Robert Caro in his Manhattan office. The later volumes of his L.B.J. biography have taken more years to write than it took the former president to live them.
Photograph by Martine Fougeron/Getty, for The New York Times

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: April 12, 2012

Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes. These stories still fill him with outrage but also with something like wonder, the two emotions that sustain him in what amounts to a solitary, Dickensian occupation with long hours and few holidays.

Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as if it belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and a hand-cranked adding machine. There are an old wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand, on large legal pads.

Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976, not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his immense, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next month, a fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,” will appear 10 years after the last, “Master of the Senate,” which came out 12 years after its predecessor, “Means of Ascent,” which in turn was published 8 years after the first book, “The Path to Power.” These are not ordinary-size volumes, either. “Means of Ascent,” at 500 pages or so, is the comparative shrimp of the bunch. “The Path to Power” is almost 900 pages long; “Master of the Senate” is close to 1,200, or nearly as long as the previous two combined. If you try to read or reread them all in just a couple weeks, as I foolishly did not long ago, you find yourself reluctant to put them down but also worried that your eyeballs may fall out.

The new book, an excerpt of which recently ran in The New Yorker, is 736 pages long and covers only about six years. It begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether or not to run in the 1960 presidential election. The book then describes his loss to Kennedy on the first ballot at the Democratic convention and takes him through the miserable, humiliating years of his vice presidency before devoting almost half its length to the 47 days between Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 (Caro’s account, told from Johnson’s point of view, is the most riveting ever) and the State of the Union address the following January — a period during which Johnson seizes the reins of power and, in breathtakingly short order, sets in motion much of the Great Society legislation.

In other words, Caro’s pace has slowed so that he is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet. We have still to read about the election of 1964, the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins scandals, Vietnam and the decision not to run for a second term. The Johnson whom most of us remember (and many of us marched in the streets against) — the stubborn, scowling Johnson, with the big jowls, the drooping elephant ears and the gallbladder scar — is only just coming into view.

Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason “The Passage of Power” took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing “Master of the Senate.” (He also thought he could finish “The Power Broker” in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: “Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.” Gottlieb added, “The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.”

In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.

This kind of knowledge does not come easily or cheaply. Caro has taken so long with Johnson that his agent, Lynn Nesbit, no longer remembers how many times she has renegotiated his contract; his publishing house has had two editors in chief, and no one there worries much about his deadlines any longer. The books come along when they come along. “I’m not a charity case,” Caro pointed out to me last month when I remarked on how Knopf had stuck by him all these years. It’s true that the Johnson volumes have been glowingly reviewed (“The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent” both won the National Book Critics Circle Award and “Master of the Senate” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) and that each of them has been a best seller, but it’s also true that they turn up so infrequently that Caro can hardly be thought of as a brand name. “Are the books profitable?” Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s current head, who took over the Johnson project — enthusiastically — after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987, said last month. He paused for a moment. “They will be,” he answered finally, “because there is nothing like them.”

Gottlieb is more philosophical. “So what if at the end of 45 years it turns out we lost money by one kind of accounting?” he said. “Think of what he has given us, what he has added. How do you weigh that?”

The two Bobs, Gottlieb and Caro, have an odd editorial relationship, almost as contentious as it is mutually admiring. They still debate, for example, or pretend to, how many words Gott­lieb cut from “The Power Broker.” It was 350,000 — or the equivalent of two or three full-size books — and Caro still regrets nearly every one. “There were things cut out of ‘The Power Broker’ that should not have been cut out,” he said to me sadly one day, showing me his personal copy of the book, dog-eared and broken-backed, filled with underlining and corrections written in between the lines. Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.

Gottlieb and Caro also have slightly different accounts of how the Johnson project came about in the first place. Caro’s original contract called for him to write a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia, the former New York City mayor, after finishing Moses. Gottlieb says that in 1974, when Caro came in to talk about that project, he told him: “It’s a mistake. There were two gods in my house in the ’30s and ’40s: F.D.R. and LaGuardia. But LaGuardia is a dead end, an anomaly. He doesn’t come from anything, and nothing followed from him. I think you should write about Lyndon Johnson.” Turning to me and shaking his head he added: “You have to understand, I knew nothing about Lyndon Johnson and didn’t care about Lyndon Johnson, and it never crossed my mind until that moment that was what Bob should do. It was one of the inexplicable great moments, because it came out of nowhere.”

Caro says that he had already made up his mind that Johnson, who had only recently died, should be his next subject, partly because he didn’t want to write about New York again, but he listened quietly to Gottlieb. “I always felt that I increased my advance by a substantial amount by just sitting there not saying ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” he told me.

Gottlieb and Caro argue about length, but they also argue about prose, even about punctuation. “You know that insane old expression, ‘The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”

Their worst battle was over the second Johnson volume, “Means of Ascent,” which is largely about the stolen Senate election of 1948. Gottlieb encouraged Caro to tell this story at length because he was fascinated by the details of local politics, but he objected, as some reviewers did, to Caro’s characterization of Johnson’s opponent in that election, Coke Stevenson, a former Texas governor, who is painted in almost heroic terms. “We went mano a mano, chin to chin, nose to nose, I so disapproved of his idealization of Coke Stevenson,” Gottlieb said. “We just about killed each other.”

The editing of the most recent book went much more smoothly, Gottlieb said, explaining: “We both behaved better, and we really had a terrific time — maybe the first time we actually enjoyed the process. He could say, ‘I know you don’t want all this,’ and I could say, ‘How interesting that you know that!’ I think we have evolved, to the extent that we’re evolvable.” He laughed, and added: “How do these things happen? You just start in the belief that it’s all worth it, and before you know it, it’s 500 years later and you’re doing the notes on the 43rd volume.”

There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.” Caro was born in October 1935 and grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street. His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he didn’t speak either very often. He was “very silent,” Caro said, and became more so after Caro’s mother died, after a long illness, when he was 12. “It was an unusual household in that I didn’t want to be there too much,” he said, adding that though he is fond of his younger sibling, Michael, now a retired real estate manager, they don’t have the kind of relationship that most brothers do. Caro spent as much time as he could at the Horace Mann School (it was his mother’s deathbed wish that he should go there) or else on a bench in Central Park with a book. He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.

Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-’50s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did. “The way I thought of it, I wasn’t at Princeton,” he said. “I was at the newspaper and the literary magazine.” He had a sports column, “Ivy Inklings,” at The Daily Prince­tonian, where he eventually became managing editor. (The top editor, until he flunked out, was R. W. Apple Jr., later to become a legendary New York Times reporter.) He also wrote short stories, or rather, not so short ones. One of them, about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant, took up almost an entire issue of The Princeton Tiger, a humor and literary magazine.

