Environmental hazards may cause lasting harm to children.

by Jerome Groopman
The New Yorker
May 31, 2010

How worried should we be about everyday chemicals?

Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, may be among the world’s most vilified chemicals. The compound, used in manufacturing polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, is found in plastic goggles, face shields, and helmets; baby bottles; protective coatings inside metal food containers; and composites and sealants used in dentistry. As animal studies began to show links between the chemical and breast and prostate cancer, early-onset puberty, and polycystic ovary syndrome, consumer groups pressured manufacturers of reusable plastic containers, like Nalgene, to remove BPA from their products. Warnings went out to avoid microwaving plasticware or putting it in the dishwasher. On May 6th, the President’s Cancer Panel issued a report deploring the rising number of carcinogens released into the environment—including BPA—and calling for much more stringent regulation and wider awareness of their dangers. The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.” Dr. LaSalle Leffall, Jr., the chairman of the panel, said in a statement, “The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm.”

The narrative seems to follow a familiar path. In the nineteen-sixties, several animal studies suggested that cyclamates, a class of artificial sweetener, caused chromosomal abnormalities and cancer. Some three-quarters of Americans were estimated to consume the sweeteners. In 1969, cyclamates were banned. Later research found that there was little evidence that these substances caused cancer in humans. In the nineteen-eighties, studies suggesting a cancer risk from Alar, a chemical used to regulate the color and ripening of apples, caused a minor panic among parents and a media uproar. In that case, the cancer risk was shown to have been overstated, but still present, and the substance remains classified a “probable human carcinogen.” Lead, too, was for years thought to be safe in small doses, until further study demonstrated that, particularly for children, even slight exposure could result in intellectual delays, hearing loss, and hyperactivity.

There is an inherent uncertainty in determining which substances are safe and which are not, and when their risks outweigh their benefits. Toxicity studies are difficult, because BPA and other, similar chemicals can have multiple effects on the body. Moreover, we are exposed to scores of them in a lifetime, and their effects in combination or in sequence might be very different from what they would be in isolation. In traditional toxicology, a single chemical is tested in one cell or animal to assess its harmful effects. In studying environmental hazards, one needs to test mixtures of many chemicals, across ranges of doses, at different points in time, and at different ages, from conception to childhood to old age. Given so many variables, it is difficult to determine how harmful these chemicals might be, or if they are harmful at all, or what anyone can do to avoid their effects. In the case of BPA and other chemicals of its sort, though, their increasing prevalence and a number of human studies that associate them with developmental issues have become too worrisome to ignore. The challenge now is to decide a course of action before there is any certainty about what is truly dangerous and what is not.

In 1980, Frederica Perera, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and a highly regarded investigator of the effects of environmental hazards, was studying how certain chemicals in cigarette smoke might cause cancer. Dissatisfied with the research at the time, which measured toxic substances outside the body and then made inferences about their effects, she began using sophisticated molecular techniques to measure compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH—which are plentiful in tobacco smoke—in the body. Perera found that after entering the lungs the compounds pass into the bloodstream and damage blood cells, binding to their DNA. She hoped to compare the damaged blood cells from smokers with healthy cells, and decided to seek out those she imagined would be uncontaminated by foreign substances. “I thought that the most perfect pristine blood would come from the umbilical cord of a newborn,” Perera said.

But when she analyzed her samples Perera discovered PAH attached to some of the DNA in blood taken from umbilical cords, too. “I was pretty shocked,” she said. “I realized that we did not know very much about what was happening during this early stage of development.”

Perera’s finding that chemicals like PAH, which can also be a component of air pollution, are passed from mother to child during pregnancy has now been replicated for more than two hundred compounds. These include PCBs, chemical coolants that were banned in the United States in 1979 but have persisted in the food chain; BPA and phthalates, used to make plastics more pliable, which leach out of containers and mix with their contents; pesticides used on crops and on insects in the home; and some flame retardants, which are often applied to upholstery, curtains, and other household items.

Fetuses and newborns lack functional enzymes in the liver and other organs that break down such chemicals, and animal studies in the past several decades have shown that these chemicals can disrupt hormones and brain development. Some scientists believe that they may promote chronic diseases seen in adulthood such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, and cancer. There is some evidence that they may have what are called epigenetic effects as well, altering gene expression in cells, including those which give rise to eggs and sperm, and allowing toxic effects to be passed on to future generations.

In 1998, Perera initiated a program at Columbia to investigate short- and long-term effects of environmental chemicals on children, and she now oversees one of the largest and longest-standing studies of a cohort of mothers and newborns in the United States. More than seven hundred mother-child pairs have been recruited from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx; Perera is also studying pregnant women in Kraków, Poland, and two cities in China, and, since September 11, 2001, a group of three hundred and twenty-nine mothers and newborns from the downtown hospitals near the World Trade Center. In all, some two thousand mother-child pairs have been studied, many for at least a decade.

This March, I visited Columbia’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, where Perera is the director, and met with a woman I’ll call Renee Martin in an office overlooking the George Washington Bridge. Martin was born in Harlem, attended a community college in Queens, and then moved to 155th Street and Broadway, where she is raising her five children. She entered the study eleven years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child. “I was asthmatic growing up,” Martin said. “And I was concerned about triggers of asthma in the environment. So when they asked me to be in the study I thought it would be a good way to get information that might tell me something about my own health and the health of my child.” She showed me a small black backpack containing a metal box with a long plastic tube. During her pregnancy, Martin would drape the tube over her shoulder, close to her chin, and a vacuum inside the device would suck in a sample of air. A filter trapped particles and vapors of ambient chemicals, like pesticides, phthalates, and PAH. “I walked around pregnant with this hose next to my mouth, but, living in New York, people hardly notice,” she said with a laugh.

The Columbia team also developed a comprehensive profile of Martin’s potential proximity to chemicals, including an environmental map that charted her apartment’s distance from gas stations, dry cleaners, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and major roadways. They took urine samples and, at delivery, blood samples from her and from the umbilical cord, along with samples from the placenta. Nearly a hundred per cent of the mothers in the study were found to have BPA and phthalates in their urine. Urine and blood samples are taken as the babies grow older, as well as samples of their exhaled breath. “We have a treasure trove of biological material,” Perera said. The researchers track the children’s weight and sexual development, and assess I.Q., visual spatial ability, attention, memory, and behavior. Brain imaging, using an M.R.I., is performed on selected children.

Martin was still breast-feeding her two-year-old daughter. “I bottle-fed my first child,” she told me. “But when you learn what can come out of plastic bottles and all the benefits of breast-feeding—my other children were nursed.” The Columbia group regularly convenes the families to hear results and discuss ways to reduce their exposure to potential environmental hazards. At one meeting, Martin found out that some widely used pesticides could result in impaired learning and behavior. “I told the landlord to stop spraying in the apartment” to combat a roach infestation, she said. On the advice of the Columbia researchers, Martin asked him to seal the cracks in the walls that were allowing cockroaches to enter, and Martin’s family meticulously swept up crumbs. This approach has now become the New York City Department of Health’s official recommendation for pest control. “You don’t need to be out in the country and have compost,” Martin said. “This has made me into an urban environmentalist.”

In 2001, using data from animal studies, the E.P.A. banned the sale of the pesticide chlorpyrifos (sold under the name Dursban) for residential and indoor use. Many agricultural uses are still permitted, and farming communities continue to be exposed to the insecticide. Residues on food may affect those who live in urban areas as well. In 2004, the Columbia group published results in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives showing that significant exposure during the prenatal period to chlorpyrifos was associated with an average hundred-and-fifty-gram reduction in birth weight—about the same effect as if the mother had smoked all through pregnancy. Those most highly exposed to the insecticide were twice as likely to be born below the tenth percentile in size for gestational age. The researchers found that children born after 2001 had much lower exposure levels—indicating that the ban was largely effective.

For those children who were exposed to the pesticide in the womb, the effects have seemed to persist. The children with the greatest exposure were starting to fall off the developmental curve and displayed signs of attention-deficit problems by the time they were three. By seven, they showed significant deficits in working memory, which is strongly tied to problem-solving, I.Q., and reading comprehension. Another study, published this month in Pediatrics, using a random cross-section of American children, showed that an elevated level of a particular pesticide residue nearly doubled the likelihood that a child would have A.D.H.D.

