columns on body scanners, she said, basically, call me a prude, but I will do everything I can to avoid this even if it means reducing travel.

“I’ve always been modest, but I’m not weird about it,” Ms. Berlin said in a telephone interview. Recently, while returning from a business trip, she declined to follow a screener’s direction to go through a body scanner at O’Hare International Airport, and was instead taken aside for a full-body pat down.

“They were rolling their eyes, like, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ — like I was the first person ever to refuse,” she said. The pat down was public and, she said, embarrassingly thorough, and in a manner that she thought was punitive for refusing to use the body scanner.

“When I got on the plane, I was still trembling,” she said. “And then I was thinking, O.K., if this is what it comes down to, if this is what it takes to get on an airplane, well, I’m going to choose not to travel by air whenever possible.”

Ralph Nader also contacted me after recent columns on body scanners. He told me that I and others in the media have failed to fully address concerns about the levels of radiation people receive from body scanners that employ X-ray technology.

(Not all do. A spokeswoman for the security administration said that 99 of the body scanners now installed use a form of X-ray technology with radiation levels that are minimal and safe. The other 43 body scanners use a form of radio wave technology. More on that issue next week.)

Mr. Nader said that he has so far managed to avoid body scanners. “Are you kidding? I never go through them,” he said. And he added that the machines will only add to the security annoyances that are forcing some people to avoid air travel.

“Pretty soon, nobody is going to take a plane if they can drive instead,” he said. “I won’t take a plane if I can drive, even 400 miles, or take the train. Who wants to go through that stuff?”

Extract from an Open University program shown on BBC2 in the early 90s. Ed Soja discusses the postmodern nature of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.

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Kim Shin-jo was part of a North Korean unit that tried to assassinate the president in 1968. Now he is a South Korean Protestant minister. (John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times / July 17, 2010)

‘I came down to cut Park Chung-hee’s throat,’ the captured would-be North Korean assassin told the nation 40 years ago. Now he finds solace in his faith and hopes to help the South put that image to rest.

By John M. Glionna
The Los Angeles Times
July 18, 2010

Reporting from Namyangju, South Korea —
He looks more like a graying clergyman than the boogeyman of thousands of South Korean childhoods.

But Kim Shin-jo is both.

The 69-year-old may preside over a Protestant church in this picturesque community where the Han River bends among mountain peaks. But he is also the reluctant grandfather of North Korean spies, a reminder of a cloak-and-dagger world that refuses to be dispatched to the history books on this divided peninsula.

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On a recent day, Kim read a news story about the sentencing of two North Korean military spies. Such stories stir bitter memories of the night in 1968 when Kim and 30 other heavily armed North Korean commandos slipped into Seoul on a mission to assassinate then-President Park Chung-hee.

For the infiltrators, the operation ended in disaster. Cornered outside the presidential residence, they waged a deadly, days-long gun battle with South Korean police and military forces. Although nearly all of the North’s commandos were killed, Kim was captured. Interrogated for months about his spy career, he was eventually released and later became a South Korean citizen, marrying and having a family.

Years in a free society have exposed the fallacy of North Korea’s argument that the South is an agonized wasteland that must be recolonized. Still, Kim feels pity for these newest Northern moles.

“I know they must be punished — we have a rule of law here,” he says. “Still, I’m a human being. I feel sorry for them.”

As the recent U.S. arrest of nearly a dozen Russian agents illustrates, international espionage still exists decades after the Cold War — especially on the Korean peninsula, where North and South are still technically at war.

Without money for high-priced satellites, a cash-starved North Korea relies on a more practical resource.

“It’s hardly believable, but in this high-tech age, North Korea still relies heavily on humans as information gatherers,” said Lee Dong-bok, a former member of South Korean intelligence and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Kim, whose parents were executed when he pursued citizenship here, still faces derision over his sinister mission of long ago. He’s not a man of God, some say, but a would-be assassin. He remains haunted for surviving when others didn’t.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I think it would have been better if I had died that day.”

*

The operation code names were Cuckoo and Skylark.

At 27, Kim was chosen from among tens of thousands of North Korean agents to form the elite 124th Special Forces Unit. Their task: Cross the heavily mined DMZ and execute the South Korean president, taking pictures to verify the kill.

The 31 commandos were divided into six teams. As an army lieutenant, Kim led a squad whose role was to take out the bodyguards at the presidential mansion, known as the Blue House.

“I felt gratified to be part of the revolution to emancipate South Korea,” Kim recalls. “We thought the president there was a stooge, an American collaborator. I hated him.”

The unit set off at 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 17, 1968, dressed in South Korean army uniforms. Moving by darkness, hiding during the day, they snipped barbed wire and marched south through the mountains.

One night, they ran into a group of farmers gathering wood. Instead of killing them, they warned the villagers not to report them. The civilians immediately contacted authorities, who launched a manhunt for the infiltrators.

Still, Kim and his teams made it to within 200 yards of the Blue House before being stopped by a suspicious South Korean soldier who demanded their identification.

The commandos opened fire, setting off a series of deadly street battles. Eventually, 35 South Koreans were killed and 64 wounded — soldiers, policemen and civilians, including a 15-year-old boy, who was among the victims of a grenade thrown at a loaded bus.

Insisting that he made a point not to kill civilians, Kim says that he scattered from the rest and never fired his gun. Instead, he fled south into the woods, where he was captured within hours.