It was also at Princeton that Caro met his wife, Ina, who would also become the only assistant and researcher he has ever trusted. She was 16 at the time, a high-school student from nearby Trenton, double-dating at a Hillel mixer. She spotted Caro, very good-looking to judge from photographs taken around that time, across the room and announced to her best friend, “That’s the boy I’m going to marry.” Three years later, she did, dropping out of college against her parents’ wishes, and though she went on to finish her degree, get another one (in medieval European history) and write a couple of books of her own, she has to an extent remarkable by today’s standards devoted her life to his. At the lowest point during the writing of “The Power Broker,” when Caro had run out of money and was close to despair about being able to finish, she sold their house in suburban Long Island, moved the family (the Caros have a son, Chase, who is now in the information-technology business) to an apartment in the Bronx and took a job teaching school to keep him going.

“That was a bad time, a very bad time,” Caro recalled.

“I always felt that the most important thing was for Bob to be able to write,” Ina said. “Things like houses and money never meant much to me. I think they meant more to our dog,” she told me one morning in their big Upper West Side apartment, adding: “But I never thought this would be all he’d write about. I’ve always wanted him to finish a novel.” Even now, she went on, it’s hard for her to accept that Johnson will probably turn out to be the great work of their lives together. “You never think about dying,” she said. “You always think there’s going to be time.”

In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as “something like $37.50 a week.” The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper’s chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. “One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control,” Caro recalled. “I still think about it. It wasn’t the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the — meekness isn’t the right word — the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt.”

Caro had a further epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ”

The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. “They were talking one day about highways and where they got built,” he recalled, “and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’ ”

Caro’s obsession with power explains a great deal about the nature of his work. For one thing, it accounts in large part for the size and scope of all his books, which Caro thinks of not as conventional biographies but as studies in the working of political power and how it affects both those who have it and those who don’t. Power, or Caro’s understanding of it, also underlies his conception of character and structure. In “The Power Broker,” it’s a drug that an insatiable Moses comes to require in larger and larger doses until it transforms him from an idealist into a monster devoid of human feeling, tearing down neighborhoods, flinging out roadways and plopping down bridges just for their own sake. Running through the Johnson books are what Caro calls “two threads, bright and dark”: the first is his naked, ruthless hunger for power — “power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will” — and the other is the often compassionate use he made of that power. If Caro’s Moses is an operatic character — a city-transforming Faust — his Johnson is a Shakespearean one: Richard III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one. You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious negative campaign Johnson waged against Coke Stevenson. But then a volume later, describing Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he seems to warm to his subject all over again.

In many ways, Caro’s notion of character is a romantic, idealistic one, and what fuels the books is disappointment and righteousness, almost like that of a lover betrayed. If there’s a downside to his method, it’s that anyone’s life, even yours or mine, described in Caro-esque detail, could take on epic, romantic proportions. The difference is that our lives would be epics of what it’s like not to have power, but the language would probably be the same. Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.

This is not a style ideally suited to the chaste, narrow paragraphs of The New Yorker, especially in 1974, when it serialized “The Power Broker” in four installments that were long even then, when the magazine was so flush with ads it sometimes had trouble filling all its columns. I was a proofreader at The New Yorker then, and my office was across from that of William Whitworth, the editor of the “Power Broker” excerpts. I remember him wearily shuttling back and forth, like some Balkan diplomat, between the office of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor in chief, and one that Caro was borrowing while its occupant, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, was away for the summer. Caro complained that the magazine had tampered with his prose, and he wasn’t wrong. Instead of merely lifting some excerpts from the book manuscript, as was usually done, Whitworth tried to condense the whole thing, and this entailed squeezing out great chunks of writing, running the beginning of one paragraph into the end of another, pages away. “They softened my style,” Caro says. Shawn, on the other hand, had the magazine’s standards to uphold: The New Yorker insisted on its own, sometimes fussy way of punctuating; it didn’t approve of passages that were too leggy and indirect; it didn’t approve of repetitions; and it especially didn’t approve of one-­sentence paragraphs. A description of the situation in vigorous Caro-ese might read something like this:

“In the editorial world, William Shawn was a man of immense power. He wielded it quietly, softly, almost in a whisper, but he wielded it nonetheless. Not for nothing did some of his staff members privately call him the Iron Mouse. For writers, Shawn’s long wooden desk was like a shrine, an altar, and in the passing of proofs across that brightly polished surface — pages and pages of proofs, stacks of proofs, sheaves and bundles of proofs, proofs from the fact-checkers, the lawyers, the grammarians, proofs marked with feathery hen-scratch and with bold red-pencilings — they discerned something like magic, the alchemy that renders ordinary, sublunary prose free of impurity and infuses it with an ineffable, entrancing glow, the sheen of true New Yorker style.

“But that style was not for everyone.

“It was not for Robert Caro.”

The negotiations became so fraught that between the second and third installments there was a weeklong gap, unthinkable in those days, while the two sides stared each other down and it seemed that the next two parts might be scuttled. Everyone at the magazine was aghast. Caro, it turned out, was as stubborn as Shawn. Here was a 38-year-old unknown who hadn’t published a word except in newspapers. Moreover, he was broke, hardly in a position to turn his back on the biggest payday of his life so far, but alone among New Yorker contributors at the time, he dared to become a Bartleby and turn his powerlessness into a point of principle.

Caro now says that Shawn agreed to restore all the changes he cared most deeply about, but the magazine version nevertheless differs from the original and changes Caro’s punctuation and paragraphing. The New Yorker series is a very readable redaction of the original — and without sacrificing much essential information, easier on the attention span than the book, which requires an immense time commitment — but for better or worse, it’s not as full-throated as the original.

Whitworth, undaunted, excerpted the first volume of the Johnson biography in The Atlantic after he became editor there in 1980.

It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting. In college he was such a quick and facile writer, and so speedy a typist, that one of his teachers, the critic R. P. Blackmur, once told him that he would never achieve anything until he learned to “stop thinking with his fingers,” and Caro actually tries to slow himself down these days. He doesn’t start typing — on an old Smith Corona Electra 210, not a computer — until he has finished four or five handwritten drafts. And then he rewrites the typescript. When I visited him one day in early December, he was correcting the page proofs of “The Passage of Power” the way Proust used to correct proofs: scratching out, writing in between the lines, pasting in additional sheets of inserts.