“The size of this deficit is educationally meaningful in the early preschool years,” Virginia Rauh, the leader of Columbia’s research, said. “Such a decline can push whole groups of children into the developmentally delayed category.”

First used in Germany, in the nineteen-thirties, bisphenol A has a chemical structure similar to that of estrogen, but was considered too weak to be developed into a contraceptive pill. Recent animal studies have shown that, even at very low levels, BPA can cause changes that may lead to cancer in the prostate gland and in breast tissue. It is also linked to disruption in brain chemistry and, in female rodents, accelerated puberty. Japanese scientists found that high levels of BPA were associated with polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of impaired fertility.

Phthalates are also ubiquitous in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal-care products. They may have effects on older children and adults as well as on neonates. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found an association of high levels of certain phthalates with lower sperm concentrations and impaired sperm motility; young girls in Puerto Rico who had developed breasts prematurely were more likely to have high levels of phthalates in their blood. Immigrant children in Belgium who exhibited precocious puberty also showed greater exposure to the pesticide DDT, which has estrogenlike effects and has been banned in the U.S., but is still used in Africa to help control malaria.

Long-term studies have provided the most compelling evidence that chemicals once considered safe may cause health problems in communities with consistent exposure over many years. Researchers from SUNY Albany, including Lawrence Schell, a biomedical anthropologist, have worked over the past two decades with Native Americans on the Mohawk reservation that borders the St. Lawrence River, once a major shipping thoroughfare, just east of Massena, New York. General Motors built a foundry nearby that made automobile parts, Alcoa had two manufacturing plants for aluminum, and the area was contaminated with PCBs, which were used in the three plants. Several Mohawk girls experienced signs of early puberty, which coincided with higher levels of PCBs in their blood.

The Albany researchers also observed that increased levels of PCBs correlated with altered levels of thyroid hormone and lower long-term memory functioning. Similar results have been found in an area of Slovakia near heavy industry. “Folks have complained about reproductive problems,” Schell said, of the residents of the Mohawk reservation. “They talked a lot about rheumatoid arthritis, about lupus, about polycystic ovary syndrome. And, you know, you hear these things and you wonder how much of it is just a heightened sensitivity, but, when you see elevated antibodies that are often a sign of autoimmune disease of one kind or another, it could be the beginning of discovering a biological basis for their complaints about these diseases.”

Beginning in 2003, Antonia Calafat, a chemist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Russ Hauser, of the Harvard School of Public Health, set out to evaluate the exposure of premature infants to certain environmental contaminants. The researchers hypothesized that infants treated in the most intensive ways—intravenous feedings and delivery of oxygen by respirators—would receive the most exposure, since chemicals like phthalates and BPA can leach from plastic tubing. They studied forty-one infants from two Boston-area intensive-care units for BPA. Calafat told me, “We saw ten times the amounts of BPA in the neonates that we are seeing in the general population.” In several children, the levels of BPA were more than a hundred times as high as in healthy Americans.

Calafat, who came to the United States from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, developed highly accurate tests to detect BPA, phthalates, and other compounds in body fluids like blood and urine. This advance, she explained, “means that you are not simply doing an exposure assessment based on the concentration of the chemicals in the food or in the air or in the soil. You are actually measuring the concentrations in the body.” With this technology, she can study each individual as if he or she were a single ecosystem. Her studies at the Centers for Disease Control show that 92.6 per cent of Americans aged six and older have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies; the levels in children between six and eleven years of age are twice as high as those in older Americans.

Critics such as Elizabeth Whelan, of the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer-education group in New York (Whelan says that about a third of its two-million-dollar annual budget comes from industry), think that the case against BPA and phthalates has more in common with those against cyclamates and Alar than with the one against lead. “The fears are irrational,” she said. “People fear what they can’t see and don’t understand. Some environmental activists emotionally manipulate parents, making them feel that the ones they love the most, their children, are in danger.” Whelan argues that the public should focus on proven health issues, such as the dangers of cigarettes and obesity and the need for bicycle helmets and other protective equipment. As for chemicals in plastics, Whelan says, “What the country needs is a national psychiatrist.”

To illustrate what Whelan says is a misguided focus on manufactured chemicals, her organization has constructed a dinner menu “filled with natural foods, and you can find a carcinogen or an endocrine-disrupting chemical in every course”—for instance, tofu and soy products are filled with plant-based estrogens that could affect hormonal balance. “Just because you find something in the urine doesn’t mean that it’s a hazard,” Whelan says. “Our understanding of risks and benefits is distorted. BPA helps protect food products from spoiling and causing botulism. Flame retardants save lives, so we don’t burn up on our couch.”

Several studies also contradict the conclusion that these chemicals have deleterious effects. The journal Toxicological Sciences recently featured a study from the E.P.A. scientist Earl Gray, a widely respected researcher, which indicated that BPA had no effect on puberty in rats. A study of military conscripts in Sweden found no connection between phthalates and depressed sperm counts, and a recent survey of newborns in New York failed to turn up an increase in a male genital malformation which might be expected if the effects from BPA seen in rodents were comparable to effects in humans. Richard Sharpe, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and an internationally recognized pioneer on the effects of chemicals in the environment on endocrine disruption, recently wrote in Toxicological Sciences, “Fundamental, repetitive work on bisphenol A has sucked in tens, probably hundreds of millions of dollars from government bodies and industry, which, at a time when research money is thin on the ground, looks increasingly like an investment with a nil return.”

With epidemiological studies, like those at Columbia, in which scientists observe people as they live, without a control group, the real-life nature of the project can make it difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation. Unknown factors in the environment or unreported habits might escape the notice of the researchers. Moreover, even sophisticated statistical analysis can sometimes yield specious results.

Dr. John Ioannides, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina, in Greece, has noted that four of the six most frequently cited epidemiological studies published in leading medical journals between 1990 and 2003 were later refuted. Demonstrating the malleability of data, Peter Austin, a medical statistician at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, in Toronto, has retrospectively analyzed medical records of the more than ten million residents of Ontario. He showed that Sagittarians are thirty-eight per cent more likely to fracture an arm than people of other astrological signs, and Leos are fifteen per cent more likely to suffer a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. (Pisces were more prone to heart failure.)

To help strengthen epidemiological analysis, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, a British medical statistician, set out certain criteria in 1965 that indicate cause and effect. Researchers must be sure that exposure to the suspected cause precedes the development of a disease; that there is a high degree of correlation between the two; that findings are replicated in different studies in various settings; that a biological explanation exists that makes the association plausible; and that increased exposure makes development of the disease more likely.

When epidemiological studies fulfill most of these criteria, they can be convincing, as when studies demonstrated a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. But, in an evolving field, dealing with chemicals that are part of daily life, the lack of long-term clinical data has made firm conclusions elusive. John Vandenbergh, a biologist who found that exposure to certain chemicals like BPA could accelerate the onset of puberty in mice, served on an expert panel that advised the National Toxicology Program, a part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, on the risks of exposure to BPA. In 2007, the panel reviewed more than three hundred scientific publications and concluded that “there is some concern” about exposure of fetuses and young children to BPA, given the research from Vandenbergh’s laboratory and others.

Vandenbergh is cognizant of the difficulty of extrapolating data from rodents and lower animals to humans. “Why can’t we just figure this out?” he said. “Well, one of the problems is that we would have to take half of the kids in the kindergarten and give them BPA and the other half not. Or expose half of the pregnant women to BPA in the doctor’s office and the other half not. And then we have to wait thirty to fifty years to see what effects this has on their development, and whether they get more prostate cancer or breast cancer. You have to wait at least until puberty to see if there is an effect on sexual maturation. Ethically, you are not going to go and feed people something if you think it harmful, and, second, you have this incredible time span to deal with.”

The inadequacy of the current regulatory system contributes greatly to the atmosphere of uncertainty. The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, does not require manufacturers to show that chemicals used in their products are safe before they go on the market; rather, the responsibility is placed on federal agencies, as well as on researchers in universities outside the government. The burden of proof is so onerous that bans on toxic chemicals can take years to achieve, and the government is often constrained from sharing information on specific products with the public, because manufacturers claim that such information is confidential. Several agencies split responsibility for oversight, with little coördination: the Food and Drug Administration supervises cosmetics, food, and medications, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates pesticides, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees children’s toys and other merchandise. The European Union, in contrast, now requires manufacturers to prove that their compounds are safe before they are sold.

