Articles. (Again!)

[conuly]

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.

A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

“When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle (position, for example) reduces the accuracy with which you can know another property (momentum, for example): “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,” is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in “The Mod Squad”? Francie’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

“In lab experiments, you’re able to control for all factors except the one you’re studying,” said Dr. Willingham. “Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.”

But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.

Surviving by Disguising: Nature’s Game of Charades

One bright October morning, Fabiano Calleia, a researcher with the Federal University of Amazonas, was out in the lowland rainforest of Manaus, Brazil, tracking his usual group of eight pied tamarins as the small, dark monkeys with their dapper white shrugs grazed on the fruits of a fig tree. Suddenly the breakfast calm was shattered by the distinctive sound of a baby tamarin’s cry — a series of short, sharp whistles, like a boiling teapot doing Morse code.

A male tamarin clambered up and down the tree, vainly trying to locate the sound’s source. The calling continued. More monkeys became riled.

And then Dr. Calleia saw, to his astonishment, that the cries weren’t coming from a tamarin pup, but rather from a margay, an ocelotlike cat with large eyes, large paws and a large appetite for monkey meat.

The margay was slinking through some nearby vines, simulating simian sounds nonstop as it headed the tamarins’ way. The spotted cat leaped, a sentinel monkey screamed and the entire troop escaped unharmed.

On returning to camp, Dr. Calleia related the event to Fabio Rohe, the program manager for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Amazon program, who immediately thought of what the local inhabitants had told him: that margays and other jungle cats will sometimes hunt by mimicking the vocalizations of their prey.

“I said, this is comparable to monkeys using tools! Let’s write something,” Dr. Rohe recalled in an e-mail interview. “And we started writing in a few days!”

The scientists published their description of the first official “field observation of margay mimicking behavior” in the journal Neotropical Primates last year, but only now is it circulating among field researchers more widely.

The report is just one of a host of recent discoveries of priceless phonies, cases of mimicry from unexpected quarters that, really, by now we should have learned to expect, and that trump in sheer entertainment value the originals on which they are based. Imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery, the severest form of battery or the weirdest survival strategy, and if you think there’s nothing new under the sun, you’re right, but so what: playing copycat turns out to be nature’s perpetual novelty machine.

For example, scientists recently discovered that in some ant species, the queen is a consummate percussionist, equipped with a tiny, uniquely ridged organ for stridulating out royal fanfares that help keep her workers in line. Who knew that the queen was such a squeezebox? Her freeloaders sure did. The scientists also discovered parasitic butterfly larvae in the colony that use their abdominal muscles or other body parts to precisely imitate the queen’s stridulations, an act of musical piracy that induces worker ants to flutter and fuss and regurgitate food right into the parasites’ mouths.

Baby German cockroaches of both sexes have been found to mimic the smell and feel of adult female cockroaches, the better to dupe adult males into spreading their wings and exposing the hidden pantries beneath — pools of beery maltose sugar, proteins and fats. The males synthesize the expensive secretions as a courtship gift to woo mates, but cockroach nymphs, with their unslakable sweet mandible, have evolved the chemical and textural means to vamp. A gentle tap of a segmented antenna infused with a knockoff version of femme fertile perfume, and the male says, go ahead, hop aboard, eat the flirt off my back.

Within-species mimicry is generally rare in nature, said Coby Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, who recently reported with his colleagues in Animal Behaviour on the gambit they dubbed jail baiting. Then again, he added, “humans have provided cockroaches with the sort of artificial ecologies that generate really unusual behaviors.” An unpredictable food supply, scant access to soil and the essential nitrogen it holds: no wonder young roaches must know how to scam.

Perhaps the most remarkable case of mimicry to come to light lately is that of the mimic octopus of Indonesia, with so many shape-shifting, shade-changing tricks at its disposal even eight sleeves cannot hold them. A report published this month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society presents the evolutionary backstory to Thaumoctopus mimicus, a marine mollusk that was discovered and described only in the last dozen years. Like most octopuses, T. mimicus can use its nervous system to instantly change colors into a perfect wallpaper blend. Unlike most other octopuses, the mimic will sometimes choose to make itself more conspicuous to potential predators, rather than less. If it must venture out to forage in dangerous open waters, it assumes a menacing disguise appropriate to context. Before swimming above the seafloor, the octopus gives a shudder, and presto, its flesh becomes boldly striped, its arms and body resolve into a leafy, spiny form: it’s a toxic lionfish. For skating along the sea bottom, the octopus turns its skin bumpy and beige, compresses its body, pulls its limbs to its side: it’s a toxic flatfish, undulating its fins, staring you down with its top-sided eyes.

“When it’s being pestered by a damselfish, it will turn one of its arms into a sea snake, with the contrasting banding pattern of a sea snake, and with the tip of the arm thickened to look like the snake’s head,” said Healy Hamilton, a biodiversity and informatics expert at the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the report. “Sea snakes are voracious predators of damselfish.”

None of the octopus’s imitations are perfect, and they don’t need to be. “If the predator just takes pause,” said Dr. Healy, “the octopus can ink and jet propulse away.”

We humans also like our mimicry in small, imperfect doses. Nobody wants to be blatantly mocked or pyramid scammed, and bashing mimes, like hating clowns, is a remarkably popular sport. Yet psychologists are coming to appreciate the profound importance of nonconscious mimicry in making us feel loved and appreciated, or simply smoothing the edges of our everyday affairs. Without realizing it, when we’re conversing with friends, we match our tone of voice and speech rhythms to theirs, adopt similar body posture and even imitate their tics. Studies have shown that, when students are instructed to work cooperatively with somebody who engages in either repeated hair touching or foot shaking, the students soon start fiddling with their hair or waggling a foot. Waiters who repeat their customers’ orders word for word, or who subtly mimic a customer’s body language, earn higher tips than do waiters who paraphrase the order or forgo the gestural mirroring.

Rick van Baaren’s laboratory at Radboud University in the Netherlands recently determined that, in subjects who were forced to socialize with somebody who had been instructed to avoid all forms of verbal and behavioral mimicry, cortisol levels shot up, and it took repeated normal, mimetic exchanges to bring their stress hormones back down.

“I think the negative effect of not being imitated is even stronger than the positive effect of being imitated,” said Dr. van Baaren.

Unless you’re a margay trying to make a monkey out of me.

In a New Role, Teachers Move to Run Schools

Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?

Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.

As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”

“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.”

The Newark teachers are part of a growing experiment around the country to allow teachers to step up from the classroom and lead efforts to turn around struggling urban school systems. Brick Avon is one of the first teacher-run schools in the New York region, joining a charter school in Brooklyn started in 2005 by the United Federation of Teachers.

Others have opened in Boston, Denver, Detroit and Los Angeles.

At Brick Avon, the principal, Charity Haygood, who calls herself the “principal teacher,” teaches every day, as do the two vice principals; Ms. Haygood started her career in Teach for America and eventually became vice principal for five years at another school.

While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.

The school has 38 teachers, including Mr. Lee, Ms. Haygood and the other four Teach for America veterans who took it over.

Teachers have more say over what they teach, and starting next year they will have more time to work with children when they introduce a longer day.

To an unusual degree, they are shown they matter, as with the air fresheners left in the faculty lounge and bathrooms, or the new air-conditioner that will be raffled off at the end of the month to a teacher with perfect attendance.

Driving the establishment of teacher-run schools is the idea that teachers who have a sense of ownership of their schools will be happier and more motivated.

But some educators and parents question whether such schools are the solution for urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students and struggle with low test scores and discipline problems.

They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.

“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.”

On the steps of Brick Avon last week, Lisa James, 26, a home health aide with a daughter in second grade, said she worried that teachers doubling as administrators would lose their focus.

“Teachers should be teachers,” she said.

Teacher-run schools are spreading as many districts seek new ways to raise student achievement and compete more effectively against charter schools.

