The Vindija cave in Croatia where three small Neanderthal bones were found.

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY Times Published: May 6, 2010

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.

Experts believe that the Neanderthal genome sequence will be of extraordinary importance in understanding human evolutionary history since the two species split some 600,000 years ago.

So far, the team has identified only about 100 genes — surprisingly few — that have contributed to the evolution of modern humans since the split. The nature of the genes in humans that differ from those of Neanderthals is of particular interest because they bear on what it means to be human, or at least not Neanderthal. Some of the genes seem to be involved in cognitive function and others in bone structure.

“Seven years ago, I really thought that it would remain impossible in my lifetime to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome,” Dr. Paabo said at a news conference. But the Leipzig team’s second conclusion, that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans before Europeans and Asians split, is being met with reserve by some archaeologists.

A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.

But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.

Dr. Paabo has pioneered the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from fossil bones, overcoming daunting obstacles over the last 13 years in his pursuit of the Neanderthal genome. Perhaps the most serious is that most Neanderthal bones are extensively contaminated with modern human DNA, which is highly similar to Neanderthal DNA. The DNA he has analyzed comes from three small bones from the Vindija cave in Croatia.

“This is a fabulous achievement,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, referring to the draft Neanderthal genome that Dr. Paabo’s team describes in Thursday’s issue of Science.

But he and other archaeologists questioned some of the interpretations put forward by Dr. Paabo and his chief colleagues, Richard E. Green of the Leipzig institute, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Geneticists have been making increasingly valuable contributions to human prehistory, but their work depends heavily on complex mathematical statistics that make their arguments hard to follow. And the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact.

“This is probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found,” Dr. Tattersall said.

Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford, said the authors’ theory of an early interbreeding episode did not seem to have taken full account of the archaeological background. “They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it.’ But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest,” he said.

In an earlier report on the Neanderthal genome, the reported DNA sequences were found by other geneticists to be extensively contaminated with human DNA. Dr. Paabo’s group has taken extra precautions but it remains to be seen how successful they have been, Dr. Klein said, especially as another group at the Leipzig institute, presumably using the same methods, has obtained results that Dr. Paabo said he could not confirm.

Dr. Paabo said that episode of human-Neanderthal breeding implied by Dr. Reich’s statistics most plausibly occurred “in the Middle East where the first modern humans appear before 100,000 years ago and there were Neanderthals until 60,000 years ago.” According to Dr. Klein, people in Africa expanded their range and reached just Israel during a warm period some 120,000 years ago. They retreated during a cold period some 80,000 years ago and were replaced by Neanderthals. It is not clear whether or not they overlapped with Neanderthals, he said.

These humans, in any case, were not fully modern and they did not expand from Africa, an episode that occurred some 30,000 years later. If there was any interbreeding, the flow of genes should have been both ways, Dr. Klein said, but Dr. Paabo’s group sees evidence for gene flow only from Neanderthals to modern humans.

The Leipzig group’s interbreeding theory would undercut the present belief that all human populations today draw from the same gene pool that existed a mere 50,000 years ago. “What we falsify here is the strong out-of-Africa hypothesis that everyone comes from the same population,” Dr. Paabo said.

In his and Dr. Reich’s view, Neanderthals interbred only with non-Africans, the people who left Africa, which would mean that non-Africans drew from a second gene pool not available to Africans.

Joseph Diliberti relaxes in his earthen home on three acres where he has lived for three decades.

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times
May 5, 2010

Reporting from Dehesa, Calif.

For three decades, former Marine-turned-Rastafarian Joseph Diliberti has lived on his three acres of paradise deep in rural eastern San Diego County: building clay dwellings, playing his flute, reading Thoreau (“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately”) and radiating peace and harmony.

But six years ago when the local fire district sent him a bill for $27,552 for cutting down what firefighters characterized as fire-prone weeds on his property, he declined to pay, just as Thoreau refused to pay his delinquent poll taxes.

Diliberti resented that a private company hired by the fire district came onto his property while he was not there. Also, he says that what the fire department calls combustible weeds were actually fire-resistant, native California plants.

With penalties and interest, the bill has grown to more than $62,000. Diliberti, who was injured in Vietnam, lives on a monthly disability check and says he cannot afford to pay the county.

“A Rasta-man doesn’t worry about these things,” he said.

Maybe not, but the taxman does. The county tax collector is threatening to auction off Dilberti’s property sometime after July 1 to pay for back taxes,.

David Nissen, division chief of the San Diego Rural Fire Protection District, wishes it had never come to this. But he said Diliberti did not respond to warning notices and later did not attend a governing board hearing where his bill was discussed. Records show that more than 800 cubic yards of brush were removed.

Diliberti filed a lawsuit but lost. He blames his attorney.

“This whole thing is tragic,” said Nissen, who said a concerned neighbor alerted the fire district to the overgrown weeds. “I just wish Mr. Diliberti had been more engaged from the beginning…. We need to stress the fact that little fires get big.”

No one disputes that brush fires are a serious matter in the backcountry of San Diego County. Fires in 2003 and 2007 destroyed thousands of homes and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres.

Diliberti declined to give his age (“Rasta-men don’t worry about age”) but allowed that he was 18 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1965. After service in Vietnam as an infantry “grunt,” he settled in San Diego and worked as a contractor.

Then in 1979, with some profits from home building, he moved to a hilly piece of property east of El Cajon where the only inhabitants were frogs, skunks, kangaroo rats, rattlesnakes, raccoons and a variety of birds.

“I got rid of all my complications so I could come here and live simply,” said Diliberti, his native Brooklyn still evident in his voice. (It was during his youth in Brooklyn that he met a Jamaican woman who introduced him to Rasta.)

Occasionally he goes fishing or kayaking in Baja California. He built a kiln for his pottery. The property has no electricity; a well provides water. Diliberti has rigged up a privy; he also built a small sweat-lodge for spiritual cleansing.

