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At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off Page
The oracle sat with her back to the hill, a breeze riffling the ruby scarves tied to her folding camp chair.
One by one, the 12 boys approached. They stood straight as the oracle lowered her sunglasses and looked them over. Sorting through a pile of paper slips with burnt edges, the oracle, a middle-aged woman, selected one for each child.
“I will prophesize your quest,” she told Tom Leier, 9, before reciting a mysterious poem that would guide him for the week ahead.
That morning, the boys had been regular Brooklyn elementary school students at a summer camp in Prospect Park. But now each had been revealed to be a half-blood, with one mortal parent and one who was a god of Greek myth.
Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.
Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.
Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.
In the Percy Jackson books, misunderstood children find out they are modern-day mythological heroes. Interest in Camp Half-Blood has been growing, perhaps because a Percy Jackson movie was released this year, or because the series features its own Camp Half-Blood, where Percy and other middle school demigods find refuge.
An independent bookstore in Austin, Tex., held the first Camp Half-Blood in 2006. The store, BookPeople, had been hosting dramatic readings of manuscripts in the series, and one day Topher Bradfield, the children’s activity coordinator, said to his young listeners, “Wouldn’t it be great if Camp Half-Blood was a real place?”
“The kids,” Mr. Bradfield recalled, “looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head, and were like: ‘Yeah, duh. Of course!’ ”
The day camp, which is held in a state park, attracts children from as far away as Brazil and Britain, who stay with their parents in nearby hotels. This year, the camp’s 450 spots sold out in an hour and a half, Mr. Bradfield said.
The camps run by bookstores, which are also in Decatur, Ga., and now in Brooklyn, are not fancy affairs. A casual observer of the various Camp Half-Bloods would see a few decorations and children in matching camp T-shirts jousting with foam swords or javelins. Gods, oracles and monsters are played by actors, counselors or volunteers.
But the homemade nature of the experience, camp staff members said, permits students to create the illusion in their own minds.
“My biggest challenge has been getting parents to understand that we don’t intend to sit indoors with their kids and read all summer,” said Crystal Bobb-Semple, the owner of Brownstone Books in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which started the Brooklyn camp this summer and charges $375 per week. “It is experiential.”
Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn had 44 campers and a simple story line. Discord had come over Brooklyn. It was up to the campers, as demigods, to find the five pieces of the Apple of Discord, a mythological object, to set things right.
Not everything went according to plan. Prospect Park denied permission to put up a tent, so the camp’s center consisted of three folding tables under tall trees. A nearby library and a movie theater were used in bad weather.
As the second session of the camp opened, the dozen boys, ages 7 to 11, squared off under a scorching sun for their first sword lesson, taught by a local Japanese sword-fighting instructor. There was some skepticism: when Nathan Mandell, 10, glimpsed the first piece of the Apple of Discord later that day, he did not buy it.
“That’s a piece of foam with glitter on it,” he said.
But the camp’s director, Karenga Arifu, known as Achilles, referred to the boys as young heroes. They teamed up for chariot races on the backs of pedicabs and corrected one another’s mythology.
“There really are demigods, and I hope that’s why I’m here,” said Tom, who wore a yellow bandanna to signify his Apollo parentage, which he believed could be true. After all, in the books, Percy Jackson does not find out that he is the son of Poseidon — not just a struggling student — until he is 12.
“I’m not here to pretend,” Tom said. “I’m here to train.”
Each day, three children were selected to go on a quest to defeat a monster and retrieve a piece of the magical apple. On Thursday, three children of Ares, the war god, set off into the wooded paths of Prospect Park.
Their swords tucked into their shirts, they chatted with their counselor, Jason McConnell, 18, about the difference between medusas and gorgons. The trees closed in around them as they climbed a flight of stone steps and traversed a mound of wood shavings. Toilet paper dangled from the trees.
They approached an overgrown circle of weeds, which Jason told them was the entrance to the Garden of Demeter.
Up ahead there was a flash of color — an orange camp T-shirt stained with fake blood. Then the monster, a Fury, jumped out of the bushes.
He was obviously a teenager in an old-man Halloween mask with rubber hands — right? The children began to fight him with their foam swords.
The monster’s sword struck Issa Chambers, 11, near the eye. He started to cry and retreated. “Get back in there,” Jason told Issa, and he did, in a flurry of anger. He pummeled the monster with his sword until Nathan shouted, “Issa, it’s an actual person!”
Walking back to camp, Issa said he felt bad for getting carried away. Jason reassured him. “Ares gave you the rage,” he said.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
The comments are mostly okay.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
By KEVIN SACK
EAST POINT, Ga. — When the Palladinos were planning their wedding, they found that traditional bridal magazines were all but useless in addressing their particular questions.
Questions like: Where does a woman find a man’s suit that does not make her look like a woman in a man’s suit? Should Kirsten and Maria both walk down the aisle, or was it O.K. for Maria, who sees herself as more masculine, to wait for her bride? At which of the Caribbean resorts in the honeymoon pictorials would two women feel most comfortable holding hands?
“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”
After their honeymoon in St. Martin, they decided to do something about it. This month, they published the second issue of their online same-sex wedding magazine, Equally Wed.
Almost from the moment Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, mainstream businesses have tried to find a way to attract customers from this new, lucrative market. But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides.
Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications. They join companies like OutVite.com, a Massachusetts stationery firm that grew along with that state’s same-sex wedding industry; photographers who promote images of gay weddings on their home pages; purveyors of groom-and-groom cake toppers; and cruise lines that advertise their embrace of gay honeymoons.
“The market doesn’t wait for politics to catch up,” said Katherine Sender, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.” “As gay marriage becomes part of the national imagination, marketing to it and publications concerning it become more and more viable.”
Gay weddings have been depicted on network television since the mid-1990s, and about 70 percent of daily newspapers now carry same-sex wedding announcements, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But some mainstream publications and broadcasters are only now taking their first halting steps toward inclusion.
This month, under pressure from gay rights groups, the “Today” show on NBC welcomed same-sex couples to compete in its annual wedding contest. Also this month, Brides, a Condé Nast publication, ran its first feature about a same-sex wedding, depicting the union of one of the magazine’s photo editors and her longtime girlfriend.
Martha Stewart Weddings, a publication of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, had already broken precedent in its winter 2010 issue, with a pictorial that showed Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman stomping on glass and sharing a kiss.
Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations. “This is a part of the mix going forward,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor-in-chief of Brides. “The world is changing.”
But because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution, Ms. Bratten said. That leaves an untapped market for Equally Wed and a handful of other Web sites devoted to same-sex weddings, with titles like Queerly Wed, So You’re EnGAYged, GayWeddings.com and RainbowWeddingNetwork.com.
In the six years since Massachusetts broke the barrier, there have been an estimated 40,000 legal same-sex marriages in the United States, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A comparable number of gay Americans have married in other countries, and an additional 84,000 couples may be in civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the institute.
Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia have now joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage, and court cases in California and Massachusetts are challenging the constitutionality of state and federal laws against it.
It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine.
“We’ve done everything we can to be equally wed,” Maria Palladino said.
The couple are publishing their quarterly from a back room in their tidy house in East Point, an emerging gay outpost just south of Atlanta. Maria, 30, who works as a freelance Web designer, is publisher. Kirsten, 32, who manages the lifestyle sections of a weekly newspaper, is editor.
Their magazine, which features a more content-driven format than some competing sites, is attracting about 8,000 unique viewers a month, Maria Palladino said. It has about 20 advertisers, including a jeweler, a hotel chain and a car insurer.
Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges.
In the summer issue, a feature about planning a green wedding shares space on the home page with an article about the legal dilemmas facing married couples when one spouse changes genders. A feature on boudoir photography gives way to an advice column on managing marriage license waiting periods in Iowa and Massachusetts.
Like traditional magazines, Equally Wed pulses with the love stories of real couples and lush photography of their ceremonies. Kirsten Palladino, who always dreamed of a white-dress wedding, writes a blog called “In Bloom,” which dispenses advice on invitation fonts and summer cocktails.
But she also answers reader questions about whether a man should propose to another man with a ring (why not?) and whether a couple should invite homophobic relatives to their wedding (better to send them an announcement after the fact). Maria Palladino, who said she has not worn a dress since high school, writes a blog from the butch point of view called “Broom Closet,” a term she coined for those who do not quite fit as either bride or groom.
The magazine includes a consumer guide to vendors who are practiced in avoiding heterosexist language and customs. When planning their own wedding, the Palladinos quickly learned to detect discomfort among the photographers they interviewed.
“They were so delicate in their handling of it,” Kirsten Palladino said. “They’d say, ‘You know, I’ve never shot a gay wedding, but I’d be happy to.’ And then sign off their e-mail: ‘Much love in Jesus Christ.’ ”
The Palladinos said that what excited them about the future, both of same-sex weddings and their magazine, was the chance to navigate between tradition and innovation. “There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”
Field Report: A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard
Comes with pictures!
Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs. While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
“Let’s see,” says Reau, a quiet honor student who’s a little taken aback to find a New Yorker in giant sunglasses asking her questions in the plot next to her tidy white-brick ranch house on a June afternoon. “Those are carrots, spinach, beets, kale, watermelon, squash, zucchini, peppers, lots of tomatoes . . . um . . . corn, radishes, lettuce, beans, onions, garlic.” The weeds that sprung up during her recent class trip to Washington, D.C., are taunting her as we talk. When I tell her that people pay $4 a bunch for the purslane that’s growing into the burlap coffee sacks she has laid down along the rows for quick weeding — she flips them over to uproot any invaders, kind of like waxing your garden — you can see her 4-H wheels turning. (She’s been a member for half her life.)
Reau lives in an agricultural area — on the last day of school, seniors are allowed to ride their four-wheelers or tractors — but her great-grandparents were the last generation to farm this land. Her parents breed Suffolk sheep on the side: her father, Mark, is a carpenter, and her mother, Brenda, is the director of Michigan State University’s extension in Monroe County. Alexandra became interested in gardening after participating in the Monroe County Youth Farm Stand Project, which Brenda started two years ago to help disadvantaged youth learn about nutrition.
“I wanted to have my own farm stand out in my front yard,” Alexandra says at the kitchen table, looking sideways at her mother while drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk from a nearby dairy. “My mom thought it wasn’t the best idea because of the road we live on,” which is narrow and fairly fast. “She’d been learning about the C.S.A. aspect, so she told me about it, and I really liked the idea. I liked that it was on my own schedule, so I could kind of pick what I wanted, ’cause it is still my summer,” she adds, finally sounding like a teenager, “and I don’t want to, like, you know, be busy every single minute of the day.”
Reau entered her idea for Garden to Go in the Prima Civitas Foundation youth-inventors competition, and her business plan won $300 in start-up money.
While we eat a colorful salad of spinach, strawberry and goat cheese (Reau’s spinach and strawberries, local goat cheese), deviled eggs (bartered) and strawberry shortcake (local, good) in the Reaus’ toile-curtained dining room, Brenda explains that a quarter of last year’s members told her that they were attracted to Garden to Go because it was a young person’s effort. “They want to support someone who is interested in working instead of being on the Internet all day!” Brenda says. “And growing food. . . .”
