D's Webclippings

July 27, 2007- Cake, but No Presents, Please

2007-10-04T15:08:00.000-04:00

CRANFORD, N.J., July 22 — At Gavin Brown’s 4th birthday party, the usual detritus lined the edges of the backyard: sippy cups, sunscreen, water shoes, stuffed animals. There were 44 guests and as many buns on the grill, in addition to an elaborate ice cream cake adorned with a fire truck. For the adults, there was sangria and savory corn salsa.

But the only gift in sight was a little red Matchbox hook and ladder rig. All the bounty from Gavin’s birthday — $240 in checks and cash collected in a red box next to a plastic fire helmet — went to the Cranford Fire Department.

“Thanks, buddy,” Lt. Frank Genova said on Sunday when Gavin handed over the loot, after which he took a tour of the pumper truck and tried on a real captain’s helmet. With the party proceeds, the birthday boy suggested, the firefighters “can buy new fire trucks, new equipment, and more food.”

In part to teach philanthropy and altruism, and in part as a defense against swarms of random plastic objects destined to clutter every square foot of their living space, a number of families are experimenting with gift-free birthday parties, suggesting that guests donate money or specified items to the charity of the child’s choice instead.

Witness, perhaps, the first hyper-parenting trend that does not reek of wanton excess.

Grown-ups who have everything have long politely requested “presence” instead of presents for later-in-life birthdays and anniversaries, and some couples have recently shunned the wedding registry, instead directing loved ones to donate.

Now, the trickle-down effect: Annie Knapp of Milford, N.J., collected $675 at her Sweet 16 in April for Heifer International, which provides livestock to poor families. Zachary Greene, who lives in the Chicago suburbs, turned 8 in November surrounded by books that his friends brought for a local reading program. And in Randolph, N.J., 6-year-old Jack Knapp (no relation to Annie) even got his grandparents to lug a 50-pound bag of kibble to his party for the local animal shelter.

Maggie Jones, director of Children for Children, a New York nonprofit, said that in the last year the number of participants in the group’s Celebrations program — which encourages “a tradition of giving” around milestones like birthdays, bar or bat mitzvahs and graduations — has more than doubled to 100-plus families. Ms. Jones said that she knew of four private schools in New York City that had made such parties the standard.

Davida Isaacson, a principal with Myerberg Shain & Associates, a fund-raising consulting firm, says that no-gift parties are one prong of a growing movement to involve even the youngest children in philanthropy. Some parents match children’s charitable donations dollar for dollar, she said, while others invite them to research causes and help decide which ones to support.

She recalled one wealthy couple telling their son when he was 18 or 19 that they were dividing their estate as if they had four children instead of three, the fourth being charity.

“The kid stormed out of the room,” she said. “And he came back a few minutes later and said, ‘You know, that’s really neat.’ ”

The gift-free party does have its detractors, most eloquent among them Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners syndicated column.

“People seem to forget that you can’t spend other people’s money, even for a good cause,” Ms. Martin said in a phone interview. “Do you really want the birthday child to grow up hating philanthropy because it’s done him out of his birthday presents?”

While she sympathizes with parents’ desire to avoid materialistic feeding frenzies, Ms. Martin advised: “They’d be much better off getting together with the other parents and agreeing on very small presents.” Besides, she noted, children learn valuable lessons giving gifts they would rather keep for themselves — and saying thank you even for things they do not like.

Toyi Ward, president of Favor Party Planning in Somerset, N.J., recalled a slightly traumatic no-gift party in which the birthday boy watched guests pile up items destined for underprivileged children through the group Toys for Tots. “The birthday child was 4, and it was a little difficult, because there were some toys in there he might have really wanted,” Ms. Ward recalled.

Catherine Racette gave the thumbs-down to a recent no-gifts party she attended (bringing a gift anyhow). “I mean, it’s the kid’s birthday,” she wrote on a community bulletin board, Maplewoodonline.com. “Let them get gifts — that’s kind of the fun of being a kid.”

Bill Doherty, who helped create Birthdays Without Pressure, a Web site opposed to expensive, competitive parties in the Nickelodeon set, said the no-gift notion was “great, especially if the child is involved in choosing the charity,” but cautioned that “it could become another source of competition.”

“Kind of like rich people and their gala charity balls,” he explained, “so people would ask, ‘How much did your child raise for charity?’ ”

In Randolph, N.J., Jack Knapp’s family has a five-year tradition of redirecting birthday benefits: They have collected dress-up clothes for a girl with cancer, items for the pediatric emergency room at Morristown Memorial Hospital and groceries for the Interfaith Food Pantry.

After seeing her two older siblings treated like heroes when they dropped off their haul, the youngest, Emily, recently told her mother, Mindy Knapp, that she wants gifts for her 4th birthday next month to go to the neonatal unit. Not that she can define neonatal.

“She said, ‘Could we give stuff to the babies at the hospital?’ Mrs. Knapp said. “Now they wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.”

Mrs. Knapp said her children’s grandparents “always support whatever cause the kids are into,” but also insist on giving them gifts, noting, “Otherwise it would be like a scene from ‘Mommie Dearest.’ ” As for skeptics, Mrs. Knapp said, “once they come to the party and see how the kids are all so excited, every single parent who expressed any doubt to me has said later, ‘I take it back; it’s a beautiful thing you’re teaching your kids.’ ”

Last year, Jack went to a party for twins where there was what Mrs. Knapp described as “a mountain of birthday presents.”

“He went up to them and said, ‘Wow, who’s getting all that stuff?’ ” she recalled. “It never occurred to him that they were bringing them home.”

Here at Gavin’s party, the 20 children did not bring gifts, but they left with them: organic cotton Ecobags filled with fruit leathers, likewise organic, and wooden toys.

Gavin’s mother, Shelley Brown, said she began talking with her son about the possibility of a present-free party several months ago. “We’re trying to raise him in a way of not being too much of a consumer,” said Ms. Brown, 35, who carried his year-old brother, Griffin, in a sling most of the afternoon. “He definitely has enough things.”

Kyle Miller of Cranford, whose 2-year-old daughter, Cady, attended the party, appreciated the life lesson that came with it. “We’re incredibly fortunate — we have an abundance of material things — but maybe that’s not the message we want to give our kids,” she said. “We want a different message.”

Another guest, Glenn Johnson, admitted to being a bit nervous about the prospect of showing up at a child’s party empty-handed (though he did bring $20 for the firefighters). So a model airplane, neatly wrapped, sat outside in his Toyota, just in case.

July 25, 2007- Fight Song at Ozarks: Work Hard and Avoid Debt

2007-10-04T15:03:00.000-04:00

I know of just the right place to implement this!!

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On Education

By JOSEPH BERGER

POINT LOOKOUT, Mo.

Like many undergraduates, students at the College of the Ozarks here work their way through school, though they often do such unconventional campus jobs as milking cows at dawn in the college’s barns and baking fruit breads for sale to donors.

But what is truly different about Hard Work U. — as the college styles itself — is that all 1,345 students must work 15 hours per week to pay off the entire cost of tuition — $15,900 per year. If they work summers, as one-third are doing this summer, they pay off their $4,400 room and board as well. Work study is not an option as it is at most campuses; it is the college’s raison d’être.

This is a college that is philosophically opposed to students starting careers with an Ozark mountain of debt — 95 percent graduate debt free — and it believes that students who put sweat equity into their education value it more.

“I find I take more pride in doing well in class when I know I’ve washed dishes to be able to take that class,” said Sarah Ledoux, a sophomore from Deridder, La.

Other students make similar remarks on this campus, spread across a thousand acres of the hardscrabble hills and hollows of southwestern Missouri. Those students and the college’s longtime president, Jerry C. Davis, think the up-by-the-bootstraps credo is one that more campuses should adopt. Too many parents, they say, think children should focus only on the “full college experience” of classes, clubs and sports, and be spared the economic realities or have those realities postponed through loans.

“The work ethic is not what it used to be,” Mr. Davis said in his Georgia drawl. “When you go out into the real world, they don’t care where you went to school. They care if you show up on time, if you don’t do the job right, if you’ve got a good attitude. Employers will tell you that graduates of College of the Ozarks have qualities they like.”

Mr. Davis, a self-made man who overcame a life that included a broken home and expulsions from two colleges, says that his school’s outlook is particularly pertinent in an era when the price of tuition can buy you a Mercedes-Benz, and when loan companies are so eager to hand out money that lenders have been accused of offering stock deals to college officials.

The College of the Ozarks — a four-year college since 1965, and rated No. 30 by U.S. News and World Report among Midwestern colleges offering both liberal arts and professional degrees — is one of seven so-called work colleges. Six describe themselves as Christian institutions and often, like Ozarks, are socially and politically conservative.

At Ozarks, drinking is forbidden, men and women live in separate dormitories and students must attend seven chapel services a year, whatever religion they are. The political outlook is evident in campus speakers like Margaret Thatcher and Tommy Franks, the retired general who led the Iraq invasion.

If work colleges have flourished through an almost spiritual faith in self-reliance, the practical economics are clearly not suited for every campus. Roger Lehecka, the former dean of students at Columbia and a consultant to scholarship programs including one at The New York Times, points out that working 15 hours a week amounts to earning roughly $6,000 for two semesters, a small portion of a year at Columbia that can cost more than $45,000.

“No way a kid could do that working 15 hours,” Mr. Lehecka said.

Colleges like Columbia pay high salaries to attract top scholars and offer students a smorgasbord of electives as well as amenities like Olympic-scale gyms. College of the Ozarks is run on a lean staff — it has only four deans — and pays full professors under $70,000 a year for teaching more hours per semester, 12. English majors can avail themselves of a bare-bones survey course like 20th-century British literature but not of a course just in James Joyce.

College of the Ozarks also gets students to do its maintenance and office jobs; student labor accounts for 7.5 percent of the $51 million budget, said Rick Hughes, the business manager. And the college has a $362.8 million endowment, 173rd among the nation’s colleges, which allows it to hand out $11.5 million in scholarships. Three of four students have family incomes low enough to qualify for Federal Pell grants of up to $4,310.

Avoiding debt is a powerful force in a region where the anguish of the Depression has been whispered down the generations. A Thomas Hart Benton painting of the embattled Joad family that used to advertise the movie “The Grapes of Wrath” is in the college’s museum.

“Growing up it was always taught you never bought something unless you had the money to pay for it,” said Eden Doss, 19, the daughter of a waitress from Berryville, Ark., who works as a researcher at that museum.

The other day, half a dozen women were mixing the candied cherries, pecans and dates for one-pound, mail-order fruit cakes that sell for $13 apiece. There was Crystal Klung, 21, of Shickley, Neb., the daughter of a mechanic and nursing home aide whose sister Cassie is saddled with loans from a Nebraska college, and Lauren Smollen, 21, who comes from a single-parent household in Jefferson City.

“My family doesn’t have a lot of money,” Ms. Smollen said. “Here you’re pretty much guaranteed to have college paid for. You don’t have debt, which is a pretty big deal when you don’t have a lot of money.”

MANY students work off campus as well, taking jobs in nearby Branson, with 49 theaters graced by names like Andy Williams and Dolly Parton that mix gospel, patriotism and glitz with country music.

Students of less-than-steely discipline admit that work sometimes cuts into study time and social life. Joe McCloud, 17, who was working with a student crew dragging lawnmowers when the heat index stood at 105, said that while the college mattered more because “you worked for it,” he didn’t get much down time.

“You’re so tired,” he said, “you go to your room and sleep.”

For some, the jobs are steppingstones toward a career. Annette Sain, a 1986 alumna, got interested as an undergraduate in work at the college’s museum. Now she manages it.

And Tim Stroud, 19, of Hume, N.Y., who was tenderly hooking up Holsteins to the vacuum lines of milking machines, hopes to use his new skills to start an agricultural business.

He said he was glad that he would be able to spend the money he earned on buying cows, not paying off loans.

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com

July 24, 2007- Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?

2007-10-04T14:59:00.000-04:00

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Basics

By NATALIE ANGIER

Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion.

O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “Rats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “rats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.”

Yet our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too.

And though rats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better mouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

There are more than 120 species of rat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black rat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown rat, also called the Norway rat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway rat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the rat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms. The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.

Scientists began using albino Norway rats for research sometime around the turn of the 19th century, and though the rats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab rats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild rats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

In another recent study, Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, and his colleague Allison Foote were astonished to discover that rats display evidence of metacognition: they know what they know and what they don’t know. Metacognition, a talent previously detected only in primates, is best exemplified by the experience of students scanning the questions on a final exam and having a pretty good sense of what their grade is likely to be. In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Rats do not lie, and, when the stakes are this high, neither do they gamble.

July 22, 2007- Did McDonald’s Give In to Temptation?

2007-10-04T14:56:00.000-04:00

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The Feed

By ANDREW MARTIN

IT wasn’t too long ago that the only thing McDonald’s seemed good at was making people fat.

Staggered by overexpansion, listless sales and a barrage of negative publicity linking its food to obesity, the chain’s glory days appeared to be fading.

In 2003, company executives set about reinventing McDonald’s by focusing on getting better rather than bigger. In the last few years, McDonald’s has seemed to do just about everything right.

The chain has spruced up its restaurants, improved its advertising and introduced menu items that have helped to reshape its image and reinvigorate sales.

Premium salads and apple dippers brought moms back. Chicken wraps lured people during off-hours; higher-quality coffee turbocharged breakfast business.

McDonald’s stock price has quadrupled in the last four years, and the company has reported positive same-store sales, an important industry measure, every month since April 2003.

Given those results, a new McDonald’s menu item is a bit of a stunner. Remember Supersize sodas? They’re back, except this time the chain is trying a new name. Meet the “Hugo,” a 42-ounce drink now available for as little as 89 cents in some markets. A Hugo soda contains about 410 calories.

McDonald’s might as well have called it the Tubbo.

Making matters worse, Hugo ads are available in several languages, making sure that minorities — who are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic — are aware of the budget beverage.

McDonald’s officials said they were simply offering customers a variety of choices. And they emphasized that the Hugo was a summer promotion and available only in some markets.

“People, I believe, tend to drink more during the summer,” said Danya Proud, a McDonald’s spokeswoman. “People are out and about.”

She said the Hugo was being offered because of customer demand, and so far, it has sold quite well. Ms. Proud cautioned about comparing the Hugo to McDonald’s old Supersize menu.

“That’s not what this is about,” she said. “You have to put it in context with the rest of our menu.”

By offering the Hugo, McDonald’s isn’t doing anything different from its rivals, particularly Burger King, which has made huge servings, like the quadruple-patty BK Stacker sandwich, a signature of its menu.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, says she feels some sympathy for fast-food restaurants. Most are public companies that must continually find ways to grow, and she says that offering bigger sizes is an easy way to do it.

“The companies are stuck,” she said. “They must grow. Therefore they are looking for products that are going to sell. And guess what? The healthy ones don’t.”

Some nutritionists, including Ms. Nestle, think that an increase in portion sizes is partially responsible for the increase in obesity, and the evidence is compelling.

The number of people who are overweight or obese has increased sharply since the early 1980s, and during that period, portion sizes have increased greatly. Ms. Nestle and Lisa R. Young, a nutritionist at N.Y.U., found that portion sizes offered by fast-food chains are two to five times larger than when first introduced.

When McDonald’s opened in 1955 the largest soda was 7 fluid ounces, according to Ms. Nestle and Ms. Young. Now a small soda is 16 ounces, and a child’s soda is 12 ounces. And what was once considered a normal adult meal is now a child’s portion. A patty the same size as the original McDonald’s hamburger and a serving of French fries, for instance, is now offered to children as part of the Happy Meal, Ms. Young said.

The problem with bigger portions has been well documented. They are undoubtedly good deals. But put simply, if people are offered more food, they eat it.

Yet the Supersize phenomenon backfired for fast-food restaurants, particularly for McDonald’s, which is the biggest hamburger chain and carefully cultivates its wholesome, family-friendly image.

As nutrition advocates increasingly harped on fast food’s role in the obesity epidemic, so, too, did books like “Fast Food Nation,” a surprise blockbuster that focused on McDonald’s role in industrializing farming and food.

Worse yet for McDonald’s was the 2004 documentary “Super Size Me” in which the filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, vomited on camera and gained 25 pounds.

McDonald’s dropped its Supersize menu that same year.

OF course, McDonald’s remains a burger joint, and its turnaround has been driven in part by brisk sales of its dollar menu, which includes double cheeseburgers, McChicken sandwiches and fries.

Sales of healthier items on the dollar menu remain relatively weak. “Double cheeseburgers always outsold salads 10 to 1,” said John Glass, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. But salads and yogurt provide a halo effect that makes the dollar menu more palatable. The Hugo is harder to swallow.

“They do not have to go there,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president for Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm. “Common sense has to prevail. No one has to drink that big of a serving.”

Ms. Young, who tracks portion sizes of fast food , said McDonald’s deserved credit in 2004 for dropping its Supersize menu and reducing portions. Neither Burger King nor Wendy’s followed suit, she said.

Wendy’s, she said, simply changed the name. A “Biggie” drink became a medium.

Now, Ms. Young accused McDonald’s of doing the same thing with the Hugo. “They got rid of Supersize and got all that good publicity,” she said. “I just think it’s a dirty trick.”

“I think they would get a lot of heat if they reintroduced Supersize,” she said, “but basically Hugo equals Supersize.”

McDonald’s has wisely recognized that its competition isn’t just other fast-food restaurants, but also coffee shops and convenience stores like 7-Eleven, where the Big Gulp remains a best seller.

But given the size of McDonald’s and its status as a cultural icon, it will always be held to a different standard. After all, Morgan Spurlock didn’t eat Burger King’s Whoppers for a month.

Hugo-size me? Not a bad name for a sequel.

The Feed is a new, monthly column about the food and beverage industry. E-mail: ajmartin@nytimes.com.

July 22, 2007- Orthodox Paradox

2007-10-04T14:54:00.000-04:00

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By NOAH FELDMAN

A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League. To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”) Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.” Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

July 23, 2007- Barbie Gets Another Accessory: An MP3 Player and More Stuff on Her Web Site

2007-10-04T14:51:00.000-04:00

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By LOUISE STORY

First, Barbie had Ken. Now, Barbie has a docking station.

A new doll hitting retail shelves this week is familiar in many ways — she’s got outfits galore — but she also has some unusual features: this Barbie, who is smaller and less shapely than her standard namesake, functions as an MP3 music player.

And when her feet are plugged into the iPodesque docking station that she comes with, she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com Web site.

The new doll is a roundabout way of charging for online content. Instead of asking young Web surfers to punch in their parents’ credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first. Some of these sites (like the Barbie one) can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites — but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen).

The trends that have brought about BarbieGirls, Webkinz and their ilk are clear: While sales of dolls, action figures and outdoor toys are down, electronics sales to children were up 16.6 percent over the last two years as of May, the latest month available from the NPD Group, a research firm that tracks retail trends. The total toy industry’s annual sales were up just 0.8 percent in May, compared with two years ago.

With children’s leisure-time habits shifting online, toy companies are responding with new products that can be construed as fun both online and offline. That Barbie in the docking station? Go to a physical store and buy her an extra outfit, and you get access to even more Web content.

Products like these represent a change not only in the design and function of toys, but also in how toy makers use their Web properties. Mattel, for instance, like many consumer goods companies, has until now treated Barbie.com, HotWheels.com and its 22 or so other Web sites as advertising forums, places to showcase toys with the hope that children will nag their parents for them. But now Mattel and others are trying to turn their sites into money-makers in their own right. Although BarbieGirls toys are just now hitting the market, Mattel has paved the way for them: about 3 million people have registered since April 27 on the BarbieGirls Web site, a virtual world where playing games can earn a visitor play money — “B Bucks” — that can be spent on the likes of miniskirts, tiaras or home accessories. And, that’s without Mattel advertising the BarbieGirls site, even on its Barbie.com home page.

Mattel’s new toy follows the success of Webkinz, a line of Web-savvy stuffed animals made by Ganz, which also sells various sigh-inducing (albeit unplugged) teddy bears. Each Webkinz comes with a number code that, once entered online, starts an “adoption” process and ushers the owner into a virtual world that amounts to a Second Life for the grade-school set.

More such products are on the way. This month Zizzle, the company that makes Pirates of the Caribbean toys (not to mention Lucky the Incredible Wonder Pup, perhaps the first stuffed Labradoodle) is introducing an online/offline toy. SpotzGirl.com is a bubblegum-pink Web site with games (that people can play free) plus a collection of girly images (pussycats, hearts) that can be made into round physical tokens.

How does one make them? With the help of the Spotz Maker, a new-age button-maker that will be available in stores for $24.99. Girls will be able to create jewelry, decorate picture frames and collect and trade their Spotz, which are sort of like charm bracelet tokens.

“Over the next few years, you’ll see a lot of companies finding ways to create products that are Web enabled,” said, Marc Rosenberg, chief marketing officer at Zizzle. “The monetization for us comes from the product, and not from the Web.”

The concept behind Web-connected toys is not new. In the late 1990s, a number of toy companies introduced physical goods that could be used to unlock online goodies.

One noteworthy attempt came from The Learning Company, an educational software company that was owned for a short time by Mattel. But concepts like physical telescopes that could zoom to far-away islands when aimed at an Internet-connected computer failed to take off, in large part because Internet connections were too slow.

But times have changed tremendously. “Kids look at video content or virtual content as their toys,” said Jessi Dunne, executive vice president of global toys for Disney. “There isn’t a distinction between — ‘That’s a toy’ and ‘That’s an online game.’ ”

These days stores routinely sell out of the $10 to $13 Webkinz — pandas, lions, hippos and other animals that unlock the online fun on “Webkinz World.” There, on the site, customers can play with avatars of their pets, shop for them using “KinzCash,” decorate their pets’ rooms, enter online tournaments and chat with their real-world friends.

“The Webkinz concept is still doing very well,” said Robert A. Eckert, Mattel’s chief executive, in the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call. “That phenomenon is real, and will continue to do well.”

So real, indeed, that the starter set for the BarbieGirls site — sold for $59.99 — will be one of this holiday season’s main Barbie products. Mattel plans to run some television ads for the product in the fall, but the site is expected to be the primarily driver of sales, said Chuck Scothon, general manager and senior vice president of girls, Mattel Brands.

“For girls to understand the level of detail, the level of content, truly the experience of BarbieGirls,” Mr. Scothon said, “we wanted to allow them to play on the site.”

Toy companies also may benefit from the Web by using it to provide add-ons to products. Toy makers could sell cheaper products with a base-level of features, then allow customers to log online to choose what custom functions they want to download, said John Rose, a senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group and leader of the firm’s Global Convergence Initiative.

Even as toy companies cash in, some media executives are wondering if they, too, might use physical products to generate new revenue for their Web sites. Neopets.com, for instance, a virtual world of whimsical creatures and games, draws more than 10 million visitors a month, according to Viacom, which owns it, and although T-shirts and other Neopet-related merchandise is for sale, it is not the main draw.

MTV, a Viacom subsidiary, has started marketing toys that relate to its Web content. Earlier this month, the network introduced a music video game, “Rock Band,” in partnership with Electronic Arts. The game allows up to four people to play along with various songs using physical instruments hooked into an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

“We’re looking at it as more of an add-on. Can we do something a little bit extra or a little bit different?” said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, which includes MTV, Nickeolodeon, VH1 and other networks. “The idea of connecting experiences is very, very important to us, but the absolute model is not established.”

