The sun sets on a building at Arcosanti, an “urban laboratory” established in the 1970s in the Arizona desert. John Burcham for The New York Times

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
NY Times Published: February 15, 2012

THE pilgrimage began with a black-and-white handbill on a campus bulletin board. At the top was a sketch of an ultramodern compound rising above a desert canyon: a city upon a hill.

Next came the manifesto. “If you are truly concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion, land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation, intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment,” the poster began. Then, at the bottom, the remedy: “Join us.”

Occupying the middle of nowhere must have appealed to the students, architects and seekers of the 1970s who founded Arcosanti, an “urban laboratory” in the desert 70 miles north of Phoenix. After following a washboard road to the desolate camp, they would find a kind of kibbutz. Here, in workshops, they might build a 30-foot-high concrete vault or plant olive trees or cast bells in silt to sell for construction money.

Above all, they were able to join an ongoing colloquy with the city’s visionary designer, Paolo Soleri. In a cosmic language of his own invention (filled with phrases like the “omega seed” and “miniaturization-complexity-duration”), Mr. Soleri proselytized for a carless society in harmony with the natural world. Over the course of 40 years, some 7,000 souls would come and go.

For the most part, though, they left. And last fall, Mr. Soleri joined this group himself, retiring at age 92 as the president of the parent Cosanti Foundation.

Now, Arcosanti is experiencing its own version of Cuba’s “special period”: a transitional era of privation and possibility. And the man who would be Raúl Castro in this analogy is the foundation’s new president, Jeff Stein, 60, formerly dean of the Boston Architectural College.

As a resident of Arcosanti in its heyday, “he has all the qualities to be the guardian of the faith,” said Michel Sarda, 69, a foundation trustee and a publisher of Mr. Soleri’s books.

But if Mr. Stein can’t miraculously transform Arcosanti into a dense eco-city for 5,000 residents — and that was always Mr. Soleri’s plan — what should it become instead?

Mr. Sarda speaks enthusiastically about building a retirement tower for golf-shy retirees and the project’s alumni. Mr. Stein’s immediate proposals are more modest: a canopy for the outdoor amphitheater, a renovated commercial bakery, a storage unit for Mr. Soleri’s collection of fantastical architectural models and a half-dozen new apartments.

Whatever Mr. Stein may wish to do, for now it will have to be accomplished with an operating budget of less than $1 million. That annual sum includes payroll, utilities, food, building materials, insurance: everything. It is, by his estimation, about a 10th of what the community needs to build new housing and attract new residents and businesses. That is, to turn a somewhat derelict complex of a dozen-odd concrete structures into something more like a city.

His first job, perhaps, is to become an ambassador: to remind the world that Arcosanti exists as a going concern. Visitors (and some 25,000 stop here each year) often observe that this city of the future seems more like a city of the past. Part Mos Eisley, part Ozymandias. But that description fails to account for the 56 inspired souls who continue to live and work and dream in the Arcosanti that exists today.

One such latter-day disciple is Maureen Connaughton, 37, who until last year was a project manager in Philadelphia for a specialty fabrication company. On a cold Tuesday night in January, Ms. Connaughton was sitting with Mr. Stein and a few dozen of her fellow Arconauts in the dining hall, known as Crafts III in the local dialect, tucking into a community meal of breaded pork chops and fried tofu. They were bundled in sweaters and hats and Carhartt jackets. Mr. Soleri may have shown a genius for passive solar design, but at Arcosanti he didn’t really do central heat.

If you were an optimist, like Ms. Connaughton, who lives in an apartment beneath the cafe and dining hall, you might note that it’s easy to sleep in the cool Arizona winter. Yes, the building’s aging concrete has a habit of flaking onto your bed. But “what you get in exchange is just so worth it,” she said. “To have this big round window and look out at the canyon.”

At a fall building workshop here in 2010, she discovered how much she liked working with her hands. This is the opposite of the paper shuffling (or, worse, paperless shuffling) that defines the modern office job. Back in Philadelphia, Ms. Connaughton loaded up the car (“I need a lot less stuff than I did before,” she said) and headed west to cast ceramic wind bells.

“I really heard all the good and bad things people say about it being set in the past,” she said of Arcosanti, sipping a $2 glass of wine from the cafe’s tiny liquor cabinet. “And I want to see it set in the present. Because it’s my present.”

DURING Mr. Soleri’s long tenure, Arcosanti evolved into a surprising anachronism: a company town. The product line? Handmade bells and heady theories about imaginary cities, or “arcologies.” Ordinary capitalism — independent businesses and privately held homes — was anathema.

Mr. Soleri never bought into the standard American real estate hustle, Mr. Sarda recalled. “He would say, ‘Developer: it starts with ‘D,’ like ‘devil’ and ‘demon,’ ” Mr. Sarda said. “I cannot say that Paolo is a man of compromise.”

Or as one longtime foundry worker put it, “Who ever tried to build a city by selling art?”

At the most basic level, Mr. Stein seems to share Mr. Soleri’s knack for avoiding personal wealth. “The typical American c.e.o. makes 325 times what the company’s average worker earns,” Mr. Stein said. As the new director, “I’m two times the average salary.” And at Arcosanti, the average salary is minimum wage.

Yet smart young volunteers continue to trek here from faraway places like Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Chile, Italy and Jordan, paying to enroll in the construction workshops. A few of these folks will decide to stay, taking a job on site.

The commute can’t be beat. The Wi-Fi signal is strong. And residents pay just $160 a month for room and board. Yes, the room might be an unheated 8-by-8-foot cube in the psychedelic shantytown known as Construction Camp. But this is part of the experience, or the experiment, or whatever you want to call it.

“There are intentional communities all over the country,” Mr. Stein said. “This isn’t one of them. It’s almost an accidental community. People were drawn here by Paolo Soleri and the power of his ideas. And by the beauty of the place.”

The architectural intern Youngsoo Kim, 32, followed the beacon of Mr. Soleri’s writing to this sparse outpost from the megalopolis of Seoul.

On a bright Wednesday morning, Mr. Kim and his colleague Yasaman Esmaili were stretching a measuring tape across the curved concrete entryways of the East Crescent. This development (unfinished, of course) includes an outdoor amphitheater, administrative offices, a rec room, a handful of residences, the Soleri archives and the scenic guest quarters called the Sky Suite.

Though the cubes and apses of Arcosanti have been sketched and photographed in countless books and exhibitions, the site and building utilities are more of a mystery. In simpler terms, no one seems to have the foggiest idea where to find a light switch.

Prompted by Mr. Stein, the pair has been trying to remedy this situation, assembling up-to-date building information models. The construction “could have been done much better,” Mr. Kim said. “But it was also meaningful for it to be built by the people who learned the concept.”

The great masses of concrete act as a thermal sink, absorbing heat during the molten days and then radiating warmth at night. But the compound’s heating, windows and insulation — the foundations of most green building — seem to have been an afterthought. Ms. Esmaili, a 26-year-old graduate of the University of Tehran, hopes to study these systems while she waits to hear from Ph.D. programs.

Mr. Soleri originally envisioned a series of greenhouses that would occupy the hill below the complex. Hot air would rise from these conservatories into a complex of tunnels that could heat the East Crescent. At present, two trial greenhouses have been finished. For now, a single volunteer has been charged with growing what she can. For better or worse, the national food-gardening craze seems to have skipped Arcosanti.

Meanwhile, the project has only dabbled in popular technologies like solar panels, rain barrels and composting toilets, off-the-shelf gear that can be applied on a small scale.

“I should have them,” Mr. Soleri said during a recent visit to the project. Yet for most Americans, he maintained, chasing these technologies can become a game unto itself. “We are passionate collectors of gadgetries,” he said. “We can’t resist.”

Mr. Soleri likes to say that he “is a scatterbrain at this point.” But he still projects a commanding presence. Upon meeting a visitor outside on a frigid morning, he raised his hand and waved it to the side, as if to say, “Kindly step out of my sunlight!”

He seemed more comfortable after an espresso, back in his former apartment, a vaguely austere 700-square-foot studio with a two-burner cooktop and an open shower next to the toilet. The paint and the carpeting, now 30 years old, seem to be original. But then, no one ever accused Mr. Soleri of personal extravagance. As Mr. Kim said, “His humbleness and frugality shocked me.”

For several years, Mr. Soleri has lived in a tumbledown ranch at the nonprofit’s Cosanti campus, on the outskirts of Scottsdale. Though his former apartment now belongs to the new chief, Mr. Stein knocked politely at the front door. He worked alongside Mr. Soleri for eight years, in the 1970s and ’80s. And if he has a skeptical thought about his mentor’s legacy, you won’t hear him voice it in public.

Mr. Soleri, however, will discuss his marvelous, flawed creation with disarming frankness. Has Arcosanti, for instance, lived up to its potential?

“No. Don’t be silly,” he said, and then laughed. “If you become a writer or you become a sculptor or a scientist, most of the time you’re able to generate yourself a means to carry on.” An anti-commercial architect, by contrast, must depend on selling his creation to investors and tycoons.

The upside is that Mr. Soleri’s theories about pollution, waste, energy depletion — all the plagues listed on the poster — have never been more compelling in the marketplace of ideas.

With the interminable recession, Mr. Kim said, “I think there are lots of Americans out there ready to simplify.”

He has coined his own Soleri-like catchphrase: “the banality of consumption.” And he has advanced Mr. Soleri’s ideas in a compilation, “Lean Linear City: Arterial Arcology,” just out from Cosanti Press. Perhaps, he said, the book will influence the cities rising from bare earth in India and China.

Nadia Begin, 41, an architect and planning coordinator at the project for almost 18 years, seemed to speak for the whole community when she said, “Arcosanti needs to be part of the conversation.”

Yet it’s hard to argue that this skeletal settlement represents the city of tomorrow, said Dennis Frenchman, 63, who has created large-scale developments in South Korea, China and Spain, and is a professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Frenchman expressed amazement at the beauty and intricacy of Mr. Soleri’s drawings, and the boldness of his invention. But “I don’t think it’s taken seriously as an urban model,” he said. “It’s really a historical curiosity” — a place whose beautiful handicrafts and Utopian spirit recall a Shaker village. The Shakers, he noted, have their furniture, the Arconauts have their bells.

Arcosanti is like a Shaker village in one other regard: the community has never bloomed with children. At last count, the number was four.

