Capitalist With a $

November 1, 2009
By ADAM KIRSCH
AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE
By Anne C. ­Heller
Illustrated. 567 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $35
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=1&hp

A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”

Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review — and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.”

For one thing, it is far more interesting than anything in Rand’s novels. That is because Heller is dealing with a human being, and one with more than her share of human failings and contradictions — “gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel . . . and ultimately self-destructive,” as Heller puts it. The characters Rand created, on the other hand — like Galt or Howard Roark, the architect hero of “The Fountainhead” — are abstract principles set to moving and talking.

This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly­wood screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity. It is the message that turned her, from the publication of “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957 until her death in 1982, into the leader of a kind of sect. (This season, another Rand book, by the academic historian Jennifer Burns, is aptly titled “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”) Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject — she writes that she is “a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations” — while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand’s conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount. “At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row,” Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren’t immune: after Wendell Willkie’s defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as “the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt.”

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas.” But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness, as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee. When Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, moved to New York, Rand followed him; she inserted herself into her protégé’s love life, urging him to marry his girlfriend; then Rand began to sleep with Branden, insisting that both their spouses be kept fully apprised of what was going on. Heller shows how the Brandens formed the nucleus of a growing group of young Rand followers, a herd of individualists who nicknamed themselves “the Collective” — ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Inevitably, it all ended in tears, when Branden fell in love with a young actress and was expelled from Rand’s circle forever. That he went on to write several best-­selling books of popular psychology “and earned the appellation ‘father of the self-esteem movement’ ” is the kind of finishing touch that makes truth stranger than fiction. For if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet Magazine. He is the author, most recently, of “Benjamin Disraeli.”

Putting America’s Diet on a Diet

October 11, 2009
The Food Issue
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11Oliver-t.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
By ALEX WITCHEL
On his first day in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver spent the afternoon at Hillbilly Hot Dogs, pitching in to cook its signature 15-pound burger. That’s 10 pounds of meat, 5 pounds of custom-made bun, American cheese, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard and mayo. Then he learned how to perfect the Home Wrecker, the eatery’s famous 15-inch, one-pound hot dog (boil first, then grill in butter). For the Home Wrecker Challenge, the dog gets 11 toppings, including chili sauce, jalapeños, liquid nacho cheese and coleslaw. Finish it in 12 minutes or less and you get a T-shirt.

So much for local color. Earlier that day, Oliver met with a pediatrician, James Bailes, and a pastor, Steve Willis. Bailes told him about an 8-year-old patient who was 80 pounds overweight and had developed Type 2 diabetes. If the child’s diet didn’t change, the doctor said, he wouldn’t live to see 30. Willis told Oliver that he visits patients in local hospitals several days a week and sees the effects of long-term obesity firsthand. Since he can’t write a prescription for their resulting illnesses, he said, all he can do is pray with them.

Last year, an Associated Press article designated the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area as the unhealthiest in America, based on its analysis of data collected in 2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half the adults in these five counties (two in West Virginia, two in Kentucky and one in Ohio) were obese, and the area led the nation in the incidence of heart disease and diabetes. The poverty rate was 19 percent, much higher than the national average. It also had the highest percentage of people 65 and older who had lost their teeth — nearly 50 percent.

All of which makes Huntington the perfect setting for the next Jamie Oliver Challenge. While he understands the allure of Home Wreckers and Big Macs alike, this British celebrity chef has made it his mission in recent years to break people’s dependence on fast food, believing that if they can learn to cook just a handful of dishes, they’ll get hooked on eating healthfully. The joy of a home-cooked meal, rudimentary as it sounds, has been at the core of his career from the start, and as he has matured, it has turned into a platform.

Oliver became famous at 23 for his television series “The Naked Chef,” which was broadcast from 1999 to 2001, first in Britain, then here, on the Food Network. The title referred not to his lack of clothing but to his belief in stripping pretense and mystery from the kitchen — the idea that anyone can cook and everyone should. He was loose and playful, measuring olive oil not in spoonfuls but in “glugs,” making a mess and having a ball. In the years since, that laddish charmer has morphed, somewhat unexpectedly, into a crusading community organizer. “Jamie’s School Dinners,” his award-winning four-part series, exposed the shameful state of school lunches in Britain and made for riveting television — he and the school cooks working feverishly to prepare dishes like tagine of lamb that the students either refused to try or dumped in the trash after one bite. When he eventually succeeded in getting them to abandon their processed poultry and fries and eat his food, the teachers reported a decrease in manic behavior and an increase in concentration. The school nurses noted a reduction in the number of asthma attacks. Those findings, along with “Feed Me Better,” his online campaign and petition drive, were the impetus for the British government to invest more than a billion dollars to overhaul school lunches.

In addition to TV specials like “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners” and “Jamie Saves Our Bacon” (exposing the state of the British poultry and pork industries, respectively), Oliver got personal with his series “Jamie’s Kitchen,” based on the Fifteen Foundation, which he created in 2002. Each year it sponsors 15 (give or take a few) young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds, including those with criminal records or a history of drug abuse, and trains them in the restaurant business. To kick-start the program and to finance Fifteen, the upscale London restaurant that would employ them, he put up his own house as collateral — without telling his wife. In addition to the London flagship, whose customers have included Brad Pitt and Bill Clinton, branches of the restaurant have opened in Cornwall, Amsterdam and Melbourne. So far, the program has graduated 159 students at a cost of $49,500 each. Oliver endowed the foundation with proceeds from his book “Cook With Jamie,” and it now operates as an independent entity.

If he were just a professional do-gooder, Oliver, who is 34, would be a bore. But food has given his life focus and meaning since childhood, and he has honored it ever since. Born and raised in Essex, northeast of London, Oliver, the son of a pub owner, grew up hyperactive and dyslexic. In school, he failed every subject except Art (he got an A) and Geology (a C). By the time he was 6, his tough-love father, Trevor, put him to work in the pub, cleaning up. His father’s work ethic was such that on summer vacations he would aim the garden hose through Jamie’s bedroom window, soaking his bed to get him out of it, at 6:30 a.m. “People die in bed,” he liked to say.

It seems to have worked. By the time he was 13, Jamie was turning out between 100 and 120 meals on a Sunday night alongside the pub’s chef. In a work-study program, he spent six weeks at a high-end restaurant, starting at the appetizers station. When the head chef quit, he took over.

Though his father was proud of him, Oliver says, he is mindful that the pub owner’s motto remains “You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” Having started out as the ear, Oliver has worked hard to prove his father wrong. Cooking saved his life. He wants it save yours too. “Being in the kitchen is the most simple part of life,” he said. “People talk about it like it was some sort of science experiment.”

In last year’s U.K. series, “Jamie’s Ministry of Food,” Oliver expanded his reach past the school system into people’s homes. He chose Rotherham, an industrial town in northern England with a high rate of obesity and related illnesses, where 20 percent of the working-age population was on public assistance. He built a community center where residents could learn to cook inexpensively for their families while instilling the idea that healthful eating is not a luxury. “They thought that cooking a meal and feeding it to your family was for posh people,” he said. Some participants in the show had never even had a kitchen table. They ate takeout food on their floors.

That project has proved a success and the perfect model for Oliver’s mission in Huntington. The community center here will be called Jamie’s Kitchen and will teach both adults and children the basic skills for cooking healthful, economical meals at home. Oliver will also work with local schools on eliminating junk food in vending machines and in cafeterias, replacing reheated processed foods with meals cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients. But there is no guarantee of success. In spite of the resources the British government has allocated for school lunches, Oliver admits that only half the schools are functioning properly; the other half are still experiencing difficulty training cafeteria staff and enforcing new guidelines. And follow-up reports show that while students now understand the benefits of eating healthfully, many still opt out of their school-lunch plans, reverting to fast food instead.

What’s really happening is about more than old habits dying hard or the love of frying. The reason the world is still waiting for the Messiah is that most people don’t actually want one, no matter how many fresh fruits and vegetables he’s carrying. Oliver expects some of the same pushback in Huntington, whether it comes from recalcitrant teenagers, petty bureaucrats or parents who don’t like being told they’ve failed. It remains to be seen whether the contest between being threatened and resentful versus forthright and true can trump the American intoxication with show business: will this much-maligned area let a Member of the British Empire play Pygmalion and win? In this country, ordinary people seem willing to do or say almost anything to be immortalized in the latter-day vaudeville of reality shows. Oliver’s goals here, no matter how authentic, can be thwarted if the balance between camera hunger and social reform goes off-kilter. The series, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” is a co-production of his company and Ryan Seacrest Productions. ABC will broadcast it in six parts in early 2010.

Like Rotherham’s, Huntington’s economy was buoyed for years by the coal mines nearby as well as by manufacturing jobs in the chemical industry, glassworks, steel foundries and locomotive-parts plants. In 1950 its population was near 90,000. Manual labor took care of excess calories, if not hardened arteries. When the coal industry was modernized and the changing economy resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs, the population dropped to less than 50,000; hospitals became one of the city’s largest employers. Another is Marshall University, home of the “Thundering Herd” football team and the subject of the 2006 film “We Are Marshall.” Its students are aficionados of the delicacies at Hillbilly Hot Dogs (a sign out front reads, “If you hit it on the run, we’ll put it on a bun”), and Oliver doesn’t blame them.

“That was 15 pounds of madness,” he said of the trademark burger, jumping into the car outside the restaurant. “But it tasted good.” He had been shooting all afternoon and was 90 minutes behind schedule, an occurrence his publicist calls “Jamie Time.” He gets so involved in what he’s doing that he tends to lose track. He was due downtown in 30 minutes to hold a town-hall meeting to talk about the show. On the way there, he agreed to run through Kroger, a local supermarket, to see what Huntington residents were buying.

As we drove there, Oliver talked about his first day in town. He likes to say that the C.D.C. statistics on obesity in the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area are only a few percentage points higher than the national average. In fact, the C.D.C.’s numbers vary from year to year: obesity rates in the last two years hovered near the national average, 34 percent, but the A.P. report that brought Oliver to West Virginia was based on 2006 figures that put the area’s obesity rate at 45 percent. From what I saw in one day, the locals were plenty touchy about their collective waistlines, so Oliver was wise to tread lightly. That is typical of his style. Effortlessly charismatic, he has an easy warmth — happy to shake hands or pat a back, though he takes the business of listening to people quite seriously. When he finds a kindred spirit, a sharp focus, an open mind, he leaps, immediately connecting. He is genuinely polite, which is in itself so rare that it is genuinely winning. Though he is still hyperactive — if he’s standing he’s pacing; if he’s sitting, a leg bounces — his mind seems insatiable.

Oliver is at the head of a multinational corporation that has produced 12 television series and assorted specials seen in 130 countries; he has written 10 cookbooks that have been translated into 29 languages and sold almost 24 million copies in 56 countries. In addition to the Fifteen Foundation and restaurants, he has opened six Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the U.K. in the past two years, high-volume yet high-quality odes to a cuisine he loves; he sells his own brands of cookware, cutlery, tableware and gift foods; he publishes his own magazine; and he continues in his ninth year as spokesman for Sainsbury’s, an upscale supermarket chain in England. Because his company is privately held, it does not release its annual earnings, but he is said to be personally worth at least $65 million.

All told, 2,150 people work for his businesses. He keeps every fact and figure in his head — no reading, no writing, no notes. The format he has worked out for so many of his series — Jamie identifies a problem, Jamie sets out to fix the problem, Jamie encounters evil forces along the way, Jamie triumphs — comes naturally to him because that’s exactly how he has lived his own life so far.

Once inside Kroger we started with produce. “I find it fascinating looking at people’s trolleys,” he said. “The ones here are twice the size they are at home.” He picked up a bag of salad greens. “A lot of these are washed in chlorine, so they lose their nutrition,” he said, tossing it back. “It takes no time to get lettuce and spin it about.” He picked up a bottle of salad dressing. “Four dollars? You can make your own for less than half that price.” He looked at its ingredients. “Water. I’ve never been taught to put water in any dressing.”

Well, how about those packages of cut-up fresh fruit? He shrugged. “I don’t understand why people can’t cut it up themselves. Don’t they own knives?”

Two little girls ran past us, playing tag while an older man trailed them, his cart bearing bananas and M&M’s. “Two things happen when shopping with kids,” Oliver said. “You either give in and buy everything they want, or if you’re a strong parent you make certain choices.”

We headed toward frozen foods. No one recognized him. Six weeks from now he’d be mobbed doing this. “Or punched,” he said. “I’m a respectful person, and I’m going to try to do things in the nice way. But it’s almost as if parents here have stopped saying no. It’s as if the kids rule the roost.” We came upon a table of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “They’re a treat, there to be loved,” he said. “But start having them every day, job done. It’s harsh to say, but these parents, when they’ve been to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise.”

Town Hall awaited. Oliver is so practiced at doing these series that he spoke automatically in sound bites, sensing it was the moment to build suspense. “Ultimately, I’m a foreigner,” he said. “I’ve got no place being here, but I’ve got all the right reasons.” He headed for the door. “I just bloody hope I pull it out of the bag.”

THE DAY IN Huntington wasn’t my first meeting with Oliver. He came to New York in August on business and, in a borrowed apartment arranged by his publisher, cooked us some lunch before we sat down to talk. His new cookbook, “Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals,” is based on the “Ministry of Food” series and will be published by Hyperion on Oct. 13. He prepared a dish from it that he often makes for his daughters Poppy, who is 7, and Daisy, who is 6: Mini Shell Pasta With a Creamy Smoked Bacon and Pea Sauce.

A timeout here for self-anointed Health Nazis. Oliver cooks and eats all kinds of meat and feels free to use butter, cream and cheese, in sane amounts. He is not a diet cop; he’s about scratch cooking, which to him means avoiding processed and fast food, learning pride of ownership, encouraging sparks of creativity and finding a reason to gather family and friends in one place. If you can make pancakes or an omelet, a pot of chili or spaghetti sauce and know how to perk up some vegetables, you can spend less and eat a more healthful meal that’s delicious.

Oliver’s hyperactivity finds its perfect expression when he’s cooking. His movements were almost balletic, charged and graceful, even when he stuck his finger straight into the pot of water to feel if it was near boiling. It was. He cut the pancetta with lightning speed. “I swear I could do that at 10 years old,” he said. “Tuck your fingers in, you never get cut.”

He dressed the salad, which he filled with fresh herbs, tossing it with his hands. Then he threw frozen peas into the pan with the pancetta. Two women who work for him moved in and out of the kitchen, talking on cellphones. “The key to life is to surround yourself with lots of women,” Oliver said. “Men would just lie to me. Girls say, ‘Give me half an hour and I’ll find out.’ They’re intelligent, more loyal and they make things happen. Everything I do is about team, really. So 90 percent of my team are women.” The dish was done within minutes. (It was also done within minutes when I made it at home, at a more leisurely pace, the following day.)

We sat at the dining-room table. “The key to life is to know what you’re good at and stay away from what you’re bad at,” he said. Well, the pasta was certainly delicious. As for the bad part, we talked about school. He said he recently ran into his “special needs” teacher, Mrs. Murphy, and actually blushed as he told me, “I gave her a big hug and kiss, and she said she was really proud of me.” Oliver has often recounted the story of being one of five children out of 150 pulled from regular classes each week to learn how to read and write, as the other kids taunted them, singing the phrase “special needs” to the tune of “Let It Be.”

He left school at 16 and graduated from Westminster Catering College. After a brief stint cooking in France, he returned to London to work at Antonio Carluccio’s Neal Street Restaurant, where he met his mentor, Gennaro Contaldo, who taught him to make bread and pasta and to love all things Italian. (Contaldo now supervises bread- and pasta-making at the Jamie’s Italian restaurants.) Then Oliver moved on to the trendy River Café, where a camera crew came to shoot one day and found him to be a natural.

Since 2000, Oliver has been married to his longtime love, Juliette Norton. A former model, she is known to his viewers and fans as “the lovely Jools.” They live in the Primrose Hill section of London and spend weekends at his farm in Essex, near where he grew up. His father’s pub, the Cricketers, is still in business. Oliver says: “I have my two girls waitressing there. Poppy is gentle, sensitive. Daisy is sort of a bit mad, incredibly funny. She eats for England. She’s only 6, and she’ll eat squid, she’ll try anything.”

Poppy and Daisy have an infant sister, Petal. Really.

“That’s Jools,” he said, easily. “My opinions in the name department don’t get much of a looking. We live very segregated sort of lives, really. Jools isn’t into anything workwise that I do. It means that home is home, and when I’m there I don’t talk about work. Like a lot of working mums or dads, I see the girls a bit in the morning, and then I really don’t see them until the weekend, which is the way it’s always been, so I don’t feel bad. Mum does a great job of being a mum.” But Oliver doesn’t just come home from work; he comes home from being an international entertainment conglomerate. That seems hard to leave at the door.

“It’s the battle of life isn’t it, trying to get the right balance,” he said. “The problem with me is, no one truly understands how I tick as a person, even my wife.” That includes his parents, he added. “When I started the Fifteen Foundation and opened that restaurant, I spent all my savings. It was kind of reckless, and the key people around me, the business accountants and my parents, it took them five years to get it. That’s why I try and take them to every graduation to meet the kids. You know my old man’s saying was ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ but I’ve spent the last eight years disagreeing with that. I like giving people a bit of extra.”

