By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: November 23, 2009

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about health care reform. But, like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.

During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain — poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.

Over the years, Americans decided they wanted a little more safety and security. This is what happens as nations grow wealthier; they use money to buy civilization.

Occasionally, our ancestors found themselves in a sweet spot. They could pass legislation that brought security but without a cost to vitality. But adults know that this situation is rare. In the real world, there’s usually a trade-off. The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter.

Early in this health care reform process, many of us thought we were in that magical sweet spot. We could extend coverage to the uninsured but also improve the system overall to lower costs. That is, we thought it would be possible to reduce the suffering of the vulnerable while simultaneously squeezing money out of the wasteful system and freeing it up for more productive uses.

That’s what the management gurus call a win-win.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The bills before Congress would almost certainly ease the anxiety of the uninsured, those who watch with terror as their child or spouse grows ill, who face bankruptcy and ruin.

And the bills would probably do it without damaging the care the rest of us receive. In every place where reforms have been tried — from Massachusetts to Switzerland — people come to cherish their new benefits. The new plans become politically untouchable.

But, alas, there would be trade-offs. Instead of reducing costs, the bills in Congress would probably raise them. They would mean that more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system.

The authors of these bills have tried to foster efficiencies. The Senate bill would initiate several interesting experiments designed to make the system more effective — giving doctors incentives to collaborate, rewarding hospitals that provide quality care at lower cost. It’s possible that some of these experiments will bloom into potent systemic reforms.

But the general view among independent health care economists is that these changes will not fundamentally bend the cost curve. The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.

As Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it.”

Rather than pushing all of the new costs onto future generations, as past governments have done, the Democrats have admirably agreed to raise taxes. Over the next generation, the tax increases in the various bills could funnel trillions of dollars from the general economy into the medical system.

Moreover, the current estimates almost certainly understate the share of the nation’s wealth that will have to be shifted. In these bills, the present Congress pledges that future Congresses will impose painful measures to cut Medicare payments and impose efficiencies. Future Congresses rarely live up to these pledges. Somebody screams “Rationing!” and there is a bipartisan rush to kill even the most tepid cost-saving measure. After all, if the current Congress, with pride of authorship, couldn’t reduce costs, why should we expect that future Congresses will?

The bottom line is that we face a brutal choice.

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.

Gulliver’s body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the Lilliputians. A joint project by architect Rafael Rivera, artist Manolo Martin and the designer Sento.

via playscapes

Thanks to John Coulter

By Paul Krugman
Published: November 22, 2009

A funny thing happened on the way to a new New Deal. A year ago, the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; today, the reigning doctrine in Washington appears to be “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

What happened? To be sure, “centrists” in the Senate have hobbled efforts to rescue the economy. But the evidence suggests that in addition to facing political opposition, President Obama and his inner circle have been intimidated by scare stories from Wall Street.

Consider the contrast between what Mr. Obama’s advisers were saying on the eve of his inauguration, and what he himself is saying now.

In December 2008 Lawrence Summers, soon to become the administration’s highest-ranking economist, called for decisive action. “Many experts,” he warned, “believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year.” In the face of that prospect, he continued, “doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.

But in a recent interview with Fox News, the president sounded diffident and nervous about his economic policy. He spoke vaguely about possible tax incentives for job creation. But “it is important though to recognize,” he went on, “that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

What? Huh?

Most economists I talk to believe that the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government efforts: the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year, while high unemployment is undermining both consumer and business confidence.

Now, it’s politically difficult for the Obama administration to enact a full-scale second stimulus. Still, he should be trying to push through as much aid to the economy as possible. And remember, Mr. Obama has the bully pulpit; it’s his job to persuade America to do what needs to be done.

Instead, however, Mr. Obama is lending his voice to those who say that we can’t create more jobs. And a report on Politico.com suggests that deficit reduction, not job creation, will be the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address. What happened?

It took me a while to puzzle this out. But the concerns Mr. Obama expressed become comprehensible if you suppose that he’s getting his views, directly or indirectly, from Wall Street.

Ever since the Great Recession began economic analysts at some (not all) major Wall Street firms have warned that efforts to fight the slump will produce even worse economic evils. In particular, they say, never mind the current ability of the U.S. government to borrow long term at remarkably low interest rates — any day now, budget deficits will lead to a collapse in investor confidence, and rates will soar.

And it’s this latter claim that Mr. Obama echoed in that Fox News interview. Is he right to be worried?

Well, spikes in long-term interest rates have happened in the past, most famously in 1994. But in 1994 the U.S. economy was adding 300,000 jobs a month, and the Fed was steadily raising short-term rates. It’s hard to see why anything similar should happen now, with the economy still bleeding jobs and the Fed showing no desire to raise rates anytime soon.

A better model, I’d argue, is Japan in the 1990s, which ran persistent large budget deficits, but also had a persistently depressed economy — and saw long-term interest rates fall almost steadily. There’s a good chance that officials are being terrorized by a phantom menace — a threat that exists only in their minds.

And shouldn’t we consider the source? As far as I can tell, the analysts now warning about soaring interest rates tend to be the same people who insisted, months after the Great Recession began, that the biggest threat facing the economy was inflation. And let’s not forget that Wall Street — which somehow failed to recognize the biggest housing bubble in history — has a less than stellar record at predicting market behavior.

Still, let’s grant that there is some risk that doing more about double-digit unemployment would undermine confidence in the bond markets. This risk must be set against the certainty of mass suffering if we don’t do more — and the possibility, as I said, of a collapse of confidence among ordinary workers and businesses.

And Mr. Summers was right the first time: in the face of the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, it’s much riskier to do too little than it is to do too much. It’s sad, and unfortunate, that the administration appears to have lost sight of that truth.

‘2THESKY, my Ender’

December 19, 2009 (Sat.) – January 9, 2010 (Saturday)

Opening Reception: December 19, 18:00-20:00

Taka Ishii

November 20, 2009
Los Angeles Times
By: Catherine Saillant

In an apparently cold-blooded attempt at smuggling, a Lomita man was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport this week with more than a dozen wriggling lizards strapped to his chest.
Michael Plank, 40, was detained by U.S. Customs agents after they discovered 15 live lizards stuffed into his money belt, officials with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said Friday.

Plank was returning from Australia on Tuesday when agents found two geckos, 11 skinks and two monitor lizards in his possession. Australian reptiles are strictly regulated, and Plank didn’t have a required export permit, officials said.

The lizards are valued at $8,500.

Smuggling wildlife into the U.S. is a felony punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to 20 years in prison. Plank has been released on a $10,000 bond and will be arraigned Dec. 21 in a Los Angeles federal court, authorities said.

The Big Squander

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 19, 2009

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess.

About the A.I.G. affair: During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money to make good on its promises if things went bad. And sure enough, things went bad.

So why protect bankers from the consequences of their errors? Well, by the time A.I.G.’s hollowness became apparent, the world financial system was on the edge of collapse and officials judged — probably correctly — that letting A.I.G. go bankrupt would push the financial system over that edge. So A.I.G. was effectively nationalized; its promises became taxpayer liabilities.

But was there any way to limit those liabilities? After all, banks would have suffered huge losses if A.I.G. had been allowed to fail. So it seemed only fair for them to bear part of the cost of the bailout, which they could have done by accepting a “haircut” on the amounts A.I.G. owed them. Indeed, the government asked them to do just that. But they said no — and that was the end of the story. Taxpayers not only ended up honoring foolish promises made by other people, they ended up doing so at 100 cents on the dollar.

Could things have been different? Some commentators argue that government officials had no way to force the banks to accept a haircut — either they let A.I.G. go bankrupt, which they weren’t ready to do, or they had to honor its contracts as written.

But this seems like a naïve view of how Wall Street works. Major financial firms are a small club, with a shared interest in sustaining the system; ever since the days of J.P. Morgan, it has been common in times of crisis to call on the big players to forgo short-term profits for the industry’s common good. Back in 1998, it was a consortium of private bankers — not the government — that put up the funds to rescue the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management.

Furthermore, big financial firms have a long-term relationship, both with the government and with each other, and can pay a price if they act selfishly in times of crisis. Bear Stearns, the investment bank, earned itself a lot of ill will by refusing to participate in that 1998 rescue, and it’s widely believed that this ill will played a major factor in the demise of Bear Stearns itself, 10 years later.

