Some quick articles by the NYTimes
Mar. 4th, 2008 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A Clash Between Popular Culture and Orthodox Piety
For thousands of Orthodox Jews, the “Big Event” — a concert featuring the popular Hasidic entertainer Lipa Schmeltzer — was supposed to happen next Sunday at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. But fans and organizers were shocked to learn late last month that a group of rabbis had issued an edict against the show, effectively canceling it.
The decree, published in Hebrew in the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia and signed by 33 rabbis, warned that the sight of dancing and singing performers would cause “ribaldry and lightheadedness” that would lure young people away from spiritual purity. It prohibited Orthodox Jews from attending the concert and called on Mr. Schmeltzer to back out.
The ban has inflamed tensions among ultra-Orthodox Jews over how to address the influences of popular culture, and it has thrust what has largely been an internal debate into public view.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose Brooklyn district includes many Hasidic neighborhoods, said the ban had triggered unprecedented dissent and outrage among Hasidim. “In all my 26 years of representing this community, I can’t remember anything that has so shaken the people,” Mr. Hikind said on Sunday.
The growing fame of Mr. Schmeltzer, who weaves pop melodies with traditional Hasidic songs, has troubled some Hasidim, who have chided him for introducing Jewish youth to secular musical styles. Others fear his popularity could rival that of the rabbis, who wield spiritual authority over Hasidic daily life.
In an effort to assuage those fears and uphold the religious practice of modesty, the concert organizers had promised separate entrances and seating for the more than 5,000 men and women who had been expected to attend, and Mr. Schmeltzer had agreed to perform only traditional Hasidic songs.
But that was not enough to prevent two community leaders in Brooklyn from mobilizing opposition to the show, which was raising money for an Israeli charity that finances weddings for orphans. In late February, the two men, Asher Friedman and Rabbi Avraham Shor, demanded that the concert be canceled. Using the text of an edict that had been used to ban a concert in Israel, they warned that the concert would “strip the youth of every shred of fear of heaven.” They said they were acting on behalf of a group of Israeli rabbis, and ultimately, 33 American rabbis signed the edict.
Sheya Mendlowitz, the concert’s producer, said Mr. Friedman and Mr. Shor had known about the concert for months but had acted without warning, just two weeks before the show, causing $700,000 in losses.
“These two activists stirred up all the trouble,” said Mr. Mendlowitz, who has worked in the Hasidic music business for 27 years. “They just wanted to sabotage us.”
Days later, Mr. Schmeltzer, who lives in Monsey, N.Y., announced that he would not perform. In an interview on Rabbi Zev J. Brenner’s syndicated radio program, he said that he had no choice but to obey the decree. “I have a career, I have a wife and kids to support, I have a mortgage to pay, I have to get out of the fire,” Mr. Schmeltzer said. He then withdrew from a concert in London as well.
When Mr. Mendlowitz canceled the show, he insisted that advertisers, Madison Square Garden and the more than 3,000 ticket holders — who paid between $50 and $500 — would be reimbursed. He added that Mr. Friedman had offered to help offset the losses — but only if Mr. Mendlowitz agreed to retire from the Hasidic concert business, a condition Mr. Mendlowitz rejected.
A man answering Mr. Friedman’s cellphone, who declined to identify himself, refused to discuss the concert.
The controversy has provided a rare glimpse into the deeply secretive Hasidic world. In recent days, debate over the ban has raged on blogs and on the radio, which provide participants the anonymity to challenge their religious leaders. “The rabbis are dictators,” said one writer on the blog Vos Iz Neias. Others defended their spiritual leaders, saying that they were protecting young people. “Our rabbis must know more than we do, what effect this concert, or the performers in general have on our children,” wrote another.
Some critics say the rabbis were manipulated, and one signer, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky of Philadelphia, told Hamodia that the rabbis did not verify the claim that the edict had been approved by Israeli rabbis. “Usually we meet together. This time, with time pressing, we did not meet together, and maybe it was not the right thing,” he said, according to Hamodia.
