At his heroin supplier’s request, Frank Ma hired people for a hit in Toronto in 1994, but they killed the wrong men.

NY Times Published: April 16, 2010
By ALAN FEUER

IT was 1994 — the Year of the Dog — and Frank Ma was in a quandary.

Mr. Ma, a 40-year-old crime boss, had just arranged the murder of his longtime heroin supplier, who, on his orders, had been gunned down in a Los Angeles parking lot. He had recently found a new supplier: Golo Keung, a member of the Big Circle Boys, one of Hong Kong’s largest criminal triads.

The quandary was this, according to court records: Mr. Keung, in classic gangster fashion, had been asking for a favor. He believed his partner in Toronto had been cheating him. He wanted the partner dead.

Mr. Ma, who had arrived in the United States a decade before from China, had pondered this request for several days, and in early May, witnesses said later, he summoned his lieutenants to his doorman building in Rego Park, Queens. Before talking shop, the half-dozen men played cards: Pick Two, one of the boss’s favorite games. Mr. Ma loved gambling, federal agents say: mah-jongg, casinos, almost any sports event. Wiretaps would later catch him wagering thousands on a basketball game he did not even seem to understand: he picked teams not by standings or statistics, but according to the color of their uniforms.

As the cards were dealt that day, Mr. Ma made an announcement. He was going to take the job for Mr. Keung. There was no way of knowing that the decision would result in two botched murders, an international investigation spanning 16 years, and his own arrest and prosecution. Its effects would ripple from central Queens to Canada to Northern California and back to Manhattan, where, only two months ago, Mr. Ma was sentenced to life in prison in what the authorities describe as the downfall of the last of New York’s Chinese gangsters.

That day around the card table in Rego Park, though, all of this was safely in the future. Mr. Ma asked an underling to secure two weapons for the job. For the hit itself, he planned to use a man from California.

That man, Ah Wah, was good. In fact, as one of Mr. Ma’s associates would later testify, he was Frank Ma’s “most helpful killer.”

Mr. Wah had once killed two men in a graveyard, federal agents say, forcing them to kneel in front of a headstone before putting bullets in their brains. His partner was a man named Luyen Nguyen; people called Mr. Nguyen “Psycho.”

Mr. Wah was from Vietnam and had pledged allegiance in the early 1990s to Mr. Ma, whom he referred to as his “dai lo,” or elder brother, according to the authorities. Mr. Wah’s associates included Paul Cai, another Vietnamese man, and William Nagatsuka, a felon from Japan. Together, they made quite a crew. According to courtroom testimony, the four immigrants killed, robbed brothels, broke into computer stores, stole cars, defrauded banks, illegally cloned cellphones and took people’s welfare checks.

Not long after Mr. Ma’s card game, court papers say, Mr. Wah invited Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka to his home in Monterey, Calif. Mr. Nagatsuka later testified that Mr. Wah said that Mr. Ma was looking for some “fresh faces” for a hit. Mr. Wah had already gone to Toronto to scout the location: the Seafood Alliance Corporation, a wholesale fish seller. He asked Mr. Nagatsuka to prepare supplies: ski masks, gloves, walkie-talkies. Mr. Nagatsuka’s roommate, referred to in the court file only as Simone, bought the walkie-talkies at a Costco in Alhambra, Calif. The four of them would split $30,000 for the job.

Days later, Mr. Wah, Mr. Nguyen, Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka flew to New York. Mr. Ma’s top lieutenant, Bing Yi Chen, met them at Kennedy Airport, court papers say, and, after they had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, took them to the boss’s home. There, they met two women, referred to in court papers as Christina and Salina, who, as Mr. Nagatsuka later said, would serve as their “tourist cover in Canada.” Expense money — $2,000 in a paper clip — was handed out.

They left Queens that night in a minivan and, hours later, checked into a small motel near Niagara Falls. The following day, July 19, they surveilled Seafood Alliance, a large, nondescript storefront in an industrial park, checking for cameras and security guards. They sent Christina and Salina shopping and promptly stole a Honda as a getaway car. They met two of Mr. Ma’s Canadian associates at a Baskin-Robbins to pick up two pistols. Back at the motel, court papers say, they cleaned the guns with WD-40 and discussed the next day’s plan: fake a robbery, tie up the victims, shoot them.

•

The men who became America’s first Chinese gangsters arrived here in the mid-1800s, mostly settling in San Francisco, where many worked for prospectors during the Gold Rush, or as laborers on the rapidly expanding transcontinental railroad. Faced with harsh conditions and anti-immigrant riots, they quickly formed social groups, called tongs, that offered protection from a hostile culture alongside basic services like credit unions.

For decades, the tongs, which also dabbled in gambling and prostitution, were mainly Cantonese, but in 1965, with the passage of a new federal immigration act, the scope and nature of Chinese immigration changed. One result was the arrival of a large number of alienated youths from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of them were put to work by the tongs as muscle at clubhouses, gambling dens and brothels in California and New York.

It is impossible to know precisely how many men were involved in Chinese organized crime over the decades, experts say. But in just two years, 1990 and 1991, at the height of the gangsters’ power, federal agents in New York alone made 130 arrests, confiscated 200 pounds of heroin and seized $25 million in assets, including $15 million in cash, as well as homes, boats, apartment buildings, jewelry stores, even the Golden Palace restaurant, one of Chinatown’s biggest, which was used to launder money.

This was the world that Frank Ma eventually inherited after slipping into the country illegally in the 1980s, court papers say. Born in China as Sui Min Ma, he started his career in the Boston rackets, moved to San Francisco and, by the early 1990s, federal agents say, settled in New York. By that point, Manhattan’s Chinatown was owned by two main tongs, each one connected with a youth gang. The On Leong tong dominated Mott Street and was allied with the violent Ghost Shadows. The Hip Sing tong controlled Pell Street and ran the Flying Dragons, whose boss, Johnny Eng, had moved into the heroin trade when the Italian Mafia’s role decreased.

(Mr. Ma, now in a federal prison in Brooklyn, declined through his lawyer, Don Buchwald, to be interviewed.)

The government does not believe that Mr. Ma was ever formally associated with a tong, but he would have known the major players — like Clifford Wong, leader of the Tung On tong, or Paul Lai, president of the Tsung Tsin Association, who once served on an advisory panel for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and even attended the wedding of the governor’s daughter. (Both men were eventually convicted on racketeering charges.)

Mr. Ma was instead a member of the 14K triad, federal agents say, a Hong Kong group founded more than 60 years ago by 14 leaders of the Kuomintang nationalist party. Based in Queens, he oversaw gambling parlors, a luxury car-theft ring, extortion rackets and an immigrant smuggling operation. By his own admission, though, his most profitable business was always heroin — and that, of course, was why he had sent his killers to Toronto.

•

In the morning, their getaway car was gone.

Perhaps someone had stolen it. The men, at any rate, had a backup plan. They had stolen license plates from another car, according to court papers, and they put these on the minivan they had driven from New York. They dropped the women at a park and drove past Seafood Alliance. In the afternoon, when the coast was clear, Mr. Wah pulled the van into a parking spot. Mr. Cai and Mr. Nguyen walked toward the door. It was locked, so Mr. Nguyen fired a few shots, shattering the glass. He stepped inside. Mr. Cai followed.

Waiting in the van, Mr. Nagatsuka heard more shots. Many, many more. Years later, at the murder trial of Bing Yi Chen, he testified as to what happened next:

Mr. Wah “started putting the minivan into reverse, started pulling away from the parking lot. Once we were driving away, we see Paul Cai and Luyen coming out, running fast. Along the way, Paul Cai disassembled his handgun, threw the handgun parts to an empty lot on the right side. We were following at a slow pace along with Luyen and Paul Cai. There was a Home Depot nearby. We went to the back of it. That’s where the plan was to meet, in the back of the Home Depot. Once we turned the corner to the Home Depot, we start hearing the siren.”

They found Christina and Salina and hurried the 80 miles back to Niagara Falls. The next day, they saw news coverage of the murders on TV: two bodies being carted off by the police. They returned to New York City and to Mr. Ma’s apartment. There, court papers say, they apologized to Mr. Chen.

They had escaped unscathed. But, on reading the morning papers, they realized they had killed the wrong two men.

•

Within hours, the case was assigned to Detective Sgt. Douglas Grady of the Toronto homicide squad.

It was a Wednesday, Detective Grady’s day off, and he was at home watching the Blue Jays on television. After six years on the job, he was accustomed to the untoward hours of police work and immediately left for the scene. He found Seafood Alliance’s glass door shot out and bullet casings strewn across the ground. “In my entire career,” he recalled in a recent interview, “I’d never seen so many shots fired at a scene.”

The victims were identified as Samson Yip, 32, a computer technician, whose body was found slumped against the wall, and Stephen Kwan, 36, an accountant, who was lying in a pool of his own blood. Detective Grady saw that both men had suffered “torture shots” to the leg and had been finished off with “coup-de-grâce shots” to the head. Mr. Kwan’s lunch — a hamburger and orange juice — still rested on his desk.

By the next morning, Detective Grady was working several leads. In a nearby parking lot, the police found a knapsack containing ski masks, walkie-talkies, a canister of WD-40, a Niagara Falls baseball cap and pieces from a 9-millimeter pistol. And in a neighborhood park, they recovered two guns and another ski mask and baseball cap.

Witnesses reported seeing a van leave the scene, but no one could identify the license plate. The guns turned out to be untraceable; the masks and clothes were tracked to the United States. Even the victims, Detective Grady said, were puzzling: college graduates with no criminal records. “There seemed to be no reason at all,” he said, “for these guys getting killed.”

One potential investigative path was the walkie-talkies. Detective Grady’s team quickly determined they had come from the Costco in Alhambra, Calif. But the list of people who had bought such radios ran into the dozens, if not the hundreds, he said. He could not — or would not — ask officials in Alhambra to track down every person on the list. Nor could he do it himself. “What? I’m going to ask my bosses to let me go to California? From Ontario? They’d think it was a scam,” he said.

The only other avenue was Seafood Alliance’s owner, David Seto, who, Detective Grady determined, had a reputation for sharp elbows and late payments. So his team investigated Mr. Seto’s finances and discovered that he lived a much more opulent life than importing shrimp or cod should probably allow. They interviewed his workers, competitors and suppliers, but it was not until they examined his investors that they found a startling clue: Mr. Seto had been in contact with a man named Golo Keung.

“Every time we interviewed him, he was nervous,” Detective Grady recalled of Mr. Seto. “He wasn’t forthright — he was dodging and weaving, as they say. He thought that somebody had tried to kill him, but he couldn’t say why or who. It just became clearer that he was the intended victim, that he was the reason these two men were dead.”