Two days later, Kim was trotted out in handcuffs on live television. Asked about his mission, the unrepentant prisoner gave an answer that still haunts many older South Koreans: “I came down to cut Park Chung-hee’s throat,” he declared.

But his revolutionary spirit would not last — thanks to a South Korean army general who headed Kim’s interrogation. Over months of patient reasoning, the officer broke through Kim’s defenses. The two eventually became close.

“He told me, ‘We have a problem with the North Korean regime, not you,’ ” Kim recalls. “He was my father’s age and treated me as his son. He said, ‘I was a young soldier too once. As a commander, I will never kill you. But I will forgive you.’ ”

*

After four decades, the South Korean government recently opened a trail that leads south toward the capital from the North Korean border. It is the path the commandos took on their fatal mission. For years, the winding path has been known as the Kim Shin-jo Route, after a man whose name for many is as recognizable as any former president.

Officials called on Kim to act as a tour guide on the trail’s opening day. He could have refused, he says. But he realized that in order to come to terms with this painful national incident, South Koreans needed to see him in the role of the everyman, to see that he was no longer their boogeyman.

All day, people pointed at him. Those old enough often spoke with scorn. Kim, they swore, was the reason many South Koreans fled their homeland in the early 1970s, fearful of another war with the North. Because of Kim, many of the older generation who remained behind lived in perpetual fear.

“Wherever I go, I get the comments,” says Kim, who became a Protestant clergyman in 1997, finding solace in his faith. “It will happen as long as I am alive. People will point and accuse me.”

Every Jan. 21, Kim memorializes the day of the attack. The day once brought what Kim calls “indescribable pain.” But his wife has taught him to think differently.

“My family tells me that as of Jan. 21, 1968, I was dead,” he says. “On that day, I started a second life. I’m really 69, an old man. But they joke that I’m only 42. And that day that once caused me so much grief should be celebrated as my birthday.”

Has endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so – and say it’s time to slow down . . .

Patrick Kingsley
The Guardian, Thursday 15 July 2010

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

The problem doesn’t just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students’ reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.

Still reading? You’re probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

“If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author’s ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly,” says Ottowa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. “I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can’t understand something written in the text, it’s your fault, not the author’s.”

And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. “Slow reading,” writes Miedema, “is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep.” Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn’t “just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us.”

So the movement’s not a particularly cohesive one – as Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent Newsweek article, “there’s no letterhead, no board of directors, and, horrors, no central website” – and nor is it a new idea: as early as 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare’s folio encouraged us to read the playwright “again and again”; in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche described himself as a “teacher of slow reading”; and, back in the 20s and 30s, dons such as IA Richards popularised close textual analysis within academic circles.

But what’s clear is that our era’s technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn’t see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written – in the London Review of Books – about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. “I don’t think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly,” he says. “You don’t get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there’s no serendipity – half the things I’ve found in my research have come when I’ve luckily stumbled across something I wasn’t expecting.”

Some academics vehemently disagree, however. One literature professor, Pierre Bayard, notoriously wrote a book about how readers can form valid opinions about texts they have only skimmed – or even not read at all. “It’s possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it,” he says in How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read (2007), before suggesting that such bluffing is even “at the heart of a creative process”.

Slow readers, obviously, are at loggerheads with Bayard. Seeley says that you might be able to engage “in a basic conversation if you have only read a book’s summary, but for the kinds of reading I want my students to do, the words matter. The physical shape of sentences matter.”

Nicholas Carr’s book elaborates further. “The words of the writer,” suggests Carr, “act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies.” And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, “the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory.”

What’s more, Seeley argues, Bayard’s literary bluffing merely obscures a bigger problem: the erosion of our powers of concentration, as highlighted by Carr’s book. Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that “most can’t concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We’re being trained away from slow reading by new technology.” But unlike Bath Spa’s Greg Garrard, she does not want to cut down on the amount of reading she sets her classes. “It’s my responsibility to challenge my students,” says Seeley. “I don’t just want to throw in the towel.”

Seeley finds an unlikely ally in Henry Hitchings, who – as the author of the rather confusingly named How to Really Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2008) – could initially be mistaken as a follower of Bayard. “My book on the subject notwithstanding,” says Hitchings, “I’m no fan of bluffing and blagging. My book was really a covert statement to the effect that reading matters. It’s supposed to encourage would-be bluffers to go beyond mere bluffing, though it does this under the cover of arming them for literary combat.”

But Hitchings also feels that clear-cut distinctions between slow and fast reading are slightly idealistic. “In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I’m reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn’t.”

Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. “It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming,” Hitchings says, “and it fragments our attention span in a way that’s not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa.” He also argues that “the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one’s sense of self, one’s capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard”.

What’s to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley’s students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? Garrard seems to think so: “I’m no luddite – I’m on my iPhone right now, having just checked my email – but I regularly carve out reading holidays in the middle of my week: four or five hours with the internet disconnected.”

Meanwhile, Jakob Nielsen – the internet guru behind some of the statistics at the beginning of this article – thinks the iPad might just be the answer: “It’s pleasant and fun, and doesn’t remind people of work.” But though John Miedema thinks iPads and Kindles are “a good halfway house, particularly if you’re on the road”, the author reveals that, for the true slow reader, there’s simply no substitute for particular aspects of the paper book: “The binding of a book captures an experience or idea at a particular space and time.” And even the act of storing a book is a pleasure for Miedema. “When the reading is complete, you place it with satisfaction on your bookshelf,” he says.