I reached one of Reau’s customers, Mary Janicki of Sylvania, Ohio, on her pontoon boat. “I liked the idea that she was such a go-getter,” said Janicki, who found Garden to Go through Reau’s page on Localharvest.org last year. “I read that she won that award and was only 13 years old, and I thought, This is a young lady who’s got it together!” Janicki has signed up for a second summer, because she appreciates the freshness of the produce as well as the idea of eating locally. “And that corn? Oh, my goodness!”
Following last year’s success, with five members and a few standbys who came whenever extra vegetables were available, Reau’s summer project has jumped the plot. Herbs and squash pop up in the flower beds edging the house; more tomatoes were started in a raised bed that her dad improvised from a neighbor’s recycled soybean seed bag; she grows flowers and peppers at her grandmother’s house next door; more flowers are flourishing outside her two rabbit barns. (Reau has been a national champion rabbit breeder since she was 10; for the past four years, she’s been packaging the manure in her dad’s old plastic nail buckets and selling it as Bunny Honey.)
Asked which vegetable she’s proudest of, Reau said potatoes. “Just because potatoes are something everyone eats: you don’t think about that you grow them; you just eat them! And their skins aren’t dry and ucky like what you get at stores.”
She’s also curious about this summer’s tomato experiment. Her neighbor, a World War II veteran named Leon Spaulding, says he was given tomato seeds by a German guard in a prison hospital. He’s been growing them for 60 years, and last summer he gave some to Alexandra to add to her 13 varieties. While flipping through gardening catalogs this spring, she noticed a tomato called Old German, and now she and her neighbor are growing both Germans to compare.
“You gave him some San Marzano plants too, didn’t you?” Brenda asks, turning to me. “On the Food Network, all the celebrity chefs talk about them being the premium tomato. So she has some of those too.” (For each C.S.A. box, Brenda and Alexandra put together recipes tailored to the week’s harvest, like minty green-bean salad or provincial tomatoes. During squash season, it’s especially helpful.)
With her drive, resourcefulness and sure touch with plants and animals, it’s no wonder Reau won the state 4-H award for horticulture and crops in June: she’s the poster girl for future farmers. She credits the youth-agriculture organization with improving her public speaking, while Garden to Go has helped her with people skills. “’Cause I used to be, like, really shy and quiet. And I’m just more talkative now.” Farming has also taught her patience. “It’s a continual process,” she says, sighing. “You have to keep working at it, and you can’t just stop.” Least favorite task, after weeding? Picking beans. “She kind of suckers her dad into helping,” Brenda says with a wink.
Those beans are adding up: last summer Reau earned enough to buy a laptop. “This year I’m working toward a treadmill,” she says. “It’s a joint effort between me and my parents. The rest will go into my college fund.”
“Plus the other purchase?” Brenda prods. “The phone upgrade? She has a Droid.”
Summer jobs, like summer romances, aren’t meant to last forever: Reau says she would like to be an engineer, focusing on biosystems. Until she hangs up her gardening gloves, Alexandra Reau will have grown the most over vacation.
Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive
I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car.
Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street.
You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way.
“When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.”
The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too.
Yet researchers who study gray squirrels argue that their subject is far more compelling than most people realize, and that behind the squirrel’s success lies a phenomenal elasticity of body, brain and behavior. Squirrels can leap a span 10 times the length of their body, roughly double what the best human long jumper can manage. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and so keep a grip while climbing no matter which way they’re facing. Squirrels can learn by watching others — cross-phyletically, if need be. In their book “Squirrels: The Animal Answer Guide,” Richard W. Thorington Jr. and Katie Ferrell of the Smithsonian Institution described the safe-pedestrian approach of a gray squirrel eager to traverse a busy avenue near the White House. The squirrel waited on the grass near a crosswalk until people began to cross the street, said the authors, “and then it crossed the street behind them.”
In the acuity of their visual system, the sensitivity and deftness with which they can manipulate objects, their sociability, chattiness and willingness to deceive, squirrels turn out to be surprisingly similar to primates. They nest communally as multigenerational, matrilineal clans, and at the end of a hard day’s forage, they greet each other with a mutual nuzzling of cheek and lip glands that looks decidedly like a kiss. Dr. Koprowski said that when he was growing up in Cleveland, squirrels were the only wild mammals to which he was exposed. “When I got to college, I thought I’d study polar bears or mountain lions,” he said. “Luckily I ended up doing my master’s and Ph.D. on squirrels instead.”
The Eastern gray is one of about 278 squirrelly species alive today, a lineage that split off from other rodents about 40 million years ago and that includes chipmunks, marmots, woodchucks — a k a groundhogs — and prairie dogs. Squirrels are found on all continents save Antarctica and Australia, and in some of the harshest settings: the Himalayan marmot, found at up to 18,000 feet above sea level, is among the highest-living mammals of the world.
A good part of a squirrel’s strength can be traced to its elaborately veined tail, which, among other things, serves as a thermoregulatory device, in winter helping to shunt warm blood toward the squirrel’s core and in summer to wick excess heat off into the air. Rodents like rats and mice are nocturnal and have poor vision, relying on whiskers to navigate their world. The gray squirrel is diurnal and has the keen eyesight to match. “Its primary visual cortex is huge,” said Jon H. Kaas, a comparative neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, A squirrel’s peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal eyesight, which means it can see what’s above and beside it without moving its head. While its color vision may only be so-so, akin to a person with red-green colorblindness who can tell green and red from other colors but not from each other, a squirrel has the benefit of natural sunglasses, pale yellow lenses that cut down on glare.
Gray squirrels use their sharp, shaded vision to keep an eye on each other. Michael A. Steele of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have studied the squirrels’ hoarding behavior, which turns out to be remarkably calculated and rococo. Squirrels may be opportunistic feeders, able to make a meal of a discarded cheeseburger, crickets or a baby sparrow if need be, but in the main they are granivores and seed hoarders. They’ll gather acorns and other nuts, assess which are in danger of germinating and using up stored nutrients, remove the offending tree embryos with a few quick slices of their incisors, and then cache the sterilized treasure for later consumption, one seed per inch-deep hole.
But the squirrels don’t just bury an acorn and come back in winter. They bury the seed, dig it up shortly afterward, rebury it elsewhere, dig it up again. “We’ve seen seeds that were recached as many as five times,” said Dr. Steele. The squirrels recache to deter theft, lest another squirrel spied the burial the first X times. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, the Steele team showed that when squirrels are certain that they are being watched, they will actively seek to deceive the would-be thieves. They’ll dig a hole, pretend to push an acorn in, and then cover it over, all the while keeping the prized seed hidden in their mouth. “Deceptive caching involves some pretty serious decision making,” Dr. Steele said. “It meets the criteria of tactical deception, which previously was thought to only occur in primates.”
Squirrels are also master kvetchers, modulating their utterances to convey the nature and severity of their complaint: a moaning “kuk” for mild discomfort, a buzzing sound for more pressing distress, and a short scream for extreme dismay. During the one or two days a year that a female is fertile, she will be chased by every male in the vicinity, all of them hounding her round and round a tree with sneezelike calls, and her on top, refusing to say gesundheit. A squirrel threatened by a serious predator like a cat, dog, hawk or wayward toddler will issue a multimodal alarm, barking out a series of loud chuk-chuk-chuks with a nasally, penetrating “whaa” at the end, while simultaneously performing a tail flag — lifting its fluffy baton high over its head and flicking it back and forth rhythmically.
Sarah R. Partan of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and her students have used a custom-built squirrel robot to track how real squirrels respond to the components of an alarm signal. The robot looks and sounds like a squirrel, its tail moves sort of like a squirrel’s, but because its plastic body is covered in rabbit fur it doesn’t smell like a squirrel. Yet squirrels tested in Florida and New England have responded to the knockoff appropriately, with alarm barks of their own or by running up a tree. Human passers-by have likewise been enchanted. “People are always coming over, asking what we’re doing,” said Dr. Partan. “We’ve had to abandon many trials halfway through.” An iSquirrel? Now that’s something even a New Yorker might love.
After High Line’s Success, Other Cities Look Up
Pictures!
Phone calls and visitors and, yes, dreams from around the world are pouring into the small offices of the Friends of the High Line on West 20th Street in Manhattan these days.
Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too...
The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.
In many of these places there had already been some talk and visions of what might be, but now New York’s accomplishment is providing ammunition for boosters while giving skeptics much-needed evidence of the potential for success. The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.
“There’s a nice healthy competition between big American cities,” said Ben Helphand, who is pushing to create a park on a defunct rail line in Chicago. “That this has been done in New York puts the onus on us to do it ourselves and to give it a Chicago stamp.”
The High Line, an elevated freight spur that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and overlooks the Hudson River, was also nothing more than a crumbling eyesore 10 years ago. But since it opened as a park last year, its plantings and vistas, tasteful design and intricate weave through the redbrick bastions of New York’s meatpacking past and contemporary buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel have been a hit. Though the High Line is not fully completed — plans have it potentially extending as far north as West 34th Street — more than two million people have already visited.
Developers from Rotterdam and Hong Kong have come looking for ideas. Officials from Jerusalem are hoping to visit. Recently a team from Singapore (Is there really anything old and rusty in Singapore?) spent time on the landscaped walkways that stretch from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street.
“We could have a full-time job if we wanted to just do tours,” said Lisa Tziona Switkin of James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer on the project. She has walked the park with people from Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere. Many of these visitors are interested in the potential for using outmoded infrastructure to add green space and transportation options as well as to promote cultural and commercial revitalization. Part of the fascination with the High Line, which is operated by the city and the nonprofit Friends group, is that it is more than just a pretty place. The neighborhoods it runs through — the meatpacking district and Chelsea — were already glamorous with many restaurants, bars and art galleries. But the opening of the High Line has made those areas even more of a destination and encouraged the Whitney Museum of American Art to build a museum there.
In the early days the founders of the Friends of the High Line, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, drew their own inspiration from the development of the Promenade Plantée in Paris, an elevated park built beginning in 1988 on an abandoned railroad viaduct.
Now their success is encouraging others. In Philadelphia the idea is to turn the Reading Viaduct, which is 60 feet wide, into an elevated park and bike path.
“Our viaduct is much wider, which gives us more opportunity in some way,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of a business improvement group that is exploring the plan there.
The proposal is the brainchild of John Struble, a furniture maker, and Sarah McEneaney, an artist, who live near the viaduct and who met Mr. David in 2003 when he walked the span with them.
“He totally inspired us,” Ms. McEneaney said. “We got a lot of advice early on.” Still, she said, the project had little momentum until the High Line opened. “That sparked a lot more interest from the city administration,” she said.
Now the business-improvement quarter, known as the Center City District, is conducting a feasibility study focused in part on whether building the park would bring new development to the neighborhood, where many buildings are vacant.
“I was a nonbeliever until I actually walked on the High Line,” Mr. Levy said. “It was a complete turnaround for me.”
Alan Greenberger, the deputy mayor for economic development in Philadelphia, expressed caution about whether what was done in New York could be reproduced elsewhere. “People do look at the economic success and say that’s inspiring,” he said. “Can you replicate it? That’s another story.”
In Chicago, Mr. Helphand is president of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, a group modeled after the organization that Mr. Hammond and Mr. David direct. He acknowledged that Chicago does not have the army of private philanthropists that New York does, but said there was still lots of enthusiasm.
“We don’t have Diane von Furstenberg,” he said, referring to a prominent supporter of the High Line, “though we do have a celebrity chef.” (The first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, $44 million of which was raised by Friends of the High Line.)
Recently, Chicago commissioned a design master plan from a team that includes a firm that was a runner-up in the competition to design the High Line.