But his father still doesn’t understand him? Oliver’s leg bounced ferociously. “He’s really proud, but he doesn’t know how I manage to multitask. I don’t know if it’s part of my dyslexia, but I can jump from one place into another, into another. So whether it’s the restaurant or the charity or the direct-sales business or the next book — there’s probably 30 things going on now — I think it scares my dad because he’s always been very good at one thing. But he’s starting to relax. I think he thinks I’m happy, and ultimately you’re only as happy as your most miserable child, aren’t you?”

What is his mother, Sally, like? “She’s hilarious. A hundred-miles-an-hour avalanche of energy. She’s superbright and fairly encyclopedic about stuff, but at the same time she’s a complete liability. She just worries and flusters and runs around the place, saying inappropriate things. She’s fairly similar to me, really. But growing up, she was a brilliant mum and a great friend. Dad was strict, hard core, waking me up with the hose.”

Oliver got his revenge ­— or at least tried to. Before he started cooking in the pub, he and his friends set off a stink bomb there during dinner time, sending 30 people out onto the street without paying their bills. “That was just stupid, really,” Oliver said, chagrined that I mentioned it and seemingly still ashamed. “That was an attack on a family business by a moron child.”

High jinks aside, he said that his parents consistently supported him and his younger sister, Anna-Marie. “I was brought up in a family where they would wish the best for you,” he said. “But doing these projects like ‘School Dinners’ and ‘Ministry of Food,’ it amazed me that around so many of these people there was no positivity. With one woman, if she started doing good stuff for herself, people that were her own flesh and blood got jealous. With Fifteen, one of the biggest problems we have is the students’ families, the lack of positive role models. That’s why I disagree with Dad.” He spoke proudly of his graduates, mentioning one who works in New York at the renowned gastropub the Spotted Pig and another who is about to become the head chef at Jamie’s Italian in Guildford. Five years ago, Oliver said, he was on the South Bank of the Thames in a courtroom getting that young man out of jail.

“Look, I think the brilliant and beautiful thing in life is that anyone can do anything,” he said. “When I used to go to special needs, we got laughed at, but we’re not supposed to all be academic. What is education? A bunch of stuff that people think we should know. Ultimately if you can put a wall up, if you can paint, if you can work with other people and, most important, if you find out what you are good at, that’s the key. Kids can do detailed, technical things, and they can do them well. Have you seen them on skateboards and surfing? It doesn’t have to be a BMX, it can be a pot and a pan and a knife, but we wrap them up in cotton wool and treat them like babies and they’re not.”

It certainly didn’t hurt him to have started early. “No,” he said, “but it’s ironic that the one thing I hated I sort of specialize in now,” referring to the cookbooks. He added, good-naturedly, “When I do writing, it’s more imagination than sentences as we know it.” But he is very visual — remember that A in art — and he works on every aspect of the books’ photography and design. “Almost 24 million copies, by someone who swore he’d never ever do any revolting reading and writing when he left school,” Oliver said with smile of pure delight. “It’s funny how things work out.”

AFTER OUR DASH through Kroger, Oliver arrived at City Hall and disappeared backstage. The auditorium was less than half full, and the front rows were filled with local reporters. Mothers brought young children with an eye toward the camera. One even armed her daughter with an oversize school menu as a visual aid. Another woman seemed to have mistaken scratch cooking for “American Idol” — she raced back and forth, trying to persuade someone, anyone, to ask Oliver to listen to her daughter sing.

Oliver picked up the mike. “Hi, guys,” he began. “Some say this is the most unhealthy town in America. We’re going to spend the next few days getting under the skin of the problem, and we’re asking families, individuals, schools and churches to spread the word. Here, the odds are against you, you live an unhealthy life and die young. That’s what the report said. So, this is not a sparkly, pretty show. It’s about finding local ambassadors for change.”

He asked people to raise their hands if friends or family were affected by obesity and bad health. Almost every hand went up. Oliver nodded. “What do you think the problems are?” Among the answers were: too much processed food in school cafeterias; a need for better prenatal nutrition; a call to stop putting Kool-Aid in toddlers’ sippy cups (earlier, Oliver heard about infants’ bottles filled with Coca-Cola); suggestions that restaurants offer smaller portions and that children’s menus offer alternatives to burgers and fries.

Oliver took it in. “This isn’t a freak show here,” he said. “You’re only a few percent away from the national average. Every child should be taught to cook in school, not just talk about nutrition all day. Good food can be made in 15 minutes. This could be the first generation where the kids teach the parents.” That earned a round of applause.

“I got a billion dollars out of the British government and put it into the school system,” he went on. “But it’s still in transition, it’s not all glossy yet. When parents get angry anything can happen. So I’ll need your help. Hopefully over the next few months, we’ll do some really good things together.”

After he left the lectern, the crew restaged the applause they would use for his entrance. It was thin before, but now it ended with a standing ovation. The townsfolk seemed as quick a study on theatrics as they were on health reform; many angled to be interviewed, to establish themselves as characters.

They were actually so intent on chasing the limelight that few seemed to notice an untended table outside the rear of the auditorium. There, in what seemed the ultimate mixed message, was the 15-pound burger Oliver helped make that afternoon. Sitting near a bowl of candy and a half-eaten plate of sandwiches, it filled an enormous platter. It had been cut into pieces, but hardly any had been taken.

As Oliver spoke to the camera downstairs and audience members jockeyed for position upstairs, the table stood ignored. Until two little boys stormed it, prompting their mother to pull herself free from the media hubbub. They stopped just short and stared at the bounty before them.

“Is it free?” one son asked. She looked around, nervously. “Yes,” she said. He reached past the burger and grabbed a box of Milk Duds. Then she got back in line, to be on TV.

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.

Smart Composting Tips for Urban Gardeners & Apartment Dwellers

Written by Ecoist on February 18th, 2009
http://webecoist.com/2009/02/18/how-to-compost-in-an-apartment-or-urban-living-space/

With the economy in dire straits and many people losing their jobs, everyone’s looking for ways to save money and become more self-sufficient. Growing your own food – even if you live in an apartment or urban setting – is a low-cost and easy first step towards saving a lot of money. Composting is another great activity that can help both your gardening and the planet. But doing it in a small space can be tricky. Here’s how to compost even in a small apartment.


The Container

First, the right container is important. You don’t want to operate a large, standard compost system in a small space, not only because square footage is at a premium but because of cost. A small unit is best. There are plenty of great options, including countertop models that are attractive and usually under $30. If you’re really concerned about odor, invest in one with a charcoal filter, such as the one pictured above, left. There are plenty of stylish choices, such as the attractive ceramic style shown above, middle, and it, too, comes with a filter so you don’t have to worry about smell. Whatever you do, don’t DIY – no tupperwares or old pots. You’ll have unwanted odor and infestation before you know what’s happened.

What to Compost

Besides bacon, which is obviously not allowed (and why would you let bacon go to waste?), don’t ever compost the following:

- anything that can’t break down reasonably fast in a small container, like old magazines, t-shirts, or (obviously) plastic.

- anything with toxic chemicals, like detergent, paint, or hair dye (you should be using eco-friendly versions of these products anyway, for your own health and the benefit of the planet).

- meat and animal byproducts other than milk or cheese. Butter, being fat, takes a long time to break down, and meat will just attract rodents and insect infestation. The breakdown process going on in your compost bucket can also be hampered by the introduction of meat. Avoid fish, bones, chicken skin – anything that you wouldn’t want your cat getting into probably should not go in the compost. If you’re tossing soup that has chicken broth in it, that’s OK to compost, but no bones. There are plenty of other uses for chicken bones, some good, some bad.

Tips for Composting
As great as it is getting rid of food scraps, you’ll need more than that for successful composting. Nitrogen is necessary to break down the foods into more than a sludge of smelly scariness, and nitrogen comes from grass clippings and dead leaves. The easiest thing to do is add in a half-inch layer of dead, relatively dry matter for every two or three inches of food compost. This usually means about once a week you’ll need to add in some of mother nature’s sheddings. Pine needles are fine, too. The key is balance – don’t think of this as a slimy food free for all. You want to keep it damp but not wet. It’s as easy as grabbing some dead leaves from the sidewalk out front and tossing them in. Newspaper works, too.

If you’re adding in things like paper, shred it! Otherwise it takes forever to break down.

Coffee grounds help create an acidic environment, and worms love them.

Add in the occasional layer of carbon-containing organic matter to balance the nitrogen – leaves are great.

Avoid ashes – they make the mixture alkaline, which means it will take a lot longer to turn into compost.

Don’t forget worms!

Keep your compost near an area with decent ventilation, but out of the sun. Compost will be warm anyway because of the breakdown mechanism going on, so you don’t want it getting too hot.

Don’t freak out if you see some bugs in your compost. They’re helping. What you don’t want are cockroaches and potato bugs or flies and other large scavenger insects. But worms and all those tiny, hard-working soil critters are OK.

What to Do with Your Compost

You’ve followed the tips for what to compost, you’ve patiently waited for about 45 days, you’ve kept the mixture appropriately moist – but not too much – and now you’re seeing some decidedly awesome compost develop in your compost bucket. What to do with it? If you’re not gardening yourself, give it away! Compost is gardening’s more nutrient-rich treasure; think of it like a vitamin bomb for your little shoots and seeds. Someone will surely appreciate all your composting efforts, even if it’s not your pals. Try Freecycle or Craigslist – you might be surprised by all the urban gardeners out there! If you are gardening yourself, you’ll only need about an inch-thick layer of compost for plants (you don’t want to smother them). If it’s still winter when you’re planting, give the seeds a little more for comfort, but make sure there is still plenty of ventilation. Don’t pack the compost in, or you’ll stifle the plants.

Green your kitchen with small worm compost bin
July 25, 4:15 PM
Cleveland Greener Living Examiner
Alicia Young
http://www.examiner.com/x-16612-Cleveland-Greener-Living-Examiner~y2009m7d25-Green-your-kitchen-with-small-worm-compost-bin
It may sound "yucky" to have worms near your kitchen, but it is completely safe, non-toxic, doesn't leave a rotten smell and won't attract bugs. Best of all you can use it year round, put it outside during the summer months and bring it inside when the temperatures drop.

A small worm compost bin will likely cost you less than $100, so shop around to find one that suits your kitchen and household. Most are produced from recycled plastic (I love that) and some will arrive in recyclable, compostable cardboard.

You will need some red wiggler worms, which you must purchase separately and I suggest you buy these locally if possible. The red wigglers, versus those you dig up in your garden or wooded areas are the best type for breaking down vegetable and fruit peelings, newspapers and other types of compostable materials.

Instructions are included with the worm compost bin and some are pretty much hands free, meaning you don't have to add extras to make it work for you. The compost is great for using in your garden, or even in flowerpots. Depending on what you put in the top of the compost bin, it will usually take a few days to a couple weeks for the red wigglers to break down the material, and then you use the castings (worm poop) in your garden or pots.

Find a variety of worm compost bins on Worms4Earth.com and Compost Bins. You don't need to wait, find one which suits your needs and household size and order one today. Be sure to order the worms after your compost bin arrives and you have the soil and water already setup.

Reduce your trash and give back to your flowers and garden, it's economically and environmentally friendly!

Alternative Medicines

Acupuncture
By Adele Reising

I am a practitioner of Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, herbal medicine and Chinese medical massage, among other types of treatment. I have my own private practice in New York City.
Here, I hope to give you a taste of the vast wisdom on health and well-being embodied in this ancient medical practice, as well as a few practical and easy applications that you can start to incorporate into your life today. If you are already familiar with Chinese medicine, I think there will be something here for you as well.
When in college at Indiana University in 1987, I met a Chinese medical doctor. This was my first exposure to Chinese medicine and I was intrigued by a medical practice with a two-thousand year history, built on a complete medical system virtually ignored by Western studies. When I began my studies with her, I began a journey that would not only take me to China, but would forever change my life.
I went on to earn a Master’s degree in Chinese medicine from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (where I ultimately taught from 1999 to 2006 and served as department chair of herbal medicine for four years). For two-and-a-half years I studied in Beijing, which included two hospital residencies. I am fluent in Chinese and read classical Chinese, the language the medical texts use. I continue my studies to this day with a Korean master, Won Duk-Huang, and the Taoist master Jeffery Yuen.
Chinese medicine is based on the ancient Chinese philosophical principle of the holistic nature of the universe, where humans are essentially a representation of the universe. For example, the heart is like the sun in the sky, the lungs the atmosphere or the sky itself, the digestion is the soil of the earth and the kidneys are the salty oceans. Chinese medicine studies the natural order of the universe in order to understand the inner workings of the human body.
Acupuncture works on a system of meridians that flows through the body, much like the nervous system or circulatory system. Qi (pronounced “chee”), our life force, moves through the meridians and is thought to flow like rivers on the earth into the sea. Certain points along the meridians will clog up or get weak; the body can’t do what it knows to do to stay healthy and illness ensues. The insertion of very fine, painless needles into these points mobilizes the flow of Qi through these meridians in therapeutic ways.
Many people think that acupuncture works on the nervous system and is used solely to treat pain. However, just as we go to our doctors for all types of ailments, Chinese medicine too, treats everything, because it is a complete medical system. While I can and do often treat pain, I also treat allergies, asthma, auto-immune disorders, gynecological disorders, infertility, migraines, irritable bowel, acid reflux, gastro-intestinal disorders, skin rashes, acne, nicotine and other drug addictions, even Asperger’s syndrome.
Chinese medicine excels at treating diseases that are chronic in nature and that Western medicine has limited treatment for, such as irritable bowel or acid reflux. Doctors manage the symptoms, but a Chinese doctor can actually cure the condition. Allergies and asthma fall into this category as well. I have cured many patients of allergies and asthma, especially children. While treating a disease such as asthma with acupuncture, the patient may continue to use inhalers to manage symptoms. My goal as an acupuncturist is to improve the situation so that inhalers are no longer necessary.
Here are a few home remedies that I often recommend to my patients and use myself. Chinese herbal remedies, like needles, help stimulate the Qi and encourage healing. I do suggest, though, that you see an acupuncturist for a full diagnosis and follow-up care.
Ginger Tea with Raw Brown Sugar (for menstrual cramps)
Ingredients: Three slices of fresh minced ginger, raw brown sugar.

Boil in one-and-a-half cups of water for five to ten minutes. Add one tablespoon of raw, unprocessed brown sugar and enjoy.
Castor Oil Pack (for joint pain)
Materials: Castor oil, a washcloth or an unbleached paper towel, plastic wrap, a hot water bottle or a heating pad.

Put one tablespoon of castor oil on the paper towel, let it absorb, and place on affected area (or put castor oil directly on affected area). Cover the washcloth. Place plastic wrap on top, to protect your heating pad or water bottle from the oil. Place the heating pad or hot water bottle over the plastic wrap. Apply to your aches and pains, enjoy for ten to twenty minutes.
Neti Pot (for clearing out the sinuses)
For sinus congestion, allergies and to prevent colds.

Materials: Neti pot, sea salt or kosher salt, baking soda, lukewarm water.

In the neti pot, mix one-quarter to one-half teaspoon of salt with one-quarter teaspoon baking soda, add lukewarm water and stir. Rinse each nostril with the liquid three to five times. For first time users, I recommend letting the liquid flow straight back and spitting it out your mouth. The baking soda creates an alkaline environment, which prevents bacterial overgrowth. If you experience burning, increase your vitamin C consumption and reduce the amount of salt. Avoid using the neti pot while you are sick.
Dry Brushing (for healthy skin and lymphatic system)
After showering, towel dry your body. Use a firm body brush (I like sisal brushes) and brush your skin vigorously from the tips of the fingers and toes toward the heart. Avoid the face and delicate areas. Moisturize as you normally would.
Scar Ointment (for new scars)
Materials: Nelsons Cuts & Scrapes Cream with with hypericum and calendula, helichrysum essential oil (Sunrose is a good brand).