This year, Los Angeles has turned over 29 city schools to groups of local teachers who worked with parents, administrators and union leaders to beat out established charter operators like Green Dot Public Schools.

Detroit is opening an elementary school without a principal; its motto is “Where teachers lead, children succeed.”

Another school with no principal was started last year by the Boston Teachers Union, with teachers ordering supplies, giving feedback to one another and deciding whose hours to reduce to save money.

“It’s really a collaborative environment,” said Betsy Drinan, 57, a teacher-leader at the Boston school. “I haven’t worked in schools before where they come to you and say ‘What do you want’ and ‘What do you need?’ ”

While teacher-run schools started as early as the mid-1990s, most had fewer than 350 students or were charter schools, including some teacher-owned cooperatives in Minnesota.

Tim McDonald, an associate with Education Evolving, a policy group in St. Paul that supports teacher-led schools, said studies showed that when teachers were given control — much like doctors or lawyers running their own practices — schools had higher morale, less turnover, more efficient decision-making and greater motivation to improve.

Still, Mr. McDonald was skeptical that a truly collaborative model could succeed widely in school districts, unless it was somehow freed from the traditional bureaucracy.

“You’re trying to run an upside-down pyramid in a pyramid structure,” he said. “There is so much momentum against being completely different in most districts.”

James H. Lytle, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on urban school reform to Teach for America teachers, said the test of school leaders was whether they could make a school work smoothly.

Teachers, he said, “want the textbooks to be there and the students to come on time.”

“The question is whether teachers have the patience to do the ‘adminis-trivia,’ ” said Dr. Lytle, a former principal and superintendent in Philadelphia and Trenton.

The union-run UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn, has run into problems. Two principals resigned after clashing with teachers, and recent test scores have been disappointing; only 22 percent of last year’s eighth graders passed state tests in English and 13 percent in math, compared with citywide rates of 37.5 percent in English and 46.3 percent in math.

Here in Newark, Mr. Lee and his partners — Ms. Haygood; Chris Perpich, who is one of the vice principals; Bernadette Scott; Princess Williams; and Mindy Weidman — worked at night and on weekends for 18 months to develop the blueprint for Brick, which is an acronym for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids.

The school has a global focus, with plans to seek approval as an International Baccalaureate school and to require Mandarin as well as Spanish.

The group asked Newark district officials for a school to run in the South Ward, a poor, crime-ridden section of the city, because, as Mr. Lee put it, “you go where the need is greatest.”

They were given the former Avon Avenue School. In 2009, only 38 percent of Avon’s eighth graders passed state tests in language arts and 14 percent in math, compared with 82.5 percent and 71.8 percent statewide.

Mr. Lee, soft-spoken and unflappable, raced through the school last week, handing out class lists to teachers, security guards, even a surprised custodian. Later, he was wiping down cafeteria tables for lunch.

“It has to get done, so teachers can focus on teaching,” said Mr. Lee, who serves as Brick Avon’s operations manager as well as executive director of Brick, but also will be teaching in the school.

The teachers are raising money — $125,000 so far — to pay for extras like teacher training and an after-school program for students. They have tried to build good will in the community by holding a barbecue in the schoolyard, stopping by block parties and knocking on families’ doors.

The day before classes started, Ms. Haygood, the principal, stood before the other 37 teachers in the auditorium, two-thirds of whom had previously taught at Avon. She read from the book “If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students.”

Then she shared her vision of a collaborative teacher-run school and asked them to demonstrate how they planned to take charge. Those without enough enthusiasm, she joked, would be required to get Brick tattooed on their backs.

Some teachers sashayed across the floor, while others cheered B-R-I-C-K. A group that included the music teacher broke into song. One teacher even slid into a split.

Afterward, Ms. Haygood asked them to jot down their feelings about the coming year.

Ed Crisafulli, 57, a science teacher working for his eighth principal at Avon, wrote down “hopeful” and then “finally.”

“We finally have someone who is a teacher,” he said, “someone who understands teachers from the smallest little thing to the biggest.”

A Ramadan Drumbeat Is Sounded in Queens

It was just past 4 the other morning when Mohammad Boota pulled his Lincoln Town Car into a service station on an industrial stretch in Long Island City, Queens, and bounded out — a typhoon of embroidered fabric, good cheer and unusual urgency.

“I’m late today,” he explained as he popped the car trunk, hauled out a barrel drum, grabbed two rough-hewn wooden sticks and, as a few bewildered mechanics watched, pounded out a galloping rhythm. The clamor echoed off a nearby hotel.

Mr. Boota, a limousine driver, has built a sideline as a ceremonial drummer for his fellow Pakistani immigrants. He is also New York City’s foremost — and perhaps only — Ramadan drummer. A few hours before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan, drummers throughout the Muslim world take to the streets to wake the faithful in time for a meal before the daytime fast.

Mr. Boota, 54, introduced the ritual to the darkened streets of Brooklyn about eight years ago. But after his drumming roused a spate of noise complaints, he restricted himself to a few blocks along Coney Island Avenue, where many Muslims live. This year, however, he has decided to push back — gently. Ramadan began on Aug. 11 and ends on Thursday, and on this recent morning Mr. Boota was taking the tradition farther afield, pioneering new drumming territory in Queens.

His plan was cautious. He intended to play only in front of Pakistani-owned businesses — gas stations, corner stores, restaurants — and never as loudly as he might were he in, say, Islamabad or Karachi.

“I’m not going to play where people have a problem,” he said, wearing a shimmering orange shalwar kameez — a traditional two-piece outfit — and a matching turban. “We, the Muslim people, already have so many issues.”

“I want people happy, dancing, eating,” he added. “I want to keep everybody happy.”

He was responding to demand, he explained. Since The New York Times published an article about him last year, Pakistanis and other Muslims have asked him to come play on their blocks.

“They say, ‘Why don’t you come to our place, too?’ ” said Mr. Boota, who immigrated in 1992 and lives with his wife and eight children in Coney Island. “They want me. Everybody happy!”

But now time was of the essence: Only about half an hour remained before everyone would already be up and heading to morning prayer. In the history of Ramadan, countless drummers have been stayed from their rounds by war, flood and pestilence, but probably none by early-morning tie-ups on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

As Mr. Boota hammered at his drum in the service station, a Pakistani mechanic whooped, pulled out a cellphone and began dancing a jerky, head-wobbling two-step, holding his phone aloft, relaying the performance to a friend at the other end of the line.

Less than a minute later, however, Mr. Boota abruptly stopped. “Ready to go?” he asked, before jumping into his car.

Several blocks north, he pulled into another service station, Punjab Auto Repair, also Pakistani-owned. Same drill.

As he plastered the walls of the mechanic’s bay with percussive sound, Imran, the manager, said Mr. Boota was maintaining an important custom, even if its usefulness had been eclipsed long ago by the alarm clock.

“It’s Pakistani culture,” said Imran, who gave only his first name. Then he nodded at Mr. Boota. “He’s a very famous guy,” he said, proudly.

Suddenly, Mr. Boota was back in his car. “Thank you, mister,” he called out the window to a mechanic. “God bless you, Monday-to-Friday guy!” And in short order, he had driven several more blocks north, played inside a nearly empty Pakistani restaurant in Astoria, and was barreling southeast on the B.Q.E. toward Jackson Heights.

Even though the debate over a planned Islamic center near ground zero has made some Muslims in New York fearful of calling attention to themselves, Mr. Boota never considered suspending his street drumming.

“This is America — America has a Constitution, freedom of religion,” he said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.” He blamed politicians for inflaming the issue. “The political people are just trying to make the big smoke,” he said.

Arriving in Jackson Heights, he parked on Broadway, where two large Pakistani restaurants face each other from opposite sides of the street. Except for two men drinking coffee on the sidewalk, the block was empty. Mr. Boota shattered the quiet.