Personally, I’m not sure I could ever go offline for long. Even while writing this article I was flicking constantly between sites, skimming too often, absorbing too little; internet reading has become too ingrained in my daily life for me to change. I read essays and articles not in hard copy but as PDFs, and I’m more comfortable churning through lots of news features from several outlets than just a few from a single print source. I suspect that many readers are in a similar position.

But if, like me, you just occasionally want to read more slowly, help is at hand. You can download a computer application called Freedom, which allows you to read in peace by cutting off your internet connection. Or if you want to remove adverts and other distractions from your screen, you could always download offline reader Instapaper for your iPhone. If you’re still reading, that is.

Romy Schneider, who was to play the young wife of a hotel owner in “L’Enfer,” which was never made, in a scene from “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno.”

By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times Published: July 15, 2010

The legend of the lost masterpiece is a staple of cinematic lore, and every so often material surfaces to give credence to the myths. The recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” brings today’s audience a big step closer to seeing that groundbreaking film in the form its director intended, and the combination of archival digging and serendipity has shed light on many other significant works that have been forgotten or compromised.

But what about those putative masterworks that were never actually finished? These movies constitute a special, speculative case, and one of them is the subject of “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” a fascinating documentary by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea. It is, in effect, a making-of documentary about a movie that was never made — a movie that was supposed to revolutionize the art form and that survives, in the limbo between intention and realization, as an intriguing possibility.

In 1964, Clouzot was an acknowledged titan of French cinema, venerated for films like “The Raven” (1943), “Quai des Orfèvres” (1947), “The Wages of Fear” (1953) and “Diabolique” (1955). It had been four years since he had made a film, and in that time his traditional methods had been challenged by the iconoclasts of the New Wave. Piqued by their bravado and impressed by Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,” Clouzot conceived an ambitious project — to be called “L’Enfer” — a story of sexual jealousy and psychological instability that would encompass an array of new and radical techniques.

Mr. Bromberg, who serves as an unseen narrator, explains how, following a tip from Clouzot’s widow, he found 85 film cans containing some 15 hours of footage. There were some completed scenes (though no soundtrack survived) and hours of tests that the meticulous director had conducted to assess everything from costumes to camera lenses to complicated optical effects. “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” punctuates these with readings from Clouzot’s script, with Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin taking roles originally played by Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani, and with candid, informative interviews with members of the crew.

They recall an enterprise that started with great promise and enthusiasm and gradually came undone. Reggiani, an actor described as having “a face like a carved chestnut,” was to play Marcel, a hotel owner driven to the brink of madness by the suspected infidelity of his young wife, Odette, played by Schneider, an Austrian-born actress who at the time was one of France’s biggest movie stars. The setting was a real hotel under a railroad viaduct that crossed a vast man-made lake, and the shooting was complicated by the fact that the lake was about to be drained by civil engineers.

Before that, though, there was great anticipation, a large budget — Columbia Pictures promised “unlimited” support — and a sense on the part of everyone involved that this was a historic work in the making. Clouzot prepared not only carefully detailed storyboards, but also a color-coded system of notation indicating changes in the protagonist’s mood and a set of obsessively precise sound-design instructions. Once shooting began, he alternated between black and white and color, creating effects that would turn the lake’s water blood-red and alter the skin tones of the actors.

The images that have made it into Mr. Bromberg’s and Ms. Medrea’s documentary are tantalizing and frequently beautiful, if sometimes bizarre. Some of the most compelling are the relatively realistic shots of people grouped in outdoor settings, reminders of Clouzot’s gift for clear, fluid, emotionally resonant composition. You can’t help but wonder how these scenes would have been juxtaposed with the wilder passages in which the images are distorted to reflected Marcel’s growing mental disorder. You also can’t help but think that any movie with Schneider, wearing blue lipstick and a white bathing cap, swinging her hips as she rides on water skis would be something to see.

But “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” is as much as you’ll see of it. As the production grew in scale — to a state of grandiosity conveyed by the French word “Hollywoodien” — Clouzot grew more demanding, more obsessive and harder to work with. The crew and cast that had so eagerly signed on grew restless and alienated, and Mr. Bromberg and Ms. Medrea’s film ends, sadly, with a fizzle, as a work that could have been either a towering monument of cinema or a fascinating folly shrinks to a footnote.

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, based on an original idea by Mr. Bromberg and rushes from “L’Enfer”; original screenplay by Clouzot, José-André Lacour and Jean Ferry; directors of photography, Irina Lubtchansky and Jérôme Krumenacker; edited by Janice Jones; music by Bruno Alexiu; production designer, Nicolas Faure; produced by Marianne Lère; released by Flicker Alley. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Bérénice Bejo (Odette) and Jacques Gamblin (Marcel).

WITH (1964 cast): Romy Schneider (Odette), Serge Reggiani (Marcel), Dany Carrel (Marylou), Jean-Claude Bercq (Martineau), Maurice Garrel (Dr. Arnoux) and Mario David (Julien).

Roe Ethridge

July 10 – August 15
Opening Reception Friday, July 16, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Curated by Matthew Porter
Featuring works by Michele Abeles, Shannon Ebner, Roe Ethridge, Miranda Lichtenstein, Arthur Ou, Michael Vahrenwald, and Hannah Whitaker

Mount Tremper Arts

Michael Rashkow
runner, 2010
archival pigment print on paper
33″ x 49″

through July 17

garboushian

Zero Gravity Corp, via Associated Press

The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking goes weightless in a special jet.