Add ten drops of helichrysum essential oil per ounce of ointment. Mix thoroughly. Apply to the affected area twice daily and avoid sun exposure to the affected area.
Goji Berries with Chrysanthemum (for red, dry eyes)
Goji berries are all the rage now, Whole Foods sells them and I have even seen them covered in chocolate! (I do not recommend the chocolate-covered ones.) In fact, Goji berries’ health properties are greatly enhanced by cooking them five to ten minutes. Throw them into your hot cereal, soups or even tea. A very nice tea full of B vitamins (the natural way) is chrysanthemum and goji berry tea. Both of these foods happen to be good for the eyes as well.
For more information on Chinese medicine and my practice, you can visit my website at www.adelereising.com.Cupping
By Amy Lafayette and Lisa Sutton

About five years ago, Gwyneth attended a premiere in a backless gown that sent tongues wagging. It wasn’t the designer of the dress that viewers were discussing; but rather, they were ogling the collection of symmetrical, purple dots that graced the skin of her back. “The marks of Gwyneth” were a sign of “cupping” and sent a flurry of photographs around the globe and even prompted her friend Oprah Winfrey to explore this ancient practice on her show.
The practice of cupping was conceived during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in China, though ancient medical transcriptions suggest its existence in Egypt as well. In its original application, cupping was prescribed for the treatment of conditions such as pulmonary tuberculosis and rheumatoid pain. In ancient times, animal horns were used to facilitate the practice, primarily to drain snakebites and lesions. The remedial application of cupping has evolved concurrent to the refinement of the cup itself, and now cups are primarily fabricated out of glass or bamboo.
In our practice, we use multiple glass cups, attaching them to the skin using negative pressure by introducing heat in the form of an ignited material. The partial vacuum created by the removal of oxygen from the cup draws the underlying tissue into the vessel. As we often tell our younger patients, the cups will feel like a small octopus grabbing hold. We frequently employ the flashing method for deficient conditions, which relies on the repeated application of single cups on a specific area. We also use the sliding method, a technique that is employed over the dorsal (generally referred to as the back) surface of the body. The cupping method functions to stimulate and promote the free flow of Qi (energy) and blood in the meridians (energy highways). This creates a kind of local congestion that can eliminate blood stagnation that may be causing pain from a deeper layer in the muscle. By creating this suction and negative pressure, cupping is used to drain excess fluids and toxins, loosen adhesions and lift connective tissue, bring blood flow to stagnant skin and muscles, and stimulate the peripheral nervous system. Indications include, but are not exclusive to, the common cold with cough, asthma, headache, dizziness and digestive disorders. It is a veritable panacea for what ails you. Most patients find the experience pleasant, although they may be left with localized discoloration that will fade and disappear within a few days (up to a week). Curiously, cupping doesn’t always leave a mark, diagnostically supporting that there is no stagnation in that area.
Acupuncture is a licensed and regulated healthcare profession, but cupping and herbology do not require licensure. However, we strongly recommend that a licensed (or certified) practitioner perform this procedure.* We come by way of this 5,000-year-old tradition after ten years of practice and previous to that, a four-year Master’s practice in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). We completed our training at the Five Branches Institute, where the course of study includes acupuncture and moxibustion, herbology (formula strategy), Tui Na (medical massage), dietetics and Qigong (martial arts).
Amy Lafayette, L.Ac., and Lisa Sutton, L.Ac., currently practice in Los Angeles.
*Ask your practitioner if your state requires a license to practice. In states that do not currently require licensing, patients should ask their practitioner if they are certified by the NCCA (National Commission for Certifying Agencies).Su Jok Therapy
By Joad Puttermilech, Su Jok Research Institute founder

I have been in a healing atmosphere since childhood – my mother practiced Watsu and yoga – but I never thought I would become a therapist. It turned out that I did, and now I perform and teach energy healing and acupuncture, specializing in Su Jok therapy.
I found Su Jok in the early 2000s when a dancer patient of mine called me just after an accident. She was diagnosed with two herniated discs, could barely move and was advised to have surgery. As the show needed to go on and it was difficult to replace her, I looked for an unconventional solution. I went with her to Dr. Alexander, an anesthesiologist who had migrated early to acupuncture and a chiropractic practice. He inserted five tiny needles at the tip of her finger and instantly her back pain went away; two days later she was on stage. I couldn’t believe my eyes and asked how it was possible. “How did you do it?” With a loud laugh he said, “You must study.” That very day I became his student and assistant. I discovered this amazing hand therapy and went to many teachers, most of them physicians who had switched from allopathic medicine to Su Jok, until I met the founder of the method, Professor Park Jae Woo, from South Korea. Besides the hand acupuncture, Professor Park also taught me Twist Therapy and Smile Meditation.
A part of Onnuri medicine, Su Jok is a treatment system comprised of a variety of techniques that prevent and cure illness and restore health without any drugs. Our hands (“su” in Korean) and feet (“jok”) represent our entire body in miniature. In fact, they represent a smaller, but nevertheless true, mirror image of the whole body (for example, the thumbs and big toes represent the head). The same way we use a remote control to operate a television, we can use our hands and feet to influence our whole body and cure disease. By understanding the exact similarities between various parts of the body and the hands and feet, one can influence any place or problem using the corresponding Su Jok treatment. The body’s meridian system, with which we perform metaphysical energy manipulation therapies, is also reflected in the hands and feet. Knowledge of the principles of hand and foot therapy provides an impressive vehicle for personal and family healthcare. In fact, our vision is that a healer in every home can take care of him- or herself and his or her family.
Together with Professor Park, who I adopted as a spiritual father, I opened Smile College in 2005. Since then, more than 2,500 students have followed our programs, including a one-day introduction to self help and an extensive three-year program with branches in Europe, Asia and Africa.
The Su Jok Research Institute (SRI) now publishes Onnuri medical literature in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic (and will soon publish in Spanish and other languages). We provide training for physicians and paramedics – the first professionals to use these treatment methods in hospitals in the early 1990s with positive and immediate results that alleviated physical and emotional suffering. In many cases, we witnessed successful remission of symptoms in acute and chronic ailments of all kinds. Very effective in treating pain in the spine and articulations, Su Jok therapy can be practiced by mothers and fathers, and even by children.
Stimulation of the healing points will generally give instant results. For example, how can you dry a runny nose? Find the tender point on the last phalanx of the thumb corresponding to the sinuses (see pictures below), apply a black pepper seed with a band-aid and massage at will. PMS is also quite easy to relieve: firmly hold the tender point between the middle and the ring finger of the hand, which represents the female urogenital organs, and massage it until it’s no longer painful (usually one or two minutes is enough to get rid of the and heaviness and cramps). Backache? Work on the back of the hand. Stimulate the sensitive points just above the knuckles of the fist; you can also apply black pepper seeds.

Joad Puttermilech is theSu Jok Research Institute founder and lecturer of International Su Jok Theraphy Association.
Contact Joad Puttermilech at www.SuJokclub.com, SuJoksri@gmail.com, +131554504331, and in NYC at the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center, 32 East 22 Street, New York, NY 10010.

Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema

August 9, 2009
By A. O. SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/movies/09scot.html?_r=1

IN “Funny People,” the new movie starring Adam Sandler, the audience is treated to glimpses of a movie starring Mr. Sandler’s character, a stand-up comedian turned movie star named George Simmons. The film within a film, which looks like a variation on the venerable “Look Who’s Talking” theme, features George’s head digitally superimposed on the body of an infant, an effect that is both grotesque and funny, and also pregnant with cultural significance.

It’s obvious that the image of a baby with Adam Sandler’s face self-mockingly encapsulates much of Mr. Sandler’s career, pointing up his curious and durable overgrown-child appeal. And it is also clear that the film’s writer and director, Judd Apatow, is lampooning some aspects of his own work, which has shamelessly exploited (though it has also earnestly explored) the juvenile, even infantile impulses that seem to define the soul of the modern male American.

But “Funny People” is decidedly not a further indulgence of such urges, in spite of anxious and obnoxious jokes about genitals and excrement. It’s a movie about growing up, feeling sad, facing death — a long, serious film whose subject is the challenge of maturity. Which may be why, in the face of a softish opening weekend, various interpreters of box office data were quick to declare “Funny People” a flop. The summer is no time for grown-ups.

My point is not to defend Mr. Apatow’s movie, which opened to mixed reviews and which is likely to have a rich and complicated afterlife as a subject for argument. I’m more troubled about the haste to declare that “Funny People” failed to connect with its audience. A similar rush to judgment greeted Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” last month, and in those pronouncements you can hear the sound of conventional wisdom taking shape.

Or you can see it embodied in that alarming man-baby, with the braying voice and the 5 o’clock shadow affixed to a pale, flabby, diaper-wrapped trunk. There may be no more incisive rendering of Hollywood’s self-image, and perhaps no truer, more damning mirror held up to the audience. Mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths — that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us. What do they think we want? The summer’s biggest blockbuster so far is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” an epic — four minutes longer than “Funny People” — based on a line of toys from Hasbro. And kids’ stuff has dominated the multiplexes and the Monday-morning box office tallies since May. There have been the 3-D guinea pigs of “G-Force,” the fuzzy (and 3-D) prehistoric creatures of the third “Ice Age” movie, the historical personages of the second “Night at the Museum” picture and of course the schoolboy wizard and his pals in the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series.

Those are the products overtly aimed at younger audiences. But the celebration of youth, in particular of male immaturity, extends to movies like “The Hangover,” Todd Phillips’s riotous and regressive crude-dude comedy with a superficial resemblance to the school-of-Apatow line, and J. J. Abrams’s “Star Trek,” which reimagines the beloved space-travel adventure as, essentially, a Harry Potter movie.

There are exceptions of course. “Angels & Demons” sent a cast of grownups chasing around the Vatican in search of clues to an ancient mystery. And the season’s successful romantic comedies, “The Proposal” and “The Ugly Truth,” while perfectly conventional, do their predictable business in a more or less adult setting. But everyone (at least in the United States) has already forgotten about “Angels & Demons,” and the Hollywood rom-com, in olden times a sparkling repository of wit and glamour, has been relegated to the status of commercial counterprogramming. Those are date movies, chick flicks, a condescending little something for the ladies. The real action is elsewhere, with the boys and their toys.

I know, I know. School’s out. People want an easy good time, free air-conditioning to go with their expensive snacks, a little escapism in a time of stress. These are the truisms of summer, invoked every time some pointy-headed grouch complains about the prevalence of sequels, or superhero movies, or big, dumb popcorn spectacles. We like big, dumb popcorn spectacles.

Or course we do — even the pointy-headed grouches among us. But those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

The big lesson of the summer of 2009 is that those qualities, while they may be desirable in some abstract, ideal way, don’t pay the bills. The studios, housed in large and beleaguered media conglomerates, have grown more cautious as the economy has faltered, releasing fewer movies and concentrating resources on dependable formulas. Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established cultural brand.

In the case of the comedies, raunchy or romantic, the genre functions as the brand, and in the case of “Up,” the Pixar label, almost uniquely in today’s Hollywood, carries its own cachet and appeal. But otherwise (and to some extent in these cases as well) the last few months have been a festival of the known, the stuff you already bought and, from force of habit or loyalty or maybe even satisfaction, decided to upgrade.

Not every new product is a sure bet. “Terminator Salvation” didn’t do so well, but then again the original Terminator is having some trouble in his current job. From Wolverine and Mr. Spock in May through the Decepticons and wizards of July it has been a triumph of the tried and true, occasionally revitalized or decked out with novelty, but mostly just what we expected. No surprises.

What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! (That George Simmons giant-baby comedy is called “Redo.”) Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.

The mostly pedestrian, occasionally enchanting, highly lucrative movies of this summer offer testimony to the success of that program. And the seasonal roster of winners and losers, as defined by box office tea-leaf readers, suggests some additional dividends. Toys, comic books, and familiar fictional characters are a bigger, more reliable draw than movie stars or well-known directors, and are also easier to control.

Wolverine, Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Hasbro — those trademarks and secondary merchandising opportunities will reliably get kids into the theaters. But the examples of “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” “Public Enemies” and, perhaps, “Funny People” are widely taken to mean that artists like Denzel Washington, John Travolta, Michael Mann, Johnny Depp and Judd Apatow may not have the same guaranteed pull. Never mind that “Public Enemies” has actually done pretty well after a slow start, and that the running time, subject matter and tone of “Funny People” make it hard to compare with “Knocked Up” or “Happy Gilmore.” Conventional wisdom is always happy to ignore such nuances.

This may be because any reduction in the clout of stars or the autonomy of directors redounds to the benefit of the companies that own the copyrights and distribute the goods. And a little anthology of cautionary economic tales from this summer will prove useful in the future, when ambitions need to be corralled and egos held in check. Middle-aged actors and critically lauded directors look like extravagances rather than sound investments. Forty is the new dead. Auteur is French for unemployed. “The Hurt Locker” — the kind of fierce and fiery action movie that might have been a blockbuster once upon a time — is treated like a delicate, exotic flower, released into art houses and sold on its prestige rather than on its visceral power.

The box office numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story either. The weekend grosses, widely guessed at on Thursday night and breathlessly reported by the middle of Sunday afternoon, record the quantity of tickets purchased, but they cannot register the quality of the experience. The aggregate of receipts shows that a lot of people like going to the movies, but not necessarily that they like what they see.

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy. In bottom-line terms, this is a distinction without a difference. A movie that people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox’s outfits, I suppose — is that it has made nearly $400 million domestically.

There is nothing else to say. Any further discussion — say about whether it’s a good movie or not — sounds quaint, old-fashioned, passé. Get a clue, grandpa.

Or go see “Up,” the only hugely successful movie of the summer that engages genuinely adult themes. It’s about loss, frustration, disappointment. And it offers one of the season’s most pointed and paradoxical lessons. If you want to make a mature film for mature audiences, make sure it’s a cartoon.

Hundreds Try Out for Art-World Reality Show

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/television/20bravo.htmlBy RANDY KENNEDY
Published: July 19, 2009
Over the last few years reality-show casting calls have become almost as much of a cultural commonplace as the shows themselves — the familiar scenes of hundreds of anxious strangers converging on a street corner with their résumés, their headshots and their A games, hoping for some kind of immortality or at least a more interesting career.

But few such casting calls have looked like the one that began in the wee hours of Saturday morning in the West Village, where Jeff Lipsky, a 37-year-old painter and digital artist from Tyngsboro, Mass., unfolded his New England Patriots lawn chair and camped out for the night in front of the White Columns gallery, first in line to audition for a new reality show being created for Bravo. Produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, the show, which doesn’t have a title or a broadcast date, will try to do for the contemporary art world what the cable channel has done for the worlds of fine cuisine (“Top Chef”) and fashion (“Project Runway”): discover young, or maybe even middle-aged or old, unknowns with the talent to command the attention of both a television audience and a serious audience in the creative field to which they aspire.

The 13 finalists eventually chosen — from among hundreds who have already auditioned in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and now in New York — will compete for a gallery show, a cash prize and a sponsored national museum tour, though the producers have not revealed how much money is at stake or which museums or galleries will participate.

It seemed to matter little to the 150 or so artists who had already gathered by 8:30 Saturday morning, bearing all manner of art: a ghoulish portrait of a face that appeared to be Michael Jackson’s melded with Elvis’s; a crazily beaded mannequin torso with the sparkly word “GIRL” attached like a tiara to the top of its head; a Caravaggio-esque painting of St. Sebastian, skewered and suffering; a photo-realistic canvas so large it arrived on a truck. At the corner of Horatio and Hudson Streets one artist was slowing traffic considerably as he applied bright blue swirly paint to the body of a topless woman who was wearing only a flesh-colored thong.

Second in line, after arriving at 1 in the morning on a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., was Jeffrey Scott Lewis, a 48-year-old collagist, single father and former store-window designer who brought along a colorful, mosaiclike work he had made from gum wrappers. (He quit smoking in February and described gum as his “new best friend.”)

“I’ve wanted to be on a reality show since the first time I saw ‘Survivor’ — but without the bug bites and stuff,” Mr. Lewis said.

“I got here about 2:30 in the morning, and the only thing I saw was this empty chair,” he said, pointing to Mr. Lipsky’s lawn chair. “And I got a little spooked, so I walked around the neighborhood for a while before I came and got in line.”

Nick Gilhool, a casting director for Magical Elves, the production company that created “Top Chef” and “Project Runway” and is helping produce the art series, said that judges and casting officials had seen a remarkably wide range of artists, from “hobbyist Sunday-painter types” to 20-somethings just out of art school to older artists who had met with some success but whose careers had languished for one reason or another. (One artist at the Miami audition flew in from Thailand.)

He declined to reveal the identity of the judges, though he described them as curators, artists, dealers, teachers and collectors “whose names people in the art world would certainly recognize.” The lone judge brought out for interviews was Simon de Pury, chairman of the auction house Phillips de Pury. He said that he did not hesitate when asked to become involved, and that his hope for the program was that it would help penetrate the air of “hermetic inapproachability” surrounding contemporary art.

Mr. Gilhool said the main criterion in picking artists was to create a show that “people in the art world will want to tune into every week to actually see the work.” But he added that the fragmented and raucous nature of contemporary art would probably make it trickier to produce than competitions dealing with more straight-ahead creations like food or clothing design. What would be the equivalent, for example, of a “quick-fire challenge,” the part of “Top Chef” in which cooks have to whip up a dish lightning fast? Life drawing with a stopwatch? Found-art scavenger-hunt race? Best postironic conceptual gambit in under a minute?

“I think there’s a reason why this really hasn’t been done before: because there are a lot of pitfalls,” Mr. Gilhool said. (In 2006 Gallery HD, a now-defunct high-definition channel, broadcast “Artstar,” an eight-episode reality show in which contestants produced works for a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, the SoHo gallery. One of its finalists, Virgil Wong, a New York conceptual artist, was in line Saturday to try out for Bravo’s show.)

By the end of Saturday’s cattle call almost 400 hopefuls had turned up. About a third of the way back in the line, Jesse Edwards, a 31-year-old painter and ceramics artist from Seattle who has been living hand to mouth since moving to New York this summer, opened his portfolio to show a picture of a work that the producers might keep handy as a cautionary reminder: a ceramic television with an image of painted apples as its screen. The piece was titled “Still Life Channel.”

“It’s a snoozer of a channel, the Still Life Channel,” Mr. Edwards said, but then quickly showed a picture of another ceramic television, this one with a mirror as its screen, titled “Your Personal Moment of Fame.”

“That channel can be whatever you want it to be,” he said. “It can be great. It’s all up to you.”

Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?