Caro is an equally obsessive researcher. Gott­lieb likes to point to a passage fairly early in “The Power Broker” describing Moses’ parents one morning in their lodge at Camp Madison, a fresh-air charity they established for poor city kids, picking up The Times and reading that their son had been fined $22,000 for improprieties in a land takeover. “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life, and now we’ll have to pay this,” Bella Moses says.

“How do you know that?” Gottlieb asked Caro. Caro explained that he tried to talk to all of the social workers who had worked at Camp Madison, and in the process he found one who had delivered the Moseses’ paper. “It was as if I had asked him, ‘How do you know it’s raining out?’ ” Gottlieb told me, and he added: “When ‘The Power Broker’ came out, other writers were amazed. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a monument not to industry, because lots of people have industry, but to something else. I don’t even know what to call it.”

Caro once spent several nights alone in a sleeping bag in the Texas Hill Country so he could understand what rural isolation felt like there. For the Johnson books, he has conducted thousands of interviews, many with Johnson’s friends and contemporaries. (Lady Bird spoke to him several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest cronies, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record.) He has spent literally several years at the Johnson Library, in Austin, Tex., painstakingly going through the red buckram boxes that contain Johnson’s papers, and he has been the first researcher to open some of the most revealing files there. “Over and over again, I’ve found crucial things that nobody knew about,” he said. “There’s always original stuff if you look hard enough.” He added that he tried to keep in mind something that his managing editor at Newsday, Alan Hathway, a crusty old newspaper­man once told him, after pointing out that Caro was the only Ivy Leaguer who ever amounted to anything: “Turn every goddamn page.”

His notes, typed on long legal sheets, often with urgent directions to himself in capital letters, fill his cabinets, and before he begins writing, he indexes the relevant files in big loose-leaf notebooks that resemble the ones behind the counter at auto-parts stores. There is no computer, no Google, no Wikipedia.

One reason Caro’s books are so long is that he does keep burrowing through the files, and he keeps finding out things he hadn’t anticipated. Before beginning the first volume, he thought he could wrap up Johnson’s early life in a couple of chapters, until he talked to some of Johnson’s college classmates and found out about his lying, conniving side, which no one had previously described. That volume also includes a mini­biography of Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s mentor in Congress, and a brilliantly evocative section about how electrification changed the lives of people in the Hill Country, much of it based on interviews conducted by Ina, who visited the women there with homemade preserves and eventually won them over, she says, because she was as shy and nervous as they were.

Caro thought that the 1948 Senate election would take up a single chapter or so in his Senate volume. Instead, it takes up most of a book of its own, what is now Volume 2. Johnson advocates used to say that “no one will ever know” whether that election was stolen. Caro knows, because he uncovered a handwritten memoir by Luis Salas, an election boss and party henchman, giving the details of how he falsified the records. The Senate book, Volume 3, begins with a 100-page history of the Senate, starting with Calhoun and Webster, because Caro felt that to understand the Senate you needed to see it in its great period. It includes minibiographies of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell Jr., the longtime Senate leader of the South, and ends with a detailed, almost vote-by-vote account of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The first few weeks of the Johnson presidency, which take up so much of the new book, were originally imagined as just a chapter in what would be the final volume, and the new book also includes much more about the Kennedys than Caro anticipated. He goes into great detail, for example, about the feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, and the visits Bobby made to Johnson’s hotel room in Los Angeles after the Democratic convention in 1960, trying to talk Johnson into withdrawing from the vice-presidential nomination.

The installments keep ballooning, in other words, developing subplots and stories-within-the-story, in a way that reflects Caro’s own process of discovery. He is looking ahead to Volume 5 and to Vietnam, which is foreshadowed in the new book by Johnson’s hawkish impatience during the Cuban missile crisis. One day when I was visiting he pulled out a thick file of notes he had written, including transcripts, about the weekly Tuesday cabinet meetings Johnson had with Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler and Walt Rostow, at which the question of whether to escalate was frequently discussed. “Look at this stuff,” Caro said to me. “It’s unbelievable!”

Caro now finds Johnson more fascinating than ever, he told me, and added: “It’s not a question of liking or disliking him. I’m trying to explain how political power worked in America in the second half of the 20th century, and here’s a guy who understood power and used it in a way that no one ever had. In the getting of that power he’s ruthless — ruthless to a degree that surprised even me, who thought he knew something about ruthlessness. But he also means it when he says that all his life he wanted to help poor people and people of color, and you see him using the ruthlessness, the savagery for wonderful ends. Does his character ever change? No. Are my feelings about Johnson mixed? They’ve always been mixed.”

On a corkboard covering the wall beside Caro’s desk, he keeps an outline, pinned up on legal-size sheets, of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” It’s not a classic outline, with indentations and numbered headings and subheadings, but a maze of sentences and paragraphs and notes to himself. These days, part of the top row is gone: the empty spaces are where the pages mapping the new book used to be. But there are several rows left to go, and 13 additional pages that won’t fit on the wall until yet more come down. Somewhere on those sheets, already written, is the very last line of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whatever volume that turns out to be. I begged him more than once, but Caro wouldn’t tell me what that line says.

Caro has no shortage of plans for what to do next, after he finishes with Johnson, and he has already picked out a topic, though he won’t reveal what it is. He also told me he could imagine writing a biography of Al Smith, the New York governor and 1928 presidential candidate. But it’s also possible that at some level he doesn’t really want to be done — that without entirely intending to, he’s eking Johnson out — because whenever a biographer finishes, burying his subject, he dies a little death, too. Caro is a great student of Gibbon, and he must be familiar with what Gibbon wrote in his house at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1787, after completing his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”: “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”

Charles McGrath is a writer at large for The Times. His most recent article for the magazine was a profile of Stephen Colbert.

Constructivist Tearoom, 2007
cone 06 clay with glazes
plate – 5″ diameter
cup – 3-1/2 x 2-1/2 x 2-1/2″

Cups 1974 – 2012
April 21 through June 9, 2012
Opening Reception April 21 5-7 PM

Lora Schlesinger

Open Book #8 (Prints), 2012
C Print
49 x 67 15/16 inches (framed)

Through May 12, 2012

Anton Kern

By JIM DWYER
NY Times Published: April 12, 2012

The most enduring and useful custom of New York subway riders is that they don masks of stone at the turnstile, and keep them on until they’ve gotten where they are going. The origins of this sound practice are beyond the memory of any living New Yorker, but even if it began with Peter Minuit, its value continues to be proved every day.