The Walt Disney Company, too, has gotten into the act. Last year, it introduced a digital camera that lets people download images of Disney characters from its Web site to their photos. Disney will introduce an analogous video camera this fall and has other online/offline toys in development, said Ms. Dunne of Disney.

“I think Disney’s a perfect example of where it will work,” she said. “We have an advantage as a media company because we have all this, where toy companies have to create content. That’s not necessarily their sweet spot.”

July 15, 2007- Alcohol Goes on a Health Kick

2007-10-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

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By ALEX WILLIAMS

On Monday around 9 p.m., three young Brooklynites stopped into Counter, a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village. Laughing and chatting, they sampled organic raspberries, poached pears, fresh pineapple and strawberries.

That this bounty was found not tableside but at the bar, where the restaurant’s menu of organic cocktails has been steadily expanding, only heightened the appeal.

“It’s the same thing as top-shelf liquor,” said Nick Guffey, 28, a massage therapist with an ink-black shag haircut, referring to drinks like his red-wine-and-poached-pear organic cocktail. “You can drink a ton and not wake up with a hangover.”

Ellen Pugliese, 24, a publicist friend next to him, agreed. “It’s better than drinking soda or something with syrup,” she said.

Ayn Teigman, 24, a legal assistant, went further. “I drank my dinner a couple of times. I’m kind of proud of that,” she said, rattling off a few of the fresh ingredients she has used, like pomegranate and strawberries. “And muddled cucumber,” she added. “That’s a vegetable, right?”

In an era of “natural” cigarettes, trans-fat-free chips and low-carb beer, it is probably no surprise that that last guilty pleasure, the cocktail, is trying to atone for its sins. And it isn’t just vegan restaurants serving more vitamin-rich vodka mixes and slinging vegetable gardens in a glass.

Whether absurd or merely inevitable, the idea of healthier tippling has started to catch on among those who have embraced things like organic food and low-sugar diets. Always ready to pounce on a fad, mixologists at trendy bars, restaurants and clubs in New York and Los Angeles have begun creating concoctions from organic fruit and vegetable purées and vitamin-filled sports drinks instead of gooey syrups.

At the same time, a new generation of liquor brands built around herbal extracts and antioxidant-rich ingredients like green tea, pomegranate and the Brazilian açaí berry (the current “it” fruit) have hit the market. Sugary cosmopolitans, apple martinis and mojitos have started to look as dated as “Sex and the City” reruns. A more contemporary alternative would be a drink like Vitamin Dj, mixed from freshly juiced organic carrots, Granny Smith apple juice, elderflower liqueur and vodka, which was introduced a few weeks ago at the Midtown restaurant Django.

“Everybody seems to be getting healthy,” said Mark Murphy, the executive chef at Ditch Plains, a surfer-inspired restaurant in the West Village. Or at least healthier. Mr. Murphy recently created a line of cocktails mixing vodka with low-calorie, sugar- and aspartame-free airforce Nutrisoda-brand sodas — each containing a day’s dose of vitamins C, E, B6, and B12 — as a more health-conscious variation on the Red Bull and vodka.

The idea that even alcohol could be more beneficent represents a collision of broader trends, said Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the Distilled Spirits Council. As people have become more health literate and corn-syrup-phobic, labels like “green” and organic have become faddish, and the culinary shift toward farm-fresh, locally grown ingredients has crossed over from kitchen to bar. “All of these epicurean issues are coming together in a martini glass, as it were,” Mr. Coleman said.

The healthful-cocktail concept received an imprint of credibility in April, when researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with Thai colleagues, reported that adding alcohol to strawberries and blackberries increased their antioxidant capacity (although alcohol still causes some cell damage, some scientists cautioned). While skeptics could validly point out that trying to mix a Theragran’s worth of vitamins into a tumbler of 80 proof makes no more sense than ordering a Diet Coke with a supersize burger and fries, nutritionists do not necessarily scoff at the idea. Wahida Karmally, the director of nutrition at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the Columbia University Medical Center, said that the sugar in a traditional margarita, loaded with syrupy triple sec, “is just empty calories.”

“If people are trying to make a syrupy drink,” she said, “they might want to purée kiwi fruit, which will give you the syrupy flavor, but also give you nutrients as well as fiber. Kiwi is packed with vitamin C.”

The waiters at Sushi Samba, a singles-friendly restaurant and lounge with locations in New York, Miami, Chicago and Tel Aviv, have recently been hawking the health properties of a drink called the Samba Juice, made with the açaí berry — a sort of super-grape harvested from the Brazilian rainforest that has more antioxidants than blueberries or cranberries, said Paul Tanguay, the beverage director. “People think it is guilt-free,” Mr. Tanguey said. “But it still contains alcohol.”

The chain sells up to 50 of the $11 drink per location each night — about a quarter the number of caipirinhas, but the number is steadily growing, he said.

The caterer Serena Bass has introduced a number of new vegetable-based drinks, like one blending yellow-tomato purée with cilantro-infused vodka. “They’re popular on the beach,” she said. “You don’t want to drink some peach-infused thing with a crab cake.”

The concept is catching on among young trendsetters, too.

Gemma Hart Corsano, 28, a photo director and event planner, said she often uses fresh fruit purées instead of sugary mixers for cocktails at dinner parties at her Brooklyn home. “It’s the same thing as a healthy steak,” she added. “Would you rather eat a grass-fed free-range steak, or a hormone-pumped one filled with steroids that lived in a cage its whole life?”

But not all are sold on the idea. David Wondrich, the drinks correspondent for Esquire magazine who said he was recently asked by his editors for the first time to devise a recipe for a healthful cocktail, said such new vegetable-based drinks sound like “they would make for a great soup.”

A cocktail, he said, “should be a reward, not a chore,” adding that an ideal cocktail should be a bit naughty. “You don’t want it to be straight out of a doctor’s office.”

It isn’t just ingredients that have become more health-focused, but the liquors themselves. A number of “organic” rums, vodkas and gins are now available, and would seem to make for a more healthful cocktail. But Mr. Coleman of the Distilled Spirits Council said the concept of organic spirits was somewhat meaningless, since the distillation process burns off impurities. But that hasn’t stopped several companies from trying to appeal to health-conscious consumers by introducing spirits containing pomegranate (witness Pama, a liqueur that blends “all-natural pomegranate juice” with vodka and tequila) and green tea (TyKu, a sake-based liqueur, has popped up in gossip columns in the hands of celebrities like Laurence Fishburne and Kevin Spacey).

In May, two brothers, Courtney and Carter Reum, both former investment bankers, introduced VeeV, a 60-proof açaí liqueur that also contains extract of prickly pear, a cactus, which is a faddish folk remedy for a hangover. VeeV-based cocktails, like the Joie de VeeV, made with fresh strawberry, lime, mint and a dash of Splenda, have started popping up at places like the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel and the Bar Marmont in Los Angeles. Cocktail purists insist, though, that even the best intentions can’t stave off a morning of regrets. Tushan Zaric, an owner and bartender at the downtown lounge Employees Only, said that in the last 18 months he has started hearing patrons diving into drinks like the Ginger Smash, with its fresh cranberries and muddled fresh ginger, saying, “That’s so good for you.”

“It’s the alibi, ‘I want to get high with no consequence,’ ” Mr. Zaric said, adding, “But we know, you have two or three of them, you’re still going to have the hangover.”

July 15, 2007- Virtual Frets, Actual Sweat

2007-10-04T14:44:00.000-04:00

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By KATIE ZEZIMA

Correction Appended

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

KEVIN Doyle and Ivan Wine strode to the front of River Gods and picked up the guitars with the confidence of two guys who had played this bar and those instruments many times before.

With their wives watching from a nearby table, Mr. Doyle, 30, a software consultant clad in a Dewar’s Scotch T-shirt, and Mr. Wine, 32, a graphic designer with an unruly goatee and thick black glasses, strapped on the guitars and chose a song from the list on a projection screen.

They planted themselves in position as the first plodding strains of Black Sabbath’s head-banging heavy-metal classic “War Pigs” emanated from the speakers. As the song’s tempo increased, they frantically fingered the multicolor buttons on the necks of the guitars, hitting them with authority in time to the song’s signature “dun-dun-dun” riffs.

But the two men were not showboating. They were actually concentrating, biting their lips and staring almost trancelike at the screen, watching colored balls falling toward them on an electronic fretboard.

When Mr. Doyle and Mr. Wine finished the last riff, the audience whooped and cheered. The newly minted music gods offered high fives as they returned to their seats.

“We rocked the song,” Mr. Wine said.

This is Guitar Hero night, where curious bar patrons, self-styled bad boys and video game addicts, all usually a drink or two deep, play the game Guitar Hero on a big screen, and fulfill their dreams of being a preening, prancing rock ’n’ roll frontman.

Bars from Roanoke, Va., to San Diego are offering Guitar Hero nights, some providing players with big-hair wigs, Viking helmets and other colorful garb to help them complete the momentary illusion of being Eric Clapton or Lenny Kravitz. Others serve as hosts of competitive tournaments where the winners receive real guitars.

Players come because, for most, it’s as close as they’ll get to being an actual rock star.

“The audience cheers and it’s almost like being onstage,” Mr. Wine said. “You don’t get that playing the game in your living room.”

Within the past year, bar owners and managers have introduced the game, usually played in basements and bedrooms, into their locations to spike business on otherwise slow nights. Now they say Guitar Hero night is the new karaoke night — without the embarrassment of atrocious vocals.

“It’s for people like me, who can’t play guitar but want to,” said Jasper Coolidge, the head talent booker at Pianos, a downtown Manhattan bar that features Guitar Hero night every Tuesday.

Mr. Coolidge said business on Tuesdays had tripled at the bar, which typically attracts a post-college crowd, since the event began in April. “We wanted some sort of quirky thing that wasn’t your typical New York dance-club house music night,” he said.

At River Gods, where the crowd is filled with high-tech workers in rock T-shirts, blue jeans and Converse sneakers, bar regulars and bewildered patrons who just stopped by for a drink, some of the players take it much more seriously.

“There are a couple of people who are these cartoon-character version of nerds,” said Jeff MacIsaac, the entertainment producer here. “They’re playing their Game Boys until Guitar Hero starts. They’re actually playing video games before the video games start.”

Guitar Hero requires dexterous players to press buttons on a plastic guitar in time with a song chosen from a library of familiar rock tunes like “Message in a Bottle” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” As the player watches colored notes scroll down a television screen, the object is to hit the corresponding colored buttons (along with a second strum button) in time with the notes to score points. The harder the level, the faster the notes fall and the more complicated the chords.

The original version of Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix, a company that creates musical-theme video games, and released by the software company RedOctane for PlayStation 2 in 2005. But it was not until the release in late 2006 of a sequel, Guitar Hero 2, which featured a larger catalog of songs (“Killing in the Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine, “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana) and a new head-to-head play mode, that the game found its way into bars. About three million copies of Guitar Hero 2 have been sold for PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360, according to Harmonix and RedOctane. No one knows how many copies are being featured in bars.

Greg LoPiccolo, one of the creators of Guitar Hero and a vice president of product development at Harmonix, said the game was created to help people experience the thrill of performing in a club. But he didn’t anticipate that it would actually catch on in bars.

“We never intended for it to happen,” said Mr. LoPiccolo, who usually selects Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” when he plays the game. “But once we saw it take place, it was kind of perfect, really.”

Prowess at Guitar Hero doesn’t necessarily equal expertise on a real guitar. At River Gods, Ben Azar, a 27-year-old guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, eyed the game’s guitar controller skeptically when it was handed to him. Just press the buttons to the beat of the song, he was told by one of the event’s organizers.

As Van Halen’s “You Really Got Me” started, Mr. Azar watched the screen as his fingers worked the frets, but he often looked confused, unsure why a note was missed or exactly what rhythm the guitar line was following.

After finishing his song, Mr. Azar said that using the Guitar Hero controller forced him to concentrate more on pressing buttons than preening like a rock god. “It’s very different,” Mr. Azar said. “It’s like making love to a rubber doll.”

Even though the game doesn’t accurately simulate the mechanics of playing a guitar, players said that the lure of Guitar Hero lies mostly in the mythology of the instrument — one that for every rock fan conjures up images of Pete Townshend smashing his guitar on stage or Jimi Hendrix setting his aflame.

“When one thinks of rock ’n’ roll, the first thing to come to mind is usually someone wailing away at a guitar,” Mr. Wine said later in an e-mail message. “The guitar is at the heart of almost every rock band out there that is or has been.”

Others players, like Shandi Sullivan, a former contestant on “America’s Next Top Model” and a regular at Pianos, appreciate Guitar Hero more for the experience of dressing up and performing for a live audience.

After discovering the game in April at a friend’s apartment, Ms. Sullivan started coming to Pianos every Tuesday, and she even bought a PlayStation 2 to practice with in her apartment. At the bar’s weekly Guitar Hero party, she assumes a different rock ’n’ roll alter ego each time. She has been both Pat Benatar and Elvis Presley. Given her choice, though, she still prefers to rock out to Megadeth, and the game has turned her on to contemporary heavy-metal acts like Shadows Fall.

“I can’t wait until the ’80s version comes out,” Ms. Sullivan said. “Eighties music is my life.”

When Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, a sequel featuring the music of such nostalgically coiffed artists as Twisted Sister and Flock of Seagulls, is released on July 24, it will be the last collaboration between Harmonix and RedOctane. Last year, MTV purchased Harmonix, and RedOctane was acquired by the video game publisher Activision.

But the Guitar Hero franchise will rock on. Later this year, RedOctane and Neversoft, a video game studio owned by Activision, plan to release Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and Harmonix will start Rock Band, a Guitar Hero-like game that will also allow players to become drummers, bassists and vocalists.

RedOctane is sponsoring a stage at the Family Values Tour this summer, which includes rock and heavy-metal acts, and it will hold Guitar Hero contests between sets. The winner will receive a guitar autographed by Jonathan Davis, the frontman of Korn.

As with real rock stars, there is plenty of rivalry and ego to be found among the players of Guitar Hero. Mr. Coolidge, the Pianos talent booker, and Caroline Enright, the manager of River Gods, have thrown down a challenge: a New York vs. Boston Guitar Hero competition, preferably to be held when the Red Sox are playing the Yankees.

“We’re going to have a tournament here to decide who is going up there,” Mr. Coolidge said from New York.

In Cambridge, Ms. Enright said she is ready and willing. “It’s on,” she said.

Correction: July 17, 2007

An article in Sunday Styles this week about the popularity of the video game Guitar Hero among bar patrons misspelled the surname of an artist whose song appears in the game, and misstated the title of that song. He is Stevie Ray Vaughan, not Vaughn, and the song is “Texas Flood,” not “Texas Blood.”

July 18, 2007- Bush’s Mideast: Missing Shades of Gray

2007-10-04T14:41:00.000-04:00

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News Analysis

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, July 17 — Five years ago, President Bush said he expected to see an independent Palestinian state before he left office. On Monday, Mr. Bush ratcheted down expectations and said Palestinians faced a stark choice between Hamas, which favors Israel’s destruction, and Fatah, which supports a two-state solution with Israel.

But Mr. Bush’s idea of an internationally backed Fatah’s winning over the Palestinian street faces many obstacles. By conflating Hamas with jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Mr. Bush presented a picture that most Palestinians do not recognize. Their internal divisions — even with Hamas having routed Fatah in Gaza last month and Fatah running the West Bank — are much more complex that the one posited by Mr. Bush.

Palestinians elected Hamas in January 2006 to rule them, after all, and even many Palestinians who voted for Fatah say the United States-led boycott of Hamas has meant it has never been given a chance to govern.

They also know that Fatah has hardly been spotless, which is why they voted against it, and that Fatah has done very little to reform itself since.

Nor is it clear that Mr. Bush’s vision is shared by other American allies or other members of the so-called quartet — Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — trying to encourage Middle East peace.

Mr. Bush’s speech was also a challenge to moderate Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to act forcefully to support Palestinian moderates, by deeds as well as by attendance at this fall’s American-sponsored conference on the Middle East. But it is doubtful that the Saudis share Mr. Bush’s analysis, since they have been urging Hamas and Fatah to get back together again under the agreement they negotiated in their holy city of Mecca.

Those same Arab moderates are bound to be concerned that an isolated Hamas will be thrown even more into the orbit of Shiite Iran and Syria, a point made on Tuesday by Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema of Italy, who said, “Not recognizing the government elected democratically is not exactly a lesson in democracy, and pushing such a group into the hands of Al Qaeda is not in the international community’s interest.”

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist and professor, said, “I was hoping Bush would differentiate between the political and military wings of Hamas as a way out of this dilemma.” The real choice for Palestinians, he said, is how best to achieve a state and a stable life, and “most Palestinians now understand that this won’t be solved militarily, that one more suicide bombing won’t make Israel crumble.”

Faced with Hamas, Israel and Washington are throwing support behind the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who personally embraces nonviolence, and the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, an independent economist. Mr. Fayyad has no troops and no electoral mandate, but with Mr. Abbas’s support he promises to create a Palestinian administration in the West Bank that can deliver what Hamas won the election promising: change and reform, security and order.

But if Mr. Fayyad succeeds, it will be without democratic legitimacy. And a putative Palestine divided between the West Bank and Gaza only perpetuates a deep Palestinian political division, leaving out Hamas and the sizable minority who support it. That will undermine the credibility of whatever deal Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and Mr. Fayyad might be able to reach with a skeptical Israel, where the rightist Likud Party leads the polls.

Yuval Steinitz, a Likud legislator, says Mr. Bush’s “new approach to Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority will not contribute to peace and stability.” Mr. Abbas cannot deliver, Mr. Steinitz said.

Hamas itself, understanding that many Palestinians were shocked by the ferocity in Gaza, has made some gestures toward reconciliation with Fatah.

On Monday, for example, the exiled Hamas political director, Khaled Meshal, called for dialogue with Mr. Abbas and apologized to Palestinians for mistakes made during the violent takeover.

“What happened, I swear to God and God is a witness, was loathsome for us,” Mr. Meshal said. “It is like a medicine pill that we were forced to swallow.” He said that “marginal mistakes” were made “by individuals who do not represent our policies.” He added, “We apologize to God before apologizing to the people for them.”

For the moment, said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for the Israeli government, Israel and the United States agree about the need to support Fatah in the West Bank and isolate Hamas in Gaza.

Israel is prepared to take “considered risks” to help Mr. Abbas, Ms. Eisin said, by releasing prisoners, giving amnesty to wanted fighters, lifting roadblocks and removing illegal Israeli outposts on Palestinian land. Still, Israel and Ms. Eisin are less clear about how to isolate Hamas without punishing Gazans.

“While Israel is trying to pressure Hamas, you have a lot of angry people getting angrier,” Mr. Kuttab said. “I don’t believe punishing people produces results. Hamas has maybe blinked a little, but it hasn’t raised the white flag.”

Ms. Eisin said: “Hamas is there in Gaza, but that doesn’t mean we have to help them or can’t oppose them. We see Hamas as a terrorist organization, and right now the Palestinian president agrees. Great. It’s Tuesday. Let’s see what happens Friday.”

Mr. Bush may have the same concerns. When he announced the international conference for this autumn, without a date, location or list of attendees, he made it clear that it would be his secretary of state, not he, who would lead it.

July 18, 2007- Abstinence Education Faces an Uncertain Future

2007-10-04T14:39:00.000-04:00

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Virginity is not a bad thing, per se, but it's not, and should not be the only option. Then again, with something like this, I just want to ask "what the fuck are you smoking?

"To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

By LAURA BEIL

HALLSVILLE, Tex. — When Jami Waite graduated from high school this year in this northeastern Texas town, her parents sat damp-eyed in the metal bleachers of Bobcat Stadium, proud in every way possible. Their youngest daughter was leaving childhood an honor graduate, a band member, a true friend, a head cheerleader — and a steadfast virgin.

“People can be abstinent, and it’s not weird,” she declared. With her face on billboards and on TV, Ms. Waite has been an emblem of sexual abstinence for Virginity Rules, which has risen from a single operation in nearby Longview to become an eight-county abstinence franchise.

For the first time, however, Virginity Rules and 700 kindred abstinence education programs are fighting serious threats to their future. Eleven state health departments rejected abstinence education this year, while legislatures in Colorado, Iowa and Washington passed laws that could kill, or at least wound, its presence in public schools.

Opponents received high-caliber ammunition this spring when the most comprehensive study of abstinence education found no sign that it delayed a teenager’s sexual debut. And, after enjoying a fivefold increase in their main federal appropriations, the abstinence programs in June received their first cut in financing from the Senate appropriations committee since 2001.

But the final outcome is in question. Some $176 million in federal support has survived several early maneuvers in the House, and the full House plans to debate the issue July 18 as part of the proposed Health and Human Services budget.

Lost in the political rancor, however, is that teenagers throughout the country are both abstaining more, and, especially among older ones, more likely to use contraception when they do not abstain.

While the reasons are not all understood, government data show the trend began years before abstinence education became the multimillion-dollar enterprise it is today. Through a combination of less sex and more contraception, pregnancy and birth rates among American teenagers as a whole have been falling since about 1991. Texas, however, has seen the smallest decline despite receiving almost $17 million in the name of virginity.

No state has more to lose in this battle than Texas, which draws more abstinence money than any other. Drive through the piney woods of northeastern Texas, and the earnest faces of adolescents appear on billboards with slogans like “No is where I stand until I have a wedding band.”

The Longview Wellness Center, which sponsors Virginity Rules, collects almost $1 million annually in abstinence financing, and serves 33 area school districts.

Even in this state, where President Bush acquired his loyalty to the policy, abstinence cannot be typecast. Megan Randolph of Dallas, who like Jami Waite just finished high school, believes in the abstinence message. But she is bothered by courses that try to scare teenagers with harrowing talk of ruined lives. “In those classes, there are going to be kids who have had sex and that hasn’t happened,” Ms. Randolph said. “So they’re going to think that doesn’t apply to them.”

Teenagers, she said, crave unfettered information — the kind restricted under federal abstinence education law, which discourages intimacy outside marriage but provides no instruction for safer sex.

At her school, Ms. Randolph, 19, was the “sexpert,” the one girls often called late at night, asking questions. And this year, before leaving Dallas to attend the Air Force Academy, Ms. Randolph was hailed as volunteer of the year by the area’s Planned Parenthood — part of abstinence education’s axis of evil.

In northeastern Texas, advocates of abstinence education vow to fight for their mission because to them, it is not just a matter of sexuality or even public health. Getting a teenager to the other side of high school without viruses or babies is a bonus, but not the real goal. They see casual sex as toxic to future marriage, family and even, in an oblique way, opposition to abortion.

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Shoring up marriage was Robert Rector’s vision a decade ago. A fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Rector wrote the first bill that legally defined abstinence education, and got it attached as a stowaway to the 1996 welfare overhaul, backed with $50 million for the states. A later Congress, irked at states’ finding loopholes in the original intent, designated a second pool of abstinence money in 2001, now the lifeblood of the movement.