By DENNIS OVERBYE
NY Times Published: July 12, 2010

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights.

Born in Woudenberg, in the Netherlands, in 1962, the brothers got early inspiration from a pair of 1970s television shows about particle physics and black holes. “I was completely captured,” Dr. Verlinde recalled. He and his brother obtained Ph.D’s from the University of Utrecht together in 1988 and then went to Princeton, Erik to the Institute for Advanced Study and Herman to the university. After bouncing back and forth across the ocean, they got tenure at Princeton. And, they married and divorced sisters. Erik left Princeton for Amsterdam to be near his children.

He made his first big splash as a graduate student when he invented Verlinde Algebra and the Verlinde formula, which are important in string theory, the so-called theory of everything, which posits that the world is made of tiny wriggling strings.

You might wonder why a string theorist is interested in Newton’s equations. After all Newton was overturned a century ago by Einstein, who explained gravity as warps in the geometry of space-time, and who some theorists think could be overturned in turn by string theorists.

Over the last 30 years gravity has been “undressed,” in Dr. Verlinde’s words, as a fundamental force.

This disrobing began in the 1970s with the discovery by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, among others, of a mysterious connection between black holes and thermodynamics, culminating in Dr. Hawking’s discovery in 1974 that when quantum effects are taken into account black holes would glow and eventually explode.

In a provocative calculation in 1995, Ted Jacobson, a theorist from the University of Maryland, showed that given a few of these holographic ideas, Einstein’s equations of general relativity are just a another way of stating the laws of thermodynamics.

Those exploding black holes (at least in theory — none has ever been observed) lit up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.

In one striking example of a holographic universe, Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study constructed a mathematical model of a “soup can” universe, where what happened inside the can, including gravity, is encoded in the label on the outside of the can, where there was no gravity, as well as one less spatial dimension. If dimensions don’t matter and gravity doesn’t matter, how real can they be?

Lee Smolin, a quantum gravity theorist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, called Dr. Jacobson’s paper “one of the most important papers of the last 20 years.”

But it received little attention at first, said Thanu Padmanabhan of the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, who has taken up the subject of “emergent gravity” in several papers over the last few years. Dr. Padmanabhan said that the connection to thermodynamics went deeper that just Einstein’s equations to other theories of gravity. “Gravity,” he said recently in a talk at the Perimeter Institute, “is the thermodynamic limit of the statistical mechanics of “atoms of space-time.”

Dr. Verlinde said he had read Dr. Jacobson’s paper many times over the years but that nobody seemed to have gotten the message. People were still talking about gravity as a fundamental force. “Clearly we have to take these analogies seriously, but somehow no one does,” he complained.

His paper, posted to the physics archive in January, resembles Dr. Jacobson’s in many ways, but Dr. Verlinde bristles when people say he has added nothing new to Dr. Jacobson’s analysis. What is new, he said, is the idea that differences in entropy can be the driving mechanism behind gravity, that gravity is, as he puts it an “entropic force.”

That inspiration came to him courtesy of a thief.

As he was about to go home from a vacation in the south of France last summer, a thief broke into his room and stole his laptop, his keys, his passport, everything. “I had to stay a week longer,” he said, “I got this idea.”

Up the beach, his brother got a series of e-mail messages first saying that he had to stay longer, then that he had a new idea and finally, on the third day, that he knew how to derive Newton’s laws from first principles, at which point Herman recalled thinking, “What’s going on here? What has he been drinking?”

When they talked the next day it all made more sense, at least to Herman. “It’s interesting,” Herman said, “how having to change plans can lead to different thoughts.”

Think of the universe as a box of scrabble letters. There is only one way to have the letters arranged to spell out the Gettysburg Address, but an astronomical number of ways to have them spell nonsense. Shake the box and it will tend toward nonsense, disorder will increase and information will be lost as the letters shuffle toward their most probable configurations. Could this be gravity?

As a metaphor for how this would work, Dr. Verlinde used the example of a polymer — a strand of DNA, say, a noodle or a hair — curling up.

“It took me two months to understand polymers,” he said.

The resulting paper, as Dr. Verlinde himself admits, is a little vague.

“This is not the basis of a theory,” Dr. Verlinde explained. “I don’t pretend this to be a theory. People should read the words I am saying opposed to the details of equations.”

Dr. Padmanabhan said that he could see little difference between Dr. Verlinde’s and Dr. Jacobson’s papers and that the new element of an entropic force lacked mathematical rigor. “I doubt whether these ideas will stand the test of time,” he wrote in an e-mail message from India. Dr. Jacobson said he couldn’t make sense of it.

John Schwarz of the California Institute of Technology, one of the fathers of string theory, said the paper was “very provocative.” Dr. Smolin called it, “very interesting and also very incomplete.”

At a workshop in Texas in the spring, Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, was asked to lead a discussion on the paper.

“The end result was that everyone else didn’t understand it either, including people who initially thought that did make some sense to them,” he said in an e-mail message.

“In any case, Erik’s paper has drawn attention to what is genuinely a deep and important question, and that’s a good thing,” Dr. Bousso went on, “I just don’t think we know any better how this actually works after Erik’s paper. There are a lot of follow-up papers, but unlike Erik, they don’t even understand the problem.”