When Mr. Seto left the country in 1995, the case went cold. Months, then years, went by without another lead.

“We’d gone to Crime Stoppers,” Detective Grady said. “We’d gone to our informants in the Asian community. We dealt with the constabulary in Hong Kong. But we weren’t getting anywhere.

“There was nothing left as to who did this,” he said. “Or why.”

•

Eight years later, in 2002, Special Agent Bill McMurray of the New York office of the F.B.I. busted a drug ring connected to a Chinese triad called the Wo Lee Kwans. Cooperating witnesses in that case led to the arrest of a killer known as Psycho: Luyen Nguyen.

One day, as often happens in police work, Agent McMurray mentioned his triumph to a friend, Officer John Glenn of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Officer Glenn, it turned out, had once been assigned to Detective Grady’s homicide squad and had never forgotten the seafood murders. On a professional whim, Officer Glenn sent Agent McMurray the one outstanding, albeit long-shot, lead in the case: the list of people who bought those Costco walkie-talkies all those years ago.

The whim paid off. Agent McMurray recognized the name Simone, Mr. Nagatsuka’s former roommate. Psycho had mentioned him while being questioned.

Within a year, the case had broken open. Mr. Nagatsuka, already in custody on other charges, began to cooperate. Bing Yi Chen, Mr. Ma’s right hand, was arrested in Arizona in 2003 and eventually went to trial, where he was convicted of committing murder while engaged in a narcotics conspiracy. The authorities found Paul Cai in Los Angeles, and he pleaded guilty to similar charges. Ah Wah, who had fled to China, was returned by extradition in 2007 and pleaded guilty to racketeering and murder charges. He now awaits sentencing.

Frank Ma, who had also fled to China in 1996, was arrested in Boston after he slipped back into the country in mid-2003. His case took nearly as long to wind through the courts as it had to investigate. He pleaded guilty to murder and narcotics charges. Finally, in February, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed down the life sentence.

“He’d killed the wrong guys, and it caused a conflict with his supplier back in Hong Kong,” Agent McMurray said in an interview. “Before he left, Frank Ma was this mysterious godlike creature, but in China, on the run, he didn’t have the support to live the lifestyle he was used to. People owed him money in America. That’s why he came back.”

His downfall marked the passage of an era.

“Could there be another Ma-type guy still out there?” Agent McMurray asked. “The fact is our source base is so good that we’d probably be aware of his existence, even if we couldn’t make a case.

“Frank Ma was probably the last of the Asian godfathers.”

Mexico City Art Fair

Sadie Cole

Petter Nilsson at work in La Gazzetta, (12th Arrondissement) Paris.

By CHRISTINE MUHLKE
Published: April 18, 2010

THIS is not how I envisioned my first meal in Paris, I thought as I stood in front of L’Agrume. I did not take a three-chapter-long Métro ride to a boring part of the Fifth Arrondissement to eat at a place with a banner in the window advertising a 14-euro lunch menu.

Inside, the chalky lavender walls were the same color as the hostess’s angora dress, summoning my inner design snob. But the welcome was so genuinely warm, I immediately got over myself and remembered why I had come all this way: since he opened L’Agrume in December, the 37-year-old chef Franck Marchesi-Grandi had been getting raves for his five-course 35-euro dinner, making him a prime candidate for my Parisian quest to find bargain menus from rising French chefs.

The first course — halved fingerling potatoes tossed in a foamy vinaigrette cushioned with cubes of foie gras — embodied the new style of cooking that I would experience throughout the week: good ingredients, nonchalantly presented and paired with sauces rooted in classic French technique. With that first bite at L’Agrume, the deft play on texture and temperature — not to mention the cheeky twist on meat and potatoes — made the trip worthwhile.

It might take a good street map and sufficient reading material for some long Métro rides, but the journeys will be worth it. With the opening of fantastic low-key spots in off-piste neighborhoods, Paris has entered a new generation of casual fine dining.

The bistronomy movement of the last decade was about reanimating bistro classics with a well-trained and respectful young hand; the new clutch of chefs under 40 are more interested in defining their own cuisine. Straying from Paris’s chic neighborhoods in search of affordable spaces, they’re often willing to forgo atmosphere, on the plate and in the room, for the sake of creative cooking at a price most can afford.

L’AGRUME

My search for under-40 chefs with under-45-euro menus began at L’Agrume, which popped up on my radar via an update from Le Fooding, the cheeky anti-Michelin group, boasting of a chef who had worked at Plaza Athénée, a Parisian grande dame hotel.

Because he cooks alone in the open kitchen, Mr. Marchesi-Grandi can’t be bothered with elaborate plating or public meltdowns. And so the food he sends out looks like what he’d make at home for friends. A fat langoustine raviolo was presented as is, zipped along by a bright, comme il faut lemon butter that prompted much bread-mopping once the satisfyingly rich pasta and its garnish of julienned spinach and spinach shoots had disappeared.

After 9 p.m., the snug room fills with a pleasant mix of food followers and locals, which means that by 9:30, Mr. Marchesi-Grandi’s one-man band is in thrash mode. I was glad that I arrived at the uncouth hour of 8:30, allowing me his undivided attention for at least three courses.

The dessert duo was a strong and simple combo of premade components jazzed up à la minute. A ball of classic milk chocolate ganache was rolled in bitter cocoa powder and floated in mint broth, while a basic vanilla panna cotta got a why-haven’t-I-thought-of-this transformation with a squeeze of lime juice and a hit of zest on top, making for an unexpected sweet-tart experience — the culinary equivalent of adding a brilliant brooch to the black dress you wore to the office.

Like the rest of the dishes, the presentation only goes halfway. But given the quality and bang for the buck, the diner is pleased to meet Mr. Marchesi-Grandi there. You can have many fancier meals in Paris, but perhaps none with as much gracious humility.

L’Agrume, 15, rue des Fossés St.-Marcel; (33-1) 43-31-86-48. Lunch, 14 to 16 euros, $18.50 to $21 at $1.32 to the euro; dinner, 35 euros. (All prices are for prix-fixe menus, without beverages or tip.)

FRENCHIE

When it opened among the wholesale clothiers of the Sentier district in the Second Arrondissement last April, Frenchie was welcomed for its affordable menu and casually correct food. The young chef Grégory Marchand has spent most of his career abroad, working at Jamie Oliver’s 15 in London (where his kitchen nickname was, yes, Frenchie) for three of his eight years there, and at Gramercy Tavern in New York for a year and a half before returning to Paris. As a result, his food speaks several languages fluently — slang included.

Mr. Marchand’s French training was enhanced by ingredient-driven Italian and American market cuisine. There are no rigorously built sauces — frankly, he doesn’t have time. Not only is he the sole cook, he’s also the reservationist and the lunchtime dishwasher. The restaurant’s popularity means he now answers the phone only at prescribed times. Please do not leave a message.

The menu maps Mr. Marchand’s influences, as well as his desire for sweetness and acidity in each dish. A recent lunch yielded a rectangle of delicate house-smoked trout on a horseradish-spiked edamame purée. Pickled red onions aligned on top, while rogue edamame sprinkled the plate. Eaten together, the combination was oddly, deliciously burgerlike in its savoriness.

A rustic salad of caramelized roast pears, earthy lardo, walnuts and salty pecorino di Fossa was a last look at winter, presented as simply as cuttings in a garden basket. Thick slices of charred pork on celery purée were joined by dark roasted brussels sprouts and brightened with pickled mustard seeds and a rough swirl of jus spiked with Xérès vinegar. Even a rainy-day bowl of gnocchi with wild mushrooms and Parmesan was shot through with acid in a vain attempt to cut the richness. Skip dessert in favor of a 6-euro glass of wine.

While the feel and food of Frenchie wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn or London’s East End, Mr. Marchand has the advantage of French training underscoring his seemingly informal offerings. It’s like watching professional ballet dancers in a basement club: there’s style, sure, but their joy comes from being able to let loose.

Frenchie, 5, rue du Nil; (33-1) 40-39-96-19; frenchie-restaurant.com. Lunch, 21 to 25 euros; dinner, 31 to 35 euros.

LA GAZZETTA

If Frenchie isn’t quite French, La Gazzetta certainly isn’t Italian. The jazzy Art Deco spot in the 12th Arrondissement (think backstage Bastille) serves pizzettas at lunch, as well as a 16-euro two-course deal, but dinner is another planet.

The 39-year-old Swedish chef Petter Nilsson has been racking up awards from hipster food guides like Omnivore and Le Fooding for his dazzling tasting menus since he arrived three years ago. For 38 euros, you can try five creative courses; 50 will get you seven courses in what feels like culinary larceny.

The menu changes weekly, which means that one night might make your top 10, another merely an intriguing respite from onglet and cassoulet. A recent meal didn’t take off until the second course: an unctuous, brutal-looking boudin risotto. Served with strips of squid and shaved turnip, the paste of the winy blood sausage turned the rice a sinister burgundy hue. Monkfish on the bone paired with humble farro was followed by a bonus fourth course of Brittany lobster in a grassy-sweet verbena broth, accompanied by tuna, wrapped, sushilike, in a slice of raw beet.

Rosy veal with chickpea purée skewed too close to hummus for my friends, but they made fast work of my supplemental cheese course: whole-wheat tart crust spread with blood-orange paste and covered with tangy Fourme d’Ambert, a blue cheese, tucked among watermelon radishes and greens — the perfect gateway dessert. The real items followed: tart-crust crumbs on white coffee ice cream and bananas was trickily balanced with citrus sauce, while a pumpkin meringue with coffee foam was quickly pushed aside.

Mr. Nilsson’s experiments with fresh flavors and incongruous pairings are of a piece with what’s happening in progressive restaurants in Scandinavia, Spain, Chicago. And yet his global positioning feels personal. La Gazzetta offers the budget gourmet the opportunity to travel the world while still in Paris.

La Gazzetta, 29, rue de Cotte; (33-1) 43-47-47-05; lagazzetta.fr. Lunch, 16 euros; dinner, 38 to 50 euros.

LE CHATEAUBRIAND

Inaki Aizpitarte, the rock-star chef of this four-year-old restaurant, speaks another dialect entirely. In his case, it’s Basque: strong, palate-rousing flavors and brash presentations that smack of the art student. Whether a particular dish resembles Action Art or naturalism, everything is expertly, calculatedly off-the-cuff.

The 37-year-old self-taught chef made his name at La Famille, a boho Montmartre spot, with an intellectual approach that sometimes bordered on painful. (I’ll spare you the “equation of mackerel” I once ate there, a math problem made dinner.)