On a Thursday night at the end of March, three people boarded the same car of an uptown No. 6 train at Spring Street. Eitan Noy, 25, a D.J. at heart and construction worker by day, had just come from an art gallery on Mulberry Street in NoLIta and was making his way home toward Sunnyside, Queens.

Charles Sonder, 24, an architect, had left a bar on the Lower East Side and was going to meet friends. A few convivial hours in the first place had given him an appetite. For sustenance on his train ride, he grabbed a stack of cheddar Pringles and a bag of Gummi-Bears. He wasn’t proud but made no apologies for his diet. “We’ve all been there,” he would later note.

Sitting next to Mr. Noy was a woman, age unknown, but a safe guess would be in early 20s. A fourth party would make a late entrance. “This dude, at the last moment before the doors closed, stepped in,” Mr. Noy said.

The woman was not happy to see him. “Instantaneously, she jumps up and starts wailing on him,” Mr. Noy said. “Punching him in the face, kicking, cursing. Soon as she saw the dude, she started fighting him. Then he kicks back.”

Somehow, Mr. Sonder, who was a Rhode Island state wrestling champion at 189 pounds in high school and does architecture at 200, had never been present for such a scuffle in the subways, but then again, he moved to New York only two years ago. In his sports life, though, he had “seen things get out of hand.”

The ride from Spring Street to the next stop, Bleecker Street, is one of the shortest in the city, with the train barely getting started before it stops.

As it pulled in, Mr. Sonder stepped toward the door, and the battle ebbed for an instant as the man and the woman parted, possibly to let him pass. But he stopped, directly between them. He didn’t say a word, just kept working his way through the Pringles. With Mr. Sonder forming an implacable barrier, the fight dwindled to generally unprintable sputterings, with the woman ordering the man: “Don’t follow me. Do not follow me.”

Mr. Noy, having been born and raised in the city, had seen plenty of subway outbursts before, including one on St. Patrick’s Day, when two men set upon a third, pulling open his bag and using some force. Just as Mr. Noy and his friend were discussing intervention, the two men displayed badges and were cuffing the third. “After that, I knew I had to have my phone camera ready,” he said. So on the No. 6 train, he whipped out his camera a few blows into the round, in time to catch some of the action; Mr. Sonder stepping in; and then another woman, with an authoritative voice, ordering the woman to sit down and the man to get off the train.

After that, the remaining combatant noticed Mr. Noy’s cellphone camera and asked if she could see it. “I didn’t know what she was going to do with it,” Mr. Noy said. “She could smash me on the head. I told her, ‘I didn’t really get anything.’ ” She persisted, he deflected, and then he got off at Grand Central Station. Mr. Sonder disappeared into the night and pretty much forgot the whole thing. He went back to his work of building three-dimensional models at an architectural firm.

About 10 days ago, Mr. Noy decided to post the video on his YouTube account, which he operates under his D.J. name, Eitan Noyze. For the first week, he said, it got about 400 hits. Then it started moving up on the Reddit Web site. As of Thursday evening, it was close to 900,000 hits. The Internet had given Mr. Sonder a new name, which he learned about when his mother texted him earlier this week: “Hey Snackman.”

He was cool incarnate. No weapons. No visible bloodshed. Not even a loud word. A newcomer to the city, munching on chips, and a poker face for the ages.

By JIM ROBBINS
NY Times Published: April 11, 2012

TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.

What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.

In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.

Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.

Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.

Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.

A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.

Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”

Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.”

Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) has proved to be the most influential architect of his generation in shaping contemporary Japanese architecture. His influence stretches from Toyo Ito, Itsuko Hasegawa and Kazunari Sakamoto, via Kazuyo Sejima, to the many excellent young studios working today. Nevertheless, his work remains little known in the West, partly due to the scarcity of publications on his work – which in turn was due to the rigorous control the architect maintained over publication of his work. Shinohara carefully selected the photographs and texts that accompanied each project, and even refused Gustavo Gili’s first proposal in 2001 to revisit and photograph his buildings. This publication has only been possible after his death in 2006, thanks to the generosity of the heirs.

Shinohara’s work from 1954 to the early 1980s consisted almost exclusively of single-family homes. After 1982, however, he began to work on larger institutional projects.

This double issue of 2G focuses solely on his single-family homes and is the result of a long process of research to identify the site and condition of each of the houses. Some no longer exist, others have been altered considerably, but fortunately the majority remains and have been photographed exclusively for 2G by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Ueda.

In this way, we are able to present an unprecedented tour of Shinohara’s houses, accompanied by numerous drawings and four original texts by the architect, all translated into Spanish for the first time (and two of them previously unpublished in English). Introductory texts by David B. Stewart, Shin-Ichi Okuyama and Enric Massip provide the necessary context for understanding the work of this almost mythical architect.

Kazuo Shinohara 2G

Thanks to Nate Lentz

By TODD SELBY and ABBY AGUIRRE
NY Times Published April 10, 2012

Cookbook, a green grocery store in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles run by the master gardener and chef Marta Teegen, is a monument to the principle of quality over quantity: inside the modest 500-square-foot space is nearly everything a cook with a penchant for natural ingredients could possibly want. The best organic produce, yes. But also Dr. Bob’s ice cream, fresh-cut flowers, pasture-raised meats, Mast Brothers chocolate, Creminelli salami, Café Fanny granola and an ever-changing menu of prepared foods, derived each week from a different cookbook of Teegen’s choosing. Mediterranean sources, like “Moro East” by Sam and Sam Clark, are in heavy rotation. “We are interested in looking at what new things people are doing with food,” Teegen says, “but we also like to go back to the classics.”

cookbook

Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots (Dodger Stadium), 1967

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
NY Times Published: April 9, 2012

When the numbers don’t seem to add up, it’s worth asking some questions.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been puzzled by the announcement of a $2.15 billion deal to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers by Magic Johnson and a group of financiers.

Of course, Johnson got most of the attention. But his celebrity has obscured a drumbeat of questions about the businessmen behind this headline-grabbing sale, which doubled the record for the price tag of an American professional sports team, set by the Miami Dolphins when it was sold for $1.1 billion in 2009.

The winning bid was led by Mark Walter and his firm, Guggenheim Partners, which most people in sports — and frankly, even on Wall Street — know very little about. (Peter Guber, the film producer behind “Rain Man” as well as Stan Kasten, the former president of the Atlanta Braves, are also involved.)