“The reason I stand out is because no one else lives this way anymore,” he said. “The laws are against people living his way. Thoreau said that government is best that governs least. I believe that.”

He is not a hermit. He likes visitors and is a soft touch for anyone down on his luck who needs a place to stay. He has a romantic streak.

“I have female companionship come and go, but I live alone, in my own space,” he said. His five daughters have three mothers. He built a treehouse atop a huge California live oak for his daughters, his grandchildren and their friends.

His property taxes are a mere $850 a year, but when he refused to pay the brush abatement bill, the county would not accept just his property tax payment.

Even if he had the money, Diliberti said, he would not pay. “It’s not about money, it’s about principle,” he said. “If I give in, I’m setting a precedent for them to do it again.”

Diliberti can claim at least a partial victory. Amid a cascade of complaints from other property owners about the private company, the district terminated the contract a few months after Diliberti’s property was cleaned.

His cause has been championed by Richard Halsey, director of the Escondido-based California Chaparral Institute. To Halsey, Diliberti is another in a line of victims of private companies acting as “bounty hunters” without regard to property rights.

Last week, Halsey wrote to the chairman of the state Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water decrying the “inappropriate and overzealous enforcement of vegetation clearance laws.”

Diliberti said he is not worried about the possibility of his land being sold from beneath his feet. He puts his faith in the late Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, considered by some Rastafarians as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

“I pray with the sagebrush,” he said. “Because my sagebrush is not their rosebush, that doesn’t give them permission to cut it. I have a right to live my life as a Rasta-man.”

link to audio slide show

Steve Nash wore his ‘Los Suns’ jersey during Wednesday’s playoff game.

By BILLY WITZ and HOWARD BECK
NY Times Published: May 5, 2010

PHOENIX — The Phoenix Suns delivered a powerful statement Wednesday night with a relatively subtle gesture: a three-letter addition to their uniforms.

Their jerseys said “Los Suns” — a Spanish-English combination intended to acknowledge the Cinco de Mayo holiday and, more broadly, to express opposition to Arizona’s new law dealing with illegal immigrants.

An N.B.A. playoff game thus became a temporary stage for an incendiary national debate.

Although the modification to the jerseys was minor, the sentiment behind it was more forceful.

Robert Sarver, the Suns’ managing partner and a Tucson native, called the new law flawed and mean-spirited and said it would hurt the state’s economy.

“However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question,” Sarver said in a statement, “and Arizona’s already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them.”

Suns forward Jared Dudley said he was not surprised that such a simple gesture had taken on national overtones. He said he listened Tuesday night as TNT’s commentators discussed it, and earlier Wednesday when it was the subject of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines.”

“Any time you have a political stance in sports and add in a playoff game, and you add in the owner standing up for it, you’re always going to have a reaction,” Dudley said.

Sarver had the support of the Suns’ players, who, according to The Arizona Republic, voted unanimously to wear the jerseys for Game 2 against the San Antonio Spurs. It was the most overt statement made by a professional sports team since the Arizona law was adopted.

The law makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and permits police officers to ask for proof of legal residency if they reasonably suspect that a person is in the United States illegally. Critics say it will lead to racial profiling.

Indicators of how Suns fans felt about the law were hard to come by. Most stark political differences were covered up by the color orange that filled the arena.

One fan who stood out was Andrew Bloom, who wore a sombrero, taped “Los” above the Suns logo on his Amar’e Stoudemire jersey and said he had a concealed banner he would unfurl later that read: Deport the Spurs.

But overt signs of support or opposition were rare.

A clerk at the team store said sales of “Los Suns” T-shirts and jerseys were more brisk than usual but she could not provide numbers. David Rojo, who wore one of the orange T-shirts, said he appreciated that Sarver, as the leader of one of Phoenix’s most prominent businesses, would take such a strong stand in opposition to the law.

“It’s awesome for me because my parents are immigrants from Mexico,” Rojo said. “It’s important that it’s not just immigrants who are opposed to the law, but an organization that has a strong place in the community.”

Jerry Dilk, a season-ticket holder for 22 seasons, was not so pleased.

“I’ve got no problem celebrating Cinco de Mayo,” said Dilk, who did not share what he called Sarver’s liberal point of view. “But I’m disappointed he chose to use his position to make a political statement.”

Despite Tuesday’s outspoken support of the gesture and opposition to the law from those in both organizations — Suns General Manager Steve Kerr said that allowing the police to ask people for their papers “rings up images of Nazi Germany” — the topic of Los Suns jerseys was one that both coaches sought to distance themselves from Wednesday.

This was, after all, the playoffs.

“It’s game time,” Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, who strongly supported Sarver on Tuesday, said as he stood outside his team’s locker room about 90 minutes before tip-off. “You guys asked me. I gave you the opinion, now do what you want with it. Now, it’s game time. I’m not running for office, just coaching.”

Suns Coach Alvin Gentry was no more interested in discussing the subject.

“This is the last thing I’m going to say about it,” Gentry said. “We’ve worn these jerseys before. We’re 3-0 in these jerseys. We’re wearing these jerseys just because it’s a national holiday, it’s Cinco de Mayo. We’re wearing it because of the diversity we have in the state of Arizona, and we’re wearing it because of the diversity in the N.B.A.”

Gentry was flooded with e-mail and voicemail messages, but he did not want to discuss the issue. Subsequent questions, brought the same answer.

The Los Suns jerseys were originally created as part of the N.B.A.’s “Noche Latina” campaign, an effort to connect with Hispanic fans. Nine teams held Latin Nights this season, and Phoenix wore Los Suns jerseys twice. Hispanics make up 15 percent of the N.B.A.’s fan base, league officials said.