So officials could have called on bankers to offer a better deal, for their own sake, and simultaneously threatened to name and shame those who balked. It was their choice not to do that, just as it was their choice not to push for more control over bailed-out banks in early 2009.

And, as I said, these seemingly safe choices have now placed the economy in grave danger.

For the economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. Unemployment is in double-digits; we desperately need more government spending on job creation. Banks are still weak, and credit is still tight; we desperately need more government aid to the financial sector. But try to talk to an ordinary voter about this, and the response you’re likely to get is: “No way. All they’ll do is hand out more money to Wall Street.”

So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

Opens Saturday Nov 21 from 6-8 at LAXART

Nice new paintings going to Art Basel Miami with David Kordansky

An aerial view of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah, taken by a camera attached to a latex weather balloon from about 800 feet in the air.

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: November 17, 2009

In 1972, a year before his death in a plane crash at 35, the artist Robert Smithson wrote, “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day.” And with the creation of his greatest work — “Spiral Jetty,” the huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — he certainly put that conviction to the test.

After the piece was constructed in 1970, it spent decades underwater as the lake rose. It has re-emerged in the last few years because of drought, but its appearance has changed markedly, whitened by salt crystals and the buildup of silt. Mr. Smithson, who was fascinated by the concept of entropy, might have welcomed this transformation. But it is less clear what he would have thought about changes wrought by visitors to the remote site, who have, at times, carried off some of the rocks as art souvenirs. Or moved them to construct their own tiny spiral jetties nearby. Or, in one case, used them to spell out what they were undoubtedly drinking at the time — “BEER” — in the pink-hued sand next to the earthwork.

Issues like this recently prompted the Dia Art Foundation, which owns the work, to begin exploring the idea of systematically documenting the site, photographing it from year to year to give curators and conservators a better idea of how it is changing and a better basis for making decisions — always tricky in the world of land art — about whether to intervene.

“In my field we’re trained to make condition reports,” said Francesca Esmay, Dia’s conservator, but she added of Smithson’s work, composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: “Its scale is such that I can’t just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it.” So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.

After considering nearly every possible way to document “Spiral Jetty” from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

Along with a little helium, some fishing line, a slightly hacked Canon PowerShot G9 point-and-shoot digital camera, an improvised plywood and metal cradle for the camera and some plastic zip ties (to keep the cradle attached and the neck of the balloon cinched), a floating land-art documentation machine was improvised, MacGyver-like.

“I’m not supposed to use the word cheap — it’s inexpensive,” Rand Eppich, a senior project manager with the Getty institute, said. Mr. Eppich, who conceived the balloon plan, made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Salt Lake City last May with a Getty assistant, Aurora Tang, and Ms. Esmay, to put the system in use for the first time.

And despite a couple of balloons that popped in the Utah heat (“Thankfully, we didn’t have cameras on them,” Mr. Eppich said), the three managed to get some spectacular and highly useful shots of the jetty from heights ranging from 800 to 1,600 feet, as they unreeled the fishing line tied to the balloon, allowing it to rise.

“You don’t need to be skilled conservators to do this part — it’s literally like remembering back to childhood birthday parties,” said Ms. Esmay, who joined Dia three years ago as its first full-time conservator. She is also responsible for the condition of sites like Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field” in western New Mexico and for works by artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Louise Bourgeois at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y.

Mr. Eppich said the Getty’s goal was to create a system that Dia could use annually at little cost and one simple enough that Ms. Esmay could operate it herself. “We want to help people do something that’s repeatable and sustainable after we’re gone,” he said.

Preservation concerns about “Spiral Jetty” have arisen lately not only because of the work’s re-emergence from the water but also because of plans announced in the last two and a half years by companies to initiate industrial projects near the site. One is a large expansion of a field of solar evaporation ponds used to extract potassium sulfate from the water for fertilizer. Another is a plan for exploratory oil drilling that Dia officials argued would disrupt the way the work would be viewed and potentially harm it physically. As a result of the drilling proposal — currently in limbo — Dia and Utah officials have begun exploring the creation of a buffer zone around the sculpture that would help protect it while still allowing the lake area to be used for other purposes.

But in addition to industrial threats to the work, there are also natural ones, like silt, which has begun to accumulate between the outermost band of the spiral and the next one in, as the lake’s level has dropped. The lake is so low it is now possible to walk a quarter-mile into it with the water reaching only knee-high.

“In my personal opinion alone,” Ms. Esmay said of the silt, “I think it’s to such a degree now that it’s foreign to the piece. But in 10 years it could be gone or in one year it could be gone. Or it could be worse. You have no way of knowing, and that’s just inherent to the work itself.”

She emphasized that the documentation project was not a prelude to any active plans to rebuild or even touch up the jetty. “Something like that might not happen for 20 years, if it ever happens at all,” she said, “but at least we’ll have 20 years of data that will show the patterns of change.”

And if any conservation plans were to go forward, then the really complicated work would begin: trying to figure out what Mr. Smithson would have thought about it.

“Nature does not proceed in a straight line,” he wrote. “It is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished.”

The South Willard and Reference Library / Stork Bites Man

Shrimp Shop

Opens this Saturday!

Boro Pants
Ceramic Mobiles
Creative Playthings
Down Vests
Handmade Toys
Little Bloomers
Silver Cups
Vintage Overalls
Wooden Blocks

and more, made in the USA, by Brett Cody Rogers, Camden Rose, Creative Playthings, Crescent Down Works, Erin Mulcahy, Kelly Breslin, Mari Eastman, Ramsey Conder and Ready 4 The House.

Opening party on Saturday November 21, 2–4pm
Music and singalong by StoryTimeFunLand

South Willard
8038 W. Third St.
Los Angeles

Come on out on Saturday it’s going to be fun!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 15, 2009

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. Nobody expects President Obama to come back from China with major new agreements, on economic policy or anything else.

But let’s hope that when the cameras aren’t rolling Mr. Obama and his hosts engage in some frank talk about currency policy. For the problem of international trade imbalances is about to get substantially worse. And there’s a potentially ugly confrontation looming unless China mends its ways.

Some background: Most of the world’s major currencies “float” against one another. That is, their relative values move up or down depending on market forces. That doesn’t necessarily mean that governments pursue pure hands-off policies: countries sometimes limit capital outflows when there’s a run on their currency (as Iceland did last year) or take steps to discourage hot-money inflows when they fear that speculators love their economies not wisely but too well (which is what Brazil is doing right now). But these days most nations try to keep the value of their currency in line with long-term economic fundamentals.

China is the great exception. Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy — forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China’s currency — Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They’ve done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities.

And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China’s currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

But why do I say that this problem is about to get much worse? Because for the past year the true scale of the China problem has been masked by temporary factors. Looking forward, we can expect to see both China’s trade surplus and America’s trade deficit surge.

That, at any rate, is the argument made in a new paper by Richard Baldwin and Daria Taglioni of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. As they note, trade imbalances, both China’s surplus and America’s deficit, have recently been much smaller than they were a few years ago. But, they argue, “these global imbalance improvements are mostly illusory — the transitory side effect of the greatest trade collapse the world has ever seen.”

Indeed, the 2008-9 plunge in world trade was one for the record books. What it mainly reflected was the fact that modern trade is dominated by sales of durable manufactured goods — and in the face of severe financial crisis and its attendant uncertainty, both consumers and corporations postponed purchases of anything that wasn’t needed immediately. How did this reduce the U.S. trade deficit? Imports of goods like automobiles collapsed; so did some U.S. exports; but because we came into the crisis importing much more than we exported, the net effect was a smaller trade gap.

But with the financial crisis abating, this process is going into reverse. Last week’s U.S. trade report showed a sharp increase in the trade deficit between August and September. And there will be many more reports along those lines.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

And I’m not sure the Obama administration gets it, either. The administration’s statements on Chinese currency policy seem pro forma, lacking any sense of urgency.

That needs to change. I don’t begrudge Mr. Obama the banquets and the photo ops; they’re part of his job. But behind the scenes he better be warning the Chinese that they’re playing a dangerous game.