But Rabbi Brenner said that despite any misgivings, there was no indication that the rabbis were prepared to rescind the ban, which could call their infallibility into question. “They have the weight of the Torah behind them,” he said. “I don’t recall a ban ever being lifted.”
Assemblyman Hikind said he planned to meet with the rabbis involved. “Suddenly, when it comes to faith in the rabbis, there is this big question mark,” he said. “And when you don’t explain to the young people, you lose them, plain and simple.”
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
By BENEDICT CAREY
The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it’s the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors’ face planting outside bars or on beaches.
Or perhaps it’s a simple a case of seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Not SAD at all, but anticipation of warmth and eagerness for a little disorder.
Either way, researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior. Until recently, their definition of binge drinking — five drinks or more in 24 hours — was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars. And investigators who ventured into the field, into the spray of warm backwash and press of wet T-shirts, often returned with findings like this one from a 2006 study: “Spring break trips are a risk factor for escalated alcohol use.”
Or this, from a 1998 analysis: “The men’s reported levels of alcohol consumption, binge drinking and intoxication were significantly higher than the women’s.”
In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.”
They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol. In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.
In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.
Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation. “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable,” said Dwight Heath, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brown.
Not to say that would-be bingers, when ordering that first tray of Irish car bombs for the table, think about discharging a cultural tradition. They have their own reasons. And those, too, shape subsequent drunken behavior.
In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.
The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”
In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.
“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”
Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself. In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted extensive interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school. Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior — and that is what they exhibited. But one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more.
In their discussion, Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing. At times, the signals cross, as when movies show spring-break binging as sunburned, sexy fun, while health pronouncements make it look like an orgy of near-criminal behavior.
At other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other. The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself” or “allow me to act completely out of character” is widely echoed in literature, pop culture and drinking lore. If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling at some level.
Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess. Then the amount of tequila consumed matters very much — and poison is poison in any culture.
Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Needles
Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Hook
By PATRICIA COHEN
The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and into women’s laps and shopping bags. When fully grown, these curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version of the Great Barrier Reef. But at the moment they were emerging at a remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by members of the audience.
This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the reef, the world’s largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an organizer of the project, who was in Manhattan last weekend to lecture, offer crocheting workshops and gather recruits. The reef is scheduled to arrive in New York City next month.
As she explained to the 40 people, nearly all women, who had gathered at New York University on Saturday, “This has grown from something that was a little object on our coffee table” to an exhibition that, so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet. And that was before the addition of that day’s catch.
Ms. Wertheim, a science writer, and her twin sister, Christine, who teaches at the California Institute for the Arts, came up with the idea of creating a woolly homage to the reef about two and a half years ago. The Wertheims, 49, grew up in Queensland in Australia, where the approximately 135,000-square-mile reef — and the billions of tiny organisms that it comprises — is located. But the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (more on that in a moment), is much more than a warning about global warming. It marks the intersection of the Wertheims’ various passions: science, mathematics, art, feminism, handicrafts and social activism.
For that reason the project has attracted a wide range of participants, including the Harlem Knitting Circle (which arrived with 10 members), a student from a Westchester high school’s environmental science club who had never crocheted before, a geoscientist and a former mathematics teacher and sheep farmer in Australia who creates algorithms to calculate the length of yarn she’ll need before spinning and dying the wool from her own sheep. In Chicago, where the exhibition appeared a few months ago, about 100 women contributed to the reef.
News of the project has been all over the online knitting and crochet world, which is how Njoya Angrum, the founder of the Harlem Knitting Circle, and Barbara H. Van Elsen of the New York City Crochet Guild discovered it.
“It pushes the boundaries of crochet, using different materials,” said Ms. Van Elsen, who wore to the gathering a bright orange yellow and green necklace that she had crocheted. “Exploring texture and color, it frees you up.”
It’s also “the greatest way to get people really aware of what’s going on in the world,” she added.
For Ms. Wertheim, a lithe woman with a no-nonsense attitude and closely cropped black and gray hair, the project embodies the “beauty and creativity that comes out of scientific thinking,” what she refers to as “conceptual enchantment.” As it turns out, the gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones, kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of the human imagination.