(LR074) Fluted bottle, 1988, stoneware, height 18 cm
(LR132) Bottle, 1985, stoneware, pitted glaze, height 29.5 cm
(LR330) Fluted bottle, 1980, stoneware, height 23 cm
(LR073) Bottle with flared neck, 1988, stoneware, height 25.4 cm

May 6 – June 3

Galerie Besson

Untitled

1959. Welded steel, canvas, black fabric, soot, and wire, 58 1/8 x 58 1/2 x 17 3/8″ (147.5 x 148.5 x 44 cm).

Through August 30

MOMA

Morton Broffman
Dr. King and Coretta Scott King
Marching, Montgomery, Alabama, 1965

Bob Adelman
Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, 1963

Through August 11, 2010

Bronx Museum

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 2, 2010

It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago.

And maybe, just maybe, the disaster will help reverse environmentalism’s long political slide — a slide largely caused by our very success in alleviating highly visible pollution. If so, there may be a small silver lining to a very dark cloud.

Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.

It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action. The Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and America began making headway against its most visible environmental problems. Air quality improved: smog alerts in Los Angeles, which used to have more than 100 a year, have become rare. Rivers stopped burning, and some became swimmable again. And Lake Erie has come back to life, in part thanks to a ban on laundry detergents containing phosphates.

Yet there was a downside to this success story.

For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

Nor was a loss of public interest the only negative consequence of the decline in visible pollution. As the photogenic crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded from memory, conservatives began pushing back against environmental regulation.

Much of the pushback took the form of demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.)

And let’s admit it: by and large, the anti-environmentalists have been winning the argument, at least as far as public opinion is concerned.

Then came the gulf disaster. Suddenly, environmental destruction was photogenic again.

For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent about the catastrophe. True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit.

For the gulf blowout is a pointed reminder that the environment won’t take care of itself, that unless carefully watched and regulated, modern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet.

Will America take heed? It depends a lot on leadership. In particular, President Obama needs to seize the moment; he needs to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, telling America that courting irreversible environmental disaster for the sake of a few barrels of oil, an amount that will hardly affect our dependence on imports, is a terrible bargain.

It’s true that Mr. Obama isn’t as well positioned to make this a teachable moment as he should be: just a month ago he announced a plan to open much of the Atlantic coast to oil exploration, a move that shocked many of his supporters and makes it hard for him to claim the moral high ground now.

But he needs to get beyond that. The catastrophe in the gulf offers an opportunity, a chance to recapture some of the spirit of the original Earth Day. And if that happens, some good may yet come of this ecological nightmare.

Anthony Friedkin, “Sun Reflections on Wave, Zuma Beach, CA” (2000)

April 30 – June 26, 2010

Opening Reception – Friday, May 14, 2010 from 6 – 9 PM

Continuum, a re-examination of the 1969 group exhibition of the same name. Continuum, which highlighted the diversity of photography in Southern California, was curated by Robert von Sternberg, and was originally mounted at the Downey Museum of Art. Von Sternberg has reprised the exhibition, which includes many of the artists initially involved, as well as a small number of photographers who began shooting around the time of the first show.

Jo Ann Callis, Eileen Cowin, Darryl Curran, Robert Flick, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Grant Mudford, Jane O’Neal, Jerry McMillian, Susan Rankaitis, Edmund Teske, Robert von Sternberg, Todd Walker

Stephen Cohen

Through May 10

The Kitchen

Rough Winds Trailer from Rough Winds on Vimeo.

LAXART

“Barricade on the Boulevard Saint-Germain near Rue Hautefeuille, May 1968,” a photograph by Alain Dejean.

By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: April 27, 2010

If you’d like a status update on Britain’s tangled feelings about its neighbor France, you could do worse than study The Sunday Times of London’s current hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. At No. 9 is the book in front of us now: the British historian Graham Robb’s admiring “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris.” More beloved by English readers, though, at No. 4, is a book by Stephen Clarke with this impish title: “1000 Years of Annoying the French.” Garçon, there’s some snark in my soup.

The appearance of one of Mr. Robb’s books on an English best-seller list, or any best-seller list, says good things about the state of British-French relations. It says even better things about the state of literary culture. That’s because Mr. Robb, over the course of a half-dozen books, including excellent biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, and a volume called “The Discovery of France,” has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere.

To observe that Mr. Robb’s books are unusual is to say several things at once. Most obviously, they sometimes apply hardy, free-range kinds of research. “The Discovery of France” was given a jolt of life by his back-road explorations on a bicycle. (“This book,” he wrote, “is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library.”) They also take unusual forms. In Mr. Robb’s new book one chapter is written like a screenplay, while another employs witty question-and-answer sections that function like lemon juice squeezed over a platter of oysters. Clearly Mr. Robb is restless, and he has little interest in being a droning, by-the-numbers tour guide.

It’s not hard, however, to think up ways to write stunt history. What’s truly unusual about Mr. Robb is the amount of real feeling and human playfulness he smuggles into his books, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page.

Did I mention that he is also jaggedly funny? His prose approximates Ian McEwan’s by way of Anthony Lane. In his new book a group of Parisians in the Latin Quarter in the 1840s don’t die from disease, they die from “various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money.’ ”

“Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris” arrives with an odd subtitle (adventure history?) that makes it sound as if it were written on a skateboard and sponsored by Mountain Dew. Here’s what this book really is: a pointillist and defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from a variety of unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history.

Among the set pieces here is an account of a young Napoleon losing his virginity to a prostitute in the Palais Royal; a portrait of the man who created the catacombs; and an investigation into how Marie Antoinette, while attempting to flee the city to save her life, became lost just a few yards from home.

There’s much more: disquisitions on police work and photographers and playwrights and France’s strange DeLillo-ish history of faked political assassinations; a portrait of Émile Zola’s long-suffering wife; an inquiry into the links between alchemy and the early days of nuclear fission; an account of Hitler’s short tour of Paris’s landmarks; a view of the affair between Juliette Gréco, the actress and later singer, and a young Miles Davis; an assessment of the 1968 student riots; and a glimpse at the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy and the roiling discontents of recent French immigration.