Not everyone in Chicago, or other cities for that matter, embraces the notion that all good ideas start in New York. Janet Attarian, a project director for the Chicago Transportation Department, said that the plan for the Bloomingdale Trail has been around since the late 1990s. “It is something that we have been cogitating for a while,” she said.
The Bloomingdale Trail is almost three miles long, twice the length of the High Line, and is wide enough to accommodate bike traffic, which will give it a certain functionality that the High Line lacks.
“In the mornings there will be a rush hour of bicycles,” Mr. Helphand predicted. “It’s the east-west nonmotorized transportation route that we don’t have.”
Jersey City officials, who can practically see the High Line across the Hudson River, want to turn a downtown railroad embankment into an elevated park and transportation corridor. The effort is complicated by a legal battle with a developer that is now in mediation. The City Council on Wednesday voted to raise funds to acquire the embankment should the city win the fight.
Maureen Crowley, a coordinator for the Embankment Preservation Coalition, said that Mr. David and Mr. Hammond have advised the group, and that Mr. Hammond recently joined its advisory board.
The coalition organized a tour of the High Line last year for Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and several other Jersey City officials, who were impressed, Ms. Crowley said.
Other recent participants in a High Line tour were from Paris, a group of officials from La Défense, that city’s business district. They sought ideas for shaping development in their own neighborhood. The group’s leader, Philippe Chaix, had been involved in developing the Promenade Plantée, the High Line’s muse a decade ago.
“When we were beginning to take the High Line around,” Mr. David recalled, “being able to point to the Promenade Plantée was huge to us. It’s exciting that the High Line can act in the same way — be something that other projects can point to and say, ‘This may sound unusual, but look, they’ve done it here, and look how successful it is.’ ”
The Language Divide, Writ Small, in Belgian Town
WEMMEL, Belgium — Most of the families living in this well-to-do community on the outskirts of Brussels are French-speaking. But the law for this region of Belgium says that all official town business must be conducted in Flemish.
That means that police reports must be written in Flemish. Voting materials must be issued in Flemish. Seventy-five percent of the books and DVDs purchased for the library must be, yes, in Flemish.
When the mayor of Wemmel, Christian Andries, presides over a town council meeting he is not allowed to utter a single French word, even to translate, or the business at hand may be annulled.
“Of course,” he said recently, with a sigh. “It is absurd.”
Belgium is without a government — again. And this picturesque bedroom community with a cobblestone square offers a clear enough picture of why. Europe as a whole may be busy papering over its differences, burying cultural disparities and centuries of feuding. But not Belgium. It seems headed the other way.
It was, in fact, a dispute over voting rights for French speakers in Wemmel and a cluster of similar villages that brought down Belgium’s last government. Unable to resolve the issue after more than three years of trying, Prime Minister Yves Leterme threw in the towel (for the third time) and the king finally accepted his resignation in April.
In the wake of last month’s elections, talks have begun in hopes of forging a coalition that can lead Belgium. But even the optimists do not expect a new government for months to come.
After the country’s 2007 election it took the Belgians about nine months to form a government. Some analysts say that the main parties are even more split this time, and some wonder whether they may even be witnessing the beginning of the end of Belgium.
“It is hard to know where this will go,” said Lieven De Winter, a professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, though like many others he believes breaking up the country would be so complicated as to be impossible, largely because neither side would give up Brussels, the capital.
For Mr. Andries, this state of affairs comes as no surprise. A friendly man of Flemish descent, he has been juggling the tensions between the two halves of Belgium for more than a decade, running a town that is technically on the Flemish-speaking side of the country, but that has become home to many French speakers looking for trees and backyards not far from Brussels.
Mr. Andries’s house was covered in protest placards once because he was accused of forcing his librarian to write letters in French to French theaters inquiring about materials that might be available for the library. Not allowed. He should have sent the letters in Flemish, which is really just a Belgian variant of Dutch.
When he invited a Congolese singer, whose mother tongue is French, to perform in Wemmel, there were so many complaints and threats that Mr. Andries said he had to ask for police assistance.
Last year, he was heavily criticized in local Flemish papers for putting new windows in the school for French-speaking Belgians before replacing those in the Flemish school.
“There are 600 children in the French school and only 400 in the Flemish school,” he said. “It seemed like the logical place to start.”
But Mr. Andries’s problems pale compared with those of three other mayors in this Flemish region, called the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, or BHV. They were elected more than four years ago but have never been officially installed. The issue? They sent voting information, written in French, to the French-speaking voters in their communities. In one of the towns, Linkebeek, some 80 percent of the 4,700 inhabitants are French-speaking.
“It is hard to believe,” said Damien Thierry, who won the election. “Belgium is an astonishing place right now.”
The ethno-linguistic fault line that runs through this country could hardly be more pronounced. The country is really a federation made up of three parts: Flanders in the north, French-speaking Wallonia in the south and Brussels, officially bilingual.
The French and the Flemish have their own political parties, their own newspapers and their own television channels, which many experts blame for the current state of affairs.
“The political parties have nothing to gain from saying anything nice about each other,” said Yves Desmet, the political editor for a Flemish newspaper, De Morgen, who has advocated for a nationwide voting system.
Like many others, he said he believed that forging a coalition would be especially difficult this time. The big winners in the election could hardly be further apart.
In the Flemish north, Bart de Wever, who supports an independent Flemish homeland, emerged triumphant with 28 percent of the vote. In southern French-speaking Wallonia, the Socialists won 26 percent of the vote. Yet the disarray comes at a particularly bad time. Belgium, like many other European countries, is facing huge deficits. Some analysts say that it needs to get its economic act together sooner rather than later.
Fueling the tensions is a change of economic fortune and a long grudge match between the Flemish and the French. Belgium, a relatively new country, declared its independence in 1830. At first, the country’s aristocracy spoke French and the country’s French-speaking regions — rich from iron and coal manufacturing — were often contemptuous of the largely agricultural north. During World War I, most Belgian officers were French-speaking and made little effort to translate for Flemish soldiers.
These days, however, the French part of Belgium — population about four million — is poorer, while Flanders, population about six million, has grown wealthy with a diverse economy. Many Flemish voters resent their taxes’ flowing south.
In some parts of Wallonia, the unemployment rate is close to 20 percent. Nonetheless, the Walloons can refuse a job if it is more than 15 miles from their homes, Mr. Desmet said, and collect unemployment. “In the north, there are jobs that could be filled,” he said. “That really annoys a lot of the Flemish.”
The voting-rights dispute in Wemmel and other towns in the BHV is so complicated that virtually no one understands it. Essentially, it gives French-speaking voters in the BHV the ability to vote for Francophone parties on the ballot in Brussels. No similar agreement exists for Flemings living in French-speaking areas. Most political analysts say a maximum of two or three Parliament seats are at stake. But the issue gnaws at the Flemish.
“The French speakers here have a right that the Flemish do not have,” said Anniek Bolsens, 37, who moved to Wemmel nearly three years ago. “The constitutional court has said it is unfair and it is.”
‘Immigrant’ List Sets Off Fears
SALT LAKE CITY — A list of 1,300 Utah residents described as illegal immigrants has sown fear among some Hispanics here, and prompted an investigation into its origins and dissemination.
Each page of the list is headed with the words “Illegal Immigrants” and each entry contains details about the individuals listed — from their address and telephone number to their date of birth and, in the case of pregnant women, their due dates. The letter was received by law enforcement and media outlets on Monday and Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Gov. Gary R. Herbert said Wednesday that an investigation was under way to see if state employees might have been involved in releasing the private information.
A memorandum accompanying the list said it was from Concerned Citizens of the United States. It urged immediate deportation proceedings against the people listed, as well as publication of their names by the news media.
The memo said an earlier version of the list had been sent to federal immigration officials in April. It promised that more names would be forthcoming, and promised authorities, “We will be listening and watching.”
“We are not violent, nor do we support violence,” the letter said.
A spokeswoman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that the agency had received a letter from the group, dated in early April.
The list came at a time of increased tension over illegal immigration, both in Utah and in the country, two weeks before neighboring Arizona enacts a tough new law aimed at fighting illegal immigration. The federal government has sued Arizona over the law. Here in Salt Lake City, a group of state lawmakers is drafting a bill patterned after it.
Several people on the list expressed anxiety that their personal information had been released, and said they were concerned about their safety and that of their families. Some of those on the list said the heightened pressure could force them from the country.
One Guatemalan man, who spoke only on condition that he be identified as Monzon, admitted that he was in the country illegally. He said he had tried hard to keep off lists of all sorts, essentially by being the best American he could — paying his taxes and staying out of debt.
“I have always tried to keep my record clean,” he said.
But he struck a fatalistic note that might please the letter writers: “It might just be time to reflect and think if the time has come to leave,” he said.
A woman who identified herself as Liset said she was from Mexico and in the United States illegally. She said that her 2-year-old son was born in the United States, but that she had filed papers to give him Mexican citizenship as well.
“If something were to happen he will go with me to Mexico,” she said. She said she believed her personal information on the list came from her application for Medicaid. As for what it was like having reporters call, reading from a sheaf of papers containing large and small details about her life, she said, “I find it strange that you know so many things.”
Angie Welling, a spokeswoman for Governor Herbert, a Republican, said that the release of the material was significant, but that the specificity of detail was even more troubling.
“Any release of private information of this nature, especially the depth and breadth of it, is concerning,” Ms. Welling said. “The governor wants to be sure that a state agency wasn’t involved, and if it was, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and to get to the bottom of who was responsible.”
Improper release of information from state records is a misdemeanor. The medical information on the list, however, from the notations about pregnancies, could potentially elevate the criminal implications far beyond that, to felony charges and lengthy prison sentences, for violation of federal medical privacy laws.
Proyecto Latino de Utah, one of the most prominent immigrant advocacy organizations in the state, received many frantic calls on Wednesday. People had heard about the list, but because no major news organization has actually published its full contents, the callers mainly wanted to know one thing: Am I on it?
“Nine missed calls this morning,” said Tony Yapías, the group’s director, glancing at his cellphone in an interview in his office. Most of the callers, he said, were not on the list.
One woman said that not knowing what could unfold next was the worst thing. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
Mr. Yapías, the former director of the state’s Office of Hispanic Affairs, said he was convinced that the list had come from the State Department of Workforce Services, an agency that combines resources for job seekers, employers and people seeking assistance like food stamps or Medicaid. The list includes information that other agencies might collect, he said, but Workforce Services’ application form includes a question that other information-laden agencies like the Division of Motor Vehicles, for example, would not ever ask: “Is anyone in your home currently pregnant?”
Ms. Welling at the governor’s office said that the state’s Department of Technology Services was leading the investigation, looking into whether a digital trail might been left behind if state computers were used to prepare the list. She said that Workforce Services, in particular, was doing its own investigation, which she called “extensive.”
She said that to her knowledge no state agency had started any investigations of individuals based on the list.
A spokesman the Department of Workforce Services, Dave Lewis, said a team of information specialists was looking for patterns — whether the computer formatting would provide clues about the document’s origin or creation and whether there had been any unusual activity in people accessing that information inside the agency.
For people who found themselves named and workers in Utah’s government alike, the result was a real-life version of the old childhood game of “Telephone.” Information had leaked out from somewhere. Where? Was it accurate? Who had compiled it? Who now had copies of the list and where might the chain of whispers go from here? Would the leakers be found?