Ms. Begin gave birth to two sons at home, in her arresting apartment above the bronze foundry, where the slanting silt-cast walls create a kind of sunken space capsule with porthole windows and skylights.

But Mr. Soleri, the master of frugality, didn’t design a lot of spacious three-bedroom units. Which explains why Ms. Begin and her husband sleep next to a crib that holds their 4-year-old son.

ARCOSANTI needs children. And new living quarters. And working greenhouses. And people to plant them. Above all, this bulwark against modern capital needs money.

Just about everyone is hoping that Mr. Stein, with his management experience and professional network, will be able to revitalize Arcosanti. At Taliesin West, another countercultural colony with quirky buildings to maintain and tourists to serve, the succession process has dragged on for more than 50 years, since Frank Lloyd Wright’s death in 1959.

Jeffrey Grip, 64, a management consultant who is the chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation board, laid out the options for a place like Arcosanti. “You can become essentially a museum: preserve and display what was created there,” Mr. Grip said. “Or you can become an educational foundation that furthers the works” of a great architect. A third path, he said, is to hope that a new mission will metamorphose in the chrysalis of the magical buildings.

If that future doesn’t materialize, what’s the worst-case scenario for Arcosanti?

“You’re looking at it,” Mr. Stein said.

His quip is less pessimistic than it may seem. Everything here is paid for, he said. “We don’t have a mortgage.” So even in its current state, Arcosanti must be more practical than the 460,000 housing units sitting empty in Arizona, according to recent census data.

Let’s say that the shuttered bakery in the Crafts III building never reopens in a renovated form — one of Mr. Stein’s priorities. Instead, it continues to be a gathering spot where Ms. Connaughton, the ceramist, meets friends after dinner. She likes to bake treats for visitors and tourists: giant sheets of lemon bars and peanut butter cookies.

On a recent night, a half-dozen friends joined her there, clustering around the warmth of the commercial oven. A few students from the Kansas City Art Institute, here for a two-week residency, were finishing sketches they had begun that morning. Their professor, who lived at Arcosanti in the 1970s, recalled bacchanals at the Construction Camp. Something about a nude public bath and an indoor bonfire.

A few decades removed from those madcap days, the youth of Arcosanti have graduated to a never-ending game of Othello. It took this happy crowd two hours to finish a six-pack. Ms. Connaughton spooned out another batch of cookies while Anita Carter, June Cash’s sister, crooned over the boombox. When the evening wound down, home was just downstairs.

For decades now, visitors have asked what it would take to finish Arcosanti. Maybe it’s time for a different question. Why doesn’t everyone choose to live this way?

”Invented Acoustical Tools”
Instruments 1966 – 2012
February 17th 2012 – April 14th 2012
Opening reception on
Friday, February 17, 2012
7:00 – 9:00 pm

Daniel Buchholz

Midnight Union Avenue, 2012
Flashe on linen with neon
93 x 79 inches

Through March 10, 2012

CSU Bakersfield

By STEVE LOHR
NY Times Published: February 11, 2012

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.

In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”

Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

Untitled (Yellow Table) 2012
31″x24″x4″
Alder, Maple, Maple ply, steel, enamel, patina

Shop Exhibit upcoming March 2012

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 12, 2012

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.

Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.

For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?

Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.

Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.

But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.

So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.

Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

Ms. O’Connor tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 to protest child abuse in the Catholic Church. She told The Times that she wants to be known only for two things she remains proud of: “making music and fighting the Vatican.” David Corio for The New York Times

By RAVI SOMAIYA
NY Times Published: February 10, 2012

OUTSIDE Sinead O’Connor’s whitewashed home here, on a windswept beachfront overlooking the misty Irish Sea, there are two talismans. One, a knee-high statue of the Virgin Mary stands with her arms beatifically spread, silently welcoming visitors. The other, a crudely taped-up sign, written so emphatically in ballpoint that the paper is almost torn through, is directed at the reporters who have besieged the singer, her four children, three dogs and a cat in recent weeks. It reads: “Dearest loving hacks. This is your quote: Rock ’n’ Roll!”

When Ms. O’Connor opened the door on a recent afternoon, wearing a black T-shirt that read “Property of Jesus” under a long, black leather coat, a wool hat pulled down low over her blazing eyes, she sounded weary. “I’m very physically tired in a way that I’ve never been in my life,” she explained. “It’s almost like my blood feels like lead.”

The trouble began, she said, when she decided that after more than two decades in the news — most memorably for tearing up a picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 to protest child abuse in the Catholic Church — she wouldn’t let the world “stop me being me,” or deny herself the instant pleasures of the Internet.

She took to her Web site last summer and advertised for a man. She was so starved for sex, she wrote, in very explicit terms, that “inanimate objects are starting to look good.” On Dec. 8, her 45th birthday, she married one of her respondents, an Irish youth drug counselor named Barry Herridge, then 38, at A Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas (the same place that Britney Spears began her 55-hour marriage to Jason Allen Alexander in 2004) and all-but live-tweeted the wedding night. They split days later. Only to reconcile. Only to split again. Now, she said, they are back together and firmly in love. Every stage of the relationship, she said — blaming the loneliness of celebrity, misplaced strategy and “too much adrenaline, too much excitement, too much everything” — was tweeted and blogged in almost real time, complete with pictures and occasional calls to a reporter or a radio station, fueling a barrage of snarky headlines.

She is not the first celebrity to have found the light of rock ’n’ roll impulse focused to incandescence by a smartphone or a laptop. John Mayer and Courtney Love, among others, have brought on their own scandals a kilobyte at a time. Charlie Sheen’s meltdown last year, narrated moment by moment on Twitter, complete with pithy catch phrases, would have been far less compelling by fax. But perhaps none has exploited the potential of constant connectivity for public cataclysm like Ms. O’Connor. She has long been making news with dramatic turns — she was ordained a priest in an independent Catholic group in 1999; she came out as a lesbian in 2000, then changed her mind — but within the bounds of interviews and public statements.

Online she has been governed only by her whims, however dark. On Jan. 11 she tweeted a cry for help, seeking a local psychiatrist. “I’m really unwell,” she wrote, “and in danger.” She had boarded a flight to America, to perform at the Golden Globe Awards, with pills in her bag and tried to overdose, she said in an interview. Even those who had mocked her online excesses paused when the news emerged.

At the same time buzz of an artistic return to form was building around her. In November she performed music from her coming album at a small concert in Hackney, in East London. John Aizlewood, the influential reviewer for The London Evening Standard, described it as “spine-tingling, stomach-tightening,” and gave it five stars. “Sinead O’Connor has seemed lost for some time,” he wrote. “On this evidence, she’s found herself again.”

The new album “How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?,” set for release on Feb. 20 by MRI, was recorded in an intimate studio in the London home of John Reynolds, her former husband, the father of her eldest child, and a longtime collaborator. It blends idealism and cynicism, love and loss, in equal measure. At its best, as on the mesmerizing “Reason With Me,” it matches the intensity and drive of her acclaimed 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra” (Ensign/Chrysalis).

“When Sinead sings a song, she really means the words she sings,” Mr. Reynolds said. “She feels it.”

Ms. O’Connor, those who know her said, is almost pathologically open. “She’s a very emotional person, and being an emotional person in this world is sometimes very difficult,” Mr. Reynolds said. “But it’s why her music connects with people. She says what she feels, sometimes painfully.”

Ms. O’Connor would not discuss the suicide attempt further, hoping to protect her children from the specifics. But she wanted to examine the rest “because I don’t want it to be like Britney Spears, where there’s this silence and people can say whatever they want and label it.” She is called crazy, she said, and it hurts: “It’s a term of abuse as bad as racism or homophobia.” She admitted herself to a psychiatric facility after the incident. When she left, she promised she would not read or watch any news. Now, when things get overwhelming, she imagines herself under a waterfall, being cleansed of her worries, or talks to a therapist. She is learning, she said, to accept that she is a good person.

Over coffee at a pub Ms. O’Connor is erudite, profane and confident, until she is not. At one point she asks aloud whether she is good or bad. Her gray eyes, with a flash of yellow and brown in their center, fill with defiance when she talks about the Irish news media and her marriage. They soften when she discusses her children, for whom she pockets cookies to take home.

She is now wrestling with a dichotomy, she said. Inside her house — in a part of County Wicklow she’d prefer not to name — amid a riot of children’s toys and statues of Jesus (there’s also a poster of the “Native American 10 Commandments” and a guitar bearing the Rastafarian flag), she is calm, focused on her young children, 5 and 8, and their older half-siblings, 16 and 24. Outside its walls, she must reconcile, she said, the unfiltered impulsiveness that has defined her career — the reservoir of raw emotion that fed her tears during the filming of her video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” — with the needs of her family.

But though her recent actions and their impact on those she loves preoccupy her, “I don’t really think I have anything to apologize for,” she said. The judgment of her behavior, she said, is tied to her gender: “ ‘Here’s this woman, she’s not behaving like a woman is supposed to behave, so she must be either mad or bad or a rebel or controversial.’ Whereas if I was a fellow it wouldn’t be up for question whether there’s anything to apologize for. No one asks Mick Jagger if he calmed down.”

To some extent, she said, her life is still defined by abuse as a child at the hands of her mother. She and her siblings were “beaten up very severely with every kind of implement you can imagine,” she told Spin magazine in 1991, and told they were dirty and worthless. “Merely the sounds of my mother’s feet,” she said, “were enough to send us into spasms of complete terror.” In 2007 she told Oprah Winfrey that she had bipolar disorder. “But that was misdiagnosed,” she said now. “What I have is post-traumatic stress from that abuse, that I deal with a day at a time.”

She dealt with those issues in public after her hit Prince song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” topped American and British charts in 1990, making her a bona-fide star and shaven-headed idol to many women. Her 1990 album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” (Ensign/Chrysalis), sold millions. But in later years she announced a form of retirement from pop music, put out experiments in traditional Irish folk and reggae and learned bel canto. She returned to Ireland, after stints in London and Los Angeles, “so my children can be near their fathers,” she said.

When she took to her blog and to Twitter last year, she said, she had come to terms with who she was. Ms. O’Connor said, “Musicians were sent to earth to help people, so we have to be imperfect, or how will they identify with us?” She had, she said, “adopted a policy of not acting any differently to my next-door neighbor.”