Mr. Robb builds his histories from small piles of angular details. The section on Napoleon begins by observing “the army of wet nurses who left their babies at home and went to sell their breast milk in the capital.” During an account of one policeman’s search for a criminal who is also a hunchback, Mr. Robb can’t help noting the difficulties: “there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris.” Once Zola discovered cameras, he writes, he tended to “behave as though he was always about to be photographed.”

Mr. Robb’s prose is fleet and ingenious. He describes the “sucking sound” of modern French police sirens, the “snickering” of certain neon signs, the melodious “parping of automobiles.” His good humor is infectious. When young men were finally allowed to visit young women in Parisian college dormitories in the 1960s, he writes that they brought “wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections.” Describing the soulless towers in immigrant suburban Paris, he notes dryly: “The planes coming in to land at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway.”

Mr. Robb pores over old newspapers, tour guides and photographs. (About one favorite picture, he writes: “So much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons that if the glass plate survived a holocaust and lay buried under rubble for centuries in a leather satchel, there would be enough to compile a small, speculative encyclopedia of Paris in the late second millennium.”)

He is just as familiar with resources like CNN and eBay, and into a discussion of Quasimodo’s climbing abilities, he casually drops a mention of parkour.

He extends his embrace to Paris’s new wave of Arab immigrants. “Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy,” he writes. But he adds: “They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse.”

Mr. Robb’s animating idea during the composition of “Parisians,” he declares, “was to create a kind of mini-Human Comedy of Paris, in which the history of the city would be illuminated by the real experience of its inhabitants.”

Through friends in Paris, Mr. Robb writes, he learned things: “a certain Parisian art de vivre: sitting in traffic jams as a form of flânerie, parking illegally as a defense of personal liberty, savoring window displays as though the streets were a public museum.”

He goes on: “They taught me the tricky etiquette of pretending to argue with waiters, and the gallantry of staring at beautiful strangers.” His book — argumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dare — is as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water.

PARISIANS

An Adventure History of Paris

By Graham Robb

Illustrated. 476 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
Related

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY Times Published: April 26, 2010

Imagine you are a killer whale, or orca, as you probably prefer to be known. You are thinking about lunch, specifically a nice fat penguin, and there on that ice floe is a whole flock of flippered lunch units.

Too bad that they know you’re there and have no intention of going for a swim right now. So how do you persuade them to go into the water?

Well, you assemble comrades from your orca pod a few hundred feet from the ice floe. Then you all swim together at full speed toward the floe. Orcas can attain speeds of more than 30 knots, so a line of them going at full tilt moves a lot of water. A microsecond before impact, the orca phalanx executes a perfect U-turn. A wall of water rises up over the floe, and the backwash flushes the surprised penguins into the sea.

Orcas have hunting tactics of similar sophistication for other prey, whether fish, seals or whales. But each orca population seems to prefer one kind of prey. Orcas that feed on whales may not even recognize fish as food.

This specialization in diet and hunting tactics, combined with small differences in markings, has long led marine biologists to suppose they might be looking at different orca species, not a single population. But standard DNA tests, based on sequencing segments of the mitochondrial genome, showed no clear divisions in the world’s orca population, according to a team of biologists led by Phillip A. Morin of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Now, Dr. Morin and colleagues have at last cracked the orca code. Using advanced methods of sequencing DNA, which allow the entire mitochondrial genome to be decoded, they found systematic differences in DNA between different populations. Mitochondria are the energy-producing organelles of cells and maintain their own small genome independent from the main genome in the cell’s nucleus.

The team looked at orcas inhabiting seven ecological niches around the world. Biologists call each group an ecotype. Two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologists, Robert L. Pitman and Paul Ensor, found in 2003 that there are three orca ecotypes in the Antarctic, one of which preys on minke whales, the second on seals and penguins, and the third on fish. Another ecotype lives in the eastern North Atlantic, and the three eastern North Pacific ecotypes are known as the transient, resident and offshore populations.

On the basis of ecotype behavior and the new DNA data, the two Antarctic orca groups that eat seals and fish should be recognized as distinct species, as should the North Pacific transients, Dr. Morin’s group concluded in a report published this month by Genome Research. The other ecotypes should be regarded as subspecies pending further data, they said.

Orcas are apex predators, a biologist’s phrase meaning you get to eat anyone else and no one eats you. But that makes them vulnerable to shrinkage in their prey population and to man-made chemicals that accumulate going up through a food chain. Currently, all orcas are lumped into a single species, Orcinus orca, but if the Morin team’s recommendations are accepted, conservationists would wish to make sure that each is protected.

Flame-retardant chemicals have already been found at troubling levels in some orca groups. “There’s a lot to be said for raising the signal that these highly charismatic species could be directly affected by some of the pollutants we are pumping out,” Dr. Morin said.

The DNA differences between orca groups had not turned up before, in part because the speciation occurred quite recently in evolutionary time. From the number of DNA changes, Dr. Morin estimates that the first split in the orca population, between the North Pacific transients and the rest, occurred some 700,000 years ago.

Eadweard Muybridge, photographer of nature, is captured in 1872 in the Grant Mariposa Grove at Yosemite.

By KAREN ROSENBERG
NY Times Published: April 26, 2010

WASHINGTON — Technology moves fast, art slower. You could say that art is still catching up to Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a pioneer of stop-motion photography and early filmmaking.

In “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, you can see how Muybridge himself got up to speed with industrialization, mechanization and the other radical changes of the late 19th century.

His impact on the 20th is difficult to overstate. The writer Rebecca Solnit, in her 2003 biography, called Muybridge “the man who split the second,” aligning him with the inventor of the atom bomb. Cultural signposts as diverse as Francis Bacon’s paintings and the performance-capture technology of “Avatar” can be traced back to the trotting horse that Muybridge photographed on a racetrack in Palo Alto, Calif.

In the Corcoran’s thorough and absorbing show, organized by its chief curator, Philip Brookman, that horse doesn’t appear until the final couple of galleries. But you can see Muybridge’s ideas about time and movement develop in richly layered landscapes, panoramas and sequential views of buildings under construction.