“What is this?” one man asked. “Is this somebody’s birthday?”

Several others came to the windows of Gourmet Sweets and Restaurant. The owner teased him about arriving so late.

“Time is gone,” Mr. Boota sighed, stepping inside the restaurant and playing briefly.

“It’s like my big family,” he said, then sat down for a cup of tea.

Bedbugs? Other Strange Invaders Threaten Much Wider Damage

You have perhaps heard about the bugs. In fact, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without hearing more about bedbugs. In your mattress, at the office, the theater, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the Empire State Building — from New York to Portland, it’s the summer’s It bug.

But at the Cornell University Agroforestry Resource Center in the Catskills, they are more concerned with a less celebrated bug, the emerald ash borer. Native to China, it was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002 — perhaps arriving in packing material with shipments to auto plants. Since then it has spread across the upper Midwest and into Canada, killing tens of millions of ash trees. It was first reported in New York in June 2009 in Cattaraugus County in southwestern New York.

This June it was discovered in Ulster and Greene Counties in the Catskills, including in the Catskill Forest Preserve. The larvae of the ash borer, a beetle with metallic green wing covers, burrow into tree bark, killing the tree in one to three years. There is no known systemic way to stop its spread or to save infested trees.

Entomologists say the bug, smaller than a penny, has the potential to kill off the 900 million ash trees in New York and the 7 billion ash trees in North America, driving the ash to extinction in a way that would surpass the damage that all but killed off the American chestnut and the elm.

“I’ve been a forest entomologist for 30 years, and I had no idea anything as bad as this could ever happen,” Mark C. Whitmore, an expert on the ash borer at Cornell, said. “The only worse thing would be the spread of the Asian longhorn beetle.”

As metaphor, the tale of two bugs, bedbug and ash borer, is perhaps too pat but is still true: Under our nose or in our bed, any pest is a huge pest, even one that causes serious annoyance but doesn’t carry disease. For those far away, out of sight, we’ll wait until disaster stares us in the face before we pay attention.

Ash trees make up 7 percent of the trees in New York State and about 10 percent of the hardwoods. Losing the ash trees, which are strong and elastic, and are used for, among other things, bows, tool handles and baseball bats, would have enormous economic costs. Beyond industrial and forestry losses, one of the biggest costs would be to individuals and municipalities that would have to cut down brittle, dead trees by the millions to avoid the danger of falling, damaged limbs.

Beyond that, the cost to the health and diversity of the forests and ecosystems that depend on them can only be guessed at.

“Nobody knows how it’s going to impact the overall function and composition of the forest,” said Marilyn Wyman of Cornell Cooperative Extension, who is working to educate people in the Catskills about the emerald ash borer. “You can’t continue to take pieces out of the system and not have something happen.”

FOR now, she and others are desperately trying to spread the word that the best way to slow the infestation’s spread is to not move firewood. The bugs fly, but it is believed that their rapid spread from the far western part of New York to the Catskills came in untreated wood used at campsites. Since 2008, it has been illegal to bring into the state or transport for more than 50 miles untreated wood that has not been kiln-dried to meet state standards.

The ash borer is only one among dozens of types of invasive plants, animals, insects and pathogens in New York alone that reflect the way human activity, usually unwitting, is altering the environment. Most recently, an invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, blamed for algal blooms that clouded Lake Tahoe, has been found in Lake George.

And the disruptions to the environment go well beyond invasive creatures, like the dire reports this summer of drastic declines, probably because of higher temperatures, in the ocean phytoplanktonthat support much of the life on earth. Weather is not climate, but in this hottest summer ever recorded in New York, in the earth’s hottest decade ever measured, one historically torrid year after another, it gets increasingly difficult to credibly refute the notion that human behavior is affecting the earth’s climate, just as it is affecting those forests, lakes and trees.

Still, on a lovely final weekend of summer, with Hurricane Earl blundering out to sea and with no shortage of ways to amuse, distract and entertain ourselves, it is easy to worry about what’s in our bed and ignore what’s in our future.

From the Other Side of Ground Zero, Anti-Muslim Venom

The Internet evangelist Bill Keller moved toward the dais in tiny, quick steps on Sunday, exhibiting the anticipation of a man ready to address a crowd. Roughly 60 people stood before him in a hotel meeting room in Lower Manhattan, temporary quarters of his Christian center, his response to the mosque planned for an empty building nearby.

“If we’re going to do something in New York City, we’re going to do something that’s not just bold and visible, but something that has a lasting presence,” said Mr. Keller, who is from the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

Later, he told reporters that Muslims “can go to their mosque and preach the lies of Islam and I’ll come here to preach the truth of the Gospel.”

Since its organizers attended a community board meeting four months ago, the mosque — part of a Muslim community center that would offer a day care center, an auditorium and a pool — quickly became fodder for a national debate. Much of the opposition is over its location: two blocks north of ground zero.

Mr. Keller promoted his center, which he called the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero, as a religious counterweight to the mosque, which he repeatedly called a “victory mosque” or a monument to “a great Muslim military accomplishment,” as he explained it at the inaugural service at the New York Marriott Downtown Hotel on West Street, two blocks south of ground zero.

His career arc makes him a somewhat unusual standard-bearer: Mr. Keller became a preacher after serving a sentence in federal prison for insider trading, as he says in a biography posted on his Web site.

He has also appeared on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and once had a program on national television, which was canceled after he called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell.” The program is now carried by a small station in Florida.

But it is on the Internet that Mr. Keller has assembled his largest following. He claims that 20,000 people visit his Web site daily and 2.5 million receive his daily sermon by e-mail.

His service at the Marriott brought together people who expressed admiration, disapproval and curiosity. A man yelled, “Muslims pray five times a day,” but Mr. Keller carried on undisturbed, denouncing Islam as a religion that preaches “hate, violence and death.” The man eventually left.

Mr. Keller also described the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is behind the Muslim community center, as followers of false faiths. Later, he called the mosque’s potential worshipers guilty of terrorism by association, saying it was “their Muslim brothers” who “flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and killed 3,000 people.”

A woman who said she had driven in from Scranton, Pa., pulled Mr. Keller aside afterward and told him that his Christian center “needs to be here,” but she asked if he could tame his language so he would not come across as such a firebrand. He told her he had to talk exactly the way he did if he wanted people to follow him.

Prebem Andersen, 60, who lives in South Salem, N.Y., said Mr. Keller had “told the truth from a Christian perspective.” Richard Borkowski, who lives in Manhattan on the West Side, wore a black T-shirt with the words “Peace Through Understanding.”

Mr. Keller plans to be at the hotel every Sunday until the end of the year and then move the center on Jan. 1 to a permanent spot, although he said he would not disclose its location until Oct. 1.

“I have three locations in contract, but I won’t say where because I don’t want people picketing outside and ruining the deal,” he said.

He is relying on donations to cover the costs of his weekly services, which total $7,000. He said he would need $1 million to run the center for its first year from its permanent home, which would be open seven days a week. He did not seem concerned about finding the money.

“There are a lot more people than you’d imagine who believe in what I’m doing,” he said.

American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?

For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.

“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.

Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.

They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.

Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.

“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.

But the season turned sour.

The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.

“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”

Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”

Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.

“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”

Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.

This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.

Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.

“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”

Zoning Law Aside, Mosque Projects Face Battles

In disputes over the construction and expansion of mosques in California, New York, Tennessee and elsewhere, supporters of the projects tend to invoke constitutional principles of religious freedom.

But to experts in land-use planning, the area of law that directly concerns the controversies scattered across the nation, the way to resolve such conflicts is in a more modern document than the Constitution. These fights are often all but moot, from a legal perspective at least, because of a federal law with an ungainly acronym.

“Every planner and zoning lawyer I’ve talked to about this is saying the same thing — Rluipa,” said Daniel Lauber, a past president of the American Planning Association.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, whose initials are commonly pronounced Ruh-LOO-pa, was approved unanimously by Congress in 2000. Its chief sponsor was Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.