Happily, now that he’s moved to the 11th Arrondissement he’s eschewed such gimmickry in favor of the raw and the sous vide. It’s gutsy food, and he doesn’t care if you like it: he’s full every night anyway. (The trick is to have an early nibble, perhaps some croquettes at L’Avant Comptoir or wine and sausage at Le Verre Volé, then show up, say, at 10, for the second seating, for which they don’t take reservations.)

For 45 euros, you not only get a glimpse of the brash cutting edge of Parisian cooking, you also get a passport to cool: this is the best-looking room of foodies you’ll ever see (sorry, Momofuku). Seated at 10:30 on a recent Friday, we began the five-course meal with a rousing amuse-bouche of Treviso radicchio fingers, sheep’s-milk cheese and translucent slices of lemon pith.

Next came a tangle of raw red cabbage in a moat of shocking orange liquid — not juice, but rather what gathers at the bottom of a bowl of shredded carrots drenched in vinaigrette; salmon roe lent salt and pop.

A fish course arrived on an earth-brown plate (bon appétit!) that was jolted to life with a slash of biting watercress purée. The elements above it — raw mackerel, apples steeped in celery juice, a furled shaving of raw daikon and creeping tendrils of baby dandelion greens — looked like something in a terrarium: painstakingly assembled by human hands, but taking on a life of its own.

Cooking was less kind to the John Dory, which had been cooked sous vide under too much pressure, leaving it firm and gummy. A few wintry Treviso radicchio leaves were prettily posed against a spray of bottarga powder coming from their tips, with grains of pomelo pulp providing the acid. A final touch of sauvagerie: the earthen plate framing bloody beef, radishes cooked sous vide for a hollow red glow, sweet-pungent shallot purée and silvery dried fish. At this point you can either laugh or scratch your head. Or both.

Desserts made concessions to normalcy: a salted quenelle of chocolate sorbet with purée of bitter orange, and a ramekin of poached-pear crumble.

(Now that they’re no longer serving a 14-euro lunch, the kitchen is much happier, according to the chef, who said that a place “for the neighborhood,” serving small plates for lunch and dinner will open next door in mid-June. Get ready to program your speed dial.)

Le Chateaubriand, 129, avenue Parmentier; (33-1) 43-57-45-95. Dinner, 45 euros.

JADIS

For the last year, the bargain-hungry have traveled several Métro stops (and a long walk) past the Eiffel Tower to the 15th Arrondissement, following fawning reviews for Guillaume Delage’s food at Jadis, a fine deal at 25 euros for lunch and 32 for dinner.

What does it say about the state of the world that a friend who dined there last fall reported seeing an American publishing magnate at one table and a Goldman Sachs honcho at another? That the food is that good.

Jadis looks unassuming enough, with cafe tables and retro posters. The menu, too, speaks bistro. Mr. Delage, 30, may have cooked with Michel Bras and Pierre Gagnaire, but he wants to reassure people who might not normally venture to a gastronomic restaurant. Once their order comes in, he gets to tweak the classics respectfully. (“We detour things,” he said at the Omnivore Food Festival in Deauville in February.)

Hence, a lunchtime appetizer of rich crab mousse found the traditional pink disc quietly updated by its bed of julienned watermelon radish. Next, a bowl of jus-braised leeks and salsify was set in front of me, brown on brown on soft. “Merci, but I ordered the … ” Just then, a narrow rectangular plate bearing classic, perfectly executed skate — brown butter, lemon, capers, a dash of piment d’Espelette chili — was placed alongside my fork. Deconstruction? Whatever. It worked, on every level.

I was delighted with the lightest dessert, a citrus “minestrone” — stained-glass sections of fruit and candied kumquat enriched with tiny peaks of lemony pastry cream and a curving orange-flower marshmallow. As I was paying, Mr. Delage began putting away napkins he’d been folding. Small is beautiful.

Jadis, 208, rue de la Croix Nivert; (33-1) 45-57-73-20; www.bistrot-jadis.com. Lunch, 25 euros; dinner, 32 euros.

YAM’TCHA

More evidence: Yam’tcha, which the 32-year-old chef Adeline Grattard opened last March in a compact brick-and-beam room a short walk from the Louvre in the First Arrondissement. In February (the day of my hard-won reservation), it was announced that she would receive her first Michelin star. Suddenly, my 45-euro, five-course lunch tasting seemed like the deal of the year (she also has 30- and 65-euro lunch menus).

Ms. Grattard has worked with Yanick Alléno and Pascal Barbot, who are of the reigning generation of greats. But the two years that she spent in Hong Kong with her Chinese husband, Chi Wah Chan, most shaped her cooking. She has mastered the art of wok and steam, resulting in a light, elegant, creative Chinese cuisine with a barely discernible French accent, evident only in the cheese course and on the wine menu; in the Asian column, Mr. Chan proposes a tea pairing with each course.

A cup of Phoenix oolong was brought as a welcome, surprising the sippers with its delicate complexity. Suddenly, the tea pairing I had turned down made sense. But too late: a tiny salad arrived atop glassy sweet-potato noodles folded around pieces of just-yielding avocado with white sesame seeds and slivers of minty shiso leaf. The dish was as quietly deep as the tea.

Potato matchsticks flashed in the wok had the texture of green papaya but a smoky, meaty flavor that became familiar throughout the meal as “le goût du wok” (“the flavor of the wok”). Sharpened with pepper flakes and vinegar, the potatoes were a fine foil for charred abalone.

A sweet-and-sour soup with dainty cubes of smoked tofu and strips of scallop was too literal for my taste. Line-caught sea bass, though, was exceptionally moist from its brief steam in the combi oven. And le goût du wok returned in a dish of al dente black rice stir-fried with spinach, spinach shoots and green onions.

Ms. Grattard serves mild, creamy cheese made by monks in Cîteaux, Burgundy, a nod to her place of birth. Those roots, along with some of that Asian zing, show again in a delectable dessert: blancmange with slivers of raw pear and, back to Asia, a shaving of zippy, floral yuzu zest.

While Ms. Grattard’s food might not seem to be of the Parisian moment — it’s more than a few clicks past fusion, which has had its day in the city — it’s part of the movement I sought: small kitchens in restaurants with low overhead allowing young chefs the room to cook personal food at prices their friends can afford.

If this means fewer bells in the dining room (of the restaurants I visited, only Jadis has tablecloths) and zero squiggly whistles on the plate, it doesn’t mean that it’s not attracting attention from the diners — and guides — who could eat elsewhere much more easily. Catch these chefs while you, and your wallet, can.

Yam’tcha, 4, rue Sauval; (33-1) 40-26-08-07. Lunch, 30 to 65 euros; dinner, 65 euros.

Through May 1, 2010

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Image from Atelier Bow Wow’s “Pet Architecture”

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI
Wall Street Journal APRIL 14, 2010

TOKYO—Japan is famous for its ability to make the most of limited space. The cocoon-like capsule hotels were first developed here and many single city dwellers live in tiny studio apartments known as rabbit hutches.

Now, a new online real-estate marketplace is taking that trait to new levels. Nokisaki.com seeks pockets of “dead space” around cities and converts them into short-term rental property.

In Tokyo, where every sliver of land is at a premium, a few feet of unused private property near the front entrance of an apartment building can be used to sell muffins. A patch of storefront space transforms into an ad hoc vegetable stand for a farmer or a consulting space for a fortune-teller.

Those spaces can be reserved at Nokisaki for short periods of time—starting from three hours—and for as little as $15 total. The spots are granted on a first-come, first-served basis and the rental times and prices are set by landlords.

It’s unclear whether Nokisaki can work in other countries, but it seems well suited to Japan, where land is scarce and it is difficult to secure permission to sell goods on public space in crowded cities like Tokyo.

Also, online services like Craigslist haven’t penetrated the real-estate market in Japan, because many landlords prefer not to deal directly with tenants.

The idea for Nokisaki is fairly simple. Landlords upload information and photos of a location. Renters look through the listings and reserve properties they like. Nokisaki verifies the information about the location and the renter, who pays Nokisaki by credit card or bank transfer. The site transfers the money to the landlord minus a 35% fee. “There are lots of spaces that owners would never think of renting out,” said Akiko Nishiura who runs the Web site with her husband, Tohru.

Mrs. Nishiura, who had worked at Sony Corp. in sales and marketing and several Internet ventures, came up with the idea for Nokisaki after struggling to find a place to set up a temporary store to gauge customer reaction for a new business idea: selling plates imported from Chile.

After finding nothing online, she walked around Tokyo neighborhoods and found that available spaces were very expensive and advertised only at local real-estate agents. She ditched the plates and launched Nokisaki in 2008, because she sensed there was a “supply-demand imbalance.” The site got off to a slow start, but the economic downturn provided a lift. There were laid-off workers looking for a simple way to try a new business without having to pay the standard up-front deposits for retail space: up to 12 months worth of rent.

Landlords, struggling to fill vacancies, were now more receptive to ways to generate additional income. The site also started seeing listings from land owners looking to fill “dead time” such as the short gaps of time between long-term renters.

“It shows the soft market and the importance of fluidity in the market,” said Ben Duncan, managing director of CB Richard Ellis in Japan, noting that he had never heard of another service like this.

Nokisaki is now approaching 200 transactions a month and Mrs. Nishiura estimates she can grow that figure 10-fold by the end of 2011. The company wouldn’t disclose revenue or profit figures, but she said the company just accepted a 10 million yen ($110,000) investment from two angel investors.

Mrs. Nishiura is looking to strike alliances with real-estate agents to increase the number of properties on the site. There are currently 130 properties on the site and about 40% are in Tokyo.

Many of the smaller spaces featured on the site are spaces for small food vans to park, such as a space blocking the front entrance of an apartment building in Tokyo’s ritzy Aoyama district for 3,000 yen a day during lunchtime. However, there are also larger spaces, like a conventional retail space with lots of foot traffic in the Shimokitazawa neighborhood available for one week at 161,000 yen.

Once a week, Herokazu Sakai spends 1,300 yen, or $14, to rent a spot in the trendy Tokyo neighborhood of Nakameguro for four hours in the morning. The space, which is about two feet wide and eight feet long, provides enough room for Mr. Sakai to park, at least partially, his pink micro-van.

His van is stocked with colorful vegetable muffins, sweet potatoes, coffee, a refrigerator, microwave and cash register. Mr. Sakai estimates he makes about 5,000 yen a day at that location. “You’re limited in terms of what you can sell because of the space,” said Mr. Sakai, who owned a stand-alone shop in Tokyo’s Odaiba neighborhood that closed two years ago.

The rental has become a small financial windfall for the 30-unit apartment building renting the space. The apartments’ management board head, Kazuki Fukuzaki, says some residents have complained about the smell of curry from another food truck, while others have grumbled about the noise made by a generator.