Born Edward James Muggeridge in the market town of Kingston upon Thames, a few miles southwest of London, Muybridge ventured to San Francisco around 1855 and made his name as a bookseller. After an 1860 stagecoach accident left him with a major head injury, he recuperated in England, where interest in photography was growing fast, and there he took up the camera. He returned to San Francisco as a photographer, one of many trying to capitalize on the market for Western landscapes.

There, he made famous and powerful friends, including Leland Stanford, the politician and railroad magnate whose collection of racehorses he famously photographed. Muybridge became a celebrity himself when he was tried, and acquitted, for the 1874 murder of his wife’s lover. (The head injury played a role in his defense.)

Along the way, he changed his name from Muggeridge to Muygridge and finally Muybridge (pronounced MOY-bridge); Edward became Eadweard (pronounced Edward). On his business cards and in advertisements for his studio he called himself Helios, the sun god from Greek mythology. The moniker was a clever reference to “sun pictures,” early photographic prints made in sunlight, but it also branded him as a traveling, outdoor photographer. The logo on his stationery showed a winged camera.

His early works are mostly stereographs (two-part photographs that give the illusion of three-dimensionality when seen in a special viewer, or stereoscope; the museum provides glasses that perform the same function). Like other stereographers, Muybridge exploited the technology by seeking out views with sharply receding perspectives.

In other ways, though, Muybridge distinguished himself from the competition. Whether surveying the Yosemite Valley or the booming city of San Francisco, he looked for unusual vantage points and played up discrepancies in scale. In “The Astonished Woodchopper,” one of his most theatrical images, a man with an ax confronts a giant sequoia.

He also wasn’t above using special effects: printing pictures extra dark so that they appeared to have been exposed under moonlight, or adding clouds from a second negative. Some of these tricks were standard practice for 19th-century photographers, but they may come as a shock to viewers who think of Muybridge as more of a scientist than an artist.

He seems to have been comfortable with both disciplines. And as Ms. Solnit argues in an eloquent catalog essay, there was a lot of crossover between the two: “Muybridge was as much an artist for scientists as he was a scientist for artists.” She notes that the painter Albert Bierstadt adapted compositions from Muybridge’s Yosemite photographs, just as the geologist Clarence King studied them for traces of glacial activity.

His album “Yosemite Views,” made with considerable effort and at great expense, is certainly stunning. Muybridge carted a mammoth-plate camera up and down the steep cliffs to look for vertiginous angles that would separate his album from an earlier one by Carleton Watkins.

He paid special attention to Yosemite’s waterfalls, which appear as milky, vaporous cones because of the images’ long exposure times. As the filmmaker Hollis Frampton has written about Muybridge’s work, “What is to be seen is not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies during the whole time-interval of the exposure.” As it happens, the Yosemite album dates from 1872 — the same year that Muybridge began his experiments with Stanford’s prize racehorse, Occident.

More modern and striking is a series he made a year earlier: a government commission to photograph lighthouses along the Pacific Coast. The subject was tailor-made for him, from the cliffs rising hundreds of feet above the sea to the beacons whose technology seems with hindsight to anticipate that of moving pictures. These are some of Muybridge’s most gorgeous and versatile images, in tune with 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century Structuralism alike.

But Muybridge wasn’t just a landscape photographer, he was also a photojournalist — one who, more often than not, worked for powerful interests. In 1873 the United States Army commissioned him to document the Lava Beds in Northern California, where war had broken out between the Modoc Indians and the government. His photographs were meant to assist the Army in moving troops through the inhospitable terrain, but some were published in magazines and newspapers. (In one, marketed as “Modoc Brave Lying in Wait for a Shot,” the subject was, in fact, a member of a neighboring tribe who worked as a scout for the military.)

The government gave Muybridge access to major building projects like the San Francisco City Hall and the city’s branch of the United States Mint, which he photographed at various stages of construction. And the Pacific Mail Steamship Company commissioned from him a series documenting coffee production in Latin America meant to reassure foreign investors with its orderly and hierarchical depictions of labor.

His most significant connection was undoubtedly his friendship with Stanford. It’s enshrined in Muybridge’s mesmerizing “Panorama of San Francisco,” shot from the rarefied precipice now known as Nob Hill, where Stanford was putting up an enormous mansion.

Yet the facts of Muybridge’s elite patronage were at odds with the democratic potential of his chosen medium. He seemed to understand this, especially in his later years when he marketed his locomotion studies to the masses at events like the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Materials from those studies — photographs, books, letters, patent models — are packed into the show’s final three galleries. Also here is Muybridge’s only surviving Zoopraxiscope, a device he invented by adding a spinning glass disk to a lantern slide projector.

The Zoopraxiscope can’t be operated by visitors, alas, but a digital projection animates some of Muybridge’s well-known photographs of animals, men, women and children in motion. The men run, jump, wrestle and pour buckets of water on one another. The women do some of these things, but they also wash and iron clothes. Many of the sequences are antic; more than a few are erotic, or homoerotic. They’re art, science and popular entertainment, and they’re what people think of when they think of Muybridge.

But, for me, the show’s defining moment was a single still image — a photograph from 1872 of Muybridge sitting in front of a giant sequoia. It seems to encompass geologic and human time, eras and instants, the rings of the tree and the horse circling the track.

“Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change” continues through July 18 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th Street NW, Washington; (202) 639-1700, corcoran.org.

Thursday, April 29, 2010
Brown Auditorium – 7:00 p.m.