Mr. Rector says viewing abstinence primarily through the lens of public health distracted the focus from marriage. “Once you understand that that’s the principal issue,” he said, “you understand that handing out condoms to a 17-year-old is utterly irrelevant.”

Strengthening marriage this way may resonate with teenagers like Ms. Waite, whose conviction is planted in a deeply held marital value, but not necessarily with Ms. Randolph, who says she is more preoccupied with succeeding in the Air Force than with marriage.

In abandoning abstinence education, states have largely said that comprehensive sex education programs, which discuss contraception beyond the failure rates, have a better scientific grounding. New laws in Colorado, Iowa and Washington state that sex education must be based on “research” or “science” — which is often interpreted as code for programs that include discussions of safer sex.

Much of the data cited in support of the efficacy of abstinence programs are from surveys taken immediately before and after a program. These commonly find an increase in intentions to stay abstinent, but do not necessarily mean that a year later, high on emotion, teenagers will follow the script.

Most studies so far have found no significant impact on behavior, and the few that do see only modest changes. In April, Mathematica Policy Research released a report that was nine years and $8 million in the making. Scientists followed middle school children enrolled in four separate abstinence programs for about five years, and found no difference in the age of first intercourse between them and their peers.

Opinions vary on whether the absence of evidence — to borrow from Carl Sagan — is evidence of absence. One of the leading experts on sex education programs, Dr. John Jemmott of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says some abstinence education programs in the future might show promise. He is hopeful about an abstinence curriculum that he has designed which, unlike many, tries to get teenagers to think long-term about their behavior and its consequences, questioning, for example, whether a boyfriend would really love you if you had sex with him. Many programs dwell on the risks of sex, not the reasons.

Dr. Jemmott knows many colleagues view abstinence education as a failed experiment. “I think that is unfair,” he said. “I think what they should say is there is not enough evidence to state whether it is efficacious.” On the other hand, he said, it is also unfair to say that sex education that discusses — without maligning — condoms encourages sex. Data from many programs, in fact, find the opposite.

[Those who thought abstinence education financing would decline swiftly under a Democratic watch were wrong: On July 11, the full House extended state grants through September — a reprieve at the edge of expiration. That same day, the House Appropriations Committee increased spending, a political move to make the proposed Health and Human Services budget more appealing to Republicans, said Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, the committee chairman.]

While the future of abstinence education is unclear, Mr. Love, back in Longview, believes “the message will go on, whether the government decides to fund it or not.”

Just ask Jami Waite. The former cheerleader is carrying her resolve to college, where she is on her way to becoming a nurse. One day she plans to wed. Until then, she says, virginity will rule.

Jacqueline Palank contributed reporting from Washington.

July 18, 2007- Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less

2007-10-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

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The Minimalist

By MARK BITTMAN

The pleasures of cooking are sometimes obscured by summer haze and heat, which can cause many of us to turn instead to bad restaurants and worse takeout. But the cook with a little bit of experience has a wealth of quick and easy alternatives at hand. The trouble is that when it’s too hot, even the most resourceful cook has a hard time remembering all the options. So here are 101 substantial main courses, all of which get you in and out of the kitchen in 10 minutes or less. (I’m not counting the time it takes to bring water to a boil, but you can stay out of the kitchen for that.) These suggestions are not formal recipes; rather, they provide a general outline. With a little imagination and some swift moves — and maybe a salad and a loaf of bread — you can turn any dish on this list into a meal that not only will be better than takeout, but won’t heat you out of the house.

1 Make six-minute eggs: simmer gently, run under cold water until cool, then peel. Serve over steamed asparagus.

2 Toss a cup of chopped mixed herbs with a few tablespoons of olive oil in a hot pan. Serve over angel-hair pasta, diluting the sauce if necessary with pasta cooking water.

3 Cut eight sea scallops into four horizontal slices each. Arrange on plates. Sprinkle with lime juice, salt and crushed chilies; serve after five minutes.

4 Open a can of white beans and combine with olive oil, salt, small or chopped shrimp, minced garlic and thyme leaves in a pan. Cook, stirring, until the shrimp are done; garnish with more olive oil.

5 Put three pounds of washed mussels in a pot with half a cup of white wine, garlic cloves, basil leaves and chopped tomatoes. Steam until mussels open. Serve with bread.

6 Heat a quarter-inch of olive oil in a skillet. Dredge flounder or sole fillets in flour and fry until crisp, about two minutes a side. Serve on sliced bread with tartar sauce.

7 Make pesto: put a couple of cups of basil leaves, a garlic clove, salt, pepper and olive oil as necessary in a blender (walnuts and Parmesan are optional). Serve over pasta (dilute with oil or water as necessary) or grilled fish or meat.

8 Put a few dozen washed littlenecks in a large, hot skillet with olive oil. When clams begin to open, add a tablespoon or two of chopped garlic. When most or all are opened, add parsley. Serve alone, with bread or over angel-hair pasta.

9 Pan-grill a skirt steak for three or four minutes a side. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, slice and serve over romaine or any other green salad, drizzled with olive oil and lemon.

10 Smear mackerel fillets with mustard, then sprinkle with chopped herbs (fresh tarragon is good), salt, pepper and bread crumbs. Bake in a 425-degree oven for about eight minutes.

11 Warm olive oil in a skillet with at least three cloves sliced garlic. When the garlic colors, add at least a teaspoon each of cumin and pimentón. A minute later, add a dozen or so shrimp, salt and pepper. Garnish with parsley, serve with lemon and bread.

12 Boil a lobster. Serve with lemon or melted butter.

13 Gazpacho: Combine one pound tomatoes cut into chunks, a cucumber peeled and cut into chunks, two or three slices stale bread torn into pieces, a quarter-cup olive oil, two tablespoons sherry vinegar and a clove of garlic in a blender with one cup water and a couple of ice cubes. Process until smooth, adding water if necessary. Season with salt and pepper, then serve or refrigerate, garnished with anchovies if you like, and a little more olive oil.

14 Put a few slices of chopped prosciutto in a skillet with olive oil, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and a bit of butter; a minute later, toss in about half a cup bread crumbs and red chili flakes to taste. Serve over pasta with chopped parsley.

15 Call it panini: Grilled cheese with prosciutto, tomatoes, thyme or basil leaves.

16 Slice or chop salami, corned beef or kielbasa and warm in a little oil; stir in eggs and scramble. Serve with mustard and rye bread.

17 Soak couscous in boiling water to cover until tender; top with sardines, tomatoes, parsley, olive oil and black pepper.

18 Stir-fry a pound or so of ground meat or chopped fish mixed with chopped onions and seasoned with cumin or chili powder. Pile into taco shells or soft tacos, along with tomato, lettuce, canned beans, onion, cilantro and sour cream.

19 Chinese tomato and eggs: Cook minced garlic in peanut oil until blond; add chopped tomatoes then, a minute later, beaten eggs, along with salt and pepper. Scramble with a little soy sauce.

20 Cut eggplant into half-inch slices. Broil with lots of olive oil, turning once, until tender and browned. Top with crumbled goat or feta cheese and broil another 20 seconds.

21 While pasta cooks, combine a couple cups chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon or more minced garlic, olive oil and 20 to 30 basil leaves. Toss with pasta, salt, pepper and Parmesan.

22 Make wraps of tuna, warm white beans, a drizzle of olive oil and lettuce and tomato.

23 The New York supper: Bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon. Serve with tomatoes, watercress or arugula, and sliced red onion or shallot.

24 Dredge thinly sliced chicken breasts in flour or cornmeal; cook about two minutes a side in hot olive oil. Place on bread with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise.

25 Upscale tuna salad: good canned tuna (packed in olive oil), capers, dill or parsley, lemon juice but no mayo. Use to stuff a tomato or two.

26 Cut Italian sausage into chunks and brown in a little olive oil; chop onions and bell peppers and add them to the pan. Cook until sausage is browned and peppers and onions tender. Serve in sandwiches.

27 Egg in a hole, glorified: Tear a hole in a piece of bread and fry in butter. Crack an egg into the hole. Deglaze pan with a little sherry vinegar mixed with water, and more butter; pour over egg.

28 New Joe’s Special, from San Francisco: Brown ground meat with minced garlic and chopped onion. When just about cooked, add chopped spinach and cook, stirring, until wilted. At the last minute, stir in two eggs, along with grated Parmesan and salt and pepper.

29 Chop prosciutto and crisp it in a skillet with olive oil; add chopped not-too-ripe figs. Serve over greens dressed with oil and vinegar; top all with crumbled blue cheese.

30 Quesadilla: Use a combination of cheeses, like Fontina mixed with grated pecorino. Put on half of a large flour tortilla with pickled jalapenos, chopped onion, shallot or scallion, chopped tomatoes and grated radish. Fold tortilla over and brown on both sides in butter or oil, until cheese is melted.

31 Fast chile rellenos: Drain canned whole green chilies. Make a slit in each and insert a piece of cheese. Dredge in flour and fry in a skillet, slit side up, until cheese melts.

32 Cobb-ish salad: Chop bacon and begin to brown it; cut boneless chicken into strips and cook it with bacon. Toss romaine and watercress or arugula with chopped tomatoes, avocado, onion and crumbled blue cheese. Add bacon and chicken. Dress with oil and vinegar.

33 Sauté 10 whole peeled garlic cloves in olive oil. Meanwhile, grate Pecorino, grind lots of black pepper, chop parsley and cook pasta. Toss all together, along with crushed dried chili flakes and salt.

34 Niçoise salad: Lightly steam haricot verts, green beans or asparagus. Arrange on a plate with chickpeas, good canned tuna, hard-cooked eggs, a green salad, sliced cucumber and tomato. Dress with oil and vinegar.

35 Cold soba with dipping sauce: Cook soba noodles, then rinse in cold water until cool. Serve with a sauce of soy sauce and minced ginger diluted with mirin and/or dry sake.

36 Fried egg “saltimbocca”: Lay slices of prosciutto or ham in a buttered skillet. Fry eggs on top of ham; top with grated Parmesan.

37 Frisée aux lardons: Cook chunks of bacon in a skillet. Meanwhile, make six-minute or poached eggs and a frisée salad. Put eggs on top of salad along with bacon; deglaze pan with sherry vinegar and pour pan juices over all.

38 Fried rice: Soften vegetables with oil in a skillet. Add cold takeout rice, chopped onion, garlic, ginger, peas and two beaten eggs. Toss until hot and cooked through. Season with soy sauce and sesame oil.

39 Taco salad: Toss together greens, chopped tomato, chopped red onion, sliced avocado, a small can of black beans and kernels from a couple of ears of corn. Toss with crumbled tortilla chips and grated cheese. Dress with olive oil, lime and chopped cilantro leaves.

40 Put a large can of chickpeas and their liquid in a medium saucepan. Add some sherry, along with olive oil, plenty of minced garlic, smoked pimentón and chopped Spanish chorizo. Heat through.

41 Raita to the rescue: Broil any fish. Serve with a sauce of drained yogurt mixed with chopped cucumber, minced onion and cayenne.

42 Season boneless lamb steaks cut from the leg with sweet curry powder. Sear on both sides. Serve over greens, with lemon wedges.

43 Migas, with egg: Sauté chopped stale bread with olive oil, mushrooms, onions and spinach. Stir in a couple of eggs.

44 Migas, without egg: Sauté chopped stale bread with chopped Spanish chorizo, plenty of garlic and lots of olive oil. Finish with chopped parsley.

45 Sauté shredded zucchini in olive oil, adding garlic and chopped herbs. Serve over pasta.

46 Broil a few slices prosciutto until crisp; crumble and toss with parsley, Parmesan, olive oil and pasta.

47 Not exactly banh mi, but... Make sandwiches on crisp bread with liverwurst, ham, sliced half-sours, shredded carrots, cilantro sprigs and Vietnamese chili-garlic paste.

48 Not takeout: Stir-fry onions with cut-up broccoli. Add cubed tofu, chicken or shrimp, or sliced beef or pork, along with a tablespoon each minced garlic and ginger. When almost done, add half cup of water, two tablespoons soy sauce and plenty of black pepper. Heat through and serve over fresh Chinese noodles.

49 Sprinkle sole fillets with chopped parsley, garlic, salt and pepper; roll up, dip in flour, then beaten egg, then bread crumbs; cook in hot olive oil about three minutes a side. Serve with lemon wedges.

50 The Waldorf: Toast a handful of walnuts in a skillet. Chop an apple or pear; toss with greens, walnuts and a dressing made with olive oil, sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard and shallot. Top, if you like, with crumbled goat or blue cheese.

51 Put a stick of butter and a handful of pine nuts in a skillet. Cook over medium heat until both are brown. Toss with cooked pasta, grated Parmesan and black pepper.

52 Grill or sauté Italian sausage and serve over store-bought hummus, with lemon wedges.

53 Put a tablespoon of cream and a slice of tomato in each of several small ramekins. Top with an egg, then salt, pepper and grated Parmesan. Bake at 350 degrees until the eggs set. Serve with toast.

54 Brown small pork (or hot dog) chunks in a skillet. Add white beans, garlic, thyme and olive oil. Or add white beans and ketchup.

55 Dredge skate or flounder in flour and brown quickly in butter or oil. Deglaze pan with a couple of spoonfuls of capers and a lot of lemon juice or a little vinegar.

56 Make a fast tomato sauce of olive oil, chopped tomatoes and garlic. Poach eggs in the sauce, then top with Parmesan.

57 Dip pork cutlets in egg, then dredge heavily in panko; brown quickly on both sides. Serve over lettuce, with fresh lemon, or bottled Japanese curry sauce.

58 Cook chicken livers in butter or oil with garlic; do not overcook. Finish with parsley, lemon juice and coarse salt; serve over toast.

59 Brown bratwursts with cut-up apples. Serve with coleslaw.

60 Peel and thinly slice raw beets; cook in butter until soft. Take out of pan and quickly cook some shrimp in same pan. Deglaze pan with sherry vinegar, adding sauce to beets and shrimp. Garnish with dill.

61 Poach shrimp and plunge into ice water. Serve with cocktail sauce: one cup ketchup, one tablespoon vinegar, three tablespoons melted butter and lots of horseradish.

62 Southeast Asia steak salad: Pan- or oven-grill skirt or flank steak. Slice and serve on a pile of greens with a sauce of one tablespoon each of nam pla and lime juice, black pepper, a teaspoon each of sugar and garlic, crushed red chili flakes and Thai basil.

63 Miso steak: Coat beef tenderloin steaks (filet mignon) with a blend of miso and chili paste thinned with sake or white wine. Grill or broil about five minutes.

64 Pasta with fresh tomatoes: Cook chopped fresh tomatoes in butter or oil with garlic until tender, while pasta cooks. Combine and serve with grated Parmesan.

65 Sauté squid rings and tentacles in olive oil with salt and pepper and garlic; add chopped tomatoes. Cook until the tomatoes break down. Serve over pasta.

66 Salmon (or just about anything else) teriyaki: Sear salmon steaks on both sides for a couple of minutes; remove. To skillet, add a splash of water, sake, a little sugar and soy sauce; when mixture is thick, return steaks to pan and turn in sauce until done. Serve hot or at room temperature.

67 Rich vegetable soup: Cook asparagus tips and peeled stalks or most any other green vegetable in chicken stock with a little tarragon until tender; reserve a few tips and purée the rest with a little butter (cream or yogurt, too, if you like) adding enough stock to thin the purée. Garnish with the reserved tips. Serve hot or cold.

68 Brush portobello caps with olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper and broil until tender. Briefly sweat chopped onions, then scramble eggs with them. Put eggs in mushrooms.

69 Buy good blintzes. Brown them on both sides in butter. Serve with sour cream, apple sauce or both.

70 Sauté squid rings and tentacles in olive oil with salt and pepper. Make a sauce of minced garlic, smoked pimentón, mayo, lots of lemon juice and fresh parsley. Serve with a chopped salad of cucumber, tomato, lettuce, grated carrot and scallion, lightly dressed.

71 Press a lot of coarsely ground black pepper onto both sides of filet mignon or other steaks or chopped meat patties. Brown in butter in a skillet for two minutes a side. Remove steaks and add a splash of red wine, chopped shallots and a bit of tarragon to skillet. Reduce, then return steaks to pan, turning in the sauce for a minute or two.

72 World’s leading sandwich: prosciutto, tomato, butter or olive oil and a baguette.

73 Near instant mezze: Combine hummus on a plate with yogurt laced with chopped cucumbers and a bit of garlic, plus tomato, feta, white beans with olive oil and pita bread.

74 Canned sardines packed in olive oil on Triscuits, with mustard and Tabasco.

75 Boil-and-eat shrimp, cooked in water with Old Bay seasoning or a mixture of thyme, garlic, paprika, chopped onion, celery, chili, salt and pepper.

76 Make a thin plain omelet with two or three eggs. Sauté cubes of bacon or pancetta or strips of prosciutto until crisp. Cut up the omelet and use it and the meat to garnish a green salad dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

77 Sear corn kernels in olive oil with minced jalapeños and chopped onions; toss with cilantro, black beans, chopped tomatoes, chopped bell pepper and lime.

78 Cook shrimp in a skillet slowly (five minutes or so) to preserve their juices, with plenty of garlic and olive oil, until done; pour over watercress or arugula, with lemon, pepper and salt.

79 Liverwurst on good sourdough rye with scallions, tomato and wholegrain mustard.

80 Not-quite merguez: Ground lamb burgers seasoned with cumin, garlic, onion, salt and cayenne. Serve with couscous and green salad, along with bottled harissa.

81 Combine crab meat with mayo, Dijon mustard, chives and tarragon. Serve in a sandwich, with potato chips.

82 Combine canned tuna in olive oil, halved grape tomatoes, black olives, mint, lemon zest and red pepper flakes. Serve with pasta, thinning with olive oil or pasta cooking water as needed.

83 Pit and chop a cup or more of mixed olives. Combine with olive oil, a little minced garlic, red pepper flakes and chopped basil or parsley. Serve over pasta.

84 Cook chopped tomatillos with a little water or stock, cilantro and a little minced fresh chili; serve over grilled, broiled or sautéed chicken breasts, with corn tortillas.

85 A winning sandwich: bresaola or prosciutto, arugula, Parmesan, marinated artichoke hearts, tomato.

86 Smoked trout fillets served with lightly toasted almonds, shredded fennel, a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of lemon.

87 Grated carrots topped with six-minute eggs (run under cold water until cool before peeling), olive oil and lemon juice.

88 Cut the top off four big tomatoes; scoop out the interiors and mix them with toasted stale baguette or pita, olive oil, salt, pepper and herbs (basil, tarragon, and/or parsley). Stuff into tomatoes and serve with salad.

89 Pasta frittata: Turn cooked pasta and a little garlic into an oiled or buttered skillet. Brown, pressing to create a cake. Flip, then top with three or four beaten eggs and loads of Parmesan. Brown other side and serve.

90 Thai-style beef: Thinly slice one and a half pounds of flank steak, pork shoulder or boneless chicken; heat peanut oil in a skillet, add meat and stir. A minute later, add a tablespoon minced garlic and some red chili flakes. Add 30 clean basil leaves, a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon or two of soy sauce or nam pla. Serve with lime juice and more chili flakes, over rice or salad.

91 Dredge calf’s liver in flour. Sear in olive oil or butter or a combination until crisp on both sides, adding salt and pepper as it cooks; it should be medium-rare. Garnish with parsley and lemon juice.

92 Rub not-too-thick pork or lamb chops with olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper plus sage or thyme. Broil about three minutes a side and drizzle with good balsamic vinegar.

93 Cut up Italian sausage into chunks and brown in a little olive oil until just about done. Dump in a lot of seedless grapes and, if you like, a little slivered garlic and chopped rosemary. Cook, stirring, until the grapes are hot. Serve with bread.

94 Ketchup-braised tofu: Dredge large tofu cubes in flour. Brown in oil; remove from skillet and wipe skillet clean. Add a little more oil, then a tablespoon minced garlic; 30 seconds later, add one and a half cups ketchup and the tofu. Cook until sauce bubbles and tofu is hot.

95 Veggie burger: Drain and pour a 14-ounce can of beans into a food processor with an onion, half a cup rolled oats, a tablespoon chili powder or other spice mix, an egg, salt and pepper. Process until mushy, then shape into burgers, adding a little liquid or oats as necessary. Cook in oil about three minutes a side and serve.

96 A Roman classic: In lots of olive oil, lightly cook lots of slivered garlic, with six or so anchovy fillets and a dried hot chili or two. Dress pasta with this.

97 So-called Fettuccine Alfredo: Heat several tablespoons of butter and about half a cup of cream in a large skillet just until the cream starts to simmer. Add slightly undercooked fresh pasta to the skillet, along with plenty of grated Parmesan. Cook over low heat, tossing, until pasta is tender and hot.

98 Rub flank steak or chuck with curry or chili powder before broiling or grilling, then slice thin across the grain.

99 Cook a couple of pounds of shrimp, shell on or off, in oil, with lots of chopped garlic. When they turn pink, remove; deglaze the pan with a half-cup or so of beer, along with a splash of Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, rosemary and a lump of butter. Serve with bread.

100 Cook red lentils in water with a little cumin and chopped bacon until soft. Top with poached or six-minute eggs (run under cold water until cool before peeling) and a little sherry vinegar.

101 Hot dogs on buns — with beans!

July 18, 2007- Just the Thing to Carry Your Conscience In

2007-10-04T13:43:00.000-04:00

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By MARIAN BURROS

IF you are reading this anytime after dawn on Wednesday, you are probably too late to make a fashion statement and simultaneously keep the world safe from plastic bags.

At 8 this morning, 15 Whole Foods stores in the New York area were to start selling $15 cotton bags by Anya Hindmarch, a London designer better known for bags that range to $1,500 and beyond. The bags, which read “I’m not a plastic bag,” are intended to be used and reused for groceries, in place of plastic. Whole Foods is selling 20,000, first come first served, limit three to a customer while supplies last. If offerings of the bag in other cities are any guide, the lines will be long.

A stampede of would-be purchasers in Taiwan in June sent 30 people to the hospital and required the riot police. A similar outpouring in Hong Kong caused no injuries, but the police closed down the shopping mall. “Apparently they are not used to queuing,” Ms. Hindmarch said last week from a hotel in Tokyo, where she had just finished the latest offering of her bag. To avoid more riots, future events in Southeast Asia will take place on the Internet.

What started out as a small effort in London to reduce the number of biodegradable-resistant plastic bags that litter the landscape has become a wildly successful worldwide campaign. With 34 stores around the world and 20 more opening this year, Ms. Hindmarch knows that even if you can’t interest people in a cause on moral or ethical grounds you can reach them by making the cause fashionable.

“To create awareness you have to create scarcity by producing a limited edition,” she said. “I hate the idea of making the environment trendy, but you need to make it cool and then it becomes a habit.”

Even before Ms. Hindmarch’s canvas tote became the talk of London, enough people were talking about plastic shopping bags that they qualified as a cause célèbre. In recent years, governments around the world have considered bans on them, and stores have found new tactics for weaning customers from them.

Made from polyethylene, a petroleum product, the bags may take as long as 500 years to degrade. Meantime they hang from trees, catch on power lines, float on oceans and lakes and clog storm drains, killing birds, fish, turtles and sea mammals unfortunate enough to ingest them or become entangled in them.

Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags a year, recycling less than 1 percent of them, according to the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group in Washington.

San Francisco is the first American city to ban the nonbiodegradable bags. Later this year, first supermarkets and then large chain pharmacies there will have to offer biodegradable and compostable bags. The drawback is that they are much more expensive than the nonrecyclables.

Antibag bills are being considered in Boston; Baltimore; Annapolis, Md.; Portland, Ore.; and Santa Monica and Oakland, Calif.

New York City is in the early stages. As part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s “green” campaign, the city sponsors public service announcements telling people to use cloth bags for grocery shopping and to reuse plastic bags.

City Councilman Michael E. McMahon, the chairman of the council’s sanitation and solid waste management committee, is from Staten Island, where he remembers the bags blowing all over from the Fresh Kills landfill, now closed. His committee is drafting a bill to require stores to take back plastic bags from customers. He hopes that in four or five years, people will be able to recycle them with their glass and paper.

Most of the city’s supermarket chains already offer reusable cloth bags for about $1. D’Agostino plans to give away 20,000 at its 19 stores in New York City and Westchester in September. Whole Foods stores in the New York region sell a model printed with a retro honey logo. They also offer a discount of 10 cents to any shopper who returns a plastic bag to the store for reuse.

For all these efforts, though, the United States is far behind other parts of the world in addressing concerns about plastic bags. In places like South Africa, Zanzibar, Scandinavia and Uganda, the use of such bags has been reduced or eliminated by banning or taxing them, by charging for them in stores, by giving incentives to customers who provide their own bags and by selling inexpensive reusable bags made of recycled plastic or cloth.

By the end of the year the bags will be banned in Paris, and by 2010 in all of France. In Ireland, where the plastic bags are known as the national flag, they have cost 20 cents each, at the government’s direction, since 2002; the fee has been credited with cutting bag use more than 90 percent.

In Uganda plastic bags are banned entirely. Bans, restrictions or incentives to switch to reusable bags are in place in towns and cities in Australia, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Canada and Britain. Various restrictions or charges are in place in Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Bangladesh and Italy. For about a decade Scandinavian countries have charged for bags, whether plastic or paper. Last March Ikea began charging 5 cents for plastic bags in its stores in the United States.

But all those efforts are foolish, according to the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc., a trade group.

“Most of the legislation being proposed to ban or limit the use of plastic bags is misguided,” it said in a statement. “The problem is not plastic bags. The problem is behavioral — the human propensity to litter. The solution is for all of us to change our behavior and learn to reduce, reuse, recycle and properly dispose of plastic bags.”

The statement also said the industry is investing in recycling facilities.

Lost in the criticism of plastic bags is the fact that paper bags have their own environmental cost, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, another research and advocacy group. By the council’s reckoning, the plastic bags used in the United States each year require some 12 million barrels of oil to produce, and paper bags, 14 million trees.

Even so, Ms. Hindmarch hasn’t given up plastic bags entirely. “There’s no way I’m going to put a smelly fish in a canvas bag,” she said.

Anyone reading this while standing in a bag line, beware: according to Ms. Hindmarch some Hong Kong bag-seekers who withstood the stampede but went away empty-handed planned to fly to New York to try again.

“I don’t want to think about the carbon footprint for that,” she said. Or the trampled.

If money is no object, the disappointed can be made whole. As of midday yesterday more than 200 were for sale on eBay, some for more than $300.

July 17, 2007- Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World

2007-10-04T13:34:00.000-04:00

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By CORNELIA DEAN

Corrections Appended

In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism.

Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.”

In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.

The book caused a stir earlier this year when a French translation materialized at high schools, universities and museums in France. Until then, creationist literature was relatively rare in France, according to Armand de Ricqles, a professor of historical biology and evolutionism at the College de France. Scientists spoke out against the book, he said in an e-mail message, and “thanks to the highly centralized public school system in France, it was possible to organize that the books sent to lycées would not be made available to children.”

So far, no similar response is emerging in the United States. “In our country we are used to nonsense like this,” said Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who, like colleagues there, found a copy in his mailbox.

He said people who had received copies were “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is.

“If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, ‘See, it looks just like a regular crab, there’s no evolution,’ ” Dr. Padian said. “Extinction does not seem to bother him. He does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time.”

Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, said he and his colleagues in the life sciences had all received copies. When he called friends at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago, they had the books too, he said. Scientists at Brigham Young University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Georgia and others have also received them.

“I think he must have sent it to every full professor in the medical school,” said Kathryn L. Calame, a microbiologist at the Columbia University medical school who received a copy. “The genetics department, the biochem department, micro — everybody I talked to had it.”

While they said they were unimpressed with the book’s content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. “If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100,” said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. “The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars.”

Fatih Sen, who heads the United States office of Global Impex, a company that markets Islamic books, gifts and other products, including “Atlas,” would not comment on its distribution, except to describe the book as “great” and refer questions to the publisher, Global Publishing of Istanbul. Repeated attempts by telephone and e-mail to reach the concern, or Mr. Yahya, were unsuccessful.

In the book and on his Web site (www.harunyahya.com), Mr. Yahya says he was born in Ankara in 1956, and grew up and was educated in Turkey. He says he seeks to unmask what the book calls “the imposture of evolutionists” and the links between their scientific views and modern evils like fascism, communism and terrorism. He says he hopes to encourage readers “to open their minds and hearts and guide them to become more devoted servants of God.”

He adds that he seeks “no material gain” from his publications, most of which are available free or at relatively low cost.

Who finances these efforts is “a big question that no one knows the answer to,” said another recipient, Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in Missouri who studies issues of science and religion, particularly Islam. Dr. Edis grew up in a secular household in Turkey and has lived in the United States since enrolling in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he earned his doctorate in 1994. He said Mr. Yahya’s activities were usually described in the Turkish press as financed by donations. “But what that can mean is anybody’s guess,” he said.

The effort seems particularly odd given the mailing list. Both Dr. Padian and Dr. Miller testified for the plaintiffs in the Dover, Penn., lawsuit that successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in schools there. Other recipients include Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University who has been active on behalf of school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution and science museums that accept evolution as the foundation for modern biology.

“I don’t know what to make of it, quite honestly,” said Laddie Elwell, the director of the Headwaters Science Center in Bemidji, Minn., which she said received a dozen copies. Chuck Deeter, a staff member, said he and his colleagues might use the books’ fossil photographs in their programs on Darwin, which he said can be a hard sell in a region where many people are fundamentalist Christians with creationist beliefs.

Support for creationism is also widespread among Muslims, said Dr. Edis, whose book “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam” was published by Prometheus Books this spring.

“Taken at face value, the Koran is a creationist text,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to find a scholar of Islam “who is going to be gung-ho about Darwin.”

Perhaps as a result, he said, Mr. Yahya’s books and other publications have won him attention in Islamic areas. “This is a guy with some influence,” Dr. Edis said, “unfortunately for mainstream science.”

Dr. Miller agreed. He said he regularly received e-mail messages from people questioning evolution, with an increasing number coming from Turkey, Lebanon and other areas in the Middle East, most citing Mr. Yahya’s work.

That’s troubling, he said, because Mr. Yahya’s ideas “cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.”

As the scientists ponder what to do with the book — for many, it is too beautiful for the trash bin but too erroneous for their shelves — they also speculate about the motives of its distributors.

“My hypothesis is, like all creationists, they believe that they have a startling truth that the public has been shielded from, and that if they present the facts, in quotation marks, that the scales will fall from the eyes and the charade of evolution will be revealed,” said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which fights the teaching of creationism in public schools. “These people are really serious about this.”

That may be, Dr. Miller said, but it’s also possible “that Harun Yahya and his people have decided that there are plenty of Muslim people in the United States who need to hear this message.”

In his e-mail message, Dr. de Ricqles said some worried that the book was directed at the Muslim population of France as a strategy to “destabilize” poor, predominantly immigrant suburbs “where a large population of youngsters of Moslem faith would be an ideal target for propaganda.”

But despite its wide distribution, Dr. Padian predicted that the book would have little impact in the United States. “We are used to books that are totally wrongheaded about science and confuse science and religion,” he said. “That’s politics.”

Correction: July 21, 2007

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the widespread distribution of “Atlas of Creation,” a book with an Islamic creationist point of view, misstated the name of a company that shipped some of the books. It is SBS Worldwide Ltd., not SDS Worldwide.

Correction: August 13, 2007

An article in Science Times on July 17 about the widespread distribution of “Atlas of Creation,” a book with an Islamic creationist point of view, not only incorrectly identified a company involved in shipping some of the books but misstated its role and its responsiveness to questions. The company, SBS Worldwide Ltd. (not SDS Worldwide, as the article had it, and corrected in this space on July 21), says it cleared a shipment of the books through customs but had nothing to do with their further distribution in the United States. SBS Worldwide Ltd. did not return calls and e-mail messages asking about its role before the article was published because it never got any; The Times had sent the questions to the wrong company. This correction was delayed in the confusion.

July 12, 2007- The Money’s in the Mattress

2007-10-04T13:32:00.000-04:00

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By PENELOPE GREEN

Correction Appended

ONE hot morning in late June, I was lying flat on my back on a bed in lower SoHo, my eyelids struggling to stay aloft, when Henry Burney, a gentle guy with a borscht belt sense of humor, leaned over and asked, “So, would you rather sleep with an Italian or Mr. Ed?”

Mr. Burney is the United States sales representative for Magniflex, the Italian mattress company that makes the $24,000 foam mattress I was lying on in the Casa Poggesi bedding store on Crosby Street. His little dig was aimed at a Swedish mattress maker, Hastens, which stuffs its versions with horsehair and charges as much as $60,000 for them. But his focus in this seduction scene was less on trashing the competition than on winning me over, not just to his product but to the seemingly absurd notion of the multithousand-dollar mattress. And he was not alone.

All spring and summer, Hastens has been running an ad in magazines like Elle Decor: a photograph of the blue-and-white-checked Vividus bed topped with a puffy white down comforter, one corner pulled back invitingly, with a pair of sharp-toed stiletto shoes on the floor beside it. The come-on reads: “Who would spend $59,750 on a bed?”

Who indeed? And what is the calculus — economic or otherwise — that brings a mattress to that particular figure? Or to $24,000, in Magniflex’s case? Or $50,000, which is the sticker price of a bed being made by Hollandia, an Israeli company that opened a showroom in the Marketplace Design Center in Philadelphia last fall and a flagship store in the Mall at Short Hills, N.J., last Thursday. I mean, what the heck? Why would anybody pay that much for a mattress?

“What did that guy say when he was asked why he climbed Mount Everest?” said Pamela N. Danziger, a marketing consultant and the author of “Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses — as Well as the Classes” and “Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need.”

“ ‘Because it’s there!’ ” she exclaimed. “I would be very interested in how many they sell at that price. I would suggest the price is more of a positioning tool, though it is true that there are a lot of rich folks. Those making over $250,000 a year are the fastest-growing households by income in the country. We know that from our survey.” (Ms. Danziger’s company, Unity Marketing, tracks the luxury market in an annual survey of the spending habits and behaviors of affluent Americans.)

Like nature, the luxury market abhors a vacuum. But certain luxury items are selling better these days than others, Ms. Danziger said. Driven, still, by inexorably aging baby boomers, all 78 million or so of them, the luxury market is most active right now, she said, with things that can be described as “experiential” and restorative, like a huge new spa bathroom or an exotic vacation. Further, some boomers are suffering the aftereffects of those exotic vacations — some may even have mounted Everest themselves. Their rotator cuffs are torn, their knees and hips are shot. They are, in fact, more achy and tired than ever — and are sleeping less, as a raft of sleep studies will attest.

“They don’t want to put their money on a new handbag anymore,” Ms. Danziger continued. “They aren’t buying that Kelly bag. A mattress really does deliver an experience to the consumer. And as you get older, sleep doesn’t come like it used to.”

After the craze over Ambien, the boomers’ last deep love, was derailed by a flurry of bad press about its potentially bizarre side effects, including sleep-eating and sleep-driving (a state that Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, may have experienced late one night in Washington last year), the mattress industry is cheerfully hurling itself into the breach, marketing mattresses to cure every ill, claiming even to put the brakes on time itself.

The narrator of a Hastens promotional video states, in a charming Swedish accent, that its beds, which start at $4,375, will give you fewer wrinkles and can slow aging.

(Hollandia turns out to be a maker of adjustable “sleep systems, ” priced from about $15,000 to $50,000, that look and feel like nothing so much as high-end hospital beds. With their German motors and 12 massage programs, they seem to acknowledge that a body ravaged by time can be only soothed, not remade. Its marketers also claim its beds cure snoring.)

Tempur-Pedic, the foam-mattress maker whose beds range from $1,200 to $7,299 (chump change on planet Hastens), sponsored a study recently that claimed, straight-faced, that Americans would rather sleep than exercise as part of their “wellness regimen,” that three out of four Americans say a good night’s sleep makes them feel younger and that a good pillow is a better “sleep accessory” — nine times better — than a “sleep partner.” More than a third of them spend as much money on their mattresses as they do on their sofas or their televisions, and 17 percent as much as on their vacations.

At the low end of the luxury mattress market, at least, things have been heating up. Six years ago, barely 2 percent of the mattresses sold cost more than $2,000, according to the International Sleep Products Association, a trade group for the industry, which had $6.7 billion in sales last year. By 2006 about 5 percent of purchases had crossed the $2,000 line. (The median price of a queen-size mattress was $650 last year, according to a survey by Furniture Today, a trade magazine.)

“I think it’s about time that Americans place the value on sleep that they place on other aspects of their life,” said Rick Anderson, president of Tempur-Pedic North America, adding, as every good mattress executive is wont to do, that “after all, we spend a third of our lives in bed.”

Mr. Anderson’s company has just rolled out a television campaign — with dreamy little spots of tropical islands, misty fjords and glistening jungles — that positions Tempur-Pedic as a “wellness brand” and its mattresses as “nighttime renewal aids.”

“If you asked someone 10 years ago what their mattress is for,” Mr. Anderson said, “they’d say it’s where I sleep. Now they expect it to relieve their stress, to relieve their aches and pains, to provide comfort. It’s emotional, it’s physical and it’s a status thing, too. You know what they say: sleep is the new black. Sleep is in style.” Gone are the days, Mr. Anderson suggested, when captains of industry bragged about sleeping just three hours a night. The power nap, he said, is gaining currency.

As proof, Mr. Anderson pointed to nap centers like the two that MetroNaps and Yelo operate in Manhattan, charging $12 to $14 for 20 minutes of shut-eye, and recent studies by the National Institutes of Health and Harvard about napping and productivity. (There is even a nap how-to book, out since January from Workman: “Take a Nap! Change Your Life” by Sara C. Mednick, a napping-research scientist at the Salk Institute.)

Ty Wenger, editor of Trader Monthly, a lifestyle magazine for a select segment of the self-made superrich, like hedge fund managers, agreed with this paradigm shift: a good night’s sleep isn’t a sign of weakness, but something to boast about.

“My readers are almost like athletes in the way they perceive themselves and pamper themselves,” Mr. Wenger said. “A good night’s sleep can mean millions for them the next day. How they prepare themselves for their job is the difference between brilliant and wealthy and going completely belly up. They aren’t hedonist playboys like those ’80s guys. They work out like crazy; they eat the finest food. It’s all about honing their instrument.”

Will they spend tens of thousands on mattresses?

“Absolutely,” he said. “The high end exists because there is somebody who wants to spend that kind of money. It’s like a consumer dare.”

Casa Poggesi has been offering the $24,000 Magniflex Gold for a month and a half, and as of yesterday afternoon, Mr. Burney said, no New Yorker had bought one. He added that on average, Magniflex mattresses go for $1,200 to $3,000. “But the Gold gets people in the door.”

Mr. Burney said his company had sold 53 Gold mattresses to individuals in Russia, and one to a hotel in Dubai. Its cost, he said, is largely a result of the fact that its cover is woven with 22-karat gold thread — “gold is a natural antimicrobial,” he said, as well as a barrier against dust mites and bedbugs — and has a cashmere underlayer. What’s inside the mattress is, as in most mattresses, a mysterious layer cake of stuff. Like every mattress sales agent, Mr. Burney has cross sections at the ready, along with diagrams and schematics and a pocketful of scientific-sounding terms.

“I know, none of it means anything to anyone,” said Mr. Burney, who explained that in plainer terms the Magniflex mattress is foam with holes drilled through it. So it breathes, as opposed to, say, a Tempur-Pedic mattress, he said, which has ridges so the air flows around the foam, but not through it. “People complain that the Tempur-Pedic is too warm,” he asserted.

“If you consider the average person sweats about a pint each night,” he said, pausing to let his words sink in.

WARREN SHOULBERG, the editor of Home Furnishings News, a trade publication for the furniture industry, reckons that a mattress purchase is the most “blind” purchase anybody ever makes.

“You only buy it once every 10 or 20 years,” he said, “so you are woefully unprepared and uneducated. You are confronted with this police lineup of white boxes that all look remarkably similar. The one that’s $500 doesn’t look all that different from the one that’s $5,000, or, now, $50,000, the way a Hyundai looks different from a Ferrari. The attributes that distinguish this product you can’t see.

“So you do the obligatory five-minute lie-down, but you’re incredibly self-conscious. Whatever very personal way that you sleep, you can’t do it on the floor of Sleepy’s. It’s not a product you can shop smart for, and that’s allowed the mattress companies to be all over the place. They kind of went crazy, and you’ve got to hand it to them.

“Now, there are a lot of affluent people who will pay a lot of money for a good night’s sleep. Or the perception of a good night’s sleep. I think the mattress guys are the smartest people in the whole home furnishings business. They have managed to attach an emotional element to your mattress. It’s not just layers of foam and padding.”

The Hastens store, in a classic SoHoian cast-iron building on Greene Street, is huge and white. This whiteness sets off the fetching blue and white plaid ticking that covers nearly every mattress. (The alternative is a white and taupe plaid.) Lina Schleenvoigt, the store’s young manager, listed the layers in a Hasten’s mattress: flax, wool and cotton, as well as horsehair, which has been not only cleaned but permed.

“Horsehair is hollow tubes,” she said proudly. “Nature’s air-conditioner. If you consider that you sweat one liter a night, and all that stays in the bed, unless the bed can breathe.”

Here we go again.

If the foam mattresses promise, as Mr. Burney said, better living through chemistry, Hastens, with its horse-and-fjord imagery, is the antifoam — the free-range bed. Its show pony, the Vividus, lives behind a velvet rope. With permission, I clambered aboard, and Ms. Schleenvoigt pushed down on my shoulder.

“You want to feel that the bed accepts you,” she said. “You have to open yourself to a new experience.”

“This,” she said, answering the $60,000 question, “is something without compromises. It takes 160 man-hours to make this bed. The horsehair is hand-selected, for example, and longer and straighter than what we use in the other beds. It has a deep feel, a bottomless feel.”

Not only that, she said, it comes with a brass plate engraved with your name.

I spent an hour here, rolling from bed to bed. It is true that the Vividus is very, very comfortable, but all the mattresses there are — beyond anything you can imagine, which is as it should be, considering that most of them cost more than a car. They even need maintenance like a car, specifically a massage and a flip every month for a year. “We call you and remind you,” Ms. Schleenvoigt said.

I flopped down next to Beth Fussell, who was splayed out on the Excelsior mattress ($15,500), her clogged feet hanging over the edge.

Ms. Fussell, 41, works at an architectural firm around the corner. She said she and her husband, who is also an architect, have been visiting this bed once a month for a year, and they plan to buy it in 18 months.

“What do you need in the city?” she said. “You don’t need a car. We sold our car last year. I think you need a good bed. It’s so stressful here.

“We were subletting an apartment and sleeping on a futon. I like the idea of something that lasts. The feeling of this bed is almost primal. You feel safe on this bed. You can’t forget this bed.”

It took two years of research and bed-testing for Suzanne Durand, 57, and her husband, Everett Ferri, 62, to circle in on their Hastens, the $22,950 2000T, which they bought in December. (“Lina let us take a nap one Sunday,” Ms. Durand said. “She turned up the air-conditioning, turned down the lights and gave us a comforter.”).

Her husband has had rotator cuff issues, she has sore hips and they had been buying mattresses every four or five years, they said. “I was still waking up as stiff as a board,” Ms. Durand said. “The way I rationalized the cost was that this was something that was going to last us for the rest of our lives. And I think that you wake up and feel better is worth it. And I do feel better.”

Mr. Ferri said he did ask Ms. Schleenvoigt if she would take their ’05 BMW X3 in trade.

The 2000T is the company’s best seller, said Erik Svensson, Hasten’s sales manager in the United States. As for Vividus sales, he said guardedly that “more than 15” have sold since the introduction last fall.

THERE is something about a hospital bed that works, said Sharon Kaplan, 59, who bought a $23,000 Hollandia with her husband, Arthur, 62, a few months ago. Or dueling hospital beds, which is what a Hollandia looks and works like: two single adjustable beds that sit side by side but operate independently.

The Kaplans, real estate developers who live in Philadelphia, weren’t looking for a new bed, but a friend invited them to Hollandia’s grand opening last spring, and one thing led to another. “You get to a certain age,” Ms. Kaplan said, “and it’s the one thing you can do, give yourself a good night’s sleep. I haven’t slept this well in years.”

I asked Mr. Kaplan how he rationalized the cost.

“You don’t,” he said. “It’s not possible.” And then he tried to, a bit: “I used to sleep on a $6,000 mattress. Now I sleep on one that cost $23,000. I sit on a sofa that costs as much, and I’m only on that for about 20 minutes a day.”

On a recent Monday, David Ashe, who is marketing Hollandia’s beds in the United States, was presiding over the company’s showroom in Philadelphia.

“Let me get you on a bed,” he said soothingly, leading me to a red velvet number in the showroom window. He drove the remote, elevating both my feet and my head, and Maria Rohe, another marketing manager, tucked a sarcophagus-shaped blanket around me. It had a pocket to slip the feet into and two pockets up top, for the hands. It was wicked comfy.

“Do you like the way that feels?” Mr. Ashe asked. “All our fabrics are coated with aloe vera.”

The obligatory cross section was hauled out, a stunning array of layers and mystery substances. The curly stuff was coconut fibers; the pink and cream-colored stuff, drilled with holes like a Magniflex, was a foam. “A natural foam,” Mr. Ashe hastened to say.

What’s in it?

“A bunch of stuff —— ”

Ms. Rohe broke in: “A proprietary blend of material.”

And then, like Mr. Burney, Mr. Ashe began tearing into Tempur-Pedic. “Take Memory Foam,” he began. “It’s synthetic, it’s dense, it doesn’t breathe, it’s hot, you end up lying in a pool of your own perspiration.”

The sweat again. How much did Mr. Ashe reckon the average person dropped in a bed each night? Was it, and I quoted Ms. Schleenvoigt, a liter?

“That’s disgusting,” he said. “I’m not sleeping with you. I’d say a cup, max.”

Fine. Now where was the $50,000 bed? We’d discussed it on the phone — its mohair cover, its built-in iPod jacks and television. I was ready.

“It’s not here,” Mr. Ashe said. “It’s in Israel. It will be here in a year. I do have a $35,000 that’s coming next week ...”

This is what’s known as the old switch-eroo.