“For God’s sake, please give it up,” Wolfgang Bolyai told his son, Jonas, a 19th century mathematician who was working on this sort of non-Euclidean geometry. “Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it too may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.”
Actually these hyperbolic forms can be glimpsed all around, in the ruffled edges of kale leaves, the ruching that “Project Runway” designers favor, rippling ballerina tutus and drugstore scrunchies that girls use to gather a ponytail.
Yet mathematicians hadn’t focused attention in their direction. It wasn’t until 1997 that Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry.
For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, “hold the theorems in their hands.”
The Wertheims read about Ms. Taimina’s work a few years ago and invited her and her husband, also a mathematician, to speak at their Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit educational organization that they founded and run from a Los Angeles post office box. From these oddly frilled forms the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the Humanities at New York University is co-sponsoring the exhibit, which will appear in the university’s Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at the World Financial Center April 5 through May 18.
In the university’s auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn, thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens, tans, purples and yellows.
Later the group members traipsed upstairs to a large jewelry studio where they settled at one of six thick wooden worktables and began crocheting. The woven organisms developed so quickly it seemed as though time-lapse photography was at work.
“I was curious at first about how to do the forms, but then I was more intrigued by the message,” said Tina Bliss, a graphic designer who lives on Staten Island. Now, with two knitting groups, she has become “an evangelist” and wants “to bring a coral reef back to Staten Island.”
Mr. Wertheim emphasizes that the art and the science — the “conceptual enchantment” — are open to everyone. Aniqua Wilkerson, a member of the Harlem Knitting Circle, explained she first learned to knit seven years ago from books and through trial and error. She had tried to crochet hats, but they kept buckling. “That was a mistake,” she said as she finished up a tightly woven urchin in lime green, melon and turquoise. “I realized it was from increasing the stitches too much.” Which is precisely the method used to create hyperbolic forms.
“Wow,” Ms. Wilkerson said, “I’d been doing that all along.”
For thousands of Orthodox Jews, the “Big Event” — a concert featuring the popular Hasidic entertainer Lipa Schmeltzer — was supposed to happen next Sunday at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. But fans and organizers were shocked to learn late last month that a group of rabbis had issued an edict against the show, effectively canceling it.
The decree, published in Hebrew in the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia and signed by 33 rabbis, warned that the sight of dancing and singing performers would cause “ribaldry and lightheadedness” that would lure young people away from spiritual purity. It prohibited Orthodox Jews from attending the concert and called on Mr. Schmeltzer to back out.
The ban has inflamed tensions among ultra-Orthodox Jews over how to address the influences of popular culture, and it has thrust what has largely been an internal debate into public view.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose Brooklyn district includes many Hasidic neighborhoods, said the ban had triggered unprecedented dissent and outrage among Hasidim. “In all my 26 years of representing this community, I can’t remember anything that has so shaken the people,” Mr. Hikind said on Sunday.
The growing fame of Mr. Schmeltzer, who weaves pop melodies with traditional Hasidic songs, has troubled some Hasidim, who have chided him for introducing Jewish youth to secular musical styles. Others fear his popularity could rival that of the rabbis, who wield spiritual authority over Hasidic daily life.
In an effort to assuage those fears and uphold the religious practice of modesty, the concert organizers had promised separate entrances and seating for the more than 5,000 men and women who had been expected to attend, and Mr. Schmeltzer had agreed to perform only traditional Hasidic songs.
But that was not enough to prevent two community leaders in Brooklyn from mobilizing opposition to the show, which was raising money for an Israeli charity that finances weddings for orphans. In late February, the two men, Asher Friedman and Rabbi Avraham Shor, demanded that the concert be canceled. Using the text of an edict that had been used to ban a concert in Israel, they warned that the concert would “strip the youth of every shred of fear of heaven.” They said they were acting on behalf of a group of Israeli rabbis, and ultimately, 33 American rabbis signed the edict.