How Microbes Defend and Define Us
Dr. Alexander Khoruts had run out of options.
In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.
Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. “The normal bacteria just didn’t exist in her,” said Dr. Khoruts. “She was colonized by all sorts of misfits.”
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
Dr. Weinstock is part of an international effort to shed light on those puzzling organs. He and his colleagues are cataloging thousands of new microbe species by gathering their DNA sequences. Meanwhile, other scientists are running experiments to figure out what those microbes are actually doing. They’re finding that the microbiome does a lot to keep us in good health. Ultimately, researchers hope, they will learn enough about the microbiome to enlist it in the fight against diseases.
“In just the last year, it really went from a small cottage industry to the big time,” said David Relman of Stanford University.
The microbiome first came to light in the mid-1600s, when the Dutch lens-grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the scum off his teeth, placed it under a microscope and discovered that it contained swimming creatures. Later generations of microbiologists continued to study microbes from our bodies, but they could only study the ones that could survive in a laboratory. For many species, this exile meant death.
In recent years, scientists have started to survey the microbiome in a new way: by gathering DNA. They scrape the skin or take a cheek swab and pull out the genetic material. Getting the DNA is fairly easy. Sequencing and making sense of it is hard, however, because a single sample may yield millions of fragments of DNA from hundreds of different species.
A number of teams are working together to tackle this problem in a systematic way. Dr. Weinstock is part of the biggest of these initiatives, known as the Human Microbiome Project. The $150 million initiative was started in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health. The project team is gathering samples from 18 different sites on the bodies of 300 volunteers.
To make sense of the genes that they’re gathering, they are sequencing the entire genomes of some 900 species that have been cultivated in the lab. Before the project, scientists had only sequenced about 20 species in the microbiome. In May, the scientists published details on the first 178 genomes. They discovered 29,693 genes that are unlike any known genes. (The entire human genome contains only around 20,000 protein-coding genes.)
“This was quite surprising to us, because these are organisms that have been studied for a long time,” said Karen E. Nelson of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.
The new surveys are helping scientists understand the many ecosystems our bodies offer microbes. In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species.
Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes.
Some microbes can only survive in one part of the body, while others are more cosmopolitan. And the species found in one person’s body may be missing from another’s. Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one.
This variation means that the total number of genes in the human microbiome must be colossal. European and Chinese researchers recently catalogued all the microbial genes in stool samples they collected from 124 individuals. In March, they published a list of 3.3 million genes.
The variation in our microbiomes emerges the moment we are born.
“You have a sterile baby coming from a germ-free environment into the world,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico. Recently, she and her colleagues studied how sterile babies get colonized in a hospital in the Venezuelan city of Puerto Ayacucho. They took samples from the bodies of newborns within minutes of birth. They found that babies born vaginally were coated with microbes from their mothers’ birth canals. But babies born by Caesarean section were covered in microbes typically found on the skin of adults.
“Our bet was that the Caesarean section babies were sterile, but it’s like they’re magnets,” said Dr. Dominguez-Bello.
We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.
In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines.
In order to co-exist with our microbiome, our immune system has to be able to tolerate thousands of harmless species, while attacking pathogens. Scientists are finding that the microbiome itself guides the immune system to the proper balance.
One way the immune system fights pathogens is with inflammation. Too much inflammation can be harmful, so we have immune cells that produce inflammation-reducing signals. Last month, Sarkis Mazmanian and June L. Round at Caltech reported that mice reared without a microbiome can’t produce an inflammation-reducing molecule called IL-10.
The scientists then inoculated the mice with a single species of gut bacteria, known as Bacteroides fragilis. Once the bacteria began to breed in the guts of the mice, they produced a signal that was taken up by certain immune cells. In response to the signal, the cells developed the ability to produce IL-10.
Scientists are not just finding new links between the microbiome and our health. They’re also finding that many diseases are accompanied by dramatic changes in the makeup of our inner ecosystems. The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight.
In some cases, new microbes may simply move into our bodies when disease alters the landscape. In other cases, however, the microbes may help give rise to the disease. Some surveys suggest that babies delivered by Caesarian section are more likely to get skin infections from multiply-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s possible that they lack the defensive shield of microbes from their mother’s birth canal.
Caesarean sections have also been linked to an increase in asthma and allergies in children. So have the increased use of antibiotics in the United States and other developed countries. Children who live on farms — where they can get a healthy dose of microbes from the soil — are less prone to getting autoimmune disorders than children who grow up in cities.
Some scientists argue that these studies all point to the same conclusion: when children are deprived of their normal supply of microbes, their immune systems get a poor education. In some people, untutored immune cells become too eager to unleash a storm of inflammation. Instead of killing off invaders, they only damage the host’s own body.
A better understanding of the microbiome might give doctors a new way to fight some of these diseases. For more than a century, scientists have been investigating how to treat patients with beneficial bacteria. But probiotics, as they’re sometimes called, have only had limited success. The problem may lie in our ignorance of precisely how most microbes in our bodies affect our health.
Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have carried out 15 more fecal transplants, 13 of which cured their patients. They’re now analyzing the microbiome of their patients to figure out precisely which species are wiping out the Clostridium difficile infections. Instead of a crude transplant, Dr. Khoruts hopes that eventually he can give his patients what he jokingly calls “God’s probiotic” — a pill containing microbes whose ability to fight infections has been scientifically validated.
Dr. Weinstock, however, warns that a deep understanding of the microbiome is a long way off.
“In terms of hard-boiled science, we’re falling short of the mark,” he said. A better picture of the microbiome will only emerge once scientists can use the genetic information Dr. Weinstock and his colleagues are gathering to run many more experiments.
“It’s just old-time science. There are no short-cuts around that,” he said.
A Chosen Few Are Teaching for America
HOUSTON — Alneada Biggers, Harvard class of 2010, was amazed this past year when she discovered that getting into the nation’s top law schools and grad programs could be easier than being accepted for a starting teaching job with Teach for America.
Ms. Biggers says that of 15 to 20 Harvard friends who applied to Teach for America, only three or four got in. “This wasn’t last minute — a lot applied in August 2009, they’d been student leaders and volunteered,” Ms. Biggers said. She says one of her closest friends wanted to do Teach for America, but was rejected and had to “settle” for University of Virginia Law School.
Will Cullen, Villanova ’10, had a friend who was rejected and instead will be a Fulbright scholar. Julianne Carlson, a new graduate of Yale — where a record 18 percent of seniors applied to Teach for America — says she knows a half dozen “amazing” classmates who were rejected, although the number is probably higher. “People are reluctant to tell you because of the stigma of not getting in,” Ms. Carlson said.
When Robert Rosen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009, he did not apply, fearing he would be turned down. Instead, he volunteered in a friend’s classroom weekly for the next year, to see if he liked teaching, but also to build a credential that would impress Teach for America. Asked how hard getting in is, James Goldberg, Duke ’10 said, “I’d compare it with being accepted to an Ivy League grad school.”
Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Rosen, Ms. Carlson, Mr. Cullen and Ms. Biggers count themselves lucky to be among the 4,500 selected by the nonprofit to work at high-poverty public schools from a record 46,359 applicants (up 32 percent over 2009). There’s little doubt the numbers are fueled by a bad economy, which has limited job options even for graduates from top campuses. In 2007, during the economic boom, 18,172 people applied.
This year, on its 20th anniversary, Teach for America hired more seniors than any other employer at numerous colleges, including Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At Harvard, 293 seniors, or 18 percent of the class, applied, compared with 100 seniors in 2007. “So many job options in finance, P.R. and consulting have been cut back,” said Ms. Carlson, the Yale grad.
In interviews, two dozen soon-to-be-teachers here in Houston, one of eight national Teach for America centers that provide a five-week crash summer course in classroom practices, mentioned the chance to help poor children and close the achievement gap as major reasons for applying. Victor Alquicira (Yale), who is Mexican-born, and Kousha Navidar (Duke), who is Iranian-born, said it was a chance to give back to a country that had given them much.
But there are other more material attractions. Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed. For Mr. Cullen, who will teach at a Dallas middle school, that’s $45,000 — the same he’d make if he’d taken a job offer from a financial public relations firm. Ms. Carlson, who will also make $45,000 teaching first grade in San Antonio, said: “I feel very fortunate. I knew a lot of people at Yale who didn’t have a job or plan when they graduated.”
In contrast, the Peace Corps (to which Teach for America compares itself) pays a cost-of-living allowance adjusted for each country where volunteers work, and a $7,500 stipend when the 27-month stint is finished.
While Teach for America is highly regarded by undergrads — Mr. Goldberg said Duke recruiting sessions typically attracted 50 students — it gets mixed reviews from education experts.
Research indicates that generally, the more experienced teachers are, the better their students perform, and several studies have criticized Teach for America’s turnover rate.
“I’m always shocked by the hullaboo, given Teach for America’s size” — about 0.2 percent of all teachers — “and its mixed impact,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, a University of Texas professor. Dr. Heilig and Su Jin Jez of California State University, Sacramento, recently published a critical assessment after reviewing two dozen studies. One study cited indicated that “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools.
“These people could be superstars, but most leave before they master the teaching craft,” Dr. Heilig said.
Carrie James, a Teach for America spokeswoman, challenged the report. Teach for America press releases cite a 2008 Harvard doctoral thesis indicating that 61 percent of their recruits stay beyond the two-year commitment. However, that same thesis also says “few people are estimated to remain in their initial placement school or the profession beyond five or six years” — a finding not highlighted in the releases.
Ms. James says the program has an impact beyond the classroom, with an alumni contact list of 13,000 still in education, including more than 500 in “government or policy.” Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, and Michael Johnston, a Colorado state senator, are among the alums.
Several of the new Teach for America members say it’s too early to know whether they’ll stick with teaching. Ms. Biggers, who was admitted to Harvard and Vanderbilt Law Schools, has deferred attending to teach elementary school in Houston for two years. She then plans to go to law school and, after finishing, says she hopes to do something in education.
To be accepted by Teach for America, applicants survived a lengthy process, with thousands cut at each step. That included an online application; a phone interview; presentation of a lesson plan; a personal interview; a written test; and a monitored group discussion with several other applicants. Rachel Faust, a University of Maryland graduate who will teach in Miami, says she was struck by how aggressive some applicants were at the group session. “They say you’re not against each other, it’s just a group discussion,” Ms. Faust said. “But some people don’t treat it like that, they’re very competitive.”
A $185 million operating budget, (two-thirds from private donations, the rest from governmental sources) helps finance recruiters at 350 campuses to enlarge the applicant pool. “I was recruited like crazy,” said Mr. Alquicira, who was a Yale Daily News editor and tutor in New Haven. “I’m not even sure how they got my name.”
The 774 new recruits who are training here are housed in Rice University dorms. Many are up past midnight doing lesson plans and by 6:30 a.m. are on a bus to teach summer school to students making up failed classes. It’s a tough lesson for those who’ve come to do battle with the achievement gap.
Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, dressed formally in high heels, was trying to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers. She’d prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken.
She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game.
“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.”
“Do I have to play?” asked the boy.
“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered.
The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order.
“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”
The oracle sat with her back to the hill, a breeze riffling the ruby scarves tied to her folding camp chair.
One by one, the 12 boys approached. They stood straight as the oracle lowered her sunglasses and looked them over. Sorting through a pile of paper slips with burnt edges, the oracle, a middle-aged woman, selected one for each child.
