Castelli in 1960 with works by Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Lee Bontecou, Edward Higgins, and Robert Rauschenberg.

by Peter Schjeldahl
June 7, 2010
The New Yorker

In 1975, when I was a critic for the Times, an editor sat me down and told me that the paper was cutting back on reviews in favor of features. He added that there was a big future for a young man who wanted to be an investigative reporter in the art world. What story did he have in mind? The dealings of Leo Castelli. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That year, a celebrated conviction of the dealer Frank Lloyd, for conspiring to plunder the estate of Mark Rothko, fed popular suspicions that the art world was a quasi-criminal enterprise zone, in which Castelli—who had a near-monopoly on the top artists and sold their work for prices that seemed fantastic—figured to be the gangster-in-chief. And what young journalist didn’t ache for the laurels of a Woodward or a Bernstein? I didn’t. I liked the art world, and I revered Castelli, though he made me nervous. Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste—with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”—I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets. He sensed this, I’m convinced, and left me alone when I visited the holy of holies that was his gallery, first at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and, after 1971, at 420 West Broadway, flashing me the odd quick knowing smile. Leo (almost no one who met him even once called him anything else) wielded custom-tailored ways of making people feel special—all people, because he crowned his Continental glamour with a faintly comic and completely endearing American-style openness.

The Times did run a piece that year, which probed Castelli’s handling of his thoroughbred stable: Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Oldenburg, Kelly, Stella, Judd, Flavin, Morris, Nauman, Serra, Ruscha, et al. It reported that he gave special consideration to favored collectors and might refuse to sell anything significant to others, and that he cultivated a network of coöperating galleries in other cities, which showed works by his artists and split the commissions on sales with him. No scandal there. The sole hint of impropriety was unsourced: “It is said that throughout the late sixties Castelli had collectors bidding up works on his behalf at auction.” But the first germane auction didn’t take place until 1970, and inflating market bubbles wasn’t Castelli’s style. He played a long game, aimed at securing art-historical, institutional recognition for his artists. Rising prices kept score, but where a work went was more important to him than what it went for. He set his sights beyond collectors, on museums and the academy. The article missed the central, arguably shady aspect of Castelli’s practice: the seduction not of pocketbooks but of hearts and minds. His mentors (whether or not they consented to the role) included Marcel Duchamp; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art; the critic Clement Greenberg; and the collector and dealer Sidney Janis. Castelli’s first wife, Ileana Schapira, who was at least his equal in taste and intellect, was never more helpful than after their divorce, in 1959, when she emerged as a formidable gallerist with her new husband, Michael Sonnabend; in Paris in the sixties, the Sonnabend Gallery raised the flag of Castelli’s American artists, to the horror of the French art establishment and the corresponding ardor of many other Europeans. At one time or another, Castelli’s brain trust numbered the art historians Leo Steinberg and Robert Rosenblum; Alan Solomon, the brilliant director of the Jewish Museum (in the early sixties, a showcase for avant-garde art); the talent-scouting dealers Dick Bellamy, uptown, and Irving Blum, in Los Angeles; and no end of critics. Castelli’s web of influence allowed him to change the culture of art from the inside out.

Who was he? A biography, “Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli” (Knopf; $35), by Annie Cohen-Solal, written in French and elegantly translated by Mark Polizzotti and the author, immerses the question in facts and sensitive analysis without exactly answering it. Something impenetrable survives the best efforts of Cohen-Solal, who met Castelli at a dinner in New York in 1989, soon after she became the cultural counsellor at the French Embassy. “So, you are the new one,” she remembers him saying to her. “Well, you’re going to take the city by storm with your orange skirt and your long gloves! Why don’t you come to the gallery tomorrow around five? You’ll see the show, you’ll meet Roy. He has an opening, and you’ll stay for the party!” With that personal note, the first and almost the last in an impeccably judicious book, Cohen-Solal establishes her membership in the community of the bedazzled-by-Leo. It’s an important credential. The impressions that Castelli made on people are not incidental to his story. In a way, they are his story.

He was born Leo Krausz, in Trieste in 1907, the second of three children of a prominent Hungarian banker and an Italian merchant heiress, both of whom were Jewish. The family took his mother’s maiden name in 1934, when the Fascist government banned non-Italianate patronymics. The family’s eventful history, reaching back on his maternal side to Renaissance Tuscany, brims with the frequent tribulations of Jewish experience at the fringes of the Austrian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Castelli didn’t conceal his heritage. He ignored it, subjecting his Jewishness to “unreflective and absolute erasure,” Cohen-Solal writes. She provides a backstory, spanning centuries, that is so detailed—her protagonist doesn’t occupy center stage for most of the book’s first hundred pages—that it initially exasperated me. But I returned to it, later, for its absorbing and, after all, highly relevant scrutiny of the historic loam that produced a bloom as exotic as Castelli.

A slight child raised in luxury in Trieste—and, during the First World War, in Vienna—he was expected to follow a career in finance. He asserted his independence by becoming both an athlete in several sports, notably mountain climbing, and a passionate student of literature in four languages. “I wanted to be a Renaissance man, and physically strong,” he recalled. At first unsuccessful with girls, he profited from a single session with a Freudian psychoanalyst, whose advice—to consider the girl’s point of view—helped to launch him on his lifelong sideline as a Casanova. Cohen-Solal evokes a world of “the Finzi-Continis of the Adriatic”; the gathering menace of Mussolini raised only mild alarm among people who were almost used to occasional spells of persecution. Castelli, whose father prudently took party membership, remembered thinking, languidly, of the Fascists as “rather intolerable.”

In 1932, at the age of twenty-five, Castelli took a job with an insurance company in Bucharest, where he courted the elder daughter of Mihai Schapira, a business tycoon. Rebuffed by her, Cohen-Solal writes, Castelli turned his attentions to her “impish, refined” sister, Ileana, who later said, none too sentimentally, “as I wanted to get out of Romania at any cost, I married him.” The couple relished the Dada art scene in Bucharest, their sensibilities agreeing in “iconoclasm, refusal of convention, love of subversion, insatiable curiosity, juvenile humor.” In 1935, a job transfer for Castelli brought them, via the Orient Express, to Paris. He was ecstatic there, while she, for all her striving and Schiaparelli raiment, felt awkwardly out of step, even as they “developed their taste in the zone between the abstraction of Klee and Kandinsky, the Surrealism of Miró, and the Dadaist loyalties” of the critic Michel Tapié. They had a daughter, Nina, in 1937, then commenced to lead separate lives.

Anxious to forestall a final breach, Ileana’s father lent Castelli the money to start a gallery, on the Place Vendôme, which was named for its co-director, the fashionable decorator René Drouin. It opened in July, 1939, with a show of modern and antique furniture, including commissioned pieces by Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini (a former girlfriend of Castelli’s from Trieste), Eugene Berman, and other artists in the force field of Surrealism. The business closed two months later, when war broke out. The closing peeved Ileana, who had been elated by Leo’s new vocation. She recalled (ruefully, I hope), “We were so carefree—what did the war matter to us? It was unimportant. What was important was what we were doing, which was so much more fun!” They were in Cannes when Paris fell, and managed to acquire visas for a departure by ship from Marseilles. By way of Oran, Oujda, and Casablanca, then overland to the north of Spain and with a subsequent docking in Havana, the family reached Ellis Island on March 12, 1941. A few days later, Castelli made his first visit to the Museum of Modern Art.

That year saw an auspicious influx of European artists and intellectuals to New York, where they joined a starry cohort that already included Duchamp, Mondrian, and Dali. Castelli fit right in. He lived with his family in a graceful brownstone that Mihai Schapira had bought: 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Leo and Ileana enrolled at Columbia University, where she studied psychology and he, thinking that he might become a teacher, took up economic history, with a concentration in Renaissance mercantilism. In March, 1942, he volunteered for the Army. (The promised shortcut to citizenship may have bolstered his courage.) Trained in intelligence for a mission in France that was later aborted, he found himself back in Bucharest, serving as a translator. In May, 1945, Sergeant Leo Castelli visited the ruins of Budapest, where his parents, having taken refuge there with his sister Silvia and her Christian husband, had just died—his mother of drowning during a panicked relocation across the Danube and his father of an infected wound.

Returning to New York, Castelli took a managerial position with his father-in-law’s new clothing factory, which he performed lackadaisically. He also embarked on what Cohen-Solal calls “the strangest ten years of his life”—1946 to 1956—which happened to be “precisely the same years as the transformation of the New York art scene.” Castelli took as gospel Alfred Barr’s modernist genealogy—a flow chart of styles from Impressionism to Surrealism and varieties of abstraction—with its open book of illustrative masterpieces at MOMA. (In 1987, he lamented that model’s dissolution: “I never thought it would come to this. I’ve always believed in development, one movement following another. . . . But everything today is very much in flux.”) Hoping to ingratiate himself with Barr, in 1946, he donated an Arshile Gorky drawing to the museum. Barr remained aloof, but that didn’t daunt Castelli, who revealed a gift for unstinting service to anyone he esteemed.

Clement Greenberg introduced Castelli to the emerging American painters, whom he quickly befriended—shifting his loyalty from the Surrealists as, later, he jumped to the insurgents of Pop art and minimalism. He bought works, often on layaway, by Klee, Mondrian, Gorky, Pollock, and other still inexpensive masters. (His later wealth, such as it was, owed largely to the appreciation of his collection.) His first exercise as a private dealer came through Drouin, in 1947: some hundred canvases by Kandinsky, consigned by his widow, Nina, a gorgon who seems to have driven a previous agent to a nervous breakdown. Castelli had to cope with creditors and tangled legal claims, while seeking exposure and buyers for the work. Mme. Kandinsky hectored him, and as much as accused him of dishonesty. Finally, he wrote to her in a tone that, for him, amounted to frothing rage: “I would like to remind you that it was because of me that a considerable number of very important paintings have been sold here in America, and that these sales have cost me a huge amount of work without earning me a dime.” He added, “It is not my habit to blow my own horn.” (Rudeness always flummoxed him. In the sixties, he smoothly handed off boors to his less politic chief assistant, Ivan Karp.) The widow wasn’t mollified, but the ordeal gained Castelli valuable contacts and taught him a great deal about the diplomatic challenges and the back-room ins and outs of the upper-tier art trade.