The Verlinde brothers are now trying to recast these ideas in more technical terms of string theory, and Erik has been on the road a bit, traveling in May to the Perimeter Institute and Stony Brook University on Long Island, stumping for the end of gravity. Michael Douglas, a professor at Stony Brook, described Dr. Verlinde’s work as “a set of ideas that resonates with the community, adding, “everyone is waiting to see if this can be made more precise.”

Until then the jury of Dr. Verlinde’s peers will still be out.

Over lunch in New York, Dr. Verlinde ruminated over his experiences of the last six months. He said he had simply surrendered to his intuition. “When this idea came to me, I was really excited and euphoric even,” Dr. Verlinde said. “It’s not often you get a chance to say something new about Newton’s laws. I don’t see immediately that I am wrong. That’s enough to go ahead.”

He said friends had encouraged him to stick his neck out and that he had no regrets. “If I am proven wrong, something has been learned anyway. Ignoring it would have been the worst thing.”

The next day Dr. Verlinde gave a more technical talk to a bunch of physicists in the city. He recalled that someone had told him the other day that the unfolding story of gravity was like the emperor’s new clothes.

“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”

How does it feel to watch the life and death of your father being re-enacted on film? Natalie Curtis, daughter of Joy Division singer, Ian Curtis, went on set, camera in hand, to find out

By: Natalie Curtis
The Guardian, Saturday 22 September 2007

I was about three when my mum first told me that my father, Ian Curtis – who died when I was one – was a singer, but it just seemed normal, like having an uncle who was a tradesman or whatever. I remember hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart on the radio and realising he was known in some way, but I never thought of him as famous. When I was growing up, neither myself nor my mother were in the public eye, and Joy Division were more cult than mainstream. The first time I heard their album Closer, I thought it was out of this world. I assumed all music was done with that level of style and intelligence. As I grew older, it was a shock to discover not everything was that amazing.

Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father’s life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn. Although it took my mother’s memoir, Touching From A Distance, as a starting point, books are read in private, whereas a film is something much more public, an experience shared with an audience. When filming began in Macclesfield, I declined the opportunity to go. Macclesfield was somewhere I’d always associated with lush, green, rolling hills and I didn’t want to associate it with a film about my father’s suicide. Gradually my curiosity got the better of me, though; after all, I did study photography and am interested in film. Also, I felt that seeing the process would make it easier to watch the finished thing.

In July 2006 I went to Nottingham, where most of the film was being shot. I was on edge. It felt too weird. A bungalow had been given a 70s makeover to recreate my parents’ engagement party. Of course, I’ve no idea how realistic it was, because I wasn’t born. I first met Sam Riley, who plays my father, outside the bungalow. Sam looked really sweet with his 70s Ian haircut; as it was the pre-band Ian he was playing, he wasn’t the Ian Curtis we all imagine. He felt a bit awkward at first, I think. But I had a sneaky cigarette with him, so when I saw that scene where Ian says, “You can’t be in my gang if you don’t smoke!” I couldn’t help but giggle.

In between scenes, I was introduced to Samantha Morton, who plays my mother. Later that night we got a call to come along to a restaurant in some dark, trendy club, and afterwards we went to the flat where Samantha was staying with her fiancé. She held my hand as we crossed the road, just like my mum used to do when I was younger – I think the cast saw me as the baby of the set, because I am the baby in the film. Samantha didn’t have on the Debbie wig when we met, but we talked until dawn about her role and I saw her notes – thoughts and reflections on how to play the character. She’d made them from my mum’s book, but also from her own experiences as a mother. She had her daughter at a similar age to my mother when she had me. She also had a “Debbie playlist” – songs my mother would have listened to in 1980, such as Bowie and Durutti Column’s Sketch For Summer, one of my own favourites. Every day before filming, Samantha would listen to the music to psych herself into character. Spending time with her had reassured me; I knew that whatever happened she’d do a damned good job, even if she didn’t seem quite like my mother. Both she and Sam are in their late 20s playing my parents in their teens and early 20s, so they seem older. I think the film has made Mum slightly dowdier, too – I certainly don’t remember her wearing such awful clothes.

It felt odder when they started filming the band scenes in a Nottingham pub that was supposed to be Rafters in Manchester, where Joy Division played. I’ve grown up with black-and-white photos of the band – probably what attracted me to become a photographer – but suddenly they were there in front of me in colour, in 3-D and uncannily accurate. Harry Treadaway – who plays drummer Steve Morris – had previously played guitar, but none of the others had played instruments before. They obviously worked hard at getting everything spot-on. Harry took me to lunch and told me he’d perfected his Macc accent by recording local lads in a bicycle shop. The “pretend Joy Division” even had banter and in-jokes like a real group, and called each other by their characters’ names: Barney, Steve, Ian and Hooky.

We talked a lot about their roles; they were particularly interested in some research I’d done for the writer, Matt Greenhalgh. My father was diagnosed with epilepsy in January 1979, and looking into this for Matt gave me a real understanding of what he was going through at the time. There was more of a stigma attached to being epileptic then and people were a lot less well informed. My father also suffered from mood swings and depression. You read about mental health services being cut now, but God knows what it must have been like in the late 70s. There were loads of side-effects to his medication. It’s likely that the epilepsy and the medication would have exacerbated the depression, although there was no provision for dealing with this.

People constantly ask, “Why did he kill himself?” To me it seems obvious – because he was really depressed. Bernard [Sumner, Joy Division guitarist] told me that my father used to drink before performing, which may explain his on-stage fits, because alcohol is a seizure trigger. Seizures can also be triggered by flashing lights, lack of sleep and stress. Ian’s lifestyle and the tension caused by the disintegration of his marriage would not have helped. He did the best he could; he was just very ill.