The New York City subway uses Helvetica as the typeface on its signage.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: November 15, 2009

Dirt. Noise. Crowds. Delays. Scary smells. Even scarier fluids swirling on the floor. There are lots of reasons to loathe the New York City subway, but one very good reason to love it — Helvetica, the typeface that’s used on its signage.

Seeing the clean, crisp shapes of those letters and numbers at station entrances, on the platforms and inside the trains is always a treat, at least it is until I spot the “Do not lean …” sign on the train doors. Ugh! There’s something not quite right about the “e” and the “a” in the word “lean.” Somehow they seem too small and too cramped. Once I’ve noticed them, the memory of the clean, crisp letters fades, and all I remember are the “off” ones.

That’s the problem with loving typography. It’s always a pleasure to discover a formally gorgeous, subtly expressive typeface while walking along a street or leafing through a magazine. (Among my current favorites are the very elegant letters in the new identity of the Paris fashion house, Céline, and the jolly jumble of multi-colored fonts on the back of the Rossi Ice Cream vans purring around London.) But that joy is swiftly obliterated by the sight of a typographic howler. It’s like having a heightened sense of smell. You spend much more of your time wincing at noxious stinks, than reveling in delightful aromas.

If it’s bad for me (an amateur enthusiast who is interested in typography, but isn’t hugely knowledgeable about it), what must it be like for the purists? Dreadful, it seems. I feel guilty enough about grumbling to my friends whenever I see this or that typographic gaffe, but am too ignorant to spot all of them, unlike the designers who work with typefaces on a daily basis, and study them lovingly.

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.” One of his (least) favorite examples is the Cooper Black typeface on the Mass sign outside a beautifully restored 1885 Carpenter Gothic church near his weekend home in Cape May Point, New Jersey. “Cooper Black is a perfectly good font, but in my mind it is a fat, happy font associated with the logo for the ‘National Lampoon,’ the sleeve of the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ album and discount retailers up and down the U.S.,” Mr. Bierut explained. “I wouldn’t choose it as a font for St. Agnes Church even as a joke. Every time I go by, my vacation is, for a moment, ruined.”

Choosing an inappropriate typeface is one problem. Applying one inaccurately is another. Sadly for type nuts, movies often offend on both counts. Take “Titanic,” in which the numbers on the dials of the ship’s pressure gauges use Helvetica, a font designed in 1957, some 45 years after the real “Titanic” sank. Helvetica was also miscast in “Good Night and Good Luck,” which takes place in the early 1950s. “I still find it bizarre to see type or lettering that is wrong by years in a period movie in which the architecture, furniture and costumes are impeccable, and where somebody would have been fired if they were not,” said Matthew Carter, the typography designer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The same applies to TV shows, including the otherwise excellent “Mad Men.” It is rare to find a review of the show that does not rave about the accuracy of its early 1960s styling, yet the “Mad Men” team is woefully sloppy when it comes to typography. Mark Simonson, a graphic designer in St. Paul, Minnesota, blogs about typographic misdemeanors on his Web site, www.marksimonson.com, and he once catalogued the flaws in “Mad Men.” The 1992 typeface, Lucida Handwriting, appears in an ad in the opening titles. Gill Sans, a British typeface designed in 1930 but rarely used in the United States until the 1970s, is used for office signage. A lipstick ad features one wholly appropriate 1958 font, Amazone, but two incongruous ones, 1978’s Balmoral and 1980’s Fenice. He noted lots of other clunkers too, but admits that he has spotted fewer new errors in the most recent episodes of “Mad Men.”

“I guess they must be doing a better job,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that the same applies to other TV shows and movies, with the unfortunate exception of the animated feature film “Up,” in which he espied Verdana, a font designed by Mr. Carter in 1996 specifically for use on computers, in scenes set in the 1930s and 1940s. “But I’m not sure how picky you should be with a cartoon.”

Yet another common blunder is the misuse of the individual characters in a typeface that includes obscure versions of letters and numbers as well as more familiar ones. These gaffes often occur when lazy designers confuse one character with another, thereby making the typographic equivalent of a spelling mistake.

The British typography designer, Paul Barnes, remembers seeing one on a poster in a Gap store. “It was set in Adobe Caslon and was supposed to say ‘Your first clothes,”’ he recalled. “Rather than use an ‘f’ and ‘I,’ they decided to use a long ‘s’ and dotless ‘i,’ thus spelling ‘sirst’ rather than ‘first.’ ” He is equally irritated by similar errors in the use of historic fonts, like the archaic black letter typefaces that date back to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

That said, even the type-savvy Mr. Barnes claims to have become more tolerant — or less intolerant — of such howlers over the years. “I’m not sure if it’s a case of growing older, or maybe I have lower expectations,” he explained. “In France recently, I drank some nice Côtes du Rhône wine with a fairly dreadful typographic dress. I was less bothered than I used to be; after all, it’s the wine that’s important!”

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: November 14, 2009

Amir Pnueli, who turned a philosopher’s explorations of time, logic and free will into a critical technique for verifying the reliability of computers, died on Nov. 2 in Manhattan. He was 68.

The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage, according to New York University, where Dr. Pnueli (pronounced p’new-EL-ee) was a professor of computer science.

In their first few decades, computers were essentially glorified calculators. Numbers were fed in, and after some calculating the answers came out. By the 1970s, programmers knew how to verify that the programs were performing such calculations correctly.

But as computers became more powerful and software more sophisticated — juggling multiple tasks and responding to changing data — verification grew harder. Programmers had to take into account the behavior of the system over time as it responded to new data or instructions while calculating.

In researching the problem, Dr. Pnueli, then at Tel Aviv University, came across the work of the philosopher Arthur Prior, who had developed “tense logic” to evaluate statements whose truthfulness changes over time.

Take the statement “I am tired,” for example. While its meaning does not change, it is sometimes true and sometimes less so, and a person acts differently depending on the extent of tiredness — going to bed versus going on a hike.

In much the same way, a computer’s actions must often adjust to circumstances. If the hard disk is busy reading data for another process, then a command to write data to the hard disk must wait.

“What Pnueli realized is this logic is actually a perfect fit for computer science,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University.

Dr. Pnueli’s findings on using Prior’s concepts (now more commonly known as temporal logic) in computer systems appeared in a landmark 1977 paper, “The Temporal Logic of Programs.”

In 1996, Dr. Pnueli received the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, an honor often called computer science’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The award citation said his 1977 paper “triggered a fundamental paradigm shift in reasoning about the dynamic behavior of systems.”

Chip makers now use software employing temporal logic to verify that the millions of transistors are calculating as designed, and programmers use temporal logic to minimize the number of bugs in their software.

“All these things are the result of Amir Pnueli’s work over 30 years ago,” Dr. Vardi said.

Amir Pnueli was born on April 22, 1941, at Nahalal, in what is now Israel. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a doctorate in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, writing a thesis on the calculation of ocean tides. He switched to computer science as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and then moved to positions at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and at Weizmann.

He founded the computer science department at Tel Aviv University in 1973 and served as its first chairman. In 1981 he returned to Weizmann as a professor of computer science. He joined the computer science department at N.Y.U. in 1999.

Dr. Pnueli also founded two software companies, Mini-Systems in 1971 and AdCad in 1984.

His awards include the Israel Prize, the highest honor given by the State of Israel, and membership as a foreign associate in the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Pnueli is survived by his wife, Ariela; two daughters, Shira Pnueli-Levi of Nes Ziona, Israel, and Noga Pnueli of Brooklyn; a son, Ishay, of Hod Hasharon, Israel; and four grandchildren.

By SAUL HANSELL
NY Times Published: November 14, 2009

HERE’S a consolation prize to the millions who recoil in bafflement from cellphone companies’ labyrinthine price plans, with their ever more intricate arrays of minutes, messages and megabytes: Economists don’t understand them, either.

In many parts of the world, the pricing of cellphone calling is simple. But in the United States, carriers offer multitiered plans.

“The whole pricing thing is weird,” said Barry Nalebuff, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management. “You pay $60 to make your first phone call. Your next 1,000 minutes are free. Then the minute after that costs 35 cents.”

To economists, it simply doesn’t make sense to make chatterboxes pay that penalty. After all, most businesses tend to give discounts to customers who buy more.