In 1950, Castelli inspired Sidney Janis to mount a showdown between European and American painters, pairing works by de Kooning and Dubuffet, Pollock and André Lanskoy, Rothko and Nicolas de Staël, Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages, and so on. (Poor Europe!) Castelli puzzled the downtown artists, who, he recalled, “figured there must be some financial angle to it. In reality, money played no part in what I was doing. While they didn’t know what to make of me, I had tremendous admiration for them.” The same year, Leo and Ileana became two of only three non-artists (the other was the much-loved, eccentric dealer Charles Egan) who were founding members of the Club, the legendary discussion group that met three times a week for the next six years. In 1951, Castelli financed—paying a few hundred dollars for rent and publicity—and helped hang the breakout Ninth Street Show, of sixty-one artists, including the cream of the New York School. After the opening, he had the signal pleasure of going to the Cedar Tavern with Alfred Barr, who, previously having resisted the local avant-garde, humbly wrote the artists’ names on the backs of photographs of work that Castelli handed him.

For two years, Willem and Elaine de Kooning summered with the Castellis in East Hampton. That friendship soured, first when Ileana proclaimed her preference for the art of Jackson Pollock, and then when Castelli opted not to represent the great Dutchman. (Ileana explained, “Leo was more interested in what was coming up than in what had already bloomed.”) The long, relative eclipse of de Kooning’s art-world prestige, until the eighties, may have stemmed from that decision. Castelli altered a situation in which critics and curators had wielded guiding authority. He became, effectively, the scene’s predominant critic. What he showed didn’t invariably succeed, but what he wouldn’t show came to bat with two strikes against it. His winning bets came to seem self-fulfilling prophecies. Cohen-Solal puts it plainly: “Castelli gave the impression of having internalized Orwell’s insight that history is written by the winners. And so he determined to write his own part in it, and that of his artists.”

Castelli was nearly fifty when he underwent a “lightning metamorphosis from dilettante dandy and financial dependent to master gallerist,” Cohen-Solal writes, opening his gallery, in the wake of a snowstorm, on February 3, 1957, in two rooms of the family home: the living room and Nina’s bedroom. The show was a dazzling foray in subtle taste, juxtaposing first-rate modern and contemporary works by Europeans and Americans. (At the entrance, a Pollock hung next to a Delaunay.) Castelli’s first roster of young artists, mostly second-generation Abstract Expressionists, was undistinguished, except for the irrepressible Robert Rauschenberg. Then Rauschenberg introduced him to Jasper Johns. Castelli’s discovery of Johns’s Flag, Target, Alphabet, and Numbers paintings, at the artist’s loft near Coenties Slip, is an event steeped in mythological significance. The taciturn images, tenderly brushed in fleshy encaustic, announced an American revolution in art. Johns remembered “a lively few minutes,” during which Castelli offered him a show. Within days of the opening, in January, 1958, Barr had acquired four Johns paintings for MOMA.

The next big find, the following year, was the sensationally dour “pinstripe” black paintings by the twenty-three-year-old Frank Stella. Leo Steinberg recalled that Castelli, distressed to learn that before he could launch the work some of it would appear in a group exhibition at MOMA, dispatched Rauschenberg and Johns to Princeton, where Stella, a recent graduate of the university, was living, to dissuade him from showing at the museum. (They failed.) Then came Castelli’s years of miracles. Starting in 1962, with a show of Lichtenstein’s comic-book-panel paintings, the revelatory débuts came in a torrent. Steinberg remembered Ivan Karp remarking, “We should discover a genius! It’s been two weeks since we last discovered a genius!” Castelli, to hold on to his artists, paid them regular stipends, on a scale unheard of in America, whether their work sold or not. In 1963, Castelli married a Frenchwoman twenty-one years his junior, Toiny Fraissex du Bost. They had a son, Jean-Christophe, later that year, and she began managing a branch of the business devoted to prints.

Castelli’s repeated efforts on behalf of Rauschenberg, in the teeth of stubborn resistance from Barr and some of his successors at MOMA to the artist’s extravagant style, are a leitmotif of Cohen-Solal’s detailed and savvy account of the dealer’s doings in the sixties. His chief coup, which doubled as a somewhat obnoxious triumph for postwar American art in general, occurred at the Venice Biennale of 1964, where Rauschenberg became the first American to win the Grand Prize for Painting. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency—beefed up during the culture-smitten Kennedy Administration—predominantly outsized works by Rauschenberg and seven other artists, including Johns and Stella, arrived in an Air Force Globemaster C-124. The scale of the effort, extending to an auxiliary show at a palazzo on the Grand Canal, was imperial, if not imperialistic. Cohen-Solal’s chapter on the Biennale presents it as a play in eight acts, complete with an extensive dramatis personae. The politicking was intense. Ileana, who represented Rauschenberg in Europe, remarked, “I hate the game of politics that goes on here, but I think if we are going to play it at all, we should play to win.” In the end, arrogant French opposition proved more off-putting to the mostly Italian judges than arrogant American ambition. (It may also have mattered that Rauschenberg’s art was wonderful.) Castelli’s labors for the artist were crowned in 1989, when he was hailed for the munificence of his personal donation to MOMA of Rauschenberg’s iconic “Bed” (1955), a paint-slathered quilt, sheet, and pillow. He dedicated the gift to Barr, who had died in 1981.

Castelli was a quick study, obviously, though not an instantaneous one, the Johns epiphany aside. He was wary of Warhol, who frequented the gallery as a collector, and craved admittance as an artist. (Rauschenberg and Johns disparaged Warhol, as they had Lichtenstein; a kind of crisis recurred whenever the gallery’s artists begrudged a newcomer, activating Castelli’s skills as a conciliator.) He was reluctant, too, to take on James Rosenquist, whose billboard-derived montages of commercial imagery struck him as too akin to Surrealism. In both cases, he was swayed by advisers in his network. Castelli’s recruitment of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris confirmed his sovereignty by conjoining the yin of minimalism to the yang of Pop, in a catholic overview of the new. He even played host, briefly, to exponents of color-field painting, a mode of abstraction that took its bearings from Greenberg’s nostalgic ideals of progressive modernism and aesthetic purity. But color-field couldn’t be squared with Castelli’s loyalty to art that gratified the intellect as well as the eye. Another dealer, André Emmerich, absorbed the Greenbergian artists, marking a historic fissure in the avant-garde, which soon fragmented beyond Castelli’s power to unite it under his hallmark.

He débuted his last genius early in 1968: Bruce Nauman, who, with Richard Serra and Eva Hesse, established the context-sensitive aesthetics of post-minimalism that still condition new art today. Later that year, Castelli opened a temporary annex, the Castelli Warehouse, on West 108th Street, with a stunningly innovative show, organized by Robert Morris, of environmental sculpture by nine artists, including Nauman, Serra, and Hesse. But Castelli’s anxiety to corral the spread of artistic novelties, including the newfangled medium of video, grew frantic. He was stung by an immense exhibition at the Met, “New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970,” organized by the then thirty-four-year-old curator and scene-making gadabout Henry Geldzahler. The spectacular yet soft-headed survey included many of Castelli’s artists, but its heavy emphasis on color-field marginalized his painstakingly discriminated vision. Meanwhile, Castelli mistook a trend in art—conceptualism—as a movement along classical lines, with leaders and followers. But conceptualism proved to be a miscellany of ploys for exalting ideas over objects. His anointed conceptualists—Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry—were faces in a crowd.

In 1971 came the expansion to SoHo, in a five-story building bought with a coöperative of dealers. Castelli took the second floor and the Sonnabend Gallery the third. Ileana outflanked him with a wave of new European artists and outrageous Americans, including Vito Acconci (who, in his performance piece “Seedbed,” hid under a ramp and masturbated while vocally fantasizing, via an amplifier, about the viewers above him). Sales of Johns and Lichtenstein kept Castelli afloat, but, what with production costs for grandiose minimalist and post-minimalist works that sold slowly, if at all, and the never interrupted outlay of stipends, amid a recession, the business was hard put by the time I declined the chance to trigger a Castelligate. Judd left, ending up at the Pace Gallery. Rauschenberg was lured away by the Knoedler Gallery. One after another, gallerists arose, including Mary Boone and Larry Gagosian, who usurped Castelli’s primacy even as they voiced tribute to him as a hero. Castelli took it as a “truly poisoned shaft,” Cohen-Solal writes, when, behind his back, Arne Glimcher, of Pace, arranged the watershed million-dollar sale of Johns’s “Three Flags” from a private collection to the Whitney Museum, in 1980. Joint shows with Boone, of Julian Schnabel, in 1981, and David Salle, in 1982, amounted to strategic capitulations. Castelli’s once mighty business model began to seem almost quaint. For one thing, he rarely worked the secondary market in already owned works, a money machine for Gagosian. Of the top galleries today, only Marian Goodman’s hews closely to Castelli’s paradigm.

Castelli’s prestige began to count against him, with his former partisans in the press “growing weary of the art scene’s more-fabulous-than-thou aura,” Cohen-Solal observes. His competitiveness waned. He took victory laps. He received the rosette of the French Legion of Honor, apparently in exchange for donating works by Johns to the Pompidou museum, and he visited Trieste four times (with as many female companions), where he was hailed by journalists as the “lord of art” and the “magnificent Triestine.” The mayor made him the honorary director of the Revoltella Museum, where, however, the real director vetoed a show of Castelli’s artists, declaring, “No merchants in the temple!” (The polyglot city had not ceased to be a twisty place.) Castelli collapsed in public more than once from a heart ailment that required surgery and a pacemaker. But he strove onward, if not so much in art and business, at least in love. His union with Toiny had inevitably faltered, given his wandering ways, but they remained married until she died, in 1987. Gagosian recalled the dealer’s invitation to join him and an artist girlfriend: “Come, let’s have a drink with her, and we’ll go to her studio and you can tell her you like her paintings.” Marriage to the Italian critic Barbara Bertozzi, in 1995, finally slowed him down. She “took away his Hermès appointment book,” Castelli’s gallery manager, Susan Brundage, said. The SoHo space closed in 1997. But Castelli remained socially active, refulgent with verve. He died at home, at the age of ninety-one, on August 21, 1999.

At a memorial service at MOMA, Jean-Christophe Castelli confessed his jealousy of the art world, for so consuming his father, but added a note of gratitude: “Instead of baseball, my father gave me the Italian Renaissance.” It was no flip remark. A friend, Bob Monk, related an astonishing scene after the funeral of Jean-Christophe’s mother: “When Leo saw that I had arrived, he lit up, came to me, and said, ‘You must see Toiny, you must see Toiny, she is beautiful.’. . . They removed the red roses, undid the screws, opened the top, and we looked at Toiny together. ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ Leo asked.” I can’t decide if that story is more touching than macabre, or vice versa. Either way, it feels close to the incomprehensible core of the man, whose grief, no doubt tinged with hysteria, found outlet in aestheticism. Perhaps art was the mode in which he assessed everything and everybody, himself included, as if fitting each passing sensation, personality, and event into an evolving composition. ♦

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner testified before the Senate Financial Committee on Thursday.