July 21, 2009
By KENNETH CHANG
The Sun is still blank (mostly)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?_r=1&hp

Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

“It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

The Sun perked up in June and July, with a sizeable clump of 20 sunspots earlier this month.

Now it is blank again, consistent with expectations that this solar cycle will be smaller and calmer, and the maximum of activity, expected to arrive in May 2013 will not be all that maximum.

For operators of satellites and power grids, that is good news. The same roiling magnetic fields that generate sunspot blotches also accelerate a devastating rain of particles that can overload and wreck electronic equipment in orbit or on Earth.

A panel of 12 scientists assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now predicts that the May 2013 peak will average 90 sunspots during that month. That would make it the weakest solar maximum since 1928, which peaked at 78 sunspots. During an average solar maximum, the Sun is covered with an average of 120 sunspots.

But the panel’s consensus “was not a unanimous decision,” said Douglas A. Biesecker, chairman of the panel. One member still believed the cycle would roar to life while others thought the maximum would peter out at only 70.

Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period.

Most solar physicists do not think anything that odd is going on with the Sun. With the recent burst of sunspots, “I don’t see we’re going into that,” Dr. Hathaway said last week.

Still, something like the Dalton Minimum — two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots — lies in the realm of the possible, Dr. Hathaway said. (The minimums are named after scientists who helped identify them: Edward W. Maunder and John Dalton.)

With better telescopes on the ground and a fleet of Sun-watching spacecraft, solar scientists know a lot more about the Sun than ever before. But they do not understand everything. Solar dynamo models, which seek to capture the dynamics of the magnetic field, cannot yet explain many basic questions, not even why the solar cycles average 11 years in length.

Predicting the solar cycle is, in many ways, much like predicting the stock market. A full understanding of the forces driving solar dynamics is far out of reach, so scientists look to key indicators that correlate with future events and create models based on those.

For example, in 2006, Dr. Hathaway looked at the magnetic fields in the polar regions of the Sun, and they were strong. During past cycles, strong polar fields at minimum grew into strong fields all over the Sun at maximum and a bounty of sunspots. Because the previous cycle had been longer than average, Dr. Hathaway thought the next one would be shorter and thus solar minimum was imminent. He predicted the new solar cycle would be a ferocious one.

Instead, the new cycle did not arrive as quickly as Dr. Hathaway anticipated, and the polar field weakened. His revised prediction is for a smaller-than-average maximum. Last November, it looked like the new cycle was finally getting started, with the new cycle sunspots in the middle latitudes outnumbering the old sunspots of the dying cycle that are closer to the equator.

After a minimum, solar activity usually takes off quickly, but instead the Sun returned to slumber. “There was a long lull of several months of virtually no activity, which had me worried,” Dr. Hathaway said.

The idea that solar cycles are related to climate is hard to fit with the actual change in energy output from the sun. From solar maximum to solar minimum, the Sun’s energy output drops a minuscule 0.1 percent.

But the overlap of the Maunder Minimum with the Little Ice Age, when Europe experienced unusually cold weather, suggests that the solar cycle could have more subtle influences on climate.

One possibility proposed a decade ago by Henrik Svensmark and other scientists at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen looks to high-energy interstellar particles known as cosmic rays. When cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere, they break apart air molecules into ions and electrons, which causes water and sulfuric acid in the air to stick together in tiny droplets. These droplets are seeds that can grow into clouds, and clouds reflect sunlight, potentially lowering temperatures.

The Sun, the Danish scientists say, influences how many cosmic rays impinge on the atmosphere and thus the number of clouds. When the Sun is frenetic, the solar wind of charged particles it spews out increases. That expands the cocoon of magnetic fields around the solar system, deflecting some of the cosmic rays.

But, according to the hypothesis, when the sunspots and solar winds die down, the magnetic cocoon contracts, more cosmic rays reach Earth, more clouds form, less sunlight reaches the ground, and temperatures cool.

“I think it’s an important effect,” Dr. Svensmark said, although he agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that has certainly contributed to recent warming.

Dr. Svensmark and his colleagues found a correlation between the rate of incoming cosmic rays and the coverage of low-level clouds between 1984 and 2002. They have also found that cosmic ray levels, reflected in concentrations of various isotopes, correlate well with climate extending back thousands of years.

But other scientists found no such pattern with higher clouds, and some other observations seem inconsistent with the hypothesis.

Terry Sloan, a cosmic ray expert at the University of Lancaster in England, said if the idea were true, one would expect the cloud-generation effect to be greatest in the polar regions where the Earth’s magnetic field tends to funnel cosmic rays.

“You’d expect clouds to be modulated in the same way,” Dr. Sloan said. “We can’t find any such behavior.”

Still, “I would think there could well be some effect,” he said, but he thought the effect was probably small. Dr. Sloan’s findings indicate that the cosmic rays could at most account for 20 percent of the warming of recent years.

Even without cosmic rays, however, a 0.1 percent change in the Sun’s energy output is enough to set off El Niño- and La Niña-like events that can influence weather around the world, according to new research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Climate modeling showed that over the largely cloud-free areas of the Pacific Ocean, the extra heating over several years warms the water, increasing evaporation. That intensifies the tropical storms and trade winds in the eastern Pacific, and the result is cooler-than-normal waters, as in a La Niña event, the scientists reported this month in the Journal of Climate.

In a year or two, the cool water pattern evolves into a pool of El Niño-like warm water, the scientists said.

New instruments should provide more information for scientists to work with. A 1.7-meter telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Southern California is up and running, and one of its first photographs shows “a string of pearls,” each about 50 miles across.

“At that scale, they can only be the fundamental fibril structure of the Sun’s magnetic field,” said Philip R. Goode, director of the solar observatory. Other telescopes may have caught hints of these tiny structures, he said, but “never so many in a row and not so clearly resolved.”

Sun-watching spacecraft cannot match the acuity of ground-based telescopes, but they can see wavelengths that are blocked by the atmosphere — and there are never any clouds in the way. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s newest sun-watching spacecraft, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is scheduled for launching this fall, will carry an instrument that will essentially be able to take sonograms that deduce the convection flows generating the magnetic fields.

That could help explain why strong magnetic fields sometimes coalesce into sunspots and why sometimes the strong fields remain disorganized without forming spots. The mechanics of how solar storms erupt out of a sunspot are also not fully understood.

A quiet cycle is no guarantee no cataclysmic solar storms will occur. The largest storm ever observed occurred in 1859, during a solar cycle similar to what is predicted.

Back then, it scrambled telegraph wires. Today, it could knock out an expanse of the power grid from Maine south to Georgia and west to Illinois. Ten percent of the orbiting satellites would be disabled. A study by the National Academy of Sciences calculated the damage would exceed a trillion dollars.

But no one can quite explain the current behavior or reliably predict the future.

“We still don’t quite understand this beast,” Dr. Hathaway said. “The theories we had for how the sunspot cycle works have major problems.”



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From Film to Fashion, A Trend with Teeth

July 2, 2009
By RUTH LA FERLA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/fashion/02VAMPIRES.html?scp=1&sq=why%20vampires%20are%20so%20alluring&st=cse

THE symptoms are unnerving: a taste for fresh meat — rare, if you please; an aversion to sunlight; and a passion for spectral-looking, fine-boned rakes. All are indications that the sufferer has been bitten by the vampire bug.

Sookie Stackhouse, the feisty young heroine of “True Blood” on HBO, risks doom whenever she visits with her otherworldly beau. And Oskar, the adolescent misfit of the Swedish art film “Let the Right One In,” a favorite in fashion circles, courts extinction each time he ventures out with Eli, the eerily ageless shape-shifter he befriends.

Sookie and Oskar are in the throes of vampire lust, a pop-culture contagion being spread via television, films and fiction. What began with the Twilight Saga, the luridly romantic young-adult series by Stephenie Meyer, followed by “Twilight,” the movie, has become a pandemic of unholy proportions.

Is it a wonder?

Rarely have monsters looked so sultry — or so camera-ready. No small part of this latest vampire mania seems to stem from the ethereal cool and youthful sexiness with which the demons are portrayed. Bela Lugosi they are not.

“The vampire is the new James Dean,” said Julie Plec, the writer and executive producer of “The Vampire Diaries,” a forthcoming series on the CW network based on the popular L. J. Smith novels about high school femmes and hommes fatales. “There is something so still and sexy about these young erotic predators,” she said.

This generation of undead prowls high school hallways and dimly lighted dance clubs as menacing — and as seductive — as they have ever been. The June premiere of the second season of “True Blood,” in which Sookie, played by Anna Paquin, is reunited with her imperious fanged suitor, drew 3.4 million viewers, making it HBO’s most-watched program since the “Sopranos” finale in 2007.

Charlaine Harris has just published “Dead and Gone,” the ninth novel in her Sookie Stackhouse series, variations on Southern Gothic fiction on which “True Blood” is based. The publishing world has been intrigued by “The Strain,” a first installment in a planned trilogy written by the film director Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, about bloodthirsty predators run amok in Manhattan.

The style world, too, has come under the vampire’s spell, in the shape of the gorgeous leather- and lace-clad night crawlers who have crept into the pages of fashion glossies.

Vampires, of course, are part of a hoary tradition that harks back to Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” at least. Anne Rice updated the genre, introducing the ghoulishly aristocratic vampire Lestat. But the undead are returning with a vengeance, in part because they “personify real-world anxieties,” said Michael Dylan Foster, an assistant professor in the department of folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“Especially during these post-9/11 times of increased vigilance, representations like the ‘Twilight’ series reflect a kind of conspiracy-theory mentality, a fear that there is something secret and dangerous going on in our own community, right under our noses.”

Given all that baggage, what keeps vampires so alluring?

One might point to their combination of deathless good looks and decadent sexuality. Their faces, as described in “Twilight,” “were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine.”

Vampirelike glamour figures strike come-hither poses in a flurry of recent fashion publications. Portrayed as androgynous creatures in the June issue of W, they affect killer glares, their menace accentuated by their chalky pallor. In the magazine’s current issue, Bruce Willis appears about to be raked by the talons of his new wife, Emma Heming, in a series of photographs by Steven Klein.

Italian Vogue has also succumbed to the vampire’s cold charms: In the June issue, the latest to arrive on American newsstands, models pose as willfully spooky night crawlers like those who once haunted Manhattan clubs; one image captures a female stalker whose supper, the smear of scarlet on her cheek suggests, has just been interrupted.

The vampire’s attraction is “all about the titillation of imagining the monsters we could be if we just let ourselves go,” suggested Rick Owens, a fashion bellwether whose goth-tinged collections sometimes evoke the undead. “We’re all fascinated with corruption, the more glamorous the better” and, he added, with the idea of “devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire.”

That sort of predatory glamour is personified by Catherine Deneuve in “The Hunger.” In that morbidly stylish 1983 cult classic, directed by Tony Scott, Ms. Deneuve is Miriam, a bloodsucking seductress in sharp-shouldered suits married to a pallid David Bowie and drawn to Susan Sarandon, a tomboyish specialist in sleep and longevity. (According to Mr. Scott, a sequel is in the writing stage.)

The undead of “The Hunger” were blessed — or cursed — with riches, hauteur and the kind of indestructible good looks aspiring glamazons can only dream of. Their modern counterparts come from every stratum of society and appeal to an array of psycho-sexual preferences.

Comely upper-crust demons haunt the corridors of Duchesne, the Upper East Side private school of “Blue Bloods,” a young-adult vampire series by Melissa de la Cruz. In “The Strain,” Mr. del Toro’s gory tale, which is framed like a police procedural, the vampires are lowlifes, unremittingly vile. Saya, the eternal schoolgirl of “Blood: The Last Vampire,” a supernatural action film that will open July 10, is a reluctant monster in a middy blouse, living a Spartan existence. Eli, the bloodsucking waif of “Let the Right One In,” based on a much-talked-about novel of the same name, is gorgeous but apparently destitute and needs only the occasional sanguinary fix to keep from shriveling. (Vampires, too, can be done in by their addictions.)

The most up-to-date — and least menacing — of this nocturnal breed are, well, deathless romantics who pine like their mortal companions for a love that lasts through eternity. Stefan, the handsome archfiend of “Vampire Diaries,” which will be broadcast on the CW network in September, keeps his lust for the human Elena resolutely in check.

In “New Moon,” the “Twilight” sequel that will open in November, the lead vampire Edward is a noble swain, performing feats of valor usually reserved for Superman. Seductive as he is, he, too, is a model of restraint. More than once in the original film Edward stops short of draining Bella, his mortal girlfriend. “I don’t want to be a monster,” he tells her urgently (though it seems she wouldn’t mind).

“Edward has rejected all humanity, but he is struggling to be human,” Ms. Plec said, adding: “There is always the question, ‘Does this person have it in him to be good, to make the right decision?’ It’s a theme that works like gangbusters in films and television.”

Impulse-control is an especially resonant theme in the current era of conflicts and cutbacks. “Periods of war, economic downturns and cultural turmoil all give rise to the production of vampire and fantasy fiction,” said Thomas Garza, chair of the department of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a specialist in vampire lore. “With a recession and war, the conflict has indeed seemed to turn inward, as we question our fiscal, political and moral status. ‘Have we been too excessive? Do we need to be more restrained?’ We seem once again to be questioning these very fundamental values.”

And, at the same time, renewing a flirtation with the dark side. Emily Rose, a performance poet in Chicago, is a devotee, she said, of “the wantonness, the gorgeousness that is the vampire.” She went on to catalog its exquisite charms: “eternal youth, invulnerability and, of course, the night life — staying up way past your bedtime.”

Surely there are worse things. “There are monsters so much bigger and more realistic in our day-to-day lives,” Ms. Rose said. “Having somebody clamp onto your neck and drain you — that doesn’t seem so scary anymore.”

“It wouldn’t be on my top 10 list of ways not to die,” she added, “especially if that vampire is at all attractive.”

July 2, 2009
Soil in the City
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

JAYNE MICHAELS, an interior designer who lives on East 57th Street in Manhattan, throws open her windows every chance she gets. “I need light and air in my life,” said Ms. Michaels, who favors gauzy fabrics in pale colors.

But breezes carry dirt, especially in New York, so once every six months Ms. Michaels pays about $400 to have her sofas, chairs, chaises and rugs shampooed.

It’s another price of living in New York: call it the dirt tax.

The dirt tax appears in cleaning costs, replacement costs and even the inability of New York homeowners to consider certain finishes and fabrics because they’re just not practical.

Not in a city where schmutz — the preferred New York term for the black gritty material — accumulates on every surface.

White rugs and sofas can become filthy anywhere. But experts (who include anyone who has ever dusted, vacuumed or swabbed in the five boroughs) say New York City’s dirt level is highly unusual.

And it inspires some unusual responses.

Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz, a prominent interior designer, and his partner, Steven Wine, a lighting designer, undress each time they enter their apartment on West 23rd Street, where almost everything is white. Then they put on “inside clothes” — usually shorts and T-shirts.

“You have no idea how much dirt you carry on your street clothes in New York,” said Mr. Noriega-Ortiz. When laying out the duplex apartment, he put the washer-dryer right by the front door.

He added, in an e-mail message: “Since we are not about to impose the remove-your-clothes-and-change rule on our guests, we tend to not entertain strangers that often. Our interior world stays much cleaner that way.”

Although none of his clients have followed his example (so far as he knows), many of them do ask guests to leave shoes at the door. Increasingly, he said, clients ask him to design foyers with benches for removing footwear, as a way of keeping their apartments clean.

Ms. Michaels said she advises clients who want light-colored fabrics to accept the inevitable: limited life span and extra expense. “I’m a prisoner to it,” she said of the cleaning regimen, which is performed by Delmont Carpet and Upholstery Cleaning Specialists in New York.

But in one concession to New York’s air, she had her drapes made of “wash and wear” polyester. In a different city, she said, she might have chosen linen. But not in New York. The last time she rinsed out the polyester drapes in her bathtub, she said, the water turned black.

The culprit is soot, said Richard Kassel, an air pollution expert with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.

In one study cited by Mr. Kassel, soot in one stretch of Midtown Manhattan was found to contain 52 percent diesel exhaust, mostly from trucks, buses and construction vehicles. The other 48 percent was a mix of everything from ground-up car tires to sea salt, he said.

Even in New York, the amount of soot varies from block to block. Susan Moolman, a publicist who moved to Manhattan in 2007, said that the dirt was much worse at her previous apartment, near the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, than at her current place on the Upper West Side.

Whether New York is a soot champion or just a contender is hard to know. Particle pollution is actually worse in cities like Bakersfield, Calif., and Pittsburgh, according to studies cited by the American Lung Association in its latest “State of the Air” report. But the particles measured are microscopic — “small enough to lodge deep in the lungs,” the report says. What New Yorkers think of as soot consists in part of much larger “chunks” that are not easily quantified, said Michael Seilback of the association. New York’s population density, traffic patterns and road conditions all contribute to the mix of dirt in the air.

In the early 20th century New York had more soot than it does today. Back then, engines were dirtier, apartment buildings had incinerators and factories abounded. “Housekeepers Have Difficulty in Keeping Homes Clean Owing to Greasy Deposits — Laundry Bills Higher,” said a 1922 New York Times headline.

But the construction boom of recent years may have worsened the soot problem for some residents. “I had one client, across the street from a construction site, who couldn’t open her windows for six months,” said Howard Sklar, owner of Durotone, a carpet- and fabric-cleaning firm based in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

The dirt tax is progressive, in that it seems to have a disproportionate impact on the rich. And that’s because only the rich insist on things like white silk rugs.