It would be easy to see the cellphone companies simply as avaricious oligopolists trying to gouge consumers for every penny they can. And in some senses they are aiming to maximize revenue, at least as much as the market will let them.

But understanding the psychological nuances of how a price plan affects customers’ behavior is at least as important to running a cellphone company today as knowing how radio waves spread over a city. Those high charges for going over your allotted minutes, for example, are designed to cause you enough pain that you will switch to a plan with a higher regular fee.

“You give people a really good bargain on this bucket of minutes,” explained Roger Entner, a senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen. “People are risk averse, so you have a relatively high overage charge, which gets people to overbuy. You also get really predictable revenue out of it, which Wall Street loves.”

Neither the cellphone companies nor their customers, as it turns out, always act in the rational way that economists might predict. Consumers often put immediate gratification and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises above their long-term interests. The companies, meanwhile, are trying to meet the sometimes irrational expectations of investors, who want growth without too much nasty volatility, even if their profits suffer.

Here are a few other examples of how the dance between cellphone companies and their customers is, to use Professor Nalebuff’s term, “weird”:

•

When Apple and AT&T started offering the iPhone for $199, plus $30 a month for Internet access, sales shot up, even though the previous deal — $399 for the phone and $20 a month — cost less over a two-year contract.

•

Phone companies have doubled the price for text messages, to 20 cents each, in recent years, even though they cost almost nothing to deliver.

•

When companies introduce certain discounts — like Sprint’s recent offer of free calling to any mobile number — the effect is that customers often switch to more expensive plans.

•

One thing that is costing cellphone companies a lot of money to provide is the one thing they offer for a flat rate with no limits: surfing the Web on gadgets like the iPhone.

There is nothing obvious or necessary about this approach to pricing. In many parts of the world, you simply buy a phone from a store, then buy a card that entitles you to talk for a set number of minutes. Use up the card and buy more minutes. No contracts. No surprising charges. No confused economists.

But for all the complexity, cellphones American-style do have a certain supersized logic. Americans spend more money each month on their wireless bills than people in any other country. But the money we spend buys a whole lot more talk time and text messages than it does elsewhere. On average, we effectively spend about 5 cents per minute of talk time and about a penny a text message, lower than anywhere else in the developed world.

This year, the deals are becoming even better. For people who want to surf the Web on their phones, wireless companies are willing to sell them iPhones, BlackBerrys and other sleek gadgets for hundreds of dollars less than they cost. The catch, of course, is that customers need to pay $30 or so extra each month for Internet access. For those who just want to talk and text without a fancy phone, there is hot competition to offer lower- price, unlimited phone plans that don’t require contracts.

In many ways, however, the least important factor in setting prices is the actual cost of providing cellular service. Cellphone companies resemble airlines, that other industry whose oblique prices exasperate consumers. Think of a cellphone network as one giant airplane that costs tens of billions of dollars to build. The cellphone companies don’t really know how much it costs to handle a call to Aunt Suzy in Syracuse, any more than an airline can calculate a specific cost for Seat 12B.

“Service providers don’t have a good measure of their costs,” said Philip Marshall, an analyst for the Yankee Group. “They don’t have the ability to say if they are going to make money” on any particular plan.

PUT simply, all a phone company wants is to get as much money as possible each month from its customers. Then it hopes that this total is more than its costs.

That’s why the carriers put great stock in a measure called average revenue per user, or ARPU (pronounced “ARE-poo.”) A climbing ARPU makes for happy phone companies and happy investors.

But in fact, over the last decade, total ARPU has been declining slightly, a result of competition. But unlike the airlines, the two largest cellphone carriers — Verizon Wireless and AT&T — have healthy profit margins. The distant third and fourth — Sprint and T-Mobile — have had a harder time keeping up.

Every few years, the companies adopt new technology that expands their networks’ capacity. For a while, they passed the benefit of these improvements to customers by periodically increasing the number of minutes in pricing plans. But since 2004, the basic rate for the lowest-priced plan at the largest carriers has stayed constant, at $39.99 for 450 prime-time minutes.

The cellphone companies wanted to avoid the sort of price wars that occurred a decade earlier in the long-distance market. So they decided to compete by offering distinctive goodies that cost little, yet had a lot of customer appeal.

Verizon Wireless focused, for example, on offering free calls to other Verizon customers. In response, T-Mobile, the smallest of the major carriers, concocted the My Faves plan, which gave users free calling to any five numbers, whatever carrier they used.

In 2004, Cingular Wireless (now AT&T) introduced what it called rollover minutes, with plans that allow unused minutes of talk time to be used in the following months.

An economist would see Cingular’s move as a price cut. After all, why buy a big plan as a cushion against what might be an occasional month of high use when you can accumulate your minutes from low-use months? In fact, it worked the other way around, encouraging people to buy larger plans. It turned out that people were happy to buy extra minutes if they knew they could keep them, rather than having them expire.

In May 2004, Sprint answered the growing complexity of cellphone plans with a much more straightforward approach. Its Fair and Flexible plan offered 300 minutes for $35, and each additional block of 50 minutes for $2.50. It was a plan that an economist could love.

Unfortunately for Sprint, customers hated it because their bills varied a great deal from month to month. ”Nobody thinks about getting the lowest cost per minute,” said a former pricing executive for Sprint who asked that his name not be used to avoid offending his former employer.

Sprint dropped the plan in early 2007, and reintroduced plans with big buckets of minutes and higher fees for going over the allotted time.

Despite all the carriers’ efforts to lure people to buy ever more expensive voice plans, the average revenue per user from voice service has been falling since 2003, according to statistics from CTIA, the wireless trade group.

MORE recently, the carriers have confronted another problem: People are talking less on their mobile phones, and texting instead. In the first half of this year, the average wireless customer sent 518 texts a month and made 220 phone calls, according to CTIA figures. (That average, of course, is driven up by the furious texting of teenagers.)

Revenue from voice plans has fallen 31 percent since peaking in 2003. To fill that hole, the carriers raised the price of a text message from 10 cents to 15 cents, and later to 20 cents. These fees provided nice cash, but as with the voice charges, the main purpose was to persuade customers to subscribe to text-message plans that cost up to $20 a month for unlimited texting on AT&T and Verizon and $10 a month on Sprint and T-Mobile.

“It really makes sense, if you are texting at all, to buy an unlimited text plan and not have to worry about it,” said Will Souder, a vice president for pricing at Sprint. Fewer people are running up big bills from 20-cent text messages, but the company’s ARPU has gone up anyway because so many customers signed up for unlimited text plans.

THE biggest boon to the wireless carriers has been Apple’s iPhone, which increased interest in using a mobile phone to surf the Web.

When it entered the smartphone business in 2007, Apple tried to turn upside down the traditional model in which carriers subsidized the cost of handsets. It initially wanted customers to pay $599 — later cut to $399 — for their handsets, but they would pay AT&T, its exclusive carrier, only $20 a month for the Internet access, a portion of which would go to Apple.

Consumers balked at the high upfront cost. By the second generation of the iPhone, Apple reverted to a traditional subsidy model. The iPhone that now costs consumers $199 actually costs AT&T about $550, according to analysts’ estimates. To cover the subsidy, the Internet price increased to $30 a month.

Yes, consumers come out behind on that deal, to the tune of $40 over two years, but it was only when the opening price dropped to $199 that iPhone sales started to skyrocket.

Now all the carriers are selling heavily subsidized smartphones. They hate this state of affairs — and wish that American consumers would just pay full price for the phones, the way people do in Europe. T-Mobile recently introduced an option for customers to pay a lower monthly bill if they buy their own phones, and even offered to spread the handset cost over two years with no interest charges.

“They are trying to break the model and get away from the big subsidies that are going into these phones,” said John Hodulik, an analyst at UBS Securities. “There is something to that, but I’m not sure it will work because people want their brand-new shiny phones.”

The growth of smartphones has especially benefited AT&T, which has the iPhone, and Verizon, which is seen as having the best network. Sprint, at No. 3, has been losing customers for several years. In addition to trying to improve its customer service, Sprint has started several pricing changes to try to stem the losses.