“I will prophesize your quest,” she told Tom Leier, 9, before reciting a mysterious poem that would guide him for the week ahead.
That morning, the boys had been regular Brooklyn elementary school students at a summer camp in Prospect Park. But now each had been revealed to be a half-blood, with one mortal parent and one who was a god of Greek myth.
Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.
Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.
Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.
In the Percy Jackson books, misunderstood children find out they are modern-day mythological heroes. Interest in Camp Half-Blood has been growing, perhaps because a Percy Jackson movie was released this year, or because the series features its own Camp Half-Blood, where Percy and other middle school demigods find refuge.
An independent bookstore in Austin, Tex., held the first Camp Half-Blood in 2006. The store, BookPeople, had been hosting dramatic readings of manuscripts in the series, and one day Topher Bradfield, the children’s activity coordinator, said to his young listeners, “Wouldn’t it be great if Camp Half-Blood was a real place?”
“The kids,” Mr. Bradfield recalled, “looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head, and were like: ‘Yeah, duh. Of course!’ ”
The day camp, which is held in a state park, attracts children from as far away as Brazil and Britain, who stay with their parents in nearby hotels. This year, the camp’s 450 spots sold out in an hour and a half, Mr. Bradfield said.
The camps run by bookstores, which are also in Decatur, Ga., and now in Brooklyn, are not fancy affairs. A casual observer of the various Camp Half-Bloods would see a few decorations and children in matching camp T-shirts jousting with foam swords or javelins. Gods, oracles and monsters are played by actors, counselors or volunteers.
But the homemade nature of the experience, camp staff members said, permits students to create the illusion in their own minds.
“My biggest challenge has been getting parents to understand that we don’t intend to sit indoors with their kids and read all summer,” said Crystal Bobb-Semple, the owner of Brownstone Books in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which started the Brooklyn camp this summer and charges $375 per week. “It is experiential.”
Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn had 44 campers and a simple story line. Discord had come over Brooklyn. It was up to the campers, as demigods, to find the five pieces of the Apple of Discord, a mythological object, to set things right.
Not everything went according to plan. Prospect Park denied permission to put up a tent, so the camp’s center consisted of three folding tables under tall trees. A nearby library and a movie theater were used in bad weather.
As the second session of the camp opened, the dozen boys, ages 7 to 11, squared off under a scorching sun for their first sword lesson, taught by a local Japanese sword-fighting instructor. There was some skepticism: when Nathan Mandell, 10, glimpsed the first piece of the Apple of Discord later that day, he did not buy it.
“That’s a piece of foam with glitter on it,” he said.
But the camp’s director, Karenga Arifu, known as Achilles, referred to the boys as young heroes. They teamed up for chariot races on the backs of pedicabs and corrected one another’s mythology.
“There really are demigods, and I hope that’s why I’m here,” said Tom, who wore a yellow bandanna to signify his Apollo parentage, which he believed could be true. After all, in the books, Percy Jackson does not find out that he is the son of Poseidon — not just a struggling student — until he is 12.
“I’m not here to pretend,” Tom said. “I’m here to train.”
Each day, three children were selected to go on a quest to defeat a monster and retrieve a piece of the magical apple. On Thursday, three children of Ares, the war god, set off into the wooded paths of Prospect Park.
Their swords tucked into their shirts, they chatted with their counselor, Jason McConnell, 18, about the difference between medusas and gorgons. The trees closed in around them as they climbed a flight of stone steps and traversed a mound of wood shavings. Toilet paper dangled from the trees.
They approached an overgrown circle of weeds, which Jason told them was the entrance to the Garden of Demeter.
Up ahead there was a flash of color — an orange camp T-shirt stained with fake blood. Then the monster, a Fury, jumped out of the bushes.
He was obviously a teenager in an old-man Halloween mask with rubber hands — right? The children began to fight him with their foam swords.
The monster’s sword struck Issa Chambers, 11, near the eye. He started to cry and retreated. “Get back in there,” Jason told Issa, and he did, in a flurry of anger. He pummeled the monster with his sword until Nathan shouted, “Issa, it’s an actual person!”
Walking back to camp, Issa said he felt bad for getting carried away. Jason reassured him. “Ares gave you the rage,” he said.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
The comments are mostly okay.
When the Bride Takes a Bride, Businesses Respond
By KEVIN SACK
EAST POINT, Ga. — When the Palladinos were planning their wedding, they found that traditional bridal magazines were all but useless in addressing their particular questions.
Questions like: Where does a woman find a man’s suit that does not make her look like a woman in a man’s suit? Should Kirsten and Maria both walk down the aisle, or was it O.K. for Maria, who sees herself as more masculine, to wait for her bride? At which of the Caribbean resorts in the honeymoon pictorials would two women feel most comfortable holding hands?
“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”
After their honeymoon in St. Martin, they decided to do something about it. This month, they published the second issue of their online same-sex wedding magazine, Equally Wed.
Almost from the moment Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, mainstream businesses have tried to find a way to attract customers from this new, lucrative market. But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides.
Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications. They join companies like OutVite.com, a Massachusetts stationery firm that grew along with that state’s same-sex wedding industry; photographers who promote images of gay weddings on their home pages; purveyors of groom-and-groom cake toppers; and cruise lines that advertise their embrace of gay honeymoons.
“The market doesn’t wait for politics to catch up,” said Katherine Sender, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.” “As gay marriage becomes part of the national imagination, marketing to it and publications concerning it become more and more viable.”
Gay weddings have been depicted on network television since the mid-1990s, and about 70 percent of daily newspapers now carry same-sex wedding announcements, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But some mainstream publications and broadcasters are only now taking their first halting steps toward inclusion.
This month, under pressure from gay rights groups, the “Today” show on NBC welcomed same-sex couples to compete in its annual wedding contest. Also this month, Brides, a Condé Nast publication, ran its first feature about a same-sex wedding, depicting the union of one of the magazine’s photo editors and her longtime girlfriend.
Martha Stewart Weddings, a publication of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, had already broken precedent in its winter 2010 issue, with a pictorial that showed Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman stomping on glass and sharing a kiss.
Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations. “This is a part of the mix going forward,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor-in-chief of Brides. “The world is changing.”
But because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution, Ms. Bratten said. That leaves an untapped market for Equally Wed and a handful of other Web sites devoted to same-sex weddings, with titles like Queerly Wed, So You’re EnGAYged, GayWeddings.com and RainbowWeddingNetwork.com.
In the six years since Massachusetts broke the barrier, there have been an estimated 40,000 legal same-sex marriages in the United States, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A comparable number of gay Americans have married in other countries, and an additional 84,000 couples may be in civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the institute.
Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia have now joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage, and court cases in California and Massachusetts are challenging the constitutionality of state and federal laws against it.
It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine.
“We’ve done everything we can to be equally wed,” Maria Palladino said.
The couple are publishing their quarterly from a back room in their tidy house in East Point, an emerging gay outpost just south of Atlanta. Maria, 30, who works as a freelance Web designer, is publisher. Kirsten, 32, who manages the lifestyle sections of a weekly newspaper, is editor.
Their magazine, which features a more content-driven format than some competing sites, is attracting about 8,000 unique viewers a month, Maria Palladino said. It has about 20 advertisers, including a jeweler, a hotel chain and a car insurer.
Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges.
In the summer issue, a feature about planning a green wedding shares space on the home page with an article about the legal dilemmas facing married couples when one spouse changes genders. A feature on boudoir photography gives way to an advice column on managing marriage license waiting periods in Iowa and Massachusetts.
Like traditional magazines, Equally Wed pulses with the love stories of real couples and lush photography of their ceremonies. Kirsten Palladino, who always dreamed of a white-dress wedding, writes a blog called “In Bloom,” which dispenses advice on invitation fonts and summer cocktails.
But she also answers reader questions about whether a man should propose to another man with a ring (why not?) and whether a couple should invite homophobic relatives to their wedding (better to send them an announcement after the fact). Maria Palladino, who said she has not worn a dress since high school, writes a blog from the butch point of view called “Broom Closet,” a term she coined for those who do not quite fit as either bride or groom.
The magazine includes a consumer guide to vendors who are practiced in avoiding heterosexist language and customs. When planning their own wedding, the Palladinos quickly learned to detect discomfort among the photographers they interviewed.
“They were so delicate in their handling of it,” Kirsten Palladino said. “They’d say, ‘You know, I’ve never shot a gay wedding, but I’d be happy to.’ And then sign off their e-mail: ‘Much love in Jesus Christ.’ ”
The Palladinos said that what excited them about the future, both of same-sex weddings and their magazine, was the chance to navigate between tradition and innovation. “There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”
Field Report: A Michigan Teen Farms Her Backyard
Comes with pictures!
Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs. While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
“Let’s see,” says Reau, a quiet honor student who’s a little taken aback to find a New Yorker in giant sunglasses asking her questions in the plot next to her tidy white-brick ranch house on a June afternoon. “Those are carrots, spinach, beets, kale, watermelon, squash, zucchini, peppers, lots of tomatoes . . . um . . . corn, radishes, lettuce, beans, onions, garlic.” The weeds that sprung up during her recent class trip to Washington, D.C., are taunting her as we talk. When I tell her that people pay $4 a bunch for the purslane that’s growing into the burlap coffee sacks she has laid down along the rows for quick weeding — she flips them over to uproot any invaders, kind of like waxing your garden — you can see her 4-H wheels turning. (She’s been a member for half her life.)
Reau lives in an agricultural area — on the last day of school, seniors are allowed to ride their four-wheelers or tractors — but her great-grandparents were the last generation to farm this land. Her parents breed Suffolk sheep on the side: her father, Mark, is a carpenter, and her mother, Brenda, is the director of Michigan State University’s extension in Monroe County. Alexandra became interested in gardening after participating in the Monroe County Youth Farm Stand Project, which Brenda started two years ago to help disadvantaged youth learn about nutrition.
“I wanted to have my own farm stand out in my front yard,” Alexandra says at the kitchen table, looking sideways at her mother while drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk from a nearby dairy. “My mom thought it wasn’t the best idea because of the road we live on,” which is narrow and fairly fast. “She’d been learning about the C.S.A. aspect, so she told me about it, and I really liked the idea. I liked that it was on my own schedule, so I could kind of pick what I wanted, ’cause it is still my summer,” she adds, finally sounding like a teenager, “and I don’t want to, like, you know, be busy every single minute of the day.”
Reau entered her idea for Garden to Go in the Prima Civitas Foundation youth-inventors competition, and her business plan won $300 in start-up money.
While we eat a colorful salad of spinach, strawberry and goat cheese (Reau’s spinach and strawberries, local goat cheese), deviled eggs (bartered) and strawberry shortcake (local, good) in the Reaus’ toile-curtained dining room, Brenda explains that a quarter of last year’s members told her that they were attracted to Garden to Go because it was a young person’s effort. “They want to support someone who is interested in working instead of being on the Internet all day!” Brenda says. “And growing food. . . .”
I reached one of Reau’s customers, Mary Janicki of Sylvania, Ohio, on her pontoon boat. “I liked the idea that she was such a go-getter,” said Janicki, who found Garden to Go through Reau’s page on Localharvest.org last year. “I read that she won that award and was only 13 years old, and I thought, This is a young lady who’s got it together!” Janicki has signed up for a second summer, because she appreciates the freshness of the produce as well as the idea of eating locally. “And that corn? Oh, my goodness!”