According to the E.P.A., some eighty-two thousand chemicals are registered for use in commerce in the United States, with about seven hundred new chemicals introduced each year. In 1998, the E.P.A. found that, among chemicals produced in quantities of more than a million pounds per year, only seven per cent had undergone the full slate of basic toxicity studies. There is no requirement to label most consumer products for their chemical contents, and no consistent regulation throughout the country. Although the F.D.A. initially concluded that BPA was safe, some states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, either have banned it or are considering a ban. (In January, the F.D.A. announced that it would conduct further testing.)

There has been some movement toward stricter controls: in July, 2008, Congress passed the Product Safety Improvement Act, which banned six phthalates from children’s toys. But so far removal from other products has been voluntary. The President’s Cancer Panel report advised people to reduce exposure with strategies that echo some of what the mothers in Frederica Perera’s study have learned: choose products made with minimal toxic substances, avoid using plastic containers to store liquids, and choose produce grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and meat free of antibiotics and hormones.

Mike Walls, the vice-president of regulatory affairs at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association that represents manufacturers of industrial chemicals, agrees that new laws are needed to regulate such chemicals. “Science has advanced since 1976, when the last legislation was enacted,” he said. But Walls notes that some eight hundred thousand people are employed in the companies that the A.C.C. represents, and that their products are found in ninety-six per cent of all American manufactured goods. “The United States is the clear leader in chemistry,” Walls said. “We have three times as many new applications for novel compounds as any other country in the world. We want to make good societal decisions but avoid regulations that will increase the burden on industry and stifle innovation.”

Academic researchers have found that the enormous financial stakes—the production of BPA is a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry—have prompted extra scrutiny of their results. In 2007, according to a recent article in Nature, a majority of non-industry-supported studies initially deemed sound by the National Toxicology Program on the safety of BPA were dismissed as unsuitable after a representative of the A.C.C. drafted a memo critiquing their methods; experimental protocols often differ from one university lab to another. Researchers are now attempting to create a single standard protocol, and a bill introduced by Representative Louise Slaughter, of New York, would fund a centralized research facility at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Other legislation aims to completely overhaul the 1976 law. “It’s clear that the current system doesn’t work at all,” Ben Dunham, a staffer in the office of Senator Frank Lautenberg, of New Jersey, who crafted the bill now before the Senate, told me. Henry Waxman, of California, and Bobby Rush, of Illinois, have released a companion discussion draft in the House. Lautenberg’s bill seeks to allow the E.P.A. to act quickly on chemicals that it considers dangerous; to give new power to the E.P.A. to establish safety criteria in chemical compounds; to create a database identifying chemicals in industrial products; and to set specific deadlines for approving or banning compounds. The bill also seeks to limit the number of animals used for research. (Millions of animals are estimated to be required to perform the testing mandated under the E.U. law.) How much data would be needed to either restrict use of a chemical or mandate an outright ban is still unclear. Lautenberg’s bill resisted the call of environmental groups to ban certain compounds like BPA immediately.

Dr. Gina Solomon, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Lautenberg bill is “an excellent first step,” but noted several “gaps” in the bill: “There is what people call lack of a hammer, meaning no meaningful penalty for missing a deadline in evaluating a chemical if E.P.A. gets bogged down, and we know from history that it can be easily bogged down.” The language setting a standard for safety is too vague, she added. “You could imagine industry driving a truck through this loophole.”

Linda Birnbaum, the director of the N.I.E.H.S. and its National Toxicology Program, helps assess chemicals for the federal government and, if Slaughter’s bill passes, could become responsible for much of the research surrounding these safety issues. Birnbaum’s branch of the National Institutes of Health is working with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the E.P.A. to test thousands of compounds, singly and in combination, to assess their potential toxicity. Part of the difficulty, she points out, is that “what is normal for me may not be normal for you. We all have our own balance of different hormones in our different systems.” When it comes to development and achievement, incremental differences—such as the drop of five to ten I.Q. points, or a lower birth weight—are significant. “We’re all past the point of looking for missing arms and legs,” Birnbaum said.

“I know of very little science where you will ever get hundred-per-cent certainty,” Birnbaum says. “Science is constantly evolving, constantly learning new things, and at times decisions have to be made in the presence of a lot of information, but maybe not certainty. The problem is we don’t always want to wait ten or twelve or twenty years to identify something that may be a problem.”

Perera, who is keenly aware of the potential pitfalls of epidemiological research, told me that her team employs rigorous statistical methods to avoid falsely suggesting that one chemical or another is responsible for any given result. And she objects to the characterization of her research as fear-mongering. “Our findings in children increasingly show real deleterious effects that can occur short-term and potentially for the rest of the child’s life,” Perera said. In January, the Columbia group published data from the mothers and infants it studied following September 11th. Cord-blood samples saved at the time of birth had been analyzed for the presence of flame retardants. Each year, the children were assessed for mental and motor development. As a point of reference, low-level lead poisoning results in an average loss of four to five I.Q. points. Those children in Columbia’s group with the highest levels of flame retardant in their blood at birth had, by the age of two, I.Q. scores nearly seven points lower than normal.

How do we go forward? Flame retardants surely serve a purpose, just as BPA and phthalates have made for better and stronger plastics. Still, while the evidence of these chemicals’ health consequences may be far from conclusive, safer alternatives need to be sought. More important, policymakers must create a better system for making decisions about when to ban these types of substances, and must invest in the research that will inform those decisions. There’s no guarantee that we’ll always be right, but protecting those at the greatest risk shouldn’t be deferred. ♦

at Sam Moyer’s Woodshop
June 4, 2010 6-9pm
533 S. Los Angeles St, 6th Floor, L.A. CA 90013

Dental Scene from “Syndromes and a Century” (2006)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”.

NY Times

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Nicola Marzovilla, the owner of I Trulli, emphasizes the importance of the dinner table. From left, his daughters, Julia and Olivia, and his wife, Astrid.

By SUSAN DOMINUS
NY Times Published: May 24, 2010

Nicola Marzovilla runs a business, so when a client at his Gramercy Park restaurant, I Trulli, asks for a children’s menu, he does not say what he really thinks. What he says is, “I’m sure we can find something on the menu your child will like.” What he thinks is, “Children’s menus are the death of civilization.”

Parents have so come to expect the safe fare (and cheaper prices) of a children’s menu that Fornino, a pizza restaurant in Park Slope, nearly faced a boycott when it opened earlier this month without one. But Mr. Marzovilla has never had one and swears he never will. Easy for him to say: He’s not in nurture-happy Park Slope, and maybe expectations are different at a restaurant where a plate of handmade pasta costs $24. But even if he were running a pizza joint, he would never offer children what he considers a “dumbed down” menu on the side.

Mr. Marzovilla welcomes young children at his restaurant, even discounts their meals on Sunday evenings, and is not above serving a simple appetizer portion of pasta to please little ones. But he has strong opinions about food, and about the messages parents convey to their offspring through what they eat. Children’s menus aim too low, he argues — they’re a parenting crutch.

“The table is very important,” Mr. Marzovilla explained as we sat around one at his restaurant early Sunday evening with our five collective children. “It’s about nutrition, it’s about family; you go right down the line. And the children’s menu is about the opposite — it’s about making it quick, making it easy, and moving on.”

Mr. Marzovilla, 50, moved with his family to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx from the Puglia region of Italy when he was 11. Even if Mr. Marzovilla was not a foodie by profession, it would be important to him that his children try, say, octopus: “It’s my culture.”

He does not make it easy for his children to refuse new foods of any kind, a policy that has yielded a 14-year-old daughter who devours all manner of raw fish, a 17-year-old son who prefers his fish whole, and an 11-year-old daughter who slurps down snails in Chinatown with such relish that the waiters sometimes line up to stare.

Try it. No. Just try it. No. Just try it! No! — such is the dialogue that accompanies many a family meal, usually ending with the parent in defeat. How is it that Mr. Marzovilla encouraged them so successfully?

Everyone at the table had a good laugh at that one. “Encouraged: that’s a good word,” said Mr. Marzovilla.