Her manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who has known her for nearly 25 years, said that he knew he would not, could not, stop her from expressing herself. “So I just tried to look away and think of all the things she has achieved with that same openness, like risking her career taking on the Catholic Church,” he said. “The same thing that makes her great, that generates joy and fulfillment in her work, has also caused great pain and difficulty for her. It is incredibly painful to see her living her life the way she lives it sometimes.”

In the dark days at the start of January, Ms. O’Connor said, she was cast into despair by an Irish newspaper that used her words online to target her husband. “It is a goldfish bowl,” she explained, “and I can’t get away from being me. Even in the nuthouse, they were afraid to take me in, because I’m Sinead O’Connor.”

She wants the same things as everyone else: a happy relationship, contented children, a blooming career. “I want to be like any other person, but I’ll have to accept that I can’t be, because sometimes me being me hurts other people,” she said. As visitors left her home, she gave wide-open, un-self-conscious hugs of farewell. In the days following the interview she text-messaged a reporter new thoughts that had occurred to her, impolitic or not. But her new Twitter account is locked and accessible only to those she knows.

“It’s not fun anymore,” she said during the interview. No one who judges her, she said in a text message, has “any inkling of the level of loneliness which would lead” to her missteps. But she will stick to her vow not to overshare online because, she wrote in another message, she wants to be known only for two things she remains proud of: “making music and fighting the Vatican.” Nothing more.

When Richard Handl was arrested for attempting to split the atom on his stove, he joined a growing band of home experimenters cooking up all kinds of trouble behind the kitchen door. Photograph: Felix Odell for the Guardian

By: Jon Ronson
The Guardian UK
Published Friday 3 February 2012

Ängelholm is a pretty southern Swedish town, famed for its clay cuckoo manufacturing, a clay cuckoo being a kind of ocarina, which is a kind of flute. The crime rate here is practically zero. Except one of its residents was last year arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen. His name is Richard Handl and he buzzes me into his first-floor flat.

I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There’s been a spate of them this past year or two.

I glance into Richard’s kitchen and recognise his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it’s clean now.

“So, you aren’t currently doing any experiments?” I ask him.

“I’m banned,” he says.

“By whom?” I ask.

“My landlord,” he says. “And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.”

Then we sit on the sofa and he tells me his story.

When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. “I had friends. We’d go partying. I have Asperger’s, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I’d make solutions that changed colour. When I was 13, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father’s pharmacy. He had sulphuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting.”

His father assumed Richard would grow up to be a pharmacist, too. He was, Richard says, happy and proud of his son, as it was his dream to raise a boy to follow in his footsteps. But something unexpected happened to Richard 14 years ago, when he was 17: “I became very aggressive to people,” he says.

“In what way?” I ask.

“It was towards my father,” Richard says. “Sometimes I hit him.”

“In response to what?”

“Very small things. Like if he was late and didn’t call.”

“Was he worried about you?”

“Yes, he was quite worried about me. He took me to the hospital, so I could talk to psychiatrists. They said I was depressed. And I had some paranoid disorder.”

“And all this just came from nowhere?”

“It just happened,” he shrugs.

Richard worked in a factory for four years, but his disorder meant he spent most of his time in his flat. His love of chemistry continued undimmed, but the possibility of him becoming a pharmacist had practically gone. So, instead, he decided one day to start a collection – he would scour the internet and buy an ampoule of every chemical element. He quickly realised he had to downgrade his ambition. “There are some very unstable radioactive elements, like polonium and francium, that last just a couple of minutes and then decay. They’re impossible to get.”

But he persevered with the others.

“Do you have any of them still here?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “Would you like to see them?”

He disappears into his bedroom and returns holding a basket filled with ampoules of gold and silver and platinum and thallium and beryllium. Some are solid blocks, some glittering shards, others shining slivers. The basket looks like a treasure chest.

“This is the most amazing one,” Richard says, picking up an ampoule marked “Cesium”. It looks like solid gold. “Watch,” he says. “If you warm it up…”

He closes his fist around it for 30 seconds. Then he shows it to me again. It has melted. We both look at it, amazed, as if we’ve just witnessed a magic trick.

“And then,” Richard says, “I began to collect radioactive elements like radium and uranium and americium.”

Richard was Googling “americium” one day when he found a story, in Harper’s magazine, chronicling the life of a Michigan boy named David Hahn who grew up in the 1990s. There was something about Hahn with which Richard identified. Both boys spent their childhoods blowing things up in the garden. Hahn once turned up at a Boy Scouts meeting in Golf Manor, Michigan, with a bright orange face due to an accidental overdose of canthaxanthin. Hahn got expelled from camp for dismantling a smoke detector (he was trying to extract the americium – pretty much everything you need to split the atom you can find on eBay or in smoke detectors and antique luminous dial clocks).

Those were the days before the internet, so getting hold of information about how to build a nuclear reactor was more complicated for Hahn than it would turn out to be for Richard. He learned how to do it by writing to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and pretending to be a physics teacher. Did they have any pamphlets on how to split the atom?

“Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium, Professor Hahn,” they wrote back.

And that’s how David Hahn managed to turn his potting shed into a nuclear reactor.

It wasn’t long before the Michigan police cottoned on, and in June 1995, 11 men in protective suits descended on the dangerously irradiated shed. He was shut down.

Sixteen years later, in Ängelholm, Richard read the Hahn story and felt inspired to try it out himself. This is how Richard went about trying to split the atom. First, he got a saucepan. Into it he put his radioactive elements – the americium and radium. He mixed them up with sulphuric acid and beryllium, and turned on the stove. The mixture bubbled up crazily, splashing all over the cooker and the floor. He quickly turned off the hob and posted a picture of the carnage on his blog, with the caption “The Meltdown!”.

His plan, he says, was to repeat the experiment, but this time collect into a test tube the neutrons that were emanating from the concoction. Then he’d have fired the “neutron ray” at a chunk of uranium sealed in a glass marble.

“What does the neutron ray look like?” I ask.

“It doesn’t look like anything,” Richard says. “You can’t see it.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“You have to measure it with a Geiger counter,” he says.

“So what you’re saying is, you’d point the test tube filled with neutrons at the uranium marble, and that’s what would split the atom?”

“Yes,” Richard says.

Richard never did collect the neutrons into a test tube. After the meltdown, he decided to email the Swedish Radiation Authority to double-check that what he was doing was above board.

“Hello!” read his email of 18 July 2011. “I’m very interested in nuclear physics and radiation. I have planned a project to build a primitive nuclear reactor. Now I’m wondering if I’m violating any laws doing so?”

They emailed him back on 11 August: “Hi. The short answer to your question is that if you build a nuclear reactor without permission, you are violating strict laws. It is a criminal offence and can lead to fines or imprisonment for up to two years.”

Richard was surprised. “The amount I had was very small,” he says, “so far away from the amount needed to make a dirty bomb or something like that. To get it to explode, you must have something called a critical mass, which is 50kg of radium or 6kg of plutonium. I had 5g. The worst that could have happened was I might have got radiation in me.”

“And got cancer years later?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Yes.”

Even though it took the radiation authority three weeks to respond to Richard’s email, everything moved very quickly after that. Within days, they’d turned up at his flat with the police.

“They told me to get out with my hands up. They scanned me with Geiger counters. There was nothing. They measured the whole apartment. They said I was arrested for a crime against the radiation safety law.”

And that’s it, so far. Sixteen weeks have passed and nothing has happened to him, besides making headlines all over the world.

“I don’t regret it,” he says, “because it was exciting. I’m sad I can’t do it any more.”

We glance at his basket of elements. “There are no other experiments you could do with these?” I ask.

“I can,” he says, “but I don’t want to.”

“What could you do?” I ask.

“I could…” Richard pauses. “This thallium is very, very poisonous. If you break the ampoule, it would start to react with the air and oxidise. Thallium oxide. Very poisonous. If you get it on your fingers, you can die.”

“But you would never consider…”

“No, no,” Richard says. He pauses. “Actually, I’m thinking of trying again to become a pharmacist. I’m going to read up some courses from the high school and begin to study in the university.”

Back home, I remember the moment Richard shrugged, unconcerned, at the possibility of developing cancer from his experiments. This happens a lot with home experimenters. Something clicks in them and their science becomes more important to them than their safety. It happened to the Brazilian priest Father Adelir de Carli, who in April 2008 strapped 1,000 helium party balloons to a chair and lifted off from the port city of Paranagua.

He’d been inspired by a truck driver named Larry Walters who in 1982 had attached 45 weather balloons to a chair and soared to 16,000ft, waving at passing Delta and TWA pilots before landing 20 miles away in Long Beach. “The more I look at it, the more I’m glad I did it,” Walters told the New York Times at the time. “It’s something for when I’m an old man. So many people have dreams and they never follow through on them.”

Twenty-six years later, Father de Carli was so captivated by the experiment, he reportedly forgot to check the weather forecast, and to learn how his GPS worked. He was blown off course and drowned.

Then there were the two racing car drivers who, in the summer of 2010, poured four gallons of methanol into a barrel in a parking lot in Washington State, sat on top and lit the fuse. They were envisaging a “barrel ride”. It was supposed to slide across the parking lot. Instead it exploded. One of them, a former American Sprint Car Series national champion called Travis Rilet, suffered 70% burns. The other, an Australian crew member called Tyson Perez, died.

In Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, a man named Paul Moran was jailed for three months last October for accidentally setting fire to his block of flats while trying to turn his faeces into gold. He had left the stuff on an electric heater and it caught light.

“It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed,” the judge said when sentencing him.

But no home experiment has gone wrong quite so heartbreakingly as that of the Pambakian family. The Pambakians live in a cottage very close to my own house, so one day I stop on my way home to have a look. There’s a Volvo parked in the driveway. In the boot is a bag filled with medical supplies, bandages, some Brasso, some old wellies, a duvet, all jumbled up. The wing mirror is stuck together with tape. There’s stuff here that would save your life if administered by a medical professional, but it’s all quite haphazard.

Dr Yvonne Pambakian won’t talk to me about the tragedy that occurred inside the cottage. So instead I sit on the press bench of her General Medical Council fitness to practice hearing and listen to her testimony and cross-examination.