A quick background check and some back-of-the-envelope math raises an obvious red flag: how on earth can this group of individuals afford to pay $2 billion in cash?
A game at Dodgers stadium last week.Michael Nelson/European Pressphoto AgencyA game at Dodgers stadium last week.

The answer is that they probably can’t — at least, not by themselves.

Mr. Walter, along with his colleague Todd Boehly, Guggenheim’s president, appear to be living out a childhood fantasy using other people’s money, some of whom may not even realize it.

In addition to their own cash, Mr. Walter plans to use money from Guggenheim subsidiaries that are insurance companies — some state-regulated — to pay for a big chunk of his purchase of the Dodgers. Guggenheim controls Guggenheim Life, a life insurer, and Security Benefit, which manages some $30 billion, among others.

Using insurance money — which is typically supposed to be invested in simple, safe assets — to buy a baseball team, the ultimate toy for the ultrarich, seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Mr. Walters has been somewhat open in acknowledging that Guggenheim’s companies will be tapped, but the investor group has not disclosed how much of the purchase price is coming from individuals.

The transaction seems even more questionable when considering Mr. Walter’s own words to The New York Times two weeks ago: “I don’t want to realize a return on investment on buying the Dodgers. I want to have a multigenerational relationship that changes my life, Magic’s life, Magic’s grandchildren’s lives and all of our lives.”

So let’s get this straight: Mr. Walter, who has a fiduciary duty to the firm’s policyholders, plans to pump their money into a baseball team, even though he says he’s not seeking to realize a return on the investment. And he is seemingly wildly overpaying by some $500 million more than the next highest bidder — he outbid Steven Cohen, the hedge fund manager, among others — so that he can be the league-designated owner of the Dodgers.

“Paying $1.5 billion or $1.6 billion — I can get there. But anything after that is pure ego,” said a longtime sports banker who worked for a rival bidder for the Dodgers. “We’ve done the math. At that price, it just doesn’t make any sense unless you want to be the king of Los Angeles.”

In fairness, many insurance companies use their premiums to make investments, including private equity and real estate deals, a slice of which can sometimes even be speculative. As long as the insurance companies meet minimum capital requirements as determined by various regulators, they do not run afoul of the law.

However, rarely does an insurance company — let alone an investment firm — buy a sports franchise using its policyholders’ or investors’ money. When Tom Hicks, the founder of the private equity firm Hicks Muse, Tate & Furst, bought the Texas Rangers in 1998, he had the good sense not to use his fund’s money; he brought in qualified outside investors, who by the way, ended up suing him anyway when the team filed for bankruptcy.

In one case, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had owned Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the company that owned the Maple Leaf professional hockey team and the Toronto Raptors pro basketball franchise, but the pension’s fund chief was not considered the teams’ owner. The pension fund sold the company last year.

So far, Mr. Walter and Guggenheim are not saying much. They have yet to reveal anything publicly about the proposed ownership structure. They are buying the team from the parking lot mogul Frank McCourt, who sent his debt-laden team into bankruptcy last year. In a filing to the bankruptcy court handling the sale of the Dodgers, none of the documents describe any of the financing arrangements except to suggest the deal is all cash.

Guggenheim Partners started relatively recently, in 2000, by a great-grandson of Meyer Guggenheim, the patriarch of the famously philanthropic family. It now manages some $125 billion for the very wealthy — including Michael Milken — and has proved itself to be a skilled risk manager. Under Mr. Walter, the firm has grown beyond money management into insurance and recently hired Alan D. Schwartz to run its advisory practice. Mr. Schwartz is the former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns, who sold it as it was collapsing to JPMorgan Chase.

People involved in the process who are close to Guggenheim said that while the company was using its insurance companies to pay for the Dodgers, it was a very good, prudent deal for its investors and policyholders. As long-term investors, these people said, the new owners could afford to be patient to see a return.

One person involved in the deal, as a point of comparison, noted that MetLife had paid $400 million for the naming rights to Giants Stadium. “This is a much better deal,” this person said. As for MetLife, “They don’t own anything.”

In a statement, one of Guggenheim’s regulators, Stephen W. Robertson, the Indiana commissioner of insurance, said: “Guggenheim’s past dealings with the Indiana Department of Insurance have demonstrated to us that the company and its representatives are of the highest integrity, and we have not taken exception to any interest Guggenheim may have in the Los Angeles Dodgers, nor do we plan to do so.”

Paying a record amount for a pro sports team may or may not turn out to be a good bet. But if rich guys are going to buy their toys, they should probably use only their own money.

A two-day self-guided journey through 37 Los Angeles-area home gardens that celebrate the beauty of California native plants, smart landscape practices and the natural heritage of our region.

Saturday & Sunday
April 14-15, 2012
10:00am – 5:00pm

Theodore Payne

15th April – 20th May

Herald Street

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 8, 2012

So, can we talk about the Paul Ryan phenomenon?

And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.

No, what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.

Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million.

Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year.

Mr. Ryan insists that despite these tax cuts his proposal is “revenue neutral,” that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes. But he has refused to specify a single loophole he would close. And if we assess the proposal without his secret (and probably nonexistent) plan to raise revenue, it turns out to involve running bigger deficits than we would run under the Obama administration’s proposals.

Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.

So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit, unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce. So why are centrists rising to Mr. Ryan’s defense?

Well, ask yourself the following: What does it mean to be a centrist, anyway?

It could mean supporting politicians who actually are relatively nonideological, who are willing, for example, to seek Democratic support for health reforms originally devised by Republicans, to support deficit-reduction plans that rely on both spending cuts and revenue increases. And by that standard, centrists should be lavishing praise on the leading politician who best fits that description — a fellow named Barack Obama.

But the “centrists” who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.

Enter Mr. Ryan, an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one. The “centrists” needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated him for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations.

So you can see the problem these commentators face. To admit that the president’s critique is right would be to admit that they were snookered by Mr. Ryan, who is the same as he ever was. More than that, it would call into question their whole centrist shtick — for the moral of my story is that Mr. Ryan isn’t the only emperor who turns out, on closer examination, to be naked.

Hence the howls of outrage, and the attacks on the president for being “partisan.” For that is what people in Washington say when they want to shout down someone who is telling the truth.

Not yet Titled, 2012 Wood, canvas, glue, acrylic 40 x 34 x 3 inches (1.02m x 86.36 x 7.62cm)

B Wurtz and Co.
Curated by Mathew Higgs
Through May 4, 2012

Richard Telles

A Breguet watch on Patriarch Kirill I, left, vanished in a doctored photo, but its reflection on the table remained. The Russian Orthodox Church Web site later restored it.