Join New York-based artist Moyra Davey for a discussion about her photographic practice and writing. In her images of everyday objects Davey reflects on personal experience and economies on the verge of obsolescence. She is the author of several publications including Long Life Cool White, which accompanied her 2008 mid-career survey, curated by Helen Molesworth at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

The event is free. Tickets required, available one hour in advance of the program. Please call the box office for more information, (323) 857-6010, or visit www.lacma.org. The event is organized by the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and is supported by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund. Parking is available for $7 at LACMA’s Spaulding lot (Spaulding Avenue at Wilshire Boulevard) or on neighboring side streets during select hours.

via

By JAMES COLLINS
NY Times Published: April 25, 2010

JUST like everyone else, I was overjoyed that a doorman strike was averted last week in New York. But as I read the articles leading up to the resolution — an arc as dramatic as that of the Cuban missile crisis — I found myself asking a disturbing question: Are doormen necessary? Necessary? Why, the very thought could only be the product of a troubled mind. You might as well ask if the Holland Tunnel is necessary! You might as well ask if the Knicks are necessary! (Actually, never mind about that one.)

Think about it, though: everyone knows that a doorman’s most important job is to provide security, but if security is the object, wouldn’t it be cheaper and make more sense to use some combination of security guards and technology? There have been several beloved doormen in my life, but it’s pretty hard to imagine any of them single-handedly disarming a gunman.

Doormen sort the mail and receive deliveries — true. But office buildings handle a huge volume of these items without putting anybody in a striped waistcoat and white gloves. Doormen take in the dry cleaning and hail taxis and bring tenants their takeout food. Please. Millions of New Yorkers manage their dry cleaning and takeout every day. And it looks almost silly to see a tenant standing next to a doorman who has his hand raised to hail a cab — it takes two people to do this?

If doormen aren’t necessities, then are they luxury items? Yes, that’s correct to a degree. And as descendants of the liveried porters and doormen of grand private houses, hotels and clubs of the 19th century, they are also displays of status.

But neither luxury nor status can explain the devotion that tenants feel for their doormen; they can’t explain why tenants provided doormen with coffee and doughnuts on the picket line during the strike in 1991 (or why, against their own interests, the doormen worked so hard to prepare tenants for running their buildings).

Why then does the institution persist and thrive? Tenants value their doormen, I believe, because they provide an extra layer of face-to-face social connection that is not strictly “necessary,” but is tremendously gratifying nonetheless. As the sociologist Peter Bearman points out in his fascinating book, “Doormen,” the doorman knows the tenants; he knows their comings and goings; he knows their friends; he knows what kind of food they like; he watches their children grow up; he may gossip to them about other tenants; for tenants he likes, he will break the rules.

Radical class distinctions no longer exist — not even the best buildings can provide them anymore — so the doorman, while still socially distant from the tenants, has risen from the status of a servant. Rather, in the big, indifferent city, he is like a small-town shopkeeper or postman or cop who knows your (and others’) business, looks out for you, helps the community cohere and talks mostly about the weather. (Mr. Bearman’s statistics confirm this.) As with those small-town figures, the doorman’s knowledge of a person can be worrying, but it is comforting, too. The doorman is a touch of Gemeinschaft in an ever more Gesellschaft world.

In my own case, I grew up in a doorman building on the Upper East Side, and I have fond memories of the sweet but dim Chris, whose dream it was to return to Greece and start a restaurant; Javier, the rabid Mets fan; way back, old Joe, who sailed a fully-rigged, five-foot-long model of a clipper ship at the boat pond. I liked knowing these men and the routine of seeing them day after day; they provided an extra element of humanness to my urban upbringing.

So maybe doormen aren’t necessary, but that is no criticism. To the contrary: it is a great compliment to say that rather than serving a merely utilitarian purpose, doormen serve a social one.

Oddly, in discussions of doormen’s tasks, the one most rarely mentioned is the one they perform most often: opening doors. This is almost purely ceremonial, and while it may smack of servility, can a tenant be blamed for taking pleasure in this show of respect, and the familiar greeting and smile that accompanies it? Anyone can open a door; only a doorman can make it mean something.

James Collins is the author of the novel “Beginner’s Greek.”

By OLIVER STRAND and KNICKERBOCKER
NY Times Published: April 22, 2010

Every architectural style falls out of fashion — Art Deco was dated by the 1950s, mid-century Modernism looked shabby by the 1980s — but after spending a generation in exile, it’s usually welcomed back. Twenty years ago a weekend house by Richard Neutra might have been dismissed as too expensive to heat; now it’s almost as sacred as a Palladian villa.

A similar reconsideration is under way for Brutalism, that brawny mix of concrete walls and soaring cantilevers that first appeared in postwar Europe.

The name comes from the “béton brut,” or raw concrete, of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, though the coinage is attributed to British architects Alison and Peter Smithson. The heavy forms defy gravity — balconies float in space, turning buildings into sculptures. But as even the best Brutalist buildings aged, water stains and crumbling walls made them look dilapidated.

Some recent restorations have revealed Brutalism’s beauty. In 2008, Yale reopened its Art and Architecture Building, designed by Paul Rudolph in the 1960s, after a loving renovation. The corduroy concrete never looked better. Brutalism never took hold in New York — the skyline here favors brick and glass. Still, there are a few concrete masterpieces worth a second look, by passersby and preservationists alike.

KIPS BAY PLAZA, KIPS BAY. I. M. PEI & ASSOCIATES (1960-1963)

Like Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei is an architectural chameleon. Each had a Brutalist phase, but Mr. Pei’s was more sincere — before he turned to glass and limestone, his material of choice was béton brut. His colossal Kips Bay Plaza tower was New York’s introduction to raw concrete; three years later a second massive slab was finished.

When viewed straight on, the towers have a commanding monotony, 21 floors of glass and concrete. They face each other, but they’re not aligned — Brutalism likes a little tension. The windows are framed by load-bearing precast column frames, and the deep recesses form a pattern as mesmerizing as an Agnes Martin pencil drawing.

CHATHAM TOWERS, CHINATOWN. KELLY & GRUZEN (1965)

These apartment towers, standing on the edge of Chinatown, are classic béton brut. The raw concrete is imprinted with the wood grain left by the slats that framed the walls when they set; up close, the impressions on the walls are as rich as the swirls on polished marble. From a distance, the stacked balconies have a powerful rhythm — in profile they appear die-cut, as if stamped by an enormous machine.