“I ask the residents to be understanding,” says Mr. Fukuzaki, “and usually they are.”

via

By HAROLD McGEE
NY Times Published: April 13, 2010

FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

Ms. Child had plenty of company for her feelings about cilantro (arugula seems to be less offensive). The authoritative Oxford Companion to Food notes that the word “coriander” is said to derive from the Greek word for bedbug, that cilantro aroma “has been compared with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes” and that “Europeans often have difficulty in overcoming their initial aversion to this smell.” There’s an “I Hate Cilantro” Facebook page with hundreds of fans and an I Hate Cilantro blog.

Yet cilantro is happily consumed by many millions of people around the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. The Portuguese put fistfuls into soups. What is it about cilantro that makes it so unpleasant for people in cultures that don’t much use it?

Some people may be genetically predisposed to dislike cilantro, according to often-cited studies by Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But cilantrophobe genetics remain little known and aren’t under systematic investigation. Meanwhile, history, chemistry and neurology have been adding some valuable pieces to the puzzle.

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology — not endorsed by modern dictionaries — back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

Modern cilantrophobes tend to describe the offending flavor as soapy rather than buggy. I don’t hate cilantro, but it does sometimes remind me of hand lotion. Each of these associations turns out to make good chemical sense.

Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.

Soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules with strongly alkaline lye or its equivalent, and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process, as they are when oxygen in the air attacks the fats and oils in cosmetics. And many bugs make strong-smelling, aldehyde-rich body fluids to attract or repel other creatures.

The published studies of cilantro aroma describe individual aldehydes as having both cilantrolike and soapy qualities. Several flavor chemists told me in e-mail messages that they smell a soapy note in the whole herb as well, but still find its aroma fresh and pleasant.

So the cilantro aldehydes are olfactory Jekyll-and-Hydes. Why is it only the evil, soapy side that shows up for cilantrophobes, and not the charming one?

I posed this question to Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells.

Dr. Gottfried turned out to be a former cilantrophobe who could speak from personal experience. He said that the great cilantro split probably reflects the primal importance of smell and taste to survival, and the brain’s constant updating of its database of experiences.

The senses of smell and taste evolved to evoke strong emotions, he explained, because they were critical to finding food and mates and avoiding poisons and predators. When we taste a food, the brain searches its memory to find a pattern from past experience that the flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.

If the flavor doesn’t fit a familiar food experience, and instead fits into a pattern that involves chemical cleaning agents and dirt, or crawly insects, then the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety. We react strongly and throw the offending ingredient on the floor where it belongs.

“When your brain detects a potential threat, it narrows your attention,” Dr. Gottfried told me in a telephone conversation. “You don’t need to know that a dangerous food has a hint of asparagus and sorrel to it. You just get it away from your mouth.”

But he explained that every new experience causes the brain to update and enlarge its set of patterns, and this can lead to a shift in how we perceive a food.

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” he said. “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

Cilantro itself can be reshaped to make it easier to take. A Japanese study published in January suggested that crushing the leaves will give leaf enzymes the chance to gradually convert the aldehydes into other substances with no aroma.

Sure enough, I’ve found cilantro pestos to be lotion-free and surprisingly mild. They actually have deeper roots in the Mediterranean than the basil version, and can be delicious on pasta and breads and meats. If you’re looking to work on your cilantro patterns, pesto might be the place to start.

The director James Cameron backs efforts to halt the building of a dam in Brazil.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
NY Times Published: April 10, 2010

VOLTA GRANDE DO XINGU, Brazil — They came from the far reaches of the Amazon, traveling in small boats and canoes for up to three days to discuss their fate. James Cameron, the Hollywood titan, stood before them with orange warrior streaks painted on his face, comparing the threats on their lands to a snake eating its prey.

“The snake kills by squeezing very slowly,” Mr. Cameron said to more than 70 indigenous people, some holding spears and bows and arrows, under a tree here along the Xingu River. “This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” he added.

As if to underscore the point, seconds later a poisonous green snake fell out of a tree, just feet from where Mr. Cameron’s wife sat on a log. Screams rang out. Villagers scattered. The snake was killed. Then indigenous leaders set off on a dance of appreciation, ending at the boat that took Mr. Cameron away. All the while, Mr. Cameron danced haltingly, shaking a spear, a chief’s feathery yellow and white headdress atop his head.

In the 15 years since he wrote the script for “Avatar,” his epic tale of greed versus nature, Mr. Cameron said, he had become an avid environmentalist. But he said that until his trip to the Brazilian Amazon last month, his advocacy was mostly limited to the environmentally responsible way he tried to live his life: solar and wind energy power his Santa Barbara home, he said, and he and his wife drive hybrid vehicles and do their own organic gardening.

“Avatar” — and its nearly $2.7 billion in global tickets sales — has changed all that, flooding Mr. Cameron with kudos for helping to “emotionalize” environmental issues and pleas to get more involved.

Now, Mr. Cameron said, he has been spurred to action, to speak out against the looming environmental destruction endangering indigenous groups around the world — a cause that is fueling his inner rage and inspiring his work on an “Avatar” sequel.

“Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell,” he said. “In fact, it almost certainly will.” Referring to his Amazon trip, he added, “It just makes me madder.”

Mr. Cameron is so fired up, in fact, that he said he was planning to go back to the Amazon this week, this time with Sigourney Weaver and at least another member of the “Avatar” cast in tow.

The focus is the huge Belo Monte dam planned by the Brazilian government. It would be the third largest in the world, and environmentalists say it would flood hundreds of square miles of the Amazon and dry up a 60-mile stretch of the Xingu River, devastating the indigenous communities that live along it. For years the project was on the shelf, but the government now plans to hold an April 20 auction to award contracts for its construction.

Stopping the dam has become a fresh personal crusade for the director, who came here as indigenous leaders from 13 tribes held a special council to discuss their last-ditch options. It was Mr. Cameron’s first visit to the Amazon, he said, even though he based the fictional planet in “Avatar” on Amazon rain forests. Still, he found the real-life similarities to the themes in his movie undeniable.

The dam is a “quintessential example of the type of thing we are showing in ‘Avatar’ — the collision of a technological civilization’s vision for progress at the expense of the natural world and the cultures of the indigenous people that live there,” he said.

Mr. Cameron said that he was writing a letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urging him to reconsider the dam and that he would press for a meeting with the president. “They need to listen to these people here,” he said.

Mr. Cameron, 55, first encountered the cause in February, after being presented with a letter from advocacy organizations and Native American groups saying they wanted Mr. Cameron to highlight “the real Pandoras in the world,” referring to the lush world under assault in his movie.

Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch, who accompanied him on his trip last month, said Mr. Cameron lit up at the idea of learning more, saying he had grown up in the Canadian woods and had even logged thousands of hours underwater exploring the world’s oceans.

As for Mr. Cameron’s Amazon adventure, it got off to a rocky start. The boat he traveled to the village in flooded when a hose became disconnected. Mr. Cameron chipped in, grabbing a plastic bucket to help bail for a few hours in the searing midday heat, he and others on the boat said.

Many of the indigenous leaders he was planning to meet with had never heard of him before, much less seen his movie. All they knew was that “a powerful ally” would be attending their gathering, Ms. Soltani said.

So, the night before Mr. Cameron and his wife, Suzy Amis, arrived with three bodyguards, a dozen or so villagers gathered in the house of José Carlos Arara, the chief of the Arara tribe here, to watch a DVD of “Avatar.”

“What happens in the film is what is happening here,” said Chief Arara, 30.

The morning after Mr. Cameron’s party arrived in the village, Chief Arara led them on a walk through the rain forest. Mr. Cameron, almost mirroring the enraptured scientists in his movie, was calm but wide-eyed, peppering the chief with questions about the local fauna and flora and traditional indigenous ways. In seconds, the chief showed how he could fashion ankle braces from leaves to help him scale an açaí tree.

The leaders then invited Mr. Cameron to participate in their meeting. He sat at a small wooden school desk as they made speeches condemning the impending dam and the Brazilian government. Mr. Cameron seemed to tear up when some leaders said they would be willing to die to stop the dam.

Finally, Mr. Cameron was asked to speak. He stood and complimented the leaders on their unity, saying they needed to fight off efforts by the government to divide them and weaken their resistance.

“That is what can stop the snake; that is what can stop the dam,” he said.

A rush of applause swept through the crowd. When the real snake fell from the tree, the director seemed unfazed. After clearing it away, indigenous leaders thanked him with gifts. One gave him a spear, another a black and red necklace of seeds. A third, Chief Jaguar from the Kaiapo nation, one of Brazil’s most respected, gave him his headdress before the dances in Mr. Cameron’s honor began.

“It’s not like there is any pressure on me or anything,” he said, half-joking, moments before boarding the boat. “These people really are looking for me to do something about their situation. We have to try to stop this dam. Their whole way of life, their society as they know it, depends on it.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

By Search and CMA

Arbitare

Thanks to Nate Lentz

By JOHN TIERNEY
NY Times Published: April 11, 2010

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.

The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

Dennis Hopper, in the film “Easy Rider,” which he directed, edited and starred in.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
NY Times Published: April 7, 2010

DENNIS HOPPER — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he has played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he has made it through the good, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring into a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He has been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next big thing, the last man standing.

Lately Mr. Hopper, who turns 74 on May 17, has been in the news again. In March his lawyer in a contentious divorce from Mr. Hopper’s fifth wife, Victoria, announced that the actor has terminal prostate cancer and was too ill to appear in court. That same week a gaunt Mr. Hopper showed up with both smiles and Jack Nicholson to receive a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Mr. Nicholson, hovering next to Mr. Hopper, was wearing a sensationally ugly shirt decorated with the stars and stripes and the image of the two doomed motorcyclists from “Easy Rider,” the movie that made Mr. Hopper a director and broke Mr. Nicholson out of B-movie irrelevance. It was a sublime, ridiculous Hollywood moment, canned and simultaneously real.

It was also a perfect gesture for Mr. Hopper, who has straddled seemingly contradictory realities for much of his career, wearing a loincloth in Andy Warhol’s “Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort of …” in 1963 only to show up as a snitch opposite John Wayne in “The Sons of Katie Elder.” Inspired by Vincent Price to collect art (yes, that Vincent Price), Mr. Hopper bought a couple of early Warhols for $75, snapping up other masterworks from the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Later, when “Easy Rider” was released, Warhol, who immortalized Mr. Hopper on silk-screen, mused on the influence he had on the actor who’s “so crazy in the eyes”: “You never know where people will pick things up.”