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
NY Times Published: April 5, 2012

MOSCOW — Facing a scandal over photographs of its leader wearing an enormously expensive watch, the Russian Orthodox Church worked a little miracle: It made the offending timepiece disappear.

Editors doctored a photograph on the church’s Web site of the leader, Patriarch Kirill I, extending a black sleeve where there once appeared to be a Breguet timepiece worth at least $30,000. The church might have gotten away with the ruse if it had not failed to also erase the watch’s reflection, which appeared in the photo on the highly glossed table where the patriarch was seated.

The church apologized for the deception on Thursday and restored the original photo to the site, but not before Patriarch Kirill weighed in, insisting in an interview with a Russian journalist that he had never worn the watch, and that any photos showing him wearing it must have been doctored to put the watch on his wrist.

The controversy, which erupted Wednesday when attentive Russian bloggers discovered the airbrushing, further stoked anger over the church’s often lavish displays of wealth and power. It also struck yet another blow to the moral authority of Russian officialdom, which has been dwindling rapidly in light of recent scandals involving police abuse, electoral fraud and corruption.

Aleksei Navalny, an anticorruption crusader, called the episode “shameful,” and bloggers gleefully ridiculed the church as hypocritical.

The church, after removing the doctored photo, blamed photo editors in its press service for the “technical mistake.”

“A gross violation of our internal ethics has occurred, and it will be thoroughly investigated,” the church said in a statement. “The guilty will be severely punished.”

It is not likely that the apology will end the debate about the watch or dampen the increasingly barbed discussions of the church’s role in Russian society. Over the past decade, the church has grown immensely powerful, becoming so close to the Kremlin that it often seems like a branch of government. It has extended its influence into a broad range of public life, including schools, courts and politics. Patriarch Kirill publicly backed Vladimir V. Putin in last month’s presidential election.

Recently, church officials stoked the ire of Russian liberals by seeking the imprisonment of members of a female punk rock group who held an impromptu concert inside Moscow’s main cathedral in February to protest the church’s political ties. Three members of the group are now in jail awaiting trial.

Then there is the question of the church’s wealth. Russian bloggers have published rumors that the patriarch has a large country house, a private yacht and a penchant for ski vacations in Switzerland, though none of this has been proved.

The watch, on the other hand, has been an object of fascination for years, and there is little question of its existence. It was first sighted on the patriarch’s wrist in 2009 during a visit to Ukraine, where he gave a televised interview on the importance of asceticism.

A Breguet watch “is virtually a sine qua non of any depiction of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or, quite simply, a life of luxury and elegance,” the company says, noting that its products have been worn by Marie Antoinette and Czar Aleksandr I and cited in works by Dumas and Hugo.

Coincidentally, the patriarch addressed the watch issue on Sunday, three days before the photo-doctoring scandal hit the blogosphere, in an interview with a prominent Kremlin-friendly television journalist, Vladimir Solovyov.

After the rumors about the watch began appearing, “I started looking for it out of interest and horror,” Kirill said, according to Mr. Solovyov, who conducted the interview off camera and related the patriarch’s comments.

Sorting through gifts he had received over the years, the patriarch discovered that he did indeed own the Breguet, Mr. Solovyov said. But he insisted that he had never worn it and said he suspected that any photos of him wearing it had been altered with Photoshop.

Watches, particularly those of the high-end Swiss variety, have been problematic for the Russian authorities. Many officials have come under fire after being photographed wearing timepieces with price tags far exceeding their annual salaries. Vladimir Resin, a former deputy mayor of Moscow, was once photographed wearing a DeWitt, the Pressy Grande Complication, reportedly worth more than $1 million.

But the patriarch has presented himself as the country’s ethical compass, and has recently embarked on a vocal campaign of public morality, advocating Christian education in public schools and opposing abortion and equal rights for gay people. He called the girl punk band protest at the cathedral “sacrilege.”

While Americans are used to hearing public positions on social issues from religious leaders, they were novel here, and they leave Patriarch Kirill and the church vulnerable to criticism, said Aleksei Makarkin, a political analyst who has written about the church.

“Now, the church has lost its symbolic immunity,” Mr. Makarkin said. “People will now say it has become the same as any other government structure.”

Russia’s often acerbic bloggers reacted to the scandal with something approaching glee. Bloggers have been uploading their own altered photographs of the patriarch to the Web, including one in which he has been erased and only the watch remains.

“The church can, of course, inspire fear or evoke respect, and even make mistakes,” Vladimir Varfolomeyev, a prominent liberal commentator, wrote on Facebook. “But it cannot be funny. Before our eyes we are witnessing the destruction of this institution.”

The Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, a senior church cleric, played down the episode. In a telephone interview, he said that the controversy over the watch was distracting attention from more serious questions, like “the borders of artistic freedom and the meaning of the Gospels today.”

“Tomorrow, they will be talking about what kind of glasses the patriarch wears,” Father Chaplin said.

April 7 – May 12, 2012
Opens April 7
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Marc Foxx

By AMY T. SCHALET
NY Times Published: April 6, 2012

WHY are boys behaving more “like girls” in terms of when they lose their virginity? In contrast to longstanding cultural tropes, there is reason to believe that teenage boys are becoming more careful and more romantic about their first sexual experiences.

For a long time, a familiar cultural lexicon has been in vogue: young women who admitted to voluntary sexual experience risked being labeled “sluts” while male peers who boasted of sexual conquests were celebrated as “studs.”

No wonder American teenage boys have long reported earlier and more sexual experience than have teenage girls. In 1988, many more boys than girls, ages 15 to 17, told researchers that they had had heterosexual intercourse.

But in the two decades since, the proportion of all American adolescents in their mid-teens claiming sexual experience has decreased, and for boys the decline has been especially steep, according to the National Survey of Family Growth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.

What happened in those two decades?

Fear seems to have played a role. In interviewing 10th graders for my book on teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands, I found that American boys often said sex could end their life as they knew it. After a condom broke, one worried: “I could be screwed for the rest of my life.” Another boy said he did not want to have sex yet for fear of becoming a father before his time.

Dutch boys did not express the same kind of fears; they assumed their girlfriends’ use of the pill would protect them against fatherhood. In the Netherlands, use of the pill is far more common, and pregnancy far less so, than among American teenagers.

The American boys I interviewed seemed more nervous about the consequences of sex than American girls. In fact, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex. Fear about sex was intensified by the AIDS crisis and by sex education that portrayed sex outside of heterosexual marriage as risky. Combined with growing access to pornography via the Internet, those influences may have made having sex with another person seem less enticing.