I’ve never really felt angry at my father for committing suicide, nor was I emotional about it all being brought up in the film because it’s been there every day for me, although I’ve not had a tortured life.

We had a lot of laughs on set, in the same way as Mum told me how there was always mischief around the band. One of my favourite moments was being an extra at the Bury riot gig scene of 1980. It felt strange shouting, “Fuck off!” at a pretend Alan Hempsall, the Crispy Ambulance singer who stood in for my father when he was too ill to go on stage, because I’d interviewed the real one in my research. I got caught up in the skinheads’ fight and had a bruise on my foot for a month. The Strawberry Studios scene was special for me because I helped Harry discover how they made the famous drum sound in She’s Lost Control. He explained that that “crrch crrch” sound was a combination of a syn drum and the sound of tape head cleaner being sprayed. It was a strange afternoon. Everyone was happy when it was all over, but I cried. Joy Division is not something that will ever go away for me.

At the wrap party it was interesting to watch the actors, who had felt like a real band to me, suddenly shaking off their characters. We were shown some rushes and the reality behind it suddenly hit me. There was a baby scene I found especially upsetting; everyone cheered and said, “That’s you.” I drank more than I normally would that night.

It was hard to watch the finished film, but it is just a film, after all. Toby Kebbell – who plays Joy Division manager Rob Gretton – is one of my favourites, but he’s not how Rob was. Rob was always around, but in the last year of his life I worked in a nearby office and got to know him much better; he was so gentle and wise. I never heard Rob swear like he does in the film and there’s a bit where he’s mean to Alan Hempsall. Rob would never have been like that. I don’t think the film captures how lovable Tony Wilson – the Factory Records boss who used his life savings to fund Joy Division’s debut – was either. However, my mother and I agree with what Tony once said: if it is a choice between the truth and the legend, take the legend every time.

I miss Tony terribly and remember him arriving on set with his mad Weimaraner William bounding on to a scene and someone yelling, “Cut!!!” Four days after I saw the finished film, Tony died of cancer. So, a year after hanging out on set with a pretend Steve and a pretend Hooky, I caught up with the real ones, not at a glitzy film premiere but at a funeral.

I have mixed feelings about the film – I feel so excited for the band and the music, but repulsed by the idea of people watching a film about my family. It’s probably the same for all those left behind. The band must have been very excited when the film got an ovation at Cannes, but it can’t be comfortable watching people be very happy about sad things in your life. I felt sad reading recently that they said they feel guilty; but if anyone let Ian Curtis down, it was the NHS, not musicians too young to help.

Tony never got to see the film, but for me it is for him. It feels like Joy Division are finally going from being an enormous cult to a household name – just as Tony always believed they should.

Organized by Walead Beshty

July 17 – August 21, 2010

Opening reception
Saturday, July 17, 6 – 8 pm

Participating Artists:

Tauba Auerbach
Thomas Barrow
Carol Bove
Troy Brauntuch
Tony Conrad
Abraham Cruzvillegas
De Rijke / De Rooij
Liz Deschenes
Isa Genzken
Wade Guyton
Robert Heinecken
Karen Kilimnik
Imi Knoebel
Michael Krebber
Glenn Ligon
Erlea Maneros Zabala
Albert Oehlen
Manfred Pernice
Seth Price
Richard Prince
Josephine Pryde
R.H. Quaytman
Eileen Quinlan
Miljohn Ruperto
Michael Snow
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Charline Von Heyl
Kelley Walker
James Welling
Christopher Williams
Christopher Wool

Regen Projects

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: July 8, 2010

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.

Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.

This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.

These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.

thanks to Danielle Kays

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart at Ms. Reinhart’s Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
NY Times Published: July 4, 2010

THE advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. “How different the position of the investor today!” the ad enthuses.

It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed.

“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.”

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.

The book, and Ms. Reinhart’s and Mr. Rogoff’s own professional journeys as economists, zero in on some of the broader shortcomings of their trade — thrown into harsh relief by economists’ widespread failure to anticipate or address the financial crisis that began in 2007.

“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”

“People almost pride themselves on not paying attention to current events,” he says.

In the past, other economists often took the same empirical approach as the Reinhart-Rogoff team. But this approach fell into disfavor over the last few decades as economists glorified financial papers that were theory-rich and data-poor.

Much of that theory-driven work, critics say, is built on the same disassembled and reassembled sets of data points — generally from just the last 25 years or so and from the same handful of rich countries — that quants have whisked into ever more dazzling and complicated mathematical formations.

But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists — like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor — have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record.

“There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”

ONE of Ken Rogoff’s favorite economics jokes — yes, there are economics jokes — is “the one about the lamppost”: A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he’s doing.

“I lost my keys in the park,” says the drunk.

“Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?” asks the puzzled cop.

“Because,” says the drunk, “that’s where the light is.”

Mr. Rogoff, 57, has spent a lifetime exploring places and ideas off the beaten track. Tall, thin and bespectacled, he grew up in Rochester. There, he attended a “tough inner-city school,” where his “true liberal parents” — a radiologist and a librarian — sent him so he would be exposed to students from a variety of social and economic classes.

He received a chess set for his 13th birthday, and he quickly discovered that he was something of a prodigy, a fact he decided to hide so he wouldn’t get beaten up in the lunchroom.