“The higher the discretionary income, the more likely they are to go for fragile goods,” said Mark Nelson, who designs and sells carpets through interior designers. His products, which frequently cost more than $50 a square foot (yes, foot), are often cream or ivory colored.

One way to keep interiors clean, many designers say, is to avoid opening windows.

That’s easy when the windows aren’t made to open, as is the case in some apartment buildings in Manhattan. But windows that don’t open pose a problem of their own: occupants have no way to wash the glass, and the building may not do it frequently enough.

In sleek modern towers, “you think you’re going to be floating above the city,” said Marc Kushner, an architect with the Manhattan firm HollwichKushner. “But in reality, you’re really looking out through grime.”

Mr. Kushner and his business partner, Matthias Hollwich, designed an apartment for a client on the Upper East Side with an entire wall of moldings, which was their way of reconciling the client’s desire for period detailing with their own contemporary sensibility. Since the building’s windows don’t open, Mr. Kushner said, he wasn’t worried about dirt collecting on the moldings.

But he is working on another apartment in a building where the windows do open. “The interior designer is from L.A.,” he said. “She suggested that we raise the bathroom vanities 12 inches, so they look like they’re floating. The first thing we thought, being from New York, is that there’s going to be so much dirt under there.”

For the living room, the designer has picked off-white upholstery, he said. “We’ve warned her about that, especially close to the windows.”

But even sealed windows don’t solve the soot problem entirely. Mr. Nelson and others said that gases created by basement heating systems often rise through buildings’ interiors.

Because the gases tend to follow load-bearing walls, which are continuous, they concentrate around the edges of rooms, he said.

The gases leave oily deposits as they pass through carpets, which are really room-size filters.

And when dirt hits those deposits, it sticks. One result can be a dark line around the perimeter of the room, known as filtration soiling.

Mr. Nelson remembered one particularly egregious case.

The setting was an apartment on Park Avenue in the 70s. A “very nice” couple had bought hand-tufted wool carpet that was installed wall to wall in their bedroom. “It was a light beige,” he said.

Soon, they noticed a dark line forming around the edges of their carpet. Mr. Nelson called Mr. Sklar, who is a certified carpet inspector. (“If you buy a new carpet and you think there’s something wrong with it, the industry dictates that a certified inspector come out to look at it,” Mr. Sklar said.) He discovered a case of filtration soiling — or as he sometimes calls it, “ring around the collar.”

Mr. Sklar told Mr. Nelson, who told the couple that “it wasn’t a carpet problem, it was a New York City problem,” Mr. Nelson said. “That’s not what they wanted to hear.”

But “if you buy white carpet, what do you expect?” Mr. Nelson added, momentarily forgetting his role as an enabler of the impractical carpet habit. “You buy a pair of linen slacks — you know they’re going to wrinkle. It’s the nature of the beast.”

When people ask him, he recommends choosing darker colors, especially for stairs. And he suggests creating a buffer zone to allow dirt to dissipate before shoes reach the carpet.

People in buildings with carpeted lobbies or foyers tend to have cleaner carpets inside their apartments, he explained. “The big question is, what carpeted surface will your feet be on before they get to your apartment?”

For those who simply have to have light-colored carpet, there is a way to prevent filtration soiling. “It’s a procedure that is done prophylactically,” Mr. Nelson said, before the carpet is installed. “It’s referred to as ‘soot seal.’ ”

“Basically, you take roofing paper, and you caulk and seal it into the perimeter of the room,” he said. “Then you do your normal install, with tack strips and padding.”

The roofing paper, he explained, prevents the gases from concentrating around the edge of the room. The process, he said, generally costs about $500 a room. But it’s worth it, he said, for people spending $20,000 or more to carpet a single room.

Mr. Sklar, who lives in Westchester, said that even after all he has seen, he understands the appeal of white carpet.

“White carpet makes a small apartment look bigger,” he said. “My son was living in an oversized closet. When my wife decorated, she did everything in whites and beiges, and all of a sudden it at least looked like a room.”

As for upholstery, Mr. Noriega-Ortiz still endorses white, because it can be bleached. “Bleach this and it’s white again,” he said, pointing to a snow-white chaise in his apartment. “What are you going to do when there’s a stain on your red sofa?”

Vicente Wolf, the well-known interior designer, lives in a white-on-white loft on West 39th Street. After describing dirt as “a price we pay for living in New York,” he said, “If it bothers you that much, take off your glasses.”

Hunting for Treasure in Paris’s Marchés aux Puces

July 1, 2009, 7:27 am
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/?8dpc
A teddy bear missing an eye. An Air France handbag. Empty tins of Soviet-era caviar. Tripods and traffic lights. A lava lamp. Fur coats and cheap suits. A bad painting of ships under full sail. Piles of antique leather camera cases. And nowhere to maneuver.

This was the flea market along and around the Rue de Bretagne on an afternoon in late May: crammed with bric-a-brac; shoppers swerving, stopping, accelerating and trying not to step on the toes of the people dining at the outdoor cafes; and me, the Frugal Traveler, hunting not just for a bargain but for something truly special — without, at first, much luck.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times The flea market at St.-Ouen.
The marchés aux puces, or flea markets, of Paris are legendary. In fact, the name itself originated at the biggest and most famous, St.-Ouen, just outside the city’s ring road at Porte de Clignancourt, where back in the 1880s (according to ParisPuces.com, a Web site run by the Association des Puces de Paris St. Ouen) an “unknown bargain hunter” looked down from nearby fortifications, observed junk dealers selling scrap metal, rags and old furniture, and exclaimed, “My word, but it’s a market of fleas!”

Apocryphal? Perhaps, but whatever the origin of the term, les puces, as they’re now known, are synonymous with treasure hunting. In the 120 years since St.-Ouen coalesced, other markets have sprung up in every corner of the city, and in many different forms. During my Frugal Traveler trip to Paris, I hoped to explore a few, find some prized items and — fingers crossed — successfully bargain for something I loved.

The Rue de Bretagne, in the northern part of the Marais, was, though chaotic, a good starting point. Technically, this was not a marché aux puces but a vide-grenier — an attic-emptying. Vide-greniers are the least formal markets, popping up in a location for as little as a day. (See www.vide-greniers.org for a schedule of vide-greniers throughout France.) Just about anybody can sell their knickknacks there — and that’s both their appeal and their challenge.

I waded through the foot traffic, unsure of how and where to stop, or what price was right for a particular object. One stand was selling a metal sign, written in Hindi, warning, “Danger! High voltage!” What is such a sign worth? How can anyone be an expert in Hindi signs — not to mention old LPs and amateur paintings and midcentury desks and gooseneck lamps — and stay sane amid the frenzy?

About to lose it, I spotted a rack of children’s clothes, and in short order had bought for my daughter a hand-knit, machine-washable, rainbow-striped cardigan with pearlescent buttons. It cost 10 euros, or $14.43 at $1.43 to the euro — a bargain even I understood.

Matt Gross for The New York Times Picture frames for sale at Vanves.
After the vide-grenier, I was ready for a proper flea, but not yet St.-Ouen. Following the advice of a family friend who’s lived in Paris for years, I started with the Marché aux Puces de la Porte de Vanves, on the south side of Paris. Vanves, open weekends, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., the friend wrote by e-mail, wasn’t as high-quality as St.-Ouen, but had better prices. A friend of a friend, she added, allegedly “bought a genuine Kees van Dongen painting there … for just about nothing.”

On a grim Saturday morning threatening rain, I rode the Métro to the southern edge of the city and began looking for my own van Dongen. Vanves was set up in a much more orderly manner than the vide-grenier — a single path, lined by vendors with folding tables, that arced around a soccer pitch. There were several “we’ve got it all” stalls, but many were specialists. I saw vintage Art Deco paper and solid metal tools once used by artisans whose professions no longer exist. An antiquarian book dealer sold first editions of Émile Zola (160 euros and up) and “Et On Tuera Tous les Affreux” (“And We’ll Kill All the Ugly Ones”), by the cult novelist Boris Vian. The novel cost 80 euros so I passed on it, though I’ve since seen it online for as much as $350.

Just before the rain came down hard, I found La Libre Caverne des Illustrateurs, a stall that sold drawings and paintings by little-known, often unnamed artists. A 1949 pencil sketch of Sengho, a village in what was then French colonial Guinea, caught my eye — the sharp details, the simplicity of the scene, the lack of sentimentality. I also liked a watercolor of a fisherman, done in the 1930s by André Galland, an illustrator whose posters sell for $100 to $2,100, according to Dustin Stein at Galerie Mistinguett, in Great Neck, N.Y., which specializes in vintage posters.

Individually, they were 15 euros, but when I asked the vendor, Mikaël Kervennic (33-6-1116-6057), for a discount, he let me have the two for 25 euros in all.

Matt Gross for The New York Times A photograph at St.-Ouen.
With one successful bargaining attempt under my belt, it was time to brave St.-Ouen, open Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. On the way up north to Porte de Clignancourt, I imagined a snake pit of buyers and sellers and traders and dealers fighting over dug-from-the-basement Rembrandts and pre-Revolutionary cutlery sets.

But St.-Ouen was orderly. Occupying several blocks, it was divided into separate, warrenlike markets specializing in different products. Well, sort of. Skimming ParisPuces.com, I couldn’t figure out how, say, the Dauphine market, which sold Renaissance period dressers and industrial art, was unlike the Biron, where you could find “luxury goods and gilt objects.” And so I just began at the first market I came to, the Vernaison, where the Puces de St.-Ouen opened as an organized institution in 1920.

Unlike the vide-grenier and Vanves, the Marché de Vernaison was easy to navigate. The vendors weren’t using folding tables — they operated out of open-faced storefronts, leaving plenty of room to wander in and out, or just walk on by. And the objects they were selling were indeed of higher quality — and, as my friend had warned, more expensive.

Matt Gross for The New York Times Leather club chairs.
A pair of leather club chairs, broken-in but sturdy, cost 2,200 euros. Two painted metal dragons, made in the early 20th century and meant to adorn walls, cost 750 euros as a set. The fuel tank from a Mustang fighter was 12,500 euros. A selection of striking 18th- and 19th-century Japanese lithographs seemed almost reasonable at 50 to 300 euros. The initial price was often not the only problem: A set of six painted wooden chairs, for example, cost 650 euros, but their vendor explained it would cost that much again to send them to my home in New York.

At the showroom of Pierre Héteau (Alley 1, Stand 37; 33-6-1050-6566), I found my first deal. Among shelf upon shelf of copper pots — the kind of gorgeously made cookware you’d never actually use, with delicate engravings and patterns on every shiny surface — I found a tire-bouchon, or corkscrew, its handle made of twisty old wood, for just 3 euros. As I paid for it, Mr. Héteau, a hefty, steel-haired man with a thick mustache and a blue apron, explained that he’d sold over 500 pieces of this beautiful cookware to David Bouley and indeed was about to send Mr. Bouley the huge copper alembic, used for making Calvados, that occupied much of the floor space.

Did the alcohol distiller, which cost 8,000 euros, still work?

“Percé, hélas,” he sighed. It had a hole.

A few doors down from Mr. Héteau’s shop was a stand filled with homey, prewar relics (Alley 1, Stand 29; 33-6-0349-6546). As tinkly old jazz played on a stereo, I sifted through piles of vintage fabrics, eventually settling on a 1930s white tablecloth with a red embroidered geometric pattern — very Deco, but 88 euros. I was determined to get it for less, so the salesman and I began negotiations. First, we discovered that three of the six matching napkins were missing, so that brought the price down to 80 euros. Then I countered: Surely he could do better?

Seventy-five, he said.

If he could do 75, then why not 70?

He called his boss, Florence Nugue. I waited. He put the phone down. He nodded. Victory!

But, I instantly wondered, should I have bargained harder? Possibly, but at least I’d saved 18 euros. And now I have this very nice tablecloth, on which my daughter, wearing her new sweater, can spill wine from a bottle that I’ve opened with my new corkscrew. Vivent les puces!

What Is a Master’s Degree Worth?

This is a good look at the cost of higher education. I'm currently a graduate student, and I am already $70,000+, with 2 more years to go, and and perhaps longer if I receive my PhD. Is it really worth the cost, or are we simply following in the footsteps of tradition?

June 30, 2009, 7:30 pm
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-worth/
By The Editors

Room for Debate recently published two forums on the burdens of student loans, and heard from a lot of former students, parents, professors and others who shared personal horror stories, blunt advice and critical observations about higher education.

A number of economists and education researchers say that the student debt problem, while real, has been overblown by the press and loan-forgiveness advocates, and that most students do not graduate with too much debt.

Resources
Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?
A Lifetime of Student Debt? Not Likely
Is a College Degree Worthless?
The Great College Hoax

But the debate presents difficult questions for young people, who face the most difficult economy since the Great Depression. Many have decided to go to graduate school, to wait out the storm. Several commenters on our forums even said they had no choice but to seek a master’s degree (and incur more debt), arguing that a B.A. today is the equivalent of having a high school diploma 20 years ago and more employers require a higher degree.

How do students know if a graduate education is worth it or not? What degrees are worth getting, and which are not? How does a student weigh the risks and benefits gain a higher education degree?


Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University professor
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former university president
Liz Pulliam Weston, personal finance columnist
Richard Vedder, Ohio University economist

The Education Bubble
Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”


The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble. What people outside the education bubble don’t realize and people inside won’t admit is that many colleges and universities are in the same position that major banks and financial institutions are: their assets (endowments down 30-40 percent this year) are plummeting, their liabilities (debts) are growing, most of their costs are fixed and rising, and their income (return on investments, support from government and private donations, etc.) is falling.

Colleges are on the prowl for new sources of income. And one place they invariably turn is to new customers, i.e., students.

This is hardly a prescription for financial success. Faced with this situation, colleges and universities are on the prowl for new sources of income. And one place they invariably turn is to new customers, i.e., students.

During times of financial stress, people become vulnerable and understandably seek to improve their situation in any way they can. For many, more education seems to be the solution. When the economy goes down, applications to graduate programs go up.

As a lifelong educator, I believe more education is always a good thing, but buyers must beware. The debt crisis is not limited to governments and universities but extends to students and their families. Far too many students come out of college with substantial debts that plague them for years.

And now the economy makes matters worse. Only 19 percent of the class of 2009 had jobs at graduation. Furthermore, many recent graduates who are young professionals and had been working for a few years have been fired. They find themselves surfing the web looking for jobs, all while worrying about health benefits and repaying their student loans.

This situation has many young people asking whether it makes sense to go back to school to pick up a master’s degree. There is no easy answer to this question and every case is different. When facing this decision, it is important to consider exactly what you need and how the degree will help you.

Some graduate degree programs can be very helpful for certain careers but many are not. And, remember, what is most interesting is not always most practical. Be sure you consider your motives and goals carefully. Do not simply assume that another degree after your name is going to open doors.

I have had too many students over the years who have gotten masters and even doctorates find themselves in debt big time, unemployed and forced to start all over in their mid-30s. If you do find a program that will enhance your prospects for a job and better life, then before your enroll, you need to figure out how you are going to pay for it and, if you must borrow more money, whether you can really afford to take on additional debt. You are going to have to do this by yourself because you cannot rely on people with vested interests in increasing enrollments to give you reliable advice.

One of the dirty secrets of many research universities is that they treat master’s students as cash cows that fund other activities. To make matters worse, with many faculty members uninterested in teaching, students cannot assume they will get what they are paying for.

Bottom line — and much of this is about the bottom line — consider your needs carefully, research your options thoroughly, don’t believe everything you read or hear and invest your time and money prudently.


The Value of an M.A.
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is president emeritus and professor of public services at the George Washington University. He is also chairman of the Higher Education Practice at Korn Ferry International.

The M.A. degree is neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. I had a classmate at Columbia who remained on after receiving his B.A. degree to earn an M.A. degree on a fellowship while waiting for his fiancé to graduate from Barnard. Another classmate who started a Ph.D. program was informed after a year that he had no real promise but if he went away quietly they would give him a booby-prize: the M.A. He became an M.D.

In the marketplace, an M.A. degree adds to one’s personal narrative. It makes one more interesting.

Does earning an M.A. (distinguishable from an M.B.A. or other professional degree) make any sense from a cost-benefit point of view? It does allow one to upgrade one’s alma mater. If you originally matriculated at a college you are vaguely uneasy about, taking an M.A. at a more elite institution allows you to kick down and kiss up, henceforth letting you tell people you “went to school” in New Haven. And it does, of course, ornament a resume indicating academic sitzfleisch — the ability to keep your behind in a chair in a diligent manner. A “B” undergraduate can become an “A” graduate student.

The M.A. permits someone who has a generic B.A. degree in a field she didn’t much care about to change direction, to add a line to her curriculum vitae that says she has a documented competency. M.A.’s also allow their owners to check the right box on corporate personnel forms and similar documents used by the armed services, N.G.O.’s, schools and public agencies that like their civil servants credentialed.

Earning an M.A. degree can be fun; it can provide knowledge; and can stretch the imagination. A cynic might conclude that the M.A. degree is the stepchild of the university community, is increasingly a commodity offered by universities in order to earn tuition dollars devoted to the Ph.D. programs. But in the marketplace, it adds to one’s personal narrative. It makes one more interesting.