The law sets a high bar for any government action that would impose zoning or other restrictions on a religious institution. Any such action must serve a “compelling government interest” while also being “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest, the law says.

Despite the clear advantage that the law gives to religious institutions, disputes over the construction of mosques have emerged around the country.

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., an arson at the site of a mosque project has raised tensions. In Temecula, Calif., some mosque opponents brought dogs to a protest, thinking it would offend Muslims who believe the animals to be unclean. Backers withdrew the planned expansion of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn., after critics raised their voices.

The opposition often reflects America’s complicated attitudes toward the Middle East, in which passions run high and even basic facts are treated as objects of contention. The conservative New English Review stated the fundamental question as “whether Islam is a religion or a political doctrine seeking domination with a thin veneer of religious practices.”

To some experts, opposition to construction of the mosque and community center near ground zero, especially by religious organizations, seems surprising.

“It is quite interesting that some of the current opponents of the mosque construction, specifically Jewish leaders and conservative Christians, were formerly quite ardent supporters of the religious freedom offered by the religious land use act,” said Scott L. Thumma, a sociology of religion professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The controversy does not split neatly along political lines. Some Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have voiced concern over plans to build the Islamic center, while Republicans like Mr. Hatch insist that the government stick to the principles of religious liberty for which the law stands.

“Clearly, the proponents of the mosque have a legal and a constitutional right to build a house of worship on private property,” Mr. Hatch said in a statement, referring to the project in Manhattan.

Like Senator Reid and President Obama, however, Mr. Hatch noted that having a legal right to build the project did not necessarily mean that it was wise to do so.

“The question in this case is whether, given the inflamed passions of the community — including those of many people who lost family members on 9/11 — building the mosque at that location is a good idea,” he said.

Opponents of new mosque construction often cite factors other than religion, like parking and traffic, when houses of worship expand. But religion often remains part of the mix. In a statement on the mosque protest in Temecula, William Rench, the senior pastor of the nearby Calvary Baptist Church, said, “Our primary concern is that the land adjacent to our property is wholly inadequate and unsuited for the proposed 25,000-square-foot Islamic worship center.”

The rest of the statement concerns Islam itself. “It seems logical to me that we would be opposed to Islam based on its fundamental teachings and on documented stories of the terror that radical Islam promotes,” Mr. Rench wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Rench said that questions of national and local security should override land-use rules, though in the case of the mosque next door, “I don’t think they represent the more extreme elements of Islam.” Still, he added, “how are we going to get assurances that it’s never going to be an issue?”

Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam of the mosque, said that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to,” and that despite the importance of Shariah, or Islamic law, to their faith, “we are bound by the law of the land,” just as someone who learns to drive in Britain must drive on the right side of the road in the United States.

No one knows what will happen in coming years or the next generation, Mr. Harmoush said, but “the future could be much better than Mr. Rench is imagining.” The mosque might, he said, for example, provide overflow parking for the church.

Patrick Richardson, the planning and development director for the City of Temecula, called the issue “very straightforward.”

“This is nothing related to politics or religion,” he said, “and the law basically precludes us from making that part of the decision-making process.”

The mosque will come up for its first public hearing in November, after the proponents complete a traffic study recommended by the city.

“I can’t say I’m surprised that there is controversy about this,” Mr. Richardson said. “I’m probably a little more disappointed than anything.”

In Willowbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, plans for a mosque and community center have run into opposition that has focused locally on grounds of parking, traffic and water runoff. But anti-Muslim Web sites have tried to fold that opposition into the broader fight over Islam.

Dr. M. A. Hamadeh, a pulmonologist who is the president of the Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America, which is building the mosque, said news of other conflicts around the country troubled him.

“This is the greatest country in the world, and the greatness is based in freedom — freedom of religion, freedom of association, and of separation between state and religion,” Dr. Hamadeh said. “In order to continue to be a great country, we have to continue to uphold these values.”

Accepted Notion of Mars as Lifeless Is Challenged

For all the triumph of NASA’s 1976 Viking mission, which put two unmanned spacecraft on Mars, there was one major disappointment: The landers failed to find carbon-based molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life.

The complete lack of these organic molecules was a surprise, and the notion of a desolate, lifeless Mars persisted for years.

Now, some scientists say that conclusion was premature and perhaps even incorrect. They suggest that such building blocks — known as organic molecules, although they need not come from living organisms — were indeed in the soil, but that they were inadvertently destroyed before they could be detected.

If true, that could cast the scientific conclusions of the Viking mission in a new light, especially since another Viking experiment claimed to have found living microbes in the soil. Most scientists discounted that possibility — how could there be life in soil devoid of the building blocks of life?

“That gospel of the Viking results has influenced our perspective on life of Mars for 35 years,” said Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and an author of the new findings, to be published in The Journal of Geophysical Research — Planets. “What do they find? Nothing. But it turns out it was not really nothing.”

The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers scooped Martian soil samples and heated them, looking for organic compounds in the released gases. It found only two — chloromethane and dichloromethane — and the scientists concluded that the chlorine compounds were contaminants from fluids used to clean the spacecraft.

Then in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander unexpectedly found a chlorine chemical, perchlorate, in the planet’s arctic soil.

In the new experiments, the scientists heated a mixture of perchlorate with soil from the Atacama Desert in Chile, often considered the closest thing on Earth to Mars. Chemical reactions destroyed organic compounds in the soil, producing mostly carbon dioxide and traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane, just like what the Viking landers had found.

“Now when we look back at the Viking results, it makes sense,” Dr. McKay said. “It was bizarre chemistry.”

For the veteran Mars researcher Gilbert V. Levin, the new paper offers a measure of vindication. His Viking experiment added nutrients to the soil and measured releases of radioactive gas, which would occur as microbes ate the food. Radioactive gas was released, but with the lack of organics in the soil, most concluded it had come from a nonbiological chemical reaction.

Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City and lead author of the new study, said the claim that Viking found life was still inconclusive. “It gives a big possibility,” he said, “but of course we don’t know.”

Dr. Levin acknowledged that nonbiological reactions could cause gas to be released, but said the Viking experiment showed that whatever was producing the gas did so at temperatures plausible for microbes but not for other explanations.

But the leader of the Viking organics experiment, Klaus Biemann, a retired professor at M.I.T., doubts the new interpretation. He noted that the experiment also detected freon, which was certainly a contaminant, and that the presence of perchlorate at the Viking sites, far from where the Phoenix landed, was speculation.

More definitive answers could come with the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to be launched next year and to arrive in 2012. It will carry an experiment that will be able to separate perchlorates from organic molecules and thus allow it to identify the organics without destroying them.

A Mosque Invisible to Many Is a Target

The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come.

The local sheriff said some in his county did not even know that the mosque was there. Nevertheless, over the years, burglars have stolen prayer rugs and religious tapestries from the small sanctuary, the only Islamic place of worship in rural Orleans County, which hugs the shore of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester. Vandals have shattered car windows and thrown beer bottles on the lawn. One night about five years ago, the wooden fence in front of the mosque was set afire.

And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosque’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.

The details of the harassment and the arrests on Tuesday of five teenagers brought reporters and cameras; the ugliness seemed consistent with a number of other suspected anti-Muslim attacks around the country amid an emotional and often-bitter public discussion about whether an Islamic community center should be built in New York City near the site of the World Trade Center.

The events here have left the congregants of the mosque — which practices a form of Islam that emphasizes simple living, prayer and meditation — searching for answers about why the periodic harassment persists.

Muhyiddin Shakoor, 66, a psychotherapist and retired professor at the State University at Brockport, who is one of the founders of the mosque, which is known as the World Sufi Foundation, said trouble seemed to ebb and flow with the national mood but appeared to have grown more mean-spirited in recent years. “It seems whatever is happening for Muslims generally gets projected on us,” he said.