Fear no doubt has also played a role in driving up condom use. Boys today are much more likely than their predecessors to use a condom the first time they have sex.

But fear is probably not the only reason for the gender convergence. While American locker-room and popular culture portray boys as mere vessels of raging hormones, research into their private experiences paints a different picture. In a large-scale survey and interviews, reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the sociologist Peggy Giordano and her colleagues found teenage boys to be just as emotionally invested in their romantic relationships as girls.

The Dutch boys I interviewed grew up in a culture that gives them permission to love; a national survey found that 90 percent of Dutch boys between 12 and 14 report having been in love. But the American boys I interviewed, having grown up in a culture that often assumes males are only out to get sex, were no less likely than Dutch boys to value relationships and love. In fact, they often used strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love. The boy whose condom broke told me the most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.”

Such romanticism has largely flown under the radar of American popular culture. Yet, the most recent research by the family growth survey, conducted between 2006 and 2010, indicates that relationships matter to boys more often than we think. Four of 10 males between 15 and 19 who had not had sex said the main reason was that they hadn’t met the right person or that they were in a relationship but waiting for the right time; an additional 3 of 10 cited religion and morality.

Boys have long been under pressure to shed what the sociologist Laura Carpenter has called the “stigma of virginity.” But maybe more American boys are now waiting because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.

When I surveyed the firestorm of objections that followed his use of the word “slut” to pillory a law school student who advocated medical coverage for birth control, men were among his most passionate detractors.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The image of male sexuality Mr. Limbaugh perpetuates is hardly something to be proud of. And it sells the hearts of men, as well as women, short.

Amy T. Schalet is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of “Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex

April 8th – May 12th, 2012
Opening Sunday, April 8th, 4-6pm

Overduin and Kite

By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
NY Times Published: April 3, 2012

NEW YORK — For all the alarm and outrage that conservative Republicans have ignited lately with actions perceived as attacks on U.S. women’s rights, there has been a fierce counteroffensive that is giving activists on the other side a larger voice and greater visibility than in recent years.

While international organizations are marshaling forces to end the abuse and oppression of women and girls worldwide and enact laws to advance gender equality, here in the United States, where women have earned more rights than in many other places, a cadre of conservative Republicans is being accused of waging a concerted campaign to turn the clock back.

The revival of the culture wars led the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, speaking at a recent meeting here, to cry out, “Where are the angry American women?”

Well, they are showing up. Escalating attacks in Congress and state legislatures and on the campaign trail, in the eyes of many women, have jolted them into action, spurred liberals and moderates to protest in the U.S. Senate and House, and galvanized thousands of ordinary women to speak out. Not least, the three-month battle may backfire on the Republican Party. The gender gap between President Barack Obama and the Republican presidential candidates is widening going into the elections this year, according to a Pew Research Center survey released March 29.

Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, an organization committed to the election of female Democrats who support abortion rights, reflected the new sense of determination among many women.

“What we are committed to doing at Emily’s List is drive a political movement to get these Republican men out of office,” she said by telephone from Washington. “What’s going on in the Republican Party is that they are being hijacked by an extremely conservative faction of the party, and the entire party has taken up the right-wing social agenda to prevent women from having all the choices they need in their lives to be successful.”

What began a year ago with a failed conservative move to cut off U.S. government aid to Planned Parenthood on grounds that it was funneling taxpayer money to facilitate abortions was followed earlier this year by a decision by the leading U.S. breast cancer charity, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, to sever ties. But under intense public pressure, with thousands of people threatening to withhold donations to the foundation, Komen executives reversed that decision.

Not long after that bruising fight, conservatives in Congress tried to roll back access to contraception under employer health plans, drumming up opposition to the mandate for such coverage in Mr. Obama’s health care law. A Republican-led House committee convened a hearing. An all-male panel was called to testify, but a female Georgetown University law student who wanted to speak for the mandate was banned. To make things worse, she was called a “slut” and a “prostitute” by a conservative radio commentator.

For Ms. Schriock, that was the tipping point. She directed Emily’s List — which has one million members — to conduct a nationwide TV ad campaign objecting to the all-male hearing. “We went on television because we wanted to make sure that every woman we could get our hands on saw that picture,” she said. Emily’s List was not alone. NARAL Pro-Choice America says it spent $250,000 on radio ads in addition to 70,000 e-mails its advocates sent to their senators.

After that hearing, a financial supporter of Rick Santorum, the anti-abortion rights and anti-contraceptives Republican presidential candidate, suggested that “gals” could prevent pregnancies by putting an aspirin “between their knees.” And in Virginia, the Republican governor supported a state bill to require that women seeking abortions undergo invasive vaginal ultrasounds. (He backed off later, but states like Ohio, Texas and Tennessee are considering similar measures.)

Now the Republicans are taking on provisions of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, a bipartisan measure that had sailed through the Congress every year until now.

This latest firestorm propelled female Senate Democrats to march in unison to the Senate floor to demand the law’s reauthorization. They didn’t get that — the vote is set for sometime in April. “It is pathetic and it is disappointing that it’s come to this,” Representative Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat, said on the floor of the House on March 27, revealing that she had been a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault. Violence against women in America — indeed everywhere, she said — “knows no gender, it knows no ethnicity, it knows nothing.”

The battle over these issues is not pitting women versus men. Rather, it breaks along ideological lines. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State, the top-ranking Republican woman in the House, was quoted by The Daily Beast last week as saying that Democrats were fabricating the “war on women” to distract from real issues.

What seems certain is that the hostilities are trending to benefit Democrats and groups that support abortion rights. “You are going to see come November a lot of independent women and probably a number of Republican women voting for Democrats across the country,” Ms. Schriock predicts.

She’s got some numbers to back her up. First, she says, “a growing number of women are stepping up to run for office,” and Emily’s List is endorsing a record number of female candidates this year: 11 for the U.S. Senate and 27 for the House. Second, she says Emily’s List has doubled its membership in the past year and has raised more money for candidates at this point in the campaign cycle than at any other time in its 27-year history (she declined to say how much).

There’s little question that what’s being called the “war on women” has prodded female senators and congresswomen and their advocates to come forward. Says Ms. Schriock: “It’s a moment in time for women, both elected women and women voters, to be highlighted in ways they haven’t been highlighted before.”