“Try ‘forced,’ ” said Julia, the 14-year-old.

“There wasn’t a time we didn’t end up trying it,” said Domenico, the 17-year-old. “Sometimes it took longer than others.”

“You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend,” Mr. Marzovilla noted. “I have a duty to mold and teach.”

Olivia, the 11-year-old, was looking at the menu. “How does fried rabbit taste?” she asked.

“Very good,” advised Domenico.

Mr. Marzovilla works most evenings, but the children sit down every night at their home in SoHo with his wife, Astrid, for a meal she cooked, usually no later than 6 p.m. It’s such a given that the children do not bother trying to negotiate their way out of it.

“Some parents, it’s important to them that their kids do sports,” Mr. Marzovilla said. “To me, it doesn’t mean a thing. To have this experience with their family is more important.”

The table was not just a place to eat for a young Mr. Marzovilla — it was a place to grow. At mealtime, he literally had a seat at the table, along with the adults and his older cousins. Two of his three siblings now live nearby, and their families often join forces in Chinatown or at their mother’s home in Murray Hill, where smaller children see older ones keeping it together for the course of the meal and eating whatever is put in front of them with an open mind.

It happened at our table Sunday at I Trulli. The restaurant experience of my twin boys, who will turn 4 this summer, extends to exactly one local diner, where, yes, they have been known to eat chicken fingers and fries. At a worshipful distance across the round table, they kept their eyes trained on Julia, Olivia and Domenico. Like them, my children devoured orecchiette with rabbit ragout. When offered a clam off the shell, one asked that I remove some brown stuff at the base — and then ate it. No, he didn’t like it. But he tried it.

“If you don’t ask your children to try things, how will they ever know what they’re capable of?” Mr. Marzovilla said. “And isn’t the same true of us?”

Catherine Deneuve, B & Bewitch
1988
Dye bleach photogram from magazine page 13 x 10.75 Inches

From the Series Are You Rea
1966
Black and white photogram
11 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches

Group Show at Cherry and Martin through July 3

Group Show at Stephen Cohen through June 26

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 23, 2010

So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.

Much reporting on opposition to the Obama administration portrays it as a sort of populist uprising. Yet the antics of the socialism-and-death-panels crowd are only part of the story of anti-Obamaism, and arguably the less important part. If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations.

How can you do that? Follow the money — donations by corporate political action committees.

Look, for example, at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. And oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.

These are extraordinary numbers given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?

One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.

Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry.

Nor are taxes the whole story.

Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration’s mildness on regulatory issues — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn’t break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.

From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.

But won’t the grass-roots rebel at being used? Don’t count on it. Last week Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling who is now the Republican nominee for senator from Kentucky, declared that the president’s criticism of BP over the disastrous oil spill in the gulf is “un-American,” that “sometimes accidents happen.” The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.

So where does that leave the president and his party? Mr. Obama wanted to transcend partisanship. Instead, however, he finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Roosevelt turned corporate opposition into a badge of honor: “I welcome their hatred,” he declared. It’s time for President Obama to find his inner F.D.R., and do the same.

NASA/Boeing Phantom Works

A rendering of the X-37B, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle that began its secret debut mission last month.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: May 21, 2010

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.
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NASA/Boeing Phantom Works

A rendering of the X-37B, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle that began its secret debut mission last month.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.

In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.

The secretive effort seeks “no offensive capabilities,” Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. “The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.”

The secretive flight, civilian specialists said in recent weeks, probably centers at least partly on testing powerful sensors for a new generation of spy satellites.

Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”

In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky.

“This looks very, very good,” Mr. Molczan said of the identification. “We got it.”

In moving from as far as 40 degrees north latitude to 40 degrees south latitude, the military spacecraft passes over many global trouble spots, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.

Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.

Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up — standard for a space shuttle — and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

A fair amount is known publicly about the features of the X-37B because it began life 11 years ago as a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the nation’s space shuttles. The Air Force took over the program in 2006, during the Bush administration, and hung a cloak of secrecy over its budget and missions.

The X-37B has a wingspan of just over 14 feet and is 29 feet long. It looks something like a space shuttle, although about a quarter of the length. The craft’s payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites. The X-37B can stay aloft for as long as nine months because it deploys solar panels for power, unlike the space shuttle.

Brian Weedon, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a private group based in Superior, Colo., said the duration of the X-37B’s initial flight would probably depend on “how well it performs in orbit.”

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the “development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems.”

Mr. Payton, a former astronaut and senior NASA official, has acknowledged that the spacecraft is ultimately meant to give the United States new advantages on terrestrial battlefields, but denies that it represents any kind of space weaponization.

On April 20, two days before the mission’s start, he told reporters that the spacecraft, if successful, would “push us in the vector of being able to react to war-fighter needs more quickly.” And, while offering no specifics, he added that its response to an “urgent war-fighter need” might even pre-empt the launching of other missions on expendable rockets.

But he emphasized the spacecraft’s advantages as an orbiting laboratory, saying it could expose new technology to space for a long time and then “bring it back” for inspection.

Mission control for the X-37B, Mr. Payton said, is located at the Air Force Space Command’s Third Space Experimentation Squadron, based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. He added that the Air Force was building another of the winged spaceships and hopes to launch it next year.

The current mission began on April 22, when an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida fired the 5.5-ton spacecraft into orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, said the secrecy surrounding the X-37B even extended to the whereabouts of the rocket’s upper stage, which was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. In one of his regular Internet postings, he said that appeared to be the first time the United States had put a space vehicle into a solar orbit that is “officially secret.”

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said many aerospace experts questioned whether the mission benefits of the X-37B outweighed its costs and argued that expendable rockets could achieve similar results.

“Sure it’s nice to have,” he said. “But is it really worth the expense?”

Mr. Weedon of the Secure World Foundation argued that the X-37B could prove valuable for quick reconnaissance missions. He said ground crews might rapidly reconfigure its payload — either optical or radar — and have it shot into space on short notice for battlefield surveillance, letting the sensors zoom in on specific conflicts beyond the reach of the nation’s fleet of regular spy satellites.

But he questioned the current mission’s secrecy.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with weapons,” Mr. Weedon said. “But because of the classification, and the refusal to talk, the door opens to all that. So, from a U.S. perspective, that’s counterproductive.”

He also questioned whether the Pentagon’s secrecy about the spacecraft’s orbit had any practical consequences other than keeping the public in the dark.

“If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

David Brown

Emily Green for The Los Angeles Times
May 21, 2010

Nowhere in the West is sustainable gardening a harder sell than in Southern California. Public gardens preach conservation, but their grounds are surrounded by turf. The message to visitors: Eastern-style, highly irrigated gardening is not just OK here, it’s the way it’s done.

And so, it is beyond refreshing, more like happy dance exciting, that Descanso Gardens has begun what will be a long-range overhaul in which water conservation is the central theme. The messaging will start with the landscaping.

A 237-page review, grandly titled a “Long Range Conceptual Plan,” outlines what will one day be a sweeping overhaul with a paean to water. “The structure of the garden plants, native and introduced, is informed by water. The Gardens’ cultural heritage and current concerns center on the need for and use of water. Therefore this Long Range Conceptual Plan was informed – and shaped – by water.”

There will be a lot of fundraising to realize the plan drawn up by the Seattle-based Portico Group, the architecture firm whose design credits include the celebrated sustainability interpretive center, the Las Vegas Springs Preserve. But finally, after five years work poring over conservation possibilities, Descanso has a mission involving truly progressive goals, which include irrigation of its 150 acres with locally harvested water, capturing storm water with bioswales, generating enough solar power to take Descanso facilities off the electricity grid and composting all its own green waste.
Descanso_20100506_1061

Rather than waiting for megabucks to drop into garden coffers in the toughest economy since the Depression, Descanso Executive Director David Brown is doing what can be done most affordably and to the greatest effect now. “We’re taking out lawn as fast as we can,” he said leaning against an oak on Descanso Drive. Two acres of sod that used to run along its entrance has already gone. The days of the eucalyptus and redwood trees that now border the parkway are numbered. Coming in their stead will be a largely native garden that will include toyon, coffee berries, sycamores, ironwood and sugar berries.