Sprint’s boldest move has been to offer a $50 flat-rate plan, including unlimited voice, text and Internet, through its prepaid Boost brand. In prepaid plans, like those popularized by MetroPCS and Leap Wireless, you don’t have to sign a contract, but you also have to buy a handset without a subsidy. Boost has garnered a net 2.1 million new accounts since introducing the unlimited offer early this year. T-Mobile and AT&T have responded in recent months by offering $60 unlimited plans.

Boost was successful, said Matt Carter, its president, because its plan stood out from the multitiered offerings of traditional wireless carriers — including its parent, Sprint. “There is a lot of complexity out there in the marketplace,” he said. “What we are is a force for simplicity.”

Lower prices that are predictable and easy to understand. Maybe an economist won’t find that weird. But will the consumer?

The state faces a water crisis and population boom, but radioactive waste from the Nevada Test Site has polluted aquifers.
Yucca Flat, Nev.

The Los Angeles Times
By Ralph Vartabedian
November 13, 2009

Reporting from Yucca Flat, Nev. - A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.

When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.

During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage.

They have successfully pressured federal officials for a fresh environmental assessment of the 1,375-square-mile test site, a step toward a potential demand for monetary compensation, replacement of the lost water or a massive cleanup.

“It is one of the largest resource losses in the country,” said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. “Nobody thought to say, ‘You are destroying a natural resource.’ ”

In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years — enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

At today’s prices, that water would be worth as much as $48 billion if it had not been fouled, Buqo said.

Although the contaminated water is migrating southwest from the high ground of the test site, the Energy Department has no cleanup plans, saying it would be impossible to remove the radioactivity. Instead, its emphasis is on monitoring.

Federal scientists say the tainted water is moving so slowly — 3 inches to 18 feet a year — that it will not reach the nearest community, Beatty, about 22 miles away, for at least 6,000 years.

Still, Nevada officials reject the idea that a massive part of their state will be a permanent environmental sacrifice zone.

Access to more water could stoke an economic boom in the area, local officials say. More than a dozen companies want to build solar electric generation plants, but the county cannot allow the projects to go forward without more water, said Gary Hollis, a Nye County commissioner.

The problem extends beyond the contamination zone. If too much clean water is pumped out of the ground from adjacent areas, it could accelerate the movement of tainted water. When Nye County applied for permits in recent years to pump clean water near the western boundary of the test site, the state engineer denied the application based on protests by the Energy Department.

(The department did not cite environmental concerns, perhaps to avoid acknowledging the extent of the Cold War contamination. Instead, federal officials said the pumping could compromise security at the test site, which is still in use.)

“Those waters have been degraded,” said Republican state Assemblyman Edwin Goedhart of Nye County, who runs a dairy with 18,000 head of livestock. “That water belongs to the people of Nevada. Even before any contamination comes off the test site, I look at this as a matter of social economic justice.”

Even before the Cold War turned the landscape radioactive, the test site was a forbidding place, as empty a spot as any in the country.

Creosote and sagebrush covered much of the gravelly terrain, punctuated by soaring mountains and crusty lake beds. In the winter months, snow covered the 7,000-foot Pahute Mesa, and a few herds of wild horses roamed the high country.

In 1950, President Truman secretly selected the site for nuclear testing and withdrew the federally owned land from public use.

In early 1951, atomic blasts started lighting up the sky over Las Vegas, then a city of fewer than 50,000. Early atmospheric tests spawned heavy fallout, and some areas are still so radioactive that anybody entering must wear hazardous-material suits. Later tests were done underground, leaving hundreds of craters that resemble otherworldly scars.

Each of the underground detonations — some as deep as 5,000 feet — vaporized a huge chamber, leaving a cavity filled with radioactive rubble.

About a third of the tests were conducted directly in aquifers, and others were hundreds or thousands of feet above the water table. Federal scientists say contamination above the aquifers should remain suspended in the perpetually dry soil, a contention that critics say is unproven.

In the hottest zones, radioactivity in the water reaches millions of picocuries per liter. The federal standard for drinking water is 20 picocuries per liter.

Federal officials say they don’t know how much water was contaminated. Whatever the amount, they say, extracting it would be prohibitively expensive, and even if the radioactive material could be separated, it would have to be put back in the ground elsewhere.

Although radiation levels in the water have declined, the longer-lived isotopes will continue to pose risks for tens of thousands of years. The Energy Department has 48 monitoring wells at the site and began drilling nine deep wells in the summer.

Bill Wilborn, the Energy Department’s water expert at the site, said the water is moving about two-thirds of a mile every 1,000 years from low-lying Yucca Flat, where 660 nuclear tests were conducted.

At the higher Pahute Mesa, where 81 of the biggest and deepest tests occurred, the water movement is more complicated. It generally flows downhill toward Beatty and the agricultural district of Amargosa Valley. On average, it is moving 1 3/4 miles every 1,000 years, but the annual pace ranges from about 1 foot to 18 feet, Wilborn said.

“The good thing is that it is not highly mobile,” he said. “There are not a lot of nearby [people], and we are not pumping to accelerate the flow.”

Federal scientists concede that much is unknown about the test site, whose vast size and complex geology make it a difficult place to study in detail.

Based on their calculations, government geologists acknowledge that the forward plume of radioactive water under Pahute Mesa should have already crossed the site boundary, although it has yet to be detected by monitoring wells. Some experts worry that the contamination could reach deeper aquifers that move much more quickly.

Because the contaminated water poses no immediate health threat, the Energy Department has ranked Nevada at the bottom of its priority list for cleaning up major sites in the nuclear weapons complex, and it operates far fewer wells than at most other contaminated sites.

The test site receives about $65 million a year from the department’s $5.5-billion annual nuclear cleanup budget. By contrast, about $1.8 billion a year is spent on the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state, even though soil and water contamination there is one-thousandth as severe as in Nevada.

Although Nevada has not pressed for compensation or replacement water so far, public officials say they are considering such action.

They have been emboldened by their recent success in blocking a federal plan to build a nuclear waste dump adjacent to the test site at Yucca Mountain.

“All the attention has been on Yucca Mountain. Now if the battle has been won on Yucca Mountain, then you may see some attention that will focus on cleaning up the test site,” said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who wrote the authoritative history of the Nevada Test Site.

The state attorney general’s office recently put a temporary halt on dumping low-level radioactive waste from other states at the Nevada Test Site. Under pressure from the office, the federal government agreed this year to conduct a new environmental analysis of the site.

“Once we have the new environmental impact statement, then we will be able to talk about the federal government compensating the state,” said Marta Adams, senior deputy attorney general.

Said Allen Biaggi, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources: “We have every expectation of the federal government cleaning up the Nevada Test Site. . . . It would cost a lot, but our groundwater is worth it.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 12, 2009

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, employment has fallen more than 5 percent, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In Country B, employment has fallen only half a percent, and unemployment is only slightly higher than it was before the crisis.

Don’t you think Country A might have something to learn from Country B?

This story isn’t hypothetical. Country A is the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse. Country B is Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses. Germany’s jobs miracle hasn’t received much attention in this country — but it’s real, it’s striking, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. government is doing the right things to fight unemployment.

Here in America, the philosophy behind jobs policy can be summarized as “if you grow it, they will come.” That is, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy. The theory is that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring.

The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly. We could, for example, have New-Deal-style employment programs. Perhaps such a thing is politically impossible now — Glenn Beck would describe anything like the Works Progress Administration as a plan to recruit pro-Obama brownshirts — but we should note, for the record, that at their peak, the W.P.A. and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed millions of Americans, at relatively low cost to the budget.

Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. Such policies could range from labor rules that discourage firing to financial incentives for companies that either add workers or reduce hours to avoid layoffs.

And that’s what the Germans have done. Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses.

Should America be trying anything along these lines? In a recent interview, Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s highest-ranking economist, was dismissive: “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount of work — and Congress doesn’t seem willing to spend enough on stimulus to change that unfortunate fact. So shouldn’t we be considering other measures, if only as a stopgap?

Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they’re bad for long-run growth — that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. And in normal times there’s something to be said for American-style “free to lose” labor markets, in which employers can fire workers at will but also face few barriers to new hiring.

But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the rise.

And long-term unemployment inflicts long-term damage. Workers who have been out of a job for too long often find it hard to get back into the labor market even when conditions improve. And there are hidden costs, too — not least for children, who suffer physically and emotionally when their parents spend months or years unemployed.