Five years ago, on 20 June 2007, she made an emergency call from the cottage. Her 22-year-old sister, Yolanda Cox, had gone into anaphylactic shock. When the paramedics arrived, they asked Pambakian what had happened.

“I gave her a drug for her asthma,” she told them.

Yolanda was rushed to the Royal Free hospital where a doctor, Alexander Mackay, asked her and her mother to explain exactly what they’d injected into her.

“They wouldn’t say,” he later told the coroner. “They said I didn’t need to know anything and the drug was extremely safe.” It seemed they were trying to protect some secret ingredient they’d been developing. “Some time later,” Mackay told the coroner, “they brought in paper information in two files.” The family were, in fact, injecting each other in their kitchen with an experimental drug of their invention, which they’d called B71.

Yolanda died a week later, on 27 June 2007.

Pambakian and her mother, she tells the hearing, began their experiments back in the mid-90s, pooling their areas of expertise (she’s a GP, her mother an immunologist). One day, they had a kind of eureka moment. To summarise it: some diabetes sufferers have an autoantibody that’s responsible for their resistance to insulin, and the Pambakians supposed that, as insulin resistance is so uniquely destructive, if they could derive a peptide from the autoantibody, it would be uniquely curative. So they did, and they called it B71. They began posting patent applications. B71 would treat – and this is just a small sample – asthma, diabetes, psoriasis, eczema, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, depression, Parkinson’s, migraines, multiple sclerosis, premature baldness in men, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, cystic fibrosis, insomnia, cancer and HIV.

They managed to persuade some Dutch money people to bankroll the business and embarked on two clinical trials in the Netherlands. That was in 2005. For two years after that, nothing happened. The whole thing seemed stuck in limbo.

And then one day in April 2007, they got an email. A woman called Caroline, a friend of one of the Dutch backers, had just been told she was dying of cancer. She was 33, with four children and – according to doctors at the Royal Marsden hospital – had only three months to live. “If there’s the remotest chance the drug might prove beneficial…” the backer emailed.

So on Good Friday 2007, Pambakian travelled to Caroline’s home, with a vial of B71 in her bag.

“You wanted to try out a theory,” GMC prosecutor Stephen Brassington says at the hearing.

“I wanted to offer her a treatment,” Pambakian snaps back.

So she prayed, and then she injected Caroline with a mammoth 6mg of the drug – a dose four times higher than they had given the Dutch trial volunteers. Caroline survived the injection, but later died of her cancer.

Brassington is incredulous. This is not how science works, he says. Science is all about assiduously gathering data, about treading gently, about conducting delicate clinical trials.

“I didn’t have safety data in thousands of people, that is true,” Pambakian admits. The way she says “thousands” is fierce, irritated, superior, as if the GMC panel live so far inside the box, they can never understand the kind of maverick thinking that changes the medical world.

When Pambakian arrived back at the cottage, they decided to make themselves test subjects. Of course, they were far from the first doctors to self-inject at home. For centuries, scientists have been deliberately infecting themselves with gonorrhoea and yellow fever; they’ve become morphine addicts and cocaine addicts in their hunt for new anaesthetics. The doctor who discovered in 2003 that stomach ulcers came from a bug and not from stress did so by drinking a potion containing the bug. So the Pambakians mixed up some more gigantic 6mg doses. And they injected themselves. And that’s when Yolanda said she didn’t feel well, and she slumped on the sofa.

“When the ambulance crew arrived, you told them that it was a treatment for asthma,” Brassington says.

“When the ambulance crew came, there was no time to sit and discuss the workings of the drug,” Pambakian replies. “I just wanted them to concentrate on getting the tube down her lungs. On giving her a chance to live. I’d have told them anything.” She pauses. “Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. We’re talking about a few people a year in the whole country. It was not in my mind. Perhaps it should have been, but it wasn’t.” She falls silent for a moment. “Now it’s on my mind all the time. Now I don’t take a Nurofen without thinking about it. Now it’s on my mind all the time.”

And at that she seems to diminish, like a balloon losing its air.

“Your judgment entirely deserted you,” the prosecutor says.

“I think ‘entirely’ is a bit…” She trails off.

“Doctors who ignore the proper, ethical process of clinical research expose their patients to unnecessary risk,” he says.

“I suppose so, yes,” she says, quietly.

“You fell seriously short of the standards expected from a registered medical practitioner,” the prosecutor says.

There’s a short silence. “Yes,” she says.

A few days later, the GMC gives its judgment: “Your name will be erased from the Medical Register.” And she leaves the hearing, no longer Dr Yvonne Pambakian, but Yvonne Pambakian.

Soon after I watch her hearing and meet Richard Handl, I receive a slightly alarmed email from Jason Bobe, who runs DIYbio.org, an online community for home science experimenters. I’d emailed him as part of my research. He says he’s worried my article may discourage home science. Maybe, he suggests, I should talk to Victor Deeb, whose experiments in his basement went disastrously wrong in a very different way and whose story might offer a counterbalance.

Deeb lives in a small Massachusetts town called Marlborough. He’s retired, in his mid-70s, and although he’s lived in the US almost all his life, he still has a strong Syrian accent, which gets stronger as he becomes more incensed down the phone.

Three years ago, on 5 August 2008, a policeman happened to be driving past Deeb’s house. “He saw smoke billowing from the air conditioner in an upstairs room, so he called the fire department.” Deeb speaks in short, exact phrases, as if he considers our conversation to be like a chemical experiment, requiring complete precision.

A plug had shorted in the bedroom. The fire department put out the fire, glanced into the basement and immediately called for emergency reinforcements.

“The whole fire department came,” Victor says. “The FBI. Even the CIA was here. It couldn’t have been any more crazy. They went into the sewer system to see if I was dumping anything down the toilet.”

What they had found in the basement was 100 bottles of chemicals. None was hazardous. There was nothing poisonous. “I was working on a coating for the inside of beverage cans containing no Bisphenol A,” Deeb says.

BPA, he explains, is standard in beverage can coatings. The problem is that it can seep into the drink and play havoc with our hormones, causing men to grow breasts and girls as young as seven to have periods. Back in 2008, he says, “there were few references in the media to the negative effect of BPA. Currently, there is a deluge of articles. So my desire to eliminate BPA was ahead of its time.” He pauses. “I spent an enormous amount of time with the authorities, trying to explain what I was working on, but they had no perception. No concept.”

And so he watched as they hauled away all the chemicals and test tubes in a truck. “I had a box full of files and notes and comments,” he says. “Twenty years’ work. They hired two PhD chemists to go through the box, looking for confirmation that there were hazardous materials in the basement. When they couldn’t find anything, they left the box out in the rain. It destroyed all my notes. Twenty years of my life and work and efforts to help others down the drain.”

“When they realised their mistake, I presume they apologised and paid you a settlement,” I say.

“The opposite!” he says. “They’re suing me for the cost of emptying my basement.”

For America’s online community of home science experimenters, the most outrageous moment of all came when the enforcement officer, Pamela Wilderman, explained her decision-making process to the local paper: “I think Mr Deeb has crossed a line somewhere,” she said. “This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.”

“Allow me to translate Ms Wilderman’s words into plain English,” wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments. “‘Mr Deeb hasn’t actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don’t like what he’s doing because I’m ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I’ll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.’ There’s a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny.”

Before I hang up, Victor Deeb says he wants to remind me of something. He says that for every David Hahn and Richard Handl, there’s a Steve Jobs and a Charles Goodyear. “They started at home. Goodyear developed the vulcanisation process by mixing sulphur with virgin rubber on his wife’s stove in their kitchen.”

And then he is gone, to do – he says – what he spends every day doing. He’s going to try to remember what he’d written on the pages in the box that was left out in the rain.

via

Ricky Swallow
Wall Clock with Primary Parts
2011
Patinated Bronze.
10 x 10 x 2 inches

BARBARA KASTEN / ALAN MICHAEL / DANIEL SINSEL / RICKY SWALLOW

11 February – 24 March 2012

MaryMary

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 9, 2012

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.

So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

Through February 11, 2012

Marc Foxx

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Opponents of Proposition 8 demonstrated outside the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday in San Francisco. The court ruled that the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage violated the Constitution.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: February 7, 2012

LOS ANGELES — A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday threw out a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008, upholding a lower court’s ruling that the ban, known as Proposition 8, violated the constitutional rights of gay men and lesbians in California.

The three-judge panel issued its ruling in San Francisco, upholding a 2010 decision by Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who had been the chief judge of the Federal District Court of the Northern District of California but has since retired. The panel found that Proposition 8 — passed by a vote of 52 percent to 48 percent — violated the equal protection rights of two same-sex couples who brought the suit. The proposition placed a specific prohibition in the State Constitution against marriage between two people of the same sex.

But Tuesday’s 2-to-1 decision was much more narrowly framed than the sweeping ruling of Judge Walker, who asserted that barring same-sex couples from marrying was a violation of the equal protection and due process clauses of the Constitution.

The two judges on Tuesday stated explicitly that they were not deciding whether there was a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, instead ruling that the disparate treatment of married couples and domestic partners since the passage of Proposition 8 violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

“Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently,” Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt wrote in the decision. “There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”

“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation ‘marriage,’ ” the judge wrote, adding, “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gay men and lesbians in California.”

In his dissenting opinion, Judge N. Randy Smith wrote that the court was overreaching in nullifying a voter initiative.

Unlike the 2008 State Supreme Court decision here overturning an earlier ban on same-sex marriage, this decision is not about to set off a race to the chapel by same-sex couples. A stay imposed on Judge Walker’s original decision will remain in place, at least for two weeks. Theodore B. Olson, one of the lawyers who challenged the ban, said he would seek to get the stay lifted; backers of Proposition 8 said they would oppose that.

Both sides in the case made clear that they intended to take the case before the Supreme Court in hopes of prompting it to settle once and for all an issue that has been fought out in courts, legislatures and ballot boxes since at least a 1971 case in Minnesota. That said, there is no guarantee the court will take it. The narrow parameters of the ruling’s reasoning — and the fact that it was written to apply only to California — may prompt the court to wait for a clearer dispute before weighing in.

Whatever the legal nuances of the decision — and lawyers were battling about how far-reaching it would prove to be — the decision reverberated throughout political circles, from the presidential campaign to state legislatures.

Mitt Romney denounced the decision as an attack by “unelected judges” on “traditional marriage” and predicted that the Supreme Court would decide the issue. “That prospect underscores the vital importance of this election and the movement to preserve our values,” he said.