In Mr. Hopper’s case the lines of influence are perhaps more overt than they might initially seem, winding from the American flag in one of Mr. Johns’s paintings, for instance, to the one that Peter Fonda wears like a target on the back of his motorcycle jacket in “Easy Rider.” Mr. Hopper, who has picked up, dropped and resumed painting and photography at different times in his life, didn’t just have a great eye for buying art; he also pushed his own aesthetics to the brink and at times over the edge. Among the most striking formal strategies in “Easy Rider” are the propulsive, eye-thwacking edits that were a signature of Mr. Hopper’s longtime friend, the collagist and avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner (“A Movie”).

“Easy Rider” retains a privileged place in American film history, though less for its formal experimentation than its perceived impact on the movie industry, as illustrated by the self-explanatory title of Peter Biskind’s popular 1998 book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.” Bluntly, this $400,000 biker movie earned almost $20 million at the time of its release, proving that the counterculture could be turned into customers with the right sales pitch. (“A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere…”) And, in the summer of 1969 when the film opened, that pitch was perfect, particularly for young audiences who saw characters they could identify with in the story of two bikers — Mr. Fonda goes by Wyatt, Mr. Hopper is Billy — who, after a big cocaine deal, zoom across the Southwest only to be shot dead by a local yokel.

The movie was a hit at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prize for best first work. When it opened in America a few months later, Andrew Sarris explained its Cannes triumph partly through the distorting lens of Vietnam, writing that “motorcycles, materialism, misanthropy and murder have long served as adequate cinematic correlatives of American life for Europeans, and never more so than in this year of law and order on Hamburger Hill.” Mr. Sarris was mostly impressed with Mr. Nicholson’s brilliant, brief turn as George Hanson, a boozer and doomed son of the South whom Wyatt and Billy meet in jail. Others, like a passionate fan named Richard Goldstein, who defended the movie in The New York Times, saw something else: “I want to believe that ‘Easy Rider’ is a travel poster for the new America.”

Certainly, the movie became a model for a new American cinema, one that was young and emancipated from the old studio mind-think, a declaration of creative independence that lasted (in theory) until Steven Spielberg’s great white shark ate its way through the box office six summers later, initiating the Blockbuster Age. For his part Mr. Hopper, whom Mr. Biskind anoints as “a drug-crazed guru of the counterculture,” remains the central character in the legend of “Easy Rider” both because Mr. Hopper directed, edited and starred in it and because of his temper, drug taking, overweening self-regard and cluelessness during the period of its production. (Mr. Hopper and Mr. Fonda share writing credit with Terry Southern.)

There are downsides to being linked with a legend, and Mr. Biskind ends his chapter on “Easy Rider” with the Manson Family murders, a queasy linkage that partly speaks to Mr. Hopper’s mushrooming profile as a Hollywood madman. It was an image that Mr. Hopper, who even described his former self as a “maniac” to Mr. Biskind, nurtured with acid trips, a gun fetish, a tendency to overshare with journalists and bouts of physical violence, culminating in his breaking the nose of his first wife, Brooke Hayward. Mr. Biskind buries the New American cinema movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s with a chapter titled “We Blew It,” echoing the line Wyatt utters to Billy in “Easy Rider.”

Many who followed Mr. Hopper’s next act might have thought he did the same. In 1970 he started “The Last Movie,” a prophetic title if ever there was one. Bankrolled by Universal — the studios were mainlining youth culture by then — he traveled to the Peruvian Andes to make a film about a stunt man who, after production on a violent Hollywood-style Western wraps, stays behind. Played by Mr. Hopper, the stunt man (though not necessarily in this order) hooks up with a local prostitute; coordinates a sex show for debauched tourists; jaws on about “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”; and takes perhaps lethal part in another film shoot, this one staged as a ritual by Indians using equipment made from twigs.

Lysergic and lyrical, engrossing and off-putting, “The Last Movie” is a blunt instrument — one scene shows an American woman swaddled in fur and perched next to a photograph of an emaciated African child — and not as narratively incomprehensible as its reputation suggests. Mr. Hopper said it was a story about America and compared the film to “an abstract expressionist painting, where the guy shows the pencil lines, leaves some empty canvas, shows a brushstroke, lets a little drip come down.” Pauline Kael picked up his metaphor and ran with it, likening Mr. Hopper’s editing, which is considerably more frenetic than it is in “Easy Rider,” to someone slashing his own canvases.

The consensus was that Mr. Hopper had hacked his career to shreds, though his worst mistake, beyond too many drugs and too much drink, was allowing journalists on the set. They came, they saw, and their reports portended the worst, as did the editors who came up with headlines like “Dennis Hopper, High in the Andes.” The most damaging might have been the Life magazine cover story with a photo of a smiling Mr. Hopper wearing a black hat and holding a flower in one hand, a football in the crook of his arm. “Is it any wonder,” a Life reader fumed, “that we’re in the shape we are in, when our children look upon such sludge as heroes?”

First “Easy Rider,” now this! There’s little doubt that Mr. Hopper’s indulgencies took their toll, but if “The Last Movie” had made the money, you might be reading a different story. The film was doomed, though — badly released, mocked and soon dismissed, as was Mr. Hopper. He more or less dropped out from the public eye until he flew off to the Philippines in 1976 to play the zonked-out photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Chattering like a hopped-up monkey, cameras clattering around his neck, T. S. Eliot’s words rolling around in his mouth, dirty, disheveled and totally bonkers, the character is a wonder, but painful. The line between Mr. Hopper’s on-screen delivery and his off-screen reputation seems too thin, it makes you squirm, as do many of his later, greater roles.

If the pleasure of his performance is tinged with discomfort, it’s because Mr. Hopper has apparently never been afraid of looking ridiculous — an important quality for performers. Few actors can navigate the line between terror and comedy as unnervingly, evidenced by his mesmerizing turn in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Where does that character end and Mr. Hopper begin? You don’t know, and that not knowing is the space in which Mr. Hopper works. Before he started to spill his guts and everything else on screen, his openness could be delightful, as when he was photographed reading Stanislavsky on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause.” He was 17, playing a guy named Goon and hanging on every word of James Dean, who told him to start taking photographs, to look at the world through a frame.

Later that openness could make you blanch, as it does in “The American Dreamer,” a documentary about the making of “The Last Movie” in which he sheds his clothes and demolishes the barrier between the private and the public. (You can watch for yourself on YouTube.) There was something repellent about how he let it all hang out even if this same quality kept you watching. At times that candor could seem like self-exploitation, as in the basketball drama “Hoosiers,” where he played a drunk trying to dry out. But what has made him Dennis Hopper, man, was how he peeled back the skin until it hurt, as he did in some of his performances and the films he directed, notably the brutal coming-of-age tale “Out of the Blue.”

In February the Variety columnist and former studio executive Peter Bart reflected on Mr. Hopper’s career, writing that he had “excelled as an actor, filmmaker, art collector and photographer and has done everything he can to self-destruct in each of those arenas.” Mr. Bart added that it seemed “impossible someone could have starred in a film like ‘Giant’ only to blow his career as a star, or to have directed a seminal movie like ‘Easy Rider’ only to disappear as a filmmaker.” That’s one way to look at a career, though various art shows, film retrospectives and books like “Dennis Hopper & the New Hollywood” and “Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967,” reveal a different life, one Mr. Bart probably wouldn’t understand.

If that life doesn’t fit with old or new notions of stardom it’s because Mr. Hopper has charted his own course nearly from the start. Given that by the time he signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1955, the old studio system was already collapsing, he didn’t have much of a choice but to head off on his own. He shook off the studio yoke, went to New York to study with Lee Strasberg, began collecting art, starred in the experimental film “Night Tide” and collaborated on an art project with Marcel Duchamp. He photographed his famous friends on and off the set and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama. He helped make Mr. Nicholson a star and did his bit to jump-start American cinema. Not bad for someone who “blew it.”

Tucked into the files on Mr. Hopper in the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills is a six-page typed biographical release about him from around 1959. Like other public relation releases from the annals of classic flackdom, this one lists his credits and statistics (height: 5’10”; weight: 160), and tells a charming tale. Mr. Hopper turned 23 that year. He had returned to Los Angeles from New York, but wasn’t working all that much. Still, as the release noted, he was managing to keep busy: “When he isn’t working, Dennis rises about 10 o’clock, reads Nietzsche (and modern plays) poolside at his Hollywood apartment, visits art galleries, browses in book shops and attends foreign films. He’s intense about everything he does.” He was just getting started.

April 10 – May 15, 2010

marc foxx

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 8, 2010

The debt crisis in Greece is approaching the point of no return. As prospects for a rescue plan seem to be fading, largely thanks to German obduracy, nervous investors have driven interest rates on Greek government bonds sky-high, sharply raising the country’s borrowing costs. This will push Greece even deeper into debt, further undermining confidence. At this point it’s hard to see how the nation can escape from this death spiral into default.

It’s a terrible story, and clearly an object lesson for the rest of us. But an object lesson in what, exactly?

Yes, Greece is paying the price for past fiscal irresponsibility. Yet that’s by no means the whole story. The Greek tragedy also illustrates the extreme danger posed by a deflationary monetary policy. And that’s a lesson one hopes American policy makers will take to heart.

The key thing to understand about Greece’s predicament is that it’s not just a matter of excessive debt. Greece’s public debt, at 113 percent of G.D.P., is indeed high, but other countries have dealt with similar levels of debt without crisis. For example, in 1946, the United States, having just emerged from World War II, had federal debt equal to 122 percent of G.D.P. Yet investors were relaxed, and rightly so: Over the next decade the ratio of U.S. debt to G.D.P. was cut nearly in half, easing any concerns people might have had about our ability to pay what we owed. And debt as a percentage of G.D.P. continued to fall in the decades that followed, hitting a low of 33 percent in 1981.

So how did the U.S. government manage to pay off its wartime debt? Actually, it didn’t. At the end of 1946, the federal government owed $271 billion; by the end of 1956 that figure had risen slightly, to $274 billion. The ratio of debt to G.D.P. fell not because debt went down, but because G.D.P. went up, roughly doubling in dollar terms over the course of a decade. The rise in G.D.P. in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real G.D.P. and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956.

Unfortunately, Greece can’t expect a similar performance. Why? Because of the euro.

Until recently, being a member of the euro zone seemed like a good thing for Greece, bringing with it cheap loans and large inflows of capital. But those capital inflows also led to inflation — and when the music stopped, Greece found itself with costs and prices way out of line with Europe’s big economies. Over time, Greek prices will have to come back down. And that means that unlike postwar America, which inflated away part of its debt, Greece will see its debt burden worsened by deflation.

That’s not all. Deflation is a painful process, which invariably takes a toll on growth and employment. So Greece won’t grow its way out of debt. On the contrary, it will have to deal with its debt in the face of an economy that’s stagnant at best.

So the only way Greece could tame its debt problem would be with savage spending cuts and tax increases, measures that would themselves worsen the unemployment rate. No wonder, then, that bond markets are losing confidence, and pushing the situation to the brink.