But the events in this county, population 44,000, also suggest how hard it can be to accurately trace the influence of national debates and moods on individual episodes of antagonism.

Mr. Cardone, the district attorney, said he believed the mosque attacks were more an example of ignorance and teenage thrill-seeking than of any specific anti-Muslim fervor. He said, by way of example, that for years a fable had persisted about the mosque, which bears no sign except for the single word “Him” in Arabic calligraphy on its white-clapboard siding: that it is not a mosque at all, but a cult house where mysterious practices occur.

“Me and a couple of friends were going to a friend’s house,” Anthony Ogden, 18, one of the teenagers arrested, said Wednesday, “and we went down that road where the supposed mosque is, beeping the horn, trying to get them to chase us. We were looking for fun, you know, the wrong kind of fun.”

Mr. Ogden, who is going into the 10th grade but is very likely not returning to high school this year, said he had heard it was a cult house where people drank blood. “How many real religious places do you see that do not have a sign stating that it’s a religious place?” he asked.

For the mosque’s members, who are largely American-born professionals, some of whom converted from Judaism and Christianity, the harassment has been a painful invasion of their faith, said Bilal Huzair, 39, one of the group’s imams. “I don’t believe at all that they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said, adding that the harassers shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they drove by.

Each night during the month-long observance of Ramadan, the congregation has gathered for the traditional night prayer in the sanctuary, its single bulb a pinpoint of light under a dark sky filled with stars.

Several times each week, congregants said, the prayer was disrupted by the sound of screeching wheels and cursing, as one or two cars raced back and forth on the gravel road outside.

The congregants became more frightened after the shooting, and when cars appeared on Monday night, they were determined to get their license-plate numbers, because the police had told them not much could be done without that information, said Jacob Zimmerman, a congregant.

They went outside with flashlights as the prayer ended. David E. Bell, the son of a local physician, was struck by one of the cars as he stood on the side of the road. He said it intentionally swerved to hit him; Mr. Ogden, who said he was a passenger in the car, said Mr. Bell had something in his hand that struck the car, a Chevrolet Blazer, breaking its driver-side mirror.

The cars sped away about two miles to a local boat launch, a gravel area surrounded by a low metal guard rail. The teenagers were spotted there by Chad Scott, 35, a Ph.D. student and former Marine who was on his way to the mosque, late for prayers. Mr. Scott said he recognized the cars as the ones that had harassed the mosque on Friday.

He called the police and then returned to the boat launch with mosque members in three cars, hoping to hold the occupants there until officers came. Mr. Ogden said that he and another teenager, Mark Vendetti, 17, got out and started apologizing. Mr. Ogden said he was bruised as a mosque member briefly restrained him there.

Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun outside the mosque, began talking to Mr. Scott and seemed to warm up to him, surprised that Mr. Scott was a former Marine.

“ ‘I’m a good Christian kid; I go to church every Sunday,’ ” Mr. Scott said Mr. Vendetti told him, adding that two of his brothers were also in the military.

But in the car that allegedly hit Mr. Bell, there was panic. Dylan Phillips, 18, drove around wildly, Mr. Huzair said, at one point nearly striking Mr. Bell, who was there with a tree branch he had brought from the mosque.

One of the teenagers also called the police. Mr. Bell, who said he was defending himself, shattered the back window of the car as it sped past. The teenagers interpreted that as aggression.

When the police arrived, they first interviewed the teenagers, who said they believed the congregants had billy clubs and swords. Instead of flashlights coming down the hill from the mosque, Mr. Ogden said, they saw “some kind of strobe.”

Mr. Vendetti faces the most serious charge: weapons possession, a felony. All the teenagers — Mr. Vendetti, Mr. Ogden, Mr. Phillips, Tim Weader and Jeff Donahue — are charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Mr. Cardone is considering additional charges, like hit-and-run and possibly a hate crime. He said he thought that at least some of the teenagers knew that Muslims worshiped there and that they had referred to Islam in their epithets.

Mr. Huzair said he was not sure of the mosque’s next step. Press conferences and events intended to educate residents seemed a stretch for an institution so simple that it has never installed heat or a restroom. “We want to end Ramadan in peace,” he said. (It ends next weekend.)

From Mr. Cardone’s perspective, it is not the job of the mosque to educate the public, adding that its members have been cooperative, law-abiding citizens through the 20 years he had been district attorney.

“They have no understanding of the gravity and sensitivity of this thing,” he said of the teenagers, adding that even so, they would be responsible for the seriousness of their actions.

Along with better education from schools and parents, he said, “part of this is law-enforcement letting people know this is not going to be tolerated.”

The Peanut Solution

Like most tales of great invention, the story of Plumpy’nut begins with a eureka moment, in this case involving a French doctor and a jar of Nutella, and proceeds through the stages of rejection, acceptance, evangelization and mass production. The product may not look like much — a little foil packet filled with a soft, sticky substance — but its advocates are prone to use the language of magic and wonders. What is Plumpy’nut? Sound it out, and you get the idea: it’s an edible paste made of peanuts, packed with calories and vitamins, that is specially formulated to renourish starving children. Since its widespread introduction five years ago, it has been credited with significantly lowering mortality rates during famines in Africa. Children on a Plumpy’nut regimen add pounds rapidly, often going from a near-death state to relative health in a month. In the world of humanitarian aid, where progress is usually measured in subtle increments of misery, the new product offers a rare satisfaction: swift, visible, fantastic efficacy.

Plumpy’nut is also a brand name, however, the registered trademark of Nutriset, a private French company that first manufactured and marketed the paste. It was not the intention of Plumpy’nut’s inventor, a crusading pediatrician named André Briend, to create an industry around Plumpy’nut. Briend, his friends say, was always personally indifferent to money. (Also, apparently, to publicity — he declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.) One element of genius in Briend’s recipe was precisely its easy replicability: it could be made by poor people, for poor people, to the benefit of patients and farmers alike. Most of the world’s peanuts are grown in developing countries, where allergies to them are relatively uncommon, and the rest of the concoction is simple to prepare. On a visit to Malawi, Briend whipped up a batch in a blender to prove that Plumpy’nut could be made just about anywhere.

Others, however, quickly realized that the miracle product had more than just moral value. Nutriset has aggressively protected its intellectual property, and the bulk of Plumpy’nut production continues to take place at Nutriset facilities in France. (Unicef, the world’s primary buyer, purchases 90 percent of its supply from that factory, according to a 2009 report prepared for the agency.) Internationally, there has been a vituperative debate over who should control the means of production, with India going so far as to impose sharp restrictions on Plumpy’nut, calling it an unproven colonialist import. Elsewhere, local producers are simply ignoring the patent. In Haiti, two manufacturers are making products similar to Plumpy’nut independently of Nutriset: one is Partners in Health, the charity co-founded by the prominent global-health activist Paul Farmer. Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters. Peanuts in Haiti and throughout the developing world have a high incidence of aflatoxin, a fungus that can sicken children, especially fragile ones. But Partners in Health says the product, which it calls Nourimanba, is safe.

When I visited one of the charity’s outpatient clinics in July, 1-year-old Elorky Decena was silent and listless as a nurse hooked a scale over the clinic’s doorway and put him in an attached harness. A month before, he was found to have severe acute malnutrition, a condition characterized by extreme stunting and wasting that afflicts an estimated 20 million children worldwide. The nurse announced that he had gained more than four pounds on a diet of Nourimanba.

Patents are meant to offer incentives to innovators by giving them a time-limited right to exclusively exploit their ideas for profit. But many say that lifesaving products should be treated by a different set of rules. There has been a long and bitter argument, for instance, over the affordability of patented AIDS drugs in Africa. Critics have made a similar case against Plumpy’nut, which is fairly expensive, costing about $60 per child for a full two-month treatment. “We were concerned because of the way Nutriset was managing their intellectual property,” said Stéphane Doyon, a nutrition specialist with Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity. “We felt that there was the possibility for the creation of a monopoly.”