Still, the decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, coming at a time when Washington State seems poised to become the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriages, seems likely to add to what members of both parties said was a sense of momentum. Chad Griffin, the president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which challenged Proposition 8, noted that polls in the past year had shown public support for same-sex marriage steadily increasing, a significant change from just a decade ago.

In New Jersey, State Senator Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat and president of the Senate, who abstained in a vote on a same-sex marriage bill two years ago, is now championing one that is to come up for a vote next Tuesday. “Today’s court ruling simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Marriage equality is right, and its time is now,” he said.

Proponents of Proposition 8 expressed disappointment, but said they were not surprised, given the nature of the Ninth Circuit, which they view as liberal, and predicted the ruling would fail before the Supreme Court. Several said the decision was narrow enough that it was more unlikely now that the Supreme Court, if it accepted the case, would use it to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

“Since the beginning of this case, we’ve known that the battle to preserve traditional marriage will ultimately be won or lost not here, but rather in the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Andrew P. Pugno, general counsel for the ProtectMarriage.com coalition, which was behind Proposition 8. “We will immediately appeal this misguided decision that disregards the will of more than seven million Californians who voted to restore marriage as the unique union of only a man and woman.”

Mr. Pugno said he had not decided whether he would appeal to the Supreme Court or ask a larger panel of the Ninth Circuit Court to review this decision.

Douglas NeJaime, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the narrowness of the decision could influence the Supreme Court to take a road it often favored: issuing narrow and incremental decisions, not sweeping ones. “It’s striking that the court — or at least the two judges — went out of their way to define the judgment as narrowly as they could,” he said.

Mr. Olson hailed the decision, saying it was a “huge day,” and noted that the judges had, in the course of their 89-page majority decision, systematically rebutted most of the arguments that had been made against gay marriage.

“I’m not at all surprised that the court didn’t go further than it needed to go,” he said. “If it had, it might have been criticized for reaching more than it should.”

The emotional repercussions were on display as Spencer Stier, 17, the son of one of the couples who initiated the case, turned out to praise it. “With this ruling, in the eyes of the government, my family is finally normal,” he said as his mother looked on.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York, and Ian Lovett from Los Angeles.

1972 Datsun 510 via

By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: February 3, 2012

WHEN Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.

Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.

But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back seats.

“For many like myself, it’s nostalgic,” said Jun Imai, a 36-year-old designer at the Hot Wheels division of Mattel, where he directed the styling for die-cast models of two 1970s-vintage Nissans released last year.

“It’s a very special feeling I have for cars like these — the designs, the sound of the engines, the way they drive,” Mr. Imai said. “They are so distinctive, yet most are approachable in terms of costs and availability.”

Mr. Imai, who lives in Southern California, owns a 1971 Datsun 510 wagon and a 1972 Datsun pickup. The vehicles’ peculiar silhouettes, diminutive scale and heavy use of chrome trim are typical of Japanese styling of the period.

Yorgo Tloupas, a co-founder and creative director of Intersection magazine, which is based in Paris, is the owner of a 1981 Honda Prelude. “I love that they don’t look like anything else,” Mr. Tloupas said.

“The first time I saw the Honda 600, I had to have the car,” he said, referring to the tiny 2-cylinder sedan that was among the company’s first models shipped to the United States.

The trend has grown rapidly. In 2005, Terry Yamaguchi, 39, and her husband, Koji, 41, who own a 1972 Toyota Celica coupe and a 1977 Celica liftback, started a casual meet-up in Long Beach, Calif., for like-minded enthusiasts. More than 200 cars showed up; the next year they created an official event, the Japanese Classic Car Show, now in its seventh year and attracting some 350 entries.

“We were not going to continue,” Ms. Yamaguchi said. “It cost a lot and we didn’t have any sponsors. We only did it for ourselves. But people were excited.”

The Japanese have a term for their suddenly trendy vintage cars. They are called nostalgic cars, said Benjamin Hsu, a co-founder of Japanese Nostalgic Car, a Web site and magazine based in Diamond Bar, Calif. “You know how the Japanese like to appropriate English terms but use them in a slightly different way,” Mr. Hsu said.

Yet the name is fitting. The demographic that’s seemingly responsible for the popularity of Japanese nostalgic cars is 30-something men who grew up with the cars. Mr. Imai remembers his uncles working on and racing Datsun 510s and 240Zs when he was a boy.

“When you have cars that were everyday cars, there’s an emotional connection,” said Bryan Thompson, a designer for Nissan, both in the Japan and the United States, from 2001 to 2009. “They’re a part of your life in the way a pet is a part of your life, or a family member.”

Mr. Thompson, who is now a contract designer for Volvo, cited his parents’ 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon as the inspiration behind his career choice.

For Mr. Hsu, interest in the era’s cars was stimulated during a layover at the Narita airport near Tokyo on a trip to Taiwan. “I stepped out for one second and saw the coolest cars I had ever seen,” he said. “They were cars that I never knew existed. That kind of blew my mind.”

Mr. Hsu founded the Japanese Nostalgic Car Web site with his brother, Dan, in 2006. They began publishing the magazine, a quarterly, two years later.

Mr. Hsu said that the nostalgic car trend in the United States was partly an evolution of the Japanese import-tuning craze of the 1990s that spawned the “Fast and the Furious” film franchise. A further push came around 2000, as interest rose in performance cars made for Japan’s home market (a movement in its own right, known as Japanese Domestic Market, or J.D.M.).

“People really wanted to find out what Japanese people were doing,” Mr. Hsu said. “And what Japanese people were doing was drifting.”

Drifting, a professional motor sport in Japan since 2000, came from the same hooligan spirit as drag racing. But instead of speeding in a straight line, drivers slide their cars around curves, smoke pouring off the tires. It required a specific kind of car — lightweight, and more important, rear-drive.

“Japanese companies weren’t building rear-wheel-drive cars, unless you get to high-end luxury,” Mr. Hsu said, which meant using models like the Toyota Corolla GT-S and the Nissan 240SX from the 1980s.

Mr. Hsu owns a 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S. “It had all the performance goodies — twin-cam, 16 valves, rear-wheel drive with an optional limited-slip differential,” he said. “To me that is the ideal performance package. The car is lightweight. It handles brilliantly. The motor revs to 7,500 r.p.m.”

The Corolla GT-S “was the gateway drug” to other nostalgic cars, Mr. Hsu said. He also cited other popular examples: the first-generation Toyota Celica; the Honda N600 and Civic CVCC; and several Mazdas — RX-2, RX-3 and the first-generation RX-7.

Many nostalgia-car enthusiasts modify the engines and suspensions, and install parts made for Japan-market models. But the appeal of vintage Japanese cars isn’t based solely on performance.

Mr. Tloupas, whose magazine collaborated with Honda last year in customizing a CR-Z, said he had always been captivated by Japanese design. “They were kind of quirky, he said.

Mr. Thompson explained that Japanese designers were still trying to find their aesthetic and, much as Chinese automakers are doing today, they imitated existing forms.

“Look at a lot of the early to mid-1970s Japanese economy cars,” he said. “They were oftentimes reinterpretations of American cars from the 1960s. Because they didn’t have the same proportions, they were very strange.”

Of course, Japanese automakers didn’t always get designs wrong. The Datsun 240Z was popular from its release as a 1970 model. The Datsun 510 has served as a platform for road racers for decades. And Japanese pickups are noted for their durability; it’s not unusual to find one with 300,000 miles on the odometer.

This year, Hot Wheels released two 1:43 scale diecast models of vintage Japanese cars, the 1971 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-X and 1973 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R. In Japan, they are equivalent to the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air or Corvette, but neither car was sold new in the United States.

The Skylines are very rare, even in Japan, and very expensive. Of the 1971 Skyline, Mr. Imai, said, “From a cultural standpoint, you’ll notice more recently this car appearing in movies and video games.”

Another model, the Toyota 2000GT, is widely regarded as the original Japanese supercar. It was sold only in limited numbers in the United States and is valued at more than $400,000 in collector-car guides; a 2000GT racecar is currently being offered for $1.7 million.

But most vintage Japanese cars remain very affordable. On eBay, a 1976 Honda Civic CVCC 5-speed with 59,000 miles recently sold for $3,550. A 1977 Corolla SR5 with 55,000 miles sold for $4,000.

Those prices may sound high for 35-year-old Japanese compacts — the prices are roughly what the cars sold for when new — but they are low compared with, say, a vintage Alfa Romeo or Chevrolet Camaro. And now owners, aware of the rising interest, are increasingly choosing to hold onto their cars.

“There are people out there,” Mr. Hsu said. “They’ve got extremely low-mileage cars, completely original, stowed in their garages all over the place.”

Scene from ‘Metropolis’ (1926) directed by Fritz Lang

Feb 6, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 20 • By MARTHA BAYLES
The Weekly Standard

What was modernism? Many well-educated people would be hard pressed to answer, even (especially?) if they were exposed to it in college. Of all the topics in the humanities, modernism may be the most ill taught, because it is both too close (having flourished between the 1880s and World War I) and too distant (having been eclipsed by postmodernism, whatever that means). At the same time, modernism has in recent years been extensively researched, and as noted by Michael Levenson, professor of literature at the University of Virginia, “we have reached a moment when many self-contained and specialized studies can be brought together.”

As for who will bring these studies together, the promotional materials accompanying this book say that Levenson is our man. A scholar who has written extensively about literary modernism, he is also conversant with the visual and performing arts, and recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Modernism. It’s a daunting task to weave together the wildly varied strands of modernism, an international phenomenon affecting all the arts over a half-century of world war and revolution; but Levenson seems well positioned to try.

What’s needed, of course, is an overarching idea, or set of ideas, to serve as a framework for the countless “provoking artifacts” and “succession of individual careers” that comprise modernism. The obvious framework, of course, is the clichéd view of modernism as “revolutionary art” that pops up out of nowhere and flings itself against “static bourgeois resistance.” To his credit, Levenson rejects this view in favor of a broader conception, namely that the multiple innovations of early modernism were part of an “oppositional culture” that, rather than pose an external challenge to late 19th-century bourgeois society, were an organic part of it. Modernism, he says, was an expression, albeit indirect, of the “thrusting and ambitious” dynamism of that same society.