What can be done? The hope was that other European countries would strike a deal, guaranteeing Greek debt in return for a commitment to harsh fiscal austerity. That might have worked. But without German support, such a deal won’t happen.

Greece could alleviate some of its problems by leaving the euro, and devaluing. But it’s hard to see how Greece could do that without triggering a catastrophic run on its banking system. Indeed, worried depositors have already begun pulling cash out of Greek banks. There are no good answers here — actually, no nonterrible answers.

But what are the lessons for America? Of course, we should be fiscally responsible. What that means, however, is taking on the big long-term issues, above all health costs — not grandstanding and penny-pinching over short-term spending to help a distressed economy.

Equally important, however, we need to steer clear of deflation, or even excessively low inflation. Unlike Greece, we’re not stuck with someone else’s currency. But as Japan has demonstrated, even countries with their own currencies can get stuck in a deflationary trap.

What worries me most about the U.S. situation right now is the rising clamor from inflation hawks, who want the Fed to raise rates (and the federal government to pull back from stimulus) even though employment has barely started to recover. If they get their way, they’ll perpetuate mass unemployment. But that’s not all. America’s public debt will be manageable if we eventually return to vigorous growth and moderate inflation. But if the tight-money people prevail, that won’t happen — and all bets will be off.

After Winter, 2004 – 2010
Chromogenic print mounted on plexiglass
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)

Through April 29

Miguel Abreu

By GAIL COLLINS
NY Times Published: April 7, 2010

April is the cruelest month. Or, if you live in Virginia, Confederate History Month.

The state is buzzing over Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling Virginia’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America. Although since McDonnell had previously turned April over to child abuse prevention, organ donation and financial literacy, perhaps it was O.K. to just pick your favorite.

The original Confederate History proclamation was a miracle of obfuscation. It did not even mention slavery. On Wednesday, the governor apologized for that and said that slavery “has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation.”

People, what’s our bottom line here. The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?

Maybe we had better be grateful for small favors. It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.

History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson, presumably because of his enthusiasm for separation of church and state. This week, John McCain rewrote his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” And on the geography front, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia took time during a recent Congressional hearing to express his concern that stationing additional Marines on Guam would make the island “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

Obviously, all these developments are not equally problematic. The admiral being questioned somberly assured Johnson that the military does not anticipate any island-toppling. And if McCain wants to re-imagine the 2008 presidential campaign, he is free to give it a try. Although if you are planning to deny that you ever thought of yourself as a maverick, it would be better not to have subtitled one of your memoirs “The Education of an American Maverick.”

The love affair with all things Confederate is way more worrisome. Once again, it’s in to talk secession. The Republican attorneys general are lining up to try to nullify the health care bill.

“Many issues of the Civil War are still being debated today,” said Brag Bowling of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which led the push to get that proclamation in Virginia. That seems extremely depressing, as if we were Serbs stewing about what the Turks did at the Plain of Blackbirds in 1389.

Actually, a national discussion of Civil War history sounds fine — as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea. In the proclamations, it generally sounds as if everything went swimmingly until the part where the South lost and grudgingly rejoined the country.

Virginia has been making big leaps lately in the category of general craziness. We all remember the Legislature’s heroic work in passing a bill to protect Virginia citizens from having microchips planted in their bodies against their will. And that the sponsor said he was concerned the chips could be a “mark of the beast” that would be used by the Antichrist at the end of days.

Confederate History Month was promoted by former Gov. George Allen, who was fond of Confederate flag-décor and suffered from a sense of history so imperfect that he did not discover his mother was half-Jewish until he was 54. Allen’s proclamation celebrated the Civil War as “a four-year struggle for independence, sovereign rights and local government control,” with such cheer that you would really think the fight was all about zoning.

Allen’s Democratic successors took a pass on celebrating Confederate history, while the Republicans followed his lead with differing degrees of enthusiasm. McDonnell, like Allen, seems to have a rather shaky grasp of the principles of intellectual inquiry. During last year’s campaign, reporters discovered that the master’s thesis he wrote at 34 denounced working women and feminists. McDonnell waved it off, saying that his work was “simply an academic exercise” that “clearly does not reflect my views.”

When he came up with his original proclamation this week, many people wanted to know why McDonnell didn’t say anything at all about slavery. “I wasn’t focused on that,” he explained.

No, for McDonnell, Confederate History Month was all about “tourism,” so much so that slavery slipped under the carpet. This was also a theme in Georgia when the State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy. “It’s for education and to help benefit tourism in the state,” said Bowling.

Have you ever noticed that tourism has been the excuse for more dreadful developments in modern history than anything but Twitter? Cheese museums. Highways to nowhere. Confederate History Month.

By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN
NY Times Published: April 7, 2010

Shirley Koecheler, 54, has been a sleepwalker for as long as she can remember. But it wasn’t until she got married that she started eating in her sleep, too. She’d wander into the kitchen — eyes open but asleep — and binge on junk food.

Like so many of those with sleep-related eating disorder, Ms. Koecheler, a businesswoman and farmer from Maple Plains, Minn., does not remember anything about her nighttime journeys. When she wakes up the next morning to a crumb-filled bed, uncomfortably full, she knows that she must have spent the night feasting.

“I’ve gained seven pounds in the past two months,” Ms. Koecheler said. “I bought the Easter candy for the kids and had my husband hide it, but I must have found it during the night. I found the wrappers in the wastebasket from the solid chocolate bunnies.”

Sleep eaters “make a beeline for the kitchen” and tend to binge on sugary, high-calorie snacks, sometimes five times a night, said Dr. John W. Winkelman, medical director of the Sleep Health Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Brighton, Mass. Some go for bizarre food combinations like peanut butter and pasta, and even the occasional nail polish or paper.

Consequences of nighttime eating can include injuries like black eyes from walking into a wall or hand cuts from a prep knife, or dental problems from gnawing on frozen food. On a deeper level, many sleep eaters feel depressed, frustrated and ashamed. Upwards of 10 percent of adults suffer from some sort of parasomnia, or sleep disorder, like sleepwalking or night terrors. Some have driven cars or performed inappropriate sexual acts — all while in a sleep-induced fog. About 1 percent, mostly women, raid the refrigerator.

No one knows what triggers these nocturnal escapades, but recent research offers a glimmer of light into the basic biology. And while there are no cures, some medications are showing promise for helping sufferers sleep more soundly. Oddly enough, sleeping pills do not help — the sedative Ambien, in fact, has been known to trigger or exacerbate the problem.

In “Sleep Runners,” a 2004 documentary about parasomnias, 75-year-old Rowena Pope of Circle Pines, Minn., recalls how one night her usually gentle husband, Cal, “began pummeling me and kicking me violently. I shook him and awakened him, and he had no idea what he was doing.”

Dr. Carlos H. Schenck, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and the film’s producer, said that violence during the night does not signify lurking aggression. Similarly, eating during sleep does not necessarily signal a daytime eating disorder, though sleep eating may be more common among people with disorders like binge eating or anorexia.

Sadly, many sleep eaters and others with related disorders suffer for years without telling their doctors because they consider it a personality quirk rather than a medical disorder. They may try all sorts of remedies, from strapping themselves to the bed to hiding food, usually to little or no avail.

Others worry they’ll be labeled with a mental illness, a notion that mental health experts now dismiss. “Those who exhibit violence during sleep, or scream, or swear, or masturbate, or eat frozen ravioli, or wander into the hallway in their underwear while asleep generally have no more of a psychological disorder than those who sleep peacefully every night,” Dr. Schenck writes in his book “Sleep: The Mysteries, the Problems and the Solutions” (Penguin/Avery, 2007).

“I thought this was just the way I was,” said Sarah Tracey, a 22-year-old radiation therapist and sleep eater from Canton, Mass. “I usually get up four or five times a night. I’ve been doing it since I was 11 or 12-ish.” When she worried that her disturbed sleep would affect her job performance, she did what so many others do – she searched online, where she found an article about sleep eating as well as an ongoing study about the disorder. “It was a huge relief to realize that it’s a real condition and I’m not being crazy.”

Scientists now divide parasomnias into two main groups, depending on whether or not they occur during the rapid eye movement, or REM, phase of sleep, when dreaming occurs. About 0.5 percent of adults, mostly men, have a rare condition called REM sleep behavior disorder that causes violent thrashing during sleep.

There are other REM disorders, including nightmare disorder, marked by horribly disturbing dreams. One of the most terrifying parasomnias, Dr. Schenck said, is sleep paralysis, which really does not fit into either of the main categories. It hits people as they are about to fall asleep or are about to wake up, rendering them unable to move.

Clonazepam, an anticonvulsant and anti-anxiety medication, helps up to 90 percent of people with REM sleep behavior disorder, though it makes some people drowsy the following day. Cal Pope, the sleep thrasher in the parasomnia documentary, has taken the pills successfully for years, though Dr. Schenck cautions that when people stop taking the drug, even for a few days, the sleep violence can return immediately.

Recent evidence also suggests that REM sleep behavior disorder may be an early harbinger of Parkinson’s disease or other neurodegenerative disorders linked to defects in the dopamine system in the brain. These clues have prompted some experts to use drugs like pramipexole (Mirapex) that boost dopamine levels to treat people who thrash in their sleep. In a small study published in Sleep Medicine, Dr. Markus H. Schmidt, the medical director of the Ohio Sleep Medicine Institute, found that pramipexole helped nine of 10 volunteers.

Non-REM sleep disorders include the sleep eaters and those with so-called sexsomnia, in which people can hurt themselves from violent masturbation or injure their bed partner with aggressive sexual behavior, all done in a sleep-like state. Unlike REM sleep behavior disorder, non-REM sleep disturbances occur when the patient is not dreaming, and their eyes may be open. As Dr. Schmidt put it, they are in a kind of no-man’s land,. not fully awake nor fully asleep.

Small studies have suggested that topiramate (Topamax), a drug used to treat epilepsy, helps about two-thirds of patients with sleep-related eating disorders, though many cannot tolerate side effects like clouded thinking and tingling in the hands and feet. Dr. Winkelman is enrolling patients in a larger trial of the drug. Many sleep eaters also suffer from restless leg syndrome, a common condition in which people feel an uncontrollable urge to move the legs when going to sleep. Drugs that boost dopamine levels may help both conditions.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that no one really understands what happens during sleep. As Dr. Winkelman explained, “Sleep is not the absence of wake. Your brain is active all night long. People think wake is like a room with the lights on and sleep is like the same room in the dark, but in the darkness a lot is going on.”

By Audrey Williams June
The Chronicle
April 4,2010

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA’s can.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.