So it’s time to try something different.

Just to be clear, I believe that a large enough conventional stimulus would do the trick. But since that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, we need to talk about cheaper alternatives that address the job problem directly. Should we introduce an employment tax credit, like the one proposed by the Economic Policy Institute? Should we introduce the German-style job-sharing subsidy proposed by the Center for Economic Policy Research? Both are worthy of consideration.

The point is that we need to start doing something more than, and different from, what we’re already doing. And the experience of other countries suggests that it’s time for a policy that explicitly and directly targets job creation.

thanks to steve hadley

The New Yorker
November 9, 2009
By Dave Cowen

I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

—Kanye West, promoting his book “Thank You and You’re Welcome.”

Whoever said life is an open book probably didn’t have any friends. Sure, he probably liked the people in his book. But did they like him? No. Why? Because they aren’t real.

My friends are real. They actually talk to me. Like just the other day my friend Bill said, “I’m not reading your e-mail for you anymore. You need to learn how to read.” And I said, “Bill, if you don’t read me my e-mail, I won’t sign an autograph for your son.” And Bill was, like, “Well, go fuck yourself. I’m going back to the hospital.” Bill’s son, Bill, Jr., or Billy Bob, was in the children’s unit there. He didn’t read the label on the box of his Sticky Stones™, and when he swallowed three of the iron-ore magnets they fused into a chain along the wall of his esophagus. Bill, Sr., felt extra bad because he hadn’t read that a consumer safety group had placed the Sticky Stones™ on its annual list of the ten worst toys. I told Bill that’s life. That stuff happens when you are doing stuff. In life. Real life. If I had told you that what had happened to Billy Bob had happened in a book, you would have said no way, that would never happen, that’s fiction. But it did. Because I told you it did.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are a few books that I am a fan of. Matchbooks are good. A lot of people are under the impression that books burn only at a specific temperature. But it’s just not true. I can burn most books at or below 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes below 300, if I soak the jacket in lighter fluid.

I also like MacBooks. You can really do stuff on them, you know. Like see how many followers you have on Twitter, or take pictures of yourself with Photo Booth, or play Second Life, or check if Bill has checked your e-mail. I miss Bill. He set up my Facebook account on my MacBook. I’ve got my own page on there. I have more than a million fans. Do you know how many fans Books have? Twenty-five thousand seven hundred and sixty-four. That’s it. So I’m not alone here. You know what else has more fans than Books? The Olive Garden. One hundred and eighty-five thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. What else? Sleep: over three hundred thousand. More people would rather be unconscious than read a book. Now, I’m not condoning sleep. I’m about doing stuff. Living life. But it just goes to show that I’m in the majority.

Right now you’re probably wondering, Hey, why is this guy, a proud non-reader of books, writing this? Isn’t this a Catch-22? And I say no, it’s not. It’s a Catch-23. What’s a Catch-23? It’s like a Catch-22, except there is no catch. I don’t want you to read this. In fact, you should stop reading right now. Seriously. Stop reading this. Start doing stuff. What kind of stuff, you ask? I don’t know. Why don’t you go to the Olive Garden? But just watch out. They give you the never-ending salad before the never-ending pasta bowl. You wouldn’t think so, but the salad fills you right up. The lettuce is mostly iceberg. All water. And the waiter really makes you feel like shit when you don’t make it to the fettucine Alfredo.

Sometimes when I don’t know what to do I imagine other people doing stuff. But like people in a different time. Or like people in a different place. And I think how cool would it be to be that person for awhile. Like to know how other people I don’t know talk or do stuff. How they really live, you know? But that’s when I’m not doing stuff of my own. Which is all the time anyway. ♦

Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2009
By: Andrew Blankstein

A Spider-Man impersonator was arrested on outstanding criminal warrants today after an incident in which he allegedly slugged a man near the Hollywood and Highland complex, Los Angeles police said.

It was not immediately clear what led to the altercation, which was reported about 12:30 p.m. in the 6800 block of Hollywood Boulevard. But it’s the latest in a string of incidents involving movie characters and celebrity lookalikes who vie for space — and attention — along the tourist-filled corridor that includes Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Christopher Loomis, 39, was being held on outstanding misdemeanor warrants in lieu of $5,500 bail, police said.

The incident unfolded when LAPD patrol officers received a radio call reporting a battery by a man in a Spider-Man costume. When they arrived, they encountered four different people dressed as the web-slinging crusader.

“They stopped one, it wasn’t him,” LAPD Lt. Beverly Lewis said. “They stopped the second, and it was the suspect.”

The victim, who said he was hit in the face and arms, refused to press charges against the costumed impersonator. But Lewis said that when they discovered the warrants, he was booked. She said it appeared the suspect and victim knew each other.

Costumed impersonators portraying the likes of Elvis, Superman, SpongeBob SquarePants and others have worked on Hollywood Boulevard for years. They collect tips from tourists by posing for pictures or performing in front of the theater.

But sometimes the fun has turned violent. Tourists have complained that some costumed characters turn abusive when the tourists refuse to pay them to pose for pictures. And there have also been brawls. Two years ago, authorities convened a “super-hero summit” designed to reduce tensions among the performers.

The meeting was prompted in part by an incident in which LAPD officers arrested a “Star Wars” street performer in his furry brown Chewbacca costume for allegedly head-butting a tour guide who complained about the character’s treatment of Japanese tourists.

In other incidents, actors dressed as the superhero Mr. Incredible, Elmo the Muppet and
the dark-hooded character from the movie “Scream” were arrested for aggressive begging. A man dressed as the horror film character Freddy Krueger was also taken into custody for allegedly stabbing someone, although no charges were filed.

“Typical Hollywood; it’s always something different,” said the LAPD’s Lewis. Loomis, still wearing his Spider-Man outfit, sat nearby, handcuffed to a bench in the Hollywood Station.

If you need a koala dog haircut, and are in Tokyo look no further.

Dog Man

By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times Published: November 10, 2009

One day in the mid-1980s, Dakis Joannou, a Greek Cypriot industrialist, was exploring the art galleries of the East Village in Manhattan when he came upon a basketball suspended in a tank of liquid. Captivated, he invested $2,700 in “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” by a little-known artist named Jeff Koons. It was, he said, as if a whole new world had opened up to him.

Twenty-five years — and 40 Koonses — later, Mr. Joannou is considered one of the most important contemporary art collectors in the world. And the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan is preparing to showcase his vast collection in a three-story exhibition, with Mr. Koons, now an art superstar, as the guest curator.

The show, slated to open in March, is generating anticipatory chatter in the art world. But it is also leading to buzz of a different kind, about the propriety of turning over a public museum to a private collector who also happens to be a museum trustee and a chief patron of the curator.

Private collection shows appeal to many art museums because they can display great works that are otherwise inaccessible. Over the last decade, though, as prices rose in the art market, the museum industry came to believe that such shows required extra vigilance about potential conflicts of interest. In this case, critics say the New Museum, which in its 32-year history has evolved from a scrappy alternative space into a mainstream institution, is jeopardizing its integrity by giving too much power to a board member with a vested interest in the artists he collects.

“Maybe it is a fantastic collection, but the museum is a public trust: nonprofit, tax exempt and government supported,” said Noah Kupferman, a former specialist at Sotheby’s who teaches a course called Fine Art as a Financial Asset at New York University. “It is supposed to be an independent arbiter of taste and art-historical value. It is not supposed to surrender itself to a trustee and donor whose collection stands to be enhanced in value by a major museum show.”

As the New Museum sees it, exhibiting Mr. Joannou’s collection, which has never been shown in the United States, is a gift to the public, providing a creative model for public-private partnerships in difficult economic times.

“We think the public will be the beneficiaries of Dakis’s very generous agreement to allow works from his foundation to cross the ocean,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, referring to Mr. Joannou’s Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Art in Athens.

“I understand why some people might consider it a perceived conflict,” she continued. “But we’re confident that the initiative is artistically and intellectually important and ethically legitimate, consistent with our mission and our vision.”

Mr. Joannou dismissed concerns. Speaking by phone from his home in Athens, he said: “Sure, I am a trustee. Would it be different if I weren’t? Some people may think some things. For me, it’s a nonissue. I know who I am and what I am doing.”