This only sounds like a landscape plan designed by a berry-loving Cedar Waxwing; the parkway planting scheme comes from Megan Fairleigh of the San Diego firm Go Native Landscape Design Studio. While using mostly natives, the new entrance garden will also employ Mediterranean plants such as olives and even the Eastern Redbud, whose cultivar ‘forest pansy’ Fairleigh says can survive on relatively little water while providing a startling purple counterpoint to the white bark of the native sycamores.

Some of the parkway replanting should be complete by June. This change alone, Brown estimates, should save 600,000 gallons of water a year. By contrast, the long-range plans anticipate water savings in the millions of gallons. Under Portico’s conceptual plan, the garden’s current annual use of almost 25 million gallons could be cut to roughly 19 million. These savings become much more meaningful when you consider that by better managing native water, the garden could eliminate its current draw of 9 million gallons a year of water expensively treated to potable standards, but then squandered on irrigation.

For Brown, the plan is to nurture the big dream while small dreams are realized on a daily basis. Change is already palpable. Beyond the parkway, just past the entrance, a former lawn is now a food garden crowded with parents and foraging children. Gratuitous turf is also steadily coming out in the rose garden.

But some of the most important changes, such as the transfer of the garden’s camellia collection out from under the oaks, will require big bucks and emotional acceptance. The problems here extend beyond dollar signs and digits. Descanso is famous for its mixed oak-camellia forests, an arrangement beloved by many, but one that garden staff have known for years is slowly killing the oaks, with marked attrition after windstorms. The problem: The irrigation needed by the exotic flowering shrubs rots the roots of the native trees.

“The tension between the camellias and the oaks perfectly captures the challenges faced by Descanso,” said Brown.

Until Brown arrived at Descanso five years ago and began looking for solutions, the arrangement pitted camellia lovers against native plant advocates. Now there is a cure on the horizon. Look at the contrasting schematics of the current planting and the future ideal in the Long Range Conceptual Plan (see both after the jump), and the camellias do appear to be migrating. Brown is committed to saving both plant communities, but to change the way that they are celebrated, placed and irrigated so that visitors who emulate the garden’s landscaping at home won’t be cultivating disaster.

“Think of the interpretive opportunities,” he said. “Descanso could be an object lesson in progress.”

via

12 JUN – 16 JUL 2010

MYSTERIES OF THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE
A LECTURE BY JEANETTE ZWINGENBERGER, 18 JUN, 19H

John Tevis

By Dean Irvine, for CNN

(CNN) — ExxonMobil is teaming up with the biotech research company run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter to produce algae-based biofuels.

The world’s second largest company announced on Tuesday that it will invest at least $300 million in biotechnology research with Venter’s Synthetic Genomics Inc to help develop biofuels made from algae, as it looks to diversify its energy portfolio.

“We believe that biofuel produced by algae could be a meaningful part of the solution in the future if our efforts result in an economically viable, low net-carbon emission transportation fuel,” said Dr. Emil Jacobs, vice president of research and development at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering in a press statement.

The total amount of investment over an unspecified period of years could total $600 million. ExxonMobil is looking toward algae-derived biofuel as part of its “ongoing efforts to reduce emissions in our operations and by consumers of our products, through both efficiency improvements and technology breakthroughs,” said Michael Dolan, senior vice president of the company.

The biofuel industry is currently facing a shift from first-generation biofuels to so-called advanced biofuels as evidence mounts that corn-based ethanol and soybean biodiesel are not as ecologically, socially or economically sustainable as many first thought.

Many analysts blamed a large part of the food price hikes around the world in 2008 on the increase in crops and arable land being diverted to produce ethanol for biofuels.

“The real challenge to creating a viable next-generation biofuel is the ability to produce it in large volumes which will require significant advances in both science and engineering,” said Venter, CEO of SGI in a press statement.

He hailed the agreement with ExxonMobil as bringing together “complementary capabilities and expertise … that could lead to the large scale production of biofuel from algae.”

Algae have been touted as a better organic material for producing biofuel by many researchers and entrepreneurs. It does not take up any arable land and can be grown in controlled conditions; at a basic level algae only needs water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and some nutrients to grow. Algae also photosynthesize to double its size in about a day.

Nevertheless, critics have questioned whether enough biomass can be produced on an industrial scale to meet future fuel demands.

The ExxonMobil announcement “eyebrow raising,” said Gillian Madill of Friends of the Earth, who voiced skepticism about the company’s commitment to non-polluting sources of energy.

However, it is part of a recognized trend for large oil companies to invest in synthetic biology for the development of biofuels; in 2007 BP invested $500 million over 10 years in biofuel research and other energy companies including Shell have followed suit.

“Will [ExxonMobil] spend the same amount of money advertising this investment as the investment itself? Are they investing in any truly ‘green’ technology such as wind or solar? The jury is out,” Madill told CNN.

“Biofuels, if anything, are a short-term way to transition us from using fossil fuels to more long-term, truly sustainable sources of energy like wind and solar power.

“Many of these oil companies are making steep investments in synthetic biology because they can literally own the very microorganisms that aim to produce fuel because of the current patentability of DNA. If synthetic biology proves successful, ‘Big Oil’ will not only own the fuel itself, but own the very life form that produces it,” Madill said

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

For nearly 25 years, Leonard Knight has spent his days, and many of his nights, painting pastoral designs and biblical quotations on a three-story mound of adobe in the Imperial Valley desert he calls his Salvation Mountain. What was supposed to be a one-week trip to paint a small religious monument has become a lifelong endeavor.

Salvation Mountain Audio Slideshow by Don Bartletti via LA Times

Illustration by Rodrigo Corra

By BUZZ BISSINGER
NY Times Published: May 19, 2010

WHEN I first met LeBron James in 2008, I was in awe. He was 23 at the time and I was 53, yet it seemed as if the ages were reversed. He had been a basketball legend for years. As we embarked on a book project together, he had an affable poise that contrasted with my own babbling efforts to build rapport. I ascribed to him a worldly wisdom.

I did not see him as the young man he was. I put him on a precarious pedestal, as if he had already reached perfection athletically and emotionally, when of course he hadn’t. Initially at least, I did exactly what the metropolitan areas of Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, have done: looked on him as a god, without fault or foible.

Which is why I believe LeBron James has to declare free agency and leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. Not simply for the pursuit of a championship ring, but for his own emotional and professional growth.

Although I have long predicted that he will go to the New York Knicks, the more I mull it, the more I understand how difficult it will be for him to leave Ohio. For all that his life has been a tremendous heaping of can-you-believe-he-did-that, personally James has been anything but adventuresome. I can’t think of an athlete so firmly attached to his roots, almost as if he is terrified to leave home.

As I got to know LeBron James and the people from his childhood who helped form him, what struck me was how his life had been spent within very narrow borders. He not only has lived in Akron since birth, but he has also played either there or in nearby Cleveland all his life — Amateur Athletic Union ball as a pre-teenager, high-school ball, pro ball (he never went to college). Given the difficulties of his youth — poor, no father and a mother who was 16 when he was born — it may be obvious why security has been paramount.

When I was with him, he liked going to a bagel shop in Akron where he knew he wouldn’t be hassled because everybody there had known him for years. He liked strolling into the gym of his old high school, St. Vincent-St. Mary, and talking to his former coach and mentor, Dru Joyce. It was almost as if he was still a student there. He is guarded about whom he lets in, and virtually all of his friends and professional confidants are childhood and high-school friends.

LeBron James’s relationship to his community is profound: he built a palatial house in the Akron area and just finished his seventh season with the Cavaliers. But I believe those roots have become golden shackles. He is too loved, and therefore too coddled and too easily forgiven.

His play in the fifth game of the N.B.A. playoff series this month against the Boston Celtics, a 120-88 trouncing, was bizarre and inexplicable. In missing 11 of the 14 shots he took, he simply looked as if he had given up, astounding not only for James but for any professional athlete competing at the level of the playoffs. It was inexcusable, whatever the circumstance.

In a place like New York, the tabloids would have screamed “LeBomb James!” In Cleveland, there were a few boos, but they amounted to nothing compared to the desperation of the fans to keep him for next season and beyond. In such an atmosphere, human nature inevitably takes over: you stop constantly pushing yourself because there is no real incentive, particularly when you have so many good nights on the basketball court and keep your fans satiated.