Mr. Ashe said, in a mollifying tone, “You know, I can get you a great night’s sleep on a $17,000 bed.”

Correction: July 26, 2007

An article on July 12 about mattresses misspelled the given name of the United States sales manager for Hastens, a Swedish manufacturer. He is Erik Svensson, not Erick.

July 11, 2007- A Trail That Leads Through Many Meals

2007-10-04T13:30:00.000-04:00

A Good Appetite

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By MELISSA CLARK

IT’S not often that a peanut butter and banana sandwich will inspire a spicy, grilled chicken dinner. But such was the case one recent afternoon, when I was simultaneously preparing one meal and daydreaming about the next.

I had just lugged home a brand new cast-iron grill, so naturally, as I smeared peanut butter onto seven-grain bread for lunch, I was also contemplating grilled chicken legs for dinner. I could just picture myself standing on the deck at dusk, gimlet in one hand, oversize tongs in the other, flipping drumsticks cloaked in crisp skin that was ever so slightly charred around the edges. Fragrant smoke wafted around me in my mind, and I inhaled the aromas of sizzling chicken. And garlic. And ... um. ...

The shimmering fantasy faded. What else, besides the garlic that neither chicken nor I could live without, could I massage over those legs?

That’s when I noticed the recipe on the cap of the extra-crunchy. Peanut sauce, it read, good for noodles and chicken. The ingredient list contained garlic powder, soy sauce, cayenne and granulated sugar. I could practically taste it — a cloying, stick-to-the-roof-of-the-mouth paste. But it did spark more delectable memories, like a peanut satay sauce.

A spicy, chili-flecked peanut concoction slathered over the chicken legs was starting to sound mighty appealing. Except I had finished the last of the peanut butter and there weren’t any peanuts in the house to grind up. But an excavation of the cupboard revealed a jar of cashews. Why not use those instead? It was easier than going to the store.

The dish was starting to take shape. Since I had to dirty the blender by grinding the nuts, I figured I would grind up the rest of the ingredients, too, which would save me the trouble of mincing and mixing.

Then I poked around the kitchen for other things to add. Garlic was in plentiful supply, so I tossed in four fat cloves, along with some jalapeños that I keep around in the summer for emergency guacamole.

Here’s something I’ve learned about jalapeños. These days, most are bred to be as bland as bell peppers. So I never automatically seed them because the seeds and veins contain most of their heat. But occasionally, you encounter a really fiery specimen. My rule of thumb is to halve a pepper and lick the guts. If there is a mild sting, I leave in the seeds. If I leap up screaming, I consider de-seeding.

Also in the fridge for guacamole was the end of a bunch of cilantro. There weren’t enough leaves left to make an impact, so I threw in some of the stems as well, which have an intense flavor of their own.

I needed to add some liquid, too, for a proper consistency. Soy sauce was a good idea (thanks, Smucker’s) and so was fresh lime juice, which would pair well with my gimlet. I also added oil to help distribute the flavors and to keep the chicken skin from sticking to the new grill grate.

I whirled it all together and applied half to the chicken, leaving half to serve as a sauce alongside. When the sun started to set and the mosquitoes made their buzzing appearance, I lighted the charcoal and waited for it to glow. Then I added the chicken, carefully tending it while gimlet-sipping, just as I imagined.

Those drumsticks rolled off the grill juicy and burnished, and the cashew sauce was even more marvelous than most peanut satays. It had a salty, buttery richness that tamed the heat from the chili, and a touch of sweetness from a dash of brown sugar.

It all got me thinking about my next meal, breakfast. Maybe a berry-yogurt-banana parfait with chopped toasted cashews? Thus the happy cycle continues, one meal into the next.

July 11, 2007- The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course

2007-10-04T13:24:00.000-04:00

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By KIM SEVERSON

A TELEVISION news producer from Atlanta recently made a deal with her boss, who was traveling in London. The producer promised she would submit her script for an investigative story ahead of deadline in exchange for two British Kit Kats and a Curly Wurly bar.

The woman, who did not want her name revealed for fear of being teased endlessly by her colleagues, so loves her British chocolate that she takes an extra suitcase when she travels to London just to bring back a haul.

“Should I admit I am carrying two U.K. Kit Kats with me in my briefcase right now, just in case I get into a bind on my trip?” she e-mailed this reporter from the road.

At this point, it would be easy to take a long, clichéd side trip into a discussion of the relative inferiority of British food. But for the rarefied palate that can appreciate the soft, immediate pleasure of an inexpensive candy bar, it’s not difficult to give the edge to sweets from the realm of the queen.

That’s why Malcolm Smart takes his son, Rowan, for a stroll to Blue Apron in Park Slope, Brooklyn, twice a week for a proper British candy bar. Rowan is 6 years old, and tends toward the mint Aero bar.

Mr. Smart, who grew up in Birmingham, England, home of the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury-Schweppes, is a Flake man himself. The Cadbury Flake, a crumbly bar of compressed ribbons of chocolate, was invented in 1920. It is thrust into swirls of soft ice cream at parks all over London, creating a dessert called a 99.

Alan Palmer, who is an owner of Blue Apron, said the British candy bars have been strong sellers since he opened the shop five years ago.“Anybody who went to school there or had any kind of business or family connection over there is totally addicted to them,” he said.

Mr. Smart, who has lived in the United States for 25 years, learned early on in his life here that British and American chocolate bars are different, even if they share a name and a look.

“One day I was eating a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk and I thought, this has absolutely no flavor,” he said. “I looked at the label and saw it was made by Hershey. I was outraged.”

Cadbury Dairy Milk is the iconic British candy bar, the one most likely to be tucked into the suitcase of a Yankee tourist looking for an inexpensive souvenir. Versions are filled with caramel, whipped fondant, whole nuts or pellets of shortbread cookie.

It’s a different bar from the Cadbury bar available in the United States. According to the label, a British Cadbury Dairy Milk bar contains milk, sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, vegetable fat and emulsifiers. The version made by the Hershey Company, which holds the license from Cadbury-Schweppes to produce the candy in the United States under the British company’s direction, starts its ingredient list with sugar. It lists lactose and the emulsifier soy lecithin, which keeps the cocoa butter from separating from the cocoa. The American product also lists “natural and artificial flavorings.”

Tony Bilsborough, a spokesman for Cadbury-Schweppes in Britain, said his company ships its specially formulated chocolate crumb — a mash of dried milk and chocolate to which cocoa butter will be added later — to Hershey, Pa. What happens next accounts for the differences.

“I imagine it’s down to the final processing and the blending,” he said. After consulting with chocolate manufacturers in each country, Cadbury tries to replicate the taste people grew up with, he said. In the United States, that means a bar that is more akin to a Hershey bar, which to many British palates tastes sour.

Kirk Seville, a spokesman for the Hershey Company, declined to explain the manufacturing process, saying the company preferred not to take part in a discussion about the manufacturing differences between a British and an American Cadbury bar.

For people here with a taste for British candy, no explanation is necessary. Their opinions are already formed.

“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax,” said Kevin Ellis, an Alaskan-born designer with Adobe Systems in San Francisco. Mr. Ellis, who says Canadian and British chocolate bars are comparable, anticipates with delight the boxes of imported chocolate bars his wife's family sends.

The appeal of British chocolate is powerful. When the Ellis family moved not long ago to another Bay Area house, a burly man from Birmingham who was helping to haul the sofa spied a box.

“Do you mind if I have a Curly Wurly?” he asked with the tenderness of a hopeful child.

The Curly Wurly, a thick strip of braided caramel covered in chocolate, is a sibling to the discontinued Marathon bar, which any American who was in high school when Jimmy Carter was president will remember fondly.

The Curly Wurly is not as popular in Britain as the Crunchie. With its crisp honeycomb interior, it’s what a Butterfinger might be if it went to finishing school and married up.

But neither rivals the Mars bar, the prom queen of British candy bars. About three million of them are made daily in Slough, just west of London. It’s like a less sweet version of the American Milky Way, rather than the almond-stuffed American Mars bar. The smart set in London melts it over ice cream for a fast dinner party dessert. Mars bars are also fried in the same sort of batter used to coat cod.

And then there is the television producer’s beloved Kit Kat, invented in York, England, in the early 1930s and available in versions that match the tastes of, variously, Japanese, Germans, Australians, Canadians and Americans.

Nicky Perry has sold chocolate bars from her home country for more than a decade at her store, Tea and Sympathy, in Greenwich Village.

Her theory is that the bars from the United Kingdom are made from a better recipe, containing fewer stabilizers. They melt more quickly than a Hershey bar, which is why she cuts back on the amount she stocks in summer.

“I can’t afford to keep the A.C. on all night or a chocolate bar would cost $10, wouldn’t it?” she said.

At the London Food Company in Montclair, N.J., about 17 percent of the store’s sales are British chocolate bars, said Samantha Codling, the owner.

Ms. Codling, who is from Essex, offers a range of Cadbury Milk bars, including the mint crisp, whole nut and Turkish delight with rose jelly. The British Smartie, which resembles an M & M but has a thicker shell, and the Malteser malt ball, also sell well.

“All the ex-pats definitely know the difference already and the Americans soon figure it out,” she said.

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

July 11, 2007- Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits

2007-10-04T12:38:00.000-04:00

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By MOTOKO RICH

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series’s United States publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the eagerly awaited seventh and final installment due out at 12:01 a.m. on July 21.

But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”

Educators agree that the series can’t get the job done alone.

“Unless there are scaffolds in place for kids — an enthusiastic adult saying, ‘Here’s the next one’ — it’s not going to happen,” said Nancie Atwell, the author of “The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers” and a teacher in Edgecomb, Me. “And in way too many American classrooms it’s not happening.”

Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles). What parents and others hoped was that the phenomenal success of the Potter books would blunt these trends, perhaps even creating a generation of lifelong readers in their wake.

“Anyone who has children or grandchildren sees the competition for children’s time increasing as they enter adolescence, and the difficulty that reading seems to have to compete effectively,” Mr. Gioia said.

Many thousands of children have, indeed, gone from the Potter books to other pleasure reading. But others have dropped away.

Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. “We’d sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns,” recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.

But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When “Deathly Hallows” comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: “I don’t really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee.”

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

Many parents, educators and librarians say that despite such statistics, they have seen enough evidence to convince them that Harry Potter is a bona fide hero.

“Parents will say, ‘You know, my son never spent time reading, and now my son is staying up late reading, keeping the light on because he can’t put that book down,’ ” said Linda B. Gambrell, president of the International Reading Association, a professional organization for teachers.

In a study commissioned last year by Scholastic, Yankelovich, a market research firm, reported that 51 percent of the 500 kids aged 5 to 17 polled said they did not read books for fun before they started reading the series. A little over three-quarters of them said Harry Potter had made them interested in reading other books.

Before she discovered Harry Potter, Kara Havranek, 13, spent most of her time romping outside in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland, or playing video games like Crash Bandicoot.

But four years after struggling through “Sorcerer’s Stone,” Kara has read and reread all six books, decorated her bedroom with Potter memorabilia and said she could hardly wait for “Deathly Hallows.”

But although Kara said she has enjoyed other books, she was not sure what lasting influence the series would have. “I probably won’t read as much when Harry Potter is over,” she said.

In a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies (the film version of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth in the series, just opened) heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.

Until Harry Potter, “I don’t think kids were reading proudly,” said Connie Williams, the school librarian at Kenilworth Junior High School in Petaluma, Calif. “Now it’s more normalized. It’s like, ‘Gosh we can read now, it’s O.K.’ ”

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.

He had read the first three Harry Potter books, but said he had no particular interest in reading more. “I don’t like to read that much,” he said. “I think there are better things to do.”

Neema Avashia, Aaron’s English teacher, said it was rare for the Harry Potter series to draw reluctant readers to books. “I try to have a lot of books in my library that reflect where kids are coming from,” Ms. Avashia said. “And Harry Potter isn’t really where my kids are coming from.” She noted that her class is 85 percent nonwhite, and Harry Potter has few characters that belong to a racial minority group.

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.

Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.

On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.

“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”

“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”

July 11, 2007- Mom Puts Family on Her Meal Plan

2007-10-04T12:28:00.000-04:00

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By LESLIE KAUFMAN

FOR the past 10 years, I have starred in my own reality series: “Working Mom Cooks Weeknight Dinner.” Think of it as “Survivor” meets “Iron Chef” with a bit of “Deal or No Deal.”

In the show’s long-running history there have been stretches in which the entire tribe was forced to subsist on scrambled eggs, tuna sandwiches and reheated Chinese food. But together we have overcome obstacles, gained wisdom and reached a point where my husband and I and our two boys eat balanced and even inventive home-cooked meals most nights.

This achievement is a bit of a wonder to my peers. So many of them struggle to eat dinner together, often waiting until the last minute to boil pasta and toss it with store-bought sauce or, more likely, dining on the leftover macaroni and cheese the babysitter fed the children. Some friends, otherwise civilized and professional, confess they resort to cold cereal.

The pitfalls of the modern family meal are well chronicled: the varying schedules, the demanding diets (low carb, no wheat, no meat) and the fact that all too often the dinner so proudly displayed is greeted by a cheerful “Oh, that looks disgusting.” For most working parents, even a 30-minute meal seems like a June Cleaver-era indulgence. By the time I walk in the door at 7:30 my children are off-the-wall hungry, even having had snacks. Ideally, dinner will take 15 minutes or less to put on the table.

But despite the challenges, I tell you it can be done. I committed to cooking a family meal when my first son was born, in 1997, not because of any psychology study about the well-being of children, but because it gave me comfort.

Every working mother has to draw the line somewhere. Maybe my children would take their first steps with a babysitter, or perform in school plays with only their grandparents in attendance. But mom would cook their dinners.

At first I rotated the dozen recipes I kept in my head over and over. But if my family grew tired of endless reiterations of chicken piccata, sloppy Joes and pasta puttanesca, they held their tongues.

Over time I developed a routine that allowed for more variation and less last-minute cooking. The key to long-term success is not so much the food but the pacing and organization of the meals. Recipes are important, of course, and I am ever vigilant about finding high-impact, low-labor inventions. But that is the easy part. These days there is no shortage of outlets that offer menu planners and ideas that are clever and quick.

I am not offering a shopping list but rather a game plan, tried and true. These are the rules of play; follow one or two each week and you will never have to eat Cheerios after 5 p.m.

Sunday Is Not a Day of Rest

If you are going to cook dinner every day of the week, you will have to do most of your shopping and some preparing ahead of time. This is particularly the case, if, like me, you live someplace that does not have a market for last-minute supplies nearby.

Yes, this means planning menus for the week. Don’t wince. This is good. It means freedom from the painfully frequent question, “What are we going to eat tonight?” By Sunday, you will know.

Getting some meals ready ahead of time makes sense for people who like to cook, because weekend preparation can be as languorous as you allow.

In spring and summer, when my boys dog me to pitch baseballs and my herb garden calls for fussing, I keep it simple. Advance work might include buying the ingredients for a composed salad and chopping and roasting whatever can be done ahead of time without sacrificing freshness. I might use the most basic techniques: steaming artichokes, for example, instead of braising them.

In winter, depending on my mood, I could make a chuck roast in wine and herbs (10 minutes of browning and stirring, three hours in the oven) instead of concocting a stew that demands that the meat be cubed, floured and browned and copious vegetables be diced. Or, I could do just the reverse.

As often as not, I don’t cook the food right away but prepare it for the moment it is to be popped into the oven. For food that looks great and entices children, I find it is easy to stuff a flank steak or chicken breasts ahead of time, secure them with twine, wrap them well and just roast them when I walk in the door.

Whatever the season, my habit is to get at least two meals done on Sunday. For at least one of these meals I make a double portion and freeze half to serve a week from the coming Tuesday. Among my standbys are chili (vegetable, chicken and white bean, or beef), Bolognese sauce, fish cakes, pesto (in ice cube trays) and soups, especially split pea, minestrone and carrot-orange.

If you are disciplined, shopping and cooking (not including time in the oven) can be kept to two hours on Sunday, setting you up for dinners through Tuesday.

The Foods of My Mother

The kitchen of the Greenwich Village apartment that I grew up in was long and narrow and had but one window, facing north. Still, in my mind’s eye it is a particularly warm room, often full of teenagers draped on counters or stools and eating everything in sight. When I was young I attributed our popularity to the fact that I was one of three gregarious female siblings. But in retrospect it seems possible my mother’s pot roast was the real magnet.

There was always a leftover roast chicken, meatloaf or pot roast in our refrigerator. Always. The reliability of these offerings was something of a joke among my friends, but they did end up in my kitchen stuffing themselves after every school event. Who could blame them? Even today few foods are more satisfying than my father’s warmed brisket sandwich on rye with mayonnaise and chili sauce.

Naturally, when I began to cook I disdained such pedestrian offerings or reconfigured them to epicurean standards. My mother’s meatloaf consisted of Lipton onion soup mix and white bread soaked in milk. Mine had to have diced vegetables, sautéed and cooled; three kinds of meat (I ground my own sausage); and spices like cumin and nutmeg.

I have now come full circle, and appreciate the genius of my mother’s approach. I have four core dishes: meatloaf, pot roast, roast chicken and meatballs. I prepare the most basic, pared-down version of each dish. By now it is reflexive. I could do it in my sleep. Perhaps I have. My basic roast chicken is covered in oil and sprinkled with kosher salt and paprika, and that’s that.

Every week I make at least one of those dishes and leave it in the back of the fridge to do emergency duty, as in: “I am not eating anything stuffed with spinach. That’s disgusting.” And like a great friend, it never fails me in a crisis. It can be reheated as a meal, sliced for sandwiches, diced for a pasta sauce and used with cheese to fill a tortilla or a twice-baked potato.

And there is always hearty food at the ready for children: mine, yours, whoever drops by.

Incredible Disassembling Meals

When my first son was little, I fed him puréed chunks of whatever my husband and I had for dinner. I congratulated myself when he showed a precocious affection for capers. The trick, I explained to friends who were amazed at his willingness to eat chopped broccolini, was to resist the child’s capricious demands for separate meals. Fortitude, I counseled.

Then, of course, came No. 2.

My second son has stubbornly adhered to a diet of mostly white foods for nearly six years: pasta, rice, cheese, bread, potatoes, chicken. He also eats red meat, baby carrots and chocolate. Recently, in what is being regarded as a green revolution, he has added edamame and string beans.

I refuse to cook to suit him, yet I cannot not feed him. What we have learned together is that no meal is greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, I plan each meal with the thought that it will be consumed in pieces. Some of every pot of pasta never gets sauce. Mushrooms or pickled things are added at the table and only for volunteers.

If everybody eats something, I call it a victory.

Take a recent night when I cooked a household favorite, meatball “pizzas” on whole-wheat pitas. My husband and I indulged in the works: two cheeses (fresh but grated by the store), meatballs (which I shaped and browned over the weekend), thinly sliced red onion and tomato, red pepper flakes and mint from the garden. Assembly took five minutes, the time under the broiler seven. (We paired this with a plain green romaine salad.)

My older son, Sam, 9, ate the salad and pita with a light covering of mozzarella. Joe, who is 6, ate meatballs with ketchup in the pita and baby carrots for his vegetable.

The next night we had lamb cooked on the grill, couscous with olives and lemon and okra pickle. My husband and I ate everything (and drank a nice zinfandel); Sam had lamb and couscous; Joe had couscous, cottage cheese and baby carrots. Needless to say, no child touched the okra.

Quick Fixes

Perhaps by now you have noticed we are not all the way through the week. I’ve helped you plan Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. If you’ve done your job well, Friday will be leftovers night. On Saturday everybody’s out and about. But what about Wednesday and Thursday?

This is why you must memorize five or six dishes that can be prepared in a snap. If you use only one a week, say on Wednesday, they will not get old or tired.

As someone who watches carbs, I make here a painful admission: pasta is the best bet (ask your babysitter or children to have the water boiling by the time you get home). Goat cheese mixed with a little hot water makes an easy, tangy dressing. I serve it over fusilli and mix in vegetables. Olives, sautéed red peppers and onions are favorite additions. My older son is partial to pasta carbonara with turkey bacon and eggs. In fact, he has learned to cook it himself.

Quickly seared meats like lamb chops and thin steaks are satisfying (cooked with little more than olive oil and sea salt) and just right over spicy prewashed greens and served with bread. (Children may omit greens and go straight for the baby carrots.) The trick for flavor here is a salad dressing with an extra twist, like puréed sun-dried tomatoes or chipotle peppers. The dressing, of course, can be made ahead.

Stir-fries are immensely popular with children but require planning if they are to hit the table in 15 minutes. I slice steak, chicken and vegetables in the morning and store them separately. It makes assembly in the evening easy. Teach the children or the babysitter to make rice or it will delay the meal.

Pan-grilled sandwiches with a mix of meat and cheese, and pickled onions and sweet pickles as condiments, are also popular. The adults can add red onion and tomatoes.

Fast vegetables are also important. Asparagus can be sprayed with olive oil and roasted in seven minutes. Prewashed baby spinach can be tossed in the wok and on the table in about as much time. Shredded cole slaw from bags can be assembled in under five.

What About Thursday?

Thursday is takeout night! You’ve earned every mouthful.

July 11, 2007- Where Outsiders, and Fear, Loom Over Daily Life

2007-10-04T12:21:00.000-04:00

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Memo From Beirut

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 7 — The Lebanese soldiers passed cautiously along the sidewalk, weapons held ready as they spread out in two long columns along the quiet, tree-lined streets of the middle-class neighborhood of Ashrafiye.

Around the corner, a glass door opened into Sushi Bar, a trendy, upscale restaurant that caters to this bit of Lebanon — the alcohol-drinking, cigar-smoking, valet-dependent Lebanon. “Do you have a reservation?” the hostess asked, offering not a hint of irony as the army patrolled outside along largely empty streets.

It is hard to know whether the hostess was engaging in a bit of wishful thinking — most of the tables were empty — or if her question was part of a broader struggle to try to hold on to some semblance of a normal life.

Lebanese are being squeezed, no longer just by fear of bombs, but by the realities of checkpoints and roving patrols of soldiers. At nearly every step, civilian life intersects with the martial: brides must pass through metal detectors on the way to their own weddings at hotels; parking attendants always search car trunks for bombs; mall security guards insist on examining the contents of pocketbooks.

“It seems everything is getting worse, because we have so many problems now,” said Ahmed Fatfat, a cabinet minister who has lived in his government offices for the last nine months because he — like the prime minister — has been afraid he will be killed if he stays at home.

After the war between Hezbollah and Israel a year ago, United Nations officials marveled at how quickly this city, and this country, got back up and running.

But now optimism is in short supply, as Lebanon grapples with a chronic political crisis, the rise of Qaeda-style militancy and a seemingly endless stream of bombings and assassinations.

The sectarian and political tensions that divide, and define, Lebanon, are more evident in daily life. The presence of foreign powers playing their hands in Lebanon is also more evident.

“Nations don’t behave this way,” said Timur Goksel, the former spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as Unifil. “It’s groups of people who share the same land.”

Foreign powers have long pursued their national interests on Lebanese soil. But any efforts to conceal those machinations have evaporated.