This is what the Marxists argue, I know. But as it happens, they are right. Objectively speaking, the changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization, railroads, telegraph and telephone, newspapers, and post-Darwinian positivism were far more disruptive to traditional beliefs and customs than anything occurring on the canvas, page, or stage. Indeed, so disruptive were these changes, the wealthy bourgeoisie created an idealized domestic sphere—tranquil, comfortable, refined, and virtuous—to serve as a bulwark against them. The trouble was, that domestic sphere proved stifling to many of its occupants, especially the women who were expected to preside over it, and thus the bourgeoisie became a ready market for the shocks and thrills imagined by artists.

From the perspective of pedagogy, the best method for conveying this idea to students would be to draw a parallel with horror films, violent video games, kinky sex comedies, and all the other shocks and thrills routinely served up by our commercial media. When Levenson describes how “[s]nugness and shock became intimates within a tight circle of exchange,” and “the inwardness of home life was interrupted by startling accounts of novelty,” he could be describing the entertainment choices of today’s suburban families. To draw this parallel is not to violate historical accuracy: There are many lines of descent between artistic modernism and American popular culture, some dating as far back as the 1930s, when Coleman Hawkins incorporated the dissonance of European art music into jazz, and Walt Disney urged his animators to sober up and study modern painting. Some of this inheritance has been enriching, some impoverishing. It all depends on which aspect of modernism we are talking about.

Possibly Levenson draws such parallels in the classroom, but he does not do so here. Of course, given the vast territory he covers, it is probably unfair to expect him to include references to how modernism has affected contemporary culture. But Modernism comes packaged as a “wide-ranging and original account of Modernism” offering “not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment.” So at a minimum, the reader expects a full articulation of the pattern by which modernist “artists depended upon a civil society they often despised” and bourgeois “audiences were drawn to the art that frightened them.”

But the reader will be disappointed. After highlighting this pattern, Levenson more or less abandons it.

My hope is to stimulate more synthetic thinking. But this is not to say that we should aim toward a new coherence for Modernism. .  .  . Rather than presenting an argument for an encompassing framework or a set of governing techniques, the book has an emphasis on intersections and transitions, moments and phases, continuities and interruptions.

By making this confession, Levenson spares the reviewer the trouble of pointing out that his book lacks an encompassing framework. To my jaundiced eye, the key word in the above passage is should—as in “this is not to say that we should aim toward a new coherence.” For all his fine erudition and sensibility, Levenson is also a professor of critical theory, which suggests that he is loath to embark upon that most dreaded of academic undertakings, the intellectually confident, epoch-spanning “meta-narrative.” (The last white male literary scholar to try that was boiled alive some years ago.)

Levenson’s refusal to pull his material together is frustrating, because this book contains many valuable insights. And yes, they are valuable in part because they reveal some striking connections with our own “postmodernist” era. (One of the topics Levenson should have addressed is the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the definitive book about modernism, when it appears, will take this comparison as its starting point.)

But let us consider some of those insights, even if to do so we must pluck parts of them from different sections of the book and reassemble them here. The first such insight has to do with the modernist treatment of the industrial city. Writing about Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, Levenson describes a deeply subjective, phantasmagorical vision of Paris “as rife with plots and plans, the streets as scenes of chaos, looming faces, and receding backs, but also rife with malevolent intention.” Later on, he contrasts this vision with that of Apollinaire, Baudelaire’s presumed heir (I’m working on the limerick). The difference, Levenson argues, is between Baudelaire’s “vertical” search for meaning in the lower depths of the psyche, liberated but also lost in the faceless crowd; and Apollinaire’s “horizontal” sprint across the surface of the urban landscape, with the self reduced to a “shallow eye” that rejects “persistence, duration, continuity .  .  . in favor of half-detached perceptions that move without punctuation and at great speed.”

In a later discussion of cinema, Levenson distinguishes between “deep Modernism” and “montage Modernism.” Predictably, he follows the film theorist André Bazin in giving full credit for montage to the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein as opposed to the Hollywood pioneer, D. W. Griffith, who had developed “cross-cutting” editing 10 years earlier. Again, it may be too much to ask Levenson to connect montage modernism, which exploits “the resources of speed, discontinuity, and juxtaposition,” with contemporary Hollywood movies. But I can’t resist thinking how much Apollinaire would appreciate the way 21st-century films hurtle through the heights and depths of 21st-century cities from Toronto to Tokyo, Mogadishu to Mumbai.

Equally striking is Levenson’s distinction between “textual” and “gestural” modernism. The former he defines as the making of “a resonant and memorable artifact”—in the language of art history, the production of objets. The latter, gestural modernism, he defines as “includ[ing] all those events that live beyond the artifacts,” ranging from the “personal style” of the artists to “ephemeral happenings” such as “the spectacles engineered by Marinetti and the futurists and the riotous evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire among the Dadaists.” The contemporary significance of gestural modernism should be obvious, as we live in an era where publicity is the medium of choice for many of our most popular artists. Where would Lady Gaga be if all she did was sing?

In an earlier chapter, Levenson links the “theatricality” of modernism with the spectacle of public protest in the era of mass media. For example, he observes, “When [British] suffragettes chained themselves to the railings around government buildings, set mailboxes aflame, or paraded through the streets, they were making resourceful use of the power of spectacle.” With full appreciation for the irony involved, Levenson then relates the suffragettes’ tactics to those of their exact contemporary, the futurist artist Filippo Marinetti, whose manifesto, published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, urged not only the demolition of museums and the glorification of war but also “contempt for woman” and fierce hostility to “feminism.”

It is, of course, impossible to write about modernism and politics without delving into the vexed topic of modernist enthusiasm for Italian fascism and Soviet communism. This Levenson does in the penultimate chapter, which compares modernism before and after World War I, and the conclusion, which examines “the ends of modernism” as found in the right-wing affinities of Ezra Pound and the left-wing activism of Bertolt Brecht.

In the chapter on the war, Levenson resorts to the clichéd view he rejected earlier, writing that “the prewar experiments of Picasso and Matisse, Stein and Joyce, and others were often directed at a stagnant and complacent society that felt, in Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, ‘as safe as houses.’ ” But let us forgive him, because his emphasis here is on the traumatic collapse of the safe bourgeois house. As he writes, “the broken field and unsheltered sweep” of trench warfare scarred the artistic imagination with “indelible memories of the open, exposed horizon, .  .  . pictures of traumatically broken space,” and images of “the outspread, uncontrolled, and perilous terrain: the waste​-​land.” Levenson regards these images as “a return of the Real,” and by extension, the cause of a shift of artistic attention away from horror and meaninglessness and toward the project of remaking a broken world.

Writing about Dada, the gleefully nihilistic art movement that arose in Zurich at the height of the war, he describes it as a “reaction to a violence that overwhelmed the illusion of safety.” In its original form, Dada had no political program. How could it, when its guiding spirit was, in the immortal words of Tristan Tzara, Ideal, ideal, ideal, / Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, / Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom? But during the tumultuous interwar years, many modernists concluded that “boomboom” was not an adequate response to what was happening in Europe.

At this point, Levenson could have joined the current debate about whether modernism was complicit in the creation of totalitarian culture. This past year saw the publication of two remarkable books, Igor Golomstock’s lengthy Totalitarian Art and Tzvetan Todorov’s succinct The Limits of Art, which joined the debate with a focus on the visual arts. The visual arts are, of course, where the similarities between the official art of fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are most uncannily vivid. Both Golomstock and Todorov enter the debate instigated by Boris Groys, whose The Total Art of Stalinism (1992) traced a direct link between the vaulting ambitions of the Russian modernists and those of their Soviet masters. Both dreamed of creating a new humanity purged of selfishness and stupidity, and both woke to a nightmare of terror.

What Levenson could have added was the perspective of literature. His pages are replete with quotations from authors—Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Jarry, Strindberg—who boasted of using their creative power to fashion a New Man. In the same vein, Levenson’s conclusion focuses on Pound, who joined forces with the fascists, and Brecht, who cast his lot with the Communists. Prudently, Levenson refrains from putting a black hat on the former and a white hat on the latter, writing instead that “Pound the Fascist and Brecht the Communist were cousins” both “in their technical ambitions” and in their “belief that art could be of great social consequence.”

Yet here, too, Levenson backs away from coherence. In one breath he pays mild tribute to “the power that Modernism claimed for itself, the power to lead history.” In the next he expresses mild regret that neither Pound nor Brecht chose to affirm the independence of art from “those forces that live beyond the aesthetic and that determine its goals and hopes.” Such bland equivocation does a disservice to the many modernists who did affirm their independence, sometimes at the price of silence or death. And it marks a retreat, all too typical of contemporary academia, from the challenge of grappling with modernism’s most troubling legacy.

via

Joon Mo Kang

By LORI ANDREWS
NY Times Published: February 4, 2012

LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

Even though laws allow people to challenge false information in credit reports, there are no laws that require data aggregators to reveal what they know about you. If I’ve Googled “diabetes” for a friend or “date rape drugs” for a mystery I’m writing, data aggregators assume those searches reflect my own health and proclivities. Because no laws regulate what types of data these aggregators can collect, they make their own rules.

In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six Internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ Internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing. For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every e-mail, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet. Other companies, like Healthline Networks Inc., have in-house limits on which private information they will collect. Healthline does not use information about people’s searches related to H.I.V., impotence or eating disorders to target ads to people, but it will use information about bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, which can be as stigmatizing as the topics on its privacy-protected list.

In the 1970s, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University named John McKnight popularized the term “redlining” to describe the failure of banks, insurers and other institutions to offer their services to inner city neighborhoods. The term came from the practice of bank officials who drew a red line on a map to indicate where they wouldn’t invest. But use of the term expanded to cover a wide array of racially discriminatory practices, such as not offering home loans to African-Americans, even those who were wealthy or middle class.

Now the map used in redlining is not a geographic map, but the map of your travels across the Web. The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.

Data aggregation has social implications as well. When young people in poor neighborhoods are bombarded with advertisements for trade schools, will they be more likely than others their age to forgo college? And when women are shown articles about celebrities rather than stock market trends, will they be less likely to develop financial savvy? Advertisers are drawing new redlines, limiting people to the roles society expects them to play.