Sheya Mendlowitz, the concert’s producer, said Mr. Friedman and Mr. Shor had known about the concert for months but had acted without warning, just two weeks before the show, causing $700,000 in losses.
“These two activists stirred up all the trouble,” said Mr. Mendlowitz, who has worked in the Hasidic music business for 27 years. “They just wanted to sabotage us.”
Days later, Mr. Schmeltzer, who lives in Monsey, N.Y., announced that he would not perform. In an interview on Rabbi Zev J. Brenner’s syndicated radio program, he said that he had no choice but to obey the decree. “I have a career, I have a wife and kids to support, I have a mortgage to pay, I have to get out of the fire,” Mr. Schmeltzer said. He then withdrew from a concert in London as well.
When Mr. Mendlowitz canceled the show, he insisted that advertisers, Madison Square Garden and the more than 3,000 ticket holders — who paid between $50 and $500 — would be reimbursed. He added that Mr. Friedman had offered to help offset the losses — but only if Mr. Mendlowitz agreed to retire from the Hasidic concert business, a condition Mr. Mendlowitz rejected.
A man answering Mr. Friedman’s cellphone, who declined to identify himself, refused to discuss the concert.
The controversy has provided a rare glimpse into the deeply secretive Hasidic world. In recent days, debate over the ban has raged on blogs and on the radio, which provide participants the anonymity to challenge their religious leaders. “The rabbis are dictators,” said one writer on the blog Vos Iz Neias. Others defended their spiritual leaders, saying that they were protecting young people. “Our rabbis must know more than we do, what effect this concert, or the performers in general have on our children,” wrote another.
Some critics say the rabbis were manipulated, and one signer, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky of Philadelphia, told Hamodia that the rabbis did not verify the claim that the edict had been approved by Israeli rabbis. “Usually we meet together. This time, with time pressing, we did not meet together, and maybe it was not the right thing,” he said, according to Hamodia.
But Rabbi Brenner said that despite any misgivings, there was no indication that the rabbis were prepared to rescind the ban, which could call their infallibility into question. “They have the weight of the Torah behind them,” he said. “I don’t recall a ban ever being lifted.”
Assemblyman Hikind said he planned to meet with the rabbis involved. “Suddenly, when it comes to faith in the rabbis, there is this big question mark,” he said. “And when you don’t explain to the young people, you lose them, plain and simple.”
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
By BENEDICT CAREY
The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it’s the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors’ face planting outside bars or on beaches.
Or perhaps it’s a simple a case of seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Not SAD at all, but anticipation of warmth and eagerness for a little disorder.
Either way, researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior. Until recently, their definition of binge drinking — five drinks or more in 24 hours — was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars. And investigators who ventured into the field, into the spray of warm backwash and press of wet T-shirts, often returned with findings like this one from a 2006 study: “Spring break trips are a risk factor for escalated alcohol use.”
Or this, from a 1998 analysis: “The men’s reported levels of alcohol consumption, binge drinking and intoxication were significantly higher than the women’s.”
In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.”
They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol. In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.
In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.
Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation. “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable,” said Dwight Heath, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brown.
Not to say that would-be bingers, when ordering that first tray of Irish car bombs for the table, think about discharging a cultural tradition. They have their own reasons. And those, too, shape subsequent drunken behavior.
In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.
The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”
In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.
“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”
Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself. In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted extensive interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school. Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior — and that is what they exhibited. But one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more.
In their discussion, Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing. At times, the signals cross, as when movies show spring-break binging as sunburned, sexy fun, while health pronouncements make it look like an orgy of near-criminal behavior.
At other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other. The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself” or “allow me to act completely out of character” is widely echoed in literature, pop culture and drinking lore. If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling at some level.
Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess. Then the amount of tequila consumed matters very much — and poison is poison in any culture.
Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Needles
Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Hook
By PATRICIA COHEN
The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and into women’s laps and shopping bags. When fully grown, these curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version of the Great Barrier Reef. But at the moment they were emerging at a remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by members of the audience.