“Poverty is a business,” Patricia Wolff, a St. Louis pediatrician, said. She founded Meds and Food for Kids, the other local producer of fortified nut paste in Haiti. When I first spoke with her in May, Meds and Food for Kids was struggling to raise money to expand its operations, and Wolff complained mightily about the difficulties she faced because of Nutriset’s market dominance. “There’s money to be made,” she said, “and there are people who have that kind of way of thinking.” Two months later, Wolff made a tentative deal for Meds and Food for Kids to become a Nutriset franchisee. In the end, she said, she couldn’t afford to battle hunger on her own.

In the United States, Plumpy’nut’s sole manufacturer and chief promoter is a 38-year-old mother of four from Barrington, R.I. Navyn Salem doesn’t have a background in medicine or aid work. She first glimpsed the potential of Plumpy’nut three years ago on “60 Minutes.” Since then, Salem has devoted herself to making the product for export to needy nations like Haiti. Though her Providence factory, a joint venture with Nutriset, has all the trappings of a business, selling its wares to relief agencies under the name Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions, the operation is registered as a nonprofit foundation and was established with seed money from Salem and her husband, Paul, a private-equity financier. Dancing along the nebulous line between capitalism and charity, Salem casts herself as a marketer, offering a neatly packaged solution to a tragic and no longer intractable malady. On a Tuesday in May, she brought her message of good news to a Mother’s Day benefit in Midtown Manhattan.

“This is not my ZIP code,” Salem said as she stood in the East Side Social Club, a wood-paneled restaurant, amid a jostling crowd of bejeweled women pinching noontime flutes of Champagne. She met one of the party’s hosts, Lauren Bush, the former model and niece of the most recent ex-president, a couple of years ago at a conference of the Clinton Global Initiative. Now Bush and her mother, Sharon, were selling a specially designed line of teddy bears — a big one called Plumpy and a small one called Nut — to raise money to purchase the product for children in Africa.

When it came time to eat their own meal, a three-course lunch­eon, the party guests found seats at tables set with elaborate centerpieces, made up of stuffed bears and Plumpy’nut packets. As volunteers sold raffle tickets for a Dior handbag, Salem delivered a practiced speech. Earnest and attractive, with wide brown eyes, she told the audience that her father, a member of an Indian merchant family, grew up in Tanzania. “There are over a billion people in our world that are malnourished,” Salem said. “It’s a shocking statistic. The good news is there’s a very simple solution.” And that, she said, was Plumpy’nut. “It’s really revolutionary, because it doesn’t need to be mixed with water or refrigerated,” Salem continued. “And the most miraculous part is, it will transform a child from literally skin and bones to certain survival in just four to six weeks.”

This transformation, seen in before-and-after photos — on one side a sick and wasted child, on the other, a chubby, smiling one — was the promise that captured imaginations far beyond the technocratic community of specialists that originally developed Plumpy’nut. “People love a silver bullet,” says the prominent nutritionist Steve Collins. Salem’s decision to devote a portion of her family’s fortune to the cause was impressive, but she is hardly the only person who was touched by the substance’s potential. At the benefit, many of the attendees said they had seen the same inspiring “60 Minutes” segment, in which Anderson Cooper compared the paste to penicillin, concluding that it “may just be the most important advance ever” in the realm of childhood malnutrition. After Salem spoke, she began squeezing dabs of Plumpy’nut onto plates and passing them around, assuring the partygoers that the brownish goo was surprisingly tasty, with the consistency and sweetness of a cookie filling. Everyone ate it right up.

Plumpy’nut proved so palatable and so valuable that it was only natural that other interests were now trying to take a bite. “You want to hear about the bad stuff?” Salem whispered. There was a lot to talk about. Outside the restaurant, beyond the protective cordon of appreciation, rival factions were fighting over a less innocent — though perhaps no less important — issue: who should profit? Plaintiffs were suing, accusing her partners at Nutriset of anticompetitive practices to protect their position atop a $200 million marketplace. Doctors, foreign-aid organizations and agribusinesses were staking competing claims, each invoking the interests of the world’s most fragile children. “Forget all the politics,” Salem pleads. “I’d like to erase them all.” But try as she might, she can’t wish away the questions of property and law.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to own a bit of Plumpy’nut.

At the beginning, the problem was devilishly simple: malnutrition was killing millions in poor countries — it’s thought to be responsible for a third of all deaths of children under 5. And yet the global medical community was expending little effort to develop improved treatments. In the early 1990s, the accepted regimen for severe acute malnutrition — a watery mixture fed through a tube — was 30 years old and was unable to prevent the deaths of 20 to 60 percent of patients in hospitals. Frustrated, a small group of doctors began searching for a better way to get nutrients into starving children. One of them was André Briend.

According to legend, Briend hit upon the inspiration for Plumpy’nut one morning at the breakfast table, when, after years of vainly mixing nutrients into cookies, pancakes and yogurt, he opened a jar of Nutella, and the idea came to him: a paste! Like most such stories, this one is not completely true — or rather, it elides many years of false starts, research, scientific collaboration and infighting. The first advance came in the form of F100, a dried high-energy milk that was fortified with a mix of vitamins and minerals that were designed to counter the specific biochemical effects of malnutrition in children. F100 had to be mixed with water, though, which in poor countries was apt to be rife with bacteria. It also tasted unpleasant. As a childhood-nutrition expert attached to a French government institute, Briend came up with the idea of mixing F100 together with peanuts, milk, sugar and oil. The concoction was full of protein and fat, which insulated its nutrients from oxygen and humidity and masked their unappetizing flavor.

The true advance lay not in the formulation, however, but in the way the paste could be put to work. Earlier treatments had to be administered in a hospital setting, which meant a long, expensive stay away from home for both mother and patient, so children were rarely brought in for treatment until they were already extremely weak and susceptible to all the pathogens that lurk in third-world health facilities. What Briend and a few other specialists envisioned was a treatment that could be administered at home, by families instead of doctors. For medical professionals, this required a radical shift in mind-set. Briend searched the world for someone willing to conduct field tests, cautioning that collaborators in his experiments, as he put it in a 2000 message to a malnutrition Listserv, “should be ready to accept a road with trial and errors.”

One doctor who decided to take a risk was Mark Manary, a pediatrician and professor, who was working at a hospital in Malawi. His malnutrition ward was crammed full of dozens of children lying on mats. “It was really an incredible burden,” Manary recalled. “These kids are deathly ill, you’re doing whatever you can for them, and you think you’re on the right track, and then you come in the next morning and four of them have died.” Manary emptied out the ward, sending his patients home with Plumpy’nut. Many malnutrition experts were horrified. “It seemed dangerous to them, and it made them afraid,” said Manary, who recalled that one eminent figure stood up at a conference and said, “You’re killing children.” In fact, when the results were analyzed, it was found that 95 percent of the subjects who received Plumpy’nut at home made a full recovery, a rate far better than that achieved with inpatient treatment.

The Malawi test emboldened Doctors Without Borders, which recognized that treating children outside clinical settings would allow a vastly scaled-up response to humanitarian emergencies. In 2005, it distributed Plumpy’nut to 60,000 children with severe acute malnutrition during a famine in Niger. Ninety percent completely recovered, and only 3 percent died. Within two years, the United Nations endorsed home care with Plumpy’nut as the preferred treatment for severe acute malnutrition. “This is an enormous breakthrough,” said Werner Schultink, chief of nutrition for Unicef. “It has created the opportunity to reach many more children with relatively limited resources.” Nonetheless, Schultink estimates that the product reaches only 10 to 15 percent of those who need it, because of logistical and budgetary constraints.