By SEWELL CHAN
NY Times Published: June 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — Senators from both parties criticized the Obama administration on Thursday for not taking a stronger line on China’s economic policies, which many in Congress say they believe unfairly disadvantage American businesses and workers.

Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, said the administration was committed to securing a “level playing field,” but in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, he could offer only a few tangible accomplishments from the annual bilateral meeting he attended in Beijing last month.

Even as both economies struggle to recover from the recession, complaints about China have grown: that China gives unfair support to its export-oriented manufacturers, has failed to abide by World Trade Organization agreements, permits the theft of American intellectual property and protects its domestic industry from competition from abroad.

“We do not have a strategic, coordinated United States economic policy, that I can determine, with respect to China,” Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and the chairman of the committee, told Mr. Geithner.

Mr. Baucus said he was particularly concerned about China’s failure to enforce intellectual property rules. “A prominent C.E.O. of a U.S. software company recently noted that many Chinese companies will legally purchase only 25 percent or less of their software needs,” he said. “They illegally pirate the rest.”

Mr. Baucus said the United States was more oriented to process, and China to results.

“China’s not going to become like the United States overnight,” Mr. Geithner replied. “China still has a government that plays an overwhelming role in determining economic activity. As you said, there is still a broad range of practices that China pursues today that is designed to protect China’s workers and firms at the expense of China’s trading partners.”

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, told Mr. Geithner: “The Chinese government radically favors domestic producers. It does it in the market through government procurement practices, and it also does it through industrial policy.”

Mr. Geithner told him: “For the first time now you’re seeing domestic demand in China, not exports, grow much faster than G.D.P. and the economy.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Congress supported China’s admission to the World Trade Organization a decade ago, only to see a trail of broken promises ever since. He said that Mr. Geithner — like past Treasury secretaries under both the Clinton and Bush administrations — had been “slow-danced off the dance floor.”

Mr. Geithner noted that China allowed the renminbi to appreciate against the dollar more than 20 percent from 2005 to 2008, and said that “broad swaths” of the American economy had benefited from growth in China.

The top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, was similarly critical, saying that China had been “refusing to play by the same rules as everyone else.”

Mr. Geithner told Mr. Grassley, “We are about action, not about talk.”

But on the politically volatile issue of China’s currency — the Chinese government has artificially held down the value of the renminbi, most economists agree, to promote exports. In doing so, China has accumulated a vast store of foreign currency reserves, mostly United States dollars.

“China has made it clear in public that they have decided to resume the reform — that’s the phrase they use — to resume the reform of their exchange-rate policy,” Mr. Geithner told Mr. Grassley, but added, “As you know, they clearly have not decided when and how they’re going to act.”

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Matthew Stoltzfus, left, on his farm in Lancaster, Pa., where a government program is working with Amish farmers to try to instill more environmentally sound methods for handling runoff.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO
NY Times Published: June 8, 2010

LANCASTER, Pa. — With simplicity as their credo, Amish farmers consume so little that some might consider them model environmental citizens.

“We are supposed to be stewards of the land,” said Matthew Stoltzfus, a 34-year-old dairy farmer and father of seven whose family, like many other Amish, shuns cars in favor of horse and buggy and lives without electricity. “It is our Christian duty.”

But farmers like Mr. Stoltzfus are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.

And the Environmental Protection Agency, charged by President Obama with restoring the bay to health, is determined to crack down. The farmers have a choice: change the way they farm or face stiff penalties.

“There’s much, much work that needs to be done, and I don’t think the full community understands,” said David McGuigan, the E.P.A. official leading an effort by the agency to change farming practices here in Lancaster County.

Runoff from manure and synthetic fertilizers has polluted the Chesapeake Bay for years, reducing oxygen rates, killing fish and creating a dead zone that has persisted since the 1970s despite off-and-on cleanup efforts. But of the dozens of counties that contribute to the deadly runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus, Lancaster ranks at the top. According to E.P.A. data from 2007, the most recent available, the county generates more than 61 million pounds of manure a year. That is 20 million pounds more than the next highest county on the list of bay polluters, and more than six times that of most other counties.

The challenge for the environmental agency is to steer the farmers toward new practices without stirring resentment that might cause a backlash. The so-called plain-sect families — Amish and Old Order Mennonites, descended from persecuted Anabaptists who fled Germany and Switzerland in the 1700s — are notoriously wary of outsiders and of the government in particular.

“They are very resistant to government interference, and they object to government subsidies,” said Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College who studies the Amish. “They feel they should take care of their own.”

But the focus on the plain-sect dairy farmers is unavoidable: they own more than 50 percent of Lancaster County’s 5,000-plus farms.

“It’s been an issue over the last 30 years,” Dr. Kraybill said. “We have too many animals here per square acre — too many cows for too few acres.”

For now, the environmental agency’s strategy is to approach each farmer individually in collaboration with state and local conservation officials and suggest improvements like fences to prevent livestock from drifting toward streams, buffers that reduce runoff and pits to keep manure stored safely.

“These are real people with their own histories and their own needs and their own culture,” said John Hanger, the secretary of environmental protection in Pennsylvania. “It’s about treating people right, and in order to treat people right, you’ve got to be able to start where they are at.”

But if that does not work, the government will have to resort to fines and penalties.

Last September, Mr. McGuigan and his colleagues visited 24 farms in a pocket of Lancaster County known as Watson’s Run to assess their practices. Twenty-three of the farms were plain sect; 17 were found to be managing their manure inadequately. The abundance of manure was also affecting water quality. Six of the 19 wells sampled contained E. coli bacteria, and 16 had nitrate levels exceeding those allowed by the E.P.A.

Persuading plain-sect farmers to install fences and buffers underwritten by federal grants has been challenging because of their tendency to shy from government programs, including subsidies. Members neither pay Social Security nor receive its benefits, for example.

Word of the E.P.A.’s farm visits last September traveled rapidly through Amish country, Mr. Stoltzfus said, even though most plain-sect farmers do not have their own phones.

The farmers whom the agency visited declined to be interviewed. But Mr. Stoltzfus, whose brother-in-law was among them, said that as the news circulated, some farmers decided on their own to make changes in anticipation of intervention by the agency.

“I had never heard of the E.P.A. coming out to do inspections,” he said. “I think these practices are going to be required more.”

With help from the Lancaster County Conservation District, Mr. Stoltzfus applied for a government grant to help finance construction of a heifer barn with a manure pit. He expects the grant to cover about 70 percent of the cost.

But some Amish farmers were angered by the agency’s intrusion and its requirements.

“It’s certainly generated controversy,” said Sam Riehl, a farmer in the area. “We wonder whether we are being told what to do, and whether the E.P.A. will make it so that we can’t even maintain our farms.”

Mr. Riehl said he had vowed never to accept a government grant. He does have a manure management plan and a manure pit, he said, although several of his neighbors do not.

Last year the federal Fish and Wildlife Service awarded $500,000 to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to work with the farmers on switching to barnyard runoff controls, streamside forest buffers, no-till farming and cover crops. The money has been lucrative for local agricultural companies like Red Barn Consulting, which has used some of it to hold milk-and-doughnut sessions in barns for Amish farmers and drop off fliers door to door.

The firm’s owner, Peter Hughes, and his employees instruct the farmers on manure management and do free walkthroughs to offer suggestions. In the last six months, Mr. Hughes said, his plain-sect clientele has soared from several dozen farmers to about 200.

Working with the plain sect presents challenges, Mr. Hughes said. For one thing, the group is deeply averse to salesmanship. Then there is the technological communication problem: most of the farmers share a phone booth along a road with several neighbors.

“I had one client who would call me at 5:15 every morning,” he said. “That was his allotted time to use the phone, and that was the only way for us to talk.”

Most days Mr. Hughes is on the road in his pickup visiting farmers. As he drives, he said, he is often struck by the dichotomy between a would-be pastoral ideal and the environmental reality.

“You see those cows and the fields, and it’s beautiful,” he said. “But then there’s that big pile of manure sitting back there.”

Mr. Stoltzfus hopes he is ahead of the game. By adopting new practices and building the manure pit, he thinks he can both help the environment and steer clear of E.P.A. interference.

At midday, Mr. Stoltzfus was placing a bowl of cut fruit into a propane-powered cooler in his backyard, one of the family’s few concessions to technology. Hand-washed black pants and plain cotton dresses fluttered on a clothesline behind him. He offered a taciturn reflection on how quickly things had changed — his willingness to accept the grant, for example.

“A while back, Old Order Amish would not participate in programs like this,” he said, “but farming is getting expensive.”

And then he ended the conversation.

“Is that all?” he said politely but coolly. “I have work to do.”

It was milking time.

Striking workers on Monday at Foshan Fengfu Autoparts, which supplies parts to Honda Motor’s joint-ventures in China.

NY Times By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: June 8, 2010

SHANGHAI — Just days after resolving a strike by agreeing to give substantial raises to 1,900 workers at its transmission factory, Honda Motor said Tuesday that employees at another of its parts plants in southern China had staged a walkout.
Readers’ Comments

A Honda spokeswoman in Tokyo, Natsuno Asanuma, said workers at an exhaust-system factory in the city of Foshan had gone on strike Monday morning. She declined to say what demands they had made. But the walkout will force Honda to halt work Wednesday at one of its four auto assembly plants in China, the company said.

The four assembly factories had just reopened after closing for almost two weeks because of the earlier strike. It was unclear how long the assembly plant, Guangqi Honda Automobile, would remain closed.

The second Honda strike comes amid growing signs that China’s huge migrant work force is gaining bargaining power. New pressure to raise pay and improve labor conditions is likely to raise the cost of doing business and could induce some companies to shift production elsewhere.

Foxconn Technology — a giant contract electronics manufacturer that also raised wages in China this month — said Tuesday it was reconsidering the way it runs its operations there.

The company, which has seen a string of suicides among workers at its sprawling, citylike campuses in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, said it was considering turning the management of some of its worker dormitories over to local governments in China.

“Because Foxconn is a commercial enterprise operating like a society, we’re responsible for almost everything for our workers, including their job, food, dorm and even personal relationships,” Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman, said Tuesday. “That is too much for a single company. A company like Foxconn shouldn’t have so many functions.”

Foxconn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, makes devices for companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Hon Hai’s shares fell more than 5 percent Tuesday in Taiwan, to their lowest since last August, after the company said it would seek to pass on its higher labor costs to clients.

As the company held annual shareholder meetings in Taipei and Hong Kong, small groups of people demonstrated outside, urging the company to improve conditions for workers.

Turning over management of employee dormitories to the government authorities would be a dramatic change for Foxconn, which — like thousands of other manufacturers in southern China — has lured peasants from rural areas to work at giant, gated factory compounds.