Degree inflation increasingly obliges more degrees to compensate for the devaluation of earlier degrees. Jobs that once were filled by high school graduates and later by college graduates today often require a master’s degree. This is largely optical, but one deals with the world he or she lives in. Still, just as the double and triple undergraduate major is a form of gilding the lily, a form of product enhancement, meant to seduce the hiring partner or the human resources director, the growing interest in the M.A. reveals the inadequacy of the baccalaureate.

In a bad job market does it make sense for students to seek a safe harbor and earn a master’s degree? Absolutely: if they can afford it; if the debt from their previous academic work is not too great; if someone else is paying; if they seek to reinvent themselves. If, if …

Universities are, after all, wonderful magical places, and learning something new is the greatest of pleasures. My friend married his fiancé, never used his M.A. degree in any professional way but had the satisfaction and joy of having read a great deal of French literature at somebody else’s expense. What is so bad about that?


Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
Liz Pulliam Weston is the author of “Easy Money,” “Your Credit Score” and “Deal with Your Debt.” She is a personal finance columnist for MSN Money.


Graduate school has traditionally been a great place to wait out recessions while honing your skills for a better job. But sometimes, the payoff doesn’t justify the cost.

When I analyzed economic costs and benefits of various degrees several years ago for an MSN column, “Is your degree worth $1 million or worthless?”, it was clear that certain degrees were winners:

–People with associates’ degrees tended to earn a lot more than those whose educations stopped at high school.

–Bachelor’s degrees, particularly those earned at lower-cost public universities, also tended to be worth the investment.

–Professional degrees in law or medicine were costly to get but clearly offered a big enough payoff.

Not such a slam dunk: Master’s degrees.

In some fields, such as business or engineering, a graduate degree typically boosted income by more than enough to justify the cost. In others — the liberal arts and social sciences, in particular — master’s degrees didn’t appear to produce much if any earnings advantage. The Census Bureau has updated the data I used a few times since then, and the results are similar: certain graduate degrees just don’t seem to pay off.

Advanced education has many other, non-economic benefits, of course. But if you’re borrowing to pay for your schooling — as 60 percent of graduate students do, accumulating an average $37,000 in student loan debt, according to the 2003-2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study — you want to make sure you can pay those student loan bills when they come due.

Otherwise, you could quite literally spend the rest of your life scraping to pay off your debt. Student loans typically can’t be erased in bankruptcy court, and student lenders have extraordinary powers to pursue borrowers, up to and including taking a portion of their Social Security retirement checks.
I hear from too many readers who have six-figure student loan debts and $40,000 incomes. They can’t save for retirement or buy a home; some can’t even pay the minimums they owe on their debt.

Those in the worst shape are often the ones who took on private student loans, which have fewer consumer protections than federal student loans and which come with higher, variable rates. The prevalence of so many strapped borrowers is why I recommend students borrow no more for their educations, in total, than they expect to make the first year out of school.

This rule of thumb won’t work for everyone — heaven knows, you may be the rare literature M.A. who writes a best-selling novel and pays off her debt with one check — but it’s a good starting point for anyone considering strapping herself to more education bills.


Not All Degrees Are Equal
Richard Vedder is director of the Center of College Affordability and Productivity and teaches economics at Ohio University.


Given the poor labor market, should new college graduates go on and get a master’s degree? For many students, this is not a bad option. Census Bureau data show us that typically young adults with master’s degrees earn about $8,000 more a year (roughly, 15 percent) than those just having a bachelor’s diploma. The lifetime earnings gains for the second degree should reach into the low six digits. For many, the rate of return on the added college investment therefore should be reasonably high — and it beats unemployment or working in a low-skilled, low-wage retail trade job.

Universities should survey former students for five years after graduation, and give that information to prospective students.

That said, however, that is not true for everyone. Not all degrees are equal — a master’s in anthropology or art probably has less incremental earning power than a M.B.A. or advanced engineering degree. If graduate enrollments soar as more decide to stay in school, the newly minted master’s graduates may find the job market not all that much better in a couple of years than at the present, and end up taking a relatively low paid job — and facing much larger student loan debts than otherwise.

Moreover, the cost of getting a master’s degree varies a lot, depending on the school attended, the availability of financial aid, the length of the master’s program (ranging typically from one to two years), not to mention the “opportunity cost” in terms of employment income lost while in school. Some master’s programs will cost a student only perhaps $10,000, while others (e.g., an expensive two-year M.B.A. program) might run over $100,000.

The decision whether to pursue further education is complicated by the fact that colleges know little about the vocational success of their own students. Ask a typical university, “How much does your average graduate make in their first job, or two years after graduation?” Usually they will not know.

Universities should survey graduates on a fairly frequent basis for at least five years after graduation, gaining helpful information to give to prospective students that allows them to roughly calculate what they might reasonably expect to gain as a return on their college investment. If a private Web site, payscale.com, can gather that sort of information for many schools, why cannot the schools themselves?

Comments:

1. June 30, 2009
7:40 pm

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The new breed of M.S. degree, a Professional Science Masters shows promise of being the MBA of Science. A concept developed by the Sloan Foundation, these are multidisciplinary programs with interactions with industry built in. They bring the promise of new employees being ready to step into a position without taking 3 to 6 months to be trained. For more information go to http://www.sciencemasters.com. for more information.

— Diana

2. June 30, 2009
7:42 pm

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My MSW allowed me to practice independently and does offer me somewhat better pay than a BSW or BA working in the social work field. It also allowed me to move overseas as a “skilled migrant” when a BA degree would have not provided me that opportunity. As they said above it all depends on the field. Whatever happened to pursuing knowledge and personal development without worryig about money?

— Ambrose

3. June 30, 2009
7:49 pm

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I think that learning another language and spending time in another culture is much more educational and enriching and inclusive and expansive than traditional Post Graduate work.

By immersion in another language and culture new possibilities open up that were not otherwise available. An international perspective is very empowering in these tremulous times, and lends itself to a peaceful debate rather than violent conflict.

It’s a lot cheaper, it is custom, and the results are life-long. Win, win, win, win. Consider the alternative…

— Jim Box

4. June 30, 2009
7:55 pm

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I just finished my M.A. in the humanities, and am unable to find work teaching at a community college (which is what I had planned to do with this degree). Luckily I had a full fellowship, so I don’t have any loans to pay, but I’m back to where I was before I went to graduate school: jobless, broke, and wondering why I didn’t study business administration.

— Serapli

5. June 30, 2009
7:57 pm

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The pundits seem to agree that an MBA or a master’s degree in engineering is worth the investment in terms of increased earnings, while a humanities MA probably is not (though some allow as how it may offer inestimable, albeit intangible, benefits).

They seem to omit a large number of degree programs from their analyses. Elementary and secondary school teachers often must do postgraduate work in order to make their teaching certificates permanent, and get a bit more pay once they have done so. Social workers and counselors become eligible for licensure only if they earn master’s degrees. Increasingly, the master’s degree is the accepted credential for physical and occupational therapists as well. These and other degrees qualify people for membership in what are sometimes called the minor professions (as opposed to law and medicine). Are they not worth pursuing? Or are they just off the radar for this particular collection of humanities and business types?

— Stephen

6. June 30, 2009
9:41 pm

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I couldn’t believe some of the anecdotes I have heard from students. Since student loans have become so widely available, there has been no limit to the imagination of universities in making up new degree programs. This has been a cynical exploitation of naive young people. I can’t believe there are so many master’s programs in public policy or international relations. I read a report of a college student coming out of a kentucky university with a master’s in international relations. A no name public school has no business misleading students and essentially defrauding them for personal gain. This student came out of her master’s program with 80,000 dollars total in educational debt and of course can’t get a job. The problem with these watered down master’s degrees, that require no more than a good college term paper as a master’s thesis, is that they devalue the degree and lead to denigration of all degree holders in soft subjects. All these master’s programs and new academic departments have sprung up in response to student loans being given to anyone with a pulse. Universities should be ashamed of themselves. Most in academia know that it is unethical to allow students to deceive themselves as to future job prospects with worthless master’s degrees from no name programs. However, when their jobs depend on maintaining a certain quota of students for a particular program of study, even previously ethical academic types have compromised their ethics in their chase to be recipients of all that loan money.

— billy bob

7. June 30, 2009
9:46 pm

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The only reason that a hospital based recreation “therapist” is now a four year college degree instead of an apprentice program or one year community college program, is because universities have realized they can stretch out these one and two year certification programs into four year degrees and get four years of student loan money instead of just one. This is just one of many examples where short study certificate based programs have mushroomed into four year degrees as a cynical attempt to increase revenue. After all, if the student loan money is flowing so freely why not turn a one year program into a four year degree? These universities should really be ashamed at what they have done.

— billy bob

8. June 30, 2009
10:18 pm

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The Master of Arts degree was intended to prepare scholars for the PHD. It involved an in depth study of the field, and more importantly, the pertinent issues in that field(e.i. what needs to be done) and to acquire knowledge and skills in how to viable research. As such,it is not a terminal degree—it’s academic limbo.

— Martin Camarata, Prof. Emeritus

9. June 30, 2009
10:23 pm

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In my experience an M.A. does not improve the career chances in most professions of the liberal arts. The qualifying degree is the Ph.D. Unless you love the field, do not even think of it. You must like knowledge for its own sake, may end up working for very little money, and still must be convinced that you are doing the right thing.

I agree with Professor Taylor’s assessment of the current state of higher education and have written more about it here:
http://brainmindinst.blogspot.com/2008/12/financial-crisis-higher-education.html

— Peter Melzer

10. June 30, 2009
10:52 pm

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I hold an ASIE, a BS Technology-Business, and an MBA.

They are worth nothing.

The real value to me has nearly always been the knowlege that came along with the process of getting the degrees. Adding fuel to this position, over the years I’ve often come in contact with degree-holders, and with people having years of experience, who apparently learned nothing from formal education nor from experience.

I’m not a particularly brilliant sort, but I have always quietly enjoyed having a broader view of a more understandable world. Knowlege also brings on the even surer knowlege that I don’t know much at all. In fact, because of my education and experience, I am now sure that I know next to nothing, and that’s a humbling thought.

Rick

— Rick Chumsae

11. June 30, 2009
11:41 pm

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One way to look at the expense and work that goes into a graduate degree is that it is an investment in yourself. Taylor is correct that the most interesting degrees are not always the most practical. However, I would warn anyone considering a challenging program that you will need to be very interested in what you are studying to complete a master’s degree. My job is normally performed by people with a master’s degree. This expectation is partly because of degree inflation, which, like grade inflation at undergraduate institutions, is real. Six weeks ago, I graduated from Georgetown’s Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program. The non-economic value of my degree is amazing. For financial reasons, I worked half-time during my studies to avoid the opportunity cost of not working altogether. I agree with Vedder’s claim that not all degrees are created equal, that’s why I chose MSFS. I suppose I’m betting society will value what Trachtenberg would call my “documented competency” in international affairs.

— David Higgins

12. June 30, 2009
11:51 pm

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A Master’s Degree is probably a much lesser education than it once was, and the whole program to some extent has become commoditized, which contradicts the very principle of advanced learning. My observation doing an MS program back in the 80’s was that fully 60 per cent of the working adult attendees were purely and solely present to get a ticket-punch on their resume. There was no curiousity about anything except whether items would be on the exam or would earn credit.

In addition, those courses that did touch on business theories all seemed to be absolutely certain that there was no purpose for business except to make money, solely and entirely. This fixation was passed around like an exalted truth, rather than a toxic misestimation. There is no question about the necessity of making money of course, but whether it is sufficient is highly debatable.

It is not surprising that the meaning and weight of the sheepskin has declined under these conditions.

— AHJ

13. July 1, 2009
12:06 am

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Most students currently enrolled in university should not be there. They have no interest in higher education and seek only a ticket to a higher-paying job. They belong in vocational school, which unfortunately means that universities are turning into glorified job-training facilities.

And that, really, is what afflicts contemporary colleges and universities. They are obsessed not with educating their students but with preparing them for the job market. They have abdicated their vital role as centers of scholarship and conduits of civilization so that they can perform the same functions as vocational schools.

If the value of a university degree is measured only in the additional income it will generate for the holder, then it’s a waste of time. Undergraduate degrees are losing their status because they indicate nothing for certain about the degree-holders, not even basic skills in reading and mathematics — and certainly not knowledge of history, literature, languages, economics, science, or philosophy. Thus, students race fruitlessly to obtain more and more graduate degrees, which in their turn will be devalued.

If universities are to recover, they must abandon vocational training and rediscover their mission of real education. If some students don’t like that or can’t do the work, then they should attend schools more appropriate to their interests.

— N.S. Palmer

14. July 1, 2009
12:09 am

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We are saddling our kids with huge, insurmountable student loans for watered-down degrees at diploma mills. And then people wonder why we’re losing the race to the Chinas, Indians, Brazils, Russias, Canadas.

— Bleak Future

15. July 1, 2009
12:11 am

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Mr. Taylor stated: “The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble.”

And Mr. Taylor, higher education as provided by the private not-for-profits is a really big business of really rich universities that basically are getting a free ride on the taxpayers federally, state and locally. Why should these big businesses, and as you noted, these are businesses, not charities, be treated as though they are charities. Some of their administrators and professors make million dollar plus salaries and perks. Unlike other businesses, they also get tax free endowments of hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is time these elitist freeloaders pay their fair share of taxes like every other business in the US.

I also think the US should place restrictions on teaching foreign students advanced graduate studies in sensitive fields that can provide military and industrial advantages to our military adversaries and countries that compete with us in the global economy and which take jobs away from Americans. These fields include physics, chemistry and materials sciences, mathematics, engineering, medical research, computer and software design, etc. The US trained a number of the Japanese before WWII who later developed Japanese offensive weapons that were used to attack Pearl Harbor. We also taught the Japanese business management techniques that were later used against us to destroy many of our major industries or sharply reduce US company market share in the US.

— LetsBfairUSA

16. July 1, 2009
12:17 am

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Is the investment worth the return? Depends on the individual. Someone with an MA in TOEFL can become Dean at a community college, or make enough money tax free abroad to pay a student loan in a year. The commentaries above seem “market-based” and limited
“Not a Slam Dunk: Master’s Degrees.” Funny.

— John McDonald

17. July 1, 2009
12:24 am

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Interesting to me that several of the contributors mentioned “degree inflation.” If our society’s current push for everyone to go to college only results in the goal posts being moved, then the whole thing feels like a kind of scam. I think we need to take the skilled trades more seriously as options for intelligent people - emphasize their connection to science and math knowledge, and once again make these respectable paths that can be taken with pride.
Using bachelors degrees for gate-keeping into some entry level white collar jobs is unnecessary when the cost of getting the degree is so high, and, honestly, the skills needed for these jobs should be attainable by high school grads.
I say it’s time to take back the high school diploma and make it mean something again. We need to stop pressuring everyone to fork over all of their money to colleges and universities unquestioningly! The honesty of the professors above is truly refreshing!!!

— SE

18. July 1, 2009
12:26 am

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I do have to wonder at this comment by Trachtenberg when he says “Does earning an M.A. (distinguishable from an M.B.A. or other professional degree) ”

An MBA is NOT a professional degree. The degrees classed as graduate professional degrees are soley JDs and MDs and VMDs. And an MBA from a no-name cow-college isn’t worth the cost of the books in the labor market.

Now as to the topic at hand, some fields do require a Masters. Social Work comes to mind as a field that requires a Masters even for ebtry level jobs. Ditto psychology. Teaching even in the elementary through secondary level requires a Masters to advance.

The problem is whether the MA (or MS) is worth the cost. taking the $8000 a year cited above as the income difference, that would work out to be a net of about $5600 a year. If a 2 year MA costs $70,000, it will take close to 13 years to pay it off not including interest.

Entry in to other fields needs a masters in order to narrow the specialization and be marketable. For example, urban planning is such an area.

On the other hand an MFA (fine arts) is a time and money pit.

Soeaking as some who holds a MA in addition to a professional doctorate, a master’s program should be approached with caution. The costs are so high these days. (And if Vedder thinks that a student can do an MA for only $10,000, I guess he assumes the student will not eat and will live in a tent or under a bridge!) If the future earnings are not substantially enhanced by having the MA, it is probably not worth it.

Once again the prospective student needs to contact the placement office and ask the following:

(1) How many graduates from the Master’s prorgam obtain a job in the field

(2) How long does it take for them to find a job

(3) How much do they make starting out

(4) How do the initial earnings of the master’s grads compare with the intial earnings of the departments BA grads who work in that field

On the other hand, if one has money to burn, education is never wasted.

— AnnA

19. July 1, 2009
12:27 am

Link
As noted in a few of the articles, this question applies only to liberal arts and the like. For engineering, you want and need an M.S. or Ph.D.

— michael

20. July 1, 2009
12:28 am

Link
Earning my MA was among the most fruitful and most rewarding experiences I’ve had, even more so than working on the PhD. Certainly it is a stepping stone of sorts, a way to make sure you would like to pursue something to a higher level (or not). The MA is a chance to delve seriously into a topic or to realize you can’t wait to finish with it and do something else. As with anything, an MA can be as rewarding and fulfilling as one makes it. I personally wouldn’t trade my MA experience—the people I have met and worked with, and the lasting friendships—for anything (including the few grand it cost!). Money spent on education is an investment in one’s life that lasts forever and can’t ever be lost in the mysterious workings of the “market” or stolen in a Ponzi scheme. Besides, most MA programs offer scholarships and teaching assistantships that cover most if not all the costs.