Briend’s invention may satisfy a need, the hunger of children, but that doesn’t directly correspond to economic demand, which is set by buyers — the donor nations and international agencies that spend billions of dollars on food aid and famine relief. This is the gap Navyn Salem is hoping to fill. Her mission is threefold. First, her plant manufactures Plumpy’nut for sale. Second, she is trying to use publicity and humanitarian appeals to persuade the customer base — the foreign-aid donors — to allocate more money to purchase and distribute the product. Finally, and most ambitiously, she is advocating the use of Plumpy’nut and a number of spinoff products to address a wider array of challenges, including malnutrition prevention. The broadened market, in theory, could be enormous: The World Bank, in a recent report, recommended that aid agencies scale up their spending on such programs, which currently stands at $300 million annually, to $6 billion a year. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers the $2.2 billion Food for Peace program, has been examining the usefulness of Plumpy’nut and products similar to it. American food aid must comply with stringent regulations meant to encourage domestic procurement, a requirement Navyn Salem is perfectly placed to meet.

Salem’s interest in philanthropy was intensified after reading a biography of Farmer, the crusading physician, with whom she subsequently traveled to Rwanda, but it took Plumpy’nut to galvanize her thoughts. “We talk about AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and how detrimental they are, these terrible epidemics, but then I realized that malnutrition was killing more than all of them combined,” Salem said. “And we know how to fix it.” She didn’t know much about famine relief or the insular community of nutritionists who deal with it, but she had a professional background in advertising and marketing, and she wanted to do something that drew on what she saw as her natural entrepreneurial strengths. “I thought, Let’s figure out if we can run a business that saves thousands and thousands of lives,” she said. Salem’s factory, located in an industrial area of Providence just off Interstate 95, cost $2 million to start. In March, right around the time she opened for business, she gave me a tour. The front lobby was decorated with large photos of grinning African children that Salem took on her trips to Rwanda and Tanzania. We donned blue smocks, hairnets and booties and entered the sanitized factory floor, where two workers, a Burundian and a Liberian, were using scoops to weigh out portions of sugar. “Most of our production staff are refugees who were recently resettled in Rhode Island,” Salem said. After the Plumpy’nut was mixed, it was run through overhead pipes into a contraption that squirted it into foil packets, which were sealed and ejected onto a conveyor belt, where workers packed them for shipping. In an adjacent warehouse, there were pallets of boxes labeled for delivery to Haiti, Yemen and Nicaragua.

Salem led me to a gleaming stainless-steel tank, which was about as tall as she was and hot to the touch. She opened a door on top, and a fragrant peanut smell wafted out as we craned to look in. “Here it is,” Salem said. “The magic stuff.”

That magic is the property of Nutriset. To trace how a family-run company based in a small town in the Normandy countryside ended up owning the patent to one of the world’s most promising humanitarian interventions, you have to go back to André Briend. He never knew anything about manufacturing food, so at the time he was trying to demonstrate the worth of Plumpy’nut, he signed a consulting agreement with Nutriset, which specialized in making therapeutic milk products. He and the company’s founder, a food scientist named Michel Lescanne, were listed as inventors on the 1997 French patent. The patent has since been registered in 38 countries, including much of Africa.

“Michel is a guy who probably holds hundreds of patents, he thinks up things all the time, but he didn’t have a viable business” before Plumpy’nut, said Mark Manary, who now runs a nonprofit group that manufactures the product under license in Malawi. “So André and I were all about this as a therapeutic opportunity, and Michel was like, ‘This is an entrepreneurial opportunity.’ ” Lescanne’s expertise was invaluable when it came to engineering the taste, texture and shelf life of Plumpy’nut.

For its contribution, Nutriset has been richly rewarded. Last year, the company produced around 14,000 metric tons of Plumpy’nut and related products, more than a tenfold increase over the amount it made in 2004, registering $66 million in sales. The family-owned company has paid out millions in dividends, according to an internal document, although the company claims the money has largely been reinvested in expanding the business. The state institute where Briend did his research receives 1 percent of sale proceeds, Nutriset says, while the inventor himself has renounced any ownership interest.

A few years ago, after some pressure from buyers, Nutriset announced that it would take a more liberal stance on licensing the product — but only in the developing world. Its affiliate network has since expanded to 11 countries, most of them in Africa. But when it comes to Europe and North America, the company has been aggressive about protecting its interests. When Salem first approached Nutriset about obtaining a license to make Plumpy’nut, she says she received a frosty reception, even though her original idea was to build a factory in Tanzania, her father’s birthplace. After meeting with Salem and her husband, the company relented, although the plan changed a bit in the process. The locus of their new joint venture, Edesia, was shifted to Rhode Island, so that it could satisfy domestic-sourcing requirements for U.S. government aid.

“Our idea with Edesia is for it to really be an incubator,” said Adeline Lescanne, Michel’s daughter and the deputy general manager of the company. She said the company was investing its profits in research into a new generation of ready-to-use therapeutic foods, or R.U.T.F., as they are called in the jargon of the foreign-aid community. The new lines would be designed to prevent malnutrition, not just cure it. “It’s a kind of pity that there is not a lot of research on new R.U.T.F.,” Lescanne said. “There are only people fighting to produce this product.”

Nutriset’s critics say that line of argument is disingenuous, because the Plumpy’nut patent is so broad as to encompass just about any kind of nut-based nutritional paste. “There are other people that would like to enter into the business,” Ben Tabatchnick, who runs a New Jersey-based kosher soup company, said. “But everybody is afraid of being sued.” Last year, Tabatchnick went to France to talk to Nutriset about his plans to develop ready-to-use therapeutic foods on a for-profit basis. “I had a meeting with them that lasted about 10 minutes, and they threw me out of the room,” he told me. Afterward, Nutriset sent him a pair of ominous letters, indicating that it had found “some similarities” between Plumpy’nut and his product, Nutty Butta.

Nutriset has sent similar saber-rattling correspondence to a number of other potential competitors. Lescanne told me that Nutriset’s vigilance over its intellectual property has a benevolent purpose. Between now and the time the patent is scheduled to expire, in 2017, the company wants to focus on building its network of affiliates in countries like Congo, Mozambique and Niger. (Salem’s plant in Tanzania is supposed to open later this year.) “We have to protect this network,” Lescanne said. “We are a bit afraid that big industrial companies will come.” In recent months, to take one example, PepsiCo Inc. has talked publicly about playing “a more decisive role” in bringing ready-to-use foods to needy populations. This has raised hackles: in a recent journal article titled “The Snack Attack,” three nutritionists warned that Pepsi-branded therapies would potentially be “potent ambassadors for equivalently branded baby foods, cola drinks and snack foods.”

“What we don’t want,” Salem told me, “is for General Mills to take over and put our Ethiopian producer out of business.” Opponents of the patent, however, say that Nutriset is just trying to avoid competition that would cut into its bottom line. Recently, a handful of companies have set up shop in countries where, because of the vagaries of various treaties, the Plumpy’nut patent is not in force. In the United States, two would-be competitors have taken a more confrontational route. They filed a lawsuit with the federal district court in Washington, D.C., seeking to have the patent invalidated.

The plaintiffs are a Texas-based manufacturer called Breedlove Foods and the Mama Cares Foundation, the charitable arm of a snack-food manufacturer based in Carlsbad, Calif. Both are small nonprofit organizations with strong ties to Christian aid organizations. But Nutriset’s defenders suspect that larger corporate interests are lurking in the background. In the French press, the patent dispute has been portrayed as a case of a plucky Gallic company besieged, as Le Monde put it, by “ ‘légions’ Américaines.”