Data aggregators’ practices conflict with what people say they want. A 2008 Consumer Reports poll of 2,000 people found that 93 percent thought Internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72 percent wanted the right to opt out of online tracking. A study by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 2009 using a random sample of 1,000 people found that 69 percent thought that the United States should adopt a law giving people the right to learn everything a Web site knows about them. We need a do-not-track law, similar to the do-not-call one. Now it’s not just about whether my dinner will be interrupted by a telemarketer. It’s about whether my dreams will be dashed by the collection of bits and bytes over which I have no control and for which companies are currently unaccountable.

Lori Andrews is a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy.”

Interior of Rudolf Schindlers’s Bubeshko Apartmets in Los Angeles. Photograph by Grant Mudford

By ERIC KLINENBERG
NY Times Published: February 4, 2012

MORE people live alone than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and in Washington, nearly one in two households are occupied by a single person.

By international standards, these numbers are surprising — surprisingly low. In Paris, the city of lovers, more than half of all households contain single people, and in socialist Stockholm, the rate tops 60 percent.

The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible. Although Americans pride themselves on their self-reliance and culture of individualism, Germany, France and Britain have a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States, as does Japan. Three of the nations with the fastest-growing populations of single people — China, India and Brazil — are also among those with the fastest growing economies.

The mere thought of living alone once sparked anxiety, dread and visions of loneliness. But those images are dated. Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.

It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, I’ve concluded that living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction.

Paradoxically, our species, so long defined by groups and by the nuclear family, has been able to embark on this experiment in solo living because global societies have become so interdependent. Dynamic markets, flourishing cities and open communications systems make modern autonomy more appealing; they give us the capacity to live alone but to engage with others when and how we want to and on our own terms.

In fact, living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.

Compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures. There is much research suggesting that single people get out more — and not only the younger ones. Erin Cornwell, a sociologist at Cornell, analyzed results from the General Social Survey (which draws on a nationally representative sample of the United States population) from 2000 to 2008 and found that single people 35 and older were more likely than those who lived with a spouse or a romantic partner to spend a social evening with neighbors or friends. In 2008, her husband, Benjamin Cornwell (also a sociologist at Cornell), was lead author of “The Social Connectedness of Older Adults,” a paper in the American Sociological Review that showed that single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers and were more likely to socialize with friends and neighbors.

SURVEYS, some by market research companies that study behavior for clients developing products and services, also indicate that married people with children are more likely than single people to hunker down at home. Those in large suburban homes often splinter into private rooms to be alone. The image of a modern family in a room together, each plugged into a separate reality, be it a smartphone, computer, video game or TV show has become a cultural cliché.

New communications technologies make living alone a social experience, so being home alone does not feel involuntary or like solitary confinement. The person alone at home can digitally navigate through a world of people, information and ideas. Internet use does not seem to cut people off from real friendships and connections.

The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community Survey — a nationally representative survey of 2,512 American adults conducted in 2008 that was the first to examine how the Internet and cellphones affect our core social networks — shows that Web use can lead to more social life, rather than to less. “Social Isolation and New Technology,” written by the Rutgers University communications scholar Keith Hampton, reveals that heavy users are more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks; more likely to visit parks, cafes and restaurants; and more likely to meet diverse people with different perspectives and beliefs.

Today five million people in the United States between ages 18 and 34 live alone, 10 times more than in 1950. But the largest number of single people are middle-aged; 15 million people between ages 35 and 64 live alone. Those who decide to live alone following a breakup or a divorce could choose to move in with roommates or family. But many of those I interviewed said they chose to live alone because they had found there was nothing worse than living with the wrong person.

In my interviews, older single people expressed a clear preference for living alone, which allowed them to retain their feelings of independence and integrity, and a clear aversion to moving in with friends or family or into a nursing home.

According to research by the Rutgers sociologist Deborah Carr, at 18 months after the death of a spouse, only one in four elderly men and one in six elderly women say they are interested in remarrying; one in three men and one in seven women are interested in dating someday; and only one in four men and one in 11 women are interested in dating immediately.

Most older widows, widowers and divorced people remake their lives as single people. A century ago, nearly 70 percent of elderly American widows lived with a child; today — thanks to Social Security, private pensions and wealth generated in the market — just 20 percent do. According to the U.C.L.A. economist Kathleen McGarry: “When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone. They buy their independence.”

Some unhealthy old people do become dangerously isolated, as I learned when I researched my book about the hundreds of people who died alone in the 1995 Chicago heat wave, and they deserve more attention and support than we give them today. But the rise of aging alone is also a social achievement. The sustained health, wealth and vitality that so many people over age 65 enjoy allow them to maintain domestic independence far longer than previous generations did. What’s new today is that the great majority of older widows, widowers and divorced people prefer living alone to their other options, and they’re willing to spend more on housing and domestic help for the privilege. Some pundits predicted that rates of living alone would plummet because of the challenged economy: young people would move into their parents’ basements; middle-aged adults would put off divorce or separation for financial reasons; the elderly would move in with their children rather than hold on to places of their own.

Thus far, however, there’s little evidence that this has happened. True, more young adults have moved in with their parents because they cannot find good jobs; but the proportion of those between 20 and 29 who live alone went down only slightly, from 11.97 percent in 2007 to 10.94 percent in 2011. In the general population, living alone has become more common — in absolute and proportional terms. The latest census report estimates that more than 32 million Americans live alone today, up from 27.2 million in 2000 and 31 million in 2010.

All signs suggest that living alone will become even more common in the future, at every stage of adulthood and in every place where people can afford a place of their own.

Hiroshi Kimura, a member of the Kudokai gang in Kitakyushu, said authorities were trying to drive a wedge between the yakuza and the community. Photograph by Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

By MARTIN FACKLER
NY Times Published: February 2, 2012

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Two years ago, the authorities in this gritty rust-belt region declared war on the yakuza, Japan’s entrenched organized crime syndicates. And that is exactly what they got.

Since this city and other local governments beefed up regulations to take on the yakuza — making it a criminal offense for companies and individuals to do business with them — there has been a death threat against Kitakyushu’s mayor and his family, hand grenades tossed at the homes of corporate executives and a construction company chairman gunned down in front of his wife.

The police say the attacks, and many other lesser threats and intimidation tactics, are the doing of the Kudokai, a gang with more than 650 members that officials call one of the most dangerous of Japan’s yakuza. The attacks have prompted the National Police Agency to propose giving law enforcement more powers to search and arrest gang members.

The yakuza remain a remarkably visible presence in Japan, as they have been for centuries. But law enforcement officials say the violence in Kitakyushu may prove a turning point, by shocking a public that has become increasingly fed up.

Any romantic aura that may have enveloped the gangsters in the past is falling away, the authorities say. They added that the Japanese increasingly see the yakuza simply as mobsters much like their counterparts in other countries, making money from drugs, gambling and extortion, particularly from their favorite target, Japan’s bloated construction industry.

“People are now seeing the reality that the yakuza are not chivalrous, but just an antisocial force,” said Kitakyushu’s mayor, Kenji Kitahashi, who said he was not intimidated by the death threat. He said the violence had turned many residents against the yakuza for hurting this former steel-making city’s efforts to lure new investment and jobs.

Japan has tried four times since the early 1990s to rein in the yakuza and has failed to make more than a dent in their numbers, currently about 80,000 (compared with estimates of 5,000 members of the American mafia at its height in the early 1960s). Like many Japanese gangs, the Kudokai even maintains its own public headquarters, the Kudokai Hall — a four-story, fortresslike white building surrounded by tall walls, barbed wire and security cameras — that sits in the center of Kitakyushu, a city of one million residents.

Until recently, the gangs were a quietly accepted fact of life. The yakuza were tolerated because they helped Japan keep its streets safe by imposing the same rigid rules and hierarchy on the criminal world that are seen in the rest of Japanese society. But as Japan has developed into a modern, middle-class nation, it has also refashioned itself into a society that relies on courts and lawyers to keep order, not medieval outlaws. The growing intolerance of the underworld has been evident in recent scandals in which a top television comedian and the national sport of sumo were forced to cut ties with gangsters.

Still, many admit, it has proven tough to completely cut ties.

“Society has used the yakuza for so long that it is hard to just get rid of them,” said Chikashi Nakamura, 75, head of a residents’ association in Kitakyushu that has campaigned to drive out the Kudokai.

Indeed, lawyers and antimob activists say the nation remains reluctant to take the final step of outlawing the gangs outright, a step many here have called for. There are fears that a ban could lead to what many here call a mafia-ization of the gangs, driving them underground and removing their last restraints on violence against regular civilians.

“It has taken 30 years to get this far, and Japan still hesitates to crush these violent groups once and for all,” said Naoyuki Fukasawa, a lawyer who specializes in defending citizens against organized crime. “The police are like archers who intentionally avoid the bull’s-eye, and instead aim at the target’s outer rings.”

The National Police Agency, which sets national crime policy, says outright criminalization is difficult because of constitutional protections on the right to assembly. But Shigeyuki Tani, director of the office of organized crime intelligence at the agency, said the office was drawing up a new law that would designate gangs like the Kudokai as “particularly dangerous,” and make it easier for the police to search their buildings and arrest members for requesting payoffs. (The current law bans only the actual payment.)

However, officials in Kitakyushu say they need even stronger powers to battle organized crime, which is deeply rooted in this city’s blue-collar neighborhoods.

Of the 44 mob-linked shootings in Japan last year, 18 took place in Fukuoka Prefecture, the district on Japan’s southernmost main island, Kyushu, where Kitakyushu is located.

While mob violence is nothing new here, the latest rampage is the worst in memory. It began two years ago, when the Kudokai angered local residents by buying a mansion across the street from a kindergarten to use as an office. After residents protested in front of the mansion’s gate, the home of a resident association leader was shot up in a nighttime attack.

Local authorities responded with the new penalties, aimed at choking off the gang’s sources of income. The police say the Kudokai then lashed out at companies that stopped payoffs, including the grenade attacks on the homes of executives from Kyushu Electric Power and another utility. The most recent attack took place on Jan. 17, when gunmen wounded a construction company president who stepped outside to buy a drink from a vending machine.

That shooting and the killing in November of the chairman of a different construction company have created an atmosphere of fear. One construction executive refused an interview by saying he was going to a hot-springs resort. However, it proved much easier to speak with the Kudokai.