SILVER TOWERS, GREENWICH VILLAGE. I. M. PEI & ASSOCIATES (1967)

The Silver Towers complex, originally called University Village, has a sense of intimacy despite the huge scale of the three 30-story buildings. They’re identical — four windows on one side, eight on the other — though the rationalism is more elegant than oppressive. The buildings belong to one another.

In 2008, the complex, along with the “Bust of Sylvette,” the 36-foot-tall copy of a Picasso sculpture in the complex’s courtyard, were among the first Brutalist structures to receive landmark status from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

TRACEY TOWERS, BRONX. PAUL RUDOLPH (1972)

By the time the Tracey Towers were completed, concrete was beginning to seem more oppressive than optimistic. These two buildings aren’t exactly the same — one is 41 stories, the other 38 — but they’re both as intricate as a Gothic church. Hundreds of balconies are tucked between rounded column-like walls that hold oval bedrooms. You almost expect flying buttresses around the base.

In 2005, a deliveryman was trapped in an elevator in the shorter tower and went undiscovered for three days despite a building-wide search by some 100 police officers. Maybe the floor plan contributed to the confusion, but don’t blame the concrete.

BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE, BRONX. MARCEL BREUER & ASSOCIATES. (1964)

In 1894, New York University moved to the Bronx. The hilltop campus, designed by McKim, Mead & White, was transformed by Marcel Breuer & Associates in the mid-1960s. In 1973, the financially strapped university sold it to the City of New York.

The most dramatic Breuer building is the smallest: Begrisch Hall. It is a wedge of concrete balanced on its skinniest edge, and its textured walls are punched through with irregularly spaced windows. It looks as if it could be tipped over in a prank.

Meister Hall couldn’t be more different. The main facade is relatively conventional, if recognizably Breuer, but the southern side has eight windowless floors — seven in blinding white concrete — set on a featureless base. It’s neoclassical austerity on a modernist scale.

By BRIAN STELTER
NY Times Published: April 23, 2010

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1

Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.

It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.

“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.

On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.

It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”

Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.

“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.

The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.

It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.

In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”

In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”

In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”

In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.

As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.

Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”

Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.

His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”

But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.

“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”

He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”

By THOMAS BARTLETT
Published April 22, 2010

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think about Peter Tripp.

In 1959, the 32-year-old disc jockey stayed awake for 201 hours, broadcasting updates and spinning records from a storefront in Times Square. Newspapers tracked his progress (“Stay-Awake Man Half Way to Goal,” read headline in The Times) and onlookers pressed against the window to catch a glimpse of the sleepless freak. Tripp wasn’t the first or the last D.J. to stage a so-called wake-a-thon, but he was certainly the most famous.

For insomniacs like me, the idea of intentionally forgoing shuteye for days on end seems unthinkably perverse. Even a few hours of missed sleep renders me slow-witted and irritable; I become a stupider, meaner, clumsier version of myself. But not sleeping for more than a week? That sounds like torture — and sleep deprivation has been used as precisely that by a number of countries, including the United States. It is an effective technique, if by “effective” you mean “inflicts profound psychological torment.”

For insomniacs, the idea of intentionally forgoing shuteye for days on end seems unthinkably perverse.

Peter Tripp was far from a shock jock. This was the ’50s, remember, when D.J.’s were mostly sedate and inoffensive, much like the music they played. Tripp’s nickname was “the curly headed kid in the third row.” Yet beneath that innocuous image was an edgy, determined striver, the kind of guy who liked Pepsi and cigarettes for breakfast. He had already made a name for himself in New York, but he envied D.J.’s like Alan Freed, who had parlayed his radio success into movie and television gigs. Tripp thought the wake-a-thon might provide the boost he needed.

A night of missed sleep isn’t going to kill you, even if it feels like it will. But the consequences of going for prolonged periods without sleep are poorly understood even now. The two psychologists who monitored Tripp tried to talk him out of it, but they were also clearly pleased at the research opportunity his stunt presented. Tripp, by all accounts, wasn’t worried.

Maybe he should have been. In photographs taken at the beginning of the wake-a-thon, Tripp appears confident, relaxed. Everyone’s eyes are on him, which is exactly what he wanted. After the second day, the sly grin has been replaced with a glum, nervous expression. By day five Tripp looks haggard, haunted and slightly crazed.

He was crazed, too, and not just slightly. While Tripp somehow managed to keep it together during broadcasts, off the air he was experiencing wild hallucinations. He saw mice and kittens scampering around the makeshift studio. He was convinced that his shoes were full of spiders. He thought a desk drawer was on fire. When a man in a dark overcoat showed up, Tripp imagined him to be an undertaker and ran terrified into the street. He had to be dragged back inside.

Tripp’s doctors gave him stimulants to help him stay functional, but it’s unlikely that the drugs were responsible for his unraveling. In studies, subjects who have gone more than four days without sleep exhibited similar behavior. They became paranoid, saw fog pouring out of walls and doors, and felt as if a band was tightening around their heads. Most of these studies stopped at around 100 hours. Tripp went twice that long.

When the ordeal was over, Tripp slept for 13 hours, woke up and asked for the newspaper. He seemed to be fine, though he would later complain of emotional instability and recurring headaches. When the story of Peter Tripp is told it’s often implied that the wake-a-thon drove him mad and he was forced to leave radio as a result. The truth is that Tripp got caught up in the payola scandals of the era. It was greed, not lack of sleep, that did him in.

Other D.J.’s, noting how much interest Tripp had drummed up, set out to top him, and several of them succeeded. By 1964, the record had been pushed to 260 hours, or more than 10 days, when a teenager in San Diego named Randy Gardner decided that staying awake for longer than anyone in recorded history would make for a nifty science fair project. He’d read about wake-a-thons and, with typical teenage hubris, figured he could beat the record.

What’s amazing is that he actually did, staying awake for 264 hours.

Randy Gardner decided that staying awake for longer than anyone in recorded history would make for a nifty science fair project.