Following last year’s success, with five members and a few standbys who came whenever extra vegetables were available, Reau’s summer project has jumped the plot. Herbs and squash pop up in the flower beds edging the house; more tomatoes were started in a raised bed that her dad improvised from a neighbor’s recycled soybean seed bag; she grows flowers and peppers at her grandmother’s house next door; more flowers are flourishing outside her two rabbit barns. (Reau has been a national champion rabbit breeder since she was 10; for the past four years, she’s been packaging the manure in her dad’s old plastic nail buckets and selling it as Bunny Honey.)
Asked which vegetable she’s proudest of, Reau said potatoes. “Just because potatoes are something everyone eats: you don’t think about that you grow them; you just eat them! And their skins aren’t dry and ucky like what you get at stores.”
She’s also curious about this summer’s tomato experiment. Her neighbor, a World War II veteran named Leon Spaulding, says he was given tomato seeds by a German guard in a prison hospital. He’s been growing them for 60 years, and last summer he gave some to Alexandra to add to her 13 varieties. While flipping through gardening catalogs this spring, she noticed a tomato called Old German, and now she and her neighbor are growing both Germans to compare.
“You gave him some San Marzano plants too, didn’t you?” Brenda asks, turning to me. “On the Food Network, all the celebrity chefs talk about them being the premium tomato. So she has some of those too.” (For each C.S.A. box, Brenda and Alexandra put together recipes tailored to the week’s harvest, like minty green-bean salad or provincial tomatoes. During squash season, it’s especially helpful.)
With her drive, resourcefulness and sure touch with plants and animals, it’s no wonder Reau won the state 4-H award for horticulture and crops in June: she’s the poster girl for future farmers. She credits the youth-agriculture organization with improving her public speaking, while Garden to Go has helped her with people skills. “’Cause I used to be, like, really shy and quiet. And I’m just more talkative now.” Farming has also taught her patience. “It’s a continual process,” she says, sighing. “You have to keep working at it, and you can’t just stop.” Least favorite task, after weeding? Picking beans. “She kind of suckers her dad into helping,” Brenda says with a wink.
Those beans are adding up: last summer Reau earned enough to buy a laptop. “This year I’m working toward a treadmill,” she says. “It’s a joint effort between me and my parents. The rest will go into my college fund.”
“Plus the other purchase?” Brenda prods. “The phone upgrade? She has a Droid.”
Summer jobs, like summer romances, aren’t meant to last forever: Reau says she would like to be an engineer, focusing on biosystems. Until she hangs up her gardening gloves, Alexandra Reau will have grown the most over vacation.
Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive
I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car.
Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street.
You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way.
“When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.”
The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too.
Yet researchers who study gray squirrels argue that their subject is far more compelling than most people realize, and that behind the squirrel’s success lies a phenomenal elasticity of body, brain and behavior. Squirrels can leap a span 10 times the length of their body, roughly double what the best human long jumper can manage. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and so keep a grip while climbing no matter which way they’re facing. Squirrels can learn by watching others — cross-phyletically, if need be. In their book “Squirrels: The Animal Answer Guide,” Richard W. Thorington Jr. and Katie Ferrell of the Smithsonian Institution described the safe-pedestrian approach of a gray squirrel eager to traverse a busy avenue near the White House. The squirrel waited on the grass near a crosswalk until people began to cross the street, said the authors, “and then it crossed the street behind them.”
In the acuity of their visual system, the sensitivity and deftness with which they can manipulate objects, their sociability, chattiness and willingness to deceive, squirrels turn out to be surprisingly similar to primates. They nest communally as multigenerational, matrilineal clans, and at the end of a hard day’s forage, they greet each other with a mutual nuzzling of cheek and lip glands that looks decidedly like a kiss. Dr. Koprowski said that when he was growing up in Cleveland, squirrels were the only wild mammals to which he was exposed. “When I got to college, I thought I’d study polar bears or mountain lions,” he said. “Luckily I ended up doing my master’s and Ph.D. on squirrels instead.”
The Eastern gray is one of about 278 squirrelly species alive today, a lineage that split off from other rodents about 40 million years ago and that includes chipmunks, marmots, woodchucks — a k a groundhogs — and prairie dogs. Squirrels are found on all continents save Antarctica and Australia, and in some of the harshest settings: the Himalayan marmot, found at up to 18,000 feet above sea level, is among the highest-living mammals of the world.
A good part of a squirrel’s strength can be traced to its elaborately veined tail, which, among other things, serves as a thermoregulatory device, in winter helping to shunt warm blood toward the squirrel’s core and in summer to wick excess heat off into the air. Rodents like rats and mice are nocturnal and have poor vision, relying on whiskers to navigate their world. The gray squirrel is diurnal and has the keen eyesight to match. “Its primary visual cortex is huge,” said Jon H. Kaas, a comparative neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, A squirrel’s peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal eyesight, which means it can see what’s above and beside it without moving its head. While its color vision may only be so-so, akin to a person with red-green colorblindness who can tell green and red from other colors but not from each other, a squirrel has the benefit of natural sunglasses, pale yellow lenses that cut down on glare.
Gray squirrels use their sharp, shaded vision to keep an eye on each other. Michael A. Steele of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have studied the squirrels’ hoarding behavior, which turns out to be remarkably calculated and rococo. Squirrels may be opportunistic feeders, able to make a meal of a discarded cheeseburger, crickets or a baby sparrow if need be, but in the main they are granivores and seed hoarders. They’ll gather acorns and other nuts, assess which are in danger of germinating and using up stored nutrients, remove the offending tree embryos with a few quick slices of their incisors, and then cache the sterilized treasure for later consumption, one seed per inch-deep hole.
But the squirrels don’t just bury an acorn and come back in winter. They bury the seed, dig it up shortly afterward, rebury it elsewhere, dig it up again. “We’ve seen seeds that were recached as many as five times,” said Dr. Steele. The squirrels recache to deter theft, lest another squirrel spied the burial the first X times. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, the Steele team showed that when squirrels are certain that they are being watched, they will actively seek to deceive the would-be thieves. They’ll dig a hole, pretend to push an acorn in, and then cover it over, all the while keeping the prized seed hidden in their mouth. “Deceptive caching involves some pretty serious decision making,” Dr. Steele said. “It meets the criteria of tactical deception, which previously was thought to only occur in primates.”
Squirrels are also master kvetchers, modulating their utterances to convey the nature and severity of their complaint: a moaning “kuk” for mild discomfort, a buzzing sound for more pressing distress, and a short scream for extreme dismay. During the one or two days a year that a female is fertile, she will be chased by every male in the vicinity, all of them hounding her round and round a tree with sneezelike calls, and her on top, refusing to say gesundheit. A squirrel threatened by a serious predator like a cat, dog, hawk or wayward toddler will issue a multimodal alarm, barking out a series of loud chuk-chuk-chuks with a nasally, penetrating “whaa” at the end, while simultaneously performing a tail flag — lifting its fluffy baton high over its head and flicking it back and forth rhythmically.
Sarah R. Partan of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and her students have used a custom-built squirrel robot to track how real squirrels respond to the components of an alarm signal. The robot looks and sounds like a squirrel, its tail moves sort of like a squirrel’s, but because its plastic body is covered in rabbit fur it doesn’t smell like a squirrel. Yet squirrels tested in Florida and New England have responded to the knockoff appropriately, with alarm barks of their own or by running up a tree. Human passers-by have likewise been enchanted. “People are always coming over, asking what we’re doing,” said Dr. Partan. “We’ve had to abandon many trials halfway through.” An iSquirrel? Now that’s something even a New Yorker might love.
After High Line’s Success, Other Cities Look Up
Pictures!
Phone calls and visitors and, yes, dreams from around the world are pouring into the small offices of the Friends of the High Line on West 20th Street in Manhattan these days.
Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too...
The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.
In many of these places there had already been some talk and visions of what might be, but now New York’s accomplishment is providing ammunition for boosters while giving skeptics much-needed evidence of the potential for success. The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.
“There’s a nice healthy competition between big American cities,” said Ben Helphand, who is pushing to create a park on a defunct rail line in Chicago. “That this has been done in New York puts the onus on us to do it ourselves and to give it a Chicago stamp.”
The High Line, an elevated freight spur that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and overlooks the Hudson River, was also nothing more than a crumbling eyesore 10 years ago. But since it opened as a park last year, its plantings and vistas, tasteful design and intricate weave through the redbrick bastions of New York’s meatpacking past and contemporary buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel have been a hit. Though the High Line is not fully completed — plans have it potentially extending as far north as West 34th Street — more than two million people have already visited.
Developers from Rotterdam and Hong Kong have come looking for ideas. Officials from Jerusalem are hoping to visit. Recently a team from Singapore (Is there really anything old and rusty in Singapore?) spent time on the landscaped walkways that stretch from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street.
“We could have a full-time job if we wanted to just do tours,” said Lisa Tziona Switkin of James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer on the project. She has walked the park with people from Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere. Many of these visitors are interested in the potential for using outmoded infrastructure to add green space and transportation options as well as to promote cultural and commercial revitalization. Part of the fascination with the High Line, which is operated by the city and the nonprofit Friends group, is that it is more than just a pretty place. The neighborhoods it runs through — the meatpacking district and Chelsea — were already glamorous with many restaurants, bars and art galleries. But the opening of the High Line has made those areas even more of a destination and encouraged the Whitney Museum of American Art to build a museum there.
In the early days the founders of the Friends of the High Line, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, drew their own inspiration from the development of the Promenade Plantée in Paris, an elevated park built beginning in 1988 on an abandoned railroad viaduct.
Now their success is encouraging others. In Philadelphia the idea is to turn the Reading Viaduct, which is 60 feet wide, into an elevated park and bike path.
“Our viaduct is much wider, which gives us more opportunity in some way,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of a business improvement group that is exploring the plan there.
The proposal is the brainchild of John Struble, a furniture maker, and Sarah McEneaney, an artist, who live near the viaduct and who met Mr. David in 2003 when he walked the span with them.
“He totally inspired us,” Ms. McEneaney said. “We got a lot of advice early on.” Still, she said, the project had little momentum until the High Line opened. “That sparked a lot more interest from the city administration,” she said.
Now the business-improvement quarter, known as the Center City District, is conducting a feasibility study focused in part on whether building the park would bring new development to the neighborhood, where many buildings are vacant.
“I was a nonbeliever until I actually walked on the High Line,” Mr. Levy said. “It was a complete turnaround for me.”
Alan Greenberger, the deputy mayor for economic development in Philadelphia, expressed caution about whether what was done in New York could be reproduced elsewhere. “People do look at the economic success and say that’s inspiring,” he said. “Can you replicate it? That’s another story.”
In Chicago, Mr. Helphand is president of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, a group modeled after the organization that Mr. Hammond and Mr. David direct. He acknowledged that Chicago does not have the army of private philanthropists that New York does, but said there was still lots of enthusiasm.
“We don’t have Diane von Furstenberg,” he said, referring to a prominent supporter of the High Line, “though we do have a celebrity chef.” (The first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, $44 million of which was raised by Friends of the High Line.)
Recently, Chicago commissioned a design master plan from a team that includes a firm that was a runner-up in the competition to design the High Line.
Not everyone in Chicago, or other cities for that matter, embraces the notion that all good ideas start in New York. Janet Attarian, a project director for the Chicago Transportation Department, said that the plan for the Bloomingdale Trail has been around since the late 1990s. “It is something that we have been cogitating for a while,” she said.