This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the reef, the world’s largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an organizer of the project, who was in Manhattan last weekend to lecture, offer crocheting workshops and gather recruits. The reef is scheduled to arrive in New York City next month.
As she explained to the 40 people, nearly all women, who had gathered at New York University on Saturday, “This has grown from something that was a little object on our coffee table” to an exhibition that, so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet. And that was before the addition of that day’s catch.
Ms. Wertheim, a science writer, and her twin sister, Christine, who teaches at the California Institute for the Arts, came up with the idea of creating a woolly homage to the reef about two and a half years ago. The Wertheims, 49, grew up in Queensland in Australia, where the approximately 135,000-square-mile reef — and the billions of tiny organisms that it comprises — is located. But the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (more on that in a moment), is much more than a warning about global warming. It marks the intersection of the Wertheims’ various passions: science, mathematics, art, feminism, handicrafts and social activism.
For that reason the project has attracted a wide range of participants, including the Harlem Knitting Circle (which arrived with 10 members), a student from a Westchester high school’s environmental science club who had never crocheted before, a geoscientist and a former mathematics teacher and sheep farmer in Australia who creates algorithms to calculate the length of yarn she’ll need before spinning and dying the wool from her own sheep. In Chicago, where the exhibition appeared a few months ago, about 100 women contributed to the reef.
News of the project has been all over the online knitting and crochet world, which is how Njoya Angrum, the founder of the Harlem Knitting Circle, and Barbara H. Van Elsen of the New York City Crochet Guild discovered it.
“It pushes the boundaries of crochet, using different materials,” said Ms. Van Elsen, who wore to the gathering a bright orange yellow and green necklace that she had crocheted. “Exploring texture and color, it frees you up.”
It’s also “the greatest way to get people really aware of what’s going on in the world,” she added.
For Ms. Wertheim, a lithe woman with a no-nonsense attitude and closely cropped black and gray hair, the project embodies the “beauty and creativity that comes out of scientific thinking,” what she refers to as “conceptual enchantment.” As it turns out, the gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones, kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of the human imagination.
“For God’s sake, please give it up,” Wolfgang Bolyai told his son, Jonas, a 19th century mathematician who was working on this sort of non-Euclidean geometry. “Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it too may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.”
Actually these hyperbolic forms can be glimpsed all around, in the ruffled edges of kale leaves, the ruching that “Project Runway” designers favor, rippling ballerina tutus and drugstore scrunchies that girls use to gather a ponytail.
Yet mathematicians hadn’t focused attention in their direction. It wasn’t until 1997 that Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry.
For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, “hold the theorems in their hands.”
The Wertheims read about Ms. Taimina’s work a few years ago and invited her and her husband, also a mathematician, to speak at their Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit educational organization that they founded and run from a Los Angeles post office box. From these oddly frilled forms the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the Humanities at New York University is co-sponsoring the exhibit, which will appear in the university’s Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at the World Financial Center April 5 through May 18.
In the university’s auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn, thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens, tans, purples and yellows.
Later the group members traipsed upstairs to a large jewelry studio where they settled at one of six thick wooden worktables and began crocheting. The woven organisms developed so quickly it seemed as though time-lapse photography was at work.
“I was curious at first about how to do the forms, but then I was more intrigued by the message,” said Tina Bliss, a graphic designer who lives on Staten Island. Now, with two knitting groups, she has become “an evangelist” and wants “to bring a coral reef back to Staten Island.”
Mr. Wertheim emphasizes that the art and the science — the “conceptual enchantment” — are open to everyone. Aniqua Wilkerson, a member of the Harlem Knitting Circle, explained she first learned to knit seven years ago from books and through trial and error. She had tried to crochet hats, but they kept buckling. “That was a mistake,” she said as she finished up a tightly woven urchin in lime green, melon and turquoise. “I realized it was from increasing the stitches too much.” Which is precisely the method used to create hyperbolic forms.
“Wow,” Ms. Wilkerson said, “I’d been doing that all along.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 01:56 am (UTC)...oh. That - that's quite a way to end the article.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 01:56 am (UTC)...oh. That - that's quite a way to end the article.