One of the company’s Shenzhen campuses employs 300,000 workers and covers about 1 square mile, or more than 2.5 square kilometers. The gated campus boasts high-rise dormitories, a hospital, a fire department, an Internet cafe and even restaurants and bank branches.

Foxconn said Sunday that it planned to double the salaries of many of its 800,000 workers in China to 2,000 renminbi, or nearly $300, a month. The huge raise by one of the country’s biggest exporters seems likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit, analysts say.

Chairman Terry Gou told the Taipei shareholders’ meeting that the company was looking to shift some unspecified production from China to automated plants in Taiwan, Reuters reported.

After years of focusing on luring foreign investment, Chinese officials are now endorsing efforts to improve conditions for workers and raise salaries. The government hopes the changes will ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor and prevent social unrest over soaring food and housing prices.

On Friday, Beijing’s municipal government said it would raise its minimum wage by 20 percent. Ma Jun, a Hong Kong-based economist at Deutsche Bank, said last week that more cities and provinces would soon raise their minimum wages 10 to 20 percent.

“We therefore believe that a faster-than-expected labor cost increase has now become a political imperative,” Mr. Ma said in a report, citing comments from Beijing’s leadership about improving social justice.

But analysts say wage pressure is also coming from labor shortages in coastal cities as the country’s declining birth rate reduces the number of young people entering the work force.

Factories in southern China that used to advertise in search of employees 18 to 24 years old are now recruiting much older workers.

The labor shortages are being exacerbated by an economic boom and improving job prospects in inland provinces.

TPV Technology, a contract manufacturer that produces computer monitors with about 16,000 workers in five cities in China, says it raised salaries by 15 percent in January and plans to raise them again, perhaps as early as July.

“We’ll adjust our salary to the market and to our competitors’ level,” said Shane Tyau, a vice president at TPV, which is based in Hong Kong. “If Foxconn announces another round of pay raises, we’ll reconsider our wage level, too.”

Economists say that China’s labor force is growing increasingly bold and that over the past year, periodic strikes in southern China — some even involving global companies — have been resolved quietly or not reported in the media.

To resolve the strike at its transmission plant, Honda offered workers raises of 24 to 32 percent. The strike had forced Honda to shut down its assembly plants in China.

Now Honda, Japan’s second-largest automaker, after Toyota Motor, has been a target again. The exhaust-system factory, which is controlled by a joint venture between a Honda subsidiary and a Chinese company.

Honda owns a network of production facilities in China, including the four car assembly factories and three auto parts manufacturers, as well as two motorbike plants, two plants that make generators, pumps and other power equipment and three research centers.

Those numbers do not include factories opened in China by Honda subsidiaries like Yutaka Giken, which separately runs four auto parts manufacturers in the country.

Honda denied Tuesday that it was vulnerable to more strikes because it had already shown a willingness to increase wages to get employees back to its production lines. “It’s not at all clear at this point whether the two strikes are related,” said Ms. Asanuma, the Honda spokeswoman.

“It’s too early at this point to say whether we are looking at some kind of chain reaction.”

Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo. Bao Beibei contributed research.

test your focus

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: June 6, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell’s workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.

For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.

The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.

Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.

“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.

“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”

Always On

Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.

In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”

In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.

Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”

No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.

At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.

So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.

Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.

His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?

Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.

The Myth of Multitasking

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.

In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)

The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.

So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.

“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.

Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.

He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.

“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”

“I have to work to suppress it.”

Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.

Interrupted by a Corpse

It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.

Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.

But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”

That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.

On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.

Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.

The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”

Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”

The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.

Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”

The Toll on Children

Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.

They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.

“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.

“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”

Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.

“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”

But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”

So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.

No Vacations

For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.

But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”

She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.

Later she found him playing video games.

The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.

His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.

“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.

On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.

Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.

The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.

Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.

Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.

She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen and Nate Lentz

Illustration by Barry Blitt

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf. Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw” and his order to “plug the damn hole.” (Thank God he hadn’t settled for “darn.”) This evidence did not persuade anyone, least of all Spike Lee, who could be found on CNN the next night begging the president, “One time, go off!”

Not going to happen. Obama will never unleash the anger of the antagonists in “Do the Right Thing” or match James Carville’s rebooted “ragin’ Cajun” shtick. That’s not who Obama is. If he tried to go off, he’d look ridiculous. But the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat is not an entirely innocuous distraction. It allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil.

Unlike his unflappable temperament, his lingering failings should and could be corrected. And they must be if his presidency is not just to rise above the 24/7 Spill-cam but to credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime. We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector. His default assumption seems to be that his peers are always as well-intentioned as he is. The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP’s version of events from the start. The company consistently understated the spill’s severity, overestimated the progress of the repair operation and low-balled the environmental damage. Yet the White House’s designated point man in the crisis, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, was still publicly reaffirming his trust in the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, as recently as two weeks ago, more than a month after the rig exploded.

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

No high-powered White House meetings or risk analyses were needed to discern how treacherous it was to trust BP this time. An intern could have figured it out. But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the president as a “savvy” businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman. Well before then, there had been a flood of journalistic indicators that Goldman under Blankfein may have gamed the crash and the bailout.

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Given Toyota’s recent game of Russian roulette with Americans’ safety and Anthem Blue Cross’s unconscionable insurance-rate increases in California, Obama shouldn’t have any problem riveting the country’s attention to this sorry saga. He has the field to himself, thanks to a political opposition whose hottest new star, Rand Paul, and most beloved gulf-state governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, both leapt to BP’s defense right after the rig exploded. The Wall Street Journal editorial page perfectly set forth the conservative establishment’s party line on May 26: “There is zero evidence so far that this blowout resulted from lax regulation or shoddy practices.” Or as BP’s Hayward asked indignantly, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

That doesn’t require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can’t do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, and soon, he’ll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well.

Cimitero Drawing 11, 2010
Gouache, wax pastel and collage on paper
29.3 x 21.5 inches

Cimitero Drawings – June 5 – July 10, 2010

marc selwyn

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup released a stunning, and little noticed, report on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to enlighten:

1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)

2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.

I warned you: stunning.

There is no way to know for sure what’s driving such a radical change in men’s views on this issue because Gallup didn’t ask, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t speculate. To help me do so, I called Dr. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author or editor of more than 20 books on men and masculinity, and Professor Ritch Savin-Williams, the chairman of human development at Cornell University and the author of seven books, most of which deal with adolescent development and same-sex attraction.

Here are three theories:

1. The contact hypothesis. As more men openly acknowledge that they are gay, it becomes harder for men who are not gay to discriminate against them. And as that group of openly gay men becomes more varied — including athletes, celebrities and soldiers — many of the old, derisive stereotypes lose their purchase. To that point, a Gallup poll released last May found that people who said they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian were more likely to be accepting of gay men and lesbians in general and more supportive of their issues.

2. Men may be becoming more egalitarian in general. As Dr. Kimmel put it: “Men have gotten increasingly comfortable with the presence of, and relative equality of, ‘the other,’ and we’re becoming more accustomed to it. And most men are finding that it has not been a disaster.” The expanding sense of acceptance likely began with the feminist and civil rights movements and is now being extended to the gay rights movement. Dr. Kimmel continued, “The dire predictions for diversity have not only not come true, but, in fact, they’ve been proved the other way.”

3. Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality. Think Ted Haggard, the once fervent antigay preacher and former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and his male prostitute. (This week, Haggard announced that he was starting a new “inclusive” church open to “gay, straight, bi, tall, short,” but no same-sex marriages. Not “God’s ideal.” Sorry.) Or George Rekers, the founding member of the Family Research Council, and his rent boy/luggage handler. Last week, the council claimed that repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would lead to an explosion of “homosexual assaults” in which sleeping soldiers would be the victims of fondling and fellatio by gay predators. In fact, there is a growing body of research that supports the notion that homophobia in some men could be a reaction to their own homosexual impulses. Many heterosexual men see this, and they don’t want to be associated with it. It’s like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool.

These sound plausible, but why aren’t women seeing the same enlightening effects as men? Professor Savin-Williams suggests that there may be a “ceiling effect,” that men are simply catching up to women, and there may be a level at which views top out. Interesting.

All of this is great news, but it doesn’t mean that all measures relating to acceptance of gay men and lesbians have changed to the same degree. People’s comfort with the “gay and lesbian” part of the equation is still greater than their comfort with the “relations” part — the idea versus the act — particularly when it comes to pairings of men.

As Professor Savin-Williams told me, there is still a higher aversive reaction to same-sex sexuality among men than among women.

For instance, in a February New York Times/CBS News poll, half of the respondents were asked if they favored letting “gay men and lesbians” serve in the military (which is still more than 85 percent male), and the other half were asked if they favored letting “homosexuals” serve. Those who got the “homosexual” question favored it at a rate that was 11 percentage points lower than those who got the “gay men and lesbians” question.

Part of the difference may be that “homosexual” is a bigger, more clinical word freighted with a lot of historical baggage. But just as likely is that the inclusion of the root word “sex” still raises an aversive response to the idea of, how shall I say, the architectural issues between two men. It is the point at which support for basic human rights cleaves from endorsement of behavior.

As for the aversion among men, it may be softening a bit. Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.” They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but … the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.

All together now: stunning.

(I now return you to Day 46 of the oil spill where they finally may be making some progress.)

By Bob Pool
Los Angeles Times
June 5, 2010

Contradictions fly along Hyperion Avenue when the Birdman of Silver Lake takes wing.

Rik Martino rolls his wobbly cart with two mismatched wheels to the corner of Tracy Street and stops at Baller Hardware to buy two 20-pound bags of True Value Wild Bird Food.

More than 30 years after arriving from his native Italy, the 58-year-old actor is still looking for his big-screen break.

Square-jawed and body-builder muscular, Martino views himself as more Al Pacino than Jean-Claude Van Damme. “No martial arts films for me. I want to be a serious actor,” he explains as he waits in line to pay.

The customer in front of him, a man wearing spandex bicycling gear, is a few cents short for his purchase. Martino fishes in his pockets, pulls out a handful of coins and plunks them on the counter in front of the surprised stranger.

Martino spends about $12 for the seed. Clerk Joe Klaas gives him a small discount. “He’s in here a couple of times a day,” Klaas says. “Nobody else buys 50 or 60 pounds of bird seed a day like Franco does.”

Says another hardware store worker with a laugh: “We’re enablers.”

“Franco Massimo” is Martino’s stage name. Some in Silver Lake call him that, while others know him as Rik.

“I should be out looking for a job,” Martino jokes. “I don’t have a car. I’m a poor guy. I shouldn’t be doing this. I know some people don’t like it, but I put the birds first.”