The old and new airport roads, for example, are lined with yellow banners boasting of Iran’s help with reconstruction. At a traffic circle in the municipality of Ghobeiry, just outside of Beirut, there is a small new public garden and three public toilets. A sign says it was all built by the “Iranian committee” in just 40 days.

The small Persian Gulf country of Qatar seems to be everywhere, from the north to the south, doling out cash for rebuilding and for health services. For some, the signs of foreign involvement add to the anxiety. “We in this country are waiting to see the outcome of the American-Iranian game,” said Fadi Abboud, head of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists.

A north-to-south tour illustrates the few free spaces Lebanese can find, now, to breathe.

“Your sweet blood protects the country,” reads a banner strung over the highway leading into Menieh, just north of Tripoli. The sign refers to the soldiers who were killed fighting Islamic militants in the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al Bared. Eighty soldiers have died, and the fighting continues.

But the fighting has also revealed a level of potentially destabilizing hostility between the Lebanese and the Palestinians who have lived here — as outsiders — for generations. When thousands of Palestinians tried to march back to their abandoned camp, the army opened fire — and local residents attacked the Palestinians.

“They don’t pay rent, they don’t pay electricity, they don’t pay to inspect their cars,” said Mustafa Deeb, 26, a truck driver who identified himself as affiliated with the Future Movement, a Sunni Muslim party.

For their part, some of the Palestinians said they believed that the Sunni-led government wanted to destroy their camp so that they would assimilate. The goal, the theory goes, is to increase the number of Sunnis in the country — Palestinians are primarily Sunni — to offset the electoral strength of Shiites. But that would undermine the Palestinians’ dream of someday returning to what is now Israel.

Residents of the south also have seen their world circumscribed by anger and fear. Thanks to money from Qatar, the village of Aynata in southern Lebanon has managed to rebuild about 60 percent of the homes that had been destroyed by Israeli bombs, people there said.

But these do not feel like happy times in Aynata. Nahed Jaafar runs a small food store and gas station on a main road in town. She cheerfully greeted visitors on a recent day, refusing to take money for a Coke and some gum, and pulling out plastic chairs for her guests to sit and talk.

Instantly, however, a dirt bike roared up and the driver, his face hidden beneath a helmet, revved his engine and spun doughnuts in the dirt right in front of Ms. Jaafar. The driver stopped and pulled off his helmet to reveal a boyish face with a scar running beneath his right eye.

He said to the visitors: “I am Hezbollah. You are not allowed to be here. You are not allowed to talk to people. You are a foreign terrorist. This is a Hezbollah area. Maybe you are working against Hezbollah.”

The urban landscape of the south falls into three categories: rubble, houses of cinderblock in the early stages of repair and new homes with stone facades and red tile roofs. The village of Bint Jbail is still mostly rubble — the victim, residents said, of a dispute over how to proceed with rebuilding.

Amid the rubble, Muhammad Hassan Bazzi, 70, his wife, Amina, and his brother Muhammad Najib Bazzi, 67, sat in the shade enjoying the afternoon breeze while sipping sweet tea from small glasses. “We ask when we will get help,” said the elder Mr. Bazzi. “They say be patient. But what is happening? We don’t know.”

“I had everything,” said Mrs. Bazzi. “Now I want a refrigerator, a washing machine, a TV.” Tears came to her eyes.

Soon a shiny black Infiniti emerged along a dirt path cutting through the rubble. The younger Mr. Bazzi saw the car and without hesitation said, “The conversation is over.”

The driver was with Hezbollah. He wanted to know who they were talking to — and what they were saying.

July 11, 2007- Wasabi to the People: Big Chains Evolve or Die

2007-10-04T11:57:00.000-04:00

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By MICHELINE MAYNARD

FACED with ever-changing tastes and myriad choices even at the cheapest prices, food companies are eager to give their customers the next new thing — even if their customers aren’t quite ready for it.

Take wasabi. Three years ago, Brooks Broadhurst was certain that customers at Eat’n Park restaurants were ready for a new dish: wasabi-encrusted salmon.

Mr. Broadhurst, the senior vice president for food and beverage at the chain, decided to add the dish to nearly half of its 79 restaurants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.

It seemed like a safe bet. By that time, sushi was a staple in the nation’s supermarkets, as were products like wasabi mustard and wasabi mayonnaise. Wasabi had even been the refrain in a popular Budweiser commercial.

But at Eat’n Park, wasabi salmon was a flop. Mr. Broadhurst said he wasn’t quite sure what went wrong, although he did wonder whether the fish, with its pale green coating and pale green sauce, looked unappealing on the laminated multipage menu, especially next to the sundaes and pies covered in whipped cream.

“Sometimes you think it’s going to be a home run, and it dies,” he said.

Mr. Broadhurst isn’t deterred from trying new dishes, though. Nor can he be. Every food company and restaurant, large or small, profits through its ability to predict customer desire. Get it right — realize, say, that people are ready for Italian-inspired coffee — and you become Starbucks.

Get it wrong, though, and customers disappear, along with revenues. As a result, chains and large food manufacturers dance a sometimes awkward tango with novelty. Flavors that would evoke yawns in acclaimed restaurants in Chicago or Los Angeles must be approached with caution by chains. While a chef in Manhattan might discover a new ingredient in the morning and have it on the menu by dinnertime, a corporate executive faced with the same ingredient will react with a lengthy regime of recipe development and test-marketing.

This process used to mean that it took years for the discoveries of a few elite tastemakers to make their way into the mainstream. But executives at food companies say they no longer have that kind of time. Interest in new flavors has accelerated, they say, as the country’s racial and ethnic makeup becomes more varied and as new ingredients and combinations appear on television. As a result, their efforts to keep up have accelerated, too.

Mark Miller, the chef at the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M., said that flavors are moving faster than ever from his upscale kitchens to chain restaurants. New dishes or ingredients are publicized within a year of showing up on chefs’ menus, he said, and it takes no more than 18 months after that for them to go mainstream.

“That’s much faster than 5 or 10 years ago,” Mr. Miller said.

New ideas emerge from the experiments of cutting-edge chefs and show up at cooking demonstrations and trade shows, like the Fancy Food Show in New York this week. Once primarily a place where manufacturers peddled products aimed at specialty markets, the aisles of Fancy Food Shows, which take place in several cities across the nation, are now filled with food industry executives searching for the next hot trends.

As Applebee’s has learned recently, standing still is not an option. At least in part because it waited for years to update its menu, the chain is now suffering.

Still, success is always unpredictable. Goat cheese, for instance, failed to impress customers when it landed in a salad last year on the menu at the Atlanta Bread Company chain of bakery restaurants, based in their namesake city. That surprised Chris Campagna, the vice president for marketing, who said his customers like to take risks. Those who tried the salad liked it, he said, but there were not enough orders to keep it on the menu.

“It was a little too early for goat cheese,” Mr. Campagna said. But, he vowed, “we’ll try it again a few years down the road.”

While goat cheese bombed, a sandwich of Cuban roast pork loin with cheese, mustard and roast pickled onions is being served at all 160 of the company’s locations in 24 states, even as far north of Cuba as Beloit, Wis. Modeled after the classic Cuban version, the Atlanta Bread sandwich sells well in areas both with and without sizable Hispanic populations, Mr. Campagna said.

For the most part, however, the company has focused less on ethnic dishes and more on sauces and spreads that can make a sandwich seem more sophisticated. For example, it puts a sun-dried tomato topping on its turkey sandwich, served on ciabatta. “They still want their chicken salad, they still want their turkey, but they want sun-dried-tomato spread and pesto,” Mr. Campagna said.

When experiments work out, a new food enters the local vocabulary. John Taylor, the vice president for product development at Panera Bread, remembers his first taste of Meyer lemon juice, at a 2005 seminar at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif.

Mr. Taylor had been vaguely aware of the Meyer lemon, a cross between an orange and a lemon, and knew it was a favorite of Alice Waters, who has used it in éclairs and tarts at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. But it wasn’t until he tasted the mellow Meyer, less tart and acidic than typical lemons, that he knew he wanted to put the flavor on the menu at Panera, a St. Louis-based chain of 1,000 bakery cafes.

Nonetheless, Panera’s use of Meyer lemons took time to develop. For one thing, it had to find something to put them in — or on.

As it happened, the company was developing a grilled salmon salad, which also would feature wheat berries, part of Mr. Taylor’s push to add whole grains to its menu. The salmon salad seemed to cry out for a citrus-based dressing. But before Panera could settle on Meyer lemons, it had to find enough of them — not an easy task, given that the growing season runs only from December to April. In the end, Panera found a supplier that could provide frozen Meyer lemon juice — which might make Ms. Waters blanch, but made Meyer lemons work for Panera.

After tinkering with the ingredients, which include a hint of roasted garlic, Panera began offering the salad at a limited number of outlets last summer, including 30 in the Detroit area. Customers liked it, although some complained that they weren’t getting enough grilled salmon for the $7.99 price.

In December, at a tasting session that the company calls a “celebration,” a revamped salad was presented to all the senior executives, including Panera Bread’s chief executive, Ronald M. Shaich, who is also a founder of the company. They liked the new version, and this spring Panera began serving it to customers nationwide.

Like Mr. Taylor a few years back, many diners had never experienced the taste, but they seemed glad to have the chance to try it. A customer at the Panera outlet in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Paula Caulder of Farmington, Mich., said she’d seen Meyer lemons in a fancy market in suburban Detroit but didn’t know how they tasted.

“I’m impressed,” said Ms. Caulder, who said she is a Food Network addict. “Maybe that’s why I’ve ordered it twice.”

Others knew less but were just as adventurous. “It’s a special kind of lemon, right?” said Suzette Wilson of St. Clair Shores, Mich., who ordered the salad at a Panera in nearby Grosse Pointe. She said that Panera should keep testing new flavors: “They should see what works.”

That entails its own risk, of course. Mr. Broadhurst at Eat’n Park, rather than end up with another wasabi salmon, now sends a questionnaire by e-mail to customers registered on its Web site, gauging their interest in dishes they might like to try. In the latest survey they were asked if they would order appetizers like stuffed soft pretzels, main courses like Miami-style tilapia with jasmine rice, and desserts including s’mores and mango cheesecake.

None made the menu. Instead Eat’n Park recently added a chicken quesadilla appetizer, a set of three mini deli sandwiches and a Philadelphia cheese steak sandwich, all winners of the popular vote.

The changes can’t be too numerous or too frequent, or older customers would revolt, Mr. Broadhurst said. Yet their children and grandchildren are eager for adventuresome dishes, he said, adding, “People are more interested in their food than they ever have been before.”

Indeed, Americans’ willingness to try new flavors in big numbers led Wrigley to introduce Mint Mojito gum under its Orbit brand in January. While mint is a staple at Wrigley, the flavors of the mojito, the Cuban alcoholic drink, seem more of a stretch. But Paul Chibe, Wrigley’s vice president for United States marketing, said the mojito — made with mint, rum, sugar, lime and carbonated water — had become as familiar to many people as the margarita or the piña colada.

Mr. Chibe said Wrigley decided to develop the gum about two years ago, when researchers at its global innovation center in Chicago, the home of its product testing, began to notice the flavor — or at least a semblance of its aroma — showing up in candles and bath products.

Buoying Wrigley’s confidence was the growing acceptance among Americans for other Latin flavors, such as dulce de leche, the milk caramel sauce widely found in ice cream, candy and desserts.

“Thirty years ago fine dining was expressed in French food,” Mr. Chibe said. “Now it’s Mexican food and Thai food. Something that was exotic five years ago isn’t anymore.”

But mojito still is, in the view of Wrigley, which has plastered the words “exotic new flavor” across one corner of the gum’s vivid green box. The gum itself has strong mint overtones and just a hint of lime, but Wrigley left out the rum flavor.

Exotic or not, Mr. Chibe said the company’s research showed that the mojito flavor was familiar enough to risk a national campaign, rather than a regional rollout.

Americans’ growing venturousness poses challenges not only for restaurant chains but also for specialty food producers, who must move more quickly to keep a grip on markets they once had to themselves.

“We used to think we were the product developers for these very big companies,” said Jonathan King, a founder of Stonewall Kitchen, a maker of high-end jams, sauces and condiments in York, Me. But mass-market interest has forced him to delete flavors that have become too familiar from the company’s lineup. Sun-dried tomato products, which it had sold since its founding in 1994, are now gone.

And despite Mr. Broadhurst’s experience at Eat’n Park, Mr. King said he believes wasabi will be the next flavor to be adopted by the mass market.

Another, he predicted, will be chipotle, the roasted jalapeño made famous by chefs like Mr. Miller in Santa Fe. Mr. King has spied it in barbecue sauce, mayonnaise and salsas, and it appears in the name of a restaurant chain, Chipotle Mexican Grill.

“Chipotle just came out of nowhere,” Mr. King said, adding that just a few years ago, “I got a sore throat explaining what a chipotle was.”

Mr. King said he was not surprised to see Panera adopt Meyer lemons, but added that customers should not equate mass-market versions with what they might find at Ms. Waters’s restaurant. “Whatever they end up doing with it,” he said, “it will be diluted.”

Mary M. Chapman contributed reporting from Detroit.

July 9, 2007- New York Wineries Face Tastings Gone Wild

2007-10-04T11:49:00.000-04:00

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By COREY KILGANNON

AQUEBOGUE, N.Y., July 3 — In the 35 years since vines began sprouting out of its sandy soil, the North Fork of Long Island has fought to be recognized as a bona fide wine region, and now more than a million visitors a year visit the tasting rooms at its 30 vineyards to sample award-winning merlots and cabernet francs.

But this season, small signs bearing stern messages — “No Buses,” “No Limos,” “Appointment Only” — have sprouted outside many of the wineries. There also are reports of tastings gone wild involving intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body until they grabbed the brass spittoon for baser purposes.

The latest additions to local lore include a story about members of an inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards here who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines. Then there were the drunken customers at the Pugliese Vineyards in Cutchogue who jumped into the shimmering lake next to the elegant outdoor tasting area. And the bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.

“All of a sudden it’s five deep at the bar with people knocking into each other and pushing each other out of the way to get to the tasting,” said Kristen Venasky, 27, who has been pouring for two years at Palmer. “Saturdays,” she said, “are for people who want to get sloshed.”

After managing to overcome the obstacles of new vines, fast-draining soil and fickle climate, the North Fork wineries are now struggling to handle crowds who are looking more for a good time than a good wine, who are interested in quaffing quickly whatever is open without regard to vintage or fermentation.

Feeling the sting of its own success, the nascent wine region is battling an ugly image — one pourer called the scene “slobs and snobs” — that detracts from the charm of the boutique wineries that are just over an hour’s drive from New York City. On any given Saturday, stretch limousines and tour buses jam otherwise bucolic Route 25, which snakes through sleepy towns, sprawling farmland and roadside vegetable stands.

In response to the raucous behavior, more associated with that South Fork bastion known as the Hamptons, almost all of the wineries have ended free tastings and now generally charge $5 for a flight of carefully measured samples. (Palmer is one of the few still pouring without charge, if only for selected wines.) Many tasting rooms have banned bachelorette parties and tightened cutoff policies on serving the inebriated. Raphael vineyards in Peconic has closed its tasting room on Saturdays except by appointment.

The North Fork is not the only wine-producing region in the state to have problems with rowdy tasters who arrive by limousine or bus. In New York — the nation’s third-largest producer of wine grapes, after California and Washington State, according to the United States Commerce Department — wineries in the Finger Lakes region have created the Safe Group Wine Tours Initiative. The program issues warnings to groups that are considered out of control and will bar repeat offenders, according to The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Many wineries in the Napa Valley of California, one of the nation’s largest wine-producing areas, also have adopted a “no limos” policy.

At North Fork wineries, it is common to see security guards and employees in the parking lots turning away limos and buses. The police say they have ratcheted up checkpoints to snare drunken drivers.

The Long Island Wine Council — which has charted the steady growth in visitors to North Fork wineries, to 1.2 million last year, from 940,000 in 2003 and 500,000 in 2000 — recently met with a consortium of local limousine companies to ask for cooperation in controlling their customers.

Jim Ferrarie, president of Long Island Wine Tours, which offers limo and bus service, said he limits itineraries to three vineyards and reminds customers, most of whom are from Nassau County or New York City, that the outings are for learning about wine, not extreme drinking.

“I could take them to six vineyards and get everyone plastered, but my goal is not to have them drink like it’s party town,” said Mr. Ferrarie, whose company has provided transportation for 73 bachelorette events this year. “They ask if the limos are stocked with liquor or if they can bring a cooler of beer on the bus. I tell them, ‘You’re on your way to a winery. This isn’t a moving bar.’ ”

Many tasters begin drinking before they arrive at their first winery, said Capt. Martin Flatley of the Southold Police Department.

“You get a group coming in from Brooklyn in a limo and they’ve spent an hour and a half indulging on the way out before they even start hitting the wineries,” Captain Flatley said.

One recent Saturday, Rob Ianne, a 22-year-old mortgage broker from Farmingdale, and five friends did the circuit in a stretch limo. “We went to Pindar and Duck Walk and two other places I can’t remember the names of,” Mr. Ianne said. “I don’t know, it’s a good time, something different to do.”

The same day, at Martha Clara Vineyards in Riverhead, a group of six included John Gagliardi, 29, who runs a metal finishing shop in Brooklyn, and Bobby Gerace, 29, a New York City firefighter, who admitted that they preferred beer. “We’re not big wine guys,” Mr. Gerace said. “We came along for the fun of it.”

At the Pugliese Vineyards, known for tastings that overlook an ornamental pond, Pat Pugliese, one of the owners, said drunken tasters end up in the water at least twice a year. “Real wine people,” she said, now avoid weekend afternoons.

“We were one of the last wineries around to have free tastings, but I had to start charging because young people looking for a quick buzz would come in and go right down the list of 21 wines and taste without spending a dime,” Ms. Pugliese said.

Asked about those naked hayriders at Palmer, Ms. Venasky laughed. “They were older people,” she said, “nothing you’d really want to see anyway.”

Even weekdays are not always immune from drunken tasters. Martha Clara promotes “Weekday Madness,” when glasses of white wine sell for $3.50, and reds go for $4. And if the madness gets to be too much, the staff is instructed to adamantly, if diplomatically, cut off tasters who seem beyond tipsy.

“You’ll pour a wine for a guy and he’ll say, ‘What, this is all I get? Fill it up,’ ” said Rudy Bernhardt, a Martha Clara salesman. “I’ll tell him, ‘Sir, this is a wine tasting, not a bar.’ ”

The Long Island Wine Press, a local magazine, has begun printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines and rules of proper behavior, including the need to refrain from putting tips in the wine spittoon.

Do not “shout that something’s disgusting because you don’t happen to like it,” the list says, and “don’t take the three-ounce pours of wine as if they were shots.”

July 10, 2007- Small, Yes, but Mighty: The Molecule Called Water

2007-10-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

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Basics

By NATALIE ANGIER

Some 380 million years ago, a few pioneering vertebrates first made the leap from water to land. And today, tens of millions of their human descendants seek summer amusement by leaping the other way. According to the travel industry, close to 90 percent of vacationers choose as their holiday destination an ocean, lake or other scenic body of water.

We may have lungs rather than gills, and the weaker swimmers among us may be perfectly capable of drowning in anything deeper than a bathtub, yet still we feel the primal tug of the tide. Consciously or otherwise, we know we’re really all wet.

As fetuses, we gestate in bags of water. As adults, we are bags of water: roughly 60 percent of our body weight comes from water, the fluidic equivalent of 45 quarts. Our cells need water to operate, and because we lose traces of our internal stores with every sweat we break, every breath and excretion we out-take, we must constantly consume more water, or we will die in three days.

Thirstiness is a universal hallmark of life. Sure, camels can forgo drinking water for five or six months and desert tortoises for that many years, and some bacterial and plant spores seem able to survive for centuries in a state of dehydrated, suspended animation. Yet sooner or later, if an organism plans to move, eat or multiply, it must find a solution of the aqueous kind.

Life on Earth arose in water, and scientists cannot imagine life arising elsewhere except by water’s limpid grace. In the view of Geraldine Richmond, a chemistry professor at the University of Oregon who often talks to the public on the wonders of water, Mark Twain put it neatest: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

Behind water’s peerless punch, and the reason it rather than alcohol or any other lubricant serves as the elixir of life, is the three-headed character whose chemical name we all know: H₂O. Scientists observe that when two atoms of hydrogen conjoin with one of oxygen, the resulting molecule displays a spectacular range of powers, gaining the mightiness of a molecular giant while retaining the speed and convenience of a molecular mite.

“Water behaves very differently from other small molecules,” said Jill Granger, a professor of chemistry at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. “If you want something else with similar properties, you’d end up with something much bigger and more complex, and then you’d lose the advantages that water has in being small.”

Because of water’s atomic architecture, the tendency of its comparatively forceful oxygen centerpiece to cling greedily to electrons as it consorts with its two meeker hydrogen mates, the entire molecule ends up polarized, with slight electromagnetic charges on its foreside and aft. Those mild charges in turn allow water molecules to engage in mild mass communion, linking up with one another and with other molecules, too, through an essential connection called a hydrogen bond. The hydrogen bond that attracts water to water and to other like-minded players is subtler than the bond that ties each water molecule’s atoms together. But subtlety breeds opportunity, and from hydrogen bonds many of water’s major and minor properties flow.

With their hydrogen bonds, water molecules become sticky, cohering as a liquid into droplets and rivulets and following each other around like a jiggling conga line. Such stickiness means that water is drawn to the inner plumbing of plants and will crawl up the fibrous conduits to hydrate even the crowns of redwood trees towering hundreds of feet above ground.

Pulled together by hydrogen bonds, water molecules become mature and stable, able to absorb huge amounts of energy before pulling a radical phase shift and changing from ice to liquid or liquid to gas. As a result, water has surprisingly high boiling and freezing points, and a strikingly generous gap between the two. For a substance with only three atoms, and two of them tiny little hydrogens, Dr. Richmond said, you’d expect water to vaporize into a gas at something like minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit, to freeze a mere 40 degrees below its boiling point, and to show scant inclination to linger in a liquid phase.

That’s what happens to hydrogen sulfide, a similarly sized molecule but with its two hydrogen atoms fastened to sulfur rather than to oxygen; on our temperate world, hydrogen sulfide has long since reached its boiling point and exists as a foul-smelling gas. Same for the tidy troika of carbon dioxide: low freezing point, low boiling point, and, poof, it’s up in the air. But given its vivid power of hydrogen bonding, water proves less flighty and fickle, with a boiling point at sea level of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and a full 180 degrees lying between the tempest of a teapot and the tinkling of an ice cube at 32 degrees. A vast temperature span over which water molecules can pool and cling as the liquid assets we love best.

We rely in myriad ways on water’s fluid forbearance, its willingness to take the heat without blinking. Earth’s oceans and lakes soak up huge quantities of solar radiation and help moderate the climate. As sweat evaporates from our skin, it wicks away large amounts of excess heat.

Water also serves as a nearly universal solvent, able to dissolve more substances than any other liquid. It can act as an acid, it can act as a base, with a pinch of salt it is the solution in which the cell’s thousands of chemical reactions take place.

At the same time, water’s gregariousness, its hydrogen-bonded viscosity, helps lend the cell a sense of community.