Museums have always depended on collectors for loans and donations, and some have a long history of exhibiting private collections. But a decade ago, “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum prompted an ethical debate.

“Sensation” is best remembered as a battle from the culture wars, in which Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani denounced as “sick stuff” artwork like Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” with its appended elephant dung. But because the collection’s owner, the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, was an active trader in the contemporary art market, “Sensation” also heightened concerns about museums renting out their reputations, being manipulated by collectors or “acting more like commercial galleries,” said Erik Ledbetter, director of international programs and ethics at the American Association of Museums.

This prompted the association, which accredits but does not regulate museums, to issue guidelines for exhibiting borrowed objects, stressing “transparency, intellectual integrity and institutional control,” Mr. Ledbetter said. While the New Museum is not accredited by the association, all museums are considered to be bound by its standards.

The guidelines stress the potential for conflicts if board members become lenders, Mr. Ledbetter said. He offered these “cautionary flags”: a show devoted to one collector; a show in which the collector is a board member, donor or underwriter; a show in which the museum gives away or pools curatorial judgment with the collector.

“Any one of those things can be managed,” he said, “but when you layer them on top of each other, it’s more complicated.”

The New Museum show raises all the association’s cautionary flags except one: Mr. Joannou is not underwriting the exhibition.

In a phone interview that she limited to 20 minutes, Ms. Phillips expressed exasperation that the museum was being challenged. Several art world blogs, especially Tyler Green’s well-read Modern Art Notes, have been critical.

“We’re not the first to do an exhibition of a private collection, and we won’t be the last,” she said.

There are abundant recent examples of private collection shows at American museums, but none that involve both a trustee and a guest curator close to the trustee.

This year alone, the Brooklyn Museum, which was showing private collections decades before “Sensation,” gave over a gallery — and curatorial control — to works by Hernan Bas, a young Miami artist, from the Rubell Family Collection. (The Rubells are not affiliated with the museum). The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited Old Master drawings from the collection of its trustee Jean Bonna, although it organized the show itself.

And the National Gallery of Art, using its own curator, is now showing modern art from the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection; in this case, all the works have been donated or promised to the museum.

That is what many institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, require to deal with potential conflict: a gift. “The minute you enter into a relationship with a private collection, you have to make sure that it’s in ink that the stuff is coming to you,” said Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The New Museum does not maintain a permanent collection, and is therefore not positioned to receive gifts.

Some museums ask the lender to sign an agreement promising a moratorium on sales so that art is not whisked straight from museum walls to an auction block. Ms. Phillips said Mr. Joannou “is aware that the museum has a policy of not exhibiting work from a trustee if they are intending to sell.” Further, she said, Mr. Joannou buys much more than he sells.

The selection of Mr. Koons as curator, Ms. Phillips said, was “the resounding choice” of the museum’s curators, partly because he has been “engaged in conversation and debate with Dakis” for the last 25 years.

Mr. Joannou’s rise as a collector paralleled Mr. Koons’s as an artist. Mr. Joannou became not only Mr. Koons’s patron, acquiring such trophy works as a giant balloon dog and a stainless steel train filled with bourbon, but also his close friend. Mr. Joannou, 69, served as best man at Mr. Koons’s first wedding and is godfather to his son. Mr. Koons, 54, designed the exterior of Mr. Joannou’s yacht, “Guilty,” and created a giant wedding cake for his daughter.

“I am extremely, extremely curious to see how Jeff will deal with the work of his peers — and of his own,” Mr. Joannou said of the coming exhibition.

Dan Cameron, a former New Museum curator who is now artistic director of the Prospect New Orleans art biennial, said the choice of Mr. Koons made him uncomfortable. “I am a big fan of Jeff’s,” he said, “but he is not a fair or impartial or even interesting interpreter of what Dakis does.”

An assistant to Mr. Koons said he was too busy to talk to a reporter.

Mr. Joannou, the chairman of an international construction firm, has more than 1,000 pieces in his collection with concentrations of works by Mr. Ofili, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and others. His collection, periodically exhibited at his Athens foundation, has been shown in Paris and Vienna.

In discussing the New Museum show, several museum leaders cautioned against what Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described as “overly puritanical” judgments about “the delicate dance” between museums and collectors.

“The Met wouldn’t be the Met — the Met wouldn’t have the collections it has — if it hadn’t been for private collectors,” he said.

And several figures in the art world defended, and applauded, the New Museum for its Joannou show. Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head for postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, called Mr. Joannou a “collector of record and a tastemaker” with a “fantastic collection that will bring back to New York a lot of things that haven’t been seen here in decades.”

Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, agreed. “I think it’s useful for the entire food chain of the contemporary art world that private collections go on view — and if they become more valuable in the process, that doesn’t hurt anyone.”

Art business experts expressed no doubt that a museum show enhances the art’s value —regardless of whether it is taken right to market. “Showing at a museum gives credence to the works a collector has assembled and does add value to the asset,” said John Arena, senior vice president in custom credit at U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management.

Contemporary art, in particular, can benefit from a museum’s stamp of approval. “When contemporary art comes into a collection, it is still wet,” said Mr. Kupferman of N.Y.U., who also works in the financial sector. “It has not withstood the test of time. In financial terms, an Old Master is kind of like a utility stock. Contemporary art is like a dot-com. It can lose its value — poof.”

Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney, founded the New Museum in 1977 as a laboratory for emerging and under-recognized artists. Ms. Phillips took the reins in 1999, and over the last decade, the museum, whose succinct mission is “new art, new ideas,” has grown considerably in ambition, profile and attendance.

Two years ago, Ms. Phillips oversaw the museum’s move into its new $48 million home on the Bowery at Prince Street, where each nook and cranny has a sponsor (the Ruth E. Horowitz stairs, the Jerome L. and Ellen Stern restrooms), as does Ms. Phillips herself (the Toby Devan Lewis director).

Mr. Cameron said he believed the new building signaled a “dramatically different direction,” more mainstream and aligned with the art market. Its exhibition schedule increasingly features artists who are already established on the contemporary art scene, and the museum’s critics consider it to be overly enmeshed in what can seem like a dizzyingly insular circle of art world insiders.

A lot of families start out in small houses – just not this small. Kelly Breslin, Ryan Conder and their 9-month-old son, Thurston, live in a 380-square-foot 1950s house in Echo Park with living quarters built above the garage. The family also makes room for a mutt named Charlie. Conder and Breslin insist they prefer living small and don’t let it cramp their style. The space is arranged for maximum efficiency but maintains the vibe of an artist’s loft with a carefully edited selection of contemporary art and midcentury Danish and Italian furniture.

We recently dropped in on Breslin and Conder, owner of the men’s clothing store South Willard. It wasn’t an exhausting tour — you’re looking at about half of their home here — but their designs for living (and parenting) were eye-opening.

Conder is a fan of furniture and lighting by the Italian designer Tobia Scarpa. The sofa is part of a three-piece Scarpa design, but the house had room for only two of the sections.

“When you have this small a space, every decision is critical. You can only have things that fit within the scale of this space,” Conder says. “And these are all things I have wanted for a long time.”

Textiles add color to the otherwise earthy, woodsy room. Rugs with geometric designs and folkloric motifs were purchased from Echo Park antiques dealer Peter Vanstone to cover the hardwood floor. Pendleton wool pillows on the sofa complement a Western camp blanket on the bed.

On the shelf above: a ceramic bowl by Akio Nukaga, a bronze plaque by Los Angeles sculptor Ricky Swallow and one of Breslin’s handmade ceramic pieces.

The closet is concealed behind drapes made from Japanese mosquito netting and the patched and mended indigo fabrics known as boro.

A bright red Formica counter separates the kitchen from the rest of the living space. It is decked with Bauer pottery and Heath Ceramics bowls purchased at estate sales.

To the right, a Danish dresser also serves as Thurston’s dressing table. “People tell you need all this stuff for a baby,” Breslin says. “All you really need is diapers, a place to change him and boobs.”

In the picture window, the couple hung a vintage California driftwood sculpture purchased at Yoko Antiques in South Pasadena.

“I love the view of the trees,” Breslin says. “It’s the closest we can get to being in a cabin and still be in the city.”