With that, Martino heads up Hyperion, spreading bird seed as he goes. He sprinkles handfuls in planters for small songbirds. He flings cupfuls on the edges of parking lots and landscaped strips for pigeons.

For about 10 years, Martino shared a home a block off Hyperion with an ill man he worked for as a conservator. When the man died last year, Martino sold the house to close out the estate. He now rents a small apartment about two miles away, living off savings.

Martino’s love for birds began in 1984 when he rescued a pigeon hit by a car and nursed him back to health. “When I let him go and watched him fly off, I got so depressed,” he remembers.

A few days later he spied the rescued pigeon on a neighbor’s roof. When Martino tried to re-catch the distinctive-looking bird, the home’s owner called the police. “I explained what I was trying to do and the cops said I should get a little net. I finally caught him a few days later in a fishnet.”

He kept the pigeon for two years until he flew off. After that, Martino began using seed to attract birds.

Eventually, he had about 200 pigeons roosting in a coop and in a shed behind the Silver Lake conservatorship home. About 25 of them still live in a tree at the residence, and they swoop down when Martino whistles for them as he spreads seed along five blocks of Hyperion Avenue.

Hundreds of other pigeons fly in from other directions. They sit atop streetlights, store signs and power lines as they wait for the seed to be distributed.

Many along Hyperion Avenue dislike the bird feeding — and the resulting droppings. But most seem to genuinely like the friendly, outgoing Martino.

“We have a lot of pigeons. We had pigeons alighting on our front door this morning,” said Allison Carter of Crossroads Trading Co., a vintage clothing shop. “But his gesture is so lovely.”

Down the street at the SiLa Bistro, co-owners Frank Boyle and Ray Lopez said they struggle with the pigeon problem constantly.

“I have nothing against pigeons, but you shouldn’t be feeding them where people eat,” Boyle said. “We had to put up spikes to keep them out of our entryway. We have to go out all the time and clean up the poop. It etches the concrete walkway.”

The Birdman is nice, Lopez added. “We don’t wish him ill, but I worry about pigeons swarming out there.”

John McGinnis, who purchased the house that Martino lived in, said the home’s floors had to be refinished because of damage from pigeon droppings. He plans to put up spikes to keep the birds away from the front door.

“My wife and I have a 2-year-old,” said McGinnis, executive producer for a motion graphics company. “It’s a bummer to have poop on the front steps.”

Martino shrugs off that kind of criticism. “Pigeons get a bad rap because people don’t know pigeons,” he says. “They say they are dirty and bring disease. I’ve been taking care of them for 30 years and look at me.”

The Birdman scatters seed in front of a strip mall before ducking inside a copy shop to print some fliers warning of what he calls a “dangerous” puddle of oily gutter water that is attracting thirsty pigeons.

Martino posts the fliers on power poles — near notices placed by the “Franklin Hills Anti-Counterfeiting Committee” warning of fake bills being passed on the street.

His handwritten flier includes his name, phone number and a reference to a YouTube video about him that a friend has produced. That lends legitimacy to what he’s doing, Martino says.

Borrowing a broom from a nearby gas station, Martino sweeps the oily water into a storm drain.

Then he heads for home, his work done for this day.

John Wooden won 10 national championships as coach of the U.C.L.A. Bruins, and is often considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history. More Photos »

By FRANK LITSKY and JOHN BRANCH
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

John Wooden, a staid Midwesterner who migrated to U.C.L.A. and became college basketball’s most successful coach, earning the nickname the Wizard of Westwood and an enduring place in sports history, died Friday at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since May 26. He was 99.

Wooden created a sports dynasty against which all others are compared, and usually pale. His teams at U.C.L.A. won 10 national championships in a 12-season stretch from 1964 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, U.C.L.A. won 88 consecutive games, still the N.C.A.A. record.

Four of Wooden’s teams finished with 30-0 records, including his first championship team, which featured no starters taller than 6 feet 5 inches.

Three of his other championship teams were anchored by the 7-foot-2 center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Two others were led by center Bill Walton, a three-time national player of the year.

Wooden retired after U.C.L.A.’s 1975 championship victory over Kentucky. A slight man hugely popular for his winning record and his understated approach, he ultimately became viewed as a kind of sage for both basketball and life, a symbol of both excellence and simpler times.

Even in retirement he remained a beloved figure and a constant presence at U.C.L.A., watching most games from a seat behind the home bench at Pauley Pavilion. Lines of well-wishers and autograph-seekers often snaked their way to his seat in Section 103B. Wooden always obliged his fans, until the university and his family requested that he be granted privacy in January 2008, when he was 97.

A dynasty like Wooden’s would be almost impossible now, because the best players seldom spend more than a year or two in college before turning professional. No N.C.A.A. men’s basketball coach has won more than four championships since Wooden retired. Of Wooden’s eight coaching successors at U.C.L.A., only one — Jim Harrick in 1995 — won an N.C.A.A. championship with the Bruins, who have managed to retain an air of the elite among basketball programs largely on Wooden’s legacy.

Wooden’s success fed upon itself. When he won his first two national championships, landed Alcindor and moved home games to the new Pauley Pavilion, high school stars begged to play for him. Besides Abdul-Jabbar and Walton, Wooden turned out celebrated players like Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, Henry Bibby, Lucius Allen, Sidney Wicks, Jamaal Wilkes and Marques Johnson.

“He was almost a mystical figure by the time I got to U.C.L.A.,” said Johnson, a starter on Wooden’s final team. “I couldn’t really sit down and have a conversation with him about real things just because I had so much reverence for him — for who he was and what he had accomplished.”

Johnson added, “He never gave that perception that that was the way he wanted you to treat him, but it was just how it was.”

Johnson, like many of Wooden’s players, grew closer to the coach in the decades after Wooden retired and visited him often.

In his autobiography, “Giant Steps” (Bantam, 1983), Abdul-Jabbar recalled his first meeting with Wooden. “Coach Wooden’s office was about the size of a walk-in closet,” he wrote. “I was brought in, and there was this very quaint-looking Midwesterner. I’d heard a lot about this man and his basketball wisdom, but he surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse.”

He continued: “I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis, and that decision endeared him to me even more. It was at once formal, my full name. I was no baby Lewie. Lewis. I liked that.”

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

Wooden said he lived by that creed, and few players tested him. One who did was Walton, a gifted 6-foot-11 center with flowing red hair who went on to play for 10 seasons in the N.B.A.

At the start of Walton’s senior season, in 1973, his U.C.L.A. teams had won 75 consecutive games and two N.C.A.A. titles. But when Wooden walked into the locker room before the first practice and saw Walton’s just-trimmed but still long hair, he said:

“Bill, that’s not short enough. We’re sure going to miss you on this team. Get on out of here.”

Walton jumped onto his bicycle, raced back to the barber shop where his hair had been trimmed the day before, got his head almost shaved and rode back. He made the last half-hour of practice.

During the Vietnam War era, Wooden’s young players, including Walton, asked permission to stage an antiwar protest. “He asked us if this reflected our convictions,” one player, Steve Patterson, told Sports Illustrated in 1989, “and we told him it did. He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at U.C.L.A.”

In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Wooden said his coaching philosophy revolved around three main ideals. One was to get his players “in the best possible condition.” Another was “quickness.”

“I wanted my centers to be quicker than the opposing centers, the forwards quicker than their forwards, and so on,” he explained.

The third was teamwork: “You better play together as a team or you sit.”

“People ask me if I’d permit fancy things, like dunks,” Wooden said. “Well, if they did dunk, it was with no fancy flair. No behind-the-back dribbles or passes unless necessary. If it was for show, you were on the bench.”

John Robert Wooden was born into a Dutch-Irish family on Oct. 14, 1910, in Hall, Ind., and grew up in a farmhouse that had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Before his sophomore year in high school, when his father, Joshua, and his mother, Roxie, lost the farm, he and his three brothers moved to Martinsville, 8 miles away and 30 miles south of Indianapolis.

His first basketball was a black cotton sock his mother had stuffed with rags. The hoop was a tomato basket until his father forged a rim from the rings of a barrel.

Wooden later led Martinsville High School to three consecutive state finals, winning in 1927. Playing the cornet in the school band at the time was Nellie Riley, a classmate. They were inseparable from then on; their marriage lasted 53 years, until her death in 1985.

Wooden went to Purdue University, even though it had no athletic scholarships. To get tuition money, he spent summers doing construction work.

At Purdue he was a basketball all-American, a 5-foot-10, 175-pound guard and team captain. In 1932 he led Purdue to the Helms Foundation’s unofficial national championship and was named national player of the year. An English major, he also had the highest grade-point average of any Purdue athlete that year. He earned a teaching degree and taught at Dayton High School in Dayton, Ky., where he also coached almost everything, including tennis and baseball. Two years later he moved back to Indiana, to South Bend Central High School, where for nine years he taught English and coached basketball. In his 11 years as a high school basketball coach, his record was 218-42.

From 1943 to 1946, he served in the Navy as a physical education instructor. Afterward, Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State) hired him as athletic director and basketball and baseball coach.

In 1948, U.C.L.A. wooed him away as basketball coach for $6,000 a year. His team practiced in a little gymnasium and had to share the court with the wrestling and gymnastics teams.

His success at U.C.L.A, where he perfected a merciless zone defense, brought him a nickname he hated: the Wizard of Westwood, a reference to the Westwood section of Los Angeles, the site of the campus.

Wooden was a religious man whose strongest exclamation was “Goodness gracious sakes alive!” Still, many opposing coaches thought he was not always a saint. Digger Phelps, the longtime Notre Dame coach, once said Wooden rode officials and opposing players more than any other coach. Wooden admitted he was no innocent.

“The thing I may be ashamed of more than anything else is having talked to opposing players,” he said. “Not calling them names, but saying something like ‘Keep your hands off him’ or ‘Don’t be a butcher.’ ”

There was a more serious mark against Wooden and his reign. By the mid-1970s, Sam Gilbert, a team booster, had befriended many U.C.L.A. players. Several said he had given them illegal benefits. According to allegations reported in The Los Angeles Times in 1982, Gilbert provided cars and clothes for U.C.L.A. players and even arranged abortions for their girlfriends at times during the previous 15 years.

“I warned them, but I couldn’t pick their friends,” Wooden told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I honestly felt Sam meant well.”

In December 1981 — more than six years after Wooden coached his last game — the N.C.A.A. placed U.C.L.A.’s basketball program on a two-year probation for violations, some involving Gilbert, although no legal action was taken against him.

Wooden was 64 and his wife was ill when he retired in 1975, saying he had lost desire. He left with a 620-147 record in 27 years at U.C.L.A. and a 40-year head coaching record of 885-203.