“We tend to drop the ball when it comes to giving rich feedback, and in the end this hurts the student,” says Chandru Rajam, who has been a business professor at several universities. “I just thought, “‘There’s got to be a better way.’” He helped found the privately held EduMetry five years ago and remains on its management staff.

Whether Virtual-TA is that better way remains to be seen. Company officials would not say how many colleges use the service, but Mr. Rajam acknowledges that the concept of anonymous and offshore grading is often difficult for colleges to swallow.

Those that have signed up are a mix of for-profit and nonprofit institutions, many of them business schools, both in the United States and overseas. Professors and administrators say they have been won over by on-the-job performance. “This is what they do for a living,” says Ms. Whisenant. “We’re working with professionals.”
Anonymous Expertise

Virtual-TA’s tag line is “Your expert teaching assistants.” These graders, also called assessors, have at least master’s degrees, the company says, and must pass a writing test, since conveying their thoughts on assignments is an integral part of the job. The company declined to provide The Chronicle with names or degrees of assessors. Mr. Rajam says that the company’s focus is on “the process, not the individual,” and that professors and institutions have ample opportunity to test the assessors’ performance during a trial period, “because the proof is in the pudding.”

Assessors are trained in the use of rubrics, or systematic guidelines for evaluating student work, and before they are hired are given sample student assignments to see “how they perform on those,” says Ravindra Singh Bangari, EduMetry’s vice president of assessment services.

Mr. Bangari, who is based in Bangalore, India, oversees a group of assessors who work from their homes. He says his job is to see that the graders, many of them women with children who are eager to do part-time work, provide results that meet each client’s standards and help students improve.

“Training goes on all the time,” says Mr. Bangari, whose employees work mostly on assignments from business schools. “We are in constant communication with U.S. faculty.”

Such communication, part of a multi-step process, begins early on. Before the work comes rolling in, the assessors receive the rubrics that professors provide, along with syllabi and textbooks. In some instances, the graders will assess a few initial assignments and return them for the professor’s approval.

Sometimes professors want changes in the nature of the comments. Ms. Whisenant found those on her students’ papers initially “way too formal,” she says. “We wanted our feedback to be conversational and more direct. So we sent them examples of how we wanted it done, and they did it.”

Professors give final grades to assignments, but the assessors score the papers based on the elements in the rubric and “help students understand where their strengths and weaknesses are,” says Tara Sherman, vice president of client services at EduMetry. “Then the professors can give the students the help they need based on the feedback.”

Mr. Bangari says that colleges use Virtual-TA’s feedback differently, but that he has seen students’ work improve the most when professors have returned assignments to students and asked them to redo the work to incorporate the feedback.

The assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students. In addition, professors receive a summary of comments from each assignment, designed to show common “trouble spots” among students’ answers, among other things. The assessors have no contact with students, and the assignments they grade are stripped of identifying information. Ms. Sherman says most papers are returned in three or four days, which can be key when it comes to how students learn. “You can reinforce certain ideas based on timely feedback,” Mr. Rajam says. “Two or three weeks after an assignment is too long.”
No Classroom Insight

Critics of outsourced grading, however, say the lack of a personal relationship is a problem.

“An outside grader has no insight into how classroom discussion may have played into what a student wrote in their paper,” says Marilyn Valentino, chair of the board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a veteran professor of English at Lorain County Community College. “Are they able to say, ‘Oh, I understand where that came from’ or ‘I understand why they thought that, because Mary said that in class’?”

Ms. Valentino also questions whether the money spent on outsourced graders could be better used to help pay for more classroom instructors.

Professors and on-site teaching assistants, she says, are better positioned to learn enough about individual students to adjust their tone to help each one get his or her ideas across on paper. “Sometimes kidding them works, sometimes being strict and straightforward works,” Ms. Valentino says. “You have to figure out how to get in that student’s mind and motivate them.”

Some professors “could be tempted to not even read” the reports about how students responded to various parts of an assignment, she says, because when “someone else is taking care of the grading,” that kind of information can become easier to ignore.

Terri Friel, dean of the business school at Roosevelt University, says such worries are common but overstated. In her former post as associate dean of administration at Butler University’s business school, she hired EduMetry to help the business school gather assessment data it needed for accreditation — another service the company offers. But Ms. Friel believed that Virtual-TA would not appeal to professors there.

“Faculty have this opinion that grading is their job, … but then they’ll turn right around and give papers to graduate teaching assistants,” Ms. Friel says. “What’s the difference in grading work online and grading it online from India? India has become known as a very good place to get a good business education, and why not make use of that capability?”

Acceptance has been a little easier at West Hills Community College, in Coalinga, Calif., which turned to Virtual-TA to help some students in its online classes get more feedback than instructors for such classes have typically offered. The service is used for one section each of three online courses—criminal justice, sociology, and basic math. Instructors can use it for three to five assignments of their choice per student. Using Virtual-TA for every assignment would be too costly, says Susan Whitener, associate vice chancellor for educational planning. (The price varies by length and complexity, but Virtual-TA suggests to potential clients that each graded assignment will cost $12 per student. That means outsourcing the grading of six assignments for 20 students in a course would cost $1,440.)

But West Hills’ investment, which it wouldn’t disclose, has paid off in an unexpected way. The feedback from Virtual-TA seems to make the difference between a student’s remaining in an online course and dropping out.

“We definitely have a cost-benefit ratio that’s completely in our favor for us to do this,” Ms. Whitener says.

Holly Suarez, an online instructor of sociology at West Hills, says retention in her class has improved since she first used Virtual-TA, two years ago, on weekly writing assignments. Before then, “I would probably lose half of my students,” says Ms. Suarez, who typically teaches 50 students per class.

Because Virtual-TA provides detailed comments about grammar, organization, and other writing errors in the papers, students have a framework for improvement that some instructors may not be able to provide, she says.

And although Ms. Suarez initially was wary of Virtual-TA—”I thought I was being replaced”—she can now see its advantages, she says. “Students are getting expert advice on how to write better, and I get the chance to really focus on instruction.”

At Houston, business majors are now exposed to Virtual-TA both as freshmen and as upperclassmen.

Steven P. Liparulo, associate director at the university’s Writing Center, helped give Virtual-TA its entree when the center decided to stop grading writing samples from the nearly 2,000 students each year planning to major in business. The writing evaluation is used to determine if students need extra help. He saw Virtual-TA as a way for the center’s tutors to concentrate on working one-on-one with students. “That’s just a much better use of their time,” he says.

EduMetry’s Mr. Rajam hopes that more colleges will see these benefits.

“People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching,” says Mr. Rajam, who is director of assurance of learning at George Washington University’s School of Business. “Sometimes people get so caught up in the mousetrap that they forget about the mouse.”

via

ABITARE – 04.06.2010
By: Edward Franken

The wheel of fortune
Every morning, two lives touch where a white drum grazes traffic on an LA freeway.
I saw her again. I thought I recognised those white knuckles clutching the wheel as if a lifetime’s concentration and rage was coming together round the black leather steering wheel. I felt the tenseness of those muscles, the slightly bent arms, the outward-raised elbows, the cold electric shock moving upwards from her shoulders into her neck, the straight back almost rammed into the seat. I’d been watching her for several days, always just a few seconds. The first time was when I hurried out of my room after hearing noises on the stairs, thinking maybe someone wanted to enter Timmy’s room. Timmy was nice to everyone, but he was weak, too fragile, and never closed the door of his new home. He was lonely and could never get used to everything being so clean. Someone might call by to give him something. He had it going and always managed to get some painkillers, which he mixed with wine. When he first arrived, the staff tried to persuade him that he couldn’t bring in all the junk-filled shopping carts he’d been pushing around for years between Fourth and Sixth. Timmy went mad, he fell onto the sidewalk and cut his calf muscle on a piece of broken glass. The center’s entire staff was paralysed. Some were kids fresh from college who never imagined something like that could happen on their first day. Timmy roared that they couldn’t stop a Nam veteran from holding on to his memories. I knew very well this wasn’t true. For years Timmy had got by on a social security number that wasn’t his – he’d probably stolen it from some drunk under the freeway overpass where they hung out during the winter. And then he showed up at the center. I turned away because I didn’t want him to recognise me. He saw me when I looked good, on the top of my game, when no one could touch me, and now I’m here. He got out of the patrol car. He went up to Timmy. He sat down and folded his legs, like he was doing yoga. The fabric of his uniform pants clung to his leg muscles, shining in the sunlight. He spoke slowly to Timmy, trying to calm him down. Timmy let a nurse bandage his leg while he went on talking, nodding his head. His partner called someone on the police radio. For a while everyone just stood there in the morning sunshine.

I looked at the white wall that reflected the sun onto the asphalt, pretending I was studying a column of ants marching out of a crack in the wall. Then a van showed up and took away Timmy’s shopping carts. He talked to the driver. It was a cousin of his who had a garage nearby and would keep Timmy’s stuff there, so he could get to it whenever he wanted. He discovered me that day, by chance. There wasn’t supposed to be a patrol car there, they had arranged everything pretty well, but then two trucks collided a block away and he was on duty. Now I’m here after a few years inside. The case fell under county jurisdiction; otherwise things would have turned out worse. While I was inside they paid me to keep my mouth shut, but when I was released I was no use to them any more. The one who had the hidden microphones was found in a car trunk three weeks later. He was so bloated they couldn’t squeeze him into the casket. The first time I saw her was through the window on the stair landing. Nobody wanted to get into the room where Timmy was snoring on his unmade bed. There were just two nurses who had gone up there to smoke a cigarette. They looked at me angrily because now I had something on them. I turned round to get away from their hatred, and that was when I saw her. She had taken the downtown exit in her black BMW. The sun was shining through the window, so I could see her clearly. I noticed her white hands immediately. The window was open and her light brown hair was blowing in the breeze. She was wearing dark glasses with slender frames and I was struck by her mouth. Her thin lips were closed and she seemed to be smiling. Now I go out on the landing every day, early in the morning, just to catch a glimpse of her. She looks so focused and alert, always choosing the right moment to change lanes, slow down, join the stream of traffic from Santa Ana, and take the 101. She remembers me about how I used to be worried about every detail, about being perfect.