“Water acts as the contact between biological molecules, not just separating them, but imparting information among them,” said Martin Chaplin, a professor of applied science who studies the structure of water at London South Bank University. “In an aqueous environment, all the molecules are able to feel the structure of all the other molecules that are present, so they can work as whole rather than as individuals.”

There’s no end to water’s chemical kinkiness, including the way it freezes from the top down and becomes buoyant as it chills. Most substances shrink and get denser and heavier as they cool, and expand and lighten as they melt. Water bucks the norm, and is lighter and airier as ice than when liquid, and so in winter marine life can find liquid haven beneath the floating blanket of ice, and so in summer ice cubes bob and clink in your glass of lemonade. Bottoms up.

July 8, 2007- A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

2007-10-04T11:43:00.000-04:00

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By KARA JESELLA

Correction Appended

ON a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29, asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms. Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

“We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York City.

“When I was in library school in the early ’80s, the students weren’t as interesting,” Mr. Block said.

Since then, however, library organizations have been trying to recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members of the profession.

“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.

In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.

Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.

The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete. “There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said, mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.

Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ms. Murphy, 29, thinks so, too. An actress who had long considered library school, Ms. Murphy finally decided to sign up after meeting several librarians — in bars.

“People I, going in, would never have expected were from the library field,” she said. “Smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.”

Maria Falgoust, 31, is also a founder of Desk Set, which took its name from the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy. A student who works part time at the library at Saint Ann’s School, she was inspired to become a librarian by a friend, a public librarian who works with teenagers and goes to rock shows regularly.

Since matriculating to Palmer, Ms. Falgoust has met plenty of other like-minded librarians at places such as Brooklyn Label, a restaurant, and at Punk Rope, an exercise class. “They’re everywhere you go,” she said.

Especially in Greenpoint, where Ms. Murphy and Ms. Falgoust live about 10 blocks from each other and where there are, Ms. Falgoust said, about 13 other librarians in the neighborhood.

How did such a nerdy profession become cool — aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just about books but also about organizing and connecting people with information, including music and movies.

And though many librarians say that they, like nurses or priests, are called to the profession, they also say the job is stable, intellectually stimulating and can have reasonable hours — perfect for creative types who want to pursue their passions outside of work and don’t want to finance their pursuits by waiting tables. (The median salary for librarians was about $51,000 in 2006, according to the American Library Association-Allied Professional Organization.)

“I wanted to do something different, something maybe more meaningful,” said Carrie Klein, 36, who used to be a publicist for a record label and for bands such as Radiohead and the Foo Fighters, but is now starting a new job in the library at Entertainment Weekly.

Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows. “Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when information is restricted.”

Ms. Campbell added that she became a librarian because it “combined a geeky intellectualism” with information technology skills and social activism.

Jessamyn West, 38, an editor of “Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out” a book that promotes social responsibility in librarianship, and the librarian behind the Web site librarian.net (its tagline is “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since 1999”) agreed that many new librarians are attracted to what they call the “Library 2.0” phenomenon. “It’s become a techie profession,” she said.

In a typical day, Ms. West might send instant and e-mail messages to patrons, many of who do their research online rather than in the library. She might also check Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites, post to her various blogs and keep current through MetaFilter and RSS feeds. Some librarians also create Wikis or podcasts.

At the American Library Association’s annual conference last month in Washington, there were display tables of graphic novels, manga and comic books. In addition to a panel called “No Shushing Required,” there were sessions on social networking and zines and one called “Future Friends: Marketing Reference and User Services to Generation X.”

On a Saturday, after a day of panels, a group of librarians relaxed and danced at Selam Restaurant. Sarah Mercure nursed a blueberry vodka and cranberry juice and talked about deciding on her career after hearing a librarian who curated a zine collection speak. Pete Welsch, a D.J., spun records and talked about how his interest in social activism, film and music led him to library school.

But some librarians have found the job can be at odds with their outside cultural interests.

“I went to see a band a few weeks ago with old co-workers and turned to one and said ‘Is it just me or is this really, really loud?’ ” said Ms. Klein, the former publicist. Her friend, she said, “laughed and said, ‘You have librarian ears now.’ ”

Correction: July 15, 2007

An article last Sunday about a younger generation of librarians misstated the name of a library organization that held a conference in Washington last month. It is the American Library Association, not the American Librarian Association.

July 9, 2007- An Introduction to the Nation of Nascar

2007-10-04T11:26:00.000-04:00

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Reporter’s Notebook

By MARC SANTORA

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., July 8 — Standing before about 200,000 die-hard racing fans who had spent hours sweating, drinking and revving up for the Pepsi 400, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is much more Brooklyn than bayou, acknowledged on Saturday what many could have guessed.

“This is my first live Nascar event,” he told the crowd.

When he was mayor, Mr. Giuliani was not shy about indulging in such New York treats as the opera or expensive Italian restaurants. But he now finds himself on different terrain as he runs for president, and so he has started educating himself on the sport that claims some 75 million fans who skew distinctly Republican.

To that end, he told reporters that he had just finished reading “The Female Fan Guide to Motorsports.”

“This is embarrassing,” Mr. Giuliani said.

The book was given to him by the author, Betsy Berns, a Giuliani fund-raiser, perhaps with the hope that the man who had once playfully dressed in women’s clothes for a campy skit might be comfortable with a Nascar tutorial for the ladies.

Mr. Giuliani also had his wife, Judith, there to give him pointers. Mrs. Giuliani grew up near a track in Pennsylvania, and she said she had been to her fair share of races.

Mr. Giuliani seemed to strike a chord with the crowd. As the couple made their way around Daytona International Speedway, looking at cars and talking with drivers and fans, they were greeted with shouts of “Rudy!” Of course, as one fan said, Rudy is a fun name to yell after a few beers.

At the Track

As he toured the speedway, Mr. Giuliani’s casual look, a blue blazer and khakis, did not exactly blend in among the throngs of men with tank tops and deep red tans.

But he did have on a pair of shiny cowboy boots. Asked about them, he said he had three pairs and had worn boots on occasion since 1996, when he won his first pair on a bet after a Yankees victory.

Mr. Giuliani, when meeting with drivers and car owners, asked question after question, said Brian France, the chief executive of Nascar who escorted him part of the day.

But Don Ward, 48, said there were only three questions Mr. Giuliani needed to know to converse with a fan like himself: “What kind of beer do you like? Who is your favorite manufacturer? And who is your favorite driver?”

Mr. Ward said he thought it best if Mr. Giuliani did not mention a favorite driver. To do so would alienate some part of the Nascar nation.

Touring the South

Mr. Giuliani began his swing through the South on Thursday with a stop in Daytona and then a fund-raiser at the home of Lesa France, Mr. France’s sister and the granddaughter of the founder of Nascar.

On Friday, the Giulianis went to Savannah, Ga. The stop marked her return to the trail after a rough introduction to national politics in the spring, when she drew some negative press over her previous marriages and comments about her possible role in a Giuliani administration.

After a town hall-style meeting on Friday morning, the couple strolled hand in hand under the shade of trees covered in Spanish moss and read a sign explaining the history of the old Cotton Exchange. They shared a quiet lunch at Vic’s on the River, a restaurant known for its fried green tomatoes, which Mrs. Giuliani ordered.

The campaign trip gave Mr. Giuliani a chance to work on a new part of his standard speech, in which he questions the opinion that the country is heading in a wrong direction.

“I ask you this question: If America is going in the wrong direction, where is the rest of the world going?” he said at a town hall meeting on Saturday in Jacksonville, Fla. “Where is Russia going? Where is England going? Where is France going? Where is Africa going? If we are going in the wrong direction, the rest of the world is falling off a cliff.”

The line was greeted with tepid applause.

When Mr. Giuliani listed the challenges the United States faced, he did not mention Iraq. Unless asked about the war, Mr. Giuliani generally does not talk about it, except as it relates to the fight against terrorism.

July 8, 2007- Her Jewish State

2007-10-04T11:24:00.000-04:00

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By ROGER COHEN

Soon after our first meeting in her Spartan office in Jerusalem, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, called me. Something was on her mind. A lawyer by training, she does not like to leave loose ends. I had asked her if the four years she spent in Mossad, the intelligence service, made her a disciplined person. Livni had seemed taken aback by the question, which interrupted the cascade of her pronouncements on Israel and its Palestinian nemesis. After a long hesitation, she said: “I don’t like this phrase, a disciplined person. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Now, an hour later, she wanted to set the record straight. “I was thinking about this idea of me as a disciplined person,” she began. I perched myself on a stone wall near the King David Hotel and listened through a blustery desert wind. “There are other parts of me that are different. I prefer jeans to a suit, sneakers to high heels, markets to malls. You’ve just returned from Paris: I prefer the Quartier Latin to the Champs Elysées. In general, I don’t like formality at all. It is just part of what I do. You know, when I was young, I went to the Sinai and worked as a waitress.”

I had not known this detail about a woman who entered Israeli politics only 11 years ago, the first to serve as foreign minister since Golda Meir and a potential prime minister. Nor was it easy to imagine the tall, well-groomed 48-year-old I had just met, in her gold-belted black pants, her crocodile-skin shoes and her snug black jacket, donning denims and sneakers and hitting a flea market.

But Livni’s phone call was telling. Israelis these days fret about how they are seen. They like to convey the spirit of the underdog — that of Israel’s heroic beginnings — as if discomfited by the adornments of an increasingly moneyed, Americanized and postheroic society. More powerful than ever, Israelis are also more anxious than ever, a paradox with U.S. parallels that they find maddening. Israel’s strength and wealth grow, but the country’s long-term security does not grow with them. The shekel rises; so does the billowing smoke just over the border in Gaza. Two Israeli withdrawals, from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, have ended up bolstering two groups that the West and Israel brand as terrorists — Hezbollah and Hamas. Some Israelis, watching the black-masked militia of Hamas take over Gaza, have taken to calling the benighted sliver of territory “Hamastan.”

The mother of all conflicts — the 59-year-old battle for the same land of Zionist and Palestinian national movements — has become even more tangled. It has been dragged into the wider crisis of Islamic civilization that daily spawns fervid death-to-the-West jihadists. To a Palestinian national struggle for a homeland, there is an answer, at least in theory. To a religious and annihilationist campaign against Israel, there is none. One of Livni’s catchphrases is, “There is a process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state.” She sees herself in a race against time.

To manage that race, she wants to lead. Her diplomatic energy, not least in helping put together the multinational United Nations force now in Lebanon, has impressed in capitals from Washington to Europe. Her restiveness is clear. After the spring publication of the Winograd Commission’s interim report on the 2006 Lebanon war, which lambasted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for lacking “judgment, responsibility and prudence,” Livni told him he should quit but did not resign herself. She also said she would one day stand for leadership of their centrist Kadima Party. This unusual act of defiance toward her boss, widely criticized as only half an insurrection, was a measure of Livni’s ambition, impatience and lingering uncertainties.

“Stagnation works against those who believe in a two-state solution,” Livni said in our first conversation. The West, she suggested, needs to tell Hamas, the Islamist movement battling Fatah for control of a Palestinian movement now split between Gaza and the West Bank, that it must not only recognize Israel’s right to exist but also “the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is not that obvious anymore.”

The Jewish state has been tied to the Livni family with a special bond since zero hour. For Livni, personal history is national history. Her parents were among the first couples to marry in the newborn state, the day after its foundation, on May 15, 1948. Her father, Eitan, served as operations chief for the Irgun, the Zionist guerrillas who used what would today be called terrorist methods to blast the British out of Mandate Palestine. Her mother, Sarah, was also an Irgun fighter; she suckled her daughter on visions of Eretz Israel, the biblical “Land of Israel,” including Judea and Samaria on the West Bank. Territorial compromise for peace had no place in the family lexicon. It was the weak talk of the peaceniks.

Yet here is Livni wanting to follow Meir and become the second woman to serve as Israeli prime minister, precisely in the name of a peace that would involve the surrender of West Bank land. On the face of it, she has moved a long way from her political starting point. “I want things to happen,” she said, “especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s values, the way I believe is the right way.” And to achieve that, you want the top job? “Only for this,” she replied. “I don’t like the exposure, the respect and so on.”

Her voice trailed away. Livni’s ambition is matched by only her bouts of self-effacement. You feel her presence in a room. She is striking, in a raw rather than a refined way, broad-faced, pale-eyed and slender. She is also strikingly confident in her lucid expositions of what she believes the Middle East needs. Stretched tight, like the membrane of the drums she recently took up playing, she exudes a tense energy. But when the conversation turns to her personal feelings, she shrinks, the “eehhhs” and “ummms” drawn out as she gathers her thoughts.

What she has, at a time of disorientation and seeping corruption in Israeli politics, is an image of absolute integrity, the distinction of being a woman on a male-dominated political scene and a wholesome quality that stands in contrast to the slick, wheeler-dealer style of Olmert, whose approval ratings have plunged into the single-digit zone.

Genuineness is her thing. At Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum, Livni, who is married with two sons, had this to say two years ago: “Being a Jewish mother is to understand with the birth of the second son how impossible and inhumane is the choice between the two.” And this: “Being an Israeli is to know that you have risen from the ashes of those who were killed and knowing you have a responsibility for the coming generations.”

Gil Samsonov, an advertising executive who has known her for many years, put it this way: “Her brand is clean. She’s not looking left and right to see whom to please.” But Israelis are looking desperately for someone who can please them. The report on the Lebanon war crystallized the country’s disorientation. How could Hezbollah have repulsed the Israeli Defense Forces? How could the country’s defense minister at the time, Amir Peretz, have had, as the report put it, no “knowledge or experience in military, political or governmental matters?” How can Olmert and his finance minister be facing investigations for corruption? How is it that the former justice minister got himself in trouble over sexual-harassment charges, the same issue that just brought down the president, Moshe Katsav? Is Israel — far from David Ben-Gurion’s model state of “working people, at home on the soil” — becoming just another tawdry commercial country with an oversize army?

To all these interrogations, Livni, competent and decent, seems to provide a possible answer. “She comes from a different place with a special, strong love of Israel,” says Dita Kohl-Roman, a friend. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, agrees: “There is an Israeli authenticity about her.”

Authenticity was a core quality of Ariel Sharon, Livni’s political mentor, the last of the heroic breed of warrior-politicians. He liked her industry and loyalty. His imprimatur bolsters her because at a time of national self-questioning, his loss is keenly felt. It was with Sharon that Livni made her fundamental ideological break: from a defender in the right-wing Likud Party of an Israeli state on all its biblical land to the idea of land for peace, embodied in the evacuation of Gaza in 2005 and the promise of a further withdrawal from the West Bank.

This shift — the reason for Sharon’s, Livni’s and Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, created in late 2005 — was rooted in a simple calculation: an Israel that wants to remain Jewish and democratic cannot also be despotic on occupied territories where Palestinian demography is against it. “There were three ideological goals for families like Livni’s and mine: Greater Israel, a Jewish state and democracy,” says Arye Naor, a political scientist whose father also fought in the Irgun. “Well, it became clear you could have any two of them, but adding a third condemned the enterprise.”

That is logical. A Greater Israeli democracy will end up not being Jewish because there will be more Arabs in it than Jews. Livni likes logic. As her adviser Tal Becker put it to me, “She believes constructive ambiguity can become destructive ambiguity.” So it was she who, working for Sharon, wrote the program of the now-governing Kadima. And it is she who pushes hardest to spell out to Palestinians the concessions they must make.

“Just as Israel was established for the Jewish people and gave refuge to them from European and Arab states, so a Palestinian state is the homeland of the Palestinian people, those who live in the territories and those who left in 1948 and are being kept as political cards in refugee camps,” she told me. “This is the national answer. The solution for Palestinians is the Palestinian state. Israel is not part of the solution.”

Or, put another way, there can be no “right of return,” a central canon for Palestinians since the war of Israel’s foundation in 1948. That year, the United Nations declared in Resolution 194: “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

History moves on, of course. About 1 in 10 Palestinians alive today and registered as refugees with the United Nations was born in Mandate Palestine. A Palestinian return en masse would condemn the Jewish state. In that sense, Livni is only stating the obvious. Whether such bluntness is helpful is another question. Palestinians are not about to trade one of their biggest chips up front. “What Livni wants us to do is give up before we start negotiations,” says Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. “I feel sorry for her. She wants to remove all risk, all fears, before engaging in discussion.”

But Livni can be relentless— a “nudnik,” or nagger, in the words of Igal Galai, a friend of Sharon’s. When Livni called me back after our first meeting, something else was eating at her: “I was minister of immigrant absorption in 2004, and I convinced Sharon that it was important that I go see Condoleezza Rice in Washington. So I went, and I saw how she was interested in the depth of the conflict, in finding a real process and doing what was right and just. I had the opportunity to convince Rice, then national security adviser, and so make a contribution to the statement President Bush made soon after.”

In that groundbreaking statement of April 14, 2004, George W. Bush declared: “It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.” No American leader had ever so explicitly trashed the “right of return” of the Palestinians. “That was my contribution,” Livni revealed to me. “I did the right thing — and so did Bush.”

Livni seems to share many things with Rice, who calls the foreign minister a “friend” and a woman of peace. They have the same intensity and work ethic, the same difficulty in thinking beyond a doctrine once it has been formed, the same disciplined intelligence that sometimes appears to lack the subtlety of wisdom and the same penchant for talking about “values” and what is “right.”

But I found myself thinking, What good was the “right thing” or plans for Palestinian refugees festering in camps or Bush’s two-state road map or Rice’s principles or Livni’s good intentions, when the whole area — spiraling downward with a devilish energy, developing ever-more-divergent Israeli and Palestinian narratives, splintering and radicalizing in the image of Iraq, threatened by a resurgent Iran, permeated by jihadists without borders — was going up in recrimination-clogged smoke? I believed in Livni’s good faith, her energy, her honesty, her determination. What I was not sure about after our first meeting was her grasp on reality. The fact is, Israelis and Palestinians have parted company. I could see little evidence that Livni, for all her lucidity, was any exception to this.

When you drive from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on Route 443, which cuts through Israeli-occupied West Bank territory, walls accompany you. Not merely the “security barrier,” as Israel calls the 430-mile-plus high-tech fence it is building to keep out Palestinians (who call it “the racist, separating wall”), but a variety of other bulwarks, of wire and concrete and brick. The barriers exist in the name of security, security, security — no escaping the Israeli mantra. To some degree, they have delivered. Palestinian suicide bombings have all but ceased. But of course they betray insecurity, a gnawing condition Israelis once thought they might overcome but now tend to view as inescapable.

Also accompanying you along the route is a procession of concrete pillars holding aloft the high-speed-train track that will one day connect the two cities in a half-hour or so and perhaps relieve the clogged traffic and swearing drivers inching across the country. Israel, as this megaproject and national bottleneck suggest, is booming. Its stock market keeps climbing. Areas north and south of Tel Aviv amount to the Middle East’s Palo Alto. An emblematic act of the new Israel was the decision of Dan Halutz, then the armed-forces chief, to offload his stock on the eve of the Lebanon war. Materialism now does battle with Zionism for the Israeli soul — Moshe Dayan requiescat in pace.

I suppose this is natural enough. After double-whammy intifadas, Oslo’s aborted peace process, Camp David’s near thing in 2000 and repeated illustration of the prodigious Palestinian penchant for self-destruction, the temptation to imagine you are in California-with-fences is understandable. Israelis once conducted a daily argument of Talmudic intensity about how to settle with the Palestinians. Now many just say, To heck with them and their festering stew of a failed and now bifurcated Hamas-Fatah prestate!

“The left saw that its outstretched hand had failed, and the right saw that its iron fist has failed, and they have both veered toward a center that now says: ‘Go away. Let’s build a bunker and wait and see,’ ” Shlomo Avineri told me. “The fact is, Yasir Arafat did not set up a state; he set up a means to continue the struggle. And Israel did not prepare for Palestinian statehood; it went on building settlements. Each believes only the language of force works in the end.”

This ultimately futile belief is part of what makes Israel such a jangled place these days, its “fantastic economic bubble,” in the words of the former diplomat Itamar Rabinovich, hovering over unease. “The country is in good shape, and the mood is in bad shape,” Shimon Peres told me. Peres, who joined Kadima from the left rather than Livni’s right, says he believes the mood is sour “because we have failed to bring Israel and the Middle East into a new age.” No kidding. Islamist fanatics rave about restoring the Caliphate, and Hamas talks of seeing off Israel the way Crusaders were once seen off: you can hardly get more “Old World” than that. But a “new age” Israel is equally vigorous, if less often in the news.

After meeting Peres, I found myself at a dinner party with Yossi Vardi, a dot-com millionaire who made a bundle from one of the first Internetwide instant-messaging services. “Israel became very fertile ground for young people with ideas,” Vardi told me. “More than $1.4 billion in venture capital came in recently. The place is crazy — a technology boom alongside a very unacceptable political situation and chaos in Gaza, where most of the population is living on under $2 a day. It’s not right or sustainable.” He took a sip of a respectable cabernet sauvignon — Israeli winemaking is on the rise (from a low base) — before adding: “You know, power corrupts, and occupation is the ultimate manifestation of power. There are no checks, no balances. Occupation, after 40 years, corrupts absolutely.”

Livni has a different view. “I don’t think the way Israel behaves is against Israeli values,” she insists. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March, she said, “I believe that we are defined — as individuals, as leaders and as nations — by our values and by the choices we make to defend them.” She sees Israel side by side with the United States in “a struggle for the future of the free world.”

As this language suggests, a lot of her intellectual energy goes into placing Israel within the Bush administration’s post-9/11, us-and-them Weltanschauung, as an integral actor in the war on terror, battling on the side of liberty against a Palestinian threat that gets agglomerated with Al Qaeda and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran — regardless of the differences between seeking Palestine and seeking the annihilation of the West. Livni sometimes seems to pursue the development of a Pavlovian response to the Middle Eastern conundrum. Say “Israel.” Ping! American values. Say “Palestine.” Ping! Terror. “I would like to remind the world that they entered our restaurants, our discotheques; they killed children in their beds,” Livni told me. “I can understand, and I can feel, the grief of a Palestinian mother. The loss of a child or a family member is awful. It is the same pain. But in any legal system, there is a difference between premeditated murder and somebody who kills by mistake.”

She continued: “These terrorists are looking for children to kill while we are trying to avoid it. It is unfair to pitch together in the same package, to say there are victims on both sides, circles of violence and so on. That does not contribute to a solution. When the Palestinians think that the world’s judgment is ‘O.K., this can happen,’ they will never stop. They need to know that the world cannot accept it, that terror is terror is terror.”

It is precisely to stop terror, Livni emphasized, that the wall has been built against the wishes of the Israeli far right, who saw in it a division of Zion: “Yet when I am in Europe, I hear Palestinians saying this is ghettoization, this is the Berlin Wall. And I say, at the end of the day, when you are talking about a two-state solution, what do you think? There is going to be a border, a fence, something.”

But where? Livni brought out a map to make her point that a return to the precise 1967 lines — as U.N. resolutions and the Arab peace plan reiterated this year in Riyadh demand — was impractical. Given certain Israeli settlements, what Bush in 2004 called “already existing major Israeli population centers,” and the eventual need to somehow link Gaza and the West Bank (Livni favors a tunnel), the border would have to shift some. So, she said, perhaps the barrier, which often zigzags inside the West Bank to separate Jewish settlers and Palestinians, could even be helpful.