He was honored in many places. Martinsville, Ind., where he grew up, has a John R. Wooden Drive and a John R. Wooden Gymnasium at Martinsville High School. A college basketball player-of-the-year award is named for him. The midseason John R. Wooden Classic features leading college teams. He was the first person elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach. In 2003, U.C.L.A. named its basketball floor the Nell and John Wooden Court.

Ever self-effacing, he declined when U.C.L.A. proposed a ceremony for his 90th birthday. In later years he lived in a modest condominium in Encino, Calif., outside Los Angeles. Hip-replacement surgery forced him to give up morning walks. He also needed his knees replaced, and he walked with a cane.

Wooden watched U.C.L.A. on television as it went to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four in 2006, 2007 and 2008. A fall at his home in February 2008 left him with a broken wrist and collarbone. He spent several weeks at a hospital and a rehabilitation center.

For most of his retirement, large crowds flocked to his speeches, usually revolving around his “Pyramid of Success,” 15 conceptual building blocks of traits like industriousness, alertness and poise, held together by faith and patience. In recent years Wooden simply sat in a chair and spoke for up to an hour without notes, hoping to impart his wisdom to newer generations. His former players said they did not appreciate Wooden’s life lessons when they were young, but the precepts stuck with them.

“At the time it was like, ‘Pyramid, shmyramid,’ ” Marques Johnson said. “ ‘Where’s the party at? Where are the girls at?’ I didn’t want to hear anything about principles and living a life of integrity at that time. But as you get older, and you have kids, and you try to pass on life lessons, now it becomes a great learning tool.”

Wooden is survived by a son, James, of Orange County, Calif.; a daughter, Nancy, of Los Angeles; 7 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Wooden always described his job as teacher, not coach. “He broke basketball down to its basic elements,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “He always told us basketball was a simple game, but his ability to make the game simple was part of his genius.”

Abdul-Jabbar recalled that there “was no ranting and raving, no histrionics or theatrics.” He continued: “To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.

“In essence,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded, “he was preparing us for life.”

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: June 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — By now, hero worship of the French artist Yves Klein (1928-62) should be a thing of the past. Sure, he was charismatic, movie-star handsome and a black belt in judo, and he had a gift for provocative gestures. At the age of 19, on the beach with two friends, a poet and an artist, Klein “signed the sky” as his first work of art. In the mid-1950s he developed a smoldering ultramarine pigment that in a stroke of branding genius, he patented and named International Klein Blue.

He also made all kinds of important art. His gloriously retinal blue monochromes are among the cornerstones of Minimalism; other works foreshadow Conceptual, performance, body and environmental art, not to mention the dematerialization of art. In an early version of commodity art, he sold collectors chunks of “invisible pictorial sensibility” (thin air) and then converted the purchase price into gold leaf that he frittered into the Seine while the buyer watched and a photographer took pictures.

He was the first artist to exhibit an art gallery as a work of art, in Paris in 1958. And in 1959 he lectured at the Sorbonne on “Art’s Evolution Toward the Immaterial.”

All this in a period of maturity that lasted slightly more than seven years.

Still, in the nearly five decades since Klein died of a heart attack at 34, miles of print have been devoted to demystifying, deconstructing and generally letting the air out of the myth of the artist as genius. Which makes it slightly unsettling that the two extremely intelligent co-curators of the dazzling retrospective of Klein’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden here sometimes sound completely smitten in their catalog essays.

Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator, calls Klein an “involuntary painter” who depicted “the invisible” and wonders if Klein wasn’t “some strange object who came, only for a short time, from the heavens to open our eyes and minds.” Then Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York and a former curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — which has organized the show with the Hirshhorn — frets about whether it is possible even to capture his extraordinary essence in exhibition form. “Klein’s gaze was cosmic and spiritual,” Mr. Vergne writes, noting that Klein was “barely older than Jesus when he died,” and that his “imprint on the creative landscape of the second half of the last century is as deep as that of a stigmata.”

A grip needs to be gotten here. Klein was a complicated creature, given to hyperbole, adept at self-mythology, guided by an overweening narcissism and full of contradictions. He also had great style, which gave everything he did a kind of show-biz glamour.

Klein rejected paintbrushes as “too excessively psychological” but used naked women smeared with International Klein Blue as “human brushes” for his “Anthropometry” paintings. These were made in public performances at which he wore white tie and tails. Why is all this not excessive or psychological — or simply par for the course in the age of Brigitte Bardot?

Klein’s “no-hands” approach to painting was probably inspired by Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, but was quite a bit more sensational. He would later use a blow torch — along with nude models and lots of water — and also the wind in the making of his work.

The famous photograph of Klein leaping from the ledge of a roof — “Into the Void” (1960) — may suggest a yearning for total freedom and Zen-like nothingness. But he also loved institutional pomp and dress-up so much that he joined the Order of St. Sebastian and was married in the order’s regalia, which included a cape, a Maltese cross and a navy admiral’s bicorn hat, feather trimmed. Even after deducting for irony, questions remain.

To their credit the curators have organized an exhibition that presents both Klein’s achievement and his foibles with a minimum of fuss and a fitting sense of clarity, concentration and elegance. Seeing his work spaciously arrayed in the circle of the Hirshhorn’s second-floor galleries adds a wonderful momentum to his manic trajectory.

Above all, the curators let Klein himself speak. The show is almost entirely devoid of explanatory texts; whatever words appear on the walls are Klein’s own. In the opening gallery a three-minute film of “The Void,” the empty-gallery-as-art staged at Galerie Iris Clert in 1958, gives a good sense of the man’s charms and contradictions.

With the passage of time “The Void” has acquired a reputation for Minimalist austerity, but in the film it looks surprisingly quaint. Outside, a huge swag of dark blue velvet is draped over the gallery’s entrance, as if heads of state are expected. Inside, Klein, in his white tie and tails, shows us around, gesturing toward various walls as if toward invisible paintings. He’s a sweetly smiling mime, part magician, part maître d’. The title of the Hirshhorn show — “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” — comes from a note that Albert Camus left at Clert’s gallery after visiting “The Void” and is included here.

This show makes clear the extent of Klein’s artistic “propositions,” as he frequently called them. It ends in a flurry of drawings concerning his “architecture of the air,” which involved walls of fire and water and a roof of blown air that would deflect precipitation, and created an Edenic locale where people could walk around naked, like the women used as human brushes.

But the blue monochromes remain his most singular achievement, and his preparation seems to have started early. Klein was the precocious only child of two painters. His Dutch father, Fred Klein, who was partly Indonesian, was a figurative painter; his mother, Marie Raymond, was an abstractionist active on the Paris art scene. Young Yves pretty much began his career with abstraction, which may help explain how he went so far beyond it. In a touchingly cartoonish watercolor from 1954, one of the earliest works in the Hirshhorn show, three rectangles — of solid yellow, red and green — are grouped together on a proscenium stage, like actors in a play. (It is strikingly reminiscent of works by the contemporary painter Hiroshi Sugito.)

More grown-up monochromes, in different colors and on canvases of different sizes, follow quickly, and by 1957 the blue monochromes have developed. The most voluptuous are dotted with the sponges that Klein used in making them, and the high point of the Hirshhorn show is a large painting blooming with sponges and surrounded by sculptures made of individual sponges on stone and wire pedestals.

Donald Judd, whose extensive use of fiery cadmium red light in his early painted wood pieces was partly if not wholly indebted to Klein, wrote admiringly that Klein’s paintings were “the only ones that are unspatial.” (Frank Stella’s were the next closest.)

Half a century on, these paintings still shock, especially in the way their matte, implacably physical surfaces seem paradoxically to leak color into the air around them. Intense to the point of assault — in a velvet-gloved sort of way — they rivet the attention and open the mind and eye to everything that Klein did subsequently, in part by establishing the sense of purity and concentration underlying all his best work. They remain some of the most nonreferential paintings in the history of Western art, possibly the first to go beyond traditional abstraction and become objects in their own right.

We live in a period when artists who reject art objects are often turned into fetishes themselves. This has happened to Klein. His blue paintings have the distinction of revealing him at his most glamorous but also his deepest. They don’t reflect the artist, and they don’t picture the world: they are simply in it, part of the vast, riveting not-us and not-him.

Another Time Man, 2010

Another Time Man, 2010

Through June 12

Zach Feuer

Wayne Miller, Magnum Photos

By Paul Bloom
May 30, 2010
The Chronicle Review

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: “I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends.”

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones. This is a powerful idea, one that I think is basically—though not entirely—right. (Certain phenomena, including horror movies and masochistic daydreams, require a different type of explanation.)
Enlarge Image The Pleasures of Imagination 2

The capacity for imaginative pleasure is universal, and it emerges early in development. All normal children, everywhere, enjoy playing and pretending. There are cultural differences in the type and frequency of play. A child in New York might pretend to be an airplane; a hunter-gatherer child will not. In the 1950s, American children played Cowboys and Indians; not so much anymore. In some cultures, play is encouraged; in others, children have to sneak off to do it. But it is always there. Failure to play and pretend is a sign of a neurological problem, one of the early symptoms of autism.

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children’s appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality. We know that children who have reached their fourth birthday tend to have a relatively sophisticated understanding, because when we ask them straight out about what is real and what is pretend, they tend to get it right. What about younger children? Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified. The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn’t have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real.

It is an open question how early this understanding emerges, and there is some intriguing experimental work exploring this. My own hunch is that even babies have some limited grasp of pretense, and you can see this from casual interaction. A useful way to spend time with a 1-year-old is to put your face up close and wait for the baby to grab at your glasses or nose or hair. Once there is contact, pull your head back and roar in mock rage. The first time you get a bit of surprise, maybe concern, a dash of fear, but then you put your head back and wait for the baby to try again. She will, and then you give the pretend-startled response. Many babies come to find this hilarious. (If the baby is an eye-poker, you can wrestle over keys instead.) For this to work, though, the baby has to know that you are not even a little bit angry; the baby must know that you are pretending.

Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn’t it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series led to similar tears. (After her final book was published, Rowling appeared in interviews and told about the letters she got, not all of them from children, begging her to spare the lives of beloved characters such as Hagrid, Hermione, Ron, and, of course, Harry Potter himself.) A friend of mine told me that he can’t remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can’t bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.

These emotional responses are typically muted compared with the real thing. Watching a movie in which someone is eaten by a shark is less intense than watching someone really being eaten by a shark. But at every level—physiological, neurological, psychological—the emotions are real, not pretend.

Does this suggest that people believe, at some level, that the events are real? Do we sometimes think that fictional characters actually exist and fictional events actually occur? Of course, people get fooled, as when parents tell their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, or when an adult mistakes a story for a documentary, or vice versa. But the idea here is more interesting than that—it is that even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it’s real.

