Untitled

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

Through August 30

MOMA

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

Bob Adelman
Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, 1963

Through August 11, 2010

Bronx Museum

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 2, 2010

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

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

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

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

Yet there was a downside to this success story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 30 – June 26, 2010

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

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

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

Stephen Cohen

Through May 10

The Kitchen

Rough Winds Trailer from Rough Winds on Vimeo.

LAXART

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

By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: April 27, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARISIANS

An Adventure History of Paris

By Graham Robb

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

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY Times Published: April 26, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By KAREN ROSENBERG
NY Times Published: April 26, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By JAMES COLLINS
NY Times Published: April 25, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHATHAM TOWERS, CHINATOWN. KELLY & GRUZEN (1965)

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

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

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

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

TRACEY TOWERS, BRONX. PAUL RUDOLPH (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

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

By BRIAN STELTER
NY Times Published: April 23, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By THOMAS BARTLETT
Published April 22, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published: April 21, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Neal of Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, N.C. announces the return of tomatoes to his menu

By JULIA MOSKIN
NY Times Published: April 20, 2010

TEN years ago, Matthew Beason’s duties as a restaurant manager here included driving to the airport to retrieve a weekly shipment of duck confit and pâté from New York.

“We couldn’t even buy anything like that around here,” said Mr. Beason, who went on to open Six Plates Wine Bar, now one of many ambitious restaurants around Durham. “Now, virtually every place in town makes its own.”

Of the rivalrous cities that make up the so-called Research Triangle — Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham — Durham 10 years ago was the unkempt sibling: scruffy and aging.

“There was no one on the street at night, just the smell of tobacco drying in the warehouses,” Mr. Beason said.

Now, a drive around town might yield the smell of clams from the coastal town of Snead’s Ferry, steaming in white wine, mustard and shallots at Piedmont restaurant; pungent spice and sweet fennel from the “lamby joe” sandwich at Six Plates; and seared mushrooms and fresh asparagus turned in a pan with spring garlic at Watts Grocery.

The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.

More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits.

“You can see the change, just driving from here to the coast,” two hours away, said Amy Tornquist, the chef and an owner of Watts Grocery, a restaurant near the Duke campus. Ms. Tornquist, 44, has lived in the area all her life. “You never saw sheep when I was young, you never saw cattle in the fields — it was all tobacco all the time,” she said. Ms. Tornquist’s restaurant isn’t blatantly farm to fork: it’s simply a given in Durham these days.

“One of our farmers said that at this point, it would make more sense for us to list the things on the menu that aren’t local,” said Drew Brown, a chef-owner of Piedmont, a restaurant a few steps from Durham’s farmer’s market and right next door to the city’s public herb garden.

Spring is just blowing into the Triangle, bringing strawberries, mushrooms and the first Sugar Snack carrots and small white turnips. “We’re raising things I never would have dreamed of,” said Michael Brinkley, a farmer whose family farm in nearby Creedmoor produced up to 60 acres of tobacco until about five years ago, when the Brinkleys shifted entirely to produce.

There are still plenty of good places for a barbecue plate, excellent French bistros like Vin Rouge and Rue Cler, and some white-tablecloth dining rooms, both traditional and modern.

But the most intriguing cooks here have a few things in common: an understanding of how to give a menu a sense of place; a true love of pork and greens in all their forms; and a lack of interest in linens and glassware. Watts Grocery, for example, looks like an upscale sports bar, but it tastes like a Southern-artisanal Union Square Cafe.

“In the old days, people would have to get out of here to really learn about food,” said Matt Neal, the owner of Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, near Chapel Hill, where he grew up.

These days, a chef here is made by learning all the ways to cook cornmeal and butcher hogs, not by taking a Grand Tour of Europe followed by hotel school in Switzerland.

Tanya Catolos, the pastry chef at the formal Washington Duke Inn in Durham, moonlights at the city’s farmer’s market, selling handmade “Pop’t-Arts” filled with Nutella or jam from a vintage Airstream trailer. “You can be very playful with food around here” she said. “People really get it now.” (She’ll be making local-rhubarb ones soon.)

The food at Neal’s Deli is resolutely everyday and American — like breakfast biscuits stuffed with egg and sausage — but the eggs are steamed tender with a touch of pepper and parsley, and the wide, crisp biscuits are mixed from high-fat local buttermilk and organic flour from a nearby mill that’s been held by the same family for nine generations. The sausage patty is from Cane Creek Farm in Alamance County, where Eliza MacLean, an owner of the farm and a former veterinarian, advises farmers across the state on the transition from tobacco to pork. Every bit of that care comes through in the flavor of the finished product, a stunning bargain at $3.25.