“I think chess may be a relatively cool thing for kids to do now, on par with soccer or other sports,” he says. “It really wasn’t then.”

Soon, he began traveling alone to competitions around the United States, paying his way with his prize winnings. He earned the rank of American “master” by the age of 14, was a New York State Open champion and soon became a “senior master,” the highest national title.

When he was 16, he left home against his parents’ wishes to become a professional chess player in Europe. He enrolled fleetingly in high schools in London and Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, but rarely attended. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be doing,” he recalls.

He spent the next 18 months or so wandering to competitions around Europe, supporting himself with winnings and by participating in exhibitions in which he played dozens of opponents simultaneously, sometimes while wearing a blindfold.

Occasionally, he slept in five-star hotels, but other nights, when his prize winnings thinned, he crashed in grimy train stations. He had few friends, and spent most of his time alone, studying chess and analyzing previous games. Clean-cut and favoring a coat and tie these days, he described himself as a ragged “hippie” during his time in Europe. He also found life in Eastern Europe friendly but strained, he says, throttled by black markets, scarcity and unmet government promises.

After much hand-wringing, he decided to return to the United States to attend Yale, which overlooked his threadbare high school transcript. He considered majoring in Russian until Jeremy Bulow, a classmate who is now an economics professor at Stanford, began evangelizing about economics.

Mr. Rogoff took an econometrics course, reveling in its precision and rigor, and went on to focus on comparative economic systems. He interrupted a brief stint in a graduate program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for the world chess championships, which were held only every three years.

After becoming an “international grandmaster,” the highest title awarded in chess, when he was 25, he decided to quit chess entirely and to return to M.I.T. He did so because he had snared the grandmaster title and because he realized that he would probably never be ranked No. 1.

He says it took him a long time to get over the game, and the euphoric, almost omnipotent highs of his past victories.

“To this day I get letters, maybe every two years, from top players asking me: ‘How do I quit? I want to quit like you did, and I can’t figure out how to do it,’ ” he says. “I tell them that it’s hard to go from being at the top of a field, because you really feel that way when you’re playing chess and winning, to being at the bottom — and they need to prepare themselves for that.”

He returned to M.I.T., rushed through what he acknowledges was a mediocre doctoral dissertation, and then became a researcher at the Federal Reserve — where he said he had good role models who taught him how to be, at last, “professional” and “serious.”

Teaching stints followed, before the International Monetary Fund chose him as its chief economist in 2001. It was at the I.M.F. that he began collaborating with a relatively unfamiliar economist named Carmen Reinhart, whom he appointed as his deputy after admiring her work from afar.

MS. REINHART, 54, is hardly a household name. And, unlike Mr. Rogoff, she has never been hired by an Ivy League school. But measured by how often her work is cited by colleagues and others, this woman whom several colleagues describe as a “firecracker” is, by a long shot, the most influential female economist in the world.

Like Mr. Rogoff, she took a circuitous route to her present position.

Born in Havana as Carmen Castellanos, she is quick-witted and favors bright, boldly printed blouses and blazers. As a girl, she memorized the lore of pirates and their trade routes, which she says was her first exposure to the idea that economic fortunes — and state revenue in particular — “can suddenly disappear without warning.”

She also lived with more personal financial and social instability. After her family fled Havana for the United States with just three suitcases when she was 10, her father traded a comfortable living as an accountant for long, less lucrative hours as a carpenter. Her mother, who had never worked outside the home before, became a seamstress.

“Most kids don’t grow up with that kind of real economic shock,” she says. “But I learned the value of scarcity, and even the sort of tensions between East and West. And at a very early age that had an imprint on me.”

With a passion for art and literature — even today, her academic papers pun on the writings of Gabriel García Márquez — she enrolled in a two-year college in Miami, intending to study fashion merchandising. Then, on a whim, she took an economics course and got hooked.

When she went to Florida International University to study economics, she met Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate who was teaching there. Recognizing her talent, he helped her apply to a top-tier graduate program in economics, at Columbia University.

At Columbia, she met her future husband, Vincent Reinhart, who is now an occasional co-author with her. They married while in graduate school, and she quit school before writing her dissertation to try to make some money on Wall Street.

“We were newlyweds, and neither of us had a penny to our name,” she says. She left school so that they “could have nice things and a house, the kind of things I imagined a family should have.”

She spent a few years at Bear Stearns, including one as chief economist, before deciding to finish her graduate work at Columbia and return to her true love: data mining. “I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain,” she says.

After earning her doctorate in 1988, Ms. Reinhart started work at the I.M.F.

“Carmen in many ways pioneered a bigger segment in economics, this push to look at history more,” says Mr. Rogoff, explaining why he chose her. “She was just so ahead of the curve.”

She honed her knack for economic archaeology at the I.M.F., spending several years performing “checkups” on member countries to make sure they were in good economic health.

While at the fund, she teamed up with Graciela Kaminsky, another member of that exceptionally rare species — the female economist — to write their seminal paper, “The Twin Crises.”

The article looked at the interaction between banking and currency crises, and why contemporary theory couldn’t explain why those ugly events usually happened together. The paper bore one of Ms. Reinhart’s hallmarks: a vast web of data, compiled from 20 countries over several decades.

In digging through old records and piecing together a vast puzzle of disconnected data points, her ultimate goal, in that paper and others, has always been “to see the forest,” she says, “and explain it.”