James is of course a great player. But he is not the greatest player in the history of the game by any stretch if you define greatness, as you should, by winning it all. He has never shown anything close to the killer mentality and step-it-up of the players he is most compared to, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. He is not in the same category as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Or Kobe Bryant.

It may be that James’s innate affability (there are few things better in all of sports than watching him interact with children) will prevent him from ever developing that refuse-to-lose attitude. But James basically has not been challenged as an athlete since he was a sophomore in high school and had a coach named Keith Dambrot. Now the head coach at Akron University, Dambrot was tough, brilliant, relentless and did more than any other coach to make James into the player he is today.

That was roughly a decade ago. Since then, James’s mind-boggling talent has intimidated coaches into submission. Like me, they have been in awe. They have been afraid to coach him, even though Dambrot has called him the most coachable player he has ever had, and doubts that he has changed very much.

The rumors and speculation are rife, and nobody, including me, really knows anything. Will he stay in Cleveland if Dwyane Wade, the Miami Heat superstar, joins the Cavaliers as a free agent? Will he go to Chicago if the University of Kentucky coach John Calipari takes over the Bulls?

I believe LeBron needs to be in a place that is bigger and more dynamic than even he is, and the only possible place is New York (though as a Philadelphian it pains me to say that). He needs to have the right supporting cast, which the Knicks could provide given the space they have freed up under the league’s salary cap. He needs a coach who will get in his face and has the credibility to back it up. He needs the personal growth.

The hysteria over his coming would be incredible at first, just as it was when Reggie Jackson and Alex Rodriguez joined the Yankees. If he played well, the hysteria would continue. He would own the town. But if the team struggled, he would hear about it, just as Jackson and Rodriguez heard about it. If he ever turned in a performance like the one he had in Game 5 against the Celtics, he would never be allowed to forget it — which, in the long run, would only help his game further develop and blossom.

Yes, he is a god in Akron and Cleveland. But sometimes worship, as genuine as it is, can create a false sense of invincibility. The result: all he and his teammates can do now is watch the Celtics advance in the playoffs.

LeBron, take the chance. Just go and never look back. In the greatest city in the world, you will never regret it. It is time to leave home.

Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights” and the co-author, with LeBron James, of “Shooting Stars.”

Photo illustration by Tony Cenicola

By KIM SEVERSON
NY Times Published: May 18, 2010

EVEN preschool teachers unwind with a round of drinks now and then. But in professional kitchens, where the hours are long, the pace intense and the goal is to deliver pleasure, the need to blow off steam has long involved substances that are mind-altering and, often enough, illegal.

“Everybody smokes dope after work,” said Anthony Bourdain, the author and chef who made his name chronicling drugs and debauchery in professional kitchens. “People you would never imagine.”

So while it should not come as a surprise that some chefs get high, it’s less often noted that drug use in the kitchen can change the experience in the dining room.

In the 1980s, cocaine helped fuel the frenetic open kitchens and boisterous dining rooms that were the incubators of celebrity chef culture. Today, a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested.

Call it haute stoner cuisine.

“There has been an entire strata of restaurants created by chefs to feed other chefs,” Mr. Bourdain said. “These are restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.”

As examples of places serving that kind of food, he offered some of David Chang’s restaurants; Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, with its poutine of foie gras; Crif Dogs in the East Village, which makes a deep-fried cheese steak hot dog; and, in fact, the entire genre of mutant-hot-dog stands.

To be sure, substance abuse and addiction are concerns in the restaurant industry, and any restaurant where an employee or owner is caught with illegal drugs could lose its liquor license.

It is also hard to imagine any ambitious kitchen could function safely during dinner rush if the staff were impaired.

And despite what Mr. Bourdain said, a great many cooks get along just fine with no chemical assistance at all.

Nevertheless, a handful of chefs are unabashedly open about marijuana’s role in their creative and recreational lives and its effect on their restaurants.

The chefs and restaurateurs Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo said most of their projects — going to Sicily to import olive oil to sell at their two Frankies Spuntino restaurants; the concept for their Brooklyn restaurant Prime Meats; even a new restaurant planned for Portland, Ore. — were conceived with the creative help of marijuana.

Roy Choi, who owns the fleet of Kogi Korean taco trucks in Los Angeles, likens the culinary culture that has grown up around marijuana to the one that rose up around the Grateful Dead years ago. Then, people who attended the band’s shows got high and shared live music. Now, people get high and share delicious, inventive and accessible food.

“It’s good music, maybe a little weed and really good times and great food that makes you feel good,” he said.

“We’re not like Cypress Hill,” Mr. Choi said, referring to a rap group known for being outspoken advocates of pot use. “It’s not like a campaign to make food out of hemp, but it is a culture. It’s a vibe we have.”

Mr. Choi, who recently opened his first restaurant, Chego!, said he uses marijuana to keep his creativity up and to squeeze in quick breaks in the midst of 17-hour workdays.

“In the middle of a busy day, I’ll smoke,” he said. “Then I’ll go to the record store and hang out and clear my mind or pop into a matinee movie and then come back to the streets.”

Getting in touch with the haute stoner food aesthetic, though, does not necessarily mean looking at life through a haze of smoke.

The cereal milk soft-serve ice cream at Momofuku Milk Bar in Manhattan is a perfect example. A dessert based on the slightly sweet flavor of milk at the bottom of a cereal bowl particularly appeals to someone who knows both high-quality food and the cannabis-induced pleasure of a munchie session built from a late-night run to the 7-Eleven.

Christina Tosi, the pastry chef of David Chang’s empire, said she was stone-cold sober when she invented it. She was in the basement of Mr. Chang’s Ssam Bar late at night, trying to save a failed experiment in fried apple pies.

“I promise you there was no marijuana involved,” she said. “It would have made the stress of it more bearable if it was.”

Mr. Chang said drugs will always be part of kitchen culture, but that marijuana alone did not explain the changes in the culinary landscape that his restaurants represent.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “But it certainly wasn’t calculated. We wanted to serve great food at an affordable price. That’s it.”

Patty Scull, who lives in the East Village, recently spent part of an evening at Momofuku Milk Bar spooning up cinnamon-bun cereal milk soft-serve with chocolate fudge topping.

“It’s so random that it’s something you would eat if you were totally baked,” she said. (For the record, she said she wasn’t.)

Ms. Tosi defines haute stoner cuisine as the kind of food that tastes good in the altered state marijuana brings.

“You like to eat stuff with texture and that is really deep in flavors,” said Ms. Tosi, who acknowledged the stoner appeal of her creations. “You want the ultimate sensory experience.”

Even for people who don’t use illegal drugs, the deep flavors and sensory appeal of dishes like the breakfast burrito pizza at Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, have an undeniable appeal. They plug directly into the reptilian portion of our brains, the side that wants what it wants and wants it now — and also a big bowl of it, please.

“I always call it the Big Mac effect,” said the chef Vinny Dotolo, who owns Animal in Los Angeles with Jon Shook. Mr. Shook’s version of the French-Canadian dish poutine, built from Cheddar cheese and French fries covered in oxtail gravy, might be considered for the haute stoner food hall of fame.

The McDonald’s sandwich is familiar and offers a range of tastes, Mr. Dotolo said. There are savory elements from the cheese and beef, sweetness from the sauce, tartness from the pickle and crunch from the lettuce, all surrounded by soft white bread.

“It’s that thing where you’re trying to hit all the senses,” he said.

If you are still skeptical, check out a Web-based show called “Munchies” (www.vbs.tv/watch/munchies), which follows chefs as they party and eat late into the night, then head back to their kitchens to cook. Billows of smoke and doobie references abound. Although the show can be cagey about who is doing the smoking, featured chefs have included the men from Animal, Mr. Chang and the Franks — Mr. Falcinelli and Mr. Castronovo.

Joanne Weir, a San Francisco cooking teacher and television personality who went to Woodstock at age 15, said that there is a difference between this period in stoner cuisine and the cooking of the hippie movement. “It’s people’s pursuit of the best ingredients,” she said.

Chefs who smoke say that includes the marijuana itself.

“The quality of marijuana you’re getting, just like the quality of booze you’re getting and the quality of food you’re getting, is better,” Mr. Falcinelli said.

Although marijuana has long been a part of restaurant culture, its current prominence results, he said, from “a triple coincidence.”