Breslin, who grew up in a large two-story home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., says she can understand that people might find her home peculiar. “I don’t think we’re so crazy,” she says. “The way that most people structure their living situations is so the parents are most happy. But who’s to say that a kid wants to be in a room down a hall?”

This is the view from the front door. Artwork includes the Arthur Ou photograph above Breslin’s head.

“Everyone who comes over says, ‘Wow, it’s so cute,’ but I know they are thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so small,’ ” she says.

Adds Conder: “Even the guy who comes to fix the sink asked where the bedroom is.”

With space at a premium, the couple stacks their cookbooks on top of the refrigerator in a wooden crate painted a brilliant blue. The top of it serves as a pedestal for a basket — one of several craft purchases they have made traveling the West in the family camper van — and an alphabet jug made by the painter and ceramist David Korty.

The solid wood and iron-legged dining table is a classic Danish design by Piet Hein and Arne Jacobsen. The chairs are Shaker-style designs by Borge Mogensen. Conder designed the stacked plywood bookcase.

The large ceramic bowl on the table was purchased at the Pasadena City College Flea Market. Conder’s pottery collection also includes the work of avant-garde ceramist Peter Voulkos and Northern California and sculptor Stan Bitters.

The front door is on a pathway that leads to another house in the back of the property. For privacy, Conder hung a vintage honeycomb-pattern American quilt. The dog door was even simpler: Charlie enters through a panel of the screen door that has been cut away from the frame.

By David A. Keeps
Los Angeles Times
November 7, 2009

Though he is still crawling, 9-month-old Thurston Conder takes about 10 seconds to have the run of the house. It’s not that he’s exceptionally fast; he just doesn’t have that far to roam. Thurston shares 380 square feet with his mom and dad, Kelly Breslin and Ryan Conder, and a medium-sized mutt named Charlie.

Lots of young families start out in small houses, just not this small. These parents say it’s their preference, and that the small space hasn’t cramped their style. It’s arranged for maximum efficiency, but it still looks comfortable and fashionably decorated. Conder, 35, owner of the men’s clothing store South Willard, and Breslin, 32, a ceramic artist, have given it a distinct personality: Quadruple their living quarters and it would look like a downtown artist’s loft with a carefully edited selection of contemporary art and Midcentury Danish and Italian design.

“Everyone who comes over says, ‘Wow, it’s so cute,’ but I know they are thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so small,’ ” Breslin says.

Adds Conder: “Even the guy who comes to fix the sink asked where the bedroom is.”

There isn’t one. Built atop a two-car garage, the 1950s house’s living quarters consist of two rooms — and that’s if you count the bath. There isn’t a designated nursery or even a crib. Along with other parents in their Echo Park circle of friends, Conder and Breslin practice co-sleeping, so Thurston rests with them.

Breslin, a former nanny, says she would hardly call their lifestyle neo-hippie.

“We are trying to be conscientious about the choices we make,” she says. “People tell you you need all this stuff for a baby. All you really need is diapers, a place to change him and boobs.”

The queen-sized bed that she and Conder share with Thurston sits on a minimalist platform with drawers for his toys. It is the only thing Conder says he has ever purchased at IKEA, and it’s tucked in a corner, a few inches from a swank, streamlined sofa by eminent Italian architect and designer Tobia Scarpa. Overnight visitors crash on the couch or sleep in a backyard tent.

At the foot of the bed, Thurston gets his diaper changed atop a Danish modern dresser. Photos and works on paper by the couple’s artist friends cover the walls. Conder also collects pottery, including the work of the noted Peter Voulkos and celebrated Northern California ceramist Stan Bitters.

Textiles add color to the otherwise earthy, woodsy room. The Western-style camp blanket on the bed that complements Pendleton wool pillows on the sofa. Rugs with geometric designs and folkloric motifs purchased from Echo Park antiques dealer Peter Vanstone cover the hardwood floors. A handcrafted American quilt hangs over the screened front door, and the clothes closet is concealed behind a vibrant indigo boro, a Japanese patchwork panel made from vintage fabrics.

An early 1960s Cocoon lamp by Achille and Pier Castiglioni — an exotic variation on George Nelson’s Bubble lamp that Conder purchased on the German EBay — hangs over an L-shaped red Formica counter that delineates the kitchen area.

The family eats at a round wooden table, with Mom and Dad sitting on chairs by Danish designer Borge Mogensen. Should guests drop by, there is a second table with a solid teak top and wrought-iron legs, a collaboration between Arne Jacobsen and Piet Hein.

“When you have this small space, every decision is critical,” Conder says. “You can only have things that fit within the scale of this space. And these are all things I have wanted for a long time. Everyone needs to question the idea of what we really need.”

Conder has had that opportunity. He was born in a 600-square-foot Craftsman in Huntington Beach but grew up in a five-bedroom tract house.

“My father made a little money, and buying that house was his biggest regret,” Conder says. “It was eventually taken back by the bank.”

Five years ago, just before he moved in as a bachelor, Conder had the opportunity to buy his current residence for $260,000. These days, the new father is happy to be paying $1,000-a-month rent.

“The American dream is to have a kid and buy a house,” he says, adding he’s thankful he went only halfway.

Living small runs in the family, apparently. His sister lives in a yurt in Hawaii. His brother, Ramsey, lives nearby with his girlfriend and baby daughter in a relatively palatial 500-square-foot apartment.

Breslin, who grew up in a large two-story home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., says she can understand why people would see her small home as peculiar.

“I don’t think we’re so crazy,” she says. “There are moms out there who never stop trying to rack up all the things that mean they have it all. Living here, I don’t need to have a job. I can focus on having as many experiences as we can have as a family rather than the stress of a mortgage or having to pay someone else to raise my child.”

Close quarters, she contends, create a tight family. “Living in one room, I can constantly see Thurston, and he knows I am watching him. The way that most people structure their living situations is so the parents are most happy. But who’s to say that a kid wants to be in a room down a hall?”

Conder laughs. “It’s probably going to mess him up in a whole new way,” he jokes, adding that Thurston may grow up longing for a mansion.

Living in such close confines demands a sense of humor, Conder says, and the size of their home has made the couple’s relationship stronger.

“When you get in a fight there is nowhere to go,” he says. “You have to deal with stuff head on.”

LA Times

NY Times By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 9, 2009

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

The New Yorker, November 9, 2009,
By Dana Goodyear

For nearly twenty-five years, Jonathan Gold, the high-low priest of the L.A. food scene, has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He tells his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers. On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals which new populations have come to town, and where they are, and what they’re cooking up. Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the alternative L.A. Weekly. Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. He sees L.A. as “the anti-melting pot” —the home of true, undiluted, regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas. Chefs read Gold, as do food nerds in their thirties who spend their weekends retracing his steps. Mentions Javier Cabral. Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman and for Mario Batali. He is sly and erudite; withdrawn in person and, in print, exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone considers him the S. J. Perelman of food. Gold is forty-nine, and grew up in South Central. He attended U.C.L.A., and then worked for a legal newspaper downtown. As an experiment, he set about trying every restaurant along Pico Boulevard, which encompasses Korean, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Oaxacan, and Jaliscan areas. Mentions Brooklyn Bagel Bakery and Mama’s Hot Tamales. Gold eats at three to five hundred restaurants every year. Mentions Robert Sietsema. At the Weekly, when Gold was in his mid-twenties, he met Laurie Ochoa. They got married in 1990, and she has been his dining companion and first reader ever since. They have two kids, Leon and Isabel. Gold drives twenty thousand miles a year in search of food. Mentions the San Gabriel Valley. Gold has observed that the insular nature of L.A. allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the restaurant-owners’ villages of origin. Describes Gold’s visit to a Malan fast-food restaurant and to a Sichuan restaurant in Rowland Heights. In 1990, Gold started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in, for the first time. To Gold’s readers, his reviews have the ontological status that the New York Times has for people interested in current events: he doesn’t write about it because it is, it is because he’s written about it. Gold used to guzzle hot sauce as a kid, and he still eats as if his manhood depended on it. He suspects that he has encouraged those he calls the “dining-as-sport” crowd. The other night, the stunt dish was live octopus, in a divey strip-mall restaurant. Mentions Jitlada, a restaurant with a once-untranslated menu of hard-to-find southern-Thai specialties.

The New Yorker

Thanks to Danny Bralver