Ms. Reinhart has bounced back and forth across the Beltway: she left the I.M.F. in Washington and began teaching in 1996 at the University of Maryland, from which Mr. Rogoff recruited her when he needed a deputy at the I.M.F. in 2001. When she left that post, she returned to the university.

Despite the large following that her work has drawn, she says she feels that the heavyweights of her profession have looked down upon her research as useful but too simplistic.

“You know, everything is simple when it’s clearly explained,” she contends. “It’s like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn’t sound clever anymore.”

But, she says, “economists love being clever.”

“THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT” was published last September, just as the nation was coming to grips with a financial crisis that had nearly spiraled out of control and a job market that lay in tatters. Despite bailout after bailout, stimulus after stimulus, economic armageddon still seemed nigh.

Given this backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that a book arguing that the crisis was a rerun, and not a wholly novel catastrophe, managed to become a best seller. So far, nearly 100,000 copies have been sold, according to its publisher, the Princeton University Press.

Still, its authors laugh when asked about the book’s opportune timing.

“We didn’t start the book thinking that, ‘Oh, in exactly seven years there will be a housing bust leading to a global financial crisis that will be the perfect environment in which to sell this giant book,’ ” says Mr. Rogoff. “But I suppose the way things work, we expected that whenever the book came out there would probably be some crisis or other to peg it to.”

They began the book around 2003, not long after Mr. Rogoff lured Ms. Reinhart back to the I.M.F. to serve as his deputy. The pair had already been collaborating fruitfully, finding that her dogged pursuit of data and his more theoretical public policy eye were well matched.

Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt.

To bolster their calls for tightened government spending, budget hawks have cited the book’s warnings about the perils of escalating public and private debt. Left-leaning analysts have been quick to take issue with that argument, saying that fiscal austerity perpetuates joblessness, and have been attacking economists associated with it.

Mr. Rogoff, because of his time at the I.M.F., has also come under fire.

In the years before and during Mr. Rogoff’s tenure, critics including the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz accused the I.M.F. of having a cold-hearted, doctrinaire approach to its work in poorer countries. Some of that criticism still clings to Mr. Rogoff. For his part, he contends that the I.M.F. did what it could for countries with intractable problems, and that the critics’ approaches would have made troubled economies even weaker.

Perhaps because “This Time Is Different” is empirical rather than proscriptive, it has defied categorization.

The New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, for example, praised the book as “the best explanation of the crisis” but referred to it as a history book, rather than a work of economic analysis, since it is “almost entirely devoid of theory.” (The implication being, of course, that genuine “economic analysis” must be hypertheoretical.)

Of course, it’s not as if history is an entirely new ingredient in economic study. There have been other vibrant historical recountings of financial crises, including “Manias, Panics and Crashes,” the 1978 book by Charles Kindleberger. Such books have typically been narrative, though, unlike the data-intensive “This Time Is Different.”

But even in its quantitative perspective and breadth, the book still stands on the shoulders of an economic classic, “A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960,” written by another great male-and-female pair of economists, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz.

“What Friedman and Schwartz did for the U.S. was heroic,” says Ms. Reinhart. “Ken and I have benefited from the use of the Internet to track down books, sources and experts to help us with our work. Friedman and Schwartz did not.”

While Professors Reinhart and Rogoff may have had technological advantages in their research, they weren’t able to outsource much of the number-crunching to graduate students — in part because they wanted to be able to stay close to the data themselves, but also because few students are interested in or trained for that kind of work.

The economics profession generally began turning away from empirical work in the early 1970s. Around that time, economists fell in love with theoretical constructs, a shift that has no single explanation. Some analysts say it may reflect economists’ desire to be seen as scientists who describe and discover universal laws of nature.

“Economists have physics envy,” says Richard Sylla, a financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He argues that Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate whom many credit with endowing economists with a mathematical tool kit, “showed that a lot of physical theories and concepts had economic analogs.”

Since that time, he says, “economists like to think that there is some physical, stable state of the world if they get the model right.” But, he adds, “there is really no such thing as a stable state for the economy.”

Others suggest that incentives for young economists to publish in journals and gain tenure predispose them to pursue technical wizardry over deep empirical research and to choose narrow slices of topics. Historians, on the other hand, are more likely to focus on more comprehensive subjects — that is, the material for books — that reflect a deeply experienced, broadly informed sense of judgment.

“They say historians peak in their 50s, once they’ve accumulated enough knowledge and wisdom to know what to look for,” says Mr. Rogoff. “By contrast, economists seem to peak much earlier. It’s hard to find an important paper written by an economist after 40.”

MICROECONOMICS — the field that focuses on smaller units like households and workers, as opposed to big-picture questions about how national economies function — has embraced real-world data-mining. (Think “Freakonomics.”)

Macroeconomics has been slower to change, but the popular success of “This Time Is Different” and related work seems to be changing how macro practitioners approach their craft.

It has also changed how policy makers think about their own mission.

Mr. Rogoff says a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry was offended at the suggestion in “This Time Is Different” that Japan had once defaulted on its debt and sent him an angry letter demanding a retraction.

Mr. Rogoff sent him a 1942 front-page article in The Times documenting the forgotten default. “Thank you,” the official wrote in apology, “for teaching the Japanese something about our own country.”

John Wesley
Alice
1965
Duco and oil on canvas
54 x 54 inches; 137 x 137 cm

Jo Baer
Untitled
1962
Gouache and graphite on paper
5 x 5 inches; 13 x 13 cm

Jo Baer and John Wesley in the Sixties

through August 13

Mathew Marks