In fact, there is a not-so-hidden instigator behind the case: the American peanut lobby. A few years ago, a Unicef official gave a presentation to an industry trade group, forecasting dramatically increasing demand for peanut pastes. That got the growers excited. They looked at Nutriset’s patent and came to the conclusion that, as a technical matter, Plumpy’nut was really nothing more than fortified peanut butter. “People have been making this stuff for centuries,” Jeff Johnson, a board member of the Peanut Institute, said. “It’s nothing new.” Johnson is the president of Birdsong Peanuts, one of the country’s largest shelling operations. Through a friend, he heard about Breedlove Foods, which was based in Lubbock, close to one of his processing plants. Johnson met with the company and proposed a challenge to Nutriset.

“It's a cotton-pickin’ shame that they decided to take the stance that they have with the intellectual-property issue,” said David Fish, Breedlove’s chief executive, whose lawsuit contends that the patent is hurting starving children. But even some Nutriset critics have questioned the motives behind the lawsuit, pointing out that America has a long and controversial history of dumping its agricultural surpluses on poor countries through food aid. “If you want to develop countries out of third-world status,” Fish replies, “they’ve got to come out and compete on the open market.”

Plumpy! Plumpy!”

With the shouted order from Rosemond Avril, an agent of a charity group, workers began unloading cardboard boxes full of foil packets from the back of a rusty blue truck. It was a sweltering Haitian morning, and next to a hive of canvas tents, the women of Bineau-Lestere were lined up beneath the branches of a gnarled quenepa tree. They were a handful of the millions displaced by last January’s earthquake, which had turned the nearby city of Léogâne into a jagged pile of concrete. Their camp, thrown up amid fields of sugar cane, was surviving on aid. On this morning, the U.N.’s World Food Program was distributing Supplementary’Plumpy, a slightly weaker formulation of the original product, to mothers with children between 6 months and 35 months.

Haiti wasn’t starving, but experts were still concerned about the perilous condition of its children. Even before the earthquake, an estimated quarter of them were chronically malnourished, and now many breadwinners were dead, livelihoods disrupted and much of the country’s commercial infrastructure destroyed. By administering Supplementary’Plumpy to children in the age group most vulnerable to severe malnutrition, the World Food Program was trying to keep a bad situation from turning into a crisis. Across Haiti, the agency was distributing such aid to 500,000 people, and the results of a survey suggested that malnutrition levels had remained stable. “This is all new,” said Myrta Kaulard, country director for the World Food Program in Haiti. “It’s preventative action.”

Darting around the scrum of women and toddlers, as a relief worker announced instructions in Creole through a bullhorn, Navyn Salem snapped pictures with her Nikon. She looked on with satisfaction as one jug-eared little boy ripped open a packet and squeezed the light brown paste into his mouth. She clicked the photo, and before long it was on its way to the Facebook page of Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions.

Salem had flown to Haiti a few days earlier aboard a private jet, lent by her husband, on a characteristically blurry mission: part sales call, part fact-finding tour. Edesia was sending its products to agencies in Haiti, the World Food Program among them, but what interested Salem most was the prospect of using ready-to-use foods to address conditions beyond severe malnutrition. She and Maria Kasparian, her second-in-command at Edesia, were shuttling from one charity to another in a loaned van, carrying boxes of free samples and brochures promoting three products designed to be taken as daily supplements. “Everyone knows Plumpy’nut,” Salem said before the trip, “but what we’re really trying to do is push these others, to address malnutrition sooner.”

Scientists have shown that there is, in the words of The Lancet, “a golden interval” for childhood nutrition that occurs before the age of 2. “This is the period when brain growth is very extensive and babies are developing their immune systems,” said Kathryn Dewey, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of California, Davis. Stunting that persists after age 2 is generally irreversible, while improved nutrition in early childhood correlates to greater educational success. One study, in Guatemala, showed that boys given a nutritional supplement as babies made 46 percent higher wages as men. Dewey has been testing whether Nutributter, one of Nutriset’s new (and patent-protected) products, might achieve similar results. “There has to be a way to break the cycle of poverty and malnutrition that has plagued these populations for hundreds and hundreds of years,” she said. “That’s the more grandiose vision of where this is headed.”

In Haiti’s Artibonite Valley, Ian Rawson, the managing director of the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, took Salem to see malnutrition inpatients — “our failures,” he called them — in a dimly lighted ward where they lay beneath a mural of parrots. Many of the children were unnaturally small and had patchy, orange-tinted hair, a classic sign of protein deficiency. “This,” Rawson said, waving a packet of Plumpy’nut, “is our immunization.” He was applying for a U.S. government grant to distribute Nutributter in the surrounding mountains, where poverty is dire, 9 out of 10 adults can’t read and acute malnutrition rates can top 35 percent. “It seems simple to me,” he said. “What’s the downside to me giving every child who’s over 4 months old a tube of Nutributter per day?”

Advocates of the preventive approach foresee a future in which children around the world consume a daily packet of nutrient-filled paste. “It’s not just for poverty-stricken people,” Salem said. “It’s just like I give my children a multi­vitamin.” Of course, this changes the nature of the intervention from an emergency treatment to a habitual routine and also dramatically escalates its prospective cost to donors. As a practical matter, Salem says, supplements will probably have to reach children through consumer markets, perhaps with subsidies. Edesia is conducting testing in Tanzania to see whether Nutributter could be sold in stores.

Some experts, however, warn that enthusiasm may be running ahead of the science. “In their rush to be innovators, I think a lot of agencies are using ready-to-use supplementary foods without evidence,” said Steve Collins, who was a pioneering advocate of home-based care for severe malnutrition. “I wouldn’t want to see a new world order where poor people are dependent on packaged supplementary foods that are manufactured in Europe or the United States.”

His wariness reflects a larger ideological divide over the proper distribution of profit. Nutriset says it is committed to opening more developing-world franchises, a strategy that brings down shipping costs and hence prices, but the majority of its network’s inventory still comes from France, and now, with the entry of Edesia, Nutriset is going to be expanding exports from the United States. Collins asks, “How are they addressing the need for poor people in Haiti not to be dependent on outside intervention in the first place?”

This question hung, unanswerable, over Salem’s journey through Haiti. Salem went there with a promise to donate a shipping container filled with $60,000 worth of Nutriset-patented products to Partners in Health, the charity run by her friend Paul Farmer. While grateful, the organization still preferred to manufacture its own product, Nourimanba, with the profits accruing to local farmers. But even this program was more a principled exercise than a development strategy. Haiti’s endemic problem of malnutrition wasn’t something you could solve with peanuts. Partners in Health also took Salem on a couple of home visits. At a one-room shack in Cange, a mother presented her 3-year-old daughter, saying she had gained 11 pounds on a regimen of Nourimanba. But the mother complained that there was no help for other serious problems she faced, like the fact that she had no job and the tin roof of her shack leaked.

Out in the hills, down a muddy path shaded by coconut palms, the health workers checked in on a small wooden farmhouse. Two children living there were on a regimen of ready-to-use food — and six were receiving nothing. The older ones watched as their little sister wolfed down an entire cup of peanut paste for the benefit of the visitors. The children’s grandmother, who was looking after them, was asked why malnutrition had been diagnosed in these two and the others not. She said she couldn’t really say, except that there simply wasn’t enough food to go around. There was no foil-wrapped answer to the maddening persistence of poverty. All that existed was a determination to meet the challenge with all the fallible tools of human ingenuity.

“We’re trying to put ourselves out of business,” said Salem, still brimming with optimism, after the trip. “That would be the best-case scenario.”

Comments

[waterfall8484]

I love your articles. :~) They make for very interesting reading, although the teaching ones are the most relevant to me right now, since I'm both a student and a TA. Especially this:

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

I'm going to put that into practice, I think. I'm not sure I agree with the whole "there are no different teaching/learning styles" statement, but I'll not go into that.

[dragonwolf]

You know, if/when WWIII starts, it will likely be because these imbeciles are poking the wrong beast with the hostile acts against Muslims. A couple of the Middle Eastern leaders have already said that Americans will be killed on sight. If they follow through on that, America will retaliate and it will only escalate from there.