There is something to this: It can be devilishly hard to pull apart fiction from reality. There are several studies showing that reading a fact in a story—and knowing that it is fiction—increases the likelihood that you believe the fact to be true. And this makes sense, because stories are mostly true. If you were to read a novel that takes place in London toward the end of the 1980s, you would learn a lot about how people in that time and place talked to one another, what they ate, how they swore, and so on, because any decent storyteller has to include these truths as a backdrop for the story. The average person’s knowledge of law firms, emergency rooms, police departments, prisons, submarines, and mob hits is not rooted in real experience or nonfictional reports. It is based on stories. Someone who watched cop shows on television would absorb many truths about contemporary police work (“You have the right to remain silent . . .”), and a viewer of a realistic movie such as Zodiac would learn more. Indeed, many people seek out certain types of fiction (historical novels, for example) because they want a painless way of learning about reality.

We go too far sometimes. Fantasy can be confounded with reality. For example, the publication of The Da Vinci Code led to a booming tourism industry in Scotland, by people accepting the novel’s claims about the location of the Holy Grail. Then there is the special problem of confusing actors with the characters they play. Leonard Nimoy, an actor born in Boston to Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, was frequently confused with his best-known role, Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan. This was sufficiently frustrating that he published a book called I Am Not Spock (and then, 20 years later, published I Am Spock). Or consider the actor Robert Young, star of one of the first medical programs, Marcus Welby, M.D., who reported getting thousands of letters asking for medical advice. He later exploited this confusion by appearing in his doctor persona (wearing a white lab coat) on television commercials for aspirin and decaffeinated coffee. There is, then, an occasional blurring between fact and reality.

In the end, though, those brought to tears by Anna Karenina are perfectly aware that she is a character in a novel; those people who wailed when J.K. Rowling killed off Dobby the House Elf knew full well that he doesn’t exist. And even young children appreciate the distinction between reality and fiction; when you ask them, “Is such-and-so real or make-believe?,” they get it right.

Why, then, are we so moved by stories?

David Hume tells the story of a man who is hung out of a high tower in a cage of iron. He knows himself to be perfectly secure, but, still, he “cannot forebear trembling.” Montaigne gives a similar example, saying that if you put a sage on the edge of a precipice, “he must shudder like a child.” My colleague, the philosopher Tamar Gendler, describes the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass walkway that extends 70 feet from the canyon’s rim. It is supposedly a thrilling experience. So thrilling

that some people drive several miles over a dirt road to get there and then discover that they are too afraid to step onto the walkway. In all of these cases, people know they are perfectly safe, but they are nonetheless frightened.

In an important pair of papers, Gend-ler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it “alief.” Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, “Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!”

The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination. Those who get pleasure voyeuristically watching real people have sex will enjoy watching actors having sex in a movie. Those who like observing clever people interact in the real world will get the same pleasure observing actors pretend to be such people on television. Imagination is Reality Lite—a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space.

For stories, though, you have access to information that the character lacks. The philosopher Noël Carroll gives the example of the opening scene in Jaws. You can’t be merely taking the teenager’s perspective as she swims in the dark, because she is cheerful, and you are terrified. You know things that she doesn’t. You hear the famous, ominous music; she doesn’t. You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life.

This is how empathy works in real life. You would feel the same way seeing someone happily swim while a shark approaches her. In both fiction and reality, then, you simultaneously make sense of the situation from both the character’s perspective and from your own.

Samuel Johnson, writing about Shakespeare, said: “The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.” Johnson was a brilliant writer, but plainly he had never heard of O.J. Simpson. If he had, he’d realize that we get plenty of pleasure from real tragedy. Indeed, Shakespeare’s tragedies depict precisely the sorts of events that we most enjoy witnessing in the real world—complex and tense social interactions revolving around sex, love, family, wealth, and status.

I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don’t care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet’s friends are coping with his death because these friends don’t exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering.

But there are also certain compelling features of the imagination. Just as artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar, unreal events can be more moving than real ones. There are three reasons for this.

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn’t include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. He is author of the forthcoming book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (W.W. Norton & Company), from which this essay is adapted.

via

Tuesday – Thursday 10pm – 2am

Night Gallery

Louise Bourgeois in 1990,
behind her marble sculpture Eye to Eye (1970)
Photo Raimon Ramis

BY: HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: May 31, 2010

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.

The cause was a heart attack, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Among her most familiar sculptures was the much-exhibited “Nature Study” (1984), a headless sphinx with powerful claws and multiple breasts. Perhaps the most provocative was “Fillette” (1968), a large, detached latex phallus. Ms. Bourgeois can be seen carrying this object, nonchalantly tucked under one arm, in a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe taken for the catalog of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In the catalog, the Mapplethorpe picture is cropped to show only the artist’s smiling face.)

That retrospective brought Ms. Bourgeois, in her early 70s, the critical and popular acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In an art world where women had been treated as second-class citizens and were discouraged from dealing with overtly sexual subject matter, she quickly assumed an emblematic presence. Her work was read by many as an assertive feminist statement, her career as an example of perseverance in the face of neglect.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, on the Left Bank of Paris, the second of three children born to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. Her parents, financially comfortable, owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration in Choisy-le-Roi. Ms. Bourgeois remembered as a child drawing fragments of missing images to help in the repairs.

She often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life as formative. Her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid, was a positive influence. Her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities (he had a 10-year affair with the children’s English governess), instilled a resentment and an insecurity that Ms. Bourgeois never laid to rest.

Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, “The Destruction of the Father,” for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms. Ms. Bourgeois has suggested as the tableau’s inspiration a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.

Similarly, for a 1994 exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” she created a single sculpture and suite of drawings in which the central image was a spider, a creature she associated with her mother, a woman of ever-changing moods.

Drawn in orange and flesh-pink gouache, it here stalked across the page and there shrunk to the size of a pea. As an immense sculpture of soldered metal tubing, it loomed ominously over the viewer but was delicate enough to quiver and sway at a touch. Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art.

Often there was a precise association in her work. After she had created a number of vertical spirals that seemed to twist in space, she evoked childhood memories of the tapestry business and her family: “When a tapestry had to be washed in the river, it took four people to hoist it out and twist it. Twisting is very important for me. When I dreamt of getting rid of the mistress, it was by twisting her neck.”

At the age of 20, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, disciplines that she valued for their stability. “I got peace of mind,” she later said, “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” But she left to enroll in a succession of art schools, and counted Fernand Léger among her teachers.

In 1938 she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian noted for his pioneering work in the field then referred to as primitive art. They moved to New York City that same year, and Ms. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League, where she studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and also produced sculpture and prints.

She knew many of the European surrealists then arriving as refugees in New York (she later dismissed them as “smart alecks”), but the artists to whom she felt closest were the American painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists.

Ms. Bourgeois had a solo show of paintings in New York in 1945 and her first exhibition of sculpture — an installation of tall, polelike figures that she intended as abstract portraits of family members and friends — four years later at the Peridot Gallery, at which time she gave up painting for good.

She enjoyed some professional success as a sculptor thereafter (she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition almost yearly until 1962). But a significant shift in her career came in 1966, when she was included in an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, “Eccentric Abstraction,” organized by the critic Lucy Lippard.

Ms. Bourgeois’s long involvement in the nascent feminist movement, about which she had passionate but ambivalent feelings, began at this time. In the following year she made her first of many trips to the marble works in Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy, where she produced dozens of major marble pieces over several years.

After her husband’s death in 1973, she began teaching at the School of Visual Arts and elsewhere, including Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York Studio School and Yale University, which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. She also received an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1993.

By the mid-1970s, with shifts in art-world trends, her reputation was steadily growing. Although she had been given only four one-woman shows in 30 years after her debut as a sculptor in 1949, from 1978 to 1981 she had five in New York alone. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the following year, the first retrospective of a woman at the museum, secured her place as an influential figure. Her reputation grew stronger in the context of the body-centered art of the ’90s, with its emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality.

Ms. Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized by the Kunstverein in Frankfurt in 1989. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition, organized by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and titled “Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” later traveled to the Brooklyn and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.

A second international retrospective was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and traveled to New York, Los Angeles and Washington the following year. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte/Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg mounted retrospectives.

She also was in four Whitney Biennials, the first in 1973 and the most recent in 1997, and a number of major international shows, including Documenta and the Carnegie International.

A survey of her prints was organized by the Modern in 1994, and a survey of her drawings by the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. At her death, two films about her had been completed. She was represented by the Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea.

Ms. Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Certainly her personal style contributed to her mystique. Petite in size, gruff of voice and manner, outspoken but suspicious of interviewers, she spent much of her time either in her home in Chelsea or in her studio in Brooklyn, where she worked with Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant since 1980.

Ms Bourgeois is survived by two sons, Jean-Louis, of Manhattan, and Alain, of Brooklyn; two grandchildren; and a great granddaughter. Her son Michel died in 1990.

A lifelong insomniac, she often stayed up drawing or writing in her journal, in the same plain, epigrammatic style in which she spoke. (Her writings and interviews were published under the title “Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father” by the MIT Press in 1998).

“I have a religious temperament,” Ms. Bourgeois, a professed atheist, said about the emotional and spiritual energy that she poured into her work. “I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”

Untitled, 2010
Silkscreen ink and enamel on linen
126 x 96 inches (320 x 243.8 cm)

Through July 30 Gagosian (Rome)

Suzy Allman for The New York Times

Eddie Walsh, a trail builder, on a remade segment of the Appalachian Trail.

By PETER APPLEBOME
NY Times Published: May 30, 2010

BEAR MOUNTAIN, N.Y.

David Litke, trail name Denver Dave, was descending Bear Mountain about 45 miles from Midtown Manhattan, finishing up a two-month, 700-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, when he came upon — what?

It was a wilderness trail, yes, but a preternaturally precise and elegant one, 800 steps made of 1,000-pound slabs of granite, and more than one mile of walkway supported by stone crib walls with boulders called gargoyles guarding the edges of the path, and trees and greenery totally undisturbed. It looked equally like an immaculate walkway that had been there forever, and like something plopped down by aliens who were skilled in stonecutting and possessed a feel for the soul of the A.T.

“Wow,” Mr. Litke said to a group at the bottom of the hill. “That is one beautiful trail. Someone could really give a lesson in trail building here.”

Actually, two of the people there did help put together the project, which has transformed the most traveled and one of the oldest sections of the most famous hiking trail in America. Eddie Walsh, a professional trail builder, managed the day-to-day work, and Edward Goodell, executive director of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, helped oversee and coordinate the project.