— Joseph Powell

21. July 1, 2009
12:30 am

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Too bad most of the remarks about the “worth” of a master’s degree are about the dollar value. I feel they miss the truth, at least the truth of my life with my master’s. I’ve had mine for almost 40 years, and its worth to me has been the enhanced intellectual and cultural advantages it has conferred. My B.A. was spent among students mostly interested in football, beer, sex, and for the academic side–credentialing. My M.A. introduced me to peers fascinated by advanced study, in love with learning, thoughtful, articulate, cultured, and polite. As a result, the “worth” of my M.A. has been the enhanced, engaged quality of my life.

— Boomerscoutofamerica

22. July 1, 2009
12:33 am

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As a student completing my M.A. in American Studies, this debate is one that is often on my mind. I am looking to graduation this fall and applying for jobs, but I find that most organizations are much more interested in my internship experiences than my academic background.

But in the end, I value my graduate studies despite their lack of financial or possibly even professional benefits. I attended a prestigious, private university for my undergraduate degree, but my graduate work at my state university is what has ultimately cemented and deepened all of my previous learning. Not everyone has the luxury of completing a degree that doesn’t necessarily lead to more money, but I’m grateful for it.

— Perry, Kansas City

23. July 1, 2009
12:40 am

Link
Quoting Mr. Vedder:”That said, however, that is not true for everyone. Not all degrees are equal — a master’s in anthropology or art probably has less incremental earning

There may be some truth to this statement, but I have to disagree that a M.F.A. in art is the same as an MA in the humanities. MFA is a terminal degree and can open doors teaching at the university level.

All these “experts” also failed to note that an advanced degree plays an important role if graduates want to work abroad. Many countries have a point system when awarding visas and education is a significant category. In this global economy, it’s not uncommon that many people now face the prospect of working over seas.

I agree that taking on tons of more debt is probably not the best approach to furthering your education but with a little effort and research you can find options or funding opportunities to help invest in your future.

I think it is also important that students have a little perspective before they just “jump” into a masters program. Often we see students just roll from a Bachelor’s into a graduate program with little or no real world experience. Just a year or two out in the world does wonders in the focus and desire it takes to pursue a higher degree. Too many students wander into a masters program with little or no direction not to mention the energy or appreciation needed to finish.

Jobs may come and go, but an education is something that will always be part of you. If a student spends wisely and takes full advantage of the time, a degree no matter what discipline will always pay off. Our society needs to reinvest in education and allow more students the opportunity to pursue higher degrees with programs, grants and sponsorships to make it happen. Having a population that is too educated is a problem I think we would rather have than the opposite.

— david donar

24. July 1, 2009
12:41 am

Link
Lest we forget - and in this bottom-line oriented society it is difficult to forget - education is not all about fiscal payback. As a recipient of 3 degrees (AB, PhD, JD) I found that each separate level gave me more appreciation of the world in general, more ability to enjoy whatever I could make of the ratrace of existence, a better appreciation of the whole complexity of life. At 75 I am still striving to learn more, not facts but things about life and how to understand them.

— joconnor

25. July 1, 2009
12:49 am


MAs for liberal arts degrees, I agree, are worthless in all but a few cases. Anyone that wants to actually specialise in their area of practice requires a MA or even PhD in order to even think about getting their foot in the door. Myself included. I work as a humaniatrian aid worker. Although there are those who have joined the field without even a bachelors degree, where I started out (London), you cannot even access internships without at least a MA. Maybe the pay does not match what you have spent on your education, nor does the experience (I found my undergraduate degree, completed in Montreal, more diverse and challenging - the MA was more of a social networking tool). However, in fields such as development or humanitarian relief… it’s a necessary evil and i don’t think that is going to change.

— JB

Time for a Break?

Need a little break from the computer? Dharma Craft online has created a little interactive Zen Garden. Sure it's geared towards getting you to buy their products, BUT its fun none the less!

Breaking News: White House Confirms Global Warming Crisis

It's all over the news: According to a report released today by the Obama administration, global warming is "unequivocal and human-induced." And while we certainly applaud the return of science to the White House, listening to the science is only half of the solution. He has to act on it.

Solving global warming is going to take serious leadership from President Obama. It's up to us to demand it.

Tell President Obama to act on the science and take the lead on global warming today.

What the science says we need to do is keep global temperature increases as far below two degrees as possible, achieve emissions reductions of at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, eliminate offsets that undermine reductions and to provide substantial international funding necessary to stop emissions from deforestation. Bottom line.

Today's report is a clarion call that the President and Congress must do much more, and more quickly, to respond to the climate crisis. Time is running out. Take a minute to add your name to the list of people demanding that President Obama follow his own science and be a leader.

Global Warming is Here - Will Congress Act?

Global warming is already having an impact on our wildlife and communities -- and without urgent action, things will get worse, according to a White House report issued this week.

Fortunately, Congress is poised to take an important first step in addressing climate change -- lending a much-needed hand to polar bears and other wildlife that are already feeling the heat.

Write your Representative today and urge support for the American Clean Energy & Security Act sponsored by Reps. Waxman and Markey (H.R. 2454).

Global warming is one of the greatest and most urgent threats facing our wildlife. According to the new White House report “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” our wildlife is already affected.

Polar bears and ring seals are rapidly losing sea ice habitat. Increased fires, insect pests, disease and invasive weeds are already affecting 33 million acres of our forests. Our deserts are becoming hotter and drier.

And without urgent action, things will get even worse.

In the coming days, the House of Representatives will vote on the American Clean Energy & Security Act -- the first comprehensive bill to address global warming to come before a House vote. This important legislation will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming our world AND take vital steps to protect our wildlife and wild places that are already threatened by climate change.

Urge your Representative to support the American Clean Energy & Security Act -- vital legislation to address global warming and protect our wildlife and wild places.

A vote on this historic bill could come as early as next week. Please take action today and urge your Representative to support for this important bill.

The 2009 Seal Slaughter Has Ended!

The 2009 Canadian seal slaughter has officially ended, and we're happy to tell you that this year, about three-fourths of the seals who were scheduled to be bludgeoned or shot to death during the annual war on seals were spared. More than 300,000 of these gentle creatures were scheduled to die during the blood bath on the ice, but more than 200,000 seals did not suffer the cruel fate that Canada had intended for them. They did not have to feel the pain of having their skull bashed in or feel what it's like to have a hook stuck through their eye, cheek, or mouth—just so that their fur could be stolen for "fashion."

This dramatic decline in the number of seals who were killed during the slaughter is largely because the price of seal fur has fallen over the years as the disgust over the slaughter increases. The European Union and the U.S. have banned seal products, and world leaders have spoken out against the massacre. Demonstrations from London to Hamburg and Los Angeles to Toronto have made the headlines, and kind people like you all over the world have sent a strong, united message that the seal bloodbath must end.

We will be fighting on for these defenseless babies until the Canadian government backs down and bans the slaughter, and we need your help.

We've just launched an awesome new site, OlympicShame2010.com, which is a spoof of the Vancouver Olympic site, to increase global pressure on the Canadian government to end the bloody seal slaughter once and for all. Be sure to check out our Canadian maple syrup boycott (read more here) as well as photos of demonstrations from around the world, a video, and lots of ways to help end the slaughter. Seriously, you'll love the site!

Keep fighting with us, and let's win this battle for the mothers and babies on the ice!

A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts. Or Not.

I have mixed feelings over the latest movie from Sacha Bron Cohen, admittedly he is hilarious, but sometimes (oft times) it crosses the line of funny and becomes offensive. Part of me cheers him on, as I hold my sides laughing, for addressing taboo topics that should be brought into the light of day and discussed, so they lose their touchy status. Then there is another part of me that is simply disgusted by the things that come out of his mouth. All in all, I kinda think that is the reaction he is looking for. I for one think about his comedy and what it means, but who's to say everyone does that?

June 14, 2009
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/movies/14barn.html?_r=1&8dpc

SACHA BARON COHEN recently approached Elton John through a representative. Could he use “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” Mr. John’s hit song from “The Lion King,” for a pivotal scene in his forthcoming movie?

“Brüno,” an R-rated comedy set for wide release by Universal Pictures on July 10, stars Mr. Baron Cohen as a flamboyantly gay fashion journalist from Austria. The filmmakers wanted to play the song during a scene in which the title character, participating in a cage-fighting match, pulls down his opponent’s pants and kisses him on the mouth, prompting a horrified crowd to throw garbage at him.

The answer was no. Mr. John, along with the Walt Disney Company, which owns the copyright to the song but seeks his approval in such matters, learned of the scene’s particulars and blanched, according to one of Mr. John’s advisers. But then Mr. John reversed himself — kind of. He didn’t want to be associated with the provocative scene, but he ultimately agreed to perform part of another song that functions as a coda to the film.

So it goes for “Brüno,” a movie that, in mercilessly exploiting the discomfort created when straight men are ambushed by aggressive gayness, happens to (surprise!) expose homophobia. Gay groups are reacting with deeply mixed emotions, heightened by the recent triumphs (Iowa) and losses (California) in efforts to legalize gay marriage. Is the film then vulgar, inappropriate and harmful? Or bold, timely and necessary? All of the above?

Ultimately the tension surrounding “Brüno” boils down to the worry that certain viewers won’t understand that the joke is on them and will leave the multiplex with their homophobia validated.

“Some people in our community may like this movie, but many are not going to be O.K. with it,” said Rashad Robinson, senior director of media programs for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “Sacha Baron Cohen’s well-meaning attempt at satire is problematic in many places and outright offensive in others.”

Holding the opposite view are people like Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine, who said he plans to put Mr. Baron Cohen on the August cover. “The movie does something hugely important, which is showing that people’s attitudes can turn on a dime when they realize you’re gay,” Mr. Hickland said. “The multiplex crowd wouldn’t normally sit down for a two-hour lecture on homophobia, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I’m excited about that.”

“Brüno” is not a lecture, at least not overtly. Like “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the 2006 smash that starred Mr. Baron Cohen as an anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist, “Brüno” is first and foremost a raunchy comedy featuring a not-so-bright guy who embraces sexism, racism and stereotypes as he happily goes about his business. Borat and Brüno are both familiar to fans of “Da Ali G Show,” Mr. Baron Cohen’s satirical talk show, which first ran in Britain in 2000 and began appearing on HBO in 2003.

Yet “Brüno” is also intended as a statement about what it is like to be a member of a minority in America in 2009. Mr. Baron Cohen’s malaprop-loaded antics are fictional, but the hate they can elicit from the people he encounters is ostensibly real. (The same was true of “Borat,” which some human rights groups also greeted with hostility; Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said at the time that audiences “may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke.”)

Bloggers have given “Brüno” an unofficial subtitle: “Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.”

Universal won’t discuss the filmmaking process, but the studio insists that the vast majority of the people who appear with Mr. Baron Cohen had no idea they were being filmed for a Hollywood movie. Ads for “Brüno” trumpet, “real people, real situations.”

That was at least true of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the former Republican presidential candidate. In a scene filmed in early 2008, Mr. Paul sits for an interview with the Baron Cohen character. (Mr. Paul has said he was told the topic would be Austrian economics.) When lighting trouble delays the interview, Mr. Baron Cohen strips to his underwear. Mr. Paul storms out muttering, “This guy is a queer.”

In a subsequent radio interview Mr. Paul said: “I don’t like the idea that he lies his way into an interview. To me it’s a real shame that people are going to reward him with millions and millions of dollars for being so crass.”

Judging from the way certain subjects in “Borat” reacted after that film was released, Universal’s lawyers will be busy. At least six lawsuits were filed against the comic and 20th Century Fox, the “Borat” distributor. So far no plaintiffs have won, but some cases are on appeal. (Universal, which won a bidding war with 20th Century Fox for the distribution rights to “Brüno,” paying $42.5 million, seems happy to take the risk. “Borat” cost $18 million and brought in $262 million worldwide.)

“Brüno” was served with its first lawsuit on May 22. According to a complaint filed by a California woman, Mr. Baron Cohen — as Brüno — infiltrated a charity bingo tournament and offended the elderly audience with vulgarities while calling a game. The plaintiff, Richelle Olson, contends that she was severely injured when she tried to grab the microphone away from him. In a statement Universal called the lawsuit “completely baseless,” noting that full footage of the encounter shows that Ms. Olson was never touched.

As roles go, there is no ambiguity about Brüno: he is a limp-wristed, sex-crazed queen. Universal’s promotional materials show him dressed in hot pants, leopard bikini underwear and riding nude on a unicorn.

The character has evolved in appearance since the television show. This Brüno has plucked eyebrows and longish hair with blonde highlights. He wears mauve lipstick. Mr. Baron Cohen also appears to have shed several pounds of arm, leg and torso hair through waxing or electrolysis.

In one scene Brüno appears on a talk show holding a baby who is wearing a T-shirt reading “Gayby.” The sequence flashes back to Brüno having sex in a hot tub while the baby sits nearby. (A person who worked on the movie noted that the flashback consists of still images that were photoshopped – no baby was actually present – and that the sex is only strongly implied.) He then boasts to the outraged talk-show audience that the baby is a man magnet (only he uses unprintable language).

In another scene Brüno, intent on becoming straight, goes to a martial arts instructor to learn how to protect himself from gay people. “If they get close to you, hit them,” the teacher says. How can you spot a gay man? “Obvious is a person being extremely nice” is the answer. Gays can be tricky, the instructor warns: “Some of them don’t even dress no different than myself or you.”

The movie also touches on the reckless pursuit of fame. For instance, under the pretext of conducting a “glamorous baby” photo shoot, Brüno interviews real moms and dads, many holding their babies on their laps. He asks one mother “is your baby comfortable with bees, wasps and hornets?” She answers, “George is comfortable with everything.” Dead or dying animals? “Yes.”

“Can Olivia lose 10 pounds in the next week?” Brüno asks another mother, who doesn’t bat an eyelash: “Yeah, I’d have to do whatever I could,” she says.

Mr. Baron Cohen declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Larry Charles, who directed the film (as well as “Borat”). Universal also declined to make a production executive available for an interview, providing the following statement instead:

“ ‘Brüno’ uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia. By placing himself in radical and risky situations, Sacha Baron Cohen forces both the people Brüno meets and the audience itself to challenge their own stereotypes, preconceptions and discomforts.

“While any work that dares to address relevant cultural sensitivities might be misinterpreted by some or offend others, we believe the overwhelming majority of the audience will understand and appreciate the film’s inarguably positive intentions.”

The studio has twice shown unfinished versions of “Brüno” to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and said that test audiences have come away with a clear understanding of the film’s positive social message. Universal also said that it screened 20 minutes of unedited footage at a Texas film festival this year, and that blog coverage was overwhelmingly upbeat.

Marketing “Brüno” poses unusual challenges for Universal, as some multiplex chains will only run trailers to R-rated films before other R-rated movies. And a stunt at the MTV Movie Awards on June 1 may have damaged the movie’s credibility, film marketers say.

During the show Mr. Baron Cohen, dressed as Brüno, dangled above the audience from wires wearing a jock strap and giant white wings. He landed face down in the lap of the rapper Eminem, who stormed out of the theater. The problem: Eminem admitted to being in on the stunt — and thus faking his reaction — which may lead audiences to doubt the studio’s assertion that actors were not used in the film.

Meanwhile the debate among gay rights advocates goes on.

“We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and Universal Pictures have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia,” said Brad Luna, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign.

Cathy Renna, who left the Gay and Lesbian Alliance after 14 years to start her own similarly focused consulting firm, said she thinks gay audiences will greet the film warmly. “Of all minority groups I think gay people are the most likely to be able to laugh at themselves,” she said. “If nothing else, let’s hope this prompts a lot of conversation.”

Will the stereotypes Mr. Baron Cohen explores offer support to opponents of gay marriage?

“I don’t think that any conservative group is going to use ‘Brüno’ to make a point about how awful gay people are,” said Frank Voci, the founder of White Knot, a nonprofit group focused on gay rights. “If they try to go there, we can easily turn around and point out how horribly these people reacted to him being gay.”

Universal would be happy if more people just took the position of Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “Milk” and has been an outspoken opponent of California’s recent ban on gay marriage.

Asked for his thoughts on “Brüno,” Mr. Black responded by e-mail, “Sadly, I haven’t seen the film yet!”

A New CD That Has No Music, but Lots of Pictures

June 11, 2009
By BEN SISARIO
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/arts/music/11danger.html?_r=1

From the start, there was something mysterious about Danger Mouse’s latest project, “Dark Night of the Soul.”

Word of it first came at the South by Southwest music festival in March, on a poster that simply listed the name Danger Mouse — the record producer and member of the R&B duo Gnarls Barkley — along with the singer-songwriter Sparklehorse and, among others, the director David Lynch. A YouTube video in Mr. Lynch’s unmistakable style stirred interest but added no details.