More states are legalizing marijuana or offering medical marijuana plans, so there is more and better pot in circulation, Mr. Falcinelli and other chefs said. At the same time, diners are wild about high-end snacking: witness the rise of food carts and the elevation of humble dishes like pizza, hamburgers and pork buns.

The chefs of the haute stoner cuisine movement are just as obsessive about their marijuana as they are about olive oil, wine or coffee.

“It’s like getting the best cheese,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “I have like four or five different types of marijuana in my refrigerator right now.”

The sensibility extends to the latest wave of coffee culture. Coffee geeks are as infatuated with their Pacas varietal beans from Central America as pot users are with their sticky sinsemilla from Humboldt County in California.

Duane Sorenson, the founder of the coffee roaster Stumptown, said that fat buds of marijuana often end up in the tip jar at his shops.

“It goes hand in hand with a cup of coffee,” he said. “It’s called wake and bake. Grab a cup of Joe and get on with it.”

Yet this is not the ’70s stoner culture of a thousand basement rec rooms, with chefs sprawled on the floor saying, “Dude, where’s my entree?” Some of the haute stoners claim that marijuana gives them an intense focus.

“We smoke quote-unquote the working man’s weed,” Mr. Falcinelli said. Mr. Castronovo added: “I’m not spacey at all. It gives me energy.”

Much of the food of the haute stoner movement is well crafted and well executed by chefs with traditional culinary training who are trying to create something both countercultural and sophisticated, said Gail Simmons, special project director of Food & Wine magazine.

“You need to have some thought and some skill to make these dishes,” she said. “It’s not just, ‘I’m twirling around at a Dead concert and I stumbled upon this cool dish.’ ”

Mr. Bourdain said Mr. Chang is a case in point.

“His sensibility is that he makes high-end stoner food in one respect but I feel sorry for anyone who shows up stoned for their shift at Momofuku,” he said. “He’d kill them.”

Mr. Chang’s establishments, Mr. Bourdain said, typify the stripping away of pretense that defines the haute stoner restaurant. Tables are bare, plates and napkins might be luxe but plain. Food comes flying from the kitchen when it’s done, courses be damned.

“If you’re stoned in a restaurant, you don’t want to deal with six layers of tableware,” Mr. Bourdain said.

Diners like the democratization of food that is part of haute stoner cuisine, as well. Rick Darge, 27, who lives in an area he calls “Beverly Hills adjacent,” seeks out Mr. Choi’s roaming taco trucks about once a week, using Twitter or the Web.

The search is part of the appeal, as is finding a piece of curb to sit while he eats. He feels more involved in the experience.

“We don’t have to go into an establishment, or be a certain way inside,” he said. “It’s more organic than that.”

Haute stoner cuisine is a way to reach a generation that was raised on Sprite and Funyuns and who never thought fancy restaurant food was for them, Mr. Choi said.

“We’ve shattered who is getting good food now,” he said. “It’s this silent message to everyone, to the every-day dude. It’s like come here, here’s a cuisine for you that will fill you up from the inside and make you feel whole and good. Weed is just a portal.”

Ron Siegel, who runs the Michelin-starred dining room at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, said he’s grown past his partying days. But even he is having a little fun with haute stoner cuisine.

To serve slow-cooked quail eggs and caviar, he places them atop plastic film that tightly covers a white porcelain serving bowl. Then he fills the vessel with smoke from grated Japanese cedar packed into the bowl of a fan-driven bong he buys in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The smoke escapes when the diner lifts a small spoon covering a hole in the plastic.

He calls it the Lincecum, after Tim Lincecum, the star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants who was arrested last fall after police found marijuana and a pipe in his car.

Like other chefs who have been around long enough to see a few trends come and go, Mr. Siegel thinks stoner food is really another version of comfort food. After particularly high-flying cultural periods or national tragedies, people retreat to dishes that are soothing and familiar, he said.

Or it could be that after an era of intensely designed or pretentious food, a retreat to simplicity follows, said Ken Friedman, the man behind the Spotted Pig and a self-described “well-known stoner.”

He doesn’t characterize the food at the Pig or at the Breslin as stoner food as much as simple food. But he is a businessman who recognizes a good trend when he sees one. He designed his bar and snack emporium, the Rusty Knot, to have a ’70s feel, with comfortable couches, black-light posters and snacks that are easily consumed with one hand.

“The Rusty Knot is the most stoner of all my places,” he said. “It’s kind of like the basement we all had when we grew up where we first smoked pot.”

Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

By DENNIS OVERBYE
NY Times Published: May 17, 2010

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.

It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.

Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.

Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”

Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”

Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Luisa Lambri
Untitled (Casino #02), 2003
Laserchrome print mounted on plexi
42 1/2 x 51 1/5 inches
(107.95 x 130.05 cm)

Through Jun 19, 2010

Luhring Augustine

Four students held a sit-in Monday in the Tucson office of Senator John McCain. They were, from left, Tania Unzueta, Lizbeth Mateo and Yahaira Carrillo, of Mexico, and Mohammad Abdollahi of Iran. Raúl Alcaraz, a legal resident from Mexico, joined.

Photograph By Joshua Lott

By JULIA PRESTON
NY Times Published: May 17, 2010

In an escalation of protest tactics, five immigrants dressed in caps and gowns held a sit-in on Monday at the Tucson offices of Senator John McCain, calling on him to sponsor legislation to open a path to legal status for young illegal immigrants.

Four of the protesters, including three who are in the country illegally, were arrested Monday evening on misdemeanor trespassing charges. The three were expected to face deportation proceedings.

It was the first time students have directly risked deportation in an effort to prompt Congress to take up a bill that would benefit illegal immigrant youths.

Separately on Monday, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Phoenix by a coalition of civil rights, labor and religious groups challenging the new Arizona law that allows the police to detain suspected illegal immigrants as unconstitutional, saying it would lead to racial profiling.

Though it was the fifth suit challenging the law, it was widely believed to have the best chance of being heard by the courts given the groups’ experience and the nature of the complaint.

Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said of the protesters, “The individuals have a right to peacefully protest in the senator’s office,” and added that Mr. McCain “understands the students’ frustrations.”

But she said: “Elections have consequences, and they should focus their efforts on the president and the Democrats that control the agenda in Congress.”

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has in years past repeatedly sponsored a bill that would offer legalization for illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, known to its supporters as the Dream Act. But this year he has not. Mr. McCain is facing a primary challenge from J.D Hayworth, a talk show host who has taken a tough stand on illegal immigrants.

The students protesting in Mr. McCain’s office said they wanted to increase pressure on Congress to pass the Dream Act this year, even if lawmakers do not take up a broader overhaul of the immigration system. The student bill is currently part of a Democratic proposal for an overhaul, largely written by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York.

“I’ve been organizing for years, and a lot of my friends have become frustrated and lost hope,” said one of the students, Lizbeth Mateo, 25. “We don’t have any more time to be waiting. I really believe this year we can make it happen.”

Ms. Mateo, who came to the United States when she was 14, said she paid full tuition to earn a degree from California State University, Northridge, the first member of her family to graduate from college. She said her plans to attend law school had failed because she lacked legal status.

Ms. Mateo was arrested, along with Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Yahaira Carrillo, 25, of Kansas City, Mo. All three are illegal immigrants.

Also arrested was Raúl Alcaraz, 27, an immigrant from Mexico who is a legal resident and a counselor at a Tucson high school.

The protesters walked into Mr. McCain’s office just before noon and sat in the lobby.

Tania Unzueta, 26, who is from Los Angeles, joined the sit-in, but she said the group decided she should leave the protest in order to avoid arrest.

Mr. Abdollahi said he could not return to Iran, where he was born, because he is gay and feared persecution there.

Margo Cowan, a lawyer representing the students, said that the Tucson police said they would advise federal immigration authorities of the arrests, and that she expected the students would be put in immigration detention.

Illegal immigrant students have become increasingly public in their protests in recent months, as the prospects for an immigration overhaul faded in Washington. Four immigrant students walked from Miami to Washington, arriving in late April. So far, immigration authorities have not moved to detain student protesters.