Now I am sure I know her. He doesn’t ask me anything. I don’t have to prove anything to him, like whether I’m good-looking or competent or know how to do my job. He’s there every morning. He seems to be watching me, smiling at me, as if he knows who I am. I’ve had it up to here. They wanted to get rid of me because they said I was only there because I was Creeley’s lover. But it was not true; they deliberately spread the rumour because they wanted me out. In every meeting they asked me twice as many questions as they did the others. All my routines, everything I did was scrutinised by committees and other departments. But I never put a foot wrong, except for getting the job by mistake because the senator’s son had been involved in a hunting accident on the day of the interview. I came from nowhere; a hairdresser’s daughter from Arizona who didn’t even know who her father was but ended up studying law with all those kids from well-off families. When I first met the D.A. he asked me to bring him a coffee. But now, after the case last year, the job is mine and they can’t touch me anymore. Now those four shitheads from Santa Barbara, with their plastic wives, their golf, their horses, their French wines, have to eat my shit. It’s a strange-looking place. Until last year it was covered in scaffolding, then they took it down and you could see a kind of white shell. I like the way it sparkles. When I see it I know I’m almost there, under five minutes barring traffic jams and accidents. I like drifting slowly right out of the Santa Monica lane, looking in the mirror to see if there’s anyone coming up behind me. It’s like time has been suspended for a few moments. There he is, he’s still there. I like his face; I can see from here that he’s got really dark eyes. It’s like he’s staring at me. I’m past the building now; the shell is in my rear-view mirror. I’m just about there. They say Los Angeles is huge, but to me it’s small.

If I stray from my normal route I get lost, it all looks the same to me, too many palm-trees. Everything is close by; home, work, the place where I first realised that I could make it and that I could stop busting my ass for a bunch of incompetents, and all this only a stone’s throw from the white shell. It was a fluke, sheer good luck. I just happened to be on duty the night they nabbed that shipment from the port and we put them all inside and reconstructed the entire network. I still remember Graham’s face when he saw my signature on the first of the warrants and nearly choked on his coffee, the fat bastard. No one said anything, not one word, meek as lambs. There was a snooty, good-looking guy, always dressed like a king, who tried to make me feel inferior. He really got up my nose. He would never cut me any slack, I asked for fifteen and he got six, just because Rosentein defended him. If it hadn’t been for the wire-tapping, I’d still be dealing with foreclosures. And look at me now. Who knows what’s inside that white building? I’m going to find out now.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Arbitare

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: April 5, 2010

According to recent polls, 60 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. The same percentage believe that the U.S. is in long-term decline. The political system is dysfunctional. A fiscal crisis looks unavoidable. There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy.

But if you want to read about them, stop right here. This column is a great luscious orgy of optimism. Because the fact is, despite all the problems, America’s future is exceedingly bright.

Over the next 40 years, demographers estimate that the U.S. population will surge by an additional 100 million people, to 400 million over all. The population will be enterprising and relatively young. In 2050, only a quarter will be over 60, compared with 31 percent in China and 41 percent in Japan.

In his book, “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” über-geographer Joel Kotkin sketches out how this growth will change the national landscape. Extrapolating from current trends, he describes an archipelago of vibrant suburban town centers, villages and urban cores.

The initial wave of suburbanization was sprawling and featureless. Tom Wolfe once observed that you only knew you were in a new town when you began to see a new set of 7-Elevens. But humans need meaningful places, so developers have been filling in with neo-downtowns — suburban gathering spots where people can dine, work, go to the movies and enjoy public space.

Over the next 40 years, Kotkin argues, urban downtowns will continue their modest (and perpetually overhyped) revival, but the real action will be out in the compact, self-sufficient suburban villages. Many of these places will be in the sunbelt — the drive to move there remains strong — but Kotkin also points to surging low-cost hubs on the Plains, like Fargo, Dubuque, Iowa City, Sioux Falls, and Boise.

The demographic growth is driven partly by fertility. The American fertility rate is 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany or Japan, and much higher than China. Americans born between 1968 and 1979 are more family-oriented than the boomers before them, and are having larger families.

In addition, the U.S. remains a magnet for immigrants. Global attitudes about immigration are diverging, and the U.S. is among the best at assimilating them (while China is exceptionally poor). As a result, half the world’s skilled immigrants come to the U.S. As Kotkin notes, between 1990 and 2005, immigrants started a quarter of the new venture-backed public companies.

The United States already measures at the top or close to the top of nearly every global measure of economic competitiveness. A comprehensive 2008 Rand Corporation study found that the U.S. leads the world in scientific and technological development. The U.S. now accounts for a third of the world’s research-and-development spending. Partly as a result, the average American worker is nearly 10 times more productive than the average Chinese worker, a gap that will close but not go away in our lifetimes.

This produces a lot of dynamism. As Stephen J. Rose points out in his book “Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis,” the number of Americans earning between $35,000 and $70,000 declined by 12 percent between 1980 and 2008. But that’s largely because the number earning over $105,000 increased by 14 percent. Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of American adults made more than $100,000 in at least one or two of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three.

As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing — emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Mad Men,” and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.

As the rising generation leads an economic revival, it will also participate in a communal one. We are living in a global age of social entrepreneurship.

In 1964, there were 15,000 foundations in the U.S. By 2001, there were 61,000. In 2007, total private giving passed $300 billion. Participation in organizations like City Year, Teach for America, and College Summit surges every year. Suburbanization helps. For every 10 percent reduction in population density, the odds that people will join a local club rise by 15 percent. The culture of service is now entrenched and widespread.

In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.

Through April 10, 2010

Richardson

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
NY Times Published: April 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES — Jordan Yospe had some notes on the script for “The 28th Amendment,” a thriller about a president and a rogue Special Forces agent on the run. Some of the White House scenes were not detailed enough, Mr. Yospe thought. And, he suggested, the heroes should stop for a snack while they were on the lam.

“There’s no fast-food scene at all, but they have to eat,” he said.

Mr. Yospe was not a screenwriter, not a producer, not even a studio executive. No, Mr. Yospe was a lawyer with the firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. He was meeting with the writer-producer Roberto Orci, who co-wrote “Transformers” and “Star Trek,” to talk about how to include brands in “The 28th Amendment.”

In the past, studio executives made deals to include products in films. Now, with the help of people like Mr. Yospe, writers and producers themselves are cutting the deals often before the movie is cast or the script is fully shaped, like “The 28th Amendment,” which Warner Brothers has agreed to distribute.

Now, having Campbell’s Soup or Chrysler associated with your project can be nearly as important to your pitch as signing Tom Cruise.

“The cost of movies is going up, and that really drives almost everything,” said Jack Epps, the co-writer of “Top Gun” who is chairman of the writing division at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “If you want to catch an executive’s attention right now, it’s not just selling the script, but you’re showing them how to create a brand.”

For the moviegoer, the shift will mean that advertising will become more integral to the movie. The change may not be obvious at first, but the devil is going to wear a lot more Prada.

Manufacturers can stipulate that a clothing label must be tried on “in a positive manner,” or candy or hamburgers have to be eaten “judiciously.” A liquor company might sponsor a film only if there is no underage drinking or if the bar where its product is served is chic rather than seedy.

The more intricately a film involves a product, the more a brand pays for the appearance, offering fees ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million a film.

Writers say this helps them work in brands gracefully, rather than finding out later that studio executives have jammed in products at the last minute. “The pressure to integrate is always there,” Mr. Orci said. “It’s got to be done realistically.”

So writers are taking charge. In the 2009 film “Up in the Air,” Jason Reitman, the writer and director, wanted a real hotel brand for his frequent-flying character.

As a Hilton HHonors Diamond V.I.P. member himself, Mr. Reitman urged the studio to make a deal with Hilton, which offered free lodging for the crew, sets and promotions of the film on everything from key cards to in-room televisions to toll-free hold messages. Hilton worked with the production company to make sure everything from staff uniforms to hotel shuttles was portrayed correctly.

Deals like that mean lower-budget movies like “Up in the Air” can be made. They also mean movie viewers are increasingly paying to see more elaborately constructed advertising.

That is one reason that screenwriters’ groups like Writers Guild of America-West have objected to the practice, and some writers are worried about further product placement.

“I think it’s lazy writing,” said Mary Gallagher, a screenwriter and instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Product placement certainly is not new — the Lumière brothers agreed to include Lever Brothers’ Sunlight soap in the 1896 film “Washing Day in Switzerland.”

But it has become far more aggressive on television, where Mr. Yospe cut his teeth, wedging brands into shows like “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” while he was general counsel at Mark Burnett Productions.

“People were blaming me personally for ‘Apprentice,’ destroying television with so many brands,” he said. Where the original “Apprentice” contestants were selling lemonade, he said, by the second season, they were producing M&M’s candy. “You start running out of things creatively to do if you have no resources, no money,” he said.

While Mr. Yospe often writes dialogue, in the meeting with Mr. Orci, he was suggesting types of advertisers to include. (Mr. Orci’s father, Roberto Orci, who is president of the advertising agency Acento, and his staff joined the meeting to discuss how brands might help market the movie.)

“You’ve written Gray has a Dodge Ram,” Mr. Yospe began, discussing a character. “Does it have to be a Dodge?’

“What’s wrong with Dodge? What have you got against Dodge?” said Mr. Orci, a soft-spoken 36-year-old.

The group began debating. In the script, Gray is described as “soldier-fit” but with “psychic damage.” Could someone like that drive, say, a Lincoln Navigator?

“That’s a mom’s car,” moaned Genesis Capunitan, an Acento executive.

Once Mr. Yospe gets clearance from the writer-producers, Mr. Orci and Alex Kurtzman, he will strike a few types of deals.

One is a straight payment, which usually runs in the mid-six to mid-seven figures, Mr. Yospe said. The second is a barter arrangement, where, say, a hotel puts up the cast and crew in exchange for being featured in the film. In the third kind, companies help market the film, as Hilton and American Airlines did for “Up in the Air.”

Mr. Yospe, who takes a percentage of the integration fees, said he was happy to work with studios, and he provided a direct path to writer-producers that a studio might not get. “Major talent like Bob Orci has it in his contract that he doesn’t have to do that sort of stuff,” Mr. Yospe said.

Indeed, Mr. Orci had mixed reactions to Mr. Yospe’s suggestions. Involving a fast-food restaurant was difficult — would a missing American president order a triple Whopper with cheese without attracting attention? One of Mr. Yospe’s ideas, though, he thought was strong.

On Page 16 of the draft, Lt. Col. Madigan Gray, the special forces officer, flirts with his girlfriend, Anna, at the bar where she works. In the next scene, the two are in bed. “It’s love,” the script says. “This woman is Gray’s anchor to emotionality he keeps locked down.”

Which is why he’s not thrilled to say, the script continues, “I’m going away again.”

Where the writers saw an anchor to emotionality, Mr. Yospe saw a selling opportunity. Could they add a brand-name trinket that Anna gives Gray as a good-luck charm, something like a bottle opener from her bar, he asked. They could charge even more if Gray used the keepsake later on.

“That’s cool,” Mr. Orci said, nodding. “If they can have that trinket in bars with the movie’s name on it? That’s smooth.”

“And it adds a little emotion,” Mr. Yospe said.

“Look at you!” said Mr. Orci, chuckling.

“Look at me,” Mr. Yospe said.