At the gang’s headquarters, Hiroshi Kimura’s business card, written in elaborate calligraphy strokes, identified him as the captain of one of the Kudokai’s sub-groups. Mr. Kimura, who wore a well-tailored black suit and glasses, was meticulously polite.

He led reporters to a room with soft chairs and a low table that looked like a typical Japanese corporate meeting room, except for the black-and-white portraits of deceased gang leaders on the wall. As Mr. Kimura spoke, burly young men in black suits silently knelt to serve cups of green tea and traditional sweets.

Mr. Kimura said the new restrictions had hurt the Kudokai, though he refused to go into detail about the gang’s economic dealings. He said the Kudokai was not behind the recent violence, though he admitted that it could have been the work of errant individual gang members. If so, he vowed, the gang would also mete out its own punishment.

He said the police shared the blame for the violence by trying to drive a wedge between the Kudokai and the community.

“If they crush us, organized crime will just become harder to see, and more violent, like in Mexico,” said Mr. Kimura, who is 58.

He spoke nostalgically of an earlier era when yakuza worked with the police to maintain social order. Police officials said those days were over, though national attitudes have been slow to catch up.

“There are still feelings to use the yakuza to solve troubles,” said Daisuke Harada, head of the organized-crime section of the Fukuoka police. “We need to root out those old attitudes, once and for all.”

Angelo Dundee is shown with with Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, at City Parks Gym in New York in 1962. Dundee groomed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard into world champions. (Dan Grossi / Associated Press / December 31, 1969)

By Steve Springer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
February 2, 2012

Angelo Dundee, who trained the two most celebrated fighters of his era, Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, and 15 world champions in all in a Hall of Fame career that began in 1952, has died. He was 90.

Dundee died Wednesday at a Clearwater, Fla., rehabilitation center, said his son, James. He had a blood clot that developed during a flight back to his Florida home after visiting Ali in Louisville, Ky., for the boxer’s 70th birthday last month.

Dundee was in Ali’s corner for the Fight of the Century, the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, and in Leonard’s corner for his No Mas match against Roberto Duran as well as his memorable fights against Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler.

Other boxers trained by Dundee included George Foreman, Carmen Basilio and Willie Pastrano.

In a sport of drama and explosiveness, dealing with fighters spouting hyperbole and filled with emotion, Dundee was the perfect complement, always calm, always analytical, ever able to maintain his cool, whether in the sweltering heat of Manila or the fury of Zaire.

In his 2007 autobiography, “My View From the Corner,” Dundee said his job was “a mixed bag combining certain qualities belonging to a doctor, an engineer, a psychologist and, sometimes, even an actor….When the bell rings ending the round, that’s when the trainer takes over.”

If Dundee hadn’t taken over on two occasions with Ali, one of the greatest careers in boxing history might have ended almost before it began.

At the end of the fourth round of a 1963 fight against Henry Cooper, Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, was surprised by a left-hand punch that floored him and left him dazed. Fortunately for Clay, it was the end of the round, allowing him to stagger back to his corner.

It was there that Dundee, trying to buy time until his fighter’s head cleared, stuck his finger in a slight split in the seams of one of Clay’s gloves, causing a slightly bigger split. That allowed Dundee to ask the referee for another pair of gloves. None were available, but the incident added valuable seconds to Clay’s rest time, allowing him to recover and go on to win on a fifth-round technical knockout.

His next fight, against heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, might not have occurred if Clay had lost to Cooper.

In the fourth round of Clay’s 1964 fight against Liston, another crisis occurred. A substance of undetermined origin got in Clay’s eyes, temporarily blinding him. In the corner prior to the fifth round, Clay ordered Dundee to cut off his gloves, ending the fight.

The trainer would do no such thing. He wet Clay’s eyes, alleviating some of the sting, and then literally shoved him back out into the ring when the bell rang. Clay, still unable to see, was told by Dundee to just run.

Run he did until, midway through the round, Clay’s vision cleared. At the end of the sixth round, Liston, claiming a shoulder injury, quit in his corner.

Thanks to Dundee, Clay had his first title and a launching pad for the meteoric career that would follow.

Dundee was born Angelo Mirena on Aug. 30, 1921, in Philadelphia, the eighth of nine children. It was his brother Joe, 21 years his senior, who first took the name Dundee to hide the fact he was a fighter from his father. His brother Chris also took the name, as did Angelo eventually.

Dundee’s introduction to boxing came during his time in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He worked the corner in service boxing tournaments.

Dundee’s course in life was set. He would follow his brother Chris, a future Hall of Fame promoter, to New York where Dundee would hone his trade at Stillman’s Gym, and then on to the Fifth Street Gym in Miami where his reputation was sealed.

He became Ali’s trainer in 1960 for Ali’s second pro fight and remained with him until the end, 21 years later. Even when Ali was surrounded by members of the Black Muslims and mired in racial controversy, Dundee, a white man, was able to remain under the radar and do his job.

Dundee added an Olympic gold medal winner to his stable of fighters when Leonard joined him after turning pro. Leonard won the medal in 1976.

Dundee’s most memorable moment in Leonard’s corner came in 1981, in Leonard’s first fight against Hearns. Momentum had slipped away from Leonard by the end of the 12th round of the 15-round match.

“You’re blowing it, son,” Dundee told him in the corner.

Leonard responded by rallying for a 14th-round TKO victory.

As he had with Ali, Dundee had again possibly saved a Hall of Fame career, ensuring himself a spot among the pantheon of boxing trainers.

Besides his son, James, Dundee is survived by his daughter, Terri, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His wife, Helen, died in 2010.

General Electric has decided to move some production from China to an expanding plant in Louisville, Ky. Photograph by Angela Shoemaker for The New York Times

By ANNIE LOWREY
NY Times Published: February 2, 2012

WASHINGTON — In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for a wide-ranging package of policies to help create American manufacturing jobs, including trade enforcement measures, business tax breaks and worker training programs.

In many ways, the proposal is surprising, as few economists now consider manufacturing a potent engine for job growth in the United States. Manufacturers have added about 330,000 jobs in the country in the last two years. But the growth followed three decades of decline, during which companies like automakers and textile companies slashed payrolls by about 7.5 million. That has led many economists to say the recent turnaround might be nothing more than a correction from the depths of the recession.

But the administration argues that big trends — like rising wages in developing countries, falling wages in America and a weaker dollar — have made moving work to or keeping work in the United States a much more viable option. And they say that manufacturers will continue to add jobs domestically, especially with a little help from Washington.

“We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back,” Mr. Obama said in his address to Congress. “But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.”

The proposal stems from a belief that after “a long period where people felt the wind was in our face, the wind is with us,” said Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council. “It’s not fighting against the trends. It’s actually working with them.”

Workers might command relatively high wages in the United States, but wages are climbing rapidly in countries like China and Brazil. High energy prices have increased shipping costs. And manufacturers argue that American workers frequently produce higher-quality goods and that American factories are closer to the markets for more sophisticated goods.

Those trends have led some companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs in the last few years, a development called on-shoring. General Electric has decided to move production of a water heater to Louisville, Ky., from China, for instance. NCR, a maker of self-service kiosks and automated teller machines, has shifted jobs to Columbus, Ga.

It is difficult to determine how many jobs American manufacturers are sending overseas or bringing back. But in a November survey by MFG.com, a site that connects manufacturers with suppliers, one in five North American manufacturers said they had brought production back from a “low-cost” country, up from about one in 10 manufacturers in early 2010.

Economists said that the administration could help sustain the trend. But they warned that the administration’s proposal seemed unlikely to lead to major job growth, and said that many businesses would still hire lower-cost workers overseas.

“We’re not going to get very labor-intensive, relatively low-skilled jobs in America, and I don’t think we want them,” said A. Michael Spence, a professor at New York University and Nobel laureate in economics. “But sometimes it makes sense to have a little help developing technologies that will make us competitive. And sometimes public support for upgrading workers’ skills makes sense.”

“The best we could possibly get is continued modest growth in manufacturing jobs,” said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group in Washington.

Mr. Bergsten noted that manufacturing continued to become more efficient, meaning companies needed fewer and fewer workers. American manufacturers produced roughly the same amount of goods in 2010 as they did a decade before, but they did so with six million fewer employees on their payrolls. Mr. Bergsten also argued that sending jobs to other countries continued to make sense for many global firms. “You’re trying to buck two major trends,” he said.

Some economists also questioned whether Washington should be giving manufacturing a hand at all.

“It’s totally implausible to think that there’s going to be a surge in manufacturing jobs,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard. Broader measures to improve American infrastructure and education, he said, would be more effective in creating middle-class jobs.

But the White House says that manufacturing offers significant potential for new jobs — jobs that require more skills and offer better pay than the assembly lines 30 or 40 years ago. And it says that even modest incentives might make a difference.

To that end, the administration has put together a far-ranging set of proposals: cutting taxes for manufacturers that produce goods in the United States, taking away tax breaks for businesses that move jobs offshore, doubling a tax deduction for makers of high-tech goods, providing support to businesses investing in areas where factories are closing, expanding worker training programs and creating a new task force to better enforce trade rules and intellectual property rights. Closing a loophole that allows companies to shift profits abroad would pay for the tax credits, the White House says.

It all adds up to what economists might call an industrial policy, the out-of-favor practice of using tariffs, taxes and other measures to help a particular industry. The White House avoids the term because it implies that the government is picking winners and losers. It argues that its proposals are a moderate plan to aid businesses deciding whether to move jobs overseas.

Countries like Germany, Japan and China offer far larger tax breaks and financing support to their manufacturers, the administration argues. Such countries have “been in a bear hug” with manufacturers, said Fred P. Hochberg, president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency. “We’ve held them at arm’s length.”

Mr. Hochberg said a focus on manufacturing and exports might lead to more sustainable growth. “For the last three decades, we’ve relied on the U.S. consumer for growth,” he said. “But now we’re seeing growth coming from an investment in infrastructure happening in the emerging economies,” where American companies should be selling their wares and expertise.

The administration also called for a focus on manufacturing because of its spillover effects on the economy. “We do believe that manufacturing punches above its weight economically,” said Mr. Sperling of the National Economic Council. “Advanced manufacturing is critical to your innovative capacity as a country.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Arture 425, Man 66: Schizophrenias, collectors, 1991. Mixed media on paper, 35 x 53 cm

Through April 9, 2012

Kunshalle Zurich