It was classic teaser marketing. And yet when “Dark Night of the Soul” was finally unveiled a few weeks ago, it still left fans puzzled. The project, it turned out, is a large-format book-and-CD package that Danger Mouse was releasing by himself, with 50 photographs by Mr. Lynch intended as accompaniment to the album’s 13 songs. But the CD is blank and recordable, and a sticker on the shrink wrap explains cryptically: “For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”

Bloggers and journalists speculated widely about why Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton, had withdrawn the music from the book. A statement on the project’s Web site (dnots.com) blamed “an ongoing dispute with EMI.”

In response, EMI issued a statement that offered no greater clarity but hinted at a negotiation: “Danger Mouse is a brilliant, talented artist for whom we have enormous respect. We continue to make every effort to resolve this situation and we are talking to Brian directly. Meanwhile, we need to reserve our rights.”

In most cases this turn of events would signify defeat: an artist battles a record label, and his music vanishes down the memory hole. But in the peculiar way that Danger Mouse has built his career, “Dark Night of the Soul” seemed to be an oblique victory, in which failure at official business can generate notoriety and, ultimately, lead to success in other endeavors.

For fans the sticker’s winking reference to illegal downloading — “Dark Night of the Soul,” like most albums in the age of leaks, is widely if unofficially available free online — was amusingly familiar. Five years ago Danger Mouse released “The Grey Album,” a mash-up that used unauthorized Beatles and Jay-Z samples and became a bootleg Internet phenomenon. The once-obscure Danger Mouse was instantly catapulted to fame, getting high-profile gigs producing Gorillaz and others; Gnarls Barkley, his group with the singer Cee-Lo Green, scored a No. 1 hit around the world with “Crazy.”

“From ‘The Grey Album’ on, he has proven himself a master of improvisation,” said Jeff Chang, author of the hip-hop history “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.” “He’s really interesting tactically, in terms of trying to figure out how to position himself and still come out ahead.”

In a telephone interview Danger Mouse said that he and Sparklehorse (whose name is Mark Linkous) had worked on “Dark Night of the Soul” for two years, with a plan to maximize creative input from everyone involved: they gave instrumental tracks to singers they liked — among them Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes — and asked them to add vocal parts however they saw fit.

“We’d say, ‘We thought you might be great on this song,’ but didn’t tell them anything else,” Danger Mouse said. “ ‘Just listen to the music, and see if you have any ideas — some lyrics, or some vocal melodies.’ We trusted each person without having to guide them very much.”

Neither EMI nor Danger Mouse would comment on the legal matter. But according to several people with knowledge of the situation, who would not speak publicly because the contractual matters are confidential, Danger Mouse’s situation is most likely related to a long-term recording contract he signed early in his career with Lex Records, a British independent that later entered into a joint venture deal with EMI.

As part of that arrangement, EMI apparently ended up with global rights to certain subsequent recordings by Danger Mouse. But not all: Gnarls Barkley is signed to Downtown Records, with distribution by Atlantic. (Further complicating things, Tom Brown, the founder of Lex, said of Danger Mouse, “Ultimately he is signed to Lex Records.” But he would not elaborate.)

Lately EMI and Danger Mouse have been engaged in contentious renegotiation talks, these people say, although no new agreement has been reached, and Danger Mouse has pulled the music from “Dark Night of the Soul” because he feared he would be in breach of contract with EMI if he released the music through any other outlet.

Danger Mouse said he financed “Dark Night of the Soul” himself: he paid for all recording sessions, Mr. Lynch’s two-day photo shoot and the costs of printing the book. All artists involved worked without payment, he added.

“Dark Night of the Soul,” with the blank CD, is available for $50 in a limited edition of 5,000 copies, and the music can be streamed at NPR.org. Mr. Lynch’s photographs are on view at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles through July 11.

When asked, Danger Mouse entertained the idea that “The Grey Album” and “Dark Night of the Soul” were made more intriguing by the unorthodox way they were released. But he added that neither involved any intentional strategy to orchestrate controversy.

“I definitely knew that it was illegal,” he said of “The Grey Album,” “but I never thought it would be big enough for anybody to really care.”

In an interview Mr. Lynch chuckled at the absurdity of releasing a CD with no music. He had been invited to contribute visuals to the project, he said, but was so taken by the concept that he ended up singing two songs. One, the title track, summarizes the album’s haunted theme with a noirish piano part and a scratchy vocal that sounds like a lonely late-night radio transmission.

“The same way that visuals can come out, lyrics can come out,” Mr. Lynch said. “You’d listen to the music, and then here comes the mood, and here come the lyrics, and away you go. It’s like the Surrealists’ kind of thing, where you trick yourself into coming up with something.”

For his part, Danger Mouse said he was disappointed with the legal and financial complications of “Dark Night of the Soul.” But he said he was pleased that what was always meant to be a small, arty project has been able to reach audiences unaltered, however strange the delivery method. And given the controversy around the project, which burnishes Danger Mouse’s image as a subversive, it seems likely that the book will sell out eventually and earn back his investment.

“I’m just trying to break even with this, if that is possible,” he said.

“There wasn’t anything on the creative side that had to be compromised in order for this to come out,” he added. “So on the one hand, the whole thing is kind of bittersweet, but at least on the creative side it’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

What's It Gonna Take to Win?

Over the next four months, I’ll be sharing with you what our team of leading scientists discovers about the devastating effects that global warming is having on glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice in the Arctic. Our job is to bring the world face-to-face with the reality of global warming.

But, as we have seen in Congress with the current weak global warming bill, we need to work together to encourage our leaders to break from the powerful forces of the fossil fuels industry. That’s where you come in — to bring reality and science home, we need your help.

It’s going to take every single one of us getting involved and taking action to rescue the climate. Greenpeace will continue standing by the science and demanding that our leaders do what’s necessary to stop global warming. Stand with us today and get involved with our grassroots campaign in your community.

Get involved with our global warming campaign in your community today!

The Greenpeace Activist Network is designed for people like you who want to get involved to help stop global warming but don't live anywhere near one of our field organizers. Just let us know you're interested by filling out this form and we'll follow up with you personally.

It’s going to take all of us to make this happen — whether you’re on a ship in the Arctic or volunteering in your community. Our leaders will only listen to us when we make them listen.

Cookie Recipes from GOOP!

Tate’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
This is Tate’s recipe – the best, simplest chocolate chip cookie recipe – but the only difference is that I bake mine for eight minutes instead of twelve. Those extra four minutes yield Tate’s signature, crispy texture but I like them slightly chewy in the middle.

YIELD: about 40 cookies
2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) lightly salted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
1 teaspoon water
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, beaten
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (Nestlé really can’t be beat)
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.

Whisk the flour, baking soda and salt together in a bowl. In another large bowl, mix the butter with a wooden spoon to lighten it a bit and then mix in the sugars. Add the water, vanilla and eggs to the butter mixture. Stir in the flour mixture until just combined and then fold in the chocolate chips. Using two soup spoons, drop the cookies 2" apart onto two nonstick or greased cookie sheets. Bake for eight minutes, rotating the sheets after four minutes. Remove the cookies to a wire rack to cool, and repeat the process with the rest of the batter.

Katie Lee Joel’s Dark Chocolate Chunk and Dried Cherry Cookies
The summer before last, a mutual friend brought the lovely Katie Lee Joel and her husband William over for dinner. Much to my delight, she brought a fresh batch of these cookies with her. I adore the contrast of the dark chocolate and the cherries – heaven.

P.S. We added pecans to our second batch for a pecan lover in the house and it worked very well.

YIELD: about 4 dozen cookies
2 1/4 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
8 ounces dark chocolate, coarsely chopped (be sure to use a high-quality chocolate with more than 60% cacao)
1 cup dried cherries (about 6 ounces), coarsely chopped
1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped (optional)
Preheat the oven to 375ºF.

Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt together into a bowl.
In the bowl of an electric mixer (or in a bowl using a handmixer), beat the butter with the sugars until light and fluffy, about three minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until incorporated. Beat in the vanilla. On low speed, add the flour mixture. With a wooden spoon, fold in the chocolate, cherries and pecans (if you’re using them).

Scoop by the heaping tablespoonful onto two nonstick or greased cookie sheets. Bake until golden and chewy, about 12 minutes, rotating the sheets after six minutes. Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool and repeat the process with the remaining dough.

For more information about Katie Lee Joel, check out her website http://www.katieleejoel.com.

Evi’s Vanillekipferl
In London I live around the corner from a woman called Evi. Evi is an avid cook of Viennese food, a Stevie Wonder fanatic and a Holocaust survivor. She once made us a batch of these delicious cookies and I went through them in one day. She is sharing her very old, very secret recipe with us, and it is an honor!

Evi says:
“On the 12th of September in 1683, after years of occupation, the Turkish Army was defeated by the Austrians and retreated from Vienna and Austria. To celebrate this event, the Austrians created the ‘Vanillekipferl,’ shaped in the form of the Turkish flag. The rest is history and here’s my secret recipe. There are quite a few recipes for Vanillekipferl on the web but this is THE REAL McCOY!! If you eat more than twelve kipferl in one go, avoid checking your weight for twenty-four hours....”

YIELD: about 10 dozen very small cookies
1/3 cup superfine sugar
1/3 cup ground almonds
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 1/2 cups self-rising flour*
pinch of salt
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar

*If you can’t find self-rising flour, simply measure out one cup unbleached, all-purpose flour and remove two teaspoonsful. Add a half teaspoon salt and one-and-a-half teaspoons baking powder.

Mix the superfine sugar, almonds, butter, flour and salt together in a bowl with a wooden spoon or your hands. Let the dough chill in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.
Roll the dough into half-inch thick ropes and cut into quarter-inch thick slices. Shape each slice into a small crescent and place on ungreased cookie sheets. You can space them quite close together as they don’t expand that much. Let the cookies rest for half an hour.

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 350ºF. Bake the cookies for 12 minutes (until they’re barely browned), rotating the trays after six minutes. Move the cookies to a wire rack and let cool for ten minutes before sifting the confectioners’ sugar over them. Allow the cookies to cool completely before eating (if you can).

Chef Kate's Blondies
This recipe has to be the least healthy ever to be included in GOOP. Butter and sugar GALORE, but you know, you only live once. I didn’t even really know how good a blondie could be until I tried this one. These yield tons of squares so they are ideal for a bake sale. The ingredients are pretty decadent, so out of curiosity we did a calorie count: 160 calories a piece, if you cut them into 60 squares. Not too shabby.

YIELD: 60 squares
2 cups (4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups granulated cane sugar
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, firmly packed
4 large eggs
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
4 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups shredded unsweetened coconut
1 1/2 cups peanut butter chips
1 1/2 cups mini marshmallows
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.

Using an electric mixer (counter-top or hand-held), cream together the butter and sugars. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Add the vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in three parts, combining well after each addition. Using a wooden spoon, fold in the coconut, peanut butter chips and marshmallows (it’s an arm workout).

Using a rubber spatula, spread the batter evenly in a nonstick or parchment-lined standard cookie sheet (12" x 18") with a 1" rim. Bake for 15 minutes, cover loosely with a piece of aluminum foil and bake for an additional 12 minutes. Let cool completely and then cut into 60 squares; they will be soft and chewy on the inside.

For more information about Chef Kate, check out her website: www.chefkatealiveandcooking.com.

Interested in GOOP? Check it out at goop.com!

Joblessness Hits 9.4%, but Slowing Losses Raise Hopes

You know that old saying that you don't know how bad something is until it hits home, well, it has finally hit home for me... In the past I could find seasonal summer work between semesters no problem. I'd show up in STL and submit a handful of applications and in a few days I'd have a job - Easy Peasy. Not so anymore. Since the beginning of May I have submitted more than 80 applications for preferrably full-time, but will accept part time, work. Most don't even bother to respond, and the maybe 10 that have mostly said sorry we can't afford seasonal work this year. Full-time regular employees are supporting the summer rush without the extra help of years past, because companies simply cannot afford to hire the seasonal help they once did. Today is the first day since I came back to Missouri on the 23rd of May that I have not spent hours looking for leads. Why you may ask? Because I've exhausted every lead. I've applied for retail, warehouse, gas station, non-profit, hotel, parks, etc. and either the few jobs they did have were filled by people they rehire every year or they just aren't hiring, so where does that leave little ol' me? Frantically worrying about how I will make my car payment and find the money to return to school and live the 11 days I am expected to be there before loan money comes in. How will I find an apartment before they are all snatched up by other students if I don't have money for a holding fee? Times are hard, and finally months into the economic crisis they have hit home.

June 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/business/economy/06jobs.html?_r=1&hpBy PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY

The American economy shed another 345,000 jobs in May as the unemployment rate spiked to 9.4 percent, but the losses were far smaller than economists expected, amplifying hopes of recovery.

“It supports the idea that before the end of the year and maybe even by late summer we could be at flat employment,” meaning no more net job losses, said Alan D. Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore. “During the course of next year, we’ll probably start to feel better.”

Wall Street saw some fresh signs of potential revival in the better-than-expected report from the Labor Department on Friday, and stocks moved moderately higher after some hesitation.

But many analysts emphasized that the marked slowdown in the pace of job market deterioration — while positive — did not alter the reality that the economy remained very weak, with grave challenges still bearing down on millions of households and businesses.

“These are still terrible numbers,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics. “We’re a million miles away from a recovery.”

Rather than a sign of renewed vigor, the latest monthly snapshot of the job market suggests the end of the acute panic suffered last fall, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed and credit froze throughout much of the economy.

“That wild disgorging of inventories and workers that we saw in the aftermath of Lehman, what you’re seeing is the reversal of that dynamic,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “You had companies throughout the world that suddenly had serious concerns about access to capital and they slashed spending and cut workers well beyond any connection to demand. There’s now a better tone to the data.”

But conspicuously absent, Mr. Barbera said, was any sign of a fresh engine for economic growth. Although home prices appear to have hit bottom in some areas of the country, construction remains weak. The auto industry and retailing remain mired in distress. The job market is likely to remain in the doldrums for many months, he said.

For more than a decade, economic growth and attendant American job opportunities were fueled by swelling wealth and liberal access to credit. As home prices soared, homeowners availed themselves of myriad forms of credit that turned increased real estate values into cash. They sprinkled this money on an array of industries, generating jobs from auto factories and lumber mills to construction companies and restaurants.

Now, as paychecks disappear, consumers are increasingly inclined to save — a source of broad grief in a country in which consumer spending makes up roughly 70 percent of economic activity.

“It’s welcome news that payrolls are declining more in line with other recessions, but we need consumption,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “People are not going to be moving forward based on housing wealth, and they’re not going to be taking on debt. They’ve got to get wage growth.”

Indeed, wage growth has been stagnating even as gasoline and medical costs rise, putting pressure on household finances. Wages were 3.1 percent higher in May than a year ago, but that growth slowed drastically this year. In April and May, average hourly wages grew just 0.1 percent, to a seasonally adjusted $18.54, from $18.52, according to the Labor Department. Wages for manufacturing workers fell 0.1 percent.

The jobs report presented a statistical puzzle. On the one hand, the net decline in jobs was much smaller than expected and the lowest figure since September. The economy lost an average of more than 700,000 jobs a month during the first three months of the year. The pace of losses eased to a revised 504,000 in April and then fell more in May, a welcome sign of improvement.

At the same time, the unemployment rate leapt to its highest rate in more than a quarter-century, reinforcing fears that joblessness will probably reach double digits.

This disconnect is a reflection of the way in which the government collects jobs data. The number of jobs comes from a survey of employers, while the unemployment data is derived from a survey of households. In April and May, the number of people who told surveyors they were actively looking for work increased by more than one million. These people would have previously been excluded from the unemployment calculation as not being part of the labor force. Now, they are back in the hunt — an apparent sign of improvement — yet struggling to secure positions in a still awful market.

The jobs report underscored the lean offerings, with May bringing another brutal stretch of layoffs, furloughs and pink slips. Manufacturers cut 156,000 jobs, including big losses for workers who make machinery, cars and car parts and computers.

That picture will almost surely worsen: this week, General Motors, now in bankruptcy, announced it was closing or idling 14 plants across the country, including several in Michigan, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate. The closings will affect as many as 20,000 workers.

Construction jobs fell by 59,000, though that was a marked improvement from just a month ago, when 108,000 construction workers lost their jobs.

Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 23,500 jobs. Professional and business services shed 51,000 jobs, though that represented a slower pace of loss than in recent months.

Over all, the economy has now shed six million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, and some economists expect an additional two million job losses. Even after the economy resumes growth, perhaps later this year, businesses are likely to be conservative in their expansion, credit will probably remain tighter than in years past, and consumers will be more inclined to save.

Instead of hiring full-time workers, many employers will probably rely on temporary hires or simply add hours for their existing employees.

“There’s no question that the jobless rate is going to continue to rise,” said Bernard Baumohl, managing director of the Economic Outlook Group. “It’s a dismal job market. It’s going to remain awful easily for the balance of this year. Even when the economy begins to recover, we might be witnessing the mother of all jobless recoveries.”

That would keep the pressure on the seven million Americans who have been out of work for 15 weeks or longer — the largest number ever.

Dante Whitfield is among those ranks. Since losing his job as a legal courier in February, Mr. Whitfield, 35, said he had been riding the bus around San Jose, Calif., in a futile quest for work, subsisting on unemployment checks and the value menu at McDonald’s.

“There’s days I come home in tears,” he said. “You just feel lost. You don’t know what to do.”