Los Angeles Series Number 7, 2009

Through April 21, 2012


Group Show at Sadie Coles

Spectral Branch, 2011
bronze, paint
198.1 x 109.2 x 68.6 cm

5 April – 5 May 2012

Xavier Hufkins

By BENEDICT CAREY
NY Times Published: March 31, 2012

SOME cultural archetypes leave the stage with a flourish, or at least some foot stomping. All those pith-helmeted colonialists, absinthe-addled poets and hippie gurus founding 1970s utopias: They made some noise, if not always much sense, before being swallowed by history.

Yet one modern American type is slipping into the past without a rattle or even its familiar whimper — the neurotic.

For a generation of postwar middle-class Americans, being neurotic meant something more than merely being anxious, and something other than exhibiting the hysteria or other disabling mood problems for which Freud used the term. It meant being interesting (if sometimes exasperating) at a time when psychoanalysis reigned in intellectual circles and Woody Allen reigned in movie houses.

That it means little now, to most Americans, is evidence of how strongly language drives the perception of mental struggle, both its sources and its remedies. In recent years psychiatrists have developed a more specialized medical vocabulary to describe anxiety, the core component of neurosis, and as a result the public has gained a greater appreciation of its many dimensions. But in the process we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as its physical embodiment — a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.

In today’s era of exquisite confusion — political, economic and otherwise — the neurotic would be a welcome guest, nervous company for nervous days, always ready to provide doses of that most potent vaccine against gloominess: wisecracking, urbane gloominess.

“I still use the term in my practice once in a while but it doesn’t really say much,” said Dr. Barbara L. Milrod, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. “We now have far more useful and specific ways of describing maladaptive behavior.”

Some of the reasons that “neurotic” has fallen out of colloquial usage are obvious. Freudian analysis lost its hold on the common consciousness, as well as in psychiatry, and some of Freud’s language lost its power. And scientists working to define mental disorders began to slice neurosis into ever finer pieces, like panic disorder, social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder — all evocative terms that percolated up into common usage, not to mention into online user groups, rock lyrics and TV shows.

In 1994, after years of nasty debate with psychoanalysts, doctors assembling the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, officially dropped the word neurosis from the book.

“The DSM is the lingua franca of psychiatry, and given what we know today the term feels old-fashioned and quaint,” said Dr. Michael First, a research psychiatrist at Columbia and a former editor of the manual. “With the general decline of value of Freud in our society, it is ultimately anachronistic.”

Still, the desire for precision and the decline of Freudian thinking do not entirely explain the disappearance of the neurotic. Psychiatrists don’t ultimately shape the language we use, after all — we all do — and neurosis has at least as much going for it as other Freudian keepers, like ego and id.

The answer may reside in the one area of social science where the spirit of the neurotic is still alive and well: research psychology.

“Neuroticism” is one of the “dimensions” of the so-called five-factor model of personality, the most studied measure in the field (other dimensions include conscientiousness and openness). It is rated using a simple questionnaire, in which people respond to statements like “I get irritated easily,” “I worry about things” and “I get stressed out easily.” Decades of research suggest that scores on those measures are relatively stable through life, and at least some of the differences in factors among people are rooted in genetic inheritance.

Over all, scores on those kinds of questionnaires have not changed much in adults in the United States since the 1950s. But recent studies have found that, among college students, neuroticism levels have increased by as much as 20 percent over the same period.

Are young people today really more anxious and troubled — more neurotic — than their parents were at the same age? Many parents undoubtedly think so (college was a long time ago), and some researchers do, too.

But another way to read those numbers is not as a measure of mental makeup but of cultural change. People of all ages today, and most especially young people, are awash in self-confession, not only in the reality-show of pop culture but in the increasingly public availability of almost every waking thought, through Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

If chronic Facebook or Twitter posting is not an exercise in neurosis, then nothing is.

“I think some of the qualities we once attributed to neurotics have simply been normalized,” said Peter N. Stearns, a historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of the forthcoming book “Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society.” “I don’t have hard evidence for this, but just look around and observe how we live. We’ve become so accustomed to people with continual worries and fears that it’s made the category obsolete.”

THE classic neurotic is still with us, all right — but with a lot more company, and everyone trying to talk over one another. “Put it this way,” Dr. Milrod said. “These are ridiculous times, and if it all makes sense to you, there’s probably something wrong.”

All the more reason to preserve a word that expands the definition of normal in the best American tradition and restores to anxiety its soul. It preserves privacy, for one thing, when it might be very important to do so. Saying “she’s neurotic” implies a difficult, self-conscious personality without giving a precise medical label. It’s closer to “stressed out” than it is to “disturbed” and implies a condition that waxes and wanes as a part of dealing with daily life.

“Sometimes vagueness has its virtues, and ‘neurotic’ sounds more garden-variety troubled than really troubled,” Dr. First said. “There’s a value in communicating that, a convenience, and neurotic is more descriptive of a personality than of symptoms — it’s an adjective describing how a person is, divorced from medical symptoms.”

Vagueness may also have some value clinically, especially in an area as poorly understood as mental health. In a series of books, including the forthcoming “The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown — and How Everyone Became Depressed,” the historian Edward Shorter has argued that in some cases, like splitting anxiety disorders from depression, precision backfires. Sadness and worry are intimate partners for many people who visit psychiatrists, and the drugs known as antidepressants are widely prescribed for anxiety as well.

The term neurosis encompasses both, and in fact predates Freud by a century. It originally referred to a problem of the nerves, not the mind, in direct contrast to “psychosis,” which implies a break in logical thinking of the sort characteristic of schizophrenia.

“We’ve lost this view of nervous illness as an illness of the whole body, and now call it a mood disorder,” Dr. Shorter said. “And sad to say, telling people they have a mood disorder misleads them. They think it’s all in their head, when in fact they feel it in their body; they’re fatigued, they have these somatic aches and pains, the pit in the stomach — it’s experienced in the whole body.”

In the original late-18th-century formulation, neurosis also was free of any genetic connection. “The knowledge that someone was ‘nervously ill’ was not necessarily a clap of doom for subsequent generations in the way that news of a family member being ‘mentally ill’ was,” Dr. Shorter wrote in “From Paralysis to Fatigue,” a history of psychosomatic illness. “Daughters of mentally ill parents might not make good marriages, the prospective in-laws all dreading the prospect of inherited insanity; those of nervously ill parents would find their prospects less impaired.”

Honestly now, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have their prospects less impaired? It amounts to one more vote for “neurosis” as a state of mind to which we can reliably retreat in strange times — if not in psychiatric treatment, at least among friends and colleagues.