The Bloomingdale Trail is almost three miles long, twice the length of the High Line, and is wide enough to accommodate bike traffic, which will give it a certain functionality that the High Line lacks.
“In the mornings there will be a rush hour of bicycles,” Mr. Helphand predicted. “It’s the east-west nonmotorized transportation route that we don’t have.”
Jersey City officials, who can practically see the High Line across the Hudson River, want to turn a downtown railroad embankment into an elevated park and transportation corridor. The effort is complicated by a legal battle with a developer that is now in mediation. The City Council on Wednesday voted to raise funds to acquire the embankment should the city win the fight.
Maureen Crowley, a coordinator for the Embankment Preservation Coalition, said that Mr. David and Mr. Hammond have advised the group, and that Mr. Hammond recently joined its advisory board.
The coalition organized a tour of the High Line last year for Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and several other Jersey City officials, who were impressed, Ms. Crowley said.
Other recent participants in a High Line tour were from Paris, a group of officials from La Défense, that city’s business district. They sought ideas for shaping development in their own neighborhood. The group’s leader, Philippe Chaix, had been involved in developing the Promenade Plantée, the High Line’s muse a decade ago.
“When we were beginning to take the High Line around,” Mr. David recalled, “being able to point to the Promenade Plantée was huge to us. It’s exciting that the High Line can act in the same way — be something that other projects can point to and say, ‘This may sound unusual, but look, they’ve done it here, and look how successful it is.’ ”
The Language Divide, Writ Small, in Belgian Town
WEMMEL, Belgium — Most of the families living in this well-to-do community on the outskirts of Brussels are French-speaking. But the law for this region of Belgium says that all official town business must be conducted in Flemish.
That means that police reports must be written in Flemish. Voting materials must be issued in Flemish. Seventy-five percent of the books and DVDs purchased for the library must be, yes, in Flemish.
When the mayor of Wemmel, Christian Andries, presides over a town council meeting he is not allowed to utter a single French word, even to translate, or the business at hand may be annulled.
“Of course,” he said recently, with a sigh. “It is absurd.”
Belgium is without a government — again. And this picturesque bedroom community with a cobblestone square offers a clear enough picture of why. Europe as a whole may be busy papering over its differences, burying cultural disparities and centuries of feuding. But not Belgium. It seems headed the other way.
It was, in fact, a dispute over voting rights for French speakers in Wemmel and a cluster of similar villages that brought down Belgium’s last government. Unable to resolve the issue after more than three years of trying, Prime Minister Yves Leterme threw in the towel (for the third time) and the king finally accepted his resignation in April.
In the wake of last month’s elections, talks have begun in hopes of forging a coalition that can lead Belgium. But even the optimists do not expect a new government for months to come.
After the country’s 2007 election it took the Belgians about nine months to form a government. Some analysts say that the main parties are even more split this time, and some wonder whether they may even be witnessing the beginning of the end of Belgium.
“It is hard to know where this will go,” said Lieven De Winter, a professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, though like many others he believes breaking up the country would be so complicated as to be impossible, largely because neither side would give up Brussels, the capital.
For Mr. Andries, this state of affairs comes as no surprise. A friendly man of Flemish descent, he has been juggling the tensions between the two halves of Belgium for more than a decade, running a town that is technically on the Flemish-speaking side of the country, but that has become home to many French speakers looking for trees and backyards not far from Brussels.
Mr. Andries’s house was covered in protest placards once because he was accused of forcing his librarian to write letters in French to French theaters inquiring about materials that might be available for the library. Not allowed. He should have sent the letters in Flemish, which is really just a Belgian variant of Dutch.
When he invited a Congolese singer, whose mother tongue is French, to perform in Wemmel, there were so many complaints and threats that Mr. Andries said he had to ask for police assistance.
Last year, he was heavily criticized in local Flemish papers for putting new windows in the school for French-speaking Belgians before replacing those in the Flemish school.
“There are 600 children in the French school and only 400 in the Flemish school,” he said. “It seemed like the logical place to start.”
But Mr. Andries’s problems pale compared with those of three other mayors in this Flemish region, called the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, or BHV. They were elected more than four years ago but have never been officially installed. The issue? They sent voting information, written in French, to the French-speaking voters in their communities. In one of the towns, Linkebeek, some 80 percent of the 4,700 inhabitants are French-speaking.
“It is hard to believe,” said Damien Thierry, who won the election. “Belgium is an astonishing place right now.”
The ethno-linguistic fault line that runs through this country could hardly be more pronounced. The country is really a federation made up of three parts: Flanders in the north, French-speaking Wallonia in the south and Brussels, officially bilingual.
The French and the Flemish have their own political parties, their own newspapers and their own television channels, which many experts blame for the current state of affairs.
“The political parties have nothing to gain from saying anything nice about each other,” said Yves Desmet, the political editor for a Flemish newspaper, De Morgen, who has advocated for a nationwide voting system.
Like many others, he said he believed that forging a coalition would be especially difficult this time. The big winners in the election could hardly be further apart.
In the Flemish north, Bart de Wever, who supports an independent Flemish homeland, emerged triumphant with 28 percent of the vote. In southern French-speaking Wallonia, the Socialists won 26 percent of the vote. Yet the disarray comes at a particularly bad time. Belgium, like many other European countries, is facing huge deficits. Some analysts say that it needs to get its economic act together sooner rather than later.
Fueling the tensions is a change of economic fortune and a long grudge match between the Flemish and the French. Belgium, a relatively new country, declared its independence in 1830. At first, the country’s aristocracy spoke French and the country’s French-speaking regions — rich from iron and coal manufacturing — were often contemptuous of the largely agricultural north. During World War I, most Belgian officers were French-speaking and made little effort to translate for Flemish soldiers.
These days, however, the French part of Belgium — population about four million — is poorer, while Flanders, population about six million, has grown wealthy with a diverse economy. Many Flemish voters resent their taxes’ flowing south.
In some parts of Wallonia, the unemployment rate is close to 20 percent. Nonetheless, the Walloons can refuse a job if it is more than 15 miles from their homes, Mr. Desmet said, and collect unemployment. “In the north, there are jobs that could be filled,” he said. “That really annoys a lot of the Flemish.”
The voting-rights dispute in Wemmel and other towns in the BHV is so complicated that virtually no one understands it. Essentially, it gives French-speaking voters in the BHV the ability to vote for Francophone parties on the ballot in Brussels. No similar agreement exists for Flemings living in French-speaking areas. Most political analysts say a maximum of two or three Parliament seats are at stake. But the issue gnaws at the Flemish.
“The French speakers here have a right that the Flemish do not have,” said Anniek Bolsens, 37, who moved to Wemmel nearly three years ago. “The constitutional court has said it is unfair and it is.”
‘Immigrant’ List Sets Off Fears
SALT LAKE CITY — A list of 1,300 Utah residents described as illegal immigrants has sown fear among some Hispanics here, and prompted an investigation into its origins and dissemination.
Each page of the list is headed with the words “Illegal Immigrants” and each entry contains details about the individuals listed — from their address and telephone number to their date of birth and, in the case of pregnant women, their due dates. The letter was received by law enforcement and media outlets on Monday and Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Gov. Gary R. Herbert said Wednesday that an investigation was under way to see if state employees might have been involved in releasing the private information.
A memorandum accompanying the list said it was from Concerned Citizens of the United States. It urged immediate deportation proceedings against the people listed, as well as publication of their names by the news media.
The memo said an earlier version of the list had been sent to federal immigration officials in April. It promised that more names would be forthcoming, and promised authorities, “We will be listening and watching.”
“We are not violent, nor do we support violence,” the letter said.
A spokeswoman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that the agency had received a letter from the group, dated in early April.
The list came at a time of increased tension over illegal immigration, both in Utah and in the country, two weeks before neighboring Arizona enacts a tough new law aimed at fighting illegal immigration. The federal government has sued Arizona over the law. Here in Salt Lake City, a group of state lawmakers is drafting a bill patterned after it.
Several people on the list expressed anxiety that their personal information had been released, and said they were concerned about their safety and that of their families. Some of those on the list said the heightened pressure could force them from the country.
One Guatemalan man, who spoke only on condition that he be identified as Monzon, admitted that he was in the country illegally. He said he had tried hard to keep off lists of all sorts, essentially by being the best American he could — paying his taxes and staying out of debt.
“I have always tried to keep my record clean,” he said.
But he struck a fatalistic note that might please the letter writers: “It might just be time to reflect and think if the time has come to leave,” he said.
A woman who identified herself as Liset said she was from Mexico and in the United States illegally. She said that her 2-year-old son was born in the United States, but that she had filed papers to give him Mexican citizenship as well.
“If something were to happen he will go with me to Mexico,” she said. She said she believed her personal information on the list came from her application for Medicaid. As for what it was like having reporters call, reading from a sheaf of papers containing large and small details about her life, she said, “I find it strange that you know so many things.”
Angie Welling, a spokeswoman for Governor Herbert, a Republican, said that the release of the material was significant, but that the specificity of detail was even more troubling.
“Any release of private information of this nature, especially the depth and breadth of it, is concerning,” Ms. Welling said. “The governor wants to be sure that a state agency wasn’t involved, and if it was, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and to get to the bottom of who was responsible.”
Improper release of information from state records is a misdemeanor. The medical information on the list, however, from the notations about pregnancies, could potentially elevate the criminal implications far beyond that, to felony charges and lengthy prison sentences, for violation of federal medical privacy laws.
Proyecto Latino de Utah, one of the most prominent immigrant advocacy organizations in the state, received many frantic calls on Wednesday. People had heard about the list, but because no major news organization has actually published its full contents, the callers mainly wanted to know one thing: Am I on it?
“Nine missed calls this morning,” said Tony Yapías, the group’s director, glancing at his cellphone in an interview in his office. Most of the callers, he said, were not on the list.
One woman said that not knowing what could unfold next was the worst thing. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
Mr. Yapías, the former director of the state’s Office of Hispanic Affairs, said he was convinced that the list had come from the State Department of Workforce Services, an agency that combines resources for job seekers, employers and people seeking assistance like food stamps or Medicaid. The list includes information that other agencies might collect, he said, but Workforce Services’ application form includes a question that other information-laden agencies like the Division of Motor Vehicles, for example, would not ever ask: “Is anyone in your home currently pregnant?”
Ms. Welling at the governor’s office said that the state’s Department of Technology Services was leading the investigation, looking into whether a digital trail might been left behind if state computers were used to prepare the list. She said that Workforce Services, in particular, was doing its own investigation, which she called “extensive.”
She said that to her knowledge no state agency had started any investigations of individuals based on the list.
A spokesman the Department of Workforce Services, Dave Lewis, said a team of information specialists was looking for patterns — whether the computer formatting would provide clues about the document’s origin or creation and whether there had been any unusual activity in people accessing that information inside the agency.
For people who found themselves named and workers in Utah’s government alike, the result was a real-life version of the old childhood game of “Telephone.” Information had leaked out from somewhere. Where? Was it accurate? Who had compiled it? Who now had copies of the list and where might the chain of whispers go from here? Would the leakers be found?
How Microbes Defend and Define Us
Dr. Alexander Khoruts had run out of options.
In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.
Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. “The normal bacteria just didn’t exist in her,” said Dr. Khoruts. “She was colonized by all sorts of misfits.”