The four-year, $1 million project, largely done by 700 volunteers doing low-tech rock and quarry work on hundreds of tons of rock, will officially open Saturday at Bear Mountain. It is a reminder of how much the 2,179-mile footpath that runs through 14 states from Maine to Georgia remains a marvel of volunteer energy, an ever-changing work in progress and a cherished green atavism in a world that feels more degraded by the day.

“This was not simply laying out a footpath and putting white blazes on some trees,” said Pamela Underhill, superintendent of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which is managed by the National Park Service and the nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy, with contributions from various state and federal agencies. It is largely maintained by some 6,400 volunteers from 30 regional trail clubs.

“It was highly technical work that’s the largest and most complex relocation and improvement project that’s taken place, certainly during my history on the trail, and I’ve been working on it since 1979,” Ms. Underhill said. “It’s just extraordinary.”

The Appalachian Trail, which was conceived in 1921 and completed in 1937, regularly pops up in popular culture, whether in “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson or in the feverish imagination of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. But in truth, it is an ingeniously cobbled together pastiche of trail experiences.

Bear Mountain has been a destination for city residents looking to experience some semblance of nature since the 19th century. Local hiking and tramping clubs began seriously building trails in the 1920s, and in January 1924, 20 miles of it was the first section specifically built as part of the A.T.

A good thing about Bear Mountain is that millions of people can get to it. A bad thing is that millions of people can get to it. So over the years, the trails have been rebuilt and relocated many times. By the 1990s, it was clear that the Bear Mountain section of the trail, used by a half-million people a year, needed to be rebuilt again. The solution, drawn up primarily by Mr. Walsh and another trail designer, Peter Jensen, was an impossibly ambitious series of steps and walkways supported by native stone.

It would last, one hoped, forever. It would keep neophytes on the trail instead of bounding out into the woods. It would work for urban hikers showing up in tennis shoes and flip-flops, as well as for serious long-haul hikers. And it would be a challenge to build.

Planning began around 2000. A design was approved in 2005, and work began in 2006. After a day of training, volunteers, working with paid employees, learned to split and shape rocks from the site, which were maneuvered into place either by hand or via a series of overhead cables rigged up in the surrounding trees.

About half the 700 volunteers worked for just a day. For many others it became an unpaid part-time job. For example, Catherine Kelleher, an information technology manager from Bethesda, Md., has come regularly every four to six weeks, usually over the weekends when most of the work was done.

“I got started, and I thought, oh my goodness, when could I ever expect to work on something on this scale again?” she said. “The A.T. is sort of like this long, skinny virtual community, like a really long power strip that wherever you plug into it, you get a little bit of energy from it.”

It opens Saturday at 10 a.m., on National Trails Day. All 700 volunteers have been invited. For those who miss it — like Ms. Kelleher, who will do trail work closer to home — well, there’s always more to do. The rock-breakers-in-chief figure they will be needing volunteers on the rest of the trails project, 1,200 steps in all, through 2013.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 30, 2010

What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.

When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world’s policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn’t a second Great Depression.

Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”

The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.

What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.

Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?

The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”

A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.

Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”

The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”

Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.

And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

By JACK EWING
Published: May 30, 2010

FRANKFURT — If the European Central Bank has one monetary dragon it considers essential to slay, it is inflation.

Keeping inflation under control is the central bank’s primary legal responsibility, and as Europe struggles to overcome economic problems caused by the sovereign debt crisis, inflation has remained the bank’s primary focus.

But some economists say it has become a driving obsession that has blinded the bank to a potentially bigger threat to Europe: deflation.

The central bank’s doubters grew louder after it made a big show of taking measures to cancel out the supposed inflationary impact of the government bond purchases it began on May 10 to help keep Greece and several other euro zone countries from defaulting on their debts.

“It’s nuts: how can they be concerned about the inflationary impact of this?” said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. “If I were the head of the E.C.B., I would be printing money to avert the decline in the money supply.”

Many economists regard deflation as more dangerous than inflation, because it prompts consumers to delay purchases as they wait for lower prices, creating a downward spiral of lower demand and production. Deflation is also bad for debtors like Greece, because they may have to pay back money that would be worth more than it was when they borrowed it.

Economists like Mr. Weinberg — and a few policy makers as well — are beginning to worry that a danger of deflation in Europe, similar to the one that strangled Japanese growth for most of the 1990s, is a bigger threat than inflation.

Prices fell in Ireland in April, while inflation was below 1 percent in five other euro zone countries. The problem also extends outside the euro zone.

“We all share some risks and problems in common with Japan circa 1995,” Adam S. Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, told an audience at the London School of Economics on May 2.

The United States is also at risk, Mr. Posen said, though he rated the chances of deflation there as low. But just as Japan did in the 1990s, the European Central Bank and the United States Federal Reserve have cut interest rates close to zero while pumping huge amounts of credit into their economies. That means the two central banks would have limited policy tools left with which to combat a collapse in prices and demand.

The downward pressure on prices has its roots in the economic decline that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but Europe’s sovereign debt problems are likely to add extra impetus. Governments, including those of Spain and Germany, are sharply reducing spending to lower their deficits, which will inevitably curb consumer demand and employment, hindering growth.

Inflation in the euro zone — the 16 countries that use the euro — rose slightly in April, to an annual rate of 1.5 percent, from 1.4 percent in March. Declines in categories like recreation and culture, communications and vacation tour packages blunted the impact of higher transportation costs. And so-called core inflation — which excludes energy prices and which most economists consider a better measure for policy-making purposes — declined to 0.7 percent in April from 0.8 percent in March. By either measure, the overall rate was still well below the central bank’s target of about 2 percent.

The real challenge for policy makers will occur in the coming months and years as Spain, Greece and Portugal struggle to regain their competitiveness on international markets. Without their own currencies to devalue, they have little choice but to cut wages and keep them well below those in countries like Germany and France. Pay cuts and lower government spending will put downward pressure on prices.

Spanish core inflation already turned negative in April.

A mild decline in prices in a few euro zone countries can be managed, economists say, but it will add to the risks of deflation. And the central bank will face more difficulty than usual in devising a monetary policy that fits both the ailing countries and the faster-growing economies like Germany and France.

“The E.C.B. has a careful balancing act to do,” said Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.

The central bank has remained firm in its focus on containing inflation. Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank’s president, has said he considers inflation a tax on the poor. And the bank’s charter obliges it to serve foremost as guardian of price stability.

As recently as Friday, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the bank’s executive board, defended the wisdom of the mandate. In a speech in Rabat, Morocco, he said permitting inflation to rise to make it easier for European nations to repay their debts, as some have urged, would backfire.

The resulting decline in the value of government bonds would inflict “major losses on the banks and financial institutions which have been heavily investing in these markets, potentially undermining the recovery,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Trichet has been under fire, especially from critics in Germany, ever since the central bank began the unprecedented bond purchases to halt a sell-off of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish government debt.

By buying government bonds on the open market, and being coy about how much it was spending, the bank was able to reduce the high premiums investors were demanding for debt from the weakest countries. A continuation of the market rout would have raised the interest rates that Spain and other countries had to pay to sell new bonds, aggravating their already grave fiscal problems.

The problem was that, to buy the bonds, the bank had to expand the assets it held on its books. So to prove that it had not stooped to printing money, the bank promised to offset the bond purchases, which totaled 26.5 billion euros ($32.6 billion as of May 24, the most recent data available), by taking in a like amount in short-term deposits from banks. In effect, it siphoned off as much liquidity as it had added.

The bond purchases were only the latest of a series of extraordinary moves that Mr. Trichet has pursued to stabilize the European banking system. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the central bank has been essentially keeping banks afloat by providing almost unlimited loans at 1 percent interest.

Mr. Trichet is eager to squash any doubts that such moves represent a shift in the bank’s focus on inflation, said Mr. Snower of the Kiel Institute. “The E.C.B. is showing very clearly that its objectives have not changed.”

Other economists say that scale of the bond purchases would not increase the money supply enough to pose an inflation risk. And the money supply is falling because of a decline in bank lending.

In addition, factories are operating below capacity and euro zone unemployment is at 10 percent. Extra money in the system would not create scarcities of goods or labor that could drive up prices, Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said.

“You don’t have to pay any more to get those workers to come out of unemployment,” Mr. Weinberg said.

The recent decline of the euro against the dollar could create some inflation. Oil and other commodities are priced in dollars and could become more expensive in euros.

Still, few economists see prices rising. “There is no reason to fear high inflation for the time being,” Simon Junker, a Commerzbank analyst, said in a note.

Much of Mr. Trichet’s anti-inflation stance seems aimed at mollifying Germany’s anxiety over the bank’s bond purchases.

After the purchases, Mr. Trichet gave interviews to three leading German publications, an unusually high number in such a short period. In each case, he tried to reassure Germans on inflation and convince them that the euro is as solid as the German mark that they reluctantly gave up 11 years ago.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: May 28, 2010

It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:

“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair. On the other hand, I probably think to myself, ‘These are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are.’ And to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.”

And a child shall lead them. …

This oil leak is not President Obama’s fault. Stopping the spill is BP’s responsibility; it both caused it and it has the best access to the best technology to plug it. Of course, as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would — because it is precisely that simple gut reaction, repeated over and over, speech after speech, that could change our national conversation on energy.

You see, right now our energy conversation is dominated by three voices. There are the “petro-determinists,” who never tire of telling us that we’ll be dependent on oil for a “long, long time.” That is true. The problem is, these same people have been telling us that ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, and their real objective in doing so is not to help us understand that breaking our oil addiction is difficult, but to make us think that it is impossible — so don’t bother.

Then there are the “eco-pessimists,” who argue that it is probably already too late. We are toast. Unless we rewire human beings to want less growth — not only ourselves but the millions in China and India who aspire to live like us — the end is nigh. The eco-pessimists may be right, and they are certainly sincere, but they have little respect for the power of innovation, the power of six billion minds all trying to solve one problem.

Finally, we have the “Obama realists.” These are the political pros who whisper to him every day that this is not the time to lay out a big new “Obama End to Oil Addiction Act.” The Democrats, they contend, are suffering from “legislative fatigue.” After casting a hard vote for health care, they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon — the essential first step in getting off oil. And, they rightly add, the G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.

The Obama realists make sure that the president is always careful to talk in vague terms about how he stands behind “Waxman-Markey” and “Kerry-Lieberman” — sterile Washington-speak for the House and Senate bills that attempt to put a small price on carbon. I am glad he is behind them; I just wish he were in front of them. I am glad the president passed health care for the nation. But healthy to do what? To go where? To grasp what dream?

Answering those questions is the president’s great opportunity here, but he has to think like a kid. Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?

That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote. That is the well of aspiration for a game-change on energy that Mr. Obama can tap into. And he could even rip off BP for his moon shot motto: Let’s get America “Beyond Petroleum.” As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.