“Palestinians oppose this even before they know where the line would be,” she mused. “There sometimes seems to be a contradiction between what Palestinians demand, what they claim and the way they act.” Palestinians, however, have no monopoly on self-contradiction. Israelis — Americanized but still in an existential struggle, terrified of annihilation but now the region’s overwhelming superpower, often blinded by the wall to what is perpetrated behind it — can sometimes resemble studies in unreason garbed in the practiced language of Western reasonableness. At times I wondered to what degree Livni had really moved from her hard-line, Likudnik beginnings.

At the Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Tel Aviv, lilac petals lie scattered on the dusty earth, and old cypresses form a solemn cortege. It is a beautiful oasis in an unlovely city. At one corner is a gravestone with an unusual engraving — that of the whole biblical Land of Israel with a gun and bayonet cutting through the center and the words “Only Thus!” This is where Livni’s father, Eitan, who died in 1991, is buried. He insisted in his will on this Irgun symbol.

He was a tough purist, and his only son, Eli Livni, the foreign minister’s brother, appears to have inherited some of his no-nonsense directness. “In the Livni family,” Eli says breezily, “your father and mother never hug you. What they give you is a good, formal education.” This upbringing involved occasional beatings with a belt (for him) and rigorous instruction in honoring principles. The Livnis were outsiders, a test of their moral fiber. Throughout the children’s education, the Labor Party was dominant. The left-wing Palmach, whose commanders included Yitzhak Rabin and Dayan, held places of honor in accounts of the state’s creation. The rightist Irgun, by contrast, was marginalized. Its political successor, the right-wing Herut Party, founded by Menachem Begin and others in 1948 and destined to evolve into Likud, was also sidelined. As an Irgun hero, Herut militant and close friend of Begin, Eitan Livni long stood on Israel’s political margins.

“Tzipi got into trouble at school at the age of 12 when a teacher was talking about the glorious role of the Haganah and Palmach, and she stood up and said, ‘What about the Irgun and the Stern Group?’ ” Eli says. “Her teacher contacted my mother and said Tzipi should not argue about facts.”

Most Saturdays, the Livnis would go to Begin’s tiny Tel Aviv apartment. Tzipi (short for the biblical name Tziporah) recalls conversations centering on “stories from the past, frustration from the present and hopes for the future.” The frustration was about exclusion: the way promotions in the army depended on being in the Labor Party and getting ahead meant praising the Labor prime minister, Ben-Gurion, rather than Vladimir Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of Likud and a Livni family hero.

“In the history books, they were not there; they were the enemy in a way, being rightists,” she told me. “On May 1, which is Labor Day, everyone was out with their red flags, and I was the one walking with the Israeli flag.”

From an early age, in other words, Tzipi Livni lived with the sense of being distinct, the need to be willful if she was to be heard and the example of a hero-father not about to hug her. Mirla Gal, who would reach the top of the Mossad during a 20-year career, met Livni in first grade. She recalls the curiosity of other kids at Livni’s membership in the Betar scouts, a group founded by Jabotinsky. Gal, like most Israeli children, was in the mainstream scouts movement, called Tzofim, where the songs and heroes were different.

“We were curious because her world wasn’t ours,” Gal said over lunch at a beachfront Tel Aviv restaurant. “Even then she was principled. When I was 12, she turned vegetarian and has been ever since.” Gal gazed out across the broad beach to a glittering Mediterranean — hard to believe it was the same tranquil sea a few miles away in seething Gaza — before adding, “You know, she drives herself very hard and always demands a lot of herself.”

“Too much?” I asked.

Gal paused. Prudence gets ingrained during two decades in Israeli intelligence. “What Tzipi asks of herself, she asks of others,” she said finally. “She has a very high threshold for trust, but once it’s there, you’re O.K. I understand because I am the same way. You have to be straight. She was raised in a house where these things were fundamental. She grew up in a very Zionist home. She loves this country so much. That is what drives her.”

The driven quality was quickly apparent. Livni was a very good soccer player, a very good basketball player, a tomboy who would go nuts when her brother hung her beloved cat out the window. Her father was rarely around, working nonstop in a glucose business, trying to raise money after work for the widows and war-injured of the Irgun. He was a dreamer — a quality Eli also sees in his sister, who has hung a photograph of their father, in pensive profile, as the only adornment of her foreign minister’s office.

“My father expressed a combination of values,” she told me, sitting in that office. “There was the understanding that the whole land of Israel was our heritage, but the other part was the need to respect others, not to control others’ lives. And because of the need to make a combination of these values, not to bring them into contradiction, I got to my own conclusion, that there is a need to divide the land.” That step was a long time coming. After the 1973 war, as a teenager, she took part in demonstrations against Henry Kissinger’s peace plans. Giving up land, any land from Sinai to the Golan Heights, was unacceptable.

In the army, Livni excelled, and at training school she was twice elected most-outstanding officer. Gal took part in the same training; she observed a toughness that impressed everyone. This, combined with impeccable nationalist credentials, made Livni an ideal candidate for the Mossad, which she joined in 1980 at the age of 22. “I brought her to Mossad,” Gal says. “She was very good at everything she did and only left by her own choice. She could have had a 20-year career there too. The smartness, the coolness, the speed of analysis, the straightness — these are prized qualities in Mossad.”

Livni will acknowledge only that she served in Paris. Did the Mossad experience influence her? “No, no, no,” she said, laughing uneasily. Nothing? Nothing, she insisted.

Her brother once visited her in the French capital and found her enrolled as a student in the Sorbonne, behaving in the strangest ways. “I came all the way from Lagos, where I was working in construction, and stayed for two days, and I think I saw her for one hour,” he recalls. “She would get these phone calls and say, I have to go, I have to go, and she’d rush off, and so in the end I said, O.K, I’m out of here.”

Livni wanted a more normal life. She left Mossad in 1984 and settled down in Israel. She completed a law degree and married Naftali Shpitzer, who now owns an advertising agency. They took up residence in a small apartment in Tel Aviv, not far from where she grew up. A first son, Omri, now in the army, was born soon after; a second, Yuval, followed. When I saw Livni a second time, in Tel Aviv, she said the seashore was where she felt at home. “But,” she added, “my existence here comes out of the connection between me and Temple Mount. This is the umbilical cord. It comes from Jerusalem.”

The biblical Jewish heritage again: you cannot take it out of Livni; it is part of her Likud inheritance. As she says, “Likud was my home, almost literally.” Her father had an office in the Likud building; her own law office was also there. Just before Begin’s rise to power in 1977, ending three decades of Labor hegemony, her father was elected to the Knesset, but politics did not grab Livni until the Oslo peace accords of 1993 cast her into inner turmoil. Once again, as in childhood, she felt alienated.

“Society was split and full of hatred, and I found myself in between two camps,” she told me. “One was the historical right of the Jews on the whole land of Israel and keeping the entire land.” Livni touched her heart. “This was my history, my heritage. On the other, I saw the left wing thinking we could live in a new Middle East, happily ever after. But I thought they were unrealistic, even if I saw we would have to give up some land to preserve the dream of Israel.”

On balance, she could not support Rabin’s push for peace. Oslo, even before Rabin’s assassination in 1995, was an illusion to her because it involved signing a memorandum while leaving the tough issues — Jerusalem, land and refugees — to last. The lawyer in her bridled. “The advice can never be just to sign and leave the most difficult parts to the end,” she said.

Livni’s first campaign for the Knesset, in 1996, failed narrowly, but she caught the eye of the Likud prime minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, and served as the head of a privatization program that helped stir Israel’s current economic boom. Netanyahu ceded to Sharon as mentor after Livni was elected to the Knesset in 1999. At various ministries — Regional Cooperation, Agriculture, Housing and Construction, Justice and Immigrant Absorption — she acquired a broad political education. Her efficiency and energy paid dividends. A vicious clash as justice minister over Supreme Court appointments — she delayed the naming of anyone after her own choice was resisted and so drove some judges crazy — amounted to one of few ripples.

“She was a Likud princess, coming from the family she did, and Bibi pushed her, and then Sharon pushed her, and here we are,” says Zalman Shoval, a prominent Likud member and former ambassador to the United States. “I don’t know whether Sharon ever thought of her as a future prime minister. I doubt it, because he only thought about succeeding himself. But she was good for him.”

As the collapse of Oslo and Camp David ended the left’s dreams of a warm peace and the second intifada hardened views across the country and 9/11 cemented Israel’s antiterror alliance with the United States, Livni came to represent a realist, rightward-shifting center. Disengagement from Gaza became the new face of firmness, a “test case” on the road to possible statehood for the Palestinians. She glided upward, spared most of the rough and tumble of politics.

As a result, doubts have lingered about whether she has what it takes to prevail. “There’s nothing Clintonian about her, no familiarity or touch with crowds,” says Majalli Whbee, a Druze Knesset member who served as her director-general at the Ministry of Regional Cooperation. “I’ve talked to her about this, told her not to put herself behind glass, and she agrees.” Shuval also wonders if she has the needed “fire in her belly.” Still, looking ahead to an election that is most likely to come within a year, given the government’s weakness, he acknowledged, “A Kadima Party led by Livni is much more formidable opposition for Likud than one led by Olmert.”

That Livni will realize her ambition is possible. She could be chosen to lead Kadima into the next election and triumph. Israeli politics are unpredictable. But her motivational dream of a two-state peace — one at odds with the Greater Israel map on her father’s grave — still seems far-fetched. Putative Palestine is remote and riven and receding. Whether Palestinians, even the moderates now gathered in an emergency West Bank government, will prove susceptible to her ideas is far from clear.

You don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. Donkeys, carts and idle people replace Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers. The whole desolate West Bank scene, described recently by the World Bank as “a shattered economic space,” is punctuated with shining garrisonlike settlements on hilltops and checkpoints where Palestinians see themselves reflected in the stylish shades of Russian-immigrant Israeli soldiers. If you are looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

In Jericho, where thousands of foreign tourists would arrive daily when the “peace of the brave” of Rabin and Yasir Arafat still held, a luxury hotel is almost empty; Palestine-in-embryo is a hard sell for tour operators. On a windblown street stands a rundown building with the Orwellian name of Negotiations Affairs Department. In it sits Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

He looks brisk in his yellow tie. When the phone rings, it is the Jordanian foreign minister; they discuss Rice’s postponing another trip. Erekat, a senior Fatah member, has an acerbic wit. “I try my best to understand the Israelis’ fears and aspirations, but they can get too complicated for me,” he said. “Every day there’s something going on, like the cats outside my window at night, and I never know if they’re making love or fighting or both!”

Erekat laughed. There was desperation in his hilarity, a trace of the hysterical. “But the Palestinians are worse!” he continued. “All you hear is shouting; all you see is chaos and lawlessness, the mess in Gaza.” He paused, eyes flitting to the Yahoo e-mail account on his computer screen. “But amidst all this, something else is developing. There are 70-percent-plus of Palestinians who go with the two-state solution, even if nearly 50 percent of Palestinians voted for Hamas. Those same people condemn suicide bombing. Look, negotiations are over. It’s time for decisions!”

He has a point. One odd thing about the Middle Eastern impasse is that a clear majority of people on both sides agree more or less on the outcome: two states, Israel and Palestine, divided along the 1967 borders adjusted to conform with agreed territorial swaps; an inventive deal on Jerusalem allowing both sides their measure of the sacred; massive compensation for Palestinian refugees not wishing to return to nascent Palestine; and perhaps a stabilizing role for a third-party force.

Unlike in Ireland, where peace has broken out without agreement on whether Ulster should ultimately be Irish or remain British, the bedrock lineaments of an accord exist. In that sense, Israel-Palestine is easier than Ireland. But the loud, absolutist, ruthless minority always prevails, and Bush’s with-us-or-against-us school in Washington does not believe in probing absolutism, as currently embodied by democratically elected Hamas, to find where it might cede to compromise.

Erekat calls himself the “most disadvantaged negotiator since Adam negotiated Eve.” He has no army, navy or economy. His society is split. “I don’t stand a chance with a U.S. senator,” he noted. The impact of Israel-loving evangelicals, the Jewish lobbyists of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the post-9/11 conflation of global and Palestinian terror has made selling Palestine in Washington about as easy as selling the North Korean economic model. That has simplified life for Olmert and Livni.

Any real U.S. pressure on Israelis to reach out to Palestinians has been intermittent at best. This, along with finding viable Palestinian representatives, is a core problem that Tony Blair will confront in his new post as special Middle East envoy for the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. The cause of peace has paled. After “Gaza first,” at the time of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, has come the new cry of “West Bank first.” It has the ring of desperation.

“Palestinians are tired of the no-partner-for-talks symphony,” Erekat said. “Livni has an interlocutor in me and Abbas. We don’t ask why Israelis choose Labor or Kadima; she doesn’t need to ask about Hamas. With a decent peace accord, we can go to a referendum. Moderates would win. That would be Hamas’s fig leaf. But Livni has to learn that peace and settlements don’t go together, walls and peace don’t go together and nothing is solved until everything is solved.”

Livni says it is the Palestinians, especially those in Hamas, who must do the learning. They need to learn to side with moderates against jihadists. They need to accept the West’s basic demands: renunciation of terror, recognition of Israel and respect of previous Palestinian-Israeli accords. They need to learn that pushing for refugees to return to Israel amounts to questioning Israel’s existence: a 1948 rather than a 1967 issue.

Arab states, unlike at Camp David in 2000, can help the Palestinians to make these compromises “by saying publicly what they say behind closed doors.” They can contribute to a “political horizon” — a favorite Livni-Rice phrase — by “opening bureaus of interest in Israel.” If they fear a nuclear Iran, as Sunni states from Jordan to the gulf do, they should support Israel as a bulwark of moderation.

Since the collapse of the Palestinian national unity government, Livni says she is more hopeful. She welcomes Blair’s arrival. The new emergency government in the West Bank, headed by a Palestinian she admires, Salam Fayyad, “offers a clear distinction between moderates and the extremists of Hamas in Gaza.” As a result, she says, “we can negotiate, starting with short-term issues, like freeing up money and easing life for Palestinians in ways that do not affect our security.”

At the same time, she continues, “we can start looking at long-term issues, the nature of a future Palestinian state, our common denominators.” But can Abbas and Fayyad deliver when Hamas controls Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live? “As usual, we are choosing between bad options,” she says. “But we must grab this chance if we don’t want to lose the West Bank to Hamas. The Arab League, the world, must work with the moderates and strengthen them right now.”

Livni’s ideas are clear. But, I asked her in our first meeting, are you good at persuading people? “Eehhh, ummmm, yes, I am good at persuading people,” she managed in that quieter voice, before declaring that she does not like to speak about herself and finally mustering, “In convincing the other, I try to start from their point of view, so it’s easier for me to find a common denominator.”

Their point of view: this is the key. I tried to imagine Livni donning her jeans and sneakers and, instead of hitting a market, taking a look at the scene outside Erekat’s place: the dry riverbed with its pile of plastic bottles and discarded tires, and beyond that a brick factory going to seed, and beyond that the sleepy sprawl of Jericho, and beyond that the checkpoints with their daily humiliations, and still farther the snaking path of the wall-cum-fence cutting the beauty of the ancient hills like a blade. What, I wondered, would she feel and how might all this impact her formulas?

Palestinians have failed themselves. Their hand in their misery is decisive. They could have had about half of the land back in 1948. At various points since then, they could have had more than the roughly 22 percent now up for negotiation. But Israelis, justifiably proud of their open society, need to scrutinize the closed autocracy just over the wall. If they will not look at the devastating physical evidence of 40 years of occupation, it is unclear how they can grasp, and so perhaps begin to turn back, the rise of Hamas and Islamic extremism.

“Hamas is ready for a two-state solution,” says Barghouti, who served as information minister in the Hamas-Fatah unity government. “They will say so when Israel recognizes Palestinians’ rights as equal human beings. But the Palestinian government that Israel wants is a government of collaborators working as subagents for Israeli security. And I can promise you they will never get that.”

Sitting in his Bethlehem office, he continued, “No walls are ever permanent, and this one destroys the idea of a two-state solution because it kills the option of a viable Palestinian state. In fact it leads to only one alternative: a binational state in which we are a majority because our population grows at 4.2 percent a year and theirs at 1.7 percent.” It won’t happen, of course, but the insidious one-state talk is a measure of the conflict’s dangerous drift.

In May, the month before the violent Hamas takeover of Gaza from Fatah, Livni gathered international ambassadors to Israel for a briefing at a Tel Aviv hotel. Hamas rockets launched from Gaza were raining down on the Israeli town of Sderot; Livni’s message was that the situation had become unbearable. “Enough is enough,” she declared, appealing for determined pressure on terrorists “so that the Palestinian people will understand that this is something which is not tolerable.”

She also gave expression to a particular Israeli disquiet: “Israelis must know that the international community does understand we are under attack. It is so important to Israel to know that our right to defend ourselves is supported and that you understand that there is suffering here, and not just among Palestinians.”

Israel — built on the Zionist dream of gathering in the Jews and so normalizing their status through the attainment of sovereignty — was supposed, as Avineri has written, not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but also ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” After the millennia of marginalization and Auschwitz, it was supposed to create what Ben-Gurion called “a self-sufficient people, master of its own fate,” rather than one “hung up in midair.” In some measure, it has.

But as Livni’s appeal for sympathy suggested, all the great achievements of Israel have not yet ended Jewish precariousness, Jewish annihilation angst — the inner “exile” of the Jew. Israel remains, in Livni’s words, “a nation struggling to realize our basic right to a peaceful coexistence.” She told me that “in a Europe without borders, people are questioning what the meaning is of a Jewish state.”

Its moral authority compromised by a 40-year occupation, its kibbutznik uniqueness compromised by a globalized consumer culture, its future compromised by the gathering appeal of jihadist dogma, Israel stands at a crossroads. “Something deep has to change,” says Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster. “We can’t any longer be the victims rushing to proclaim we’re being obliterated and ending up obliterating others.” The Diaspora Jew did not go to Zion to build the Jew among nations.

Livni, with her umbilical attachment to the Zionist idea, gets this. She gets the need to hurry to some resolution with the Palestinians in order to stop the erosion of the Israeli raison d’etre. Watching her in that hotel conference room, beneath the attentive gaze of dozens of ambassadors, I had to admire her. Each point was made with punch, not least that Hamas was rearming in Gaza with Hezbollah in Lebanon as a model. “She is very professional, in good standing and taken very seriously,” Jakken Biorn Lian, the Norwegian ambassador, told me.

My admiration was redoubled because May had been a bad month for her. Her high-wire act after the Winograd Commission report, telling Olmert he should go without going herself, had brought a wave of media criticism, much of it sexist. She was described as being fit only to run a women’s volunteer group. The onslaught was a fair reflection of the sexism she also encountered within the heavily male cabinet as she tried to resist another bombing raid on Lebanon.

A few days after her not-quite-oust-Olmert push, Yariv Reicher, a consultant, told me: “I’ll take her as my lawyer or friend, but to lead here you have to have something hard to describe, something Sharon and Begin and Rabin had, something from the innermost person that gives you hope, an answer to your pain. She needs to speak from her guts.”

But it did take guts for Livni to tell her boss he should quit. Rows between Israeli prime ministers and foreign ministers are nothing new: each vies to control the Washington relationship, the one that counts. But Olmert-Livni represents a new level of poison. When Sharon had his crippling stroke last year, both she and Olmert were in position to take over the Kadima leadership. Livni stepped aside — and was rewarded, she feels, with contempt. Livni’s testimony to the Winograd Commission amounts to a portrait of humiliation. Requests for meetings with Olmert at critical moments in the war are refused; she is told to “calm down” when she does see him; she is forced to watch the prime minister chat to the chief of staff as she is talking; and she is long frustrated in her quest for a diplomatic outcome.

“The situation is very sensitive,” she told me when I asked about Olmert during our first meeting, adding that in the end “it is not about me and the prime minister but the crisis in our society.” What she had said “was exactly what I wanted to say, no regrets. I chose the words. I know that people want blood. That’s nice, but. . . .”

Resilience tends to pay in Israeli politics. Netanyahu has bounced back at the head of Likud, and even Ehud Barak, the former prime minister who fell from grace after his peace efforts collapsed, has returned as Labor leader and defense minister. Many saw a rite of passage in Livni’s grilling by the media. Her rise had been too smooth; this painful episode would toughen her. “Of course she will come back,” says Igal Galai, the friend of Sharon’s who watched her emergence. “Right now in Israel, I don’t see anyone better.”

Doubts persist over the future of Kadima, bereft of its creator, Sharon, and beset by corruption. But Livni says that she still believes in the neophyte party. She did not leave Likud to follow Sharon, she insists. She left “because there is a need to promote a peace process” and Likud is a party “whose ideology starts with the word ‘no.’ ” Israelis are questing for new hope. Whether Netanyahu’s Likud or Barak’s Labor can provide that is open to question: both speak of yesterday.

Dita Kohl-Roman has watched her friend’s evolution closely. Livni used to shut off any conversation about becoming prime minister, but the Lebanon war was a turning point. Such crises pose the question, Can you take this — do you want the job enough? “And a few months later we sat in a Tel Aviv coffee shop,” Kohl-Roman told me, “and she said she was ready to run for prime minister and that she had gone through an inner process and was prepared.” She says she believes that to win Livni “must get over her uptightness, go through a process of loosening. And then I hope our society can encompass someone who represents something so good and decent as our leader.”

Livni can rise above her inner constraints. In a speech in 2005 that riveted the nation on the 10th anniversary of Rabin’s death, she declared: “I did not elect or choose Rabin, but he was elected to be the Israeli prime minister, the prime minister of my country. . . . Law, ladies and gentlemen, is not a technical issue. It is the full expression of a precious system. Specifically, in a time when Israel is fighting for its existence, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the aim, the common denominator and the shared values that are all the meaning of the existence of Israel: a national homeland for the Jewish people, a Jewish and democratic state. These two values are connected to each other. This is the thing that connects us with each other.”

Those words in my head, I strolled through Rabin Square, which has all the beauty of Warsaw at the height of Communism. In one corner is a small shrine to Rabin at the spot where he was murdered on Nov. 4, 1995. An inscription says that here Yitzhak Rabin was murdered “in the struggle for peace.” Another says, “Peace shall be his legacy.”

Alongside these words is a photograph, seemingly from a faraway era, of Rabin shaking Arafat’s hand beneath the sunny gaze of President Bill Clinton. I found myself fighting back tears: how much had been lost since then and how close Israelis and Palestinians had come. A peace of the brave it was; it is brave to see beyond grievance, hurt and history to the innocence in every child’s eye.

Might Livni and Israel rise to bravery again and might Palestine find a leader to accompany such courage? There are few encouraging signs, but Livni has not given up hope. “Each of us can live with our narrative, so long as we are pragmatic when it comes to the land,” she says. “I still believe in our right to the whole land, but felt it was more important to make a compromise. We cannot solve who was right or wrong in 1948 or decide who is more just. The Palestinians can feel justice is on their side, and I can feel it is on my side. What we have to decide about is not history but the future.”

Roger Cohen is a columnist for The International Herald Tribune and a guest columnist for The New York Times.