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
Dr. Weinstock is part of an international effort to shed light on those puzzling organs. He and his colleagues are cataloging thousands of new microbe species by gathering their DNA sequences. Meanwhile, other scientists are running experiments to figure out what those microbes are actually doing. They’re finding that the microbiome does a lot to keep us in good health. Ultimately, researchers hope, they will learn enough about the microbiome to enlist it in the fight against diseases.
“In just the last year, it really went from a small cottage industry to the big time,” said David Relman of Stanford University.
The microbiome first came to light in the mid-1600s, when the Dutch lens-grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the scum off his teeth, placed it under a microscope and discovered that it contained swimming creatures. Later generations of microbiologists continued to study microbes from our bodies, but they could only study the ones that could survive in a laboratory. For many species, this exile meant death.
In recent years, scientists have started to survey the microbiome in a new way: by gathering DNA. They scrape the skin or take a cheek swab and pull out the genetic material. Getting the DNA is fairly easy. Sequencing and making sense of it is hard, however, because a single sample may yield millions of fragments of DNA from hundreds of different species.
A number of teams are working together to tackle this problem in a systematic way. Dr. Weinstock is part of the biggest of these initiatives, known as the Human Microbiome Project. The $150 million initiative was started in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health. The project team is gathering samples from 18 different sites on the bodies of 300 volunteers.
To make sense of the genes that they’re gathering, they are sequencing the entire genomes of some 900 species that have been cultivated in the lab. Before the project, scientists had only sequenced about 20 species in the microbiome. In May, the scientists published details on the first 178 genomes. They discovered 29,693 genes that are unlike any known genes. (The entire human genome contains only around 20,000 protein-coding genes.)
“This was quite surprising to us, because these are organisms that have been studied for a long time,” said Karen E. Nelson of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.
The new surveys are helping scientists understand the many ecosystems our bodies offer microbes. In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species.
Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes.
Some microbes can only survive in one part of the body, while others are more cosmopolitan. And the species found in one person’s body may be missing from another’s. Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one.
This variation means that the total number of genes in the human microbiome must be colossal. European and Chinese researchers recently catalogued all the microbial genes in stool samples they collected from 124 individuals. In March, they published a list of 3.3 million genes.
The variation in our microbiomes emerges the moment we are born.
“You have a sterile baby coming from a germ-free environment into the world,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico. Recently, she and her colleagues studied how sterile babies get colonized in a hospital in the Venezuelan city of Puerto Ayacucho. They took samples from the bodies of newborns within minutes of birth. They found that babies born vaginally were coated with microbes from their mothers’ birth canals. But babies born by Caesarean section were covered in microbes typically found on the skin of adults.
“Our bet was that the Caesarean section babies were sterile, but it’s like they’re magnets,” said Dr. Dominguez-Bello.
We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.
In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines.
In order to co-exist with our microbiome, our immune system has to be able to tolerate thousands of harmless species, while attacking pathogens. Scientists are finding that the microbiome itself guides the immune system to the proper balance.
One way the immune system fights pathogens is with inflammation. Too much inflammation can be harmful, so we have immune cells that produce inflammation-reducing signals. Last month, Sarkis Mazmanian and June L. Round at Caltech reported that mice reared without a microbiome can’t produce an inflammation-reducing molecule called IL-10.
The scientists then inoculated the mice with a single species of gut bacteria, known as Bacteroides fragilis. Once the bacteria began to breed in the guts of the mice, they produced a signal that was taken up by certain immune cells. In response to the signal, the cells developed the ability to produce IL-10.
Scientists are not just finding new links between the microbiome and our health. They’re also finding that many diseases are accompanied by dramatic changes in the makeup of our inner ecosystems. The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight.
In some cases, new microbes may simply move into our bodies when disease alters the landscape. In other cases, however, the microbes may help give rise to the disease. Some surveys suggest that babies delivered by Caesarian section are more likely to get skin infections from multiply-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s possible that they lack the defensive shield of microbes from their mother’s birth canal.
Caesarean sections have also been linked to an increase in asthma and allergies in children. So have the increased use of antibiotics in the United States and other developed countries. Children who live on farms — where they can get a healthy dose of microbes from the soil — are less prone to getting autoimmune disorders than children who grow up in cities.
Some scientists argue that these studies all point to the same conclusion: when children are deprived of their normal supply of microbes, their immune systems get a poor education. In some people, untutored immune cells become too eager to unleash a storm of inflammation. Instead of killing off invaders, they only damage the host’s own body.
A better understanding of the microbiome might give doctors a new way to fight some of these diseases. For more than a century, scientists have been investigating how to treat patients with beneficial bacteria. But probiotics, as they’re sometimes called, have only had limited success. The problem may lie in our ignorance of precisely how most microbes in our bodies affect our health.
Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have carried out 15 more fecal transplants, 13 of which cured their patients. They’re now analyzing the microbiome of their patients to figure out precisely which species are wiping out the Clostridium difficile infections. Instead of a crude transplant, Dr. Khoruts hopes that eventually he can give his patients what he jokingly calls “God’s probiotic” — a pill containing microbes whose ability to fight infections has been scientifically validated.
Dr. Weinstock, however, warns that a deep understanding of the microbiome is a long way off.
“In terms of hard-boiled science, we’re falling short of the mark,” he said. A better picture of the microbiome will only emerge once scientists can use the genetic information Dr. Weinstock and his colleagues are gathering to run many more experiments.
“It’s just old-time science. There are no short-cuts around that,” he said.
A Chosen Few Are Teaching for America
HOUSTON — Alneada Biggers, Harvard class of 2010, was amazed this past year when she discovered that getting into the nation’s top law schools and grad programs could be easier than being accepted for a starting teaching job with Teach for America.
Ms. Biggers says that of 15 to 20 Harvard friends who applied to Teach for America, only three or four got in. “This wasn’t last minute — a lot applied in August 2009, they’d been student leaders and volunteered,” Ms. Biggers said. She says one of her closest friends wanted to do Teach for America, but was rejected and had to “settle” for University of Virginia Law School.
Will Cullen, Villanova ’10, had a friend who was rejected and instead will be a Fulbright scholar. Julianne Carlson, a new graduate of Yale — where a record 18 percent of seniors applied to Teach for America — says she knows a half dozen “amazing” classmates who were rejected, although the number is probably higher. “People are reluctant to tell you because of the stigma of not getting in,” Ms. Carlson said.
When Robert Rosen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009, he did not apply, fearing he would be turned down. Instead, he volunteered in a friend’s classroom weekly for the next year, to see if he liked teaching, but also to build a credential that would impress Teach for America. Asked how hard getting in is, James Goldberg, Duke ’10 said, “I’d compare it with being accepted to an Ivy League grad school.”
Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Rosen, Ms. Carlson, Mr. Cullen and Ms. Biggers count themselves lucky to be among the 4,500 selected by the nonprofit to work at high-poverty public schools from a record 46,359 applicants (up 32 percent over 2009). There’s little doubt the numbers are fueled by a bad economy, which has limited job options even for graduates from top campuses. In 2007, during the economic boom, 18,172 people applied.
This year, on its 20th anniversary, Teach for America hired more seniors than any other employer at numerous colleges, including Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At Harvard, 293 seniors, or 18 percent of the class, applied, compared with 100 seniors in 2007. “So many job options in finance, P.R. and consulting have been cut back,” said Ms. Carlson, the Yale grad.
In interviews, two dozen soon-to-be-teachers here in Houston, one of eight national Teach for America centers that provide a five-week crash summer course in classroom practices, mentioned the chance to help poor children and close the achievement gap as major reasons for applying. Victor Alquicira (Yale), who is Mexican-born, and Kousha Navidar (Duke), who is Iranian-born, said it was a chance to give back to a country that had given them much.
But there are other more material attractions. Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed. For Mr. Cullen, who will teach at a Dallas middle school, that’s $45,000 — the same he’d make if he’d taken a job offer from a financial public relations firm. Ms. Carlson, who will also make $45,000 teaching first grade in San Antonio, said: “I feel very fortunate. I knew a lot of people at Yale who didn’t have a job or plan when they graduated.”
In contrast, the Peace Corps (to which Teach for America compares itself) pays a cost-of-living allowance adjusted for each country where volunteers work, and a $7,500 stipend when the 27-month stint is finished.
While Teach for America is highly regarded by undergrads — Mr. Goldberg said Duke recruiting sessions typically attracted 50 students — it gets mixed reviews from education experts.
Research indicates that generally, the more experienced teachers are, the better their students perform, and several studies have criticized Teach for America’s turnover rate.
“I’m always shocked by the hullaboo, given Teach for America’s size” — about 0.2 percent of all teachers — “and its mixed impact,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, a University of Texas professor. Dr. Heilig and Su Jin Jez of California State University, Sacramento, recently published a critical assessment after reviewing two dozen studies. One study cited indicated that “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools.
“These people could be superstars, but most leave before they master the teaching craft,” Dr. Heilig said.
Carrie James, a Teach for America spokeswoman, challenged the report. Teach for America press releases cite a 2008 Harvard doctoral thesis indicating that 61 percent of their recruits stay beyond the two-year commitment. However, that same thesis also says “few people are estimated to remain in their initial placement school or the profession beyond five or six years” — a finding not highlighted in the releases.
Ms. James says the program has an impact beyond the classroom, with an alumni contact list of 13,000 still in education, including more than 500 in “government or policy.” Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, and Michael Johnston, a Colorado state senator, are among the alums.
Several of the new Teach for America members say it’s too early to know whether they’ll stick with teaching. Ms. Biggers, who was admitted to Harvard and Vanderbilt Law Schools, has deferred attending to teach elementary school in Houston for two years. She then plans to go to law school and, after finishing, says she hopes to do something in education.
To be accepted by Teach for America, applicants survived a lengthy process, with thousands cut at each step. That included an online application; a phone interview; presentation of a lesson plan; a personal interview; a written test; and a monitored group discussion with several other applicants. Rachel Faust, a University of Maryland graduate who will teach in Miami, says she was struck by how aggressive some applicants were at the group session. “They say you’re not against each other, it’s just a group discussion,” Ms. Faust said. “But some people don’t treat it like that, they’re very competitive.”
A $185 million operating budget, (two-thirds from private donations, the rest from governmental sources) helps finance recruiters at 350 campuses to enlarge the applicant pool. “I was recruited like crazy,” said Mr. Alquicira, who was a Yale Daily News editor and tutor in New Haven. “I’m not even sure how they got my name.”
The 774 new recruits who are training here are housed in Rice University dorms. Many are up past midnight doing lesson plans and by 6:30 a.m. are on a bus to teach summer school to students making up failed classes. It’s a tough lesson for those who’ve come to do battle with the achievement gap.
Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, dressed formally in high heels, was trying to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers. She’d prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken.
She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game.
“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.”
“Do I have to play?” asked the boy.
“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered.
The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order.
“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”
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I also seem to recall something about Flemish speakers having to learn French in school but French speakers not having to learn Flemish, which Flemish speakers also resent; haven't yet found confirmation of that, but the Wikipedia article on Languages of Belgium says that 59% of Flemings know French but only 19% of Walloons know Flemish/Dutch.
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However, "having to learn" a language is different from retaining any degree of fluency in it. Historically, French has been more useful to the world community, and the Walloon (French-speaking) population was wealthier as well, so it makes sense that the Flemish would have more French than the other way around.
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