Lawmakers are divided over whether to take up the Dream Act as separate legislation. Andy Fisher, a spokesman for Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a Republican who is a lead sponsor of the bill, said that the senator did not support any effort to advance a comprehensive immigration overhaul this year, but that he believed the Dream Act could be “doable” separately.

An aide to Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat who is the act’s other lead sponsor, said he continued to see it as part of an overhaul.

Lawyers for the groups that filed the suit over the Arizona immigration law Monday took aim at a chief argument of its supporters: that it largely parallels existing federal statutes. The lawyers said the Arizona law went further because federal agents are not required to check the immigration status of people they stop or arrest, as the state law requires.

Untitled, 2005
c-print
18 x 12,7 cm

Through June 26

Casey Kaplan

Michiko Doihara Tamaki, left, gets help from her daughter, Jeanne Tamaki, as she prepares for a special ceremony to receive an honorary degree.

Photograph By Irfan Khan

The 48 people recognized in a special ceremony in Westwood had been students when they were shipped to camps during World War II.

By Patrick McDonnell
Los Angeles Times
May 16, 2010

A lifetime ago, the Yamaguchi family labored long and hard in a chop-suey shop in downtown Los Angeles to send their son, Kei, to university, hoping it would give him the chance for a better life.

World War II interrupted the immigrant family’s dreams, but on Saturday, Kei Yamaguchi finally received his degree from UCLA — almost seven decades after he left.

“It feels great,” said the 91-year-old Yamaguchi, who is still active in the family termite-control business.

He was among 48 Japanese Americans who were awarded honorary degrees, some posthumously, in a special ceremony at the Westwood campus.

All were from families forcibly relocated to camps after Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066. In one of the darker chapters of U.S. history, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were interned.

Among those shipped to camps were about 700 University of California students from four campuses, including UCLA. Some ended up earning degrees at other universities; others never returned to college.

Last year, the UC Board of Regents voted to suspend a three-decade ban on awarding honorary degrees in order to recognize the former scholars. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger later signed legislation directing the UC system and other post-secondary institutions to confer honorary degrees upon those obliged to abandon their studies during the war.

Some of Saturday’s honorees, including Yamaguchi, were able to attend and donned robes, caps, flower leis and ribbons crafted by current students. Children, grandchildren and other relatives stood in for those who had died or were unable to attend.

A few were in wheelchairs. Many walked slowly, using canes and leaning on loved ones.

But all exuded pride as UCLA Chancellor Gene Block awarded them diplomas during an upbeat ceremony at Schoenberg Hall. Cheers and thunderous applause erupted as each recipient’s name was read aloud.

“It’s been a long time coming. I never thought it would happen,” said honorary graduate Toshio Matsumoto, 87, a retired electrical engineer from Sacramento.

He traced a life arc not uncommon among this group, from UCLA to the camps to a resumption of studies in the Midwest to a stint in the Army and a successful career in private industry. He recalled how his father was forced to sell his grocery store in downtown L.A. for a paltry $500 before the family was whisked away.

“It was very traumatic,” said Matsumoto, who, like others, displayed no rancor.

Yuriko Ito Takenaka, 86, voiced hope that the group’s collective experience would resonate with a younger generation for whom an injustice like forced internment may seem hard to fathom.

“People nowadays don’t think about civil rights,” said Takenaka, who was a freshman at UCLA when her family was interned and who later completed her nursing studies at Stanford University. “They take it all for granted. This is a way to remind people what happened.”

Fumio Robert Naka, 86, who was a UCLA student when he was sent to the Manzanar internment camp in the Owens Valley, said the experience taught a lesson in how humans can persevere when confronted with events “beyond our control.”

Naka, who travelled from his home in Massachusetts and delivered the honoree address, eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard and became an acclaimed electrical engineer. He worked on radar technology for the U.S. government, much of it top secret, and recalled how his former boss once said to him: “You’ve gone from being a distrusted American to one of the most trusted Americans.”

There were also bittersweet moments for the loved ones of those who have died.

“This feels wonderful, but sad at the same time,” said Kerry Cababa, whose late mother, Masa Fujioka, was among those honored. “My mother would have loved to have been here. She was always a big UCLA booster.”

Accounts closed because of failure to explain fully who shares access to users’ personal details.

By: Rhodri Marsden
The Independent UK
Saturday, 15 May 2010

A friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked him, back in 2004, after the 19-year-old had casually mentioned in an online conversation that 4,000 people had uploaded their personal information to his fledgling website: “How did you manage that?” He typed back: “They just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’,” then indiscreetly described them as “dumbfucks”.

This week’s reporting of that conversation, brushed off by Facebook but not denied, comes at an awkward time for the social networking site, whose 400 million members have made it the second most popular online destination behind Google.

Its privacy policies, inextricably coupled with it urging that we share our information with the world, have regularly hit the headlines, but in the past fortnight the privacy debate has developed into what some excitable commentators are calling a “firestorm of anger”.

Prominent technology bloggers have publicly deleted their accounts, and an EU data protection body has issued a strongly worded statement criticising the website. Anyone busy using Facebook probably will not have noticed, and that is essentially the problem.

The biggest charge levelled against it is that users simply are not fully aware of changes that are regularly made about who can see our information, which search engines can catalogue that information, and which companies can advertise products to us based upon it. At the end of last year, certain categories of data belonging to over-18s were made visible to “everyone” (Facebook and non-Facebook users) by default.

This was presented in a benign, socially inclusive way, but it did not take long for concerned users to urgently forward instructions to their friends explaining how to revert these changes. In addition, more widespread use of Facebook Connect (a system where we can permit external websites to link to our Facebook account to improve the “user experience”) has furrowed many brows, particularly when we see pictures of friends unexpectedly popping up next to gossip columns or cricket scores.

But the recently introduced “Instant Personalisation” service has pushed things too near the edge. Facebook describes it as “magical”, but the wider consensus is “creepy”: three websites (namely docs.com, pandora.com and yelp.com) now know that you are a Facebook user and welcome you as such on your first visit, unless you have specifically turned the option off within Facebook.

But making decisions and taking action over these privacy issues isn’t easy. Facebook’s commitment to providing “granular” privacy settings for each type of information results in a fiendishly complex system. About 50 settings are spread across several pages, with important and alarming-sounding sections such as “what your friends can share about you” buried within a submenu of a submenu.

Each external website you approve with Facebook Connect provides another potential information leak and yet another screen of privacy options, and the privacy policy governing all this runs to some 5,830 words.

People are choosing to close their accounts (another seven-step process that, ironically, does not actually delete your information from Facebook’s servers.) Signups to the site have also reportedly slowed, albeit to a colossal 20 million per month.

But for many, Facebook has become indispensable. It is a one-stop address book; it is a diary of upcoming events, from gigs to birthdays to political rallies; it is a place to chat with friends when you are having an evening in, and it strengthens bonds between people who might have become estranged through laziness or forgetfulness.

Facebook could certainly be accused of tapping into a narcissistic streak that compels us to publicly share information to make us seem more important than we actually are, it is also a powerful friendship tool. Without it, many of us would feel bereft, not technologically, but socially. That’s why we are there, and why we stay there.

What most users say about privacy is, “Well, who cares?” Social networking is such a fast-developing medium that the consequences of our information being disseminated are not really understood. In fact, other than the appearance of adverts for barbecue sets appearing on the same page as our stated love of picnics, it is barely noticed. News stories of people losing their jobs because of drunken photos appearing online are seen as rare exceptions that happen to others, and if you asked people if they really wanted to lose control of their online persona, you would not blame them if they said, “I don’t know. What does that even mean?” And few of us would be able to give them an answer that did not sound unneccesarily paranoid.

But even prominent Facebook supporters are voicing concern, not least because Facebook’s response to the outcry has been muted. They are used to complaints about cosmetic changes to the website, but the impossibility of keeping nearly half a billion people happy means that, understandably, they ignore these. They are used to the retroactive whining of those whose voluntary uploads to Facebook find their way into the public domain via indiscreet friends; understandably, they ignore that, too.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president for public policy, has apologised, but only for the confusion surrounding the changes, and not the changes themselves, which have been described in that statement from the EU as a possible breach of data protection law.

This could give Zuckerberg a far bigger headache than a clutch of critical blogs, but he cannot say that he did not see it coming. After all, he was the one who apparently expressed such surprise six years ago at our willingness to give him all our information free.