It began without any fanfare. The teen was trying to win a blue ribbon, after all, not become famous. He enlisted two buddies, one of whom was with him at all times, including when nature called, to make sure that he didn’t nod off even for a second. They listened to records, played basketball and wandered the suburban streets of San Diego in the wee hours while normal people were tucked snugly in their beds.

Word got out and, by the end, Gardner was besieged by reporters. He also attracted the attention of William Dement, perhaps the world’s foremost sleep researcher, who personally spent the last few days of the experiment with Gardner, driving him and his friends around in a rented convertible. In contrast to Tripp, Gardner didn’t so much as have a sip of tea, relying on willpower alone to keep his eyelids open. But, like the New York D.J., Gardner temporarily lost touch with reality. At one point, he saw a path leading to a quiet forest, even though he was indoors at the time. The white teenager also believed himself to be the black running back for the San Diego Chargers.

I had lunch with Randy Gardner recently. Turns out, he still lives in San Diego and, except for a mustache and some gray hair, looks nearly identical to the teenager who set a record for staying awake more than four decades ago. We talked about what it’s like to be known for something you did in high school, as if everything you’ve accomplished in the interim was of no consequence. It annoys him at times, but he remains proud of the feat. Curiously, it’s mostly foreign reporters who have contacted him for interviews over the years: Americans don’t seem particularly interested, but he’s big in Japan.

During our conversation, Gardner let slip that he had trouble sleeping the night before. This isn’t unusual for him. In the last few years he’s struggled with insomnia. “Every single night I try to go to sleep and I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” he tells me. He’s been up at three in the morning, slamming doors and literally screaming in frustration. I know how he feels. I’ve pounded the mattress with my fists and fought back tears. We bonded over our common agony.

Of course he recognizes the irony of the boy who set the record for not sleeping now, as an older man, being unable to fall asleep. “Maybe it’s karma,” he says, half-joking. “Like the universe saying ‘Oh, you don’t want to sleep? Well, there you go!’” I guess that’s possible, I tell him, but it doesn’t explain what’s wrong with the rest of us.

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published: April 21, 2010

Is there anything creepier than a big, beer-breathed celebrity athlete exposing himself in a night club and hitting on underage girls, all the while protected by an entourage of off-duty cops? Well, yes. It’s the big, corporate sponsor — Nike, in this case — that continues trying to sell product with the creep as their role model.

You have to go a long way to find anything as disgusting as a night on the town with Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, as described in a 572-page Georgia police report of a sexual assault accusation against him last month.

After hours of drinking and carousing, the six-foot-five-inch football player followed an intoxicated 20-year-old student into a club’s bathroom and forced her to have sex, the woman told police. When her friend appealed for help, she was ignored by the bodyguards, the report indicated.

Prosecutors said they would not file charges against the quarterback — in part because of sloppy police work by officers who fawned over the athlete — but they castigated his behavior. This was the second time in less than a year that Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault. Last year, a woman claimed in a civil suit that Roethlisberger raped her in a hotel room in Lake Tahoe, an allegation he denies. The Georgia report also mentioned a third woman who said a drunken Roethlisberger accosted her repeatedly on two occasions.

If this guy didn’t have a pair of Super Bowl Rings and a $102 million contract to entertain us on Sundays, most people would see him for what he is: a thug with a predatory sense of entitlement.

On Wednesday, the NFL suspended him for six games and ordered him to “comprehensive behavioral counseling.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has a done an admirable job of bringing the tawdry details to a troubled Steeler Nation, has editorialized about the “sting of betrayal” that fans feel, so much so that he may even be traded imminently. Even a local sponsor, the maker of Big Ben’s Beef Jerky, has dropped him, citing his recent behavior.

But Nike, the shoe-maker to the world, the biggest brand in the endorsement game, is standing by Roethlisberger — at least for the moment — just as they continue to back Tiger Woods after his serial infidelities.

For Nike, Roethlisberger has been used in commercials to sell the aptly named “Marauder” cleats. The company did not return my phone calls for comment, but in an e-mail earlier they said, “Ben continues to be part of the Nike roster of athletes.”

Really? Ben Roethlisberger, a man most parents would not let near their daughter, let alone their community center, is a fit representative for one of the premier American corporations.

What, exactly does it take for Nike to dump a jock? Dog-fighting will do it. After Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty to running a felony dog-fighting ring, Nike took action. “We consider any cruelty to animals inhumane and unacceptable,” the company said at the time.

But cruelty to women is O.K. I don’t know how else to read the company’s inconsistent stand. Here is a guy who treats women like garbage, yet a company that boasts of having humane corporate values uses him as their front man. Ditto Tiger Woods. Same with Kobe Bryant after a rape allegation, a case that was later dropped.

I’m sure Roethlisberger can live without his beef jerky contract or the praise of the hometown newspaper. But if you took away his swoosh, that would sting. Throughout the sporting world, and in many schools, the real pariah is the lone athlete not carrying Nike’s water.

Besides, what’s the point of having someone like Roethlisberger wearing a company logo in public? Do people really decide to buy shoes because a brute who spends his nights drunkenly pawing at women, and worse, lent his name to them?

Our culture puts a premium on athletic performance, and very little on off-field character. So it is. And “corporate ethics,” of course, is one of those oxymorons that should be explained to fresh-faced business students. Kids: in American capitalism, we reward Wall Street failure and Back Street sexual assault.

Perhaps a certain creepy cred does help move product. Sales of Nike’s golf line have remained consistent in the months since Tiger Woods was found to be a nightmare husband.

But I’ve come to expect more of Nike with regard to women. I’ve met women runners and soccer players who are at the top of their game, world-class athletes, who have been ignored by all but Nike. At the company headquarters in Oregon, Nike helps obscure female athletes train and find a community of equally motivated women.

That’s one message from Nike. The other is: It’s O.K. for a buffoon of a man to disrespect women, so long as he continues to throw a football well.