Mr. Neal prides himself on high-quality, low-brow food, like a house-made porchetta sandwich with spinach and pickled peppers, served with a bag of Zapp’s potato chips from Louisiana. “I honestly do not know how to make a soufflé,” said Mr. Neal, whose father, Bill Neal, was the founding chef of Crook’s Corner and La Residence in Chapel Hill and one of the most famous chefs in the South until his death in 1991.

Bill Neal, his son added hastily, certainly did know how to make a soufflé. “But soufflés are not what I want to cook,” he said.

What Mr. Neal and others like him do want to cook are full-flavored versions of the food they learned at their parents’ elbows, and in influential local kitchens like Crook’s Corner, Nana’s and Magnolia Grill, where many of them polished their craft. The tender cornmeal butter cakes at Watts Grocery are like a combination of a French financier and Southern spoon bread; at Six Plates, the slick-sounding sautéed crawfish on red pepper polenta with tomato broth is a take on shrimp and grits, the Carolina coastal classic.

Mr. Brinkley, the farmer, says that his family’s farm, and many others, might not have made it through the loss of the tobacco cash crop without the lucky coincidence of the rise in the local food movement. Now, chefs compete over his lady peas, pink-eyed peas and butternut squash — a relatively exotic vegetable here, he said, where the sweet potato was once the king of the winter table.

Then again, “We’re also working hours I never would have dreamed of,” he said, adding that raising such diverse crops and marketing them has more than doubled his workload. He makes weekly appearances at the Durham farmer’s market. Mr. Brown, of Piedmont, said that the farmers there are treated like rock stars, that dogs and babies abound and that hipsters mingle with hippies.

As Mr. Brinkley said, “It’s a lot different from dropping off your tobacco at the station and picking up your check.”

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
NY Times Published: April 20, 2010

How much water do you use every day?

Your household water meter only tells part of the story — what was directly used for washing, cooking and other tasks. But what about the water that was used to grow the food you ate for dinner? Or to manufacture the book you bought or the gasoline your car burned?

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have estimated this kind of direct and indirect water use — not for households, but for American industries. Their goal was to create a tool for better assessing the impact on water use of decisions made up and down the industrial supply chain, just as one might assess cost or carbon footprint.

Chris Hendrickson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering; Michael Blackhurst, a graduate student; and Jordi Sels i Vidal, a visiting researcher, used water data from the United States Geological Survey (from 2000) and applied an economic model to estimate direct and indirect use in paint manufacturing, fiber and yarn making, grain farming and about 420 other industrial sectors, big and small. Their findings are reported in Environmental Science and Technology.

Most of the direct water use, they report, is accounted for by the broad categories of power generation and agriculture. As for individual sectors, almost all use more water indirectly than directly. For example, in cane sugar refining, relatively little water is used at the mills. More than 95 percent is used indirectly, to grow the cane, generate electricity for the mills and in other parts of the supply chain.

“If you’re doing a lifecycle assessment, you want to make sure you include upstream activities that are water intensive,” Dr. Hendrickson said. “This tool should allow people to understand the implications of water use.”

May 8 – June 26, 2010

Mathew Marks

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 18, 2010

Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, “Goldman Sachs.”

Sure enough, last week the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Gucci-loafer guys at Goldman of engaging in what amounts to white-collar looting.

I’m using the term looting in the sense defined by the economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer in a 1993 paper titled “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” That paper, written in the aftermath of the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan years, argued that many of the losses in that crisis were the result of deliberate fraud.

Was the same true of the current financial crisis?

Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who both failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own. And for the most part, subprime lenders didn’t hold on to the loans they made. Instead, they sold off the loans to investors, in some cases surely knowing that the potential for future losses was greater than the people buying those loans (or securities backed by the loans) realized.

What we’re now seeing are accusations of a third form of fraud.

We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.

The obvious question is whether financial reform of the kind now being contemplated would have prevented some or all of the fraud that now seems to have flourished over the past decade. And the answer is yes.

For one thing, an independent consumer protection bureau could have helped limit predatory lending. Another provision in the proposed Senate bill, requiring that lenders retain 5 percent of the value of loans they make, would have limited the practice of making bad loans and quickly selling them off to unwary investors.

It’s less clear whether proposals for derivatives reform — which mainly involve requiring that financial instruments like credit default swaps be traded openly and transparently, like ordinary stocks and bonds — would have prevented the alleged abuses by Goldman (although they probably would have prevented the insurer A.I.G. from running wild and requiring a federal bailout). What we can say is that the final draft of financial reform had better include language that would prevent this kind of looting — in particular, it should block the creation of “synthetic C.D.O.’s,” cocktails of credit default swaps that let investors take big bets on assets without actually owning them.

The main moral you should draw from the charges against Goldman, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong — and not just because no such promise would be credible.

For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.